The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Ath, I’m sorry,’ Elaira blurted. ‘Never mind. My tongue runs ahead of sound thought all the time, it’s the monumental failure of my upbringing.’

  Not quite disarmed, Arithon looked back in spare amusement as she faced him. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  Elaira grinned. ‘Well, it’s true. Ask how many birch rods my seniors broke trying to retrain my attitude. They say I have a rotten, stubborn mind.’

  ‘Is that a refusal?’ His voice held a note she would have sold her crystal to decipher.

  But the clamour of her feelings rang far too insistent to leave any space for intuition. Elaira dusted crumbled herbs from her fingers while the poultice pot steamed and spat at her elbow, its agitation as thick as her thoughts. Acutely attuned to just who this man was, of what he might come to mean to her, she balanced her own desperation against the spun thread of his control. Although he would leave without protest if she asked, Morriel had bidden her to solicit his interest, no matter the means or the cost.

  ‘I might teach you herbs and their physical handling,’ Elaira said at last, and hesitated.

  He came to her immediate rescue. ‘I’m certainly aware some constraints must be set.’ How else to protect the arcane secrets she was sworn to keep within her order? But he left this unspoken in natural reticence, as any spirit must who had schooling in the subtleties of power; his background in all likelihood lent him access to such knowledge, since many of the plants used for medicines held magical properties as well.

  He finished, ‘Even with the connections to ritual left out, your recipes would be better founded than any I could get from a hedge witch.’

  The moment hung, while Elaira fought through a turmoil of indecision.

  Arithon could not know what he laid in her hands: the one opening her heart could not deny, hand in glove with the opportune chance Morriel Prime desired to bind him. The sculptured grace of his fingers stayed vulnerable and stilled, while his eyes watched, the same suspended green of a tide pool poised between flood and ebb. Then, as the interval grew prolonged, a sharp, marring change pricked him into dismay. ‘Ath in his mercy, not you as well. You can’t be afraid of me also.’

  Impelled from uncertainty by a response too self-honest to deny, Elaira waved him inside. ‘By all means, if you’re worried, come in and terrify me further. The upset is frankly quite welcome.’ The crease between her brows eased to pleasure. ‘Won’t grubbing for root stock spoil your hands?’

  ‘I can hope I’ll enjoy finding out.’ Irrevocably then, Arithon crossed over her threshold, and through the one vital moment she needed to read him, the light interfered and hazed his form from behind.

  Her cottage was small, two meagre rooms conjoined by a single doorway. Elaira felt each of his light, restless steps, while his busy mind surveyed her dwelling. She wondered what he saw, since meticulously little of her character lay exposed for prying eyes.

  The rafters supported a storage loft, accessed by a narrow ladder. On pegs spiked into the beams, the roots she had foraged through the winter months hung in string bundles to dry. Glare through the salt-filmed dormers caught on the incised clay seals to fend off mould and stray iyats. Beyond her plank table, a mismatched rack of shed deer antlers hung her cloak. Straight boards in Merior became seats for dories, so her cottage boasted no shelves. Her jars of prepared remedies were stacked in willow hampers along the wall, sorted and labelled, and preserved by runes scribed in ink ground from minerals. A brick oven and the coiled glass tubes of an apothecary’s still jammed the hearth, the overburdened mantle above crammed with jars of wooden spoons and mismatched kitchen crockery.

  As impersonal as the room were the clothes Elaira wore, of grey twill and cambric edged with flax ribbon dyed with mulberry.

  She disdained earrings; kept no jewellery beyond a braided silver bracelet dulled from careless wear. The quartz pendant strung on light chain at her neck was no ornament, but the working badge of her order. Her feet and her hands were brown and bare, hatched at wrists and ankles in tiny scabs and white scars from briar scratches taken while foraging.

  Conscious of Arithon’s regard like a play of pressed air across her skin, Elaira added comfrey and thyme to her mix. She talked to dispel her unease, while he quartered her workroom again, his caged-panther passage too deft to cause disturbance, and his clasped hands not touching anything. ‘Do you know how to bless and cut oak? If so, you can start by building yourself a stool. I’d have you sit down. Is it some older habit, or piratical dishonesty, or did Halliron let you pace like a ghost?’

