Treason's Shore (40 page)

“Who got to him first?” Jeje asked the air.

“And how?” Gillor rubbed her knuckles.

Fox moved stiffly down to the water line as they brought the rowboat in. “I just came from the cavern. Everything is there, untouched. My suggestion is this. We send Fangras and his fleet down to Ymar, where Chim and his allies are forming to jump on the last Venn outpost.”

“What?” Jeje demanded. “How’d you know that?”

Gillor shrugged. “Makes sense. If the Venn are gone, the strait will be up for grabs.”

“The Venn aren’t going to be gone for long,” Fox said, gently feeling his swelling face and wincing.

This time, they all exclaimed, “What?”

“I don’t know anymore than that. We’ll pick up information when we reach Bren. Chim will know where we can find the alliance. Right now, we’ll keep our five capital ships here. Load up, buy coffee for trade. Extra barrels to hide the gold in. Load our capital ships and some of the smaller ones with hand-picked crew. And we’ll follow on after the fleet, with a side trip to deliver the gold to Wisthia Shagal.”

“Empty it?” Jeje said, and whistled.

“I suspect you’ll be thoroughly sick of the amount by the time you’re done carrying it.” He laughed silently, then winced. “Speaking of sick, orders will go out to the entire fleet: collect fish oil as they sail.”

The four exchanged glances, and Gillor gave her expressive Fal shrug. If he’d gone mad, at least it was a madness a Fal could appreciate.

Jeje scowled. “You gonna tell us what happened?”

“No,” Fox said.

Barend opened his hands. “Then let’s get busy.”

Chapter Twenty-five

“T
HE Council of Elders is reconvening the Frasadeng tomorrow at noon, and all in service rank are required to attend,” the young messenger wearing the white of Anborc said to Brun Durasnir the next morning—or what passed for morning when the windows still showed dark. “The accused traitor has been found.”

Is this accident, coming the very day after the return of the fleet?
Brun Durasnir thought. Instinct was sure: nothing was accident. There had been no announcement the night before at the council gathering celebrating the triumphant return of Prince Rajnir and his commanders.

A full day before the convening? Why? The messenger was not the one to ask. She dismissed him and returned to her tasks.

The low winter sun, gaining strength every day, had just emerged from the southern horizon when one of the
Cormorant
’s ensigns appeared at the command quarters in Saeborc to leave Fulla Durasnir’s formal summer uniforms and take his freshly aired winter gear back to the ship. He said nothing, but there was something in his gaze, and the careful way he laid the heavy linens and silk in her arms, that caused her to speed to their room as soon as he was gone and to sort through the clothing.

And there, rolled up in a shirt, was a single strip of the archivist’s paper that she used to mark scrolls, with a single rune drawn on it.

She twitched it into a twist, tossed it into the stove vent under the sleeping platform, then carried on with her tasks.

A short-glass before midnight, she checked to see that her son Halvir was peacefully asleep in his bedchamber. Then she went into the wardrobe room against the cold west wall, and took from her oldest trunk the long scratch-wool gray cloak of a thrall. Her skin crept as she shrugged it over her own cloak, though it was clean and had never been worn by any thrall. Her own mother had used it to punish her when she was young. She had kept it as a disguise and as a reminder.

Symbols make seeming real, she reflected as she yanked the hood over her face, and then pulled heavy gloves over her house gloves: life inside the tower, expected of the commanders, meant endless cold drafts from nowhere during winter that the house dag never seemed to be able to ward.

It was good to walk where the silent ones had to walk, she thought as she slipped down the thralls’ narrow stairs, where pairs of thick wooden clogs waited. She thrust her fine shoes into a pair of the clogs. There had to be thralls—she understood the order of things—for who would do their work if there were none? The lowest branches of the Tree gave support to the higher reaches, everyone knew that, and to walk for a time where thralls walked reminded her not to be brusque with those who could not answer back.

She eased through Saeborc’s Trallagat, the thralls’ entrance to the abandoned Hilda annex. Icy air found the chinks in her clothing as she ran up the steps to the side door that gave onto the narrow causeway beside the King’s Road gutters, where thralls must walk so their feet would not defile the tablet-patterned stone of the road.

Even wearing three layers, she gasped when the wind struck her full force, trying to flense her flesh from her bones as she bent into the wind.

She had confidently expected to be alone, and so she was surprised to discover shrouded figures here and there, some carrying burdens, all bent into the wind.
So I will just be one more of them,
she thought, and toiled grimly toward the bridge.

On rare good days, the distance from the Saeborc to the bridge over the river, midpoint along the King’s Road, was but a few steps. In the fierce, numbing wind of winter, it seemed longer, but terrible as it was, this plod into the wind was preferable to the thralls’ long staircase, covered with moss, that led to the frigid, dank old tunnel under the river, and then the long climb upward again. From the number of those abroad, most clothed in gray, others thought so, too, causing her to wonder if they were all thralls.
I must not see conspiracy, just because we have lived in an atmosphere of it. We have regained order . . .

The King’s Road was customarily only used for ceremony, or to be strolled on during the rare pleasant summer evenings, when people would light the ramparts with candles and walk about talking and sipping the sharp, heady triple-distilled bristic. The exception was the Blood Crowd, when a condemned traitor was taken in full view of the city, who could vent their anger for their betrayal before the application of the knife on the top of Sinnaborc and the slow expiration under the waiting eyes of the death birds.

Her heart lurched. A Blood Crowd? Were the burdens some bore baskets of stone and ordure? She lengthened her steps, while keeping her head low.

