“Not at present,” said Adelis.
“Because there are good people here as well as ill.” Pen reflected on all he’d met, Jato, Godino, the friendly cook, the Mother’s midwife, and on and on.
“The gods may be able to sort the just from the unjust soul by soul. I’m afraid armies must treat them in batches.”
“Mm,” Pen half-conceded. “I wonder if poor Godino remains safe. An attempt at rescue might just draw attention to him where there was none before.”
“Possibly. If your Brother Godino is a man of sense he’ll have taken to the hills by now.”
“So I hope.” Pen finished with the tersest description he could manage of his past day, which nonetheless made Adelis’s eyebrows climb.
“You know, my offer to you to attend upon my army as an irregular auxiliary still stands,” said Adelis, leadingly.
“And so does my refusal,” Pen sighed.
It was an old argument. Adelis did not pursue it, turning instead to drawing more of their version of events from the Corva sisters. His efforts at kindliness were more labored than his Roknari, but the girls seemed to take them for sincere.
“The parlay, Adelis,” said Pen, when Adelis finished diverting himself with this.
“Ah, yes, that. I have wrangled a treaty from the Guild of Lantihera.”
Pen blinked. “To what end?”
“An agreement to leave Orbas, its islands, and its shipping alone.”
“Do you think they’ll honor it?”
“For a season, perhaps. I’ve slipped a few agents ashore to watch for their inevitable lapse. Next time we can return in less of a scramble. Or, better, induce the Carpagamons to do so.”
“You didn’t look as if you were scrambling. Quite formidable.”
“Learned, you have no idea what a miracle of logistics you observe before you. If it weren’t for the sea maneuvers I’d talked Jurgo into, and which were supposed to take place next week, we wouldn’t have sailed out of Vilnoc for another month.”
“I daresay. So… a treaty in exchange for not invading Lantihera, which you weren’t going to do in the first place?” No wonder Adelis had looked smug.
“I sweetened the pot by offering to not grant my fleet three days of shore leave.”
“There’s a difference between that and sacking the town?”
“Not much. The council took my point. You were a more fundamental bone of contention. To the tune of thirty thousand silver ryols.”
Pen gasped, appalled. “That’s a prince’s ransom! Or, wait, no, were they demanding reparations…?”
Adelis stared, then laughed. “Ah, no, Penric! I wouldn’t have offered a copper for that. No, that’s what they’re paying us to not leave you here.”
Des crowed with delight.
Penric just… drank.
* * *
The Orban fleet sailed on the morning tide, right after the coin chests were delivered.
Pen leaned on the stern rail with Adelis and watched the island recede behind them. That dwindling was the most desirable sight he could imagine.
“What will you do with my, my anti-ransom?” Pen asked him.
“It will be split. Part will be divided among my troops, to compensate them for the sad lack of loot from the sad lack of battle. The rest to Jurgo, to help pay for this sea-holiday.”
“Maneuvers,” corrected Pen. “Just a more realistic sort.”
“That is an argument I will store up.”
“Don’t forget the share to the Temple.”
“I’ll leave that accounting to the duke.”
Pen snickered. Sails raised, oars shipped, the breeze moved them for free, and in the right direction. White-and-gray harbor gulls swooped and shrieked in their wake, an unmelodic hymn to their recessional. The bold scavenger birds were considered creatures of the Bastard in these seas, he was reminded.
“It doesn’t do any good, you know,” Pen said at last. “All those ships and goods I destroyed were stolen in the first place. The Lanti pirates will just return to their trade with their efforts redoubled, to make up their losses.”
“I expect so,” said Adelis. “We could still turn back and raze the town.” Pen was not entirely sure that was an idle jest. “Before they finish rebuilding that old Carpagamon fortress would actually be a good time.”
Pen waved an averting hand. “I don’t know what would stop the raiders altogether. The middle-merchants who buy the goods and people are as much a part of the system as the pirates, and the ones they sell them to even more so, and more diffuse and harder to attack. Being nearly everybody.” Pen brooded. “The cantons manage without slavery.”
