The Ships of Merior (38 page)

A servant stepped from the shadows and pulled out a padded leather chair. The guard captain sank into the place he was offered, startled to scarlet embarrassment by the squeak of the horsehair upholstery.

‘Your Grace, how was I to know you?’ he burst out. ‘The clan captives were not sent to offend. My Lord Mayor wished to be helpful.’

‘No harm done.’ Lysaer arranged his wrists on his chair arms, while the servant went on to serve wine from a cut-crystal decanter. ‘But you must understand, far more lies at stake than a matter of idealistic principle. To chain hostile clansmen within a loyal enclave is letting the viper into our midst. Such men could become a ready tool for our downfall, should an enemy steal in and cut their chains. As oppressors, our ranks would stand weakened. I’ll sanction no such liability in the heart of my city, to risk the security of my following.’

His goblet now filled with red claret, Lysaer turned the glass in jewelled fingers. ‘So you see, the offence was not yours, but against my own royal trust, a private integrity I am oath-sworn as sovereign never to bend or to break.’ Arrows of stained light bloodied his rings as
he looked across in earnest entreaty. ‘Best to kill cleanly, or else let any who oppose our new order stay at liberty to amend their reiving ways.’

‘A worthy thought.’ The guard captain raised his glass and swallowed, ill at ease, but at least lent fair grounds on which to argue. ‘But what of my Lord Mayor’s prisoners? Karfael restored your charter to these lands. His city’s confidence has been breached, since he entrusted men into your hands who have done injury to his merchants. In setting them free, you have spurned him.’

Swift to resume an ongoing point of contention, Lord Diegan agreed. ‘My liege, there’s been an insult. You can’t just let the issue rest.’

No glazing graced the crude casements. Summer moths pattered into the pool of the lamplight, to dance in crazed circles and die wing-charred. The damask table-cloth held a Utter of tiny corpses, fluttering and maimed, or fallen limp. As if they were human, and bloody, Lysaer sighed, pained as few ever saw him. ‘I understand the mayor’s cause for outrage. But the sordid outcome of this case should be obvious.’

When the look on the captain’s shaved features remained blank, the prince gripped his goblet and dashed off a neat swallow, as though to erase the sharp taste of bitterness. The clansmen I released were weary enough to drop where they stood. Most were wounded. Where can they run? They are weaponless. When darkness fell, a discreet troop of headhunters with tracking dogs were set after them. This far removed from their bolt-holes in Westwood, I doubt if a man of them survives.’

‘They could be lucky,’ Lord Diegan interrupted. ‘The drifters who raise horses in the meadows of Pasyvier could offer them shelter.’

‘That’s a long-shot.’ Lysaer flicked a dying insect from his sleeve in sudden, nerve-fired impatience. ‘If there are survivors, my point isn’t lost. Word will be carried to the clans, and our troops here will learn a painless lesson.
This is Avenor, where all men are entitled to the terms of royal justice. Any who disrupt trade or prey upon the roads will be handled according to their deserts.’ He settled on his elbows, his blue eyes spiked with reflections thrown off by the lamp. ‘Diegan, this is one thread in a weave of whole cloth. We must start thinking for the future. When my garrison marches to war against the Master of Shadow, they mustn’t be divided in purpose. We can’t maintain the burden, then, of guarding the roads in friendly territory. How can we ever clear the wilds of clan pests if we continue to fan the old hatreds?’

Impressed enough to shed his self-consciousness, Karfael’s captain gave a grainy laugh. ‘Wise tactics, if any clanborn barbarian can ever be made to know his place. But why ask for archers? I watched your bowmen at the butts. They are marksmen. Why borrow ours?’

Lysaer’s formal sovereignty broke before a grin of boyish merriness. ‘My own troops balked at their orders.’

Pained, Lord Diegan drained his goblet, then waved back the servant who bent to replenish his wine. ‘No. Drink won’t help. I need my head clear instead.’ But a suspect brightness to his glance showed him already sunk in his cups. To the Karfael man, he said in stabbing sarcasm, ‘His Grace could scarcely order floggings for men who objected to -’

‘Lord Diegan,’ Lysaer cut in firmly. ‘Not now. We’ve been through this. I won’t change my stance.’

Still nettled by the terrifying fervour Lysaer’s lancers had turned against his veterans that afternoon, the captain coughed as the wine stung his throat in the course of his clumsy swallow. ‘What’s this?’

