Aghast, his face white and his frame racked to shivers, Arithon looked stricken by a deathblow as he regarded the ruin of his hope to make clean escape to blue water.
Feylind reached up and squeezed his dripping, cold fingers. ‘Mother asked you to come home with us. She made a pot of fish soup.’
Fiark blew plastered blond hair from his lips and chimed in, ‘You can borrow my blanket from the loft.’
Arithon forced himself to stir. ‘Thank you. And thank Jinesse, too, for her kindness. Say that I’ll visit her cottage later. Now go home. She’ll greet me with scolding if she finds out I’ve let you get wet.’
The children hared off, screaming in delight as they kicked and splashed through the puddles.
Ignored where he waited, growing soggy in a tunic that reeked of unwashed sweat, Dakar slapped the crimped locks behind his neck to dam the water that dribbled down his collar. ‘Are we just going to stand here until we grow roots in the damp?’
The chart loft still stood. To judge by the cries of raucous laughter ringing in muffled bursts through the boards, and the woodsmoke which trailed from the chimney, the labourers inside would at least be warm, if the beer that made them blithe had run out.
Arithon’s stillness cracked into a purposeful stride that carried him up to the doorway. He lifted the latch, crashed the panel inward, and stood stiff-armed against the silver splash of runoff that poured off the palm-thatched roof.
Blocked in the entry behind him, Dakar saw the uproarious company of the yard’s workers rock into stupefied stillness. Calloused hands drifted in midair, crockery beer mugs forgotten; bare feet shifted under bench boards and table. Like the rasp of a hornet’s nest disturbed in dry grass, Ivel the blind splicer chuckled in malice from his perch on a nail barrel in the corner. It’s himself come back, and early, too. What else could shrivel the tongues in yer mouths? I’d warrant a visit by Dharkaron’s Chariot would be given a saucier welcome.’
‘I want to know what happened,’ Arithon cut in, his bard’s trained diction never sharper. ‘Let the master shipwright stay and tell me. The steam box is whole, still. So are the tools and the sawpit. If the new wood’s a loss, the one hull not decked yet can be taken apart and used to patch up the holed one. By Ath, I don’t pay any man silver to sit on his rump sucking down beer ‘til he’s witless!’
A galvanic stir swept the crowded tables as benches rumbled back from plank trestles. The labourers arose in guilt-fed haste and pressed to be first to crowd the doorway. Arithon stepped aside to let them pass, his burning gaze merciless on every man’s face. Only when the last cringing layabout had passed did he move to enter the sail loft. Stale air and dampness and the smell of sour lager hung heavy in the stifling heat. Reprieved at last from the misery of the rain, Dakar sidled to the stove to warm his fingers, eyes darting in prayerful search for a tankard and a broached cask.
‘No beer left,’ rasped Ivel from his cranny. Scathelessly smug before Arithon’s flicked glance, and crafty enough to anticipate, he tipped his grizzled beard toward the tread that advanced and shrugged his bony shoulders. His large, seamed hands with their thumbs worn shiny from years of twining hemp gleamed red against shadow as Dakar fiddled open the gate of the iron stove and prodded the embers inside.
‘Rope store’s full burnt,’ the splicer quipped in brassy cheer. ‘Can’t make me work in yon rain without materials.’ He tilted his narrow head, impertinent as a gossip. ‘What’ll ye do? That gold store of yers, lad, she’s bound to be played right low.’
Arithon swept aside a litter of sticky crockery, kicked a bench closer, and sat. ‘I’ll thank you not to comment until the master shipwright has explained himself.’
Ivel leaned aside and shot a neat stream of spit at a bowl on the trestle by his elbow. ‘Master shipwright’s run off. He feared to face yer temper, and some lass in Shaddorn took him in. You want to know what happened, I’ll tell it. Else you can try out yer touch with the wretch who torched the yard. The men hazed him like butchers. He won’t talk.’
Arithon straightened, his wet fingers clenched and his eyes icy sparks in the gloom. ‘One man?’
‘Aye.’ Ivel’s grin revealed gapped, yellow teeth. ‘Hates yer living guts. Hid in the brush till the lads all got drunk, then launched on his merry bit of sabotage.’
‘He knows who I am?’ Arithon asked in a dead, level voice. ‘He told the labourers?’
A cracking, high cackle split from Ivel’s throat. He hugged his knees to his chest on his barrel, a dried-up, corded little monkey of a man who lived and breathed to stir up malice. ‘He told the men nothing, for all the hide they singed off him. What I ken, I got because I took him water when he raved. But your secret’s full safe with me, prince.’
Arithon snapped up a chipped flagon and hurled it. The smash of unglazed crockery against the board floor raised a storm of clay dust and chinking fragments. ‘Secret?’ He laughed in a brittle, thin irony more bitter than the splicer could match. ‘The whole of the north knows precisely where I am, and I find my ships burned to ashes.’
Still by the stove, polished ruddy by the coals, Dakar rubbed sweaty knuckles over his rumpled tunic. ‘You say the man who did this is held captive?’
Ivel rocked off a nod. ‘Aye, he is. Bound and locked in the boiler shed. The master joiner guards the key.’
The wood fire had been lit to heat the steam box again. Aware of the rain as a drummed, liquid trickle off the thatch and the erratic, spaced hiss as a leak dripped onto the hot copper vat, the prisoner curled on his side in abject misery. The damp, sand floor made him shiver. Hungry, thirsty, fevered down to his bones, at first he presumed the footsteps outside meant a labourer had come to fuel the stove.
Since such were wont to kick him as they passed, he wormed into the gap behind the log stores. If he feigned sleep and stayed out of sight, sometimes his presence was forgotten. Today, the mere hope made him pitiful. The sweeping chills that seized through his frame made him unable to keep still.
The footsteps outside came closer, overlaid by agitated talk. Then a stranger’s voice blistered across rising argument like tempered steel through threshed straw. ‘Enough! I’ll hear no excuses. Stay out here until you’re called.’ Keys chimed sour notes through a patter of hurried strides, and the new arrival spoke again. ‘No, Dakar. You will wait.’
The bar in the lock grated and gave; the door jerked open. A flood of rain-washed air swirled through the heat and a small, lithe man stepped inside. He stood a moment, eyes searching the darkness, while the fiery glare from the furnace lined his sharp profile and the lip he curled up at the stench.
Snapped to a scourge of clear anger, he said, ‘You claim he’s in here?’
The master joiner’s south shore drawl filtered back, uncertain through the silvered splash of water. ‘Master, he’s there. My heart’s blood as surety. We’d never let him escape.’
Without any fumbling, the man found the lamp and the striker kept ready on the shelf by the doorway. His hands shook as he lit the spill. The trembling flare of illumination as he touched flame to wick shed gold over finely made knuckles. He raised the lamp and hung its iron ring from a nail in the rafters.
Through vision impaired to slits by bruises and swelling, the prisoner saw him fully, centred beneath the yellow glow. Thin and well-knit, he looked like a wraith in dark breeches, his white shirt slathered to his shoulders by the rain. His hair was black. Wet strands stuck like ink to his temples and jaw. The features they framed were pale granite, all chipped