‘When’s the next launching?’ murmured a flaxen-haired bard in a voice unmistakably Arithon’s, while from a tucked pose in a scarletcushioned window seat, the broad-shouldered master of Tysan’s royal shipyard weighed his every word with the slit-eyed contention of a lynx.
‘Next week,’ Cattrick drawled. ‘The gilders are still fussing with her brightwork. If the riggers and splicers are left to their gnashing row over topping lifts, the shakedown could stretch a bit longer.’ A pause for a smile of provocative, white teeth. ‘You know this brig’s going to be tougher. The disappearance of the last was blamed on green officers, so this time they’ve assigned the tried and trusty.’
The bard sheared a needle-bright chord from his lyranthe. Under his hands the music held laughter, belied by the shaded intensity of the gaze stilled and trained upon Cattrick. ‘Your craft is the building of excellent ships. My share of the fun is to steal them.’
The spelled record dimmed, faded back into fusty trails of chalk. Lirenda blinked, brought back to herself. She had screened the final, spent frames of the construct. Ahead stretched the fire-strung nets of live power, preset for events yet to come.
The interface with the present spread at her feet, and the next sounding she touched would be volatile. Contact might jar the uncoiling precision of the spell’s influence. Arithon s’Ffalenn still possessed trained awareness. Blind instinct could warn him if she raised a disturbance. Now, the least misstep would unbalance the conjury. The smallest disruption of pent power could destroy her if an inadvertent move chanced to unravel the delicate bindings.
Lirenda blotted a forehead rinsed in sweat. Around her, the observatory seemed a sealed tomb; cold dark wrapped its core of inferno. Loop upon loop of slaved power lay spring wound and cocked, awaiting the moment of release. Lirenda strove to read the fine lines inked like magma across the dark. The dazzle whirled her to dizziness, and the Great Waystone remained beyond view. Aware she must risk direct contact through visions, she knew visceral fear. The danger before her was no longer malleable. Should she once lose control inside those nets of voracious power, naught would remain of frail flesh and bone but an immolated silt of white ash.
Carried by her unbending determination, Lirenda stilled her awareness. Blank as cooled glass, she stamped down her traitorous, cringing unease, raised her jewel on its chain, and doused its bared facets in the surging, live current of the spell. As the upending rush of seer’s vision claimed her, she braced herself to receive…
The taproom was jammed to an airless, close heat of packed bodies and uproarious noise. By nightfall, drawn in from the frost and the leaden chill of coastal winter, every yard craftsman and beached sailhand in Riverton crammed into the Laughing Captain. Celebration ruled the hour. That day had seen a successful royal launching. The new brig rode at anchor behind the seawall, sparkling with lanterns hooked to her yards as the riggers tied in her last running lines. The crew selected to man her for shakedown attended the madhouse festivity. They sat apart, under orders to moderate their drink. Despite the close eye of an iron-willed captain, they howled with laughter and accepted the beer mugs passed across by congratulatory friends.
Only the bard at the settle had elbow room. With the same stilled deception of a storm’s sunlit eye, he stirred the jammed room to a feverish, wild energy through a reeling succession of dance tunes. The crowd responded, and stamped, and roared with fine spirits, dry tinder raked for the spark.
Dakar’s clumsy, inebriated trip came perfectly timed to fetch against a bald sailor. The pair of them toppled in a tangling heap, and a trestle crashed over to a flying gush of spilled beer. A bystander’s screeched insult provoked a swung fist. From behind their captain’s cordon, several of the brig’s crew laughed and shouted in scathing amusement. As though uncoiled from a spell, an agile little caulker whose dinner had been upset snatched a pitcher from a barmaid’s laden tray. He hurled its foamy contents to silence the ridicule and doused their small pocket of decorum. Through yells of blind outrage, the bard’s measures changed key, then leaped a surreptitious beat faster. His disingenuous skill burned the very air to abandon, while tempers frayed red, and brawlers set to and sowed mayhem across the packed taproom…
“Dharkaron curse the man’s effrontery!” Lirenda swore as scried vision dissolved and freed thought.
