The Lascar's Dagger (55 page)

“If I steal the feathers, will I be under anyone else’s spell? Kesleer’s? Regal Vilmar’s? Because they once owned them?”

“No. The plumes have to be gifted for that to happen, not stolen or found.”

“Let me make sure I have this quite straight. You’re ordering me to steal the feathers back because the magic of your people, through the medium of the kris, chose me. Even though the only advantage I have is that I can pass for a Lowmian, and you can’t. Then, assuming I’m successful, you don’t want me to give you the feathers – because that would give
me
ascendancy over
you
. Instead, you want me to go to Chenderawasi with you so I can personally return the feathers – all four of them – to your new raja. I will do this, you assume, in order to rid myself of your power over me, and to ensure that the plumes don’t wreak more havoc among the Va-cherished by being gifted to others.”

“Er, yes.”

“I have a better idea. If I steal the feathers, I give you all four, we call it quits, and I walk away. I won’t use their power. My word as the Shenat witan I once was.”

“I – I can’t take back the one I gave away.” He had paled, as if the idea of that made him sick. “I
gave
it to you. The feather would never stay with me. It would just find its way back to you.”

“Like the dagger.”

He nodded, subdued.

“And I can’t give it to anyone else, because I am a decent fellow. Would it matter if I kept it for ever? Or maybe I could destroy all four.”

Ardhi blanched. “You won’t live for ever, Witan Heron. And on your death, then what? These feathers can’t be destroyed. You can’t burn them. Their potency lasts for generations. The only person who won’t be affected by their power to enslave is the rightful owner. The new Raja.”

“We’ve always been told that people with witcheries can’t use them to commit crimes.”

“What I’m asking you to do is not a crime. I am asking you to correct a terrible wrong that was done.”

“Right now I don’t feel like a decent fellow. I’m angry enough to murder you. I loathe this revolting witchery of yours.”

“You are dying to see my islands, though, aren’t you? Come, let me buy you an ale and we’ll talk about the Summer Seas.”

For one treacherous moment he pictured islands in an emerald sea; he savoured the perfume of nutmeg trees and imagined the taste of fresh coconut cut from the palm trees he’d heard about. Sailors’ tales. Pashali stories.

And the story he’d never heard: of birds that must be impossibly beautiful.

His daydream didn’t last long. Inside a taproom five minutes later, the conversation was all about an outbreak of the Horned Death in Ustgrind. Over in one of the tradesmen’s districts along the River Ust…

Saker listened with a sinking heart.

Right then, all he wanted to do was go home. The trouble was, he had no idea of where home was, except that it wasn’t some remote isle in the Summer Seas.

S
aker lounged at the edge of the square outside the only gate to Ustgrind Castle. Makeshift stalls of the morning market cluttered the space in front of the looming grimness of the castle walls. Everything looked oddly wrong.

Colour
, he thought.
There’s no colour
. This was a society subscribing to the belief that a love of colour was intrinsically sacrilegious, a doctrine doubly absurd when it was obvious that so much of Va’s creation was multicoloured. Poor Mathilda, with her love of pretty clothes and baubles and music, inside that ugly pile of stone … He tried to dredge up a spark of lingering anger towards her, and found only pity and guilt. The love was gone, if ever it had been real, and even the scars were fading. He shrugged and tossed the memory away. He was here to observe, to find some way to enter the castle without being caught, not to dwell on the past.

The Castle Watch kept the area immediately in front of the gate clear. They were easily identifiable by their pikes and their black tunics trimmed in dull red, and no one entered the outer bailey without their scrutiny. Their comrades patrolling the battlements were called the Castle Wardens. They wore a different uniform and some carried an arquebus in place of the pike.

Ardhi and I might as well be a couple of suicidal dewberries planning to be eaten alive,
he thought miserably.
Fool-born idea to break into a royal castle
.
It looks as if we have to go over the wall in the dead of night
…
But then what? Wander around like a pair of purblind moles looking for worms?

He scanned the crowd one more time, preparing to leave, when something made him hesitate. A nondescript woman, poorly dressed and elderly, weaving in and out of the crowd. She was hunched, bent over a walking stick, although several times she moved surprisingly fast through the crowd. Something about her momentarily puzzled him. He could
feel
her.

