Paladin of Souls (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Maybe he has dreams, too. The thought clotted her breath.

  The memory of the Bastard’s second kiss heated her face. What if it had been not unholy jest, but another gift—one meant to be passed along? Might it be granted to her to perform a miracle of healing, as agreeably as this? So are the saints seduced by their gods. Her heart thumped in concealed excitement. A life for a life, and by the grace of the Bastard, my sin is lifted.

  In a kind of fascination, she bent forward. The closely shaved skin of Illvin’s jaw was stretched too thinly over the fine bones. His lips were neutral in color, a little parted upon pale, square teeth.

  Neither warm nor cold, as her lips pressed upon them …

  She breathed into that mouth. She remembered that the tongue was the organ held sacred to the Bastard, as womb for the Mother, male organs for the Father, heart for the Brother, and brain for the Daughter. Because the tongue was the source of all lies, the Quadrene heretics falsely charged. She dared secretly to trace those teeth, touch the cool tip of his tongue with hers, as the god had invaded her mouth in her dream. Her fingers spread, hovering over his heart, not quite venturing to touch, to feel for a bandage wrapped around his chest beneath that decorated tunic. His chest did not rise. His dark eyes, and she knew their color by heart already, did not open in wonder. He lay inert.

  She swallowed a wail of disappointment, concealed chagrin, straightened. Found her voice, lost somewhere. “As you see. It does no good.” Foolish hope and foolish failure.

  “Eh,” said Goram. His eyes were narrowed, sharp upon her. He, too, looked disappointed, but by no means crushed. “Must be something else.”

  Let me out of here. This is too painful.

  Liss, standing watching this play, cast Ista a look of mute apology. A lecture on a handmaiden’s duties in screening the importunate, the simple, and the strange from her lady’s presence seemed in order, later.

  “But you are the one he was going on about,” repeated Goram in an insistent tone. Recovering his audacity, it seemed. Or perhaps the futility of her kiss had reduced his awe of her. She was, after all, merely a dowager royina, obviously insufficiently potent to breathe the near dead to life. “Not tall, hair curled all wild down your back, gray eyes, face all still—grave, he said you were grave.” He looked her up and down and gave a short nod, as if satisfied with her graveness. “The very one.”

  “Who said—who described me so to you?” demanded Ista, exasperated.

  Goram jerked his head toward the bed. “Him.”

  “When?” Ista’s voice came out sharper than she’d intended; Liss jumped.

  Goram’s hands opened. “When he wakes up.”

  “Does he wake up? I thought—Lady Cattilara gave me to understand—he had never come out of his swoon after he was stabbed.”

  “Eh, Lady Catti,” said Goram, and sniffed. Ista wasn’t certain if he was making a comment or just clearing his nose. “But he don’t stay awake, see. He comes up most every day for a while, around noon. We mainly try to get as much food into him as we can, while he can swallow without choking. He don’t get enough. He’s wasting away, you can see it. Lady Catti, she came up with a smart idea to put goat’s milk down his throat with a little leather tube, and you can see that it helps, but not enough. He’s too thin now. Every day, his grip is less strong.”

  “Is he coherent, when he wakes?”

  Goram shrugged. “Eh.”

  Not an encouraging answer. But if he waked at all, why not now, for her kiss, or at any other time? Why just at the time that his brother slept his motionless sleep … her mind shied from the thought.

  Goram added, “He does go on, sometimes. Some would say he just raves.”

  Liss said, “Is it uncanny, do you think? Some Roknari sorcery?”

  Ista flinched at the notion. I wasn’t going to ask it. I wasn’t going to suggest it. I want nothing to do with the uncanny. “Sorcery is illegal in the princedoms, and the Archipelago.” For more than just theological reasons; it was scarcely encouraged in Chalion, either. Yet given opportunity—and sufficient desperation, criminality, or hubris—a stray demon might present as much temptation to a Quadrene as to a Quintarian. More, since a Quadrene who had contracted a demon risked dangerous accusations of heretical transgression if he sought assistance from his Temple.

  Goram shrugged again. “Lady Catti, she thinks it’s poison from that Roknari dagger, because the wound don’t heal right. I used to poison rats in the stables—never saw any that worked like this.”

  Liss’s brows drew in, as she studied the still form. “Have you served him long?”

