Penric's Demon

Penric’s Demon

The morning light sloped across the meadows, breathing pale green into the interlaced branches of the woods beyond, picking out shy pink and white blossoms here and there among the new leaves. The spring air hung soft with promise. Penric’s mother, before she had gone off in the wagon with his sisters to oversee the final preparations, had turned her face to the cool blue sky and declared it a perfect day for a betrothal; surely the gods were smiling upon the House of Jurald at last! Penric had refrained from pointing out that the learned divines taught that the gods did not control the weather, and been rewarded for this filial forbearance with a sharp maternal injunction to hurry up, finish dressing, and follow! This was no time to be dragging his feet!

Penric stared glumly between his horse’s bobbing ears and reflected that it would have been an even better day to go fishing. Not the most exciting pastime, but it was the one thing he’d ever found to do that made people stop talking at him. He tried to imagine the muddy, winding road going somewhere less familiar than Greenwell Town. He supposed it actually did, if you followed it far enough. As his elder brother Drovo had done? Not a happy thought.

He frowned down at the brown sleeves of his jacket, laced with orange and gold-colored thread betraying a brassy tarnish. Even for this, he was still wearing hand-me-downs. The fine suit had been new when Drovo had first worn it at age thirteen for his oath to the militant Son’s Order as a page-dedicat; not just as customary for his sex and age and rank, but true to his boisterous heart, Penric fancied. Drovo had outgrown the garb too swiftly for it to become much frayed or patched. Pulled out of a storage chest reeking of camphor, it had been fitted to the nineteen-year-old Penric merely by stealing a little fabric from the shoulders to lengthen the legs of the trousers. He tried to encourage himself with the thought that at least he wasn’t wearing hand-me-downs from his sisters, except that he was fairly sure the linen shirt, shabby and soft, under the jacket had once been a blouson.

Well, Drovo wouldn’t be outgrowing any more clothes now.

His death last year in Adria, of a camp fever before he’d even had a chance to help lose his mercenary company’s first battle, had been the second mortal disaster to befall the family in four years. The first had been the death of their father, of a swift infection in the jaw following a neglected abscess of a tooth. They’d all missed the jovial Lord of Jurald, if not, perhaps, his drinking and gambling. Penric’s eldest brother Lord Rolsch had seemed a soberer hand on the helm, if only he hadn’t been such a gull for every pious beggar, whether in rags or Temple robes, to come down the pike. And if the Lords of Jurald hadn’t ruled over a local peasantry whose main pastimes seemed to be archery, poaching, and tax evasion. So Drovo had taken his oath-money from the company recruiter, spent it in equipping himself, and gone off to the wars beyond the mountains, cheerily promising to come back rich with spoils to repair the family fortunes.

At least his fate had cured the clan of urging Penric to do the same . . .

Not that he’d ever been tempted. One rowdy Drovo had been enough to make Pen’s youth a misery; camp life with a whole company of like-minded bruisers was a nightmare in prospect. And that was before one even got to the grim battles.

“Pick up the pace, Little Pen,” his groom, Gans, advised him in the familiar terms of his childhood. “I shouldn’t like to hear it if I deliver you late.”

“Nor I,” Pen sighed agreement, and they kicked their horses into a trot.

Pen tried to drag his thoughts into a sunnier mode, matching the morning. The bed of the daughter of a rich cheese merchant certainly made a more attractive arena in which to try to better his lot than the battlegrounds of the north. Preita was as nice and round as the purse she came with. He wondered if she understood what a hollowed-out lordly title her family was buying for her. The three times they’d been allowed to meet, strictly chaperoned, she had seemed a trifle dubious about it all, if tolerably pleased in turn with Pen’s appearance. Shyness, or shrewdness? Pen’s sister-in-law Lady Jurald had found and fostered the match, through some connection with Preita’s mother. Well, presumably the girl’s parents understood what they were purchasing. It would be up to Pen to make sure she did not regret the bargain.

How hard could husbanding be? Don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t bring hunting dogs to the table. Don’t be terrified of tooth-drawers. Don’t be stupid about money. Don’t go for a soldier. No hitting girls. He wasn’t drawn to violate any of these prohibitions. Assuming older sisters weren’t classified as girls. Maybe make that, No hitting girls first.

Perhaps, once he had secured his bride and her dowry, he might persuade her to move somewhere farther down the road? Pen imagined a cottage by a lake, with no servants he had not hired himself. But Preita seemed quite devoted to her own family. And neither half of the couple was likely to enjoy more than a modest allowance before Pen reached his majority. Until then, the purse strings would remain in Rolsch’s hands. Who was unlikely to be persuaded, while there was still room at Jurald Court, to part with unnecessary expenses for housing not under his fraternal eye. And Pen was fairly sure Preita hadn’t thought she was signing up for life in a cottage. Which would probably be given to damp, anyway.

Do your best, Pen told himself firmly as they turned onto the main road to Greenwell, and then, his head coming up, What’s this?

An odd collection of horses and figures was halted on the verge.

A man with a badge pinning jaunty blue and white feathers on his hat, marking him as of the Daughter’s Order, held four restive horses. The weapons of a Temple guardsman hung at his belt. A second guardsman and a woman in a superior sort of servant’s garb knelt by a figure laid out supine on a spread cloak. Had a rider in the party been thrown? Pen pulled his horse to a halt.

“Is someone hurt here?” he called. The supine figure, he saw at closer range, was a slight, elderly woman, gray haired and gray faced, in a muddle of robes of no particular colors. “Do you need help?”

The second guardsman rose and turned eagerly to him. “Young sir! Do you know how far it is to the next town, and do they have physicians of the Mother there?”

“Yes, Greenwell; not five miles up the road you’re on,” said Pen, pointing. “The Mother’s Order keeps a hospice there.”

The guardsman took the reins of three of their mounts from his fellow, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Go; ride for help. Get a litter—better, a wagon.” The man nodded and sprang to his saddle, wheeled, and clapped his heels to his horse’s flanks. It galloped off in a spray of dirt clods.

Pen dismounted and handed his own reins up to Gans, who stared at the scene in doubt. The middle-aged woman took in Pen’s neat, pious brown suit, and seemed to grow less wary. “Divine Ruchia has taken suddenly ill on the road,” she said, gesturing to the older woman, who lay breathing in short gasps. “She was struck by a great pain in her chest, and fell.”

“Oh, I was taken ill long before that,” the old woman commented between huffs. “I lingered too long in Darthaca . . . Told the fools to bring the ceremony to me.”

Torn between curiosity, concern, and a reflection that if he’d left for town earlier as he’d been charged, he could have avoided all this, Pen lowered himself to the old woman’s side. Cautiously, he felt her forehead, as his mother had used to do for him; her skin seemed clammy, not feverish. He had not the first notion of what to do for her, but it seemed wrong to just remount and ride away, for all that Gans was now glaring in tight-lipped worry.

“I am Lord Penric of kin Jurald, barons in this valley,” he told her, gesturing back to the road they’d come from. He wasn’t sure what to say next. She seemed most in authority here, but surely least able to command, in her current distressed state. Her cloak slipped off her shoulder, revealing Temple braids pinned there marking a divine—not in the green and gold of the Mother of Summer, as he would have expected, or perhaps the blue and white of the Daughter of Spring, but the white, cream, and silver of the Bastard, the fifth god, master of all disasters out of season. He gulped, swallowing his surprise.

She wheezed a short laugh and stirred, lifting a claw-like hand to his face. “Pretty boy. There’s a better last sight than scowling Marda. Gift of sorts. But those colors don’t suit you, you know.”

He raised his head to the servant woman who, as he’d knelt, had retreated. “Is she delirious?”

The servant shook her head. “Can’t tell, can I? She’s been spouting things no one else understands since I was assigned to ride with her.”

The old woman’s lips twitched back. “Really?” she said. She did not seem to be addressing Marda. Or Penric. “That will throw the fools into a tizzy.” She fought for another breath. “Illogical to wish to see it, I suppose.”

Increasingly frightened, and feeling quite stupid and helpless, Pen tried: “Let me serve you in your need, Learned.”

She stared intently up at him for two more disrupted breaths, then wheezed, “Accepted.”

She’s dying. Cold, slick, not like the fevered heat and stink of his father’s deathbed, but the advancing pallor was unmistakable. He wanted nothing so much as to run away, but her hand, falling back from his face, found his and gripped it weakly. He wasn’t enough something—cowardly, brave?—to shake it off. Both the servant and the guardsman, he saw out of the corner of his eye, were hastily backing away. What?

“Lord Bastard,” she breathed. “Y’r doorway hurts. ’D think y’ could arrange things better f’yr servants . . .”

If all he could do was hold her hand, Pen decided in desperation, well, that was what he would do. His grip tightened.

For a moment, her brown eyes seemed to flash with a deep violet light. Then, between one breath and . . . none, her eyes went dull and still.

No one was looking back at him now.

He heard a confusion of women’s voices babbling in half-a-dozen languages, most of which he didn’t recognize, crying out in terror and pain. His head, throbbing with tension, seemed to explode in a thick, tangled net of lightning, all white.

Then all black.

Strange dreams scattered as Penric woke to a fierce headache, a raging thirst, and a desperate need to piss. He was in a bed in a small chamber, high up under the eaves judging by the slope of the whitewashed ceiling, wearing only his shirt and trews. As he stirred and groaned, an unfamiliar face appeared over him. Pen was not quite reassured to see the man wore the green tunic of a dedicat of the Mother’s Order. A few minutes of bustle followed as the man helped him to a chamber pot, then drew him back from the window where Pen tried to put his head out. By his glimpse of the street and the sky, he was in Greenwell Town, probably at the Mother’s hospice. Still morning, so maybe he wasn’t in too much trouble yet? At the dedicat’s urging Pen reeled back into the bed and negotiated for a cup of water, which left him with only the headache and a vast confusion.

“How did I come here? I was on the road. Did I faint? Where is my suit?” He’d better not have lost or ruined the suit. Not to mention his good boots, also missing. “There was this sick old woman—a divine—”

“I will fetch Learned Lurenz,” the dedicat told him. “Don’t move!”

The man hurried out. Muffled voices sounded from the hallway, then steps thumping away. Pen spotted his suit, folded neatly atop a chest, with his boots beside it, which relieved him of one worry. He squeezed his eyes open and shut, and sat up to help himself to another cup of water. He was trying to decide if he could stagger across the room to retrieve his clothes when footsteps tapped once more, and he hurriedly tucked himself back under the sheets as instructed.

Without knocking, there entered tall, skinny Learned Lurenz, the Greenwell Town Temple’s chief divine; reassuringly recognizable, alarmingly tense. He bent over Pen as if about to feel his forehead, but then drew back his hand. “Which are you?” he demanded of Pen.

Pen blinked, starting to wonder if he had fallen not ill, but into some bard’s tale. “Learned Lurenz, you know me! Penric kin Jurald—you taught me arithmetic and geography—you used to pop me on the head with your stick for inattention.” Hard enough to sting, too. That had been a decade ago, before the divine had been promoted to his present position. Lurenz was a long-time devotee of the Father of Winter, though as senior divine he supervised all five holy houses now. The growing city was angling for an archdivineship to be established here, Rolsch had said; Pen supposed Lurenz hoped for the promotion.

“Ah.” Lurenz let out a sigh of relief, straightening up. “We are not too late, then.”

“I’d better not be! Mother and Rolsch will be peeved, I can tell you. No idea what poor Preita will think, either. Where is Gans?”

“Lord Penric,” said Learned Lurenz in his stern voice, as if about to ask Pen to recite the major rivers of Darthaca, “what do you remember of yesterday?”

Pen squeezed his eyes shut and open again. They still throbbed. “Yesterday? There was nothing special about yesterday, except for Mother and my sister fussing about the fit of that stupid suit. They wouldn’t let me go riding.”

They stared at each other in a moment of mutual incomprehension. Then Lurenz muttered “Ah!” again, and continued, “On the road. You were riding into town with Gans, and you came upon the party of Learned Ruchia . . . ? She was lying ill on the ground?”

“Oh! That poor old woman, yes. Did she really die?”

“I’m afraid so.” Lurenz signed himself, touching forehead, lips, navel, groin, and spreading his hand briefly over heart, Daughter-Bastard-Mother-Father-Son, tally of the five gods. “We brought her body to lie in the Bastard’s orphanage here, awaiting burial, and some resolution to this tangle.”

“What tangle?” asked Pen, getting a sinking feeling in his stomach to add to his headache.

“Lord Pen”—the nickname was oddly steadying—maybe he wasn’t in too much trouble yet?—“tell me everything you remember about your encounter with Learned Ruchia, and how you came to, ah, swoon. Every detail.” Lurenz pulled up a stool to the bedside and sat, suggesting that he did not mean Pen to stint on the tale.

Pen described the events, together with what everyone had said as exactly as he could recall, strange as it had been, in case it was important—he didn’t have to cast his mind back very far, after all. He hesitated before mentioning the violet light and the babbling voices, because it made it sound as if he’d been seeing things, but finally put them in, too. “But what did she mean by saying Accepted? Not that you expect someone who’s busy dying to make a lot of sense, but she sounded pretty definite. And, really, I don’t like to say it, but her servants didn’t seem very loyal. Or”—a horrible new thought—“had she some contagion?” He rubbed the hand that had gripped hers surreptitiously on the sheet.

“A contagion to be sure, but not a disease,” sighed Lurenz, sitting up from his intent crouch. He frowned at Pen in a very unsettling fashion. “Did you realize she was a Temple sorceress?”

“What?” Pen gaped.

“A very senior one, I am given to understand, bearing a demon of great power. She was on her way to her Order’s main house in Martensbridge, to make some report, and seek aid in her illness for, for handling the creature. Or handing it on, in the event of her death. The Bastard’s people have some rituals to control this procedure, with which I am, ah, not familiar. Not exactly my god.”

The sinking feeling was turning into a stone. “I’ve never met a sorcerer before.” A choking arose in his throat, and without his volition his mouth added, “Well, now you are one, blue-eyed boy!” The tart cadences of the dying divine seemed to echo in the words; then the choking feeling slid back, as if the effort had exhausted it. He clapped his hand over his mouth and stared at Lurenz in terror. “I didn’t say that!”

Lurenz had jerked back, glaring. “You had better not be trying on some jape, boy!”

Pen shook his head violently, suddenly afraid to speak.

Low voices from the hallway rose in sharp argument. The door banged open, and Pen’s mother barged through, yanking her arm from the grip of one of the Temple guards Pen had met on the road. Lord Rolsch, following, held up a stern hand that daunted the man from trying to grab her again. Learned Lurenz rose and quelled the altercation by motioning the guardsman back, shaking his head in a mix of negation and assurance.

“You’ve awoken! Thank the gods!” The senior Lady Jurald rushed to the bedside and seemed about to fling herself on Pen, but then, to his relief, stopped short. She clutched the sleeve of Lurenz’s robe, instead, tugging it in her urgency. “What has happened to him? Can you tell yet?”

Rolsch detached her from the divine and restrained her, but after a worried glance down at Pen, turned a face almost as anxious as hers upon Lurenz. They both seemed startlingly changed from this morning’s ceremonial tidiness, though still in the same best clothes. Lady Jurald’s face was puffy, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair awry with random wisps escaping from her braids. Rolsch looked exhausted, too, his face . . . unshaven?

This isn’t this morning anymore, Pen realized at last. This is tomorrow . . . today . . . oh gods. Had he slept the sun around . . . ?

Lurenz, not a man to shirk a painful duty, captured Lady Jurald’s fluttering hands and straightened up into his most grave and fatherly pose. “I am so sorry, Lady Jurald.” His nod took in Rolsch as well. “It is just as we feared. Your son has been possessed by, or it seems rather, of, a demon of the white god. It revealed itself to me plain a moment ago.”

Rolsch flinched; Pen’s mother gasped, “Lady of Summer help us! Can nothing be done?”

Pen, now sitting up against the headboard, stared down at his body in alarm. A demon of the Bastard, inside him? Where inside him . . . ?

Lurenz moistened his lips. “It is not as bad as it could be. The demon does not appear to be ascendant—it has not yet seized control of his body for itself. I am told that such a wrenching transference disrupts or weakens it for some time, before it becomes established in or, or accustomed to, its new abode. If Lord Penric is firm of will, and obeys, ah, all his holy instructions, there may yet be a way to save him.”

“They go into people,” Rolsch tried; “There ought to be a way for them to go out.” He undercut this tentative optimism by adding, “Besides the person dying, of course.”

Another nod from Lurenz, altogether too casual in Pen’s opinion. “As the unfortunate Learned Ruchia did. Which is how Lord Penric came to be in this predicament.”

“Oh, Pen, why ever did you . . . ?” his mother flung at him.

“I . . . I didn’t . . .” Pen’s hands waved. “I thought the old lady was sick!” Which had been, well, not wrong. “I was just trying to help!” He shut his mouth abruptly, but no strange force rose in his throat to add a sharp comment.

“Oh, Pen,” moaned his mother; Rolsch rolled his eyes in general exasperation.

Lurenz cut short what promised to be a lengthy round of recriminations. “Be that as it may, the harm is done, and there is no way to undo it here in Greenwell Town. I have discussed this possibility with Learned Ruchia’s escort. The late divine’s fleshly husk must necessarily be buried here, but her escort is obliged to carry her possessions on to her destination, that her Order may dispose of them howsoever she willed. That mandate must include, I have suggested”—forcefully, his tone implied—“her greatest treasure, her demon.”

What did Lurenz mean by a way to save him? Just about to vent objections to being talked over when he was right here, Pen registered the drift of this, and eased back, alert. Transporting the demon must perforce mean transporting Pen to . . . somewhere beyond Greenwell Town, anyway. Freitten, even?

“The Temple guards have agreed to escort Lord Penric to the head house of the Bastard’s Order in Martensbridge, where, I trust, they will have the scholars to . . . to decide what properly to do.”

“Oh,” said Lady Jurald, in a dubious tone.

Rolsch frowned. “Who shall pay for this journey? This seems a Temple matter . . .”

Lurenz took the hint, if not cheerily. “The Temple will undertake to gift him with the rest of Divine Ruchia’s travel allowance, and the use of its remounts and hostels along the road. After he reaches Martensbridge . . . that must be for her Order to decide.”

“Hm,” said Rolsch. It had been Rolsch, last year, who had forbade Pen’s scheme to go to the university lately founded in Freitten, on the grounds that the family could not afford it, and then stifled Pen’s protests by dragging him in mind-numbing detail through all his baronial accounts to prove it. It had been quite disheartening to find his brother not selfish, but truthful. While not Freitten, Martensbridge was even farther from Greenwell.

Tentatively, Pen cleared his throat. It still seemed his own . . . “What about the betrothal?”

A grim silence greeted this.

Rolsch finally said, heavily, “Well, it didn’t happen yesterday.”

His mother put in, “But dear Preita’s kin were kind enough to feed us anyway, as we waited here to see if . . . for you to wake up. So at least the food hasn’t gone to waste.”

“So much cheese . . .” muttered Rolsch.

Pen was beginning to get the picture of all that must have happened while he’d been lying here like a warmish sort of corpse in this bed, and it wasn’t merry. His body brought back in a wagon alongside that of a dead woman, Mother and Rolsch somehow found—Gans, of course—the celebration broken up just as it began, his anxious kin, quite obviously, up all night . . . “How is Preita . . . taking it?”

“She grew quite horrified, when we saw your body,” said Rolsch.

“Her mother has her in charge now,” said Lady Jurald.

“Someone should send to her, and tell her I’m all right,” said Pen, dismayed at this.

The silence following this lay a little too long.

Lady Jurald sighed. She was not a woman to shirk a painful duty either, or she could not have stayed married to their father all those years. “I had better go to her myself. There is a great deal to explain. And discuss.”

Pen wanted to ask if becoming a sorcerer made a man more, or less, attractive as a husband, but he had an uneasy feeling that he could guess. Cravenly, he let his mother go off without any messages from himself, necessarily under Rolsch’s escort though she plainly didn’t want to leave Pen alone.

“Is there anything else you need right now, Lord Penric?” Learned Lurenz inquired, also preparing to take his leave.

“I’m quite hungry,” Pen realized. And no wonder, if he hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast. “May I go down to the refectory?”

“I’ll have a dedicat bring you a meal on a tray,” the divine promised him.

“But . . . I’m really not hurt.” Pen rolled his shoulders and stretched his legs, beginning to feel more at home in his body again, as though recovering from a bout of fever. “I can get dressed and go down. No need to trouble anyone.”

“No, please stay in this room, Lord Penric,” said Lurenz more firmly. “At least for now.”

He let himself out, the door closing as he paused to speak with the Temple guardsman still standing before it. Despite being safe in the Mother’s hospice, the man bore all his weapons that he had carried on the road. What in the world did he think he needed to guard against in here . . . ?

Oh.

The hunger pangs in Pen’s belly seemed to congeal, and he huddled down in his sheets.

After Pen ate, and a dedicat came to take his tray away, Pen dared to poke his head out into the hallway. The big Temple guard he had seen earlier was gone, replaced by an even bigger fellow in the uniform of the Greenwell Town watch. He looked less like a candidate for the mercenary recruiters than a veteran back from the wars, hard and grim.

