Grand Conspiracy Read online

  For Cattrick, that day, the hard edge to the breeze forewarned of the keen chill of winter. He led the prince and his three guardsmen through the shipworks the same way he measured his planks: with direct and exacting attentiveness. The steam boxes puffed like somnolent dragons. The shadows cast from raw ribs and keelsons, and the golden lengths of spruce being shaped in the sawpits seemed glued into the abundant, rich scents of salt air, pine pitch, and hot tar.

  Lysaer did not rush. Nor did he expect to be spoon-fed the facts. As though his jewels and spotless white velvet represented no difference of station, he engaged the laborers in conversation. He shook the men’s hands as though they were not coarsely clad, rinsed in running sweat turned sticky with shavings and filth. If his majesty stunned them, or his unearthly grace, he gave no credence to awe. Nor did he seek either fault or restitution for the stupefying losses set in train by the Shadow Master’s plotting.

  The spontaneous contact touched off admiration and camaraderie. The laborers opened and laughed. Through their loosened ease, the Prince of the Light learned the workings of the yard in utmost, gritty detail. He found Cattrick’s steady competence was held in respect. At each site, he tested and observed and moved on, while the rapport that he engendered between disparate men gained focus and became a unified cord of tied force.

  Few could escape the drawing pull of the Prince of the Light’s bright charisma. From the dusty boys who shoveled the shavings from the sawpits, to the ox goads who kept the creaking wheels of the ropewalks slowly turning, to the sailmakers in their swept loft, stitching yards of oak-dyed canvas, the craftsmen sharpened to purposeful unity. Their industry flowed with their source of inspiration. At one crook of Lysaer’s diamond-jeweled finger, each one appeared ready to throw down his tools and beg for a place in armed service. The adulation was euphoric, as if within the prince’s magnetic presence, plain sunlight shone brighter, and the toils of exertion came sweetened, enriched to scintillant meaning.

  Cattrick watched the transformation. The lined, wary squint never left his expression, and his broad hands stayed jammed in his breeches. He volunteered little, but gave answers like ruled lines to those questions Lysaer posed directly. Afternoon wore away toward sundown. The shadows lost edges, elongated to the texture of torn felt, and blended without seam into twilight. The royal party climbed the outdoor stairway to the sanctum of Cattrick’s chartloft. There, huddled under the glimmer of cheap tallow dips, they reviewed the close-guarded leaves penned with the lines of ships’ plans.

  The moment was inopportune for interruption, yet one came in the form of a riled yell from the royal man-at-arms posted on watch outside.

  A voice pealed through commotion, demanding. ‘Damn you, I’m an ally! If you don’t want a fight, put up your fool sword. One grunt’s length of steel is scarcely enough to keep me from going inside.’

  Something responded with an indignant clang.

  ‘Told you,’ said the intruder, disgusted. ‘Now use the brains that Ath gave a mule and don’t try to stab me in the back.’

  Speedy, light footsteps ascended the stair. An imperious fist banged on the door, and the latch gave way and flew open.

  Mearn s’Brydion, youngest brother of the clanborn Duke of Alestron, arrived at the entry, slit-eyed and poised as a cat with a bristled tail. His gaze fastened instantly on Lysaer. ‘You know how far and long I’ve had to ride to gain your ear for this audience?’ Neither honorific nor apology was offered in his testy habit of old clanblood arrogance and quicksilver, unvarnished nerve.

  He strode in. Leathers left sweat-damp and redolent of horse cracked to his brisk stride. Brown hair peeled up and spiked by chill wind threw sliding lines of shadow across his frowning agitation. ‘Your lady is dead.’

  For the second time, Lysaer’s raised arm checked the defensive rush of his bodyguard. ‘That’s surely no news, though you were in King Eldir’s court, I understand, on the day I blessed and settled her ashes.’

  Mearn bore in like a terrier. ‘If I was in Havish, that doesn’t change that you honored her shade four months after the hour Princess Talith passed the Wheel!’

  Resigned, Lysaer straightened from his perusal of a chart. Unruffled by the hard length of his day, he confronted the s’Brydion style of ripping censure with calm like grounded bedrock. ‘Should you concern yourself?’

  Mearn reached the edge of the trestle, stopped. He planted gauntleted fists on the edge. The studs bit into creaking wood as he leaned and bore down on his knuckles. ‘Your seneschal claims she committed suicide.’

  His blue eyes serene, Lysaer replied, ‘I believe him.’

