Saintsday came around, and with it came our mandatory weekly baths in the river (which was far from my only bath, but was my only bath with all the other Scamps), followed by the proctors leading us en masse to the Bannered Temple for services. Services weren't mandatory for the older Sneaks and Greycloaks, but many of them acted as acolytes for the temple, either as part of their coursework or because they were true believers of one of the faiths. But for Scamps, attendance was considered to be part of our Religion coursework.

Most Scamps looked forward to Saintsdays because they let us sleep in an extra hour and there was no breakfast duty. For me, though, it was a chore - I got up at the same time I always did but had two hours to kill instead of one. At age seven-and-a-half, I didn't yet have the attention span to sit down for hours to read or study. A single hour was pushing it. Zev had shown me some of the calisthenic exercises that some of the older Sneaks had taught him, and we managed to make a game out of it - he, Mailyn, and I, that is, and sometimes Nate. Aldo never once woke up early on a Saintsday, which should surprise nobody at this point. The way our game worked was this:

"Crane, Turtle, Mantis," Zev said.

I proceeded through the three stances - the crane with its foot drawn up to near the hip and two limbs extended up and out; the turtle prone with its back arched, supported off its belly by four splayed limbs; the mantis crouching with its legs wide, its forelimbs drawn up and ready to strike. Each of the twenty-two calisthenic stances was named after an animal. For our game, the 'leader' called out three stances and the other participants went through the poses as quickly (but correctly) as they could until somebody made an obvious error. If the leader called out no errors, then the rounds would proceed until somebody was the slowest twice in a row. That person took a turn as the next leader - and this gave a brief respite if you'd made an error due to exhaustion or soreness from too many stances. The goal was to go as many rounds as possible before becoming the leader.

"Nate was slowest," Zev observed. "Okay… Turtle, Tiger, Turtle," Zev said… "Vix was slowest."

"I…" I started - but I shut my mouth right afterward, since questioning the leader was an automatic forfeit unless the other competitors backed you, which was rare. "You must like turtles…" I said. I suspect that Zev just liked to watch us prostrate ourselves upon the boards, only to bounce back up again. Which, to be fair, does look pretty amusing.

"Mantis, Eagle, Turtle… Vix, you were slowest."

I rolled to my feet, nodded, and took a moment to catch my breath - I'd gone almost thirty rounds, so I was a bit winded. "You're sure… you're sure this'll help… with fighting?" I gasped.

Zev shrugged and took my place in line. "It's supposed to. If you want to stop, you're welcome to."

"I'm hardly even tired," I lied. "Okay, um… Tiger, Basilisk, Carrafin!"

"Always with the carrafins," Nate huffed. I could only shrug - I suppose carrafins for me what turtles were for Zev.

As a result of our little morning exercise group, I was usually good and sweaty all through my classes, but my daily bathing schedule kept me from reeking like an urchin, unlike some of my classmates. By the time we wandered down in our masses to bathe in the Largotto, the fug of sweat and stink that followed our group practically wavered in the air like alchemical fumes.

"Keep up! I want to see everybody in the water!" Solomon barked at us. "If one of you stinks during services this week, I'll carry you out and dunk you in the river myself!"

Each proctor-underproctor pair was responsible for their own bunk hall, but three hundred precocious kids is an awful lot for two teenagers to keep track of. They made a valiant attempt to count and account for us all but, to smell some of the students sitting in front of me at services every week, some clearly (and malodorously) managed to shirk their bathing.

Bathing at the Step Wharf with all the other Scamps was a crowded and chaotic affair - technically, there was enough space for everybody, but there's no way to get fifteen hundred children to understand that if they separate themselves wisely, each should have about eight square meters of space - far more than any child ought to take up. Instead, we tended to cluster into play-groups, because how were you supposed to cavort and roughhouse with everybody arrayed in a space-maximizing grid? There was a no roughhousing rule, of course, but it was only enforced for truly excessive cases.