  Poised alongside the thin paper spread with flowers too delicate to preserve by hanging, Arithon spun in wide surprise. ‘You’d rather instruct a blunderer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Elaira said, truthful. Aware as Jinesse had never been of his capacity to perceive nuance in others, but to be misunderstood himself, she added, ‘You could say I’ve just undertaken to find out.’

  Her unexpected barb let him laugh. ‘Ath, you are forthright. After two weeks of bargaining with unctuous saw-millers, I find that a welcome relief.’

  ‘Well it can’t last.’ Elaira grinned also. ‘People aren’t fond of ticks or midges that nip too close to the skin. Or so said the old thief who raised me. He was wise enough at least not to die on a felon’s scaffold.’ She raised the square of linen and tipped the crushed herbs in her pot. ‘I’d planned to go foraging this afternoon. Unless you like watching poultices boil, we’ll meet then? No study of herbals can start anywhere else but with the live plants in the field.’

  ‘Lady, consider me enchanted to accept.’ Arithon returned an unfettered smile, then bowed and as soundlessly left her.

  So began an odd, suspended interval, fractured from connection to past or future like a jewel unencumbered by a setting.

  Spring flowed across the Scimlade peninsula, ephemeral as reflections on glass, the seasonal cycles of trees, moon and tides more subtle in tropical latitude. Only the discerning observer could track the changes as vegetation quickened and renewed, to the flight of ocean birds in migration. Arithon had been well-taught by the mage who had raised him. He knew to walk barefoot in her medicinal garden, and to dig for roots with wooden implements. He had a sharp eye for detail. By day, they walked the marshes where blue heron stalked fish, he with his coarse, sailor’s trousers rolled above the knee and a collecting bag slung at his shoulder, and Elaira with her skirts kirtled up.

  The virtues of purslane, stargrass, and marsh mallows were partially familiar to him. He could lay hands on the trunks of red maples and willows, and in an odd, listening stillness, sense the quickened flow of spring sap. Her guidance was scarcely needed to show which bark to harvest, or how much to cut from one tree. The small herbs and mosses native only to Athera or partial to southern climate, Elaira pointed out and explained as they perused the sun-drenched glens and sandy scrub for tasselflower, poke, and boneset, or the deepest shade of the oak hammocks for galls. She was pleased to see he did not learn her lore by rote, but lingered on his knees in the hot, sandy soil to draw into himself the nuance of each plant, to seek the hidden, intuitive secrets inherent in leaves and flowers and roots.

  As he knelt in clean earth, his hands cupped beneath the tiny, starred bell of a nightshade’s flower, Elaira stole the moment for herself, to align the surface traits of the living man with the aura pattern revealed by her First Senior. The oddity struck her, that an uncharacteristic diffidence flawed his bearing as he bent a queerly desperate intensity over the plant under study.

  A scarcely visible tremor flawed his touch, before he curled his fingers shut and knuckled his fist against his forehead.

  Wary of a half-glimpsed gap in his defences, Elaira froze where she stood. Something had upset his mage-sight. Warned by deep instinct that incautious words would drive him to protect himself through temper, she scarcely dared to breathe.

  The stricken depth of her silence translated through to him anyway.

  After a second, Arithon glanced up a
t her, his gaze something more than shadowed, and his black hair whorled against his damp skin by the anguished pressure of his fingers. ‘You know, don’t you,’ he accused in blunt defence.

  Elaira lowered her basket to the ground. With the mild, slow moves a bee-keeper might use to steal honey from a smoked hive, she settled in the meadow beside him and arranged her mud-splashed skirt around her ankles. A killdeer ran piping to draw notice from its nest, while high overhead, a black vulture scribed spiralling circles.

  ‘I’ve guessed something’s wrong,’ she admitted at length. ‘Common nightshade is a poison and a narcotic. Used for healing, the extract can act on the eyes, and the heart, or ease a child with the colic. But it has no property to induce prying that I was ever aware of.’

  The tiniest twitch of a smile turned his lips. ‘Subtle lady,’ he said, but chose not to share whatever pain had grazed so near the surface. The elbow she used to prop her shoulder rested scant inches from his thigh. As always, he made no move in avoidance; but as scrupulously, he also never touched. Even by chance, over the roughest of trails, he maintained a meticulous distance.

