Penric's Mission

IV

Nikys sat in the garden of her rented villa and tried to eat… breakfast, she supposed it must be, this being morning. A morning. Which?

It had been, what, two days?—since she’d brought Adelis back here, clinging to his saddle, his labored breathing as frightening as weeping. Half her servants had fled after the visitation from the governor’s men and not returned, so, to her loathing, she’d had to employ the soldiers who’d escorted them to support him stumbling to his upstairs bedchamber and lay him down. She hadn’t wanted them touching him. She’d ejected them from her domain as swiftly as she could thereafter, without thanks, but a provincial guardsman still lurked outside her front door, and another beyond her back wall.

After that, the nightmare had commenced. She’d sponged her brother’s body, dressed him in clean linen, coaxed him to eat, with poor luck, forced him to drink. He’d not cooperated much. She’d seen Adelis in a dozen bad moods in the past, exhausted or frustrated or enraged, though generally with the army or the Imperial court rather than with her. She’d never before seen him broken.

It was lovely in the garden in this first light. Water trickled musically through clever stone channels from the tiny spring that had made the villa, though old, such a wonderful find, half a year ago when Adelis had invited her to join him at his new posting. On the pergola that shaded her little table and chairs, grapevines shot forth leaves that seemed to expand by the hour, with green sprigs of new grapes peeping shyly through them. Bees bumbled among the flowers. On the far end, where the kitchen garden grew apace, dew sparkled off a spiderweb like a necklace of jewels carelessly dropped by some passing sprite. The space breathed charm, grace, ease, surcease from troubles.

This morning, its lying beauty offended her.

She ate the other half of her boiled egg, with a bite of bread to force it down, and a swallow of cold tea to force down the bread. When she finished, she’d have to return to Adelis’s bedchamber and try again with the bandages stuck to his face. He’d screamed when she touched them, and struck out—blindly, of course, and so he’d connected at his full strength in a way he’d not done since they were squabbling children. His full strength had been much less, then. She rubbed at the deep bruise on her cheek, and buried her face in her hands.

She couldn’t weep. Or sleep. Or eat. Or breathe…

Control yourself anyway. You have to go back now.

When she looked up, an apparition sat across from her.

She was so bewildered she didn’t even jump, though her jaw fell open as she stared.

Her first thought was not man, or woman, but ethereal. Luminous eyes as blue as the sea in summer. Hair an astonishing electrum color, drawn back in a knot at the nape but with a few strands messily escaping to catch a sunbeam in a wispy halo. And nothing human should have skin so milk-pale.

She dismissed her furious fancies. It was most certainly a man. Her gaze skipped down the long, folded body. Wiry arms, hands too large and strong for a woman, nails cut blunt and scrupulously clean. Sandaled feet too long to be feminine, chest too flat, hips much too narrow. Drawn back to the face, she discovered an inexplicably cheery smile and white, sound teeth.

He wore an undyed sleeveless tunic to his knees, belted at the thin waist, with a sleeveless jacket in dark green over it, suggesting, without quite being, the garment of an acolyte of the Mother’s Order.

In a soft, friendly tone, her hallucination spoke: “Madame Khatai, I trust?”

She swallowed and located her voice, sharp-edged with alarm: “How did you get in here? There are guards.” Less to keep people from going in and out, she suspected, than to mark and report who did so.

“Perhaps they went off-duty? I didn’t see any.”

“My servants should have stopped you.

“I’m afraid I didn’t see any of them, either,” he said as if in apology.

That she could believe, she thought grimly.

“Pardon me for startling you,” he went on in that same soft voice.

Stunning me.

“—my name is Master Penric. I am a physician.”

She rolled back in her chair. “Apprentice Penric, I might believe. You can’t be a day over twenty-one. Less.”

“I’m thirty, I assure you, lady.”

He claimed an age the same as hers, and she was a century old, this morning. “I might grant twenty-five.”

He waved an airy hand. “Twenty-five it shall be, then, if you prefer.”

“And Master…?”

“In all but final oath.” His smile grew rueful.

“Hnh.”

“My credentials aside, some of your brother’s officers took up a collection to hire me to attend upon him. For reasons you may understand better than I, they strongly wished to stay anonymous.” He raised his blond brows, and she grimaced, unable to gainsay the likelihood. “But my fee is paid, and here I am.”

“For how long?”

He shrugged. “As long as I’m needed.” He gestured at the large case by his feet. “I brought supplies, and a change of clothing.” After a moment he conceded, “I might not have been anyone’s first pick as a physician. But I was the one who would come. …And I’m fairly good with burns.”

