Читать книгу Grand Conspiracy - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 17

The sealed orders from Avenor reached the small settlement known as Watercross in the shortened days of late autumn. There, the river route through Ilswater intersected the trade road that spanned Caithwood, linking Valenford to Quarn and the southern seaports of Tysan. Built at the threshold of the ancient stand of forest, the massive old land bridge, with its mossy stone pilings, spanned the river in the elegant arches which bespoke the masterful skill of centaur masons. Since the departure of the Paravians, mankind had made free with the axe. Five inns clustered by the verge, a congested accretion of multiple wings of timber raised three storeys high. These were fronted by a commodious barge dock, and boasted between them a post stable and a prosperous smithy. The streetside cluster of shops fanned into a disordered tangle of clapboard cottages, each with a cow and a garden patch. The steadings were inhabited by the families of serving girls who had married rivermen or drovers, and raised sprawling families whose lifeblood was tuned to the movement of commerce.

The summer’s campaign to suppress Caithwood’s clansmen had spurred wider change. The inns were jammed to screaming capacity, each room and attic housing crown officers and stockpiles of perishable supplies. In response to demand, every Watercross resident had rented out bedrooms and haylofts at extortionist prices, then relocated their displaced and bickering offspring in the crannies of pantries and woodsheds. Talk of new building abounded, while tents and picket lines crowded the riverbank, and more timber fell to clear acreage. Amid the chewed ends of stumps and the trodden, pocked earth quilted over with flame-bright swatches of fallen leaves, the orderly tents of an Alliance encampment nestled into the river’s south bank. Its hub of command was a sagging board building that, in springtime, had served as a pig shack.

The sow and her farrow had long since graced the pot. Under the damp thatch that had been their last shelter, Etarra’s Lord Harradene snapped off his gloves and stamped the caked mud from his boots. The day officer delivered the most urgent news through the noise of his jangling impatience, while a gesture saw the wrapped packets of dispatches accepted by his breathless equerry. Harradene stilled as he heard the reports. His cliff-edged frown stayed quarried in place as he learned that the camp north of Caithwood had withdrawn in disorder back to Valenford.

‘No, don’t repeat that,’ he snapped. ‘I heard damn all the first time. Puling ninnies, every milk-nosed captain who let his company turn tail. Fact’s known well enough. Fellowship conjury never kills.’ He slapped the royal writ on the trestle with the maps and glowered at his ring of cringing officers. ‘I don’t care horse apples if some fools have fled from a display of arcane posturing! Your prince wants a fire. Therefore, this stand of wood’s going to burn! We’re driving clan dogs out of hiding with singed tails, and the crown’s bounties won’t wait for the hindmost.’

Through a spattering of cheers, someone’s raspy question prevailed. ‘Is this wise?’

The boldest of the sergeants appended a protest. ‘The Sorcerer claimed he would waken the trees.’

Lord Commander Harradene spun back, his spiked brows still furrowed, and the shoulders under his sunwheel surcoat bristled as a bear’s before a charge. ‘Oh, did he indeed?’ His rankling, Etarran sarcasm thundered, sifting fine dust from the thatch. ‘And what will that mean, do you think? That hundred-year-old oaks are likely to rise up and walk? That greenwood is going to bear steel?’ He turned in a tight circle, leaving no officer unwithered by his scathing contempt. ‘Is there anyone else present with the brains of a chicken?’

No one spoke or moved. Pent silence expanded like poison, sawn through at a distance by barking dogs and the wailing of some mother’s toddler.

‘Good!’ Lord Harradene slapped the wet ends of his gloves against the dulled mail of his byrnie. ‘Now show me you’ve kept the two bollocks Ath gave a newborn. In one hour, I want ten relays of messengers assembled. They’ll bear my orders the length and breadth of Taerlin. By dawn on the day of the new moon, every man marching in the service of the Light will be in position to torch trees. We’ll have archers in line to take down the flushed clansmen. Hereafter, these roads will be safe enough for a naked virgin to travel unscathed!’

Ahead of all argument, Lord Harradene snarled his ultimatum. ‘Any man who fears trees may turn in his insignia right here, right now, and go home stripped of all honors. Ones who run later, or ones who drag feet will be burned and run through by the sword as no less than Fellowship Sorcerers’ collaborators!’

