Authors: Janny Wurts
He shoved back the gelding’s nose with a gently spoken epithet, all trace of roguish pleasure erased from his taut, narrow features. One year and events had changed him. His quick mind and observant eye were bent now toward other pursuits than tumbling loose ladies and gambling. The breath of the breeze fanned a chill on his neck, the lovelock he had worn since his first growth of beard shorn off in cold purpose since Vastmark.
A dove called, mournful, from a thicket.
Mearn swung about at the sound, raised the corner of his cloak, and unveiled the ducal blazon. Then he found himself a dry, flat rock in a cranny, and sat out of the wind while his horse grazed.
A slow interval passed, with Mearn touched to prickles by the certain awareness that he was being watched from all angles. Then, with no ceremony, a young man moved upslope to meet him. His approach scarcely woke any sound from dry grasses. He wore undyed leathers and a vest with dark lacing. He carried bow, knife, and sword as if weapons were natural as flesh. Large framed, deliberate, he had a step like a wary king stag’s. His light eyes, never still, swept the hillock behind, then Mearn, and measured him down to his boot soles. On that day, the high chieftain of Tysan’s outlawed clansmen was nineteen, one year shy as the old law still reckoned manhood.
“Lord Maenol, Teir s’Gannley,
caithdein
of Tysan,” Mearn greeted. He arose, inclined his head in respect, and shared grief for the grandson,
whose titles and inheritance now burdened his young shoulders through Lysaer’s murder of his predecessor.
Unlike the deceased Lady Maenalle, the heir returned neither welcome nor greeting. He stood, chin tilted, silent, while the gusts flicked the laces on his clothing.
No whit less stubborn, Mearn met that challenge with a sheared, bright-edged smile. If the s’Brydion ancestral stronghold had withstood the wars of the uprising; if his family owed fealty to another kingdom and another chieftain on the farthest shore of the continent, the ways of charter law and the old codes of honor were still held in common with Tysan’s clans in Tysan. Shared trust ran deep beyond words.
“You have taken an unmentionable risk to come here,” the boy said at last in his startling, mellow baritone.
“I bear unmentionable tidings,” Mearn countered. “And a packet, bound for Arithon, sewn in the lining of my saddlecloth. I went through Sithaer itself to keep
that
from the handling of Lysaer’s overzealous pack of grooms.” He added, “You’ll want to read the contents before you send them on. Your clans are the ones most threatened.”
Tysan’s young
caithdein
took that ominous statement in stride; such troubles were scarcely new. His own parents had fallen to headhunters. “It’s risky to be sending late dispatches across,” he pointed out, vexed more for the snags in the timing. “Arithon plans to sail as soon as the weather settles.”
Small need to dwell on the risk of disaster, if their covert crossings to his island haven at Corith were sighted. The fair, warming weather would see the first trade galleys nosing their way from snug harbors, the earliest at sea always manned by the keenest, most vigilant captains.
“I leave that decision in your hands, then.” Mearn strode to his grazing horse, removed girth and saddle, and sat down with the redolent, damp horsecloth. He used his knife to pick out the hem stitching. The packet inside was wrapped in cerecloth, by its weight and thickness no less than purloined copies of state documents.
“Oh, well-done,” murmured Maenol. Still standing, stiff backed, against a sky that now threatened fine drizzle, he nipped through the twine ties with his teeth, then flipped through the pressed, folded parchments. The dark arch of his eyebrows turned grim as he read. Documents recording rightful claim to clan prisoners to be bound over into slavery; documents of arraignment without trial for acts of dark sorcery, attested and signed, which named Prince Arithon criminal
and renegade. Maenol’s sharp features, never animated, stilled to pale quartz as he perused the signatures and seals.
“Merciful Ath,” the words torn through his reserve as if jerked by the barbed bite of steel. “Is there no end? How can so many mayors bind these acts into law, upon no proof or surety beyond Lysaer’s spoken word? It’s not canny!”
“It’s happened,” Mearn said. “I’ve seen. Lysaer has a tongue like pure honey. Fiends plague, my own family once fell for his trumpedup cause before we discovered any better. I’ll need a courier sent to warn my brother Bransian.”
Maenol looked up. “That you’ll have.” He paused, squared fingers gripping the first lists and requisitions appointed for the planned royal shipyard; for the galleys where his people might come to suffer at the oar, under the whip and in chains. He took a moment, seemed to gather himself, then asked, “Is this truth, the accusation Lysaer s’Ilessid has laid against Prince Arithon at the Havens?”
