TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

  Arithon's smile cut the gloom like edged lightning. 'That's scarcely a setback, lady captain. Lysaer can muster his force at Etarra. He can outfit and march them the breadth of the continent at vast and ruinous expense. But to engage and wreak my ruin, he first has to find me. That will cost him a long and merry search.'

  The Shadow Master stretched, caught the lantern from its peg, and flung an expansive gesture toward the ladder that led to the hatch. 'What do you say? We could broach that cask you're perched on. Let's drink like old friends to the charter you've earned, and my most cherished hope of freedom.'

  Bargain

  The cherry trees in Tysan cast off their spring mantles, and flurries of pink and white blossoms gusted over the fringe of the war banners. Petals sprinkled the surcoats of the men in the cavalcades and strewed the lashed tarps on the supply wagons which furrowed black tracks in the mud beneath Avenor's north gate turrets. With the equinox feast and the prince's state wedding a month gone, his royal city rededicated its heart to the coming war against the Master of Shadow.

  Lysaer's new bride had no choice but to endure through the massive upheaval involved with launching the campaign. Her husband was rarely at her side. Surrounded by advisors and officers, he could be glimpsed between trips to the armouries and stock sheds; or some days not at all, closeted as he was through lengthy meetings with his secretaries and his seneschal. The dispositions, the inventory lists, the arrangements for wagons and supplies seemed grindingly endless.

  Nights in the fast quiet of their high tower chamber became a guarded time of solace for them both. Clenched in the passion of her husband's embrace, Talith unleashed every charm she possessed to kindle his ecstasy, then storm his keyed nerves until his ongoing worries became seared away by blind passion. She melted to Lysaer's skilled touch until her own starved response touched off his rapture in turn, to eclipse and scald out self-awareness. In his arms, she let nothing intrude; not the discipline of fractious young officers, nor frayed temper from the trials created by marching armed companies across leagues of bad roads; or allotments wrung from a dwindled treasury, to hire galleys for crossing Instrell bay to reach established supply lines in Rathain.

  Talith had no hope to change fate. Prince Lysaer's peace of mind was inextricably linked to his drive to kill the Master of Shadow.

  A third of Avenor's garrison had already marched in hired passage as caravan guards. The rest embraced a feverish schedule to set final polish on training already knit into close discipline. Talith lived in dread of the moment when the meadows burst into high flower. However sweet a nest she could weave with new love, once the season could provide for the draught teams, Avenor's last divisions would depart. Her splendid royal husband would be nowhere else but in the dust of the vanguard with his officers.

  But this morning the war horns were still silent. The casement panes loomed blank as pearl inlay while the dawn slowly quenched the last stars. Birds outside roused and chirped in sleepy twitters against the tap of a wall sentry's step. Talith rolled over. Her hair a dragged spill of honey from her temples, she slid her flattened hand beneath quilted silk in a sensuous quest for warm flesh.

  Strong arms enfolded her from behind. The embrace robbed the bite from chill air, even as the coverlet slipped off her creamy shoulders. Lysaer nestled his chin in her nape and murmured into her ear. 'I can't take time for you this morning, my love.'

  She twisted to face him. The rasp of his suede doublet against her skin raised the disturbing discovery that he was already dressed. 'The sun isn't up. You aren't wearing silk.' Apprehension cranked her tone a pitch higher. 'Where are you going?'

  Lysaer kissed her, languorous and light until she struggled to fling off the bedclothes that mired her hips and knees. His touch infallibly drove her to heat until she ached in surrender. Before she recovered from the storm to her senses, he melted back, lost in the shadows by the armoire.

  A whispered flick of strap leather and a chink of dangled spurs disclosed his intent to pull on his boots without the service of his valet. Before her alarm could find voice, Lysaer spoke. 'In the land of my birth, by old custom, the king would ride into the wood and slay a spring boar to prove his prowess. Not to be shamed by tradition, beloved, I've set the day aside to go hunting.'

  'You're mad!' Talith shot erect in a churned up calyx of silk sheets. 'Why rush off to bloody some hapless, mean creature?' Etarran enough to make her pique sting, she flared, 'Does the Master of Shadow not offer sport enough?'

