Penric's Mission

VI

Over the next few days, Nikys’s household settled into a strange, limping new routine. Their safety was balanced on the knife’s edge, she knew, of the continued inattention of the provincial governor and whatever cabal in the capital—and she could probably guess the most likely men—who had engineered Adelis’s downfall. They were doubtless waiting out there for the word of his death, from the shock or infection or despair. She was disinclined to give them the satisfaction. Although she supposed a long, silent convalescence followed by a retreat into some hermitage, religious or secular, would serve their purposes just as well. From here forward, Adelis would carry his imprisonment with him, at no further cost to the empire.

She’d made no move to replace the servants who had prudently scattered after the arrest; she wondered how soon the ones who’d lingered would realize how little coin she had left to pay them, and follow. Well, not the maid, the gardener-porter, and the scullion, who’d come with the villa rather like the furnishings, and would stay after the current tenants decamped. Which would be when? Adelis had paid her rent through the half-year, but the end of that term was coming up in a few weeks. Possibly why their landlord had not moved to evict his politically poisonous lodgers already.

Not that any woman could scheme how to hold household when she had absolutely no idea what her resources were going to be. Still, Nikys could make some shrewd guesses. Adelis’s army pay would be cut off, of course, and all the property he’d inherited from his mother and their father attainted. Would the Thasalon imperial bureaucracy snap up every bit, or leave him some pittance? Would the small remains of her own dower and the military pension from Kymis be seized as well? That would be like a hawk, having taken a fat hare, returning for a mouse.

Their entire lack of visitors told its own tale. Some of his old officer cadre in the Western Army might have had the courage to come, but Adelis had been most cannily separated from them, now, hadn’t he? Although given that some of his new men had sent that extraordinary (if extraordinarily odd) physician, she must hoist her opinion of them back up.

She and Master Penric had quickly found their way to a division of labor in the sickroom. The physician had taken a pallet on the floor, attendant-fashion, and guarded Adelis at night. Nikys relieved him twice a day: in the afternoon, when he rested in the garden or went out to discreetly restock his medical supplies, and in the evening after supper, when he departed on errands he never explained, though they seemed urgent to him. She’d almost swear she’d once encountered him coming back in through Adelis’s window, which made no sense at all, so she’d dismissed the impression from her burdened mind. She wondered what other professional duties the man was leaving undone, to linger so diligently in this stricken villa.

The cook being numbered among the deserters, and the housemaid having proved as clumsy in the kitchen as she was in the sickroom, Nikys took over that task, not least because she trusted no one else with the preparation of invalid fare. Five gods knew she’d had plenty of practice cooking such for Kymis during that last miserable year. She finally managed to draw the physician to a midday meal with her under the pergola, hoping to quiz him frankly on Adelis’s progress out of Adelis’s earshot.

After they delivered the platters and jugs, she dismissed the scullion and sat herself down with a tired sigh, staring dully at her own plate feeling as if she’d forgotten how to eat. Master Penric poured her wine-and-water, and offered the beaker along with a smile fit to compete with the sunlight spangling his hair.

While she was still mustering her first question, he said, “I noticed your green cloak on the wall peg in the atrium, Madame Khatai. Is yours a recent bereavement?” He appeared poised to offer condolences, if so.

Dark green for a widow, yes, though she owed no other allegiance to the Mother of Summer. Sadly. “Not very recent. Kymis died four years ago.” As his look of inquiry did not diminish, she went on: “He was a comrade of my brother’s—something of an older mentor to him, when he was a young officer. Adelis felt he owed him much.”

His blond brows pinched. “Were you payment?”

Her lips quirked. “Perhaps, a little. Our mothers were widowed by then, in reduced circumstances, so helping me to an honorable marriage to a good man whom he trusted seemed the right thing to do. Ten years ago… we were all younger, in a terrible hurry to get on with our lives. I wish I could have…” She faltered. But talking to this mild, pretty man seemed curiously easy, and he was a physician. His claim of in all but final oath seemed borne out, so far. “I wish I could have given Kymis children. I still don’t know if it was some, some subtle physical impediment, his or mine, or just that he was called too much away to the border incursions. Adelis moved the world to get him back to me when he was wounded and maimed, as if I could somehow repair what the war had destroyed. But all I tried to do to save his life only prolonged his death. He cursed me, toward the end. I thought he had a point, but I didn’t know how to let go.”

It was the most honest thing she’d said about Kymis’s dreadful last year to anyone—it was certainly nothing she could ever confess to Adelis—but Penric merely nodded, and said, “Yes.”

