‘Perhaps what you saw in that alley was real, and the rest sprang from the meddling of Desh-thiere,’ Talith said.
A bar of late sunlight sliced through the casement and illuminated Lysaer’s face. Melted by his magnificence, Talith scarcely noticed how he studied her in turn, rapt as a man who laboured to unravel hidden meaning from a torn page of manuscript. In belief that he listened, she added, ‘If the Fellowship Sorcerers are right, and the Mistwraith’s curse forced this enmity to set your paired gifts of light and shadow at odds, why ruin our lives to pursue it?’ She stroked the nap of gold stubble on his cheek and leaned into his solid comfort. ‘Why not withdraw your warhost and wait? The truth will out soon enough. Either we’ll see your half-brother raise arms against Tysan, or Arithon s’Ffalenn will go his own way and bloodshed can be avoided altogether.’
‘Do you honestly believe this campaign is misguided?’ Lysaer asked without emotion. ‘What made you lose faith in my cause?’
‘I saw Arithon s’Ffalenn go down on his knees to plead Fellowship protection from the curse,’ Talith admitted. ‘I was wrong, before. The crown prince I knew and hated in Etarra was a man I never understood.’
‘He’s bewitched you,’ Lysaer whispered. ‘Even you.’ He pulled through the clasp of her arms and arose, his gaze still locked to her face. ‘Sithaer’s blind furies! I don’t believe this happened. How many nights did he whisper in your ear to convince you of his innocence at Jaelot? Did he have an excuse for the seven men who burned in the destruction of Alestron’s armoury?’
Talith’s temper flared at her husband’s shocked anguish, and for his assumption as well. ‘Arithon s’Ffalenn made no such claim! Nor did he admit me to his confidence. Quite the contrary. We were enemies. But as a woman caught in the conflict between you, I could scarcely hide my eyes and stop my ears! The judgement I’ve drawn is my own.’
‘But of course,’ Lysaer said. ‘His traps for the innocent are never any less than diabolically perfect.’
Talith surged erect in a flushed, magnificent rage. ‘How dare you!’ Her half-discarded gown bared her perfect, rose-tipped breasts. The necklace of white glass at her throat fanned a sparkle at each breath. Unconscious of her charms in the throes of her conviction, she was powerfully seductive, temptation enough to freeze a man’s reason and undo him.
Lysaer stepped back, mortally afraid. He longed to stay lost, then trembled for the urge. His honour as prince seemed a strident, dry duty, fed to ripe weakness by the strangling ties of love already spun about his spirit.
In his wife’s presence, he beheld his own downfall, and his shocking self-revulsion must have showed.
‘Merciful Ath, what are you thinking?’ Talith raised her arms. ‘Do you imagine I was sent back to corrupt you?’
Again Lysaer retreated from her touch.
‘Daelion save us both, you infer a base congress!’ Shattered beyond pride, Talith resorted to entreaty. ‘Your enemy laid neither hand nor tie upon me!’
Quite the opposite was true. Once she had surrendered to recognition of his assets, Arithon had been scrupulous to avoid her company. Yet the damage had happened regardless: beyond all salvation, the poison of mistrust raised a solid wall between the affection and forgiveness two people required for future happiness.
‘This wasn’t meant to be,’ Talith protested, the first break of heartache in her appeal. ‘The ransom was done for gold, to pay for the defence to meet the allied might of your war host.’
‘Truth or subterfuge, what does it matter?’ Lysaer braced his weakened stance on the back of a stuffed chair. ‘My nemesis has spoiled your belief in me.’
Her beauty was changeless, unforgettable. The tender need that had made her long months of captivity a living misery to endure coalesced to sharp pain, as a scalpel might open living flesh. The extreme, harsh strength Lysaer engaged to keep from breaking turned his face to a mask of white ice.
Unstrung, not yet unmanned, he clung raggedly to principle. His heartbreak was terrible to witness as he strove to overmaster the bitter fruit of this betrayal. Royal as he was, raised to hold judgement in the face of self-sacrifice, the burden of bloodline had never before shackled him so harshly. Every line of his elegance was racked out of true, his self-belief shaken by mortal passion.
