The Ships of Merior (52 page)

The courtesy expected as that personage appeared, yawning and straightening his furred brocades and gold chains, was no custom Pesquil subscribed to. No bow did he give, no preamble in flowery language; he scorned men of pedigree and privilege as naturally as he hated barbarians.

He presented his case with the ripping flat brusqueness of a slap dealt to shame an incompetent. ‘When was the last time this city received any courier or message from the southcoast?’

The city’s chubby seneschal crumpled into his
upholstered chair. A florid man with watery eyes, he rearranged his feathered hat, turned his knuckles to admire the sparkle of his rings, and raised his pencilled black eyebrows. He took his time answering; men arrived without appointment to make demands with crude manners well deserved to wait upon his pleasure. ‘Summer, I should think. Why care?’

Pesquil clamped his fists in forbearance. ‘Lord Commander Harridene’s still out on campaign?’ A drawn pause; a languid nod; Pesquil’s next question rapped back fast as a ricochet. ‘Who’s acting captain of the garrison?’

Etarra’s seneschal stiffened his spine, disdainful. ‘You scarcely needed to disturb me to ask what any servant could tell you.’

A moment of locked wills, while bleak, cold black eyes stared down the pompous official. At length the seneschal blotted moisture from his fashionably-powdered cheeks and gave in. ‘Gharmag’s sick with the cough. His senior staff sergeant holds the temporary command.’

Another pale-cheeked puppy with pedigree whose father deemed he needed hardening, Pesquil remembered. No twitch of disgust crossed the raised bones of his features. Etarra’s army had lost more than a skilled captain with Gnudsog’s death in Strakewood; a strategist of unrefined tastes and no pretensions, he had at least kept a finger on the pulse of rumour in the drovers’ dives and taverns.

‘Let me tell you what I learned in one hour from four caravan guards just in from North Ward,’ Pesquil said.

The seneschal bristled. ‘But this is outrageous! To barge in and berate me for not consorting with riff-raff in the streets. For your insolence, I should demand a review of your competence.’

‘Try.’ Pesquil bared yellowed teeth, his mailed fist at ease on the sword responsible for harvesting more clan
scalps than any other blade in the northern reaches. ‘This city’s ignorant riff-raff, as you name them, have word of the Master of Shadow. They bandy tales in our taverns that every misbegotten sailor’s told his grandmother since the traders’ galleys berthed in winter dry dock!’

The overbred smirk on the seneschal’s face dissolved like wax left near a fire.
‘What?’

‘On the night of summer solstice, the city of Jaelot was half torn to wreckage by a sorcerer who lived there for months in disguise, but left with black hair and green eyes.’ Unmoved by the seneschal’s pasty-faced shock, Pesquil inflected his next lines like the cut and riposte of lethal steel. ‘Alestron, downcoast, suffered an explosion inside a locked armoury that killed seven men. Although the s’Brydion duke is no fool, and his best troops combed the countryside for a fugitive who bore the selfsame description, no culprit was found. Arithon s’Ffalenn has come out of hiding in Melhalla. If the guild minister’s council has not paused to wonder, or take steps to see why no messengers came through from that region,
somebody
had better act now. Or I’ll personally roust Lord Mayor Morfett away from counting jewels for his daughter’s trousseau over this.’

‘Right away, right away!’ The seneschal flurried a hand to dispatch his limp secretary on the errand.

Pesquil watched the agitated hurry raised by his news in stone-faced, scalding ill-humour. Braced for days of political manoeuvring while Etarra’s beribboned city governance primed in agitation to act, he decided, cold-nerved, that he would arrange to carry the dispatches sent to Avenor himself. A hand-picked contingent of his headhunters would ensure information reached Prince Lysaer with all speed.

On the morn that Pesquil’s company embarked from Etarra under dismal, sleeting skies for their arduous winter journey to Avenor, balmy southern winds flapped the pennons of a newly-launched sloop, moored amid a damascened circle of reflection in the distant, turquoise waters of Merior. The Shadow Master whose misdeeds were named in Mayor Morfett’s sealed dispatches scarcely looked the mage-trained minion of evil. Clad in a plain linen shirt and loose trousers, he carried no weapon beyond a rigging knife. The tanned hands that drove the sweeping stroke of his oars as he rowed the sloop’s tender ashore were innocent of spells or subterfuge.

