Fugitive Prince (35 page)

In letters sent by prostitutes, officials, and tavernkeeps, the political brangles unfolded, of relations gone from displeased to contentious at every level of government. The coastal mayors resented King Eldir’s sharp justice. Inbound trade from Tysan would suffer without galleys, cut off altogether while the winter’s rough weather closed the north passage to oared transport. Tension waxed to distrust at the border, as Alliance officials were forced to discover their Prince of the Light’s bold policies received no margin of tolerance in Havish.

The royal counselors at Ostermere might accept that their king would never back down.

“It’s the rock-brained coastal mayors who refuse to hear sense,” the clansman explained at agitated length. “They’re howling protest. Most won’t understand that charter law can’t be changed or repealed. The crown’s execution of a few arraigned traitors isn’t going to deter them. Bribes will just double. Nobody’s fooled. Enough gold will tempt any man to dishonesty, and the headhunters in Tysan are bringing in captives with no heed at all for the season.”

Feylind perceived the stakes well enough. Until the ice broke in Stormwell, galleymen had no open route except southward through King Eldir’s territory. Oared ships demanded more fresh water and provisions; their vulnerable low freeboard required close access to safe harbors, since storm swells could cause them to founder. Only a blue-water hull with full sail could achieve the passage from Capewell round West Shand in one leg.

Fiark tapped the last document against his shut teeth. “I see backlash and dangerous pressure coming to bear on Cattrick’s shipworks at Riverton,” he said softly.

“Man, we know that!” The clansman sheathed the knife he had used to scratch maps of Alliance troop movements and shoved to his feet in bursting, sore agitation. “Maenol himself’s said Prince Arithon should leave. Though how we could help to spirit him cross-country is a right sticky point at the moment. Can’t even protect our own
families
in the forests, Alliance patrols are so fierce.”

No need to voice the full scope of the problem. With guild profits affected, more than ever, the Alliance would covet the new vessels targeted by the Shadow Master’s delicate plotting.

“One thing’s sure,” the clansman insisted, his fists clenched in sorrowful emphasis. “Those ships are the last and only hope to save my Lord Maenol’s people.”

Under mounting persecution from the Alliance, the last bloodlines in Tysan faced an increasing threat of extermination. Their loss would open the gates to disaster, since the territory the clans spilled their blood to keep wild would become razed by the axes of townsmen.

“The cry is raised to seize land for development,” the clan spokesman finished in a grief sharpened to desperation. “We are the grass roots of the Fellowship’s compact. Kill us off, and all ties to law end.” No proven line of descent would remain to keep faith with humanity’s petition for sanctuary. “Ath help us all, if the Paravians return, and the Ath-forsaken mayors have the power in hand to cast off the Fellowship’s sanctions.”

The Fellowship Sorcerer crossed the barrens of Rathain in the teeth of a howling storm. The gale which blasted the swept landscape of Daon Ramon razed over the rounded, low hills in an assault of horizontal sleet. Stone and dry gullies lay marbled in ice. The wind screamed and flayed, lent the cruel edge of a billion dashed shards of quartz. In weather that vicious, posted sentries were useless, even at the narrow mouth of the draw which sheltered the small clan encampment. The first Earl Jieret’s scouts knew of Asandir’s arrival was the presence of a steaming dark horse in their midst.

The young swordsman who wore his braid tied with fox tails gasped and reached in shot panic to draw steel.

His wrist was caught and yanked brutally short by the clamping hand of his elder. “No. That’s a friend.” To the muffled figure on his blowing mount, the veteran called, “Kingmaker?”

A nod answered. The cowled Sorcerer dismounted, cloak snapping in the whiteout scream of a gust.

“Take his horse, boy.” The older scout turned the younger one loose with a companionable clap on the shoulder. “Don’t be shy. If there’s Fellowship business, and not just a traveler’s need to ask shelter, our guest will ask for your High Earl.”

Asandir surrendered his wet reins. His reassurance fell like a struck mote of sunlight against the gray storm that kept the land mantled in winter. “Is Jieret in camp?”

The older scout nodded. “I’ll fetch him. You’ll find his wife Feithan
in the lodge tent, the one with the stag antlers hung on the javelin rack by the door flap.”

