Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [62]
His head tilted, conceding the point.
She tottered beyond the bodies and up the ravine a short way to find some rocks with bushes. She returned to find him kneeling by the streamlet. He smiled and offered her something on a leaf; she squinted, and recognized it after a bewildered moment as a slice of strong tallow soap.
“Oh,” she breathed. It was all she could do not to burst into tears. She fell to her knees and washed her hands beneath a chill freshet that spurted over the rocks, then, more carefully, her hurt wrists. She drank then from her cupped hands, handful after dripping handful.
He laid a small linen-wrapped packet on a flat stone and opened it to reveal a pile of clean rags cut for bandages. From his saddlebag, presumably; the Jokonans had used up all such preparations of their own. “Sera, I fear that I must ask you to ride some distance farther. Better you should clean and pad your knees first, eh?”
“Oh. Yes. My thanks, sir.” She sat on a rock, removed her boots for the first time in recent memory, and carefully rolled up one skirt leg, peeling it away from the crusted sores where it had stuck and dried. He hovered, cleaned hands opening to help, but closed them again as she stoically carried on. The soap next, painful but relieving. And revealing. The deep scarlet abrasions oozed yellow fluid.
“Those will be a week, healing,” he remarked.
“Probably.”
As a horse soldier, he had no doubt treated saddle sores before, and diagnosed with authority. He watched a moment more as if to be sure she was going to be all right, stretched his fingers and rubbed his face, then rose and went to turn over the bodies.
His examination was methodical, and not for looting, for he barely glanced at the rings or pins or purses the corpses yielded. Any papers he happened upon, however, he examined and folded carefully away in his tunic. This Porifors—or dy Porifors; he had not said if it was first name or last—was an officer, no question, and one with a steady head: some military vassal of the provincar of Caribastos, or trained up like such a battle lord. Foix’s letter, it appeared, had either been left with the deserted column or gone with one of the escapees.
“Can you tell me, Sera, what were the other prisoners in the Jokonan train?”
“Few, the gods be thanked. Six women from Ibra, and seven men, that the Jokonans judged valuable enough to drag over the mountains with them. And twelve, no, eleven guardsmen of the Daughter’s Order, who had undertaken to convey my pilgrimage, captured by the Jokonan column these . . . two days back.” Only two days? “I have good hope that one of my guardsmen and some others from my party escaped back in Tolnoxo, when we were first overtaken.”
“You were the only lady of Chalion among those taken?” His brow wrinkled further.
She nodded shortly, and tried to think of something useful to say to this intent officer. “These raiders rode under the seal of Prince Sordso, for they had tally officers accounting the prince’s fifth. They came up through Ibra, and pillaged the town of Rauma there, then escaped over the passes when the march of Rauma followed hotly. The one you beheaded over there”—she nodded toward the sad corpse—“was the senior, though I do not believe he was the original commander. As of yesterday, their numbers were about ninety-two, though some may have deserted in the night before they ran afoul of your ambush.”
“Tolnoxo . . .” He dusted his hands, rose from the last corpse, and strolled over to examine her progress. She was just tying strips around the pad on her second knee. His meticulous courtesy somehow made her more, not less, conscious of the fact that she was alone with a strange man. “No wonder. You are now less than thirty miles from the border of Jokona. That column covered nearly a hundred miles, these past two days.”
“They were pushing. They were afraid.” She glanced around the scene. Iridescent green flies were beginning to gather, an ugly buzzing in the damp shade. “Not afraid enough to stay home in the first place, unfortunately.”