The Prisoner of Limnos

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “He says he’s courting me. I didn’t say I was courting him.” She removed the braids from her mother’s grip and restored them to their place.

  “I thought you wanted to remarry. That was why Adelis invited you to Patos, wasn’t it? To meet eligible men? Or at least that’s the tale you both told me.”

  “Yes, but all the men he introduced to me were army officers. I wasn’t going to travel down that road again.”

  “Did you tell Adelis that?”

  “Not… exactly. I didn’t want to dishearten him. He was trying to help.”

  “And also, you won a trip to Patos,” said Idrene, amused. She plunked down on the edge of the bed, patting the place beside her by way of invitation.

  Ruefully, Nikys shrugged and sat. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “True, though?”

  “Yes,” Nikys admitted. “Although after Adelis was blinded, I had quite different reasons to be grateful I was there.”

  “Yes…” said Idrene, her humor melting into pensiveness. “Hideous as it all was, I’m glad you were at his side. I think things would have gone much worse for him without you. Well, your Penric certainly has nothing of the camp about him. So has he actually asked you to wed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t agree to it? Why? Has he some hidden defect of character?”

  “Not… not hidden. Just complicated. He’s only loaned to the duke of Adria, but he is truly subordinate to the archdivine. He either has to go to a great deal of trouble to renegotiate his Temple oaths, or I would have to follow him to Adria. I don’t want to go to Adria, for all he claims he’d teach me their tongue.”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course he’d have to speak Adriac. But it’s not his native place, you say?”

  “No, he’s from the cantons, some obscure mountain town. But he trained in the Weald. He speaks Wealdean, Adriac, Cedonian, Darthacan, Ibran, Roknari, and I’m not sure what all else by now. He’s a notable scholar.”

  Idrene took this in, thoughtfully. “It’s true I had my fill of being dragged from pillar to post after my father, and later yours. As a home, the army has its drawbacks. And I should not like to shift myself to Orbas only for you to run off to live in Adria.”

  “Penric wants me to live in the air, like a bird, for all I can tell from what he’s offered.”

  “Bachelor habits of mind, I daresay. Well, then, your solution is easy. Insist he stay in Orbas for you, and give you a house as a bride-gift. If he won’t or can’t, then bid him a fond goodbye.”

  “Mother! I’m not selling myself to the man!”

  Her mother’s voice went a touch drier. “But you shouldn’t be selling yourself short, either. And if you don’t like that bargain, perhaps it’s not such a sticking-point after all, hm?”

  “Mm.” This was already shaping up to be one of those conversations with Idrene. Nikys was almost sorry she’d started it. Or not. Considering how close they’d come to never having such a chance again.

  Idrene lowered her voice. “But you should know, Florina’s jewelry is in a box walled under the plaster on the west side of her old writing cabinet. Because everyone knows to dig up the root cellar for such things. We’d always meant for you to have it for a second dowry, when you remarried. If ever you can return there before I do, find it and take it. Married or not!”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Nikys, thrown aback. Florma had owned some extraordinary pieces, she recalled, some of it preserved from her own noble dowry, some gifts from her husband as he rose in rank and wealth. At the least reckoning, there might be the value of a modest house out of them, with something left over.

  “So there’s another resource for you. Not any more chancy than marrying some chancy man. If I were you, I’d send your sorcerer to fetch it for you. Like a hero in a tale given a task to win his princess.”

  “He’s not my—and I wouldn’t want him to risk his life on a third trip to Cedonia!” She glared indignantly, which only made her mother smile.

  “So, no Adria, but we have established Learned Penric is more valuable to you than jewels. Or a house. That’s a start. What else?”

  Nikys sighed, unwillingly driven to recite her next verse. “I wouldn’t just be marrying him. I’d be marrying Desdemona. She’s going to be inside his head always. Closer than a wife, more intimate than anything I can imagine.”

  Idrene shrugged. “Any number of women have to learn how to share their husbands with another. I grant most of them are not chaos demons. Sometimes it works very well, sometimes it works very badly, mostly it falls somewhere between. My experience, happily, was on the better end.”