‘Oh, my dear!’ Talith cried, unable to bear the gulf she sensed as it widened. ‘Nothing has changed in my life or my love that ever mattered between us.’ She moved again, begging the embrace that promised affirmation, to refound the basis of their union.
Lysaer cried out. He shoved the chair in her path, one hand raised, while the other fumbled blindly for the latch. Then he reached the door, dragged it open.
He was going to step through. Talith pressed her hands to her lips and pleaded through tears for one word in reconciliation. ‘I implore you, don’t leave this here. Don’t let an enemy stand between us.’
The sight of her, broken-spirited and begging for his sympathy, and yet still firm in her defection, snapped the last of Lysaer’s pride. ‘Before Ath, how I loved you!’ he cried in strangled sorrow.
Then the door thudded to. The latch plinked and caught. Sheltered on the far side, the Prince of the West pressed his cheek against the painted panel, punished to a vista too harrowing to admit the balm of tears.
His suffering made the moment too real. The scent of waxed wood; the startled flight of two maidservants caught idle and gossiping in the corridor; tiny things, each burned in bleak imprint that ripped away hope of self-denial.
Lysaer squeezed his fists closed. The dig of his nails into flesh gave no surcease. Memory harrowed him in every vicious detail; still he saw Lady Talith’s appalled shock as her loss shredded the last tissue of her hope. He saw her skin lose all tint; the blushed tips of her breasts a cry of colour the more punishing for the surge as desire remained to hound his flesh before a need that made him quiver like an addict.
For of course, he could not entrust her now to bear his heir. He could never again treasure her unsullied company, nor allow her inside his defences. Not without suffering her suborning influence and the deadly, real chance she might seduce him to abandon law and justice.
Once passion escaped reason, a man could go mad.
Lysaer cursed his weakness. If one fool had been blind enough to lose himself to love, the blame for the turned weapon was an enemy’s. Through tears of hurt for his wife’s tragic usage, like a litany against demons, the Prince of the West recited the lethal chain of logic that undid him.
‘Never gold, you inhuman, soulless bastard. The ransom and the raid, they were all smoke and ruse. Your purpose with Lady Talith was this, and no other: to pierce and to weaken and to level by storm the only exposed place within my heart.’
Ways and Means
Sethvir returns to Althain Tower after an absence of five months and on his doorstep finds Lirenda, First Enchantress of the Koriathain; and to her tartly-phrased demand for the return of her order’s Great Waystone, he replies, ‘I’ve been wondering for the past five hundred years when you ladies would trouble yourselves to ask. Why not come in for tea …?’
Spurred on by outrage over the piracy that has caused Talith’s ransom to be paid twice over, a delegation of Tysan’s city mayors and trade ministers gather in council at the crossroads city of Erdane, and the document they thrash through in state language is the draft of a charter to acknowledge Lysaer’s right of succession to Tysan’s high kingship, underwritten by town law …
While Avenor’s royal galley rows north bearing Princess Talith back home to the towers of Avenor, her husband drives south with all speed; and like darkening storm, his armies mass on the borders of Vastmark to wreak vengeance and death upon the Master of Shadow before the onset of winter …
VII. GRAND AUGURY
Dawn broke in a spray of high cirrus over the Westland Sea. Tossed like a chip on the royal blue swell, the brig-antine Khetienn ploughed southeastward in an offshore course, her bowsprit hazed under plumed sheets
of spray, and her stretched canvas bent to the force of each following gust. Dakar the Mad Prophet sat on a bight of rope, a woeful stream of water frayed by the wind off the screwed ends of his hair. He was not seasick.
‘I wish I’d had a sword,’ he said in black vehemence. ‘So help me, someone should have paid for Dhirken’s death.’
The voice of Kharadmon flung back through the keening air. ‘To what use? Vengeance won’t bring her back. Arithon told you the same.’
‘Then went ahead and vented his scalded nerves on his seamen.’ Dakar rolled his eyes at the creaking gear aloft, while behind him at the wheel, the quartermaster and two sailhands wrestled oaths through clenched teeth, straining to man the rank helm. ‘Fiends plague, we’re risking every stick in this tub to a gale, and not one sail with a reef tied in!’
