The Ships of Merior (50 page)

The smile that bent the near corner of his mouth revealed the disadvantage was intentional. ‘The dory will not drown your little ones. Nor will the sea of itself bring them harm. Lack of knowledge will certainly do both.’

Nettled past diffidence at last, Jinesse exclaimed, ‘Trust a man to make a simple thing impossible.’

‘This is not simple,’ Arithon said.

‘I won’t have their future tied to fishing, can’t you understand?’ He had been in Merior long enough to have seen the crippled old men while away their afternoons on the guest house porch; the horribly-swollen arthritic hands, or ones maimed and scarred, that could no longer draw nets from the sea.

But Arithon did see, Jinesse realized as he faced her directly. The compassion in his challenge, and the stillness of his patience made her wonder if he, too, had weathered losses. He said, ‘The twins’ father has died.
Would you give them your fear as their legacy? Will you force them to ignorance, where now there is laughter, when the sea is born into their very blood?’

Against a terrible, ripping urge to break down and weep, Jinesse whispered, ‘Don’t argue. Let us go, build your sloop, and leave this village.’

‘I will do all of that,’ Arithon promised. A less sensitive man might have tried to reassure her by touch. This one did nothing but speak, in that voice which relentlessly stripped the protections she had patched over raw and stinging grief. ‘But first I would leave you a gift. Let me teach your twins a mariner’s skills, as my father taught me. I will give them the sea, and a freedom beyond fishing boats, and you can face your heart and learn to abide without terror.’

He moved. Before she could frame any protest, he had risen. As he pressed a warm weight into her chilled fingers, she almost missed the welted scars that disfigured one palm and both wrists. ‘Here. Take my pledge. Your children shall be given all they need to stay safe, and you will find joy in their accomplishment.’

Jinesse turned over the token he offered in trade for her personal weakness: a scratched signet of white gold set with an emerald and incised with a rampant leopard seal. The ring was an heirloom, and with it, he granted a trust. Merior was too small for a man of his presence; all the village wondered why he needed refuge, and what sort of trouble he was fleeing. The sigil offered means to unriddle his surname and his origin, hers to pursue if she wished.

The gravity in Arithon’s manner suggested power in that knowledge, and key to his deepest reserve. ‘Jinesse, if after six months you still wish your children to stay ashore and apprentice in a craft shop, I shall help underwrite your decision. But let them have the dory until then. Give me that time to win your faith.’
‘Let the craft be launched on the bay side,’ she begged, the more wretched for the tremor in her plea.

He laughed, a chime of relief like bright music. ‘I’d actually planned on Garth’s pond. You don’t have to watch. I’ll look after their lessons myself.’

The sky darkened. A stiff, sudden wind flagged the palms by the harbour, and rattled the shack’s ill-hung door. Chipped wood scudded like autumn-tossed leaves, to scrape and catch in her mourning skirts. A fresh downpour spun sudden silver over the dories strung out on cork moorings, empty in wait for the fishing fleet’s return. Aching still for one left unpartnered, Jinesse clenched chapped hands beneath the humid chill of her oilskins.

Afraid of the secrets that surrounded this outsider, of what else he might soften if she lingered, she allowed him to escort her across the shell flats to the wicket gate by the market.

And then the bleak rain fell and swallowed him.

By the time she reached her tiny cottage with its roof of moss-draped cedar, and its front door painted with talismans which had done nothing to spare her goodman from the waves, the storm pounded in torrents across the spit. Arithon’s ring was an icy lump in her palm. For days she left it untouched in the bottom of her wicker sewing basket. She was no gossip, with naught else to do but pry into an outsider’s past.

Yet in the dark of the night when the twins were abed, and the sea boomed relentlessly against the headland to remind of its cruel theft, the toll of grief and loneliness chiselled away her resolve. She took down the basket, scrounged the dark emerald from its nest of thimbles and thread, and made an impression in candle wax. She used chalk to copy the leopard seal, then marked out the slanting, graceful runes that inscribed the inside of the band.

With the drawings wrapped in a packet the next
morning, she hopped a ride on an old, creaking tinker’s cart bound downcoast to Shaddorn. An enclave of Ath’s initiates still kept a hostel in a remote cove by Sickle Bay, and there she stopped to make inquiry.