The pig shack emptied to a stampede of boots, and the last couriers streamed away well ahead of the hour allocated for their departure. Some galloped north and east, mounted upon fast horses and given escort by tried veterans in sunwheel surcoats. Others ducked spray from the oars of swift boats, commandeered from trade service by crown authority. These careened downriver into the wilds, their course sped by the winding ribbon of the Ilswater’s lower branch in its rush to meet the sea estuary.

The trees dripped and brooded in the mist-heavy air. They exhibited no change as their sovereign territory became invaded by the Alliance couriers, who dispersed the written orders for Lord Commander Harradene’s campaign of fire and sword. Their stillness magnified the trepidation of the men, who rode with ears tuned to the wind in the leaves and heard nothing, only autumn’s chorus of dying vegetation as the unmoored foliage chattered and danced in the gusts. In the boats, beneath breaking cloud, sweat-drenched oarsmen watched the shadowed deeps on the bank, prodding at waterbound roots with unease as they moored to make camp for the night.

Yet no living tree displayed any sign of an uncanny movement. The fiery pageant of changed maples unveiled at each bend in the river, their outlines punch-cut and serene. The hollows wore carpets of scarlet and gold, turned by the furtive brush of night’s frosts presaging the advent of winter.

Whatever the Sorcerer Asandir threatened, no Alliance scout’s sharpened vigilance detected anything untoward or amiss. Mice continued to nest in blankets and stores, seeking shelter against the chill; the hunting owls sailed the starry dark, silent and sleek as lapped silk. Days, the hawks circled and called from a blue enameled sky. Geese clamored south in straggling chevrons as they had for time beyond memory. No one saw oak groves tear up roots or talk. If every place a man trod to seek firewood, his steps felt stalked by hidden watchers, that unease more likely stemmed from the clan scouts who shadowed their movements, unseen.

The spate of outrageous speculation peaked and subsided, restored to a general complacency as Lord Harradene’s orders reached the far-flung Alliance encampments, and the days waxed and waned without incident. The rank-and-file troops who occupied the deep wilds were experienced and staunch. They curbed all explosions of foolish hysteria lest they draw in the prankish attention of iyats, the invisible fiends that played living havoc with a man’s kit and gear. Evenings were spent wrapping fire arrows with cotton, or binding oiled rag to pine billets. The casks of pitch and resin that would fuel their brands were drawn from supply, and tallied in readiness for action.

Across Caithwood, the ordered companies marched into position, unmolested beyond the nipped flush of cold fingers and the paned skins of ice on the bogs. No signs appeared of arcane workings. The only change any troop captain could pinpoint was the scarcity of traps set by the lurking bands of clansmen.

‘Well enough, they know when to tuck tail and run,’ dismissed Lord Harradene when the duty officer drew the oddity to his attention. ‘We already know they were warned by that Sorcerer. Should they stay, do you think, just to burn?’

The eve of new moon arrived in due course. Over the jittering light of night campfires, tucked under cloaks against the wind, the archers waxed longbows and cracked bawdy jokes lest the silence be claimed by the rush of tossed leaves, or the bared scrape of oak twigs find voice. Dawn would see all of Caithwood aflame, by the grace of Prince Lysaer’s dispensation. If some men who had families lay awake out of pity for clan children and wives destined to fall in the carnage, Tysan’s headhunters celebrated. Other scarred, grizzled veterans recalled the bloody knives that had dispatched their wounded with no mercy given at Tal Quorin.

‘’Tweren’t natural,’ those whispered. ‘Our wounded all died, throat-cut and choking, done in by the hands of mere boys.’

Two hours before the new moon’s pale dawn, at chosen locations across Caithwood, every man not on watch as a sentry sharpened and readied his weapons. The archers checked arrows and quarrels, and positioned the casks of oil and pitch. No one sensed any flare of worked sorcery. Trees loomed dumb as they always had, amid their shed mantles of leaves. Against black, forest stillness and a nagging, keen chill, troops bolstered their courage with whatever cruel memories could fan their passion for vengeance.

The graying east sky brought a scouring north breeze that promised an auspicious campaign. In the posted positions set forth by Lord Harradene, the most hardened veterans wolfed down cold bread. They teased laggards with jokes as they girded on mail and weapons in the steadily strengthening half-light. By horn call and barked order, they formed ranks and fanned out, the forefront to wield torches and fire arrows, and the rest set at strategic points to intercept whatever might flee from the heart of the lethal conflagration.

