Paladin of Souls (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “He is a most perfect gentleman,” Ista assured him. “I find him very shapely.”

  Illvin looked down at Catti, now slumped over against Goram’s shrinking shoulder. “What’s this? Is she all right?”

  “For the moment,” Ista assured both him and Arhys, who was eyeing his wife even more uncertainly. “I, ah … required that she change chairs with you for a little while.”

  “I did not know you could do that,” said Illvin cautiously.

  “Neither did I, till I tried it a moment ago. The demon’s spell is unbroken, just … reapportioned.”

  Arhys, his face rigid with his discomfiture, nevertheless knelt and gathered Cattilara up in his arms. Illvin felt his right shoulder and frowned; his frown deepened as his glance took in a slow red leak starting on Cattilara’s shoulder. He leaned aside for his burdened brother to duck back into the wagon. Ista handed her reins to Liss and scrambled from her saddle across to the wagon seat; Illvin extended a hand to swing her safely aboard.

  “We must talk,” she told him.

  He nodded in heartfelt agreement. “Goram,” he added. His groom looked up with open relief in his face. “Get this wagon turned around and headed back to Porifors.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said Goram happily.

  Ista ducked after Arhys and Illvin as Foix began calling instructions to his men to help back and turn the team. Arhys laid Cattilara, her head lolling, down on the pallet he had just vacated. It was dim and musty under the canvas after the bright light outside, but Ista’s eyes quickly adjusted. The other servant, Cattilara’s woman, and the page squatted fearfully at the back of the wagon among three or four small trunks. It seemed modest provision for the journey, though the marchess’s jewel case no doubt reposed somewhere within the baggage.

  Arhys sent the manservant and the woman forward to sit with Goram. His page, round-eyed with worry, settled near him; he gave the boy a reassuring ruffle of the hair. Arhys sat cross-legged by his wife’s head. Illvin handed Ista down onto the pallet opposite; she felt her scabs crack under their pads as she folded her knees. Illvin started to settle cross-legged next to her, realized the inadequacy of his narrow robe for that position, and sat instead on his knees.

  Arhys glowered down at his wife. “I can’t believe she’d think I would desert Porifors.”

  “I don’t imagine she did,” said Ista. “Hence this deceit.” She hesitated. “It’s a hard thing, when all your life rides on the decisions of others, and you can do nothing to affect the outcome.”

  The wagon finished its turn and started off at a walking pace. The team would be tired enough by the time they’d retraced the ten or so miles to the castle.

  Arhys touched Cattilara’s shoulder, now showing a dark red stain from the slow ooze beneath. “This won’t do.”

  “It must, till we get back to Porifors,” said Illvin uneasily. He stretched his arms and hands and hitched his shoulders, as if settling back into a body grown unused to him. He tested his own grip, and frowned.

  “I can only hope the garrison hasn’t fallen into an uproar over my disappearance,” said Arhys.

  “As soon as we arrive,” said Ista, “we must make another attempt to question Cattilara’s demon. It must know what is afoot in Jokona and, most of all, who dispatched it.” She repeated to Illvin the officer’s tale of the sudden reform of Sordso the Sot.

  “How very strange,” mused Illvin. “Sordso never showed any sign of such family feeling before.”

  “But—will we be able to question the creature, Royina?” asked Arhys, still staring down at Cattilara. “We had little enough luck the last time.”

  Ista shook her head in equal doubt. “I did not have Learned dy Cabon’s advice, before. Nor the assistance of Foix dy Gura. We may be able to set one demon upon the other, to some good effect. Or … to some effect. I shall take counsel of the divine when we return.”

  “I would take counsel of my brother, while I can,” said Arhys.

  “I would take counsel of some food,” said Illvin. “Is there any in this wagon?”

  Arhys bade his page search; the boy emerged from rooting among the supplies with a loaf of bread, a sack of leathery dried apricots, and a skin of water. Illvin settled and began conscientiously gnawing, while Arhys detailed the reports from Porifors’s scouts.

  “We are missing news from the north road altogether,” Illvin observed as Arhys wound up his rapid account. “I mislike this.”

