Masquerade in Lodi

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Her lips curved up. “Of course He could. He sent you.”

  Pen buried his flattered, horrified grumble in a bite of fig.

  “Saint…?” said Lonniel faintly, stopping in mid-chew.

  “I was just getting to that part,” said Ree, his tired face growing eager as he glanced over at Chio. “It’s how the Temple gets rid of demons, you know. Or maybe you don’t. I can’t say as I really knew, before, just a dim notion that someone from the white god’s Order took care of such things.”

  “That someone would be me, for the archdivineship of Lodi,” Chio said, with a tentative smile across the table at Lonniel.

  “Uh, had we introduced Blessed Chio to you when we met earlier?” asked Penric. He couldn’t remember, in the welter of subsequent events.

  “Blessed Chio…?” Lonniel shook her head. “No! Nor you either, properly, Learned,” she added as an afterthought. “A real sorcerer, come to our house? Nobody tells me anything important.”

  Iserne bit her lip, possibly on a tart reminder that they’d caught the sisters sneaking out the door, not an incident to invite much in the way of confidences.

  “My apologies,” Pen interjected, before Iserne was pricked into saying anything that might restart some chronic mother-daughter dispute. “Penric kin Jurald, court sorcerer to Archdivine Ogial. And Blessed Chio, my Order’s saint residing at the chapterhouse of the Isle of Gulls. I was originally sent by the archdivine to look into the case of the shiplost man brought to the Gift of the Sea, and, well, we have.” He gestured at Ree, and by extension at the whole tumultuous night.

  Lonniel, her brows scrunching, asked her brother, “What was it like? Having a demon?” An eye-flick at Pen, as she realized another demon must be sitting next to her. She didn’t, quite, edge away.

  Ree made a helpless hand-wave. “A horrible fever dream, that went on and on and I couldn’t wake up from it. Memories that weren’t mine, running through my head. Some terrible—strangling and being strangled all atop, gods that Roknari man was more awful than Merin—some just strange. Moving through the water, weightless and joyful and powerful. Crunching down all those wriggling live fish, ugh. My body walking around Lodi on its own, and I could only watch as it did things I didn’t choose. I got all the bruises and hunger just the same. When the god came and took it away… I can’t…” His voice died.

  Chio, listening, smiled quietly at that.

  He shifted to face her. “You do this over and over? The god comes to you each time?”

  She tilted her head. “Whenever the Order brings me another elemental. It’s an unsteady supply, but maybe four to six a year.”

  “It—that experience—must… do things. To you.” As it just had to Ree?

  She considered this in kindly seriousness. “The god… enlarges my world?”

  Or her soul, Pen suspected. And she confronted this vastness six times a year? One direct encounter—two, now—with his god in Pen’s lifetime had been overwhelming enough.

  “How can you bear it? That demon was so dreadful.”

  “That one was very, very bad,” she agreed with a sigh. “With new elementals, caught early, it’s more like killing chickens. Uncanny chickens, but still. An unpleasant task I try to make as mercifully quick as possible.”

  Which meant the one in the warehouse had felt more like hanging a human? Chio did not point this up, so neither did Pen.

  “Will you always be a saint?” asked Ree.

  “I’m at the god’s disposal, not Him at mine. Any time could be the last, I expect.”

  Pen offered, “I believe the Saint of Idau has served the region around Martensbridge for over thirty years. He’s quite aged now, but he’s still at it as far as I know.” Blessed Broylin’s calling must have come upon him in mid-life, Pen realized. That had to be a story, and he regretted not collecting it. But, indeed, sorcerers did not linger around saints to socialize.

  Lonniel asked, “Will the Bastard’s Order always keep you on the Isle of Gulls? Like… like a princess in a tower?”

  A more gratifying comparison than a prisoner in a dungeon, Pen supposed.

  Chio was surprised into a laugh. “I’m sure Learned Riesta—my chapterhouse supervisor—wishes he could. But I’m devotee to the Bastard, not to the Daughter of Spring. I have no religious duty to withdraw from the world. I can have whatever life I can arrange. You said Broylin was a baker, Penric? I wonder whatever happened to that dressmaker… Now I’m not a child, I stay on Gulls mainly because I can’t afford to take myself elsewhere.” She grew thoughtful. “Does Riesta keep me poor on purpose for that?”