‘I do have more finesse than to rip out her canvas,’ Kharadmon said in reproof. When his accuser failed to return an apology, the discorporate Sorcerer added a breezy remonstrance that tweaked the untidy hems and untucked laces of the Mad Prophet’s sodden state garments.
‘We’re in a hurry because Khetienn has debts against her at Innish,’ someone said in unwarranted explanation. ‘I want them cleared before the notes come due.’
Dakar’s sullen brooding gave way to awareness that Arithon s’Ffalenn stood behind him, and had probably overheard his last comment. Braced for unpleasantness, he spun to look.
State doublet and silk shirt had been changed for a sailor’s smock with several generations of tar stains. Beneath wind-snatched dark hair, the Shadow Master’s expression showed no stripped edge of reprimand, but a self-haunted directness Dakar had never seen.
Arithon addressed a query to the invisible presence of the Sorcerer. ‘If Dhirken could be condemned for the honest charter of her brig, what in Ath’s mercy will befall Talith?’
‘Do you really wish to know?’ Kharadmon’s interrupted appeal to the winds whirled into a small eddy that chased droplets over the deck.
‘I must,’ said Arithon in stark demand.
‘Why care?’ Dakar broke in. ‘Talith was insufferably arrogant. She flaunted her looks outright to manipulate an opening for intrigue.’ To the Fellowship spirit which arrowed above the brigantine’s masthead, he added, ‘I watched the whole thing. Arithon kept his distance from the lady as though she were fiend-plagued and venomous!’
‘So he did,’ Kharadmon agreed. Wind screamed through stays, and the brigantine slammed smoking through another swell. A green swirl of waters slapped across her rails, to drain in throaty gurgles through her scuppers. ‘Despite that care, Talith came to recognize Arithon’s compassion. She was too proud to play false with her husband. And she believed Lysaer’s judgement was not impaired. Desh-thiere’s curse showed her the error of her trust, but too late.’
‘Her marriage is ruined,’ Arithon concluded in an anguish that begged against hope for contradiction.
Kharadmon was not wont to soften the impact of cause and effect. ‘Lysaer will never lie with her again. He’ll honour her position and not flaunt a mistress. But his liaison with his wife until the day of her death will be kept to a state formality.’
‘He’d put her aside?’ Incredulous, Dakar shoved up straight. The Khetienn rolled. Braced through a particularly virulent dousing, he became torn into conflicted interests by Arithon’s precipitous departure.
‘Believe it,’ Kharadmon finished. ‘The lady came back having seen too much. The marred gift of s’Ilessid justice won’t let Lysaer abide the ambiguity.’
Ice-cold, shivering in suspicion that rang clear through to his bones, Dakar laced stubborn, red fingers over his streaming knees. Fellowship Sorcerers were ever subtle players. The distinct possibility could not be ignored that Kharadmon might play his sympathies against Lysaer for a purpose; particularly if Sethvir sensed any echo that he harboured a secret augury on Arithon’s life.
Dakar lacked the straight courage to confront the matter outright; and at an indeterminate point inside the next hour Kharadmon left the Khetienn to make her way south on the world’s winds.
The seamen changed watch at nightfall before the Mad Prophet caught the startling anomaly: Arithon had made no other appearance on the brigantine’s deck since his disjointed inquiry after the fate of Princess Talith.
The weather had eased with the sunset. Khetienn sailed large, rocking to a fair weather swell. Her course bent due south, and wind off her quarter flapped the royal pennon no one had troubled to run down from the masthead. A game of dice was under way in the galley; the whoop of a winner and the pound of a fist against wood drummed up from the trestle belowdecks. Topside, sails and rigging carved the starry sky in neat order; too neat, the Mad Prophet surmised. As if the mate on watch had tidied the Khetienn’s lines and spars in the expectation no adjustments would be asked.
‘Himself went below,’ the quartermaster answered in laconic response to Dakar’s concern. ‘Said, let him bide. He didn’t want to know if the wind changed. Steward was turned off, also. No food and no service before morning.’
Dakar’s pulse quickened in alarm. Adamant as Ari-thon could be when he desired solitude, he was an irreproachable captain. Never before had he failed to oversee every nuance of sail trim and course. His slackened attentiveness now made no sense, not when the Kheti-enn was engaged in a race to reach Shand ahead of Lysaer’s galley.
