Deep in the night she awoke to see Penric, who like all of them had lain down half dressed, pull on his jacket and slip out through the shadows. Adelis was snoring. Was the sorcerer making his escape to Adria? Planning some final, belated betrayal? Alarmed, she slid into her shoes, whipped her cloak around her, and followed him on tiptoe.
He exited silently through the inn’s front door; she waited a moment and did the same, flattening to the wall and looking around for that narrow form, without torch or lantern, flickering in and out of the moonlight. She pulled up her hood and tracked him down the street and around a corner. He crossed a paved square and disappeared under a temple portico. She waited for the second creak of a heavy door, then dared to run to catch up. What did he want inside?
He’d left the door ajar; she eased it open with no betraying sound, and found a deeper shadow to stand in. The moon, just past full, shone directly down into the sacred atrium, pulling short the blue shadow of the fire plinth. A few red coals gleamed in its ashes. As her eyes adjusted, she spotted Penric making his slow way around the perimeter from altar to altar, signing himself, then cursorily opening what she’d thought were supposed to be locked offering boxes and helping himself to the contents, tipping the coins into his purse. Which did explain how he’d been finding funds since his escape from the bottle dungeon, apart from pickpocketing provincial officials. He skipped the Mother’s offering box, although he signed himself and bowed his head before Her place all the same.
At the Bastard’s offering box, he murmured, “Hm. They must love You better in these hills.” He topped off his purse, but, instead of merely bowing, went down on his knees before the altar with its white cloth. He raised his hands palms-out in an attitude of supplication; after a minute, he instead lay prone on the tiles, arms out in the attitude of deepest supplication. Or possibly exhaustion.
Quiet fell. Yet not, she thought, quietude, for in a minute he mumbled, “Who am I fooling, kindest-and-cruelest Sir? You never answer me anyway.”
His voice went acerbic. “Fool indeed, to invite His attention. This is not something we want. Really.”
Nikys had no wish to interrupt a prayer, but this seemed more like an argument. She walked over and sat herself down cross-legged beside the… physician, sorcerer, divine? Which of his bewildering multiplicity of selves had laid itself down in such hope-starved humility?
He rolled over on his back and smiled at her, seeming unsurprised. “Hullo, Nikys. Come to pray?”
“Maybe.”
He bent his head back toward the white-topped altar. “Is this your god too? I think you said so, once back in Patos.”
“For lack of answers to my prayers from any others, yes.”
“My condolences.”
She wasn’t sure how to take that. “I’ve been wanting to tell you. I had another idea, back in the coach.”
“Oh?”
“Instead of Adelis going to Adria with you, which he will not, why don’t you come to Orbas with us?”
The little noise he made was altogether uninformative, although it sounded vaguely like a man being hit. Then he paused, doubtful. “Does Arisaydia endorse this?”
“I’m sure I could talk him around,” said Nikys, a little airily. “Once we are established there, Adelis could help you to some honorable appointment. Maybe even court sorcerer.”
“Likely the duke already has one. That’s how I lost my last position, you know. When Princess-Archdivine Llewen died so suddenly, the replacement archdivine brought her own trusted sorceress from Easthome. I offered to stay quietly apart among my books and papers—I wasn’t even done with my latest translation—but no one seemed to think there was room in the palace for two chaos demons. Not even the chaos demons.”
Wait, was that last delivered in his other voice? But he was going on, speaking his reminiscence to the night sky framed by the inner architrave.
“They all tried their hardest to shift me into the Martensbridge Mother’s Order, which wanted me as much as the Palace suddenly did not. Very tidy. Everyone happy but me. No man should have to bury two mothers in one year.”
Her neck felt wrenched with this last turn. “What?”
He waved a hand, dismissing she-knew-not-what. “Princess Llewen had been like a second mother to me. My own mother’s death happened not long after, back at Jurald Court. I wasn’t there for either one. Not sure if that was a blessing or a curse.”
“I’m sorry.” Surely more inadequate words were never spoken, but his hand waved again, this time in understanding acceptance. She tried to find her way back to her proposal. “If not court sorcerer, Orbas must surely be willing to make you court physician.” Eager, once they learned what he’d done for Adelis.
Without heat, and with some precision, Penric said, “I would rather die.” His smile grew small and strange.
Nikys sat up, gathering her determination. “I’ve been trying to work out why a man of your obvious—extraordinary—skills would not take up the healing trade. I think I know.”
“Do you? Tell me.” His tone was ironic, but not malicious. There didn’t seem to be a malicious bone in his body.
“You lost a patient. Maybe someone important to you”—could it have been his princess? his mother?—“maybe just someone you tried too hard for, and it broke your heart, and your will to go on.” She tried to gauge his reaction out of the corner of her eye. Was she too bold, too offensive? Would he be angry at her probing?
She hadn’t expected to evoke a crack of laughter, cut off sharp, and she flinched. Mad as a boot, Adelis had said. Was the observation shrewder than she’d guessed?
“If only that.” Penric stretched back on the temple floor, folded his hands behind his head, and squinted up at the moon, which bathed his pale face in pale light until he looked carved of snow. “Try three a week. More, some weeks.”
“What?”
“This is a place for confessions, why not? After tomorrow we are unlikely to see each other again, even better. Like lancing an infection, and as ugly yet fascinating as what drains from one, aye. Might be good for me.”
Three boots? She bit her lip.
“Everything started well. I was happy in my scholar’s work for the princess-archdivine. But due to my transcription and translations of Learned Ruchia’s germinal volumes on sorcery and medicine, the Mother’s Order at Martensbridge found out that two of Desdemona’s former riders had been physicians. The princess was eager to add another string to my bow, and so was I, when she sent me over to their hospice to learn. Apprentice, we all thought, until all of Learned Amberein’s and Learned Helvia’s knowledge began to awaken in me, and suddenly I was doing as much teaching as learning. Not that every new patient isn’t a lesson for every physician, lifelong. I did enjoy instructing the apprentices in anatomy.
“I brought off some difficult cures. It all depends, you know, on underlying conditions. If they’d taken your brother’s eyes with hot irons, it would have left me too little to work with. But from the outside, no one could tell why I sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.
“The hospice began to ask more and more of me because, after all, it sometimes worked. Worth trying, you know? I was stretched, but still holding my own, when the princess passed away and I lost a defender I didn’t realize I’d had.