Lunch had been disappointing after arriving so late, but well worth getting such a long look at the retreating form of the Lemur. By the time Arlo had made it down to the officer’s mess, the galley fires were out and the cooks were changing everything over to get ready for the evening meal. Still, Arlo was provided with some cold soup and cold coffee, a few fresh carrots, and some of Irina’s shortbread. It went down well with the thrill of seeing Moriah one last time. Arlo also sent off a reply to Treistan’s message and took advantage of his access to the radio to send a message to the Lemur as well, in which he complimented Moriah on her fabulous pink dress. Then, he spent the entire afternoon on deck practicing with his new sword. So long as nobody made any snide comments, Arlo found he was able to go through the motions of his favorite drills adequately enough. He wasn’t sure if he would have liked to fence with it over the basket–hilted sabre he’d used at school, but that was mainly due to the fact that even with the blunts on them the swords he and his fellow students used on the dueling grounds left dings in the handguards and painful welts on any part of the body that were left uncovered with fencing armor. The new sword, slightly heavier and with its almost open-by-comparison knuckle bow, thumb ring, and nagel left Arlo feeling exposed.
This was why he, while dining at the captain’s table that night, had asked Captain Hardwick if the ship’s armorer might have a spare gauntlet while seeing if there was a shaving kit he could borrow.
“Think nothing of it, cousin!” Hardwick had told him while the two hunched over the dimly lit little table in the captain’s spartan quarters. They had both been sawing away at some poor bird who’d been shot earlier in the day and rendered into a tough roast that the captain was oddly pleased with; perhaps due to the fact that the bird seemed to have subsisted on a diet of Peppernuts’ eponymous local food and the dry, chewy drumsticks had a rich spicy flavor. Despite this, its stringy flesh seemed to offer little repast for the former governor who had been up until recently used to more tender things.
Arlo had decided to fill himself up with the potatoes after that. The wine was somewhat dubious as well, one a red so dry and bitter that it could have been mistaken for dyed witch hazel and the other a white so sweet that it may as well have been syrup. Once again, the captain seemed excessively pleased with himself for choosing the items and he drank nearly the entire bottle of the red while Arlo made-do with sipping; feeling like it was too delicate a subject to complain about. Luckily, his politeness paid off, because not only did the captain send for a gauntlet from the armorer’s mate but in the end Arlo was provided with a cute little wooden box which contained a shavette, a folded strop, and a packet of washing powder. It bore the hound from his family’s coat-of-arms like his badge, and Elroyal explained that it had been a gift for long service but he’d never used it.
Finally, after an interminable interlude in which Arlo was forced to answer many questions about Irina’s provenance, the origins of her tattoo, and her eligibility as a bachelorette (to which in most cases he could only say he did not know), Arlo was released to return to his cabin and really explore the room for the first time.
The room he’d been given aboard the Dawnstorm was larger and it had offered much more privacy as a room for one, but his room on the Sunseeker had its own private head and a washbasin. Arlo had been overjoyed to see them, dreaming of spending a morning preening without fear of having some bluff seaman come in and catch him at it. At the time he had been shown the room, however, he only had time to drop off his satchel and then rush off to meet the captain for dinner.
Now, passing some sailors in the narrow corridor, absolutely exhausted from his long day, Arlo was moving as eagerly as his tired bones would allow him towards the cabin. He slid gently down the last rungs of a shipladder from the stern gallery and rounded a corner past the passage that led down into the engine room to finally rest his hand on the handle carved out of the sliding wooden door. He slid it open and froze in place.
Nothing was how he’d left it.
First off, the second bed that had been in the room before was missing. In its place was a desk, upon which many of Arlo’s things had been placed neatly and arranged as though he was expected to arrive and use them. The little booth in the middle of the room that contained the head and the washbasin was left open and likewise stocked with fluffy towels and assorted washing powders. Most importantly, most intrusively, the bed on the other side of the booth was weighed down with a mostly-naked Oathkeeper.
