“No doubt,” said Bosha. “Events have overturned nearly everything, but with the amount of paper they seized from both your houses, they could have manufactured something just as lethal. When I worked in the Thasalon chancellery, we could have done it with six lines.” He chased a bite of cheese with a bite of bread.
Nikys’s eyebrows rose. “I didn’t know you had served in the imperial bureaucracy.”
He shrugged. “Almost eight years. It’s not a secret. Although my career was under the reign of the prior emperor, and was truncated when he was.”
“And as violently?” inquired Idrene, much interested.
“Only because my father chose to throw in our family’s lot with one of the losing pretenders. I might have been able to weather the storm otherwise.” He grimaced. “Or had I not let him draw me home when the wrong soldiers arrived. Bad day. I barely escaped with my life.” He took a swallow of barley-water. “Cured me of ambition.”
Idrene looked as though she had no trouble filling in the horrors he’d left out. Nikys did some mental calculations.
“Was that when you went into Lady Xarre’s service?”
“Indirectly. I’d fled the debacle—”
Nikys translated that as slaughter.
“—at my family’s estate, and ended up taking shelter that night in the Xarre garden. In what turned out to be Lady Tanar’s tree house, which was not at all what a boy would have imagined as a tree house. I thought the reason all the furnishings seemed so small was because I was delirious. Which I did become, later on.”
He eyed his appreciative female audience hanging on his tale, and unfolded a trifle more. “When Lady Tanar found me there the next day, I begged her to hide me. I’d some dim notion of making it seem like a game to her. She entered into it with more enthusiasm than I quite… quite knew what to do with. Smuggled me food and drink and bandages.” He touched the left side of his mouth, which quirked up. “My physician was six, and had never sewn anything but a hem before, but she did her best. I can still picture the charmingly intense look of concentration on her face as she bent over me. Stabbing me repeatedly.” His amusement slipped to a grimace. “And my blood up to her wrists. That was disturbing. In retrospect. At the time I had other things on my mind.
“Really, it was the first thing I ever taught her. How to sew up skin. She was a shockingly quick study. It set the tone for our future dealings in a way, hm, that I’ve never been able to get back under my control since.” He looked up, producing an awkward smile. “And that’s my one and only war story, in full.”
Nikys wagered not. Neither sole nor complete, though evidently pivotal.
“And here I am telling it to the general’s widow. You lived through those times. I’m sure you’ve seen worse.”
“No,” said Idrene, with a thoughtful look at him. “Merely more.”
He hesitated, then inclined his head in delicate appreciation.
“How did you get out of the tree house?” Nikys couldn’t help asking.
“Ah. The game couldn’t last, of course. After about two weeks I grew so feverish Lady Tanar became frightened enough to ask for help. Of her mother, fortunately for me. I think the servants would have turned me over to the soldiers, or just tossed me into the street. Lady Xarre chose otherwise. I was kept discreetly in her household until I recovered. I found ways to make myself useful, and stayed.”
So much so that he was still there fourteen years later?
“Lady Xarre took a risk,” Idrene observed. Her tone made it an observation of fact, not a judgment.
Bosha opened his hands. “Time went on, the capital settled back down. I was forgotten soon enough. My family were not great lords. None of my older brothers survived to renew the threat. Nor was I going to start the clan over.”
Which was one reason the court bureaucracy favored eunuchs for high posts; they could not put the aggrandizement of their nonexistent children over the needs of the empire. Despite all, the clan game was still played, with families cutting and placing a spare son in such service to later boost brothers or nephews. Nikys wondered if the Boshas had once had some such plan for their odd fifth son. It seemed to have gone profoundly awry, if so.
“My father lived for a while, after. I was glad of that.” His crooked lips drew back in a smile that was all sharp edges, like a poisoned blade. “Long enough to know I was his sole remaining son.”
He turned about and climbed down from the cart to ready the horse for the next stage.
Which raised another question, which Nikys absolutely could not ask: had Bosha been a volunteer, exactly, for his bureaucratic career? Or had he been pressured or forced into it by a family overburdened with sons competing for their inheritances? That, too, happened sometimes.
No, she thought, contemplating his story. I’ve no need to ask.
The starlight scintillated overhead as they took the road again, but the deep shadows on the ground slowed them to a walking pace. At times even the earnest carthorse balked, and Bosha would go to its head to lead it, murmuring reassurances in the fuzzy flicking ears. Nikys hoped the pale man’s misery in bright light was repaid by better vision at night.
At least they were making steady progress away from Limnos. She hesitated to call it the right direction, as they would have to double back north by ship to circumnavigate the Cedonian peninsula and reach Orbas again. If they had to sail without Penric would there be some safe way to leave him word which ship they’d taken?
Would he be safe at all, or was he being as overconfident as whatever error had led him to that first ugly sojourn in the bottle dungeon? His powers were astonishing, but subtle, and she knew he could be taken by surprise, or overwhelmed by numbers. Her mind’s eye went on to produce an unwanted string of vivid playlets of how this might happen, growing more and more horrific and bizarre. And unlikely, she told herself sternly. He would not end up smashed on the rocks, or drowned in the sea, or beaten by brutal soldiers till the blood ran down to flood those blue eyes with opaque red. He had skills. He had tricks. He had Desdemona.
So few people knew how valuable that bright blond head was, that was the trouble. How irreplaceable. The notion of him being killed by ruffians wholly ignorant of what they destroyed was the most sickening of all.
She wished her imagination came with a lever to shut it off, like an irrigation gate. This nightmare garden needed no watering.
The darkness was cooling rapidly. Nikys leaned against her mother, who leaned equally exhausted against her, and not just to share heat. As the horse plodded on, Nikys wondered if she had just traded a gold coin for a gold coin.
XIII
Des felt the presence of the women in the corridor before Pen heard the key in the lock. Swiftly, he huddled himself up on the cot facing the wall, drapery drawn over his head, simulating a prisoner in deep depression at her fate. Rather as Idrene had looked when they’d first come in, come to think.
He trusted he wouldn’t have to attempt a geas. Apart from the challenge of trying to cast it on three subjects at once, the trouble with using a geas on a person—as contrasted with an animal—was that when it wore off, the person remembered.
“Madame Gardiki?” The dedicat’s voice was not unkind. The other two presences seemed bored but watchful. “Your dinner is here.”