by Sarah Remy
“Come with me, lad,” the housecarl said. “Your lord has need of comfortable rooms, a nice fire, and supper waiting when he returns. We can do that, canna we? And you’ll show me how he likes his things hung and stowed.”
“Go, Liam,” Mal said, more gently. “I’ll return once my duty’s done.”
The wrinkle above Liam’s nose smoothed. Biaz nodded, steering the boy toward the tower staircase, towing the housemen and their burdens in his wake. The housecarl glanced back once. He nodded to Mal, respectful or encouraging, then turned away.
THE SUN WAS dropping again toward twilight when Mal stepped back into fresh air. Without the wind to shed the perfume, the scent of near-blooming roses was overpowering and poignant. He’d grown up alongside the rose hedges, been pricked and bled by many a thorn. He’d helped his mother harvest the petals for rose oil, and in the fall he’d collected rosehips for the apothecary’s healing teas as well as the poultice his father preferred for gout.
He stopped in to check on the horses, and was pleased and unsurprised to find the two geldings scrubbed down, put away, and happily picking through alfalfa. The bay nickered in welcome, while Liam’s chestnut rolled an unfriendly eye. The boy left in charge of the horses was dozing on a straw bale, snugged tight under a horse blanket, snoring. Mal ruffled the bay’s mane, then left the animals to their supper.
The bailey was little different than he remembered. The high walls stood straight and strong, braced by crawling roses. New oyster had been recently spread; the white shells were still more whole than crushed. Mal scooped a small valve from the ground, rubbing the shell between thumb and forefinger. He took the keepsake with him across the courtyard and around the tower, past the shuttered blacksmith and deserted market.
Selkirk’s westmost wall broke form and reached outward toward the sea, like the stem of a harvest gourd, following the shape of the coast. The sound of wave against rock grew loud as Mal approached the west gate, and the creak and groan of tall ships anchored beyond.
Selkirk’s temple clung like a mollusk against the southwest curve of the battlements, a narrow half spire of graystone bent drunkenly over the battlements, then rising yet again. The temple was cleared of vegetation, gray against green. Square, barred windows kept watch over bailey and coast.
A young priest sat on the threshold, robes pulled around bony knees. His yellow eyes widened at Mal’s approach. He hopped to his feet, bowing at the waist.
“Lord Vocent,” he said. “You’ve come. Her ladyship’s inside, my lord. In the highest chapel. You’ll be well received, my lord. You’ve been missed.”
Mal nodded, sketched the expected sigil from breastbone to groin and shoulder to shoulder, then entered the temple. He had to stand for a heartbeat in the dim, smoky chill, waiting for his eyes to adjust to candlelight. Striped squares of twilight fell through the windows, illuminating the curving stairway that spiraled from floor to battlements. Sweet grass smoldered in a wide brazier bolted to the center of the graystone floor.
Mal conjured mage-light. He followed the globe up the spiral stairway, purposefully scuffing his sandals against stone, knowing the light and the noise would provide his mother the warning she needed.
She stood waiting for him at the top of the spiral, framed in a single wide window. Beyond and below, Selkirk’s pier crawled with seamen tending sleeping ships, stowing barrels and bundles before true dark.
“You’re too late,” Lady Selkirk said. “He’s gone.”
Mal gritted his teeth. The climb from bailey to high temple had never winded him as a child, but his lungs were not what they had been before the agraine, and he hated that he was near to panting. He hid his labored breathing behind a tight smile.
“If your priests couldn’t save him, Mother, I’d be of little use. I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t fooled by his sympathy, and she was quick enough to note the rise and fall of his chest, clever enough not to remark upon it, and unkind enough to let pity show on her face.
“He didn’t mean to be saved,” she said. “He’d determined to die. But he wanted to see you before he passed; see the boy as a man. Recognize his lad in the king’s most beloved.”
The last was said with a gentle sneer. If Mal was short and slight, Lady Selkirk was delicate as a lass; the crown of her head barely topped Mal’s shoulder. She wore the seaman’s uniform of trousers and tunic, and the Rose badge on her arm. A tightly knotted linen kerchief protected her dark curls from the wind; freckles and age spots on her hands and face spoke more of hard work than age.
