Traitor's Knot (Light & Shadow 07)

  The omission would spare the crown prince's dignity, or so Eriegal thought at the time. Jieret's daughter was trustworthy. She would rise to wear her caithdein's black with increased confidence, given the experience. Whether or not today's initiative determined Arithon's fitness to rule, someone needed to wrest the feckless creature away from his amorous dalliance.

  Shrewdly practical, Eriegal finished his overdue meal. Then he dragged up a hassock, folded his arms, and nodded off, while the council's discussion droned in the background above him.

  By midafternoon the rain fell in torrents. The trail scouts reported, wet to the skin. Then the foragers returned, complaining. They snacked on jerked meat, since the kindling outside was as uselessly soaked as their bow-strings, and game could not be tracked in a downpour. Only the sentries maintained their strict schedule, swathed in oiled leather, while the outlying patrols sheltered as they could under the wind-battered oaks.

  No one fretted that Jeynsa did not reappear. As discussion closed, and the elders arose to retire to the tents of their relatives, sly comments disparaged the Prince of Rathain's steamy passion, beyond doubt holed up in some piss-reeking den in a rock ledge claimed from a forest cat.

  Twilight's gloom had dissolved into pitch-dark when the Koriani enchantress finally came in.

  She had been gathering cat's-tail roots in the mires, to judge by the mud drawn up in rings at her hem-line and sleeves. Her sopped hair was tied back like a cart-horse's mane, and his Grace of Rathain was not with her.

  Before Feithan could address her need for dry clothes, she was accosted by Dakar's jagged state of suspended torment. 'What did he say?'

  Elaira surveyed the close-knit party of six, orange-lit by the flare of a pine knot: Sidir, seated with grave attention, a chart of the kingdom inked on rolled deer-hide under his sensitive fingers; and beside him, Feithan, her dark lashes downcast. She, at least, displayed aching discomfort for the past night's inconsolable handling.

  Braggen leaned his bull frame by the door-post, great sword set aside and arms folded. If his fixed scowl wore a flush of embarrassment, High Earl Barach's candid stare implied that he might not yet know what had occurred in the glen by the Willowbrook. Also oblivious, Eriegal lay in a tucked heap by the center pole, sleeping against a scrunched hassock.

  The dearth of privacy scarcely troubled clan custom; Dakar's stricken glance refused to release her. 'Elaira, I beg you. What did his Grace say?'

  The enchantress regarded him, eyes sparked to cold fire. 'That you should have trusted him to protect me.'

  Braggen broke in with hot incredulity. 'Over Selidie's possession of your personal crystal and a babe of his lineage, defenceless?'

  'Even so.' Her resharpened censure raked the huge clansman over, not sparing him the cut-glass state of her anguish. 'His friends could have let him attend his own fate.'

  'That doesn't allow for the crux of the crisis,' Sidir stated without remonstrance. 'You imply that we should have permitted the lane flux to recoil and hurl the weal of two kingdoms to imbalance?'

  Elaira just stared at him, while her bedraggled hems dripped, and her hands locked tight on her bundled roots, collected through her hours of cathartic foraging.

  'What else under Ath's sky could we have done?' Dakar cried at last in stripped anguish.

  Elaira stirred. She glanced sidewards at Feithan, who nodded. Given that tacit leave against the sensitive uncertainty, that her Prime's meddling had not reneged the lodge tent's grant of guest welcome, the enchantress finally stepped into the light thrown by the flickering brand. There, shoulders bowed, she sat down. 'You could have allowed Arithon the gift of respect for what was held sacred between us.'

  Earl Barach proved not to be uninformed: his steady calm much too old for his years, his comment cut through without passion. 'You would have set your man's dignity above the land's health and the critical need for a bountiful harvest to redress the west's blight and famine?'

  Elaira said nothing, but covered her face with chilled hands. By the tenor of their silence, the men did not see: except for Sidir, who lifted the burden of roots from her lap and delivered his whispered apology.

  'I don't understand,' Braggen insisted, his nerves sawed as the tension extended.

  Feithan's unstinting spirit spared the enchantress the wretched need to explain. 'She means you to know that Prince Arithon would have chosen the child before he left the lane's kindled forces imbalanced or the land's needs unrequited.'

