‘I must go home to mind my own mutton,’ Licanin said briskly. ‘There will be matters arising across my barony which only I can resolve.’
Zurenne could hardly deny that and she knew she should be grateful that he’d spent so much time on Halferan’s affairs. But the prospect of being left alone with this unlooked-for guest, this lady wizard, made her nervous, though she was hard put to know why. The woman looked so unassuming, unremarkable to the point of plainness in her dove-grey dress.
Perhaps it was the intensity in Jilseth’s hazel eyes, as she asked for every detail of Master Minelas’s time here. Or was Zurenne imagining things, her emotions still churning with her hatred of the man?
Granted, Zurenne was desperate to know that the scoundrel was captured, that her daughters’ inheritance was restored. All the same, the question remained. Why had Licanin gone to Hadrumal to seek wizardly assistance? Why was he so loath to discuss that visit with her?
Zurenne was beginning to suspect that Licanin was keeping secrets from her. She had accepted such behaviour from her husband without question. From her brother-by-marriage, it was as constant and as tiresome an irritant as a blistered finger.
‘I scryed over your demesne this morning.’ Jilseth was reassuring Licanin. ‘All seems well with your manor and tenants.’
‘My thanks for that.’ Licanin beckoned to the groom and mounted his placid steed. He paused to look around the courtyard.
Whatever Zurenne’s other tribulations, it was such a comfort to see her home restored from Starrid’s callous neglect. The cobbles were swept with no fugitive wisp of straw escaping the stable block. The steps up to the great hall opposite had been scoured clean. The windows of the baronial tower gleamed, newly washed. The oaken door of the shrine at the other end of the great hall gleamed with new coins nailed there as token of fervent vows, in gratitude for the barony’s restoration.
Licanin grunted, apparently satisfied. ‘I will write from the road tomorrow,’ he promised Zurenne. ‘Send my messenger back to let me know how everything goes on here. Send one of your own men whenever you need my guidance. As soon as I reach home, I will send a cage of our own courier doves and one of my own loft men to start raising birds here.’
‘My thanks indeed.’ Zurenne was sincerely grateful for that. Whether through Starrid’s malice or incompetence, every Halferan bird had died. If there’d been any birds from other baronies, Minelas must have wrung their necks.
When those Licanin birds arrived, could she keep one in her withdrawing room, caged like a songbird? Zurenne never wanted to be without some means of summoning help ever again.
She looked at Master Rauffe, her new steward. The briskly jovial man had stepped up to Lord Licanin’s stirrup, to exchange a few final words. He would doubtless be scandalised at the notion of a courier dove in the baronial chambers. Was it worth a quarrel, especially when any such wilful behaviour would be immediately reported to her brother-by-marriage? Zurenne had been allowed to choose her new personal servants but Master Rauffe was a Licanin man.
The grey-haired baron gathered up his reins. ‘I will write before the turn of the season with my proposals for the Summer Parliament, to secure the grant of guardianship placing you under my care. Your other sisters’ husbands have already sworn to endorse me. Saedrin save you, my dear, and your daughters.’
He waved up at the withdrawing room window. Ilysh and Esnina waved back. Zurenne had judged it safest for the girls to stay upstairs, after Neeny’s tantrums at breakfast had tried Lord Licanin’s patience to breaking point. Zurenne’s only consolation was he had been sleeping in the gatehouse’s freshly refurbished guest quarters, so the little girl’s nightmares hadn’t woken him from his sleep.
His personal guards drew up behind him, their horses restive after days in the stable. Impeccably liveried and every man alert, the well-drilled troop rode out through the gatehouse, following the fluttering pennant showing Licanin’s bronze chevrons on a yellow ground.
The contrast with the Halferan guard was sadly marked. While they had turned up in twos and threes as soon as they heard Starrid and his brutes had been ousted, only greybeards and callow youths now wore Halferan’s modest uniform of buff leather and undyed wool.
Licanin had not hesitated to chastise them, demanding that they account for deserting their lady in her time of such need. Zurenne’s heart had twisted within her, as they stammered their excuses. They were no match for Minelas’s hireling swordsmen. Some showed the scars they had suffered for defying his henchmen. Others wept openly for Halferan’s chosen men, murdered with their lord in the swamp.
