The Lascar's Dagger (20 page)

He scanned the garden to make sure there were no guards around, then began to descend.

In the morning he would go down to the port and seek a sailor’s berth on a ship bound for Ustgrind. Tars could always find work.

Saker awoke into a grey morning light, feeling cold. For a moment he lay still, wondering what was wrong. Then he sat bolt upright.

Va curdle me, what the fobbing…

His head spun and pain shot from the back of his skull through his brain to his eyes. He swayed and had to put out a hand to stop himself from falling back on his pillow.

There was a gap in his shutters, and a puddle of rainwater on the floor. Moving his head slowly, he surveyed the room. The kris lay in the middle of the floor and its scabbard was empty on the table. His candle had been moved.

Oh, spittle damn, I wasn’t
drunk
last night, was I?

He vaguely recalled a nightmare. There had been a brawl, and rain, and pain in his knee…

For the life of him he couldn’t remember anything more. He groaned and swung his feet to the floor. He was late for morning prayers.

L
ife at court continued without change as autumn crawled its way towards winter. If the King and his courtiers were worried about the plague to the north, they didn’t show it, although Saker heard that King Edwayn had sent guards to block the main roads entering Throssel to anyone who appeared sick or weak.

If there were ever any repercussions about the dagger cut on the Prime’s embroidered banner, Saker never heard about them. When he returned from that adventure, he’d written down all he could remember from the ledgers he’d seen. He mulled it over, put it away, then considered it again. So much of what he remembered had been abbreviations. What, for example, in a ledger labelled “Resources”,
did
Mi.For.Okwd
mean? Abbreviations like that had headed columns of tree names, followed by a number and then a value. Some kind of code, he assumed.

Another ledger had been labelled “Lances”. It had contained lists of people grouped into tens, each group headed by the name of a place, most of them in Ardrone, although he recognised villages and towns from all over the Va-cherished Hemisphere. He estimated there could have been as many as five thousand people listed.

He’d thought about sending his notes to the Pontifect, but had ultimately decided against it. She’d only be angry that he’d taken such a risk for so little coherent return. He’d tell her about it when he knew more.

As for the night the lascar’s dagger had apparently tried to dig the nails out of his bedroom shutter … He
thought
he remembered fighting someone, but in the morning the door and the window shutters had still been barred from the inside. His window was three storeys up, and the gap made by the single missing board – which he’d found on the outer sill – would not have allowed entry to anything bigger than a cat. In fact, the events were so bizarre, and his blurred memory of them so weird, he thought it all better forgotten.
Just the kris up to its usual tricks
…

He remained alert and watchful, more cautious about his personal safety than usual, while he waited for a communication from the Pontifect. As a result of his conversation with Juster, he’d sent another letter after the first, with an even stronger warning. As time passed, he wondered at the lack of reply, and sent a third communication, even though the courier’s wife assured him coldly that all his letters had been delivered to Vavala. He’d never warmed to her, but her frigid reception of his last letter made him wonder if she was furious with him for involving her husband in something she thought clandestine.

While he waited, it was the Princess who diverted him, who brought both joy and inspiration to his days. Trailed by her grey mouse of a handmaiden, she kept him constantly at her side, although it was her future that concerned her most, not her religious life.

“Amuse me, witan,” she said one day. “Tell me what it’s like to go to a university and study.” The next day it was a request that he tell her tales of his boyhood on the farm; after that she wanted him to relate the tales told by the Pashali traders, and describe the mastodon caravans that rode into Muntdorn through Coldheart Pass. She laughed at his silly jokes, teased him about his childhood escapades and his first love, and listened wide-eyed when he described his adventures as a sixteen-year-old acolyte taking foolish risks for all the wrong reasons.

Every now and then, his breath would catch as she fought tears at a mention of her marriage, or lifted her chin when someone spoke of the Regal. Once, when Prince Ryce carelessly told her she would bring brightness to the Lowmian court if she married Vilmar, she’d clutched Saker’s arm so tightly, her fingers bruised him. The terror that flared in her eyes tore his heart to shreds, yet there was nothing he could do. His counsel was trite, and left the taste of ashes in his mouth. He tried to imagine what it could possibly be like for her to have a father using her as a commodity in a business transaction, to be refused any information about her future until it was settled, to know she was to be traded away to a foreign country, to be made aware that she had to accept whatever others decided for her.

