MIRA’S LAST DANCE
A Penric & Desdemona novella
in
the World of the Five Gods
Lois McMaster Bujold
2017
Copyright © 2017 by Lois McMaster Bujold
Cover by Ron Miller
I
Nikys was worried about their sorcerer.
They’d fetched up at this little hill-country farmhouse two days ago, passing off their disheveled party of three as a man and his wife, plus their friend who’d sprained his ankle when they’d lost their way on the rocky trails in the dark. Their coin spoke more convincingly than they did, she’d suspected. What seemed to her a small sum had bought them shelter, displacing the farmer couple from their whitewashed bedroom to the loft and their half-grown children in turn to the stable. Such rural hospitality would cost their hosts a great deal more trouble than that if Imperial pursuers arrived here, Nikys reflected uneasily. She rocked her hips to bump open the bedroom door, and carried her tray within.
Learned Penric was dutifully lying flat in the bed, as ordered, but not asleep. He hitched himself up on one elbow, blinking glazed blue eyes at her, and favored her with one of his strange sweet smiles. Quite as if he hadn’t almost died three nights ago, defending her and her brother Adelis.
“Ah. Another meal, already?”
“I’m sure you need it. Or Desdemona does.” Penric might just be one of those maddening long, lean people who could eat like a horse and never gain a bit of pudge, but she guessed his chaos demon, riding inside him like a second personality—a very complicated second personality—drew on his body for nourishment as well. “Do you have to eat for two?”
“Mm, maybe a little. Here, I can get up—”
“Lie back!” Nikys and Desdemona commanded together. Since Des spoke through Penric’s mouth, the effect was quite peculiar, but Nikys fancied she was getting used to it. “Listen to your demonic physician,” Nikys said, to which Des added, “Yes, and listen to your lovely nurse. She knows what she’s about in the sickroom.”
“When did you two combine forces?” Penric muttered, as Nikys set down the tray on the washstand and drew it to the bedside, plumped his pillows, and permitted him to sit up. “Here, you don’t need to spoon-feed me.”
“It’s not soup, so I can’t.” Nikys plopped down beside him, spread goat cheese onto circles of coarse country flatbread, added sliced onion, and rolled them up, alternating handing them across with holding the beaker of watered wine. Penric tried to take the vessel one-handed, but ended up having to use two, as his hand shook. He cast her an evasive look through those unreasonably long blond eyelashes.
Not for the first time, Nikys wondered exactly what it meant that the rival sorcerer, whom Pen had defeated in that bizarre twilight fight, had tried to rip his heart apart inside his body, and how much magical work Desdemona had been doing every moment since to keep it beating. Her own and Adelis’s father, old General Arisaydia, had survived half-a-dozen bloody military campaigns in his life, only to die of a sudden seizure of the heart. That final, fatal blow had made no mark upon him. Bad hearts frightened her.
Nikys finished coaxing the whole of her culinary offering down the not-unwilling man. The fact that Penric was out of breath from eating lunch was more telling than his panting protestations of recovery. She checked the artistic bandage around his right ankle, mainly placed there to help him remember which one was supposed to be sprained, and tightened it up again.
The discreet blond knot at his nape had unraveled into a tangled mess. “I have a comb,” Nikys went on, drawing it from the pocket of her borrowed apron. “I can straighten out those snarls of yours.” She’d wanted an excuse to touch that amazing electrum hair for weeks, ever since he’d appeared like an improbable guardian spirit in her villa garden, offering healing for her unjustly blinded brother.
He started to indignantly refuse, and then either his wits or his demon caught up with him. He swallowed his manly declaration of self-sufficiency, converting it into a hopeful smile. “That would be very nice.”
