Penric's Mission

VII

Arisaydia wasn’t easy to coax out of bed. Penric fancied the man knew it was the first slippery step in undertaking to stay alive, instead of holding on to his imagined—begged-for—death like a starving child clutching food. But his dizziness, once he was upright, was no worse than anyone abed for a week might experience, and as he inhaled and straightened, it was plain that his body’s native strength had been little impaired by his ordeal. He was still in pain, but Pen had found himself able to reduce the opiates more quickly than he’d anticipated, Arisaydia’s slurred and muzzy mumbling giving way to crisper speech. Even if it was mostly swearing, so far.

Pen guided him out to the second-floor gallery circling the dual atriums, front and central, that admitted so much light and air into the villa, unlike the tightly boarded houses of the far-off mountain cantons. Did they ever get snow in this country? Arisaydia’s hand trailed along the walls; Pen took the balcony side. Pen was almost sure the man wouldn’t lunge for the rail and over, trying to finish the job that his enemies had started. Almost. It would make a dreadful mess on the mosaic floor of his sister’s nice house, for one thing; for another, so short a drop was uncertain of outcome. So they strolled along arm-in-arm, like two friends out for a postprandial airing.

To distract Arisaydia from his surliness, Penric essayed, “Is it true that you and your sister are twins?”

It worked; Arisaydia’s lips puffed in almost-a-laugh. “It was something of a joke among our mothers and us, when we grew old enough to realize we were unusual. If a woman could give birth to children of two different fathers on the same day, no one would hesitate to dub them twins. Why not the same for two mothers and one father?”

They came to a corner where the wall fell away; Arisaydia’s free hand hesitated, clenched, then fell firmly controlled to his side. Only his slightly tighter grip on Pen’s arm, as quickly reduced, betrayed his refusal to show whatever fear he must feel.

“A wife and a concubine are often bitter rivals in a man’s house, but our mothers always seemed more like comrades-in-arms to us. Our father was flanked and outnumbered, but at least he had the wit to surrender. After he died, they continued to share their household—goods and grief and tasks portioned out all the same.”

I wonder if they shared a bed, too? Des put in brightly. Pen set his teeth to be sure that didn’t slip out, and asked instead, “Were they close in age, or by blood, or some such ties?”

“Not at all. Nikys’s mother was twenty years younger than mine. My mother and father had evidently tried for children for years with no luck—it was long after he died that my mother ever mentioned her miscarriages in my hearing. So a child to share was certainly hoped for. And then, by whatever joke of the gods, there were two at once. We never knew whether to blame the Mother or the Bastard.” Another turn brought a wall back within reach; Arisaydia barely traced it this time.

Nikys came out into the central atrium, holding something in her hand. She looked up at the sound of their voices. Her lips parted, a thrill illuminating her features as she saw them walking. Pen had guessed right; she was very pretty when she smiled. He felt a queer flutter in his stomach, to know that his work had put such a look on her face. And a following clench, to consider what she might look like to learn the whole story of Pen’s involvement with her brother’s woes. He heard the sound of her quick slippers on the stairs as he guided Arisaydia back into his bedchamber once more.

As he helped his not-very-patient patient sit up in bed, notably straighter than heretofore, Pen studied his face. The blisters were much reduced, shrunken and wrinkling; those that had broken were healing cleanly from the edges inward. The rims of his eyelids were silvery-damp—tear ducts, gods, how many rats had died for those tear ducts to open and work once more? Pen was still in grave doubt about the delicate irises. And nothing was more likely than for the brutalized lenses to go to cataracts, trading one form of blindness for another. Pen had heard of a horrifying operation tried in Darthaca, of cutting out clouded lenses and replacing their function with glass spectacles, but he hadn’t heard that the success rate was high, and Bastard’s tears, how could a person lie down and let someone take a knife to their eyes? Then he wondered how they’d held Arisaydia down for the boiling vinegar, and then he tried to stop thinking.

Arisaydia’s lids were still too swollen to open, but it wouldn’t be long now. Soon, Penric would find out what he’d done. More to the point, so would Arisaydia. Penric had not one guess how the man would respond. Except, probably not mildly.

