Penric's Demon (11 page)

“A very specialized saint, dedicated wholly to the Bastard. Through him, the god eats demons, and so draws them back out of the world.”

“What happens to the sorcerer?”

“Nothing, save whatever grief he may suffer at the loss of such powers. However balanced by relief at the return of his own control. Tigney,” she said bitterly, “recovered entirely.”

Pen’s face scrunched. “Desdemona—did you
witness
this event? This . . . eating?”

“Oh, aye.”

“What was it like?”

“Have you ever witnessed an execution?”

“Once, at Greenwell. There was a man hanged for robbing and murdering on the road. Learned Lurenz took us, he said, so that we might learn the true wages of crime. Just the boys, though.”

“And did you?”

“Well . . . highwaymen did not seem so thrilling to me after that.”

“Just like that, then, I expect. If you were a demon.”

“Ah.” It was Pen’s turn to fall silent.

He was several pages farther on when Desdemona said, “But if you ever try to take us to Idau, we will try to fight you. With all our powers.”

Pen swallowed. “Noted.”

*
   
*
   
*

Pen was closing on the end of the same chapter, a little stiff from sitting, when the door rattled. Swiftly, he thrust the book under his pillow and took up the bit of half-done mending he had ready for such an occasion, but it was only Clee.

“Ah, there you are,” said Clee. “I was looking for you.”

“Does Learned Tigney want something of me?”
Finally?

“Not at all. But my brother Rusi has invited the both of us to dine with him at Castle Martenden this evening.”

Pen’s interest was caught, despite his frustration at being interrupted in the middle of a difficult passage. Castle Martenden, it was said, had never been taken by force of arms, although that might partly be because no great wars had yet come to it, merely local squabbles. Which could be as fatal as any wider struggle to those involved, no doubt.

“I should like that. But, tonight? It’s a long walk.”

Clee smiled. “Rusi is a better host than that. There are horses waiting for us outside the gate.”

“Are we to stay the night?”

“There’ll be a good moon later, so if the weather holds fine, we need not. But Rusi will provide all that we need if we decide to delay till morning.”

Gratified both with the prospect of escaping this narrow house for an evening, and an opportunity to see so fascinating a fortress, Pen hurried to don what of his new clothes were now usable. Clee gave him no opening to better hide Ruchia’s book, unfortunately, as he waited politely for Pen to ready himself, and then ushered him out the door before him.

“I should ask leave of Learned Tigney,” Pen remembered as they started down the stairs.

“No need,” said Clee.
 
“I already have.
 
You aren’t a prisoner here, you know.”

And yet not quite free, if Clee was detailed to be his duenna. The scribe was by way of being Tigney’s private secretary, trusted with his correspondence; also with his captive, it seemed. Pen wondered if Clee also worked with the ciphers, and if it would be wrong to ask him about them. “Good.”
 
Giving Learned Cautious no chance to reverse his ruling, Pen followed Clee directly out to the street.

A brisk walk brought them to the old stone bridge; upstream and down, several millwheels turned and creaked in the steady outflow. They passed over the arch and through the lesser half of Martensbridge. This part of town was devoted to serving the caravans that came down from the north passes, and boasted warehouses, tanners, saddlers, smiths, and lodgings for travelers who wished to stay close to their goods. Beyond the gate that served the road flanking the lake, they found a small livery. Two horses waited, bespoke and already saddled. They seemed better mannered than the usual rental remounts.

Watching Clee swing up readily to his saddle, Pen asked, “Are these your brother’s beasts?”

Clee nodded, and reined around confidently to lead Pen onto the road north. They walked their mounts along side by side for a while, threading local traffic; farm carts going, at this hour, mostly home from the markets, animals being walked to their fates at city butchers.

“Were you taught horsemanship as a child?” Pen asked.

“Yes, we had all the usual castle sports. Castle Martenden was a good place to grow up. I wasn’t apprenticed to the Order till I turned fourteen, as directed in our father’s will.”

