TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

  Ellaine drank a sip, overwhelmingly grateful as she realized the parched state of her mouth.

  'There, dear, that's better.' Dame Dawr raised her own glass in a salute of grimmest irony, then brushed the rare vintage to her lips in a token gesture of camaraderie. Her deep, brown eyes held amusement for the fact that, alone of any invited guest in the chamber, she could brazen through every stilted rule of protocol and chat woman to woman on the royal dais. Clan law did not recognize the s'Ilessid claim to crown rule; if the s'Brydion granted Avenor a warbond alliance, no one had ever managed to enforce the custom of court manners on any of the duke's outspoken envoys.

  Nor had the representative sent from Alestron been anyone closer than a distant second cousin for more then a decade, a lapse the inner circle had noted. The remedy for that slight faced them this night. Tysan's writ of invitation had pointedly requested that a female blood relation of the duke should attend the solstice festivities at Avenor.

  Lord Bransian s'Brydion had recast the request at his whim, had in fact ignored the salutation addressed to the name of his eminently marriageable youngest daughter. In the girl's stead, he had dispatched his acid-witted grandame; or perhaps not. Now confounded by the formidable collected presence of the woman, Ellaine wondered if the state voyage to Avenor had been Dawr's idea from the outset.

  Which twist of cunning politics did not leave her ungrateful for an outright act of human kindness; the wine accomplished a miracle's work of restoring her. 'Thank you,' she said, earnest. Her hands, for a blessing, had ceased trembling.

  'I shan't linger,' Dawr said. 'Your rat-faced little steward seems to have an unpleasantly prying personality. Someone should slap his face for listening at doorways, or at least break his slippered foot. With a limp, he couldn't slink. Take greatest care, my dear. Your predecessor, Talith, found her way to a terrible end.'

  Ellaine looked up, met and locked eyes with the old woman's shrewd glance. A charged moment passed. The princess took a fast breath, then gambled upon the earnest spark of challenge shared through that split-second contact. 'A suicide. So sad.'

  Dame Dawr regarded her back, her reply a scaled snap of honesty. 'No mere sorrow over that one's death, madam. I believe my grandson Mearn, who spoke fierce words on the matter.' She raised her goblet yet again, her gesture pure sarcasm as she yielded proud principle and delivered her withheld courtesy. 'To your s'Ilessid husband and his oath to serve true justice.'

  Ellaine caught back her breath in surprise. S'Brydion had never given deference to royalty throughout all the years they had paid court to Avenor.

  Dawr's fingers were fine ivory, and deliberate as she set the flute aside on the massive carved wood of the chair arm. 'My dear, I wish you well. My duke sends respects. You have seen all you need of my company.'

  On that abrupt note, the old woman grasped her black stick and arose. She absented herself with no bow, no apology, never asking or receiving word of leave. Her steps down the dais stair were frail, but assured. She reached the marble dance floor on her own before she snapped imperious fingers to summon her retainers to her side. They came, two armed swordsmen clad in s'Brydion scarlet, and faultlessly attentive to her wishes. In respect, they assisted Dame Dawr's measured retreat through the double doors of the grand ballroom.

  On the dais, Princess Ellaine did not miss the final irony: that the wine in the lady's abandoned goblet stayed untouched. Clan custom, by rigid code of honor, never drank to the name of an enemy. Dame Dawr had exposed the terrifying answer to the question Avenor's princess had dared to broach through a perilous exchange of small talk.

  The suspected truth, affirmed, shot fear like black ice through and through Ellaine's guarded heart.

  By the word of s'Brydion, Princess Talith's death had been no suicide at all.

  Shaken to her core, sadly wiser than the girl she had been on her wedding night thirteen years in the past, Princess Ellaine took the implicit warning to her breast. Whether or not she let the matter bide, or if she chose to resume her doomed struggle to keep a hand in her young son's destiny, she had been clearly told of the possible deadly consequences.

  If Dawr's grandson Mearn had discerned the rotten truth, then secret factions existed in Avenor, underneath the Light's glory and Lysaer's banner. Their machinations had not stopped at clandestine murder. Against those unknown faces, alone under the heel of such power, the princess dared not leave the hall, or show any sign of her undermining dismay. She must do her utmost to smooth over appearances, as though Dawr's words had held nothing more than the usual banal court courtesy.

