“Don’t slip,” cautioned Arithon through the barrage.
Moss slicked the wet stone. Vivet clambered downwards, teeth chattering, relieved to bestow Valien into Arithon’s charge. The night sky hung deep as a caul overhead, pocked with the haloed glimmer of strewn constellations. The thunder of the cataract diminished behind before the weary party gained respite.
“Here,” whispered Arithon. His touch guided Vivet ahead through the mist, and then doubled back. Several stumbling steps brought her into a grotto, hidden beneath a sloped ledge. Water sang and dripped, fed by overshot moisture from the falls above, and guttered down the seamed face. Inside, the leaf-lined cleft remained dry. If wolves had whelped here, the den was unoccupied.
Vivet folded, without care for the cobwebs, and reclaimed Valien’s squirming distemper. His plaintive wail cut like a blade, risen to beet-faced rage. Savaged by his tantrum, she scarcely heard Arithon’s hurried instructions.
“Get yourselves settled and fed. Then sleep if you can. I’m off meanwhile to set a few snares.” His regard raked her with an acuity that belied his mild remark upon parting. “Relief is at hand. If my plan delivers, the journey won’t stress you as sorely hereforward.”
Alarmed, Vivet rallied to ask if his traps were to be laid for animals. Before speech, he was gone, melted into the night. Valien had outworn the impulse to cry. His boneless weight in her lap sapped the will to arise. Whether she might forewarn the Ettinmen set at risk, the lead seized under pressure had widened too far, with her resiliency spent. If the falls did not drown her shout, a perfidious outcry might tip her hand and upset the directive laid on her. Neither could Valien stay on his own through a search likely foredoomed to failure. Arithon’s skill in the wilds was legend. Too often, and with bitter oaths, Roaco’s trackers had been balked by his wily experience.
Compelled to abide, Vivet tucked up with Valien, asleep from the moment she laid down her head.
Vivet woke to the morning light in her eyes. Daybreak had passed, the sun risen to flood the east-facing cranny. Arithon was already alert, slouched like a feral tomcat with one elbow braced at the brink. Protected between, Valien sat on his rump, poking his cache of smooth pebbles into straggly rows.
The indolent atmosphere of camaraderie ignited Vivet’s short temper. “We might have slacked off last night’s pace, it would seem.” She was all-over stiff and welted from biting insects. Beyond aching muscles and abused joints, her heels stung, crusted with burst blisters. Her next breath for carping complaint met a cobra-fast finger, pressed to her lips. Then Arithon released his high-handed censure and without apology pointed upwards.
Scraps of aggravated conversation floated down-slope through the din of the cataract, peppered by the inflections of Ettin dialect.
The insolent quarry appeared undisturbed by the hunters’ proximity. Quite the contrary, his gaze through disordered black hair gleamed with intrigued speculation. “How many,” he murmured, “do you suppose Roaco’s sent for the blood-bath?”
Vivet shrugged, surly and unwilling to rise to his goading. Border patrols always worked in pairs, expanded by squads of six. Under his quizzing regard, she flicked off the obvious sum on disdainful fingers.
Arithon’s lips flexed with joyful irony. “You’ve underrated our criminal value, my dear. I’ve sorted twelve individual voices.” Expectantly paused, his attention unwavering under her reticent silence, he said cheerfully, “My count when their heads broke the sky-line at dawn confirmed an even fourteen.”
Nothing suggested this fact was news; long since, he must have ascertained the strength of the opposition. Vivet disregarded the provocation, relieved when his interest deserted her for a whispered exchange with Valien.
The boy nodded, forehead puckered with concentration. His small, grubby fingers selected the best of his collected pebbles. After earnest thought, he added two more, then bestowed the gifts into the man’s open palm, grinning in sly conspiracy.
“Anli,” Arithon murmured, the diminutive spoken in Paravian. “Very good. Now we play for the prize.”
While Vivet suffered tugged heart-strings, the fey creature who claimed her son’s trust uncoiled with animal grace. Head cocked, he listened, as if a recognizable language patterned the random air-currents that traced over his skin.
Vivet noticed, then only: Arithon had stripped to rolled shirtsleeves, the older scars on his bruised wrists and forearm exposed against his habitual reticence. Further, his discarded jerkin and cloak were not in the sheltered cleft.
