The Ships of Merior (63 page)

As he knelt in clean earth, his hands cupped beneath
the tiny, starred bell of a nightshade’s flower, Elaira stole the moment for herself, to align the surface traits of the living man with the aura pattern revealed by her First Senior. The oddity struck her, that an uncharacteristic diffidence flawed his bearing as he bent a queerly desperate intensity over the plant under study.

A scarcely visible tremor flawed his touch, before he curled his fingers shut and knuckled his fist against his forehead.

Wary of a half-glimpsed gap in his defences, Elaira froze where she stood. Something had upset his mage-sight. Warned by deep instinct that incautious words would drive him to protect himself through temper, she scarcely dared to breathe.

The stricken depth of her silence translated through to him anyway.

After a second, Arithon glanced up at her, his gaze something more than shadowed, and his black hair whorled against his damp skin by the anguished pressure of his fingers. ‘You know, don’t you,’ he accused in blunt defence.

Elaira lowered her basket to the ground. With the mild, slow moves a bee-keeper might use to steal honey from a smoked hive, she settled in the meadow beside him and arranged her mud-splashed skirt around her ankles. A killdeer ran piping to draw notice from its nest, while high overhead, a black vulture scribed spiralling circles.

‘I’ve guessed something’s wrong,’ she admitted at length. ‘Common nightshade is a poison and a narcotic. Used for healing, the extract can act on the eyes, and the heart, or ease a child with the colic. But it has no property to induce prying that I was ever aware of.’

The tiniest twitch of a smile turned his lips. ‘Subtle lady,’ he said, but chose not to share whatever pain had grazed so near the surface. The elbow she used to prop her shoulder rested scant inches from his thigh. As always, he made no move in avoidance; but as scrupulously, he also never touched. Even by chance, over the
roughest of trails, he maintained a meticulous distance.

To pressure that barrier as Jinesse had done would be a grievous mistake. Through reticent silence, Elaira sensed recrimination. Unwittingly, he had relaxed too much. The ease of her company had laid siege to a reserve he had no inclination to slacken.

But before he found the courtesy to escape from her presence, Elaira shot him a sidewise grin. ‘What was that ruckus at the yard the other morning?’

Green eyes widened through a second of surprise. Then, in an explosion impelled by relief, Arithon snorted into laughter. ‘Dakar. What else? We’ve hired in a blind rope splicer with a tongue like a viper. The framers took bets on a contest of insults, the winner to mete out some prankish punishment.’

Elaira peeled the sticky hair from her nape, then flicked out the ends to rebraid them. ‘And Dakar lost? What was the forfeit?’

His glance drawn to admire her dark locks, that sparked to bronze fire where the sun touched, Arithon set his chin on crossed wrists. ‘Old Ivel bet the lads that our prophet was too fat to squeeze into an empty tar cask. Dakar managed, of course, as a point of sore pride. But when his elbows got jammed, and he asked for help to get out, an enterprising joiner clapped on the lid and nailed him in. He wound up adrift in Garth’s pond.’

‘Jinesse’s twins fished him out?’ Elaira asked between gasps.

‘No.’ Arithon wiped his eyes and snatched the breath to answer. ‘Are you kidding? Feylind would as likely raise cheers while he drowned, and Fiark would sling rocks at his tombstone. Dakar shouted and pounded until the staves sprung and began to take in water. The old men who idle on the boarding house porch finally netted him to shore and broached the cask. But they filched his beer store as payment.’

Restored to companionable ease, Arithon gathered
himself to his feet. Against custom, he offered his hand to assist Elaira up, and in gifted inspiration, she released his warm fingers a half instant before he did so on his own.

Their eyes met.

‘Rare lady,’ he said again. But the shadows were gone and he smiled.

After that, he relaxed in her presence as Halliron Masterbard must have known him, freed for a brief space in time from the burdens inflicted by Desh-thiere’s curse and royal bloodline. The work at the shipyard drove him to relentless hard labour, while the frames were bevelled, then set erect and dubbed fair, to be followed under the harsh sunlight by keelson, side keelsons, and bilge stringers.

The hour after the knightheads were set, he reappeared at the cottage, his clothing pungent with a resinous sprinkle of spruce shavings. Every moment he could spare was spent in Elaira’s company.