That last did not so much decide as dismast her, setting her adrift on dangerous shoals of hope. Her gaze caught on those scrubbed, thin-fingered hands. She might believe those hands, though she was none too sure of his tongue. She had no trust in this sudden stranger, she had no trust in anyone, but she was so benighted tired…

Perhaps he read her surrender in her posture, for he continued, “I should examine the general as soon as possible. I’m so sorry I couldn’t be here earlier.”

“Follow me, then.” She pushed herself up, frugally drained the dregs of her tea, and led him into the house. “But he’s not a general anymore, you know.” She had come to hate the very sound of the betraying—betrayed—military title, which her brother had so cherished.

“What should I call him, then?”

“Arisaydia. I suppose.” She did not invite this Penric fellow to Adelis.

As he lugged his case up the stairs after her, he asked, “Has he spoken much?”

“A little.”

“What has he said?”

She stopped before Adelis’s door and scowled up at the physician. “Please let me die.”

He hesitated, then said quietly, “I see.”

As she opened the door he took a very deep breath and squared his shoulders—she revised his age downward again—and followed her inside.

Adelis lay as she’d left him to go down to breakfast. Nikys glanced at the scullion she’d set to watch him. “Any changes?”

The boy ducked his head. “No, lady.”

“You may go back to the kitchen.”

The blond physician held up a hand. “When you get there, boil a pot of water and set it to cool. And then another. We’re going to need a lot.”

“The water left from my tea should be cool by now,” Nikys offered tentatively.

“Good. Bring that first.” Master Penric nodded, and the boy retreated, staring back curiously over his shoulder.

Nikys went to the bedside and took Adelis’s hand. Its tension told her that he did not sleep. “Adelis. I’ve brought you a physician, Master Penric.” The man had brought himself, more like, but she doubted Adelis would respond well to that news, either.

Below the cloth wound around his face, still not unwrapped from that first awful day, his lips moved, and he growled, “Go away. Don’t want him.”

Nikys perforce ignored this. Her hand hovered over the grubby makeshift bandage. “I’m sure this should come off, but it’s glued itself to his skin. My maid said it should be ripped off, but I didn’t let her.”

Adelis spasmed on his bed, one fist wavering up; Nikys dodged it. “Is that cack-handed hag back? Get rid of her!”

“Shh, shh. She’s gone. I won’t let her in here again, promise.”

“Better not.” He subsided.

Penric, coming to the bed’s other side, let his hand pass over the cloth and cleared his throat. “In the woman’s defense, there is a treatment, debridement, for the reduction of burn scarring that involves… something like that, which she might have seen sometime and misunderstood. Not for this, though.” His voice went tart. “If the fool woman had done that here, it would have torn off his eyelids.”

Both Nikys and Penric clapped their hands over their mouths, she to keep her breakfast down, he as if to call back the blunt words. Adelis jerked and groaned. Penric grimaced in weird irritation, and added hurriedly, “Sorry. Sorry!” casting Nikys an apologetic head-duck. “Burns are a gruesome business, I can’t deny. I hate them.”

A faint snort from the bed.

Penric eyed the heavy supine figure under the sheet. “What have you given him, so far?”

“I obtained some syrup of poppies. I’m almost out, though.” Adelis loathed the opiate, but he’d accepted it from her hands this time. She didn’t think it had quelled the pain enough for him to sleep, but it had kept him too quiescent to fight them, lying in sodden silence. Too quiescent to rise and seek to do himself harm?

“I brought a good quantity. He can be given some more before I start.”

The physician cleared space on the wash table, opened his case, laid out a cloth, and positioned supplies upon it in a precise, organized manner that subtly reassured her. He began by measuring out his syrup into a little vessel with a spout; then he held up Adelis’s head and tipped it into his mouth, stroking his throat with a finger as he swallowed it down. His movements were gentle, but firm and sure, practiced-seeming. Mindful, but not in the least hesitant.

The scullion returned with the first of the water, and Penric laid a towel under Adelis’s head and commenced dribbling it over the blindfold. “This will take some time to loosen,” he remarked, “but it won’t be difficult. And I promise all his skin will stay on.”

A fainter snort.

It seemed an optimistic prediction, but Nikys longed to believe it, so said nothing. As she sat in her chair, watching the man watching her brother, her head nodded, and she jerked it back up. As much to keep herself awake as for any real curiosity, she asked, “Are you from the northern peninsula? Your speech is a little odd.”

He hesitated, then smiled again. “My mother was. My father was a Weald-man, from the country over the other mountains, to your far south and east.”

