Lunurin had sent Rosa for the Palisade physician. By the time she returned at last, cool water and shade had already revived Inez.
“Forgive me, Sister, he has too many injured from the earthquake. He wouldn’t come,” Rosa reported, wringing her hands.
“How’s the bleeding now?” Lunurin crouched beside Inez who sat on the ground, head tipped forward, nose pinched shut.
“Stopped,” Inez mumbled nasally, wiping helplessly at the bloodstains all down the white of her habit.
“Let’s get you up to your bed where you can rest. I’ll help you clean up,” Lunurin suggested, reaching to lift her up.
Inez balked, sweat standing out on her brow. She held out both hands to stay Lunurin. “No, don’t! I’ll be sick for sure. I can walk,” she insisted.
Lunurin gave her a hand up and helped her to the girls’ dormitory.
“You should go. You have dinner. I just need to wait for the queasiness to pass.” Inez curled onto her cot, rejecting all Lunurin’s attempts to help her clean up and change.
Lunurin frowned down at her. “Alright. We’ll get you to one of the herb-healers in Aynila tomorrow to make sure it’s nothing serious. I’ll send Cat up with dinner once you’ve had a chance to rest.”
Inez cracked her eyes open to peer up at Lunurin pleadingly. “Please don’t bother Ate, she’s busy tonight. I just need to lie down a bit, I’ll be fine. One of the other girls will bring me something.”
Lunurin would’ve argued, but Rosa ran in with word the cook was threatening to walk out on them again. Between tonight’s dinner and the festival Mass of Our Lady María of the Drowned, the ruined ovens put her in an impossible position.
Several hours later, Lunurin was dragged away from the kitchens by Sister Philippa. Philippa had just completed a headcount of the girls’ dormitory. Lunurin hoped Inez was able to rest despite the commotion.
Muttering prayers to Saint Anthony under her breath, Philippa hauled Lunurin into Father DeSoto’s study, and scowled to see him and Catalina bent over rosters of polo laborers.
“Father, we have a problem.”
“A moment,” he murmured, lifting a hand.
“If you please, Father. If you are so caught up in the building work, then you need to train someone to take your place in the school, Father Ortiz or someone with more time on their hands. We have the students’ safety to think of!” Philippa cried.
“Safety? Safety! Sister Philippa, the coffin dam around the Puente de Hilaga’s final pylon is taking on water, and as Sister Catalina so helpfully reminds me, half my workforce is overdue to be released from their contracts. But the governor still plans on announcing the entire delta will be connected by my bridges before the end of the month, despite stealing laborers for the Santa Clarita,” DeSoto shot back, still deeply engrossed in the rosters on his desk.
“A student is missing!” Philippa exclaimed.
“Who is missing?”
“The Prinsa girl! Bitten—however you say it,” Sister Philippa snapped.
“Bituin was in the group I supervised in the first math section. Father DeSoto, did she make it to your second session after the demonstration? I know we all got a little distracted by Inez’s fall, and I had to leave you to manage everyone on your own to get Inez settled,” Lunurin lied easily.
Father DeSoto looked up at last, frowning. “She must have.”
“Do you have the attendance sheet?” She knew full well Father DeSoto relied on Inez to handle administrative tasks.
“Well no, I don’t,” he admitted.
Sister Philippa huffed in frustration. “Father! It is your job to record attendance for your classes.”
“Now, Sister…”
“I have one twelve-year-old girl who could’ve wandered off into the Palisade at any time in the last five hours. When she vanished matters. Do I need to alert the Palisade guard, or can I keep this embarrassment private?”
“Let’s not panic. How far can one girl have gone?”
“Easy for you to say. You’re the one who lost her!”
Cat spoke up. “All the children have had a difficult day. It’s likely she’s hidden away on the church grounds and fallen asleep. She did the same thing last week, and I can’t tell you the number of times I spent the night in some quiet corner rather than come out when I was her age,” she counseled in an offhand tone.
“That’s true. Father DeSoto, will you do a headcount on the boys, just to be safe?” Lunurin asked with all the earnestness she could muster.
