Penric's Mission

XI

Arisaydia’s eyes looked better the next morning, and saw better, too, Penric judged. Also more shrewdly, although that wasn’t the eyes, exactly. For the first time, he refused even the reduced dose of the syrup of poppies, and insisted that his sister, not Penric, shave him. Which suggested he hadn’t quite wrapped his military mind around how little a medically trained sorcerer needed a weapon, but it was perhaps not prudent to point this out.

Working the lather and razor carefully around the nearly healed burns, Nikys asked, “Will the brown come back?” Arisaydia’s irises were still that peculiar deep garnet color, although the whites were clearing to merely a wine-sick sort of bloodshot.

“I’m not sure. I’ve never done a healing this delicate before.” Pen didn’t know if anyone had.

This triggered Arisaydia’s demand for a mirror, which Nikys had to go fetch from the innkeeper’s wife downstairs. It was good silvered glass, though, and its small circle reflected back a clear image of half of Arisaydia’s face at a time. “Huh,” he said, frowning and tilting it this way and that, but he seemed much less appalled than Penric had feared. Pen supposed the man had witnessed injuries more devastating than this in the course of his career. “I can work with this.”

Without Pen’s labors, the upper half of his face would have become a knotted mass of yellow, ropy scar tissue, but, of course, without Pen’s labors Arisaydia would never have been troubled by the sight of it. These scars would eventually work out as flatter, paler, with redder skin between, in a sort of spray pattern not unlike an owl’s feathers. Strange, but nothing to make children scream, and any woman who would recoil likely wasn’t tough enough for Arisaydia anyway. Nikys managed to seem completely unruffled, a mirror Arisaydia had to find more reassuring than the glass one.

He emphatically refused to redon the blinding mask, so Penric made do with gauze wrappings above and below his eyes, which gleamed out like coals. By tomorrow, even those light dressings might be dispensed with. Pen’s efforts last night had been intense, but the results were at last making themselves visible to less subtle senses than his own.

The other advantage to stopping at a larger town was that it could support a public livery, which Pen had located when he’d been out shedding chaos. Arisaydia made no objection to Pen’s proposal to hire a private coach to carry them all farther south, which doubtless meant that he harbored his own ideas about their route in that direction that he wasn’t sharing. The vehicle would restrict them to the road, dangerously, but also be swift.

Pen disemboweled Prygos’s purse to make sure the coach was the smallest and lightest available, the horses a team of four to be managed by a postilion riding one of the front pair, out of earshot. He feigned it would allow him to continue his healing en route, but its overwhelming advantage was the privacy it would give him to open the next stage of his negotiations. Which were going to go somewhere past delicate and through awkward to, possibly, incendiary.

Because by the time they reached Skirose, some one-hundred-eighty miles farther on, he must somehow persuade Arisaydia and Nikys to turn east with him to the coast. There to find some fishing vessel to deliver them to the island of Corfara, and from there, passage to Lodi in Adria. And if he couldn’t…

Then we still need to turn east, said Des.

Arisaydia refused to be dressed again in his sister’s clothes, but did, grudgingly, consent to be muffled in the green cloak and hurried through the inn to the waiting coach. Once inside, and started on their rattling way, he instantly divested it, bundled it up, and thrust it back at Nikys, seated next to him. “You are never to speak of this.”

She returned a musical sort of “Mmm!” that promised nothing, and Penric discovered how enchanting her round face grew when she smiled deeply enough to dimple. Thwarted, Arisaydia switched his glower to Pen, more convincingly.

Penric had taken the rear-facing seat across from them, along with their meager baggage. Making sure his feet were firmly planted on the sword scabbard laid on the floor, he tried to evolve a plausible way to open his negotiation. Which must also entail his confession. Arisaydia took the problem out of his hands.

“What did Prygos’s clerk—Tepelen, Velka, whoever he was—mean when he said you were supposed to be drowned? He knew you. And you knew him.”

Penric cleared his throat. “Ah. Yes. That’s something we need to discuss. I’d been putting it off till after I was sure I could restore your sight. That time has come.”

Arisaydia made an impatient so get on with it gesture.

Penric signed himself, tapped his lips twice with his thumb, and gave a short, seated bow. “Permit me to introduce myself more fully. I am Learned Penric of Martensbridge, formerly court sorcerer to the late princess-archdivine of that canton. For the last year, I’ve been in service to the archdivine of Adria. Who, for my command of the Cedonian language and certain other skills, loaned me to his cousin the duke, to dispatch as his envoy in response to your letter begging honorable military employment in his realm.”

Nikys’s eyes widened.

Arisaydia barked, “I wrote no such letter!”

“Forged, yes. Velka confirmed that. It was a plot from the start. Velka, who had been following me in the ship from Lodi, seized the duke’s quite authentic reply as soon as I set foot ashore in Patos. Velka knew I was the envoy but didn’t know my real name nor, I suspect, my real calling. Although I’m not sure they would have treated me any differently if they had. They cracked my skull and tossed me down a bottle dungeon in the shore fortress. The night after you were blinded, they tried to drown me in my cell. Tying up a loose end, I expect.”

Nikys gasped. “How did you escape?”

Penric, who had worked out in his head a scholarly letter on his novel method during his nights in the sickroom, almost opened his mouth to start spouting the preamble, then realized that wasn’t really the question being asked. “Magic.”

Arisaydia sat back, glaring fiercely. “More likely he was let go. Agent or unwitting cat’s-paw, could be either.”

