Penric's Mission (Penric & Desdemona Book 4) by Lois McMaster Bujold

Author:Lois McMaster Bujold [Bujold, Lois McMaster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2016-11-01T22:00:00+00:00

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“We need to be moving faster,” said Adelis. Although the way his chin had sunk to Nikys’s shoulder suggested he was growing as fatigued as their doubly burdened horse. They’d come about twelve miles out of Patos, she guessed.

The traffic had thinned from the bustle around the city, where they’d threaded their way past builders’ ox-carts, donkeys laden with vegetables for the markets, animals being driven to the butchers, sedan chairs and open chariots, and private coaches whose drivers had shouted them out of the path. They’d passed a road-repair crew whose lewd catcalls at the two unescorted women had made Adelis growl, his hand twitching for his sword, and, once, a troop of soldiers marching the other way, which had made him hunch and lower his face, squinting sidewise from the shadow of the hood trying to make out markers of regiment and rank.

Out here, fellow travelers had dwindled to the occasional farm wain or herdsman with pigs. The sun was slanting across the countryside, spreading buttery light over the small farms and larger villas tracking the watercourses, the grapevines and flickering gray-green olive groves on the slopes, the rocky heights given over to scrub and goats and sheep.

“We’re moving faster than your army.”

“Anything would move faster than an army,” he returned. The spurt of remembered aggravation gave him the energy to sit up, at least.

“How are you bearing up back there?” She hesitated. “How much can you see?”

“It’s… blurry. I can see colors. It’s too bright. Makes my eyes water. Your cloak is too hot.”

“Yes, I know.” She felt oddly glad to be out of it. She’d once imagined the widow’s green would protect her from unwanted attention, but there’d proved to be a certain cadre of men who imagined it marked her as available to them, instead. She’d quickly learned not to be unduly gentle in repelling their advances, and had held her borders where she wanted them. Of course, she’d always been backed by the tacit garrison of Adelis’s rank and reputation—that, too, now attainted. She added, “Faster to where?”

“I’m thinking about that.”

She said tentatively, “I was wondering if we should try to make for my mother’s.” In which case, they needed to find a different road.

“Five gods, no.”

She glanced over her shoulder to catch his grimace.

“It’s one of the first places they’ll think to look, and harboring me would bring disaster down upon her.” He paused. “You could probably take refuge there unmolested.”

She answered this with the long, unfavorable silence it deserved. He evidently took her point, for his return grunt was muted.

He’d been alternating between keeping his face down and his eyes closed, trying to protect their inflamed sensitivity, and looking around, testing and retesting his returning sight as if fearful it would vanish away again. She interrupted this cycle to ask, “Did you realize Master Penric was uncanny? I mean, before that unholy show in the garden.”

“I… as physicians went, he seemed more sensible than most. He had a trick of massaging my scalp that he said was for headache, and it certainly seemed to work.

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