He did not sound anxious. Excitement woke a gemstone glitter in green eyes, but his tanned forearm was steady as he confronted Uray at guard point.
The man was not so sunk in contempt that the herder's assured poise did not touch him. He resorted to bluster in the uneasy hope he could lay bare some sign of cowed nerves. "Think twice, stripling. You could end up a cripple, and for what? The silver I carry is only as much as a man might toss to a beggar.'
'But I don't beg,' Fionn Areth said loudly. 'And that's silver I haven't got to pay for safe lodging and supper.' Since Uray still hesitated, he seized the initiative and launched off the first, testing lunge.
Uray snapped his blade in a bruising, hard parry, uncaring whether his weight and man's strength were too much for an unseasoned amateur. Steel rang and slid and gave way like a lover, teasing him into a lunge.
Fionn Areth sidestepped like a soft breath of air, shed the force of the thrust just enough to allow the blade to pass over his shoulder. Like a typical garrison soldier accustomed to sparring with the same partners over and over, Uray was that split second slow to recover his overplayed balance. The boy gave way, backwards. He let his blade scissor against his opponent's, then rotated his wrist and effected a bind. Steel snarled on steel. Uray swore, surprised, as his thumb turned and wrenched in the loop of his sword guard. The weapon left his hand with a singing, stressed clang. The clamor as it struck the stone of the jetty belled into a dumbfounded silence.
Fionn Areth flipped back the few strands of hair that had tugged free of the thong. While the guardsmen, the overseer, and the barge convicts gawped, he pressed the loaned sword back into the hand of its owner, and demanded of Uray, 'Pass over the silver you owe me.'
He stepped across the fallen sword, accepted the washed leather wallet that Uray fumbled and gave him. While a chattering throng of blackbirds winged overhead, he retrieved his pony from the overseer. Her tantrums by then had played out. She followed, demure, as he collectedly resumed his interrupted course toward the gatehouse.
'Daelion's cock!' swore the owner of the sword as the pony's sorrel tail vanished into the gloom of the archway. 'A goatboy who's a prodigy, who would have guessed?' He reached out and clapped a mollified Uray on the shoulder, then bent and retrieved the man's dispossessed sword from the causeway. 'I'll buy you beer, man. I owe you that much. After all, it was I who browbeat you into that contest.'
Uray shook his head, still looking bemused as he rubbed the wrenched tendons of his wrist. 'D'you know,' he said, thoughtful, 'if we played things just right, we could win my week's beer coin right back using that boy's talent.'
The mustached guard whistled. 'Why in Sithaer not? He wouldn't have to disarm an opponent. Just hold his own for long enough to outlast expectations.' Teeth flashed in a grin of pure devilment. 'I know just the man to finagle into taking the challenge. Do you suppose that boy would agree to the match if I offered him his pick of the second-rate swords in the armory?'
'Captain Jussey?' Uray lit into wicked conspiracy. 'Himself against a grass-seedy moorlands goatherd? By Ath, that would be a glorious comeuppance for the bruises we've suffered in the practice yard!'
Edged in step by step to join the conversation, the overseer laughed. 'Ask the herder, why not? And if he accepts, tell him I'll pay his night's lodging along with the stabling costs for that ornery witch of a pony.'
* * *
Day spilled like molten gold across Eltair Bay, the long, slanting rays of early sunlight nicked through racing bands of wind-torn, low-bellied clouds. Yet Morriel Prime had no care for the magnificence of the view outside the open curtains of her palanquin. Still laced with the damp of yesterday's driving storm, the cold bit like a flayer's knife. Yet anger, more than the frost in the air, flushed the ancient Prime's nose a brilliant pink. Her black eyes narrowed, couched amid rice-paper wrinkles of displeasure as she snapped a command for her bearers to halt on the verge.
The column of her escort bunched into a racketing snarl as wagons, sumpter mules, and her mounted escort came to a disorderly stop on the steep, rutted track leading into the mountains from Highscarp.
Morriel's querulous demand sliced through the jingle of bits, and creaking axles, and the thin, lonely cries of the marsh birds flocking the misted flats at the bayside. 'Send a circle of six seniors to my side, now!'
A towheaded page boy darted from the shade of the palanquin to gather the peers she required.
