Fugitive Prince (21 page)

A sigh unreeled through a throat skinned raw from mindless screaming. “Bless you again, for generosity. I thought you were saving that bottle for—” Dakar stopped, would have slapped his own forehead for stupidity, had he retained any strength.

The barren rocks of Kathtairr harbored no cause at all for celebration; he had known very well since the day four years past, when the brigantine had first weighed her anchor for Corith.

The prince who sat in iron quiet beside him seemed to have shed his rancor for that. Arithon reached, recaptured the wine, pulled a deep draft in turn. Starlight strung sparks through the phosphorescent runnels on his skin, and streaked premature silver through black hair as he swallowed. He seemed to think better of speech and, instead, restored the crock into Dakar’s needful grasp.

The Mad Prophet drank deep to drown a lancing, sharp urge to weep. When he next looked, Arithon s’Ffalenn had clasped both his wrists with exquisite, fine-jointed hands, a habit he kept to mask the disfiguring marks of old scars.

Dakar shivered. The hour had grown late. Kathtairr’s harsh terrain had traded the day’s heat for the keening, cold winds off the interior. But the gusts which sluiced over his sweat-dampened clothes scarcely touched him, aware as he was of the deeper chill. With his mind still awash in the harrowing images just snatched from the uncertain future, words slipped his grasp before thought. “How can you bear this, year after year? How can you live, self-aware as you are, of the fate that hangs on your choices?”

“I wouldn’t,” Arithon admitted. His skin pricked into sudden gooseflesh. His thumb traced the thin line healed crosswise overtop of the weals once chafed by iron fetters. The gesture arose from unpleasant recollection of his blood oath, irrevocably given to hold him to life by every means at his command. The terrible vow had been sworn to Asandir just after the destruction of Lysaer’s fleet at Minderl Bay.

Sensitive now to the one burning question Dakar had never dared
ask, Arithon offered his confidence. “You wonder how the Fellowship Sorcerers won my consent to that binding.” A brief pause, while the stars burned in chill unconcern. “I was told the world might not live if I surrendered the struggle in death.” Rathain’s prince tipped his dark crown to rest against striated rocks that sprouted no kindly lacework of lichen. The steep planes of his face might have been sculpted alabaster, except for the small, tensioned wrinkles which nipped at the corners of his eyes. “I saw that I couldn’t trust myself, Dakar. Not once I heard what was left on the gate world of Marak.”

“Marak!” The Mad Prophet shot straight to a gurgle of sloshed protest from the wine. “Ath, Marak! A crisis on a link world across South Gate. Of course! What else but the severed body of the Mistwraith could frighten the Fellowship dizzy? Dharkaron avenge! The Sorcerers bound you for that?”

“You need not upset yourself.” Arithon’s disarming, peaceful tone but reminded that he owned a masterbard’s tongue. Dissembling cleverness was his second nature. Dakar knew too much not to guess at the pain, and beyond that, to forgiveness that was genuine, as the Shadow Master finished, “If the Fellowship Sorcerers sought to divert me to Kathtairr, they will have had urgent reason.”

“They’ve been building wards. I’ve seen them in dreams when the powers crest on the solstices.” Dakar found his palms sweating on cold crockery. He required a single-minded and desperate care not to fumble as he tipped the bottle to his lips. “The bindings they weave are unimaginably vast. As if the Sorcerers strive to stave off the advent of their own defeat.”

Arithon replied after a short silence, his fingers knuckled white to his wrists. “We have to find the Paravians, Dakar. For all of our sake, they offer the only sane hope of reprieve.”

Those half-glimpsed fragments of augury could bite too viciously, after all. Dakar choked back misery, hating the savage sting that inevitably arose to sour the fruits of his gift. He sucked down wine in one guzzling burst, too racked to set voice to the irony,
that he had indeed seen a unicorn in his vision, and read death for Rathain’s prince in the same moment.
Life held no sureties. His talent for prescience was more fickle than a courtesan. One storm in the path of the
Khetienn’s
charted course, and that goring on the beach might never come to see daylight.

A gust whipped the chisel-sharp summits of stone. Hazed by the sting of airborne sand, Dakar wiped tearing eyes. He tipped the bottle again, and cursed when it ran empty. The wine had left him stranded far short of the drunken oblivion he wished for.

The torment on his moon-round face must not, after all, have been due to the grit, since Arithon said in that level compassion that always sliced straight to the quick, “Let’s get you back. There’s more wine on the brigantine, and just as well. If I’m going to get in my cups along with you, it’s better done after I’ve launched and rowed your dory from the strand.”

