Talith held his gaze, locked eye to eye. But her lip trembled ever so slightly.
Like a kick in the belly, Pesquil recognized that the motive which drove her was love. He would not shake that, not if he killed her.
That moment a knock sounded at the locked door. 'The serving lad, arrived to mow off your stubble,' Talith said on a wicked note of triumph. 'We shall both be denounced and thrown out of Etarra, since I'm the indisputable bad influence.'
A truth, Pesquil allowed, as her fluttery accomplices froze short of the last, outrageous act.
Lysaer's future wife left the gutted armoire and pried the key out of the one girl's pinched grasp. She turned the lock, flung the door wide, and watched like a cat with a mouse in its paws as the page on the far side gasped and stumbled back in surprise.
'Do you see, I left the bedclothes untouched,' she said, and pealed into a last, merry laugh.
'Lady Talith!' her male victim ground out on a note of teeth-gnashing fury. 'I'll wear you a set of saddle blisters such as you'll pray for death to escape!'
Then, as the page dropped his basin and razor and fled, and the daughters embraced their conspirator in girlish bravado and wished her safe journey and good health, Pesquil shied the pulped soap out the window in the wake of his purloined apparel. Girt in the tepid discomfort of his bath, he concluded that any prince mad enough to marry a pedigree Etarran lady deserved to suffer merry hell and intrigue on the home front. Just as well the Master of Shadow would afford a sound reason for a husband to stay absent in the cause of bloody war. Lysaer would need the violence just to stay, sane with that brazen-mouthed vixen in his bed and ever busy, stitching steel claws through his vitals.
* * *
The first sound heard by visitors to the prince's new city of Avenor was the sweet, high ring of the armourer's mallets shivering the air between the stripped branches of the oak groves. Worn by a long and arduous journey, weary of the suck and splash of her mount's hooves through the rime of late-season snow, Lady Talith pushed back her fur-lined hood, the better to take in the view as Pesquil's cavalcade of headhunters crested the last rise and passed the gap in the hills.
Ahead, the clear, cold line of the sea slashed a sky like dirty ice. Flocks of gulls settled like caught twists of paper against the dunes, crusted with salt-eaten drifts. The city's unfinished walls commanded a high knoll, smirched with smoke from the brickmaker's kilns, and alive as an ants' nest with activity.
Windburned to a high flush, her silken hair silted in the collar of her cloak, Talith sorted through the jumbled supply sheds, the cruck built officers' hall, then squinted against sunlight torn through a broken cloud layer to pick out the ravelled outline of keeps and revetments and gate turrets. Inside the honeycomb shapes of partial structures, a single tower arose, near complete, the spoked beams of its roof line as yet bare of slate. The distant snaps of the ox drovers' whips, the limpid stream of banners, and the squeals of a hog bound for slaughter strained through the white rush of surf and the trumpet calls of an officer.
Even through inclement weather, the practice field lay in use. Directed by a mounted officer, a field kitchen spread half-dismantled in churned mud. A tent billowed flat to shouts and a timed release of guy ropes, while mule teams jostled supply wagons into position for loading. Marksmen fired crossbows at the butts; grooms with buckets swarmed up and down the horse lines to tend steaming charges led in hot from heavy exercise, while the men just dismounted shed empty quivers and short, compound bows, to take up pikes and renew their drill in the disciplined formation of foot companies.
When Lysaer's army marched against the Shadow Master, every soldier in the ranks would be hard trained and multiply skilled in the arts of warfare.
'I warned you, lady.' Pesquil reined his horse into step beside hers, engrossed in professional survey. 'This place is more barracks than city. Your comforts are left back in Erdane.'
Talith said nothing, nor moved. But her horse tossed its head to a shivering jingle of belled bridle reins before she stabbed in her heels and sent it downhill at a canter.
'She must have hide like a crocodile,' the headhunter lieutenant complained. 'It's unnatural she should feel so fresh after six ugly weeks in the saddle.'
The journey from Erdane had been trying beyond endurance, even without the unwanted presence of the lady. Harried by blizzards, all but frozen to starvation in the Tornir passes, delayed a fortnight in wait for safe crossing over the ripping torrents of the Melor River ford, the headhunter party was fortunate to have reached Avenor before the first thaws.