Morriel waited, her delicate, claw hands clenched to an obsidian scrying ball. The stone's glassy surface imprinted no natural reflections. Instead of plain sky, or the brightening light sequined over the shifting, gray waters to the east, its black depths showed a scene like an etching stippled in silvered shadows and moving smoke.
In colorless mime between the Prime's palms, a black-haired boy and a surly-faced captain at arms circled, feinted, and crossed swords in a match fight. Above the ghostly and flickering ranks of agitated spectators reared the queer, gabled roofs with stone carvings and talisman dragons that distinguished the city of Daenfal.
'Imbecile boy!' Morriel muttered. Although she had provoked his departure from Araethura as a ploy to unbalance Lirenda, this prank outpaced expectations. She fumed in searing, helpless impatience, while her summons traveled the length of her train and brought robed seniors indecorously scurrying from the comfort of their enclosed wagons. Ill at ease in the wilds, they stumbled in soft shoes over the loose stones and snagged their red-bordered hems in dead burdock.
'I want a ward and a trance melding!' Morriel snapped, while the last of them spoke her breathless obeisance. 'Has Elaira passed through Daenfal yet?'
'She's been and gone, Matriarch,' reported the enchantress who served as the train's ranking seeress. 'Your order for haste was taken to heart. At lane watch this sunrise, she was a full day's journey down the lakeshore east of the river gate.'
Morriel stifled a burst of ill temper. 'Then I have words I want sent to our sisters in residence at Daenfal, and without a second to lose.' Between eggshell knuckles with their blued tracks of veins, the scrying ball enacted its shadow dance reflection of parry and riposte.
'Your will,' said the seeress, too experienced for surprise. She relayed her Prime's decree. A second shuffling scramble erupted as the enchantresses fanned into a circle on the broken, weedy ground. The Prime's bearers scrambled nervously clear, wisely unwilling to stay near the palanquin while the Matriarch raised her powers in conjury. Spell crystals flashed through the clear, morning air, as each enchantress engaged her personal focus and performed the requisite sigils to enact a primary warding. Then, in a dedicated obedience which transcended the rough, roadside setting and showed no dismay for the snags in loomed silk, each sat on her haunches, bent her head, and released her will and awareness. The ritual trance melded their separate talents into a seamless vessel of joined intent.
The breeze caught in that vortex. Bent from its blustering, northwesterly course, it whiplashed into a spiral, crackling the cloth of the enchantresses' cloaks, and snarling the ties of the lead-weighted curtains that flanked the chair in the palanquin. Morriel Prime endured the raw blast. Her back poker straight and her skeletal hands welded to the flickering scrying ball, she weathered the first plunge into bone-hurting chill. Electrical tingles razed her thin skin. As the spell forces built and blazed active, more strayed charges snicked flares of static over her rings and her hair. The Prime poised, as though listening to an unseen litany, while the power raised by her circle of six seniors leveled into a unified force.
The flux reached its peak in one burning, bright moment. Morriel Prime released one hand from the sphere of obsidian. She extended a finger and traced the Prime Matriarch's symbol and seal, then added the paired ciphers which granted her unilateral command. The engaged imperative of her personal seal laid claim to the heart of the vortex. A shock ripped the silence, without sound, without source. Morriel closed the iron fist of her mastery around that raw core of energy. She turned the inner f
ire of her will to bridge her message across the distance to Daenfal.
The demand she imprinted on the peeress stationed there was succinct, and direct as a brand to the skin: to search through the records of Koriani oaths of service and find one attached to a merchant who could mount an eastbound caravan at short notice.
'Charge the man to send a packtrain across the Pass of Sards with all speed,' Morriel snapped through the contact. 'He'll transport goods belonging to the order. Include my imperative that they reach the coast for consignment before the feast of winter solstice. Most important of all, I want a young swordsman named Fionn Areth to serve the train as a road guard as far as the city of Jaelot.' She followed up with his concise description, then the name of the tavern where her chosen hired sword could be found. 'By your Koriani vow of service, do not fail me in this. Expect I will contact the lane watch at sundown to be certain you've followed my instructions.'