  “Going on three years.”

  “As a groom?”

  “Groom, sergeant, messenger, dogsbody, whatever. ’Tendant, now. The others, they’re too spooked. Afraid to touch him. I’m the only one who does it really right.”

  She cocked her head to one side; her puzzled frown did not diminish. “Why does he wear his hair in the Roknari style? Though I must say, it suits him.”

  “He goes there. Went there. As the march’s scout. He was good enough to pass, knows the tongue—his father’s mother was Roknari, for all she learned to sign the Five, he told me once.”

  Footsteps sounded outside, and he looked up in trepidation. The door opened. Lady Cattilara’s voice said sharply, “Goram, what are you about? I heard voices—oh. I beg your pardon, Royina.”

  Ista turned, crossing her arms; Lady Cattilara dipped in a curtsey, though she shot a brief scowl at the groom. She wore an apron over the fine dress she’d appeared in at dinner, and she was trailed by a maid bearing a covered pitcher. Her eyes widened a little as they passed over the courtly garb of the patient. She breathed out through her nostrils, an incensed huff.

  Goram hunched, dropping his gaze, and took refuge in a sudden renewal of his unintelligible mumble.

  Ista was moved by his hangdog look to try to spare him trouble. “You must excuse Goram,” she said smoothly. “I asked him if I might view Lord Illvin, because …” Yes, why? To see if he resembled his brother? No, that was weak. To see if he resembled my dreams? Worse. “I perceived Lord Arhys was most troubled by his plight. I’ve decided to write to a certain highly experienced physician of my acquaintance in Valenda, Learned Tovia, to see if she might have any advice in the case. So I wished to be able to describe him and his symptoms very exactly. She is a stickler for precision in her diagnoses.”

  “That is extremely kind of you, Royina, to offer your own physician,” said Lady Cattilara, looking touched. “My husband is grieved indeed by his brother’s tragedy. If the master physicians we have sent for continue to prove unwilling to travel so far—such adepts tend to be old, we are finding—we should be most grateful for such aid.” She cast a doubtful glance at the maid with the pitcher. “Do you think she would want to know how we feed him the goat’s milk? I’m afraid the process is not very pretty. Sometimes he chokes it up.”

  The implications were clear, sinister, and repulsive. Given all the labor to which Goram had gone to present his fallen master in the most dignified possible light, Ista had no heart to watch that long body stripped of its courtly adornment and subjected to indignities, however necessary. “I expect Learned Tovia is well acquainted with all the tricks of nursing. I do not think I need to mark it.”

  Lady Cattilara looked relieved. With a carry-on gesture to the maid and Goram, she ushered Ista and Liss back out onto the gallery, and walked with them toward Ista’s chambers. Twilight was gathering; the courtyard was altogether in shadow, though the highest clouds glowed peach against the deepening blue.

  “Goram is a very dutiful man,” Cattilara said apologetically to Ista, “but I’m afraid he’s more than a trifle simple. Though he is by far the best of Lord Illvin’s men who have undertaken to attend him. They are too horrified, I think. Goram had a rougher life, before, and is not squeamish. I could not begin to manage Illvin without him.”

  Goram’s tongue was simple, but his hands were
not, in Ista’s judgment, for all that he seemed the exemplar of a lack-witted attendant. “He appears to have a rare loyalty to Lord Illvin.”

  “No great wonder. I believe he had been an officer’s servant, in his younger days, and been captured by the Roknari during one of Roya Orico’s illfated campaigns, and sold as a slave to the Quadrenes. In any case, Illvin retrieved him—on one of his trips to Jokona, I think it was. I don’t know if Illvin simply bought him, or what, though it seems there was some unpleasant misadventure involved in it all. Goram has stayed by Illvin since. I suppose he’s too old to go off and try to make his way elsewhere.” Cattilara’s gaze flicked up. “What did the poor fellow try to talk to you about?”

  Liss’s mouth opened; Ista’s hand nipped her arm before she could reply. Ista said, “I’m afraid he’s not very lucid. I had hoped he was an old retainer and could tell me about the brothers’ youth, but it proved not to be the case.”

  Cattilara smiled in bright sympathy. “When Lord dy Lutez was still alive, and young, you mean? I’m afraid the chancellor—was he already Roya Ias’s chancellor, way back then, or just a rising courtier?—didn’t come much to Porifors.”

