Ree lifted his good hand toward the darkening bruise on her cheek. “Did I do that? I’m so sorry, Blessed Chio.”
She didn’t flinch. Shrugging off his apology, she said, “I know it wasn’t really you. Anyway, it was Merin’s fault for shoving me at you like that. He should have been praying, not cursing.”
Iserne seized the chair on Ree’s other side, leaving Pen to take the place across. “What’s this tale?”
Ree’s and Chio’s tumbling joint account of the confrontation in the warehouse was understandably both garbled and horrifying, Ree’s part not least because, famished, he kept trying to talk with his mouth full. Clarity was not much improved by them working backward, leapfrog fashion, from each of their vantages through the chaotic events of the evening leading up to it. Pen judged Ree was severely editing his hectic experiences spent under his ascendant demon for his mother’s ears. He did awkwardly confess about the fellow he’d robbed for the clothing he still wore, drawing in Penric to give what he hoped were soothing reassurances.
“Wait,” said Iserne, holding up her hands. “Go back to the beginning. You’re saying Merin threw you from your ship? It wasn’t an accident?”
Her teeth set as Ree disgorged a longer tale of his accusation of Merin and how it had come about, with a lot of names and details of merchant accounts and accounting that Pen did not follow but Iserne evidently did. It was clear Ree was regaining his wits, if not his composure.
“Embezzling. Well, I’m not surprised,” she said.
“You’re not? I was blindsided,” said Ree.
“Plainly, someone should have told you, but Merin was your Uncle Nigus’s man and problem, and so Ripol kept out of it. Nigus suspected sticky fingers back when Merin worked for him, but the losses all had other explanations—sly, I gathered—so he didn’t think he could prove it in a law court. He solved his problem by recommending Merin on to one of his more bitter rivals. Which I thought as nearly dubious as the original thefts, but I wasn’t consulted.”
“I’d wondered why you didn’t like him flattering Lonniel. I’d thought it was because he was too poor.”
She sniffed. “Ripol was that poor when we first married. And a difficult time we had of it, but he met our challenges by working harder. Not by wasting all his cleverness taking dishonest shortcuts.” She went on more intently, “But what happened after you were thrown into the water?”
Ree looked away, the fatigue underlying his sunburned features growing more marked. “I was so angry, I didn’t even think to be frightened at first, till my cries went unheard and the ship sailed out of sight. I could guess which way was east by the moon, as long as it was above the horizon, and by the stars a little. And the sun when dawn came. I didn’t think I could make it, but I swam toward the coast as best I could. Slower and slower as I grew tired. Finally it was all I could do to stay afloat. I thought, well, I thought about a lot of things. Things I should have done, and shouldn’t have, and all the things I was never going to get to do.”
Iserne’s hand pressed her lips, and she didn’t interrupt. Chio listened with grave interest, head bent toward him.
“The dolphin was the strangest part,” Ree went on, “coming up under me in the dawn just when I couldn’t swim anymore. I’d never been so close to one before, let alone touched it. Its skin was all slick, cool and firm like wet leather. Except lumpy—I think now the bumps must have been tumors, because some were broken open and infected, and there was a memory of pain, later. Not easy to hang onto, but I swear it waited for me like a good horse. We must have moved slowly toward Adria all that long day. Then it died, and sank from under me, and I thought I had gone mad from fear at last. I can scarcely remember the fishermen, I was so confused by then. We should find them to thank them.”
“Oh yes,” said Iserne fervently.
“The people from the hospice may be able to identify them for you,” Pen suggested. “If someone takes back that concussed fellow’s clothes and purse, you could ask then. He’s owed thanks of a sort, too, I think.”
“Does he know what he owes to you?” Chio asked Pen in curiosity.
All right, it could have been his life, if the rats had been quicker and hungrier, or if Madboy had bashed him harder. Pen waved this away. “He owes me nothing. All in a Bastard’s Eve work.” Pen’s holiday, hah.
Ree looked perturbed at this reminder, and altogether too grateful to his mother when she said, “I’ll take on that task tomorrow.”
“You’re likely the person best suited to make sure there are no repercussions,” Pen agreed. “There’s going to be enough of a legal tangle with Merin.” Pen was glad his Temple duties ended with the demon and the saint, the machineries of justice being the prerogative of the city and a very different god than his own.
A feminine voice, sleepy and miffed, sounded from the archway. “You’re having a feast? And you didn’t wake me up?” Then a gasp. “Ree!”
Pen looked up, and Ree twisted around in his chair, to see Lonniel pick up the skirts of her nightdress and pelt the few steps to her brother’s side. Iserne had to lean away as she grabbed him in an excited hug and ran her anxious fingers through his hair in a sisterly echo of his mother’s earlier greeting. “How is your head?”
“My head? Much better than it was, now I’m alone in it again.”
“It’s not broken after all?” she said as her searching fingers found neither lumps nor clotted blood.
“No, that was the other fellow, but Learned Penric says he’ll get better.”
“What?” They blinked at each other in mirrored confusion.
Penric explained to Ree, “We stopped here earlier, after we first encountered Iserne and Merin searching for you in the hospice. Merin didn’t want to mention your near-drowning or the demon, which he’d just found out about himself—Bastard’s teeth, that must have come as a shock. Nor tell the truth, for obvious reasons. So he told your sisters that after your ship moored in Lodi you’d run off due to being hit on the head in an unloading accident.”
“Son of a bitch,” growled Ree. “Whyever did he come here in the first place?”
“To bring the news to your mother of your loss overboard sailing up to the last stop in Trigonie,” said Chio. “He claimed he was sent to do so, on account of you two being cabinmates and him knowing your family, but I’ll bet he volunteered, to make sure only the right things were said.”
Ree’s jaw dropped at this outrageousness, echoed by Iserne’s affronted huff.
Chio mused on, “You have to admire his nerve, in a way. To face his murder victim’s mother and tell all those smooth lies. I knew he was sweating about it, but I didn’t realize why.”
“What?” shrieked Lonniel.
Her mother, not willing to give up her place, sent her around the table to sit next to Penric as Ree began his tale once more. Wide-eyed, she worked her way through two fruit tarts and a pile of pistachios as he brought his synopsis up from his fall into the sea to the mortal fight in their father’s warehouse.
He paused and cleared his throat. “If you were sweet on Merin, I’m sorry.”
She made a wry face. “Not especially? He made sheep’s-eyes at me, but so do the other young fellows who work for Father and Uncle. I knew he was angry and resentful of anyone with more luck than himself, which to hear him tell it seemed to be most people. I never dreamed he’d take it so far.”