Despite the chaos, I wasn't worried about getting my Saintsday dress stolen because Solomon had given Thero and Oltzen a good shouting and a smack upside the head when they'd deliberately ruined my dress with river mud two weeks before, and he'd threatened to put the two on permanent breakfast duty. The proctors weren't about to march a naked child into the temple, and therefore Thero and Oltzen's petty bullying forced the proctors to track down an appropriate parishioner's dress for me to wear. So the tetrad no longer tried to steal my clothes, at least not during Saintsday bathing, because they would come out on the losing side of that interaction, not me. I felt untouchable…

That is, I did up until they decided I wasn't untouchable. I was with my usual group of friends, just chatting and bathing, when I got separated. One minute, I was washing my hair with lye soap (which I was quite assiduous about) with everybody else right behind me, and by the time I finished, they were fifteen meters away and gawping excitedly as the sleek ebon cutter ship of a Collegium Master went sliding by up the river with a few semi-famous Shadows tending to the sails.

"Hey, I think that's Herrick Hawk!" Zev shouted - and he'd been very impressed to learn that I actually knew the Hawk. Well… insofar as he'd spoken with me the one time and might recognize me in a crowd.

I was about to reaffirm to my friends that I knew the Hawk when I suddenly found myself pulled beneath the Largotto. I was submerged just as I'd been taking in a breath to shout about my being good pals with the Hawk. As a result, I got a big and unexpected breath of river water, and I immediately (and understandably) panicked. I thrashed about, at first thinking that I'd been dragged under by some lurking denizen of the river - gavials and water constrictors occasionally sunned themselves along the less populated parts of the river and sharks occasionally swam as far upriver as Alhred Island. But there were no razor-sharp teeth slicing into me, no bone-pulverizing jaws. Just the meaty hands of two kids who were slightly bigger and stronger than me holding my flailing body underwater.

I tried to struggle against the hand, to no avail. I coughed out the water I'd breathed in, expelling precious oxygen with it and inviting yet more water into my throat. I thrashed, my chest already screaming for air, motes of purple and black dancing about my vision as I peered through the hazy river water. I was going to drown. I was going to die in the river fifteen meters from my chattering, oblivious friends. And then I saw it - the pinkish skin of somebody's flank wavering right in front of me. As my face brushed against it, I bit down - hard.

Oltzen cried out, which drew the attention of one of the proctors - not one I recognized - who yanked me out of the water, bawling, semi-conscious, and coughing up what felt like liters of river water. Oltzen shot away, grimacing and grasping at his bite-marked side while Tizzie Drake glared daggers as the proctor dragged me, half-drowned, into the shallower waters.

"No roughhousing!" the proctor shouted - to me as much as at them. She waded up the underwater steps of the wharf to place me in the shallows. "Why are you crying? Avatar's ashes, this is why there's no roughhousing!"

I tried to explain over my coughs and cries that I hadn't been doing anything - that I hated the kids who'd been drowning me and would have preferred never to interact with him ever again, let alone roughhouse with them. But I could barely get breaths in, let alone get a word out. My lungs and nose burned from taking in water, and every third word became a watery cough. By the time I had the wherewithal to speak, the proctor was already off and dealing with another, less-serious kerfuffle and my friends were wading to the shore, worry written across their faces.

"Hey, what happened?" Nate asked - though he hardly had to ask. Already, he was casting angry glances at Oltzen and Tizzie, hooting in laughter as if almost drowning me was just about the funniest thing they'd ever done.

Within a few minutes, I'd coughed and cried enough that I could explain that Oltzen and Tizzie had held me under and tried to drown me. All of my friends glared at them, as if daring them to try something now, but the two seemed content to swim over to Thero and Nima - the rest of the Tetrad of Terror - to boast about how they'd almost drowned me.

I sometimes wonder whether the protection of God (or multiple gods, archangels, saints, spirits, honored dead, or whatever your faith tradition holds) helps children shrug off physical traumas that would kill adults. I surely almost died in the river that day (and not for the last time), and yet I managed to get dried and dressed in time for services. I wonder whether the archangels offer some scintilla of extra grace to children. But then I recall that I've seen children die… more than once and sometimes more than one at a time, often for no reason. If the suffering of children is part of His plan, He can go fuck Himself - pardon my Frissonic…

Mailyn tugged on my sleeve. “We got to get to services – we’ll talk about it after.”

I nodded and trudged toward the towering, bright-spired temple glittering over the Largotto, far too beautiful a thing on a day where I’d almost died.