The Lascar's Dagger (16 page)

“I have three older brothers, all prolific in their breeding, fortunately. No one in my family cares if I wed or not. Which is fortunate for me, considering I enjoy my life the way it is.”

He fell silent as Mathilda and Celandine approached. Mathilda acknowledged their bows and lifted her skirts far enough to display her ankles and embroidered slippers. “Look!” she said. “My best pumps are sopping wet!”

“Milady, we can’t have that! You may catch ague.” Juster, without asking her permission, picked her up by the waist and sat her on the table.

She squealed. “Lord Juster! I am sure that is inappropriate behaviour!”

He laughed at her. “Not mine, surely. I am saving your life.” He waved to Celandine. “Put her slippers in the sun to dry. We mustn’t allow our princess to catch the ague. Oh, did you mean
your
behaviour, milady? Sitting on a table amongst the food?” He turned to Saker. “What do you think, witan? Quite reprehensible manners on the part of a princess?”

“I think it is you who are incorrigible, my lord,” he responded lightly, trying not to stare at Mathilda’s stockinged feet as Celandine removed her pumps.

“Quite incorrigible,” Princess Mathilda agreed, wriggling her toes, “and I’m sure no one else would dare treat me so cavalierly, except you, Lord Juster. Go disport yourself elsewhere, if you please. I wish to speak with my spiritual adviser.”

“Milady,” Saker said when Juster had left, “how may I serve you?”

“Oh don’t be so formal, witan. Especially as I know you wish to chide me, for being either too indecorous or too imperious, when a princess should be above reproach on both counts.”

“I must lack daring. I have not the courage to chide a princess.” He couldn’t stop his lips curling at the corners. No matter what she did, she could always make him smile.

She was suddenly sober. “I just wanted to tell you that the King has rejected the marriage proposal from West Denva.”

“I hadn’t heard that. Did Prince Ryce tell you?”

She pouted. “No, he wouldn’t. But I have my methods.”

Behind her, Celandine tilted her chin, a small movement, but full of meaning.
Celandine
had found out? There was no way of confirming that, though, so he asked instead, “Are you pleased?”

“I – I think the alternative proposed is not one that pleases me. Witan, if you have any compassion for me, any concern for this loyal servant of Va, you will intercede if – if…” But she couldn’t continue.

Sweet Va
, he thought.
She’s heard more hints it’s to be Regal Vilmar
. Bile rose into his gorge, stinging his throat.
Don’t let that happen. Please don’t let that happen.
He’d never felt so helpless. So gutted. How would she ever be able to stand it? “I will pray that the final decision is one you will find … attractive,” he said.

She sat there wriggling her toes in her damp stockings, her face a mask of disappointment and loss. Her next words were whispered so low he almost missed them. “Never attractive. Never. I cannot marry him to whom I’m drawn. Passable is all I can hope for. Or kind. Will he – will my husband be kind?”

Her words were a whip flaying his conscience.

“Witan Saker, is there nothing you can do? Intercede for me with the Pontifect?”

He was overwhelmed by a desire to say he’d do anything – but the words died before they reached his tongue. He had no say in the affairs of princes or kings. “The Pontifect has said she can do nothing if both parties agree to a marriage.”

“How can I refuse if the King insists? He threatens to confine me to my solar until I agree. Who is there to prevent that?”

“You…” He caught the informality, swallowed it back. “The Princess is always in my prayers.”

She looked away from him, swinging her feet. “You disappoint me.” The side of her foot brushed his thigh. He stepped back abruptly, as if she’d burned him.

“Doubtless I ask the impossible,” she said bitterly, “and I have no right to do so. Celandine, put my slippers on again. I have little heart for these revels.”

He watched her go, sick to the stomach, and wondered at the depth of his sorrow for her. Her predicament had lodged in his flesh like a wound he could not heal. When he was back in his room, he’d write to the Pontifect and ask again if there was some way to discourage a union between the Princess and Regal Vilmar – although he could almost hear the derisive snort Fritillary Reedling would give when she read his request.

