Herb-Wife (Lord Alchemist Duology) (41 page)

"I've
a few things I should be doing there myself," he said gently,
and offered his arm as if she'd not offered even a glimpse of
vulnerability.

In
the workroom, with only herb-witchery and alchemy as conversational
topics, Kessa began to relax again. After an hour or so, Dayn came to
the top of the stairs. "M'lord, Watchman Thioso is here –
as the city-prince's man, he says."

"As
I suspected." No reason Prince Tegar'd bother finding someone
who'd have to be briefed, if he'd decided Thioso was reliable. "Make
sure he's been fed, if you would? Another half-hour, and we should be
sufficiently early to get good seats on the coach."

"Aye,
m'lord."

Kessa
sat on the floor, straining off the liquid from some herb-witchery.
It seemed only a small dose, sufficient to cover the bottom of a
mortar. With the liquid gone, she edged the small pot closer to the
fire, perhaps to crisp the ingredients. Iathor bent over for a closer
look. "What is it?"

She
hesitated for a long moment. "It makes things sleep."

"Like
Jeck's dogs, when your brother visited that night?" Or
brother
s
 . . .

"Yes,"
she admitted. "But that was an older brewing my brother had."

He
knelt behind her and slid his arms around her shoulders. It was hard
to judge what was tight enough to be secure, yet loose enough not to
frighten her. "Kessa . . . Brew what you will in
our
workroom. I only ask, if it's aught that can hurt someone,
tell me. Both so it may be labeled properly, and . . .
before you use it, that I might try to think of some safer tactic."

Her
hands caught at his sleeves, clenching in the fabric. "I'll
try."

"Thank
you." He nosed aside her man's queue of hair and kissed the back
of her neck. It made her breath catch, which made him wish for more
time.

"I-I'd
best set the healing brews to steep," she said in a near-gasp,
and pulled against his arms.

He
let her go, despite urges he'd not've thought he'd feel so strongly,
months before when he'd met her. He'd his own brews to tend –
and Lairn Ronan's Vigor powder to examine and compare to the more
traditional Vigeur.

After
a time, Dayn tapped on the door again. "We're a few minutes shy
of the half-hour, by the sand-glass, m'lord."

Iathor
stretched. "My thanks, Dayn. Offer use of a water-closet to
Thioso, if you would?"

"Of
course, m'lord."

Iathor
put up the equipment and lightly stained papers and fabrics he'd used
to find the Vigor powder's colors. It seemed to work much the way
Vigeur did, if his analysis was correct, drawing the body toward its
ideal form, in strength and health. Unsafe for children, of course,
rushing them toward adulthood. Iathor suspected neither Iasen nor
Lairn'd contemplated that matter, and placed the Vigor on a higher
shelf. Best to get into such habits
before
sons were old
enough to open jars.

Or
daughters.
He watched Kessa scrape powder from the mortar into a
glass vial. Once Keli found a pain-killer that worked on her, would
Kessa be willing to bear more than an heir? More than a spare?

He
wondered, abruptly, why
he'd
no sisters. Had his parents
thought Vigeur would give them time, so they could wait till Iathor
and Iasen were more grown? If so, his father'd never mentioned it
after Elera's carriage accident made him a widower.

Dark
thoughts, before a long coach ride. He tried to shake them from his
mind as he attended the water-closet himself. It helped that Thioso
took one look at "Kellisan" and asked the air why he was
surprised he wasn't surprised. It helped that, in his carriage, Kessa
seemed to deliberately mimic Thioso's confident slouch. Better to go
along with her disguise rather than hold her tight while he shivered
at potential dangers.

Before
they got out at the official mail station, Thioso asked, "So,
you're not bringing along your . . . wife, Sir Kymus?"

"My
student," Iathor agreed.

"Kellisan,"
Kessa said.

"I
wonder if Cym's nice?" Thioso said, exiting the carriage.
"Perhaps I could stay, after you two return here."

Iathor
followed, and Kessa jumped down after, not waiting for assistance.

