Vorrice made no reply, but snapped shut the curtains to a sliding clash of yanked rings.
Veiled in safe darkness, Mearn loosed his pent breath. Moisture plumed from his lips, whirled away by another keening gust. The cold at his back seared down to the bone, while rage hazed his mood to fierce recklessness. He seized a short moment to steady his mind, then quit the ledge, athletic and sure as he groped the next handhold higher up. His mind stayed unsettled, each circling thought struck from a mold of hot fear. Erdane’s guild ministers had not forgotten their history since the uprising which dethroned the past high kings. They knew the clan bloodlines were an irreplaceable legacy. To judge by Koshlin’s least sinister insinuations, they understood the connection between the oldest and first ruling families, and the guarded liaison once maintained between mankind and lost races.
For few spirits were born with the tenacity to withstand the living presence of the Paravians. Mearn knew as much from the chronicles preserved in Alestron’s archives. Those moldered histories read with the fierce ring of legend. Mortals who survived the experience of contact quite often went mad, driven distraught by their limited human perceptions. The fortunate who were stricken found solace with Ath’s Brotherhood. Most others simply wasted away, reft witless by a thirst for a splendor too majestic to sustain reason. Daily cares, kin, the very necessities of survival fell into eclipse before Paravian presence, which reflected unsullied the grandiloquent grace of the power which sourced Ath’s creation.
For this, the Fellowship in their wisdom had sworn and sealed the great compact. Their act of intervention took charge before the grief of more limited human awareness could tear the fabric of society asunder.
Men like Koshlin still fueled the misunderstanding which gave rise to the slaughter of the high kings. Sunk in dangerous resentment, nursed by ignorance and hate, they mistook the clans’ past rule for repression, when in fact charter law compelled bygone sovereigns to a guiding burden of defense.
S’Brydion clan record said Melhalla’s twelfth high king had set seal to Alestron’s original city charter. Like many another chosen family, the new overlords made their residence in an abandoned fortress. The old races had forsaken walled keeps after the binding of the drake spawn whose marauding had ended in defeat in the middle of the Second Age. Every duke since then swore himself to life service, and the peril as acting intermediary between his demesne and the consecrated wilds inhabited by the free Paravians. They held vested authority, but only in trust. Forests were never to be cut down for fields, nor were fences and roadways ever built, except by grant of permission. Mankind had settled Athera on sufferance. Their works and their governance had been cautiously allowed, that the great mysteries maintained by Paravian wardship should remain in perpetual harmony.
Rule was not based upon power or privilege, but on the fraught perils of sacrifice. The pitfalls were documented. Lords and crowned high kings most often died young, heart torn between dedicated care for their own, and the terrible, exultant conflict of spirit as they treated with beings who formed the living bridge across the veil.
Mearn hugged his shivering body to the granite, groped a toe into the next crack, and shoved upward. The whispered scrape of his shirt over stone, and the moan of the wind through the gulf of starry darkness left him too much space to brood. A natural gambler, he measured the odds and concluded that fate dealt the clans a bad throw. His brother the duke had initially backed Arithon for matters of family honor. But as politics and greed built on the grand impetus of Lysaer’s cry for armed justice, that chosen loyalty could well become an act of desperate survival.
Five centuries past, a misguided war cast off crown justice. Dissenters had seized the protection of the towns to wrest Athera’s unexploited wilds from the sway of the Fellowship’s compact. Now Lysaer’s bright new Alliance of Light lent a glove for the hands of those factions who still sought to raise mankind into dominance. The sinister purpose which first launched the headhunters’ leagues regained its original impetus: to exterminate the link preserved in clan bloodlines and end the resurgence of Paravian mysteries.
Mearn reached the next windowsill winded, his knuckles and fingertips raw from the granite. The chamber inside was curtained and dark, its purpose impossible to fathom. If a living princess was held captive above, sleeping guards or attendants might be quartered here. Mearn shut his eyes, listening. Small sounds drifted up from the street in diminished, wind-snatched fragments: a slap of hurried footsteps, then the head falconer’s surly phrasing in complaint of a dishonest scullion. Between oaths and blasphemies maligning the oaf’s character, the reference to stolen pigeons surfaced in recurrent disgust.