The moment stretched, turned suddenly perilous. Oblivious yet, the snapped speech of the Ettinmen flickered nearer. Through the sussurant hiss of the falls, a snapped stick silenced the bird-song. Nerveless, intent, Arithon’s fixated eyes wore the sheared reflection of summer’s foliage. Against the lucent back-drop of sky, he was the purposeful predator, poised for an ambush on familiar ground.
“You’ve been here before,” Vivet blurted, before sense.
His head turned, with a testy glance fit to peel skin. “By glory, did you imagine I could toss jackstraws with your child’s life? If you ever thought I would court danger at fortune’s caprice, what earthly reason gave your consent to rely on my guardianship?”
Vivet reeled, stung breathless. Pinned beyond hope of a sensible answer, she endured in discomfort a survey more scouring than a Koriathain’s.
Let the s’Ffalenn sorcerer never discern the tap-root of her secret terror. Whether Arithon suspected a convenient recapture by Ettin’s pursuit might buy her release, he must never fathom the price rendered due if his bid for escape should succeed. “My child’s no son of yours.” Before she blurted the more fatal confession, she attacked to deflect him. “Why should a nameless, dead stranger’s by-blow matter to you?”
Not heartless stone, the motive behind Arithon’s inscrutable purpose: impatience, contempt, or perhaps a flashed glimpse of exasperated endurance slipped through before he quashed his startled emotion. “Valien is himself, and innocent of his begetting. Take care you don’t mar his joy with your bitterness, in or out of my presence.”
As nothing else could, his defence of her son made Vivet choke back a scream for his folly. Better sense—in harsh fact any claim to wisdom at all—should have warned him to jettison her plight outright. Honey and poison, the ceaseless inner turmoil that defeated her wit to express: for she was the made tool of his enemies. Her weakness netted his insidious strength, relentless as bait on the hook. He would buy her deliverance, come whatever cost, no matter that his accursed tenacity sealed her fate without quarter.
Her blank anguish drowned horror. If she could not bear his cold-blooded slaughter by arrows before the eyes of her child, self-interest flinched also from withering fear: a brazen betrayal to force the quick end might waken the monster and unleash the black arts of the Master of Shadow. Vivet froze at the crux, a trapped pawn seized by the merciless claim on her destiny.
Through Valien’s sing-song burble of pleasure, and the liquid trill of a thrush, the inflection of the human voices closed through the thrash of white water. Like echo, Arithon’s bearing transformed. Become the blade unsheathed, he unhooked from his belt a sling fashioned from rag and knotted sinew: the sort used by small boys to bag game for the supper pot. Loaded with Valien’s cache of smooth pebbles, a man’s strength whirled a lethal weapon. Yet Arithon did not launch the missiles upslope but arced his stones in a bunch above the tree-tops beneath. The impacts cracked harmlessly into the adjacent, buttressed outcrop. But the rattle of their falling trajectory woke the Ettin archers to shouting alarm.
Arithon’s wicked smile accompanied the dust puffs kicked up by the scattershot ricochets. Vivet back-traced their pinging descent to a sunlit niche on the far slope, strategically occupied by a stuffed effigy made from the missing jerkin and cloak.
“Now, Valien!” the tactician encouraged with unnatural, infectious glee. “We get to count the prize haul of big splashes.”
The enemy fervour unfolded,
disordered, to a warning, deep grate of rock. The monolithic rasp triggered off the squirted, wasp hum of multiple arrows, loosed raggedly wide of the mark as the bowmen were rocked off balance. More shouts erupted, spiked by a fresh hail of kicked stones, which smacked downwards, shredding thrashed leaves off the overhead branches. Then dismay cranked the oaths a shrill octave higher. Chaos gathered momentum: Ettin’s best archers windmilled, teetered as their footing gave way. The convenient flat outcrop, by no chance at all, had presented the opportune stance to rain fletched death upon the cloth decoy.
Hindsight recalled the seamed ledge, sited at the brink of the falls. Stable enough under Arithon’s weight the past night, while he stretched to refill a flask from the spray: until his subsequent visit had doctored a layered fracture for purposeful sabotage.
The sprung trap delivered its engineered malice, as, grinding protest, the shifted slab slid. Gravity’s inexorable pull loosened the snap and ping of the pebbles speeding its ponderous skid. Then the massive stone toppled. Its titanic descent sledded down-slope to the thunderous whoosh of its splash in the basin. Treble yells from the air-borne men, trailing, piled into glissades of wet impacts, while the backwash of sloshed water rained down amid spluttering expletives.
