The intuitive deduction that marked Koriani origins shot Elaira’s uneasiness into focus. She had been mistaken to bring this prince here, alone. Even incapacitated his person bespoke a man wayward in judgement and decisively quick to take action. The association that had set him off-balance when he entered the Four Ravens must run deeper than a defaced kingdom banner: he had not expected to be attacked. When he woke, Arithon, High Prince of Rathain, was bound to be mettlesomely, royally enraged.
Elaira blotted flour off miraculously ungrazed knuckles: the fingers seemed too finely made for the offensive delivered by the pot-hook. She tossed aside her rag as if it burned her. The remiss young junior on lane watch still had not touched her presence; worse yet, Elaira had no clue how she should handle the man, or herself, when the moment came to wake him up.
Arithon stirred on his own in that wretchedest moment of uncertainty. Elaira had time to panic and jack-knife clear as the heir apparent to a high kingship gathered his wits and sat up.
An immediate grimace twisted his face. He reached up, touched the swollen cut in his scalp, and looked at her. ‘Which wheel from the afterlife did you spare me from, Daelion Fatemaster’s or those of Dharkaron’s Chariot? I feel as if I’ve been milled under by something punishing from the Almighty.’
‘How could you be so utterly, unbelievably stupid!’ Elaira burst out. Damn him, he was laughing! ‘They could have killed you in there, and to what purpose?’
Arithon lowered his fingers, saw blood and thoughtfully hooked the rag she had discarded. He folded the frayed edges neatly over on themselves and pressed the compress to his scratch. ‘Now that’s a question you might answer for me.’
‘Dharkaron, Ath’s avenger!’ Elaira was fast becoming exasperated. ‘You’re in Erdane! Your speech patterns are perfectly barbarian. And the Ravens is a headhunters’ haunt!’
Very still, Arithon said, ‘Whose heads are the hunted?’
His curiosity was in no wise rooted in insolence. Filled by creeping disbelief Elaira said, ‘Asandir never told you? They pay bodyweight in gold for the fugitive heirs of the earls. Half-weight for clan blood and probably every jewel off the mayor’s chubby daughters for anything related to a prince.’
Arithon lazed back on one elbow in the hay, his face tipped unreadably forward as he knotted the cloth around his head. ‘And what do you know of any princes?’
Elaira felt her heart bang hard against her ribs. ‘Do you mean to tell me, that you don’t know who you are?’
His response came back mocking. ‘I thought I did. Has something changed?’
‘No.’ Elaira gripped both hands in front of her shins: two could play his game. ‘Your Grace, you are Teir’s’Ffalenn, prince and heir-apparent of the crown of Rathain. All that pompous rhetoric means true-born son of an old-blood high king. Every able man in this city, as well as the surrounding countryside, would give his eldest child to be first to draw and quarter you.’
A sound between a choke and a gasp cut her short.
Elaira glanced up to find Arithon’s hand fallen away and his head thrown back. The face beneath the black hair was helplessly stripped by confusion.
He had not been baiting her: he had plainly not been told. That was not all; around Arithon’s person Elaira sensed a gathering corona of power, invisibly triggered and unmistakably Asandir’s. She had a split-second to note that the forces that rang in opposition to Arithon’s will were in fact an ingeniously-laid restraint; then the gist of what she had said lent an impetus that provided him opening. He reacted with a practised unbinding, and the fabric of the ward sheared asunder.
A snap like a spark whipped the air.
Then Arithon did get angry, a charged, blind-sided rage that left him wound like a spring and staring inward. ‘Teir’s’Ffalenn,’ he said flatly. His Paravian was accentless and fluent and the repeated term translated to mean ‘successor to power’. In the glow of the jewel the ratty twist of rag around his head lent the shadowed illusion of a crown. ‘Tell me about Rathain.’
His command allowed no loophole for refusal; afraid to provoke an explosion, Elaira chose not to try. ‘The five northeastern principalities on this continent were territories in vassalage to Rathain, whose liege lord once ruled at Ithamon.’ She shrugged wretchedly. ‘Since sovereignty of Athera passed from Paravians to men, the high king crowned there by the Fellowship has always, without exception, been s’Ffalenn.’
