“I obtained some syrup of poppies. I’m almost out, though.” Adelis loathed the opiate, but he’d accepted it from her hands this time. She didn’t think it had quelled the pain enough for him to sleep, but it had kept him too quiescent to fight them, lying in sodden silence. Too quiescent to rise and seek to do himself harm?
“I brought a good quantity. He can be given some more before I start.”
The physician cleared space on the wash table, opened his case, laid out a cloth, and positioned supplies upon it in a precise, organized manner that subtly reassured her. He began by measuring out his syrup into a little vessel with a spout; then he held up Adelis’s head and tipped it into his mouth, stroking his throat with a finger as he swallowed it down. His movements were gentle, but firm and sure, practiced-seeming. Mindful, but not in the least hesitant.
The scullion returned with the first of the water, and Penric laid a towel under Adelis’s head and commenced dribbling it over the blindfold. “This will take some time to loosen,” he remarked, “but it won’t be difficult. And I promise all his skin will stay on.”
A fainter snort.
It seemed an optimistic prediction, but Nikys longed to believe it, so said nothing. As she sat in her chair, watching the man watching her brother, her head nodded, and she jerked it back up. As much to keep herself awake as for any real curiosity, she asked, “Are you from the northern peninsula? Your speech is a little odd.”
He hesitated, then smiled again. “My mother was. My father was a Weald-man, from the country over the other mountains, to your far south and east.”
“I’ve seen men like you in the emperor’s guard in Thasalon. They were supposed to be from islands in the frozen southern sea. Fierce warriors, I was told, but ill-behaved visitors.” Well, not just like him, as he didn’t look the least like a warrior. But some of the big brutes had been similar in coloration, if not so, so… so much so.
“I’m a well-behaved visitor, I assure you.”
“Where did you study medicine?”
“…Rosehall. It’s in the Weald.”
Her brows rose. “I’ve heard of it! A great university, yes?” Despite her reservations, she grew more hopeful.
He looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t think Cedonians knew much about my father’s land.”
“I’ve lived in the capital, and seaports. People get around. Like you.”
His smile grew a bit strained. “Yes, I suppose so.”
At length, done fiddling with water and oils, he took sharp scissors from his case and cut through the cloth on either side of Adelis’s face. He undid the wrap from around the back of his patient’s head and dropped it out of the way, resettling him on the towel. Adelis groaned in fear. “You need not watch this,” Penric said over his shoulder to Nikys.
“I’ll stay.”
“Hold his hands, then.”
She went to the bed’s other side. “To console him?”
A long finger flicked out and tapped her purpled cheek. “So he can’t hit me.”
She half-smiled and did so; Adelis gripped her spasmodically back.
Penric took a breath, closed his hands on either side of the stiff cloth, and lifted it delicately. The vile mask seemed to puff away from Adelis’s face like a dry leaf, pulling… nothing at all.
She swallowed hard at the destruction that was revealed.
Blisters, huge puffs of membrane-thin skin bulging with liquid, ranged over Adelis’s upper face and quivered. His eyelids were a horror, rising out of his eye sockets like round bladders. What was not white and swollen was violently red and pink. As Nikys recoiled, sickened, Penric leaned forward, staring fiercely into what had been her brother’s eyes as if he were trying to see right through his skull. But he said only, “Huh.”
He caught Adelis’s hands on their way to feel his own face and yanked them down hard, the first ungentle gesture she’d seen him make. “No. No touching. Stay on your back. That skin is barely stronger than a soap bubble, and we want to preserve those blisters intact for as long as possible. They’re protecting you, little though it may feel like it.”
Adelis panted, but obeyed.
The physician’s brilliant blue eyes seemed filled with jostling thoughts, but Nikys couldn’t begin to guess what they might be. “I think what I most need now, Madame Khatai, is for you to go get some real rest. I’ll stay here and keep watch. Come back and relieve me at nightfall.” He beamed sunnily at her.
“I’ll bring you both food, later. Or have it brought.”
“That would be excellent.” He hummed, as if mulling something, then said, “If I’m going to be living in your household for a few days, we’d best give some thought how I am to be explained to your other servants. I’d suggest you tell them you’ve hired me on to be your brother’s male attendant. Which is not actually untrue, among its other benefits.”
While she couldn’t imagine why anyone, even the politically hostile, could object to Adelis being seen by a physician however oddly he’d been delivered to them, she was reminded that among her erstwhile servants was one certain spy. She nodded slowly. “All right.”
She went out to make preparations in the kitchen, and see to the arrangement of the small spare bedchamber. She didn’t think she could sleep, but when she reached her own room on the other side of the atrium and sat down on her bed, she felt as if the weight of an oxcart, complete with ox, had been lifted from her shoulders.
She was still crying from the sheer relief of it when she fell asleep.
* * *
She returned as instructed at sunset. When she eased open the door, Master Penric leaped up holding a finger to his lips and reeled out of the room. He clutched her hands and shook them up and down like a long-lost relative. His palms were feverish. His wide grin at her was nearly lunatic.
“He’s asleep, miraculously. When he wakes up, get more water down him. Don’t let him touch his face. I’ll be back in a while and measure out the next dose of poppy syrup.”
And then she wondered if he’d been drinking, or maybe sampling the poppy juice himself, for he called over his shoulder as he bounded down the stairs, “ ’Scuse me, but I havetogokillsomerats now.”
“What?”
