LITMIR.BIZ

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seven years. You’ll agree, it’s time I returned home to Alestron and settled myself with a wife.’

      Before Lysaer could speak, he jerked up his chin. ‘No leave is asked. I’m not one of your subjects.’

      Lysaer smiled in carved, regal tolerance. ‘No need to stand upon thorny clan pride. I never made such a claim. Please give your brother the duke my regards and the blessing of the Alliance.’

      The words held dismissal. A polite man would leave. Mearn remained planted like immovable oak, his eyes pale ice in the gloom.

      Lysaer chose diplomacy and ignored him, bent back to review the outspread leaves of scale drawings. He asked questions of Cattrick, who resumed answering with unruffled brevity. Minutes flowed into another hour. The shutters fretted in the play of the sea breeze, and the half-burned-down tallow dips gyrated to the wayward tug of the drafts. Outside, the yard workers indulged their light spirits, keyed to fast talk and euphoria. They seemed reluctant to leave. Their royal visitor was held by some to be god sent, and the rumors of miracles and divine favor gained fresh force with each passing month. Through Cattrick’s clipped consonants, the foreman’s exasperated remonstrance mingled with the metallic clangor of tools being put away. ‘Well, don’t just gawp with yer jaws hanging open. Damn fools. Honest citizens might think this was a boys’ brothel, the way you lot hang about, staring at a closed doorway.’

      ‘You wishing?’ somebody whooped, half-choking with laughter, and the clutter of voices diminished as the yard at last settled to the night watch’s step and the wash of the first riptide breakers.

      The parchment drawing of a brig’s revised lines remained spread on the table as Lysaer finally straightened to end his detailed inspection. Others, loosely rolled, not yet tied with string, lay in a jumbled heap to one side. Mearn still held his place, a taut form melted into close-woven shadow. His watching eyes caught the unsteady light like pinned sparks as the royal men-at-arms regrouped for their charge’s departure.

      White velvet and diamonds lent Prince Lysaer a wintery majesty as he voiced his commendation for Cattrick’s watertight management. ‘The neglect brought on by my absence will be put right the moment my handfasting to Erdane’s daughter can replenish the funds in the treasury. Rest assured, her dowry will bring in enough gold to amend the quality of your raw materials. You’ll have whatever sum you name then. Make an itemized list and send it under seal to my seneschal.’ He paused, his smile bestowed like new morning. ‘Until then, be diligent. After the Shadow Master’s blatant acts of piracy, the trade guilds must be given a show to mend their shaken faith. I will ask that my newly launched fleet be ready to sail into Avenor with flags flying to commemorate my nuptials.’

      ‘Your Grace,’ Cattrick acknowledged, his bow neat and perfunctory. ‘You’ll have a display worth your confidence.’

      He accompanied the prince as far as the doorway, saw him out into rising wind and a night fallen dense as stuck tar.

      Cattrick closed the door and reset the bar. For a large man, he moved carefully. The loft’s gapped, wooden floor creaked to his tread as he crossed back to the table and began one by one to tidy and roll up the ships’ plans. No fool, he judged as Lysaer had, that Mearn s’Brydion enjoyed any chance to pick fights. He chose not to comment. The clan hothead deserved to be ignored for his scathing lack of manners, his interruption, and his irritating effrontery.

      Mearn proved unkindly disposed to the silence. He shifted foot to foot through the distant bark of laughter from the garrison sentry who exchanged parting banter and secured the yard gates. Through the clattering hooves of the royal departure, he pushed off from the sill and completed a stalking cat’s stride. A stiletto appeared from nowhere. Steel scribed a hot flash as he threw the weapon across the tentative halo of flameglow.

      The blade struck and sang quivering, impaled through the scroll which Cattrick had just laid aside.

      ‘I know ships,’ Mearn opened through the diminishing whine as stressed metal subsided into stillness.

