LITMIR.BIZ

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She shoved out of bed in her night rail, a handsome woman with graceful hands who marshaled her thoughts, blinking into the flare as the servant struck light to a candle. ‘The kitchen staff will be baking the day’s bread. Get someone to send them notice we’re receiving, and tell them how many guests of state.’

      ‘I’ll go, mistress,’ the steward offered at once, then added, ‘should I have the east-wing chambers refreshed?’

      ‘Wake the master of horse, first,’ the mayor amended, one foot poked half into his hose. ‘If this meeting’s too pressing to bide until daybreak, I’m thinking we’ll be dunned for fast couriers before anyone wants hospitality and beds.’

      ‘Yes, lord.’ The steward ducked out, the door latch clicked shut with apprehensive care.

      ‘At least we didn’t suffer this intrusion two days ago.’ Prosaic, the wife pinned her smoky tangles of hair, then dug in the lacquered armoire for a wrap, and the best of her fancy lace petticoats.

      Stalled by a tangle snagged in his points, the mayor gave tongue out of habit. ‘Our guild ministers weren’t all puking drunk at the twelfth night festivities.’

      ‘No.’ The honeyed agreement that made his wife indispensable at state functions preceded her wasp sting of denouement. ‘But if your Divine Prince saw all the jewels on their wives as they tried to outshine the Etarrans, we’d find his marshals dunning our treasury. Or don’t you think Avenor’s come begging for funds, or armed troops, or else the grain stores to mount a winter campaign on barbarians?’

      ‘I don’t know what he’s come for!’ Off-balance, the mayor jammed his stick shanks into his best pair of silk-slashed breeches. ‘If you’re going to speculate, have the good grace to wait until after I’ve clothed my shivering buttocks.’

      ‘You’ll sweat soon enough, on your knees before royalty.’ The wife’s catty tongue showed no deference to station. ‘Bowing to a blood prince was bother enough, before there were flocks of sunwheel fanatics, rolling cow eyes like he’s god sent.’

      The mayor stretched a kink from the small of his back, startled to unwonted laughter. ‘Say that to his Grace, I’ll buy you new pearls.’

      ‘I’d rather warn the unmarried chambermaids to steer clear of shadowy alcoves.’ Adrift in lace petticoats, with her ribbons undone, his wife looked up in snide interest. ‘Gossip from Avenor insists his Exalted Grace hasn’t bedded his princess since the hour his heir was conceived.’ Through a frown at her husband, who snatched up yesterday’s shirt for convenience, she added, ‘That’s sixteen years. If the s’Ilessid’s kept his manhood to himself for that long, I agree with his priests. He’s not human.’

      ‘He’s not human,’ the mayor affirmed, then bellowed, short-tempered, for his valet to roust up and lend help with the studs on his doublet. When the slug-headed servant failed to appear, the mayor kept talking, his elbows bent at ridiculous angles through his effort to loop rows of braid frogs on jet buttons. ‘His Grace hasn’t aged since I was a child, and he was presented as Prince of the West. That was before he forwent Tysan’s colors for a mantle of white fox and diamonds.’

      ‘Oh, he’s aged,’ the wife argued, her sharp humor fled as she stepped to assist with her husband’s disgruntled robing. ‘Just look at his eyes. Hard as faceted sapphire, and too driven for pity.’ A break, as she perked up his wilted lace collar, then, ‘You want the gold chain and ruby pendant?’ Without pause for his nod, she settled the massive links over his dove gray silk. ‘Whatever the Exalted Prince asks you to give, don’t commit the new recruits.’

      ‘What?’ The mayor peered at his wife. ‘There hasn’t been heavy fighting since the Caithwood campaign failed to clear Taerlin’s forests of clansmen.’

      ‘I know.’ His wife spun away in a rustle of layered muslin. ‘But things change. Whatever ill wind has blown in with that galley, no man of twenty should be sent out to die before the grass greens in the spring.’