  Dakar stood, shocked white. 'That would have set him, and you, against the unleashed might of your order! You're saying we should have left him such a risk? Dharkaron's black vengeance, lady! Where are the sane limits? For a Teir's'Ffalenn's arrogance and his gift of rogue talent, we should turn our backs on all consequence? You tell us we ought to have sanctioned his ruin!'

  The Koriani enchantress uncovered her face and regarded the prophet whose ungovernable Sight had entangled too many lives in fast knots. 'I ask what you and your Fellowship will not give, in trust. Leave Arithon willing to fail on his merits!' Elaira's leashed temper gave way. 'What could have happened?'

  'Arithon's child -' began Dakar.

  'And mine!' cracked Elaira. 'His and mine! Not yours. Or your Fellowship's, or Prime Selidie's, despite what she thinks! We could have been left with the chance to look after our own, as a risk shouldered squarely between us.'

  When the spellbinder's heated stance failed to buckle, Elaira lashed back in raw shame. 'Ath's mercy! He was helpless, and I lack the power to stand down a Fellowship Sorcerer! How would you feel?'

  The Mad Prophet flushed. 'Lady, on that score, I daresay I have cause to know!'

  That forced her acknowledgement: he did not practise vice. The burden he bore from the glen was no pittance; was made worse, in chill fact, since as the free agent, he could have refused Kharadmon's ruthless expedient.

  Dakar faced away. If the humid scents of wet leather, oiled steel, and pine smoke clogged an atmosphere grown too close, there remained unavoidable details to discuss. Despite his stripped nerves and Elaira's reft heart-break, he stiffened resolve and pressed forward. 'I have to ask, lady. Has his Grace abrogated the permissions I held?'

  'No.' Elaira knotted her fingers, scarcely aware as Feithan slipped off to fetch her mulled wine and a blanket. 'That says far more for Arithon's grace of forgiveness than for the regard given a crown prince's sanctioned integrity.'

  'And now?' Language did not encompass the delicate words; Dakar could not frame the question, though she must know he could not leave that excoriating, last query unanswered: whether or not the Crown Prince of Rathain had willfully chosen to go forward and make her entangled love consummate.

  Elaira replied, now shaking as the flushed hare pressed at bay by a wolf pack. 'He would not have me endangered, he said.'

  She wept then, the silenced tears tracking down her already rain-soaked face.

  Then Feithan arrived and wrapped her cold, huddled form into an heirloom blanket. 'My dear, you're exhausted. Let's see you to bed with a cup of spiced wine and a posset.'

  Elaira did not protest the kindness and allowed the insistent clanswoman to guide her onto her feet. Checked as she stood by Sidir's tacit touch, she paused only to answer his last, gentle question.

  'Your prince consulted with Kharadmon long enough to reach an accord for the timing to enact their planned purge of the Kralovir. Just before daybreak, Arithon left. If the Aiyenne's in flood, he'll ford at Narms, and ride post down the Mathorn Road. In fair weather or foul, ten days should see his Grace through to the gates of Etarra.' For the anxiety on the Mad Prophet's face, she added, 'He said you could abandon his service, or else catch up with him as you chose. He left an address for the purpose.'

  'A trapper's relation?' Dakar shivered, then nodded, if not relieved, at least reassured he would not be shunned out of rancour. 'That makes sense. His Grace owes the man's sister a promise concerning a call of condolence.' Yesterday's fulfilled obligation to a survi
ving clanborn uncle had provided the information. The woman's husband had closed his cooper's shop in Eastwall and re-established his trade where the bounty of Alliance funding made business more lucrative.

  Much later, when Elaira was settled and sleeping, Eriegal stirred from his extended catnap. First informed of Prince Arithon's precipitous departure, then given the round of ill news he had missed by his choice to guard Jeynsa, he heard out the grim scale of the upset served by the Alliance's taint of cult necromancy. Sidir's account did not finish until the pine knot had burned to a coal.

  Under thin, bloody light, Eriegal rubbed at his balding head, the first uneasy sign he was troubled. 'Jeynsa went after Prince Arithon,' he admitted to Barach point-blank.

  No one worried. The girl was well able to look after herself anywhere in the free wilds. Burdened down by far weightier concerns, Barach shrugged. 'If my sister tried to follow his Grace, the rain will have spoiled her tracking.'

  'So she catches him up?' said Braggen, amused. 'Our liege is no fool. He'll shred her dignity, raise every hackle she's got, then send her young backside packing.'

