Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [174]
“Foix, stand by her feet. Keep an eye on her demon,” Ista directed. Foix nodded and did so. Ista was unhappy to be demanding yet one more duty of him, when he was so plainly drained to the point of swaying on his feet. He desperately needed to rest for a few hours before the sortie. But Joen had taught her greater caution of demons.
Ista called up her inner sight and closed her hands around the flow of soul-fire from Catti’s heart, reducing it to the tiniest trickle of contact with Arhys. Ista imagined the look of life flowing from his face in the next room, and her chest tightened. The demon shadow squirmed in agitation, but did not challenge Ista’s control. Cattilara’s eyes flew open, and her breath drew in. She sat up abruptly, then swayed, dizzy. Liss pressed a tin cup of water into her hand. By the way she guzzled, pressing it to her dry lips, Ista thought they were none too soon with this sustenance. Liss transferred the tray to a small table by the bedside and drew off the linen cover. Plain fare, and stale, presented on a miscellany of battered old plates.
Catti glared over the cup at Ista and glowered down at the tray. “What is this? Servants’ food? Or a prisoner’s? Is the mistress of Porifors so dethroned by her usurper, now?”
“It is the last and best untainted food in the keep, reserved for you. We are now surrounded by a Jokonan army and besieged by a troop of sorcerers. Their demon magic is chewing everything within these walls to pieces and spitting it out upon us. All the water is gone. The meat seethes with maggots. Half the courts are burned, and a third of the horses lie dead. Men are dying tonight below us of disease and injury without ever having come within bowshot of Joen and Sordso’s troops. Joen’s new way of making war is ingenious, cruel, and effective. Extraordinarily effective. So eat, because it is the only meal Arhys will have tonight.”
Cattilara gritted her teeth, but at least she gritted them on her first bite of dry bread. “We could have fled. We should have fled! I could have had Arhys forty miles from here by now, and out of this. Curse you for a lack-witted bitch!”
Foix and Liss stirred at the insult, but Ista’s raised hand stayed them. “Arhys would not have thanked you. And who is we? Are you even certain whose voice speaks from inside your head right now? Eat.”
Catti gnawed, gracelessly, but too driven by her ferocious waking hunger to spurn the proffered meal. Liss kept the water coming, for Cattilara’s sunken features betrayed how dangerously parched she had grown. Ista let her chew and swallow for several minutes, until she began visibly to slow.
“Later tonight,” Ista began again, “Arhys rides out on a hazardous sortie, a gamble to save us all. Or die trying.”
“You mean him to die,” Catti mumbled. “You hate him. You hate me.”
“You are twice mistaken, though I admit to a strong desire to slap you at times. Now, for instance. Lady Cattilara, you are the wife of a soldier-commander and the daughter of a soldier-commander. You cannot possibly have been raised, here in this dire borderland, to such wild self-indulgence.”
Cattilara looked away, perhaps to conceal a flash of shame in her face. “This stupid war has always dragged on. It will always drag on. But once Arhys is gone, he’s gone forever. And all the good in the world goes with him. The gods would take him and leave me bereft, and I curse them!”
“I have cursed them for years,” said Ista dryly. “Turnabout being fair.” Cattilara was furious, distraught, writhing in overwhelming pain. But was she divorced altogether from reason?
So what is reality now, here in this waking nightmare? Where is reason? Absurd, that I of all women should insist on reason.
“Keep chewing.” Ista straightened her weary back, crossed her arms. “I have a proposition for you.”
Cattilara glowered in suspicion.
“You may accept or refuse, but you may not have other choices. It quite resembles a miracle, in that regard.