The Prisoner of Limnos

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  THE PRISONER

  OF

  LIMNOS

  A Penric & Desdemona novella

  in the World of the Five Gods

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Copyright © 2017 by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Cover art and design by Ron Miller, 2017

  I

  The bookroom in the duke of Orbas’s palace at Vilnoc was a lovely chamber. The spacious octagon, lined with shelves for scrolls and codices, was capped by a glassed roof. A well of good light for reading fell upon the central table where Penric sat. The quietude smelled of ink and paper, time and thought. It was his own failing that he couldn’t concentrate upon a single word of the rare scroll rolled open in front of him.

  He sighed and pulled the letter from the inner pocket of his white tunic, unfolded and read it once more. It had been handed to him this morning by the superior of the Bastard’s Order here in Vilnoc. So, did he hope its contents might have changed since then? The lines penned by his own master the Archdivine of Adria, across the sea in Lodi, were quite short. And tart. And ordered him, for the third time—given that his mission to secure General Arisaydia for Adria had plainly failed—to stop loitering in Orbas and remove himself forthwith back to Lodi and his Temple duties waiting there.

  Penric had written three temporizing missives to this high prelate, suggesting variously plausible reasons why he might linger in Vilnoc or even be assigned some ongoing diplomatic duty in the court of Orbas. All had fallen flat. At no point had he let slip his real reason for delaying, as that, he was sure, would have been even less well-received.

  Nikys.

  Or, more formally, the widowed Madame Khatai, sister to the young general and presently taking up new duties as lady-in-waiting to the duke of Orbas’s daughter. Duties, she had repeatedly made clear to Penric, that left her no time for dallying. Nor dalliance. Or at least none with him.

  Who knew what other courtiers about the palace might catch her eye? Or vice versa, definitely that. The widow had only her plump beauty for dowry right now, making her more a target for idle flirtation than courtship, though either vision was equally maddening. Even the dubious protection of poverty wouldn’t last. The refugee siblings had arrived at the duke’s court with no more than the clothes they stood in, but the general, already dispatched in the duke’s service, would not long remain penniless.

  Oh, she’s still interested in you, Desdemona countered these glum thoughts.

  So you claim, he thought back. But I can’t see it.

  The two-hundred-year-old Temple demon who lived inside of Penric and gave him the powers of a sorcerer was deeply imprinted by the lives of the ten women who had held her before him. He usually imagined this gave him a hidden advantage when dealing with females, but it seemed to be failing in this case.

  You’re too impatient, Des chided him.

  You’re too old, he thought back, grumpily. And not very prudently, but there was no concealing his thoughts from Des. You don’t remember what it’s like.

  I promise I remember far more than you do, she shot back. It was all too likely. Grant you, we’ve not seen this dance from inside the fellow’s angle of view before. Though it appears to be equally absurd.

  Patient, impatient, hopeful or hopeless, certainly absurd, his pining scarcely mattered if he was going to have to bundle it all up and throw it overboard from some departing ship tomorrow. He might as well throw himself into the sea as well, and be done with it.

  Now you’re just being melodramatic.

  Bah, leave me to brood in peace. He tried once more to bring his mind to bear upon the antique Cedonian prose laid out before him.

  He should probably be packing. Not that the task would take long, since he, too, had arrived in Orbas with little more than what he wore—apart from his medical case and the folded-up costume of an auburn-tressed courtesan named Mira. Sora Mira, whose cleverness and professional skills had slid them all through the final set of dangers before they’d reached the safety of the border. Mira had been his demon’s fifth possessor, a century past. He touched his hair. The last of the henna was almost out of his pale blond queue by now, but Nikys was not yet over Mira.

  Not yet? Or not ever?

  Desdemona, in all her complexity, was going to be a part of him until the day he died. As a Temple divine, he had a duty to care for his chaos demon; it had been made very clear in his seminary training that all their actions had to be ultimately his responsibility. But he was now beneficiary of two centuries of experience accumulated from ten wildly varied lives. (Twelve, counting the lioness and the mare.) To deny it all was beginning to feel like denying himself.

