Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The miscreant met their affronted charge from a circle of cleared floor, arms folded over a rust red suede brigandine studded with steel that hazed sparked reflections to the stuttering flare of the lanterns. Hair like raw gold set off a tanned face just now scowling with searing impatience. A woman; one taller than most men, and charged to the fury of a lioness just shown the outrage of an injured cub.

  Too wise to risk life and limb to her wrath, the wine seller lowered his mallet. He stalled the rush of his henchmen with a word. To the woman who regarded him as though he were a slug that had just crawled from under a carcass, he said, ‘You have business here, mistress?’

  ‘Captain, to you, pud-wad.’ Eyes blue and hard as the glints on fired porcelain raked the wine seller over and fastened. ‘You have my lad here, the Evenstar’s deckhand, that one of your potboys laid open?’

  The wine seller deflated. ‘The trade brig, Evenstar, of Innish registry? Then you must be Feylind.’ As her foot tapped in dangerous, leashed exasperation, he unburdened fast enough to bite his tongue spitting out consonants. ‘Yes, the fellow’s back in the stores closet with his hurt palm bound up in cheesecloth. We thought best not to move him before the gash had stopped bleeding.’

  Feylind tipped up a silver-blond eyebrow. ‘Tide’s turning, you liar. You hoped we’d be sailing, with the lad left beached here and forgotten.’

  The wine seller flushed deeper than his finest Carithwyr red. ‘Show her to him,’ he commanded to his most imposing thug. He prevaricated, squirming, and prayed one of his wenches had the smart sense to dart back and unlock the closet. ‘The patron you kicked will bear you no charges.’

  Feylind laughed. ‘Charges? That’s funny. He’ll limp in my memory, and maybe think twice before he lets a stiff cock interfere with his civilized manners.’ She tipped her chin toward the rear doorway, the plight of her wounded deckhand still stubbornly uppermost in her mind. ‘That way?’ Her no-nonsense, brisk stride, smoothly matched by her mate, forced the muscle-bound servant appointed as escort to trip over himself to keep up.

  The young man with the knife wound sat on an upturned wine tun, rinsed in the light thrown off by a fluttering tallow dip. His face was tinged green, perhaps owing to the ripe reek of waxed cheddar, strung on twine loops from the rafters to discourage the ravage of insects and mice. He looked up, blanched white as Feylind stepped in, her head ducked in time to avoid getting brained by a dusty wheel of cheese.

  ‘Captain, the tide––’ he blurted in apology.

  Feylind cut off his excuses. ‘Evenstar took a mooring. Less ruinous than wharfage. Stay on my crew list, and the costs of delay are going to be docked from your pay share. Are you with me or leaving?’

  The boy straightened, unhappy and in pain, but grateful to be dealt such a fair-handed chance at redemption. Morvain was a galleyman’s haven. Blue-water skills and experience with sail were unlikely to win him a berth above a paid oar bench; and the wound in his hand would brand him unfit until too near the end of the season. ‘With you,’ he gasped. ‘I’ll board Evenstar directly.’

  Feylind snapped her head in negation. ‘First, let’s see that palm. How bad is the gash?’ She kept no paid healer on Evenstar’s crew list. Bellyaches and coughs, she treated herself. The man who stitched up the small mishaps on board was always the one who patched up torn canvas the neatest.

  When the boy stalled, reluctant, she gave him short shrift. ‘Yank off that cloth, now, mister. You don’t want to see what becomes of a limb that puffs up and turns septic, and goes stinking rotten with gangrene.’

  The boy grimaced, then looked sidewards as he peeled the soaked rag. Less squeamish by lengths, Feylind gripped his wrist and raised the palm for inspection. ‘Bring that light closer, will you?’

  The wine seller’s lackey lifted the tallow dip and held the flame steady through Feylind’s inventive, fierce oath for the fact the slice ran crosswise, with three tendons severed, and bone laid bare underneath. ‘Blocked the thrust with your hand, did you? Wise up. If you can’t snag the knife in loose cloth, then strike with the bony edge of your forearm, yes?’

  To the wine seller’s man, she said, ‘We’re going to need an herb witch who can work major spellcraft. Do you know one whose fees aren’t robbery?’

