'You presume I would lose the same argument twice?' Liesse flounced from the mattress. Beyond the keep's floor-boards, scarred by hobnailed boots, an orange sunrise brightened the arrow-slit. The glare spat sullen glints off the bronze-cornered chests, and burnished the steel bosses of the duke's baldric, carelessly slung on a chair-back. 'It's not Rathain's feckless prince' she admitted, 'but the warnings delivered by three Fellowship Sorcerers that set the cold into my liver.'
'My heir should be wearing tanned buckskins in Atwood? Ath, woman! You bleed me!' Bransian levered upright, to a groan from the bed-frame, which also bore scars, where an ancestor had stabbed his knives inside of arm's reach in the head-board. 'Sevrand's an adult. Let him choose for himself.'
The duke kicked off the blankets and snatched for the grimy gambeson that had padded yesterday's chainmail. 'You would shame me ahead of the Fatemaster himself! No fighting man on these walls will stand firm, believing I planned on defeat.'
To which Liesse bent her head. Face buried amid her uncombed brown hair and the clutch of exasperated fingers, she sighed.
Bransian's bunched fists released, as he realized she was trembling. 'Wife!' he barked, sucked hollow by tenderness. One barefoot stride and he gathered her close: her tears would bring him to his knees, if not wring him wretchedly gutless. 'You should fear a few enemies?'
'No' Liesse gasped, muffled. She raised her chin from his chest, coughing back laughter. 'I should despair of the hope you could reach for clean clothes before letting the filth rot them to rags off your back!'
Yet no biting humour might stem the Alliance advance that surged in on them like flood-tide.
As the new morning brightened, the shore-side watch beacons relayed more damning reports. Alliance companies now mushroomed over the muddied acres left scorched by the reivers' torch. Hourly, more troop-laden warships hove in. Anchored hulls jammed the coves like teeth in a trap, until the expectant tension locked down, cranked as an overtaut drumhead.
* * *
Day followed day. From lookout tower, to battlement, to the eyrie vantage of the upper citadel, the sentries flashed mirrors in coded signal. Alestron watched Lysaer's grand war host assemble, until the counters that burdened Bransian's maps swallowed all of the surrounding shore-line. Dawn followed dawn, while the town hunkered down behind fast-shut gates and denied egress to outbound civilians.
'I don't understand,' Fionn Areth complained from his leaned stance between the Sea Gate's battle-scarred merlons. Above him, the massive groan of the winches raised the hoist, bearing stone-shot and slopping, filled casks. Saltwater was being stockpiled ahead, for the flammable hidings that guarded the foundations under the ramparts.
As the platform's shadow scythed over his face, the goatherd sawed on in his Araethurian twang, 'Shouldn't the duke bless every tuck-tailed coward who wishes to leave? Why hang on to their chicken-shit mouths? They're just wasting his food stores and draining his cisterns.'
'Morale,' stated Jeynsa, as bitten as forest-bred manners could frame a response.
Fionn Areth slid his gaze sideward and studied her. A tall, freckled lynx, she lounged with her chin on her fist, while the wind fluttered through her knife-cropped brown hair. Her bitten-off nails were black-rimmed with tar. That would be the remnant of yesterday's toil, a longshoreman's morning spent loading the pitch barrels sent to the Wyntok Gate.
Engrossed, the grass-lander chafed to dissect the enigma she represented. Forestborn daughter of a former high earl, she wore bladed weapons as though bred to war. Though her woman's build could not outmatch a man's bulk, the fact never humbled her manner. Jeynsa's brazen promise to summon her crown prince gave even s'Brydion aggression a frost-ridden pause. If the duke and his brothers were wont to treat her tenderly for a move that bordered on treason, their citadel's matrons, with their clinging toddlers, applauded her as a saviour.
For Fionn Areth, the fascination stayed fresh: he wondered how Arithon was going to handle the chit, if and when he chose to arrive.
Until then, the arena became verbal prodding. 'Morale, so you say?' the grass-lander mused. "Then you'd be the going expert on sieges, come from an even more back-country birthright than I?'
Jeynsa laughed. 'Rats leave sinking ships. The s'Brydion banner has never been struck.' Six hundred and fifty-three years to the day, all campaigns to rout charter rule from Alestron had been smashed at punishing cost. 'Clanblood doesn't shrink at long odds. Let the squeamish guilds bleed their wealth from this town, or pack off their wives and young children, there's too little left at stake to stem losses. Some panicked town turncoat might unlatch the back-postern, or take bribes to welcome the enemy.'