  Which was not the same thing as keeping the direst bits private, true. Any man did that.

  Agh. He gritted his teeth and reset the weights that held the scroll open.

  At the scuff of sandals and a soft knock at the doorjamb, Penric looked up from his manuscript. As if summoned from his own thoughts like an apparition, although magic only worked that way in tales, Nikys stood in the entry to the bookroom. Penric kept his breathing level with an effort.

  She was dressed for her day’s duties in the Cedonian version of a sober summer gown, a loose linen dress belted at the waist, sleeves gathered in folds. It was dyed a widow’s dark green that had lost its saturation to wear and washings and faded to an ambiguous sea-color. All hasty hand-me-downs from other ladies of the court, just as Penric’s own white tunic and trousers were borrowings from the chapterhouse of the Bastard’s Order, where he was also lent a room.

  Her black curls were gathered by embroidered bands, holding them off her neck. Her dark eyes were as sober as her garb. She clutched a paper in her hand.

  “Learned Penric.”

  His formal title that she’d used since their arrival in Orbas had replaced the Pen! she’d come to call him in their flight across half of Cedonia, and it felt like a slap. Rising politely to his feet, he retaliated in kind: “Madame Khatai. How may I help you?”

  She cast him a distraught look, as if his question were not a rhetorical pleasantry, but some toweringly difficult puzzle. His heart perked up in curiosity.

  “I just received this letter.” She waved the paper and hurried across the bookroom to his side. “Really it was addressed to Adelis, but before he left he made me his executor for all his interests in his absence.”

  Those were duties she’d held before for her military brother. Given the hazards of his trade, it could all too easily turn into an executorship in fact, and it was a sign of his trust in his twin.

  “It concerns me as much or more,” she went on, “even though it’s plain he’s the real target.” She bit her lip and thrust the single page at him, obviously meaning him to read it, too. By its cleanliness, it must have arrived wrapped in some outer protecting envelope.

  He took it, readily suppressing any faint qualm that perhaps he should not be reading General Adelis Arisaydia’s personal correspondence. Or his official correspondence, either.

  It was in a spidery but clear handwriting, unsigned and unaddressed unless that salutation, To the one of the yellow roses meant more to Nikys than to Pen. It went on: You need to know that on the second night of the full moon—a scant week ago—the dam of your cradle-mate was brought to the spring on Limnos by the order of the one who served you pickles. She is guarded there by his servants. The purpose being plain enough, it is hoped this may reach you in advance of any surprise, if the rumors of your destination prove true.

  We will try to find out more. Yours in haste and hope.

  “All right,” said Pen. “I may read six languages, but I need you to interpret this.”

  She ducked her chin. “I recognize the handwriting. It’s Lady T
anar’s eunuch secretary, Master Bosha.”

  “And if I knew who either of these people were…?”

  She waved an urgent hand. “Adelis was trying to court Lady Tanar two years ago, when we were both in Thasalon, before he was dispatched to thwart the Rusylli incursion. After which he was reassigned to the garrison in Patos, and after that, well, you saw all the disasters that overtook us there. In aid of his suit Adelis set me on to make friends with her, and we exchanged visits, oh, several times.”

  “So the yellow roses were, what, some courting gift from him?”

  She nodded vigorously, making her bound-up curls bounce.

  “I suppose it’s a good sign that she remembered them two years later, but what about the rest of this?”

  “The one who served you pickles has to refer to Minister Methani, who ordered Adelis be blinded with the boiling vinegar. Limnos is an island just off the coast near Thasalon—the Daughter’s Order maintains a retreat there for high-born devotees who wish to withdraw from the world and dedicate their virginity to her. It also serves as a place for those who have grown old in her service to retire.”

  “Also the high-born ones, I would guess?”

