Penric’s Mission

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  He emphatically refused to redon the blinding mask, so Penric made do with gauze wrappings above and below his eyes, which gleamed out like coals. By tomorrow, even those light dressings might be dispensed with. Pen’s efforts last night had been intense, but the results were at last making themselves visible to less subtle senses than his own.

  The other advantage to stopping at a larger town was that it could support a public livery, which Pen had located when he’d been out shedding chaos. Arisaydia made no objection to Pen’s proposal to hire a private coach to carry them all farther south, which doubtless meant that he harbored his own ideas about their route in that direction that he wasn’t sharing. The vehicle would restrict them to the road, dangerously, but also be swift.

  Pen disemboweled Prygos’s purse to make sure the coach was the smallest and lightest available, the horses a team of four to be managed by a postilion riding one of the front pair, out of earshot. He feigned it would allow him to continue his healing en route, but its overwhelming advantage was the privacy it would give him to open the next stage of his negotiations. Which were going to go somewhere past delicate and through awkward to, possibly, incendiary.

  Because by the time they reached Skirose, some one-hundred-eighty miles farther on, he must somehow persuade Arisaydia and Nikys to turn east with him to the coast. There to find some fishing vessel to deliver them to the island of Corfara, and from there, passage to Lodi in Adria. And if he couldn’t…

  Then we still need to turn east, said Des.

  * * *

  Arisaydia refused to be dressed again in his sister’s clothes, but did, grudgingly, consent to be muffled in the green cloak and hurried through the inn to the waiting coach. Once inside, and started on their rattling way, he instantly divested it, bundled it up, and thrust it back at Nikys, seated next to him. “You are never to speak of this.”

  She returned a musical sort of “Mmm!” that promised nothing, and Penric discovered how enchanting her round face grew when she smiled deeply enough to dimple. Thwarted, Arisaydia switched his glower to Pen, more convincingly.

  Penric had taken the rear-facing seat across from them, along with their meager baggage. Making sure his feet were firmly planted on the sword scabbard laid on the floor, he tried to evolve a plausible way to open his negotiation. Which must also entail his confession. Arisaydia took the problem out of his hands.

  “What did Prygos’s clerk—Tepelen, Velka, whoever he was—mean when he said you were supposed to be drowned? He knew you. And you knew him.”

  Penric cleared his throat. “Ah. Yes. That’s something we need to discuss. I’d been putting it off till after I was sure I could restore your sight. That time has come.”

  Arisaydia made an impatient so get on with it gesture.

  Penric signed himself, tapped his lips twice with his thumb, and gave a short, seated bow. “Permit me to introduce myself more fully. I am Learned Penric of Martensbridge, formerly court sorcerer to the late princess-archdivine of that canton. For the last year, I’ve been in service to the archdivine of Adria. Who, for my command of the Cedonian language and certain other skills, loaned me to his cousin the duke, to dispatch as his envoy in response to your letter begging honorable military employment in his realm.”

  Nikys’s eyes widened.

  Arisaydia barked, “I wrote no such letter!”

  “Forged, yes. Velka confirmed that. It was a plot from the start. Velka, who had been following me in the ship from Lodi, seized the duke’s quite authentic reply as soon as I set foot ashore in Patos. Velka knew I was the envoy but didn’t know my real name nor, I suspect, my real calling. Although I’m not sure they would have treated me any differently if they had. They cracked my skull and tossed me down a bottle dungeon in the shore fortress. The night after you were blinded, they tried to drown me in my cell. Tying up a loose end, I expect.”

  Nikys gasped. “How did you escape?”

  Penric, who had worked out in his head a scholarly letter on his novel method during his nights in the sickroom, almost opened his mouth to start spouting the preamble, then realized that wasn’t really the question being asked. “Magic.”

  Arisaydia sat back, glaring fiercely. “More likely he was let go. Agent or unwitting cat’s-paw, could be either.”

  Penric, affronted, snapped, “If you must know, when the water was halfway up the cell I turned some of it to ice and stood on it to reach the opening.”