  Lumped onto a hassock in jellied exhaustion, Dakar dismissed, 'If he doesn't, I'll knife him, believe it.'

  For what lay in the north was an unresolved danger cold-bloodedly vicious, and beyond the pale of any clansman's mortal imagining.

  Summer 5671

  Bait

  Fast as Arithon could cross the wilds of Halwythwood, then engage the travellers' amenities for a swift passage by way of the trade-road, the Mad Prophet could maintain no such scorching pace. He lacked the stamina to make speed on foot. Post-horses tired beneath his stout bulk, even if his slipshod balance astride did not scour him to raw blisters. Beyond mundane discomforts, he found himself loath to meet Arithon s'Ffalenn face-to-face.

  The spellbinder who had enacted a Fellowship directive had not stood, heart or mind, as a friend.

  A fortnight and two days granted too brief an interval to reconcile the hurt, or ease the fresh brunt of remorse. Hot sun, and dust, and the seasonal scourge of night-feeding insects could not eclipse the dread or distance the hollow eyes of the enchantress now left to keep desolate vigil in Halwythwood.

  But the shadow thrown by the dark practice of necromancy posed a crisis too bleak to defer. Too soon, Dakar crossed the Mathorn foothills. First wrapped in the resin-thick taint of the firs that blackened the steepening slopes, then folded under the blanketing shade thrown by the flint-crowned rims of the peaks, he cleared the last notch, while his hack puffed and lagged underneath him.

  Spread under dusty haze, amid the creak of spoked wheels and the lowing of the teamed oxen, the overlook exposed the last, rolling downs, where the wilds of Daon Ramon lapped against the furrowed pass that bisected the spurs of two ranges. All traffic bound northward funnelled up through the gap, while the diminishing ruts of the east-bound trade-road wound away towards the opposite coast. The snake-twist approach to Etarra had always dizzied, for the switched-back that curves rose in ascent to the southern gate. Yet today, the brassy fall of noon sunlight lit the sweeping changes made since the year of Prince Arithon's failed coronation.

  Dakar reined up with caught breath at the sight.

  The wedged muddle of square-cut brick battlements and knobbed towers still straddled the cleft of the pass. But the forested vales he remembered had been razed to stripped clay and bare rock. Above loomed the bleak, fitted walls of an outer array of defence-works, newly constructed by conscript labor under the arcane expertise of Elssine's masons.

  . With Lysaer s'Ilessid now the ratified mayor, a westlands-bred chancellor had been appointed to govern, his experience and temperament a sharp match for the town's stew of pedigree arrogance and cutthroat politics. Etarra's influence lay at the hotbed center of the sunwheel Alliance. Onto that template, Raiett Raven's directive had stamped its pejorative imprint, transforming the north's most prosperous trade hub into the seat of command for its burgeoning war host.

  The scorched scrub and broom-grass at the foot of the notch were now trampled to dirt by a soldiers' camp, pavilions and tents sprawled out in picketed squares. Recruits drilled on the gouged turf of the practise fields, where wild orchards once ripened apples. Flag standards parted the tenuous breeze, smoke-hazed by the fires in the ramshackle armoury sheds that scabbed the vale like a canker. The burdened air bore its tang of hot steel, the composting reek of the middens, the fly-swarming latrines, the stock pens, and the bustling cook-shacks.

  Thought stalled. The heart faltered. Nowhere was the Master of Shadow more hated and feared than here, in the heart of Rathain. Inside this wasp's nest of zealous fanatics, there walked that single, marked man, his flesh made the target for every fletched arrow; his blood the sought prize for each pennoned lance, and down to the last sharpened sword. To curb a deadly incursion of necromancy, Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn had entered Etarra, unsupported, bereft, and alone.

  A whip cracked, close by. 'Get along, you fat jackass!' An incensed driver shook his fist and shouted over the milling grind of the drays. 'I'm not paid to park here for the view! Bedamned if your nag hasn't jammed the whole road while you nod off like a daisy!'

  Dakar snapped from the throes of unpleasant reverie and reined his blown hack downhill. Before long, he steered through the warren of free-booting whore's cribs and craft shacks, where inquiry found him the cooper's shop appointed for Arithon's rendezvous.

