‘If enemies were lurking, we couldn’t see them. Night’s like the black heart of Sithaer.’ The scout peeled his soaked cloak, then surrendered the dry linen he had saved to tend his sword to bind up a gash on a sheep dog.
Cold to the bone, warned by the creak of the ridgepole on its pins and the thrummed slap of canvas of a wind still sullenly rising, Dakar shook off paralysing tiredness to ask the grandfather for a blanket to replace his soaked clothes. While the tribesman stepped out to borrow from a neighbour, the Mad Prophet lost his battle against exhaustion. Sleep overcame him, and in misplaced kindness, no one saw the need to roust him out.
He woke to the gut-sick, upset sense of something gone terribly wrong. As if power had stirred just beyond his awareness, or a prescient tremor had shot through his dreams before he could grasp its significance. The first thing he heard was Caolle’s voice, declaiming, in a tone unwarrantedly jubilant.
Someone else answered, laughing. Then a scout’s buoyant whoop shook droplets from the ridgepole onto Dakar’s face. He spluttered and sat up, stiff enough to groan and blinking to clear bleary eyes. The tent was empty, the fire gone out. Startled by the lateness of the hour, he ploughed through dank fleeces to the door flap.
Cold air slapped his face, no improvement. His wits were too sleep-clogged to think. The view met his vision in blinding whiteness. He squinted, picked out thin mist, grey rock, and dead bracken, dusted over with hoarfrost.
Dawn was hours gone and a shepherd had filched his cloak.
He groped through a dimness muddled in the smells of rancid food and peat ash until he found a garment to pull over his shivering shoulders. Emerged like an otter out of water into cold, he gasped, ‘What’s happened? Where’s Arithon?’
Caolle stood by the cracked ice of a spring, slapping caked sleet from his sleeve cuffs. He turned a face with rimed eyebrows toward the tent. ‘You slept through the news? Jaelot’s garrison’s finally had enough. This morning, they’re folding their camp. Columns are marching east as we speak. They’ve started to pull out of Vastmark.’
To Dakar’s continued stiff silence, he added, ‘Not to worry for the others. They’ve delayed for good reason, to be sure the retreat matched the rumours.’
‘Where’s Arithon?’ Dakar repeated.
His plaintive note of fear cut through at last and snapped the war captain’s complaisance. ‘Why?’ Caolle strode over, his raw knuckles clamped to his sword hilt. ‘His Grace is down the trail. Asked for time to himself.’ He swept a glance that bit over Dakar’s dishevelment. ‘Fiends alive, what’s wrong?’
The Mad Prophet never broke his own absorbed study: of cliffs that felt skewed out of balance; over a wilderness of mist, raked like tufted fleece across the valleys; and under sky capped in lead-bellied clouds. The steep rake of rock where the tents clung like lichens dropped away into sparkling white, spiked in frost that cased stone and grasses in ethereal, glassine beauty.
Through the brutal cold, Dakar cried, ‘Caolle, get your scouts! Tell them to look for an assassin!’
Then he was off at a limping run toward the narrow trail that snaked down the slope. Shouting erupted behind him, sliced by the sliding, steel ring of blades from wet scabbards. Clansmen were running at his heels, fanning out to scour the ridges.
Too fat to sprint,’ Dakar skidded down a shale face to cut off one bend in the trail. White plumes of moisture streamed past his lips. He moaned at the stab of icy air. There was no rain, he thought, desperate. His prescient dream had shown rainfall, dead bracken, and lichened boulders, not the naked, scoured rock he traversed at a windmilling scramble.
The track cut to the right. Past the rim of the hill, the trail jagged like a kinked cord into a ravine sheltered from the winds, and grown with stands of grass and russet fronds of killed bracken. The cold of high altitude had turned the plants early. Dakar gasped as dread plunged in a rush through his vitals. The site was the same. He had passed the place, unrecognized, unknowing, last night in the darkness.
Here lay the location his prescient prophecy had revealed for the Shadow Master’s death.
The last, outside hope became dashed at next breath. There the prince stood with his back turned, absorbed by something farther down the trail. Arithon wore leathers streaked dull from foul weather, the black hair uncut since his court visit to Ostermere knotted back with a deer hide thong. A quiver of arrows hung near empty at his hip, the yew bow he had borrowed set aside, still strung, against a scaled shoulder of rock. His bearing held the loose-limbed, enviable grace seen so often on the tranquil sands of Merior.
