Fugitive Prince

  “Oh Ath, that I hadn’t, or better that I could have renounced life and breath on the day of my birth.” Arithon sat upright, his face pressed behind his opened, marked hands and his shoulders braced against trembling.

  “Your survival had to come first,” Dakar insisted, unmanned himself, and too much the coward to watch. Nor could he quite mask the flick of an honest revulsion as he made tactless effort to ease an impossible grief. “All hope isn’t lost. Arithon, your stroke didn’t kill him, not at once, I swear this. Caolle still breathed when I left him.”

  “Ath, no!” the Shadow Master cried, shot straight and sawn through by redoubled remorse. “He is clanborn, and hurt, and what have I done but left him helpless among enemies? His own people would have served him a mercy stroke!”

  The cry drowned echoless in the winds of the flats. While a wedge of flying geese sliced the gray sky, and the oxen nosed brainlessly forward, Dakar found nothing to say. Nor could he ease the unbearable distress of the prince who refused even tears in his locked and horrified silence.

  Fragile as a silk moth’s spun filament, the blood oath alone stayed the force and fury of Arithon’s natural reaction. Moment to moment, while the warm life in his veins seemed a cruel violation, and the beat of his heart framed insult to his integrity, he sat in bound quiet. Eyes wide, hands slack, he dared not even flinch to be served the unconditional gift of the land’s beauty. Not now, Dakar sensed with a wounding, sure pity: not when all sound and all movement revolted the nerves, and a mind lay torn and trapped in the grasp of transfixing grief.

  The sough of the breeze in the budding briars, and the mournful cries of the hawk and the marsh wren filled all the world with oblivious industry, while the wain rolled and bore the Master of Shadow into the cheerless dusk.

  They made camp in a hollow with a stream, under the leafed-out crowns of a willow grove. The trees were ancient. Their dry-rotted trunks offered nest hollows for owls, whose plangent hoots and gliding, swift flight made the oxen whuff and back against their tethers. Low clouds shed a steady, fine drizzle that sluiced a varnishing glaze of damp over man and beast, and made the fireless night a bitter misery.

  Dakar served out the last of the farmwife’s provisions, a heel of rye bread and strips of jerked beef cured hard as glass through the length of winter’s storage. The spellbinder chewed without appetite. In oathbound responsibility, he noted Arithon’s attempt to do the same.

  But exhaustion and stress exacted their toll. Two unobtrusive trips into the brush came and went before the Mad Prophet noticed anything amiss. Every scrap of sustenance the Shadow Master dutifully forced down was rejected with wretched persistence.

  Dakar could have wept and sworn both at once for the cost of the blood bond imposed by the Fellowship at Athir. Since straight pain was suddenly preferable to the ongoing cruelty of silence, he scrounged out the flask of sour wine he had hoarded and shoved it toward Arithon’s chilled hands.

  “Drink. You need it. And talk, for Ath’s sake. If you can make such a dogged effort to eat despite the fact you’re too sickened, you can try just as hard to make plans.”

  Arithon looked at him. Wrists hugging one on another about his drawn-up knees, and his fingers like clamped bone under the soggy, grimed cuffs of his sleeves, he said nothing. Neither did he accept the offered solace of the wine.

  “Well, you can’t risk sailing to Corith!” Dakar exploded. “You know if you try to face Lysaer again, you’ll become slave to Desh-thiere’s curse.”

  The ruinous fact could not be evaded. The awful limit must be faced. Intent had not served; free permissions had proved woefully inadequate; the working of the geas strengthened with each contact. Dakar gnawed a torn thumbnail, demoralized and mute. As well as he, the Shadow Master knew: if not for the saving intervention of the sword, he would have lost his mind into irreversible insanity at Riverton.

  Dakar dragged in a breath that felt heavy as liquid glass. “You don’t know the worst yet. Koriathain are involved.” Pained for the necessity which made him twist the knife, he repeated what Mearn s’Brydion had seen, the terrible proof that the flight out of town had been launched by means of a golem wrought of spells. “To assist Lysaer’s cause, they deliberately triggered the bane of the Mistwraith’s geas.”