But no assault in Alestron's proud history carried the threat levelled now.
Fionn Areth had shared the look-outs' reports. He had heard the opinions of Vhandon and Talvish, and eavesdropped on grim talk in the barracks. If today's white-capped view from the Sea Gate embrasure did not show the invidious advance at the harbour mouth, the truth was not secret: their sea-bound supply line was thwarted. Kalesh and Adruin commanded the narrows. The massed counters stacked on the duke's tactical maps also stymied the citadel's access by trade-road. Just as likely, the outer gates had been barred to stop nervous deserters from joining the enemy.
The more telling point, to Fionn Areth's stark eye, was how the sorcerer known as the Spinner of Darkness would grapple the appalling scale of sheer numbers. If the Teir's'Ffalenn elected to bestir himself, and risk Jeynsa's bid for protection; the grass-lander felt qualified to weigh the question. His own reprieve, snatched from the scaffold, had not been the pitched target of three kingdoms' fanatical muster.
'Charter law would seem scarcely a boon,' he declared. 'Or why else should you lump those of us without lineage in arse-kissing terms with your foemen?'
That touched a nerve, finally. Jeynsa straightened and stared. Green as fire in opal, her glance raked him. 'Ask your royal double how my father died. Then remember. The price in bloodshed on Daon Ramon Barrens was the cost of your rescue from Jaelot's executioner.'
'I was not made party to your prince's choice,' Fionn Areth said, a piercing fact to strike wind from his victim.
But not Jeynsa Teiren's'Valerient, who backed down from no scrap: whose arms underneath her short-sleeved leather jerkin wore bruises gained sparring with Sevrand at quarterstaves. 'You dare to pass judgement on me? Or set me up for comparison?'
Fionn Areth sustained her blistering stare. 'I condemn nothing' he pronounced without shame. 'Rather, I'd ask: are you Arithon's friend or his enemy?'
That touched a nerve, also. Fanned rage chilled to ice. Jeynsa sized up the goatherd's antagonism, then dismissed his bold query, unflinching. 'You've spent too much time under Talvish's heel, in quarters with rank-and-file fighting men. They measure by nothing else but brute force, which dangerously narrows your view-point.'
'Then show me' Fionn Areth insisted.
Jeynsa snapped up his challenge and led him through the town. Not from the vantage of the inner citadel, whose lofty battlements had been raised by Paravians. Not over the chain-bridge to the middle town district, where the cast shadow of pending attack dimmed the air with stirred dust from lance drills on the practice field. Nor where the squads of sweating men laboured, refining the range of the trebuchets. Instead, Jeynsa marched him into the arched carriage-way that fronted the ducal residence.
A wagon was parked by the carved, granite steps, with their pillars of Highscarp marble. The four-in-hand team at the hub of activity wore gleaming harness, brasses studded with Alestron's bull blazon. There, Jeynsa prevailed upon Mearn's pregnant wife, and asked for the two of them to accompany her on the daily rounds shared between the ranking s'Brydion women.
'Someone must hear and respond to the people' Lady Fianzia explained to the baffled Araethurian. Her piled, blond hair was wound with strung pearls, a delicate accent to her jade dress, trimmed at the hem with white ribbon. Blunt as flint, despite the kestrel's build that seeme
d overwhelmed by her ripened belly, she tipped her chin towards the servant who loaded a stacked pile of hampers. 'Lend a hand. We'll be away, soonest.'
'You've packed bread for the needy?' Fionn Areth inquired, hefting baskets that smelled of fresh baking.
Fianzia arched her eyebrows in signal offence. 'Shame on you, goatherd! Alestron's seat rules under charter law!'
The grasslander scowled through his tumbled, black hair. When he failed to amend his insulting mistake with apology, the lady gathered up her full skirt. She declined Jeynsa's help; leaned on the armed man-servant, who assisted her gravid weight up to the driver's seat.
'Get in, young fool!' The instant her passengers clambered aboard, she took reins and whip into tiny, ringed hands and rousted the team out with tart vehemence. 'Jeynsa was right. Your presumptions are dangerous. Stuck as you are with the face of a prince, you'd better learn quick what sets us apart from the usurping mayors.'