“Where did the fellow go who came with . . .” Pen wasn’t sure what to call her, dead sorceress seeming disrespectful though definitive. “With the late Learned Ruchia?”

“The dead sorceress?” said the watchman. “They both went off to witness her funeral, so they pulled me in to stand their post.”

“Should—should I not attend?”

“I was told you are to stay in this room. Lord Penric. Please?” He looked down at Pen and offered an apprehensive smile that took Pen utterly aback.

Helplessly, Pen returned the smile, in the same false measure. “Of course,” he murmured, and retreated.

There being no more comfortable seat in the little chamber than the stool, Pen went back to bed, to sit up hugging his knees and trying to remember everything he’d ever learned about sorcerers and their demons. It seemed meager.

He was fairly sure real ones weren’t much like the ones in children’s tales. They did not call castles to sprout out of the ground like mushrooms for passing lost heroes, or enchant princesses to hundred-year sleeps, or, or . . . Pen was not sure about poison princes, but it seemed to him unlikely to call upon a sorcerer for something an apothecary could do better. Pen’s life so far had been sadly free of heroes, princesses, or princes, in any case.

He was not, upon reflection, at all sure what the real ones did for a living, either when subjected to Temple disciplines, or gone renegade. The common saying was that a man became a sorcerer upon acquiring a demon much as a man became a rider upon acquiring a horse, with the implication that the inept horseman was riding for a fall. But what made a good horseman?

Demons were supposed to begin as formless, mindless elementals, fragments escaped or leaked into the world from the Bastard’s Hell, a place of chaotic dissolution. Pen had a dim mental picture of something like a ball of white wool shot with a prickle of sparks. All that demons possessed of speech or knowledge or personhood was taken from their successive masters, though whether copied or stolen, Pen was unclear. It had seemed a distinction without a difference if they only left with their prizes when their masters died, except . . . maybe not, if the ripped-up souls could not then go on to their god. He was growing uncomfortably sorry he had dozed or doodled through so many of those droning theology lectures in school.

Tales not from the nursery told of demons becoming ascendant within their masters, taking the body for some wild ride while the mind of the man was trapped as a helpless witness within. The demons were careless of injury, disease, or death, since they could jump from their worn-out mount to another like a courier riding relay. And the corrosion of such unchanneled chaos ate away at the sorcerer’s soul.

Except it seemed Learned Ruchia’s soul was expected to go to her god as usual, so maybe that varied as well? Or was it something about the mysterious Temple disciplines that made the difference? Pen had not the first idea what they might be. Was anyone going to think to tell him?

Did the hospice library have any books on the subject, and would they let Pen read them if he asked? But the Mother’s house seemed more likely to house tomes on anatomy and medicines than on the doings of her second Son and his demonic pets.

As night fell, his fretting was relieved by the return of Gans, bearing a load of Pen’s clothes and gear from home and a pair of saddlebags to pack them in. The load exceeded the capacity of the bags, yet certain necessities seemed to be missing.

“Did my brother not send me a sword?” The armory at Jurald Court could surely spare one.

The graying groom cleared his throat. “He gave it to me. Instead, I guess. I’m charged to go along with you on the road to Martensbridge, look after you and all.” Gans did not look best pleased with this proffered adventure. “We’re to leave tomorrow at dawn.”

“Oh!” said Pen, startled. “So soon?”

“Soonest begun, soonest done,” Gans intoned. His goal, clearly, was the done. Gans had always been a man of settled routines.

Pen set about extracting a view of yesterday’s events as Gans had witnessed them, but his laconic account did not add much to what Pen had already imagined, except for a strong sense leaking through that Gans considered it unjust of Pen to encounter such a disaster on Gans’s watch. But his new task, it seemed, was not a punishment; the Temple guards had requested his witness in Martensbridge of the events he had seen.

“I don’t know why,” he grumbled. “Seems to me a scribe could write it down on half a page, and save me the saddle sores.”

Gans took himself off to sleep elsewhere in the old mansion gifted to the Mother’s Order and converted to its present charitable purpose—Pen guessed his own quarantined chamber had once been some servant’s quarters. He turned to the problem of packing his bags. Someone back at Jurald Court had apparently just grabbed all the clothing he owned. The brown suit went on the impractical pile to be returned there in the morning, along with the most threadbare of his unloved hand-me-downs. How long was he to be gone? Where was he going, exactly? What would he need there?

He wondered if packing for the university would have been anything like this. ‘Sorcerer’ had certainly not been on Pen’s former list of scholarly ambitions, but then, neither had ‘theologian’, ‘divine’, ‘physician’, ‘teacher’, ‘lawyer’, or any other high trade taught there—yet another reason for Rolsch’s dubiousness about it all. The Bastard’s Order must have a separate seminary of some sort . . . ?

Pen washed in the basin and put himself to bed, there to lie awake too long trying to sense the alien spirit now parasitizing his body. Did demons manifest as a stomach ache? He was still wondering when he finally drifted off.

Penric carried his saddlebags down to the entry hall in the morning gloom to find a send-off he hadn’t expected in the form of Preita herself, in all her pretty roundness, escorted by a frowning brother and sister.

“Preita!” He went to her, only to have her flinch back, if with a tremulous smile.

“Hullo, Pen.” They stared uncertainly at each other. “I hear you’re going away.”

“Only to Martensbridge. Not to the ends of the world.” He swallowed, and got out, “Are we still to be betrothed?”

Regretfully, she shook her head. “Do you even know when you will return?”

“Er . . . no.” Two days ago, he’d known everything about his future. Today, he knew nothing. He was not sure this change was an improvement.

“So—so you can see how difficult that would be. For me.”

“Uh, yes, to be sure.”

Her hands started to reach out, but then retreated behind her back and consoled each other there. “I am so sorry. But surely you see any girl must be quite afraid to marry a man who could set her on fire with a word!”

He’d dreamed of setting her alight with kisses. “Any man could set a girl on fire with a torch, but he’d have to be deranged!”

This won only an uneasy shrug. “I brought you something. For the road, you know.”

She motioned to her brother, who handed over a large sack that proved, when Pen opened it, to contain a huge wheel of cheese. “Thank you,” Pen managed. He glanced at his bulging saddlebags, and ruthlessly turned to hand it on to the impatiently waiting Gans. “Here. Find a place to pack this. Somehow.”

Gans shot him a beleaguered look, but carried it out.

Preita gave him a jerky nod, but ventured no closer; apparently, he was not to get even one soft farewell hug to see him off. “Good luck, Pen. I will pray that all goes well with you.”

“And I, you.”

The two Temple guardsmen stood outside, holding the saddled horses. The late sorceress’s gear was packed aboard a sturdy cob, where Gans was securing the sack of cheese. Another mount awaited Pen.

He made for it, but paused at a call; it seemed he had one more painful farewell to endure. His mother and Rolsch hurried up as Preita and her siblings hurried away, exchanging awkward nods in passing. His kin looked less harried and exhausted than yesterday, but still unhappy.

“Pen,” said Rolsch, gravely. “The five gods protect you on your road.” He thrust out a small bag of coin, which Pen, surprised, took.

“Wear it around your neck,” his mother told him anxiously. “I hear those cutpurses in the cities can have away with a purse off a man’s belt and he never feels a tug.”

The cord had been lengthened for such prudence; dutifully, Pen obeyed, sneaking a peek within before tucking the soft leather into his shirt. More copper than silver, and no gold, but it made him not quite entirely a beggar at the Temple’s table.

Pen steeled himself to endure the embarrassment of a tearful maternal embrace, but, though Lady Jurald started forward, she stopped much like Preita. She raised her hand in a farewell wave, instead, as though he were turning out of sight and not standing a pace away.

“Be more careful, Pen!” she begged, her voice breaking. She turned back to Rolsch.

“Yes, Mama,” Pen sighed.

He went to his horse. Gans offered him no leg up, not that Pen had any problem lifting his wiry body into a saddle. As he did so, he had the quelling realization that not one person had touched him since whoever had carried him up and dumped him into that bed day before yesterday.

The senior guardsman motioned them forward, and the party rode off up the cobbled main street beneath the whitewash and half-timbering of the houses lining it. No flowers yet brightened their window boxes, in the chill of early spring. Pen turned in his saddle to wave one last time, but his mother and Rolsch were entering the hostel, and did not see.

Pen cleared his throat, and asked the senior guardsman, whose name was Trinker, “Did the Learned Ruchia’s funeral go all right, yesterday afternoon? They didn’t let me attend.”

“Oh, aye. Taken up by her god, all right, signed by that white dove and all.”

“I see.” Pen hesitated. “Can we please stop where she is buried? Just for a moment.”

Trinker grunted but could not gainsay this pious request, so nodded.

The graveyard where the Temple-sworn were buried lay beyond the walls, on the road out of town; they turned aside, and Trinker escorted Pen to the new mound, as yet unmarked, while Gans and Wilrom waited atop their horses.

Nothing much to see, now, in the dawn damp; nothing much to feel, though Pen extended all his exacerbated senses. He bowed his head and offered a silent prayer, the wording haltingly remembered from services for his father, and that other brother who had died when Pen was little, and some aged servants. The grave returned no answer, but something inside him seemed to ease, as if pacified.

He mounted again, and Trinker urged them into a trot as they crossed the covered wooden bridge over the river and the town fell behind.

The bright sunshine of the past two days, like a misplaced breath of summer, was gone, replaced by a more usual misty damp, which would likely turn to a chill drizzle before the morning was out. The high mountains to the north hid their white heads in the clouds, which lay like a gray lid over the wide uplands of Pen’s country. The road followed the river downstream, into what passed in these parts for flatter lands—or at least the valleys widened and the hills shrank. Pen wondered how soon they would catch a glimpse of the Raven Range, that other long stone hedge on the opposite side of the plateau , dividing the Cantons from the great realm of the Weald to the south.

The Temple guards kept them mostly to a trot, walking up the hills, a rhythm designed to eat the most miles in the least time. It was not the breakneck pace of a courier, but it did assume a change of horses being available, which they took at a noon halt at a Temple way-station. They passed farm carts, pack mules, cows, sheep, and country folk in small villages. Once, carefully, they rode around a company of marching pike men, recruits on their way to being exported to other lords’ wars. Like Drovo, Pen thought. He wondered how many would ever march home. Better it seemed to export cheese or cloth, but it was true that fortunes were made in the military trade. Though seldom by the soldiers, any more than by the cheeses.

While ascending the hills, Pen coaxed their guards to talk a little. He was surprised to learn that they were not Divine Ruchia’s own retainers, but had been assigned to her at the border town of Liest, when she’d crossed out of Darthaca on her way to Martensbridge; likewise the woman servant Marda. Gans was indignant to learn that Marda had been allowed to give a deposition and then head for home. Trinker and Wilrom were quite apprehensive about what their seniors would say when it was learned that they had lost their charge on the road, helpless though they had been to prevent it. They had come prepared to fight bad men, not bad hearts. As for the fumbling of her valuable demon into the chance-encountered younger brother of a minor valley lord . . . no one seemed to be looking forward to explaining that.

At dusk, with forty miles of muddy road behind them, they halted at a modest town that boasted a house of the Daughter’s Order, which took them in. Penric was again shown to a room by himself; a smiling dedicat brought him hot water and food, and he smiled back in gratitude, but she did not linger. A check outside his door found a local guardsman standing sentry. Pen said a hesitant hello and retreated, too tired to mind.

His room was as small as the one at the hospice, but better furnished; chairs with embroidered cushions, a table with a mirror and stool clearly meant for lady guests, something a house of the Daughter of Spring was more likely to host. Pen took advantage by sitting down with his comb, undoing his queue, and attacking the day’s accumulated snarls, which his fine, pale blond hair was prone to.

When he glanced up at the mirror, his mouth said, “Yes, let’s get another look at you.”

Pen froze. Was the demon awake again? His jaw clamped shut; his throat tightened.

How did the thing perceive the world, anyway? Did it share his vision, his hearing? His thoughts? Did it have to take turns looking out, as with his voice, or was it always there, like a bird perched on his shoulder?

He breathed, unlocked his muscles. Said, “Would you like to speak?” And waited.

“Want to look,” said the demon through his mouth. “We want to see what we’ve bought.” Its speech was fairly clear, its accent the cultured Wealdean of the lands around Martensbridge, as Ruchia’s had been.

Pen had not spent much time in front of mirrors since he’d grown big and fast enough to evade older sisters bent on using him as a large doll. His own features, in the glass, suddenly grew strange to him. But his vision did not go black; it seemed the two of them shared his eyes together.

His face, as lean as his body, had good bones, he’d been told. His fair skin was redeemed from its youth by what he hoped was a reasonably assertive nose. Long lashes framed what Mama had fondly called lake-blue eyes. In Pen’s experience lakes were more often gray, green, blinding white with snow, or black glass if frozen on a cold, still night. But on a rare bright summer day lakes could be that color, he supposed.

Nobody else had been talking to him; nobody else had been telling him anything. Had he been missing a chance? He exhaled, relaxed his throat, tried to soften the set of his tired, tense shoulders. To make himself open. “Can you answer questions?”

A snort. “If they’re not too witless.”

“I can’t guarantee that.”

The Hmm from his throat answering this did not seem hostile, at least.

Pen began in the simplest way he could think of. “What’s your name?”

A surprised pause. “My riders call me Demon.”

“That’s like calling your horse Horse, or me Boy. Or Man,” he hastily revised this. “Even a horse gets a name.”

“How would we get a name—Boy?”

“I . . . suppose most names are given. By people’s parents. By creatures’ owners. Sometimes they are inherited.”

A long silence followed this. Whatever the entity had been expecting from him, it evidently hadn’t been this.

His mouth said, hesitantly, “I suppose we could be Ruchia.”

Another voice objected, “But what about Helvia? Or Amberein?”

Yet another voice said something in a language Pen didn’t even recognize, though the cadences seemed to tease his understanding; he thought Umelan might have been another name. More unknown words spouted from his mouth, three voices, four; he lost track till it all ended in an inarticulate growl and a weird squeal.

“How many are you?” asked Pen, startled. “How many . . . generations?” How many riders had this old demon attached itself to, and copied—or stolen—life from?

“You expect us to do arithmetic?”

Pen’s brows went up. “Yes,” he decided.

“There will be a price. He doesn’t know about the price.” That accent was . . . Darthacan?

“Ruchia has lately paid,” said Ruchia’s voice. “That reserve will be long, drawing down.”

A surly pause. “Twelve,” said a voice.

“Only if we count the lioness and the mare,” muttered another. “Must we?”

“So . . . so are you twelve persons, or one?” Pen asked.

“Yes,” said the Ruchia-voice. “Both. At once.”

“Like, um, like a town council?”

“ . . . We suppose.” The voice was not impressed.

“Are—were—you all, er, ladies?”

“It is customary,” said a voice. Though another added, “She was no lady!”

Customary, Pen gathered, for a demon to be handed on to another rider of the same sex. But not, obviously, theologically required, or he wouldn’t be in this fix. Dear gods. Have I just acquired a council of twelve invisible older sisters? Ten, he supposed, if he didn’t count the mare and the, what, lioness? Did either of them have names in their animal tongues to argue about?

“I think you had better have one name,” said Pen. “Though if I want to speak to, to a particular layer of you, that one could have—inherit—her old rider’s name, I suppose.” Twelve? He would sort them out somehow.

“Hmm.” A most dubious noise, of uncertain origin.

“I have two names,” he offered. “Penric, which is my particular name, and Jurald, which is my kin name. The name for all of you could be like your kin name.”

Pen hoped no one was listening to this—all in his voice, ultimately—through the walls. No wonder Marda had believed the sorceress’s utterances incomprehensible. He thought to add, “Did you speak to Learned Ruchia in this fashion?”

“In time,” said the Ruchia-voice, “we had silent speech.”

How much time did that take? Pen wondered. And if it went on long enough, might a man no longer know which voice was his own? He shuddered, but wrenched his mind back to the moment. “You ought to have a name for when I mean all of you, as one. Not Demon. Something nicer than what I’d call a dog, for the five gods’ sakes. How if I pick something? Make it a present.”

The silence this time was so long, he wondered if the creature had gone back to sleep, or into hiding, or whatever it did when he could not feel or hear it. “In twelve long lives,” it said quietly at last, “no one has ever offered us a present.”

“Well, that’s not . . . not an easy thing. I mean, you don’t exactly have a body, so how could anybody give you any material gift? But a name is a thing of the air, of the mind and the spirit, so a fellow could give it to a spirit, right?” He felt he was making headway, here. And because betrothal had been lately on his mind, he tossed in, at a hazard, “A courting gift.”

He had the sense of an explosive Huff! but no sound came with it. Had he thrown a creature of chaos into confusion? That seemed only fair, considering what it was doing to him.

But then the ambiguous voice said, cautiously, “What do you offer? Penric of Jurald.”

He hadn’t actually got that far in his thinking yet. He choked in panic. Steadied himself. Reached for inspiration, and caught it. “Desdemona,” he said, suddenly certain. “I read it in a book of tales from Saone, when I was a boy, and thought it sounded very fine. She was a princess.”

A faint, flattered exhalation through his nose.

“Amusing,” said the Ruchia-voice. It seemed to be the dominant one; was that because it was freshest? Or had the late divine held the creature longest? Or what?

Another long silence; Pen yawned in exhaustion. Were they taking a vote in there? Had he started a civil war in his own gut? That could be bad. He was about to take it all back, when the ambiguous voice said, “Accepted.”

“Desdemona it is, then!” he said, relieved. He wondered if it would shorten to Des, when they grew to know each other better. Like Pen. That could be all right.

“We thank you for your gift of the spirit. Pretty Penric . . .” The voice fell away in a weary whisper, and Pen guessed the uprooted creature was spent for the night.

As was he. He staggered dizzily to bed.

The next morning’s ride brought them early to the big Crow River at the foot of the Raven Range, where they turned downstream on the main east-west road that followed it. The Ravens, once the mist cleared enough to unveil them, and before the afternoon rains closed in, were greener and less lofty than the fierce icy peaks in whose shadow Pen had grown up, but formidably rugged still. The road crossed the swelling river twice, once over a wooden span and once over a stone bridge with graceful arches, both with tolls collected by the villages that served them. With the spring melt, the Crow ran too high for upstream traffic, but rafts of logs or cargo packed in barrels still made their way down on the spate. Pen thought the nimble raft men must be brave to dare the cold waters, and beguiled an hour imagining himself one of their company.

More than local traffic kept the road a busy one; merchants’ pack trains, small parties of pilgrims, and enclosed wagons were added to the usual farm carts, cows, pigs, and sheep. Three times they passed or were passed by galloping couriers, from towns or the Temple; the latter waved cheerily in return for Pen’s guards’ salutes. Courier, now there was an honorable task a lean, light man might undertake . . . though by the end of that second day’s ride, Pen’s backside was questioning this ambition.

Nightfall brought them to a town at the confluence with the River Linnet, not fifteen miles from their destination and under its territorial jurisdiction. Although it was probably not possible to get lost following the Linnet’s valley upstream to where it drained the big lake at Martensbridge, Trinker ruled that they dare not risk arriving after the town gates closed, and instead found them impromptu, but free, lodging at the local Lady-school.

The Lady-school, dedicated to the Daughter of Spring, was not unlike the one in Greenwell that Pen had attended in his youth, being a couple of rooms on the ground floor of the house where the teachers lodged. It was not appointed for pilgrims like the big chapterhouse of the Daughter’s Order last night—where Pen had been able to sell his cheese to the refectory for a substantial addition to his pocket money—but a private bedchamber was cleared for him nonetheless. Pen did not think this was because he was the most honored guest.

As a prisoner, he had been well treated, but his status was plain. He checked the tiny window, four floors up over the street. If his captors imagined it would hold him, they had reckoned without his slight build or his years spent climbing, either up trees out of reach of Drovo, or in the mountains hunting. He could skin out of their grip in a moment, but—where would he go?

This was like waiting for the physician, that time he’d broken his arm. Uncomfortable, but there was nothing he could do to hurry events. Except, it seemed, continue on to the mysteries of Martensbridge.

He lay down and attempted sleep, only to become aware, after a few minutes, that he was sharing the narrow cot with a family of fleas. He flicked, rubbed, turned again. Or maybe a festival of fleas. Would they celebrate all night? He muttered an imprecation as one bit his calf, beginning the banquet.

“Would you like some help with that?” said Desdemona, amusement lacing her voice.

Pen clapped his hand over his mouth. “Quieter!” he whispered, alarmed. “Wilrom is sleeping right outside the door. He’ll hear.” And think . . . what?

Desdemona obligingly whispered, “We can destroy fleas, you know.”

Pen hadn’t. “Is it permitted?”

“Not only permitted, but encouraged. We must have done in armies of them, over the years. Vermin are not considered theologically protected, even by the Bastard whose creatures they are. And it is a magic that runs safely downhill, from order to disorder.”

“Less disorder for my bed, surely.”

