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, rainbow 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 good wife 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.
Temptation could mount to an insidious ache, to invent some excuse to call on Mistress Jinesse and ask if she had seen h
im, or talked, or knew how he had weathered the winter cooped up in the incense-soaked taverns of the southcoast.
An interval later, slouched on one elbow at her work table surrounded by stubs of chalk, snipped lengths of brown string, and twists of figured tin laid out to fashion sigils to repel iyats, Elaira stirred from troubled thought. She rubbed long-boned fingers at her temples, startled by the diced slant of sunlight through the casement; her hands had lain idle through the morning. In the sandy yard outside her window, the goat-bells had stilled, each animal tucked on folded knees under the patched shade of the scrub thorn.
Elaira grasped her oak stylus and selected a ribbon of metal. Resolute in concentration, she embossed the unquiet ciphers that fashioned a spell of go-hither into the wafer thin alloy. Arithon s’Ffalenn had returned to Merior. If he planned to stay, hearsay would inform her soon enough.
But the impact of the Shadow Master’s intentions outpaced even the villagers’ loose talk. Black Drake sheared into port by sundown. Hard in her wake came three merchant galleys crammed to their load lines with lumber from the Telzen mills. The fleet had brought its own lightermen and stevedores. The next day Merior’s cramped quay seethed like a kicked ants’ nest with oared boats, while cargoes of imported planking were offloaded and set down in stacks on the sandspit beyond the village. The arthritic old sailors left the boarding house porch to observe, and even the most clouded eye among them could not mistake seasoned oak; the sawn boards of spruce and fragrant cedar; the beech; the rare locust; the fine teak which rimmed the raked crests of the dunes like buttresses.
Delivered to the beaches above Merior to the last beam and billet came the marrow to fashion blue-water ships.
Speculative gossip led to spirited wagers, met by cheers from the winners when yet another galley bearing tools hove in from Southshire. Feylind took interest in Black Drake, then threw a swaggering tantrum when balked in her desire to have a red shirt like Captain Dhirken’s. The trading sloop that used the Scimlade beaches for her yearly careening haled into port out of season. She delivered a master shipwright and seventeen journeyman craftsmen.
Onto the strand of Merior, seemingly overnight, came the sinew and skilled labour to begin the manufacture of hundred-ton keels. As suddenly, the load-bearing fleet raised anchor. To the beat of the drum and a white thrash of oars, or the crack and belly of filled canvas, the vessels made way and returned to their customary trade routes. Gusts from the north bore the tang of fresh timbers; then the rattling hail of hammer, saw and chisel, as crude shacks sprang up to house the influx of outsiders.
Merior’s hardy villagers met over beer in jammed parlours, and lashed up a storm of troubled talk.
In plain words, Arithon told any who asked of his plans. He would build ten brigantines, dismantle his craftyard, and leave Merior unchanged by his tenancy.
Certainly his choice of location bore out the spirit of his promise. ‘Not to fret,’ said the gouty old fisherman who diced with his cronies beside the boarding house steps. ‘Or why should yon outsider lay the bedlogs for his ways on the Scimlade sandspit? First heavy blow from the east, and Ath’s seas’ll scour his works away. Not being a landgrubbing fool, that’s his stamp o’ surety his roots aren’t for keeping.’
‘He’s treated fair with Jinesse,’ the wife who poured lager chimed in. ‘Nobody’s cheated. And he’s said, for the noise and the bother, he’d fix any lugger’s broken tackle and take no fee like a neighbour.’
But as the first timbers were sunk and fared smooth, men with comely young daughters found their worries less easily settled. The craftsmen who bunked in their ramshackle cabins earned silver with no place to spend it. Merior boasted no ready tavern or house of entertainment, as Dakar had gained bruises to determine. Approached in the sapphire twilight by a knot of fishermen off the luggers, Arithon heard through their complaint and made immediate contingency.
His warning was posted by dark, that any worker who caused trouble would be turned off without hearing; then that problem averted long before it arose, a boat was hired to bear the craftsmen in shifts for leavetime downcoast in Shaddorn.
Throughout the days of upheaval, the villagers’ wild conjecture, the disorders of change adroitly smoothed over, Elaira kept to her shop. She cast no patterns of divination to mark the activity of the prince she had come to Merior for the unparalleled cold purpose of binding with ties of affection. Progress at the yard was on everyone’s lips, through the week as the whipsaw pit was fashioned. Under Arithon’s swarm of labourers, pole buildings for the joiner’s shop, loft, and steam shed were raised and roofed. Summer winds off the ocean swept inland and raked up buttresses of thunderheads to lash squalls across Sickle Bay; in contrast, the peninsula’s weather inclined to stay dry. The shakes for the walls were left stacked aside, while through the close, humid heat of afternoons, over the grumble of distant thunder, the first keel for an eighty foot brigantine was laid between stem and stem post. Beset from sunrise to dark by the feverish clangour of hammers as the frames were set up and dubbed fair, Elaira employed no feminine artifice.
