‘It’s my honour, my lady.’ Sirstin favoured Lysha with a fatherly grin. ‘My lady Esnina.’
Neeny giggled as the smith bowed to her, still pink-cheeked with elation at being so honoured. Zurenne spared her younger daughter a smile, privately surprised that boredom or weariness hadn’t yet overcome the little girl’s earlier promises to behave.
‘Our thanks for your son’s service.’ Sirstin’s lad Linset was the most youthful of the barony’s guards currently accompanying Corrain to the Duryea parliament.
Zurenne spoke loudly enough for her words to reach those in the hall below the dais. Let them remember that their tithe would be spent feeding and equipping the troopers who defended Halferan’s roads and herds from any villains still seeking easy pickings after the barony’s recent troubles.
‘Tye Fitrel.’ The old man climbed stiffly up onto the dais, a surprisingly fat purse in his weathered hand, and scars of swordplay visible across his knuckles.
‘Fair festival.’ Zurenne greeted the veteran guardsman warmly.
‘Master Fitrel, you are most welcome to our feast.’ Lysha’s eyes shone with equal gratitude for the old man’s stalwart service.
Neeny bounced forward in her chair. ‘Sergeant!’
‘Not any more, moppet, I’m retired. Now, here’s something for your festival.’ Fitrel opened the purse to take out a little toy rabbit, fashioned from the fur of the real coneys which he raised in pens around his house.
Corrain had helped the old warrior rebuild his holding on the edge of the village across the brook. Comparing the manor’s newly drawn tithe map with one surviving from the old archive Zurenne had noticed shifting boundaries had favoured the old man significantly.
She didn’t begrudge him a finger-width of the ground. Fitrel hadn’t only rallied old men and beardless boys to the manor’s defence this past year. A generation ago, barely older than Lysha was now, Corrain had been bereft of both parents. Fitrel had taken him under his roof. Zurenne had come to realise just how much Halferan owed to the loyalty which the old man had instilled in the guardsman.
As Neeny squealed with delight over her new toy, stroking the little rabbit’s stitched face, Fitrel chuckled with affection.
‘Four silver make a gold star and one silver mark over.’ Master Rauffe recorded the tally of coin in the correct columns.
Zurenne saw that this second strong box was nearly full, soon to join the first which Kusint had already stowed behind the iron gate barring the stair to the cellars beneath the muniment room.
‘Thank you, Sergeant Fitrel.’ The red-headed captain echoed Ilysh.
‘I plan on staying retired.’ The old man looked at Kusint with a glint in his eye. ‘Don’t give me cause to come back to the barrack hall to show you how to keep your troopers properly harnessed.’
‘You can sleep easy,’ Kusint assured him with a grin.
‘Once I’ve got a meal and some ale in my belly.’ Fitrel nodded to them all and went on his way
Zurenne saw that someone had sent word to Doratine that the old sergeant was the last waiting to pay his tithe. Trestles had already been set up, supporting long tabletops. Now kitchen lackeys and maidservants appeared at the far end of the hall carrying platters and bowls. The demesne folk cheered, breaking off their conversations around the broad fireplaces newly built on either side of the hall to replace the old-fashioned central hearth.
Zurenne noted few roast birds or haunches of mutton and pork amid the festival bounty. With Halferan’s herds and flocks so sorely reduced, the young bullocks and rams usually supplying tender, flavoursome meat would see an unexpected spring, to be fattened up to a greater weight or to be sold on to neighbouring baronies.
This feast offered a preponderance of stews; the best way to cook the tough cuts from older, barren heifers and ewes earmarked for autumn slaughter, not worth the fodder to see them through winter. Fortunately Doratine knew how to render such meat palatable with spices and long simmering. Zurenne also saw plenty of pies doubtless filled with bottled fruit salvaged from the back shelves of storerooms across the barony, mixed with the last shreds of meat stripped from the carcasses.
The dishes were interspersed with decorative evergreen garlands, the better to fill the tables. Zurenne also saw bowls of nuts and rounds of cheeses and wrinkled apples from the hay barn lofts; humble fare normally never seen at a festival.
She smiled as Halferan’s assembled tenantry and yeomen greeted their feast with loud cheers. They didn’t care that these tables weren’t laden with extravagant delicacies. Halferan barony was renewed and a new year was opening and that was reason enough for celebration.
