Grand Conspiracy (34 page)

Under a gold sky and the diving flocks of gulls who scavenged the rocks at low tide, the livery mounts and grooms sent to
dispatch Avenor's royal delegation to the beamed hall in the old city left the wharf with empty saddles. One groom and one gelding trailed after them, bearing the shrewd old seneschal, who would serve as Prince Lysaer's ambassador. The Mayor of Hanshire's full brother, Raiett Raven, boarded the Alliance flag galley. He perched at the rail, sharply watchful as his namesake, while Avenor's fleet of five cast off from the docks and cleaved their smoking-fast course from the harbor.

Beside him, faced inboard with mailed elbows braced upon streaming, wet wood, Sulfin Evend lounged with the settled ease of close kin. Both men observed the unearthly transformation, as Lysaer in his stainless white-and-gold tabard walked among the sweating banks of oarsmen. After a night passed in killing exertion, he asked more: that they raise themselves to the task of overtaking the fleet which had departed from Hanshire ahead of them.

‘Impressive,' Raiett murmured, drumming his long fingers against the ruby-and-silver bracelets he wore everywhere as a talisman. ‘So tell me, nephew. Since you've deserted your birthright for soldiering, is this Prince of the Light all he claims to be?'

Sulfin Evend returned his enigmatic regard. ‘What do you know?'

‘What I see.' Still entranced by the sacrificial dedication of the rowers, Raiett smiled. ‘His Grace has an impressive style. His handling of men is extraordinary. The shipyard laborer who carried us word of the late conspiracy was drawn to turn informant on a master who trusted him.'

Mail chinked, sullen, to Sulfin Evend's shrug. ‘You aren't one given to belabor the quirks of a simple commoner's loyalty.'

‘Just as you weren't expected to cast aside the privilege of your family ties.' Raiett's gaze over the silver flash of his bracelet assumed the fixed focus of a cat. ‘Your father asks why, since Hanshire has never favored Tysan's return to the outdated mores of a monarchy.'

‘What do you know?' Sulfin Evend repeated, while the sea heaved, rocking, under the keel, and spray thrashed and creamed to the redoubled pull of timed oars. The galley's wake streamed behind, white lace against indigo, erased by the indistinct pallor of mist as the fleet drew away from the shoreline.

Raiett straightened, annoyed. He stabbed a closed fist into the rail as if his clasped fingers held steel. ‘Very well. Forget social subtlety. We'll play instead for bare facts. Cattrick's a native
Southshire craftsman with cousins and kin ties in Merior. The seer who advises your father's council links his betrayal of Arithon s'Ffalenn to the demands of a Koriani oath of debt. Since the shipwright's true loyalty might not ride on crown gold, the question begs asking.
Why didn't Lysaer s'Ilessid prevent
his defection?
His Grace had to suspect sabotage before this. Why didn't he catch the flaw in the designs which saw his eight ships hit the rocks?'

One stroke, two; the galley plowed through a stiffening crosswind, flags cracked to the beat of her urgency. Sulfin Evend jerked his dagger from the sheath at his belt and presented the point toward his uncle. ‘His Grace does not confide in me, ever. Nor would my counsel be fitting in his affairs.'

‘Ath!' Raiett's quicksilver explosion of frustration warred with his close-held restraint. He did not respond to the ritual opening offered by the bared knife. ‘You can't believe the man is creation's divine gift to spare all Athera from darkness!'

Hard gray to searching, pale green, the eyes of the two men locked. Still holding out the gleaming, sharp blade, Sulfin Evend looked away first.

Raiett's utter astonishment woke disused lines of humor over his crag-thin features. When he spoke, he was gruff. ‘Put up that steel.' He waited until the dagger was sheathed, made tactful at last by a dignity even his striking contempt could not shake. ‘Very well. At least we know it wasn't the quarrel with your father that sent you off slumming with the guard into Riverton.'

‘I stand here alive,' Sulfin Evend replied, ‘because I pursued the Master of Shadow through a grimward, and the Name of the Light and Lysaer s'Ilessid spared me from the horror which killed every man of my company.' His final pronouncement came chill as black ice. ‘Every accusation of shadows and fell sorcery the prince charged of the enemy is true. These I have witnessed. The rest you must judge for yourself. Tell my father I have sworn life service to s'Ilessid. I won't be returning to Hanshire.'

Beneath, on the benches, the oarsmen streamed sweat, driving heart and sinew to surpass the limitations of human endurance. Avenor's flag galley cleaved the wavecrests, sheeting spray, while astern, her sister vessels trailed in their frustrated effort to keep pace.