Then a rattling fall of pebbles shattered his moment of solitude. Arithon spun, his wild start of tension eased to a welcoming smile.
‘Dakar,’ he shouted. ‘It’s over. The warhost has broken to march east.’
Even from a distance, his face looked shadowed. The hollows left chiselled by sleepless nights and strain had yet to soften, though the killing, the risk, the deadly danger presented by Desh-thiere’s curse grew less for each minute that passed. He might have no time to celebrate the fact he had survived with his integrity intact and his tribal allies unharmed.
Dakar swore and kept running.
Time slowed. Vision acquired a rending brilliance of detail; again he saw the brown skeletons of bracken, the eerie sense of framed stillness in the half-breath before frightful tragedy.
Then the last hope, ripped away as the sky opened up into downpour. The final facet of the vision given months before fell inexorably into place. Two steps, and Arithon would complete the angle of that image. Some assassin’s arrow would fly and strike, and all they had accomplished would be lost. All; Dakar howled for the waste. The Mistwraith’s dire threat would acquire free rein through his own colossal carelessness and a tardy, selfish hoarding of a loyalty he had almost rejected for blind prejudice.
He tried to shout. The wind snatched his words. He could not make himself heard for the drumroll of rain on rock, nor cry over the unbroken trickle of runoff guttered over bare ledges. By some cruel trick of nature, a fickle gust from behind, he heard very clearly the twang of a bowstring from cover higher up the scarp. Then the hum of the arrow as it launched toward rendezvous with its living target.
Dakar had no time to frame spells to command steel, to bend air and arrest wood and feather. His desperate effort to warn Sethvir slipped awry in the chaos of the deluge. The fleeting second for preventive action slipped past. Arithon closed that fatal, last step, to stand isolate at the crux of fate and prophecy.
There was nothing else left under earth and sky one labouring, fat spellbinder could do.
The Mad Prophet launched his ungainly body in between to offer himself as Arithon’s shield.
A split second he had to flinch from folly, to ache for the likely fact the archer in hiding could simply fire a second spelled shaft and complete the diverted work of the first. One heartbeat he raged against the futility of his act and ached for obligations left undone.
Then the arrow struck. Impact pitched him forward onto his face and pain sliced his regrets to screaming ribbons.
Dakar hit gravel rolling, primed with the counterspells he needed to engage his longevity training. His first effort was waylaid and poisoned inside. Slashed through the scald of his blood by something more sinister than steel, he locked his jaws and groaned. Had he not been spellbinder to a Fellowship Sorcerer, he might not have recognized the distinctive bite of arcane energy; the crystal driven resonance of a Koriani seal, furtively set to ensure the arrow’s wound would be mortal.
He gasped. Rain fell in his eyes. Every muscle in his back and abdomen cramped, and agony drove him to whimper. He could feel the bleeding. Instinct insisted he must engage this sigil and that binding to stem the gush; to close torn tissues and claw back a firm foothold on life.
But a rank tide of dizziness sucked through his awareness. He could not think, could not concentrate, could not snatch back the threads of self-discipline. Five hundred years of arduous s
tudy, and he lacked the means to unwind the fugitive work of a solitary Koriani death seal.
He had time to taste irony along with the blood. The spell-turned arrow intended for Arithon hurt a thousand times worse than the knife thrust taken from an irate husband for his stolen kiss from a kitchen wench, the signal bit of folly which had bought his unwanted term of service.
Then darkness blanked his sight. Tears of remorse wet Dakar’s cheeks, striped by the cold fall of rain. He understood he was not going to pull himself together, was not going to staunch the ebb of his life force in time. He would pass the Wheel and suffer Daelion’s judgment without seeing whether Arithon survived.
Of all disappointments, that sparked his anger. He could not even snatch the awareness for the handful of minutes he needed to know the outcome of his train of mistakes.
The last thing he felt were hurried hands on his shoulder. Then a voice, perhaps Caolle’s, in gruff and distant protest. ‘Name of Ath, there’s no justice in the world if he dies …’
But therein lay the unkind twist of fate. Had Dakar any breath, he would have railed against paradox, that for all his inept living, his one selfless act should seal his end. He wondered if Sethvir’s histories would name him hero, or if his Fellowship master would appreciate the contradiction; and then he had no thought but silence.
