Grand Conspiracy (32 page)

‘No mercy for us if your brother's ship doesn't show.' Ivel the blind splicer leaned forward, his horn-callused hands tucked around bony knees. Unlike other men, the dank darkness shrouding the view on all sides left his observant, snide nature unhampered. ‘We've been stew meat for an Alliance patrol since the
instant you asked for clan help to take down those northbound couriers.'

‘Be glad for that favor.' Mearn s'Brydion's grin held a trace of a sneer as he faced into the wind from the sea. ‘Even the deer don't move on these heights, that they can't be seen with a ship's glass.'

‘Oh?' Ivel's contradiction came smug. ‘Even through night fog and rain?'

‘Through fog and rain, and much worse than that, you can depend on clan honor to guard your miserable safety. My kind don't go back on their given word. Ever. Forget that at your peril, old man.' A whisper of damp leathers informed of Mearn's movement as he opened the shutter of the lantern that burned with a reek of hot pitch by his knee. Light flared; died as he slid the aperture closed.

Down the ravine, which dropped in slate steps to the sea, an answering flash of orange blinked twice, snagged in the woolly halo of the fogbank.

‘There's Cattrick's signal,' said Mearn, with the particularly evil lilt he used for his winning bets. ‘The boat's already put in.' While the renegade band of high-ranking shipwrights moved ahead through the shadows, he added, ‘Are you coming? Or were you planning to root your bones on this hill as a monument to sheer spite?'

‘Devil,' snapped Ivel, annoyed for the fact the s'Brydion quick tongue made him flush. ‘Did you want me to beg for your guidance?'

‘Never thought of it.' Mearn stood, passed the closed lantern off to another man, then extended a hand to the splicer. ‘Particularly since I see you don't trust your compatriots from the shipyard to render you the same service.'

Ivel accepted the assistance with a grip like a bear and a bark of derisive laughter. ‘Trust them? You imply there's a choice? They dosed my tea once with black hellebore for a prank, while you just finished swearing birth and death will bend for the pride of your family honor.'

‘Come find out.' Mearn's invitation was just as cat sure as his step on the rain-wet slope, guiding the blind man's descent. ‘My brother's hospitality's not the sort of experience a man's very likely to forget.'

The flank of the gully was seamed with runners of vine. Dune grass caught in the clefts where the gannets would nest and
lay eggs. Layered slate pushed through vegetation and moss, weathered to a knife-edged fragility that crumbled under each step. Mearn chose the footholds with detached patience, his soft, steady words talking the blind man down after him.

‘You're good on the cliffs,' Ivel commented, breathless, in the windy niche where they rested.

Mearn gave back the pause that bespoke his triangular smile. ‘Alestron's an eyrie, didn't you know? My blood ancestors all learned to climb almost from the moment they walked.'

‘Oh?' Ivel warmed, that gleaned spark all he needed to strike back in disparagement. ‘The ones who lacked the agility of a spider didn't survive long enough to breed?'

But Mearn laughed aloud, his humor unshaken. ‘There could be some truth to that. Dame Dawr, my maternal grandmother, once scaled the east wall for a tryst with my grandfather. The revetments there are now mortared over and embedded with crushed glass, as much to deny her fool's route to an enemy as for the fact that her love match galled my great-grandfather to fits.'

Mearn sidestepped. His neat touch steered the splicer around a dripping stand of furze. ‘My great-grandame had the sense to let the pair marry. Before, as she said, the next generation of s'Brydion dukes wound up smashed like displaced guillemot eggs on the rocks … step down, there's a boulder. The footing at the bottom is loose stone. Do you feel it?'

Ivel's trusting stride arrived on the drenched shingle, with Mearn scarcely winded, and his ebullience dimmed not at all. ‘For Dame Dawr, crushed glass only sweetened the challenge. She just climbed the façade of the adjacent tower, then used a rope and grapple slung across to the roof gutter. The story goes that she conceived my late father through the hour the new mortar was curing. As proof of her child's paternity, she left handprints. They're still hardened solid in the battlement under my grandfather's window.'

‘The lady's still living?' Ivel inquired on that knife-point intuition that so often provided the leverage that fueled his jibes.