Nikys entered, holding out her hand. “I wondered if this would do? It was an old masquerade mask. The beak should come off readily. Adelis went as a raven. For the battlefield, he said, which I thought at the time was morbid.” She reflected. “Or a sly dig from the army at the bureaucrats. If so, they missed the point.”

“Perhaps fortunately,” Arisaydia murmured, turning his head toward the sound of her voice, the mask visible, apparently, to his memory. “But I was young and angry.”

Penric accepted the object, turning it to check the side he cared about. It was made to cover the upper half of the face, and its dimensions closely matched the ravages of the scalding. No problem to pad it with ointment-saturated gauze, changeable according to each day’s needs. And, while feigning to Arisaydia that it would hide his disfigurement from unsympathetic eyes, it would also keep the man from discovering prematurely what Penric had been doing to him, before the work was done.

What will we do in the after? Nikys had asked. Pen still had no answer, but the problem would soon be upon them all, and it wasn’t going to be the one she was imagining.

Penric turned the mask over. The front side was black leather, cut and stitched in elegant lines, decorated with striking sprays of black feathers a little ragged and brittle from age and a sojourn in some chest. “And what did you go as?” he asked Nikys. “A swan?” White to her brother’s dramatic black?

She laughed. “Not I! Even back then I had more sense. I went as an owl. A much rounder bird.” She waved a hand down her body, which was indeed more owl- than swan-shaped. Pen thought she looked wonderfully soft, but he didn’t suppose he dared say so.

“Wisdom bird,” said Arisaydia. The ghost of a smile twitched his lips. “I remember that. Did I tease you?”

“Of course.”

“Foolish raven.”

Curious, Pen held up the mask before Arisaydia’s face. And blinked.

“My word,” said Des. Pen quickly closed his mouth before she could add more, and more embarrassing, commentary.

With the eye-diverting damage obscured, the man sprang into focus as not exactly handsome, but arrestingly powerful. Pen had met men and women like that, from time to time; it was nothing a sculptor could ever capture, not residing in the line or the form, but when one saw them, souls ablaze, one could not look away. The raven mask emphasized the effect, unfairly.

No, keep looking! Des demanded. For all the stares you’ve been sneaking at his sister’s ample backside, you can give us this. He’s not going to object.

They’d had this argument in bathhouses where, in general, Pen went because he wanted a bath. Seven-twelfths of Desdemona found the places fascinating for more prurient reasons, although not including, curiously, the imprint of the courtesan Mira, who knew more about what might be done in bathhouses—besides bathing—than Penric had ever imagined, and shared it whether Pen wanted to know or not. Mira was professionally unimpressed with prurience. Some of the rest of the sorority were inclined to goggle—Pen swore Ruchia was the worst—which, since they seized Pen’s eyes to do so, had a few times early on got him either punched or propositioned by his fellow bathers. Once, both.

You’d be propositioned anyway, Des objected. That part is not our fault.

Firmly, Penric set the mask aside. “That will work,” he assured Nikys, keeping his eyes lifted. “Thank you.” He was rewarded with another faint smile, like glancing moonlight.

A little later, when Nikys had gone off to see to preparations for the next meal, and Pen was working on modifying the mask, he judged Arisaydia sufficiently disarmed by their excursions into his family history to try more troubling questions. He definitely had to ask them before the return of Arisaydia’s vision upended any belief that his secrets no longer mattered. And you accuse me of being ruthless, Des sniffed. Arisaydia had been apprised of the little fiction about his anonymous military benefactors, whose names Pen had steadfastly refused to divulge because they didn’t exist, and he didn’t dare make any up. But this had leant Pen a useful air of rectitude. Pen decided to deploy them again.

“Your secret friends who hired me were very upset with the rumors about your arrest,” he started. “Outraged by some, worried, I think, by others. Did all this come out of nowhere, from your point of view?” Surely the general had been taken by surprise or he else could have fled, or flung up some other evasion or resistance.

“Not… nowhere,” said Arisaydia slowly. He held out a hand palm-up, as if measuring some unseen threat. “Accusation and counter-accusation, rumor and slander, are staples of the Thasalon court, as men wrestle for advantage and access to the emperor’s favor. I thought I was well out of it, and just as glad to be so, up here in Patos.”

“Do you know who your enemies are?”

Arisaydia’s laugh held little humor. “I could reel off a list. Although in this case, my friends were likely the greater danger.”