The usual age for such placements. “Had the old lord a large family?”

“Not very, to my benefit. Rusi and I were the only boys. Rusi’s elder sister is long married, and mine chose the Daughter’s Order, and now teaches at a Lady-school down the valley of the Linnet.”

“It sounds a reasonably happy family life, then.” Pen hoped Clee would hear the delicate inquiry in that; or, if he didn’t, so much the better.

Evidently he did, for his lips turned up, wryly. “Rusi’s lady mother always treated us children fairly. And Rusi is my elder by a decade. So even if his parents had died in the opposite order, and our father had married my mother, very unlikely considering her station and lack of dower, I still would not be the heir. Nor greatly suited to the task.”

“You aren’t jealous of Rusillin’s rank?”

Clee eyed him sidelong. “I’d have been a fool not to have thought of it, and a greater fool not to have thought better of it. Are you jealous of your brother Rolsch?”

“No,” Pen realized, never having considered it quite like that before. “Rolsch plagued me in many ways, when I was growing up, if not how Drovo did—he was enough older to be above such humor, I think, as well as not being naturally inclined to it. But I never wanted his place. Still don’t.”

“That’s fortunate, then.”

As the road grew less crowded farther from town, Clee led them first to a trot and then to an easy canter, and Pen followed, heartened to have found another commonality with the prickly dedicat. After about an hour’s ride in the late spring afternoon, the waters sparkling to their right and the hills rising to their left, they rounded a curve of the lake, and the gray bulk of Castle Martenden loomed up before them.

It perched on an islet only a dozen paces out from shore, its walls seeming to grow out of the rock that was its foundation. High and solid and forbidding, they followed the contours of the islet’s bounds. This had resulted in something other than foursquare, though four round towers with conical slate caps jutted up at its corners, with a fifth for luck over the drawbridge.

The village of Martenden straggled along the road, a mere farm hamlet, though the fields and vines climbing the slopes beyond looked fair enough. A smithy, an alehouse, a leather-worker’s, a carpenter’s shop, a small inn for travelers too soon benighted to push on to the city at the lake’s end. Clee followed his glance.

“Its earlier lords had more hopes of this place,” he observed, “but they were all siphoned away by the Temple and the city merchants.”

“Mm,” said Pen. “I expect the city exploits the river for its mills, as well. And it is the logical end-point of lake traffic.”

“There is that.”

Clee led them right up to the small arched bridge and drawbridge, clopping across and returning the salute of a soldier standing guard with easy familiarity. Door and portcullis were all blocked open on this peaceful day. Inside the court, paved with fitted flagstones, the place was not so bleak. Arched porticos with stone columns ran along two sides of the irregular space. Atop them two stories of wooden galleries overlooked this light well, suggesting that those living within did not actually have to grope about in darkness at all hours. As they dismounted and a groom hurried up to take charge of their horses, Lord Rusillin himself came out on a balcony, saw them, and waved. He made his way down an end staircase, boots scuffing in an alert man’s rhythm, to the courtyard.

“Ah, you have secured our guest,” said Rusillin amiably to his brother. “Any difficulties along the way?”

“None whatsoever,” Clee assured him.

Making the hand-over-heart salute, he went on to Pen, “Lord Penric. Welcome to Castle Martenden.”

“Thank you for your invitation, Lord Rusillin. I was most interested to see it.” Pen looked up past the galleries toward the battlements. “And from it.”

Rusillin smiled. “Our supper is almost ready. But we could certainly take you up to the sentry walk.”

The castle’s lord led back up the stairs he had descended, and from the third floor over to a short set of stone steps. Pen followed eagerly, Clee bringing up the rear. Then onto the walkway behind the high, crenellated outer wall. Pen leaned over to gaze up and down the lake, imagining being a sentry here, on the watch for enemies. Or, he supposed, merchants’ boats laden with rich cargo from north or south, but he had not heard Castle Martenden accused of lake piracy.

