“Then I,” said Nikys determinedly, “shall do some sewing, if I can get the materials.”
“I can help,” offered Penric. “Cloth or skin, I make very tidy stitches.”
She smiled up at him. I’ll bet you do.
The part about You are perfect as you are she tucked away for later examination, like a child hoarding a sweet that she was afraid would be stolen by some stern grownup. I have had to be my own grownup for a very long time now, haven’t I?
IV
Penric was impressed with Nikys’s foraging abilities, as she gathered supplies for their next project of disguise. They all retreated to their room for the rest of the afternoon to carry it out. Zihre had donated a pair of identical black half-masks, broad across the upper face, modestly ornamented with sequins. Nikys turned and cut up a voluminous old black skirt for two tabards, which, when she draped them over a black shirt and trousers for Adelis and a dark dress for herself, blended well and gave them both a unified air. Done with being fitted, and having run out of sandals to clean and swords to sharpen, Adelis sat and watched.
“These should have matching embroidery and more decoration,” Nikys murmured, her borrowed needle flashing in and out, “but there isn’t time. This bit of braid around the edges must do.”
“Everyday garb, perhaps,” Penric offered, his fingers trying to equal her pace on the other piece. “I’m sure Mira provided her servants something showier for those exotic evenings, sadly delayed with the rest of her things by the accursed carters.”
Nikys smiled into her work. Penric watched her covertly. Bent over in her concentration, she seemed utterly unaware of how enchanting she looked. Surely she was built to be the serene, solid center of… something. My life, he tried not to think. Because she would be stopping in Orbas with her brother, and he would be sailing back to Adria, right? He kept his needle moving.
But he couldn’t stop picking at the impasse. Like a scab? “I know what Adelis plans when we get to Vilnoc,” Penric said. “What of you?”
Nikys glanced up in surprise. “What?”
“Have you taken no thought for yourself?”
“While I have,” Adelis put in, “Nikys will not lack.”
Penric reflected, but refrained from observing aloud, that what Adelis had right now were the possessions they carried and a murderous pursuit. Both of which he was sharing equally with his sister, to be sure.
“Well, then,” Pen tried again, “what would you desire? I mean, if you had a choice.”
It was a little painful watching Nikys trying to wrap her imagination around the idea of having a choice. Or failing to. “What’s the point of such speculation?” she asked in turn. “I’ll deal with what chance drops in my way when it arrives there.” The gesture she made put Pen uncomfortably in mind of a mourner throwing the first handful of dirt into a grave. Three times, he supposed, she had suffered her life to be upended by disaster overtaking those she’d depended upon: her father’s sudden death, her husband’s lingering one, and now Adelis’s flight for his life. She glanced at her half-twin and away, but her needle didn’t falter. “I did love the villa in Patos. I used to pretend it was mine. Just as well it wasn’t, now.”
She wants her own house? Pen tried to interpret this.
Most women do, Des returned, at some point in their lives. Getting one without going through some man is made nearly impossible on purpose, I suspect.
So would two small rooms in someone else’s mansion overlooking a canal qualify? Sufficient for himself, they suddenly seemed a scanty offering.
“We won’t be this poor for long,” Adelis vowed. Less optimism, Pen suspected, than an effort to keep up his sister’s morale. Adelis, too, had lost hugely in the late—ongoing—calamity, almost including his eyesight. Did that last recovery put the rest into an altered perspective?
Nikys shrugged. “Safety has nothing to do with being rich or poor. Or good or bad. A person could be as pious as you please, and own a palace, and still lose it all in a moment when the earth shakes its shoulders, or fire erupts.” She frowned at her stitches. “Maybe true safety lies not in roots, but in feet. Or wings.” She glanced, strangely, at Penric.
Bower birds, Pen thought. Didn’t that breed try to attract females by producing elaborate, decorated nests?
Or there’s that bird that hangs upside down from a branch by its toes, shakes its wings wildly, and screams for hours, Des put in with a spurious air of helpfulness. You could try that.