  The princess retrieved the old lady's abandoned wine flute before Gace Steward's sharp vigilance should notice and discern its private and sinister meaning. While the dance couples turned to the bright beat of the tambours, and the gold-embossed suns for summer solstice glittered by candlelight, she raised the glass to her lips and drained the contents in admiration for Dawr s'Brydion's astonishing, insolent courage.

  Summer Solstice 5667

  Encounter

  Morvain's seaside quarter languished under thick fog as midnight drew nigh, the odd burst of raucous song and snatched laughter stitched through the slap of the riptide's first currents. Solstice revelers staggered home under fuzzed torches, or banged into the taverns demanding more wine, determined in their excessive, high spirits to drink and dance until sunrise. The noisiest quarter fronted the dockside. There, the shanties of the poor who worked Morvain's looms crammed up against the alleys where mariners on shore leave bought grog and solicited entertainment. The mill hands and the wenches who knotted carpet all mingled with tarred topmen, stevedores, and the free galleymen muscled like bulls from paid service at the oar. Misunderstandings abounded, over which women were trollops, and which cherished wives or grown sisters. In these sordid streets, lit by pitch pine brands, even the lighthearted pranks played for solstice might start roughhouse fights, or end with a knife thrust in bloodshed, if a body jostled into a mean drunk, or miscalled the start of an argument.

  As the captain responsible for a young deckhand who had broken his watch orders and slipped ashore without leave, Feylind of the Evenstar snarled in justifiable bad temper. 'In here?' Her jerked gesture of contempt encompassed the gaping door to a wineshop, which spilled light and screaming laughter into the damp, foggy street.

  The strapping first mate at her shoulder returned a clipped nod.

  'Aye, Captain. In there.' He stood back and allowed the lady first entry, well warned not to cross her when she wore her capped boots and the belt which hung her black-handled cutlass.

  Feylind snapped a rude phrase under her breath, tossed back her flax braid, then squared her trim shoulders and plowed in.

  Across the stone threshold, the intense, steamy heat and dense noise, and a churning mass of twined bodies impacted the senses like a wall. The tang of summer sweat pressed the air into felt. Feylind never hesitated. The first goatish lout who fingered her hair found himself spun aside, then crunched facefirst against the oak lintel. The next one, who jeered, received a reviling curse and an elbow that folded him, speechless. The third lecher, who pinched to apprise her willing womanhood, dropped howling to the bricks, felled by a lashed kick to the kneecap.

  To judge by his swift faint as he tried to stand up, he might not walk again without the skilled help of a bonesetter.

  The florid wine seller behind the bar looked around, harried, as the swirl of recoil jammed the dancers and jostled the blithe singers off-key. He beckoned, warned that trouble had entered his establishment, and two muscled heavies pushed off their stools to attend him. Not to be caught weaponless, he snatched up the wood mallet kept at hand to hammer the bungs into barrels. Then he bore through the press to eject the brawling fool who had dared to assault paying customers.

  The miscreant met their affronted charge from a circle of cleared floor, arms folded over a rust red suede brigandine studded with steel that hazed sparked reflections to the stuttering flare of the lanterns.
Hair like raw gold set off a tanned face just now scowling with searing impatience. A woman; one taller than most men, and charged to the fury of a lioness just shown the outrage of an injured cub.

  Too wise to risk life and limb to her wrath, the wine seller lowered his mallet. He stalled the rush of his henchmen with a word. To the woman who regarded him as though he were a slug that had just crawled from under a carcass, he said, 'You have business here, mistress?'

  'Captain, to you, pud-wad.' Eyes blue and hard as the glints on fired porcelain raked the wine seller over and fastened. 'You have my lad here, the Evenstar's deckhand, that one of your potboys laid open?'

  The wine seller deflated. 'The trade brig, Evenstar, of Innish registry? Then you must be Feylind.' As her foot tapped in dangerous, leashed exasperation, he unburdened fast enough to bite his tongue spitting out consonants. 'Yes, the fellow's back in the stores closet with his hurt palm bound up in cheesecloth. We thought best not to move him before the gash had stopped bleeding.'

  Feylind tipped up a silver-blond eyebrow. 'Tide's turning, you liar. You hoped we'd be sailing, with the lad left beached here and forgotten.'