He nodded.
Catalina rose to her feet. “I suggest we let the matter rest tonight. We don’t want to rouse a search with the abbot’s guests arriving. Come breakfast I wouldn’t be surprised if Biti has reappeared. But I’ll leave you three to sort it. I should check on my sister, and I’ve got another few contracts to review.”
As expected, none of the boys were missing. Father DeSoto and Catalina had soon returned to the labor shortage problem, but Sister Philippa remained unconvinced.
“I’ll search the girls’ dormitories again,” she said. “Maybe the girls are concealing her.”
Unable to obfuscate the search further, Lunurin returned to preparations for dinner. Agitation swirled under her breastbone, but she pushed it down, and went to face her panicking cook and all the abbot’s illustrious dinner guests.
* * *
The abbot’s dinner had attracted every important inhabitant of the Palisade and no few members of Aynila’s principalia, including the Lakan, Tigas Dakila, though Lunurin couldn’t see his son, Alon. There were a dozen who showed despite previously declining the invitation. She could thank everyone’s earthquake anxieties for that. While her guests were occupied with golden mango, buttery papaya, small tart siniguelas, and cold kinilaw-style dishes “cooked” in fresh calamansi juice and palm vinegar, Lunurin hoped desperately that the abbot’s paella was cooking properly in its sealed clay pot in the coal pit behind the kitchens, and they wouldn’t all break their teeth on raw rice.
The well-to-do of the Palisade had all the same concerns as the school children. “My wife thinks we ought to evacuate to high ground. What if there are more aftershocks, or some witch saboteur tries to pull in another wave?”
“Aynila is quite free of water witches thanks to the Inquisition’s efforts.” The abbot was always pleased at the opportunity to speak on his favorite topic.
“What about the three witches executed after sabotaging the Puente de Hilaga last All Saint’s Feast?” the governor drawled. “It would’ve been completed months ago if not for that incident. Think how much more work our shipyards could take on with direct access to the resources on Hilaga’s delta and the metalworking conclave.”
“They were the last of a dying breed. We stamped out the scourge of witchcraft during the Inquest after their last attempt to stand in the way of progress. They will be erased, lost to myth, like the sea serpents from our navigational maps as we bring the light of God and civilization to the farthest reaches of the Empire,” the abbot insisted.
Lunurin remembered those sleepless nights. How the stinging smoke from the women’s pyres had lingered in her lungs, their screams in her ears, as she and Cat had desperately tried to get ahead of the Inquisition’s broad definition of a collaborator. Anyone who’d run afoul of the overseers or the church became a target. A quarter of the women servants were dragged before the abbot to be “tested” for witch blood.
“Aynila won’t stand for their ilk either. Jungle rebels and troublemakers, the lot of them,” the Lakan agreed.
Lunurin wondered if he was only publicly distancing himself from his late wife’s ill-fated attempt to destroy the Palisade, or if he truly believed in the abbot’s witch hunts.
“You may be sure that any collaborators or sympathizers remaining among us were rooted out, by hook and crook, and repented of the sinfulness in their hearts,” the abbot concluded.
Lunurin remembered how even many of those found innocent had died after the canings and other “interrogation” methods the abbot so enjoyed employing. Cold sweat trickled down her back. There was so much zeal in the abbot’s gleaming green eyes.
How small a slipup would it take for her piety to be deemed lacking, or her loyalty suspect? For the abbot to turn that flaying witching cane upon her?
The cook entered, freeing Lunurin from the memory of pyre smoke darkening the sky. The dinner must go on. The paella pot was wide and shallow, nearly as big as a kalesa wheel. It took four servants to set it before the abbot and his guests of honor at the head of the table. Lunurin accepted a small hammer from the cook and cracked the dish, shattering the clay sealing the top from hot coals and dirt. The cook lifted off the lid with a flourish, savory steam rushing out. Anito and turmeric had replaced saffron to achieve the rich golden color. Nestled into the rice, among half a bay’s worth of smaller oysters, shrimp, and crabs, were the four huge gold-lip oysters.