‘Fiends,’ swore the quartermaster, his brow creased with disbelief for the determined set to Dakar’s stance. ‘Oh man, you’re not going down after him. The fool who tries his temper, I swear on my hindparts, is fair askin’ to get the gizzard knifed out o’ him.’
But like the misfortunate princess, Dakar had been too far and seen too much. From an altered perspective he scarcely knew for his own, he lashed out at the helmsman in anger. ‘Did you never think? Arithon’s not indestructible, however hard he tries to act the part. He’s just been told another friend passed the Wheel. The upset can’t help but aggrieve him.’
The staid old quartermaster looked wary, his eyes knurled in wrinkles like walnuts. ‘True or not,’ he allowed, ‘I’d rather you twist the snake’s tail than me.’
Dakar returned an epithet, not cheered by the thought that for once in his born life, Asandir would have praised him. ‘I’ve been a dimwit since the second I drew breath.’ Still grousing under his breath in sad misery, he squeezed his girth down the companionway. ‘Even a dog has the good sense to know when it’s too old and simple to change.’
The sterncastle door lay ahead, an unlit square of dark varnish. Dakar weighed his outright cowardice against his unspeakable fear; and terror won. He stepped forward, entered, and bumbled against the heave of the vessel down the narrow corridor to the captain’s quarters.
His knock went unanswered. The door, unsurprisingly, proved locked.
‘Open,’ snapped Dakar, out of tolerance with unease. ‘If you don’t, so help me, Arithon, I’m going to break the latch. And not by neat sorcery, either.’
No sound came from the far side. To a half-snarled oath, then a rushed prayer to Ath, the Mad Prophet lowered his chin for a bull’s charge, prepared to crash his shoulder against the wood.
The latch tripped and the panel whipped open to reveal Arithon in his shirtsleeves. ‘I asked not to be troubled,’ he said in ruthless annoyance. ‘The quartermaster warned you. Is this loyalty, Dakar? Or, Sithaer forbid, an attempt to shepherd my conscience?’
‘None of those.’ Dakar straightened up, dusky as a plum. A self-control he never knew he possessed held him steady as he raked his attention over the prince who opposed him. The clothing and hair, faintly dishevelled, and green eyes acute in their focus gave him scant grounds for reassurance. He planted himself amid the opened doorway in outright, stubborn intent.
‘By all means,’ cried Arithon in explosive antagonism. ‘If you’re going to make an occasion of my mistakes, you might as well come inside. The whole blighted crew doesn’t need to share in the happy exhibition.’
/> As the Shadow Master cleared the passage, Dakar saw beyond to the damning array of items laid out in the spill of the lamp on the chart table.
‘You were going to break in,’ Arithon said by way of rough defence for the small stone pipe, and the opened cap of a canister whose spice-scented contents snapped Dakar’s foreboding into dread.
‘Ath’s own infinite mercy!’ The Mad Prophet spun to face down the Prince of Rathain, unmindful of temper, uncaring how he meddled, this once in his life a Fellowship spellbinder upbraiding a fellow mage for sheer idiocy. ‘What were you thinking to do! You can’t try an augury under influence of tienelle. You’ve blinded your talent! The poisons in that herb will run their course beyond control. If the toxins don’t land you stone dead, you’ll end up crippled or witless.’
‘That can be argued,’ Arithon said, his fury burned down to rankling sarcasm as he twisted the key in the lock. ‘Davien’s works and the Five Centuries Fountain should put your unpleasant point to the test.’
Dakar fell back and sat with a thud on the cabin’s lower berth. True to his own form when high stakes left him shaky, he forgot the most salient details.
As Arithon regarded him in nasty hilarity, he resisted with mulish annoyance. ‘You’ve got longevity protection, no more than that. It doesn’t make you immortal. The Fountain’s effects might keep your body alive, but nothing about the Betrayer’s handiwork can guard you from going insane. Lost to mage-sight, your mind will be undone and naked.’
‘Well then, one way or another, I won’t be self-blinded after this,’ the Shadow Master said. He sought the tienelle scrying for more than just augury. Plainly he intended to use the same means to smash down the blocks which disbarred his access to his arcane perception.