Penric’s Demon (Penric and Desdemona, #1)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

Penric stared glumly between his horse’s bobbing ears and reflected that it would have been an even better day to go fishing. Not the most exciting pastime, but it was the one thing he’d ever found to do that made people stop talking at him.

Pen wanted to ask if becoming a sorcerer made a man more, or less, attractive as a husband, but he had an uneasy feeling that he could guess.

Pen washed in the basin and put himself to bed, there to lie awake too long trying to sense the alien spirit now parasitizing his body. Did demons manifest as a stomach ache? He was still wondering when he finally drifted off.

Pen thought Gans’s description of him “flopped over as gray and limp as a dead eel,” was unduly blunt.

The hunting in the mountains had been a happier chore. He’d had good luck with wild sheep, often able to take one down with a single arrow, not to mention being most nimble at retrieving carcasses from awkward slopes and ledges, a task to which his servants had cheered him on with suspicious enthusiasm.

Someday, he promised himself, I shall have new clothes, from a real tailor. Though how he was to get to that someday, he had no notion.