The Curse of the Mistwraith

Someone shouted. Hands raised in the press, pointing toward the glow that spread from the lone blond figure on the dais. The fighting nearest Gnudsog’s embattled lines faltered. Farmers stared, bricks and cart-axles torn out for bludgeons dangling forgotten in their hands as belligerence gave way to wonder. Rough men who prowled to steal and pillage spun from doorways suddenly rinsed clean of shadow. Stripped of their cover, they dodged away into side-streets to avoid arrest by the watch. Guild bands of more directed hatreds paused on their way to disadvantage rival factions. Least brazen, the craftsmen and the shopkeepers clustered in their fearful bands cried out at the rebirth of the light that would spare their property and livelihood. ‘We are saved!’

Lord Diegan answered from the dais stair. ‘By the grace of Lysaer of the Light, our city shall recover prosperity!’

‘Lysaer of the Light!’ hailed a mason with roughened hands. His chant was taken up, until the central square of Etarra rang to a thousand raised voices.

The golden circle widened, waxed brighter. Lysaer’s hands seemed bathed in a fountainhead of gilt sparks. Light burnished his hair like fine metal and glanced off the tinsel stitching banding his lace cuffs and pourpoint. The face tipped upward under that swathe of illumination showed no change at the clamour of the crowd. Fine-chiselled in concentration, the lord from the west who wrought miracles seemed an angel sent down into squalor from the exalted hosts of Athlieria.

Even Gnudsog was inspired from dourness. ‘He has the look on him, like a prince.’ Eyes dark as swamp-peat swivelled and fixed on Lord Diegan. ‘Don’t let your ninnies in the council be handing him a crown in silly gratitude.’

Not entirely mollified as the chanting swelled to rattle the farthest windows of the square, Etarra’s Lord Commander gave back a grim grin. ‘What Lysaer wants for his service is the head of the prince of Rathain.’

‘Good.’ Gnudsog smiled. On his grizzled features, the expression made no improvement; the scars and chipped teeth from past scraps made him baleful enough to inspire prayers of deliverance from a headhunter. ‘For that, on my sword, he’ll have my help.’

The subject of Etarra’s adulation alone remained oblivious; Lysaer’s engagement with Arithon’s sorceries required total concentration. Even under barrage by pure light, the shadows proved stubborn to shift. Like inkstains set in pale felt, they resisted with a fierceness that at times made them seem to push back. Again, Lysaer stepped up his countermeasure. Time passed. As the light poured steadily from him, he tracked only the retreat of the dark. Blind to all else, deaf to Diegan’s encouragement, he missed the exultant moment when Etarra lay lit from wall to wall by the fiery glow of his gift. Lamps and torches brightened even the dimmest back-alleys where Gnudsog sent patrols to quell any unreformed rioters.

By afternoon, the merchants unlocked their mansions. Drawn by wild rumours and by the burning, continuous flow of light, people from all quarters of the city reemerged to pack the main square. The chanting subsided and later died into an awe-struck silence.

Locked in his private crusade against the dark, Lysaer did not stir when the city governors reawakened to discover their council hall doors were fastened closed by nothing beyond everyday bolts and latches.

At some point, unseen, the sorcerer Traithe had departed.

Humbled as they heard of the s’Ilessid prince who had shouldered their cause against monarchy, Etarra’s high officials gathered on the dais. Amid splintered laths and ripped silk, they stood in vigil at Lysaer’s side.

Lost to their presence, bathed in a blinding dazzle, Lysaer wrestled the frustration that Arithon’s greater training had defeated him. Determination held him steadfast. Etarra’s plight would be spoken for until his last strength became spent. The shadows by now were beaten back outside the walls. Beyond hearing that the bloodshed had ended: driven past the point of caring by the curse-born obsession to obliterate the works of his half-brother, Lysaer hammered out light in singleminded ferocity.

Diegan was closest when the wide-spread arms began to shudder. The light-rinsed hands finally spasmed to fists in the extremity of advanced exhaustion, and a tremor racked Lysaer’s body. He swayed on his feet, and there at his side was Etarra’s Lord Commander to lend him support as he crumpled.

Lysaer’s eyes flicked open then, agonized in abject defeat.

Moved to compassion, Lord Diegan said, ‘Lysaer, it’s all right. The riots are ended. You’ve done well enough to stop the bloodshed, and the shadows are cleared past the gates.’

‘All is not right!’ His next line a whisper of unrequited fury, Lysaer collapsed in Diegan’s arms. ‘Nothing is ended. Neither dark nor the prince of darkness shall rule in Rathain while I live.’

Spoken from the dais where a crowned king should have sworn oath to uphold the royal charter, the acoustics arranged by the Fellowship picked up the softest words. The passion in Lysaer’s promise carried clearly to the edges of the square.

Silence reigned for perhaps a dozen heartbeats. Then air itself seemed to shatter as the gathered mass of Etarra’s thousands released its pent breath and cheered in full-throated approval. The roar of the accolade shook the earth. Yet the prince who had won their reprieve from pure terror heard no sound at all, having fainted in Diegan’s embrace.

The shadows set over Etarra by Arithon s’Ffalenn cleared shortly after midnight of their own accord. By then, the populace had become enamoured of the hero in their midst; rumour attributed deliverance to the blond-haired prince from the west. The last band of looters languished in irons. Too taciturn to show satisfaction for a long day’s work well done, Gnudsog sat enthroned in the windowseat alcove of Lord Governor Morfett’s best guest suite.

He looked out of place as a botched carving amid violet and gold tassels and amber cushions. Stripped of his field gear, clad still in the sweaty fleece gambeson he preferred to wear under chainmail, he slugged wine from a huge brass tankard. His peat-bog eyes watched, brooding, as the city’s governing elect crowded the rest of the room’s furnishings and argued in overheated elegance over disposition of his troops.

Their wilted ribbons and sadly creased sarcenets lent the chamber the feel of a second rate bordello. Couched in their midst, resplendent as any in his velvets and the frost-point fire of his sapphires, Lysaer s’Ilessid lay unconscious or dead asleep in the aftermath of exhaustion. The healer who had examined him said to let him rest, then left without daring a prognosis.

Apt to be ambivalent over fine points, Gnudsog drank. He cracked his knuckles in impatience. The cant of the councilmen irked him. Repeated searches had established beyond doubt that every Fellowship sorcerer appeared spontaneously to have vanished; squads had turned the warehouse district inside out, to no avail. The meat knacker’s conscripts had scarpered. Little further justice could be done until one shadow-bending criminal could be traced in his flight and eventually arraigned for execution. To which end, Gnudsog ran the house steward’s pages breathless, sending dispatches to his lieutenants and to his far-flung network of scouts.

When the long-sought news came back to him, along with incontrovertible proof that Arithon’s trail had been picked up, no one heard him through the din of raised voices.

Gnudsog lost his temper.

He cracked his tankard down with such force that wine geysered over the brim. Silence fell. The governing elect of Etarra turned heads, balding, curled, and hatted with felts pearled and feathered, to glare down superior noses at the author of untimely poor manners.

Sublimely untroubled by protocol, Gnudsog wiped his stubbled chin on the back of one hirsute wrist. ‘As I said, he is found. Your shadow-meddling little sorcerer has fled down the north road. By now, he has five hours’ lead, on straight course for the clans of Deshir.’

The pronouncement launched the room into uproar. The minister of the dyers and spinners guild fired off into maundering monologue, while the mayor of the south quarter flailed his chair arm with his bonnet in a vain attempt to recall order. His thumps were overwhelmed by an excited jabber of speculation, shrilly over-cut by the governor of trade’s expostulation. ‘Ath preserve us! We are lost! Against sorcery and shadows, our best troops will be cut to bleeding dogmeat. What use are good swords, unless the Prince of Light can be convinced or coerced to give us aid?’

The heads swivelled back, belatedly covetous of the jewelled asset ensconced in their midst. Only now, the blue eyes were opened. Lysaer had wakened to their bickering.

Gnudsog chuckled at the speed with which Etarra’s high officials rearranged themselves in solicitude. The most prideful and disdainful of pedigreed high-bloods bent to their knees at the side of their intended saviour.

Amused a bit by their pandering, Lysaer sat up. Thoughtful, frowning through dishevelled gold hair, he said seriously, ‘My support was never in question.’ Declaiming voices stilled to listen. ‘You have my help, as long and as much as you need it. But Etarra must act without hesitation. There will be war, if Arithon survives to win allies. With the northern clans behind him, he could escape justice altogether.’

‘The barbarians may be troublesome but they can’t mount a serious threat,’ interjected Pesquil, sallow and lean in the sable sash that denoted top rank in the northern league of headhunters. ‘Our city garrison could wipe out the clans. That much was never at issue. For years, we’ve mapped the campaign. We know the barbarians’ campsites, their bolt-holes, even the location of their caches. What was ever and always the deterrent was allocation of funds to send troops.’

Lord Governor Morfett blotted streaming temples on the draggled lace of his cuffs. ‘After today’s display of sorcery and shadows, I much doubt the treasury will stint.’

As the minister of city finances cleared his throat to argue, Lysaer s’Ilessid arose. ‘Ath spare us the war, why wait?’ He caught Diegan’s nod of approval, and added, ‘Strike now with a mounted division, and we might need nothing more than a block and a scaffold for execution.’

‘Twenty lancers already ride.’ Across the chamber, Gnudsog was smiling as the officials again heeded his presence. ‘They left the north gate half an hour ago.’

Lysaer regarded the grizzled captain with engaging concern and respect. ‘Your city could be indebted for your foresight, but lancers might not be enough. Arithon s’Ffalenn is as wily and ruthless as the pirate who fathered him. The more time he gains, the more dangerous he becomes. If we are not to be taken unaware, we must assume now that he will evade your patrol and reach the northern barbarians. Gentlemen, for all your safety, I urge your city to muster immediately for war.’

‘We have a quorum!’ Diegan cracked out from his perch of cat-comfort amid the fur quilts. ‘Shall we take the issue to vote?’

Hands were raised, a count taken and Gnudsog’s smile became voracious. He redirected the outgoing stream of pages to scare up scribes and ink. The city seals were sent for as an afterthought. Within the hour Morfett’s ornamental tables were pressed into service as desks and Gnudsog’s horny fists became weighted with requisitions for provisions, arms and draft teams. Throughout, Lysaer paced the chamber, consumed by restless passion, haranguing reticent officials and cajoling the minister of finance to yield up the keys to the treasury. ‘Strike thoroughly and at once,’ he stressed. ‘Or I can promise you’ll have trouble on a scale your histories have never seen.’

In all of Athera, he was the sole man qualified to measure the damages that s’Ffalenn wiles could inflict. His greatest fear was in making the Etarrans understand just how perilous an enemy they had against them.

Just past dawn, Gnudsog’s troop of light cavalry clattered into the citadel’s north bailey. Tired riders dismounted amid the noisy, uprooted industry of a city arming for war. By then the governor’s council looked toward one saviour for guidance. The patrol’s weary officer was sent apace to Lysaer with news that his riders had failed in their mission to capture Arithon.

Presented across a table littered with crumb-scattered plates and charts spread helter-skelter with the inked-over marks of evolving strategy, the young lancer finished his report. ‘We could not overtake him, my lords. The Shadow Master had a wide lead already, even without Sithaer’s own darkness and a cold that dropped snow to hide his tracks. When we learned he’d snatched a remount from a caravan, we had no choice but turn back. To continue was useless, with our horses winded near to foundering.’

Sunlight slanted across creased layers of parchments that crackled as Diegan leaned on them; that sound, and the rasp as Lord Governor Morfett scratched his fleshy, stubbled jaws filled an interval of stillness. None of the men had slept or refreshed themselves throughout a night spent planning.

The lance captain shifted from foot to foot, justly nervous.

‘Why didn’t you commandeer fresh horses from the caravan’s road-master?’ Diegan demanded at length.

‘My Lord Commander, the merchant who owned the pack-train wasn’t under Etarran jurisdiction.’ Still bitter, the captain added, ‘Even so, we might have had help, had we been able to bribe his road-master a tenth as generously as the renegade.’

Lysaer frowned. Beaten pale by fatigue, long past finesse, he said, ‘But you claimed that Arithon stole the horse.’

‘He did.’ The captain clamped his teeth against frustration. ‘Your Shadow Master dared not attempt a fair offer as his speech, like yours, begging pardon, my lord, is very like the barbarians’. Rather than risk being skewered the instant he opened his mouth, he fired a supply tent for diversion, brought his shadows down and made off with a carthorse. Asked no man’s leave, mind, but left a cloak pin fixed to the picket-line set with an emerald big enough to choke on. The road-master was sick drunk on beer by the time my lancers had the story. The hired troop guarding the caravan were Sithaer bent on having a holiday, and in no mood for chasing any fugitive.’

Lysaer slammed both hands into the clutter. Crumbs bounced, and an ink-flask tottered to the chime of a disarranged butter knife. ‘How like the bastard, Dharkaron Avenger take s’Ffalenn cunning!’

At the prince’s expostulation, Lord Diegan showed the fashionable bland interest, while Governor Morfett started from the act of dabbing smeared butter from his chin. ‘I beg your pardon, my lord?’

Lysaer’s glance flashed anger. ‘Arithon is quick, innovative as a fiend, and aware of our weaknesses to a fine point. I’ve seen his family’s work before. Given any chance, he will play us one against another, until we are driven to spoil our own cause for the havoc. But this time will be different. Arithon’s twisted strategies will be turned back against him. When that happens, Daelion grant that I be on the field to break him.’

Roused from obsession by the lance captain, who cringed in his dust-streaked cloak and sweaty boots, Lysaer softened to sympathy. ‘I see you’re tired. Rest assured, your competence in this matter was never for an instant in question.’ As naturally as if loyalty were his due to praise, he finished, ‘Should all of Etarra arise against the prince of shadows with service as willing as yours, his death will be swiftly accomplished.’

Sojourns

Lane-watch report reaches Prime Enchantress Morriel, that Etarra musters for war; her summons to her First Senior is immediate, and her orders stingingly curt: ‘The Fellowship sorcerers have misplayed the s’Ffalenn succession. Arithon is in flight as a fugitive, and your guess was apt: if Elaira was forewarned of this development, her escapade at Erdane held more than infatuation. Recall her westward to Narms, and pack for travel. We shall meet her there with all speed…’

Bearing the last wraith exorcised at Etarra across the deepest wilds of Daon Ramon, Asandir and the Mad Prophet press on toward Skelseng’s Gate with intent to remove Desh-thiere to a place of better security; while across the sky at their shoulder, sunset burns angry scarlet on a snarl of storm-clouds that Kharadmon has unleashed, to close over lands to the north…

While on the plain of Araithe, pounding at a gallop away from the city of Etarra, a fugitive mounted on a stolen draught-horse rides hunched against the falling slash of rain…

XV. STRAKEWOOD

The last of the equinox storms that Kharadmon released to pass southward encountered the fierce dark of Arithon’s shadows some leagues to the north of Etarra. The result warped nature. For a long time, snow fell like a madman’s tangle of lacework and patterned lands barely clothed by green spring.

Covered by darkness, given a clear road by the biting, unnatural cold, Arithon spread spells of illusion and concealment over the hillsides he travelled, until his reserves burned dry within him. His protections lifted finally because fury and strength were spent to lassitude.

The snowfall thawed to sleet, and then to rain that slashed in blinding torrents; soaked soil heaved porous by frost churned up to a froth of mud and puddles. The deep footing made his horse labour. All gaits past a walk became a rolling, sliding misery that begged for torn tendons and lameness. Out of pity for the dun mare, Arithon turned her loose to wander the sedge-grown downs before she stone-bruised or crippled herself.

Her markings made her far too conspicuous to keep anyway; for all the good sense in his decision, her relinquishment stung, which surprised him. Since Ithamon and Etarra, he had not expected to have any place left in him for sentiment.

The carthorse he stole to replace his spent mare fared worse. Ill-shod and less sure-footed, it stumbled and careened, until Arithon at last dropped the reins and let it go forward as it could. He had abandoned his saddle, the dun’s girth being too short to accommodate a draught breed. Rain soaked both mount and rider to the skin, the only warm patch shared between them where human seat and thigh made contact with steaming wet horse.

Contrary to belief in Etarra, Arithon had not chosen the north road by design, but only because he had been driven, and because south, there lay only Ithamon.

Three days and two nights of blind flight had left him so wrung by exhaustion that when the scouts sent by Steiven to intercept him closed in a ring to bar his way, he had neither strength nor inclination to wheel his head-hanging mount and try even token resistance.

They brought him under escort to a camp in a copse between the hills channelling a river that wound its course north toward the sea. Dawn had broken and the storm had slackened to drizzle. A silvery patter of droplets off leaves and budding twigs interlaced with bright notes of birdsong. Except for small sounds, the chink of bits and soft snorts from an inbound scout’s mount, sign of human habitation remained scant. No smoke trailed from any firepits, and no dogs whined or barked.

Confirmed in his suspicion of an encampment in enemy territory, Arithon dismounted. The wet ends of his cloak dragged streaks through the muddied lather caked to the gelding’s heaving sides. Barbarian hands steadied him as he swayed on his feet. The draught-horse was led away, while a scout pointed toward a hide tent pitched a short distance off through the trees.

‘Lord Steiven awaits you within, your Grace,’ she said.

Arithon followed her direction, too weary to disclaim the royal title. To move at all required daunting concentration. His hips felt on fire, and extended hours astride had left him a jelly-legged mess of hurting muscles. He stumbled into the lodge tent, bringing the scents of skinned grass and fusty wet wool into an atmosphere of warmth, tinted in autumn colours by fine-patterned carpets and candlelight. As the tent flap slapped shut on his heels, he stood blinking, vaguely aware that a cluster of people regarded him expectantly. A rustle of motion shifted their ranks.

Belatedly he understood that they had not simply sat down at the low table scattered across with quill nibs, tin flagons and battered rolls of parchment. Instead, all four were kneeling behind the clutter: one young man, one middle-aged female and two elders. The fifth, a dramatically imposing man who wore a russet leather brigandine said in deep-voiced command, ‘Honour and welcome to s’Ffalenn, your Grace.’

Arithon flinched. A right-handed gesture of denial spattered droplets from pleated cuffs and laces sadly ingrained with dirt. His left arm held something bulky cradled amid the spoiled and wadded wool of his cloak, while, touched to hard highlights in the candle-glow, the circlet of Rathain gleamed forgotten through a rain-plastered swathe of black hair. He spoke finally, in a rasp that sounded dredged from his bootsoles. ‘I ask guest-welcome as a supplicant and a stranger. None here owes me any fealty.’

His eyes were adjusting to the dimness, but the dazzle of candles defeated what clarity of sight he regained. The speaker arose, smiling in welcome, and in a nerve-stressed flash of intuition, Arithon beheld his aura as a mage would. This man with his scarred face and arresting dignity had a seer’s gift. Forevision had revealed this moment to him, and his manner held no fear for compromise as he said, ‘You are Teir’s’Ffalenn, and sanctioned for succession by the hand of Asandir. I am sworn to serve your line, as my forefathers before me were appointed regents of the realm until return of Rathain’s true high king.’

‘Caithdein,’ Arithon whispered, white-lipped.

A stir swept the others at his use of the old tongue, but the phrase for ‘shadow behind the throne’ merely caused the large warrior’s smile to broaden. ‘I’ve preserved Rathain’s heritage and fighting strength only in the absence of a royal heir. Claim your inheritance, my prince. My regency is ended.’

Arithon clamped his teeth against anger. ‘Tell your clansmen to stand up.’ He was too tired for this. The light hurt his eyes and his head spun, and the burden wrapped up in his cloak could not be put off for much longer. ‘I’m a bastard son,’ he added desperately. ‘I lay claim to no man’s loyalty.’

‘Your Grace, that does not matter.’ The aristocratic elder at the clan chieftain’s shoulder was silver-haired and attired as if for court in a black tunic elegantly slashed and lined with gleaming saffron silk. Sure in stride and bearing, he left his place and crossed the piled carpets to bow in quiet style before the prince. As he rose, wing-tip eyebrows turned up. A mouth seamed deep by humour revealed a flash of spaced front teeth. ‘Birth cannot negate your birthright. Illegitimacy has never before deterred the line of s’Ffalenn succession. Back to Torbrand’s time, direct descent has always ranked above the claims of cousins or siblings by marriage. I can name a dozen ballads as quick example.’

Arithon stared at the straight-backed, spare-voiced old man, and weariness spread across his steep features. ‘Who are you?’ he whispered.

The gentleman ignored his question and instead raised a voice too flawless to be mistaken for anything less than a singer’s. ‘You are of s’Ffalenn blood, and the Fellowship of Seven themselves have marked you heir.’

‘Who are you?’ Arithon repeated, strain setting edges to a tone already rough.

‘I’m called Halliron and I, too, have claimed guest welcome of the clans of the north.’

