"I was," said Rose. "But that is not your concern."
"You cannot have been given the Chathrand."
Rose pitched forward, rage contorting his features. Oggosk touched his arm. The captain twitched in her direction, then paused and sat back. One finger stabbed out at Chadfallow.
"We're ashore, Doctor, where your tongue is your own. But tomorrow we sail. Remember that. For I am the captain of the Great Ship. And if you mean to board her, I warn you, envoy though you be: on the water there's no law but mine. The law of Nilus Rotheby Rose. There's a thorn in that name, and a bee-sting, and a blade: my kin knew what they were about when they named me Nilus-dagger. Climb in!"
"No," said Chadfallow, slowly shaking his head. "I won't sail with you, no."
Their eyes met. Rose looked caught between satisfaction and offense.
"Well," he said at last, "that is between you and your Emperor. Don't expect me to beg. Driver!"
The driver abruptly shrank three inches, his knees buckling.
"Drive on, you dumb, staring, scrofulous cur!"
Moments later the carriage was vanishing around the corner of the street. Chadfallow stood motionless, alarmed as he could not remember being in his life. When the porters reached the tavern door with his sea chest he did not know what to tell them.
A Natural Scholar
1 Vaqrin 941
6:40 a.m.
After the Eniel rounded the headland, Pazel spent a dismal hour on the pier. The fishermen took a brief interest in him, told him life ashore was better here than in sprawling Etherhorde, where boys were snatched in broad daylight by the Flikkermen and chained to looms in the clothing mills. One old man even offered him breakfast. Before Pazel could accept, however, a shout of "Crawlies! Crawlies!" had gone up around the wharf, and the men stampeded for shore. Pazel sat shivering, working old nails out of the pier and tossing them into the bay, all the while silently cursing the name of Ignus Chadfallow.
The man was a liar, and Pazel his lifelong fool. In Ormael, where Pazel had lived with his mother and sister in a stone house overlooking the city, he had thought Chadfallow magnificent and kind. His own father, a sea captain, had brought the doctor for his first visit when Pazel was but six, introducing him to the family as "our distinguished friend from Etherhorde, city of kings." After presenting his wife, Suthinia, and daughter, Neda, to the doctor, he gestured to Pazel and boomed: "That is my son, Chadfallow-a quick wit, and a natural scholar." Pazel turned scarlet from the praise, although he had something else in mind for his future than books and learning. He wanted to sail on his father's ship.
Chadfallow was one of the few Arquali to have set foot in Ormael since the end of the Second Sea War. His deep voice and elegant strange clothes left Pazel speechless with admiration. For years he pictured Arqual as a land of soft-spoken gentlemen in waistcoats.
Six months after presenting Chadfallow to his family, Captain Gregory Pathkendle sailed out of Ormael on a scouting mission and never returned. Some terrible and total accident, it was supposed. A general dismay gripped the city. Sailors' widows left gifts on the doorstep: mourning lace for his mother and sister, a black scarf for Pazel himself Then a Rukmast merchantman brought the news that Pathkendle's boat had been spotted in the Gulf of Thуl, among a flotilla of Mzithrini warships. She had been repainted, and flew the gold-and-black pennant of the Mzithrin Kings.
Chadfallow was by then the Emperor's Special Envoy to Ormael, and lived in a fine house in the city. He visited Pazel's home often during those months of fear, and always insisted that Gregory might yet be alive, imprisoned by pirates ("they spawn like eels in the Gulf") or the Mzithrinis themselves. Pazel's sister Neda asked if the doctor's great Empire couldn't send ships to rescue him. Chadfallow replied that the Mzithrin Kings ruled a territory as great as Arqual's own. If they sailed against her, he said, no one would be rescued but many more fathers would die.
Nonetheless he was a comfort to them all. Pazel's mother Suthinia often persuaded Chadfallow to stay for dinner, after which he would kiss her hand in thanks. "A meal as lovely as its authoress," he would say, making the children squirm. There was no denying Suthinia's beauty, with her dark olive skin and startling green eyes. Like Chadfallow she was a foreigner, having come down from the highlands with a troupe of merchants, dealers in cinnamon and kohl, and even long after her marriage to Captain Gregory the neighbors still treated her with unease. Beauty was one thing, but those clothes, that laugh?
Chadfallow, however, had smiled on her from the first. He smiled at Pazel, too, in those days, praising his quick way with languages and sternly commanding him never to neglect Arquali. As months turned to years and warships of many nations were sighted offshore, Chadfallow was often called back to Arqual to consult with his Emperor. Returning to Ormael, he brought the children grammar books and dictionaries: useful gifts, if rather dull.
Then the news from the outer world darkened. Sailors brought rumors of bloodshed in distant lands, small nations devoured by larger ones, war fleets rebuilt. And it was at this moment of alarm that Pazel's father suddenly reappeared.
His old ship, still under Mzithrini flags, made a daring run past Ormael harbor at daybreak, firing shot after shot. Later it was noted that his guns hit few targets-perhaps none at all-but in the dawn confusion no one doubted that the city was under attack.
An Ormali ship immediately gave chase. Captain Gregory tacked north, almost dead into the wind, giving his pursuers many a fine opportunity to rake his sails with grapeshot. Soon Gregory's canvas was in tatters. He appeared to have trouble with his chaser-cannon, too: in any case, not a single shot was fired at his pursuers. The battle was brief: Ormael's little fighting ship emptied her guns into Gregory's, and as they neared Cape Cуristel they raised a flag for his surrender. Pazel's father was heard to shout "No!" while waving oddly from his quarterdeck. And then the Grygulv rounded the cape.
She was a 120-gun Mzithrini Blodmel, or "war-angel," one of the deadliest ships afloat. In a panic, the Ormali captain ordered his men to "wear the ship"-spin her hard about and run downwind. But the Grygulv was already upon them, and her broadside was furious. She blasted rudder and mast from the Ormali ship, and followed up with the most feared weapon in the world-a Mzithrini dragon's-egg shot, which burst in liquid flame across the deck. When the smoke cleared the Grygulv was making west, alongside Gregory's ship, and thirty Ormalis lay dead.
The city, which had mourned Captain Gregory for a year after his disappearance, instantly renamed him Pathkendle the Traitor, and to many of his schoolmates Pazel became simply the Traitor's Son.
Pazel suffered terribly. Even his best friends abandoned him. Some of his teachers considered it their duty to punish the sin of bad blood: they made him sit apart and called him a lazy fool if he gave a wrong answer (which he rarely did). When his mother complained to the headmaster, the man threw up his hands: "Why blame us? You married that villain!" Suthinia flew into a rage, chased the headmaster from his office to the science hall and beat him with a stuffed marmoset. Then she pulled Pazel from school and dragged him wordlessly home. No other school would take him after the incident, however, and in three weeks she slipped the headmaster a grotesque sum to forget the whole affair.
From that day on they ate smaller meals, and burned less coal on chilly nights. And when he returned to school his classmates greeted him with a song:
He's Pazel Pathkendle, his daddy went bad,
His mother went mad with a mar-mo-set.
It was enough to make him hope Suthinia would never again feel the need to protect him. But her master plan for her children's safety had not even begun.