Shadowsinger (7 page)

“What about the Sturinnese, Lady Secca?” asked Wilten. “Could they not follow us from Narial?”

Secca nodded to Alcaren.

“That would be most difficult for them,” Alcaren said smoothly. “Much of the coast is rugged and rocky, and they have no vessels to carry them to Stygia. The only other route is by the midland farm roads, and that would take them far, far longer. We would be well in position on the highland bluffs before they could reach us.”

“What do we know about Lord High Counselor Fehern? Will he hold until we reach Envaryl?”

Rather than answer the question directly, Secca turned to Richina. “If you would call up Lord Fehern in the glass?”

“Yes, lady.” Richina stood and reclaimed her lutar, taking it from the case and checking the tuning. Shortly, she began the chords for the scrying spell, and then the spell itself.

The glass displayed a man standing by a window, a figure seemingly tall, with graying black hair, deep-set eyes, and an angular face.

Both Wilten and Delcetta frowned.

Secca was more interested in the broad-shouldered figure in traveler's gray who stood back from Fehern's shoulder. She studied the man. “He looks like a Sea-Priest, even if he's in gray and not white.”

No one else around the table spoke.

Secca smiled at Alcaren. “Can you come up with a spell to see if he is?”

Richina's eyes went from Secca to the glass, then back to the Ranuan. Then the younger sorceress sang the release couplet for her own spell.

After frowning and mouthing some words, Alcaren eased from his chair. He picked up his lumand, an instrument smaller than Secca's lutar and, facing the glass, began to sing.

The glass showed almost the same scene, except that it focused on the dark-haired man with the trimmed and square black beard.

“You can release it,” Secca said to Alcaren. “If you and Richina would sit down…” She waited until all were seated around the conference table.

“Did you know this before?” asked Palian.

“Not for certain. Jolyn had sent a scroll some weeks ago that suggested Fehern's rise to Lord High Counselor had been sudden and unexpected.” Secca laughed once, harshly. “We had Sea-Priests in Ebra. Why not in Dumar?”

“How could he place himself in the hands of the Sea-Priests?” asked Delcetta. “Does he not understand that he will be their slave?”

“Perhaps Fehern doesn't know the man is a Sea-Priest,” suggested Richina.

“He may not wish to know,” said Alcaren dryly.

“With this…can we afford to enter Dumar?” asked Wilten.

“Can we afford not to?” countered Palian. “Fehern cannot know or allow himself to believe that the man is Sturinnese. Otherwise, he would not have fought the Sea-Priests. He would have sought terms or some advantage. Better we act before the Sturinnese learn we know such.”

“So long as we never rely on Lord High Counselor Fehern,” added Alcaren.

Secca stood. “We still embark in three days. While we make ready,
I would like you to think upon this, and how we might turn it to our advantage.”

Wilten looked at Delcetta, then at Delvor, and finally at Alcaren. Each met his gaze without blinking. A long moment passed before he murmured, “As you will, Lady Secca.”

Those around the table rose and bowed to Secca, except for Alcaren, who merely stepped back toward the windows while the others filed out of the chamber.

After the door closed behind Richina, Secca and Alcaren exchanged glances.

“It's a trap, you know,” Alcaren said.

“A snare within a trap, I think.” Secca looked at Alcaren. “Yet waiting will tighten the noose more.”

“The Maitre has been planning this for years.”

“He has been planning longer. We'll have to plan better,” she replied. After a moment, she added, “Once preparations are complete, and just before we embark, we should send a message by sorcery to Lord Robero telling him that we are beginning the effort to reclaim Dumar.”

“Do you have some thoughts as to how we are to accomplish that, my lady?”

“Not yet.” She smiled, half-sadly, not quite truthfully, as she recalled the notes hidden away in her pack, the ones taken from Anna's notebooks with the spells she had shuddered to read, and shuddered more in reading Anna's explanations. “Do you?”

“Not yet, but I have great confidence in you.”

Secca shook her head.

