Feylind met the last dory, bearing Arithon. Oblivious to any need for tact, a swagger to her step meticulously copied from Captain Dhirken, she rushed through the falling dark and seized his hand. ‘You said Talliarthe is due in with dispatches. Let me take her out when she arrives.’ She tossed her head, insistent, the braid down her back like a glistening rope of oil in the flicker of freshly-lit torches. ‘I must show my mother I can navigate and reef a sail. When she sees what I can do, she’ll understand.’
The Master of Shadow let her tug at his fingers, standing thoughtful by the shoreline. ‘You aren’t strong enough to man the sloop by yourself just yet.’ As she heaved straight to protest, he touched her lips silent. ‘But that can be overcome. Here’s what I think. You can captain her. Give all the orders. Fiark will go, and Tharrick, and one of the Khetienn’s sailhands for muscle in case a gale blows in out of season. If your mother gives consent, you can thread the mazes to the strait and come back. Fifteen days. After that, you understand, I can’t do any more. What happens must become Jinesse’s decision.’
‘She’ll let me go,’ Feylind declared, her young face determined.
Arithon returned a grave shake of his head. ‘She’ll do what’s best.’ He worked himself free of her adoring grasp, a twist to his mouth that was wry and sadly tender.
A snag of light in a royal sapphire spun to sudden movement in the gloom; Lady Talith, as observer, whirled and fled. She had no desire, ever, to see this man vulnerable. He was her dedicated enemy, and Lysaer’s bastard nemesis, a sorcerer born and bound to clever reiving. Her husband insisted he used children as a ploy. If his compassion for the feelings of the little ones stemmed from falsehood, Talith would avoid the temptation to let his wiles sap the bastions of her hatred.
The princess invoked the privilege due her station and demanded her meal in the solitude of her cabin. She was not present to hear the widow consent to Feylind’s trial aboard the sloop. Settled early in her bed of musty blankets, she lay wakeful to the brangle of the clansman, Caolle, and Tharrick, arguing over nuances of siege warfare. Interleaved through their gruff words and laughter, clear as the peal of flung coin, Arithon’s meticulous, silver-tongued speech taught the twins the three-toned whistle used by the tribes at need to signal danger.
When sleep finally claimed the Princess of Avenor, it came laced with dreams of her husband’s anguished pain for the assault by an enemy upon a vulnerable flank he had trusted in her good sense to guard.
The next day, Talith arose to find the Master of Shadow gone, and the yard in the moody care of his senior joiner. Astonished to be abandoned to her own devices, uneasy in hindsight for her flaunting show of jewels the day before, she stalked like a stork over the litter of shavings and asked imperious questions.
The sour fellow answered her, laconic, between powerful strokes of his adze. ‘Ask Ivel what you will. I’m busy.’ He tipped the haft of his tool toward a barrel where a shrivelled old splicer hunkered, chewing his breakfast of smoked cod.
Talith wrinkled her nose at the noisome stink borne downwind. Need for information overcame her distaste. The splicer, if blind, proved an addict for gossip, pleased to speak on any subject she wished.
‘Master’s off into the uplands. The clan war captain from Rathain’s gone with him. That one came, you must know, to train mercenaries.’ Ivel spat a cod bone and tucked meaty fists around the napped knees of his breeches. ‘Once Caolle’s established with the recruits, Arithon’s for the valley, where Shand’s caithdein’s sent horses. They’ll cull the herd, and select thirty to ship out for sale. The brigantine’s to bide here at anchorage until the sloop brings in dispatches. She’ll sail on the tide and rejoin him downcoast for loading.’
‘He won’t be coming back?’ Talith could scarcely contain her surprise.
Ivel gave a teeth-licking grin. ‘Now that’s not a guess I’d set words on. The man’s like the wind. In and out at his whim. The only engagement he’s fixed on for sure is his plan to collect your ransom at Ostermere.’
‘That’s not until midsummer.’ Talith tapped her foot. ‘He’ll keep me immured here until then?’
‘Are you? I heard of no walls, no locks.’ Ivel sucked the aftertaste of fish off his forefinger and rocked to a wicked, low cackle. ‘I don’t see,’ he confessed with unnecessary relish, the shocking, white orbs in his eye sockets rolled up for her inspection. ‘But say if I’m wrong. The young master didn’t leave you any guards.’
