There is no offense to You in me.
And she knew it to be true.
Penric sighed, rolled over, and sat up, then looked alarmed. “Why are you crying?” he whispered.
“Am I?” said Nikys. She wiped at her cheeks to find them wet. Daughter’s waters, given back. Her head, and heart, felt overfull in a very different way than before. “It’s all right.”
“I can take—”
She reached out and caught his hand, laid a finger to stop his anxious lips. “No. It’s really all right. We can go, now.” She echoed his own words back to him. “It will be very well.” This time, she stood first, and pulled him up after her.
XI
Des was crying, too. Pen was surrounded, inside and out, by crying women. It was appalling.
His demon’s response at least was familiar from their previous sidewise encounters with something like this. Or Someone like this. Demons were terrified of gods, the one power that could destroy them. Des’s shaking was simple fear. Or maybe not-so-simple fear. Interestingly, she wasn’t curled in as tight a ball within him as usual. If she’d had a body other than his own, he’d have imagined her prone, arms out hugging the floor tiles, face turned away, all abject surrender.
Nikys… was something else altogether. Whatever it was, it didn’t include a speck of fear. Which was unnerving in its own right.
She wasn’t gulping or sobbing or shaking, but water still trickled in fine silver rivulets from the corners of her dark eyes. Anxiously, he drew her away to a bench in the shade of a colonnade, as far as they could get from the well and its attendant. The acolyte was watching them with a curious frown, but then her attention was drawn away by the entry of the women with the four daughters, still overexcited from their happy encounter with the dogs.
He extended his arm around Nikys’s shoulders, hovering tentatively, offering consolation if she wished it. She must have wished something, because she dove into his embrace, her hands going out to grip his draperies. It was not so much a gesture of affection as of drowning. “Whatever did you pray to the goddess to grant?” Pen whispered.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I made an offering. I suppose.”
The five functions of prayer, Pen had been taught, were service, supplication, gratitude, divination, and atonement, of which supplication and divination were the most begged and the least answered. Atonement grew in importance as one moved through life. So what song of service or gratitude was this?
“What did you feel?”
“I can’t say.”
“Too difficult? Or too private?”
“Both.” She looked away. “I can’t make claims. Putting myself forward. It might have just been heatstroke.”
Pen felt her forehead, then his own. Each were equally warm in this bright day, and he spared a hope that Bosha had found a nice deep crevice. “As I once said to a man who’d had a similar experience: Do not deny the gods. And they will not deny you.”
She raised her face, lips parting in surprise. “You believe me?”
“I don’t have to believe. I know. Or rather, Des saw. She’s almost spasming inside me right now. She’ll recover in a while. She does that.”
Gazing at him in consternation, she said, “You’ve encountered something like this before?”
“Three times. One does not forget.”
She mumbled into his bodice, “It was surely no more than the brush of the hem of Her cloak.”
“Mm, but it’s a very great cloak. It covers the width of the world.” He sighed. “Or so I imagine. The most I will ever get is a waft from the flutter of the hem in passing.” As now?
Her look grew a trifle wild-eyed. “You understand this?”
“Understand?” He snorted. “As much as I might drink the sea.” Envy? …maybe.
She swallowed, and got out, “What did you pray for?”
“It was groveling. Mostly. Lots and lots of groveling. That tapestry is downright menacing.”
She tried to choke down her laugh and ended up snorting it through her nose. “You shouldn’t… I shouldn’t…”
“Yes, you should. Joy is a mark of Them, you see. It will likely keep leaking out of you for some while.”
“Oh…” She took a breath, sat up, reordered herself. “And you deal with this sort of thing all the time?”
“Not all the time, white god forfend. Very rarely. I would not survive the overload.”
“Why are you still sane?” Her lips pursed, then sneaked up. “Oh. Maybe I answered my own question.”
“Now, now. Be nice.” He couldn’t help it; her grin was infectious. He reached out and lightly brushed the last of the silver from her soft cheeks with the backs of his knuckles. He did not blot the cool away. He tried not to feel like a greedy child snitching a treat from his sister’s plate.
Maybe not greedy. Maybe just hungry.
The both gazed out at the court. The four girls had been dissuaded from trying to swim around the annular basin like the line of dolphins that decorated it, but were being permitted to wade and splash in the trough, skirts hiked up, shrieking. There wouldn’t be a dry stitch on them, presently. Sandals were strewn everywhere. The acolyte and their mother looked on laughing.
“You know,” said Nikys, “I had worked out an elaborate ruse about asking the way to the garderobe, but I don’t think it will be needed. Let’s just go.”
“Aye.”
She seemed to find it very natural to twine her arm through that of her tall friend as they quietly moved into the shadowy interior of the next building.
“Where should we look first?” said Pen.
“You’re asking me? The goddess didn’t exactly give me a map.”
“Ah, They never do,” sighed Pen. “It’s practically another mark.”
She finally dared to say it out loud, if very quietly: “…I think She gave me a blessing.”
His lips curved up. “Even better.”
She seemed to take this in, all the way, for after a breath she nodded. Then said, “So did you have a plan?”
He wrinkled his nose in doubt as they stopped and looked around the next small courtyard. “Bosha thought they’d keep your mother on the side toward the sea, where the drop is most difficult. The top four or five floors have balconies, giving potential access. Or egress. So less likely those. I’d say start on the bottom floor on the east side. Poke around, see what we find.”
“What if we’re stopped?”
The place was far from unpeopled, although the women they glimpsed all seemed to be hurrying about their business, with scant attention given to the pair of pilgrims not yet too far out of place. “Keep that garderobe story in reserve. It may not be a waste of invention after all.”
When they came to the dimmer interior corridors, Pen shoved the green spectacles up on his head under the fold of his drapery. “I shall be glad to be rid of these. Give them back to Bosha if you can. Though not before you reach the boat.”
“Of course. I hope he’s all right.”
After two false casts, they came to a promising stairway. Pen knew they were going the right way when the descent through fine masonry changed to one carved through solid rock. At the very bottom, the stairs turned out onto a long corridor.
On its right side, a few niches reflected an aqueous blue daylight into the corridor. A gallery of near-identical doors lay along it. The left was lined with windowless cells, some with doors across, some open, all apparently used for storage. A scattering of wall sconces were frugally unlit.
“How do we find the right door?” whispered Nikys.
“Hers will be locked, with one person behind it, most likely. If it’s unlocked or no one is home, then not.” Or so he hoped. Des, I need you. Rise and shine, love.