Rumour held the disappearance of the Paravians had set the old order into decline. Certainly the long, winding lane that led to the hostel was hedged on both sides by rank woods. Its buildings were stone, dressed out in moss-flecked sigils that were uncanny to the eye, and which touched Jinesse’s skin to odd starts of gooseflesh. The grounds themselves looked unkempt, waist-deep in dog fennel and exuberant runners of wild vine. Unaware that initiates revered all growing things for their place, like most unversed visitors, the widow mistook their way of blessing for neglect.

Afraid to shout lest she find the silence one of desertion, she startled at movement, and was greeted by a white-robed old woman who answered her request before she spoke.

‘Claithen’s the brother who could help. Bide a bit. He will come for you.’

Jinesse was offered a bench beneath the knees of a hoary, crowned cypress. She cooled her feet in the trickle of a spring and worried her packet in fretful hands. The peace of moss-bearded hardwoods and an unpruned riot of citrus was broken by blackbirds who flapped and shrieked like viragos over seed grain that a wizened little cook tossed out of the door from the scullery. Unseen in a thicket, a quail called.

‘You have a seal you need identified?’ questioned a peppery voice.

Jinesse started, spun, and confronted a squat man with leaf-dark eyes, a bald crown, and a book clutched tight to his chest.

He gave her a jolly, wrinkled smile. ‘I thought we should look for it here, that Ath’s blessed sun shed his light on the knowledge you seek.’
The bench was wide enough for two, if tall for the brother’s bandy legs. He sat, feet swinging like a child’s, and balanced his fat tome on his knees. The serenity he commanded seemed to stare her through and finger every trouble in her heart. ‘You’ve brought a drawing,’ he prompted to crack her shyness.

She picked the string off her packet. Ath’s blessed sun made the leopard seem ineptly drawn, a sad and unexpected embarrassment. The original had been like the man, elegant in grace, with a captivating fierceness noticed too late for the safety of hapless small prey.

Claithen regarded her chalked copy in silence. Then he smoothed open flocked pages and bared the selfsame blazon, except this one was beautiful, painted in silver gilt and black, on a field as deep green as fine emerald.

Jinesse need not know letters to interpret the crown above the sepia ink of the house name.

The royal arms of s’Ffalenn,’ Claithen murmured. Hands as age-flecked as the pages eased the book’s boards closed. He reached out, touched a forefinger to the chalk-marked leaf in her lap, and traced an intricate pattern.

Whether the sign stood for blessing or curse, Jinesse had no way to know. But power translated across the touch; even through paper, she felt a flashpoint tingle of mystery cross her flesh. Her fabricated tale to explain her curiosity died unspoken. Never mind that the story was plausible: curious bits of jetsam were brought up all the time, oddments from the past, sea-crusted and strange, nested with the fish in the nets.

Yet with a tact that pierced, Claithen’s quiet made a he too wretched to contemplate.

‘Who would wear such a seal?’ Jinesse asked finally.

The initiate pushed back his ivory linen cuff and threaded a knobby finger along her unpolished scrawl of runes. ‘It says here:
“To my sons, from their forebears, back to Torbrand”.
Your man is the scion of Rathain.
There’s a prince of that line returned, by Ath’s grace. His shadows helped return the true sunlight.’

Jinesse shut her eyes and swallowed hard. The outsider who sheltered in Merior by the Sea owned powers more dangerous than silver-tongued persuasion, skills more dire than any simple love of ships. She wished no involvement with his sorcerous secrets. Appalled fear for her children left her sick.

‘You look tired,’ said Claithen. ‘In the buttery, we have herb tea in stone jars and new biscuits.’

‘No thank you.’ Jinesse stood up quickly, the paper crumpled in hands now smudged in damning, scarlet smears of chalk. ‘I have to walk back to Merior. You’ve been helpful. I’ll send down a basket of jam the next time a wagon comes by.’

Claithen peered up in gentle censure. ‘No need. The world in its wisdom provides.’ He freed a hand from his book and gestured toward the sprawl of the citrus grove. ‘If it is Arithon of Rathain you have met, believe this. He shall do you no harm. The heritage of his bloodline will permit him no cruelty, and Ath’s greater mercy walks beside you.’

Jinesse jerked back a step, breathless. Her children must never know the breadth of this quandary: their friend was the Master of
Shadow
, and if he stayed, his enemies would be visited upon Merior. He required refuge from the whole of the north, and their village offered too small a haven.

