Left clammy by worse than the clasp of wet linen, Jieret pressed, ‘What needs to be done, we’d better get started. My perimeter guard already argues we’ve been in one place for too long.’
Arithon looked up, his green eyes piercing. ‘We have maybe two hours.’ A frisson of chill seemed to rip through his frame. His masking effort as he reached for the next acorn made an insufficient diversion to offset his caithdein’s sharp scrutiny. ‘After that, I can’t guarantee any leeway. Let my half brother come too close, and the driving pressure of Desh-thiere’s curse will swell to unmanageable proportions.’
‘You feel him already?’ Jieret demanded, aware as he spoke that the shadow of something unwholesome swept across Arithon’s aura.
At least his liege had the grace not to lie. ‘A constant thorn in my side.’ He paused, as though snagged into vicious inner conflict. Only a man who knew him to his depths could observe the near-to-invisible struggle as he battled and reaffirmed his precarious hold on self-possession. After a fraught moment, his aura burned clear. A shade paler, his hands a trifle less steady, he resumed packing the next acorn. His glance of bright inquiry took in the distress behind Jieret’s scowling expression.
‘You saw that?’ Too mortified to suffer the inevitable reply, he shrugged off what, for him, had to be an excoriating storm of embarrassment. ‘As you say, time grows short. Please, don’t interrupt. You aren’t going to like the strategy I’ve planned, but while you were sleeping, I measured the options. Here’s how I believe we must play this.’
Long before noon, the scouts who kept watch from the hilltops overlooking the Aiyenne dispatched runners with urgent word. The first advance columns of townsmen approached, plowing their arduous way down the vales to the north and east. The contingent from Narms, closing off free escape to the west, was led in by the savvy experience of headhunters.
‘No sign of them yet, but that’s a false reckoning,’ gasped the rider sent back to the riverside camp with the news. Given the league’s specialized knowledge of the land, an approach spearheaded by seasoned professionals was bound to be cunningly circumspect. ‘May not spot them at all, till they’re crawling all over us.’ Dismounted to ease his laboring mount, the man tucked his reddened hands out of the wind and cast an anxious glance backward. ‘Theirid’s had all the ponies brought in. They’ve been saddled, in case, and the war band’s armed also. Everyone’s waiting for Jieret’s orders.’
Still on guard at the mouth of the cleft, crouched on his knees on swept stone, Eafinn’s son squinted down the shining edge of the blade he had just finished resharpening. ‘High Earl will give orders whenever he’s ready.’ As glacially cool under pressure as the father whose loss the past spring had cost the war band its most wily captain, he flipped back a fallen hank of pale hair, then deliberately slid the weapon home in its sheath. ‘At his Grace’s pleasure, he’ll come out.’
The messenger scout cracked in jangled impatience. ‘I don’t care blazes what they’re doing in there!’ The fringes on his stained buckskin jacket snapped to his vehement gesture. ‘If we don’t move out fast, our prince risks disaster. Do you want him trapped like a rat in that grotto? Then pass him my message in warning.’
With long-limbed, quick grace, Eafinn’s son stood. ‘I was charged to guard his Grace’s privacy.’ Under late-season sunlight that hoarded its warmth, his bare head shone like burnished platinum. The competent fingers clasped to Alithiel’s black hilt stayed as nervelessly set in their purpose. ‘My prince holds my promise. No way I’ll let you risk crossing his will after what happened last night.’
‘See sense, man!’ The scout runner spun, his agitation increased as his keen ear detected the inbound drumroll of hooves. He scanned the mottled hills, patched brown and gray where weathered outcrops of sandstone punched through the ice-crusted mantle of snow. He pointed to the low ground at the verge of the river, left flattened by the silted burden of sediment laid down each year in spring flood. ‘That’s our rider, inbound. I’d lay spit against the red blood of my ancestors he’ll bring word that the headhunter troop with s’Ilessid has been seen on our western flank. Press things any later, we won’t have a chance. It’s haul our liege out by the scruff of his neck or get speared like stoats defending the ground where we stand.’
