“But no one else here will, and you are in no wise obliged to inform them. The world is not always so friendly a place that you can afford to squander your advantages on a pointless conceit.”
“I much prefer the meaningful title I earned to the empty one I inherited.”
“So, not modesty at all, but sly pride? Your scholarship is a delight to me, Penric, but of the many things you learned in seminary, I doubt court polish was one.”
“Recalling our meals in the student refectory, I’m afraid you’re right,” he granted ruefully.
“Think of this visit as an opportunity for a different kind of learning, then. Another day will put some other plate on your table, more to your taste, but do not waste the food in front of you.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” he said meekly.
Their conversation broke off as her guards and bearers, and the second sedan chair porting her inseparable secretary, negotiated the long flights of steps crisscrossing down the bluff. Pen fell behind as the lanes narrowed and twisted, then strode up beside Llewyn again as they came to the wider street fronted by the mansion of the royal relative hosting tonight’s festivities. When the chair grounded beside the entrance, he was granted the privilege of raising her to her silk-slippered feet and offering her his arm, which she took with a rather smug smile.
The official naming ceremony for the blobby scrap of humanity Penric had been assured was a prince had gone off smoothly, the gods be thanked, three days ago. So he supposed the worst was over. Since the Archdivine of Easthome had officiated, Penric was not sure what his own superior’s Temple task had been, besides swelling an already impressive procession. Good fairy, perhaps? Penric’s function had seemed to be to stand around, look decorative, and try desperately to guard his best white robes against the detritus of a busy city. Tonight was shaping to be a reprise.
He even spotted some of the same faces, here in the hall of the elderly lord who was husband to Llewyn’s even-more-aged sister Princess Llewanna—Llewyn released her hold on Pen to embrace this sibling. Really, it didn’t seem all that different from some of the princess-archdivine’s god’s-day banquets back in Martensbridge. Well, more lords, fewer merchants. Fewer Temple folk, for that matter; Pen didn’t spot that many other robes. More highborn relatives, though the influx of the aristocracy into town was already starting to thin. More expensive clothes and jewels. Ambassadors from far countries, not near counties, all right, that was a novelty—perhaps he’d have a chance to practice his languages before the evening was over. Men whose mistakes could kill more people, faster; but still, just men.
The candlelit banquet chamber was excessively warm in the summer evening. Pen sat by Llewyn’s left hand and was painfully polite to the few people who spoke to him and not her, smiling but not too much, since she’d once chided him for the latter. Was court polish a euphemism for being very bored while being stuffed very full?
It wasn’t until the tables were being cleared away for the doubtless sedate dancing that he spotted an object of interest, or at least another person under fifty years old. The young fellow was even skinnier than Pen, managing to look less like a lord and more like a very well-dressed scarecrow. His most prominent feature was a pair of the thickest glass spectacles Pen had ever seen on a person’s face.
They drifted together next to a wall wainscoted in gilded leather. “Is that not Martensbridge lens-craft?” Pen inquired, as pleased as if he’d run across an unexpected old acquaintance from his home village.
“Ah!” The young man’s hand flew to his gold-decked temple. “You know the work?”
“Yes, very well. And the workman, I daresay. The artisan in Lower Linden Street, yes? I’ve heard several of my more aged colleagues pour blessings upon his head. And his hands.”
The fellow’s chest swelled as much as it could. “You understand!” He peered more questioningly at Pen. “Do you?”
“As I can think of no greater nightmare than to lose my ability to read, yes.”
The bespectacled lordling smiled gratefully. “I was fourteen before I even found mine. Everyone just thought I was a clumsy fool when I was younger.”
“Oh, that’s unfortunate.”
He nodded. “Because I could see shapes and colors and light and movement just fine, I didn’t think myself blind, didn’t realize others saw so much more than me. And neither did they. It was a Temple divine who’d been trying to tutor me, and who wore them himself, who first suspected my malady, and took me to Martensbridge to have me fitted. It was a revelation. Trees had leaves. And letters were not elusive fur-bearing creatures hiding coyly behind each other. I wasn’t stupid, I just couldn’t see.” He was a little breathless, getting this all out at once to a rare sympathetic listener. “When I graduated Rosehall with second honors, it was the proudest day of my life, and no one understood why I was weeping till I nearly couldn’t see again. Except Yvaina.” He nodded sharply at this mysterious codicil.
“I attended the white god’s seminary at Rosehall,” Pen returned, quite willing to be cheerful for a fellow bookman’s miracle. “I wonder if we could have been there at the same time?” Or not; Pen would certainly have remembered the spectacles, however unprepossessing their owner. Although the great university at Rosehall did host some six thousand students at a time. “I took my braids and oaths a year ago this spring.”
“I left four years back,” the young man said. “So maybe?”
“Mm, no. That would have been just about the time I arrived.”
His brows crimped in puzzlement over the arithmetic; a divine’s training normally took six years, not three. But he shrugged this off.
Pen asked, “What was your study?”
“Mathematics, mostly. I’d hoped to find a place in the Father’s Order, perhaps rising to comptroller, at which point I thought I could afford to marry. I even began there as a lay dedicat. But, uh, other things happened first.”
A young woman approached them, nearly as lanky and scrawny as the man apart from the distinctive pregnant bulge about her middle, like a plum on a stick. Pen had thought Des had fallen asleep, as he’d wished he could do, but she put in, The word you are groping for, young Pen, is willowy. Far more flattering, thus safer. Trust me.
Her clothes, though rich, hung on her almost as tentatively as the fellow’s, but at the sight of her his face lit as though the sun had come out behind his winking lenses.
“Ah. Allow me to introduce my wife. Baroness Yvaina kin Pikepool. And, oh, you are, learned sir…?”
Pikepool was not one of the major Wealdean kin houses, or Llewyn would have made Pen con it before now. Possibly not as obscure, however, as his own. Pen bowed. “Lord Penric kin Jurald, presently of Martensbridge.”
“Ah, that’s why you were sitting with the Princess Llewyn at the high table. You looked a very daunting guardian.”
Yvaina’s rather thick brows knotted. “Is that not a Darthacan name?”
“Saonese, courtesy of a younger son with a short-lived dower and a last canton kin land-heiress. Then you would be Baron…?”
The fellow opened his hands as if in embarrassment. “Wegae kin Pikepool. Though only lord for the last two years. The inheritance was quite unexpected.”
The name might be obscure, but it was memorable. “You wouldn’t happen to own a large tract of wooded hills about ten miles east of here?”
Wegae blinked in surprise. “It’s part of the old family seat. That and that dreadful falling-down fortress. It’s only good for a hunting lodge anymore, if I had the least interest in hunting.” He made an excusing gesture at his face. “That was another skill no one could beat into me as a lad, along with reading.”