Chapter 257: Conditions [2]

"Are you?" Ulrich asked with a very suspicious stare.

Perhaps she was a sea mercenary, yes, but by now Ulrich knew she was hiding something else, and certainly not a small matter.

Meera just raised an amused brow.

"I am whatever the room requires." Her eyes gleamed. "Now. That is the ninth. There is a tenth, and it is not a condition. It is a fear."

"Say it."

"The Crown."

Meera let the word sit.

"You asked me once whether the Crown knew what you were building, and you did not answer when I asked it back. I will tell you what the Sea Lords know. They know that the royal galleons have doubled on this coast since the summer. They know that three months ago a press gang out of Port Callan took forty men off the Grayhaven docks in a single night and the magistrate called it lawful. They know that the Crown has hanged nobles before for raising swords the King did not sanction, and that the Crown does not much care whether those swords were on land or on water."

She leaned forward.

"They are not afraid of you, Ulrich. They are afraid of what happens to them the morning the Crown decides that the Count Rubenhart and his ten pirate captains have become inconvenient. Because on that morning, you will be a Count with a very good lawyer, and they will be ten men at the end of ten ropes."

Ulrich said nothing for a moment.

"The Crown is my concern," he said at last.

He could deal with Kaliantha; he trusted himself on that part.

"They will want more than that."

"They will have more than that." He met her eyes. "Tell them that the Count Rubenhart does not intend to hang beside them, and that he has given the matter rather more thought than they have."

Meera looked at him.

Then, slowly, she nodded.

"That, I can carry."

"Good."

"Is that all your answers?"

"No."

Ulrich leaned forward in the armchair.

"I will meet them next month. Not sooner. I will answer what they ask. There will be no oath that night."

"And after."

"After, if they are still there, this. I have a thousand men in this county who wear my colors and have never seen salt water. Estate guards, road wardens, the garrisons of the coastal villages, levies who drill twice a year and spend the rest of it growing grapes. Perhaps more than a thousand, once Fabian has been through the rolls. I will divide them into ten companies. A hundred men to each. One company to each of your so-called Sea Lords."

"A hundred landsmen each," Meera said. "To ten pirates."

"To ten instructors. Paid by me. Each of them takes a company and makes sailors of it. Navigation. Rigging. Boarding. Fighting on a deck that moves. Whatever it is that you people know and my knights do not. At the end of the term, I look at the ten companies. I see which of them can sail, which of them can fight, and which of them have spent six months learning to drink and dice. Then I know which of the ten is worth keeping."

He sat back.

"It is not only the men who are being trained."

Meera laughed, delighted, and clapped her gloved hands once together.

"Oh, that is cruel," she said. "That is properly cruel. You are going to make ten men who have never taken an order in their lives compete with one another to please you, and you are going to let them believe it was their own idea. Half of them will work their crews to the bone out of sheer pride."

"That is the intent."

"It is sound." She said it plainly, the captain again. "It is very sound. I have three things to add to it, and then it is perfect."

"Add them."

"One. Do not send a hundred men to each ship at once. There is not a hull on this coast that can carry a hundred green landsmen and still sail. Send them in watches. Thirty at a time, a month each, rotating, so that every man of the hundred has had his feet on a deck by the end of the term and none of them have sunk the ship by standing all on one side of it."

Ulrich nodded.

"Two. Put one of your own officers with each company. A knight, a sergeant, someone who answers to you and not to the captain. Not to command. To watch. Your Sea Lords will teach a great deal better if they know someone is writing it all down for the Count, and your men will remember who pays them."

"That was already intended."

"Then say so next time, and I shall not have to be clever. Three." She lifted her glass and looked at him over its rim. "Do it in winter."

Ulrich’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"Winter."

"Anyone can sail in summer. Children sail in summer. If you want to know which of your thousand grape-growers can be made into sailors and which of your ten captains can make them, you put them on the water when the water is trying to kill them. Start your term after the harvest. By the spring you will know everything you need to know about all of them, and the ones who are still standing will be worth ten of the ones who left."

Ulrich considered it.

The harvest ended in the ninth month. Grayhaven in the eighth. A winter term. By spring, the girls would have another half year of lessons behind them, and he would know whether he had ten Sea Lords or five, or two.

Ulrich wanted his fleet to have advanced greatly by three years from now. He wanted to take not more than one year for the trial and testing process.

It would be his own fleet bearing his name and crest; he certainly wanted it to be perfect.

"Winter," he said.

"Winter."

"Then that is over."

He stood.

"You will take dinner with us. Your men will eat in the guards’ hall. Fabian will see to it."

Meera rose as well but did not move toward the door.

"Is it, though?"

Ulrich had taken one step.

He stopped, because she had taken two, and somehow the second had placed her squarely between him and the way out. The settee was at his back. The window was at his side. And Meera stood before him with her gloved hands folded demurely at her waist and her head tilted.

"Is it truly over, Ulrich?"

Ulrich looked down at her.

"What else do you want."

"Oh, I know exactly what I want."

She smirked.

Her hand rose and reached toward the front of his breeches.

"I am dreaming of you," she said, "every single night. Wet ones. Every one of them. It has been terribly inconvenient aboard a ship, you understand. There is nowhere to be alone."

Ulrich winced.

"Then you should have slept less."

"I tried. It did not help."

"See a physician."

"I have. He was not you."

Her hand did not quite reach him. She let it hover, fingers curled, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her palm through the cloth, and she watched his face while she did it with an expression of pure enjoyment.

Then she rose on her toes and pressed her lips to his.

It was not a chaste kiss.

Her mouth was soft and tasted of the Rubenhart red she had been drinking, dark fruit and oak, beneath that something else, something warm and expensive, a perfume that had certainly not come from any shop in Grayhaven. Jasmine, perhaps. Amber. Whatever it was, she had put it on for this, and she had put it on knowing he would notice, and she was clearly enjoying that too.

Ulrich’s hands found her waist.

He told himself it was to hold her off.

It did not hold her off.

Meera made a small, pleased sound against his mouth and pressed closer, the silk of her bodice flattening against his shirt, her arms sliding up around his neck, and she kissed him again as brazen as ever.

Her hand left his neck.

It slid down his chest, over his belt, and slipped inside the waist of his breeches.

Ulrich caught her wrist.

He drew her hand out and held it, not roughly, between them, and when she opened her eyes, he was looking down at her with an expression that was not anger and was not quite refusal. Something more restrained.

"Not now."

Meera looked at his face.

Then she let out a long breath and stepped back, and he let her go.

"Well," she said, smoothing her bodice with both hands as though nothing had happened. "That is a pity. Because I am leaving after dinner."

Ulrich raised a brow.

"After dinner."

He was pretty sure she would stay the night, and it was the entire purpose of coming late in the afternoon to catch him off guard.

"In something of a hurry, in fact. I have business on the coast that will not wait for your arm to finish deciding whether it belongs to you."

"In a hurry to steal someone’s boat," Ulrich said, "or their gold?"

Meera chuckled.

"Something else, my Lord."

She did not elaborate.

She retrieved her hat from the side table, turned it once in her hands, and looked up at him from beneath her lashes.

"Are you upset?" She asked sweetly. "That I am not staying the night? You look upset. You look positively bereft, Count Rubenhart. I had no idea you would take it so hard."

Ulrich gave her a deadpan stare.

"Then leave after dinner."

He turned, stepped around her, and walked to the door.

Behind him, Meera began to giggle as she practically jumped to her feet and followed him.