I’m not that desperate. Yet. Though even a rented villa seemed beyond his purse as a Temple divine.
Not beyond your ingenuity as a sorcerer, if you didn’t continually underprice our services.
Our powers are a gift from the god. It seems wrong to hoard their benefits.
So put up your sign as a physician.
Penric’s amusement congealed. No.
After a daunted pause, Des muttered, Sorry. Not a good jest?
No. Pen drew a steadying breath. Never mind.
He came to the end of his length of braid and tied off his thread, automatically using the one-handed technique a surgeon had taught him. Brows rising, Nikys paused to stare, then shook her head and kept sewing.
So what would I desire, if I had a choice? Pen thought to ask himself. One answer was obvious, and sat in front of him. But was the choice his to make?
You have many choices, Desdemona opined. The real question is, what would you trade for them?
* * *
Consulting with Madame Zihre during her drainage treatment, Penric struck a bargain to earn another night’s lodging and meals, not to mention their clothing and masks, by taking a seat that evening above the entry atrium and discreetly delousing any incoming clients in need of it. This proved to be a good third of them. In the persona of Sora Mira’s own servant, neat in her black tabard and mask, Nikys attended upon him as they sheltered in a spot normally occupied by the upstairs maid. Penric wasn’t sure which of them was guarding the other from any untoward notice, but in the event Zihre’s customers seemed reasonably inhibited. If excessively inhabited.
It was all downhill magic, and so not costly, but really, such small prey made barely a nibble for Desdemona, given the demands of his own self-healing, still proceeding, and his work on Madame Zihre’s tumor. He wondered if he might change clothes later and take to the rooftops in search of some better chaos sinks; and then there was the temple still to mulct. Zihre’s house was proving a seductively comfortable respite, but they dared not linger long.
Toward midevening the influx of customers slacked off, and Penric decided he could leave his post and visit the garden, where Zihre provided food and drinks for her clients, as well as music and conversation. It simulated an impromptu, cresset-lit salon under the stars, although Penric expected the personalities and politics of this provincial town were nothing so rarified as in the aristocratic soirées of Lodi that Mira had once dominated.
They weren’t half as rarified as they liked to pretend, Mira told him, amused.
In any case, it seemed a safe place to practice Mira a bit, before having to flaunt her at the potentially lethal audience of a border guard-post. Plus, he was getting peckish.
Trailed by Nikys, he shortened his stride to something more dainty as he navigated the stairs, managing not to wobble atop the clogs. Do you have any idea, sighed Mira, what I could have done back then given your splendid inches? Some dozen men and half-a-dozen women occupied the garden; he was a little startled when all their heads turned upon his entry. Not a few jaws hung open for a long moment, before their owners recovered them. He smiled benignly and selected a seat, a padded bench beneath a lantern hung on a post. Good choice, murmured Mira. The light will really bring out our hair.
Self-consciously, he leaned back and fluffed it a trifle, and wound a curl around his fingers. Nikys, bless her, guided a servant with a tray to him, and he selected a couple of snacks, aromatic meat wrapped in cooked grape leaves, and some bites of white cheese.
“Aren’t you hungry?” he murmured to her.
“Servant, remember?” she whispered back. “I’d be dismissed for helping myself in front of guests.”
“Mira, happily, is eccentric.” He tapped her chin sternly and popped a grape-leaf-wrap into her mouth with his own slim fingers, and she smiled back unwilled. Possibly not such a wise move; abruptly, not all the men who were staring were staring only at him.
Three fellows circled in upon him, one abandoning his own partner to do so, to her dismay. The two younger ones were glowered off by the older, a broad, stocky man sporting a military haircut tipped with gray. The man had a face to launch a powerful glower, a trebuchet of a visage. Big, hooked nose, big chin, big ears; dark skin peppered with old smallpox scars; it reminded Pen of nothing so much as a well-worn boot, probably with hobnails. Yet it was redeemed from its remarkable ugliness by a pair of shrewd brown eyes, and more so by his slightly grim smile as he slid in beside Penric on the bench. Interestingly, he was not one of the visitors Penric had needed to secretly delouse, earlier. Nikys took up a maidservantly guard position behind them.