Shown such living proof of the prince's inspired leadership, Raiett chose the grace of retreat. ‘If you won't come back, at least lend your family the continued benefit of your judgment. You've
always had a fine touch for state intrigue. Don't waste that gift in stubborn silence.'

‘You always make the loose stones roll your way.' Sulfin Evend drew breath, the hooked curve of his brows knit through a moment of revealing, self-searching thought. ‘Very well. I see a prince with a vision beleaguered by our political ploys and mean bickering. He fears for us all. His mission to defend humanity's cause is made vulnerable through our petty differences. Since you ask, yes. I believe his Grace saw the flawed ships' plans at Riverton for what they were.'

‘Damn you, give us particulars,' Raiett snapped.

Again goaded to challenge, Sulfin Evend gripped the rail until his sword-hardened strength scored nail-bitten crescents in the varnish. ‘All right. I can speculate. His Grace didn't expose Cattrick, because Mearn very likely noticed the selfsame discrepancies in the drawings. Add on the persistent frustration, that the wild clans won't be suborned from the Shadow Master's influence. Since they die for their causes, Lysaer sought to intimidate them. But his effort to break their heart by enslavement has backlashed, and the Fellowship's intervention with Caithwood's trees surprised and outflanked him. Repercussions from that have mangled his sea trade, an ill turn,
unless
Tysan's prince seeks a grand cause to unify. Then he might let such a friction raise a force of ill will to eradicate the old bloodlines. Bleed the towns into fighting, he'll gain troops and funds. For that, I would say he has gambled his ships. Today, perhaps he has won.'

For if Mearn s'Brydion had been left the temptation to collaborate in treason with Cattrick, and Duke Bransian had dispatched his state galley in support, then a just retaliation must follow. A campaign in the east to lay siege at Alestron could be used to marry Lysaer's support in Tysan with those towns in Melhalla which had not yet suffered a hardship to align them with Alliance interests.

‘He needs a clan war to build on, I thought so!' Raiett slapped his knuckled fist into his palm, the unformed suspicions of recent years distilled to a crystalline certainty.

‘Aren't we a trifle premature?' said a voice. ‘Mearn's guilt isn't proved, but still only hearsay.' While Sulfin Evend faced seaward, flushed and hot with embarrassment, Raiett lifted his head. He turned just in time to see Lysaer s'Ilessid step up from the oar benches onto the raised deck by the rail.

His Grace seemed unoffended, the ingrained reflex of royal bearing unfazed by gossip or criticism. The blue eyes were wide-lashed, clear as the spring sky that brightened like new satin over the misted horizon. ‘To convict Mearn s'Brydion of treason, or establish his innocence, he must first be found. Then he must be taken into safe custody to stand trial.' To Raiett, poised as a leaned sword against sea swells that came and went through the late-breaking fogbanks, Lysaer posed the conversational question with the same forthright edge. ‘If I could ask an opinion in exchange for the ones volunteered by my Lord Commander, do you think your mayor's fleet lies under the command of reasonable men?'

Raiett shrugged. His dark mantle snapped to a sudden gust. ‘What's reasonable?' He elaborated, soft as the first testing tap of a sword point. ‘If our slave-driven galleys stay disbarred from King Eldir's ports, and none of your promised sailing vessels survive this disaster to replace them, more than your merchants in Tysan will see ruin. Mearn's head on a pike would salve pride, if naught else.' Sarcasm thinned into velvet-clothed challenge, Hanshire's First Counselor finished. ‘If you preferred his skin living, I wonder why you didn't trouble to remand him into secure custody sooner?'

‘For trust of his older brother, who gave me true service at Vastmark.' Lysaer settled between the two men, eyes lucent as cut aquamarine, while the oars clove dark waters, ripping up rooster tails of spray. ‘Do you think my flag vessel can overtake Hanshire's war fleet?'

‘I cannot speak for Hanshire,' Raiett said, his appraisal revised since the wharf. The stark edge of his profile showed hollows like scarped granite in the breaking ale fall of sunlight.

‘Then speak for humanity and justice instead.' Lysaer stripped away pretense. ‘Even conspirators deserve a fair hearing. If we fail to catch up with your mayor's galleys before Alestron's state vessel is boarded, do you think there will be an accused man left alive to receive the grace of a public trial?'

‘No.' Raiett laughed. ‘Not a prayer. And you can't overtake, though you burst the hearts of your best string of oarsmen by trying.'

The prince must have known the assessment of Hanshire's counselor was accurate, for as sun razed through the last layers of mist, the wind would stir brisk from the west. Any galley southbound would roll on her keel, to the detriment of her
oarstroke. ‘You'd have to summon a gale from behind in order to sight their masthead banners by sundown.'

