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i_read_whatSo this is the last chapter of Ships of Merior. It doesn't really feel like a last chapter though. Not in the same way that Mistwraith's did. I'm not sure if that's because Merior was conceived as only half of a larger book, or just because we didn't get a huge climactic Strakewood moment.
I think I'm glad we didn't, actually. Those moments are more effective when they're far apart. Too many and they lose impact.
That said, the ending chapter should have SOME sense of (temporary) resolution. So we'll see if this delivers.
Oh, already, ALREADY, we're off to a wonderful start. Remember the sneak peek at the end of last chapter? With Jieret aiming his arrow inscribed with the name of the man who murdered his family?
Captain Mayor Pesquil of the northern league of head-hunters pitched himself down and sideways into cover one fatal instant too late. Before he struck ground, the four-bladed steel broadhead aimed to take him slapped into the small of his back.
He landed hard enough to slam the wind from his lungs and trip a frost-rimed hail of stones into rattling descent down the slope. Their noisy, bouncing fall through stunted brush and cracked saplings caused men to glance up from their labour with wagons and shovels amidst the boulders which jammed the road below. Pesquil snatched air to shout warning of attack, then gasped, wrung mute. A spasm clamped his muscles. He could not breathe, could not speak, but only hug the flinty soil, pain-white and clammy with weakness.
Fucking YES.
There's a pretty great character moment where he thinks about how if his scouts hadn't seen him go down, or if they missed the warning shower of pebbles, they deserve to be cut down for negligence.
And because there's nothing better than seeing a genocidal monster rage impotently:
The unbroken quiet spurred him to a rage of colossal proportion.
He had always understood the snares at Valleygap had been fashioned to take down headhunters. Now, lying agonized in the scald of his own blood, Captain Mayor Pesquil cursed with ferocity: fool that he was, he had not understood until the endplay. Jieret Red-beard had blindsided him. Pressured too hard keeping others alive, he had never once thought to imagine himself as the ultimate, targeted prey.
Ring within ring, by spring-trap and rockfall, then the suspect boredom of two quiet weeks without incident, the last ambush in these inhospitable vales had been staged to deprive Lysaer of his most effective commander.
Pesquil gets carried off, mouthing curses against the name "s'Valerient" and while I don't generally consider myself to be a cruel or sadistic person, this does make me very happy.
And Pesquil's death here is slow. He's taken to the hospital tent:
Twilight settled early in the pit between the hills. Pesquil became aware of a dimness thick with mildewed canvas, musty wool, and the hated, dank smell of crumbled shale that pervaded the gap’s deep ravines. The hospital reek of medicinal herbs and an uglier stink of charred flesh lifted a curl to his lips. A mauling throb in his back and the virulent sting left by cautery played over every ugly bit of trauma imposed upon his body to remove the barbarian arrow. The injury was bad. He needed no doomsaying healer to tell him.
And of course, it isn't long before Lysaer is at his bedside. Lysaer must have better things to do, Pesquil manages to say, but of COURSE, Lysaer has to be here. Pesquil has a few final orders: tripling sentries, and when the supply train arrives, test biscuit and cheese on the dogs before eating it.
And in a lovely moment, Lysaer unintentionally digs the emotional knife deeper:
‘I should have expected you’d not shirk for sick leave.’ Lysaer smiled with that grave arrogance that seemed inborn into old-blood princes. ‘Before you get wrapped up in duties that can wait, I thought you’d like the chance to study this.’ He bent, raised the limp, dry hand that trailed outside the bedclothes, and pressed a sharp object into the captain mayor’s palm.
‘The broadhead removed from your back,’ the prince said.
Pesquil can't read it himself, which annoys him. He'd asked not to be dosed, but the healers and/or Lysaer overruled him. ("The prince did not share the cold truth, that no soporific posset troubled Pesquil’s concentration. Despite every effort and a brutal round of cautery, Pesquil’s sunken flesh and fevered skin affirmed the healer’s prognosis: the wound was still bleeding inside."
Yesss. For Jieret, Dania, the women. The children. Fucking YES.)
Lysaer asks if he wants to know what it says, and reads it off.
Lysaer turned the steel blades. ‘The letters on the first blade say, “from the son of the Earl of the North”.’
‘Jieret s’Valerient, I thought so.’ Pesquil shut his eyes, his sallow complexion paled to rubbed ivory, but without the grace of patina. His skin hung paper dry under the flutter of the lantern. ‘Go on.’
The next says, “for my lady mother, and four sisters”, and the next, “for the slaughtered innocents by Tal Quorin”.’ Lysaer trailed off into silence, his eyes, cold blue, on his injured officer, and his hands prepared to mete out a bracing restraint in case rage turned the wounded man distraught.
Pesquil isn't distraught. He knows exactly what this is. Remember, he's studied the clans. But the message is delivered to him and to Lysaer both, by Lysaer. Sometimes, accidently, he does seem to actually live up to the whole "Justice" thing. Albeit unintentionally.
And there's a pretty great bit here too, that makes this even more deserved:
‘A barbarous custom,’ Lysaer said in what seemed a disjointed interval later.
Had Pesquil been hale, he would have laughed. ‘The clans weren’t first with that practice. Townsmen during the uprising assassinated the High King of Havish with a sword engraved with his lineage.’ Too close to his pass beneath the Wheel for tact, he ended on a wisp of scorching irony, ‘You should know well, Prince - since you carry a blade specially forged to kill a sorcerer.’
The prick struck home: the sword in Lysaer’s scabbard since the hour of his march on Tal Quorin bore his enemy’s name in reverse runes.
I'd like to think that if Lysaer was the man he had been before the curse, this might have given him pause and inspired him to re-examine a lot of his beliefs about the clansfolk and townsfolk. Perhaps he might even consider looking at other clan customs that he finds horrifying and see how his own allies are the cause and inspiration for them.
Of course, Lysaer isn't that man.
Pesquil is dying. We get some nice insight into his physical suffering. But there's something he wants to do:
And yet, one thing remained. Today’s arrow had proven that a lifelong antagonist had sired a worthy son to succeed himself; Pesquil pushed back against his shroud of fogged wits. He gathered breath against the dreadful gnaw of pain and said, ‘Lysaer s’Ilessid, fetch your scribe.’
Lysaer clearly thinks Pesquil's writing to a loved one. He's not. He's giving out instructions to "ensure Jieret Red-beard and his fourteen Companions would not be left an opening to obstruct the army’s passage on to Werpoint.
And then, we finally see his last moments. For Jieret's sake, I'll share them:
The headhunter commander who despised rank and privilege delivered his last bequest with a prince in attendance at his bedside; the hour had been left too late for a scribe. His dark eyes unseeing in the spill of the lamplight, Pesquil never knew the hand that transcribed his racked lines was royal, and steady in its office. His last words came widely spaced, fought out with the same fanatical dedication that had enacted the bitter slaughter at Tal Quorin, and that even the act of dying could not unhinge.
Captain Mayor Pesquil of the northern league of head-hunters passed the Wheel bound still to his duty.
Whether he dreaded his reckoning with Daelion Fate-master, or felt remorse at the last for the clan lives he had claimed for paid bounty, no living man ever knew. Prince Lysaer laid aside his lapdesk and pen, closed the fixed eyes with their joyless fervour extinguished, then shrouded the gaunt, sunken architecture of the face in the colours of his own royal blazon.
Farewell, Pesquil. I have to admit, there were times I found you almost amusing. Even almost... admirable is definitely the wrong word, because hi, genocidal monster.... Maybe I'll borrow his phrase for Steiven. You were a "worthy antagonist". And you're living proof of something that Anne McCaffrey and Jennifer Roberson have yet (at least as far as I am in their respective series) to realize. A formidable antagonist is more effective than an incompetent one. An interesting, complicated antagonist is better than a cardboard cut out.
If Pesquil were Meron or T'ron or Tynstar, this moment would not be nearly so great. There's always a bit of satisfaction when the heroes finally defeat the villains, especially when the villains are as monstrous as Pesquil is. But when a villain is capable and clever, strong and insightful, then we appreciate our heroes more too. Twelve year old Jieret could not have defeated Pesquil. Steiven s'Valerient did not defeat Pesquil.
But twenty year old Jieret s'Valerient DID defeat him. He's grown, become stronger, wiser, more cunning and more relentless. And he finally got a bit of justice.
And Lysaer has lost his best asset against the clans.
Though, of course, this being Lysaer, he is able to turn this into his advantage. He's making their safe arrival Pesquil's monument, and has implored each garrison commander to allow a staff officer from Avenor to give advice. And, shaken by the loss of their expert, the commanders actually accept. (the appointed officers are supremely well-versed in the handling of men, as well.)
So they finally clear the pass of Valleygap, but they find that the wagons that they'd sent to resupply their stores are abandoned. They test the beef on the dogs: two out of three die. Diegan orders the stores fired, and they cross the last forty leagues with empty stomachs.
They do make it to Perlorn though. There are even some would be deserters, though they get stripped and whipped appropriately.
There are, as always, some beautiful descriptions:
Clouds like layered slate masked the hills at the horizon when, reprovisioned at punishing expense by a city hoarding its harvest against the onset of winter, the columns reformed to continue their march eastward. They wound through hills and vales half-erased by a grey smoke of drizzle, then slogged beside laden carts, bespattered with mud thrown off mired wheels. The teams slipped and laboured over roads transformed to soaked ruts, or washed out by freshets swollen from the silvered rungs of water shed off the stone shoulders of the Skyshiels.
Yet even as the wagons groaned and stuck fast in muck, or an axle broke, or someone sat to wad his boots with lint to ease the nip of raw blisters, Prince Lysaer was there on his caparisoned destrier to call encouragement, or share in rough jokes and commiseration.
Of course.
And of course the elite troops from Avenor inspire the other garrisons to look their most polished. Because Lysaer is good at that. And spirits are high, after all, the Master of Shadow is one man, and Merior is a sandspit village. The men are happy enough to make jokes, stating they'll be home for spring planting. And so on.
The officers are less happy though. Werpoint is not really equipped to handle the demands of garrison captains who want to be billeted indoors. The supply trains are late. The merchants are being bullied for provisions that they haven't got. And heck, even the chief councilman's daughter walked outside and got SOLICITED "like a dockside bawd."
Diegan is at his diplomatic best here:
Lord Diegan uttered a showy apology, then finished with his nastiest smile. ‘Now get me an empty council chamber with a fire and a staff servant, and a board with hot food for my twenty officers. After that, I don’t care if you throw your mayor out of his personal bed suite! The Prince of the West will have quarters befitting his station.’
The seneschal paused like a terrier outfaced by a mastiff, measured the threat in the Lord Commander’s stance, then dispatched a cringing underling to roust up the mayor’s house steward.
Effective. Diegan's grown as a character too.
But some problems can't be bullied: including bad wind, a lack of stores, clan attacks on grain supplies and so on. Diegan and Lysaer share a moment:
Prince Lysaer tossed his gloves and his silk-lined storm cloak to his hovering equerry, then gestured the servant’s dismissal. A vexed stride brought him to the table, where he ripped off the end of the bread loaf pried away from the kitchen staff with threats. He stared at the steam that arose off the morsel, shot a glare at the darkened casement, then spun in barely-held fury. ‘This can’t happen. I didn’t raise and train a grand war host only to be stopped by a run of poor luck and the ridiculous misfortune that the winds choose to blow southeast!’
