The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts

matter how unsteady he was on his feet, his fingers knew their way about a woman.

      The wench hissed in affront. Her shove plonked the Mad Prophet backward on the unpadded timber of the bench. The air left his lungs in a whistle. Tediously, he started the effort of dragging himself upright all over again.

      ‘Slip on the ice,’ snapped the serving maid. She snatched up her tray to an indignant rattle of cheap crockery. ‘The door will be barred when you come back, and I hope your bollocks freeze solid.’

      Suffering too much for rejoinder, Dakar pried his gut from behind the trestle and carved a staggering course toward the doorway. As he bypassed the party at the fireside, a dart flew to another barrage of shouts. The mule drover had hit another bull’s-eye.

      ‘Damn me to Sithaer,’ cried the tanner in beet-faced irritation. ‘You cheat like the Shadow Master himself!’

      Dakar tacked sharply and caught himself a bump against the doorpost. ‘Hardly,’ he volunteered to whoever was wise enough to listen. ‘Yon one’s no man for harmless games. His sort of tricks infuriate and kill and make enemies.’

      But the Mad Prophet’s slurred advice was pre-empted by warning from another bystander. ‘Don’t speak that name here! Would you draw him, and the winds of ill luck? Sorcerers hear their names spoken. There’s a burned patch, I’ve heard, in Deshir where the soldier’s bones lie that will never again grow green trees.’

      Dakar half-turned to denounce this, but lost his chance as the latch let go under his hand. The doorpanel he leaned on suddenly swung wide and spilled him outside in a stumble. He yowled his injured shock as grey slush soaked both feet to the ankles; no boots, he remembered belatedly. The struggle to go back in and search for them entailed too much effort, his hose being already sodden.

      The inn yard wore ice in sheets unsliced by the ruts of any cartwheels. Unless there were east-running storms, travellers on the Eltair road were unlikely to choose the byway through the foothills. Beleaguered by gusts that cut straight off the summits of the Skyshiels to rattle the signboard of the cooper’s shack, stung by an unkindly fall of sleet, Dakar yawed and slipped on his errand. He collided with the firewood hovel, a hitching rack and a water trough, and cursed in dark conclusion that mountain villages were an uncivilized place to suffer the virulent effects of brewed hops.

      Returned an interval just short of frostbite, with his points tangled and his hair screwed to ringlets by the damp, he blundered back to the tavern door. He had sheltered in the privy until the cold came near to killing him, and was ready primed with pleas in case the barmaid was still piqued. But the panel was not locked against him. Intensely relieved, Dakar hauled his mushy socks into the taproom as furtively as his shivering would allow.

      Nobody noticed him.

      The door had stayed unbarred in the bustle created by a new arrival, a slender, aged gentleman even now being solicitously ushered to the fireside. The landlord had personally stirred from his parlour for this service, and even the sour-tempered bar wench had brightened in her haste to cheer the gloom with rushlights.

      Probably some rich man stranded in the passes by a wrong turn in the storm, Dakar supposed; until he noticed the dart players standing stalled in mute awe with their coins abandoned on the table.

      ‘Fiends plague me, I never thought to live as witness,’ the mule drover said in a powerful whisper. ‘The Masterbard himself, come to visit our village?’

      Dakar blinked in astonishment. Halliron, here?

      Beyond the smoke-grimed support beams, the newcomer tossed back his sleet-crusted hood. Shoulder-length hanks of white hair tumbled free, caught with sparkles of unmelted ice. Then, striking and clear as a signature, a mellowed voice addressed the landlord. ‘What a storm. The passes are awful. We have silver if you’ve got quarters for extra lodgers.’

      ‘Oh, no!’ protested the innkeeper. ‘That is, I have rooms. All tidy. Cleanest linen on the coast side of High-scarp. But your coin stays in your purse. Every penny. Your presence will draw customers just for the news, even if you don’t care to sing.’

      ‘Your commons won’t go tuneless, for your kindness,’ Halliron promised. Erect despite more than eight decades of age, he had a prominent, aristocratic nose, and spaced front teeth that flashed in a smile. ‘We’ll need two beds. My apprentice will be in as soon as he’s stabled the pony.’

      Crouched down to build up the fire, the landlord straightened up, horrified. ‘My boy, didn’t he meet you in the yard? Why, that laggard, no-good -’

      The door latch tripped amid the tirade. Wind-driven sleet slashed in on the draught that breathed chill through the fug from the fire as a figure muffled in wet woollens entered, moving fast. Dakar’s parked bulk was side-stepped and a new voice cut in, declaiming, ‘Your anger’s misplaced. Your groom is hard at work. The harness was wet and needed oiling, and Halliron’s pony hates boys. My master would have told you, I usually tend him myself.’

      Impatient with his headache and his relapsed eyesight, Dakar squinted at the latest arrival. Layered as he was in tatty mufflers and a cape-shouldered, nondescript mantle, there seemed more wool to him than man. A path cleared before him to the hearthside. Caked ice cracked from his clothing as he undid fastenings to disgorge a long, tapered bundle laced in oilskins. This he deposited carefully out of reach of the fire’s leaping heat. A pair of wet gloves flew off after, to land smartly on top of the settle.

      Then movement at the corner of his vision caused the stranger swiftly to spin. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Let me.’

      And Halliron, who had reached to unfasten his cloak brooch, found his wrists gently caught and restrained.

      ‘You must spare those fingers,’ chided the Master-bard’s apprentice. All unwittingly, he had managed to draw every eye in the room.

      Too congenial to be embarrassed by public attention, the aged bard gave a hampered shrug. While younger hands worked to shed his weight of sodden mantles, the innkeeper’s spaniel-eyed sympathy raised his humour. ‘Never get old. It’s a ridiculously uncomfortable process Ath Creator should be made to find a cure for.’

      Remiss for his neglected hospitality, the innkeeper barked at his barmaid. ‘Mulled wine, girl, and hot soup. And if the wife is still dallying about the kitchen, tell her to cut the fresh bread.’

      While the wench hustled off, a thoughtful Dakar propped his swaying balance against the nearest trestle. As unabashed as the dart players, he stared while the bard’s apprentice left off attending his master and turned to peel off his own heavy cloak. The man revealed underneath proved to be an indeterminate age in his twenties, compactly built to the point of slenderness. Nondescript ash brown hair fell lankly over thin cheekbones, and his eyes were a muddy grey hazel.

      He was nobody Dakar knew.

      While the visitors settled themselves, the landlord retired behind the bar to industriously buff water spots off the few tankards he owned that had glazing. Over the flow of resumed conversation as the dart players renewed their dropped game, the high-pitched exclamations of the tavern mistress rang from the depths of a pantry closet, followed by a banging of pots and hurried footsteps. A drudge appeared with bristle brush and bucket to scour the grime from the boards, while Dakar took himself off to an unobtrusive window nook, brightened by his upturn in prospects. Penniless still, sober enough to be plagued by the granddame of all headaches, he barely winced as other steps thumped the boards over his head: some servant, dispatched no doubt to ensure the linens lived up to the innkeeper’s boasts. The back door banged. Outside, through the whirl of grey sleet, one of the innkeeper’s mop-headed children dashed to spread word that the Masterbard of Athera had taken up residence for the night.

      Soon enough, the stable boy came in with the bard’s bundles of baggage. The apprentice accepted the burden and was shown upstairs to their lodgings, while the Masterbard sat by the settle to drink hot spiced wine and share news with the early arrivals. He had come down the cape coast, not through Eastwall, he told the shepherd eager to know the latest