The Ships of Merior (39 page)

Caolle studied the lion crest on the cloth in his hand one last time, then straightened, his obstreperous nature focused to an assassin’s piercing interest. ‘You’ve read the satchel’s contents already, I see.’ Gold fringe shed a sullen sparkle as he tossed the felt where it would not mire his feet. ‘If the news is bad, let me hear it.’ War steel chimed in the gloom as he sheathed his dagger and tucked a blade that matched him for wear in the crook of one elbow.

The parchment in Jieret’s fingers crackled as it passed into Caolle’s ruthless grip. ‘Our liege lord finally made his presence known.’

‘And about time, isn’t it?’ Caolle squinted at the pages, snapped them straight to net the last, failing light, then coughed in surprise as he picked out the same lion crest
in the seal. ‘Jaelot? You’re saying Prince Arithon was there?’

The Earl of the North had tact enough to know when his war captain’s questions were best ignored. While Caolle read, he surveyed the unkind fruits of a raid most rapaciously executed: the huddle of bound survivors; their disjointed muddle of wagons, with hulks of felled draught animals in unbreathing, splay-legged heaps; and beyond, bunched movement in the gloom, the restless, milling mass of the outriders’ horses strung together by scouts who worked in expedient silence.

Every extra mount would be needed to leave this place quickly despite the added risk of leaving tracks. While the weather favoured enemy patrols, clansmen in Rathain did not travel burdened; nor did they camp in one place for more than a snatched night’s rest.

‘Apprenticed to Halliron Masterbard?’ Always a deliberate reader, Caolle paused between paragraphs to ruminate. ‘A typical s’Ffalenn bit of cleverness: why didn’t we guess his Grace might try that?’

‘I doubt our liege acted for a ploy.’ The boyhood memory remained all too clear, of the night Jieret had lain awake to overhear the old Masterbard berate a prince for squandered talents. Stung to reminder of a past when his family had been alive, the earl clenched his jaw. He waited with held breath through the moment of profound shock, as his war captain deciphered the last lines, which listed the damage Arithon s’Ffalenn had inflicted through his music on the night of the mayor’s solstice feast.

‘Dharkaron Avenger!’ Caolle cranked the parchment into a tight roll, and metal scraped, dissonant, as the movement fretted his studded brigandine against the hilt of his broadsword. ‘We have to presume that dispatch rider knows the content of this.’

The young Earl of the North stared into the gathering night, while breeze feathered the grass heads against
boot cuffs spattered with the drying tang of blood. He could not watch as Caolle retraced the pitiless course of logic: that if the courier knew the name behind the desecration of Jaelot, he would have talked. Every drover in the caravan might already be primed to repeat his gossip, facts that at all costs must be kept from reaching the Mayor of Etarra.

‘Ath’s mercy, the damned prisoners outnumber us.’ Caolle’s blunt fingers closed, crushing the report with its black and gold ribbons and cracked seal. ‘I wiped my steel clean too soon, I see.’ The implied death warrant for two dozen lives sounded level and matter of fact.

But Jieret knew his captain better than the father he had lost, and no gruff bluster might fool him. ‘We can’t take the risk.’ Behind his tortured acceptance lay a grief no years might tame, for the last time Etarra’s army had found cause to march against Arithon s’Ffalenn, his people had nearly been exterminated. The others can move out ahead of us. No need to say what we’ve found.’

The parchment fluttered to the ground as Caolle’s stocky hand closed over his chieftain’s wrist. ‘No, boy,’ he said, though the earl at his side was anything but a child. ‘They’ll have to know. We can silence this caravan, and maybe the next, before Pesquil’s patrols infest these hills with trackers. But word must leak out eventually. Just count ourselves lucky we’ve had warning.’

Yards off in the gathering darkness, a clansman cracked a joke to a burst of stifled laughter. Through a breeze-snatched hoot of rejoinder, Caolle said, ‘You ride out with the others. Leave me to deal with what’s here. I’ll see it’s done fast and clean, while the townsmen are sleeping and unaware.’

Jieret’s expelled breath shuddered through the touch shared between them. ‘You can’t spare me!’

‘No.’ Caolle scraped his stubbled chin with the back of a gore-flecked wrist. ‘We can’t spare our liege lord, either. That doesn’t mean we won’t try. Now go. The
longer we tarry in this place, the greater the danger. Another caravan’s outriders could find the ruts where the wagons left the road. We daren’t be tracked and found here.’

