He sat with his mouth hanging open and watched in stunned fascination as the Orban fleet paraded into Lanti Harbor.
In another moment, Pen overcame his paralysis and scrambled down the mast so fast it made Des yip. He pounded across the deck, leaping the groaning, swearing bodies who had not yet begun to find their feet, and thrust his head over the rail.
“Lencia! Seuka! Come get me, quickly!”
Alarmed, the girls rowed near as Pen swung out onto the netting and dropped into the boat, making it dip and pitch. “I’ll take the oars now.”
“Are they after you?” asked Seuka, with a fierce look up at Falun’s galley.
“No, but I need to catch my brother-in-law.”
“What?” said Lencia, giving up her seat to Pen’s urgency. “…You have a brother-in-law?”
“Yes, and he’s here. Somehow.” The boat surged as Pen dug in the oars. He only had time to blast a few fist-sized patches of rot below Falun’s waterline in passing, which did not nearly relieve his feelings.
As they rounded the slaver, Pen glanced over his shoulder and tried to select a course that would intercept the flagship. Unfairly, Adelis had far more oars than he did, but then the general—or was he appointed an admiral for this venture?—also had a boat measured in tons. Many tons. With great momentum, and a bronze rostrum that could rip through enemy hulls even faster than Pen could.
And, if those ships were full of his seasoned Rusylli-campaign veterans, he led a gang of brutes who could eat pirate rowdies for lunch, and possibly intended to.
As the two vessels converged, Pen stood up on his knees on his seat, shouted, and waved frantically. Lookouts observed, conferred; in a moment, a broad, tough, familiar figure in an army cuirass of boiled leather plates and a thrown-back red cloak came to the rail, saw him, and called orders over his shoulder. After a moment, all the churning oars rose in unison and paused. Men hurried, and a climbing net was flung over the bow ahead of the oar banks.
Pen rowed faster, the ship slowed, and he managed to bump the rowboat into the right spot. “Grab on!” he yelled at the girls, who reached for the netting. They didn’t quite match speed before they were pulled out right over the thwart; Pen hastily followed, ready to lunge or if necessary dive for a falling young body, but they clung on and climbed. The rowboat thunked off the hull and spun away, and Pen spared a hope its poor owner would eventually find it.
Many strong arms reached down to pull them up and inboard, and Pen in turn. “Ah!” Clutching the rail, he hauled himself to his feet and looked around.
Boots clumped across the deck, and Adelis stood before him, hands on his hips, shaking his head in exasperation. “There you are. Why am I not even surprised?”
“However did you know where to find me?”
“I thought the columns of smoke were a good guide.”
“Well, yes, but—” Pen became aware of the sisters shrinking to his sides, staring in fear at Adelis.
Pen didn’t find Adelis in the least fearful, but then, he was used to him. Muscular build, Cedonian brick-colored skin, black hair in a military cut, clean shaved, all very normal up to the top half of his face. There, severe red and white burn scars framed his eyes in a pattern like an owl’s feathers. His irises were a strange deep garnet color, glowing like coals under the black mantel of his eyebrows when the light caught them. Pen knew every inch of that face, since he’d healed it after the murderous boiling acid that had been meant to steal Adelis’s sight permanently. That Adelis had smoothly refitted both miraculous recovery and horrifying scars into support of his commander’s reputation was all Adelis, though.
Pen granted the effect was a bit shocking when one first encountered it. He didn’t think his brother-in-law would enjoy little girls screaming at the sight of him, though, so he hurried his introductions, first in Roknari, of which Adelis had a good working grasp.
“Lencia, Seuka, this is my wife’s twin brother, General Adelis Arisaydia.” Pen made his voice deliberately cheerful, by way of guidance. “He serves the duke of Orbas, as Nikys and I do.”
Well, not quite the same way, suggested Adelis’s eyebrow twitch.
Switching to Cedonian, “Adelis, this is Lencia and Seuka Corva, late of Raspay, orphans and wards of my Order. And so of me, for the moment. I haven’t been able to teach them much Cedonian yet, though we’re working on it.”
“Ah,” said Adelis. He looked down wryly at the sisters. In passable low Roknari, he said, “Welcome to my flagship the Eye of Orbas, Lencia and Seuka Corva. How did you come to meet our Penric?”
“He… dropped from the sky?” Seuka offered hesitantly.
“The pirates threw him into the hold where we were prisoners,” Lencia clarified this. “Then we were all brought to Lantihera and sold, and we’ve been trying to get away ever since.”
“It’s a long tale that I can tell later,” said Pen. The merest glance confirmed Adelis had his hands full right now, from the anxious officers clustered around him like bees tending their queen to the trail of ships following on their stern, signal flags flapping. “But—how did you chance to come to Lantihera? Do you mean to conquer the island?”
“Brother of Autumn avert, no.” Adelis tapped his fist over his heart in unironic prayer. “It’s much too far from Orbas’s coast to defend, and has no strategic value to us. Quite the reverse. We don’t need to let them know that, though.” A sardonic jerk of his head toward the burning waterfront. “But the Lanti pirates have been annoying Orbas for some time. Yours was the third Orban ship captured this year, and they lately raided a village on Pulpi.” One of the dukedom’s few coastal islands. “Duke Jurgo was fed up, so he sent me to persuade them to stop.”
Along with a couple thousands of his friends, evidently.
“He granted me discretion as to how. Extracting you, which I figured for the trickiest part, is unexpectedly accomplished. And razing the town in revenge for you seems… redundant. Is that chaos all your doing?”
“More or less.” Penric rubbed his tired, smoke-stung, itching eyes. “It’s been a bad day.”
“I see that.” Adelis tilted his head, lightened his tone. “And do I also find you well, Madame Desdemona?”
“Yes, indeed, General,” said Des through Pen’s mouth, which he politely yielded to her. “I’m having a delightful outing.”
A scimitar glint slipped across Adelis’s mouth. Initially appalled, Adelis had only gradually become reconciled to Penric’s demon, but lately he’d begun to treat her as a sort of invisible sister-in-law. It was their shared bloody-mindedness that had finally broken the ice, Pen decided.
“But,” said Penric. “How did you even know I was here?”
Adelis snorted. “First was that ship you’d boarded in Trigonie, which sailed into Vilnoc complaining of their mishandling. Its crew had retaken it in the night, and it probably arrived not long after you reached Lantihera—though the description of their missing passenger took about a day to reach anyone who actually knew what you were. Next was your travel-box, which some fishermen had hauled up in their nets and couldn’t get open, so brought to Nikys. Who did not react well.” Adelis grimaced. “Third was an Adriac merchanter with damaged water casks and a lurid tale of their escape in which you featured almost, but not quite, unrecognizably. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times begins to seem like a message to be ignored at one’s peril.” He cleared his throat. “And Nikys, of course. Very upset. Also to be ignored at one’s peril.”
“Oh,” said Penric. Warmed. Disturbed, but also warmed.
Adelis rubbed the back of his neck and huffed. “Fishing you out of the harbor first upends my tactical plans. Not that they aren’t always. Eh, but I think I can do something interesting with this.” He didn’t look very discommoded.