Warhost of Vastmark. Janny Wurts

spoiled her sleep.

      They spoke of the lives they had led, Jinesse married to a man too spirited for her retiring nature to match, and the emptiness of the house since his boisterous presence had been claimed untimely by the sea. Tharrick sharpened her carving knives, flame light playing over knuckles grown scarred from his former years of armed service. The blades across the whetstone slid in natural habit, as sword steel often had before battle. Yet his voice held very little of regret as he talked about a girl who had married a rival, then the heartbreak that led him to enrol in the duke’s guard. Summer campaigns against Kalesh or Adruin had kept him too busy for homelife after that.

      They discussed the twins, who had inherited their father’s penchant for wider horizons. Often as not, the conversation ended with the widow shedding tears on Tharrick’s shoulder.

      The shortened winter days passed in swift succession to the ring of caulker’s hammers; and then in a rush that allowed neither respite nor relief, the small hull was complete and afloat. She was named the Shearfast. In a ferocious hurry that hazed the villagers to unease, the few men still employed at the shipyard fitted her out with the temporary masts and rigging to ready her for blue water.

      The grey, rainy morning her sails were bent on, the first war galleys breasted the northern horizon.

      Ashore, like wasps stirred up by the onset of cataclysm, the four hired men still caught on the Scimlade spit raced in grim haste to carry through their master’s intent to fire what remained of his shipworks. Damp weather hampered them. Even splashed in pitch and turpentine, the thatch on the sheds was slow to catch. By the time the last outbuilding shot up in flames, the oncoming fleet drew in close. The eye could distinguish their banners and blazons, the devices of Avenor and Alestron in stitched gold, on fields red as rage, and ice blue. The clarion cry of trumpets and shouted orders from the officers pealed over the wind-borne boom of drums. The oarsmen on the galleys quickened stroke to battle speed, thrashing spray in cold drifts on the gusts.

      Thigh-deep by the shoreline with a longboat held braced against the combers, the nimble little sailhand hired in to captain Shearfast screamed to hurry the men who sprinted down the strand and threw themselves splashing through the shallows. Tharrick had time to notice the widow’s forlorn figure, bundled in black shawls by the dunes, as he hurled himself over the gunwales and grabbed up oars.

      He knew Jinesse well enough to guess the depth of her misery, and to ache in raw certainty she was weeping.

      ‘Stroke!’ yelled the grizzled captain. He balanced like a monkey in the stern seat as the longboat surged ahead to the timed dig of her crew. ‘Didn’t flay my damned knuckles patching leftover canvas to see our spars get flamed in the cove!’

      A crewman who muscled the craft toward deep water cursed a skinned wrist, then flung a harried look behind. The galleys had gained with a speed that left him wide-eyed. ‘Must have demons rowing.’

      Tharrick dragged hard on his loom. ‘Those are Duke Bransian’s warships. His oarsmen won’t be a whipped bunch of convicts, but mercenaries standing short shifts.’

      ‘Rot them,’ the hired captain gasped through snatched breaths. ‘Just row and beg luck sends a squall line.’

      The newly launched hull wore a lugger’s rig. In dimmed visibility, half-seen through dirty weather, she might be passed over as a fishing craft. Distance offered a slim hope to save her. Once she lay hull down over the horizon, the duke’s fleet would see scant reason to turn and pursue what would look like a hard-run fishing smack.

      Tharrick shut his eyes and threw all his weight into the pull of his oar. Better than his fugitive companions, he knew the efficiency of Alestron’s training and assault tactics. Cold horror spurred his incentive. He might suffer a fate more ruinous than flogging should his former commanders retake him. This time he would be caught beyond doubt in collusion with Arithon s’Ffalenn.

      By the time the longboat slewed under the Shearfast’s sleek side, the burn scars on Tharrick’s palms were broken open with blisters. He winced through the sting as he clambered on board, then snarled curses with the seamen as he shouldered his share and caught hemp slivers hauling on halyards. The temporary masts carried no head-sails, only two yards rigged fore and aft with an unwieldy, loose-footed lugsail. The sorry old canvas made over from a wreck was patched and dingy with mildew.

      The captain summed up Shearfast’s prospects with language that damned in rich epithets. ‘Bitch’ll hide herself roundly in a fogbank or storm, but lumber like a spitted pig to weather. Shame that. Hull’s built on glorious lines. Rig her out decent, she’d fly.’

      ‘She’ll need to fly,’ groused the deckhand who returned at speed from unshackling the mooring chain. ‘They’re onto us, busy as sharks to bloody meat.’

      As the yards were hauled around squealing to brace full to the wind, Tharrick saw the oncoming galleys deploy in smooth formation, one group to give chase and harry, and a second to turn wide and flank them. In a straight race of speed, Shearfast was outmatched.

      The grizzled little captain bounded aft to the helm, a whipstaff that, given time and skilled carpentry, would be replaced by cables and wheel. ‘We’ve got one advantage,’ he said, then spat across the rail in madcap malice. ‘We know the reefs. They don’t. Fiends take the hindmost. Stay their course to sound the mark, and they’ve lost us.’

      Wind cracked loose canvas, then kicked sails in taut curves with a whump. Shearfast bore off and gathered way, a pressure wave of wrinkled water forced against her lee strakes as the lugsails began sluggishly to draw. The quiet, cove harbour of Merior fell behind, while east gusts spat rain through the rigging. Tharrick did not look back, nor allow himself to think of other chases in the past, when he had held a captaincy among the troops aboard the galleys.

      A hare before wolves, Shearfast wore ship and spread her patched rig on a reach to drive downcoast. The men Arithon had entrusted to crew his last vessel owned the nerve to stand down Dharkaron’s Chariot. On guts and desperation, they shouldered the challenge of an untried hull, shook her down in an ill-balanced marriage with ungainly sails, set at odds with her keel and the free-running grace of her lines. The drag of the whipstaff to hold her on course would have daunted the strength of most helmsmen. Her captain bared teeth and muscled her brute pull. Mastered through wits and determination, and an unerring gut instinct for seamanship, Shearfast danced a dainty course through the reefs. She flirted with the wind and courted the lee shore like a rich maid in rags, caught slumming in dangerous company.

      Behind her, voracious, the galleys chewed away her lead in a flying white thrash of timed oars.

      The first of them ran aground on a coral head in a grinding, grating screech of smashed timbers. Like a back-broken insect, her looms waved and splashed in clacking disunity, then snarled in misdirected stroke. Shouts re-echoed across the open water. A bugle wailed a frantic call for aid.

      ‘Hah!’ Shearfast’s captain loosed a wicked laugh. ‘There’s one belly-up and another bogged down to tend her.’

      In the waist, the one crewman not busy easing sheet-lines strung a bow and began wrapping tips onto fire arrows. His stripped palms bound in cloth, Tharrick passed lint and short lengths of twine to tie the wisps in place. Fitful drizzle added drops to the sweat misted over his face. Cold water fingered runnels down his collar. He leaned to the buck of the deck. The captain steered to headings as gnarled and tortuous as any chased prey, with the galleys relentlessly gaining.

      A curtain of rainfall dusted hazed mercury over the narrowing span of sea left between them. The captain shot a hurried, wild glance at the clouds, leaden and low-bellied as a strumpet’s hiked petticoats above the snapped crests of the whitecaps. The squall which struck now would bring no salvation. Any gain through reduced visibility would come offset by increased risk. Underwaters frayed to froth by driving bands of precipitation, the reefs Shearfast skirted would be treacherously hidden, the greener shallows that warned of submerged sandbars and coral hammered out into uniform grey.

      Rising winds slewed and