“A gift, from Aynila’s famous oyster beds.” She served the guests of honor each a portion topped with one of the huge oysters.
The captain held up a golden pearl the size of his thumb. “Naturally gold? It’s not the dish coloring it? Marvelous.”
The Lakan, who knew exactly where these pearls had been harvested from, eyed her sharply.
“These new beds of yours seem quite mature,” the Lakan commented.
Lunurin suddenly remembered the Codicíans’ blithe claims that the old tide-touched oyster beds had all been destroyed and that these beds were new, the sole property of the Church and certainly not the product of Lunurin spending months diving for scattered survivors among the ransacked beds.
The abbot grinned. “It’s the pearl-culturing methods we’ve introduced. Nothing of this size would’ve been possible with the backward ways previously employed.”
Under your late wife went unsaid.
But before the Lakan could take insult, Sister Philippa burst in, shouting, “Explain this!”
She had a student’s thin brown arm clenched in her talonlike hand, dragging them behind her as she marched toward the head table. Inez.
A dozen possible scenarios raced across Lunurin’s mind. Philippa’s wrath was legendary within the convent. No small part of Lunurin’s youth had been spent developing elaborate deceptions to ensure she and Catalina evaded the woman’s appetite for punishment. But what could Inez have done?
Lunurin intercepted Philippa, attempting to de-escalate the situation. “Now, Sister, let me help you deal with whatever it is.”
“This little hussy is pregnant!” Sister Philippa declared. “This is what comes of allowing mixing of the students.”
She hauled Inez forward and flung her into Lunurin’s middle. Lunurin clutched Inez, baffled at the outlandish allegation.
In her arms, Inez shook and wept, wrapped in nothing but a sheet. Everyone stared. This was bad, very bad. Her mind raced, coming up with only flat denial.
“That’s not possible. She just turned thirteen. This isn’t a matter that concerns everyone, Sister Philippa. Let’s take this back to the girls’ dormitory and sort it out in privacy.”
Lunurin took Philippa’s arm and tried to sweep both her and Inez back out of the dining room. But Philippa dug her heels in and reached to yank Inez’s sheet. Lunurin knocked Philippa’s hand aside, tucking Inez behind her. Along the way, her hand encountered a firm bump under the sheet. Lunurin nearly bit through her own tongue, but kept her face blank of everything besides mild confusion. “Please, Sister, decorum. Inez deserves her modesty.”
“She’s a lying whore!”
“Philippa!” Lunurin’s stomach clenched tight at all the leering eyes, the abbot’s face reddening with fury, Philippa smiling cruelly, oh-so satisfied at having proven Lunurin was failing as acting-abbess.
“How dare you allow this—this impropriety!” the abbot sputtered, then lapsed into silence, unable to find words for his outrage.
Lunurin curtseyed low. Somehow, she had to repair this. “Forgive me, Abbot. We’re merely tired and stressed after the earthquake. I’m sure this is another case of tapeworms. It’s been going around among the servants when they buy street food. Crushed papaya seeds and coconut oil will clear the ailment in a week.”
She didn’t wait for the abbot’s response.
“What? I…” Philippa sputtered.
Lunurin urged Inez into the hands of the cook, who hustled her out the servants’ entrance.
“This has all been a misunderstanding,” Lunurin announced firmly.
An elderly nun gesticulated with a spoon. “It’s not fever, is it?”
“Just worms, not contagious,” Lunurin assured her.
The old woman shuddered. “Oh, poor dear. I got those when I first arrived. Thought I’d die. Sister Philippa, do stop interrupting a fine meal for no reason. Worms! As if anyone wants those on the mind when they’re eating.”
Lunurin curtseyed again to the head of the table. “My apologies. We take our responsibility for the health and welfare of our students very seriously. I will see that all is settled.”
Lunurin seized Philippa’s arm, hustling her away from the abbot, red-faced and beside himself at this breach in decorum, and the governor, who’d started to guffaw, his booming laugh chasing them out.