Arithon moved, not fast enough to mask a flinch. He ripped the rag from his head as though it were metal and heavy, and an anguish he could not bury needled his reply to sarcasm. ‘Don’t tell me. The people of Rathain are subject to misery and strife and Ithamon is a ruin in a wasteland.’
In point of fact he was correct; but even rattled to shaking, Elaira was not fool enough to say so. There had to be a reason why Asandir had kept knowledge of this prince’s inheritance a close secret.
Arithon arose from the hay. He paced in agitated strides across the loft and barely a board creaked to his passing. At length he spun about, his desperation sharp as unsheathed steel. ‘What about Lysaer?’
Elaira tried for humour. ‘Oh well, there’s a kingdom waiting for him too. In fact, we’re sitting in the middle of it.’
‘Ah.’ Arithon’s brows tipped up. ‘The banner in the Ravens. And perhaps such unloving royal subjects were the reason for Asandir’s reticence?’
Careful to suppress other more volatile suppositions, the enchantress nodded placating agreement. She watched the s’Ffalenn prince absorb this and wondered what enormity she had caused, what balance had shifted while Arithon went from tense to perceptively crafty.
‘I can keep this fiasco from Asandir,’ he said in answer to the very thought that had made her bite her lip.
Elaira widened her eyes. ‘You?’ Merciful Ath, had he failed to perceive the awful strength in the ward she had accidentally lent him leverage to unbind? ‘How? Are you crazy?’
Arithon inclined his head in the precise direction of the Ravens, though the barn wall before him had no window. ‘Lady, how did you get across the taproom?’
Elaira reached up and smothered the light of her jewel in time to hide her expression. In the taproom, diverted by fighting, he could not have seen through her glamour.
A breath of air brushed her face out of darkness: Arithon was moving again, restless, and his words came turbulently fast. ‘Asandir won’t have expected me to break through a block of that magnitude.’ Hay rustled as he gestured, perhaps with remembered impatience. ‘Sithaer’s furies, I’d been trying to achieve its release for long enough. Trouble was, if I pushed too hard, I went unconscious.’
Elaira turned white as she connected that the banner in the taproom had initiated Arithon’s compulsive moment of unsteadiness. ‘I wonder why the sorcerer didn’t tell you?’
Hands caught her wrists; deceptively and dangerously gentle they pulled her fingers away from the jewel. Light sprang back and revealed Arithon on one knee before her, his expression determinedly furious. ‘Because I happen not to wish the burdens that go with a throne!’
He let her go, shoved away as though he sensed her Koriani perceptions might draw advantage from his stillness. ‘Kings all too often get their hands tied. And for what? To keep food in the mouths of the hungry? Hardly that, because the starving will feed themselves, if left alone. No. A bad king revels in his importance. A good one hates his office. He spends himself into infirmity quashing deadly little plots to make power the tool of the greedy.’
Elaira looked up into green eyes, frightened by the depth of their vehemence. She argued anyway. ‘Your friend Lysaer would say that satisfaction can be found in true justice.’
Arithon stood up and made a gesture of wounding appeal. ‘Platitudes offer no succour, my lady. There’s very little beauty in satisfaction and justice rewards nobody with joy.’ He lowered his hands and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘As Felirin the Scarlet would tell you.’
He referred to the minstre
l in the Ravens who had abetted his narrow escape. Not the least bit taken in by his show of surface excuses, Elaira drew her own conclusion. Arithon had slipped his sorcerer chaperone and ventured abroad in Erdane looking expressly to provoke. He might not have known the townsmen’s pitch of antagonism; or he might have simply not cared. His wildness made him contorted as knot-work to decipher.
In a typically rapid shift of mood, he managed a civilized recovery. ‘I owe you, lady enchantress. You spared me some rather unpleasant handling, and for that you have my thanks. Someday I hope to show my gratitude.’
Which was prettily done, and sincere, but hardly near the point. ‘I saved your life,’ Elaira said in bald effort to shake his complacency.
He just looked at her, his clothing in disarray and his face a bit worn, and his reticence underhandedly reproachful. He had not been defenceless. The pot-hook was only a diversion, since he had both training and shadow-mastery carefully held in reserve. Touched by revelation, Elaira saw that indeed he had not been backed against the passage to the pantry by any accident but design.
