TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

  'That could be the curse or the blessing of a lifetime,' Mearn finished, this time showing honest trepidation. 'No way to tell which 'til I'm shackled.'

  Stiff currents swirled where the tide met the bluffs, the broad swell of the combers chopped up and confused after threading the crooked channels between the jumbled landmass and its reef-ridden train of bare islets. The foam pulled and surged in an unruly boil. Most of the renegade shipwrights waded thigh deep in the flood, steadying the galley's sent tender between them. Now and again one would curse as he slipped on the weed-slick rocks.

  Cattrick awaited also, stilled oak where he stood in a cranny in the cliffs, guarding the shuttered lantern just used to signal the galley lying offshore. Made aware of Mearn's presence by Ivel's piquant retorts, he said softly, 'The craft will take six. Do you want to cross first load, or second?'

  'We'll go last, you and I,' Mearn replied without forethought. He passed Ivel's bear-paw grip off to another for guidance into the boat. Enveloped by the tingling fog of thin rainfall, no man on the shore could see clearly. The inevitable fumbling as passengers piled into the lighter caused a mild havoc of banged knees and curses, marked by a breathless, cheerful relief after days spent lurking in wet brush. The Alliance patrols had been relentlessly persistent, even through the expert diversions laid down by the clansmen Lord Maenol had sent to escort their flight across country.

  In that hour, with deliverance at hand, Cattrick remained marked apart by his reserved silence.

  'Regrets?' murmured Mearn, settled beside him. He rested his own covered lamp on a rock ledge.

  'Some.' Cattrick turned his head, his powerful, craftsman's build masked in darkness, and his tension deceptively blurred by his mellow southcoast accent. 'Yet I have always believed that life is what a man makes of it.'

  From this decision, there would be no return course. He would no longer be free to choose where he lived; from the hour his fleet of flawed vessels launched, and the moment the torches had been set to level the royal yard at Riverton, parts of the continent had forever become closed to him. In the quiet of words unspoken, the most painful facts would not bend before sentiment. Cattrick already knew his own birthplace at Southshire supported an entrenched Alliance presence. He could never return to his native soil, nor grow old in the land of his kin.

  "This I promise,' Mearn stated through the ragged, white rush of the surf. 'Whatever passes, believe me, Alestron will give you greater freedom than any you'd know had you kept your contract with Lysaer s'Ilessid.'

  A fuzzed flare of orange burst and vanished in the night, over the fog-shrouded waters.

  'We'll see, then.' Cattrick pushed his large frame off the rocks. His deliberate hands adjusted the signal lantern to emit a short flash, marking the beachhead for the returning longboat.

  Neither man voiced the uncomfortable truth, that the acceptance of s'Brydion hospitality and employment was no longer a matter of choice. For the sake of his pride, and the Koriani oath of debt used to force his betrayal of Arithon's employment, the master shipwright had rebelled against the dictates of his fate. The price for his act to recoup his lost honor had forever thrown his well-being upon the Duke of Alestron's mercy. His life and livelihood rested in s'Brydion hands, with no recourse at all should clan honor fall short of his irrevocably given trust.

  Silence reigned between clansman and shipwright, written over by the thrash of the waves and the trickle of rain over rocks. In due course, the longboat sent from the galley reached shore, announced by the grate of an oarshaft fending off of the shoaling stone shingle. Cattrick lifted his lantern. As always, each motion was planted and sure. His step betrayed no uncertainty. Yet to Mearn, wading into the icy shallows beside him to make their escape out of Tysan, the moment held the fragility of a bubble of blown glass, given the trembling promise of form, but no surety of survival through the punitive stresses of cooling.

  Nor was Cattrick oblivious to the pitfalls that might await in the unknown. 'I stand on your good word,' he said, as the icy waters swirled over his boot tops. 'Whatever passes, never forget. I knew Tharrick, who once served as a captain in your city guard.' The s'Brydion brothers all knew that name, must acknowledge the implicit message: that the master shipwright had seen that man's loyalty to Alestron earn him a scarred back from the whip and the fate of a permanent outcast.