He captured Mira’s hand. “Hello, there. You’re new, are you?”
Penric allowed him to touch his lips to Mira’s knuckles, and decided not to attempt a simper. “And you, I gather, are not?”
He chuckled. “Nothing new about me by now, no. Name’s Chadro. And yours, lady?”
“You may call me Mira. Alas, I am not new either. I’m merely a guest of Madame Zihre’s, breaking my journey here.”
His heavy eyebrows went up in disappointment. “Not an employee of the house, then, Mira?”
Pen shook his head.
“Ah. Pity.” He set Pen’s hand down upon his skirted thigh, and patted it. “How do you know Zihre?”
“We’d not met before yesterday, but we share a mutual friend, in whose name I was able to presume upon her gracious hospitality.”
“Do you…” He hesitated. “Might this friend, and you, by chance also share Zihre’s trade?”
“I used to, but I am retiring to, shall we call it, private service. Hence the journey.”
“Really.” His smile crept back. So did his hand. “But not retired yet?”
“You tempt me, sir, but I have these pending obligations.”
“You lie very nicely. Kind Mira. I can’t imagine this face tempts you much.”
“One part is not the whole of a man, nor the whole measure of a man’s worth.”
“Hah.” His amusement grew. “You make a prettier philosopher than most I’ve met.”
Mira smiled. “Not a high bar to leap over, I daresay.”
“Indeed, not. If you—” But his next foray into this faintly ponderous banter was interrupted by an altercation from the atrium, which spilled violently into the garden.
Two red-faced young men, both with poniards drawn, circled each other, seeking space. The other occupants of the garden gave it to them, scattering back to the walls with alarmed cries. The young men were both well-dressed in the local style, with elaborated hair that suggested neither were of the military persuasion that so many of the clients here shared. A couple of servants dropped their trays and raced out, calling for help from the porter and Zihre.
“Berat scum!” one cried. “A pox upon your house, and you!”
“Parga dog! I’ll cut out your lying tongue!”
They barged forward, meeting in a shrill scrape of steel.
“Oh, gods,” groaned Chadro. “Who let those idiots in here both at the same time?” Unlike every other more prudent witness, when he rose he stepped not back but forward.
Penric matched him. The last thing his party needed was for a brawl to turn bloody, bringing in the local authorities to question and closely examine everyone present, including the passing travelers. As strangers, they’d draw attention, and with enough attention someone might well put together the manservant with the burn scars on his face, and whatever circular from the capital for Adelis’s arrest that had arrived by now. This had to be stopped, and Penric had the means. To manage it discreetly, not revealing his powers, was going to be trickier…
Des, speed me. As slippery as a snake, Penric weaved between the two opponents, managing to grab one knife-clutching hand by the wrist. He dodged a flash from behind, though it clipped a curl from his hair. A quick twist to the nerve beneath the skin, and the hand flew open, dropping the poniard. He swung his leg around behind his victim’s knees, disguising a jab to his nerves there and dropping the fellow neatly to the ground. Chadro meanwhile had stepped behind the other man and slid his muscular arms through his armpits, lifting him off his feet with a jerk and trapping him close. One strong shake, like a dog dispatching a rat, and the second poniard followed the first to the paving stones, clattering.
“That’s enough!” barked Chadro, his voice deep and loud; parade-ground pitched, charged with authority. “I’ll cool both your hot heads upside down in the well if you don’t settle!” Penric didn’t doubt Chadro could and would do it, too, and apparently no one else doubted it either.
Penric bent and quickly collected both poniards, and another knife concealed beneath his man’s jacket at the small of his back, and yet another hidden in the other’s boot. Clutching the cutlery, he danced back out of range of it all, smiling and catching his breath. A couple of the young men with military haircuts belatedly stepped forward to aid Chadro, taking his prisoner off his hands, and the big porter arrived at last, looking both alarmed and irate. Penric’s man wasn’t exactly standing up yet, crouched over clutching his paralyzed right hand with his left, though he would recover the use of his no-doubt-tingling limbs in a few minutes. Probably.
