The gardens for the children produced another benefit—everyone in the colony wanted their youngest children there, under Simplicity’s gentle guidance, for part of the day. Raffaele brought her twins when she came to learn cooking, and the other women copied her. As Ruth Ann had suspected, Raffaele would never be more than a middling baker. Her hand was too heavy for pastry, and not firm enough for yeast dough, though both her pie crusts and bread were now at least edible. But the other women followed her lead, and the gardens were full of busy little children.
Raffaele’s twins, though—the twins gave Ruth Ann a funny feeling in the chest. Salomar, in particular, was all too familiar . . . she had seen that quirk of mouth, that shape of eyebrow and set of eye, before. She looked again and again at Raffaele and Ronnie, trying to trace in their faces the source of those details of Salomar’s. What kept nagging at her had to be impossible. She had to be imagining it. Didn’t she?
She put her mind firmly back on the school. A few of the other former wives were being courted by men whose wives had died, but enough of the women wanted no part of remarriage that she was sure of enough teachers for years to come. Her daughters had suitors, too, the older ones.
And her sons, about whose acceptance she had been so worried, were every one of them more expert at tool use than these city folks, for all that those men had taken courses and been passed as expert enough. They may’ve been, Ruth Ann thought, with the fancy electric tools they’d trained on, but few of them knew anything of unpowered tools.
Everything from beds and tables to bowls poured out of the boys’ workshop. Nobody minded that it was plain stuff, though one of the other colonists began making stains out of local plants to give the wood different tones of soft red and yellow. And nobody here minded if a few girls took up woodcrafting. All through the rest of that spring, and into this new world’s long summer, Ruth Ann blessed the long series of chances that had brought them here.
“I never thought nineteen women and a bunch of children could make this much difference,” Ronnie said one hot afternoon. He’d taken to coming by to fetch the twins, and he often stopped to chat, leaning on one of the planters. “You’ve galvanized the colony, is what you’ve done. The extra supplies helped, but it’s you, Ruth Ann, you and the rest of them, who’ve waked us up and gotten us moving.”
She glanced sideways at him, thinking that he hadn’t learned it all yet, even so. Greatly daring, but also confident, she reached to the basket of hand tools. “While you’re resting,” she said, handing him a weeder and nodding to the planter he leaned on.
He grinned at her. “You never do stop working, do you?”
“You don’t have to rush if you don’t get behind,” she pointed out. “Those stickery ones are the weeds.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned at her. “I’ll learn in the end.”
“By the way,” she said, finding it easier to bring this up when he was bending over the tangled growth, weeding. “Those twins of yours . . . I can’t believe your Raffaele bore them—she’s so tiny.”
Ronnie’s ears turned redder. “She didn’t,” he said shortly. “They’re adopted.”
“It doesn’t matter to God,” Ruth Ann said. “What it is, though—and I know I’m being presumptuous, but—that Salomar. He reminds me of someone.”
The back of Ronnie’s neck went three shades darker, not counting the sunburn. “Who?” he asked, more coolly than Ruth Ann expected.
“I’m thinking,” Ruth Ann said, folding her needle away, because her hand had started shaking. “I’m thinking he minds me of my—of Mitch. And I’m thinking, if there’s any reason he should mind me of Mitch, that you might be worrying that I’d notice. You’ve been awful good to us, and I don’t want to worry you. So if—if it is that, what I’m thinking of, then—then I want you to know that I don’t mind, and I’m glad to have the boy around. Both of them.”
Ronnie said nothing; his shoulders bunched, and the dirt flew.
“I won’t say any more,” Ruth Ann said.
“It’s . . . all right.” He turned around; his eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I—we didn’t know you were coming, or—but—Oh, I’m making a mess of this, Raffa will kill me. But if you’ve guessed, you’ve guessed—”
“I bore nine of that man’s children; I know their stamp,” Ruth Ann said. She said nothing of Peter’s father, though she knew exactly who that red hair reminded her of.
“Brun wanted a good home for them; she was afraid they might be stolen away and used against her.”
“You don’t have to defend her to me,” Ruth Ann said. She still could not understand a woman not clinging to her own flesh and blood, but she wasn’t going to argue that now. If their mother had been a natural mother, she herself wouldn’t have this chance. “You don’t know what a blessing it is, to have those children here,” she said. “I’ve worried and worried—that’s the last bit of Mitch I’ll ever see; I wanted to know the children were safe. Will Raffaele mind? I’m not going to interfere, I promise you.”
“She’ll skin me, but she’ll hug you,” Ronnie said. “Ruth Ann—you are a very, very unusual lady.”
“I try to be a good woman,” Ruth Ann said, but a bubble of delight rose and would not be denied. She stood up, and let her head fall back. “Praise God, you aren’t angry with me for seeing what I saw, and you won’t keep me from him. I never thought to be happy again, and here I am happier than I’ve ever been.”
Chapter Thirteen
Confession, for a member of the Order of Swords who had been on a mission, must always be to a priest of the Order. Even so, there were things no one confessed, not if he wanted to live; the priests had the right—ecclesiastical and legal—to mete out punishment, including death.
Hostite Fieddi knelt in silence, awaiting the priest’s arrival, and thought about what he had to confess, and what he had to conceal. As a young man, he had found distinguishing between debriefing and confession very difficult, but now it was second nature.
The soft chime rang; Hostite began the old, familiar ritual, “Forgive me . . .” Even as his voice continued the opening phrases, his mind was dividing, as sheep from goats, the truths he must repent from the other truths of which he must not repent, as long as he was a Swordmaster.
“It has been a long time,” the priest said.
“I was on a mission,” Hostite said. “To distant worlds.”
“Beyond the Church’s dominion?” asked the priest.
“Nothing is beyond the Church’s dominion,” Hostite said. “But this was far from any priest of the Order of Swords.”
“Ah. Go on then.”
Category by category, he laid his soul’s burden out, the temptations acted upon and those merely dwelt upon in the mind, the orders followed which ought not to have been followed, the orders not followed which ought to have been followed. He was heartily sorry for them all, for the necessities which his duty placed upon his conscience, when he would—were he other than he was—have been happy to live in peace all his days, with no more to confess than a lustful glance at someone’s daughter.
“And have you any other sins . . . lust perhaps?”
They always asked about lust, though by now they should know that his conditioning had destroyed that possibility. He answered as always, and as always received his penance in true submission of spirit. When he was too old to be of service, when the Master of the Order of Swords commanded, he would confess the last of his sins, and go to his death clean-hearted, no longer the Shadow of the dancers, but filled with light. So it had been promised him, and so he believed.
There was no other life but this possible, and no other future to which he belonged.
“Hostite—!” The Master’s call brought him out of the reverie which a long penance produced.