‘A topic we’ll save for tomorrow morning.’ Still rueful, Lysaer motioned to the pages piled up on the sidelines, burdened down with trays and steaming platters. ‘Spare me from the temper of my cook, instead. If we don’t make an effort with his sauces and meats, he’s going
to be out here with the knives he uses to joint beef. Slow-spoken as he is, he moves like a weasel. If we let him think his efforts at the spit have been slighted, hell skewer us faster than anybody’s company of crack archers.’

All night, the burly captain from Karfael dreamed of the deadly, precise turn of teamwork displayed by Avenor’s foot troops and mounted lancers. At sunrise, awakened in twisted blankets and running cold sweat, he wondered afresh why Lysaer s’Ilessid should require his troop of lacklustre bowmen to muster and march inland to a secluded defile.

The haze of morning mists had yet to burn off and disperse. His beard and eyebrows grizzled with condensation, his mailshirt a grinding weight that hampered every effort to slap off the insects that whined in the absence of a breeze, the captain nursed a foul mood.

To judge by reddened eyes and a dishevelled state of grooming, Diegan beside him suffered the same fierce headache, courtesy of Lysaer’s expensive brandies. At least, the fine skin around his eyes tightened each time his bay horse stamped and jingled its bridle. Whatever service Karfael’s archers were to bestow on behalf of Avenor, the city’s Lord Commander remained opposed.

‘How much longer do we stand idle on the hilltops?’ The captain could all but feel his gear rusting in the damp.

Lord Diegan turned his head, the expression mirrored in the rim of his gilded visor tightly drawn and cynical. ‘Not long. Only until the mist lifts enough to signal your bowmen on the ridgetops. Blond hair should stand out in early sunlight. They won’t find it hard to see their target.’

‘You want
my men
to shoot arrows at
his Grace?
Ath Creator!’ The guard captain’s horse jibbed sidewards in response to his stiffened fists. Playing at the reins to
resettle it, he said in pale outrage, ‘The rumour’s true then? The Prince of the West would test his gift of light? If this trial goes wrong, you know what will happen! Dharkaron’s Black Spear and Chariot! We’ll have a massacre. Your elite garrison at Avenor will run riot in mis-played loyalty and butcher my field troop like crowbait!’

‘My liege insists it won’t go wrong,’ Diegan said in disparaging boredom. ‘He’s practised for months. He claims he’s mastered a refinement of his talent. Said he’d bum the shafts to white cinders long before they fall and endanger him.’

‘Why?’ cried the captain. ‘Why should he risk his royal person?’

‘Well,
I
couldn’t talk him out of it,’ Diegan snapped. ‘My men wouldn’t take the order. If yours won’t either, his royal Grace spoke his intention to march without escort and invite Hanshire’s garrison to indulge him. Since Lord Mayor Garde would likely send heavy infantry with orders to provoke open war, and Lysaer won’t harm any soldier he considers his ally, here we are happily slapping midges.’

In some unseen, mist-mantled glen, a wood thrush sang in falling triplets. A hare grazed under a gorse bush that had been invisible the moment before. Weak sun melted through, flooding the valley with mellow warmth. Lord Diegan straightened his chased helm, flicked beaded dewdrops from the crest feathers, and gave way to the misery that chewed him. In the arrogance he once used to provoke Etarra’s dandies to rash escapades, he said, ‘His Grace won’t see reason. He made a fool of you yesterday. Are you townsman enough to dare to use his princely bide for a target shoot? Or did his manners at dinner overawe you enough to trade in your bollocks as a royalist?’

Karfael’s captain returned a low laugh at the jibe. ‘There’s still bounty offered for royal scalps.’ He gathered his reins, prepared to ride personally to his sergeants.
‘Why not make this a sporting event? Eighty royals says your prince winds up bloody and dead.’

‘Done,’ said Diegan with quick recklessness. But his face stayed averted, as though his expression might betray him. ‘If you win, let’s hope the coin buys me peace. I’m tired of being heart-torn and angry.’

The captain paused, no fool in his reading of men. ‘You love him that much. I can’t fathom it.’

‘Don’t stay here, then,’ Lord Diegan flung back, still adamant in his need to look elsewhere. ‘Prince Lysaer has a way about him no man can resist. Every night I thank Ath that the Master of Shadow wasn’t born with the same natural gift.’

Day brightened. The mist shredded in drifts above a landscape patched with swatches of summer foliage. With an agony that pinned him breathless, Lord Diegan heard cadenced hoofbeats as the captain’s destrier cantered off; in dull misery he marked the shouted orders to the sergeants, followed by Lysaer’s assent, absorbed without echo by the slopes.

