The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts

lady fortune blessed him with her kiss the night before, she had stomped on his head the next morning. Peach brandy dealt a hangover to rival the most horrible torments of Sithaer. He could hardly have felt less miserable if somebody bad sunk a pair of fleecing shears up to their handles in both eyes.

      His discomfort was not improved by the fact he sat wedged between bundles of baggage in a jostling, low-slung conveyance that just now was rolling downhill. Small stones and gravel cracked and pinged under iron-rimmed wheels that made as much noise as a gristmill. Poked in the ribs by something hard, buffeted to sorry chills by winds that smelled of spruce and fresh ice, Dakar groaned.

      ‘Oh, your acquisition is alive, I see,’ somebody observed with jilting humour. ‘Should we stop and offer him breakfast? Or no. Better ask first if he needs to piddle.’

      Dakar cracked open gummed eyes. Granted a retreating view of a switched-back road edged with evergreen, he groaned and rolled back his head, only to be gouged in the nape by a flat griddle. He was in the Masterbard’s pony cart, inveigled there by Medlir’s sweet tongue and imprudent consumption of alcohol. Being stranded and broke in a backcountry tavern in hindsight began to show merits.

      The brandy had spun him wicked dreams.

      Badgered through his sleep by a quick-tongued man with green eyes, black hair, and the sharp-planed features of s’Ffalenn royalty, the Mad Prophet wondered what prompted his mind to play tricks and prod him with memories of the Shadow Master.

      Then the cart jerked to a stop, which taxed his thought to a standstill. A shadow fell over him. Somebody not much larger than his nemesis in build, but with intentions infinitely kinder said, ‘Do you have to pee?’

      Dakar rubbed crust from his lashes. Medlir leaned on the cart side and watched him with eyes of muddied hazel. His smile was sympathetic. ‘I don’t imagine you feel hale. Who’d have thought you the hero, to drain that flask to the dregs?’

      ‘If there’d been another just like it, I could’ve emptied that one as well. You would too, if you knew the man I’m supposed to be protecting.’ Dakar added with thick urgency, ‘Since you asked, the bushes are a very good idea.’

      Medlir let down the tailgate, whose fastening pins and boards and battered binges combined to make a terrible racket. Holding his head, Dakar levered himself up and out from his nest amid the camp gear. He staggered into the roadway, not to relieve himself, but to find himself a cranny in which to crouch and be sick. He managed to reach the ditch by the roadside. There Medlir’s thoughtful grip was all that kept him from pitching head-down into puddles scummed over in ice and stitched with brambles.

      That wretchedness finished, back upright on unsteady legs, Dakar realized his feet were no longer unshod. Somebody had kindly, if carelessly, restored his mislaid boots. The beer-damp stockings inside had crumpled in a way sure to chafe him a wicked set of blisters.

      Still, Dakar concluded as he hauled himself back to the wagon, he would perish of a million wasting hangovers before he would bend to Asandir’s will concerning the Master of Shadow. If my life wasn’t bothered by sorcerers, maybe then I could stop drinking,’ he confided as he moled his way under a carriage rug.

      Halliron unbraced the brake and clucked to the shaggy buckskin between the shafts. The cart rattled south down the Eltair road, that ran like a track of unreeled string, pinched between the black rock shores of the bay and the snow-bearded range of the Skyshiels. Cold winds scoured with salt off the water parted the pony’s rough coat. Halliron drove with his hands layered in mittens, while Medlir walked, his stride loose and long, and his mind preoccupied with recitation of ballads, or some lilted line of melody to which his master would often contribute comment.

      A bard’s apprenticeship involved rigorous study, as Dakar came to appreciate in the hours while his hangover lifted. Although Halliron wore his age well, his years numbered eighty-seven. The damp bothered more than his hands, and although he seldom complained of his aches, he was engaged in a desperate race to train his successor before vigour failed him.

      In an afternoon stop at a post station, where a room was engaged to allow the old man to rest, Medlir admitted to Dakar that the trip to Shand was for sentiment.

      ‘The Masterbard was born at Innish on the south coast, where River Ippash meets the sea. He would see his home before he dies and have his ashes laid by the canals near his family.’

      ‘He has family?’ Dakar said, surprised. As many years as he bad known Halliron, he had never heard mention of roots.

      ‘A daughter, I think.’ Medlir picked at a plate of sausage and bread, too considerate for unrestrained gossip. ‘The mother preferred not to travel.’

      Thoroughly familiar with every road in the continent, Dakar weighed distances and miles. ‘You could make the south coast by the summer.’

      ‘Well, yes.’ Medlir smiled. ‘We hope to. If every tavern in between can stop flinging us blandishments to tarry.’

      The common room was nearly empty, the last relay of messengers from Highscarp being mounted outside in the yard. Flushed from the morning’s raw winds, or maybe the heat of the fire, Medlir appeared not to mind the way Dakar surveyed him relentlessly: from slim, musician’s fingers that tapped whistle tunes on the edges of the crockery, to the unique way he chose to style his shirts, with sleeves full and long to the forearm, the cuffs tight-laced over the wrists to end at the heel of his hands.

      In the hour of the Mist wraith’s curse, Arithon bad once fielded a strike from a light-bolt that left him welted from right palm to elbow, Dakar remembered. The unbidden association made him frown. He stared all the closer at Halliron’s apprentice, who leaned back to stretch in the sunlight that sloped through the casement.

      His hands proved unscarred on both sides.

      Dakar stifled an oath of self-disgust. Paranoia was making him foolish. The Master of Shadow was mage-trained. To another eye schooled to know talent, his aura should have blazed with unshed power against the darkened panelling of this room. By now sobered up enough to use Asandir’s teaching, Dakar squinted and peered, but detected nothing beyond the life-force that should halo the form of an ordinary man in prime health. He relaxed and started to sit back, then swore beneath his breath as he realized: such a detail could be masked with shadow.

      ‘What?’ Medlir regarded him inquiringly. ‘You seem bothered. Are you certain you won’t share my meal?’

      The Mad Prophet looked into the man’s guileless face, then on impulse raised his hands and summoned power until his fingers streamed trailers of mage-fire.

      Grey eyes ticked with mustard flecks watched him back, neither dazzled nor curious. Not a lash or a lid quivered at Dakar’s display; the minstrel apprentice’s pupils, widened in the dimness, failed to narrow so much as a hair’s-breadth.

      ‘Forgive me,’ Medlir said. ‘I wasn’t thinking, of course. You must still be feeling quite shaky.’ He pushed aside his plate, leaned on his elbows, and peeled a flaked callus from a fingertip well thickened from fret board and lyranthe string. ‘We probably won’t be moving on today, anyway. Halliron slept poorly last night. Since he’ll do best if he rests until tomorrow, I will play in the common room to satisfy the landlord. You can have a bed and hot soup.’

      Now Dakar grinned slyly back. ‘Actually, I’d rather hear you sing me the ballad of the Cat and the Mead.’

      ‘Which version?’ Medlir reached across the bench, lifted Halliron’s instrument, and began with enthusiasm to untie wrappings. ‘There’s the one that’s suitable for little children, and the one fit for nowhere but the bawdy house, and a half dozen variations that fall in the range in between.’

      ‘Oh, try the one that’s obscene,’ Dakar said, his plump chin propped on folded knuckles and his cheeks dimpled in contentment over his scraggle of red beard.

      ‘The one with eighty eight verses and that awful repetitive chorus?’ Medlir tucked the lyranthe on his lap, made swift adjustment of the strings,