Mira's Last Dance Read online

  “That would be very welcome.”

  Chadro offered his arm again, and they strolled slowly back toward the coach. “If your duke proves sand, would you know how to find me?”

  “I would.”

  “You are young yet—what, twenty, twenty-three? You might change your mind in the future. The future is a long time.”

  You have no idea how long, thought Mira. I had no idea. She had reigned in Lodi over a century ago, after all. “Would you still want me at thirty? Forty?” She smiled dryly. “Two hundred?”

  “Yes,” said Chadro simply.

  “Cruel to give you false hopes.”

  “Crueler to give me none.”

  “Not really.”

  This is excruciating, said Pen.

  Aye. The darling men used to imagine they’d fallen in love with me all the time. Most of them were actually in love with their own cocks.

  But not all?

  She sighed, silently. No, not all. I might have surrendered myself to one of them, but the tumor in my womb overtook me first. I wasn’t half past forty when I died. She brightened. It’s lovely to know I can still hook them in.

  Yes, Mira. Now please throw him back.

  I am trying, she pouted. He’s charmingly persistent.

  “Two dukes, eh?” Chadro vented a reluctantly defeated huff.

  “One must seize great opportunities when they come.”

  “It seems some opportunities come too late. Or too early.” He stopped and turned her toward him. “For all we did night before last, I never got a kiss.”

  Pen barely managed to get an arm up between them, fingers spread on Chadro’s chest, as Chadro encircled Mira and drew her to him, leaned up, and pressed his lips to hers. Pen did not interfere as Mira returned it with grace, but chastely, as far from the wickedly inventive Mira of the bedchamber as he could imagine. No wonder she’d made men’s heads spin. He was just glad he’d chosen a minimal sort of padding, hard to discern in the folds of the blue-green dress. The watching soldiers whooped and whistled. Pen sensed wide eyes behind the masks in the coach window.

  “Freedom can turn to ash as well,” murmured Chadro.

  “I know,” said Mira.

  “You are too young to be so wise.”

  “You are too old to be so foolish. But you are kind, which is a rarer treasure than gold. May the woman you finally bestow it upon be worthy of it.” She slipped out of his hold, and Pen skipped toward the coach, terrified lest some incriminating underpadding come loose in the heat. With a strained smile, Chadro followed and handed Mira up the steps once more, giving her copper-tipped fingers a last squeeze of sincere farewell. He clicked the coach door closed.

  Pen fell into the seat across from Nikys and Adelis, wheezing. Some low-voiced commands from outside, and the coach started up once more, this time with six armed outriders.

  Adelis looked ready to surge across the gap and throttle him. “What just happened?”

  “General Chadro has charitably undertaken to escort Sora Mira to the border, and see her safely across.”

  “What?” gasped Nikys. “How did you bring that off?” Adelis jerked around to look out the window, as if making sure they were still headed in the right direction.

  “All Mira’s work, I assure you.”

  Nikys stared at him, wary-eyed even through her sequined trim. “So where does Mira leave off and Penric begin, behind that pretty face of yours?”

  Pen thought of how Sugane and Litikone had blended together, after all their years, and Vasia nearly as much, and shook his head. “Should I live long enough, who knows?” Still reeling, he flung his head back against the seat and waited for his heart to slow. That had been worse than sprinting. “If my demon doesn’t slay me by sheer terror first. Although then it will be someone else’s problem. Consoling thought.”

  Nikys tensed as if she wanted to recoil, but in the close confines of the coach, there was nowhere to retreat.

  Penric closed his eyes, and thought, I swear to my god, Desdemona, if I ever again have to disguise myself as a woman, I’m calling in Learned Aulia.

  Ungrateful, Penric! But he could sense Mira’s amusement. At him, of course.

  A murmur from Aulia: I’m not sure it’s such a compliment to me, either. Are you saying I’m dull?

  Penric imagined a mental figure of himself flailing his hands in apology and backing away, which made Des snicker.

  Des went on, If you wanted a dull life, Penric, you picked up the wrong demon from that roadside out of Greenwell.

