Halliron had depths of subtlety well disguised by his congenial nature. Since the oddity intrigued him, that the prince so taken with his music had never sought closer acquaintance, he took pains to hide his interest.
The domestic camp moved by night and rested only after full daybreak. On the morn they were to reach their destination, the mists of early dawn ripped and dispersed into tatters, cut by slanted shafts of white sunlight. The birds were loud at their nesting calls. Like strands of silvered silk wound through its green forest tapestry, the river Tal Quorin re-emerged in a bend to flow once again beside the trail. The thin, acid soil of the heights gave up its black mantle of pines. The fertile trough of the watershed here lay broken into long, irregular valleys. Winding through hollows and glens, the river current lisped over glacial deposits of smoothed granite, and skeined eddies around willow roots like the knobbled knees of old men. The demise of Desh-thiere had brought change. Little plants pressed up through moss and pine-needles, and opened coloured petals for the first time in five centuries untrammelled by the sooty prints of fungal spores.
Steiven’s daughters clung to Arithon like shadows as together they enjoyed discovery of each new bud and petal; where the wild flowers matched those he remembered from Rauven’s deep woodland glens, he gave their names. Where they did not, he knelt, the sun warm across his back, and shared wonders otherworldly and strange in drifts of dew-drenched leaf mould.
His absorption was not so complete that he overlooked the faint, sour ring of steel that threaded through the trilled cries and fast-beating wings of disturbed marsh flickers. Halliron’s fascination had not stopped at appearances, for all that the camp women had already dismissed their prince as a fanciful dreamer. Only the bard remained observant enough to spot the brief frisson that shocked through the prince’s bearing.
Puzzled, Halliron tossed damp hair from his temples the better to watch as Arithon straightened up from contemplation. Swift words from him and the children ranged eagerly ahead to scout their next find on their own. Arithon hung behind, a shadow in dark leathers under the light-flecked boughs of a hazel thicket.
From the crest of an unseen hillside, the axe blows reached ragged crescendo. The tree bole under punishment gave a juddering crack and fell to earth in a whipping tangle of greenery that hissed like a rip through warm air. Arithon recoiled. He turned as if jabbed by sharp pain and his eyes passed unseeing across the bard, standing not twenty feet behind, with the forest shade hatching his elegant court velvets that stood out too plainly to be missed.
Another tree cracked and fell. Exposed full face to an observation he would have avoided, Arithon paled in the grip of some deep, introspective discomfort.
And Halliron caught his breath in comprehension. Acquainted with the Warden of Althain, befriended by Asandir, he saw into this prince and recognized like a watermark in fine paper the stamp of a mage-trained awareness.
Arithon’s interest in trailside wildflowers had been a ruse to mask attention linked to the deeper mysteries of the forest. Caught as he was in partial trance, the axe-cut, dying trees sent a scream of pain across his nerves. An unprepared part of him was bark and leaves and running spring sap, slashed untimely from its taproot by blows from sharpened steel. The shock momentarily upset his mastery. He struggled, stumbling slightly, to tear his stung consciousness free.
Pushed by reflex before thought, Halliron hastened forward and caught the prince by an elbow to support his unsteady step.
The touch caused Arithon to snap stiff. His head came up, around, and in green eyes the Masterbard caught a flare that looked like smothered anger. The impression was false. Halliron saw past hostility to what perhaps was an envy sprung from offence; indisputably the resentment was directed fully and personally toward him.
Halliron’s startlement caused him to let go, simultaneous with Arithon’s instinctive jerk backward, with the result that sensitive musician’s fingers recorded an instant impression. The forearm under its covering of water-spoiled silk was wiry and fit, not at all the constitution of the fine-drawn dandy the prince purported to affect.
Arithon spun away to hide an expression Halliron would have bribed in gold to have read. Between the two men lay a silence heavy with secrets, and as if their burden were at once too much, the prince abruptly sat down. He fingered the edge of a rock hoarded like some hoary, moss-crusted jewel between the miserly grip of old roots. ‘I’m sorry.’ His apology was too quick and cold. ‘I believed I was alone.’
Halliron absorbed this display with narrowed, tawny eyes. He observed on intuition, ‘You had wards set, and not just to hide the notes of whistles.’
