Fiark grinned. ‘She won’t give up trying to put you in skirts? Or are you concerned that your language will finally hound the poor lady to drink?’
Feylind laughed. ‘It’s the subject we’re hell-bound to discuss. His affairs. If she overhears us, she’ll have a nerve storm. Last time I spoke of his doings in her kitchen, she doused me down with a milk-pail, then just about dinged me unconscious.’
‘Using what? Her straw basket of sewing silk?’ Fiark needled sweetly.
‘Sithaer’s raving furies, nothing so kind.’ Feylind pattered down the dim stairway. ‘Mother gives the impression she’s fifty and frail. But raise her temper, we’re more alike than you know. She went for my nape with her flat-iron.’
‘To keep you in the house? And it worked?’ Fiark burst into unbridled delight. ‘Is that why you’re packing your boarding axe? Ath, I wondered. After all, you’re not dressed to repel panting suitors.’
‘The ones who pant get my boot in their teeth.’ Paused under the arch at the outer arcade, a flamboyant, slim figure stamped against the glaring noon sunshine, Feylind paused. Her freckled face sobered. ‘With Mother, you don’t get the grace of a warning. I swear I saw swimming lights for a week, with a bump fit to rival a peacock’s egg.’
In the cool, whitewashed kitchen with its azure tiles, the light fell like rippled water through roundels of glass. Feylind sat at ease at the trestle, a robust toddler astride her bent knee. Summer had bleached the child’s hair from its dark brown to the mixed hues of pulled taffy. His flushed face resembled his pert mother, while the blue eyes that surveyed the ship’s captain, beyond mistake, favoured Fiark.
‘That’s not a toy,’ Feylind murmured, prying curious fingers away from the hilt of her rigging knife. ‘Just haul on my earring. There’s a fine little man.’ She grinned as the wife laid out fruit and pale wine. ‘My son’s aboard ship?’
‘And your daughter.’ The neat woman smiled. ‘Tharrick took both of them. They were wrecking the peace until they could visit their father.’
Feylind raised her eyebrows, head tipped to forestall the mauling yank at her ear-lobe. ‘They saw the flags on the custom-house?’
‘Flags! They know the lines of a ship and her sail rig,’ Fiark corrected from the side-lines. ‘The boy’s been begging for months to ply his hand at the oar as a lighterman.’
The wife sat beside him, perhaps to revive the exhausted admonishment, that long since, Feylind should have wed her first mate.
‘Don’t start,’ Feylind warned. ‘The randy goat’s already married to Evenstar, besides.’ Her strong hands set down the squirming child, then unsheathed the disputed blade and began to dismember peaches. ‘Our boy’s too young for the lighters, as yet. He could run errands for the chandler’s, if he’s keen. You don’t mind them underfoot?’
‘Shore rats.’ Fiark grinned. His elegant, buckled shoes were propped up on a chair seat. Fair-skinned, but without his sister’s lined squint, he leaned back with his collar and doublet unlaced. ‘You’d have them on Evenstar’s deck? The sea’s in their blood, there’s no question.’
‘To mimic my sailhands’ randy habits?’ Feylind chuckled. ‘Not on your life. I’d set them a ruinous example as a mother, forbye. No. The pests can stay safe in the nursery with yours.’ She pinned her brother’s sapphire stare. ‘Since, after all, I am not bound for Havish.’
Fiark’s pigeon of a wife shoved erect and bristled. ‘You promised! No language!’
Feylind shrugged. ‘That’s up to Fiark. He doesn’t need to provoke me with reasons to go back on my given word.’
‘In fact, I must.’ Her brother lunged. Faster than his rich clothing suggested possible, he snatched his son short of his clamber up Feylind’s knee. At his nod, the mother whisked the wailing child out. ‘We’re going to argue in earnest, I see.’
‘Argue!’ Feylind glowered like a shark, regretting the axe left behind in the garret office.
Fiark’s brows were set level, now, as their need to mince pronouns was discarded. ‘Feylind. There were set-backs. Arithon never reached Eltair’s coast. His escape plan from Jaelot met failure.’ He told the rest quickly. ‘His Grace is safe, but holed up in the Mathorns.’
That Arithon was now the guest of Davien was a fact far too volatile to reveal, given Feylind’s impulsive temperament. In no mood to try her with subtle explanations, Fiark waited, intent.
When his sister said nothing, he caught her wrist. ‘Feylind, his Grace is safe! I’ve had confirmed word by fast courier, through Atchaz. Dakar and the rescued double are also secure with the s’Brydion at Alestron. That’s a milk run, damn it! A coastal lugger and a hired crew of fishermen can collect the pair, and Khetienn can be flagged down for an off-shore rendezvous.’
Feylind stared, drained under her sea-going tan. ‘Leaving Arithon land-bound? Merciful death. I can’t bear it!’
‘For now,’ Fiark stated. ‘The idea is his choice. I can’t cross his royal will on the matter, and neither can you.’
When his twin swallowed, anguished, he held his breath, hoping that somehow good sense would prevail.
‘The weather’s not canny’ Uncomplacent, Feylind squared her shoulders. ‘They say it’s done nothing but dump rain in the west.’
Fiark released his sister’s taut limb. Sympathy, from him, would destroy her tough strength. She had not married, as both of them knew, because her unswerving devotion tied her heart to the cause of the Crown Prince of Rathain.
She stirred finally, stabbed the knife into a melon, and folded her arms at her breast. ‘Why couldn’t his Grace have made me the acting captain of the Khetienn?’ she whispered in plaintive longing.
Fiark need not answer. The reason was self-evident: Feylind was bound as master to an honest brig because Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had sworn his royal oath not to set her at risk. Once, years ago, a female captain had been killed, mistakenly condemned as the Master of Shadow’s associate. The trumped-up charges had been an act of spite, inflicted by frustrated enemies.
‘You would break his heart, sister,’ Fiark said, a quiet truth. Day by day, the Alliance’s influence strengthened. The network of correspondence he handled was becoming increasingly dangerous. ‘You will sail for Havish. There are people suffering. Even as we speak, the Evenstar’s being loaded to relieve them.’
Feylind reached out and halved the melon, first sign that she might capitulate. Yet her truce held razor-edged warning. ‘There will come a time when the promise his Grace swore to our mother will not be enough to restrain me.’
Fiark released the pent air in his lungs. His smile was calm, and his eyes, very bright, as their minds at last reached concord. ‘On that day, if it comes, and if his Grace requires your sniping interference, you’ll cast off your hawsers and sail with my whole-hearted backing.’ At her laughing breath, the trade factor who master-minded Arithon’s shoreside affairs let his guarded worry evaporate. ‘You didn’t doubt?’
‘Never you,’ Feylind stated. Aware she was hungry, she attacked the hacked melon. ‘Though I wonder sometimes, watching you mince about with your gentrified manners, and your pompous velvets and lace. Let’s see how you manage when Mother grabs for her iron and brains you for keeping dishonest company’
Not chastened at all, Fiark replied in the fishing-village vernacular of their childhood. ‘Leave mother to Tharrick. It’s the wee snip I married who’s the more apt to snatch her pot-hook and geld me for agreeing to your feckless risks.’
Summer 5670