If the mores of the Koriani Order commanded her to offer herself as bait, for stubborn pride she would do no less and no more than maintain an obligatory residence. The village was too small, too close. If Arithon s’Ffalenn could avoid her throughout the two years ordained to build his fleet, his effort of itself framed a statement.
In the cool airs each dawn, she arose and lit her brazier to brew the day’s decoctions and tisanes. In the wind-torn late afternoons, while storms flared and cracked across the bay, she walked the dunes to collect seaweed to distil into tincture of iodine. The weather might settle to its sultry summer pattern, but the days failed to pass unremarked. Teased by awareness of Arithon’s presence, her thoughts stayed hooked to distraction, as though the boundaries of controlled quiet and trance were made unruly and permeable. The disciplined stillness required for her arts gave no surcease, but chafed and pressured her innermost nature to reclaim its desired alignment.
The small mage craft Elaira worked through her crystal, by which she enhanced the efficacy of her remedies, stroked her nerves to unwanted sensitivity until, on the wings of slipped thought, she could sense even Arithon’s footfalls through the shared, sandy ground of Scimlade Tip.
Frustrated, irritable, she heaved a gusty sigh and battled her reluctance to face another morning fixing simples. Amid her bundles of dried goldenrod, tansy, and the skinned stems of aloe selected to mix a paste for lacerations, she cast a jaundiced glance over stoppered glass bottles in sorry need of her attention; her depleted stores of comfrey, gentian, and mint, perpetually in demand for babes who suffered from colic. A coil of hair slithered down her bare forearm, glinted with auburn like copper chipped through dark rust. She snapped the offending lock over her shoulder, and noticed the time lost to daydreams.
Brisk in self-reproach, Elaira rummaged behind her still for the poultice pot, dipped water from her pail, and chained it from the tripod to boil. The open doorway at her back let in the sea-breeze, and the inventive notes of mocking birds who carolled to mark their spring nests. Cats from the fishmarket strolled in at will to rub through her ankles or sprawl in silken languor at her feet.
She resisted the temptation to rise and serve them the left-over cod from her breakfast. Ruled by iron will and the Koriani creed to ease what she could of mortal suffering, she murmured the litany to focus her innermind, and stopped, mid-phrase, as the light changed. A mild chill crossed her spine. Subtle as a wisp of cirrus might dampen the fall of a sun mote, the cool sensation between her shoulderblades resolved to clear warning that a presence observed her from the doorway.
Thrilled through by a ridiculous rush of joy, she broke off, considered; then bit her lip, quelled her smile, and turned around.
Arithon s’Ffalenn leaned like a waif against her lintel.
Restrained by the nuance of mages, he would not cross her threshold without an express invitation, though in sun-faded breeche
s, laced at the calf, and no shoes, he looked common as a journeyman carpenter. His shirt was full-sleeved and open. Ringless, loose hands were tucked in folded arms, and hair straight and glossy as a crow’s spread primaries fanned the tanned wedge of his brow. His lips stayed chiselled and serious, an odd contradiction to the strung, wary poise behind his candour.
Just barely, Elaira quashed her impulse to speak first. Her eyes, pale slate, awaited his pleasure in bland inquiry.
Arithon averted his glance, tapped a finger too fine-jointed for a labourer’s against his elbow, then smiled and gave back the ground he had stolen through surprise. ‘The shipyard’s master has learned how I like things done. Since the works can be left to themselves for the morning, I thought I might call.’
The pot over the brazier burbled to a boil. In pretence of seeming busy, Elaira bent to shorten its chain, then reached for the mint and the stone-bladed knife she preferred over steel for cutting herbs. In careful, measured increments she trimmed and crumbled the leaves on a clean square of linen. ‘You don’t suffer from contusions or colic? That’s ill timing.’
She felt his attention flick over her, sharpened. Before his study could read her, she rocked him off-balance again. ‘Come in, or go, or say what you want. I’m not going to fly out of the window.’
He laughed, but stepped no closer. ‘You know herbals and remedies. I’d a mind to ask if you’d teach me.’
Jarred by his unexpected request, Elaira dropped her knife with a clatter. The tip struck an earthenware crock and snicked off a chip of enamel. ‘Why?’ she said, then instantly regretted it as she sensed through his fractional recoil an answer too painfully obvious.
Arithon s’Ffalenn had been mage-trained. The strictures of his discipline would insist on fair balance: spell paired with counter-ward; any application of force, no matter how small, matched in its kind by restraint. Hounded by a curse that might demand bloodshed on a field of unbridled violence, straight principle would drive him to seek a surgeon’s knowledge to bind wounds and set bones and heal.