Are you regretting the haste and disorder of our own pairing? Des’s query was soft, the faintest tint of hurt coloring her doubt. Not that it could be undone now. Save by a few arrows to his back or some like mischance.
Pen returned ruefully, Oh, I have for a while suspected we had a better Matchmaker than Hamo, conscientious though he is.
…That thought would be more flattering if it were more comforting.
Aye, Pen sighed.
The Easthome royal magistrates hanged Halber kin Pikepool a week after the Grayjays had returned him to their custody.
Penric did not attend. Hamo did, he heard.
Three days before they were to depart for Martensbridge, Penric made a formal request to call upon the princess-archdivine.
She received him in her private chambers, waving out the servants attempting to pack all that she had brought, topped by all that she had acquired in the royal capital, for the four-hundred-mile journey home. The Easthome hills were fine in their way, but they were not the austere white peaks fencing his horizon that Pen was used to. Though the mountains, he was sure, would wait for him, with the endless patience of stone. All the impatience of flesh and nerve drove him now.
He flashed his finest smile as he seated himself on blue-and-white silk, safe now against the trousers of his Order’s well-laundered whites. “I have a proposal for you, Your Grace. To enhance my abilities as your court sorcerer.”
“Shouldn’t there be more pleasantries before you leap in?”
“Oh. Er, do you want some?”
“Not particularly.” A quirk of her gray eyebrows indicated interest without commitment. “Do go on.”
“I’ve been speaking with my friend Shaman Inglis. And with his superior, Master Firthwyth, over at the Royal Fellowship. He is supervisor of the training of the young shamans. The Fellowship being part school, part farm, part a community of historical scholarship, and part, these days, hospice for injured or sick creatures.”
“It sounds a lively place,” she conceded.
He nodded vigorously. “Anyway, Master Firthwyth agrees that it would be of great interest for me to study awhile with the royal shamans. Learn what I can of their magics.”
“And what do my nephew’s shamans gain from this?”
“Well, they get to study me back, I expect.”
“How long do you imagine this study would take?”
“Hard to say. I mean, a shaman can spend a lifetime exploring his calling, but I already have a calling of my own, that, er, calls to me as well. But the Fellowship maintains a fine and growing library. I was allowed to see it, when I was over there visiting the other day.” Inglis had sternly forbade him to drool on the priceless volumes.
“And how long would it take you to read every book in it? A month?”
“Oh, longer than that!” He hesitated. “…A year?”
“A cap of sorts, I suppose.” A quizzical tilt of her elaborately braided head. “And what would my reimbursement be, for the loss of your services during all that time?”
“When I came back, I could do more kinds of things?”
“What things?”
“If I already knew—if anyone knew—I wouldn’t have to go study to find out, now would I?”
“That’s… actually a less specious argument than it sounds at first blush.”
They exchanged nods, like two swordsmen saluting.
She drummed her fingers on her silk-swathed knee. “When we returned home, I was going to tell you… Master Riedel of the Mother’s Order in Martensbridge was very impressed by your new edition of Learned Ruchia’s work on sorcery as applied to the arts of medicine. He wanted to extend you an invitation to study at the hospice. Part-time, as your other duties permitted.”
“Oh.” Pen sat up. He hadn’t realized his gift of the fresh-printed volumes to the hospice’s library, and his few meals at the princess-archdivine’s table with Master Riedel, had borne such excellent fruit. “Oh, yes, I’d like to do that! Too.”
“Not instead?”
“Too,” he said, with more certainty. “Though I grant I can’t do both at once. Not even with sorcery.”
“Then you have a puzzle.” She sat back in some fascination, as if to watch him solve it. Or, possibly, as if to watch a man trying to eat a meal twice the size of his head, Pen wasn’t sure.
“Two of Des’s prior riders,” he said slowly, “had trained and practiced as physicians.”
“Master Riedel is aware. He thinks it would make you a very quick study.”
Pen nodded. “In my prior experiences with, with drawing on Des’s vast knowledge, it doesn’t exactly just appear on its own in my mind. I have to induce it, more or less. Like, I don’t know, digging a ditch from an irrigation channel to its water source. Then it flows on its own. Well, sometimes it’s more like raising it bucket by bucket, but in any case. It was so with the languages. What Master Riedel might teach me would allow me to know all Des knows, eventually.”
Pen wasn’t going to ask Des’s opinion on this one. She’d had her own reasons for jumping to not-yet-Learned Ruchia last time, rather than the physician-aspirant that the Temple had planned for her. Besides, having transcribed every word of Ruchia’s medical text for printing, not to mention translating it into two and a half languages so far, he’d gained more than a trickle of understanding already.
“The point is,” he slowly felt his way forward, “if I study the shamanic magic first, I will have a chance of bringing something new back to more formal medical studies. More than just a review of things already known.”
Llewyn pursed her lips. “That is an honestly compelling view.” She hesitated. “And how would you plan to support yourself, during this scholarly holiday?”
“I, er, was hoping you could grant me a stipend?”
“So I am to pay to be deprived of your services for some undefined amount of time?”
“…Yes?” Pen tried for a sop. “Although I am fairly sure Wegae and Yvaina kin Pikepool would feed me, from time to time. I’ve already enjoyed some very interesting dinners over there.”
“Set a savory table, do they?”
“I don’t remember the food. But Yvaina has had this terrific notion, if I can get Learned Hamo interested. She proposes to invest in a press, using the sort of printing plates I produce with sorcery. Except I had this idea, really from rusting out Treuch’s knife before he gutted me, well, anyway, explaining it over dinner, it occurred to me that a sorcerer could create steel plates as well as wooden ones. Which could last for thousands of copies, not just dozens or hundreds. So students wouldn’t ever have to stab each other over sharing expensive texts again. And then she asked if I couldn’t do woodcuts or engravings the same way, and I said no, never thought about it because I couldn’t draw, but then she said, maybe some sorcerer who could. And I said, Oh. Of course. I think I can get Hamo to let me teach the technique to some of his people. And then—”
Llewyn held up a hand to stem this tide. “Remind me to have my secretary explain the concept of a percentage recompense to you. Soon. Possibly tonight.”
“Er, yes, Archdivine.” Pen subsided.
“Certainly before you are turned loose in Easthome to cut whatever swathe seems inevitable.”
Pen’s heart rose in hope. In quite another tone, he said, “Yes, Archdivine.”
“Hah.” She rubbed her fine chin, regarding him thoughtfully. “There is a line from a poem that rises to my mind. I no longer remember from where, but that’s the hazard of my years—oh. Do you suppose Baroness kin Pikepool’s press would ever share out poetry?”