Читать книгу Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 11

The prophetic dream broke on a scream of sheer rage, torn from the throat of a doomed prince.

A second, real cry became its live echo, wrung in drawn agony from the caithdein sworn to life service of liege and realm.

Jieret, Teir’s’Valerient, and Earl of the North snapped awake in Rathain with the vision’s cruel vista seared into indelible memory. Unmindful of peace, deaf to the birdsong which layered the spring dawn in the woodland outside his lodge tent, he eased himself free of his wife’s tangled limbs and arose from the blankets to stand shivering. Unsettled, naked, he sucked down breath after breath of chill air. The close, familiar smells of tanned deer hide and oiled steel, and the pitchy bite of cut balsam failed to restore him to balance. “Ath keep our sons!” he gasped through locked teeth. He could not shed his Sight of the last s’Ffalenn prince, crumpled and still in the swift, welling spurt of his life’s blood.

“Another augury?” The bedding rustled. A lavish fall of hair stroked his back, then a cheek, laid against his taut shoulder; his wife, arisen behind him, to link calming hands at his waist.

His tension would tell her the portent was ugly. Too often, in sleep, the prescient vision he inherited from his father warned him of death and trouble.

Jieret raked long fingers through his ginger beard. He braced his nerve, spun, and enfolded his lady into his possessive embrace. “I’m sorry, dove.” The soft, misted peace of the greenwood seemed suddenly, desperately precious. “I shall have to travel very far, very fast. The life of our prince is at stake.”

She would not question his judgment, not for that. Arithon s’Ffalenn was the last of Rathain’s royal line. Should he die with no heir, his feal clansmen would forfeit all hope to reclaim their birthright.

Feithan’s fingers unclasped, brushed down Jieret’s flanks, and withdrew. “How much spare clothing will you carry?” She caught up the blanket, still warm from their sleeping, and spread it to pack his necessities.

Jieret bent, caught her wrists, and marveled as always. The strength in her was a subtle thing, her bones like a sparrow’s in his hands, which were broad and corded beyond his youthful years from relentless seasons of fighting. Their eyes met and shared mute appeal. “I’ll take weapons and the leathers on my back, and you, first of all.” A smile turned his lips. The expression softened the fierce planes of his face, and offset the hawk bridge of his nose. “Leave the blanket.”

He rocked her against his chest, his touch tender. An urgency he could scarcely contain spoke of the perils he must weather on the solitary trek that would take him to Tysan’s western shore. Bounties were still paid for captured clansmen. Headhunters plied the wilds in bands, their tracking dogs combing the thickets. Towns and trade roads were no less a hazard, choked with informers and guardsmen sent out recruiting to replenish the troops lost in Vastmark.

The wife in Jieret’s arms would not speak of the risks. Strong as the generations of survivors who had bred her, she absorbed his need, then massaged to ease his old scars with skilled hands, until he kissed her and slipped free to dress.

Jieret s’Valerient, called Red-beard, was in that hour twenty-one years of age. Supple, self-reliant, clean limbed as the deer he ran down in the hunt, he was rangy and tall, a being tanned out of oak bark. War and early losses had lent his hazel eyes more than a touch of gray flint. Jieret’s inheritance of the caithdein’s title had fallen to him during childhood, both his parents and four sisters slain in one day by town troops on the banks of Tal Quorin. On his wrist, even then, his first badge of achievement: the straight, fine scar from the knife cut which bound him lifelong to the honor of blood pact with his prince.

Proud of his rugged courage, too shrewd to voice fear, Feithan reached beneath their mattress of spruce boughs and tossed him his worn, quilloned knife.

She smiled, a nip of white teeth. “The sooner you go, the better the chance you’ll be back to my lodge before autumn.”

Then she folded slim knees behind her crossed arms and watched him bind on sheath and sword belt. If she wept, her tears were well masked behind tangles of ebony hair. Not on her last breath would she voice her disappointment. If her young husband did not return, his line must live on in the child she knew to be growing within her. She would endure, no less than any other clan woman widowed in a sudden, bloody raid.

Her husband was the oathsworn caithdein of Rathain, his birthright an iron bond of trust. The needs of kingdom and prince must come first, ahead of survival and family.

Feithan held no rancor. If the Teir’s’Ffalenn died, no clanborn babe in Rathain could have peace. The future would be kingless, while the townsmen continued their centuries-old practice of extirpation. Headhunters would keep sewing scalps of clan victims as trophy fringe on their saddlecloths, until at last the survivors dwindled, their irreplaceable old bloodlines too thinned by loss to sustain.

“Go in grace, my lord husband,” were the last words she said, as her man kissed her lips and stepped out.

Three days on foot through his native glens in Strakewood saw Lord Jieret to the shores of Instrell Bay. There, a bribe to a Westfen fisherman secured his safe crossing to Atainia. From landfall just north of the trade port of Lorn, Jieret faced an overland journey of a hundred and fifty leagues. Anviled, rocky ridges arose off the coast, the country between summits guttered in dry gulches, and the scrub thorn which clawed stunted footholds in the sands of the Bittern Desert.

Here, where a man made a target against the luminous sky, Jieret kept to the gullies. Sweat painted tracks through his coat of rimed dust. He jogged, walked, jogged on again, refusing to measure the odds that his errand was already futile.

The winter storms had abated. Any day, the Master of Shadow would raise sail to ply the world’s uncharted waters. He would seek the fabled continent beyond the Westland Sea, and finally know if Athera held a refuge beyond reach of the Mistwraith’s curse.

The Sorcerer, Sethvir, Warden of Althain could have named Prince Arithon’s location. Yet at dusk on spring equinox, when Jieret passed his tower, the Fellowship held convocation. Where Sorcerers worked, the elements paid uncanny homage. The night air seemed charged to crystalline clarity, the land lidded under a transparent sky with its winds preternaturally silenced. Ozone tinged the silvered glow which speared in beams from the keep’s topmost arrow slits, and earth itself seemed to ring to the dance of ancient arcane rhythms. Though the clans did not share the widespread fear in the towns toward the powers called from natural forces, the man was a fool who held no mortal dread of disrupting the Sorcerers’ conjury.

