TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

  A prince who was also Athera's Masterbard would not be given to slipshod use of language.

  Eldir tugged off his royal fillet with a curse. His hair stuck up in hanks and his temper was ruffled, but the other loose end was what rankled. Where the Master of Shadow was concerned, any implication of trouble posed a peril too dire to ignore. Stray elements of chance amidst a tangle of diplomacy induced by the Mist-wraith's curse offered too grave a potential for disaster. In his tousled shirt and a tunic still redolent of horse, against the plaintive, hobbled protests of his valet, the King of Havish thrust aside propriety. He marched his suspicions up three breathless flights of stairs to cast into the laps of the Fellowship Sorcerers.

  Asandir answered his knock. Brisk, imperious, and impeccable in his court dress, he heard Eldir through in a bottled impatience that woke baleful light in his eyes. 'You were right to bring this to me.'

  To Kharadmon, invisible, he demanded, 'Find Arithon. We'll have his explanation.' Then, in an irony sheared to suspicion, he spun in the doorway and glared at Sethvir, who perched on the window seat with one of the stable kittens batting at loose threads on his cuff. 'You knew about this?'

  Through the uncanny, stabbing chill as Kharadmon drifted by, Eldir saw Althain's Warden give an abstracted blink. 'The ransom?' he said presently. His hands stroked the kitten, which retracted tiny claws and yawned. Then insane glee bent the Sorcerer's mouth, half-masked in the bristles of his beard. 'You don't know? The gold has been stolen, of course.'

  'What!' Eldir advanced into the sun-drenched tower chamber, bristling with royal antagonism. 'Do you mean to say while I've been running fool's circles to keep your Teir s'Ffalenn from making mincemeat of my courtiers, he has raided an armada and made off with five hundred thousand coin weight in gold!'

  'Did I mention any name?' But dissembling was wasted; Eldir only glowered until Sethvir gave way with a shrug. 'That's the part of his personality that makes us all feel like we've been kissing coiled vipers for a penny bet.' On the far side of a table cluttered with books, across the candles that had dribbled the faces of the wrought-silver nymphs who upheld them, he unfolded into a stretch, mild as milk before the high king's outrage. 'You can rein in your fuming and thank your creator for the favour of Arithon's resourcefulness. Else our peril before the Mistwraith would be redoubled. There's no space left for diplomacy. Only force can prevail against the war host that's gathered in Shand.'

  'His Grace of Rathain gave his oath to keep the peace,' Eldir persisted, unmoved. 'Does your Fellowship condone his act of thievery?'

  'Certainly not.' Asandir was unequivocal. 'If Arithon's accounting fails to satisfy, the issue will be taken to trial under Havish's royal justice.'

  Out of pity for the redoubled apprehension behind Eldir's straight stance, Sethvir set the kitten on the floor, pulled out a cushioned chair, and swept the seat free of papers. 'Sit,' he urged gently. 'Let the miscreant answer for his own acts.'

  A step echoed up the turnpike stair. Long before it arrived, the postern swung open to admit the icy, poured draught that heralded Kharadmon. Arithon followed, damp from his bath, and wearing little but trunk hose and a shirt still half-unlaced. A pace inside the doorway he stopped. His sharp glance swept the assembled Sorcerers, then Havish's king, united in postures of annoyance.

  His dark brows flicked up, but not in surprise. 'You've heard the ransom was waylaid,' he surmised without pretence of apology.

  'Dharkaron avenge!' Asandir exclaimed. He snatched a chair for himself. 'You had better have your reasons, prince, for no one of us will spare you from punishment.'

  'My royal oath,' Arithon gave back in rapid-fire reply. 'The one I swore in blood at Athir that avowed I would do anything in my power to survive.'

  Eldir, amazed, saw Asandir of the Fellowship succumb to a wine-deep flush. The words he forced out were beaten metal. 'Go on.'

  Under that scouring scrutiny, Arithon broke into sweat; but never from nerves. He sucked in a vexed breath. 'The gold was to be surrendered into your hands as soon as may be, though not to ransom the lady. I sought the diversion-' He broke off, shook his head, then resumed in quick anguish, 'Ath show me mercy, I needed a delaying tactic.' Green eyes held steady under interrogating glares as the last of his appeal was flung in desperation toward the one Sorcerer who might be disposed to listen. 'If you've looked in on Vastmark, you'll know why,' he told Sethvir. 'Put baldly, I had to buy time.'