He had not. The fact had chafed against Talith’s confidence through every waking minute of the morning. Equally plain, the Prince of Rathain had not departed in an unplanned rush. Down by the landing a longboat rocked, where men loading wood for the livestock stalls poked fun at somebody’s lame joke. Sounds of industrious hammering rang from the anchorage beyond the masking point of the barrier isles. Talith had noted the packet left for Jinesse, set with Arithon’s signature and seal, papers drawn up with proprieties observed to present Fiark to the trade factor at Innish. Tharrick had spoken of being awake in the dawn to see the Shadow Master away. The stolid second mate from the Khetienn had his orders and his sea duffel off-loaded and ready. He had bathed and scrounged up a new shirt for the honour to crew on the sloop when Feylind sailed her passage through the straits.
In the dazzle of early sunlight, over odds and ends of lumber pegged in dovetailed joints by muscular, half-stripped men, Talith moved off to search for signs of slackening; of inactivity. But the industry in the yard lapsed not a beat for Arithon’s glaring absence.
‘He’s not human,’ the handmaid ventured in a whisper, the rope-handled bucket she had borrowed to wash underthings clamped in her fretted, red fingers. She tipped her head toward the workers bent over the sawpit ripping out new planks. ‘His men are trapped under spells, or why else should they sweat like slaves for an absent master?’
‘Discipline,’ Talith said, annoyed enough by the obvious to snap to her captor’s defence. Despite her unforgiving hours of observation, no evidence had she found of fell powers beyond the use of his birth gift at her capture.
Behind her shoulder, she heard the splicer’s rich chuckle. No doubt some clever repartee concerning her maid’s beliefs would make rounds of the yard before noon. The old badger had a nose for dissent. His relentless, snide commentary on other people’s problems kept half the yard in laughter, and the other half, fit to sling their chisels at him.
Talith ordered her servant to retire and resumed her covert study of Arithon’s labourers. What talk she overheard was illuminating. The men appeared dedicated. They pursued their assigned tasks without complaint. The former guard, Tharrick, was no fool. Jinesse had confided, when asked of his ambivalence, the odd fact he had changed a lifelong allegiance in favour of loyalty to Arithon.
The Princess of Avenor twitched her skirts clear of a puddle and inclined her bright head to the man who stepped aside to let her pass. These folk were not honourless, nor were they lacking self-constraint; but in any group society, there would be factions. As Etarrans lived for intrigue, she should have small difficulty finding a weakness to exploit.
Two days passed. Talith bided in a stiff display of meekness until the sloop Talliarthe returned in due form with her dispatches. The paid captain who manned her disembarked, to reassume his former post aboard the Khetienn. Avenor’s princess retired to her quarters while the graceful little pleasure craft was reprovisioned to set sail with Jinesse, Tharrick, and both twins, and the trustworthy seaman appointed for his strength, as guard against unforeseen weather. She embarked to Feylind’s proud, shouted orders and vanished between combed, white reefs and black rock. The sloop’s sister brigantine raised anchor at the crest of the same tide, three joiners on board still sawing timbers and banging pegs to refigure her hold.
Left to herself amid a yard of common shipwrights, and provided no comforts to divert her, Lady Talith arranged her hair and her clothing. She hardened her heart like sugar stirred in hemlock to test the temper of the Shadow Maste
r’s loyal following. The challenge lay before her, to subvert his given trust and make his men hers if she could.
In a dress cut down from its former state magnificence, unjewelled, but fitted at the waist, she ventured out as though to take the air. She gazed at the sky, the worked wood, and the workers’ muscled bodies with all the sultry boredom she could muster; and was surprised.
None of them gaped in smitten lust.
What glances she received were not even curious, but snatched behind her back in irritation. Not every man was impervious; the rare few who were fidgety under her regard would redden and turn fumbling with their tools. One fled outright to take shelter in the privy. But even that fellow came back determined, and assiduously refused to look at her. Badger though she might with her stunning allure, like salt in a raw sore, if she lingered too long, or raised a skirt to rub her ankle, a tougher-willed companion invariably came to ask her victim for unnecessary help with a measurement.
None returned her greeting by other than a nod. If she attempted conversation, she received a bobbing bow and some grumbled excuse or apology: that she was in the way, would she kindly move aside, her presence was a regrettable inconvenience. No one so much as met her eyes.