Just Yes. Just that. It was nothing to burst into tears at the table about. She swallowed, hard. And awkwardly returned, “I suppose, as a physician”—in training, anyway—“you’ve seen the like. How it is to try and fail to keep some valued thing alive.”

The flicker in his light eyes might have been from the movement of the dappled shade; he smoothly converted his flinch into a shrug, and she cursed her tongue, or her brain, or the day. Or her life. The smile he reaffixed was so like his usual ones, she began to wonder about their validity as well. But he said, answering her fears and not her words, and how did he know, “Adelis will live. I expect to get him up walking later today. He may not thank me at first, mind you.”

Nikys gasped. “Truly?”

“Truly. He’s a sturdy man; I think he’d have got that far on his own. If not, perhaps, quite so soon.”

That far as compared to what? But he continued, gesturing with his fork, “So eat, Madame.” He followed his own advice, munching with evident relish. For all his spare frame, he had an excellent appetite, of the sort that suggested starving student days were not long behind him. “You have a good cook. Shame to waste her art.”

Nikys was about to protest that she was the cook, then realized Almost-Master Penric had certainly observed this. She smiled a little despite everything, and copied his example. After a few bites and a swallow of watered wine, she said, “That was what Adelis brought me to Patos for. To try to help me to a second marriage with another officer, if older and richer this time. I was happy to be here, but I hadn’t the heart to tell him his efforts were a waste, that I would never again marry a military man. When we were talking last night, he apologized, the idiot. He seemed to think if he’d wedded me away to the protection of another, I would have been out from under all”—she waved a hand about—“this. Never mind the feelings of the poor hypothetical husband, to find himself suddenly kin to an accused traitor. Or what if he’d refused to admit Adelis to his household, when I brought him back blinded? I couldn’t suggest that to Adelis, but it felt like how he describes ducking a crossbow bolt—you don’t even know what you’ve escaped till it’s over.”

Penric scratched his head and smiled. “I quite see that. You do?”

“What?”

He coughed. “Nothing.”

She grew graver. “I hate all this madness. But I can’t help thinking about what it might have been like for Adelis if there had been no one loyal to him here, in this extremity.” Would his tormentors have just cast him blinded into the street? The like had happened to other traitors. “I’m frightened all the time, yet I can’t wish myself elsewhere.”

“Frightened?” His brows flicked up. “Surely the worst is done, over.”

It was her turn to shrug, mute with the weight of her dread. “Dying is easy. Surviving is hard. I learned that with Kymis.” And no wonder she’d been thinking about her late husband so much these past few days, like a healed scar broken open again. “What will we do in the after?”

“That…” Penric sank back, sobered. “That is actually a very good question, Madame Khatai.” And, mumbled under his breath: “About time somebody asked that one, Pen.” He shook his head as if to clear it, and went on, “I am reminded. If Arisaydia is to be up and moving about, I want to devise some sort of protective mask for his upper face that we can easily take on and off. Line the back with gauze that I can soak with healing ointment, or change out and keep dry and clean, as needed.”

“I think I might have something that would do. I’ll look for it and bring it to you.”

He nodded.

Somehow, while they were talking, she had emptied her plate. She drained the last of her beaker and studied the young physician. Abruptly, she decided he deserved to be warned. “I suspect there is a spy in my household.”

He choked on his wine, coughed, mopped his lips. “Oh?” he squeaked, then finally cleared his throat and dropped his voice to its normal timbre. “What makes you say that?”

“The night before Adelis was blinded, I had devised an escape. I had mounts and a groom secreted near the prison. It was all for nothing, because Adelis refused to come with me. Which was also for nothing, as it proved, but anyway, my horses and servant were taken even before I left Adelis’s cell, and soldiers were waiting in ambush for us at the entrance. They didn’t even bother to arrest me. But someone had known my arrangements, and passed the news along, and it wasn’t the jailer I’d bribed. I’ve not seen the groom since, so it could have been him, or any of the other servants who fled. Or it could have been one who stayed. I don’t know.”

“I see. How very uncomfortable for you.”

“It’s maddening, but it seemed the least of my worries at first.” She frowned at him. “I don’t know if any of this could follow you home, Master Penric. Perhaps, like me, you are too small a mouse for their appetites. But I should not wish to see you suffer for helping us. So, I don’t know… be discreet?”

“I did know what I was getting into before I came,” he pointed out kindly. “More or less.”

“But still.”

He waved a conceding hand. “As you say, still. I will undertake to be a very demure mouse.”

She stared at him, thinking, There’s a hopeless plan. But at least she’d tried.