The Curse of the Mistwraith

  It rampaged over a snake-twist curve in the river, a towering, tumbling brown wall jagged with logs, uprooted trees and slashed greenery. The vanguard of Etarra’s proud army was allowed a split second of terror, but no escape.

  The water hit.

  Men, mounts, and bright pennons crumpled as if struck by the log-mailed fist of doom. Horses screamed, upended, their cries as one with their riders who were crushed, and scythed under, and drowned. The foaming jaws that crested over Tal Quorin’s banks thrashed on in a welter of chaos, to cut down everything standing; to smash living flesh without quarter and to turn the snapped shafts of the lances against those maimed, to impale and gut, and club unconscious with a force more furious than man’s.

  The passage of the flood was cataclysmically swift, and it dragged on its course the mangled destriers, the rent and sodden banners and the dismembered, drowned and dying men of all but the extreme flanks of Etarra’s first division.

  Given warning by the dispatch of Gnudsog’s staff messenger, Lord Diegan did not turn tail and abandon his second company in a bolt for higher ground. In a rapid-fire string of orders, he commanded four reliable men to escort Lysaer out of danger, then called to muster the ranks behind for a speedy retreat from the riverbank.

  The ground was soggy. The suck and splash of many horses and men drawn to a halt in one place foiled the most effective shout; and Diegan lacked Gnudsog’s bull bellow. So that when the soldiers he had dispatched to attend the prince closed instead around his own horse and insistently grasped at the bridle, he thought his first orders had been mistaken.

  ‘The prince!’ he cracked out in white anger. ‘I said, you escort his Grace, Lysaer.’

  The men continued to seem deaf.

  Lord Diegan spun in his saddle, suspicion in his eyes as bright as the glint on his jewels.

  And Lysaer met him, harder still. ‘Go! This was my error. My fight. Let me save what I can. For I fear the worst still awaits us.’

  Enraged and far from willing to desert his post of command, Lord Diegan hauled to wheel his horse. Between his hands, the reins recoiled into slack: his own men had cut the leather at the bit-ring and were traitorously goading his mount to trot away from the river and his troops.

  ‘Damn your royal effrontery to Sithaer!’ cried Lord Diegan.

  Lysaer gave him back an insouciant wave, while he directed cracking strings of directions that effected a miracle of smooth deployment among the troops. As Lord Diegan was dragged up the rise toward the forest, his last, venomous thought was that no man alive should be blessed all at once, with looks, toughness and such surpassing talent for leadership; grudging resignation followed that perhaps this was why the Fellowship had insisted on restoring royal rule to start with.

  Three-quarters of the men were clear of the rivercourse when the spate gushed from the narrower channel of the upper valley and raced to claim the marshy stretch of flatland. Tal Quorin’s fury was less spent than engorged on its burden of disembowelled horses and racked men. Laced in dirty foam, and encumbered by stripped caparisons and bodies both thrashing and lifeless, the flood bore down upon the second division of Etarra’s city garrison.

  Lysaer heard the hiss and splash; felt the thunderous shake of the pummelled earth translate from the ground through his horse. He did not turn. Although every nerve in his body was keyed to the disaster about to overtake him, he continued in his clear, even voice to issue concise instructions to convey the next cohort of pikemen to the safe ground.

  The men who dragged Diegan by force up the rise from the marshlands watched helpless as the waters closed threshing down. They saw the fear scribed on the faces of their front-rank companions, impossibly trapped; they saw and could do nothing to stem the disordered burst of panic and the tragic unravelling of an order that against odds had held until now. And they saw, some of them weeping, the prince on his magnificently trained chestnut struggle with spur and seat to hold his ground.

  The Lord Commander they had spared from destruction ceased in that moment to fight them, but drove his fist again and again in balked fury against the mailed flesh of his thigh. No man could do aught, now, but watch. The gelding was schooled to the sternest standards by the best gifted horsemen in the continent. But as the waters crashed hungrily down, bridleless, it reverted to instinct. The Lord Commander and his escort in the wood saw it rear, and then bolt like an arrow through straw, straight into the pressed ranks behind. The army seethed in a mass stampede of berserk flight. Footmen were trampled, and companions shoved and even stabbed as soldiers clawed to reach the high ground. Then the flood closed over all with a slap that diminished the screams, the shouts and every other futile mortal protest.

