Читать книгу Warhost of Vastmark - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 10

In the quiet back room of the widow Jinesse’s cottage, the exiled guard captain lay on his cot in recovery, while the wind through the opened casement beside him carried the distant beat of hammers. Their frenetic rhythm did not slacken for rain showers, nor for the onset of dark. Had Tharrick still burned to inflict his revenge upon the Master of Shadow, the desperate hurry implied by the pace would have rung sweet to his ears.

The balm of his victory instead left him hollow and distressed. The undaunted resumption of activity on the sandspit abraded the satisfaction from his achievement until he felt shamed to puzzled anguish. His single-handed attack had fairly ruined a man’s hopes, and yet, no one close to Arithon stepped forth to berate him for the damage. The widow named his friend did not stint her hospitality. She did not speak out in censure. If her twin children were more aggressive in their loyalties, the morning she caught them paired at his bedside, accusing voices raised in a shocking turn of language, she scolded their mannerless tongues and packed them off on an errand to the fish market.

While brother and sister raced in barefoot escape down the lane, their shouts washed into the tireless thunder of surf, Tharrick turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. For hours he listened to the gusts through the palm fronds and the swish of the rush broom the widow used to tidy her floors. Left ill from his wounds, he skirted the dizzy brink of delirium. At cruel and fickle moments, his ears remade sound into the high, whining slash of the braided leather whip that stung him still in bad dreams.

Weak as a husk swathed in dressings and poultices, he counted the knots in the ceiling beams, while the diced square of sun let in through the casement crept its daily arc across the floor.

Afternoons, as the room cooled into shadow, Arithon came with a satchel of herbs to brew simples in the widow’s cramped kitchen. Her murmur beyond the inside door carried overtones of worry as she asked after progress at the shipyard.

‘The work goes well enough.’ Through the splash of well water poured from bucket to pot, Arithon explained how his craftsmen were breaking up the worn hulk of a lugger to ease the shortage of planking. ‘Dakar needs the use of your trestle table by tomorrow,’ he added in a brisk change of subject. ‘Would you mind? I’ve asked him to copy some nautical charts. He’ll stay sober. The twins have been offered three coppers to watch him. They’ve promised to fetch me running if he tries to sneak out to buy spirits.’

Jinesse gave the delighted, little fluttery laugh she seemed to hoard for the Master of Shadow. ‘They’ll be like small fiends on his case. Won’t you pity him?’

‘Dakar?’ Visible through the narrow doorway, Arithon settled with his shoulder against the brick by the hob. His gaze stayed fixed on the water in defiance of the adage that insisted a watched pot never boiled. ‘The man’s been deadweight on my hands long enough. If he moans over-much, or his manners get crude, I’ll send two of my caulkers to sit on him while you sew his offensive mouth shut.’

‘I doubt I’ll notice his swearing,’ Jinesse admitted. ‘Dakar’s grumbles are no match for my twins when they’re shouting.’

The astringency of steeping remedies wafted on the steam that trailed from the kitchen. From the back room, Tharrick made out the rim of the pot on the fire as Arithon crouched alongside. Sorcerer though he was, he made no spell passes over the brew. In Alestron, to treat whip weals, even the wizened herb witch had done as much while she mixed her powders and unguents. The Master of Shadow sometimes phrased a catchy bar of notes over the burble of hot water. All but plain song lay beyond him. The fingers that clasped the wooden spoon to stir were grained in dirt and callus, the split nails too work-worn to handle his exquisite lyranthe.

‘Too much tar on my knuckles again,’ he murmured, the struck resonance of his voice despair overlaid by chagrin.

‘Don’t you mind.’ The widow rummaged in her closet, found a tattered shirt of her late husband’s, and tore the clean linen into strips. ‘I changed the dressings yesterday. I can do the same again.’ She pushed a wisp of hair off her cheek with the back of a spidery hand. ‘If you need to be at the yard, you should go.’

‘I’ll thank you to handle the bandages. But I won’t leave until I’ve seen how Tharrick’s cuts are closing.’ Arithon swung the pot off the hob, arose, and tipped his raven head for Jinesse to pass ahead of him.

The pair entered the sickroom, the widow with her face flushed pink above her blouse and her unburdened hands given to fidgeting with her skirts. Through his days of convalescence, Tharrick had taken quiet pleasure in her presence. She had a certain shy grace in those moments when she believed no one watched. But Arithon set her on edge. His quick, light movement and contained self-command hurled her off course like a moth thrown into strong light.