  Mearn sucked a breath between his clenched teeth. 'We all make mistakes.' He caught the longboat's thwart, passed his lantern to the coxswain, then leaned into the work of turning the bow face about in the heaving surf. 'Our biggest lapse through that botched affray was misreading Prince Arithon's motives in the first place.' Strain on his muscles was reflected in his voice, as the craft swung seaward, helped by the odd shove from an oarsman. 'In defense for our bad call against Tharrick, I could add that the Teir's'Ffalenn has a mind that's too clever, and worse than a maze to decipher. We s'Brydion have straightforward, warmongering ways.' A pause as a wave rolled under the boat's keel, followed hard by the bitten conclusion. 'It's no secret. The uprising five hundred years ago throttled our gentler nature in bloodshed. I make no apology for that. We've survived with our city still ruled by crown charter through keeping an unbreakable code. We kill first and ask questions later.'

  'A warning for me?' Cattrick asked, while the ebb sucked and whorled around his knees.

  Mearn laughed. 'Very likely.' He leaped into the boat. 'Are you coming or not? When all's said and done, my brother Parrien has a rabid, quick temper. He isn't the sort who likes pacing his decks while we browbeat a frivolous point of philosophy.'

  'Frivolous, is it?' Cattrick boarded as well, the heated bronze lantern still grasped in his hand, and his cloak bunched up in the crook of his elbow to raise the hem clear of the sea. 'You've a damned queer outlook for an intelligent man. I rest my case for uncertainty upon Ivel's observation, that in your duke's town of Alestron, life seems to take second place, after idiot courage and cleverness.'

  Mearn grinned, grabbed an oar, and shoved off. 'Well, the foul-mouthed old coot got that much right.' His haste sparked to a devilish wild humor, he snapped, 'Forward, stroke!' Duke Bransian's war-trained oarsmen dug in. The boat cleaved forward into the murk with a lurch that sat Cattrick down with an undignified smack on the stern seat.

  The passage was short, sped by the first, riffling pull of turned tide, and guided by the furtive, timed flash of the lanterns. The oarsmen pulled the longboat into the lee of Alestron's state galley, where the deck crew waited with lines slung from turned davits to hoist the tender aboard. While the oarsmen stowed their wet looms and wrestled the pins on chilled shackles, Cattrick climbed the side battens, with Mearn athletic as an otter at his heels. Strong hands caught the shipwright's thick wrists as he reached the high deck and pulled him securely aboard.

  By then, fog and rain had thickened the darkness to smoked felt. He could see very little. The air wore the biting scent of tarred cord through its underlying miasma of soaked canvas, and bilge, and the sweat-pungent wool of benched rowers. The men who kept hold on him were armored and callused, and carried their balance like field troops. Chilled by what seemed overzealous security, Cattrick fleetingly wondered why Ivel and the others who had arrived first should be so unnaturally quiet.

  Then a voice, more grainy than Mearn's but bearing a sibling's inflection, eased his mind. 'Your men are below, given quarters already.'

  'Parrien s'Brydion?' Cattrick said, a touch brusque since his first, testing tug had not prompted the men-at-arms to release him.

  Mearn's older brother returned a bitten affirmation of identity, immediately followed by a nerve-wound command to his crew to douse the wick in the helm lantern.

  Through the flared glimmer as the shutters were drawn, and the flame was duly snuffed out, Cattrick received the brief, stamped impression of gloss varnish and gilt. Men moved, unspeaking, about unseen tasks. An unsettled creak of leaded beach below decks bespoke a crew with readied oars. By now aware the men-at-arms had no plans
to release him before they received direct orders, the master shipwright clamped a stranglehold on his impatience.

  This shoreline was under s'Ilessid sovereignty; to be caught here engaged in treasonous activities with none other than Alestron's state galley would carry unimaginably dire consequences. The s'Brydion were well within their rights to be cautious, even to the point of taking unpleasant steps in protection.

  Nor was the crew lacking an envious, smooth discipline. The longboat was shackled with almost no noise.

  'Heave!' called the bosun from amidships. 'Bring her in smart, boys!'

  The capstan crew responded to a clacking of pawls, and the lines in the davits smoked taut and arose, bearing the tender inboard.

  A scrape of damp leathers saw Mearn at the rail, flanked by the adept pair of oarsmen.

  'You took long enough,' Parrien groused. 'We've been watching the lichens grow on this spit for two days.'

