Fugitive Prince (46 page)

Dakar swiveled sideways in dumbstruck shock. “At
sea?
Lysaer s’Ilessid? Ath, he can’t be! Arithon was driven to break his disguise by full onslaught of Desh-thiere’s curse. Only Lysaer’s immediate proximity could provoke such a fit of murdering insanity!”

Mearn shook his head, the thick stubble on his jaw graining the hollow of his cheek. “Spells and trickery.” He suddenly sounded every inch as tired as he looked. “Yon curse was triggered by Koriani intent. I saw the accursed tangle of hair and silk scraps they used to shape Lysaer’s proxy.”

Horror whitened Dakar’s rumpled features, and the cloudless spring sun sparked small, silver glints on the hair roots at his temples, changed from ginger to white overnight. “You’re saying the witches
brought on the whole incident by means of a conjured fetch?”

“Why else would their First Senior be carrying a wee doll made of tied rags and blond hair?” Since the ramifications were too grievous to grapple, that Arithon could be hazed hither and yon by a bundled spell created by a Koriani whim, Mearn traced the flight of a marsh falcon who snapped from its high, lazy spirals to stoop. “His Grace can’t flee to Corith. He’ll find Lysaer waiting with a war fleet well primed to carve his s’Ffalenn liver into stew meat.”

Dakar glowered down the roadway, which unreeled straight ahead, between the capped horns of the oxen. “I won’t ask what you risked to deliver the warning.”

Mearn laughed. “There’s not enough gold in Ath’s whole creation to pay the whores to preserve my randy reputation.”

“What?” The starting ghost of a dimple dented the cheek above Dakar’s rumpled beard. “Past experience should have taught me. The s’Brydion line runs to madmen who are born addicted to danger.”

Mearn’s grin widened, then became the triangular smile his brothers had learned to regard with extreme trepidation. “You never saw me,” he said. “For the past seven days, I’ve been in bed at Avenor jousting the lights out of three willing doxies.”

“I see.” Dakar rolled a walleyed glance of apprehension toward the muddle of lumps in the sacking. “Forgive me when I tell you I wish that had been the plain truth.”

“Oh man,” Mearn agreed, turned sharply restive as the horse which stamped and curvetted underneath him. He glanced over his shoulder, and the Mad Prophet heard too: through the weave of the gusts, the oncoming hooves of yet another patrol sent to scour the roads out of Riverton.

“You should go,” he advised Mearn. To be seen under questioning by a man with Hanshire trappings would draw perilous attention to them both.

“As you suggest.” Mearn’s humor changed to a wicked slice of malice as he gave rein to his head-shaking mount. “I leave you the road, and wish you joy on the moment when yon testy mountebank wakens. Upset his temper, he’s got a tongue can raze scales off the innocent fish.”

The ox wain rolled on into the afternoon, while the blue sky clotted with high-flying clouds, and the sun dimmed and vanished into haze. Dakar ate cheese with the gritty, hard bread provided by the farmwife whose goodman had sold him the wagon. He absorbed himself licking sticky crumbs from his fingers. The lines threaded unattended through the fist on his knee when a sneeze and a shudder beneath the potato sacks reminded of his fugitive passenger.

Dakar tossed off the last crust for the birds and halted the oxen. He considered, then decided against releasing his mild spell cipher.

The next moment, the burlap stirred and parted. An angular face shaded in beard stubble emerged, capped by moldered stems of oat straw stuck through untidy black hair. Eyes of a burning and terrible emerald blinked and regarded the wind-flattened briars in the hedgerow, ragged border to a ladderworked mesh of fallow fields, then absorbed the rutted groove of the roadway. The intelligence behind stayed mercifully baffled and blank.

“Potatoes,” the bard murmured, puzzled. His glance turned to Dakar, inquiring, and his light touch explored a clotted scab on one cheekbone. “No doubt a just punishment for tupping the farmer’s eager daughter, except that I can’t recall the chit’s face.”

A pause; hands that in daylight showed the scuffs and congested
bruises of a ruinous combat received an absorbed inspection. Reassured at last that all his joints flexed, Arithon raked clinging chaff from his collar and lapsed back to a dusty puff of rot from the sacking. “Dakar,” he said, muffled, “the guano is a stroke of pure brilliance, I admit. But may we dispense with the manure and the offal? If I suffer my fair deserts from a hangover, I could manage rather well without the stink.”

