* * *
All night, the burly captain from Karfael dreamed of the deadly, precise turn of teamwork displayed by Avenor's foot troops and mounted lancers. At sunrise, awakened in twisted blankets and running cold sweat, he wondered afresh why Lysaer s'Ilessid should require his troop of lacklustre bowmen to muster and march inland to a secluded defile.
The haze of morning mists had yet to burn off and disperse. His beard and eyebrows grizzled with condensation, his mailshirt a grinding weight that hampered every effort to slap off the insects that whined in the absence of a breeze, the captain nursed a foul mood.
To judge by reddened eyes and a dishevelled state of grooming, Diegan beside him suffered the same fierce headache, courtesy of Lysaer's expensive brandies. At least, the fine skin around his eyes tightened each time his bay horse stamped and jingled its bridle. Whatever service Karfael's archers were to bestow on behalf of Avenor, the city's Lord Commander remained opposed.
'How much longer do we stand idle on the hilltops?' The captain could all but feel his gear rusting in the damp.
Lord Diegan turned his head, the expression mirrored in the rim of his gilded visor tightly drawn and cynical. 'Not long. Only until the mist lifts enough to signal your bowmen on the ridgetops. Blond hair should stand out in early sunlight. They won't find it hard to see their target.'
'You want my men to shoot arrows at his Grace? Ath Creator!' The guard captain's horse jibbed sidewards in response to his stiffened fists. Playing at the reins to resettle it, he said in pale outrage, 'The rumour's true then? The Prince of the West would test his gift of light? If this trial goes wrong, you know what will happen! Dharkaron's Black Spear and Chariot! We'll have a massacre. Your elite garrison at Avenor will run riot in misplayed loyalty and butcher my field troop like crowbait!'
'My liege insists it won't go wrong,' Diegan said in disparaging boredom. 'He's practised for months. He claims he's mastered a refinement of his talent. Said he'd burn the shafts to white cinders long before they fall and endanger him.'
'Why?' cried the captain. 'Why should he risk his royal person?'
'Well, I couldn't talk him out of it,' Diegan snapped. 'My men wouldn't take the order. If yours won't either, his royal Grace spoke his intention to march without escort and invite Hanshire's garrison to indulge him. Since Lord Mayor Garde would likely send heavy infantry with orders to provoke open war, and Lysaer won't harm any soldier he considers his ally, here we are happily slapping midges.'
In some unseen, mist-mantled glen, a wood thrush sang in falling triplets. A hare grazed under a gorse bush that had been invisible the moment before. Weak sun melted through, flooding the valley with mellow warmth. Lord Diegan straightened his chased helm, flicked beaded dewdrops from the crest feathers, and gave way to the misery that chewed him. In the arrogance he once used to provoke Etarra's dandies to rash escapades, he said, 'His Grace won't see reason. He made a fool of you yesterday. Are you townsman enough to dare to use his princely hide for a target shoot? Or did his manners at dinner overawe you enough to trade in your bollocks as a royalist?'
Karfael's captain returned a low laugh at the jibe. 'There's still bounty offered for royal scalps.' He gathered his reins, prepared to ride personally to his sergeants.
'Why not make this a sporting event? Eighty royals says your prince winds up bloody and dead.'
'Done,' said Diegan with quick recklessness. But his face stayed averted, as though his expression might betray him. 'If you win, let's hope the coin buys me peace. I'm tired of being heart-torn and angry.'
The captain paused, no fool in his reading of men. 'You love him that much. I can't fathom it.'
'Don't stay here, then,' Lord Diegan flung back, still adamant in his need to look elsewhere. 'Prince Lysaer has a way about him no man can resist. Every night I thank Ath that the Master of Shadow wasn't born with the same natural gift.'
Day brightened. The mist shredded in drifts above a landscape patched with swatches of summer foliage. With an agony that pinned him breathless, Lord Diegan heard cadenced hoofbeats as the captain's destrier cantered off; in dull misery he marked the shouted orders to the sergeants, followed by Lysaer's assent, absorbed without echo by the slopes.
Avenor's Lord Commander looped his reins in his elbow and masked his face in gloved hands.
