LITMIR.BIZ

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grunted in disgust, backed his rawboned mount from the hillcrest, and reined around to rejoin his brothers. Faced to the wind, his beard whipped like a lion’s mane across his faded surcoat, he regarded the Prince of the West with eyes the gritted grey of filed iron. ‘This hunt’s a shambles. We may as well discuss the other.’ Never one to trouble over niceties, he plunged headlong to the point. ‘An entire fleet was scuttled. Excuses won’t restore your burned ships. I want to know if the loss was due to incompetence.’

      Lysaer met the duke’s glare, his back straight, and his hands square and steady on his reins. ‘Let me tell you how a pirate who works sorcery and shadow goes about butchering the innocent.’

      Keldmar snorted and scuffed a gob of dirt off the steel-studded knuckles of his gauntlet. ‘The trade fleet was anchored off Werpoint for the purpose of moving your war host. A fool might call that innocent. Your s’Ffalenn enemy’s proved he’s not stupid, that’s all.’

      Parrien glared at the brother near enough in looks to be his birth twin. ‘You jabber like a woman at her laundry tub.’

      Keldmar returned a smile rowed with teeth. ‘Say that again across my sword. Words are for ninnies. Let’s determine who’s a woman with bare steel.’

      Duke Bransian shouldered his horse between the pair, effectively strangling their rivalry. To the prince interrupted by the family style of bickering, he said, ‘We have our ships snugged down and our mercenaries on leave for the season, as they should be. Winter’s no time to pursue war. Men sicken and die from disease. They desert from poor spirits. I hate this Master of Shadow full well and yet, on your counsel, we held our strike against him last summer. Now you’ve gone and made a bungle of things, bedamned if I’ll campaign in unfavourable weather to make amends for the lapse! Nor will I rise to arms in alliance for anything short of a cause to stir Dharkaron’s Chariot from Athlieria.’

      ‘We have that,’ Lysaer said, unsmiling. ‘Time’s gone against us since Werpoint. The Master of Shadow will pull out of Merior. He knows we’re aware of his intentions there. The best chance we have is to close on him now, before he dismantles his shipyard.’

      Bransian regarded the blond prince before him, silent, unbending, and as powerful as the trained war-horse beneath him, who awaited his command in taut stillness.

      Lysaer matched that dagger steel gaze. ‘You’re quick to ask of incompetence. Tell me straight, and mean what you say, that on the day your armoury went to ashes and smoke at the hand of Arithon s’Ffalenn, you never felt duped, or a fool.’

      The duke’s grey destrier flung its head hard as the fist on its reins snapped the bit. State visitors who came to Alestron to importune on the heels of a grossly misspent favour were wont to cajole, or flatter, or bring some rich offering to ease relations. This unvarnished honesty was unprecedented, its impact as stunningly unpleasant as an unveiled insult or a threat. Mearn dragged a hissed breath between his teeth, while Parrien and Keldmar fixed the Prince of the West with expressions of matched admiration.

      Straight against the icy, winter whine of the wind, Bransian flushed irate red. A hound in the distant stream bottom yipped. The huntsman’s whip cracked in swift reprimand. On the ridgetop, the more dangerous challenge brought stillness, until the duke’s war-horse sidled and slashed its thick tail in an ear-flattened response to its rider’s temper.

      Then Bransian threw back his coiffed head and succumbed to a deep, belly laugh. ‘You have bollocks, prince. I’ll give you that. Yes. I felt like the world’s born fool. If you were incompetent at Werpoint, so was I that day our secret armoury was ruined. You’ve made your point. This Shadow Master’s far too wily to be permitted to live and run abroad. But if I’m going to muster Alestron’s troops to march against him, I’m not going to waste my hours of comfort. Our plans should be discussed underneath a dry roof, over wine and a table of hot food.’

       Lane Imprints

      In Whitehold, the Koriani Prime broods over two image spheres whose significance stymies all conjecture: in one, the flare of mighty wards conceals some momentous event in Althain Tower; the next shows the Master of Shadow on a windy beach, a knife at his wrist as he kneels to swear blood oath at the feet of a Fellowship Sorcerer; and resigned to frustration, the Prime Matriarch curses timing, that First Enchantress Lirenda’s trial to regain the order’s Great Waystone cannot take place any sooner than spring equinox …

      In a windy pass in Vastmark, the discorporate Sorcerer Luhaine waylays a black-clad colleague in the company of a circling raven to relate ill news from Althain Tower: ‘The knowledge Kharadmon sought from the worlds beyond South Gate has eluded his grasp. The Mistwraith’s curse over the royal half-brothers cannot be tried at this time. Its latent evils are far worse than we feared, a danger too dire to provoke …’

      Soon after Prince Lysaer and Duke Bransian shake hands to seal an armed alliance, and the mercenary camps at Alestron muster to cross Shand to stage an attack on Merior, the clansmen under Erlien, caithdein of the realm, engage his given order to strip every farmstead in the path of the army of horses and cattle, and to hamper their advance as they can …

       II. SHIPS OF MERIOR

      In the quiet back room of the widow Jinesse’s cottage, the exiled guard captain lay on his cot in recovery, while the wind through the opened casement beside him carried the distant beat of hammers. Their frenetic rhythm did not slacken for rain showers, nor for the onset of dark. Had Tharrick still burned to inflict his revenge upon the Master of Shadow, the desperate hurry implied by the pace would have rung sweet to his ears.

      The balm of his victory instead left him hollow and distressed. The undaunted resumption of activity on the sandspit abraded the satisfaction from his achievement until he felt shamed to puzzled anguish. His single-handed attack had fairly ruined a man’s hopes, and yet, no one close to Arithon stepped forth to berate him for the damage. The widow named his friend did not stint her hospitality. She did not speak out in censure. If her twin children were more aggressive in their loyalties, the morning she caught them paired at his bedside, accusing voices raised in a shocking turn of language, she scolded their mannerless tongues and packed them off on an errand to the fish market.

      While brother and sister raced in barefoot escape down the lane, their shouts washed into the tireless thunder of surf, Tharrick turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. For hours he listened to the gusts through the palm fronds and the swish of the rush broom the widow used to tidy her floors. Left ill from his wounds, he skirted the dizzy brink of delirium. At cruel and fickle moments, his ears remade sound into the high, whining slash of the braided leather whip that stung him still in bad dreams.

      Weak as a husk swathed in dressings and poultices, he counted the knots in the ceiling beams, while the diced square of sun let in through the casement crept its daily arc across the floor.

      Afternoons, as the room cooled into shadow, Arithon came with a satchel of herbs to brew simples in the widow’s cramped kitchen. Her murmur beyond the inside door carried overtones of worry as she asked after progress at the shipyard.

      ‘The work goes well enough.’ Through the splash of well water poured from bucket to pot, Arithon explained how his craftsmen were breaking up the worn hulk of a lugger to ease the shortage of planking. ‘Dakar needs the use of your trestle table by tomorrow,’ he added in a brisk change of subject. ‘Would you mind? I’ve asked him to copy some nautical charts. He’ll stay sober. The twins have been offered three coppers to watch him. They’ve promised to fetch me running if he tries to sneak out to buy spirits.’

      Jinesse gave the delighted, little fluttery laugh she seemed to hoard for the Master of Shadow. ‘They’ll be like small fiends on his case. Won’t you pity him?’

      ‘Dakar?’ Visible through the narrow doorway, Arithon settled with his shoulder against the brick by the hob.

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