  Ha. Which of us picked up which? And what were wrong or right demons, anyway? All demons started identically, as unformed blobs of chaos escaped into the world from the Bastard’s hell, or repository of disorder, or whatever it was. Each grew more different from all the others with every rider it came to; the differences redoubled as its riders accumulated over time. Des’s theological argument that the Temple should not blame the demons for the imprints their riders left upon them was ongoing, and… not to be solved on a coach road.

  The vehicle rumbled onward. After a few minutes, Pen opened his eyes and gathered his wits enough to caution, “No word of this episode must ever pass anyone’s lips.”

  Adelis snorted. “Embarrassed, Learned? It seems late to find your pride.”

  “Not one word,” said Penric, irritated. “If it ever gets out to your enemies at the Imperial court how Chadro let you slip through his hands like this, they’ll hang him in your place, Adelis. And he doesn’t deserve it.” He added, more cruelly, “Or maybe they’ll put out his eyes with boiling vinegar.”

  That won a real flinch, and Adelis dropped his gaze, if not ashamed, at least deterred. Although after a while he muttered, “If we ever end up facing each other across a field of arms, I may well wish I’d let him hang.”

  The last five miles to the border passed in brooding silence.

  Chadro’s high-ranking oversight saw them past the guards on the Cedonian side with utmost courtesy, and no questions asked. The hired coach ferried them the few hundred yards down and across the stream marking the boundary of the two polities, and up the next slope to the post of the Orbas guards. There the postilion let them off, was duly rewarded with a suitable coin, and turned his horses around to go back.

  The men of Orbas, having watched their impressive arrival at the opposite guard-post, gave them a closer inspection. No one broke character yet. The two masked servants trailed dutifully, overshadowed by their dazzling mistress, who gave the guards to understand, without naming names, that she was traveling under the protection of a very high lord of Orbas indeed, who was looking forward anxiously to her safe and untrammeled arrival.

  The closest thing to an attack was after they cleared the soldiers, as they suffered the importunities of three rival coach owners competing for their business. Adelis, in the role of Mira’s manservant, shouted and cuffed them to silence and chose the one who seemed to boast the healthiest and fastest team. It wasn’t till they clambered into the new conveyance that Chadro, watching from the far side of the ravine, gave Mira one last wave. Charitably, she waved back and blew him a broad kiss before he turned his horse and rode away, spine disconsolately bowed.

  They were a mile up the road from the border village, with no sign or sound of pursuit, when Adelis at last threw his countryman’s hat and the carnival mask to the rocking floor of the coach and bent over with his scarred face buried in his hands. His shoulders shook, and Penric wasn’t sure if he was weeping or getting ready to vomit. Or both. Of the three who had shared this journey, Adelis had borne the most frightening burden, and Penric fancied the mask staring up blindly by their feet was not the only one he’d been wearing.

  Nikys laid a consoling hand on her brother’s arm and squeezed, perhaps knowing better than to speak. Prudently, Penric copied her muteness.

  VII

  After the first change of horses on the coast road, Learned Penric skinned out of Mira’s togs and back into his own, an awkward process in
the close confines of the coach. No… not really his own, Nikys supposed, just whatever plausible garb he’d obtained from some used-clothing merchant in Patos after escaping the bottle dungeon, and before presenting himself to Nikys in her villa’s garden. That bright morning seemed a hundred years ago, from this vantage. Undyed tunic, trousers, a sleeveless green coat that had once fooled her eye, or at least her tired mind, into accepting him as a physician of the Mother’s Order (unsworn); the clothes, the man, the deceits, and all of their little company seemed worse for wear after their long flight.

  “When you get to the ducal palace, Adelis,” Penric said, beginning to take down Mira’s elegant hairstyle, “there are bound to be a lot of questions about your blinding. I would ask you… beg you…” He paused to remuster his words. “It will likely make it much simpler for you if your tale is that the man who administered the boiling vinegar did a poor job of it, and your eyesight recovered largely on its own. Your sister’s good nursing did the rest.”

  Adelis studied him. “You don’t desire the credit? The reputation?”

  “Not for that, no.”

