Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [66]
“Whose are these excellent soldiers?” asked Ista.
“Mine, happily,” he replied. “Ah, my apologies; I failed to introduce myself fully in all my haste. Arhys dy Lutez, March of Porifors, at your service, Sera. Castle Porifors guards all the sharp point of Chalion between Jokona and Ibra, and its men are the honed edge of that blade. Five gods be thanked, a somewhat easier task now that Ibra is made all peaceful in the Royina Iselle’s arms.”
She froze in his gentle grip. “Dy Lutez?” she repeated, aghast. “Are you any relation to . . . ?”
He stiffened in turn; his cheerful amiability cooled. But his suddenly studied voice remained light. “The great chancellor and traitor, Arvol dy Lutez? My father.”
He was not either of dy Lutez’s two principal heirs, sons of the chancellor’s first marriage who had trailed after him at court in Ista’s time. The famous courtier’s three acknowledged bastards had all been girls, disposed to high and lucrative marriages long ago. Dy Lutez had been twice a widower by the time Ista had first met him, his second wife already a decade dead. This Arhys must be a son of that second wife, then. The one whom dy Lutez, in the prime of his manhood, had abandoned at her country estates so that he might go haring off after Ias, at court or in the field, unimpeded. A northern heiress, yes, Ista recalled that much.
His voice went a little harsh. “Does it startle you that a traitor’s son serves Chalion well?”
“Not at all.” She turned her eyes up to trace the bones of his face, so close to her view. Arhys must take something in his fine chin and straight nose from his mother, but the appalling energy of the man was all dy Lutez. “He was a great man. You have . . . something of the look of him.”
His brows shot up; he turned his head around to look at her in an entirely new way, a muffled, eager urgency. She had not realized how masked he was, until it slipped. “Truly? You once met him? To look at?”
“What, had not you?”
“Not to remember. My mother had a painting, but it was bad.” He frowned. “I was almost old enough to be brought to court at Cardegoss, when he . . . died. I was old enough. But . . . perhaps it was better so.” The eagerness cloaked itself, settled back to its secret lair. His brief smile was faintly embarrassed. A mature man of forty, pretending not to care for the grief of a young man of twenty. Ista took back her belief in her own numbness, for this inadvertent flash of self-revelation wrenched like a knife in her stomach.
They rounded a bend in the river to discover its inward curve lapping a meadow edged with woods. The grass was trampled and littered with the detritus of a camp half-struck, dead campfires and scattered gear. At distant horse lines strung between trees, a few men saddled up mounts or tied baggage to mules. Men packed, men sat, a few men slept on blankets or on the bare ground. Some officers’ tents sheltered beneath a grove on the meadow’s far side.
A dozen men rushed dy Lutez as soon as he came in view, cheering, shouting greetings and questions, pelting him with news and demanding orders. A familiar figure in blue ran stiffly in their wake.
“Ah! Ah! She is spared!” Ferda dy Gura cried joyously. “We are spared!”
He looked as though he had been dragged backward through thorn scrub for about a mile, dirty, exhausted, and pale with fatigue, but hale: no bandages, no blood, limping no worse than his own saddle soreness and a few bruises might account for. Ista’s heart melted with relief.
“Royina!” he cried. “Thank the gods, one and five! Praise the Daughter of Spring! I was sure the Jokonans had snatched you away at the last! I’ve all who can still ride out with the march of Porifors’s men, searching for you—”
“Our company, Ferda—were any hurt?” Ista struggled upright, a hand upon the march’s arm, as Ferda pushed his way up to the dappled horse’s shoulder.
He ran a hand through his sweat-stiff hair. “One was hit in the thigh by a quarrel from the march’s men, bad luck, one had his leg broken when his horse fell on him. I set two to tend them, while we wait for the