  Because the pair, mount and rider, were moving with the flow, the crest did not at once immolate them. Heads surfaced, upflung in struggle, noble chestnut with an eye rolling white, the other sleeked wet and shining blond. Lysaer had discarded his helm, but could do nothing to shed the chainmail that could drown him. Then the unseen thrust of a log, or maybe a submerged corpse entangled in shed loops of harness battered and encumbered the swimmers. The horse rolled and went under in the sucking rush of current. Of the rider, they saw no more sign.

  Lord Diegan’s fury went cold. ‘You and you!’ he said through clenched teeth to the men who still held his horse’s bridle. ‘Knot my reins to the bit!’ He snapped the severed leather in their faces without caring if he took out an eye. Then he spurred down the bank and reclaimed his post with a shout that carried even over the gush of Tal Quorin’s black torrent. ‘Etarrans! To me! Reform ranks.’

  Somewhere upstream lurked the clansmen who had arranged this disaster. They would die very messily, Diegan swore, as he reviewed for losses and discovered still wider calamity. Of the first and second companies of Etarra’s guard, scarcely a quarter remained standing. These waded, dripping, toward the bank. They towed the maimed and the dying; still, these were the luckier ones, since horror did not end with the flood. For the troops Lysaer’s considered logic had sent clear in advance of the waters, the hillsides now offered poor haven. Where the riverbanks appeared most solidly inviting, the footing lay undermined in a maze of deadfalls and traps. The ground gave way beneath the lancers’ destriers. Their screams rent the air as they fell twisting into pits lined with sharpened stakes.

  ‘Stay in the shallows!’ Diegan cried. He muscled his mount by main force off dry ground, then ploughed girth-deep through rushing waters to rally his straggle of survivors. The horse cloths wicked up water, dragging his mount at each step. He cut them away. Since they bore his house blazon and badges of rank, a grazed and bleeding lieutenant lashed them up crudely to a pike pole. Around that dripping, swamp-sodden standard, the second company struggled to reform denuded ranks. They gathered, hauling in their moaning wounded, and killing in deft mercy those horses unable to rise. The flood torrent crested and passed to leave a foam-laced train of muddy rapids, pocked into rills and potholes that were not caused by rocks, but by the flesh, bone, and sinew of Etarra’s brave fighting force, with its eighteen hundred lancers, its silk pennons, its hand-picked recruits and its chainmail and arms, bought new from the merchants’ levy.

  As the diamond lines of stiff current eased into slackwater ripples, the river receded to yield up its toll of carnage and dead. Of the body of a drifter-bred chestnut gelding, there was no sign, nor had any man of Diegan’s company seen trace of its royal rider.

  Of Lysaer, no one spoke; but his absence weighed on the calm that fell as the roar of Tal Quorin diminished. On the bank, a band of archers fussed with spoiled fletching and stretched bowstrings. Knee-deep in muck and flattened sedges, pikemen drew daggers and slashed the drenched pennons that unbalanced their polearms in desperate, grim-faced need to seek out clan enemies and kill. Hardly a man was not bleeding. Scarcely a horse was not lame.

  The only outcry to be heard was the cross scream of a jay.

  Something whipcracked through the foliage. A standing man staggered and c
ollapsed and around him, others started shouting.

  The clanborn were firing off arrows.

  Another man buckled against Diegan’s horse. He fought the beast’s sidewards shy; felt a whisper of wind flick his cheek. The flights came, not in volleys but singly, shot at leisure from a point of heavy cover up the slope. The shafts snicked and cracked through pale birches. They whined through windless air, to smack with the malevolent skill of scout marksmen into the stranded ranks in the marshes.

  Diegan cried orders for the sensible counter-move, to retreat and duck shoulder deep in water, to seek bulwarks behind hummocks and the brush-caught mounds of dead horses. As he used the flat of his sword to belt his bucketing mount into the reed beds, only a seasoned few followed.

  Unmoored by a lust for blood and vengeance, the hotter blooded men and fresh recruits charged at the origin of the crossfire.

  The deadfalls, the spring-traps and the slip nooses set in waiting all claimed their inevitable toll of lives. Steiven’s scouts owned a gristly ingenuity and their toil’s harvest laced the greenwood yet again with the agonized screams of townsmen, who died, slaughtered, without one blow struck in defence.

