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XVI

Nikys snapped awake at a rap on the chamber door, her sleep-slurry washed away by alarm. Thankfully, it was Bosha. She snared a quick look out the window to check the time as Idrene sat up on the edge of the bed, yawning, and Bosha took off his hat and settled on a stool. Late afternoon; they’d slept a good stretch. Perhaps two more hours till sunset?

“What did you find?” asked Idrene.

Bosha grimaced. “Nothing good yet. Of the ships now at dock, three are headed the wrong way, one is not suitable for unescorted women, and the last is a Xarre-owned vessel. You will understand if I’d prefer not to place you there, but in any case, its next port of call is Thasalon, which you’d best avoid.”

Idrene nodded. Nikys couldn’t decide whether to be worried or relieved. Sooner away was better, but a delay might allow Penric to catch up with them. . . . If nothing awful had befallen him.

“How long, do you think,” said Idrene, “should we wait for a better chance before giving up and heading east overland? Could you drive us to a coach road?”

“Maybe,” said Bosha, obviously not liking this much better than putting them on a Xarre ship. “But your description will certainly reach any border before you. This whole scheme depends on speed.”

Indeed, outrunning pursuit was all their hope. Resisting it, should it catch them, was out of the question without Penric, and even more terrifying to contemplate with him.

“Three ships are putting out on this tide,” said Bosha. “I’m told Akylaxio gets half-a-dozen seagoing merchanters a day docking to load or offload. A couple of day-coasters call regularly”—local ships that passed to and from the smaller towns and islands—“but that’s not a first choice.”

Not a good choice at all. They would repeat the same risks at every port, and accumulate delays.

Idrene rubbed her sleep-creased cheeks. “Let’s give it till tomorrow morning to see what else arrives. Then take counsel and decide.” She rose to splash her face at the basin, and went to peer out the window. “I confess, I’m growing mortally tired of being trapped in small rooms.”

Bosha gave her a sympathetic nod, and with the women’s collaboration turned to filling out as much of their documents as he could. It seemed he could alter his handwriting at will, Nikys noticed. He put down his quill and looked up at a fresh tap on the chamber door. “That may be dinner.” He rose to open it, though his other hand hovered on the hilt at his belt.

But it wasn’t the maidservant who stumbled through. It was Penric. And . . .

“Ikos!” Idrene shrieked, dashing across the room and falling upon him.

He seized her back, huffing relief. “So it was all true . . . !”

“Keep your voices down,” Penric and Bosha chorused.

Bosha glanced at this new man and opened his hand in pressing query to Penric, who shrugged and closed the door firmly behind them. “Brother,” he muttered. “The other brother.”

“Oh. The bridgebuilder? But what . . . ?”

“He was a surprise to me, too.”

Penric was altered in coloration yet again, his hair now a sandy brown, sticky with salt, and his head and arms and feet paler, but mottled, like a peculiar tan or a mild skin disorder. He was back in his tunic and trousers, noticeably grubbier.

Ikos looked, and smelled, as if he were home from a very bad, very long day at work, stubbled and sunburned, clothes crusty with dried sweat. Nikys hugged him anyway. Pen looked on as if . . . envious? Breaking away from Ikos because Idrene was elbowing in again, Nikys’s fingers stretched and closed. She didn’t need her hands to assure herself of Pen’s reality; her eyes were enough, in this company. For a moment she wished her company anywhere but here.

Idrene’s anxious questions tumbled over one another. “What are you doing here, you shouldn’t be within a hundred miles of me, whatever are you two doing together, how did you get here?”

“Fishing boat,” said Ikos, choosing the simplest from this spate. “From Limnos.”

“I was worried how we’d get into Akylaxio discreetly,” Penric put in, “but it turns out that a brace of those big tuna fish make an excuse to dock at any harbor, no questions asked. We picked them up along the way. Ye gods, they’re huge in a small boat. For a moment I thought they’d sink us. I’d only seen them laid out flat in the markets at Lodi, before.”

“You stopped to go fishing?” said Idrene, sounding bewildered.

“No,” said Ikos distantly, “we didn’t stop. They leaped into the boat all on their own, and died at our feet. Smiling. Apparently.”

That . . . ah, that wasn’t a joke. Or sarcasm. Nikys had seen that round-eyed look on people before, and what did it say that she recognized it? He wasn’t poleaxed, just Penric’d. Her lips stretched up unwilled.

