The House of the Four Winds: Book One of One Dozen Daughters

by Mercedes Lackey

  Clarice wasn’t certain whether the man was saying Sprunt might have given up his secrets under torture, or suggesting that she and Dominick be tortured to encourage them to do so. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the council didn’t seem to have been completely persuaded by Dominick’s clever story. Even though parts of it are very nearly true, she thought. They think we’re pirate hunters, not pirates.

  “True enough. Look at him. He stinks of manly virtue.” It was Aubrianna again. “Look at how upright he is. How clean-limbed. How terribly noble! And far too familiar with how we manage our affairs. He’s just the sort they’d send.”

  “Well, we really aren’t,” Clarice said, doing her best to sound both convincing and patronizing. “Sprunt was luckier than he should have been—five ships? People were starting to talk, you know. It was the medallion that cinched it, though. If you don’t want people to come here, why hand out maps?”

  “It’s true the medallions can be passed on without a vote from the council.” A woman who hadn’t spoken before wrapped her fingers around her tankard. “If possession alone could condemn someone, we’d all have to hang ourselves.”

  “Given,” Captain Watson echoed in grudging agreement. “Or lost. Or stolen.”

  “Thirty-six of them there were, when they were forged,” Captain Harrison said. “Three for each of the wind’s twelve quarters. And how many now?”

  “Seventeen that we know of—as you know,” Fairfax said. “The rest have gone to the bottom, where we are honorbound to send them if there is a chance of their capture. And when they are all lost, why—what then?”

  “Why … then I shall make more, my darling. Never fear that the House of the Four Winds will lie empty, its enchantments broken.”

  The mocking female voice came from the shadows at the back of the room, and for a moment Clarice thought it was Fleta, for it possessed much the same lilting Caribe accent, but the woman who walked into the light was exotic in a way Fleta could never hope to equal. She carried herself with the haughty grace of a queen, and everyone in the room turned to regard her approach in respectful silence. She was a tiny thing, barely five feet tall, and so lushly female that no corset in the universe could let her pass as a boy. Her hair was a shining blue-black mass of curls held back from her face by a bright scarf tied about her brow. She wore a sleeveless bodice of black silk that barely covered her breasts, and her skirt was a thing of fluttering tatters in a hundred shades of blue that left her legs nearly bare. Dozens of multicolored bead necklaces were looped about her throat, and she wore sparkling gold bangles on her wrists and ankles. Her skin was honey dark, and as she approached, Clarice could see that her eyes were quite strange: large, almond shaped, and yellow-green, like a cat’s.

  “You said that was impossible when you made them, Lady Shamal,” Fairfax said deferentially. He rose from his chair, clearly to offer it to her.

  “With what I have here to work with,” Shamal agreed. “But Dorado is not the whole world.”

  She ignored the chair and walked slowly around the table. Dominick was openly staring at her, his expression suggesting he’d just been struck by lightning. His mouth was hanging slightly open. Clarice wasn’t sure he was actually remembering to breathe. Then at last her mind kicked in, and both surprise and irritation vanished under a flood of primal fear.

  Everything about Shamal was hyperreal. Not merely her jewelry or her clothes or even her artfully tousled hair. Everything.

  Oh, dear Dr. Karlavaegen, how I wish I had paid more attention to your lectures! Everyone here has spoken of “the Lady.” Is she a powerful thaumaturge—or a creature of magic itself?

  “But that isn’t talk for a pleasant gathering such as this,” Shamal said with a throaty laugh. She stopped halfway between Dominick and Fairfax. “We are here to welcome the newest member of our company, are we not? Of course you have suspicions of him—rightfully so, for are we not surrounded on every side by enemies? And yet … there are always good men to be found.”

  From the direction of Shamal’s gaze, she clearly felt she’d found one in Dominick. Clarice fought to keep her head through the swirling emotions of jealousy and fear. Shamal unsettled people—she could see it in the way the council members held themselves. At least, if I am not alone in my reaction to her, it can hardly be noticed, can it?

