Traitor's Knot (epub)

  'Trust, you say!' Rankled, the Araethurian attacked. 'Such a creature could see your Feylind destroyed and never look back on the carnage!'

  'Watch your tongue.' Large, mild-natured, the mate seemed unmoved. 'My captain believes the man won't let her down.' Yet his taut jaw fairly shouted with warning: he would settle the score with far more than harsh words, if his beloved's impetuous faith should ever come to be broken.

  'Let Fionn stay, Teive.' Arithon dredged up a brittle smile, couched in recline on the casks. 'Like the nettle, and the burr, and the thorn in the rose, his badgering pricks keep me wakeful.'

  The mate shrugged. 'Your risk. I'll send down Vhandon.' Brave enough in the pinch of necessity, he regarded the fiends, weaving like ripples through uneven glass outside the sword's sphere of radiance. 'That's if you still have an ounce of grit left to get me away through the swarm.'

  That cynical jab opened Arithon's eyes. He said, stripped earnest, 'I could load the small boat with provisions and leave.'

  The mate paused, raw fists empty. 'And your double with you? Would that stop the attack?'

  'I don't know.' The admission came thin through the groan of the ship's timbers.

  Dakar swore at Rathain's prince and pushed straight. 'What are you doing? You swore oath at Athir!' To the mate, he explained, 'A blood binding stands in force, to the Fellowship, that his Grace must use any and every known resource to stay on this side of Fate's Wheel.' Turned on Arithon, he said, desperate, 'We've gone too far out. Even if you could reach the coast at this season, in an oared boat without shelter, how many would die? You'd still have to deal with that ambush through sorcery! Wrecked galleys won't win you the prize reassurance, that Evenstar won't face an impoundment. Her crew might yet suffer a criminal arraignment by town justice as your associates. And Feylind -'

  'No, Dakar.' Arithon stirred a hand, pleading silence. 'Teive's her man. Let him speak.'

  'Her man, you say!' The mate cracked. The festering scab tore away at one stroke and savaged his sturdy complacency. 'If you accept that, then why did you come here?'

  Arithon met spiking rage without flinching. 'The same reason you did. For Feylind.'

  Teive swallowed. 'Then give me one reason why you think you should rightfully stay.'

  No barrier lay between the two men: one whose steadfast love nurtured the welfare of a woman, and the other, the enticing, mysterious stranger whose entangled affairs had now set her at dreadful risk. The shocked moment stretched. Against thrashing noise, as the brig pitched on her reckless east bearing, and the iyats pinned down between sword and sigil strained to feed on the flaring hostility, the question burned, a heart-beat removed from fracturing violence.

  Drawn white, Arithon tendered his answer. 'Koriathain have bid to claim her, as pawn. But I am the piece they want off the game-board. Should they take us with me still aboard, she'll survive. Better yet, my protections may hold. Granted respite, I can destroy that sigil, then salvage this brig's reputation. We all go free. Without prey, the coastal ambush disbands. The Alliance fanatics row home to their wives, without needless fracas and bloodshed.'

  'Or they'll regroup to fight us another day. You can't keep your grip, not indefinitely' Once started, the mate hurled down the same fears he had worked to allay, in his crewmen. 'Your capture is likely to happen right here. This keel could take too much damage and sink. Your enemies won't guard our survival, your Grace. Should we resist and go down for your feud? Or waste and die, lost at sea in the tenders?'

  'If that happens,' said Arithon,'I will be dead. The witches won't have my surrender.'

  The mate nodded once. His quittance was brisk. 'I can ask for no more. Sing me out.'

  Head bent, his scraped fingers pinched on crossed wrists, Arithon did as requested. While the mate went his way through the packed flock of fiends, Fionn Areth crouched by the lamp and vented his wretched confusion. 'How can you risk the lives of such friends? Have so many died that they've become ciphers, dismissed by a callous heart?'

  Nervelessly still, his head tipped back to rest, Arithon quashed Dakar's steamed intervention with the barest flick of a glance. Then he said, 'Feylind is as close to me as a daughter, and this, her ship's crew, is her family.'

  'You would kill them all, and yourself as well, just for the well-being of strangers?' Fionn Areth gripped his knees, if only to stay his blazing urge to shatter the self-contained presence before him. 'Why spare the Alliance? I don't understand.'

