Remaining by the bedchamber door for several moments more, and calling to the fat-faced, richly robed Raban, Baster-kin informs the healer that he himself will approach the bed only when the patient has in fact been calmed The healer nods obsequiously, and then returns by reverse steps to a table by the bed. He quickly prepares and administers to the tormented woman before him a powerful, crude mixture of several of his drugs: opium, Cannabis indica, and, finally, ground and properly brewed wild hops‡ from the mountainside. The effect of this combination is swift: within moments, Lady Baster-kin’s pain and seeming madness finally begin to subside, although, in her face, there is no greater apprehension of the events about her than there had been moments before.
A quieted chamber and household is what Rendulic Baster-kin has repeatedly demanded of Raban this evening. Only when the Merchant Lord is sure the effect is not temporary does he slowly approach his wife’s bed. He orders Raban and the healer’s apprentice out of the room, but exempts Chen-lun’s personal servant from this command: he has learned over the years of his marriage and especially of his lady’s illness that even attempting to order the ever-silent attendant from her mistress’s presence, particularly during such crises as this one, has no effect, and indeed can lead to unspoken yet dangerous confrontations. The woman, who is called simply Ju,† has been Lady Baster-kin’s shadow‡ since long before the striking, black-eyed princess came to Broken. A dark, silent form, lithe of shape and movement (just as was her mistress, before illness struck and began laying long siege to her body), Ju seems ever to keep one hand on the pommel of a large dagger, its scabbard stitched into a belt drawn round her waist.
Only the most warlike marauders, of the regions to the east and northeast of Broken, carry such blades; and the weapon is not merely ornamental, especially in one such as Ju’s hands. Upon those few occasions when Baster-kin has seen her wield it, she has demonstrated admirable skill at the close quarters for which it was designed. He therefore treats the woman with far more respect than he would any common Broken noblewoman’s handmaiden, just as Ju plainly appreciates the fact that, difficult as her mistress’s long illness has been for Baster-kin, his lordship has neither ignored his wife, nor failed to allow whatever healers she desires to treat her, doubt though he may their abilities. Then, too, this strongest Merchant Lord in the history of the Baster-kin family has never lost his temper when Chen-lun, in the grip of fever and pain, has assaulted her husband with maddened fantasies, uttering indictments that Ju knows are often more than unfair.
But finally, and most importantly, Baster-kin and Ju share one terrible secret: the reason that their lady lies so grievously ill upon the bed between them. Ju knows that, in truth, her lady has been truly fortunate to have been tied to so unexpectedly decent a husband, whatever his occasional manifestations of pained disgust at the sickness that long ago destroyed the intimate world that once gave the pair not only pleasure, but unexpected solace, and which now separates them, both physically and as true man and wife, forever …
Chen-lun, too, knows how hard her husband struggles to relieve her pain and cure her disease without revealing the secret of its cause and destroying her name in the kingdom she adopted as her home upon their marriage. Indeed, if the full facts were known, they would likely ruin her even among her own people; and the knowledge of her lordship’s faith inspires the initially happy (if still feverish) attitude that she takes toward him, once she is indeed certain that her perception of his tall form emerging from the shadowy entryway to the bedchamber is more than the mere effect of illness or drugs.
“Rendulic,” she whispers, attempting a smile and some sense of composure; but her face and body offer living testament to the torment she has endured during the hours leading to this meeting.
For his part, Baster-kin does what he can to disguise the various forms of despair, masked by disappointment, that the progression of her disease causes deep in his soul. He tries to concentrate his attention upon her black eyes, which once shone in enchanting harmony with the long sheets of her utterly straight black hair as it fell across her skin and his own during the short time that they found joyous pleasure in each other’s embrace. That all too short a time …
The wedding of the newly invested Rendulic, Lord Baster-kin, to the exotic Chen-lun had seemed an entirely brilliant occasion. Only weeks after the ceremony — weeks during which the upper floors of the Kastelgerd were often heard to echo with the sounds of swordplay, in addition to bursting crockery destroyed by flying arrows, as Chen-lun (raised to be a most capable warrior, it should be recalled, in her own tribe) and Rendulic punctuated their long bouts of lovemaking with athletics of a wholly different order — the new lady of the Kastelgerd was declared by the family’s healers to be unquestionably with child; and a mere seven Moons later, the couple’s first son, a golden-haired boy that they agreed to call Adelwülf,† was born. The new scion appeared to be nothing if not a confirmation that Kafra had approved the match of an eastern princess and a loyal new leader of the kingdom over which the golden god had long ago elected to shower his radiance—
And then had come, almost as quickly, another son …
Later pressed by the family’s healers to recall his wife’s physical condition at the time of this child’s conception, Rendulic Baster-kin had replied that if some sign of disease or divine disfavor had in fact been present, he had not detected it. Certainly, the conception had taken place very soon after Adelwülf’s birth, perhaps unwisely soon; but Chen-lun had not experienced any signs of illness until the later stages of her carrying of the creature — and those had not seemed sufficient to explain the thoroughly misshapen condition of the boy; the mass of pustules and ill-formed bones that seemed to mar every part of his skin and body, and worse, to grow only more numerous and offensive during its first weeks and months of life.
The then-obscure Healer Raban had stepped forward to suggest to young Lord Baster-kin — who every day grew more desperate for an explanation that would remove not only some part of the revulsion engendered by merely gazing at the child, but the terrible sense of guilt he felt when he remembered his own sickly youth, and then gazed upon this fruit of his loins — that the child might not be a Baster-kin at all; that, much as his lord- and ladyship may have passed every night together, throughout the period during which the monstrous child was thought to have been conceived, there were nonetheless alps† living in the forests of Broken’s slopes who could make themselves undetectable to men of true virtue. Worse still, there were stronger and more artful such creatures inhabiting Davon Wood: enemies of Broken that might well have made the journey across the Cat’s Paw and up the mountain, if they were certain that a member of a Broken noble house had taken to wife a woman who was, by both blood and nature, less innately virtuous than a daughter of the Kafran kingdom would have been …