VII
After the first change of horses on the coast road, Learned Penric skinned out of Mira’s togs and back into his own, an awkward process in the close confines of the coach. No . . . not really his own, Nikys supposed, just whatever plausible garb he’d obtained from some used-clothing merchant in Patos after escaping the bottle dungeon, and before presenting himself to Nikys in her villa’s garden. That bright morning seemed a hundred years ago, from this vantage. Undyed tunic, trousers, a sleeveless green coat that had once fooled her eye, or at least her tired mind, into accepting him as a physician of the Mother’s Order (unsworn); the clothes, the man, the deceits, and all of their little company seemed worse for wear after their long flight.
“When you get to the ducal palace, Adelis,” Penric said, beginning to take down Mira’s elegant hairstyle, “there are bound to be a lot of questions about your blinding. I would ask you . . . beg you . . . ” He paused to remuster his words. “It will likely make it much simpler for you if your tale is that the man who administered the boiling vinegar did a poor job of it, and your eyesight recovered largely on its own. Your sister’s good nursing did the rest.”
Adelis studied him. “You don’t desire the credit? The reputation?”
“Not for that, no.”
“So what is your role in this play? This time.” That Adelis had grown mortally tired of playacting was plain in his wearied tone.
“I don’t suppose I need a speaking part at all. When we reach Vilnoc I plan to find the main temple, and report in at whatever house of the Bastard’s Order they have there. Once I establish my identity I can find my own way back to Adria.” He cast a guarded glance over at Nikys, thinking of who-knew-what. Combing out his hair with his hands, he began braiding it in a single short rope down his back. “Although it might be well for you to come in with me, and use the Order’s house as a staging area for your foray upon the palace. Get a wash, a meal, maybe a loan of clothing. Send a messenger ahead announcing your arrival who will not be ignored or shuffled aside. Rather than taking your host by surprise. This not being an attack.”
“I suppose,” said Adelis slowly, “it would be better not to appear wholly as beggars at Duke Jurgo’s gates.”
Even though they were? But no. Adelis was a man with a treasure of military skill and experience to offer, as desirable as gold to any leader as beleaguered as Duke Jurgo of Orbas. Penric was right; her brother should do nothing to devalue himself, here at the start. And since she was his whole train, neither should she. Pensively, Nikys lifted the servant’s tabard over her head, folding it aside. Adelis had already shed his.
Penric sacrificed the last contents of their leather water bottle to wet a dirty shirt and try to scrub off his rouge and kohl. The effort left him resembling a man who had lost a tavern brawl and then not slept for three days; impatiently, Nikys grabbed the shirt from him and cleaned his face herself. He merely murmured, “Thank you.” She merely handed the shirt back rather than throwing it.
The port town of Vilnoc came into sight around the next bend and rise of the road, and Nikys peered out the left window, eager for any orientation in her upended world. She’d caught only brief flashes of the sea in the past few miles, but here the shoreline opened out before her. Vilnoc sat athwart the constantly silting mouth of the Oare river, navigable to larger boats for only a few miles inland before rising turbulently into this hillier country. The town had tracked the river downstream over the centuries, stretching itself to the present waterfront with its fortifications, one of Orbas’s few good harbors along this difficult coastline. Which was part of why the duke made the town his summer capital, but really, to Nikys’s Cedonian eye the place seemed hardly larger than Patos.
The livery lay outside the city walls, where they dismounted from the coach and paid off the postilion. An ostler gave directions to the local chapter of the Bastard’s Order, sited hard by the main temple, which was visible from the inn yard as a looming shape on a height. For once, when they entered the city gates, they gave up their real names to the gate guards, though not their titles; Penric kin Jurald, Adelis Arisaydia, Nikys Arisaydia Khatai. Penric, Nikys reflected, had not been very careful picking an alias back in Sosie, if that was his real surname.
The local chapterhouse of the white god was readily found, a place for Temple administration rather than worship, occupying an old merchant’s mansion on a side street just off the temple square. Penric parleyed them past the porter by sheer assertion, then left them uneasy in the vestibule as he talked his way up the resident hierarchy. He came back just before Adelis was about to bolt. He was accompanied by a gray-haired woman in the white robes of a full-braid divine, with a pendant around her neck that signified some authority, or at any rate the porter and the dedicat set to watch them stood up and braced at her entry in a respectful manner that Nikys did not associate with devotees of the Bastard. She addressed Adelis as General, Nikys as Madame Khatai, and Penric as Learned Sir. The latter made her minions blink, and the copper-haired vagabond grin at them.
