Warhost of Vastmark

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.

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 fishermen snatched by the wind from the decks of a lugger, assumed the unreality of a daydream.

Tharrick found himself unable to sustain the blank patience implied by those level, green eyes. ‘Why should you take such a risk?’

Arithon’s answer surprised him. ‘Because your master abandoned all faith in you. The least I can do as the cause of your exile is to leave you the chance to prove out your duke’s unfair judgment.’

‘You’d allow me to ruin you in truth,’ Tharrick said.

‘Once, that was everything you wanted.’ Motionless Arithon remained, while the widow at his shoulder held her breath.

The appeal in Jinesse’s regard made Tharrick speak out at last. ‘No.’ He had worked himself to blisters seeing that brigantine launched. Respect before trust tempered his final decision. ‘Dharkaron Avenger bear witness, you’ve treated me nothing but fairly. Betrayal of your interests will not be forthcoming from me.’

Arithon’s taut brows lifted. He smiled. The one word of thanks, the banal platitude he instinctively avoided served to sharpen the impact of his pleasure. His honest emotion struck and shattered the reserve of the guardsman who had set out to wrong him.

Tharrick straightened his shoulders, restored to dignity and manhood.

Then the widow’s shy nod of approval vaulted him on to rash impulse. ‘Don’t scuttle the other brigantine. I could stay on, see her launched. If Alestron’s galleys are delayed a few days, she could be jury-rigged out on a lugger’s gear.’

Arithon pushed to his feet in astonishment. ‘I would never on my life presume to ask so much!’ He embarked on a scrutiny that seemed to burn Tharrick through to the marrow, then finally shrugged, embarrassed and caught at a loss. ‘I need not give warning. You well know the odds you must face, and the risk.’

Tharrick agreed. ‘I could fail.’

Arithon was curt. ‘You could find yourself horribly compromised.’ Small need to imagine how Duke Bransian might punish what would be seen as a second betrayal.

‘Let me try,’ the former guardsman begged. He suddenly felt the recovery of his honour hung on the strength of the sacrifice. ‘I give you my oath, I’ll do all I can to save what my pride set in jeopardy.’

‘You’ll not swear to me,’ Arithon said, his rebuff fallen shy of the vehemence his cornered straits warranted. ‘I’ll be far offshore and beyond Lysaer’s reach. No. If you swear, you’ll bind your promise to the widow Jinesse. She’s the only friend I have in this village who’s chosen to stay with the risk of knowing my identity.’

‘Demon!’ Amazed to near anger by the trap that would hold him to the absolute letter of loyalty, Tharrick asked, ‘Have you always weighed hearts like the Fatemaster?’ For of all spirits living, he would not see the widow let down.

The white flash of a grin, as Arithon caught his hand in a firm clasp of amity. ‘I judge no one. Your duke in Alestron was a man blind to merit. If the labourers in the yard will support your mad plan, I’d bless my good luck and be grateful.’

Sealed to undertake the adventure on a handshake, Tharrick stepped back. The Master of Shadow gave a nod in salute to Jinesse, who hung back in mute anguish by the hob. With no more farewell than that, he turned in neat grace toward the doorway.

Dakar heaved to his feet and followed after, plaintive and resigned as a cur snapped on a short leash. ‘We could at least stay for supper,’ he lamented. ‘Jinesse spreads a much better table than you do.’

His entreaty raised no reply.

The last Merior saw of Rathain’s prince was his spare silhouette as he launched Talliarthe’s tiny dory against the silver-laced breakers on the strand. His bright, pealing laugh carried back through the rush of the tide’s ebb.

‘Very well, Dakar. I’ve laid in spirits to ease your sick stomach on the voyage. But you’ll broach the cask after we’ve rowed to the mooring. Once aboard the sloop, you can drink yourself senseless. But damned if I’ll strain myself hauling your deadweight over the rail on a halyard.’

Fugitives

The twins stowed away. No one discovered their absence until dawn, when the luggers sailed out to fish. By then, the bayside mooring that had secured the Khetienn bobbed empty. The line of the horizon cut the sea’s edge in an unbroken band, Arithon’s sloop Talliarthe long gone.

The widow’s tearful questions raised no answers. No one had seen the children slip into the water by moonlight the previous night. No small, dripping forms had been noticed, climbing the wet length of a mooring chain, and no dory was missed from the beach.

‘They could be anywhere,’ Jinesse cried, her thin shoulders cradled in Tharrick’s burly arms and her face pressed against his broad chest. Memories of Innish’s quayside impelled her to jagged edged grief. ‘Ten years of age is far too young to be out and about in the world.’

Tharrick stroked the blonde hair she had been too distraught to bind up. ‘They’re not alone,’ he assured her. ‘If they hid in the sloop, they’ll come to no harm. Arithon cares for them like an older brother.’

‘What if they stowed aboard the Khetienn?’ Jinesse’s voice split. ‘Ath preserve them, Southshire’s a sailor’s port! Even so young, Fiark could be snatched and sold to a trade galley! And Feylind -’ She ran out of nerve to voice her anxieties over brothels.

‘No.’ Tharrick grasped her tighter and gave her a gentle shake. ‘Arithon’s two most trusted hands sailed with that brigantine. Think soundly! His discipline’s forthright. His men fear his temper like Dharkaron himself, or believe this, I’d have found my throat slit on the first dark night since he freed me.’

Every labourer in the yard knew their master’s fondness for the twins. The measure of his censure when rules were transgressed, or a mob grew unruly with drink, was an experience never to be forgotten. Arithon’s response to Tharrick’s rough handling had been roundly unpleasant, had left joiners twice his size and strength cowed and cringing. It would be worth a man’s life to misuse the widow’s children, or allow any harm to befall them.

While Jinesse’s composure crumpled into sobs, Tharrick bundled her close and swept her out of the fog and back to the snug comfort of her cottage.

‘It’s eighty leagues overland to Southshire!’ he cried as she lunged to snatch her shawl and chase the fish wagon. ‘You won’t make it off the Scimlade peninsula before that army’s sealed the roads.’

Which facts held an unkindly truth. Made by plodding oxcart, such a journey would take weeks. A fishing lugger might reach the south-coast in a fortnight, but to seek out the Khetienn with an army infesting Alland was to jeopardize Arithon’s anonymity. Jinesse sank down at her kitchen table, her face muffled in her hands and her shoulders bowed in despair. If the twins were away with the Talliarthe, their position with the Shadow Master would become the more endangered through a search to attempt their recovery.

Tharrick’s large hands rubbed the nape of her neck. ‘I share your concern. You won’t be alone. Once the little brigantine’s launched, I’ll take it upon myself to sail to Southshire.’ The promise felt right, once made. ‘Whether your young ones have gone there with Khetienn, or if they’ve thrust their bothersome presence upon Arithon, I’ll track them both down and see them safe.’

The days after solstice passed in an agony of worry for Jinesse. She could not confide the extent of her distress to the villagers, who knew Arithon only as a respectable outsider with a talent for music and well-founded interests in shipbuilding.

The boardinghouse landlady awarded her moping short shrift. ‘Yon man is no fool, never mind the fat drunk who keeps his company. He’ll bring your twins back, well scolded and chastened, and they’ll be none the worse for their escapade.’

Tharrick, who knew the dire facts behind her fear, lent whatever comfort he could. Through the labour that consumed him day and night at the shipyard, he took his meals at the widow’s, and sat up over candlelight in the hours before dawn when the ceaseless tension 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.