“That seems to have been tried, judging by the histories I’ve read.” And Pen had read rather more of them than he was going to let on, not that one could trust their writers. “Successfully, sometimes.”
Arisaydia grimaced. “Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have believed that myth wholeheartedly, that we needed only the right man to quell all wrongs. But, as you say, it’s been tried, and nothing seems to change in the end. I had to see a lot more of the court to learn what we are up against, and it isn’t just the corruption of courtiers, for all that we’re well-supplied with that, too. Taxation is a mess, for one thing. The sporadic plagues have chewed holes in the fabric of the realm. At some golden periods the shortfall was made up for by conquest, I suppose, but it seems every generation we lose more territory than we gain. Reform is resisted by everyone who has an interest in it not taking place at their expense. Including the army, I’m sorry to say. To set one man, no matter how heroic or well-intentioned, up against the whole vast weight of that… and then to excoriate him for his inevitable failure…” He shook his head. “I would say five gods spare me, but there was a cadre of my officers who thought otherwise. And started to go beyond muttering. Evidently, half a year and Patos were not distance enough to save me from their admiration. And the reaction it engendered.”
Arisaydia, Pen noticed, was naming no names, and likely not for the same reasons Pen hadn’t. In his present state it seemed less calculation than habit, and a curious habit it was for a man to have developed.
“Did you not write to the duke of Adria asking for, um, greater distance? That was one of the rumors.” Penric had held the letter in his hand in the duke’s cabinet and read it. The chancellery of Adria was expert in forgeries, both detecting and creating them, but it had been in a scribe’s handwriting, with only Arisaydia’s signature appended. The duke had been frank with Pen about the dubious possibilities, which was why he’d been supposed to sound out the general most discreetly at first. And, should it not prove Arisaydia’s idea, implant it anyway.
“Adria! Certainly not. Why would I treat with Adria? Their sea merchants are little better than pirates, sometimes. Rats with boats, nibbling at our coasts.” Arisaydia’s mouth set. He couldn’t glower yet, but his eyelids tensed, and then his lips parted in pain. “Agh.” He sighed and huddled down in his sheets, obviously tiring.
Well, that wasn’t encouraging for Pen’s secondary plan. He had begun to wonder, if he could restore Arisaydia’s sight, if he might persuade him to flee east after all. Not that letting the duke aim Arisaydia at Carpagamo, a country that had never done harm to Pen, seemed a very holy mission, but politics were generally unholy, and that had never kept the Temple from dabbling in them. But he could not have stayed in Martensbridge and kept his sanity, and the archdivine of Adria had promised him a place that did not include duties to the Mother’s Order.
Yet here I am, practicing medicine again all unwilled. Is the Bastard laughing?
This left the question of who in Cedonia had forged the initial letter, as the duke was fully convinced it had originated here. Clear entrapment, it seemed. Vicious both in its intent and its results. Velka might have brought it; he’d certainly escorted the very real reply back into the right wrong Cedonian hands, which had to have been outstretched waiting for it.
Penric was really starting to want some time alone in a quiet room with Velka. He was theologically forbidden to kill with his magic, but there were other possibilities. So very, very many. And oh gods he surely now understood why physician-sorcerers were the most tightly controlled of all the discreet cadre of Temple mages.
Desdemona couldn’t lick her lips, but she could lick his. It brought him out of his furious fugue with a start. Her little frisson of anticipatory excitement faded, and she sighed.
Don’t tempt me, and he had no idea which of them said it.
VIII
As she and the physician walked Adelis around the garden between them, just two days after he’d first been persuaded up, Nikys was pleased to see how much steadier he was on his feet. It was plain that the overwhelming pain of his scalding, so precisely and cruelly placed, that had driven him close to madness was vastly reduced. He was healing with amazing speed.
She did not know what mysterious Wealdean techniques the half-foreign physician was bringing to his task, but her respect for his skills had risen and risen. Even as he went on being rather odd. He talked to himself, for one thing, when he didn’t think he was overheard, in what she guessed was his father’s tongue, or sometimes in snatches of what she recognized as Darthacan. And then argued back. He always smiled at her, yet his bright eyes were restless and strained, as if masking a brain busy elsewhere.
As they turned and paced along the wall, Adelis unwound his arm from Master Penric’s, but not from hers; his hand drifted up to touch his cheek just below the black mask. The sly design made him look strong, and dangerous, and not at all invalidish. It made him look quite like himself, in fact, at least when in one of his more sardonic moods. But his voice was uncharacteristically tentative as he asked, “Does my face look like a goat’s bottom?”
Her heart clenched, but she returned lightly, “I always thought your face looked like a goat’s bottom, dear brother. It appears no different to me.”
Penric’s brows lifted in concern as he turned to her across Adelis. But Adelis just smirked, looking mordant below the mask, and gave her arm a squeeze, returning in a matching tone, “Dear sister. Always my compass.” His voice fell to quiet seriousness. “In the darkest places. It seems.”
She swallowed and squeezed back.
Penric offered, “Your blisters looked much better this morning. Almost gone.”
“Are you a connoisseur of blisters, Master Penric?” asked Adelis.
“It goes with my trade, I suppose. Yours were superb.”
“That’s Adelis for you,” said Nikys. “Always has to have the best.”
A huff of laugh. “Your latest ointment has tamed the itching, thankfully.”
“Good. I don’t want you scratching.”
They turned once more and negotiated the steps up to the pergola, and Nikys said, “Go around again? Or rest?”
“Go around again,” said Adelis, definitely. Nikys smiled.
But before they could continue, a brisk knocking at the front door echoed through the atriums, and they all paused, listening intently. The gardener-porter answered and admitted the supplicant. Supplicants; two voices quizzed him. If it was a friendly visit, it was the first since they’d been plunged into this political quarantine. If it was not…
A sharp, indrawn breath from Master Penric drew her attention. “I know that voice. One of them. I need—he mustn’t see me!” The voices approached, the aged gardener shuffling slowly in escort, the others stepping impatiently short to match. Penric looked around frantically; he was quite cut off from the house by the visitors’ entry route. “No time.”
To Nikys’s astonishment, he scrambled up the corner post of the pergola like a cat climbing a tree to escape a dog. He swung back down to add, “He’s no friend to you. Be careful.” And then ran lightly along the top, making the grape leaves bounce and quiver. Adelis, lips parted in unvoiced question, turned his head to track the thumps and rustles. Reaching the second-floor balcony overlooking the back garden, Penric vaulted over the railing and melted to the floor. Nikys could spot one blue eye peeking back through the uprights.