The Lascar's Dagger (66 page)

Lustgrader directed a thunderous frown at Saker, then switched his attention to the midshipman. “Find out who they are and what they want. And it had better be urgent before they can come aboard a vessel about to sail.” He looked back at Saker. “What the fobbing blazes is a
woman
doing here?” he demanded. “How did she get on board?” He inserted his fingers into the end of the bambu to draw out the contents. “Is this what I think it is? And is that female holding a
child
?”

“A plume, sir,” Saker said, ignoring the last question, “given to me by a lascar, which I wish to present to you. It will be of value to you in the Spicerie. I wouldn’t pull it out here, if I were you. The wind…”

The captain had his fingers gripped around the end of the quill, and they were shaking. Saker knew what he was feeling. Desire, gratitude, longing. And an odd sense of inevitability.

He wanted to snatch the feather away from Lustgrader, tell him he hadn’t meant it, it was
his,
dammit. He bit his lip to halt the words and tasted blood.

“That’s – that’s very kind of you. I accept,” Lustgrader said. The look he turned to Saker was obsequious, almost lover-like. Saker felt sick. Pain welled up to choke him. He wanted to howl with the agony of letting go. At the repulsiveness of enslaving another. Instead he said, “Ask your second to take command of the sailing. It’s important you attend to the pinnace. Deal with the stowaway later.”

The Captain looked at him in a puzzled way. “Yes, of course. You heard, Mynster Tolbun? You have the ship.”

The man standing behind the captain looked shocked, but stuttered, “Ay, ay, sir.”

As Saker and Lustgrader left the poop deck, Sorrel trailing behind, Saker spoke softly into the Captain’s ear. “You will get rid of this pinnace. No one is to come aboard. Some of them are Dire Sweepers. You know, the assassins who hunt out and kill those with the Horned Plague.”

Lustgrader nodded. “There’s no plague on board,” he said. He sounded as if he was having trouble focusing. “I’ll stop that nonsense immediately!”

Saker was relentless. “The woman and the baby are to be given a cabin to themselves for as long as they’re on board. You will tolerate no discussion of this among the crew. Just tell them you’ve received instructions that they are to be regarded as privileged, um, supernumeraries. Do you understand?”

“Yes, of course.” Lustgrader strode off without a backward glance to where the midshipman was calling down to the pinnace. “Refuse them permission, Mynster Bachold! If they insist, fire that wheel-lock pistol of yours at them…”

Saker let him go and drew in a deep breath. “Don’t go near the railing,” he murmured to Sorrel. “We don’t want anyone on the pinnace to be certain we’re on board.”

She turned to him, her face a picture of utmost horror. “That – that was
hideous
! How could you
do
that?”

“Easily enough, if it was the only way to save your life and mine. And Piper’s.” He sighed. “I think if anything it’s worse this way than the other way around, with me on the receiving end.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There were four bewitched feathers. Ardhi gifted me one, which meant I had to do everything he asked of me. And what he asked was that I steal the other plumes from Regal Vilmar. I had no choice.”

Her jaw dropped as she began to understand. “And now you’ve done that to someone else?” She took a step away from him in revulsion. “You just used the same witchery on Captain Lustgrader? A ghastly magic from the Va-forsaken Hemisphere! How
could
you?”

“Would you rather be returning to the shore, with Piper in your arms?”

She stared at him. “This is vile, Saker, and you know it. How can you not, when it was done to you? How long will this – this witchery last?”

“Long enough to save us, I hope. Look, the good thing is you’ll have a cabin of sorts to yourself, with Piper, which means you’ll both be safe. Later, I’ll tell you everything we know about … about all this. About why I am on board this ship. Everything.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she said.

She wasn’t smiling.

Saker was up on the deck at first light, watching the sky beyond the coast of Ardrone. Angry anvil-shaped storm clouds glowered, promising stormy seas. The ship was scudding down the Ardmeer estuary with a strong following wind from the north-east. Looking up, he noticed the mainsails had been reefed some time during the night in anticipation of bad weather.

Sorrel, with Piper sleeping in her arms, came to stand next to him at the railing. She was wearing a real dress this time instead of a glamoured one, and she’d obviously had an opportunity to wash.

“What happened to the rags you were wearing?” he asked.