Lysaer’s handpicked sailhands had been fearlessly targeted, and a fool’s guess could forecast outcome. To sideline the men of unswerving crown loyalty assigned to choice berths on the brig, the bonesetters in Riverton would be given a busy night’s work. Arithon would claim his diabolical triumph as the scheduled shakedown raised sail with an alternate crew.
Burning to uncover how Morriel’s construct might serve the s’Ffalenn prince his comeuppance, Lirenda mapped a parallel strand in the weave. She found a fresh spring trap interlinked to a marvel of scried forecast, and already engaged by the Riverton launching. The construct arced across distance and time, and conjoined with another, inset with the trefoil seal of a sworn obligation. Some minor Name who bore oath of debt to the Koriani Order received his call to deliver due service.
In the stale dark of the observatory, under roof beams nicked scarlet by the agitated light thrown off by arcane powers, the First Senior set her will once again and pitched her crystal to imprint its moment of due consequence…
Amid the gaudy appointments of an Etarran hall of state, a lanky scholar with soft hands arose from his self-conscious bow. Clad in wine velvet, his bristled, white hair tamed by a cross-laced silk ribbon, he raised his chin to squint at the imposing, blond figure on the dais. Fingers damp, and heart pounding, he offered up the aged vellum he had asked private audience to deliver.
“Milord Prince of the Light, my translation is done. By Koriani request, the fruits of rare knowledge are to be freely given to your cause. What you hold in your hands is an early-Third Age treatise on the lost arts of ocean navigation.”
A deep, rolling thrill pricked Lirenda to gooseflesh. Morriel, in collaboration with Lysaer, against Arithon; the piquancy of that manipulative use of politics raised a sharp gasp of astonishment. Seldom before had a Koriani Prime used power to move sovereign players as pawns. Lirenda traced the spell’s ranging reach toward the future. Curiosity fed now on the drive of ambition, she saw the sealed dispatch from Cattrick which would soon prompt Prince Lysaer to assemble a picked following and leave Etarra in whirlwind secrecy and haste. Cause to consequence, the mighty construct converged, with Arithon flushed into desperate flight. Once he took to the sea, the grand plan would close on him, its culminating force dovetailed into an ingenious, orchestrated opportunity. The last stroke would fall amid the stormy, broad swells of Mainmere Bay. Lirenda reached Alt, the rune of closure, and the construct’s cycle showed the end game to crown its set purpose.
Morriel’s clandestine trap would strip Arithon defenseless, then bind his mettlesome fate into impotence through Koriani captivity.
On her knees before the last sigil, Lirenda pressed narrow palms to her lips to stifle vindictive laughter. Humiliation lanced through the rags of her mirth, that Morriel should judge her too fragile a vessel to bear knowledge of Arithon’s defeat. If the Matriarch died of such overweening arrogance, fate’s backhanded justice was worthy of Dharkaron Avenger.
Lirenda regarded the inner circle of traced, dusty ash and singed herbs. The arced patterns of ending and ward were precise. She sobered to fact, that the old Prime had left no loose ends. Past the dribbled stubs of dead candles, beyond the ceremonial braziers burned cold on their stands, the amethyst Waystone gleamed in sullen quiescence. No vestige of strayed power smoldered unchecked to draw backlash. Lirenda would require no ritual rune of passage to cross this last ward of protection.
These vital defenses, set to shield the spell’s creator from the scalding blast of fused energies, had been breached long since. The break had been instant. No vestige of guarding virtue had survived long enough to bleed away through attrition.
Lirenda raised her skirt hems in shaking fingers, irrationally reluctant to disturb the fine lines whose sigils had failed to protect. She encountered the reason for the lapse soon enough. A girl scarcely sworn to initiate service lay sprawled across the perimeter, hands outflung on the charred slate floor. She breathed in a queerly arrested rhythm, her hollowed, pale features stamped in frozen panic by the passage of arcane forces.
Deep rage shattered Lirenda’s dispassion.
Morriel Prime had not fallen to a flux of miscast energies. She had been betrayed. The failed nerve of this inadequate chit had undone the entire circle. Recognition followed, that the Matriarch had anticipated, even planned for disaster. Seven chains of stayspells wrought over the observatory kept the construct in fugue through that unbinding moment of crisis. Awe remained, that Morriel had called up the strength and sheer will to force her spell to consummation. In mortal pain, perhaps dying, she had impelled her grand construct to live on.
