TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

  Lysaer advanced to preserve the initiative. 'I haven't come empty-handed.'

  'A bribe? That's impertinence, to presume earthy wealth could sway any sister of my order.' The cone heaved up a coarse scratch of laughter. 'Prince, you waste time. Take up your spear and go hunt the boar. He would show you more sport for less danger.'

  Hands clasped before him in cool censure, Lysaer said, 'I give the beggars in my court a better hearing.'

  A creased palm slapped the. whirling wheel to a stop. Would a beggar offer bloodpnce to take his Halfbrother's life?'

  'Would you let a point of kinship overset a whole kingdom's right to justice?' Across darkness, through eddyless air clogged with the rancid reek of tallow, Lysaer felt the probe of the enchantress's regard like subliminal pressure against his bones. Iron to his core, ruled every breath by royal dignity, he quelled the swift prick of affront, that this enchantress should dare to question his morals, or doubt his fitness to act on behalf of a jeopardized society. 'In allowance for mercy, I would say instead that I petition for help to mete out a swift act of cautery. Who else is qualified to outmatch this evil? Or should civilization be abandoned to suffer, and a people see ruin for a sentimental principle, hinged on an accident of birth? Do we shelter one life, regardless of ancestry, then sanction the act of mass murder? Answer me fairly: can the breach between townsman and clanborn ever hope to be healed for as long as Rathain's prince remains alive?'

  The treadle squeaked again and revived the lagged spin of the wheel. 'You imply the Koriani Senior Circle is remiss? For Arithon s'Ffalenn, Morriel Prime has already made disposition.' A tuft of wool flitted free of the crone's grasp and drifted like an errant spirit across the candle's thin halo. 'You mistake us. We are not as the Fellowship, to turn blind eyes to events. I can lend your endeavour this much, Prince of Tysan: you shall suffer no interference. Should you find your quarry and run him to ground, force of arms shall be left to prevail.'

  'You would dismiss me unheard?' Lysaer cried.

  An invisible movement jerked the lint on a draught, and a snake hiss whisper lashed the gloom. 'How dare you!'

  But the implied admission stood: that the Koriani Prime already knew the Shadow Master's whereabouts. Lysaer outfaced the crone's ire. 'Before the Mistwraith invaded Athera, your order did not trifle with nursing the sick. They peddled no petty charms for iyat bane and let herb witches attend birthings and sick livestock. Koriani magecraft at one time was said to cure mortal wounds. Initiate sisters weren't culled from your orphanages, but sent to your hospices by parents, lest their talents languish without teaching. What of your hopes to restore such lost influence? Is your sisterhood content to remain overshadowed by events? As a prince pledged to mend this land's rifts and sad hatreds, I would suggest your Prime's goal and mine at heart aren't so terribly different.'

  The crone's gaze devoured him now, sharply enough to raise a flush. Hazed by his own rapid heartbeat, Lysaer finished on a drawn note of acid. 'I beg to suggest this exchange is no tawdry bargain, but a just restoration of a moral balance. I once visited Althain Tower. Sethvir's storerooms hold treasures that perhaps should be brought into daylight.'

  'You meddle beyond your depth, Prince!' But the enchantress faltered in her spinning. The wheel lost impetus. Slackened a bare instant from firm tension, the yarn snapped into spring-loops and tangles, unnoticed as her eyes pinned his face.

  Riled by the disparate sense of being memorized for future study, Lysaer lifted his spread palm and raised the bright current of his gift.

  Light bloomed from his fingertips. The sediment of gloom flowed away as though strained from murky water to unveil the cramped room in its poverty. the threadbare coverlet on the trucklebed, moth-nipped and fringed with ravelled seams; furnishings worn to a patina of hard use; and walls swagged in warped shelves, crammed with a herbalist's collection of flasks and packets of root stocks.

  The enchantress proved an angular woman with sunken cheeks and puffed hands. Her shapeless brown twill hung speckled with wax and napped to frayed seams at the cuffs. Brown walnut eyes might have been warm, were they not touched to an impervious glitter that stabbed even the dead air for its secrets.

  'Speak your bribe then, Prince.' Her face a leather mask, she added, 'If you seek to gain, you must abide by my judgement. Your case will be weighed on grounds of moral merit, but beware. You trespass in affairs beyond your depth.'

