Arithon sat back sharply, discomfort plain upon his face. The bard had managed to shock him, as nobody else ever had, and his recovery lacked courtesy or grace. ‘That was not my intent.’ For once too upset to try pretence, he hitched his shoulders in dismissal. ‘Of course, I’m touched by your regard. But I saw no reason to inflict my inadequate fingering upon you.’ The sarcasm used in desperation bloomed now to drive back tearing anguish. ‘My sword, you’ll recall, is now wedded to the cause of a kingdom.’
Halliron shrugged off the protestation. ‘The mechanics of your playing can definitely be improved upon.’ He cradled the lyranthe against his shoulder, set fingers to strings, and repeated several bars of Arithon’s work. Beneath his skill, melody emerged refocused into a rendition to make the heart leap for pure pain.
The effect left Dania with her fingers pressed to her lips, and the Prince of Rathain dead white.
Halliron damped the strings with a slap the exquisite soundboard magnified like a shout. ‘With work, you shall surpass me. Study, apply yourself to life training, and no one alive could match your style.’ The Masterbard pressed his instrument back into Arithon’s lap.
‘If, if, if!’ Arithon spurned the invitation in a recoil that dragged air in a whine across strings as he thrust the instrument aside. ‘Where is Steiven?’
‘Stop evading.’ Incensed, Halliron held to his subject. ‘I’ve searched all my life, and never heard the equal of your natural ability.’
Arithon whipped taut with a speed that belied the indolence he had adopted since his arrival. The weave of moving shadows as he thrust to his feet plunged the painted stag into darkness, leaving hounds with bared muzzles exposed to the merciless candlelight. To Dania he said crisply, ‘If Caolle is available, I’ll speak to him instead.’
Dismayed, the lady instinctively forestalled him. ‘You haven’t eaten, your Grace. Let me bring wine and fresh bread.’
Arithon abruptly shook his head.
He was a man who never used gestures when a verbal backlash would serve better. Alarmed, Dania surveyed his face. ‘You’re unwell.’
‘Which is not your concern, dear lady.’ Arithon caught her hands and kissed her knuckles, inspired to ruthless certainty that his clammy sweat and fine trembling would set her off-balance enough to quiet her. ‘Caolle or your husband, it doesn’t matter which. But I must speak with one of them immediately.’
Silence followed his demand, a rugged war of wills that Halliron finally broke because he misliked risking Deshir’s lady to the edged temper of the s’Ffalenn heir. ‘Steiven and Caolle are closeted in the tent that serves as armoury. They’re taking inventory, and probably won’t mind the interruption.’
Arithon gave the bard a smile of astonishing gratitude. Then he kissed the lady’s hands again. ‘My respect, and my thanks for your hospitality.’ Need before gentleness commanded him as he released his touch and departed.
The lodge-flap sighed closed on his heels, and infused the close tent with the night-scent of dew-soaked evergreen. Lady Dania stared blindly across an emptiness left brilliant with candles, her arms hugged forlornly across her chest. ‘He tries hard to make us think he takes us lightly.’
Wordless in sympathy, Halliron caught her shoulders. He turned her, sat her down and fetched her wine. This once in his life unwilling to seek music to quiet an uneasy mind, he poured a second goblet for himself. ‘It’s fate that’s his enemy, not ourselves.’ He drank deep, to dull a grief he could not bear, that his search for a successor had found its match in a man who had no use at all for an apprenticeship.
Underlit by the glow of a single candle, the war captain of Deshir’s clans crouched, counting unfletched arrows in their bins while Steiven marked numbers on a tally. Caolle was first to look up as the tent flap stirred and admitted a drift of night air. A smile broke through his weathered scowl. ‘Well, well. Look who’s come.’
Arithon stepped through the entry. Burdened with a rolled set of parchments, and in no mood to be subtle under needling, he had done nothing to ease his withdrawal symptoms beyond a pause to drink at the river. The water had not settled well. By that, he knew he had very little time to make his point before weakness forced him to retire. Driven to fast movement to conceal a resurgence of cramps, he chose a table arrayed with swords set aside for the armourer’s attention in the morning. These he swept aside with a belling clangour that made Steiven jump to his feet.
‘Your Grace?’ The clan chieftain left his captain, the tally slate abandoned in his haste.
