Warhost of Vastmark

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, whispered fall of droplets. For a rootless, directionless man accustomed to armed drills and activity, the fascination with the herons that fished the shallows of Garth’s pond paled through one solitary hour. Tharrick startled the birds into ungainly flight on an oath spat out like flung stone. Like Jinesse’s twins with their penchant for scrapes, he felt himself drawn beyond reason to wander up the spit toward the racketing industry of the shipyard.

There, under firm-handed discipline, the craftsmen his fires had caught slacking laboured to rectify their lapse. He strolled among them. Brazen as nails, even daring retaliation for their master’s hand in his recovery, Tharrick meandered through the steam fanned from the boiler-shack chimney. The crunch of shavings beneath his boot soles and his conspicuous, clean linen shirt drew the eyes of the men, stripped to the waist, sweaty skins dusted by chaff from the sawpits as they cut and shaped smooth reworked planks. His trespass was noted by unembarrassed glances, then just as swiftly forgotten.

Even the master joiner, who had ordered his beatings and tried unspeakable means to force his silence, showed no rancour at his presence. Arithon’s will had made itself felt. Enemy though he was, none dared to raise word or hand against him. All were ruled by their master’s ruthless tongue and his fever-pitched driving purpose. The salvage effort on the damaged brigantine already showed a near-complete patch at her bow; the one still in frames on her bedlogs lay changed, half-cannibalized for her wood, then lessened in length and faired ready for planking. A less-ambitious vessel with a shorter sheerline took shape, fitted here and there between the yellow of new spruce with the odd checked timber fished together from the derelict lugger.

In three weeks of mulish, unswerving effort, Arithon s’Ffalenn had rechannelled his loss into what skirted the edge of a miracle.

Struck by a stabbing, unhappy urge to weep, Tharrick held his chin in stiff pride. He would not bend before awe, would not spin and run to the widow’s cottage to hide his face in shame. The man who had forgiven his malice in mercy would be shown the qualities which had earned his past captaincy in Alestron. In hesitant steps on the fringes, Tharrick began to lend his help. If his mending ribs would not let him wheel a handcart, or his palms were too tender to wield a pod auger to drill holes for treenails in hardened oak, he could steady a plank for the plane on the trestles, or run errands, or turn dowels to pin timbers and ribs. He could stoke the fire in the boiler shed, and maybe, for his conscience, regain a small measure of the self-respect he had lost to disgrace and harsh exile.

On the third day, when he returned to the widow’s with his shirt and hair flecked with shavings, he found silver on the table, left in his name by the Shadow Master.

Tharrick’s unshaven face darkened in a ruddy burst of temper.

Drawn by the bang as he hurled open the casement, Jinesse caught his wrist and stopped his attempt to fling the coins into the fallow tangle of her garden. ‘Tharrick, no. What are you thinking? Arithon doesn’t run a slave yard. Neither does he give grown men charity. He said if you can’t be bothered to collect your pay with the others, this was the last time he’d cover for your mistakes.’

‘Mistakes?’ Poised with one brawny wrist imprisoned in her butterfly clasp, Tharrick shook off a stab of temper. The widow’s tipped-up features implored him. Her hair wisped at her temples like new floss, and her wide, worried eyes were a delicate, dawn-painted blue. He swallowed. His grip on the coins relaxed from its white-knuckled tension.

‘Mistakes,’ he repeated. This time the word rang bitter. He slanted his cheek against the window frame, eyes shut in racking distaste. ‘By Daelion Fatemaster, yon one’s a demon for forcing a man to think.’

‘More than just men.’ Jinesse gave a nervous, soft laugh and let him go.

His lids still squeezed closed, Tharrick asked her, ‘What did he do for you, then?’

She stepped back, swung the basket of carrots brought up from the market onto the table, and rummaged through a drawer for a knife. ‘He once took me sailing to Innish.’ In a confidence shared with nobody else, she told what that passage had meant.