Nikys was then taken up to the women’s dormitory by a smiling young acolyte, very interested in her tale. Nikys kept her answers brief. But it was such a relief to be in the company of women once more, even if only for an hour or two. The hen party that promptly assembled to get her washed and dressed reminded her of the fuss Zihre had made for Mira, although the results were less spectacular and more respectable. Nikys thought she resembled a plump gray partridge, and wondered if she might have looked less dull had she been able to borrow Mira’s dress. Minus the extension below the hem.
As she was being fed and fitted, she thought back over all that Penric had done for them, for no benefit to himself if Adelis did not choose Adria. Or unless Duke Jurgo did not choose Adelis? Was that the chance Penric was waiting for, why he continued to aid them? Their reception here was by no means assured.
She did not want to move to Adria. She hadn’t wanted to abandon Cedonia, for that matter, though she could not regret a moment of her support for her brother. Beggars can’t be choosers the old saw went. So if you wanted choice, you must not beg? There was something wrong with that notion, when Adelis himself would shortly be begging a place from the duke.
What she wanted—well, she couldn’t have what she wanted, now could she? Which left her not with choices, but with second-choices. Or maybe mixed choices, things she desperately wanted inextricably mixed with things she wanted no parts of.
I want my life to not be one continuous emergency for a while. Gods. She was so tired her eyes were throbbing. But she could not relax yet. This palace presentation still loomed. She must get through it without stumbling, for Adelis’s sake.
And if, contrary to all this pointless fretting, the duke granted Adelis his whole desire? Adelis would be off at once to look after his new army, leaving his sister to fend for herself in a strange country. Installed in some safe-appearing box first, no doubt, but still, alone among strangers. She’d returned to her widowed mother’s house after she herself had been widowed, four years ago, but that wasn’t an option this time, with her mother still in Cedonia. Safe in Cedonia, Nikys prayed. That his father’s concubine had been as much a mother to Adelis as his own noble dam was not likely to occur to his enemies; only his closest friends were aware of it.
Safe in Cedonia was not so comfortable a thought as it had used to be, Nikys couldn’t help reflecting, as a breathless dedicat popped into the dormitory and told her it was time to go down to the entry again, the duke’s page had arrived, and Madame’s brother the general was already waiting.
In the vestibule, she found Adelis dressed in clean, well-fitting tunic and trousers, dark and neat. Without ornament, more soldierly than aristocratic, but that seemed exactly what was wanted; Duke Jurgo must prefer to multiply subordinates, not rivals. Someone had trimmed his hair back to military standards. The owl-feather red scars framing the glaring garnet eyes might be a bit unnerving, she granted, to a gaze not grown used to them. In another lifetime, she might have dubbed the effect demonic, except she now had much more informed ideas of what a demon really was.
He gave her an approving nod. “We look as well as we can, I suppose.”
She calibrated for Adelis-speech and smiled at the effusive praise, standing taller.
He stepped closer and lowered his voice. Watching her. “Your infatuation with the sorcerer is over now, I trust. After all his antics in Sosie.”
Her smile faded, as she contemplated the tangled complexity of all she’d witnessed. The lunatic absurdities of pubic lice and amorous generals aside . . . I saw him pull death from a woman’s breast as if drawing down wool from a distaff. And then spin it out into the world, following him like a billowing shadow. He sees in the dark. She shook her head. “I have no idea what to think of him by now.”
He gave a little chin-duck, as if reassured. She had no such reassurance for herself.
Speak of the demon. A quick, scuffing step on the stair heralded Penric’s arrival. Nikys found herself gaping, as taken aback as her first sight of him in the garden of the Patos villa.
He had somehow obtained Bastard’s whites in the style of Adria; a close-fitting, long-sleeved linen tunic buttoned high to the neck, with an upstanding round collar, open from the waist down with panels that kicked around his knees. Slim linen trousers. Pale polished shoes. Most riveting, on his left shoulder, the triple loop with silver-tipped ends of a full-braid Temple divine, the usual white and cream colors twisted with a silver cord signifying a sorcerer. Or warning of one . . .
Unfairly, the official garb made him look even taller.
The copper lacquer was gone from his clean fingers. His hair was still henna’d, if a lighter shade, and drawn back in a tight knot at his nape. His blue eyes were alight, and Nikys realized that she was seeing him for the first time in his real persona, free of dissembling.