Witchery. She had a witchery.

She was not buying or selling anything, so her movements appeared purposeless. Every now and then she faded into the crowd like mist dissipating into the air.

Interested, he approached her more closely, only to see a much younger woman than her disguise suggested. No, not a disguise, a glamour. She was dark-haired, with long dark lashes framing deep blue eyes. He’d seen her before, twice. On board Juster’s ship, and along the road to the Chervil shrine. Not the glamoured Celandine mouse, but the real woman, Sorrel Redwing. He watched as she sidled up unnoticed behind a wealthy merchant bargaining with a stallholder over some quills and ink. Taken by surprise, Saker could only gape as she deftly cut a gold button from the merchant’s sleeve with a small-bladed knife. Both knife and button then disappeared into her clothing, her action blurred by her old-woman glamour.

Va’s teeth, she’s using her glamour to steal!

As he dithered, wondering what to do, she turned her attention to a burgher’s wife, evidently tempted by a bulging pocket-purse hanging from her waist. He gaped, shocked, as her hand opened the drawstring.

He’d heard many tales of how witcheries vanished if someone tried to misuse them. Never had he heard of the successful use of a witchery to perpetrate a crime, and yet here he was, watching it happen.

Snapped out of his shocked immobility, he pushed his way through the crowd to her side. Seizing her by the elbow, he jerked her away from the burgher’s wife, bending to mutter into her ear, “I know what you’re doing. Stop it this instant or I’ll call the guard.”

Unaware until then that anyone had penetrated her glamour, she yelped, startled, wrenching her arm free even as she turned to look at him. Her walking stick fell to the ground unheeded. Her eyes widened in dawning recognition and disbelief. In her alarm, her glamour wavered.

He picked up the stick and hustled her away to the edge of the crowd, where they could have a more private conversation. By the time he had found a quiet spot, she had regained her composure.

“Hang me for a hedge-born flirt,” she said. “If it isn’t Saker Rampion.”

“How in all Va’s cherished world did Celandine Marten become a cutpurse in a street market? I thought you’d be living the pampered life in royal apartments!”

“Sorrel. Sorrel Redwing. No glamour, no Celandine, just me. Sorrel.”

“Yes, I know. I’m an idiot. With a canker for a brain. And I owe you twenty thousand grovelling apologies for my idiocy about what was the glamour.” He stared at her, trying to sort out the best way to handle her presence, and all he knew about her.

Sorrel Redwing murdered her husband.

She smiled faintly. “Ah, so you made some enquiries about me, then. I’m flattered you cared enough to bother.”

He gritted his teeth.
Damn her for a harpy, she always managed to rile him
. “You murdered your husband.”

“Yes, and you went to bed with a princess. We are a fine pair, aren’t we? Although I had thought you might have given up hanging around Mathilda like a tomcat on the prowl.”

He flushed, half in annoyance that she should think Mathilda was the reason he was in Ustgrind, half in embarrassment. Around them the disinterested crowd flowed, and life went on; he heard and saw none of it. Va rot it, he had no idea what to say.

When the silence threatened to become ridiculous she said, “If you want me to take a message to the Princess, I won’t do it. I see no point in furthering your, er, idiocy.”

“You – you…” He waved a hand ineffectually at the castle. “What the sweet acorns are you doing
stealing
in the street? Did the Regala throw you out? How can you use a guardian-granted witchery to steal? A common cutpurse! Shame on you!”

“There are no depths to which I will not sink,” she agreed complacently. “Depraved, I am. But
never
common, surely.”

His mind seethed with questions, but none of those were foremost in his thoughts now. Instead, he was thinking that this meeting was all too much of a coincidence. Pickles ’n’ hay, was the damned Chenderawasi magic intervening to make things happen again? He needed to get into the palace, and lo and behold, here was someone who might be able to help. The Pontifect would say it was Va’s work and he should have more faith. But he’d seen too much to believe in that kind of simplicity any more.

