He wriggled his feet in his odd leather sandals. His workman’s garb was unexceptional, a sleeveless tunic and trousers that were expected to ride short in the legs anyway. He’d knotted his hair on his nape, still blond but not hanging out like a signal flag. A countryman’s straw hat shaded his eyes. His accent, broadly archaic from the far northern mountains of Cedonia, marked him as not from around here, so legitimately lost, without making him alien.
Until you start talking at length, and that scholar’s vocabulary begins falling out, commented Des. In that country accent, it’s like a donkey opening its mouth and spouting poetry.
I’ll try to be more brief, Pen sighed.
Curse it, he had to start somewhere. He spotted a lone soldier, not an officer, leaving the squared-off barracks grounds, and angled over to accost him before he disappeared into the close, winding streets of the civil side.
“Pardon me. Can you tell me where to find General Arisaydia? I was given”—Bastard’s tears, don’t say a letter—“a package of figs to deliver to him.”
The soldier stopped and stared. “Hadn’t you heard? He was arrested. Four days ago, by the governor’s guards. By Imperial order, it’s claimed. I don’t know where they took him, but he’s sure not here.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the military quarter now suddenly not Pen’s goal.
Pen swallowed in shock. Seven or so days after his own arrest—if the two were connected, why the delay? Gathering other evidence?
“On what charge?” Pen managed.
The soldier shrugged. “Treason, I guess. They can slap that on anything. Sounds like shit to me.” He hesitated, as if wanting to call back his unguarded words. “But what do I know?” He shouldered away from Penric and strode on, surly. Disturbed.
Seven days. Time for a speedy courier to ride to the Imperial capital, a day or two for debate, persuasion—plotting—a couple of days for an arrest order from high enough up to be returned? Very high up, it sounded like. Officers at Arisaydia’s level could be moved around like game pieces only by the most powerful of hands.
However it had come about, it was plain that rumors were running through the army like dye through wool. If Pen wanted answers without bringing attention to himself by asking questions, he needed to find a place where the military talked to each other. Handily, several taverns catering to the soldiers’ trade clustered in the nearby streets. He glanced into a few until he found one that was more crowded, and where his countryman’s dress would blend in, and slipped inside.
He held a tankard of vilely sour ale and wandered about, listening for key words and especially for the key name. He found it at a table with half-a-dozen low-grade officers, a couple captains-of-hundreds and their lieutenants. He slid onto a stool by the wall and pulled the brim of his hat a little farther down over his eyes, and simulated a workman’s tired doze. Well, simulated the doze; the tired was authentic.
“It was never peculation, not him,” one scoffed.
“I’d not heard that one,” said another. “Plotting betrayal with the Duke of Orbas, I was told. Or the Duke of Adria. Or of Trigonie. Some frigging foreign duke or another, anyway.”
Universal scowls greeted this claim.
“Or no duke at all,” growled a grizzled captain. “Some trumped-up charge by those eunuchs at court, more likely.”
Another made a crude joke at the expense of mutilated men, which his comrades seemed to find more black than funny.
“Yes, but what’s Arisaydia have that that crowd of mincing bureaucrats would want to steal?”
The grizzled captain shrugged. “The loyalty of the Army of the West, for starters. Enough high-born bureaucrats, whether they still have their balls or not, have military nephews who might like to filch a rank they can’t bloody earn.”
“Surely the emperor,” began another, but his captain held up a stemming hand. He began again more carefully, “Surely those Thasalon courtiers are not to be trusted…”
Men at this level could hardly know more than Penric did, but their talk was alarming.
No, sighed Des. All standard army-issue bitching about the civil government, so far. It doesn’t seem to have changed in a hundred years.
Huh.
