Warhost of Vastmark
As Havish’s High Chancellor cleared his voice to intone a memorized, formal greeting, the Master of Shadow met Eldir’s level glance, then cut in with ice-breaking honesty. ‘I think we can dispense with the language. Your weather has summed things up neatly. No doubt, given choice, I’m the last living spirit a king should welcome to his noble realm of Havish.’
Eldir’s firm lips twitched in surprise just barely curbed. Too practical to hold the remark as anything less than plain truth, he did not smile as he said, ‘My realm has survived the Mad Prophet’s misadventures. What could you bring that’s any worse?’
Arithon’s smile turned wicked. He moved, swept the flat of his hand down the dripping fringes, and in the interval while the waterfall lessened, drew the lady fully under cover. ‘I bring you the wife of Lysaer s’Ilessid.’ He slipped her slender fingers into the hand of Havish’s suddenly flustered young high king. ‘Princess Talith, once of Etarra.’
State manners fell short of a counterthrust. Shoved headlong beyond his depth, Eldir lost his breath, eyes pinned to her tawny magnificence. His wild blush clashed with his tabard. He could scramble together no sharp wit to respond as Arithon admitted, regretful, that Dakar was included in Rathain’s delegation, if currently in the hold overseeing the unloading of a royal gift, which thundered hooves in indignant fury against the Khetienn’s lower timbers.
Unable to stand upon dignity, King Eldir abandoned himself to a rare, deep burst of laughter. ‘Welcome to my kingdom, Lady Talith. Though for the mountebank who brought you, I reserve the same grace until he shows better manners than to present you as potential trouble.’
The challenge floundered into awkward silence. The moment spun out to pattered rainfall while the ministers swivelled their hatted heads. The realm’s champion craned his neck to peer past his coif, while, most perceptive, the caithdein closed a step toward his king. His cool regard surveyed Arithon’s sudden, rigid stance. But the Master of Shadow had taken no umbrage. His glance had merely skimmed the delegation and fixed on the one wizened figure overlooked.
Crammed like wadded rag between the jewels and damp velvets of state panoply, Sethvir of the Fellowship stepped forward. If the Sorcerer had chosen to be last acknowledged, the effect of his presence was profound.
Arithon s’Ffalenn’s veneer of manners cracked away. His face turned ice pale, and his movement, pure reflex, drove Eldir’s ministers to fly back as though he jumped them with a knife.
But the sharp surge of speed that dropped him to one knee before that robed and bearded figure held no threat, but only abject humility. ‘Warden,’ said Arithon. ‘Sethvir.’ Then, Masterbard though he was, his throat closed; speech failed him.
The Sorcerer he addressed raised a fragile hand and traced his crown of black hair. As though the prince asked his audience in private, he spoke. ‘We should fear, you think? Since your strike at Minderl Bay, the Mist-wraith’s geas has deepened its hold and grown worse. Your suspicion is well founded. At each encounter, its curse becomes more troublesome to manage.’
‘You do see,’ Arithon said, muffled. He looked up. The wells of his eyes were open and wide, his expression unmasked before horror. ‘This exchange for the ransom could launch a disaster. If you ask, I could leave at the outset.’
Sethvir’s crinkled features rearranged in reproof. ‘We are guarded already. Ease your mind.’ He thrust his other hand from the rim of his cuff and raised Rathain’s prince to his feet. His glance held a glint like steel behind mist for the warning, not needed, that Arithon had voiced without heed for pride or witnesses.
Too late, if Rathain’s prince now strove to mask how he cared, that the chancellor’s glance turned cold in reserve, and Eldir’s courtiers kept their marked distance. To Talith’s trained eye, seeking weakness in an enemy, that incongruous moment of sacrifice rocked the very roots of her conviction.