Caolle tossed aside an arrow, lifted the candle, and followed. His distaste intensified as Arithon shed a cascade of scrolled documents and whipped them flat across the tabletop. The parchments so callously handled were the tactical maps that culminated painstaking labour and days of vociferous debate.
Annoyed enough that his gorge rose, Caolle’s steps became deliberate. ‘If you’re finished with moping for the day, perhaps you’d care to tell us the name of the man presently in command of Etarra’s reserve corps of archers?’
Braced against the table to steady a nasty rush of dizziness, Arithon tried to answer. His throat was already bone-dry. The drink at the river had not been sufficient to satisfy the demands of withdrawal. Warned that his neglect had now set him on dangerous ground, that the effects of herb poisons would have him unconscious if he pushed without care, he looked, but saw no place to sit down.
‘Or have the sulks clouded your memory?’ Caolle goaded. ‘You need not trouble. Our plans have already been set.’
Arithon returned an impatient lift of his head. ‘The commander’s name is Hadig. And you’re going to have to change tactics.’
Caolle gave a gruff, low laugh and at once confronted his clan chief. ‘This womanish daydreamer suggests that our councils have been wasted. Do we leave our arrows uncounted, just to let him show us better?’
Arithon neither acknowledged the insult, nor allowed Steiven’s puzzled regard any interval to unravel his personal state. He reached with a hand forced to steadiness and swept across an inked arc of symbols that his fickle mind twisted into bodies, bent and broken and bathed in congealed blood. ‘Here,’ he half gasped. ‘And here. I’ll suffer no man’s mother or child in the path of Etarra’s armies.’
Lip curled in contempt, Caolle said, ‘You think us gutless as townsmen.’
‘I took an oath!’ Arithon locked eyes with him. ‘I speak out of concern.’
Caolle set down the candle and leaned on bunched hands across the charts. ‘You’d make a prime town governor.’
‘You’ll listen,’ Arithon returned, a jab of command in his tone. ‘Would you ruin your people for sheer pride? My objection has no grounds in sentiment.’
‘Sentiment? Fiends, are you blind?’ Caolle’s scarred fists crashed onto the table top, jarring swordblades in ringing counterpoint while the candle guttered and spattered hot wax across the maps. ‘There are nine-hundred-sixty of us of age to wield weapons. That includes every man of the northeast forest clans, who will not, cannot, even with Ath’s help, get here in time to make a difference. Ten to one odds, had you counted. Dharkaron Avenger couldn’t balance such stakes. And you’ve the puking gall to fly in my face with objections?’
‘Caolle! Recall you address your sovereign lord.’ Steiven reappeared out of shadow with camp stools salvaged from a field kit. He distributed the seats around the table and said as sharply, ‘Your Grace, if you wish changes, speak your reason. Argument serves no purpose here.’
The clanlord sat down then, and in iron-clad example directed his attention to the maps. If a night of communion with nature had jolted Arithon out of apathy he would never ridicule the change. This prince’s hand had helped to banish Desh-thiere; if the powers used then could help now, he must be encouraged to offer them. Yet, confronted by Arithon’s unsteady bearing as he pulled up the stool and sank onto it, Steiven wondered silently if Caolle’s supposition had been right, and his liege had retired from the oathtaking to get himse
lf royally drunk.
Arithon rested his chin on folded fingers. ‘I’ve had warning,’ he opened without preamble. ‘The lives of every clan woman and child will be lost if they are sent out to stand against Lysaer. Butchery best describes the method. I could sound no alternative sequence.’
Caolle for a mercy stayed silent, while Steiven adjusted to this implied application of mage schooled prescience with a care he might have used when taking aim on a half-startled buck. ‘Can you be more specific?’
‘Unfortunately not.’ Arithon resumed a tone beaten level by an unpleasant ringing in his ears. ‘Your son disrupted my scrying. Small talk of his sisters provoked a precognition. His presence masked further development. I suggest, and not lightly, that you take full heed and arrange safeguards.’
Steiven regarded his prince and desperately suppressed the thought that rose inside him like a scream: that his own life already had been pledged. It seemed most cruelly unjust that loyalty to this Teir’s’Ffalenn might claim his wife and five young ones as well. He said only, ‘You wish me to remove the women and younger children from the lines?’
