The Ships of Merior (55 page)

If the pretty dark daughters standing guard upon the doorway showed unease at his balky character, Talith’s fresh poise only heightened under challenge. ‘I am no ornament to be left waiting on a shelf.’ She stood, jerked open a drawer, and plucked out the clean holland shirt
scarcely wrinkled from its storage in a saddle pack. You have news of Arithon s’Ffalenn. That will mean war. I don’t intend to sit here while you rouse my betrothed to muster his armies and quarter the continent to fight him.’ A back-step carried her to the casement. She flicked the catch, pressed open the leaded panes, and tossed the shirt upward onto the snow-covered slates of the dormer peak.

Thin through cold air, a whistle spiralled up from the sentry who stood duty on the wall walk.

‘You bloodsucking minx!’ Pesquil snapped soapy fingers to the sides of the tub, while the water sucked and splashed, and the draught raked his leathered skin to gooseflesh.

Talith smiled. She would toss out his clothes, and be damned to his dignity. His scars would be the talk of every barracks in Erdane, as well as the boudoirs of the ladies.

There were limits. ‘I don’t know where the Master of Shadow is laired up. But he’s disrupted the peace and caused havoc in one city, and killed seven men in another through an explosion of fire and sorcery. His movement has been traced southward, along the eastern coastline.’ Pesquil’s lips quirked like wire in his bristle of black beard. Eyes as flat as marsh mud glared upward at Talith, who weighed options as she might select a ballgown, a pair of hose and breeches in each hand.

‘Lady,’ Pesquil snapped, ‘that’s hardly enough to set armies marching, and it happens to be the sum of my news.’

‘You come personally as courier,’ Talith contradicted. The hose fluttered in the swirl of the wind, then snapped up to join the shirt in its icy eyrie. The girls smothered giggles; Talith inspected the trousers for inspiration, hooked the breech points in playful fingers, and began to unlace them, strand for strand. No pity in her, Pesquil judged, that she would neglect the least
detail and fail to fling the towels, and even the benighted sheets off the bed.

‘Why?’ Talith pressured.

‘Because your fussy pack of Etarran dignitaries was too soft for a winter passage.’ Fuming through risen veils of steam, Pesquil gave a barked, ruthless laugh. ‘By myself, I’ll make sure the message gets through without barbarian interference. Prince Lysaer will receive this news before spring. I leave on the morrow, and if the Great West Road through Tornir Peaks is closed due to storms, I’ll fare on by way of Teal’s Gap.’

‘That’s a fool’s errand!’ broke in the mayor’s older daughter, her hands clenched white on the door key. She darted a worried glance at Talith. ‘Lady, the pass this madman proposes to cross lies in the Sorcerers’ Preserve.’

Every child in the westlands knew tales of that place, where fire-breathing creatures once the scourge of past ages flew on pinioned wings sixty spans long. Whenever the wards at its boundaries weakened or failed, caravan drovers brought back nightmare accounts of draught stock slaughtered wholesale, or charred in their traces to bones and papered carbon.

‘If the Khadrim don’t flame you to a cinder, or tear you limb from limb with their jaws, there are hot springs, and mud pots, and lava wells, and no guide to choose a safe trail.’ The girl cautioned, ‘Better to stay neglected here in Erdane than to find yourself boiled alive.’

‘Wise advice,’ Pesquil said, eyes slitted. ‘If you think my headhunters will serve as your escort to Avenor, Lady Talith, I’ll skid my bare arse over every roof tree in this city just to prove you wrong.’

‘You will take me,’ Talith said. The breeches hooked on her fingertips fluttered out the window, snagged on a flagstaff above the rampart, and streamed, displaying frayed seams to the wind. Etarran to her devious core, she spared not a glance for her nervous accomplices.
Pesquil confronted her tawny magnificence, the water that embraced his hips chill enough to dampen the dregs of any man’s ardour, and the soap squeezed 10 pulp in his fists. ‘I won’t.’

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 lucked 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 Erdane, 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 mud-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.’