Lysaer s'Ilessid measured the oarsmen, streaming sweat in the extremity of effort. ‘I thought so, too.' He straightened, the riffling breeze entangling gold hair with the ruff of his ermine collar. ‘Then we'll just have to serve your mayor an unmistakable message to wait for due process and the administration of my royal justice.' He raised his locked hands, faced toward the galley's bow, then straightened his arms over his head.

Sulfin Evend knew enough to mask his face.

Raiett Raven caught the searing, fireball blast full in the eyes, as the power exploded from Prince Lysaer's shut fists. The light bolt sheared a terrible, spitting line of fire across the pale arc of the heavens and vanished away to the south. Its aftermath left a slamming, rumbling crash of concussed air that slapped the galley like a toy, then eddied away into thunder.

‘Let that be the portent to inform of my coming,' Lysaer pronounced through the creak of stressed lines and the sullen flap of furled canvas. He left the open deck to the stupefied stare of Hanshire's First Counselor, whose widespread fame had been built and made on his reputation for unflappable decorum.

Spring 5654

At Avenor, aching inside and out as she sits before her mirror in the empty opulence of the royal suite, Princess Ellaine regards the hollow-eyed image of herself, then shouts for her maid, the beaten defeat of her pride snapped to rage; spurned once as chattel, she will not stand down before Lysaer's callous handling without giving the spirited protest of a fight …

Leagues southward, at Innish, Fiark pores over charts and sorts lists of lading, fingers thrust through his spun gold hair; and the letters he writes in the secrecy of late-night candlelight arrange, like a delicate web, the supply routes of the provisions that will keep Prince Arithon's small fleet safely at sea, beyond reach of Lysaer s'Ilessid and the curse of Desh-thiere's machinations …

In a closed, curtained chamber scented by a birch fire, Lirenda of the Koriathain clasps shaking hands around the returned chain of her quartz focus; the first scrying she effects on the lost keys of restored power frames a sleeping herder boy in Araethura, whose round, child's face has begun to firm with the first hint of angularity set in train by her spells of transformation …

T
he spellbinder's call reached Althain Tower just past nightfall on the same day that Lysaer's light beacon flared down the Korias coast. At that hour, Sethvir sat tucked in his breakfast nook mourning the demise of his favorite buskins. After countless years' service, the soles were too thin to last through another season. The fur had rubbed off. Only odd tufts remained, clinging between shiny patches of leather so worn, it dissolved into cobweb under the efforts of needle and thread. The prime black wolf hide had been the gift of a Camris trapper who now lay five decades dead. Sethvir sighed, while the spring drafts teased his bare toes and ankles, and the earth link channeled the events of the world through the limitless vaults of his mind.

Then one fragment snagged.

… a thousand leagues east in the Cildein Ocean, a chip of stone taken
from the
Khetienn'
s ballast sank through clean brine, trailing the sultry
heat infused by flame, and a distress cipher scribed in fresh blood
…

Althain's Warden picked a wisp of shed fur from his beard. He blinked misted eyes. Disgruntled as a roused owl, he narrowed the thundering span of his vision and touched the source of the conflict knotted into the stone's ritual sinking.

Its signature Name speared a chill clear through him.

Through the torchlit beat of a galley's sped oars in the night spread
over Tysan; between the padded steps of a forest cat hunting the wilds
of Deshir; across the knifing flight of a bat over Lithmere
, the Warden of Althain retrieved the steel needle which had failed to revive his aged footwear. The sharpened tip served him in place of the chalk left upstairs with his books in the library. He shoved his cold tea mug aside, rammed buskins and spooled thread out of the way to clear open space on the tabletop. An ink flask tipped over. Oddments of paper scribbled with notes flew airborne and scattered about his bare feet.

Sethvir paid no heed. He scribed a swift circle in the wood of the trestle, then summoned to invoke the powers of the elements. Air and water responded to urgency and need. A line of fine energies shimmered through his demarked geometry and bridged him a merciless focus.

‘Dakar?'

The pull of that call sent vibrations coursing outward through the drawn span of the circle. An image bloomed over the wood like spilled oil, then transformed into cohesive contact. The Sorcerer gazed through that window across distance and beheld the tight confines of the
Khetienn
's stern cabin.

There, the Mad Prophet hunched in despair on a berth. His moon face was pressed between his cramped fingers, and his screwed-up hair dripping sweat.

