“That’s an old rumor.”
“Funny, you never heard it around till he was promoted so high, so young…”
“Well, he’s a poor blind bastard now. Whether his parents were married or not.”
The mood of the table blighted, the party broke up, most men finishing their meals and drifting out, a couple settling in for deeper drinking. Penric, as soon as he could stand without shaking, made his way into the street, now half-shaded in the angled, descending sun, and found a wall to prop his shoulders against.
Gods, Des, now what?
Start back to Adria, I suppose. Not through the port of Patos, by preference.
Acid bile burned Pen’s throat at the thought of such an empty-handed retreat. No, far worse than empty-handed.
It made no sense. The Duke of Adria had fancied to hire the demoted and presumably disaffected general as a mercenary captain for his own endemic and inconclusive wars against his neighbor Carpagamo. The private letter he’d received from Arisaydia himself had suggested it, and the duke had taken him up on it…
Taken the bait?
But it wasn’t treason, no more than Penric exchanging his service across the borders from the new princess-archdivine of Martensbridge to the archdivine of Adria. The duke hadn’t planned to use Arisaydia against Cedonia, after all. It was just… a little delicate.
It shouldn’t have been much worse than that, unless, unless, what?
There had to be a hidden half to this somewhere that Pen was not seeing. As he’d not seen how that Cedonian, Velka, could have guessed Pen’s real mission. Unless, of course, he’d already known…
But, Bastard’s tears and Mother’s blood, blinding. He’d seen burns and bone-deep scalds when drafted into his apprenticing-and-more at the Mother’s Hospice in Martensbridge. Up close, in some bad cases. He didn’t have to imagine anything.
“I have to do something about this.”
Five gods, Pen, what? The damage is done. It’s time to cut our losses and fly.
“I don’t know yet.” And then, in the next three breaths, he did.
He would need particulars on the sister, her name and domicile, and then a better used-clothing merchant. A better bathhouse, too, that offered services of a barber and a manicurist. An apothecary. A knife-maker’s shop serving some very specialized needs. And more. How providential was it that the Father of Winter had filled his purse…?
It was going to be a busy night. He pushed off from the wall. “Let’s go find out.”
IV
Nikys sat in the garden of her rented villa and tried to eat… breakfast, she supposed it must be, this being morning. A morning. Which?
It had been, what, two days?—since she’d brought Adelis back here, clinging to his saddle, his labored breathing as frightening as weeping. Half her servants had fled after the visitation from the governor’s men and not returned, so, to her loathing, she’d had to employ the soldiers who’d escorted them to support him stumbling to his upstairs bedchamber and lay him down. She hadn’t wanted them touching him. She’d ejected them from her domain as swiftly as she could thereafter, without thanks, but a provincial guardsman still lurked outside her front door, and another beyond her back wall.
After that, the nightmare had commenced. She’d sponged her brother’s body, dressed him in clean linen, coaxed him to eat, with poor luck, forced him to drink. He’d not cooperated much. She’d seen Adelis in a dozen bad moods in the past, exhausted or frustrated or enraged, though generally with the army or the Imperial court rather than with her. She’d never before seen him broken.
It was lovely in the garden in this first light. Water trickled musically through clever stone channels from the tiny spring that had made the villa, though old, such a wonderful find, half a year ago when Adelis had invited her to join him at his new posting. On the pergola that shaded her little table and chairs, grapevines shot forth leaves that seemed to expand by the hour, with green sprigs of new grapes peeping shyly through them. Bees bumbled among the flowers. On the far end, where the kitchen garden grew apace, dew sparkled off a spiderweb like a necklace of jewels carelessly dropped by some passing sprite. The space breathed charm, grace, ease, surcease from troubles.
This morning, its lying beauty offended her.
She ate the other half of her boiled egg, with a bite of bread to force it down, and a swallow of cold tea to force down the bread. When she finished, she’d have to return to Adelis’s bedchamber and try again with the bandages stuck to his face. He’d screamed when she touched them, and struck out—blindly, of course, and so he’d connected at his full strength in a way he’d not done since they were squabbling children. His full strength had been much less, then. She rubbed at the deep bruise on her cheek, and buried her face in her hands.
She couldn’t weep. Or sleep. Or eat. Or breathe…
Control yourself anyway. You have to go back now.
When she looked up, an apparition sat across from her.
She was so bewildered she didn’t even jump, though her jaw fell open as she stared.
Her first thought was not man, or woman, but ethereal. Luminous eyes as blue as the sea in summer. Hair an astonishing electrum color, drawn back in a knot at the nape but with a few strands messily escaping to catch a sunbeam in a wispy halo. And nothing human should have skin so milk-pale.
She dismissed her furious fancies. It was most certainly a man. Her gaze skipped down the long, folded body. Wiry arms, hands too large and strong for a woman, nails cut blunt and scrupulously clean. Sandaled feet too long to be feminine, chest too flat, hips much too narrow. Drawn back to the face, she discovered an inexplicably cheery smile and white, sound teeth.
He wore an undyed sleeveless tunic to his knees, belted at the thin waist, with a sleeveless jacket in dark green over it, suggesting, without quite being, the garment of an acolyte of the Mother’s Order.
In a soft, friendly tone, her hallucination spoke: “Madame Khatai, I trust?”
She swallowed and located her voice, sharp-edged with alarm: “How did you get in here? There are guards.” Less to keep people from going in and out, she suspected, than to mark and report who did so.
“Perhaps they went off-duty? I didn’t see any.”
“My servants should have stopped you.
“I’m afraid I didn’t see any of them, either,” he said as if in apology.
That she could believe, she thought grimly.
“Pardon me for startling you,” he went on in that same soft voice.
Stunning me.
“—my name is Master Penric. I am a physician.”
She rolled back in her chair. “Apprentice Penric, I might believe. You can’t be a day over twenty-one. Less.”
“I’m thirty, I assure you, lady.”
He claimed an age the same as hers, and she was a century old, this morning. “I might grant twenty-five.”
He waved an airy hand. “Twenty-five it shall be, then, if you prefer.”
“And Master…?”
“In all but final oath.” His smile grew rueful.
“Hnh.”
“My credentials aside, some of your brother’s officers took up a collection to hire me to attend upon him. For reasons you may understand better than I, they strongly wished to stay anonymous.” He raised his blond brows, and she grimaced, unable to gainsay the likelihood. “But my fee is paid, and here I am.”