  The meeting he dreaded did not await him. Dismounted before the open, board shed, he was welcomed as a traveller tired from the road, well spoken for, and expected. A lanky boy led his horse off to the livery. Set at ease in the shade, Dakar was served currant bread and tepid tea by a muscular matron, who then hustled off to stoke the flame for the steam-box. While he munched to the din of the cooper's apprentice, hammering steel into barrel hoops, the plank trestle was shared by an inquisitive old man whose pouched eyes were clouded by cataracts.

  Dakar gave back all the news from the road, on request recounting the blazons of the dispatch riders inbound from the towns lying west. Such interest was ordinary, the routine queries any sight-impaired elder might ask, whose shelter relied on the fortune of a nephew's craft, or grandson's. Yet as the meal finished, the untidy fellow did not settle into his wicker chair for a nap. Instead, he delved into a box at his feet and pulled forth a folded document. The wrapper was tied with gilt ribbon and a genuine sunwheel seal.

  Dakar shot erect as though pinked with an awl.

  The man's milky eyes stared ahead, quite oblivious to the irregularity. 'You will take this into Etarra, my friend. Deliver it to the proprietor of Simshane's House of Exotic Delights.'

  Dakar clicked his mouth shut. 'But that's the brothel that sells -'

  The old man had a cutting, ironic smile. 'Did you come here to help? Then you'll say you're eager to sample his wares. Since this document offers him lavish reward, he'll fall over himself to oblige you. Is the bargain so dreadful? You'll have a comfortable bath. A softer bed than this abode can offer a guest who's a stranger. At breakfast, you'll tell the fat pimp that two hired carriages will arrive the next night to collect the young flowers he peddles. If you find them sweet, and yielding, and clean, you'll promise delivery of gold on these terms and seal a clandestine transaction.'

  The Mad Prophet slammed his fists on the trestle.

  Plates, crumbs, and tea mugs jounced, lost under the din from the craft-yard. The blind elder did not twitch an eye-lash. 'You don't like such instructions? They grate on your character?'

  On his feet before thought, Dakar snatched the scroll from the man's idle hand. 'Don't ask,' he retorted through his clenched teeth. 'If the conniving bastard who left me these orders comes back here to ask for more favours, you can tell him from me: he's got a vicious hand with a grudge, not to mention a sick touch for back-stabbing cruelty.'

  The old man blinked. 'I'll say you're not going?'

  'Oh, I'll go!' Dakar shoved off the trestle, the ache in his spine like a heated
steel rod and his eyes pinched to slits of hazed anger. 'If only to say to the mountebank's face what I think of his vindictive temperament!'

  The old man raised white eyebrows, and Dakar, beyond words, turned his back and stamped out.

  Red-faced, and scorching in merciless sunlight, he was forced to beg transport up-town, cheek by jowl with a chatterbox boy who drove for the kiln that baked mud-bricks. The urchin pattered through the day's seamy gossip in gutter-snipe accents, while the rattletrap vehicle rumbled uphill, and the straining oxen dropped steaming manure. They crept past the tight bends. Stopped for the laden drays, paused to breathe draft teams, the spellbinder huddled in simmering fury until the odd phrase in the boy's busy tongue snatched his cogitation up short. 'What did you just say?'

  The filthy child flipped him a grin, snaggled with broken front teeth. 'Which? The pedigree spinster who dropped stone-dead in her plate while porking down snails at the banquet?'

  'Not that,' Dakar said, canny enough to cool his sharp interest.

  'Oh!' The boy's puzzlement cleared. 'The bit before that one. You weren't aware of the blind bard's bet with the city's appointed High Chancellor?'

  'That one,' the disgruntled spellbinder affirmed, and then heard in remarkable depth of the cloudy-eyed free singer who was winning enraptured acclaim through the vibrancy of his playing.

  'There's this wager afoot,' the waif ran on, switching his oxen around the last hairpin curve. High overhead a hawk sliced the sky, while the war camp sank into the bruise-coloured shade that mantled the lower vale. 'Word goes the High Chancellor can't sleep at night. The bard's posed a challenge, and promised hard proof. Inside of three days, he's claimed he will show that his music can free any man living from the affliction.'

  As the burdened cart ground up to the gate, Dakar chewed over the fresh pill of rancour: that the encounter he dreaded had come and gone in the noisy murk of the craft shed. In hindsight, that unassuming old man had been much too suave; not to mention the suspect, official parchment was sealed with a sunwheel blazon. The very same fiendish bent for conniving would mean that two birds must fall to one stone. This errand to visit an unsavoury brothel promised more than an underhand stab to retaliate.