Chadro bent and scooped up something off the pavement, and lumbered to Pen’s side. “Lady,” he said earnestly, “you should not have run between those two wild men. They nearly knifed you.” He held out his hand, in which lay the shining copper scrap of Pen’s hair.
About to protest I was perfectly safe, Pen was interrupted by the portion of Desdemona that was Mira. Leave this to me, oh-so-Learned, or you will botch it. Bemused, he let Mira take over. “Oh, my!” she gasped, as Chadro captured her hand and tipped the curl into her palm. “I never saw. So good that you stopped him.”
“Whatever possessed you, to attempt that?”
A true explanation of what possessed Penric would take all night, he thought wryly. “I was thinking only that Madame Zihre did not deserve the disruption to her household.”
“Very true.” He frowned up at her. “What did you do to the one that you put down? You were very quick.”
“Oh,” Mira flipped at her hair, “I was taught a few tricks, early in my trade, for discouraging obstreperous clients.” She took Chadro’s thick paw and pressed the curl into it. “You may as well keep it. I can’t put it back.”
His hand closed around it, and he smiled. “I suppose not.”
Penric looked around for Nikys, who had sensibly, thank their mutual god, hung back behind the bench. Her dark eyes wide with fear, she hurried forward to his side, gripping his arm tight. He could feel her hand shake. “Sora Mira! Are you all right?” She did not add, You cursed fool! but he thought he detected it in the set of her jaw.
“Perfectly all right, thanks to this gentleman here,” Mira purred, and Nikys shot her—him—them—an even more scorching look, quickly concealed as she bent her face. She swallowed and regained control of her features, or at least, her distressed gaze was sufficiently in-character for a lady’s loyal maidservant.
Madame Zihre appeared, looking rather rumpled, to sort out the contretemps, and Pen faded back a little more. The clash had started when the two young men had both attempted to choose the same lady for the evening, apparently for no better reason than to thwart the other. With the air of a mother sending unruly children to bed without their suppers, Zihre decreed that neither should have the girl, instead assigning them two others, or they could take themselves back out to the street with no refunds.
“My knives!” protested one, unwisely. Indeed, giving them back their weapons even upon their departure invited them to take up their brawl again as soon as they got outside.
“Madame Zihre,” said Penric, “might I suggest a servant be dispatched to deliver their weapons to their respective parents, together with an explanation as to why. They can each beg their property back from their fathers in the morning.”
Both paled, the one standing shooting Pen a look of extreme dislike, the one still seated a look of dislike mixed with dread. Chadro grinned. Zihre nodded dry agreement, and consigned the blades to a manservant to so dispose of. The angry, but cowed, rivals were drawn up opposite stairs by their girls, whom Penric suspected Zihre had selected more for reliable sense than looks.
“I trust those two will be delivered out the front door, later, at different times,” he murmured to her.
“Oh, yes,” she agreed distractedly. “Thank you for your aid, Ler—Sora Mira.” She turned and added, “And you, General Chadro. Without your quick wits and work, that could have been the most dreadful mess.”
Penric blinked. Well, that explains some things… At that rank, and clearly active duty, Chadro could only be the commander of the whatever-number-it-was Imperial infantry that Adelis had identified as the local garrison. Fourteenth, that was it. Ye gods, did he and Adelis know each other?
She continued to Chadro, “Consider your entertainment on the house tonight, sir.”
“Hm,” he said, “about that…” He sent Mira a faint smile and drew Zihre into the atrium. Penric pricked his ears, but could not quite make out their low-voiced consultation, except that they took turns glancing back into the garden. Zihre made some rather helpless palms-out gestures, and shrugged. Chadro grimaced unhappily. After another minute of even lower-voiced exchange, they returned, Zihre looking apologetic, Chadro frustrated.