The bandages provided the excuse she needed to steady herself. Despite her retiring nature, her handling was firm as she lifted the bedclothes to attend her battered charity case. The number and severity of Tharrick’s burns and cuts made even small movement unpleasant. Soothed by her touch, grateful for her gentle care as she used the herb infusion to soak and soften the scabs before she peeled the crusted linen, Tharrick sweated through the undignified process in silence.

Jinesse was not alone in feeling unnerved before the intensity of Arithon’s regard. With the window at his back, his face looked drawn to hollows, the eyes like sharp points sunk in pits. His tone held the edge of a burr, struck from impatience or exhaustion as he said, Stay with the red clover for the burns. That gash on the thigh still looks inflamed. Along with elecampane and cone flower, let’s add wild thyme, and of course, keep on with the betony.’

He began a step to fetch the pastes for the poultices, swayed, and snatched at the windowsill to steady himself.

Jinesse rounded on him, as near as she ever came to scolding. ‘You can’t continue on like this!’

A stunned second passed. Dismayed by her inadvertent boldness, Jinesse trapped a breath behind closed lips. As if to hold off an attack by wild wolves, she clutched the snarl of fouled linen to her breast.

Too tired for temper, stung by her wary fear, Arithon gave way to wide surprise. ‘What choice do I have?’

‘Sit!’ Jinesse snapped. As if the half-naked presence of the invalid on her sheets were of no more account than cut wood, she cast the linens into her laundry hamper, yanked the high-backed chair from beyond the clothes chest, and plunked it on the boards by the windowsill. If you’re too pressed and dirty to attend this job yourself, the very least you’ll do for me is to spend a few minutes off your feet.’

To everyone’s astonishment, most of all his own, the Prince of Rathain did her bidding. Up close, he looked drawn beneath his tan. His hair was caught in pitchy tangles at the temples where he had raked it back with knuckles still smeared from green planks. The thumbnail on his left hand was swollen black, perhaps from a mis-struck mallet. Unable to bear his appearance straight on, the widow threw open the curtains to flush out the cloying reek of herbs.

Breezes off the ocean fingered the loosened laces of Arithon’s shirt. The impersonal touch relaxed him, or else the flood of fresh air. He tipped his crown to rest against the chair back and almost instantly fell asleep.

Tharrick surrendered his chafed wrist to the widow for dressing, and pondered the incongruity; how unlikely it seemed, that a sorcerer of such black reputation could behave in mild, trusting innocence.

To his dismay, he found he had mused his thought aloud.

Jinesse slapped a heated strip of linen over the applied layer of poultice paste brusquely enough to raise a sting. ‘Arithon’s driving himself half to death in that shipyard!’ At Tharrick’s subdued flinch, she gentled her touch with the wrapping. ‘They say he’s not slept in two days beyond catnaps, and Ath show him mercy, just look at his hands! He’s Athera’s own Masterbard, and criminal indeed, to dare risk his gift to common labour!’

Which was near enough to outright accusation. Already miserable, caught vulnerably naked before a benefactor he had not wanted and unable to turn away for the lacerations still open to the air, the burly exile could do nothing else but tip his chin to the wall and shut his eyes.

Jinesse smoothed a wrinkle in the linen, ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’ She tucked the bandage into itself and spread her hands loose in her lap. ‘Arithon insisted you weren’t at fault, but the setback has gone very hard. Those ships that you burned were the dream of his heart, and now he scarcely speaks for disappointment.’

‘Is he not, then, the felon he is named?’ Tharrick swallowed. ‘Do you think him innocent of all charges?’

The ticking in the mattress whispered as Jinesse sat down. Steam from the pot by her ankle sieved a backdrop like gauze against a profile as thin-skinned and fair. Tendrils of blond hair wisped out of the coiled braid at her nape, atremble in the breeze as she darted a glance at the prince sprawled asleep in her chair. ‘I don’t know.’

Tharrick propped himself on one elbow.

‘How can I tell?’ Jinesse admitted, her divided opinion a palpable weight upon shoulders too frail for harsh judgment. ‘Arithon once charged me to measure him by his behaviour. The villagers here respect him. They might not know him for the Master of Shadow, but they don’t give their trust lightly. Arithon never cheated anyone. Nor has he sheltered behind lies. Except for the music he draws from his heart, no one has seen him work spellcraft.’

She trailed off, her lip pinched between small, tight teeth.

Flat on his back with cracked ribs, and never in his life more helpless, Tharrick was swept by a sharp, sudden urge to protect her. She seemed so slender and torn, alone in this house with no trusted mate to share the rearing of her twins, nor this moment’s pained indecision.

Arithon, perhaps, was perceptive enough to take advantage. Moved to a queer stab of jealousy, Tharrick said, ‘The sorcery that burned Alestron’s armoury killed seven men. I was there.’