“I do…It is just that you fear doing what you must do.” Alcaren grinned. “Remember, you don't have to do anything this moment.” He glanced toward the bedchamber, with a half-leering smile, “except enjoy your consort.”

“I never thought…” Secca began.

“Neither did I,” he replied.

They both laughed, and the sound was a mixture of rue and joy.

Encora, Ranuak

The Matriarch walks slowly toward the throne-chair of blue crystal that waits upon the low dais at the end of the formal receiving room. Her eyes barely take in the familiar room, or her distorted reflection in the shadowed long windows on the west side of the room, a reflection that does not show clearly the blonde hair that is silvering all too rapidly, nor the drawn face that has become more and more angular with each season.

Silently, she steps up onto the dais, turning and seating herself on the blue cushion that is the sole softness within the chamber. She straightens herself upon the throne-chair of blue crystal, then clears her throat, before declaring firmly, “You may show her in.”

“Yes, Matriarch.” The voice of the guard is firm and clear, although he stands in the corridor outside the receiving room.

The door opens. A gray-haired woman steps slowly into the formal receiving room, and beams of golden morning light slanting through the long windows bathe her boots. The short cut of her hair accentuates the roundness of her face, but the deep-set eyes are hard and cold. She offers a bow that is less than perfunctory. “Matriarch.”

“You expressed a desire to see me. What do you wish?” asks Alya.

“I would like to know how long you intend to keep us prisoned in the White Tower. Or our daughters in the Blue.”

“Not much longer, Santhya. It would not have been necessary had you not been so foolish as to try to kill the Sorceress Protector.”

“I did nothing of the sort, Matriarch.” After a pause, she adds, “As you well know.” After a second pause, she continues, “Nor did I consort a sorcerer and a sorceress under the aegis of the Matriarchy.”

“You would rather I deny them that small happiness?” Alya snorts. “As for attempting murder, as one of your council, you approved that
attempt, even if you did not personally lift the blade.” Alya offers a wry smile. “Even so, I keep my word. It may be a week or two, but then you can return to your home.”

“But not to the Exchange, I wager.”

“No.” Alya shakes her head. “You have proven that you place the Ladies of the Shadows above your duty to Ranuak. That is not acceptable for the Assistant Exchange Mistress.”

“Dyleroy accepts this?”

“It was her decision, not mine. She is Exchange Mistress.”

“For mere golds you will destroy all we hold dear.”

Alya's eyes glitter, and a palpable chill issues from the dais.

Santhya shivers, but says nothing, and her own deep-set eyes continue to view the Matriarch.

Finally, Alya speaks, slowly, deliberately. “What we hold dear is the right to determine how we live. What we hold dear is for each woman to be mistress of her own body. Golds are one tool, but no Matriarch and no Exchange Mistress has ever subverted those principles to golds. You, and all the Ladies of the Shadows, fear the use of sorcery so greatly that you would return us to being slaves rather than see sorcery employed to keep us free. Through fear, you would enslave us.”

“Through sorcery,” counters Santhya, “you will destroy us.”

“I doubt that.”

“Matriarch…small as she is, well-mannered as she is, that sorceress will destroy all that is Liedwahr before the year is out. The Spell-Fire Wars will seem like nothing compared to what she will unleash in the name of protecting Defalk—and us—from the Sea-Priests. The oceans will turn to steam; the land will flow like water; and the handful of folk who survive will die barren.”

Alya laughs. “In the time of the Mynyans, during the Spell-Fire Wars you mention so often and so well, there were scores of sorcerers and sorceresses. Today, Defalk has four, perhaps five. The Sea-Priests may have a score, possibly twoscore, after the score or so that the Sorceress-Protector Secca destroyed.”

“The Sorceress-Protector has the knowledge from the Mist Worlds, and none had that in the time of the Spell-Fire Wars.”

“Enough.” Alya does not raise her voice, but the receiving room chills yet more, despite the morning sunlight angling through the eastern windows. “We do not agree. We will likely never agree. I have answered your inquiry, and you may go.”

Santhya offers the slightest of bows, then turns without speaking
and walks toward the door that opens as she nears it and closes after she passes through it.

