the hem with white ribbon. Blunt as flint, despite the kestrel’s build that seemed overwhelmed by her ripened belly, she tipped her chin towards the servant who loaded a stacked pile of hampers. ‘Lend a hand. We’ll be away, soonest.’
‘You’ve packed bread for the needy?’ Fionn Areth inquired, hefting baskets that smelled of fresh baking.
Fianzia arched her eyebrows in signal offence. ‘Shame on you, goatherd! Alestron’s seat rules under charter law!’
The grass-lander scowled through his tumbled, black hair. When he failed to amend his insulting mistake with apology, the lady gathered up her full skirt. She declined Jeynsa’s help; leaned on the armed man-servant, who assisted her gravid weight up to the driver’s seat.
‘Get in, young fool!’ The instant her passengers clambered aboard, she took reins and whip into tiny, ringed hands and rousted the team out with tart vehemence. ‘Jeynsa was right. Your presumptions are dangerous. Stuck as you are with the face of a prince, you’d better learn quick what sets us apart from the usurping mayors.’
The wagon rolled out of the carriage-way to the brisk jingle of harness bells. Past the arched gate with its charging bull finials, Fianzia steered the gleaming horses down-slope. No novice, she jockeyed between the drays that ground uphill with stockpiled supply for the warehouses. She threaded the steep, switched-back turns and showed crisp courtesy to the other drivers. Baled fodder, crated livestock and chickens, barrels of flour and beer, and sacks of hulled oats and barley vied for space with packs of shouting children. From the smithies came chests of crossbolts and arrows, and for the defenceworks, the reeking scraped hides, bundled up green from the stock-yard.
Few vehicles moved outbound. Fianzia’s wagon seemed out of place, breasting the war-time bustle past the stone mansions and officers’ homes in the merchant precinct. Her place on the whip’s box commanded no deference. The ducal badge on the lead horses’ bridles was scarcely imposing enough to draw notice.
Yet the way parted for her. Amid din and turmoil, through dust and smoke, acrid with the bite of quenched steel and the charcoal fumes from the armourers’, she drove like a breath of spring sunshine. Irascible carters granted her precedence. The armed guards at the barbican saluted her through. By now sweated over their burnish of grooming, the horses clopped through the slatted lanes, bordered by wood-frame tenements; past the tiny, fenced yards with their pecking hens, and the shuttered sheds, where the journeymen’s shacks butted into the shops of the craft quarter.
Mearn’s lady reined up at length in a cramped, public courtyard, criss-crossed with string lines drying laundry. The cobbles were slicked with puddles and run-off, centred by a neighbourhood well. Hung linen snapped on the sea-breeze. The tin strips of iyat banes jangled. Children in motley peeped through potted herbs and leaned at the railings of the outdoor stairways. Women with crying babes and toddlers in tow gossiped over yoke buckets, or else pounded soiled clothes in hooped tubs.
No citizen was ill-fed. The matrons’ stout arms gleamed with bracelets. Some wore gemstone beads and enamel, and others, fine rings of wrought wire. The garments they scrubbed for their households were plain: stout broadcloth biased with wool, but not ragged. As Fianzia invited, the hampers were shared, food and wine passed with cheerful camaraderie.
While Fionn Areth and Jeynsa did a groom’s work, and steadied the draught team’s bridles, Fianzia sat down on the lowered tail-board. Patient, she listened to whatever subject the women who gathered might broach. She answered their questions, no matter how difficult, making no effort to hide that the siege would draw Lysaer’s might to attempt their destruction. Duke Bransian had set aside barracks space. All families were invited to shelter within the Paravian-built walls of the upper citadel. Folk need do no more than submit their names to be assigned to a billet.
Several voices protested.
‘We can’t leave our craft shop!’
‘My husband’s smithy is all of our livelihood!’
Fianzia set down her wine goblet. ‘Whoever decides not to evacuate won’t be left abandoned without due protection.’ She qualified through the expectant silence, as molasses sweets quieted the fretful children, and the pearl cincture just unwound from her hair was dangled to distract a wailing infant. ‘No less than the duke’s immediate family are entrusted to shoulder your safety.’
While the baby burbled and sucked on the pearls, Mearn’s lady backed up her assertion: besides Parrien’s fleet, harrying the coast with the ferocity of a wolf pack, Sevrand commanded the garrison at the Sea Gate, and the sentinel turrets flanking the harbour mouth. Field divisions under Keldmar secured the outlying farm-steads for the crofters, who cured the winter’s meat in the smoke-houses and gathered the last cutting of hay.
Fianzia asked Fionn Areth to verify fact: that the captains at large stood with the front ranks, backing Bransian’s staunchest veterans. Through Talvish, the grass-lander knew the details of Vhandon’s latest strike forays. He was urged to describe the rings of set traps, engineered to bloody the enemy advance.
Since clan custom required a father’s presence at birth, Mearn was the brother kept closest. ‘My husband has charge of the outermost walls.’ A steady hand laid on her swollen stomach, Fianzia finished her reassurances.
‘Why doesn’t she mention the trebuchets, or the placement of the new ballista?’ Fionn Areth demanded of Jeynsa at a spiked whisper.
‘Because every citizen born under s’Brydion rule has studied the engines of war. Didn’t you notice the crews at their drill? They’re craftsfolk.’ Jeynsa swiped off the flies that bothered the harness horse under her charge, then added, ‘Defence of these homes will not be left to chance. Every one of these wives knows her archery. The young here learn sword-play as school-children.’
Yet arrows and stone-shot and skilled handling of weapons could not stop an avatar wielding raw light.
Fionn Areth cringed, gut-sick to recall the legitimate claims: accounts sworn by townsmen elsewhere, that insisted clan mothers in the wilds of Deshir raised their children to wage bloody war. Daring, impatient, he pressed for the truth, if only to silence his conscience. ‘If Tal Quorin’s slaughter was not a mistake, s’Ilessid justice will make a clean end to the lie that puts steel in the hands of the innocent.’
Jeynsa did not strike him. She stared him down, until the unquiet shadow that darkened her eyes hackled him to clamped teeth.
Then she said, ‘I’d have you witness the head-hunters’ league at their work. Before being spread-eagled for rapine, then butchered with my scalp cut as trophy fringe on a saddle-cloth, I will teach my daughters to use a sharp knife. Or my sons, that your false avatar’s mercy would see cuffed in irons and branded for slavery.’
‘Only the criminal condemned row the galleys,’ Fionn Areth retorted. ‘Do you clansfolk not also slaughter for lies? How many of these people have been told they’ll raise arms for a turncoat spy’s act of treason?’
Jeynsa’s smile was savage. ‘Listen and learn.’
For a ruddy laundress now broached the issue headlong. ‘Has anyone in Alestron borne recent witness to the s’Ilessid’s rogue powers of Light?’
‘Since Vastmark? Mearn has, when he served the duke’s wiles as ambassador sent to Avenor.’ Fianzia delivered the harsh assessment, unflinching. ‘He would urge you, each one, to value your lives before your possessions.’
The impact of her quiet statement turned heads, that her husband was not stationed above the Mathiell Gate, beyond risk of the front line of fire. As nothing else could, the poise of Mearn’s lady defined the steely integrity upholding the s’Brydion defence.
Tensioned quiet remained, torn by a wail as an aunt reached to rescue the pearls from the infant, who stuffed the whole string in his drooling mouth. No untouched observer, the lady tousled the babe’s curls, then graciously left him the gift of her mangled jewellery. ‘Keep your nephew and all of your kinsfolk safe,’ she said, and smiled, and