      Cattrick’s lips peeled back in the smile that made even Arithon s’Ffalenn take cold stock. ‘That’s a claim that demands a forfeit, in this place.’

      Mearn laughed. His teeth were crisply white as a ferret’s. ‘If you are speaking to Lysaer’s lackey, I believe you. Don’t lie. I have a second knife.’

      Cattrick straightened, linked his broad hands, and stretched until the joints in his shoulders cracked. ‘All right. The knife’s a provocation. Remember that. And I won’t need to lie. If I am speaking to Lysaer’s lackey, he wouldn’t leave the yard gates with his life.’

      Mearn’s eyes lit, cold as balefire with challenge. ‘Imagine my joy. I do think perhaps I might like what I hear.’

      ‘Then why not tell me, if you know your ships?’ Cattrick yanked out the knife, flicked his wrist, and let the pierced parchment unroll with a scraping hiss until it lay flat on the trestle.

      ‘Well enough. That’s fair.’ Mearn advanced and chose a stance on the opposite side of the board. ‘The irony shouldn’t escape you, I made certain. Now we both have knives.’

      Cattrick unbent to a rough, booming laugh, then yanked open the drawstrings of his sleeve cuffs and shoved them back to clear his wrists. ‘You clansmen have arrogance bred into the bone.’ The knife in his hand described fearless threat. ‘Let us also see if your landlubber minds can interpret what I know to make ships cleave a course through blue water.’

      Mearn returned his most evil grin and snapped a finger into the parchment. ‘This brig might have a grace to her lines fit to melt a man’s heart at her launching. But the love affair ends at her shakedown. She’ll be wayward as a cow under canvas. I’d bank on a nasty lee helm at the stiffening hint of a squall.’ He raised his head, treated Lysaer’s master shipwright to the frost of an unforgiving glare. ‘In a gale, I’d bet silver she’ll founder.’

      Outside, the harbor bell tolled to mark the full change of the tide. A gust buffeted through gapped boards in the shutters and fluttered the flames in the sconces. Cattrick flipped the knife and, with his own stamp of insolence, used its murderous edge to scrape tar from the rims of his fingernails. His eyes, half-hooded in apparent inattention, shared the same vicious glints as the steel. ‘Go on,’ he urged the s’Brydion ambassador. ‘You passed the unfinished frames on their bedlogs. What else did you see outside?’

      ‘Mayhem.’ Mearn slapped the handle of his knife against his gloved palm, tap, tap, tap, like the winding tension on a ratchet. ‘The fleet Prince Lysaer has commissioned from you will be lucky to withstand the first coast-hopping run to Avenor.’

      ‘Opinion,’ Cattrick fired back. He sidestepped and sat on the chartloft’s crude stool. ‘If I’m talking to Lysaer’s sworn ally, what then?’

      ‘You have a bigger problem on your hands than ships that won’t answer their helmsman.’ Slap! went the knife handle, then ceased with an emphasis as startling. Mearn qualified into the teeth of raw tension, ‘The craftsmen in your yard are scarcely unseasoned. Why haven’t they noticed? And if they have, shouldn’t you now beware of their temper? Prince Lysaer can move plain stone to adore him. You know they worship him as an avatar in Avenor.’

      ‘A warning?’ Cattrick unfolded to his massive height, expansive with stifled delight. ‘The knife, you say, won’t come from up front, but in the back from some planker’s self-righteous turn of conscience? Why worry? This yard’s been guarded like a pedigree virgin since the Master of Shadow beset us with thievery last winter. I shape my own risks. The men here in position to know me will also have to choose theirs. High time I ask what reason you have to jam your sniping clan nose in my business.’

      ‘Well, first off,’ said Mearn, ‘I came here to kill you. A matter concerning a letter scribed in your hand that drew Lysaer s’Ilessid from Etarra with armed troops. A lot of clan blood was spilled over that. That’s a stirring provocation; only now, your ships’ plans give me reason to take pause. If you’ve turned coat again,

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