  That unbearable news carried vicious implication, that Lysaer s’llessid had been leagues at sea, and no threat. Plans for the launching and abduction of three ships were upset for naught. Lastingly worse, Caolle had fought and fallen to Arithon’s sword for no true threat at all, but only manipulative illusion.

  In comfortless grief, set isolate by the needling fall of fine rain, Dakar could not bear to strike light and measure the scope of Arithon’s anguish. He feared worst of all to broach what no empty offer of solace might disguise, that every associate and accomplice brought in for the launching remained still in Riverton, unwarned and defenseless against whatever machinations the Koriani First Senior might devise.

  Dakar chewed his lip in agonized suspension. He waited through a pause grown dense as lead crystal, while soft rain wet his cheeks and trickled from the untidy bristle of his beard. No night birds called. Just the whispered tap of droplets, and subliminal rustles as willow fronds bowed to their burden of damp. The weather promised no surcease; clouds would sheet in from the north until dawn. Nor did a mere spellbinder know of a palliative to ease wounded pride, or shore up the wreckage of a man’s priceless care and integrity.

  Human balm did not exist to relieve an inhuman quandary. No friend could mask the impact of inborn s’Ahelas farsight, that would turn the birth gift of a ruthless insight ahead to map the course of a poisoned future. Helplessness remained, of a dimension to grind thought down into despair for a balance inevitably foredoomed.

  A masterbard whose compassionate heart had been torn out thrice over in the cause of meaningless destruction could not have limitless strength.

  The rain and the dark embraced Arithon’s stilled form. The wine flask lay untouched by his feet, while the drizzle pattered and seeped and leaded the tender shoots of new greenery.

  Against every interfering impulse, despite the oblivious, brash decadence that prompted his fleshly excesses, Dakar kept his palms jammed over his lips. He would not speak. Even through the tormenting, perilous awareness that the blood oath sworn to the Fellowship Sorcerers allowed but one terrible course.

  If Arithon kept faith and held his gift of Shadow in reserve against the greater threat of the Mistwraith, he would be forced to spare his own life through the ruin of uncounted others. No reason could ease that abnegation of free will. The wait seemed to span the are of oblivion, while time wound into a brutal, shared tension to shred the most steadfast patience.

  “I dare not attempt to save the men or the outpost at Corith,” Arithon announced at drawn length. With Koriani led into conspiracy with Lysaer, he saw well enough. No place remained inside the five kingdoms where he could depend on safe refuge. “Nor can I recover the launched ships for the clans. No course is left but to recover Talliarthe and sail south and east to regroup.”

  Dakar set his chin in his hands. He could make no answer, overwhelmed as he was by the sweet rush of astonishment and gratitude. Nor could he repress his outright awe for the character of Rathain’s prince. He knew no one else capable, no spirit with the outright, mulish fight to reach past such branding ignominy and guilt, and for nothing if not another compounding act of self-betrayal. The torment of Caolle’s tragedy did not end here, but extended to embrace losses unbearably larger.

  As if no friend wept for the grievous depth of character that carved up such tenacious resilience, Arithon laid out his decision with the icy dispassion a surgeon must find, when forced to amputation with no time to spare for anesthesia. “There’s a fishing village south of Torwent in Havish remote enough to lend short-term sanctuary. From there, I’ll send word to Fiark at Innish. He can release the Khetienn from her current merchant charter. The Evenstar’s not to be compromised, for Feyl
ind’s sake. Her runs can enable safe drop points for stores to extend our blue-water passages.”

  His admission came in agonized quiet, that no shred of his hopes could be salvaged. That because of his presence, Lysaer’s deadly, trained force from Etarra was drawn into Tysan, where clansmen fought now for survival. The men, the ships, the months of meticulous and dangerous work to redeem threatened bloodlines: all designs fallen short on the brink of completion, then abandoned in one cruel stroke.

  The last line in summary, dredged up in pain for a world future bought at a damning price in shed blood. “We must sail offshore, alone, and quarter the seas until the Paravians are found.”

