Fugitive Prince

  An undignified thump intervened from outside. Dakar clanged the latch and demanded admittance, and Caolle moved fast to let him in. Against a strung stillness, the clansman snapped the door closed, the hands beneath his cloak clasped to the hilts of his weapons.

  Too drunken for tact as he sized up the tension, Dakar blundered on, snatched the second tankard from Cattrick’s preoccupied hand, and spouted his venomous opinion. “A friend might believe you wanted the thrill of seeing a sorcerer burned alive.”

  Cattrick’s pelt of whiskers parted into a wolfish smile. “I prefer to speak to my associates firsthand.” He uncorked the decanter, rolled a long swallow of brandy on his tongue, and switched his regard to frame Arithon. “You’re not drinking, either. Does that mean we’re too careful to risk any untoward confidence?”

  “There isn’t an abundance of confidence to share.” Arithon sampled his drink, grimaced at the sting to a throat stressed from singing, then tipped his head back in the chair and shut his eyes. He let go a small binding. The shadows he used to disguise his appearance ran off like singed silk in the candlelight. When next he looked up, his eyes were bright green and his hair the sheened black of a raven’s wing. His gift had done more than falsify coloring.

  Now none in his presence could mistake his frank warning: the exasperation laid bare, or its unwanted corollary, written into the planes of bone pressed against hollowed, pale flesh. If such an unmasking had meant to restore confidence, the mistake escaped salvage as Cattrick leaned forward, eager to test how far he might sway exposed weakness.

  Dakar felt a sudden grue ream his spine. Hazed by some thwarted fragment of prescience, or maybe just spurious hunch, he blurted, “Cattrick, are you in Koriani pay?”

  “Don’t answer that!” Arithon sheared in. “I don’t believe it.” He did not look settled or sanguine anymore. “Caolle, pass on what we brought from the tinsmith’s, if you please.”

  The clansman slipped the sack from the thong at his belt. Never a man to forbear from sharp action, he hurled it full force toward the bed.

  Cattrick fielded the catch without upsetting the brandy. Since its unwieldy bulk required both hands, he nipped off the thong binding and upended the contents in a caroling chime over the red velvet coverlet.

  Dakar’s eyebrows shot up. The tinsmith had delivered in pristine gold coinage, struck in Havish’s fair city of Cheivalt.

  Prepared when Cattrick’s lips hardened to contempt, Arithon said, “That’s no bribe. I thought we agreed. A man of your stature can be paid, but not bought.”

  Cattrick lost all his angst to disbelief. “No! Don’t say we’re due wages. The crown of Tysan rewards our work well enough.”

  “Lysaer’s pay is spoils.” Enthused beyond weariness, Arithon laughed at the shipwright’s flummoxed startlement. “If you can unbend on that fine point, let’s drink your nice brandy and celebrate. After all, the miserable galley work’s finished. You’re laying new keels for my fleet, now.”

  “Ath!” Cattrick slapped his leg in a stymied explosion of temper. “Fiends plague us all, man, you could’ve sent some sort of word back after our previous launching! The lads in the yard are the devil to keep quiet, and I take unkindly to guessing. Did our new brig shake down in safe passage to Corith?”

  “That much and better,” Arithon quipped. “The pay for your craftsmen was sent from the sale of the cider she carried as cargo. Now could we back off and swill spirits in earnest? You can sell me out to my enemies later if my nasty reputation makes you squeamish. But if we rise tomorrow undamaged by brandy, then all our brash claims to manly pursuit are going to lie forfeit by default.”

  Dakar woke up to hazed pain, as though moths with steel hammers set to with rivets and fastened the inside of his skull to his brain. His bladder was full, and his tongue, like furred lead. Well versed with the miseries that came entrenched with cheap beer, he groaned and shoved upright. With his throbbing head plowed facedown into a pillow, he fumbled to grab the first container at hand to catch what his body ejected.

  “You look fit to serve time as ship’s ballast,” said a quiet, etched voice across the room.

  A moan escaped the pillow. Dakar unshuttered a bloodshot brown eye and measured his tormentor, who sat tidied and dressed in the flamboyant elegance expected of bards who garnered a taproom patronage. “You shouldn’t be capable of speech. By Daelion’s fell justice, that brandy would have knocked anyone else down sick as a mule with a belly full of yew.”