‘Oh?’ Lord Diegan lounged back against the stone beside the settle and crossed his ankles on a footstool. His rowelled spurs snagged cuts in the embroidery, a fact to provide a spurt of sour pleasure, since the mayor’s house steward had been niggardly about supplying clean towels, and no servant had come to replenish the wood in the firebox. While his prince paced the carpet, too distressed to eat, Avenor’s Lord Commander said in gentle satire, ‘You’d think the better of setbacks if we were frozen alive by some fell mix of sorcery and shadows?’
Lysaer thinks that Arithon must have some hand at play. Right now all the delays seemed "exclusively targeted in revenge against Pesquil and his headhunters", but they're also Arithon's feal allies. And: "No man acquainted with s’Ffalenn wiles could rule out the chance their strikes had been timed as one thread in some wider design."
...in Mistwraith, I'd have called that an exaggeration. But well, as this book has proven, he's not actually wrong here. He's wrong about the why. Not the how.
It is fun though seeing Lysaer at a loss that he can't just Charisma out of his way. But well, maybe he can. He's apparently forced the consent of the fleet captains: the galleys will sail with the evening tide, even if they have to row across the bay.
--
The next subchapter then is Strike at Minderl Bay.
Interestingly, our viewpoint character this subchapter is the captain of a merchant brig named the Savrid. He happens to be carrying a packet of sealed dispatches from the officers' council with Lysaer, and he's just found a knife pressed against him.
‘Move on,’ the barbarian said, unreliably agreeable. ‘Or don’t. I can bleed you like a pig right here, and my archers in your crosstrees won’t even twinge against firing on unarmed oarsmen. You wish your bully boys to live? My liege would prefer they don’t suffer, but I’d as soon run them beneath the Wheel if you balk.’
Hi there!
We're told that, as a merchant's ship, the crew of the Savrid are not really suited to a warhost's demands. And well. They let themselves get hijacked by barbarians. Oops. The captain wisely surrenders.
We get a description for him. And one of someone else, this last, decidedly a bit...primrose?
His blindfold was whipped off with enough force to scuff his fair-skinned cheeks to a flush. Light-haired, blue-eyed, and burly enough to have worked his way up from a mate’s berth, the captain raised his square chin and glowered into a flare of lamplight fierce enough to make him squint. ‘Sure’s ebb tide, whoever you are, you’re going to be made to pay for this.’
‘How much is your dignity worth?’ quipped a voice with stinging, cool clarity. The speaker was small, compactly made, and mantled in plain-cut wool. The brassy spill of the oil flame played over black hair and eyes like summer leaves. A thin, chiselled mouth bent in dry irony at the flustered state of his captive.
Whatever the shanghaied captain expected, that opening set him at a loss. ‘Who are you?’
The stranger gave an elegant smile, reached out a limber hand and snatched the dispatch packet out of his prisoner’s tunic. ‘I’m the one wretch this lively war host has convened at Werpoint to eradicate.’ The beautiful fingers snapped through the wax seal, flicked open folded papers and tipped them in unbreathing steadiness toward the light.
Hi Arithon!
How long DOES it take to sail from Minderl Bay to Merior and back? I mean, I guess it takes a lot longer if you have to sail an entire army.
So, introductions made, the poor guy is rather aghast to find himself the prisoner of the Master of Shadow. ("You?" Hee.) He assumes Arithon is here to close with Lysaer's army. But nope, Arithon's here to forestall a war. "The broad shouldered clansman" with him (Hi, Jieret) supports his argument:
The broad-shouldered clansman returned the insult with a low burst of laughter and swiped his knife toward the harbour. ‘Did you see an attack fleet? No? Well, you wouldn’t. Because all we have with us are eight quick men, a cockleshell of a dory, and Arithon’s dinky pleasure sloop.’
...of course. Fucking Arithon.
Anyway, an interesting dude with a hooked nose, shifty eyes, and a tattooed cheek comes in. I THINK this dude is Dhirken's first mate? But I might be wrong about this. Anyway, he notes that the crew is stowed. Arithon reassures the captain that the men are unharmed. Albeit displeased.
Arithon reads the dispatches and tells Jieret that Caolle's hunch is justified: Lysaer indeed knows all about Merior. And this bit made me laugh:
The other swarthy scoundrel sidled straight from his slouch as the Shadow Master closed his edged musing. ‘Unless we want a war host down our throats and in our blankets, there’s no room left for half measures. Some risks will have to be shouldered.’
‘Ath’s Black Avenger! Haven’t we done that already?’ The clansman stared uneasily at the shifty-looking seaman, then swore afresh as the creature glared back like a felon. ‘My liege, you’re mad just to be here.’ Unsettled enough to forget himself, he straightened, cracked his head on a deck beam, and ripped out in rife exasperation, ‘Takes an underfed stripling to love seafaring!’
Poor Jieret. It'd be so nice to have a sane liege lord, wouldn't it?
The captain though won't be imprisoned with the rest. Arithon acquiesces, Lysaer might fare better with a witness, but he grants Jieret permission to gag the prisoner if he gets distracting.
So they arrange for the Savrid to take its proper place. The sailor notes their agreement: if this goes wrong, he's sailing off as he sees fit.
We get some more description of Arithon as he paces:
Little else about the sorcerer seemed remarkable. The tunic he wore was patched at the hem, and a sailmaker’s stitch laced his scabbard. At each fresh change, while canvas was unbrailed and braced full, he held a tigerish pause as he measured the activity abovedecks. When the brig shouldered forward and heeled to the wind, he eased back into soft, balanced steps.
Eventually, Jieret and Arithon have an emotional discussion, all in front of this poor Captain who doesn't want to be involved in this familial spat. The gist of it being that Arithon mostly agrees that this plan is stupid, but he doesn't think he has a choice. It's either stop the war host now, or there'll be another bloodbath. Arithon doesn't intend to let it happen in his name, or on Lysaer's chosen battlefield.
The clansman’s bearded profile loomed a notch in the view like the anvil silhouette of a squall line. ‘Well if it’s possible to provoke a behemoth and survive, the least I can do, my prince, is back you with all of my heart.’ The assurance came measured and steady; and yet when Jieret arose to hang the lantern, the changed flare of light showed a face tinged chalky with fear.
Oh Jieret. You are the best.
So time passes. And then, things get a little bondage-y.
An oath lilted back from the gloom. Jieret Red-beard shouldered into view, a pair of fleece bracers in his hands. At Arithon’s swift query, he said, ‘They’re mine. And yes, before you ask, they’ll fit you. I trimmed them down with my knife.’ Hardened against any protest, he added, ‘If you stay bull-stubborn and go through with this, I won’t have you tear yourself raw.’
Arithon managed a smile, slicked with the grimness a condemned man might carry through his last march to the scaffold. Then he drew a sword of spectacular artistry from his scabbard and laid its black blade on the chart table. Disarmed, his expression of humility at odds with his killer’s reputation, he freed his laced cuffs and bared slender wrists to his liegeman.
The barbarian showed no surprise at the marring white tracery of scars he tucked underneath the leather cuffs. He drew the ties firm then went on to lash his sovereign’s wrists with braided leather.
‘Jieret,’ Arithon said. ‘Thongs can break. I saw wire in the starboard locker. Forget about pity and use it.’
Arithon doesn't want you to stint on the S&M portion of this BDSM session, Jieret. And okay, he IS twenty, but he still seems a bit young for this, Arithon. And indeed, Jieret "accept[s] the bidding in dumb misery, drawing the wire tight in forceful jerks that had everything to do with a duty he found abhorrent."
And of course Arithon endures in distant stillness, because why brood if you can't brood angstfully and artfully. And Arithon gives some nice, cryptically awful sounding orders:
‘Make sure this ship keeps her station,’ he insisted, then added in cutting entreaty, ‘Jieret, by your oath as my liegeman, I charge you. Don’t let me give way, no matter how horribly I scream.’
Jieret asks if one seaside village could be worth this risk. Arithon reminds Jieret that while Merior isn't his birthright, he did pledge a woman his signet ring to keep her children safe.
‘Forgive me,’ Jieret whispered, for eight years in the past, on Tal Quorin’s greening banks, the decision had been no whit different. ‘Don’t hold me to blame in my fear for you.’
‘Wasted effort.’ Above the laboured creak of ship’s timbers, Arithon’s voice sounded easy. ‘Save your pity instead for the captains lured here in the misled belief they were threatened.’
The drama...
And here we go.
One moment the city of Werpoint rested in stilled peace, the anchorage thatched with masts and hazed soft gold by daybreak. Menace seemed absent; unreal. No inhabitant expected the Shadow Master’s presence. Unremarked, he gave no bodily sign in warning, no showman’s flourish designed to awe or terrify his audience. Arithon s’Ffalenn simply poised with a dancer’s concentration and spun the shadow he had ruled since his birth.
The snare he designed was for Werpoint.
A giant black leopard bounded over the rim of the southern horizon. The apparition swelled to monstrous proportion, then snarled in a silent, silhouetted show of fangs and swallowed the risen disc of the sun. For an instant, two diminished slits of sky glared through its eyes; then it blinked.
Darkness clapped down, soundless, complete, unnatural as if the air compressed to felt.
No star burned, no light. Werpoint’s broad headland seemed snuffed from existence, its harbour and ships swallowed up as completely as if Daelion Fatemaster had gone berserk and unravelled the thread of creation. Banished into fell darkness, a city in its entirety lay erased.
Niiice.
Then a thunderclap "rip[s] the sky into light." Lysaer of course. He's shooting through the shadow with light. Because that's what Arithon's done here:
In a wilful, cold-blooded dance with disaster, Arithon of Rathain had wakened the curse of the Mistwraith. The need bloomed and burned, to hammer force against force, until one or both of them lay dead.
People, causes, Werpoint’s naked vulnerability the next instant came to mean nothing. His body limned in actinic bursts of glare, Arithon surged toward the stem window. His lips peeled back from bared teeth in a mask that abjured his claim to humanity. Empowered but weaponless, he sought to raise his hands. The bonds on his wrists caught him short. The jerk he tried to free them doubled his frame and an animal snarl rasped his throat.
Jieret urges Arithon not to give in, and we get more dramatic description:
The Master of Shadow gave a scraped cry that violated mercy to witness. The fury that knotted his limbs let go. He staggered and all but fell.
Jieret caught him, while the veil of shadows that prisoned the daylight flared and flickered, weakened under Lysaer’s strike from Werpoint.
Steady as tide, Jieret murmured while the man in his hands hissed in a shuddering breath. ‘Easy, my liege. Easy. The effect of the curse can be tempered. If I didn’t believe it, I’d never have let you attempt this.’
Jieret really is the best, isn't he. Anyway, Arithon does pull himself together, albeit with "flesh racked to bone by sourceless agony".
Then the next stop of the plan: the dark veil dissipates, but reveals, to the south, an inbound fleet of black ships, all rigged as brigantines. The sailors freak out, as one does.