The light brushed without sparkle over plain wooden hairpins as Jinesse quickly shook her head. ‘I don’t say he’s blameless, of that or any other accusation laid against him. He’s never made excuses or tried to deny his past actions. His silence is so strict on the subject, if I dared, I would challenge him in frustration.’

‘What do you think?’ pressed Tharrick.

The widow bent, wrung out another dressing, and scooped up a dollop of herb paste. ‘I think this village need not become involved. The Shadow Master took pains to set no roots here. Quite the contrary. He wishes himself at sea to the point where he’s desperate. If he were some dread sorcerer or a minion of evil, I’m doubting he’d need to drive himself to the edge for the sake of a half-built brace of ships.’

The shadow of a gull flicked past the window. Chilled by its passage, Tharrick said, ‘What if he wishes such ships to disrupt the trade of honest men?’

‘Piracy?’ Jinesse looked up, her cupped hands filled with remedies, to stare at Tharrick in shock. ‘Is that what you believe? If it’s true, there’s no thread of evidence. These brigantines weren’t planned for armament. I held the impression they were Arithon’s hope to outrun the bloodshed loosed upon him by the armies from the north.’

The bandaging resumed in stiff silence. Arithon slept on, pliant as a scarecrow, his head tipped aslant and his blistered palms slack against the soiled thighs of his breeches. Jinesse proceeded on her own to mix the tisane from valerian and poppy to dull her invalid’s pain and let him sleep. Warmed and eased by her ministrations, Tharrick watched through half-closed eyelids as she hooked the basket of soiled linens on one arm and collected the herb jar and pot from the side table. As comfort returned and he slipped into drugged reverie, he noticed she took extreme care not to disturb the other sleeper as she passed.

Before he dozed off, Tharrick pondered this reserve, in his quiet way relieved. If she were corrupted by the Shadow Master, or sheltered him in collusion, she acted without ties to the heart.

In time, the wounded guardsman drifted into dreams. When he roused, much later, and Jinesse brought him bread and gruel, the chair was vacant and Arithon long gone.

The days passed, the schedule of the widow’s attentions interspersed between drug-soaked sleep and hours spun into muddled awareness. Impressions not hazed by possets and fever stood out like cut crystal: of the twins’ boisterous contention over which last fetched water from the well; of a killdeer crying in the deeps of the night; of storm rains pattering the beachhead, and once, Arithon’s voice in a whipcrack inflection berating the Mad Prophet for shoddy penmanship on the charts.

‘I don’t care blazes if an iyat has warped all your quill pens! If you’re too fat and slack to chalk out a simple bane-ward, then buy a tin talisman for the purpose! Either way, your copies had better be up to my standards.’

‘To Sithaer with all that!’ Dakar plunged on in scathing hatred. ‘Alestron’s joined forces with Lysaer to kill you. I saw the duke swear alliance in a dream …’

Another night, held restless and awake by the throb of the leg wound that had festered, Tharrick overheard the end of another discussion, Arithon’s diction muted by concern. ‘Well yes, the coffers are low. The outlay to the forges at Perdith was never planned. I’ve got enough silver left to keep the workers on, period. No more funds for wood. None for new canvas. If the hull that’s least damaged gets launched at all, she’ll have to leave Merior under tow. The point’s likely moot. Ath knows there’s no coin to charter a vessel to drag her.’

A chair scraped on brick as Jinesse arose to set water on the hob for tea. Some other stranger with a sailor’s broad drawl murmured commiseration, then finished off in dry warning. ‘The rumour’s true enough. Alestron’s troops of mercenaries are mustering. War galleys refitted to put to sea. You’d better pray Ath sends in storms black enough to close the harbours, because if the season holds fair, the sands of Scimlade Tip could soon grow too hot to hold you.’

Then Dakar cut in, carping, ‘If you had a firkin of sense, man, you’d give up the yard. Take what silver you have left and sail out on the tide in your sloop.’

Arithon replied in a timbre to raise sudden chills. ‘I have no intention of letting my efforts get scuttled in Merior’s harbour. That means you’re not only going to stay sober, you’ll stir off your backside and help. I want a lane scrying daily at noon, and each time you fail me, by my oath to Asandir, I’ll see you starve without dinner.’

The back-and-forth volley of argument extended long into the night. When Jinesse entered late, her pale face lit by the flutter of a hand-carried candle, Tharrick struggled up from his pillow. ‘Why doesn’t the Shadow Master take better care? I can eavesdrop on all of his plans.’