Colour drained from Arithon’s features. The irony hit him like pain: before him stood the Masterbard, the single individual in Athera’s five realms who could grant his heart’s first desire; had an unwanted throne not spoiled opportunity.

A candle burned on a staked brass stand not a foot from Arithon’s elbow. He reached out and pinched the wick, a half a second too late; light had already betrayed his naked longing to every stranger present.

He seized his only diversion and unfurled the wadding of his cloak. ‘Take her,’ he said as veiling cloth fell away from the blue-tinged corpse of the child he had carried in his arms since Etarra. Perhaps five years old, she was stunted and drawn by starvation. The bony arm curled and stiff across her breast showed the ravages of a wound gone septic, and the hand half-hidden by its stained shreds of bandage reeked overpoweringly of corrupted flesh.

Those clan councilmen not already standing shot to their feet in distress.

‘She died in the night,’ Arithon said. ‘She was one of yours, conscripted to serve Etarra’s horse-knackers. Others enslaved with her were freed to make their way home as they could. This one was too sick to walk.’

Someone spoke an oath in the old tongue. Someone else hurried forward to relieve him of the dead child’s weight. This last was a woman clad in the leathers of a scout, and in more ways than her hardness reminiscent of Maenalle of Tysan. ‘It’s Tanlie’s girl, can’t be doubt. No other had that mole on her earlobe.’

Caught aback by the sudden change in his balance, and the loosening of an arm bound by cramps, Arithon fought a battering wave of sorrow. ‘Please, then, offer Tanlie my sympathy. Her girl died bravely, none better.’ He slipped the sodden velvets of his tabard and offered Rathain’s leopard blazon for her shroud.

The woman accepted with tears in her eyes. Before the shock could pass, Arithon rounded on the others who advanced to surround him. ‘I bring you no legacy but strife!’

His cry halted nothing. Quite the contrary: their tall, scar-faced chieftain said firmly, ‘Tanlie’s girl is no grief we’ve not seen, and many times, in the generations since Ithamon was torn to ruins.’

‘No. Not this grief.’ Arithon broke through hoarseness to achieve a tone that finally, mercifully, checked them cold. ‘I’ve been bound and spell-cursed by Desh-thiere to fight my half-brother, Lysaer s’Ilessid. There is no sanity in the hatred that drives us both, only unbridled lust to kill. Lysaer has raised Etarra against me, and their garrison will march within days. Would you spend your lives for a stranger not even born in this world?’

Concern rather than force shaded the clan chieftain’s rebuke. ‘Townsmen have held our lives cheaply since centuries before your birth, and for less cause than butchering horseflesh. Tanlie’s girl lived for naught if she failed to teach you that.’ His glance toward the snuffed candle betrayed his suspicion that his liege’s inveigling tactics hid infirmity. ‘By right of Rathain’s charter, the northlands clans have cause to stand in your defence.’

‘Will you listen?’ Arithon lost grip on his temper. ‘Oppose Lysaer, and you’ll call down certain ruin on your loved ones. Rights are not at issue. Causes are fallacy. We are speaking of geas-driven obsession, a madness that holds to no limits. Against my half-brother, I have no shred of conscience. For that most basic fact, I refuse the responsibility. Your clans would become no defence for me, but just another weapon to be squandered.’

A stir rippled through the gathered clan lords, while a sough of breeze spattered raindrops across the tent roof. The storm outside might be ending: the one brewing inside threatened to break into open contention. The fugitive arrived among the clans was unquestionably of s’Ffalenn blood but he spoke with the forevision of a sorcerer, reminding them uncomfortably that his were the powers of the West Gate Prophecy, that had banished Desh-thiere from the sky. He might wear Torbrand’s image; yet he was a stranger, unknown and unnamed, promising disaster and pleading release from his birthright. Hotly awaited though his arrival had been, lives hung in the balance. The council would be wise to listen.

Blunt-faced, his hair greyed as worn steel by years of ambush and skirmish, Caolle urged his chieftain to stay wary. The rest marked his words in respect, for the toughened veteran presented opinions few others cared to voice.

Steiven was moved, but not to caution. He left his place by the council table and took stance beside Halliron. His rangy frame dwarfed the Masterbard, who was not short, and his hazel eyes shone bitter as he admitted, ‘I have Sight. For years I have lived with foreknowledge of the moment and manner of my death. There is no option, your Grace of Rathain, elders. Etarra will march upon the northlands whether or not a Teir’s’Ffalenn is given sanctuary among us.’ He half-turned to face down Arithon, his large hands hooked in the lacing that clasped his belt with its row of black-hafted throwing knives. ‘My liege, our destiny is to defend you. The city garrison will campaign against us, and we must stand to fight. Your choice is simple. Shall we die for an empty title, or a living, breathing sovereign?’

Arithon measured the taller man. His stillness bespoke distaste, for the claim upon his conscience was shameless; also double-binding as Sithaer’s traps for the damned since the plea gave proof of the clan chief’s supreme dedication. Only the tap of the rain across canvas, and the whispered hiss of hot wax as draft fanned the candleflames lent sound to the tensioned atmosphere.

Arithon’s response, when it came, was pitched for the chieftain’s ears alone. ‘My lord. Ath and Daelion Fatemaster have conspired. They should have sent me a regent I could hate, a man drunk on power and tied to petty interests. Where the unlucky accident of my birth would never bind me, your courage leaves me humbled and tied. As the sovereign cause of your death, what is left? It’s a shabby, spiritless gesture, to beg in advance your forgiveness.’

‘That you have,’ said the clan chieftain of Deshir, neither speechless, nor subdued. ‘But in exchange I ask your friendship, Arithon of Rathain.’

The prince managed to curb his recoil at the unexpected knowledge of his name. ‘Did your dreams spoil all of my secrets?’ And then strain and sleeplessness undid him. He had to cover his face with both hands to mask unbidden emotion. ‘What are you called?’ he said through his fingers.

‘Steiven s’Valerient, Earl of Deshir.’

A shudder jarred the prince. The oddly-singed silk of his shirt sleeve slithered back to reveal a seared weal that snaked the length of his right forearm, to vanish under cloth at the elbow. Arithon ignored the murmurs that broke out among the clan lords, as through blistered, shaking hands he swore guest-oath.

‘To this house, its lord, and his sworn companions, I pledge friendship. Ath’s blessing upon family and kin, strength to the heir, and honour to the name of s’Valerient. Beneath this roof and before Ath, count me brother, my service as true as blood-kin. Dharkaron witness.’

Arithon’s fingers fell away, to uncover features as hollowed as stripped bone. ‘You’ve seen this before,’ he accused.

Steiven laughed. From his towering height, he embraced his royal liege like a son. ‘I’ve lived for it.’

Then, aware that Arithon’s exhaustion threatened collapse, he shouldered the prince’s weight as he had done for his own spent scouts and in peremptory command sent his clan elders packing to fetch bath water, hot food and dry blankets.

The war council resumed upon the moment Arithon’s needs had been attended. Etarra was capable of mounting an invasion force ten thousand strong: and with an understanding turned to grimness by five long centuries of hatred, Steiven dared not assume that the army sent after Arithon would be one man less than full muster.

Etarran lives would be counted cheaply for the ruin of the s’Ffalenn royal line.

‘I’ll need another message run through the relay,’ said the gaunt old Earl of Fallowmere, his single, unclouded eye fixed like a gimlet on his regent. ‘By tomorrow every scout I have of fighting age will march to support your Deshans.’

‘Well, they’ll get here too damned late!’ Caolle drove his poignard into the rough-split wood that planked the table. ‘You know that fey princeling is right. If we stand, we’re going to have a massacre.’

‘If we don’t stand, we’ll be slaughtered on the run, or else die of rot and fever in the boglands of Anglefen by summer.’ Quietly, Steiven added, ‘We’ll fight. But the field must be chosen to our advantage.’

‘Biggest, blood-spilling raid we’ll ever stage,’ said the last Earl of Fallowmere. ‘For myself, I wouldn’t miss it.’

Caolle glared.

In a warmth of brotherly bickering, the strategies were argued, discarded and reworked, chart after chart unrolled and shoved aside until parchments layered the carpets like quilting. A site was finally chosen in a range of valleys along the Tal Quorin where the current ran wide and shallow between a grassy verge of low banks.

‘All right then.’ Steiven raised his corded arms, the dull studs on his brigandine winking in sequence as he stretched. ‘Roust last night’s patrol. All our camps must relocate east to the river site. The first arrivals will need to start cutting timber to build the traps.’

‘And the prince?’ Caolle demanded. His chapped lips thinned at the softening he saw on his chieftain’s scarred face. ‘Ah, no, my lord, you’re not thinking to wait out his grace’s infirmity. This is unsafe territory and we need to break camp before nightfall.’

There followed a moment in which clanlord and war captain clashed glances across the candletops. In Deshir, the custom was unbending: any scout unfit for travel was given a mercy stroke and abandoned where he lay by the trail. In lands ranged by Etarra’s headhunters, litters for the wounded and the lame endangered those men still hale; and no man, however minor his injury, was ever left at risk of captivity.

‘You wake him,’ Steiven invited with a fierce flash of teeth. ‘I warrant he’ll walk, just to spite you. It’s the grey he rode in on we’ll likely be leaving for crowbait.’

Arithon came half-awake as a warm weight settled over his knees. Something else tugged at his hair and another touch trailed across the knuckles of his unbandaged hand that lay outside the blankets.

He drew breath and stirred, and the stiffness of his body caught him up in an ache that made him gasp.

‘You woke him up,’ a child’s voice piped anxiously.

‘Didn’t,’ said another, fast as echo, from the other side of the pallet.

Arithon opened his eyes.

‘Did too, see?’ said a brunette perhaps six years old, with tea-coloured eyes and dimples, who lounged against the ticking by his shoulder. ‘He might get mad.’

Exactly what he chose to do next became the focus of four pairs of eyes, from the auburn-haired angel astride his knees, to the tallest, regarding him with pre-teen dignity from the bedstead, to the least of them, as dark-haired as the father she resembled, sucking on two fingers and staring shyly from behind her eldest sister.

Arithon elbowed himself halfway upright, and froze as the slide of the blankets warned he was naked underneath. His sluggish thoughts scrambled to reorient and to integrate hide walls and the patchworked fur coverlets of a sleeping cubicle with his last waking memory, of an inadvertent nap in the saddle that had ended in a fall from a moving horse.

‘You aren’t mad, are you?’ said the sable-haired ten-year-old with another bounce against his knee.

He hurt everywhere. He was too tired still by half, and if he wanted to be annoyed, he lacked the will. Outnumbered, and pinned beneath the coverlets by a weight of small admirers, he adjusted his tactics to accommodate.

A short interval later Steiven’s wife Dania peeked into the alcove. She carried a bowl of bread dough braced against her hip, and was fumingly prepared to dress down daughters warned all morning to leave their guest in peace.

The miscreants had found a length of rawhide. Five heads bent together over a puzzle that, with the help of tiny hands and much patient instruction from the prince, was forming into an intricate piece of knotwork.

Dania’s reprimand died unspoken. Quietly, carefully, she moved to slip the privacy flap closed. But he had heard her, involved as he was, even through the giggles of the girls.

‘It’s all right. Tashka has told me the camp is to move this afternoon. I should have been wakened soon in any case.’ Green eyes turned in question toward the doorway, made the more vivid by close proximity of the oldest child’s fiery hair. ‘You have beautiful daughters, lady. They are yours, I see, and Lord Steiven’s? The resemblance is too striking to overlook.’

The bread bowl suddenly seemed an encumbrance. Aware that as her sovereign he deserved a semblance of courtesy, Dania froze with the intuition that if she curtseyed, she was going to see him angry.

Her youngest displaced one awkwardness by creation of another.

‘Mama, look!’ Edal called pulling her hands too fast from hide lacing. Oblivious to her sisters’ cries of dismay as the pattern collapsed into tangles, she seized Arithon’s wrist in chubby hands and said loudly, ‘Look, the prince has scars.’

‘Everybody who escapes from Etarra has scars, Edal,’ Dania scolded in gentle exasperation. ‘But it’s never polite to speak of them.’ She raised the bread bowl as if it were a shield before her breast and delivered a succession of orders that set her daughters to flight like butterflies. As the last one vanished, she discovered the prince still regarding her. He did have scars, she knew from attending him the night before; ones not in keeping with his station, and except for the queer burn on his arm, too old to have happened in Etarra.

The awkwardness remained. Unused to strangers, far less ones born royal, Dania wished her curiosity could be deflected as easily as her daughters’, by a ploy with a scrap of hide string.

He found words that had equal effect. ‘I should like to help with the packing.’

Gracefully turned to practicalities, Dania said, ‘Your clothing is still wet from being washed. There are leggings and a tunic that should fit you in the chest by the wall. When you’re dressed, we’ll see about food.’

‘The Masterbard,’ asked Arithon in the same light tone of conversation. ‘Is he still with the clans?’

‘Yes.’ Despite diffidence, Dania smiled. The expression lifted cares from her face and softened the seams of hard living and weather. ‘Halliron groused too much to refuse. Danger, he said, went hand in hand with history. At his age, he claimed he’d expire from impatience before he’d hear news at second hand.’

Something retreated behind Arithon’s expression, though his eyes like shadowed emerald never shifted in their framework of gaunt flesh. It stung her not to know why the Masterbard’s presence should cause upset; aside from prodigious talent as a musician, Halliron was the very soul of kindness. When Arithon graciously dismissed her with his thanks, Lady Dania was relieved to escape to undertake the much tidier frustration of punching bread dough.

Arithon arose and stiffly dressed in the black-dyed leathers offered for his use from the chest. These were sewn of deerhide, beaten soft and adorned with pale threadwork at collar, shoulder and hem. The silk needle-work was finely embroidered; but there was no silver lacing. In Deshir’s forest, one did not wear garments that might inadvertently flash or catch the light. Dania’s mention of damp clothing was likely an excuse to wean away the coronation finery that was ill-suited for the trail.

Arithon emerged from the alcove to find, embarrassed, that the only clan lodge tent still standing had been the one under which he sheltered. Every other hide dwelling sat on the beaten earth in a pine clearing, furled tight as puffballs just sprouted after a rainfall. A team of children appeared immediately to begin striking the s’Valerient tents. Dania’s daughters were everywhere under the feet of the boys who yanked stakes and unreeled spun cordage to coax collapsing hide to fall in folds. They all carried knives, though the eldest among them looked not a day past fourteen.

Nowhere did Arithon encounter signs of grief or burial of the dead child he had borne from Etarra. At first impression, these clanfolk seemed more hardened even than Maenalle’s, more scarred, more grim, more ingrained by desperate necessity. By overhearing stray comments, Arithon gathered the men had marched ahead of the camp to the site on the south-east edge of Deshire forest, where pitched battle would be fought with Etarra’s army.

Found at her baking over an open-air trestle, Dania pushed a fallen coil of hair from her cheek with the back of one floury wrist. ‘Well need journey-cakes for the trail. These are hard and savourless, so I’ve made sweet bread. Edal’s gone to the ovens so you can have yours hot.’ She turned her head, prepared to call, when a tardy daughter reappeared with steaming bread in a linen napkin. ‘Eat,’ Dania urged, still absorbed with the batter that clung to the bowl. ‘You must be famished.’

He was. Three days and four nights with too little food had left him faint to the edge of sickness. Arithon took the linen and lifted the bread, forced despite his hunger to pick at it slowly. Even bland sustenance sat uneasily in his painfully empty innards. He realized that he was being treated as an invalid. ‘Last night.’ His voice was very soft. ‘What happened?’

Dania banged her hands down so hard the wooden bowl close to cracked. ‘Ath, you would ask.’ Although her back was turned, motherly instinct pinpointed little Edal’s eager regard. Dania reflexively packed her daughter off to fetch back a bucket of clean water. ‘You were too tired to ride. Any fool could have seen. But the men, they’ve lived with troubles for so long that I sometimes think we’ve come to value all the wrong sort of things.’

‘I didn’t ask for excuses,’ Arithon interrupted mildly. ‘What happened?’

She was blunt. ‘You fell off your horse. My Lord Steiven took you up across his saddlebow.’

That jogged his recall. Fragments came back to him of Caolle’s sarcastic comment that he should be left in the mud by the trail, that the clans had outgrown any need for royal sovereignty; of somebody else in drier tones suggesting he should be lashed to a packhorse like deadwood, that the scars chafed on his wrists were enough indication that this sort of happenstance might not be new.

Dania began to stack up dirtied spoons and bowls to allow him the chance to let down his odd barrier of silence, maybe broach what had hounded him out of Etarra in the first place with only clothes fit for feasting on his back.

When his stillness became prolonged, she risked a peek and found him gone, the napkin filled with crumbs abandoned in neat folds upon the rock where he had been sitting.

The clouds and the rain had passed and left the air redolent with evergreen, underlaid by the mustier wet of shed needles. Arithon strolled the hard-beaten paths of what had once been a long-term campsite. He should have been unobtrusive in his soft black leathers, under sun-striped shadows beneath the trees; but he was the only man in a company of older women, bearing mothers and young children. Busy enough with securing leather bundles, or sealing wrapped belongings in oaken casks, they seldom gave more than a glance at his approach. Behind his back, they were all wont to stare.

He allowed them, of a mind to make observations himself. Small birds with gold-banded wings foraged, pecking at the dirt where the lodge tents had set. They took off in fan-shaped flocks, wove and wheeled, to alight again just ahead. A small girl told him they were pine-sparrows. Arithon thanked her, and moved on.

Like the last, this camp kept no dogs. Infants rode on their mothers’ backs; toddlers too young for chores laughed at their play, but did not stray into the pinewoods. Half-clad, or wearing leather patched with motley, they tussled at sticks and ball between mounds of household goods left stranded by the furled lodges. The casks, the chests lashed in protective layers of oiled leather, the thick-woven carpets with their bright colours hidden in rolls; all were tied and stacked in piles, to be carried off to a warren of hidden root-cellars dug into the woodland floor. The bitter conclusion was inescapable. The site the clans were leaving was a home of sorts, familiar and often revisited. The place they were going to on account of their prince was bare and temporary, and necessities would be carried on their backs.

Arithon fingered the little tin canister purloined from Sethvir’s saddlebags. He had not hesitated to take the tienelle in the heat of his escape from Etarra; still less did he regret the theft now. Against Lord Diegan’s army, the defenders of Strakewood Forest would be outnumbered nine to one. That quandary added weight to the ache of total weariness. If he were to shy from using his talents, directed by every scrap of augury he could draw from the herb’s narcotic visions, the people who sheltered him must rely upon chance for survival. But in order to smoke the leaves to sound the future he required absolute privacy.

In that he was already thwarted.

Even if there had been a refuge between the bustle where no one would disturb or remark on him, the packers were hurrying to complete their tasks by afternoon. Aware that two boys had sneaked up to dog his steps in exaggerated imitation of his gait, Arithon regarded the rain-matted detritus of pine needles that his boots passed across without track. A thought and a chill ran through him: he might escape by becoming too visible. At once, with some savagery, he scuffled his heels to foster false impression of his ignorance, that these folk needed less than a secretive caution necessary to survival in the wild.

The contempt the boys copied from their elders, that Rathain’s royal scion was weak, or maybe helpless, was a trait it might suit him to foster, Arithon thought. The frustration he had leashed behind forced and mild courtesy perhaps was a perverse sort of kindness. Nights and days in the saddle had worn his body; in spirit, the wrenching realignment that had taken place in the course of Desh-thiere’s curse lay compounded by reckless overuse of spellcraft. Resisting the creeping and insidious urge to turn back to Etarra and attack Lysaer claimed further toll upon his strength. His depleted grip on self-command made mastery of the herb’s ill effects too risky to try until he rested: in the throes of the poison’s withdrawal symptoms Arithon knew he would be lucky to be able to walk.

Better if these clansmen believed him overbred to the point of uselessness. Once they had repulsed Etarra’s invasion, his shadows and his aid would not be needed. Their disdain might drive them finally to release him from the blood bonds of Rathain’s sovereignty.

Charged with perverse and bitter humour, Arithon left the canister’s deadly contents for later. He retrod his course through the wheeling pine-sparrows to Lady Dania, where, seemingly overcome by her distressed protestations, he allowed himself to be talked out of his earlier insistence that he help with a share of the packing.

In the course of the next four days, Arithon let slip the stern barriers imposed by a lifetime of mage training. For his puzzles and his oddments of sleight-of-hand illusion, he won the undying adulation of Dania’s daughters, who had never known a grown man to play games with them. The clan boys stayed aloof, until he captivated the smallest with a whistle carved of beechwood and given voice with shaved shims of river reed. After that, Arithon spent every waking hour the domestic camp was not moving on the trail seated by someone’s fireside, whittling.