  A dangerous, brittle stillness claimed the space where Lysaer stood. Then the hiss of his expelled breath tore through his protracted quiet. 'Dare you question my love for you?'

  Talith gasped. 'Ath show me mercy, how can it compete?' And the tears came, hot and stormy, for the way his honest hurt could devastate her defences.

  'Is it so hard?'

  With sadly swallowed pride, she admitted, 'I dread the day you must leave me.'

  A boot dropped with a thud against the carpet. Then the mattress gave to his knee. Cool fingers cradled Talith's chin, turned her stiff neck. Lysaer's lips moulded to hers and shared the salt on her mouth. 'One old boar shouldn't keep me past nightfall if I'm quick and skilled.

  As for my regard, lady wife, how can that be measured against a commensurate evil? You've married a prince who is human flesh and blood.' Like the rip of cold iron, he added, 'If you, who are closest, think my heart isn't torn, then rejoice, for I have triumphed. Every man bound to follow me onto the field must never guess how this duty chafes my spirit. Did you forget?'

  His grip tightened. 'The criminal I go to ruin is my mother's bastard son. I beg you, bear up and be brave. The killing of a half-brother is burden enough on my conscience.'

  No touch from her could soothe his inner pain; no word existed to hold him: Lysaer slipped gently away. By the time Talith's misery relented enough to meet his need for her smile, new sun bronzed the east casement. Long since, her prince had summoned his huntsman and gone.

  * * *

  His quest for the royal boar turned inland and wound through the glens, bedecked in new spring like worked lace. The cool shadows still pocketing the hill flanks gave way to tepid light. Lysaer went attended by three men at arms and his equerry. His sole badge of rank, the star and crown embroidered on his saddlecloth, stabbed a prick of unquiet reflection. His hounds ran collared in stitched leather; his horse's trappings were plain. The polished ash boar-spear socketed in his lance rest sported no ribbons or inlay. Its sharpened head snicked and fretted through the greenery as he rode, a flame of silvered steel wreathed in yellow puffs of disturbed pollen.

  Beyond the tangled bittervines netted over the banks of a marsh, the huntsman encountered fresh boar's slots. The black, boggy earth lay hacked and churned where the creature had savaged the ground, perhaps rooting up fallen acorns, or else testing its own rank strength. The hounds were given the scent. A ridged moil of black and tan bodies, they surged baying down the glen to a whipped, pale turbulence of ferns.

  The prince of Tysan set spurs to his mount, his hair like sun-caught flax and his gloved hands easy on the reins. Eager and restive beneath him, his blooded horse crashed through saplings and brush, and scattered winged tempests of finches.

  'Fiends plague us!' groused the taciturn captain at arms as the royal escort mustered to follow. 'Your wives had better like sewing. Here's good clothes we're going to shred to rags.'

  The hounds streamed through the underbrush in a primal, belling frenzy. In his sensible cross-gartered hose and leather jacket, the huntsman blew his horn to speed his pack, while riders ducked branches and splashed through the sky-printed mirrors of puddles in chase.

  Through the course of that fast, mad gallop, the party lost sight of their prince.

  The pack was whipped off at the first check and a search begun for the man. Avenor's master huntsman proved a skilled tracker. He found the prince's horse inside the hour, grazing knee-deep in meadow grass and marsh mallow, its saddle flaps caught wi
th pinched leaves. Both stirrups dangled. The boar-spear was gone from its socket and the reins rested looped, neither broken nor trailed on the ground.

  Of Lysaer s'Ilessid, they found no sign.

  While the hounds milled and snuffled and whined their frustration, then lolled panting on their bellies, the leathery old huntsman pursed bearded lips and fingered his coiled rawhide whip. 'I see no sign of any accident. If you'll hear my opinion, let be and go home. His Grace wanted time to himself.'

  'You would take such a chance?' The burly captain flicked bruised leaves off his thighs and adjusted the sour leather of his gauntlets. 'His Grace holds our hope of deliverance. Enemies know it. This could be a barbarian trap.' His order sent the equerry back to summon Cap. tain Mayor Pesquil and muster men for an organized search.

  'You waste effort.' Too laconic to be rankled over doubts about his competence, the huntsman raked back streaked hair and snapped his fingers to break off a growling confrontation between a hound couple. 'I'd know, were barbarians about. The ground's too mired to hide footprints. If enemies lay waiting in ambush close by, no blackbirds would scold in the brush. Your prince will return when he's ready. If you trouble the headhunter captain to check, mark me, he'll tell you the same.'