  “How did you decide, when you went with Father?”

  “Several long, frank talks, to start.”

  “And he persuaded you?”

  “Oh, five gods forfend, I didn’t talk with the general! What a pointless waste of breath that would have been. I talked with Florina.” Idrene waved a hand. “It helped that Florina was the shrewd and experienced woman she was.” She eyed Nikys. “So… you seem to think this demon is a person, or persons. A woman. Can she talk, then?”

  “Yes, we’ve talked before this. But she has to use Penric’s mouth to do so. With his permission. So it’s not as if I could speak with her privately. He’s always with her, and she’s always with him. She’d be there with us in bed, too, I might point out.”

  “Oh, hm, yes. That does become very personal, doesn’t it?” Idrene did not expand on this, to Nikys’s relief. Though she added cheerily, “On the positive side, she could never give birth to heirs rival to your own children.”

  Nikys set her teeth.

  Yet the notion did plant itself in Nikys’s mind. If her dilemma was with the demon, perhaps it was with the demon she should be talking? It would, necessarily, be a council of three. Or fourteen.

  But not impossible. And she’d seen Penric demolish impossibilities before.

  I’ve spoken with a goddess. A demon cannot be more daunting.

  It was the strangest thought she’d had in a week of strangeness. Like a seed putting out slow shoots, down into the earth and up to the sky. She left it in the tender darkness for now.

  “So, no Adria, better than jewels, you’d have to sleep with a chaos demon. Although I must say, it sounds as if you’ve rubbed along with her fairly well so far. And she did heal Adelis.” This news, apparently, had gone a long way toward reconciling Idrene to Penric’s uncanny aspects.

  “She and Pen together. They seem to work as a yoked pair on that sort of thing.”

  “An astonishing one, if so. Anything else?”

  Nikys looked away. This far into her heart’s fears, she might as well unburden herself of the whole basket. “You know Kymis and I were never able to get a child. I keep wondering if that was my fault. …I could be condemning Pen to childlessness.”

  The puff through Idrene’s nose held a sad familiarity. “I imagine Florma could have given you the best counsel on that. It’s no small worry, I know. But it seems to me you have its solution already. As a physician, couldn’t your Penric determine the true cause? The Temple rations out its mage-physicians like water in the desert, but you hold this one in your hand.”

  “Mother!” Nikys flushed. “I can’t ask the man to, to look up my private parts!”

  “Why not? I don’t imagine he’d object. As either physician or man. What, you mean you haven’t tried him out in bed yet? I would have, in your place.”

  “Yes, Drema, we know,” sighed Nikys. “And I’m sure Ikos thanks you for it.” She nudged her mother in fond exasperation. “I’m not sure I’d have your courage. Or whatever it was that carried you though. Bloody-minded determination.”

  Idrene chuckled. “Ikos has grown into such a dear man. So that worked out well in the end. It was rough along the way in parts, but of all my many regrets, Ikos was never one. Look at it this way. Either your fears are justified, in which case you run no risk, or they are not, and so they are settled in your favor
. Or do you judge Learned Penric would run away at the news he was to be a father?”

  “…No. Absolutely not. He may even have it in his mind.”

  “Another thing you haven’t talked about with him? This list is getting long, dear Nikys.”

  She hunched. “I’d be betting my whole life on the man. I did that once with Kymis. And then he went and died on me.” The furious helplessness of that loss still reverberated, when she made the mistake of remembering.

  “Oh.” Idrene’s smile grew crooked. “I know the answer for that one. It worked quite well for Florina. And your father. And Ikos’s father, too.”

  Nikys raised her face. “You do? What?”

  She tapped Nikys’s forehead in a gesture not quite a blessing. And said, in a voice as arid as Nikys had ever heard from her, “Die first.”

  XV

  As the sun climbed, Penric and Ikos descended, negotiating the narrowest passages of the pilgrim stairs, scarcely wider than Pen’s aching shoulders, to where they widened out. The drop was much reduced by this point. Desdemona had calmed somewhat. So Pen finally asked her, Grant you the machine was strange, and I know you’ve never liked heights, but why the extreme fear, Des?

