Mira's Last Dance

  Penric, Des murmured. Take a look at this.

  His outer vision was abruptly flooded with his inner one, and he glanced around, wondering if she had spotted a sundered ghost. The lingering smudges of those lost souls were common enough that he usually had Des spare him the distraction, lest he alarm companions by constantly dodging around things they could not see. But at his sight’s fullest intensity he also saw the souls of those still alive, congruent with their bodies in an eerie swirling nimbus of life and light. It seemed to him such intimate god-sight ought not to be gifted to a mere man, but he’d learned to use it back when he’d been a practicing physician. Far too much practice, but it hadn’t made perfect. Right now, Adelis was mostly dark red, stress and anger well-contained, no contradictions there. Annoying as it sometimes was, Pen appreciated the man’s straightforwardness. Nikys—he sneaked a peek—was blue with weariness, a snarled thread of thick green worry running through that he quite wanted to wind out of her, if only he had a way, which he didn’t.

  No, said Des. Look at Madame Zihre. Left breast.

  She was a normal mix of colors, more to the blue and green, but he saw at once the black blot of chaos riding in her breast. That familiar, lethal egg… Oh. He gulped. Oh, Des, I wish you hadn’t shown me that. Which was the other reason he avoided using his inner sight. All that overwhelming pain, pouring in from the people around him—how did gods and saints endure such knowledge?

  The tumor’s still encapsulated. There’s a chance. Des let the disrupting visions fade, to Pen’s relief. Or I should not have troubled you. Attend to her later, perhaps.

  Perhaps. Pen drew breath and forced his attention back to his external surroundings. Madame Zihre frowned doubtfully at Pen’s companions, following in behind them—Nikys with their sack of meager belongings and Penric’s medical case, Adelis, his hat pulled down again, clutching a roll that looked exactly like a bundle of weapons.

  “Could we take my servants to our chamber, first?” Penric suggested. “They’re very tired.”

  “Mm, yes,” said Zihre thoughtfully. She plucked a candlestick from a table by the stairs, lit it from another, and led them up to the small gallery over the entry atrium. Entering a bedchamber there, she shared the flame with a brace of candles on a shelf, and a couple in fine mirrored wall sconces, and gave Penric a sidelong glance. “How about this?”

  The place had a rumpled air; after a quick survey, Des reported, Lively in here. She’s testing you.

  “Is it… clean?” asked Nikys, pausing on the threshold in doubt.

  Penric waved a hand, and enjoyed the familiar little flush of warmth through his body as Des divested chaos. “It is now.”

  “Ah. Thank you, Learned Jurald.” Getting into her assigned role at once, hah. She smiled and entered confidently, Adelis trailing.

  By the bemused purse of her lips, Zihre was more persuaded by Nikys’s belief than by Penric’s patter.

  Nikys set down the case and hefted the sack stuffed with their clothing, mostly filthy by now. “May I join your laundresses, Madame? What little we saved from the wreck is overdue a washing in something other than seawater.”

  “Certainly. Come down when you’re ready.”

  A female voice shrilly calling Zihre’s name echoed from the atrium, and she grimaced.

  “We’ll follow you shortly,” Penric told her, and she nodded and hurried off to address her next household crisis.

  Penric shut the door behind her. A basin and ewer sat on the chamber’s washstand; he seized the moment to splash his face and hands, saying to Nikys and Adelis, “Adelis should stay out of sight in this room. We’d best get our story straight. Where did our ship wreck?”

  “Cape Crow would make the most sense,” allowed Adelis.

  “Right, so I coasted down from, say, Trigonie. Trying to get around to”—Penric mentally reviewed the map—“Thasalon. After the wreck, I wouldn’t get on a ship again, nor would any captain have me, because of those nautical superstitions about sorcerers aboard being bad luck.”

  “Apparently confirmed,” Adelis murmured.

  Penric ignored this. “So we struck west overland. You two have not been with me for long. Which should allow you to say I don’t know to most questions about me.”

  “You hired us in Trigonie,” offered Nikys, entering into the spirit of this. “We worked cheaply, because we were trying to get home to Cedonia. Should we still be a man and his wife?”

