Soler takes his time, picking out the kids.

For one thing, he hasn't got a good place to put them.  People will keep dropping theirs off at the church, or not even theirs but random vagrant children who'd been bothering somebody, or their neighbors' kids where the neighbors kicked off.  They hang on to them long enough to check, with the children or if they're too little then by asking around, whether there's anyone who wants them home, and in that time they need adults who aren't divided between fifteen other things, and Soler's got a dozen things on his plate but he doesn't need to add three children of his own to the mix.

For another thing, Vinyet doesn't read much better than he does - she stayed in school, but there was nothing to practice with, after, and she was never strong at it. There's no use in sending a letter.  He would like to cut down on the amount of time Vinyet's got more children than she knows about, and that means waiting till the convention wraps up properly and he can set out for home.

For a third thing, he's constantly telling people they ought to adopt children, and he's encouraging them to be a little choosy, because it would be a rotten thing to adopt a child and find actually you didn't care for them.  And he would rather not claim for himself some child that was going to be the only right one for another adopter.  He'll bring some home no matter what anyone else does, and what if there's somebody as picky as that strix who found the one little boy in all the city who'd suit her, only with a less obvious criterion than "wings", and he takes their kid?  Too, he's at the orphanage most days, and getting little snatches of the personalities there, and he's seeing which ones he likes, which ones he still likes after a week, which ones have dropped their company manners by the thirtieth time they've seen his face.  So he's being pickier and letting everyone else be pickier, and if it feels a little cold, there's nothing warm about any more little ones in those little hells than there absolutely have to be.

So he waits.  Till the convention is over.  He decides on three.

He needs an older girl; it's a long trip and he'll want help with the littler children.  There's a Lídia, eleven years old, stocky and with a grouchy set to her jaw, deaf in one ear that got boxed wrong a few years back.  And he's never seen her do worse than pinch another child while she's getting them to keep their oatmeal off the floor and the chamber pot contents where they belong and sing their letters, and they mind her still, and she leans into the breeze when it blows fresh air through the choking maze of the city, and he pictures her on the farm with a goat under one arm, growing up to be a schoolteacher he wouldn't weep to hand a grandchild to, and it's right, that picture.

There's an Aspex, with a nose that's been broken twice in the eight (they think) years he's been in the world, and he's a runner, keeps escaping the orphanage and making a tremendous lot of work for the ladies who run the place, and one day Soler winds up chasing him down because no one else was free to do it, and the boy isn't knocking over rubbish bins or graffiti-ing all the Shelynite murals or shoplifting candy and chestnuts, he's climbing somebody's trees.  And the trees aren't his to climb, but the orphanage doesn't have any, it has two stumps that represent a bitter winter and some trampled weeds.  Soler can see him in the apple tree at home, getting the ones from the highest branch.

And there's Mireia, also eight, who walks herself to Soler's church twice a week.  The Fourth Street matron's been taking the children to the Sarenrites, on Sundays.  It's a shorter walk to herd the crowd of little ones through, and also the Sarenrites at some point got a lot of foreigners coming through to help with orphanage-type things in a way Soler can't imagine personally doing without losing his lunch over the complicity with the little Hells those places are - maybe this is a personal weakness of his but it seems to be there to stay; blessings be upon the Sarenrites, who can touch orphanages without feeling unclean.  Anyway, Mireia goes to the Sarenrite services with all her orphanage-mates, Sundays, but on Waterdays and Stardays she's walking the mile to the temple of Erastil.  He never hears that she's "missing", so she's wrangled permission to do it somehow, and he asks her once what she's looking for, in the Erastilian sermons, and she says to him that she knows food comes from farms, and she'd like to know how it does that, because there's not quite enough but she doesn't understand why.  So obviously he's got to bring her home and tell Vinyet to get her her fill of stew and bread.

When the convention's over he speaks to each one in turn, to make sure that they can all abide each other - he's thought so, but you can never be too sure - and that they like those pictures too, of the farm and how they'd fit on it.  And then Soler loads up his three youngest children onto a cart he's bought with the savings from the delegate stipend, and drives the ox before it east.

He and the children sleep under the cart, eating crackers and dried fruit in the cart and making supper in the evening of potatoes and carrots and beans that he brought along, and sometimes too the rabbits and partridges and - once - wild boar that he's able to shoot for them on the way.  Mireia learns to skin them; they save the rabbit fur for winter things for them, anything that they won't be able to take handed down from their brothers and sisters.  Aspex tries pulling the bow, but it's too much for him as yet.  Lídia stirs the stew and makes sure the ox doesn't run off while it's grazing.  And Soler tells them about home.  About their mama, who will get such a surprise but he knows she'll love them as her own; and how much better her stew is than his, and her fresh bread you can smell from half a field away when it comes from the oven and that crackles like flames when you break the crust.  About their big brother who can fix anything from roofs to wagons.  Their big sister who knits like the wind.  Their nieces and nephews, one of those a toddler who's named Aspex so the baby one will need a nickname, now, won't he, we'd best think of something.  Their oldest brother who joined the army the once but came straight back home like a good man ought to when he was let go.  Their sister who's only a few years older than Lídia, who makes up silly songs and will be most pleased to have more warm bodies in the bed when winter comes, as her toes get so cold.  Their brother who when Soler left was courting the miller's girl, and if they know what's good for them they've waited for their papa to come home and bless their house together, but maybe they've gotten started on building it in advance anyway.  Their brother who didn't make it home from school, and they'd better join Soler in praying that he finds the angels, in the Boneyard, and they lead him out of it the right way.  The babies who he prays for the same way, because Urgathoa took them.  All their aunts and uncles.  Soler's mother, who lives with one of those aunts and will embroider all their things with their initials for them if they ask her nicely and rub her achy old feet for her.  Cousins, scores of cousins, scattered around the whole county but Soler knows where most of them are and plans to take a route that visits a few of them on the way home.

It winds up being that the road he had in mind is washed out, so they'll visit their cousins later.  They go through the hills instead, the wretched up-and-down that has always made the place so sparsely settled and so distantly churched and schooled.  It's beastly getting the cart through and several times Soler has to detach the ox and turn into a giant for a moment to pick up the cart and put it across some obstacle.  It's a woodsy area, too, which means plenty of firewood for overnight and another wild boar and a few wolf howls that frighten Mireia, but they make it through all right.  Eventually they're tromping down into the narrow valley, and he can point out that house, that's the miller's house, yes, the one your future sister-in-law grew up in; and over that rise there is your aunt, no, not that one, the other aunt, and past that, past that, eight more hours of slow going but they'll get there today, is home.

He smells the bread before he sees the house.  The dog smells him before any human contact is established, and is out like an arrow from the house, tail wagging, waiting to be introduced to three new lickable people.  And then, like sunrise, Vinyet opens the door.

"Vinyet!" he calls, as the dog races back to her to communicate his excitement about Soler's return.  "Vinyet, did you know that in cities people just leave children lying around?"

A heartbeat goes by, two heartbeats, and then -

"Well, then, you'd best get them over here, then, mister, I'm not going to throw them their supper across shouting distance!" she calls back.

And Lídia starts crying, and Aspex leaps out of the cart and breaks into a run for the house, and Mireia wants Soler to carry her in, and there are names to be learned and the ox to be pastured and the cart to be squared away and there's not really enough bread to go around, because Vinyet didn't know when to expect him back let alone how many people to expect him with, but she opens a jar of peaches and gets out a cheese and it stretches all right, and then she's got Mireia kneading the dough with her for morning while Soler sends Aspex out with a light to count the goats and Lídia goes on a grand tour with her new big sister. And the city's only a bad dream.