  No mention was made of the third brig, Cariadwin, sailing under a clan crew to Corith, where she must inevitably fall to Lysaer s’Ilessid as a sacrifice. Nor did Arithon belabor past choices, or wallow in selfcastigation for what might have been saved, had his bid to free Maenol’s clans from enslavement been pursued in less brilliant aggression. But Dakar knew him too well; having seen the s’Ffalenn prince through the atrocity at the Havens, having offered the shoulder that steadied him after the horrors unleashed at Dier Kenton Vale, the dispassionate, stark outlines of tonight’s recast strategy spun him no false reassurance.

  He could do no more than stifle his sorrow for what went unsaid in the dark and the rain. The change he had most feared to witness had come. Never through even the ugliest setback had he heard Arithon’s voice turn flattened and dull in defeat.

  At the time which spanned the midpoint of night, that suspended hour equidistant from sundown and dawn, the Mad Prophet gave up his failed effort to rest in the clammy shelter of his cloak. He stole to his feet and listened. Arithon lay still, huddled limbs furled in oiled wool and his breathing soft and regular. He was not asleep. The rain had freshened, and the pattering stream of moisture from the willows’ arched canopy conjoined into trickles of runoff. Rising wet drove the mice to their burrows. The owls had ceased silent flight.

  In trust that his absence would be taken for a routine call to relieve himself, the Mad Prophet crept from the campsite. He followed the throaty voice of guttered water and crossed a ditch with a streamlet. The eddies flowed clogged and tan with drained clay, too muddied to serve his intent. A few paces on, he found a wide puddle cast to the sullen gleam of pooled mercury under the haze of the storm scud.

  The water proved clear enough for scrying.

  Dakar knelt. He raked away sodden leaves and a sandy detritus of gravel. Into the softened mud on the verges, he traced out the radiants invoking the cardinal points of direction. Then he settled himself, cleared his fraught mind, and immersed himself into mage-trance. Between the night’s whispered rainfall and the fluting shrieks of spring peepers, he sought the voice and the essence of water. He asked and exchanged a permission. Raindrops still fell fine as pins, pocking the puddle with their fleeting circular imprints. A soft word, a rune, and the surface sheeted still. Palms sweated now with the concentration of refined talent, Dakar invoked a star’s Name, the one which rode the meridian on this particular hour, at the nadir of night’s span of darkness.

  Lastly, he ripped off a thread from his sleeve, rusted brown with dried blood spattered from Caolle’s wound. This he soaked clean in the puddle. He restrained his fretted nerves as he waited, while the essence dissolved and released its magnetic aura.

  A minute came and went, sevenscore heartbeats set to the impact of a numbered fall of raindrops. The rune traced over the puddle’s surface flared like weak phosphor and drifted. Dakar gathered his inner faculties, ordered will into balance, and murmured, “tiendar,” the Paravian call to invoke the linking tie between spirit and bodily flesh.

  Had Caolle died, no such connection would remain and the conjury just set would fade away unrequited.

  But as Rathain’s prince had so desperately feared, the liegeman from Deshir yet clung to life. In the shadowy depths of the puddle an image formed, a scrying forged through the delicate energies of one star’s ascendancy, and a clansman’s fierce will to survive.

  Candlelight in a cramped chamber, where a youthful woman in gray-and-white robes labored over a brazier and pot, brewing a steaming herb tisane. She paused as she stirred to attune small magics through the crystal on the chain at her neck, and to chalk sigils on the stiff squares of paper which held her medicinal plants and dried rootstock.

  Just past the edge of that circle of light, eyes like bored gimlets of obsidian, Caolle watched her, his colorless, blunt features sweating in the extremity of his pain. He still wore the mail shirt, though the links and the gambeson beneath had been dragged up his torso to bare his wounded side for the Koriani healer’s ministrations.

  As if his fixed gaze were abrasive, the enchantress glanced aside from her work. “No,” she informed with acerbic exasperation. Though he had not spoken, she answered his direct thought. “The mail can’t come off without tearing your wound. Your life’s to be spared by command of our First Senior, and I won’t risk restarting the bleeding.”

  Caolle’s life given over to Koriani design; Dakar spared no second to mourn this sure confirmation of disaster. Nor did he delay to size up the anguish the news would inflict upon Arithon’s already shattered peace of mind. A scant interval remained before his conjured connection to the star’s power waned and passed. A rune, another cipher, swiftly composed to exploit the connection with First Senior Lirenda, who had intervened outside of mortal consent to stay the natural course of death. Dakar’s construct widened to summon another image in the puddle.