Lirenda straightened up and moved on, leveled to realize she owned no such depths, nor any grand bent for self-sacrifice. Beneath the scintillant eye of the Waystone, she confronted the last tragic figures. They lay in their layers of crumpled robes, youth and age like two dolls dropped through a fracture in time. The first throat she probed for a life sign lay cold; the steadfast initiate who had held to her vows had perished, her life’s spirit drained out of ruthless necessity, that the Prime might survive long enough to stabilize the conjury.
One bundle remained, cast down like dry sticks in a shroud of fine velvets. Lirenda sucked in a steadying breath. Lit by the gleam of the Waystone’s chill presence, she knelt down and braced herself to touch.
The wrist she raised felt insubstantial as bleached parchment wrapped over substanceless bone. But a pulse still threaded the blue network of veins. Though cool, the flesh was not corpse chill.
Against all adversity, Morriel Prime still survived. Unconscious, weakened, perhaps strayed beyond recall, indomitable will kept her breathing.
Lirenda bent her head, while heated tears welled through her eyelids. There and then, amid the musky, flat ash of spilled offerings and the alkaline tang of scraped chalk, she weighed an unthinkable choice: to collapse the grand construct and draw Morriel clear, or to let the spell burn on undisturbed to completion, and hope the Prime’s tenuous reserves could hang on until the last sigil reached its planned closure.
Arithon’s freedom weighed against Morriel’s life; Lirenda snagged her lip between teeth like small pearls, shredded in the cruel crux between desire and ambition. Prime power in hand, and the chance to seize her autonomy; or a sheltered subservience with demeaning awareness that one man, still at large, held the means to unstring her whole character.
Lirenda arose. A laugh ripped from her patrician throat, shrill with leashed-back self-loathing. She was prideful and flawed, too desperately consumed by desire to rule. Temptation had set its steel claws in her vitals, and she was too threatened to tear free.
Alone in the dark, without voice beyond conscience, Lirenda turned her back on the fallen Prime. She shouldered the task of retracing her steps without jostling the spell’s course of alignment. She held no regrets. At heart, she was exactly what her mother had claimed: a spirit born lacking the female kindness Ath granted to natural womanhood. The man who might have unchained her closed spirit held too potent a power to ruin her. Once she was confirmed as Koriani Prime Matriarch, her authority would be unassailable. No one alive need ever know of the emptiness masked at her core.
Tidings
Midwinter 5653
The port of Innish had been known as the jewel of the southcoast for as long as oared ships ranged the seas. During the hard winters, when the Stormwell Gulf capes seized with ice, warehouse space at the dockside rented out at a premium. Every shed and stable loft near the waterfront became pressed into use by the insatiable demands of commerce.
In years when the seasonal snows also sealed the northern passes, the inland attics with sound roofs lay crammed with the silks spun in Atchaz, then packed through the desert by caravan. Crated oranges from Southshire towered in stacks under awnings, awaiting sea trade to the eastern ports along Eltair Bay, or the western cities of Havish. The streets teemed. Sailhands on leave lounged under the shade of the damson trees. Merchants with their trains, breathless errand boys, and half-naked stevedores shouldering bales breasted the chaotic commotion. Busy men cursed the languidly idle who obstructed their frenetic course. The side alleys and the louvered windows of the wineshops rang with the brass bells of the prostitutes. In gilt-dusted lashes, heavy scents, and soft paint, the paid women of Innish could lure a man into dalliance and drown him in pleasure for hours.
Just crossing the wharf district for a day’s business could tax an honest man to short temper. The sights themselves were temptation, the stucco colonnades with their tiled roofs and pierced finials a puzzle of artful complexity. The allure of Innish could waylay the senses in the whirl of its milling crowds, its exotic scents, or its outright, seamy misfortune, dealt out by the riffraff who skulked and preyed off the wealth that changed hands in the streets.
Feylind’s brother, Fiark, had as much as he could handle as a journeyman trade factor. Left wan from the hours spent working over his master’s accounts by lamplight, sweating under his beautifully tailored broadcloth in the lush southland heat, he had no patience to spare, even for thrashing through arguments with the twin sister just called back in port.