Loose stone chinked as Eafinn’s son planted his stance. ‘Even so,’ he insisted, though he had not missed the disturbing fact that the inbound rider slid his horse on its hocks down a gravel bank rather than lose precious minutes on a safe but more roundabout route. ‘I’m not the man to judge what’s at stake. Don’t ask me again to break my given word or ignore the command of Rathain’s sovereign prince.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Earl Jieret interjected from behind, as he squeezed his way through the cleft. Reclad in his studded brigandine, and armed with his father’s belt and throwing knives, he looked bleak enough to scale iron at twenty paces. To the overwrought rider, now flushed to embarrassment, he snapped, ‘No questions! I need the Companions here, now!’
The rider vaulted astride in relief, wheeled his mount, and pounded away on the errand.
Rathain’s caithdein stepped from the rocks. Fully emerged into daylight, he stretched his broad shoulders as though to throw off binding cramps. The leonine bristle of his beard failed to mask the startling change undergone during the night. He looked something more than worn to distraction: a fey, wild spark lit his glance from within. Through his frowning pause as he ascertained that the camp on the riverside was packed and ready to move, the otherworldly light in his gray hazel eyes took on a glint like the reflection off rain-beaten metal.
Struck that he looked like a man who kept too slight a hold on breathing life, Eafinn’s son found himself moved to a queer stab of pity. ‘Don’t say his Grace had no plan to save us.’
‘He has a plan,’ Jieret affirmed, agonized. Through the distanced clatter as the inbound rider reined across the icebound span of the riverbed, he added his heartsick opinion. ‘If this war band is spared, it will happen because Arithon will have courted disaster and taunted the turn of Fate’s Wheel ahead of us.’
‘Then how can I help?’ Eafinn’s son asked, sharply driven to try to relieve some the source of the tension.
‘Leave the sword in my care.’ As Alithiel’s burdensome weight changed hands, Jieret delivered a bitten string of instructions. ‘Fetch the horses his Grace brought in last night. They’re faster than our ponies. Check them for soundness. If Cienn reshod them as I asked, bring them here. Have the three fittest ones saddled and bridled.’
‘You want supplies also?’ Given his chieftain’s clipped nod of assent, the young man evinced the resilience of his family heritage. ‘I’m gone, then.’
His light step scarcely stirred the loose rocks as he ran downstream on his errand. Jieret drew in a deep breath. He was given no moment of privacy, nor space to contain his trepidation before the Companions arrived: Theirid with his black-fox tails streaming in the stiffening gusts from the north; squat, muscular Cienn, replacing a snapped tie on his bracer; Braggen, his heavy brows bristled, and his short, scrappy steps reflecting a pique like dammed magma. The others checked weapons, or swore at the uncooperative, clear sky. Two-legged and dangerous, they were a leashed wolf pack, fretful of the delay, and explosively primed for an action they knew must court failure.
‘My brothers,’ Rathain’s caithdein addressed as he met each man’s eyes in bleak honesty. ‘The charter law of the realm, your children’s future, and the guardianship of the free wilds stands or falls upon how we carry the day. Prince Arithon has given all in his power, and more, to lessen the odds set against us. If his strategy prevails, some will survive. Whether you face life or death for his cause, by your oath of fealty as his clanborn liegemen, I ask that you not fall short.’
No time, for lingering last words or commiseration over shared risks; no time to seek praise or encouragement that might bolster morale or raise heart; no time at all to acknowledge or honor the
binding, close ties of a lifetime. Nor did one Companion among them complain of the lack. Jieret in that moment could have wept for the gift of their outright trust. He battled his sorrow, that such shining strength of character should become nothing more than a ready weapon on this hour, upon which hung all the hopes of the next generation. These eight true spirits, who had known grief and bloodshed too young, as grown men could reliably perform without sentiment.
Wrung by the urgent necessity that must see them sent out, some to die in the maneuvering sacrifice of game pawns, Jieret knelt. He drew his knife, and scratched a crude map on the sandstone. From somewhere he mustered the necessary speech. ‘Here is what your prince asks of you.’
Against the cry of the wind, he produced the spelled acorns, explained how each was a proxy. One by one, he outlined their destined use. He named each appropriate bearer. Called by name, the Companions stepped forward. The moment as each man accepted his fate cut deepest, for unkindly brevity. The shared glance, the fleeting brush of warm flesh as the talisman was transferred to a competent hand. Jieret raged, the scream in him silenced, that for many this might be the last parting on the earthly side of Fate’s Wheel. His sore regret was not eased, despite all that his liege had done to spare his caithdein’s raw conscience.