  “You’re right.” Arithon stood, the slashed velvet sleeves of his doublet tacked with matched studs of black pearls. “I should have been, too, except that I had to render my gorge after Cattrick earned the good grace to fall senseless. He was packed off home in the slop taker’s cart for the round sum of two silvers.”

  “That’s thievery.” Dakar found the chamber pot. Pillow clenched now to his heaving belly, he sat, torn by two needs and waiting to see which bodily orifice was going to demand service first. “Not to mention a waste of fine brandy.” Then, disgusted to be caught just as black as the kettle, he folded in half and gave the selfsame libation to the vengeful god of brewed hops.

  Erect once again, and vastly more comfortable, he rinsed his sour mouth and regarded the prince, who thoughtfully seemed to be sorting out yesterday’s clothes for him. “We’re going someplace?”

  Unwontedly serious, Arithon passed over his shirt, then small-clothes and breeches in turn. “Yes. There’s something I need you to see.”

  Outside, the daylight had lost its dawn blush. The wind blew brisk with a warning of rain as the spellbinder trailed in the Masterbard’s footsteps through the quay alleys which led west through Riverton. Gulls screamed and called in a pale citrine sky. Dakar made his way with hands clamped to his temples, cursing when his feet tripped him. The fog-dampened cobblestones gleamed like new lead under the deep gloom of the eaves. Even that minimal glare hurt his eyes.

  “This excursion had damned well better be necessary,” he groused at the crossroads where the wharfside buildings thinned out. The stone road gave way to a rutted, mud track, interspersed by board bridges which stitched an uneven course through the mudflats of the Ilswater delta. Low ground wore bearded stands of marsh grass, interspersed with the less savory industry drawn by a thriving sea commerce. The air clung with smells. Still sunk in the misery of a tender stomach, Dakar pressed his cloak hem over his nose to cut the reek of the tanneries and the dead animal stink of the stock-yards.

  “Where in bleak Sithaer are you taking me?” he demanded as Arithon moved ahead like a wraith through a streamer of late-rising fog.

  “No place that’s civil. I’m sorry.” Reappeared in solid outline in his elegant gray silk, Arithon descended a weathered log stair. His high boots wore a fresh coat of wax, no detriment as he picked his way down a meandering path churned boggy with cow slots and muck. The ground oozed brackish water, and marsh wrens flitted off the fluffed heads of the reed stalks.

  “Not the barge docks at the estuary.” Dakar grimaced as the wet soaked through the scuffed leather shoes he persistently neglected to upkeep. “That’s a nasty, rough place to wear pearl-studded clothing. The meat packers there will knock a man flat just on principle, far less to snatch any wealth they think they can clean off of your person.”

  “We’re not dealing with meat packers.” Arithon turned sharply left off the path. Ahead, the land undulated, ochre on gray, the tufted sedges and marsh grass skirting the verge of the sinkpools dirtied with crusts of salt rime.

  “Damn you!” snapped Dakar, sunk ankle deep in cold water that shot pain like iced nails through his headache. “Since reasonable people don’t wear black pearls for a slogging jaunt through the marshes, you might have warned I’d get wet.”

  Arithon stopped, turned, caught Dakar’s moist wrist in hard fingers. “I will warn you now to stay silent. Where we’re going, if we’re seen, we’ll find trouble far worse than a meat packer’s mannerless fisticuffs.”

  The co
rollary stayed unspoken, that to chance-met observers with too much curiosity, a bard who wore clothing fit for rough country would have business other than minstrelsy. Dakar curbed his complaint. He sloshed at Arithon’s heels for a miserable half league, while his headache settled to roost in his forehead, and his beard became snagged with shed seed heads. Ahead, the damp ground arose into a low bluff, combed at the crest with rustling tufts of pale dune grass. The chatter of male voices issued from the far side, cut through by the metallic plink of a smith’s hammer. Someone’s coarse laughter was met by a shout. As bard and prophet mounted the slope, they heard an intermittent squeal of wood pressed to wood, telltale sign that a barge dragged at fixed bollards in the rip of the tide through the estuary.

  “There’s a landing here?” Dakar ventured in soft inquiry.