  The wine seller flushed deeper than his finest Carithwyr red. 'Show her to him,' he commanded to his most imposing thug. He prevaricated, squirming, and prayed one of his wenches had the smart sense to dart back and unlock the closet. 'The patron you kicked will bear you no charges.'

  Feylind laughed. 'Charges? That's funny. He'll limp in my memory, and maybe think twice before he lets a stiff cock interfere with his civilized manners.' She tipped her chin toward the rear doorway, the plight of her wounded deckhand still stubbornly uppermost in her mind. "That way?' Her no-nonsense, brisk stride, smoothly matched by her mate, forced the muscle-bound servant appointed as escort to trip over himself to keep up.

  The young man with the knife wound sat on an upturned wine tun, rinsed in the light thrown off by a fluttering tallow dip. His face was tinged green, perhaps owing to the ripe reek of waxed cheddar, strung on twine loops from the rafters to discourage the ravage of insects and mice. He looked up, blanched white as Feylind stepped in, her head ducked in time to avoid getting brained by a dusty wheel of cheese.

  'Captain, the tide—' he blurted in apology.

  Feylind cut off his excuses. 'Evenstar took a mooring. Less ruinous than wharfage. Stay on my crew list, and the costs of delay are going to be docked from your pay share. Are you with me or leaving?'

  The boy straightened, unhappy and in pain, but grateful to be dealt such a fair-handed chance at redemption. Morvain was a galleyman's haven. Blue-water skills and experience with sail were unlikely to win him a berth above a paid oar bench; and the wound in his hand would brand him unfit until too near the end of the season. 'With you,' he gasped. 'I'll board Evenstar directly.'

  Feylind snapped her head in negation. 'First, let's see that palm. How bad is the gash?' She kept no paid healer on Evenstar's crew list. Bellyaches and coughs, she treated herself. The man who stitched up the small mishaps on board was always the one who patched up torn canvas the neatest.

  When the boy stalled, reluctant, she gave him short shrift. 'Yank off that cloth, now, mister. You don't want to see what becomes of a limb that puffs up and turns septic, and goes stinking rotten with gangrene.'

  The boy grimaced, then looked sidewards as he peeled the soaked rag. Less squeamish by lengths, Feylind gripped his wrist and raised the palm for inspection. 'Bring that light closer, will you?'

  The wine seller's lackey lifted the tallow dip and held the flame steady through Feylind's inventive, fierce oath for the fact the slice ran crosswise, with three tendons severed, and bone laid bare underneath. 'Blocked the thrust with your hand, did you? Wise up. If you can't snag the knife in loose cloth, then strike with the bony edge of your forearm, yes?'

  To the wine seller's man, she said, 'We're going to need an herb witch who can work major spellcraft. Do you know one whose fees aren't robbery?'

  'Not here.' The fellow scraped at his stubbled chin, dubious. 'This town's sworn to Light, and the mayor's advisor is loyal to the Alliance. No herb witches left here. For wounds bad as this one, you'd go to the hospice run by the Koriani sisterhouse.'

  'No sisterhouse,' Feylind shot back. Her crisp, efficient touch wound the pressure bandage back over the gash, still sullenly bleeding. 'This lackwit can damned well live as a cripple before I show my face there.' She looped the ends of the cloth in a half hitch, fierce enough to wring a gasp from the boy as she finished in planted vehemence, 'Won't encumber my brig with the binding obligation of any Koriani oath of debt.'

  'Can't blame you for that.' Shadows pinwheeled and jerked as the wineshop's man replaced the tallow dip on the shelf. He stepped back to clear the open doorway and paused, belatedly helpful, 'There's one herbalist, Koriani, but she acts independently. Keeps no ties to the Morvain sisterhouse. She'll take plain coin, if it's healing, and not charm craft. The street waif out back who begs for our cheese scraps will show you there for a copper.'

  * * *

  The Koriani herbalist inhabited a bait shack jammed into the alley that fronted the seawall. No lamps burned in the deep maze of the poor quarter. Swathed in close fog, and the offal reek of fish guts heaved into the sump and awaiting the scouring ebb tide, the waves slapped over the weed-tangled rock, a stone's throw away in pitch-darkness. Each footstep disturbed the scuttle of rats, or flushed bone-thin, scavenging cats, prowling for live vermin in the gutters.

