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 specialized 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.
The sense of a snort from Des, which he prudently ignored.
It occurred to Pen, watching Chio trail a meditative hand in the water, that there was one aspect of her night’s saintly labors she had entirely talked around at the Richelons’ table. And that his duty to her as a divine of their shared Order extended beyond merely acting as her guardsman. Even if she’d handed him back as much defending as he’d given to her, which was a trifle embarrassing.
She has the god’s guidance, Pen. Why would she need yours?
Cogent question, but… Let’s find out.
It took him a moment or two to decide how to start.
“When I was nineteen, and feckless, and knew almost nothing yet about my new calling as a sorcerer, it never even crossed my mind to wonder what distress disposing of Des would have caused old Broylin. He was presented to me as already an authority, an immovable fixture in the world, like a mountain. He seemed surprised when the god refused my demon, but not… not unhappy. I just assumed he’d seen many and worse. I know of one for certain—a renegade Temple demon, which must have become a full person by the time it was recalled and destroyed by the god.” Des’s memories of Tigney’s ascendant demon were fraught enough, shared only reluctantly with Pen.
Chio shook the droplets off her hand and turned toward him. “You’re a noticing sort of man, Learned Penric. In ways Riesta can’t be, I guess.”
Pen opened a conceding palm. “Yes.”
A little silence. Then, “In a way,” Chio said, “I’m glad this one was such an awful mess. At least there wasn’t doubt, atop the other ugliness of my task. If that was a birthday gift to me from the god, well… it’s not as if I can give it back.”
“Good is not always the same thing as nice, they say.” He studied her tired young face in the light of the sun, now topping the city and piercing the watery silver air with rose-gold. It would be a fine fair day, and hot. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I… will be.” She puffed a faint laugh, adding, “You’re the first to ever ask me that, at one of these duties. Everyone asked it of that chicken-woman, after I freed her, but not of me. Not even me. Her elemental hadn’t been in her long enough to pick up more than a trace of humanity. It was like erasing a shadow. This… wasn’t like that. Full person, yes. Very full.” Her eyes sought the passing shoreline. “The god grieved for the fate of his creature.”
Did her hands feel stained with that fate? “It was seven lives deep, by my count, however short some were, and had grown dark and twisted. I don’t think any other rider could have healed it by that stage. Not even by all our god’s contriving.”
“This, I saw.” She turned back to him. “Your demon is much, much deeper, but not dark. She glows, like colored lanterns in a vast winding cavern.”
Des had been seeing nothing in that moment of demon-destruction, like a child hiding its head under a blanket from night terrors. But if Chio had been watching over the white god’s shoulder, nothing would have been hidden from her. It was probably well such moments were short, so that the gods could return their saints to the world still sane. Mostly.
Chio’s curious look across at Pen grew grave, unblinking. “What do you grieve for so hard, Learned?”
Oh. So it wasn’t just Des that she’d seen into, or Merin and Ree.
He shrugged in discomfort. “In time, most of us become orphans, it turns out. The princess-archdivine had been like a second mother to me. And as great a loss, last year.” As that bereavement had fallen bare months before the death of his first mother, Pen supposed he had an exact-enough standard of comparison, though he wasn’t sure such a balance-scale made any sense, really.
Chio rocked back, absorbing this. Then leaned forward. “That wasn’t all, I think?”