  “You’ve been that for the last while. Better change it around. Go back to brother and sister?”

  Nikys, kneeling to sort dirty clothing, nodded.

  Adelis folded his arms and looked skeptical. “Why are you traveling?”

  “Temple business,” Penric returned at once. “Which, of course, I have not discussed with you. You think I’m a…”

  “Spy?” said Nikys brightly.

  “Lunatic?” suggested Adelis.

  “Called as a physician,” Penric suppressed this flight of fancy, or commentary. “To treat someone important. Or moderately important, I suppose. But, really, if you just say Temple business and look down your nose at your interrogator, it usually suffices.”

  Adelis’s lips twitched. “Confirming something I’ve long suspected about Temple functionaries.”

  Penric waved this off, and bent to help Nikys with her now-sorted bundles.

  “No.” She tapped his hands away. “No lifting for you till Des says.”

  “I’m doing much better,” Penric protested, but rose empty-handed. “Though I’d as soon get this night’s work over with as swiftly as possible. I’m about dead on my feet. Not literally,” he added hastily, as Nikys looked up in alarm.

  Adelis hoisted her up, and the bundles into her arms, and opened the door for them.

  “I’ll try to bring us back some food,” she told him.

  “Don’t trip on the stairs,” Adelis called after them in an under-voice. “Or Penric’s tongue.”

  * * *

  Penric caught up with Madame Zihre downstairs, and had her guide him around her house from room to room. The place was surprisingly free of bedbugs, but while he was at it he had Des strip out in passing endemic fleas, flies, wool moths, and all their eggs, from every cranny, cupboard, chest, and fold of fabric, as well as his primary target of lice. Nearly the entire household was collected in the garden and laundry, aiding the washing, which allowed him to stand in the shadows and divest them all more-or-less at once. Heartwarming, Des quipped happily, growing replete with balance. Pen dissuaded Madame Zihre from introducing him, or even letting him be seen by his beneficiaries, as he was beginning to evolve a new idea.

  Leaning against an atrium pillar in the shadows with his arms folded, he remarked to her, “You, happily, are not infested.”

  “You can tell this?” Her expression had not shifted much from its initial dubiousness. Like any merchant, she’d likely had plenty of experience with cheaters and charlatans, and was plainly waiting for him to slip up in some revealing way.

  He nodded. “Is there someplace we can go to talk quietly?”

  Her lips drew back in a half-smile, dryly satisfied, as she braced for whatever sly pitch she now expected from him. “Come this way.”

  She led him upstairs into a bedroom, richly appointed and obviously her own, and unlocked a door to a small private cabinet. A writing table, quills and inkpots, shelves with ledgers for accounts and tax records, a strongbox—this was her real personal space. She lit the generous candles and settled him on a stool crowded by the wall, turning around the straight chair at the table for herself.

  Penric clasped his hands between his knees, smiling to conceal his own unhappiness. He had so not wanted to be drawn into this calling again… “Madame Zihre. Do you know what rides in your left breast?”

  She gasped, her hand flying to the spot. Aye, she knows, murmured Des.

  She swallowed and raised her chin, and said in a voice gone grim, “My death. In due course. Such a curse killed my older s
ister… eventually.”

  Penric could picture it all too well. He nodded. “I made acquaintance with such things when I was training as a sorcerer-physician in, ah, my home country. I had no luck destroying any tumors that had spread like tree roots, but if they were still encapsulated like an egg, sometimes… I did.” But less luck persuading his fellow physicians in Martensbridge, or the patients they brought too late before him, of the critical differences, visible only to him.

  “How, destroy?”

  “Small, repeated applications of heat, of burning, inside the affected flesh. Although lately I have bethought that burning with cold would be a gentler method.”

  “Burn with cold?” She stared at him. “That sounds mad.”

  “Ah, Cedonia is a warm country. I keep forgetting. Yes, it is possible to burn with cold.” He sat back, held up his fingers, and concentrated. A tiny hailstone grew from the air between them. He let it enlarge for several breaths, till it was the size of a pullet egg, and held it out to Madame Zihre.

