“…No.”
“Imagine… I don’t know, imagine Nikys was your demon. And, in slaying, would be not just slain but sundered. Could you see it then?”
Reluctantly, Adelis said, “Maybe. I see that you would lose your powers.”
“And thus, I run away.”
Adelis, his head drooping, vented a little unconceding huff, but did not pursue the matter further.
He did revive to protest when Penric made to place his mask—and when had he retrieved it?—relined with clean gauze and ointment, upon him for the night. “If you want to end up with working eyelids, you’ll cooperate,” said Penric sternly, and overbore him. Nikys didn’t think he’d succeed in doing that for much longer.
When he’d finished cleaning up and restoring his supplies in their case, Penric told her, “I’m going out for a little.”
“Why? You did that every night back at the villa, and I wondered.”
“Ah.” He paused at the door. “It’s not a great mystery, if you recall what I told you of the price of uphill magic. Creating order, such as in healing, generates a greater burden of chaos, which I must promptly find a place to shed. The more efficiently I work out ways to do this, the more uphill magic I can safely accomplish.”
“Wait. Does working this, these healings put you at some risk?”
“Not necessarily,” he said cheerfully, and whisked out the door, shutting it firmly behind him.
“Not necessarily,” she echoed aloud, hovering somewhere between baffled and peeved. “That’s no answer!”
“If you haven’t yet noticed that the man is as slippery as a fish,” Adelis remarked dryly from his bed, “it’s time you did. Also mad as a boot.”
“Fish,” Nikys returned with what dignity she could muster, “don’t wear boots.” It wasn’t much of a rejoinder, nor much of a rebuttal, but it served to see her off to her own room.
XI
Arisaydia’s eyes looked better the next morning, and saw better, too, Penric judged. Also more shrewdly, although that wasn’t the eyes, exactly. For the first time, he refused even the reduced dose of the syrup of poppies, and insisted that his sister, not Penric, shave him. Which suggested he hadn’t quite wrapped his military mind around how little a medically trained sorcerer needed a weapon, but it was perhaps not prudent to point this out.
Working the lather and razor carefully around the nearly healed burns, Nikys asked, “Will the brown come back?” Arisaydia’s irises were still that peculiar deep garnet color, although the whites were clearing to merely a wine-sick sort of bloodshot.
“I’m not sure. I’ve never done a healing this delicate before.” Pen didn’t know if anyone had.
This triggered Arisaydia’s demand for a mirror, which Nikys had to go fetch from the innkeeper’s wife downstairs. It was good silvered glass, though, and its small circle reflected back a clear image of half of Arisaydia’s face at a time. “Huh,” he said, frowning and tilting it this way and that, but he seemed much less appalled than Penric had feared. Pen supposed the man had witnessed injuries more devastating than this in the course of his career. “I can work with this.”
Without Pen’s labors, the upper half of his face would have become a knotted mass of yellow, ropy scar tissue, but, of course, without Pen’s labors Arisaydia would never have been troubled by the sight of it. These scars would eventually work out as flatter, paler, with redder skin between, in a sort of spray pattern not unlike an owl’s feathers. Strange, but nothing to make children scream, and any woman who would recoil likely wasn’t tough enough for Arisaydia anyway. Nikys managed to seem completely unruffled, a mirror Arisaydia had to find more reassuring than the glass one.
He emphatically refused to redon the blinding mask, so Penric made do with gauze wrappings above and below his eyes, which gleamed out like coals. By tomorrow, even those light dressings might be dispensed with. Pen’s efforts last night had been intense, but the results were at last making themselves visible to less subtle senses than his own.
The other advantage to stopping at a larger town was that it could support a public livery, which Pen had located when he’d been out shedding chaos. Arisaydia made no objection to Pen’s proposal to hire a private coach to carry them all farther south, which doubtless meant that he harbored his own ideas about their route in that direction that he wasn’t sharing. The vehicle would restrict them to the road, dangerously, but also be swift.
Pen disemboweled Prygos’s purse to make sure the coach was the smallest and lightest available, the horses a team of four to be managed by a postilion riding one of the front pair, out of earshot. He feigned it would allow him to continue his healing en route, but its overwhelming advantage was the privacy it would give him to open the next stage of his negotiations. Which were going to go somewhere past delicate and through awkward to, possibly, incendiary.
Because by the time they reached Skirose, some one-hundred-eighty miles farther on, he must somehow persuade Arisaydia and Nikys to turn east with him to the coast. There to find some fishing vessel to deliver them to the island of Corfara, and from there, passage to Lodi in Adria. And if he couldn’t…
Then we still need to turn east, said Des.
Arisaydia refused to be dressed again in his sister’s clothes, but did, grudgingly, consent to be muffled in the green cloak and hurried through the inn to the waiting coach. Once inside, and started on their rattling way, he instantly divested it, bundled it up, and thrust it back at Nikys, seated next to him. “You are never to speak of this.”
She returned a musical sort of “Mmm!” that promised nothing, and Penric discovered how enchanting her round face grew when she smiled deeply enough to dimple. Thwarted, Arisaydia switched his glower to Pen, more convincingly.
Penric had taken the rear-facing seat across from them, along with their meager baggage. Making sure his feet were firmly planted on the sword scabbard laid on the floor, he tried to evolve a plausible way to open his negotiation. Which must also entail his confession. Arisaydia took the problem out of his hands.
“What did Prygos’s clerk—Tepelen, Velka, whoever he was—mean when he said you were supposed to be drowned? He knew you. And you knew him.”
Penric cleared his throat. “Ah. Yes. That’s something we need to discuss. I’d been putting it off till after I was sure I could restore your sight. That time has come.”
Arisaydia made an impatient so get on with it gesture.
Penric signed himself, tapped his lips twice with his thumb, and gave a short, seated bow. “Permit me to introduce myself more fully. I am Learned Penric of Martensbridge, formerly court sorcerer to the late princess-archdivine of that canton. For the last year, I’ve been in service to the archdivine of Adria. Who, for my command of the Cedonian language and certain other skills, loaned me to his cousin the duke, to dispatch as his envoy in response to your letter begging honorable military employment in his realm.”
Nikys’s eyes widened.
Arisaydia barked, “I wrote no such letter!”
“Forged, yes. Velka confirmed that. It was a plot from the start. Velka, who had been following me in the ship from Lodi, seized the duke’s quite authentic reply as soon as I set foot ashore in Patos. Velka knew I was the envoy but didn’t know my real name nor, I suspect, my real calling. Although I’m not sure they would have treated me any differently if they had. They cracked my skull and tossed me down a bottle dungeon in the shore fortress. The night after you were blinded, they tried to drown me in my cell. Tying up a loose end, I expect.”