Fugitive Prince (59 page)

A minute trickled by, elusive as the fall of sand grains sieved through an hourglass. Then Sethvir blinked, stirred, and linked
crooked knuckles through the rumpled fall of his cuffs. He flashed a conspirator’s wink to the page and rescued the canted mug himself. “A trip to the kitchen would not be amiss. Could you bring back a fresh pot of tea?”

His pert smile saw the boy off on his errand, yet the glance he bestowed back on King Eldir stayed as lapsed into distance as a fog-bank. “Merciful maker,” he grumbled. “If I’m overtaxed by any one thing, it’s intransigent princes who run amok without the saving bad grace of planting even one bastard on a tavern wench. When you marry next week, grant our Fellowship a boon. Breed up a clutch of royal heirs.”

A cough as rich as aged oak escaped Eldir’s sturdy palm. “Dare I guess?” Only one other childless scion in Athera was the last of his family line. “Is Arithon being difficult again?”

Sethvir raised miffed eyebrows. “That sort of indulgence would be blessed relief where the Teir’s’Ffalenn is concerned, well you know as much.”

King Eldir curled his knuckles against his lips to nip his impolitic laughter. One disruptive visit to his court had been enough; Rathain’s prince had countered Tysan’s public campaign of eradication through a volatile mix of unlawful conniving and a devilish bent for playing unconscionable stakes. No matter that Havish stayed neutral through the feud sown by Desh-thiere’s curse. All spring, the dockside at Ostermere had seethed with bold talk concerning the rigged ships disappeared from their Riverton launchings. If rumor held truth, the marauding crews included disaffected clansmen from Tysan.

Since no mind might fathom the full scope of Arithon’s design, the King of Havish asked outright, “What’s Rathain’s prince done this time?”

Sethvir blinked. “Raised a hue and cry that has every crown-commissioned guard in south Korias lathering good horses to kill him.” He scowled into space, while the reflexive span of his consciousness mapped the speed and direction of more than one far-distant set of hoofbeats. Then his branching thoughts riffled like cards through a player’s deck, testing the probable offshoots of consequence.

Amid myriad moments of unformed possibility, one stood forth, a diamond-clear crossroads of movement and intent pared to the fixed edge of destiny:
in three days’ time, guardsmen under a Hanshire captain named Sulfin Evend would close upon the three fugitives. The spells of illusion and misdirection the Mad Prophet spun to evade them would fail, because in the past, their commander had studied with the boy wards of the Koriathain. He understood very clearly how spellcraft could upset the hierar
chy of political power. The grown man had sworn his sword to the Alliance to confront the source of that fear.

The King of Havish said something.

Althain’s Warden replied, his mind still enmeshed with the whirlwind array of unborn happenstance:
when Dakar the Mad Prophet would come to scribe a distress rune in blood upon the surface of a stone. Under the light of a chilly, gray dawn, he would dry the figure in flame, then cast the construct into a streamlet. At the hour his appeal for help reached the Fellowship, time would be too short to act.

Sethvir shifted the are of his thoughts. A fraction of an instant let him catalog what resource he might call to hand. Though his powers as a Fellowship Sorcerer were overwhelmingly sufficient to effect complete rescue then and there, he would not,
must
not, do other than allow the threatened parties to act to save themselves. The reprieve he had won from a past outside of Athera’s historical record still haunted; still seared his waking awareness. A stock of experience too bitter to endure had stamped its mark of immutable truth.

By the Law of the Major Balance, his Fellowship could not use direct force to intervene without unseating the course of the world’s destiny.

The audience with King Eldir suffered a small lapse as the grievous pain of past losses weighed on the Sorcerer’s heart. He was not complacent. Once, before drake-dream had snatched the Fellowship of Seven to Athera, he and his colleagues had enacted their will for a cause. They had paid for their meddling with appalling consequences. He could not but ache before the chill wisdom that for Desh-thiere’s curse, his Fellowship must resist the temptation to relive the same choices again.

By the compact’s clear terms, their powers were sworn to preserve the Paravian mysteries; mankind might accept steering counsel and assistance on request, but the ultimate course of humanity’s survival must be shaped through self-will and free choice.

“Your tea has arrived,” King Eldir prompted.

Sethvir looked up, found a smile for the page, then exhumed his mug from the folds of his robe and set it upright on the table. Worn as he was, and tested by conscience, his gnarled grip held no palsy. Through the interval while a royal servant refreshed his cup, the Sorcerer unreeled his considered response in the form of three direct appeals.