‘On time, and no quarter,’ read Harradene’s last orders. The fires would be kindled at sunrise, with no reprieve given for clan prisoners, grown man or woman, child or newborn. The Etarran field troops blew on chilled fingers. They eyed the dense trees, their ink-blown branches entangled against the brightening skyline. The gusts smelled of dead leaves, and cookfires, and oiled metal; ordinary, even surreal before the butchering bloodshed to come. Today, fair retribution for the long string of massacres at Tal Quorin, at Minderl Bay, and at Dier Kenton Vale, each one the design of murdering clan war bands in collusion with the Master of Shadow.

Now came the fierce reckoning for so many dead, and a long-overdue salve for the interests of trade. Caithwood was to be cleansed of barbarians by decree of the Prince of the Light.

The Alliance ranks stilled in the mist-laden gloom, prepared with tinder and steel. They fingered the honed edges on their knives and drew swords; tested the grip on halberd and lance and soothed their restive horses, sweating in anticipation. A long-sought, elusive quarry would be theirs to bring down. The sunwheel banners fluttered in the stiffening north breeze, and the leaves spoke, scratching, against the eaves of the forest.

One moment rushed into the next. Under light turned pearlescent, the eastern sky brightened into a sheer, cloudless citrine. The black borders of Caithwood limned in silhouette, the wind-tossed verge of an ocean of linked trees, their collective awareness and their language dumb noise to more limited human ears. On that poised instant, a Fellowship Sorcerer spoke a word: the Paravian rune that meant one and which tied all things in Ath’s creation into the prime chord of unity.

The next second, the reddened edge of the sun sliced above the horizon.

Illumination speared the heavens. At each of two hundred and eighty locations, Alliance horn calls rang out; the cried order clove through the burn of chill wind, to execute Prince Lysaer’s sealed order. Men steadied drawn steel. Excited fingers grasped flints, began the decisive move to strike sparks and set pitch-soaked arrows and cressets alight.

There came no connection. On one Sorcerer’s word, a wave of awareness crossed time and space, sped fleeting as light on the cognizant tide that passed from one tree to the next. The moment lagged into an unnatural sense of hesitation. The stir of the wind gained a surreal impetus, and the susurrant scratch of dead leaves acquired a magnified roar of wild sound. That nexus of vibration caught the conscious mind and sucked human thought into a whirlpool that overwhelmed all reasoned continuity. No live thing was exempt. The deer ceased their browsing with wide, glassy eyes. Hawks on the branches mantled and blinked, for the moment too muddled for flight. Among the two-legged, whether clansman or soldier, that pause gripped the heart like old roots. Busy purpose made no sense. Logic lost meaning. A peace deep and vast as the slow turn of seasons, the ordered dance of a planet’s annual journey round its star grasped and drowned every shred of animal identity.

For that one given instant, the speech of the trees reigned in smothering supremacy. The staunch patience of fixed roots and the wine taste of sun rinsed warp and weft through the weave of all breathing, warm-blooded awareness. Iron prejudice shattered. Those Alliance-sworn men who were townbred and ignorant now learned what the hawk, and the deer, and the insect had always known, and what Caithwood’s clans kept alive by tradition. Their unbroken, old ways reaffirmed the immutable truth through words that gave thanks, and through timeworn, small rituals which renewed by expression of gratitude. That trees were alive. Their gifts and their bounty might be taken at will. They could be raped and robbed, or they could be acknowledged, a trust of consent sealed in the language of humility, granting each bough and trunk its due recognition for generous sacrifice.

Yet the wisdom of Paravian law had dimmed with the passage of centuries. Men now walked Athera who gave back no such grace. Whether the lapse stemmed from blind carelessness or the vice of acquisitive greed did not matter. The chain-linked communion that was forest discerned no gray shade of distinction. Trees grasped no code but the one that acknowledged the grand chord of Ath’s primal order. They owned no concept to forsake whole awareness for individual separation.

No second was given; no freed train of thought broke the noose for shock or humanborn fear. The vise grip of the dream on men’s minds was unyielding, a crescendo wrought of numbers too massive to deny, each note tuned to urgent communion.