“And are also very poor, you say.”
“Mm.” Pen could not altogether deny this. “Not that poor. We do well enough.”
Adelis offered, “The Darthacans, I’m told, are building ships and warships off their far east coast that are all-sail, and don’t require rowers. The rougher seas there have sunk more galleys than battles ever did, so that makes sense to me. If those designs do indeed prove superior, the time of galley slaves may come to an end without the need for virtuous canton austerity.”
“But not in mines. Or the demand for concubines and servants.” Scullions and scribes alike.
“I can’t help you there. Not my trade. Pray to your gods, Learned.”
“The gods take almost all who do not refuse them, slave or free. I’m not sure they see a difference between one form of human misery and another. They don’t think the way we do. Soul by soul, as you say.”
Adelis’s black brows flicked up, perhaps at the disquiet of standing next to a man who could plausibly claim any idea of how the gods thought. “Thieves will still pursue other forms of treasure that they cannot otherwise earn, or just raid for mad bravado. And soldiers will still be called upon to put them down. I don’t foresee an end to either of our trades in my lifetime.”
“Nor mine, I suppose. Trade or lifetime.” Pen turned to lean his back against the rail and study the Corva sisters, presently cross-legged on the other side of the stern being taught knots by a friendly sailor.
Adelis followed his glance, and asked with an odd diffidence, “Are those two god-touched, do you know?”
Because Pen could tell, being in an oblique chaotic sense god-touched himself?
Adelis went on, “They seem to have suffered the most extraordinary mix of chance and mischance, ill-luck and luck. Of which the most extraordinary was having you dropped atop them. Your god’s white hand at work?”
“I wish I knew,” sighed Pen. “Not one single thing that has happened requires an extraordinary explanation. It’s just the, hm, accumulation.” He pursed his lips. “I hope I get a chance to delve further into their mystery.”
“If you do, pray share it.” Adelis pushed off the rail, called away by some officer wanting his commander’s attention. “If you can.”
“Aye,” said Penric.
Epilogue
As much as Pen liked his upstairs study overlooking the shared well-court, he had to admit it grew close on a hot Vilnoc summer morning. So he’d moved the girls’ language lesson down to the back pergola, its plank table and benches shaded by grape leaves, the surrounding pots of kitchen herbs lending a pleasantly rustic effect. The concentration of practicing Cedonian letters with slate and chalk had given way, in the languid warmth, to learning a few children’s Temple hymns instead. Pen thought the rhythm, rhyme, and refrains did more, faster, to fix words in young brains than dry readings or recitations, not that the latter didn’t have their place.
And he was able, without drudgery, to slip in the needed repetition by trying for harmony, his light baritone blending agreeably, he hoped, with the girls’ sopranos. Curiously, Seuka’s voice held to the key better than Lencia’s; he fancied Lencia’s busy mind was trying too hard. Still straining to be both lost mother and father to their truncated family, when being big sister seemed task enough to Pen.
Their rudimentary choir pra
ctice was interrupted by Nikys, rapping on a pergola support and smiling, so presumably not because she was being maddened by the noise. “Penric, we have a visitor.”
He looked up and past her shoulder. The man hovering anxiously there was middle-aged, middle-sized, sturdy rather than stout. He wore ordinary dress of tunic, belt, and trousers, if well-made, and sensible sandals in this weather. His hair and beard were dark with a smattering of gray, his skin not Cedonian-brick but a paler warm tan that might have come from anywhere along the continent’s more eastward coasts. Pen pegged it as Ibra by the familiar letter clutched tightly in his hand, and the girls’ reactions.
“Papa!” shrieked Lencia; after an uncertain moment—it had been, what, over a year since they’d last seen the man—Seuka followed her bolt around the table.
