Fugitive Prince (36 page)

S
ince Arithon made his covert request for an inquiry into the fate of Princess Talith, Mearn s’Brydion grew back his lovelock. A thorough and leisurely round of seductions of ladies-in-waiting and chambermaids would yield him sure word whether Lysaer’s public declaration of retirement covered a madwoman’s seclusion, or incarceration of an unwilling prisoner. When pillow talk bought Mearn no more than the court knew, and uproarious drinking with the palace garrison drew owlish blank looks and speculation, his prowling search slipped past locked doors. By night, he perused the private ledgers kept by Avenor’s tight-faced Minister of the Treasury.

Even there, outright facts stayed elusive. One odd, recurrent entry for high-council security allotted gold to six guardsmen without recorded names. Another, in Lord Eilish’s fussy capitals, awarded a stipend for the princess’s retreat that was suspiciously meager to support a full staff and the comforts for a cosseted royal wife.

Mearn’s lips quirked in jaundiced thought where he crouched, lightly clad in bitter air, his chosen vantage now the wind-raked slates atop the ornate, spired roof of the council hall.

Yesterday’s snowfall had cleared off to a brilliance of winter constellations. Beneath, emptied streets traced a gleam of tarnished silver, frozen to ruts sliced by cart wheels. The respectable taverns had closed for the night, their banked kitchen fires trailing thin smoke
from the chimneys. The upper-story window frames lay paned in dimmed glass, pocked by the odd candleflame where a restless eccentric clung to sleepless activity. Mearn’s furtive presence passed unseen. Left a cold trail by the happier pursuits of loose-living females and beer, he snugged coiled rope across his trim shoulders, then chalked resin on the soles of his thinnest kid slippers.

By the dark of the moon, he set out to test the one lead pried loose by dint of his maternal grandmother’s advice.

‘Townborn will always dissemble and cheat,’
he recalled her admonishing through a youthful attempt to talk his way through a scrape.
‘That’s what nature breeds out of landowning avarice.’
White haired, diminutive, as flawlessly neat as a porcelain lily, she peered up at him, her chuckle all vinegar delight as she jabbed home her point with the blackthorn stick she brandished in old age like a weapon.
‘Ath above, boy! You keep all your brains in your cock? To know a statesman’s true heart, you must first track his wealth. Only his gold never lies.’

By coin’s sterling testament, the keep which fronted Avenor’s state palace held the realm’s most fugitive secret. At least, Mearn had learned after tailing the self-important senior clerk who paid wages, the anonymous six guardsmen played watchdog to the locked and barred tower attached to the building’s south wing. The structure was hexagonal, built of the fired fawn brick used to expedite the restoration of Tysan’s capital. From Mearn’s stance by the pillars which braced a dome vaulting, the keep’s north facade cut a ruled silhouette through the smoke silver stipple of stars. No pennon flew from its blunt, leaded roof. The banded masonry beneath the upper battlement held no carved follies or gargoyles. Only the simple sunwheel emblem graced the dressed-granite lintels of the entry below, a cavernous portal of strapped oaken doors, studded in steel and square bosses. This, Mearn discovered, stayed barred to all but a handpicked cadre of the realm’s highest officers.

Avenor’s new fashion of zealous idealism made bribes too chancy to contemplate. Hands tucked in the crook of his elbows for warmth, Mearn suppressed a dry snort. Never mind his recent, scapegrace reputation, earned in the boudoirs and wineshops; as the ducal ambassador for his clanborn brother, Lysaer’s officials clung to their prejudice against his credibility.

Townborn rancor ran deep as the root of the Fellowship’s compact. A man who preferred his grudges blood fresh, Mearn doused pricked temper to taciturn silence time and again, while the courtiers spun to their hatreds like weathercocks. He observed, his knife hand locked into stillness, when tempers flared up during councils of state.
Always some merchant who lost goods to Maenol’s forest raiders would yammer the old accusations. Then every pigheaded guild minister in sight would ignore five centuries of history: s’Brydion of Alestron had
never
preyed upon caravans. Mearn met each outburst and pigeon-brained insult with cynical, ingrained suspicion. Since even his most innocently posed inquiries were likely to worsen his questionable clan standing, he chose to sidestep the quagmires of intrigue. The bare-handed adventure of scaling the tower held much more to his taste.