A call arrowed out to touch Asandir, just ridden the breadth of Tysan to test the new patterns of prejudice fanned by Lysaer’s campaign to repress mage talent.

A second tracer flagged down Kharadmon, on watch amid the grand ward against a cold backdrop of stars; and tied in a request to the brewing spring storm in Athera’s arctic latitudes.

A third touch raised the awareness of a patriarch tree, wind beaten and twice seared by lightning, and exchanged a pact of permission.

One last vectored inquiry mapped cause and effect, and gauged their impact on the future. Sethvir foresaw no trend of enlightened understanding arise out of Arithon’s brash rescue of Felirin. The summer would bring on more trials, more burnings, more sunwheel recruits led to enlist by unsettled fears and strained politics. The spiraling trend of Prince Lysaer’s maligned belief would gain heated impetus, fresh spark to the trend which drew men to embrace the cause of the Alliance of Light.

Misunderstanding of a sword’s gifted powers served only to ignite a new wave of fear. The price of Fellowship assistance as always touched off wider ramifications.

Sethvir sought prosaic comfort from his mug of scalding tea. When he raised his tormented gaze to Eldir, he offered his sorrowful forecast, “Very soon you will be pressured to take sides on the issue of practicing sorcery. The mage talented will come seeking refuge within your borders before the advent of summer solstice.”

“There’s no decision to be made,” Eldir said, his strong hands reaching to gather up the spelled parchment. “Tysan’s burnings are unjust. The condemned are not criminals.” For the scion of a line renowned for mild pragmatism, he finished in vehement force. “My crown is a mockery if Havish can’t provide them with sanctuary. We’ve already spoken for the refugees who flee Tysan’s persecution of the clanborn.”

Sethvir touched his crabbed fingertips against his closed eyelids. Shadowed by the finials of the massive gilt chair, he could have been mistaken for an arthritic grandfather, mantled in velvets too voluminous for their framework of brittle, aged bones. His voice was subdued as he tendered the only bright truth he could offer. “Your Grace, because of your mercy, more than one irreplaceable clan bloodline will be saved. That could be the one act to salvage the balance on the hour when the Paravians choose to return.”

The spin of the Fatemaster’s Wheel meantime would scarcely stop for a platitude. The Sorcerer diffused his attention back into fragmented awareness;
while far off to the north, amid the hummocked landscape of Mainmere
’s
ruined keeps, Asandir drew rein, wheeled his stallion, and sent it thundering back down the road he had just traversed through Caithwood. Elsewhere, a storm gained intensity; a battered tree consented to
the hour of its death; and the Hanshire captain named Sulfin Evend clattered into a Middlecross posthouse, shouting for provisions and remounts with a zeal the laziest horseboy must attend.

Beyond these small happenings, hazed into momentous event with the passage of years; snicked warp through weft with the turn of seasons, and the fall of changed leaves, and the byplay of iyats, Sethvir saw sunwheel priests raise vast armies, to carpet the summer landscape. Rank upon rank crossed the Lanshire border to bring Lysaer’s cause by fire and by sword into the Kingdom of Havish.

Unwilling to dwell upon the sorrows Desh-thiere’s curse might inflict on the future, he immersed himself in particulars. “Please extend to your bride my Fellowship’s profound regret,” he said. “Due to an unforeseen difficulty, Asandir will be late for your wedding.”

“No matter.” King Eldir arose, staid as plain granite against the stitched silk of a tapestry. He thrust the rolled parchment under his arm and returned his rare, even smile. “We won’t see hurt feelings. Every city mayor and guild minister your colleague shamed into compliance for my coronation will more likely be silly with relief. They’ve complained in the past that Asandir’s scrutiny just makes them sweat rings through their expensive brocades.”

But Sethvir sensed how the lightness was forced. He and Havish’s king matched an agonized glance of understanding.

Then Althain’s Warden clasped the royal wrist. “Trust your heart, your Grace. Your decisions today have been fitting and right.”

No longer did the Sorcerer seem aged, or careworn unto fragility. His myopic air of fuddled inattention could not mask what he was: a spirit annealed to unassailable strength through a past few others would survive. He owned the endurance to brave trials yet to come, and King Eldir s’Lornmein was too wise to stay blind to consequence: the impact of the day’s event would not happen in his reign, but must fall like a blow upon the shoulders of his unborn descendants.