Mearn looked back, intent, his mouth turned glass hard. “I don’t know.” He could not stay seated, but pushed to his feet, pressured to vent his raw nerves. “But there’s one proven fact every charge so far has omitted. Arithon lost his mage powers years ago, in defense of his own by the river Tal Quorin. If the slaughter at the Havens was committed to enable an act of dark sorcery, his hand could not shape the spells.”
“The deaths could be his,” Maenol said, blunt. “He could have used an accomplice.”
Mearn stopped. As his gaze bore into the younger man, relentlessly direct, Tysan’s
caithdein
raised his chin and would neither bend nor stand down. “I’m this realm’s steward, in the absence of its king. I must ask, since our fate’s been entangled with Arithon’s. As a mage whose talents were blinded and broken, who knows to what lengths desperation might drive him to wrest back his gift for grand conjury?”
“You never met him,” Mearn said, implacable.
“Once.” Maenol all of a sudden seemed heartsore. He stared toward the wood where a pheasant pair called, while the breeze framed the unrestrained joy of a lark. “I was eleven. Arithon seemed retiring, unimportant at the time. All my devotion was for our fair s’Ilessid prince, just arrived. I couldn’t imagine he’d betray us.”
Mearn at last looked away, his sigh a soundless exhalation. “Arithon’s nothing like his half brother. Trust me in this. As for his guilt, there’s no guessing, given the nature of the man. He’s determined, and beyond any doubt, the most dangerous creature my family
has ever chanced to cross.” Attuned to his master’s distress, one of the brindle hounds roused and whined; the horse stamped, and clouds lowered, dimming the earth beneath their soft-footed shrouding. The sky threatened torrents before nightfall.
“This much I can say,” Mearn added finally, his arms folded as if the chill of the wetting to come later bit through his leathers beforetime. “I have never yet known Arithon to lie. He received the Fellowship’s sanction as Crown Prince. Since his oathswearing to Rathain, his integrity has been tested, once in life trial by the
caithdein
of Shand, and again, by my blood family. His morals were not found wanting. No act he undertook had been done without reason. Before I dared judge on those deaths at the Havens, I would ask in his presence to hear out his sworn explanation.”
The breeze hissed through the grasses, rich with the bearing promise of thawed soil.
“Well,” Maenol shrugged in that steely light fatalism better suited to a man years older, “the tangle won’t be yours or mine to unravel, but Earl Jieret’s, as Rathain’s sworn
caithdein.
If a boat can be sent, your dispatches will go across. Given luck, Arithon can be reached before he sails. Rest assured, my runner to your kin in Melhalla will leave my camp before nightfall.”
“One last thing,” Mearn said as he offered his forearms for a formal clasp in parting. “Lysaer has set scholars to work. They’ll comb the old archives until they’ve recovered the past arts of navigation.”
“So Arithon expected,” said Maenol. The practice of star sights, disused and forgotten through the centuries while Desh-thiere’s mists had smothered Athera’s skies, could not stay lost for much longer. For each day his
Khetienn
delayed her departure, the risk of discovery increased. Ancient charts might be found, or a rutter, to recall the location of the offshore Isles of Min Pierens. Arithon held neither the resources nor the men to repel an assault from the tumbledown fortress at Corith.
To be caught there would drive him to flight.
Aware like cold death that time was Lysaer’s ally, the two clansmen went separate ways. In birdsong, the day waned, while the gentle rain fell and pattered chill tears through the dark, blurred brakes of the oak forest.
The day after Mearn’s duplicitous stag hunt, couriers bearing the same copied dispatches ride outbound from Avenor, their horse trappings emblazoned with the sunwheel on gold, new device of the Prince of the Light; and they pass another messenger inbound from the south, who delivers King Eldir’s ultimatum, that slave-bearing galleys henceforward shall be barred from all ports in his Kingdom of Havish…
While dawn mists mantle the oak forests of Avenor, a black arrow screams over the city walls, shot from a clan messenger’s bowstring; affixed to its shaft, sealed in Maenol s’Gannley’s blood, a letter pronounces a forfeit of life against the s’Ilessid pretender who has dared break the freedom of the first kingdom charter…
Far eastward, in the greenwood of yet another kingdom, the clanblood chieftain named Earl of the North cries out in torment from his dreams; and the warning delivered by his gift of Sight shows a packed city square with a scaffold, cordoned about with white banners and a dazzle of sunwheel blazons, and chained there for the blade of a public execution is his sworn liege, the Prince of Rathain…
T
he prophetic dream broke on a scream of sheer rage, torn from the throat of a doomed prince.
