Dakar’s unhappy reverie ended as the day’s appointed muscle arrived to press the next stage of his journey. Hauled up by the armpits and dragged like strapped meat, he abandoned his struggle, for once, and forwent his colourful howls. The cold was already too ruthlessly fierce, and quite enough vicious affront had been served by the food spurned under his heel. His limp bulk was heaved onto the horse and strapped down, without anyone’s bother to dust off the snow that clung to his haunches. The melt would redouble his punishment, later. Morose, the Mad Prophet groused into his beard, ‘Were your crown prince present, he would surely weep.’
‘Tears don’t feed children,’ his brisk escort snapped, ‘and pitiful reasons can’t undo the harm caused by fools for their wrong-headed actions.’
‘Neither does murder put an end to grief, or my suffering ease yesterday’s misery!’ Dakar jerked at his bonds with pointed eloquence. ‘A townsman’s chained hound suffers less needless cruelty!’
‘And does the dog bite without provocation?’ The woman who favoured her mauled finger snatched up the reins and knotted them into the string with the cavalcade’s pack-horse. ‘Even if you hadn’t been party to treason, every time we’ve left your legs free, you’ve slunk off and tried to escape.’
‘Not to run,’ Dakar bristled. ‘Believe my warning, you rabid lynx! We serve the same cause. I don’t plan to quit your pestilent forest before I’ve had my audience with Cosach s’Valerient.’
‘Who knows for what end, if not purposeful mischief?’ The clanswoman’s feral smile showed teeth as she whacked her mount into line past a pack-mare with flattened ears. ‘Who’d trust your word since you’ve refused to spill the lofty reason that’s brought you?’
The Mad Prophet shut his whiskered jaws like a clam. No agonized interval jounced on a horse could make him open that subject. News of Arithon’s freedom was too dangerously volatile to risk outside of the s’Valerient lodge, and without the wisdom of Rathain’s high council. Nor would he engage a conjurer’s arts amid the scouts’ acrimonious company. The refined talents bred into clan lineages had intensified, culled as they had been by interminable wars and ruthless years of persecution. He dared not provoke their deadly distrust and risk the message he carried. The future relied on their threatened prince, lost beyond recourse if his desperate news could not outpace the breaking wave of disaster.
Too often, Dakar sensed the subliminal tingle that fore-ran his bouts of precognition. But day upon day, his precocious talent stayed quiescent. He sweated out formless fears in his dreams, then jerked awake without memory. Exhausted and irritable, he listened to silence until he felt stretched unto breaking.
‘Hie!’ called the trail boss. ‘Time to be gone!’ While the last-minute stragglers shambled to order, the close-knit party of outriding scouts vanished into the wood, and the pack-train struck out on the move.
The shaggy horse beneath Dakar was jerked forward into a trot. He cursed, and complained of the strain on his stomach. When his moans were ignored, he bashed head first into a low tree bough and let the bent twigs whip backwards into the black frown on his keeper’s face. Act obstreperous enough, and he might speed the pace, even plague his clan escort to the point where they took the wise choice to be rid of him.
Three days later, Cosach s’Valerient, High Earl of the North and oathsworn caithdein to the Crown of Rathain, forded the north fork of the Arwent and rode into Halwythwood’s deep, dappled shade, where the thousand-year groves of oaks towered still, bare trunks garlanded with mistletoe and snow-capped ivy. The war band he kept at vigilant heel pushed their mounts on return to the clan’s east-side settlement. Amid the feral, jostling pack, Cosach was the blade on the axe at the forefront. A huge man with a beard shagged like a bear’s coat, he came cold to the bone from a fortnight’s patrol across the open sweep of Daon Ramon Barrens. An unsated wildness clung to his presence. The great sword in his scabbard was too recently blooded, quenching the starry-eyed greed of a Light-blinded company of bountymen; and his hunting knives, scarcely cleaned from the chase that had bagged two grey-coated bucks.
The dressed carcasses rode on a pack-horse, slabbed with the rich meat found in the remote vales where the golden grasses once grazed by unicorns kept stubborn hold in the briar. But no man had seen the fabled grace of the vanished Paravians for more than eight hundred years. If such history lived on in the mouths of the bards, Cosach did not mourn the bygone past. The late slant of pale sunlight gleamed in his hazel eyes as he laughed at his son Esfand’s latest wisecrack. The lad was approaching fifteen years of age, unfinished and rash, with a temper as fitful as mercury.