Dawn saw Jieret on his way. His lanky stride ate the distance, through the rocky, slabbed washes bedded with black sand, puddled still from the snowmelt off the lava crags to the north. Before the ford, he veered west, to give the trade roads to Isaer wide berth. He kept to ditches and hedgerows through the flax bogs and farmlands, and moved softly by night where the headhunters scoured the flats. A stolen horse saw him to cover in the tangled stands of spruce which patchworked the Thaldein foothills.

There, better mounted by clansmen from Tysan, he galloped south with the relays who carried news between their fugitive enclaves in Camris.

The first scouts insisted the Master of Shadow would have left his winter haven at Corith.

Flanked by a campfire, the first cooked meat in his belly since the desert, and his undone braid fanned in hanks upon shoulders still glazed from a wash in a freshet, Jieret said, “I know that.” The bronze bristle of his jaw thrust out and hardened. “I have to try anyway.”

The scout who lounged across from him spat out the stem of sweetgrass he had meticulously used to scrub his teeth. “Fiends plague, then. Keep your bad news to yourself. We’ve heard enough already from Avenor to turn our hearts sore with grief.”

Every restive sinew in Jieret’s body coiled tense. “What’s happened?” A late-singing mockingbird caroled through the gloom with a sweet and incongruous tranquillity. “What has Lysaer s’Ilessid done now?”

The scout spat into the embers and spoke, and amid the fragrant, piney gloom beneath the Thaldeins, Jieret Red-beard first heard of the edict which endorsed live capture and slavery.

“Spring equinox has passed, with the ultimatum given,” the scout finished off in bitten rage. “Our Lord Maenol would never swear, but sent the false prince his black arrow proclaiming no quarter.”

Lysaer’s life, among the clans who by right should grant him fealty, was now irrevocably called forfeit. Jieret had no words. The event posed a vicious and unnatural tragedy, a warping of tradition provoked at its root by the evil of the Mistwraith’s curse.

The breeze carried the odd chill, breathed down from the snowfields, bathed pristine white under starlight. Jieret felt as if the cold inside had closed stealthy knuckles around the heart. He sat, eyes shut, and his knees clamped behind his clasped hands. “Events have turned grim in ways even Ath could scarce believe. How are you set when the headhunters start the spring forays?”

“Well enough.” The scout shrugged. “Troops and supplies are depleted since Vastmark. We’ll have a year, maybe two, before Lysaer’s Alliance regroups, but mark me. Then we’ll see sorrows.”

For a moment, like the drawn-out whisper of old grief, the wind stroked through the greening briar. Then the scout tipped his graying head. “You’ll need to go back,” he urged, gentle. “Our people will carry your message from here. No better can be done. The Khetienn will have sailed. If she has, your wait for your prince could be lengthy.”

The stiff pause came freighted with facts left unspoken: that whether or not the Master of Shadow had passed beyond reach, the headhunters’ leagues in Rathain were ever in Lysaer’s close confidence. The defeats freshly suffered at Arithon’s hand, then the loss of their late captain Pesquil by Jieret’s own arrow, had fanned their clamor for vengeance to fresh fervor.

“You see what must happen,” the scout said in staid logic. “Skannt’s going to claim sanction from Etarra’s fat mayor to harrow Rathain’s feal clans the same way.”

“I know that.” Jieret erupted in strung nerves, reached his feet, and resisted the blind urge to slam his fist into a tree. “Ath, for chained slavery? The guild merchants will cheer and donate the coin to forge manacles. Morality’s no deterrent. For years now, Etarrans have used our child captives as forced labor.” His back to the fire, he seemed a man racked, the passage of each breath made difficult. “I have to go on. What I know must not wait. Nor should my liege hear my word at second hand.”

By the embers, the scout swore in sympathy.

Forced to the crux of a terrible decision, Jieret summed up troubled thoughts. “My clans are more to me than the spirit in my body, but I am not irreplaceable. The Fellowship can appoint a new caithdein for Rathain if my liege is not at hand to make his choice. My spokesman, Deshir’s former war captain, Caolle, would agree. He knows the warning I bring is an augury which bears on Prince Arithon’s life.”

The last of his line, this fugitive Teir’s’Ffalenn; threat to him ended all argument.

“Ath guard your way, then,” the scout said, blunt as hammered metal. “May the clans in the south speed your journey.”

Jieret crossed the Thaldein passes, dismissed his friendly escort, and grew lean and browned from hiding in ditches through the Valendale’s sun-drenched, plowed farmsteads. He took no careless step. But headhunters picked up his trail west of Cainford. He left five hounds dead, and two men, and limped on with bound ribs and a calf with a festering dog bite. The hedge witch he challenged at knifepoint for healing cursed his barbarian tongue, then tried to sell him an amulet snagged together from squirrel skin and the strung vertebra of a grouse.

Jieret refused her the price of a cut lock of his bronze hair.

“‘Twould be useful for bird snares,” the crone muttered. She sniffled over her sticky decoction, then knotted a bandage over an ill-smelling poultice with vindictive and sharp ferocity.

“I like the birds free, and myself most of all.” Jieret wanted to flinch at her handling, but dared not, with his dagger point pressed to her back. The crone’s hovel had nesting sparrows in its eaves, and the pot on her brazier leaked. Poverty and townborn contempt for her simples had leached all her pride in her trade. Jieret harbored the cynical suspicion that any offering from his person would be sold back to headhunters by nightfall, twined into a tracking spell to trace him.

Despite his need, the crone put a grudge in her remedies. His leg swelled and ached. Through curses of agony, he tore the dressing away and soaked off the salves in a stream. Feverish, limping, he thrashed his way south through the brush. A second pack of tracking dogs winded his scent and burst into yammering tongue. Freshly mounted, their masters tried to run him to earth against the guard spells of a grimward, which no man living might cross. There, he might have perished, inadvertently killed by Fellowship defenses set to keep trespassers from harm.