A second, real cry became its live echo, wrung in drawn agony from the
caithdein
sworn to life service of liege and realm.
Jieret, Teir’s’Valerient, and Earl of the North snapped awake in Rathain with the vision’s cruel vista seared into indelible memory. Unmindful of peace, deaf to the birdsong which layered the spring dawn in the woodland outside his lodge tent, he eased himself free of his wife’s tangled limbs and arose from the blankets to stand shivering. Unsettled, naked, he sucked down breath after breath of chill air. The close, familiar smells of tanned deer hide and oiled steel, and the pitchy bite of cut balsam failed to restore him to balance. “Ath keep our sons!” he gasped through locked teeth. He could not shed his Sight of the last s’Ffalenn prince, crumpled and still in the swift, welling spurt of his life’s blood.
“Another augury?” The bedding rustled. A lavish fall of hair stroked his back, then a cheek, laid against his taut shoulder; his wife, arisen behind him, to link calming hands at his waist.
His tension would tell her the portent was ugly. Too often, in sleep, the prescient vision he inherited from his father warned him of death and trouble.
Jieret raked long fingers through his ginger beard. He braced his
nerve, spun, and enfolded his lady into his possessive embrace. “I’m sorry, dove.” The soft, misted peace of the greenwood seemed suddenly, desperately precious. “I shall have to travel very far, very fast. The life of our prince is at stake.”
She would not question his judgment, not for that. Arithon s’Ffalenn was the last of Rathain’s royal line. Should he die with no heir, his feal clansmen would forfeit all hope to reclaim their birthright.
Feithan’s fingers unclasped, brushed down Jieret’s flanks, and withdrew. “How much spare clothing will you carry?” She caught up the blanket, still warm from their sleeping, and spread it to pack his necessities.
Jieret bent, caught her wrists, and marveled as always. The strength in her was a subtle thing, her bones like a sparrow’s in his hands, which were broad and corded beyond his youthful years from relentless seasons of fighting. Their eyes met and shared mute appeal. “I’ll take weapons and the leathers on my back, and you, first of all.” A smile turned his lips. The expression softened the fierce planes of his face, and offset the hawk bridge of his nose. “Leave the blanket.”
He rocked her against his chest, his touch tender. An urgency he could scarcely contain spoke of the perils he must weather on the solitary trek that would take him to Tysan’s western shore. Bounties were still paid for captured clansmen. Headhunters plied the wilds in bands, their tracking dogs combing the thickets. Towns and trade roads were no less a hazard, choked with informers and guardsmen sent out recruiting to replenish the troops lost in Vastmark.
The wife in Jieret’s arms would not speak of the risks. Strong as the generations of survivors who had bred her, she absorbed his need, then massaged to ease his old scars with skilled hands, until he kissed her and slipped free to dress.
Jieret s’Valerient, called Red-beard, was in that hour twenty-one years of age. Supple, self-reliant, clean limbed as the deer he ran down in the hunt, he was rangy and tall, a being tanned out of oak bark. War and early losses had lent his hazel eyes more than a touch of gray flint. Jieret’s inheritance of the
caithdein’s
title had fallen to him during childhood, both his parents and four sisters slain in one day by town troops on the banks of Tal Quorin. On his wrist, even then, his first badge of achievement: the straight, fine scar from the knife cut which bound him lifelong to the honor of blood pact with his prince.
Proud of his rugged courage, too shrewd to voice fear, Feithan reached beneath their mattress of spruce boughs and tossed him his worn, quilloned knife.
She smiled, a nip of white teeth. “The sooner you go, the better the chance you’ll be back to my lodge before autumn.”
Then she folded slim knees behind her crossed arms and watched him bind on sheath and sword belt. If she wept, her tears were well masked behind tangles of ebony hair. Not on her last breath would she voice her disappointment. If her young husband did not return, his line must live on in the child she knew to be growing within her. She would endure, no less than any other clan woman widowed in a sudden, bloody raid.
Her husband was the oathsworn
caithdein
of Rathain, his birthright an iron bond of trust. The needs of kingdom and prince must come first, ahead of survival and family.