“Mother,” Mal said, a caution. He knew very well what his family thought of his service to the flatland king; since Siobahn’s death, his mother’s dutiful letters were rife with pointed insinuation and disapproval. Siobahn had complained from the very beginning that Mal had given his heart to his king at the expense of his marriage bed. She’d been jealous of Renault’s claim, driven to distraction by Mal’s divided loyalties, and she’d filled her letters to Mal’s parents with line after line of vitriol.
Still, it was much easier to feed letters to the fire, poison forgotten, than to face the same disapproval in person. He had to remind himself he was a man well grown, and not the same youth his mother had once put over her knee for nicking Cook’s mince tart.
“Come and light the lantern, Malachi,” Lady Selkirk ordered, when his silence lingered. “Make yourself useful.”
She indicated the barrel-sized glass lantern hung in front of the window. A web of thick chain held the suspended lantern immobile against wind and storm. The glass was thick as Mal’s thumb, charmed generations earlier by a more knowledgeable magus, impervious to arrow, hammer, and blade.
There were six such lanterns set in temples along Renault’s coastal holding. They’d been commissioned by the Virgin King’s sea-loving sire, to guard his navy against rocky shore. The magic and materials used to engender the glass marvels were long forgotten.
Lady Selkirk expected Mal to take the torch from its bracket on the wall, use the flame to light the oil already prepared by way of a hatch. Instead he tightened his smile, snapped thumb against ring finger, yellow gem sparking, and called fire to the oil. Flames leapt high behind the glass shield, loud and hungry, tinged green.
The green was a failing, evidence of his rattled emotion, but his mother didn’t have to know that small secret.
“Drama,” Lady Selkirk said, sounding now more weary than angry. “Even as a lad, you never tolerated normalcy. I’d counted on your wife to soften those edges.”
“Without edges I’d be a useless weapon, Mother.” Mal folded his hands at his back, watched the planes and shadows shift across his mam’s thin face. “You summoned me. I’m here. I expected to find Father laid out as proper.” He made a show of looking around the small space, cocking his brows at the stone bier, empty and cold between lantern and window. “You’re vacillating, Mother.”
“No.” She stiffened. For the first time Mal glimpsed real grief in the depths of her green eyes. His eyes, the one piece of herself she’d allowed him.
“He breathed his last only hours ago,” she continued. “There’s been no time. He’s had the blessing, of course. Master Josef said the prayers. And then we had word of your approach.”
“Ah,” Mal realized. “You’ve left the job to me.”
“It’s the least you can do,” she replied coldly. “See it’s done correctly, Malachi. I’ll not have his shade lingering for regret.”
“Alive, my father spared no time for regret,” Mal said. “It’s unlikely that will change with his death.”
“God willing,” Lady Selkirk said, resigned. Then she turned her back on Mal, spine stiff as she descended the spiral. Mal sent his mage globe after, to light her way, and received no thanks in return.
He walked around lantern and bier to the window, placed his hands on the wide graystone sill, and looke
d out on the sea. Torches burned along the waterline, thrust amongst the rocks and into the sand, set carefully away from the pier itself. Lads and lasses stood watch, buckets of seawater at the ready in case wind sent a spark skyward.
A single unguarded ember could lay waste to tall ship and trade goods alike.
Mal counted three ships moored in the deep water. It was too dark to make out either their colors or captain’s flag.
He realized he’d have to walk the pier in the morning, shake hands with captain and crew, ask the right questions, show an interest. Because it was expected. They’d be kind to him, because he was newly made Selkirk, the last of the line. But they’d be wary, because he’d long ago taken on a different role: the right hand of the king.
Salt air and smoke stung Mal’s eyes. He smudged moisture from his lashes with the back of his hand, then went in search of Liam.
“WHAT’S HE SAYING, my lord?”