Sound advice, Jieret knew. At such moments, he understood his father’s past silences all too well. No townsman could be faulted for paying bounty to head-hunters when the horror of tonight’s work came to light. But worse, far more lasting, were the consequences if Etarra’s army found Arithon, and Avenor’s new forces joined with them, as must happen, in time, despite this most ruthless precaution. Maenalle’s reports out of Tysan were unremitting and grim. The army Lysaer shaped to hunt the Shadow Master promised a ruthless opposition that would suffer no clan ally to live.

‘Well need to pick a site to make rendezvous,’ Jieret said at last.

As always, Caolle’s thoughts ran ahead of him. ‘At the Farl Rocks, deep in the Barrens.’ No merchant would follow them there, and a headhunter tracking team, with great reluctance: the site had once been Paravian, and the old, carved markers that crowned its hills were firmly believed to be haunted.

Faced by the prospect of a hard, dusty ride on horses of uncertain quality, Jieret clasped wrists with his war captain in hurried salute. ‘Make it quick,’ he begged in an agonized whisper.

Then he strode off, uncannily quiet for a man of his loose-limbed build. His father had moved that way, too, Caolle remembered; no surprise. Both had learned their scoutcraft at his knee, to his own exacting standards. The grief at times stabbed through him, that despite every farced lesson in survival, his efforts could still fall short. Every advantage he could wring out of blood and experience might not keep this last scion of the earl’s line alive long enough to marry and raise a grown heir.

Once Etarra’s army marched, their life’s hope could
be wasted, to see the clans restored to rule under a s’Ffalenn high king at Ithamon.

A breeze flicked the offending twist of parchment into tumbling flight across the grass. Caolle bent with an angry chink of steel and speared the dispatch with his blade. He would burn the writ, then grind his dagger sharp on a whetstone. That his liege lord would never sanction the blood about to be spilled for his sake made no difference. Arithon of Rathain was not here to gainsay. Still, Caolle shrugged off a lingering, unpleasant recollection of green eyes that saw far too much, and a burden of conscience too deep for most men to sustain his Grace’s locked glance.

‘Be damned to you, prince,’ the war captain muttered into the bristles of his beard. ‘If niceties counted for everything, you’d have left us to die in your absence along the banks of Tal Quorin.’

While Jieret called the muster through the velvety night, and the chink of bit rings and stirrups stabbed through furtive movement as the scouts tightened girths to ride out, Caolle pried the official writ clear of his sword with a shrieking, dry scrape. For himself, he never imagined any life beyond the bloody heritage the fugitive clanborn had lived since the uprising. Yet the unwilling lesson learned in the teeth of Etarra’s army had forced a view his dead lord, Steiven, could never in life make him see: some crimes against nature existed which no force of arms could put right.

That Arithon of Rathain should be placed in sovereign responsibility while set under a curse of violence was one of them. The very least a liegeman of Caolle’s disposition could do was to slit a few townborn throats.

The war captain did not revel in murder; but as one who had buried too many bodies left spitted and scalped by marauding headhunters, the act carried little of Arithon’s lacerating burden of remorse.

The sun threw a harsh, orange pall over hills that unfolded in hazed ranks to the horizon. Rain-thirsty soil crumbled, dusty, between shrivelled heads of yellow grass that in a past age had spread a waist-high, rippling green carpet over the fells. Once a meadow that rustled to the light dance of unicorns, the dry ground of Daon Ramon Barrens now thundered to the beat of an approaching rider.

Caolle had reached the Farl Rocks. His late arrival did nothing to alleviate Jieret Red-beard’s taxed mood.

Informed where he stood on the flat-topped megalith he had climbed to use as a vantage point, he swore at the cloudless sky. ‘By Dharkaron, he has salt, to presume we’d still be camped here.’

Powdered lichens fanned away on the breeze as the Earl of the North leaped down to face his informer, a Companion, one of fourteen young boys who had survived the slaughter at Strakewood to grow with him to manhood.

‘We left him a horse,’ Jieret ranted, angry now he was relieved of cause to worry. ‘Mounted, he should have reached here three days ago.’

‘Well, he isn’t alone.’ Blond and easy-tempered, the Companion who ventured this tidbit stretched, the flat iron studs on his brigandine too dull to catch the day’s brassy light, and sword steel too polished glancing bright as if dipped in acid.