  “So what is your role in this play? This time.” That Adelis had grown mortally tired of playacting was plain in his wearied tone.

  “I don’t suppose I need a speaking part at all. When we reach Vilnoc I plan to find the main temple, and report in at whatever house of the Bastard’s Order they have there. Once I establish my identity I can find my own way back to Adria.” He cast a guarded glance over at Nikys, thinking of who-knew-what. Combing out his hair with his hands, he began braiding it in a single short rope down his back. “Although it might be well for you to come in with me, and use the Order’s house as a staging area for your foray upon the palace. Get a wash, a meal, maybe a loan of clothing. Send a messenger ahead announcing your arrival who will not be ignored or shuffled aside. Rather than taking your host by surprise. This not being an attack.”

  “I suppose,” said Adelis slowly, “it would be better not to appear wholly as beggars at Duke Jurgo’s gates.”

  Even though they were? But no. Adelis was a man with a treasure of military skill and experience to offer, as desirable as gold to any leader as beleaguered as Duke Jurgo of Orbas. Penric was right; her brother should do nothing to devalue himself, here at the start. And since she was his whole train, neither should she. Pensively, Nikys lifted the servant’s tabard over her head, folding it aside. Adelis had already shed his.

  Penric sacrificed the last contents of their leather water bottle to wet a dirty shirt and try to scrub off his rouge and kohl. The effort left him resembling a man who had lost a tavern brawl and then not slept for three days; impatiently, Nikys grabbed the shirt from him and cleaned his face herself. He merely murmured, “Thank you.” She merely handed the shirt back rather than throwing it.

  The port town of Vilnoc came into sight around the next bend and rise of the road, and Nikys peered out the left window, eager for any orientation in her upended world. She’d caught only brief flashes of the sea in the past few miles, but here the shoreline opened out before her. Vilnoc sat athwart the constantly silting mouth of the Oare river, navigable to larger boats for only a few miles inland before rising turbulently into this hillier country. The town had tracked the river downstream over the centuries, stretching itself to the present waterfront with its fortifications, one of Orbas’s few good harbors along this difficult coastline. Which was part of why the duke made the town his summer capital, but really, to Nikys’s Cedonian eye the place seemed hardly larger than Patos.

  The livery lay outside the city walls, where they dismounted from the coach and paid off the postilion. An ostler gave directions to the local chapter of the Bastard’s Order, sited hard by the main temple, which was visible from the inn yard as a looming shape on a height. For once, when they entered the city gates, they gave up their real names to the gate guards, though not their titles; Penric kin Jurald, Adelis Arisaydia, Nikys Arisaydia Khatai. Penric, Nikys reflected, had not been very careful picking an alias back in Sosie, if that was his real surname.

  The local chapterhouse of the white god was readily found, a place for Temple administration rather than worship, occupying an old merchant’s mansion on a side street just off the temple square. Penric parleyed them past the porter by sheer assertion, then left them uneasy in the vestibule as he talked his way up the resident hierarchy. He came back just before Adelis was about to bolt. He was accompanied by a gray-haired woman in the white robes of a full-braid divine, with a pendant around her neck that signified some authority, or at any rate the porter and the dedicat set to watch them stood up and braced at her entry in a respectful manner that Nikys did not associate with devotees of the Bastard. She addressed Adelis as General, Nikys as Madame Khatai, and Penric as Learned Sir. The latter made her minions blink, and the copper-haired vagabond grin at them.

  Nikys was then taken up to the women’s dormitory by a smiling young acolyte, very interested in her tale. Nikys kept her answers brief. But it was such a relief to be in the company of women once more, even if only for an hour or two. The hen party that promptly assembled to get her washed and dressed reminded her of the fuss Zihre had made for Mira, although the results were less spectacular and more respectable. Nikys thought she resembled a plump gray partridge, and wondered if she might have looked less dull had she been able to borrow Mira’s dress. Minus the extension below the hem.

  As she was being fed and fitted, she thought back over all that Penric had done for them, for no benefit to himself if Adelis did not choose Adria. Or unless Duke Jurgo did not choose Adelis? Was that the chance Penric was waiting for, why he continued to aid them? Their reception here was by no means assured.