For a very long time, there was nothing. Darkness, stillness, utter cold; then a point of blue light, etching a fretted course to close patterns a trained mage should recognize. Meaning that tantalized reason grazed the edge of labouring consciousness. The mind knew nothing, felt less. Just an invidious lassitude and a quiet more profound than winter’s grip of black ice.
Then a powerful voice pierced the chill and cracked the shackles of freezing blankness. Dakar heard his Name twined in power that could have raised the earth’s molten core in fiery summons.
A question followed, demanding a permission. Dakar felt tears prick the insides of his eyelids and a ghostly sense of flesh he had forgotten he still possessed. His thoughts imprinted an awareness of Asandir’s presence, then gave free consent to what was asked.
Someone he could not see cried out in relief.
Then a burst of white light scoured through him and pain rushed back like a shriek torn through perfect vacuum.
Weeping for the return of bodily sensation, gasping breaths that seemed drawn in pure flame, the Mad Prophet opened his eyes. Rain and clouds; a bitter wind snapped his cheek. He saw Asandir’s face, drawn in weathered lines and a fearful, patient concentration.
Then Caolle’s voice, surly with concern. ‘Shouldn’t we get him to shelter?’
No one answered. Dakar felt the Sorcerer’s hands in tender strength turn his body. He rolled prone on sharp gravel, rinsed over in running water. Blood trailed from his mouth. The taste made him gag. Too depleted to shiver, he felt the chill spear clear through him as fingers gently cut the tunic from the broken off arrow shaft struck on an angle through his back.
‘Steady,’ said Asandir.
Then, as Dakar struggled to ask what crisis should bring a Fellowship Sorcerer to his side, and to warn of the Koriani plot against Arithon, his master said, inarguable, ‘Don’t speak.’
Dakar felt the burn of a sigil drawn in warm fire against his skin. The pain bled away, stilled from a thundering scream to a murmur.
‘Sleep, Dakar,’ said the Sorcerer in that tone no mortal man could summon the wits to disobey.
The time was much later. Night, Dakar sensed as he clawed through mazed wits to reclaim his smothered awareness. He opened his eyes to the ruddy glare of a tallow lamp. Spidery legs of shadow stalked across the woven patterns of a shepherd’s tent. He smelled rancid fleece and the hot reek of fat. Scapegrace that he was, he longed for cheap gin to obliterate the upwelling emotion that threatened to rip up his guts.
Against every blundering mistake in creation, his master had seen fit to assist his survival. The result promised punishment and joy.
A swathe of firm bandaging constricted his chest. Every breath jerked an ache through his back. He still did not know; he feared above all to ask if his foolhardy act had won reprieve.
Then the voice he most wanted to hear this side of the Wheel spoke in gentle censure at his bedside. ‘For the armoury at Alestron, I’d say we were quits.’ Lean hands closed over his palms and pressed something sharp and metallic into his strengthless grasp.
The Mad Prophet rolled his eyes to find the Prince of Rathain propped on crossed arms against his bedside.
Too hurt to move, Dakar traced the razor-edged metal between his fingers. ‘A clan vengeance arrow?’
Arithon recited the inscription on the flange, unblinking, his grave features lent an unwarranted sense of majesty by the uneven play of the light. ‘ “From the hand of Bransian s’Brydion, for the seven who died in the armoury.” You know you saved my life.’
Against more than the Duke of Alestron, Dakar struggled to say. A banespell from Morriel Prime had sped the s’Brydion vow of enmity; and now, most dangerously, her guile had ensured that no trace of evidence would remain. Had he not taken the arrow in the Shadow Master’s stead, not even Althain’s Warden could have known of a plot in progress. Except for his testimony as living witness, the magic had left no aura.
Arithon answered his urgent concern. ‘Asandir found out about the Koriathain as he healed you. No one knows why their order should wish me dead.’
Dakar expelled a scratchy sigh. ‘If the Fellowship saw, why didn’t my master do something earlier? Where has he gone now?’
Above him, etched in motionless tension, Arithon weighed his reply. A masterbard’s exacting intuition let him say, ‘Sethvir picked up your distress on the ridgetop and passed on the warning. But Asandir made no intervention until you had accomplished the errand he set you on course to complete.’