  Arithon closed his eyes. 'Because these people here understand why they fight. Their love and their loyalties are freely given, and based on the truth, however unsavoury. Their choice has not been triggered by fear, or embellished by self-righteous vainglory.'

  When the goatherd's locked fury failed to dispel, the Master of Shadow mustered his overtried patience. 'An honest end among friends won't lack meaning. Each will sacrifice what they can for the other in acts that arise out of caring. Their fight is sourced in survival and love. By contrast, those fools on the galleys have sharpened their swords for a lie. Their lives and their faith have been cozened from them. First deluded and set against me by Lysaer, then whipped on by meddling Koriathain, they have been sent blindfold to the slaughter. Like thousands of others cut down by my hand, they would cross Fate's Wheel for reasonless hate, and their deaths would serve nothing but ruin.'

  Left silent with thought, Fionn Areth lost wind, while Dakar allowed his claimed place by the lamp in a storm-cloud of stifled censure.

  A taut interval passed. Amid grinding noise and pervasive, dank chill, the gyrating corkscrews of each breasted swell framed a trial of bruising endurance. To lie down was to suffer bone-rattling discomfort. For any man tested by sleepless exhaustion, the jostling effort to sit by itself became a draining exertion. Hour upon hour, Arithon's taxed face showed the focus required to hold mage-sourced intention in wakeful alignment.

  If Fionn Areth regretted his choice, his obstinate need to plumb truth from falsehood kept him tenaciously rooted.

  Then Vhandon arrived, brisk-tempered and swordless. His grizzled frown and his veteran's strength seemed displaced, clutching a bundle of blankets. If the shrilling tones of Arithon's whistle brought him unscathed through the rampaging iyats, he emerged, no less discomposed. 'This is havoc!'

  His baleful glance raked the assemblage of stacked casks, marked out which of the dark-haired doubles to guard, then fastened on Dakar, who now looked more rumpled and dissolute than he had on the hour he woke from his bingeing. 'He's ailing, you say?'

  The clipped line referred to the Master of Shadow, arranged with his slackened hands in his lap, and his head lolled back with closed eyes.

  'Mage-trance,' said Dakar. 'Best not to disturb him.'

  'Sithaer, don't worry.' The intrepid liegeman unloaded his burden. 'I'd just wring his royal neck for the folly of sticking his head in the noose.'

  'You'd rather he should break his oathsworn promise?' Fionn Areth inquired from his perch next to Arithon's feet.

  'Should I answer?' Vhandon's lip curled. 'You're dangerous as ice on a hot spring, young fool. Nobody knows which damned way you'll erupt. Were I the man who trained you for the sword, you'd be digging latrines and nowhere near handling weapons!'

  Fionn Areth's sparked temper crashed against Dakar, who shoved a placating arm in between. 'Vhan, let him be. Of course he can't think! His peers had no further use for edged steel beyond shearing and slaughtering livestock.'

  Vhandon shrugged, his blunt manner unravelled by an irrepressible chuckle. 'All right, whelp. Hear the truth. His Grace's stickling way with a promise is why he needs such as me to protect him. By my call, you'd have died on the scaffold, and bad cess to Jaelot's warped justice. Therefore, you will mind your tongue. My fist at your throat, if you try my patience. I won't waste my breath on a warning.'

  As the pigheaded herder subsided, the liegeman turned his stolid back. 'Grudges just feed the iyats, besides.'

  While Dakar rearranged the blankets for warmth,
Vhandon surveyed the rest of the hold. His vigilant eye tracked the ripped tufts of silk, then the flotsam of spoiled cargo: the smashed barrels and cracked rock, with the wink of a game card, flitting an aimless, fiend-driven course through the gloom outside of the ward ring. 'Until now, I never appreciated the old centaur magics laid through the stones of Alestron's walls.' His icy regard fixed back on Dakar. 'What's to do?'

  'Watch. Wait. Keep your liege wakeful.' Hunkered under a cowl of blankets, the Mad Prophet sank his bearded chin on propped fists. 'If aught else can be done, I'll instruct you.'

  Too upright to shirk while standing on watch, Vhandon raked an irascible hand through grey hair and finally measured his stricken prince. 'How long can he last, so?'

  Dakar sighed. 'Five days, supported by mage-trained faculties, if he wasn't sustaining a siege. Under present conditions, he'll have bested fate if he can hold out beyond morning.'