  “Oh, aye, just as you say,” Aubrianna Watson said, a bit too sharply. “But Sprunt was a cunning old dog, and I don’t think he’d spill his secrets to the first man who bought him a bottle—or six. I say this tale of Moryet’s is a lie, and a liar has something to hide. Cut his throat, take his ship—and if I am wrong, then I shall make a pretty apology the next time our paths cross.” She smiled triumphantly.

  “You were always so wasteful, Sister,” Melisande Watson said reproachfully. “Take his ship and his crew, of course, but Captain Moryet and Mr. Swann would fetch a pretty price if we sold them on—and cut their tongues out first, of course,” she added conscientiously. “So they won’t talk about what they oughtn’t.”

  “Alas, dear ladies,” Fairfax said, sounding regretful, and not shocked in the least, “that would be against the Code of the Brotherhood. Any who sail into our harbor have immunity from all quarrels until they sail out again.” He paused to drink from his tankard. “Unless, of course, there’s some proof they’re out to do us harm.…” He gazed at them expectantly.

  The dark-skinned man with the clean-shaven head spoke again. “Ah, Edmund, my dear friend, how many times have I told you one cannot prove a negative? No, this line of reasoning won’t hold water. Not in the least.”

  “And how do you propose to find the truth then, Alec, my dear?” Fairfax asked mildly.

  “We could let them sail away and chase them down in open sea,” Captain Watson said.

  Her sister sighed. “Cleaving to the letter and not the spirit of the Code as always.”

  “I know!” Alec said, beaming. “They must show us the true color of their hearts.”

  “Black, of course,” Topper Harrison drawled.

  “How?” Clarice said boldly into the laughter that followed. She had the crawling sensation that this was a play, and only she and Dominick didn’t know their lines.

  “A prize,” Captain Fairfax said. “Take a rich prize, bring it here, and prove yourselves beyond all doubt.”

  “Well, I suppose we could—” Dominick began.

  It did not take any mystical insight for Clarice to feel the jaws of the trap close about them.

  “Of course!” Shamal said, clapping her hands in delight. “The very thing! It will solve Captain Moryet’s problems and our own! He will go in search of the Heart of Light, and when he returns with it, I will have all I need to cast a new set of medallions! The Brotherhood shall reign over a fleet of corsairs that can scour the Hispalides and New Hesperia herself bare of treasure!”

  Everyone was smiling now. Dominick turned to Clarice with an expression of baffled fear. Clearly he could tell that something bad had happened and had no idea what.

  “And why hasn’t anyone else done this?” Clarice asked.

  For a moment an expression of surprise flitted across Shamal’s face, turning her beauty to ugliness. Then she laughed. “Why, it is fearsomely dangerous, child! The Heart of Light is guarded by so many dangers that none have passed through them alive, and it lies in uncharted seas! To seek it is a quest so fraught with peril that no one here will undertake it—though the rewards would be … great indeed. The moment I saw his face, I was certain the dashing Captain Moryet was the one to succeed where so many others have failed.”

  Suddenly Dominick pushed back his chair and got to his feet. After a startled moment, Clarice joined him.

  “Captains,” he said with a bow. “Lady Shamal. I thank you for an entertaining evening, but the hour grows late, and we must take our leave. Before we do, permit me to congratulate you on a rare joke. Why, first you say it is obvious I am your sworn enemy and so must be executed at once, and th
en you say I and all my crew may sail freely forth to a destination from which we are not likely to return! Well played, my brothers! I salute you!” He doffed his hat in an ironic salute and turned to go, tucking it under his arm.

  Oh, Spirits and Powers, let this work. Clarice was certain, as she knew Dominick must be, that nobody here tonight had been playing a joke on them. But let the two of them get out that door alive, and …

  “I told you he was a clever fellow.” Shamal’s voice at his back made Dominick hesitate. From her own vantage point Clarice could see the sorceress moving toward them. “And see, he has spotted the flaw in the argument. But it is no flaw, and I have the proof.”

  Dominick had turned toward Shamal as she spoke. She swayed toward him with a cat-footed tread, and as she came, she teased one of the necklaces about her throat loose from its fellows and flung it into the air.