  “Not always, but certainly those who have risen high in Her Order. And also”—she took a deep breath—“as a delicate prison for noblewomen whom the emperor has taken hostage against their rebellious relatives. This says they’ve taken my mother.”

  Pen swallowed. “Oh.”

  “Oh, gods, I thought she would be safer than this. She’s not Adelis’s mother, after all, nor high-born. Most people don’t know how close they are. Someone must have said too much to the wrong ears, at the imperial court.”

  “Unless this Methani fellow is clutching straws.”

  “Possible, but it hardly matters now.”

  Nikys and Adelis insisted they were twins, being born on the same day to two different mothers and the same father, on the grounds that had it been two fathers and the same mother, none would hesitate to dub them so. Old General Arisaydia’s first marriage to a noblewoman with imperial connections had sadly been without issue for years, until he took a second wife, or concubine—Pen was a little unclear on Cedonian domestic legalities—and by whatever joke of the Mother and the Bastard, found himself with two offspring at once. Typically such women were expected to be rivals, but those two seemed to have united, instead, taking house together after the death of their husband in Nikys’s late teens. According to Nikys, her mother had mourned the loss of the senior wife, a few years ago, even more than she’d mourned their husband.

  It had all left Adelis’s enemies at the imperial court with a dearth of potential hostages to hold against him, certainly.

  “And what have the duchess or the duke to say to this?”

  “I don’t know yet. I came to you first.”

  Pen felt more alarmed than flattered. “Er, why?”

  Her gaze upon him intensified. “You’re a sorcerer. You smuggled Adelis and me out of Cedonia to Orbas. You escaped a bottle dungeon, and no one does that. I believe you could save my mother.”

  Penric gulped down his first impulse, which was to protest that those all had been flukes, unrepeatable. “We must take this to Duke Jurgo, to start. A threat against the loyalty of his new general concerns him closely, after all.”

  “Yes.” Her hands clenched. “We have next to no resources, even between us, but he could help us if he chose.”

  Just exactly what she might have in mind, Pen shuddered to imagine. Perhaps Jurgo would be a voice of reason? Leaving the scroll open on the table, Pen folded and repocketed his own letter of the morning.

  “What’s that?” Nikys asked, seeing this.

  “Oh”—Pen exhaled—“nothing of importance now. Let’s go find Duke Jurgo.”

  They exited the bookroom together, Nikys’s shorter steps for once outpacing Penric’s leggy stride.

  II

  They tracked the duke, eventually, not to his cabinet but to the east end of the palace, where he was examining some renovations in progress. The work-crew foreman sent Nikys an unsolicited look of gratitude when she drew Jurgo off to a quieter courtyard.

  Jurgo was a pleasantly ugly, mostly-affable man in his early forties, duke for some fifteen years and as solid in his position as possible for lord of such a beleaguered realm. Shrewd, or he wouldn’t be so solid. If Nikys could present her needs as lying in line with his, she thought she might have a chance of gaining his support. At cross-purposes, she’d be weak indeed.

  Jurgo settled on a shaded bench under the colonnade, Nikys standing stiff before him as he read her note. She strove to organize her thoughts through a head throbbing with more tension than since Adelis had been arrested back in Patos. And to shove aside, for the moment, a thousand thronging visions of what dire things might be happening to her mother right now. Women prisoners were almost never blinded, for example. Castration did not apply. The cutting-off of breasts, promising not only agony to the woman but starvation to her infant, was not usually threatened to women past childbearing. Retreats of the Daughter’s Order did not feature dungeons.

  Is she very frightened? Has she been cruelly treated? Nikys swallowed hard to keep control of her voice.

  Penric leaned against a post and listened soberly as she again explained the strange message’s import.

  Jurgo tapped the paper in his hand, and asked, “Do you trust this? How certain are you of its senders?”

  “Master Bosha’s handwriting I know well, from other correspondence with Lady Tanar. Along with the roses, it’s full of private things that Adelis would be expected to understand at once, just as I do.”