  Althain's Warden gave back an arch censure that cracked before a glimmer of interest. 'You've bearded the lion in a way you can't be implicated?'

  Arithon inclined his head in careful respect to Eldir of Havish. 'When the ploy is discovered in public, that will be for the king's grace to decide.'

  'Well,' said Sethvir, nonplussed. 'The law's well and good, but you'd better have made a clean job of this. A term of incarceration for grand theft would scarcely work with Lysaer's war host of a size to level any stronghold to see you dead.'

  'I pay my debts,' Arithon said, clipped. 'The Royal Justiciar of Havish and his sovereign can be the judge of my case.' He bowed to Eldir, spun on his heel, and left, while the strapped oaken door thudded home in its frame with force enough to crack piaster.

  'Torbrand's temper!' Sethvir shook his head, bemused to commiserate despite Asandir's thunderous affront. 'He has a way, Rathain's prince, of letting us all know what his given oath at Athir cost his dignity.'

  'S'Ffalenn dignity be damned,' Kharadmon rapped out from his unseen place by the casement. 'Whatever the cost, there's too strong a chance that blood pledge may become all we have against threat of Athera's total ruin.'

  * * *

  On the eve of midsummer, the armada sent from Tysan made port to a blare of trumpets and a flying, wind-snapped panoply of banners and sapphire pennons. They docked at the quayside, surrounded in the swoop and dive of swifts, and white gulls chased by the noise from their nests in the cliff caves. Bristling with weapons and smartly turned men-at-arms, enfolded amid her escort of warships, the royal galley seemed unmolested. No officer came ashore crying tales of piracy on the high seas.

  Mistrustful despite the atmosphere of pomp and decorum, Luhaine went to investigate. He brought the incredulous bad news. 'Lord Commander Diegan doesn't know, nor is any other officer on board aware. But the strongboxes on the flagship hold no coin. They contain soggy bags of ballast sand. The secret can't be kept. Once the lightermen lift the first coffer ashore, they're going to notice something wrong.'

  King Eldir took charge before the scandal broke, and in venomous ill temper, asked his valet to regale him in his robes of state. He dispatched his seneschal to the harbour with forms of requisition. Lysaer's senior officers were summoned from their vessels for a mandatory royal audience.

  The close council took place in the small, panelled study where the harbourmaster filed his accounts. The room smelled of dried ink and salt-musty carpets. Its paned casements were curtained in green gloom from the grape arbours left to run riot without. Jackdaws nested in the cornices. The sleepy twitter of their fledglings chirped through the creaking scrape of chairs as men in clothing too hot for the season shifted their weight in impatience.

  King Eldir presided, long-suffering in resignation as a muzzled mastiff. His mood was familiar to his justiciar and his chancellor from his first years of crown rule, when he had stood down his council and his crabbed city mayors as a lad just barely eighteen. 'You will say if anything unusual happened on your trip down my coastline.'

  The ranking captain of the armada blinked, his narrow head tipped like a fishing heron. 'Your Grace, nothing at all untoward -' His hesitation rocked the silence like a hiccough. 'Except for one disabled fishing smack. She was left adrift, flying distress flags. We boarded and took her in tow, since her crew had abandoned ship. The hull was sound enough, though her rigging had suffered damage from a squall. We sold her to the island villagers south of Torwent.'

  'How long did you drag her on a cable?' asked the justiciar in his
grainy bass.

  'Three days,' came the puzzled answer. 'She was a vessel of no account.' The galleyman stroked his beard, careful to remember in detail. 'Twenty-six coin weight was all she was worth. Dharkaron's Horses, her planks were half-sprung. We were grateful enough to be rid of her. If her owners lodge complaint, our salvage was fair. We've witnesses will swear she was abandoned.'

  'No one questions your integrity,' Eldir assured. He arose, solid in his royal trappings, and rankled enough to snap as he called for Arithon s'Ffalenn to present himself.

  Lightly made as fine steel before a battle-axe, the Master of Shadow made his bow. When questioned on the subject of fishing smacks, he produced two legitimate bills of sale. The first was scrawled across with the armada captain's signature and doucely sealed under Tysan's official blazon; the second one, of folded, cheap paper, showed the plain capitals of a country scribe.