“But great disorder for the fleas,” Desdemona whispered back. Pen’s lips grinned, not by his volition. “The sharpest fall of all, from life to death.”

That last comment was unsettling, but so were the fleas. “Go ahead,” whispered Pen, and lay still, straining to sense whatever was going to happen.

A pulse of heat, a slight flush through his body. Its direction was vague, though it seemed more down from his back, into the mattress, than up from his chest toward the ceiling.

“Twenty-six fleas, two ticks, three beetles, and nine lice,” said Desdemona with a satisfied sigh, like a woman consuming a sweet custard. “And a multitude of moth eggs in the wool stuffing.”

As the first magic he had ever worked, this lacked glamor. “I thought you didn’t do arithmetic?” said Pen.

“Huh.” Pen wasn’t sure if her huff was peeved or pleased. “You pay attention, do you?”

“I’m . . . presently spurred to.”

“Are you,” she breathed.

His bedding might be depopulated, but he was still not alone. It also occurred to him, belatedly, that he didn’t know whether demons could lie. Did they always speak truth to their riders, or could they trick them? Could they cut the cloth of fact to fit their goals, leaving out essential information to reverse its effect? Desdemona was the one . . . person, he decided for simplicity he would think of her as a person, he could not ask. Or rather, he could ask, she might answer, but it wouldn’t help.

Instead, he inquired, “Before Ruchia, were you a, that is, with a Temple sorceress as well?”

“Helvia was a physician-surgeon,” said the Helvia-voice—he might as well start thinking of her as Helvia—in the reassuringly local accent of Liest. “High in the Mother’s Order.”

“And I, Amberein, before her,” said the thick Darthacan accent. “In the Temple school in Saone.”

“I thought you said . . . physicians heal, sorcerers destroy?” said Pen, puzzled anew. “How can you be both?”

“We can do uphill magic as well, but it is very costly,” said Desdemona.

“Some healing is done by destroying,” said Amberein. “Stones of the bladder. Reduction of cysts or tumors. Amputations. Many subtler things.”

“Worms,” sighed Helvia. “You would not believe how many people suffer from worms. Not to mention fleas, lice, and other infestations.” It took a breath, and added, “Which was why, when Helvia’s time ran out, we did not jump to the young physician they had prepared, but to Ruchia. We were so tired of worms. Hah!”

Before Pen could ask what Ruchia had done to make her so preferable, another voice interjected a comment in a language he did not know. “Who was that?”

“Aulia of Brajar,” put in Desdemona. “Good Temple-woman. She spoke no Wealdean, only Ibran, though in time you will come to understand her. Before her, Umelan the Roknari.”

“Roknari!” said Pen, startled. “I thought the Quadrene heretics abjure the Bastard. How came she by a demon in the Archipelago?”

“It’s a long tale, which I’m sure she will tell you—in tedious detail—when you gain her tongue,” soothed Desdemona.

I, gain her tongue? It seemed to Pen that she had gained his, for she used it to make what sounded like a tart rejoinder.

“Can you give me a short tale?” asked Pen.

“She was born in the Archipelago, taken as a slave in a war raid, bought for a servant by Mira, a famous courtesan in the lagoon city of Adria, who possessed us at the time. Mira was untrained, but clever; we’d found in her our best rider yet. When Mira died, we jumped to Umelan, who ran away back home only to find the ill fate meted out to sorcerers on those islands.”

Pen’s imagination, briefly stuck on the courtesan part, raced to catch up. “Which is what?” Not that he had any intention of going to those lands.

“Sometimes they are burned alive, but often, they are taken out to sea and put overboard with a cushion that slowly fills with water and sinks. By the time the sorcerer drowns, the boat will have got far enough away that the demon will have nowhere to jump but to the fishes.”

Both he and Desdemona shuddered at this picture, Pen fancied, if perhaps for different reasons.

Pen’s mouth emitted a spate in that strange language, the words unknown to him but the tone of grievance very clear. Umelan adding her views?

“After her executioners rowed off, but before she was quite drowned, she was spotted by a passing galley from Brajar. The rescue was not much better than the capture, but we were set ashore alive in Brajar and, at a loss for any other course, went supplicant to a house of the Bastard’s Order. It was . . . good, there.” A slight pause, and she added, “For the first time, we were understood.”

Pen counted up on his fingers. Not the whole tally even yet. “And before, uh, Mira of Adria?”

“Rogaska, a serving-woman in the court of the Duke of Orbas. He made a gift of her to Mira. Before her, Vasia of Patos in Cedonia, our first rider who could read and write—a widow, then something of a courtesan as well, after the manner of that city. Which was how she came to die in luxury at the court of Orbas. Roundaboutly.”

Pen blinked. Cedonia? That seemed a country of fable to him, a place for tales to be set far enough away that none could gainsay their wonders. Also said to be warm. He was impressed. And envious. This creature had seen places and peoples that Pen could scarcely dream of.

“Before her, Litikone, a goodwife of the Cedonian northern provinces; before her, Sugane, a village woman in the mountains. She slew the aging lioness when it attacked her goats, all by herself with a rusty spear. She was a proper rider, despite her ignorance! Before that, the wild mare of the hills, that the lioness killed and ate, and before that . . . we know not. Perhaps the white god.”

“Do you, did you, er . . .” Pen was not sure how to put it. “Did you experience all these deaths?”

The voice was dry as dust. “Up to a point.”

But not any balancing births. Not that he remembered his own, either.

As long as he hosted this entity, Pen realized, he need never lack for bedtime stories, though he might lack for the ability to sleep, after.

But not tonight. Helplessly, he yawned, settling back in his warm and flea-less bedding. His voice whispered on for a while in unknown words, like a mountain rivulet, as he drifted off.

Pen woke aroused, rolled over sleepily, and reached for himself. The room seemed warm and dim and safe and quiet.

His hand had barely touched its target when his mouth commented, “Ooh, I’ve not felt it from this angle before. This should be interesting.”

Pen’s hand froze.

“Don’t stop on our account,” said Desdemona. “Physicians, remember?”

“Yes, don’t be shy. I’ve seen a thousand of ’em.”

“Speak for yourself!”

“Well, I’ve certainly diapered them a thousand times.”

Pen had no idea what the next comment was, and it might just have been the language, but it certainly sounded obscene.

He rolled from the bed and dressed as fast as possible. He couldn’t be out on the road soon enough.

The Linnet ran green and swift in the spring melt, and surprisingly wide. A few merchants’ boats dared the flood. The road coursed alongside it, with more pack trains going upstream than down. Its valley was hedged by what were, by Pen’s standards, low hills. As they passed the third broken fortification glowering down from these modest crags, he was moved to ask, “What happened to the castles?”

Wilrom and Gans shrugged, but Trinker, craning his neck, said, “Martensbridge did, I heard. Some local lords had taken to robbing merchants outright, though they’d started by calling it tolls. The guilds of the city combined with the princess-archdivine’s troops to destroy the nests that they couldn’t buy out, and made the road safe for all from the lake to the Crow. And all the tolls go to Martensbridge, now.”

Not, Pen reflected sadly, a method of gain Jurald Court might have mimicked; the roads in its reach were more likely to hold herds of cows than rich caravans.

Villages clustered around weirs and mills and, once, a wooden bridge. Then they rounded a curve in the valley and Martensbridge came into view. Pen stared, fascinated.

The place was easily ten times the size of Greenwell. The river bisected it, twice crossed by stone bridges and once by one of timber; buildings of stone as well as wood rose up the slopes, packed behind its walls. Trinker stood in his stirrups, and guessed that the substantial edifice crowning one hill might be the palace of the famous princess-archdivine, and heart, therefore, of his Order in this region. Beyond the city, the wide vista of lake opened out to the north, bordered with farms and fields and vineyards on the lower slopes, dark woods on the steeps. Covered merchants’ boats and open fishing skiffs dotted the ruffled surface. Then more hills, and then, dreamlike on the far horizon, a line of familiar white peaks, briefly making a bow from the curtain of the clouds.

It was not possible to get lost in Greenwell. After they had made their way through the south gate, they discovered that this was not the case for Martensbridge. They rode up and down several streets, all of them paved with cobbles, while Pen gaped at the high houses, the well-dressed men and women, the bright markets, stately merchants and hurrying servants, fine fountains in squares crowded with laundresses, elegant or clever wrought-iron signs for artisans’ shops and guildhalls, windows of stained glass with pictures. Trinker referred again to the scrap of paper holding his directions, looking hot and frustrated.

“Turn left here,” said Pen suddenly, when Trinker made to lead them right. Pen had no idea where the certainty in his voice came from, but everyone followed. “Right here,” he said at the next street. “And up,” at the next intersection. “And here we are.”

Pen sat in his saddle and peered at the stone building, crowded in a row along the steep street with its neighbors. Though narrow, it stood some five floors tall, looking like a lesser guildhall of some sort. It boasted no stained glass. The only marker was a discreet wooden sign over the door showing two hands painted white, loosely closed, one thumb pointing up and the other down. The thumb was the sign and signifier of the Bastard, the one finger on the hand that touched all the others. Aside from that, the place did not look in the least temple-like. Trinker cast Pen a disquieted look, dismounted, and knocked on the door.

It was answered by a porter wearing a tabard with the same two-hand design stitched on it, otherwise in common dress. His glance took in the official badge of the Daughter’s Order and blue and white feathers on Trinker’s hat. “Yes, sir?”

Trinker cleared his throat, awkwardly. “We are the escort of the Learned Ruchia, ridden from Liest. We were told that someone awaited her in this house. We need to see him.”

The porter looked over their party. “Where is the divine?”

“That’s what we need to see somebody about.”

The porter’s brow wrinkled. “Wait here, sir. If you please.” The door closed again.

Pen had to give Trinker credit, he stood his ground, back straight, and did not suggest they all run off. Half of why Pen had not made his escape through his window last night had been the reflection that it would be a cruel trick to play on his guards, who were only carrying out their duties and who had done him no harm. The other half was pure curiosity over what the Bastard’s Order here was supposed to do for him in his predicament, for surely he wouldn’t have been sent all this way unless there was something?

He wondered if the gruesome Roknari ploy with the cushion would work out on that lake. Probably, and swiftly, given the spring chill of the water. He tried to stop thinking.

In a few minutes, the door opened again, the porter escorting an anxious-looking man of middle years, height, and girth, his neatly trimmed beard and hair a graying brown. He wore an ordinary townsman’s gown, belted and soberly hemmed at his knees, over trousers of some dark stuff. The unbleached wool of the tunic only hinted at his allegiance, but the divine’s braid in white, cream and silver pinned to his shoulder made it plain. Easy to remove and pocket if he wished to walk about incognito, Pen wondered?

“I am Learned Tigney,” he said, his glance summing the party. Gans was clearly a groom, the two Temple guards were easy to place; Penric less so, and the gaze caught on him for a moment before going back to Trinker, waiting to speak with his hat in his hands. “I’m told you have news of Learned Ruchia? We were expecting her anytime this week.”

Trinker cleared his throat. “News, sir, but not good. Learned Ruchia was overtaken on the road with a seizure of the heart, some five miles short of Greenwell Town. She passed away before Wilrom”—he nodded at his comrade—“could return with help. The Temple of Greenwell saw her buried there with her due rites—their white dove signed her for her god, all proper. Not knowing what else to do, and being more than halfway here already, we brought on all her clothes and cases, to give to those who should have them.”

Tigney cast him a sharp look. “Not opened, I trust?”

“No, sir,” said Trinker fervently. “She was a sorceress, after all. We didn’t dare.”

Tigney’s posture of relief was short-lived; he tensed again. “But—what happened to her demon? Did it go to her god with her, then?”

“Uh, no.” He nodded toward Pen.

Tigney’s head whipped around. Pen offered a weak smile and a little wave of his fingers. “Here, sir. I’m afraid.”

“Who . . . ?” Tigney gave him a long, pole-axed stare. “You had better come inside.”

He told off the porter to take Ruchia’s things to his chambers, which resulted in a bustle of unloading from the packsaddle into the hall, then sent him off with Gans and Wilrom to deliver the horses to some nearby mews that kept a place for Temple beasts.

“This way.” He led Penric and Trinker up one flight to a small, well-lit room overlooking the street. Seeming a cross between a scholar’s study and a counting house, it held a table cluttered with papers and writing tools, a scattering of chairs, and some jammed shelves. Pen eyed them and wondered why a divine of the Bastard should have twenty or so courier dispatch cases lined up.

Tigney scrubbed his hand through his beard and gestured them to sit. “And you are . . . ?” he continued to Pen.

“Penric kin Jurald of Jurald Court, near Greenwell Town, sir.” He wondered if he was obliged to introduce Desdemona. “My eldest brother Rolsch is lord of that valley.”

“How came you to—no. Begin at the beginning, or there will be no making head nor tail of things.” He turned to Trinker, and efficiently extracted an account of his doings from the time he was assigned to escort the divine at Liest until the disaster at Greenwell. The party seemed to have traveled rather more slowly than with Pen.

“But why were you on that road at all?” asked Tigney, a plaintive note in his voice. “It’s not the most direct route from Liest to Martensbridge.”

Trinker shrugged. “I know, sir. The divine told us to go that way.”

“Why?”

“She said she’d shuttled back and forth from Liest to Martensbridge on the main road three dozen times in her life, and wanted a change of scene.”

“Did she say anything else about why she chose that course? Or was it just caprice? Any hint or strange comment?”

“No, sir . . . ?”

Tigney’s lips twisted, taking this in, but then he blew out his breath and went on. “There was a woman servant, you say? But then why didn’t—where is she?”

“Went back to Liest, sir. The Greenwell divine took her sworn deposition, first. Should it go to you?”

“Yes, for my sins.”

Trinker pulled out this document and handed it across; Tigney unsealed and read it, his frown deepening, then set it aside with an unsatisfied sigh.

Pen ventured, “Learned, do you know of these things? Sorcerers, and demons and . . . things?”

Tigney began to speak, but then turned his head at a knock on the door. It proved to be Wilrom and Gans, delivered back. With all the witnesses present, the divine turned to their accounts of Ruchia’s death, each offered with slightly different details but clearly congruent. Pen thought Gans’s description of him “flopped over as gray and limp as a dead eel,” was unduly blunt. Tigney collected Pen’s own testimony last: final words, purple flashes, and mysterious voices dutifully not left out, even though it made everyone stare at him in alarm except his interrogator, who seemed to take them as a matter of course.

Tigney then asked an intent string of questions ascertaining that there was no way Pen or anyone else at Jurald Court could ever have met Ruchia before, or known about her in any way, before the chance meeting on the road. The divine compressed his lips and turned to Pen once more.

“Since you awoke from that long swoon, have you felt or experienced anything unusual? Anything at all.”

“I had a very bad headache, but it wore off by the time we left Greenwell.” And no one will touch me, I have been summarily unbetrothed, and I have been made a prisoner even though I have committed no crime. Best leave that out. Tigney was just beginning to relax when Pen added, “Also, night before last the demon woke up and began talking to me.”

Tigney went still. “How?”

“Er . . . through my mouth?”

“Are you sure of this?”

Pen couldn’t tell what to make of that question. Did Tigney suppose him to be delirious or hallucinating? Was that common among the newly bedemoned? “I know it wasn’t me. I don’t speak Ibran. Or Roknari, Adriac, or Cedonian. She was really chatty once she got started. Also argumentative.” Ten women all stuck together, no wonder. Or their ghosts, disturbing thought. Images of their ghosts was scarcely better.

Tigney took this in, then rose and went to shout down the staircase for the porter, whose name was apparently Cosso. Or perhaps, Cosso! “See that these three men are fed,” he ordered the fellow, shepherding Gans and the guards out. “Find a place in the house for Lord Penric’s groom, tonight.” He reassured the guards, “We’ll send you two to lodge with your own Order at the palace temple, but don’t leave before I have a chance to speak to you again.”

He closed the door on them all, then turned and studied Pen. Pen looked hopefully back. At length he placed a hand on Pen’s brow and intoned loudly, “Demon, speak!”

Silence. It went on until Pen stirred in discomfort. “I’m not stopping her,” he offered. “She may sleep during the day. So far, she’s only talked to me before bed.” The only times he’d been alone?

Tigney scowled and deployed that commanding voice once more. “Speak!”

“Should I try?” said Pen brightly, growing nervous. He softened his tone. “Desdemona, could you please say something to Learned Tigney, here, so he doesn’t think I’ve gone mad or, or that I’m lying? Please?”

After a long moment, his mouth said mulishly, “We don’t see why we should. Cowardly demon-destroyer. Ruchia may have thought him diligent, but we always thought him a prig.”

Pen’s hands sprang to his flushing face as if to dam this alarming spate; he lowered them cautiously. “Sorry, sir. She seems to be a bit opinionated. Er . . . had you two met before?”

“I’ve known—knew”—he made a pained hand-wave at the correction—“Ruchia these twenty years. Though only after she acquired her mount.”

Pen said hesitantly, “I’m sorry for your loss. Were you friends, then?”

“Say colleagues. She had the training of me when I first contracted my demon.”

“You’re a sorcerer, too?” said Pen in surprise.

“I was. Not anymore.”

Pen swallowed. “You didn’t end it by dying.”

“No. There is another way.” The man could certainly put the grim in grimace. “Wasteful, but sometimes necessary.”

Pen wanted to follow this up, but instead Tigney began asking him all about his childhood and youth at Jurald Court. It seemed to Pen to make a short and boring biography.

“Why did you stop on the road?” he asked at last.

“How could I not? The lady appeared to be in grave distress.” Which had turned out to be all too true. “I wanted to help.”

“You might have volunteered to ride for the town.”

Pen blinked. “I didn’t think of that. It all happened so fast. Wilrom was already galloping off by the time I dismounted to see what was going on.”

Tigney rubbed his forehead, and muttered, “And so all is in disarray.” He looked up and added, “We had expected to house Learned Ruchia at the palace temple, but I think you’d best stay here, for now. We’ll find you a room.” He went again to shout for Cosso; when the man arrived, he gave more orders as a master might. Was Tigney very senior, here? This was plainly a house for functionaries, for the practical business of the Temple, not for worship or prayer.

“What do you do in the Bastard’s Order, sir?”

Tigney’s brows rose. “Did you not know? I oversee all the Temple sorcerers of this region. Comings and goings, assignments and accounts. I’m a bailiff of sorcerers, if you like. And you know how much everyone loves bailiffs. Thankless task. But Bastard knows they do not organize themselves.”

“Must I stay in my room?” Pen asked as he was ushered into the hallway.

Tigney snorted. “If the demon is already awake, it is probably pointless to try to hold you, but I request that you not depart the house without my leave. Please.” That last seemed dragged out of him, but he did sound earnest.

Pen nodded. “Yes, sir.” One building seemed enough of Martensbridge for the moment. He didn’t think he could get lost in here.

“Thank you,” said Tigney, and added to the porter, “Send the two Daughter’s men to me again, then the servant Gans. And let Clee know that I will be needing him later, and not to go off.”

Pen followed the man out.

The porter led Pen to the top floor, given over to a series of tiny rooms for servants or lesser dedicats. The chamber to which he was gestured did have a window, with a battered table shoved up to it, holding a basin, mismatched ewer, a few grubby towels, a shaving mirror, and someone’s razor kit. It was flanked by two cots. There were other signs of occupation—pegs hung with clothing, a chest at the foot of one cot, boots scattered about, more possessions pushed under both beds. The second cot had been cleared, with Pen’s saddlebags dumped atop. A supper would be served below-stairs for the house’s denizens at dusk, Cosso told him before departing; Pen was pleased to be invited. Apparently, his exile from human contact was ended, if only for lack of space. He hoped the room’s resident would not be too dismayed by his imposed guest. At least he wouldn’t have to share a bed with a stranger, as sometimes happened in crowded inns.

Finding cold water still left in the ewer, Pen washed the road dirt from his hands and face, pulled a few things from his saddlebags for later, and sat on the edge of the cot, trying to overcome his disorientation.

“Desdemona? Are you there?” A stupid way to phrase it. Where, and how, would she go? “Are you awake?”

No answer. After few more minutes of sitting, bone-tired but not sleepy enough to nap, his mood shifted to frustration. Tigney had implied he had the run of the house, hadn’t he? If no one else was going to show him how to go on, he’d just have to figure it out for himself. He rose to explore.

Nothing else on this floor but more servants’ cells. The next floor down was mostly closed doors, if fewer of them; the one left open gave onto someone’s bedchamber. Pen let only his glance stray within. The next floor down from that had more open doors, to workrooms like Tigney’s, with people about, though what tasks they performed therein were not at all obvious to Pen. He poked his head into the large, quiet room that he gauged was above Tigney’s, and stopped short.

It was the house’s library, and Pen had never seen so many books and scrolls in one room in his life. Even the Greenwell Lady-school had only boasted one bookcase, the entire contents of which Pen had read up by his second year. There was no tradition of scholarship among his ancestors, either; Jurald Court had account books, records of hunts and harvests, a few books of tales shared around till the pages had worked loose, a couple of tomes of theology left to gather dust. Pen stepped within, marveling.