But clan hunters from Taerlin heard the commotion and spirited him downstream in a boat. Safe at last under Caithwood’s dense cover, cosseted by a girl with cool hands, he slept off his lingering wound sickness.

Six weeks, since he had left his wife in Deshir. Early spring exchanged lace-worked blossom and bud for the sumptuous mantle of summer. On the sandy neck of Mainmere Bay, Jieret was met by the clan chief whose ancestral seat lay in ruins across silvered waters. She had ridden hard to bear him a message, the scout in her company said.

The hour was dusk, the sky, cloudless azure. Jieret crouched by her campfire under the eaves of scrub maples and spat out the bones of the rock bass netted for supper. While thrushes fluted clear notes through the boughs, and the deer emerged to nibble the verge of the bogs, he regarded the wizened little duchess who bore ancient title to Mainmere. She watched him eat, her gnarled hands folded. Along with age, she wore callus from sword and from bridle rein. The leathers belted to her waist were a man’s, and shaded under the fans of white lashes, her eyes met his own with stark pity.

“What’s wrong?” Against the soft, sustained lisp of the breeze, Jieret sounded boisterous and unseasoned.

Lady Kellis touched the battered satchel by her knee. “A documented accusation by Avenor, made against your sanctioned prince.” She resumed in her husked, worn alto. “My lord Maenol withheld this one writ from the packet, for your hand alone, he insisted. By your sworn duty, this becomes your legal charge as caithdein of Rathain.”

Her fingers trembled as she loosened the strings of her parcel. “For this, we risk another passage to see you safe into Corith. There’s a chance the Khetienn’s departure was delayed. In the month when the ice broke, the Shadow Master heard of Lysaer’s proclamation of slavery. Word came back that he intended to make disposition on behalf of our clans.”

“What’s the charge?” Jieret’s appetite fled. He rinsed his hands in the leather bucket used earlier to sluice down his whetstone, in no hurry to accept the offered document.

But Lady Kellis had no reassurance to steady him. “I leave you to read,” she said in blank reserve. “Then you must act as your oath to your kingdom demands.”

At first touch, the heavy, state parchment filled Jieret with trepidation. He unfolded its leaves, braced as though handed the news of a recent fatality. Then he perused the first lines of official script, and his fists knotted from helpless rage. “But there was never a trial to affirm this arraignment!”

The Duchess of Mainmere gave a dry laugh. “Be thankful. If there had been, the towns would have seen your prince burn.”

By the time Jieret finished, he was shaking. Traced bronze by the flame light, he bent his rangy shoulders and dammed silent misery behind the locked palms of his hands.

A caithdein’s given charge was the testing of princes, if the Fellowship Sorcerers were preoccupied. The clans of Tysan were lawfully correct. Any accusation of dark sorcery against his liege belonged nowhere else but with him.

Heavy of heart, Jieret tucked the document into his shirt. “I will go on to Corith. Find a boat quickly to bear me.”

The grandame arose, touched his arm in mute sympathy, then left him to a comfortless night. While the stars shimmered through the puzzle-cut shapes of black leaves, the ugly duty before him at Corith lent spin to-his chafing fear. Rathain’s sworn caithdein could not shake his dread, that his prescient dream of a city execution and Avenor’s sealed writ of arraignment might share a fatal connection.

Passage to the Isles of Min Pierens in a patched-up fishing smack took three weeks, beating against the season’s prevailing westerlies, and bouts of calm between squall lines. As the little craft wore through the islands off the headland, Jieret crouched on the deck, stripped down to his sun-scorched skin. Between his knees, he braced a bucket of damp sand against the wallowing roll of the deck. A monologue of curses marked his ongoing effort to scrub the green bloom of mold from his leathers.

“Man, lend it mercy,” drawled the craft’s only deckhand, perched like a limpet halfway up the mast with orders to watch out for shoals. “Keep on that, and just weep when yer bollocks tumble out and dangle right pretty through the holes.”

Jieret looked up, a squint to one eye as he took vengeful aim with the holystone.

But the sailhand’s snide interest had swung toward the land, where the high, russet rock notched the sky in crazed patterns. Tumbled walls crowned the summit, bleached with sun, and the broken, eggshell rims of the keeps which remained of a Second Age fortress. Beyond, unveiled by the sliding shift of vantage as the fishing smack nosed downwind, there arose a trim set of masts stripped of canvas, and a dark, lean hull, rocking serene at her anchorage.

“Swamp me for a half-wit!” cried the sailhand. “Who’d have risked coin to wager? The Khetienn hasn’t sailed after all.”

Jieret reached his feet in a rushed, thoughtless movement, and the bucket overset; a wet sludge of sand flooded over the offending set of leathers. “Fiends plague!”

The language loosed next won a laugh from the boat’s swarthy captain. “Ach, let her go, lad! The deck won’t see harm. For your stripped buttocks, we’ll scrounge a loan from our slop chest.”

“My naked arse isn’t like to be burned for dark sorcery,” Jieret groused, his distress not at all for soaked garments. He glowered across the closing gap of water. The brigantine’s satin brightwork mocked him back, insolent, unmarred by the damage rough weather might cause to drive her back into shelter. Nor did her decks hold industrious crewmen, but languished untenanted in the heat. Jieret’s foreboding deepened. His liege should be long away from known waters, with no trouble too dire to stay him.

The hard-run little fishing smack put in and launched her dory over the side. “We’ll hold off for your signal,” said the captain from his squint-eyed perch at the rail.

Jieret settled into the tender’s stern seat, still damp, but presentable. He brooded throughout the approach to the strand, limned in the flat glare of noon, the shade like slopped ink beneath the cedars. As the craft neared the shore, a figure built plump and round as a partridge bobbed amid the rocks, craned a short neck, then erupted into spectacular strings of epithets.

The oarsman listened, awestruck. “D’ye suppose yon one caught a hornet in his breeks?” He reversed his stroke, and the dory spun about in the wash of a slack tide breaker. “A collection like that’s a rare masterpiece. Never heard the like, not in any cutthroat dive the length of the westshore dockside.”