King Eldir said something banal and polite. Sidelined from preoccupied thought, Talith answered, unmindful of the rain that clung, silver on gilt, in the cropped ends of her hair. She deferred to the royal wish and let herself be led from quayside. Solid in his duty, but without distinctive grace, King Eldir handed her into the dry comfort of his carriage. Footmen closed the lacquered door. She was left her peace and privacy as the coachman on the box took up the lines and set his matched team to a jingling, smart trot. Grooms brought a horse for the visiting prince, then the caparisoned mount of the king. Attendant men-at-arms clambered into wet saddles; the equerries retrieved banners sluiced to their poles from the deluge. Hazed by fog, peered at by curious, wet knots of bystanders from doorways and windows, and from archways spanned dark over puddles, the procession wound from the quayside. Enclosed by Ostermere’s streaked limestone and tarnished copper brick, they ascended the tiered levels from the trade quarter to the high, buttressed citadel which guarded the seat of Eldir’s council. Calls from the teamsters and the grinding of dray wheels and the slapping splash of boys running errands sounded thin, unreal, a fabric of noise webbed over scarce-buried tension.
The high officials of Havish completed their cere monial entry in an edged, uneasy hurry for the creature of black hair and bare honesty and desperate, devious subtleties that their court had let into its midst.
King Eldir’s monarchy at Ostermere embarked on its fifth year of office scarcely groomed to the ways of sovereign rule, uncertain in its unity as the threads of a tapestry quarrelled over by its commissioners. Factions were emerging, but not settled. The young ladies who vied for their liege’s affection had yet to be sorted into favoured candidates, though ones with no interest in scholarly discourse were relegated to the hopeful fringes. The high king’s justice subscribed to Havish’s first charter, written at the dawn of the Third Age by the Fellowship. His taxes were fair. But since the edict against clan raids, and the repeal of bounties that disbanded the headhunters’ leagues, his authority had been sorely felt. Royal guardsmen patrolled the trade roads in force. Day labour from the cities was collected on strict schedule to restore the dilapidated paving, the slate for which dated from Paravian times. Slowly, the isolated settlements in Lanshire were being won back and brought to the order of law and commerce.
On the central table in the king’s close chamber, still subject to controversy, plans were being drawn to restore the clans from their centuries of wilderness exile. The ruins at Telmandir would be rebuilt for their habitation, and two lesser sites, reduced to weed-grown foundations that city records held no written name for, but that villagers and townborn alike still shunned in adamant dread.
Into that stew of unresolved power, of disgruntled mayors and town trade interests all vying in cutthroat ambition to hold their pre-eminence against ancient clan claims to position, came the person of Arithon s’Ffalenn. Neutral though Havish remained on the issue of Desh-thiere’s curse, no royal edict could quell nine years of wild rumour. The court might absorb Princess Talith’s hot pride and Dakar’s wild antics in stride. But this was the prince who had helped restore sunlight and set seals of captivity on the Mistwraith; who was sorcerer, and pirate, and mountebank and Masterbard, that had folk in four kingdoms raised to arms.
The banquet to introduce his presence became a tilting ground of intrigue and curiosity. King Eldir received his gift of ten mares and a magnificent, silver-grey stallion to match them with the proper degree of cool courtesy. Known as he was for his indulgence in horse-flesh, he had a tenacious disposition for level thinking. Against Arithon’s insouciance at the waterfront, Havish’s liege exacted his grave style of revenge. He showed no favour, but settled in comfort on his dais and allowed his packs of courtiers to sate their voracious interests as they chose.
Princess Talith could have warned of the mistake. She had observed, front and centre, nine years in the past, when Arithon had been presented to Etarra’s pedigree élite as the prince sanctioned for Rathain’s sovereignty. If he looked no day older for the years that had passed, his skill at evasion had sharpened. The finery he chose, then as
now, was expensive, but simple to the point of severity. He wore no jewels; no leopard device. Rathain’s royal colours of green, black, and silver commanded no aura of respect. He had grace, but no majesty; no overweening presence of muscular height or size. This caused the men, infallibly, to underestimate him. Their more observant women disregarded his slight stature, but looked instead at the way he filled his clothes.
For their fawning, their advances, their unwelcome prying questions, they discovered too late the word, the fast quip, deployed in small malice like the sting of a briar masked in ivy. They found that Arithon could move through a crowd like shadow itself and shame his clumsier pursuit to embarrassment. Inside of three hours, his wishes were made clear. He invited no close acquaintance, no female company, no circle of wishful admirers. Of his gifts of shadow or his upbringing by mages on Dascen Elur beyond West Gate, he would make no display for entertainment.