A pair of long writing tables stood endways to the two windows overlooking the street, sharing the light as fairly as possible. One was taken by a fellow who looked not much older than Pen—heartening—his head bent over his work, quill carefully scratching. His dark hair was cut soldier-fashion, as if to pad a helmet, though it showed no sign of a helmet ever having rested there. By the stack of cut and scored blank sheets to his left, the smaller stack of filled ones to his right, and the book propped open on a wooden stand in front of him, he was working as a copyist.

He glanced up at Pen and frowned, not welcoming interruption. Pen tried smiling, with a silent little wave to indicate his friendliness and harmlessness and general willingness to be greeted, but the man merely grunted and returned his eyes to his page-in-progress. Taking the rebuff in good part, Pen shifted his attention to the shelves.

One whole floor-to-ceiling case appeared to be theology, no surprise in this place. Another was devoted to chronicles, mostly of other times and realms; Pen’s own land was more noted for producing cheese than history, he feared. Some ancient, fragile scrolls resided on a set of shelves all to themselves, with corded silk tassels hanging down holding slips of wood inked with titles for each, which he dared not touch. He was thrilled to spot a collection of what appeared to be books of tales, looking well thumbed. Then a tall case of works in Darthacan, of which Pen had a grasp his Lady-school teachers had grudgingly pronounced adequate; a couple of shelves of works in unreadable Ibran; and then another entire shelf in the ancient tongue of Cedonia, with its exotic letters.

Pen had only seen fragments of the mysterious language before, on old coins or carved on the fallen temple ruins above the road to Greenwell, lone legacy in his hinterland of an empire that had, over a millennium ago, stretched two thousand miles from the warm Cedonian peninsula to the cold Darthacan coast. Scholars described it as fleetingly glorious, like some shooting star, but three hundred years of such ascendency did not seem so fleeting to Pen. In any case, after those swift generations it had fallen apart again, split and re-split among revolts and generals just as Great Audar’s empire out of Darthaca was to do hundreds of years later, when his heirs failed.

Pen’s hand went out to a work bound in waxed cloth, a modern copy and so not too daunting, with its title inked enigmatically on its spine in the beautiful letters. Wondering who had copied it out, he let it fall open in his hand just to see the calligraphy, as lovely as scrollwork or interlace and about as informative.

Instead, his eye picked out a paragraph: “In the sixth year of the reign of Emperor Letus dubbed The Engineer, for so he had served in his youth in the armies of his uncle, undermining the fortifications of his enemies, before the second plague made him heir, he caused to be built the first aqueduct of the city, nine miles from the springs of the Epalia, watering the gardens of his Empress and piped to new fountains throughout the town, for the health and pleasure of its inhabitants . . .”

Pen gasped and squeezed his eyes shut. After a few moments, he peeked again, very cautiously. Still the same elegant, alien lettering. But now they had become words, their meanings flowing into his mind as effortlessly as any Wealdean text.

“I can read this!” he whispered aloud in astonishment.

“Oh, good,” said Desdemona. “We’d hoped you’d be a quick study.”

“But I can’t read this!”

“In time,” she replied, “you will come to know most of what we know.” A pause. “That runs both ways.”

Pen snapped his jaw shut, trying to master his sudden unsteadiness. He could only think that he would have the better part of that exchange.

A bored voice remarked from behind him, “The librarian should be back soon, if you need help.”

“Thank you,” Pen managed, turning and smiling. “Just, um, talking to myself, here. Bad habit. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

The man shrugged, but did not return at once to his page.

“What are you working on?” asked Pen, nodding to the papers.

“Just a collection of tales.” He ticked at the volume with his fingernail, dismissively. “Stupid stuff. The important books go to the senior dedicats.”

“Still, I’d think you’d learn a lot, doing that. Do you ever make up the blocks of wood to print many copies? I’ve heard they do that in Martensbridge.”

“Do I look like a woodcarver?” He wriggled his inky hand. “Though that work, and the pay for it, also goes to the seniors.”

“You are a dedicat?” Pen hazarded. The scribe wore no braids or badges, just ordinary town dress of tunic and trousers. “Lay, or Temple-sworn?”

He stretched his shoulders and grimaced. “Sworn. I mean to make acolyte soon, if all the places don’t go to those who brought richer dowries.”

One of the several routes into the Bastard’s Order, Pen had heard, was for the families of children born out of wedlock to dedicate them to the Temple, together with a portion for their keep. That is, if the families were well-off. Poor foundlings were left more anonymously, and cheaply, at the orphanages. Not liking to ask for clarification, lest this be a sore issue for the fellow, Pen said instead, “At least it’s indoor work. Not like herding cows.”

The man smiled sourly. “You a cowherd, country boy?”

“At need,” Pen confessed. The scribe’s tone made it sound a low task, rather than the occasional outdoor holiday Pen had found it, but then, it hadn’t been Pen’s daily portion without relief. “And haying,” he added. “Everyone turns out for the harvest, high or low.”

The hunting in the mountains had been a happier chore. He’d had good luck with wild sheep, often able to take one down with a single arrow, not to mention being most nimble at retrieving carcasses from awkward slopes and ledges, a task to which his servants had cheered him on with suspicious enthusiasm. It was the one activity that had reconciled Pen to the god naturally apportioned to his age and sex. The Son of Autumn’s rule over comradeship-in-arms had less appeal, if Drovo and his friends had been anything to go by.

“Cowherds. Why?” the fellow muttered, and dipped his quill again, incurious of an answer.

An older woman entered, carrying a stack of books. An acolyte’s looped braid hung on the shoulder of proper white Temple robes, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles swung by a ribbon around her neck. Martensbridge was noted for its glasswork; perhaps ordinary people could afford such rich aids here? Certainly this must be the librarian. She stopped and stared at Pen, more interested than hostile. “And who are you?”

He ducked his head. “Penric kin Jurald, ma’am. I’m a . . . visitor.” Because that sounded better than prisoner. “Learned Tigney said I might go about the house.”

Her brows rose in surprise at the divine’s name. “Really.”

Pen couldn’t tell from her tone if she thought that good or bad, but he forged on. “I was wondering if you had any books on sorcery or demons. Practical ones,” he added prudently, lest he be gifted with some thick tome in a high and soporific style. He didn’t see how the subject could be made boring, but he’d read—well, tried to read—some theological works from Learned Lurenz’s shelves, and didn’t underestimate the determined drabness of Temple scholars.

She took a step back, her head coming up. “Such books are restricted to those of the rank of divine and above. I’m afraid, young man, you have not yet earned the braids for them.”

“But you must have such books, yes?” Somewhere. He’d seen none in his survey of the shelves.

Her glance went to a tall wardrobe set against the far wall. “Locked up, certainly. Or they would quickly become the most stolen of our treasures.”

Pen stared with fresh interest at the capacious cabinet, wondering how many books it might hold. “If a divine said it was all right, would it be all right?” Could, or would, Tigney give permission?

“Such authorizations are possible, yes, but there must be need. What do you imagine your need to be?” She smiled at him with the ironic air of a woman long experienced in resisting the blandishments of her juniors angling for forbidden treats. Well, he’d always been able to get around the Jurald Court cooks . . .

“Ah, you see, I lately contracted a demon of my own, from a Temple sorceress who died on the road at Greenwell. It was an accident, truly it was, but if Desdemona and I are going to be stuck with each other, I think I’d better know more about what I’m doing than I do. Which is almost nothing, so anything at all you could lend me would be a start.” He smiled his most hopeful smile at her, trying for maximum sunniness. Trustworthiness, too; he should definitely try to look trustworthy.

Evidently, he failed, for she took a hastier step backward, her hand going to her throat. She frowned at him for a long, long moment. “If that is a jape, young man, I will have your hide for binding leather. Wait here.” She set down her armload of books on the table and hurried out again.

Pen’s glance went again to the now-riveting cabinet, and he wondered if she could possibly mean that threat literally. A librarian of the demon-god, after all . . .

The quill had stopped scratching, and Pen turned to find the dedicat-scribe staring at him as if he’d sprouted antlers from his head. “How did you come by a demon?” he asked, astonished.

Getting practiced by now, Pen recited the short tale, summing the disaster in as few sentences as he could make sound coherent. Fairly coherent.

The scribe’s wide eyes narrowed. “You know, none below the rank of divine are allowed to receive a Temple demon, and the gift of its sorcery. It’s considered a high and rare accomplishment. Men compete just for a place in line, studying and preparing, then wait for years.”

Pen scratched his head. “There must be other accidents, from time to time. I mean, you can’t control the time or place of a person’s death.” Well . . . there was one sure way that sprang to Pen’s mind, but he’d heard no rumors of the Temple doing that.

Lips compressed, the scribe just shook his head.

The librarian returned with Learned Tigney in tow. Pen brightened.

“Oh, sir! May I be permitted to read the books here?” He gestured to the locked cabinet. “You certainly can’t say I don’t have need.”

Tigney sighed. “Lord Penric, I’ve only just begun to unpack the Learned Ruchia’s cases. I’ve no idea yet what needs I am going to find in this tangle.” He eyed Pen, who returned his best starving-boy look. The divine’s expression did not so much soften, as grow shrewd. “But, while you wait, you might certainly have leave to read the books from the other shelves, here in this room when it is open. That would keep you occupied for a time, I should think.”

And feet fastened in one place, too, Pen fancied was the unspoken cap to that. But Tigney hadn’t, actually, said No, never. “Indeed, sir.” He tried to project dutiful resignation, pending a rematch. He realized he still had the Cedonian chronicle in his hand, and lowered his voice, showing the book to Tigney.

“When I opened this book, I found I could read it. Is that . . . usual?”

Tigney’s lips quirked up. “If you are a Cedonian, I suppose.”

Pen mustered a feeble smile at the heavy humor. Better than anger or thunderous forbiddings, certainly. “But I’m not. I had not a word of it until, well, just now.”

His witticism duly rewarded, Tigney granted Pen a short nod of reassurance. “Yes, it’s usual. If any demon serves a master long enough, it will take up an imprint of its rider’s mother tongue. And pass it along, in due course. Ruchia had half-a-dozen such languages at her command, all spoken as a native. Very useful to her, and to the Temple.”

“Was she a great scholar, then?”

Tigney hesitated. “Not as such.” He eyed Pen a moment more. “You were very quick to absorb it, though. It more often requires some weeks or months for such knowledge to, so to speak, leak through. But then, Ruchia’s was an unusually old and powerful mount.” He drew breath. “It is going to take me some time yet to sort through Ruchia’s effects. I may want to speak to her old demon directly, as the most intimate, if not necessarily the most reliable, witness to her affairs. If you might hold yourself in readiness here for that, I should be most grateful.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Pen, deciding to take this half-victory while he could get it. “Although . . . I don’t seem to control her speaking.”

“You do; you just don’t know it yet.”

Pen bit back another bid for the cabinet. It wasn’t as though he was going to be able to read all these books in a day anyway.

Tigney went on, “Or rather, if it controlled you, you would most certainly know it.” He looked away, grimly, making Pen wonder again about the former sorcerer’s somehow-discarded demon.

The divine turned to the shamelessly listening scribe, who had stopped even pretending to write. “Clee, when you are done with that page, come downstairs. I’ve some letters need copied before they go out.”

“Yes, sir,” said the scribe, with a dutiful wave of his quill, and went back to diligent scratching.

Tigney motioned the librarian after him; Pen glimpsed them making some low-voiced exchange out in the hall, punctuated by glances his way, after which Tigney departed and the librarian came back. She gave Pen a provisional sort of nod in passing, and took up her mysterious business at a desk in the corner.

Overwhelmed by his choices, Pen started to make for the shelf of tales, but instead went to sit at the second table and reopen the Cedonian chronicle, driven by a faint, irrational fear that his newfound skill might desert him as abruptly as it had arrived, and he’d better seize this chance while he could. A chronicle was as good as a tale, anyway, imperial courts seeming almost as fantastical as ogres’ lairs. And he really wanted to find out more about the emperor who was an engineer, who had made fountains for his people. It seemed a strangely un-imperial task; weren’t emperors supposed to go around conquering people? Which was how they became emperors, one presumed.

The scribe Clee finished his page, tidied his supplies on a shelf, and departed, with a sort of grunt-nod in Pen’s direction; not exactly a friendly farewell, but politely acknowledging his existence. Pen returned a smile and head-duck, feeling like an envoy signing a truce to a skirmish he had not known was being fought. The librarian didn’t leave until the light failed and Pen went down to seek supper. She locked the outer door carefully behind them both.

Supper, plain food but abundant, was served in a whitewashed cellar refectory with a long table. Not all of the dedicats and acolytes who worked here were fed here, Pen discovered, as some lived in lodgings nearby, or were married. Tigney wasn’t present, but Clee was, and not-uncordially waved Pen to a seat on the bench next to him, where he was introduced merely as “a visitor.” Pen, tired out and hungry, was content to listen, and not talk much; Clee turned off any questions that drew too near to the real matters that had brought Pen to Martensbridge. Mostly younger folk, the dedicats gossiped, exchanged comments about their work, which seemed to be mostly administrative, ate fast, and hurried off.

The servants had the next turn at the table; coming out, Pen met Gans coming in. The groom seemed contented enough to have nothing to do and all food provided for the next few days, but still asked, “When can we go home, Lord Penric?”

“I don’t know yet,” Pen admitted. “Learned Tigney seems to be the man to decide, after he goes through Learned Ruchia’s effects.” How hard could that task be? They had all fit on one packsaddle, and had been mostly women’s clothes. Well . . . except for the demon. “I guess he’s her executor, of sorts.”

Gans accepted this with a glum grunt, and Pen followed Clee upstairs, where he discovered that it was the scribe’s room he was sharing. He didn’t seem as put-out to lose his privacy as Pen might have feared. The rule of the house was early to bed and rise at first light, so Pen, too, readied himself to lie down. Truly, this day felt a year long, so crowded with changes as it had been. Clee did not blow out their shared candle at once, but rather, asked a few leading questions about Pen’s family as rustic lords of what Pen was beginning to realize must seem quite a minor mountain valley.

“Are you from this city?” Pen asked in turn. The scribe seemed sophisticated enough to be.

“I am now,” said Clee. “I wasn’t born here. I was born at Castle Martenden, about ten miles up the lakeshore. My brother is baron there.”

“Oh, the same as Rolsch,” said Pen, pleased to find some connection. “You are Dedicat Lord Clee, then?”

Clee grimaced. “I should say, my half-brother.”

“Ah,” said Pen. After an awkward moment, he offered, “I have a half-uncle, who farms near Greenwell. I like him. His wife is always very kind to me.” These thing happen, Pen hoped this implied. Not a problem.

Clee snorted. “Castle Martenden is not just some fortified farmhouse. Kin Martenden have been great landholders in these parts for centuries.”

Pen thought this an unjust description of Jurald Court. Or at least, it ought to be large, sprawling fortified farmhouse.

“My brother is at loggerheads with the city, which covets his lands and rents and rights,” Clee went on. “The city fathers grow big in their own esteem. They’ve bought out a dozen minor lordships already that fell into their debt. I think the merchant guilds conspire to net the foolish that way.”

Pen remembered the ruins on the road in, and thought the city’s outlying district might have grown as much by force of arms as mercantile trickery. Although, he supposed, wealth must come first, before arms could be bought. Martensbridge was a royal free town, its charter making it unbeholden to any lords except the Hallow King of the Weald himself. It stood oddly balanced between its distant lord, and its treaties with its nearer neighbor cities with their more varied allegiances. Pen’s impression was that Martensbridge felt itself a lot more free than royal, and recalled the joking prayer an acolyte had told him over dinner: Five gods bless and keep the Hallow King—far from us!

“What about the princess-archdivine?” Pen asked. “I’ve never met a princess. Or an archdivine, for that matter. I hope I might get a chance to see her before I go home. Is she very beautiful?”

Clee vented a laugh. “She’s fifty.”

Pen supposed princesses in tales always seemed to be young and lovely because when they grew older they became queens. The princess-archdivine’s title was more political, and unrelated to her marital status. “I suppose even royal princesses can have callings.”

Clee shrugged. “The archdivineship of Martensbridge has been a dumping ground for Wealdean royal spares for centuries. I’ll give this one credit, though, she’s powerfully shrewd. Besides managing Temple lands, she’s fostered the silk makers here, which has brought even more coin to her hands, which has allowed her to buy yet more territory. No one knows what will happen when the city and the princess run out of other fodder, and have to start in eating each other.”

With that ambiguous remark, Clee blew out the candle and rolled over. Pen, eyelids weighted with exhaustion, did not even attempt to talk to Desdemona.

For the next two days Pen sat in the library and read, trooped downstairs to eat, and smiled shyly at people who all seemed too busy to talk to him, save, sometimes, Clee, when taking a stretch from his scribal work. The locked cabinet was an itch at the corner of his eye.

Pen supposed even librarians had to go to the garderobe sometime, but this one never left the room unless there were other persons present; another copyist or two, or dedicats or acolytes reading and taking notes. None of the valuable books were allowed to be removed and read elsewhere save by divines of the highest ranks, of which there seemed to be three or four here besides Tigney, and even they received stern looks and admonitions along with their volumes.

Pen finished the fascinating Cedonian chronicle, and started another in Darthacan. He discovered his reading in that language had somehow become far more fluid and swift—he didn’t have to stop and think through the sentences, and he seemed to know many more words than he’d ever learned in the Greenwell Lady-school. A slimmer chronicle in comfortable Wealdean supplied a short history of Martensbridge. The marsh hamlet at the outlet of the long lake had acquired its name when an earlier lord of kin Martenden had built the first stone bridge, the text asserted, convincingly enough. The improved roads had brought increasing wealth. Somewhat unfairly, Pen thought, kin Martenden had lost control of the growing town when their own overlord’s family died out, and the greater territory fell to a prince of the Weald. The town had bought or won or bribed—on this, the chronicle was unclear, but it seemed to involve lending money to the right lords with hungry armies—its first royal charter soon thereafter, swept in under the cloak of the princess-archdivine, and never let to lapse thereafter. Glass- and silk-makers came down from the north over the high passes from Adria and Saone, metal-workers from Carpagamo, and settled in the new free town. Caravans arrived from as far away as the reduced modern descendant of the Cedonian Empire, ah! Pen wondered if he might meet such travelers in the marketplaces or counting houses, and test his new tongue.

The chronicle claimed that Great Audar had once resided here, and told a legend of a bargain he made with a helpful talking marten that somehow resulted in a blessing for the locality, and a more exciting source of its name. Pen had read of that legend appended to at least two other towns, one with a snake and one with a hawk, though both with Great Audar, which made him distrust the book’s author just a little. Apart from the talking animals. While there were rumors about the Hallow King’s strange, secretive cadre of royal shamans having some special understanding of the kin animals of their land, Darthacan Audar had been the bitter enemy of the Old Weald and its forest magics in his long-ago day, so Pen didn’t think this could be some oblique reference to those mysterious practices.

By the third day, although his mind was still wildly excited by the written riches in the room, Pen’s eyes were burning, and his not-well-padded haunches were rethinking his calling as a scholar much as they had a career as a courier. Besides, for the first time this week it had stopped drizzling and the sun was out. Desperate for movement, he went down to see Tigney.

The divine’s door was open; Pen leaned on the frame, cleared his throat, and ventured, “How goes it, sir? Is there anything I can do here? To help? Any task at all?”

“A task . . . ?” Tigney leaned back from his writing table and regarded Pen thoughtfully. “I suppose you are a mountaineer. Not used to being cooped up all day, I daresay.”

“The library is very fine, but that’s so, sir. Even in the winter, we hunted in the lower forests every week, or ran the trap lines.”

“Hm.” Tigney drummed his fingers on the scarred tabletop, then gestured to a neat stack of clothing folded on a chair. “Ruchia had no heirs of the body. Often in such cases a Temple sorcerer’s possessions are willed to their successor along with their demon, but Ruchia left no directive with me. You cannot wear her clothes, but if you would like to run an errand, you could take them to the garment merchant on Elm Street, and turn them into money for the Order.”

A modest task, but it would allow Pen to walk about the town. And, if he performed it well, Tigney might find other work for him. Being the errand boy of this house couldn’t be worse than being the errand boy of Jurald Court. He’d never felt a calling before to serve the gods, but who knew? “Certainly! I’d be glad to.”

While Tigney gave him more precise directions to Elm Street, Pen went to tie up the bundle. His hand hesitated.

“I think you do not want to sell this one, sir.” It was an elaborate, embroidered skirt. Pen shook it out, puzzled. It seemed just a skirt, if heavy. Why had he said that?

Tigney’s brows rose. “I thought I’d checked them all. Ah—was that you, who spoke just now?”

“Not sure, sir.” Pen ran the long hem through his fingers, which found an unsewn slot. Poking within, he drew out a folded length of thin cloth. He shook it free to find it covered all over with fine writing, in none of the languages he recognized. No, it is a cipher. What?

Tigney held out his hand in demand; Pen delivered both skirt and cipher. “Ah!” said Tigney. “Cloth, not parchment. No wonder I felt nothing. Clever Ruchia!” He glanced up rather sharply at Pen. “Are there any more like this?”