  “Yes. I am most troubled for the two parties that have not yet returned or sent any courier. I was about to send another patrol after them, when my morning duties were so unexpectedly interrupted.” Arhys glanced in exasperation at his unconscious wife. “Or possibly go myself.”

  “I beg you will not,” said Illvin, rubbing his shoulder.

  “Well … no. Perhaps that would not be wise, under the circumstances.” His gaze upon Cattilara grew, if possible, more worried. She looked terribly defenseless, curled up on her side. Without the underlying strain of subterfuge in her face, her striking natural beauty reasserted itself.

  He glanced up and managed a brief smile for Ista’s sake. “Do not be alarmed, Royina. Even if some unseen force approaches from that direction, there is little they can do against Porifors. The walls are stout, the garrison loyal, the approaches for siege engines difficult in the extreme, and the fortress stands upon solid rock. It cannot be undermined. Support from Oby would arrive before our assailants had time to finish making camp.”

  “If Oby is not itself attacked at the same time,” muttered Illvin.

  Arhys glanced away. “I have spoken at length with the temple notary in the past few days, and placed my will in writing under his care. The castle warder has charge of all my other papers. I have appointed you my executor, and joint guardian of little Liviana.”

  “Arhys,” said Illvin, his voice drawn with doubt. “I would point out that there is no guarantee that I will get out of this alive either.”

  His brother nodded. “Liviana’s grandfather becomes her sole sponsor in that case, and guardian of all her dy Lutez properties. In all events—given the lack of any child between Catti and me—I mean to return Cattilara with her jointure to the guardianship of Lord dy Oby.”

  “Cattilara would care as little for my rule as I would care to exert it,” said Illvin. “Thank you from us both.”

  Arhys nodded in wry understanding. “If you—if—if you cannot undertake it in Liviana’s name, Porifors’s military command must revert to the provincar of Caribastos, to be assigned to a man he judges able to carry out its tasks. I have written him to warn him … well, only that I am ill, and that he may wish to look about him just in case.”

  “You take care of every duty. No matter how distasteful.” Illvin smiled bleakly. “You have always sought to take a father’s care of us all. Is there any doubt which god waits to take you up? But let Him wait a little longer, I say.” He glanced aside at Ista.

  But no god awaits him, Ista thought. That’s what sundered means.

  Arhys shrugged. “The days gnaw at me as rats gnaw a corpse. I can feel it now, more and more. I have already overstayed, most grievously. Royina …” His eyes upon her were uncomfortably penetrating. “Can you release me? Is that why you were tumbled down here?”

  Ista hesitated. “I scarcely know what I can do and what I cannot. If I am meant to channel miracles, that one would not be my first choice. Yet it is the nature of miracles that their human conduit may not choose them, except to cry them yes or no. It is only demon sorcery that we may bend to our own wills. No one bends a god.”

  “And yet,” said Illvin thoughtfully, “the Bastard is half a demon himself, they say. I think his nature is not wholly as the rest of his family’s. Perhaps his miracles are not either?”

  Ista frowned in confusion. “I … don’t know. He seemed just as much beyond me in my dream as his Mother did in my vision of her, nigh on twenty years ago. In any case, I have only tried to rearrange the strength that flows a
mong you three. I have not tried to break the bindings beneath, or force the demon to do so against its mistress’s will, though it is clear enough that it would abandon all and fly if it could.”

  “Try now,” said Arhys.

  Both Ista and Illvin made simultaneous noises of protest, and glanced at each other.

  “Because if you cannot do this, I must also know,” said Arhys patiently.

  “But—there is no way to test it but to do it. And then I would not know how to undo it.”

  “I did not suggest that you then seek to undo it.”

  “I would fear to leave you damned.”

  “More than I am now?”

  Ista looked away, discomfited. She read a soul-deep exhaustion in his face; as if he grew hourly less loath to end his travails, even into the dwindling silence of nothingness. “But—what if this is not the task I was sent for? What if I am wrong in my reasoning—again? I should have been ecstatic if it had been given me to heal you. I do not wish to murder another dy Lutez.”

  “You did once.”

  “Yes, but not by sorcery. By drowning. The method would not work on you. You haven’t taken a breath in the last fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh. Yes.” He looked embarrassed and made an effort to inhale.