‘Damn those blighted, warmongering weasels to the ugliest pit of oblivion!' Through muffling fingers, Dakar's next imprecations changed target. ‘And may Dharkaron's Black Horses piss on the obtuse doings of mages! You demented, miserable dreamer! Get your dighty nit-picking nose out of your books and lend me some help when I need it!'

‘I'm already here,' Althain's Warden announced with acerbic clarity.

‘Sethvir?' Dakar straightened, flushed with disbelieving, wild hope. ‘Thank Ath! Have you seen the disaster Parrien and Mearn s'Brydion have stirred up with Cattrick at Avenor?'

‘Nit-picking?' Sharpened to a forbidding attentiveness, Sethvir added, ‘
Dighty?
'

He did not withdraw, though his tart remonstrances raised no sign of embarrassed contrition.

Miserably pale above his rucked doublet, the reprobate prophet displayed every sign of being sunk in a wasting indulgence.
Sickness imprinted the dough folds of his skin. His laces were snarled, as if he had been too befuddled to locate the business end of his points. Yet the earth-linked awareness of the Fellowship Sorcerer saw beyond surface dissipation: the damp fingers trembling in the flare of the oil lamp could not have lifted a wine jug.

‘Please, will you help?' Dakar whispered.

Sethvir touched his fingertips to the edge of the circle. He probed past the burn of Dakar's nausea and affirmed that its cause was not excess drinking or seasickness. Unthinking as reflex, the Warden's tuned powers singled out the thread of happenstance that had wakened the Mad Prophet's wild talent for prescience. ‘You foresaw the citadel at Alestron under siege by Alliance forces.'

‘In a dream, yes.' Dakar flopped backward in prostrate relief. ‘You must see the scope of my problem.'

Sethvir tracked the converging angles in one vaulting chain of swift thought:
that the two retainers Parrien s'Brydion had left aboard
the
Khetienn
to guard Arithon were the duke's sworn men. Their old
tie of loyalty might supplant their
charge's
safety if their
lord's
domain
became threatened; and should the Master of Shadow return headlong
to the continent to intercede in Alestron's behalf, nothing could stop
an encounter with Prince Lysaer and the wrath of his southbound war
fleet. The insidious grip of the Mistwraith's curse worsened with each
successive encounter
.

‘Dharkaron's Black Spear!' Dakar exclaimed. ‘How can you stay calm? The half brothers can't meet, or Arithon will shatter.' At Riverton, even the proximity of a Koriani fetch endowed with Lysaer's auric energy had hurled the Master of Shadow beyond sanity. ‘An armed conflict now would destroy your last hope to reunite the Fellowship and keep the s'Ffalenn bloodline alive.'

Sethvir looked away. All of time seemed to hang in the balance while his awareness expanded to plumb the night sky through the arrow slit over his head. ‘We cannot intervene, Dakar.' As though something inscribed in the distant stars moved him to nameless sorrow, he added, ‘You know this.'

Yet stakes on Athera were no longer malleable. Two accursed princes held the world's fate between them. The risk unleashed by a live confrontation would fling wide the gates to disaster.

‘Don't even dare to
suggest
I break his leg.' Dakar winced as the force of his vehemence lanced stabbing pain through his temples.
‘And anyway, Parrien's crude tactic just let Rathain's prince learn the notes to fuse shattered bone.'

Sethvir said, mild, ‘Arithon knew those already.'

‘From Elaira, at Merior, I remember.' Dakar hugged himself through a wretched shiver. ‘
You
didn't have to listen through his hours of practice until he recaptured the tonalities.'

Sethvir set a knuckle to his lips in forbearance. In cold fact, he had; the earth link was unremitting, its depth of detail as intricate as the patterns inside a revolving kaleidoscope. The melodies wrought by Arithon in convalescence had made more than the new retainers from Alestron blot streaming tears in broad daylight.

The Mad Prophet ground his fists against his closed lids, but the memory remained, embedded like nails through the brain. ‘That music could strip a man, spirit from flesh, then remake him in ribbons of light. To hear, you could never believe any suffering could lie past the reach of such mending.' He broke off and sighed for the sorrowful fact that Desh-thiere had worked the exception. ‘Your Masterbard was walking without splints in two weeks, yet the hurt in his heart was no less.'

‘I know.' At whim, Sethvir could affirm the devastating grief inflicted by Caolle's death. Nor had he missed the scarring sorrows left since Vastmark that still destroyed Arithon's sleep. The accusation told hardest of all, that the Teir's'Ffalenn's peace had been sacrificed for the blood vow sworn at Fellowship behest on the sands at Athir nine years ago.

For Dakar's discomfort, Sethvir scribed a healing glyph into the link that established the span of his circle. ‘Granting Rathain's prince permission to die is not an acceptable compromise.'

