Warhost of Vastmark. Janny Wurts

      The joiners returned in grumbling small groups. Their senior craftsman sought Arithon to call him aside. Pressed by his mulish, exhausted reluctance, the stout-bellied journeyman who checked the yard’s measuring gave in to necessity and shouldered the end of the plank the Shadow Master had been carrying.

      ‘It’s only a ship,’ the master joiner exhorted to the spare, tired figure that confronted him. ‘Does losing her matter so much that you ruin yourself and break the very hearts of the men?’

      Scathing in anger, Arithon said, ‘You brought me away just for that?’

      ‘No.’ The master joiner braced rangy shoulders against the urgency of those green eyes upon him. ‘You’re losing your sense of propriety. This morning Tharrick admired your judgment and you threw back his words in his face.’

      Arithon’s lips thinned into instant contempt. ‘In case you’d failed to notice, Tharrick’s all too quick to carve life up into absolutes. I can do very well without his worshipful admiration. Not when the reckoning is likely as not to get him killed by the hand of his own duke!’

      ‘Very well.’ The master joiner shrugged. ‘If you’re Sithaer bent on wearing yourself out with work, I’ll not stand and watch with only my good sense for company.’ An easy-natured spirit when his handiwork was not being kindled by vengeance-bent arsonists, he stripped off his shirt and ordered his journeyman to hand him his heaviest mallet.

      A question rang back through the darkness. The master joiner returned his most irritable bellow. ‘Bedamned to my supper! I asked for a tool to shoulder a shift with the fasteners.’

      The next day brought news, called across choppy water to a fishing lugger from a Telzen trader blown off her course by the storm. A troop of mercenaries north of the city had come to grief when the plank span of the river bridge in Selkwood had collapsed beneath their marching weight.

      ‘Barbarian work,’ the fisherman related. ‘No lives were lost, but the delay caused an uproar. The duke’s captains were short-tempered when they reached the city markets to resupply.’

      If Merior’s villagers never guessed the identity of the man Alestron’s army joined forces with Prince Lysaer to eradicate, Arithon continued his pursuits in brazen defiance of the odds. Undaunted by logic, that his enemies would board galleys to cross Sickle Bay to shorten the long march through Southshire, he faced this fresh setback without flinching.

      The fleet he had burned in Werpoint harbour to buy respite had won him precious little leeway. Alestron’s troops would be hounding his heels well ahead of the advent of spring.

      Clad in a shirt for the first time in weeks, the light in his hair like spilled ink, Arithon stood to one side of the hull of his sole salvaged brigantine. Her new decking caulked and made watertight only that morning, she wore the strong reek of oakum and tar, and a linseed aroma of new paint. In sheer, smooth lines, an axe forged to cleave through deep waters, she seemed to strain toward the surface of the bay. The yard workers who crowded in excitement by the strand could not help but feel proud of their accomplishment. If any of them knew of the warhost days away, none broached the subject to Tharrick.

      The man who replaced the master shipwright and another one chosen for fast reflexes knelt beneath a keel sheathed in gleaming copper. They pounded now to split out the blocks that braced the craft on her ways. The high cries of gulls, and the clangour of steel mauls marked the moment as the hull shifted, her birth pang a creak like the stretched joints of a wrestler.

      Fiark’s shout rang down from his perch on the bowsprit. Content to hang in Arithon’s shadow, Feylind flung both arms around his waist in a hug of elfin delight.

      Rankly sweating in a tunic too hot for the tropics, Dakar observed the proceedings in glowering sobriety. ‘Their faith is vast,’ he said, and sniffed down his nose, as the eighty-foot vessel shifted and squealed on her ways. Her quivering hesitancy marked the start of her plunge toward her first kiss of salt waters. ‘I wouldn’t be caught under that thing. Not drunken, insane, nor for the gold to founder a trade galley.’

      From his place in deep shadow, arrested between mallet strokes, the shipwright cracked a dry laugh. ‘And well might you worry, at that! A fat sot like you, down here? First off, if you’d fit, the Fatemaster would as likely snatch at his chance to turn your lazy bones beneath the Wheel.’

      Dakar’s outraged epithet became lost as the hull gave way into motion with a slide of wood on wood. She splashed onto the aquamarine breast of the shallows, adrift, to the twins’ paired shrieks of exuberance.

      While sailhands recruited from the south shore taverns waded after, to catch lines and launch longboats to warp the floated hull to a mooring, Tharrick was among the first to approach and offer his congratulations. Arithon returned a quick, brilliant smile that faded as the former guardsman’s gaze shifted to encompass the smaller hull still poised forlorn on her ways.

      Understanding flashed wordless between them. Of ten ships planned at the outset, one brigantine in the water might be all that Arithon’s best effort could garner. As fishermen said, his luck neared the shoals; the hour was too late to save the second.

      Whatever awaited in the uncertain future, the workers were spared trepidation. A beer cask was rolled out and broached in the yard to celebrate the launching of Khetienn, named in the old tongue for the black-and-gold leopard renowned as the s’Ffalenn royal arms. While the mean schedule slackened and men made merry to the pipe of a sailor’s tin whistle, Arithon, and most notably, Dakar, were conspicuous for their early absence. If the new vessel’s master pleaded weariness, the Mad Prophet was parted from the beer cask in vociferous, howling disagreement. Too careful to drink in the company of men his earlier rancour had injured, Tharrick slipped away the moment he drained his first tankard.

      The boom of winter breakers rolled like thunder down the sleepy village lanes. Slanted in afternoon shadows through the storm-stripped palms, he strode past the fishnets hung out to dry and entered the widow’s cottage. The day’s homey smell of fish stew and bacon was cut by a disquieting murmur of voices.

      The twins were not in their place by the hob, shelling peas and squalling in argument. In a quiet unnatural for their absence, a meeting was in progress around the trestle in Jinesse’s kitchen.

      ‘Tonight,’ Arithon was saying, his tone subdued to regret, ‘I’ll slip Talliarthe’s mooring on the ebb tide and sail her straight offshore. No trace will be left to follow. The workers are paid through the next fortnight. Ones loyal to me will ship out one by one, the last out to scuttle the little hull. When the Prince of the West arrives with his galleys, he’ll find no sign of my presence, and no cause to engage bloody war.’

      ‘What of the Khetienn?’ the widow protested. ‘You can’t just abandon her. Not when she’s cost all you own to get launched.’

      Arithon flipped her a sweet, patient smile. ‘We’ve made disposition.’ Across a glower of palpable venom from the Mad Prophet, he added, ‘Dakar held a dicing debt over a trader captain out of Innish. His galley lies off Shaddorn to slip in by night and take my new vessel under tow. Her sails, her mastcaps and chain are crated and packed in her hold along with the best of the yard’s tools. The riggers at Southshire will complete her on credit against a share of her first run’s cargo. With luck, I’ll stay free to redeem her.’

      A board creaked to Tharrick’s shifted weight. Arithon started erect, noted whose presence blocked the doorway, then settled back in maddening complacence.

      ‘You dare much to trust me,’ said the exiled captain. ‘Should you not show alarm? It’s my own duke’s army inbound toward this village. A word from me and that hull could be impounded at Southshire.’

      ‘Will you speak, then?’ challenged Arithon. Coiled and still as the leopard his brigantine honoured, the calm he maintained as he waited for answer built to a frightening presence. In the widow’s cosy kitchen, the quiet felt isolate, a bubble blown out of glass. The sounds outside the window, of surf and crying gulls and the distant shouts of