  For one second, two, prince and clansman locked stares, the former all fired, untarnished elegance, and the latter rumpled and taut as stressed cord. Cattrick looked on with folded arms, while the tense royal guardsmen stood by with mailed hands welded to their sword grips.

  Then Mearn spun about in abrupt, liquid grace. ‘You believe him.’ He paced, the short, blunt spurs on his boots flicking off small points of light. He expected no answer. When he reached the shuttered window, he faced about and braced his angular frame against the sill. ‘They say on the streets that you have pressed suit for the Mayor of Erdane’s eldest daughter.’

  ‘My offer for her hand in marriage has been accepted.’ Lysaer was not smiling. His jewels might have been frozen stars, so controlled was his breathing. ‘The official announcement will be made next week.’

  Mearn pushed back his cuffs and latched his thumbs through his sword belt. He might not bow, had never acknowledged Lysaer’s claim to title. As the scabbard and sheath at his hip were not empty, no man present dared mistake his clanbred defiance of court etiquette. ‘Well then,’ Mearn said, ‘since you’re to marry so soon, you must understand the personal edge to my impatience. I’ve stood as my brother’s ambassador for seven years. You’ll agree, it’s time I returned home to Alestron and settled myself with a wife.’

  Before Lysaer could speak, he jerked up his chin. ‘No leave is asked. I’m not one of your subjects.’

  Lysaer smiled in carved, regal tolerance. ‘No need to stand upon thorny clan pride. I never made such a claim. Please give your brother the duke my regards and the blessing of the Alliance.’

  The words held dismissal. A polite man would leave. Mearn remained planted like immovable oak, his eyes pale ice in the gloom.

  Lysaer chose diplomacy and ignored him, bent back to review the outspread leaves of scale drawings. He asked questions of Cattrick, who resumed answering with unruffled brevity. Minutes flowed into another hour. The shutters fretted in the play of the sea breeze, and the half-burned-down tallow dips gyrated to the wayward tug of the drafts. Outside, the yard workers indulged their light spirits, keyed to fast talk and euphoria. They seemed reluctant to leave. Their royal visitor was held by some to be god sent, and the rumors of miracles and divine favor gained fresh force with each passing month. Through Cattrick’s clipped consonants, the foreman’s exasperated remonstrance mingled with the metallic clangor of tools being put away. ‘Well, don’t just gawp with yer jaws hanging open. Damn fools. Honest citizens might think this was a boys’ brothel, the way you lot hang about, staring at a closed doorway.’

  ‘You wishing?’ somebody whooped, half-choking with laughter, and the clutter of voices diminished as the yard at last settled to the night watch’s step and the wash of the first riptide breakers.

  The parchment drawing of a brig’s revised lines remained spread on the table as Lysaer finally straightened to end his detailed inspection. Others, loosely rolled, not yet tied with string, lay in a jumbled heap to one side. Mearn still held his place, a taut form melted into close-woven shadow. His watching eyes caught the unsteady light like pinned sparks as the royal men-at-arms regrouped for their charge’s departure.

  White velvet and diamonds lent Prince Lysaer a wintery majesty as he voiced his commendation for Cattrick’s watertight management. ‘The neglect brought on by my absence will be put right the
moment my handfasting to Erdane’s daughter can replenish the funds in the treasury. Rest assured, her dowry will bring in enough gold to amend the quality of your raw materials. You’ll have whatever sum you name then. Make an itemized list and send it under seal to my seneschal.’ He paused, his smile bestowed like new morning. ‘Until then, be diligent. After the Shadow Master’s blatant acts of piracy, the trade guilds must be given a show to mend their shaken faith. I will ask that my newly launched fleet be ready to sail into Avenor with flags flying to commemorate my nuptials.’

  ‘Your Grace,’ Cattrick acknowledged, his bow neat and perfunctory. ‘You’ll have a display worth your confidence.’

  He accompanied the prince as far as the doorway, saw him out into rising wind and a night fallen dense as stuck tar.

  Cattrick closed the door and reset the bar. For a large man, he moved carefully. The loft’s gapped, wooden floor creaked to his tread as he crossed back to the table and began one by one to tidy and roll up the ships’ plans. No fool, he judged as Lysaer had, that Mearn s’Brydion enjoyed any chance to pick fights. He chose not to comment. The clan hothead deserved to be ignored for his scathing lack of manners, his interruption, and his irritating effrontery.

