The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold [30]
And then supper, and then to his chamber, where he pottered about trying on his new old clothing, and folding it away, and attempting the first few pages of deciphering the poor dead fool of a wool merchant’s book. But Cazaril’s eyes grew heavy over this task, and he slept like a block till morning.
AS IT HAD BEGUN, SO IT WENT ON. IN THE MORNING, lessons with the two lovely young ladies in Darthacan or Roknari or geography or arithmetic or geometry. For geography, he filched away the good maps from Teidez’s tutor and entertained the royesse with suitably edited accounts of some of his more exotic past journeys around Chalion, Ibra, Brajar, great Darthaca, or the five perpetually quarreling Roknari princedoms along the north coast.
His more recent slave’s-eye views of the Roknar Archipelago, he edited much more severely. Iselle’s and Betriz’s open boredom with court Roknari, he discovered, was susceptible to exactly the same cure as he’d used on the couple of young pages from the provincar of Guarida’s household he’d once been detailed to teach the language. He traded the ladies one word of rude Roknari (albeit not the most rude) for every twenty of court Roknari they demonstrated themselves to have memorized. Not that they would ever get to use that vocabulary, but it might be well for them to be able to recognize things said in their hearing. And they giggled charmingly.
Cazaril approached his first assigned duty, quietly investigating the probity of the provincial justiciar, with trepidation. Oblique inquiries of the Provincara and dy Ferrej filled in background without supplying certainty, as neither had crossed the man in his professional capacity, merely in unexceptionable social contacts. A few excursions down into town to try to find anyone who’d known Cazaril seventeen years ago and would speak to him frankly proved a little disheartening. The only man who recognized him with certainty at sight was an elderly baker who’d maintained a long and lucrative career selling sweets to all the castle’s parade of pages, but he was an amiable fellow not inclined to lawsuits.
Cazaril started working through the wool merchant’s notebook leaf by leaf, as quickly as his other duties permitted him. Some truly disgusting early experiments in calling down the Bastard’s demons had been entirely ineffective, Cazaril was relieved to observe. The dead duelist’s name never appeared but with some excoriating adjectives attached, or sometimes just the adjectives alone; the live judge’s name did not turn up explicitly. But before Cazaril had the tangle even half-unraveled, the question was taken out of his inexpert hands.
An Officer of Inquiry from the Provincar of Baocia’s court arrived, from the busy town of Taryoon, to which the Dowager’s son had moved his capital upon inheriting his father’s gift. It had taken, Cazaril counted off in his head later, just about as many days as one could expect for a letter from the Provincara to her son to be written, dispatched, and read, for orders to be passed down to Baocia’s Chancellery of Justice, and for the Inquirer to ready himself and his staff for travel. Privilege indeed. Cazaril was unsure of the Provincara’s allegiance to the processes of law, but he wagered the business of leaving loose enemies untidily about had plucked some, ah, housewifely nerve of hers.
The next day the judge Vrese was discovered to have ridden off in the night with two servants and some hastily packed bags and chests, leaving a disrupted household and a fireplace full of ashes from burned papers.
Cazaril tried to discourage Iselle from taking this as proof either, but that was a bit of a stretch even for his slow judgment. The alternative—that Iselle had been touched by the goddess that day—disturbed