‘If you ask him yourself, he would tell you straight out that he hasn’t got anything to hide.’ Jinesse set her light on the nightstand, bent over, and laid a tentative palm on his brow. ‘Your fever’s abated. How goes the pain? The posset should be stopped, if you can bear it. Poppy’s unsafe, over time. Arithon won’t have you grow addicted.’

‘Why ever should he care?’ Tharrick cried, and flopped back, his large hands bunched in the sheets the way a castaway might cling to a reef. ‘What am I to him but an enemy?’

His dread had recurred more than once in his nightmares, that a sorcerer might cosset an assassin back to health for some lingering, spell-turned revenge.

Jinesse tugged the linen free of Tharrick’s fists and smoothed the ruched bedclothes across his chest. She looked tired. The dry lines of crow’s-feet around her eyes were made harsh in the upslanting glow of the candle as she gave a tight shake of her head. ‘The prince means you no harm. He’s said, if you wanted, he would arrange for a cart to bear you to take sanctuary in the hostel with Ath’s adepts. The moment you’re well enough to travel, you can leave.’

Tharrick dragged in a hissed breath and said in bleak pain through locked teeth, ‘When I go, I shall walk, and not be asking that bastard for his royal charity.’

A timid, pretty smile bowed the widow’s mouth. ‘Ask mine, then. You’re welcome here. By my word, his coin never paid for your soup.’

Tharrick sank back into sheets that smelled faintly of lavender, his cheeks stained to colour by embarrassment. ‘You know I have no prospects.’

Against habit, the widow’s smile broadened. ‘My dear man, forgive me. But you’re going to have to be back up and walking before that becomes anybody’s worry.’

Denied cause for outrage, reft of every justification for his enmity against the Shadow Master, Tharrick exerted his last, stubborn pride to arise from his bed and recover. From his faltering first steps across the widow’s cottage, his progress seemed inextricably paired with the patching of the damaged brigantine his act of revenge had holed through.

A fit man, conditioned to a life of hard training, he pressed his healing strength with impatience. Reclad in castoffs from Jinesse’s drowned husband, Tharrick limped through the fish market. His path skirted mud between bait casks and standing puddles left from the showers that swept off the wintry, slate sea. The snatches of talk he overheard among the women who salted down fish for the barrels made uneasy contrast with the nighttime discussions over the widow’s kitchen trestle. Here, the strident squabbles as the gulls snatched after offal seemed the only stressed note. Engrossed in homey gossip, Merior’s villagers appeared utterly oblivious to the armed divisions bound south to storm their peninsula.

Tharrick maintained a stiff silence, set apart by his awareness of the destruction Duke Bransian’s style of war could unleash. The fishwives’ inimical, freezing quiet disbarred him from conversation. Already an outsider, his assault upon Arithon’s shipyard made him outcast. Disapproval shuttered the villagers’ dour faces and pressured him to move on. Tharrick felt just as uneasy in their company, uninformed as they were of Dakar’s noon scryings, which showed an outbreak of clan livestock raids intended to hamper Alestron’s crack mercenaries in their passage down the coast.

Such measures would yield small delay. Once on the march, s’Brydion war captains were a force inexorable as tide, as Tharrick well knew from experience. A fleet pulled out of dry dock converged to blockade, manned by cautious captains who took care to snug down in safe harbours at night. This was not the fair weather trade season, when passage to Scimlade Tip might be made without thought in a fortnight. Through the uneasy winds before each winter’s solstice, no galleyman worth his salt dared the storms that could sweep in without warning. Years beyond counting, ships had been thrashed to wreckage as they hove into sight of sheltered waters. The passage between Ishlir and Elssine afforded small protection, where the grass flats spread inland and mighty winds roared off the Cildein Ocean. Even Selkwood’s tall pines could gain no foothold to root. What oaks could survive grew stunted by breakage, skeletal and hunched as old men.

Bound in its tranquil spell of ignorance, unwarned by the cracking pace of Arithon’s work shifts, the folk of Merior walked their quiet lanes, while their rows of whitewashed cottages shed the rains in a mesmerized, whispered fall of droplets. For a rootless, directionless man accustomed to armed drills and activity, the fascination with the herons that fished the shallows of Garth’s pond paled through one solitary hour. Tharrick startled the birds into ungainly flight on an oath spat out like flung stone. Like Jinesse’s twins with their penchant for scrapes, he felt himself drawn beyond reason to wander up the spit toward the racketing industry of the shipyard.