  “I could not speculate,” said Pen, deciding to be diplomatic.

  “Maybe it’s just his frugal habit,” she said, tolerantly. “The orphanage always has too many mouths to feed.”

  “Can saints marry?” asked Lonniel. Pen approved her avid curiosity, if not her bluntness.

  Iserne, alive to the hazards of both, and perhaps to spare Chio awkwardness, answered this one. “I’ve met two petty saints, judges in the Father’s Order, who are married. To each other, which must make for peculiar bed-talk. And one saint-acolyte in the Mother’s, whom I encountered when I helped draw up her will some years ago. So yes. About as commonly as other people, I imagine.”

  “Oh. I was wondering, because of the Bastard’s Order. That maybe it wasn’t done over there, on account of some, um, courtesy to the god.”

  “Yes, people in our Order do marry.” Penric cleared his throat. “Sorcerers maybe less often. I’m given to understand our demons make us difficult as spouses. Five of Desdemona’s—that is, my demon’s—prior riders managed somehow, though. All of them were wed before they became sorceresses, come to think. But never two mages to each other. Two chaos demons in one household would be, how to put this, an oversupply of chaos in one place.” Or even two chaos demons in one palace, which was how he came to be booted out of Martensbridge.

  “What about a sorcerer and a saint?” Lonniel went on, irrepressibly. Pen estimated she was of the age when marriage loomed as her next great life passage, hence this alarming focus.

  Her mother rolled her eyes, reproving, “Lonniel.”

  “No,” Des answered aloud firmly, before Pen could speak again.

  “Oh. Too bad.” Her gaze flicked at her brother as she continued to serenely demolish her pear.

  So may a sorcerer and a saint be friends?

  Across a table seems all right, Des allowed, sounding bemused at the discovery. In the same bed would be much too close.

  Well, quite.

  “So… you would be, um, allowed visitors, Blessed Chio?” said Ree in a tentative tone. “At your chapterhouse?”

  Chio lifted one slim shoulder. “If any ever came out to Gulls.” She added to Lonniel, “We don’t actually have any towers at the orphanage. It might be fun to live in one, if not as a prisoner. There’d be a handsome view of the basin, and the city. Much better than the girls’ dormitory, though they gave me my own room in the chapterhouse after my calling came upon me. They needed the dormer bed for the next orphan, I expect.”

  Lonniel’s eyes brightened, and she gestured urgently with her pear core. “Could we come? And visit you?”

  Ree’s startled glance shifted to his sister. “What a, a good idea.”

  Des, watching the play, started to silently laugh. Well, there’s a sister who’s just earned herself some brotherly love.

  What?

  Do keep up, Pen.

  Iserne said judiciously, “We could all go out. Ripol will certainly want to meet and thank Blessed Chio, when he returns.”

  Lonniel perked up at this offered treat. Ree cast his mother a grateful look.

  Is Iserne keeping up, too?

  Oh, I think so.

  Iserne bestowed a benign smile upon the saint. Upon the unmarried young woman? Both?

  “Be warned,” said Chio, “Learned Riesta will ask you for donations to the orphanage. He always does, no matter who comes. From the arc
hdivine down to the boatmen.”

  “Then we’ll be in good company,” said Iserne, undeterred.

  Lonniel bounced in her chair. “Ooh, yes, let’s all make a day of it when Papa gets back.”

  “You’d be very welcome,” said Chio. Her expression warmed as it dawned on her that Iserne’s offer was not just a social fib, made to be polite and as lightly forgotten, but a real promise. “All of you.”

  In the tug between admiring Chio, and falling face-first into his plate, Ree’s plate was starting to win. They’d all eaten till they couldn’t hold more, both Lonniel and Chio demonstrating impressive capacities. What food was left on the table would have to fend for itself, Pen thought muzzily. Ree wasn’t the only one for whom the horizontal beckoned. A gray light leaked through the dining chamber’s shutters, harbinger of the early midsummer dawn.