  Rocked back on his heels, the scarred liegeman absorbed this. His silence thereafter spoke volumes, while the nerve-wracking hours of vigil began, that unbearably stretched each passing minute, and magnified minor discomforts. The sloshing pound of water on wood, the watch orders called abovedecks, and the stirring pressure of caged iyats played on, a repetitive cycle of unreal dream, cast outside the sword's silvered radiance.

  Inside, there was nothing to tend but the lamp. Worse, on occasions when movement was needful, and circumstance called upon Arithon's skills to sound the precise tones for fiend bane: to let a man come or go through the lines, in order to eat or relieve himself. Between times, sunk into his fathomless trance, the Teir's'Ffalenn huddled without moving. Awareness pared down to a pinpoint spark, he maintained the fragile strand of intent that upheld the warding spun over the sigil.

  As additional iyats converged on the brig, he dared not expend further effort to rout them. The crew must carry on as they could, standing down fresh bedev-ilment through emotionless boredom. Starved out of reaction, denied prodding sport, the sprites would flit and possess things at random until the forced draw of the sigil eventually winnowed them into containment. Fionn Areth stayed complacent. Between catnaps, or loose conversation with Dakar, he reset the wick of the lamp and refilled the depleted reservoir.

  Toward midnight, Vhandon relented enough to try him at arm wrestling. No weakling, the younger man learned from mistakes. Beneath thin-skinned nerves and volatile temperament, his innate perseverance lent him a natural prowess.

  Daybreak arrived. The bosun shouted the change in the watch. Clad in unlaced jerkin and shirt, Talvish appeared at the lower deck-hatch. 'Relief,' he called down. 'I've brought cheese and biscuit and a hide flask of rum. That's if the iyats don't savage them, first.'

  His voice, or his agile step on the ladder, roused Arithon out of reverie. He whistled the piercing notes of the threnodies, eyes pinched shut, while Vhandon let down his rolled-up sleeves and relinquished his post to his fellow man-at-arms. Given a parting clap on the back, Fionn Areth was left with the cheerless last wish for survivor's luck on the battle-line.

  'Perish the luck, he has my strong arm,' Talvish cracked in astringent humour. Arrived, intact, through the dense swarm of fiends, he assessed the disparate company. 'What were you lot doing all night? Vhan, you look thrashed. Glassy-eyed and useless as a hooked fish someone left too long in the creel.'

  'Later,' said Vhandon, 'I'll best you at knives. Sixty yards at a flying target.' He crossed through the ward, urgent with need to spare Arithon's dwindling strength.

  Affronted by Talvish's quicksilver tongue, Fionn Areth regretted to see the older campaigner depart. As the bard's notes of fiend bane echoed and died, the herder waited for Dakar to stop the barrage of vexation.

  Instead, Talvish was greeted with naked relief. 'He's losing ground, quickly.'

  Eyebrows raised, fair hair gleaming under the glow of the ward light, Talvish peered downward at his prostrate prince. 'Are you comatose, or just sleeping?'

  However ragged, the faint smile from Arithon showed welcome.

  The swordsman grinned back. 'My wee man, it's tomorrow.' Rejecting every fraught sign of depletion, he shot out a lean hand, snatched the nearest slack wrist, and hauled his unsteady liege to his feet. 'Bear up. You've got enemies counting on you to maintain your half of the contest.'

  'Talvish,' husked Arithon. 'You rival the night-stalking weasel, my friend, for your hair-raising cures to clear drowsiness. I'd better pace. Less risk, I think, to fall on my face than lie down for your throat-nipping slaughter.'

  'Aye, very well. The cockerels upstairs were glad to be rid of me, too.' Talvish adjusted his taller frame to assist his liege's uncertain balance. One glance at the other's stripped face, and he added, 'Did you know the cook's fashed because his best pots got swooped by iyats and chucked themselves overboard?'

  'I thought things had gotten a little too quiet.' Arithon paused for strained laughter. 'I'll have a set cast, when we get back to shore. Ones endowed with the bell tones for fiend bane as part of the foundry's bargain.' The exchange touched Fionn Areth to mollified silence. He had known Talvish as gaoler, for months. The man had always struck him as cold, each thought, word, and movement precise as though drilled to impervious perfection. As a killer, the creature knew his job too well. Yet here, that rigid perception broke down. Beyond all regard for stripped pride, Talvish laid his heart bare. No ice remained in those eyes, only grief. An observer could not miss the caring concern as this liegeman attended his prince.