Brague
and Dayn got the baggage from atop the carriage, and passed down the
small satchels containing undertunics, stockings, and a few
carefully-packed alchemical preparations.

The
Cym Mail's driver was checking his four horses' tack. Iathor waited
for the man to look up before saying, "I'm Iathor Kymus. There
should be five seats arranged. I've two trunks for the roof."

"Good
waterproof ones?" the driver asked, not bothering to introduce
himself in turn. "Like to be rain or snow on the way."

"Aye.
Satchels for inside." Iathor patted his.

"Eh,
small enough. We've nigh a full coach, so any crowding from your bags
is your own lookout. Get the station men to load the trunks and climb
in. We'll be off when my cannon-man gets here."

"My
thanks. I hope we make good time. I've urgent business."

The
driver snorted. "Isn't it always? I'll not kill the horses for
you."

"If
necessary, I've healing that works well enough on horses."

That
won begrudgingly approval. "Aye? I'll keep that in mind. Short
days, though. We'll not run at night when bandits might be hungry."

"Understood.
I'll get my student and men on now." His dramsmen had already
gotten someone to help load the baggage atop the roof. Iathor
collected Kessa and Thioso, who'd been ignoring each other warily. He
let the watchman enter first, then Kessa, boyish enough that Iathor
could quash the urge to assist her.

He
followed into a dim compartment, long enough for a leather-covered,
backless bench between the front and rear seats, and wide enough for
the benches to seat three, provided no one was too well-padded. The
middle bench was somewhat in the way of the door; Kessa perched on it
nervously, while Thioso claimed a space at the rear-facing seats.

Iathor
took the rear bench and tugged Kessa beside him. "As I recall,
the middle's worst. Its only back is that strap." He pointed to
the leather loop hanging at one side. "Weather permitting, we
can return via boat, on the River Eath."

Kessa
sighed. "Going to be that bad, is it?"

Iathor
looked around at the coach's compartment, its leather curtains
strapped down over the windows, and thought about it being "nigh
full." Flashing nightmares of broken wheels and toppling
carriages skittered across his mind, making him more grim than he'd
intended. "Mayhap."

Oddly,
his wife seemed amused. "How reassuring."

Then
Brague and Dayn climbed in; Dayn next to Kessa, Brague on the middle
bench with a grimace. A tradesman followed, and all Iathor could
think of was to act as master and student, asking "Kellisan"
to recite the common metal-salts.

Chapter
XXV

T
he
coach ride from Aeston to Cym was every bit as wretched as Iathor'd
hinted, and possibly more-so. The food was no worse than Kessa'd had
on her own, but Tania's art had spoiled her for overcooked, scanty
meat and underdone or over-mushy vegetables in cold stew. She and
Iathor sniped at each other over meals after he complained, the first
day, that she was too thin to ignore food, and she'd retorted that
he'd hardly touched his either.

The
bedding was cheap: sagging ropes beneath hay-stuffed mattresses when
they'd frames, or a scanty assortment of sack-cloth "mattresses"
that probably served as feed-bags when no one was around. Even before
moving into Iathor's house, she'd had charge of her own cot, and was
more sympathetic to lumps of her own making.

Rats
and bedbugs, at least, were absent; the vermin-bane sachets were
effective when looped around a wrist or stuffed into one's shirt.
Their spare sachets made the Lord Alchemist popular with their fellow
travelers.

Those
fellow travelers were not popular with Kessa. Two were whitesmith
journeymen, brothers who'd returned to Aeston because of their aged
and cranky grandfather's death; they only spoke of the man's
unpleasant illness, death, cranky and eccentric will, and how they
missed Cym's copper-leaf courtesans. They tried to get their captive
alchemist to agree their grandfather'd been mis-treated, but Iathor
escaped the conversation by professing thorough ignorance of
medicinal alchemy.

The
other man was a servant sent to prepare a house in Cym, he unbent
enough to explain to Iathor; there was to be a wedding between two
Baron-merchants' families, and he'd had to ensure the Aeston branch's
accommodations were adequate. The rest of the passengers were beneath
the servant's notice.