He took a painful breath. For all the control he had over his own life, he might as well have been an oarless rowing boat in a rip tide. Va, Chenderawasi, the Way of the Oak, A’Va – or just bizarre coincidence … When someone gifted with a witchery could use the gift to commit a crime, he no longer knew which way was forward, and which the path to the oblivion of hell.

He was still reeling from the implications of his thoughts when she said with a deadly seriousness, “We need to talk.”

Unable to find the right words to say, he nodded.

“But not here,” she added. “Somewhere we can be private.”

“I know just the place. An abandoned shrine, not far from here.” He offered her his arm and she slipped her fingers into the crook of his elbow. Her touch was firm, but her body maintained its distance as he guided her out of the square towards the river path. He was glad of that; she was far too alluring for him to be oblivious to the curves of her figure, or the shine of the curls that had escaped her coif. Mostly, though, it was her eyes that haunted him. So dark a blue, so intelligent, so scathing in their mockery of him.

She killed her husband.

And then, as if he was arguing with himself:
She must have had a reason.

Ustgrind had no city wall, and he headed straight through the back streets towards the river upstream of the castle. She walked at his side, serenely composed now, all her glamour vanished. No one would ever call her pretty, yet he found her strong features had an attractive beauty all their own.

“Will you hear my apology?” he asked.

“Which one?”

Rot her, she didn’t make anything easy. He ploughed on. “I accused you of using a glamour to cover your Celandine appearance in order to entice my interest. That was uncouth, incorrect and clay-brained.”

“It was.”

“I apologise. When I saw you near the Chervil Moors shrine, I ought to have realised, but I was not … not myself right then. I was not thinking clearly.”

“When naked and blue with cold, doubtless it is hard to be rational.”

He was silenced, thrown. She was laughing at him? Angry? He couldn’t tell. He was off-kilter, trying to grasp the reality that the shadowy Celandine was no more than play-acting. She had never been real. This Sorrel Redwing, the woman he’d first met at the windswept moorland shrine, was the real person, and he didn’t understand her. She didn’t make
sense
. One thing he did know, she was no mouse, hiding in the corners because she was frightened. She was bold enough to disguise herself as a man and ride from Throssel to Chervil alone. Bold enough to steal on streets where the penalty was death.

Blister it, she was bold enough to have killed her husband. You need to be careful, Saker.

Lowmian shrines were always centred around water, not oak trees, but this one had the sad appearance of a place scarred by drought and neglect. The water that fed it and the shrine-keeper had died together, and now the charm and witchery of the shrine itself were fading.

Sorrel sat on a stone-carved seat and spread her skirts. He wondered if she was making certain he would not try to share her seat. He stood instead, although there was another seat opposite hers.

“Do you still serve the Princess?” he asked. “The Regala, I should say.”

“Yes.”

“Then why were you stealing?”

“I’m desperate for money, why else? No one has ever paid me coin for my service.” His shock must have been apparent, because she added, “The Regal sent all Mathilda’s ladies-in-waiting home. All her jewellery was taken from her. She has nothing more than a little pin money. Her access to the Ardronese Ambassador is limited. Her new Lowmian ladies spy for Vilmar and his courtier favourites. She couldn’t give me anything to sell without someone calling attention to it being missing, so I must seek money where I can.”

“That – that is inconceivable. To treat an Ardronese princess so?”

“Oh? And what about treating a servant so?”

He had no reply to that.

“To be fair to the Lowmians,” she said, “if she asks for anything they consider reasonable, it is given to her without question. Nor do I believe her treatment is any different to that meted out to other regalas in the past. It’s just the Lowmian way. What need has a regala for money when she has only to ask for what she wants? What need does someone as lowly as I have for coin?”

“Can she not seek an allowance from King Edwayn?”

“That would be insulting to the Regal, wouldn’t it? All her letters are read by others, you know.” She sighed. “Witan, the court here is not like the palace in Throssel. She is allowed no visitor except those chosen for her, and they would never dream of speaking to her without her ladies being present to overhear all that is said. Even her clerics are the Regal’s choice. That is what is
normal
. I can come and go because I use the glamour, but I have no money and no access to anything I can legitimately sell.”