‘You won’t cozen us to race back to the lodge,’ the war band’s gruff captain shouted above the young game-cock’s banter. ‘Rush ahead, push your horse to fresh sweat, you’ll be walking him dry until nightfall. When you get to the bath, the vat will be cold, and the rest of us will be feasting.’
Then the cheerful mood died. A runner dashed up to meet them, too breathless to carry good news.
As though talk had been strangled, the inbound company reined up in sharp order, bit rings muffled and weapons gripped ready for draw in twoscore tensioned fists.
Cosach demanded with ominous force, ‘What’s gone amiss in our absence?’
‘The Mad Prophet,’ the messenger gasped, not only run to exhaustion but flummoxed beyond ready words.
Cosach’s level eyebrows snarled into a frown. ‘Dakar?’ he snapped, mystified. He remembered the spellbinder: a whey-faced, chubby toad, always found in the shelter of Asandir’s shadow.
Cosach nailed the point that the messenger’s fretted distress had left dangling, ‘The Sorcerer’s not with the sneak coward, this time?’
‘No.’ The runner grimaced. ‘Patrol picked the rat up skulking in the forest by way of the north-west coast. They had him held in bound custody all the way into the settlement.’
‘And?’ Cosach snapped. ‘What happened then? Don’t say that yellow slinker invoked spellcraft, unwound the scouts’ knots, and broke free?’
The winded runner blushed with embarrassment, rallied his nerve, and said, terse, ‘All that. And worse. Crazy prophet’s tweaked the flux lines to static and afflicted the lodge with a fiend storm.’
‘Toss the damned lard-sack out!’ Cosach roared. ‘Is the whole cringing watch parked like girls on their rumps?’
‘Not a man among them has slept for two days,’ the crest-fallen runner insisted.
Cosach gathered his reins, unconvinced. ‘Then they’re nodding off while you galloped here to sob out their woes on my shoulder? Take over that pack string and haul in the meat as a fit reward for stupidity.’ The High Earl rammed his tired mount forward. The panting runner became crowded aside as the restive war band acted on signal to move on the double.
‘By Dharkaron’s Black Chariot, the problem had better be far out of sight before we arrive,’ Cosach threatened the men assembled a brisk step behind. ‘Or I’ll have the settlement’s duty guard spitted alongside that sniveling spellbinder’s flensed carcass!’
The messenger shouted in anguished frustration above the thunder of departing hooves. ‘We tried! The guard’s fashed. Lord, you’ll see for yourself. No one can reach the lodge, far less get inside to lay hands on the weasel.’
The caithdein’s frothed company drew rein at due length, with every wind-blown mount’s winter coat sweated to whorled foam. Their state of exertion at journey’s end rushed the horse-boys, who sprinted to snatch up the reins as the war band dismounted. Rathain’s clans maintained no permanent stabling since the nearby presence of domestic animals posed a dangerous magnet for tracking hounds. Horses in use were rotated on picket lines, with the herds at rest by long habit turned loose on the barrens to graze. Once the forest camps had been as ephemeral, with dwellings tailored for instant mobility. But that rigid practice eased in the recent years under Etarra’s enforced, lawful justice. Lately, the winter settlement dared to include the comfort of permanent structures. H
ere, the High Earl’s anxiety raised furious force, since any threat brought into the heart-wood placed innocent lives in harm’s way.
‘I’ll stuff that fat spellbinder’s head through his liver!’ Cosach swore as he peeled off the encumbrance of the fur mantle best suited for blizzards in open country. He paused only to task his impetuous son with the chores required by the master of horse. Around him, the war band stripped down to bare leathers, sheathed weapons adjusted from shoulders to hips, and with javelins hefted in hand, they pressed onwards afoot at grim speed.
Not one trail-weary spirit complained of exhaustion. Hard-bitten and lean, the men jogged the last homeward leg without flagging, prepared to arrive on their mettle to fight like singed wildcats. Except that the narrow trail to the settlement was blocked by a pert woman, near term with child.