  Illvin’s eyes had grown wide. “What tale is this?”

  Ista glanced at him, gritted her teeth, and said, “Arvol dy Lutez did not die in the Zangre under questioning. Ias and I drowned him by mistake in the course of an attempt among the three of us to call down a miracle for Chalion’s sake. The treason accusation was entirely false.” Well. That was certainly getting more succinct with practice.

  Illvin’s mouth hung open for a moment longer. He finally said, “Ah. I always did think that treason charge was oddly handled.”

  “The rite failed because Arvol’s courage failed.” She stopped. Then blurted out, “And yet I might have saved the hour even at the last, if I could have called down a miracle of healing. Even as he lay drowned dead at our feet. The Mother, the very goddess of remedy, stood at my right hand, just around some … corner of perception. If my soul had not been so knotted with rage and fear and grief that there was no room in it for any god to enter.” Three prior confessions had all evaded this codicil, she realized. She glanced aside again at Illvin. “Or if I had loved him instead of hated him. Or if—I don’t know.”

  Illvin cleared his throat. “Most people fail to work miracles most of the time. Such a dereliction scarcely needs accounting for.”

  “Mine does. I was called.” She brooded, as the wagon creaked along. Now I am called again. But what for? She glanced up at Arhys. “I wonder how our lives would have been different if your father had brought you to court? Maybe we put the wrong dy Lutez in that barrel.” Now, there was a vision. “What was he like at twenty, Illvin?”

  “Oh, quite as he is now,” Illvin responded. “Not as polished or practiced, perhaps. Not as broad in the shoulder.” A smile of memory flickered over his mouth. “Not as levelheaded.”

  “Not as dead,” growled Arhys, frowning at his hands, which he was stretching and clenching again. Testing for numbness? For increasing numbness?

  “When I was young and beautiful, at court in Cardegoss …” When Arhys had not yet been married even once. When all things were still possible. Might she then have taken a dy Lutez as a lover after all, and made the false slander true? And yet Fonsa’s dark curse had blighted all budding hopes in that court—to what horrors might it have bent that sweet dream, to what disasters drawn Arhys’s youthful brilliance? Would it be true or false comfort to suggest to Arhys that Arvol had kept him away for his own safety? She suppressed a shudder. “It was still too late.”

  Arhys blinked at her, missing the implications, but Illvin grunted a pained laugh. “Imagine you’d met him before you’d married Ias, then, as long as you’re spinning might-have-beens,” he advised dryly. He cast her an odd look. “All my might-have-beens come out the same either way.”

  The wagon bumped and rocked, marking a turn off the road. Ista peeked out to discover that they had returned to the walled village, and were stopping in the olive grove again to water the horses. The sun had climbed to noon, and the day was growing very hot.

  Ista clambered down for a moment to stretch her half-healed legs and get a drink. Liss still had Lord Illvin’s white horse in tow, watering it at the stream. Illvin looked out longingly at it, then abruptly disappeared back inside the wagon. Voices came from behind the canvas, some sort of argument involving Illvin, Goram, and the manservant. Illvin emerged a few minutes later smiling in satisfaction, wearing his groom’s leather trousers and the manservant’s boots below his light linen robe. The trousers were cinched in around his waist and barely reached his calves, but the boots made up the difference.

  Illvin reclaimed his horse and grinned as he mounted it. Appreciation for a body up and moving at will through the bright world again was plain in his face, perhaps the more keenly felt for the fragility of the stolen moment. He let Liss help lengthen his stirrups, spoke a word of thanks, settled in his saddle, and gave Ista a cheery salute.

  Goram, Ista was relieved to see, now wore a pair of ill-fitting linen trousers evidently borrowed from the wagon’s scanty store, though the hapless manservant was left barefoot. The Daughter’s men helped roll up the wagon’s canvas sides partway, as the heat of the day was making the suffocating stuffiness a greater trial than the dust of the road. Not, Ista conceded, that Lord Arhys was likely to notice either one. They started off again. Foix disposed four of his men before and two behind the lumbering wagon, and Illvin and Liss rode along at either side, within easy speaking distance.