Mal dipped a corner of sea sponge in the bowl of rose oil Liam held cupped in his hands. Mal squeezed the sponge until jagged pores absorbed the oil, brushed overflow back into the bowl, then used the sponge to paint rose-perfume sigils on his father’s forearm.
“Nay, nothing,” he replied absently. “His shade has gone on. There’s no evidence of it here. The temple’s empty of ghosts. The priests prefer it that way.”
“Oh.”
Mal looked away from his work, studied the boy.
“What is it, lad? Are you seeing something I’m not?” He’d become more comfortable with Siobahn’s loss, but he still caught himself second-guessing his intuition, and that was more worrisome than he liked to admit.
He’d spent his entire term as vocent working with Siobahn at his side, relying on her strength more even than his own. He sometimes still felt unmoored without his bride, a callow youth feeling his way forward into uncharted territory.
You’re no less a vocent without her, Avani had written over the winter, when he’d used ink and parchment to confess his doubts. The bhut was but a manifestation, a channeling of all that makes you magus.
Avani, who still held faith that her foreign Goddess would right all wrongs, and understood too little of what it meant to be vocent.
“No, my lord.” Liam answered, startling Mal from recollection. “But you looked fretful. I thought perhaps his spirit was moaning about, all sour and lost as they sometimes are.”
Mal’s small smile was far more real than the tight grimace he’d shown his mam.
“He was my da, Liam,” he said, looking down on his father’s blunt, slack face. “He used to sit me on his lap after supper, and tell me tales of rogue seamen and lost treasure and the battles he’d fought on the deep sea.”
Liam peeked around Mal’s shoulder, thoughtful.
“And that’s what kilt him, my lord? That tiny prick on his thumb?”
“Aye.” Mal squeezed the sponge again, painted Selkirk’s brow. “See, there, how the flesh is puffed around the entrance, how the veins are black up and along the arm, all the way past his elbow?”
“Of course, my lord.” Liam bent closer to the punctured thumb, nearly sloshing rose oil as he did so. Mal captured the bowl, set it on the bier alongside his sponge, and picked up his father’s hand.
He traced the line of vein beneath skin, his fingers pale against his father’s sun-darkened skin.
“The infection started in the wound,” he explained. “And poisoned the blood. The poison spread along the veins, toward the heart. Sepsis, the priests call it.” He set the hand gently back in place. “Generally treatable, if caught well in time. Even after the infection has spread, amputation of the thumb or hand might have saved his life.”
Liam studied the dead man on the bier. Mal wondered what the boy saw. An old sea lord, gnarled and past his prime, or a man still strong of bone and sinew, marked by loss and battle, but quick of mind and heart? The body was naked but for loin wrappings, long limbs peppered with the small scars one received on the water. Larger scars, remnants of battle, marked his chest and right side; war hadn’t felled the Selkirk, nor had grief.
It had taken something as simple and mundane as a fishhook to put the man in his shroud.
“Did it hurt, my lord?” Liam wondered, ghoulish in youth. “Or was it like the Red Worm, and quick?”
“It would have hurt, at the last,” Mal replied. “But once his organs failed, he wouldn’t have lingered long.”
“He was a canny man, was he, the Selkirk?”
“Very.” Mal touched his father’s brow again, this time in benediction. His father had known enough to send his youngest son away to the king, even if it meant leaving Selkirk without true heir.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” Liam said. “Even if he spoke unkindly of you, still you loved him. So, I’m sorry for your loss.” He picked up his bowl, silently extended the sponge.
“Thank you.” Mal didn’t ask how the boy knew the keep’s history; tongues wagged, especially during mourning.
WHEN THE SELKIRK was properly laid out and anointed, eyes pressed closed, weighted down with the true gold coins kept since his birth for exactly that purpose, Mal sent Liam to bed. The boy went without fuss, yawning.
Mal returned to the window, to the scrape of the wind and the crash of the waves, and the perfume of roses blooming in the dark. There was a moon in the sky, near full, lighting the deep off and on as high clouds scuttered across the yellow face. The heat off the lantern warmed the nape of Mal’s neck.
“He was proud of you, my lord.”