Once in the courtyard, Lunurin reiterated, “It was the washing girls, Rosa and Isa, last week. The worms are in the water at this time of year, anyone who uses river water for cooking is at risk. We should be drinking more tea, even the servants. Boiled water, that’s the way.”
Philippa snarled at her. “Even you can’t make this vanish overnight. You may be acting-abbess because I can’t fathom the servants’ gibberish tongues, but you can’t hide this from the abbot.”
Well now she couldn’t. Fury skated down her spine. If Magdalena were here, Philippa wouldn’t have dared cause such a spectacle, but Lunurin kept her expression calm. If she was going to protect Inez, she had to sell the lie.
“I’ve lived on these islands all my life, Sister. I know our parasites. Tapeworms aren’t even the worst. You should see flatworm snail fever. At least this will only give Inez a sore stomach for a few days. Cat and I will take her off your hands for the night. A worm purge isn’t a pretty sight. It would disturb the other girls.”
Philippa hesitated, glaring at Lunurin.
“Unless you’d like to administer the laxatives?” Lunurin offered. “Though I warn you, the worms sometimes try to spread to a new host once the purging process begins. It would be best to keep her isolated from the other children a short while.”
“You can’t really expect me—”
“Would you prefer the Palisade physician handles it? You know how busy he is, especially after the quake. Worms are hardly life-threatening.”
Philippa’s thin lips peeled back from her teeth in disgust. “It’s ungodly the kinds of illnesses these islands spawn. I pray all is well in the morning. Good night, Sister María.”
It took everything in her to keep her pleasant smile plastered in place, rather than bare her teeth right back at the horrible woman. Philippa dealt with, Lunurin hurried toward the kitchens.
Rosa intercepted her. “Cook took her up to your cell.” She handed Lunurin a bag of crushed papaya seeds and a jar of coconut oil. The girl fidgeted with the rosary at her wrist, thumbing through the wooden beads till she held a golden cowry shell etched with a peak. “Tell Inez I’ll pray she feels better. I shouldn’t have shared those kwek kwek skewers. I thought they were fine!”
They had been. Lunurin had enjoyed a few of the crisp fried quail eggs coated in annato and sweet potato starch herself, but she appreciated Rosa’s dedication to the story. Her brother had been one of those forced into hard labor sentences during the falla tax riots. Lunurin hoped Rosa wasn’t showing anything but sympathy. It was too dangerous.
Lunurin was starting to see those subtle hatch marks everywhere. Waves and mountains, etched into the banana leaf-wrapped deliveries to the church kitchens, marking the goods that weren’t day-old or otherwise subtly spoiled, and gratified near public worksites. The old gods weren’t the only ones who were restless.
It would only get worse if the Codicíans completed the Puente de Hilaga, tightening their control over all the delta’s river traffic.
Lunurin hurried up to find Inez.
Catalina had abandoned her contracts. Inez huddled on her sister’s pallet.
“Lunurin, could it be tapeworms?” Cat asked, desperate hope in her expression.
“No.” Lunurin set aside the deworming treatment and threw open the trunk at the foot of her bed, digging for the porcelain bottles of herbal medicine from Alon. She had a root decoction of abutra, a leaf tincture of sagilala, and tubang-bakod seed oil… but they were for when someone first missed their period. She thumped a fist into her thigh, her frustration dangerously close to fear. She couldn’t panic; she had to think.
Lunurin went to sit beside Inez. “May I?”
Inez nodded, and Lunurin palpitated the hard bump of her stomach. Lunurin was no healer, but Inez must be well into her fourth month. Alon had given her tinctures to help the servants take care of things before anyone got fired. But they weren’t safe this far along.
“What happened? Was it a boy from school?” Catalina asked.
Inez went white. “I can’t tell you.”
Catalina continued, “Inez, we want to help, you have to tell us. If it’s a boy from the school—”
“It’s not, Ate!”
“Inez, it’s okay… these things happen,” Lunurin tried.
“They’re not supposed to!” Catalina hissed.
Lunurin knew when Cat’s sharpness was fear. She put a hand on Cat’s, trying to soothe her.