“I… don’t understand?” Pen scarcely needed to fake a confused naiveté.

“The Western Army was not well treated by Thasalon in our last campaign. Supplies and reinforcements were almost impossible to extract, pay was in arrears… In an offensive campaign, an army can pay itself out of the spoils of the enemy country. But we were defending, on our own ground. Pillage was discouraged and, when it occurred, complained of to the government. And punished, which set up its own tensions. In some encounters we were scarcely better organized than the barbarians we fought, and we were well-chewed by them. Our victory was more desperate than triumphal.

“The army always complains they are insufficiently rewarded for the burdens they undertake. It was more true than usual this time around, and the muttering in the tents and barracks fed on itself and turned ugly. There are invariably military men who believe if only they could replace whatever emperor is on the throne with one of their own, their injustices would be remedied.”

“That seems to have been tried, judging by the histories I’ve read.” And Pen had read rather more of them than he was going to let on, not that one could trust their writers. “Successfully, sometimes.”

Arisaydia grimaced. “Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have believed that myth wholeheartedly, that we needed only the right man to quell all wrongs. But, as you say, it’s been tried, and nothing seems to change in the end. I had to see a lot more of the court to learn what we are up against, and it isn’t just the corruption of courtiers, for all that we’re well-supplied with that, too. Taxation is a mess, for one thing. The sporadic plagues have chewed holes in the fabric of the realm. At some golden periods the shortfall was made up for by conquest, I suppose, but it seems every generation we lose more territory than we gain. Reform is resisted by everyone who has an interest in it not taking place at their expense. Including the army, I’m sorry to say. To set one man, no matter how heroic or well-intentioned, up against the whole vast weight of that… and then to excoriate him for his inevitable failure…” He shook his head. “I would say five gods spare me, but there was a cadre of my officers who thought otherwise. And started to go beyond muttering. Evidently, half a year and Patos were not distance enough to save me from their admiration. And the reaction it engendered.”

Arisaydia, Pen noticed, was naming no names, and likely not for the same reasons Pen hadn’t. In his present state it seemed less calculation than habit, and a curious habit it was for a man to have developed.

“Did you not write to the duke of Adria asking for, um, greater distance? That was one of the rumors.” Penric had held the letter in his hand in the duke’s cabinet and read it. The chancellery of Adria was expert in forgeries, both detecting and creating them, but it had been in a scribe’s handwriting, with only Arisaydia’s signature appended. The duke had been frank with Pen about the dubious possibilities, which was why he’d been supposed to sound out the general most discreetly at first. And, should it not prove Arisaydia’s idea, implant it anyway.

“Adria! Certainly not. Why would I treat with Adria? Their sea merchants are little better than pirates, sometimes. Rats with boats, nibbling at our coasts.” Arisaydia’s mouth set. He couldn’t glower yet, but his eyelids tensed, and then his lips parted in pain. “Agh.” He sighed and huddled down in his sheets, obviously tiring.

Well, that wasn’t encouraging for Pen’s secondary plan. He had begun to wonder, if he could restore Arisaydia’s sight, if he might persuade him to flee east after all. Not that letting the duke aim Arisaydia at Carpagamo, a country that had never done harm to Pen, seemed a very holy mission, but politics were generally unholy, and that had never kept the Temple from dabbling in them. But he could not have stayed in Martensbridge and kept his sanity, and the archdivine of Adria had promised him a place that did not include duties to the Mother’s Order.

Yet here I am, practicing medicine again all unwilled. Is the Bastard laughing?

This left the question of who in Cedonia had forged the initial letter, as the duke was fully convinced it had originated here. Clear entrapment, it seemed. Vicious both in its intent and its results. Velka might have brought it; he’d certainly escorted the very real reply back into the right wrong Cedonian hands, which had to have been outstretched waiting for it.

Penric was really starting to want some time alone in a quiet room with Velka. He was theologically forbidden to kill with his magic, but there were other possibilities. So very, very many. And oh gods he surely now understood why physician-sorcerers were the most tightly controlled of all the discreet cadre of Temple mages.

Desdemona couldn’t lick her lips, but she could lick his. It brought him out of his furious fugue with a start. Her little frisson of anticipatory excitement faded, and she sighed.

Don’t tempt me, and he had no idea which of them said it.