Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [105]
Goram looked across at Ista. Illvin’s head turned to follow his glance.
His dark eyes widened. “You! Who are you? Do I dream still?”
“No. Not this time.” She hesitated. “My name is . . . Ista. I am here for a reason, but I do not know what it is.”
His lips puffed on a painful laugh. “Ah. Me, too.”
Goram hastened to arrange his pillows; he fell back into them, as if this little effort had already exhausted him. Goram followed up immediately with a bite of stewed meat on a spoon, redolent with herbs and garlic. “Here’s meat, m’lord. Eat, eat, quickly.”
Illvin took it in, evidently before he thought to resist; he gulped it down and waved the following bite away. He turned his head toward Ista again. “You don’t . . . shine in the dark, now. Did I dream you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” His brows knotted in bewilderment. “How do you know?” He failed to duck the insistent spoon, and was perforce silenced again.
“Lord Illvin, what do you remember about the night you were stabbed? In Princess Umerue’s chambers?”
“Stabbed, me? I was not . . .” His hand felt beneath his robe for the bandage around his torso. “Curse you, Goram, why do you keep winding this benighted rag around me? I have told you . . . I have told you . . .” He clawed it away, pulled it loose, flung it down on the foot of the bed. The skin of his chest was unmarked.
Ista stood, came to the bedside, and turned the white cloth over. The dressing pad was soaked with a dull red-brown bloodstain. She angled it toward his gaze, raising her brows. He frowned fiercely and shook his head.
“I have no wound! I have no fever. I do not vomit. Why do I sleep so much? I grow so weak . . . I totter like a newborn calf . . . I cannot think . . . five gods, please not a palsy-stroke, drooling and crippled . . .” His voice sharpened in alarm. “Arhys, I saw Arhys fall at my feet. Blood—where is my brother—?”
Goram’s voice went exaggeratedly soothing. “Now, m’lord, now. The march is fine. I’ve told you that fifty times. I see him every day.”
“Why doesn’t he come to see me?” Now the slurred tongue was querulous, edging on a whine like an overtired child.
“He does. You’re asleep. Don’t fret you so.” The harried Goram glowered briefly at Ista. “Here. Eat meat.”
Arhys was in Umerue’s chamber that night, too? Already the tale began to diverge from Cattilara’s tidy version. “Did Lord Pechma stab you?” Ista asked.
Illvin blinked in confusion. He gulped down the latest bite Goram inserted, and said, “Pechma? That feckless fool? Is he still here at Porifors? What has Pechma to do with any of this?”
Ista said patiently, “Was Lord Pechma there at all?”
“Where?”
“In Princess Umerue’s chamber.”
“No! Why should he be? The golden bitch treated him like a slave, same as the rest. Double-dealing . . . double . . .”
Ista’s voice sharpened. “Golden bitch? Umerue?”
“Mother and Daughter, but she was cruelly beautiful! Sometimes. But when she forgot to look at me, she was plain. As when I saw her before, in Jokona. But when her amber eyes were on me, I would have played her slave. No, not played. Been. But she turned her eyes on poor Arhys . . . all women do. . . .”
Well, yes . . .
“She saw him. She wanted him. She took him, as easily as picking up a, up a, something . . . I figured it out. I followed. She had him down on the bed. She had her mouth on his . . .”
“Meat,” said Goram, and shoved in another bite.
An exotic woman, a virile man, a midnight visit, a spurned suitor . . . the roles the same, but the actors altered from Cattilara’s version? Not Pechma but Illvin, the murderous intruder on some intimate scene? It hung together; it was not hard to imagine that Umerue, sent to woo Illvin for the sake of some alliance with Jokona, might for either personal or political reasons switch targets to his elder and more powerful brother. Cattilara was an impediment to such a design, true, but she was just the sort of bump