“Seven,” murmured Arithon, his comment pocked by yet another immersion. “Ha! There’s eight.” Eyes crinkled with hilarity, he tallied the separate cries, pleased as the child beside him over each outburst of jabbering rage.
“You’ve only inflamed their murderous cause,” Vivet cautioned, while the Ettin hunters who remained unscathed swarmed to rescue their floundering comrades.
“Well, yes. It’s a lame, slapstick comedy. Enter, sopped dignity, charging to patch the savaged decorum of a deadly man-hunt.” Arithon grinned. “Behold, and applaud the finale.”
More noise erupted on cue, embellished by shrieks of ear-splitting fury.
Clutching his ribs, Arithon gasped, “That would be the effect of your soap, slathered to grease the descent.”
Overcome, he folded in helpless mirth, while another resounded barrage of ripe thumps thrashed, tumbling, through abused greenery, and more hapless bodies met their demise in a glottal explosion of splashes.
The joke unleashed Valien’s giggles, and Arithon’s mangled epilogue. “Felled to the last man, boots … sinew … and weapons.”
Cocky before Vivet’s appalled silence, he surmised, “There won’t be a functional marksman among them. Not only are their laminate recurves prone to warp, soaked-gut bow-strings will stretch under tension for days. I suggest we’d be wise to bolt like hares across the next ridge.”
Arithon set a brutal pace. Valien straddled his shoulders, fists clutched in his black hair. Dragged at his heels, out of sorts on a sour stomach and broken sleep, Vivet still noticed the measuring glances the sorcerer cast over his shoulder.
“You’re not gloating,” she jabbed. “Why haven’t you claimed the self-styled prize for your ill-gotten victory?”
“Brava. You imply I might have sufficient integrity to honour fair terms?” Arrived at a streamlet, left hand clasped to Valien’s ankle to free his grip to assist her across, Arithon tendered a sheepish apology. “If honesty matters, I plan to cheat while your countrymen strip to dry out their clothing.”
Vivet stared, her unease redoubled as the humour left his expression. “Devil’s tricks for the curtain-call,” he admitted. “I have no better means, beyond plaguing iyats, by which to relieve your drenched countrymen of their breeches.”
“What?” Vivet exclaimed. “Clothes only? Not weapons?”
“Pity the fellows if you were in charge,” Arithon chided, remorseless. “No blades and no bows, bare-arsed in these wilds? The predicament would be an unnatural cruelty. The chase takes us into the foot-hills by nightfall. A tracker stripped down to his tender skin becomes meat for the biting insects, with added punishment from the thorn patches lacing the scrub. Our valiant pursuit won’t press their chase, naked. By the time the wretches can trap for green hides to redress their miserable modesty, our trail will lose them in Silvermarsh.
Night fled over the open heath of Daon Ramon, with midsummer’s air blood-warm and breezeless around the small, furtive party southbound. Dakar perched atop the stacked rocks used to bake the past evening’s meal, jabbing a stick into the powdered ash in the fire pit. Tarens awoke to the arrhythmic sound. He turned over, alert, since the nervous habit signalled upcoming trouble. The Mad Prophet’s lumped form notched the pre-dawn gloom, unkempt as an abandoned tinker’s sack.
“Where’s Elaira?” For the hollow in the brush covert was empty, her dusty blanket removed as well.
“You let her go off alone!” he accused, rattled onto his feet.
Dakar dropped the stick with a start. Eyes rolled sidewards and his pouched expression morose, he allowed, “I’m impressed you believe that I might have stopped her.”
“Damn your slacking hide.” Disgusted, Tarens snagged up his baldric, cinched the buckle, and adjusted the hang of his daggers. “When did she leave?”
“Too long ago. You’ll chase your own tail, pelting after her.” Yet Dakar’s evasive stab at the embers engendered suspicion rather than sympathy.
Tarens snatched the offensive stick. “Damned if you didn’t nod off through your watch!”
Dakar winced. “I did not sleep a wink, fiends plague the sharp stones and the roots.” Balled into a clench, his untrustworthy features sparked by sly interest, he added, “Has it never crossed your yokel’s mind that some women prefer not to drag along a defender?”