  “Not very full. It’s quite short.”

  “The shorter, the better, for this sort of thing,” Penric put in from the side. “Every unneeded sentence is another chance for betrayal, should it fall into the wrong hands on its journey.”

  Jurgo gave a conceding nod. “Could its writing have been bribed, or suborned?” His hand circled. “Compelled?”

  “Lady Tanar Xarre is rich, and Master Bosha very loyal to her,” said Nikys. “So not the first two. And I have trouble imagining any compulsion that would force him to write such a thing against her will.”

  Penric shrugged. “If he’s a scribe, an offer to break his fingers might suffice. Or to blind him.” While this was delivered in Penric’s voice, the casual bloody-mindedness hinted it might be Desdemona talking.

  It wasn’t as if Nikys had spoken that much with Surakos Bosha, despite him being an ironic, watchful presence wherever Tanar went. So she couldn’t support the conviction with which she said, “No.” She added after a reluctant moment, “Although if someone threatened to break Tanar’s fingers, it’s hard to tell what might happen.” Since someone wouldn’t live long wasn’t a thing she could say out loud. “But I can’t picture how such an event might come about. Tanar is well-protected in her lady mother’s household.” Largely by Bosha himself, Nikys gathered.

  “Even metaphorically?” asked Penric. “Pressure put on this Lady Tanar, her secretary writing to her dictation?”

  Unhappily, Nikys turned out her hands. “To what end?” And hoped everyone else wasn’t thinking the obvious, Entrapment.

  The duke’s canny eyes studied Nikys. “If General Arisaydia received this, as he apparently was intended to, what do you think he would do?”

  Nikys hesitated.

  Jurgo prodded, “Desert his post and attempt a rescue?”

  “No.”

  “Lead his troops in some illicit sortie?”

  “Never.”

  “How much would this impede his duties?”

  “Not at all,” said Nikys, both in simple honesty, and in aid of the duke’s trust in his new general, “because he is Adelis. But he would be distracted and disturbed, as any man would.”

  “So no good could come from forwarding this to him.”

  “Except that he may find out from some less friendly source, at a worse time. Must, or
what’s the point of taking a hostage?”

  “Hm.”

  “Unless,” Nikys drew breath, “our mother was rescued already, and the report of that could come with it.”

  “I cannot lend troops for such a move, not against Cedonia.”

  “I know. I have a less costly and risky plan.” At least, less costly or risky to Jurgo. “Allow me and Learned Penric to cross the border in secret and bring her out.”

  The duke glanced aside at Penric, whose mouth was set in a grim line, and did not scoff. “Wouldn’t that just risk giving Adelis’s enemies two hostages instead of one?”

  Nikys demurred, “Given the weight of the first to him—to us—adding a second scarcely tilts the scale more.”

  “That risk could be averted,” Penric said in a neutral tone, “by just sending me.”

  Nikys shook her head. “You don’t know the country or the people, but I do. More to the point, they do not know you. This is too dangerous a business to expect them to trust some complete stranger.” Of which Penric was one of the strangest. Although he could be convincing at need—she remembered that from Patos.

  To Nikys’s intense relief, neither man tried to gainsay this.

  “So what is your scheme?” asked Jurgo, glancing between them.

  “As far as I’ve come in an hour’s thought,” said Nikys, “Learned Penric and I could make our way much as we did before, passing ourselves off in whatever way seems best, to Lady Tanar’s estate outside Thasalon. Take shelter and guidance there for the next step, that of getting on and then off the island with my mother. Repeat the stages in the opposite direction.”

  “Preferably better-funded this time,” Penric put in. “Including a purse adequate for bribes. Still much cheaper than sending troops.”

  “Troops,” Jurgo depressed this ploy, “were never an option. But the risk you’d bring to your proposed hosts seems beyond that invited by a mere friendly warning.” He rattled the letter by way of emphasis.