The talk had turned to other complaints when a new man joined them, and Pen had to keep himself from sitting bolt upright. He was a younger fellow, broad and brawny, and had the sunburned brick-colored skin of most of the men here, but his face was strained and ghastly, drained to a sallow tinge. Wide-eyed and breathless, he fell into a seat on the bench, where his comrades obligingly shifted to give him room, and said, “Five gods, give me a drink.” Not waiting, he seized one from a comrade, who yielded it up with a surprised eyebrow-lift. “I just heard—” He tipped back the tankard, and his mouth worked, but he couldn’t seem to swallow. He had to struggle for a moment before he could choke it down.
“Arisaydia,” he gasped out. “Yesterday noon in secret at the municipal prison. Imperial order.”
“Released?” said a man hopefully, then faltered.
“Executed?” growled the grizzled captain, voice grim as iron.
The new man shook his head. “They blinded him with boiling vinegar.”
Shocked silence. Bitten lips.
Pen bent on his stool and swallowed back vomit.
Don’t you dare, said Des. Don’t give a sign.
“Princely,” observed the gray captain, in a weird sardonic lilt that might be rage, or grief, or swallowed curses. “Thought us army mules usually got hot irons through our eyes.”
“Not an honor I’d care for,” muttered another.
The other captain leaned back and sighed. “Well, that’s done him. What a gods-forsaken waste.”
“Is he still in the prison?”
The new man shook his head. “No. They gave him over to his twin sister, what’s-her-name, I heard.”
So what is her name…?!
The men were easing back as they took this in, scowling but not, apparently, moved to leap up and start a military mutiny at the news this afternoon. Someone secured the messenger his own tankard, and he gulped deep. Some moved their food aside, but kept their clutches on their drinks.
“Hope she’s a good nurse,” said a lieutenant.
“Or will help him to a good knife,” said another. “Either one.”
Pen panted in horror, so, so grateful for the straw hat, its brim now down to his chin.
“Are they really twins?”
“Who knows? Story I heard was that he was the son of old General Arisaydia’s highborn wife, and she was the daughter of his concubine, whelped on the same day. Unless the midwife swapped them in secret, to give the old man an heir.”
“That’s an old rumor.”
“Funny, you never heard it around till he was promoted so high, so young…”
“Well, he’s a poor blind bastard now. Whether his parents were married or not.”
The mood of the table blighted, the party broke up, most men finishing their meals and drifting out, a couple settling in for deeper drinking. Penric, as soon as he could stand without shaking, made his way into the street, now half-shaded in the angled, descending sun, and found a wall to prop his shoulders against.
Gods, Des, now what?
Start back to Adria, I suppose. Not through the port of Patos, by preference.
Acid bile burned Pen’s throat at the thought of such an empty-handed retreat. No, far worse than empty-handed.
It made no sense. The Duke of Adria had fancied to hire the demoted and presumably disaffected general as a mercenary captain for his own endemic and inconclusive wars against his neighbor Carpagamo. The private letter he’d received from Arisaydia himself had suggested it, and the duke had taken him up on it…
Taken the bait?
But it wasn’t treason, no more than Penric exchanging his service across the borders from the new princess-archdivine of Martensbridge to the archdivine of Adria. The duke hadn’t planned to use Arisaydia agains
t Cedonia, after all. It was just… a little delicate.
It shouldn’t have been much worse than that, unless, unless, what?
There had to be a hidden half to this somewhere that Pen was not seeing. As he’d not seen how that Cedonian, Velka, could have guessed Pen’s real mission. Unless, of course, he’d already known…
But, Bastard’s tears and Mother’s blood, blinding. He’d seen burns and bone-deep scalds when drafted into his apprenticing-and-more at the Mother’s Hospice in Martensbridge. Up close, in some bad cases. He didn’t have to imagine anything.
“I have to do something about this.”
Five gods, Pen, what? The damage is done. It’s time to cut our losses and fly.
“I don’t know yet.” And then, in the next three breaths, he did.
He would need particulars on the sister, her name and domicile, and then a better used-clothing merchant. A better bathhouse, too, that offered services of a barber and a manicurist. An apothecary. A knife-maker’s shop serving some very specialized needs. And more. How providential was it that the Father of Winter had filled his purse…?
