“—and gathered enough support from his superiors to be shunted to me, whenever I manage to get around to him,” she continued. “I’ll see him this afternoon.”
A thought struck her. She added, “Unless you would like to see him yourself, Garric?”
He looked at Liane, who gave a tiny shake of her head. “No,” Garric said. “But I will want to know what you learn, Sharina. This Moon Wisdom may be more than—”
He glanced at the priestess. “Than a scheme by opportunists to defraud the temple of its proper revenues,” he concluded. Only the slightest hesitation suggested that he’d intended to say something a little different from the words that actually came out.
Garric stood, ending the meeting. “Lords Waldron, Attaper, and Zettin,” he said, “I’ll need a report on the current readiness of the forces you command. By the end of the day, if you please.”
He turned his eyes to the Chancellor. In the same tone of command, so different from anything Sharina had heard from her brother’s lips during the years they grew up together on Haft, he continued, “Lord Royhas, I want all the information we have on the property and perquisites of the individual rulers of this confederacy. I realize that—”
Someone nearby shrieked like a hog nose-clamped for slaughter.
“What’s that?” bellowed someone else, a guard because during the meeting nobody else was permitted near this building and the smaller one adjacent, where her brother had interviewed a spy. “What’s the matter in there!”
Garric was the first to the door and out it, drawing the sword that he alone wore in the council. Attaper and Waldron had the same instinct to run toward trouble, but Garric was younger and already standing.
Another scream…. Sharina followed Attaper, leaping over the chair Garric had flung aside as he moved. Waldron was at the other end of the room, fighting his way through civilians who’d risen also but weren’t as quick to learn for themselves what was causing such terror.
The pair of Blood Eagles posted at the door of the smaller conference room were banging their fists on it, apparently trying to get the attention of the man inside. He had other things on his mind, to the degree that fear let him think at all.
“Break it down!” Garric shouted. Before the guards could act, he slammed his own right bootheel into the latchplate. Sharina knew her brother wasn’t Cashel for strength, but nobody who’d seen Garric lift free a bogged ewe would doubt he was a powerful man by most standards.
The bronze catch inside flew out of its staples. Garric rebounded from the impact, so the guards burst into the room ahead of him.
The spy, his face contorted, was wrestling with nothing at all. And yet there must be something, because both the man’s feet were off the floor….
A Blood Eagle thrust his spear past the spy’s ear; the steel point met only air. His partner dropped his weapon and tried to grapple with the screaming man.
The spy vanished with a sort of twisting motion, like the last of the foam being slung from the rim of a washbasin. There was an odd odor; it reminded Sharina of the way a stone might smell in the dead of winter.
For a moment she thought she could still hear the screams; then they too vanished.
2
“Swing me on your arm again, Chalcus!” Merota demanded. “I want to go all the way over this time!”
Ilna didn’t let her face react. In the sailor’s presence the girl was sometimes either younger than her nine years or very much more mature.
“And so we shall,” said Chalcus, glancing up at the square funnel that slanted rainwater from the roof into the pool here in the center of the entrance hall. “In the garden, though, for you’re growing to such a fine woman that I fear your heels would smudge the ceiling.”
He gestured the women ahead of him and out the south doorway, adding a little bow to Ilna. “And then,” he continued in the same cheerful lilt, “you’ll go back to your room and the lessons I’ve no doubt your tutors have set you. Mistress Ilna and I will speak alone after that.”
They stepped past the loom, covered for the moment. In Chalcus’ company, Ilna took in the colors and sounds of the brick-walled court, the richness that she generally ignored because it had nothing to do with her work.
Five generations in the past, Duke Valgard of Ornifal ruled the neighboring islands outright and claimed with as much justice as any other could to be King of the Isles. Valles was the kingdom’s greatest metropolis then, while the palace compound housed thousands and was a city in its own right.
Those times were over, but workmen were restoring the buildings and grounds at the same rapid tempo as Garric rebuilt the government itself. The bungalow Ilna shared with Cashel, and now Merota, was meant for a senior gardener. It was a detached structure rather than part of a barracks housing the families of twenty clerks or servants, but it was neither spacious nor expensively decorated.
Ilna had chosen the residence herself, mostly for the garden courtyard that gave her good light on clear days. Even that was a needless luxury: she could weave in the dark with perfect assurance. The chamberlain—he’d been replaced since then—had tried to insist that someone of Lady Ilna’s stature must have more luxurious accommodations.
Ilna’s expression at the memory could have cut glass. There were many things that Ilna os-Kenset felt she must do, but none of those duties were imposed by others.
Chalcus extended his left arm, bare except for its scars. He wore as usual only a single short-sleeved tunic. Because he was in money, the present garment was of linen dyed with first-pressing indigo. The hem and sleeves were embroidered in gold thread, and the sash was of fine black silk.
He wore it with a swagger; but then, Chalcus did everything with a swagger.
Merota gripped the sailor’s thick wrist and forearm. She jumped, and Chalcus added a little toss, giving the girl the boost she needed to go over, shrilling delight as her tunics flapped like flags in a storm.
“Why do you always swing her with your left arm, Master Chalcus?” Ilna asked suddenly. He’d said he was here to have a private interview with her. One result of the discussion could be that they’d never see each other again.
“Swing me again, Chalcus!” Merota said.
Chalcus hugged the child to his left side, but it was Ilna he faced with a broad grin. “Indeed, what would happen if some ill-wisher sprang from the lemon balm there—”
He nodded to the bed of herbs with tiny white flowers. None of the stems were as tall as Ilna’s knee.
“—and my sword arm was all tangled with a lovely woman, eh?”
Chalcus wasn’t wearing a sword, and the short curved dagger thrust through his sash was no bigger than the knife every man in a rural village carried for routine tasks. The steel of the blade, however, was as incomparably better than that of knives forged by travelling blacksmiths as Chalcus himself was superior to the common run of sailors.
“Then you’d kill him with your left hand!” Merota said, giggling.
Chalcus looked down at her. “Aye, perhaps I would at that, child,” he said. “Now leave us, if you will.”
Instead of arguing as Ilna had half expected the girl would do—expected until she heard the tone Chalcus used this time—Merota said, “Yes, Chalcus.”
She turned and curtsied to Ilna. “Mistress Ilna,” she said, then reentered the bungalow at a swift but ladylike pace.
Chalcus bent away from Ilna as though to smell the purple-tendriled mint along the east wall. “I’ve been thinking over where I might go next, mistress,” he said. “There’s little use for my sort in a place like Valles, you know.”
He turned and smiled at her. “You’ve a fine crop of herbs growing here,” he added in the same negligent tone. “Those who you cook for are lucky folk indeed.”
Ilna allowed no servants in the bungalow, though with the child’s tutors traipsing in and out there was work enough to keep the place in proper order. Ilna hadn’t met the cook or maid yet who performed to her standards; and in truth, even if such a paragon appeared, Ilna wouldn’t want to share her dwelling with a servant.