For a morning, their going was made raucous by the young, hooting on their new toys. They laughed at their daring, to be making noises unnatural to the wakened wood; but the whistles were confiscated, and Arithon was chastised by a weatherbeaten woman who would have borne arms alongside the fighting men, had she not been near-term with a pregnancy. ‘You’ll have headhunters on us with your addle-headed ways. Our boys are needing no such silly influence!’

Arithon regarded her with green-eyed, languid resignation, and murmured soft apology. The woman left in disgust.

‘Royal he may be, but what use have the clans for a dreamer!’ he heard her exhorting some others, in a rest-stop farther down the trail.

He let the comment pass, though heads turned to see whether he had overheard, and what would be his reaction. He gave them back his closed eyes, and crossed hands behind his head, to all appearance asleep with his back against a tree so rough that the bark had turned silver with dried moss.

The whistles had drawn no headhunters, because he had set arcane defences against any outside seeker who should chance to track their company. The entrapments were subtle, a fooling of the eye to make sight linger on the flick of a leaf in the breeze, or deflect thought into futile reflection to read meaning in some willow’s gnarled roots.

Dania had to shake him out of trance, when the time came to move on.

During nights by the fireside, with one or another of Dania’s daughters fallen asleep across his lap, Arithon immersed himself in Halliron’s music. The M’asterbard had an exquisite, expressive style upon the strings, and he did not shy from imparting passionate emotion into his playing. The lyranthe he carried was ancient and ornate in a sparely elegant way. Her voice was so like the one that Arithon had been forced to abandon at Etarra that she, too, might have been crafted by a Paravian maker. Arithon dared not touch her fretboard to look for Elshian’s rune. The feel of polished wood, of responsive, silver-toned strings, would have overcome his defences like drugged wine. The hope could hurt too much, that the chance of reprieve from kingship seemed a scant step closer.

Those evenings by the fireside, Halliron’s ballads wove their mystery as though just for him. He chuckled at their merriness and let the tears track unabashed down his face. The whispers this created suited his purpose. By daylight, while he walked abandoned to reverie down the trail, he replayed in his mind Halliron’s polished arpeggios, his trills of ornamentation, the clean, meticulous cadences whose simplicity shaped naked force. At such times, when the stares of Deshir clanswomen turned aside in disgust, he would draw the eyes of the bard.

Halliron had depths of subtlety well disguised by his congenial nature. Since the oddity intrigued him, that the prince so taken with his music had never sought closer acquaintance, he took pains to hide his interest.

The domestic camp moved by night and rested only after full daybreak. On the morn they were to reach their destination, the mists of early dawn ripped and dispersed into tatters, cut by slanted shafts of white sunlight. The birds were loud at their nesting calls. Like strands of silvered silk wound through its green forest tapestry, the river Tal Quorin re-emerged in a bend to flow once again beside the trail. The thin, acid soil of the heights gave up its black mantle of pines. The fertile trough of the watershed here lay broken into long, irregular valleys. Winding through hollows and glens, the river current lisped over glacial deposits of smoothed granite, and skeined eddies around willow roots like the knobbled knees of old men. The demise of Desh-thiere had brought change. Little plants pressed up through moss and pine-needles, and opened coloured petals for the first time in five centuries untrammelled by the sooty prints of fungal spores.

Steiven’s daughters clung to Arithon like shadows as together they enjoyed discovery of each new bud and petal; where the wild flowers matched those he remembered from Rauven’s deep woodland glens, he gave their names. Where they did not, he knelt, the sun warm across his back, and shared wonders otherworldly and strange in drifts of dew-drenched leaf mould.

His absorption was not so complete that he overlooked the faint, sour ring of steel that threaded through the trilled cries and fast-beating wings of disturbed marsh flickers. Halliron’s fascination had not stopped at appearances, for all that the camp women had already dismissed their prince as a fanciful dreamer. Only the bard remained observant enough to spot the brief frisson that shocked through the prince’s bearing.

Puzzled, Halliron tossed damp hair from his temples the better to watch as Arithon straightened up from contemplation. Swift words from him and the children ranged eagerly ahead to scout their next find on their own. Arithon hung behind, a shadow in dark leathers under the light-flecked boughs of a hazel thicket.

From the crest of an unseen hillside, the axe blows reached ragged crescendo. The tree bole under punishment gave a juddering crack and fell to earth in a whipping tangle of greenery that hissed like a rip through warm air. Arithon recoiled. He turned as if jabbed by sharp pain and his eyes passed unseeing across the bard, standing not twenty feet behind, with the forest shade hatching his elegant court velvets that stood out too plainly to be missed.

Another tree cracked and fell. Exposed full face to an observation he would have avoided, Arithon paled in the grip of some deep, introspective discomfort.

And Halliron caught his breath in comprehension. Acquainted with the Warden of Althain, befriended by Asandir, he saw into this prince and recognized like a watermark in fine paper the stamp of a mage-trained awareness.

Arithon’s interest in trailside wildflowers had been a ruse to mask attention linked to the deeper mysteries of the forest. Caught as he was in partial trance, the axe-cut, dying trees sent a scream of pain across his nerves. An unprepared part of him was bark and leaves and running spring sap, slashed untimely from its taproot by blows from sharpened steel. The shock momentarily upset his mastery. He struggled, stumbling slightly, to tear his stung consciousness free.

Pushed by reflex before thought, Halliron hastened forward and caught the prince by an elbow to support his unsteady step.

The touch caused Arithon to snap stiff. His head came up, around, and in green eyes the Masterbard caught a flare that looked like smothered anger. The impression was false. Halliron saw past hostility to what perhaps was an envy sprung from offence; indisputably the resentment was directed fully and personally toward him.

Halliron’s startlement caused him to let go, simultaneous with Arithon’s instinctive jerk backward, with the result that sensitive musician’s fingers recorded an instant impression. The forearm under its covering of water-spoiled silk was wiry and fit, not at all the constitution of the fine-drawn dandy the prince purported to affect.

Arithon spun away to hide an expression Halliron would have bribed in gold to have read. Between the two men lay a silence heavy with secrets, and as if their burden were at once too much, the prince abruptly sat down. He fingered the edge of a rock hoarded like some hoary, moss-crusted jewel between the miserly grip of old roots. ‘I’m sorry.’ His apology was too quick and cold. ‘I believed I was alone.’

Halliron absorbed this display with narrowed, tawny eyes. He observed on intuition, ‘You had wards set, and not just to hide the notes of whistles.’

‘If so, that’s no business of yours.’ Arithon let his knuckles fall loose in dry grass, left wind-broken from winter’s snowfall like the bundled small bones of dead birds. He had regained control. At least, he no longer shivered as the axe-falls rang. Only the earth seemed to shudder in vibration as each quick trunk slammed the ground.

After a moment, the bard said, ‘If you want Deshir’s clans to disown you, desert them.’

That touched a nerve. Arithon’s smile at the barb was full lipped, and brimmingly, off-puttingly merry. ‘Desert me, instead. Your perceptions feel like a tinker’s spilled needles: a punishing trap for false steps.’

Halliron was not easily irritated. Years of settling vain, even senile patrons and short-tempered, envious peers had taught him to treat with human nature sparely, to unwind misunderstanding like a snarl in fine-spun wool. Intrigued by Arithon’s reticence, he gave no ground, even as Arithon pressed to escape and regain untrammelled access to the trail.

There was no gap. Halliron had him boxed between a stand of dense brush and the seamed, ungiving face of another rock.

Spoiled as his behaviour suggested, the Teir’s’Ffalenn did not have the nerve or the anger in him to shoulder an old man aside to have his way.

‘I could ask,’ Halliron said in the Shandian drawl that seeped back occasionally from his boyhood, ‘why, when you first met me, did you react as if I were a threat to you?’

‘Because,’ Arithon began, and on impulse, switched liquidly to the Paravian. ‘Cuel ean i murdain ei dath-tol na soaren’; which translated, ‘you are the enemy I never expected to meet’.

His accent was flawless. And the coiled hardness in him this time would not be denied. Halliron moved aside before he was indeed physically shoved.

Undeceived by the show for a moment, the Masterbard watched the scion of Rathain’s murdered high kings stride away. The man was not angry. However desperately he wished to foster that impression, to a bard’s ear for nuance, it was obvious that Arithon was unbearably distressed.

Halliron resumed his walk in pensive thought. For some pernicious reason he felt guilty for even this slight an intrusion into the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s altogether raptly-guarded privacy. If anything left the bard irked, it was his suspicion that Steiven’s daughters were entrusted with an honesty nobody else in the camp seemed to merit.

The clans of Deshir were altering the landscape in the valleys to either side of the Tal Quorin’s watercourse. The woods rang with the noise of their feverish haste, of axes and falling timber and the grinding over stones of makeshift sledges. A party of raiders had stolen draught teams. The chink of chain and harness fittings blended with drovers’ calls. Even Halliron’s pony was pressed into service, hauling hampers of cut brush.

Upon arrival, the women left tents and belongings still furled in their packs in a clearing. Every free hand was set to work, while the children and the elderly were sent out to forage or dress the game sent in by the hunting parties who ranged the glades further afield. The racket had scattered the deer, the birds, and even the beavers were driven into hiding by rafts of cut logs sent downstream.

Lord Steiven was south, below the white-water rapids where the river fanned into sheets of open water between grassy green swards of marsh. There he oversaw the remaking of innocent landscape into traps to mire Etarra’s army. Arithon did not join him. Neither did he lend his strength to the shifting of logs and stones. Conspicuous for his idleness, for even the Masterbard had volunteered to help the cooks, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn sat in the shade through the morning, apparently taking a nap. Nobody saw him move, nor as much as open an eye.

When the work-crews returned to eat at midday he was still there and had to be wakened for the meal.

And yet, he must have stirred. A scout who passed through the armoury lodge found the tactical maps disturbed. Penned in the margins of a supply draft in fussy, over-ornamented script were concisely drawn summaries of the weapon and training profile of Etarra’s garrison troops, along with names, numbers and insightful characteristics of most of its ranking officers.

Since the prince never mentioned this contribution, the matter became overshadowed. The contempt of the clan’s womenfolk became all the deeper entrenched by Arithon’s current absorption, of drawing puzzles in the dirt with the toddlers. His laughter tangled with the talk of the men at the boards and the scrape of knives as they sawed and hammered the dry waybread into chunks to soften in hot gravy. Veiled looks were cast at the prince between bites. The younger scouts began to sound bitter, while the most campaign-scarred grew silent. Steiven was not present to stem the quietly acid speculation, which Arithon joyously ignored. His mood stayed isolate, as unshakeable as if he were deaf, or a half-wit.

Afternoon saw the Teir’s’Ffalenn kneeling amid the patchworked shadows of a beechgrove to receive oath of fealty from the fighting scouts of the clans. The timing of the ceremony had been at Steiven’s orders: men grumbled in dour, closed knots that the roster might have been changed if their earl had come back from the lower valley in time to hear gossip from his wife.

But delayed until the last minute, Steiven arrived still winded from his hurry to reach the glen. That Strakewood’s clansmen had gathered in his absence, half-stripped and muddy, or sweating in leathers still grimed from their labours on the defenceworks, was in tribute to the loyalty given their chieftain rather than respect for the prince about to become their liege lord.

Steiven assumed position a half-step to one side of the s’Ffalenn prince. Except for recovery of Asandir’s circlet that was proof of his sanction for succession, Arithon still wore the black suede tunic and leggings that had once belonged to Lady Dania’s younger brother. As at the earlier ceremony in Etarra, Arithon carried no ornament beyond his father’s signet. The smoke-dark blade forged by Paravian mastery was struck upright into the earth at his elbow, the emerald in the pommel a hard green sparkle underlying the reflections of the foliage. Already in place on one knee in the crumbled detritus of last season’s fall of copper leaves, he met no one’s interested glance. His attention seemed absorbed more by the cheep of nesting wrens in the branches than in the greeting murmured by his regent.

For a moment Lord Steiven knew regret that an occasion as momentous as this should be held at short notice in the greenwood. The last such ceremony would have taken place in Ithamon, under beautiful vaulted ceilings rich with jewelled hangings and banners. Customarily held on a prince’s twentieth birthday, past events had been preceded and followed by grand celebration and feasting.

Saddened by the sombreness of this gathering, and moved to a crush of emotion that would barely allow speech, that he had lived for this day; that he, of all his exiled ancestors, should be the one to stand witness to the returned s’Ffalenn scion, Steiven drew breath to renew a ritual many thousands of years old. ‘I, Teir’s’Valerient, appointed Regent of the Realm and Warden of Ithamon through my father, and his fathers, back to the last crowned sovereign, bring before you Arithon, son of Avar, sanctioned heir and direct descendant of Torbrand s’Ffalenn, founder of the line appointed by the Fellowship of Seven to rule the principalities of Rathain. Let any man who questions the validity of this prince’s claim now stand forth.’

Feet shifted, deadened from sound by damp earth. The shrill cry of a hawk hung loud in the air.

Steiven resumed. ‘Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn, turn your back. A prince who would accept oath of fealty must trust those he would lead and defend. If any among this gathering have earned your ill-will, state their names for all to hear, that they may be excluded.’

Seeming delicate as porcelain before his regent’s scarred height, Arithon tipped up his face. ‘I bear no man grudge.’ The words were clear, for all that his eyes were barriered. His fingers shook as he gripped and pulled Alithiel’s blade from the earth. ‘I appoint you my guardian against treachery.’ His raised knee shifted; he pivoted, and neatly, still kneeling, turned his back.

According to time-worn ritual, Steiven positioned himself at Arithon’s shoulder, facing the waiting company. ‘Let those who would be feal companions of Arithon, son of Avar, step forward and present a weapon in pledge of service and defence.’

The clan chieftain then drew his own sword and ran its point into the ground. One by one his scouts and his fighting men, his hunters and his women who had no family representative to swear for them, filed forward. They passed with bent neck beneath the unsheathed threat of Alithiel guarding the royal back and left knives, daggers, poignards or heirloom swords in token of their trust. When the last of them had returned to their place, Arithon was permitted to turn around.

But not, even yet, to arise. On his knees, white now as any mayor’s bleached linen, he bowed his head before that hedge of steel and crossed apparently fragile hands over the hilt of the nearest sword.

Thin and weary as a fox run to earth, he drew breath to renounce personal claim to the life he had found in Athera. ‘I pledge myself, body, mind and heart to serve Rathain: to guard, to hold unified and to deliver justice according to Ath’s law. If the land knows peace, I preserve her: war, I defend. Through hardship, famine or plague, I suffer no less than my sworn companions. In war, peace and strife, I bind myself to the charter of the land, as given by the Fellowship of Seven, strike me dead should I fail to uphold for all people the rights stated therein. Dharkaron witness.’

‘Arise Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn and Crown Prince this moment of Rathain.’ Steiven stepped back, smiling, as his liege at last gained his feet. ‘Ath grant you long life, and sound heirs.’

Arithon laid hand on the chieftain’s huge bastard sword and drew its weight from the earth. He offered the weapon back to Steiven with his royal blessing. And one by one, for what seemed like an hour, other weapons were returned in like fashion, binding their owners to loyal service. The steel was their oath; the burden of their lives and safety, now and forever, Arithon’s; as he was now theirs, until death.

The muttering over his weaknesses cut off sharply, as Steiven’s barked orders sent each team back to felling trees and digging pitfalls for the incomplete defence works.

As the clearing rapidly emptied, Arithon met his Lord Regent’s regard. His green eyes not quite yet rinsed to bleakness, he said, ‘My first act will be the rending of that oath.’

Steiven’s easy humour vanished as he proffered Alithiel to his prince. ‘I’ve heard. The talk doesn’t fool me. And you dwell on the matter, your Grace, like one blind to the lay of the weather. Etarra’s hatreds smoulder hot enough that it takes no spark at all to set them burning.’

Arithon accepted back the icy weight of Alithiel. The haste under which he had fled his coronation had kept the blade without a sheath: he was obliged to slide her bared length through a belt that was nicked and sliced from such usage, and the force as he rammed the weapon home roused an angry ring from the steel. ‘Lysaer is not fit to be judged by rational men. He has been cursed, as I have, and feuds or justice have no bearing on his actions. I would not see your clansmen become the tool that Etarra’s garrison has.’

He brushed past before Steiven could answer. Without further word to anyone, Arithon left the clearing in the opposite direction to the camp.

Steiven started after him, but a hand on his forearm caught him back.

‘Let him go,’ murmured Halliron in that musical gentleness that could and had stopped killing fights. ‘My heart tells me this prince knows all too clearly what he’s about. You cannot shoulder what troubles him.’ A smile revealed the sly gap in front teeth. ‘Besides, if he’s touchy as the ballads name his forebears, he’ll tolerate no man’s interference.’

Steiven swore explosively. ‘I know that. You know that. But likeness to his ancestors isn’t going to satisfy my clansmen. If this womanish brooding continues, my war captain has vowed he’ll strip the royal person to his short hairs to find out if they hide a castration. By Ath!’ the former regent ended with rare and exasperated fierceness, ‘If Caolle tries, it’s on my mind I’m going to let him!’

Attraction

Etarra prepared for war. The clang of the armourers’ mallets rang from the smithies day and night, counterpointed by the whack and slap of practice staves as last year’s recruits were drilled to professional polish. Almost overnight it seemed that every young man of fighting age appeared in the streets wearing half-armour.

Not all would be leaving for battle. The highborn elite, those whose pedigrees traced back without taint to the original burghers who had overthrown the old monarchy, found themselves sidelined in the bustle created by the renegade prince. Their exploits, their mischief and their profligate gambling debts were no longer the talk of the ladies’ parlours. Arithon’s name had supplanted them, and out of fear of his shadows, mistresses and favoured courtesans turned fickle in sudden preference for strapping big fellows with less refined manners and swords.

The parties of the rich and young grew the more frenzied to compensate. From Diegan, Lady Talith heard details: of how the bluest-blooded and brashest had drunk claret until they staggered, and then staged a race up the alarm tower to see who could be first to swing from the bass bell’s clapper. The winner had emerged miraculously unscathed. Those less lucky, judged by the nature of their scars, became heroes, or the butt of scathing jokes which was the fashionable way to test their charm. One gallant had twisted an ankle. Another had fallen through a railing and suffered two broken wrists. He appeared in splints at the soirées and bragged that the ladies could kiss him on both cheeks at once, as he lacked a sound hand to fend them off.

Once, Lady Talith would have sat front and centre to egg on admirers and dare foolish feats to gain her favour. She would have laughed at the cleverest wit and gleaned all the gossip to unravel the fierce tapestry of intrigue that underlay the glitter of Etarran society.

But this night found her separate from the festivities, breathing in the outdoor airs that perfumes inside the ballroom behind her were selected with care to overpower. There was nothing attractive by night in damp stone; starlight, to her, was too uncomfortably new to feel safe. The laughter, the dancing and the delicate sparkle of light through the pierced porcelain of a thousand candle-shades should have drawn her back like a moth to flame. Her gown of costly damask was new, and her jewels simple, but dazzling.

But the parties now seemed silly shamming. She resisted the creeping ennui to no avail and just as fiercely fought to deny its cause; to avoid setting name to the day, no, the moment, when the wild antics of the men had become reduced to just games, and empty ones at that.

Diegan had experienced a similar change. Though brother and sister had not compared thoughts, his humour had been flat for days. Where once he would have battled jealously to retain his circle of admirers, now they were deserting his side like ebb-tide, with himself the one least dismayed. It felt, Talith decided, as if somebody had entered her childhood home and maliciously rearranged all the furniture.

She could not flee the recognition that her life seemed dreary since Lysaer s’Ilessid had stepped into it.

Talith leaned over the balustrade. Never before then had she known admiration that did not arise from flamboyance; humour that did not belittle; power not bought through brutish intrigues or bribes.

The man’s direct nature had cut through Etarra’s convoluted greed and excesses like a sharpened knife through mould rinds.

A breeze whispered through the garden, loosing a small blizzard of petals and almost masking the footfalls that approached from across the terrace. She was annoyed. She had fended off four dandies on her way to the doorway.

‘Go away.’ Cold, disastrously discourteous, she refused to look aside and so much as acknowledge the identity of the man she dismissed.

The footsteps stopped.

Warm hands reached out and gently gathered the twist of hair that trailed down the nape of her neck. She stiffened, dismayed to realize she could not spin and deal a slap for the impertinence. His fingers had tightened too firmly: like a boat, she was effectively moored.

‘They insisted inside that you had grown tired of the party,’ Lysaer s’Ilessid said in greeting.

She shivered. Then blushed; and would have slapped him then for his boldness, that had wrung from her such a reaction. She was unaccustomed to being played like a fish.

He let her go. Cool air ruffled through the strands his fingers had parted. Mulberry blossoms showered in a swirl of white, and eddied in the lee of the railing.

Talith stepped around, prepared to use her pretty woman’s scorn to drive him off-balance. He deserved as much for his confidence that everywhere he went he would be welcomed.