Eldir regarded the blunt failure of his retaliation and the stunning rebuff of his courtiers with his cleft chin parked on steepled fingers. His eyes stayed peat brown in thought. ‘Your prince is dangerous,’ he said in outright judgement to Sethvir. ‘He has no heart in him at all.’
‘Do you think so?’ The Warden of Althain moved veined knuckles and set a bread crust to one side, unmindful as his transition from vagueness left the ends of his beard in peril of wicking up gravy. ‘I should venture, instead, what you see is a man too long hunted.’
‘My caithdein Machiel’s not like that.’ Eldir gestured with his meat knife as Arithon came to rest in a particularly dim corner, his back to a tapestry and his lips flat set in distaste.
Sethvir’s reply was very quiet. ‘Your clan steward only stood guard for his life. This prince lies under siege for his spirit. Look, you shall see.’ The Sorcerer crooked a hand and beckoned.
Insignificant as the gesture appeared, Arithon saw. For the Warden of Althain, he came in willing, incongruous respect.
‘Ostermere’s court has established no patronage,’ said Sethvir as Arithon paused beneath the dais. ‘The treasury’s too scant and the trade ministers are uncultured. His Grace has no titled bard in residence.’ Althain’s Warden finished in a bracing rebuke that startled Eldir to attention. ‘If you won’t make conversation, I charge you by your office. You owe this court the music you were made and trained to share.’
Arithon’s carriage hardened to chiselled anger.
In the face of s’Ffalenn rage, that a half-breath might trigger, Sethvir gave a smile that unstrung his victim for sheer pity. It hurts. I know this. I ask in Halliron’s memory. This realm is neutral, and I believe the old master would not have your name be reviled on false grounds. You will play and leave nothing to the mercy of unkind hearsay.’
To the king’s page who hovered in mouse quiet to one side, the Sorcerer said, ‘Fetch a lyranthe from the gallery.’
Arithon accepted the beautiful, varnished instrument with a word for the boy, but no bow for the king, and scarcely a glance at Sethvir. He was shaking; no one close at hand could fail to notice. A stool was fetched. He sat mute and tuned each silvered string.
This was not the exquisite instrument left under glass in the captain’s cabin aboard his brigantine. Only Talith and Sethvir shared past knowledge of the other lyranthe, smashed in Etarra by Lysaer’s hand in a fit of curse-driven violence. Here, where mishap might turn the best-laid plans, Arithon chose not to risk the treasure inherited from Halliron. The princess was aware he held rank as a bard, but had never before heard him play; like Eldir and his courtiers, the experience took her by storm.
His skill tore their hearts, bled them white, and then bound them, effortless as wind, in haunting sweet resonance like coins thrown down through a rainfall. He made them cry tears for sheer joy. His was a talent not seen on Athera for more than a thousand years, Sethvir admitted through the salt-damp folds of his napkin. When at the last, silvered string was damped still by the bard, the court had been wooed and won over.
They had seen the jewel in their midst in all its rare splendour, and no matter how thankless its cutting edge, nothing could make them give it up. Rathain’s prince would have no surcease now, however he bristled and snapped.
He snatched what refuge he could in rough sports.
Hunting, hawking, matches at arms, then contests with bows on horseback: Arithon showed them a competence that humiliated, and won back his right to reserve. He handled a sword with a killing polish even the softest trade minister could respect. If Sethvir’s intent was undone by a fraction, no one any longer risked baiting Rathain’s prince to plumb the mettle of his intellect.
Four days before solstice and the arrival of her ransom, Princess Talith perched in the gallery above the high king’s main hall, looking down on candlelit tables and the tossing press of courtiers who languished replete from the feast. The air smelled of lilies, almond sauces and lavender, almost too cloying to breathe.
Talith had climbed the stair to clear her head. Beside the bench she chose for refuge, swathed in borrowed cleric’s robes, the Mad Prophet stood with his elbows stubbed against the marble rail and his knuckles matted through his beard. The irony caught the princess’s notice, that the man the pair of them tracked like choice prey was the inimitable Prince of Rathain.
Like Talith, Dakar seemed to ache for a fact intrusively, even desperately denied: that Arithon’s vicious-ness stemmed not from cruelty but from too terrible a gift of compassion.