      The mayor took pause, the squared links of his state jewelry dipped blood in the fluttering candlelight. ‘You think the Master of Shadow’s come back?’

      His wife plucked up her hand mirror. One glance, and her puffy eyes half filled with tears. She slapped the silvered face down in rare and explosive anger. ‘Whyever else should we be dragged out of bed before dawn?’ Discomposed by the thought of exalted state company, she rebounded to blistering irritation. ‘If Avenor brings word of the Spinner of Darkness, the ill news of his reiving is just going to wait until my maid makes me presentable.’

      Chilled in stockinged feet, unsure how to manage the imminent concept of shadows and minions of evil, the mayor bent and rummaged through the bottom of the armoire. He fetched out the fanciest boots he could find, ones with velvet-lined cuffs and stitched patterns of seed pearls. ‘I’ll delay the proceedings by serving mulled wine.’ He jammed a foppish black hat with peacock plumes over his short-cropped head, then sailed through the doorway, girded to balk s’Ilessid divinity and appease his wife’s queer foreboding.

      The hall and the stairwell were darkened by night, the pine-knot brand in the lower vestibule burned down to a flickering cinder. The light would be refreshed at the dawn change of watch, as yet several hours away.

      Such lack of diligent guard was routine. Narms was no bastion of armed prowess, to draw the Divine Prince in a crisis. Its city maintained one dilapidated keep, without earthworks. Built over and around the site of an ancient Paravian sea landing, her wealth was guild owned, and invested into skilled labor. Through the centuries since the uprising, the crumbled brick quay overlooking the bay head acquired a sprawl of shanties and warehouses. Sailhands’ dives lined the waterfront by the fishmongers’. The recessed cove of the harbor sheltered the industry of dyers and craftsmen, whose lifeblood was tied to town trade. Raw materials and goods came and left from the moss-crusted jetties built through the years after Rathain’s last high king was slaughtered. The current garrison quartered only mounted men-at-arms, split into small companies to guard caravans. For the clan raids that plagued the land route to Morvain, Narms’s south district offered a comfortable nest for fortune-seeking headhunters, who scoured Halwythwood for scalps that paid bounty.

      By tradition, Alliance interests made landfall at Narms, then passed briskly through to hold loftier counsel at Etarra.

      The mayor approached the entry to his great hall and discovered the royal delegation from the harbor already installed ahead of him. One leaf of the heavy double panel lay ajar. A spill of escaped light sliced the dimmed anteroom, strung through by the echoes of rapid-paced talk. The oddity shook him, that he felt estranged while underneath his own roof.

      Anxiety bit deeper as he reached the threshold, his shortstrided footsteps unnaturally loud as he entered the cavernous chamber. The hearthfire newly lit by his guard captain did nothing to lift the dank chill. Stone walls had been stripped of the star and moon tapestries unfurled each year for the solstice festivities. On a floor scrubbed bare of its formal wax polish, the replacement hangings of hunting scenes lay still rolled, not yet looped on the polished brass rods. The board trestles had been stacked by the wall during cleaning, except for the one set erect for the use of the surprise delegation from Tysan.

      That rectangle stood like a snag in the candlelight, bare of linen cloth, and surrounded by men whose steel-clad intensity raised a wall of unease at ten yards. Among six, on their feet, the seated man towered, his self-contained presence a mantle of majesty that seemed bred in the flesh and the bone of him. As always, Lysaer s’Ilessid held the eye like a compass drawn by a magnet.

      Golden-haired, cloaked in white, the s’Ilessid prince shone brilliant as diamond and pearl couched against the unadorned setting. The chair he occupied might have been a throne, not the tawdry furnishing the deerhounds had chewed to tattered hanks of burst horsehair. His innate nobility overshadowed his retinue, whose sunwheel tabards of gold and watered silk showed the sad creases ingrained by pack straps and sea chests.

      A glance showed the mayor his game plan was forfeit. The basket of new bread sent

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