Even
his arrogance was overwhelmed, the second day, by the woman who
climbed up and glared at Dayn until Iathor sighed and waved him to
the center bench. Then she glared at Kessa until Kessa moved so
Iathor the middle seat. At the next meal, they were informed the
woman's name was Caeldra Whiteriver, from a cadet line of the
Whiteriver Counts; she was a widow, traveling to visit her middle son
in Cym; the coaches were wretched, leaving while she was in the privy
and stranding her in an equally wretched town for two days till this
coach arrived; and her eldest son in Aeston was an ungrateful brat.
Despite Iathor's delicate attempts to discover if she'd seen Iasen,
she clung to the conversation's tiller doggedly, in her carrying,
incessant voice.

(That
evening, Thioso snickered when Kessa threatened to dose him into
unconsciousness if he breathed any hint Kessa should be in the same
"women's room" as Caeldra.)

Kessa
missed her family bitterly, for all she'd have forbidden Laita to set
foot in the rocking, swaying, dark, alternately over-heated and dank
or chilled and bitter coach. She could've fought with Tag and made up
grudgingly in old patterns, or squabbled with Burk and immediately
repented. With Jontho, she'd have smiled and nodded as the others
talked, while he dipped his fingers into their money-pouches.

It
wasn't the same to snap at Iathor, nor, when he got too annoying the
third day, to fling herself down on the middle bench between Brague
and Dayn, and glare at him while the servant and Caeldra took the
other two seats in the back. (She repented of the middle bench and
its inadequate back-rest strap by the next stop, but stubbornly kept
her place; the next morning found her too stiff to object when Iathor
put her in the back corner again.)

There
were no bandits, and only one lamed horse; with a healing ointment
applied to its foot, it could walk at a reasonable pace, and was
changed with the other three at the next stop. Kessa regretted the
lack of bandits. A "young man" could have a decent,
palm-long knife in her boot, and her brothers – in Burk's
name – had sent her one as a wedding gift via Tag's
crèche-rat, Tych. Kessa'd quietly paid the child and spirited the
blade into her Kellisan clothes. Her coat was another cast-off of
Iathor's, and she'd used the small inner pockets for her own
preparations. Most were healing, but she'd her herb-witchery sleeping
powder in a little glass vial.

The
fifth evening, they arrived in Cym: tired, sore, and mostly not
speaking to one another out of exhaustion or irritation or because
Caeldra never quite shut up . . . and there was no
point trying to speak around her.

At
the Cym Mail station, the passengers and their baggage were unloaded,
and Caeldra went inside to claim the trunk that'd gone on before her.
Thioso announced, "I'm going to hire her a buggy. And I'm going
to have him take her to her son's house right away."

From
whitesmiths to servant to Kymus household, they all added a bit of
money to the idea. Dayn and a whitesmith carried Caeldra's recovered
trunk to the hired buggy, and for the only time during the entire
trip, the widow was speechless, barely managing a stammered,
Oh.
My thanks. Oh.
She waved as the buggy left; Dayn and Thioso waved
back enthusiastically.

Kessa
was less pleased when the other two buggies for hire, waiting near
the mail station, were claimed by the whitesmiths and the nobles'
servant, leaving the rest of them in the lamp-lit dusk. The mail
station wasn't in the center of the town; the area around it was
built up with warehouses and perhaps some apartments. Most of the Cym
Mail's block was taken up with the building where mail was sorted and
delivered by runners, its carriage house, and its stables.

It
was starting to snow. Kessa felt her lip curl. "Blight. We're
going to wind up walking. Will the station keep
our
trunks?"

"Surely
there's a carriage around that'll carry . . . five."
Iathor included Thioso at the last moment.

"After
the rest of this trip? The only thing we
didn't
have was
bandits – likely because they feared they'd catch 'Lady
Whiteriver' and have to listen to her!" Kessa waved a hand at
the empty street-sides and chilly cobblestones where only occupied
vehicles moved. "We're going to be walking, Kymus."