‘He strikes out because of his vulnerable heart,’ Talith shared in dismay to the rotund prophet propped by the cushions where she sat, silk skirts fanned about her like frost over glass in stilled shimmers of pearls and embroidery. ‘Why should you wish to pull him down? I have my husband’s royal honour to defend. What reason do you have to hate?’
‘The same, nearly.’ Dakar hunched his shoulders, her perception unwanted as the prick of a rapier at his back. ‘Prince Lysaer has been my best friend.’ He ducked his spaniel head, palms ground into fists for his inadvertent slip into past tense. That brush with conscience was too painful. Revile his nemesis though he would, a small girl’s dying had branded itself into memory. Whatever Arithon was, or was not, his care for one child had been genuine.
‘If he’s acting,’ the Mad Prophet promised, ‘if he takes just one step awry, he shall receive the full measure he deserves.’
Whatever veiled threat lay behind Dakar’s statement, Talith found she had no wish to find out.
Three days before solstice, while the candlemakers bent over their moulds through short nights to meet the demand for the festival, and children in the merchants’ mansions cut paper talismans to hang behind windows and eaves, the poor quarter folk wove baskets of osiers to set on their doorsteps for alms. Wood for the dancer’s bonfires was unladen from farm wagons in Ostermere’s wide public squares. Through the racketing snarl of traffic as the royal kennelman took his hounds to exercise, Asandir of the Fellowship rode through the restored north postern, slick as a needle through fleece. He was flanked by a blast of unseasonal chill air which contained the entities, Kharadmon and Luhaine.
Traithe remained downcoast in Cheivalt, aboard Lysaer s’Ilessid’s state galley.
Among the Fellowship Sorcerers, agreement was unanimous long before Arithon’s warning. Through the supervised exchange of Princess Talith’s ransom, the half-brothers must not come face-to-face. For the cursed pair to enter the same city, even for the span of one day, would require the most stringent precautions.
The Mistwraith’s blighting geas could not entirely be curbed. At each confrontation, its drive to seed destruction intensified. The best the Fellowship Sorcerers could expect was to lace the walls and the harbour in safe guards, then hope to shift one or the other prince to safety if unforeseen mishap should occur.
Over tea in a squat tower keep that overlooked Ostermere’s notched rooftops, spread in tiered steps to the seaside, Sethvir shared counsel with his discorporate colleagues, while Asandir stitched a silvered veil of war
ds over the mansion Lysaer was to occupy once his half-brother embarked a safe distance offshore in the Khetienn.
‘You’ve measured the hard evidence in the Shadow Master’s aura. Arithon suffered far worse than a slip of control at Minderl Bay. Our theory’s borne out,’ Althain’s Warden said sadly. ‘At each encounter, the curse will unstring a little more of the grip the Teir’s’Ffa-lenn holds on his sanity. He has implored us to require his s’Ilessid half-brother to send a delegate to receive the Lady Talith from his hand. We must listen. Wards are not enough. The risk of further damage must not be left to chance.’
‘Lysaer won’t like it,’ Kharadmon cracked. The restless vortex of his presence riffled over the tapestries and caused the glass in the leaded casements to sing at odd moments in stress-caught tones of vibration.
‘Lysaer’s wishes don’t matter,’ Luhaine countered, tart with the worry they all felt. ‘The harrowing of Shand is going to unhinge quite enough of the peace as things stand.’
For no opening remained. Even Arithon’s ingenuity could no longer forestall the brunt of Lysaer’s muster in the south. Once the princess’s ransom was accomplished, bloodshed must inevitably follow. Armies massed on the borders of Vastmark, thick as the lines of summer anvil heads. Caolle’s shepherd archers set stone breastworks in the passes, and prepared points of ambush to stall the mighty army that threatened any day to roll over them.
As a miniature wind devil upset Sethvir’s quill pens for the second time in an hour, Luhaine upbraided his rival colleague. ‘You’re worse than an ill-mannered child! We’d all be most grateful if you could restrain your excessive energy.’
‘Oh, indeed?’ Kharadmon loosed a whiplash breath of mirth. ‘My excessive energy scarcely signifies.’ His nasal retort a dead ringer for Luhaine’s style at lecturing, he ended, ‘Certainly not when your reference is childish rampaging.’