A gust hissed over the cornices and snapped the royal pennons on their lanyards. No comfort-loving sentry would stand his watch exposed to such lacerating cold. Mearn snatched his chance to cross the roof peak unseen. By touch, he avoided the patches of glaze ice; his soft soles made no sound against slates raked bare by the elements. Below him, the snow-covered gables of Avenor wore the night like a mantle spun from frost opal and woodsmoke.

To the west, his view commanded the black sweep of the sea, flecked by carnelian watchbeacons. Eastward, over the square walls and past the crowned turrets of the gatekeeps, a ragged mound tore a scar in the flank of the hill. There the Paravian stones cast down by Lysaer’s builders lay jumbled as lichened bones, silted in rubble where the crumbled Second Age towers had been razed off the foundations to make way for his grander design. The dells the ancient ruin once defended fanned inland, pocketed in winter-silent drifts. Forest had encroached on the older boundary where mankind’s tilled acreage ended, and the inviolate expanse of Paravian provenance once began. Horned centaur guardians no longer trod under the massive oaks crowning the hillcrests. No sunchildren danced in the vales, with their tangling skeins of shallow streams. The glens where Tysan’s dead high kings had met to hold council with Athera’s lost races lay grown over with holly and briar, forgotten except by the deer and the hare, the mice and the night-hunting owl.

Clansmen might stubbornly adhere to past ways, but inside town walls, the land’s former heritage was scorned. A carriage clattered over the cobbles, bearing some late-going gallant to the sea-quarter wineshops where friends met to vent youthful spirits. A cur yapped, down by the exciseman’s sheds. The commotion set off an answering chorus from the stables next to the barracks, where Lysaer’s coursers were kenneled alongside the lean hounds bred by headhunters to worry the fugitive clansmen.

Among them, deep toned, Mearn’s own couple of deerhounds gave tongue. For their heart, he loosed breathless laughter. While his
dearies kept up the commotion and diverted the bored wits of the sentries, he tucked up against the beaded cornice where the tower joined with the roof.

Kiln-fired masonry offered no purchase to climbers, an advantage for defense. To offset its prime weakness, that brick inclined to shatter under stoneshot launched from siege catapults, the vulnerable angles had been laid and faced with blocks of field-hewn granite. Scarcely as inviting as a stairway, Mearn thought as he sighted aloft to weigh his prospects. The mortar at least was unlikely to crumble. No standing structure in Tysan’s restored capital had stood for more than a decade. Though exposed to the elements, the roof line of the council hall masked the first stage of the ascent. The blast of the wind would press him into the wall, and drive the keep’s anonymous, paid guards to huddle on the leeward side.

Since Mearn looked on caution as a mealymouthed word for gutless procrastination, he tightened the laced wrists of his sleeves and stripped off his gloves. Hands hooked to chill stone, he wedged his toe in the crack of the first course of granite and forsook his safe stance on the roof. Either Princess Talith was locked away in seclusion above, or he could send honest word back to Arithon s’Ffalenn that she was nowhere inside of Avenor.

Shouts from the kennels at last quelled the deerhounds. Mearn’s raised vantage over the wall walks chiseled even the small sounds into unnerving clarity. Above the hiss of his breath through locked teeth, he picked out the warbling flute of distressed pigeons, wakened by a thief in the falconer’s dovecote.

Clamped to exposed rock, shivering from an unrelenting exertion that scarcely left room for thought, he could do little else but cling and hope the desperate wretch would wring the birds’ necks with dispatch. Never mind the s’Brydion posture of alliance, now placed in irrefutable jeopardy. Mearn set his jaw and groped another determined handhold, then forced burning thighs to straighten. The breast of his jerkin scraped another foot up sheer granite. For pure, demented folly, he resisted the breathless urge to laugh. His brothers would gripe themselves prostrate should he become caught by some guard rousted up for a servant’s inept pilfering.

If risk of ignominy was not bad enough, an unexpected light flared scarcely ten yards above. Mearn flinched like a cat. Reflex alone saved his balance. A fleeting glance upward showed a gleam of new flame behind a row of slit windows.

Someone had entered the keep’s third-floor chamber.