It was going to be a busy night. He pushed off from the wall. “Let’s go find out.”
IV
Nikys sat in the garden of her rented villa and tried to eat… breakfast, she supposed it must be, this being morning. A morning. Which?
It had been, what, two days?—since she’d brought Adelis back here, clinging to his saddle, his labored breathing as frightening as weeping. Half her servants had fled after the visitation from the governor’s men and not returned, so, to her loathing, she’d had to employ the soldiers who’d escorted them to support him stumbling to his upstairs bedchamber and lay him down. She hadn’t wanted them touching him. She’d ejected them from her domain as swiftly as she could thereafter, without thanks, but a provincial guardsman still lurked outside her front door, and another beyond her back wall.
After that, the nightmare had commenced. She’d sponged her brother’s body, dressed him in clean linen, coaxed him to eat, with poor luck, forced him to drink. He’d not cooperated much. She’d seen Adelis in a dozen bad moods in the past, exhausted or frustrated or enraged, though generally with the army or the Imperial court rather than with her. She’d never before seen him broken.
It was lovely in the garden in this first light. Water trickled musically through clever stone channels from the tiny spring that had made the villa, though old, such a wonderful find, half a year ago when Adelis had invited her to join him at his new posting. On the pergola that shaded her little table and chairs, grapevines shot forth leaves that seemed to expand by the hour, with green sprigs of new grapes peeping shyly through them. Bees bumbled among the flowers. On the far end, where the kitchen garden grew apace, dew sparkled off a spiderweb like a necklace of jewels carelessly dropped by some passing sprite. The space breathed charm, grace, ease, surcease from troubles.
This morning, its lying beauty offended her.
She ate the other half of her boiled egg, with a bite of bread to force it down, and a swallow of cold tea to force down the bread. When she finished, she’d have to return to Adelis’s bedchamber and try again with the bandages stuck to his face. He’d screamed when she touched them, and struck out—blindly, of course, and so he’d connected at his full strength in a way he’d not done since they were squabbling children. His full strength had been much less, then. She rubbed at the deep bruise on her cheek, and buried her face in her hands.
She couldn’t weep. Or sleep. Or eat. Or breathe…
Control yourself anyway. You have to go back now.
When she looked up, an apparition sat across from her.
She was so bewildered she didn’t even jump, though her jaw fell open as she stared.
Her first thought was not man, or woman, but ethereal. Luminous eyes as blue as the sea in summer. Hair an astonishing electrum color, drawn back in a knot at the nape but with a few strands messily escaping to catch a sunbeam in a wispy halo. And nothing human should have skin so milk-pale.
She dismissed her furious fancies. It was most certainly a man. Her gaze skipped down the long, folded body. Wiry arms, hands too large and strong for a woman, nails cut blunt and scrupulously clean. Sandaled feet too long to be feminine, chest too flat, hips much too narrow. Drawn back to the face, she discovered an inexplicably cheery smile and white, sound teeth.
He wore an undyed sleeveless tunic to his knees, belted at the thin waist, with a sleeveless jacket in dark green over it, suggesting, without quite being, the garment of an acolyte of the Mother’s Order.
In a soft, friendly tone, her hallucination spoke: “Madame Khatai, I trust?”
She swallowed and located her voice, sharp-edged with alarm: “How did you get in here? There are guards.” Less to keep people from going in and out, she suspected, than to mark and report who did so.
“Perhaps they went off-duty? I didn’t see any.”
“My servants should have stopped you.
“I’m afraid I didn’t see any of them, either,” he said as if in apology.
That she could believe, she thought grimly.
“Pardon me for startling you,” he went on in that same soft voice.
Stunning me.
“—my name is Master Penric. I am a physician.”
She rolled back in her chair. “Apprentice Penric, I might believe. You can’t be a day over twenty-one. Less.”
“I’m thirty, I assure you, lady.”
