6. N #2
“Look,” she said, as much to herself as to him, “I have to report this. This was done to her as a child. It breaks every ethical and legal boundary we have. I used to spell-sculpt before the king declared it anathema except for reparative work, and I could never have done this much,
this intensive work to an adult who wanted it, much less to a child. Alter a misshapen nose, yes. Perhaps widen the eyes, or sculpt the cheekbones. Oh, and all this work? It also rendered her useless as a wife. Those hips can’t pass an apple, much less a child.”
He held up his hand. Ah, so that’s where she was headed with this.
Took her time about it. He mulled over his options.
A report now would draw too much attention to her presence, and with it too many questions.
“No one here did this to her,” he said, flatly.
“She comes from outside the city and was found here by virtue of an unrepeatable accident. So, there’s no one, no perpetrator, to report.”
He smiled thinly. “If I recall correctly, you do have to have someone to point the finger at if you make such a report, correct?”
The physician made a noncommittal gesture.
“The report starts the questions, so a culprit isn’t usually necessary, but in general, you are correct … we’d be reporting someone who did this. I’ve heard of cases where a low-born tries to buff up a daughter’s looks to improve her prospects, but nothing even vaguely close to this.
My oath is to repair, restore, and reverse … but this, this was butchery. I’m going to have to make a report.”
Haldeen tried a different tack. “Yesss, of course, but we’re still sorting out some things here, and we need a little time. Make sure she’s healthy, perhaps learn a bit about who did this to her, do a bit of our own investigating until we can learn who the renegade is, and hopefully, where he is.
That would be the logical way to proceed wouldn’t it?”
The physician looked uncertain.
He pressed his case. “And as someone who once had a thriving practice as a spell-sculptor, you’d be ideal to help us with that inquiry, so that your report would be more detailed, once the time came. And, of course, we’d need to put you on a retainer for that, now wouldn’t we?”
He watched as the physician considered the offer.
She licked her lips nervously, biting the lower, a clear sign of her discomfort.
The king had wiped out the livelihoods of half the physicians in the city when he banned spell sculpting, and as for them limiting themselves to …
ahem, repair, restore, and reverse, Andaleisia certainly came home with a different nose than she left with after her repair.
So, clearly more latitude for “adjustments” than the good doctor let on.
This physician was now reduced to tending workers on his estate, dispensing pills and Healing minor injuries for very small rations, since all the more lucrative work she had been doing was gone.
Of course there were always a few major injuries that brought in greater rations, but the plain truth of it was, those were a lot fewer than the attacks on the city would indicate, because when the Predators broke through, they generally didn’t leave much behind but the dead.
She would be in a tight space, so he let the silence lengthen, drawing out and knowing that knowing the first to speak would lose. “Yesss,” the physician agreed after the interval had grown too long. No effort to counter and ask for more. She was hungry enough to take the offer.
He smiled. Once she’d compromised herself the first time, the next would be easier, and so forth.
One delay would feed the next, and no report would be made.
She would frame it up in a way that salved her conscience, but it amounted to the same thing.
He thought of a number for the retainer, then halved it.
“A ration a day, until your investigation is complete, and a room in the upper servants’ dorm? Something suited to a governess?”
She nodded, once. “I’ll start immediately.”
“No need,” he replied. “She’s still sick, after all. And Kilfenora keeps her pretty busy. Take a few days to get yourself sorted. Then, you can get started.”
The physician bobbed her head. She had gone cheaply in the end. He made a gesture towards the door. The physician got up to leave, then turned, surprising him a bit.
“I’ll still have to make a report eventually,” she said, “no way around that.”
“Of course,” he said blandly.
Once she left, he ran his hand through his thinning hair.
The costs for keeping Triana had begun to pinch.
The physician would be a drain on his ration store, and his agreement with Nora bit into his resources.
Triana still rejected about one potion out three, for various reasons …
too much this, not enough that. Food she sent back …
food from his own table … wasted, when she wasn’t throwing it up.
He had to remind himself that the cost would be worth it in the end.
In the meantime, he needed to keep her under his control while he mined out what she knew.
Once he was satisfied she had shared all she knew, then he would have to keep her longer to maintain a monopoly on what he learned.
