Dakar stamped on his boots and pressed forward, regardless. He transgressed in blatant defiance of fact, that he no longer claimed the safe passage once granted by Fellowship sanction. Old business drove him to attempt a fool’s errand within the heart of the forest. He must evade notice. Duck those formidable patrols for as long as possible, and not because of his driven urgency to make speed.
‘Fiends should gnaw out my liver, before I try this,’ Dakar grumbled through chattering teeth. After the crippling chill of immersion, his palms already were sweating.
Not only must his rushed step make no noise; the need to stay circumspect in this place also posed a masterful test of his arcane ability. Dakar skulked across the frozen expanse of the thoroughfare. He plunged past the fringe of crabbed scrub, poised motionless under the darkened loom of old growth, and laid his gloved hand against the first of the towering trees: a battered sycamore, ancient and scabrous with seasons of shredded, shed bark. Eyes shut, he plunged into rapt trance. He entrained the exacting permissions in strict form, then borrowed the pattern of the tree’s aura and cloaked himself in its staid peace.
When he pressed on, the pulse of his animal presence no longer deflected the flux. Even that delicate mask might not lend the sufficient cover to hide him. Blindsiding a woodwise clan talent was always wretchedly difficult. To ease past the scouts’ guarded net of tuned instinct, Dakar must project a seamless accord with the land’s resonant signature. Two centuries past, the feat would have been easier. Then, the wracked conflict of Desh-thiere’s cursed princes had thinned clan numbers across the breadth of Rathain. But those tense generations of stand-off had slackened after the justice of Lysaer’s mayoral authority stood down the entrenched feuds, and by fiat, at the last, enforced change and restored the due process of trial at Etarra. Through mailed fist and gloved charm, his lord’s grace had imposed the historic decree that curbed the payout of bounties to head-hunters under his rule.
For two centuries since, Etarra’s fat treasury awarded gold only for raiders, caught outside the boundaries of proscribed lands, with those accused proved guilty by law before they were sentenced for a violation.
Where clan presence elsewhere remained suppressed under the True Sect’s persecution, in the free wilds of Rathain, the old blood-lines strengthened in a recovery that rebounded with each generation. Dakar walked the more lightly, aware how he skirted the brink of edged peril. He crossed the swift creeks without careless splashes and crept under the vaulted crowns of the oaks without snapping so much as a stick. If he drew the attention of owls and deer, he took pains not to set them to flight.
The least such disturbance might earn him an arrow, shot from cover without pause for parley. He might never see the leather-clad sentry, or hear the bow-string that released its broadhead shaft to waylay him. Distrust ran fever-pitch high towards outsiders who ventured off the road. Light-blind fanatics too often dared to poach for clan scalps, rewarded at distance by the temple priests. The Light’s canon promised a blessed reward in the after-life, and paid in gold coin from the head-hunters’ leagues to the west, where talented heritage was damned as the ally of Shadow. Inside the secretive deeps of the greenwood, murderous deaths yet occurred on both sides with disturbing frequency.
Dakar ranged eastward. His progress stayed steady until after moonset, when the extended use of refined vision to find his way wore down his stamina. Then he found a quiet hollow out of the wind, laid down tight wardings, and rolled up in his cloak, shoulder braced to rest against the mossy bole of a beech. Sleep found him smiling with smug satisfaction. He felt he had crossed through well-guarded terrain with as much finesse as his former master.
Which complacency lasted until he jerked awake to the kiss of steel at his throat. ‘Move, and you die,’ an unfriendly voice warned, whetted by a deep-woods clan accent.
Dakar opened his eyes with a long-suffering sigh. ‘How did you broach my defenses?’
A brief laugh from the scout, whose ruthless hand rifled the spellbinder’s town clothing to confiscate his paltry collection of weapons. ‘Nobody ever complained that you snore?’
Divested of dagger and eating knife, Dakar was roughly hauled to his feet. A striker snapped, leftwards, and a second hostile party shoved a lit spill into features screwed up with embarrassment. Before the fat trespasser mustered the words to explain the errand that brought him, a female scout coughed from the side-lines.
‘Looks like you’ve bagged the Mad Prophet,’ she announced with vicious scorn.