The burden of conferring the hardest choices had been made by Arithon’s command, under Rathain’s vested crown authority.
For the grace of that studied gesture of reprieve, the heart must not shrink from its office. Jieret forced down the unbearable pain. He stifled his awareness of pending tragedy, the most wounding detail sealed under time’s urgent pressure: that the formidable, compassionate perception which had plumbed the worthy character of each Companion in scarcely an hour of contact would not in turn be understood by these men, who must bear the realm’s fate by their actions. They accepted the risk to life and limb for a prince they assumed was a stranger. Jieret bore up, cut to solitary grief by the solid affirmation that their Teir’s’Ffalenn knew them. His was a mage-trained awareness, schooled to acknowledge individuality. He had raised that gift to a masterbard’s empathy, that heard and embraced the unique splendor of song, braided through each man’s identity. No time to explain how his Grace would mourn each one lost, all the days that his life should outlast them.
The eighth and last acorn was dispatched to Eafinn’s son, just arrived with the saddled horses. ‘The honor is not truly mine, but my father’s,’ he said as he tucked the spelled construct safely away in his scrip. Flushed faintly pink, he clasped wrists with his chieftain. ‘Give his Grace my regards, if I cannot.’
The leading reins of the horses passed into Jieret’s broad grasp, and the young man departed, straight as the ash spear he had inherited from the kinfolk who had died, so long past, at Tal Quorin. From the vantage by the river, his neat clan braid stood out, burnished flax against the drab buckskins of the scouts he selected to ride in his squad.
Only Braggen remained, the result of fierce dispute that his liege had resolved by enforcing his sovereign right. Of eight Companions, just the one had not received a spelled acorn. Touched through his new mage-sight by the bearing pressure of the huge man’s simmering temper, Jieret secured the horses to a nearby deadfall. In the face of Braggen’s blistering, stiff silence, he scuffed wet snow over the map and scrubbed the scraped lines off the rock. Tired to the bone, and anxious for what lay ahead, he held off his final set of instructions as the mounted scout plunged up the near bank of the Aiyenne and hauled his lathered gray to a headshaking stop.
‘Lysaer’s force approaches! They’re using the available cover like ticks. Can’t tell you numbers yet, but their advance is no more than six leagues off.’
‘Let them come unhindered,’ Jieret instructed. ‘You’ll answer to Theirid, he’ll be on the east flank. Eat now, if you have to. The war band will be riding within the hour, split into eight squads, to bait the enemy into a mazing pursuit.’
The scout scraped at the caked mud on his face, smeared in streaks for the purpose of camouflage. He checked his sword, dubious. ‘You’ve found a way to make the Alliance split forces?’
‘Yes.’ As the scout reined around and departed, Jieret shook himself out of a moment of odd, inattentive hesitation, as though his sight played untrustworthy tricks where the sunlight patterned the ridges of sandstone underfoot. He added, a near whisper under his breath, ‘Just pray the plan works.’
He shook off rising dread. Through the silvery glare cast off rotten, patched ice, under slanting sunlight leached of all warmth by the rampaging, unnatural winter, he was left alone to tame Braggen’s volatile mood of contention and dauntless courage.
‘Was there no place for me?’ the huge man asked, forlorn. Confusion sat ill on his strapping, broad frame. Accustomed to act with decisive competence, he confronted his chieftain unflinching. The shame tied him in knots, that this day found him wanting. That the other Companions must carry the hazards of crisis without him demeaned his manhood too much to bear.
And time, once again, denied Jieret the chance to measure his course with due care or finesse. ‘On the contrary. Arithon asked for your service by name. We are left, you and I, to shoulder the most dangerous share of our prince’s intricate strategy.’
Braggen’s axe-cut features cracked to stark surprise. ‘We two?’ Gruff embarrassment burned a flush through creased skin. After his attacking provocation last night, he had presumed his liege would show him no more than the favor of civil tolerance. Now granted an unlooked-for forgiveness, even grounds for an unbroken trust, the Companion scrubbed his face with gloved hands. Fast as he moved, his response failed to mask the startled, bright shine of his tears.
