Fugitive Prince (53 page)
Authors: Janny Wurts
When Maenol had finished, he returned to Mearn’s side, bearing the sewn-leather bucket and horn dipper. The citrine gleam of the rushlight traced the stubble on his cheek, and the gaps torn in the fringe on his deerskin where thongs had been cut off at need to mend, or tie bandages or tourniquets. Lives and blood would be given as generously to defend the needs of the land.
Mearn labored to regather the lost thread of his composure. Before accepting the same care from the hands of the man who was Tysan’s
reigning
caithdein,
he demanded in rankling honesty, “My Lord of Camris, why are you still here?”
The unaccustomed use of his formal title touched the younger man to stiff wariness. He crouched. The water dipper all but snapped as his hand clenched, and his face showed a startled and sudden vulnerability that exposed the youth in his twenty-five years. Carefully, slowly, he set down the water. Clan habit did not waste the gifts of the earth, nor take life’s bounty for granted. He settled on his heels, strong wrists draped on his knees, while the carnelian glow of the rushlight mapped the small scabs ripped by briars, and the deeper scars left by war on his knuckles. In the same grave steadiness that flinched from no hardship, he answered, “I had to ask a boon of you, in behalf of my clans.”
Thirst forgotten, Mearn refused the wringing weakness in his limbs and elbowed himself half-erect. Inadequately braced against the wadded mat of the rushes, he shook back the stuck ends of his hair and matched the other man’s courage headlong. “Whatever you need will be given. My word on s’Brydion clan honor.”
Maenol looked away, perhaps overcome. “I accept that word from you. Ath bless your willing heart.” He paused, then added through a harsh burr of regret, “Sleep now. We’ll speak of this later.”
He arose, clasped his benefactor’s shoulder in salute. Moved by uncharacteristic reticence, he averted his direct glance, and Mearn, in suspicion that the
caithdein
was weeping, did not press, but left the man to his dignified privacy.
The fever had left him light-headed in any case. Drained from his effort to keep focused composure, he gave in to the sapping demand of his flesh and lay back. Despite his fierce worry and his musty, uncomfortable nest of damp fur, sleep came like an ambush and dropped a black cloth over his thought and his senses.
When Mearn s’Brydion reawakened, the rain had cleared into a chill, gusty night. The rushlight burned now by the cracked open doorway, where a fenwoman bent, stirring fish stew in a cauldron. She was typical of her breed, built rawboned and short. Hair of an indeterminate color was bundled beneath a string cap. Feathers swung from hoops in her earlobes, and her layered skirts were sewn with dark threads into queer, whorled patterns and luck signs. Three purses made from the shells of marsh turtles dangled from a cincture at her waist, and two raggedy children sucked their fingers and peered from the well of deep shadow behind her. A third infant waved from the carry sack she wore strapped to her back.
If her household was typical, her fenlander husband would be faring out in his skiff, trapping and fishing for the family.
Mazed in the lassitude left by his illness, Mearn took too long to notice the hovel was emptied of wounded. The furs where the clan scouts had languished were rolled in neat bundles, lashed with fiber twine twisted from wild flax. Maenol s’Gannley was gone, replaced by a toothless elder smoking a root pipe. Beside Mearn’s shoulder sat the last of the clansmen, a boy of twelve years. He had blond hair tied into a neat braid, and hands too large for his still-growing frame. Sword and knife rode in sheaths at his waist. His belt was his only ornament, sewn with simple designs of wooden beads and otter fur. He waited, stiff backed and composed in the tight, sober silence that came over the young in times of crisis.
Touched by foreboding, Mearn fisted the hand hidden under the covering furs. “My word as given,” he said at careful length. “Just what have I bound into promise?”
The boy started. His dark eyes went wide, the pupils dense black as he realized his charge was awake. He said nothing, but instead drew two letters out of his jerkin and passed them across to Mearn’s keeping. Then he rose. He seemed all knobby joints, rail thin for his growth. Despite tender age, he knew how to move to accommodate the adult weapons he carried. His voice had just started the change to a man’s bass timbre, yet the cracking child’s treble which intruded as he addressed the fenwife put no crimp at all on his dignity.
“Mistress,” he requested, then thanked her generosity in fair dialect as she surrendered the use of her rushlight.