And Arithon, being a dick, rubs salt in the wound:
"From his unseen vantage on the wall walks, Lysaer s’Ilessid would recognize the oncoming fleet. He would see in their lines and the trim of red sails a memory resurfaced from childhood: brigantines fashioned by the hand of s’Ffalenn, built in the shipyards at Merior at sorcerous speed, and now, attacking for pillage and piracy.
Provoked as a cold point of strategy, his rage would burst all bounds.
And naturally, this means that Lysaer blasts the crap out of him. And...wow. He HAS been practicing:
The light bolt he launched in defence of his own slashed the dawn like a scimitar. Air shrieked. The sky flashed blinding white, then rebounded into fumes and smoke, lit to churned orange by a firestorm of raw, ignited power. The holocaust scalded across wave crests rent to steam, until the bay seemed a cauldron brewed by demons.
There's more illusion work, as Arithon keeps a desperate grip on his sanity, while Lysaer keeps blasting:
A clap and a boom volleyed over Werpoint. Against the massed fleet and his sworn mortal enemy, Lysaer retorted in pure light. The sky above the battlements split with the blast. Arithon’s teasing play of shadows became snuffed in one towering burst of raw force.
The bolt jagged on and struck the bay, a hammer on at anvil of waves. The inrunning fleet of brigantines exploded into crackling fire. The throaty report slammed a shock through the wind as timbers, canvas, sails and spars ignited, touched off like a torch to inferno.
And this last one is so bad that it sets Arithon off for good:
Struck by the backlash of that virulent, unbridled violence, Arithon lost his last, harried hold on self-awareness. Before Jieret could react, he screamed primal rage and rammed the mullioned casement with his shoulder. The panes shrilled and burst to flying fragments. Then the hands in restraint drove him mad. Arithon twisted like an eel, eyes wide open and wild. Glass slivers stabbed through his shirt linen and reddened his clansman’s clenched fingers.
Jieret swore, shifted grip, and gasped in retching pain from a hit to the belly. ‘No you won’t,’ he ground past a stopped bitch of breath.
Arithon thrashed free in a reeling charge that carried him toward the companionway.
And yep, confirmed, that dude WAS Dhirken's first mate, I'm far better at recognizing fictional characters than I am real people:
Jieret rammed after in pursuit. ‘Show your face outside and you know what will happen. By your very orders, that criminal of a mate will slit your throat and claim this brig as his prize.’
The Master of Shadow flung back a mocking laugh not a man of his friends would have recognized. ‘Not if I freeze the living flesh off his bones with bindings wrought out of shadow.’
Yeah, Arithon's not really here anymore. So Jieret fucking tackles him. Which is amazing. But it's a much more difficult fight than it should be. Arithon's half Jieret's size, bound hands, but also fucking crazy.
And across the bay, Lysaer is still blasting at shadows. The fleet is still advancing. And the Savrid's captain notices "a shattering truth":
Through the dross of patched dark, through rank bad judgement and confusion as hull ground into hull, the imprisoned captain on the Savrid deciphered a shattering truth: the straggle of fired hulls had lost their clean lines. The raked masts and spars glazed in outline by fire no longer wore the shapes of the brigantines Lysaer had spent his powers to destroy.
No fleet of deadly warcraft out of Merior, this ragtag chain of hulls: the hostile vessels which closed upon Werpoint were unarmed old hulks, a derelict gaggle of fishing boats and rafts, packed with dried fir boughs and floss, which exploded in fanned sparks and flurried in the breeze, to touch alight whatever lay before them. The illusion of shadows that once masked their shapes had winnowed away to reveal the cunning trap beneath.
Ka-fucking boom. The captain weeps in beaten grief, while Arithon and Jieret continue their wrestling match:
Even bound, Arithon used his head, his knees, and his feet to bruise and strike. Jieret Red-beard vented pain in choked oaths. The only grip his prince could not break was the hand he held latched in black hair, and that insufficient to stay him. The clansman came aware in clear dread that Arithon manoeuvred toward the uncanny blade still left unsheathed on the chart table.
‘Ah no, my prince. Never that.’ Jieret at last resorted to blows in return. His merciless fist bashed his liege lord in the jaw. While his adversary reeled, half-stunned, he snatched up the black sword himself.
And because it's in a righteous cause, it lights up. In a "tight, controlled cut" he slashes Arithon's shoulder and:
Contact wrung a cry from the man and the elements. A flare of white sheeted through the cabin. Nothing like any weaving of Lysaer’s, the clean blast of brilliance came twined with a peal of struck sound. The resonance climbed in unbearable sweetness. Its harmony unstrung the mind. The passions of hatred and sorrow alike were dashed out in a celebration of life that made of all strife a desecration.
Smote by a longing that ached through his bones, the brig captain groaned for the sorrows of the world. Fired to unalloyed grief, stripped in a heartbeat to the dross and clay that cased the naked sum of his mortality, he heard Arithon s’Ffalenn cry aloud as if his heart had been torn from his body.
Still screaming, the Shadow Master folded to his knees. Blood streaked from the gash traced in flesh by Jieret’s cut. The enchanted scald of light nicked over the white bone, laid bare beneath his slashed shirt. A marring edge of scarlet flowed down the black blade, then sublimated away in the heatless burn of magics laced through immutable metal.
...okay, sometimes I do understand the "my sword is just so awesome" angst. WHOA.
So Arithon's back to himself. Albeit in agony, an agony that Jieret feels, by the way, through the bloodpact. Arithon didn't know that part.
‘My liege,’ Jieret begged, appalled too late for the inadvertent cost of his admission. ‘Don’t spurn my part. You charged me to safeguard your integrity. Whatever you say now, as caithdein, I am bound. I shall hold you to the letter of that promise.’
‘You feel this?’ Arithon repeated, his tone skinned into shrill horror.
Merciless, Jieret cut him off. ‘That can’t be permitted to matter! No one alive can shoulder the burden you carry. You have a job to finish, or blameless people here and in Shand will start dying.’ Brutal by necessity, he seized his prince’s forearm, hurled him upright and around to face the stem window. When Arithon recoiled and tried to flinch aside, Jieret wrestled him immobile in a shackling grip that spared nothing.
Pinned still and gasping, Arithon had no choice but to behold the unalloyed impact of his handiwork.
Things are on fucking fire. See, you know what happens when you have a dude casting lightning bolts at flammable hulks of impending explosions?
Heheheh.
Also, there's this:
‘So end what you’ve started,’ snarled Jieret, ‘and bedamned to your whining.’ Then he touched the dire sword like Dharkaron’s black Spear against his sovereign’s quivering nape.
I love Jieret so much.
So now that Arithon's back in control of himself, he can spin more illusion. He makes the shoals seem more distant, distracts helmsmen at the right moment. The very few vessels that are brought in safely from the massive harbour fires end up lurching aground, turned about back into the firestorm, et cetera.
I do love magic contrasts. And melodramatic angst:
Where Lysaer’s opposing talents were hampered by the need to spare allies, Arithon stiffened shadow at will. Even without access to the wellspring of his mage talent, training lent advantage and finesse. He could play his gift to gossamer illusion, or snap wave crests to ice in a swift, freezing absence of light. Where the fleet fled the fire, he used cold as a weapon, to jam sails, and ice rudders in their pintles. Many a stricken quartermaster fought to clear his fouled steering, while the smaller slower luggers in their path were overtaken and mulched to wreckage beneath the trampling bows of crippled ships.
Thin as the cries of flocking gulls, the screams of the injured carried on the breeze to Arithon’s vantage at the stern window. For all his clever strategy and wilful bleak purpose, he was not unscathed by the suffering. Taxed to visible, shivering pain, he sought to spin aside again; to abjure his killing touch on those fell tides of shadow and give way at last to despair.
Like rock behind him, Jieret forced him back with a prod of spelled steel, and never one slued of human mercy.
Denied leave to turn away, Arithon could not know that Jieret was weeping. Locked against the force of a grief stifled ruthlessly silent, the clansman’s knuckles on the sword’s grip were rigid, marble-white, and his eyes showed the anguish of a spirit torn up piecemeal. He held unbending to his given service, the black blade ever steadfast, even as the inevitable few vessels tore free of the harbour’s morass of fire and billowed ash to run the straits toward the open sea.
By now, he's back in control of himself, and orders the crew to put the Savrid to sail. Now it's time for some nautical raids and old school Dascan Elur piracy tactics. With fire arrows.
Ka-fucking-boom.
And eventually, they get the fuck out of there. Shadows vanish, the sun is shining. And Arithon thinks it's probably okay to release him. And of course, things get emotional:
The ebony sword flashed, moved; the gleaming tip dropped from fixed guard. The red-haired clansman whose age, in the daylight, was not a day more than twenty, sawed through the bonds tied with cord. Then he cast down the blade as though its mere touch burned his skin. The clanging reverberation of tempered steel against the deck caused him to shiver and shrink. His hands trembled. Minutes passed as he fumbled with torn fingers to untwist the crimps in the wire.
When the last bond gave way, he dropped to his knees, hands clasped to the ripped bracers that had scarcely spared the royal flesh beneath from the rigours of curse-bound directive. He could not bear to look up, nor confront what awaited in the face of the sovereign he had obeyed to the ruin of all pride.
‘My liege lord,’ he entreated. ‘I beg your forgiveness.’ In agonized remorse, he convulsed his fingers in torn fleeces. ‘Rathain’s justice and Dharkaron hear my case, I had no way else to keep your orders.’
Poor Jieret's had a hell of a night.
Arithon s’Ffalenn pried loose his chafed wrists. He turned around, careful in movement as if his bones were spun glass and his being might shatter at the jar of a wrongly-drawn breath. A moment passed while he stood with closed eyes. The running blood from his shoulder seeped through his torn shirt and tapped the white spruce of the deck. Then he stirred. He laced narrow fingers over the damp, copper crown of the caithdein who had abused him; who had broken his royal will on the point of a sword to force a cruel round of strategy to its finish.
‘Jieret,’ he whispered. The tracks of his tears had dried on his face. Rucked hair flicked his cheek in the play of the breeze through the shattered panes of the stem window. ‘Arise, man, I beg you. We share a brother’s trust. What pride or integrity do I have left that this curse hasn’t thoroughly undone?’ His wounding note of compassion snapped all at once to bare a core of acid bitterness. ‘If ruin and despair are any cause for satisfaction, take back your heart and stand tall. By strict count of burned planks and wrecked ships, we have rather brilliantly succeeded.’
Indeed, no army would sail upon Merior to take down the Master of Shadow.
I probably didn't need to add so many excerpts to this part, but well, I can't leave you hanging on the emotional resolution, right?
--
So the last subchapter, the very last in the book, is Reckoning:
We're back with Lysaer here. And...I won't deny, this is pretty satisfying too.
On the smoke-hazed battlements of Werpoint, Lysaer s’Ilessid stood in freezing wind and tainted sunlight and regarded a vista of wrecked hopes. The enormity of fate seemed unreal, years of careful planning reduced to ruin within hours by one strike of diabolical cunning. Longboats plied the bay to rescue what remained to be salvaged after the Shadow Master’s surprise attack on the harbour.
The ships are gone. The oarsmen are hauling in survivors who are all either half-dead from hypothermia or screaming from hideous burns.