Wonder stopped her cold. Strung in his hands was a chain of lights, delicate as flame hung on beadwire.

Lysaer smiled. His eyes sparkled with reflections; his face, struck out in shadow and soft light, held a beauty to madden a sculptor to fits of missed inspiration. The pale, fine hair that just brushed his collar was his sole ornament.

The effect stopped Talith’s breath.

‘Do you want me to leave?’ Lysaer teased.

Pique snapped her out of entrancement. ‘You haven’t been invited to stay.’ But her glance betrayed her, as she marvelled at the shining string that quivered and danced between his hands.

His smile deepened at the corners. ‘No jewel can compare.’

He looked down at the bauble, made it gleam and spit sparks like stirred embers. ‘This cannot compare. It’s a poor, flashy phantom. A worthless illusion sprung from light. But if you insist on hiding in the darkness, at least if you wear it, you’ll be gilded.’ He reached up, stepped closer and, with a gesture that brushed the bared skin of her collarbones, settled his spell around her neck.

The lights were neither warm nor cold; in fact, their presence against her flesh raised no tactile sensation at all. That for an oddity made her ache. As if, like a gem or a pearl, she should feel something tangible from his gift.

‘Gold suits you,’ Lysaer murmured. He watched in quiet pleasure as she experimented with his handiwork, let it spill like captive fireflies through her fingers.

And then, too suddenly, he gave the reason for his coming. ‘The army marches out on the morrow.’

She looked up, her head tipped provocatively sideways; the necklace of lights brightened her chin to fine angles. ‘Should that trouble me?’

Lysaer paused, thoughtful. He seemed not offended or set back. ‘I don’t think anyone in this city understands the threat in the man we leave to cut down.’

‘Arithon?’ Talith tossed back her mane of hair, about to say, disparaging, that even allied to barbarians the deposed prince could hardly challenge a fortified city.

Lysaer stepped to her suddenly and caught her arms below her bared shoulders. He did not shake her. Neither did he raise his voice to chastise. His touch stayed soft and the eyes that stared down into hers were wide open, very blue and anguished only with himself. ‘Lady, I fear for your city, for your safety, for your happiness. And about Arithon s’Ffalenn, I can make nobody comprehend.’

‘What else is there to know?’ She looked back at him, graceful as some tawny cat assured of its power to captivate.

Lysaer slid his palms down her arms lightly as a breath. He backed away, set his hands on the balustrade and stared out over the darkened garden. He was deeply troubled and she realized with a snap of vexation that her allure had not even touched him. He gave her no chance to retaliate, but said quickly, ‘I grew up in a land that was terrorized by the predations of the s’Ffalenn. We in Amroth had wealth, good ships, skilled men with quality weapons to defend us. We should have triumphed easily, for the isle of Karthan the pirate kings ruled was little more than a sandspit. The people were poor, with few resources, fewer men. But what they had, they used with the cleverness of demons.’

He stilled for a moment. Talith saw that his hands had balled into fists. Unsure whether his tension might be troublesome to cross, she waited, patient because his lordly display of dedication was novel enough to intrigue her.

Presently, Lysaer spoke again. ‘The killing and the grief went back for generations, through my great-grandfather’s time. Both of my uncles were lured into traps and sent back to us pickled, for burial. Grief left my father unreasonable, even mad. He lost a wife, before my mother. Two daughters died with her, who would have been my half-sisters, had I known them. No one told me they existed until I was twelve, when I forced my father’s seneschal to say why the royal crypt held an unmarked vault.’

Lysaer took a breath. ‘All my life, I remember the campaigns, the fleets and the generals sent out to eradicate the s’Ffalenn. We accomplished little for great efforts. We managed to burn villages, poor shanties whose loss seemed scarcely to hurt. Karthish lookouts would spot the inbound fleets and warn the people to escape. Men sent ashore to track refugees would scour the desert to no avail. Sea engagements went as badly. Our ships were lured into exhaustive chases, wrecked in shoal waters because the artisans who drew our charts were once fed false information. Our captains and crews died fighting against lee shores in gales. They died of thirst, hunger, mutiny and fire because the weapon of the s’Ffalenn was ingenuity that seemed inexhaustible as the tides. The pirate princes revelled in feuding. Their trickery never repeated itself and they sailed to no predictable pattern.’

Remembered anguish drove Lysaer to straighten from the balustrade. ‘These past captains were only men, clever and hungry for bloodshed. The last of their line, the s’Ffalenn heir bequeathed to Athera, is far more. He was born to an enchantress, raised to the ways of power. A sorcerer, a shadow master, his tricks will come barbed in spells.’

His eyes at last turned and met Talith’s, dreadfully deep and revealing. ‘Arithon fooled even me, lady. He drew me to believe he was harmless, then cozened true friendship from me. If not for your brother’s apt questions, if not for the doubts he reawakened, no one might have acted in time. Arithon might never have stood before Etarra and revealed his true nature in the square.’

Lysaer ended in harsh and personal discomfort. ‘That is what I cannot teach your people to know and fear.’

Caught up in fascination exotic enough to make her shiver, Talith said, ‘But you are lord over powers of light. You can defend against witchery.’

‘I’m a man,’ Lysaer amended. ‘Men fail.’

Uncertainty flawed Talith’s entrancement. She had been affected inside, and surprised by that recognition, she wanted his hands on her. ‘You’ll come back. Diegan’s army will win that black sorcerer’s head.’

Breeze stirred a drift of mulberry petals between them. They dusted Talith’s cheeks and caught in her hair and on the abalone tips of lacquered pins. With a gentle hand he brushed them away. ‘We can try. We can hope.’ He cupped her face, bent and kissed her with maddening lightness.

She reached to pull him closer, but the slithering drag of her caped sleeves warned him in time to draw back. From a safe half-pace away he smiled at her. ‘No. Not now. You’ll wait for me, lovely lady. When Arithon s’Ffalenn is vanquished and your city is safe, I’ll return. If your desire for my presence still endures, we shall build something great between us then.’

She swallowed back her annoyance, the more amazed because he did not mock her frustrated passion as Etarran men might have done. ‘What if you don’t come back?’

His lightness vanished. ‘Then you’ll be left to find out why Etarra’s army lost. In my memory, you’ll use such knowledge to warn your people, so that Arithon’s predations don’t catch them unprepared when the time comes to fight him again.’

‘You can’t believe you’ll be defeated!’ Talith cried, forgetting in distress to be artful.

‘I can’t be so cocky as to think for a second I might not.’ He gave a stiff shrug in apology. ‘S’Ffalenn pirates in the past have ruined better men than me.’

‘You’re all we have.’ Talith corrected herself with passionate sharpness: ‘All I have.’

Inside the ballroom the musicians struck up a merry tune. Past the opened doubled doors dancers gathered, formed lines and began to tread the first measures. Their movements seemed meaningless. Mute in her appeal, Talith saw with a relief that made her tremble that Lysaer would not, after all, depart without thought for her happiness.

‘One dance.’ The s’Ilessid prince laughed gently and gathered her, silk, pearls and ruffled, layered skirts, as delicately as if she were a blown bit of thistledown captured in the circle of his arms.

Deduction

Under a breeze from the east, the soured mud of bare tideflats and the dyeworks of Narms swept a reeking pall over the town, which consisted of box-fronted wooden mansions, one storey warehouse sheds, and a harbour. A craft centre from first to last, the place recognized no elegance beyond the bustling purpose of commerce.

Up-coast, where the beautiful yarns spun and dyed in these wind-raked, ramshackle shops were woven into famed rugs and tapestries, Cildorn’s stone buildings held the deeper mystery of more ancient sites: a resonance that lingered from Paravian inhabitance still drew the earth’s forces to flow very near to the surface. For the advantage such powers lent to spellcraft, the Koriani Prime would have preferred to conduct her errand there. But since the Fellowship’s gross misjudgement over Arithon’s failed coronation, Elaira could make Narms with better speed.

The building let for Morriel’s use was owned by the widow of a former Koriani boy-ward. Since his death, hard times and slatternly management had caused his dyeworks to fail. Long abandoned to the whims of stray iyats, the yard stood cluttered with cracked buckets silted wrist-deep in dead leaves. The shop, crudely shuttered, lay sandwiched between a brewery and the mudflats. Storms in winter sometimes flooded the warehouse. The building smelled now of mouldered rags and worm-rotted planking, underlaid by the taint of hops and fish.

One lingering fiend had to be chased from the rafters. Then the sole vat not cursed with slow leaks was dragged inside by Morriel’s servant, wedged level on packed sand flooring, and filled for scrying. A yarn rack propped up and sumptuously padded with quilts had been prepared for the comfort of the Prime, but disdained by the Koriani matriarch. Hunched under shawls like a crow draggled down by wet plumage, she waited in the flickering light of the resin torches with a patience her First Senior could not match.

Sustained by voracious ambition, Lirenda revelled in being the only one chosen for active duty. Though it was well past midnight and her fellow seniors had long since retired, out of pride she would not show weariness and sit in the presence of her Prime.

Sharing attendance upon Morriel’s needs was the huge half-wit who stood as her doorguard. Witness to more secrets than any living Koriani senior, the man sat crosslegged in a corner, drooping in his effort to stay awake. The streets outside were mostly quiet. Sometimes a late worker from the brewery strode whistling by. The stillness in between magnified the hiss of burning resin and the distant beat of combers off Instrell Bay. A sudden clatter of iron as a horse arrived outside caused the half-wit to startle up from his doze and hasten to unbar the door.

Elaira’s voice carried in on the gust that swept the threshold as she dismissed the livery groom who would return her mount to the stable. She entered a moment later. Hair blown loose from her braid was screwed into wisps by the seaside humidity and her skin was like chalk with exhaustion.

She had ridden a hundred leagues in under three days. Chafed raw at the knees from leathers stiffened with horse sweat, she made obeisance to the Koriani matriarch. The formal words of greeting came courageously steady from her lips.

Lirenda watched, avid, as Morriel beckoned Elaira closer. Under browless hoods of bone, the Prime’s deepset eyes did not merely study, but raked the rider who stepped forward on command.

Exposed full-figure in flamelight, Elaira withstood the inspection. Awareness that the sisterhood’s arts of observation would take in all, from the scuffs on her boots left by pebbles kicked in impatience at post stables too slow to tack her remounts; to the stains on her cloak where a drunk in a wayside tavern had upset the broth she could not stay to have replenished.

The Prime observed, ‘Your journey was trying, I see.’

Eased by the unexpected kindness, Elaira straightened sore shoulders. ‘Not so bad.’ In wry humour that Lirenda found particularly grating, she added, ‘If the inns had lice in the bedclothes, at least I escaped finding out.’

Morriel’s lips twitched, perhaps in the ghost of a smile. ‘Your spirits are intact, I can see. When did you last eat?’

Elaira paused for thought, which gave answer enough in itself. The crone gestured to her half-wit. ‘Quen, go next door to the brewer’s and buy some bread and sausage.’ To Elaira, in disarming solicitude, she added, ‘Do you wish beer?’

Not so tired she failed to sense a trap, Elaira shook her head. ‘On the heels of an emergency summons, I think not, thank you. Unless I have leave to go to bed?’

‘You have not.’ But the Prime’s approval was apparent, that the girl had kept sharp wits. ‘Though you deserve the rest, surely. I’m not unaware that you had to bid against the trade guilds’ couriers, jammed as the livery stables have been with bearers carrying ill news.’

Inordinate numbers of state messengers had crowded the roads as well, but Elaira had been too pressed to hear gossip. ‘Worse happened since I left Etarra?’

‘A great deal.’ Fog curled through the door as Quen slipped back in with a steaming parcel. As the torches hissed and spat in the damp, Morriel motioned toward the vat. ‘Bring your meal while you study the water. I would see you brought current with events, that you understand the importance of the demands you’ve been called to attend.’

To thank Quen for any service was to invite an embarrassment of obsequious gratitude. Elaira patted his rough hand and took the food, half-braced in pity in case his fawning should displease the Prime. But Quen only ducked his head in pathetic ecstasy for her kindness, then retired back to his corner.

Elaira unwrapped greasy coils of sausage and trailed after her mistress toward the vat.

Lirenda knew bitterness that the order’s most incorrigible junior initiate should be casually stuffing her mouth, while beside her, Morriel Prime prepared to admit her to the highest level of Koriani affairs, and for no better cause than a disobedient escapade with a man.

With no thought spared for Lirenda’s disaffection, Morriel hitched up one hip and with a drag of thick woollens, perched on the rim of the vat. Graced by a balance at odds with her years, she hooked the crystal that hung on fine chains at her neck and informed Elaira, ‘The images you will observe reflect events that occurred today.’

Morriel dangled her jewel above the ruffled water, then completed a pass that engaged spellcraft. Elaira leaned over a surface bound into mirror-smoothness, while the vision induced by the Prime’s clairvoyance overlaid the madder-stained depths…

Morning sun tinted the square brick turrets of Etarra’s watch-keeps and struck shafts through the dust billowed up by the garrison that tramped outbound from the northwestern gate. Its columns were narrowed by the flanks of the Mathorn pass, and rank after rank of raised pikes and lances gridded the pale, hazed sky. Windowed in water, men marched like toy figurines given life, the gold and red banners of the city guard cracking in the breeze like snipped cloth.

‘Fatemaster’s mercy,’ Elaira murmured, her sausage cooling in fingers that felt sapped of nerves. ‘There’s to be war, then?’

For reply, Morriel shifted vantage to display Etarra’s host in its entirety.

Ten thousand strong, spearheaded by caparisoned rows of mounted lancers and trailed by the light cavalry under the standard of the headhunter’s league, the army advanced down switched-back roads like a serpent roused hungry from its lair. Crowds packed the city ramparts to cheer, foremost among them a tawny-haired woman in a glitter of gold-netted silk. Heralds raised trumpets emblazoned with tassels and silent fanfare sounded for the smiling, bejewelled figure of Lysaer s’Ilessid, mounted on his chestnut horse, and flanked by Lord Diegan and Etarra’s field general, the grim-faced, leonine Gnudsog.

Shocked beyond thought for protocol, Elaira accosted her supreme superior. ‘Lysaer has raised Etarra? Daelion forfend, whatever for?’

A gust hissed through the gapped warehouse, sour with the reek of dried seaweed. Lirenda braced in expectation of immediate displeasure from the Prime, but Morriel simply sighed and tugged with thin hands to rearrange the burden of her shawls. The image in the dye-vat dispersed. Drily, the crone said, ‘I believe this next image should tell you.’

She effected a second pass.

The water’s glassine surface now showed the mild haze of a mid-spring afternoon. Shadows pocked the stubble of a stripped hillside. Brown and unobtrusive against mats of hacked bark and wilted greenery, a band of barbarian scouts left the timber they had cut and packed in six foot lengths onto sledges. They gathered presently in a clearing, where the only man among them not dirtied from labour waited on his knees before the blade of his own drawn sword. A start in her nerves from recognition, Elaira beheld Arithon s’Ffalenn. Beside him, stiff-backed and vexed, stood the rangy frame of the most powerful barbarian in the north: Steiven s’Valerient, Caithdein of Ithamon and high chieftain of the clans of Deshir.

‘But this makes no sense.’ Elaira abandoned her half-eaten meal in its folds of steam-soggy paper. Just one breath away from a thunderous headache, she raised hands to rub at her temples. ‘The clans in Strakewood are no match for the might of Etarra.’

‘They believe otherwise.’ Morriel removed her jewel. The spell that fuelled her clairvoyance snapped, and woodlands vanished, leaving waters that flashed and puckered over a blood-dark silt of old dyes. ‘Three valleys along Tal Quorin’s banks have been riddled with deadfalls to that end. War is in the offing. The princes so fondly received by the Fellowship are themselves at the root and cause.’

‘No.’ Elaira raised her chin in sick protest. ‘The Seven wouldn’t—’ She stopped, fought down dread for a slip that could betray her past trust with Asandir. ‘The sorcerers must surely intervene if their princes are caught at the heart of this.’

‘Ah,’ said Morriel, her flash of discovery well hidden, though across the warehouse, Lirenda looked vindicated. ‘But the sorcerers have all fled Etarra. Like rats off a foundering ship, they abandoned their post of responsibility on the instant Desh-thiere’s curse claimed the half-brothers.’

Morriel paused. Acute, colourless eyes flicked aside to encompass Elaira’s strained face. ‘Your friend Asandir made a mis-step.’

The implication of collaborative association with a Fellowship sorcerer went unnoticed before the disclaimer that stormed Elaira’s thoughts: that the power she had encountered in the loft of Enithen Tuer’s was no likely candidate for mistakes. If the Fellowship of Seven had withdrawn, they must surely have done so deliberately.

Morriel’s eyes held her gaze like a snake’s. Exposed to the Prime’s sharp dispassion, that would see past nuance and draw out frightful truths, Elaira fought down raw nerves and dread. Too late, with both hands locked in fear to the cold stone edge of the dye vat, she waited to be denounced for far worse offence than a silly romantic entanglement.

‘Oh, yes, the truth behind your illicit visit to the Four Ravens Tavern last autumn is known to us.’ The Prime tucked her focus stone in her lap with a clicking of hooked yellow fingernails. ‘However, we deem your visit to Asandir too petty for pursuit in light of the present crisis. Since the actions of s’Ffalenn and s’Ilessid have brought Rathain’s factions to arms, a character scan must be made of both princes. Our sisterhood must know how five centuries of exile have altered the Fellowship’s royal lines.’

The blow so long suspected fell at last as Morriel gathered her skirts and stood erect. ‘You have been summoned here, Elaira, as the only initiate we have who has been in close enough contact with the royal heirs to undertake the attempt.’

Stunned as if her guts had come unhinged, Elaira thrust off from the dye-vat. The Koriani order owned her, flesh and mind, but this demand threatened to annihilate her. Perfect, unbiased recall, down to the smallest detail of the princes’ features, dress, and bearing, was required of her; or Morriel’s scrying would be useless, her delicate chains of deductions riddled with deadends and errors. Though every Koriani initiate had been exactingly trained for clear recall, reproducing images for character scan was a task given only to the most time-proven, gifted Seniors. The perils involved were no secret. The ritual unleashed emotion, could and had linked participants to depths of insight that a bond of sympathy with the subject under study became near impossible to deny. As if poised on the rim of a pit that beckoned her spirit to damnation, Elaira fought black despair. If this was the Prime Circle’s test to determine whether she had excised her attraction for Arithon s’Ffalenn, it was too much, far too cruelly soon.

Wind wailed through the boarded windows; over the white noise of breakers, a gull flew calling through the dark. Elaira shuddered, unnerved by Morriel’s regard still pinned on her.

To protest a direct order from the Prime was to beg instantaneous destruction. Hollow with dread, and hounded by Lirenda’s antagonistic wish to see her crumble, Elaira bowed to Morriel Prime. ‘Your will.’

The matriarch of the sisterhood said no more as she raised her crystal spinning on its chains and rehooked the clasp at her neck. She snapped bird-boned fingers for Quen, who hastened forward and offered Elaira a small stone pipe and a sealed tin that held tobacco steeped in water mildly infused with a tienelle extract. Less potent than the uncut, dried leaves, the mixture used by junior initiates was still toxic enough to cause multiple unpleasant side-effects.

Elaira exchanged the items for her mangled chunk of sausage, and this time found no thanks for the half-wit.

Morriel said, not unkindly, ‘Make yourself ready as you can. Do not rush. When you have achieved a trance heightened by the drug, we shall begin.’

Minutes later, as the lighted fumes from the pipe curled through the mildew-dank warehouse, Quen slept curled like a dog by the doorway. Equally oblivious, though deadly pale, Elaira sat crosslegged, her eyes closed and her back propped straight against the dye-vat. Her strength of self-discipline could not be faulted as she laid the pipe aside and drew the slow, measured breaths that indicated full surrender to the broadening, glass-sharp awareness induced by the poisons in the herb smoke.

Across a gloom deepened by the embered stubs of the torches, Lirenda stirred. ‘You were easy on her.’

Morriel sighed. Fragile under crushing layers of shawls, she crossed the floor and sank into the quilts her servant had prepared for her. ‘You think so?’ The voice so precisely edged but a moment before now sounded querulous and tired.

Belatedly, Lirenda stirred to attend her Prime’s comfort.

Yet as she reached to assist with the blankets, Morriel fended her away. ‘You pay no mind to your heart, First Senior. That is a most wasteful fault.’

Taken aback, Lirenda was forced to reconsider. ‘Then Elaira is to think she’s forgiven for falling prey to distractions of the flesh, not to mention the further possibility she has abetted the despoiler, Asandir?’

