“What do you want of me, lady?” Corfe asked wearily.
“I have spoken to the Pontiff of you, Corfe. He also thinks highly of you. He tells me you have no family, no roots now that the Holy City is no more.”
Corfe bent his head. “Perhaps.”
She rose from her chair and came over to him. Her hands encircled his face, the fingertips just touching his cheekbones. He could smell the lavender her dress had been stored in, the more subtle perfume that rose off her skin. The brilliant eyes held his.
“There is pain in you, a rawness that may never scab over entirely,” she said in a low voice. “It is this which drives you on. You are a man without peace, Corfe, without hope of peace. Was it Aekir?”
“My wife,” he said, his voice half strangled in his throat. “She died.”
The fingertips brushed his face as lightly as a bee nuzzling a flower. Her eyes seemed enormous: viridian orbs with utter black at their core.
“I will help you,” she said.
“Why?”
She leaned down. Her face seemed almost to glow. Her breath stirred his forelock.
“Because I am only a woman, and I need a soldier to do my killing for me.” Her voice was as low as the bass note of a lute, dark as heather honey. Her lips brushed his temple and the hair on the back of his neck rose like the pelt of a cat caught in a thunderstorm. They remained like that for an endless second, breathing each other’s breath.
Then she straightened, releasing him.
“I will procure a command for you,” she said, suddenly brisk. “A flying column. You will take it wherever I wish to send it. You will do whatever it is I want you to do. In return—” She hesitated and her smile made her seem much younger. “In return, I will protect you, and I will see that the intrigues of the court do not hamstring your every move.”
Corfe looked up at her from his stool. He was not tall; even had he been standing their eyes would just have been level with each other.
“I still don’t understand.”
“You will. One day you will. Go to the court chamberlain. Tell him you have need of funds; if he objects, tell him to come to me. Procure for yourself a more fitting wardrobe.”
“What of the King?” Corfe asked.
“The King will do as he is told,” she snapped, and he saw the iron in her, the hidden strength. “That is all, Colonel. You may go.”
Corfe was bewildered. As he stood up she did not move away at once and he brushed against her. Then she turned away from him.
He bowed to her slender backbone, and left the chamber without another word.
I T was a featureless, windswept land. Flat salt marshes spread out for miles in every direction but the sea. The only sounds were the piping of marsh birds and the hissing of the wind in the reeds. Off to the north-west the Hebros Mountains loomed, their knees already pale with snow.
The longboats were ferrying the last of the stores from the ship. The soldiers had lit fires on the firmer of the reed islands and were busy constructing shelters to keep out the searching wind. Abeleyn stood by one of the fires and stared out at the skewed hulk of the beached carrack. Dietl was beside him, his eyes red-rimmed with grief and pain. They had sealed his stump with boiling pitch, but the agony of seeing his ship in such a pass seemed to have affected him more than the loss of his hand.
“When I come into my kingdom again, you shall have the best carrack in the state fleet, Captain,” Abeleyn told him gently.
Dietl shook his head. “Never was there such a ship. She broke my heart, faithful to the last.”
They had heaved the guns overboard as the ship took on more and more water, then the heavier of the stores and finally the fresh water casks. The carrack had grounded upon a sandbar with the sea swirling around her hatches, and there had settled, canting to one side as the tide went out. It was a narrow bar, and as the supporting water withdrew her back had broken with an agonized screeching and groaning that seemed almost sentient.
Abeleyn clapped Dietl on his good shoulder and walked away from the fire. “Orsini!”
“Yes, sire.” Sergeant Orsini was immediately on hand. He was the only soldier of any rank remaining with Abeleyn’s company: the officers had gone down fighting in the two
“What have we got, Sergeant? How many and how much?”
Orsini blinked, his mind turning it over.
“Some sixty soldiers, sire, maybe a dozen of your own household attendants, and the remaining crew of the carrack numbers near thirty. But of that total, maybe twenty are wounded. There’s two or three won’t last out the night.”
“Horses?” Abeleyn asked tersely.
“Drowned in the hold, most of ’em, sire, or shot through with splinters in the battle. We managed to get out your own gelding and three mules. It’s all there is.”
“Stores?”
Orsini looked at the mounds of waterlogged sacks, crates and casks that were piling up on the little island and its neighbours, half hidden in the yellow reed beds.
“Not much, sire, not for a hundred men. Supplies for a week if we’re easy on ’em. Ten days at a pinch.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. You’ll have a guard rota set up, of course.”
“Yes, sire. Nearly every man salvaged his arquebus, though the powder’ll take a while to dry.”
“Good work, Orsini. That’s all.”
The sergeant went back to his work. Abeleyn’s mouth tightened as he watched the parties of soaked, bloodied and exhausted men setting up their makeshift camp on the soggy reed islands. They had fought a battle, struggled to bring a dying ship to shore, and now they would have to scrabble for survival on this remote coast. He had heard not a word of dissension or complaint. It humbled him.
He knew that they had beached somewhere south of the Habrir river; technically they were in Hebrion, the river marking the border between the kingdom and its attached duchy. This was a desolate portion of Abeleyn’s dominions though, an extensive marshland which reached far inland and was crossed by only one or two causeway-raised Royal roads. There would be villages within a day’s march, but no town of any significance for fifteen leagues—and that the city of Pontifidad, back to the north-east. Abrusio was over fifty leagues away, and to get to it overland they would have to cross the lower passes of the Hebros, where the mountains that were the backbone of Hebrion plunged precipitously into the sea.
A swoop of wings, and he turned to find Golophin’s gyrfalcon perched on a thick reed behind him.
“Where have you been?” he asked shortly.
“The bird or I, sire? The bird has been resting, and well-earned the rest has been. I have been busy, though.”
“Well?”
“Rovero and Mercado are ours, thank the Blessed Saints.”
Abeleyn muttered a quiet prayer of thanks himself. “Then I can do it.”
“Yes. There are other ramifications, though—”
“Talking to birds again, sire?” a woman’s voice said. Golophin’s familiar took off at once, leaving a barred feather circling in the air behind it.
The lady Jemilla was dressed in a long, fur-trimmed mantle of wool the colour of a cooling ember. She had let her thick mane of ebony hair tumble down about her face, emphasizing the paleness of her skin, and her lips were rouged. Of her pregnancy, some three months gone, there was as yet no visible sign.
Abeleyn’s temper flickered a moment, but he mastered it. “You look well, lady.”
“Last time you saw me, sire, I was prostrate, retching and green in the face. I should hope that I look well now, by contrast if nothing else.” She came closer.
“I trust my men have made you comfortable?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied, smiling. “They are such gallants at heart, your soldiers. They have built me a lovely shelter of canvas and driftwood, with a fire to warm it. I feel like the Queen of the Beachcombers.”
