The Prisoner of Limnos (Penric and Desdemona, #6)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

He alternated between staring out the window at the bony countryside, and regarding the unbony woman in his lap.

they didn’t even offer to make her a ghost bride.” “I don’t know what that is.” A short hesitation. “Oh, thank you Des. They really do that?” He turned to Nikys. “Marry people to dead people?” “Not often. It’s a sort of adoption, as much as anything. If they’d had the ceremony—it’s sometimes held at the graveside, but more often with a memori tablet—my mother would have become a daughter-in-law of the house. With certain rights of support and inheritance, among other things.

Adelis is not the sort of man who inspires poisoning. He’s the sort of man who inspires hitting on the head with a skillet.” Penric muffled a too-agreeing snort. “So speaks his loving sister. Have you ever done so?” “Not since we were twelve, I admit.” She added after a moment, “Then he grew too tall to reach. Bad angle for the swing.”

his habitual smirk slipped into a smile of such surpassing tenderness that Nikys’s breath caught.

“I’m not sure how such wild feats are supposed to impress the gods,” mused Pen, squinting upward, “who are present everywhere the same. Though my subtler seminary teachers advised me that any useful effect is upon the supplicant, not some holy audience. It’s all in whether the given action fills a person or empties them, leaving room for a god to enter. You could sit by yourself in a quiet room and have as good a chance at it. A man could walk up those two thousand steps on his hands singing hymns the whole way and have none.”

She tried to choke down her laugh and ended up snorting it through her nose. “You shouldn’t… I shouldn’t…” “Yes, you should. Joy is a mark of Them, you see. It will likely keep leaking out of you for some while.”

On its right side, a few niches reflected an aqueous blue daylight into the corridor.

You lived through those times. I’m sure you’ve seen worse.” “No,” said Idrene, with a thoughtful look at him. “Merely more.” He hesitated, then inclined his head in delicate appreciation.

The starlight scintillated overhead

This nightmare garden needed no watering.

“Oh.” Idrene’s smile grew crooked. “I know the answer for that one. It worked quite well for Florina. And your father. And Ikos’s father, too.” Nikys raised her face. “You do? What?” She tapped Nikys’s forehead in a gesture not quite a blessing. And said, in a voice as arid as Nikys had ever heard from her, “Die first.”

“I was worried how we’d get into Akylaxio discreetly,” Penric put in, “but it turns out that a brace of those big tuna fish make an excuse to dock at any harbor, no questions asked. We picked them up along the way. Ye gods, they’re huge in a small boat. For a moment I thought they’d sink us. I’d only seen them laid out flat in the markets at Lodi, before.” “You stopped to go fishing?” said Idrene, sounding bewildered. “No,” said Ikos distantly, “we didn’t stop. They leaped into the boat all on their own, and died at our feet. Smiling. Apparently.” That… ah, that wasn’t a joke. Or sarcasm. Nikys had seen that round-eyed look on people before, and what did it say that she recognized it? He wasn’t poleaxed, just Penric’d.

Given how she’d fretted at Penric’s absence, surely his presence should be the cure? Perhaps this was what a gambler felt when he laid his whole stake on one last throw of the dice. Not a thrill she relished, it seemed.

“We cannot protect anyone from being alive, Master Bosha. No matter how much we might wish to.”

One gives you the shirt off his back, mused Des, and the other offers to help you bury bodies. I do believe you have made some new friends, Pen!

Not that keeping an eye on all that male elegance was a burden.

flesh and blood and long, long bones. Mistakes and miracles, awkwardness and profound grace, sorrow and joy. Beautiful hands, slim-fingered and sensitive