himself facing Ignus Chadfallow.
“Hello,” said Pazel, not very warmly.
Captivity had aged the doctor. His craggy face was stained with soot that no amount of washing had yet been able to remove. His deep-set eyes shone with a new, more desperate fervor. The nose Pazel had broken on Bramian had healed with a subtle clockwise twist.
“I’ve been looking for you since yesterday, Pazel,” he said at last. “Why have you been avoiding me?”
Pazel shrugged. “I’m here now,” he said.
They had crossed paths twice since the doctor gained his freedom. Both times Pazel had hurried by, mumbling about his duties. He had no desire to be cornered and questioned by the man.
“You should eat less sausage, more fish and greens,” said the doctor. Neeps slid a whole sausage into his mouth.
Pazel scowled. “What is it you want, Ignus? Missed trying out drugs on me?”
“May I sit down?”
Neeps and Marila glanced at each other and edged away. Pazel sighed, and Chadfallow lowered himself stiffly to the deck. He was not holding a plate. Instead he cradled a leather pouch in both hands. It appeared to contain some object no larger than a matchbox. Chadfallow held it as one might a fine glass figurine.
“I’m a doctor,” he said. “I took an oath to defend life.”
Pazel gave him a discouraging look. No philosophy, please.
“Would you like to know what I’ve been asking myself this morning?” Chadfallow continued.
“Dying to,” said Pazel.
“What if it were you in there? What would I be thinking now? Would I have even stopped to think?”
“What are you talking about?” asked Pazel. “In where?”
Chadfallow lifted his eyes in the direction of the forecastle house. Pazel grew still.
“Hercol is my oldest friend, after Thasha’s father,” said Chadfallow, “and he loved an ixchel woman, desperately. I honestly don’t know what to do.”
“Ignus,” said Pazel, trying to keep his eyes off the pouch, “what’s going on? What is that you’re carrying?”
“I’ve just told you,” said Chadfallow, “the antidote.”
Pazel gasped. “The permanent antidote? What, another pill?”
“Another ten pills. One for every remaining hostage. At least, that is what the note said. When I reached my desk in the sickbay the pouch was waiting for me.”
“But that’s fantastic! You can set them free!”
“Softly, you fool,” hissed Chadfallow.
Glancing about, Pazel quickly understood. There were ixchel all over the deck. And men who had been taught to hate ixchel all their lives. Thasha, he noticed suddenly, was now seated alone; Fulbreech had moved off to starboard. Perhaps they’re fighting, thought Pazel, with a vague sense of hope.
“Why can’t it always be this way?” said Chadfallow suddenly, his eyes sweeping the deck. “Peace and cooperation, sanity. There’s enough room on this ship for men and ixchel. And Rin knows there’s enough room in Alifros. Why do we fight? Why don’t we get on with living, while we’re alive?”
Now that the doctor pointed it out, the scene did look more harmonious than ever before. Men and ixchel milled about together, not exactly with warmth, but with a sated sort of tolerance, as if the feasting had crowded their mutual animosities to one side. At the starboard rail a Turach was holding an ixchel sword in the palm of his hand, squinting at it, while its owner chattered on about the workmanship. Beyond the circle of tarboys, several topmen actually seemed to be trading jokes with the little people.
Diadrelu, Pazel thought. You should be here. I’m looking at your dream.
But of course he wasn’t, really. The jokes had a bitter edge. Each side had too many deaths to blame on the other. Rose was an infamous crawly-killer, and others-Uskins, Alyash, Haddismal-were almost as bad.
“Tell me about the note, Ignus,” said Pazel quietly.
“It was vile and sarcastic,” said Chadfallow. “Play God, it said. Hand out life and death like sweets to children. The ones who die first may be the luckiest. It was written by an ixchel hand, I’m certain of that. And the ink was not yet dry.”
Pazel looked away, and for several minutes he and the doctor just studied the deck. No, it was not all good. Taliktrum’s Dawn Soldiers were eating in a huddle apart, scowling at those of their brethren who mingled most freely with the humans. A Turach glanced from a pie to a group of ixchel and back again; he frowned, as though concluding that they had touched it.
“You can’t just let them out,” whispered Pazel.
“No,” said Chadfallow, “not yet.”
“You should hide the pills.”
After a moment the doctor nodded. “Hide them, and negotiate. Once we are certain who speaks for the little people. Is it Talag, now that his son has fled? Or Taliktrum’s security chief, the one called Saturyk? In either case, if we are intelligent we may prevent bloodshed altogether.”
Their eyes met. To his own surprise Pazel actually smiled. “Diplomacy, Ignus?” he said.
The doctor inclined his head. “My specialty.”
They both laughed-and it hurt to share a laugh with Chadfallow, after so much betrayal and deceit. But it felt good, too. Ignus had once been like a second father. He had even saved Pazel from slavery. After Pazel’s real father, Captain Gregory, abandoned them, Chadfallow had protected the family, and at last revealed his consuming love for Pazel’s mother. But halfway across the Nelluroq, Mr. Druffle (who had also known Gregory) had told Pazel that the doctor’s love for Suthinia had begun years earlier-that it was, in fact, the very thing that had driven Gregory away. Pazel had begged Chadfallow to deny it. The doctor had only replied that things were more complicated than they appeared.
Pazel doubted he could ever forgive Chadfallow for breaking up his family. Still, in the midst of so much waste and ruin and killing, that sort of sin, loving another man’s wife, suddenly appeared very small. Of course, Chadfallow had done other things, darker and more suspicious, things that love could not explain.
“You let Arunis board the ship, Ignus,” he said. “That day in the Straits of Simja. Why in the Pits did you do that?”
“He was about to kill Thasha with that necklace. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”
Pazel scowled. He’d asked himself the same question, many times. No answer he could come up with made him feel good.
“You would have done so out of love for the girl,” said the doctor. “I might have wished to do so out of love for her father, but I would not have. No, I would have let her die, if I had not felt-”
“What?”
Chadfallow drew a slow breath. “A hunch, nothing more,” he said at last. “An instinct, that her death would bring a greater disaster than any of us could foresee. I feel it still. In the way Hercol speaks of her; the way Ramachni called her ‘my champion.’ They have never trusted me with the whole story of Thasha Isiq. Nor have any of you.”
Pazel averted his eyes. He thinks I know more than I do. But he’s right, I haven’t trusted him. How could I, how could I, after “Ignus,” he heard himself say, “why didn’t you warn us of the invasion? You could have saved us then and there. We could have escaped.”
It was the question he had never dared ask, the question that had burned inside him for almost six years. Chadfallow looked as though he had expected it.
“Escape?” he said. “Do you think Suthinia Sadralin Pathkendle would have been content to escape, to run off into the Highlands with her children? Or”-he hesitated, swallowed; his face was suddenly vulnerable and young-“with me?”
“Definitely not with you,” said Pazel. “Oh, damn it-that’s not what I meant-”
“She would have raised the alarm. She would have stormed out into the city and told everyone the Arqualis were coming.”
“They’d never have listened. They all thought she was crazy.”
“But they did not think I was,” said Chadfallow. “Suthinia would have named me as her source immediately. And I could not afford to lie. I was doing everything I could to negotiate Ormael’s peaceful surrender, with