‘At the very least.’ Arithon sounded strained.
‘Suicide,’ Caolle interrupted. He stuck broad thumbs in his belt and licked his teeth. ‘We cannot act in fear of who will die. If we hold back any one resource, where do we stop? We’ll have no need at all for fussy strategy, if our lines get overrun and all of our fighting strength falls jack-dead on the field!’
‘There are alternatives,’ Arithon interjected. At his word, the candle flicked out, though no hand had moved to pinch the flame.
When Caolle leaned out to test the wick, Steiven stopped him on instinct. ‘Don’t. Snuffed candles usually smoke. I smell none, which must mean the light is still burning.’
‘The sun can be blackened as easily,’ Arithon’s voice resumed out of darkness. ‘Mine is full command of shadow. Though I am loath to kill by trickery, the night can be a formidable weapon.’
He released the captive candle as abruptly, and in a steady, undisturbed spill, flamelight glinted in multiple reflection on the helms and scale brigandines of a dozen men-at-arms, conjured from nowhere and arrayed behind the prince’s chair.
Caolle broke his chief’s hold. He surged erect. His hands in frenzied urgency sorted through the weapons that weighted the map-ends for just one blade with a serviceable edge.
Arithon’s grating laughter stopped him cold. ‘Illusion only,’ the prince admonished. His magery dispersed into thin air, with Caolle left blinking and foolish, his fists interlocked behind the crossguard of an ill-balanced antique broadsword.
The prince said with stinging coolness, ‘I’m hardly the green boy you imagined. By the grace of my grandfather’s upbringing, I hold the sole alternative. Listen and live. Or I’ll step back, reject my oath, your feal defence and every last trace of your memory.’
As if taunting the temper that, in one move, could finish a swing up to gut him, the Shadow Master held the clan captain’s gaze in tight-lipped, bristling antagonism. Until, suspicious that the prince might not be drunk, but rather driving for the opening to provoke, Steiven intervened. ‘Caolle, put down that blade. Whether or not you’ve been mocked, I can tolerate no violence against a guest who’s sworn at my hearth.’
Caolle settled, hunched as a mastiff forced to give ground. He watched with hot eyes as Arithon applied a stick of charcoal to the map and re-formed the deployment of Deshir’s forces. As the fine, unsteady hands revitalized the plans with new strategy, the irascible veteran was forced to revise his impression of the s’Ffalenn heir. The prince was impressively clever, if weak. His hands trembled, and the green eyes burned beneath slack lids as though driven to fever by high-strung nerves. Battle experience might toughen him enough to make him a passable sovereign, Caolle thought; but he kept his opinion to himself.
Near the end, they suffered interruption. Framed suddenly against the torchless blackness of the doorway, a scout in weapons and leathers made a hasty entrance. ‘Your Grace. Lord Caolle. The Lady Dania requires the presence of her husband. Your Jieret has had another nightmare and is out of his senses with grief.’
‘Forgive me,’ Steiven blurted, on his feet and gone in a bound that riffled stacked maps in his wake.
Relieved to be quit of his message, the scout came fully inside and settled on the stool his chief had vacated. He gave Caolle an apologetic shrug. ‘Ath ease his suffering, poor young one.’ For Arithon’s benefit, he explained, ‘Jieret has Sight, as his father does.’
‘Jieret has natural prescience?’ Hunched over crossed arms on the tabletop, Arithon snapped straight in wild-eyed, sweating attention. ‘Ath’s mercy, why did nobody think to tell me?’
Cynical before this unlooked-for burst of concern, Caolle drummed his knuckles on his swordbelt and watched; while the scout, less dour, let out a sigh. ‘No kind gift for a boy, to be sure. Whatever he’s dreamed broke his heart.’
‘I’ll tell you what he saw.’ Arithon shot a vicious glance toward Caolle. ‘The slaughter of every living relative. If I’d known that child had Sight, I’d never have allowed him to stay near me. I was still half-tranced from scrying, and my defences at the time were wide open. If he’s gifted, he’ll have picked up the sequence from me. Mine the blame, if he’s taken any harm.’