Foraging trips drew them further afield, into the deep, still bayous that fringed the shores of Sickle Bay, alive with cormorants that startled from their step with awkward cries, and the singing hum of summer insects. By noon, they found refuge in trackless glens of red cedar, alive with jewelled moths clinging wing-folded in the undergrowth. They carved footprints over the sand hills, amid the clacking, arrowed flit of dragonflies. In a silence removed from the shipyard’s brisk clamour, Arithon allowed the salve of Elaira’s companionship to ease his veneer of tight reserve. Time and again she resisted any foray into topics that leaned toward the personal. Unlike everyone else, she never once questioned his integrity. He began to laugh easily, and spoke more than once of the high mage who had raised him on the world beyond the West Gates.

‘My grandfather was sparing in his praise of apprentices,’ Arithon volunteered on a night outing. They had
gone to gather herbs for talismans of ward best harvested under influence of the moon, and now rested side by side on a fallen log while a fox barked deep in the brush. Arithon toyed with a storm-broken branch, exploring by touch the tiny, green buds of a live oak’s acorns, that ripened light tan and jet black. ‘My grandfather insisted we think for ourselves and achieve for our own satisfaction. Deep study of the mysteries were their own tough path, he always said. To live for approval of others was a pitfall that begged a false turning.’

Cued by a queer little hole in her gut, that
now
was the moment she had angled for, Elaira refused to look at him as she said, ‘And do you seek approval from others to know you did right in Etarra’s attack on Deshir forest?’

Her reference to the children killed with the clans in his defence made him surge to his feet in recoil. The oak branch thudded earthward with a dropped thrash of leaves and his eyes bored down at her, anguished, ‘Who else besides the clansmen who survived could be aware that the deaths of those children were beyond fate’s grasp to prevent? Daelion Fatemaster show his mercy in fair judgement for their murders. There is no absolution, no redress. For I can never be reconciled with what happened in my name that day on the banks of Tal Quorin.’

‘You swore an oath as Rathain’s prince to protect your feal clans.’ Elaira looked up, her features traced with silver light. If he wanted to flee or strike out at her presumption, he was stopped by the tears that sheened her eyes.

‘What makes you take my troubles for your own?’ The veined silk of the oak leaves shivered as he began and checked a step forward. A moonbeam cast through the boughs overhead played like a wisp of dropped floss over the edge of his cheekbone, then grazed insubstantial as spirit light across his full sleeve and the attenuated knuckles of one hand.

‘I wasn’t, in fact,’ Elaira said in dry rebuke. ‘It’s an
entrenched bad habit, like saving wing-broken birds and rescuing waterlogged spiders out of horse troughs.’ She threw back a damp smile, unwilling to draw unfair advantage from the birth-gifted empathy that ran in him deep enough to lacerate. ‘Did I ever tell you what I did as a penniless chit on the day I caught the Mayor of Morvain’s son tormenting a mongrel in an alley?’

‘Rare lady,’ he said, softened at last to ease his guard. ‘You did not.’ A shadow limned against gauzy plumes of ground mist, he bent, twitched the oak branch aside, and resettled himself at her feet. While the small southland finches rustled in the treetops, he listened as she told of the exploit that left a young boy with injured fingers, and which set an end to her freedom of the streets, to place her in Koriani fosterage.

‘The herb witch who sold simples to the prostitutes had always insisted I had talent,’ she finished, her hands nested tight on her knees and her hair channelled into silky torrents by the bleached linen pleats of her blouse. ‘If I also suspected the amethyst in the pin I’d just stolen had once been a mage’s scrying crystal, the dog was terrified and about to end up hamstrung, and I was too angry to care. Right or wrong, I copied the symbol I had seen the poor-quarter herb witch use to ill-wish patrons who cheated her. I recall not being surprised, or even horrified, as the knife slipped in falling and stabbed the mayor’s son through the wrist.’

Enfolded in the milky warm air of the night, steadied by Arithon’s silence, Elaira eased knotted fingers and shrugged. ‘I escaped sentence and burning because the Koriani undertook to heal the child in exchange for a claim to take me into permanent fosterage. They said if they hadn’t intervened, the boy would never have recovered. His nerves had been severed. Not by the steel, but by an ill wish wrought of raw magic’ She looked aside at him, her eyes like flawed quartz, and the evanescent scent of her melded warp through weft with the heavier
perfume of cedar. ‘If I can presume, I may understand, just a little, how wretched you must feel.’

