Hah. Once she is with child, the duke will do her a favor by sending you off to do his bidding. You are going to be just like all those medical students who diagnose themselves with every rare fatal malady they’ve just learned about. When the time comes, mark you, I am not going to let you terrorize her with all your lurid worries.
He had to smile at the vision. Des was probably just being optimistic in order to buoy him, here in this dark near-prison so far from home, but he granted he was a little heartened.
A rustling and a sigh came from the cot next to his, and a whisper in Roknari, “Are you awake?”
Not meant for Pen’s ears, he realized as Lencia mumbled in irritation to her sister, “I am now. Go back to sleep.”
“Can’t.”
“Well, stop wriggling around. And quit kicking me.”
“M’not.”
“Are too.”
A sigh. Then, “I miss Mama. I want to go home. I want Mama.”
“Don’t talk about it,” chided Lencia, hunching as if hit. “It just makes it worse.”
“It wasn’t s’pposed to be like this. Why didn’t Papa come?”
“You saw he never got the letter. He probably doesn’t even know about Mama yet.”
“Maybe… maybe he came to Raspay after we left. And is following us.”
“Well, if he did, he won’t find us now. We aren’t anywhere we meant to be.”
A brooding silence, and a defeated whisper, of, “Yes, I know… I just… don’t want it to be so.”
A reluctant, conceding hum. “Me, too, Seuka.”
After a while, another whisper: “So what are we going to do? Mama died, Papa didn’t come, Taspeig left us… that poor sea captain was killed…” A shudder.
Had that slaughter happened in front of the girls’ eyes?
“I don’t know. Stop wanting grownups to fix things, maybe. It hasn’t worked so far.”
“Should we try to run away together?”
“I… maybe. I don’t know. That might be worse. If anyone on this island caught us, they’d probably give us back, and then we’d be beaten. Or maybe they’d just make us be slaves in a poorer house.”
“At least we’d be with each other.”
“Only until one of us was sold. Or both of us.”
A voiceless mm, like a dog’s plaint. “What about Master Penric? He said… uh, I’m not really sure what he said.”
A shifting of attention to the nearby cot where Pen lay. He kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady, and refrained from moving.
“I couldn’t figure it out either. I suppose he was just blustering, the way fellows do.”
“But he seems kind. And smart. He keeps trying to help people.”
“I don’t think kind is much help against pirates.”
“He’s pretty enough to be a crow-boy.” Seuka considered this. “Or maybe when he was younger, before he became a scribe.”
“It looked like that Rathnattan captain who bought him thought so too.”
“Does… do you think Master Penric realized? Should we warn him?”
“Don’t know. Mama says”—a hiccough—“said, crow-boys are worse-treated than street whores. I’m not so sure about scribes.” A hesitation. “Anyway, what could he do if we did? He doesn’t look very strong.”
“The captain was plenty strong, and the pirates still hacked him to bits.” A gulp. No, two gulps, confirming Pen’s speculation. “Maybe smart would work better. If it was on our side.”
“No one is on our side, Seuka.”
A long exhalation. “I s’ppose not.”
“Go to sleep.” Lencia started to turn over, but then, reluctantly, rolled back and hugged her sister close like some bony, awkward, unhappy cloth doll.
The two fell back to sleep before Pen did.
Pen woke at dawn and slipped quietly out of their room, careful not to rouse the girls or the old couple and the injured Aloro, who’d taken the other two beds last night while the less crippled were delegated to the dormitory hammocks. Pen drifted down to the kitchen just in time to intercept the house servants arriving to prepare breakfast.
There, for the price of some volunteer labor and charm, he deftly extracted a deal of potentially useful information. The older woman in charge, her lame brother, and a niece proved chatty, interested in the friendly scribe from far away over icy mountains they would likely never see. Pen paid for their tales with a few vivid word-pictures of his birthplace that left him a trifle homesick.
The island, he’d learned yesterday, was Lantihera, an Old Cedonian name hinting at its deeper history; it had once been a possession of the empire, which explained the antique remnant of water system in the back court. More immediately useful, the name had finally placed it on Pen’s mental map of the region. The servants’ recent personal and local anecdotes were also revealing.
This unprisonlike building was dedicated to ransom candidates, the injured, and the meek. The port—meaning the town, Lanti Harbor or just Lanti for short—was its owner and the little clan’s employers. Their work here was seasonal; both pirates and their prey were driven from the sea by the storms that plagued it in winter, the tempest Pen’s ship had suffered being an untimely fluke.
Summer was actually, the cook explained to Pen, the quiet time in town, when most of the ships and their crews were out. The rowdies drank and gamed and whored their way through winter, arriving at spring dead broke, if not just plain dead, and ready to raid again. Given the hazards of their trade, Pen was not entirely sure this approach to life was irrational, though the cook spared a nod of admiration for the few notable sailors prudent or successful enough to retire rich, at least by local standards.
A more secure prison for the able-bodied men slated for slavery lay at the other end of the harbor, owned by the guild of fifteen pirate captains who divided control of the port uneasily with the town council. In either location, captives were kept for as short a time as possible before shifting their risks to the flesh-merchants who carried them away. Making Lanti less a slave market than a wholesale warehouse, with people shuffled off in bulk shiploads.
Really, Pen mused, if the Lanti pirates only captured people and goods for their own use, the island would soon be saturated, and the trade would dwindle. It was the middlemen buying the booty and the captives for coin who made the demand bottomless. Pen wasn’t sure which half of the traffic he disliked most. Perhaps he didn’t have to choose a hierarchy. Lowerarchy?
Slavery was not practiced in the austere cantons, though there remained the question of the continuous export of its men in the mercenary companies, so railed against by the Temple. At least such fellows bartered themselves. During a few historical famines, starving farmers had sold their children to the merchants who came over the mountains from the north for the purpose, events long remembered and resented. Pen wondered what lives the young starvelings had all found in the warmer countries, and if he’d ever met any of their descendants unawares.
All very fascinating, scholar-man, said Des, but if you want more of the gruesome details, ask Umelan. I don’t see need to repeat her experiences in this life. Pray attend to the practical. I can’t get off this island without you.
Yes, yes. Pen smiled as he lifted a tray of bread and olives to carry into the main room, which made the startled cook smile back in quizzical echo.
After settling the girls—who had been thrown into a brief panic by awakening to his absence, and Pen wasn’t entirely sure if they’d worried for themselves or for him—overseeing their breakfasts, and working up a little more goodwill in the kitchen, Pen explored the building. An armed guard who seemed more a dozing porter sat outside the front door; even less picket impeded Pen from going out the back way, though he refrained for the moment. The only reading matter he found was an abandoned sheaf of old accounts, which even he was not desperate enough to secure for later. At the end of the upstairs corridor, he discovered a ladder leading to the flat roof, and ascended.