“You have to get it out of me.” Inez seized Lunurin’s arm.
“Don’t say such things.” Catalina crossed herself, then pressed a hand hard over her mouth.
Lunurin lifted her hand from Inez’s belly, cradling her face. She was so young, her face rounded with lingering baby fat, her dark eyes red from weeping. Lunurin remembered her own confusion and terror in the aftermath of the many mistakes of her youth. How little her mother and stepfather had cared for her panicked explanations. Lunurin’s gut twisted. She had to do better for Inez than had been done for her. Inez had only made a small mistake, not risked the lives of hundreds. Lunurin wouldn’t let this ruin Inez’s life.
“Is that what you want?” she asked.
“Please. Please, you have to. I’ll drink anything, papaya seeds, coconut oil. I want everything back the way it was before—before—”
“Before what, Inez?” Catalina asked.
“Father DeSoto,” Inez whispered, her face crumpling into tears.
The world dropped out from under Lunurin.
She drew both sisters into her arms, holding them too tightly. Catalina was shaking and swearing. Inez’s little body shuddered with sobs.
Lunurin’s blood roared in her ears. Thunder throbbed in the distance, a low rumble that vibrated into her skull through her mutya. The promise of a storm brewed over the warm seawater of the bay. With it, she could drown them all. She need only reach out and cry the goddess’s true name, and she would have all the vengeance she needed for the terrible things the Codicíans were doing to her people, to her islands, and to Inez, the child she and Catalina had practically raised.
Catalina pinched the soft skin under Lunurin’s upper arm, hard. She snapped back into her body with a disorienting wrench, and took a deep breath, trying to shake off the goddess’s rage.
She shot Cat a grateful look. No matter what the old gods wanted her to believe, she wasn’t responsible for everyone—just Inez, just Cat, just preserving her little sliver of peace inside the convent. The old gods wouldn’t be there in the aftermath of her destruction. They would have their vengeance, like they had with the sinking of the San Pedro, like when Lakan Dalisay called in the tsunami. But when the Codicíans retaliated by killing every gods-blessed they could find… the gods would be silent, and leave them to human mercies.
“I’m sorry!” Inez wept. “Please, you can’t tell anyone! You can’t! He said… he said if I told anyone I’d be thrown out of the convent. They’d never let me see Ate again.”
Catalina shook her head in denial, her expression twisting in anguish, too distraught for words.
Lunurin struggled to keep her voice even. “We won’t do anything rash. Only…” Words failed. Lunurin’s rage tangled in on itself. She had suggested Inez help with Father DeSoto’s math classes when his usual assistant, Ortiz, got sick—
“They’ll send me away!”
“No, no, I won’t let that happen.” Lunurin forced surety into her voice. She wiped Inez’s tears and squeezed Cat’s shaking hands. “We can fix this.”
“How? How? I don’t—there isn’t anyone—” Cat pressed her lips together, trying to smother her rising panic. She laid her cheek to the top of her sister’s head, blinking back the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.
Cat had no family who could take Inez in. Inez couldn’t be expelled from the convent. She had no one in the world except for her big sister and Lunurin.
Lunurin bit her cheek, tasting the blunt edges of pain and wrestling with the impulse to tear DeSoto from his place at the abbot’s table and push him out a window headfirst. She needed a plan. “Inez, when… when did it start? Your monthlies would’ve stopped. You might’ve felt nauseous and your breasts sore.”
Inez shivered all over. “I thought I was dying. It feels like it’s killing me.”
“You’re not dying,” Lunurin assured her. “I remember you hardly ate anything at the Feast of the Three Kings. Half the Palisade were recovering from fever, I assumed…”
“I couldn’t keep anything down. I was sick every day then,” Inez whispered.
Cat clutched Inez tighter. “How could this happen? Why? Lunurin, what will we do?”
Lunurin ran the math. Five months, maybe more, no less than four, damn. She needed a better answer for the desperation in Cat’s gaze, but she was still reeling. What was she supposed to do except gouge out DeSoto’s eyes with a spoon?