  Lysaer drew breath and found himself trembling after all. Necessity impelled him to commit himself. 'I have seen in the store vaults at Althain a weighty sphere of cut amethyst. Traithe named that jewel the Waystone of the Koriathain.'

  The crone gave a clipped cry. A candle-caught sparkle of tears rinsed her cheeks, quarried in seams and tired hollows. 'We never knew,' she said in a shattered whisper.

  Misplaced since the time of the uprising, the Great Waystone held capacity to channel the trained awareness of one hundred and eighty enchantresses. The crystal had stood as the keystone of Koriani power. Since its disappearance, the sisterhood had been as a body blinded, reduced to crippling weakness.

  If means could be found to restore its possession into the hands of the Prime, the order could rebuild its lost influence. The Koriathain might regain their former strength to steer events in mercy and compassion; to alleviate those trends of daily suffering the Fellowship in its arrogance deemed unworthy of attention. Through the Great Waystone, the medicinal virtues of herbals could be raised beyond individual treatment, plagues could be averted, the course of storms bent aside; earthquake and wildfire forced quiescent. Once more the order could act to spare the world from its imprint of senseless, natural disasters.

  The crone sat bemused, her hands draped loose amid the carded wool in her lap. 'Ath bless your vision, Prince of Tysan.' Flushed to deep gratitude, she attended the matter of his asking price. 'Approach and stare into the candle flame. My art shall grant the augury you ask of us.'

  Lysaer dispelled the blaze of his gift. While the shadows rushed back and veiled her in obscurity, he crossed the worn, creaking boards. The isolate flame glowed through his hair, the tips of each strand feed bright as spun wire. He aligned his sight as the crone had directed, and inhaled the fragrance of lavender and pennyroyal and mint, and the fox-musk scent of whatever had been used to cut the oil from raw fleeces.

  The crone neither spoke nor moved. Her lashes stayed parted as her eyes glazed blindly into trance. The knuckles in her lap twitched once and stilled, chapped to cracks like the glaze on cheap crockery.

  Tense, lightly sweating, Lysaer waited empty-handed for the magic to touch him. Seconds passed. The candle's fire bent and wavered and thrashed up its rippled, thready fumes. His eyes burned with the strain of fixed focus. The transition that plunged into prescient dream fell seamless and silent, outside his five senses to fathom.

  One moment he stood in the enchantress's cramped cottage. The next breath he was nowhere at all, a disembodied presence shot through a swoop of uneasy distress. Then his awareness contracted into a sharp, focused vision that encompassed a vista far distant ...

  ... the azure harbour sparkled under mild, salt winds, creased by the satin splash of breakers. Against a fan of palm trees and the fluffy, low clouds of the tropics, a man in sailor's garb closed a bargain with an aproned craftsman. 'My shipyard will be settled at Merior by the Sea,' he informed. 'Your contract will extend for two years, through the course of building ten brigantines.' As he turned to depart, the fall of southern sunlight limned glossy black hair and a face of steep planes and narrow angles; eyes clear-cut as dark tourmaline revealed him as the scion of s'Ffalenn ...

  The mirror-bright clarity of the scrying splintered, savaged by a claw-rip of hatred. Lysaer screamed in thwarted rage. The curse-driven impulse to draw steel, to dismember an enemy beyond reach unstrung his reasoned, royal bearing. He thrashed a step backward and spun, to seek the cottage doorway where his boar-spear waited ready to his hand.

  But the walls, the blurred spice of
herbs, the candle and crone: all were banished. His foot raised no squeak of waxed floor boards. Instead, he crashed through damp branches.

  Lysaer jerked short in bewilderment. The unconsummated passion raised by the scrying sheared through his body in waves. Banished back to the wood by some twist of fey spells, he stood at the verge of a glen. The air wore a diaphanous mantle of twilight; grass and fiddlehead ferns drooped to a tarnish of dew.

  Lysaer shuddered in the cold air. His oak spear lay at his feet. He snatched up the weapon, still fired in every nerve by an untamed blaze of animosity.

  Movement across the clearing caught his eye. Embedded in shadow beneath the tree limbs, a boar waited, head down and bristling to challenge the disturbance in its territory. Failing light printed the curves of its tushes, varnished with spittle. The pits of mean eyes scanned the gloom to a twitch of pricked ears.