‘If so, that’s no business of yours.’ Arithon let his knuckles fall loose in dry grass, left wind-broken from winter’s snowfall like the bundled small bones of dead birds. He had regained control. At least, he no longer shivered as the axe-falls rang. Only the earth seemed to shudder in vibration as each quick trunk slammed the ground.
After a moment, the bard said, ‘If you want Deshir’s clans to disown you, desert them.’
That touched a nerve. Arithon’s smile at the barb was full lipped, and brimmingly, off-puttingly merry. ‘Desert me, instead. Your perceptions feel like a tinker’s spilled needles: a punishing trap for false steps.’
Halliron was not easily irritated. Years of settling vain, even senile patrons and short-tempered, envious peers had taught him to treat with human nature sparely, to unwind misunderstanding like a snarl in fine-spun wool. Intrigued by Arithon’s reticence, he gave no ground, even as Arithon pressed to escape and regain untrammelled access to the trail.
There was no gap. Halliron had him boxed between a stand of dense brush and the seamed, ungiving face of another rock.
Spoiled as his behaviour suggested, the Teir’s’Ffalenn did not have the nerve or the anger in him to shoulder an old man aside to have his way.
‘I could ask,’ Halliron said in the Shandian drawl that seeped back occasionally from his boyhood, ‘why, when you first met me, did you react as if I were a threat to you?’
‘Because,’ Arithon began, and on impulse, switched liquidly to the Paravian. ‘Cuel ean i murdain ei dath-tol na soaren’; which translated, ‘you are the enemy I never expected to meet’.
His accent was flawless. And the coiled hardness in him this time would not be denied. Halliron moved aside before he was indeed physically shoved.
Undeceived by the show for a moment, the Masterbard watched the scion of Rathain’s murdered high kings stride away. The man was not angry. However desperately he wished to foster that impression, to a bard’s ear for nuance, it was obvious that Arithon was unbearably distressed.
Halliron resumed his walk in pensive thought. For some pernicious reason he felt guilty for even this slight an intrusion into the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s altogether raptly-guarded privacy. If anything left the bard irked, it was his suspicion that Steiven’s daughters were entrusted with an honesty nobody else in the camp seemed to merit.
The clans of Deshir were altering the landscape in the valleys to either side of the Tal Quorin’s watercourse. The woods rang with the noise of their feverish haste, of axes and falling timber and the grinding over stones of makeshift sledges. A party of raiders had stolen draught teams. The chink of chain and harness fittings blended with drovers’ calls. Even Halliron’s pony was pressed into service, hauling hampers of cut brush.
Upon arrival, the women left tents and belongings still furled in their packs in a clearing. Every free hand was set to work, while the children and the elderly were sent out to forage or dress the game sent in by the hunting parties who ranged the glades further afield. The racket had scattered the deer, the birds, and even the beavers were driven into hiding by rafts of cut logs sent downstream.
Lord Steiven was south, below the white-water rapids where the river fanned into sheets of open water between grassy green swards of marsh. There he oversaw the remaking of innocent landscape into traps to mire Etarra’s army.
Arithon did not join him. Neither did he lend his strength to the shifting of logs and stones. Conspicuous for his idleness, for even the Masterbard had volunteered to help the cooks, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn sat in the shade through the morning, apparently taking a nap. Nobody saw him move, nor as much as open an eye.
When the work-crews returned to eat at midday he was still there and had to be wakened for the meal.
And yet, he must have stirred. A scout who passed through the armoury lodge found the tactical maps disturbed. Penned in the margins of a supply draft in fussy, over-ornamented script were concisely drawn summaries of the weapon and training profile of Etarra’s garrison troops, along with names, numbers and insightful characteristics of most of its ranking officers.
Since the prince never mentioned this contribution, the matter became overshadowed. The contempt of the clan’s womenfolk became all the deeper entrenched by Arithon’s current absorption, of drawing puzzles in the dirt with the toddlers. His laughter tangled with the talk of the men at the boards and the scrape of knives as they sawed and hammered the dry waybread into chunks to soften in hot gravy. Veiled looks were cast at the prince between bites. The younger scouts began to sound bitter, while the most campaign-scarred grew silent. Steiven was not present to stem the quietly acid speculation, which Arithon joyously ignored. His mood stayed isolate, as unshakeable as if he were deaf, or a half-wit.