  'The villagers made a profit,' Arithon finished off. 'For myself, I only bought her for the ballast under her bilges.'

  Irony within irony played like sunlight through clouds behind his masking grave smile as the justiciar perused the ribboned documents and noticed: the fishing smack's name was Royal freedom.

  The boat herself could not be presented for inspection. 'An accident with a lamp,' Arithon said with a true ring of regret. 'She burned at her mooring the day after she was purchased.'

  If Sethvir knew aught of the false planking which must have concealed a thieving crew; whether his earth-linked senses had seen furtive moves at the dark of the moon when men must have crept hand over hand up the fishing smack's cable, to steal into the galley's hold to exchange the gold in the strongboxes for their ballast sand, he proved to be immersed in one of his vacuous dazes. No matter who addressed him on the subject, he stayed patently deaf under questioning.

  Signal

  While the theft of Princess Talith's ransom set sorcerers and officials seething like stirred ants at Ostermere, and the bonfires in celebration of the solstice blazed for masked dancers across the continent, a much smaller snag in the world's affairs sat huddled beside a bed of embers twelve leagues downcoast from Shand's lesser trade city of Ithish.

  Feylind had never known such low spirits in all her young life. She sat with her chin cupped in dirty palms, unresponsive to her mother's pleas for reason, and well practised at glaring when Tharrick, who had betrayed her, spoke in rebuke for her rudeness. The summer rasp of crickets and the thrummed wings of nighthawks skimming over the thickets were of more interest than adult persuasion. No one alive could force her to believe the sea she was leaving was no loss.

  Her three attempts to steal away by night met with failure, even the last, when Fiark abetted her by groaning through a theatrical display of stomach cramps. Always Tharrick tracked her down and dragged her back. By now, the little sloop with Arithon's second mate would have sailed too far downcoast to overtake. Feylind brooded. She reviled her fate in inventive, filthy language. Most sorely, she wished she shared her brother's nasty talent for throwing rocks. Just now Tharrick's leather-clad backside posed a tempting target, while he stooped to clean the coneys he had snared for their supper.

  Darkness stole over the stepped shoulders of shale where the dwindled spine of the Kelhorns gave way to low pine scrub. The vetch-tangled meadows caught between lay flecked in seasonal white asters. Posies of wildflowers were not Feylind's passion. She watched the stars kindle the arch of the zenith, heartsore as she named off the ones she had learned for navigation.

  The sliver of new moon reminded her of Dhirken's bright cutlass. Fingers locked around her skinned knees, Feylind longed to steal the curved knife Tharrick used for dressing game, then pretend it was a sword like the captain's.

  Fiark ached for his twin's unhappiness; his long, grave look spoke more than words. While Jinesse busied herself cutting herbs for the stewpot, he leaned into her side and whispered, 'If Mother binds you to that weaver as apprentice, I'll help you slip off to sea afterward.'

  'I heard that,' Jinesse snapped. 'Trade galleys don't take girls into service. Their backs are too weak for the oar.'

  'Galleys!' Feylind spat. 'I'm not such a simpleton. Sail is where the future lies.' Small use to argue how deep-water keels would offer faster, safer transport when coupled with new knowledge of navigation. Her mother was not minded to listen.

  Stung afresh for the reversal that had torn away her dreams, the girl blew a strand of fair hair from her lips and raised her voice in loud song. The chanty she chose was salty and lewd, learned at the dockside in Southshire while the Khetienn had rolled mastless at her anchorage.

  Jinesse tossed wild onions in the stewpot, her lips a pursed ridge of determination. 'Feylind, be still.'

  But she did not insist. Worn down from contending with her daughter's wayward spirit, she cast a shamed glance toward Tharrick. Feylind saw, and sang louder, clever enough to guess the appeal for stronger discipline would rankle the former guardsman's sensibilities.

  'Such caterwauling will just make you sore in the throat,' Tharrick chided, his heart in sympathy with her. 'If it makes you feel better, keep on till you're hoarse. You'll only wear yourself out.'

  Jinesse hunched her shoulders in tormented unhappiness and stirred the thin gruel of meal with a peeled stick while her daughter sang seventeen exhaustively long ballads. No one gave a thought that the racket might come to draw notice.