  To pressure that barrier as Jinesse had done would be a grievous mistake. Through reticent silence, Elaira sensed recrimination. Unwittingly, he had relaxed too much. The ease of her company had laid siege to a reserve he had no inclination to slacken.

  But before he found the courtesy to escape from her presence, Elaira shot him a sidewise grin. ‘What was that ruckus at the yard the other morning?’

  Green eyes widened through a second of surprise. Then, in an explosion impelled by relief, Arithon snorted into laughter. ‘Dakar. What else? We’ve hired in a blind rope splicer with a tongue like a viper. The framers took bets on a contest of insults, the winner to mete out some prankish punishment.’

  Elaira peeled the sticky hair from her nape, then flicked out the ends to rebraid them. ‘And Dakar lost? What was the forfeit?’

  His glance drawn to admire her dark locks, that sparked to bronze fire where the sun touched, Arithon set his chin on crossed wrists. ‘Old Ivel bet the lads that our prophet was too fat to squeeze into an empty tar cask. Dakar managed, of course, as a point of sore pride. But when his elbows got jammed, and he asked for help to get out, an enterprising joiner clapped on the lid and nailed him in. He wound up adrift in Garth’s pond.’

  ‘Jinesse’s twins fished him out?’ Elaira asked between gasps.

  ‘No.’ Arithon wiped his eyes and snatched the breath to answer. ‘Are you kidding? Feylind would as likely raise cheers while he drowned, and Fiark would sling rocks at his tombstone. Dakar shouted and pounded until the staves sprung and began to take in water. The old men who idle on the boarding house porch finally netted him to shore and broached the cask. But they filched his beer store as payment.’

  Restored to companionable ease, Arithon gathered himself to his feet. Against custom, he offered his hand to assist Elaira up, and in gifted inspiration, she released his warm fingers a half instant before he did so on his own.

  Their eyes met.

  ‘Rare lady,’ he said again. But the shadows were gone and he smiled.

  After that, he relaxed in her presence as Halliron Masterbard must have known him, freed for a brief space in time from the burdens inflicted by Desh-thiere’s curse and royal bloodline. The work at the shipyard drove him to relentless hard labour, while the frames were bevelled, then set erect and dubbed fair, to be followed under the harsh sunlight by keelson, side keelsons, and bilge stringers.

  The hour after the knightheads were set, he reappeared at the cottage, his clothing pungent with a resinous sprinkle of spruce shavings. Every moment he could spare was spent in Elaira’s company.

  Foraging trips drew them further afield, into the deep, still bayous that fringed the shores of Sickle Bay, alive with cormorants that startled from their step with awkward cries, and the singing hum of summer insects. By noon, they found refuge in trackless glens of red cedar, alive with jewelled moths clinging wing-folded in the undergrowth. They carved footprints over the sand hills, amid the clacking, arrowed flit of dragonflies. In a silence removed from the shipyard’s brisk clamour, Arithon allowed the salve of Elaira’s companionship to ease his veneer of tight reserve. Time and again she resisted any foray into topics that leaned toward the personal. Unlike everyone else, she never once questioned his integrity. He began to laugh easily, and spoke more than once of the high mage who had raised him on the world beyond the West Gates.

  ‘My grandfather was sparing in his praise of apprentices,’ Arithon volunteered on a night outing. They had gone to gather herbs for talismans of ward best harvested under influence of the moon, and now rested side by side on a fallen log while a fox barked deep in the brush. Arithon toyed with a storm-broken branch, exploring by touch the tiny, green buds of a live oak’s acorns, that ripened light tan and jet black. ‘My grandfather insisted we think for ourselves and achieve for our own satisfaction. Deep study of the mysteries were their own tough path, he always said. To live for approval of others was a pitfall that begged a false turning.’

  Cued by a queer little hole in her gut, that now was the moment she had angled for, Elaira refused to look at him as she said, ‘And do you seek approval from others to know you did right in Etarra’s attack on Deshir forest?’

