Tranquility looked up at him in alarm. “How is…?”
The man shook his head. “We urged him not to make the attempt. We all insisted it was too late. He knew. As I said, holy Sinura loved him very dearly, or She would not have granted his prayers in this instance.”
Or else the gods loved Dantio even more.
Later the chief slaver came looking for the palace’s boy and was told he had been dead when he arrived. Justifiably apprehensive, the man went and reported to Saltaja, who ordered him flogged to the doorknocker of death for carelessness. She made Eide question a Witness, who confirmed what the slaver had said: Dantio had died.
By that time he and Tranquility were at sea.
No one pursued them or came looking for them. The voyage to Bergashamm never took less than two sixdays and she spun it out to two thirties, dallying at sun-dried fishing ports around the coast. Dantio soon recovered from his ordeal. With the resilience and ignorance of youth, he was more annoyed by the mutilation of his ears than worried over what else he had lost.
At first Tranquility worried that the Eldest would anathematize her for interfering, but eventually she realized that the gods had saved Dantio by a miracle and mortals must not argue with gods. Besides, the cult had reported that the boy had died, so how could it change its story without denying its own claim of infallibility? As long as Saltaja did not notice the difference between “died” and “is dead,” she should nevermore be a problem for Dantio.
Unless he chose to become a problem for her, of course. Children do grow up.
What was Tranquility to do with this ward she had so unexpectedly inherited? Try to smuggle him home over the Edge? See him apprenticed to some trade? Dantio answered that question for her one night.
The ship had been beached, as usual. Crew and passengers were asleep ashore under the sky, in a world deliciously cool after the daytime heat, scented by teasing breaths of salty sea-wind, lulled by the splash of waves. She wondered what had wakened her-the lurid phantasms of a dreaming sailor? Not predatory marauders approaching… No, the source was right beside her, staring up at the stars. Dantio was registering true happiness for the first time since she met him.
“Go to sleep,” she whispered.
(surprise-joy) He grinned. “You know everything!”
“Only the goddess knows everything. Seers just know more than most people.”
(worry) “My mama won’t mind that I love you too, will she?”
“Of course not. And my goddess does not mind that I love you.”
Tranquility felt the boy’s adoration whenever he looked at her, but until then she had not realized how much she returned it. Few Witnesses ever managed enough self-deception to fall in love. Bergashamm was full of aging spinsters, with many sixty more of them scattered in retirement all over the Face.
“You will send me home, won’t you?” (anxiety, homesickness)
Tranquility rolled over to face him, resigned to a serious discussion. The sailors snored on. Would the Eldest tolerate even more meddling than she had done already? “That may be possible, dear, but it will not be easy. I’m sure I cannot rescue your brothers. If we try to do that, we will put them in great danger. And you, too. And me.”
(distress-resentment) “Why? I will not go without Benard and Orlando!”
It seemed to take half the night to convince him, but he accepted the situation at last. “Then teach me!” he said, frowning at the stars.
“Teach you what?”
“How to know the things you know.”
His motivation was suspect, but she had long recognized his bright, questing mind. “I can try,” she said.
“You can, but will you?”
She chuckled. “I will try, when we get to Bergashamm.”
He was too young to be even a postulant, but he became a sort of mascot-and also a teaching aid in the lectures on seasoning. Later that year the Maynists located the Celebre daughter, who had vanished with her wet nurse during the sack of Jat-Nogul, and now turned up in Skjar as putative daughter of Master Merchant Horth. Some furtive prying soon confirmed that she was another seasoner. Four of them!
Rather than return to Skjar, Tranquility accepted a roaming commission to investigate other Florengian hostages scattered around the Face. She established that most were being well treated, and that none had seasoning. Accompanying her on her travels, Dantio saw his brothers from afar and was comforted. He learned a great deal about Vigaelia, the way the Werists were ruling it, and the subtle art of snooping without being noticed. When he was sixteen, they returned to Bergashamm, and he was accepted as a novice, although he was still younger than all other novices and even most postulants.
He put up with the discipline for four sixdays. Then he came calling on Tranquility one evening and brazenly asked her to sponsor him for initiation. He was tall, slender, with the perpetual restlessness of an adolescent, but he was still a child. In one sense he always would be.
“You are insane!” she said. “At your age? The elders will never approve you. They would laugh me to shame if I put you forward.”
He had a confidence far beyond his years, and he grinned at her doubts. “They won’t, you know! Half of them are convinced that the goddess has chosen me to avenge the harm Stralg did to Her cult in the year I was born. The other half can’t stand the sight of me and will rely on the All-Knowing to throw me out on my ear, what’s left of it.”
Holy Mayn rejected about one candidate in five. The discards were sent away, and it was known that few of them ever prospered afterward-how could they, when She did not want them and they had forsworn all other gods? But Dantio’s confidence was as solid as rock, and Tranquility could not fault his logic. Ordinary rules did not apply to him.
The council agreed to consider his application, and even that was a surprise.
By tradition, examinations were held in the crypt below the chapel, in pitch darkness. Tranquility led him in, whispering a warning to watch his step, for a thick layer of black sand covered the floor. When they reached the center, she told him to kneel. The Eldest sat on a tall stool in the center like a mummified monkey, her twisted fingers clutching her staff. Eight elders stood on either side of her, in a crescent facing the applicant.
Darkness and silence. Tranquility had never known a mere initiation to raise such emotions. The chapel seemed to shake with them, and her own doubts rang as loud as any. She expected a refusal. He was the youngest novice ever put forward and the first Florengian to apply to the Vigaelian mystery, but his age and color barely mattered. Everyone knew that he was a brilliant student. What concerned the examiners was his history, and that rubbed salt into the gaping wound dividing the cult. Half the elders wanted to abrogate the Werist compact; the rest supported the Eldest, who was adamant that it must be preserved. The old crone did not like it, though, and she played fair in her appointments to the council. It was as evenly divided as the mystery itself.
She began the ritual without preliminaries. “Who seeks the goddess?”
“Honored mother, I bring Candidate Mist.”
Hearing his new name for the first time, Dantio grinned in the darkness, unaware of the others’ smiles and frowns. His own, joking, suggestion had been Garlic, but the choice was Tranquility’s and she thought she had chosen well. He could pass for man or woman; he was fluent in Florengian, Vigaelian, and Wroggian. His dark complexion and cropped ears made him extremely visible, yet slaves were so unimportant that few people noticed him.
“Surely,” whined the bitter voice of old Agate, “a Witness with seasoning is a contradiction of all the cult stands for?” She had been primed to ask this as the first question, to resolve the matter right away.
“Flavor is merely a potential,” Tranquility said. “It may never be expressed in action, or it may act entirely by accident, with no intent on his part. The All-Knowing may even accept him and negate his seasoning-we have no precedents to judge by.”
(doubt-relief-anger)
Also fear, because a seasoner Witness might change the flavor of the cult itself. The Eldest was already very old, so Mist-Dantio was too young to be her direct successor, but a generation after that…? Aging childless spinsters do not accept change easily.
“How can he possibly be impartial?” Vihuela demanded. “After what that woman did to him? Can he take the