His speculation foundered against a peculiar, chilly reticence as, boots gripped in hand, his profile like the anviled rim of a thundercloud, the muscled young chieftain from Strakewood splashed thigh deep in the shallows.

“Well then,” the crewman said, stoic. “I’ll be off. Show us a light from the point if ye want passage back to the mainland.”

Oars creaked. The dory reversed direction, leaving Jieret to wade through the surf.

The diatribe from the headland hiccuped through a pause, then switched key to outraged recognition. “Ath! It’s yourself!” Jieret forbore to glance shoreward.

“He’s not with you!” The fat man on the beach hopped the last steps to the tidemark, shook his lard fist, and erupted, “Damn his licebrained, sow-eared, rutting stubborn mind! He’s bent on getting himself killed.”

Jieret arrived on dry shingle. “Not with me?” he echoed. Stopped erect in noon glare while salt droplets sluiced runnels down his ankles, he gazed from full height into an unkempt, round face and smoldering, cinnamon eyes.

“Turd-stupid, string-plucking goose,” said Dakar, erstwhile spellbinder to a Fellowship Sorcerer, and known far and wide as the Mad Prophet. He licked bearded lips, then clapped his mouth closed, belatedly aware that the clansman who loomed over him brimmed like dammed acid with temper. Dakar’s layers of mismatched clothing heaved as he dredged up an ingratiating shrug. “Well, maybe not a goose, exactly.”

“You refer to my liege, Prince Arithon?” Jieret tossed a clipped nod past his shoulder. Behind him, a wing-folded raptor on the settled arc of the sea, the brigantine seemed juxtaposed on the view, a wild thing imprisoned by the natural stone revetments which bordered the harbor basin. “Don’t you dare claim he isn’t here.”

The Mad Prophet screwed his eyes shut. Wheezing like a martyr from his headlong rush to the beachhead, he raised chubby, exasperated hands and tugged at his fox brush beard.

Since on their last meeting, Dakar had been the Master of Shadow’s implacable enemy, Jieret added, “We are speaking of the same man?”

Dakar flounced stiff. “Nobody else drives me to fits of sick fury, and anyway, you should know best. This isn’t the first time he’s had you come chasing his shirttails the length of the continent.”

Too wary to mind insults, Jieret kept his fierce glower. Dakar for a miracle was not wallowing drunk. Though the clownish, suffused features were still slack from loose living, the spirit inside his dissipated flesh seemed transformed into change. The pouched eyes held a glint of shrewd purpose. A queer incongruity, and one at sharp odds with the Mad Prophet’s scapegrace reputation.

The silence extended too long.

“What’s amiss?” pestered Dakar. “Something’s turned wrong. Or Ath’s own Avenger couldn’t have dragged you to sea.”

“Oh, there’s trouble, well enough.” Jieret parked his hip against a boulder and jammed on his boots to mask his outright anxiety. “Perhaps you’d best say where Prince Arithon went.”

“Ashore,” Dakar said. Sweating in his seamy, worn clothes, he looked all at once beaten down, just another bit of flotsam cast up by storm to wilt on the waterworn rocks. “His Grace is alone, back on the mainland.”

Jieret confronted the Mad Prophet’s moon features like a swordsman stunned silly by a mace. “The mainland,” he echoed in stark disbelief. “Please Ath, not now. He can’t be.”

“Best come up.” Sly eyes swiveled askance; Dakar surveyed Rathain’s tall caithdein, bitter himself with shared sympathy. “You look like you need to be out of the sun, and besides, there’s a risk. We oughtn’t discuss his royal affairs so freely here in the open.”

Jieret looked blank. “What?”

“Koriani,” said Dakar. “Damn prying witches and their bothersome spells.” Then he rolled his gaze skyward, remiss. “I forgot. You wouldn’t know how far things went wrong last autumn in Vastmark. The Koriani Prime Enchantress tried her level best to have Arithon s’Ffalenn assassinated.”

Jieret shot tense, hand clasped on his knife, his color gone shatteringly white. “On my oath as caithdein, is every living faction on Athera dead set to end my liege lord’s life?”

“Damned near.” Dakar closed his moist grip on the larger man’s elbow and tugged. “You haven’t brought dispatches in with the sloop? Just yourself? Best move along, then.” He nodded toward the cliff path. “I’ve got quarters up in the old fortress.”

Cicadas buzzed amid the crumbled rock stair that jagged up the flank of the headland. The dry air scarcely stirred, thick with the resin taint of cedar. Gray lichens silted like ash in the crannies, and the only visible inhabitants were the finches, flitting in startled bursts through the vines netted over bent limbs and black needles.

From the heights, the isle was a fissured, clenched fist, the fretted shoreline worried by tides, and seamed in jagged grottos, hazed over in lavender shade. Here, in the First Age, Paravian seers had held council with dragons, who flew the world’s skies no more. Against the vicious aberrations spawned by the drakes’ wild magic, defenders from four races had languished, besieged, in the cramped, ragged bounds of the curtain wall. Now strewn like kicked block, the last ridge of foundation housed basking, gold lizards which skittered away into cracks.

The eldest living dragons had spun their dream of desperation and appeal within these baked, cratered keeps, to draw to Athera the aid of the Fellowship Sorcerers. But if any ghost presence from that past remained to haunt Corith’s ruin, the land retained no thread of dissonance. Just bare stone, tuned shrill by the blaze of summer noon, and loomed on the untrammeled song of bundled energies which underpinned all the substance of creation. Centuries of wind and battering storms had swept even the deepest, layered bedrock clean of the imprint of violent vibration.

“Through here,” Dakar puffed. He beckoned into gloom and reappeared beyond a crumbling archway.

Jieret followed, but saw no sign of tenancy. The temporary, safe haven for a Third Age fugitive felt abandoned, as if the site had been owned for all time by naught but the wind and the seabirds.

