Authors: Janny Wurts
From the corner, Dakar gasped. Before Jieret could decry the necessity, Arithon closed an unsteady hand on the blade, over steel just meticulously sharpened. Scarlet welled from his palm, spilled through lean fingers, and ribboned slick tracks down his wrist. He inclined his head to the spellbinder.
“You have my consent. Lay down the binding, my life as surety that nothing I speak is a falsehood.”
Dakar arose. Raised to a grave majesty sprung from stark fear, he clasped Arithon’s wet fist. The spell rune he framed burned in lines of cold light, then twined like barbed ribbon through the rich flood flowing from the knife cut. “Beware,” he cautioned. “What you ask is done. One word of deceit will destroy you.”
By ancient custom, the last scion of s’Ffalenn then knelt before his
caithdein.
The Shadow Master said in metallic distaste, “The deaths at the Havens are all mine, every one. But this charge of dark sorcery has no ground. No spell was spun, light or dark at that inlet. There were no fell tricks. No engagement occurred beyond arrows and steel, nor even the use of my birth-born mastery of shadow.” Still trembling, he
regarded the spreading, red stain on his shirt cuff and finished his venomous delivery. “What happened was simple, cold murder.”
He laughed then, wide-eyed, and spun the slicked blade. The point now angled against his own breast, its chased silver pommel a reckless invitation to serve judgment. “Are you horrified? Caolle thought treason and threatened to spit me with bared steel.”
Jieret swallowed, stunned blank and sickened. Five hundred forty lives had been taken in cold blood: the truth forced out in a naked confession that asked neither quarter nor pity.
“You can’t find the gall to ask why?” pressured Arithon, still venting pain into anger. “Or are you waiting for a Fellowship Sorcerer to gainsay a testimony made under truthseals?”
“Almighty Ath, that’s enough!” Dakar launched himself across his clutter of belongings and with a competence few would have credited, snatched the knife from Arithon’s grasp. He discarded the blade and clutched the prince’s soaked shirt in both hands. To Jieret, caught aback as the Shadow Master swayed on his feet, the Mad Prophet cried in rebuke, “What more must you have? Kingdom law has been satisfied. Daelion himself! A crown prince’s blood oath alone should have satisfied that the charge of dark sorcery was false. Your duty could have demanded far less, since Caolle himself stood as witness.”
With no gap for reply, he turned his invective toward the prince braced upright in his hands. “By Sithaer, you’re freezing! Where’s Cattrick? Wasn’t anyone aboard to share the watch on your sloop? How long were you out there, manning the helm in the storm?”
“Galleys,” said Arithon, abruptly too worn to fuel his own manic fury. “Seven, with registry flags out of Capewell. I lost them six days ago, off the shoals of Carithwyr.” Against every precedent, he failed to resist as Dakar pressed him to sit. The drum of the rain nearly canceled his speech. “Cattrick’s still on the mainland. I meant him to stay. He’s agreed to return to my employ.”
“He’s a fool, then.” Dakar shoved past Jieret, who felt awkward and in the way. Displaced wing feathers fluttered helter-skelter as the spellbinder cleared the trunk and flung up the rickety lid. “I won’t ask what you promised him.”
Folded on the pallet, Arithon said nothing. His face did not show, his head being bent and resting on his knees. The fire in its makeshift bracket across the drum tower had finally ignited the oiled rags. Golden light limned his appalling exhaustion. His loose, sailhand’s cottons hung off his gaunt frame, except where heavy wet had slicked the cloth to his flanks. His wrists showed each ridge of old scars and taut sinew, and the cut on his hand bled too freely.
“Liege, let me help,” Jieret begged.
“Find him a blanket,” Dakar ordered, terse, then rummaged through his things, and snatched out linen strips and tied a pressure wrap over Arithon’s gashed hand. “Idiot,” he murmured. “You used that damned blade like a butcher. Got tendons laid bare. When the bleeding’s controlled, you’ll need to be sewn, or risk scarring that may mar your music.”
“My throat isn’t cut. I can sing.” Arithon lilted a slurred line of doggerel taken from a dockside ballad. Then, as Jieret bent down to swaddle him in wool, his maundering humor fled before desperate focus. “Why are you here?” he demanded. A deep tremor racked him. He locked his teeth through the spasm, then ground on in unswerving logic, “Had that parchment reached your hand in Rathain, Dakar’s right. Caolle could have refuted those charges.”