  “So you’ve explained,” said Ista coolly. She allowed Cattilara to ease her and Liss into their own chambers and escape back to her nursing supervision.

  Or whatever it was she did, in Illvin’s service. Ista wondered if there was anything lacing that goat’s milk in addition to the honey, or what strange spices might be sprinkled on that food he bolted, once a day. After which he gabbled incoherently, then slept the sun around, unable to be roused.

  A seductively rational consideration, that one. Not a single dose of poison from a Roknari dagger, but an ongoing regimen, from a source much closer to home? It would account for the visible symptoms quite exactly. She was sorry she had thought of it. Less disturbing than dreams of white fire, though.

  “Why did you pinch my arm?” Liss demanded when the door had closed.

  “To stop your speech.”

  “Well, I figured that. Why?”

  “The marchess was not best pleased with her groom’s forwardness. I wished to save him a cuffing, or at least, sharp words.”

  “Oh.” Liss frowned, digesting this. “I’m sorry I let him trouble you. He seemed harmless in the stables. I liked how he handled the horse. I never dreamed he would ask you for anything so foolish.” She added after a moment, “You were kind not to mock him, or refuse his plea.”

  Kindness had nothing to do with it. “He certainly went to great pains to make it as attractive a proposition as possible.”

  The merry glint returned to Liss’s eye in response to her wry tone. “That’s so. And yet … it made it all seem sadder, somehow.”

  Ista could only nod agreement.

  IT EASED ISTA’S HEART TO HAVE LISS’S PLAIN, PRACTICAL MINISTRATIONS again, readying her for bed. Liss bade her a cheerful good night and went off to sleep in the outer chamber, within call. She left the candle burning again at Ista’s bidding, and Ista sat up on her pillows and meditated on the day’s new revelations.

  Her fingers drummed. She felt as restless as when she had used to pace round and round the battlements at Valenda Castle, till her feet blistered and the soles parted from her slippers and her attendants begged for mercy. That had been an opiate for thought, though, not its aid.

  For all that it seemed a string of accidents had brought her to Porifors, the Bastard had claimed she was not here by chance. The gods were parsimonious, Lord dy Cazaril had once remarked to her, and took their chances where they found them. He had not pretended it was a positive feature, god-gnawed man that he was. Ista smiled in grim agreement.

  How were prayers answered, anyway? For prayers were innumerable, but miracles were rare. The gods set others to their work, it seemed. For however vast a god might be, it had only the width of one soul at a time to reach into the world of matter: whether door, window, chink, crack, pinhole …

  Demons, for all that they were supposedly legion, were not vast, possessing nothing like the infinite depth of those Eyes, but they seemed limited similarly; except that they could chew away at the edges of their living apertures, and so widen them, over time.

  So who here must she reproach for praying for her advent? Or perhaps not for her, but just for help, and sending her was but a nasty jape of the Bastard’s. She had absolved Lord Illvin when she’d thought him senseless, but if Goram spoke truth, he had periods of … if not lucidity, arousal, after all. And Goram himself had certainly made supplication of her, with the work of his hands if not words. Someone had laid that silent prayer of the white rose across Illvin’s empty plate. Lady Cattilara plainly ached with the pain of her longing for a child, and her husband … was not what he seemed, either.

  Foolish beyond hope to send a middle-aged former madwoman running down the roads of Chalion to fetch up here, and for what? Failed saint, failed sorceress, failed royina, wife, mother, daughter, failed … well, lover was not a role she’d ever attempted. Less even than failure, in her hierarchy of woe. At first, upon discovering Lord Arhys’s relation to dy Lutez, she’d guessed this for a tribunal on the gods’ parts, for her old, cold murder and sin confessed to dy Cabon back in Casilchas. Feared that she was slated to be dragged though all that stale guilt yet again: Fetch a bucket of water for the drowning woman!

  But now … it seemed her self-involved expectations were mockingly thwarted. Not herself, but another, was the center of the god’s attentions. Her lips puffed on a bitter laugh. And she was merely being … what? Tempted to meddle?

  Tempted, certainly. The Bastard had plainly primed her with that salacious kiss of His. His questing tongue had sent a most cryptic message, but that part of it she had received clearly, body and mind.

