His room was as small as the one at the hospice, but better furnished; chairs with embroidered cushions, a table with a mirror and stool clearly meant for lady guests, something a house of the Daughter of Spring was more likely to host. Pen took advantage by sitting down with his comb, undoing his queue, and attacking the day’s accumulated snarls, which his fine, pale blond hair was prone to.
When he glanced up at the mirror, his mouth said, “Yes, let’s get another look at you.”
Pen froze. Was the demon awake again? His jaw clamped shut; his throat tightened.
How did the thing perceive the world, anyway? Did it share his vision, his hearing? His thoughts? Did it have to take turns looking out, as with his voice, or was it always there, like a bird perched on his shoulder?
He breathed, unlocked his muscles. Said, “Would you like to speak?” And waited.
“Want to look,” said the demon through his mouth. “We want to see what we’ve bought.” Its speech was fairly clear, its accent the cultured Wealdean of the lands around Martensbridge, as Ruchia’s had been.
Pen had not spent much time in front of mirrors since he’d grown big and fast enough to evade older sisters bent on using him as a large doll. His own features, in the glass, suddenly grew strange to him. But his vision did not go black; it seemed the two of them shared his eyes together.
His face, as lean as his body, had good bones, he’d been told. His fair skin was redeemed from its youth by what he hoped was a reasonably assertive nose. Long lashes framed what Mama had fondly called lake-blue eyes. In Pen’s experience lakes were more often gray, green, blinding white with snow, or black glass if frozen on a cold, still night. But on a rare bright summer day lakes could be that color, he supposed.
Nobody else had been talking to him; nobody else had been telling him anything. Had he been missing a chance? He exhaled, relaxed his throat, tried to soften the set of his tired, tense shoulders. To make himself open. “Can you answer questions?”
A snort. “If they’re not too witless.”
“I can’t guarantee that.”
The Hmm from his throat answering this did not seem hostile, at least.
Pen began in the simplest way he could think of. “What’s your name?”
A surprised pause. “My riders call me Demon.”
“That’s like calling your horse Horse, or me Boy. Or Man,” he hastily revised this. “Even a horse gets a name.”
“How would we get a name—Boy?”
“I . . . suppose most names are given. By people’s parents. By creatures’ owners. Sometimes they are inherited.”
A long silence followed this. Whatever the entity had been expecting from him, it evidently hadn’t been this.
His mouth said, hesitantly, “I suppose we could be Ruchia.”
Another voice objected, “But what about Helvia? Or Amberein?”
Yet another voice said something in a language Pen didn’t even recognize, though the cadences seemed to tease his understanding; he thought Umelan might have been another name. More unknown words spouted from his mouth, three voices, four; he lost track till it all ended in an inarticulate growl and a weird squeal.
“How many are you?” asked Pen, startled. “How many . . . generations?” How many riders had this old demon attached itself to, and copied—or stolen—life from?
“You expect us to do arithmetic?”
Pen’s brows went up. “Yes,” he decided.
“There will be a price. He doesn’t know about the price.” That accent was . . . Darthacan?
“Ruchia has lately paid,” said Ruchia’s voice. “That reserve will be long, drawing down.”
A surly pause. “Twelve,” said a voice.
“Only if we count the lioness and the mare,” muttered another. “Must we?”
“So . . . so are you twelve persons, or one?” Pen asked.
“Yes,” said the Ruchia-voice. “Both. At once.”
“Like, um, like a town council?”
“ . . . We suppose.” The voice was not impressed.
“Are—were—you all, er, ladies?”
“It is customary,” said a voice. Though another added, “She was no lady!”
Customary, Pen gathered, for a demon to be handed on to another rider of the same sex. But not, obviously, theologically required, or he wouldn’t be in this fix. Dear gods. Have I just acquired a council of twelve invisible older sisters? Ten, he supposed, if he didn’t count the mare and the, what, lioness? Did either of them have names in their animal tongues to argue about?
“I think you had better have one name,” said Pen. “Though if I want to speak to, to a particular layer of you, that one could have—inherit—her old rider’s name, I suppose.” Twelve? He would sort them out somehow.
“Hmm.” A most dubious noise, of uncertain origin.
“I have two names,” he offered. “Penric, which is my particular name, and Jurald, which is my kin name. The name for all of you could be like your kin name.”
Pen hoped no one was listening to this—all in his voice, ultimately—through the walls. No wonder Marda had believed the sorceress’s utterances incomprehensible. He thought to add, “Did you speak to Learned Ruchia in this fashion?”
“In time,” said the Ruchia-voice, “we had silent speech.”
How much time did that take? Pen wondered. And if it went on long enough, might a man no longer know which voice was his own? He shuddered, but wrenched his mind back to the moment. “You ought to have a name for when I mean all of you, as one. Not Demon. Something nicer than what I’d call a dog, for the five gods’ sakes. How if I pick something? Make it a present.”
The silence this time was so long, he wondered if the creature had gone back to sleep, or into hiding, or whatever it did when he could not feel or hear it. “In twelve long lives,” it said quietly at last, “no one has ever offered us a present.”
“Well, that’s not . . . not an easy thing. I mean, you don’t exactly have a body, so how could anybody give you any material gift? But a name is a thing of the air, of the mind and the spirit, so a fellow could give it to a spirit, right?” He felt he was making headway, here. And because betrothal had been lately on his mind, he tossed in, at a hazard, “A courting gift.”
He had the sense of an explosive Huff! but no sound came with it. Had he thrown a creature of chaos into confusion? That seemed only fair, considering what it was doing to him.
But then the ambiguous voice said, cautiously, “What do you offer? Penric of Jurald.”
He hadn’t actually got that far in his thinking yet. He choked in panic. Steadied himself. Reached for inspiration, and caught it. “Desdemona,” he said, suddenly certain. “I read it in a book of tales from Saone, when I was a boy, and thought it sounded very fine. She was a princess.”
A faint, flattered exhalation through his nose.
“Amusing,” said the Ruchia-voice. It seemed to be the dominant one; was that because it was freshest? Or had the late divine held the creature longest? Or what?
Another long silence; Pen yawned in exhaustion. Were they taking a vote in there? Had he started a civil war in his own gut? That could be bad. He was about to take it all back, when the ambiguous voice said, “Accepted.”
“Desdemona it is, then!” he said, relieved. He wondered if it would shorten to Des, when they grew to know each other better. Like Pen. That could be all right.