The years spent on shipboard with Arithon’s crews had not blunted her feckless temperament. Her decorum was still nonexistent. No woman he knew but a dockside hussy would pick her fights amid the racketing press of the wharf at noontide, where shouted conversation could scarcely be heard, and rumors flew mouth to mouth at the least possible whiff of a scandal.
“Why can’t you give us a cargo bound for Ostermere,” Feylind shrilled. Clad in the man’s dress she wore at her post as navigator on board the brig Evenstar, she spun sideways to avoid a servant bearing a crate of white doves. “Don’t tell me the ladies of Eldir’s capital have given up buying fine silk! Not when the King’s Grace just issued a public proclamation of his handfasting!”
“What would you know of court women and their refined ways, gallivanting in slops on a ship’s deck?” Fiark sniped back.
Feylind eyed him askance, unable to accustom herself to his adult dignity, nor the golden hair trimmed neat at his collar, and his genteel, quality clothing. No trace remained of the barefoot boy as he paused by the bollards and hailed a lighterman to ferry him out to a brig at a remote anchorage.
“You can’t duck me so easily,” Feylind retorted, her pale braid flying loose strands in the breeze, and her full-sleeved man’s shirt and pearl-sewn scarlet waistcoat enough to turn heads for sheer gaudiness.
When her brother merely shrugged, she shot out a toe and expertly fended the inbound lighter away from the dock. The oarsman cursed her. She fielded his insults with a phrase by lengths more inventive, then crossed her arms and glowered down her freckled nose at her twin. Except for appearances, nothing was changed between them. Either they connived hand in glove at appalling acts of mischief, or they fought each other like stoats.
Feylind tapped her foot. Fiark would know she would heave him into the bay in his finery before she let him ignore her.
He glared back in anger for only a moment. Then the smile she loved best turned the corners of his lips, and merriment sparkled in his wide cobalt eyes. “You want to gain news of him?” That pronoun, between them, required no naming; they had spent half their lives in Prince Arithon’s shadow, underfoot, or attached out of bold fascination to the strings of his far-flung machinations. “Well, you don’t need to finagle a passage to Corith to hear.”
Feylind’s eyes of identical color lit into shrewd recognition. “That ship you’re in such a hurry to meet?”
She laughed, spun about, and flicked something bright in a careless arc over the turquoise water which roiled in mishmashed c
hop against the seawall. The offering clanged into the cockpit of the lighter: a coin from Perdith, minted in heavy red gold.
The craft’s slighted oarsman yelped in mid-oath. He recovered the bribe, then stood, face upturned, and bowed his unctuous appeasement. “Where would the lady like to go?”
“Such a way you have with men,” Fiark teased, then stung her pride back by extending his hand like a gallant to assist her off of the dock.
“Do that again, and you’ll swim for it,” Feylind said. Limber as a monkey, she stepped off the wharf, trod down on the gunwale, then startled the lighterman all over again by claiming his unoccupied bench. She unshipped his spare pair of looms, threaded their leathers through the rowlocks, and scarce paused for Fiark to board at the stern before she dug the blades into a ferocious stroke.
“Now I’m in a hurry,” she confessed as the lighter shot forward. Two other craft in the way veered aside, the owner of one snapping oaths. Feylind ignored him, intent upon Fiark. “Tell the man where we’re pointing this tub.”
When her brother took his time to indicate direction, Feylind jabbed down one oar like a rudder and shot the lighter craft sideways. Head twisted, she sized up the motley collection of boats, small and large, riding over their slice-cut reflections in the shelter of Innish harbor. Her grasp of detail quickly winnowed the clutter of merchant brigs: the slipshod ones with their sails tied in gaskets, and others run by more rigorous captains, rolling neat at their moorings with yardarms varnished and stripped. She assessed crosshatched rigging, the swept decks with baled cargoes, then unerring, spotted the one vessel set apart.
“Hah!” she whooped, triumphant. “Belay Fiark’s word, I already see.” She backwatered, hauled, and jacked the lighter onto her selfdetermined new heading. “We’re bound for the brig with the shameless bronze tits on her figurehead.”