'Well,' said Pesquil in dry humour, 'if her nibs strains her mount's tendons by miring its legs in a ditch, the problem at least will be Lysaer's.'
'Well give her credit, she's anxious for her prince,' the lieutenant grumbled. 'At least she didn't whine about the hardship.' He reined his horse carefully over patched ice and into the rutted mud where lately the mounted archers had fired volleys into straw sacking. Servants moved, drab against the mire, recovering those few shafts that strayed and scoring their markings on a tally.
Pesquil turned his head to eye the bristled targets, then raised eyebrows spiked like frizzed wire through the fur that lined his conical helm. He faced forward, shrugged off a rare thrill of admiration, and recovered the lapsed thread of his thought. 'You didn't look at her eyes, man. That minx isn't eager. She's vexed. I'll lay you three royals against your chased silver spurs: the pair'll meet and have a row like a thunderclap.'
* * *
Minutes later, unmindful of the sensation she had created in her ride across the tilt yard, the lady pried herself out of the suffocating hug her brother had clapped over her on sight. 'Talith, Talith!' His welcome came tempered with consternation. 'What in Sithaer are you doing here?'
Lightly mussed, her furs left ruffled to bent hair and the taint of lathered warhorse, she tipped up her chin to view the brother parted from her for a year.
Diegan had grown harder, leaner. His elegant jewels were replaced by thick mail and leather that showed the rubbed shine of hard wear. The dark, handsome features were knit taut to the bone, rugged now with new angles where the flesh of languid living had burned away.
'By the look of you, I shall have to learn tactics if I'm to share in the dinner conversation,' Talith said. 'You seem a proper commander of armies. Though you have busy fellows doing more than one job like cuckoos packed into a hawk's nest, I didn't count many troops. Did you set all your soldiers to laying bricks?'
'Yes, in fact.' Diegan swept his fair sister into the buffeting activity that clogged the invisible division between the armed camp, and the domain of the masons and labourers. Over the creak of a dray laden down with hewn beams, the Lord Commander qualified. 'His Grace insisted the experience would teach our soldiers some fine points that might help with future sieges. You should have seen the mercenaries' expressions when they heard they'd serve a turn at taking orders from the master mason.'
'And did they?' asked Talith in sidelong malice. Diegan laughed, strangely bitter. 'Under Lysaer? He has a gift.' He dodged a loose goat, a handcart crusted with dried mortar, and ducked the invitation of a blowsy woman festooned in scarlet ribbons. 'For our prince, they would do a groom's chores and whistle. I could use your tongue, sister, to scale the rust from my mail.' While a pack of recruits stopped, staring and silly, directly in the midst of the causeway, he cupped her elbow in his gauntleted hand and gave a firm steer toward the largest of the camp's timbered buildings. 'Don't mind the tenderfeet. Our most seasoned field troops are on campaign.'
At Talith's stark glance of surprise, Diegan warmed further to his subject. 'Our southshore trade routes don't close in winter, and the Caithwood road is rife with marauding barbarians. We hire out our finished companies as caravan guards. They gain hardening, our treasury takes a share of the merchants' profits when the goods are sold on destination, and the guilds pay the troops' daily upkeep.'
'How perfectly sensible and dull.' Talith raised the m
ud-splashed hem of her habit and mounted the gritty, planked steps to the hall. 'And naturally, Prince Lysaer fights beside them?'
'In fact, no. I thought I was taking you to him.' Suave before her blighted scorn, Diegan hurled back in piquant challenge, 'Perhaps I should pack you straight back to Erdane without a meeting.'
Talith bristled against his hand.
'Why are you here, sister?' Direct in a manner she had never seen before, Diegan searched her face as he might measure an enemy. 'Have you come to cast off his Grace?'
Behind her smile, Talith was furious. 'You'll have to wait and see.' In Etarra, the gallants would have eaten her alive, were her thoughts to appear so transparent.
For a second, Diegan poised, mailed fingers spread flat on the unvarnished door panel. Then he bashed the portal open, drew her inside, and the slanting light cut off at his back flashed obliquely over his teeth. Caught somewhere between oaths and laughter, he said, 'Lady sister, leave him if you can.'
Thrown into uncertainty by a reaction too difficult to interpret, Talith resisted her brother's pressure on her back as he traversed the unlighted hallway. 'Diegan, wait. We should talk first.'
