With his back to her, she could see that one of his shoulders was significantly higher than the other, and his spine was slightly twisted. It looked very painful.
Perhaps that accounted for his sourness.
“The beacon and your scratch do not match up, my lady,” he said softly. “Is there any significance to the position where it does match up?”
“Of course, the beacon is meant to show sailors where the coast is, when there are storms and fog,” she said aloud. “During times like those, ships hug the coastline, so they navigate by the beacons in order to avoid being lost at sea. But also a beacon has to be placed precisely, because at the spot where it has been built, there are generally shoals or rocks where ships can run aground.”
He nodded. “So if, say, something were to destroy this beacon, the new one would have to be built on exactly the same spot?”
“Oh, more than that. Even if this one were destroyed, some sort of temporary beacon would have to be put there immediately,” she replied. “It’s just too vital.”
She watched his lips compress and his eyes narrow, only at that moment realizing that they were a dark grey that seemed to darken even as she watched. He knew something that she didn’t.
“I wish, my lady, that we could discover just where along your coastline this scratch does line up,” he whispered.
“There is no way to tell, and I wouldn’t care to go outside in a storm to try to find out,” she whispered back. Then she said, in a normal tone, “If it were not for the beacons, of course, it would not be possible for trade ships to sail in the winter, nor for the coastal patrols to keep enemies from our shores. Fishermen have no need of them, of course, for when the weather is foul they wisely do not put out to sea.”
“Indeed. Well, this has been very enlightening, my lady, and I thank you for your hospitality.” He stood up abruptly, forcing her to step back with some haste. He sketched a bow. “There is a great deal more about this sea-keep and its daughter than meets the eye.”
He held the door open for her courteously, and she stepped through. They parted at the intersection of the two corridors, and she returned to her room, feeling irritated and uneasy. She had shared her information with him, but he had given her nothing.
Her irritation only increased when she returned to the Great Hall, intending, if nothing else, to watch the beachcombers and her father’s overseer below from the vantage point of the great window behind the High Table on the dais, thinking perhaps she might be able also to guess where the displaced beacon had been, though she could not for a moment imagine how the light had been displaced. As far as she could tell, though she was far from certain about this, it had been “moved” several hundred yards down the coastline and a bit farther out to sea. Which, if she was correct, would mean that any boat using it as a guide would think the promontory and rocks that the beacon stood over were there, and that once past, it would be safe to cut in closer to shore.
Which would, of course, depending on the accuracy of the beacon, put a ship directly on the rocks.
Was it just greed that had driven her father to storm-assisted piracy? That didn’t make a great deal of sense. In summer, when storms never lasted more than a day, yes. But winter storms lasted several days, and it wouldn’t do her father a great deal of good if the ship he wanted was wrecked on the first or second day of a storm. You couldn’t go out on the rocks for salvage in the teeth of a winter gale, and anything washed up after a wreck would soon be taken away by the sea and tides again. If he was colluding with the Khaleem to bring in invaders—
Well, that made no sense, either. You would want the beacon where it actually was if you were bringing in strangers to this coast, and anyway, where would they land? The docks for the keep were small, nowhere near big enough for an invasion force. And anyway, the Khaleemate ran to pirates, not soldiers. It was one thing to turn them loose on the high seas and tax them on their booty when they returned to port. It was quite another to expect them to come in to land and act like soldiers.
So why shift the beacon?
And who had done it? The only thing she could think of was that it had been done by magic, and aside from Massid and Kedric, there were no obvious strangers here.
And surely Massid could not be a magician. As rare as magicians were, surely the Khaleem would not allow a son who was also a magician so far away from home.
She brooded down on the waves crashing over the rocks in torrents of white foam, and felt a chill steal over her. That left Kedric.
Kedric, who she, not that long ago, had told almost everything. So now, if he was her father’s man, her father knew everything—from her own reluctance to be handed off in marriage to Massid, to the fact that she knew about the beacon. After all, he hadn’t said he was the King’s man, she had merely read it into what he had said.
Blessed God, I have been a fool! She stared sightlessly down into the water, feeling her heart slowly going numb, and her mind with it. She had showed him—she had told him—
What? asked an impatient and surprisingly rational voice inside her. You told him that you would do your duty and marry Massid if you thought it would protect your people, but that you didn’t think it would do any such thing. You made it clear you were unhappy about the idea, and who wouldn’t be? You told him a few choice things about the Countess, but nothing that’s not common knowledge, and you didn’t reveal that you are a Grey Lady. You pointed out what your duty was to your people, and how much that duty could cost you. You showed him the scratch on the glass and told him why you’d made it, but so far as he knows, you have no way of telling anyone else.
All that was true, certainly, but—
But if he’s your father’s man, now he has all the arguments your father needs—or so he thinks—to persuade you to marry Massid when he proposes it. There’s no harm in that. He knows you are more intelligent than you appear, but there’s no harm in that, either. He doesn’t know about the birds, or your weapons, or any of your other skills. The only thing you showed him is that you are an intelligent young woman who suspects her father is up to no good, but who certainly can’t tell anyone and can’t do anything about the knowledge.
She recognized that little voice in her mind; it was the one that coolly analyzed and put fears to rest, no matter how panicked the rest of her mind was. It was seldom wrong, and that only in degree. She sometimes wondered if it was the voice of some guardian angel. Sometimes the voice sounded exactly like the Countess, though, and while she admired the Countess greatly, she would have been the first to say that the Countess Vrenable was no angel.
She unclenched her fists and closed her eyes a moment to clear her mind. If Kedric was the King’s man, he had information he might be able to use. If he was her father’s man, he had nothing he could use to harm her—except that he—and her father—would now know that she was intelligent enough and quick enough to suspect something was wrong.
So—not “no” harm done. Though she was not an immediate danger to any plans they had in train, she could reveal them, now or later. So she had done herself harm enough that her father might move a little faster to put her where she could do him no harm…which was probably with Massid.
Time to send another bird. And more than time to resume her training. When the time came, she might need every bit of strength she had.
But two weeks, and another storm, passed with nothing changing in the keep or out of it, so far as appearances went. Every day Moira tended to the affairs of the keep as the Keep Lady should. Every evening she spent dining in the Great Hall with her father and Massid. Afternoons were spent at her embroidery; she quickly finished the half-finished placket, had Anatha stitch it to one of her gowns, and started another. But there was one change that no one was aware of.