Certainly no villager knew him for the author of uncivil deeds as he leapt barefoot into the shallows, beached his dory, and strode through the dunes and shoulder-high oat grass to call at the whitewashed cottage of Mistress Jinesse. Two fishermen who idled on shore leave grinned in lewd interest, for the widow’s battened windows gave clear indication that she wished no truck with any visitor.

Arithon s’Ffalenn stood braced in the sun-washed sand
of her yard, a crooked grin on his lips. Then he drew his rigging knife, pried the blade between the shutters, and slit the loop of cord that hooked the inside fastening pegs. As the loosened panels creaked wide, he laid a hand flat on the sill, saluted the watchers, and neatly vaulted through.

A dauntless shriek and a fishwife’s imprecations drifted through the cracked boards. A mockingbird settled on the rooftree startled in a flash of barred wings. Then the bolt grated back and the widow’s painted door crashed open, not to eject an impecunious male caller, but to liberate her towheaded twins, who bounded through, yelling their excitement, an overstuffed duffel slung between them. The panel flapped agape in the sea-breeze. Something suspiciously like crockery crashed and broke against an inside wall. Moments later, Arithon emerged, the widow held in tow by her wrists.

‘Really!’ She tried to plant her feet, overbalanced, and stumbled into him.

Not about to waste the opportunity, Arithon grinned and snaked an arm around her waist. She pounded his shoulder with the fist just freed, and fingers pulled untimely from the mixing of bread dough shed small puffs of blown flour.

Jinesse shrieked, ‘It’s the woman who brews simples you should be dragging to your lair, not I, and certainly not my two children!’

‘I do have nicer manners than to haul you unwilling to the shell flats,’ Arithon admonished. His smile only widened, and she realized: they were bound due east for the beach. She turned her red face, and through disarranged hair, saw the little sloop perched like a gull on jewelled waters.

Her cheeks drained to ghastly white. ‘Fiends and devils take your interfering spirit. I don’t like boats. Let me be.’

‘Quite the contrary,’ Arithon demurred, his smooth
voice jarred by her struggles, I’ve decided the first lady to board
Talliarthe
should be one afraid of the sea.’

Jinesse howled. ‘You named your blighted vessel
Talliarthe!’
Her terror now spurred by indignation, she emphasized with a chop that glanced scatheless off the hard-knit muscles of his chest. ‘How fitting!’

‘Well, yes,’ said Arithon, agreeably pleased; his sloop’s namesake was the legendary sea sprite reputed to spirit off maidens who wandered inside the tidemark. ‘Don’t be angry. Your girl Feylind made the suggestion.’ Staggered as a woman two fingers taller than his height thrashed and battered at his composure, he tucked his chin, changed grip, and hoisted.

Jinesse gave a pealing yell that all but deafened his right ear, then found herself tossed belly-down over his shoulder. A flock of feeding rails scattered and took wing like thrown birch chips. The twins ignored her cries and launched the dory, while Arithon made a gallant’s apology and waded undaunted through the surf.

‘You know I don’t swim!’ The widow’s plea cut off on a racked jolt of breath as he ducked. The horizon spun through a sickening circle. Through the dishevelled locks ripped loose from lost pins, Jinesse saw herself deposited with the duffel on the stem seat. Panic overwhelmed her. She grabbed an oar and slashed to beat off her kidnapper, now waist-deep in green water with both hands clamped on the thwart to hold the dory against an onrushing comber.

Arithon dodged the whistling attack. The oar blade smacked short in necklaced foam. Gouged spray sheeted skyward and left him drenched and still laughing. ‘Don’t say,’ he gasped, breathless, ‘if you could swim, you’d jump ship. It’s Ath’s own blessing you don’t.’

Jinesse spat out the taste of brine. She mopped a plastered swathe of hair from her neck, her glare fully spoiled by the trickling sting of saltwater. Then his firm push
shot the dory ahead through the froth, and fright ripped a scream from her throat.

Arithon breasted the crest. Sleeked in wet clothes and lean as an otter, he vaulted the gunwale. Diamond streams of runoff spattered from his hair, no impediment as he twisted his purloined loom out of the widow’s locked grasp. While shrieks that would credit a wild harpy shredded the mid-morning quiet, he proceeded with his abduction. Watching from shore, Merior’s idle villagers absorbed every nuance and chuckled themselves into stitches.

‘Well, it’s fitting!’ declared the boarding house landlady, drawn to her porch with her broom still in hand to oversee the outcome of the fracas. ‘That Jinesse has been too straitlaced for health since the sea took her husband. Yon’s a comely enough young man, for an outsider. His company just might lend a bloom to her cheeks. Mayhap then she’ll stop fussing. To hear her carry on, you’d swear those poor twins were like to drown in Garth’s pond!’