The stillness sawed at Jieret’s suspicion. “Where are my liege’s people? The crew of the Khetienn? Daelion, Master of Fate, save his Grace, has he kept none but you to stand by him?”

Suddenly exposed before dangerous antipathy, Dakar stopped, sliding, to chinks in complaint from loose stone. “I’m not your prince’s enemy, not anymore. And he’s kept the Khetienn’s crew, her full complement. They’re all here, and safe, masked under my ward of concealment.” A note of plaintive unhappiness crept through. “That’s why, Ath forgive me, I had to stay. Given the choice, I wouldn’t be here.”

Jieret regarded Dakar’s sweating tension. “I know the s’Ffalenn temper, none better. You were told to hide the brigantine, if galleys happened on her?”

Dakar nodded, miserable. “Or fire her, should my spells of illusion fall short.” He shuffled breathlessly on. “Man, I couldn’t stop him from going. His Grace has a will to stand down the Avenger’s Five Horses, and no mercy on the fool who interferes. If he gets himself butchered on some mayor’s scaffold, I can’t argue his right to tempt fate.”

At Jieret’s worried start, Dakar raised his hands. “No, rest assured. Arithon’s not taunting a death wish. He couldn’t if he wanted. The Fellowship of Seven forced him to take blood oath last winter. He’s bound and sworn to life, whatever the cost, against future threat from the Mistwraith.”

“Mercy on him,” Jieret whispered, shocked. In all Athera’s history, so strict a measure had never been asked of a crown prince. “I didn’t know.”

“That happened after you parted at Minderl Bay.” Dakar reached a gap in the masonry. Beyond him, the hazed jointure of sea and sky dimmed into distance, snagged with fluffs of white cloud. Innocent now, those scattered fleeces would mass into towers by late afternoon, and anvil into a squall line. Just as untrustworthy, Dakar turned right and vanished into clear space.

Jieret’s startled shout entangled with a prosaic reassurance, flung backward. “Pay no mind to the wards. They’re illusion. The footing’s quite safe.”

Faced by a jagged opening, then a yawning gap into air, the clan chieftain muttered imprecations against the spellbinder’s feckless character. A clutch of fractured boulders overhung the drop, ready to launch from their settings at the first wrong breath of the wind. No coward, Jieret stepped down.

Chills roiled and rippled across his flesh. His senses upended. A fierce, hot tingle sang through his nerves, then stopped with a bracing jolt.

The Earl of the North bit back a yelp, the steel hilts of his weapons turned hot to his hand. He blinked, wits recovered, to find himself standing in a dusty, flat compound, scattered with tents sewn from sailcloth. Nor was Corith any longer untenanted. A circle of sailhands hunkered in the shade of a gnarled cedar. The ones near at hand looked aside at him, bored, then resumed quarreling over a dice throw, the winning stakes a collection of sticks notched with tally marks. The crescent knife used to keep count flashed in the fist of a prune-skinned little desertman, who stabbed air and hurled his scathing invective at a ship’s boy for rigging the odds.

“The defense spell is spliced reflection,” Dakar said, smug. “Those cliff rocks, and that span of ocean were borrowed intact from a site halfway down the north slope.” As the fracas erupted into knee-slapping mirth over the ship’s boy’s scurrilous rejoinder, the spellbinder admitted, “Of course, the noise was more difficult to mask.”

Case in point, a shout pealed out like steel put to the hammer.

The urchin shot erect from amid the pack of dicers. All coltish brown limbs and angular grace, the creature had blond hair tied in a glistening, long braid. The end was cross-laced with a frippery of ribbon bleached to rust. A second glance at a body clad in scruffy sailhand’s cottons showed the first, shy curves of a girl at the threshold of maturity.

“Arithon wasn’t on that fishing craft?” she shrilled across the brassy wash of sunlight.

At Dakar’s headshake, she crowed her wild triumph. “Well then you owe me six royals! He wasn’t to embark ‘til the winds changed, and the weather’s stayed contrary this season.”

“There are still three days left before solstice,” Dakar hurled back. “Your silver’s not won before then.” Soured by the prospect of forfeited coin, he confided to Jieret, “That’s Feylind, the pest. I misspoke myself teaching that girl to wager. She attached herself to Arithon at Merior by the Sea, and for her talent, your liege thought to train her. She’s gifted at navigation and seamanship when she isn’t cheating numbers on the dice.”

“She has spirit, give her that.” Jieret watched her spin back to defend her hoarded spoils, then realized: this girl must be one of the twins that Arithon had spoken of granting his oath of protection. Years passed. Feylind had grown beyond childhood; nor would her brother Fiark remain beardless much longer, wherever his own fate had sent him.

“Come on,” Dakar urged. “If the heat isn’t making you die for a drink, I want all your rumors from the mainland.”

Dusk softened over the broken spires at Corith. The sea beyond the breakwater spread a flat, purple disk. The seasonal squall line rumbled off the coast, stalled through afternoon by the chancy, winnowing breezes. Cloud ramparts loomed off the islands, their sulfurous rims stained by the afterglow. When Jieret refused outright to say what drew him from Rathain, Dakar parked his bulk upon the creaking rope pallet he had strung in the shelter of a tumbledown drum tower. The furnishings consisted of axe-cut fir, lashed at the jointures with twine. A water jug, a basin, and a clump of holed socks lay cached in the niche of an arrow slit. Beneath this, a sea chest in use as a table held a spellbinder’s clutter of bundled herbs, and an edged pair of shearwater’s flight feathers. Jieret chose to sit on the stone floor through the exchange of desultory small news.

They suffered but one interruption; the desertman burst in without word or apology, and left a meal of smoked fish and greens. The last of the day slowly fled. The ragged old walls were roofed with a haphazard patchwork of sailcloth, worried to threads and gaps by the wind until stars could be counted in constellations. Outside, the sailhands had laid off their dicing. Someone returned from trapping, and coals were laid in to roast conies. No stranger to the nuance of leading men, Jieret listened. Through spirited slangs and the odd burst of laughter he noticed the underlying worry.