  “I should escort Blessed Chio back to Gulls,” Pen announced to the air generally. And wasn’t that going to be awkward at this late hour. He briefly pictured dropping the disheveled girl off at the chapterhouse boat landing like a package and fleeing back across the water, but no, that would be cowardly. The saint had set a daunting example of courage and nerve tonight, so Pen needed to hold up the honor of, of… sorcerers, or whatever. For the Order and the White God! he imagined declaiming, except that he was fairly certain his god would just laugh at him.

  “Oh. Yes, of course.” Iserne, too, had to pull herself away from a fascinated study of her young guest. “It’s so late it’s become early.” Her expression softened at her son. “Ree should go to bed, before he needs carrying up in a sack. I can’t do that anymore, now he’s man-sized.”

  Ree made a grunt of exhausted agreement, but pulled himself together as Pen and Chio rose. He managed to stand, holding the back of his chair, and offered her a precarious bow. “Blessed Chio. I hope to see you again soon.”

  She touched her forehead, mouth, navel, groin, and heart in the tally of five-fold benediction, tapped the back of her thumb to her lips, and pressed it to his forehead. “The white god guard you until then.”

  “He has been. Hasn’t he? You would know.”

  A secret smile, but it might be a secret shared with Ree. “Maybe.”

  Pen trailed after her into the entryway, like a pilot boat to some homegoing sailing vessel. There followed the confusions of departure, Pen in embarrassment begging Iserne for oarboat fare, his mumbled apologies overborne by her grateful generosity of coins. He could catch up to her next week in the curia and pay her back, he consoled himself.

  Iserne gave them careful directions to the nearest public landing at the mouth of the Wealdmen’s Canal, where Pen hoped they would find some early, or late, boatman waiting for work. He considered, for about two seconds, saving money by walking, again, all across town to the landing closer to Gulls on the city basin. No. The Richelon door closed on the happy fuss of his mother and sister getting Ree aimed up the stairs to his bed, and his unconvincing protests of self-sufficiency.

  * * *

  The rising light was turning the misty shore air to silver as they arrived at the landing, where they found a sleepy and thankfully ungarrulous boatman waiting to start his busy Bastard’s Day labors. Pen settled Chio in the forward-facing seat and took the one across from her. The boatman shoved them off with a surge that settled into gentle and soporific rocking.

  Pen blinked gritty eyes, and remembered: “Oh. Happy birthday, Blessed Chio. Will you at least get sweet custard, later?”

  “I trust so. The chapterhouse does put on a fine Bastard’s Day feast, once we have endured Riesta’s homilies. The orphans work up good appetites during the afternoon games in the god’s honor. Though right now I’m too full to care.” She tilted her head back to the warming sky. “Learned Iserne is a generous mother. I wonder if Ree, and Lonniel, and Lepia know how lucky they are.”

  And Ripol, presumably. Not hard to see who was the strong glue holding that household together.

  “They seem an admirable family,” Chio went on. “Much the sort I once dreamed of being adopted into. I’m too old for that now.” That telling I-don’t-care one-shoulder shrug, again.

  “It’s a family at a late stage,” Pen observed idly. “You’re seeing the results of many years of labors, not the labor itself. I grew up in a largish family myself, but as the lastborn, I never saw the beginnings either. We children mostly couldn’t wait to get away, toward the end.” Pen’s older brother Drovo, disastrously into a mercenary company. His sisters more naturally passing into marriage, nothing fatal there, yet. The eldest Rolsch stuck forever at the core, though as baron he presumably had compensations pleasing to him. Penric… well. He’d always been the odd duck.

  Swan, by now, suggested Des. Look, you’re even garbed in white feathers.

  Seriously smudged and ruffled, after the past night. White was a terrible choice of emblematic color for a god of chaos.

  Reminded of his sisters, it occurred to Pen there was another way for a young woman to acquire a family, very traditional indeed. But surely merchant clans did not approve portionless brides? The richer orphanages did sometimes bestow modest dowries upon their girls, he’d heard, though more often the houses were pressed just to come up with apprenticeship fees. It might be unkind to put such a notion into Chio’s head.