  A few miles from the village they topped the rise, swung right along the slope, and began their drop into the broad valley that Porifors guarded. They rounded a stand of trees; abruptly, Foix flung up a hand. Their little party ground to a halt.

  Illvin rose in his stirrups, his eyes widening. Ista and Arhys scrambled to the front of the wagon and looked out. Arhys’s lips drew back, and his teeth clenched, though only Ista’s breath drew in, harsh as a rasp down her dry throat.

  Turning onto the road just ahead of them from some cross-country push was a large column of cavalry. The white pelicans of Jokona glowed on their sea-green tabards. Their armor glinted. Their spearpoints winked in the light in a long line, stitched like jewels across a courtier’s cloak in the descending folds of the land.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A LOW MOAN BROKE FROM GORAM’S LIPS AS HE CROUCHED, GRAY with fear, over his team’s reins.

  “Get back, get back,” Arhys hissed to the manservant and Cattilara’s woman, shoving them behind him to stumble and crouch in the bed of the wagon. His hand clapped down on Goram’s shoulder. “Drive on! Drive through them, if we can.” He stood up and signaled to Foix, sitting his skittering horse and staring frantically forward and back. “Go on!”

  Foix gave him a salute, drew his sword, and wheeled his horse around. The forward four men from the Daughter’s Order drew their weapons and fell in to either side of him, preparing to clear the way for the wagon behind them. It was not possible to see how much of the Jokonan column had already debouched onto the curving road ahead, though the number still to come, strung back through the brush on the valley’s steep side to their left, seemed to go on and on. Goram whipped up his team. The wagon groaned and began to rumble forward.

  The Jokonans nearest them looked over their shoulders to see what was bearing down on them from behind. Shouts, the ring of weapons being drawn, the squeals of horses jerked around and spurred forward.

  Arhys grabbed Ista by the upper arm and hustled her back to relative cover in the wagon’s center. The wagon bed bumped and rocked, and Ista dropped to her knees before she was pitched onto them. Illvin’s parade horse trotted beside the wagon, breaking into its rocking canter as the dray horses picked up speed. Illvin leaned over and shouted, “Arhys! I need a weapon!” His empty hand extended in demand toward
his brother, who looked frantically around. Illvin glanced ahead. “Quickly!”

  With a curse, Arhys snatched up the only pointed object in view, a pitchfork that had been fastened along the wagon bed’s inner wall. He swung it out to Illvin, who glared at his brother in extreme exasperation but grabbed it anyway, sweeping it around prongs forward. “I was thinking of a sword.”

  “Sorry,” said Arhys, drawing his. “It’s taken. I need a horse.” His head swiveled to Liss, cantering along the opposite side.

  “No, Arhys!” Illvin shouted over the rumbling of the wagon, the quickening hoofbeats, and the yells rising ahead. “Stay back! Have some sense!” He pointed to the unconscious Cattilara.

  Arhys’s head jerked back, and he drew breath through his teeth not for air but for anguish, as he realized just whose body must now bear his battle risks.

  “Stay by the royina! Ah. Here comes my sword—!” Illvin clapped his borrowed boots to his white horse’s sides; the beast’s broad haunches bunched, and it sprang forward with a startling bound. Illvin’s linen bed robe flapped open on his bare torso and fluttered in his wake. His tied-back hair streamed out behind him.

  Ista clutched the side boards and stared out openmouthed. Wrong horse, wrong weapon, wrong armor—half naked qualified as wrong armor, did it not?—yelling like a madman … Illvin wrapped his right arm around the pitchfork and pointed it like a lance at the Jokonan soldier bearing down upon him, sword upraised. At the last moment, at some hidden pressure from Illvin’s knee, the heavy white horse swerved, caroming into the Jokonan’s mount. The pitchfork tines slid up on either side of the enemy’s descending sword wrist. A twist, a yank, a snatch, and Illvin was riding onward with the hilt clutched in his other hand while the Jokonan tumbled from his saddle and was half trampled by the horses of Foix’s two rear guards galloping after them. Illvin gave a whoop of triumph and brandished the sword, but, with a thoughtful glance at the humble tool gripped under his other arm, also hung on to the pitchfork.