Days later, shivering in the predawn chill of the Korias flats, Dakar the Mad Prophet licked blood from a nicked thumb and cast his stone construct into the shallow current of a streamlet. He ached from the soles of his mud-spattered boots to the uncombed crown of his head. His vision held the treacherous shimmer brought on by overstrained hours of mage-sight. He linked pudgy hands and stretched a kink from his back, then swore aloud for the misery that the landscape offered dim prospects for a trio of fugitives. Driven off the coast road, a rider could find himself mazed amid farmsteads, with their yapping dogs and screaming geese, and where treacherous stands of pasture fencing could yield up angry bulls or lethal delays spent backtracking from unexpected cul-de-sacs. The low roll of the fields carried sound far too clearly, and extended visibility for miles. Those expanses too thin for tillage or grazing formed a vast, washed floodplain of poor, stony sand, patched over with scrub too sparse to mask fleeing hoofprints.

Huddled amid a witch-hazel thicket wadded with morning fog, the horses nosed the ground for straggling shoots of sawgrass, ears limp and coats matted into dry whorls of sweat. Felirin could do little to tend them. Salt leached into the raw burns on his hands, though every plain shirt in his saddlebag had been torn up at need to make dressings. Arithon had packed the worst blisters and weals with burdock sprouts beaten in egg whites before he himself had succumbed to his backlash. The inevitable penalty he must pay for channeling
unrefined earth powers with his mage talent blinded left him drained near to incapacity.

Prone amid the stripped saddles with his head cradled on his locked arms, he made small complaint, though the tight-lipped expression he wore when he moved told Dakar how deeply he suffered. Nor had the sorrows inflicted at Riverton been lifted by his keeping good faith with his charged duty as Masterbard. Like snags in deep current, that unseen despondency leeched him, ebbing his reserves without letup. He needed henbane tea and a bed warmed with stones to ease the spasms which racked him. But sunwheel guardsmen searched door-to-door. Farmwives would sell him to his enemies out of fear before they would offer him shelter.

Faint gold rinsed the clogged, misty air. The fog was starting to thin. Dakar clutched his ribs to suppress a chill, aware that the thicket provided inadequate shelter. The mists would lift in less than an hour, leaving horses and riders a sitting target for the oncoming Alliance patrol.

The mare chose that moment to fling up her head and whinny a deafening inquiry. Dakar swore. “Just let the whole world know we’re here, you worthless bundle of dog meat.” He dealt a pebble by the streamside a temperamental kick.

The stone arced aloft, but the predictable crack of its impact never happened.

Wary, Dakar glanced up.

Five paces ahead, an inked phantom against mist, a black horse and cloaked rider confronted him, their approach uncannily silent. Even the clang of shod hooves on rinsed rocks failed to raise telltale clatters. The horse halted, meeting Dakar’s sharp start with pricked ears, but no trace of a shy. A ghost eye gleamed like frosted glass through the veils of dawn mist. Under a dark mantle, the rider stirred. A hand unfurled from a gray-banded sleeve, and let the abused pebble drop to the streambed with a murmured phrase of apology.

“You!” Dakar cried. “Did you have to scare a hunted man out of his living skin?”

The Sorcerer Asandir inclined his head in reproof, his regard on the spellbinder’s thumb. “You did send a summons.”

Dakar glanced down, caught aback, then closed shaking fingers over his still bleeding cut. “We need help,” he admitted. “I’ve scried warning. The patrol I can’t shake will close in by noon. If Sethvir doesn’t already know. Earl Jieret’s had Sight of a public execution, the condemned man being Prince Arithon.”

Asandir sat the black stud, patient, but without speech.

The Mad Prophet flushed slowly crimson. “I ask for Arithon’s survival, ” he defended.

The Sorcerer touched the black’s neck, soothing it from stamping off the midges which swarmed at its mud-spattered fetlocks. “Arithon suffers backlash, yes? As well he should expect from his prior experience, when he raised the Paravian mysteries at Jaelot.”

“You won’t see him?” Dakar demanded.

“He has not asked.” The Sorcerer touched his horse again, and as if language had passed between master and beast, the stud backed a half step and wheeled to go. While Dakar stood, helpless, his bleeding hand clenched to a frustrated fist, the hooded head turned. Silver eyes met his, and one bristled brow tipped up. “How you’ve changed,” Asandir commented. “I should have expected at least an impertinent question demanding to know where I’m bound.”