Whatever they had lost, at least they were free of Minelas. Even if he returned, his crimes had been uncovered. Zurenne looked up at the gatehouse, where Halferan’s standard of three pewter bars slanted across a damson ground fluttered in the wind. No one would usurp this barony again. Even if the price of that was Master Rauffe’s overbearing solicitude and his wife’s irritating tendency to reorganise the linen closets without ever consulting Zurenne.
‘Shall we take some air? Jilseth suggested brightly. ‘Would you like to walk around the walls?’
Zurenne considered her options. That was a more inviting prospect than returning to her withdrawing room to deal with Neeny’s sulks and Lysha’s endless questions about what exactly Lord Licanin’s guardianship would allow her, or forbid her, to do.
The noblewoman wasn’t deceived though. Jilseth must have more questions about Master Minelas. Well, Zurenne didn’t have to answer. She inclined her head to the lady wizard. ‘Let’s see how the pastures are faring.’
Rather than head for the main gatehouse, she turned towards the narrow entrance cut through the manor’s encircling wall, tucked behind the great hall. That was how Starrid escaped. Licanin’s men had discovered the gate swinging open as they routed the last of his hirelings.
Their path cut through the herb garden that separated the baronial tower from the kitchen and any risk of a spreading fire. Beside the kitchen, the laundry, brewery and bake house chimneys smoked steadily. Zurenne could hear the water that served them rushing through the stone-lined conduit that ran from the brook outside the walls.
A cloud of steam billowing from the laundry’s latticed window told her that the maids had opened the sluice to let their suds wash along the channels to the stream a suitably discreet distance away. Snowy linen flapped in the breeze in the drying ground behind the household buildings, in front of the storehouses whose garrets accommodated those servants who didn’t live in the village beyond the brook.
‘Mistress Rauffe has the household well in hand,’ Jilseth observed.
‘Indeed.’ Zurenne reminded herself to be grateful. She had her keys back, their reassuring weight swinging from the chain fastened around her waist. As long as she held those, she was content to leave hiring scullery maids and lackeys to Mistress Rauffe, a shrewd judge of character for all her appearance of rotund amiability.
Under Starrid’s rule, most of the manor’s maidservants had fled his henchmen’s lustful attentions. Those few that remained were so self-evidently traitorous sluts that Zurenne had them thrashed from the gates with birch twigs, letting them take nothing but the clothes on their backs. That had left the manor inconveniently ill-attended until Master Rauffe had arrived.
‘My lady.’ The portly guard at the rear gate tugged his forelock and opened it for her.
Zurenne nodded to the guardsman at the sally gate. Jilseth followed her through to the top of the sloping bank supporting the wall on this side of the compound.
The grazing land that lay beyond was neatly divided with sturdy hedges. Spring grass was dotted with ewes and frolicking lambs. Dairy cows stood aloof, chewing their cud. Birdsong floated on the balmy breeze.
‘Your demesne reeve tells me the herds are flourishing,’ Jilseth remarked.
‘Indeed.’ Zurenne nodded.
The demesne reeve had also told her that the lady wizard knew nothing of animal husbandry, h
owever learned she might be. That’s how Zurenne had learned that Jilseth had been asking what the man knew of Master Minelas’s intentions when he left Halferan. Anxiously twisting his homespun hood in his hands, the reeve swore he meant Zurenne’s honoured guest no insult but he truly had nothing to tell her.
Zurenne studied Jilseth thorough her eyelashes as they rounded the curve of the roughly plastered brick wall. Why were a minor coastal barony’s affairs of such interest to Hadrumal’s Archmage?
Jilseth halted. ‘You know I went to the marshes yesterday.’
‘Indeed.’ Zurenne shivered despite the warm sun. Ten leagues to the edge of the saltings and the lady wizard had gone and come back within the afternoon. A man on a fast horse would have been hard pressed to do that without ruining the beast for days.
‘Would you like to know what I learned?’ Jilseth offered.
‘Of my husband’s death? No,’ Zurenne said tightly. ‘You told Lord Licanin and that will suffice. He will lay the facts before parliament. I have no standing as a widow.’