  It was an extreme drop.

  You couldn’t have died no matter what went wrong.

  A reluctant hesitation. Sugane died from a fall.

  Des’s very first human rider had been a Cedonian mountain woman of the northern peninsula. Pen still had to work to keep her broad country accent from leaking into his Cedonian, although he’d smoothed it out quite a bit through listening to Nikys’s and Adelis’s Thasalon-trained voices.

  A day or so after, Des went on. She was brought to Litikone’s house, which was how I came to jump to her. It’s not a memory I’ve shared with you. It wouldn’t help you.

  Des tended to keep that final part of all her riders’ histories not secret, Pen thought, so much as private. Do you think your chaos might have contributed to the accident? You wouldn’t have had it under such good control back then.

  A shifty pause. Might have. It was almost two centuries ago. Even demons forget.

  Not much, in Pen’s observation. But even demons mourned, and had a long time to do so. Grief, guilt, regret… not everything they learned how to do from their human riders was a boon. He did not press.

  Ikos called a halt where the stairs twisted back to become more of a trail through scree, zig-zagging down leftward toward what Pen thought might be a boat landing. He could glimpse a timber dock, but no boats, set in a ragged bite of shoreline that could barely be called a cove.

  “I’ll have my pack, now,” said Ikos, holding out a hand.

  Pen’s legs were quivering custard and his mouth was dry, but he offered gamely, “I could haul it a bit farther. Where are we going?”

  “I’m going to my boat.” Ikos gestured right to where a faint path led away to some hidden track above the water.

  Yes, of course Ikos, with his meticulous planning, would have a boat waiting to take his mother off the island. Unlike Pen, whose plans had been more nebulous at this point, involving blending with departing pilgrims.

  “You can go anywhere else you please.” Standing a couple of steps above Pen, Ikos could frown down at him. “Sorcerer.”

  “Ah, hm. When did you figure that out?”

  “Candles don’t light themselves. Seagulls don’t burst in midair, no matter what crap they’ve been eating. And I still don’t know what kind of spell you cast on that poor acolyte, but I want no parts of it. I know sorcerers leak bad luck, and I don’t want yours anywhere near a boat I’m on.”

  “I didn’t put any kind of a geas on Acolyte Hekat!” Pen protested. Not that he had a way of proving it to Ikos. There were good reasons sorcerers learned to be discreet. “And I’m not a hedge sorcerer. I’m Temple-trained. Learned Penric kin Jurald, formerly of Martensbridge, sworn divine of the Bastard’s Order.” And of the white god in Person, but that was another story. He left off his younger-brother courtesy title of Lord, as he usually did, since Ikos seemed a man who would not be impressed by such empty baubles. Pen had come far from Jurald Court, tucked in its valley in the distant cantons.

  In so many ways, murmured Des.

  “Formerly of Martensbridge? Wherever that is,” said Ikos skeptically. “Where’re you from now?”

  “That’s unsettled at present. I’m waiting for Nikys to decide. If she says yes, probably Orbas, for the time being. If no… I don’t know.”

  Ikos’s face screwed up. “Why hasn’t she said yes? Widow ’n all.”

  “I wish I knew,” Pen sighed, ignoring Des’s Do you want a list? “I’m working on her. And not with magic, I might point out. Self-evidently.”

  “Hm…”

  “The point is, I promise I can keep my demon’s chaos off your boat. It might be hard on a passing seagull. Or a shark, or whatever. But I’m certainly not going to befoul or sink a ship I’m sailing in!” He added, prudentially, “Though neither sorcerers nor gods have any control over the weather.”

  Ikos folded his arms. “I’ve got no reason to trust anything you’ve said is true.”

  “I trust you.” More or less. “I rode in your evil device. Isn’t that proof enough?”

  “It was perfectly safe!” snapped Ikos. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “So is my magic. You’re here, aren’t you?”

  Ikos’s head went back and his lips tightened, but he did not at once reply.

