Fugitive Prince (65 page)

“I gave my agreement,” Earl Jieret said, stiff. “There are no conditions. By whatever means, to bring back my liege, I serve the need of Rathain.”

“Bless your straight courage.” Traithe’s break into gratitude could have masked tears as he bent and shouldered his satchel. “We haven’t much time left before dawn. If you can bear this, we’ll have to start now.”

The wind rustled through the dense crowns of the trees, and coiled through brush fringed and heavy with the foil and pearl droplets of summer dew. Enriched by greenery and bearing soil, the dark spanned the forest like uncut velvet, still scribed by ruled rays of moonlight. Yet the sky seemed more indigo than sable, and the mockingbird’s solo had silenced. All Caithwood seemed poised at the cusp, while the world’s axis turned toward the ending of night.

“I’m ready.” Jieret flanked the Sorcerer, his rangy stride shortened in deference to the other’s halting gait.

Traithe moved upstream. A short walk led into the grotto the scouts used to draw their fresh water. An underground spring welled in streamlets from a crack in the rocks. Trickles of runoff channeled through moss and boulders to form a shallow pool that spilled into the dagged foam of the creek. There, the current lay divided in the dry months of summer by a washed islet of rounded stones. Traithe splashed through the ankle-deep channel and laid his satchel among the lush cap of moss strewn with the fragrance of shed pine needles. The site owned an innate tranquillity, alive with the melodious splash where the split watercourse rejoined, to gutter and leap down a winding channel that widened and eventually rippled into the pewter stands of the tidal marsh.

“Sit,” the Sorcerer instructed, his voice like worn silk and his grandfatherly understanding pitched to transcend ragged nerves. “I have some brief preparations to make.”

A pause, while he murmured a phrase to his bird. The raven croaked. Every bit the miffed gentleman, it shuffled sulky wing feathers, then sidled down its master’s arm and hopped off. One effortless glide saw it settled upon the bough of a nearby maple. Traithe spoke
what sounded like a Paravian epithet in reply to its avian impertinence, then resumed his dropped thread of human dialogue. “My lord Jieret, whatever happens, you may rest assured you will never experience any pain.”

The raven cocked its head, avid as a critic, while the Sorcerer knelt. He nursed his scarred hands with relentless patience and undid the knots on his satchel, then removed a thin quartz crystal. In sequence, he took out a stone knife, five clay bowls, and a clean beeswax candle. Last came a leather-wrapped bundle that contained folded packets of dried herbs. He placed each item on the moss before his knees with its Name and a ritual blessing.

Then he looked up at Jieret, whose apprehension all but sang aloud like a strand of overcranked wire. “If you have tight clothing, loosen the laces. The ground here is soft. Choose a place where you can lie down and be comfortable.”

Jieret scraped his wrist bracer across the bristled red beard on his jaw, then busied himself stripping off his sword and the bone-handled throwing knives that he had claimed from his father’s dead body. “Will I sleep?”

Traithe stood once again, a clay bowl in hand. His reply floated back as a disembodied whisper as he trod careful steps to the spring. “Your body will. Not your mind.”

He spoke over the water in the cadence of Paravian, then dipped the bowl and placed the filled vessel on a nearby stone. Jieret watched, heart pounding, as the black-clad Sorcerer crumbled an aromatic herb into another readied bowl. This one had painted animals on the side that seemed to shift and move in the darkness. Traithe closed his eyes. His features were seamed like the ancient, white birch, mapped by rough usage, yet wholly tranquil as he asked a formal permission. Jieret recognized the Paravian phrase for the living fire, then started as a spark jumped between Traithe’s spread hands. The herbs in the bowl sprang into pale flame. Smoke arose, a twining silver braid that turned in the air as if alive. It sifted a veiling haze through the breeze as Traithe stood erect and offered to each cardinal point of the compass, then harkened to the elemental powers of the four directions. Last, he took up the thin crystal. More words of invocation, the symmetry of each syllable fluid as liquid light. Jieret could not tell whether the play of the smoke or the language eased his nerves into harmony. He sat, relaxed and half-mesmerized, while a soft glow arose from the palm of Traithe’s hand and kindled the crystal into an adamantine blaze of raised force.

The Sorcerer used that summoned power to scribe a clean circle
around the small islet of stones. Where the quartz wand passed, a thin sound keened, striking a blade of pure energy that parted a rip through the air.