“My liege, not now.” Jieret scarcely noticed the tug as Dakar snatched the blanket from his fist. “The other news that brought me can wait.”
“Ah, no!” Arithon shoved off the wool the Mad Prophet sought to drape over him. His eyes raked up, fever bright. “I won’t have that sleep spell you’ve slipped through the weave.” He shot to his feet, restored to command through animate, blistering irritation. “By your oath as
caithdein,
Jieret, speak.”
The moment hung, its tension spun out in maniacal wind and the distanced percussion of thunder. Leaked droplets pattered under the sailcloth. The torch spat and hissed, fingered by drafts until every shadow seemed crawlingly alive. Black haired, baleful, Arithon waited, his presence stillness incarnate. He was not a patient man. The fretted, willful energy he used to avert collapse seemed nursed from a leashed spark of violence, as if his heart’s peace had been razed off in Vastmark, to leave a core of acid-etched steel.
Jieret quailed before apprehension. This was no stranger he confronted, but his crown prince, scarred and haunted by the trials brought down by the Mistwraith’s dire curse. The spring’s prophetic dream lodged too vividly in recall, with its wrenching potential for tragedy. The vision was terrifying, final: the wide square paved in brick, centered by its cordon of guardsmen and the unpainted rise of the scaffold, pennoned in the dazzling glitter of gold cord and sunwheel banners. His very pulse seemed to throb to the chant of packed onlookers. He shook off the mesmerizing hold of remembrance, in thought or utterance unwilling to grapple the silver-bright length of the executioner’s sword, then the scream of this same prince, fallen.
“I had an augury on your Grace’s life,” he rasped, torn by his need to be finished.
“Oh, how merry!” Arithon exclaimed, sardonic. “My fate’s already wound in auguries like tripping strings. No. Don’t plod through the hysterical details. Let me have just the bare facts.”
“You must listen!” cried Jieret, frightened by the dismissal. “After the slaughter at Tal Quorin, would you take my gifted dreams lightly?”
“But I don’t.” Unrepentant, Arithon accepted a blanket from Dakar that was combed free of furtive seals to bring sleep. He flicked the wool across his wet frame, winced as he fumbled a one-handed clasp, then stepped back to forestall more assistance. “I can manage. Am doing so, in fact. Your Sight does run true, more’s the pity. But for the sake of Rathain, I’d have preferred to be spared the unnecessary favor. As my oathsworn
caithdein,
your presence here can’t improve my wretched odds of surviving.” He spun, tripped over the stool in a startling turn of spoiled grace. “Now give me the details without any melodrama.”
“The time seemed high summer,” Jieret resumed, ferociously bland. “A public execution, under town auspice, with every appropriate trapping.”
“How splendid and trite.
How predictable!”
Arithon gasped back shrilling laughter. Perhaps goaded on by his
caithdein’s
sharp recoil, he bit back like salt in a sore, “All right, my sworn lord, your duty’s been met to the last grasping letter of the law. By kingdom charter, I’ve been properly tried and warned. Now for love of the realm, you are free. Return to Rathain. The fishing sloop that brought you sails tomorrow for Carithwyr on my personal orders. Her captain was told to expect you on board. You will cross High King Eldir’s
neutral
realm of Havish to reach your homeland, and avoid another tangle with Tysan’s headhunters.”
“Go,” Dakar urged, cued by a mix of dread and epiphany, since every shred of bad news out of Tysan would have emerged through that prior exchange with the fishermen. Arithon was not sanguine for very good reason, beside being too spent to cope. The Mad Prophet grabbed Jieret’s elbow, wide-eyed and imploring. “Come away. What you’re seeing’s not temper, but a mannerless plea to be alone.”
The clansman stayed fixed, his bleak, considered gaze upon the motionless form of his prince. He looked as if he might speak.
The Mad Prophet plugged his ears, shut his eyes, and cringed like a dog that expected a kick.
Yet Jieret held silent. When no explosion came from the figure under the blanket, the spellbinder cracked one eye open.
“For mercy’s sake, Dakar, just get him out,” Arithon stated in hoarse, deadened misery.
Like an obedient, fat ninepin bowling down a young oak, the Mad Prophet plowed Rathain’s young
caithdein
into prudent retreat through the doorway.
The squall passed. Above the swept rocks of the fortress at Corith, stars emerged from the cloud cover. Sea winds combed the headland and slapped through the sailcloth roofed over the ruined north drum keep. Bronzed by the smoking stub of the oil cresset lit to treat Arithon’s hand, Dakar sat awake, keeping watch. Long since, the spooled silk and needles used to close up the gash had been tidied and put away. On the pallet, stone quiet, the Teir’s’Ffalenn lay sprawled in exhausted sleep.