The blow fell, bloodless, in that trampling breadth of vision. Lost in the vast ocean of forbearance that defined the existence of greenwood, the trees’ vision reclaimed hate and violence for peace. Townborn minds stilled and sank into an abiding continuity that frayed sensibility, and awoke a remorse without mercy: of wood cut, unblessed; of saplings uprooted. Each thoughtless twig broken in callous disregard framed a cry of acid-etched clarity. The impact stunned beating hearts like a wound. A day’s pitiless industry, which sought to turn fire and steel to rend life, ripped a chasm of shame through shocked conscience.

Men screamed without voice as the dream of the wood flooded through them and clamped like the embrace of black earth.

There came no reprieve, no concept for pity. Each hand that had moved with intent to strike spark; each arm, to grasp weapons for slaughter; all dropped, limp. Names and identity and meaningful purpose submerged without trace in the flux. What remained was the everlasting communion that passed between root and leaf and spread branch. The peace of the forest seized the mind like fast ice and held with the endurance of centuries.

Determined experience served none in that hour. The strongest and best of drilled veterans gave way, sapped of will and inclination. Any who ventured near Caithwood unprepared, all those who embraced human purpose beyond the encompassing calm of live trees was undone. To the last rank and file, to the most steadfast captain, the Alliance veterans buckled at the knees. They dropped swords and tinder, crumpled like rags, or slipped reins through slack hands and toppled off startled horses. When the messengers came riding from Watercross to inquire, they found Lord Commander Harradene’s troops felled to a man, sprawled comatose on the cold ground.

Flurried searches confirmed: not one Alliance supporter inside Caithwood was left standing. Nor did the camp servants who lurked on the fringes remain in command of their wits. Dazed, even weeping, they forgot their own names, while livestock and woods creatures raided their supplies, and their oxen browsed loose through the brush.

How the clans fared, no city man knew, since no one saw hide nor hair of them.

In the depths of a glen, ankle deep in red oak leaves, Asandir lifted long, lean fingers from the bark of the ancient patriarch that ruled Caithwood. He murmured a run of liquid, sweet syllables, a blessing framed in the tongue of the vanished Paravians.

Clear of eye, his mind and his purpose vised to ruthless alignment, he stepped back from the tree whose compliance had keyed a whole forest’s salvation. Subtle as shadow in his featureless leathers, he traversed drifted leaves with a step like a wraith’s and retrieved the tied reins of his horse. He tightened the animal’s slack girth and remounted. Two hours’ ride through the breezy afternoon brought him to a clearing in a glen, where he met the eldest in the circle of clan chieftains who maintained their caithdein’s guard over Caithwood.

Cenwaith was a great-grandmother, wizened, but not frail. Tiny hands with the weathered grain of burled walnut clutched a bronze-studded quarterstaff. By the scars crisscrossing her knuckles, she had wielded weapons throughout a hard lifetime. Her jacket of fox fur blended her diminutive form amid the changed leaves of the maples.

‘How long?’ she asked him, her voice the aged quaver of water-smoothed stone, rinsed by a tumbling brook.

Asandir paused, his gaze turned to flint beneath a fringe of dark lashes. ‘Days. Maybe five, before the first caravan from the south can use the road without leaving prone bodies. No man bearing steel will escape, even then.’ He brushed a caught leaf from his hair and firmed the reins to stall his inquisitive horse from nipping the sleeve of his shirt. ‘No victim will suffer, rest assured of that much. The awareness of trees regards time very differently. Lysaer’s troops who fell senseless will lie in stasis until they find release from the dream. Your people must take flight as soon as they may. Abide by my warnings. They’ll stay safe as long as none breaks the covenant laid down to appease the roused might of the greenwood.’

‘No steel and no fire?’ The grandame wheezed out a fluttery laugh. ‘Our folk know their place. We’ve laid in stores to hold us through the next fortnight.’ Before then, the last clanfolk would have slipped past Lord Harradene’s unstrung cordon. Their fighting strength would regroup in the rugged mountains in Camris. The young who had families would cross Mainmere estuary by boat to claim sanctuary in Havish. The Alliance’s campaign of persecution was this day deferred, with Tysan’s threatened bloodlines granted reprieve for continuance.