Arlo’s blood heated up to see Placelle Lamella there sitting cross-legged on his bed with her hair tumbled down in a wispy mess and her vacant smirk scrawled innocently across her face while she had her armor, boots, gloves, and hammer piled up on the floor below. She was wearing only an ugly stained sleeveless shift in a careworn muslin that had obviously seen better days when it was first sewn together based on the way the patches were sewn into the seams on one side. Instead of billowing away like Arlo would have liked, it clung to her body obscenely, and he found himself eyeing her figure with as much curiosity as disdain. She was not fat, nor muscular, but rather equal generous shares of both. Her thick and powerful biceps flexed gently as she worked a needle into and out one corner of the linen cassock she was darning, and each time they did Arlo felt his eye drawn first to the musculature and then to the extremely generous bust that undulated next.
At some flailing hope of maintaining decency he let his eyes sink down to her soft stomach and then found himself unconsciously seeking the shape of her thighs beneath the cassock. He raised his hands to cover his face, but then indignation took over again and he bore them down at his sides in tight fists so he could ask, outraged, “What are you doing here? Where is Professor Pluramon and where is his bed? I was told I would be sharing this room with him.”
Placelle Lamella focused her half-lidded gaze on Arlo for a moment, and her smile disappeared, but she answered calmly. “He decided to stay in the infirmary with the night surgeon, so they took the other bed out and gave you a desk.”
Arlo sighed and crossed his arms. “They also seemed to give me an Oathkeeper in the bargain.”
Here, Placelle Lamella’s face took on a sadder expression. “I’m sorry, Arlo. I was rooming with Irina. She does not like me very much. And when I took off my clothes…”
The Oathkeeper looked down at her bust now, and then a little further over to her things piled up on the floor before looking back up at Arlo with an expression similar to that of a child who had been caught stealing. “Well, just now when you first came in, I could taste that you thought I was really pretty. Then I could tell you were mad I was here. But Irina…”
She sighed a longer sigh than Arlo had before her and started sewing again. “She thought I was really pretty, too, and it made her hate me more. And it made her hate herself, too. I just wanted to stop hurting her.”
This brought yet another sigh, this time from Arlo again as he slipped out of his bolero and draped it over the back of the chair at his new desk. He wasn’t sure what exactly had flown into Irina’s nose, but he had a basic enough idea from Placelle Lamella’s testimony. Worse, a sense of reluctant acquiescence was subsuming him. He had to admit to himself he could no longer throw the Oathkeeper out without feeling guilty. As he worked his fingers into his collar to loosen his cravat, Arlo said, “I don’t see why she should be so ashamed of it. Imperial women have courted each other throughout history. It’s something of a tradition, or so I’m told.”
At least, in school he had read textbook accounts of great clans who might have female Clannarchs with female lovers, or of powerful women who would groom their successors and their successor’s wives at the same time. He had never met one of these women, but the society he’d grown up in at least seemed to think of it as an old-fashioned sort of thing.
“I don’t think she hates herself for liking pretty girls, Arlo.” Placelle Lamella said. She worked at the corner of her cassock in silence for a while longer and then finally said, “You should know I was raised by the Marrowed Bone Order. They specialize in handling people like me. They taught me special techniques growing up how to conserve my energy so I wouldn’t be hungry if I didn’t feed. They taught me how to resist the urge to tell people things that hurt them, or trick people into hurting themselves. But other people like me aren’t always so nice.”
Arlo unbuttoned his waistcoat next and then removed his garrison belt. With the sabre and the revolver on it, it was much heavier than he was used to, but extra weight was becoming more reassuring the more he got used to the idea that his sword might protect him. He approached the bed and noticed the Oath in its holster already hanging on the headboard. So, instead of asking what she meant, he pointed to the bed and asked, “Were you expecting me to sleep on the desk or something?”
Placelle Lamella looked over at her pistol and wrinkled her nose before shrugging. “No, I thought you might like me to sleep next to you. But I can sleep on the floor if it bothers you.”
Arlo caught himself looking down at her bust again and then looked away. He felt like he was in some kind of hostage situation. “I thought you said, way back when we first met, that you couldn’t feel romantic love.”
