The sorcerer in his tawdry robe incongruously began to chuckle. ‘Dharkaron’s Chariot,’ he swore mildly. ‘I can’t wait to see what happens when you meet your royal liege.’
‘A boy, just barely grown,’ Morfett sneered. ‘He’ll be sorry to find that bribes won’t buy him sovereignty.’
At this, Sethvir seemed stunned speechless.
Lord Governor Morfett stroked his chins and fatuously gave himself the victory.
The prince’s party must have rounded the last switchback then, for shouts arose from the countryfolk gathered along the lower roadway. Their cheers were boisterously joyful, after the sorcerers’ promise to pry croft rents away from the land-guilds. Since the ministers whose authority had been bypassed had ratified no such relinquishment, of course, the blandishment was false. Morfett sweated in irritation. Though nothing could be seen yet from his vantage-point before the gatehouse, the officials all began to elbow and press in their eagerness. Shorter than his peers by a head, Morfett had to crane his neck like any bumpkin to retain his view of the valley.
He anticipated a cavalcade, resplendent with jewelled trappings and trailing banners; and wagons with silk streamers and canopies. That was what one would expect of a prince, or so his wife had speculated in her gossip with cronies for a week. Since pomp in Etarra established status, a royal retinue would only impress if it was blindingly, ostentatiously lavish.
Morfett saw just four horsemen, unattended, on mounts that wore no caparisons. They carried no banners or streamers; neither did they prove to be outriders for another larger party. Asandir was the one astride the black; at least, the dark, silver-bordered cloak that billowed in the gusts was unmistakably his austere style. The fat man in russet on the paint looked too undignified for a prince; his companion, a fair man, owned the bearing, but though his velvets were cut from indigo deep enough to raise envy from the cloth guild he wore no royal device.
That left the slight, straight figure on the dun with the irregular marking on her neck.
Morfett’s narrowed eyes fastened upon that last rider with the keenness of a snake measuring its distance to strike.
A green cloak with the silver heraldic leopard of Rathain muffled the man and most of the horse. The hands that gripped the dun’s reins were spare as any boy’s, and skilled. The dun was inventively difficult. From a distance the face of the rider looked fine-chiselled, and the black hair Morfett heard was distinctive of s’Ffalenn blew uncovered in the breeze.
The Lord Governor smiled in viperish glee. ‘A child,’ he exulted. His supposition to Sethvir fortuitously seemed confirmed: the pretender to Rathain’s throne was a green youth, and Etarran politics would devour him.
Expansive, nearly happy, the Lord Governor bestowed a dimpled smile upon the Warden of Althain, who now looked distractedly deadpan. ‘Sorcerer,’ Morfett mocked, ‘here’s my sanction. Let the affirmation ceremony for this prince’s right of ancestry take place on Etarran soil. His Grace has my leave to chill his feet in our dirt, may he grub the worms’ favour from the honour!’
Chuckles rippled through the ranks of Etarra’s officials. Women tittered while, like the boom of a storm surge against the slope below the walls, cries of redoubled welcome arose from the riff-raff of farmers.
‘Come forward,’ Sethvir invited over the noise. ‘Your word as given, Lord Governor, we’ll proceed to acknowledge Rathain’s prince.’
‘Then I don’t have to kiss his royal cheeks until he’s barefoot?’ Morfett roared with laughter; by Ath, he would retain the upper hand. ‘As you wish, sorcerer! Let us go on to the courtyard of the fountains, and let your puppet prince forgo this sham of receiving my welcome at the gate!’
Flushed as he enjoyed his huge joke, Morfett parked his rump on the combing of a terracotta retaining wall. The pruned stubble of rosebushes that hitched at his gold-stitched jacket scarcely merited attention, the charade to be enacted in the flowerbeds being far too rich to miss. In signal unconcern for their silks and their ribbons, high city officials and the pedigreed curious who were last to arrive jockeyed for position between rows of potted trees and greening topiary. The prince’s party entered. Jeers blended with the trickle of the fountains, while Asandir caught the dun mare’s reins to foil her spirited sidle. Her royal burden dismounted.
Up close, the green cloak more than ever overwhelmed the lightly knit frame of the prince.