Magecraft and jargon left no impression upon Caolle, who disdained outbursts of any sort. He pulled his skinning knife from his boot sheath, and in the extreme and failing candlelight expertly shaved off a hangnail. ‘You worry for nothing,’ he said to Arithon. ‘Deshir’s young are hardly fragile. Any such weakness in clan bloodlines, town headhunters have long since stamped out.’
The reassurance appeared to settle Arithon’s mind, for by the time the captain looked up to sheath his blade, the prince had apparently fallen asleep. His black hair feathered a pillowing wrist, with the other hand outflung across the map; as if he had started to surge to his feet, then surrendered the inclination.
If arcane scrying had exhausted the prince to the same degree as his recent flight from Etarra, the man was a fool who tried to roust him. The scout said as much, his long face gloomy in disgust.
For his part, Caolle gave grudging credit for Arithon’s contribution to the defence strategy: he did not curse his liege lord’s failing out loud, but in tones of mulish reserve, requested help to shift Arithon back to Steiven’s lodge tent.
‘That’s twice in a week our chief’s left us to haul deadweight like deer-dressers,’ the scout grumbled. The candle fluttered at his movement as he kicked back Steiven’s stool, leaned over and hooked his forearms under Arithon’s shoulders. ‘Phew. What’s he got on his clothes? Smells like burnt spice or something.’
Caolle shrugged. The finicky habits of mages being outside his province to fathom, he hefted the royal legs without comment.
As both men manoeuvred their prince around the chart-strewn table, the scout gave a breathless, short laugh. ‘Well, he’s small enough, Ath be thanked. Easy to sling as a puppy. If I have to strain a sword hand for my liege, I’m glad to know I’ll do it killing townsmen.’
‘Ye’ll do it standing extra turns at duty!’ Caolle snapped, moved at last to vent the spleen he had too long bent aside to please his chieftain. ‘Get back to your post where you belong, and leave yon princeling’s nursing to me.’ The mettlesome captain of the Deshans shouldered the unconscious prince like a game carcass and huffed on alone to Steiven’s lodge tent.
Dania’s extravagant expenditure of candles by this hour had burned low; those few wicks that still struggled alight fed on drafts, half drowned in puddled wax. Other candles snuffed to conserve resources stood tall white in a gloomy play of shadows. As conscious of their cost as of the life in the burden he carried, Caolle took care not to knock against them as he bore Arithon toward the cushions in the comer where Halliron’s lyranthe lay propped, unshrouded still, if not forgotten.
Caolle shucked his load, tugged straight a twist in his tu
nic, and considered his duty to his sovereign completed. He raised a forearm to blot his brow, caught a whiff of his leather bracers and nearly spat. The exotic reek from whatever rite of magery the prince had trifled with had transferred itself to his person. Moved to seek fresher air outside, Caolle spun to depart, but checked halfway to the doorflap as Steiven re-emerged from the alcove set aside for his children.
To forestall answering for the prince, Caolle asked, ‘Is Jieret settled?’
Steiven sighed, strolled crunching through scrolls of dry birch bark and uncorked the wine flagon his wife had left out for the Masterbard. ‘He’s coherent. Halliron’s telling him a story. If we’re lucky, he’ll choose something boring that will ease the boy back to sleep.’
‘The nightmare was truesight, then?’ Ruled by habit, Caolle braced broad shoulders against the king post and regarded the master he had first raised and now served without question. Neither man could have named the day when duty had deepened to respect; the nuance of who was master had never mattered between them. ‘Did Jieret say what he dreamed?’
Caught in mid-swallow, Steiven parked the flagon on his forearm. He shook his head. ‘Dania says he told nothing beyond the name of Fethgurn’s daughter. Though what Teynie has to do with an ugly precognition, Daelion Fatemaster knows. My boy cannot tell us. Whatever Jieret dreamed, it’s too much for him to bear. His mind has closed to recall, as mine did, once.’ And he stopped, knowing Caolle would remember: it had been the captain’s gruff hands that had soothed him, the night before his father found his death.
A shiver swept over Steiven. His regard lay heavy with understanding upon his captain: too soon, Etarra’s troops would invade these valleys.
Wordless, Caolle extended his hand for the flagon. Steiven watched while his first captain drank, his eyes as deep with worry as his oldest confidante had ever seen them. ‘We must withdraw the girls and women as Arithon wishes. Seer or not, his objections and Jieret’s nightmare are too close to be a coincidence.’