Uncertain, Nikys guided Adelis to the outdoor table. He seated himself stiffly. The porter and his charges arrived, a pair of men in civil dress followed by a sharply turned-out provincial guard. If Penric had recognized one voice, Nikys recognized one man: the provincial governor’s senior secretary, Master Prygos. Neither friend nor enemy, she would have thought, just a punctilious functionary, his ambitions restricted to his own domain. The gray-haired, dyspeptic bureaucrat half-bowed to each of them, more habitually polite than truly respectful, as Adelis could not see it. Prygos cursorily introduced his trailing clerk as Tepelen. This was a younger man, shrewd-faced, evidently not in his trade long enough for his body to soften and grow pale like his superior’s.
“I am charged today to deliver your copy of your bill of attainder,” he told Adelis, formally. He nodded to Tepelen, who rummaged in his documents case and withdrew a thick sheaf, evidently a list of all the property Adelis no longer owned. Tepelen handed it to Prygos, who turned to hand it to Adelis, then paused and said, “Er.”
Penric, by whatever impulse, had lined the eyeholes of the mask with a double layer of black silk, giving it an unsettling effect of gleaming bird eyes. The light played over the silk as Adelis nodded toward her. “Pray give it to Madame Khatai,” he murmured. “She is my scribe these days.”
“Ah. Yes.”
Nikys took it, glanced through the cramped governmental calligraphy and legal cant, and set it down under her elbows.
Adelis inquired shortly of Prygos, “Do I have anything left to live on, or should I find a begging bowl for the marketplace?”
Prygos cleared his throat. “Madame Khatai’s pension was left alone, as was the property of her mother that your mother left to her. Your dependents will not be houseless.”
“Small mercies,” said Adelis.
“They suffice,” murmured Nikys. It would be a constrained little life, the pair of them crammed back into her aging mother’s house in its small inland town. Betrayed. Defeated. But not dead. Therefore, not hopeless. Call it, in Adelis’s lexicon, a retreat to regroup.
Prygos’s hand rose, then fell; he looked to his clerk, who cast him a steely frown. He cleared his throat again, and said, “My apologies, but I am also charged to inspect and report on General Arisaydia’s injuries and recovery.” Adelis’s military title was a slip, Nikys thought, unusual for so precise a man. “Uh, Madame Khatai, might I trouble you to help remove his mask?”
Adelis’s jaw set; his hands clenched on the tabletop. She let her own hand reach out to cover his fist in silent inquiry. Barely perceptibly, he shook his head. “If humiliation is to be my bread,” he murmured to her, “best I grow accustomed to the taste.”
She sighed, sickened, and rose to step behind him and unlace the strings holding his mask and dressings in place. She reached around him to lift it as gently as she had seen Master Penric do; she felt a slight tug as the ointment released, but his skin seemed much less fragile today. He didn’t even flinch, reverting to that stubborn I-am-a-boulder stolidity.
Then he gasped.
She flitted instantly around to his side. “Oh, gods, did I hurt you?”
A flash of startled red gleamed between his shrunken lids as he turned his head toward her, then his eyes squeezed closed again. His hands tightened on the table’s edge, knuckles paling. His teeth set and his body trembled. “Maybe a little,” he managed.
She sank back down in her seat, setting the mask on the table. Prygos gulped and looked away. Tepelen, by contrast, sat up with a muffled oath. He leaned forward, eyes narrowing as he stared into the half-wreck of Adelis’s face.
“Pray excuse us for just a moment.” He rose, and his hand fell to Prygos’s shoulder, gripping it, pressing him to rise and follow. Prygos looked up, surprised, but obeyed, and wasn’t that odd? Tepelen motioned at the impassive guard, who had propped himself against the pergola post. “Stay. Keep them here.” The two men trailed away through the house and out the front. Nikys pricked her ears, but neither spoke till the door closed between, cutting off sound.
“Nikys,” said Adelis, his voice taut, “I’m getting a little tired. Perhaps you could escort me back up to my bedchamber.”
“Of course.”
She started to rise again, but the guard put in sternly, “Please stay seated, General.”
Adelis’s hands wavered out, found her, patted their way up to her head. He turned her face close to his. His eyes slitted open again. The whites were bloodshot nearly solid red, his irises were a strange garnet color, but the tight black circles of his pupils looked back at her. “Dear Nikys,” he said. “In that case, perhaps you could fetch refreshments for our guests, and for me. Get my attendant to help you.” The lids pinched closed once more, concealing… a terrible wonder. And an exactly equal terrible danger.
Her head felt so bloodless with shock that she feared she might pass out, but she said, “Certainly,” and scrambled to her feet. The guard frowned, but evidently decided that her mouse-self, mere nursemaid to the important man, was too frail a threat to concern him.
She walked firmly into the house, not looking back. She did not turn aside toward the kitchen, though she mentally reviewed the residue of wine in the pantry, fit only for servants and therefore too good for these visitors, and her stock of ready poisons, sadly lacking. She walked, did not run, don’t run, up the stairs to the gallery. Master Penric was no longer lying prone on the back balcony, but she heard faint noises coming from Adelis’s chamber.
She entered and closed the door behind her to find him swiftly packing the last of his medical kit. He’d pulled on trousers under his tunic. He looked up and cast her the most contrived smile yet.
Of the dozen alarms jostling her mouth, one escaped first: “He can see!”
“Yes.”
“How long?
“Since yesterday. Or if you mean when did I know I could recover his eyesight, since nearly the beginning, or I’d have been gone long ago.”
She gaped at him. “Are you leaving now?”
“No… I don’t know. I’m not finished.” He grimaced and snapped his case closed. “More to the point, Velka saw. Worst possible time for the man to show up, I swear.”
“Who?”
“Tepelen. The clerk who isn’t. I don’t know which is his real name. Maybe neither. He’s a high-level agent from the cabal in the capital who entrapped your brother. I don’t know how high, but he isn’t stupid, and he doesn’t waste time.” He looked around. “And neither should we. Is there any money in this room? Anything Adelis or you would want to aid your flight from the city?”
She would cry What flight? but his intent, and their need, were too plain to argue. “We haven’t enough coin left to pay the laundress tomorrow. I was hoping she would take something in trade.”
“Can you ride?”
“Yes. But I haven’t a horse.”
“Hnh.” He stood up and tapped his lips with his thumb. “I would so prefer to be discreet about this. May not be possible.” They both froze as the sound of the front door slamming, and the tread of too many heavy feet, penetrated faintly from the atrium. “Bastard’s hell, no good. Go back and stay by your brother. I won’t be far away. Don’t panic.”
If her glare could have blasted him where he stood, he would be floating ash. She whirled and ran for the stairs.
She made it back to the table barely before the new invasion. Prygos and his not-clerk were followed by four guardsmen, the two who’d been posted at her doors and two more. The one who’d been left on watch pushed off from his pergola support and looked his inquiry not at the senior secretary, but at Tepelen. Or Velka. Or whoever the cursed man was.