The flame jerked and fluttered as the boy brought the wick. Mearn ran his thumb over the wafer of wax, impressed with the ancient seal employed by Tysan’s
caithdein
for personal use through the centuries of fugitive exile. The choice of devise confirmed a most risky necessity, unrelieved by the fact the first missive set down upon formal parchment was inscribed to his Grace, Eldir, High King of Havish. The second note bore Mearn’s own name in a script astonishingly erudite. He had never seen Maenol’s written hand. By wary habit, the forestborn clans wrote no messages for fear such might fall into the hands of town enemies.
That Lord Maenol had seen fit to wield pen and ink bespoke desperation and appalling finality. Mearn gripped the note, reluctant as stone. For an agonized instant, he wished himself far from this site in the marshes, that he not be the one left to carry whatever burden the sealed parchment was bound to contain.
Then, as if stung into branding impatience, he ripped the seal
open. Wax bits arced through the gloom like flung gravel. Tagged by the flickering, uncertain flame light, eyes stinging with humility, Mearn read.
The first line requested his assistance to deliver an appeal to King Eldir. Tysan’s
caithdein
would beg sanctuary in Havish for the refugee survivors who managed to win free of Alliance persecution against clanblood. The cost in pride, in pain, in the sheer magnitude of that understated defeat raised a knot of remorse in Mearn’s chest. Scarcely seven years since the massive downfall at Vastmark, Prince Lysaer had succeeded in unseating a clan presence whose roots went back five thousand years. Words were inadequate to express grief and heartache, that without the trials of the Mistwaith’s curse, these same clansmen should have sworn the same man their loyalty.
Now naught could be done but watch entropy march through the breach. The bottomless demands of trade and crown treasury held small care for the great mysteries. No means existed to soften the blow, that Arithon’s loss of three brigs at Riverton might impact all future generations. A clan abdication of Tysan’s free territory would leave townsmen free rein for desecration. Unwilling to admit such a weight of despair, Mearn stamped back bleak thoughts.
The boy watched his face, restrained into choked stillness that bespoke an unkindly awareness of consequences. The hovel’s thick warmth and the fenwoman’s welcome lent him no ease.
Mearn tucked the missive for King Eldir away, then fought for the presence to peruse the second request.
There, even Lord Maenol’s steady hand faltered, the letters formed into jerked lines of reluctance as they charged s’Brydion by word of honor to admit the boy named Ianfar s’Gannley into Mearn’s personal household as a page.
‘The boy is my uncle’s son,’
Maenol’s words stated, torn by small gaps as though more than once the ink had dried on the quill nib.
‘As of this moment, he stands as my heir. He will inherit should I pass the Wheel without leaving progeny. My scouts just brought word the Alliance forces are closing the east passes. I see no better way to ensure the boy’s safe deliverance from Tysan’s sovereign territory. I charge you, by your family Name, keep him safe. If my war captain in Camris survives me, the raising of Ianfar must fall to him. Should that one perish, seek fosterage with any forestborn family you see fit. Be sure he learns what he must to rule after me.’
Mearn closed his fingers, crumpling the parchment with a burst of animal savagery. Too grim to weep, he used all his anger to resmooth the crushed leaf, which he then rearranged into razor-sharp folds and tipped into the spill of the rushlight. Smoke billowed black. The acrid
reek of burned hide rode the air, and the fenwife shot upright, exclaiming.
One look at Mearn’s face shocked her silent. Through the dirty orange flame that crawled up the charred missive, the brother of Duke Bransian s’Brydion met the paralyzed gaze of young Ianfar s’Gannley. “I accept both charges laid on me by your chieftain. Will you formally agree to my guardianship?”
The boy tucked his hands under his arms, too brave to show he was shivering. He knew well enough his consent entailed the unspeakable possibility that his clans might be driven to yield up their sovereign charge in Tysan. Almost, his heart seemed to fail him. The underlit shadow thrown by his lashes made his eyes seem too large and too bright.
Then the stark, gritty fiber of his people shone through. “I bow to the will of my
caithdein
and the demands of necessity.” His dignity far more in that moment than many men managed in a lifetime, he bowed. “In gratitude, s’Gannley gives thanks for the generosity of s’Brydion.”