Then, from a shattering and sudden break in thought, a ripped intake of breath: Arithon s’Ffalenn came fully and finally awake. His next words reviled in distilled venom. “Should I curse you or thank you for my deliverance? Or better, give you the whip hand to send me straight on to damnation and Dharkaron’s black vengeance?”

His unspoken anguish hung on the pause,
‘For Caolle, there exists no redress.’

Dakar clamped helpless fists to the lines and slapped the worn leather over the backs of the oxen. “You swore oath at Athir,” he reminded through the squealing protest of stressed wood as the wain sucked free of the mud and rolled onward.

“Oh Ath, that I hadn’t, or better that I could have renounced life and breath on the day of my birth.” Arithon sat upright, his face pressed behind his opened, marked hands and his shoulders braced against trembling.

“Your survival had to come first,” Dakar insisted, unmanned himself, and too much the coward to watch. Nor could he quite mask the flick of an honest revulsion as he made tactless effort to ease an impossible grief. “All hope isn’t lost. Arithon, your stroke didn’t kill him, not at once, I swear this. Caolle still breathed when I left him.”

“Ath, no!” the Shadow Master cried, shot straight and sawn through by redoubled remorse. “He is clanborn, and hurt, and what have I done but left him helpless among enemies?
His own people would have served him a mercy stroke!”

The cry drowned echoless in the winds of the flats. While a wedge of flying geese sliced the gray sky, and the oxen nosed brainlessly forward, Dakar found nothing to say. Nor could he ease the unbearable distress of the prince who refused even tears in his locked and horrified silence.

Fragile as a silk moth’s spun filament, the blood oath alone stayed the force and fury of Arithon’s natural reaction. Moment to moment, while the warm life in his veins seemed a cruel violation, and the beat of his heart framed insult to his integrity, he sat in bound quiet. Eyes wide, hands slack, he dared not even flinch to be served the unconditional gift of the land’s beauty. Not now, Dakar sensed with a wounding,
sure pity: not when all sound and all movement revolted the nerves, and a mind lay torn and trapped in the grasp of transfixing grief.

The sough of the breeze in the budding briars, and the mournful cries of the hawk and the marsh wren filled all the world with oblivious industry, while the wain rolled and bore the Master of Shadow into the cheerless dusk.

They made camp in a hollow with a stream, under the leafed-out crowns of a willow grove. The trees were ancient. Their dry-rotted trunks offered nest hollows for owls, whose plangent hoots and gliding, swift flight made the oxen whuff and back against their tethers. Low clouds shed a steady, fine drizzle that sluiced a varnishing glaze of damp over man and beast, and made the fireless night a bitter misery.

Dakar served out the last of the farmwife’s provisions, a heel of rye bread and strips of jerked beef cured hard as glass through the length of winter’s storage. The spellbinder chewed without appetite. In oathbound responsibility, he noted Arithon’s attempt to do the same.

But exhaustion and stress exacted their toll. Two unobtrusive trips into the brush came and went before the Mad Prophet noticed anything amiss. Every scrap of sustenance the Shadow Master dutifully forced down was rejected with wretched persistence.

Dakar could have wept and sworn both at once for the cost of the blood bond imposed by the Fellowship at Athir. Since straight pain was suddenly preferable to the ongoing cruelty of silence, he scrounged out the flask of sour wine he had hoarded and shoved it toward Arithon’s chilled hands.

“Drink. You need it. And talk, for Ath’s sake. If you can make such a dogged effort to eat despite the fact you’re too sickened, you can try just as hard to make plans.”

Arithon looked at him. Wrists hugging one on another about his drawn-up knees, and his fingers like clamped bone under the soggy, grimed cuffs of his sleeves, he said nothing. Neither did he accept the offered solace of the wine.

“Well, you can’t risk sailing to Corith!” Dakar exploded. “You know if you try to face Lysaer again, you’ll become slave to Desh-thiere’s curse.”

The ruinous fact could not be evaded. The awful limit
must
be faced. Intent had not served; free permissions had proved woefully inadequate; the working of the geas strengthened with each contact. Dakar gnawed a torn thumbnail, demoralized and mute. As well as
he, the Shadow Master knew:
if not for the saving intervention of the sword, he would have lost his mind into irreversible insanity at Riverton.

