Nikys gasped. “How did you escape?”
Penric, who had worked out in his head a scholarly letter on his novel method during his nights in the sickroom, almost opened his mouth to start spouting the preamble, then realized that wasn’t really the question being asked. “Magic.”
Arisaydia sat back, glaring fiercely. “More likely he was let go. Agent or unwitting cat’s-paw, could be either.”
Penric, affronted, snapped, “If you must know, when the water was halfway up the cell I turned some of it to ice and stood on it to reach the opening.”
“I don’t believe that,” scoffed Arisaydia. Nikys looked more doubtful.
Penric sighed and sat back. “Just a minute…” He held up his pinched fingers and concentrated. Des had been right in her theory about water in the desert, or at least in Cedonia, he was pleased to see, as the tiny, intense spot of cold grew to a hailstone half an inch across. He leaned forward, pulled out Arisaydia’s palm, and dropped the chip into it. Arisaydia, looking vaguely horrified, shook it hastily out of his hand. For good measure, Pen made a bigger one for Nikys; she, at least, rewarded him with a more appropriate look of awe. And, after a moment, bent forward to taste it.
“Don’t—!” her brother began, but she crunched it between her teeth and smiled.
“It really is ice! They had ice sometimes at court in Thasalon,” she told Penric, “but they brought it down out of the mountains in winter and stored it underground.” She narrowed her eyes. “If you are a Temple sorcerer, you must owe final allegiance to the Bastard’s Order, yes?”
“He is my chosen god, yes.” Or choosing one—Pen had never been quite sure. “I did really attend the white god’s seminary at Rosehall, which is associated with the university corporate body there.”
“But not its medical faculty?” You lied? her eyes asked.
Penric waved this away. “I had enough on my plate then just with the theology, since I was doing everything backward, and in a hurry. A Temple sorcerer is supposed to train as a divine first, and only then be invested with a demon. Everything caught up with itself eventually.”
She tilted her head, lips firmed with a different flavor of doubt than her brother’s. “You are neither quack nor charlatan. Your skills, even if uncanny, couldn’t have come out of the air.”
And there was a place he didn’t wish to dwell. “They were hard-earned, just not all by me. But this is beside the point. I was sent here as a go-between, not as a physician. The duke of Adria was quite sincere in desiring to take you into his train, General Arisaydia, and would be pleased if I were to return with you. And your sister. At present you are running away, but that’s not enough; you need to be running toward. If we turn for the coast at Skirose, I think I can get us all aboard a ship for Adria.”
“Ship captains don’t like to take sorcerers aboard,” Arisaydia observed, in a temporizing tone. “They say it’s bad luck.”
Not nearly as bad of luck as being caught helping an Imperial fugitive, Pen suspected. “Eh, hedge sorcerers, certainly. The Temple-trained know enough not to shed chaos in the rigging, and, further, know how not to.”
“Can mariners tell the difference?”
“Generally not, which is another reason why I travel incognito.”
Nikys was staring back and forth between them, clearly taken aback by this new proposal to dispose of her life unconsulted. “I don’t speak Adriac. I speak a little Darthacan.”
Pen smiled hopefully at her. “I could help. I could translate. I could teach you.”
By their dual frowns, Pen didn’t think he was making much headway. He tried again to bring things back to the issue: “The duke really does want you. He thinks with your skills and experience you’d slice through the forces of Carpagamo like a knife through butter, and I concur. Although even you might break a tooth on their canton mountain mercenaries. Unless the duke hired you some canton troops of your own, I suppose, although that could get very awkward and messy and probably is not a good idea. Certainly not for my poor cantons.” He added after a moment, “Adria and Carpagamo do no end of horrible things to one another, as opportunity presents, but at least I can promise you blinding is not public policy there.”
It was Nikys who pulled the unravelling thread from this. “You aren’t really half Cedonian, are you? That was another lie.”
“Ah, no. I’m from the valley of the Greenwell, in the mountains about a hundred miles east of Martensbridge. I don’t think you would find it on a Cedonian-made map.” Or most other maps, truth to tell.
“Are the cantons even a country?” said Arisaydia in unflattering doubt.
“Mm, more a patchwork of… city-states is too grand—call us town-states. Conquerors from the Old Cedonian Empire to Great Audar of Darthaca to Saone and the Weald have all tried to hold various of the cantons, but none have succeeded for long. We have no tolerance for foreign misrule. We prefer our own misrule.” A little homesick grin twitched Pen’s mouth. “Not that there’s much profit in conquest. Our mountains have few productive mines, and our fields are worse. Unless you like goats and cows. Our main exports are cheese and mercenaries. Both quite good,” he added in a faint spasm of patriotism. “It snows a lot,” he ran down. “When it isn’t raining. Perhaps that’s why I’m good with ice.” Gods, he was tired.
“Mad as three boots,” muttered Arisaydia, cryptically.
“Adria,” said Pen, “would pay you well.”
Arisaydia’s mouth twisted in disgust. “No doubt.” He raised his chin, his garnet eyes glinting. “I was never in correspondence with the duke of Adria. I was in correspondence with the duke of Orbas.”
Pen’s eyes widened; Des murmured, Aha! Now, there was a missing piece fallen into place…
“I’d not got so far as telling him to go jump in the sea, although that was next. A happy interruption, in retrospect. When we arrive at Skirose, you are welcome to go home to Adria, with my best curses. Nikys and I will strike south for Orbas.”
He sat back and folded his arms, stony. Nikys’s lips parted, and a hand lifted, but fell back, whatever she thought given no voice.
Arisaydia added, “And if you try to lay a geas on me like those bloody horses, I’ll run you through.”
Surreptitiously, Pen put a little more weight on the scabbard under his foot. “That would be harder for me than it looks. And harder for you than you think.”
Arisaydia snorted and closed his eyes, shutting out… everything. Pen could see his point.
XII
A strained, exhausted silence filled the coach, broken by the bustle of changing the horses at the first fifteen miles. A servant sold them cups of thin ale, which Nikys drank for lack of any better beverage, and they took turns at the livery’s privy. She seized a moment when the physician… sorcerer… Learned Penric, an oath-sworn Temple divine ye gods, was out of earshot to draw Adelis aside beneath a tree overhanging the coach yard.
“It’s all very well to spurn the duke of Adria, but have you noticed that Penric is the only one among us with any money?”
“I thought you had some.” Adelis, certainly, had been hurried out of the villa with little more than her clothes on his back.
“Enough for a night at an inn and a few meals, maybe. Not enough to get us to Orbas. If that’s our destination, the man emptying out his purse to buy us passage all the way to Skirose was a boon.” And the continuous travel through the coming night, purchased at a premium, would give them a significant edge on any pursuit.