Lysaer blames himself for this, cursing himself as a fool. He should have realized the brigantines were impossible even for a sorcerer to obtain. And he'd seen this before:
Eight years past, in a grimy back alley in Etarra, he had watched his half-brother spin a toy-sized ship out of shadow for the delight of a ragged pack of children. Small as that vessel had been, a creation of whimsical fancy, her execution and design had been perfect to the last detail. On the banks of Tal Quorin, Arithon had criminally proven his regard for the young was no more than a charade to lull suspicion and buy trust.
On Minderl Bay, for stakes unconscionably higher, he had repeated his game of illusion. Except now his ploy with ships had been cast in life size to enact a bloody toll in human lives.
...I mean, TECHNICALLY, Lysaer, YOU'RE the one that killed them.
He continues with the self-recrimination:
Lysaer let the winds snarl his hair and dam back the tears he refused to shed in remorse. Shamed beyond self-forgiveness for the towering temper that had pressured him out of control, he ached in guilt-fed silence. How well his enemy had judged him. Teased into anger, baited to a rage as mad as his father’s in Dascen Elur, he had savaged the very sky with his gifted powers to ignite that chain of fire ships, and enact the very letter of the Shadow Master’s design.
How Arithon must be laughing, the poisoned depths of his adversary’s dishonour a personal and private triumph. Lysaer slammed a fist on cold stone until his knuckles split.
At his shoulder, Lord Diegan had to speak twice before his sovereign prince heard him. ‘Your Grace, if you insist on staying out here, at least allow your valet to clothe you in warmer attire.’
Lysaer succumbed to a violent shiver. He choked back the burst of undignified laughter that clawed for escape from his throat. In fact, he wore nothing beyond a holland shirt snatched in haste from his bedside. The tails flapped like flags about his naked buttocks; before the world, he offered a ludicrous sight, standing in plain view, chapping his muscular royal thighs.
...Arithon definitely knows how to add insult to injury, even when not on purpose.
So Lysaer gets dressed. He figures his troops' morale must be his immediate concern, and his errors in judgment "lent no excuse to deny them support through his presence"
Of course, Lysaer's PR is always amazing, and to the people of Werpoint, he's actually the hero who saved them from ruin. Though there are many stranded ship captains who feel differently.:
Grim-faced and diligent, his fine clothes marred with sea water, blood, and smeared tar, Lysaer faced down every ship’s master and sailhand to confront him with incoherent rage. To their faces, he rebuked them in bracing, selfless dignity. ‘Do you think you’re the first to suffer for the wiles of s’Ffalenn? Did I never say his shadow-bending sorcery presents an unspeakable danger? If one glancing encounter makes you quiver and turn tail, leave now and count yourselves lucky to go living. My ranks have no place for faint hearts.’
He does his job of course, assigning shelter, arranging care for injured, sending out headhunters and dogs to try to find any of Arithon's accomplices. No luck there, of course. And Lysaer didn't really expect it. But the sea captains need to believe that they tried. Now they're going to be more diligent in chasing the criminals back to Merior.
Of course.
(Captain Mayor Skannt, by the way, seems to buy into a lot more of Lysaer's crap than Pesquil did. We're told that his lazy, half-lidded lashes mask "the spark of a fanatic".)
And now there's a matter of what to do. There are only a few vessels that can sail. It's winter. And Werpoint can't support the warhost. But Lysaer is implicable:
‘How much of an army must we have to strike at Merior?’ Lysaer said in forceful conclusion. His trimmed blond hair feathered shadows over his ringed and tired eyes, yet weariness stole nothing from his character. No trace of his gnawing anguish flawed his voice or his bearing as he added, ‘The village there has no resources, no garrison, nor any natural advantage of landscape beyond its troublesome access. My troops from Avenor are hardened. They’ll survive a winter march. The core of our veterans from Etarra have the heart to weather setbacks. Let’s look to patch together a reduced fleet, and find captains stung to rage enough to sail them.’
Impelled by royal influence, the dignitaries of Werpoint and the factions of disgruntled officers plunged into a night of rapt planning. By first light, to a marvel of swift decisions, the process of reorganization had been detailed and begun. Lysaer scarcely ate or slept. Every moment he could spare from arbitration and the thankless, unending task of smoothing the ruffled tempers of the merchants, he spent at the bedsides of the wounded or scribing letters to the widows of the dead. No detail was too small for his attention, no diplomacy too petty to express.
Men came into his presence worn, or frustrated, or enraged to the point of violence. Without exception, they left inspired to fresh purpose.
Lysaer himself isn't doing so well:
Only Lord Diegan could imagine the cost and the heartache such care for his following had cost. Every promise Lysaer had made had been ruined; every hope built over the course of eight years crumbled down in one hour of fire and trickery.
So the main force is disbanding. They'll have to turn back and march BACK to Etarra. There'll be fatalities. Pesquil is dead (yay!), a sacrifice without purpose.
But there is an interruption. One that Diegan can't get rid of: a sea captain demanding admittance.
It's the captain of the Savrid, and he has a message from Arithon.
The seaman wore a merchant’s broadcloth. Fair haired, his sturdy frame fleshed on the spare side of corpulent, he had honest blue eyes and a wary stance on the carpet. The cap in his hands showed crushed prints in the velvet from the fretted grip of thick fingers. Too independent to bow before royalty, he bestowed a curt nod of respect. ‘My Lord Prince.’
I like this guy actually. He's had a rough day, but he's got pride. And he's got something really important to say.
The brig captain draped his mangled cap on his knee. The same clear-eyed squint he used to trim his sails measured the stately prince by the casement. The weariness on the royal features did not escape him, nor the glacial, forced control behind the façade of poised patience. The captain spoke at length, a mulish set to his chin. ‘The man told me you were cursed by the Mistwraith to fight.’
‘Arithon s’Ffalenn is a sorcerer,’ Lysaer replied. ‘He would say anything to undermine your moral faith.’
The royal sincerity moved the seaman to visible distress. His boot scraped the carpet, and his troubled glance flicked aside. ‘In this case, I don’t think so.’
DID anyone ever bother to TELL Lysaer about the Curse?
We know he's angry at the Fellowship for succoring Arithon (...don't be mad, really, if anything, they've been helping you), but did they ever even bother to explain?
I mean, I doubt he'd listen, but still.
Lysaer urges the man to explain, telling him he need not fear for what he believes is truth. So the guy does. Thankfully his recap is described in a paragraph, and we don't have to reread what just happened.
The key part is that, while he didn't really have the option to chase Arithon, he probably wouldn't have. Whatever Lysaer claimed, however he framed his grand cause, the prince he called enemy was not the born killer he was named.
And:
Until his last breath, Savrid’s captain would recall the black sword in the hands of the clan liegeman who had slaughtered pride, even broken the man’s will to hold him to a desperate act of prevention.
...I don't think Arithon actually anticipated this when he decided on a witness. Actually, I think he'd be horrified. But these are things that Lysaer should hear.
There's some back and forth as to specifics about the raid, and then the message:
‘I’m going to set you free,’ Arithon had said. ‘But in return, I ask for one service. Go as my messenger to Lysaer s’Ilessid. Tell him in my name that I chose to destroy his fleet and strand his war host at Werpoint. Bid him remember, should he make disposition to pursue me. The burning was provoked by my fullest intent while the vessels at anchorage were not loaded.’
If he'd waited until the following night, thirty-five thousand people could have died.
This captain is a very brave man.
Lysaer s’Ilessid surveyed the ship captain whose message skirted very near to treason. Whether the man would ever have lent his unstinting service was now moot. His part at Werpoint had compromised his trust through delusion that the Master of Shadow was no murderer. Rather than pressure the issue outright in judgement, Lysaer clasped his fingers in a flaring sparkle of sapphire rings.
He asks, gently, if the captain would lend his ship to bear Lysaer south as an envoy to Alestron. But the captain, (who really does deserve a name but, like many of Wurts's best side characters, doesn't get one) refuses. Lysaer's cause isn't his and he won't help pursue Rathain's prince in the south.
‘The Shadow Master compromised your ship!’ Lord Diegan protested. ‘Are your crewmen complacent at his handling?’
‘My crewmen are alive and untouched by the fires.’ The captain snapped his cap off his thigh, jammed it over his hair, and without awaiting royal leave, shoved in spare haste to his feet. ‘Prince Arithon did not a man of them harm. I would have things remain as they are.’
Stolid as seasoned oak, he spun on his heel to depart.
Sometimes. SOMETIMES. Virtue wins out.
Diegan thinks they can't just let him go. They need the ship. But Lysaer notes that this isn't Avenor, and he has no right of royal requisition here.
That's an interesting note, considering why Maenalle was executed.
Diegan and Lysaer share another moment:
In this hour, the flicker of the candleflames lit no prince, but a man, punished by event and embittered by a cruel blow to pride.
The sight stopped his Lord Commander’s tirade.
Honoured to humility, Diegan saw his prince had let down his lofty public majesty before him in trust as a friend. He felt his heart twist in response. Anguished by every thoughtless past moment, when he had wished the royal self-esteem to falter, he now felt diminished in shame.
In the mortifying sting of defeat at Werpoint, he came at last to know that the humanity had been there all along. Beneath the lordly ruler, the bright poise, the unshakeable, inspirational confidence, Lysaer had the same flaws and needs as any other. The sacrifice he made to become an example to his people reduced his Lord Commander to disgrace.
Lysaer muses on how s'Ffalenn wiles drove his father to mad acts of grief. And now, we understand how exactly Lysaer can rationalize all the horrible shit we've heard about his original kingdom over the past few books. It's not the King's fault. It's Avar and Arithon all along.
He notes that to bring justice to "the Shadow Master's victims" and to protect the land, he must remain strong and act with restraint.
And he wants them to let the Savrid's captain go. He figures, probably rightly, that the man isn't going to find a listening ear among his fellows, who have all lost ships and men to this fight.
The subchapter ends with Lysaer's reinforced determination:
When the wine was drained to the lees, and Lysaer finally asked for his valet, he gave his Lord Commander the last, most poignant observation. ‘We shall weather this. Never undervalue your part, my Lord Diegan. At Etarra, you’ll recall, it was you and your lady sister who reminded me of Arithon’s wicked nature. Whether or not the Mistwraith had a part in any curse, whether or not my ungovernable temper was rooted in an aberrant geas, two facts still cannot be argued. I am the only spirit alive with the gifts to battle Arithon’s shadows; and the destructive acts against Jaelot and Alestron remain proof positive of my half-brother’s criminal nature. To go on and see him dead will serve justice and restore this land to final peace.’
--
The VERY last bit, our LAST sneak peek section is After Thoughts
1. Arithon, waking up bandaged and watched over by Jieret, vows to himself that he won't risk the s'Valerient line again in the feud. He whispers a royal command that Jieret marry, get an heir, and look to his clan's survival.
2. Two joiners playing dice through their watch suddenly smell smoke. The finished hull in Arithon's shipyard, is on fire.
3. And last...
Entangled in sleep in the Mayor of Werpoint’s guest suite, Prince Lysaer cries out in the throes of a night mare; while outside his chamber doorway, in a loyalty sprung from the heart, Lord Commander Diegan arises, Etarran enough to shoulder for political expedience what his prince is too merciful to condone - the assassination of the ship’s captain sympathetic to Arithon, that word of Desh-thiere’s curse not become common gossip in the streets…
...alas, poor nameless captain. Fuck you, Diegan.