  “I don’t believe that,” scoffed Arisaydia. Nikys looked more doubtful.

  Penric sighed and sat back. “Just a minute…” He held up his pinched fingers and concentrated. Des had been right in her theory about water in the desert, or at least in Cedonia, he was pleased to see, as the tiny, intense spot of cold grew to a hailstone half an inch across. He leaned forward, pulled out Arisaydia’s palm, and dropped the chip into it. Arisaydia, looking vaguely horrified, shook it hastily out of his hand. For good measure, Pen made a bigger one for Nikys; she, at least, rewarded him with a more appropriate look of awe. And, after a moment, bent forward to taste it.

  “Don’t—!” her brother began, but she crunched it between her teeth and smiled.

  “It really is ice! They had ice sometimes at court in Thasalon,” she told Penric, “but they brought it down out of the mountains in winter and stored it underground.” She narrowed her eyes. “If you are a Temple sorcerer, you must owe final allegiance to the Bastard’s Order, yes?”

  “He is my chosen god, yes.” Or choosing one—Pen had never been quite sure. “I did really attend the white god’s seminary at Rosehall, which is associated with the university corporate body there.”

  “But not its medical faculty?” You lied? her eyes asked.

  Penric waved this away. “I had enough on my plate then just with the theology, since I was doing everything backward, and in a hurry. A Temple sorcerer is supposed to train as a divine first, and only then be invested with a demon. Everything caught up with itself eventually.”

  She tilted her head, lips firmed with a different flavor of doubt than her brother’s. “You are neither quack nor charlatan. Your skills, even if uncanny, couldn’t have come out of the air.”

  And there was a place he didn’t wish to dwell. “They were hard-earned, just not all by me. But this is beside the point. I was sent here as a go-between, not as a physician. The duke of Adria was quite sincere in desiring to take you into his train, General Arisaydia, and would be pleased if I were to return with you. And your sister. At present you are running away, but that’s not enough; you need to be running toward. If we turn for the coast at Skirose, I think I can get us all aboard a ship for Adria.”

  “Ship captains don’t like to take sorcerers aboard,” Arisaydia observed, in a temporizing tone. “They say it’s bad luck.”

  Not nearly as bad of luck as being caught helping an Imperial fugitive, Pen suspected. “Eh, hedge sorcerers, certainly. The Temple-trained know enough not to shed chaos in the rigging, and, further, know how not to.”

  “Can mariners tell the difference?”

  “Generally not, which is another reason why I travel incognito.”

  Nikys was staring back and forth between them, clearly taken aback by this new proposal to dispose of her life unconsulted. “I don’t speak Adriac. I speak a little Darthacan.”

  Pen smiled hopefully at her. “I could help. I could translate. I could teach you.”

  By their dual frowns, Pen didn’t think he was making much headway. He tried again to bring things back to the issue: “The duke really does want you. He thinks with your skills and experience you’d slice through the forces of Carpagamo like a knife through butter, and I concur. Although even you might break a tooth on their canton mountain mercenaries. Unless the duke hired you some canton troops of your own, I suppose, although that could get very awkward and messy and probably is not a good idea. Certainly not for my poor cantons.” He added after a moment, “Adria and Carpagamo do no end of horrible things to one another,
as opportunity presents, but at least I can promise you blinding is not public policy there.”

  It was Nikys who pulled the unravelling thread from this. “You aren’t really half Cedonian, are you? That was another lie.”

  “Ah, no. I’m from the valley of the Greenwell, in the mountains about a hundred miles east of Martensbridge. I don’t think you would find it on a Cedonian-made map.” Or most other maps, truth to tell.

  “Are the cantons even a country?” said Arisaydia in unflattering doubt.

  “Mm, more a patchwork of… city-states is too grand—call us town-states. Conquerors from the Old Cedonian Empire to Great Audar of Darthaca to Saone and the Weald have all tried to hold various of the cantons, but none have succeeded for long. We have no tolerance for foreign misrule. We prefer our own misrule.” A little homesick grin twitched Pen’s mouth. “Not that there’s much profit in conquest. Our mountains have few productive mines, and our fields are worse. Unless you like goats and cows. Our main exports are cheese and mercenaries. Both quite good,” he added in a faint spasm of patriotism. “It snows a lot,” he ran down. “When it isn’t raining. Perhaps that’s why I’m good with ice.” Gods, he was tired.