She tittered at that, but agreed. “That’s right, I’m sorry to say.”
Now, Arlo sat down on the bed next to her with his gear still in his hands. She started to lean towards him as though she were going to put her head on his shoulder and he pushed her away. “No, listen, what are you up to, Oathkeeper? Everywhere I’ve been in the empire, sharing a bed is for siblings or lovers. If you cannot feel true love, why do you think you want to sleep next to me?”
“I can tell you’re lonely.” was the simple answer, followed by a more clinical, “And it still feels good to hold onto somebody warm, love or no love. Don’t worry about it, Arlo, I really can sleep on the floor just fine. I have slept on a lot of floors in my life.”
Arlo sneered. “No, the dog comparisons have gone too far if that happens. If anybody sleeps on the floor, it’s going to be me.”
Placelle Lamella only shrugged and went back to her sewing. This irritated Arlo, so he hopped up again and hung his belt from a peg on the side of the booth that was probably intended for his jacket. He wanted to unbutton his shirt next, but Placelle Lamella’s loafing around in her shift had already set him on edge and he didn’t want her thinking he was getting ideas. This thought, at least, gave him inspiration for his next argument.
“What,” he asked, smugly and matter-of-factly as though he’d found a loophole in all of her plans, “If our close proximity were to… excite my baser instinct, hm? And then I was driven mad with lust, and attempted to take advantage of you? Are you worried about this sort of thing?”
As always, she seemed to miss the point. Placelle Lamella nodded, then held up her finished cassock and carefully eyed the mended seam. She had done a terrible job, in Arlo’s opinion, but it at least looked like a strong stitch even if it were a crooked one. While she was leaning over to where her belt and her Oath were hanging over the headboard, she answered, “You wouldn’t. I can tell, you would be ashamed of yourself. Even if you did, I would let you. I don’t feel lust, either, but it still feels kind of good to do that sort of stuff. On top of that, I’m strong enough to stop you if I really wanted to. And still…”
She sat back up again holding a little triangular knife which she folded the loose thread around to cut while she continued, “Even if you did, and even if I let you, all of us with my curse who grew up in the church had surgery at a very early age so we cannot have children. Everything would be fine.”
Arlo gasped at the thought of such cruelty. He found himself covering his mouth with his hand just imagining it. He found himself gasping again when Placelle Lamella tossed her cassock onto the floor and stood to casually lift the hem of her shift. His eyes bulged at the tuft of nearly-pink strawberry-blonde pubic hair bursting in an unkempt mass from between her equally unshaven legs, but the Oathkeeper drew his attention higher pointing to a long white line of a scar across the underside of her slightly pudgy navel among the little trail of fuzzy hair and the red scrawl of stretch marks.
“I was eleven.” she told him as casually as though it were what she ate for breakfast. She let the skirt drop again and turned to return her little knife to its place on her belt. “It’s to keep us from making more of ourselves. We’re dangerous.”
“It’s a horrible thing to do to anybody who doesn’t want it,” Arlo said, utterly aghast and now looking through her to his darkest imagining, “Especially a child.”
Having been raised in and indoctrinated by the environment which endorsed the surgery, Placelle Lamella could not agree. She elected to leave it at another shrug. Then, as some sort of bizarre consolation she decided to add, “Boys have it much worse than girls. After their surgery, many of them never finish growing up, and a lot of them take their own lives.”
Arlo thought he might be sick. He had been raised to patriotism over piety, but had always been taught that the Divine Orderhood was just as important to the health of the nation as the government itself. Now he found himself shaken to his core to imagine that the Jade Queen permitted such barbarity in her own followers. The spirit of the Imperial Constitution was completely against such ill use of one’s fellow man, and he was certain that any local governor who permitted such a backwards custom would be removed from his office and shot by the first Tribune to notice it. Sensing his distress with her curse, Placelle Lamella stepped forward and took him into her arms to coo at him like she had back on the Dawnstorm. The gesture was actually much nicer this time around without her armor smashed against his face, even if the cushion of her generous bust reminded him unpleasantly of the carnal inkling that had started this conversation in the first place.
