Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [138]
“It’s one of Lord Arhys’s pages. He says his lord waits below, and would beg a word with you.”
Ista’s brows went up. “At this hour? Very well. Tell him I will be down directly.”
Liss went to convey the message, and Ista slipped out of her wrapper and back into the lavender linen shift and black silk overrobe. Her hand hesitated over the mourning brooch, lying on the table, then fastened the soft black fabric beneath her breasts with it as before. Inadvertently appropriate garb, for Arhys’s presence, she reflected. With Liss carrying a candle in a glass vase to light their steps, she went out on the gallery.
Lord Arhys stood at the foot of the stairs, holding a torch aloft, looking up intently. He still wore his sword and boots, as if just returned from riding out. Ista was glad to see a coat of mail beneath his gray-and-gold tabard. The night air was soft and still from the day’s heat, and the flame gave a steady light, cast down over his pale features.
“Royina, I would speak with you. Apart.”
Ista gestured toward the bench at the courtyard’s far end, and he nodded.
“Wait here,” Ista said quietly to Liss, and the girl nodded and plunked down at the top of the steps. Ista descended and paced across the pavement at Arhys’s side. He handed his torch to his page, but the boy could not reach the bracket high on a carved pillar, and Arhys smiled briefly and took it back to set therein. He dismissed the page to keep Liss company. Ista and he settled themselves on either end of the stone slab, still not wholly cooled from its day’s baking. The starry depths of the sky, bounded above by the roofs’ rectangle, seemed to swallow the golden glow of Liss’s candle and the torch, and give back nothing. Arhys’s face was a gilded shadow against the deeper shadows, but his eyes gleamed.
“A busy day, your restored companions and their Jokonan tailpiece have brought us,” he began. “Two of my patrols, to the south and the west, have returned with nothing to report. Two have not yet come back, and they concern me.” He hesitated. “Cattilara did not greet my return. She is angry with me, I think.”
“For riding out on your duties? She will surely forgive you.”
“She will not forgive my dying. I am become her enemy in this, as well as her prize.”
Have you, now? “She still thinks she can get you back. Or at least prevent you from going. She does not, I think, perceive the wasting effect of this delay upon you, being blinded by the surfaces of things. If she sees the disintegrating ghosts at all, I do not think she understands the nature of their damnation.”
“Damnation,” he breathed. “Is that what my state is. That explains much.”
“Theologically, I do believe that is precisely what it is, although perhaps Learned dy Cabon could refine the term. I do not know the scholars’ language, but I have seen the thing itself. You are cut off from the nourishment of matter, but blocked from the sustenance of your god. And yet, not by your own will, as the true and mercifully sundered spirits are. By another’s interference. This is . . . wrong.”
He stretched and clenched his hands. “It can’t go on. I don’t even bother to pretend to eat, now. I drink only sips. My hands and face and feet are growing numb. Just within the past ten days I’ve noticed it, faintly at first, but it’s getting worse.”
“That does not sound good,” she agreed. She hesitated. “Have you prayed?”
His hand went to his left sleeve, and Ista remembered the black-and-gray prayer cord bound secretly there. “Need for the gods comes and goes in a man’s life. Cattilara longed for a child, I made my obeisances . . . but if the Father of Winter ever heard me, He gave me no sign. I was never the sort to receive portents, or to delude myself that I had. Silence was always my portion, in return for my prayers. But of late it seems to me the silence has grown . . . emptier. Royina”—his gaze, sparking out