‘She's chosen the woman I'm promised to wed,' Mearn admitted, while the waves surged and ebbed, and the cluster of master craftsmen already arrived admitted the mismatched pair of latecomers.

‘That could be the curse or the blessing of a lifetime,' Mearn finished, this time showing honest trepidation. ‘No way to tell which 'til I'm shackled.'

Stiff currents swirled where the tide met the bluffs, the broad swell of the combers chopped up and confused after threading the crooked channels between the jumbled landmass and its reef-ridden train of bare islets. The foam pulled and surged in an unruly boil. Most of the renegade shipwrights waded thigh deep in the flood, steadying the galley's sent tender between them. Now and again one would curse as he slipped on the weed-slick rocks.

Cattrick awaited also, stilled oak where he stood in a cranny in the cliffs, guarding the shuttered lantern just used to signal the galley lying offshore. Made aware of Mearn's presence by Ivel's piquant retorts, he said softly, ‘The craft will take six. Do you want to cross first load, or second?'

‘We'll go last, you and I,' Mearn replied without forethought. He passed Ivel's bear-paw grip off to another for guidance into the boat. Enveloped by the tingling fog of thin rainfall, no man on the shore could see clearly. The inevitable fumbling as passengers piled into the lighter caused a mild havoc of banged knees and curses, marked by a breathless, cheerful relief after days spent lurking in wet brush. The Alliance patrols had been relentlessly persistent, even through the expert diversions laid down by the clansmen Lord Maenol had sent to escort their flight across country.

In that hour, with deliverance at hand, Cattrick remained marked apart by his reserved silence.

‘Regrets?' murmured Mearn, settled beside him. He rested his own covered lamp on a rock ledge.

‘Some.' Cattrick turned his head, his powerful, craftsman's build masked in darkness, and his tension deceptively blurred by his mellow southcoast accent. ‘Yet I have always believed that life is what a man makes of it.'

From this decision, there would be no return course. He would no longer be free to choose where he lived; from the hour his fleet of flawed vessels launched, and the moment the torches had been set to level the royal yard at Riverton, parts of the continent had forever become closed to him. In the quiet of words unspoken, the most painful facts would not bend before sentiment. Cattrick already knew his own birthplace at Southshire supported an entrenched Alliance presence. He could never return to his native soil, nor grow old in the land of his kin.

‘This I promise,' Mearn stated through the ragged, white rush of the surf. ‘Whatever passes, believe me, Alestron will give you
greater freedom than any you'd know had you kept your contract with Lysaer s'Ilessid.'

A fuzzed flare of orange burst and vanished in the night, over the fog-shrouded waters.

‘We'll see, then.' Cattrick pushed his large frame off the rocks. His deliberate hands adjusted the signal lantern to emit a short flash, marking the beachhead for the returning longboat.

Neither man voiced the uncomfortable truth, that the acceptance of s'Brydion hospitality and employment was no longer a matter of choice. For the sake of his pride, and the Koriani oath of debt used to force his betrayal of Arithon's employment, the master shipwright had rebelled against the dictates of his fate. The price for his act to recoup his lost honor had forever thrown his well-being upon the Duke of Alestron's mercy. His life and livelihood rested in s'Brydion hands, with no recourse at all should clan honor fall short of his irrevocably given trust.

Silence reigned between clansman and shipwright, written over by the thrash of the waves and the trickle of rain over rocks. In due course, the longboat sent from the galley reached shore, announced by the grate of an oarshaft fending off of the shoaling stone shingle. Cattrick lifted his lantern. As always, each motion was planted and sure. His step betrayed no uncertainty. Yet to Mearn, wading into the icy shallows beside him to make their escape out of Tysan, the moment held the fragility of a bubble of blown glass, given the trembling promise of form, but no surety of survival through the punitive stresses of cooling.

Nor was Cattrick oblivious to the pitfalls that might await in the unknown. ‘I stand on your good word,' he said, as the icy waters swirled over his boot tops. ‘Whatever passes, never forget. I knew Tharrick, who once served as a captain in your city guard.' The s'Brydion brothers all knew that name, must acknowledge the implicit message: that the master shipwright had seen that man's
loyalty
to Alestron earn him a scarred back from the whip and the fate of a permanent outcast.