And he must tell Fritillary all about the lascar’s dagger. Thinking back, he wasn’t even sure why he hadn’t told her already. Keeping silent seemed asinine in retrospect; she might have been able to explain its power. And now he had another reason for her to know: he was certain there was something consistently odd about the way the kris reacted in the Prime’s presence.

“Master Witan?”

The serving lad was back, nervously holding the dagger out towards him. “Did you really want this thrown away?”

Saker smoothed away his frown. “Somehow I don’t think you could, even if you tried.” He held out his hand. “Give it here.”

Relieved, the young server surrendered the blade and scampered away.

He replaced it in the sheath, only to find it had managed to cut a hole through the leather, and the point was poking into his thigh.
Pox on’t
, he thought.
Is there no way I have any control over this wretched thing?

That night, as he sat in his room penning his private letter to the Pontifect, which he would send through her courier, he included his concern for the Princess. He suspected, however, that if Ardrone received some trade advantage as a result of her marriage, Fritillary would be pleased, not upset, and the thought depressed him.
Everything’s always about monetary advantages and politics
.

He dawdled over finishing the report. An odd feeling niggled at him that there was something else he’d wanted to say. Something that had occurred to him during the revelries. The more he tried to remember, the more the idea of it skipped out of reach. It was a weird feeling for someone who prided himself on his memory.

Finally he gave up, and signed and sealed the letter.

S
orrel Redwing stood with her back to one of the stone pillars that held up the roof of the Great Hall of Throssel Castle. The stone was hard and cold, but at least it was something to lean against. She expected to stand there for several hours. Her appearance blended in with the stonework, until she was as well camouflaged as a bittern among reed stalks. If she was noticed, she hoped that she’d be of no more consequence than the menservants scurrying to and fro to put the suckling pigs and the roasted swans on the table for the evening meal.

She’d have preferred to do almost anything else, but this was now her life. Mathilda’s spy, feeding the Princess the gossip of the court, the truths people uttered when they didn’t know they were overheard.

Another autumn come, and she still didn’t know why she’d been given a witchery, or how she was supposed to be serving Va. She was waiting, still waiting for some kind of revelation. Some Va-sent vision. Something, anything not this. She was so
bored
. Worse, she was shackled in place by her lack of resources. It never occurred to the Princess to
pay
anything for her services.

I think this is worse than living at Ermine Manor. At least there I could remember Heather so easily. I could hear her laughter
. She’d escaped from the Ermines, only to end up as the Princess’s penned goose.
Va, I dedicated myself to your service. Isn’t there something more important that I’m supposed to be doing?

An unpleasant thought followed hard on the heels of that: perhaps this was penance for having killed Nikard. If so, how long for the murder of a man who’d deliberately killed his own child because she was born deaf?

Oh, Heather
…

She shivered.
I’ll never cease looking for a way out
.

Her next thought surprised her: she wanted so much more of life than she would once have thought acceptable. In Ermine Hall, her life had
plodded
from one day to the next, the only bright window in her years there being Heather. Now she wanted more. To be loved, yes. Someone, somewhere. A man like Saker Rampion. Strong, honest, caring.
Why does he never look at me?
She almost snorted. Why would he? She was just the grey nonentity, always fading into the background.

But even love wouldn’t be enough. She wanted to find joy in life, to experience hope, to be
challenged
.

She glanced around the room. Knots of courtiers formed and re-formed as they laughed and drank and gossiped and waited for the King to arrive. Her gaze moved on until she located Saker Rampion. He was standing next to Lord Juster, talking quietly with a seriousness at odds with most of the others in the Hall.
If I could have married someone like him
, she thought,
I might have been happy
.
He’d have been a wonderful father to Heather.

As chaperone when the Princess was with the witan, she listened to all their conversations. There was something about Saker’s watchful eye, his quiet, thoughtful air, that both attracted and intrigued.

He and Lord Juster Dornbeck were an unlikely pair. She knew Dornbeck was a buccaneer, a man whose passions always seemed larger than life. Gossip said he loved too well and too often, drank too much and too frequently, played too hard and too dangerously. By contrast, in all the time Rampion had been at court, she’d never heard gossip about him that linked his name to any woman, or to any kind of excess. And yet his friendship with Lord Juster appeared genuine.