  Poised beyond view in dense brush on a knoll, the royal subject of the argument listened as the voices of his retinue grew heated. Lysaer grinned in smothered amusement, then crept away through the trees.

  He turned south, determined to stay solitary. For the wise old huntsman had interpreted his wish like a brother: this day's work had little to do with a ceremonial hunt to kill a boar.

  The season was too new for the trees to be leafed in full canopies. Patched, ephemeral shadows imprinted the ground like a cat-tangled skein of loose yarn. Black earth and rotted oak mould breathed through the burgeoning fragrance of greenery and undergrowth sprigged in yellow buds. Too warm in his suede jerkin, Lysaer slid damp hands along the grip of his boar-spear. In all ways, he dreaded this errand.

  But a meddler in force who used magecraft to terrorize and kill; a reiver in whose name clan barbarians committed outright slaughter; such a one deserved no stay of mercy. While unwary cities were attacked out of hand, no upright sovereign dared waste the time to search through conventional trackers.

  To ferret out the Master of Shadow's location, a prince sworn and dedicated to his people's defence must not cavil at a liaison that might yield results through arcane scrying.

  But even for moral right and mercy, the prospect of sorcery left Lysaer deeply unsettled.

  Truly alone for the first hour since the machinations of a sorcerer had banished him through a World Gate into exile, shouldered since with responsibility bequeathed by long-forgotten ancestors, Lysaer thought of the mother he had barely known. Lost when he was four into the arms of a s'Ffalenn lover, she had been the only daughter of a high mage. From her had come his given gift of light and Arithon's deadly touch at weaving shadow. Lysaer's last memories of her were indelibly twined with the scents of citrus and spices; of delicate jewels and silver chains, and a rippled fall of pale hair. The Lady Talera had made no spells in his presence that he could recall. More clearly he remembered his father's savage rages, the acrimony of the kingdom's prim seneschal, and the lengthy, hushed sessions of the kingdom council following her repudiated marriage vows.

  Horror still revisited through his recollection of the trials, the miasma of late-burning oil lamps intermingled with the sweaty fear of the accused. Then the weeping agony of the families through the purges, as every man, woman and child suspected of sorcerous activity, or in sheltering the queen in her escape, was sent to the executioner's block for justice. The poisoned, vicious anger of his royal father still cut, at his request to ask his mother's family for the training to develop his born talents to full advantage.

  Whatever cloaking spells and trickery Queen Talera had used to shame her lawful marriage and beget her bastard, her cuckolded husband never shed his passionate distrust of magecraft. Her legitimate firstborn had grown to manhood without so much as a herb witch to tell him whether he had inhented any further arcane potential from the distaff side of his bloodline.

  Whereas Arithon had been raised by the high mage himself. His powers had been moulded by the arduous discipline demanded by a master's training.

  Lysaer jabbed the butt of his spear into the loam of the deerpath. The breeze had died. Sun cloaked his shoulders in unpleasant heat as his track meandered through the bottomlands, crossed like sable braid with the trickles of spring-fed freshets. His uneasy mind spared no thought for the splash of startled frogs and the whirred wings of marsh wrens and blackbirds. Distaste for his charge warred with childhood jealousy, never quite silenced by the principles expounded by his father.

  The words still haunted, burred with the memory of the wax-scented gloom of the privy chamber as the royal spate of rage finally cooled. 'My son, ideals and strengths and the foundation of sound rule are never so simply reconciled. A king who values his subjects will treat with them as a fellowman. Power to upset natural order goes ill with royal office, that by nature must wield influence over lives. The concepts of justice and fairness are not born through greater strength. They spring instead from sympathy with the lowliest weakness.' The King of Amroth had looked upon his heir, the seams of a life-time's bitter decisions softened to entreaty on his face. 'The judgements you make for the crown when you inherit will be hard enough on the heart. You will need a mind undivided between the laws that must govern humanity and the uncanny secrets of the mysteries.'

  Experience lent vicious validation to such counsel. Queen Talera had been moved to desert her family for something more than spiteful vengeance. She had gone, she insisted, to right a balance, then been lonely enough to bury the grief of her sacrifice in the comfort of illicit love.