Dakar shut his eyes, beholden beyond utterance. Quick temper and subterfuge aside, the Master of Shadow could be trusted to keep the most damnable letter of his word.

Shepherded back aboard the
Khetienn
and installed under blankets in the stern cabin, the Mad Prophet was plied with shared wine and sympathy until his maudlin mood gave way to exhaustion. By the hour he passed out, Arithon had not forsaken sobriety, though dawn blushed the sky to the east. The last crock stood drained to the lees. Dakar snored in a muddled heap with his cheek pressed flat to the chart desk. Arithon s’Ffalenn tucked the blanket over his slumped shoulder, then returned to the quarterdeck, and shouted crisp orders to roust out the watch. “Stand by to make sail!”

As the sun sliced the rim of the horizon, his seamen turned the capstan to clacking life and raised anchor. Sailhands clambered at speed up tarred ratlines, then lay aloft to slip gaskets.

“Clear away the flying jib! Loose and let fall topsails and main course! Man halyards, sheets, and weather braces! Out spanker! Sheet home!”

Canvas the color of old blood slithered free and cracked taut, and the
Khetienn
gathered way, bound back to old risks on the continent.

Athera’s sea winds changed with the advent of autumn, blew in hard, veering gusts, northwesterly, then due north under skies raked in cirrus as the days shortened. Bowled ahead with the wind on her quarter, then abeam, the
Khetienn
logged off the leagues, her exhilarating passage made under cascading sheets of spray. The crew kept light spirits, shearing fast course for known waters. Dakar stayed alone in trepidation. Given his most drunken spree of imagination, he could never have foreseen the uncoiling speed with which planning gave birth to event.

Landfall at Corith occurred after dark, a ghosting, windward approach made on spanker, staysails, and jibs. A coin silver moon threw the archipelago’s notched summits into chipped coal relief. Tension gripped the deckhands. Drugged by the scent of bearing land and live earth after month upon month of salt winds and Kathtairr’s seared rock, the off-watch crew crowded the foredeck. What
scraps of dialogue wafted astern detailed their eagerness to escape an endless diet of salt pork and beans, and hardtack infested with weevils.

“Don’t let me see another ration o’ fish soup with the pepper stores gone,” groused another, eyes rolled furtively over his shoulder to be sure the cook’s ear was turned elsewhere.

Still as a wraith at the quarterdeck rail, Arithon s’Ffalenn held a ship’s glass trained on the bulking dark shoreline. His close, raking survey scoured the unfolding jut of the headland, nicked like a tarnished engraving with the unraveling foam of spent breakers.

Dakar, given mage-sight, required no glass to see that the harbor at Corith was not empty.

“Daelion’s arse,” he swore in a gust of ill feeling. “Damn Lysaer’s industry, those are masts! Wear ship! We’re pointed straight into an ambush.”

Arithon snapped the glass closed on a smile of silken patience.

Too sharply aware of smothered chuckles from the quartermaster, Dakar reinterpreted the Shadow Master’s quiet with an unholy surge of disbelief.

“You didn’t smell the breeze?” Arithon laughed, the predatory flash of his teeth all the more vivid by moonlight. “I doubt we’re in danger of attack from that brig. She doesn’t bear a fighting company scrambling to span arbalests. Just a hold crammed with casks shipped in from the orchards of Korias.”

“Apples.” A mystified frown puckered Dakar’s forehead. He shoved back the rumpled screw of hair that the wind flicked back in his eyes. “Why apples?”

A whispered dance of bare footfalls, Feylind arrived aft to claim her place at the Shadow Master’s side. His equal for height, and grown into a saucy, long-legged, eighteen, she snatched the closed ship’s glass from his hand. The roped braid slid off her shoulder to lick her small breast as she deployed the brass segments. She raked piercing study in turn over the vessel limned dark against needle-worked reflections cast by a low-riding moon.

“Dharkaron’s hairy bollocks!” She gave a clear whistle. “The varnish still shines on her figurehead’s tits. It’s a mermaid, and look!” Fired outrage snapped through. “The ship’s carvers at Riverton are a raunchy band of goats. Bedamned if her nipples aren’t gilded!”

“Don’t lose our heading,” gasped Arithon to the quartermaster, who had folded his grizzled face into his elbow to stifle an inopportune smirk of humor.