Another scout spat in his face with contempt, while the one whose hard fingers latched onto his collar jerked him backwards with brutal force. Tripped up by a root, Dakar crashed on his arse. More swords licked his throat. Someone else’s vindictive kick bashed his side and robbed him of breath to defend himself.
‘Traitor’s patsy!’ The insult accompanied the bite of a rawhide cord as someone’s brusque hands lashed him up like killed game at the ankles.
‘I wasn’t,’ Dakar gasped, indignant with injury.
But clan memory for trouble stayed rigidly fixed. The grudge festered still for the galled fact that the spellbinder had borne witness but done nothing: none of his trained power had been engaged to change fate on the terrible night of the royal betrayal. Alongside Eriegal’s, Dakar’s name bore the blame for Prince Arithon’s captivity two hundred and forty nine years ago.
The heated resentment ran beyond reprieve despite the fine point, that the same oath of debt which enforced that inaction had been sworn, first of all, to save Rathain’s threatened crown blood-line.
‘Revisit your history!’ Dakar protested, in vain.
The grim fellow who lashed his legs did not desist but tested the knots, then moved on to bind up the spellbinder’s wrists. No one else seemed inclined to listen: that Arithon would have perished at Athir, long before Eriegal hatched the secretive plot which cast his Grace, living, into Prime Selidie’s entrapment.
‘Don’t try to appeal based on your former status,’ the woman cut in ahead of the lie he might fabricate to buy a reprieve. ‘Althain’s Warden sent word to us weeks ago, that Asandir declared you in disgrace. Everyone knows you’ve been dismissed from the Sorcerer’s apprenticeship.’
‘Fellowship service can’t shelter you now,’ someone else crowed with satisfaction. ‘Cosach s’Valerient will tear out your throat to redress the stain on our clan heritage.’
‘I came here to ask for his audience,’ Dakar declared, justly stung.
‘Frost would blight the groves at midsummer, first!’ his captor denounced, then jerked the restraints unpleasantly tighter.
Dakar yowled with pain. ‘Is this an amputation?’ He received no relief, and no answer. Instead, his manhandled senses upended as the mob hefted his struggling bulk with intent to sling him from a pole like a hunter’s dressed trophy. ‘Cut me loose! I’d accept your armed escort with dignity.’
‘Daft seer!’ The woman’s rough palm briefly cupped his flushed cheek. ‘Are you panting to die like that yellow dog, Eriegal?’
‘Cosach will grant me a hearing!’ Dakar insisted. As a cut length of sapling was shoved through his bonds, hand and foot, he continued his rant against the barbarity. ‘The news I carry at least will summon the clan chiefs to the high earl’s lodge tent. Count on my word, a runner should be sent to Fallowmere for the cool-headed counsel of Laithen s’Idir.’
‘Don’t bet your breathing life on that, pigeon!’ Stone-hearted and deaf, the patrol’s ringleader signalled for an immediate departure.
The scouts fell silent and shouldered their load. They bore the Mad Prophet at a ferocious pace, his strapped body jounced through the whip-lash of branches with little allowance for mercy. Such fever-pitch haste did not bode well. Dakar gave up pleading into stopped ears. Bravado, not courage, masked the anxious dread that, in his case, the arm of the realm’s justice might fail. Once before in Tysan, s’Ilessid infamy had decreed the execution of an invested caithdein. The sentence then had been
carried through with a sword in cold blood, despite the clear verdict that the woman accused had done nothing except enact the lawful charge of her office. Worse than that shameful hour of infamy, Rathain’s clans in Halwythwood bore the unforgivable shame of a liegeman’s conspiracy against their blood prince.
Dakar endured the hours of cruel strain on his limbs. Eyes squeezed shut against the rake of twigs in his face, he wrestled to stem his rushed surge of panic. He had come alone against the cognizant risk that he could be tried as a scapegoat. If he was duly charged for his part in the past events that caused Arithon’s downfall, he feared the vital tidings he carried to avert a fatal recurrence might die unvoiced. The fresh news of the crown prince’s jeopardized escape might not spare his neck from the swift sword of s’Valerient retribution.