Arithon’s absence weighed on them all, though the subject stayed scrupulously unmentioned. Even the Mad Prophet’s prying, sly talk circled to evade the sore topic.

The temperature cooled. Jieret cracked his knuckles and suddenly ran out of patience. “Why should my liege be alone on the mainland?”

Silence; the fallen summer darkness cut by a yelp as a sailhand burned careless fingers at the spit. Dakar against custom had not touched his food. He regarded his laced fingers, as if he just realized his soft, dimpled knuckles were wearing a stranger’s rough callus. He was not drunk. His clothing was mended, and his beard, trimmed neat, as if dogged grooming might suppress the misery that impelled his anguished admission. “His Grace sought Cattrick. That huge master joiner he used to employ back in Merior.”

“Dharkaron avenge!” Jieret cried. “His Grace went to Shand?”

“I already know,” Dakar supplied. “Official books of grievances have been opened on the southcoast. Lord Erlien’s clansmen sent warning. Any town citizen can make claim of injury against Arithon. No proof is required. Just a sealed statement from the plaintiff. Those women left widowed at Vastmark have wasted no time recording all manner of spurious spite. The pages are filled to the margins, and the mayors have promised to appeal for redress at Avenor.”

“This Cattrick,” Jieret snapped. “Is his loyalty secure?”

“Arithon believed he’d be able to win back the craftsman’s trust.” As this fueled a more alarming shift into fury, the Mad Prophet cringed, and cried out, “You know your liege!”

Jieret showed the fat spellbinder no quarter, but drew up his legs and busied his hands working the ringed salt from his buckskins. No need to reiterate the plain fact: that Dakar’s intent was equally well suspect, outspoken as he had been in the past concerning the Shadow Master’s ethics.

A thunderclap boomed over the ocean. Echoes shook the ominous flat air, and growled through the Mad Prophet’s explanation. “Once Arithon heard that his half brother had signed formal sanction for slave labor, his temper lit off like fell sparks. No reason moved him. He would go ashore, use his Masterbard’s talent and ply the southshore taverns. He meant to recall his craftsmen and recruit those who dared on some devious scheme to stall Avenor’s injustice.”

Jieret glanced up, his eyes chill hazel. He asked to borrow an oiled rag and a whetstone, then deliberately tended the steel of his quilloned dagger. Dakar, who had once known the caithdein’s father, knew better than to interrupt. The clan chieftain took his time, then stabbed the blade upright in the rush seat of a footstool. He gave his considered opinion. “Had I been here, I would have fought my liege bloody, even bundled him in irons to hold him.”

“Oh, you could have tried,” Dakar rebutted. “His Grace knows the tricks of his Masterbard’s title. Even if he couldn’t sing triplets to turn steel, the problem’s not simple or straightforward. Arithon has changed. The campaign brought to ruin at Dier Kenton Vale left him marked, sometimes too deeply to reach. You don’t want to tangle with his temper.”

But that had been true far and long before the devastating war in Vastmark. Every one of Jieret’s ancestors had lived with the peril of challenging s’Ffalenn royalty head-on. The clan chief probed, “You haven’t mentioned the Havens.”

A sudden, fierce gust slapped the sailcloth overhead. Dakar flinched. Brown eyes slid away in discomfort. “Your war captain, Caolle, saw everything.”

Jieret stared back in rancorous bitterness. “My war captain? Who came back to us changed? He resigned his post, did you know that? Said he would lift a sword for nothing else except to train our young scouts sharper skills. But no more to kill. He won’t say what took place.” Jieret paused, snorted through the high bridge of his nose in mixed admiration and disgust. “For stubborn, close secrets, a clam’s less lockjawed than Caolle.”

Beyond stiff disquiet, the wind raked the night, deepened by clouds until the stars at the zenith were blackened. Dakar raised no smile as, in boisterous consternation, the sailhands scurried for shelter. His gaze tracked the broken, white line of the breakers creaming the reefs far below. Each crest came unraveled in driven, wild splendor against shores nothing like another blood-soaked shingle he wished he could raze out of memory.

He said softly, “If Caolle can’t speak, then neither will I. Trust my word. What went wrong between the Havens and the clash with Lysaer’s war host lies beyond spoken words to explain. Hear advice from a friend. Don’t ask your prince. I beg you, keep clear and don’t pry. Let Arithon explain if he chooses.”

“If he’s still alive, and not roasted for sorcery on some mayor’s pile of lit faggots.” Jieret shot out a fist and grabbed the stout spellbinder by the collar. “By Ath, prophet! Where my prince is concerned, I’m more than a friend. We’re bloodbond! I’ve twice risked my life to guard his mind from Desh-thiere’s curse.” Pain, naked and deep as a canker burst through. “Dharkaron avenge!” cried Jieret. “I’ve drawn his very blood to spare his sanity. What happened on that shoreline, in his right mind or not, could scarcely come to surprise me.”

Strangely uncowed by the clansman’s fierce strength, Dakar tore away. “It’s not what you could bear, nor what I could!” Just anguish blazed through and reclothed his rumpled dignity. “Nor do you question a man’s conscience alone, but a masterbard’s empathy turned under siege by the Fellowship’s imposed royal gift of compassion. Let Arithon be, if you have any mercy.”

Hemmed in by the howling descent of the squall line, Earl Jieret went obstinate to the bone. “That one thing I can’t do. In this, I am not my own master, but the oathsworn caithdein of Rathain. I am the realm’s conscience in matters of the law! And Lysaer’s charges of dark sorcery are too weighty to drop without question or inquiry.”

The tempest broke over the cliff top. Wind screamed, and the billowed, dry dust became trampled under the cloudburst. The sky above Corith split apart in actinic tangles of lightning. For a drawn span of minutes, thunder slammed through the old fortress. Jieret hung waiting, racked to naked appeal; he first presumed Dakar had left him. Against the white gush of the leaks through the sailcloth, his agonized words had only the storm’s voice for answer.

Then from the tempestuous wail of the elements, the Mad Prophet served his opinion. “Well thank Ath, it’s going to be you. Your liege would mangle anyone else who challenged his integrity this time.”

