husband was aboard?’ Lysaer probed softly.
Jinesse jerked her fingers from his clasp. Her wide-eyed flash of resentment transformed to dismay as she spun and flounced off of the dais.
‘Go with her,’ Lysaer said in swift order to the officer at the base of the stair. ‘See her home safely and stay there until I can send someone to console her. There were survivors from that vessel. I don’t know how many, but her loved one could possibly be among them.’
Mollified by the kindness shown to one of their own, the villagers of Merior gave way to a grudging, gruff patience as Lysaer concluded his speech. ‘I’ve scarcely touched on the danger this conniving pirate presents. If you never saw him work shadows or sorcery, you will be shown that his gifts are no tale without substance. Among you stand my officers, who saw the sunlight over Minderl Bay become strangled into darkness. They will stay and hear your questions. Lord Diegan will tell of the massacre he survived on the banks of Tal Quorin in Deshir. We have a man from Jaelot and another from Alestron, who witnessed the felonies there. But lest what they say turn your hearts to rank fear, I would have you understand you’re not alone.’
Lysaer raised his arms. His full, embroidered sleeves fell away from his wrists as he stretched his hands wide and summoned the powers of his birth gift. A flood of golden light washed the fish market. It rinsed through the flames in the torches, and built, blinding, dazzling, until the eye could not separate the figure of the prince from the overwhelming, miraculous glare.
Lysaer’s voice rolled over the dismayed gasps of the awestruck fisherfolk at his feet. ‘My gift of light is a full match for the Master of Shadow! Be assured I shall not rest until this land is safe, and his evil designs are eradicated.’
From the boardinghouse landlady, who called with a basket of scones, Jinesse learned how opinion had turned once Prince Lysaer had left the villagers to enjoy his hospitality. The beer and the wine had flowed freely, while talk loosened. The old gossip concerning the Black Drake and the widow’s past voyage on Talliarthe were resurrected and bandied about with fresh fervour. Most telling of all was Arithon’s reticence. The fact he had no confidant, that he never shared the least clue to his intentions became the most damning fact against him. Paired with first-hand accounts of his atrocities in the north, such self-possessed privacy in hindsight became the quiet of a secret, scheming mind.
By roundabout means, the landlady reached the news she had been appointed to deliver. ‘When the galley’s crew boarded and took Shearfast, they insist only two of Arithon’s sailors met them. Those refused quarter and fought to the death, but not to save their command. They had already fired the new hull to scuttle her. Despite the flames, the duke’s officers searched the hold. They found a bound man held captive below decks. He was cut loose while unconscious, and is now in the care of Prince Lysaer’s personal healer.’
Jinesse looked up from the skirt she had been mending, her needle poised at an agonized angle between stitches she had jerked much too tight. The name of Tharrick hung unspoken as she said, ‘But Arithon kept no one prisoner.’
The boardinghouse landlady sniffed and drizzled honey over one of the pastries. ‘I said so. The Prince of the West showed no opinion on the matter, but looked me through as though I were a child in sad want of wisdom.’
Unbleached homespun crumpled under Jinesse’s knuckles. She, too, kept her thoughts to herself. For the ruinous delay which Tharrick’s retribution had inflicted on the works at the shipyard, it seemed entirely plausible that Shearfast’s doomed crew might have seized their belated revenge. To ask the next question required all the courage she possessed. ‘What did you say to his Grace?’
‘Why, nothing.’ The landlady flicked crumbs from her blouse and gave a shrug as dour as a fisherman’s. ‘Let these outsiders untangle their own misadventures. We’re not traderfolk, to hang our daily lives upon rumours. The mackerel won’t swim to the net any better should we buy and sell talk like informants. If Arithon’s evil, that’s his own affair. He tried no foul acts in our village.’ But her forceful, brusque note as she ended spoke of doubts irrevocably seeded.
The landlady folded the linen she had used to pack the scones. ‘With only two bodies found to be counted, Prince Lysaer wished you to hear there may have been other survivors.’ As she arose and smoothed her skirts over her ample thighs, she added on afterthought, ‘His Grace seems anxious to know the number of Shearfast’s crew. They were Arithon’s people, I told him.’
Miserable and mute, Jinesse watched the other woman sweep past the pantry to let herself out. Paused at the threshold on departure, her full-lipped, cattiest smile as much for Lysaer’s young officer, listening at his post outside the doorway, the landlady concluded her last line. ‘I said, why ever should we care?’
The following morning, the Prince of the West presented himself at the widow’s cottage for a visit. By then, he had made enough inquiries to know that her husband had drowned a year past in a fishing accident. Whatever her attachment to the men who had crewed the lost Shearfast, he came prepared to treat her grief with compassion. As his escort, he brought a pair of neatly appointed guardsmen to relieve the one on duty in the yard.
The elegance and manners of old blood royalty should not have upset her poise, Jinesse thought. Arithon’s disconcerting, satirical directness had never made her feel embarrassed for unrefined origins, nor had his bearing afflicted her with apologetic confusion over whether or not she should curtsy.
Resplendent in glossy silk, and a chain of gold and matched sapphires, Lysaer stepped across the waxed boards of her parlour and caught her chapped fingers away from her habitual urge to fidget. ‘Come sit,’ he insisted.
He spun her gently to a chair. The shutters on the window were latched against the morning, the gloom pricked by leaked light through the cracks where the wood was poorly fitted. Clad in dark skirts and a laced bodice of brown twill, Jinesse looked more faded than usual. Her cheeks were drawn and her eyes as tintless as the palest aquamarine.
Memories of another prince in rough linen who had set her just as deftly on a woodpile dogged her thoughts as she sought once again to plumb royal character through a face. Where Arithon had shown her discomfiting reticence and a perception forthright enough to wound, Prince Lysaer seemed candid and direct as clear sunlight. His dress was rich without being ostentatious. The breathtaking effect of overpowering male beauty he countered in personal warmth that lent an effect no less awesome.
The study he flicked over the room’s rude interior held detached interest, until the fired glitter of the fine, cut glass bowl on her dish shelves snagged his interest. His surprise was genuine as he crossed the room on a stride. The sculpted shape of his hand bore an uncanny resemblance to Arithon’s as he lifted the Falgaire crystal from the shelf.
‘Where did you get this?’
Jinesse’s answer was cold. ‘I received it as a present from a friend.’
Lysaer recrossed the floor, set the bowl on the chest by the window, then unlatched and flung wide the shutters. Sunlight streamed in, and the salt scent of breakers, cut by the shrill calls of the gulls. The facets of the crystal responded in an incandescent flare of captured brilliance.
‘A lovely gift, Falgaire glasswork,’ Lysaer said. He found the battered stool the twins liked for whittling and perched. ‘I shan’t hide the truth. I know you accepted this bowl from Arithon s’Ffalenn, though no doubt you would have declined his generosity had you known where he first obtained it.’
When Jinesse did not favour