Morriel clasped skeletal fingers. Her eyes as she looked up were empty, like fog or featureless rain. ‘Elaira played a girl’s prank that placed her most woefully in a bad place at the wrong time. She is intelligent, and gifted with an insight that runs rare and true. Which strengths caused her to see the s’Ffalenn heir through to his depths and let him touch her. I venture to suggest that her reasons for attraction are real, and dauntingly powerful to any mind born female. That is why you alone were called to witness the scrying that shall take place tonight. I would shield our other Seniors from exposure to fearful temptation. There is warning for you in this. Heed the risk.’

‘You do feel sorry for Elaira,’ Lirenda observed, thrilled by discovery that Morriel had any softness left for sentiment.

The Prime denied nothing. ‘I pity the fact I have ruined her.’

Lirenda would not believe this. Planks creaked as she crossed a fallen trestle to brighten a fresh set of torches. ‘Nobody asked Elaira to create that scene in the taproom, or to seek Asandir out beforehand. The silly girl ruined herself.’

‘No. She would have recovered from the mistake. Had done so quite admirably, in fact, until I sent her afterwards to Etarra.’ Hard to her core now, and misliking the strengthened light which inked shadows in every seam of her face, Morriel drew a short breath. ‘You will learn from this, First Senior, if you covet position as my successor. Elaira is a valuable tool, a window into Arithon’s character we’re going to need sorely if we wish to track the conflict the Fellowship has set loose upon the continent. We must tenderly encourage that girl to keep discipline. She is dedicated. With judicious handling, her botched insight will prove useful for a very long time before she breaks. For as you guessed, if our order’s training had held, she should have rejected the curiosity that prompted her foray into Erdane. Elaira is a flawed instrument. But she will serve as no other can, until the day comes when she is driven to forsake her vows. Let her own shortfalls, and not your vindictive perfectionism, be the quality that throws her to destruction.’

The Prime closed her eyes to snatch an interval to meditate, indication enough that she had spent her reserves on talk. Lirenda as ever was wily enough to respect the line that was drawn; too wily, the aged Prime sometimes thought. Like many another former matriarch, she wished the last trial of initiation for the Koriani seat of Prime Power was not fatal to most every aspirant.

Lirenda was the forty-third hopeful selected to attempt the succession. Morriel battled to separate her consciousness from the ache of her brittle bones. She feared afresh to become the first to break the chain of command: to become the Prime that death would overtake before an heir survived to finish training.

Old she was, and bitterly tired. Morriel snatched what solace she could from the disciplines of her office. What Lirenda did through the minutes that passed held no concern. Years since, the Prime had ceased to invest interest in the particulars of any one candidate. The woman who succeeded – that one only she could love. Since the death of the first, the rest had been nothing but ciphers.

Informed at length by the scent of charred herbs that the pipe had been fully smoked, Morriel stirred. On the moment the narcotic peaked Elaira’s powers of recall, she shed piled blankets and arose. Lirenda had already stationed herself over the dye vat, her rapt expression clear enough indication that an image already lay in view. Careful of joints over-worn from centuries of unnatural lifespan, the Prime Enchantress crossed the warehouse to share what the waters would show.

‘A throwback,’ Lirenda murmured, as the matriarch drew abreast. ‘He could almost be Torbrand’s double.’

Humbled by Elaira’s courage, which had dared display Arithon first, Morriel said nothing. Then she looked, and her heart would not allow speech past the stunningly expressive detail in the image in the vat.

The chosen moment was one that Elaira had stolen; when the man had foolishly supposed no observer with higher interests would be present. He crouched in a filthy alley, attended by those who least cared for power, and sorceries, and bloody contentions between factions. Surrounded by a tattered pack of children, Arithon bent in the act of setting a brigantine fashioned of shadows to capture the breeze in full sails.

Elaira had caught him glancing up to see his illusion under way. His face held untrammelled peace. A laugh of delight and satisfaction lightened the corners of his mouth. His eyes were unshadowed and the sharp-angled features of s’Ffalenn inheritance had fleetingly softened to expose, in vivid clarity, the depths of generosity and caring that buttressed his musician’s sensitivity.

The effect was spirit stripped naked. The accuracy of Elaira’s recreation gave the lie to every sharp edge, every cutting word, every difficult and cross-grained reaction that Arithon had ever employed to defend this, his vulnerable inner heart.

‘Daelion Fatemaster,’ Morriel gasped. ‘The girl’s unmasked him for us, wholly. I never believed it could be done.’

Totally absorbed by the image, Lirenda never noticed that her nails had broken under the force of her tightened grip on the scaled stone. ‘He can be brought down, though. The killing will unman him, finally, for s’Ffalenn conscience must force him over time to back down.’

Morriel gave the image long study, her head cocked in unexpectedly grandmotherly fascination. ‘Look again,’ she urged. ‘War will not be what stops this prince.’ When Lirenda made no response, she added, ‘My point is subtle. But plain to be read, if you study his hands before his eyes.’

Obedient, Lirenda regarded Arithon’s fingers, which were slim and quick, and in this frozen moment of Elaira’s recall, graceful in completion of a difficult spell. The green eyes were deep, not dangerous. ‘I fail to find further conclusion,’ the First Senior said with reluctance.

Morriel’s cackling laugh echoed through the ramshackle warehouse. ‘But he is not clever! Not when he’s truly honest. That means the deceit Arithon so readily displays when provoked is not rooted in venal ingenuity. No. Sadly not. What drives this prince’s wit is not craftiness, but the gift of true farsight imbued in the s’Ahelas royal line.’

Lirenda considered this, while outside, something that crashed in an alley disturbed a cat from a cranny with a yowl. Roused back to herself by distraction, Morriel reached out and tapped Elaira’s hand. ‘Show us the half-brother, now.’

The image of Arithon slipped away, replaced momentarily by another. Now the s’Ilessid prince stood in the fog of a pre-dawn garden, half-lit by a shaft of lamplight that escaped through the gate from the street. He leaned against the pedestal of a statue, his lashes and cloak beaded with damp that sparked as he breathed like fine diamonds. The water was the only jewel on him: for once, his clothing held no artifice. Even his hair lay unbrushed. Although in public Lysaer maintained the flawless manners of diplomacy, here, alone, his lordly fine looks lay hagridden by doubt as he wrestled some inward dilemma his conscience could not resolve. The pain on his face, in the bearing of his shoulders and the lamp-gilded knuckles of clenched hands, was unanswerably intense. Elaira’s observance had peeled back all poise to expose him in a moment of soul-rending self-distaste.

‘Oh, Elaira, well done!’ murmured Morriel.

At her side, honed to heightened sensitivity by the fumes that trailed from the pipe bowl, Lirenda felt her being struck and jangled by that chord of conflicted emotions. She not only saw, but felt how s’Ilessid justice warred with the s’Ahelas farsight inherited from the distaff side of Lysaer’s pedigree.

His mouth in this captured instant held none of the tenderness that adoring women back in Amroth had experienced while plying him for kisses. Unyielding as tempered wire lay calculation threaded through by royal upbringing, and the machinations of Desh-thiere’s latent wraith. The result charged the nerves to disquiet; as if for one heartbeat pity were absent, and mercy an omitted concept.

‘We have seen what we must,’ the Prime announced abruptly. To Elaira she added, ‘You’re permitted to relax from your trance.’

As the image dissolved, Lirenda looked up, sparked by unsated excitement. ‘Misfortunate luck. Both princes have inherited the gifts of two royal houses.’

Discomfited at last by trepidation, Morriel tucked her arms beneath her shawls. ‘Unlucky and perilous. Arithon’s is an incompatible legacy. His mind is fatally flawed. The Fellowship should never have sanctioned his right of succession, for suffering shall dog his path as surely as seasons must turn.’

Elaira shuddered in transition back to consciousness, opened her eyes, and whitely fought the first twinge of tienelle withdrawal. ‘My Prime, you mistake him,’ she said shakily.

Amazed she should dare contradiction, Lirenda shot swift glance at the Prime.

But Morriel showed no offence for the impertinence.

Given this tacit liberty, Elaira insisted, ‘Lysaer’s the one who bears watching. Ath’s mercy, I’ve met him. He’s a living inspiration, the flesh and blood example of human kindness. The masses must flock to his standard, for his cause shall be presented in passionate and upright idealism. Then indeed there will be upheaval and suffering, since bias toward noble principles offers a weapon already fashioned for a ruler of his trained talents. All Prince Lysaer need do is pose in that mould, and set by Desh-thiere’s curse to turn his gifts toward bloodshed, he has no other course.’

‘That’s a predictable cycle,’ Lirenda interjected, annoyed beyond restraint by the Prime’s unfathomable licence. ‘We know where Lysaer will turn, and what will be the result. What can be anticipated can also be controlled or prevented. Arithon owns no such stability.’

Frustrated by narcotically enhanced perceptions, Elaira cried protest. ‘But Arithon is a man devoted to harmony, a musician with a seer’s perception. He’s conscious of his actions as Lysaer can never be!’

‘Which is precisely what makes him dangerous, Elaira,’ Morriel corrected sadly. ‘For Lysaer’s sense of justice and farsight will answer to logic, and therefore be reconciled by compromise. But since when can compassion ever be made to condone pain? S’Ahelas blood gives Arithon full grasp of cause and effect; mage-training compounds this with awareness of the forward reactions of power. These traits aligned against the s’Ffalenn gift of sympathetic empathy cancels the mind’s self-defences. The shelter of petty hatred becomes untenable. Arithon is a visionary placed at a nexus of responsibility. Desh-thiere’s curse will embroil him in violence he can neither escape nor master. Stress will prove his undoing, for the sensitivities of poets have ever been frail, and the broadened span of his thinking shall but inflame and haunt him to madness.’

‘You’re mistaken,’ Elaira insisted, recalling the whiplash resilience the living man had possessed. ‘Ath be my witness, the conclusion you’ve drawn from this is wrong.’

‘Time will tell.’ Morriel motioned dismissal. ‘You are excused to rest. The widow will have a bed waiting, and a basin to wash. Remember to drink enough water, lest you take harm from the tienelle poisons.’

The traditional response all but caught in Elaira’s throat. ‘Your will.’ She dragged herself to her feet, managed a graceless curtsey, and before the cramping that marked the aftermath of tienelle usage tore her composure to shreds, contrived to walk out of the warehouse.

Outside, wrapped in darkness with the dank winds cooling her sweaty face and her back to the mildewed sill of a craft shanty, the tears came.

Elaira could not cast off the ripping, unhappy remorse, that in keeping loyalty to her order, she had effected a betrayal much deeper. Her every intent had just misfired, to expose a man’s private self, that his hidden pregnabilities should win him the protection of Koriani sympathy. Yet understanding had turned awry in her hands. Elaira ached with recognition that she had only succeeded in granting a weapon to an enemy.

Daybreak

In a widow’s attic bedchamber, First Senior Lirenda wakens once again, restlessly entangled in her bedclothes; and the dream that spoils her sleep is the same, of a man’s green eyes imbued with a compassion deep enough to leave her weeping and desolate in the icy chill before dawn…

As fog curls silver through the marshes flanking Tal Quorin, Deshir’s clansmen break fast on dry journey-biscuit and take up their shovels and axes; and although they speak little on the fact their crown prince has been absent since his oathtaking ceremony the previous afternoon, Steiven’s son Jieret overhears enough to become intrigued over Arithon’s whereabouts…

In the chimney-warmed garret of a north-kingdom hostel, a caravan-master nurses a flagon of spirits; between gulps and recriminations, he cannot fathom what possessed him to give over the horse-thief’s jewelled pin to that dreamy-eyed greybeard in maroon who had met him in the alley and simply asked for the gift, as if acorn-sized emeralds were proper to claim as charity from an absolute stranger…

XVI. AUGURY

In a place of his own choosing, well removed from the activities of the clans, Arithon disengaged mage-trained senses from the webs of subliminal energy that delineated the surrounding forest. Gently the awareness bled from him, of living leaves and dappling sunlight; of roots rejuvenated by the Mistwraith’s defeat groping warmed soil in new growth; and of birds that flicked in bursts through the branches as they gathered small twigs for their nesting. His touch upon the land’s pulse had been thorough but light; even the secretive night-lynx had not been disturbed where she slept denned up with her young. Arithon opened his eyes at last to the fluting calls of thrushes and the light-shafted haze of midmorning.

Absent since his oathtaking the previous afternoon, Rathain’s new crown-prince laced his fingers and stretched kinks from his shoulders and back. Worry he would have masked before others sat all too plain on his face.

Deep trance had absorbed him for twelve unbroken hours, a necessary interval to ensure that this small, streamside glen would stay isolated enough for the arduous scrying that lay ahead of him. Game deer within his proximity browsed untroubled by hunters, the paths they tracked never trodden by clan children sent out to forage for herbs and firewood.

Muscles released from the demand of perfect stillness cramped as Arithon arose. The gimp in his movement dismayed him, forced a reckoning for a self-discipline sadly slackened since his apprenticeship at Rauven. No small bit wrung by trepidation, he knelt. Alone beside one of the Tal Quorin basin’s many streamlets, that bent in dark courses through towering oaks and tangled thickets of witch hazel, he dipped his hands and drank.

Icy water hit his empty stomach and shot a quiver through him. While he rested on his heels for an interval to allow his body to settle, a half-smile tugged at his mouth. His unexplained night in the open had hopefully confirmed the feckless character he had fostered among Deshir’s clansmen. Let them think he went off to mope. Unless he shied clear of Lady Dania’s sharp perception and Halliron Masterbard’s meddlesome curiosity, he could never have fasted to purge his system without becoming embroiled in a Sithaer-bent mess of unwanted inquiries. No frivolous excuse could mask the unbending requirements of spellcraft. Let the clans suspect he was mage-trained and every deception he had played to win his freedom would be irremediably spoiled. Concealed in place and purpose, Arithon engaged his mastery and methodically centred his will.

If the clans of the north were determined to stand to war against Etarra’s army, his oath to Rathain bound him to make sure that no man’s life be needlessly endangered. Given means to tap prescient scrying through Rauven’s teaching and the tienelle filched from Sethvir, Arithon took out the stolen canister. Fearfully aware of risk to himself, he unwrapped the stone pipe inside and packed the bowl with silvery, notched leaves that sheared the forest air with their pungence.

Narcotically expanded senses might sound whether Caolle’s battle strategies would deflect Lysaer’s assault, but the perils could not be ignored. Until the drug’s influence faded, the scryer’s awareness would be hypersensitized, every nerve left unshielded before the risk of chance-met interference. This was not Rauven or Althain Tower, ringed around with defences and intricate wardspells to protect the unshuttered mind. And Arithon had cast away the second safeguard instilled by his grandfather’s tutelage: that trance under influence of tienelle never be attempted while alone. If he lost his iron self-command, if his concentration became shaken by the maze of drug-induced visions, no one stood by to realign his frayed concentration.

Arithon smoothed a last leaflet into the pipe and rammed it firm. More than his personal hope of happiness held him adamant. Events might have cornered him against an inborn compassion he could not shed, but the deeper danger still stalked him. He could not evade the certainty that his oath to Deshir was a fragile thing before the curse Desh-thiere’s wraith had left embedded and coiled through his being. The endangerment to Rathain’s feal vassals must be shouldered, while every minute the temptation to take and twist clan trust into a weapon to bring down Lysaer ate like a darkness at his heart. Only a mage’s sensitivity allowed Arithon to separate that poisoned urge from active will; and the passage of days wore him down with the draining, constant effort such distinction took to maintain. Until he won free of royal obligation, and could dissociate himself from any claim to sovereignty, the double-edged burden would continue to chafe at his control.

No cause must jeopardize the image of weakness so painstakingly fostered among the clans. Though Halliron had breached that pretence, the Masterbard was one that Rathain’s new crown-prince least wished to admit into confidence. The wild need to seize upon false escape, to accept companionship and release through musical indulgence, could too easily lure him into misstep.

Finished preparing the pipe, Arithon arose. He braced his back against a massive old oak and took a full breath, clean-scented with growing greenery and the sharper pungence of evergreens. He invited the peace of the forest to calm him. Absorbed by the lisp of current over mosscapped rocks, and calls of chipmunks in a fallen log, he stilled his clamour of self-doubt and drew on his mastery to create a spark.

The herb in the pipe-bowl ignited. Silver-blue smoke trailed and twined like ghost-spells on the breeze. Touched to a frisson of apprehension by the sting of acrid fumes, Arithon collected his will. He set the pipe stem to his lips and drew poisoned smoke deep into his lungs.

Vertigo upended his physical senses. Well-prepared, he pressed against the tree and let live wood reaffirm his balance. The kick as the drug fired his nerves was harder by far to absorb and master. He gasped in near pain at the explosive unreeling of his innermind as sights, smells, and sensations launched him through a spiralling hyperbole.

He was immediately grateful he had seen through the precaution of fasting. The plants Sethvir had dried at Althain were fiercely potent and pure.

The trickle of the stream by Arithon’s feet became an avalanche of sound in his ears; the squall of a jay, a torment that flicked his hearing like a whip. Battered to the verge of bewilderment, he clenched his right hand, let the dig of his nails in half-healed burns anchor his scattered concentration. The instant he had firm control, he cast his mind ahead into the many-branching avenues of possible happenstance.

Reeling holocaust met him. Fire and smoke swallowed all, while the higher-pitched vibration of dying trees screamed across his lacerated senses. Arithon cried out in forced empathy. Through a wilderness of chaotic sensation he groped, and finally separated the cause: Lysaer’s army, waiting until the tinder-dry days of midsummer, then firing Strakewood, that the windcaught blaze drive the clans out of cover to be rounded up and slaughtered. Vistas followed, of razed timber and dead men, blackened with ash and feeding flies. Clan children marched in ragged coffles, then died one by one in a public display that packed Etarra’s square with vicious, screaming onlookers. Arithon’s stomach wrenched at the smell of the executioner’s excitement, charged and whelmed to a sickness of ecstasy by rivers of new-spilled blood.

The Master of Shadow bit back horror and physical distress, and in forced effort as difficult as anything he had undertaken throughout training, transmuted revulsion to the icy detachment necessary to reimpose control. The hideous sequence arrested, only to slip his grasp again as sensitized perceptions careened off on a tangent.

He saw a hillside strewn with corpses; banners fallen and snarled by the trampling passage of horses; and beyond these a clearing that held townsmen who were also Rathain’s subjects, hideously disembowelled and hung by their ankles from game hooks.

‘No!’ Arithon ground the heels of his hands in his eyesockets, then ripped in a shuddering, clean breath of air. Whirled by a firestorm of prescience, he grappled to recover mental balance, to reach past the reeling crush of nightmare for the single thread dictated by Caolle’s prudently laid strategy.

Control escaped him.

Harrowed by atrocities that deluged his mind in shockwaves, Arithon bent double in dry heaves. Gagged by the taste of bile, he sucked in another fast breath. Sweat poured off him in runnels. His sensitized flesh recorded the slide and fall of each salty drop. Another breath, this one deeper; his mind cleared fractionally. He managed to pry his consciousness away from the herb-induced barrage of far sight. He had been right to fear! One wrong choice, one misplaced scout or mistimed attack, and all he had envisioned might result.

Arithon tightened his hold on concentration, then locked onto the sequence he desired. His hand trembled as he shallowly drew on the pipe. Prepared this time for raw carnage, he traced through the spinning nexus of possibilities that deluged his innermind, to follow the single one that mattered.

Caolle planned to lure Etarra’s thousands up the Tal Quorin’s creekbed. Upstream, where the river shoaled and fanned out into reedbeds and swamp, the tight phalanxes of townsmen would be compelled to split their ranks. The terrain as they progressed would divide them further, until two rising, parallel ridges parted the garrison three ways. As battle became joined with the clan scouts, Arithon reviewed the unfolding engagement with deliberate slowness, while tienelle-inflamed awareness touched off in outbranching visions the thousands of alternate outcomes each action in due course might take. Natural and man-made barriers would successfully disadvantage two of Etarra’s split divisions. Archers placed in earth-bank embrasures Caolle hoped would disable the third.

Arithon paused to resteady himself. The bowmen would not be enough, he saw, as prescience swooped and spun to frame a grim chain of disasters. Etarra’s guardsmen slaughtered clan scouts like meat behind over-run embankments until the screams of dying men gave way to the croak of sated crows, all because the left flank of Etarra’s army would be commanded by a man whose lifetime obsession had been the study of barbarian tactics.

The butcher had grizzled grey hair and hands that were narrow and expressive. The face with its pocking of scars and out-thrust jaw was that of Pesquil, Mayor of Etarra’s League of Headhunters. His were the orders that sent city officers upslope like terriers to secure the ridge-tops. Etarra’s west division of pikemen would split two ways, then weaken the cohesion of barbarian resistance by storming both ends of the ridge. Then the light horse cohort dispatched single file through a ravine to the east would circle back and eventually bottle the valley from the north. They would crush the barbarian right flank and rejoin Gnudsog’s troops in time to effect rescue of the main columns bogged in the Tal Quorin marshes.