Afternoon saw the Teir’s’Ffalenn kneeling amid the patchworked shadows of a beechgrove to receive oath of fealty from the fighting scouts of the clans. The timing of the ceremony had been at Steiven’s orders: men grumbled in dour, closed knots that the roster might have been changed if their earl had come back from the lower valley in time to hear gossip from his wife.
But delayed until the last minute, Steiven arrived still winded from his hurry to reach the glen. That Strakewood’s clansmen had gathered in his absence, half-stripped and muddy, or sweating in leathers still grimed from their labours on the defenceworks, was in tribute to the loyalty given their chieftain rather than respect for the prince about to become their liege lord.
Steiven assumed position a half-step to one side of the s’Ffalenn prince. Except for recovery of Asandir’s circlet that was proof of his sanction for succession, Arithon still wore the black suede tunic and leggings that had once belonged to Lady Dania’s younger brother. As at the earlier ceremony in Etarra, Arithon carried no ornament beyond his father’s signet. The smoke-dark blade forged by Paravian mastery was struck upright into the earth at his elbow, the emerald in the pommel a hard green sparkle underlying the reflections of the foliage. Already in place on one knee in the crumbled detritus of last season’s fall of copper leaves, he met no one’s interested glance. His attention seemed absorbed more by the cheep of nesting wrens in the branches than in the greeting murmured by his regent.
For a moment Lord Steiven knew regret that an occasion as momentous as this should be held at short notice in the greenwood. The last such ceremony would have taken place in Ithamon, under beautiful vaulted ceilings rich with jewelled hangings and banners. Customarily held on a prince’s twentieth birthday, past events had been preceded and followed by grand celebration and feasting.
Saddened by the sombreness of this gathering, and moved to a crush of emotion that would barely allow speech, that he had lived for this day; that he, of all his exiled ancestors, should be the one to stand witness to the returned s’Ffalenn scion, Steiven drew breath to renew a ritual many thousands of years old. ‘I, Teir’s’Valerient, appointed Regent of the Realm and Warden of Ithamon through my father, and his fathers, back to the last crowned sovereign, bring before you Arithon, son of Avar, sanctioned heir and direct descendant of Torbrand s’Ffalenn, founder of the line appointed by the Fellowship of Seven to rule the principalities of Rathain. Let any man who questions the validity of this prince’s claim now stand forth.’
Feet shifted, deadened from sound by damp earth. The shrill cry of a hawk hung loud in the air.
Steiven resumed. ‘Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn, turn your back. A prince who would accept oath of fealty must trust those he would lead and defend. If any among this gathering have earned your ill-will, state their names for all to hear, that they may be excluded.’
Seeming delicate as porcelain before his regent’s scarred height, Arithon tipped up his face. ‘I bear no man grudge.’ The words were clear, for all that his eyes were barriered. His fingers shook as he gripped and pulled Alithiel’s blade from the earth. ‘I appoint you my guardian against treachery.’ His raised knee shifted; he pivoted, and neatly, still kneeling, turned his back.
According to time-worn ritual, Steiven positioned himself at Arithon’s shoulder, facing the waiting company. ‘Let those who would be feal companions of Arithon, son of Avar, step forward and present a weapon in pledge of service and defence.’
The clan chieftain then drew his own sword and ran its point into the ground. One by one his scouts and his fighting men, his hunters and his women who had no family representative to swear for them, filed forward. They passed with bent neck beneath the unsheathed threat of Alithiel guarding the royal back and left knives, daggers, poignards or heirloom swords in token of their trust. When the last of them had returned to their place, Arithon was permitted to turn around.
But not, even yet, to arise. On his knees, white now as any mayor’s bleached linen, he bowed his head before that hedge of steel and crossed apparently fragile hands over the hilt of the nearest sword.