“This is not charity, boy,” Mearn denounced, gruff. He tossed the last flaring embers to the floor, which was earth, and damp enough not to lend fuel to the sparks. “Under my roof, you’ll have standing as a brother. Be sure, if my family has any resource to give, you won’t end your days in foreign exile.”
Had the child been younger, even by two years, a grown man could have extended his arm and gathered that awkward, stiff form into an embrace for comfort. But hardship had imposed too early a maturity. The boy stepped woodenly forward and offered his wrist for the clasp to seal a pact between adults.
Mearn blinked. He hoped the scalding blur to his sight was solely due to his fever. With his jaw clenched hard against any words that might unmask the pity that tore him, he pretended the wrists he accepted were not cold, or drawn taut with fear and uncertainty.
“Don’t you mind, boy,” he said in dry humor. “We’re in poor state together. If I’m not mistaken, our first act must be to beg help from these fenlanders to thread a safe path through the mires. Then we might need to pilfer a post horse to make our way back to Avenor. We’ll need to go swiftly.” One corner of his mouth crawled up in fierce irony as he remembered the gold and the compromised straits of his house servant, still embroiled in the ruse concerning several sly doxies. Their extended service to cover his absence by now must have seeded a staggering collection of wild rumors. “If I’m going to look peaked, it’s all in good form. A man who’s been worn to his bones by
three women over the course of a fortnight would be nothing else except prostrate. Do you bet?”
A tentative nod. The boy’s fingers stopped trembling a fraction.
“That’s good,” Mearn assured, and lightened his touch. “We’ll get along fine. I’ll stand you five silvers for the bone buttons on your boot cuff that when my brother the duke learns about my randy reputation, he’ll send sealed word by fast courier. He’ll say that my dallying is shameful, and for clan’s sake, the time’s come to marry.”
By then. Lord Maenol’s bitter note of appeal lay in immolated bits on the floor. The fenwife bustled over, indignant, and poured water over the ashes.
“I could have used that to drink, pretty mistress,” Mearn said in reflexive protest. He released his steadying hold on the boy, grabbed the empty bucket, and tucked it into Ianfar’s stilted grasp. “Go, man,” he urged. “Refill this for the lady, and take as long as you like.”
The release came no moment too soon. Run to the end of his flagging strength, Ianfar bolted outdoors to unburden his anguish in private.
Left to the breathless scolding of his benefactress, Mearn shut his eyes against branding pain and the flame of a burgeoning headache. When the fenwife understood he was not going to argue, he managed a beautifully worded apology that sapped the very last of his reserves. Before the maw of oblivion claimed him, he made a vow with the unyielding endurance of black iron. Once back in Avenor, when Ianfar was delivered into absolute safety, he would seek out the name of the man who had betrayed Arithon’s faith and precipitated the premature flight out of Riverton. For Lord Maenol’s losses, and for the clans’ forced abdication of their age-long stewardship of a kingdom, that one would suffer the harsh edge of s’Brydion justice until Dharkaron Avenger himself interceded to ask human mercy.
Early Spring 5653
In a tavern along the road south of Middlecross, a middle-aged minstrel clad in scarlet sits down and tunes his lyranthe for his night’s round of performance; and his accustomed audience of tradesmen and farmhands is swelled by a half company of crown soldiers under command of another man, whose nondescript mantle covers the sunwheel blazon of authority, and who hears through each ballad with mounting suspicion and a frown of incensed disapproval…
A fortnight following Arithon’s clean escape out of Riverton, his imprisoned accomplices are boarded into the holds of the three brigs newly commissioned; while the appointed royal captains call orders to make sail, Cattrick stands at the trestle in his loft, a sharpened shim of graphite clenched in his fist, and his heart lit with rage fit to murder…
On the same day, Mearn s’Brydion returns to Avenor, Ianfar s’Gannley alongside him; and the first gossip he hears as he hands off his blown livery horse is the word of Princess Talith’s fatal plunge from a high tower battlement, named by the shocked and mourning court as a suicide caused by despair…
Spring 5653
T
he three brigs newly commissioned under Lysaer’s sunwheel banner raised anchor to a windward tide. Before the rip grew too stiff to ride for advantage, the pert little fleet raised stainless, fresh sails and began its mincing, piloted run down the estuary to ply open waters to Corith.