Worst of all, he was the one who had to guide her to acceptance and submission. He agonised over whether to tell her what Juster had said about Regal Vilmar’s first wife, torn between warning her and making her acceptance of her fate even harder. Inside, he wanted to spit at the injustice of it all.

As the days shortened and the colours of the oaks peaked, there was more news from Lowmeer about the preparation of the Lowmian Spicerie Trading Company’s new spice fleet. There’d been delays, according to the Prince, probably something to do with the shortage of cladding for the hulls against shipworm.

“Terrible little beasties, those worms,” Juster told Saker with a grave shake of his head as they walked through the city in search of a tavern to have a midday meal. “In warm seas, they can turn good strong oak planking into wet sawdust. The Lowmians were well advised to clad their ships. Pity they had trouble finding the right metals for the job.”

“By which I take it your ship is cladded against these worms and perhaps you had something to do with the shortage of the cladding?”

“Me? Tush! True, my cousins do have an interest in the East Denva copper mines, but how could I possibly have had anything to do with delays?”

“Indeed.” The man was incorrigible.

“Witan?” someone asked at Saker’s elbow. He turned to see the ten-year-old son of the courier who took his letters to the Pontifect. “My da said I was to give you this.” He handed over a slim packet wrapped in canvas and quickly disappeared into the crowded street.

He knew the handwriting scrawled on the cover; it belonged to the Pontifect’s elderly secretary, Barden.

“From the Pontifect?” Juster asked. “Open it up. I know you’ve been waiting for it.”

It contained a short note from Fritillary. He read it twice, stabbed through with surprise. It contained no thanks for his intelligence, and no instructions about what to do next.

I have considered your information and will be taking action. In the meantime, you’re to confine yourself to advising the Lady Mathilda to marry as she is instructed, and to continue to bestow your spiritual advice on her and his highness Prince Ryce.

She’d signed it using her full title, not as she usually did with her initials. Deeply annoyed, he folded the note and tucked it into his sleeve, unsettled. He’d just been put very firmly in his place. Fritillary was going to use other agents to deal with the matter. When it came to an affair of real importance, he was being relegated to the role of spiritual nursemaid.

The following week, Lord Juster Dornbeck feted his friends aboard his new galleon,
Golden Petrel
, to celebrate the ship’s completion.

The vessel rode at anchor on Throssel Water within sight of Throssel Palace, bobbing gently in the middle of a cluster of river barges like an elegant mother swan surrounded by fussing cygnets. Saker lounged against the taffrail, observing another crowd of bejewelled courtiers being rowed across on the royal galley to join the party. The flag at the stern told him they included his two charges, Prince Ryce and Lady Mathilda.

Watched by a nervous riverman, the Prince – having commandeered the sweep – was standing in the stern doing a reasonable job of keeping the vessel heading in the correct direction. The Princess, shaded by the silken canopy, ignored the antics of her brother and sat chatting with her ladies-in-waiting in the prow. Celandine the mouse, grey-eyed, meek and dull, dressed as usual in her grey widow’s weeds, watched expressionless.

Saker wondered how much longer Mathilda was going to stay compliant and accept she had no say in her future. When he’d tried to draw parallels between her and her mother, who’d been a Staravale princess sent to marry Edwayn, she’d given him a flinty stare, saying, “Yes, my mother was sold too. After all, a princess is never more than an offering made by one
man
to another, never more than a cynical gift from one monarch to another, all to secure a bargain that is rarely kept!”

He’d been unable to hide a wince.

Her laughter came to him now as she clambered up the ladder on to the deck, hampered by her copious skirts. He watched as Lord Juster bowed over her hand and raised her fingers to his lips while the grey mouse busied herself straightening the hem of her mistress’s kirtle. He looked away quickly, knowing how easily he could love Mathilda, if he allowed himself that liberty. Knowing how sometimes she looked at him, and the corner of her mouth would quirk upwards as if she, too, could have loved…

Those were thoughts better forgotten.