That such survival came at a price, the old woman and the Sorcerer never doubted. Tysan’s trade route to the east was now irremediably severed from the moment northern snows closed the passes; and with slave-bearing galleys disbarred from King Eldir’s coastline, the crisis would find no relief.

Blame for those woes would only lend impetus to Lysaer s’Ilessid’s pitched campaign of intolerance. Asandir foresaw the cost of this day’s reprieve written in bleak terms on the future: more armed troops raised for the purpose of war against mage talent and, ultimately, to hunt down and kill by the Mistwraith’s fell geas, the Shadow Master, who was Rathain’s last living prince. Too aggrieved for speech, he moved to return his borrowed horse.

Cenwaith’s firm touch caught his wrist in restraint. ‘You’ll not be staying, Kingmaker?’

The Sorcerer shook his head, the weariness bearing upon his broad shoulders a yoke he dared not defer for his own needs or comfort. ‘I cannot.’ He gathered himself, while her kind eyes sought and failed to plumb the extent of his urgency. ‘The troubles I forsook in Midhalla to come here have strengthened and grown in my absence.’

Courtesy kept her from pressing with questions. Since he need not seed pointless worry at his back, he answered with direct speech. ‘The trees will lapse back into somnolence on their own, once they’re left undisturbed, and if the crown rescinds its sealed edict to enact their destruction by fire.’

Caravan masters would eventually learn not to hack down live wood. Nor would Tysan’s leagues of armed headhunters fare reiving for scalps with their former impunity. An eerie unrest would settle and linger. In the odd, haunted glen, the oldest stands of forest would cling to isolate pockets of self-awareness. Years would pass, perhaps a century or more, before equilibrium was finally restored.

‘The Alliance offenders who are comatose will be carted away and cared for, if not by the crown, then by their own friends and families.’ A mote of thin sunlight struck through the chill air, and lent fleeting warmth to farseeing gray eyes as Asandir spoke his conclusion. ‘The trained men of war and those minds most firmly committed to violence may linger in trance. But unless they were sickly before this began, no lasting harm will befall them.’

Not so easily solved were the dangers in Mirthlvain left at large in his haste to cross the continent; nor must the stout heart give way before sorrow, that the act which spared Caithwood must force Taerlin’s clanborn to forsake their beloved home territory. ‘The forest will guard itself well enough. Your people can safely return in due time. Once Sethvir finds his way back from the grimward, he will act to settle what loose ends he can. The trees here will abide by his reassurance and release those lives held in abeyance.’

A gust raked the grove. Leaves fell, gilt and chestnut and flame red, ripped into capricious eddies. Cenwaith pressed thin hands into her fur jacket, the quarterstaff rested against the straight frailty of her stance. Her dark eyes tracked the flight of a jay and returned no reproach for fate’s cruelties. Then the locked moment ended. Her regrets stayed sealed into stoic silence. She cocked her head, her sparrow’s pert gesture infused with the implacable will to survive the onslaught of bitter storms. ‘Keep the horse, Kingmaker. May our gift of him speed you to trouble-free passage.’

Asandir’s leashed austerity broke before a smile of revealing warmth. ‘My need is far less.’ He unwound long fingers from the leather rein and clasped hers in their place with a moth touch that promised the endurance of mountains. ‘There will be strayed Alliance war mounts trailing their bridles and hanging themselves up in thickets. There I can borrow without hardship. Let my thanks be the more for your care of me, lady. Carry my blessing with your people, and pass on my regards to your caithdein.’

He left her then without fanfare, a reticent figure who fared forth on foot, mantled in forbidding solitude. His presence claimed no grandeur. The formal blue cloak with its loomed silver ribbon stayed bundled inside the rolled blanket he carried slung over his shoulder. His long strides bore him into the deepwood with the unconscious grace of the king stag. Nor did he look back as the grandame waved him on his way in farewell.

Already his restless thoughts bent toward Mainmere. For stark necessity, another word of thanks he owed the reigning clan duchess there must be deferred to blind haste. The spawned horrors of Mirthlvain would wait for no niceties. Shepherds on the Radmoore downs would see their flocks slaughtered if the seasonal migration from the mire was not swiftly curtailed.