  More candles burned in the loft above the clerk’s shed. Here the royal shipyard’s hired master stored his drafting pens and his tools. The closely kept plans drawn up for his three-masted brigs lay unrolled on broad trestles, weighted at the corners with gray, rounded rocks from the river bottom. Though the hour was past midnight, Cattrick’s personal domain was not private. The benches by the wall where he issued his daily instructions to his laborers were still occupied. Clad in their dark robes of judgment, Riverton’s tribunal and justiciar sat informal session, while a secretary scribbled out transcript.

  Before them, a wretched southcoast rope splicer knelt in sweaty, shivering fear from the aftermath of an interrogation made under the burning compulsion of arcanely wrought sets of truth seals. His shock held him passive while the shipyard’s blacksmith hammered the rivets to close the steel shackles on his wrists.

  “That’s the last of them,” pronounced the aristocratic woman with a disdain to slice through the clangor. Her expression was abstract porcelain, and her gown, a sweeping purple robe with red borders. “Lock him away with the rest until the launched hulls are made seaworthy.”

  The smith finished his task and shouldered his satchel of hammers and tongs. Blinking and stiff from the long hours spent hearing testimony, Riverton’s officials arose. Uneasy, without talk, they shook the creases from their clothes and made their pompous way through the door to the outside stair.

  Lastly went the guards with their workaday armor and drawn swords, to remand the chained prisoner into custody.

  The Koriani First Senior remained, composed as fine ivory in the unsettled spill of the flame light. The focusing jewel she had used to wrest open the privacy of men’s minds lay tucked between her clasped hands, each curled, slender finger arranged into line like the fluting on a blush-colored shell.

  She was not alone. A broad-shouldered man stepped out of the gloom and skirted the laden trestles. If the eyes set amid his measuring squint stayed nervelessly direct, his step held a stalker’s sharp caution.

  “What now?” challenged Cattrick. He extended his work-hardened, sinewy wrists in a gesture of mock supplication. “Have you no shackles for me? Or am I to stay free in reward for my peerless service?”

  Lirenda returned an imperious flick of her nails. “Busy man. Never presume to take freedom for granted. Be grateful. Your place remains here.”

  As Cattrick’s brows frowned in distrustful surprise, she deign
ed to proffer explanation. “The gossip must eventually reach Arithon. When he learns you were the one who effected his betrayal, your worth will be sadly diminished as a hostage.” Her enameled gold eyes shimmered with contempt as she swept her gaze head to foot, and dismissed him. “You’re Lysaer’s man, now, and if you have sense, will remain so.”

  High overhead, behind banked layers of cloud, the star crossed the zenith, its span of ascendancy past. The scrying linked through its energies flicked out. Left staring at raindrops stamping faint rings over and over in a puddle, Dakar gripped his knees through an unpleasant shudder. Beset by the aftershock of sorrow and distaste, he engaged the familiar, ritual steps to release the used frame of his construct. Three handclaps and a breath disbursed the life tie to Caolle. A scribed rune of passage unwound the spiraled energies bound by permission to water. A green stick blessed and borrowed from a bush made a sweep to erase the directional markers. Once the leftover traces of his craft were disbursed under blessing, Dakar stretched his sore shoulders. He gathered himself, but stopped short on the point of arising.

  Some intuited warning of disturbance made him glance over his shoulder.

  A whiff of rain-wet leather and a shadowy presence: Arithon s’Ffalenn stood like a wraith at his back.

  “Dharkaron’s bleak vengeance!” the Mad Prophet swore, then shut stinging eyes. A high surge of relief combed through him for the fact the prince’s mage-sight lay blinded. His Grace may have borne witness to every step of arcane ritual, but the train of summoned images would for a mercy lie beyond the reach of his five mortal senses.

  As if private thought had been shouted aloud, Arithon contradicted in searing irony. “Trust me, I heard the whole coil all too well.”

  No apology sufficed to fling back in rejoinder. Nor was space given for Dakar to venture even a token attempt. While he ached for a pity beyond words to express, the Master of Shadow spun on his heel and strode off.