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.”
“Politics change.” Her soft mouth set mulishly. “I can afford to wait.”
“Do you want him to wait? Should I tell him so?” Nikys hesitated, though her hands kept moving. “Do you love him that much?”
Tanar, after a moment, returned candor for candor. “I’m not sure. Setting all the pretty poetry aside as beguiling blither, because I’ve never met anyone who seems to actually think like that, I don’t know what love is supposed to be. I care that he should be well. The thought of him being injured or killed distresses me. When we had the news of his blinding”—a shudder passed through her—“I cried and carried on till poor Sura was quite alarmed. Of course I knew enough to compose myself before I left our chambers.” She tossed her head in some remembered irritation.
After a few more strokes, she added in a lower voice, “I thought for a while, before Patos, that I might use waiting for Adelis as a stick to fend off the others, but not if it could call down more danger on his head. Because assassins can cross borders where armies cannot.”
Nikys sighed, unable to gainsay this, but pointed out, “Given the hazards of his profession, I think that should be one of your lesser worries.” And, more thoughtfully: “It might be better for a soldier’s wife not to love too much.”
Tanar’s gaze sought hers in the mirror, just obliquely enough to ask: “Do you still miss your husband Kymis?”
Nikys drew a cool breath through her nostrils. So many memories, and the good ones, in a strange way, almost more painful than the bad, so that she preferred to put them all away in the same locked box. “Not so much now. The present drives out the past, a little more each day.”
A knock sounded at the chamber door, and Tanar went to receive Nikys’s valise from the hands of her servant, whom she bade a fond goodnight. Both women broke off to share out the washstand and don nightgowns. Tanar’s spacious bed seemed the most inviting road-weary Nikys had ever seen, and she fell into it gratefully as Tanar blew out the candles.
In the darkness, Tanar remarked, “Your courier fellow, Penric—Daughter’s blessings, what a fetching young man. I’ve not seen that color of hair or eyes except among the emperor’s southern-island guard, and nothing like so bright.”
“Not so young,” said Nikys. “He’s thirty.” And it’s the Bastard’s blessings. Theologically speaking. Maybe that explains it all . . .
“Really? The same age as you?” Tanar seemed to mull this. In a tone of sly humor, she murmured, “Do you fancy him?”
Nikys made a neutral noise.
“Because you’re a widow, as free as a woman can be. I don’t suppose there’s any insurmountable barrier of rank between you.” An envious sigh. “And he looked as if he liked you. I quite think you could have him, if you wanted him,” she rippled on in cheerful, grating speculation. “Do you know very much about his background?”
“I’m beginning to.”
Tanar nudged her with her elbow. “Do tell?”
“Not my tale.” Starting with, He’s the agent who carried the fatal letter from the duke of Adria, descending through He’s a Temple sorcerer with ten other women’s ghosts living inside his head, and going on to He could knock a dozen soldiers to the ground with a twitch of his eyebrow, and Master Bosha really wouldn’t like that news. Not to mention being a physician of near-miraculous powers too broken to practice his craft, a scholar in half-a-dozen languages with enough reputation to be coveted by the duke of Orbas, and a man so very, very far away from home. “It’s complicated.”
Tanar made a noise of disappointment, but pressed no further.
After a little, Tanar added, “I was so sorry I hadn’t had a chance to meet Madame Gardiki. Adelis spoke of inviting your mother to Thasalon for the purpose, but then the Rusylli interrupted. And all the rest followed.”
“Well. I can’t say he’s ever mentioned wanting to do so for any other woman. I think she would like you.”
A hopeful sort of “Mm?”
“Do you really think we will be able to get her out?” All the worrisome unknowns still ahead of them made Nikys’s head throb to contemplate. Bosha had placed his elegant thumb square upon the problem. And then a miracle occurs.
No. As they gained more information, they would find a route through. Somehow. Step by step. She couldn’t work miracles, but she knew she could work work.
Tanar, Nikys thought, also hesitated between kindness and candor. Nikys could not tell which side Tanar imagined she was coming down on when she at last stated confidently, “Sura will know how.”
Nikys let that sit unchallenged. She had put hope before prudence, or why else had she come this far? A few more breaths, in the dark. Hope or prayer, she offered up: “I always wanted to have a sister, too.”
“Let us try to make that happen, then,” said Tanar softly.