Faint and sick, Arithon watched the Deshans left alive at that juncture become herded into slaughter to a man.

Attempts to forestall their fate by assassinating Pesquil saw three scouts dead under torture. Whether fated by luck or by Daelion, the man would remain in command on the morning that battle commenced.

Sad recognition followed, that even the gravest misuse of shadow mastery and sorcery could not clinch a fourth effort. Pesquil’s Etarran paranoia made him carry a talisman, an artifact passed down since the rebellion that would ward against mischance by magic.

Arithon wept then, for sure knowledge: that his hope and his preferred future were forfeit. Left to their own resource, the clans were destined for ruin. Whether he left them outright, or played through his charade of weak prince and carried his sword at Steiven’s shoulder made no difference. Did he fight as a man, and not a sorcerer, his own corpse would be part of the carnage.

He yanked himself clear to escape a second reliving of the aftermath and the children’s executions in Etarra.

Shivering, wrung by a storm of guilt and grief, Arithon rallied wits enough to realize his pipe-bowl held only ashes. Though his body ached for reprieve, he could not let go yet.

The sweat on his lips mingled with a dampness salty enough to be tears, as he forced unsteady hands to move and function. He pried the lid back off the canister, repacked the pipe, then sucked in a redoubled dose of the herb to use trance to sound an alternative.

Back to the initial deployment, he reran the sequence of Caolle’s battle plan. Only this time, before Pesquil’s cat-cunning strategies could unravel clan defences, Arithon added pertinent contributions of his own. Inspired to terrible invention by the breadth of tienelle awareness, he gave his whole mind, bent the talents his grandfather had nurtured to full-scale killing. Wrought of magecraft, and shadow mastery, and devious cunning, he tested strategies that brooked no conscience. He toyed with the visions, slanted and skewed them to tens and thousands of variations. He weighed and recombined results; counted the dead and the wounded with a will locked hard against any acknowledgement of suffering. To feel, to think at all, was to lose the mind to sorrow. Dogged, driven half mad by his oathtaken weight of responsibility, he inhaled more tienelle and threshed through each chain of happenstance in exhaustive review for blind errors.

By the end, spent to a weariness that soaked in dull pain to his bones, he had garnered a handful of tactics that might yield the lowest toll of lives. His work would hold only if no unforeseen circumstance arose to upset his tested effect patterns; if against odds he had managed to circumvent all possible avenues of probability.

He was not Sethvir, to be tracking a scope of event as wide as the chance interaction that could happen between eleven hundred human lives. He could only try his best and leave his frailties to hope.

The tienelle was finished off in any case.

Arithon blew his lungs clear of the last, spent smoke. He sank on his heels and let the empty canister drop between his feet. At the edge of mauled senses, he sensed the quick, running tremors of withdrawal that must be damped and subdued before they built and racked through his body. He held motionless. Unlike the drug that had nearly ruined him in Amroth, tienelle’s toxins were not addictive. Once he had regained inner stillness, he could use mastery to annul the poisons. The torment would pass without craving. Arithon bent the lingering influence of the drug’s sensual enhancement toward steadying himself until his awareness could stabilize and let time reassume natural proportions.

The liquid call of a lark trilled through the glen. Eyes closed, Arithon savoured the sorrowful melody. He had done well, he knew. Amid odds so bleakly tipped toward defeat, he had ploughed an alternate path. Bitterness squeezed his heart for what felt like a tragic failure. To the farthest-flung limit of his abilities, a scant third of Steiven’s clansmen could be kept alive. How could a prince, mage or otherwise, brook the scale of such sacrifice? Etarra would suffer greater losses; but the cost would be cruel for a stalemate, particularly when mishap could yet play a hand, and snatch back the chance of even that.

No trick of magecraft could fully anticipate bad luck. All guarantees were forfeit, since the day Etarra’s garrison marched upon the north.

Arithon rapped the ashes from the pipe bowl. The slightest attempt at motion now shot lancing pains through his skull. Warned to pay heed to common sense, he took swift stock of his condition.

His clothing lay wrung with damp sweat and his flesh was drawn from dehydration. Since tienelle could kill if its lesser poisons were not rinsed from the body, he bent at once and tried a swallow from the stream.

The water hit his stomach and set off a rolling bout of nausea. He clamped his hands to his mouth, unsettled by the fight he underwent to keep the precious moisture down. Worn through a brutal and difficult scrying, he recognized his judgement had blurred. Had he considered with his full wits about him, he should never have dared try this much tienelle in one session, far less in seclusion. He needed herbal tea, a bed and the presence of another mage to ward the thought-paths that yet lay vulnerably open. Lacking such comforts, he had no choice left but to wait. The herb must be allowed time to fade. Only with his senses released from its burning scope of vision would he be able to transmute the residual poisons the water could not flush through. Until then, he could tolerate no human company.

Twilight fell. Birdsong stilled, and the boughs overhead became sprays of black lace against a sky pricked by pale stars. Engaged in private struggle against the fevers of withdrawal, Arithon sat with his head tilted back against an oak bole that kindly performed its appointed function and kept his body propped upright. The dark tunic lent by Lady Dania melted his form into shadow, while stray spurts of drug-born intuition stung him with unwanted revelation: that the clothing on his back had belonged to the lady’s younger brother, fallen wounded in a raid at fifteen. Caolle’s hand had delivered the mercy-stroke that gave the boy clean death. Arithon ground his knuckles in his eyes to drive off the scents of a forest clearing, and blood fallen hot on green ferns. Too beaten to avert the bounding starts of truesight that flickered like delirium through his consciousness, he schooled his thoughts to rough order by laboured, exhaustive reviews of longwinded ballads.

Engrossed in Dakar’s favourite drinking song, which was long and lewd, and only funny if both singer and listeners were flat drunk, Arithon groped through the first stanzas. He might be stretched thin, but he did not lack the fibre to master himself. Yet when between the fifth and sixth chorus his whispered recitation went ragged, he stumbled to shivering silence and realized. Someone had invaded his retreat.

Arithon felt his ears whine and his sinews draw tight under the eddying, electrical pull of another mind. Unlike the near-mystical calm radiated by birds or wild animals, this presence was unmistakably human. Its excitements, uncertainties and randomly chaotic energies tugged, burned and rebounded through the channels still defencelessly opened by the herb.

‘Come around where I can see you,’ he managed in a tone dragged husky by discomfort. Grateful that the falling darkness would conceal the worst of his weakness, he waited.

Sticks cracked. A stand of hazels shivered, parted, and disgorged Jieret, who emerged looking sheepish from the depths of a nearby thicket.

‘How did you know I was there?’ Peevish to find himself discovered, Steiven’s son approached, bent down, and with a curiosity that brazenly challenged, hooked up the empty tienelle canister from the verge of the streambank. He sniffed the pungent odour that lingered inside, curled his lip and darted a sidelong glance toward Arithon.

The boy expected a reprimand, Arithon knew; and also, he repressed the curious urge to ask if his prince was some sort of addict. His liege obliged him by saying nothing. Politeness triumphed. Jieret shrugged and set down the container, then fixed the man with an accusation quite spoiled for the fact that his tunic was plastered with damp leaves. ‘I made no noise.’

Arithon concealed a shudder of dry heaves behind a chuckle and lied outright. ‘The mosquitoes told me.’

‘But I didn’t swat even one!’ Jieret objected.

‘Next time, don’t scratch,’ the Master of Shadow advised. A flinch escaped his restraint at the boy’s explosion of laughter.

‘You don’t miss much, your Grace.’ The implication remained unspoken, that drugs or drink should deaden the senses.

‘You will use no title, when you address me,’ said Arithon. ‘Your blade was not one I swore oath over, yesterday afternoon. You owe me no homage at all.’

‘But I was too young!’ Jieret dropped to his knees. ‘Here.’ He groped at his belt and proffered the knife he kept for whittling. ‘Take my steel now. I’ll be of age next season.’

Arithon forced a smile over a discomfort that riled him to dizziness. The razor-edged perception of herb-prescience kept him humble, presented him bluntly with recognition that Jieret’s impetuous offer held no hero-worship. A piercingly observant child, his knife was a boy’s way of testing the mettle of a prince his clan elders but pretended not to scorn.

Tenderly as his condition would allow, Arithon chose his answer. ‘Lad, you’ve a good ten years to grow yet before you can cross your father’s will. If Steiven forbade you to swear vassalage, I cannot dishonour his judgement. We can share friendship, if you wish, but nothing more weighty than that.’

Jieret recoiled in affront and sheathed his knife. ‘I’ll be twenty in just eight more years.’ His presence a blur amid thickening gloom, he added, ‘Tashka says I’m large for my age. But she’s my sister, and what do girls know?’ His chin tipped up at a cocky angle his mother would have viewed with trepidation. ‘I’ll fight with the men at your side, prince, when Etarra’s army invades our forest.’

The blood-soaked visions still threatened. Arithon dragged back wandering attention. ‘I forbid you.’

‘But it’s custom!’ Jieret bounded to his feet. ‘Friends always fight together. And Halliron bet Elwedd you’re even better with a sword than Caolle is.’

‘The bard will lose his silver, then,’ Arithon snapped, and at once regretted his outburst. Unbalanced by his pounding head, he laboured to restore his pose of harmless indecision. ‘You can serve me best by staying aside to protect your little sisters.’

Jieret sneered. ‘Caolle’s right, you think like a townborn. Clan girls don’t need protection, a chief’s daughters least of any. Except for Edal and Meara, my sisters will be in battle too, disarming the fallen and catching the enemy’s loose horses.’

Arithon gasped. Hurled into an explosion of prescience like a bloodbath, he reeled, saved from toppling only by the tree at his back. His mind, his heart, the very breath in his throat all but stopped as involuntary foresight seared through him: of women and girls lying gutted in pitiful death. The peace of forest night was swallowed by the din of future screaming. Shocked to hot tears and futile fury, Arithon struggled to recover; while the moss dug up by his spasmed fingers seeped warm red with the blood to be reaped by the vengeance of Etarra’s steel.

Consciousness dwindled despite his best effort. He fought in a breath that became a choked-off cry as his mind was wrenched and then jarred back to focus by Jieret’s grip tugging at his arm.

‘My prince.’ The boy regarded him anxiously. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No.’ Arithon shuddered. While nightmare futures sawed through him, he had only enough constraint to be gentle as he disengaged from the child’s touch. ‘If I’m boring, that’s because I’m worried. Take me back to your father, boy. I have news of grave importance he needs to hear.’

Dubious and critical as any scout on reconnaissance, Jieret looked on as Arithon bent by the spring and swallowed water in sucking gulps. The prince looked sick; was in fact shaking, and running with sweat that smelled of fear. But Jieret had not lost sight of the fact that he trespassed; by nature too canny to contradict, he accepted the conclusion that Halliron’s wagered coin would end up in Elwedd’s purse.

The water and the walk seemed to help. Arithon breathed more freely as movement and increased circulation eased the worst of his withdrawal. Through the hour’s hike back to camp, he regained at least the semblance of his accustomed equilibrium.

Which was well, because the mother of a boy who has lit off into open forest with no word of explanation was bound not to wait with complaisance. Lady Dania intercepted her miscreants at the flap of Steiven’s lodge. She had shed her daytime leathers for a tight-sleeved dress of lilac blue. Russet hair that Arithon had never seen unbraided trailed like undone crochet-work down her back. The effect of softened femininity hit him like a blow and he stopped, struck briefly speechless.

But his momentary awkwardness escaped notice as Dania latched onto her errant son. ‘Jieret! What possessed you? It shames me to see a boy of twelve behaving with less care than a toddler!’

Recessed in the shadow beyond the entry, Arithon interrupted. ‘The boy was with me, and quite safe.’

Lady Dania shot him a scorching glance.

Awed by the briskness with which she abandoned her scolding and ordered him off to bed, Jieret saw that, prince or not, Arithon was going to suffer all of his mother’s thwarted temper. Wary of his fate should he linger, the boy beat an escape through the curtain that separated the nook he shared with his sisters.

Dania cracked back the tentflap, cross to her core from the licence of intemperate royalty. She bent a severe gaze upon the culprit, who escaped her by standing stone-still in the darkness. Reminded afresh that Arithon could be disquieting and difficult, and that Caolle had warned earlier he might have remedied his nerves since the oathtaking with drink or some other indulgence, Dania too said nothing, but busied herself lighting candles.

While new flame fired the delicately embroidered patterns that bordered her bodice and hemline and sparked a brighter warmth of colour in her hair, she barbed her subtlety in a smile of sweetened welcome.

‘Steiven will be back shortly,’ she offered. When Arithon’s reticence remained, she dared him to try sheer bad manners. ‘Come in. Sit. Be comfortable while we wait for him.’

Appreciative of her heroic effort not to nag, and piquantly aware she would rifle what deductions she could from his appearance, Arithon slipped through the doorflap. Her mind matched his measure far too often to make him comfortable. He half-smiled to see that her rearguard attack had defeated him; not a cushion in the lodge remained in dimness enough for concealment. He countered her candles by an absolute refusal to settle. While Dania ducked past the privacy flap to make sure of young Jieret and tuck him with canny firmness into bed, Arithon gave rein to restlessness and paced.

This lodge was not so fine as the one left in storage at the last camp. Bereft of tapestries, fine carpets and permanent furnishings, the dwelling still displayed evidence of civilized inhabitance. One corner was flaked with wood chips and bark, where Jieret had whittled toys for his sisters. An opened book rested on a woven reed-mat, a half-spent candle close by. The text in the surfeit of lighting flashed as he stepped, with bright colours and gilt illumination. The wall behind had been painted over with an elaborate scene of a stag hunt. In the corner, cushioned on a pallet stuffed with evergreen, Halliron’s lyranthe lay abandoned.

Silver strings strung reflections like beads, numerous and scintillant as the candleflames. Arithon set his teeth, but could not quite manage to turn aside. Topaz settings and small emeralds beckoned for his attention amid the carved and inlaid bands that laced from the scrolled base to the peghead with its rows of ebony tuners.

Before thought could stop him, he had seated himself. He extended a finger and tentatively, lightly brushed the strings.

The timbre that answered wrung his heart, so perfectly did it match the voice of the instrument left and lost in Etarra. The maker’s rune stamped in pearl inlay on the back of the soundboard was not visible; but tone was all the signature Arithon required to identify Elshian’s handiwork.

The temptation could be too much.

Framed against a painted backdrop of deer hounds frozen in full cry, he lifted the lyranthe, set his hand to silver frets, and began very softly to play.

The burns where Lysaer’s light bolt had seared his right palm and wrist had barely started to heal. Tripped up as the pull of the wound marred his timing, Arithon struck out a rough and moody line of notes. Lost to his irritation, half-unmoored by lightheadedness, he had space in him only for song. He flexed his stiff hand, cursed mildly as the scab cracked, and launched off in a run that seemed to banish hide walls and let in space like cloud-blown sky.

Notes trilled and spattered across quiet in a statement that through unsullied expression of beauty negated his uncertainty and pain.

Newly returned from Jieret’s bedside, Lady Dania was arrested by the sound. Unwitting party to something not meant to be shared, she poised stock-still with the fringed end of the privacy curtain forgotten between her clenched hands.

A soaring arpeggio introduced a change in key like an epiphany. Major chord to minor, the lyranthe rang through a boldly personal statement that flashed with a grace like edged swordplay. Stirred through the stuffy, airless heat trapped inside hide walls, Dania shivered in delight. This prince could bind spells with his playing. Entranced beyond fear of impropriety, she smiled her appreciation and advanced.

The privacy flap smacked shut like a slap, but her attempt at warning passed unnoticed. The notes built and blended and sprang separate while Arithon laid his cheek against the curve of resonating wood. His eyes were closed, his whole being intertwined with the notes that danced under his hands.

A slipped finger shattered the spell. There came a pause while his wrist lifted. Then his hands dipped again, through a jarring, heavily plucked statement that skirted the edge of discord.

Arithon silenced the strings with an impatient caress, then turned his hand to find his cut split, and a bead of blood welling through.

Dania discovered herself half-dizzied from some reasonless urge to hold her breath. She moved another step, just as the prince looked up.

The emotion in his eyes struck her with the force of a stormfront alive with the beat of summer thunder.

She gave way and sat across from him. ‘I didn’t intend to eavesdrop. But I have to admit you have a gift even Halliron must envy.’

Mention of the Masterbard pricked Arithon to an irritable glance down. Had the instrument in his hands not awed him, he might have answered his first impulse, and flung it away as though his skin hurt. ‘Lady, your praise is far too generous.’

He did not blot the burst burn on his tunic. A tiny start unsettled her as she wondered if somehow he knew: the garment had been her deceased brother’s. His eyes were on her again. He saw, and she realized too well that her intuition set keen challenge against his intentions.

Dania absorbed the awkward moment by rearranging the skirt over her knees. Blue cloth settled a ring of twilight over a tawny landscape of flax hassocks, and her hands, like paired birds, nestled together in her lap. Arithon ducked quickly forward and hoped his fallen hair would shade his face. His breathing was harder to temper; Steiven’s wife had a vivid, magnetic beauty beneath the wear of hard living and the fullness lent by child bearing. The fact she tracked his mind without effort evoked an intimacy that played havoc with drug-heightened senses and provoked him to shameless response.

Preternaturally conscious of her quick, timid glance toward his face, he turned his head.

‘Something troubles you,’ she said. ‘Is that why you seek my husband?’

Her voice had that velvety timbre associated with wind through high grass. A fine-grained tremor shook him and he shut his eyes fast as the dregs of the tienelle fanned a flare of heat through his veins.

‘Some things are best let lie.’ He stamped down the flicker of vision too late. Prescience arose, full-bodied and ugly enough to choke him, of Lady Dania sprawled in black leaf mould, the leathers she wore for workaday ripped down to expose muddied thighs, and her throat slashed open by a sword stroke.

Dimly, he realized she was speaking. ‘If it were up to me, I would drop every weapon in Etarra into the bogs of Anglefen, and hire you as bard of Deshir.’

Arithon opened his eyes, flashed her a glance hot and molten as brass tailings stirred in a crucible. He said no word, but hooked back the lyranthe with an urgency concealed behind languidness.

Dania was not deceived. Neither could she deny the compulsion that drove him, rooted as it was in the gentleness that tonight for some reason he could not mask. The music he loosed with his hands held a spirit that gave easy surcease from talk.

He took the release she allowed him with gratitude that sang through E major, then plunged in sliding falls to tread deeper measures that rang lyrically placid and dark. He tempered his impatience in the mathematical progression of schooled notes. Pinched between physical discomfort and the horrific pageant of images inflicted at random upon his innermind, Arithon longed for Steiven to come, that he could finish this business and be alone. He wanted the forest, with the calls of whippoorwills and running water to smooth his abraded nerves. He needed delicate, exacting concentration to unbind the residual taint within his body. Yet the urgency of the final revelation which had shown him clan girls and wives lying slaughtered disbarred the solitude he required.

Arithon channelled himself into music as a substitute for thought until steps at the doorflap spoiled his cadence.

‘Must you deal behind my back?’ Halliron’s demand shattered the spell before the last note had quite faded.

Dania started and jerked her scented skirts aside to allow the bard space to take a seat. ‘How long have you been here?’

Arithon damped the dwindling ring of silver strings and proffered Elshian’s lyranthe to her master.

Halliron took back his instrument, derisively abrupt. ‘I heard it all. The fragment preceding as well.’ Pale, hard eyes touched the prince with a look as inimical as a knife-thrust. ‘I know the voice of my lyranthe better than that of my own child. You should have known she would call me. Did you lack the guts, not to speak to me beforehand?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Arithon’s hands balled up. He forgot his torn scab and tension rimmed one fingernail brightly scarlet. ‘I was thoughtlessly selfish. Here’s my promise not to meddle, after this.’

‘Meddle!’ Dania had never heard the bard’s voice so charged with fury. ‘You arrogant, manipulative young fool! Don’t insult my intelligence by playing your falsehoods on me. It’s an Ath-given talent you’ve been hiding. I say it here, you’ve no right to see that strangled.’

Arithon sat back sharply, discomfort plain upon his face. The bard had managed to shock him, as nobody else ever had, and his recovery lacked courtesy or grace. ‘That was not my intent.’ For once too upset to try pretence, he hitched his shoulders in dismissal. ‘Of course, I’m touched by your regard. But I saw no reason to inflict my inadequate fingering upon you.’ The sarcasm used in desperation bloomed now to drive back tearing anguish. ‘My sword, you’ll recall, is now wedded to the cause of a kingdom.’

Halliron shrugged off the protestation. ‘The mechanics of your playing can definitely be improved upon.’ He cradled the lyranthe against his shoulder, set fingers to strings, and repeated several bars of Arithon’s work. Beneath his skill, melody emerged refocused into a rendition to make the heart leap for pure pain.

