Penric carried his saddlebags down to the entry hall in the morning gloom to find a send-off he hadn’t expected in the form of Preita herself, in all her pretty roundness, escorted by a frowning brother and sister.
“Preita!” He went to her, only to have her flinch back, if with a tremulous smile.
“Hullo, Pen.” They stared uncertainly at each other. “I hear you’re going away.”
“Only to Martensbridge. Not to the ends of the world.” He swallowed, and got out, “Are we still to be betrothed?”
Regretfully, she shook her head. “Do you even know when you will return?”
“Er . . . no.” Two days ago, he’d known everything about his future. Today, he knew nothing. He was not sure this change was an improvement.
“So—so you can see how difficult that would be. For me.”
“Uh, yes, to be sure.”
Her hands started to reach out, but then retreated behind her back and consoled each other there. “I am so sorry. But surely you see any girl must be quite afraid to marry a man who could set her on fire with a word!”
He’d dreamed of setting her alight with kisses. “Any man could set a girl on fire with a torch, but he’d have to be deranged!”
This won only an uneasy shrug. “I brought you something. For the road, you know.”
She motioned to her brother, who handed over a large sack that proved, when Pen opened it, to contain a huge wheel of cheese. “Thank you,” Pen managed. He glanced at his bulging saddlebags, and ruthlessly turned to hand it on to the impatiently waiting Gans. “Here. Find a place to pack this. Somehow.”
Gans shot him a beleaguered look, but carried it out.
Preita gave him a jerky nod, but ventured no closer; apparently, he was not to get even one soft farewell hug to see him off. “Good luck, Pen. I will pray that all goes well with you.”
“And I, you.”
The two Temple guardsmen stood outside, holding the saddled horses. The late sorceress’s gear was packed aboard a sturdy cob, where Gans was securing the sack of cheese. Another mount awaited Pen.
He made for it, but paused at a call; it seemed he had one more painful farewell to endure. His mother and Rolsch hurried up as Preita and her siblings hurried away, exchanging awkward nods in passing. His kin looked less harried and exhausted than yesterday, but still unhappy.
“Pen,” said Rolsch, gravely. “The five gods protect you on your road.” He thrust out a small bag of coin, which Pen, surprised, took.
“Wear it around your neck,” his mother told him anxiously. “I hear those cutpurses in the cities can have away with a purse off a man’s belt and he never feels a tug.”
The cord had been lengthened for such prudence; dutifully, Pen obeyed, sneaking a peek within before tucking the soft leather into his shirt. More copper than silver, and no gold, but it made him not quite entirely a beggar at the Temple’s table.
Pen steeled himself to endure the embarrassment of a tearful maternal embrace, but, though Lady Jurald started forward, she stopped much like Preita. She raised her hand in a farewell wave, instead, as though he were turning out of sight and not standing a pace away.
“Be more careful, Pen!” she begged, her voice breaking. She turned back to Rolsch.
“Yes, Mama,” Pen sighed.
He went to his horse. Gans offered him no leg up, not that Pen had any problem lifting his wiry body into a saddle. As he did so, he had the quelling realization that not one person had touched him since whoever had carried him up and dumped him into that bed day before yesterday.
The senior guardsman motioned them forward, and the party rode off up the cobbled main street beneath the whitewash and half-timbering of the houses lining it. No flowers yet brightened their window boxes, in the chill of early spring. Pen turned in his saddle to wave one last time, but his mother and Rolsch were entering the hostel, and did not see.
Pen cleared his throat, and asked the senior guardsman, whose name was Trinker, “Did the Learned Ruchia’s funeral go all right, yesterday afternoon? They didn’t let me attend.”
“Oh, aye. Taken up by her god, all right, signed by that white dove and all.”
“I see.” Pen hesitated. “Can we please stop where she is buried? Just for a moment.”
Trinker grunted but could not gainsay this pious request, so nodded.
The graveyard where the Temple-sworn were buried lay beyond the walls, on the road out of town; they turned aside, and Trinker escorted Pen to the new mound, as yet unmarked, while Gans and Wilrom waited atop their horses.
Nothing much to see, now, in the dawn damp; nothing much to feel, though Pen extended all his exacerbated senses. He bowed his head and offered a silent prayer, the wording haltingly remembered from services for his father, and that other brother who had died when Pen was little, and some aged servants. The grave returned no answer, but something inside him seemed to ease, as if pacified.
He mounted again, and Trinker urged them into a trot as they crossed the covered wooden bridge over the river and the town fell behind.
The bright sunshine of the past two days, like a misplaced breath of summer, was gone, replaced by a more usual misty damp, which would likely turn to a chill drizzle before the morning was out. The high mountains to the north hid their white heads in the clouds, which lay like a gray lid over the wide uplands of Pen’s country. The road followed the river downstream, into what passed in these parts for flatter lands—or at least the valleys widened and the hills shrank. Pen wondered how soon they would catch a glimpse of the Raven Range, that other long stone hedge on the opposite side of the plateau , dividing the Cantons from the great realm of the Weald to the south.
The Temple guards kept them mostly to a trot, walking up the hills, a rhythm designed to eat the most miles in the least time. It was not the breakneck pace of a courier, but it did assume a change of horses being available, which they took at a noon halt at a Temple way-station. They passed farm carts, pack mules, cows, sheep, and country folk in small villages. Once, carefully, they rode around a company of marching pike men, recruits on their way to being exported to other lords’ wars. Like Drovo, Pen thought. He wondered how many would ever march home. Better it seemed to export cheese or cloth, but it was true that fortunes were made in the military trade. Though seldom by the soldiers, any more than by the cheeses.
While ascending the hills, Pen coaxed their guards to talk a little. He was surprised to learn that they were not Divine Ruchia’s own retainers, but had been assigned to her at the border town of Liest, when she’d crossed out of Darthaca on her way to Martensbridge; likewise the woman servant Marda. Gans was indignant to learn that Marda had been allowed to give a deposition and then head for home. Trinker and Wilrom were quite apprehensive about what their seniors would say when it was learned that they had lost their charge on the road, helpless though they had been to prevent it. They had come prepared to fight bad men, not bad hearts. As for the fumbling of her valuable demon into the chance-encountered younger brother of a minor valley lord . . . no one seemed to be looking forward to explaining that.
At dusk, with forty miles of muddy road behind them, they halted at a modest town that boasted a house of the Daughter’s Order, which took them in. Penric was again shown to a room by himself; a smiling dedicat brought him hot water and food, and he smiled back in gratitude, but she did not linger. A check outside his door found a local guardsman standing sentry. Pen said a hesitant hello and retreated, too tired to mind.