“Daelion Fatemaster’s almighty debts!” harangued the falconer. “If your duty as Avenor’s royal steward won’t see the miscreant punished, who in creation’s going to act? Should the Captain of Avenor’s Royal Guard be yanked in to box the ears of a feckless boy? Well, kiss my dead granny’s arse, if that’s what you think! Bedamned if I’ll show my face at his door to say why he has to roust out.”
Mearn twitched narrow lips, his soft snort of laughter damped by his sleeve as the brangle destroyed the night quiet. Echoes bounced, multiplied, through the tower entry. The theft in the dovecote seemed the cause of Gace Steward’s delay, a setback to nettle his weasely temperament into a snarling row. The falconer refused to give back any ground. Delighted to seize on the chance-met diversion, Mearn s’Brydion nipped from his niche and embarked on the grueling last ascent of the upper battlements.
The watchtower’s turret had a crenellated guard walk, inset with drains to gutter rainwater. These offered the climber a precarious left handhold while he unslung his grapple and line. He timed his throw between gusts, lest the wind spoil his aim. The carrying, metallic chink as the hooks slid and caught prickled his nape into gooseflesh. He could not shake the unnerving conviction that an archer took aim between his shoulder blades. Imagination harried him on through the moments he was forced to trust his weight to the rope. Eyes shut, sweat branding the acrid taste of salt on his lips, he swung out over air and scaled the line hand over hand.
Gusts battered at his progress, fetched him against stone in repeated, bruising impacts that tore through his shirt and skinned a shoulder. Then he reached the crenellation. He dragged himself up and through, and crouched head down, sheltered at last from the buffeting cold.
Had guards been stationed there on the wall walk, he should have died, betrayed by teeth that chattered from fraught nerves and chill. Yet no man-at-arms came to skewer him. Gray stone and pale brick wore nothing beyond ice, except where the reaching scour of the elements swept the battlement clean. Mearn thrived on escapades. He shrugged his scuffed clothing back to rights, licked a scraped knuckle, and raked his lovelock free of his collar.
The tower’s turret chamber had windows secured with oak-plank shutters strapped in iron. No light shone through the gaps at the edges. With his ear pressed to the wood, Mearn sensed no activity. A questing touch confirmed a barred fastening, likely fitted with a lock and hasp from inside. The hinges were mounted prison fashion, onto the outer wall. Mearn unlaced the thong ties from his collar points, ripped off his shirt cuff to muffle stray noise, then looped the heads of the pins with the leather and worried until they slipped free.
Left the play in the hasp, and one side unanchored, the shutter gave just enough to allow him an opening to push through.
Mearn deferred his first move. While the gusts slapped and pried through the rip in his shirt, he peered into the stillness, poised as the predator who tested the lair of unknown and dangerous prey. Faint warmth touched his skin, dense with the charcoal smoke of banked embers and a lighter fragrance of lavender. He detected no movement, could see little beyond the bronze-bossed handles of what might be a lady’s clothes chest. Bulked corners of other furnishings lay limned in the starlight admitted by the breached shutter.
Mearn raised his thigh, tautened his grip, and hoisted soundlessly onto th
e broad sill. A feathered brush of his jerkin across studded wood, a whisper of calfskin on stone, and he was through, flattened to the curve of the inside wall.
He waited.
Nothing; just the breathy draw of coals in an unseen grate, and the fret of the wind outside. His wide, straining eyes discerned the frame of a curtained box bed, the harder gleam of a porcelain ewer on a stand, and the pale linen oblong of a towel. The chamber was appointed for basic comfort, but not in the grace of high luxury. An Etarran-bred princess accustomed to society and the gregarious convolutions of city intrigue would be like to go mad from sheer boredom.
That moment, from nowhere, fierce fingers grasped his lovelock.
Mearn whirled. His sudden, lithe reflex ripped off the hold. His wrist bone jarred metal. The shuttering cover of a hand lamp chinked back. Caught in the flaring, sudden haze of light, the woman he seized with a wrestler’s strength was all molten gold hair and pearl skin. She was fire, gilt-and-white porcelain, and a vision to stun a male witless. Widened bronze eyes flashed up to meet his, black lashed and deep, with pupils to drown him in primordial night.
