“All right,” said Pen. “I may read six languages, but I need you to interpret this.”
She ducked her chin. “I recognize the handwriting. It’s Lady Tanar’s eunuch secretary, Master Bosha.”
“And if I knew who either of these people were…?”
She waved an urgent hand. “Adelis was trying to court Lady Tanar two years ago, when we were both in Thasalon, before he was dispatched to thwart the Rusylli incursion. After which he was reassigned to the garrison in Patos, and after that, well, you saw all the disasters that overtook us there. In aid of his suit Adelis set me on to make friends with her, and we exchanged visits, oh, several times.”
“So the yellow roses were, what, some courting gift from him?”
She nodded vigorously, making her bound-up curls bounce.
“I suppose it’s a good sign that she remembered them two years later, but what about the rest of this?”
“The one who served you pickles has to refer to Minister Methani, who ordered Adelis be blinded with the boiling vinegar. Limnos is an island just off the coast near Thasalon—the Daughter’s Order maintains a retreat there for high-born devotees who wish to withdraw from the world and dedicate their virginity to her. It also serves as a place for those who have grown old in her service to retire.”
“Also the high-born ones, I would guess?”
“Not always, but certainly those who have risen high in Her Order. And also”—she took a deep breath—“as a delicate prison for noblewomen whom the emperor has taken hostage against their rebellious relatives. This says they’ve taken my mother.”
Pen swallowed. “Oh.”
“Oh, gods, I thought she would be safer than this. She’s not Adelis’s mother, after all, nor high-born. Most people don’t know how close they are. Someone must have said too much to the wrong ears, at the imperial court.”
“Unless this Methani fellow is clutching straws.”
“Possible, but it hardly matters now.”
Nikys and Adelis insisted they were twins, being born on the same day to two different mothers and the same father, on the grounds that had it been two fathers and the same mother, none would hesitate to dub them so. Old General Arisaydia’s first marriage to a noblewoman with imperial connections had sadly been without issue for years, until he took a second wife, or concubine—Pen was a little unclear on Cedonian domestic legalities—and by whatever joke of the Mother and the Bastard, found himself with two offspring at once. Typically such women were expected to be rivals, but those two seemed to have united, instead, taking house together after the death of their husband in Nikys’s late teens. According to Nikys, her mother had mourned the loss of the senior wife, a few years ago, even more than she’d mourned their husband.
It had all left Adelis’s enemies at the imperial court with a dearth of potential hostages to hold against him, certainly.
“And what have the duchess or the duke to say to this?”
“I don’t know yet. I came to you first.”
Pen felt more alarmed than flattered. “Er, why?”
Her gaze upon him intensified. “You’re a sorcerer. You smuggled Adelis and me out of Cedonia to Orbas. You escaped a bottle dungeon, and no one does that. I believe you could save my mother.”
Penric gulped down his first impulse, which was to protest that those all had been flukes, unrepeatable. “We must take this to Duke Jurgo, to start. A threat against the loyalty of his new general concerns him closely, after all.”
“Yes.” Her hands clenched. “We have next to no resources, even between us, but he could help us if he chose.”
Just exactly what she might have in mind, Pen shuddered to imagine. Perhaps Jurgo would be a voice of reason? Leaving the scroll open on the table, Pen folded and repocketed his own letter of the morning.
“What’s that?” Nikys asked, seeing this.
“Oh”—Pen exhaled—“nothing of importance now. Let’s go find Duke Jurgo.”
They exited the bookroom together, Nikys’s shorter steps for once outpacing Penric’s leggy stride.
II
They tracked the duke, eventually, not to his cabinet but to the east end of the palace, where he was examining some renovations in progress. The work-crew foreman sent Nikys an unsolicited look of gratitude when she drew Jurgo off to a quieter courtyard.
Jurgo was a pleasantly ugly, mostly-affable man in his early forties, duke for some fifteen years and as solid in his position as possible for lord of such a beleaguered realm. Shrewd, or he wouldn’t be so solid. If Nikys could present her needs as lying in line with his, she thought she might have a chance of gaining his support. At cross-purposes, she’d be weak indeed.
Jurgo settled on a shaded bench under the colonnade, Nikys standing stiff before him as he read her note. She strove to organize her thoughts through a head throbbing with more tension than since Adelis had been arrested back in Patos. And to shove aside, for the moment, a thousand thronging visions of what dire things might be happening to her mother right now. Women prisoners were almost never blinded, for example. Castration did not apply. The cutting-off of breasts, promising not only agony to the woman but starvation to her infant, was not usually threatened to women past childbearing. Retreats of the Daughter’s Order did not feature dungeons.
Is she very frightened? Has she been cruelly treated? Nikys swallowed hard to keep control of her voice.
Penric leaned against a post and listened soberly as she again explained the strange message’s import.
Jurgo tapped the paper in his hand, and asked, “Do you trust this? How certain are you of its senders?”
“Master Bosha’s handwriting I know well, from other correspondence with Lady Tanar. Along with the roses, it’s full of private things that Adelis would be expected to understand at once, just as I do.”
“Not very full. It’s quite short.”
“The shorter, the better, for this sort of thing,” Penric put in from the side. “Every unneeded sentence is another chance for betrayal, should it fall into the wrong hands on its journey.”
Jurgo gave a conceding nod. “Could its writing have been bribed, or suborned?” His hand circled. “Compelled?”
“Lady Tanar Xarre is rich, and Master Bosha very loyal to her,” said Nikys. “So not the first two. And I have trouble imagining any compulsion that would force him to write such a thing against her will.”
Penric shrugged. “If he’s a scribe, an offer to break his fingers might suffice. Or to blind him.” While this was delivered in Penric’s voice, the casual bloody-mindedness hinted it might be Desdemona talking.
It wasn’t as if Nikys had spoken that much with Surakos Bosha, despite him being an ironic, watchful presence wherever Tanar went. So she couldn’t support the conviction with which she said, “No.” She added after a reluctant moment, “Although if someone threatened to break Tanar’s fingers, it’s hard to tell what might happen.” Since someone wouldn’t live long wasn’t a thing she could say out loud. “But I can’t picture how such an event might come about. Tanar is well-protected in her lady mother’s household.” Largely by Bosha himself, Nikys gathered.
“Even metaphorically?” asked Penric. “Pressure put on this Lady Tanar, her secretary writing to her dictation?”
Unhappily, Nikys turned out her hands. “To what end?” And hoped everyone else wasn’t thinking the obvious, Entrapment.
The duke’s canny eyes studied Nikys. “If General Arisaydia received this, as he apparently was intended to, what do you think he would do?”