  Arithon nodded, then crouched to avoid being caught in stark silhouette against sky. Screened by the thickets of grass, he pressed forward, then beckoned for Dakar to share his vantage point.

  The Mad Prophet knelt in his brine-sodden hose. “Smugglers?” he whispered.

  “You’ll see.” Arithon’s face stayed attentively trained forward. “Listen.” Stilled as a fox, he strained to glean what he could from the windblown rags of conversation.

  “Fool dogs didn’t scent them,” one party blustered. He had rust-spotted chain mail and the stance of a braggart, meaty arms crossed on his chest. “The fiends had masked their back trail using green brush smeared with otter’s musk.” Through the ongoing throes of involved explanation, someone else cursed the smith for taking a fussy long time with his rivets.

  The hammer strokes paused, while a curse was returned, and Dakar parted the grasses. The headland where he and Arithon sheltered overhung an alluvial deposit, piled on the bend in one of the channels which drained the mouth of the Ilswater. The barge dock which hosted the current activity nestled beneath the steep curve of the bluffs. The planking was unweathered and new, but built to outlast winter storms. The bollards were well sunk and braced in roped triplets, with two vessels currently tied. One was a seagoing galley by the chipped strakes and dulled paint which bespoke the hard usage of a trader. The other was a river barge fitted out as a slaver. Halfnaked clansmen stood or sat, chained to steel rings in her deck.

  Dakar knew a white-hot explosion of rage, then an ache beyond words to express. These were the proud keepers of the old and irreplaceable bloodlines whose sworn bond of service began at the dawn of the Third Age. Now, one man’s whim reduced their function to brute labor. By Lysaer’s decree of revenge against Maenol, free men were reduced to the lives of kenneled dogs: a priceless heritage thrown to entropy and waste; a wild pride darkened to resentment and despair.

  A hand touched Dakar’s rigid wrist in restraint: Arithon’s, in forbearing compassion. “Those guardsmen can’t realize the impacting scope of their action.”

  Dakar choked down his fury. No excuse salved his nerves; not when he had borne living witness to the past, when the clans had braved their place as the link between mortal men and the burning, dire grace of the Paravians. His gorge rose at the price of an outworn injustice, reduced now to blind hatred and ignorance.

  Other cruelties stung for their needlessness. The captives had nothing beyond the crumpled leathers on their backs. Most were torn and marred with old bloodstains, testament to the violence of the hunt that had brought them to capture. They numbered a miserable two dozen, ill clothed and ill fed, their hair wind tangled and their bodies exposed to the chilly caprice of the weather.

  Eight guardsmen with the badges of royal authority oversaw the next step of what seemed an entrenched routine. To pass time in boredom, they traded epithets and jokes as the prisoners were off-loaded one at a time from the barge. A small fire flickered on the verge. There, a bandy-legged smith fitted each convict with an iron collar and cuffs. His burly apprentice then closed the steel link which fixed their chains to a bench on the deck of the trader’s galley.

  “Lookit that gimper. Never guess now, but he’s the one who fought like a wildcat.” The speaker with the sergeant’s badge sliced a thick finger down his cheek. “Left our captain with a scar his wife won’t forgive. Man beat the fool wretch half-senseless for that. He only stopped when six headhunters pulled him off. Their kind breathe and piss for their money, I swear. To Sithaer with all else, the bounty was half if the puking clan vermin upped and died.”

  Sickened now by worse than a hangover, Dakar saw through the marks of old bruises, and recognized just whose wrists were being fitted with permanent fetters. The young man who stood, fighting tremors of pain, was none other than the scout from Caithwood who had provided the spare horse for Caolle.

  The sight was one to brand the mind for cruel sorrow: the scout, chin raised, unwilling to show his gruff captors one sign that degradation and suffering touched his spirit. He did not flinch as the hammer blows closed the steel rivets, nor when the soldier grasped his lank braid and hacked the hair short at his nape. His face wore the battering bruises of rough handling. One arm and shoulder showed the livid scabs left from untended wounds. He walked with a stumbling limp as two guards prodded him up the gangplank to the galley. There, his forest-bred nerve almost failed him. The soldiers had to bundle him up to the bench, force him down, and hold him, while the apprentice clubbed his jaw to make way for the tools that would leave him chained like an animal.