“Not to fear,” Traithe assured as if from great distance. “These are but simple protections to bind and contain the regenerative forces we’ll raise here.”

Yet somehow Jieret sensed the import was more weighty, as if the spelled circle cut ties through time and space and engaged powers beyond mortal understanding. The raven launched into flight. Dense as pressed ink against the substanceless night, it shuttled in patterns overhead. The rings of its passage dizzied the mind. Jieret blinked, disbelieving, as his eye seemed to track an uncanny energy combed into alignment by the bird’s feathers. Each quill seemed attached to a streamer of light. Rather than lose himself forever in bewitching mystery, he settled for the ordinary task of unbuckling his belt.

Around him and past the water’s purled edge, Traithe moved about his work, his lamed tread uncannily silent. He placed what seemed an empty bowl to the east, then the fire bowl to the south, water to west, and one he had filled with plain dark earth to the north. Each pause involved a singing invocation that ignited another strand of unseen current, and wove its flow to the joined circle.

Jieret clamped back the unease that surged through his gut. As if violence could somehow reground his turned senses, he yanked the leather tie on his braid, then plowed stiffened fingers through the hair at his temples, dragging the plait loose at his nape. Another glance, darted sidewards; “You’re making my hair stand on end.”

Straight on his feet with his eyes closed, Traithe appeared halfway removed from the world, his cragged features remote as chased marble; and yet, when he answered, his human warmth was never more real and immediate. “Not to worry. There is no power raised here that is not a part of Ath’s order.” At the center of the circle, he took up the final bowl and shook out the last packet of herbs. This plant loosed a fragrance biting as snow, and a pungency that stripped all five senses to preternatural wakefulness.

“Tienelle,” Traithe explained. He tipped back his hat to unstick damp hair at his temples. “What you commonly know as seersweed. The properties of the flower break down the barriers between space and time, and release the mind to an unclouded view of the continuum. For your safety, the full potency will be weakened. You’ll receive just enough smoke to loosen the ties to your body, that your spirit can be freed to search.”

Jieret said nothing, his throat dried to sand that left him unable to swallow.

Traithe’s glance held a grave and reassuring kindness as he noticed the earl’s knotted fists. “You don’t have to go through with this. We can stop now.”

Jieret jerked up his chin, just shy of offense. “Keep on. I am blood bonded with my prince. This is my job and no other’s.”

“But a straight battle with steel would be simpler,” Traithe admitted in bald understanding. “Be steady. I stand with you, never forget that.”

He called fire and lit the herb. The smoke whirled and twined, spun silk against a darkness ingrained with the faint paling imprint of daybreak. Jieret drew a fast breath, apprehension tightening his chest despite every verbal resolve. He had but one moment for shattering fear. Then the herb’s fragrance burned through the floor of his lungs, seized his heartstrings, and hurled him into a spiraling vertigo that whirled him headlong from the earth.

Dimly he realized Traithe was still speaking. Hands touched his skin, a nagging distraction that badgered him to lie down. Wrung through and disoriented, he fretted at the contact. His mind rampaged through turmoil, then found its release like a beast sprung out of a trap. His awareness burst open. The shrill song of stars threaded the gaps between leaves, and the wind sighed through his being. Its rustling passage through summer green branches framed a language he could almost understand.

Traithe loomed above him, his dark clothes the same shimmering, iridescent obsidian as the plumage of his raven. He towered, a figure of primordial mystery punched through the spun cloth of twilight. He raised the stone knife, its blade of white chert trailing filaments of blue light.

Jieret blinked, while the earth turned, the majesty of her dance a vibration that thrummed through his bones. The stars paled, then burst into pearlescent sparks that burned through the backdrop of daybreak. Then the clouds ignited also, their drifting serenity shot into fire-opal patterns. Nesting thrushes sang out a chord that knitted the air into ecstasy. Jieret felt warm fingers clasp his right hand, then bear down, pinning his forearm. The textures of cold dew and mossy stones screamed detail like etched light down the trackways of overstimulated flesh.

He heard Traithe’s voice, a whisper of sound strung on a filament that corded the arc of eternity. “By your blood bond to Prince Arithon s’Ffalenn, by the ties that lie beyond life and limb, you will seek.
Let two become one.”