A movement drew Nikys’s eye to another figure waiting in the vestibule, a nervous youth of perhaps twelve in the tabard and livery of Orbas. The duke’s page, presumably. He stepped forward and touched a hand to his forehead in greeting and salute. “If you are all here, Learned Sir, General, Madame, I am charged to take you to Duke Jurgo’s secretary, Master Stobrek, who will take you to the duke.”
They followed the boy out to the streets of Vilnoc, where the sea-softened light was slanting toward evening. Adelis dropped back beside Penric to murmur, “I thought you were done here?”
“So did I, but I was told I was invited. Which, from a ruling duke, means commanded. I have some small reputation as a Temple scholar, and it seems the duke collects such men. Scholars, writers, theologians, artists, musicians. A cheaper way to ornament his court than masons, I suppose.”
Nikys had seen the famous buildings and fabulous temples of Thasalon, some of which had come close to bankrupting an empire; Penric was right about that.
“For display like a menagerie?” Adelis said dryly.
Penric’s lips twitched. “As the duke neither rides them nor eats them nor puts them to the plow, very like, I expect.”
They walked some four or five blocks following the page, turning twice, before they came to a broader avenue that ran from the top of the town nearly to the harbor. The ducal seat here was neither castle nor palace, but a row of three older mansions run together. Echoes wafted from one scaffolded end: hammering and sawing, the clink of chisels, and men’s cries. The page led them through the middle door, unimpeded by a flanking pair of guardsmen who granted him familiar nods. They did stare openly at Adelis’s face—and covertly at Penric’s shoulder.
Nikys had barely taken her bearings in the marble-lined vestibule when a delighted voice cried out: “Oh, it is him! Most excellent chance!”
“Master Stobrek, the duke’s secretary,” murmured the page helpfully, as the man strode towards them, his arms out in greeting. His sweeping garments were a cut above those of the usual palace functionary, and he wore a badge of office on a gold chain around his neck.
Adelis took a breath and stood straighter, but the man walked right past him and seized on Penric. “Learned Penric of Martensbridge! It is such an honor to have you in Vilnoc!”
Penric smiled in a slightly panicked fashion, but allowed the fellow to capture and shake both his hands. “Learned Penric of Adria, for the past year,” he put in. “I exchanged archdivineships. We have met, ah . . . ?”
“At that extraordinary Temple conclave in Carpagamo. Five years ago, now, so I don’t wonder you don’t remember me—I was just a clerk in the Archdivine of Orbas’s train at the time, and your talents were only beginning to be recognized. But I certainly remember you! I am instructed to tell you, on Duke Jurgo’s behalf and my own, you are most warmly welcomed at the duke’s table tonight.”
Stobrek turned around and added, as a palpable afterthought, “And you too, General Arisaydia.”
Adelis’s return smile was rather fixed. Stuffed, in fact. “Thank you, Master Stobrek.” He rolled his eye at Penric in new question; Penric just opened his hands and shrugged.
Nikys bit her lip. Really hard. Even though she was probably the only person present who could get away with laughing at Adelis. And even though her doubts about Penric still ran as deep as a well. She supposed she could now be sure Penric was Penric. Among other beings. But I knew that already, didn’t I?
As an afterthought to the afterthought, Stobrek continued, “And you too, Madame Khatai.”
She offered up her sweetest smile in return, and murmured, “Thank the duke for me-too, then, Master Stobrek.” She was fairly sure only Pen caught the acid edge; in any case, his lids lowered in what might have been acknowledgement.
A woman arrived—no, a lady, Nikys placed her by the fine details of her dress and discreet jewelry. Dark hair bound up, no gray but not young. Stobrek looked up and said, “Ah,” in a gratified manner. “May I present Madame Dassia. First lady-in-waiting to Her Grace the duchess.”
She nodded graciously to him, acknowledged the two men with only the barest gasp at Adelis’s disfigurement, instantly stifled, and turned to Nikys. “The Duchess of Orbas invites you to make her acquaintance, Madame Khatai. Please, come this way.”
The woman led Nikys toward the marble staircase, heading up to whatever maze of courts and galleries this improvised palace had acquired.
Master Stobrek added, “And the duke awaits you, General, Learned Penric. By your leave, follow me.” They trailed him through a ground-floor archway and out of her sight.
It was becoming apparent already that she and Adelis had reached a safe harbor. So, she no longer had to be afraid every hour, terrified in anticipation of whatever new threat it might bring. Wasn’t that enough?