‘Do you suppose he’s inbred, to be so delicate?’ muttered Diegan to a stifled explosion of hilarity. Somebody passed a flask of wine. Fanned by Morfett’s bold sarcasm, the mood of Etarra’s well-born displayed the viciousness gloved in gaiety that would have enlivened an out-of-season garden party. The courtyard’s eight foot high mortised walls reflected the women’s disparaging remarks with the clarity of an amphitheatre.
The dun’s reins were passed to an unseen attendant while the fair-haired companion in his elegant velvets unclasped the green cloak and bared the royal shoulders.
Morfett moistened plump lips and lingeringly assessed his enemy.
To Etarran eyes the prince who stood revealed was plainly clad to a point that invited ridicule. His tunic and shirt were cut of unadorned linen that anyone less lazy than a peasant at least would have bothered to bleach white. The natural fibres emphasized a complexion that looked tintless and porcelain-pale. When Asandir faced the prince and took slender fingers into his own to escort his royal charge forward, Morfett could have crowed. The s’Ffalenn wore no jewellery. The only gemstones on him were the emerald in his sword-hilt which, though well-cut, could not be called large; and an ordinary white gold signet ring that showed the battering of hard wear.
‘Plain as a forest barbarian,’ jibed the minister of the weaver’s guild.
Sethvir raised his eyebrows in reproof. ‘Every s’Ffalenn to be sanctioned for succession came to his ceremony unadorned.’
But the spirit of exuberant contempt by now had infected the whole gathering.
The prince’s poise showed stiffness as he removed his boots. He assumed his place in the flowerbed, ankle deep in black soil hoed up by the gardeners and awaiting the sprouting of spring lilies. Asandir kept hold on his hands and intoned a ritual in a softly sonorous voice. None of Etarra’s elite cared to hold still enough to listen. Diegan’s sister was loudly pointing out to the half-deaf seneschal of the treasury that the royal ankles had scars exactly like marks made by felon’s shackles. The subject was snapped up in speculation by a junior clerk who gasped out improvised doggerel between whoops and snorts of stifled laughter. Morfett saw no need to offer reprimand.
The damned Fellowship mages had been duly warned how his council felt toward monarchy.
The prince knelt on cue. His sorcerer chaperone bent with him and scooped a double handful of earth which he lifted above wind-ruffled raven hair.
Morfett choked back a grin. Less restrained, Diegan murmured from behind, ‘Ath, did anybody check whether pig’s dung and ditch waste had been spread in for fertilizer yet?’
The sorcerer must have overheard. He cupped his burden nonetheless and his voice echoed back from sandstone walls, cutting through the busy buzz of satire. ‘Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn, direct line descendant of Torbrand, first High King of Rathain, I affirm your right of succession. As this realm will be yours to guard, so are you bound to the land.’
Diegan’s chuckles choked off, replaced by blank rage. ‘Right of succession? Who sanctioned this?’
Caught weeping tears of suppressed mirth, Morfett rounded in a dawning explosion of anger. Without care for the dearth of privacy, he loudly upbraided Sethvir. ‘You said the royal bastard was only to be affirmed in his ancestry!’
But the Warden of Althain had all too conveniently vanished. While the Lord Governor wildly sought to find him his peripheral vision caught a blurred flash of light. He whirled again to face the garden. There knelt the prince, and crowned, but not with soil or pig’s dung. A circlet of shining silver crossed his brow that had been nowhere in evidence
before. Asandir’s hands fell away, and then steadied him back on his feet.
‘Ath!’ someone shouted in shaky awe. ‘Did you see? That sorcerer changed dirt into silver!’
Sethvir chose that moment to reappear. ‘It is done, the circlet of sanction wrought from the soil of Rathain. My Lord Governor. Time has come to congratulate your acknowledged prince.’
‘I gave no such consent! What has passed was done on false pretences!’ Morfett dug in his toes, his chin outthrust like a bulldog’s. Yet no sorcerer of the Fellowship forced him forward. Instead, Rathain’s prince came to him.
All his adult life Morfett had battled the misfortune that short stature forced him to peer up at even his lowliest scullion. The shock of meeting green eyes that were level with his own caused him an involuntary step back.
‘You need not kneel,’ informed the silver-crowned personage whose face turned out not to be delicate but as bloodless and defined as if chipped from white quartz. ‘I have not accepted your fealty.’