Silly, she guessed, to think a man as handsome as Saker, with such a gentle, winning smile, would not bed a willing tavern lass occasionally. Often. Maybe he had a regular lover. Someone he wanted to marry. The thought caused her a stab of pain, and she sighed. Pox on’t, she was
such
a fool.

Just then, the King entered with the more important courtiers and made his way to the main table. Once they were settled, everyone else sought places at the trestle boards that ran the length of the hall. On their way to their seats, Lord Juster and Witan Saker halted only two paces away from the edge of her skirts.

They were too close. One false step and either of them could trip over her feet. She began to sweat, but didn’t dare wipe the moisture away as it dripped down her brow and into her eyes.

“You’re sure? Those money-grabbing Lowmian merchants managed to make their consortium
work
?” Lord Juster was asking.

Saker nodded. “The Lowmian Spicerie Trading Company, with the Regal as patron. I’ll wager he’s been playing off one merchant family against another, one port against another.”

Juster nodded. “And collects the gifts bestowed by those striving to reassert their privileged places. One can only wonder how the most frugal and austere of men often seem also to be the most covetous! What in all damp and watery Ustgrind does Vilmar
do
with his gold? Sit on it, like a mythical dragon on his hoard?”

“Well, he certainly doesn’t wear his wealth. He dresses like a shipping clerk.”

“I heard the Lowmians have already laid the keels of three new fluyts.”

Flights?
She wondered if she’d heard the word correctly. Ships of some kind, that was obvious.

Saker nodded.

“While our penny-pinching merchants continue to bicker like children with the King and the shipbuilders,” Juster said in disgust.

“My sources in Lowmeer tell me Kesleer’s carrack the
Spice Dragon
is being refitted to bring the new fleet up to four. All only lightly armed.”

“No match for my
Golden Petrel,
then!”

“Is it rigged yet?”

“
She
is indeed,” Lord Juster corrected. Casually he leaned an arm against the pillar, his hand resting just a finger’s length from Sorrel’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if one of the Regal’s galleons didn’t sail with them to provide more fire power.”

She almost screamed. How could they not see her? Her heart was pounding. She concentrated, pressing herself into the stone.
I am not here, not here
…

Intent on their conversation, neither of the men noticed her.

“I’m looking forward to seeing how the
Petrel
matches up to these fluyts,” Lord Juster continued.

Through the blur of sweat trickling into her eyelashes, she saw a golden haze around Saker, misting the air from a point at his hip. They didn’t notice that either. She eyed at it uneasily, mystified.

Dornbeck said, “Don’t look at me like that, Saker! My ship is the only chance we have of being able to obtain spices without paying through the nose for them.”

She heard the words but hardly absorbed their meaning. The space around Saker was filling with golden light, cascades of orange and vermilion, as soft as rolls of satin. Her terror grew. Smells filled her nostrils: the tang of salt borne on a sea wind, the musty damp of a forest floor after heavy rain. Song filled her ears, birdsong, but of no bird she’d ever heard, unearthly, bell-like notes beautiful almost beyond bearing.

Rampion and Dornbeck moved to be seated at the tables, and the colours and sounds faded, leaving Sorrel shaking and wet with sweat. No one was looking at her. No one else had noticed anything unusual.

She stayed where she was, her fright gradually fading. Some kind of vision, she decided, caused by the fear of being caught.
Nothing more, please Va. Nothing more. I couldn’t take on another burden to worry about.

After dinner was over, as the tables were dismantled and the hall was prepared for dancing, Sorrel caught sight of Saker again. He had ensconced himself behind a pillar, and to her amusement he was eavesdropping on a conversation between Tonias Pedding, the Prime’s secretary, and the palace resident prelate, Conrid Masterton. Well, two could play the same game, she supposed. Without further thought, she crossed to stand where she could both watch and listen. Blurred into the wall, she went unnoticed.