  Lent a hunter's concentration by the riptide shock of Desh-thiere's curse, Lysaer had no space for fear. The scrying had shown him his enemy, and now the berserk need mauled through him, to tear living flesh and draw blood. He raised his weapon, levelled its barred crosspiece, and crouched to meet the boar's attack.

  His move broke the beast's snuffling uncertainty. It gnashed razored ivory, lowered its coarse neck and charged.

  Dew scattered before a snapping click of cloven hooves. The boar came on, a brute mass of churning sinew and foul, snorted breath.

  But Lysaer saw no animal bearing down on the braced tip of his spear.

  Imprinted against the vague darkness, he aimed instead at the black, glossy hair; the detested, trickster features of his half-brother.

  Lysaer's lips peeled back in poisoned exultation as the boar pounded headlong toward his vitals. The spear graced his hands like a smoothed bar of light, nervelessly steady and sure.

  Perhaps the crazed beast sensed its doom; or else the fickle wind cast the scent of oiled metal, poised ready to be sheathed in hot hide. At the crux of the last closing stride, the boar swerved. The spear jabbed its shoulder and ripped deep. Impetus drove the weapon home through its straining mass of muscle. Bone hammered and grated in vibration through the wood in Lysaer's grasp.

  The wound he dealt was mortal, but not quick. The boar squealed its agony and thrashed. It tussled to gore, to a spray of gouged turf and bruised grasses. Its killer held fast to the spear shaft, partnered in a battering dance of death. Raised to sick thrill, Lysaer savoured fierce strength brought to helpless, thwarted rage; he gloried in his ascendance, and as his victim weakened, he revelled in its pain.

  He twisted the spear, felt the blade slide past bone and bite deeper, to hack and ravage and bleed white. Through his curse-driven fervour of elation, he gloated in the knowledge that finally, his half-brother lay within reach.

  Before the turn of the year, the unprincipled creature dying on his steel would be the Shadow Master, Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  He hacked at the boar's carcass long past the final quiver of life. Then a last, savage shiver rocked through him. Chilled in running sweat, smeared with torn greens and the hot copper reek of spilled blood, Lysaer felt his obsessed fit of fury drain away.

  Awakened to shamed honour, he discovered just how far from sanity the witch's filthy scrying had driven him.

  The spear fell from his slackened fingers. Drained from the aftershock of magic, he bent, arms hugged to his breast. The stink of death and faeces revolted his civilized senses. He crouched, overcome, and was rackingly sick on the grass.

  Captain Mayor Pesquil sighted him there, huddled in the muck beside the butchered boar, steaming in the cold air of twilight.

  Prince Lysaer flinched at the swish of soft steps in the grass. He gathered himself and shoved erect. 'Don't touch me,' he said.

  Pesquil looked him up and down, careful not to study the remains that lay mauled beyond salvage as a trophy. In damning, steely quiet, he noted, 'I see you took your beast without any contest at all.'

  Untouched by remorse, Lysaer recovered the sticky shaft of his weapon and braced his bruised body to full height. 'Avenor's army will march to sure victory, now. I know where our enemy lies hidden. The main muster shall take place at Etarra. Then we'll need galleys, as fast as we can hire them, to sail our war host southward to Merior.'

  'What are you talking about?' Pesquil snapped. 'Arithon s'Ffalenn.' Over bloodied fingers, Lysaer s'Ilessid smiled. 'We shall find him holed up in Merior, building ships to prey on merchant commerce. His pirate father did the same. If we can cross the continent and put our war host to sea, the Master of Shadow will lie in his grave by the winter.'

  Feeling cleansed, Lysaer understood that the Koriani witch had been wise in her way to arrange his tryst with the boar. The catharsis of violence had restored his control. He could review her scrying now with equanimity. A detail slipped past in the first heat of vision pricked now to the forefront of his mind.

  The bullion chest in the sand by his half-brother's foot, offered to bind honest craftsmen, had carried an Etarran guild brand as well as the wax seal of Tysan. The Master of Shadow could never have acquired such a coffer, except through Lady Maenalle's collaboration.

  Stiffened to sharp outrage, Lysaer said, 'Ath's mercy on her. We have beyond doubt been betrayed.' There and then in Pesquil's presence, he swore his royal oath to wreak vengeance upon the caithdein of Tysan. 'Mark my word, Lady Maenalle's life is forfeit. She has forsaken her realm and sent all my raided gold to serve the cause of Arithon s'Ffalenn.'

