“To be fair,” said Pen, seminary debate-habits lingering, “I don’t think he’d ever planned murder. His main aim seemed to be theft. But when Ree caught him out, things went from bad to worse, each rash impulse struggling to fix the one before it.” Pen contemplated this. “Ending with trying to stab a saint, which strikes me as epically stupid.” He frowned at Chio. “Though the god could not have protected you from a blade, you know.”
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.”