  What point, to wake that sleeping appetite here, now? What point ever? No dishes had been served up in tiny, backwater Valenda worth salivating over, even if the curse had not paralyzed her as much below the waist as above it. She was hardly to be faulted for failing her feminine duty to fall in love there. She tried to imagine dy Ferrej, or any other gentleman of the Provincara’s entourage, as an object of desire, and snorted. Just as well. Anyway, a modest lady always kept her eyes downcast. She had been taught that rule by age eleven.

  Work, the Bastard had said.

  Not dalliance.

  But what work? Healing? Enticing thought. But if so it was not, it appeared, to be effected with a simple kiss. Perhaps she’d just missed something on her first try, something obvious. Or subtle. Or profound. Or obscene? Though she had little heart for a second attempt. She briefly wished the god had been more explicit, then took back the wish as ill phrased.

  But as disastrous as the situation already was, could even she make it worse? Perhaps she was here on the same principle as young physicians set to practice their experiments and new potions on the hopeless cases. So that no blame attached to their—usually inevitable—failures. The dying, they do have at Porifors. A little practice piece, this tightly contained domestic tragedy. Two brothers, a barren wife, one castle … perhaps it was not beyond her scope. Not like the future of a royacy, or the fate of the world. Not like the first time the gods had conscripted her into their service.

  But why send me in answer to a prayer, when you know perfectly well I can’t do a thing without You?

  It wasn’t too hard to follow the logic of that one to its inevitable conclusion, either.

  Unless I open to You, You cannot lift a leaf. Unless You pour into me, I cannot do … what?

  Whether a sally port was a passage or a barrier depended not on the materials of which it was made, but on its position. The free will of the door, as it were. All doors opened in both directions. She could not open the gate of herself a crack and peek out, and expect to still hold the fortress.

  But I cannot see …

  She cursed the gods methodically, in five couplets, in ferocious parody of an old childhood bedtime prayer, rolled over,
and wrapped her pillow over her head. This isn’t defiance. This is shuffling.

  IF ANY GOD DABBLED IN HER DREAMS, ISTA DID NOT REMEMBER IT when her eyes opened in the night. But regardless of the phantasms that troubled the mind, the body still had to piss. She sighed, poked her feet out of bed, and went to open the heavy wooden shutter to let in a little light. Near midnight, she guessed, by the misshapen moon’s silver sheen. Well past the full, now, but the night was chill and clear. She rummaged under the bed for her chamber pot.

  Finished, she eased the lid back on with a clink, frowned at how loud the noise seemed in the stillness, and pushed the pot back out of the way again. She returned to the window, intending to bar the shutters once more.

  A shuffling of slippered feet sounded in the courtyard below, then scuffed quickly up the stairs. Ista held her breath, peering between the spirals of iron. Catti again, all soft, shimmering silks, flowing over her body like water as she moved in the moonlight. One would think the cursed girl would get cold.

  She certainly wasn’t carrying a pitcher of goat’s milk this time. She wasn’t even carrying a candle. Whether she clutched some smaller, more perilous vial close to her chest, or merely held her light robe closed, Ista could not tell.

  She eased Lord Illvin’s door open in silence and slid within.

  Ista stood still at her window, staring into the dark, hands wrapped around the cold iron foliage.

  All right. You win. I can’t stand this any longer.

  Teeth grinding, Ista sorted through her clothes presently hung on the row of wall pegs, drew down the black silk robe, and shrugged it on over her pale nightdress. She didn’t wish to risk waking Liss by blundering in the dark through the outer chamber to the door. Did her window even open? She wasn’t sure the iron rod holding the grating closed would move out of its stone groove at first, but it came up with a tug. The grating pushed outward. She hoisted her hips up to the sill and swung her legs out.

  Her bare feet made less noise on the boards of the gallery than Catti’s slippers had. As no orange glow had begun in the dark chamber opposite, Ista was unsurprised to find the inner shutters of Illvin’s window open to the moonlight, too. But from Ista’s vantage, easing up to the edge of the sinuous iron vines that guarded the opening, Catti was scarcely more than a dark shape moving among darker shapes, a scuff, a breath, the squeak of a floorboard softer than a mouse’s cry.