Thin, ragged clouds obscured patches of brilliant stars as she peered northward along the road, shifting her eyes away from the lone pale tower of Sinnaborc at the terminus. If you ignored the Sinnaborc, the north towers looked like fingers reaching toward the sky: the massive Saeborc at her shoulder the thumb, the pairs of towers on either side of the road forming a cupped hand reaching upward.

This was the shortest way to the abandoned tunnels that once had belonged to the Hilda, before a king in the previous century had tried to shift power away from the Oneli by giving the Hilda autonomy and their own annexes off Leofaborc.

She bent farther into the wind, stumping in the awkward peg-heeled clogs over the icy stone of the bridge toward the southern curve of the King’s Road. Far below the covered bridge corridor, the river plunged in a roar over the stones to empty into the sea.

She turned her head sideways to peer past Skalts’ Tower toward Leofaborc, and beyond that, Anborc in the distance. The three smaller House towers were obscured from her view, which meant no one who might be braving their western ramparts could see her, either. And if they did, they would see only a humble thrall, head down.

One more peek, up the smooth western face of Skalts’ Tower: no one visible on its rampart. She left the gutter for the old pathway down to the rocky point from which people had viewed the ships along the single pier for centuries.

To the right, the viewpoint, to the left, the old Trallagat.

She stamped into the mossy old tunnel as echoes of the surf roared over the rocks below, then hissed outward again. In her day the young had often met here for assignations. Here was where she’d first trysted with Fulla when she was just a scribe and he a third son about to be sent south.

A scrape, followed by the ice-tinkle and squish of a step from the other end caused her to halt. Then the footsteps approached rapidly, as someone whistled a single soft note. She ran forward, heedless of mucky puddles, then fell into Fulla’s arms. They ripped their hoods up and kissed with all the passion of youth.

When at last they broke apart, he said, “Did anyone say anything to you last night after we met at the gathering?”

“No. No one is interested in our reconciliation. We’re old and boring.” She added dryly, “Our parting was interesting as long as they could laugh about our cold beds, or speculate whether you’d choose a wife from another House and whether you would set aside Halvir in favor of a new son.”

Durasnir snorted, his breath a brief pale cloud in the cold, dim blue light. “Erkric noticed I did not go home with you. I want him to think affairs remain cool between us.”

“Why? What happened in Goerael?”

“First tell me what has been happening here.”

She said, “Nothing. People are quiet, going about their lives. Except for glancing over their shoulders in fear of spiderwebs, which has become habit for us all.”

“Like steps in the hel dance, when they use their slippers to make the patterns in the sand on the floor,” he observed. “You are so used to their beguiling movements, at first you do not see that the sand-patterns have changed.”

He so rarely used figurative language she was surprised, and wondered if he’d been sipping bristic to ward the cold. She said slowly, “As you predicted when we began our farcical parting, the council has accepted that Prince Rajnir will be declared king. The skalts have made much of your triumphs on Goerael under his leadership—”

“Triumphs,” he repeated scornfully. “Triumphs! They all ran and hid, except for a mad few. On Goerael, Rajnir never said a word without Erkric at his side. I never spoke to Rajnir except to receive orders, and Erkric stood there to watch me receive them. I tried to contact the northern commander. I also tried to hold conversation with my captains, but at every turn there was one of Erkric’s dags. Their being able to shift around by magic gives them the advantage. That and their spying webwork.”

“Why?” she asked. “I thought all that must end, now that the old king is all but forgotten, and everyone looks to Rajnir as our next.”

“Listen: there is more. Erkric caused Rajnir to assign each of the commanders a dag for an aide, but these are nothing more, or less, than personal spies.”

“A personal
spy?
A
dag
as a spy?” She made the sign of warding; the world, which had seemed safe (once she’d accustomed herself to the lack of private speech in her own home) had again cracked into madness.

Durasnir bent his head, whispering into the rough wool of her hood. “Ulaffa was able to accomplish one thing. My spy is our old friend Dag Byarin. Now, I cannot tell you for certain that he works against Erkric. In their own ways, I suspect, the dags not committed to Erkric’s cause face as much danger as we do. I am careful to say nothing before Byarin that he cannot report to Erkric. And in his turn, he does not see me anywhere but where I say I am. So right now, I am asleep on my ship.” A brief smile. “But I am summoned to the Frasadeng for the treason trial.”

“Bringing me back to my question. Why? No one blames Rajnir for the failed invasion. It is past. The talk is all about Goerael. Because you told me to speak to no one for fear of spiderwebs, and because my contacts among the old queen’s household were dispersed to the far corners of Venn, I cannot write for information. I am left with these unanswered questions.”

“There is no talk about Rajnir? No suspicion?”

Brun exclaimed, “How many times must I say it? All I hear around me is a wish to return to the old ways, to order.”

Durasnir gripped her arms. “You forget magic. By brandishing Signi as a traitor, Dag Erkric will convince the council, and the Houses, and the people, that his own actions were unquestionable.”

“But what is the need? Rajnir will be proclaimed king, and his first act will be to name Erkric Dag of the Venn. What more is there?”

“Magic, as I said. Until now, magic has been used according to strict rules. What I did not tell you before was this: during the invasion, Erkric began breaking those rules. He still did not win, but he might have, had not Dag Signi, or someone else, interfered. Not in defense of the Marlovans, but directly counter to Erkric’s actions, which were nominally in our favor, but only when gaining him power.”

“Nominally?”

“Some dags died. By magic, it is said. Again, I don’t have proof. Ulaffa, head of the Yaga Krona, does not have proof.”

For the first time, the possibilities of unchecked magical power broke on her mind, making her feel sick with apprehension.

Durasnir sensed it in the tensing of her body, and went on deliberately, so that she would understand. Now that Erkric thought he was in reach of winning—that Durasnir was isolated even from his wife—he could share his burdens with her once again.