--
And thus, Ships of Merior ends. Verdict forthcoming.
I think I'm glad we didn't, actually. Those moments are more effective when they're far apart. Too many and they lose impact.
That said, the ending chapter should have SOME sense of (temporary) resolution. So we'll see if this delivers.
Oh, already, ALREADY, we're off to a wonderful start. Remember the sneak peek at the end of last chapter? With Jieret aiming his arrow inscribed with the name of the man who murdered his family?
Captain Mayor Pesquil of the northern league of head-hunters pitched himself down and sideways into cover one fatal instant too late. Before he struck ground, the four-bladed steel broadhead aimed to take him slapped into the small of his back.
He landed hard enough to slam the wind from his lungs and trip a frost-rimed hail of stones into rattling descent down the slope. Their noisy, bouncing fall through stunted brush and cracked saplings caused men to glance up from their labour with wagons and shovels amidst the boulders which jammed the road below. Pesquil snatched air to shout warning of attack, then gasped, wrung mute. A spasm clamped his muscles. He could not breathe, could not speak, but only hug the flinty soil, pain-white and clammy with weakness.
Fucking YES.
There's a pretty great character moment where he thinks about how if his scouts hadn't seen him go down, or if they missed the warning shower of pebbles, they deserve to be cut down for negligence.
And because there's nothing better than seeing a genocidal monster rage impotently:
The unbroken quiet spurred him to a rage of colossal proportion.
He had always understood the snares at Valleygap had been fashioned to take down headhunters. Now, lying agonized in the scald of his own blood, Captain Mayor Pesquil cursed with ferocity: fool that he was, he had not understood until the endplay. Jieret Red-beard had blindsided him. Pressured too hard keeping others alive, he had never once thought to imagine himself as the ultimate, targeted prey.
Ring within ring, by spring-trap and rockfall, then the suspect boredom of two quiet weeks without incident, the last ambush in these inhospitable vales had been staged to deprive Lysaer of his most effective commander.
Pesquil gets carried off, mouthing curses against the name "s'Valerient" and while I don't generally consider myself to be a cruel or sadistic person, this does make me very happy.
And Pesquil's death here is slow. He's taken to the hospital tent:
Twilight settled early in the pit between the hills. Pesquil became aware of a dimness thick with mildewed canvas, musty wool, and the hated, dank smell of crumbled shale that pervaded the gap’s deep ravines. The hospital reek of medicinal herbs and an uglier stink of charred flesh lifted a curl to his lips. A mauling throb in his back and the virulent sting left by cautery played over every ugly bit of trauma imposed upon his body to remove the barbarian arrow. The injury was bad. He needed no doomsaying healer to tell him.
And of course, it isn't long before Lysaer is at his bedside. Lysaer must have better things to do, Pesquil manages to say, but of COURSE, Lysaer has to be here. Pesquil has a few final orders: tripling sentries, and when the supply train arrives, test biscuit and cheese on the dogs before eating it.
And in a lovely moment, Lysaer unintentionally digs the emotional knife deeper:
‘I should have expected you’d not shirk for sick leave.’ Lysaer smiled with that grave arrogance that seemed inborn into old-blood princes. ‘Before you get wrapped up in duties that can wait, I thought you’d like the chance to study this.’ He bent, raised the limp, dry hand that trailed outside the bedclothes, and pressed a sharp object into the captain mayor’s palm.
‘The broadhead removed from your back,’ the prince said.
Pesquil can't read it himself, which annoys him. He'd asked not to be dosed, but the healers and/or Lysaer overruled him. ("The prince did not share the cold truth, that no soporific posset troubled Pesquil’s concentration. Despite every effort and a brutal round of cautery, Pesquil’s sunken flesh and fevered skin affirmed the healer’s prognosis: the wound was still bleeding inside."
Yesss. For Jieret, Dania, the women. The children. Fucking YES.)
Lysaer asks if he wants to know what it says, and reads it off.
Lysaer turned the steel blades. ‘The letters on the first blade say, “from the son of the Earl of the North”.’
‘Jieret s’Valerient, I thought so.’ Pesquil shut his eyes, his sallow complexion paled to rubbed ivory, but without the grace of patina. His skin hung paper dry under the flutter of the lantern. ‘Go on.’
The next says, “for my lady mother, and four sisters”, and the next, “for the slaughtered innocents by Tal Quorin”.’ Lysaer trailed off into silence, his eyes, cold blue, on his injured officer, and his hands prepared to mete out a bracing restraint in case rage turned the wounded man distraught.
Pesquil isn't distraught. He knows exactly what this is. Remember, he's studied the clans. But the message is delivered to him and to Lysaer both, by Lysaer. Sometimes, accidently, he does seem to actually live up to the whole "Justice" thing. Albeit unintentionally.
And there's a pretty great bit here too, that makes this even more deserved:
‘A barbarous custom,’ Lysaer said in what seemed a disjointed interval later.
Had Pesquil been hale, he would have laughed. ‘The clans weren’t first with that practice. Townsmen during the uprising assassinated the High King of Havish with a sword engraved with his lineage.’ Too close to his pass beneath the Wheel for tact, he ended on a wisp of scorching irony, ‘You should know well, Prince - since you carry a blade specially forged to kill a sorcerer.’
The prick struck home: the sword in Lysaer’s scabbard since the hour of his march on Tal Quorin bore his enemy’s name in reverse runes.
I'd like to think that if Lysaer was the man he had been before the curse, this might have given him pause and inspired him to re-examine a lot of his beliefs about the clansfolk and townsfolk. Perhaps he might even consider looking at other clan customs that he finds horrifying and see how his own allies are the cause and inspiration for them.
Of course, Lysaer isn't that man.
Pesquil is dying. We get some nice insight into his physical suffering. But there's something he wants to do:
And yet, one thing remained. Today’s arrow had proven that a lifelong antagonist had sired a worthy son to succeed himself; Pesquil pushed back against his shroud of fogged wits. He gathered breath against the dreadful gnaw of pain and said, ‘Lysaer s’Ilessid, fetch your scribe.’
Lysaer clearly thinks Pesquil's writing to a loved one. He's not. He's giving out instructions to "ensure Jieret Red-beard and his fourteen Companions would not be left an opening to obstruct the army’s passage on to Werpoint.
And then, we finally see his last moments. For Jieret's sake, I'll share them:
The headhunter commander who despised rank and privilege delivered his last bequest with a prince in attendance at his bedside; the hour had been left too late for a scribe. His dark eyes unseeing in the spill of the lamplight, Pesquil never knew the hand that transcribed his racked lines was royal, and steady in its office. His last words came widely spaced, fought out with the same fanatical dedication that had enacted the bitter slaughter at Tal Quorin, and that even the act of dying could not unhinge.
Captain Mayor Pesquil of the northern league of head-hunters passed the Wheel bound still to his duty.
Whether he dreaded his reckoning with Daelion Fate-master, or felt remorse at the last for the clan lives he had claimed for paid bounty, no living man ever knew. Prince Lysaer laid aside his lapdesk and pen, closed the fixed eyes with their joyless fervour extinguished, then shrouded the gaunt, sunken architecture of the face in the colours of his own royal blazon.
Farewell, Pesquil. I have to admit, there were times I found you almost amusing. Even almost... admirable is definitely the wrong word, because hi, genocidal monster.... Maybe I'll borrow his phrase for Steiven. You were a "worthy antagonist". And you're living proof of something that Anne McCaffrey and Jennifer Roberson have yet (at least as far as I am in their respective series) to realize. A formidable antagonist is more effective than an incompetent one. An interesting, complicated antagonist is better than a cardboard cut out.
If Pesquil were Meron or T'ron or Tynstar, this moment would not be nearly so great. There's always a bit of satisfaction when the heroes finally defeat the villains, especially when the villains are as monstrous as Pesquil is. But when a villain is capable and clever, strong and insightful, then we appreciate our heroes more too. Twelve year old Jieret could not have defeated Pesquil. Steiven s'Valerient did not defeat Pesquil.
But twenty year old Jieret s'Valerient DID defeat him. He's grown, become stronger, wiser, more cunning and more relentless. And he finally got a bit of justice.
And Lysaer has lost his best asset against the clans.
Though, of course, this being Lysaer, he is able to turn this into his advantage. He's making their safe arrival Pesquil's monument, and has implored each garrison commander to allow a staff officer from Avenor to give advice. And, shaken by the loss of their expert, the commanders actually accept. (the appointed officers are supremely well-versed in the handling of men, as well.)
So they finally clear the pass of Valleygap, but they find that the wagons that they'd sent to resupply their stores are abandoned. They test the beef on the dogs: two out of three die. Diegan orders the stores fired, and they cross the last forty leagues with empty stomachs.
They do make it to Perlorn though. There are even some would be deserters, though they get stripped and whipped appropriately.
There are, as always, some beautiful descriptions:
Clouds like layered slate masked the hills at the horizon when, reprovisioned at punishing expense by a city hoarding its harvest against the onset of winter, the columns reformed to continue their march eastward. They wound through hills and vales half-erased by a grey smoke of drizzle, then slogged beside laden carts, bespattered with mud thrown off mired wheels. The teams slipped and laboured over roads transformed to soaked ruts, or washed out by freshets swollen from the silvered rungs of water shed off the stone shoulders of the Skyshiels.
Yet even as the wagons groaned and stuck fast in muck, or an axle broke, or someone sat to wad his boots with lint to ease the nip of raw blisters, Prince Lysaer was there on his caparisoned destrier to call encouragement, or share in rough jokes and commiseration.
Of course.
And of course the elite troops from Avenor inspire the other garrisons to look their most polished. Because Lysaer is good at that. And spirits are high, after all, the Master of Shadow is one man, and Merior is a sandspit village. The men are happy enough to make jokes, stating they'll be home for spring planting. And so on.
The officers are less happy though. Werpoint is not really equipped to handle the demands of garrison captains who want to be billeted indoors. The supply trains are late. The merchants are being bullied for provisions that they haven't got. And heck, even the chief councilman's daughter walked outside and got SOLICITED "like a dockside bawd."
Diegan is at his diplomatic best here:
Lord Diegan uttered a showy apology, then finished with his nastiest smile. ‘Now get me an empty council chamber with a fire and a staff servant, and a board with hot food for my twenty officers. After that, I don’t care if you throw your mayor out of his personal bed suite! The Prince of the West will have quarters befitting his station.’
The seneschal paused like a terrier outfaced by a mastiff, measured the threat in the Lord Commander’s stance, then dispatched a cringing underling to roust up the mayor’s house steward.
Effective. Diegan's grown as a character too.
But some problems can't be bullied: including bad wind, a lack of stores, clan attacks on grain supplies and so on. Diegan and Lysaer share a moment:
Prince Lysaer tossed his gloves and his silk-lined storm cloak to his hovering equerry, then gestured the servant’s dismissal. A vexed stride brought him to the table, where he ripped off the end of the bread loaf pried away from the kitchen staff with threats. He stared at the steam that arose off the morsel, shot a glare at the darkened casement, then spun in barely-held fury. ‘This can’t happen. I didn’t raise and train a grand war host only to be stopped by a run of poor luck and the ridiculous misfortune that the winds choose to blow southeast!’
