“…I know.” Pen sighed. He pictured the man in the upstairs bedchamber whose life his fumbled packet of papers had somehow destroyed. No—he eyed the pergola—two lives, it seemed.
You hardly destroyed Arisaydia all by yourself. You had some expert help.
Aye to that. The increasing suspicion that he’d been used was a growing itch in Penric’s mind. But by whom, and where, in this tangle of events? “Who around here would know who Arisaydia’s enemies are?” He answered his own question before Des, this time: “Arisaydia would. For a start. If I could get him talking instead of just groaning.” And, he was now sure, not if but when he did, who might a man trust more than his physician?
Des’s silence would be tight-lipped, if she’d had lips. After a while she remarked, I know you have no Temple orders for this. And I’ve felt no god move. You have embarked on this entirely on your own, Pen. How great a step from independent to renegade?
Or how many little slippery ones, more probably. And Des could not, would not, stop him, though she wasn’t beyond making him stop to think. “Shall I pray to my god for guidance, then?”
They both fell silent, considering the fifth god each in their own way.
What would you do if you got it, and it wasn’t what you wanted to hear?
“…Maybe I’ll wait for Him to call on me.”
Des shuddered. I suppose you think that is an amusing joke.
Pen’s lips stretched in something almost a real smile as he dropped over the wall.
VI
Over the next few days, Nikys’s household settled into a strange, limping new routine. Their safety was balanced on the knife’s edge, she knew, of the continued inattention of the provincial governor and whatever cabal in the capital—and she could probably guess the most likely men—who had engineered Adelis’s downfall. They were doubtless waiting out there for the word of his death, from the shock or infection or despair. She was disinclined to give them the satisfaction. Although she supposed a long, silent convalescence followed by a retreat into some hermitage, religious or secular, would serve their purposes just as well. From here forward, Adelis would carry his imprisonment with him, at no further cost to the empire.
She’d made no move to replace the servants who had prudently scattered after the arrest; she wondered how soon the ones who’d lingered would realize how little coin she had left to pay them, and follow. Well, not the maid, the gardener-porter, and the scullion, who’d come with the villa rather like the furnishings, and would stay after the current tenants decamped. Which would be when? Adelis had paid her rent through the half-year, but the end of that term was coming up in a few weeks. Possibly why their landlord had not moved to evict his politically poisonous lodgers already.
Not that any woman could scheme how to hold household when she had absolutely no idea what her resources were going to be. Still, Nikys could make some shrewd guesses. Adelis’s army pay would be cut off, of course, and all the property he’d inherited from his mother and their father attainted. Would the Thasalon imperial bureaucracy snap up every bit, or leave him some pittance? Would the small remains of her own dower and the military pension from Kymis be seized as well? That would be like a hawk, having taken a fat hare, returning for a mouse.
Their entire lack of visitors told its own tale. Some of his old officer cadre in the Western Army might have had the courage to come, but Adelis had been most cannily separated from them, now, hadn’t he? Although given that some of his new men had sent that extraordinary (if extraordinarily odd) physician, she must hoist her opinion of them back up.
She and Master Penric had quickly found their way to a division of labor in the sickroom. The physician had taken a pallet on the floor, attendant-fashion, and guarded Adelis at night. Nikys relieved him twice a day: in the afternoon, when he rested in the garden or went out to discreetly restock his medical supplies, and in the evening after supper, when he departed on errands he never explained, though they seemed urgent to him. She’d almost swear she’d once encountered him coming back in through Adelis’s window, which made no sense at all, so she’d dismissed the impression from her burdened mind. She wondered what other professional duties the man was leaving undone, to linger so diligently in this stricken villa.
The cook being numbered among the deserters, and the housemaid having proved as clumsy in the kitchen as she was in the sickroom, Nikys took over that task, not least because she trusted no one else with the preparation of invalid fare. Five gods knew she’d had plenty of practice cooking such for Kymis during that last miserable year. She finally managed to draw the physician to a midday meal with her under the pergola, hoping to quiz him frankly on Adelis’s progress out of Adelis’s earshot.
After they delivered the platters and jugs, she dismissed the scullion and sat herself down with a tired sigh, staring dully at her own plate feeling as if she’d forgotten how to eat. Master Penric poured her wine-and-water, and offered the beaker along with a smile fit to compete with the sunlight spangling his hair.
While she was still mustering her first question, he said, “I noticed your green cloak on the wall peg in the atrium, Madame Khatai. Is yours a recent bereavement?” He appeared poised to offer condolences, if so.
Dark green for a widow, yes, though she owed no other allegiance to the Mother of Summer. Sadly. “Not very recent. Kymis died four years ago.” As his look of inquiry did not diminish, she went on: “He was a comrade of my brother’s—something of an older mentor to him, when he was a young officer. Adelis felt he owed him much.”
His blond brows pinched. “Were you payment?”
Her lips quirked. “Perhaps, a little. Our mothers were widowed by then, in reduced circumstances, so helping me to an honorable marriage to a good man whom he trusted seemed the right thing to do. Ten years ago… we were all younger, in a terrible hurry to get on with our lives. I wish I could have…” She faltered. But talking to this mild, pretty man seemed curiously easy, and he was a physician. His claim of in all but final oath seemed borne out, so far. “I wish I could have given Kymis children. I still don’t know if it was some, some subtle physical impediment, his or mine, or just that he was called too much away to the border incursions. Adelis moved the world to get him back to me when he was wounded and maimed, as if I could somehow repair what the war had destroyed. But all I tried to do to save his life only prolonged his death. He cursed me, toward the end. I thought he had a point, but I didn’t know how to let go.”
It was the most honest thing she’d said about Kymis’s dreadful last year to anyone—it was certainly nothing she could ever confess to Adelis—but Penric merely nodded, and said, “Yes.”
Just Yes. Just that. It was nothing to burst into tears at the table about. She swallowed, hard. And awkwardly returned, “I suppose, as a physician”—in training, anyway—“you’ve seen the like. How it is to try and fail to keep some valued thing alive.”
The flicker in his light eyes might have been from the movement of the dappled shade; he smoothly converted his flinch into a shrug, and she cursed her tongue, or her brain, or the day. Or her life. The smile he reaffixed was so like his usual ones, she began to wonder about their validity as well. But he said, answering her fears and not her words, and how did he know, “Adelis will live. I expect to get him up walking later today. He may not thank me at first, mind you.”