Dakar dragged in a breath that felt heavy as liquid glass. “You don’t know the worst yet. Koriathain are involved.” Pained for the necessity which made him twist the knife, he repeated what Mearn s’Brydion had seen, the terrible proof that the flight out of town had been launched by means of a golem wrought of spells. “To assist Lysaer’s cause, they deliberately triggered the bane of the Mistwraith’s geas.”

That unbearable news carried vicious implication,
that Lysaer s’llessid had been leagues at sea, and no threat.
Plans for the launching and abduction of three ships were upset for naught. Lastingly worse, Caolle had fought and fallen to Arithon’s sword for no true threat at all, but only manipulative illusion.

In comfortless grief, set isolate by the needling fall of fine rain, Dakar could not bear to strike light and measure the scope of Arithon’s anguish. He feared worst of all to broach what no empty offer of solace might disguise, that every associate and accomplice brought in for the launching remained still in Riverton, unwarned and defenseless against whatever machinations the Koriani First Senior might devise.

Dakar chewed his lip in agonized suspension. He waited through a pause grown dense as lead crystal, while soft rain wet his cheeks and trickled from the untidy bristle of his beard. No night birds called. Just the whispered tap of droplets, and subliminal rustles as willow fronds bowed to their burden of damp. The weather promised no surcease; clouds would sheet in from the north until dawn. Nor did a mere spellbinder know of a palliative to ease wounded pride, or shore up the wreckage of a man’s priceless care and integrity.

Human balm did not exist to relieve an inhuman quandary. No friend could mask the impact of inborn s’Ahelas farsight, that would turn the birth gift of a ruthless insight ahead to map the course of a poisoned future. Helplessness remained, of a dimension to grind thought down into despair for a balance inevitably foredoomed.

A masterbard whose compassionate heart had been torn out thrice over in the cause of meaningless destruction could not have limitless strength.

The rain and the dark embraced Arithon’s stilled form. The wine flask lay untouched by his feet, while the drizzle pattered and seeped and leaded the tender shoots of new greenery.

Against every interfering impulse, despite the oblivious, brash decadence that prompted his fleshly excesses, Dakar kept his palms
jammed over his lips. He would not speak. Even through the tormenting, perilous awareness that the blood oath sworn to the Fellowship Sorcerers allowed but one terrible course.

If Arithon kept faith and held his gift of Shadow in reserve against the greater threat of the Mistwraith, he would be forced to spare his own life through the ruin of uncounted others. No reason could ease that abnegation of free will. The wait seemed to span the are of oblivion, while time wound into a brutal, shared tension to shred the most steadfast patience.

“I dare not attempt to save the men or the outpost at Corith,” Arithon announced at drawn length. With Koriani led into conspiracy with Lysaer, he saw well enough. No place remained inside the five kingdoms where he could depend on safe refuge. “Nor can I recover the launched ships for the clans. No course is left but to recover
Talliarthe
and sail south and east to regroup.”

Dakar set his chin in his hands. He could make no answer, overwhelmed as he was by the sweet rush of astonishment and gratitude. Nor could he repress his outright awe for the character of Rathain’s prince. He knew no one else capable, no spirit with the outright, mulish fight to reach past such branding ignominy and guilt,
and for nothing
if not another compounding act of self-betrayal. The torment of Caolle’s tragedy did not end here, but extended to embrace losses unbearably larger.

As if no friend wept for the grievous depth of character that carved up such tenacious resilience, Arithon laid out his decision with the icy dispassion a surgeon must find, when forced to amputation with no time to spare for anesthesia. “There’s a fishing village south of Torwent in Havish remote enough to lend short-term sanctuary. From there, I’ll send word to Fiark at Innish. He can release the
Khetienn
from her current merchant charter. The
Evenstar’s
not to be compromised, for Feylind’s sake. Her runs can enable safe drop points for stores to extend our blue-water passages.”

His admission came in agonized quiet, that no shred of his hopes could be salvaged. That because of his presence, Lysaer’s deadly, trained force from Etarra was drawn into Tysan, where clansmen fought now for survival. The men, the ships, the months of meticulous and dangerous work to redeem threatened bloodlines: all designs fallen short on the brink of completion, then abandoned in one cruel stroke.

The last line in summary, dredged up in pain for a world future bought at a damning price in shed blood. “We must sail offshore, alone, and quarter the seas until the Paravians are found.”