He caught Adelis’s hands on their way to feel his own face and yanked them down hard, the first ungentle gesture she’d seen him make. “No. No touching. Stay on your back. That skin is barely stronger than a soap bubble, and we want to preserve those blisters intact for as long as possible. They’re protecting you, little though it may feel like it.”
Adelis panted, but obeyed.
The physician’s brilliant blue eyes seemed filled with jostling thoughts, but Nikys couldn’t begin to guess what they might be. “I think what I most need now, Madame Khatai, is for you to go get some real rest. I’ll stay here and keep watch. Come back and relieve me at nightfall.” He beamed sunnily at her.
“I’ll bring you both food, later. Or have it brought.”
“That would be excellent.” He hummed, as if mulling something, then said, “If I’m going to be living in your household for a few days, we’d best give some thought how I am to be explained to your other servants. I’d suggest you tell them you’ve hired me on to be your brother’s male attendant. Which is not actually untrue, among its other benefits.”
While she couldn’t imagine why anyone, even the politically hostile, could object to Adelis being seen by a physician however oddly he’d been delivered to them, she was reminded that among her erstwhile servants was one certain spy. She nodded slowly. “All right.”
She went out to make preparations in the kitchen, and see to the arrangement of the small spare bedchamber. She didn’t think she could sleep, but when she reached her own room on the other side of the atrium and sat down on her bed, she felt as if the weight of an oxcart, complete with ox, had been lifted from her shoulders.
She was still crying from the sheer relief of it when she fell asleep.
She returned as instructed at sunset. When she eased open the door, Master Penric leaped up holding a finger to his lips and reeled out of the room. He clutched her hands and shook them up and down like a long-lost relative. His palms were feverish. His wide grin at her was nearly lunatic.
“He’s asleep, miraculously. When he wakes up, get more water down him. Don’t let him touch his face. I’ll be back in a while and measure out the next dose of poppy syrup.”
And then she wondered if he’d been drinking, or maybe sampling the poppy juice himself, for he called over his shoulder as he bounded down the stairs, “ ’Scuse me, but I havetogokillsomerats now.”
“What?”
“Mice? Mice would be all right, but you need more of ’em.” His voice faded as he dodged not to the front door, but out the back way. “Has to be something useless lurking around this neighborhood. Stray dog would do a treat right now. Sweet lord god Bastard, deliver us something…”
She blinked, closed her mouth, shook her head, and went within. Sitting and watching the slow rise and fall of her brother’s chest beneath his sheets as the shadows deepened, she decided she didn’t care how strange the blond man was, if he could get Adelis to sleep like that.
V
Penric gauged his distance in the dark from the neighbor’s roof to the garden wall, leapt lightly, and settled himself down atop it for some composing meditation. The sleepy provincial guards, it appeared, had been instructed to attend to the villa’s entrance and the postern gate in the rear wall, and that was just what they were doing. The one at the back had curled himself up against his assigned door and was currently napping, combining two tasks.
A bat fluttered by against the stars, but Pen let this one go, since his body had finally cooled. This neighborhood outside the city walls had lacked the swarm of big, aggressive rats like the harbor’s, but he wasn’t going back down there tonight. Des had left a trail of destruction through all the small vermin within her range, but with this much chaos to divest, insects had scarcely repaid even the moment’s attention they took. Private middens had yielded more red-blooded prey, including a few slinking suburban rats, and what he thought might have been some kind of hedgehog. Pen regretted the mangy, worm-riddled street cat, but they’d been desperately hot and at least the poor beast no longer suffered.
“Eyes,” muttered Pen. “They’re so small. Why should this engender so much more chaos than making several times my weight in ice?”
His demon couldn’t wheeze, exactly, so maybe it was just him as Des replied, “It may be the most subtle uphill magic you’ve yet attempted. The ice was big but simple. This mad healing you’ve thrown us into is complex.”
Penric’s initial plan, more selfish than charitable, had been simply to assure Arisaydia would survive his blinding, to evade the burden of yet another unwanted death in the pack Pen carried. It was only when he’d examined the man with all of Des’s perceptions focused to their greatest intensity that he’d realized that the backs of his eyes, in all their impossible delicacy, were undamaged. And, suddenly, the hopeless had become merely the very, very tricky.
His first task had been the finicky release of beginning adhesions as Arisaydia’s injured eyelids tried to grow themselves onto his steam-lashed eyeballs; then, rapid reduction of the ocular swelling, his skills and refined belladonna tincture working together. Pen had poured all the uphill magic he could into Arisaydia’s own body’s powers to heal, but that was a narrow channel that could only accept so much help at a time before it burst in a destructive back-blow. It was like trying to relieve a man dying of thirst using a teaspoon, but at least he’d kept the sips coming all the long day.
Arisaydia’s survival was no longer in question, perhaps never had been. Pen had discovered the man in the bed to be above middle height, muscular and fit, obviously healthy before this catastrophe had struck him down. His face and arms and legs were that attractive reddish-brick tan common to the men of this region, though the parts of his body routinely covered by clothes more matched his sister’s lighter, indoor version. His aquiline features, rough-cut in granite, were in her echoed in fine round marble; both shared the same midnight-black hair, his cut short, hers drawn back from her face and curling over her shoulders. Pen wondered what color his eyes had been. He could ask Madame Khatai, but it might distress her.
Speaking of which… “Do try to be more sensitive around the sister, Des. She’s quite upset already.”
Des snorted. You have more than enough sensitivity for us all. To excess, as I have pointed out before.
Bloody-minded chaos demon, Pen thought back.
The impression of an amused purr. I do sometimes wonder how you ever survived, Pen, before you were us.
Whereas I more often wonder how I am to survive after…
He stared down into the shadows beneath the pergola, where he had first seen and studied Madame Khatai from just about this vantage at dawn. She’d borne something of her brother’s air of sturdy health, after a delightfully plump female fashion, but Pen didn’t think he’d ever seen a woman’s posture so expressive of utter despair. I imagine she’d be quite pretty if she smiled.
Des’s response was sardonic: So what is she when she isn’t smiling?
Penric contemplated the conundrum. “Heartbreaking. I think.”
Was Des taken aback? Oh, Pen, no. This isn’t the time or place for one of your futile infatuations. This isn’t a place we should be in at all. We should be making our way back to Adria.