Feithan held no rancor. If the Teir’s’Ffalenn died, no clanborn babe in Rathain could have peace. The future would be kingless, while the townsmen continued their centuries-old practice of extirpation. Headhunters would keep sewing scalps of clan victims as trophy fringe on their saddlecloths, until at last the survivors dwindled, their irreplaceable old bloodlines too thinned by loss to sustain.
“Go in grace, my lord husband,” were the last words she said, as her man kissed her lips and stepped out.
Three days on foot through his native glens in Strakewood saw Lord Jieret to the shores of Instrell Bay. There, a bribe to a Westfen fisherman secured his safe crossing to Atainia. From landfall just north of the trade port of Lorn, Jieret faced an overland journey of a hundred and fifty leagues. Anviled, rocky ridges arose off the coast, the country between summits guttered in dry gulches, and the scrub thorn which clawed stunted footholds in the sands of the Bittern Desert.
Here, where a man made a target against the luminous sky, Jieret kept to the gullies. Sweat painted tracks through his coat of rimed dust. He jogged, walked, jogged on again, refusing to measure the odds that his errand was already futile.
The winter storms had abated. Any day, the Master of Shadow would raise sail to ply the world’s uncharted waters. He would seek the fabled continent beyond the Westland Sea, and finally know if Athera held a refuge beyond reach of the Mistwraith’s curse.
The Sorcerer, Sethvir, Warden of Althain could have named Prince Arithon’s location. Yet at dusk on spring equinox, when Jieret passed his tower, the Fellowship held convocation. Where Sorcerers worked, the elements paid uncanny homage. The night air seemed charged to crystalline clarity, the land lidded under a transparent sky with its
winds preternaturally silenced. Ozone tinged the silvered glow which speared in beams from the keep’s topmost arrow slits, and earth itself seemed to ring to the dance of ancient arcane rhythms. Though the clans did not share the widespread fear in the towns toward the powers called from natural forces, the man was a fool who held no mortal dread of disrupting the Sorcerers’ conjury.
Dawn saw Jieret on his way. His lanky stride ate the distance, through the rocky, slabbed washes bedded with black sand, puddled still from the snowmelt off the lava crags to the north. Before the ford, he veered west, to give the trade roads to Isaer wide berth. He kept to ditches and hedgerows through the flax bogs and farmlands, and moved softly by night where the headhunters scoured the flats. A stolen horse saw him to cover in the tangled stands of spruce which patchworked the Thaldein foothills.
There, better mounted by clansmen from Tysan, he galloped south with the relays who carried news between their fugitive enclaves in Camris.
The first scouts insisted the Master of Shadow would have left his winter haven at Corith.
Flanked by a campfire, the first cooked meat in his belly since the desert, and his undone braid fanned in hanks upon shoulders still glazed from a wash in a freshet, Jieret said, “I know that.” The bronze bristle of his jaw thrust out and hardened. “I have to try anyway.”
The scout who lounged across from him spat out the stem of sweetgrass he had meticulously used to scrub his teeth. “Fiends plague, then. Keep your bad news to yourself. We’ve heard enough already from Avenor to turn our hearts sore with grief.”
Every restive sinew in Jieret’s body coiled tense. “What’s happened?” A late-singing mockingbird caroled through the gloom with a sweet and incongruous tranquillity. “What has Lysaer s’Ilessid done now?”
The scout spat into the embers and spoke, and amid the fragrant, piney gloom beneath the Thaldeins, Jieret Red-beard first heard of the edict which endorsed live capture and slavery.
“Spring equinox has passed, with the ultimatum given,” the scout finished off in bitten rage. “Our Lord Maenol would never swear, but sent the false prince his black arrow proclaiming no quarter.”
Lysaer’s life, among the clans who by right should grant him fealty, was now irrevocably called forfeit. Jieret had no words. The event posed a vicious and unnatural tragedy, a warping of tradition provoked at its root by the evil of the Mistwraith’s curse.
The breeze carried the odd chill, breathed down from the snowfields, bathed pristine white under starlight. Jieret felt as if the cold inside had closed stealthy knuckles around the heart. He sat, eyes shut, and his knees clamped behind his clasped hands. “Events have turned grim in ways even Ath could scarce believe. How are you set when the headhunters start the spring forays?”
“Well enough.” The scout shrugged. “Troops and supplies are depleted since Vastmark. We’ll have a year, maybe two, before Lysaer’s Alliance regroups, but mark me. Then we’ll see sorrows.”
