"Laid down in her bedchamber, with her women to take care of her."
"Good. Foix, find dy Cabon and attend upon me there. Now."
"I must look to our defenses," said Arhys. "I'll join you as soon as I can. If I can. Illvin... ?"
Illvin looked up from instructing a groom in the care of his injured horse.
Arhys's gaze flicked briefly toward the inner court, where his and his wife's chambers lay. "Do what you must."
"Oh, aye." Illvin grimaced, and turned to follow Ista. The wild excitement that had sustained him through the clash on the road was passing off. He limped like his horse, stiff and weary, as they passed under the archway to the fountain court.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CATTILARA'S CHAMBER HAD MUCH THE SAME AIR OF FEMININE refuge as when Ista had entered it on her first day at Porifors. Now, however, the marchess's women were upset rather than welcoming: either anxious and outraged or frightened and guilty, depending on whether they had been privy to the escape plan. They stared at the royina's present bloody, breathless, tight-lipped disarray with horror. Ista ruthlessly dismissed them all, though with orders for wash water, drinks, and food for Lord Illvin—and for the rest of her party, who had all tumbled out onto the road a lifetime ago this morning with no more breakfast than a swallow of tea and bread, or less.
Illvin went to Cattilara's basin and wrung out a wet towel; he glanced at Ista and politely handed it to her first. The red grime she rubbed off her face was startling. Nor was all of the blood from the horse, she realized as she dabbed gingerly at her scratches. Illvin rinsed and wrung out the cloth again and rubbed down his own bloody face and dirt-streaked torso, and accepted a cup of drinking water from Liss, draining it in a gulp. He then trod over to Ista's side to stare at Cattilara, laid down on her bed still in her traveling dress. The right sleeve had been removed, and a compress bound about the ambiguous wound in her shoulder.
She was lovely as a sleeping child, unmarred but for a smudge on her cheek. On her, it looked an elegant decoration. But Illvin's finger uneasily traced the new sunken quality around her eyes. "Surely her body is too slight to support Arhys's as well as her own."
And he ought to know. Ista glanced at Illvin's hollow cheeks and ridged ribs. "For weeks or months, no. For hours or days ... I think it is her turn. And I know who Porifors can least spare right now."
Illvin grimaced, and glanced over his shoulder at the opening door. Foix escorted an anxious dy Cabon within.
"Five gods be thanked, you are saved, Royina!" the divine said in heartfelt tones. "The Lady Cattilara as well!"
"I thank you, too, Learned," said Ista, "for abiding by my instructions."
He regarded the marchess's silent form with alarm. "She was not injured, was she?"
"No, she is not hurt." Ista added reluctantly, "Yet. But I have induced her to lend her own soul's strength to Arhys for a time, in place of Lord Illvin. Now we must somehow compel her demon to speak. I don't know if it was master or servant to Princess Umerue, but I am certain it was witness to—more, a product of—Dowager Princess Joen's demonic machinations. Illvin was right, yesterday: it has to know what she was doing, because it was part of what she was doing. Although it seems to have escaped her... leash." Upon reflection, an encouraging realization. "Joen's control is evidently not inviolable."
Dy Cabon gazed at her in blank alarm, and Ista realized belatedly that this must seem gibberish to him. Illvin's high brow wrinkled in nearly equal puzzlement; he said cautiously, "You said Joen seemed more uncanny than Sordso. How so?"
Haltingly, Ista tried to describe her inner vision of the dowager princess, glimpsed so briefly and terrifyingly beside her wrecked palanquin, and of the demon-ridden Prince Sordso. Of how Sordso's demon fire had seemed to unknit her very bones. "Demons have always cringed before me up till now, though I do not know why. I did not know I was so vulnerable to them." She glanced uneasily at Foix.
"This array you describe is very strange," mused dy Cabon, rubbing his chins. "One demon battening on one soul is the rule. There is no room for more. And demons do not usually tolerate each other even in the same general vicinity, let alone in the same body. I do not know what force could harness them all together like that, apart from the god Himself."
Ista bit her lip in thought. "What Joen contained did not look like what Sordso contained. Sordso seemed possessed of a common demon, like Cattilara's or Foix's, except ascendant instead of subordinate—like Catti's when she let it up for questioning, before, and we could barely force it back down again. It was the demon, not her son, who was answering to Joen."
Dy Cabon's face bunched in distaste as he took this in.
Ista glanced at Foix, standing behind him and looking even less pleased. He was as sweat-soaked and grimed from the morning's work as any of them, but he, at least, seemed to have escaped any bloody wound. "Foix."
He jerked. "Royina?"
"Can you help me? I wish to push Cattilara's soul-fire down into her body, and the demon light up into her head, that it may speak and answer and yet not seize her. Without allowing it to break the net by which it sustains Arhys. This not being a convenient moment to drop Porifors's commander down dead... . More dead."
"Are you just waiting till Lord Arhys is ready, then, Royina, to release his soul?" asked Foix curiously.
Ista shook her head. "I don't know if that is my task, or even if I could if I tried. I fear to leave him a ghost, irrevocably cut off from the gods. Yet he hangs by a thread now."
"Waiting till we are ready, more like," muttered Illvin.
Foix frowned down at Cattilara. "Royina, I stand prepared at your command to do anything I can, but I don't understand what you want of me. I see no fires, no lights. Do you?"
"I did not at first. My sensitivity was but a confused wash of feelings, chills, intuitions, and dreams." Ista stretched her fingers, closed her fist. "Then the god opened my eyes to His realm. Whatever the reality may be, my inner eye now sees it as patterns of light and shadow, color and line. Some lights hang like a net, some flow like a powerful stream."
Foix shook his head in bewilderment.
"Then how did you work the flies, and the stumbling horse?" asked Ista patiently. "Do you not perceive anything, perhaps by some other metaphor? Do you hear, instead? Or touch?"
"I"—he shrugged—"I just wished them. No—willed them. I pictured the events clearly in my mind, and commanded the demon, and they just happened. It felt... odd, though."
Ista bit her finger, studying him. Then on impulse, stepped in front of him. "Bend your head," she commanded.
Looking surprised, he did so. She grasped his tunic and pulled him down yet farther.
Lord Bastard, let Your gift be shared. Or not. Curse your Eyes. She pressed her lips to Foix's sweaty brow. Ah. Yes.
The bear whined in pain. Briefly, a deep violet light seemed to flare in Foix's widening eyes. She released him and stepped back; he staggered upright. A barely perceptible white fire faded on his brow.
"Oh." He touched the spot and stared around the room, at all his company, openmouthed. "This is what you see? All the time?"
"Yes."
"How is it that you do not fall down when you try to walk?"
"One grows used to it. The inner eye learns, just as the outer ones do, to sort out the unusual and ignore the rest. There is seeing without observing, and then there is attending. I need you to attend with me to Cattilara now."
Dy Cabon's mouth pursed in awe and alarm; his hands rubbed one another uncertainly. "Royina, this is potentially very bad for him..."