With this, Ser Brog finished his wine and rose to light her to a duplicate of his own tiny cabin. She decided she had been mistaken about the question, he was only expressing interest in the friend of a friend. It was nice not to have to be afraid. An hour or so later, as she sat curled up on the bed, but not yet disrobed, came a demonstration of how well the Amorosians cared for their own. A knock on the door turned into a porter with a neatly-strapped small trunk, painted with her assumed name. It held an assortment of body-linens, shoes and a dress in her size, new and of good quality.
IV
She was roused by feet beating in rhythm and the sound of distant shouts; a big round spot of light swung slowly from side to side across the door. Last night had shown her a jug and a basin beneath the let-down leaf that formed a writing table, but the water was so cold it gave her goose-pimples. The new dress would need taking in at the shoulders, so after trying it, she returned to the old before stepping toward the deck along a passage that held three more doors like her own. Two men in yokes were pushing and relaxing on opposite sides of a pivoted bar (to steer the ship, she supposed), under the orders of an officer in a green cap. One of the workers was the curl-bearded man who had accosted Dame Domijaiek the evening before. He relaxed one hand to touch his forelock and had the grace to look sheepish. The officer hardly looked at her; he was watching the masts that rose on every side and the small boats about, for they were well out into the Bredafloss, moving steadily downstream, though the sails hung so flat, it seemed they could contain no air at all.
Lalette stepped past the steersmen to watch the slow pageant of river moving by, and heard a step. Ser Brog; he touched his cap and invited her to breakfast, down a flight of steep stairs and along another passage to an apartment at the rear of the ship. A skylight threw dappled gleams across a table laid for five, with food already on it. Another man was standing by; Ser Brog presented the second mate, and as he did so, a big officer with a firm chin and bags under his eyes came in with an air of great hurry and sat down without waiting for the rest. This was the captain, Ser Mülvedo; he bounced half an inch from his seat when his name was mentioned, and fell to eating while the rest were taking their places.
Lalette thought his courtesy somewhat strange to one who wore a badge of good condition, and it was stranger still when a youngish officer entered, to be greeted by the Captain with; “You are tardy. You know the rule of the ship. Take your meal with the crew.”
The young officer went out sourly, but not before Lalette recognized him as the one who had directed her toward the lazarette. The meal went on in silence; when the Captain rose, so did the others, and Ser Brog touched Lalette’s arm to take her to the deck again. The spring air was fine, the stream-bank all tricked out in tender green. Lalette looked (and felt with a thrill of delight that all was really now spring for her, she was free from the old life and everything to win), but Ser Brog was speaking.
“I am sorry to dream,” she said.
“Why, dreams do be what we grow by. I would be saying that you had brought luck and fair weather on our leave-taking—for all but Tegval.”
“The one sent from his breakfast?”
“He.” The cargo-overseer laughed. “Our third mate is an admirable young man, with only one flaw—that he has discovered how admirable he is and does not stint his own admiration.”