  “Look.” Pen scratched his hot and sticky scalp. His fingers came away darkened. “How do you decide anything is sound? You test it, don’t you?”

  “If I’m trying out new gear,” said Ikos, “I usually test it to destruction. To be sure.”

  “Ah. If you had two sorcerers, you could try that, I suppose. You see the problem.”

  Ikos snorted.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a question.” Ask me anything seemed a dangerously open-ended invitation, so Pen left it at that.

  “Doesn’t work too well if I’m trying to decide whether you’re telling the truth in the first place,” Ikos pointed out. “But, I don’t know… What’s Nikys’s objection to you? You being a learned divine and all. Seems to me the sort of thing women ought to like.” His lips tweaked up. “No complaining you come home from work all smelly, eh?”

  Pen suspected that had not been a compliment. “I can’t say,” he replied, if not with truth then with precision. “But when Nikys received the letter reporting her mother had been arrested and taken to Limnos, I was the first person she came to for help. If you don’t trust me, could you trust her?”

  Ikos considered. Or wavered. Or at any rate, thought about it. “I like the girl,” he said at last. “Pretty solid.”

  “I know.”

  “Huh.”

  “You have a boat, and I urgently need to get to Akylaxio. I could pay for your time and trouble.” Pen did not suggest a price; no need for anyone to know how much of Duke Jurgo’s purse he was still carrying.

  “Not my boat. It belongs to some friends.”

  “All right, I could pay them.”

  Ikos pursed his lips. “Doubt they’ll like to have a sorcerer aboard, either.”

  “You don’t have to mention my calling. Or anything else about me, really.”

  “You want me to lie to my friends?”

  “You want to listen to this same argument all over again, at length? If you think you’re tired of it, imagine how I feel. You don’t have to lie. Just… leave it out.”

  “Which tells me something about you, I suppose.” Nothing that Ikos approved of, by the sardonic expression on his sweaty copper face.

  Pen waved his hands in frustration. “I’m supposed to meet your mother and Nikys in Akylaxio, to escort them on to Orbas. It could be a chance for you to see them. Your last for a while.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “Why didn’t you say so first?”

  While Pen was still mentally flailing for a reply, Ikos
led off down the side path. “Come on, then,” he said over his shoulder. A tight smile. “You can carry the machine.”

  * * *

  Pen scrambled after his guide for about two miles on the scrubby trail following the shoreline. In a tiny cove, they found the boat attended by three men as sunbaked and tough-looking as Ikos. The crew waved and exchanged laconic greetings with him, but stared at Pen.

  “That your mother, is it?” said one. “There’s things you haven’t told us about your family, Ikos, my lad.”

  Ikos shrugged. “Change of plans. It seems my mother’s gone to Akylaxio. We need to get there.”

  “What, after all your trouble?”

  “Aye. I’m not best pleased about it either.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “This one says he’ll pay for the ride.”

  The dickering was short, since Pen, wildly anxious to be gone, closed the deal at the first suggested price. The fellows, who could have been brothers to the hardy fishermen Pen had observed putting out from Guza, presumably had been told by Ikos what risks they ran, or if not, it wasn’t for Pen to apprise them.

  Riding in the clear water as if floating on air, the boat might well be just such a day-fishing vessel, smelling of sun-warmed tar and timber, salt and fish-scales. It would have been substantial for the cold lakes of the cantons, but seemed disturbingly undersized for this vast blue sea. When they cast off and raised its one sail, Pen hunkered up in the shifting shade and left its management to the men who, he hoped, knew what they were doing. Ikos doubtless thought it was perfectly safe, because he curled up on a folded sack and fell into a doze. Either that or he was just too exhausted to care.

  Had Nikys and Idrene reached Akylaxio unharmed? Or had they run afoul of some trouble or delay in that long night-ride they’d planned up the coast road? Lamed horse, cart-wheel come off, a tumble into a ditch? Or bandits? Pen expected Bosha could speedily dispose of one bandit, or two, but what if there’d been, say, six, or a dozen?