The Ships of Merior (66 page)

Whether her deepest suspicions were true, and Tal Quorin’s past tragedy had damaged him further, she stifled her desire to pry. Some facts were better off left to bide beyond range of her order’s covetous grasp.

‘You aren’t paying attention,’ Elaira admonished on the night he asked what her life had been like as a Koriani novice. ‘We spent a lot of time learning to draw sigils to drive out rats, and if you burn your fingers on that flask, there’ll be no music for the wedding.’

‘What wedding?’ Arithon snatched up a linen rag to shield his grip on the hot container.

‘Can’t you take pity on the matchmaking goodwives in this village?’ Elaira scolded in fond exasperation. You’ll spoil their gloating over six months’ hard work, then break their hearts since your calls at my cottage create their juiciest hours of gossip.’

‘And you told them?’ he said in stifled alarm.

Elaira returned a glare of owlish propriety. ‘That with Dakar in tow, your new ships were going to need extremely potent talismans to avert incompetence, misfortune, and iyats.’

Rathain’s prince grinned through the flame-rippled air off the brazier. ‘Plain truth.’

The sorrow struck Elaira at sudden, odd moments, that such joy must become the first thing to wither when Arithon’s cursed fate overtook him, and the contradictory ironies embedded in his nature came to exert their-inevitable pressures. Bound to a course of inescapable
violence as he was, she could not shake her dread that Morriel’s belief would prevail, and his very strengths of character become the catalysts to drive his mind to destruction.

Whether the compassionate intelligence that sourced Elaira’s fascination had engaged his deeper feelings in return, he lent her no chance to find out. To Jinesse, who maintained a tenuous, dutiful friendship, he seemed as he always had: willing enough to speak when addressed, but disinclined to volunteer his confidence.

Despite a reluctance too elusive to finger, he played to brighten the wedding of the cobbler’s daughter and the freckled youngest son of the abalone cutter, who had no touch for his father’s trade and sailed as hired crew with the fishing fleet. An adept from Ath’s Brotherhood came to bless the ceremony, hooded in robes of stainless, white linen, threaded at the hems and collar with interlocked seals of gold and silver. The feast lasted long after the summer twilight faded. Dancers whirled in carefree circles around the bonfires, while smoke tanged the humid air, rich with the aromatic oils burned to repel swarming insects. Seen through the celebrants’ capering shadows, the groom looked smart in his new broadcloth jacket, his bride flushed and radiant under curled lemon hair, wreathed in oak greens and scarlet ribbons. The bronze bells sewn on her slippers chimed merry time to her joy.

Seated by Jinesse, her hands filled with spiced bread and hot fish, Elaira mellowed to the fast-paced, seamless peal of lyranthe notes that stitched out the polished, brilliant rhythm.

But for the widow who recalled Arithon’s performance on
Talliarthe’s
deck and again, more forcefully, at Innish, the measures described by the bard’s skilled fingers seemed as mere surface ripples thrown out to mask the grand depths. Where Elaira was drawn by curiosity to inquire, Jinesse chewed her lip and admitted,
‘His mind is elsewhere, tonight. His heart is not in his music’

The twins chose that moment to badger their mother for taffy. Through their engaging, boisterous noise, Elaira found no graceful way to reopen the lapsed conversation.

The next week a squall line raked in from the east and upset the run of fair weather. Battered fishing luggers beat under reefed sails for the shelter of Merior’s harbour. In perennial mixed blessing, the fleet’s safe return came accompanied by the indiscriminate misfortune that abounded among men who worked at sea.

Tinselled with falling rain that hissed through her firebrand, Elaira struggled up the exposed spit toward the shipyard. The night was a roaring black maelstrom around her. Freak winds battered wet skirts against her shins and shredded spindrift in bursting, white sheets off the breakers. Exposed to the storm’s raw brunt, the pole sheds shook to the blasts, while a loosened plank banged a madman’s tattoo, and dilute flares of lightning lit the anvilled clouds to stirred sulphur. Elaira picked an uncertain path between obsidian puddles and dune grass streamered like frayed ribbon. Against the heave of roiled surf, the looming frame of the half-complete brigantine combed the gusts to shrill vehemence. Nearer to hand bulked the mass of the chart loft, needles of candleflame pricked through its ill-fitted shakes. Inside the sole building to be graced with four walls, the yard’s roisterous labourers gathered over trestles to eat supper, compare conquests and shoot dice.

