“Ah, yes, that. I have wrangled a treaty from the Guild of Lantihera.”
Pen blinked. “To what end?”
“An agreement to leave Orbas, its islands, and its shipping alone.”
“Do you think they’ll honor it?”
“For a season, perhaps. I’ve slipped a few agents ashore to watch for their inevitable lapse. Next time we can return in less of a scramble. Or, better, induce the Carpagamons to do so.”
“You didn’t look as if you were scrambling. Quite formidable.”
“Learned, you have no idea what a miracle of logistics you observe before you. If it weren’t for the sea maneuvers I’d talked Jurgo into, and which were supposed to take place next week, we wouldn’t have sailed out of Vilnoc for another month.”
“I daresay. So… a treaty in exchange for not invading Lantihera, which you weren’t going to do in the first place?” No wonder Adelis had looked smug.
“I sweetened the pot by offering to not grant my fleet three days of shore leave.”
“There’s a difference between that and sacking the town?”
“Not much. The council took my point. You were a more fundamental bone of contention. To the tune of thirty thousand silver ryols.”
Pen gasped, appalled. “That’s a prince’s ransom! Or, wait, no, were they demanding reparations…?”
Adelis stared, then laughed. “Ah, no, Penric! I wouldn’t have offered a copper for that. No, that’s what they’re paying us to not leave you here.”
Des crowed with delight.
Penric just… drank.
The Orban fleet sailed on the morning tide, right after the coin chests were delivered.
Pen leaned on the stern rail with Adelis and watched the island recede behind them. That dwindling was the most desirable sight he could imagine.
“What will you do with my, my anti-ransom?” Pen asked him.
“It will be split. Part will be divided among my troops, to compensate them for the sad lack of loot from the sad lack of battle. The rest to Jurgo, to help pay for this sea-holiday.”
“Maneuvers,” corrected Pen. “Just a more realistic sort.”
“That is an argument I will store up.”
“Don’t forget the share to the Temple.”
“I’ll leave that accounting to the duke.”
Pen snickered. Sails raised, oars shipped, the breeze moved them for free, and in the right direction. White-and-gray harbor gulls swooped and shrieked in their wake, an unmelodic hymn to their recessional. The bold scavenger birds were considered creatures of the Bastard in these seas, he was reminded.
“It doesn’t do any good, you know,” Pen said at last. “All those ships and goods I destroyed were stolen in the first place. The Lanti pirates will just return to their trade with their efforts redoubled, to make up their losses.”
“I expect so,” said Adelis. “We could still turn back and raze the town.” Pen was not entirely sure that was an idle jest. “Before they finish rebuilding that old Carpagamon fortress would actually be a good time.”
Pen waved an averting hand. “I don’t know what would stop the raiders altogether. The middle-merchants who buy the goods and people are as much a part of the system as the pirates, and the ones they sell them to even more so, and more diffuse and harder to attack. Being nearly everybody.” Pen brooded. “The cantons manage without slavery.”
“And are also very poor, you say.”
“Mm.” Pen could not altogether deny this. “Not that poor. We do well enough.”
Adelis offered, “The Darthacans, I’m told, are building ships and warships off their far east coast that are all-sail, and don’t require rowers. The rougher seas there have sunk more galleys than battles ever did, so that makes sense to me. If those designs do indeed prove superior, the time of galley slaves may come to an end without the need for virtuous canton austerity.”
“But not in mines. Or the demand for concubines and servants.” Scullions and scribes alike.
“I can’t help you there. Not my trade. Pray to your gods, Learned.”
“The gods take almost all who do not refuse them, slave or free. I’m not sure they see a difference between one form of human misery and another. They don’t think the way we do. Soul by soul, as you say.”
Adelis’s black brows flicked up, perhaps at the disquiet of standing next to a man who could plausibly claim any idea of how the gods thought. “Thieves will still pursue other forms of treasure that they cannot otherwise earn, or just raid for mad bravado. And soldiers will still be called upon to put them down. I don’t foresee an end to either of our trades in my lifetime.”
“Nor mine, I suppose. Trade or lifetime.” Pen turned to lean his back against the rail and study the Corva sisters, presently cross-legged on the other side of the stern being taught knots by a friendly sailor.
Adelis followed his glance, and asked with an odd diffidence, “Are those two god-touched, do you know?”
Because Pen could tell, being in an oblique chaotic sense god-touched himself?
Adelis went on, “They seem to have suffered the most extraordinary mix of chance and mischance, ill-luck and luck. Of which the most extraordinary was having you dropped atop them. Your god’s white hand at work?”
“I wish I knew,” sighed Pen. “Not one single thing that has happened requires an extraordinary explanation. It’s just the, hm, accumulation.” He pursed his lips. “I hope I get a chance to delve further into their mystery.”
“If you do, pray share it.” Adelis pushed off the rail, called away by some officer wanting his commander’s attention. “If you can.”
“Aye,” said Penric.
Epilogue
As much as Pen liked his upstairs study overlooking the shared well-court, he had to admit it grew close on a hot Vilnoc summer morning. So he’d moved the girls’ language lesson down to the back pergola, its plank table and benches shaded by grape leaves, the surrounding pots of kitchen herbs lending a pleasantly rustic effect. The concentration of practicing Cedonian letters with slate and chalk had given way, in the languid warmth, to learning a few children’s Temple hymns instead. Pen thought the rhythm, rhyme, and refrains did more, faster, to fix words in young brains than dry readings or recitations, not that the latter didn’t have their place.
And he was able, without drudgery, to slip in the needed repetition by trying for harmony, his light baritone blending agreeably, he hoped, with the girls’ sopranos. Curiously, Seuka’s voice held to the key better than Lencia’s; he fancied Lencia’s busy mind was trying too hard. Still straining to be both lost mother and father to their truncated family, when being big sister seemed task enough to Pen.
Their rudimentary choir practice was interrupted by Nikys, rapping on a pergola support and smiling, so presumably not because she was being maddened by the noise. “Penric, we have a visitor.”
He looked up and past her shoulder. The man hovering anxiously there was middle-aged, middle-sized, sturdy rather than stout. He wore ordinary dress of tunic, belt, and trousers, if well-made, and sensible sandals in this weather. His hair and beard were dark with a smattering of gray, his skin not Cedonian-brick but a paler warm tan that might have come from anywhere along the continent’s more eastward coasts. Pen pegged it as Ibra by the familiar letter clutched tightly in his hand, and the girls’ reactions.
“Papa!” shrieked Lencia; after an uncertain moment—it had been, what, over a year since they’d last seen the man—Seuka followed her bolt around the table.
He dropped to his knees and opened his arms to receive them, embracing them both at once, hard. “Ah,” he huffed, dampening eyes closing in a grimace caught between joy and pain. In Ibran, he muttered, “Ah, so it’s all true…”