Bitterlich clenched his jaw and tried to rub the blinding tears from his eyes, his whole reserve shattered. Eulalie had wrecked him at last, from half a world away and without even trying, she’d taken the daughter he didn’t even know he had and tossed her in the gutter.

Yet outrage had no place in his relationship to Rebecca. She was such an amazing child. He’d taken her as a student. Would she want him as a parent?

Isabelle led Rebecca onto the quarterdeck where no one else was standing. The girl was shivering, and not from the cold. The shock of this late discovery had capsized Bitterlich’s world, and he needed some time to right his ship. Rebecca needed help making sense of it.

“What are you feeling?” Isabelle asked Rebecca.

She hunched her head down. “I don’t know. Why was he so upset?”

“He isn’t upset at you,” Isabelle said. “He is upset at what was done to you, to both of you. Your mother left him the night they conceived you, and he never knew she was pregnant.” Trying to explain the mess Eulalie had made of Bitterlich to a twelve-year-old was not in her wheelhouse. “As he said, if he’d known, he would have taken you in and raised you, he would have been your father in heart and deed as well as body, but he never had that chance.”

“Instead she left me at the orphanage,” Rebecca said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Isabelle said. She was more than inclined to think the worst of Eulalie, but there were many reasons a woman, especially a saintborn noblewoman, might abandon a bastard newborn, chief amongst these being self-defense. Eulalie had gotten married shortly after conceiving Rebecca, and her husband would have been within his legal rights to divorce her and take her dowry if she presented him with a bastard. Better to give the child away. Indeed better not to tell Bitterlich lest he use that knowledge against her. Rebecca was profoundly lucky Eulalie hadn’t broken her neck and called her stillborn.

Which means you can use this child against her mother, Primus said.

I am not using a child as a pawn, Isabelle replied, indignant.

But you would use her as a soldier on a warship, Primus said.

Isabelle’s teeth gnashed, but she had no instant rebuttal.

Rebecca, not privy to this aside said, “Does that mean I have to be the major’s daughter?”