Winter 5923
Stand Downs
Tarens times his move just before dawn, when Arin’s tormented visions dissolve at last into helpless sleep: one sharp blow stuns his victim for long enough to bind hands and feet with ripped cloth; and as green eyes open with pained reproach, the crofter snaps his resentful apology, ‘No man should be asked to shape his own demise. Taken this way, you’re at least free to hate the hand that throws you to your enemies…’
Informed of her quarry’s captive plight in Caithwood, Selidie Prime alters her plans and calls for a council of Seniors to act on changed orders: ‘I want the best of our resources called off Elaira’s pursuit and turned to retake the Master of Shadow. Corner that prize, and everything else will fall into place in the aftermath…’
Day brightens the mullioned casements when the door to Lysaer’s study cracks open at last, with Daliana clothed in immaculate composure; she calls the aghast chamber servants inside, where their lord lies asleep with his head pillowed atop his cleared desk upon folded arms: ‘For comfort, you might see your master to bed. Use care as you raise him since he’s suffered the misery of a brutal night…’
Winter 5923
VI. Haunted Wood
Of the elusive clan enclaves that survived in Tysan, the armed bands of scouts who risked life and limb to secure Caithwood’s free wilds ranked among the most secretive. Those with the keenest eyes and ears and the most gifted trackers ran the riskiest sweeps at the verges. They shot no arrows point-blank from the thickets. Generations of temple persecution had thinned their old blood numbers too far to waylay unsanctioned outsiders without extreme care. When last night’s rash pair lit their heedless fire on the west river-bank, direct confrontation was deferred until the list of their allies was known; also who might miss them, and what faction’s business led them astray from the road that gave honest traders a safe right-of-way through the forest.
Moved in force since daylight, the scouts’ furtive presence flanked the skulkers set under scrutiny: the larger of them a fair-haired brute, likely outlawed, and the other, less obvious, whose quieter step through the scrub belied his bound hands as a herded prisoner. Dark-haired, begrimed in a cut-down cloth jacket and ill-fitted breeches patched at the knees, that one spoke tenderly, nursing harsh bruises that unquestionably made his head hurt.
‘Thank me for the complaint, or I’ll bash you again!’ the blond fellow lashed out in sore temper. His grousing carried a crofter’s broad vowels, flattened further by the welted scar that inflamed his crushed nose. ‘Bad things befall folk who set foot in Caithwood.’
The captive’s subdued response escaped hearing.
‘Oh, aye!’ the farm-bred chap ranted on. ‘The damned trees are said to be haunted! I told you I wouldn’t grovel here at the mercy of a bunch of deep-woods barbarians. This way, too, you won’t be thrown to your execution without the moral leave to defend yourself. Best do that, forbye! If you don’t display some natural fight, I’ll stay accused as a sorcerer’s patsy.’
The clan scouts who lurked in the scant winter brush exchanged interested looks and raised eyebrows. A signal from their lean captain restrained the youngest, who eagerly fingered the knife strapped over the hip of his buckskins.
The flicked message came back, signed in indignant hand code: ‘Who dares to haze talent is no friend to us!’
‘Patience!’ the veteran leader returned. ‘Watch now, and spring later.’ He leaned forward and tapped the fur-clad shoulder of the rapacious woman endowed with the hunter’s gift. His wordless touch urged her to tighten the glamour her birth talent engaged to mask them. No chance must be taken. If in fact the large blow-hard’s captive commanded an initiate’s awareness, his mage-sense might notice their presence. More, if his source for such power was rogue, he might prove exceedingly dangerous.
The trespassers angled southward meantime, unaware of surveillance. Their course wended through the flats carved out by the floods which roiled over the river-banks when the snowpacks broke in the northern peaks. Spring’s torrent would flatten these brakes, where today’s grey cotton-tail rustled in hiding and deer bedded down in the dry stands of marsh reeds. Ignorant enough to thrash through the tangle, prisoner and henchman raised enough blundering racket for ten. At their flanks like a pack of shadowy wolves, the avid scouts stalked them apace.
The dark-haired man’s reasonable tone drifted clearly through the laced thickets of catkins and witch hazel, torn a bit breathless as his captor bullied him onwards. ‘What do you actually know of me, Tarens? Start there. I will answer for everything.’