‘Ath!’ Dakar whispered, too weak for heat and vehemence. He coughed out the rancid reek of mutton fat. ‘Don’t ever run afoul of a Fellowship Sorcerer. Their ways are devious and tangled in a manner even Daelion couldn’t fathom.’ But hindsight showed his assigned service to Arithon was no penance, after all; just a difficult lesson brought to full circle.
‘You can rest,’ the Master of Shadow said in rueful sympathy. ‘Asandir has ridden on as my envoy to inform Lysaer s’Ilessid of another ransom. Thanks to your timely call to action, Caolle’s scouts took Duke Bransian prisoner in my name.’
‘You’ve got all four brothers s’Brydion?’ Dakar’s beard twitched to his lopsided grin. ‘A bloody plague of fiends would be simpler to banish. You’ll let them go for Lysaer’s gold?’
Green eyes flashed to a gem-cut glint of bright humour. ‘Stay and find out. Asandir left his wish that you choose your own road from this place.’
The Mad Prophet grabbed the blankets to shove up on one elbow, then groaned. Felled by a stab of wretched agony, he surrendered to prostration while spinning senses settled. ‘I can go with him or make my own way?’
In dreamy disbelief, Dakar pondered this, a frown furrowed under the hair left screwed into a cockscomb nest of wild tangles. Beyond doubt he felt unready to resume the disciplines demanded of a Fellowship spellbinder. The willing burden of responsibility was too fresh, too unwieldy a yoke upon shoulders still far from self-reliant.
The prince he had spilled his blood to preserve had opened his mind to new venues. Their relationship intrigued him like some razor-edged puzzle he could not resist the urge to challenge.
‘I’d stay in your service, if you’ll have me.’ Reddened in diffidence, Dakar tucked his bearded chin beneath the coverlet. ‘If after Jaelot and Merior and yesterday’s blunder, you can imagine me becoming something more than a damned liability.’
Across from him, Arithon raised eyebrows in surprise. ‘My service of itself is a damned liability. Has an arrow in the back taught you nothing?’ Then his lips flexed and dismissed his rare smile. Unmasked by deep warmth few others came to witness, he added, ‘In truth, Dakar, I’d be
honoured. Three times you’ve proven your worth and your caring. I’d be the world’s greatest idiot to turn your offer of friendship aside.’
Overset by embarrassment, Dakar stared up at the worn weave of the tent, pricked with holes at the roofpole. ‘I’ll still get drunk,’ he warned. The light swam around him, bright beyond bearing, and the air felt too thick to draw past the lump in his throat. Against a maddening, sleepy urge to drift beyond thought, the Mad Prophet mumbled into the fleeces. ‘I’ll not give up whoring, no matter how horribly you plague me.’
Somewhere far off, the s’Ffalenn prince was laughing without satire. ‘If five centuries of apprenticeship with a Fellowship Sorcerer failed to break your decadent habits, who am I to dare try?’
Last Defeat
Rain fell over Vastmark in cold, autumn torrents, and the valleys lay pooled in pewter puddles. In a war camp half-dismantled, undone into chaos, and up to its ankles in churned mud, Lysaer s’Ilessid stood in the open, bareheaded, while the Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, took his leave after bringing word of Duke Bransian’s captivity.
The moment was not private or friendly. Around the site where prince confronted Sorcerer, wet ox teams drew the great drays. Spoked wheels sucked over the moiled ground to a creak of stressed timbers, laden beds heaped with war gear and furled canvas. The drovers goaded their beasts and stared in furtive fear as they passed. No few marvelled over the proud courage of their liege lord, who dared the attempt to stand down a mage of the Fellowship.
‘You are not welcome here,’ Lysaer said in stiff anger, while the Sorcerer regarded his stilted reserve in a stillness that marked them both as figures set apart. ‘Not only for the fact you speak for the Shadow Master, and not just for the misfortune that Arithon demands another ransom from me for a hostage.’
Asandir regarded the s’Ilessid prince unabashed, while the water channelled off his silver hair and through the grooves scored from the corners of his eyes over cheekbones like weathering on old granite. His answer, when it came, held restrained sorrow. ‘That’s a very large statement, made from a very closed heart.’