Warhost of Vastmark. Janny Wurts

stare at Tharrick in shock. ‘Is that what you believe? If it’s true, there’s no thread of evidence. These brigantines weren’t planned for armament. I held the impression they were Arithon’s hope to outrun the bloodshed loosed upon him by the armies from the north.’

      The bandaging resumed in stiff silence. Arithon slept on, pliant as a scarecrow, his head tipped aslant and his blistered palms slack against the soiled thighs of his breeches. Jinesse proceeded on her own to mix the tisane from valerian and poppy to dull her invalid’s pain and let him sleep. Warmed and eased by her ministrations, Tharrick watched through half-closed eyelids as she hooked the basket of soiled linens on one arm and collected the herb jar and pot from the side table. As comfort returned and he slipped into drugged reverie, he noticed she took extreme care not to disturb the other sleeper as she passed.

      Before he dozed off, Tharrick pondered this reserve, in his quiet way relieved. If she were corrupted by the Shadow Master, or sheltered him in collusion, she acted without ties to the heart.

      In time, the wounded guardsman drifted into dreams. When he roused, much later, and Jinesse brought him bread and gruel, the chair was vacant and Arithon long gone.

      The days passed, the schedule of the widow’s attentions interspersed between drug-soaked sleep and hours spun into muddled awareness. Impressions not hazed by possets and fever stood out like cut crystal: of the twins’ boisterous contention over which last fetched water from the well; of a killdeer crying in the deeps of the night; of storm rains pattering the beachhead, and once, Arithon’s voice in a whipcrack inflection berating the Mad Prophet for shoddy penmanship on the charts.

      ‘I don’t care blazes if an iyat has warped all your quill pens! If you’re too fat and slack to chalk out a simple bane-ward, then buy a tin talisman for the purpose! Either way, your copies had better be up to my standards.’

      ‘To Sithaer with all that!’ Dakar plunged on in scathing hatred. ‘Alestron’s joined forces with Lysaer to kill you. I saw the duke swear alliance in a dream …’

      Another night, held restless and awake by the throb of the leg wound that had festered, Tharrick overheard the end of another discussion, Arithon’s diction muted by concern. ‘Well yes, the coffers are low. The outlay to the forges at Perdith was never planned. I’ve got enough silver left to keep the workers on, period. No more funds for wood. None for new canvas. If the hull that’s least damaged gets launched at all, she’ll have to leave Merior under tow. The point’s likely moot. Ath knows there’s no coin to charter a vessel to drag her.’

      A chair scraped on brick as Jinesse arose to set water on the hob for tea. Some other stranger with a sailor’s broad drawl murmured commiseration, then finished off in dry warning. ‘The rumour’s true enough. Alestron’s troops of mercenaries are mustering. War galleys refitted to put to sea. You’d better pray Ath sends in storms black enough to close the harbours, because if the season holds fair, the sands of Scimlade Tip could soon grow too hot to hold you.’

      Then Dakar cut in, carping, ‘If you had a firkin of sense, man, you’d give up the yard. Take what silver you have left and sail out on the tide in your sloop.’

      Arithon replied in a timbre to raise sudden chills. ‘I have no intention of letting my efforts get scuttled in Merior’s harbour. That means you’re not only going to stay sober, you’ll stir off your backside and help. I want a lane scrying daily at noon, and each time you fail me, by my oath to Asandir, I’ll see you starve without dinner.’

      The back-and-forth volley of argument extended long into the night. When Jinesse entered late, her pale face lit by the flutter of a hand-carried candle, Tharrick struggled up from his pillow. ‘Why doesn’t the Shadow Master take better care? I can eavesdrop on all of his plans.’

      ‘If you ask him yourself, he would tell you straight out that he hasn’t got anything to hide.’ Jinesse set her light on the nightstand, bent over, and laid a tentative palm on his brow. ‘Your fever’s abated. How goes the pain? The posset should be stopped, if you can bear it. Poppy’s unsafe, over time. Arithon won’t have you grow addicted.’