Mearn gasped out a virulent oath, wishing pustules and pox on
palace officials taken with urges to burn candles in towers past midnight. No afterthought, he added his prayer that the crazed individual disregard any notion to admire the stars or the view. The niches where the sills pierced the wall offered the only secure ledge for him to pause. His predicament was not mutable. Not through an unbroken ascent, with the next set of casements a distance of forty feet higher up. Fatigue already ran searing tremors through his limbs. His own labored breath turned his head. He must snatch that stop to rest, or succumb to exhaustion and fall.

Wind hissed across masonry and thrummed the thick frames of the casements. Mearn shut his eyes against a blurred sting of tears from the cold. On a grimace of effort, he unlatched his numbed fingers from a handhold, fumbled, then hooked the rough edge of the sill.

The light flickered. A thickset body shadowed the glass, and a complaining voice Mearn recognized as Quinold, Lord High Chancellor, drifted to the casement overhead. “Beastly drafts at this season.”

Behind diamond mullions, a scant span apart from the knuckles which suspended the climber from a lethal plunge to the roof slates, Lord Quinold’s pudgy hands seized the tasseled cord to draw the curtains. Brass hoops slid on the rod and a heavy fall of velvet doused the candlelight down to a slit.

Mearn hissed with relief. Shaking and runneled in icy sweat, he shifted his weight, hitched himself up the last, saving foot to the level stone of the window ledge. The knifing winds which had been his ally now sheared through his clothing. His skin had worn through at the fingertips. A forthright inspection revealed flesh underneath gone too numb to feel the abrasion. Mearn’s heart raced with the unpleasant awareness that nothing more than thin rondels of glass and the untrustworthy mask of a curtain guarded his niche from discovery.

Let him be caught inside Lysaer’s guarded precinct, and no tribunal would trifle with charges of treason. Town law was explicit. Execution of clansmen brought public dismemberment without benefit of a hearing, followed by death from a sword blade run through the heart.

Mearn wrapped his forearms around his tucked knees, as much to contain his outright contempt as to foil the ripping north wind. His diplomacy at Avenor could scarcely bend five centuries of ingrained disrespect. The ways of city governance confounded and astonished him, that these twit-brained townborn with their manned walls and libraries, their obsessive filing of ledgers and written record, could so arrogantly disown the founding facts of their heritage.

The fugitive forest clans their conceit named barbarian kept no
inscribed histories. Persecution by headhunters denied them safe haven to live in shelter and comfort, yet they preserved memory of the purpose behind their unmixed bloodlines and ancestry. Mearn’s restless penchant to challenge authority made him rage, that unbridled greed could ever have raised this bloodletting rift between factions.

As if to bear out his cynical view, the Lord High Chancellor stumped past the gap in the curtains, his diction precise as he resumed brassy carping. “Ath, there’s no wine. Some dimwit neglected to restock the cupboard. Damn those breeding pests of barbarians, you know how I hate climbing stairs for these meetings.”

A gravelly voice Mearn did not recognize answered too low to overhear. Pricked to curiosity, well practiced from a boyhood spent eavesdropping on his short-tempered older brothers, he set his ear to the glass.

“…scarcely a matter of clan raiding this time,” the bass speaker finished in stiff censure.

A chair scraped. Lord Chancellor Quinold sat down, his next line filtered through a barrage of squeaks wrung from rush caning and wood. “No wonder you’re thin, Vorrice. You fret like a nesting pack rat. To judge by your maundering, one might mistakenly think the Fellowship Sorcerers were omnipotent. Or are you worried the Paravians might return in their full and fatal glory overnight? Really, we’d all fare better if you could relax your obsession with burning convicted talent. The perils posed by the Shadow Master are far more immediate, since his overt collaboration with Maenol’s clansmen.”

“But the old races aren’t dead,” the one named Vorrice lashed back. His grainy voice stabbed with conviction. “If they were, the accursed taint of practicing magecraft would be banished from the world altogether. Obstructions by meddling sorcerers would be ended, besides. Until that day comes, public cleansings become my bound duty.”

Outside on the sill, a chill gripped Mearn that bit deeper than any assault of mere wind. He had watched Lysaer’s interdict against sorcery seed spurious arrests across Tysan. On the street, not a whisper of rumor had emerged to suggest a fanatic invested with high office to enforce a campaign of persecution.

A knock sounded at the door to the inside chamber. “That must be Tellisec and the other guild ministers,” the Lord High Chancellor surmised, then huffed through the bother of raising his bulk to admit them.