Asandir quickened pace. Harried as he measured the hours he had lost in oblivious communion with the trees, he knew he must raise the power of the lane with the utmost dispatch and transfer his presence out of Tysan.

The first winter snows rimed the roads when the Alliance courier bearing word back from Caithwood reached the seat of state government at Avenor. Gace Steward gave the shivering, chilled rider a weasel’s darting inspection, asked once, and was shown an authentic set of seals from the supply officer stationed at Watercross.

‘Come along.’ A discerning intelligence lurked behind the royal house steward’s furtive, quick carriage. He snapped narrow fingers for the servants to open the door wider. Against the scream of raw wind and the stream of the wax lights set in the sconces by the entry, he beckoned the tired courier inside. ‘Follow me. His Grace of the Light is at light supper with his Lord Commander, Erdane’s resident delegate, and eight city ministers of trade, but for news out of Taerlin, I promise you’ll have his ear.’

Too weary to have scraped the mud and rime from his boots, even had time been given, the courier directed his stumbling step down the carpet that paved the wide hallway. The chink of his spurs cast thin echoes off the vaulted ceiling, and his cloak slapped, wet, at his ankles. His impression of gilt-trimmed opulence framed too great a contrast, after his weeks of enduring chapping gusts off the river and reeling, long hours ahorse on roads choked in wet snow and darkness. A liveried servant pattered ahead and flung open the door to the banquet hall. The light flooded outward, too bright, and packed with a heat of perfumes and rich sauces. Noise rolled into the corridor, a barrage of argumentative voices fit to stagger the exhausted courier where he stood.

Gace Steward’s clever grip set him steady. ‘Just wait. I’ll have you inside for your audience straightaway.’ As if the prospect of injecting disaster into the scene’s rampant discord amused him, he plowed like an eel through the close-press of Avenor’s shouting dignitaries.

On the sanctuary of the raised dais, only two men held their tempers in check. The Prince of the Light sat with his elegant, ringed fingers lightly curled on the stem of his wineglass. The other hand lay flat on the damask tablecloth, stilled amid a spread of gleaming cutlery and food that had not yet been touched. He wore no diamonds. A doublet roped with gold and white pearls hazed his outline in the glow of soft light, a display of pale magnificence artfully set off by the indigo tapestry hung behind his gilt chair. Beside him, dark panther to his bright grace, the Lord Commander, Sulfin Evend, leaned against a pilaster with his narrow hands hooked through the bronze-studded harness of his baldric.

Once a captain at arms in the Hanshire guard, he had eyes like poured ice water, a square jaw, thin lips, and a ruthless penchant for analysis that posed even the event of light supper as a mapped-out strategy of war. His whetted vigilance encompassed the room. Through the cadence of the servants who refilled carafes and platters, his slitted gaze noted Gace Steward’s furtive entry with the infallible assessment of a predator.

He unfolded crossed arms, bent, and spoke a word to the Exalted Prince.

Lysaer showed no change of expression. Intent and possessed of a monumental calm, he continued to listen as the current complainant shot to his feet, jewels sparking to his purpled state of fury.

‘… there’s no recourse and no redress! Every galley sent southward through Havish with slave oarsmen gets struck helpless by Fellowship sorcery!’

Hats jerked, feathers trembled, and vintage wine sloshed in its calyx of crystal as the uneasy company grumbled and muttered, engrossed in remonstrance for recent infamy. Angry sentences broke through the hubbub like the crack of stone shot through a hailstorm.

‘We can’t extradite the prisoners!’ The exasperated consonants of Lord Eilish, Minister of the Royal Treasury, spattered through the grim background of noise. ‘Yes, it’s the same damned numskull policy men bled to throw down with the uprising. Yes, we already tried. There’s no chance for ransom.’

His woolly head snagged in the turmoil like fleece off a peasant’s card, Avenor’s seneschal stabbed a harried finger and reviewed the core problem yet again to quell a latecomer’s uninformed temerity. ‘Word came through under High King Eldir’s seal just this morning. His Grace has freed the chained slaves from the benches. He won’t negotiate. Every officer and captain caught in breach of charter law will face his tribunal and be indicted under Havish’s Crown Justice.’

‘Sail’s no help at all!’ pealed an importunate voice. ‘Every laden vessel to strike out across Mainmere gets waylaid by barbarian pirates!’