“We left the lads to sell the fish,” Ikos went on, “and strolled around at random till he found you.”

“It wasn’t random,” Pen protested, “it was logic. Mostly. But tell me everything that’s happened to you!”

They ended up with Idrene and Nikys seated on the edge of the bed, Penric on the stool, and Ikos at Idrene’s feet, her hand fondling his hair, urgently swapping tales. Bosha leaned silently against the wall with his arms folded, taking in, Nikys thought, everything, although even his set face screwed up with consternation at parts. He did not look best pleased when he learned about the encounter with his sister Hekat, nor Pen’s promise that her brother would tell her all about it on his next visit. “All that seems safe,” Pen temporized, which did not improve matters.

Bosha broke off to answer the door and receive the dinner tray from the maid, and order more food, very necessary as the two men fell upon the offering like starved wolves.

The second round of dinner was delivered and consumed before they came to the end of Penric’s and Ikos’s intertwined and often clashing explanations, frequently dislocated by Idrene’s many questions. “You do make me wish I’d been able to ride in your machine,” Idrene told Ikos. “It sounds splendid. Perhaps, at some happier time, you might get a chance to demonstrate it for me.” Ikos smiled. Penric rubbed his jaw, squeezing some remark to unintelligibility.

Nikys left out from her account only her strange experience in the court of the sacred well, and Pen did not press her on it, to her silent gratitude. She turned at last to Ikos.

“But you say you have a boat?”

He shook his head. “Not my boat, and nothing that could take you to Orbas.”

Pen scratched his scalp and grimaced. “I’m thinking I want to find a bathhouse before I board anything. I’ll circle back through the harbor and see what’s come in since the last check, after.”

Idrene was clearly torn between sending Ikos with him, or keeping her son at her side for every possible moment before they had to part. But Ikos stretched, his joints making disturbing muffled crunching noises, sniffed his armpit without prompting, and chose to depart with Penric.

Nikys fell backward on the bed, floating between elation and new terror. The latter hardly seemed fair. Given how she’d fretted at Penric’s absence, surely his presence should be the cure? Perhaps this was what a gambler felt when he laid his whole stake on one last throw of the dice. Not a thrill she relished, it seemed.


It was nearly dark, Nikys was anxious, Idrene was pacing from wall to wall, and Bosha was staying out of her way, when the two men returned, much cleaner.

And triumphant. Penric barely closed the door behind him before he blurted, “Two more ships have docked. One is Roknari—”

A general flinch.

“—but the other is Saonese. Heading homeward, near full-laden. It’s not going to Orbas, but it is planning a stop at the Carpagamon islands, and from there it should be no challenge to double back to the duchy.”

“Do you speak Saonese?” asked Nikys. A difficult dialect of Darthacan; she had a working command of the latter.

“Oh, yes, it’s practically my father-tongue. Jurald is a Saonese name, you know. And there was Learned Amberein, one of Des’s riders before me. The purser thought I was an expatriate fellow-countryman. I didn’t correct him. Time for that later. Anyway, they keep a few cabins aboard for independent merchants transshipping cargo. Only one free, but I booked it. More space than a coach, at least. Another may open up later in the voyage. They sail on the morning tide.”

“Should we go there now?” asked Idrene, looking ready to dive for their baggage.

Pen shook his head. “The Customs shed closes at dark. We’re supposed to board in the morning.”

Bosha drummed his pale fingers on his thigh. “That could be cutting things fine.”

“Yes.” Pen bit his lip. “Though it would be the usual course for passengers.”

“Mm,” said Bosha. There seemed no choice but to accept this delay. Nikys wondered if she’d sleep at all tonight.

Pen had secured a chamber across the hall for the two men and Bosha, though Ikos lingered with Idrene and Nikys. He’d been supposed to be at his next worksite two weeks ago, although he claimed his crew could begin surveying without him. They would say their goodbyes indoors in private tomorrow; he planned to watch over their departure from a distance with Bosha till they were safely away.

They talked in low tones until his head was nodding, and his mother sent him to bed with a kiss the like of which he’d probably not had from her since he was four. It seemed to please them both. It often felt to Nikys that her elder brother’s relationship with their mother was less, not more, complicated than her own for its long gap, but she could not begrudge it.


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Framed