Arithon’s workers were unattached men. Given an hour of unsupervised freedom, they would drink to ease boredom, and become crapulous; divided by disparate origins and rivalries, not a few were wont to pick fights.

Resigned to plain fact, that every black eye and skinned knuckle would arrive on her doorstep for treatment
come the morrow, and that Arithon’s visits would lapse while the wrongfully battered sued for their rights to restitution, Elaira marched up to the chart loft and hammered a fist on the door.

Her torch spat sparks like thrown sequins. The rain laced a damascened fall off the drenched ends of her hair, her plain cuffs, and the layered hems of cloak and skirt. Her insistent rapping took a moment to be noticed. More seconds passed as voices declaimed inside, before a chair scraped and somebody moved to raise the latch. The portal creaked inward and faces peered out, sallow in the glow of cheap tallow dips, or brosy with drink and primed to proffer lewd comment.

Elaira spoke first, her voice a steel ribbon through the background clamour of banging tin flagons and a buffeting roar of conversation. ‘Fetch your master.’

Movement heaved through packed bodies. Arithon appeared, dishevelled from the press, his attentiveness masked behind inquiry.

There’s been an accident to a fisherman!’ Elaira shouted through the scream of the gust that flagged her torch flame. ‘You’re needed.’

Shadowed in the swoop of the draught, Arithon pulled in a careful breath. ‘You’re mistaken if you think I can help.’

Behind the arm he held braced against the door jamb, two burly craftsmen elbowed each other and exchanged ribald leers. Hampered by the total lack of privacy, Arithon stepped into the rain and let the storm slam the door shut behind him. He said nothing more. The hard wind flogged his black hair into tangles, before the wet slashed the strands and bared his expression to the fickle rags of torch light.

Presented with a wall, Elaira bent on him every power of observation she could wring from her Koriani arts. The gusts lagged for an instant. The recovered leap of the cresset showed him unmoving in the beat of the
downpour; except the light dashed and flared across the abalone beads that weighted the ties of his shirt. His breathing was fast and unsteady. Through his hard-leashed control, the enchantress found no foothold to determine why he might meet her request for help with falsehood, or what hidden circumstance should fracture his mood in distress.

As always when his reticence thwarted her, she met him head-on with plain honesty. ‘The boy who just married caught his wrist in a line during an attempt to strike sail. The damage is extensive. Broken bones, torn flesh and dislocation. Without arcane help, he’ll stay crippled. The union you just helped to celebrate in such joy will come to be dissolved.’

Recoiled to astonishment, Arithon burst out, ‘But why?’

‘Local custom,’ Elaira said, disgusted. Despite his sympathy, she dared not give in to her urgency and grasp his arm to hasten him away from the chart shack. ‘Your masterbard’s training at law can’t cover every regional backwater. With regard to marriage, some places keep stubborn traditions. Shepherds’ enclaves in Vastmark shun women for lack of fertility. Settlements above Waterfork in Lithmere demand a tax to be paid before nuptials. For Merior, a bride’s father holds the right to nullify her contract at any time before her first childbirth if the match is ruled unfavourable. The law was first written to curb wife beating. Its practice has extended to include cases where a husband loses his livelihood. What chance does this boy have? And you saw the girl. She adores him.’

Arithon s’Ffalenn stood a second longer, his features veiled in the drowning thunder of rainfall. Then he said, ‘Wait. I shall come.’ He pushed back inside, to return a minute later with the leather-wrapped bundle of his lyranthe.

‘Ath’s mercy!’ Elaira exclaimed, her patience torn
through by his obstinacy. ‘It’s your mage-sight that boy requires, not any comfort drawn from music!’

‘For that, I’m sorry, rare lady.’ Arithon tucked her sodden fingers through his elbow and drew her into the darkness. ‘But since the battle on the banks of Tal Quorin, my bard’s gift is all I can offer.’

‘Can’t? Or won’t?’ Distraught and furious to believe he might obstruct her through some tangle of guilt-induced conscience, Elaira raised the flittering torch and let the light fall full on his face.

His contact with her hand jerked away as he twisted, muscle meshed to bone in an anger not quite savage enough to mask a grief of immeasurable proportion. Through the thrash of storm wind and water, amid harried black puddles that seemed utterly to swallow the tormented flame above her fist, Elaira felt Koriani talent and intuitive instinct noose disparate memories into painful focus: Dakar, haranguing a man he believed to be vulnerable; then like hammered echo, the unnerving study Arithon had once subjected to a growing stalk of wild nightshade.