More caustic, the delegate from Erdane slammed down his fist; cutlery and pastries jumped and resettled to a clashing complaint from fine porcelain. ‘Such marauding is done in hulls stolen from us! They’ve been outfitted with weapons and trained crews by hell’s minion! Arithon s’Ffalenn is the plaguing curse that’s gutting the marrow of our trade!’

Profits were being eaten alive by clan pests crying vengeance for kinfolk, branded and chained at the oar. Sweating in ermine too dense for the heat, the minister of the glass guild at last hurled the gauntlet. ‘What is your vaunted Alliance of Light doing to cap the bleeding breach?’

‘What’s being done? The crown seneschal hurled back, the stringy wattles of his neck creased by his massive chains of office. ‘Answer me this! Just why would we have four companies of crack Etarrans maintained at Alliance expense, given arms and standing orders to burn the clan dens out of Caithwood?’

Against that broil of seething, high temper, Gace Steward wormed onto the dais. Lord Commander Sulfin Evend straightened and met him. Tiercel pale eyes glinted like turned steel as he heard the man’s breathy, fast message.

‘News!’ he cracked over the burgeoning noise. ‘A courier’s brought word back from Watercross.’

The Prince of the Light pushed back his chair. He stood up, his grace like subtle, poured light before his less polished guests and court ministers. At his movement, the baying complainants faltered. Shamed by the calm in his steady blue gaze, they shuffled aside and made way for the courier.

His travel-stained cloak and mud-splashed boots screamed disaster the instant he entered. His stumbling step raised a jolting clangor of roweled spurs through the delicate chink of state jewelry. The last yammering talk crashed to blighted whispers. The scintillant glint of rubies and cut gemstones froze, nailed still within a tableau of choked quiet. Avenor’s favored dignitaries turned heads and clasped hands, breasts locked in an epidemic seizure of stopped breath.

The messenger reached the dais stair, caught and braced by Sulfin Evend. Against the gold-trimmed tablecloth, he folded to his knees in a homage that verged upon total collapse. ‘Your Grace, Prince Exalted.’ Every mile he had ridden rasped through his spare words, a cry of appeal for his sovereign’s mercy against the ill news that he carried. He offered up the sealed roll of his dispatch with hands that shook beyond recourse.

‘Give the rider my chair,’ Prince Lysaer said, his shaft of exasperation for the lapse of humanity exhibited by his own stunned staff. ‘See him comfortable at once.’

Caught staring along with everyone else, Gace Steward started, then leaped to obey that ominous, struck tone of command. A brisk snap of fingers summoned a page to bring wine in a crystal goblet.

‘Sit,’ Lysaer said. ‘Since I see that the missive you carry is secure, you may count your mission as accomplished. Please accept your due honor and my praise for the hardships imposed on you by the season.’ Nor did he move to accept the dispatch until the man had been settled, and had drained the glass of Carithwyr red to the dregs. The creased parchment changed hands in resignation, not fear. The courier’s gratitude for small kindness served as fuel, cranking the onlookers to an unbearable, fever-pitched tension.

All eyes tracked the Prince Exalted, poised on the dais with the scroll case in hand but not yet opened. The seal was genuine, its imprint that of the Etarran commander who captained the campaign to rout the clan enclaves in Taerlin. Yet the superscription was not in Lord Harradene’s bold script; his cipher had been imprinted in haste by the secretary posted with the supply train at Watercross.

The glow on Lysaer’s pearls hazed to sudden motion as he ripped through the ribbons and wax. He read, while his courtiers hung, their anxiety unrequited by his majestic demeanor.

He reached the end and looked up, locked in private shock. Then, overcome, he closed his eyes, while the last bloom of color receded from his fair skin. ‘We are to mourn,’ he announced in a strangled, gruff utterance. Brute strength sustained him. He regained full voice. His announcement sang out with hammering force and rocked the far corners of the room. ‘Every brave man who stood ground for the Light in Caithwood has been struck senseless by conjury set loose by a Fellowship Sorcerer!’

An indrawn gasp swept the company.

‘Worse,’ Lysaer said, ‘there’s a haunting by trees that has closed the road to armed caravans.’

An explosion of fiends in Avenor’s main market would have created less havoc; this fresh disaster slammed home even as the first blizzards choked the high passes through Camris.

