“It’s one of the first places they’ll think to look, and harboring me would bring disaster down upon her.” He paused. “You could probably take refuge there unmolested.”
She answered this with the long, unfavorable silence it deserved. He evidently took her point, for his return grunt was muted.
He’d been alternating between keeping his face down and his eyes closed, trying to protect their inflamed sensitivity, and looking around, testing and retesting his returning sight as if fearful it would vanish away again. She interrupted this cycle to ask, “Did you realize Master Penric was uncanny? I mean, before that unholy show in the garden.”
“I… as physicians went, he seemed more sensible than most. He had a trick of massaging my scalp that he said was for headache, and it certainly seemed to work. I don’t know.” He seemed to consider. “He could have been lying. About the healing, I mean. Perhaps I was not so badly injured as it felt like.”
“No. I saw your face when he first lifted off the prison wrap. You were that badly injured.” And then some.
He added somewhat inconsequently, “He didn’t look like what I’d imagined. From his speech, I never guessed he’d be barely out of his youth.” He peered around again, and stiffened.
“Pursuit?” asked Nikys. Could they get off the road and hide?
“In a manner of speaking.”
She stood in her stirrups to look, but then eased back when she recognized the single horseman, puffs of pale dust kicking up in his wake on the dirt track that ran alongside the paved military road. In a few minutes, Master Penric trotted up beside them, both he and his horse sweating and winded. His face was flushed pink under a countryman’s straw hat.
“Ah, good! I caught up with you.”
“If it was that easy for you,” said Adelis, “it will be that easy for them.”
“Ah, probably not right away. They’ll be quite a while sorting themselves out back there. And I had the advantage of knowing which road to try.” He smiled cheerily, but it won him only dual glowers of suspicion. “But they know what they’re dealing with in me now, which is, mm, unfortunate. Doubt they’ll come so unprepared again.”
“You didn’t kill them while you could,” said Adelis. It wasn’t a question. “You left witnesses.”
“Well, really, that would have been a problem. Would you have had me slay the maid and the porter, too? The scullion? The laundress? The butcher’s lad? How about the apothecary…?”
Adelis scowled and looked away, discomfited.
“Take heart,” Penric advised. “The next best thing to no witnesses is many, who will all contradict each other. Or else arrive at a consensus that has more to do with their needs than with what they’ve seen.”
“Did you burn down the villa?” Nikys asked, thinking morbidly of her good floor loom, left behind along with so many of the tools of her life.
“What? Oh. No.”
“So was his name Velka or Tepelen?”
“You know, I forgot to ask. He was the same man as—” Penric broke off, smiled, waved a hand as if to drive off a fly.
“Same man as who?” asked Adelis.
“Doesn’t matter. He did say his master was a Minister Methani. Does that name mean something to you?”
Adelis shrugged. “Methani? Yes, that’s very likely.”
Penric looked disappointed at this tepid response. “Not a surprise, I take it.”
“Not especially. We’ve been clashing at court for a couple of years, now.”
“Had you ever done anything to anger him personally? Traduce his mother, steal his slippers, ravish his goat?”
Adelis cleared his throat. “I may have said a few intemperate things. From time to time.”
Nikys snorted. She looked again sidelong at the strange blond man. “So you’re really a sorcerer?” Was he really a physician, for that matter? “Why did you follow after us?”
He lifted a hand from his reins and tilted it back and forth. “A number of reasons. Mostly because I hadn’t finished treating your brother’s eyes. It was upsetting to be so close to bringing off… what I mean to bring off, and be so rudely interrupted.”
Adelis blew out a non-laugh, short and sardonic.
Penric turned in his saddle and added to him, “Also, I promised Des I would try to restore your eyebrows. She was rather set on it.”
“Des?” said Adelis, beating Nikys to the question.
“Ah, ha, Desdemona, my demon. I suppose it’s about time you were all introduced, given she’s been living with you right along, within me, for the past week.” He looked at them both, hopefully. “You do know that it’s the acquisition, the possession, of a chaos demon that turns a person into a sorcerer, yes?”
Nikys didn’t think she’d reacted visibly, but their horse yawed farther from Penric’s.
Adelis said warily, “Is it… ascendant? That’s a great danger for hedge sorcerers, I’ve heard.”
“No, certainly not. I mean, yes, it’s a significant hazard, but it’s not the case here.”
“How can you tell?” said Adelis. “That is… how can we tell?”
“A sorcerer or sorceress whose demon has become ascendant will exhibit far more chaotic—erratic—behavior.”
A long silence. Twin, level stares.
Penric seemed stung. “No, really, not! Though Des does leak out from time to time. You’ve both heard her speak. With my voice, of course. It would be quite unkind to keep her wholly prisoned.”
Adelis said slowly, “You… share your body… with this unnatural being?”
“Share and share alike, yes. It’s an intimate relationship.”
Adelis looked revolted; Penric was beginning to look offended by his reaction.
Nikys put in hastily, “It seems natural to me. Every mother does it, and every unborn child. Even Adelis and I once had to share another’s body and blood.”
“Unmanly, then,” Adelis muttered.
Penric touched his thumb to his lips and gave a little bow in his saddle. “There are compensations. As you… can see.” His thin smile put the point to the wordplay.
Nikys tried again to divert the tension: “Did Adelis’s officers know you were a sorcerer when they hired you for him?”
“Ah, not exactly. By the way, do you know how far we are from the nearest largish town? Because we would be more remarked in a small village. And I’d prefer to find some inn that’s quiet and clean to continue the eye treatments tonight.”
“Doara is about eight miles off,” said Nikys. “We should be there by sunset.”
“Perfect. That will be a good time to get rid of these incriminating horses, too.”
“You have a plan for that?” said Adelis, sounding distrustful.
“Oh, yes.”
They were in sight of Doara, and dusk was closing in, when Master Penric pulled them off the road into the cover of some scrubby trees and had them dismount.
“I believe the best, and most confusing, thing will be to send these beasts back to their own stable. Better than just turning them loose to be found along our route.”
As Adelis detached the saddle scabbard, Penric unbridled his mount, scratched its ears, and began rubbing its forehead, crooning under his breath in a strange tongue. Turning away to secure the bridle to the saddle, he remarked, “I once spent a year in Easthome, the capital of the Weald, studying their style of magic with the Royal Fellowship of Shamans. A geas of persuasion doesn’t come at all naturally to a chaos demon, but we learned to simulate it. A real shaman can lay a geas lasting weeks or months. The best I can do is hours. Well, it’s only a horse, and the compulsion lies in line with its own inclinations. I expect this will do.”
He repeated the mystifying performance with the other animal, then turned them both loose with friendly slaps to their haunches. “Off you go, now.” They snuffled and trotted away down the road together. “Ah.” He bent over, looking distracted. A patter of wet red fell from his sunburned nose into the dry dirt.