Dangerous Waters (15 page)

As Kusint answered, although Corrain couldn’t see his face, he could hear an unexpected grin in the Soluran’s words. ‘No duke. An alliance of exiles from across Ensaimin joined forces with malcontents within Lescar. They hired Captain-general Evord to raise an army to throw down all the dukes. I enlisted as they marched through the Forest. I had a fancy to see somewhere new.’ He sighed. ‘Be careful what you wish for, isn’t that what they say?’

Corrain was too astonished to answer. He had long known that any Lescari with a handful of wits fled their homeland, especially when the dukes’ bloody skirmishing erupted into full scale warfare. Such vagabonds would drift along the coast or traipse the high roads into Caladhria. The parliament disapproved of vagrants, so barons’ troopers with dogs and staves kept them moving onwards. Corrain had done his share of telling such unfortunates to seek better luck elsewhere. From what he’d heard in Trebin, most ended up in Ensaimin, amid that patchwork of fiefdoms and city states.

Where it seemed that some had prospered sufficiently to raise themselves an army. Corrain wondered what the barons’ parliament had made of that.

‘So what about you?’ Kusint prompted. ‘How did you end up in these chains?’

Corrain looked warily around. While he’d seen no sign that the whip master or overseers understood any Tormalin, there were enough mainlander slaves who would. None of them were too close. He lowered his voice all the same.

‘We were betrayed, me and Hosh, our comrades in arms and our liege-lord, Halferan. A man called Minelas led us straight into a band of corsairs’ clutches.’ Hatred all but choked him. ‘After taking our lord’s gold and promising to defeat them.’

Kusint halted at the edge of the water, twisting to look back at Corrain, disbelieving. ‘How could one man promise to defeat a whole band of raiders?’

Corrain could see the hope in his face nonetheless. Kusint sought some way out of these chains as fervently as he did.

Corrain hesitated. Though Lord Halferan was a year and more dead, he was still loath to reveal their baron’s secret. ‘Not a man. A mage.’

‘Oh.’ Kusint turned away, disappointed, hefting the pole again. ‘So it was just lies.’

They began wading out towards the galley, arms braced to lift the pole high to keep the barrel clear of the water. When they reached the stern ladders, slaves at the top tossed down the net used to haul the heavy barrels up. With one last effort, Hosh and Corrain hefted their burden into the mesh, rope sling, pole and all.

As it slid upwards, Corrain stooped to wash the whip cut on his shoulder. Gritting his teeth against the sting of the saltier water, he scrubbed harder. He couldn’t risk it festering.

‘He wasn’t lying,’ he said distantly. ‘He really was a wizard. I saw his magic for myself. He killed a handful of my friends with it, so the corsair leader could murder my lord.’

Corrain wondered if he would ever see that giant corsair again, with those gold chains plaited into his beard. On some Caladhrian beach or trading island, not merely in his dreams. Corrain had woken so many times after ripping a sword through the villain’s throat or spilling his entrails with a dagger.

The Forest lad was frowning. ‘I thought your wizards were forbidden to kill. When there was rumour of magic at work in Lescar, everyone said that it was impossible.’

‘So Planir of Hadrumal told us.’ Corrain’s throat tightened as he recalled Lord Halferan’s anguish at the Archmage’s dismissal. ‘But this Minelas, he said that he would help us for the sake of natural justice.’

And they had all been deceived, even their wise and noble lord. Because Halferan was desperate. Because Minelas was so poisonously plausible, with his open and courteous manner.

Corrain should have thought it through. Mage or not, any man betraying a lifetime’s oath should never be truly trusted.

He looked around the moonlit estuary. It had been so long since he’d spoken of any of this. He’d thought he’d become accustomed to that ever-present pain; the ache of knowing how utterly he’d failed his oath and his allegiance. Putting it into words prompted more anguish than he could bear.

If he tried to flee, was there any chance he could escape? Would the Aldabreshin arrows miss him in the dimness? Could he outstrip the searching raiders, burdened with these fetters? Could he hide somewhere in the reeds until they were forced to quit the hunt, the galley drawn away by the tides?

‘Corrain?’ It was Hosh, floundering in the sucking mud.

No. He couldn’t try to flee now, not with the fool boy in tow, and he couldn’t leave Hosh to suffer whatever revenge the whip master would inflict on him.

But that didn’t mean they couldn’t escape. They’d been talking of nothing else, the two of them, when they could find some peace and privacy. They had finally come up with a plan which would work as well, if not better, with three. If it worked at all.

Corrain seized Kusint’s elbow to stop him climbing back aboard just yet. ‘Can you handle a small boat? Can you swim?’ He couldn’t and neither could Hosh but they’d agreed that couldn’t deter them.

‘I can swim,’ Kusint said slowly, ‘and I know something of boats. I was raised beside a river that makes your Rel look like a rain-fed stream.’

Corrain looked steadily at him. ‘We have a plan to escape these slavers. It’s not without risk.’

‘Life without risk is like meat without salt.’ Kusint grinned with a recklessness born of unforeseen hope.

A belligerent shout from up on the galley startled Hosh so badly that he nearly lost his footing. ‘We have to get back aboard!’

He scrambled for the ladder. Corrain and Kusint followed with every appearance of cowed obedience.

As Kusint grasped the rungs, he nodded at Corrain. ‘Till later, then.’

C
HAPTER
N
INE

Halferan Manor, Caladhria

21st of Aft-Spring

‘Y
OU WON’T DELAY
your departure?’ Zurenne swallowed. She didn’t want her voice to tremble. ‘The skies do look ominous.’

As Baron Licanin looked from the groom leading his horse from the stable to the scudding clouds above, the lady wizard spoke up.

‘It won’t rain today, my lord, not before sunset. You’ll have no trouble on the road.’

Zurenne could have slapped the woman. She had, in those reveries she allowed herself in the manor’s silent shrine. The lady wizard showed no shred of piety and never followed her there.

‘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.’