Precious little would be left for Halferan’s hounds, Zurenne reflected, beyond bones to crack for their marrow. Still, better that the manor’s dogs went hungry instead of the household. Besides, well-fed hounds would be more inclined to doze in their kennels instead of staying alert for sneak thieves hoping to take advantage of the manor’s festival generosity.
She turned to Kusint as Master Rauffe totted up his ledger’s columns. ‘Have any beggars knocked at the gatehouse today?
The truly indigent could still expect a share of this feast, insofar as Halferan could afford to honour Ostrin, god of hospitality.
‘Just one sturdy rogue looking for a handout instead of doing a day’s work to fill his belly.’ Kusint closed the coin coffer and locked it. ‘He got a stale crust and a cup of water and then young Linset escorted him back to the high road.’
He broke off as a louder cheer than any yet greeted the appearance of three kitchen maids carrying foaming jugs of ale in each hand.
Zurenne heard Corrain’s name saluted with several upraised tankards. She smiled. The demesne folk should certainly be grateful. Their new baron had ridden out time and again with his newly-drilled troopers before the turn of For-Winter left the roads hock-deep in mud. They had recovered most of Halferan’s scattered herds and taken back the grain illicitly harvested by Baron Karpis’s henchmen. Now none of Halferan’s villages would go without bread for lack of wheat this winter and there was enough barley to keep the manor’s brew house and most taverns’ tuns from idleness.
‘My lady?’ Zurenne’s personal maid arrived at her side, offering a pewter goblet on a linen-covered silver tray.
‘Thank you.’ Zurenne took a sip of the darkly glinting liquid rimmed with creamy foam. She summoned up a smile to hide her desire for wine instead. This time next year, perhaps, as long as Halferan’s fortunes were sufficiently restored for such self-indulgence. ‘Raselle, take Esnina to choose something to eat, before she gets too tired.’
So far the little girl hadn’t provoked Ilysh’s irritation or inconvenienced Master Rauffe but it could only be a matter of time. The last thing Zurenne wanted was Neeny’s hopping rabbit spilling ink over the steward’s ledger.
‘Yes, my lady.’
Zurenne watched Neeny agree to Raselle’s suggestion with telling alacrity. The little girl headed straight for the table where Doratine’s maids were now setting out dishes of honey cakes.
‘Lady Ilysh? Shall we join the feast?’ Zurenne turned to her daughter but before Lysha could push her chair back, a woman stumped heavily up the dais steps and approached the table.
‘Saedrin and all the gods bless you, my lady.’ Mistress Rotharle reached across the table to lay her age-spotted hand on Ilysh’s slender one.
‘Fair festival to you and yours,’ the girl replied with a smile.
‘And many more to come, Poldrion willing.’ Mistress Rotharle looked over Ilysh’s head to the narrow doorway at the back of the dais. Giving the young girl’s hand a final pat, she continued on her way to the shrine.
Despite the heat from the fires down in the hall and the logs smouldering in the smaller hearth up here on the dais, Zurenne shivered in the cold draft as the old woman opened the door. This festival-night would see a steady procession to the shrine as those who had survived the corsairs remembered loved ones sent to Saedrin’s judgement in brutal and untimely fashion.
‘Mama?’ Lysha twisted around in her seat as Mistress Rotharle called out, startled, within the shadowed shrine.
Zurenne instantly recognised the other voice. Just as swiftly, she was ashamed to realise she hadn’t noted his absence. She walked hurried into the shrine to see Hosh disappearing through the outer door.
Mistress Rotharle looked at Zurenne, distressed. ‘I just want a moment to remember my Tull but the poor boy can stay—’
‘I’ll tell him.’ As Zurenne opened the outer door, she looked this way and that. The cobbled expanse between the hall and the range of kitchen buildings was deserted. Had Hosh returned to the guards’ barrack hall opposite? She looked towards the gatehouse. Had he already passed beneath that arch and through the porter’s door in the barred and iron-bound oak, fleeing to his widowed mother’s house across the brook in the village?
‘My lady?’ Hosh was standing behind the shrine’s door.
‘Oh!’ Startled, Zurenne took a hasty step back. ‘No, forgive me.’
