The Lascar's Dagger (7 page)

Va-damn, there she was again, reading his mind. “So why me?”

“Because, at nineteen and seventeen respectively, they’ll relate to a tutor not much older. And because I want the royals to understand the importance of shrines, of witchery, of field and forest, of the true Way of the Oak. They get far too little of that at court. The Prime of Ardrone, Valerian Fox, doesn’t favour close affinity with the natural. He’d like to replace shrines and shrine-keepers. Replace them with his town-based clergy and their rituals.”

“You want me to counter the influence of the
Prime
?” He was incredulous. The Prime was the most important cleric in any country, and in Ardrone, he or she was appointed to the post by the King, not the Pontifect.

She smiled. “You’re dying to ask why I have such faith in your abilities.”

Pox on her mind-reading! Was he really so – so transparent? He said carefully, “Young clerics are as common as daffodils here in Vavala. So why me? Come to think of it, I’ve never understood why me. Not from the time I was ten and you came to my father’s holdings and arranged to send me to university.” She’d been the Faith arbiter of the district at the time, but she’d had no connection to his family. At least, none that he knew about.

“Your courage. You lived in a house where your father ignored you and your stepmother actively worked to send you away because you were a threat to the inheritance of her own sons, yet you still managed to look them proudly in the eye.”

“Did I? I just remember feeling about as low as a mudworm all the time because I didn’t understand why I wasn’t loved.” He wanted to shiver, just thinking about it. “There has to be more to it than that.”

“Well, I did know your real mother.”

He stared at her in shock. In anger.
Why did you never tell me that?

She shrugged. “I decided to look you up when I was in the district.”

He hesitated, searching for the right way to draw her out, to be polite and not show his rage at her secrecy. No one had ever spoken to him about his mother; his father had forbidden it. And now she was telling him she’d
known
her?

He was still framing his question when she added, “You impressed me. I could see you didn’t belong on that farm, so I bargained with your father. He allowed me to send you to university. In exchange I swore to him that I would never speak to you about your mother. I’ll keep that agreement while he lives. One day you’ll know all there is to know, I promise.”

He pushed aside the fury he felt towards his father for imposing such a condition, and thought instead of his mother. Only one memory remained: a dark-haired woman, kneeling on the floor beside him where he stood. No memory remained of her voice, or her face, or what she’d told him. He’d been upset because she was crying. He couldn’t have been more than two or three at the time.

“I didn’t send you to university out of sheer sentimentality,” she said. “I’m always on the lookout for acolytes who have a love of nature. People to whom worship at a shrine is more natural than adoration inside the stone walls of a chapel. Too many of the bright young clerics are more fond of doctrine and rituals than what is real. You’re true Shenat, like me. You know what I mean.”

He did, too.

“Our lands are in danger when the old beliefs are neglected,” she said. “Never, ever forget that. It’s easy for the nobility and rulers to lose sight of what is important. I have no faith in the Ardronese Prime to remind the King and court.”

“You think they’ll take any notice of
me
?”

“The court? No. The Prince and the Princess? I hope they’ll respond to your sincerity. There are bad times coming, and when they do, it is old ways and the witcheries that will save us.”

Bad times?
He didn’t like the sound of that. “May I ask what your witchery is?” He was sure she had one. How else could a woman of no particular family or history come to be Pontifect? Va, via a shrine’s unseen guardian, must have gifted her.

“What do you think it is?” she asked, amused rather than offended by the question.

“You read minds?”

“Nothing so simple or so invasive, thank Va! I just have a talent for knowing the general essence of what someone is thinking, if those thoughts are important to me. I doubt I would have become Pontifect without it.”

Oh, fobbing grubbery. She
can
look inside my head.
“A convenient talent, I imagine.”

“Not something I would wish on anyone.” She paused, then added softly, “A witchery lays a terrible burden on whoever possesses it.”

He glimpsed a bleakness in her as she spoke, even as she changed the subject. “But to business. Your real mission in Ardrone. As you must have guessed, it is not just to give spiritual advice. I thought you might be the person to give Prince Ryce a nudge in the right direction every now and then – and that he might listen to you.”