  Interstices

  In the glens beside Tysan's seacoast, a boar's blood clots in matted grass; a candle stub charged with energies from a dangerously significant scrying dusts trailers of failed smoke through an abandoned cottage; a prince rejoins his worried retinue; but unlike every other night, the Warden of Althain fails to track these events from his tower, immersed as he is in the deeps between stars in search of a colleague's lost spirit . . .

  Within Alestron's state chamber, a dishonoured captain marked with raw whip scars stands straight to receive the sentence of his duke; but the words that condemn him to exile mean less than the knowledge that an envoy rides north to seek word of the war host being raised to hunt the Master of Shadow ...

  In Avenor, under low-bellied clouds and fine drizzle, the last companies gather under Tysan's royal banner, then form up in smart columns to march east; while before the arch of the gatehouse, Lady Talith sheds tears of farewell in her husband's embrace, saying, 'Kill the felon swiftly and return.'

  XII. ELAIRA

  Arithon's sloop Talliarthe slipped back into Merior's tiny anchorage after a late night passage. The fishermen abroad in the pearl grey of dawn simply saw her, returned without fanfare and tied off to an unused mooring. By sunup, Jinesse 's young twins repeated the discovery. Their bout of ecstatic shouting rang shrill through the glassine air. Through the wheeling flocks of sea birds startled from the watch tower, the children rowed out in their dory and came back an hour later. Braced in the little boat's bow lay an exquisite bowl of Falgaire crystal crated in straw and a bolt of blue silk for their mother, sent with Arithon's compliments.

  Disturbed at her washing by the widow's confounded dismay, the boarding house mistress offered counsel. 'Keep his gifts or sell them for silver, but don't be silly over nothing! Yon outsider's a man who knows his own mind.' The large woman thrust out the dripping end of a bedsheet. 'Hold this.' Her strong, collected hands wrung the cloth. 'You'll offend him, and deeply, if you slight him by sending them back.'

  Returned to her cottage with her apron spattered with soap suds, and her hair tugged into a shag of wild ends by the sea breeze, Jinesse slammed her door and shot the bar. Then, unsettled to note how the shimmery, pastel silk heightened her thin-skinned, fair colouring, she locked the bolt away in her dower chest. The crystal bowl was too delicate for the kitchen. It lay unused behind glass in her dish cupboard, its luxury displaced as diamonds tossed in burlap. Even in gloom when the candles were cold, stray light struck the cut facets and woke a vibrant, r
ainbow shimmer, too rich to belong beside vessels of commonplace clay.

  Then the gossip stormed through Merior like wildfire. In the front room of her herb shop, the Koriani enchantress still in residence received word from a young mother who stopped to collect an infusion for a convalescent child.

  'The outsider's back, and no one knows why, except to use our village for a smuggler's haven.' In no hurry to leave, the goodwife offered a half copper, and tucked away the wrapped remedy in return. She fussed at the fringe on her shawl and added, 'You heard about that black brig which stopped here in his name? Well, she carried a cargo of gold and rare riches. The cobbler's wife says the whole cache was sailed west and buried in the sands of Sanpashir.'

  When this comment raised nothing but silence, the woman tried a fresh angle. 'You know that rough woman captain and the outsider are in league. Both carry scars from past violence. Jinesse may well come to grief through her friendship. I should fear, were I in her place.'

  'I don't believe Jinesse will suffer,' Elaira said firmly. Unbound hair mantled her shoulders, dimmed to brown smoke in the shadow as she stepped past the dormer. She dropped the coin into the milk crock that served her as strongbox, then returned.

  If she knew more of the outsider's doings, she was unwilling to talk. Wide open and direct, eyes the fathom less, pale sheen of electrum stayed level and pinned on her client.

  Disturbed by that close a scrutiny, or perhaps frozen out by the silence, the mother made haste and departed. Elaira sighed and decided to brew tea to ease the starting, tight pangs of a headache. In place of relief, she felt deep unease, that intuition had served her correctly: Arithon s'Ffalenn had come back. Spared the painful indignity of chasing his shirt tails to Innish, as Morriel's orders would eventually have insisted, the enchantress shook off the unreasonable desire to throw down everything as the twins had, and run with skirts flying to the beach.