Then a whining flight of arrows split the air, their sound as evil, as deadly, as any fallen on another summer's day, ones that had wreaked a bloody slaughter on the flood-trampled banks of Tal Quorin.
Pierced through by past horrors and present dread, Lord Diegan listened in suspension. But the moment gave back no crack of broadheads, nor the rattle as fletched shafts sliced and flickered deflected paths through snatched leaves. He heard no strike of steel into flesh, no screaming. Just a whispered shriek of air, and a heat that swept his skin in a fleeting, flash-fire burn of wind.
Over the settled silence left by the departed wood thrush, Karfael's captain bellowed in astonished incredulity, 'Ath! Almighty Ath, here's a miracle!'
Eyes scalded blind behind a screen of soaked leather, Diegan heard Lysaer's peal of gladdened laughter. 'No miracle, good man. But now, at last, I can answer to Maenalle's barbarians. I have means to defend my army from her ambush on the day they must cross the passes of Orlan to challenge the Master of Shadow.'
Unnerved and unmanned, Lord Diegan slumped weakkneed in his saddle. His horse had dropped its neck to crop greenery; he understood he would have to dismount to recapture his reins, slithered down the beast's crest to loop behind its gold-trimmed headstall.
By the time Karfael's envoy cantered back to rejoin him, Lord Diegan stood in the grass. Dry eyed, at least lent the semblance of dignity by his veneer of Etarran cynicism, he looked up into the face of a veteran captain enraptured as if touched by light, as indeed, he likely had been.
Lysaer's presence did that to a man.
Crisp in his surcoat cut of silk, Lord Diegan regarded the town delegate in shaken, heartsore humility. He could not have given the order to fire; not even to test whether Lysaer's gift of light could be raised as shield and defence. The ache in his chest finally loosened enough to release its hold on his tongue.
'You owe me eighty royals,' he said to the captain. Then he smiled in elation that pierced him more sweetly than his fiercest climax with a woman. 'My prince isn't bloody and dead.'
'Did you see that?'cried the captain, too bemused still to acknowledge the outcome of the bet. 'His Grace of Tysan raised light and not an arrow in a thousand could touch him. He is invincible, and the army at his back cannot fail.'
Sacrifice
Hard by the trade road that wound northward to the city of Etarra, the old ford that once channelled the River Severnir spread dust-dry in the gloaming, a weed-choked bed of naked rocks and bent grasses, loud with the strident clicks of summer insects. The clansmen who hastened like shadows through the gloom made little noise. They had the last prisoner from the caravan bound and gagged before twilight darkened the west-facing rimrocks; and a stillness too uneasy to be mistaken for peace settled over the jumbled ravines etched through the Skyshiel foothills.
The ox teams used to draw the laden wagons sprawled where their drovers had last reined them, collapsed in dead, folded heaps amid the slackened leather of their traces. Throat wounds inflicted in practised slaughter were spared the sucking predation of flies only by the advent of night. The drays themselves had not been rifled. The tarps still secured their trade wares and goods since this raid had not been made for plunder.
Sickened by the coppery reek of fresh blood more than pride would admit, Caolle, war captain of Strakewood's last clansmen, stood with his foot propped on a rock. He cleaned his blades on a courier's black felt saddlecloth, careful to avoid the bullion fringe that might scrape and cause stray noise. Small difference that the deaths were of beasts, and not human. To any who followed the old ways, all wasteful killing was offence.
But in Caolle's experience, any milksop too squeam
ish to take life was a fool unlikely to survive. Etarra's northern league of headhunters saw to that, all the more since Lysaer's fresh alliances, which drove the clans' current need to waylay any caravan travelling in the company of a message rider.
Quiet footsteps approached to Caolle's right. Since just one man alive dared creep up on him while he held unsheathed steel, the war captain jerked up his bristled chin. 'Did you find that courier's dispatches yet?' The dagger in his hand moved a querulous fraction. 'If you haven't, I'm minded to squeeze his throat a bit. Get him dizzy, he'll sing out his answer that much faster.'
Lanky, tall, as self-possessed as cool marble, Jieret Red-beard stopped a careful, clear sword's length away. 'That won't be necessary.'