The sound that impacted his closed throat wrenched his larynx. Mearn lost all grip on his senses. Swept head to foot by a physical awareness to freeze thought and unstring his reason, the swift, building pressure of desire in his loins ran him through like the shock of a sword thrust.
“Ath!” he gasped in a wrenched whisper. “Save us all, lady. You are like the Avenger’s own spear, too sharp to touch without bleeding.” Cramped fingers could be forced to unlock; dumb flesh, be compelled to step back.
Her Grace, Princess Talith touched cool fingers to his lips. “Be wary. A handmaid sleeps in the chamber beneath, and her loyalty is not to me.”
Mearn shuddered and broke her restraint as though burned. He had heard all the rumors, even glimpsed Lysaer’s wife at state functions before her incarceration. At safe remove behind a retinue and attendants, she had been a sight to turn heads. Nothing alive could prepare any man for the impact of her at close quarters. Mearn discovered himself helpless to tear his gaze from her face. The delicate, ivory line of her shoulder entrapped him, and the sheer fall of the nightrobe whose folds by turns offered and obscured a form of breathtaking loveliness.
Words came like bruised increments of noise, struck by a faltering tongue. “You’re a prisoner, then?” Mearn forced a next sentence. “The party who sent me believed so.”
A brute turn of will let him recall the danger posed by the lamp; he snatched back the presence to lean through the casement and close the skewed board of the shutter. Faced away, wit and speech gained a measure of reprieve. “Word at court insists you’ve gone into retreat. Stress and overwrought nerves, Gace Steward says. The upset is attributed to barrenness.”
“Lies,” Talith said on a barb of stung spirit. “My bed has been barren.” Bitterness made her laugh, but in venomous, smothered quiet. “No husband, no seed, hence, no child. It is Lysaer who fails to get us an heir.” She dimmed the small lamp and restored it to a soot-streaked niche in the wall. “For hatred of his half brother, the prince thinks to put me aside.”
“The abduction by Arithon caused this?” Mearn straightened and set his back against stone, acute in his private discomfort. The lady’s tower quarters were too cramped to pace. If he stirred one step in any direction, his retreat would not bring him more than an arm’s length from her. “But why? Eight hundred thousand coin weight in gold brought you home with your virtue intact.”
Talith flung back a ripple of bright hair and regarded him. The contempt that fired her topaz eyes seemed to roil the very marrow in his bones. “You say. Yet what proof can I show for my loyalty?”
Mearn swore. A stride carried him to the box bed, impelled by a pity too fierce to keep still. “Prince Lysaer’s a fool. I can’t change that.” He locked hands to the spare rope coiled across his shoulders, flamed to ridiculous, boyish embarrassment for his sweaty state of dishevelment. Torn shirt, ripped fingers, and wind-tangled hair, he felt rough as an unsanded plank. “But I can offer means to escape.”
“To what?” Talith answered. This time, she spun away in swift violence.
Not in time; Mearn saw the lucent, gold rims of her eyes dim to a sudden flood of tears. He ached to take her into his arms, to circle her glass-and-gold-leaf fragility inside a bastion of comfort. Pride stopped him, then the first, warning prick of intuition. “You still love your husband.”
Her rancor a core of iron in silk, the princess rebutted, “Should my heart lie with duty, in Avenor?”
But the statement struck cold to a gambler’s ear. Hatred could breed twisted passions, Mearn knew. He watched. The lady opened a drawer and fished out a striker and candles. Her hand stayed too steady as she lit the fresh wicks. Tears might still glitter through her ebony lashes, and vulnerability sharpen an allure like thin crystal, and yet, she had been born a pedigree Etarran. A clansman forgot at his peril: her breed fed on intrigue and betrayal since infancy.
Three years of solitary contemplation in this tower might foment a thousand deadly hopes of revenge. If Lady Talith of Avenor wished no escape, she would angle to gain something else.
“I need to conceive a child,” she announced without prelude.
