‘My heir should be wearing tanned buckskins in Atwood? Ath, woman! You bleed me!’ Bransian levered upright, to a groan from the bed-frame, which also bore scars, where an ancestor had stabbed his knives inside of arm’s reach in the head-board. ‘Sevrand’s an adult. Let him choose for himself.’
The duke kicked off the blankets and snatched for the grimy gambeson that had padded yesterday’s chainmail. ‘You would shame me ahead of the Fatemaster himself! No fighting man on these walls will stand firm, believing I planned on defeat.’
To which Liesse bent her head. Face buried amid her uncombed brown hair and the clutch of exasperated fingers, she sighed.
Bransian’s bunched fists released, as he realized she was trembling. ‘Wife!’ he barked, sucked hollow by tenderness. One barefoot stride and he gathered her close: her tears would bring him to his knees, if not wring him wretchedly gutless. ‘You should fear a few enemies?’
‘No,’ Liesse gasped, muffled. She raised her chin from his chest, coughing back laughter. ‘I should despair of the hope you could reach for clean clothes before letting the filth rot them to rags off your back!’
Yet no biting humour might stem the Alliance advance that surged in on them like flood-tide.
As the new morning brightened, the shore-side watch beacons relayed more damning reports. Alliance companies now mushroomed over the muddied acres left scorched by the reivers’ torch. Hourly, more troop-laden warships hove in. Anchored hulls jammed the coves like teeth in a trap, until the expectant tension locked down, cranked as an overtaut drumhead.
Day followed day. From lookout tower, to battlement, to the eyrie vantage of the upper citadel, the sentries flashed mirrors in coded signal. Alestron watched Lysaer’s grand war host assemble, until the counters that burdened Bransian’s maps swallowed all of the surrounding shore-line. Dawn followed dawn, while the town hunkered down behind fast-shut gates and denied egress to out-bound civilians.
‘I don’t understand,’ Fionn Areth complained from his leaned stance between the Sea Gate’s battle-scarred merlons. Above him, the massive groan of the winches raised the hoist, bearing stone-shot and slopping, filled casks. Saltwater was being stockpiled ahead, for the flammable hidings that guarded the foundations under the ramparts.
As the platform’s shadow scythed over his face, the goatherd sawed on in his Araethurian twang, ‘Shouldn’t the duke bless every tuck-tailed coward who wishes to leave? Why hang on to their chicken-shit mouths? They’re just wasting his food stores and draining his cisterns.’
‘Morale,’ stated Jeynsa, as bitten as forest-bred manners could frame a response.
Fionn Areth slid his gaze sideward and studied her. A tall, freckled lynx, she lounged with her chin on her fist, while the wind fluttered through her knife-cropped brown hair. Her bitten-off nails were black-rimmed with tar. That would be the remnant of yesterday’s toil, a longshoreman’s morning spent loading the pitch barrels sent to the Wyntok Gate.
Engrossed, the grass-lander chafed to dissect the enigma she represented. Forestborn daughter of a former high earl, she wore bladed weapons as though bred to war. Though her woman’s build could not outmatch a man’s bulk, the fact never humbled her manner. Jeynsa’s brazen promise to summon her crown prince gave even s’Brydion aggression a frost-ridden pause. If the duke and his brothers were wont to treat her tenderly for a move that bordered on treason, their citadel’s matrons, with their clinging toddlers, applauded her as a saviour.
For Fionn Areth, the fascination stayed fresh: he wondered how Arithon was going to handle the chit, if and when he chose to arrive.
Until then, the arena became verbal prodding. ‘Morale, so you say?’ the grass-lander mused. ‘Then you’d be the going expert on sieges, come from an even more back-country birthright than I?’
Jeynsa laughed. ‘Rats leave sinking ships. The s’Brydion banner has never been struck.’ Six hundred and fifty-three years to the day, all campaigns to rout charter rule from Alestron had been smashed at punishing cost. ‘Clanblood doesn’t shrink at long odds. Let the squeamish guilds bleed their wealth from this town, or pack off their wives and young children, there’s too little left at stake to stem losses. Some panicked town turncoat might unlatch the back-postern, or take bribes to welcome the enemy.’
But no assault in Alestron’s proud history carried the threat levelled now.
Fionn Areth had shared the look-outs’ reports. He had heard the opinions of Vhandon and Talvish, and eavesdropped on grim talk in the barracks. If today’s white-capped view from the Sea Gate embrasure did not show the invidious advance at the harbour mouth, the truth was not secret: their sea-bound supply line was thwarted. Kalesh and Adruin commanded the narrows. The massed counters stacked on the duke’s tactical maps also stymied the citadel’s access by trade-road. Just as likely, the outer gates had been barred to stop nervous deserters from joining the enemy.
The more telling point, to Fionn Areth’s stark eye, was how the sorcerer known as the Spinner of Darkness would grapple the appalling scale of sheer numbers. If the Teir’s’Ffalenn elected to bestir himself, and risk Jeynsa’s bid for protection; the grass-lander felt qualified to weigh the question. His own reprieve, snatched from the scaffold, had not been the pitched target of three kingdoms’ fanatical muster.
‘Charter law would seem scarcely a boon,’ he declared. ‘Or why else should you lump those of us without lineage in arse-kissing terms with your foemen?’
That touched a nerve, finally. Jeynsa straightened and stared. Green as fire in opal, her glance raked him. ‘Ask your royal double how my father died. Then remember. The price in bloodshed on Daon Ramon Barrens was the cost of your rescue from Jaelot’s executioner.’
‘I was not made party to your prince’s choice,’ Fionn Areth said, a piercing fact to strike wind from his victim.
But not Jeynsa Teiren’s’Valerient, who backed down from no scrap: whose arms underneath her short-sleeved leather jerkin wore bruises gained sparring with Sevrand at quarterstaves. ‘You dare to pass judgement on me? Or set me up for comparison?’
Fionn Areth sustained her blistering stare. ‘I condemn nothing,’ he pronounced without shame. ‘Rather, I’d ask: are you Arithon’s friend or his enemy?’
That touched a nerve, also. Fanned rage chilled to ice. Jeynsa sized up the goatherd’s antagonism, then dismissed his bold query, unflinching. ‘You’ve spent too much time under Talvish’s heel, in quarters with rank-and-file fighting men. They measure by nothing else but brute force, which dangerously narrows your view-point.’
‘Then show me,’ Fionn Areth insisted.
Jeynsa snapped up his challenge and led him through the town. Not from the vantage of the inner citadel, whose lofty battlements had been raised by Paravians. Not over the chain-bridge to the middle town district, where the cast shadow of pending attack dimmed the air with stirred dust from lance drills on the practice field. Nor where the squads of sweating men laboured, refining the range of the trebuchets. Instead, Jeynsa marched him into the arched carriage-way that fronted the ducal residence.
A wagon was parked by the carved, granite steps, with their pillars of Highscarp marble. The four-in-hand team at the hub of activity wore gleaming harness, brasses studded with Alestron’s bull blazon. There, Jeynsa prevailed upon Mearn’s pregnant wife, and asked for the two of them to accompany her on the daily rounds shared between the ranking s’Brydion women.
‘Someone must hear