He claimed an age the same as hers, and she was a century old, this morning. “I might grant twenty-five.”
He waved an airy hand. “Twenty-five it shall be, then, if you prefer.”
“And Master…?”
“In all but final oath.” His smile grew rueful.
“Hnh.”
“My credentials aside, some of your brother’s officers took up a collection to hire me to attend upon him. For reasons you may understand better than I, they strongly wished to stay anonymous.” He raised his blond brows, and she grimaced, unable to gainsay the likelihood. “But my fee is paid, and here I am.”
“For how long?”
He shrugged. “As long as I’m needed.” He gestured at the large case by his feet. “I brought supplies, and a change of clothing.” After a moment he conceded, “I might not have been anyone’s first pick as a physician. But I was the one who would come. …And I’m fairly good with burns.”
That last did not so much decide as dismast her, setting her adrift on dangerous shoals of hope. Her gaze caught on those scrubbed, thin-fingered hands. She might believe those hands, though she was none too sure of his tongue. She had no trust in this sudden stranger, she had no trust in anyone, but she was so benighted tired…
Perhaps he read her surrender in her posture, for he continued, “I should examine the general as soon as possible. I’m so sorry I couldn’t be here earlier.”
“Follow me, then.” She pushed herself up, frugally drained the dregs of her tea, and led him into the house. “But he’s not a general anymore, you know.” She had come to hate the very sound of the betraying—betrayed—military title, which her brother had so cherished.
“What should I call him, then?”
“Arisaydia. I suppose.” She did not invite this Penric fellow to Adelis.
As he lugged his case up the stairs after her, he asked, “Has he spoken much?”
“A little.”
“What has he said?”
She stopped before Adelis’s door and scowled up at the physician. “Please let me die.”
He hesitated, then said quietly, “I see.”
As she opened the door he took a very deep breath and squared his shoulders—she revised his age downward again—and followed her inside.
Adelis lay as she’d left him to go down to breakfast. Nikys glanced at the scullion she’d set to watch him. “Any changes?”
The boy ducked his head. “No, lady.”
“You may go back to the kitchen.
”
The blond physician held up a hand. “When you get there, boil a pot of water and set it to cool. And then another. We’re going to need a lot.”
“The water left from my tea should be cool by now,” Nikys offered tentatively.
“Good. Bring that first.” Master Penric nodded, and the boy retreated, staring back curiously over his shoulder.
Nikys went to the bedside and took Adelis’s hand. Its tension told her that he did not sleep. “Adelis. I’ve brought you a physician, Master Penric.” The man had brought himself, more like, but she doubted Adelis would respond well to that news, either.
Below the cloth wound around his face, still not unwrapped from that first awful day, his lips moved, and he growled, “Go away. Don’t want him.”
Nikys perforce ignored this. Her hand hovered over the grubby makeshift bandage. “I’m sure this should come off, but it’s glued itself to his skin. My maid said it should be ripped off, but I didn’t let her.”
Adelis spasmed on his bed, one fist wavering up; Nikys dodged it. “Is that cack-handed hag back? Get rid of her!”
“Shh, shh. She’s gone. I won’t let her in here again, promise.”
“Better not.” He subsided.
Penric, coming to the bed’s other side, let his hand pass over the cloth and cleared his throat. “In the woman’s defense, there is a treatment, debridement, for the reduction of burn scarring that involves… something like that, which she might have seen sometime and misunderstood. Not for this, though.” His voice went tart. “If the fool woman had done that here, it would have torn off his eyelids.”
Both Nikys and Penric clapped their hands over their mouths, she to keep her breakfast down, he as if to call back the blunt words. Adelis jerked and groaned. Penric grimaced in weird irritation, and added hurriedly, “Sorry. Sorry!” casting Nikys an apologetic head-duck. “Burns are a gruesome business, I can’t deny. I hate them.”
A faint snort from the bed.
Penric eyed the heavy supine figure under the sheet. “What have you given him, so far?”