For a moment, like the drawn-out whisper of old grief, the wind stroked through the greening briar. Then the scout tipped his graying head. “You’ll need to go back,” he urged, gentle. “Our people will carry your message from here. No better can be done. The
Khetienn
will have sailed. If she has, your wait for your prince could be lengthy.”
The stiff pause came freighted with facts left unspoken: that whether or not the Master of Shadow had passed beyond reach, the headhunters’ leagues in Rathain were ever in Lysaer’s close confidence. The defeats freshly suffered at Arithon’s hand, then the loss of their late captain Pesquil by Jieret’s own arrow, had fanned their clamor for vengeance to fresh fervor.
“You see what must happen,” the scout said in staid logic. “Skannt’s going to claim sanction from Etarra’s fat mayor to harrow Rathain’s feal clans the same way.”
“I know that.” Jieret erupted in strung nerves, reached his feet, and resisted the blind urge to slam his fist into a tree. “Ath, for chained slavery? The guild merchants will cheer and donate the coin to forge manacles. Morality’s no deterrent. For years now, Etarrans have used our child captives as forced labor.” His back to the fire, he seemed a man racked, the passage of each breath made difficult. “I have to go on. What I know must not wait. Nor should my liege hear my word at second hand.”
By the embers, the scout swore in sympathy.
Forced to the crux of a terrible decision, Jieret summed up troubled thoughts. “My clans are more to me than the spirit in my body, but I am not irreplaceable. The Fellowship can appoint a new
caithdein
for Rathain if my liege is not at hand to make his choice. My spokesman, Deshir’s former war captain, Caolle, would agree. He knows the warning I bring is an augury which bears on Prince Arithon’s life.”
The last of his line, this fugitive Teir’s’Ffalenn; threat to him ended all argument.
“Ath guard your way, then,” the scout said, blunt as hammered metal. “May the clans in the south speed your journey.”
Jieret crossed the Thaldein passes, dismissed his friendly escort, and grew lean and browned from hiding in ditches through the Valendale’s sun-drenched, plowed farmsteads. He took no careless step. But headhunters picked up his trail west of Cainford. He left five hounds dead, and two men, and limped on with bound ribs and a calf with a festering dog bite. The hedge witch he challenged at knifepoint for healing cursed his barbarian tongue, then tried to sell him an amulet snagged together from squirrel skin and the strung vertebra of a grouse.
Jieret refused her the price of a cut lock of his bronze hair.
“‘Twould be useful for bird snares,” the crone muttered. She sniffled over her sticky decoction, then knotted a bandage over an ill-smelling poultice with vindictive and sharp ferocity.
“I like the birds free, and myself most of all.” Jieret wanted to flinch at her handling, but dared not, with his dagger point pressed to her back. The crone’s hovel had nesting sparrows in its eaves, and the pot on her brazier leaked. Poverty and townborn contempt for her simples had leached all her pride in her trade. Jieret harbored the cynical suspicion that any offering from his person would be sold back to headhunters by nightfall, twined into a tracking spell to trace him.
Despite his need, the crone put a grudge in her remedies. His leg swelled and ached. Through curses of agony, he tore the dressing away and soaked off the salves in a stream. Feverish, limping, he thrashed his way south through the brush. A second pack of tracking dogs winded his scent and burst into yammering tongue. Freshly mounted, their masters tried to run him to earth against the guard spells of a grimward, which no man living might cross. There, he might have perished, inadvertently killed by Fellowship defenses set to keep trespassers from harm.
But clan hunters from Taerlin heard the commotion and spirited him downstream in a boat. Safe at last under Caithwood’s dense cover, cosseted by a girl with cool hands, he slept off his lingering wound sickness.
Six weeks, since he had left his wife in Deshir. Early spring exchanged lace-worked blossom and bud for the sumptuous mantle of summer. On the sandy neck of Mainmere Bay, Jieret was met by the clan chief whose ancestral seat lay in ruins across silvered waters. She had ridden hard to bear him a message, the scout in her company said.
The hour was dusk, the sky, cloudless azure. Jieret crouched by her campfire under the eaves of scrub maples and spat out the bones of the rock bass netted for supper. While thrushes fluted clear notes through the boughs, and the deer emerged to nibble the verge of the bogs, he regarded the wizened little duchess who bore ancient title to Mainmere. She watched him eat, her gnarled hands folded. Along with age, she wore callus from sword and from bridle rein. The leathers belted to her waist were a man’s, and shaded under the fans of white lashes, her eyes met his own with stark pity.