Avenor’s Lord Commander looped his reins in his elbow and masked his face in gloved hands.

Then a winning flight of arrows split the air, their sound as evil, as deadly, as any fallen on another summer’s day, ones that had wreaked a bloody slaughter on the flood-trampled banks of Tal Quorin.

Pierced through by past horrors and present dread, Lord Diegan listened in suspension. But the moment gave back no crack of broadheads, nor the rattle as fletched shafts sliced and flickered deflected paths through snatched leaves. He heard no strike of steel into flesh, no screaming. Just a whispered shriek of air, and a heat that swept his skin in a fleeting, flash-fire burn of wind.

Over the settled silence left by the departed wood thrush, Karfael’s captain bellowed in astonished incredulity, ‘Ath! Almighty Ath, here’s a miracle!’

Eyes scalded blind behind a screen of soaked leather, Diegan heard Lysaer’s peal of gladdened laughter. ‘No miracle, good man. But now, at last, I can answer to Maenalle’s barbarians. I have means to defend my army from her ambush on the day they must cross the passes of Orlan to challenge the Master of Shadow.’

Unnerved and unmanned, Lord Diegan slumped weak-kneed in his saddle. His horse had dropped its neck to crop greenery; he understood he would have to dismount to recapture his reins, slithered down the beast’s crest to loop behind its gold-trimmed headstall.

By the time Karfael’s envoy cantered back to rejoin him, Lord Diegan stood in the grass. Dry eyed, at least lent the semblance of dignity by his veneer of Etarran cynicism, he looked up into the face of a veteran captain enraptured as if touched by light, as indeed, he likely had been.

Lysaer’s presence did that to a man.

Crisp in his surcoat cut of silk, Lord Diegan regarded the town delegate in shaken, heartsore humility. He could not have given the order to fire; not even to test whether Lysaer’s gift of light could be raised as shield and defence. The ache in his chest finally loosened enough to release its hold on his tongue.

‘You owe me eighty royals,’ he said to the captain. Then he smiled in elation that pierced him more sweetly than his fiercest climax with a woman. ‘My prince isn’t bloody and dead.’

‘Did you see that?’
cried the captain, too bemused still to acknowledge the outcome of the bet. ‘His Grace of Tysan raised light and not an arrow in a thousand could touch him. He is invincible, and the army at his back cannot fail.’

Hard by the trade road that wound northward to the city of Etarra, the old ford that once channelled the River Severnir spread dust-dry in the gloaming, a weed-choked bed of naked rocks and bent grasses, loud with the strident clicks of summer insects. The clansmen who hastened like shadows through the gloom made little noise. They had the last prisoner from the caravan bound and gagged before twilight darkened the west-facing rim-rocks; and a stillness too uneasy to be mistaken for peace settled over the fumbled ravines etched through the Skyshiel foothills.

The ox teams used to draw the laden wagons sprawled where their drovers had last reined them, collapsed in dead, folded heaps amid the slackened leather of their traces. Throat wounds inflicted in practised slaughter were spared the sucking predation of flies only by the advent of night. The drays themselves had not been rifled. The tarps still secured their trade wares and goods since this raid had not been made for plunder.

Sickened by the coppery reek of fresh blood more than pride would admit, Caolle, war captain of Strakewood’s last clansmen, stood with his foot propped on a rock. He
cleaned his blades on a courier’s black felt saddlecloth, careful to avoid the bullion fringe that might scrape and cause stray noise. Small difference that the deaths were of beasts, and not human. To any who followed the old ways, all wasteful killing was offence.

But in Caolle’s experience, any milksop too squeamish to take life was a fool unlikely to survive. Etarra’s northern league of headhunters saw to that, all the more since Lysaer’s fresh alliances, which drove the clans’ current need to waylay any caravan travelling in the company of a message rider.

Quiet footsteps approached to Caolle’s right. Since just one man alive dared creep up on him while he held unsheathed steel, the war captain jerked up his bristled chin. ‘Did you find that courier’s dispatches yet?’ The dagger in his hand moved a querulous fraction. ‘If you haven’t, I’m minded to squeeze his throat a bit. Get him dizzy, he’ll sing out his answer that much faster.’

Lanky, tall, as self-possessed as cool marble, Jieret Red-beard stopped a careful, clear sword’s length away. ‘That won’t be necessary.’