word through her teeth.
‘Beans,’ her twin spoke back in rejoinder. ‘Also salt pork in barrels, dried corn, and flour. Spirits and wine—because of rains and flooding, the low-country cisterns have become uselessly tainted. Children have sickened. You’ll be carrying medicinals. Oh yes, and some nets of fresh limes, dropped by fast galley from Southshire.’
Feylind smiled like lightning unleashed. Captain to a crew of twenty, all male, she unslung her boarding axe and let fly. Moulding and varnish smashed to uncivil splinters as she razed off the outside latch.
‘Feylind, you maniac!’
The lock turned with alacrity. Sunk steel was wrenched from its setting as Fiark jerked open the mangled panel. Feylind immediately began her next stroke. As the door swung wide, the raised blade topped its arc. She snapped her wrists; changed its falling trajectory.
The haft left her hands, and the edged helve impaled in the rim of her brother’s desk. Quill-pens fluttered air-borne. Stacked ledgers toppled. Piles of correspondence disgorged their lead weights, and sluiced in white sheaves to the floor-boards.
Fiark’s fair brow relaxed. Immaculate in his dark velvet and pale lawn, he sized up his twin sister’s strapping, tanned arms, and the sailor’s slops she wore hacked to frayed threads above bare feet and neatly turned ankles. His sigh masked a smile. ‘After the scars from your hobnailed boots, today’s flourish is scarcely significant.’ He met her eyes, of identical blue. ‘You are not sailing east. King Eldir needs a skilled captain, and Evenstar’s the only bottom we have with no dicey political strings on her registry’
‘Bugger that, with a goat,’ Feylind said, furious. ‘You can kiss your High King’s land-lubbing arse! Give him your mouthful of sweet consolation, because I am not sailing to Havish.’
‘I will not start a war!’ Fiark snapped. ‘And dare spew that filth to King Eldir’s face, he’d have your tongue for gutter-snipe insolence.’
Feylind hooked her chapped thumbs in her belt. ‘You know who missed his backup rendezvous at Alestron.’
Her volatile change in subject need mention no name. Fiark shut his eyes, only half in forbearance. ‘Ath, you’re obsessed.’ Then, ‘Yes, I was aware.’ Without pause to tidy the wreck of his desk, he reached for his key, closed and locked his breached door, and valiantly called for a stand-off. ‘Since the taverns at this hour are too hot for arguing, we’ll discuss the matter at home?’
‘Yours?’ Feylind said. ‘Not Mother’s.’
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.