  'Liar,' Mearn greeted, white teeth split by a grin. 'At least, Bransian's gilt brightwork isn't spattered to Sithaer with the clam-stinking guano the gulls leave all over the beach. Have we turned out the pretty flags and state trappings to add pomp to the s'Ilessid wedding? If so, no one's awed. You've missed all the fun since the feast and the ceremony were celebrated yesterday.'

  Fast talk transformed into liquid, light movement, the younger s'Brydion embraced his taller, brawnier sibling.

  Distracted by their sparring reunion, Cattrick took one fatal instant too long to react as a kiss of cold steel snapped over his pinioned wrists. He drew breath to bellow; felt a hand clamp his mouth. His shout emerged muffled, and his outrage exploded like magma from a volcano.

  Powerful as he was, Parrien's mercenaries were trained fighters. Their hands wrung him helpless before he could do more than jerk up his knee and snap off an impotent kick. The effort missed cleanly. His shackled wrists were dragged to an excruciating angle, while his ankles were lashed and his mouth gagged with a professional speed that drove him to tears of wild fury.

  Mearn said in mild inquiry, 'Parrien? What passes?'

  'An arrest,' said the older s'Brydion, unperturbed. 'Did you think we could turn traitor before Lysaer's whole council and his pack of foreign dignitaries, and not start another bloodbath against clansmen?'

  Through his doomed struggles to strike back at his captors, Cattrick heard the crisp order to the mercenaries that sealed his fate as Parrien s'Brydion's prisoner. 'Set rivets in those chains. Then confine him in the sail hold along with the rest, and make sure the gag stays in place on that blind splicer's insolent mouth!'

  "That's scarcely civil,' Mearn interjected, his tone too complacent to be taken for more than small needling. 'You were told these men are my invited guests? Parrien?' While the bruising efficiency of the duke's men-at-arms bundled Cattrick toward the hatch grating, and the deckhands plowed on with the task of raising the galley's set anchor, Mearn's nerveless prodding raised Parrien's exasperated bass.

  'I saw Arithon at Sanpashir, damn you! He has a tongue by lengths nastier than yours, but between his rank insolence, he spoke sound sense! Now here is how we're going to play this.'

  Cattrick shrieked into the salt-musty cloth. He managed a desperate, jackknifing wrench that bashed one of the mercenaries off-balance. That one jostled an onlooking officer, who dropped something metallic with a belling clang and a splash of broken glass.

  'That was the ship's glass I heard hit the deck?' Stark out of patience, Parrien vented his testy annoyance on his mercenaries. 'Keep on like this, and that fool's hobnailed boots will tear more gaping chunks out of Bransian's brightwork. Will you just damned well hit that big wretch and be done!'

  'Man, at your pleasure.' Someone in mail with a mace for a fist efficiently reduced Cattrick's ox struggles to a limpid state of unconsciousness.

  Spring 5654

  Summons for War

  The small war fleet from Avenor swept into Hanshire just after daybreak. Adrift amid the opaline tatters of dawn mist, the ancient walled port rode the jut of the coast in forbidding, tiered splendor, its high turrets crowned by the signal fires kindled to mourn the misfortunate lost mariners.

  From the decks of the royal flagship, Sulfin Evend swept a riveting survey over the city, from its lofty, swept heights, to the charcoal sketch outlines of the merchant docks and the straggled pilings of the fishermen's wharves. His lean fingers tapped the rail with expressive impatience.

  'Fetch his Grace topside,' he demanded in a lightning shift of mood that allowed for no explanation. His scowl tracked the bosun's departure, then raked the length of the vessel's upper deck.

  All appeared in regular order, aboard. The royal flag galley nudged shoreward, her stately grace quickened by oar strokes that sheared curling white water from her beaked prow. Her smart lines and clean brightwork reflected sharp discipline, and her heading clove the arrow-straight course through ebb tide that reflected exemplary seamanship.

  'What's amiss?' asked her captain, gruff in defense. At his back, the ship's watch officers shared unsettled glances, unable to tag the detail which had snagged the Alliance Lord Commander's impatience.

  When Sulfin Evend held to his sulfurous fuming, the sea captain came back, blunt. 'You know something?' He endured the Lord Commander's rebuffing, curt silence with the stoicism that rode his ships through the vagaries of coastal weather.

  'I was born here,' Sulfin Evend admitted at length. His eyes were pale smoke as he resumed his scouring survey. At second glance, even a foreign observer must note the peculiar quiet settled over the shoreline. The brothel windows fronting the dockside quarter showed no lights, nor any sign of debauched guests making their late departures.