Jieret averted his glance, stunned to awe. As always, the bard’s fierce insight surpassed him. He, who had handled Braggen’s irritating bluster all his life, had expected outspoken resistance. Yet Arithon’s compassion saw the overlooked truth: of all men, this one now had something desperate to prove. He would stand by his charged orders, ferocious in grit, determined not to meet the Wheel’s turning stripped of the honor that sourced his self-worth.
Braced by the vehemence in Braggen’s character, the last assignment became almost painless to complete. As Rathain’s caithdein, shadow behind a throne to be held secure for the future, Jieret set the cold weight of Alithiel into the last Companion’s stunned hands. ‘By the power vested in me under charter law, as given by the Fellowship of Seven, I’ll have your oath on this blade you won’t falter.’
In the absence of the crowned heir, his sworn purpose was to guard the well-being of the kingdom. Jieret assumed the burden of that stewardship, spear straight, while Braggen knelt on the stony ground and set his crossed hands, then his forehead, to the black metal of Alithiel’s cross guard.
‘My oath, on this sword, may Dharkaron strike swiftly should I fail or fall short.’ Braggen’s rough, dark head remained bent in submission as the hand of his chieftain forbade him to rise.
For a chill, prolonged moment, the only voice in the world was the wind, sheeting over the brush of the barrens. Under glacial sky, the snaked bed of the Aiyenne wore its jumbled rickle of grayed ice. The two clansmen poised on the scoured rock ledge seemed diminished, resolute mortal will reduced to a mote wrapped in transient flesh against an enduring and desolate landscape.
The crown prince whose sovereign word might reverse that one moment’s critical act and consequence had already passed beyond argument.
Jieret flung back the bronze length of his clan braid. Chin tipped to sky, he drew a chilling, deep breath, and sealed his final decision. ‘His Grace asked you to carry the most difficult proxy of all.’ The ninth and the last, bearing the number symbolic of death, rebirth, and redemption. The Earl of the North threw off his shiver of wretched foreboding. ‘Yet for the good of the realm, I see fit to change his Grace’s instructions. His chance of survival, and ours, will be greater if I carry forward the burden he assigned to you. Can you accept this? Will you stand in my plac
e?’
‘Your honor, my earl, has always been mine.’ Braggen looked up, brown eyes stark with appeal. ‘Was there ever a question?’
Jieret found courage from somewhere to smile. ‘Never. Rise, Braggen. In my stead, you must be the liegeman who stands guard at Prince Arithon’s side.’
‘He’ll argue,’ Braggen snapped, once again set off-balance by bristling incredulity.
‘He would,’ Jieret agreed. He clapped the other man’s muscular shoulder, in no doubt at last that his impulse was merited. He gestured for Braggen to follow, then reentered the cleft, his voice dampened by the encroaching stone as he ducked through the narrow passage. ‘His Grace is in no position, as you’ll see. Nor will your service escape complications. The risks you must handle won’t necessarily be the sort you can solve with brute force and edged weapons.’
Inside the cavern, the candlewick burned down to a drowned and flickering stub. Under the uncertain, flittering light, half- mantled in crawling shadow, Braggen made out the form of the s’Ffalenn prince, tucked prostrate in the muffling fur of the high earl’s favorite bearskin. The sharp s’Ffalenn profile was stilled as carved wax. The hair his caithdein had trimmed with such care spilled in onyx disorder over one angled cheekbone and the river-washed boulder that cradled his head.
Braggen paused, horrified. ‘Ath, he’s out cold.’
‘More,’ revealed Jieret from the uncertain dark. ‘He worried the drive of the Mistwraith’s curse might overcome his last strength. Rather than lose his will to insanity, he decided to spiritwalk. A dangerous precaution, but one he hoped would also displace his half brother’s awareness of his presence.’ Sensitive to the Companion’s mulish uneasiness, since he harbored the same doubts himself, Jieret hastened to qualify. ‘His Grace was mage-trained, remember! The risks are well-known to him. In addition, we agreed on the expedient safeguard of binding his unmoored self to Alithiel.’