  The apparently casual touch; the irreverent reproof: all were enacted with tacit design to lift Arithon's flagging spirits.

  'Well, I feel like the post propped up by the gate,' the Master of Shadow replied to the latest prodding remark.

  Talvish grinned. 'If your joints moaned that much, we would grease them.' Braced against the plunge of the brig, he held on as his weaving charge faltered. 'Fits and staggers aside, you're not going to sit down.'

  They walked to keep Arithon wakeful. Tortuous slow-motion, wobbling circles, around and around the stacked casks. Talvish withstood the tireless course. If the mask sometimes slipped, and his smiles were forced, his agile hands kept their gentleness. At intervals, Dakar broke from his naps and made conversation to revive the bard's slipping focus.

  Fionn Areth overheard disparate fragments, between his moments of blackout sleep.

  '. . . centaur forges.' A next scraping step, and Arithon's tentative question, 'Did you know? About the awareness instilled by the Paravian craftsmen when they forged my Isaervian sword?'

  'No.' Dakar shifted his haunches, uneasy, or else tiredly reluctant.

  A pause, while the lamp-flame flared in the draught. Then Arithon said, 'Why did Asandir never tell me she carried mystical properties not meant to be sullied with bloodshed?'

  'I didn't know!' the Mad Prophet repeated. 'Between us, you were the initiate master. No Sorcerer will offer advanced knowledge unasked. Even if that stricture had not been kept, were you ready to hear, Teir's'Ffalenn?'

  The glimmering radiance from the dark blade bared Arithon's unshielded expression: guilt, and black fear, and the suffocating weight imposed by yet another charge of immeasurable responsibility. 'In truth, no,' he admitted. 'Little has changed. I would still refute the entrapment of my crown ancestry.'

  The ship rolled. Talvish compensated. Abovedecks, Feylind's call to the quartermaster demanded another point on the wind.

  Propped upright, brow knit, the Master of Shadow chased the difficult bent of his thought through his fogging exhaustion. 'Kamridian must have been an extraordinary king to have had such a gift bestowed on him. If I had to guess, I would have supposed the potential instilled in this blade was never meant to be borne by a mortal.'

  'You can't know that, my friend,' Dakar stated quietly. 'Kamridian challenged Kewar's maze and met his destruction. In his footsteps, you have passed through and survived.'

  Arithon winced. 'If my life was foretold by aught else but your prophecy, grant me the kindness. Don't say s
o.' Yet the shifting prism of his altered awareness threw back the cut-crystal memory: of a centaur guardian's words in the maze, spoken in tender remonstrance. 'Fate's forger, you were Named. There lies your destiny, ripe for the hour when you finally embrace the full reach and strength of your power.'

  A slow hour passed. The next followed, arduous, as Arithon's stumbling progress became too harsh a demand to sustain. When the mate returned to give Talvish relief, the whistle for fiend bane was almost too faint to stand down the horde clumped against the lit circle.

  'You should stay outside, Teive,' Arithon grated. He crouched beside the mound of stacked casks, half-unmoored where his liegeman had left him. 'I can't last much longer. Feylind ought to have you at her side if the time comes to launch off the boats.'

  The mate's silenced gesture released Talvish, who had paused in torn question halfway up the ladder. To Arithon, Teive listed crisp facts. 'It's midday already. We're past a hundred leagues off the coast with a following wind, and a bank of high cirrus for warning. We've got heavy weather bearing in from the north. Try the boats, we'll be dead in a day, either from storm, or exposure.'

  Arithon lifted his head, green eyes tortured. 'Then we've won by stalemate. The Prime Matriarch has to know this.'

  Teive clamped his jaw, silent, while Dakar, from the casks, gave a negative shake of his head. Mage-sense informed him: the sigil embedded in Evenstar's sheathing still emitted its dissonant spell-craft. Hours had passed without any changes. The relentless flux of quartz-driven assault showed no sign of a wavering break.

  Aware of the bane as a continuous ache, drilling each separate bone, the Master of Shadow shared the agonizing assessment. Alone, beaten white, he sustained the blunt weight of the mate's speechless accusation.

  Unable to bear the inimical silence, Dakar reminded, 'His Grace is oathsworn, since Athir. The Fellowship Sorcerers hold his bond in blood. He can't surrender. Not while he still has access to resource, and not for as long as he lives.'