He dropped to his knees and opened his arms to receive them, embracing them both at once, hard. “Ah,” he huffed, dampening eyes closing in a grimace caught between joy and pain. In Ibran, he muttered, “Ah, so it’s all true…”
“Master Ubi Getaf, I take it,” said Pen, rising to greet this welcome, if sudden, apparition. The letter being abused in that thick fist was the one he’d written to Learned Iserne in Lodi, three weeks ago when they’d first reached Vilnoc, tightly summarizing his late adventures and begging her help in finding the wandering merchant. She had followed through splendidly, it seemed.
“Learned Penric?” said Getaf, less surely. He clambered to his feet and, both his hands being occupied by his clinging offspring, ducked his head at Penric. He continued in halting Cedonian, “I understand I have much to thank you for in rescuing my children.”
Pen returned in smooth Ibran, “It was no more than any decent adult would have done, under the circumstances.”
Well, perhaps a little more, murmured Des, amused. He would wait a while, Pen decided, to introduce Des.
Getaf’s head went back as he parsed Pen’s regional Ibran accent. “You… are from Brajar…?”
“No, but my language teacher was, long ago.” And I thank you for it, Learned Aulia, he thought to that layer of Des that was the Brajaran Temple woman, who had once received Des from the dying Umelan like the baton in some mortal relay.
Getaf accepted this with another nod, too distracted to be curious. The girls dragged him to a bench, both trying to tell all their tale at once in a mixture of Roknari, which he seemed to speak well, and a little Ibran. He sat heavily, his head swinging back and forth like a man trying to follow some fast-moving ball game, or perhaps a bear befuddled by bees.
Nikys folded her arms and leaned back against the pergola post, listening in understandable bafflement, as she had some Roknari but no Ibran. But Pen thought she followed the emotions perfectly well, and approved. He pulled out his bench and motioned her to his side, where they sat, her soft thigh in its draped linen pressing companionably against his lean one. Don’t you dare disappear on me like that again he received in a language more fundamental than any that tripped from his tongue. He grasped her plump hand and returned an equally silent, Aye, Madame Owl.
He murmured to her, “Does Getaf seem an upright fellow to you?”
Equally intent on the reunion playing out, Nikys murmured back, “Look at the girls. Such unhesitating gladness goes beyond just relief at a familiar face, I think.”
Thanks in great part to Nikys the sisters were clean; shining hair neatly bound in braids and colored ties; fed, if not to sleekness, at least to the point that their natural skinniness no longer looked sunken with stress; and dressed in a superior grade of hand-me-downs that Nikys had begged from the duchess’s household. Penric was pleased that they were able to present the pair to their papa in such good order, as though he were again a student offering some especially well-done work to one of his seminary masters. He hoped he’d get a good mark.
Getaf’s expression sobered as the girls worked their way back to the tale of their mother’s death, the details all new to him since Pen’s letter had devoted only a clause about died from illness in Raspay to the root calamity.
“I am so sorry,” he told them. “I’d heard nothing of this. When the prince of Jokona’s border clash with Ibra closed his coasts to Zagosur trade, I thought to wait it out with a venture west. The Zagosur factor should have forwarded your letter to me, not returned it. And Taspeig should most certainly have accompanied you all the way to Lodi, not abandoned you at Agenno, although… although that might not have helped.”
“She was very tired and cranky by then,” Lencia offered in excuse. “We all were. And I think she was running out of money.”
“Still. Still.”
Seuka raised her face. “Are you going to take us home now, Papa?”
Getaf hesitated, too palpably. Where was home for these sisters now, really? Raspay seemed as abandoned behind them as any sunken ship, with not even a floating spar left to cling to.
Lencia, as ever the more alert to the difficulties, put in, “Or at least take us along with you?”
That was a, hm, not-bad picture, of living like young apprentices trailing a master trader and learning the world, as many such men made their sons. And sometimes daughters.
Getaf rubbed his forehead, frowning into his lap. “That presents certain problems, which I must take thought for. I can’t take you back to Zagosur. Which, I suppose, was never home for you anyway. But I won’t leave you without succor; that, I promise.” He looked across at Pen and switched to Cedonian. “Learned Penric, may I speak with you in private for a moment?”