She reached out to lay a gentle hand on Hosh’s sleeve when the boy would have retreated. Stepping out into the night, she closed the shrine door behind her. ‘Please sit with me for a moment.’
‘As you wish, my lady.’ Reluctant but obedient, Hosh sat down on the bench by the shrine wall.
The rough-hewn seat had been set up while the manor was being rebuilt. So many folk had come to the shrine to beseech divine favour to speed their labours or to seek solace for their grief over slain kin and valued friends. The men nailed silver and copper pennies to the outer face of the door while the women pinned twists of cloth or scraps of lace and ribbon on the inside; tokens of faithfulness to each deity they prayed to.
‘Mistress Rotharle won’t be long,’ Zurenne assured the boy. ‘You can return to your prayers.
‘I can wait.’ He gazed up at the sky.
Zurenne looked up to see what fascinated him so.
‘They call it the Opal, in the Archipelago,’ he said, unprompted, pointing at the Greater Moon. ‘The Lesser Moon’s the Pearl, according their heavenly compass.’
‘Oh.’ Zurenne knew nothing of Aldabreshin stargazing.
‘I only learned to interpret the skies to keep watch for ill omens.’ Hosh turned to look anxiously at her. ‘Then I could warn the other slaves and maybe they wouldn’t give me a kicking so they could steal my food.’
‘That sounds very wise.’ As Zurenne smiled reassurance, she tried desperately to hide her pity.
Close to, Hosh’s injuries were cruelly visible, even in the moonlight. The deep dent in his cheekbone drew his eyelids askew while his sunken lips betrayed the loss of so many teeth on that side of his mouth. The cold night air prompted a trickle of moisture from his sagging eye and a glistening smear beneath his grotesquely broken nose.
Corrain had told her how a corsair’s sword pommel had smashed the boy’s face, when Minelas had drawn them into a deadly ambush. The wizard’s promises had all been lies; that his magic would bolster Halferan’s attack as her husband and Halferan’s best guardsmen fell upon the unsuspecting corsairs laired in the coastal marshes. Instead the waiting raiders had killed or enslaved them while Minelas had returned to make prisoners of Zurenne and her children in order to plunder Lysha and Neeny’s inheritance.
She and Corrain had been in the muniment room in the rebuilt tower’s ground floor. Zurenne had brought the letters and ledgers amassed during her sojourn at the Taw Ricks’ hunting lodge to be added to the scant manor records salvaged by Master Rauffe before they had fled the corsairs’ final assault.
Corrain had been writing the new muster roll of Halferan’s guardsmen. He broke off to take Zurenne entirely unawares with a sudden outburst. It was his fault and his alone that the corsairs had captured so many Halferan men. Hosh would have fought to the death, Corrain had insisted. He was the one who had ordered the boy and the rest to throw down their swords in hopes of living to fight another day. He had brought that disgrace on Halferan.
Falling silent as abruptly as he had spoken, Corrain had left his list unfinished, hurrying from the tower to call for a horse. Zurenne hadn’t seen him for the next two days. After that, Corrain had said nothing more of his time enslaved in the islands and Zurenne had no intention of asking him.
‘Forgive me, my lady.’ Hosh flinched and turned away.
Stricken, Zurenne realised he thought that she’d been staring at his injuries, rather than overtaken by recollection. But she couldn’t think how she might explain. She had to do something though or the boy would flee to hide himself away with his misery.
‘Tell me what you make of this sky, in the Aldabreshin fashion.’
‘My lady?’ Hosh was startled into looking back at her.
‘Is there anything in these heavens to encourage the southern savages to come north again?’ Zurenne looked up at the moon, realising why that question had come to mind.
Even though Corrain and Jilseth had assured her that all the corsairs were dead, she was still mortally afraid of seeing warning beacons lit on the seaward horizon.
‘The Aldabreshi don’t sail north in the winter, my lady.’ Hosh fell silent for a long moment then said slowly, ‘But looking to the future, the Amethyst is below the horizon, along with the stars of the Sea Serpent. That jewel warns against arrogance and anger while the Sea Serpent warns of unseen forces and foes. Both are in the arc of the heavenly compass where the islanders look for omens of home and family. You’ve shown yourself a worthy mother, my lady, and a steadfast defender of your daughters. Any Aldabreshin would consider those stars a warning against attacking you again.’