  Four hundred yards downstream, creeping silent and unmounted through marshes flash-flooded under waters rinsed opaque with yellow clay, Captain Mayor Pesquil’s advance scouts found Lysaer s’Ilessid. Stranded on a sandbar with swift waters sheeting past on either side, he stood skin-wet and shivering, one forearm bathed in blood. His face was grazed, his clothing ripped. His sword also was scarlet, though the right hand gripped white to the pommel showed no wound.

  Half unmoored from thread settings, sapphires hung like clots from his surcoat, each sparking cold fire at the ripping jerk of each breath. At the prince’s feet, mudcaked as his boots, sprawled the corpse of a fine chestnut gelding with a log staked through its lean barrel. Its throat had been cut. Questing flies already sucked its filmed eyes.

  Knee deep in a current still treacherous with debris, the scout who encountered the pair discreetly queried, his voice a bare breath above a whisper, ‘Your Grace?’

  Lysaer whipped around. He had a black bruise on his chin. The rest of his face was white to the bone and his eyes, bright and empty as his jewels. Clumsily staunched with a knotted rag, his arm seeped from a nasty gash. Faced forward, the reason for his unsteady breathing was disclosed by the plum-coloured swelling pressed against the burst rings of his mail.

  No stranger to injuries, the scout added, ‘You appear to have broken your collarbone.’

  He received no answer. A nearly imperceptible tremor swept the man before him from head to foot.

  ‘It is shock. You must sit.’ The scout stepped forward fast, prepared for the chance his charge might faint.

  ‘Not here.’ As if the drowned and disembowelled corpses wadded like rags in the sullied waters did not exist, Lysaer shifted his regard back to the horse at his feet. ‘Never here.’ Beyond him, a clot of logs and brush rolled in the current. Sunlight silvered the crescent bill of a pike, its sodden streamers fanned across the cheek of a corpse left in openmouthed surprise: his jaw had been fully torn away. Lysaer dropped his sword, raised his hand, and masked the side of his face between the arch of his forefinger and thumb.

  Since he looked on the edge of collapse, the scout presumed and gripped the royal elbow in support.

  A shudder jarred the prince in recoil. Lysaer’s head snapped up. He wrenched free, and the scout saw in dawning horror that his Grace suffered no confusion at all, but a self-revulsion so deep it shocked the watching spirit to behold.

  ‘I was wrong,’ Lysaer said with the same, self-damning clarity. ‘Daelion’s pity upon me, every man who has died in this place has been ruined for a misplaced belief and my idealistic folly.’

  Pesquil’s scout stumbled to find a banal reply. ‘Clan tactics are ever without honour, your Grace.’

  But it was not the barbarians’ touch at warfare that had splintered Lysaer’s heart into rage; it was the knowledge, delivered on two companies’ ruthlessly massacred bodies, that he had been masterfully deceived.

  Arithon was a trickster to make his s’Ffalenn forbears in Karthan seem as mere simpletons in comparison. For this trap to have been baited with children, meant the scene over the shadow brigantine in Etarra’s back alleys, had all been a sham, most carefully engineered, most exactingly executed. Here, over the corpse of a horse, amid a riverbed swollen still in carnage, Lysaer understood that the joy, the compassion, the agonized self-sacrifice Arithon had shown toward the brats conscripted to the knackers’ yards had been nothing, nothing at all. Just another ruse, another play of diabolical sleight-of-hand and seamless guile.

  This man, this bastard of shadows, had no scruple, but only an unholy passion for lies of a stripe that could cajole human sympathy, and then turn and without conscience rend all decency.

  Quite aside from Desh-thiere’s curse, Lysaer rededicated himself to moral purpose. His half-brother, so gifted in magecraft and so superior in unprincipled cunning, was a blight and a threat to society. With a continent riddled with encampments of barbarians, each one a ready weapon for his hands, no bound existed to the havoc Arithon might choose to create.

  Lysaer stirred. Seared to numbness by the enormity of his mistake, he bent, closed his hand and retrieved his sword. The blade he cleaned on his surcoat and the scout’s banality he ignored. ‘My horse is dead,’ he said crisply. ‘I shall need another.’

  ‘No man goes mounted with my headhunters,’ interjected a severe voice from the side. Unseen, unnoticed, Captain Mayor Pesquil waded the last strides toward the sandspit, several scouts arrayed at his heels. The interruption in his patrol had been noticed, and reported with a zeal that suggested his underlings knew what their posts were worth.