She had him sit up on the edge of the bed and knelt behind him. The rope net strung on the bedframe, topped by the wool-stuffed mattress, was not the firmest of seating, and his narrow hips rather sank between her knees. She began at the bottom of the tail of hair that reached to his mid-back, working out the knots as though carding fine flax. He’d kept himself as clean as a cat back in the villa in Patos, as became a physician, but they were all the worse for wear after a week’s flight. She wondered if she could persuade him to let her wash it for him. She just might, judging by the way he was making low humming noises, as close to a purr as a human could come, as the tortoiseshell tines reached his neck and scalp and began slow, repeated strokes.
Alternating the comb and her gratified fingers, she began to separate the soft length into three strands for braiding, only to discover that somehow there was no room left for the task between his bony back and her… un-bony front. She cleared her throat and inched back, and he seemed to come awake and lurched forward, bowed spine straightening, once again the tidy Temple divine. Albeit a divine sworn to the Bastard, the fifth god, whose emblematic color was a white in real life usually ambiguously stained. She’d sometimes wondered if that was the white god’s idea of theological humor. Laundresses should be in His flock, really; they probably served Him on their knees more often than did divines. Learned Penric cleared his throat, too, and she caught a glimpse past his ear of milk-pale cheekbone faintly flushed.
She set to finishing the queue and tying it off—she’d snipped the bit of white ribbon from one of her few garments that she’d managed to grab when they’d escaped the soldiers in Patos. An undefeated enemy, still out there on the hunt. The memory was enough to chill her brief warm comfort. Just as well; she had barely time to slide off the bed and tuck Penric back into it as the distinctive clunk of her brother’s boots sounded across the farmhouse floorboards and through the door.
“There you are.”
Adelis looked, really, almost his old self, at least from the mouth down. Standing straight again, sturdy, muscular; his thirty years sat lightly upon young General Arisaydia. Young former-general Arisaydia. Only when he took off his countryman’s broad-brimmed hat did the horror of the burn-scarring on his upper face spring out. A barely healed spray of red and raised pink welts bloomed like malign flower petals around his eyes, though Penric claimed they would someday fade pale. His formerly dark brown irises had been resurrected a garnet red from their acid destruction. But thanks to Penric’s sorcerous healing he could see again, and well, apparently, which in Nikys’s view went somewhere beyond magic to miracle.
Adelis ran a hand through his black hair, growing unmilitarily untrimmed, and addressed a point in the air between his sister and the man in the bed. “How is he doing?”
“All right,” answered Penric.
“Not as well as he claims,” Nikys corrected this. “Desdemona says he shouldn’t do any lifting or sudden exertion, so as not to strain his healing heart.”
“Hnh,” said Adelis. He focused on Penric. “Do you think you could ride tomorrow? Led at a walk?”
“Not on that poor donkey in the yard. My feet would drag the ground,” said Penric.
Adelis’s shrug acknowledged the truth of this. “I’ve found a neighbor lad with a mule. He can’t take us all the way to the Duchy of Orbas, but he can take us down to a cousin’s farm in the valley. Which would at least put us farther from the pass that they know we hiked over. We’re not safe here for long.”
Penric nodded; Nikys frowned. Penric put in, “A change of scene wouldn’t hurt. Des has pretty much eradicated all the small pests within range, shedding chaos. We could do with a new supp
ly.”
His demon traded out the disorder harvested from his sorcerous healings, as Nikys understood it, venting it into the world as safely as they could manage. Killing theologically allowed vermin, the divine claimed, was the most efficient such sink available. Other sinks were less efficient. Or less allowed. She contemplated the dangerous gap between not allowed and not possible. Did Penric know where the real boundaries lay? She hoped so.
“We’ll go at dawn, then,” said Adelis.
* * *
In the event, it was full light when they finally loaded Penric, still short-winded, and their few possessions aboard the tall and placid mule. Adelis’s stolen sword and bow and arrows traveled wrapped in cloth, a discretion that didn’t content him much. Nikys was just as glad. She didn’t doubt her brother would fight to the death before allowing himself to be captured again, but it seemed pointless to send stranger-souls unripe to their gods if it made no difference to the outcome. Penric’s glib tongue might be a better defense than Adelis’s sword arm. Or indeed, Penric’s magic, though his demon was very quiet this morning. Busy within him still healing his hidden damage, she guessed from the occasional flies, buzzing up from animal droppings on the farm track, that fell dead in their wake. She trusted the mule-boy didn’t notice.