That’s what Licanin had said, when Jilseth had made the same offer the evening before. Zurenne had debated with herself long into the night, staring up at her bed’s canopy, before deciding there was nothing to be gained by revisiting the grief that had so nearly destroyed her. Licanin was right. Now she must be strong for her daughters and look to their future. All her sisters said so.
Their letters bolstered Zurenne’s resolve during the day, if she ever found herself unoccupied and that was seldom enough. It was at night in her lonely bed that she quaked with fear, lest Minelas reappear to challenge Licanin’s guardianship. There were still sixty five days to go before the barons gathered at Solstice. Zurenne was crossing them out in her almanac. Even thinking of it now, she had to lace her fingers together to stop her hands from trembling.
‘As you wish.’
As Jilseth replied Zurenne saw a shadow cross her brow. Had the lady wizard discovered something dire out there in the marsh? What could be more dreadful than Halferan’s death?
‘I should return to my daughters,’ Zurenne said abruptly.
‘May I join you?’ Jilseth asked politely.
Zurenne narrowed her eyes at the lady wizard. ‘To ask them more about Master Minelas?’ Lysha had said that the woman wanted to know every word which had passed between her and the vile usurper.
Zurenne certainly didn’t believe that Jilseth had any other interest in her children. She was as irritated as Licanin by Neeny’s prattle. While she deigned to approve Lysha’s copybook, she’d barely glanced at the embroidery which the girl had shyly shown her.
What of your needlework, my lady mage? Zurenne longed to ask. Who sews your seams so that you have the leisure to disparage such womanly virtues? Or is such honest toil done by magic amid Hadrumal’s mists? What little Licanin had said of his visit to that unearthly isle sounded most unsettling.
Jilseth declined Zurenne’s challenge. ‘I hoped that Ilysh might play the clavichord,’ she said.
That was as good as an outright lie as far as Zurenne was concerned. The lady wizard was as deaf to music as the stable cat. When Ilysh had shown Lord Licanin her proficiency on the expensive instrument, Jilseth’s tapping foot had constantly stumbled over the beat.
Zurenne shook her head. ‘We will be attending to the shrine.’
Since Starrid had gone, Ilysh insisted on helping her mother. A baron always served as the demesne priest, she argued and if she was the heiress to Halferan, this was her duty to her father’s memory. Zurenne could no more deny her than she could stop Esnina trailing after them, to rumple the shrine table linen and dabble in the bowls of flowers.
‘As you wish.’ Jilseth inclined her head, apparently submissive.
Zurenne wasn’t at all convinced, so made no reply. Walking onwards around the wall, she contemplated the reassuring vista of the horses grazing in the pasture on this side of the brook and the peaceful bustle of the village beyond, by the high road. They followed the curve of the sturdy wall and turned to see the manor’s gatehouse.
As soon as they came into view, someone shouted high up in the gatehouse’s turret. The gusting wind snatched away his words.
Zurenne looked through the open gate to see who the man sought to alert. The ragged guard troop in the courtyard looked uncertainly at each other. She realised with a cold shock that these men she must now rely on had no captain to guide them.
‘My lady, the sentry is calling you.’ Jilseth snapped her fingers and the man’s panic sounded in Zurenne’s ear as clearly as if he stood beside her.
‘Riders, my lady, an armoured troop, coming through the woods on the north road.’
Zurenne’s knees almost gave way. Minelas and his henchmen were returning.
‘They must have been keeping watch from the cover of the woodland,’ Jilseth observed with mild interest, ‘until Lord Licanin was well clear. Very well, my lady Halferan, will you meet them on the steps of your hall or welcome them inside?’
Zurenne couldn’t answer. Her mouth was dry as dust.
‘That depends who they are, of course.’ Firm yet unobtrusive, Jilseth’s hand on her elbow propelled Zurenne through the shadowed entrance.
‘My lady!’ The sentry hurried to lean over the turret’s inner parapet. ‘They’ve unfurled gold lattice on a crimson ground!’
‘Baron Karpis’s standard.’ Zurenne cleared her throat. ‘We’ll wait on the hall steps.’
She could not face Lord Karpis alone. Halferan had always said that he was a bully. He’d told Zurenne of debates among the barons when he’d been forced to shout their arrogant neighbour down, to make him acknowledge objections to whatever plan he had in mind.
