“Mother!” Nikys flushed. “I can’t ask the man to, to look up my private parts!”
“Why not? I don’t imagine he’d object. As either physician or man. What, you mean you haven’t tried him out in bed yet? I would have, in your place.”
“Yes, Drema, we know,” sighed Nikys. “And I’m sure Ikos thanks you for it.” She nudged her mother in fond exasperation. “I’m not sure I’d have your courage. Or whatever it was that carried you though. Bloody-minded determination.”
Idrene chuckled. “Ikos has grown into such a dear man. So that worked out well in the end. It was rough along the way in parts, but of all my many regrets, Ikos was never one. Look at it this way. Either your fears are justified, in which case you run no risk, or they are not, and so they are settled in your favor. Or do you judge Learned Penric would run away at the news he was to be a father?”
“…No. Absolutely not. He may even have it in his mind.”
“Another thing you haven’t talked about with him? This list is getting long, dear Nikys.”
She hunched. “I’d be betting my whole life on the man. I did that once with Kymis. And then he went and died on me.” The furious helplessness of that loss still reverberated, when she made the mistake of remembering.
“Oh.” Idrene’s smile grew crooked. “I know the answer for that one. It worked quite well for Florina. And your father. And Ikos’s father, too.”
Nikys raised her face. “You do? What?”
She tapped Nikys’s forehead in a gesture not quite a blessing. And said, in a voice as arid as Nikys had ever heard from her, “Die first.”
XV
As the sun climbed, Penric and Ikos descended, negotiating the narrowest passages of the pilgrim stairs, scarcely wider than Pen’s aching shoulders, to where they widened out. The drop was much reduced by this point. Desdemona had calmed somewhat. So Pen finally asked her, Grant you the machine was strange, and I know you’ve never liked heights, but why the extreme fear, Des?
It was an extreme drop.
You couldn’t have died no matter what went wrong.
A reluctant hesitation. Sugane died from a fall.
Des’s very first human rider had been a Cedonian mountain woman of the northern peninsula. Pen still had to work to keep her broad country accent from leaking into his Cedonian, although he’d smoothed it out quite a bit through listening to Nikys’s and Adelis’s Thasalon-trained voices.
A day or so after, Des went on. She was brought to Litikone’s house, which was how I came to jump to her. It’s not a memory I’ve shared with you. It wouldn’t help you.
Des tended to keep that final part of all her riders’ histories not secret, Pen thought, so much as private. Do you think your chaos might have contributed to the accident? You wouldn’t have had it under such good control back then.
A shifty pause. Might have. It was almost two centuries ago. Even demons forget.
Not much, in Pen’s observation. But even demons mourned, and had a long time to do so. Grief, guilt, regret… not everything they learned how to do from their human riders was a boon. He did not press.
Ikos called a halt where the stairs twisted back to become more of a trail through scree, zig-zagging down leftward toward what Pen thought might be a boat landing. He could glimpse a timber dock, but no boats, set in a ragged bite of shoreline that could barely be called a cove.
“I’ll have my pack, now,” said Ikos, holding out a hand.
Pen’s legs were quivering custard and his mouth was dry, but he offered gamely, “I could haul it a bit farther. Where are we going?”
“I’m going to my boat.” Ikos gestured right to where a faint path led away to some hidden track above the water.
Yes, of course Ikos, with his meticulous planning, would have a boat waiting to take his mother off the island. Unlike Pen, whose plans had been more nebulous at this point, involving blending with departing pilgrims.
“You can go anywhere else you please.” Standing a couple of steps above Pen, Ikos could frown down at him. “Sorcerer.”
“Ah, hm. When did you figure that out?”
“Candles don’t light themselves. Seagulls don’t burst in midair, no matter what crap they’ve been eating. And I still don’t know what kind of spell you cast on that poor acolyte, but I want no parts of it. I know sorcerers leak bad luck, and I don’t want yours anywhere near a boat I’m on.”
“I didn’t put any kind of a geas on Acolyte Hekat!” Pen protested. Not that he had a way of proving it to Ikos. There were good reasons sorcerers learned to be discreet. “And I’m not a hedge sorcerer. I’m Temple-trained. Learned Penric kin Jurald, formerly of Martensbridge, sworn divine of the Bastard’s Order.” And of the white god in Person, but that was another story. He left off his younger-brother courtesy title of Lord, as he usually did, since Ikos seemed a man who would not be impressed by such empty baubles. Pen had come far from Jurald Court, tucked in its valley in the distant cantons.
In so many ways, murmured Des.
“Formerly of Martensbridge? Wherever that is,” said Ikos skeptically. “Where’re you from now?”
“That’s unsettled at present. I’m waiting for Nikys to decide. If she says yes, probably Orbas, for the time being. If no… I don’t know.”
Ikos’s face screwed up. “Why hasn’t she said yes? Widow ’n all.”
“I wish I knew,” Pen sighed, ignoring Des’s Do you want a list? “I’m working on her. And not with magic, I might point out. Self-evidently.”
“Hm…”
“The point is, I promise I can keep my demon’s chaos off your boat. It might be hard on a passing seagull. Or a shark, or whatever. But I’m certainly not going to befoul or sink a ship I’m sailing in!” He added, prudentially, “Though neither sorcerers nor gods have any control over the weather.”
Ikos folded his arms. “I’ve got no reason to trust anything you’ve said is true.”
“I trust you.” More or less. “I rode in your evil device. Isn’t that proof enough?”
“It was perfectly safe!” snapped Ikos. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
“So is my magic. You’re here, aren’t you?”
Ikos’s head went back and his lips tightened, but he did not at once reply.
“Look.” Pen scratched his hot and sticky scalp. His fingers came away darkened. “How do you decide anything is sound? You test it, don’t you?”
“If I’m trying out new gear,” said Ikos, “I usually test it to destruction. To be sure.”
“Ah. If you had two sorcerers, you could try that, I suppose. You see the problem.”
Ikos snorted.
“I was thinking more along the lines of a question.” Ask me anything seemed a dangerously open-ended invitation, so Pen left it at that.
“Doesn’t work too well if I’m trying to decide whether you’re telling the truth in the first place,” Ikos pointed out. “But, I don’t know… What’s Nikys’s objection to you? You being a learned divine and all. Seems to me the sort of thing women ought to like.” His lips tweaked up. “No complaining you come home from work all smelly, eh?”
Pen suspected that had not been a compliment. “I can’t say,” he replied, if not with truth then with precision. “But when Nikys received the letter reporting her mother had been arrested and taken to Limnos, I was the first person she came to for help. If you don’t trust me, could you trust her?”