Chapter Text

Red didn’t feel like he fit in with the janissaries. It wasn’t sharing a room: he’d done that in the army. Although he certainly would have appreciated privacy, he didn’t require it the way he used to.

They spent a lot of the day playing card games he didn’t know from an Italian style of deck: it had only forty cards, and instead of the suits that he was familiar with, there were coins, cups, swords and staves. He’d started learning how to play the games, slowly getting the feel for the strategy. They told him he was quite good for a beginner; all the long evenings with his friends in Columbus, and the more recent afternoons spent playing cards at Olivier’s house in town had apparently given him some skills that transferred.

“So, Lucia says that you’ve only been in his majesty’s service for a year?” Jacques, a young man with bright green eyes, asked.

Red nodded, wondering if this was going to be a shameful rumour that he’d long to shake one day. “Yes. What about you?”

Jacques grinned as he played a card to the pile, winning the trick. “Eight years,” he replied, scooping up the cards.

“Three,” added Odette, a blonde woman who couldn’t have been any older than Red.

“Twenty-six,” said Florence, Jacques’s mother, a middle-aged woman with hard brown eyes.

The fourth janissary was Victor, who never seemed to have anything to say. “Thirty-eight,” came his clipped reply. He wasn’t playing cards: he was sitting on his bed, reading a thick book.

“How come Lucia’s being doing it so much longer?” Red asked.

“I told you,” she replied, smiling. Like Victor, she wasn’t playing cards; she was embroidering flowers onto a piece of white fabric. “I’m a thrall, so I’m blessed with a long life. Janissaries aren’t.”

“So… the rest of you just like the way it feels, too?”

Florence laughed. “No. Her grace has been a patron of our family for generations.”

“... what?” Red remembered, a while ago, William mentioning that he did something like that.

Jacques smiled. “When we come of age, we get the opportunity to serve her. I’d been looking forward to it since I was very young.”

“Her gifts have let us work harder than anyone else on the island. Let us learn our craft faster, given us more time to spend with family. It’s a great blessing for our family to have been chosen,” Florence finished.

“Oh, so you’re all… family?” He looked at Odette, who had much lighter features than Florence and Jacques, and Victor, who had dark, Sicilian skin.

Victor snorted. “No, just those two. They’re the Rigal family; there are more of them in Bonifacio.”

“Oh, so you…”

“When I was younger, I started doing it because I was rebellious. I continue because I’m sensible.”

“What about you, Odette?”

“None of your business,” she scowled.

Red was too taken aback by her sudden hostility to attempt to push any further, and the game continued for several minutes in silence before Lucia finally changed the subject to a much less personal topic.