  Supper was a cheerless affair. Through much of the night, Feylind lay sleepless and weeping. When dawn came, Tharrick commented that three days more would see them through the downs to the trade road. The girl overheard, stole her chance, and tried to bolt again.

  The chit could dodge like a hare through the pine brakes. Engrossed in headlong pursuit through the scrub, ducking through deer trails and skinning under branches, Tharrick laboured against the slap of green branches. He swore and gained a mouthful of needles. His bow snagged a bough and nearly jerked him off his feet. In heated annoyance, he discarded it, then the quiver of arrows which jounced and clattered against his thigh.

  The most damnable aspect of this morning's chase was the pitiful truth that he had no choice but to catch the girl. A hundred and fifty leagues of deserted coastline distanced her from Arithon's outpost in the Cascains. No child could survive such a journey alone. Even if she could find an adult guide to assist her, the encampment on those shores was not permanent. By now, very likely, the site lay abandoned. Too many galleys flying enemy colours threaded in search through the islets. Arithon s'Ffalenn was never such a fool as to set roots in one location for too long.

  Tharrick crashed down a rocky gully and followed its winding bed to a draw. Sticks snapped ahead, a whorled thrash of grasses marked Feylind's panting progress through the clearing. He called her name.

  An insolent whistle floated back. He recognized the piercing trill of notes for the call that Arithon had taught the twins on the eve of his departure.

  'See sense, by Ath's mercy!' Tharrick tripped over an edge of shale, just escaped a turned ankle, then ripped his palm like blistering vengeance on a thorn branch as he floundered to recoup his balance. 'Girl, will you listen? There's nothing in these wilds to win your way back to Prince Arithon.'

  'Is there not?' cried a voice in rebuttal.

  Tharrick snatched back his bleeding hand and cast a startled glance ahead. Several archers in stained buckskins stood foursquare in his path. Their bows held steel broadheads nocked and ready to draw, and their expressions were inimical as death.

  Wise enough to know when he was beaten, Tharrick raised his arms from his sides and uttered the rudest phrases he knew from his years in the mercenaries' barracks. When he ran out of breath, he swore fresh oaths at Feylind, then glared in black chagrin at his captors. 'You're tribesfolk?'

  'Sheepherders?' A grey-haired man returned a sharp laugh. 'Never. We're Erlien's liegemen. Yon whistle's a clan signal. We take it the girl is discontent with your company?'

  Feylind crawled out of a brush brake, green twig
s caught in the sailor's braid that tumbled half-undone down her back. 'They want to drag me off to a weaver in Shaddorn. But I would rather learn the sea, under Arithon.'

  The elder scout gave her an uncle's stern scrutiny. 'He'll have taught you that whistle himself, then?'

  Feylind nodded. She tipped a grin in apology to Tharrick, still pinned under threat from the archers. The angle of her chin, the set lift of her jaw, and the gleam in her eyes as she seized her moment to claim her due destiny showed through her unfinished, child's form like blued steel.

  She would make a formidable person, Tharrick saw. No weaver's wool-musty shop could ever contain her in safe bindings of yarn and soft thread.

  He needed no threats from armed clansmen to accept the final outcome, that the widow must be made to see reason, to untie the apron strings and let this twin go. 'Take her,' he said to the scouts. 'See her safely to his Grace of Rathain.' Then, to Feylind, man to woman, he added, 'Girl, sail the seas with my blessing.'

  The smile that lit her fair face became worth all the world, even if it broke her mother's heart.

  Tharrick shut his eyes against a desperate swell of emotion. When next he looked the draw was empty, sun dappled and serene, except for the squall of a jay. He raked back his damp cuffs, twitched a bristle of evergreen from his shirt laces, then retraced his steps to reclaim his dropped bow and quiver.

  Then he looked ahead and discovered in complaisance that the future was going to be simple after all.

  War was a rotten, grinding misery of a life. The brothers s'Brydion and the Master of Shadow in their separate ways had weaned out his taste for professional violence. Tharrick's muddled wants resolved then and there.

  He and Fiark would take the road to Innish. The factor sympathetic to Arithon was bound to need a stout hand to guard the gates of his warehouses. For Jinesse, a whole man could give a shoulder for her tears. Though it took him all the days he had left to live, Tharrick vowed he would rebuild her broken home, and her hearth, and her misplaced contentment.