The Ships of Merior (62 page)

In plain words, Arithon told any who asked of his plans. He would build ten brigantines, dismantle his craftyard, and leave Merior unchanged by his tenancy.

Certainly his choice of location bore out the spirit of his promise. ‘Not to fret,’ said the gouty old fisherman who diced with his cronies beside the boarding house steps. ‘Or why should yon outsider lay the bedlogs for his ways on the Scimlade sandspit? First heavy blow from the east, and Ath’s seas’ll scour his works away. Not being a landgrubbing fool, that’s his stamp o’ surety his roots aren’t for keeping.’

‘He’s treated fair with Jinesse,’ the wife who poured lager chimed in. ‘Nobody’s cheated. And he’s said, for the noise and the bother, he’d fix any lugger’s broken tackle and take no fee like a neighbour.’

But as the first timbers were sunk and fared smooth, men with comely young daughters found their worries less easily settled. The craftsmen who bunked in their ramshackle cabins earned silver with no place to spend it. Merior boasted no ready tavern or house of entertainment, as Dakar had gained bruises to determine. Approached in the sapphire twilight by a knot of fishermen off the luggers, Arithon heard through their complaint and made immediate contingency.

His warning was posted by dark, that any worker who caused trouble would be turned off without hearing; then that problem averted long before it arose, a boat was hired to bear the craftsmen in shifts for leavetime downcoast in Shaddorn.

Throughout the days of upheaval, the villagers’ wild conjecture, the disorders of change adroitly smoothed over, Elaira kept to her shop. She cast no patterns of divination to mark the activity of the prince she had come to Merior for the unparalleled cold purpose of binding with ties of affection. Progress at the yard was on everyone’s lips, through the week as the whipsaw pit was fashioned. Under Arithon’s swarm of labourers, pole buildings for the joiner’s shop, loft, and steam shed were raised and roofed. Summer winds off the ocean swept inland and raked up buttresses of thunderheads to lash
squalls across Sickle Bay; in contrast, the peninsula’s weather inclined to stay dry. The shakes for the walls were left stacked aside, while through the close, humid heat of afternoons, over the grumble of distant thunder, the first keel for an eighty foot brigantine was laid between stem and stem post. Beset from sunrise to dark by the feverish clangour of hammers as the frames were set up and dubbed fair, Elaira employed no feminine artifice.

If the mores of the Koriani Order commanded her to offer herself as bait, for stubborn pride she would do no less and no more than maintain an obligatory residence. The village was too small, too close. If Arithon s’Ffalenn could avoid her throughout the two years ordained to build his fleet, his effort of itself framed a statement.

In the cool airs each dawn, she arose and lit her brazier to brew the day’s decoctions and tisanes. In the wind-torn late afternoons, while storms flared and cracked across the bay, she walked the dunes to collect seaweed to distil into tincture of iodine. The weather might settle to its sultry summer pattern, but the days failed to pass unremarked. Teased by awareness of Arithon’s presence, her thoughts stayed hooked to distraction, as though the boundaries of controlled quiet and trance were made unruly and permeable. The disciplined stillness required for her arts gave no surcease, but chafed and pressured her innermost nature to reclaim its desired alignment.

The small mage craft Elaira worked through her crystal, by which she enhanced the efficacy of her remedies, stroked her nerves to unwanted sensitivity until, on the wings of slipped thought, she could sense even Arithon’s footfalls through the shared, sandy ground of Scimlade Tip.

Frustrated, irritable, she heaved a gusty sigh and battled her reluctance to face another morning fixing simples. Amid her bundles of dried goldenrod, tansy, and the skinned stems of aloe selected to mix a paste for
lacerations, she cast a jaundiced glance over stoppered glass bottles in sorry need of her attention; her depleted stores of comfrey, gentian, and mint, perpetually in demand for babes who suffered from colic. A coil of hair slithered down her bare forearm, glinted with auburn like copper chipped through dark rust. She snapped the offending lock over her shoulder, and noticed the time lost to daydreams.

Brisk in self-reproach, Elaira rummaged behind her still for the poultice pot, dipped water from her pail, and chained it from the tripod to boil. The open doorway at her back let in the sea-breeze, and the inventive notes of mocking birds who carolled to mark their spring nests. Cats from the fishmarket strolled in at will to rub through her ankles or sprawl in silken languor at her feet.

She resisted the temptation to rise and serve them the left-over cod from her breakfast. Ruled by iron will and the Koriani creed to ease what she could of mortal suffering, she murmured the litany to focus her innermind, and stopped, mid-phrase, as the light changed. A mild chill crossed her spine. Subtle as a wisp of cirrus might dampen the fall of a sun mote, the cool sensation between her shoulderblades resolved to clear warning that a presence observed her from the doorway.

Thrilled through by a ridiculous rush of joy, she broke off, considered; then bit her lip, quelled her smile, and turned around.

Arithon s’Ffalenn leaned like a waif against her lintel.

Restrained by the nuance of mages, he would not cross her threshold without an express invitation, though in sun-faded breeches, laced at the calf, and no shoes, he looked common as a journeyman carpenter. His shirt was full-sleeved and open. Ringless, loose hands were tucked in folded arms, and hair straight and glossy as a crow’s spread primaries fanned the tanned wedge of his brow. His lips stayed chiselled and serious, an odd
contradiction to the strung, wary poise behind his candour.

Just barely, Elaira quashed her impulse to speak first. Her eyes, pale slate, awaited his pleasure in bland inquiry.

Arithon averted his glance, tapped a finger too fine-jointed for a labourer’s against his elbow, then smiled and gave back the ground he had stolen through surprise. ‘The shipyard’s master has learned how I like things done. Since the works can be left to themselves for the morning, I thought I might call.’

The pot over the brazier burbled to a boil. In pretence of seeming busy, Elaira bent to shorten its chain, then reached for the mint and the stone-bladed knife she preferred over steel for cutting herbs. In careful, measured increments she trimmed and crumbled the leaves on a clean square of linen. ‘You don’t suffer from contusions or colic? That’s ill timing.’

She felt his attention flick over her, sharpened. Before his study could read her, she rocked him off-balance again. ‘Come in, or go, or say what you want. I’m not going to fly out of the window.’

He laughed, but stepped no closer. ‘You know herbals and remedies. I’d a mind to ask if you’d teach me.’

Jarred by his unexpected request, Elaira dropped her knife with a clatter. The tip struck an earthenware crock and snicked off a chip of enamel. ‘Why?’ she said, then instantly regretted it as she sensed through his fractional recoil an answer too painfully obvious.

Arithon s’Ffalenn had been mage-trained. The strictures of his discipline would insist on fair balance: spell paired with counter-ward; any application of force, no matter how small, matched in its kind by restraint. Hounded by a curse that might demand bloodshed on a field of unbridled violence, straight principle would drive him to seek a surgeon’s knowledge to bind wounds and set bones and heal.

‘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.