‘Oh?’ Lord Diegan lounged back against the stone beside the settle and crossed his ankles on a footstool. His rowelled spurs snagged cuts in the embroidery, a fact to provide a spurt of sour pleasure, since the mayor’s house steward had been niggardly about supplying clean towels, and no servant had come to replenish the wood in the firebox. While his prince paced the carpet, too distressed to eat, Avenor’s Lord Commander said in gentle satire, ‘You’d think the better of setbacks if we were frozen alive by some fell mix of sorcery and shadows?’
Lysaer thinks that Arithon must have some hand at play. Right now all the delays seemed "exclusively targeted in revenge against Pesquil and his headhunters", but they're also Arithon's feal allies. And: "No man acquainted with s’Ffalenn wiles could rule out the chance their strikes had been timed as one thread in some wider design."
...in Mistwraith, I'd have called that an exaggeration. But well, as this book has proven, he's not actually wrong here. He's wrong about the why. Not the how.
It is fun though seeing Lysaer at a loss that he can't just Charisma out of his way. But well, maybe he can. He's apparently forced the consent of the fleet captains: the galleys will sail with the evening tide, even if they have to row across the bay.
--
The next subchapter then is Strike at Minderl Bay.
Interestingly, our viewpoint character this subchapter is the captain of a merchant brig named the Savrid. He happens to be carrying a packet of sealed dispatches from the officers' council with Lysaer, and he's just found a knife pressed against him.
‘Move on,’ the barbarian said, unreliably agreeable. ‘Or don’t. I can bleed you like a pig right here, and my archers in your crosstrees won’t even twinge against firing on unarmed oarsmen. You wish your bully boys to live? My liege would prefer they don’t suffer, but I’d as soon run them beneath the Wheel if you balk.’
Hi there!
We're told that, as a merchant's ship, the crew of the Savrid are not really suited to a warhost's demands. And well. They let themselves get hijacked by barbarians. Oops. The captain wisely surrenders.
We get a description for him. And one of someone else, this last, decidedly a bit...primrose?
His blindfold was whipped off with enough force to scuff his fair-skinned cheeks to a flush. Light-haired, blue-eyed, and burly enough to have worked his way up from a mate’s berth, the captain raised his square chin and glowered into a flare of lamplight fierce enough to make him squint. ‘Sure’s ebb tide, whoever you are, you’re going to be made to pay for this.’
‘How much is your dignity worth?’ quipped a voice with stinging, cool clarity. The speaker was small, compactly made, and mantled in plain-cut wool. The brassy spill of the oil flame played over black hair and eyes like summer leaves. A thin, chiselled mouth bent in dry irony at the flustered state of his captive.
Whatever the shanghaied captain expected, that opening set him at a loss. ‘Who are you?’
The stranger gave an elegant smile, reached out a limber hand and snatched the dispatch packet out of his prisoner’s tunic. ‘I’m the one wretch this lively war host has convened at Werpoint to eradicate.’ The beautiful fingers snapped through the wax seal, flicked open folded papers and tipped them in unbreathing steadiness toward the light.
Hi Arithon!
How long DOES it take to sail from Minderl Bay to Merior and back? I mean, I guess it takes a lot longer if you have to sail an entire army.
So, introductions made, the poor guy is rather aghast to find himself the prisoner of the Master of Shadow. ("You?" Hee.) He assumes Arithon is here to close with Lysaer's army. But nope, Arithon's here to forestall a war. "The broad shouldered clansman" with him (Hi, Jieret) supports his argument:
The broad-shouldered clansman returned the insult with a low burst of laughter and swiped his knife toward the harbour. ‘Did you see an attack fleet? No? Well, you wouldn’t. Because all we have with us are eight quick men, a cockleshell of a dory, and Arithon’s dinky pleasure sloop.’
...of course. Fucking Arithon.
Anyway, an interesting dude with a hooked nose, shifty eyes, and a tattooed cheek comes in. I THINK this dude is Dhirken's first mate? But I might be wrong about this. Anyway, he notes that the crew is stowed. Arithon reassures the captain that the men are unharmed. Albeit displeased.
Arithon reads the dispatches and tells Jieret that Caolle's hunch is justified: Lysaer indeed knows all about Merior. And this bit made me laugh:
The other swarthy scoundrel sidled straight from his slouch as the Shadow Master closed his edged musing. ‘Unless we want a war host down our throats and in our blankets, there’s no room left for half measures. Some risks will have to be shouldered.’
‘Ath’s Black Avenger! Haven’t we done that already?’ The clansman stared uneasily at the shifty-looking seaman, then swore afresh as the creature glared back like a felon. ‘My liege, you’re mad just to be here.’ Unsettled enough to forget himself, he straightened, cracked his head on a deck beam, and ripped out in rife exasperation, ‘Takes an underfed stripling to love seafaring!’
Poor Jieret. It'd be so nice to have a sane liege lord, wouldn't it?
The captain though won't be imprisoned with the rest. Arithon acquiesces, Lysaer might fare better with a witness, but he grants Jieret permission to gag the prisoner if he gets distracting.
So they arrange for the Savrid to take its proper place. The sailor notes their agreement: if this goes wrong, he's sailing off as he sees fit.
We get some more description of Arithon as he paces:
Little else about the sorcerer seemed remarkable. The tunic he wore was patched at the hem, and a sailmaker’s stitch laced his scabbard. At each fresh change, while canvas was unbrailed and braced full, he held a tigerish pause as he measured the activity abovedecks. When the brig shouldered forward and heeled to the wind, he eased back into soft, balanced steps.
Eventually, Jieret and Arithon have an emotional discussion, all in front of this poor Captain who doesn't want to be involved in this familial spat. The gist of it being that Arithon mostly agrees that this plan is stupid, but he doesn't think he has a choice. It's either stop the war host now, or there'll be another bloodbath. Arithon doesn't intend to let it happen in his name, or on Lysaer's chosen battlefield.
The clansman’s bearded profile loomed a notch in the view like the anvil silhouette of a squall line. ‘Well if it’s possible to provoke a behemoth and survive, the least I can do, my prince, is back you with all of my heart.’ The assurance came measured and steady; and yet when Jieret arose to hang the lantern, the changed flare of light showed a face tinged chalky with fear.
Oh Jieret. You are the best.
So time passes. And then, things get a little bondage-y.
An oath lilted back from the gloom. Jieret Red-beard shouldered into view, a pair of fleece bracers in his hands. At Arithon’s swift query, he said, ‘They’re mine. And yes, before you ask, they’ll fit you. I trimmed them down with my knife.’ Hardened against any protest, he added, ‘If you stay bull-stubborn and go through with this, I won’t have you tear yourself raw.’
Arithon managed a smile, slicked with the grimness a condemned man might carry through his last march to the scaffold. Then he drew a sword of spectacular artistry from his scabbard and laid its black blade on the chart table. Disarmed, his expression of humility at odds with his killer’s reputation, he freed his laced cuffs and bared slender wrists to his liegeman.
The barbarian showed no surprise at the marring white tracery of scars he tucked underneath the leather cuffs. He drew the ties firm then went on to lash his sovereign’s wrists with braided leather.
‘Jieret,’ Arithon said. ‘Thongs can break. I saw wire in the starboard locker. Forget about pity and use it.’
Arithon doesn't want you to stint on the S&M portion of this BDSM session, Jieret. And okay, he IS twenty, but he still seems a bit young for this, Arithon. And indeed, Jieret "accept[s] the bidding in dumb misery, drawing the wire tight in forceful jerks that had everything to do with a duty he found abhorrent."
And of course Arithon endures in distant stillness, because why brood if you can't brood angstfully and artfully. And Arithon gives some nice, cryptically awful sounding orders:
‘Make sure this ship keeps her station,’ he insisted, then added in cutting entreaty, ‘Jieret, by your oath as my liegeman, I charge you. Don’t let me give way, no matter how horribly I scream.’
Jieret asks if one seaside village could be worth this risk. Arithon reminds Jieret that while Merior isn't his birthright, he did pledge a woman his signet ring to keep her children safe.
‘Forgive me,’ Jieret whispered, for eight years in the past, on Tal Quorin’s greening banks, the decision had been no whit different. ‘Don’t hold me to blame in my fear for you.’
‘Wasted effort.’ Above the laboured creak of ship’s timbers, Arithon’s voice sounded easy. ‘Save your pity instead for the captains lured here in the misled belief they were threatened.’
The drama...
And here we go.
One moment the city of Werpoint rested in stilled peace, the anchorage thatched with masts and hazed soft gold by daybreak. Menace seemed absent; unreal. No inhabitant expected the Shadow Master’s presence. Unremarked, he gave no bodily sign in warning, no showman’s flourish designed to awe or terrify his audience. Arithon s’Ffalenn simply poised with a dancer’s concentration and spun the shadow he had ruled since his birth.
The snare he designed was for Werpoint.
A giant black leopard bounded over the rim of the southern horizon. The apparition swelled to monstrous proportion, then snarled in a silent, silhouetted show of fangs and swallowed the risen disc of the sun. For an instant, two diminished slits of sky glared through its eyes; then it blinked.
Darkness clapped down, soundless, complete, unnatural as if the air compressed to felt.
No star burned, no light. Werpoint’s broad headland seemed snuffed from existence, its harbour and ships swallowed up as completely as if Daelion Fatemaster had gone berserk and unravelled the thread of creation. Banished into fell darkness, a city in its entirety lay erased.
Niiice.
Then a thunderclap "rip[s] the sky into light." Lysaer of course. He's shooting through the shadow with light. Because that's what Arithon's done here:
In a wilful, cold-blooded dance with disaster, Arithon of Rathain had wakened the curse of the Mistwraith. The need bloomed and burned, to hammer force against force, until one or both of them lay dead.
People, causes, Werpoint’s naked vulnerability the next instant came to mean nothing. His body limned in actinic bursts of glare, Arithon surged toward the stem window. His lips peeled back from bared teeth in a mask that abjured his claim to humanity. Empowered but weaponless, he sought to raise his hands. The bonds on his wrists caught him short. The jerk he tried to free them doubled his frame and an animal snarl rasped his throat.
Jieret urges Arithon not to give in, and we get more dramatic description:
The Master of Shadow gave a scraped cry that violated mercy to witness. The fury that knotted his limbs let go. He staggered and all but fell.
Jieret caught him, while the veil of shadows that prisoned the daylight flared and flickered, weakened under Lysaer’s strike from Werpoint.
Steady as tide, Jieret murmured while the man in his hands hissed in a shuddering breath. ‘Easy, my liege. Easy. The effect of the curse can be tempered. If I didn’t believe it, I’d never have let you attempt this.’
Jieret really is the best, isn't he. Anyway, Arithon does pull himself together, albeit with "flesh racked to bone by sourceless agony".
Then the next stop of the plan: the dark veil dissipates, but reveals, to the south, an inbound fleet of black ships, all rigged as brigantines. The sailors freak out, as one does.
And Arithon, being a dick, rubs salt in the wound:
"From his unseen vantage on the wall walks, Lysaer s’Ilessid would recognize the oncoming fleet. He would see in their lines and the trim of red sails a memory resurfaced from childhood: brigantines fashioned by the hand of s’Ffalenn, built in the shipyards at Merior at sorcerous speed, and now, attacking for pillage and piracy.