“Mice? Mice would be all right, but you need more of ’em.” His voice faded as he dodged not to the front door, but out the back way. “Has to be something useless lurking around this neighborhood. Stray dog would do a treat right now. Sweet lord god Bastard, deliver us something…”
She blinked, closed her mouth, shook her head, and went within. Sitting and watching the slow rise and fall of her brother’s chest beneath his sheets as the shadows deepened, she decided she didn’t care how strange the blond man was, if he could get Adelis to sleep like that.
V
Penric gauged his distance in the dark from the neighbor’s roof to the garden wall, leapt lightly, and settled himself down atop it for some composing meditation. The sleepy provincial guards, it appeared, had been instructed to attend to the villa’s entrance and the postern gate in the rear wall, and that was just what they were doing. The one at the back had curled himself up against his assigned door and was currently napping, combining two tasks.
A bat fluttered by against the stars, but Pen let this one go, since his body had finally cooled. This neighborhood outside the city walls had lacked the swarm of big, aggressive rats like the harbor’s, but he wasn’t going back down there tonight. Des had left a trail of destruction through all the small vermin within her range, but with this much chaos to divest, insects had scarcely repaid even the moment’s attention they took. Private middens had yielded more red-blooded prey, including a few slinking suburban rats, and what he thought might have been some kind of hedgehog. Pen regretted the mangy, worm-riddled street cat, but they’d been desperately hot and at least the poor beast no longer suffered.
“Eyes,” muttered Pen. “They’re so small. Why should this engender so much more chaos than making several times my weight in ice?”
<
br /> His demon couldn’t wheeze, exactly, so maybe it was just him as Des replied, “It may be the most subtle uphill magic you’ve yet attempted. The ice was big but simple. This mad healing you’ve thrown us into is complex.”
Penric’s initial plan, more selfish than charitable, had been simply to assure Arisaydia would survive his blinding, to evade the burden of yet another unwanted death in the pack Pen carried. It was only when he’d examined the man with all of Des’s perceptions focused to their greatest intensity that he’d realized that the backs of his eyes, in all their impossible delicacy, were undamaged. And, suddenly, the hopeless had become merely the very, very tricky.
His first task had been the finicky release of beginning adhesions as Arisaydia’s injured eyelids tried to grow themselves onto his steam-lashed eyeballs; then, rapid reduction of the ocular swelling, his skills and refined belladonna tincture working together. Pen had poured all the uphill magic he could into Arisaydia’s own body’s powers to heal, but that was a narrow channel that could only accept so much help at a time before it burst in a destructive back-blow. It was like trying to relieve a man dying of thirst using a teaspoon, but at least he’d kept the sips coming all the long day.
Arisaydia’s survival was no longer in question, perhaps never had been. Pen had discovered the man in the bed to be above middle height, muscular and fit, obviously healthy before this catastrophe had struck him down. His face and arms and legs were that attractive reddish-brick tan common to the men of this region, though the parts of his body routinely covered by clothes more matched his sister’s lighter, indoor version. His aquiline features, rough-cut in granite, were in her echoed in fine round marble; both shared the same midnight-black hair, his cut short, hers drawn back from her face and curling over her shoulders. Pen wondered what color his eyes had been. He could ask Madame Khatai, but it might distress her.
Speaking of which… “Do try to be more sensitive around the sister, Des. She’s quite upset already.”
Des snorted. You have more than enough sensitivity for us all. To excess, as I have pointed out before.
Bloody-minded chaos demon, Pen thought back.
The impression of an amused purr. I do sometimes wonder how you ever survived, Pen, before you were us.
Whereas I more often wonder how I am to survive after…
He stared down into the shadows beneath the pergola, where he had first seen and studied Madame Khatai from just about this vantage at dawn. She’d borne something of her brother’s air of sturdy health, after a delightfully plump female fashion, but Pen didn’t think he’d ever seen a woman’s posture so expressive of utter despair. I imagine she’d be quite pretty if she smiled.
Des’s response was sardonic: So what is she when she isn’t smiling?
Penric contemplated the conundrum. “Heartbreaking. I think.”
Was Des taken aback? Oh, Pen, no. This isn’t the time or place for one of your futile infatuations. This isn’t a place we should be in at all. We should be making our way back to Adria.
“…I know.” Pen sighed. He pictured the man in the upstairs bedchamber whose life his fumbled packet of papers had somehow destroyed. No—he eyed the pergola—two lives, it seemed.
You hardly destroyed Arisaydia all by yourself. You had some expert help.
Aye to that. The increasing suspicion that he’d been used was a growing itch in Penric’s mind. But by whom, and where, in this tangle of events? “Who around here would know who Arisaydia’s enemies are?” He answered his own question before Des, this time: “Arisaydia would. For a start. If I could get him talking instead of just groaning.” And, he was now sure, not if but when he did, who might a man trust more than his physician?
Des’s silence would be tight-lipped, if she’d had lips. After a while she remarked, I know you have no Temple orders for this. And I’ve felt no god move. You have embarked on this entirely on your own, Pen. How great a step from independent to renegade?
Or how many little slippery ones, more probably. And Des could not, would not, stop him, though she wasn’t beyond making him stop to think. “Shall I pray to my god for guidance, then?”
They both fell silent, considering the fifth god each in their own way.
What would you do if you got it, and it wasn’t what you wanted to hear?
“…Maybe I’ll wait for Him to call on me.”
Des shuddered. I suppose you think that is an amusing joke.
Pen’s lips stretched in something almost a real smile as he dropped over the wall.
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 alo
ng 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.”
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