Confined in the narrow gloom of the mate’s cabin, and crammed head and feet in a hammock ill suited to the frame and muscle of a man given lifetime service as a war captain, Caolle listened to the tense strings of orders which maneuvered the flag vessel,
Lance of Justice,
through her intricate, bending course down the narrows. Since his complaint that the fumes of fresh varnish turned his head, the door to his quarters was latched back and open. His ankles by then were already chained to forestall him trying escape. By the free air through the quarterdeck hatch grating, and the brackish miasma of the salt bogs, he mapped the layered headlands of a shoreline he could not see.
Moment to moment, Caolle rode his taxed senses. However his wound ached, he asked for no posset. Too easily, the reins of clear consciousness might slip his grasp and spin him back into circling delirium. The Koriani healer meant him well, but her remedies gave him sleep that brought nightmares, and no peace of mind when he woke.
Like a crippled, old dog, he felt he had outlived his usefulness. The enchantresses’ meddling fed his unease, tick tight as they were with Lysaer s’Ilessid’s Alliance. Dread fanned that anxiety, that his part in his liege lord’s flight out of Riverton might become their best tool to clinch Prince Arithon’s downfall.
Now the brig was under way, ostensibly to reinforce the s’llessid assault on the outpost at the Isles of Min Pierens.
Caolle was not resigned. Discomfited by the roll of rough passage as her crew worked ship in the tideway, he traded straight pain for awareness. The hammock swung and creaked from its rings as the vessel slipped astream of the ebb. Canvas cracked overhead, square sails caught aback, and steering cables hissed as the quartermaster spun the helm hard alee to swing her stern down the channel. Terse orders volleyed through the rocking lag of the stay, as drift bore the vessel past the sandy tongue of a spit. Then the shivering bang from aloft as her yards braced full to the wind; new foam dashed off the rudder. The brig regained way and sailed close-hauled down the neck of the Riverton Narrows.
Caolle’s hammock rocked to the heel of the deck. He clamped his teeth and stifled the oaths that would draw unwanted attention. The straits of his captivity were worse than demeaning. The least cramp in his limbs could not be eased without begging outside help. His weakness was not deemed a reliable jailer: the festered wounds on his forearms were poulticed, dressed wrist to elbow in bandages which also served as restraint. Immobility left him more time than he could use without fretting.
Abovedecks, the leadsman called off the mark. The captain barked for a two-point change in course.
“Smarten up on those braces!” howled the mate to some laggards. “Are ye blue-water hands, or a pack o’ coast-hugging galleymen?”
The lookout sang out and the lead line confirmed shoaling water. Other crewmen stationed at the port cathead let go the ring painter. The cockbilled anchor splashed to windward to a rattling fall of cable. While the bow was stayed through the tug of an eddy, Caolle pitched his forest-sharp senses to take fullest stock of his surroundings.
By now, he judged the ship’s company included twenty-five combat-trained guardsmen. Half of these sprawled idle, polishing mail, or shooting dice for small coin in the galley. Their less seaworthy fellows shared the rail on the main deck, unmercifully rousted hither and yon by rushed seamen as the brig wore again, and the lee side changed port to starboard. Two dozen more sailhands berthed forward as crew, each one vouchsafed by merchant references or a
paper with a justiciar’s seal to affirm lawful background from a city of lifelong residence.
Others on board, Caolle recalled from the Laughing Captain’s taproom. These included the brig’s handpicked officers, a captain, two mates, a grizzled and temperamental quartermaster, and the serving-class appointments of cook, purser, and cabin steward. At large also was a street brat, caught stowing away, and pressed into crown service as ship’s boy. His vociferous, guttersnipe insolence came and went through the companionway as he fetched and carried for the Koriani First Senior.
Since spells and scryings wrought through quartz-crystal resonance could not be made to span open salt water, Lirenda and the healer, brought along to tend Caolle, made passage on the same vessel. They shared the captain’s quarters in the stern cabin, while the displaced officers occupied the chart room a scant breadth of a bulkhead away.
More orders sang out, and the brig hauled her wind; the changed quarter of the breeze wafted the smell of fish stew from the galley, mingled with soldier’s oaths and the cook’s nasal carping. By the bite of his temper and a doleful emphasis on assignment of unfair duties, Caolle learned that seventy-two of Arithon’s accomplices, exposed by Koriani conjury languished, chained, in the brig’s hold as well. By default, the two vessels trailing the flagship must bear the Etarran fighting companies imported to defeat the Shadow Master at Corith.