      ‘Why ever should he care?’ Tharrick cried, and flopped back, his large hands bunched in the sheets the way a castaway might cling to a reef. ‘What am I to him but an enemy?’

      His dread had recurred more than once in his nightmares, that a sorcerer might cosset an assassin back to health for some lingering, spell-turned revenge.

      Jinesse tugged the linen free of Tharrick’s fists and smoothed the ruched bedclothes across his chest. She looked tired. The dry lines of crow’s-feet around her eyes were made harsh in the upslanting glow of the candle as she gave a tight shake of her head. ‘The prince means you no harm. He’s said, if you wanted, he would arrange for a cart to bear you to take sanctuary in the hostel with Ath’s adepts. The moment you’re well enough to travel, you can leave.’

      Tharrick dragged in a hissed breath and said in bleak pain through locked teeth, ‘When I go, I shall walk, and not be asking that bastard for his royal charity.’

      A timid, pretty smile bowed the widow’s mouth. ‘Ask mine, then. You’re welcome here. By my word, his coin never paid for your soup.’

      Tharrick sank back into sheets that smelled faintly of lavender, his cheeks stained to colour by embarrassment. ‘You know I have no prospects.’

      Against habit, the widow’s smile broadened. ‘My dear man, forgive me. But you’re going to have to be back up and walking before that becomes anybody’s worry.’

      Denied cause for outrage, reft of every justification for his enmity against the Shadow Master, Tharrick exerted his last, stubborn pride to arise from his bed and recover. From his faltering first steps across the widow’s cottage, his progress seemed inextricably paired with the patching of the damaged brigantine his act of revenge had holed through.

      A fit man, conditioned to a life of hard training, he pressed his healing strength with impatience. Reclad in castoffs from Jinesse’s drowned husband, Tharrick limped through the fish market. His path skirted mud between bait casks and standing puddles left from the showers that swept off the wintry, slate sea. The snatches of talk he overheard among the women who salted down fish for the barrels made uneasy contrast with the nighttime discussions over the widow’s kitchen trestle. Here, the strident squabbles as the gulls snatched after offal seemed the only stressed note. Engrossed in homey gossip, Merior’s villagers appeared utterly oblivious to the armed divisions bound south to storm their peninsula.

      Tharrick maintained a stiff silence, set apart by his awareness of the destruction Duke Bransian’s style of war could unleash. The fishwives’ inimical, freezing quiet disbarred him from conversation. Already an outsider, his assault upon Arithon’s shipyard made him outcast. Disapproval shuttered the villagers’ dour faces and pressured him to move on. Tharrick felt just as uneasy in their company, uninformed as they were of Dakar’s noon scryings, which showed an outbreak of clan livestock raids intended to hamper Alestron’s crack mercenaries in their passage down the coast.

      Such measures would yield small delay. Once on the march, s’Brydion war captains were a force inexorable as tide, as Tharrick well knew from experience. A fleet pulled out of dry dock converged to blockade, manned by cautious captains who took care to snug down in safe harbours at night. This was not the fair weather trade season, when passage to Scimlade Tip might be made without thought in a fortnight. Through the uneasy winds before each winter’s solstice, no galleyman worth his salt dared the storms that could sweep in without warning. Years beyond counting, ships had been thrashed to wreckage as they hove into sight of sheltered waters. The passage between Ishlir and Elssine afforded small protection, where the grass flats spread inland and mighty winds roared off the Cildein Ocean. Even Selkwood’s tall pines could gain no foothold to root. What oaks could survive grew stunted by breakage, skeletal and hunched as old men.

      Bound in its tranquil spell of ignorance, unwarned by the cracking pace of Arithon’s work shifts, the folk of Merior walked their quiet lanes, while their rows of whitewashed cottages shed the rains in a mesmerized,