Obstinate, he quickened stride. 'If you are here to break off your handfasting, by all means, do so. I shall not stand in your path.'
The smells of wax and wet horse rode the shadows; the wool runner was swept, if continually damp from the traffic of men who shed snow off of muddy boots. The boards underneath had been pegged while still green; seasoned now by the warmth of the hearth peats, they squeaked even to Talith's light tread.
Conscious of a closed door ahead, and of a heart that beat much too fast, Talith sidestepped, but could not evade her brother's grip. Puzzled by the odd, tormented tension that hardened him, she pushed back in diamond-cool clarity. 'Diegan, the man who led my escort is Etarra's best headhunter, your old friend Captain Mayor Pesquil.'
That halted him. With a freezing jingle of disturbed mail, Diegan shot out a fist and gripped his sisters shoulder. Hair the glossy black of new ribbon ruffled in the nap of his gambeson as he pulled her a stiff step closer and searched her face in the dimness. 'Pesquil? Here? I saw no banner. Ath Creator, what has happened?'
Unspoken between them in a corridor too narrow for comfort hung the name of the Master of Shadow.
In calculated, smiling obstruction, Talith knew just how to twist. 'Why not go ask the Lord Mayor and find out?'
Once, her brother would have shot back some barb to blunt the fresh thrill of her victory. Now, determination rode like a stranger on features she had known all her life. The Lord Commander who managed Lysaer's armies simply left her, the swept hilt of his sword dragged in a screaming scrape across the board wall as he jostled past.
A breath of sudden cold, and the door banged. Ceded her privacy in the pent, dreary gloom of the corridor, Talith chewed her lip in hesitation. She had come here to break off her promise to Lysaer s'Ilessid. Love by itself was not enough to ease the ache of his prolonged absence; her brother's queer challenge was not rational. She was Etarran, and beautiful, and knew her own mind; she never failed to get what she wanted.
From within the closed chamber ahead, she heard the rise and fall of someone speaking. Too proud to eavesdrop like a servant, she shook out the habit her brother had left wrinkled, stepped forward, and raised the crude door latch.
The hinges gave without a sound.
She stepped into a late spill of sun, flared through diamond-paned windows. Lozenged in thin, patterned light, a carpet woven in the exquisite taste of Narms' master guildsmen brightened the rough plank floor. The walls were panelled, and muted further in tapestries. A pearl-inlaid secretaire sat at right angles to a desk, and two cushioned benches carved in ebony. The rich, leather smell of books and parchment and a lingering trace of heated wax combined to frame an air of power and wealth. A page's velvet cap lay on a footstool by the hearth. Hedged between a pair of massive candle stands and a table half-buried under charts, the crown of a golden fair head bent close to that of an earnest little boy.
'We don't yet have a scribe, that's not civilized, I know,' said Lysaer s'Ilessid to the child. 'But that doesn't matter. A page should know how to fold and seal a document for the day he grows up to be a lord.'
The boy said something in dulcet, shy tones.
'The job is only boring before you learn how it's done.' A sculptured hand reached up, snagged a ribbon in Tysan's royal colours from a cache between quills and inkwell, and resumed patient instruction. 'Here, and here,' Lysaer said, a smile on his lips to tear the heart. 'Now the knot. Use two hands this time, and try not to smear the royal star.'
A striker changed hands, then the heavy brass seal with the star and crown sigil of Tysan. Undone by the page's worshipful concentration as he backed up with his burden to try afresh, Talith held her fingertips pressed to her lips as Lysaer s'Ilessid straightened up.
The light fringed his hair to a leafed blaze of gold. Unsoftened by the coarser glow of candles, his austere face showed an unearthly beauty no memory could preserve with due justice. The impact of cobalt-blue eyes stunned like a physical shock. The frozen moment, while Prince Lysaer sized up her waiting presence, spun the last shred of breath from Talith's throat.
His Grace of Tysan was not in rough attire, as she had expected, but ablaze with gold studs and a chain worked in pearls and small sapphires. His cuffs and collar were damascened silk, and his tabard, of trimmed velvet, looked cut from the shadow of a snowdrift. Every inch of him lordly, he poised for the space of a heartbeat.
Then a sudden, blinding smile enlivened his face with affection. 'Lady Talith!' In one fluid movement he vaulted the table. His rush set the candle flames streaming. Sooner than she wished, he reached out and touched, and enveloped her in welcoming arms.
