“A contagion to be sure, but not a disease,” sighed Lurenz, sitting up from his intent crouch. He frowned at Pen in a very unsettling fashion. “Did you realize she was a Temple sorceress?”
“What?” Pen gaped.
“A very senior one, I am given to understand, bearing a demon of great power. She was on her way to her Order’s main house in Martensbridge, to make some report, and seek aid in her illness for, for handling the creature. Or handing it on, in the event of her death. The Bastard’s people have some rituals to control this procedure, with which I am, ah, not familiar. Not exactly my god.”
The sinking feeling was turning into a stone. “I’ve never met a sorcerer before.” A choking arose in his throat, and without his volition his mouth added, “Well, now you are one, blue-eyed boy!” The tart cadences of the dying divine seemed to echo in the words; then the choking feeling slid back, as if the effort had exhausted it. He clapped his hand over his mouth and stared at Lurenz in terror. “I didn’t say that!”
Lurenz had jerked back, glaring. “You had better not be trying on some jape, boy!”
Pen shook his head violently, suddenly afraid to speak.
Low voices from the hallway rose in sharp argument. The door banged open, and Pen’s mother barged through, yanking her arm from the grip of one of the Temple guards Pen had met on the road. Lord Rolsch, following, held up a stern hand that daunted the man from trying to grab her again. Learned Lurenz rose and quelled the altercation by motioning the guardsman back, shaking his head in a mix of negation and assurance.
“You’ve awoken! Thank the gods!” The senior Lady Jurald rushed to the bedside and seemed about to fling herself on Pen, but then, to his relief, stopped short. She clutched the sleeve of Lurenz’s robe, instead, tugging it in her urgency. “What has happened to him? Can you tell yet?”
Rolsch detached her from the divine and restrained her, but after a worried glance down at Pen, turned a face almost as anxious as hers upon Lurenz. They both seemed startlingly changed from this morning’s ceremonial tidiness, though still in the same best clothes. Lady Jurald’s face was puffy, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair awry with random wisps escaping from her braids. Rolsch looked exhausted, too, his face . . . unshaven?
This isn’t this morning anymore, Pen realized at last. This is tomorrow . . . today . . . oh gods. Had he slept the sun around . . . ?
Lurenz, not a man to shirk a painful duty, captured Lady Jurald’s fluttering hands and straightened up into his most grave and fatherly pose. “I am so sorry, Lady Jurald.” His nod took in Rolsch as well. “It is just as we feared. Your son has been possessed by, or it seems rather, of, a demon of the white god. It revealed itself to me plain a moment ago.”
Rolsch flinched; Pen’s mother gasped, “Lady of Summer help us! Can nothing be done?”
Pen, now sitting up against the headboard, stared down at his body in alarm. A demon of the Bastard, inside him? Where inside him . . . ?
Lurenz moistened his lips. “It is not as bad as it could be. The demon does not appear to be ascendant—it has not yet seized control of his body for itself. I am told that such a wrenching transference disrupts or weakens it for some time, before it becomes established in or, or accustomed to, its new abode. If Lord Penric is firm of will, and obeys, ah, all his holy instructions, there may yet be a way to save him.”
“They go into people,” Rolsch tried; “There ought to be a way for them to go out.” He undercut this tentative optimism by adding, “Besides the person dying, of course.”
Another nod from Lurenz, altogether too casual in Pen’s opinion. “As the unfortunate Learned Ruchia did. Which is how Lord Penric came to be in this predicament.”
“Oh, Pen, why ever did you . . . ?” his mother flung at him.
“I . . . I didn’t . . .” Pen’s hands waved. “I thought the old lady was sick!” Which had been, well, not wrong. “I was just trying to help!” He shut his mouth abruptly, but no strange force rose in his throat to add a sharp comment.
“Oh, Pen,” moaned his mother; Rolsch rolled his eyes in general exasperation.
Lurenz cut short what promised to be a lengthy round of recriminations. “Be that as it may, the harm is done, and there is no way to undo it here in Greenwell Town. I have discussed this possibility with Learned Ruchia’s escort. The late divine’s fleshly husk must necessarily be buried here, but her escort is obliged to carry her possessions on to her destination, that her Order may dispose of them howsoever she willed. That mandate must include, I have suggested”—forcefully, his tone implied—“her greatest treasure, her demon.”
What did Lurenz mean by a way to save him? Just about to vent objections to being talked over when he was right here, Pen registered the drift of this, and eased back, alert. Transporting the demon must perforce mean transporting Pen to . . . somewhere beyond Greenwell Town, anyway. Freitten, even?
“The Temple guards have agreed to escort Lord Penric to the head house of the Bastard’s Order in Martensbridge, where, I trust, they will have the scholars to . . . to decide what properly to do.”
“Oh,” said Lady Jurald, in a dubious tone.
Rolsch frowned. “Who shall pay for this journey? This seems a Temple matter . . .”
Lurenz took the hint, if not cheerily. “The Temple will undertake to gift him with the rest of Divine Ruchia’s travel allowance, and the use of its remounts and hostels along the road. After he reaches Martensbridge . . . that must be for her Order to decide.”
“Hm,” said Rolsch. It had been Rolsch, last year, who had forbade Pen’s scheme to go to the university lately founded in Freitten, on the grounds that the family could not afford it, and then stifled Pen’s protests by dragging him in mind-numbing detail through all his baronial accounts to prove it. It had been quite disheartening to find his brother not selfish, but truthful. While not Freitten, Martensbridge was even farther from Greenwell.
Tentatively, Pen cleared his throat. It still seemed his own . . . “What about the betrothal?”
A grim silence greeted this.
Rolsch finally said, heavily, “Well, it didn’t happen yesterday.”
His mother put in, “But dear Preita’s kin were kind enough to feed us anyway, as we waited here to see if . . . for you to wake up. So at least the food hasn’t gone to waste.”
“So much cheese . . .” muttered Rolsch.
Pen was beginning to get the picture of all that must have happened while he’d been lying here like a warmish sort of corpse in this bed, and it wasn’t merry. His body brought back in a wagon alongside that of a dead woman, Mother and Rolsch somehow found—Gans, of course—the celebration broken up just as it began, his anxious kin, quite obviously, up all night . . . “How is Preita . . . taking it?”
“She grew quite horrified, when we saw your body,” said Rolsch.
“Her mother has her in charge now,” said Lady Jurald.
“Someone should send to her, and tell her I’m all right,” said Pen, dismayed at this.