“On the false impression that such advice would be disinterested?”

She silenced him with a glare. “If Lowmeer dominates the spice trade, there’ll be huge disparity in wealth between Ardrone and Lowmeer. The price of spices will spiral to ridiculous amounts if there’s a bad outbreak of the Black Pestilence or the Rose-Spot Fever. You are aware that many people believe carrying a pomander of spices and hanging wreaths of them in the house will ward off pestilence?”

He nodded, remembering the men with the death cart.

“It’s nonsense. But the belief could result in outrageously rich merchants in Lowmeer. That would not be in the interests of peace or of Va-Faith. I hardly need to point out to you that townsfolk are the sector of the population that most ignores our sacred guardianship of nature. Especially very rich townsfolk.”

Ah
. It was all about keeping the balance between the differences within the Faith, as well as between the two largest countries within the Va-cherished lands.

“Keep your wits about you, and let me know if you hear anything,” she added. “Prince Ryce won’t be nineteen for ever, and King Edwayn has already appointed him to take charge of the royal interests in the trade routes and the merchant navy.”

That sounded like a fine way to ensure disaster. What on earth would a young pleasure-loving prince – with a penchant for boar- and bear-hunting, or so he’d heard – know about trade and shipping? “Do you really think I’m the person for the task? I can’t say I know much about court manners. Or giving spiritual guidance, if it comes to that.”

“You’ll learn. The Ardronese merchant fleet should match that of Lowmeer, and that’s the way I’d like you to turn Prince Ryce’s thoughts.”

For the next hour, as they sat at her work table, she filled him in on all she knew about the Ardronese court, its royal family and the state of the kingdom’s finances, trade and politics.

She concluded the briefing with a warning. “Be careful with Prime Valerian Fox. I did not choose him for the post, remember. And I have never been able to sense his thoughts. Send your most private reports to me without going through his office and use code words where appropriate. I have a trusted courier. His wife runs a tavern called the Three-Horned Ox. She sits at a cash desk just inside the tavern door. You address your letter to me, and give it to her. The courier – or one of his many sons – gets paid when it’s delivered here.”

He nodded thoughtfully. Things must be worse than he’d imagined, if she couldn’t trust the office of the Prime.

Picking up a handful of the spices he’d brought, she lifted them to her nose and inhaled. “I don’t trust anyone,” she said. “Not even you. I worry about your conceit, Saker. Remember that the cocksure rider falls harder. And I expect you to behave at court with all the decorum of a true witan. Keep your gambling and your whoring—”

“I beg your pardon, your reverence, I do not
whore
.”

“Your tupping of willing taproom serving girls, then. Keep
any
unwitan-like behaviour discreet, or better still, non-existent. Is that clear?”

He resisted the temptation to say he had no particular love of gambling either, and wondered what he was missing. Something. It was as if she was looking inside him for something she couldn’t find. He kept his reply devoid of expression. “As you wish, your reverence.”

“I wish I could believe you,” she muttered, exasperated. “You may go. On your way out, ask Secretary Barden for your letters of introduction to the King and Prime Valerian Fox. And see the counting house about your expenses.” She looked him up and down. “You need new clothes. A king’s court, witan. Priestly robes, good quality, not clothes for tavern crawling and brawling. Understand?”

He tried desperately hard not to think of anything at all.

The merchant in Gort cradled the spices in the palm of his hand. Twenty cloves, five anise stars and six candlenuts.

“Where did you steal these?” he asked, and the look he gave was as hard as the nutmegs and the cinnamon sticks Ardhi still had concealed in his pack.

“Not steal,” Ardhi said firmly, submerging his annoyance under a veneer of polite neutrality. If the man wanted a reason to justify his purchase, the truth would suffice. “Bring from island mine. Er, from my island.”
Splinter it, I need to practise this pesky language more.

The suspicion in the merchant’s eyes didn’t vanish, but the tension across his shoulders eased. “Five guildeens for the lot.”

It was an insulting offer, but Ardhi hid a smile. In the Chenderawasi Archipelago, children learned to bargain the moment they picked up their first cowrie shell from the reef. “Five guildeen, one piece,” he said, knowing that price was just as ridiculous.