The firm, muscled strength underneath his soft clothes lifted her, spun her, set her down. Talith was consumed, then ignited by his flame of vital heat. She sensed the sped pace of his heart as his knuckles sank in her damp ermine, and his lips seared a kiss on her forehead. 'You are just the person I wished to see, beloved. My writ was to reach you in the hands of the next messenger. Yesterday, our wedding date was set.'
Her anger in trembling ruins, Talith recovered her breath with a gasp. 'What?'
'We shall marry when the orchards are in blossom.' Lysaer consumed her with his gaze, then took swift advantage of her open-mouthed, speechless surprise.
'Leave him if you can,' her brother had mocked. Wrapped in the prince's embrace, sealed to his lips in a branding flush of passion, that challenge rang sadly diminished. As though drugged, or enspelled, Talith felt her resolve sublimate like wax set in flame.
The kiss ended and left her bereft.
'By Ath, you crossed the passes. No wonder you're peaked. The journey had to be terrible.' Still talking, Lysaer set her down on one of the cushioned benches. With the same seamless charm, his page was dispatched to fetch mulled wine and scones from the bakehouse. Then, while she was still heady with his presence, Lysaer, Prince of Tysan, raised both her hands and savoured them, captive in his grip.
Only now did she notice the calluses inscribed by sword and lance and bridle rein, the telltale smudges of fatigue in the hollows of his face. The stamp of cold purpose lay on his good looks like the blued gleam of steel from the forge.
And like the first ice to trammel clear waters, reason caught up and flawed his joy. 'My dear, you are magnificent. No doubt my best officers are all stumbling into walls at the sight of you, but what possessed you to leave Erdane at this season?'
Talith had no more will to frame answer; then, as Pesquil's nasal tones intruded from the outside corridor, she lost all need to use words.
Lysaer stepped away. His jewels spat indigo sparks in the gloom, and candles winnowed by spurts of disturbed air threw wavering, ominous shadows. His pleasure erased before a turbulent frown, the prince flung wide the door to his private study.
Left, but not forgotten on her bench,
decimated beyond reprieve by Lysaer's magnetic charm, Lady Talith sat in dumb misery while her brother and the Captain Mayor of Etarra's league of headhunters made free and entered, and dispatched the news that the Master of Shadow had sown havoc through two cities in the east.
Throughout, Lysaer listened, not rigid with outrage, but distilled instead to a leashed back, frightening fury. The glow from the casement etched his rapt profile and splintered through the gold ribbon on his sleeves.
'I have no verified facts from either government,' Pesquil hastened to add. 'But the rumours are spread through more than one source. Jaelot and Alestron are unlikely places for spurious tales of fancy to arise.'
A glint of sharp distress charged the depths of Lysaer's eyes as he reeled off a string of fast conclusions. 'They are port towns. It is s'Ffalenn design, and wantonly inflicted on innocents.' Passion frayed through as he added, 'The instant the weather lets the trade galleys sail, we'll send for documented evidence. At last I'll gain the leverage I need to turn Tysan's guildsmen. The threat this man presents is dire, but until now, only cities in Rathain saw the proof.'
Pesquil tapped the worn steel in his scabbard, his side; long glance whittled shrewd. 'Erdane's offered you three hundred reserves already, upon presentation of hard evidence.'
Lysaer dealt the headhunter captain a spirited slap on the shoulder. 'Well done!' He surged behind his desk, seized pen and paper, and scribbled a rushed line of notes. 'We have much to accomplish in a matter of days. As you must be aware, you've earned a reward. I had a thousand royals posted for the man who brought the first word of the Shadow Master.'
'Use the gold to pay soldiers,' Pesquil said in a sudden red flush of embarrassment. 'Your army, they're prepared?'
Lord Commander Diegan broke in, 'The men are more than ready. On command, they would march against Dharkaron himself.'
'Weather won't delay us overlong,' Lysaer added. 'A third of our forces already lie south in Caithwood, on hired campaign against barbarians. Word can be sped by fast courier. Those divisions can be marched east directly.' Rapidly, he outlined his intent to gather Avenor's high officials and every ranking officer from the barracks. Then he spun and met the irate glare of Talith, who believed herself set aside and forgotten.