  Her reference to the children killed with the clans in his defence made him surge to his feet in recoil. The oak branch thudded earthward with a dropped thrash of leaves and his eyes bored down at her, anguished, ‘Who else besides the clansmen who survived could be aware that the deaths of those children were beyond fate’s grasp to prevent? Daelion Fatemaster show his mercy in fair judgement for their murders. There is no absolution, no redress. For I can never be reconciled with what happened in my name that day on the banks of Tal Quorin.’

  ‘You swore an oath as Rathain’s prince to protect your feal clans.’ Elaira looked up, her features traced with silver light. If he wanted to flee or strike out at her presumption, he was stopped by the tears that sheened her eyes.

  ‘What makes you take my troubles for your own?’ The veined silk of the oak leaves shivered as he began and checked a step forward. A moonbeam cast through the boughs overhead played like a wisp of dropped floss over the edge of his cheekbone, then grazed insubstantial as spirit light across his full sleeve and the attenuated knuckles of one hand.

  ‘I wasn’t, in fact,’ Elaira said in dry rebuke. ‘It’s an entrenched bad habit, like saving wing-broken birds and rescuing waterlogged spiders out of horse troughs.’ She threw back a damp smile, unwilling to draw unfair advantage from the birth-gifted empathy that ran in him deep enough to lacerate. ‘Did I ever tell you what I did as a penniless chit on the day I caught the Mayor of Morvain’s son tormenting a mongrel in an alley?’

  ‘Rare lady,’ he said, softened at last to ease his guard. ‘You did not.’ A shadow limned against gauzy plumes of ground mist, he bent, twitched the oak branch aside, and resettled himself at her feet. While the small southland finches rustled in the treetops, he listened as she told of the exploit that left a young boy with injured fingers, and which set an end to her freedom of the streets, to place her in Koriani fosterage.

  ‘The herb witch who sold simples to the prostitutes had always insisted I had talent,’ she finished, her hands nested tight on her knees and her hair channelled into silky torrents by the bleached linen pleats of her blouse. ‘If I also suspected the amethyst in the pin I’d just stolen had once been a mage’s scrying crystal, the dog was terrified and about to end up hamstrung, and I was too angry to care. Right or wrong, I copied the symbol I had seen the poor-quarter herb witch use to ill-wish patrons who cheated her. I recall not being surprised, or even horrified, as the knife slipped in falling and stabbed the mayor’s son through the wrist.’

  Enfolded in the milky warm air of the night, steadied by Arithon’s silence, Elaira eased knotted fingers and shrugged. ‘I escaped sentence and burning because the Koriani undertook to h
eal the child in exchange for a claim to take me into permanent fosterage. They said if they hadn’t intervened, the boy would never have recovered. His nerves had been severed. Not by the steel, but by an ill wish wrought of raw magic’ She looked aside at him, her eyes like flawed quartz, and the evanescent scent of her melded warp through weft with the heavier perfume of cedar. ‘If I can presume, I may understand, just a little, how wretched you must feel.’

  She ended with a clipped cough to mask a shiver. ‘Do you know, it often still haunts me. I never knew if the mongrel was spared.’

  Amid the rich, living fabric of the woodland, the man at her feet seemed a clamped knot of silence, turned in on himself in stark brooding. Alarmed, that perhaps she had dared too much, Elaira summoned full command of her art and looked at him; and what she read in every locked joint and in the raised tilt of his head was a longing of unbearable proportion. She ached to reach out, to test his emotion and see whether she could shape from one vulnerable moment a bond of immutable trust. She wished to touch him as she had never yearned for anything else in all of her proscribed life.

  But instinct reared through desire and stopped her.

  Without knowing why, she broke his mood, sharply, and led him off on a tangent. ‘What words would your s’Ahelas grandfather have for me, to care more for a dog than a child?’

  ‘He would have said, of such a child, that the dog was the more blameless spirit. In my case, he warned on no uncertain terms. The powers of mages and the burdens of a ruler make an incompatible legacy.’ Arithon clasped his arms around drawn-up knees, his admission burred rough as he added, ‘Once, I could have listened and been free.’

  Over the rasp of spring crickets, a whippoorwill called its slurred triplets. While Arithon pursed his lips and whistled back like a mimic, Elaira reviewed his phrasing, for as a bard, he was wont to be precise; and swift as a prick through crowding thoughts, she grasped the implication to his statement: ‘For I can never be reconciled with what happened in my name…’