“I’ve seen men like you in the emperor’s guard in Thasalon. They were supposed to be from islands in the frozen southern sea. Fierce warriors, I was told, but ill-behaved visitors.” Well, not just like him, as he didn’t look the least like a warrior. But some of the big brutes had been similar in coloration, if not so, so… so much so.

“I’m a well-behaved visitor, I assure you.”

“Where did you study medicine?”

“…Rosehall. It’s in the Weald.”

Her brows rose. “I’ve heard of it! A great university, yes?” Despite her reservations, she grew more hopeful.

He looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t think Cedonians knew much about my father’s land.”

“I’ve lived in the capital, and seaports. People get around. Like you.”

His smile grew a bit strained. “Yes, I suppose so.”

At length, done fiddling with water and oils, he took sharp scissors from his case and cut through the cloth on either side of Adelis’s face. He undid the wrap from around the back of his patient’s head and dropped it out of the way, resettling him on the towel. Adelis groaned in fear. “You need not watch this,” Penric said over his shoulder to Nikys.

“I’ll stay.”

“Hold his hands, then.”

She went to the bed’s other side. “To console him?”

A long finger flicked out and tapped her purpled cheek. “So he can’t hit me.”

She half-smiled and did so; Adelis gripped her spasmodically back.

Penric took a breath, closed his hands on either side of the stiff cloth, and lifted it delicately. The vile mask seemed to puff away from Adelis’s face like a dry leaf, pulling… nothing at all.

She swallowed hard at the destruction that was revealed.

Blisters, huge puffs of membrane-thin skin bulging with liquid, ranged over Adelis’s upper face and quivered. His eyelids were a horror, rising out of his eye sockets like round bladders. What was not white and swollen was violently red and pink. As Nikys recoiled, sickened, Penric leaned forward, staring fiercely into what had been her brother’s eyes as if he were trying to see right through his skull. But he said only, “Huh.”

He caught Adelis’s hands on their way to feel his own face and yanked them down hard, the first ungentle gesture she’d seen him make. “No. No touching. Stay on your back. That skin is barely stronger than a soap bubble, and we want to preserve those blisters intact for as long as possible. They’re protecting you, little though it may feel like it.”

Adelis panted, but obeyed.

The physician’s brilliant blue eyes seemed filled with jostling thoughts, but Nikys couldn’t begin to guess what they might be. “I think what I most need now, Madame Khatai, is for you to go get some real rest. I’ll stay here and keep watch. Come back and relieve me at nightfall.” He beamed sunnily at her.

“I’ll bring you both food, later. Or have it brought.”

“That would be excellent.” He hummed, as if mulling something, then said, “If I’m going to be living in your household for a few days, we’d best give some thought how I am to be explained to your other servants. I’d suggest you tell them you’ve hired me on to be your brother’s male attendant. Which is not actually untrue, among its other benefits.”

While she couldn’t imagine why anyone, even the politically hostile, could object to Adelis being seen by a physician however oddly he’d been delivered to them, she was reminded that among her erstwhile servants was one certain spy. She nodded slowly. “All right.”

She went out to make preparations in the kitchen, and see to the arrangement of the small spare bedchamber. She didn’t think she could sleep, but when she reached her own room on the other side of the atrium and sat down on her bed, she felt as if the weight of an oxcart, complete with ox, had been lifted from her shoulders.

She was still crying from the sheer relief of it when she fell asleep.

She returned as instructed at sunset. When she eased open the door, Master Penric leaped up holding a finger to his lips and reeled out of the room. He clutched her hands and shook them up and down like a long-lost relative. His palms were feverish. His wide grin at her was nearly lunatic.

“He’s asleep, miraculously. When he wakes up, get more water down him. Don’t let him touch his face. I’ll be back in a while and measure out the next dose of poppy syrup.”

And then she wondered if he’d been drinking, or maybe sampling the poppy juice himself, for he called over his shoulder as he bounded down the stairs, “ ’Scuse me, but I havetogokillsomerats now.”

“What?”

“Mice? Mice would be all right, but you need more of ’em.” His voice faded as he dodged not to the front door, but out the back way. “Has to be something useless lurking around this neighborhood. Stray dog would do a treat right now. Sweet lord god Bastard, deliver us something…”

She blinked, closed her mouth, shook her head, and went within. Sitting and watching the slow rise and fall of her brother’s chest beneath his sheets as the shadows deepened, she decided she didn’t care how strange the blond man was, if he could get Adelis to sleep like that.