The presence of this youth leading the mule inhibited conversation on the long trudge, thankfully more downhill than not. The farm track, which eventually grew to a farm road, followed a winding creek with the hills rising on either side. Nikys was hot, sweaty, and footsore by the noon halt, where the boy led them out onto a local promontory shaded by old oaks, evidently a favorite stop. She could see why. It offered a last high view out over the miles-wide valley that made this province such a valuable, and defended, granary for the Cedonian empire.
The mule-boy led his charge off to a distant patch of grass for its own lunch. Adelis strolled to the rim above the drop-off, pushed back his hat, and stared with eyes narrowed. Nikys and Penric joined him.
“This is as good as a map,” Penric remarked, following his gaze. “What are we looking at?”
Adelis dipped his chin. “The walled town on that bit of height above the river is Sosie. Not the capital of the province, that’s down by the mouth with the port. But it’s home to the garrison that guards the top end of this valley.” His hand sketched out the squared-off patch, vague in the distance, that suggested barracks. “Imperial troops, not provincial. Part of the Fourteenth Infantry.”
“That sounds like something we might need to avoid,” said Penric. “Would any of them recognize you?”
Adelis’s hand touched his still-tender face. “I wonder.”
“The three of us are distinctive, if any description has been circulated yet,” Nikys observed unhappily. Even if not together, Adelis’s disfigurement and Penric’s height and foreign coloration would make them stand out. Only Nikys might pass unremarked.
“Still, Sosie has a large temple,” said Adelis. Its stone shape was just visible, rising on a hill within the city walls. “Might you, ah, refresh your purse there?” He cast Penric a sidewise look.
Penric’s expression was more grimace than smile. “I should not like to make a settled habit of robbing offering boxes. Although it’s still better than robbing people directly. It’s money they’ve already given up, and so presumably will not miss.” He mused on, whether talking himself into or out of the suggestion Nikys could not tell, “Hard on the local Temple, though. You would not believe Temple expenses.”
“But we could hire horses again, or even some sort of carriage,” Nikys couldn’t help noting. Her tired feet talking, to be sure, but a carriage might be better for the convalescent sorcerer as well.
“By what route?” asked Penric.
“Only two choices,” said Adelis. “Well, three. We could make our way down the valley to the coast road, or even to a port for some local ship to take us south.”
“That was my suggestion in the last valley,” Penric noted a bit dryly. “We could have saved steps.”
Adelis stiffly ignored this, and continued, “Either will be well guarded. And I guarantee any description of us will be sent to the border posts and ports first. The other way would be to find a path up through the mountains to Orbas.”
The rocky walls lining the other side of the valley were considerably more daunting than the hills they had just come over. Which was a good part of why the current duke of Orbas was able to maintain his precarious independence from a neighbor who would be very pleased to turn his lands back into an imperial province. Nikys had always felt that Cedonia had the right of that old dispute, before.
Penric stared at the distant precipices, too, and finally said, “Unless we could pass in disguise.”
“I am not putting on Nikys’s clothes again,” said Adelis, scowling.
Penric grinned, provokingly. “True, you did not make a very convincing widow.”
“I’m an officer. Not an actor.” A brief clench of his jaw suggested to Nikys that he was remembering he was neither, now.
“In any case,” said Nikys, placating, “our roads lie together till we reach Vilnoc in Orbas. Penric can as well sail home to Adria from there.” Or not…
“Or we all could,” Penric suggested. Yet again.
“Nikys and I are going to Orbas,” said Adelis. “You may go where you please.”
Penric studied his set face, and sighed.