“I . . . don’t know.”

Pen didn’t feel there were, but Tigney ended up prodding through every hem and fold in the stack to be sure. He then sat up and read the message on the cloth, without referring to any cipher-book. Leaning back with a relieved sigh, he muttered, “Nothing too difficult, then. Thank His Whiteness. I think.”

Pen swallowed. “Sir—was Learned Ruchia a spy?” That frail old woman?

Tigney waved a hand in vigorous negation. “Certainly not! A trusted agent of the Temple, yes, able to sail smoothly through some very troubled waters, I will give her that.”

Pen took in this evasion. He was pretty sure it came out to a yes. Which made Tigney . . . her spymaster? Neither personage fit his mental image of either role. He smiled hesitantly and said nothing.

As Pen bundled up the cloth once more and made for the door, Tigney added kindly, “You can keep half of whatever you can sell them for.”

“Thank you, sir!” Pen waved and left quickly, before Tigney could change his mind about either the errand or its reward, after the capricious manner of seniors.

Safely out of earshot on the steep street, Desdemona snappishly remarked, “Half! Tigney is a cheeseparing drudge. You should have had it all.”

So, she hadn’t been asleep. “I thought it very generous. He didn’t need to offer me any. Also”—he grinned—“he forgot to tell me when I had to be back.”

“Humph,” said Desdemona, sounding amused. “Well, we do like a truant.”

Pen took the long way to Elm Street, down to the river and along it past the old stone bridge to a market, still busy even though it was early afternoon. He stood a while and listened to a pair of musicians, one with a fiddle and the other with a skin drum, set up to amuse the crowd with silly or mournful songs, a hat at their feet upturned invitingly. Pen reflected that unlike all the other vendors here, they could not call back their merchandise if the bargain was bad, and fished a few precious coppers out of his thin purse for the hat before continuing down the quayside.

At a low point of the embankment wall, he set the clothing bundle down and leaned over, trying to see up the river to the lake. He might need a higher vantage. “Desdemona . . . is music a good gift of the spirit?”

“Oh, aye. We like a good song.”

“What about knowledge? Reading?”

“That’s good, too.”

“Were you reading along with me, these past days? Over my shoulder, as it were?”

“Sometimes.”

“Should I do that more?”

“To please me, do you mean?” She sounded disconcerted.

“Well . . . yes, I guess so.”

A long silence, then: “Those things are all interesting, but it is the share of your body that is my daily gift, without which I could not maintain existence in this world. Or in any other. So gifts of the body are actually very acceptable.”

“That would be . . . my body, right? Things done for my body?” said Pen, trying to work this out. Not that he could maintain his own existence in the world without it, either.

“Have you any other body? I don’t.”

“At present.” Though the demon had shared a dozen other bodies before his. Would she share more, after . . . ? His memory reverted, unwilled, to the interrupted morning bed activities back at the Lady-school, and his face heated. However discomfited he had been, sooner or later his body was going to have its way about that, chatty audience or no. Not that he hadn’t been willing to share that intimacy with Preita, in prospect. And this was different, how . . . ?

Desdemona drew a long breath. “Think of how a good rider maintains his favorite horse. Brushed and glossy and well fed. Sound shoes. Carefully exercised and trained, and taken out for fast gallops. Ribbons braided in its mane, fine saddles and bridles to make a show, maybe trimmed with silver or colored glass beads. A steed to be proud of.”

Wait, I thought I was supposed to be the rider . . . ? All these equine metaphors were growing befuddling.

“In short,” said Desdemona briskly, “as we have never had an actual lord before, could you at least try to dress like one?”

Pen snorted, eyeing the sleeve of his countryman’s smock. “I’m afraid this is how actual lords dress, when their purses are as flat as kin Jurald’s.” Also, the demon was beginning to sound disturbingly like his sisters again, which sat uncomfortably with the thoughts he’d been having just before she’d gone off about horses.

“Put another way—what you enjoy, we enjoy, for the most part.”

Pen was startled by this. “Food? Drink?” Other pleasures of the flesh . . . ?

“Yes, indeed!”

“Wine-sickness?”

She said smugly, “Oh, the wine-sickness can be all yours.”

“You . . . can evade my pain?” The implications of that were odd.

“We can withdraw from it to a degree, yes.”

“Surely managing one’s demon should be harder than managing a horse.” Not that horses were easy, five gods knew. “I mean, those Temple disciplines and so on?” Everyone kept talking about the all-important Temple disciplines, but no one ever explained what they were.

“The hard things will come on their own. You need not go hunting them.” She added after a reflective moment, “Though I pity the poor demon who gets stuck with a Temple ascetic. Hair shirts, really, what is the point?” She gave the impression of a faint, dramatic shudder, and Pen smiled despite himself. She added more tartly, “And it indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one’s own discomfort for a benefit to another.”

Pen blinked, an old puzzle suddenly laid open to him, bare and plain. Yes. That’s it exactly.

Feeling a need to digest this, he heaved the bundle of clothes back up. “Let’s go find Elm Street.”

He was quite out of his reckoning with Tigney’s directions by now, but Desdemona, clearly, knew the town well. They arrived at their goal efficiently, without any doubling back.

The shop was dark, with a peculiar smell. Pen set the clothes on the counter, and the shop woman told over them with quick fingers, and named a price.

“Pen,” muttered Desdemona, “let me do this.”

“If you don’t embarrass me,” Pen muttered back. The shop woman gave him a strange look, but then his mouth began a sharp, though polite enough, negotiation that resulted in due course in a sum double what he had first been offered.

“Good,” said Desdemona. “Let us look around a little.”

Abandoning the counter, they went to the shelves and piles. Obligingly, Pen sorted and dealt. “Can you even see what you’re doing?” he murmured.

“Oh, yes. You could, too. Wait . . . now try.”

Pen squinted, and the shadows seemed to retreat. The view wasn’t really an improvement. But somehow, from these unpromising heaps, he pulled some quite fine discards, if torn or discolored in spots. Granted the elegant blue brocade doublet with the three-inch gash in the front, set around with brown stains, was a bit disturbing.

“We can set these to rights,” Desdemona promised.

“Isn’t that what you call uphill magic?”

“Only a very little. Can you sew?”

“Not especially well, no.”

A brief silence. “We believe you will find that you now can.”

Pen set back several items that seemed too gaudy, to Desdemona’s disappointment, but at last they agreed on a small pile of what she assured him were men’s garments, the likes of which Pen had never seen at Jurald Court, nor Greenwell either. The silk-weavers here seemed to set a high standard for local castoffs, certainly. Back to the counter for another negotiation, and in a few more minutes, Pen left the shop not only with the additions to his wardrobe, but with a goodly supply of coins. Even when he turned over Tigney’s half, there would be some money left over.

Someday, he promised himself, I shall have new clothes, from a real tailor. Though how he was to get to that someday, he had no notion.

Heading back downhill, they passed a bathhouse. Pen stopped and eyed it. “Pleasures of the body, eh?” Clean and warm surely qualified. Not to mention shaved and trimmed.

“Superb idea!” said Desdemona. “But not that one. There’s a better one farther up near the palace.”

“It looks tidy enough . . .”

“Trust me.”

The voice he’d come to recognize as Mira of Adria said something, which he tried but failed to not-understand. If you would but put him under my direction, I could show him how to make a fortune in a place like this seemed to be the gist of it.

Pen chose not to pursue the remark.

The bathhouse near the palace-and-temple precincts was intimidatingly large, compared to the one in Greenwell run out the back of a woman’s home, but not too crowded at this time of day. Pen visited its barber for a serious shave and a trim of the ragged ends of his hair, then the men’s side for a thorough lathering with scented soap of head and body, a sluicing rinse with a bucket of warm water, and a soak in the huge wooden tub with the copper bottom, big enough for half-a-dozen men, kept heated with a small fire underneath. He oozed down in the water and lingered with his eyes half closed until the skin of his fingers began to grow wrinkly, he began to worry that Tigney might be ready to send out a search party, and he became aware that Desdemona, who seemed to be purring as much as himself, was eyeing a couple of the better-looking of his fellow bathers in a way that Pen found unsettling. Time to decamp.

Dressed, hair combed out and drying, and back on the street, he glanced at the looming bulk of the temple at the top of the hill. It was the most imposing structure in town, and the chronicle of Martensbridge that he’d read yesterday had made much of it. A temple had always crowned this high site, but the prior one, being built of wood in the style of the Weald, had burned down in one of the periodic fires. In a joint building effort of Temple and town that had taken several decades, it had been replaced by this one of stone, after the Darthacan manner. This represented not a change in lordship or worship, but a change in wealth, Pen gathered. Curious, he turned his steps not downhill, but up.

He walked all the way around it, marveling at its size and stately proportions, then peeked through the tall pillared portico. No ceremonies seemed to be in progress, and other lone worshipers were trickling in and out, so Pen ventured within. As the space opened up before him, he realized that the old wooden Greenwell temple was a mere hall by comparison, despite its abundant woodcarvings. Or maybe a barn.

The holy fire on the central granite plinth had a round copper hood and chimney, made rich with delicate hammered designs, to carry the smoke out of the worshipers’ eyes, with the result that the domed roof was not smoke-blackened. A ring of arched windows below the dome let in light. The space was six-sided, one for the broad entryway and one for each of the five gods, opening to domed apses that must, could one see the temple from the top, make it look like a grand stone flower.

The niche for the Lady of Spring, whose season this now was, was redolent with offerings of fresh blooms. A few serious-looking townsmen were praying in the niche of the Father of Winter, god of, among other things, justice. Judges, lawyers? More likely litigants, Pen decided. An impressively pregnant woman knelt on a cushion before the altar of the Mother of Summer, praying perhaps for a safe delivery, or possibly just for the strength to stand up again. The Bastard’s niche, between the Daughter’s and the Mother’s, was presently empty.

Pen went by habit to the altar of the Son of Autumn. Only two fellows were there before him. The younger man, looking like a military recruit, knelt on one of the provided cushions, his hands up, palms out and fingers spread. Praying for luck? An older man lay prone on one of the large prayer rugs, arms out, hands clenching, in the attitude of deepest supplication. It was mere fancy that Pen imagined him a veteran, praying for forgiveness, but he couldn’t shake off the impression.

He picked out a cushion behind them and got down onto his knees without quite knowing what he was praying for. Or should be praying for. Or even Who he should be praying to. So he prayed for the safety and well-being of his family, and of all on the Jurald lands, and poor half-cheated Preita as, he was reminded, he had promised to do. Ruchia? Hardly the right god. He signed the tally, rose, and carried his knee cushion over to the Bastard’s niche.

Kneeling again, he realized he’d forgotten to pray for himself. How temporary was the transfer of his affairs to this new god? The Bastard was the master of disasters; supplicants more often prayed to avert His attentions, like paying a mercenary company to route around one’s town.

Would praying for knowledge be safe? Pen was certainly desperate for it. But the white god was the author of some pretty vicious ironies, as far as the prophecy-stories associated with His gifts told. Praying for the soul of Ruchia seemed late off the mark, as she was signed by her funeral miracle to be in His hands already. Pen contented himself with hoping she was happy there, whatever that meant in that profoundly altered state beyond death.

On impulse, Pen decided to pray for Desdemona. Granted, demons were already creatures of the god, though whether escaped prisoners or servants seemed unclear. Maybe they could be either, as one man might be good and another bad, or a man might go from bad to good or the reverse at different times of his life? He became aware that she had grown very quiet, like a tight, closed ball inside of him.

Demons, unkillable and, it appeared, immune to pain, did not fear much, but they feared their god, and the dissolution they would suffer if they fell back into His hands. Pen would too, he decided, if going to the gods meant his destruction and not his preservation. However it was that souls were sustained in the hands of their chosen gods. Or choosing gods.

Praying for her safety and well-being must cover it, since neither were possible without that substrate of continuing existence. A well-practiced prayer that he knew how to do. So he did, whispering the words aloud.

In all, he was relieved that no one answered.

He unfolded himself and went back to the portico, pausing a moment to take in the view up the lake. He wondered if that distant gray smudge sticking out into the water from the left shore might be Clee’s castle birthplace—not on a crag, for a change, but using a small island to provide it with a free moat.

Uncertain which of the descending avenues to take back to the Order’s house, Pen called softly, “Desdemona . . . ?”

No answer. She seemed still locked up inside him. Pen wondered if the gods really were more present in their temples, for all that the divines taught that They were always equally present everywhere. And if demons would know. Pen pursed his lips, then slipped into a silk mercer’s shop at the top of one street.

Most of the goods displayed were far beyond his means, but he negotiated for a bit of ribbon about the length of his arm without doing his little stock of coins too much damage. He found the mirror provided for customers to hold the cloth up to their faces, and braided the blue silk band through his queue. He turned his head and waited.

“Pretty!” murmured Desdemona.

Aha, that’s fetched her out. He must keep that trick in mind. He said only “Thank you,” and went back to the street, where he was then able to ask himself for directions. No wonder sorcerers have a reputation for being strange. That silent speech, if he ever gained the knack of it, would be a great convenience. Swinging his bundle of new old clothes, he started off.

A couple of housemaids giggled and blushed as he strode by, which Pen ignored. A glum and elderly washerwoman, shuffling along, looked up, and her wrinkled face broke into so unexpectedly sweet a smile that Pen had to smile back, and offer her a little bow. A shave and a hair wash worked on women of all sorts, it seemed. Which, since Desdemona might well be described as women of all sorts, was . . . opportune.

Turning down the steep street fronting the Order’s house, he saw Clee walking up it accompanied by a tall, black-bearded, soldierly fellow leading his horse. Pen finally saw what the term richly caparisoned meant, for it was a very well-dressed horse: saddle and bridle carved and stained and set with silver; its saddle blanket, admittedly atop a more practical sheepskin, of embroidered silk. He thought of Desdemona’s horse lecture, and was amused.

Two mounted guardsmen and a groom followed, reins slack. The bearded fellow bore a sword, in a town where very few men carried them, and a jeweled band on his hat.

Not much apart from the near-identical color and cut of their hair marked the two men as related. Clee was lanky, his hands thin and ink-stained, his clothing a knee-length townsman’s gown with trousers in a simple cut and fabric. His companion was thickset and muscular, his hands broad, suitable for maintaining a grip on a weapon in defiance of blows, his riding leathers heavy and less elaborate than what his horse was wearing. Pen suspected the straight black hair had actually borne a helmet at some point. Tough, solid, unsmiling.

Clee looked up and saw Penric, and his head went back in surprise; after a moment, he beckoned Pen nearer. The pair stopped to let him come up.

“Penric! I would like you to meet my brother, Lord Rusillin kin Martenden. Rusi, this is our visitor, Lord Penric kin Jurald, from the valley of Greenwell.”

Lord Rusillin spread his hand over his heart in the courteous gesture of a comrade of the Son, and offered Pen a reserved nod. Pen smiled and nodded back, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch his lips in the sign of the Bastard. “Five gods give you good day, my lord.”

The carved mouth made an effort at a smile. “Lord Penric. One god is giving you a difficult time, by what my brother tells me.”

Clee had gossiped about his condition? Pen supposed it was unusual, and therefore interesting. He couldn’t think Learned Tigney would like that. But then, very few people were as determinedly uninformative as Tigney. Pen managed, “So far, I have taken no harm from my accident. And it’s won me a trip to Martensbridge at the Temple’s expense, which I cannot fault.”

The smile grew more genuine. “You should join a mercenary company if you really want to see the world.”

Was Rusillin recruiting? That was one way for a lord to maintain his estate, certainly. “My brother Drovo did that,” said Pen.

“Good for him!”

Affability did not seem to come easily to the man, but Pen sensed he was trying. He therefore let this go by, struggling to remember what all he’d said to Clee about Drovo. By Clee’s lack of a wince, Pen hadn’t got round to mentioning his brother’s final fate, ah, that was right.

“Rusi collects and leads a company of men for the Earl Palatine of Westria,” said Clee, confirming Pen’s guess.

“A mercenary company that could find good uses for a sorcerer,” Lord Rusillin remarked, “though the Temple does not often release theirs to such services. The sorcerer might find such tasks profitable as well.”

Pen cleared his throat. “I’m neither a sorcerer nor Temple-sworn, at present. Or only an infant sorcerer. I acquired my demon less than a fortnight ago, and they are much weakened for a time by such transitions, I’ve learned. And I’ve had no training at all. So I’m afraid I’m not much use to anyone, just yet.”

“Hm. There’s a shame.” Rusillin gave him a kindly look, or perhaps it was pity.

“Well,” said Pen, extricating himself before Clee’s brother could start in on any more direct military propositioning, “I should report in to Learned Tigney. He’ll be wondering where I went. Honored to meet you, my Lord Rusillin.”

“And you, Lord Penric.”

He watched Pen keenly as he went inside, bending his head to make some remark to Clee that Pen did not hear, though Clee’s lips twitched. Pen was pleased that the two half-brothers seemed to have a reasonably fraternal relationship despite their differences in estate. There was certainly plenty to tempt Clee to envy, were he inclined to it.

He wondered if Desdemona had found Rusillin’s powerful figure impressive.

Pen went upstairs and settled with Tigney who, remarking sternly on his lateness, received as strict an accounting of Pen’s time as of his coins.

“Desdemona seemed to like the bathhouse,” Pen told him. “I hadn’t known creatures of spirit could partake of pleasures of the body quite so simply.”

Tigney’s lips thinned in his beard. “So dangerously, if the demon becomes ascendant. They devolve into fascination and excess, with no thought for preservation. As a man might ride a stolen horse to death.”

Controlling a wicked impulse to whinny, Pen excused himself to put his new treasures away and return to his station in the library.

The following afternoon, Pen had grown so absorbed in a Darthacan chronicle of Great Audar that he almost missed his chance.

The librarian had gone out, but a scribe and two acolytes were still working. They left one by one as Pen was perusing an account of the massacre at Holytree that seemed vastly different than one he had read from a Wealdean writer. He only looked up when Desdemona, with some effort, made his mouth say, “Hey!”

“What?”

“Now’s your moment. To the cabinet.”

Pen set his volume down and hurried over to it. “Wait. It’s still locked.” He wasn’t going to try to force it; the lock was sturdy, the woodwork was fine, and the destruction would be obvious.

“Put your hand on the lock.”

Baffled, Pen did so. A surge of heat seemed to flow from his palm. Within the metal mechanism, something clicked.

“Could you always do that?” he asked.

“Not for the first few days.” He had the sense of a convalescent tottering happily around a room after too long abed, delighted to be working weakened muscles again.

“But . . . Tigney must know. Hasn’t he told the librarian?”

“To be sure, which is why you have never been left alone here. This oversight will not last. So hasten.”

Willingly, Pen did so. The cabinet door creaked wide.

The contents were slightly disappointing; a mere two shelves of volumes, less than forty in all, the other two shelves bare. Nothing sparkled or growled or seemed to need to be chained like a vicious dog. His hands reached out eagerly. “Which one?”

“Not that, no, no . . . that one.”

“It’s not the thickest.”

“No, but it’s the best. Three-fourths of what’s here is rubbish. Now close up. She’s coming back.”

Pen swung the door shut; the latch clicked. He set his hand to it. “And lock up again?”

“We can’t do that.”

“Wait, why not?”

“Locking increases order. Too advanced for you right now.”

The disorder that would result if the librarian thought to check the lock was a bit frightening to contemplate, if one wasn’t a durable demon. Pen scurried back to his bench, shoved the filched volume into his tunic, and opened his Darthacan chronicle once more. The words seemed to dance before his eyes, and the volume tucked under his heart to burn. Footsteps sounded from the hall.

“Don’t leave right away,” muttered Desdemona, “and don’t make a show of it, or offer limping explanations. Go out exactly as you always do.”

To Pen’s relief, the first one back was the scribe, who gave Pen a cordial nod and took up her quill again. The librarian, returning a few minutes later, looked around as if satisfied and went to her desk, where she took up a perpetual copying task that she fitted in between other duties, much like a woman with her knitting. Pen read two more pages without taking in a word, then rose, tucked the parchment slip with his name on it into the page where he’d stopped, and set the volume on the librarian’s desk with his usual “Thank you.”

She nodded back, with a mildly approving look, and Pen made his escape.

Unsure where else to hide, Pen went back to Clee’s room; to his relief, the dedicat was out. He closed the door, set a chair in front of it to slow anyone entering, jounced down on his bed, and opened the stolen book. Borrowed book. It wasn’t as though he meant to take it out of the house. And he certainly meant to put it back. Undetected, by preference.

Essentials of Sorcery and the Management of Demons, the title page read. The Work of Learned Ruchia of Martensbridge, Senior Divine and Sorceress of the Bastard’s Order. With Aid from Learned Helvia of Liest and Learned Amberein of Saone. Volume One.

“Hey,” said Pen, indignant. “You wrote this!”

“Not we,” sighed Desdemona. “Ruchia’s doings. We would not have had the patience. And a tedious great deal of work it was, too. We threatened to throw her off a bridge, once, if she would not finish it up and be done.”