Then the knife traced the scar of a much older cut, taken before a past battle that left the banks of Tal Quorin soaked with the reaped fruits of hatred. The stone edge of the blade that was
now
scored and bit. Its savage, hot sting raised a sleeting, bright numbness. Freed blood scalded hot over the
caithdein’s
bared skin. The knife’s edge smoked light. Through half-opened eyes and a mind deranged by the herb smoke, Jieret watched the uncanny, cold fires off the sharpened chert meet and join with the haze that misted from the flow of his opened vein.

“Ride the winds with my blessing, Jieret s’Valerient!” Traithe scribed a sign that melded the trifold forces of stone knife, flesh, and life. The twined powers blazed, then towered, transformed into resonance fierce enough to blind vision and scatter the last vestige of reason.

A wind out of vacuum rushed through Jieret’s mind. He cried aloud, his voice a splash of raw noise amid the howling expanse of the infinite. Then his last tie to human awareness hurled up and out though the crown of his head. He whirled on the vast chord of sound and light that wove the span of Ath’s universe, insignificant and frail as a leaf unmoored by the chill gales of autumn.

The sun rose, spilling dappled gold spangles over the spring, and cascading sequined reflections off the small stream. But inside the scribed circle, where Traithe sat on vigil, the gray half-light of dawn hung and lingered. Time froze in place there, poised on the filament of Earl Jieret’s courage and the Sorcerer’s cast force of intent. A small stone pipe by Traithe’s knee held the spent ashes of more tienelle leaves, the last ember gone cold with the morning. Submerged in deep trance, poised as a bridge across the veil of the mysteries, he cupped his scarred hands over the brow of the prostrate Earl of the North. The stone knife was cleaned, the cut wrist neatly bandaged. Jieret’s hawk features were a stilled casting in wax, his fox hair a cry of bright color against a pillow of emerald moss.

Nothing moved in that tableau. The raven kept watch, its eyes amber beads that scarcely shifted or blinked though the days came and went in their natural rhythm outside of the spell-circle laid through the crystal.

Then, as if summoned by some unseen cue, the bird launched into flight and disappeared. Traithe’s tranced awareness sensed its departure, as under the distant guidance of Althain’s Warden, it departed the plane of dense matter and crossed into the spirit worlds, strung
like infinite cast shadows between the poles of primal energy and firmament.

Though Traithe’s eyes remained closed, he stared beyond the brink of time’s prison and into the limitless unknown. He held guard in that place marking space for the gateway, while a finespun trail of magnetic light traced the path of Earl Jieret’s journey. Behind the
caithdein’s
lead, a shot arrow of feather and bone, a bird who was more than mere life and flesh flew on a mission of recovery. There existed no recourse. Either the blood tie would call Earl Jieret to Prince Arithon, and afford a firm contact to draw from, or all three would be lost, bird, man, and prince; and the prophet and bard along with them.

“Fly brother,” Traithe urged in spun dream to his raven. “Follow, and bridge the connection to bring them all back.”

There were no guarantees. Earl Jieret’s awareness might ride the winds seeking for an untold span of time. If, in that interval, the Alliance attack swept through Caithwood, or if even one man disturbed the precise spells of suspension Traithe had laid down, the
caithdein
of Rathain would be torn back into the linear patterns of time and entropy. Should that misfortune happen, his comatose flesh would again become subject to the cruel passage of days. Severed from consciousness, Jieret’s tie to breathing life would fade and weaken. Attrition would claim his body and organs, until his vital signs failed and Fate’s Wheel turned, bringing final oblivion and death.

Summer sun streamed through the wide windows of the Koriani sisterhouse at Capewell, laden with the tang of green herbs from the gardens, and the brisk tonic of salt winds off the sea. The fish markets teemed under pale, golden light. Elderly women exchanged gossip at the well, their pails and jugs clumped on the cobbles, while through the lingering heat of afternoon, the craftsmen’s wives gathered on the colonnaded balconies and sewed sequined masks for the harvest festival. In the shade of the walled courtyard, the orphan boys shouted at their games, free through the indolent days while the crops slowly ripened, and the crofters required no labor. If the waterfront inns catered to men-at-arms wearing sunwheel surcoats, or if the roads wore the passage of couriers and patrols in hanging clouds of fine dust, Tysan’s crown treasury honored its debts for their lodging. In the lazy month while the barley ripened, the season left time for indulging the gifts of earth’s bounty.