“How nicely opportune,” a silvery, smooth voice issued unbidden from the rain. “I can see I’ve returned just in time to play my own part in the satire.”

Dakar gasped an oath, and Jieret, spun in one surge to his feet, faced the doorway.

Lightning flared like a rip in black silk, to limn the arrival standing there. The man was slight boned, soaked as a seal in plain cotton. Temper smoked through each stabbing vowel as he added, “I’m back from the mainland, blown in with a spate of foul weather. Don’t cheer,” said Arithon s’Ffalenn. He stepped forward, reduced once again to a voice clothed over in darkness. “Cattrick didn’t sell my killed carcass to the mayors, though assuredly, he had to be wooed.”

Dakar’s stupor unlocked all at once. He splashed sliding through a puddle, and rummaged after oiled rags and a wet length of kindling. Nerves interfered. When his hands dropped the flints, he resorted to a cantrip, spell driven. A spark erupted in a ripe flare of sulfur. New flame snagged the torch, fought into tormented brilliance by the gusts. Its flittering glow bronzed the first thing to hand, the bent crown of Jieret’s head.

He had knelt. Taller than his sovereign, a muscled tiger before a wraith, he stumbled through the ritual greeting, caithdein to his sworn prince.

Black haired, green eyed, pale as if chipped from veined quartz, the Master of Shadow poised on braced feet with his crossed arms wrapped to his chest. He was shivering. Shed droplets rocked off the plastered folds of his shirt and scribed rubied flecks through the torchlight. “There’s a parchment,” he prompted, succinct. “Let me see it.”

At Jieret’s upflung glance of distress, the prince’s brows angled higher. “You can hear? Good. Than arise and stop looking amazed. Your mission’s no secret. Every forest scout I met crossing Falwood said a writ had been passed to my caithdein’s charge. If I’m not over-joyed to find Rathain’s left stewardless, at least I’ll see why no clansman in Havish seemed eager to look me in the face.”

Jieret stood erect, his every movement cautious. That his prince was unarmed made no difference. The royal presence framed warning like the gleam on a lake of black ice. The pair of them were bloodbond, and yet, here stood a stranger masked in the features of a friend. This diamond-edged malice held a febrile, strung focus more volatile than Jieret remembered. While thunder boomed and shook the ancient foundations, and the rain thrashed in demented torrents, he became aware of Dakar’s tense stillness, as if even the whisper of a wrongly drawn breath might trigger the spring of a predator.

Jieret’s hand did not shake in its office as he said, “I would soften this, liege, if I could.” In the uncanny, grave style inherited from his father, he drew the bundled document from the breast of his leathers and passed it across to his prince.

Arithon stiffened at first sight of the seals: the crown and star blazon of the purloined s’Ilessid device, and another, stamped in a lozenge of champagne wax, the rayed sunwheel adopted since Vastmark. The Shadow Master flipped open the folded leaves, then tipped them to capture the torchlight.

He read. His skin went from pale to transparent, and his very heart seemed to stop. Then he stirred. A word passed his lips, the staccato lilt of consonants framed in the grace of old Paravian. He hurled down the indictment as though its mere touch burned his flesh. Then he whirled, bent, and in a move of pure fury, plucked Jieret’s quilloned knife from the stool seat.

“Caithdein of Rathain,” he intoned in chiseled, formal language. “The truth, on my word as your crown prince. If that’s not sufficient, you’ll have your sure proof through a death seal set into the lifeblood spilled from my body.”

From the corner, Dakar gasped. Before Jieret could decry the necessity, Arithon closed an unsteady hand on the blade, over steel just meticulously sharpened. Scarlet welled from his palm, spilled through lean fingers, and ribboned slick tracks down his wrist. He inclined his head to the spellbinder.

“You have my consent. Lay down the binding, my life as surety that nothing I speak is a falsehood.”

Dakar arose. Raised to a grave majesty sprung from stark fear, he clasped Arithon’s wet fist. The spell rune he framed burned in lines of cold light, then twined like barbed ribbon through the rich flood flowing from the knife cut. “Beware,” he cautioned. “What you ask is done. One word of deceit will destroy you.”

By ancient custom, the last scion of s’Ffalenn then knelt before his caithdein.

The Shadow Master said in metallic distaste, “The deaths at the Havens are all mine, every one. But this charge of dark sorcery has no ground. No spell was spun, light or dark at that inlet. There were no fell tricks. No engagement occurred beyond arrows and steel, nor even the use of my birth-born mastery of shadow.” Still trembling, he regarded the spreading, red stain on his shirt cuff and finished his venomous delivery. “What happened was simple, cold murder.”

He laughed then, wide-eyed, and spun the slicked blade. The point now angled against his own breast, its chased silver pommel a reckless invitation to serve judgment. “Are you horrified? Caolle thought treason and threatened to spit me with bared steel.”

Jieret swallowed, stunned blank and sickened. Five hundred forty lives had been taken in cold blood: the truth forced out in a naked confession that asked neither quarter nor pity.

“You can’t find the gall to ask why?” pressured Arithon, still venting pain into anger. “Or are you waiting for a Fellowship Sorcerer to gainsay a testimony made under truthseals?”

“Almighty Ath, that’s enough!” Dakar launched himself across his clutter of belongings and with a competence few would have credited, snatched the knife from Arithon’s grasp. He discarded the blade and clutched the prince’s soaked shirt in both hands. To Jieret, caught aback as the Shadow Master swayed on his feet, the Mad Prophet cried in rebuke, “What more must you have? Kingdom law has been satisfied. Daelion himself! A crown prince’s blood oath alone should have satisfied that the charge of dark sorcery was false. Your duty could have demanded far less, since Caolle himself stood as witness.”

With no gap for reply, he turned his invective toward the prince braced upright in his hands. “By Sithaer, you’re freezing! Where’s Cattrick? Wasn’t anyone aboard to share the watch on your sloop? How long were you out there, manning the helm in the storm?”