The gifted relief of his suffering did nothing for Dakar's strangling concern. ‘One day your Master of Shadow will go mad, and nothing in anyone's living power will be able to call him back.' The threat carried weight: against the thick gloom, a pale streak at each temple, the hair grown in gray since the hour when Dakar had drawn on his own life force. His sacrifice then had been all that contained Arithon's fit of insanity brought on during crisis at Riverton.

Sethvir caught the unused thread on his needle and wound it in hoops on his thumb. ‘Go to sleep,' he advised, his turn into vagueness a whim that defied understanding. ‘The s'Brydion have always been first-rate strategists. They would scarcely start a war for the sake of an escapade to foul the Riverton shipworks.'

Dakar shoved erect in fish-eyed suspicion. ‘That's much too evasive, in particular since Cattrick has already betrayed Arithon's interests before this.'

‘No faith without proof?' Sethvir's tufted brows rose. ‘Very well.' He slipped the thread off his knuckle and stretched it two-handed, faintly singing and taut on the air. ‘Pay close attention. You aren't going to see what you expect.' A deft flick set a slipknot into the end. ‘Fetch the lamp, or a candle. Any small flame should serve.'

A flurry of trepidation arose from the circle of spelled wood framing the connection across land and the vaster leg over water. Then a mundane yelp as the brigantine broached a swell and fetched Dakar into a bulkhead. ‘Pox on all sailing!' He rummaged a candle and pricket from the locker beneath the
Khetienn
's chart desk, then peered uneasily over his shoulder. ‘Will this scrying stay private?'

Sethvir set another knot into the thread. His eyes were blank sky, at odds with the sly smile which stirred the untrimmed cascade of his beard. ‘Arithon won't see. But Ath Creator himself couldn't stop him from hearing the spell's resonance if he has inclination.'

Dakar paused in dismay, the striker left dangling, while the wick flared and glazed his bunched frown and the pale moon curve of one cheek. ‘You do have your way of letting me know when I've pried outside of wise limits.'

Althain's Warden said nothing. His seamed, pixie features held strict concentration, while the strand in his fingers came alive. Whipped by unseen spells, it turned in contortion and formed an animate chain of fine ciphers. To these, Sethvir fastened the tail of a thought.

Power surged through the construct. Spell-wrought twine glowed silver and threw off smoking trails of blue light. ‘Now hold the flame steady.'

Aboard the
Khetienn
, clammy and chilled by uncanny trepidation, Dakar sensed someone's footsteps emerge from the quarterdeck companionway. As a second presence took station at his shoulder, he had no time to acknowledge that Arithon s'Ffalenn stood motionless in the shadow behind him.

For the Warden of Althain stabbed his steel needle into the circle, straight into the heart of the candleflame. That contact joined an arc across time and space. Earth-linked Sight and elemental heat achieved flash point union, and the scrying that
Dakar had begged for intercession flooded in and became manifest inside the brigantine's stern cabin …

Five Alliance vessels in command of Lysaer overtook the mayor's war fleet dispatched from Hanshire in the dwindling light after sundown. By full dark, Lysaer's rotund ship's master was immersed in the delicate maneuver of merging the two disparate fleets. Orders were shouted through bullhorns, and the blink of signal lamps rocked over heaving waters when, bearing northward, the inbound s'Brydion raked into the muddle at attack speed. The boom of the drum which timed their crack oarsmen barreled through the breach, dire as the oncoming storm that opened the gates to stark chaos.

Those captains who executed the command to join forces screamed orders for their oarsmen to hold stroke. Steersmen leaned hard on oak whipstaffs and veered. Lysaer's royal galleys and the vessels from Hanshire scattered like schooling fish set to flight by the splash of a boulder. Oarblades entangled. Rowers and captains vented rank tempers, and transformed a calm night off the coastal cliffs to a bedlam of clashed discipline and oaths.

Amid the confusion, one man's enthusiasm overrode the clamor of bellowing irritation and splashed looms. ‘Almighty Ath! Did Prince Lysaer engage every seagoing ship inside hailing distance of Avenor? Who in Sithaer has he launched off to fight? Naught's left to be saved. His shipyard at Riverton's already burned. The ashes are cooled for three days.'

‘Who speaks?' Lysaer's fleet commander yelled back. He gestured for his officers to withhold hard action, stalling for time as a tactic to allow the other galleys to surround the brash new arrival and close in. ‘You're fresh out of port? We're anxious for news from the estuary.'

The voice claimed identity as Parrien s'Brydion, then added, intrigued, ‘What, were your scheduled post riders waylaid on the road?'