On Calilan, there was a saying: “Go to a stormcaller for vengeance, for they do not heal, and they do not save.” But no one had ever told Catalina this. For her, Lunurin would have to solve this another way.
“Nothing I have can help this far along,” Lunurin admitted.
Catalina’s eyes went wide. “What do you mean? What do you have?”
Lunurin stared back, unrepentant. “Sometimes the servants need help. The abbot does worse than dismiss those who become pregnant. It’s no different than when we help a shipyard worker.”
Cat’s expression twisted with anguish. “It is! We can’t—I can’t—Saints have mercy.”
Lunurin grabbed her hand. “We’ve done worse to help those less dear to us than Inez.”
Catalina went very pale at her words. But they didn’t have time for Cat’s ever-shifting scales of right and wrong to take a hard dip toward repentance now. Inez needed them.
“We have to do this.” Lunurin laid a clean habit and belt on the bed. “Come, Inez, up, up. Can you dress for me?”
When neither moved, Lunurin gently guided Inez behind the bamboo privacy screen.
Catalina fisted her hands in Lunurin’s collar, pulling her down to whisper, “We have to stop. We’ll only make things worse. I never should’ve helped you this morning. We went too far, and now Inez—”
“This isn’t divine punishment.” Lunurin cut off Cat’s spiral, less kindly than she intended. She kissed Cat’s white knuckles and held her gaze. “Repentance won’t save your sister. We have to do that ourselves. Come, we have to go.”
“Where? How? The convent is shut for the night.”
“To Alon, he’ll help.”
“The Palisade gates are closed. How can he help with this?”
“He will,” Lunurin insisted.
“What? Put her up till the baby is born? That’s asking a lot of the Lakan’s son, even if he does love you.” Her voice dripped with venom. Lunurin flinched; Cat’s fear could make her cruel.
She squeezed Cat’s shoulders. “Inez doesn’t want this baby. It would ruin her life. They will never let an unmarried mother remain in the convent, not as a postulant or servant. You know that.”
Cat bit her lip. “It’s a sin.”
Why couldn’t Cat see that to the Church, their very existence was a sin? What was one more?
The clouds over the bay were not yet heavy with rain, only illuminated from within by flashes of lightning and a dry rumble of thunder throbbing in her bones.
“What DeSoto did was the sin. This is harm reduction. We have to protect Inez.”
Catalina’s brow furrowed, torn between her love for her sister and her faith. “There’s got to be another way. Why do you always run to him when things get difficult?”
Lunurin wanted to shout. They’d been working with Alon for years. When sickness came for the students and servants of the convent and the Palisade physician couldn’t trouble himself, Alon could be depended on. Where did Catalina think she’d sent all the workers they’d disappeared? And during the latest inquest… yet Catalina had begrudged every hint of his involvement then too.
But sometimes the only thing left to do was to beg the mercy of the Sea Lady and a tide-touched healer. Alon was the last she knew of in Aynila.
“If there is, I don’t know it. I’m sorry, Cat. Right now, we have no safe options. Alon will tell us what the safe options are. I can’t do this alone.”
In the face of her honesty, Cat’s sharpness ebbed. She latched onto Lunurin’s plan like a woman drowning. “Okay, options. Yes. Options.”
Inez came out dressed. Catalina released her white-knuckled grip on Lunurin’s habit. Cat helped Inez roll her sleeves, securing all the extra material around her neatly with the belt.
Oh dear, that made the problem apparent. No matter. If they met anyone the way Lunurin was taking them, they’d have bigger problems than a pregnant postulant.
Grateful once again for the placement of their room, Lunurin slid open the capiz shell window to peer into the deserted street outside. They were on the bamboo second floor jutting over the street, some twelve feet off the cobblestone. Below the window hung a sturdy planter, in which Cat grew orchids. Underneath the orchid baskets, Lunurin kept a rope ladder, which she unfurled down to the street.
Lunurin took Cat’s and Inez’s shaking hands in hers, squeezing tight. “It’s not dangerous. You can do this. Trust me, we can fix this together.”