And if neither man—one as stubborn as a stone, the other too supple to be pinned down—would, or even could, change his mind, where would that leave Nikys? No place happy.
After eating, they resumed the downward trek. Penric, watching Nikys stump along, apparently forgot his sprained ankle and offered to trade her his place on the mule. For the mule-boy’s benefit, Nikys asked after his fictional crippling, keeping his real one to herself, and he subsided, gallantry thwarted. But the mule-boy allowed as how they might ride double. Nikys was duly boosted onto the beast behind Penric, wriggling her way to comfort atop the blanket strapped to its barrel. Neither the mule nor Adelis seemed best pleased with this cozy new arrangement, but they didn’t kick. Nikys slipped her arms around Penric’s waist, for security, and he sat back a little, for what reason she did not speculate. Weary in the warm afternoon, she leaned her head against his shoulder and half dozed, the thousand worries coursing through her mind easing their torrent for a time.
* * *
Arriving at the next farmstead in the early evening, they negotiated shelter with nearly the last of their coin. The combination of their thin purse and a house full of farm family left the stable loft the sole choice for their new bedroom. Adelis and Penric were both apologetic about it. Nikys was too tired to complain even if she had been a fussy fool, which she was not. This more fertile stretch of country also assured a good supply of stored grain, hence an abundance of the mice and rats that infested such. Desdemona was pleased. Penric, swinging a stick that he occasionally remembered to lean on, puffed off in the dark to hunt them for all the world like a cat.
Adelis hooked the lantern on a nail safely away from the straw, and rather pointedly arranged their blankets with himself in the middle as a bolster. Nikys snickered.
“I haven’t been a girl laying flowers on the altar of the Daughter of Spring”—goddess of, among other things, virginity—“for over a decade,” she pointed out.
“One wouldn’t know it, from the infatuated way you were hanging on that sorcerer’s shoulder all afternoon.”
“You don’t, actually, have a right to tell your thirty-year-old widowed sister who and who not to cuddle.” Should it please her to cuddle anyone, which it hadn’t for a very long, gray time.
Adelis lowered himself to their straw pile with a grunt, looking unhappy. On the whole, Nikys thought she’d rather deal with grouchy, where she could give as good, or as bad, as she got. “Think it through. I know what wonders the man has done for us, and I’m not ungrateful, but he’s an Adriac agent, for the five gods’ sake. Sent here
to suborn me, till that plan went wrong in so many ways. He hasn’t stopped being one, for all that I’ve chosen to go supplicant to Duke Jurgo of Orbas instead. Suppose, in the best case, we all win through to Vilnoc alive. The man will have no choice then but to go on home, empty-handed. Don’t get… don’t get taken in, is all I ask. You don’t want to end up with nothing but a blue-eyed infant to remember him by.”
Nikys was not altogether sure she’d object to such a souvenir, but she snorted. “I had six years of marriage with Kymis, which left me with less than that. And it wasn’t for lack of trying, I assure you. I don’t think it’s a pressing danger.” Although her late husband’s frequent and prolonged absences on military duties hadn’t helped. “Anyway, I doubt Learned Penric’s up to seducing anyone, in his current condition.”
Adelis was drawn into a sly smirk. “Quite. We wouldn’t want the poor man dropping of an apoplexy between your thighs.”
“Adelis!” Deterring image indeed.
“Truth, it’s happened! I’ve heard. Although generally with older men.”
She threw straw at him. He threw it back. Before they could revert further to their five-year-old selves, she heard the squeak of the stable door, the object of their argument returning. She bit back retaliating rudeness. But she did think to add, “You should want to keep him with you anyway, at least until you gain a position from Duke Jurgo. It will give you a much stronger position to negotiate from if Jurgo knows, or at least believes, that you have another offer waiting. Not supplicant, but, but…”
“Merchant?” he said dryly. “With myself as both seller and horse?”
“Think it through,” she shot his own words back at him, and he raised a hand in concession.