Caolle studied the lion crest on the cloth in his hand one last time, then straightened, his obstreperous nature focused to an assassin's piercing interest. 'You've read the satchel's contents already, I see.' Gold fringe shed a sullen sparkle as he tossed the felt where it would not mire his feet. 'If the news is bad, let me hear it.' War steel chimed in the gloom as he sheathed his dagger and tucked a blade that matched him for wear in the crook of one elbow.
The parchment in Jieret's fingers crackled as it passed into Caolle's ruthless grip. 'Our liege lord finally made his presence known.'
'And about time, isn't it?' Caolle squinted at the pages, snapped them straight to net the last, failing light, then coughed in surprise as he picked out the same lion crest in the seal. Jaelot? You're saying Prince Arithon was there?'
The Earl of the North had tact enough to know when his war captain's questions were best ignored. While Caolle read, he surveyed the unkind fruits of a raid most rapaciously executed: the huddle of bound survivors; their disjointed muddle of wagons, with hulks of felled draught animals in unbreathing, splay-legged heaps; and beyond, bunched movement in the gloom, the restless, milling mass of the outriders' horses strung together by scouts who worked in expedient silence.
Every extra mount would be needed to leave this place quickly despite the added risk of leaving tracks. While the weather favoured enemy patrols, clansmen in Rathain did not travel burdened; nor did they camp in one place for more than a snatched night's rest.
'Apprenticed to Halliron Masterbard?' Always a deliberate reader, Caolle paused between paragraphs to ruminate. 'A typical s'Ffalenn bit of cleverness: why didn't we guess his Grace might try that?'
'I doubt our liege acted for a ploy.' The boyhood memory remained all too clear, of the night Jieret had lain awake to overhear the old Masterbard berate a prince for squandered talents. Stung to reminder of a past when his family had been alive, the earl clenched his jaw. He waited with held breath through the moment of profound shock, as his war captain deciphered the last lines, which listed the damage Arithon s'Ffalenn had inflicted through his music on the night of the mayor's solstice feast.
'Dharkaron Avenger!' Caolle cranked the parchment into a tight roll, and metal scraped, dissonant, as the movement fretted his studded brigandine against the hilt of his broadsword. 'We have to presume that dispatch rider knows the content of this.'
The young Earl of the North stared into the gathering night, while breeze feathered the grass heads against boot cuffs spattered with the drying tang of blood. He could not watch as Caolle retraced the pitiless course of logic: that if the courier knew the name behind the desecration of Jaelot, he would have talked. Every drover in the caravan might already be primed to repeat his gossip, facts that at all costs must be kept from reaching the Mayor of Etarra.
'Ath's mercy, the damned prisoners outnumber us.' Caolle's blunt fingers closed, crushing the report with its black and gold ribbons and cracked seal. 'I wiped my steel clean too soon, I see.' The implied death warrant for two dozen lives sounded level and matter of fact.
But Jieret knew his captain better than the father he had lost, and no gruff bluster might fool him. 'We can't take the risk.' Behind his tortured acceptance lay a grief no years might tame, for the last time Etarra's army had found cause to march against Arithon s'Ffalenn, his people had nearly been exterminated. 'The others can move out ahead of us. No need to say what we've found.'
The parchment fluttered to the ground as Caolle's stocky hand closed over his chieftain's wrist. 'No, boy,' he said, though the earl at his side was anything but a child. 'They'll have to know. We can silence this caravan, and maybe the next, before Pesquil's patrols infest these hills with trackers. But word must leak out eventually. Just count ourselves lucky we've had warning.'
Yards off in the gathering darkness, a clansman cracked a joke to a burst of stifled laughter. Through a breeze-snatched hoot of rejoinder, Caolle said, 'You ride out with the others. Leave me to deal with what's here. I'll see it's done fast and clean, while the townsmen are sleeping and unaware.'
Jieret's expelled breath shuddered through the touch shared between them. 'You can't spare me!'
'No.' Caolle scraped his stubbled chin with the back of a gore-flecked wrist. 'We can't spare our liege lord, either. That doesn't mean we won't try. Now go. The longer we tarry in this place, the greater the danger. Another caravan's outriders could find the ruts where the wagons left the road. We daren't be tracked and found here.'