More than blood had been sacrificed to Desh-thiere’s curse in the massacre at Tal Quorin
, Elaira perceived in horrified discovery.
Arithon s’Ffalenn had lost touch with his mage-bom talent.
Transfixed by shared pity, she wrenched to a stop in her tracks.

Arithon paused also, aggrieved enough to have laid flat all his defences.
‘Ei ciard’huinn,’
he said in lyric Paravian, which translated,
I am exposed.
‘I could wish that Morriel shouldn’t know.’

Appalled to concede just what she had forced him to betray, Elaira swallowed. Words failed. Apologies were useless. Numbed and uncaring if the sluiced wet on her cheeks held some droplets that fell hotly salted, she ached, sieved through by mute misery.

His eyes brilliant green, his manner recaptured into calm that deferred all blame, Arithon pried the torch
from her. He resettled the lyranthe’s strap across his shoulder, reached again, and recovered her chilled hand. ‘Rare lady, the grief is not yours. It’s hardly worth the lad’s future happiness.’

His touch soothed back the drowned mass of her sleeve, found her wrist, then warmly closed and drew her onward. Through a stumbling succession of steps, she was forced from shocked stupor to react.

‘The gift of s’Ffalenn compassion will kill you,’ she snapped. ‘That’s not worth any lad’s happiness!’

Through the dark, limned in demonic, snatched shadows by the claw of wild wind through the cresset, Arithon s’Ffalenn shook his head. ‘I’m not made up of divided parts, but a whole being flawed by Desh-thiere’s curse. What use to mourn? The trained gifts I abused to spare clansmen have enforced their own measure of protection.’

Through their sodden, paired walk across the village, Elaira found nothing else to say.

Forced to hard practicality at last, she broached the necessary question as she reached for her door latch. ‘Jinesse told me your bardic inspiration dissolved longstanding hatreds at Innish. But this healing will demand a weave far more powerful. I should never attempt it by myself. How good are you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Still as cut shadow against the stormrinsed shakes of her cottage, Arithon added, ‘Halliron died soon after I won through to my mastery. If my limits have yet to be sounded, at least, after Jaelot, we can expect there are true strengths to draw on.’

‘Tactfully put!’ In a less worried moment, Elaira might have laughed. ‘Though, Dharkaron’s Spear and Chariot, if I’m to risk losing my walls to a whirlwind of unmanaged powers, I could wish the night was a mild one.’

She bashed open the door. Inside, under a draught-caught flutter of wax candles, the injured boy lay
stretched on her worktable, clad still in his workaday oilskins. The floorboards beneath were streaked with rainwater and blood, the sandy prints of fishermen’s boots not yet lent time to dry. A weather-worn woman huddled on a stool alongside, her greying hair pinned up with basket straws. Fingers chapped red by a lifetime gutting fish for the salt barrels lay clasped in sleeves bedecked in an iridescent glimmer of shed cod scales.

Elaira doused her torch in a bucket by the step, tossed off her drenched cloak and excused the relation directly. ‘You were kind to wait. I’ll send word the minute we have news.’

The woman arose, pulled her knot-worked shawl over tired shoulders and asked in diffidence, ‘With your leave?’ At Elaira’s swift nod, she bent and kissed the boy on the cheek.

A scraped breath of pain escaped him at even so tender a touch. ‘Go, Mother,’ he gasped through locked teeth. ‘Sit with my Elie and comfort her.’

His lyranthe set aside, Arithon crossed to steady the woman as she stumbled, weeping, toward the threshold. He saw her safely out, latched the door, then peeled off his shirt in a flicked scatter of droplets.

‘Use the towel on the hook by the basin.’ Elaira clasped the boy’s sound wrist to measure his pulse. Her clinical study took in his face, pallid as ambergris, then timed the thin rasp of his breathing.

A half-second later, Arithon arrived, the towel slung over his bare shoulder.

‘I dare not dose him with soporifics,’ Elaira explained, her speech in Paravian to spare the boy from disheartenment. Too dangerous, with the body thrown this deep in shock.’

Despite her involvement she could not escape the awareness of Arithon’s presence; of the warmth that radiated off his skin and his rock-steady calm. He moved after a moment. Warm hands gathered up her wet hair
and blotted its drenched coils in the towel. Then, collected and firm, his fingers raked through and divided the wet strands, then plaited the rich mass into her usual neat braid.