His Conquering Sword by Kate Elliott Read Free Book Online Page A

Veselov. He’s Arina Veselov’s cousin, and he’s also dyan—warleader—of their tribe.”
    “Perfect.” Owen examined Veselov. “Look at the angle of the shoulders, and the tilt of the chin. He’s canted just off center, too, in his seat on the horse, which draws attention without seeming to and without imperiling his stability in the saddle. And that face. Goddess, if I’d had that face, I would have stayed an actor.”
    “A good thing you didn’t have it, then,” retorted Diana, stung by his praise. It wasn’t as if Veselov was acting; he was just being himself. She had never heard Owen praise anyone so extravagantly, not even Gwyn. “Everyone says your genius is for directing.”
    “So it is,” agreed Owen without a trace of arrogance. “He’s acting without knowing he’s doing it, and he’s doing it right, by and large. I’ve been watching him for the whole ride over here. He’s taught himself the art of listening and the art of connecting. Do you know how many competent actors I’ve worked with who took years to get where he is now?”
    Diana wondered ungraciously if Owen counted her among their number, but then Yomi came over to chase her back to the tent set up as a dressing room behind the platform.
    The performance was a disaster and yet absolutely wonderful. The setting itself could not be improved upon. Coming onstage for her first entrance, Diana felt transported to some ancient scene. They could have been any group of itinerant actors out making their way along the Silk Road, the famous Earth trade route that ran across the mountains and deserts and steppes of Asia, stopping in this medieval oriental city made glorious by its marble colonnades and gentle silk banners. Even the play, in its own way, seemed ironically appropriate: During a revolt in feudal Georgia, Grusha, a servant girl, flees to the mountains with the Governor’s small son, who has been abandoned in the panic by his mother; in the second act, a drunken village clerk named Azdak is made a judge by the rebel soldiers and tries the case to determine which of the women is the child’s true mother.
    From the beginning, they attracted a hard-core audience off to the left who stayed in place for the entire play. But other than that group, and the jaran riders who patrolled the square with half an eye on the Habakar natives and half on the play, the audience shifted and grew and shrank according to some tidal schedule that Diana could not interpret. It was frustrating, and yet, it was in part for this experiment that she had come, to see what would play, what could communicate, across such a gulf of space and culture, to touch those who were open to being touched. And, inspired by the setting, by the city, by the bright colored silks or the clear blue of the afternoon sky, the acting fell into place and they worked off each other in that seamless fiction that can never be achieved except by grace, fortune, and sheer, hard repetitious work brought by a fortuitous combination of events to its fruition in transcendent art.
    It worked. Diana knew it worked. They all knew it had worked. At the end, sweating and exhausted and for once sated, she took Gwyn’s hand—he had played the soldier and lover Simon—and, with the lifelike doll that represented the child tucked in the crook of her other arm, she, and he, and the others, took a single bow, which was all that they needed to take, or that the audience understood. Straightening, she flashed a grin at Gwyn and he smiled back, wiping sweat from his forehead. She turned to look toward Arina, who had watched it all from a wagon over to one side, and discovered that Vasil had dismounted to stand next to his cousin and was regarding Diana, and the stage, with uncomfortably intent interest.
    “You’ve made a conquest, Di,” said Gwyn in an undertone as he turned to go back to the dressing room and strip his makeup off.
    “I hope not. Wait for me.” Veselov bothered her. One of the