Nasir returned before dawn smelling of harbour smoke, wine dregs, fish scales, and other people’s secrets.
Rydric had not slept much. Kings rarely slept well before sea journeys, though sailors insisted this was vanity, since the sea did not care whether a man came to it rested. He stood in the guesthouse courtyard while servants carried chests toward the quay and Morain counted each one aloud as if repetition could prevent theft.
Nasir approached without haste.
That was how Rydric knew the news was not immediate disaster.
“What?” Rydric asked.
“There is no proof of a trap,” Nasir said.
Baudren, standing near the gate, looked up. “A comforting beginning.”
Nasir ignored him. “But the port is pricing us.”
“Ports price everything.”
“Yes,” Nasir said. “Usually they begin with cargo.”
Rydric’s face did not change.
Nasir continued, low enough that only Rydric, Baudren, and Alianor, who had come into the courtyard behind her father, could hear.
“They ask where Your Grace sails. How many guards remain with you. Whether Prince Zeid is hostage, guest, or groom. Whether the princess is already bound to him. Whether the High Luminary’s court will receive the treaty. Whether the treaty chests are guarded by Esberian knights or Jaludian riders.”
Alianor’s hand tightened on the strap of her travel glove.
Nasir glanced at her once.
“They also ask whether it is true that Princess Alianor killed men of the Revealed Star for the Sultan’s peace.”
Baudren swore softly.
Alianor said nothing.
Rydric looked toward the harbour, where the masts stood black against a paling sky.
“Do they know who asks?” he said.
“No. Or they know and were paid not to know. In Darat al-Bahr the difference is expensive.”
“Names?”
“None worth trusting.”
“Then we sail.”
Baudren said, “If questions are already moving—”
“Then we move too.”
Nasir bowed slightly. He had not advised delay. He had only named the weather. Rydric had chosen to sail into it.
The quay had already begun to wake.
Mikhael Laskaron’s vessel, the Bright Saphronia, lay moored between a grain ship and a Rhomanian trader with painted eyes on its prow. The Bright Saphronia was broader than Alianor had expected and uglier than its name deserved. Its hull smelled of pitch and wet wood. Sailors moved over it with the ill temper of men asked to prepare a ship, receive royal passengers, placate horses, hide forbidden cargo, and respect treaty chests before breakfast.
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Horses hated the boarding plank.
A grey destrier belonging to one of Rydric’s knights planted all four hooves and refused to enter. Two sailors pulled. A groom pushed. The horse rolled one eye back and expressed an opinion of maritime travel that required no translation.
Rafiq watched the animal with sympathy.
“I agree with him,” he said.
Zeid stood beside the plank, pale in the dawn and composed enough to make Alianor distrust every inch of him. His travel coat was heavier than the weather required. Rafiq had won that argument. Zeid’s hand rested lightly against the rail rope. He looked at the ship as one might look at a legal clause designed by an enemy.
Alianor saw the pause before he stepped forward.
“Afraid of water?”
Zeid did not look at her. “I distrust anything that moves without legs.”
“Then you will enjoy the sea.”
“That sounded like a curse.”
“It was.”
He glanced at her then, and despite the grey light and the stink of bilge and horses, something almost brightened in his face.
The boarding plank lurched beneath a sailor’s boots.
The brightness vanished.
“After you,” he said.
“Coward.”
“Diplomat.”
“Those are not opposites.”
“I am learning so much in the west.”
She went first because refusing would have made his caution into the center of the moment, and because the plank was narrow, and because she did not want him to know she had understood anything. The boards shifted under her boots. The harbour water slapped the hull below. She reached the deck and turned.
Zeid crossed more slowly. He placed each step with precision, one hand on the rope, his coat moving in the morning wind. Halfway across, the horse behind him screamed and pulled back. The plank jumped.
Alianor’s hand moved before thought.
Zeid caught the rope and steadied himself.
He looked up.
Her hand stopped in the air between them.
For one foolish instant it seemed both of them might acknowledge what had almost happened.
Then a sailor behind Zeid shouted at the horse, the horse answered with violence, and dignity was saved by chaos.
Zeid reached the deck.
“You were saying?” he asked.
“That the sea has poor manners.”
“Ah. I agree.”
Rafiq came after him carrying the medicine chest himself, refusing to trust it to any sailor, groom, knight, clerk, saint, or serafim. Nasir followed with a bundle of papers under his arm. Khalaf came next, clutching a smaller treaty case with the expression of a man crossing into perdition by plank.
Rydric boarded last.
Not because ceremony required it, though ceremony was pleased to pretend so. He boarded last because he had spent the final hour arguing over payment, cargo order, witness placement, horse space, and whether two sealed treaty chests counted as baggage, diplomatic instruments, or holy burdens. Mikhael had suggested they counted as weight. Morain had nearly admired him for it.
At last the lines were cast off.
Sailcloth cracked above them. Oars pushed the ship clear of the quay. Men shouted from the harbour wall. Some blessed them. Some cursed them. Some offered to sell them fruit at a price that suggested the fruit had been grown in the Light’s garden and carried down by serafim.
Alianor stood near the rail.
Darat al-Bahr slid sideways: towers, warehouses, gulls, counting houses, cranes, masts, smoke, stone, men shrinking into colour and motion. The land did not release them at once. It held by sight long after the ropes were gone.
Nasir watched the harbour.
Too many men watched them leave.
On the quay, Sir Dietmar of Kaltenbrunn stood beneath the shade of a rope awning and kept his face turned toward the ship until it passed beyond easy recognition.
He had seen Rydric Aldren before.
Years earlier, after a western victory near Darat al-Bahr, Duke Luitpold of Osterven had ordered his banner raised beside the other great lords’ cloths. Rydric had ordered it taken down. No duke’s banner, he had said, stood level with a king’s. The Esberians had called it hierarchy. The Osterven men had called it dishonour and remembered it with the patience of mountain snow.
Dietmar remembered.
He also remembered what he had seen that morning.
The Esberian king travelling with fewer men than a king should.
Treaty chests under guard.
A prince of the One Covenant treated as both guest and hostage.
The Aldren princess riding near him.
Jaludian attendants boarding a Rhomanian-chartered vessel.
And the talk in the harbour, repeated often enough to grow legs: the princess had killed Illuminant men on the Sultan’s road for breaking the Sultan’s peace.
Dietmar did not know whether every word was true.
He knew truth enough.
By the time the Bright Saphronia had cleared the outer harbour, he had found a scribe attached to a Lagoran counting room. Good ink. Clean parchment. A courier who knew the inland roads through friendly houses and unfriendly tolls.
Dietmar dictated carefully.
The scribe sanded the ink.
Dietmar sealed the letter.