  Evenstar's first mate moved with his hand gripped to his cutlass, sharply watchful of his mistress's back. Glad herself for the comforts of knives and capped boots, Feylind scrounged up a silver and dismissed the pox-scarred mite who had served as her guide from the wineshop. 'We'll follow the waterfront to find our way back.' She passed over the coin. 'Make sure you change that with a shopkeeper who's honest.'

  The child grinned and departed, his rapid, light footsteps vanished into the noisome darkness. Left alone with her first mate and the shivering lad with the oozing bandage, Feylind took matters in hand and groped over the gapped, weathered wall of the bait shack until she located its shoddy plank door. She tapped, not lightly, in case the inhabitant was deaf with age or asleep in a stupor of gin.

  'Hold on for one moment!' called a female voice from within; not old at all, or one whit bleary, which, oddly, did not inspire confidence.

  Feylind glanced to the solid presence of her ship's mate, unable to read the expression on his broad face in the sea misty darkness.

  Seconds later, the rickety panel creaked open. A woman in a dark shawl emerged, still dabbing moist eyes, and shedding the cheap scent of a half-silver prostitute, struck through by the more biting undertone of an astringent salve to ease bruises. She gave Feylind's company no second glance, but hurried along on her way.

  'Plague take the fists of lust-ridden sailors,' snapped the herbalist in riled temper. Planks scraped as she jammed her door open wider to admit the next client on her threshold. 'If you've brought me the meatbrains who savaged that girl, let me tell you, I'm likely to geld him.'

  Feylind's teeth flashed in a wicked, wild grin. 'You find him, I'll hold him down for the knife.'

  The blurred face half-glimpsed in the interior gloom returned a gasp of pleased laughter. 'Come in. The festival's kept me much too busy to waste time with trifles of courtesy.'

  For no reason under sky she could name, that honesty reassured Feylind. She stepped ahead, unafraid, into an enveloping blackness with a distinct scented character wrought of flower spices and bittersweet herbs, and the gritted tang of burned charcoal. The mate and lad pressed in on her heels, the scrape of their steps stiff with trepidation. No doubt they were as aware as she that the threshold was guarded by some unseen presence that raked bare flesh to chills in the dark.

  Nor was the enchantress's mood less than briskly professional as she bent the discerning regard of her sisterhood upon the Evenstar's hesitant company. 'Which one of you is bleeding or sick? I don't give
philters to abort unborn babes, so if that's what you're asking, seek elsewhere.'

  'Shut the door,' Feylind said to her nerve-jumpy mate. Since enchantresses saw perfectly well in the dark, she matched the challenging test set against her with the unadorned truth. "The lad has a gashed hand with cut tendons, and I have no patience. My brig's got two hours left for the tide, or she'll cost us another day's mooring.'

  'Let's see, then.' The pleasant, mild alto recovered its previous biting frankness. 'But I'll warn you, Captain, my services could cost you ten times your ship's fee, and double as much if you rush me.'

  'I'll pay to the letter of your demand for the healing, but understand, before you begin. I'll make no binding promise, nor bow to your sisterhood's practice of swearing an oath of debt.'

  'Rest assured, then.' The enchantress snapped a simple flint striker, and the concealing darkness she had worn like a mask splintered into a sudden flare of light. 'The Morvain sisterhouse holds my obedience, not my loyalty. My practice here has no ties to their hospice.'

  New flame strengthened behind the panes of a clean lantern, backed with polished reflectors of tin. Dazzled and blinking, Feylind made out a stacked set of willow hampers, then the neatly made cot with a quilt of dyed linen, a weathered stool bought used from the cod market, and a worktable crammed with oddments and jars. Before these stood the Koriani herbalist. She wore no purple skirt and displayed no badge of rank on her person. Her boyish, slim form was clad in a simple, loose blouse and what looked like an apprentice smith's leather leggings with laces that hooked up the sides on bone buttons. A smattering of soot and cinder holes were overlaid by green stains, where a stone knife had been repeatedly wiped clean of the sap juices bled from cut greenery. Her feet on the packed earthen floor were bare, and striped with run dye from a pair of thonged sandals repeatedly soaked through in rain puddles.

  A cascade of bronze hair tied up with fish twine tumbled over her shoulder as she reached high and hooked the lit lamp from a spike on the rafter. Her eyes, when she turned, were the rinsed tint of dawn mist, and her features, familiar from childhood on the Scimlade sandspit.