  “Mad as three boots,” muttered Arisaydia, cryptically.

  “Adria,” said Pen, “would pay you well.”

  Arisaydia’s mouth twisted in disgust. “No doubt.” He raised his chin, his garnet eyes glinting. “I was never in correspondence with the duke of Adria. I was in correspondence with the duke of Orbas.”

  Pen’s eyes widened; Des murmured, Aha! Now, there was a missing piece fallen into place…

  “I’d not got so far as telling him to go jump in the sea, although that was next. A happy interruption, in retrospect. When we arrive at Skirose, you are welcome to go home to Adria, with my best curses. Nikys and I will strike south for Orbas.”

  He sat back and folded his arms, stony. Nikys’s lips parted, and a hand lifted, but fell back, whatever she thought given no voice.

  Arisaydia added, “And if you try to lay a geas on me like those bloody horses, I’ll run you through.”

  Surreptitiously, Pen put a little more weight on the scabbard under his foot. “That would be harder for me than it looks. And harder for you than you think.”

  Arisaydia snorted and closed his eyes, shutting out… everything. Pen could see his point.

  XII

  A strained, exhausted silence filled the coach, broken by the bustle of changing the horses at the first fifteen miles. A servant sold them cups of thin ale, which Nikys drank for lack of any better beverage, and they took turns at the livery’s privy. She seized a moment when the physician… sorcerer… Learned Penric, an oath-sworn Temple divine ye gods, was out of earshot to draw Adelis aside beneath a tree overhanging the coach yard.

  “It’s all very well to spurn the duke of Adria, but have you noticed that Penric is the only one among us with any money?”

  “I thought you had some.” Adelis, certainly, had been hurried out of the villa with little more than her clothes on his back.

  “Enough for a night at an inn and a few meals, maybe. Not enough to get us to Orbas. If that’s our destination, the man emptying out his purse to buy us passage all the way to Skirose was a boon.” And the continuous travel through the coming night, purchased at a premium, would give them a significant edge on any pursuit.

  “I believe that was Secretary Prygos’s purse, but yes. Getting it away from the sorcerer could be tricky.”

  “I wasn’t actually suggesting we repay his bounty by robbing the man,” Nikys said a little tartly. “He could be an extraordinary resource.” The fact that he’d served princesses, archdivines and dukes hinted at a high level of standing that the man himself concealed. “You don’t wish to be conscripted by Adria…”

  His laugh was short and humorless. “My Adriac is poor, I get sick on ships, and I have no desire to let those sea rats use me against Cedonia, which I don’t doubt they’d try to do sooner or later, Carpagamo be hanged. No.” He added in a lower tone, as if embarrassed by the hope, “From Orbas, I might have some chance of eventually reinstating myself with Thasalon. From Adria I’d have none.”

  Nikys considered this. “Something dire would have to happen to Minister Methani and his hangers-on, to allow you that.”

  Adelis’s teeth glinted, feral below the wreck of his face. “Probably.”

  She took a steadying breath. “So what do you say we turn it around and try to conscript Penric to Orbas?” Or to ourselves?

  “I’m still trying to figure out how to safely shed him. As I’ve refused to make myself his duke’s man, he has no reason not to betray us.”

  “I think that’s about as likely as an artist setting fire to his master-painting. For all that he mumbles around it, he seems wildly proud of what he’s done for your eyes.” As well he should be, she suspected. If she hadn’t known it was magic, she’d have dubbed it miracle.

  “Nikys, he’s an Adriac agent. Self-confessed!”

  “He’s a lot more than that.”

  Adelis snorted. “Are you sure it’s Orbas you desire him for?”

  Her lips twitched up; she hoped she wasn’t flushing. “It’s true I’ve come to like him. He’s just… different. Strange, but not unkind.”