“Galleys,” said Arithon, abruptly too worn to fuel his own manic fury. “Seven, with registry flags out of Capewell. I lost them six days ago, off the shoals of Carithwyr.” Against every precedent, he failed to resist as Dakar pressed him to sit. The drum of the rain nearly canceled his speech. “Cattrick’s still on the mainland. I meant him to stay. He’s agreed to return to my employ.”

“He’s a fool, then.” Dakar shoved past Jieret, who felt awkward and in the way. Displaced wing feathers fluttered helter-skelter as the spellbinder cleared the trunk and flung up the rickety lid. “I won’t ask what you promised him.”

Folded on the pallet, Arithon said nothing. His face did not show, his head being bent and resting on his knees. The fire in its makeshift bracket across the drum tower had finally ignited the oiled rags. Golden light limned his appalling exhaustion. His loose, sailhand’s cottons hung off his gaunt frame, except where heavy wet had slicked the cloth to his flanks. His wrists showed each ridge of old scars and taut sinew, and the cut on his hand bled too freely.

“Liege, let me help,” Jieret begged.

“Find him a blanket,” Dakar ordered, terse, then rummaged through his things, and snatched out linen strips and tied a pressure wrap over Arithon’s gashed hand. “Idiot,” he murmured. “You used that damned blade like a butcher. Got tendons laid bare. When the bleeding’s controlled, you’ll need to be sewn, or risk scarring that may mar your music.”

“My throat isn’t cut. I can sing.” Arithon lilted a slurred line of doggerel taken from a dockside ballad. Then, as Jieret bent down to swaddle him in wool, his maundering humor fled before desperate focus. “Why are you here?” he demanded. A deep tremor racked him. He locked his teeth through the spasm, then ground on in unswerving logic, “Had that parchment reached your hand in Rathain, Dakar’s right. Caolle could have refuted those charges.”

“My liege, not now.” Jieret scarcely noticed the tug as Dakar snatched the blanket from his fist. “The other news that brought me can wait.”

“Ah, no!” Arithon shoved off the wool the Mad Prophet sought to drape over him. His eyes raked up, fever bright. “I won’t have that sleep spell you’ve slipped through the weave.” He shot to his feet, restored to command through animate, blistering irritation. “By your oath as caithdein, Jieret, speak.”

The moment hung, its tension spun out in maniacal wind and the distanced percussion of thunder. Leaked droplets pattered under the sailcloth. The torch spat and hissed, fingered by drafts until every shadow seemed crawlingly alive. Black haired, baleful, Arithon waited, his presence stillness incarnate. He was not a patient man. The fretted, willful energy he used to avert collapse seemed nursed from a leashed spark of violence, as if his heart’s peace had been razed off in Vastmark, to leave a core of acid-etched steel.

Jieret quailed before apprehension. This was no stranger he confronted, but his crown prince, scarred and haunted by the trials brought down by the Mistwraith’s dire curse. The spring’s prophetic dream lodged too vividly in recall, with its wrenching potential for tragedy. The vision was terrifying, final: the wide square paved in brick, centered by its cordon of guardsmen and the unpainted rise of the scaffold, pennoned in the dazzling glitter of gold cord and sunwheel banners. His very pulse seemed to throb to the chant of packed onlookers. He shook off the mesmerizing hold of remembrance, in thought or utterance unwilling to grapple the silver-bright length of the executioner’s sword, then the scream of this same prince, fallen.

“I had an augury on your Grace’s life,” he rasped, torn by his need to be finished.

“Oh, how merry!” Arithon exclaimed, sardonic. “My fate’s already wound in auguries like tripping strings. No. Don’t plod through the hysterical details. Let me have just the bare facts.”

“You must listen!” cried Jieret, frightened by the dismissal. “After the slaughter at Tal Quorin, would you take my gifted dreams lightly?”

“But I don’t.” Unrepentant, Arithon accepted a blanket from Dakar that was combed free of furtive seals to bring sleep. He flicked the wool across his wet frame, winced as he fumbled a one-handed clasp, then stepped back to forestall more assistance. “I can manage. Am doing so, in fact. Your Sight does run true, more’s the pity. But for the sake of Rathain, I’d have preferred to be spared the unnecessary favor. As my oathsworn caithdein, your presence here can’t improve my wretched odds of surviving.” He spun, tripped over the stool in a startling turn of spoiled grace. “Now give me the details without any melodrama.”

“The time seemed high summer,” Jieret resumed, ferociously bland. “A public execution, under town auspice, with every appropriate trapping.”

“How splendid and trite. How predictable!” Arithon gasped back shrilling laughter. Perhaps goaded on by his caithdein’s sharp recoil, he bit back like salt in a sore, “All right, my sworn lord, your duty’s been met to the last grasping letter of the law. By kingdom charter, I’ve been properly tried and warned. Now for love of the realm, you are free. Return to Rathain. The fishing sloop that brought you sails tomorrow for Carithwyr on my personal orders. Her captain was told to expect you on board. You will cross High King Eldir’s neutral realm of Havish to reach your homeland, and avoid another tangle with Tysan’s headhunters.”

“Go,” Dakar urged, cued by a mix of dread and epiphany, since every shred of bad news out of Tysan would have emerged through that prior exchange with the fishermen. Arithon was not sanguine for very good reason, beside being too spent to cope. The Mad Prophet grabbed Jieret’s elbow, wide-eyed and imploring. “Come away. What you’re seeing’s not temper, but a mannerless plea to be alone.”

The clansman stayed fixed, his bleak, considered gaze upon the motionless form of his prince. He looked as if he might speak.

The Mad Prophet plugged his ears, shut his eyes, and cringed like a dog that expected a kick.

Yet Jieret held silent. When no explosion came from the figure under the blanket, the spellbinder cracked one eye open.

“For mercy’s sake, Dakar, just get him out,” Arithon stated in hoarse, deadened misery.

Like an obedient, fat ninepin bowling down a young oak, the Mad Prophet plowed Rathain’s young caithdein into prudent retreat through the doorway.