“Can you walk, my lord?” asked Foix in a dubious voice.
Right now, he wasn’t sure if he could stand up. He glowered helplessly at Foix, who was tired but resilient, pink rather than gray after days in the saddle. Youth. Eh. “By tomorrow, I will.” He rubbed his face. “Do dy Jironal’s men realize they are not guardians but prison-keepers? That they are being led into possible treason against the rightful Heiress?”
The dedicat-commander sat back, and opened his hands. “Such charges are being flung about like snowballs from both parties right now. Rumors that the royesse has sent agents into Ibra to contract a marriage with the new Heir are flying everywhere.” He gave Royse Bergon an apologetic nod.
So much for the secrecy of his mission. He considered the pitfalls of potential party lines in Chalion. Iselle and Orico versus dy Jironal, all right. Iselle versus Orico and Dy Jironal . . . hideously dangerous.
“The news has had a mixed reception,” the commander continued. “The ladies look on Bergon with approval and want to make a romance of it all, because it’s said that he is brave and well-favored. Soberer heads worry that Iselle may sell Chalion to the Fox, because she is, ah, young and inexperienced.”
In other words, foolish and flighty. Sober heads had much to learn. Cazaril’s lips drew back on a dry grin. “No,” he mumbled. “We have not done that.” He realized that he was speaking to his knees, his forehead having unaccountably sunk to the table and anchored there.
After about a minute Bergon’s voice murmured gently in his ear, “Caz? Are you awake?”
“Mm.”
“Would you like to go to bed, my lord?” the dedicat-commander inquired after another pause.
“Mm.”
He whimpered a little as strong hands under each arm forced him to his feet. Ferda and Foix, leading him off somewhere, cruelly. The table had been soft enough . . . He didn’t even remember falling into the bed.
Someone was shaking his shoulder.
A hideously cheerful voice bellowed in his ear, “Rise and ride, Captain Sunshine!”
He spasmed and clawed at his covers, tried to sit up, and thought better of the effort. He pulled open his glued-shut eyelids, blinking in the candlelight. The identity of the voice finally penetrated. “Palli! You’re alive!” He meant to shout joyfully. At least it came out audibly. “What time is it?” He struggled again to sit up, making it onto one elbow. He seemed to be in some evicted officer-dedicat’s plainly furnished bedchamber.
“About an hour before dawn. We’ve been riding all night. Iselle sent me to find you.” He raised his brace of candles higher. Bergon was standing anxiously at his shoulder, and Foix too. “Bastard’s demons, Caz, you look like death on a trencher.”
“That . . . has been observed.” He lay back down. Palli was here. Palli was here, and all was well. He could shove Bergon and all his burdens off onto him, lie here, and not get up. Die alone and in peace, taking Dondo out of the world with him. “Take Royse Bergon and his company to Iselle. Leave me—”
“What, for dy Jironal’s patrols to find? Not if I value my future fortune as a courtier! Iselle wants you safe with her in Taryoon.”
“Taryoon? Not Valenda?” He blinked. “Safe?” This time he did struggle up, and all the way to his feet, where he passed out.
The black fog lifted, and he found Bergon, round-eyed, holding him slumped on the edge of the bed.
“Sit a minute with your head down,” Palli advised.
Cazaril obediently bent over his aching belly. If Dondo had visited him last night, he’d not been home. The ghost had kicked him a few times in his sleep, though, it felt like. From the inside out.
Bergon said softly, “He ate nothing when we came in last night. He collapsed straightaway, and we put him to bed.”
“Right,” said Palli, and jerked his thumb at the hovering Foix, who nodded and slipped out of the room.
“Taryoon?” Cazaril mumbled from the vicinity of his knees.
“Aye. She gave all two thousand of dy Jironal’s men the slip, she did. Well, first of all, before that, her uncle dy Baocia pulled his men out and went home. The fools let him go; thought it was a danger removed from their midst. Yes, and made free to move at will! Then Iselle rode out five days running, always with a troop of dy Jironal’s cavalry for escort, and gave them more exercise than they cared for. Had ’em absolutely convinced she meant to escape while riding. So when she and Lady Betriz went walking out one day with old Lady dy Hueltar, they let her go by. I was waiting with two saddled horses, and two women to change cloaks with ’em and go back with the old lady. We were gone down that ravine so fast . . . The old Provincara undertook to conceal she’d flown for as long as possible, pass it off that she was ill in her mother’s chambers. They’ve doubtless tumbled to it by now, but I’ll wager she was safe with her uncle in Taryoon before Valenda knew she was gone. Five gods, those girls can ride! Sixty miles cross-country between dusk and dawn under a full moon, and only one change of horses.”
“Girls?” said Cazaril. “Is Lady Betriz safe, too?”
“Oh, aye. Both of ’em chipper as songbirds, when I left ’em. Made me feel old.”
Cazaril squinted up at Palli, five years his junior, but let this pass. “Ser dy Ferrej . . . the Provincara, Lady Ista?”
Palli’s face sobered. “Still hostages in Valenda. They all told the girls to go on, you know.”
“Ah.”
Foix brought him a bowl of bean porridge, hot and aromatic, on a tray, and Bergon himself arranged his pillows and helped him sit up to eat it. Cazaril had thought he was ravenous, yet found himself unable to force down more than a few bites. Palli was keen to get away while the darkness still cloaked their numbers. Cazaril struggled to oblige, letting Foix help him back into his clothes. He dreaded the attempt to ride again.
In the post’s stable yard, he found that their escort, a dozen men of the Daughter’s Order who’d followed Palli from Taryoon, waited with a horse litter slung between two mounts. Indignant at first, he let Bergon persuade him into it, and the cavalcade swung away into the graying dark. The rough back roads and trails they took made the litter jounce and sway nauseatingly. After half an hour of this, he cried for mercy, and undertook to climb on a horse. Someone had thought to bring along a smooth-paced ambler for this very purpose, and he clung to the saddle and endured its rippling gait while they swung wide around Valenda and its occupiers’ patrols.
In the afternoon, they dropped down from some wooded slopes onto a wider road, and Palli rode alongside him. Palli eyed him curiously, a little sideways.
“I hear you do miracles with mules.”
“Not me. The goddess.” Cazaril’s smile twisted. “She has a way with mules, it seems.”
“I’m also told you’re strangely hard on brigands.”
“We were a strong company, well armed. If the brigands hadn’t been set onto us by dy Joal, they would never have attempted us.”
“Dy Joal was one of dy Jironal’s best swords. Foix says you took him down in seconds.”
“That was a mistake. Besides, his foot slipped.”
Palli’s lips twitched. “You don’t have to go around telling people that, you know.” He stared ahead between his horse’s bobbing ears for a time. “So, the boy you defended on the Roknari galley was Bergon himself.”
“Yes. Kidnapped by his brother’s bravos, it turned out. Now I know why the Ibran fleet rowed so hard after us.”
“Did you never guess who he really was? Then or later?”