A war captain’s instinct died hard, to know the strength and position of his enemies.
Caolle closed his eyes. From habit, he reconstructed the mate’s cabin in detail from memory. On his right hand, a hanging locker leaked a tanner’s tang of new oilskins; then a stand and basin, rowed with latched hooks holding buckets of drawn seawater and a mesh bag with lye soap for washing. To his left lay the mate’s berth, and a small niche for an officer’s sea chest, with a brass lantern mounted in gimbals overhead, swinging unlit to the toss of the hull. Caolle gave no ground to discomfort. He quizzed his recall until he knew he could find his way without mishap, even in total darkness. Then he catnapped as he could, restive with distrust and the incessant throb of bound wounds.
For a while, the rush and slap of rip currents in the estuary kept time to his uneasy dreams. He drowsed and woke and drowsed again. When sunset faded into silver-gray dusk, the vessel cleared the last shoals at the mouth of the inlet. The commotion as she raised topsails,
then the change to the long, swinging roll of fresh sea swells sharpened Caolle back to full consciousness.
Flaring light jinked through a seam in the bulkhead as the cabin steward kindled the lantern in the chart room adjacent. A discussion in progress resumed on the heels of his departure. Through the staid clump of the captain’s seaboots, a woman’s soprano raised a snag which burgeoned into rife argument. The captain’s bitten authority clashed into female rejoinder.
“We will not lay our course for the Isles of Min Pierens,” Lirenda contradicted, chill as new ice on a freshet. “That was sheer presumption on your part since, in fact, our quarry will not sail there either.”
The first mate’s gruff bass backed his captain’s disagreement, whelmed into thundering canvas as crewmen aloft shook out the reefs in the mainsail.
Then Koriani reply, in dictatorial steel. “No. By no means. Not only has the future been scried for full surety, but we have deliberately allowed Arithon s’Ffalenn to hear warning of Prince Lysaer’s plans.” In clipped, sulky venom, the First Senior qualified. “The Shadow Master knows an Alliance blockade will close over him if he sails to Corith. We’ve foreseen his reaction. He’ll flee south for Torwent. Sealed forecast has already shown us the cove where he’ll reclaim his sloop and embark. His point of vulnerability lies in the estuary at the head of Mainmere Bay. If our spellcraft restrains his shadows, your three ships plying the mouth of the inlet can pin him down as he bolts for open water.”
“That’s a coast run,” cracked the captain, tired and brittle from the long, fussy hours of seamanship required to run the Riverton Narrows. “You’d have been better off to charter a galleyman who hauls cargo through Tideport and Mainmere.”
“You’re afraid?” Lirenda’s derisive accusation chilled Caolle to ugly foreboding. “I’m surprised. Three ships with armed companies against a pleasure sloop crewed by one man and a bumbling, fat drunk would seem an auspicious engagement.”
The captain’s slow-strided pacing stopped short. “Do you take me for a fool? You speak of the shadow-bending sorcerer who caused the trade fleet to burn at Minderl Bay.”
“Against whom you’ve the backing of the Koriani Prime Matriarch. Gainsay her will, and you also betray the Alliance of Light for refusing your help to corner the Spinner of Darkness.” Lirenda cut off debate with aristocratic dismissal. “Do fetch out your charts, captain. Our course is a foregone conclusion. The trap which my order has set will be sprung, the fate of your enemy is already destined and sealed through multiple wards of grand augury.”
Distressed to alarm in the salt-muggy confines of the mate’s cabin, Caolle heard the captain expend his last argument. “I don’t like your odds, witch. This felon commands the very fabric of darkness. No mortal fighting company can close on a prize they can’t see. Nor can my quartermaster steer clear of the reefs if he’s reft blind on lee shores in an inlet!”
“You worry for nothing.” Lirenda arose to a breezy rustle of silk. The crack in the wall flickered as she crossed through the light to leave by means of the companionway. “The Master of Shadow will come readily to heel once he learns of our cargo of hostages.”