‘Shall we ask him how much Minelas paid, to purchase his testimony before the parliament?’ Jilseth clapped her hands at a dithering boy in overlarge livery. ‘Summon all the household to support your lady!’
Hurrying across the cobbles on nerveless feet, for the first time Zurenne was glad of the lady wizard’s presence. Nevertheless she doubted she’d have the nerve to challenge Baron Karpis over his treachery. How were they to be rid of him without Lord Licanin’s authority?
The fringe of the woods wasn’t very far along the high road. The women had barely reached the top of the great hall’s steps when their unwelcome visitors arrived.
Lord Karpis glared at the Halferan guards. ‘Who will take charge of my horse?’ The beast was lathered from the gallop, a blush of blood amid the sweat betraying cruel whip strokes.
No one moved. Every man looked to Zurenne for her order. She managed a curt shake of her head as their loyalty warmed her.
Red-faced with indignation, Lord Karpis kicked his horse towards the great hall’s steps. ‘This is no welcome, my lady!’ Still in his prime though now tending to fat, he was as fussily dressed as Zurenne remembered, both gold fringe and embroidery decorating his costly riding cloak. The pomade in his hair was so thick that not even riding headlong had stirred his mouse-brown locks.
‘I sent you no invitation.’ Sudden anger lent a welcome edge to Zurenne’s words.
‘I need no invitation to do my duty.’ Karpis dismissed her with a haughty gesture and turned in his saddle to beckon to his assembled men.
To Zurenne’s utter astonishment, Starrid emerged from the knot of horsemen. With a repellent smirk, the man rode towards the steward’s dwelling beside the stable.
‘Where does he think he is going?’ Zurenne demanded, outraged.
‘You have no authority to dismiss Halferan’s steward,’ Karpis declared, as much to the assembled household as to Zurenne herself. ‘He will resume his former duties.’
‘He will not!’ Zurenne almost started down the steps to bar Starrid’s way herself.
Jilseth’s unseen hand held her back. Her voice breathed in Zurenne’s ear. ‘Stay up here and he can’t look down on you.’
As Zurenne froze, the lady wizard addressed Baron Karpis.
‘You have only r
ecently returned from the parliament in Duryea, I believe. How did you find the roads, my lord?’
‘What?’ The conventional courtesy distracted him. ‘The journey was easy enough.’ His belligerence returned. ‘Who are you to ask?’
‘She is my guest,’ Zurenne snapped, ‘which you are not. Kindly explain your presence and your impertinence!’
As she glared back at him, she was pleased to see a pensioned-off sergeant-at-arms plant himself between Starrid and the steward’s house. Mistress Rauffe stood on the threshold with a birch broom. Her husband approached from the path by the brew house, tall and wiry and with a copper stick in his hand.
‘What poisonous nonsense has this scoundrel poured into your ear?’ Zurenne didn’t hide her contempt for Starrid.
Baron Karpis ignored her, addressing the assembled household once again. ‘Lord Licanin has no authority to dismiss Halferan’s steward. There has been no new grant of guardianship approved by the barons’ parliament.’
Jilseth stepped forward. ‘On whose authority do you presume to reinstate him? On Master Minelas’s behalf?’
The anger warming Zurenne deserted her. Did Karpis herald her tormentor’s return? How soon could she get word to Lord Licanin? What might Minelas to do her and her daughters in the meantime?
Then she realised that Baron Karpis was glaring at Jilseth. He hadn’t liked that question. However the pompous bully swiftly rallied. ‘Master Minelas has been absent from the last three parliaments. When I learned he was no longer resident here, I realised my duty to settle Halferan’s affairs.’
Zurenne found her voice. ‘The barony’s affairs are settled. Lord Licanin stands as my guardian.’
‘In good conscience, I cannot approve that.’ Karpis shook his head, his confidence returning. ‘I will make my own case to the Summer Parliament. Until then, I will manage Halferan’s affairs as the closest neighbouring baron and don’t presume to gainsay me, woman,’ he said with sudden venom. ‘You will do as you’re bidden. Begin by yielding to your husband’s steward. Don’t imagine Lord Licanin’s guardianship will be approved,’ he promised ominously. ‘He lives far too far away to defend unprotected women in such uncertain times.’
Dangerous Waters Page 11