  She took the ice lump, and her lips parted in surprise. It was the first visible, uphill magic he had worked in front of her. When she looked up at him again, her expression was frighteningly intense, shock and fear and hope intermingled, and a whole new kind of doubt. “Oh,” she breathed. “You really are. You seem so young.”

  He nodded, not bothering to feign an offense he did not feel. “I’m thirty, but never mind. Do you wish me to try to treat you?”

  Her eyes narrowed and her lips thinned again, as she thought she spotted the hook. “What is your price?”

  “For this, nothing,” said Penric. “Not least because—and you have to understand this—I cannot guarantee you will be healed, or that the tumor will not return. They did, sometimes.” And often worse than before, destroying false hopes as devastatingly as a fire. “My offer stands regardless. Nevertheless, I do have a need. I want to travel on from Sosie as someone else, unrecognizable. My servants also.”

  She took this in, blinking thoughtfully. “Why such secrecy?”

  “Temple business.” Not wholly a lie. The archdivine of Adira had assigned him to his duke, who had assigned him to fetch General Arisaydia, and things had spun out—of control, among other things—from there. Bringing him, all unplanned, here. Unplanned by any human schemer, anyway, he conceded uneasily.

  You know, for a divine of the god of lies, you cleave to the truth rather closely, Des commented.

  It’s the scholar in me. Hush.

  But Madame Zihre, for all her wariness, accepted this without demur, awarding him a slightly more respectful nod. “So… what is it that you do for such things?” She motioned to her breast once more.

  “As you have observed, the deepest magics never show above the surface. It would be helpful for my precision if I may touch you.”

  “Right now?” She seemed to expect more preparation. More ceremony, something.

  He was too tired to invent any. “Soonest begun.” Soonest done. He opened his hand toward her. “I should warn you, you will feel some pain.”

  “Well, that’s some proof, isn’t it?” She shrugged out of half her bodice with an almost medical unselfconsciousness, a curious parallel between their respective crafts, and leaned toward him.

  Des, sight, please. The inner vision came up at once. He placed his fingers on her fine soft skin, found the dark blot, and called up the spot of sucking cold in its center as he had just done for the hailstone. Her breath caught as she felt it, but she held still as the chill increased, though her hands gripped her skirts on her knees. She was not the first woman he’d met who endured dire pain in disturbing silence, and he wondered if Nikys would be another such. When the ice reached the edge of the blot, he stopped and sat back.

  She inhaled, and allowed herself to pant. “That’s all?”

  “First treatment. I should repeat it tomorrow, to be sure. As sure as I can be. Then later I’ll need to open it and drain the killed matter, to prevent necrosis and infection.” And cram the area with as much uphill magic as he could make it accept, but that part would be invisible to her.

  She nodded and reordered her clothing. Her breathing was slowing, to his relief. “I can feel it. Maybe it’s doing me good.”

  “It will likely swell and hurt worse through the night. Tell me everything you feel. It will help me…” To guess what I’ve done was perhaps not the most reassuring thing to say. He left the sentence hanging.

  “So… how do you plan to make yourself unrecognizable, and how do you imagine I can help? Can’t you do it by magic?”

  “Sorcery only works that way in tales, to my regret. I would love to be able to turn myself into a bird and fly, wouldn’t you? I cannot even manage a cloak of invisibility, but I’ve found it’s possible to manage a cloak of misdirection.” He took a breath. “I think it will be best to start from the skin out. Have you, anywhere about your premises, a woman’s undergarment that used to be called a bum roll?”

  “Oh!” She looked him up and down, and her face lit with true delight for the first time since he’d met her. “Oh, yes. I see what you have in mind. …Oh, I do adore a masquerade.”

  III

  When the uproar of the nighttime laundering and bathing crisis had died away, and nearly all the linens and garments of the household were strung on lines across the garden to await the morning sun, Nikys sneaked a bath for herself before returning to their room. She found Penric leaning on the balcony railing outside their door, looking pensive, though he straightened and smiled when he saw her. “Adelis fell asleep,” he told her. “He’s really not as recovered yet as he thinks he is.”