Penric, affronted, snapped, “If you must know, when the water was halfway up the cell I turned some of it to ice and stood on it to reach the opening.”

“I don’t believe that,” scoffed Arisaydia. Nikys looked more doubtful.

Penric sighed and sat back. “Just a minute…” He held up his pinched fingers and concentrated. Des had been right in her theory about water in the desert, or at least in Cedonia, he was pleased to see, as the tiny, intense spot of cold grew to a hailstone half an inch across. He leaned forward, pulled out Arisaydia’s palm, and dropped the chip into it. Arisaydia, looking vaguely horrified, shook it hastily out of his hand. For good measure, Pen made a bigger one for Nikys; she, at least, rewarded him with a more appropriate look of awe. And, after a moment, bent forward to taste it.

“Don’t—!” her brother began, but she crunched it between her teeth and smiled.

“It really is ice! They had ice sometimes at court in Thasalon,” she told Penric, “but they brought it down out of the mountains in winter and stored it underground.” She narrowed her eyes. “If you are a Temple sorcerer, you must owe final allegiance to the Bastard’s Order, yes?”

“He is my chosen god, yes.” Or choosing one—Pen had never been quite sure. “I did really attend the white god’s seminary at Rosehall, which is associated with the university corporate body there.”

“But not its medical faculty?” You lied? her eyes asked.

Penric waved this away. “I had enough on my plate then just with the theology, since I was doing everything backward, and in a hurry. A Temple sorcerer is supposed to train as a divine first, and only then be invested with a demon. Everything caught up with itself eventually.”

She tilted her head, lips firmed with a different flavor of doubt than her brother’s. “You are neither quack nor charlatan. Your skills, even if uncanny, couldn’t have come out of the air.”

And there was a place he didn’t wish to dwell. “They were hard-earned, just not all by me. But this is beside the point. I was sent here as a go-between, not as a physician. The duke of Adria was quite sincere in desiring to take you into his train, General Arisaydia, and would be pleased if I were to return with you. And your sister. At present you are running away, but that’s not enough; you need to be running toward. If we turn for the coast at Skirose, I think I can get us all aboard a ship for Adria.”

“Ship captains don’t like to take sorcerers aboard,” Arisaydia observed, in a temporizing tone. “They say it’s bad luck.”

Not nearly as bad of luck as being caught helping an Imperial fugitive, Pen suspected. “Eh, hedge sorcerers, certainly. The Temple-trained know enough not to shed chaos in the rigging, and, further, know how not to.”

“Can mariners tell the difference?”

“Generally not, which is another reason why I travel incognito.”

Nikys was staring back and forth between them, clearly taken aback by this new proposal to dispose of her life unconsulted. “I don’t speak Adriac. I speak a little Darthacan.”

Pen smiled hopefully at her. “I could help. I could translate. I could teach you.”

By their dual frowns, Pen didn’t think he was making much headway. He tried again to bring things back to the issue: “The duke really does want you. He thinks with your skills and experience you’d slice through the forces of Carpagamo like a knife through butter, and I concur. Although even you might break a tooth on their canton mountain mercenaries. Unless the duke hired you some canton troops of your own, I suppose, although that could get very awkward and messy and probably is not a good idea. Certainly not for my poor cantons.” He added after a moment, “Adria and Carpagamo do no end of horrible things to one another, as opportunity presents, but at least I can promise you blinding is not public policy there.”

It was Nikys who pulled the unravelling thread from this. “You aren’t really half Cedonian, are you? That was another lie.”

“Ah, no. I’m from the valley of the Greenwell, in the mountains about a hundred miles east of Martensbridge. I don’t think you would find it on a Cedonian-made map.” Or most other maps, truth to tell.

“Are the cantons even a country?” said Arisaydia in unflattering doubt.

“Mm, more a patchwork of… city-states is too grand—call us town-states. Conquerors from the Old Cedonian Empire to Great Audar of Darthaca to Saone and the Weald have all tried to hold various of the cantons, but none have succeeded for long. We have no tolerance for foreign misrule. We prefer our own misrule.” A little homesick grin twitched Pen’s mouth. “Not that there’s much profit in conquest. Our mountains have few productive mines, and our fields are worse. Unless you like goats and cows. Our main exports are cheese and mercenaries. Both quite good,” he added in a faint spasm of patriotism. “It snows a lot,” he ran down. “When it isn’t raining. Perhaps that’s why I’m good with ice.” Gods, he was tired.

“Mad as three boots,” muttered Arisaydia, cryptically.

“Adria,” said Pen, “would pay you well.”

Arisaydia’s mouth twisted in disgust. “No doubt.” He raised his chin, his garnet eyes glinting. “I was never in correspondence with the duke of Adria. I was in correspondence with the duke of Orbas.”

Pen’s eyes widened; Des murmured, Aha! Now, there was a missing piece fallen into place…

“I’d not got so far as telling him to go jump in the sea, although that was next. A happy interruption, in retrospect. When we arrive at Skirose, you are welcome to go home to Adria, with my best curses. Nikys and I will strike south for Orbas.”

He sat back and folded his arms, stony. Nikys’s lips parted, and a hand lifted, but fell back, whatever she thought given no voice.

Arisaydia added, “And if you try to lay a geas on me like those bloody horses, I’ll run you through.”

Surreptitiously, Pen put a little more weight on the scabbard under his foot. “That would be harder for me than it looks. And harder for you than you think.”

Arisaydia snorted and closed his eyes, shutting out… everything. Pen could see his point.