Thin and weary as a fox run to earth, he drew breath to renounce personal claim to the life he had found in Athera. ‘I pledge myself, body, mind and heart to serve Rathain: to guard, to hold unified and to deliver justice according to Ath’s law. If the land knows peace, I preserve her: war, I defend. Through hardship, famine or plague, I suffer no less than my sworn companions. In war, peace and strife, I bind myself to the charter of the land, as given by the Fellowship of Seven, strike me dead should I fail to uphold for all people the rights stated therein. Dharkaron witness.’
‘Arise Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn and Crown Prince this moment of Rathain.’ Steiven stepped back, smiling, as his liege at last gained his feet. ‘Ath grant you long life, and sound heirs.’
Arithon laid hand on the chieftain’s huge bastard sword and drew its weight from the earth. He offered the weapon back to Steiven with his royal blessing. And one by one, for what seemed like an hour, other weapons were returned in like fashion, binding their owners to loyal service. The steel was their oath; the burden of their lives and safety, now and forever, Arithon’s; as he was now theirs, until death.
The muttering over his weaknesses cut off sharply, as Steiven’s barked orders sent each team back to felling trees and digging pitfalls for the incomplete defence works.
As the clearing rapidly emptied, Arithon met his Lord Regent’s regard. His green eyes not quite yet rinsed to bleakness, he said, ‘My first act will be the rending of that oath.’
Steiven’s easy humour vanished as he proffered Alithiel to his prince. ‘I’ve heard. The talk doesn’t fool me. And you dwell on the matter, your Grace, like one blind to the lay of the weather. Etarra’s hatreds smoulder hot enough that it takes no spark at all to set them burning.’
Arithon accepted back the icy weight of Alithiel. The haste under which he had fled his coronation had kept the blade without a sheath: he was obliged to slide her bared length through a belt that was nicked and sliced from such usage, and the force as he rammed the weapon home roused an angry ring from the steel. ‘Lysaer is not fit to be judged by rational men. He has been cursed, as I have, and feuds or justice have no bearing on his actions. I would not see your clansmen become the tool that Etarra’s garrison has.’
He brushed past before Steiven could answer. Without further word to anyone, Arithon left the clearing in the opposite direction to the camp.
Steiven started after him, but a hand on his forearm caught him back.
‘Let him go,’ murmured Hal
liron in that musical gentleness that could and had stopped killing fights. ‘My heart tells me this prince knows all too clearly what he’s about. You cannot shoulder what troubles him.’ A smile revealed the sly gap in front teeth. ‘Besides, if he’s touchy as the ballads name his forebears, he’ll tolerate no man’s interference.’
Steiven swore explosively. ‘I know that. You know that. But likeness to his ancestors isn’t going to satisfy my clansmen. If this womanish brooding continues, my war captain has vowed he’ll strip the royal person to his short hairs to find out if they hide a castration. By Ath!’ the former regent ended with rare and exasperated fierceness, ‘If Caolle tries, it’s on my mind I’m going to let him!’
Attraction
Etarra prepared for war. The clang of the armourers’ mallets rang from the smithies day and night, counterpointed by the whack and slap of practice staves as last year’s recruits were drilled to professional polish. Almost overnight it seemed that every young man of fighting age appeared in the streets wearing half-armour.
Not all would be leaving for battle. The highborn elite, those whose pedigrees traced back without taint to the original burghers who had overthrown the old monarchy, found themselves sidelined in the bustle created by the renegade prince. Their exploits, their mischief and their profligate gambling debts were no longer the talk of the ladies’ parlours. Arithon’s name had supplanted them, and out of fear of his shadows, mistresses and favoured courtesans turned fickle in sudden preference for strapping big fellows with less refined manners and swords.
The parties of the rich and young grew the more frenzied to compensate. From Diegan, Lady Talith heard details: of how the bluest-blooded and brashest had drunk claret until they staggered, and then staged a race up the alarm tower to see who could be first to swing from the bass bell’s clapper. The winner had emerged miraculously unscathed. Those less lucky, judged by the nature of their scars, became heroes, or the butt of scathing jokes which was the fashionable way to test their charm. One gallant had twisted an ankle. Another had fallen through a railing and suffered two broken wrists. He appeared in splints at the soirées and bragged that the ladies could kiss him on both cheeks at once, as he lacked a sound hand to fend them off.