She ended with a clipped cough to mask a shiver. ‘Do you know, it often still haunts me. I never knew if the mongrel was spared.’

Amid the rich, living fabric of the woodland, the man at her feet seemed a clamped knot of silence, turned in on himself in stark brooding. Alarmed, that perhaps she had dared too much, Elaira summoned full command of her art and looked at him; and what she read in every locked joint and in the raised tilt of his head was a longing of unbearable proportion. She ached to reach out, to test his emotion and see whether she could shape from one vulnerable moment a bond of immutable trust. She wished to touch him as she had never yearned for anything else in all of her proscribed life.

But instinct reared through desire and stopped her.

Without knowing why, she broke his mood, sharply, and led him off on a tangent. ‘What words would your s’Ahelas grandfather have for me, to care more for a dog than a child?’

‘He would have said, of such a child, that the dog was the more blameless spirit. In my case, he warned on no uncertain terms. The powers of mages and the burdens of a ruler make an incompatible legacy.’ Arithon clasped his arms around drawn-up knees, his admission burred rough as he added, ‘Once, I could have listened and been free.’

Over the rasp of spring crickets, a whippoorwill called its slurred triplets. While Arithon pursed his lips and whistled back like a mimic, Elaira reviewed his phrasing, for as a bard, he was wont to be precise; and swift as a prick through crowding thoughts, she grasped the implication to his statement:
‘For I can never be reconciled with what happened in my name…’

‘You knew
!’ she exclaimed with a force that scared the bird silent. ‘Before Etarra’s armies ever marched, you
understood the northern clans were going to be slaughtered.’

He regarded the sequinned edges of the leaves, his lashes widened as if by some force of concentrated focus, he could interpret the tracks of the wind as it brushed through the palms. Beyond these, across stands of saltmarsh dusted soot-grey in the moonlight, the stippled prints of stray gusts threw pewter sheets over the jet waters of the bay.

But the soft anonymity of the night had lost any power to calm.

‘Their chieftain had Sight,’ Arithon confessed on a struck note of anguish. ‘Steiven’s vision held truth, more’s the pity. I backed up his claim with a tienelle scrying.’

In his royal presence or his absence, Deshir had been fated to suffer Etarra’s invasion. The pain of past dilemma sharpened every angle in the face of the Teir’s’Ffalenn charged and tied to an unwanted royal heritage.

‘So, prince, are you guilty?’
Asandir had once asked of an event too entangled to separate a whole verdict with clean certainty.

Elaira mapped the surge of trapped feelings in a man seldom given to shared confidence, her fingertips touched to her spell-crystal to enhance her clarity of sight. But nothing of pity could stiffen her for the blow as Arithon turned toward her, and disclosed, The clans of Deshir should have died to a man, had I not stayed and used sorcery in defence.
That was all that held me to the letter of my sovereign oath.
So you see,’ he ended in an agony he might never unburden, ‘it might not matter, to know if the puppy was saved. More than two hundred clansmen survived the fight at Tal Quorin. But there is no settlement to be found in such a victory. I can’t sort past the deaths and the bloodshed to say if their lives matched the cost.’

A slow breath unreeled from Elaira’s throat. Eyes closed, her knuckles pressed to her lips to stem the fatal urge to cast off her vows and tell him the damaging intent of her Prime Senior’s directive, she locked down a cry of pure misery.

Morriel Prime had been mistaken, and Lirenda dead wrong, to seek a binding to track this prince’s movements. The Fellowship of Seven had judged well to insist that the s’Ffalenn compassion in Arithon’s character had ruled his actions to a pernicious degree. Yet if mitigating circumstances argued his case for the butchery of Etarra’s army in Deshir, the future offered no such remission.

Indeed, no sounder option existed than to choose as Arithon had, to build ships to escape in extended exile.

Elaira had not even realized she wept until droplets splashed hot on her knuckles. She sensed a rustle of movement, and then Arithon was standing, a bleak silhouette against the boughs with their netted sparkle of spring stars. Two hands pressed briefly on her shoulders, warm and something less than steady. ‘I’m sorry, rare lady.’ He sighed with a sibilance like pearls rubbed in velvet. ‘I’ve done you no kindness tonight. If I grieve for any small thing, it is that.’