There, under firm-handed discipline, the craftsmen his fires had caught slacking laboured to rectify their lapse. He strolled among them. Brazen as nails, even daring retaliation for their master’s hand in his recovery, Tharrick meandered through the steam fanned from the boiler-shack chimney. The crunch of shavings beneath his boot soles and his conspicuous, clean linen shirt drew the eyes of the men, stripped to the waist, sweaty skins dusted by chaff from the sawpits as they cut and shaped smooth reworked planks. His trespass was noted by unembarrassed glances, then just as swiftly forgotten.

Even the master joiner, who had ordered his beatings and tried unspeakable means to force his silence, showed no rancour at his presence. Arithon’s will had made itself felt. Enemy though he was, none dared to raise word or hand against him. All were ruled by their master’s ruthless tongue and his fever-pitched driving purpose. The salvage effort on the damaged brigantine already showed a near-complete patch at her bow; the one still in frames on her bedlogs lay changed, half-cannibalized for her wood, then lessened in length and faired ready for planking. A less-ambitious vessel with a shorter sheerline took shape, fitted here and there between the yellow of new spruce with the odd checked timber fished together from the derelict lugger.

In three weeks of mulish, unswerving effort, Arithon s’Ffalenn had rechannelled his loss into what skirted the edge of a miracle.

Struck by a stabbing, unhappy urge to weep, Tharrick held his chin in stiff pride. He would not bend before awe, would not spin and run to the widow’s cottage to hide his face in shame. The man who had forgiven his malice in mercy would be shown the qualities which had earned his past captaincy in Alestron. In hesitant steps on the fringes, Tharrick began to lend his help. If his mending ribs would not let him wheel a handcart, or his palms were too tender to wield a pod auger to drill holes for treenails in hardened oak, he could steady a plank for the plane on the trestles, or run errands, or turn dowels to pin timbers and ribs. He could stoke the fire in the boiler shed, and maybe, for his conscience, regain a small measure of the self-respect he had lost to disgrace and harsh exile.

On the third day, when he returned to the widow’s with his shirt and hair flecked with shavings, he found silver on the table, left in his name by the Shadow Master.

Tharrick’s unshaven face darkened in a ruddy burst of temper.

Drawn by the bang as he hurled open the casement, Jinesse caught his wrist and stopped his attempt to fling the coins into the fallow tangle of her garden. ‘Tharrick, no. What are you thinking? Arithon doesn’t run a slave yard. Neither does he give grown men charity. He said if you can’t be bothered to collect your pay with the others, this was the last time he’d cover for your mistakes.’

‘Mistakes?’ Poised with one brawny wrist imprisoned in her butterfly clasp, Tharrick shook off a stab of temper. The widow’s tipped-up features implored him. Her hair wisped at her temples like new floss, and her wide, worried eyes were a delicate, dawn-painted blue. He swallowed. His grip on the coins relaxed from its white-knuckled tension.

‘Mistakes,’ he repeated. This time the word rang bitter. He slanted his cheek against the window frame, eyes shut in racking distaste. ‘By Daelion Fatemaster, yon one’s a demon for forcing a man to think.’

‘More than just men.’ Jinesse gave a nervous, soft laugh and let him go.

His lids still squeezed closed, Tharrick asked her, ‘What did he do for you, then?’

She stepped back, swung the basket of carrots brought up from the market onto the table, and rummaged through a drawer for a knife. ‘He once took me sailing to Innish.’ In a confidence shared with nobody else, she told what that passage had meant.

Evening stole in. The kitchen lay purpled in shadow, cut by fiery, glancing sparkles from the bowl of Falgaire crystal which sat, unused, in the dish cupboard. Tharrick progressed from helping to peel vegetables to holding Jinesse’s cool hands as she finished her careful account. They sat together without speaking, until the twins clambered through the outside doorway and startled the pair of them apart.

The storm struck before dawn to a mean snarl of wind that flattened the sea oats and hurled breakers like bulwarks against the strand. Men rushed with lanterns through the rain-torn dark to drag exposed dories into shelter behind the dunes, and supplement moorings with anchor and cable. The brunt of the gale howled in from the north, more trouble to shipping upcoast, the widow insisted, clad in a loose cotton robe as she set the pot on the hob to make soup.

If she rejoiced in the delay of the war galleys or the army, she had the restraint not to gloat.

The shutters creaked and slammed against their fastenings, and their sharp, random bangs as the gusts changed direction caused Tharrick to flinch from edged nerves. ‘What of Arithon’s shipyard?’

The widow sighed and pushed back the hair that unreeled down her shoulders like limp flax. ‘There could be damage if the wind veers. A storm surge could ride the high tide. Should the gale blow through first, the beached hulls will be safe. The luggers may run aground off the Scimlade, where sandbars have shifted from their beds, but the hook in the coastline here usually shelters us. Just pray the wind stays northeast.’