The effect left Dania with her fingers pressed to her lips, and the Prince of Rathain dead white.

Halliron damped the strings with a slap the exquisite soundboard magnified like a shout. ‘With work, you shall surpass me. Study, apply yourself to life training, and no one alive could match your style.’ The Masterbard pressed his instrument back into Arithon’s lap.

‘If, if, if!’ Arithon spurned the invitation in a recoil that dragged air in a whine across strings as he thrust the instrument aside. ‘Where is Steiven?’

‘Stop evading.’ Incensed, Halliron held to his subject. ‘I’ve searched all my life, and never heard the equal of your natural ability.’

Arithon whipped taut with a speed that belied the indolence he had adopted since his arrival. The weave of moving shadows as he thrust to his feet plunged the painted stag into darkness, leaving hounds with bared muzzles exposed to the merciless candlelight. To Dania he said crisply, ‘If Caolle is available, I’ll speak to him instead.’

Dismayed, the lady instinctively forestalled him. ‘You haven’t eaten, your Grace. Let me bring wine and fresh bread.’

Arithon abruptly shook his head.

He was a man who never used gestures when a verbal backlash would serve better. Alarmed, Dania surveyed his face. ‘You’re unwell.’

‘Which is not your concern, dear lady.’ Arithon caught her hands and kissed her knuckles, inspired to ruthless certainty that his clammy sweat and fine trembling would set her off-balance enough to quiet her. ‘Caolle or your husband, it doesn’t matter which. But I must speak with one of them immediately.’

Silence followed his demand, a rugged war of wills that Halliron finally broke because he misliked risking Deshir’s lady to the edged temper of the s’Ffalenn heir. ‘Steiven and Caolle are closeted in the tent that serves as armoury. They’re taking inventory, and probably won’t mind the interruption.’

Arithon gave the bard a smile of astonishing gratitude. Then he kissed the lady’s hands again. ‘My respect, and my thanks for your hospitality.’ Need before gentleness commanded him as he released his touch and departed.

The lodge-flap sighed closed on his heels, and infused the close tent with the night-scent of dew-soaked evergreen. Lady Dania stared blindly across an emptiness left brilliant with candles, her arms hugged forlornly across her chest. ‘He tries hard to make us think he takes us lightly.’

Wordless in sympathy, Halliron caught her shoulders. He turned her, sat her down and fetched her wine. This once in his life unwilling to seek music to quiet an uneasy mind, he poured a second goblet for himself. ‘It’s fate that’s his enemy, not ourselves.’ He drank deep, to dull a grief he could not bear, that his search for a successor had found its match in a man who had no use at all for an apprenticeship.

Underlit by the glow of a single candle, the war captain of Deshir’s clans crouched, counting unfletched arrows in their bins while Steiven marked numbers on a tally. Caolle was first to look up as the tent flap stirred and admitted a drift of night air. A smile broke through his weathered scowl. ‘Well, well. Look who’s come.’

Arithon stepped through the entry. Burdened with a rolled set of parchments, and in no mood to be subtle under needling, he had done nothing to ease his withdrawal symptoms beyond a pause to drink at the river. The water had not settled well. By that, he knew he had very little time to make his point before weakness forced him to retire. Driven to fast movement to conceal a resurgence of cramps, he chose a table arrayed with swords set aside for the armourer’s attention in the morning. These he swept aside with a belling clangour that made Steiven jump to his feet.

‘Your Grace?’ The clan chieftain left his captain, the tally slate abandoned in his haste.

Caolle tossed aside an arrow, lifted the candle, and followed. His distaste intensified as Arithon shed a cascade of scrolled documents and whipped them flat across the tabletop. The parchments so callously handled were the tactical maps that culminated painstaking labour and days of vociferous debate.

Annoyed enough that his gorge rose, Caolle’s steps became deliberate. ‘If you’re finished with moping for the day, perhaps you’d care to tell us the name of the man presently in command of Etarra’s reserve corps of archers?’

Braced against the table to steady a nasty rush of dizziness, Arithon tried to answer. His throat was already bone-dry. The drink at the river had not been sufficient to satisfy the demands of withdrawal. Warned that his neglect had now set him on dangerous ground, that the effects of herb poisons would have him unconscious if he pushed without care, he looked, but saw no place to sit down.

‘Or have the sulks clouded your memory?’ Caolle goaded. ‘You need not trouble. Our plans have already been set.’

Arithon returned an impatient lift of his head. ‘The commander’s name is Hadig. And you’re going to have to change tactics.’

Caolle gave a gruff, low laugh and at once confronted his clan chief. ‘This womanish daydreamer suggests that our councils have been wasted. Do we leave our arrows uncounted, just to let him show us better?’

Arithon neither acknowledged the insult, nor allowed Steiven’s puzzled regard any interval to unravel his personal state. He reached with a hand forced to steadiness and swept across an inked arc of symbols that his fickle mind twisted into bodies, bent and broken and bathed in congealed blood. ‘Here,’ he half gasped. ‘And here. I’ll suffer no man’s mother or child in the path of Etarra’s armies.’

Lip curled in contempt, Caolle said, ‘You think us gutless as townsmen.’

‘I took an oath!’ Arithon locked eyes with him. ‘I speak out of concern.’

Caolle set down the candle and leaned on bunched hands across the charts. ‘You’d make a prime town governor.’

‘You’ll listen,’ Arithon returned, a jab of command in his tone. ‘Would you ruin your people for sheer pride? My objection has no grounds in sentiment.’

‘Sentiment? Fiends, are you blind?’ Caolle’s scarred fists crashed onto the table top, jarring swordblades in ringing counterpoint while the candle guttered and spattered hot wax across the maps. ‘There are nine-hundred-sixty of us of age to wield weapons. That includes every man of the northeast forest clans, who will not, cannot, even with Ath’s help, get here in time to make a difference. Ten to one odds, had you counted. Dharkaron Avenger couldn’t balance such stakes. And you’ve the puking gall to fly in my face with objections?’

‘Caolle! Recall you address your sovereign lord.’ Steiven reappeared out of shadow with camp stools salvaged from a field kit. He distributed the seats around the table and said as sharply, ‘Your Grace, if you wish changes, speak your reason. Argument serves no purpose here.’

The clanlord sat down then, and in iron-clad example directed his attention to the maps. If a night of communion with nature had jolted Arithon out of apathy he would never ridicule the change. This prince’s hand had helped to banish Desh-thiere; if the powers used then could help now, he must be encouraged to offer them. Yet, confronted by Arithon’s unsteady bearing as he pulled up the stool and sank onto it, Steiven wondered silently if Caolle’s supposition had been right, and his liege had retired from the oathtaking to get himself royally drunk.

Arithon rested his chin on folded fingers. ‘I’ve had warning,’ he opened without preamble. ‘The lives of every clan woman and child will be lost if they are sent out to stand against Lysaer. Butchery best describes the method. I could sound no alternative sequence.’

Caolle for a mercy stayed silent, while Steiven adjusted to this implied application of mage schooled prescience with a care he might have used when taking aim on a half-startled buck. ‘Can you be more specific?’

‘Unfortunately not.’ Arithon resumed a tone beaten level by an unpleasant ringing in his ears. ‘Your son disrupted my scrying. Small talk of his sisters provoked a precognition. His presence masked further development. I suggest, and not lightly, that you take full heed and arrange safeguards.’

Steiven regarded his prince and desperately suppressed the thought that rose inside him like a scream: that his own life already had been pledged. It seemed most cruelly unjust that loyalty to this Teir’s’Ffalenn might claim his wife and five young ones as well. He said only, ‘You wish me to remove the women and younger children from the lines?’

‘At the very least.’ Arithon sounded strained.

‘Suicide,’ Caolle interrupted. He stuck broad thumbs in his belt and licked his teeth. ‘We cannot act in fear of who will die. If we hold back any one resource, where do we stop? We’ll have no need at all for fussy strategy, if our lines get overrun and all of our fighting strength falls jack-dead on the field!’

‘There are alternatives,’ Arithon interjected. At his word, the candle flicked out, though no hand had moved to pinch the flame.

When Caolle leaned out to test the wick, Steiven stopped him on instinct. ‘Don’t. Snuffed candles usually smoke. I smell none, which must mean the light is still burning.’

‘The sun can be blackened as easily,’ Arithon’s voice resumed out of darkness. ‘Mine is full command of shadow. Though I am loath to kill by trickery, the night can be a formidable weapon.’

He released the captive candle as abruptly, and in a steady, undisturbed spill, flamelight glinted in multiple reflection on the helms and scale brigandines of a dozen men-at-arms, conjured from nowhere and arrayed behind the prince’s chair.

Caolle broke his chief’s hold. He surged erect. His hands in frenzied urgency sorted through the weapons that weighted the map-ends for just one blade with a serviceable edge.

Arithon’s grating laughter stopped him cold. ‘Illusion only,’ the prince admonished. His magery dispersed into thin air, with Caolle left blinking and foolish, his fists interlocked behind the crossguard of an ill-balanced antique broadsword.

The prince said with stinging coolness, ‘I’m hardly the green boy you imagined. By the grace of my grandfather’s upbringing, I hold the sole alternative. Listen and live. Or I’ll step back, reject my oath, your feal defence and every last trace of your memory.’

As if taunting the temper that, in one move, could finish a swing up to gut him, the Shadow Master held the clan captain’s gaze in tight-lipped, bristling antagonism. Until, suspicious that the prince might not be drunk, but rather driving for the opening to provoke, Steiven intervened. ‘Caolle, put down that blade. Whether or not you’ve been mocked, I can tolerate no violence against a guest who’s sworn at my hearth.’

Caolle settled, hunched as a mastiff forced to give ground. He watched with hot eyes as Arithon applied a stick of charcoal to the map and re-formed the deployment of Deshir’s forces. As the fine, unsteady hands revitalized the plans with new strategy, the irascible veteran was forced to revise his impression of the s’Ffalenn heir. The prince was impressively clever, if weak. His hands trembled, and the green eyes burned beneath slack lids as though driven to fever by high-strung nerves. Battle experience might toughen him enough to make him a passable sovereign, Caolle thought; but he kept his opinion to himself.

Near the end, they suffered interruption. Framed suddenly against the torchless blackness of the doorway, a scout in weapons and leathers made a hasty entrance. ‘Your Grace. Lord Caolle. The Lady Dania requires the presence of her husband. Your Jieret has had another nightmare and is out of his senses with grief.’

‘Forgive me,’ Steiven blurted, on his feet and gone in a bound that riffled stacked maps in his wake.

Relieved to be quit of his message, the scout came fully inside and settled on the stool his chief had vacated. He gave Caolle an apologetic shrug. ‘Ath ease his suffering, poor young one.’ For Arithon’s benefit, he explained, ‘Jieret has Sight, as his father does.’

‘Jieret has natural prescience?’ Hunched over crossed arms on the tabletop, Arithon snapped straight in wild-eyed, sweating attention. ‘Ath’s mercy, why did nobody think to tell me?’

Cynical before this unlooked-for burst of concern, Caolle drummed his knuckles on his swordbelt and watched; while the scout, less dour, let out a sigh. ‘No kind gift for a boy, to be sure. Whatever he’s dreamed broke his heart.’

‘I’ll tell you what he saw.’ Arithon shot a vicious glance toward Caolle. ‘The slaughter of every living relative. If I’d known that child had Sight, I’d never have allowed him to stay near me. I was still half-tranced from scrying, and my defences at the time were wide open. If he’s gifted, he’ll have picked up the sequence from me. Mine the blame, if he’s taken any harm.’

Magecraft and jargon left no impression upon Caolle, who disdained outbursts of any sort. He pulled his skinning knife from his boot sheath, and in the extreme and failing candlelight expertly shaved off a hangnail. ‘You worry for nothing,’ he said to Arithon. ‘Deshir’s young are hardly fragile. Any such weakness in clan bloodlines, town headhunters have long since stamped out.’

The reassurance appeared to settle Arithon’s mind, for by the time the captain looked up to sheath his blade, the prince had apparently fallen asleep. His black hair feathered a pillowing wrist, with the other hand outflung across the map; as if he had started to surge to his feet, then surrendered the inclination.

If arcane scrying had exhausted the prince to the same degree as his recent flight from Etarra, the man was a fool who tried to roust him. The scout said as much, his long face gloomy in disgust.

For his part, Caolle gave grudging credit for Arithon’s contribution to the defence strategy: he did not curse his liege lord’s failing out loud, but in tones of mulish reserve, requested help to shift Arithon back to Steiven’s lodge tent.

‘That’s twice in a week our chief’s left us to haul deadweight like deer-dressers,’ the scout grumbled. The candle fluttered at his movement as he kicked back Steiven’s stool, leaned over and hooked his forearms under Arithon’s shoulders. ‘Phew. What’s he got on his clothes? Smells like burnt spice or something.’

Caolle shrugged. The finicky habits of mages being outside his province to fathom, he hefted the royal legs without comment.

As both men manoeuvred their prince around the chart-strewn table, the scout gave a breathless, short laugh. ‘Well, he’s small enough, Ath be thanked. Easy to sling as a puppy. If I have to strain a sword hand for my liege, I’m glad to know I’ll do it killing townsmen.’

‘Ye’ll do it standing extra turns at duty!’ Caolle snapped, moved at last to vent the spleen he had too long bent aside to please his chieftain. ‘Get back to your post where you belong, and leave yon princeling’s nursing to me.’ The mettlesome captain of the Deshans shouldered the unconscious prince like a game carcass and huffed on alone to Steiven’s lodge tent.

Dania’s extravagant expenditure of candles by this hour had burned low; those few wicks that still struggled alight fed on drafts, half drowned in puddled wax. Other candles snuffed to conserve resources stood tall white in a gloomy play of shadows. As conscious of their cost as of the life in the burden he carried, Caolle took care not to knock against them as he bore Arithon toward the cushions in the comer where Halliron’s lyranthe lay propped, unshrouded still, if not forgotten.

Caolle shucked his load, tugged straight a twist in his tunic, and considered his duty to his sovereign completed. He raised a forearm to blot his brow, caught a whiff of his leather bracers and nearly spat. The exotic reek from whatever rite of magery the prince had trifled with had transferred itself to his person. Moved to seek fresher air outside, Caolle spun to depart, but checked halfway to the doorflap as Steiven re-emerged from the alcove set aside for his children.

To forestall answering for the prince, Caolle asked, ‘Is Jieret settled?’

Steiven sighed, strolled crunching through scrolls of dry birch bark and uncorked the wine flagon his wife had left out for the Masterbard. ‘He’s coherent. Halliron’s telling him a story. If we’re lucky, he’ll choose something boring that will ease the boy back to sleep.’

‘The nightmare was truesight, then?’ Ruled by habit, Caolle braced broad shoulders against the king post and regarded the master he had first raised and now served without question. Neither man could have named the day when duty had deepened to respect; the nuance of who was master had never mattered between them. ‘Did Jieret say what he dreamed?’

Caught in mid-swallow, Steiven parked the flagon on his forearm. He shook his head. ‘Dania says he told nothing beyond the name of Fethgurn’s daughter. Though what Teynie has to do with an ugly precognition, Daelion Fatemaster knows. My boy cannot tell us. Whatever Jieret dreamed, it’s too much for him to bear. His mind has closed to recall, as mine did, once.’ And he stopped, knowing Caolle would remember: it had been the captain’s gruff hands that had soothed him, the night before his father found his death.

A shiver swept over Steiven. His regard lay heavy with understanding upon his captain: too soon, Etarra’s troops would invade these valleys.

Wordless, Caolle extended his hand for the flagon. Steiven watched while his first captain drank, his eyes as deep with worry as his oldest confidante had ever seen them. ‘We must withdraw the girls and women as Arithon wishes. Seer or not, his objections and Jieret’s nightmare are too close to be a coincidence.’

‘The boys over ten years of age will have to disarm the fallen then,’ Caolle insisted, his eyes beneath the crag of his browline deepened to pits as the candle by his elbow fluttered out. ‘Those few absolutely can’t be spared.’

Steiven nodded, took back the wine, and paused with the neck of the flagon half-raised. As if he expected a rejoinder, he glanced around and across the darkened tent. ‘Where’s the prince?’

Caolle jerked his chin past his shoulder. ‘There. Fell asleep on the tactical maps, so I brought him.’ Deshir’s war captain folded thick arms in expectation of Dania’s scolding as she and Halliron emerged from soothing Jieret into bed.

‘Ah well.’ Steiven sighed, aware how little reprimand would accomplish with his war captain planted like a bull. Finally, softly, he set the flask aside. ‘Our Teir’s’Ffalenn’s entitled to his comforts, I would guess, if he spent last night smacking midges in the open.’

A rustle of skirts and more flickering from spent candles, and Lady Dania reached her husband’s side. ‘Arithon ought to sleep,’ she said tartly. ‘When he left here, he was unwell.’

Caolle smiled. While the Masterbard crossed the lodge to fetch his instrument, the captain stole the moment to bait her by hooking back the flagon. ‘A man can be unwell, and not be the least bit sick.’ He drank, his eyes on hers.

Dania gave no ground. The captain’s blistering insolence she suspected held a hint of jealousy; at least, Caolle had never subjected her to teasing before the day she had wed. Her lord shied well clear, since better than anybody else, his lady could keep the war captain in his place.

Dania’s mouth tautened in conclusion that Caolle’s antagonism toward Arithon was the same: that he would treat even a dog with contempt, if it dared to claim Steiven’s affection. As though the grizzled captain were an overbearing brother, she reached out and slapped the flagon from his mouth. ‘Now what would his Grace be drunk on, stream water?’

Caolle choked to kill an untimely burst of laughter. ‘He has a weak head, our royal heir, or maybe just a weak stomach?’

The discussion was cut short, as Halliron cried out from the corner, ‘Ath Creator, how long has he been like this?’

Steiven spun round on reflex; Caolle, with considering deliberation. Half-lost in the maze of deepened shadows, the Masterbard bent over Arithon, one hand clasped over the royal wrist and feeling in concern for a pulse.

‘Sithaer’s fires, man.’ Caolle rubbed his eyes, which were stinging tired from too much stress. ‘You act as if he’s dying. He only dropped off to sleep.’

‘He could be dying,’ Halliron said, his performer’s voice bladed to satire. ‘Did none of you notice the smell on him?’

‘Is something wrong?’ Steiven released the hand that cupped his wife’s waist as Dania moved to light candles.

Halliron made a sound of exasperation. When Caolle looked brazenly blank, and Steiven’s expression failed to clear, the Masterbard raised Arithon’s other wrist and hauled him into a half reclining posture that needed several pillows to support. As his fingers untied the prince’s shirtcuffs, he said, ‘Have you ever read anything on herb lore? In particular on the leaves of the mountain flower called tienelle?’

‘Seersweed?’ Shocked to quick action, Steiven yanked the flagon from Caolle’s grasp and crossed the tent. ‘Ath preserve us. Not the narcotic used by mages…’ He knelt, touched the prince’s clammy flesh, and bits of remembered trivia fell together with an alarming, unpleasant feel of truth. The prince had spoken of scrying. If tienelle had been part of his method, it would indeed induce visions; followed by illness from toxins that had no listed antidote. Enraged at the prince’s reticence, and then by his own slow perception, Steiven ripped out a word he had never used under his own roofpole, or in the presence of his wife.

‘He told us he was trained!’ Caolle protested.

‘And so he must be. I much doubt he would leave us by suicide.’ Steiven withheld his sympathy, while Caolle started to pace.

Halliron continued his ministrations, aggrieved to a depth that none but Lady Dania understood. Her hands trembled on the striker as for the second time that night she lit wick after wick in succession; while the Masterbard resumed condemnation. ‘How long did you delay him, badgering and questioning his manhood?’

‘Never mind that,’ cut in Steiven. ‘Just tell us what’s to be done.’

The Masterbard’s smile was whitelipped and merciless, and directed to stop Caolle between strides. ‘Wake him up and ask,’ he invited. ‘I’m no mage at all. My tunes and your prowess at war in this case are no foil for fatal poison.’

‘Well, his Grace volunteered for the sacrifice,’ Caolle snapped. ‘Don’t make me slap him back to consciousness. I’d be too much tempted to break his neck.’

Nobody answered that outburst. Dania stood with the striker wrung between her fingers. Halliron steadied the prince’s head, while Steiven raised the flask and began forcing wine down the flaccid royal throat.

Arithon roused, bent in half by a cough that immediately progressed to nausea. Between spasms, he gasped for water. A basin was proffered. He drank and was sick. He drank again, his hands locked one on another in a torment that left Dania silently, desperately weeping.

This time the liquid stayed down. When the Master of Shadow raised green eyes rinsed blank by the force of will he needed to command his reflexes, no one present could escape recognition of the mettle he had masked behind laziness.

Arithon knew as much. Even through pain, his manner suggested the chagrin of a joke undone as his gaze locked level with Caolle’s.

