The Ships of Merior by Janny Wurts Read Free Book Online

trade galleys had safely put in for the winter, a silence developed. Halliron admitted he had bypassed the main road and shortcut across the old, ruined trail that wound its way west from the cape.
    ‘And no,’ he said quickly, before someone asked, ‘I saw no Paravian ghosts. Just old marker stones covered with lichen and acres of bracken bent with rain. The old routes are shunned for no reason under sky I can see.’
    ‘Sorcerers use them,’ the mule drover muttered. ‘And travellers see strange lights on them at night.’
    Since the subject left folk uneasy, the serving wench was sent off in a flounce of skirts to bring back a fresh round of tankards. Dakar, who held small aversion to the hauntings of ruins and unused roads, trained crafty attention toward the bar. In the interval while the girl made rounds with her tray, and the self-important innkeeper held station in the Masterbard’s circle, the beer keg stood unattended.
    Something Halliron said raised a round of knee-slapping laughter. The Mad Prophet stood, and sidled, and in a move that bespoke long practice, worked his bulk between the countertop and the broached barrel. His eyes turned innocently elsewhere, he trawled through the suds in the washtub, hooked up a tankard, and positioned it upright for filling. No one looked his way, even through the ticklish task of twisting the spigot behind his back.
    Dakar darted a glance toward the fireside. Aware to a hair’s-breadth of the interval needed for a large-sized tankard to brim over, and ready with a vacuous smile, he rolled furtive eyes to make sure of the passage to the kitchens.
    A shadow loomed at his flank: the bard’s hazel-eyed apprentice, arrived without sound, and all but standing on top of him. The Mad Prophet gave a violent start that slopped foam in cold runnels down his backside.
    ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ he assayed, caught up meanwhile in a disastrous grab to stem the copious gush of the beer. He fumbled the twist. Brew rose hissing over the tankard brim and pattered over the frayed heels of his socks.
    The apprentice minstrel gave a wicked grin, leaned across, and deftly turned off the spigot. ‘I’m called Medlir. And I suggest you’re mistaken. I’m very certain I know you.’
    ‘From some bad line in a ballad, maybe,’ Dakar said, plaintively concerned with rescuing a soap-slicked tankard from upset as he juggled it from his backside to his front. That small victory achieved, he looked the bard’s apprentice in the eye and began pouring beer down his gullet. When the tankard was three quarters empty, it belatedly dawned that the odd little man was going to keep quiet about his theft. Dakar stopped swallowing to catch his breath. His sodden hose squelched in puddled beer as he pressed forward, intent now on making his escape.
    Medlir side-stepped and blocked him. ‘Don’t be a fool.’ He tipped his head a surreptitious fraction to show the barmaid, shoving toward them in outraged determination.
    The Mad Prophet’s dismay darkened to a glare shared equally between the girl and Halliron’s obstructive apprentice. ‘Ah, damn!’ He prepared in martyred pain to scuttle his purloined brew into the washtub.
    ‘Not so fast.’ Medlir stopped the move with long, slender fingers and flipped a silver with clanging accuracy into the bowl on the bar wench’s tray. ‘Drink to my health,’ he invited Dakar. ‘The change should pay forthe spill on the floor, and keep your throat wet through this evening.’
    Startled speechless, the Mad Prophet let himself be ushered away and seated with a squish of wet clothing at a trestle off to one side. Oddly uneasy with the way his luck had turned, he sucked a long pull from his tankard, licked foam from his moustache, and grimaced at the lye taste of soap. ‘Surely a ballad?’ he ventured obliquely.
    Medlir sat very still, his lank hair now dry and fallen in fronds against his temples. ‘Actually not. I met your