So, more rations expended … and not common rations either, but higher class stuff, with a little bit of naturally grown food to round out the spell-made rations to keep up appearances … damn the cost.
By the stars, though … if they have resources to waste by turning women into freakish “beauties,” how lush is this world they found? How easy is the living there? It boggles the mind.
He became aware of Nora’s cool gaze. He could see her thinking, working something out.
“Yes?” He said, drawing her out.
Nora made it a point to study the hem on the trousers. “You can buy her off for a while, but she has her duty.”
“Yes,” he replied. He definitely disliked how Nora had phrased that.
“I have engaged the services of a professional to ascertain potential ethical breaches by … unknown parties, which the good doctor can pursue to her heart’s desire, or at least until Triana is of no further value, and then it won’t matter.”
“I see,” replied Nora, her voice noncommittal. “Of course.”
He watched her working her thumbnail along the seam on the bottom of the trousers until she found something that interested her. Taking a small stylus, she worked it into the seam
“Hmmm. Our girl lives in a dangerous neighborhood.”
“How do you know?” he answered.
“By the very small gemstones she has sewn into her trouser hem. A routine pair of outdoor trousers, and she’s prepared to be ransomed, or to bribe her way out of captivity. No wonder she wanted these back.”
Far too late, he made a connection. This felt pretty far afield for a tutor. “How do you know to look for all this?”
Nora shrugged, dismissing the importance of the question. “I pay attention to details. Little things like … this. But I didn’t realize she was throwing up.”
“Yes,” he replied. “Every night. Well, the last two nights.”
She gave him a grin, with a hint of malice mixed in. “Are you sure she’s not pregnant?”
He let out a long stream of profanity, as she wrapped up the clothing box. “I’m for the laundry.”
It wasn’t until much later that he realized she had changed the subject, and hadn’t answered the question.
Haldeen reviewed Nora’s transcripts while awaiting the king’s pleasure.
He blinked through his headache and tried to focus.
Nora wrote using a dry, droning style that he found hard to follow, headache or no.
She seemed to be going on at some length about time passage and linguistic drift, and philological studies …
whatever those were … in obscure places he had no interest in.
He looked at the small water clock that kept time in his inner office.
The sovereign now accounted others’ time as valuable, and rarely kept his lords waiting, even by Farspeaker.
The king expected efficiency, and made it a point to give it.
Alliard hadn’t been the birth lords’ first, second, or even fifth-choice, but had been a compromise between entrenched factions.
Fortunately for all, he had proven good at the job …
just in time for the bottom to fall out.
I shudder to think what life would have been like if Santosveria had been in charge.
We’d probably all be squeezed into a single city by now, while the king dithered and changed his robes hourly.
Haldeen took a sip of the concoction, hopefully just enough to ease the throbbing in his temples, and not enough to leave his head stuffed with wool. He closed his eyes for a moment, to rest them before continuing, when he heard a dry “Ahem.”
His eyes snapped open and he stood. Of course, the king would chime in, during the few seconds he’d taken to rest. He started to stammer out an apology.
The king, ghostly in the Farspeaker’s globe, put his hand up. “Don’t worry about it, Haldeen. I don’t begrudge a few moments of rest, especially when I’m running late.” The king sounded tired.
Haldeen nodded. The king’s face appeared drawn and weary, and he had evidently not slept for some time. “Majesty?”
The king glanced to one side of the Farspeaker, and nodded to someone that Haldeen couldn’t see.
“Haldeen, do you know that the difference is between order and disorder, civilization and chaos?”
Held held his silence. The king had lectured on this point nearly every day … but it was also the king’s privilege to educate. He waited.
“Three missed meals, Haldeen. That’s it. The Monsters outside will be nothing to the monsters in here once hunger spreads, and we start killing each other over who gets to have supper.”
Haldeen kept his face carefully neutral, while the king continued.
“The new Lord High Provisioner has completed a very quiet survey, done on his own initiative, and the ration counts in the warehouses appear … optimistic.”
The king made a wry face at the euphemism.
“How ‘optimistic,’ Majesty?” Haldeen replied.
He really should not have been surprised that the warehouse counts had been inflated, and he doubted that anyone had done a brick by brick ration inventory in half a lifetime.
The daily ration store hadn’t really hadn’t mattered all that much …
right up to the point where it mattered a whole lot.