  “That was a jest.” Adelis’s eyes narrowed in new suspicion. “Has he offered you any offense? He’s not been… trying to seduce you in some sorcerous way, has he?”

  She had to laugh at this. “I don’t think he’d need sorcery for that, but no.” Alas was probably not the best thing to add.

  Adelis being Adelis, he heard it anyway. “Of all the—! I introduced you to any number of honest officers, yet you want to make cow’s eyes at some foreign little, little…”

  “He’s taller than you,” Nikys pointed out, as he groped for a word to sum Penric. She thought he’d need an oration at the least.

  “Skinny then, twitchy, lying… he has a chaos demon inside him! If he were doing something to you, could you tell? I can’t!”

  “Then maybe he’s not. Wasn’t. Whichever.” Was that alarm the root of his antipathy? Or was the antipathy his alarm’s disguise? She took a breath to tame her temper. “We can certainly both see what he has done for you. That ought to give you a comparison.” She could grant that the very invisibility of Penric’s magic was disturbing—how could a man defend against an attack he could not see? But she didn’t usually need to squeeze fair judgment out of Adelis like oil from an olive press. “I’d think Thasalon just gave you a sharp lesson in the hazards of imagining threats where there are none.”

  He did flinch at that one, and backed down a tiny Adelis-inch, worth a yard from any other man. “I just believe he could be dangerous. To you.”

  She folded her arms, her head tilting at this blatant hypocrisy. “Then you shouldn’t have taught me not to be afraid of dangerous men, hm?”

  He knew enough not to step into this quagmire, but he soon found another, saying grumpily, “I’d think you’d be jealous of a fellow who’s prettier than you.”

  “Why, are you? Really, Adelis!” She spotted the man in question emerging around the side of the stable, and had to admit that last fraternal jape was part-right. Not about the jealousy, though, which would be as futile as envying the sunlight. “Hush, here he comes back.”

  They climbed once more into the close confines of the coach and were off, rumbling and bumping along at a smart, steady trot.

  A few miles farther on, they were passed by a galloping provincial courier. Penric glanced out the window and frowned. Minutes later, the horse came cantering back down the track, bucking and kicking at its saddle turned under its belly, followed at length by the panting, swearing courier. Adelis craned his neck to look after them as they fell behind.

  “Did you do that?” he asked Penric.

  “Yes,” he sighed. “I’m not sure it will actually help anything.”

  Adelis drummed his fingers on the window rim. “I don�
�t like being trapped on this road.”

  Penric shrugged. “We can count on a one-day start at least. I guarantee Velka won’t be recovered enough to ride yet. And then, if he means to pursue me, he’ll be put to requisitioning a sorcerer from the Patos Temple, or wherever one might be obtained. If the Temple in Cedonia is anything like the ones I know, the delays will be maddening. Although if they think I’m a hedge sorcerer, they’ll take the request seriously. Controlling hedge sorcery is in their mandate regardless of the politics.”

  “If we could find a coach, so could Velka,” said Adelis. “With or without his own pet sorcerer.”

  “Hm.”

  “You didn’t cripple him permanently.” The least Penric might have done, Adelis seemed to imply, even if his status as a learned Temple divine finally explained why he would not kill.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I suppose the simplest answer is… to avoid accumulating theological damage to ourselves?” Penric frowned. “I understand the drift of your questions, Arisaydia. Every realm’s army tries to tap the Temple for destructive sorcerers, even as rare as we are. I won’t say my superiors never give in, but someone is always sorry later. Generally the sorcerer. It’s a known hazard.”

  Adelis accepted this with a provisional “Hm,” of his own. Nikys was increasingly sensible that there was disciplined thought behind what the sorcerer would or would not do, even if the hidden rules of it escaped her. To the point where she was starting to wonder if his claimed age of thirty might be a lie in the other direction.

  Though there was Desdemona, at two-hundred-and-something. It was deceptively easy, but wrong, to overlook Penric’s permanent passenger. And then Nikys wondered what all this looked like from the demon’s point of view.