Exile's Children by Angus Wells

extend the wick until the honest yellow flame drove off the afterimage of waves and eternity and lost hope. He reached for the wine bottle and cursed long when he found it empty. He contentedhimself with water instead, splashing some against his face that he fully regain his senses. After that he dressed and waited full-clad for dawn. He did not want to return to that dream; he did not understand it, only that it filled him with an awful fear.
    It was a lengthy wait, but in time the prison made those sounds that prisons make in announcement of another day. Light came pale past the bars on the window and the nocturnal rustlings, the moans of other inmates, the night cries, gave way to muted conversation, the jangle of keys, the clatter of the breakfast trolley.
    Davyd felt no appetite for the porridge, white bread, and aromatic coffee that should be Julius’s final purchase on his behalf. His belly felt filled with liquid that rolled and shifted like sea swell, and he only tidied himself and waited to be summoned.
    His case was not heard until noon, and when the Militiamen came to fetter him and bring him before the judge, his belly rumbled protestingly. He thought that might perhaps serve him well—that he appear not well fed but as a starveling orphan forced by unkind fate to a life of crime. He hoped the judge would not inquire too deeply of his circumstances and confrères, for he knew he would not live long—no matter where he be sent—did he give up Julius and the others. Most strongly, he hoped the magicks warding the court would not reveal him for a dreamer; he prayed there be no Inquisitors present.
    He need not have worried: such inquiries seemed not to have occurred to the judge, whose aim appeared to be the swiftest possible dispensation of the Autarchy’s justice. Nor did any Inquisitors attend, only the watchful Militiamen and a tipstaff.
    Davyd was asked his name, to which he answered, “Davyd Furth, sir,” doing his best to sound utterly miserable and equally penitent. It was not difficult to manage the misery. His age was established as thirteen and his abode as the street, after which the judge pronounced his sentence.
    When he declared that Davyd be indentured and held prisoner until the next transportation ship sailed for Salvation, Davyd broke down. He shrieked his objections, pounding manacled fists against the ledge of the accused’s box, quite oblivious of the hexes that burned his skin. He begged that he be sent to the quarries, to the mines—even the barges. Only not condemn him to crossing the ocean. He wailed as the Militiamen dragged him away.
    He was sobbing as the door of his cell closed. He
knew
that he must surely suffer a horrid fate upon the Sea of Sorrows and, had he not been left chained and his belt and foulard taken from him, he would likely have become a suicide.

6 Virtue Assaulted
    Work as a tavern wench in the Flying Horse was not the employment Flysse Cobal had hoped to find in Bantar, but she bore her disappointment as cheerfully as she could. She had hoped to find a position as a lady’s maid, or perhaps a seamstress, but the bustling city had proven unkind to her dreams and she had been forced to settle for serving ale and avoiding the groping hands of amorous patrons. And it was easier here, she told herself, than in ’sieur Shaxbrof’s mansion in Cudham. There, it had been quite impossible to escape the master’s attentions or, though it was no fault of hers that he pursued her, the animosity of his wife. She had thought it a fine thing to be accepted as a parlormaid, a great honor for a farmgirl whose family could barely support three daughters when the harvest had failed for two years running, and she had gone eagerly to her new post. She had not anticipated that so elevated and aging a man as ’sieur Shaxbrof would prove so lecherous, nor that his wife should blame her rather than him and order her dismissal. That had