  Briefly beguiled into friendship with her bastard, Lysaer had seen the insidious way fine knowledge of power could corrupt mercy. The secret fear rode his heart: how the means to sway fate might corrode a man's spirit to forget his humanity and embrace an abstruse creed without pity. Wider knowledge could blind the eye to suffering; or why else should Athera's greatest arcane order give even indirect sanction to a prince who had turned the shining wisdom of his upbringing toward acts of unconscionable slaughter?

  Shadows had been used to entrap an army; magecraft itself, to bind and kill.

  And yet the Fellowship sorcerers who held the sure resource to forbid such offences stood back and did nothing at all.

  Lysaer refused to resent the sorry fact that he stood alone in his resolve. He would act and risk perilous consequences to find whether the Koriathain were willing to lend their arts to help him track down a felon.

  The enchantress's cottage lay deep in the glens. Upon Lysaer's arrival, late day spun cobwebbed shadows across vibrant green moss and tender grasses. Shoots of sprouting herbs and the whiskered leaves of coltsfoot grew in hoed rows by the snaggled sprawl of a withy fence. The dilapidated dwelling beyond sagged in the roof beams like a toadstool leaning to rot. But the shutters were whitewashed and the stone step swept clean of debris. Footsore, thirsty, his heartbeat rushed by apprehension, Lysaer strode up to knock.

  The panel swung open to his touch. From a gloom flecked by the unsteady eye of one candle, a cracked porcelain voice bade him enter.

  The boar-spear was too unwieldy to carry indoors. Lysaer rested its shaft against the outside lintel. The hasty breath he snatched to brace his nerve was ingrained with must, tallow grease and unwashed fleeces, and a fierce tang of aromatic herbs. Beneath lurked a taint of less pleasant things: of stale ash and husked insects trapped in cobwebs; of rust and dried blood and grated rootstock. A tingle kissed his nape as he stepped in to a shrill squeak of floorboards. Something moved beyond the light like the smooth slide of bone against cloth. 'You do not come to hunt beasts, son of s'Ahelas.'

  Startled to be named for his mother's kin, Lysaer sidestepped in failed effort to escape the glare of
the candle. Stopped by the touch of something iron against his knee, he sensed the bundles of dried herbs in the rafters, and wool hooks draped with pallid skeins of yarn. 'I came to seek counsel.'

  The tart voice snapped in correction. 'You came to ask to know the refuge of your half-brother, Arithon, your purpose to arrange for his death.' In flame-rimmed outline, a withered hand lifted. An unseen treadle creaked, and the starred spokes of a spinning-wheel squeaked to life in a sudden whir of air.

  Rinsed in trickled sweat, Lysaer made out the crone's form. She sat, swathed in dull cloth, hair like spun glass and spider's thread an uncombed blur in the darkness. Hooded eyes fixed him, sunken pits in a skull. The cleft lips looked as if they were stitched the way paupers dressed corpses out for burial.

  Lysaer raised his courage to open a distasteful negotiation. 'Do the Koriathain condone the wanton use of arcane power? Walls and buildings in Jaelot were unlaced, stone from stone, and none who suffered saw justice.'

  The spinning wheel settled into rhythm. 'You speak of an event on a coastline far beyond the chartered boundaries of Tysan.' A sibilance of cloth, a scratch of dry fleeces and yarn turned off the spindle, teased between waxy, crabbed fingers.

  'Rathain's own prince was the instigator.' Calm under questioning, Lysaer said, 'Do the powers of Athera permit such a prince to despoil the same cities bound under his sovereign protection?'

  The crone's chin lifted. 'For this you set yourself to pluck a man's life from the hands of Daelion Fatemaster?'

  Bored through by a gaze like struck flint, measured in every detail, even down to the trembling gold highlight on his hair, Lysaer forced a bold step. 'I would defend the weak and the innocent against any man whose misuse of grand conjury caused them harm.'

  The whickered turn of the wheel held steady. Pinwheel shadows flared over a plank table, a leather chest, and a hamper of laced withies in one corner. 'If I grant you the scrying you desire, you will use it to violate the peace. Our Koriani creed cannot sanction bloody war.'