When he left the merchant’s much later, coins were jingling in his purse, and the rueful tone of the man’s farewell was satisfying.

Outside in the street again, he paused as needle-sharp pain lanced his eye, as real as the jab of a sea urchin’s spine. He knew that pain. It was the prick of the kris, coming from a long way off. Usually it was faint, tantalising, a reminder of all that was familiar – then suddenly it would jab him, becoming a reminder of the horror that had sent him halfway around the world.

And always, always he asked the question: why had it left him? He hadn’t thrown it. It had
abandoned
him. Flung itself at that unknown man in the warehouse.
Why?

He still had no idea.

And he had no idea if he’d done the right thing after he’d fooled the warehouse guards with a child’s bambu trick. His first actions – to swim ashore and retrieve his pack – were obvious enough, but to decide to follow the traces the kris had scratched into the air, instead of seeking the stolen regalia on his own without its help? That was a dubious decision.

Until the warehouse, the kris had been leading him like a villager leading his pig on a string; afterwards, he was lost and lonely, with panic perched on his shoulder like a mischievous
gawa
spirit uttering teasing whispers in his ear.

He sighed, and the bitterness of bile rose into his throat, searing him with the memory of his splintering failure. He’d grabbed the empty bambu instead of the contents. So close, so very close, and he’d bumbled it, bleached bonehead that he was! And he hadn’t even realised it until it was too late.

The ultimate dilemma was still lodged somewhere in his gut, a churning, sickening quandary he had no way of resolving: he couldn’t find the regalia without the kris, and the kris had deserted him because he’d failed to seize the one opportunity he’d had.

I
have
to find that man and the kris.

The man’s name he didn’t know, but by the time he’d reached the port of Gort, he’d discovered that the medallion the fellow had worn meant that he was Ardronese. If necessary, he’d follow him all the way to Ardrone. He’d kill him to obtain the kris if he must, then start his hunt for the regalia all over again.

He had no choice. Failure not only meant his eternal exile; it would mean the end of the Chenderawasi Islands.

“T
his weather is ridiculous! We should have stayed in Twite.” Lady Mathilda, Princess of Ardrone, glared at her elder brother where he sat opposite her in the coach. She was irrationally irritated that he was there at all. The moment it started to rain, he’d abandoned his horse for the interior of the lumbering vehicle. A sensible decision, for though the coach might lurch and sway, at least it was dry, but his presence annoyed her anyway.

“This trip,” she continued, knowing she was whining and not caring, “has been a disaster from beginning to end. I mislike it when Father decides we’re to do our royal duty and display ourselves to the Kingdom.”

“Like a pair of well-bred whelps being shown to the houndmaster to see if they’re suitable for the pack?” Prince Ryce, heir-apparent to the throne of Ardrone, grinned at her. “I’ve quite enjoyed myself.”

“Yes, you would. It must be
so
convenient to have every pretty – or even not so pretty – marriageable woman under thirty paraded for your edification and, I have no doubt, with half of them quite prepared to warm your bed if they thought it would get your attention.”

“And you mislike having so many young men pay attention to you?”

“Don’t look so insufferably smug. There’s not one man I met whom Father would consider eligible, so what’s the point in even looking their way? And has it escaped your notice that for the past few days I’ve had no lady-in-waiting and no maid? It’s been horrible having to rely on women I don’t know, and maids I’ve never seen before in my life.”

“I’m sorry, Mathilda. That was rotten luck.”

She glared at him, knowing he really didn’t care that her two ladies-in-waiting and her maid had been taken sick with the ague and she’d had to leave them behind in Oakwood.

“With a little luck,” he continued, “we’ll be on board ship tomorrow, sailing for home. Once we arrive at Redpoll Manor tonight, Lady Frytha will supply you with whatever you need.”

With an audible sigh and a slump of her shoulders, she changed the subject to what was really bothering her. “Last night Kenda Rosse hinted she’d heard rumours that Father had sent my portrait to Lowmeer, at the request of the Regal. Have you heard anything about that?”