He motioned over a beardless young officer and detailed him to escort Penric and the Corva sisters to his own cabin. “Get them whatever they need.”
The lad led Penric and his charges off, picking their way over the deck. Adelis, gesturing, was the brief center of a new flurry, men departing this way and that, more signal flags urgently rising. Handling ships, Pen reflected, seemed a much more complicated matter than sinking them. But at least he seemed unlikely to be tossed overboard from this one.
Adelis’s cabin, tucked down in a corner by the stern, proved an even smaller closet than the coffin on Pen’s first ship. It did feature a solid bunk, not a hammock, which was soon put to use with its fold-down board as table for the basin and wash-water the aide brought at Pen’s earnest request, plus food or at least rations. Pen gave the girls their pick and then, famished to the point of tremors, snacked on olives, rather stale bread rounds, dried fruit, cheese curds, more olives, and even ate his fish plank.
He and Des personally supplied much purer drinking water all around, worth the heat-price, taming the harsh red army wine. Everyone frugally shared basin, soap chunk, and washrag, and Pen sacrificed the last of the limited ewer of cask-water to lather and rinse his crusting hair.
Clean sailors’ tunics, belted with braided cord, made neat modest dresses for the girls, though they made it plain they meant to preserve their boys’ togs as precious plunder. Pen did not miss the tunic and trousers he’d been captured in, not new to start with and last seen much worse for wear, but he wondered how soon the girls would realize the sack of food and clothes they had lost when attacked on the beach included the last work of their mother’s hands.
About to redon, with distaste, the damp, muddled-green cast-offs, Pen was startled when the aide brought out and handed him a neat bundle of his own clothes from Vilnoc.
“Madame Nikys sent them with the general,” the young officer informed him proudly. “She had great faith in him.”
Fine linen drawers. Slim tan trousers. The summer tunic of his rank and Order: sleeveless pale linen, its high neck supported by the silver-plated torc that was the only uncomfortable bit of it. Split down the sides from the hips, it fell to his calves in two panels, slits and hems weighted with a band embroidered with a frieze of creatures sacred to the Bastard in Orbas: rats and crows, gulls and hill vultures, some ambiguous insects, all much more endearing than in real life. It was cinched with a braided sash intertwining white and cream, proclaiming his rank as a senior divine, and its third strand of silver marking, or perhaps warning of, his status as a Temple sorcerer.
Every stitch of it lovingly spun, woven, and sewn by Nikys. Putting it on was like easing into her embrace. It also allowed him to slip in a small lesson in Quintarian theology to the girls, intrigued by its meaningful details but mostly taken with the cavorting needlework creatures.
His rank and calling seemed to settle again on his shoulders with his garb; not inwardly, whence it never strayed, but certainly outwardly, judging by the way the aide stepped back half a pace in new respect. Or possibly caution.
Good, purred Des. About time we received our due.
No furious fighting had erupted outside, obviously. Pen had heard the rattle of the ship’s stone anchor being let down a while ago, the very opposite of rowing like mad to ram some doomed target. Had there been any left.
Adelis, he shortly learned when they ventured back out onto the deck, had gone ashore for a parley with whatever quorum of the Guild and the town council could be hastily gathered. He’d trailed an honor guard of a few hundred sturdy, heavily armed soldiers. The rest of the fleet hovered on the water, temporarily quiescent but alert. Any lesser Lanti vessels had scattered away like frightened ducks.
Pen hung on the landward rail. The port was in utter disarray. Five ships sunk at their moorings—Falun’s galley now lay on its side, waterlogged—three still smoldering, the remains of one pier falling in blackened chunks into the water, a major segment of the waterfront burnt to the ground; really, the work the Orban fleet had come to do was already near-complete. With half its ships and captains out to sea, the Guild was in no position to offer resistance. They had apparently leapt on the offer of a negotiation.
While waiting for developments, Pen persuaded the aide to conduct the girls and himself on a tour of the war galley. Adelis had shown him around its fascinating complexity once before, a few months ago when it was in dock for winter maintenance in Vilnoc’s navy yard, so not a few of the men recognized their general’s Temple-man relative, compelling Pen to return salutes with a polite tally-sign and blessing. The rowers idling at their benches were military volunteers, no slaves here, and they and the soldiers seemed inclined to take Pen as more mascot than threat, along with his wards, who amused them. Although a number of the men, returning from a visit to the railing to study their erstwhile target of Lanti, cast him unsettled looks.
Adelis never believed in wasting time, so Penric was not too surprised to see him rowed back out to the Eye of Orbas at sunset. The faint Adelis-smirk on his face as he climbed back up the netting indicated the general was in a good mood, which seemed to hearten his welcoming men. Pen felt more cautious about that, but he didn’t get an explanation till they were sitting down for dinner together.
Beneath a hooped canopy that sheltered a portion of the stern, illuminated by hanging lanterns, they perched cross-legged on cushions and were brought an onboard picnic, a cut above the lunch rations. The girls settled close at Pen’s feet. Pen topped up Adelis’s wine, not over-watered, and prodded him for his report from shore.
Adelis grinned and held his news hostage for Pen’s tale first. Pen started with the dawn attack, though with a short doubling-back to complain of the archdivine of Trigonie whose delays had put Pen on that ship in the first place. He left out mentions of his brushes with the gods, though the bemused narrowing of Adelis’s red-sparking eyes suggested he observed the lacunae. The collapses of Pen’s first plan for ransom, and his second for the prison escape, he detailed but briefly; Pen thought it unnecessary of Adelis to laugh like a drain at the picture of Pen left swearing on the dock. Then a synopsis of their sojourn in the temple.
“Are you planning to attack Lanti Town?” Pen asked.
“Not at present,” said Adelis.
“Because there are good people here as well as ill.” Pen reflected on all he’d met, Jato, Godino, the friendly cook, the Mother’s midwife, and on and on.
“The gods may be able to sort the just from the unjust soul by soul. I’m afraid armies must treat them in batches.”
“Mm,” Pen half-conceded. “I wonder if poor Godino remains safe. An attempt at rescue might just draw attention to him where there was none before.”
“Possibly. If your Brother Godino is a man of sense he’ll have taken to the hills by now.”
“So I hope.” Pen finished with the tersest description he could manage of his past day, which nonetheless made Adelis’s eyebrows climb.
“You know, my offer to you to attend upon my army as an irregular auxiliary still stands,” said Adelis, leadingly.
“And so does my refusal,” Pen sighed.
It was an old argument. Adelis did not pursue it, turning instead to drawing more of their version of events from the Corva sisters. His efforts at kindliness were more labored than his Roknari, but the girls seemed to take them for sincere.
“The parlay, Adelis,” said Pen, when Adelis finished diverting himself with this.