“Don’t worry so much, Arlo,” she whispered sweetly to him, “I’m happy, most of us are. I get to serve The Goddess and carry her light with me everywhere I go. I get to help other people who get left behind or fall through the cracks find a place in our world. And I get to meet all sorts of fantastic people, people just like you.”
Arlo wrapped his arms around the taller woman and tried to believe her. He tried to just let himself forget, but instead he just kept wondering what else the Trampled Rose did to people. What other things did the Marrowed Bone Order do? What other orders had their own little mutilations? How many members of the Divine Orderhood were aware of these things and just let them go on? Why did the Jade Queen allow it? Eventually, Placelle Lamella pulled him down onto the bed, still petting him, and then kissed his forehead before rising to go to his waistcoat. He was impressed that she knew to retrieve his watch and bring it to him so he could listen to its ticking and center himself with it.
“Did you want me to step out while you did some washing up before bed?” she asked next, one hand gently stroking Arlo’s hair while the other tugged delicately at the cravat he was using as a hairband. He pushed her hands away, but patted her back at the same time.
“Are you going to walk around the ship in your shift?” he asked in return, setting his watch on the corner of the bed next to its pillow.
Placelle Lamella looked down at herself again and offered another one of those shrugs. Arlo sighed and sat up with a shake of his head. “No, I suppose I’ll let you stay. I just wanted to shave and wash my face anyhow.”
“Would you be more comfortable sleeping with a blanket between us?” she asked while she watched him get to his feet and almost begrudgingly unbutton his shirt.
“I don’t know, I’ve never slept next to someone I wasn’t in love with.” he answered from in front of the booth while surveying the washbasin. He certainly couldn’t imagine sleeping in his boots on purpose, but he had already slept in his trousers almost every night on the Lemur. Arlo felt a pang of irritation again when he noticed that his answer seemed to perk up the Oathkeeper and that dopey smirk returned to her face.
“So you don’t mind sleeping next to me, then?” she asked now with her eyes coming open a bit more.
It was pitiful, but also somewhat endearing. Arlo lathered up a handful of washing powder in fresh lukewarm water piped up from somewhere deep in the ship’s hold. He formed a smooth, even layer of foam across his jaw while looking across at the excited Oathkeeper with a cautious expression. While he was stropping the shavette with the little rawhide strip from his gifted shaving kit, Arlo finally decided, “Fine, I’ll try it. If it makes me feel awkward, or if it’s too uncomfortable, we have to get the second bed back in here tomorrow.”
Placelle Lamella performed her little excited dance of wiggling in place to show her excitement while she clapped her hands. “I promise I’ll be very gentle and warm. You won’t be disappointed, Arlo.”
But he was already a little disappointed. It was all he could think about while running the blade across his face in smooth, even strokes. Though he wasn’t sure what his prospects with Moriah were, he was sure that her finding out he had even slept next to another woman couldn’t help them much. He was also sure that he would feel awkward up against Placelle Lamella, because his eyes alone had already told him that he admired her shapely form. It was embarrassing to lust after someone who couldn’t requite it, and moreso to feel like he was throwing away his chances with Moriah. Arlo tried to remind himself that Placelle Lamella had been said to be the emotional equivalent of a dog and that she’d acted the part well enough so far, but some things went too far. It was impossible to believe that anybody could conceive of this thinking, talking woman lying in bed next to him as anything at all like a faithful hound sleeping at his feet.
“If Moriah finds out about this, she’ll never kiss me again.” he said with a sigh while splashing more warm water on his face to rinse off the remaining foam. His clean-shaven face looked back at him through a small mirror over the wash basin and in the looking glass he saw a harried man.
“I won’t tell anybody.” Placelle Lamella promised, though it meant little to Arlo who had been on enough ships growing up to know that there were no such things as secrets with any compliment under five-hundred. Still, the Oathkeeper continued her meaningless little offerings. “And if you meet a girl you like here on the ship, and want to bring her back here, I can leave for that, too. I could go and sleep in her bed.”
