“Oh, I was taken ill long before that,” the old woman commented between huffs. “I lingered too long in Darthaca . . . Told the fools to bring the ceremony to me.”
Torn between curiosity, concern, and a reflection that if he’d left for town earlier as he’d been charged, he could have avoided all this, Pen lowered himself to the old woman’s side. Cautiously, he felt her forehead, as his mother had used to do for him; her skin seemed clammy, not feverish. He had not the first notion of what to do for her, but it seemed wrong to just remount and ride away, for all that Gans was now glaring in tight-lipped worry.
“I am Lord Penric of kin Jurald, barons in this valley,” he told her, gesturing back to the road they’d come from. He wasn’t sure what to say next. She seemed most in authority here, but surely least able to command, in her current distressed state. Her cloak slipped off her shoulder, revealing Temple braids pinned there marking a divine—not in the green and gold of the Mother of Summer, as he would have expected, or perhaps the blue and white of the Daughter of Spring, but the white, cream, and silver of the Bastard, the fifth god, master of all disasters out of season. He gulped, swallowing his surprise.
She wheezed a short laugh and stirred, lifting a claw-like hand to his face. “Pretty boy. There’s a better last sight than scowling Marda. Gift of sorts. But those colors don’t suit you, you know.”
He raised his head to the servant woman who, as he’d knelt, had retreated. “Is she delirious?”
The servant shook her head. “Can’t tell, can I? She’s been spouting things no one else understands since I was assigned to ride with her.”
The old woman’s lips twitched back. “Really?” she said. She did not seem to be addressing Marda. Or Penric. “That will throw the fools into a tizzy.” She fought for another breath. “Illogical to wish to see it, I suppose.”
Increasingly frightened, and feeling quite stupid and helpless, Pen tried: “Let me serve you in your need, Learned.”
She stared intently up at him for two more disrupted breaths, then wheezed, “Accepted.”
She’s dying. Cold, slick, not like the fevered heat and stink of his father’s deathbed, but the advancing pallor was unmistakable. He wanted nothing so much as to run away, but her hand, falling back from his face, found his and gripped it weakly. He wasn’t enough something—cowardly, brave?—to shake it off. Both the servant and the guardsman, he saw out of the corner of his eye, were hastily backing away. What?
“Lord Bastard,” she breathed. “Y’r doorway hurts. ’D think y’ could arrange things better f’yr servants . . .”
If all he could do was hold her hand, Pen decided in desperation, well, that was what he would do. His grip tightened.
For a moment, her brown eyes seemed to flash with a deep violet light. Then, between one breath and . . . none, her eyes went dull and still.
No one was looking back at him now.
He heard a confusion of women’s voices babbling in half-a-dozen languages, most of which he didn’t recognize, crying out in terror and pain. His head, throbbing with tension, seemed to explode in a thick, tangled net of lightning, all white.
Then all black.
Strange dreams scattered as Penric woke to a fierce headache, a raging thirst, and a desperate need to piss. He was in a bed in a small chamber, high up under the eaves judging by the slope of the whitewashed ceiling, wearing only his shirt and trews. As he stirred and groaned, an unfamiliar face appeared over him. Pen was not quite reassured to see the man wore the green tunic of a dedicat of the Mother’s Order. A few minutes of bustle followed as the man helped him to a chamber pot, then drew him back from the window where Pen tried to put his head out. By his glimpse of the street and the sky, he was in Greenwell Town, probably at the Mother’s hospice. Still morning, so maybe he wasn’t in too much trouble yet? At the dedicat’s urging Pen reeled back into the bed and negotiated for a cup of water, which left him with only the headache and a vast confusion.
“How did I come here? I was on the road. Did I faint? Where is my suit?” He’d better not have lost or ruined the suit. Not to mention his good boots, also missing. “There was this sick old woman—a divine—”
“I will fetch Learned Lurenz,” the dedicat told him. “Don’t move!”
The man hurried out. Muffled voices sounded from the hallway, then steps thumping away. Pen spotted his suit, folded neatly atop a chest, with his boots beside it, which relieved him of one worry. He squeezed his eyes open and shut, and sat up to help himself to another cup of water. He was trying to decide if he could stagger across the room to retrieve his clothes when footsteps tapped once more, and he hurriedly tucked himself back under the sheets as instructed.
Without knocking, there entered tall, skinny Learned Lurenz, the Greenwell Town Temple’s chief divine; reassuringly recognizable, alarmingly tense. He bent over Pen as if about to feel his forehead, but then drew back his hand. “Which are you?” he demanded of Pen.
Pen blinked, starting to wonder if he had fallen not ill, but into some bard’s tale. “Learned Lurenz, you know me! Penric kin Jurald—you taught me arithmetic and geography—you used to pop me on the head with your stick for inattention.” Hard enough to sting, too. That had been a decade ago, before the divine had been promoted to his present position. Lurenz was a long-time devotee of the Father of Winter, though as senior divine he supervised all five holy houses now. The growing city was angling for an archdivineship to be established here, Rolsch had said; Pen supposed Lurenz hoped for the promotion.
“Ah.” Lurenz let out a sigh of relief, straightening up. “We are not too late, then.”
“I’d better not be! Mother and Rolsch will be peeved, I can tell you. No idea what poor Preita will think, either. Where is Gans?”
“Lord Penric,” said Learned Lurenz in his stern voice, as if about to ask Pen to recite the major rivers of Darthaca, “what do you remember of yesterday?”
Pen squeezed his eyes shut and open again. They still throbbed. “Yesterday? There was nothing special about yesterday, except for Mother and my sister fussing about the fit of that stupid suit. They wouldn’t let me go riding.”
They stared at each other in a moment of mutual incomprehension. Then Lurenz muttered “Ah!” again, and continued, “On the road. You were riding into town with Gans, and you came upon the party of Learned Ruchia . . . ? She was lying ill on the ground?”
“Oh! That poor old woman, yes. Did she really die?”
“I’m afraid so.” Lurenz signed himself, touching forehead, lips, navel, groin, and spreading his hand briefly over heart, Daughter-Bastard-Mother-Father-Son, tally of the five gods. “We brought her body to lie in the Bastard’s orphanage here, awaiting burial, and some resolution to this tangle.”
“What tangle?” asked Pen, getting a sinking feeling in his stomach to add to his headache.
“Lord Pen”—the nickname was oddly steadying—maybe he wasn’t in too much trouble yet?—“tell me everything you remember about your encounter with Learned Ruchia, and how you came to, ah, swoon. Every detail.” Lurenz pulled up a stool to the bedside and sat, suggesting that he did not mean Pen to stint on the tale.
Pen described the events, together with what everyone had said as exactly as he could recall, strange as it had been, in case it was important—he didn’t have to cast his mind back very far, after all. He hesitated before mentioning the violet light and the babbling voices, because it made it sound as if he’d been seeing things, but finally put them in, too. “But what did she mean by saying Accepted? Not that you expect someone who’s busy dying to make a lot of sense, but she sounded pretty definite. And, really, I don’t like to say it, but her servants didn’t seem very loyal. Or”—a horrible new thought—“had she some contagion?” He rubbed the hand that had gripped hers surreptitiously on the sheet.