  Sulfin Evend gripped the rail and stretched, wringing the kinks of a long, chilly vigil from his taut-knit shoulders. 'When signal fires burn during daylight, the high council believes there's cause for war in the wind. Also, you'll see the wharf's been cleared of berthed ships.'

  Given the sea captain's ungratified patience, Avenor's Lord Commander jabbed stiff fingers through his straw bristle hair. 'We're expected. That shouldn't surprise me. Avenor's flags will have been identified already by the Koriani scryers who reside in the palace. Hanshire's Lord Mayor keeps an enclave of them in city pay to report inbound ships to the harbormaster. His council might have a long-standing aversion to royalty, but every ranking town minister with ambition has learned to respect his wife's habit of ceremony. She'll have sent a state party to welcome the prince, or you wouldn't be seeing a yard of free space to tie this ship up at the landing.'

  The galley edged forward, drifting before the reduced beat of her rowers. Ahead, the towers of the upper city loomed from the blurred folds of the bluffs, pricked by the glow of the watch lamps. Ashore, the only sound stirring was the thump of the crab sellers' skiffs, inbound under oars with filled traps. Through rags of pale mist, the layered silhouettes of the rooftrees and notched walls of the trade mansions framed an interlocking puzzle shaded like mother-of-pearl.

  Hanshire had launched ships in Paravian times, and the striated basalt of the old city battlements still bore the raked gashes left by the balefire of dragons. Ivy clothed the deepest clefts, and softened the arrowed teeth of crenellations still capped in ancient blue slate. Lower down, the newer walls by the quay had been raised out of block from the local quarries. The soft, red-gold sandstone had worn smooth with weather inside the course of five centuries. Boys and lovesick sailors had carved names of sweethearts, or sigils for luck into the jetty, where the tide slapped green at the ebb, and the barnacles clung like calcified mildew.

  But the grand panoply Sulfin Evend expected did not show for the royal arrival. The sea-quarter cove stayed unnaturally subdued, its day-to-day commerce suspended. Knots of loiterers surrounding the fish stalls looked briefly up as Avenor's fleet of warships made fast to outlying moorings, then returned to their huddles and fast talk.

  Where the flagship docked, a lone officer in the blazon of Hanshire's elite guard he
aded a liveried contingent of grooms. Each of these waited with two saddled horses. Ahead and to one side stood another man, of wiry build, his interest too bright to be casual. His hatless, close-cropped head of salt hair riffled to the whispering kiss of the sea breeze. The rest of his lean height was cloaked in black velvet, cut to his boot tops of scarlet-dyed suede with their patterned cuffs beaded with seed pearls. While Avenor's state galley secured lines and fenders, he measured the performance of her crew, his narrowed eyes the verdigris tint of aged bronze.

  Sulfin Evend muttered what might have been an obscenity, then added, 'Get his Grace up here, now.'

  The galley captain stirred his planted frame, and all but collided with a figure in a plain cloak. Lysaer s'Ilessid stood one pace away, wrapped in the dull mantle which had secured his anonymity the night before. While the realm's stick-thin seneschal fidgeted behind, stiff in primped velvets and jeweled hat, the prince said, 'If you know who that is, you'd best tell me.'

  When Avenor's Lord Commander did not speak at once, the flag captain smothered a nervous cough. 'Has to be Raiett, the mayor's dour brother. Folks call him Raven, for when he appears, they say that fighting soon follows.'

  'Then I haven't misjudged.' Lysaer's satisfaction rang through the squealing grate of wood as four sailhands ran the gangway down to the dock. He flipped back his hood, unsnagged a frogged fastening, and tossed his mantle to the ever-present, hovering page boy. Against shredding mists, the revealed magnificence of his sunwheel tabard shot fire like gilt on white porcelain. Beneath the fragile, stamped pallor that lingered from the previous night's indulgence, his expression was marble, echoed and reinforced by the immaculate set of his shoulders. The sword in his gem-faced scabbard was a field weapon, and the helm tucked under the vambrace on his forearm was forge-hardened steel, without plume or ceremonial visor.

  'You expect we'll have bloodshed?' Sulfin Evend laughed, his approval as sharp as the well-kept gleam on his chain mail.