Incredulous, Tarens bent to the task of obliterating the fire pit. “Don’t feed me that idiocy. Not with The Hatchet’s picketed scouts swarming the country like an infestation.”
Dakar watched, unblinking, a brown toad in his tatty ruckle of loosened clothing. “You’re speaking of Rathain’s handfast crown consort, who scarcely requires my leave, or anyone’s. She’ll travel this kingdom’s sovereign territory just as she pleases.”
The next moment, with scarcely a rustle, something riffled the air behind Tarens’s back. He spun, alarmed, into a white billow of fabric that enveloped his face, and entangled his reach for his dagger. He clawed off the obstruction, then snarled a curse as he noted the gleam of a recruit’s Sunwheel surcoat. The garment was foisted on him by Elaira, arrived back with cat-footed stealth.
“Wear that!” she snapped, freezing his impulse to fling down the offensive cloth. “It’s genuine issue, brought fresh from the encampment’s laundress by a bargain neither of you could repeat. Sully the outfit, and you’ll shame the veteran who’s agreed to mentor your orientation.”
“We’re infiltrating the ranks?” Tarens surmised, aghast. “I tried that once in Arithon’s company. The tactic sent us Sithaer’s way to ruin. I’m condemned under seal by the Canon, what’s more. Whoever you’ve cozened to cover my tracks, I’m a bone to be tossed for a rich reward to the True Sect examiners.”
“No. You’ll see.” Elaira’s peeling glare transferred to the Mad Prophet.
“I’m moving already!” he groused, before she kicked his arse.
She talked on through the lumbering thrust that heaved his bulk upright. “I’ve located prior acquaintances who know me as a harness mender. That’s my plausible story, already arranged. Dakar, are you good for a tinker’s work in the forge? That will do. You’ll pose as my drunken assistant, and Tarens, a green conscript signed on from his former post as a caravan guard. We’ll pass, provided none of us ruffles the flux in a manner that broadcasts trained talent. I have only one officer’s tent to avoid. The main host’s encampment is sprawling enough and chaotic from the recent musters. Provided we slip through at the dawn change of watch, our presence won’t attract questions.”
Tarens griped, aghast, his callused hands tugging the hateful surcoat over his shoulders. “Your Sunwheel henchman will expose my bumpkin’s ignorance inside of an hour.”
Elaira thumped a pair of waxed boots at his feet, fol
lowed by a rucksack packed with a foot soldier’s gear. “He’ll accept you, no question. Get dressed.”
“You pinched that kit out of somebody’s tent?” Dakar’s eyebrows buckled with awe. “Slick move! Until that soldier wakes up and gets hopping furious in his bare feet. What’s to spare our trusty crofter from the whipping post for petty theft?”
Elaira served the spellbinder with a contempt to clip bollocks. “Learn how to have friends,” she retorted. “Or stay here on your merits. Daybreak won’t wait, and I’ve had enough of your gutless objections.”
The sky wore the hazy colour of ash, scribbled over with smoke from the cook-shacks and the chimneys that hooded the forge-fires. Beneath spread the vista of Sunwheel tents, rows of peaked canvas tinged rose with the advent of dawn. The enchantress’s party of three sauntered towards an atmosphere of seething bustle, pocked by harried shouts and blared horns as the Light’s war camp stirred awake. Committed past recourse, Tarens trailed Elaira’s lead, pursued by Dakar’s wheezy complaints. The air fore-promised broiling heat, summer’s haze thickened by the ammoniac reek of picketed livestock and trampled manure. They skirted the perimeter sentries’ overlook through a hollow, crossed a shallow creek, and made their bold entry, shadowed against the thornbrake behind the horse-lines. The returned patrols had already dismounted, steaming animals being stripped of their tack and led to water by bleary-faced grooms. The riders out-bound, amid saddling up, jostled into restive formation. Others milled, cursing the slackers, who stalled, grumbling, over the draw that assigned their current mounts.
Elaira plunged undaunted into the press. “Mending!” Her cry pierced through the hubbub. “Bring me your harness, broken or worn!”
A frantic page dashed past a cluster of officers, burdened with a torn girth. At his heels came a freckled squire, trailing a set of broken reins. Elaira foisted their strap goods on Dakar, and, passing, hooked up a bridle with gold bosses left unattended. She thrust the flash tack upon Tarens, forthwith. “That belongs to your mentor, returned from repair. Behave like you own it, and don’t look back.”