“Riverton!” Dakar howled in unadulterated fury. “Save us all, you
move fast! If that’s Lysaer’s vessel, you’ve had to be conniving at piracy for years! Why am I always the
last
one to hear what’s afoot?”

But the Shadow Master was himself left no standing to answer. Unable to follow his own sage advice, he lay curled in snorting mirth against the brightwork of the rail, while Feylind pummeled his shoulder with her fist for the fact he took her offended sex lightly.

He had to shield his head with crossed wrists as she changed tactics and lunged to attack with the ship’s glass. “Woman, desist! I’m bludgeoned half-silly and left unfit for command. You’ll have to lay the
Khetienn’s
course in yourself. If you ram her on a reef, working in without lanterns, believe it, I’ll dock her repairs from your dowry.”

“Keep my dowry for gravecloths, I’ve no wish to marry.” Feylind flicked back her braid, the tanned arm with the glass still upraised like a cudgel. “You’d let me strike sail?”

“Under threat of getting my skull cracked, yes.” Arithon straightened, disheveled and smiling. “You’ll see to ranging the cable and let go the anchor as well. Now be off!”

Feylind yelled for joy, hurled the ship’s glass straight for his face, a challenge for even his thoughtless, fast reflex, and spun away to claim the wheel to steer the brigantine in.

“Ath,” Dakar made cautious comment from the sidelines. “Take more bribe than gold to find a willing husband for that minx.”

“I heard that, you sorry, fat windbag!” shrilled Feylind. Her crisp order to stand by sent the deckhands scrambling to man brails and halyards.

“Don’t worry,” said Arithon in that thoughtful, grave manner that unfailingly masked seamless subterfuge. “You won’t have to guard against finding black hellebore in your beer. The
Khetienn’s
past due for careening, and the moment the sail rig and paint can be hastened through a refit on that brig, Feylind will serve as her navigator to Innish to pay her brother an extended visit.”

“You think I should be pleased with the arrangement?” Dakar said. Strong purgatives in his drink seemed a piddling, small nuisance against the chance to roll doxies and breathe citrus perfume in the sun-warmed brothels of Shand.

“What are your prospects?” asked Arithon by way of evasive reply. “Did you really want to stay and play hermit for the winter hunting wild deer on these islands?”

Dakar had two short days to wonder and brood, while the
Khetienn’s
trained crew split forces. They carried out whirlwind arrangements to send their mismatched fleet of two back to sea, and
sailed under straightforward orders to raise funds by selling their service in honest charter to merchants. Feylind might swagger and whoop as she claimed her new post, but the Mad Prophet held no illusions.

If the Master of Shadow wished the girl sent away, then danger would dog his next passage. The risk to the ships in his charge might be less, but their pursuit would not stay innocuous.

The course of suspect events started off with an unkindly, rough crossing to the mainland aboard Arithon’s tiny pleasure sloop. She made landfall amid the deep coves of Caithwood, under low, leaden clouds and driving rain. A discreet whistled signal drew clansmen to meet her. In silent efficiency, the band of scouts saw her warped into an inlet, and covered in brush and deep cover. An icy drizzle misted the flame red of changed maples. Dakar shivered in the chill, then endured a dank evening in a cave lit by a smoking oil wick, while Arithon’s reading of dispatches led to a terse exchange of news.

Swathed like a sausage in his salt-fusty clothing, Dakar bludgeoned through fogged wits to listen.

A grizzled forest captain with an eye patch sat tying new fletching on his hunting arrows. “Can’t offer better than deer jerky. Fires are too risky for cooking, with new patrols off the roads out of Quarn.”

Arithon’s reply came measured, all but inaudible over the trickle of moisture off the evergreen thicket outside. “They’ve gotten that sharp?”

A grunt gave him answer, while the clansman split a goose quill with his belt knife. “Tracker’s a gift from a demon.” With the bounties doubled for live capture, muster for headhunters had tripled. “They’re crown funded, too. Much better outfitted.” A lengthy squint down an arrow shaft, to ascertain the new feather would steer true, then the tart summary, made over the winding of waxed string. “It’s an offense against nature, but we’ve had to set traps for the dogs.”

Amid the back-and-forth round of discussion, Dakar fought ebbing attention, jerked out of a doze more than once by grim details of shore patrols and galleymen, and a stockade built to hold slaves inside city walls at Hanshire. His eyes closed at length. Time must have escaped him, because he looked up and saw Arithon had changed out of sailhand’s garb.