  Dakar shut his eyes against pity and tears. The chance was too real, that the ships built at Riverton would become the last hope to save Tysan’s dwindled clan bloodlines.

  “You do see,” whispered Arithon. “Maenol’s people must be given the fair means to fight back.”

  Dakar swallowed. He had no argument for stark necessity. Nor could he summon the cold-hearted logic to decry that the dangers posed too grave a risk for a prince already under curse by the Mistwraith. As a vicious, damp gust raked over the bluff and razed first warning of winter in a chill that bit to the bone, he took sharp note of the season. “It’s late in the year. Too late for a galley to round Stormwell Cape. The ice will be moving already in Northstrait. That ship can’t make passage to Miralt.”

  “No,” Arithon agreed. “There’s another incentive as you’ll see.”

  For the galley captain had poked his head out of his snug cabin. His shout carried clearly to the guard on the dock, who wore the sunwheel badge of authority. That one unhooked his thumb from his belt and strode aboard. Amid brief discussion, he pulled something from his tunic. A tied leather pouch changed hands. The galleyman shook the contents. The greed in his smile exposed yellow teeth as he ripped open the strings and counted the coin, the pale flash of gold a bright note under the rubbed velvet of the overcast sky.

  “That’s a bribe for the harbormaster at Cheivalt,” Arithon said. Even through his low tone of voice, the sorrow wrenched through. “They defy King Eldir’s edict to move the slaves southward through Havish. Once past Mornos, no mayor in Shand will scruple to disbar slave-bearing galleys from the seaports. These men will be resold in Shandor or Vhalzein. If no one intervenes, they might labor until their death on the southern trade routes.”

  “We can stop them.” Dakar shoved stubby fingers through his hair, thinking furious and fast through his hangover. “Send word ahead that corruption has undermined Havish’s edict.”

  Arithon’s answering smile was cold as the north-shadowed side of a glacier. “I trust I’m forgiven the price of wet feet? Without an accurate description of that galley, we could do nothing at all.”

  Dakar blinked. “Demon,” he murmured. “How did you know where to look for this shifty transaction?”

  “That guard sergeant drank in our taproom last night,” Arithon murmured in reply. “It’s a galleyman’s dive, you had to have noticed. The fellow made his contact, then got into his cups and bragged of his cleverness to a trollop. Amazing, how men with a chit in their lap think a bard won’t take note of plainspoken words while he’s playing.” The Master of Shadow backed down from the
crest then, his eyes grim as fired enamel. “We should go. There are urgent letters to be written and sent, and no more to gain here but heartache.”

  Liaison

  Late Autumn 5652

  Lysaer’s royal galley rowed into the snug port at Narms against the bitter gales which presaged the ending of autumn. Despite wind and rain, the city did him honor by staging a sumptuous celebration. Feeling ran high in the packed state guildhall. Delegates had traveled from the far shore of Rathain to fete the prince’s grand entry. The cities of Highscarp, Jaelot, and Werpoint owned a tangible reason to show gratitude, since the crown’s generous restitution for every galley destroyed by the Master of Shadow at Minderl Bay. Pensions were allotted for the families left fatherless, and then new ships, replaced out of Tysan’s royal treasury; the gifts did not end with fair frames and stout planking. Daily, there arrived the convict clan crews to satisfy losses to labor.

  Rathain’s grateful guildsmen had underwritten the night’s feast. The wine and the toasts flowed freely. The hour was late when the Prince of the Light shook off his ardent admirers. He shed the adoration of the last clinging sycophants and retired at length to his chamber.

  The Lord Mayor of Narms had provided his visiting royalty with a large suite of rooms commanding the sweep of the harbor. The furnishings were heavy, varnished black walnut, and the rugs, woven in gold ropes with the deep scarlet dyes for which Narms was famed far and wide. The bedhangings had been scented with dried rose petals. The basin held lavender water. Towels and soap were of the first quality, and a tray of rare vintage wine had been left as a courtesy.

  Lysaer paused in the first private moment he had known since the hour his state galley had left Miralt Head. As his body servant latched the door gently behind him, he resisted the frank urge to raise his hands and massage the ache in his temples. His arrival had gone well. The pledges obtained for money and troops to build the resources of his Alliance had poured in, fanned by the bow wake of excitement. Much rode on his ability to fire such sentiment.