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 archdivine 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.