Provoked as a cold point of strategy, his rage would burst all bounds.
And naturally, this means that Lysaer blasts the crap out of him. And...wow. He HAS been practicing:
The light bolt he launched in defence of his own slashed the dawn like a scimitar. Air shrieked. The sky flashed blinding white, then rebounded into fumes and smoke, lit to churned orange by a firestorm of raw, ignited power. The holocaust scalded across wave crests rent to steam, until the bay seemed a cauldron brewed by demons.
There's more illusion work, as Arithon keeps a desperate grip on his sanity, while Lysaer keeps blasting:
A clap and a boom volleyed over Werpoint. Against the massed fleet and his sworn mortal enemy, Lysaer retorted in pure light. The sky above the battlements split with the blast. Arithon’s teasing play of shadows became snuffed in one towering burst of raw force.
The bolt jagged on and struck the bay, a hammer on at anvil of waves. The inrunning fleet of brigantines exploded into crackling fire. The throaty report slammed a shock through the wind as timbers, canvas, sails and spars ignited, touched off like a torch to inferno.
And this last one is so bad that it sets Arithon off for good:
Struck by the backlash of that virulent, unbridled violence, Arithon lost his last, harried hold on self-awareness. Before Jieret could react, he screamed primal rage and rammed the mullioned casement with his shoulder. The panes shrilled and burst to flying fragments. Then the hands in restraint drove him mad. Arithon twisted like an eel, eyes wide open and wild. Glass slivers stabbed through his shirt linen and reddened his clansman’s clenched fingers.
Jieret swore, shifted grip, and gasped in retching pain from a hit to the belly. ‘No you won’t,’ he ground past a stopped bitch of breath.
Arithon thrashed free in a reeling charge that carried him toward the companionway.
And yep, confirmed, that dude WAS Dhirken's first mate, I'm far better at recognizing fictional characters than I am real people:
Jieret rammed after in pursuit. ‘Show your face outside and you know what will happen. By your very orders, that criminal of a mate will slit your throat and claim this brig as his prize.’
The Master of Shadow flung back a mocking laugh not a man of his friends would have recognized. ‘Not if I freeze the living flesh off his bones with bindings wrought out of shadow.’
Yeah, Arithon's not really here anymore. So Jieret fucking tackles him. Which is amazing. But it's a much more difficult fight than it should be. Arithon's half Jieret's size, bound hands, but also fucking crazy.
And across the bay, Lysaer is still blasting at shadows. The fleet is still advancing. And the Savrid's captain notices "a shattering truth":
Through the dross of patched dark, through rank bad judgement and confusion as hull ground into hull, the imprisoned captain on the Savrid deciphered a shattering truth: the straggle of fired hulls had lost their clean lines. The raked masts and spars glazed in outline by fire no longer wore the shapes of the brigantines Lysaer had spent his powers to destroy.
No fleet of deadly warcraft out of Merior, this ragtag chain of hulls: the hostile vessels which closed upon Werpoint were unarmed old hulks, a derelict gaggle of fishing boats and rafts, packed with dried fir boughs and floss, which exploded in fanned sparks and flurried in the breeze, to touch alight whatever lay before them. The illusion of shadows that once masked their shapes had winnowed away to reveal the cunning trap beneath.
Ka-fucking boom. The captain weeps in beaten grief, while Arithon and Jieret continue their wrestling match:
Even bound, Arithon used his head, his knees, and his feet to bruise and strike. Jieret Red-beard vented pain in choked oaths. The only grip his prince could not break was the hand he held latched in black hair, and that insufficient to stay him. The clansman came aware in clear dread that Arithon manoeuvred toward the uncanny blade still left unsheathed on the chart table.
‘Ah no, my prince. Never that.’ Jieret at last resorted to blows in return. His merciless fist bashed his liege lord in the jaw. While his adversary reeled, half-stunned, he snatched up the black sword himself.
And because it's in a righteous cause, it lights up. In a "tight, controlled cut" he slashes Arithon's shoulder and:
Contact wrung a cry from the man and the elements. A flare of white sheeted through the cabin. Nothing like any weaving of Lysaer’s, the clean blast of brilliance came twined with a peal of struck sound. The resonance climbed in unbearable sweetness. Its harmony unstrung the mind. The passions of hatred and sorrow alike were dashed out in a celebration of life that made of all strife a desecration.
Smote by a longing that ached through his bones, the brig captain groaned for the sorrows of the world. Fired to unalloyed grief, stripped in a heartbeat to the dross and clay that cased the naked sum of his mortality, he heard Arithon s’Ffalenn cry aloud as if his heart had been torn from his body.
Still screaming, the Shadow Master folded to his knees. Blood streaked from the gash traced in flesh by Jieret’s cut. The enchanted scald of light nicked over the white bone, laid bare beneath his slashed shirt. A marring edge of scarlet flowed down the black blade, then sublimated away in the heatless burn of magics laced through immutable metal.
...okay, sometimes I do understand the "my sword is just so awesome" angst. WHOA.
So Arithon's back to himself. Albeit in agony, an agony that Jieret feels, by the way, through the bloodpact. Arithon didn't know that part.
‘My liege,’ Jieret begged, appalled too late for the inadvertent cost of his admission. ‘Don’t spurn my part. You charged me to safeguard your integrity. Whatever you say now, as caithdein, I am bound. I shall hold you to the letter of that promise.’
‘You feel this?’ Arithon repeated, his tone skinned into shrill horror.
Merciless, Jieret cut him off. ‘That can’t be permitted to matter! No one alive can shoulder the burden you carry. You have a job to finish, or blameless people here and in Shand will start dying.’ Brutal by necessity, he seized his prince’s forearm, hurled him upright and around to face the stem window. When Arithon recoiled and tried to flinch aside, Jieret wrestled him immobile in a shackling grip that spared nothing.
Pinned still and gasping, Arithon had no choice but to behold the unalloyed impact of his handiwork.
Things are on fucking fire. See, you know what happens when you have a dude casting lightning bolts at flammable hulks of impending explosions?
Heheheh.
Also, there's this:
‘So end what you’ve started,’ snarled Jieret, ‘and bedamned to your whining.’ Then he touched the dire sword like Dharkaron’s black Spear against his sovereign’s quivering nape.
I love Jieret so much.
So now that Arithon's back in control of himself, he can spin more illusion. He makes the shoals seem more distant, distracts helmsmen at the right moment. The very few vessels that are brought in safely from the massive harbour fires end up lurching aground, turned about back into the firestorm, et cetera.
I do love magic contrasts. And melodramatic angst:
Where Lysaer’s opposing talents were hampered by the need to spare allies, Arithon stiffened shadow at will. Even without access to the wellspring of his mage talent, training lent advantage and finesse. He could play his gift to gossamer illusion, or snap wave crests to ice in a swift, freezing absence of light. Where the fleet fled the fire, he used cold as a weapon, to jam sails, and ice rudders in their pintles. Many a stricken quartermaster fought to clear his fouled steering, while the smaller slower luggers in their path were overtaken and mulched to wreckage beneath the trampling bows of crippled ships.
Thin as the cries of flocking gulls, the screams of the injured carried on the breeze to Arithon’s vantage at the stern window. For all his clever strategy and wilful bleak purpose, he was not unscathed by the suffering. Taxed to visible, shivering pain, he sought to spin aside again; to abjure his killing touch on those fell tides of shadow and give way at last to despair.
Like rock behind him, Jieret forced him back with a prod of spelled steel, and never one slued of human mercy.
Denied leave to turn away, Arithon could not know that Jieret was weeping. Locked against the force of a grief stifled ruthlessly silent, the clansman’s knuckles on the sword’s grip were rigid, marble-white, and his eyes showed the anguish of a spirit torn up piecemeal. He held unbending to his given service, the black blade ever steadfast, even as the inevitable few vessels tore free of the harbour’s morass of fire and billowed ash to run the straits toward the open sea.
By now, he's back in control of himself, and orders the crew to put the Savrid to sail. Now it's time for some nautical raids and old school Dascan Elur piracy tactics. With fire arrows.
Ka-fucking-boom.
And eventually, they get the fuck out of there. Shadows vanish, the sun is shining. And Arithon thinks it's probably okay to release him. And of course, things get emotional:
The ebony sword flashed, moved; the gleaming tip dropped from fixed guard. The red-haired clansman whose age, in the daylight, was not a day more than twenty, sawed through the bonds tied with cord. Then he cast down the blade as though its mere touch burned his skin. The clanging reverberation of tempered steel against the deck caused him to shiver and shrink. His hands trembled. Minutes passed as he fumbled with torn fingers to untwist the crimps in the wire.
When the last bond gave way, he dropped to his knees, hands clasped to the ripped bracers that had scarcely spared the royal flesh beneath from the rigours of curse-bound directive. He could not bear to look up, nor confront what awaited in the face of the sovereign he had obeyed to the ruin of all pride.
‘My liege lord,’ he entreated. ‘I beg your forgiveness.’ In agonized remorse, he convulsed his fingers in torn fleeces. ‘Rathain’s justice and Dharkaron hear my case, I had no way else to keep your orders.’
Poor Jieret's had a hell of a night.
Arithon s’Ffalenn pried loose his chafed wrists. He turned around, careful in movement as if his bones were spun glass and his being might shatter at the jar of a wrongly-drawn breath. A moment passed while he stood with closed eyes. The running blood from his shoulder seeped through his torn shirt and tapped the white spruce of the deck. Then he stirred. He laced narrow fingers over the damp, copper crown of the caithdein who had abused him; who had broken his royal will on the point of a sword to force a cruel round of strategy to its finish.
‘Jieret,’ he whispered. The tracks of his tears had dried on his face. Rucked hair flicked his cheek in the play of the breeze through the shattered panes of the stem window. ‘Arise, man, I beg you. We share a brother’s trust. What pride or integrity do I have left that this curse hasn’t thoroughly undone?’ His wounding note of compassion snapped all at once to bare a core of acid bitterness. ‘If ruin and despair are any cause for satisfaction, take back your heart and stand tall. By strict count of burned planks and wrecked ships, we have rather brilliantly succeeded.’
Indeed, no army would sail upon Merior to take down the Master of Shadow.
I probably didn't need to add so many excerpts to this part, but well, I can't leave you hanging on the emotional resolution, right?
--
So the last subchapter, the very last in the book, is Reckoning:
We're back with Lysaer here. And...I won't deny, this is pretty satisfying too.
On the smoke-hazed battlements of Werpoint, Lysaer s’Ilessid stood in freezing wind and tainted sunlight and regarded a vista of wrecked hopes. The enormity of fate seemed unreal, years of careful planning reduced to ruin within hours by one strike of diabolical cunning. Longboats plied the bay to rescue what remained to be salvaged after the Shadow Master’s surprise attack on the harbour.
The ships are gone. The oarsmen are hauling in survivors who are all either half-dead from hypothermia or screaming from hideous burns.
Lysaer blames himself for this, cursing himself as a fool. He should have realized the brigantines were impossible even for a sorcerer to obtain. And he'd seen this before:
Eight years past, in a grimy back alley in Etarra, he had watched his half-brother spin a toy-sized ship out of shadow for the delight of a ragged pack of children. Small as that vessel had been, a creation of whimsical fancy, her execution and design had been perfect to the last detail. On the banks of Tal Quorin, Arithon had criminally proven his regard for the young was no more than a charade to lull suspicion and buy trust.