Alone in the receiving room, Alya does not rise from the crystal chair. Her eyes are dark, and her face remains drawn.

With the sun barely rising over the port quarter of Encora, Secca and Alcaren dismounted on the pier where the ocean trader was tied. Secca still felt tired from having to do sorcery early in the morning to send the message tube to Lord Robero, but she hadn't wanted to send it much before they left, and did not wish to send it later, when she might need all her strength to deal with the Sturinnese. As she turned, Secca glanced again at the wooden plaque below and aft of the bowsprit, where the spare script letters proclaimed
Silberwelle
.

“You don't mind that it's the
Silberwelle
, do you?” asked Alcaren.

“Not so long as you don't have any Darksong in mind,” Secca replied. Still, it had been disconcerting to find that the “flagship” of her small expedition was the same vessel from whose deck she had destroyed the Sturinnese fleet blockading Encora—and where she had nearly died.

After unstrapping her saddlebags and lutar, Secca turned and looked once more at the
Silberwelle
. “I hadn't thought…”

“You hadn't thought what, Lady Sorceress?” came the question from the ship's railing beside the upper end of the gangway.

Secca glanced up and smiled at the woman who addressed her. Captain Denyst was less than a span taller than Secca and little broader. The captain's broad and welcoming smile, set in a face tanned and weathered, showed even white teeth.

“You'd not be depriving me of the chance to help you strike at the Sea-Pigs now, would you?” asked the
Silberwelle
's captain in her unique voice, a voice that carried the slightest of rasping edges and seemed to cut through everything around.

Secca shook her head. “I'm afraid I didn't end the last battle particularly well.”

“Any battle you win and survive is a good one.” Denyst gestured abruptly. “Don't stand there. Come on board. Need to load all those players and mounts coming down the pier, and need to cast off no later than midmorning.”

Secca walked up the gangway, trying to reconcile the feelings she harbored with the knowledge that the
Silberwelle
and her captain were the best suited for the voyage ahead, yet also recalling the chill feeling of those moments but a few weeks before when she had gone to the edge of death—and perhaps farther. As her boots touched the wood, and she moved away from the pier, two crew members waited to descend to begin loading Secca's and Alcaren's mounts.

“It's good to see you looking so well,” offered Denyst, once Secca and Alcaren stood on the main deck. “Consorting looks to agree with you two.” The wiry captain grinned directly at Secca. “Take someone like you to set this rascal's heart afire.” Denyst then glanced toward Alcaren. “Good thing, too.”

“You'd have me ablaze all the time?” joked Alcaren.

“Better that than an unhappy trader or a guard to the Matriarch, don't you think? Love'd be the only ruler you'd abide.” Denyst turned slightly and called to the crewmen leading the gray up the gangway. “Those two in the forward stalls!”

“Aye, Captain.”

Denyst turned to the two. “The first, and I'll be sharing her cabin. You can have mine.”

“You don't have to…” Secca began to protest.

“Aye, and I don't, but consorting happens but once, and there's little enough time before you face the Sea-Pigs.” Denyst's eyes twinkled. “Next voyage you take with me, you two can have a smaller space.”

“Thank you.” Secca hoped there would be the opportunity for another voyage.

“Thank you,” echoed Alcaren.

“No thanks till we port at Stygia.” Denyst frowned. “There are no Sturinnese vessels in Narial? That is what you said?”

“That is what the glass shows,” Secca admitted.

“They don't have anything here to challenge us,” Alcaren replied. “But there is a fleet gathering in the Ostisles.”

“We best hasten home,” Denyst said. “Leastwise, quick enough to discourage them from coming after us. Best you get yourself settled while
I tend to the load-on. Figuring the balance with all those mounts will take some doing.” With a quick smile, Denyst stepped past them toward the gangway.

Alcaren gestured toward the hatch leading aft.

Secca glanced back up at the poop deck railing, where she had fallen at the end of the battle, and where Alcaren had used Darksong to save her. Then she swallowed and followed Alcaren through the hatch toward the captain's cabin.