Distracted by this, Pen found his next sentence jammed up in his mouth. When he had untangled his tongue, he asked instead, “Could you have?”

“No,” sighed Desdemona. “Not her. Neither from a bridge nor from our being.” She added after a little, “Best rider ever.”

“Couldn’t you just tell me all this?”

“Your voice would grow hoarse, and Tigney would wonder.” Another pause. “The Temple offers many warnings about demons, and they are not all wrong. You may trust Ruchia. Also, you will not be able to waste precious time arguing with her.”

Taking the hint, Pen turned to the first page. This text was handwritten, not printed from woodblock, which made it easier to read, but also made him worry about how few copies might exist. He tried to settle himself and pay attention, and not read so fast in his excitement that he failed to take it all in.

After a time, he asked, “Desdemona, what does she mean by enhanced perception?

“Hm. Can you juggle?”

“I can manage three balls. I have trouble with four or more.” And there had been strong domestic objections to his attempt to try it with burning brands, like the acrobat he’d seen in the marketplace.

“Find three things. Or four.”

The room was not well supplied with balls, apples, or other substitutes, but he finally rolled up two pairs of socks. “So, and?”

“So, juggle.”

The three sock balls went as usual; the four, after a brief encouraging run, ended with Pen fishing dust-smeared sock balls out from under the beds.

“Now, again,” said Desdemona.

The sock balls rose—and slowed. They curved in the same trajectories, but Pen felt he might almost take a sip of ale between having to attend to each. His hands moved more languidly, though, and with more effort, as if he were stroking through water.

“That was fun,” he said, collecting all four out of the air and stopping.

“We can’t keep that up for very long,” said Desdemona, “but it is useful in a pinch.”

“Should I wish to take up the trade of a marketplace juggler, I suppose.”

“It works as well for dodging blows. Whether from fists or blades.”

“Oh.” Pen thought this through. “Could I dodge arrows?”

“If there are not too many.”

“Could I snatch arrows out of the air . . . ?”

“Only if you were wearing thick gloves.”

“Could I—”

“Pen?”

“Yes?”

“Keep reading.”

“Ah. Yes.”

After a time he asked, “Could I shoot fireballs from my fingertips?”

Desdemona vented a long-suffering sigh. “No. You may light very, very small fires.”

Pen pulled over the candle stump and held his forefinger to the black wick. “Show me.” A moment later, he snatched his hand back. “Ow!” He sucked on the scorched finger. The flame licked up, smoked, and steadied.

“I see it will take you a little practice,” she said serenely. He thought she was laughing at him, but it was hard to tell. He was reminded that she didn’t have to feel the pain.

“I confess I don’t see much advantage over flint and steel or a spill. Unless you didn’t have them, I suppose.”

“You may also do the same from across the room. Or across the street.” She added after a moment, “Fire is beloved of the god. You only need a very, very small flame, shrewdly placed, and the fire will do the rest. With equal ease, you can light a candle—or burn down a city.”

Having no desire to burn down a city, Pen dismissed that last. “I wish I’d had this skill when struggling with all those rainy campfires, when we were up in the hills trying to make meat out of sheep. I would have been the most popular man on the hunt.”

Desdemona was silent for a moment, then said, “It is one of many skills best kept discreetly hidden. For if it is known, any accidental fire within a mile could be blamed on you. And no way for you to prove your innocence.”

“Oh.”

“In fact, most of the skills are dual-edged that way.”

Pen digested that. Was that one more reason that real Temple sorcerers were so quiet and elusive?

He turned the next page.

It was the succeeding afternoon before he could steal another session with the book, feigning to be going up to his room to work on repairs of his new old clothing. After the first few chapters, all seeming very practical, Ruchia’s prose grew denser, and the subtleties of what she was trying to describe more slippery.

“I don’t wholly understand what she’s trying to say about the magical friction,” he complained to Desdemona, who had been silent for so long he’d wondered if she’d fallen asleep.

“Hm. Pull that candle over, and light it and blow it out a few times, as fast as you can.”

He did so, fascinated with the process. He still found it easier to point when making the little flash shoot up where he intended, though not with his hand held so close. He could dimly sense how, with practice, he might not even need that aid. After a dozen rounds of the exercise, he shook out his hand, which had grown uncomfortably hot even though he’d not touched the flame. He rubbed it with the other.

“Feel that, do you?”

“Yes?”

“If a sorcerer demands too much strong magic of his demon, too quickly, his body will go beyond mere fever to its own destruction.”

Pen’s brow furrowed. “Are you saying a sorcerer could burst into flames?”

“Mm, no, the body is too wet for that. He would more just . . . burst. Like a grilled sausage splitting its casing.”

Pen stared down at his torso. “Yech. Does this happen often?” Surely any demise so spectacular would have been talked about more.

“No, not really. Usually the sorcerer will pass out before that. Perhaps suffer the usual aftereffects of a bad fever. But it is certainly possible in theory.”

Pen wished she didn’t sound so enthusiastic about the idea. Revolted but not deterred, he returned to the book.

A long while later, he frowned and thumbed back to the title page. “Where is volume two? What is volume two? Should I have it? Is there a copy in that cabinet?”

“There is, but it is beyond you for the moment. It is mostly about the application of sorcery to medicine.”

He wrinkled his nose, staring at the page. “Did Learned Helvia and Learned Amberein help Ruchia with that part?”

“Oh, yes. Ruchia also consulted with another physician or two from the Mother’s Order, on the more obscure points.”

He considered the timing. It didn’t add up. “Wait. Were Helvia and Amberein still alive at the writing?”

“Not exactly. Maybe in the sense that their knowledge survived the way Ruchia’s voice has survived on those pages. Ruchia still credited them anyway, by way of a memorial. She spent the most time on the second volume, by way of restitution, she said, for the unplanned loss of us from the Mother’s hand.”

Pen wondered if there was a very disappointed young physician somewhere, missing, due to Pen’s roadside accident, the Temple demon she or he had been promised. “Can I learn all of that?”

“Perhaps. In due course. You would do well to spend some time studying with the Mother’s people first before trying much. But how much of your life do you really wish to devote to treating people’s worms?”

“Leaving aside the views of the worms, healing seems a safer sort of magic than some of these other things.”

“Oh, no. It is by far the most dangerous. And the most subtle. Most dangerous because most subtle, we suppose.”

“I suppose . . . if anything went wrong . . . is it possible to kill a person by magic?”

“No,” said Desdemona firmly, but then, after a long pause, “Yes. But only once.”

“Why only once?”

“Death opens a door to the gods, through which they can, for a moment, reach into the world directly. The demon would be naked and helpless before our Master, and be plucked out like an eyeball before the sorcerer could take a breath. And be delivered to the Bastard’s hell, and its utter destruction.”

“Even if it were not murder, but, say, a medical accident while trying to treat a person? The intent not harm, but good?”

“That is part of what makes the practice so challenging. And not for the novice.”

Pen curled up atop his blankets and hugged his knees. “Desdemona—what happened to Tigney’s demon? Do you know?”

A sense of deep discomfort. “Yes, for Ruchia supervised it.”

“What, then?”

“The theory is covered four chapters on.”

The last chapter in the book, Pen realized. “Yes, but I want the story. The short tale, at least.”

A long silence. Surly? Uncertain? Untrusting . . . ?

Pen drew breath and said more firmly, “Desdemona, tell me.”

Compelled—so, he could compel—she reluctantly replied, “Even at the beginning, he was overmatched with a demon too strong for him. For a few years, all seemed well, and he reveled in his new powers. But then his demon ascended, and made off with his body. He fled to Orbas. It took the Temple a year to find him, subdue him, and bring him back.”

“And?” he prodded, when she did not at once go on.

“And they brought him before the Saint of Idau.”

“The town of Idau possesses a saint? I had not heard of such.”

“A very specialized saint, dedicated wholly to the Bastard. Through him, the god eats demons, and so draws them back out of the world.”

“What happens to the sorcerer?”

“Nothing, save whatever grief he may suffer at the loss of such powers. However balanced by relief at the return of his own control. Tigney,” she said bitterly, “recovered entirely.”

Pen’s face scrunched. “Desdemona—did you witness this event? This . . . eating?”

“Oh, aye.”

“What was it like?”

“Have you ever witnessed an execution?”

“Once, at Greenwell. There was a man hanged for robbing and murdering on the road. Learned Lurenz took us, he said, so that we might learn the true wages of crime. Just the boys, though.”

“And did you?”

“Well . . . highwaymen did not seem so thrilling to me after that.”

“Just like that, then, I expect. If you were a demon.”

“Ah.” It was Pen’s turn to fall silent.

He was several pages farther on when Desdemona said, “But if you ever try to take us to Idau, we will try to fight you. With all our powers.”

Pen swallowed. “Noted.”

Pen was closing on the end of the same chapter, a little stiff from sitting, when the door rattled. Swiftly, he thrust the book under his pillow and took up the bit of half-done mending he had ready for such an occasion, but it was only Clee.

“Ah, there you are,” said Clee. “I was looking for you.”

“Does Learned Tigney want something of me?” Finally?

“Not at all. But my brother Rusi has invited the both of us to dine with him at Castle Martenden this evening.”

Pen’s interest was caught, despite his frustration at being interrupted in the middle of a difficult passage. Castle Martenden, it was said, had never been taken by force of arms, although that might partly be because no great wars had yet come to it, merely local squabbles. Which could be as fatal as any wider struggle to those involved, no doubt.

“I should like that. But, tonight? It’s a long walk.”

Clee smiled. “Rusi is a better host than that. There are horses waiting for us outside the gate.”

“Are we to stay the night?”

“There’ll be a good moon later, so if the weather holds fine, we need not. But Rusi will provide all that we need if we decide to delay till morning.”

Gratified both with the prospect of escaping this narrow house for an evening, and an opportunity to see so fascinating a fortress, Pen hurried to don what of his new clothes were now usable. Clee gave him no opening to better hide Ruchia’s book, unfortunately, as he waited politely for Pen to ready himself, and then ushered him out the door before him.

“I should ask leave of Learned Tigney,” Pen remembered as they started down the stairs.

“No need,” said Clee. “I already have. You aren’t a prisoner here, you know.”

And yet not quite free, if Clee was detailed to be his duenna. The scribe was by way of being Tigney’s private secretary, trusted with his correspondence; also with his captive, it seemed. Pen wondered if Clee also worked with the ciphers, and if it would be wrong to ask him about them. “Good.” Giving Learned Cautious no chance to reverse his ruling, Pen followed Clee directly out to the street.

A brisk walk brought them to the old stone bridge; upstream and down, several millwheels turned and creaked in the steady outflow. They passed over the arch and through the lesser half of Martensbridge. This part of town was devoted to serving the caravans that came down from the north passes, and boasted warehouses, tanners, saddlers, smiths, and lodgings for travelers who wished to stay close to their goods. Beyond the gate that served the road flanking the lake, they found a small livery. Two horses waited, bespoke and already saddled. They seemed better mannered than the usual rental remounts.

Watching Clee swing up readily to his saddle, Pen asked, “Are these your brother’s beasts?”

Clee nodded, and reined around confidently to lead Pen onto the road north. They walked their mounts along side by side for a while, threading local traffic; farm carts going, at this hour, mostly home from the markets, animals being walked to their fates at city butchers.

“Were you taught horsemanship as a child?” Pen asked.

“Yes, we had all the usual castle sports. Castle Martenden was a good place to grow up. I wasn’t apprenticed to the Order till I turned fourteen, as directed in our father’s will.”

The usual age for such placements. “Had the old lord a large family?”

“Not very, to my benefit. Rusi and I were the only boys. Rusi’s elder sister is long married, and mine chose the Daughter’s Order, and now teaches at a Lady-school down the valley of the Linnet.”

“It sounds a reasonably happy family life, then.” Pen hoped Clee would hear the delicate inquiry in that; or, if he didn’t, so much the better.

Evidently he did, for his lips turned up, wryly. “Rusi’s lady mother always treated us children fairly. And Rusi is my elder by a decade. So even if his parents had died in the opposite order, and our father had married my mother, very unlikely considering her station and lack of dower, I still would not be the heir. Nor greatly suited to the task.”

“You aren’t jealous of Rusillin’s rank?”

Clee eyed him sidelong. “I’d have been a fool not to have thought of it, and a greater fool not to have thought better of it. Are you jealous of your brother Rolsch?”

“No,” Pen realized, never having considered it quite like that before. “Rolsch plagued me in many ways, when I was growing up, if not how Drovo did—he was enough older to be above such humor, I think, as well as not being naturally inclined to it. But I never wanted his place. Still don’t.”

“That’s fortunate, then.”

As the road grew less crowded farther from town, Clee led them first to a trot and then to an easy canter, and Pen followed, heartened to have found another commonality with the prickly dedicat. After about an hour’s ride in the late spring afternoon, the waters sparkling to their right and the hills rising to their left, they rounded a curve of the lake, and the gray bulk of Castle Martenden loomed up before them.

It perched on an islet only a dozen paces out from shore, its walls seeming to grow out of the rock that was its foundation. High and solid and forbidding, they followed the contours of the islet’s bounds. This had resulted in something other than foursquare, though four round towers with conical slate caps jutted up at its corners, with a fifth for luck over the drawbridge.

The village of Martenden straggled along the road, a mere farm hamlet, though the fields and vines climbing the slopes beyond looked fair enough. A smithy, an alehouse, a leather-worker’s, a carpenter’s shop, a small inn for travelers too soon benighted to push on to the city at the lake’s end. Clee followed his glance.

“Its earlier lords had more hopes of this place,” he observed, “but they were all siphoned away by the Temple and the city merchants.”

“Mm,” said Pen. “I expect the city exploits the river for its mills, as well. And it is the logical end-point of lake traffic.”

“There is that.”

Clee led them right up to the small arched bridge and drawbridge, clopping across and returning the salute of a soldier standing guard with easy familiarity. Door and portcullis were all blocked open on this peaceful day. Inside the court, paved with fitted flagstones, the place was not so bleak. Arched porticos with stone columns ran along two sides of the irregular space. Atop them two stories of wooden galleries overlooked this light well, suggesting that those living within did not actually have to grope about in darkness at all hours. As they dismounted and a groom hurried up to take charge of their horses, Lord Rusillin himself came out on a balcony, saw them, and waved. He made his way down an end staircase, boots scuffing in an alert man’s rhythm, to the courtyard.

“Ah, you have secured our guest,” said Rusillin amiably to his brother. “Any difficulties along the way?”

“None whatsoever,” Clee assured him.

Making the hand-over-heart salute, he went on to Pen, “Lord Penric. Welcome to Castle Martenden.”

“Thank you for your invitation, Lord Rusillin. I was most interested to see it.” Pen looked up past the galleries toward the battlements. “And from it.”

Rusillin smiled. “Our supper is almost ready. But we could certainly take you up to the sentry walk.”

The castle’s lord led back up the stairs he had descended, and from the third floor over to a short set of stone steps. Pen followed eagerly, Clee bringing up the rear. Then onto the walkway behind the high, crenellated outer wall. Pen leaned over to gaze up and down the lake, imagining being a sentry here, on the watch for enemies. Or, he supposed, merchants’ boats laden with rich cargo from north or south, but he had not heard Castle Martenden accused of lake piracy.

Ten miles distant to the south, he could just make out the walled city. The lake curved slightly here, narrowing, then its northern arm struck out an even longer distance to the smaller town that overlooked its headwaters, lacking a princess-archdivine to raise its status and its walls, but doing well as an embarkation point for trade. Beyond the curve, a pair of small green islands decorated the blue surface, home, he understood, mainly to goats, sheep, and a few reclusive religious mystics. The westering sun breathed a golden glow over it all.

“Beautiful,” Pen said, awed. “Has this place ever been besieged in your time, Lord Rusillin?”

“Not in mine,” Rusillin replied easily. “My father fought off an incursion of the Earl of Westria, in his day, but at the ridges and along the roads. His troops never reached here. Or Martensbridge, little though the town remembers.”

“Yet now you work for Westria?”

Rusillin’s lips stretched. “The earl palatine learned his lesson. Far better to have us with him than against.”

Jurald Court really was a farmhouse, compared to this, Pen conceded.

“What lies beneath?” Pen asked, turning back to look down into the paved courtyard, grown shadowed as the light angled.

“You’ll see the lower levels after supper,” Rusillin promised. “There is an interesting water gate off the main stores. Very useful for bringing goods in and out.”

“I suppose this place would never run short of water in a siege,” Pen mused. “Another advantage over a crag.”

“To be sure,” Rusillin agreed, and led the back to the stairs. He pointed out a few more militarily useful features along the way, sounding as house-proud as any goodwife. Were the goodwife enamored of serious mayhem.

They walked, boots sounding on the boards, along the third-floor gallery to what proved not a lordly dining hall but a small chamber. Two slit windows on the lake side, framing an unlit fireplace built into the stone wall, provided a faint illumination, and Pen blinked, tempted for a moment to call on Desdemona’s seeing-in-the-dark skill, but his eyes adjusted soon enough. Good wax candles, only one frugally lit, graced an age-darkened sideboard crowded with covered dishes. Clee went to share the flames around among the holders there and upon the round table set only for three. The lord meant to have the luxury of privacy tonight with his interesting guest, apparently. At his brother’s polite request, Clee took the role of server, cheerfully and without resentment. Smiling, he offered Pen the pewter basin to wash his hands first.

The repast was rich in meats and thankfully sparing of cheese: venison, slices of beef, racks of lamb, and a whole chicken were presented, which Rusillin carved with the speed and dexterity of a surgeon accomplishing an amputation. A stew of spiced root vegetables, any winter-stored tiredness masked by their buttery sauce, and a salat of fresh spring greens improved the variety still more. The wine was pale yellow, sweet, and from kin Martenden’s own land, Pen learned. The two brothers, Pen noticed, drank sparingly, so he tried to do the same, for all that each took turns topping up his glass.

Plainly primed by Clee, his host exerted himself to draw Pen out about his youth at Jurald Court. Pen chose not to spoil the mood by mentioning Drovo’s death, but he did ask questions in turn about the mercenary life, wondering if his brother had found it satisfying before its truncation. Talking about his command, Rusillin sounded more like Rolsch than like Drovo, more calculations and logistics and complaints of dubious suppliers than thrilling tales of heroism. Garrison life ran mostly dull, but Rusillin’s company had seen bloodshed in two clashes over a disputed valley on the earl palatine’s far borders, and in one peasant revolt over, of all things, an attempt by the earl to eradicate packs of feral dogs plaguing the region.

Rusillin topped up Pen’s glass again, with an encouragement to drink pointed with assorted toasts. Pen remembered that Drovo had been at a drunken party with his friends when they’d been recruited in Greenwell, though he had defended his choice with vigor even after he’d sobered up. Could a man be made dead drunk and drafted into mercenary service the way the king of Darthaca had once been rumored to press sailors during one of his wars? Surely it would be easier to run away from a mercenary company than from a ship at sea. He wet his lips and smiled cautiously through the toasts.

Rusillin then inquired genially about Pen’s accidental acquisition of Desdemona. Pen told the tale, again; the repetition was beginning to seem more like the memory of a memory than the thing itself. Clee was very interested in the details of his swoon, which Pen on the whole was unable to supply. Growing a touch morose, perhaps with the wine, Pen dwelt on his broken betrothal.

“Does the pretty Preita await you?” asked Rusillin.

“I doubt it,” sighed Pen. “Her parents were no doubt entertaining better offers for her hand by the time I rode out of town.”

“Mm, sad.”

Clee made to refill his glass in consolation, frowning to find no room. “And has the demon awoken within you?”

“A little,” Pen confessed, reluctant to recount such lunatic experiences before this company. And he could hardly describe Ruchia’s book to Clee, deep in Tigney’s confidences.

“So it survived the abrupt transfer all intact?” said Rusillin.

“Oh, yes. Seems to have.”

Clee pressed more meat upon him which Pen, stuffed, was compelled to refuse. “I can hardly hold any more of your abundant hospitality, my lord,” he apologized.

“It was the least I could do. I have one more indulgence to offer.”

Rusillin went to the sideboard, and came back with three goblets fashioned of the pale green glass of the district, passing them around with his own hands like a very superior butler. They proved filled with a golden liqueur scented of flowers. Pen had thought such things were served in smaller vessels, but the lord of Martenden seemed not a man to stint his table.

“Try this cordial. It is distilled by a woman in our own village.” Rusillin saluted Pen with his glass, and sipped, as did Clee.

Pen lifted his own goblet in grateful return toast. As he set it to his lips, a voice inside his head began, Penric, Penric, Pen, pen, penpenpen Pen! Pen! It sounded as panting and effortful as someone breaking through a brick wall with a sledgehammer. His eyes widened, and he smiled in concealment of his confusion.

Desdemona . . . ? What? he tried back.

Take only a small sip, and hold it in your mouth. Don’t swallow. Be ready to spit it into your napkin.

Not knowing what else to do, or why, he did as instructed. The cordial was on the whole pleasant, very sweet and complex, but with a bitter undertaste.

Aha. Syrup of poppies only. We can handle that. Drink, then, but very slowly. Do not betray your knowledge.