Morning broke yellow-grey as an old bruise above the eastern horizon. Cold light revealed a cove racked and littered with palm fronds and the flaccid, corpse fingers of stranded kelp. Two cottages had lost their thatched roofs. Against the whining gusts, the ragged beat of hammers resumed.

Yet when Tharrick picked his way around puddles and downed sticks to the yard on its wind-racked spit, he found no joiners at work on the framing. He was told all three shifts had been sent to make repairs in the village.

Arithon was immersed in sweating industry, restoking the stove beneath the boiler.

Quiet to one side, his hair newly trimmed and yesterday’s stubble shaven clean, Tharrick ventured the first comment he had dared since making his own way at the shipyard. ‘It’s likely your generosity has doomed the last hull.’

Arithon crammed another billet into the stove, then yanked back his hand as the sparks flew. ‘If so, that was my choice to make.’

‘I’m not a green fool.’ Tharrick envied the neat, practised speed that hurled each split piece of kindling over the heat-rippled bed of hot ash. ‘I’ve led men. Your example makes them work until their hearts burst to meet an impossible standard.’

A slick, cold laugh wrung from the Shadow Master’s throat as he clashed the fire door closed. ‘You’re mistaken.’ He straightened, reduced to lean contours sketched out in a silverpoint gleam of wet skin. His eyes were derisive and heavy with fatigue as he regarded the former guardsman who offered his tentative respect. ‘I happen to have employed every wood-sawyer and carpenter inside of thirty leagues. Had I not sent the joiners, we’d have gotten every fishwife and her man’s favourite marlinespike fouling the works here by noon. In case you hadn’t noticed, the framing’s all done. It’s the caulkers I can’t spare, and I needed some excuse to keep the fasteners overtime with the planking.’

Unapologetic, ill-tempered, Arithon sidestepped and slipped past. Abandoned to an eddied whirl of air, Tharrick swallowed back humiliation. The widow’s observation was borne out with sharp vengeance, that if the Shadow Master’s generosity could be held beyond reproach, it was not to be mistaken for his friendship.

The day wore away in grey drizzle and a murderous round of hard work. The ragged thunder of the caulkers’ mallets as hot oakum was forced between the gaps in the brigantine’s decking winnowed the stink of melting tar on winds left tainted with storm wrack. At nighfall, the pace did not relent. Planks were run out of the steam box and forced tight against the ship’s timbers. Still hot, they were fastened with treenails of locust to lie below the waterline, oak above. Torches spilled a hellish, flickering light across the naked shoulders of the labourers, slicked through the dirt where sweat and cold water channelled in runnels off their bodies.

The joiners returned in grumbling small groups. Their senior craftsman sought Arithon to call him aside. Pressed by his mulish, exhausted reluctance, the stout-bellied journeyman who checked the yard’s measuring gave in to necessity and shouldered the end of the plank the Shadow Master had been carrying.

‘It’s only a ship,’ the master joiner exhorted to the spare, tired figure that confronted him. ‘Does losing her matter so much that you ruin yourself and break the very hearts of the men?’

Scathing in anger, Arithon said, ‘You brought me away just for that?’

‘No.’ The master joiner braced rangy shoulders against the urgency of those green eyes upon him. ‘You’re losing your sense of propriety. This morning Tharrick admired your judgment and you threw back his words in his face.’

Arithon’s lips thinned into instant contempt. ‘In case you’d failed to notice, Tharrick’s all too quick to carve life up into absolutes. I can do very well without his worshipful admiration. Not when the reckoning is likely as not to get him killed by the hand of his own duke!’

‘Very well.’ The master joiner shrugged. ‘If you’re Sithaer bent on wearing yourself out with work, I’ll not stand and watch with only my good sense for company.’ An easy-natured spirit when his handiwork was not being kindled by vengeance-bent arsonists, he stripped off his shirt and ordered his journeyman to hand him his heaviest mallet.

A question rang back through the darkness. The master joiner returned his most irritable bellow. ‘Bedamned to my supper! I asked for a tool to shoulder a shift with the fasteners.’

The next day brought news, called across choppy water to a fishing lugger from a Telzen trader blown off her course by the storm. A troop of mercenaries north of the city had come to grief when the plank span of the river bridge in Selkwood had collapsed beneath their marching weight.

‘Barbarian work,’ the fisherman related. ‘No lives were lost, but the delay caused an uproar. The duke’s captains were short-tempered when they reached the city markets to resupply.’

If Merior’s villagers never guessed the identity of the man Alestron’s army joined forces with Prince Lysaer to eradicate, Arithon continued his pursuits in brazen defiance of the odds. Undaunted by logic, that his enemies would board galleys to cross Sickle Bay to shorten the long march through Southshire, he faced this fresh setback without flinching.

