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MIRA’S LAST DANCE

A Penric & Desdemona novella

in

the World of the Five Gods

Lois McMaster Bujold

2017

Copyright © 2017 by Lois McMaster Bujold

Cover by Ron Miller

I

Nikys was worried about their sorcerer.

They’d fetched up at this little hill-country farmhouse two days ago, passing off their disheveled party of three as a man and his wife, plus their friend who’d sprained his ankle when they’d lost their way on the rocky trails in the dark. Their coin spoke more convincingly than they did, she’d suspected. What seemed to her a small sum had bought them shelter, displacing the farmer couple from their whitewashed bedroom to the loft and their half-grown children in turn to the stable. Such rural hospitality would cost their hosts a great deal more trouble than that if Imperial pursuers arrived here, Nikys reflected uneasily. She rocked her hips to bump open the bedroom door, and carried her tray within.

Learned Penric was dutifully lying flat in the bed, as ordered, but not asleep. He hitched himself up on one elbow, blinking glazed blue eyes at her, and favored her with one of his strange sweet smiles. Quite as if he hadn’t almost died three nights ago, defending her and her brother Adelis.

“Ah. Another meal, already?”

“I’m sure you need it. Or Desdemona does. ” Penric might just be one of those maddening long, lean people who could eat like a horse and never gain a bit of pudge, but she guessed his chaos demon, riding inside him like a second personality—a very complicated second personality—drew on his body for nourishment as well. “Do you have to eat for two?”

“Mm, maybe a little. Here, I can get up—”

“Lie back!” Nikys and Desdemona commanded together.

Since Des spoke through Penric’s mouth, the effect was quite peculiar, but Nikys fancied she was getting used to it. “Listen to your demonic physician,” Nikys said, to which Des added, “Yes, and listen to your lovely nurse. She knows what she’s about in the sickroom. ”

“When did you two combine forces?” Penric muttered, as Nikys set down the tray on the washstand and drew it to the bedside, plumped his pillows, and permitted him to sit up. “Here, you don’t need to spoon-feed me. ”

“It’s not soup, so I can’t. ” Nikys plopped down beside him, spread goat cheese onto circles of coarse country flatbread, added sliced onion, and rolled them up, alternating handing them across with holding the beaker of watered wine. Penric tried to take the vessel one-handed, but ended up having to use two, as his hand shook. He cast her an evasive look through those unreasonably long blond eyelashes.

Not for the first time, Nikys wondered exactly what it meant that the rival sorcerer, whom Pen had defeated in that bizarre twilight fight, had tried to rip his heart apart inside his body, and how much magical work Desdemona had been doing every moment since to keep it beating. Her own and Adelis’s father, old General Arisaydia, had survived half-a-dozen bloody military campaigns in his life, only to die of a sudden seizure of the heart. That final, fatal blow had made no mark upon him. Bad hearts frightened her.