We’re not asking, Des.
Back in the sitting chamber, Bosha knocked on an adjoining door, evidently to the lady’s bedchamber. Tanar opened it brightly, received Nikys’s case, and bade them both a cheery goodnight. Pen could hear her and Nikys’s voices, quietly speaking, as the door swung shut again. Bosha led to a matching door on the opposite inner wall, opening it to another bedchamber.
He lit a brace of candles, and Penric took in a carved writing table, shelves crammed with books and papers, chests and a wardrobe along the walls, a washstand, and a narrow bed piled with folded clothing. Bosha removed the garments perfunctorily to the tops of a couple of the chests, and gestured. “You can have my bed.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“Where I usually do.” He plucked nightclothes from a hook on the inside of the wardrobe and vanished back to the sitting room, shutting the door behind him.
Nonplussed, but mortally tired, Pen took advantage of the washstand, then changed into his own nightshirt. He poked briefly around the room. Bosha seemed to own a great deal more clothing than an average servant, much more finely made. The books and papers were too many to take in, but seemed mostly of a utilitarian nature—apparently, he really was Tanar’s secretary. Among his other more disturbing duties. A number of drawers and chests were locked, which wouldn’t have slowed Pen down had he further reason to pry.
Curious, and concerned because while the eunuch had put himself between Pen and Tanar, fair enough, he had also put himself between Pen and Nikys, Pen cracked the door to the sitting room and checked. Bosha, wearing a nightshirt of fine lawn, was just unrolling a wool-stuffed linen mattress down before Lady Tanar’s door. An unsheathed short sword with a chased blade sat propped by the doorjamb.
Is that one tainted too, Des?
Seems to be. I long to ask him what he is using, and how he compounds it. You ought to find that professionally interesting as well.
Do you think he brews up his own drugs? Those locked chests were suddenly more interesting.
Do you imagine he doesn’t?
A faint sound of feminine voices penetrated from the closed door beyond. Pen bet Bosha wasn’t above putting his ear to it.
Nor are you, Pen dear, but it seems the position is taken.
Pen was too exhausted to fret further tonight. Judging that they were both about as sincere as two strange cats, he exchanged polite nods with Bosha and withdrew.
VI
While waiting for the men to return with their baggage, Tanar drew Nikys into her bedchamber. She sat before her dressing table and began, a bit awkwardly, to take down her braids for the night.
“Shall I help you?” asked Nikys, moving behind her.
“Oh, would you please? Sura usually does it, but with you here he won’t intrude.”
“My pleasure.” Nikys began to withdraw the pearl pins and drop them into the enameled bowl that Tanar shifted closer.
To watch Nikys, Tanar angled the glass mirror in its wooden arms, and sat straight. “It’s so good to see you well, though I’m sorry it took such a terrifying errand to bring you to me again. Adelis was the only one of my suitors with the wit to offer me a sister.”
Nikys smiled, flattered. In their early acquaintance Tanar had looked up to her—ten years older and once married—as a fount of female wisdom on how men and women dealt with each other in the bedchamber. Nikys had eventually determined that this was not because Tanar had been left untutored, but rather that she was collecting intelligence from as many sources as possible. Preparing for her life’s journey, like Penric studying Duke Jurgo’s maps before they’d left Vilnoc. That Nikys had elected to be frank and clear, just as she would have wished for herself, had been much valued.
“Adelis…” Tanar began again more tentatively. “Do you know how he still feels about me? I wrote him a few times while he was on campaign, but received no reply.”
“That’s just Adelis,” Nikys reassured her, beginning to unwind auburn braids. “He doesn’t reply to me either when he’s in the field, but I know he saves my letters.” Now lost with the rest of their possessions. “He was hurried off to Patos so swiftly after the Rusylli campaign, with no triumphal celebration even offered in the capital. And then he had to master his new command. I think he was already starting to be wary. If he suspected trouble was coming down on him, he wouldn’t have wanted to involve you.”
Tanar’s face set in a grave grimace. “I’m very afraid I might have been involved despite myself. Did you know Minister Methani’s nephew, Lord Bordane, has been one of my more persistent suitors?”
Adelis had suspected that Methani’s cabal, close around the emperor at court, had engineered his downfall by the subtle half-forged correspondence with the Duke of Adria. That was to say, Adelis’s letter to Adria had been forged; the return reply had been condemningly real, and guided forthwith into his enemies’ outstretched hands.
“It’s a hideous thought,” continued Tanar, “but as soon as I had heard what had happened to Adelis in Patos, I wondered how much might have been a ploy to get him permanently out of Lord Bordane’s way.” She raised quietly stricken eyes to Nikys’s, in the mirror.
Nikys considered this, watching the guilty fear fleeting in Tanar’s face. “That might have been a factor,” she said hesitantly, “but it certainly wasn’t that alone. Adelis and Methani had been clashing at court for years before this. Adelis’s recent success against the Rusylli, and so his rising popularity with his troops, are far more likely to have set this off. I can’t speak for Lord Bordane, but I guarantee Methani’s more worried about threats to the emperor from a potential usurper than about his nephew’s love-life.” Imagined threats, curse him—all of this horror done for fears made of vapor and slander. “The latter might simply have been a bonus, from their point of view.” Granted Methani would not be immune to the appeal of bringing Tanar’s wealth into his clan.
Tanar took this in, and slowly nodded. More relieved by this honesty than by some airy denial, and no wonder Nikys liked her. Had Adelis appreciated her character, as well as her lively beauty?
“Is Lord Bordane still persistent?” Nikys took up the hairbrush from the table and began untangling Tanar’s tresses.
Tanar made a moue. “Among others. Up until my last birthday Mother held them all off for me, playing the rigid guardian, but now I’m at my legal majority, they know I could consent on my own. They try all kinds of tricks to get me alone to hear their pleas. Sura is most annoyed.” Her puff of disdain transmuted to a purr of pleasure as Nikys changed to longer, more soothing strokes. “Oh, that’s almost as good as Sura.”
That a eunuch servant acted sometimes as a lady’s maid was no very unusual thing. Tanar’s morning habit of brushing and braiding Bosha’s white hair in turn had been more startling, when Nikys had glimpsed it on her last overnight visit. It was evidently a custom lingering from when Tanar had been a tyrannical six-year-old princess of the house, treating her new guardian, to his bemusement, as something between a playmate, a large doll, and a compliant slave. Most other innocent intimacies from that era had fallen away with Tanar’s more conscious maturity, to Bosha’s silent regret, Nikys gathered.
“Do none of your other suitors tempt you?”
Tanar shrugged. “I confess, your brother was the first man to really do so.”
“It’s become rather hopeless,” Nikys observed, reluctantly conscientious. “It will be long before he can rebuild his fortune, if ever. You are anchored to Cedonia by your own possessions, and he cannot cross the border.”