  Mearn proved unkindly disposed to the silence. He shifted foot to foot through the distant bark of laughter from the garrison sentry who exchanged parting banter and secured the yard gates. Through the clattering hooves of the royal departure, he pushed off from the sill and completed a stalking cat’s stride. A stiletto appeared from nowhere. Steel scribed a hot flash as he threw the weapon across the tentative halo of flameglow.

  The blade struck and sang quivering, impaled through the scroll which Cattrick had just laid aside.

  ‘I know ships,’ Mearn opened through the diminishing whine as stressed metal subsided into stillness.

  Cattrick’s lips peeled back in the smile that made even Arithon s’Ffalenn take cold stock. ‘That’s a claim that demands a forfeit, in this place.’

  Mearn laughed. His teeth were crisply white as a ferret’s. ‘If you are speaking to Lysaer’s lackey, I believe you. Don’t lie. I have a second knife.’

  Cattrick straightened, linked his broad hands, and stretched until the joints in his shoulders cracked. ‘All right. The knife’s a provocation. Remember that. And I won’t need to lie. If I am speaking to Lysaer’s lackey, he wouldn’t leave the yard gates with his life.’

  Mearn’s eyes lit, cold as balefire with challenge. ‘Imagine my joy. I do think perhaps I might like what I hear.’

  ‘Then why not tell me, if you know your ships?’ Cattrick yanked out the knife, flicked his wrist, and let the pierced parchment unroll with a scraping hiss until it lay flat on the trestle.

  ‘Well enough. That’s fair.’ Mearn advanced and chose a stance on the opposite side of the board. ‘The irony shouldn’t escape you, I made certain. Now we both have knives.’

  Cattrick unbent to a rough, booming laugh, then yanked open the drawstrings of his sleeve cuffs and shoved them back to clear his wrists. ‘You clansmen have arrogance bred into the bone.’ The knife in his hand described fearless threat. ‘Let us also see if your landlubber minds can interpret what I know to make ships cleave a course through blue water.’

  Mearn returned his most evil grin and snapped a finger into the parchment. ‘This brig might have a grace to her lines fit to melt a man’s heart at her launching. But the love affair ends at her shakedown. She’ll be wayward as a cow under canvas. I’d bank on a nasty lee helm at the stiffening hint of a squall.’ He raised his head, treated Lysaer’s master shipwright to the frost of an unforgiving glare. ‘In a gale, I’d bet silver she’ll founder.’

  Outside, the harbor bell tolled to mark the full change of the tide. A gust buffeted through gapped boards in the shutters and fluttered the flames in the sconces. Cattrick flipped the knife and, with his own stamp of insolence, used its murderous edge to scrape tar from the rims of his fingernails. His eyes, half-hooded in apparent inattention, shared the same vicious glints as the steel. ‘Go on,’ he urged the s’Brydion ambassador. ‘You passed the unfinished frames on their bedlogs. What else did you see outside?’

  ‘Mayhem.’ Mearn slapped the handle of his knife against his gloved palm, tap, tap, tap, like the winding tension on a ratchet. ‘The fleet Prince Lysaer has commissioned from you will be lucky to withstand the first coast-hopping run to Avenor.’

  ‘Opinion,’ Cattrick fired back. He sidestepped and sat on the chartloft’s crude stool. ‘If I’m talking to Lysaer’s sworn ally, what then?’

  ‘You have a bigger problem on your hands than ships that won’t answer their helmsman.’ Slap! went the knife handle, then ceased with an emphasis as startling. Mearn qualified into the teeth of raw tension, ‘The craftsmen in your yard are scarcely unseasoned. Why haven’t they noticed? And if they have, shouldn’t you now beware of their temper? Prince Lysaer can move plain stone to adore him. You know they worship him as an avatar in Avenor.’

  ‘A warning?’ Cattrick unfolded to his massive height, expansive with stifled delight. ‘The knife, you say, won’t come from up front, but in the back from some planker’s self-righteous turn of conscience? Why worry? This yard’s been guarded like a pedigree virgin since the Master of Shadow beset us with thievery last winter. I shape my own risks. The men here in position to know me will also have to choose theirs. High time I ask what reason you have to jam your sniping clan nose in my business.’

  ‘Well, first off,’ said Mearn, ‘I came here to kill you. A matter concerning a letter scribed in your hand that drew Lysaer s’Ilessid from Etarra with armed troops. A lot of clan blood was spilled over that. That’s a stirring provocation; only now, your ships’ plans give me reason to take pause. If you’ve turned coat again, I’d like to know why.’ His tone curdled to a whiplash of bitterness. ‘There’s an opportunity to weigh, in light of that gold that’s promised from Erdane for Lysaer s’Ilessid’s pledged marriage.’