“Are you mad?” The captain of the brig banged frustrated fists on his chart table. “The man’s a fell sorcerer and a thrice-confirmed killer! Do you actually believe he’d give himself up to spare a mere coffle of lackeys?”
The latch clicked and held as Lirenda paused at the threshold. Her conclusion came freighted with menace to seize the hottest man’s blood. “Then, captain, you must lay us a course for the Lanshire coast on the strength of my Koriani Order’s requirement.”
Lashed prone in his hammock, Caolle measured the stakes and weighed his own judgment concerning Prince Arithon’s chances. He held no false hope. Set against the entrenched s’Ffalenn gift of compassion, the undermining sense of guilt engendered by just one accursed sword thrust seeded the opening for disaster.
Caolle understood he was not made as the realm’s sworn
caithdein,
to test and grapple the fires of s’Ffalenn royal conscience. Nor could he swerve from implications that nagged like a poisonous aftertaste. He could not stand down, not for his life’s sake: not after overhearing the harsh, focused hunger which charged the First Enchantress’s tone at each mention of Prince Arithon’s name.
Forty years with the burden of command left Caolle a sharp judge of character. Whatever Morriel’s successor believed, her reasons for seeking the Shadow Master’s ruin were entrenched and intensely personal enough to raise the hair at his nape. In defiance of despair, and the straits of mortal pain, Caolle gritted his teeth. He linked his fists through hemp netting and began in stark need to chafe the linen bound over his poultices.
Midnight brought the change in the watch, with the flagship leading her sister vessels on a dogleg course which would bear straight offshore for a clandestine passage, then bend on a rhumb line to make landfall through Mainmere Narrows. The fleet of three ran before following winds when the Koriani healer closed off the mate’s cabin and
laid down her satchel of remedies at Caolle’s side. Each night and noon, she came to renew the regenerative spells on his wound, that strict schedule kept since the First Senior had remanded his care to her charge.
The lantern lit by the ship’s boy at sundown had burned low, its weakened flicker made worse by the strong pitch of the swells kicked up by the equinox shift in the wind. The brig tossed stem to stern in long, rolling corkscrews, doused under back-fallen arcs of carved spray. New varnish sweated to the influx of sea damp. Snatched in crawling shadows and sliding spears of wan light, the convalescent stirred in his hammock. A groan escaped his clenched teeth.
Moved to pity for the wearing discomfort caused by the rigors of sea passage, the enchantress sighed and deferred her intent to trim the neglected wick. The sigils she required to reverse fatal wounding carried an unkindly resonance. Enspelled tissues closed at the price of nagging pain, and the clansman was stubborn as grit. He rejected those possets she mixed to bring ease through the gift of oblivious sleep.
Yet tonight, even his stiff pride seemed forced to bow before the demands of his suffering. “Something’s not right,” Caolle ground through a gasp. “The dressing’s turned sodden.”
“Easy. We’ll see.” The enchantress touched his brow, found him clammy with chill. Her frown deepened. She thrust a palm under the blanket. Caolle’s shoulder and chest were also running fresh sweat. “You’re fevered,” she soothed in that bedside gentleness she used to disguise deep concern.
For the ciphers and seals still actively binding spirit to flesh were far from safe or beneficent. If Caolle’s wound had gone septic, the same conjuries which regenerated torn tissue would outrace their proper intent. Sigils as a rule were unselective, a vectored spell of forced impetus. A starting suppuration would engage their figured energies, then turn on itself and run rampant. All risks came redoubled. Misread the first signs, and Arithon’s liegeman could die in an hour, consumed from within by infection.
Now grateful for the dimness which masked peripheral distractions, the Koriani healer hooked out the silver chain which hung her spell crystal from her neck. She dangled the jewel above Caolle’s flank, then shut her eyes and smoothed her awareness into trance. The peace of her craft settled over her mind and distanced the ship’s clamor of stray noise. The squeal of the rudder cables dimmed into the mirth of the hands who idled on the afterdeck to share a lewd joke with the quartermaster. Channeled to heightened sensitivity through
the attuned matrix of her quartz, the enchantress sounded each of the sigils intermeshed with the clan liegeman’s life energies. Naught seemed amiss. The layered streams of vitality interlaced through his aura showed no ominous stain of dull gray. She listened, diligent, and rechecked her findings. The first sign of dissonance could be subtle in warning of fresh inflammation.