Pen and Nikys glanced at each other. Nikys rose, and said kindly, “Lencia, Seuka, can you come help me fetch food and drink for your papa?”
Lencia frowned, and Seuka’s lower lip stuck out, wary of the risk of people arranging their lives without their say-so. Penric sympathized, but construed there might be personal matters Getaf didn’t wish to share with them. As well, Nikys could seize this chance for a candid conference with his daughters. Pen nodded brightly at them, and they let themselves be shuffled off, only dragging their sandaled feet a little.
Getaf watched them disappear into the house, then lowered his voice and said in Ibran, “May I take it they were not worse abused by the pirates?”
“You may. Apparently due to their higher sale value as virgins. Which, er, they have retained.”
Getaf nodded in relief. Then paused, mustering his words. “Your friend Learned Iserne caught up with me just in time in Lodi. I’d finished amassing my trade goods there, and in another week I would have been on my way back to Zagosur.” He chewed his lip. “I don’t think it wise to try to take Lencia and Seuka to my household there. My wife holds all in firm hands, very reliable manager, has nurtured our own children near to maturity, with a useful web of in-laws, but… I don’t think she would make them very welcome. They deserve better than grudging care, and because of my business I would not be much there to provide a balancing weight.”
“I gather Madame Getaf does not know about your mistress?” Or had Jedula Corva been more in the nature of a second wife?
Getaf shook his head. “And I’d prefer to keep it that way. Given there is nothing left in Raspay to argue about.”
“Understandable…”
“Jedula was an anchor to me, but to the extent I’d thought about anything happening to her and not me, I assumed I would pay Taspeig to care for the girls, in their house as before. I can’t see taking them back to Taspeig now, given her unreliable behavior in Agenno. Anyway, I expect she has gone on to find some other life for herself. And the status of half-Quintarian orphans in Raspay, even if they’re not destitute, is not happy.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Getaf stared into his hands, cradled between his knees, then looked up at Pen more keenly. “What can you tell me about the Bastard’s Order here in Vilnoc? Is it well-run?”
Pen’s brows rose. “The orphanage is as decent as it can manage. Chronically short of funds and staff, like most such places, but its people are very dedicated.”
Getaf waved this aside. “No, no. I’d take our chances in Zagosur before I’d leave the girls in an orphanage. Spare those resources for the truly needy. I’m thinking about the chapterhouse itself. Lencia and especially Seuka are a little young to be placed as dowered dedicats to the Order, but… perhaps you have some influence there?”
“Huh.” Pen folded his arms on the plank table. “There’s an interesting notion.”
“A good chapterhouse might assume their care and education at a higher level than an orphanage can provide, and keep them together if their dower-contract so instructed. And… and for the first time in their lives, their birth-status might make them more, not less, welcomed. Um—where have they been staying in Vilnoc till now? Your letter was unclear on that point.” He pressed the wrinkled paper out on the table in a nervous gesture.
“Oh, sorry. They’ve been staying here. I suppose you can think of my house as a branch of the Order, irregular senior member as I am.”
Getaf looked up in hesitation. “Do you think you…? Would your wife…?”
Pen felt his way forward, sharing Getaf’s uncertainty. Nikys had been nothing but generous to the lost girls, but was it right to pledge her labor into an indefinite future when a perfectly good parent had turned up after all, willing to do his part? Even more central, what was the optimum opportunity for Lencia and Seuka?
“I… actually think the chapterhouse would make a better regular domicile for them,” Pen said slowly, “given the erratic nature of my own duties, and also those of Nikys and Adelis. And there would be more kinds of people around to teach and train them, not to mention a supply of energetic young fellow-dedicats to befriend. But, really, this need not be either-or. It’s only a short walk from here. Looking in on each other would be an easy task.”
Lord Bastard, is this your intent? Pen would pray to his god for guidance, but he never did get any back when he did that, so he supposed he must use his own judgment. Though capturing two such bright souls for His Order must surely be an acceptable offering.
The Orphans of Raspay Page 13