* * *
Lirenda detested the rigors of travel as much as she disdained manual labor, uncouth manners, and poverty. Huddled in a wagon under scratchy wool blankets while the wind whined and tore through the shelter of a north-facing spruce thicket, she cursed the inconvenience of the Eltair Bay trade road in chilled white clouds of spent breath. The guttering wick in the glass-paned lantern scarcely kept the darkness at bay. The flame was an inadequate light source for scrying. That shortfall became added salt in the sore of her bitter frustration. Lirenda shifted her chilled grasp on the quartz sphere. She smoothed the black velvet cloth spread over her knees, then closed her eyes to reframe her disturbed equilibrium.
When at last she laid claim to the seat of prime power, she swore to avoid this forsaken route under the knees of the mountains. The land was too stony and rough to grow barley. The ferocity of the storms that swept in off the ocean discouraged the building of inns, and no galleys rowed up this harborless coastline except in the calms of high summer.
Another screaming gust rocked the wagon. Outside, in distracting, snatched fragments, Lirenda overheard the carefree remarks shared between the low-ranking initiates who journeyed in her close company. Their foolery rankled her nerves like stray thorns and fueled her building annoyance.
Four times, she had sounded Araethura for Fionn Areth. Each effort had drawn a blank. The quartz sphere had garnered no answers at all, no solid reflection of his presence, but only the moorland acres of grasses, wind-bent by frost, and tipped silver-white under moonlight.
The worry could fester inside like a canker. The setback was unthinkable, that on the cusp of her bid to claim victory, something untoward could have happened to the boy who formed the very linchpin of her plans. No choice remained but to repeat her effort to seek him all over again.
He was a young man, hot-blooded enough to be tumbling some wench in a hay barn. Engrossed in lust, his animal preference for privacy would raise instinctive barriers against prying spellcraft. Lirenda forced down her building irritation, then calmed herself back into trance. She cast the refocused net of her awareness into the dimmed lattice of the quartz sphere.
This time her effort snagged an immediate live contact. The sheer strength and force of the encounter rocked her balance, as though a set of steel grapples dragged her down through the heart of a whirlpool. Hazed to startled fear, Lirenda flinched in avoidance; yet her bid to tear free only bound her more strongly.
For one instant of mindless, blinding panic, she held the nightmare-bleak thought that she had tagged, not Fionn Areth, but Prince Arithon of Rathain, with the full range of his trained mage talents revitalized.
'This is your Prime Matriarch speaking, you ninny!' The whiplash command of Morriel's voice shattered the web of illusion. Lirenda startled bolt upright. By desperate reflex, she caught the quartz sphere before it tumbled from her slackened grasp. Her flood of relief as she recognized the Prime's sigil came poisoned by shame, to be caught in a moment of outright incompetence.
Blinking, discomposed, Lirenda snatched to recover her wrecked poise. 'Your summons arrived on the moment I had initiated a scrying to find Fionn Areth.'
I know that.' Morriel's pinched features regarded her reprovingly from the cleared depths of the quartz. 'Four times, you called him. By now you should realize he's no longer in Araethura.'
Lirenda's breath stopped. Somehow, she managed to push back her shock and cling to the semblance of calm. 'He's left his family?'
'And must I repeat myself four times over also?' the Prime rasped back in tart anger. Through the buffeting wind, and the thrashing of fir branches, her venomous tirade resumed. 'That boy parted from his mother a fortnight ago! The lane-watcher picked him up, alone in Daenfal, fighting a match wager at swords with a veteran man-at-arms!'
Too haughty to cringe, Lirenda felt her face warm into a violent flush. Through the leap of her pulse, she framed the unthinkable question. 'Has he taken any harm?'
'No thanks to your vigilance,' Morriel conceded.
Lirenda drew breath to promise amends, but her words were cut off without mercy.
'You'll do nothing at all, but resume making your way south into Jaelot.' The Prime Matriarch permitted no protest and no compromise. 'When you arrive, find quarters at an inn and draw the Lord Mayor into your exclusive confidence.'
'Fionn Areth—'
'Has been taken care of,' the Prime said, her displeasure a crackle of live force. 'I've engaged oath of debt with a reliable merchant. Your boy will cross the Skyshiel passes in his safe employ as a caravan guard. He'll arrive none the worse for your inept grasp of priorities. Mind me well, Lirenda, and take warning from this. I will not act to spare him should you fumble again. Your whole future hangs in the balance, and mine, and the order's, and woe unto you should you fail us!'
