Which was… pretty much what Arisaydia had said. For all his theatrics, Pen didn’t feel he was moving forward, here. Though he wondered if that too independent translated to wouldn’t lie down under the thumbs of the right men.
“Didn’t it occur to any of you people that the reason you couldn’t find a line was that there wasn’t one? That you weren’t destroying a disloyal man, but creating one?”
“If he wasn’t disloyal yet, he was ripe to fall,” Velka snarled back. “And then the cost of stopping him would be much higher.”
Well, one couldn’t say Velka didn’t believe in his mission. Not the wholly cynical tool of some wholly cynical master, quite.
Cynical enough, said Des. Spies have to be.
I suppose you would know. Ruchia.
A touch. Des aimed a grimace at him, and subsided.
“Also,” Pen added a bit more tartly, “if you didn’t treat your armies so badly in the first place, they wouldn’t go out looking for some poor sod to stick up on a standard in front of them and fight you for their favor. It doesn’t seem to me the root of this is Arisaydia’s fault. It’s, it’s, it’s… just your own masters’ bad management. Circling back to bite them. If you’d spend half this effort fixing the real problems, you could stop all the disaffected generals before they started, instead of, of blinding them piecemeal one by one. You’re worse than evil. You’re inefficient.”
Velka stared at him through his one good eye, so taken aback he stopped whimpering. “What are you really sent to Cedonia for?”
“I’m beginning to wonder,” Penric admitted ruefully. If he was sent to be Velka’s spiritual advisor, it seemed a supremely unfunny joke on Someone’s part. Which didn’t make it unlikely.
He also thought of the unexpected treasury found in the Father of Winter’s offering box in the temple. Maybe the duke of Adria wasn’t the only one who has borrowed me? The suspicion was simultaneously heartening and horrifying.
The Father wasn’t Penric’s god, but He might be Velka’s. “Do you have children?” he asked, then, at Velka’s flinch, added hastily, “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
Revenge was tempting, but not his mandate.
I don’t know why not, said Des. Arisaydia was ready to slay them all, and leave no witnesses. A sense of reluctant admiration. No… not reluctant.
You know we can’t do that.
I can’t, with our sorcery. You could, with your right arm, if you hadn’t thrown all the blades down the jakes.
Penric decided to ignore this. He sat up, considering his congregation of one.
“My time is short,” he said at last, “so my sermon will be, too. When a man witnesses a miracle of the gods, the prudent first response should not be to try to undo it.” A long finger reached out to tap Velka between the eyes; he jerked back. It had actually been a lot of meticulous, tricky, uncomfortable chaos-sluffing uphill sorcery, but Velka didn’t need to know that. Though given Desdemona’s ultimate source, perhaps it was true after a fashion. “So consider me a messenger from a higher power than a duke, and let me help you to remember this. To use the machineries of justice to commit injustice is the deepest offense to the Father of Winter.”
He pressed his thumb to the middle of Velka’s forehead. As he knew so well from his mountain childhood, cold could burn as brutally as fire. The work was vastly finer than his ice floe, not nearly as subtle as the labor he’d been doing all week. He lifted his thumb to reveal thin, frozen white lines in the shape of a stylized snowflake, surrounded by a red bloom of hurt. It would heal, ultimately, to a red then a white brand on Velka’s skin.
It didn’t come close to the amount of scarring Arisaydia would bear. But as a pointed memento, Pen fancied this wintery mark might serve.
He dismounted from Velka, collected the man’s purse to keep company with that from the provincial secretary, and pressed himself to his feet, suddenly very tired. Time to go.
Past time, Des agreed.
As he made for the door, Velka wrenched himself around on the floor and cried, “Hedge sorcerer! You’re insane!”
Your fine sermon doesn’t seem to have taken, Learned Penric, said Des. She was much too amused.
Pen took two steps out, aiming to collect his medical case and his soon-to-be-stolen horse, then whipped around. He stuck his head through the lumber room door and yelled back, “I’m not a hedge sorcerer. And your government policies are stupid!”
He was still fuming when he rode to the end of the street. From the edge of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the scullion coming back, leading a pelting posse of guardsmen. Which answered the question of who had been the spy among Madame Khatai’s servants, he supposed, rather too late to do any practical good. He pressed his horse into a quick trot, rounding the corner safe from their view.
X
“We need to be moving faster,” said Adelis. Although the way his chin had sunk to Nikys’s shoulder suggested he was growing as fatigued as their doubly burdened horse. They’d come about twelve miles out of Patos, she guessed.
The traffic had thinned from the bustle around the city, where they’d threaded their way past builders’ ox-carts, donkeys laden with vegetables for the markets, animals being driven to the butchers, sedan chairs and open chariots, and private coaches whose drivers had shouted them out of the path. They’d passed a road-repair crew whose lewd catcalls at the two unescorted women had made Adelis growl, his hand twitching for his sword, and, once, a troop of soldiers marching the other way, which had made him hunch and lower his face, squinting sidewise from the shadow of the hood trying to make out markers of regiment and rank.
Out here, fellow travelers had dwindled to the occasional farm wain or herdsman with pigs. The sun was slanting across the countryside, spreading buttery light over the small farms and larger villas tracking the watercourses, the grapevines and flickering gray-green olive groves on the slopes, the rocky heights given over to scrub and goats and sheep.
“We’re moving faster than your army.”
“Anything would move faster than an army,” he returned. The spurt of remembered aggravation gave him the energy to sit up, at least.
“How are you bearing up back there?” She hesitated. “How much can you see?”
“It’s… blurry. I can see colors. It’s too bright. Makes my eyes water. Your cloak is too hot.”
“Yes, I know.” She felt oddly glad to be out of it. She’d once imagined the widow’s green would protect her from unwanted attention, but there’d proved to be a certain cadre of men who imagined it marked her as available to them, instead. She’d quickly learned not to be unduly gentle in repelling their advances, and had held her borders where she wanted them. Of course, she’d always been backed by the tacit garrison of Adelis’s rank and reputation—that, too, now attainted. She added, “Faster to where?”
“I’m thinking about that.”
She said tentatively, “I was wondering if we should try to make for my mother’s.” In which case, they needed to find a different road.
“Five gods, no.”
She glanced over her shoulder to catch his grimace.