young men do. In his heart Pazel thanked the nameless soldier a thousand times for directing him to their care.
The Swan took him east, into the heart of Arqual. She had been pressed into service as a troop-carrier, but with the seizure of Ormael complete her captain returned quietly to trade, mostly in the bays of Emledri and Sorhn. Pazel supposed he would never see his mother or sister again, even if they had somehow dodged slavery and death. It was dangerous to think of them too often: when he did he became clumsy with grief, his mind filling with a bright, cold fog that frightened him. In any case there was nothing he could do.
When Captain Faral became a drunkard, Pazel found himself transferred to another ship, the Anju, so abruptly he had no time even to take leave of the old men who had taught him the ways of the sea. This time rumor preceded him: the other tarboys knew that some wealthy doctor had paid off the Swan and arranged for Pazel to be seized like a mailbag (as indeed he was) and flung into life aboard the Anju. Pazel was furious with Chadfallow. The Anju was a nastier ship in every sense: a whaler that stank of burned blubber and echoed with the laughs of men whose lives were butchery on a giant scale. Pazel hated it from the first. But a month after his transfer, a deckhand returned from shore leave with the news that the Swan had meandered in a fog onto the Lava Shoals at Urnsfich, shattering her keel and sinking in a matter of minutes. Of her ninety sailors, just three had made it to shore.
Life on the Anju was a terror. She leaked badly and her bilge-pumps clogged with whale grease. Her captain was violent and feared his own shadow. On calm days he lowered tarboys into the frigid seas to check for sabotage by murths or saltworms. During lightning storms he sent them aloft to tie live chickens to the topmasts, offerings to the demons of the sky.
None of these dangers ever touched the whaling vessel. Her end came when the crew, their wits addled by spoiled rye, sailed her at ludicrous speed into Pуl Harbor, where she would have rammed a Kings' clipper if the shore guns had not blown her to bits.
The Noonfirth Kings shipped the dazed crew back to Etherhorde, where her captain was beheaded, and Pazel transferred to a grain ship. After that, an ore-carrier, a barge on the River Sorhn, a signal-boat guiding warships through the Paulandri Shoals. Finally, just six months earlier, he had been assigned to the Eniel. After each of these transfers, a rumor would eventually inform him that a certain nobleman, a brooding fellow with gray temples, had made the arrangements. But Chadfallow never sent so much as a word of greeting to Pazel himself.
In the past half year Pazel had come to love Captain Nestef. The old navigator adored his ship and wanted a peaceable crew. They ate well, and had music after meals, and in each port the captain bought stories or travelogues or collections of jokes from the chandleries, and read them aloud on dull nights far from land.
Of course, he was still Ormali. Jervik in particular took care that no one forgot it. He despised Ormalis- despised anyone to whom he felt superior-and just last week had stolen his skipper's knife and ivory whale, the only objects Pazel cared about in the world. They would be Jervik's forever now.
But Nestef's kindness had made it all bearable. The captain had even talked of buying Pazel his citizenship, and helping him return to school. The very thought of reading again filled Pazel's mind with dazzling hopes.
And now Chadfallow had blasted them. He didn't know why the doctor was interfering again, but this time he had plucked Pazel from the best ship he could ever have hoped for. And what had he slipped into that tea?
He stood, threw a last nail into the water and turned to face the wharf. A new life: that was what he was choosing. A life without Arquali uncles. Without their protection, or their deceit.
Almost Free
3 Vaqrin 941
5:56 p.m.
Niriviel, the moon falcon, shot by overhead, a cream-colored arrow. On the bench beside the splendid catfish tanks of the Lorg Academy of Obedient Daughters, the girl with blond hair felt her heart lift at the sight, and then an instant's regret at the thought that she would never see him again. An instant was all she could muster, for while she loved the falcon, she hated the Academy a thousand times more.
Behind her, a woman cleared her throat. The blond girl looked over her shoulder to see one of the Lorg Sisters frowning at her in silence. In her dark brown robe the Sister's face seemed whiter than the lilies in the tanks; whiter than the fish weaving slow paths among the stems.
'Good evening, Sister,' said the girl.
'Her Grace will see you in the hatcheries,' said the woman tersely.
Startled, the girl rose to her feet.
'After your meditation, child!'
The Sister turned on her heel and stalked off. The girl sat again, sidelong to hide her face from the Academy windows, and pressed her knuckles hard against the wrought-iron bench. A meeting with the Mother Prohibitor! It was a rare honor: girls did not have private audiences with the head of the Order except for the gravest of reasons. It's a trap, she told herself. I knew they'd try something.
The Accateo, as the Sisters liked to call it, was the most costly and exclusive school for girls in the Imperium. Also the oldest, which partly explained the Sisters' tendency to speak Old Arquali, and dress in cloaks like funeral wraps, and to serve dishes (horse-liver puddings, starling broth) that had vanished from even the most traditional Etherhorde dining rooms a century ago.
Also the loneliest, thought the girl, warming to her theme.
Also the darkest, cruelest, most ignorant heap of stone ever to disgrace the word school.
Her name was Thasha Isiq, and she was dropping out. It ought to have been the happiest day of the two years she had spent at the Lorg. Two years without a glimpse of father or friends, without hearing the ocean or climbing Maj Hill. Two years without laughing, except softly in corners, and at the risk of punishment.
But she could not rejoice in her coming freedom, not yet. The Sisters' power was too great. They woke you with their songs (guttural chants recounting the evil history of womankind); they studied your private journals, not just openly but with a red quill for correcting your grammar; they questioned you about your dreams; they compared you with the impossibly pure First Sisters in the time of the Amber Kings; they gave you chores in house or gardens, along with meditations to recite nonstop while doing so. Then came breakfast. And after that, the real labor: your education.
Thasha had known nothing about the Academy when Syrarys, her father's consort, announced that she was to be enrolled. When she realized Syrarys meant the walled compound with the grim towers and fanged iron gate, she refused outright. A great battle followed between daughter and consort, and Thasha lost. Or rather, surrendered: her father's illness, a brain inflammation that had lasted years, suddenly worsened, and the family doctor told her bluntly that Eberzam Isiq would not recover unless he was spared, temporarily at least, the work and worries of fatherhood.
To Thasha the diagnosis stank of trickery. Syrarys hated her, though she pretended love. And Thasha had never quite trusted Dr. Chadfallow, friend to the Emperor though he was.
The welcome letter from the Academy promised lessons in music, dance and literature, and for a while Thasha took heart, for she had dearly loved all three subjects. Today she almost hated them.
The trouble was evil. It was the great obsession of the Sisters, and with it they poisoned everything they touched. 'Literature' meant poring together over the journals of former students, now wives in the richest households across the known world: journals that recorded in humiliating detail each woman's lifelong struggle against the inherent wickedness of her nature. 'Dance' meant mastering the stiff waltzes and quadrilles of society balls, or the erotic performances certain families demanded of brides for twelve nights before their weddings. 'Music' just meant sin. Confession of sin in whining arias. Regret for sin in madrigals that never ended. Memory of sin in low, groveling groans.
For close to a thousand years, the Accateo had spiritually mangled girls. They entered jittery, wide-eyed waifs; they left docile dreamers, hypnotized by the epic of their own rottenness and the lifelong struggle ahead to become slightly less so. Thasha looked over at a girl her own age, pruning the roses a few yards away: eyes heavy with lack of sleep, lips moving ceaselessly with her assigned meditation. Now and then she smiled, as if at some happy secret. A pretty girl, of course.