Evening stole in. The kitchen lay purpled in shadow, cut by fiery, glancing sparkles from the bowl of Falgaire crystal which sat, unused, in the dish cupboard. Tharrick progressed from helping to peel vegetables to holding Jinesse’s cool hands as she finished her careful account. They sat together without speaking, until the twins clambered through the outside doorway and startled the pair of them apart.

The storm struck before dawn to a mean snarl of wind that flattened the sea oats and hurled breakers like bulwarks against the strand. Men rushed with lanterns through the rain-torn dark to drag exposed dories into shelter behind the dunes, and supplement moorings with anchor and cable. The brunt of the gale howled in from the north, more trouble to shipping upcoast, the widow insisted, clad in a loose cotton robe as she set the pot on the hob to make soup.

If she rejoiced in the delay of the war galleys or the army, she had the restraint not to gloat.

The shutters creaked and slammed against their fastenings, and their sharp, random bangs as the gusts changed direction caused Tharrick to flinch from edged nerves. ‘What of Arithon’s shipyard?’

The widow sighed and pushed back the hair that unreeled down her shoulders like limp flax. ‘There could be damage if the wind veers. A storm surge could ride the high tide. Should the gale blow through first, the beached hulls will be safe. The luggers may run aground off the Scimlade, where sandbars have shifted from their beds, but the hook in the coastline here usually shelters us. Just pray the wind stays northeast.’

Morning broke yellow-grey as an old bruise above the eastern horizon. Cold light revealed a cove racked and littered with palm fronds and the flaccid, corpse fingers of stranded kelp. Two cottages had lost their thatched roofs. Against the whining gusts, the ragged beat of hammers resumed.

Yet when Tharrick picked his way around puddles and downed sticks to the yard on its wind-racked spit, he found no joiners at work on the framing. He was told all three shifts had been sent to make repairs in the village.

Arithon was immersed in sweating industry, restoking the stove beneath the boiler.

Quiet to one side, his hair newly trimmed and yesterday’s stubble shaven clean, Tharrick ventured the first comment he had dared since making his own way at the shipyard. ‘It’s likely your generosity has doomed the last hull.’

Arithon crammed another billet into the stove, then yanked back his hand as the sparks flew. ‘If so, that was my choice to make.’

‘I’m not a green fool.’ Tharrick envied the neat, practised speed that hurled each split piece of kindling over the heat-rippled bed of hot ash. ‘I’ve led men. Your example makes them work until their hearts burst to meet an impossible standard.’

A slick, cold laugh wrung from the Shadow Master’s throat as he clashed the fire door closed. ‘You’re mistaken.’ He straightened, reduced to lean contours sketched out in a silverpoint gleam of wet skin. His eyes were derisive and heavy with fatigue as he regarded the former guardsman who offered his tentative respect. ‘I happen to have employed every wood-sawyer and carpenter inside of thirty leagues. Had I not sent the joiners, we’d have gotten every fishwife and her man’s favourite marlinespike fouling the works here by noon. In case you hadn’t noticed, the framing’s all done. It’s the caulkers I can’t spare, and I needed some excuse to keep the fasteners overtime with the planking.’

Unapologetic, ill-tempered, Arithon sidestepped and slipped past. Abandoned to an eddied whirl of air, Tharrick swallowed back humiliation. The widow’s observation was borne out with sharp vengeance, that if the Shadow Master’s generosity could be held beyond reproach, it was not to be mistaken for his friendship.

The day wore away in grey drizzle and a murderous round of hard work. The ragged thunder of the caulkers’ mallets as hot oakum was forced between the gaps in the brigantine’s decking winnowed the stink of melting tar on winds left tainted with storm wrack. At nighfall, the pace did not relent. Planks were run out of the steam box and forced tight against the ship’s timbers. Still hot, they were fastened with treenails of locust to lie below the waterline, oak above. Torches spilled a hellish, flickering light across the naked shoulders of the labourers, slicked through the dirt where sweat and cold water channelled in runnels off their bodies.

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.