For the benefit of the sorcerous eddy that now iced the sweat at his collar, he added, ‘That’s precisely how I shall serve the land, this time. No matter what errand Sethvir’s flipped a shade to dispatch! I won’t play the toady with mincing ambassadors or hang out my flag for diplomacy!’
Silence. Even the tough, summer grass had stopped rustling.
Bransian glared mulishly forward, pulse soaring. ‘Is it Luhaine, again? If so, speak up quick! We’re busy as coupling may-flies, which means I can’t dawdle for carping yap from a gas-bag.’
‘Luhaine should hear you,’ Kharadmon snapped with relish, ‘the more since he treasures his grudges like fossils.’
Bransian stiffened. Red-faced, he folded his arms. ‘If you’ve come here to plead against an armed fight, a straight pin in the arse would be kinder.’
‘You may not have a living arse to offend,’ Kharadmon pointed out. ‘Lysaer’s taken Tirans. Varens, Farsee, Northstor, and Easttair have all received Sunwheel sealed orders to march. Need I repeat that their harbours are already swarming? Perdith will join them, with Kalesh and Adruin primed to fuel that bonfire by week’s end. You will see your gates stormed. The Light’s minions will blockade your harbour within weeks, if you care to credit my warning. Carping yap!’ the Sorcerer cracked with offence. ‘Should I waste my time here, or try the reasonable course and visit your lady?’
‘Liesse?’ Bransian’s lip curled. He kicked his dropped gorget, then spun towards the cold dust-devil that marked Kharadmon’s seething presence. ‘My wife’s will backs mine. No women will leave. If they went, they would strip the steadfast heart out of the citadel.’
‘Send Sevrand, then,’ the Sorcerer persisted. ‘At least leave your heir to the refuge of Atwood, if only to safeguard your lineage.’
‘No get of mine would embrace such dishonour!’ Bransian’s glare showed blazing contempt. ‘Shame on your words, Sorcerer! Such as Sevrand’s become, he would run himself through, first. No cousin of mine forsakes his courage, or fails to stand in defence of his heritage.’
‘So would the compact that binds charter law fail,’ Kharadmon stated, ruthless. ‘If each man sheds his blood for his personal turf above the weal of this land, we are lost. Prince Arithon was right to disown you.’
Since drawn steel could not silence an insolent shade, Bransian hit back with complacency. ‘Alestron has always endured, undefeated.’ He squared challenging shoulders, large fists hooked on his sword-belt. ‘Or is the power of Lysaer’s false godhead much worse than the fire of Athera’s great dragons?’
‘Apparently you are hell-bound to find out,’ Kharadmon said, frustrated beyond storm or heat. ‘If I thought earnest prayer could soften your pride, I would beg every power alive that innocents who rely on these walls do not pay the harsh price of your folly.’
‘Over the wrack of my dead enemies, they won’t,’ Duke Bransian insisted.
But the Fellowship shade had already left, without the flourish of a rejoinder.
In his absence, the sunlight beat down like hot brass. The revetted walls danced through shimmering haze, while the glass fragments set into the mortar glared white. Yet even noon’s wilting humidity could not blunt s’Brydion temper. The duke stalked ahead and snatched up his tossed mail. Straightened up with the links wadded in his bare hands, he harangued his available men. ‘Damn your shirking hides! Who asked you loungers to park on your rumps? Hop to! There’s a war bearing down on this stronghold! Load up the next round of stone-shot!’
While Alestron’s titled lord drilled his field-troops, his brother Mearn was not gambling. Found in the smoking, red heat of the forge, the youngest of the duke’s siblings was whetting one of his stiletto daggers. The whine of steel on the grindstone lagged only an instant as Kharadmon’s chill presence sliced in, flaring the smith’s coals bright ruby.
Mearn straightened, astute enough to shout through the clangour of hammers and dismiss the journeymen armourers. The knife in his fist remained poised in fierce irony as the grumbling men filed out. Too soon, he was facing an empty doorway across the brimstone hiss of the coals.
‘You’ve knocked heads with Bransian, now it’s my turn,’ he supposed without formal greeting. Youngest by ten years, he avoided his sibling’s mistake of presuming his visitor was Luhaine. Mearn mopped his wet blade on the leather apron tied over a dandy’s trim doublet. Unhurried, he inspected his work, then stamped a dissatisfied foot onto the grindstone’s treadle.
Were Kharadmon still embodied, his smile would have befitted a hunting tiger. ‘I could edge that blade for you, without need to sweat.’
Mearn raised refined eyebrows. Thin as a whip, and crafty since birth, he shrugged with exquisite disinterest. ‘For what price, pray tell?’
Kharadmon also liked spare debates. ‘The safekeeping of your pregnant wife in the caithdein’s lodge tent in Atwood.’
‘You foresee our defeat?’ Not waiting for answer, Mearn grinned. ‘Bransian will be smoking with temper, for that. Nor, I imagine, did you waste the breeze chasing down brothers Keldmar and Parrien.’
Kharadmon’s snort flared the coals in the pit. ‘That pair? Thick as they are, like two stones in a sack? Though in naked truth, any word from a rock is dulcet and politely reasonable.’
‘You couldn’t expect courtesy,’ Mearn agreed without heat. ‘My brothers see nothing more in a rock beyond dinging the heads of our enemies.’ His quicksilver grin showed sharp teeth. ‘When Bransian wants us complacent in council, he tells our women to ply us with drink. Personally, I’d stuff the lot with red meat. Drowsy and parked like swilled hogs in their seats, they’re less apt to start hammering fights.’
‘Our Fellowship should stoop to such tactics, you think?’ Kharadmon pressed with snide irony.
Mearn deigned not to comment. As the wheel lagged, he resurveyed his blade. Since the finish seemed pleasing, he tucked the glittering weapon back into the wrist sheath beneath his lace cuff. ‘You realize,’ he said, thoughtful, ‘I would set my manhood at risk if I dared to speak for my wife? That’s if she deigned to address me at all. Since Arithon’s rebuff, she’s been thick with Dame Dawr. I will tell you this: if she wanted to birth our first child in Atwood, she would have gone there directly.’
Kharadmon’s sigh riffled dust from the shelves, all but worked bare of the ingots the forges were smelting for weaponry.
‘You’re perfectly free to try swaying Anzia,’ Mearn invited. ‘You’ve no skin to blister. Nor ears to be thrashed till they ring like whacked chimes. The wife swears,’ he admitted. ‘I’m amazed the grandame’s endured for this long without tossing her out on her petticoats.’
Kharadmon did not laugh. ‘If the grandame’s hand selected your match, she’ll have balanced your badgering wits.’
‘She did, the sly bitch.’ Mearn shrugged. ‘Gave me a woman intelligent enough to split hairs with a glower. At least on those days when she’s not ripping mad. Then it’s cut to the tenderest parts straightaway. She’d snip a man’s bollocks with pincers.’ Fishing his next dagger out of his boot, he gave the wheel’s pedal a vengeful kick. As the stone whirred, the knife was applied with neat fingers. ‘Our child’s near term. If I want another, or hope for a kindly welcome in bed, I know when to keep my douce distance.’
‘But unlike your brothers, you’ve never liked hunting,’ Kharadmon admonished with piercing persistence.
‘No.’ Mearn stopped his sharpening, grey eyes intense. ‘But try telling that to the rest of my family. As you’ve said, dumb rocks clapped in a sack have more sense. Nobody weans a s’Brydion from war. Long before Dawr, the cock’s hens were hand-picked for hatching their get for the battle-field.’
‘Not for this accursed fight!’ Kharadmon said. This time sorrow scalded.