The quartz sphere went black. Shaking, enraged, and half-sick with reaction, Lirenda closed bloodless lips. She was not going to fail. That possibility had never for a moment crossed her mind; nor had she lapsed into carelessness. Fionn Areth's precipitous departure had been nothing more than the extraordinary bad luck of coincidence.
Far more likely this reprimand had been meted out as another of Morriel's cruel tests. Lirenda sucked icy air through clenched teeth. There were limits to pride, to honor and obedience. She would not buckle under petty intimidation. No matter whose blood and whose fate must be sacrificed, she would take Arithon captive and recover her rightful inheritance as First Senior.
* * *
Left the richer from his escapade by a purse of town-minted coin and the gift of a second-rate sword, Fionn Areth idled away the evening in the racketing crush of a lakeshore tavern. He learned to quaff his beer with due caution lest the next round of congratulatory backslaps catch him in the process of swallowing. If the morning's bout at swordplay with the garrison's rough captain had earned him a reputation, inopportune fits of choking were unlikely to impress the soldiers who had welcomed him into their circle.
He had not won the fight. A bound slice on his wrist and a chorus of bruises made him wince over every small movement. His defeat had not displeased his benefactors. They had wagered their silver that he could withstand the older man's prowess through a slow count of one hundred. His defense had outlasted his detractors' expectations, that no yokel goatherder could match blows with a seasoned professional. Now, in a spree of uproarious celebration, the winners seemed determined to spend their hoard of coin carousing at the Cockatrice Tavern.
Uray clomped by to refill drained tankards and noticed him frowning again. 'Drink up, boy!' he roared in boisterous good spirits. 'We've taken a belting from Hamhand Jussey for years. Hurts sore to lose, but few men I know could stand up to him past the third parry.'
The beer overflowed under Uray's enthusiasm. Fionn Areth licked sour foam off his thumb. He returned what he hoped was a confident smile, while around him the taproom's raw noise crescendoed off the beamed ceiling. A man two trestles down had offended a doxy, with every hooting, drunken onlooker hurling good-natured slangs or offering disastrous advice. T
he air hung thick as moist cotton. The reek of boiled leather armor and oiled steel underhung the greasy fug thrown off by the fluttering tallow wicks burning in pinched clay pots. Under a kaleidoscopic jumble of thrown shadow, past the shrieking gyrations of a whore who danced on a tabletop, the dart game in the corner had dissipated into an off-key chorus of song. Amid that glorious tapestry of bedlam, men clashed emptied tankards to flag down the overworked barmaid.
Fionn Areth looked on, enchanted. Born and bred in the austere isolation of the moorlands, he drank in the noise and the novelty of sharing the company of worldly men. He nursed his beer and his aches and listened while the soldiers traded boasts of past exploits at arms. From a derelict veteran with cataracts he heard an eyewitness account of the infamous slaughter in Vastmark, when Prince Lysaer of the Light had advanced on the Shadow Master with a war host thirty-five thousand strong.
'I served in the ranks of Jaelot's field troop, signed on to bolster their numbers. Firsthand, on the flanks of a Vastmark mountain, I saw the sorcerer weave his unnatural darkness. Cold enough to freeze a man's hand to his weapon and deadly to those in our vanguard. Mowed them all down like wheat through a scythe. Not one man left standing, and not one blow struck.' The veteran rolled eyes like rheumy, filmed egg whites. 'Terrible sight, one I've never forgot though my vision's gone dim as my memory.'
Another veteran chimed in, eager to elaborate. 'I had an uncle who died at Dier Kenton Vale.' Hunched over his beer, he recited the story, heard as a boy from a retired guardsman, of how the mountains themselves were pulled down in malice to destroy the proud ranks of Prince Lysaer's war host. 'Twenty thousand men, slaughtered in one hour. The earth was made to shift by black sorcery; there's a fact to strike fear in the strongest. That evil crime was made public knowledge under the sunwheel seal at Avenor. The documents attest that the Spinner of Darkness wove his dire spells on the blood of five hundred innocents. All of them were gutted while still alive. Hear tell their hearts were cut out and burned in some filthy, secret ritual carried out on the shores of the Havens.'