‘Keep your wretched excuses. I don’t want to hear them!’ The bumpkin kicked venomously at a hummock. ‘What gave you the right to revile my brother’s most intimate secret?’
‘Your survival! Yes, exactly that!’ the bound man snapped, out of patience. ‘Not one of those dedicates or their uppity dedicate officers knew the names of your family. Your aunt’s past the Wheel, beyond callous slurs! But what sorrow would befall Efflin, to lose you? How could I answer to your bereaved sister? Before I let you get killed out of hand, or worse, see you run back to Kelsing in chains, I would act again! Times over, if the bold choice kept you safe. A friend set free without harm is the measure by which I weigh my actions and character.’
‘Charm the birds themselves,’ rasped Tarens, as low spirits gouged him to bitterness. ‘I’m done with your sweet-talker’s poison. The croft’s lost. My own kin would be mad to absolve me of murder if I defied sense and returned to them.’
Screened by the brush, the scout captain’s lip curled. ‘Escaped felons!’ His signalled verdict tensioned his slit-eyed companions to lethal readiness.
A stick cracked. The big townsman’s angry shove prodded the smaller wretch through a deadfall. Another push overset his strapped balance, with curses against the hell winds of Darkness grunted through the savage yank that manhandled his staggered frame upright.
Untoward abusiveness offended clan mores: the scout captain waved for his squad to close in, with another baleful glance pitched sidewards to curb the blade of the bloodthirsty youngest. Arrows worked best for a swift execution, safest when faced against an unknown arcane talent, where surprise trumped the risk at close quarters. Soundless as the shade cast by the wan sunlight, the clan patrol unslung their horn bows to dispatch the invaders.
While they eased feathered shafts from their shoulder-slung quivers, the dark-haired fellow was speaking again. If he had no identifiable accent, his emphasis packed a sincerity that almost bloomed a flare of pure light in the flux.
‘When hope dies, you breathe it back to life again! No matter how long it takes, or what time’s required to heal the wound. Disappointment will not last a lifetime unless you lie down and give in. I don’t know how I came by this truth. But nothing, and no one, will strip my belief that we live by free choice in this world for a reason. Don’t buy the lie of futility, Tarens! No matter what comes, or how far the course of your future is changed by my influence.’
To listen invited the chance of beguilement. The clan captain shook off an uneasy chill. Against the peril of a sorcerer’s wiles, he nocked a broadhead shaft to his bow-string. His closed circle of sc
outs backed his choice without argument. Caithwood’s defenders were desperately few; a mistake on the wrong side of caution could break their last tenuous foothold, if not doom their rare family lines to destruction.
In stealthy unison, five recurve bows were bent to full draw.
But through the half breath to take steady aim, just before the signal to fire, the tension between hunted prey and poised killers exploded into pandemonium.
‘Tarens!’ gasped the dark-haired prisoner. ‘Hold up!’ Ignored, he repeated, urgently shrill, ‘Stop, Tarens. Now!’
When the bull-necked crofter refused to comply, the smaller fellow pitched sideways and dropped. Twisting with his tied wrists swung as a club, he chopped the bumpkin behind the knees. Both men tumbled into a disorderly heap. The bigger chap roared and punched back in raw fury.
The lashed victim resisted, at rank disadvantage. Fractionally quicker, he jack-knifed and rolled to wrest clear of the crofter’s hammering punishment. His adversary snagged a hold on his jacket; a jerk backwards flattened him beyond recourse. Through a blow to the jaw, then a knee in the groin that curled him, half-senseless, he still managed to shout across the vile insults heaped on him by his oppressor.
The phrases, cadenced in flawless Paravian, voiced an emphatic appeal: ‘Ama’idan eth erathiri awen nahil kithiran! Da i’liosmariennt, tur eth fadael s’roth-itieren kiranlaer, dasil’i’laire s’i’kewiar-seyshaleng ple ei criesient lesan’ii’eng s’lesh-llieriennt!’
The scout captain eased his bow-string and swore. No order to loose could be sanctioned, not now. Clanborn were fluent in the ancient tongue, and this stranger’s words were delivered in form to invoke an inviolate tradition: ‘Mercy for strangers arrived without welcome! By charter law, under the creed of guest-oath hospitality, grace us with a hearing for an honest request to seek sanctuary!’