Arlo chuckled imagining himself trying to explain to a potential lover that, if she would just arrange a place for him to stow his pet Oathkeeper they could make a night of it. He dried his face and moved to the desk to start putting away the things Placelle Lamella had left out while changing the subject, “By the way, I know you’re not used to ship life, but you can’t leave things out like this. If the swell rises, or if we hit a storm, it’ll go everywhere. Ship your clothes somewhere, too. There’s usually a spot under the bed. No, not– ugh!”
He dashed across the room to stop the larger woman in the middle of raising the hem of her shift again and shoved it back down over the cheeks of her rump with a blush coloring his face before saying firmly, “I meant whatever ones you will not be wearing.”
When she seemed confused by how irritated he was, Arlo gritted his teeth, sucked in a breath, and explained carefully, “Placelle Lamella, I find your body very alluring, and you have already told me you would let me have my way with you if I wanted. In the same breath you said you did not pine for me and could not pine for me, and yet you seem incredibly eager to sleep next to me.”
She nodded, but still looked confused, so Arlo continued, still tense, “I am trying not to give in to temptation because I do not want to feel bad later and I do not want to spoil the hope in my heart for someone else.”
The big woman’s head was tilted in that odd questioning way again, and Arlo thought he was going to have to explain it more, but eventually she just patted him on the head and said, “Tomorrow, when it is not so late and we won’t have to rouse anybody or make some person leave their station, let us send for the other bed. I don’t want to torture you. I just know how lonely you were, and up until you let me start following you around I was really lonely too. My trip here has counted the loneliest days of my entire life.”
The guilt that washed over Arlo at that made him sigh yet again. The very situation was torturous. Still, he steeled himself and gave her a nod to show that this would be fine. With a gentle smile, she eased herself down onto the bed and wedged herself against the bulkhead to leave him as much room as possible. The bed itself was not so small that two couldn’t fit on it, but it was certainly not wide enough for them to do so without touching even if Placelle Lamella hadn’t been so big. She pressed her back against the wall so she would be facing him when he joined her and looked up at him patiently while he finished putting things away at the desk. When he came to join her, he didn’t lie fully on the bed at first, but instead sat on the side of the mattress and removed his boots. As he’d predicted, there was a cargo net under the bed that Placelle Lamella had already stuffed her gear into. He put his boots next to the massive clamshell of her cuirass with a sigh before finally lying down with his back to her. He had to admit that it was extremely comforting to lie there with his watch ticking away right next to his head on the corner of the bed, and Placelle Lamella pressed up against him from behind with her warm breath as a soft tremor that surprisingly did not tickle his scalp. Soon, she wormed one arm under the pillow beneath his head and the other around his side to hold onto him.
“Don’t worry, Arlo, it’s okay,” she assured him. “Just let me know if it’s too much and I’ll leave you alone. I’ll even wake you up in the morning if you need to start the day at a certain time.”
Arlo didn’t respond at first. He just soaked in her grip for a long moment. Facing away like this did seem to soften the ardor of temptation, and this warmth and tenderness had been what he’d craved every single day since losing Lost Pip’s Rock. Eventually, he told her, “I have a breakfast appointment. It’s so early in the Life Watch right now, I think I will probably wake up in time on my own.”
“That’s good.” she replied, a sweet murmur right in his ear. “You need your rest, Arlo.”
Another long minute passed and Arlo felt something well up in him that made him ask, “Placelle Lamella, are you sure you can’t fall in love with anybody?”
Her answer was as sad and full of regret as he had expected it to be. “I’m sure, Arlo. I’m sorry. I wish I could.”
Arlo sighed one last time. He let his eyes drift closed and focused on the sound of the water outside the hull and the strong, firm ticking of his watch. He thought of Moriah’s pink dress billowing in the wind on the deck of the Lemur. He thought of his mother’s silver dress billowing in the wind on the deck of the Dawnstorm of his youth.
His last thought before finally falling asleep was that he would not send for the other bed in the morning.