  Automatically, both Dominick and Clarice looked upward. The necklace was a delicate thing of beads, blazing bright and sharp with sorcery.

  It should not have been able to pass over Dominick’s head as neatly as a lariat’s loop, but it did. He should have been able to tear it off again or break the slender strand. And he could not. It was as if his fingers passed through the beads as he clawed at them. The circlet of green stone beads slowly turned red, as if they drank his life’s blood.

  “Here is a binding only true love can break,” Shamal said with a triumphant smile. “And while you wear it, Dominick Moryet, you must do Shamal’s bidding. And so you shall seek my treasure, and do all I ask of you.”

  “Faithless enchantress!” Dominick snarled. He turned to face Fairfax, his expression of fury enough to make the smile fade from Fairfax’s face. “So this is the legendary hospitality of the Brethren, is it? To leash me as if I were a hound, and—”

  “Hush, my darling,” Shamal said, and to Clarice’s barely concealed horror, Dominick stopped speaking at once. “Now. Come. The hour is indeed late and the road uncertain. I shall see you safely back to your craft. And we shall go as friends, will we not?”

  She tucked her arm through his, smiling, smiling. Dominick’s eyes glittered with the effort he was making to refuse. Instead, he bowed slightly. “I thank you for your courtesy, Lady Shamal,” he said, sounding, to Clarice’s horror, as if the words were not forced from him by sorcery. “Indeed, I think you are the first friend I have found in this place.”

  * * *

  The walk down the mountain was nerve-racking, for if Shamal’s enchantment could exert such control over Dominick, all she had to do was ask him to tell her the truth, and he would have no choice but to do so. But Shamal’s attention was apparently focused on other matters entirely.

  “This is a lovely island,” she said to Dominick. “I hope you will be able to see something of it before you must sail. You do not have to leave immediately, I trust?”

  As if when we leave is up to us! Clarice snarled mentally.

  “We must take on supplies if we are to travel any distance,” Dominick answered. “I have made some inquiries at the chandlery. Mr. Thompson assures me Asesino will be seaworthy again within a sennight.”

  “Then you and I will have time to become great friends,” Shamal said. “And you will tell me of the great city which you call home. I am eager to hear of your Albion and its queen.”

  I just bet you are, Clarice growled to herself. But she had larger worries just now. Shamal could have forced the truth from Dominick at the meeting, if they wanted it. They don’t care whether we are pirates or pirate hunters—why should they? Their true and only purpose is to send us sailing off after this Heart of Light, whatever it is. If we die sailing after it, they win. And if we come back, Shamal has another weapon to control us, a weapon none of us can use.

  At least … At least there is a way out. Shamal said true love could break her spell. Perhaps …

  “And here is the heart of our pretty town,” Shamal said.

  Ahead was an open space lit by moonlight and a few hanging cressets. The cressets gave a dim and uncertain light, but it was enough to show Clarice what occupied the center of the square: a wooden platform, raised only a few steps above the ground. It held two posts about twelve feet tall, spaced their own height apart, with a crosspiece connecting them. Several sets of shackles hung from the crosspiece by their chains.

  And one set that was not empty.

  The corpse hung limply, bloated and sagging. Though its head was bowed, Clarice could see its face, slack-jawed and ghostly pale. The dead man’s long, black coat fluttered in the breeze.

  It was Reverend Dobbs. Or at least what was left of him. Suddenly the scent of decay was overpowering. He must have been killed soon after he reached shore.

  She should be sickened. Outraged. But all Clarice could think was What did he say before he died?

  Shamal kept walking, acting as if the gibbet and its occupant weren’t even there.

  “You can find your way from here, I think,” Shamal said, stopping in the archway of the road that led down to the harbor. She spoke as if they had not passed a dead man on a gibbet to reach it, a man whose death Shamal must have known about before she led them here.

  “We can, Lady Shamal,” Dominick answered with colorless politeness.

  “Then I will leave you.” She turned away. “For now.”