  ‘Not here.’ The fellow scraped at his stubbled chin, dubious. ‘This town’s sworn to Light, and the mayor’s advisor is loyal to the Alliance. No herb witches left here. For wounds bad as this one, you’d go to the hospice run by the Koriani sisterhouse.’

  ‘No sisterhouse,’ Feylind shot back. Her crisp, efficient touch wound the pressure bandage back over the gash, still sullenly bleeding. ‘This lackwit can damned well live as a cripple before I show my face there.’ She looped the ends of the cloth in a half hitch, fierce enough to wring a gasp from the boy as she finished in planted vehemence, ‘Won’t encumber my brig with the binding obligation of any Koriani oath of debt.’

  ‘Can’t blame you for that.’ Shadows pinwheeled and jerked as the wineshop’s man replaced the tallow dip on the shelf. He stepped back to clear the open doorway and paused, belatedly helpful, ‘There’s one herbalist, Koriani, but she acts independently. Keeps no ties to the Morvain sisterhouse. She’ll take plain coin, if it’s healing, and not charm craft. The street waif out back who begs for our cheese scraps will show you there for a copper.’

  The Koriani herbalist inhabited a bait shack jammed into the alley that fronted the seawall. No lamps burned in the deep maze of the poor quarter. Swathed in close fog, and the offal reek of fish guts heaved into the sump and awaiting the scouring ebb tide, the waves slapped over the weed-tangled rock, a stone’s throw away in pitch-darkness. Each footstep disturbed the scuttle of rats, or flushed bone-thin, scavenging cats, prowling for live vermin in the gutters.

  Evenstar’s first mate moved with his hand gripped to his cutlass, sharply watchful of his mistress’s back. Glad herself for the comforts of knives and capped boots, Feylind scrounged up a silver and dismissed the pox-scarred mite who had served as her guide from the wineshop. ‘We’ll follow the waterfront to find our way back.’ She passed over the coin. ‘Make sure you change that with a shopkeeper who’s honest.’

  The child grinned and departed, his rapid, light footsteps vanished into the noisome darkness. Left alone with her first mate and the shivering lad with the oozing bandage, Feylind took matters in hand and groped over the gapped, weathered wall of the bait shack until she located its shoddy plank door. She tapped, not lightly, in case the inhabitant was deaf with age or asleep in a stupor of gin.

  ‘Hold on for one moment!’ called a female voice from within; not old at all, or one whit bleary, which, oddly, did not inspire confidence.

  Feylind glanced to the solid presence of her ship’s mate, unable to read the expression on his broad face in the sea misty darkness.

  Seconds later, the rickety panel creaked open. A woman in a dark shawl emerged, still dabbing moist eyes, and shedding the cheap scent of a half-silver prostitute, struck through by the more biting undertone of an astringent salve to ease bruises. She gave Feylind’s company no second glance, but hurried along on her way.

  ‘Plague take the fists of lust-ridden sailors,’ snapped the herbalist in riled temper. Planks scraped as she jammed her door open wider to admit the next client on her threshold. ‘If you’ve brought me the meatbrains who savaged that girl, let me tell you, I’m likely to geld him.’

  Feylind’s teeth flashed in a wicked, wild grin. ‘You find him, I’ll hold him down for the knife.’

  The blurred face half-glimpsed in the interior gloom returned a gasp of pleased laughter. ‘Come in. The festival’s kept me much too busy to waste time with trifles of courtesy.’

  For no reason under sky she could name, that honesty reassured Feylind. She stepped ahead, unafraid, into an enveloping blackness with a distinct scented character wrought of flower spices and bittersweet herbs, and the gritted tang of burned charcoal. The mate and lad pressed in on her h
eels, the scrape of their steps stiff with trepidation. No doubt they were as aware as she that the threshold was guarded by some unseen presence that raked bare flesh to chills in the dark.

  Nor was the enchantress’s mood less than briskly professional as she bent the discerning regard of her sisterhood upon the Evenstar’s hesitant company. ‘Which one of you is bleeding or sick? I don’t give philters to abort unborn babes, so if that’s what you’re asking, seek elsewhere.’

  ‘Shut the door,’ Feylind said to her nerve-jumpy mate. Since enchantresses saw perfectly well in the dark, she matched the challenging test set against her with the unadorned truth. ‘The lad has a gashed hand with cut tendons, and I have no patience. My brig’s got two hours left for the tide, or she’ll cost us another day’s mooring.’