On Minderl Bay, for stakes unconscionably higher, he had repeated his game of illusion. Except now his ploy with ships had been cast in life size to enact a bloody toll in human lives.
...I mean, TECHNICALLY, Lysaer, YOU'RE the one that killed them.
He continues with the self-recrimination:
Lysaer let the winds snarl his hair and dam back the tears he refused to shed in remorse. Shamed beyond self-forgiveness for the towering temper that had pressured him out of control, he ached in guilt-fed silence. How well his enemy had judged him. Teased into anger, baited to a rage as mad as his father’s in Dascen Elur, he had savaged the very sky with his gifted powers to ignite that chain of fire ships, and enact the very letter of the Shadow Master’s design.
How Arithon must be laughing, the poisoned depths of his adversary’s dishonour a personal and private triumph. Lysaer slammed a fist on cold stone until his knuckles split.
At his shoulder, Lord Diegan had to speak twice before his sovereign prince heard him. ‘Your Grace, if you insist on staying out here, at least allow your valet to clothe you in warmer attire.’
Lysaer succumbed to a violent shiver. He choked back the burst of undignified laughter that clawed for escape from his throat. In fact, he wore nothing beyond a holland shirt snatched in haste from his bedside. The tails flapped like flags about his naked buttocks; before the world, he offered a ludicrous sight, standing in plain view, chapping his muscular royal thighs.
...Arithon definitely knows how to add insult to injury, even when not on purpose.
So Lysaer gets dressed. He figures his troops' morale must be his immediate concern, and his errors in judgment "lent no excuse to deny them support through his presence"
Of course, Lysaer's PR is always amazing, and to the people of Werpoint, he's actually the hero who saved them from ruin. Though there are many stranded ship captains who feel differently.:
Grim-faced and diligent, his fine clothes marred with sea water, blood, and smeared tar, Lysaer faced down every ship’s master and sailhand to confront him with incoherent rage. To their faces, he rebuked them in bracing, selfless dignity. ‘Do you think you’re the first to suffer for the wiles of s’Ffalenn? Did I never say his shadow-bending sorcery presents an unspeakable danger? If one glancing encounter makes you quiver and turn tail, leave now and count yourselves lucky to go living. My ranks have no place for faint hearts.’
He does his job of course, assigning shelter, arranging care for injured, sending out headhunters and dogs to try to find any of Arithon's accomplices. No luck there, of course. And Lysaer didn't really expect it. But the sea captains need to believe that they tried. Now they're going to be more diligent in chasing the criminals back to Merior.
Of course.
(Captain Mayor Skannt, by the way, seems to buy into a lot more of Lysaer's crap than Pesquil did. We're told that his lazy, half-lidded lashes mask "the spark of a fanatic".)
And now there's a matter of what to do. There are only a few vessels that can sail. It's winter. And Werpoint can't support the warhost. But Lysaer is implicable:
‘How much of an army must we have to strike at Merior?’ Lysaer said in forceful conclusion. His trimmed blond hair feathered shadows over his ringed and tired eyes, yet weariness stole nothing from his character. No trace of his gnawing anguish flawed his voice or his bearing as he added, ‘The village there has no resources, no garrison, nor any natural advantage of landscape beyond its troublesome access. My troops from Avenor are hardened. They’ll survive a winter march. The core of our veterans from Etarra have the heart to weather setbacks. Let’s look to patch together a reduced fleet, and find captains stung to rage enough to sail them.’
Impelled by royal influence, the dignitaries of Werpoint and the factions of disgruntled officers plunged into a night of rapt planning. By first light, to a marvel of swift decisions, the process of reorganization had been detailed and begun. Lysaer scarcely ate or slept. Every moment he could spare from arbitration and the thankless, unending task of smoothing the ruffled tempers of the merchants, he spent at the bedsides of the wounded or scribing letters to the widows of the dead. No detail was too small for his attention, no diplomacy too petty to express.
Men came into his presence worn, or frustrated, or enraged to the point of violence. Without exception, they left inspired to fresh purpose.
Lysaer himself isn't doing so well:
Only Lord Diegan could imagine the cost and the heartache such care for his following had cost. Every promise Lysaer had made had been ruined; every hope built over the course of eight years crumbled down in one hour of fire and trickery.
So the main force is disbanding. They'll have to turn back and march BACK to Etarra. There'll be fatalities. Pesquil is dead (yay!), a sacrifice without purpose.
But there is an interruption. One that Diegan can't get rid of: a sea captain demanding admittance.
It's the captain of the Savrid, and he has a message from Arithon.
The seaman wore a merchant’s broadcloth. Fair haired, his sturdy frame fleshed on the spare side of corpulent, he had honest blue eyes and a wary stance on the carpet. The cap in his hands showed crushed prints in the velvet from the fretted grip of thick fingers. Too independent to bow before royalty, he bestowed a curt nod of respect. ‘My Lord Prince.’
I like this guy actually. He's had a rough day, but he's got pride. And he's got something really important to say.
The brig captain draped his mangled cap on his knee. The same clear-eyed squint he used to trim his sails measured the stately prince by the casement. The weariness on the royal features did not escape him, nor the glacial, forced control behind the façade of poised patience. The captain spoke at length, a mulish set to his chin. ‘The man told me you were cursed by the Mistwraith to fight.’
‘Arithon s’Ffalenn is a sorcerer,’ Lysaer replied. ‘He would say anything to undermine your moral faith.’
The royal sincerity moved the seaman to visible distress. His boot scraped the carpet, and his troubled glance flicked aside. ‘In this case, I don’t think so.’
DID anyone ever bother to TELL Lysaer about the Curse?
We know he's angry at the Fellowship for succoring Arithon (...don't be mad, really, if anything, they've been helping you), but did they ever even bother to explain?
I mean, I doubt he'd listen, but still.
Lysaer urges the man to explain, telling him he need not fear for what he believes is truth. So the guy does. Thankfully his recap is described in a paragraph, and we don't have to reread what just happened.
The key part is that, while he didn't really have the option to chase Arithon, he probably wouldn't have. Whatever Lysaer claimed, however he framed his grand cause, the prince he called enemy was not the born killer he was named.
And:
Until his last breath, Savrid’s captain would recall the black sword in the hands of the clan liegeman who had slaughtered pride, even broken the man’s will to hold him to a desperate act of prevention.
...I don't think Arithon actually anticipated this when he decided on a witness. Actually, I think he'd be horrified. But these are things that Lysaer should hear.
There's some back and forth as to specifics about the raid, and then the message:
‘I’m going to set you free,’ Arithon had said. ‘But in return, I ask for one service. Go as my messenger to Lysaer s’Ilessid. Tell him in my name that I chose to destroy his fleet and strand his war host at Werpoint. Bid him remember, should he make disposition to pursue me. The burning was provoked by my fullest intent while the vessels at anchorage were not loaded.’
If he'd waited until the following night, thirty-five thousand people could have died.
This captain is a very brave man.
Lysaer s’Ilessid surveyed the ship captain whose message skirted very near to treason. Whether the man would ever have lent his unstinting service was now moot. His part at Werpoint had compromised his trust through delusion that the Master of Shadow was no murderer. Rather than pressure the issue outright in judgement, Lysaer clasped his fingers in a flaring sparkle of sapphire rings.
He asks, gently, if the captain would lend his ship to bear Lysaer south as an envoy to Alestron. But the captain, (who really does deserve a name but, like many of Wurts's best side characters, doesn't get one) refuses. Lysaer's cause isn't his and he won't help pursue Rathain's prince in the south.
‘The Shadow Master compromised your ship!’ Lord Diegan protested. ‘Are your crewmen complacent at his handling?’
‘My crewmen are alive and untouched by the fires.’ The captain snapped his cap off his thigh, jammed it over his hair, and without awaiting royal leave, shoved in spare haste to his feet. ‘Prince Arithon did not a man of them harm. I would have things remain as they are.’
Stolid as seasoned oak, he spun on his heel to depart.
Sometimes. SOMETIMES. Virtue wins out.
Diegan thinks they can't just let him go. They need the ship. But Lysaer notes that this isn't Avenor, and he has no right of royal requisition here.
That's an interesting note, considering why Maenalle was executed.
Diegan and Lysaer share another moment:
In this hour, the flicker of the candleflames lit no prince, but a man, punished by event and embittered by a cruel blow to pride.
The sight stopped his Lord Commander’s tirade.
Honoured to humility, Diegan saw his prince had let down his lofty public majesty before him in trust as a friend. He felt his heart twist in response. Anguished by every thoughtless past moment, when he had wished the royal self-esteem to falter, he now felt diminished in shame.
In the mortifying sting of defeat at Werpoint, he came at last to know that the humanity had been there all along. Beneath the lordly ruler, the bright poise, the unshakeable, inspirational confidence, Lysaer had the same flaws and needs as any other. The sacrifice he made to become an example to his people reduced his Lord Commander to disgrace.
Lysaer muses on how s'Ffalenn wiles drove his father to mad acts of grief. And now, we understand how exactly Lysaer can rationalize all the horrible shit we've heard about his original kingdom over the past few books. It's not the King's fault. It's Avar and Arithon all along.
He notes that to bring justice to "the Shadow Master's victims" and to protect the land, he must remain strong and act with restraint.
And he wants them to let the Savrid's captain go. He figures, probably rightly, that the man isn't going to find a listening ear among his fellows, who have all lost ships and men to this fight.
The subchapter ends with Lysaer's reinforced determination:
When the wine was drained to the lees, and Lysaer finally asked for his valet, he gave his Lord Commander the last, most poignant observation. ‘We shall weather this. Never undervalue your part, my Lord Diegan. At Etarra, you’ll recall, it was you and your lady sister who reminded me of Arithon’s wicked nature. Whether or not the Mistwraith had a part in any curse, whether or not my ungovernable temper was rooted in an aberrant geas, two facts still cannot be argued. I am the only spirit alive with the gifts to battle Arithon’s shadows; and the destructive acts against Jaelot and Alestron remain proof positive of my half-brother’s criminal nature. To go on and see him dead will serve justice and restore this land to final peace.’
--
The VERY last bit, our LAST sneak peek section is After Thoughts
1. Arithon, waking up bandaged and watched over by Jieret, vows to himself that he won't risk the s'Valerient line again in the feud. He whispers a royal command that Jieret marry, get an heir, and look to his clan's survival.
2. Two joiners playing dice through their watch suddenly smell smoke. The finished hull in Arithon's shipyard, is on fire.
3. And last...
Entangled in sleep in the Mayor of Werpoint’s guest suite, Prince Lysaer cries out in the throes of a night mare; while outside his chamber doorway, in a loyalty sprung from the heart, Lord Commander Diegan arises, Etarran enough to shoulder for political expedience what his prince is too merciful to condone - the assassination of the ship’s captain sympathetic to Arithon, that word of Desh-thiere’s curse not become common gossip in the streets…
...alas, poor nameless captain. Fuck you, Diegan.
--
And thus, Ships of Merior ends. Verdict forthcoming.