Mearn sucked a breath between his clenched teeth. ‘We all make mistakes.' He caught the longboat's thwart, passed his lantern to the coxswain, then leaned into the work of turning the bow face about in the heaving surf. ‘Our biggest lapse through that botched affray was misreading Prince Arithon's motives in the first place.' Strain on his muscles was reflected in his voice, as the craft swung seaward, helped by the odd shove from an oarsman. ‘In defense for our bad call against Tharrick, I could
add that the Teir's'Ffalenn has a mind that's too clever, and worse than a maze to decipher. We s'Brydion have straightforward, warmongering ways.' A pause as a wave rolled under the boat's keel, followed hard by the bitten conclusion. ‘It's no secret. The uprising five hundred years ago throttled our gentler nature in bloodshed. I make no apology for that. We've survived with our city still ruled by crown charter through keeping an unbreakable code. We kill first and ask questions later.'

‘A warning for me?' Cattrick asked, while the ebb sucked and whorled around his knees.

Mearn laughed. ‘Very likely.' He leaped into the boat. ‘Are you coming or not? When all's said and done, my brother Parrien has a rabid, quick temper. He isn't the sort who likes pacing his decks while we browbeat a frivolous point of philosophy.'

‘Frivolous, is it?' Cattrick boarded as well, the heated bronze lantern still grasped in his hand, and his cloak bunched up in the crook of his elbow to raise the hem clear of the sea. ‘You've a damned queer outlook for an intelligent man. I rest my case for uncertainty upon Ivel's observation, that in your duke's town of Alestron, life seems to take second place, after idiot courage and cleverness.'

Mearn grinned, grabbed an oar, and shoved off. ‘Well, the foul-mouthed old coot got that much right.' His haste sparked to a devilish wild humor, he snapped, ‘Forward, stroke!' Duke Bransian's war-trained oarsmen dug in. The boat cleaved forward into the murk with a lurch that sat Cattrick down with an undignified smack on the stern seat.

The passage was short, sped by the first, riffling pull of turned tide, and guided by the furtive, timed flash of the lanterns. The oarsmen pulled the longboat into the lee of Alestron's state galley, where the deck crew waited with lines slung from turned davits to hoist the tender aboard. While the oarsmen stowed their wet looms and wrestled the pins on chilled shackles, Cattrick climbed the side battens, with Mearn athletic as an otter at his heels. Strong hands caught the shipwright's thick wrists as he reached the high deck and pulled him securely aboard.

By then, fog and rain had thickened the darkness to smoked felt. He could see very little. The air wore the biting scent of tarred cord through its underlying miasma of soaked canvas, and bilge, and the sweat-pungent wool of benched rowers. The men who kept hold on him were armored and callused, and carried their balance like field troops. Chilled by what
seemed overzealous security, Cattrick fleetingly wondered why Ivel and the others who had arrived first should be so unnaturally quiet.

Then a voice, more grainy than Mearn's but bearing a sibling's inflection, eased his mind. ‘Your men are below, given quarters already.'

‘Parrien s'Brydion?' Cattrick said, a touch brusque since his first, testing tug had not prompted the men-at-arms to release him.

Mearn's older brother returned a bitten affirmation of identity, immediately followed by a nerve-wound command to his crew to douse the wick in the helm lantern.

Through the flared glimmer as the shutters were drawn, and the flame was duly snuffed out, Cattrick received the brief, stamped impression of gloss varnish and gilt. Men moved, unspeaking, about unseen tasks. An unsettled creak of leaded beach below decks bespoke a crew with readied oars. By now aware the men-at-arms had no plans to release him before they received direct orders, the master shipwright clamped a stranglehold on his impatience.

This shoreline was under s'Ilessid sovereignty; to be caught here engaged in treasonous activities with none other than Alestron's state galley would carry unimaginably dire consequences. The s'Brydion were well within their rights to be cautious, even to the point of taking unpleasant steps in protection.

Nor was the crew lacking an envious, smooth discipline. The longboat was shackled with almost no noise.

‘Heave!' called the bosun from amidships. ‘Bring her in smart, boys!'

The capstan crew responded to a clacking of pawls, and the lines in the davits smoked taut and arose, bearing the tender inboard.

A scrape of damp leathers saw Mearn at the rail, flanked by the adept pair of oarsmen.