The fleet he had burned in Werpoint harbour to buy respite had won him precious little leeway. Alestron’s troops would be hounding his heels well ahead of the advent of spring.

Clad in a shirt for the first time in weeks, the light in his hair like spilled ink, Arithon stood to one side of the hull of his sole salvaged brigantine. Her new decking caulked and made watertight only that morning, she wore the strong reek of oakum and tar, and a linseed aroma of new paint. In sheer, smooth lines, an axe forged to cleave through deep waters, she seemed to strain toward the surface of the bay. The yard workers who crowded in excitement by the strand could not help but feel proud of their accomplishment. If any of them knew of the warhost days away, none broached the subject to Tharrick.

The man who replaced the master shipwright and another one chosen for fast reflexes knelt beneath a keel sheathed in gleaming copper. They pounded now to split out the blocks that braced the craft on her ways. The high cries of gulls, and the clangour of steel mauls marked the moment as the hull shifted, her birth pang a creak like the stretched joints of a wrestler.

Fiark’s shout rang down from his perch on the bowsprit. Content to hang in Arithon’s shadow, Feylind flung both arms around his waist in a hug of elfin delight.

Rankly sweating in a tunic too hot for the tropics, Dakar observed the proceedings in glowering sobriety. ‘Their faith is vast,’ he said, and sniffed down his nose, as the eighty-foot vessel shifted and squealed on her ways. Her quivering hesitancy marked the start of her plunge toward her first kiss of salt waters. ‘I wouldn’t be caught under that thing. Not drunken, insane, nor for the gold to founder a trade galley.’

From his place in deep shadow, arrested between mallet strokes, the shipwright cracked a dry laugh. ‘And well might you worry, at that! A fat sot like you, down here? First off, if you’d fit, the Fatemaster would as likely snatch at his chance to turn your lazy bones beneath the Wheel.’

Dakar’s outraged epithet became lost as the hull gave way into motion with a slide of wood on wood. She splashed onto the aquamarine breast of the shallows, adrift, to the twins’ paired shrieks of exuberance.

While sailhands recruited from the south shore taverns waded after, to catch lines and launch longboats to warp the floated hull to a mooring, Tharrick was among the first to approach and offer his congratulations. Arithon returned a quick, brilliant smile that faded as the former guardsman’s gaze shifted to encompass the smaller hull still poised forlorn on her ways.

Understanding flashed wordless between them. Of ten ships planned at the outset, one brigantine in the water might be all that Arithon’s best effort could garner. As fishermen said, his luck neared the shoals; the hour was too late to save the second.

Whatever awaited in the uncertain future, the workers were spared trepidation. A beer cask was rolled out and broached in the yard to celebrate the launching of Khetienn, named in the old tongue for the black-and-gold leopard renowned as the s’Ffalenn royal arms. While the mean schedule slackened and men made merry to the pipe of a sailor’s tin whistle, Arithon, and most notably, Dakar, were conspicuous for their early absence. If the new vessel’s master pleaded weariness, the Mad Prophet was parted from the beer cask in vociferous, howling disagreement. Too careful to drink in the company of men his earlier rancour had injured, Tharrick slipped away the moment he drained his first tankard.

The boom of winter breakers rolled like thunder down the sleepy village lanes. Slanted in afternoon shadows through the storm-stripped palms, he strode past the fishnets hung out to dry and entered the widow’s cottage. The day’s homey smell of fish stew and bacon was cut by a disquieting murmur of voices.

The twins were not in their place by the hob, shelling peas and squalling in argument. In a quiet unnatural for their absence, a meeting was in progress around the trestle in Jinesse’s kitchen.

‘Tonight,’ Arithon was saying, his tone subdued to regret, ‘I’ll slip Talliarthe’s mooring on the ebb tide and sail her straight offshore. No trace will be left to follow. The workers are paid through the next fortnight. Ones loyal to me will ship out one by one, the last out to scuttle the little hull. When the Prince of the West arrives with his galleys, he’ll find no sign of my presence, and no cause to engage bloody war.’

‘What of the Khetienn?’ the widow protested. ‘You can’t just abandon her. Not when she’s cost all you own to get launched.’

Arithon flipped her a sweet, patient smile. ‘We’ve made disposition.’ Across a glower of palpable venom from the Mad Prophet, he added, ‘Dakar held a dicing debt over a trader captain out of Innish. His galley lies off Shaddorn to slip in by night and take my new vessel under tow. Her sails, her mastcaps and chain are crated and packed in her hold along with the best of the yard’s tools. The riggers at Southshire will complete her on credit against a share of her first run’s cargo. With luck, I’ll stay free to redeem her.’