She said with an eloquent toss of her head, ‘How did I expect you’d charge in like a bull with horns lowered to gore?’ Wrapped head to foot in an exquisite green mantle, and her silver-blond clan braid pinned up in carved wooden combs, she stiff-armed Rathain’s caithdein with a slender palm at chest height, and mocked gently, ‘As though a rampant fiend storm could be sliced apart and dispatched by the sword!’
Rammed short in his tracks, Cosach exploded: ‘If you came here to plead for a traitor’s doomed neck, step aside!’
‘Without my kiss for your welcome home?’ Mate to his cantankerous temper for years, Jalienne stepped in, and before the grins of the abashed war band, burrowed her face into her husband’s wire beard. ‘You will raze off the ticklish overgrowth,’ she murmured, muffled, then received the dubious solace of his chapped lips.
Cosach laughed, then succumbed and wrapped her gravid form into his massive embrace. The imminent birth was a gift come late, and a mixed blessing, burdened by worries a man handled best by addressing the crisis at present. ‘No infants inside the settlement are at risk?’
Jalienne bridled within in his bear’s grip. ‘I’d have rolled up my sleeves, first!’
Yet even in these times of tight timber roofs, a caithdein’s concerns were not lightly dismissed. ‘Then that runner met us in a lather for no reason?’
The war band stirred, restless, while the earl’s lady paused for a heart-beat and frowned. ‘You’ll see soon enough when you reach the settlement. Or at least,’ she amended with speedy tact, ‘you might if you don’t try to barrel straight in without thought and a curb on your temper.’
‘I’d just perish of your brisk tongue the sooner,’ groused Cosach as he released her. He detailed a man to escort her back at a more sedate pace, then tossed her too-canny advice to the wind and bolted his war band ahead at a sprint. The problem could be measured, he felt, with the drive in the men kept at fever pitch.
Set inside a cordon of concealed sentries, the clans’ winter quarters blended seamlessly into the surrounding forest. The round shacks had walls of vertical planks, kept dry by bark shingles bespattered with lichen and raised off the ground on stone piers. The turfed roofs wore mantles of leaf mulch and pine needles, mottled with the late season’s patched snow. Since cookfires burned only in outdoor pits, banked back or extinguished in daylight, no smoke betrayed the location. The central lodge hall itself rose two stories, ringed around the pillar of a living oak. Its weathered beams peaked beneath the widespread canopy, whose massive moss-hoary limbs drooped like a convolute skirt and cloaked the building in neutral shadow. The structure eluded the casual eye; but not on the hour of Cosach’s arrival.
Secrecy and tranquillity were heaved into a mad uproar by a manic cyclone of air-borne objects that whirled around the site. No natural wind tossed the crown of the oak, but a fiend storm of virulent ferocity. The on-going harassment was not random, either. The eruptive assault selectively snatched only those personal items worn or carried by the remiss day watch. Daggers, belts, boots, a treasured hip flask made of horn, and every sundry item of clothing from leathers to small-clothes tumbled and tossed in the grip of the gyre. Bystanders kept their safe distance or else risked being stripped, if not razed flat, by the murderous pelt of the maelstrom.
Cosach dropped his reprimand for the watch captain. Lips tight-set and beard bristled like a terrier’s ruff, he surveyed the scene, beyond speech. His grim pause ascertained that the under-age children were bundled away out of reach. Before anyone sighted his approach, or quite realized the war band was back from Daon Ramon, he unbuckled his sword, stripped off his knives, and tossed the load of baldric and blades into the arms of his right-hand captain. ‘You will stay where you are. Hold the men. No one follows, I’m clear?’ Beyond argument, he shucked leathers, shirt, and laced breeches, then his linen down to pink skin.
‘I’ll have that prophet’s neck in my barehanded grip,’ he promised as he muscled forward. The oblivious gawpers caught in his path were shouldered roughly aside. Ahead of the sensible move to prevent him, the realm’s caithdein charged stark naked towards the rim of the vortex. Neither the cold nor the shouts of alarm deterred him, or the comet-tail of hazing fiends that bedeviled his straight-line approach. Clearly, the renegade spellbinder had steered the assault with intent to repel his clan wardens. The sly trick would not spare his doomed hide. Since Cosach wore nothing the crazed sprites could seize, their rampage would scarcely waylay him.
While he bored in, they snagged at his hair, yanked his beard, and painfully tweaked at his ears. He knew well enough to smother annoyance. Excessive emotion excited the entities’ penchant for mischief. The war band’s cries of dismay never turned the shaggy head of their chieftain. Too busy dodging hurled objects, Cosach dared not admit the distraction, far less turn tail to attempt a retreat.
