Okros barely glanced at Tinwright, as if it might hurt to look someone directly in the eye. “Yes, yes,” he said, “good day.” A moment later he was gone, hurrying back toward the castle as though possessing a chicken might be a crime against the throne.
Perhaps he is afraid of being robbed, Tinwright thought. Some people here would kill for a smaller meal than that. But the whole encounter seemed strange. Surely there were more birds to be found in the castle residence than down here in the ruins of the outer keep—and why should the physician seem so furtive?
As he made his way back up the hill toward the Inner Keep a memory floated just beyond Tinwright’s reach—something from a book he had read, one of his father’s…
The love of reading might have been the only gift the old man had given him, he sometimes thought, but it had been a good one: a nearly endless supply of books, mostly borrowed (or perhaps stolen, Matt Tinwright suddenly thought now) from the houses where Kearn Tinwright had been a tutor—Clemon, Phelsas, all the classics, as well as lighter fare like the poetry of Vanderin Uegenios and the plays of the Hierosoline and Syannese masters. Reading Vanderin had inspired young Matt with visions of a courtly life, a career of being admired by fine ladies and rewarded with gold by fine gentlemen. Strange that he should finally be living that life and yet be so cursedly miserable…
The thing that had been tickling his memory came to him suddenly—some lines from Meno Strivolis, the Syannese master poet of two centuries earlier:
That was all—just a morsel from Meno about Vais, the infamous witch-queen of Krace, a few lines which spoke of a black cockerel like the one the physician had been hiding. Nothing else to it—but it was odd that Okros should come so far just to buy poultry. Better and fatter birds could be found in the residence henyard, surely…
But perhaps not birds of that particular color, Tinwright thought suddenly. More of the poem had come to him:
The fear that had seized him when he bumped into Okros came back to him threefold, so that for a moment Matt Tinwright couldn’t walk straight and had to stop in the middle of the narrow street. People shoved past him with angry words, but he barely heard them.
Could that be the reason? Had Okros walked all the way down from the safety of the residence to the outer keep because he needed a rooster of just the right color for some kind of ritual? Did it have something to do with the mirror Brone wanted to know about?
Full of confused, fearful thoughts, but also afire with excitement that felt a bit like a fever, Matt Tinwright hurried back across the crowded, brawling inner keep.
His mother was predictably furious. “What do you mean you are going out again? I need wood for the fire! It is all well for you to come in here like some petty lordling, calling for eel stew, demanding that I break my back cooking. What devilry are you up to?”
“Thank you, Mother, and a good day to you, too. But I am not going out quite yet.” He bent his head so he could go up the narrow stairwell without dashing out his brains.
Elan was sitting up in the large bed she was sharing with Puzzle’s grand-nieces, working at a bit of embroidery. He was glad to see her stronger, but she still had the haunted look he had hoped to see banished from her face forever.
“My lady, are you alone?”
She smiled grimly. “As you see. The girls are visiting the neighbors’, trying to cozen an extra blanket—their mother and yours are now sleeping on the couch downstairs, if you remember.”
He did. The whispered struggles of the two older women crammed together on the narrow couch like two bad-tempered skeletons in a single coffin were the reason he was back sleeping with Puzzle in the crowded royal residence, unsatisfying as that was. “I saw Brother Okros in the market place. Do you know anything of him?”
Elan gave him a strange look. “What do you mean? I know he is Hendon’s physician. I know he is full of odd ideas ...”
“Like what?”
“About the gods, I think. I never paid much attention when he was at table with us. He would talk on and on about alchemy and the holy oracles. Some of it seemed blasphemous to me ...” She curled her lip. “But blasphemy never bothered Hendon.”
“Does he… have you ever heard that he is a magic-worker?”
Elan shook her head. “No, but as I said, I scarcely know him. He and Hendon would often talk late at night, at strange hours, as if Okros were working at some important task for him that could not wait. Hendon once had a man beaten almost to death for interrupting him during an afternoon nap but he never lost his temper with Okros.”
“What did they talk about?”
Elan’s expression had become something painful to see, and Tinwright suddenly realized he was making her think about things she did not wish to remember. “I… I cannot remember,” she said at last. “They never spoke for long in front of me. Hendon would take him to another part of the residence. But I heard the physician say once that… what was it, it was so strange! Oh, yes, he told Hendon, ‘The perfection has begun to change—it is telling a different truth now.’ I could make no sense of it.”
Tinwright frowned, thinking. “Could it have been ‘reflection,’ not ‘perfection’?”
Elan shrugged. He could see the darkness in her eyes and wished he could have spared her this. “Perhaps,” she said quietly. “I could not hear them well.”
The reflection has begun to change, he thought. It is telling a different truth now. It made a sort of disturbing sense if they had been talking about the mirror Brone had mentioned. And Elan had mentioned the gods. Meno’s poem spoke of a heartless queen sacrificing a black cockerel to Kernios so she could curse her enemies. Was that what Okros planned to do? That would be no ordinary sacrifice, but some kind of witchcraft instead.
He had to tell Avin Brone. Then, duty discharged, Matt Tinwright could return to the somewhat flea-ridden bosom of his family and enjoy a well-earned bowl of eel stew.
Brone motioned to a spotty young man who was leaning against a threadbare tapestry, cutting his nails with a gleaming knife—Tinwright thought he was probably one of the count’s relatives from Landsend. “Bring me some wine, boy.” He turned back to Tinwright. “Very well. Here are some coppers for your new information, poet. Now find Okros again—he is probably in the herb garden this time of day, especially with so many wounded in need of physic. Follow him wherever he goes, but do not give yourself away.”
Matt Tinwright could only sit and stare, open-mouthed. “What?” he said at last, barely able to get the word out of his mouth. “What?”