Beginning to appreciate his obstinacy, Elaira choked back a snort of laughter. ‘You were on course for the midden in any case?’
Arithon smiled. ‘As the possibility presented itself, yes. Have you lodgings? I’d like to see you back safely.’
‘Oh, that’s priceless,’ Elaira gasped. Her eyes were watering. She hoped it was only the dust. ‘You’re a damned liability in this town.’
‘In any town.’ The Shadow Master paid her tribute with a bow. ‘You shouldn’t worry over things that I’m too lazy to bother with.’
‘That’s the problem exactly.’ Elaira allowed him to take her hand and draw her up to her feet. His strength was indeed deceptive, and he seemed to release her fingers with reluctance. She said, ‘I can find my way just fine. The question is, can you?’
She did not refer to the wards that concealed the location of the seeress’s house where he lodged.
Her deliberately oblique reference did not escape him. ‘Asandir knows I went out for air.’ Arithon made a rueful face at the odoriferous stains on his clothing. ‘There are several suitably smelly puddles in the alley near Enithen Tuer’s. And dozens of hazardous obstacles. A man prone to odd fits of dizziness might be quite likely to trip.’
He reached out and began with light hands to pluck the loose hay from her hair. That moment, when all care for pretence was abandoned, the junior initiate on lane watch stumbled clumsily across Elaira’s presence.
The enchantress stiffened as the energies of her distant colleague passed across her, identified her and responded with a jab of self-righteous indignation. The backlash hurt. ‘Sithaer’s furies, not now!’ Elaira capped her dismay with a fittingly filthy word.
Taken aback, Arithon stepped away. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You did nothing,’ Elaira assured, her mind only half on apology. Apparently there were worse offences than visiting sorcerers of the Fellowship, or even engaging in card games with disreputable apprentice prophets: by the repercussions sensed in the background, Elaira understood that speaking with princes in haylofts after midnight was undeniably one of them. Yet to explain the particulars of her crisis would take by far too much time. ‘I have a scrape of my own to work out of – my personal version of Asandir.’
Arithon grinned and melted unobtrusively into the shadows. ‘Then I commend you to subterfuge and a fast, soft landing in a midden.’
She heard his soft step reach the ladder.
‘Farewell, lady enchantress.’ Then he was gone, leaving her alone with a larger dilemma than the one she had found in the loft at Enithen Tuer’s.
Guardian of Mirthlvain
Cupped like a witch’s cauldron between the jagged peaks of the Tiriacs and the north shore of Methlas Lake, Mirthlvain Swamp was not a place where even the boldest cared to tread. Submerged under vaporous mists, the pools with their hummocks of spear-tipped reeds spawned horrors in their muddy depths that the efforts of two civilizations had failed to secure behind walls. Yet a man did dare the dangers and walk here, on the crumbling stone causeway that remained of an ancient and long over-run bulwark. Grievously shorthanded as the Fellowship sorcerers had been through the years since the Mistwraith’s conquest, never for an instant was Mirthlvain Swamp left unwatched.
The master spellbinder Verrain crouched on a precarious span of stonework with his elbows braced on his knees. A rust-coloured cloak lay furled at his feet and untrimmed blond hair fringed his collar with beads of accumulated damp. He had poised for a very long time, motionless, his large, capable hands with their puncture scars from old bite wounds curled over an equally battered staff.
Wavelets flurried fitfully against the decayed wall, disturbed by something that lurked unseen in the depths; then the waters subsided to oily stagnation. A line creased Verrain’s brows and one ivory knuckle twitched. Black eyes regarded blacker water, both invisibly troubled.
The misted sky reflected in the pool shivered faintly, as if bubbles sprang from the muck underneath and rose in a sequin shimmer; except that no trapped air broke the surface. Verrain pursed lips that a very long time in the past had been the delight of Daenfal’s barmaids. He loosed a hand from his staff and slowly, carefully, extended his arm above the pool.
He spoke in accents as antiquated as the doxies, who were all six centuries dead. ‘Show yourself, spawn of the methuri.’
Then he closed his fingers. The ribbon of power he held leashed in readiness uncoiled through lightless fathoms.
Ripples bloomed to a curl of froth as a whip-thin tail sliced the surface, splashed and vanished.