A board creaked to Tharrick’s shifted weight. Arithon started erect, noted whose presence blocked the doorway, then settled back in maddening complacence.

‘You dare much to trust me,’ said the exiled captain. ‘Should you not show alarm? It’s my own duke’s army inbound toward this village. A word from me and that hull could be impounded at Southshire.’

‘Will you speak, then?’ challenged Arithon. Coiled and still as the leopard his brigantine honoured, the calm he maintained as he waited for answer built to a frightening presence. In the widow’s cosy kitchen, the quiet felt isolate, a bubble blown out of glass. The sounds outside the window, of surf and crying gulls and the distant shouts of fishermen snatched by the wind from the decks of a lugger, assumed the unreality of a daydream.

Tharrick found himself unable to sustain the blank patience implied by those level, green eyes. ‘Why should you take such a risk?’

Arithon’s answer surprised him. ‘Because your master abandoned all faith in you. The least I can do as the cause of your exile is to leave you the chance to prove out your duke’s unfair judgment.’

‘You’d allow me to ruin you in truth,’ Tharrick said.

‘Once, that was everything you wanted.’ Motionless Arithon remained, while the widow at his shoulder held her breath.

The appeal in Jinesse’s regard made Tharrick speak out at last. ‘No.’ He had worked himself to blisters seeing that brigantine launched. Respect before trust tempered his final decision. ‘Dharkaron Avenger bear witness, you’ve treated me nothing but fairly. Betrayal of your interests will not be forthcoming from me.’

Arithon’s taut brows lifted. He smiled. The one word of thanks, the banal platitude he instinctively avoided served to sharpen the impact of his pleasure. His honest emotion struck and shattered the reserve of the guardsman who had set out to wrong him.

Tharrick straightened his shoulders, restored to dignity and manhood.

Then the widow’s shy nod of approval vaulted him on to rash impulse. ‘Don’t scuttle the other brigantine. I could stay on, see her launched. If Alestron’s galleys are delayed a few days, she could be jury-rigged out on a lugger’s gear.’

Arithon pushed to his feet in astonishment. ‘I would never on my life presume to ask so much!’ He embarked on a scrutiny that seemed to burn Tharrick through to the marrow, then finally shrugged, embarrassed and caught at a loss. ‘I need not give warning. You well know the odds you must face, and the risk.’

Tharrick agreed. ‘I could fail.’

Arithon was curt. ‘You could find yourself horribly compromised.’ Small need to imagine how Duke Bransian might punish what would be seen as a second betrayal.

‘Let me try,’ the former guardsman begged. He suddenly felt the recovery of his honour hung on the strength of the sacrifice. ‘I give you my oath, I’ll do all I can to save what my pride set in jeopardy.’

‘You’ll not swear to me,’ Arithon said, his rebuff fallen shy of the vehemence his cornered straits warranted. ‘I’ll be far offshore and beyond Lysaer’s reach. No. If you swear, you’ll bind your promise to the widow Jinesse. She’s the only friend I have in this village who’s chosen to stay with the risk of knowing my identity.’

‘Demon!’ Amazed to near anger by the trap that would hold him to the absolute letter of loyalty, Tharrick asked, ‘Have you always weighed hearts like the Fatemaster?’ For of all spirits living, he would not see the widow let down.

The white flash of a grin, as Arithon caught his hand in a firm clasp of amity. ‘I judge no one. Your duke in Alestron was a man blind to merit. If the labourers in the yard will support your mad plan, I’d bless my good luck and be grateful.’

Sealed to undertake the adventure on a handshake, Tharrick stepped back. The Master of Shadow gave a nod in salute to Jinesse, who hung back in mute anguish by the hob. With no more farewell than that, he turned in neat grace toward the doorway.

Dakar heaved to his feet and followed after, plaintive and resigned as a cur snapped on a short leash. ‘We could at least stay for supper,’ he lamented. ‘Jinesse spreads a much better table than you do.’

His entreaty raised no reply.

The last Merior saw of Rathain’s prince was his spare silhouette as he launched Talliarthe’s tiny dory against the silver-laced breakers on the strand. His bright, pealing laugh carried back through the rush of the tide’s ebb.

‘Very well, Dakar. I’ve laid in spirits to ease your sick stomach on the voyage. But you’ll broach the cask after we’ve rowed to the mooring. Once aboard the sloop, you can drink yourself senseless. But damned if I’ll strain myself hauling your deadweight over the rail on a halyard.’