Why not?

Because we want to see what transpires.

Ruchia, Pen recalled, had been a spy. Trusted agent. Who sailed troubled waters, whatever they were, aside from a prime example of Tigney’s maddening vagueness. Pen felt he had embarked all unknowing into a very strange storm.

The liquid in his mouth acquired an even nastier taste, and Desdemona whispered, against the evidence of Pen’s senses, Good. It is made safe. Now swallow.

Pen gulped, and managed, without choking much, to say “Most interesting. It smells of chamomile blossoms.”

“Yes, I believe that is one of the ingredients, though the goodwife guards her recipe even from me. Chamomile is said to be very soothing.” Rusillin sipped from his own goblet with evident pleasure, and regarded Pen benignly. When not laced with syrup of poppies, the stuff was evidently a deal more palatable.

The conversation grew more desultory as Pen slowly drank. The two brothers were now watching him with all the attention of a cat or a dog, spoiled by tidbits at the table, tracking every morsel their master ate, waiting to pounce on a prize. When Pen yawned, not really feigned after the meal and all that untainted wine, they swayed with it. Pen’s body grew warm, though the room was cool as the lake-light from the slit windows faded to gray and shadows of evening encroached, and he undid the collar of his tunic.

Finishing his glass, Pen remarked, “Very soothing indeed, my lord.”

“I shall tell the goodwife how much you enjoyed it,” Rusillin promised, and took the glass away again to the sideboard where, his back to the room, he refilled it.

Clumsy, opined Desdemona. I suspect poisoning guests is not in his usual line. Though I suppose greater subtlety would be wasted on you.

And why was she an expert? Pen had no trouble producing a frog-eyed goggle as Rusillin handed him a second glass. Its undertaste was even more bitter than the first.

They’re not taking any chances, are they? mused Desdemona, as the stuff turned vile in his mouth.

Now what should I do? asked Pen, starting to panic. I’m going to throw up soon.

Keep playing along. You may now start to feign a drunken stupor. I’m sure you’ve witnessed such things.

Not only witnessed, but experienced, if only the once. Wine-sickness, like a hanging, had been a salutary lesson he’d taken to heart at a young age.

“You could use this cordial as a bedtime composer,” Pen remarked, letting his speech slur.

“Truly,” said Clee, sipping along with him from a glass in which the level had barely dropped.

Pen yawned again, more widely. “Sorry, m’lor’,” he muttered, and let his head fall, pillowed on his arms. Silence fell around the table.

Bastard’s tears, he demanded of Desdemona, now what?

Stay limp. If they think their ploy effective, they will not bother to bind you. A considering pause. Not that bindings are any great impediment, but why make extra work for us?

Rusillin’s voice finally came, “Is he out? Check his eyes.”

Clee lifted Pen’s head, painfully by the hair, and pulled back an eyelid. Pen suppressed a yelp and tried to make his eyes roll up.

“Not wholly,” Clee judged, accurately, “but I expect this will do.” He took a fraught breath. “Are you ready?”

“Yes. Let’s get the business over with.”

Between them, they lifted Pen from his chair and supported him, an arm dragged over each brotherly shoulder.

“Ha,” huffed Clee. “Lord Cowherd is not as light as he looks.”

“These wiry types can fool you, sometimes,” Rusillin observed. “I was beginning to think he was never going to fall over.”

For conspirators, they didn’t sound very passionate, Pen thought. Or even very excited. He felt a bit indignant about that. The fright was all on his part. He let his eyes slit open.

Together, they manhandled him out onto the gallery, now deeply shadowed with the evening though the sky was still pale, only the first stars showing. Down a back stair. Past the level of the courtyard, and down a darker, narrower stair, the walls partly dressed stone, partly seeming carved out of the living rock. While Clee supported Pen’s half-limp form, Rusillin lifted a ring of keys from his belt and unlocked a stout wooden door. They dragged Pen through, and Rusillin turned and locked it again.

Shouldn’t we be trying to escape? Pen asked urgently.

Soon. There are two of them. The chance must be good, or it is likely to be wasted.

There were two of him, too, Pen thought, or perhaps thirteen depending on if you counted the lioness and the mare, but he still felt outnumbered. He felt outnumbered just by Rusillin.

Pen wasn’t sure if they’d brought him to a cellar, a storeroom, an armory, or a dungeon. The long chamber seemed to partake of all those descriptions. The roof was supported with pillared arches of stone, graceful enough for a minor Darthacan temple. High on the lakeside wall, a line of thin, iron-barred windows like half-moons let in the last of the silvery twilight. A bundle of pikes rested off the floor in a pair of wooden cradles. Barrels and crates were stacked all around, but along one wall lay a pile of old straw, with several sets of ugly manacles hanging down. That the irons were unpeopled and rusty was not all that reassuring.

The brothers dragged Pen to the far end of the chamber and let him down, rather gently, to the cold rock floor. He twitched and half rolled, and caught a glimpse of the nearby water gate. From this side, it was a stone ramp down to a broad, low arch above the lake, which lapped gently at its base. A barred portcullis, raised at present, protected the opening in the thick walls, and a further set of heavy doors were pulled back. On the ramp, a skiff was drawn up half out of the water, its oars shipped. Faint reflections rippled on the curving roof of the chamber.

“Let’s have a better light for this,” said Rusillin, and Clee pulled a tinderbox from his belt pouch and went to kneel by a row of part-used tallow candles set up along the edge of the ramp and shielded from drafts by coarse glass vases. Half-a-dozen smoky yellow lights soon sprang up, which, Pen realized, made hardly a difference to him. Another advantage lost to delay?

When Rusillin turned his back for a moment, going to rummage among his stores, Pen seized the chance to turn his head, but the only other item of interest in view was an old wool-stuffed mattress flopped on the floor nearby, a blanket and pillow piled at its foot. So why aren’t I laid on that? If it was where kindly kidnappers kept their victims while waiting to sell them on to some evil merchant rowing in from the lake, shouldn’t it be over by the manacles?

He forced himself to stay limp, if still slit-eyed, as the brothers came back to gaze down at him in a moment of contemplation.

“That was easy,” said Clee. “As you said, let him walk to us. Like a calf to the market.”

“Bit of an innocent, I’d say,” said Rusillin.

“Bit of a fool. Well, Lord Cowherd.” Clee prodded Pen with his toe. “Sorry about this, but needs must drive.”

“He’ll feel no pain. You, or I?” Rusillin held up a long, wicked war-knife, obtained from somewhere among the stored armaments. Its edge gleamed new-honed.

“It’s your trade. Probably your reward, if the demon jumps to you.”

“Those are the odds, correct? The demon always jumps to the strongest man in reach, you said.”

“So Tigney claims.”

“In that case, why it did not jump to one of those temple guards the sorceress trailed?”

“Can’t guess.” Clee shrugged. “He did say it was the most powerful demon he’d ever overseen in all his stable. You have to wonder why it jumped to the divine, back in her day.”

“It shall like its new home, I daresay,” said Rusillin tranquilly.

They’re not trying to kidnap me. They’re trying to kidnap Desdemona!

So Pen wasn’t the merchandise, from the robber lord’s point of view; he was just the wagon. I thought a demon could not kill and hope to survive?

Other way around, said Desdemona. A sorcerer cannot kill with magic and keep his demon. But he can certainly be killed, and lose it. If it jumps in time.

So was he to be summarily unbetrothed a second time, before he lost his life? He felt madly bereft in prospect. Surely a demon must prefer a powerful captain, who would lead it to the feast of all chaos on a battlefield, over, over clumsy Lord Cowherd. The epithet stung.

Not, said Desdemona tensely, if we scramble. Now, Pen.

As Rusillin’s thick fingers made to close on his throat, and the blade descended, candlelight flickering along its quite excessive length, Pen jerked and rolled away.

“Bastard’s teeth!” Rusillin swore. “I thought he was out. Clee, grab him!”

Pen pushed to his knees, then to his feet, as Clee made an oddly slow swung at him. He evaded the dedicat and looked for the door, but Rusillin was already in the way. He slashed at Pen’s belly, which barely twisted out of reach in time. Pen dodged around a pillar. Rusillin dodged the other way. Clee cut him off, seizing him around the shoulders. “Gah, he moves like a snake!”

Rusillin lunged.

As the blade approached Pen’s belly, a spiral of rust ran up its length; by the time the hilt rammed home, as slowly to Pen’s eye as a bead falling through honey, it had shattered into a thousand bright orange flecks that burst into the air like dandelion fluff, and about as lethal.

“What!” Pen and Rusillin both grunted, practically in unison.

Fire, said Desdemona cheerfully, takes many forms.

Clee still clutched him from behind. Pen wrenched away. Rusillin tossed away his hilt, grabbed up a pike, and swung it between Pen and his goal.

“Demon, capitulate!” cried Clee. “We offer you a better master! Tigney means to betray you to the Saint of Idau! I copied out the letter! Aid that fool you ride at your own peril!”

Desdemona, as excited as a hunting dog let loose upon its prey, seemed to hesitate, freezing within Pen.

Pen, backing away from both men, tried frantically to counter. “But which master? Have you thought it through? Whichever one of you she takes will fall helpless in a swoon, and the other can cut his throat again.” Could he divide his enemies?

Rusillin grinned horribly, swinging his pike around. “I think not. If it jumps to me, Clee still cannot take my lands nor my command, so his risks are doubled. If it jumps to him, well, I am just as pleased to skip the risks, and have a loyal sorcerer secretly in my service, whose rewards will be rich.”

“You can’t imagine we were so stupid as not to work that out in advance,” chided Clee, also grabbing a pike and getting between Pen and the door. Together, both men strove to back him up, jabbing and feinting and allowing him no escape. They seemed ruffled, but not enraged. It felt very strange to be murdered so indifferently. Rusillin, Pen thought, would be just this cold and level-headed in battle, perhaps had been.

Surely any Bastard’s demon must prefer so potent a soldier.

“What,” jeered Desdemona aloud, “and have to look at your ugly face in every mirror till we found a way to throw you off? The Bastard my Master spare us that!”

“Des, don’t bait them!” yelped Pen, horrified.

Clee blinked in confusion, but held his block. Rusillin’s brawny arms drew back his heavy pike, preparing for a lethal lunge.

Pen set their hair on fire.

Clee dropped his pike and yelled. Rusillin, made of sterner stuff, tried to complete his lunge first, his pike’s hooked blade banging and scraping into the stone wall where Pen had been an instant before.

Every trouser tie, buckle, and toggle on both men’s clothing worked loose at once. Rusillin’s next lunge was much impeded by his trousers falling down around his thighs, catching him up; Pen swore Desdemona giggled. As both men staggered around beating out the flames on their heads and tripping over their clothing, she cried, Make for the water gate!

Pen ran down the ramp, tried to push off the skiff, which didn’t budge, saw Rusillin out of the corner of his eye hopping furiously toward him, and shot through the low archway. The water splashed cold around his ankles, calves, thighs, crotch, aaah! He wailed, “But Des, I can’t swim!” as his next step landed on nothing, and he plunged over into a drop-off as steep and sudden as the castle wall’s rise above him.

That’s all right, said Desdemona smugly. Umelan can. Let her guide you.

Umelan made it known in a violent surge of revulsion that she was not used to waters this cold, nor a body so lean and unbuoyant, but somehow Pen floundered to the surface and began a dog’s paddle out into the growing darkness. He blinked water out of his eyes and swiveled his head, looking for the direction to shore.

Make for the opposite bank, Desdemona advised. Rusillin will be sure to have men out searching the nearer one for you before long.

“I can’t swim that far!” Pen gasped.

If you relax and slow down, you will find that you can.

Pen kept paddling. Gradually, his strokes lengthened, and his trailing legs found a rhythm like a frog’s which, if they did not propel him much, at least did not impede him. His frantic gasping steadied.

Until he heard Clee’s voice, too close behind him: “There he is! I can see his hair in the water.”

Pen turned to find the shadowy silhouette of the skiff putting out from the water gate. Two men, it seemed, could shift its weight where one man could not. The oars creaked and screeched in their locks as Rusillin pulled mightily. Could Rusillin beat Pen down with an oar and drown him? Hook him with a pike, and drag him back to the castle like some long, unwieldy fish?

Now, that wasn’t bright, murmured Desdemona happily. Pen’s body warmed in pulsing waves, in the cold water.

Clee, standing to peer toward Pen, a pike gripped in his hands like a harpoon, swore in surprise as his foot went through the bottom of the boat. He lost his hold on the weapon, which sank, weighted by its big steel blade. The oarlocks worked loose, and the oars skittered along the thwarts; Rusillin cursed. The skiff settled sluggishly.

Over the high castle walls, a voice floated up in a frightened bellow: “Fire! FIRE!” Other voices took up the chorus.

Rusillin looked out into the darkness after his retreating prize, back over his shoulder at his other threatened treasure, and, using one oar as a paddle, began to turn his water-weighted craft around.

“Rusi,” said Clee in an alarmed voice, “I can’t swim either!”

“Then you’d better grab that oar and get to work,” Rusillin snarled. “The other fool will drown in this cold soon enough.”

At that point, it was really redundant for Rusillin’s oar blade to snap off as he dug it into the water.

Very quietly, Pen turned on his back and began paddling in the opposite direction.

The moon was rising over the eastern hills by the time Pen pulled himself up over the rocks, crawled a few paces, and flopped down in some lovely soft mud. He was chilled through and wheezing. He never wanted to move again.

At length, curiosity overcame his torpor, and he made the effort to roll onto his side and peer back across the lake. The sparks and orange glow that had been soaring from the castle like a chimney fire had finally stopped, ah. That was a nice castle, he thought sadly. Too bad.

Rough justice, murmured Desdemona, sounding nearly as exhausted as Pen. If you want the other kind, you shouldn’t draw the attention of the white god.

“Did Ruchia do things like this?”

Not often. She was too astute to let herself be cornered. Desdemona seemed to consider. After the first few lessons.

She added after a little, If you lie here longer, you will perish of the cold, and all my night’s work will be wasted. Also, I do not wish to be stuck in a cow.

Pen pulled himself to a sitting position. “You could have had Clee.”

I’d rather the cow.

“Or Lord Rusillin.” Why had she not chosen Rusillin?

Get up, Pen. Walking us out of here is your work.

Pen climbed to his knees, then to his feet. Then, skirting around a few incurious cattle, to what passed for a road on this steeper eastern shore, more of a rutted farm track. He stared north up the length of the lake, south down it. He bore no risk of getting lost, exactly.

We could go north, Desdemona observed. We could go anywhere. A pause. Except Idau.

“I can’t say that I’ve ever longed to see Idau.” Or even thought about its name on the map, where it appeared as a dot no bigger than Greenwell, some fifty miles west of Martensbridge and just over the border to the lands of the earl palatine. “But all my things are back in Martensbridge. And I never finished the book. And Tigney must be wondering where I am by now. Do you think he really gave Clee leave to take me to the castle?” Could Tigney even have been a conspirator? Uncomfortable thought.

Hah. Tigney might have given you leave to go beyond the town walls—never us.

“You suspected something? Even then?”

Mm. A very noncommittal . . . non-noise. We were sure something interesting must be afoot. We didn’t know what. We could not speak aloud in front of Clee, nor yet silently to you.

“Are all demons this curious? Or did you get that from Ruchia?”

Ruchia and we . . . were a very good match. Unsurprising, since we chose her. Desdemona feigned a yawn. You walk. We’ll nap. Wake us when we arrive.

Pen sighed and started south, boots squelching as he stumbled over the ruts. This night was going to be interminable.

The sky had turned steely, though the sun had not yet chased the moon over the eastern hills, when Pen came again to the Martensbridge town gates. Early market traffic already made them lively. The gate guard scowled at Pen, and began to recite the restrictive town rules about vagabonds.

“I bear a message for Learned Tigney at the Bastard’s Order,” Pen said, picking the not-quite-lie most likely to explain both his appearance and his urgency. “The boat had a mishap. I have traveled all through the night.”

The name of Tigney and the Order seemed to be the master key. Pen found himself trudging again up the steep street as the sky melted to bronze, then muted gold.

The surprisingly awake-looking porter answered his pounding at the door, and gaped at him in amazement. “Lord Penric!”

“Good morning, Cosso. I need to see Learned Tigney. At once.” He’d had plenty of time to think, while he’d stumbled through the dark, of how to explain the night’s doings, and why a powerful local lord had tried to murder him. Indignation had given way a while back to unease. Now that he was here, all his fine furious speeches seemed to run through his numb fingers like water.

“I believe,” said the porter, “that he wishes to see you. Though I can’t say you are expected. Come up.”

Cosso ushered him straight to Tigney’s work chamber, where candles burned low and guttering in their sockets.

“Learned, Lord Penric is here.” Cosso gave way, pushing Pen before him, then took up a guardsman’s stance by the door, his face quite wooden.

Tigney sat at his desk, his quill molting in his fingers as he fiddled with it. Pen was alarmed to see Ruchia’s book laid out on the writing table, but much more alarmed to find Clee there before him. Both Temple men looked up at him in shock.

Tigney was dressed for the day—no, for yesterday. Clee wore a close cap over his remaining hair; howsoever he had put himself to rights after a night of attempted murder and, presumably, firefighting, he was rumpled up again by a ten-mile ride in the dawn. Still, he had to look better than Pen. At least I’ve stopped dripping. Pen would be enraged at the sight of him, but he was just too tired to muster the emotion.

“Well, well,” said Tigney, putting down the quill and steepling his fingers. “Has the committee for the defense arrived?”

Verbal sparring was beyond Pen by this point. He said simply, “Good morning, Learned. Yesterday afternoon, Clee told me you had approved an invitation by his brother for me to dine at Castle Martenden. They gave me a drugged cordial, and took me down to the storeroom and tried to murder me. They wanted to steal Desdemona. I broke away, and swam the lake, and now I’m back.” He squinted. That seemed to cover most of it. “Oh, and I’m afraid we may have set the castle on fire, but they shouldn’t have tried to spit me on those pikes.” He squeezed his eyes shut, and open. “And I’m sorry about the boat. But not very.”

Tigney, canny and cautious, raised his chin and regarded Pen. “Whereas the tale Clee has just told me was that your demon ascended and beguiled him to take you to the castle, where you went on an arsonous rampage, stole a boat, and either escaped or drowned. You are supposed to be halfway to the border of Adria by now.”

Pen considered this. “Much too far to walk.”

“It is two men’s word again one’s,” said Clee, who had overcome his first horrified paralysis. “And him a stranger in this place.”

Stranger than you can imagine. Pen raised a finger. “Two against two. Me and Desdemona. Unless you count her as twelve, in which case I can make up a jury right here.”

Tigney rubbed his forehead, doubtless aching, and glowered at them both. “That one of you is lying is self-evident. Fortunately, I have another witness. In a sense.” He motioned to the porter. “Cosso, please fetch our other guest. Apologize, but make him understand it is urgent. Ah—tell him Lord Penric has come back.”

The porter nodded and went out.

Clee, heated, said, “Learned, you cannot be thinking of taking testimony from the demon! It is utterly unreliable!”

Tigney stared dryly at him. “I do know demons, Clee.”

Clee either had the sense to shut up, or was temporarily out of arguments. Pen was pretty sure this was not the scene Clee had been picturing when he’d hurried to lay his tale before Tigney. If he had really thought Pen drowned, a not-unlikely outcome, why had he come to make these accusations, rather than holing up with his brother? Maybe Rusillin had thrown him out? Clee certainly had been the one to pass along the gossip about Pen’s arrival in town. Which of the brothers had been the first to broach the demon-stealing scheme?

Minutes passed. Pen sat down on the floor. Tigney started to say something, then made a never-mind gesture, and left him there.

Finally, a bustle sounded from the hall; the porter’s voice soothing, a new one querulous. A short, stout old man wearing a stained white dressing gown and stumping along with a stick entered the room. Tigney, who had left Clee and Pen standing, hurried to set him out a cushioned chair. His hair was white and receding and combed back to a thin queue; his face was as round and wrinkled as a winter-stored apple, but not nearly as sweet. He might have been a retired baker with bad digestion. He thumped down in the proffered seat with a grunt, and stacked his hands on his cane.

Inside Pen, Desdemona screamed. And wailed a heartbroken, Ah! Ah! We are undone! It is the Saint of Idau! Pen felt a desperate flush of heat through his body, and then she curled into so tight and despairing a ball within him as to nearly implode.

“Blessed Broylin.” Tigney bowed before him. Then, after a moment, he thumped Clee on the back of the head and shoved it down as well. Coming up wincing, Clee crouched and backed away, signing himself and mumbling, “Blessed One . . .” Clee seemed nearly as surprised as Desdemona, if more frozen. No one could be as frantic.

Tigney glowered down at the boggled, bedraggled Pen, but then just shook his head.

So was this to be the second lethal ambush Penric and Desdemona had faced in the space of less than a day? Ambush it clearly was meant to be, crafted by the cunning Tigney no doubt. No wonder he hadn’t troubled to tutor Pen. He must have been planning it for a week, to get this creaky old man transported here from Idau in secret. How else could he corner and arrest such a powerful demon, except by surprise? And Pen had walked her right into it. Should he get up and try to run? Could he get up, let alone run? We should have gone north after all. Oh, Desdemona, I am so sorry . . .