Biaz was a wise man. He’d scuffed the tips of his own sandals against the stairs as he climbed, giving Mal fair warning.
“Was he?” Mal studied the moon. “He never wrote, you know. Not once after I’d fostered to Doyle, or after, when I was made vocent. Mother penned a missive every season, of course, but the Selkirk cut me from his heart.”
The housecarl moved to stand at the window, shoulder against Mal’s, swollen brown fingers gripping the sill. He looked down at the torches on the beach, and Mal felt his pride in the swell of his rib cage.
“After your brother Rowan was lost,” Biaz said, “your father had interest only in the business. He threw himself into the trade with a passion I hadn’t seen since the war. And he did well by it; we’ve seven ships now, my lord, and three of them the fastest brigs in service.”
“Seven,” Mal echoed, surprised. “Where’d he find the coin?”
“It’s said a Serrano can charm the balls off a bull,” Biaz said. “And that was certainly true of your father. He negotiated exclusive trade rights with Gheislain, and again with the tribesmen off the Black Coast. He knew how to grease a port master’s palm, did your father, and how to pay off the pirate kings, and he turned near every coin he earned back into the business, where he could.”
“That can’t have made him popular in Low Port.”
The housecarl shrugged. “Sea lords are a jealous sort, you’ve the right of it. But they’re also fiercely loyal, and the Selkirk, he knew well how to earn their loyalty and keep it.”
“With more coin?” Mal hazarded, amused.
“Some of that,” Biaz admitted. “But also the charm. He knew how to look a person in the eye and make him think he was the only man in the world mattered. Rowan was the same, he was.”
“I remember.”
“You, though, my lord,” Biaz took a long breath. “You’re far more like her ladyship. You run deep, the both of you.”
Mal considered the moon. “Is that meant to be a compliment?”
“Aye, because a man who runs deep will always do right.” Biaz waited.
“Not always,” Mal said. “But this time. You needn’t worry, Shannon. I don’t intend to accept the title.”
The housecarle exhaled, relieved. “I didn’t think you would, my lord.”
“Selkirk isn’t home, has
n’t been for most of my life. My brother’s too deeply a part of its walls.”
Biaz’s mouth tightened. He glanced over his shoulder with much the same furtive peek Liam had used earlier. “Rowan, my lord? The maids claim he walks the lower halls, but I’ve never—”
“Metaphorically,” Mal corrected. “Rowan’s not here. The ghost in the lower hall is Cook’s lost lad. But don’t tell her; it will break her heart. Let them think it’s Rowan.” He left the window at last, considered his father’s shell. “I only meant my brother went down in my place, when he was supposed to be sitting the sea lord’s chair.”
“Because your father insisted on an heir at the helm.” Biaz glanced at the body on the bier, crossed himself quietly.
“And I was useless as a palsied infant on the water. It should have been me. The keep hasn’t forgotten.” Mal grimaced. “The fire in the temple didn’t much help, after.”
Biaz chuckled, wry. “Why do you think Master Josef is holed away in his cell? It’s true you’re not his favorite.” His glance brushed Mal’s yellow ring, jerked away again. “So, the title?”
“Will go next to my mother,” Mal replied. “I’ve the king’s blessing. I imagine she’ll be pleased.”
Biaz’s dark brows rose.
“She’s just lost her husband, my lord. I misdoubt she’ll find much pleasure in it at all.”
Chastened, Mal nodded.
SELKIRK’S SEAT WAS more high-backed bench than chair, notable only for the thick, blue cushion on the plank, a concession to the sea lord’s gout. Mal lowered himself onto the cushion, felt the press of wood beneath the goose down, and thought the padding had done his father little good.
The hall was empty but for a fair-haired lad tending the hearth. More benches were stacked against the graystone walls, awaiting dawn and breakfast. The boards were scrubbed clean; two long-limbed dogs chewed bones beneath the table, quietly content.
Mal rested his head against the seat’s high back. He closed his eyes, listening to the snap and pop of embers in the chimney. He dozed in his father’s chair, dreamless, oddly content as the hounds at their supper.