  Lysaer disregarded the impertinence. Wide and unflinching in candour, his eyes transferred to the commander of Etarra’s league of headhunters. ‘This was my mistake. Since my ignorance has led to disaster, I’m ready to listen. But in one thing, I will not be swayed. Arithon s’Ffalenn will be stopped. And killed. And if you deem it necessary to slay children to keep a weapon such as Steiven’s clansmen from his hands, I shall no longer obstruct you.’

  Pockscarred and twitchy with a flame of nervous energy, Pesquil’s black eyebrows arched. If he was startled, his mocking inquisitiveness stayed unblunted. ‘Did my Lord Diegan survive?’

  ‘I hope so. I sent him to cover on the bank with all of the men I had time to send out of danger.’ Tartly polite, Lysaer added, ‘Is the interrogation finished?’

  Now Pesquil was astonished, and not quite glib enough to hide it.

  Urbanely defensive, Lysaer said, ‘If my judgement was lacking, my first duty was to see the men didn’t lose their commander by it.’

  The lanky, curled braid that Pesquil wore for battle slapped his cheek as he jerked his head. ‘To Sithaer with your honour. I would ask, rather, how you got any pedigreed scion of Etarra to agree to take orders from anybody.’

  Now Lysaer’s expression turned arch. ‘Simply put, there are certain advantages to being born and raised a king’s heir.’ A heartbeat later, he smiled. ‘The nasty minded sort of arrogance that stops a man being gainsaid is one of them.’

  ‘Hah!’ Pesquil slapped his thigh in contempt; but around him, the men who knew him best hid grins. Lysaer saw as much, and understood they had reached an agreement. And so he kept his humour when Pesquil added, ‘Well, then, prince. There won’t be much advantage if you choose to keep up bleeding, and wind up keeled over on that horse.’

  Stiffly, for his dignity balked at public handling, Lysaer extended his badly-wrapped arm that by now dripped messily scarlet. The man Pesquil signalled stepped forward, and with a deft expertise took charge. The binding and split bracer beneath were pulled away; the gash examined and bandaged.

  Of the men, only Pesquil dared comment. ‘You’re lucky. The cut is deep, but it runs with the line of the muscle. You’ll scar but have no loss of functi
on.’

  Neither grateful nor relieved, Lysaer half-turned his face as his collarbone also was examined, the arm he did not need for a sword slung and strapped immobile. Beneath the hauberk at his neck as they had cut away the padding to probe the bone, his pulsebeat could be seen, heavy and rapid with anger. He said in a tone almost level, ‘How many do you think survived this?’

  ‘None.’ Pesquil squinted across muddied waters, while snarls of brush drifted by and a corpse trailed, moored by a rack of ripped trappings. ‘There would have been deadfalls, of course. Pits and spring-traps that rip to disembowel. These are Steiven’s clans you have marched on.’

  When Lysaer endured this, still steady in silence, Pesquil’s lips quirked in a sneer. ‘Ah, Gnudsog, you are thinking. Why not say so? The veteran who saw fit not to question, despite his years and experience…’ The officer who led Etarra’s headhunters through a career of blazing obsession studied Lysaer with pity. ‘You should know, about Gnudsog, that his brother and young son died at the hands of barbarians. They fell with a merchant’s train on their way to East Ward, to attend a cousin’s wedding. Etarra’s great captain got his start hunting heads, as anyone would readily tell you. He stopped, because he loved it too much. Dearer than his own life, he once told me.’ Irked now, and bristling because this prince was listening sincerely, as no scion of fine pedigree would deign to do, Pesquil curled his lip. ‘If he thought he could kill a few barbarians, old Gnudsog would’ve thrown every soldier he had to Daelion and the pits of Sithaer.’

  ‘I was the one who did that,’ Lysaer corrected with quick acerbity; the scout finished with his dressings and withdrew, embarrassed as the discussion went on as if both men were private. ‘I thought I was waiting for you to say what was left to be done. We still have the companies on our flanks.’

  Pesquil laughed, but softly. ‘Do we?’

  And across from him, Lysaer’s gaze wavered, as cold remembrance touched him: that bad as the river had been, they had yet to encounter any shadows. He collected himself in a breath. ‘Are you afraid to find out?’