The Towers of the Sunset - L. E. Modesitt [126]
“If you wish, Lydya and I can take the guitar back to the keep,” Klerris offers.
“Most appreciated—”
“Regent Creslin? Regent Creslin?”
Creslin smiles at the healer and at the Black Wizard, then turns toward the nervous ship captain, who bears a stack of parchment in his hands.
LXXXI
“YOU’VE MADE A good start with the physical conditioning. But . . .” Megaera raises her eyebrows, waiting for the guard captain’s next words “whether you can master a lifetime of training in a season or two is another question.”
Megaera shakes her head slowly. “There’s no choice.”
“Creslin’s not that hard, is he? My sister felt that he was a good man at heart.”
“It’s not that at all. Against him, I need no defenses. Besides, from what I’ve seen, I’m not sure that I’d ever prevail by force of arms.” She lifts the white-oak wand. “Where do we begin?”
The guard captain raises her eyebrows in response. “At the beginning, with the way you hold a blade.”
The redhead smiles faintly but allows her fingers to be repositioned.
“. . . and in the way you stand . . .”
The sorenesses she will receive cannot be as bad as the burning that has created the scars across her wrists. At least that is what she hopes.
“You may regret this, lady . . .”
She may indeed, but the time for regrets is past. Instead, she concentrates on how the older woman places the blade within her fingers, on how she should grip and wield the weapon.
LXXXII
THE MAN WEARS gray leather trousers and a faded green shirt with sleeves trimmed short above the elbows. For a long time he stands at the end of the pier studying the long, slow swells out beyond the breakwater, watching as a few higher waves surge white over the rocks. The pier is shadowed by the western hills, by the shadows just preceding sunset.
He turns westward, where the high, hazy clouds begin to glisten orange and pink to herald the sun’s disappearance into the sea beyond the western slopes. With a last look at the skies, at the towers of the sunset, he turns.
His scuffed boots carry him from the pier toward the half-built inn, where the walls and the roof are in place for the public room. The walls for the guests’ sleeping quarters lag behind, partly by design and partly because the troopers have diminished enthusiasm for the section of less immediacy to them. Strangely, some of the Westwind detachment have begun to help with the co-regents’ holding on the cliff, so much so that they have completed the exterior and interior walls, doing more in a few eight-days than Creslin had done in nearly a season.
Those working on the keep with Megaera have accomplished even more, and whatever Megaera is doing—beyond her determination to master a blade—she is developing a increasing bond with the guards. Creslin shakes his head.
Two fishermen are folding nets left out earlier to dry as he leaves the end of the pier. “Evenin’, ser,” the gray-haired one offers, barely looking up from the cording.
“Good evening,” Creslin returns with a smile. “Are you heading out early in the morning?”
“Always early . . . leastwise if you want to catch anything.”
The other fisherman, younger and darker, with a welt across one shoulder, nods his bearded face but says nothing as Creslin continues toward the building under construction.
“. . . new regent, hear tell, him and the redheaded woman.”
“. . . witches, both of them.”
“. . . better a witch who’s here to look after . . .”
“Maybe . . .”
Creslin hopes that he can fulfill the faith of the one and gain the confidence of the other. He pauses by the unfinished inn, glancing at the nearly completed split-stone roof tiling over one end. Then he makes his way between the piles of rough-cut stone. Inside the public room, the hearth is completed, and the stone flooring slabs have been set but not grouted. The windows have, as of yet, neither shutters nor glass, but neither are necessary in the heat of the summer to come.
Klerris feels that a cloudy glass can be made from the sand of the beaches that lie beyond the low hills to the