  Nikys wondered if that went for Penric as well; he looked exhausted. She entered the chamber quietly, wondering how they were to divide the bed this time. But she found Madame Zihre had sent up two pallets for the traveling divine’s retainers. Adelis already occupied one of them.

  “You should take the bed,” Penric whispered.

  “No, you should,” she whispered back. “What if someone comes in? It would look strange to have given it up to your maidservant.”

  He opened his mouth, but she held her finger to his lips and shook her head. He glanced at Adelis and forbore to continue the argument, to her relief. Her pallet was still an improvement over a pile of straw. They had surely not reached safety yet. But with Adelis snoring on one side, and the gentle creaks of Penric nesting himself into the bed on the other, it seemed a sufficient substitute that all her anxieties failed to keep her awake long.

  This was not a household that rose with the dawn the way her well-ordered and much-missed villa in Patos had. But it was not long after first light that a quiet tap announced a servant with wash water and a bit of breakfast for the odd guests. Nikys intercepted it at the door, and swapped out the chamber pot. They gratefully devoured the hot tea, bread, and fruit. Nikys was surprised when the next knock was not the returning servant, but the lady of the house herself.

  “Learned Jurald. My bathhouse is temporarily deserted. This is a good moment to begin that task we discussed last night.”

  “I should be pleased, Madame,” Penric replied smoothly.

  “Bring your maidservant. I don’t want to get my hands all over henna.”

  They all shuffled after her, through the forest of laundry already half-dry in the day’s promise of heat, to the little bathhouse, where Adelis was induced to haul water on the promise that he could be next. He frowned over his shoulder as he was sent off to stay out of sight till then.

  Penric shucked off the shirt he’d slept in and started to untie his trousers, then stopped. “Oh. I did not mean to offend your modesty, Madame Khatai. After four years of teaching anatomy to the apprentices, I’m afraid anyone with their skin still on looks dressed to me.”

  Even Zihre raised her eyebrows at this rueful comment.

  Nikys took this in. Urk. He wasn’t worrying about the other madame’s modesty, she noted. “Learned,” she sighed, “just get in the bath.”

>   “Ah. Right.”

  He was sluiced—Nikys stood on the bench to lift the bucket high enough—soaped himself up, sluiced again, and then nipped delicately into the wooden tub. Thin he was, but strappy, not scrawny, she was pleased to note. And that milk skin went all over.

  And then she was allowed to fulfill the fantasy that she would not have confessed aloud under threat of thumbscrews, and wash that amazing hair. This was followed with a light henna rinse, which almost broke her heart to apply. But the silver-blond transmuted to an almost equally entrancing copper-blond, not raw red the way the color sometimes came out. Zihre handed him a light robe after he’d dried himself, and Nikys made him squeeze his brilliant eyes shut and very carefully colored his eyebrows as well. Her hands emerged a somewhat less-attractive orange.

  Zihre smiled in satisfaction. “Ah, yes. Very natural. I thought that might do.”

  “It’s better than the walnut dye I started this trip with. I believe it will be best not to overexaggerate anything.”

  “It’s a start. That beard stubble must go, next. Did you bring your own razor, or shall we use one of ours?”

  It occurred to Nikys then that for all she’d seen Penric shave Adelis, during his blindness, she’d never seen him shave himself, even in the constant close quarters they’d shared on their flight.

  “I actually have a trick for that. A bit of oil and a cloth will suffice.”

  He rubbed oil over his jaw, then scrubbed it thoroughly with the cloth. The stubble—miraculously—seemed to have transferred to the cloth. Was that uphill magic, or down? Nikys tensed as Zihre ran her hand over the smoothed skin so revealed.

  “My word. That’s effective.” She gestured down his chest, faintly dusted with fine gold hairs. “And now the rest of it.”

  “Er. I had actually planned to keep my clothes on.” He waved a wiry arm. “Long sleeves. High neck. And so on. A look of expensive reserve.”

  “We’ll have to experiment with the clothes. I don’t have much of that style. The upper half of your chest, then.”