“I’ll find my way.” Asandir peeled a glove, used the back of his wrist to scrape the ice from his eyebrows. His level gray eyes then measured the scout, who was shivering, his buckskins soaked through to the skin. He said in tacit handling of stiff pride, “When you find Jieret, give him my word. There are no headhunters out reiving within eighty leagues of this site. No need to stand guard until this weather has lifted. I left wards on my back trail and a spell of confusion to spin any tracking hounds widdershins. The seals won’t release for three days. If dogs or armed townsmen try to push through, they’ll just make themselves dizzy running themselves into circles.”

“Ath bless you for that!” The scout’s reddened features broke into a pleased smile, masked as he shouldered head down through the gale.

Asandir tucked his bare hand back under his mantle, then footed his way over iced rock and the rimed crusts of dead grass to the cluster of wind-beaten lodge tents.

The antlers on the rack proved still fresh from the hunt, and the small, dark-haired woman who unfurled the door flap was wet to the wrists from a fatty emulsion of boiled deer brains.

When she saw who awaited outside her threshold, her thin, gamine features blushed scarlet. “Come on in. The place reeks.” Her shrug framed apology as she let the flap fall, enclosing her visitor in a steamy fog of white woodsmoke and the odorous stench from the pot where two scraped hides were set curing. “Couldn’t be helped. If I waited for sunshine, the boys wouldn’t have the leggings they need to cover their new growth of ankle.”

She stepped back to her labor, one skin draped and dripping over a rope stretched taut between the two lodgepoles. “Let me just wring this out, and I’ll see to your needs. No doubt you’re famished. Hang your cloak, if you want, by the fire.”

With competent, chapped hands, she flipped the ends of the hide into a neat loop, tucked in the edges, then inserted a stick through the center and twisted. The raw leather gave up its burden of moisture, pattering runnels into the beaten earth floor.

Asandir watched her in light, alert silence. The unassuming movements as he cracked the cased ice off his shoulders and peeled off his layers of soaked wool were deceptive, even ordinary. Yet Feithan’s blush remained high in tacit awareness that everything about her was being measured, from the sable coil of hair fallen loose at her neck, to
the skinning knife on its thong that had thinned from too many years of sharpening. She felt like that steel: worn with use, but still strong, still keen, still able to cope with the hardships that seemed to increase with each year as Alliance patrols pinched and harried clan movements.

“The scouts have gone for Jieret,” Asandir said. Unasked, he had bent. He caught up her forked stick and fished the next hide from the pot, his upturned smile flashed through his austerity like quicksilver. “I’m already wet, yes?” He slung the saturated buckskin over the rope and lent his arm to the heavy work of wringing.

“You shouldn’t,” Feithan chided. “You’ll stink just like me.” Then she whooped like a girl as she realized just what he was doing with his hands.

Magelight flared soft indigo over the wet hide, then brightened, changed, slid down the spectrum to bloom into clear, fiery scarlet. The leather steamed and unfurled, dry and warm from his spell seal, finished inside the span of one heartbeat for its final curing in smoke.

“I won’t have to stretch this?” Feithan asked, dumbfounded.

The Sorcerer shook his head, running his testing touch down the velvety surface. “Nor smoke it, either, unless you wish to darken the color.” Luminosity trailed where his fingertips passed. The thick air seemed to shimmer through an unheard song, as though a resonance of his blessing did honor to the dead buck. “The hide wouldn’t have dried before nightfall, and this storm could be better spent sewing. Do you wish me to treat the next one as well?”

“I thank you, yes.” Flushed now with pleasure, Feithan stepped back and let him lift the moist pelt still draped on the rope. “Though, Ath, I could have used a few of your tricks on the morning I tackled the scraping. The camp boys were to help, but my truant of a husband spirited them off to go hunting.”

She untied the taut cord, then knelt to collapse the frames used earlier for stretching and drying. Immersed in false brusqueness, she tried not to care how desperately her fingers were shaking. But her uneasy questions loomed too large to ignore, and the forceful quiet of Asandir’s presence was too palpably real at her back. She would mask her sharp worry in chatter before she dared to ask why a Fellowship Sorcerer should visit her hearth in the comfortless misery of deep winter.

Stilled as old oak, his silvered hair lying lank on broad shoulders, the Sorcerer spoke as if he heard her thought anyway. “I’m here to Name the next heir to Jieret’s title.”