  He offered instead, “The princess-archdivine once quipped to me that our friends are what the gods give us to make up for our families.” In one of their more wine-mellowed late-night chats—though he suspected the hallow kings of the Weald experienced family on a whole different level.

  Not that different, said Des, and how did she know?

  Chio, at least, smiled at Pen’s imported joke.

  Her orphan state wasn’t a problem he could fix by any sorcery of his. That was a task for their god’s hand, perhaps. Though one needed to be cautious in prayers to the Bastard.

  Oh, come, Des scoffed. What makes you think His hand wasn’t stirring this pot all night? And possibly before then. I don’t think you need to say a word.

  Parsimony, or opportunism? Why not both…?

  I’d bet on Ree, myself. Young. Energetic. Grateful…

  There’s no tower to rescue this princess from, Pen pointed out.

  The lad seems resourceful. He might build one just to rescue her from it.

  Hah.

  Pen wished Chio well in any case. Whatever that well turned out to be.

  Chio sat up and pointed out across the glinting waters. “Ooh, look! The boats are starting to come in for the Bastard’s Day procession.”

  Pen followed her line. Either a big oarboat or a small galley, five oars on a side, sculled along overtaking them. It was painted, or freshly repainted, in white, with scrolling decorations of silver or more likely tin feigning silver, festooned with garlands and flowers, pennants flirting with the air.

  “That’s the boat from the Glass Island chapterhouse,” Chio identified it. She waved wildly at its occupants, who waved back. A grinning woman at the rail, taking in Pen’s vestments, tossed them a shouted blessing and a circlet of white flowers, which fell short and landed in the water. Chio made their boatman swerve aside. Pen grabbed the thwart as their boat wobbled when she leaned over to pluck it out and shake it off. She plopped it atop her head, where it sat askew.

  “Are there orphan boats from Glass Island, too?” Pen asked, looking around for such. The decorated flotilla of small vessels following the chapterhouse craft seemed to be a miscellaneous lot, but children were only thinly scattered among their passengers.

  “No, Glass doesn’t have an orphanage.”

  “I never thought to ask. Are you supposed to be in the procession today?” As an honored saint now, not displayed as hopeful human wares. If so, Pen was going to be delivering her late for it, oops.

  “Mm, no, the five Orders here tend to keep all their saints very private. The Father’s and the Mother’s people, I know, so that they won’t get pestered to distraction by supplicants. My task is too special
ized to draw supplicants, except those who really need me. Who are generally guided in.” Her grin flickered. “Like you.”

  Pen wasn’t sure but what blundered might be a better term than guided, for his Bastard’s Eve.

  “You have fine weather for the procession, this morning,” Pen allowed. The lagoon’s soft air felt good on his face, though by noon they’d all be seeking shade.

  “It’s usually so at midsummer,” the boatman put in, the first he’d interrupted—though he had been, inescapably, listening. Slow to wake up, maybe; Pen sympathized. But everyone was allowed to comment on the weather, everywhere, as far as Pen had observed. “Sometimes there’s wind. The equinoxes are more chancy. I row for the Father’s procession at winter solstice. Chilly, and properly somber if there’s mist. Your hands get chapped.” He nodded and, evidently satisfied to have said his piece, went back to his rhythmic sweeping.

  Five gods, five major festivals; the Bastard’s Day always taking over Mother’s Midsummer in Quintarian lands. The three other holy days that fell exactly between the solstices and equinoxes found alternate excuses for their celebrations.

  The Quadrenes tuck our god’s intercalary day in at Father’s Midwinter, Des remarked, because they imagine it keeps Him under better control. It’s considered a day of ill luck, for fasting and prayer, where no one goes out or starts any new enterprise. A pause for consideration, or perhaps memory, for she added, Young Umelan always found it very boring.

  Pen squinted and yawned. The boatman likely wouldn’t be too startled if his passenger curled up on the bottom of his boat and started snoring. He had to have ferried home plenty of exhausted holiday-goers over the years, if none quite this late, nor from a night this strange.

  Chio had fallen silent, studying the shifting cityscape as they reached the central basin. Fatigue seemed to be gaining on her at last, though not as much as on Pen. He didn’t often meet anyone who made him feel quite so old.