“What?” Mearn exclaimed.
“You risked much to find me. I trust you like women?” She gave no more warning, but closed in and cornered him, one exquisite, warm shoulder exposed by an artful slip of her night rail. The curve of her breast underneath was too perfect to endure without touching. Mearn felt the bang of raw physical sensation hammer the center of his chest. Her soft scent filled his mind. Rife chaos struck through his labored, trapped logic. “You want,” he began in emasculated anger.
She tipped back her head, cupped his jaw in fine hands, and did not smile at the violent flush to his skin. “Don’t be a hypocrite. However much you posture and prickle, you want me in bed well enough.”
“That has little to do with good sense,” Mearn gasped. His breath failed him. His next utterance came out strangled. “A child-”
Reason fled, words dissolved to a groan as she stretched up and laid her softened lips against the sped pulse in his neck. His arms closed around her through no sane volition. Touched off by explosive, violent need, he pressed her slim heat against him. The fingers still torn and stinging from his climb locked in her cascade of bright hair.
Her seduction was no longer passionless or steady as she slipped her hands through his collar. Prolonged years of loneliness ripped away pretense. “You are very fine,” she murmured beneath his chin. “Brave also. Sire us a prince to make the realm proud.”
“Ath, this is madness!” Mearn twisted free. “My get would be half-bred.” He caught her wrists, his birth accent snapping. “Lady, you have no idea what you’re asking.”
“Oh?” Talith laughed, deep and low in her throat. If his strength was too harsh, she did not pull away. Chin lifted, her taut, aroused nipple a hairsbreadth from his tormented flesh, she let her pose become her sweet challenge, well assured he could not resist.
Mearn cursed.
Talith returned a slow smile. “Can a princess be faulted for taking a lover if she is cast off in neglect? Let the court in Avenor hear I’m not barren, the disgrace will become my fresh victory. My child of course won’t be Lysaer’s. For that, his much vaunted manhood will be laughingstock.”
“Things aren’t that simple,” Mearn wrenched out. She was too close, too desirable. Her appeal for just vindication was too potent to let him think. Nor had he the means to let her down with any proper kindness or subtlety. “I can’t. Lady, your spirit is great, and your beauty unmatched. I could lie with you for sheer pleasure. But I can never, ever presume the right to make a new life between us.”
She broke then, her tears a bright, rolling spill over her flawless cheekbones. “Ath’s mercy, help me! Won’t you see how I need this? A shamed wife could gain freedom, some measure of autonomy. Yes, the worst could
befall. Lysaer may cast me off. At least I could return to my cousins in Etarra.”
“I can’t,” Mearn said, helpless before her unhappiness. “It’s a matter of honoring my family bloodline.”
Her features stayed blank, confounding Mearn’s pity. Etarra was a city founded too late to have any record of the uprising. Unlike the persistent guild minister from Erdane, Talith would not know of the facts behind clanborn descent.
Mearn shut his eyes, anguished. He dared not explain; not after the clandestine overture just presented to Lysaer’s high counselors. Clan numbers in Rathain were dangerously dwindled from the impact of the Mistwraith’s curse. The damaging truth in Etarran hands, that the old family bloodlines were not replaceable, might hasten their final destruction.
“Lady,” he said through bleak anguish, “let me help you escape. Once free, you can flee to Etarra if you like, or even conceive your bastard at will on any other man that you choose.” She did not answer.
Mearn sensed the stir, then the chill kiss of draft on his skin as she widened the distance between them. As he looked, and interpreted her proud determination, he felt as if his powers of cognition had suffered a dousing in ice water. “Lady,” he said, more dangerous now, “what do you know? There’s something to this you’re not telling me.”
Talith smiled. Her neat, narrow fingers adjusted her night rail and reclothed her inviting nakedness. “Tell all and give nothing? How like a man who has bloodline, but apparently no measure of heated blood in him. Why am I not surprised? I should be asking, instead, who has sent you.”
Mearn grinned. “You sound like my grandmother Dawr. Sharp as vinegar and sand when her males won’t do as she pleases. I have no intention of saying which party takes active interest in your predicament. Shall I end our sweet impasse and go?”