Ten miles distant to the south, he could just make out the walled city. The lake curved slightly here, narrowing, then its northern arm struck out an even longer distance to the smaller town that overlooked its headwaters, lacking a princess-archdivine to raise its status and its walls, but doing well as an embarkation point for trade. Beyond the curve, a pair of small green islands decorated the blue surface, home, he understood, mainly to goats, sheep, and a few reclusive religious mystics. The westering sun breathed a golden glow over it all.

“Beautiful,” Pen said, awed. “Has this place ever been besieged in your time, Lord Rusillin?”

“Not in mine,” Rusillin replied easily. “My father fought off an incursion of the Earl of Westria, in his day, but at the ridges and along the roads. His troops never reached here. Or Martensbridge, little though the town remembers.”

“Yet now you work for Westria?”

Rusillin’s lips stretched. “The earl palatine learned his lesson. Far better to have us with him than against.”

Jurald Court really was a farmhouse, compared to this, Pen conceded.

“What lies beneath?” Pen asked, turning back to look down into the paved courtyard, grown shadowed as the light angled.

“You’ll see the lower levels after supper,” Rusillin promised. “There is an interesting water gate off the main stores. Very useful for bringing goods in and out.”

“I suppose this place would never run short of water in a siege,” Pen mused. “Another advantage over a crag.”

“To be sure,” Rusillin agreed, and led the back to the stairs. He pointed out a few more militarily useful features along the way, sounding as house-proud as any goodwife. Were the goodwife enamored of serious mayhem.

They walked, boots sounding on the boards, along the third-floor gallery to what proved not a lordly dining hall but a small chamber. Two slit windows on the lake side, framing an unlit fireplace built into the stone wall, provided a faint illumination, and Pen blinked, tempted for a moment to call on Desdemona’s seeing-in-the-dark skill, but his eyes adjusted soon enough. Good wax candles, only one frugally lit, graced an age-darkened sideboard crowded with covered dishes. Clee went to share the flames around among the holders there and upon the round table set only for three. The lord meant to have the luxury of privacy tonight with his interesting guest, apparently.
 
At his brother’s polite request, Clee took the role of server, cheerfully and without resentment. Smiling, he offered Pen the pewter basin to wash his hands first.

The repast was rich in meats and thankfully sparing of cheese: venison, slices of beef, racks of lamb, and a whole chicken were presented, which Rusillin carved with the speed and dexterity of a surgeon accomplishing an amputation. A stew of spiced root vegetables, any winter-stored tiredness masked by their buttery sauce, and a salat of fresh spring greens improved the variety still more. The wine was pale yellow, sweet, and from kin Martenden’s own land, Pen learned. The two brothers, Pen noticed, drank sparingly, so he tried to do the same, for all that each took turns topping up his glass.

Plainly primed by Clee, his host exerted himself to draw Pen out about his youth at Jurald Court. Pen chose not to spoil the mood by mentioning Drovo’s death, but he did ask questions in turn about the mercenary life, wondering if his brother had found it satisfying before its truncation. Talking about his command, Rusillin sounded more like Rolsch than like Drovo, more calculations and logistics and complaints of dubious suppliers than thrilling tales of heroism. Garrison life ran mostly dull, but Rusillin’s company had seen bloodshed in two clashes over a disputed valley on the earl palatine’s far borders, and in one peasant revolt over, of all things, an attempt by the earl to eradicate packs of feral dogs plaguing the region.

Rusillin topped up Pen’s glass again, with an encouragement to drink pointed with assorted toasts. Pen remembered that Drovo had been at a drunken party with his friends when they’d been recruited in Greenwell, though he had defended his choice with vigor even after he’d sobered up. Could a man be made dead drunk and drafted into mercenary service the way the king of Darthaca had once been rumored to press sailors during one of his wars? Surely it would be easier to run away from a mercenary company than from a ship at sea. He wet his lips and smiled cautiously through the toasts.