  ‘Let’s see, then.’ The pleasant, mild alto recovered its previous biting frankness. ‘But I’ll warn you, Captain, my services could cost you ten times your ship’s fee, and double as much if you rush me.’

  ‘I’ll pay to the letter of your demand for the healing, but understand, before you begin. I’ll make no binding promise, nor bow to your sisterhood’s practice of swearing an oath of debt.’

  ‘Rest assured, then.’ The enchantress snapped a simple flint striker, and the concealing darkness she had worn like a mask splintered into a sudden flare of light. ‘The Morvain sisterhouse holds my obedience, not my loyalty. My practice here has no ties to their hospice.’

  New flame strengthened behind the panes of a clean lantern, backed with polished reflectors of tin. Dazzled and blinking, Feylind made out a stacked set of willow hampers, then the neatly made cot with a quilt of dyed linen, a weathered stool bought used from the cod market, and a worktable crammed with oddments and jars. Before these stood the Koriani herbalist. She wore no purple skirt and displayed no badge of rank on her person. Her boyish, slim form was clad in a simple, loose blouse and what looked like an apprentice smith’s leather leggings with laces that hooked up the sides on bone buttons. A smattering of soot and cinder holes were overlaid by green stains, where a stone knife had been repeatedly wiped clean of the sap juices bled from cut greenery. Her feet on the packed earthen floor were bare, and striped with run dye from a pair of thonged sandals repeatedly soaked through in rain puddles.

  A cascade of bronze hair tied up with fish twine tumbled over her shoulder as she reached high and hooked the lit lamp from a spike on the rafter. Her eyes, when she turned, were the rinsed tint of dawn mist, and her features, familiar from childhood on the Scimlade sandspit.

  ‘I knew you in Merior,’ Feylind burst out.

  The herbalist smiled. ‘I thought so, too. You’re Feylind, Fiark’s twin sister? If so, you’d be master of the merchant brig, Evenstar, a stunning accomplishment.’ Her memory was flawless. She would last have seen Feylind as a girl of eight, yet needed no word to confirm that her visitor was the same spirit, grown into a strapping maturity.

  Like many Koriani, Elaira had not aged, despite the passage of two dozen years. Nor had she lost the sharp-witted perception that, by the unfailing prompt of female instinct, Feylind knew had captured Prince Arithon’s affection. Because of that memory, the moment of recognition between the two women carried an impacting weight of close secrets.

  Elaira’s fierce irony as always dispelled unsafe pitfalls and strangling awkwardness. ‘You have mooring fees piling up while we wait?’

  Snapped back to the subject of safer concerns, Feylind collared the reluctant lad and shoved his rawboned, shrinking frame forward. ‘The knife work’s the fault of Skjend wine seller’s potboy. Evenstar pays your work fee, but I’d be much obliged if you’d charge his shop extra for provocation and nuisance.’

  Elaira laughed. ‘I can try. But prying coin from that skinflint’s coffer is like squeezing a pig’s bladder and praying the stream that pours out will smell like southcoast brandy.’ Her lightning move caught the deckhand’s wrist before he quite realized she intended to touch him.

  As he fidgeted in dread apprehension, and the Evenstar’s brawny, practical mate sought excuses to direct his glance elsewhere, Elaira pulled a small steel knife from her boot cuff. Both men flinched back, yet she did nothing more than slice through the knots in the cheesecloth. The stained wrapping fell away and bared the gashed palm to the light.

  Her prognosis was expert and swift. ‘Can’t move any fingers but the first and the thumb?’

  The young deckhand managed a tongue-tied nod.

  ‘Sit. Stop worrying.’ Her no-nonsense touch steered the lad onto the stool. ‘You won’t feel a thing. In ten minutes, guaranteed, you’ll be asleep and dreaming of girls, or better, the sweetcakes your grandame used to bake for the solstice.’ From a hamper, she pulled a square of clean, boiled linen, and folded it into a compress. ‘There.’ She glanced to the mate, and evidently decided he would fare better if he was kept busy. ‘Hold this in place and press down firmly. That should slow down the bleeding while I mix up a posset.’

  Elaira turned her back, pulled a glazed mug from a shelf, then filled it with water poured from a stoneware jug. She asked Feylind, ‘Can your mate heft an unconscious lug to his berth?’