He ran a finger around his collar, not enjoying the last warmth of autumn on the windless deck.
What I wouldn’t give to be back in the nondescript, comfortable garb of Saker Rampion, spy, with the comfort of a sword at my side
.

Damn the Pontifect.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?”

He jumped, unaware until then that his private corner on the aft deck had been broached by Lord Juster, who’d abandoned the two royals to their courtiers. He waved a flagon of wine at Saker, and continued, “She’s my maiden, my virgin, my about-to-be bosom companion, everything a man could want in a wife. Look, Saker, at her slim elegance. And think of the dowry she’ll bring…”

“You forgot to mention the sharp angles of her rump and the rope wig of her hair. She’s a paunch-bellied
ship
, you moldwarp.” He grinned, though. Juster might play the fool, but his idiocy concealed a mind Saker appreciated. Pity he drank far too much. And whored too much too, either side of the bed depending on whether he was on shore or on board ship, by all reports. At least he was never
boring
. And boring was what his own life threatened to become if he was confined to his spiritual role.

“Tut-tut, such language from a witan. Can’t you at least admire her lines? That squared stern you speak of so disparagingly offers me more cabin room. Her sleek lowness, her narrow lines – they make her faster and more manoeuvrable. No high fo’c’sle that used to make the carracks such a bitch to sail close to the wind.” The slight slurring of his words and the extra care he took to enunciate more clearly betrayed his drunkenness. “Come, my clerical friend, put that empty goblet aside and toast the success of her maiden voyage.” He handed over the flagon.

Saker raised it and drank. Swallowing, he said, “Here’s to your safe return. If you have more of this wine on board, I’ll admit that a voyage would have much to recommend it.” He took another draught, savouring its rich, tangy tartness. “When will you be sailing?”

“Before the winter storms arrive, I trust. I already have the King’s signature on the letters of marque, but I’m still hunting for good officers. Can’t bear the thought of sharing a table with ignorant idiots for months on end. Don’t mind what a man’s ancestry is, but he must have good conversation.”

His quick frown didn’t escape Juster as he took the flagon back. “You aren’t going to get self-righteously Va with me, are you, my friend? Privateer, remember; not pirate.”

His tone was edgy, and Saker hid a sigh. A drunk Juster was more belligerent than he liked, yet he himself wasn’t in the mood to be conciliatory. “You could have the
Golden Petrel
sunk beneath you.”

“Bastards do it to us whenever they have the chance. ’S’truth, we’ve both been at this for nigh a hundred years. What’s the matter with you lately? You act as if you have prickles in your hose!”

“It’s called maturity.”

“Va forbid I catch it, then! No, I suspect you have a secret desire to escape to adventure and sail aboard the
Golden Petrel
.” He drained the last of the wine and flung the empty flagon over the stern. One of his servants hurried up with a newly opened replacement. “Tell the truth now! Aren’t you hankering after adventure in exotic lands?”

“No. My sailing is confined to the role of a passenger who prefers to arrive at his destination in the shortest time possible.”

“Look up there,” Juster said, pointing to the crow’s nest. “Imagine those masts straining under full sail, with ocean on all sides, the crew hauling on the sheets.”

Saker looked up and grimaced. “Imagine climbing up there in the rain, with the wind howling. I prefer
not
to imagine it, I think.”

“You could do it now, easily,” Juster said, and drank again. “We’re at anchor.”

A hand reached over his shoulder and took the flagon from him. “I dare you, witan!”

“Your highness,” Saker said, and bowed to Prince Ryce. “I believe I’m too old for dares.”

Juster pulled a face in his direction.

“Nonsense!” Mathilda had followed her brother up the ladder from the quarterdeck, her ladies-in-waiting giggling behind her as a gust of wind whipped at their skirts. “You could do whatever you put your mind to. Is not Va watching over you?” She dimpled at him, holding out her hand. Her overskirt, looped with panels edged with pearls, was so wide the men had to move away to give her room on the aft deck. Her only concession to being out in the open was a gauzy kerchief to protect her neck and shoulders from the sun.