  * * *

  Clarice barely stifled an entirely unmasculine squeak of alarm as Dominick seized her arm and began to run. When they were halfway down the path, he staggered to a stop, clawing at his neck. After a moment, Clarice realized he was trying desperately to remove the necklace.

  “Clarence! Do something!” he gasped.

  She knocked his hands away and grabbed at the necklace. She could see it plainly in the moonlight, a dark line against the white of his shirt. But no matter how hard she tried to grasp it, the thing seemed to slide through her fingers as if it were smoke.

  It wasn’t an illusion. It had tangled itself in the lapels of his coat as he ran. But neither of them could touch it.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and Dominick sank to his knees in despair.

  She knelt beside him, putting her arm around him, fighting to be Clarence and not Clarice, because it was clear that Clarice didn’t love him enough to break the spell. If this isn’t love, she thought wildly, what is? How will I know it? Do I watch him die and know it’s because I … wasn’t good enough?

  Nothing in her life had prepared her for the desperation she felt. The fear that wasn’t for herself, any part of it, but for someone, Dominick, whom she couldn’t protect.

  Maybe this was love after all. But it clearly wasn’t enough.

  After long, tense moments of charged silence, Dominick pushed himself from under her arm and got to his feet.

  “Let’s get back to the ship,” he said, his voice rough.

  * * *

  Kayin, Dickon, and Dr. Chapman were waiting in the common room.

  “As you see, we return hale and whole, and none of us is likely to be slain anytime soon,” Dominick said. He’d poured himself a glass of wine as soon as he’d walked in and drank it down as if it were water.

  “Encouraging,” Dr. Chapman said. “And it took them four hours to say so?”

  Clarice pulled out her pocket watch. She hadn’t thought nearly so much time had passed, but it had.

  “They implied it, rather,” Dominick said. “They said a great many other things.”

  He told them most of it—the meeting with the Brotherhood, his story, their suspicion. He told them about Shamal and the Heart of Light, but he didn’t mention Shamal’s spell. He’d concealed the necklace before they’d come aboard by the simple expedient of opening his shirt. He could not touch it, but it answered to the pull of gravity as if it were an ordinary string of beads—except that nothing he could do would make it fall off.

  “They must want this thing badly,” Dr. Chapman said, when Dominick stopped. “Whatever it is.”

  Clarice had waited for Domin
ick to tell all of the truth and now realized he wasn’t going to. She opened her mouth to add the ensorcelling to the tale, then stopped. Perhaps he has a plan, she thought hopefully. Spirits and Powers know we need one.

  Or perhaps it was part of Shamal’s spell. Clarice hoped there was some way to find out.

  “I wouldn’t’ve thought of pirates as trusting souls,” Dickon said. “I suppose they’re going to hand you a set of charts and expect you to use them. But why would anyone in his right mind, well, either go or come back?”

  “D’ye think they’re selling you a bill of goods?” Kayin frowned, puzzling it out. “I’d say ambush, but it makes no sense.”

  Here, Clarice could comment without violating Dominick’s trust. “Apparently there’s a rule against killing us while we’re in port unless they have absolute proof we’re going to betray them.”

  “Ah, the nebulous and elastic Code of the Pirate Brotherhood,” Dr. Chapman said sourly. “I certainly wish I’d been there to hear that cited. Unfortunately, as soon as Dobbs surfaces and starts to tell the tale of the voyage, they’ll have their proof.”

  “He won’t,” Dominick said flatly. “He’s dead. We saw the body on the way back.”

  “What?” Dickon said. “Dead? When? How?”

  Dominick just shook his head. “Maybe since midday. The body was pretty high. ‘How’ could be anything. I didn’t get a good look.”

  “But we know he’d been to Dorado before this voyage,” Clarice said thoughtfully. “He as much as told us so. And he would’ve gone first to someone he thought could help. Or who could do us the most damage.”

  “Shamal,” Dominick said bitterly.

  “Do you think she had him killed?” Dickon asked blankly. “Why? And he must have told her…” He trailed off in confusion.

  “Any tale Dobbs told would match pretty closely with what I told the Council,” Dominick said. “Except for Clarence being passenger and not crew.”