  Her guttersnipe dialect set the officer at ease, and he answered the query himself. ‘Done that often enough when the drinking’s been rough, and for louts twice as beefy as this one.’

  ‘Then you’re hired.’ Elaira tipped in a dosage of carefully measured droplets from several glass phials, then laid a sigil of binding over the brew to augment and speed the effects. ‘Drink this down,’ she instructed the injured boy. She received back the emptied mug. The ship’s mate assumed position at the deckhand’s shoulder and propped him as his posture swayed and slackened into a slump. ‘Lay him out on my cot, and then be so kind as to hold the lamp while I’m working.’

  While the enchantress gathered her sharp needles and gut thread, her surgical knife, and her remedies, Feylind moved in and removed the deckhand’s splashed boots. Then she lent her own muscle to the mate’s work by shifting the unconscious man’s ankles. ‘Sing out as you need things.’

  ‘Thanks. I will.’ Elaira laid her selected instruments on a packing crate, tucked up her feet, and settled cross-legged on the bare dirt. She then draped a fresh square of linen on her knees. ‘The compress can come off now.’ A fine line marred her brow as she took the gashed hand into her lap and splayed the fingers over the cloth. ‘The cut’s clean. The sewing shouldn’t be difficult. If you want something to drink while you’re waiting, heat the water in the flask slung from the brazier. There’s tea in the crock by the dish shelf.’

  Feylind unhooked the flint striker and followed directions, while her mate, set at ease like a bone-lazy dog, settled on the stool with the lamp. If the shack’s state of spotless, neat poverty surprised her, respect held her silent as she scrounged up two more chipped mugs, a bent spoon, and a small hoard of honey in a jar with a mended lid. She laid one drink, heavily sweetened, by Elaira’s elbow, then sat on the floor with her back propped against the pine trestle, nursing the other herself.

  By then, the enchantress had already sewn two of the tendons. Her conjury was impeccable; several neat, glowing sigils damped back the blood flow, and a third, pulsing violet, performed a function beyond Feylind’s awareness to fathom.

  ‘Don’t stare directly at the spells,’ Elaira warned gently. ‘They can harm the unshielded eyes.’ She knotted her gut thread, snatched a swallow of tea, then resumed work in unbroken concentration.

  Outside, a cur barked. Someone stocky wearing hobnailed boots crunched past the shack’s closed door. More distant, a drunk couple argued. Inured to disturbances, squarely at home amid the packed, squalling denizens of the poor quarter, the enchantress laid down neat stitches like clockwork. Something more than the labor beneath her sure hands pinched her lip between thoughtful teeth. ‘Does your mate serve you closely?’

  Feylind picked up the odd drift of the question. ‘He knows all my secrets, if that’s what you mean.’
Her quick grin came and went, and a swift shared glance with the man whose silent company attended her. In fact, he was Evenstar’s second-in-command, and her lover, those nights she felt maudlin.

  A looped knot, a snip of the knife; Elaira swabbed the wound clean with astringent. With one hand clasped beneath the deckhand’s elbow to feel for the sequential flex of the muscles, she tested each finger in turn with a slight bearing tension. ‘Well, we’ve apparently joined the correct piece to its counterpart.’ Satisfied, she changed needles and started the less fussy process of closing the torn flap of skin.

  Feylind could bear the drawn quiet no longer. ‘You have something to say? I have friends, perhaps, who could make certain your thought finds the right destination.’

  Elaira’s hand lifted, paused, then resumed her task, patient. Her directness, point-blank, displayed courage that humbled. ‘He swore your mother his oath that you wouldn’t take undue risks.’

  That pronoun, between them, held no ambiguity. As fondly attached to the Prince of Rathain, Feylind grinned like a shark in the dimness. ‘Well, I don’t always follow instructions. Do you?’ At once, she regretted her tactless phrasing.

  Elaira’s mouth jerked to a hardened, thin line. She answered, though words cost her agony. ‘Where my Koriani vow of obedience is at stake, I’ve no choice.’ Stern discipline kept her touch steady on the needle. The loose tendrils of bronze hair wisped at her temples were but mildly dampened with sweat. Through a strung pause, she finished and knotted the next stitch. ‘I beg you, for his life’s sake, take extreme care what you say. Nor should you mention those friends in my hearing. If I know who they are, they could be taken and used against him.’

  Feylind returned the small grace of her silence.