The wagon rolled out of the carriage-way to the brisk jingle of harness bells. Past the arched gate with its charging bull finials, Fianzia steered the gleaming horses down-slope. No novice, she jockeyed between the drays that ground uphill with stockpiled supply for the warehouses. She threaded the steep, switched-back turns and showed crisp courtesy to the other drivers. Baled fodder, crated livestock and chickens, barrels of flour and beer, and sacks of hulled oats and barley vied for space with packs of shouting children. From the smithies came chests of crossbolts and arrows, and for the defence works, the reeking scraped hides, bundled up green from the stock-yard.
Few vehicles moved outbound. Fianzia's wagon seemed out of place, breasting the war-time bustle past the stone mansions and officers' homes in the merchant precinct. Her place on the whip's box commanded no deference. The ducal badge on the lead horses' bridles was scarcely imposing enough to draw notice.
Yet the way parted for her. Amid din and turmoil, through dust and smoke, acrid with the bite of quenched steel and the charcoal fumes from the armourers', she drove like a breath of spring sunshine. Irascible carters granted her precedence. The armed guards at the barbican saluted her through. By now sweated over their burnish of grooming, the horses clopped through the slatted lanes, bordered by wood-frame tenements; past the tiny, fenced yards with their pecking hens, and the shuttered sheds, where the journeymen's shacks butted into the shops of the craft quarter.
Mearn's lady reined up at length in a cramped, public courtyard, crisscrossed with string lines drying laundry. The cobbles were slicked with puddles and run-off, centred by a neighbourhood well. Hung linen snapped on the sea-breeze. The tin strips of iyat banes jangled. Children in motley peeped through potted herbs and leaned at the railings of the outdoor stairways. Women with crying babes and toddlers in tow gossiped over yoke buckets, or else pounded soiled clothes in hooped tubs.
No citizen was ill-fed. The matrons' stout arms gleamed with bracelets. Some wore gemstone beads and enamel, and others, fine rings of wrought wire. The garments they scrubbed for their households were plain: stout broadcloth biased with wool, but not ragged. As Fianzia invited, the hampers were shared, food and wine passed with cheerful camaraderie.
While Fionn Areth and Jeynsa did a groom's work, and steadied the draught team's bridles, Fianzia sat down on the lowered tail-board. Patient, she listened to whatever subject the women who gathered might broach. She answered their questions, no matter how difficult, making no effort to hide that the siege would draw Lysaer's might to attempt their destruction. Duke Bransian had set aside barracks space. All families were invited to shelter within the Paravian-built walls of the upper citadel. Folk need do no more than submit their names to be assigned to a billet.
Several voices protested.
'We can't leave our craft shop!'
'My husband's smithy is all of our livelihood!'
Fianzia set down her wine goblet. 'Whoever decides not to evacuate won't be left abandoned without due protection.' She qualified through the expectant silence, as molasses sweets quieted the fretful children, and the pearl cincture just unwound from her hair was dangled to distract a wailing infant. 'No less than the duke's immediate family are entrusted to shoulder your safety.'
While the baby burbled and sucked on the pearls, Mearn's lady backed up her assertion: besides Parrien's fleet, harrying the coast with the ferocity of a wolf pack, Sevrand commanded the garrison at the Sea Gate, and the sentinel turrets flanking the harbour mouth. Field divisions under Keldmar secured the outlying farm-steads for the crofters, who cured the winter's meat in the smokehouses and gathered the last cutting of hay.
Fianzia asked Fionn Areth to verify fact: that the captains at large stood with the front ranks, backing Bransian's staunchest veterans. Through Talvish, the grasslander knew the details of Vhandon's latest strike forays. He was urged to describe the rings of set traps, engineered to bloody the enemy advance.
Since clan custom required a father's presence at birth, Mearn was the brother kept closest. 'My husband has charge of the outermost walls.' A steady hand laid on her swollen stomach, Fianzia finished her reassurances.
'Why doesn't she mention the trebuchets, or the placement of the new ballista?' Fionn Areth demanded of Jeynsa at a spiked whisper.
'Because every citizen born under s'Brydion rule has studied the engines of war. Didn't you notice the crews at their drill? They're craftsfolk.' Jeynsa swiped off the flies that bothered the harness horse under her charge, then added, 'Defence of these homes will not be left to chance. Every one of these wives knows her archery. The young here learn sword-play as school-children.'
Yet arrows and stone-shot and skilled handling of weapons could not stop an avatar wielding raw light.