‘I know very little of mercy,’ Jinesse whispered; her husband had died of Ath’s storms.

‘Then life and Prince Arithon will teach you.’ No longer placid, the initiate brother bobbed to his sandalled feet. He gave her a last, searching glance that, like the bitter taste of aloes, seemed to curdle the dread in her breast. ‘In time, we shall come to meet again in this place. For now, I will see you to the gate since, sadly, my library holds no more help for you.’
Every step of the way back to Merior, Jinesse thrashed through agonized doubts. She weighed her children’s recent triumph over grief, and the fragile, trusting gift of their happiness against the dark rumours that surrounded the revealed name of their benefactor. The truth behind Arithon’s reticence burdened her, and chafed with the memory of his kindness. If he harboured deceits, their depth lay outside her grasp.

Timid in the end, loath as she was to confront him, she let the days pass one into another, and did nothing to forbid the twins’ friendship.

Another outsider came to Merior, a woman who rented a cottage and set up a small custom selling simples. The convenience was appreciated. Before, the only apothecary was south in Shaddorn, and when a babe sickened or a fisherman suffered injury, the hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood was a long, rough cart ride away. Good-wives gossiped with the village’s two shopkeepers, and wondered if the woman’s arrival might be connected to the other outsiders who currently inhabited the shell flats. Only Jinesse knew their questions were well founded, and she kept her own wary counsel.

Tiny as Merior was, folk there kept distance from strangers. Word of the woman’s presence never reached the pair most likely to be interested, and despite the villagers’ keen curiosity, her visit to the shell flats was unannounced.

She went, her cloak of grey wool snapped by harsh gusts off the sea, and her way directed by an elderly tosspot who informed in slurred gravity, ‘You’ll find the man, lady. Just follow the footpath toward Scimlade Tip and listen for the sound of the hammers.’

The autumn season had been fortunate; no deadly storms had whipped in off the Cildein to savage the exposed eastern shoreline. The mangroves that fringed
the sheltered inlet dripped and tossed branches mantled in glossy foliage. Sheared stems of deadwood past gales had ripped down lay masked in weed-bound shadow. The cedar-shingled shack on the shell flats shook to the thrum of the winds, as the half-decked little sloop cradled on braces did not.

The sky hung streamered and low as drenched wool, and the hammers, that morning, lay mute.

Skirts lifted clear of runoff from the fishmarket, the visitor picked her way through damp-rotted oat grass and crossed through a wicket gate festooned with Dakar’s holed stockings, left out for the weather to launder. The hesitant crunch of her footsteps stopped as a voice, light with a humour few ever overheard, raised clearly across the yard’s stacked lengths of lumber.

‘Bless you, no, that isn’t elegant. You need to go with the grain of the wood, not across.’ Framed by the lyre curves of the unfinished hull, the speaker bent over two intent tow heads, set lean fingers over a child’s stubby, dirty ones, and redirected the stroke of the plane.

Under sure guidance, the blade sang across new spruce and scrolled up a ribbon-thin shaving. The child with the tool shouted in pleasure, while the other tugged at the man’s idle arm and begged vociferously for a replay.

At that moment, Arithon of Rathain looked up.

The enchantress who intruded upon his privacy was relentlessly trained to interpret every nuance through detail. She took in the sailor’s tunic, decently clean, but rumpled in emphatic rebuttal of royal birthright; the dark, uncut hair that cast an air of benevolent untidiness over a perception still mage-trained, and keen as a razor; the sea tan and shirt style that minimized old scars, and beyond these, surprise, masked behind the polite lift of black eyebrows.

The rasp of the plane died away. Two twins turned pitch-sticky faces and stared. The one to whom persistence
had ceded the tool blew chips from the blade and demanded, ‘Who’s she?’

‘Is that how your mother greets strangers?’ the lady admonished, smiling.

‘Are you a stranger?’ Arithon countered, his guard nearly good enough to mask an underlying alarm.

Unprepared for the lurch of her heart as he regarded her, the visitor traced the end of the spar with her finger. The loving care that had guided its shaping sang through every fibre of the wood; as immediate, to her, the awareness of the hands that enacted the labour. Her shield of banality crumpled. ‘I don’t know.’