  Cattrick hooted. ‘It’s a woman, after all!’ His sarcasm raked. ‘Princess Talith didn’t commit suicide.’

  Mearn’s first response was a whitening about the lips as the muscles of his jaw sharply tightened. ‘On that, there’s my knife. You can draw your own conclusion.’

  ‘I don’t need to. Nor will I fight for a woman whose sorrows are ended.’ One sudden, strong move, and Cattrick impaled the fine blade in the tabletop. ‘The truth holds no passion. My defection last spring was forced by a Koriani oath of debt, sworn on behalf of my sister. Their hold on me’s forfeit, discharged by that letter.’ He leaned forward, his shadow looming over the damning designs on the trestle. ‘Let’s by all means stay forthright. If this is an offer to join Alestron in conspiracy, I accept. If it’s not what I think, then hear my sweet warning. You’ll leave Riverton by sea, with a load of stone lashed to your ankles.’

  Mearn’s mercurial laugh intermingled with the chime as he cast his own steel to sliding rest beside the dagger impaled in the trestle. Metal struck metal. The pealing clang reechoed to the wicked bent of his gambler’s delight. ‘I have a much nicer idea. Why not sit down and stop bristling hackles? Let me extend an invitation: let’s both drink beer to the Shadow Master’s health over a certain chest of gold in the ducal hall at Alestron.’ As an afterthought, he grinned. ‘We build ships there, too.’

  Cattrick’s brows furrowed upward. ‘Then you’re Prince Arithon’s covert ally?’

  ‘Since Vastmark,’ Mearn admitted. ‘We, too, had our reasons for turning coat.’ He hiked up one leg and perched on the edge of the trestle. ‘I can write my brother in coded state language and demand his swiftest galley to bear me homeward come the spring. First, I’ll need to know what date to ask for, and which port of call will offer the most favorable rendezvous.’

  ‘The outer reefs, northwest of Orlest,’ Cattrick said with scarcely a second’s hesitation. ‘The timing, of course, must depend on the prince as he sets final plans for his wedding.’

  A
utumn 5653

  Dispositions

  On the snow-dusted moors of Araethura, the herbalist’s cottage stands empty and cold, the enchantress who lived there gone north to ply her talents in the stews by the Morvain quay, where street children snatch life by robbery and wits; and knife wounds acquired by randy sailors and the unending afflictions of poor quarter harlots will take her mind far from the betrayal enacted through a black-haired shepherd boy’s trust …

  The day before Prince Lysaer’s sealed orders reach Caithwood, the Sorcerer Asandir stands under the frost-turned crown of a great oak, his expression like chisel-cut granite; over his head, the winds of late autumn thrash the leaves to a song of rare fury, and the drumming of twigs and the moaning of pines transmit the tattoo outward through the forest like the ripples cast across a stilled pool …

  In the teeming port city of Innish, on the south coast, a fair young man entrusted as merchant’s factor sits by the wavering light of a candle, reading a letter in sharp, coded script that describes a specific tavern in Southshire where dispatches are to be left, and closes with the laughing, wishful observation, ‘Keep your harpy of a sister well clear of my affairs, or one better, tell her I’ll play tasteless ballads for her wedding if she’ll find the good grace to exchange feckless seafaring for marriage …’

  Late Autumn–Winter 5653

  III.

  Caithwood

  The sealed orders from Avenor reached the small settlement known as Watercross in the shortened days of late autumn. There, the river route through Ilswater intersected the trade road that spanned Caithwood, linking Valenford to Quarn and the southern seaports of Tysan. Built at the threshold of the ancient stand of forest, the massive old land bridge, with its mossy stone pilings, spanned the river in the elegant arches which bespoke the masterful skill of centaur masons. Since the departure of the Paravians, mankind had made free with the axe. Five inns clustered by the verge, a congested accretion of multiple wings of timber raised three storeys high. These were fronted by a commodious barge dock, and boasted between them a post stable and a prosperous smithy. The streetside cluster of shops fanned into a disordered tangle of clapboard cottages, each with a cow and a garden patch. The steadings were inhabited by the families of serving girls who had married rivermen or drovers, and raised sprawling families whose lifeblood was tuned to the movement of commerce.