Jieret shut his teeth in a silent snarl. Spoiling for a fight, he strode off the grassy hillock and into the shadow of the defile where his company had slept on small stones through three long and fireless nights. If no man had seen a Paravian ghost, the site held a presence that somehow pierced the heart and left a man maudlin and sorrowful.

The horse just ridden in stood apart from the others. Through a lattice of drought-stunted alders, Jieret could see it, bridle fixed to a leading rein, and bearing a rider too narrow in the shoulders to be Caolle.

‘Fiends plague us all, I thought so!’ he cried, and exploded a finch to arrowed flight. Aware trouble would compound if he lingered, he threaded apace through the saplings, not snapping sticks despite his rage.

His war captain heard his approach anyway. Tired enough that his shoulders hunched, Caolle sucked a mouthful from his waterskin and spat in a hurry to free his tongue. ‘She has two brats.’

Jieret stopped, knee-deep in blighted grass, and surrounded by a disgorged flurry of leafhoppers.

One look at Caolle’s tortured stiffness, and the last of his anger drained away. ‘I thought only males drove that caravan.’

The war captain grunted, lifted the waterskin and slopped the dregs over his head. A spill of droplets darkened hair the colour of filed iron, and channelled through seams that just now looked quarried into the crags of his face.

His eyes, bleak as charcoal, locked with Jieret’s. Through the years since the tragedy at Strakewood, no Companion had ever confronted him over the past, when his insistence had overruled Arithon’s plea to withhold the clan’s children from the battle on Tal Quorin’s fateful banks. Since the slaughter that had drenched summer moss in the next generation’s young blood, Caolle was least likely to forget the cost of his personal misjudgement. These were hidden in the carpet rolls. Don’t worry. I got them out before they saw the bodies.’

Jieret shut his eyes and somehow found the grace to hold his tongue, while more insects disturbed by Caolle’s ablutions blundered in flight over his leathers and boots.

‘Some things I can do well enough,’ Caolle finished in a tone stripped bare of any insolence. ‘But not even for the life of my liege could I draw steel on a woman or a child.’

The Earl of the North allowed himself an exasperated
look at the unwanted prisoner who sat, bound astride the tired gelding. She was brown-haired, neatly made, and no doubt comely when she was not dirty and shaking tired. The reddened eyes that glared above the twist of rag which silenced her were frightened and fierce with defiance. She clutched a child of perhaps three years against her shoulder; a second infant slept in a saddlebag, a filthy thumb tucked in his mouth.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Jieret prodded, antagonized by the prick of her regard. ‘She screams if you take off the gag, and she’s tried to knife you in the back?’

‘Well, I did kill her brother,’ Caolle allowed. He shook out his hair, drops flying off him like an ill-mannered dog after a swim. ‘Our cause was sound enough. Every drover in that caravan knew about Jaelot. The news can’t be kept close for long.’

But Jieret had expected that much. To the woman, he said, ‘You’ll go free, but only if you don’t disrupt my men.’

She tossed her chin and looked daggers, most likely convinced she would be forced regardless, or abandoned in the wilds unprotected. Both prospects were tempting enough to a company who had seen every woman in Strakewood cut down without mercy by townsmen. Clan numbers were pared back to the point at which children would be a blessing to foster, whether stolen or begotten by violence. Only the helpless anguish of knowing the brutalities suffered by his mother and sisters kept Jieret on the side of moral decency. He reached out, caught Caolle’s soggy sleeve, and drew him away down the defile.

Once out of the prisoner’s earshot, he said, ‘One of us needs to find Arithon.’

‘Just how do you plan to do that?’ Caolle rubbed a trickle of moisture off his chin and winced at the sting of small scabs. To judge by the state of his wrist, the woman not only scratched, but could land a bite like a
champion. Seldom caught out in embarrassment, Caolle hunched like a bear with a thorn and gruffly pursued his objection. ‘After the disaster our liege unleashed in Jaelot, the mayor’s guard sent out a sweep of armed patrols. Neither they nor their packs of headhunters with beaters and twenty-three couples of hounds could track a royal hair of him.’

Too hardened not to guess the vivid means by which Caolle had extracted this information, Jieret bypassed the point without questions. ‘Lady Maenalle, Steward of Tysan, asked for a rendezvous in a cove in the Gulf of Stormwell. Since Sethvir of Althain saw fit to pass on her request, we can presume that someone sent by Arithon will answer.’