Caught on his knees by the sick-bed, the captain of Deshir’s defence said no word, but gripped the basin as if blunt metal might sprout legs and kick him in the stomach.

The deep s’Ffalenn eyes never flickered, but the mouth twitched in a pinched-off, flippant smile. ‘I’ll try you at foils on the morrow,’ Arithon challenged, prepared to take bruises for his falsehood.

Grudgingly forced to revise his assessment of the s’Ffalenn prince yet again, Caolle snarled, ‘Save your steel for the heartblood of Etarra’s city guard.’

Work on the defences continued without relenting as Arithon rested from his debilitating bout with the tienelle. He did not rise to cross foils with the clan captain, but on Steiven’s enforced orders kept to his bed. He heard in thin-lipped silence that the participation of boys in the battle was a matter beyond his royal right to question.

If his initial reaction was too quiet, his response came typically obstinate. He waited until Dania’s back was turned, called young Jieret to his bedside, and with the blade of a boy’s knife for carving, nicked his left wrist. There and then he swore a blood pact of friendship with his caithdein’s only son.

Confronted minutes later by the father’s anger, Arithon gazed up from his pillows, peaceful with grieved affection. ‘That is the best I can do for you, whom I love as my brother. I can see your heir survives this war to continue your line and title.’

Struck speechless by emotion, Steiven whirled and left the prince’s presence. With his own death already a sealed fate, the Earl of the North could have asked no better parting from this life, save the chance to better know the spirit of the man who had graced him.

‘Ath lighten your burden, my prince,’ he murmured. And he stumbled on blindly across the lodge tent, into the arms of his wife.

Dania exclaimed in dismay at his kiss. She tasted salt tears on Steiven’s lips. Drowned in silent, close embrace, she pulled loose, caught his hand and guided him to slip the laces on her bodice.

Steiven accepted her invitation. In the sunwarmed air of their sleeping nook, he allowed her quiet touch and hot flesh to absorb his bitter brew of sorrow. But the pleasure of release was saddened by the knowledge that this moment was to be among the last.

Incarceration

Dakar the Mad Prophet stopped cold in his tracks, wiped at his streaming forehead, and glared askance down a sheer rockface toward a valley spread like quilting between a dizzying array of black peaks. Fresh sweat rolled off his temples. Left faint and sick from the effects of exertion and extreme altitude, he complained to a point of empty air, ‘You call this a trail? I say it’s a deathtrap. And I hope you have defence wards set. If a fiend chances by and possesses a loose stone, it’s sure to make mischief and trip me.’

Made the more mutinous as his outburst drew no response, Dakar plucked at the straps of his knapsack, which bulged from his back like the shell of some malformed turtle. ‘And anyway, I’d think you sorcerers wouldn’t chance my taking a fall, not lugging this, anyway. And I don’t see why I was appointed to act as the Fellowship’s pack-mule in the first place!’

A breeze flicked through a fan of alpine flowers near Dakar’s feet, perhaps provoked by Kharadmon’s invisible presence.

‘Oh, come on!’ Dakar griped. ‘A miser in a poorhouse has more to say than you! Why not admit you know why Asandir has me carrying his Ath-forsaken Mistwraith to the summit of Rockfell Peak?’

‘You need the exercise?’ Kharadmon quipped. A daisy fell out of nowhere and brushed past Dakar’s left ear.

The Mad Prophet swiped it away. He scraped forward, his shoulder pressed to the mountain, until the narrow ribbon of trail reached a switchback half-blocked by boulders. There he seized the opportunity to plump himself down. The perch he chose was moss-grown. Seepage from a glacial spring made him grimace and huff like a walrus, yet laziness triumphed. A soaked rump notwithstanding, he bent at the waist and shucked off the knapsack. Inside, girdled with tingling guard-spells, lay the flask that bottled Desh-thiere. ‘I should heave this off the nearest precipice, and see you all juggle spells to catch it back,’ the Mad Prophet suggested nastily.

‘Try,’ Kharadmon invited.

Dakar’s glower deepened. ‘A damned iyat has more sense of fun than you.’

‘I should hope so.’ Below their vantage, the slow-falling speck that was the daisy winked out. A second later, Kharadmon’s image unfurled, extravagantly poised in midair. ‘Or I’d throw you off the cliff, and see how far and long you’d bounce.’

‘Do that.’ Dakar sighed. ‘Break my back. I’d like to lie down and rest for six months or maybe a year.’

Kharadmon stroked the spade-black beard that thrust from his chin. Piebald hair streamed on the winds that whipped off the snowfields higher up and his green eyes glinted, shrewd. ‘You’re thinking your master has misused you?’

‘Not me,’ Dakar snapped. ‘I said so before: Prince Lysaer.’ Cautious not to try Kharadmon’s impatience, he heaved to his feet, and with a martyred roll of his eyes, resettled his pack on sore shoulders. ‘Sithaer take your Fellowship’s grand plans, you used a good man and then broke him.’

‘Ah.’ Kharadmon flicked away into nothing. A cold draft at odds with nature, he flowed upslope against the wind.

Dakar resumed inching up a track better suited for small goats. ‘You don’t agree,’ he said sourly.

The discorporate mage surprised with an answer. ‘You’ve seen Asandir take deer for the supper pot.’

‘He never hunts anything I ever saw.’ The Mad Prophet bent, clawed out a pebble that had worked its way into his boot-top, then sidestepped through a hair pin bend, his buttocks pressed to sheer rock while his beer-gut jutted over sky. ‘Asandir just goes out and sits in a thicket somewhere. Eventually a buck happens along, lies down, and dies for him.’

‘He projects his need and asks,’ Kharadmon corrected tartly. ‘The deer chooses freely, and its fate and man’s hunger end in balance.’

‘You’re not saying Lysaer volunteered,’ Dakar protested.

The trail doubled back, its frost-split stone scoured lifeless except for mustard and black flecks of lichen. From ahead, Kharadmon sent back, ‘No. Your prince answered circumstance according to his inate character. The Fellowship imposed nothing outside his natural will and intentions.’

Dakar viewed the next span with trepidation, and ended by scrabbling forward on hands and knees. Gravel loosened by his passage slid and bounced, and finally rocketed into the abyss that was Rockfell vale. Between stertorous panting, he gasped, ‘You can’t claim…Desh-thiere’s wraith…submits to any law of the Major Balance.’

‘Where opening did not already exist, the creature could not have gained foothold,’ said Kharadmon.

Squatted now on his hams and blowing harder, Dakar squirmed to shift the bite of the packstraps. Already blistered on his heels, his temper had abraded to match. ‘But Sethvir as much as admitted the s’Ilessid inborn gift was at fault. Had Lysaer not been driven to seek perfect justice, the wraith would have found nothing to exploit.’

Frostily unmoved, Kharadmon said, ‘If so, our Fellowship has a reckoning to answer for.’

Dakar took a second to recognize capitulation. ‘Well then!’ he cried, and closed for the kill. ‘Why in Ath’s name did you surrender Lysaer knowing he’d have no defence?’

The flicks and slaps of breeze that expressed Kharadmon’s displeasure died into ominous stillness. Even the winds off the ridges dared not cross the imposed circle of his silence. ‘Because,’ his reply cracked back at length, ‘Ath Creator himself did not insist that his works spring perfectly formed from the void. We are permitted our mistakes, for which, my fat prophet, you should kiss the earth daily and be grateful.’

Hunkered like a bear on damp haunches, Dakar prepared to argue further. But a second voice admonished from below: ‘Best give less thought to Lysaer’s business and more to your own, which is jeopardized. The outcrop where you’ve chosen to pontificate is not terribly well anchored to the scarp.’

The Mad Prophet ejected a filthy word. Sweated over more than bad footing, he scooted forward and cautiously peered downward.

Soundless, graceful, in a stroll that disallowed fourteen thousand feet of vertical drop, Asandir ascended the switchback just below. Grey hair, grey cloak, with both wrists adorned by talisman bracelets runed in white metal, he was silver from head to foot.

‘Where did you disappear to this morning?’ Dakar shot back. ‘I cooked some breakfast and found you gone, and never a word of instruction as to what you wished me to do.’

Asandir stopped. His brows lifted. The mouth underneath never moved. He looked at Dakar and said acidly, ‘That’s no reason to threaten to pitch Desh-thiere off any handy vertical precipice.’

‘Ah, fiends,’ moaned Dakar. ‘A man can’t say one word without you hearing it.’ He hugged the cliff face resignedly and hauled himself back upright.

‘Sethvir heard you, too.’ By then, Asandir had hooked the loops of the knapsack. As the Mad Prophet obligingly shrugged off straps, the sorcerer reappropriated custody of Desh-thiere’s flask.

Lightened enough to try boldness, Dakar stole a glance slantwise at his master. ‘What were you doing, anyway?’

Asandir attended the packstraps, in need of commodious readjustment to fit his slimmer anatomy. ‘What did you use here, spider’s knots?’ He abandoned the tangle, and more efficiently called a spell to clear the ties.

‘I’m no sailor, to be handy with strings or a sewing awl.’ It served any sorcerer properly, Dakar thought, to have left him in charge of such matters. He watched, envious, as the rawhide slithered free of itself with a sinuous ease of living snakes. ‘How did you do that?’

Silver-grey eyes now flicked up, keenly bright in their scrutiny. ‘Which question did you actually want answered?’

Hopeful, Dakar said, ‘Both.’

But Asandir’s mood since Etarra had not been the least bit forgiving. ‘When a peak such as this has served through two ages as a prison, prudence would dictate a check to be sure the rock is still willing to absorb the antagonism of the entity we wish to confine.’

‘And how does one bribe old stone into becoming a sewer for human refuse?’ Dakar smirked.

Asandir looked back at him, serious. ‘Rocks outlast all our doings. Longevity gives them great respect for politeness, a tendency you would benefit from copying.’

‘You can have your stones and your trees, and your communion with both for permissions,’ Dakar retorted. ‘I’ll save my appreciation for a paid woman, if we don’t break our necks on this peak.’

A warning shift in Asandir’s regard prompted Dakar to spin around and resume clambering up the trail. As stones gouged his knees, he vowed under his breath that henceforward he would restrict his inquiries to spells that could untie string. Then the next time he attracted a pack of mischief-bent iyats, he need not cut his laces to pry his boots off.

The ledge faded out at the snowline. Confronted by a rock face cracked into vertical ladders and packed under scabs of blue ice, Dakar swallowed. ‘We’re not going up that.’

Nobody answered. He blinked, rubbing sweat from his eyes. ‘Well, I’m not going up that.’

‘You could spend the night here,’ Asandir agreed. ‘You might even be comfortable, before the storm.’

‘What storm?’ Dakar studied the sky, which deepened now toward clear aquamarine. Sunset was nigh, but the air smelled of glacier, not snow. ‘There aren’t any clouds! I could spit and hit the moon.’

Asandir kept climbing. The Mad Prophet fidgeted from foot to foot while arcanely frigid air eddied upward, as Kharadmon also passed him by.

Dakar scrubbed his face on his tunic sleeve, then reviewed his position. The pitch they had already climbed was frightful, Rockfell’s southeastern exposure a needle to split the wind. The nethermost spine of the Skyshiels nipped the horizon all around, while below, hulking as somnolent dragons, two ridges hoarded the valley between. Farthest down, dark tarnish in a gloom of cut-off sunlight, river Avast’s ice-fed streamlets wound through forested ravines napped and ledged like rumpled velvet.

Just looking made Dakar’s head spin. He could wait, but if he nodded off to sleep for one second he would tumble off the cranny that marked the trailhead. Above, sharp rocks as bleak as nightmare swooped up, lost in clouds gilt-hemmed by failing daylight. Asandir had already disappeared. Beaten at last to resignation, Dakar stuffed his fat hands in a cleft and inched upward toward fog that was powdered with whirling snow. He inhaled the flakes repeatedly as he climbed. Eyes squeezed shut, he spoke through teeth clamped against a sneeze, and hoped to Sithaer that Asandir would take pity on him. ‘How much further?’ His muscles felt wrapped in hot wire.

Kharadmon’s chuckle answered. ‘Not far at all. Unless you prefer to keep scrabbling along by your fingernails?’

Suspicious of some prank, Dakar risked a look.

Then he, too, laughed aloud. Not half a pace to his left, some capricious carver had fitted a staircase into the rockface. Elegant to the point of absurdity, the risers were black marble adorned at edge and corner with leering, haughty gargoyles. An extravagance of scrolled newel posts had once supported railings, until weather had scoured the brass away. Now only fastening holes remained.

‘Damn me,’ exclaimed Dakar. ‘What fool engineered that?’

‘Davien.’ As if bemused by the quirks of his mounte-bank colleague, Kharadmon qualified. ‘Fifteen centuries back, when he fashioned the pit into Rockfell, Davien insisted the stone of the mountain might decide one day to shrug him off. He was right to assume that anyone who braves the ascent thus far does a mage’s business here.’

Crabbing sideways across the face, Dakar was ill-inclined to argue with the Betrayer’s skewed sense of logic. He caught a post, swung onto the stair, then bit back his relief as the inimical gazes of gargoyles seemed to follow his progress hungrily. He tested the risers with suspicion. Everything else Davien had built was untrustworthy and clever with traps; if this stairway was either harmless or safe, it should be the glaring exception. Dakar almost wished he was clinging like an insect to wild rock.

Dewed with clammy fog, the Mad Prophet broke through the cloud layer. Ahead, the last sunshine glared off Rockfell’s knifepoint summit. Suspended between that pinnacle which supported heaven, and a netherworld floored with combed cotton and shaded rose and purple by the encroaching twilight, Dakar sucked in a nervous breath. Dire cold froze the hair in his nose. He coughed, which caused Asandir to beckon impatiently from the ledge where Davien’s stairway ended.

The pack by then rested at Asandir’s feet, a lump of weather-stained canvas that Dakar gave a wide berth upon his arrival. The thing might appear as innocuous as somebody’s bundled picnic, but even an apprentice’s awareness could sense the hedging sting of guard-wards from two paces away.

Asandir poised before a vertical slab of black rock, his ear pressed to its mirror-smooth polish and his palms resting flat on either side. He seemed prepared to spend motionless hours that way, while his apprentice shivered, abandoned to boredom.

A whining snap split the air.

‘Kharadmon,’ Asandir commanded, and suddenly, sharply, stepped back.

Dakar smelled ozone, then all but fell over as a bolt stark as lightning seared across the blank stone. A mapwork of convoluted spell craft flared across the face, chiselled with charged lines of runes. Lit blue by a chained might that dazzled and dwarfed him, Asandir stood unmoved, while from below, the fog moiled up in disturbed billows to hedge Rockfell round with anvil formations like thunderheads.

Though only nature responded in reaction to the proximity of energized coils of power, the likeness to the moving mists of Desh-thiere left Dakar hollow with dread. The sun had dipped low. What sky remained visible glowed aquamarine, the moon a burning disc as fey in its light as the dagger-edged fire of raw spells. But these rang in high, subliminal vibration, haloed by silver-blue veilings of disturbed fog. Then abruptly as the power had been raised, it flickered, flared violet, and faded.

Where rock had been lay a door.

Dakar gaped. ‘How did you do that?’

Asandir muttered words about physical rearrangement, and briskly hooked up his pack. A second later he vanished into the square black vault that formed the unsealed entrance to Rockfell.

Flash-blind and blinking, Dakar advanced more cautiously. Swallowed at once by the dark, he felt oppressed to the point of suffocation. But the air came and went from his lungs, unrestricted. The innards of the mountain were dry, bone-cold and smelled like metal filings and dust. The doorway at his back seemed a cube rinsed with light, as dangerously transient as a tienelle vision. ‘You didn’t happen to bring candles?’ Dakar asked wistfully.

Out of pity, Kharadmon made a light. Its spark spread through gloom to reveal a bare chamber carved on floor and walls in complex patterns and runes of guard. At the centre rested a slab, set askew to reveal a pit containing a bottomless well of blind darkness. The cobwebbed rungs of a ladder poked through, its origin swallowed in shadow.

Asandir hefted the sack with the flask and started down. Before he had done three steps, dry wood gave way beneath his boot. Slivers whispered falling through air and long seconds elapsed before their impact echoed back, proving the shaft had a bottom.

The well was dreadfully deep.

Unfazed at being poised on rotten footing over what amounted to an abyss, the sorcerer said, ‘Kharadmon? You’ll need to strengthen the ladder or Dakar will surely break his neck.’

‘I’m not going down there!’ The Mad Prophet folded his arms across his chest and obstinately planted his toes.

‘If you don’t, you’re quite likely to freeze.’ Pragmatic, Asandir waited while the rungs under his hands flared red under Kharadmon’s binding. He moved on, his hair stirred by air currents that funnelled down into the pit.

Dakar steeled himself and swung onto the ladder that dropped away into the unknown. His hands left sweatmarks on wood still warmed from enchantment. He forced himself to start down, while Kharadmon’s light travelled with him until he was encircled by stone walls. The descent seemed to go on forever. His calves quivered as overstressed muscles bore his weight. The Mad Prophet could not shake the impression that the well had been cut deeper than the roots of Rockfell mountain itself.

The jar as his foot struck the bottom almost startled him out of his skin. He looked about. The shaft ended in a five-sided cell, scrawled with entangled sigils and spiralling lattices of power that made the eyes burn and the head swim in vicious, twisty dizziness.

‘Don’t stare,’ Asandir cautioned. ‘The patterns here both dazzle and bind. You could lose your mind in this maze of wards to the point where even I can’t call you back.’

Such were the safeguards upon the chamber that the sorcerer’s warning fell dead against the air. Even the echoes were trapped. Dakar ripped his gaze away, then knuckled his eyes until they teared. ‘What was the last thing confined here?’

Kharadmon snorted in contempt. ‘You might better ask what last escaped. Everything ever shut in here eventually worked its way out.’

‘Not the iyats,’ Asandir contradicted. He ran his fingers over the walls. His touch raised uneasy vibrations in the air that riled the skin but made no sound. Green sparks danced from the contact causing Dakar to grit his teeth. Unperturbed, the sorcerer added, ‘Those were released, you’ll remember, to add havoc to Davien’s rebellion.’

‘We’re not going to sleep here,’ Dakar interrupted. He felt claustrophobic, and strongly inclined to throw up.

Asandir glanced abstractedly over one shoulder. ‘I advise you to try. You’ll feel less ill with your eyes closed, and rechecking the symmetry of these wards will likely take most of the night.’

‘You didn’t need me,’ Dakar retorted. ‘Why insist that I come?’

‘But Kharadmon told you already.’ Impatient, Asandir abandoned the intricacies of his spell-work. He turned full around and gave Dakar a regard that was testy enough to peel skin. ‘Your body needed the exercise.’

Which point incensed Dakar to black rage. He filled his lungs to shout imprecations.

No word emerged. His jaw opened, shut and opened again like a fish’s. His eyes bulged. Then, in some odd fit of difficulty that had no visible cause, his features crumpled in frustration and his knees buckled. His Fellowship master caught him before he collapsed.

Laughing, Asandir lowered the Mad Prophet’s bulk the rest of the way to the floor. ‘How timely.’

Kharadmon’s ripe chuckle answered. ‘Quite.’ His image unfurled, posed in satisfaction over Dakar. ‘He’ll sleep through the night. Good. That should leave us some peace in which to work.’

The next thing Dakar knew, Asandir was shaking him awake.

‘Get up,’ the sorcerer insisted. ‘You’re lying across space we need for the final defence ward.’

Dakar grumbled, and finally yielded to the prodding that urged him back to his feet. His bones ached from hours spent on hard and chilly stone, and his eyes felt bored through by a blast of unbearable light. He determined after a moment that the glare emanated from the centre of the pit. He blinked, squinted through hurting vision and, at the heart of the dazzle, barely made out the shadowy outline of the flask that contained the Mistwraith.

About then he noticed that his skin tingled as if drenched by a tonic, and all of his body hair had lifted. Throughout his service with Asandir, he had never witnessed such a presence of raw force. For once in his life awed to silence, he gaped.

From behind him, Asandir’s voice rose and fell in incantation. The words, Dakar noticed uneasily, were not in any language ever spoken upon the soil of Athera; and the halo of light that netted Desh-thiere’s flask was not solid, but seemed as he stared to be composed of flecked light that shuttled in convoluted, interlocking spirals that ached the eye’s attempt to follow.

Then a grip closed on his wrist and tugged him back. ‘Cover your face. At once,’ Asandir commanded. ‘Or the energy flare as Kharadmon sets the ward will leave you blind.’

Dakar began to comply, then paused. ‘Wait,’ he said on impulse. ‘Let me help.’

‘You can’t.’ Asandir’s curtness stemmed from weariness. He worked to soften his delivery as he added, ‘I can’t. The energies involved would vaporize flesh. The final binding must be sealed by Kharadmon alone.’