The gamut he challenged carried lethal stakes. Cosach ducked a barrage of flung blades. Yanked off a flapping shirt that noosed his neck, then stumbled as, in animate malice, the sleeves hooded his face and attempted to blind him. A ferociously fit man who disliked subtle tactics, he tore that nuisance away by main strength. While the garment’s owner cursed him from the side-lines, a hail of shed boots, several baskets, and a stray pot hurtled at him with whistling force. Cosach dived flat. Crusted snow scoured his buff frame, scuffed again as he wrenched clear of a tumbled hamper that burst open and disgorged its load of dried peas. Pelted to stinging welts, he bounced to his feet and just missed being garrotted by the laces slipped out of someone’s twill trousers.
As a naked sword cart-wheeled in from behind and nearly slashed his left hamstring, Cosach swore. He forgot the imperative need for constraint as a coal-pot whooshed by and showered live cinders over his head. He clapped out the caught bloom of flame in his hair. Blistered, now furious, he hopped too late and caught a whacked shin from a child’s filched game stick. Then a welter of horn spoons clattered into his nape, followed up by a meat fork, which grazed him. Beleaguered, he finally questioned the wisdom of taking the headlong approach. While his sally carried him up to the door, exposure to the cold numbed his reflexes. If the lodge entrance was fiend-bound or jammed, he might perish of chill just as easily as suffer a fatal stab in the back by a friend’s purloined dirk.
Cosach’s evident danger held the war band riveted. No one cracked ribald jokes or laughed over his crazy predicament. The near misses as he ducked and dived through the onslaught raised a pall of stark silence, sliced by the deadly whistle of steel, and the whip-crack reports of flogged leathers that clansfolk could ill afford to replace.
The murderous rage for the offensive waste drew the fiends down on Cosach like vengeance. A knife nicked the wrist he raised to the latch. Scored to bloodshed, then clipped to a snipped hank off his braid, he bellowed and rammed against the shut panel, and wrenched at the fastening for his very life.
The latch was not jammed. The oiled pin tripped. Cosach’s impetuous bulk flung the panel wide open and spilled him, rolling, across the plank floor boards inside. Splinters gouged his flesh in unmentionable places. The sting launched him back upright with a foul-tempered roar. ‘Spellbinding coward! My oath s
ays you’re crow-bait!’
Yet no scuttling fugitive presented a target to satisfy his berserk outrage. Cosach surveyed the hall. Benches, and trestles, and stone fire pit loomed vacant. The wood stack and kindling bin lent the slippery prophet no haven. The tapestry hangings, the targes and javelins remained serenely mounted on the timber walls. The fire tongs and pokers, the meat spits, the antlers kept for carving, and the pegged frames to stretch the green hides rested untouched in the dusty light shafted downwards through the smoke vent.
‘Show yourself,’ Cosach bellowed. ‘I promise your end could be made grotesquely unpleasant!’
Nothing moved. No sound arose through the din from the fracas outside, random crashes cut by the snarl of ripped cloth and outbursts of clatter as the possessed items tangled together, and hard objects banged in collision. Within the lodge, everything remained still. The chart chests, the lard barrels, the shelves with their casks of supplies and the crates of forged arrow-points, dearly bought, stayed inviolate. Although the doorway gaped open, no fiend broached the threshold. Either the storm was repulsed by design, or the stamped tin banes against infestation were not overwhelmed by the charge the spellbinder leaked as an attractant.
Which finicky trivia did not concern Cosach. He would ferret the verminous meddler out, whatever bolt-hole in the furniture sheltered his shiftless carcass. Spattered red with the droplets from his gashed wrist, chilled to gooseflesh and chattering teeth, the Earl of the North stalked towards the javelin rack, its socketed weapons kept honed for rabid wolves and forest wildcats.
A blanket unfurled into his path from above, tossed over the rail from the upstairs gallery.
‘High Earl Cosach!’ The Mad Prophet called downwards, his hopeful tone pitched to defang the hunt. ‘You’ll appreciate why I have to face you, disarmed! If you’re also humiliated, that’s only just. I’ve been handled in ways that defame charter law. Kenneled dogs have been better treated.’