At noon, while the sun blistered down, except in the defile by the cliff wall, she presented complaint to the splicer. The blind man grunted, but at least gave her answer where he sat on an upturned barrel, at work amid a snake’s nest of cordage. ‘These know what their lives are worth, surely.’
His hands were like bear’s paws, flat and short-fingered, but astoundingly deft at their craft. Talith watched his tacit touch on the tough, grey twine, half-mesmerized by the finish of a whip-smooth four-square sennit. ‘Your master told his people to ignore me?’
Ivel tipped up his chin to roll his eyes, an affectation he enjoyed to shock the squeamish. ‘Arithon told them to ignore the pride o’ manhood in their breeches.’ His fingers never faltered as he talked. ‘You’re a sight, so they say, to steal reason.’
Talith gave a low, metallic laugh. ‘That makes them afraid to speak? Or were they forbidden?’
‘Well now.’ Ivel tilted his thatched, unkempt head and licked the pad of his thumb, then selected a new rope and twisted the plies open to begin work on a new hawser. ‘Arithon said none was to touch you. It’s the men, you see. They worried the issue amongst themselves.’ The splicer twirled his marlinespike at the peaks which rimmed the sky all around. ‘No whores here, you understand. Not even a pot-house to sell beer to numb the healthy itch. The men decided if they ignored you in a pack, they’d have a lighter time with the temptation.’
Talith blinked, set aback. ‘Are they men at all, and not animals, to so dread the loss of their manners? Or are they gelded by fear, to give over their male right to act as they please? Why should they cast off pride? It’s for the whim of another they abstain from their basic human comforts.’
‘Philosophy is it?’ Ivel flipped the yarns back and in expert speed began to whip an eye splice. ‘We’re not much bent on refinements. Where’s the profit? Best to leave such pompous rhetoric for the lazy rich and the scholars to chew over. The men here all work because the pay’s good. Some are rootless. Some want better lives for their families. Arithon won’t forgive a slacker. His demands can be hard, but he’s fair.’
Talith gave a soft, scornful sigh. ‘Is this paradise, that no one’s discontent? I’m impressed. Will every living, unmanned one of you line up for his turn to lick a polish on Arithon’s boots?’ Her gaze fixed as a tiger’s on Ivel’s bent head, she took her chance and made her covert bid for subterfuge. ‘I’d give every jewel I own, and all my gold braid, to escape such blissful false happiness.’
If the blind splicer was the sole spirit in the yard who dared speak to her, he had a mind inquisitive enough to ferret out any whispers of dissent. Her seed planted, her bribe offered, Talith turned on her heel. She walked on, her part now to wait and seem uninterested in case Ivel failed to take the bait. She would formulate a second strategy while she waited to see whether her effort bore fruit.
Three nights later, wakeful and agonized by circling thoughts, she heard a faint scratch at the window across from her pallet. Through the snores of the handmaid asleep in an unkempt heap that seemed all elbows and knees, Talith heard a faint whisper.
‘Your Grace?’
She arose in her shift. Her unbound hair drifted like snarled floss over her bare shoulders, she crept to crack open the shutter. The unsanded floorboards creaked like the call of Dharkaron’s doom under her barefoot step. She froze, taut and listening, while her maid groaned and stirred to a rustle of bed linen.
After a moment, the woman lay silent.
Talith stalked forward again, her lip caught between her front teeth. In the cool darkness, she heard nothing at all but the white splash of wavelets against the shore. The whisper of her title might have been imagined, a wishful echo of her desperate need.
She slipped the leather loop off the shutter peg anyway. A waning quarter moon drifted over the landing. The high, Vastmark cliffs sliced a line of sheared coal against summer’s constellations, risen in a jewel-set tapestry as they had for three Ages to adorn the late hours of spring nights. Somewhere on the south coast, perhaps, Lysaer s’Ilessid regarded those very stars, and ached with the same loss that wore her heart.
‘Lady Talith,’ came a hushed whisper from the shadow below the sill.