“I kept them. They’ll do for swaddling once they’re clean. Fortunately I had my own clothes in my bundle.”

“I’ll order the captain to put you ashore in Ardrone,” he said. “He’ll have to do it if I ask. Port Teal, or Port Sedge, perhaps. I hope the strong winds won’t be a problem. Did you sleep?”

“Not much.” She laughed. “A woman with a young baby rarely sleeps much. But I felt … safe. The ship’s boy milked the goats for Piper.” She grimaced. “I was worried I might be sick, the wind is so strong, but it seems I’m a good sailor.”

“Piper?”

“She’s fine.”

“Can I hold her?”

She transferred Piper to his arms and he stood for a long time in silence, looking down on her. Then he said quietly, “She might have lied to me.” It wasn’t a question and he knew she’d understand who he meant. “She lied about a lot of things. She lied to King Edwayn. She planned it all.” He looked up from the sleeping baby. “Vilmar’s first wife was also from the Ardronese royal family. There was some suggestion she was murdered because she didn’t give him a son. Mathilda might have heard that story.”

He drew in a deep breath, feeling he needed more air before he could continue. “Perhaps she took me to bed hoping it would put an end to her marriage. But maybe, just maybe, she had a second plan if the first one didn’t work. Maybe she wanted to make sure she was increasing
before
she was married.”

“And if the wedding had been called off and she was already bearing a child?”

“There are ways to get rid of an unwanted child early on. Maybe she thought it was worth the risk.”

She thought about that. “You’ll never know. Even if she were to tell you, you’ve no way of knowing what’s truth and what’s lie.”

“No. I’ll never know.” He touched Piper’s cheek. “What an empty-headed ninny you must have thought me.”

“Yes, I did.” Her honesty was brutal. “There is something else you don’t know. To be truthful, I’m not sure I know it either.”

He looked at her, curious. “Go on.”

“Prime Fox called Princess Mathilda to Faith House several times after you were arrested. Both times she came back crying, but also strangely … buoyant. Later she kept asking to see him again, but he never would. I didn’t think much about it. But then, when she was delivering Piper here, half out of her mind with pain, and not being able to scream … she blamed someone for not helping her. Said he was an evil man who’d promised she wouldn’t have to marry Vilmar. I thought she might have meant you. After the birth, she said, ‘What if these are his children?’ She calmed down a bit after that, but I don’t think she remembered exactly what she’d said. She threatened me with death if I told anyone what she’d said about Fox. But she hadn’t mentioned the Prime at all. So then I thought, she wasn’t talking about you at all. She meant Fox.”

He stared at her, shocked. “Va above, you think
Valerian Fox
bedded her, promising to help prevent her marriage if she agreed?”

“She might have been muddled. She’d been in pain, with no sleep. But yes, that’s what I think.”

He stood in silence for a long time, looking down on the face of the sleeping child. Then he said quietly, “I loved her, you know. Or I thought I did.”

“That doesn’t excuse your actions.”

“No. I’ve spent every day since then wishing I could undo it, but I can’t.” He looked away from her, unable to meet her gaze. “Afterwards, the only thing I held on to, tenaciously, was that we’d loved one another. That was my justification. And then I realised the person I thought she was … doesn’t really exist. Never did exist.”

He bent and brushed his lips to Piper’s head. The milky, baby smell of her made his chest feel tight. “It was your idea wasn’t it? Coming to my trial, defending me, taking that dangerous ride to the Chervil Moors. Your idea, not hers. You wanted to make things right. I didn’t deserve it, but you did it anyway, because she’d wronged a foolish witan. Va above, you must despise me.”

She cocked her head to regard him with a serious expression. “Despised? No. I’ve only ever despised one man, and believe me, he deserved it. And died for it, too. You were just clay-brained.”

“Dizzy-eyed was the expression you used, I believe.”

She smiled then, a playful twitch of the lips. “Extremely.”

Piper stirred in his arms and he wrapped her blanket a little tighter. Her mouth blew a kiss and he felt as if his knees had turned to sand. “I seem to have ruined your life, and I never meant to. We can still undo some of the knots, partly. You can still get to Vavala from the Ardronese coast on one of the coastal boats. Once in Vavala, the Pontifect will help you. You – you’ll like her.”