‘Nor will you!’ Trembling with mortification for being duped in public, Morfett curled his lip. ‘The governor’s council, of which I am head, refuses to acknowledge your existence.’
A breeze rattled the dry canes of the roses and flicked a twist of black hair from the circlet. Too late, Morfett saw that this prince had the look of a sorcerer: eyes that were piercing and level and strikingly devoid of antagonism. Like those Fellowship colleagues whose nefarious machinations had produced him, he could answer a man’s unspoken thoughts. ‘If you and your council rule justly, you need have no fear of me.’
The officials surrounding Morfett were belatedly recognizing the legalities behind Asandir’s late speech. From all sides, their ribald commentary was replaced by murmurs of incredulity and rage.
‘You have not been given any right of sovereignty in this city!’ Diegan, commander of the guard, interposed from behind his Lord Governor’s shoulder.
‘True.’ Arithon’s gaze left Morfett to encompass the courtier who had spoken out of turn, and whose dandyish cloak was thrown back to reveal a hand clenched on a sword hilt. The weapon was flashily bejewelled; if the steel behind its gold-chased quillons was something more than ceremonial, Arithon dismissed the threat. His brows twitched up in flippant challenge. ‘But if this contest were a footrace the outcome would hardly merit contest. Do you bet?’
‘All that I have,’ Diegan answered thickly. ‘That should warn you.’
‘Oh, I was warned,’ said Arithon with poorly concealed impatience. ‘Too well, too late and in rich and tedious detail. In some things, I’ve had less choice than you have.’
Too fast for verbal riposte, and in total disregard for the captain’s aggressive posture, he whipped around to address Asandir. ‘You’ve had your display. Whether or not the person who took charge of my boots reappears with intent to return them, I would be pleased to retire.’
The exchange ended so quickly that Morfett was left with his mouth open. The prince was whisked off amid his circle of sorcerers; but the edged and dangerous antagonism he had sown among the townsmen remained, festering and unsatisfied. Diegan stared after the departed royal party with his jaw clenched. Amid widening circles of loud talk, guildsmen in brocades were shaking fists, or banded together in disturbed groups. Etarra’s three fraternities of assassins were going to profit, to judge by the speed with which curses transformed into whispering. As husbands bandied plots like vigilantes, wives and daughters were being unceremoniously bundled back home.
Livid and speechless, and left no target for his outrage, the Lord Governor leaned gratefully on the hand that answered his need for support. ‘The effrontery of the bastard!’ he spluttered when he finally recovered his breath. ‘Footrace, indeed! Does he think us a pack of rank schoolboys?’
‘He can be difficult,’ an impressive personage with pale gold hair volunteered in commiseration. ‘But I have never known him to be anything less than fair.’
That instant Morfett realized that his benefactor was gently attempting to draw him apart from his councilmen. He yanked back, bristling fury. ‘Who are you?’ Blue velvet clothing might fail to jog his memory, but the green heraldic cloak folded over the stranger’s arm at once identified the prince’s blond-haired companion. ‘Never mind,’ Morfett snapped. ‘You’re one of the royal cronies, and assuredly no help to Etarra.’
Still smiling, Lysaer said, ‘Quite the contrary. I’m the one royal crony who’s not a sorcerer and also the only friend you have who understands the cross-grained nature of your prince.’
The commander of the guard perked up instantly. ‘I know a tavern,’ he invited and, grumbling, Morfett allowed himself to be swept along into their wake.
The heavy door boomed closed. Tired to his bones, Arithon s’Ffalenn leaned back against uncomfortable, brass-studded panels. Muffled, the voice of the Lord Governor’s wife nattered after him from the outside hallway. ‘Do make yourself comfortable, your Grace. Of course, my house staff and servants will eagerly attend to your needs.’
Arithon replied in tones of steelclad politeness. ‘Your kindness is generous. I shall be content to sleep undisturbed.’ The decorative studs that gouged his back impelled him to straighten as he finished his survey of the guest chamber.
The glitter made his head ache. Glass beading riddled the panelled walls, and gilt casements with rose-tinted panes clashed unmercifully with a floor laid out in tiles. These also were patterned, a blaring assemblage of lozenges done in saffron, amber and violet; the furnishings had raised knots in gold, every padded edge decked in silk twist and fringe. Even the carpets sported tassels.