  She did not want to move to Adria. She hadn’t wanted to abandon Cedonia, for that matter, though she could not regret a moment of her support for her brother. Beggars can’t be choosers the old saw went. So if you wanted choice, you must not beg? There was something wrong with that notion, when Adelis himself would shortly be begging a place from the duke.

  What she wanted—well, she couldn’t have what she wanted, now could she? Which left her not with choices, but with second-choices. Or maybe mixed choices, things she desperately wanted inextricably mixed with things she wanted no parts of.

  I want my life to not be one continuous emergency for a while. Gods. She was so tired her eyes were throbbing. But she could not relax yet. This palace presentation still loomed. She must get through it without stumbling, for Adelis’s sake.

  And if, contrary to all this pointless fretting, the duke granted Adelis his whole desire? Adelis would be off at once to look after his new army, leaving his sister to fend for herself in a strange country. Installed in some safe-appearing box first, no doubt, but still, alone among strangers. She’d returned to her widowed mother’s house after she herself had been widowed, four years ago, but that wasn’t an option this time, with her mother still in Cedonia. Safe in Cedonia, Nikys prayed. That his father’s concubine had been as much a mother to Adelis as his own noble dam was not likely to occur to his enemies; only his closest friends were aware of it.

  Safe in Cedonia was not so comfortable a thought as it had used to be, Nikys couldn’t help reflecting, as a breathless dedicat popped into the dormitory and told her it was time to go down to the entry again, the duke’s page had arrived, and Madame’s brother the general was already waiting.

  In the vestibule, she found Adelis dressed in clean, well-fitting tunic and trousers, dark and neat. Without ornament, more soldierly than aristocratic, but that seemed exactly what was wanted; Duke Jurgo must prefer to multiply subordinates, not rivals. Someone had trimmed his hair back to military standards. The owl-feather red scars framing the glaring garnet eyes might be a bit unnerving, she granted, to a gaze not grown used to them. In another lifetime, she might have dubbed the effect demonic, except she now had much more informed ideas of what a demon really was.

  He gave her an approving nod. “We look as
well as we can, I suppose.”

  She calibrated for Adelis-speech and smiled at the effusive praise, standing taller.

  He stepped closer and lowered his voice. Watching her. “Your infatuation with the sorcerer is over now, I trust. After all his antics in Sosie.”

  Her smile faded, as she contemplated the tangled complexity of all she’d witnessed. The lunatic absurdities of pubic lice and amorous generals aside… I saw him pull death from a woman’s breast as if drawing down wool from a distaff. And then spin it out into the world, following him like a billowing shadow. He sees in the dark. She shook her head. “I have no idea what to think of him by now.”

  He gave a little chin-duck, as if reassured. She had no such reassurance for herself.

  Speak of the demon. A quick, scuffing step on the stair heralded Penric’s arrival. Nikys found herself gaping, as taken aback as her first sight of him in the garden of the Patos villa.

  He had somehow obtained Bastard’s whites in the style of Adria; a close-fitting, long-sleeved linen tunic buttoned high to the neck, with an upstanding round collar, open from the waist down with panels that kicked around his knees. Slim linen trousers. Pale polished shoes. Most riveting, on his left shoulder, the triple loop with silver-tipped ends of a full-braid Temple divine, the usual white and cream colors twisted with a silver cord signifying a sorcerer. Or warning of one…

  Unfairly, the official garb made him look even taller.

  The copper lacquer was gone from his clean fingers. His hair was still henna’d, if a lighter shade, and drawn back in a tight knot at his nape. His blue eyes were alight, and Nikys realized that she was seeing him for the first time in his real persona, free of dissembling.

  A movement drew Nikys’s eye to another figure waiting in the vestibule, a nervous youth of perhaps twelve in the tabard and livery of Orbas. The duke’s page, presumably. He stepped forward and touched a hand to his forehead in greeting and salute. “If you are all here, Learned Sir, General, Madame, I am charged to take you to Duke Jurgo’s secretary, Master Stobrek, who will take you to the duke.”