“You can come with me now. Ardhi can’t force you to do anything any more, can he?”

“No, he can’t.”

“So come ashore with me. We’ll both go to the Pontifect.”

“I could do that,” he admitted, and smiled at Piper. “There’s nothing I would like better than to take the problem to her and dump it in her lap. To say: ‘You fix it. This is a problem for the Va-Faith, not me.’”

“But you hesitate.”

He decided to be honest with her. She deserved that much.
And telling someone might clarify my own thoughts on it.
“When I was granted a witchery, it was an odd one. I’ve never heard of someone being able to talk to birds. Well, sort of talk to them. And then along comes Ardhi and tells me things about bird feathers and witchery and birds of paradise.”

“So?”

“You remember Ardhi’s kris? The one you saw on Juster’s ship.”

She nodded.

“Those gold flecks – they are part of bird of paradise plumes. Feathers that don’t burn when metal is forged.”

“That’s impossible, surely.”

He didn’t speak.

She said, “Oh. Apparently not.”

“Everywhere I look there is a connection to birds. So that’s the first oddity that gives me pause. Then there’s something deeply wrong in Lowmeer, and it’s spreading to Ardrone. The Horned Death. The Dire Sweepers. The devil-kin, the murder of twins. The unholy pact made by a regal so long ago … That’s the second thing. The wrongness.”

Why in all Va’s cherished world had Dyer remembered an unimportant student called Saker Rampion, and recognised him five or six years later on a dark night in Dortgren?
He needed to think about that too.

“And you think the answer to
that
is on the other side of the world?” She was incredulous.

He ploughed on, remorseless. “I believe the magic of Ardhi’s kris has been manipulating my life for the past year or more. I need to find out why. That’s the third reason. And the fourth … the fourth is more nebulous. It’s about what the plumes can do. You said it was diabolical, and you are right. I want them out of this hemisphere, and back where they belong.”

She waited for him to say something more, but he was silent. Frowning, she said, “Would it be correct to say that Kesleer doesn’t have that power over Regal Vilmar any more?”

He nodded.

“Will the Regal know he was duped?”

“By now? Oh yes. He’ll know
how
, too.”

“Then I think Regal Vilmar would love to get more of those plumes. For himself.”

“And where there was one bird with plumes that can bewitch, there will be others…” His hold tightened instinctively around the sleeping child.
You have no rights to her, Saker,
he told himself.
None.

“You need to go to the Summer Seas.”

He nodded. “There’s a final reason, Sorrel, something else you don’t know – I’m the Pontifect’s spy. I always have been. Since I was a lad in the lowest school of the university, learning my letters. Not a very good spy, not half as good as I thought I was, but my duty is to her, to the Pontificate and Va-Faith, to the whole of the Va-cherished Hemisphere. It is what I am: an agent of the Faith. And that might be something even more important to all of us.”

She shivered, and he moved closer to her, putting his back between her and the wind, sheltering the baby between them. “If this fleet raids the Chenderawasi Islands for the plumes, they’ll have a potent weapon of domination when they return here. Even if people were warned about the outcome of accepting, resisting the lure of a gift of a plume is not easy.” He shuddered. “The Regal probably doesn’t realise how the power can be passed on either … I think it’s my duty to stay here on board. I’m sorry, Sorrel. You’ll have to go to the Pontifect on your own.”

She shrugged, smiling slightly. “Never mind. I’m a capable woman with a glamour. I can travel the length of the Va-cherished Hemisphere alone, if I want.”

He believed her. “Tell the Pontifect everything you know. Everything. I’ve written to her as well, and my letter is already on its way.”

She nodded wordlessly.

Gently he transferred Piper into her arms and then watched her walk away.
Perhaps it’s just as well. I could get far too fond of her.

He
meant Piper. Of course he did.

Up in the rigging, Ardhi was checking all the reefs made by one of the tyro sailors. As he moved along the sail testing the ties, his dagger twisted in its sheath. He halted, heart lurching.
What now?

Still balanced on the footrope, one hand holding tight to the spar, he pulled out the blade and looked at it. The metal was a dark and angry slate-grey, churning, alive. The gold flecks within flashed and streaked like lightning in the sky, only to die and reappear elsewhere in the metal.