Sound advice, Jieret knew. At such moments, he understood his father's past silences all too well. No townsman could be faulted for paying bounty to headhunters when the horror of tonight's work came to light. But worse, far more lasting, were the consequences if Etarra's army found Arithon, and Avenor's new forces joined with them, as must happen, in time, despite this most ruthless precaution. Maenalle's reports out of Tysan were unremitting and grim. The army Lysaer shaped to hunt the Shadow Master promised a ruthless opposition that would suffer no clan ally to live.
'We'll need to pick a site to make rendezvous,' Jieret said at last.
As always, Caolle's thoughts ran ahead of him. 'At the Farl Rocks, deep in the Barrens.' No merchant would follow them there, and a headhunter tracking team, with great reluctance: the site had once been Paravian, and the old, carved markers that crowned its hills were firmly believed to be haunted.
Faced by the prospect of a hard, dusty ride on horses of uncertain quality, Jieret clasped wrists with his war captain in hurried salute. 'Make it quick,' he begged in an agonized whisper.
Then he strode off, uncannily quiet for a man of his loose-limbed build. His father had moved that way, too, Caolle remembered; no surprise. Both had learned their scoutcraft at his knee, to his own exacting standards. The grief at times stabbed through him, that despite every forced lesson in survival, his efforts could still fall short. Every advantage he could wring out of blood and experience might not keep this last scion of the earl's line alive long enough to marry and raise a grown heir. Once Etarra's army marched, their life's hope could be wasted, to see the clans restored to rule under a s'Ffatenn high king at Ithamon.
A breeze flicked the offending twist of parchment into tumbling flight across the grass. Caolle bent with an angry chink of steel and speared the dispatch with his blade. He would burn the writ, then grind his dagger sharp on a whetstone. That his liege lord would never sanction the blood about to be spilled for his sake made no difference. Arithon of Rathain was not here to gainsay. Still, Caolle shrugged off a lingering, unpleasant recollection of green eyes that saw far too much, and a burden of conscience too deep for most men to sustain his Grace's locked glance.
Be damned to you, prince,' the war captain muttered into the bristles of his beard. 'If niceties counted for everything, you'd have left us to die in your absence along the banks of Tal Quorin.'
While Jieret called the muster through the velvety night, and the chink of bit rings and stirrups stabbed through furtive movement as the scouts tightened girths to ride out, Caolle pried the official writ clear of his sword with a shrieking, dry scrape. For himself, he never imagined any life beyond the bloody heritage the fugitive clanborn had lived since the uprising. Yet the unwilling lesson teamed in the teeth of Etarra's army had
forced a view his dead lord, Steiven, could never in life make him see: some crimes against nature existed which no force of arms could put right.
That Arithon of Rathain should be placed in sovereign responsibility while set under a curse of violence was one of them. The very least a liegeman of Caolle's disposition could do was to slit a few townborn throats.
The war captain did not revel in murder; but as one who had buried too many bodies left spitted and scalped by marauding headhunters, the act carried little of Arithon's lacerating burden of remorse.
* * *
The sun threw a harsh, orange pall over hills that unfolded in hazed ranks to the horizon. Rain-thirsty soil crumbled, dusty, between shrivelled heads of yellow grass that in a past age had spread a waist-high, rippling green carpet over the fells. Once a meadow that rustled to the light dance of unicorns, the dry ground of Daon Ramon Barrens now thundered to the beat of an approaching rider.
Caolle had reached the Farl Rocks. His late arrival did nothing to alleviate Jieret Red-beard's taxed mood. Informed where he stood on the flat-topped megalith he had climbed to use as a vantage point, he swore at the cloudless sky. 'By Dharkaron, he has salt, to presume we'd still be camped here.'
Powdered lichens fanned away on the breeze as the Earl of the North leaped down to face his informer, a Companion, one of fourteen young boys who had survived the slaughter at Strakewood to grow with him to manhood.
'We left him a horse,' Jieret ranted, angry now he was relieved of cause to worry. 'Mounted, he should have reached here three days ago.'
'Well, he isn't alone.' Blond and easy-tempered, the Companion who ventured this tidbit stretched, the flat iron studs on his brigandine too dull to catch the day's brassy light, and sword steel too polished glancing bright as if dipped in acid.