“So, Blessed.” Tigney gestured to Pen. “Is his demon ascended?”

The old man frowned unfavorably at Pen, who looked up at him in dismay, but said, “No. Not a bit. All your panic seems unfounded, Tig. Entirely not worth what that vile cart did to my back, rushing me here.”

As the gray eyes squinted down, Pen was abruptly caught in that gaze, as if he were looking through two pinholes at a blinding sun, as if something huge and ancient and present lay just around some corner of perception. He couldn’t look away. He couldn’t run away. He thought he might even want to crawl toward. That elderly and unprepossessing body seemed worn like a stage costume, insubstantial and deceptive as gauze, over, yes, only a man, but also a channel to something that was . . . not a man. Not anything Pen had ever expected to meet face-to-face alive, even through such a screen.

It came to him that every prayer he’d ever said or mumbled or yawned around before had been by rote. And that he’d never be able to pray like that again.

“Can you compel his demon to speech?” Tigney asked the saint.

“If I can persuade it to stop howling in fear, perhaps.”

Clee, unwisely, tried, “But can you compel it to speak the truth?”

The old man eyed him. “Don’t know. D’you think I could compel you?”

Clee wilted. But, driven by whatever desperation, he essayed: “If the demon is not ascended, then Lord Penric’s behavior is his own, mad or criminal to repay begged hospitality with arson and destruction. And he should be brought before the judges for it.”

The old man snorted. “And how do you imagine the magistrates of Martensbridge could arraign a sorcerer against his will?”

Tigney cleared his throat. “Even if it is not yet ascended, I fear that it’s only a matter of time. Learned Ruchia’s was the most formidable demon in the whole of my experience. Much too powerful for this raw young man, however well-intentioned he may be. Blessed, I take full responsibility for my Temple-sworn duties, and I must ask you, as a matter of prudence, to take this danger out of this boy and the world.”

Pen, listening intently, his stomach curling, tried pointing out, “But I’m not Temple-sworn. I’m really only a guest here.”

Clee said poisonously, “In your case, that’s hardly a recommendation.”

Tigney just shook his head.

It came to Pen that for all the talk of accusations and magistrates, arguing like a lawyer was not what was called for now. If there was truly a god immanent in this chamber, it wanted another mode of speech altogether.

Pen climbed up on his knees and shuffled over to face the saint. Inside him, he thought Desdemona wept, despairing as a woman mounting a scaffold. Tigney made an abortive motion as if to restrain Pen, but the old man merely regarded him curiously, without fear.

Pen opened both hands and raised them, as he might have done before a temple altar, with less cause. It occurred to him that the attitude of supplication was identical to that of surrender on a battlefield.

“Blessed, if I speak, will the god hear?”

The sheep’s-wool eyebrows twitched. “The gods hear you at all times, speaking or silent. You hearing the god . . . that is more rare.”

Pen decided to take that for a typical obscure Bastard’s Yes. He swallowed, thought of bowing his head, but then decided to look up. At, or through, those terrifying gray eyes.

“Lord God Bastard, Mother’s Son, Fifth and White. Please spare Desdemona. She’s a good demon.” Pen considered that descriptor, in all its ambiguity—good for what?—and decided to let it stand. “She has no life save through me, and, by your leave, please . . . please let me serve her in her need.” And, in what was surely the most foolhardy impulse of his life, even beating out Drovo’s drunken oath to the military recruiter, added, “And Yours.”

Tigney shook his head, back and forth, once, slowly.

The Saint of Idau raised his hand and laid it on Pen’s forehead, in some beginning malediction. His lips parted. Stopped. His look grew inward for an instant more deep than long. Fathoms deep. The eyebrows climbed in surprise. “Huh! There’s a first.” His hand dropped back.

“What?” said Tigney, nearly squirming with anxiety. “The white god takes the demon, yes?”

“No. Spits her back. Says He doesn’t want her. At least not yet.”

Tigney blinked, stunned. Pen’s breath caught. What, what, what . . . ?

Clee protested, “But you must!”

The saint eyed him sourly. “If you want to argue with the god, go to the temple. Not that you’ll get much save sore knees, but it’ll spare my ears.” He made to lever himself up with his cane.

Pen cried aloud, “Wait, wait, what . . . Blessed, what does that mean?”

The old man eyed him glumly. “It means congratulations. You’re a sorcerer.” He pursed his lips, and added more judiciously, “The gods do not act for our ends, but for Theirs. Presumably, the god has some interesting future in mind for you—for you two. This is not a blessing. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

Tigney, aghast, said, “But what should we do with him?”

“No idea,” said the saint. He paused. “Though it would likely be prudent not to let him get killed on your doorstep.”

His eyes still wide, Tigney said, “He’ll have to be sworn into the Order.”

The saint’s lips quirked up. “Weren’t you listening? He just was.” He wrinkled his nose. “Though not, I suppose, to the Order as such . . .” He shuffled toward the hall, grumpily mumbling, “Ah, Lord Bastard, my back . . .”

At the doorway, he turned around. “Oh.” He pointed to Penric. “That one tells the truth”—his finger swung to Clee—“that one lies. Have fun sorting out this tangle, Tig.” His cantankerous voice floated over his shoulder: “I’m going back to Idau.”

Clee was taken away by a couple of husky dedicats, Pen was not sure to where. With more painfully sincere politeness than heretofore, Tigney suggested Pen might like to rest in his room a while. Pen, swaying on his feet, did not demur, and neither did Desdemona, who had gone very silent indeed.

All Pen’s meager possessions had been turned out and strewn across his bed, though nothing save Ruchia’s book appeared to be taken. Clee’s things were in no better form, and for the first time, realizing Tigney had known nothing, Pen wondered what the divine had first made of it all when both men had gone missing last night. He wasn’t quite able to muster sympathy.

He cleared his bed without ceremony, stripped out of his clammy clothes, stole Clee’s blankets to throw atop his own, and climbed in, more exhausted than he’d ever been even after the most futile, sleet-soaked hunt. When he slept, he dreamed uneasily of fathomless eyes.

He woke in the early afternoon, ravenous, and went to beg food in the kitchen, where dedicats or acolytes who had missed meals were, depending on the mood of the servants, sometimes allowed charity. His extended to dry bread, some pretty good beer, and a random but generous assortment of leftovers from lunch. Hunger makes the best sauce, he remembered his mother intoning to him, vexingly, but there was nothing left on his plate but a smear by the time he’d done.

A dedicat found him there, drooping over his place. “Lord Penric,” she said. “Learned Tigney begs you will attend upon him upstairs.”

She led him not to Tigney’s workroom, but to a larger chamber at the back of the house. Pen hesitated in the doorway, taking in the intimidating committee assembled around a long table. Tigney was present, and two older divines in the robes of the Bastard’s Order, but also one in the neat black gown of the Father’s, black and gray braid on the shoulder, with a notebook and quill before him. A bulky man whom Pen guessed by the chain of office around his neck was a city magistrate sat next to him. A middle-aged woman in a fine silk gown, protected by an over-robe of scarcely less elegant linen, tidied a stack of papers, and rearranged her own quills and ink. All stared back at Pen.

The saint had apparently gone back not to Idau, but to bed, for he sat fully dressed in plain townsman’s garb on a cushioned chair in the corner, eyes half closed as if dozing. Pen did not feel the god within him now, to his relief. The immense absence did not seem to leave an empty space, precisely, so much as one reserved, freed of all life’s clutter and waiting for its Guest again.

Tigney rose and ushered Pen to a chair at the foot of the table, facing the room’s window. He could see all the interested faces around the board, and they could see his even better.

“Learneds, Your Honor, milady.” That last, by Tigney’s respectful nod, was directed to the woman in silk. “I present to you Lord Penric kin Jurald of the valley of Greenwell, as discussed.” Tigney did not present Desdemona. Pen thought she was awake, within him, but still very silent; exhausted, cautious—a mode, he was beginning to realize, not characteristic of demons—still afraid of the saint?

Tigney sat to Pen’s left; the magistrate straightened up and frowned down the table. “This committee is here assembled to inquire into the unfortunate events of last night,” he said, formally. If he’d been trained as a lawyer, Pen suspected he could parse more implications out of that. Not a trial, yet—inquest, was that the term? The magistrate went on, “We have thus far taken the testimony of Learned Tigney and Blessed Broylin of Idau, and the testimony and confession of Dedicat Clee.”

“Did Clee finally stop lying?” Pen asked Tigney.

“Mostly,” Tigney grunted. “We think.”

In his corner, the saint snorted softly, but did not look up.

“There remain some points of confusion and uncertainty,” the magistrate went on. Pen did not doubt it. “In aid of their resolution, we request that you take oath before the gods of the truth of your tongue, and recount what you experienced for our records.”

Pen gulped, but, coached through the wording by the Father’s divine, readily did so. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to lie about anyway. Maybe he was still too tired.

Under the prodding of the magistrate, Pen repeated his account of the events of the past day, in a deal more detail than his first bald report to Tigney. Quills scratched furiously. Every once in a while, another member of the committee would ask some shrewd or uncomfortable question, by which Pen began to grasp what a gullible idiot he had been. Remembered terror and outrage yielded to some embarrassment.

At least he was not alone in that last. The magistrate asked Tigney, “Why did you choose to lodge Lord Penric in Dedicat Clee’s room? Was there no other choice?”

Tigney cleared his throat. “No, but Clee was, I thought, my trusted assistant. The two were of a like age. I thought Clee might keep an eye on his doings, maybe draw him out and find any falsehoods in his tale. And report to me.”

Pen’s eyebrows scrunched. “You set him to spy on me?”

“It seemed prudent. Your story was . . . unusual. And as you yourself have found, some men will do questionable things in hopes of gaining a sorcerer’s powers.”

Pen thought throat-cutting went a bit beyond questionable, but Father’s divine looked up from his note-taking and asked, “If Dedicat Clee had not been placed so close to temptation, do you think he might not have generated his scheme in the first place?”

Tigney shrank in his seat. After a long pause, he muttered, “I do not know. Maybe not.”

The woman in silk and linen pursed her lips, her own busy quill pausing. “In all your observations last night, Lord Penric, was there anything to tell you which of the brothers first originated the plan?”

“I’m . . . not sure,” said Pen. “Up till the castle caught fire, they seemed very united and, um, loyal to each other. Lord Rusillin seemed more willing to abandon the hunt at that point, but then, he thought I was about to drown in the lake. In his, er,”—not defense—“so did I.” Pen blinked. “Is there any word from Castle Martenden today? I mean, apart from Clee. I couldn’t tell if he’d come back because his brother had thrown him out, or to prepare some ground on Rusillin’s behalf.” If the latter, he had certainly failed. Mucked it up beyond all repair, possibly. Pen could hope.

“That will be another point to clarify,” the woman murmured, her quill scratching again. “Or maybe not.” A slight, strange smile turned her lips. “Dedicat Clee claims the notion was his brother’s, over a dinner with too much wine.”

“But then, he would,” observed one of the other senior divines. By her slight frown, the woman did not seem to find this helpful.

“Will Lord Rusillin be arrested, too, like his brother?”

“We are looking into the practicalities of that,” said the woman.

Unlike Clee, Lord Rusillin, ensconced in... whatever was left of his stronghold, had his own armed men, which must certainly make the task more challenging to a town constable. Pen didn’t get the idea this disturbed her as much as it did him.

The committee ran out of questions as Pen ran out of answers, and, sucked dry, he was released.

Tigney escorted him out. “I have many urgent things to attend to as a result of all this,” he said, waving a hand about a bit randomly, if appropriately. “I should be grateful if you would keep to your room a while longer, Lord Penric. Or at least to this house.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“That’s one of the things I must attend to.” Tigney sighed, and Pen wondered if he’d had the benefit of a nap this morning. Probably not. “Apparently, you are meant to keep your demon. You might even have been intended to get your demon.” He looked troubled by this thought, not without cause. “Blessed Broylin either would not or could not say.”

Emboldened, Pen said, “If I am to stay in, can I have Ruchia’s book back? And the run of the library?”

Tigney began to make his usual negative noises. Pen added, “Because if I don’t have anything to read, and can’t leave the house, I will have no way to pass the time except to experiment with my new powers.”

Tigney grimaced like a man chewing on an unripe quince, but shortly thereafter Pen, grinning, climbed back to his room with the book clutched firmly in his hand.

He was back reading in the library the next morning when Tigney himself came to find him.

“Lord Penric. Please dress yourself”—Tigney looked him over—“as best you can, and make ready to accompany me up the hill. Our presence is requested.”

“Up the hill?” said Penric, confused. Some local argot?

“At the palace,” Tigney clarified, confirming Pen’s guess and alarming him no little bit.

He hurried through a better wash from his basin, combed and retied his hair with the blue ribbon, and skinned into the least dire selection of clothing left in his pile. Shortly after, he found himself climbing up the steep street in Tigney’s wake. The divine, typically, did not say much. Pen supposed he would learn all for himself, firsthand, and gritted his teeth in patience.

The palace, with all its offices, was a rambling structure of rose-colored stone extending over three buildings behind the temple. It was no fortress like grim Castle Martenden; if the city walls did not hold, its own would not slow a determined attack for long. Its upper facades were rich with windows. They were admitted to a side entrance, where a servant in the livery of the princess-and-archdivine escorted them up two flights not to a throne room, but to a workroom reminiscent of Tigney’s, though several times larger. On the lake side, four tall doors set with glass admitted good light, and allowed the exit of occupants onto a narrow balcony. Writing tables and chairs were positioned to catch the best illumination. Several scribes were at work, who looked up curiously as they arrived, then bent their heads again to their quills.

Pen was not too surprised when the silk-and-linen-clad woman from yesterday’s inquest rose to receive them from the servant at the door. “Five gods give you good day, Lord Penric, Learned. This way, if you please.”

First, Penric was made to sit down and read through a long copy of his deposition from yesterday, sign it, and have his signature countersigned by Tigney and the woman, whom he finally learned thereby was the princess-archdivine’s own secretary. This was repeated for two more clear copies—some palace scribe had been busy last night. It all seemed tolerably accurate and complete, from a certain point of view.

Then he was taken to the end of the room, where another aging woman sat at a desk apart, reading through a stack of papers. Her gray hair was more finely dressed, her silks more elaborate than the secretary’s—though Pen was beginning to get the idea that silks were to this palace as cheeses were to Greenwell, locally abundant to the point of surfeit. Time-softened skin, slight body, yet somehow secure within herself—he didn’t need Tigney to knock him on the back of the head in order to bow low when he was presented.

“Your Grace,” he followed Tigney’s lead in addressing her. She extended her hand in brief formal courtesy, and they each bent to kiss her archdivine’s ring. She was not wearing the Temple robes of that office today; Pen wondered how she kept track of which personage she spoke for at any given moment. Rather like possessing a demon, that.

The princess-archdivines of Martensbridge were by three centuries of tradition daughters of the Hallow King of the Weald, called or perhaps assigned to this pocket palatine duty on behalf of their royal parent, though this one was, by the grind of time, now aunt to the present king. Lacking a spare or willing daughter, the office was sometimes filled by a cousin or niece; sometimes elected from the Daughter’s Order. Like all things human, the princesses had varied over time in their abilities, but everything about the orderliness of this place spoke well of its current ruler.

There was a sad shortage of crowns and robes about the princess-and-archdivine today, to Pen’s disappointment, though she did wear some handsome jewelry. Power without panoply, but he was grateful for the informality when she gestured and her secretary brought two chairs for her guests.

As they settled themselves, Pen a bit gingerly, she said, “So, this is your problem child, Tigney.” He nodded ruefully. Her shrewd gray-eyed gaze went to Pen. “Learned Ruchia’s demon is now within you?”

“Yes, Your Grace?” Had she known Ruchia?

Evidently so, for she sighed and said, “I had once hoped that she would become my court sorceress, but there were other calls upon her skills. And I’m afraid she found my modest court too dull.” Pen wondered if she saw him as a poor exchange, though as her gaze dwelt on him her expression softened.

Deciding he was addressing the princess, just at the moment, he essayed cautiously, “I am sorry about burning down your castle, Your Grace.”

Her lips curved up, slyly. “Ah, but Martenden is not my castle. Kin Martenden formerly owed fealty to kin Shrike, who died out heirless a generation ago, leaving Martenden orphaned, or perhaps rogue. A freedom of which the current lord’s father, and Rusillin himself, have taken undue advantage. Four times has that castle blocked or seized traffic on the road and the lake during disputes with the city. The city council has been trying to buy out the lordship for fifteen years, but every time they thought him cornered, he’s turned about, most lately with his mercenary schemes. Stealing young men away from this country, more cruel than any tax he has paid, or more often not paid, to us. Castle Martenden has been a bloody thorn in the side of the royal free city for years.”

“Oh,” said Pen, beginning to be enlightened.

“Lord Rusillin is weakened and off balance as never before, and best of all, he did it to himself. This is not an opportunity I or the town mean to let slip away. Nonetheless, the campaign, being tricky, will take a little time and much cooperation.” She grimaced at that last word. “That being so, we think it well for you to be put out of his reach. Rusillin is not a forgiving sort of fellow.”

“Er?” said Pen. Tigney sighed.

The princess nodded to Pen. “I understand you took an irregular holy oath yesterday. If you will make it a regular one today, the Temple of Martensbridge will undertake to send you to the white god’s seminary at Rosehall. There you will receive the divine’s training that most Temple sorcerers complete before they are offered the responsibility of a demon. Better late than never, I suppose.”

Pen gasped. “Rosehall? The Weald city with the university? That’s three hundred years old? The famous one?”

Tigney cleared his throat. “The seminary, while associated with the university corporation, has its own specialized faculty, one of the very few authorized to oversee the training of Temple sorcerers. Nonetheless, you would be expected to take some lectures from the other body. Since you are starting all askew. I cannot imagine it will be easy. For anyone involved.”

The princess—or perhaps it was the archdivine—smiled. “If the Bastard’s Order at Rosehall can’t handle a little disorder, they have taken oath to the wrong god. But it will give time for this young man’s superiors to take thought, and judge him fairly.” She considered. “Some prayers for guidance might not be a bad idea, either.”

Pen wasn’t sure if the tightness in his chest was his own excitement, or Desdemona. He gulped. “Your Grace. Learned. May I—I need to talk with—there are two affected here. May I have leave to go apart, and speak with Desdemona?” He wasn’t sure they could manage silent speech just now, and he had no wish to sound demented in front of this high lady.

The princess raised her well-groomed eyebrows. “Desdemona?”

“It’s what he’s named his demon,” Tigney muttered to her.

“He’s named it?” The eyebrows stayed up. “Unusual. But yes, Lord Penric, if you feel you need to.” She gestured toward the balcony. “Take your time.”

As Pen slipped through the glassed door and closed it behind him, she and Tigney leaned their heads closer together.

Pen gripped the carved wooden balustrade and stared out down over the town, the river, the bridges and mills, the long lake. The pale line of the peaks on the farthest horizon.

“Desdemona!” he nearly squeaked. “Rosehall! The university! Me, to be a learned divine! Can you even imagine it?”

She said dryly, “All too well. Four of my riders before you have been down that road, although three of them before my time. Thankfully.”

“Even better! It would be as if I had my own tutor living inside my head! How easy could it be?”

“Mm, I’m not sure how similar the study in Brajar or Saone is, or was, to Rosehall.”

“I hear the students at Rosehall have great freedom in the city.”

“If you like drunken, rowdy parties, I suppose.”

“And don’t you?”

He thought she smiled, or might have, had she possessed lips. “Perhaps,” she admitted.

“I could be the first Learned in my whole family, as far back as I know. D’you think my mother will be pleased?” All right, his imagination was getting a little ahead of events, here. But he would send a letter home with Gans, telling her, since it appeared the Temple was going to send him off posthaste.

“Mm,” said Desdemona. “While in general mothers are quite happy to brag about their children rising in the Temple, there is a slight problem with those who take oath to the white god. Women fear it might reflect on their own marital fidelity, in the minds of some of their gossips.”

“Oh,” said Pen, taken aback. “That seems very unfair, given it was my father who—never mind.”

“Your mother will be pleased for you in her heart,” Desdemona promised him. Somewhat airily, he felt, given that the demon had still been insensate when he’d last seen Lady Jurald. But with good will.

“Will you—” He stopped. May I go was an absurd question to ask, Will you go with me even more so. He wasn’t back arguing his case with Rolsch or his mother, after all. Habits. “Will you be pleased?”

“Pen,” she said, in a quiet tone he’d never heard from her before. He stilled, listening.

“You looked a god in the eyes and bore witness for me, by which alone I am preserved.” She took a deep breath, through his mouth. “You looked a god in the eyes. And spoke for me. There is nothing in my power that I will ever refuse you, after that.”

He took that in, to his ears and to his heart. Swallowed. Nodded shortly, staring unseeing at the far-distant peaks.

In a few minutes, when he was composed again, he went back inside to kneel before a princess and pledge his future.