‘Ah,’ said Verrain thoughtfully. ‘I am not so easily evaded.’ He murmured a word that unbound a restraint: a force like an arrow speared through the murk in pursuit of a creature that zig-zagged in patterns of wild flight.
Muck flurried up from the depths. Then the peaty waters moiled and burst into spray as a serpentine shape slashed through. The snake was narrow, its head the distinctive wedge of a viper. The eyes it pinned on its tormentor were scarlet as jewels, and malevolent.
The spellbinder forced himself not to recoil. Though aware the sculling serpent was fully capable of a strike, he traced a symbol upon the air. A shimmer remained where his finger passed.
The snake stayed trained upon the ward glyph as, crouched on the heels of worn boots, and bare of any artifice or talisman, Verrain transformed thought into power. His palms began to glow faintly. He handled raw energy as though it were solid and twisted it into a strand. The serpent hissed, fighting the ward that held it bound and its tail flicked a silver fin of water into the tangled banks of reed.
Verrain’s forehead ran with sweat. Faster now, his fingers wove spell-thread into a snare which he cast over the creature that knifed the water.
The pool exploded into spray. Unnaturally vocal for its kind, it screamed like a rabbit as the ward clamped over its coils.
The hair prickled on Verrain’s neck as it twisted. He blocked its attempt to dive. The snake screamed again. The spellbinder’s nostrils flared against the vapours thrown off by churning water. Grim with concentration and braced as if for a blow, he released the rest of the energies he had pooled throughout motionless hours of waiting.
Light pulsed across his fine-knit spells. The mesh unravelled in a flash and the serpent’s cry ceased as if pinched. A last reflexive surge shot it full length from the marsh before it fell back, limp.
Verrain snatched up his staff. Fast as a swordsman, he hooked one flaccid coil before it could sink beyond sight. A practised snap of his wrist flipped the serpent clear of the pool. Its dripping four-foot length spilled with a slither on the moss-rotten stone of the wall.
Exposed to full view, it gleamed sleekly black. A row of barbs ridged the length of its spine. Verrain prodded the head into profile. The red eyes were slitted like a cat’s. An ivory diamond patterned the throat; the rest of the underbelly was dark. Verrain pried open the mo
uth and extended the fangs from their membrane sheaths. Venom seeped out, odourless and diamond-clear; but the drop that splashed the rock left a caustic, smoking stain.
Verrain scrambled back beyond reach of the fumes. His wide, expressive mouth lost all trace of the fact he ever smiled. He had expected this serpent might be a fresh variation; the creatures bent into mutation in past ages to serve as hosts for methuri, or hate-wraiths, interbred with persistent success. Although the Fellowship of Seven had exterminated the last of these iyat-related parasites five thousand years back, Mirthlvain Swamp continued relentlessly to brew up left-over crossbreeds.
Diamond-throated meth-snakes cropped up in many forms, ranging from harmless to virulently poisonous. This one Verrain had snared as a formality, never suspecting its bite might carry a cierl-ankeshed toxin. He shuddered to think of the risk he had taken, to Name-trance the creature bare-handed. Weak in the knees, he leaned on his staff and thanked Ath Creator he was unharmed and still standing upright.
Even skin-contact with that deadliest of poisons caused a wasting of the nerves, a screaming firestorm of agony that resulted in twitching paralysis. His body might have lain on this wall and suppurated for days before the life finally left it.
Aware through Sethvir that the Fellowship was taxed thin by an outbreak of Khadrim and the development of the West Gate Prophecy, Verrain frowned. His discovery was not going to please; cierl-ankeshed was a threat that his masters securely believed had been eradicated.
Suddenly drained by his weariness, the spellbinder who was Guardian of Mirthlvain straightened. He shook out his rust-brown cloak, raised up his staff and nudged the dead snake from the wall. The corpse fell with a splash but did not sink. Even as Verrain moved away, his footsteps cautious on the unstable stone of the wall, the ink-black waters behind him boiled up in a froth as scavengers converged in a frenzy to devour the meth-snake’s remains.
Observations
In the city of Castle Point, a raven drops out of misty sky and alights on the shoulder of a sorcerer who wears black, and whose dark, sad eyes are shadowed further by a broad-brimmed hat with a patterned silver band…