Pen didn’t feel there were, but Tigney ended up prodding through every hem and fold in the stack to be sure. He then sat up and read the message on the cloth, without referring to any cipher-book. Leaning back with a relieved sigh, he muttered, “Nothing too difficult, then. Thank His Whiteness. I think.”
Pen swallowed. “Sir—was Learned Ruchia a spy?” That frail old woman?
Tigney waved a hand in vigorous negation. “Certainly not! A trusted agent of the Temple, yes, able to sail smoothly through some very troubled waters, I will give her that.”
Pen took in this evasion. He was pretty sure it came out to a yes. Which made Tigney . . . her spymaster? Neither personage fit his mental image of either role. He smiled hesitantly and said nothing.
As Pen bundled up the cloth once more and made for the door, Tigney added kindly, “You can keep half of whatever you can sell them for.”
“Thank you, sir!” Pen waved and left quickly, before Tigney could change his mind about either the errand or its reward, after the capricious manner of seniors.
Safely out of earshot on the steep street, Desdemona snappishly remarked, “Half! Tigney is a cheeseparing drudge. You should have had it all.”
So, she hadn’t been asleep. “I thought it very generous. He didn’t need to offer me any. Also”—he grinned—“he forgot to tell me when I had to be back.”
“Humph,” said Desdemona, sounding amused. “Well, we do like a truant.”
Pen took the long way to Elm Street, down to the river and along it past the old stone bridge to a market, still busy even though it was early afternoon. He stood a while and listened to a pair of musicians, one with a fiddle and the other with a skin drum, set up to amuse the crowd with silly or mournful songs, a hat at their feet upturned invitingly. Pen reflected that unlike all the other vendors here, they could not call back their merchandise if the bargain was bad, and fished a few precious coppers out of his thin purse for the hat before continuing down the quayside.
At a low point of the embankment wall, he set the clothing bundle down and leaned over, trying to see up the river to the lake. He might need a higher vantage. “Desdemona . . . is music a good gift of the spirit?”
“Oh, aye. We like a good song.”
“What about knowledge? Reading?”
“That’s good, too.”
“Were you reading along with me, these past days? Over my shoulder, as it were?”
“Sometimes.”
“Should I do that more?”
“To please me, do you mean?” She sounded disconcerted.
“Well . . . yes, I guess so.”
A long silence, then: “Those things are all interesting, but it is the share of your body that is my daily gift, without which I could not maintain existence in this world. Or in any other. So gifts of the body are actually very acceptable.”
“That would be . . . my body, right? Things done for my body?” said Pen, trying to work this out. Not that he could maintain his own existence in the world without it, either.
“Have you any other body? I don’t.”
“At present.” Though the demon had shared a dozen other bodies before his. Would she share more, after . . . ? His memory reverted, unwilled, to the interrupted morning bed activities back at the Lady-school, and his face heated. However discomfited he had been, sooner or later his body was going to have its way about that, chatty audience or no. Not that he hadn’t been willing to share that intimacy with Preita, in prospect. And this was different, how . . . ?
Desdemona drew a long breath. “Think of how a good rider maintains his favorite horse. Brushed and glossy and well fed. Sound shoes. Carefully exercised and trained, and taken out for fast gallops. Ribbons braided in its mane, fine saddles and bridles to make a show, maybe trimmed with silver or colored glass beads. A steed to be proud of.”
Wait, I thought I was supposed to be the rider . . . ? All these equine metaphors were growing befuddling.
“In short,” said Desdemona briskly, “as we have never had an actual lord before, could you at least try to dress like one?”
Pen snorted, eyeing the sleeve of his countryman’s smock. “I’m afraid this is how actual lords dress, when their purses are as flat as kin Jurald’s.” Also, the demon was beginning to sound disturbingly like his sisters again, which sat uncomfortably with the thoughts he’d been having just before she’d gone off about horses.
“Put another way—what you enjoy, we enjoy, for the most part.”
Pen was startled by this. “Food? Drink?” Other pleasures of the flesh . . . ?
“Yes, indeed!”
“Wine-sickness?”
She said smugly, “Oh, the wine-sickness can be all yours.”
“You . . . can evade my pain?” The implications of that were odd.
“We can withdraw from it to a degree, yes.”
“Surely managing one’s demon should be harder than managing a horse.” Not that horses were easy, five gods knew. “I mean, those Temple disciplines and so on?” Everyone kept talking about the all-important Temple disciplines, but no one ever explained what they were.
“The hard things will come on their own. You need not go hunting them.” She added after a reflective moment, “Though I pity the poor demon who gets stuck with a Temple ascetic. Hair shirts, really, what is the point?” She gave the impression of a faint, dramatic shudder, and Pen smiled despite himself. She added more tartly, “And it indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one’s own discomfort for a benefit to another.”
Pen blinked, an old puzzle suddenly laid open to him, bare and plain. Yes. That’s it exactly.
Feeling a need to digest this, he heaved the bundle of clothes back up. “Let’s go find Elm Street.”
He was quite out of his reckoning with Tigney’s directions by now, but Desdemona, clearly, knew the town well. They arrived at their goal efficiently, without any doubling back.
The shop was dark, with a peculiar smell. Pen set the clothes on the counter, and the shop woman told over them with quick fingers, and named a price.
“Pen,” muttered Desdemona, “let me do this.”
“If you don’t embarrass me,” Pen muttered back. The shop woman gave him a strange look, but then his mouth began a sharp, though polite enough, negotiation that resulted in due course in a sum double what he had first been offered.
“Good,” said Desdemona. “Let us look around a little.”
Abandoning the counter, they went to the shelves and piles. Obligingly, Pen sorted and dealt. “Can you even see what you’re doing?” he murmured.
“Oh, yes. You could, too. Wait . . . now try.”
Pen squinted, and the shadows seemed to retreat. The view wasn’t really an improvement. But somehow, from these unpromising heaps, he pulled some quite fine discards, if torn or discolored in spots. Granted the elegant blue brocade doublet with the three-inch gash in the front, set around with brown stains, was a bit disturbing.
“We can set these to rights,” Desdemona promised.
“Isn’t that what you call uphill magic?”
“Only a very little. Can you sew?”
“Not especially well, no.”
A brief silence. “We believe you will find that you now can.”
Pen set back several items that seemed too gaudy, to Desdemona’s disappointment, but at last they agreed on a small pile of what she assured him were men’s garments, the likes of which Pen had never seen at Jurald Court, nor Greenwell either. The silk-weavers here seemed to set a high standard for local castoffs, certainly. Back to the counter for another negotiation, and in a few more minutes, Pen left the shop not only with the additions to his wardrobe, but with a goodly supply of coins. Even when he turned over Tigney’s half, there would be some money left over.