The princess peered down, her breath sped by hope. She made out a furtive, crouched figure, then a nap of grey hair, and the raised, triangular features of Ivel the splicer, his blind eyes a glint of grey marble above the scooped hollows of his cheekbones. ‘Lady, there are four men who have plans to leave the Cascains. They’ve decided to throw their lot with you. They’ve got a derelict fisherman’s smack hove up in a cove behind an islet. She’s being repaired in secret and made seaworthy as we speak. On the dark moon, she’ll embark. The joiner who has the limp will come for you then. Have your jewels ready. If you can’t keep your handmaid from making an outcry, don’t fret if someone has to bind her. We all risk our lives. What Arithon would do if we’re caught at your escape would drive a man witless to imagine.’
Talith still held the stinging, fresh memory of her youthful guardsman with a crossbow bolt through his neck.
Through the nerve-fired interval while the fishing smack was readied, she exerted her influence to improve on the plan. Her maid would stay behind and claim her mistress was indisposed, then pretend to look after an invalid.
‘I’ll cut my hair and leave it sewn around a bolster,’ the princess slipped to Ivel in passing on her habitual morning walks. ‘That should buy a few days without pursuit. I agree the stakes are desperate. My servant has said she’ll do her part.’
Clandestine words blossomed into action more swiftly than hope had allowed. The cutting edge of competence so well enforced by the Shadow Master became strikingly effective, turned against him. The room in the shack grew confining as a cage. Talith and her maid purloined an eating knife and under cover of bland conversation, took surreptitious turns picking jewels and braid off the gowns and slippers in her clothes trunks. After that, Talith had nothing left to do but to pace and count the hours while the moon waned.
Wakeful on the night Ivel’s man came to fetch her, she let him see the hoard, crammed like stashed plunder in a knotted square cut from a petticoat. The reward was deemed acceptable. She would pay out in port. That last detail agreed, she shook hands with her conspirator. Then, her head oddly light, the hacked ends of her hair feathered around her nape and ears, she wrapped up in a cloak of undistinguished colour and boarded the waiting dory. The shifty, pigtailed seaman at the oars rowed from the landing, fast, silent, his timed stroke kicking the small craft ahead in sharp spurts. For all his haste, their progress was silent. The brass rowlocks had been muffled with strips of torn silk much too fine for their usage as rags.
‘The fancy shirt o’ the Master’s,’ her conspirator suppli
ed, his grin a bright nip of teeth against the dark. ‘Fitting contribution, so Ivel says, the evil old louse.’
Talith stifled an enlivened burst of laughter. As the blackened span of shoreline with its wood stacks and trestles fell astern and slipped beyond sight, her Etarran heart thrilled to savage joy. The escape she engineered held a righteous sting of justice. Not only would Arithon’s pride be put down before King Eldir and the vaunted Fellowship; the loss of her ransom would renege his promised payment to his mercenaries. Lysaer’s campaign would become a bloodless triumph. This last little joke lent a crowning fillip: that for the sake of stealth, the s’Ffalenn bastard’s very men had robbed his best shirt off his back.
‘Fitting indeed,’ she gasped back in low pleasure.
Then the fishing smack loomed ahead, her worn rails and spars ghostly grey against the bulking, jagged cliffs. As the dory slipped past her rudder, Talith saw a plate of wood with crude, chiselled lettering nailed to the side of her transom.
Her fellow conspirators had named their redoubtable little craft none else but the Royal Freedom.
‘You’re fools!’ Talith cried in a pleased whisper as rough, friendly hands grasped her wrists and pulled her on board. ‘It’s begging discovery.’
But the four men who sealed their pact to betray the Master of Shadow emphatically refused to make a change.
‘It’s all fitting,’ they told the princess between abashed smiles, then ushered her on into a tiny, cramped cabin infused by the gagging stink of cod. There, by the glimmer of a shielded lantern, the ringleader sat her down on a lashed cask and revealed the gist of his plan.
‘The Freedom’s intent is to make port in Eldir’s kingdom and beg sanctuary in your behalf.’ The fellow wore a rough jerkin, half-unlaced at his throat. Sweat gleamed on his skin like molten copper as he traced a finger over his sea chart. ‘We daren’t ply the South Strait north to Redburn, though that’s closest. Khetienn’s in the straits, and she can haul like Dharkaron’s muckle Chariot, if things should come to a chase. Should wind of our passage reach Arithon, we’d see ourselves beached and flayed alive. Whole damned straits are a trap, too easily cornered and cut off.’