‘Grace save us, now even our land routes are strangled!’ pealed the distressed Minister of the Royal Treasury.

Before wailing pandemonium could upend the whole room, the Prince of the Light met injured rage with a cry of derisive astonishment. ‘Did you expect our triumph over tyranny could be simple? Or did you believe the Fellowship of Seven would abdicate its stranglehold of power for this, our first stir of opposition?’ Avid as white flame, Lysaer paused. His gaze raked the choleric tangle of courtiers, and his rebuke rolled on like a dousing of pure arctic ice. ‘You amaze me, afraid as you are for your gold, when four companies of dedicated Etarrans lie stricken. They have offered their lives on foreign soil for a cause far more grave and far-reaching than a short-term hoarding of wealth.’

‘Our coin paid for those troops,’ a man in claret velvet dared from the rearmost ranks.

‘Are you so faint of heart you can cry for results, but not weather even one setback?’ Lysaer’s tone shaded into ineffable sorrow. ‘I am shamed, then. Count endurance so lightly, then expect to fall short! The course we embark on will not ride on one effort, nor even flourish without a concerted, long-range vision of sacrifice. Upon petty greed and divisive hearts will the Sorcerers and the evil embodied by the Shadow Master achieve our sorry defeat. Men will weep then, and not just for one season’s lost profits in trade. No. The suffering price will be written and paid by our children’s descendants for all time!’

Tense stillness descended, stirred by the shifting of hats and corpulent weight, and the sweating of bodies discomfited by constraining state clothes and pressed velvets. Only Erdane’s man seemed unmoved, as a volatile defensiveness swept through the gathering, the smoldering spark of unease touched against their deep-seated fear of dispossession.

Prince Lysaer gave the guildsmen’s sullen quiet no quarter. ‘Very well. If the great citizens of Avenor lack the character and dedication to sustain the full course of endeavor, I shall expend every resource I have to remember humanity first of all.’

An eruption of protests rattled the salvers, with the shrill, angered cries of Avenor’s guild ministers ringing the loudest of all.

‘What’s to be done?’ snapped the Minister of the Royal Treasury. ‘You have no vast funds to wage a winter campaign, and your dowry’s been promised to the shipyard.’

A hard, weighty pause; then Prince Lysaer turned his back. His appeal was presented to no one else but his steadfast Lord Commander. ‘You have my direct order, and an open note on my possessions. Sell every furnishing, every tapestry, every chest of gold plate in my household and use the proceeds to succor those fallen. Give all in my power to provide for their care. You will make free of Tysan’s crown resources, and call the full garrison back into field service. Their immediate muster will lend you the muscle to move every man stricken down into dry quarters and comfort.’

Against the dismayed rustle arisen at his back, his words lashed with stinging reprimand. ‘Every captain or soldier who refuses my summons will be turned off without pay! More than that, any city too engrossed in self-interest to supply aid will be cast outside my protection.’

He exhorted no more, spoke of no retribution. In suspense, his courtiers craned forward. They expected the usual smooth flourish of statecraft that would frame the grand plan to build forces and see justice done.

Lysaer gave back the barest, leashed glance of exasperation. His carriage displayed his most acid contempt as he dismissed his Lord Commander to shoulder the duties set upon him.

The impact struck home: outside of all precedent, there would be no fiery speech of inspiration, no brilliant new strategy to banish the perils of high sorcery.

The Prince Exalted awarded the grave majesty of his regard to the mud-splashed courier, who sat dazed with exhaustion in his chair. As though that picked audience was intimately private, he bestowed the magnanimous accolade of his kindness. ‘For your care for your fellow Etarrans, please stay. Sit and sup in my place. Enjoy the best food and drink in good health, for in sad fact, my presence is wasted. The truth is a tragedy, as you see. Avenor begs for no guidance beyond the bare need to see its trade and its merchants feather their own nests, and I was not born, nor gifted with divine powers for the purpose of rich men’s protection.’

A muted flash of his pearls underscored his gesture to summon his page to his side. Then the Prince of the Light stepped down from the dais. Without further ceremony, he swept from the hall, leaving Erdane’s delegate struck thoughtful, and Avenor’s state ministers gawping like fishes tossed onto shores of dry sand.

Early Winter 5653