A kindly neighbour volunteered to douse the widow’s fire and close up her vacated cottage. Over their laundry and their baking, Merior’s gossips warmed to loquacious speculation. Lulled under mild southern sunlight, they remained unaware that larger threads of happenstance tied their favoured visitor to an imminent muster of armies.

The prophet whose gift of sight might have warned them held himself oblivious by acrimonious design.

Having twice stifled the onset of his talent for prescience, Dakar sprawled in a drunken stupor in the berth he had inhabited since the hour of the little sloop’s launching. He moaned green-faced in his blankets, while the waters broke into chop and shoaled with the tide off Scimlade Tip, and the neat, painted dory bobbed to her destination. The vituperative outrage of the widow mingled with gulls’ calls and the delighted shouts of
children.
Talliarthe’s
insolent, black-haired master boarded his passengers and cleated his tender to a tow-line. Then he slipped the pretty sloop’s mooring and spread smart, tanbark sails to the wind.

Five days of fair-weather winds coaxed Jinesse from the grip of pale nerves. The sloop sailed through her shakedown like a pert, saucy lady, the slack as the breeze stretched new stays drawn in daily, and the promise of her design proven through in a smooth dance of passage. Jinesse emerged from clenched fear to final, exhausted recognition that her dread of blue waters gnawed her hollow and sick to no purpose. The twins thrived on clean sun and hours spent fishing from the stem rail. Arithon’s company proved polite but evasive. His assiduous good manners at last reassured her that his plans matched his stated intent: to wean away her visceral distrust of the sea.

At dusk, with the black, notched forests of the southcoast a lacework border to a cobalt sky strung with stars, the little sloop’s decks offered peace. While the moon spilled a path of molten light on dark waters,
Talliarthe
sailed lightly west. Soothed by the whisper of the wake against the crocheted caps on the wave crests, the widow perched on the cabintop with her knees tucked up in clasped arms. The strung tension she had suffered since her husband’s loss had eased with the days. She could breathe the sea air, content, while the breeze off the sail combed her loose hair and spun the ends into tangles.

A lithe shadow against the frame of the cockpit, the Prince of Rathain stood in his loose linen shirt and plain jerkin, the tiller braced in hands that other nights, in quiet anchorage, had woven wizardry magic on his lyranthe. The twins slept below, entangled like kittens in a berth; Dakar lay wedged in the forepeak, his bilious temper
stilled by the ale provisioned in casks at Shaddorn.

Enspelled by the moment’s tranquillity, enervated by the unaccustomed freedom of having no household and no cares, Jinesse gave timid rein to curiosity. ‘Why did you come to Merior?’

Arithon’s face turned, his steep, angled features inscrutable against stars and sky. His answer came back unhurried, in the form of a chorus from a sailor’s chantey.
’ “Where sands lie like sugar, heave, me bully boys, ho! Where flowers bloom red, and the lily fair maids, boys, the maidens never say no.”’

When his light lines met with prying silence, he did not again shy from the subject. ‘Why ask?’

‘Somebody must.’ A film of moisture cemented her palms to her shins. ‘Nobody harmless has scars such as yours, and you made a free gift of your blazon.’

The sloop rocked over a swell, cupped a gust in taut gear, and thrummed into a complacent heel. Arithon braced a foot against the leeside locker and nursed his weight against the helm as water chuckled past the rudder. ‘No secret there. Dakar will spill anything, drunk.’

Jinesse matched his evasion with flat truth. ‘He hasn’t, you know. He’s wary of you as the man who burned his tongue once too often at the feast.’

Arithon flashed her a smile. ‘Well he should be. Did you dare ask him why?’

Warned by a note like the slick draw of steel from its scabbard, Jinesse raised thin fingers to hook wind-ruffled hair from her lashes. ‘The cobbler’s wife tried. She said afterwards she’d take the simpler challenge and pry open an oyster barehanded.’

Arithon gave a musical, soft laugh. ‘You know who I am. You’ll have heard the dire rumours. Since you never exposed me, I prefer the belief that my conduct has lent foothold for trust.’ A headsail whispered into a luff. He stretched, flicked a line off a cleat, and with the strength that was his most understated attribute, hardened a line
with deft precision. The sloop quickened and sheared ahead to a clipped lisp of foam. Disturbed phosphorescence scattered like dropped sparks in the ploughed black waters of her wake.