A sortie from the bed to the privy would require lighted candles to forestall hooked toes and whacked shins.
Arithon shut his eyes and wished back the stark hills of Daon Ramon. The windswept ruins there at least kept the tatters of dignity.
‘You haven’t seen the fur quilts, yet,’ Asandir invited drily from the other side of the room. Against the chamber’s blinding opulence, his preferred midnight blue and silver made him grim as an aspect of Dharkaron dispatched to punish mortal vanity.
‘Excuse me.’ Arithon wished only to forget his first sight of Etarra; with copper-clad domes clustered thick as warts behind square bastions, the city resembled a fat toad squatted between weathered slate mountains. He sighed and reopened his eyes. ‘I presume Sethvir brought the records?’
‘If you can make out lettering between the flourishes affected by Etarra’s clerks,’ groused the Warden of Althain. Surrounded by leatherbound ledgers heaped in stacks in an alcove, he looked nothing less than besieged. ‘I hate to pain you further.’ He waved a haphazard scroll-case toward a pair of cherubs whose carved curls sprouted indigo candles. ‘But the lady of the house brought these when I asked for more light.’
‘Burn them, and the archives, too!’ Arithon’s laughter took on a baleful edge. ‘We’d save a lot of bother if we could level this atrocity and build a new city from the rubble.’
Sethvir waggled a quill pen at him. ‘Don’t imagine we haven’t been tempted!’ Then he blinked and looked vague and snapped his fingers: both cherub candles sprouted flame. The wax as it heated gave off a cloying perfume. A casement perforce was unlatched and in the draft, the new light wavered over features shaded toward concern. ‘A nasty night of reading for us both. You won’t like it. Etarran guilds resolve their disputes on the blades of hired assassins.’
Not too exhausted to field subtleties, Arithon hooked off his silver circlet. ‘How many wards of guard did you need to set over this room?’
Sethvir and Asandir exchanged a glance, but neither one gave him answer.
‘Never mind.’ Arithon hurled the royal fillet into the nearest padded chair. ‘If the governor’s council wants a knife in my back, by morning I’ll make them a reason.’
But reason had already been given, as the sorcerers had cause to know. They did not discuss the three paid killers who had earlier been unobtrusively foiled. The vi
per’s nest of factions that ruled the city stood united in their cause to see the s’Ffalenn royal line killed off. Vigilance over Arithon’s safety could never for a moment be relaxed.
For the rest of the afternoon and well on into evening, the Prince of Rathain and the sorcerers remained in seclusion, poring over old records. Dakar came back. An exhaustive tour of the taverns had affirmed his opinion that Etarra brewed terrible ale. Dispatched, staggering, to the scullery, he fetched back a light meal, chilled wine and candles from the servants’ wing that thankfully did not merit any scent. His errands finished, he sprawled full-length on the fur quilts, the boots he had forgotten to remove sticking through the rods of the bedstead.
At midnight, Lysaer stepped in, lightly flushed, a satisfied smile on his face. He hooked Arithon’s circlet off the chair, set it safely on a tortoiseshell sidetable, and sat. ‘Ath, this room is as overdecorated as the taproom I just came from.’ He sniffed, and grinning added, ‘It reeks in here like a brothel madam’s boudoir.’
Arithon baited blandly, ‘You should have been here when the candles were fresh. They would’ve given you an erection. And anyway, I’m surprised you can tell.’
At Lysaer’s mystification, Sethvir said, ‘You smell as if you bathed in cheap gin. By that, dare we presume you accomplished your assignment and lasted for the duration?’
Lysaer laughed. ‘When I retired, the elect of the guilds were banging their tankards on the table. The foppish-looking fellow who’s commander of Etarra’s guard was singing war-songs offkey and the barmaids were hoisting the Lord Governor into a brewer’s wagon to be delivered to the arms of his wife. Gentlemen, what news I have is good. Tomorrow would have brought foul and secret machinations against our prince, except that the messengers entrusted to spread word of the arrangements met with mishap. Kharadmon has an unsubtle touch, I must say, since one of them slipped in horse dung and apparently broke his elbow. His yelling disrupted half the prostitutes in the shanty district. The names he chose to curse at the top of his lungs were a frank embarrassment.’