Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [32]
Whatever You want from me, I can’t do it. I’ve proved that before. Go away. Go away.
She lay trembling for a long time; the moonlight had turned to gray predawn mist before she fell asleep again.
ISTA WAS AWAKENED NOT BY LISS SLIPPING OUT, BUT BY LISS SLIPPING back in. She was embarrassed to discover her handmaiden had let her sleep through morning prayers, rudeness both as a pilgrim, however false, and as a real guest.
“You looked so tired,” Liss excused herself when Ista chided her. “You did not seem to sleep well last night.”
Indeed. Ista had to admit, she was glad for the extra rest. A breakfast was brought to her on a tray by a bowing acolyte, also not usual for a pilgrim so laggard as to miss the morning’s start.
After dressing and having her hair done up in a slightly more elaborate braid than usual—not looking too much like a horse, she hoped—she walked with Liss about the old mansion. They fetched up in the now-sunny court. Sitting on a bench by the wall, they watched the denizens of the school hurry past on their tasks, students and teachers and servants. Another thing Ista liked about Liss, she decided, was that the girl didn’t chatter. She conversed pleasantly enough when spoken to; the remainder of the time she fell without resentment into a restful silence.
Ista felt a cool breath on her neck from the wall she leaned against: one of this place’s ghosts. It wove around her like a cat seeking a lap, and she almost raised her hand to shoo it away, but then the impression faded. Some sad spirit, not taken up by the gods, or refusing them, or lost somehow. New ghosts kept the form they’d had in life, for a while, often violent, harsh, outraged, but in time they all came to this faded, shapeless, slow oblivion. For such an old building, the ghosts here seemed few and tranquil. Fortresses—like the Zangre—were usually the worst. Ista was resigned to her lingering sensitivity, as long as no such wasted souls took form before her inner eye. Seeing such a spirit would mean some god breathed too near, that her second sight was leaking back—and all that went with it.
Ista considered the courtyard in her dream. It was no place she’d ever been before, of that she was sure. She was equally convinced it was a real place. To avoid it . . . to certainly avoid it, all she had to do was crawl back to the castle at Valenda and stay there till her body rotted around her.
No. I will not go back.
The thought made her restless, and she rose and prowled the school, Liss dutifully at her heels. Many acolytes or divines, passing her on the balcony walks or in the corridors, bowed and smiled, by which she concluded dy Cabon’s indiscretion had now been widely shared. Pretending to be Sera dy Ajelo was well enough; having half a hundred total strangers assiduously pretend along with her felt oddly irritating.
They looked into a succession of small rooms crammed with books, packed in shelves and piled on tables: dy Cabon’s desired library. To Ista’s surprise, Foix dy Gura was curled up in a window seat with his nose in a volume. He looked up, blinked, rose, and made a little courtesy. “Lady. Liss.”
“I did not know you read theology, Foix.”
“Oh, I read anything. But it’s not all theology. There are hundreds of other things, some very odd. They never throw anything away here. There’s a whole locked room where they keep the books on sorcery and demons, and, um, the lewd books. Chained.”
Ista raised her brows. “That they may not be opened?”
Foix’s grin flashed. “That they may not be carried off, I think.” He held out the book in his hand. “There are more verse romances like this. I could find you one.”
Liss, staring around in wonder at what might have been more books in one place than she’d ever seen in her life, looked hopeful. Ista shook her head. “Later, perhaps.