Feithan closed her eyes. The rank smell of deer brains all at once
seemed to unstring her senses. Fighting a tight chest, then wheeling faintness, she crouched half-unmoored, as if the dependable solidity of the earth must give way to a yawning void. She hung on, her lips clamped shut against desperate fear, and her arms clutched into an awkward embrace around a disjointed bundle of ash sticks.

While the moment hung, she forced her stunned thoughts to sort out what the Sorcerer had told her.

Jieret’s
life was not endangered. An heir for his title as steward of Rathain was only chosen by the Fellowship when the s’Ffalenn royal line became threatened.

No confirmed ill news, then; not an immediate disaster to her family, but too likely a larger one pending for the realm. In mechanical habit, she continued to tidy the collapsed slats of the hide frame. Then she drew on raw courage and a forced, hammered steadiness. “Which son should I call?”

A hand touched her shoulder, light as a moth’s wing, and uncannily warm for a traveler just spared from the battering siege of harsh weather. “Neither son, lady.”

Asandir had reached her side in one long, soundless step. Another move saw the wood lifted out of her hands. His understated strength raised her upright and gripped her in bedrock support. “Dismiss every fear for your husband as well. He stays here in Rathain, under my binding command if need be. This appointment of succession is but a formality and, life willing, should stay so for many years to come.”

Steadied enough to stop shivering, Feithan tipped up her angular face. She surveyed the Sorcerer, who topped her by a head, his patience like glacial scarred granite. Then the wonder broke through and wakened a flutter in her veins. “You want
Kei?”

Asandir’s smile was quietly luminous, subtle and fleeting as the spill of a moonbeam in the sultry flare of spent coals. “She will be Kei no longer. And yes. Be proud. Your daughter shall become the next Teiren’s’Valerient, steward to the royalty of Rathain.”

“She’s with the neighbor,” Feithan explained, straightened now with relief. “The smoke from the tanning sometimes bothers the newborns. Let me just rinse my hands and fetch her back.”

The Fellowship ceremony for Naming the
caithdein’s
heir took place in hurried solemnity. There was no feast, no celebration, no joyous gathering of far-flung clans the tradition usually warranted. Only Jieret and his wife attended the ritual when Asandir in his travel-stained leathers accepted the infant from Feithan’s arms.

On that day scarcely one month old, she was tucked in a sheepskin laced at the front with plain thongs. Her gems were the glints of melted sleet caught in silk of the fleeces. Her wide eyes were blue, still uncolored from birth, but tracking the Sorcerer’s finger as he traced a glyph in white light over the dome of her forehead. “You who were Kei shall be Jeynsa Teiren’s’Valerient henceforward.”

Translation from the old Paravian meant successor to power. For a moment, the Sorcerer’s presence seemed raised to a levei that transcended mortality. His hair, his large hands, the very life in his veins seemed to sing with a subliminal silvery aura. The babe in his grasp seemed both flesh and light, surrounded and infused by the majestic force of a power too fierce to be captured by reason. Feithan raised cramped knuckles to dash away tears. Jieret stood silent, perhaps in remembrance of his own hour of oath taking, years past in Strakewood when his parents stood living beside him.

Slashing winds and the singing whine of the sleet ruled the moment as Asandir’s arcane rune sank and touched. Its intricate angles blazed bright as a meteor, and then dimmed, softly melded against the smooth warmth of the girl child’s skin. “Jeynsa, little spirit, be strong. Prove worthy of the destiny you will come to carry forward from the time-honored lineage of your ancestors.”

Then the choosing was done. The Sorcerer raised the bundled child. Smiling and dazzled, she was returned to the care of her mother. More than Name had changed. Jeynsa’s future was sealed. A sign like a gossamer tracing in starlight gleamed under the rim of her hood.

“My mark will bear witness, she is Fellowship chosen.” Diminished once again to a weathered old traveler, sturdy, but worn from long service, the Sorcerer gave last instructions. “The sign will fade in one cycle of the moon. Raise the girl to bear the proud title of
caithdein,
with all of the powers and charges therein. She will swear formal service to her prince in the fullness of time.”

Earl Jieret touched his daughter’s soft cheek. Still wrapped in the crumpled furs he had worn in the thorn brakes, his wolf-pelt hat dripping ice melt through his braid, he raised his bearded chin and regarded the Sorcerer who stood unmoving before him. In all of Athera, he was one of the few who stood tall enough, and bred of a stern enough fiber to endure a prolonged, level stare. “You’re not staying?”