The Mad Prophet listened to the call of the night-flying owl, mournful between the irregular tap of twine lacings. He waited, alert for the moment of inevitable aftermath. No man mentioned the Havens inlet in the Shadow Master’s hearing that dreams did not come and goad the prince screaming from sleep. Grateful that foresight had seen Lord Jieret dismissed before the inevitable backlash, Dakar settled his chin on plump wrists.
An hour passed, uneventful. The night smelled of puddled rock, mingled near at hand with the astringent bite of medicinal herbs. Gusts thrummed sighing through the cedars down the slope, cut by the whistle of a sentry, come back from the headland to roust his relief watch. Dakar traced out a fine rune. His trained talent as spellbinder raised an appeal to the air, then bent the element’s given consent to work a small construct of deflection. When the sailor just wakened in the compound raised a noisy string of complaint, no ripple of disturbance crossed the line of soft conjury to upset Arithon’s rest.
Somewhere in the thickets a fox barked. The midsummer stars arced across the black zenith, their dance unchanged through the centuries since man first inhabited Athera. Against their seasonal harmony, a whispered rustle of discord: on the pallet, one fine-boned hand spasmed closed. The Master of Shadow curled into a locked huddle and loosed a harsh breath through his teeth.
Dakar crossed to the pallet. He murmured a cantrip to ground his inner strength in the ageless stone of the headland. Then, as Arithon moaned, twisted sidewards, and thrashed, he grasped the slighter man’s shoulder. He caught the fist that snapped up toward his chin, winced for the abuse to new bandages, then pressed down in firm restraint. The prince he resisted might be sorrowfully thin, but his struggles were inventive and difficult. Dakar required main force to prevail. He turned the sharp s’Ffalenn features into the blankets and stifled the rising, agonized groan into the muddle of bedding.
“Wake,” he murmured. “Arithon, throw off the dream and come back.” He barbed each word in spell-turned clarity. “This is Corith, and everyone is safe.”
Dakar waited, spoke again. He absorbed the next onslaught of redoubled, blind fight as the Shadow Master tried to bludgeon free. Against his undignified need to cry out, the Mad Prophet held steadfast, until the corded tension under his hands dissolved through a spasm of transition. The Teir’s’Ffalenn in his care passed from nightmare into living remembrance of a horror no passage of time might erase. Then, as often happened, Dakar waited, silent, while the Master of Shadow softly wept.
The cresset by then had dwindled to a coal. Rinsed by ruby light, the Mad Prophet stayed his sympathy, while Rathain’s crown prince cocked an elbow and pushed himself upright. The single-handed sail to slip pursuit from the mainland had worn him. The resilience never recovered since Vastmark had abraded further in the months spent ashore. Terrors of guilt and conscience dulled the green eyes that regarded Dakar through the gloom, left them lusterless as sea-battered glass. The expressive, fine bones of the Masterbard’s hand rested slack on the coverlet, bundled flesh sapped of small grace.
“Daelion Fatemaster forgive me for the way I treated Jieret,” were the first words the Shadow Master said. He looked fevered. Minutes passed as he steadied his breathing, and his high, sweating flush subsided back into pallor. “He is Rathain’s true
caithdein,
courage and honor to his core. So like his father, he’s become. Does he know even yet what he means to me? Should he take harm from Lysaer’s miscalled
judgments, I don’t think I could stand it. Let Dharkaron Avenger redress his wronged feelings.
I had to send him back to his people.”
“You did right,” Dakar soothed. “Lord Jieret will go, and soon after, the
Khetienn
will sail.”
An interval passed without speech. Arithon tipped back his tangled head and rested against the worn stone of the bastion. The steep, angled features of his ancestry carved sharper in the uncertain scrawl of deep shadows. “If Cattrick succeeds, we’ll have ships,” he murmured, his ongoing effort to control his fraught nerves sketched in pained creases around his eyes. “The clans can be taken to safety. We only have to find the Paravians.” His hope was a refuge from the drive of Desh-thiere’s curse behind the strong wardspells that masked them.
In the dimness, Dakar averted his face. Ill practiced at patience, he fiddled with his sleeve cuffs, then launched on a sharp change in subject. “What will you do about Jieret’s new augury?”