Fionn Areth cringed, gut-sick to recall the legitimate claims: accounts sworn by townsmen elsewhere, that insisted clan mothers in the wilds of Deshir raised their children to wage bloody war. Daring, impatient, he pressed for the truth, if only to silence his conscience. 'If Tal Quorin's slaughter was not a mistake, s'Ilessid justice will make a clean end to the lie that puts steel in the hands of the innocent.'
Jeynsa did not strike him. She stared him down, until the unquiet shadow that darkened her eyes hackled him to clamped teeth.
Then she said, 'I'd have you witness the head-hunters' league at their work. Before being spread-eagled for rapine, then butchered with my scalp cut as trophy fringe on a saddle-cloth, I will teach my daughters to use a sharp knife. Or my sons, that your false avatar's mercy would see cuffed in irons and branded for slavery.'
'Only the criminal condemned row the galleys,' Fionn Areth retorted. 'Do you clansfolk not also slaughter for lies? How many of these people have been told they'll raise arms for a turncoat spy's act of treason?'
Jeynsa's smile was savage. 'Listen and learn.'
For a ruddy laundress now broached the issue headlong. 'Has anyone in Alestron borne recent witness to the s'Ilessid's rogue powers of Light?'
'Since Vastmark? Mearn has, when he served the duke's wiles as ambassador sent to Avenor.' Fianzia delivered the harsh assessment, unflinching. 'He would urge you, each one, to value your lives before your possessions.'
The impact of her quiet statement turned heads, that her husband was not stationed above the Mathiell Gate, beyond risk of the front line of fire. As nothing else could, the poise of Mearn's lady defined the steely integrity upholding the s'Brydion defence.
Tensioned quiet remained, torn by a wail as an aunt reached to rescue the pearls from the infant, who stuffed the whole string in his drooling mouth. No untouched observer, the lady tousled the babe's curls, then graciously left him the gift of her mangled jewellery. 'Keep your nephew and all of your kinsfolk safe' she said, and smiled, and retired to the driver's seat on the wagon. 'As you will, give your names to the quartermaster at the gatehouse garrison.'
'Never! Not while your husband's at risk,' the smith's raw-boned relative declared. 'Should our courage be any less than your own?'
Mearn's lady inclined her head. She gath
ered the reins of the team in firm hands, while her oddly rankled young escort clambered aboard to ride on.
Stop after stop, Fianzia heard questions and spoke, and consoled countless fretful children. Her rounds did not finish until the last hamper was emptied. By then, the late shadows bled the warmth and colour out of the teeming streets.
The wagon team climbed uphill towards home. Fionn Areth and Jeynsa sat elbow to elbow on the dropped tail-board, backs nestled against the stacked basketry, while the flies buzzed over the lees in the wine jugs. Barking dogs, the screams of scavenging gulls, and the horn-call that foreran the watch change carried through the grind of the wheels. Day fled, while the shingle roofs dropped away in stepped tiers to the patchwork of fields, far beneath.
Against the cries of a street vendor hawking two penny charms for young lovers, the goatherd laced into contention again. 'You don't believe that your crown prince is blameless.'
'Did you see nothing in front of your eyes?' Jeynsa shoved erect, cold fire in her jade eyes. 'Do you think those families don't deserve to survive? Or that the indulgence of one man's sensibilities should be gratified at their expense? Why not ask Fianzia what kind of legacy she would leave to her unborn child? Life's owed, for a life.'
Certainly, there, history spoke in support: the s'Brydion withdrawal from Lysaer's campaign had salvaged the Master of Shadow's entrenched fight in Vastmark. Because of Mearn's warning, rushed out of Avenor, Tysan's clansmen had sent the timely message that enabled Dakar to unmask the Koriani snare laid to trap Arithon at Riverton.
'I don't call my liege to account for the sake of position, or lineage,' said Jeynsa s'Valerient with unblinking candour. 'I came because I believe in defending the lives of civilians. One might ask, Fionn Areth: what besides rancour draws you?'
'Truth,' the mulish Araethurian insisted. 'Since I lost a misplayed challenge at arms, I was promised the chance to determine whether your prince is a criminal killer. He's already been condemned, by Alliance decree.' Passion flamed, in blind disregard. 'At heart, do you know? Is your Teir's'Ffalenn the minion of evil declared by Lysaer as Spinner of Darkness?'