Fugitive Prince (66 page)

The Koriani Prime Matriarch harbored no such soft sentiment through her tedious days of convalescence. Imprisoned by her debilitating weakness, and fed on the brew of yet another bitter defeat, she lay swathed in thin coverlets. Her eggshell flesh showed each blue track of vein. Bones pressed against skin seamed and worn to translucency, the joints like knobbed pearl beneath. Through the weeks since the spell construct’s release had roused her from coma, her glistening black eyes lent the sole spark of life to her visage.

She refused idle company. The least small disturbance barraged
her strained nerves. Sound and light taxed her senses past endurance, as if the trial of living exhausted repetitive discipline. The bedchamber appointed for her recovery was always kept dim for that reason. Thick curtains were drawn over the paned windows to close out the noise and the frenetic stimulation brought in on strayed currents of breeze. The dammed-in heat of the summer afternoons burdened the stilled air, dense as a wool blanket, and choked with the scents of the medicinal teas to cosset her wasted flesh. The gnawing needs of her intellect were more difficult to appease.

Each day, by the sweltering light of a beeswax candle, a senior-rank seeress in dove gray silk sat in strict attendance with a scrying crystal tucked on her knees.

“Matriarch,” she responded, as she had countless times to the same scantly whispered request, “I search, but find no sign or presence of Arithon s’Ffalenn. The crystal shows me naught yet again but the cold fog of the veil.”

A dry breath stirred the bundled form in the bedding. “He’s too clever by far. That’s the bane of his mother’s lineage.” Morriel forced out another thready whisper, rough as scabbed rust in the gloom. “He is not on Athera, then.” Her hands lay half-curled, crabbed as the feet of a petrified songbird, each hideous detail exaggerated in shadow spun by the crawling spearpoint of flame. “Proceed.”

“Your will, matriarch.” The seeress bent to her travail, the bound knot of her hair bone ivory in the gloom, and her collar stuck to her moist neck. The drill she enacted would follow repetitive routine, her efforts divided between three futile searches, none of which changed from one day to the next. Already, the resident Senior Circle at this sisterhouse whispered in corners that the Prime had lapsed into her dotage. The rumors were kept guarded, with no successor at hand to receive an appeal for review. The peeress stayed loyal, and as an outsider, the seeress chose not to speculate. Bound by her vows to unquestioned obedience, she blotted the steamed moisture off her palms, then rebalanced her mind and gazed once more into the vast depths of the crystal.

This time, her intent was cast to draw in the location of First Senior Lirenda.

Ever since her awakening amid the spent ash of her construct, the Koriani Prime had been consumed by frustration. Her mind would not rest. Not until she knew what had destroyed her laid plan to capture Arithon s’Ffalenn.

Always before this, the crystal scrying had shown darkness, a barrier of blank, impenetrable density that the most gifted talent could
not pierce. Resigned to another failure, the seeress tuned her effort with all the skilled force her experience could command. Her will became the refined filament, drawn like steel thread through the aperture of the mysteries.

This time the wall yielded as if no impedance had existed. The seeress gasped. Her mind reeled into vertigo as her gift met and tapped into a scene of turbulence and light. She centered and grounded, by instinct steadying the contact. Sound immersed her, a welter of voices all shouting at once. Jubilation reigned, amid a rushed tumult of tumbling impressions. Somewhere on a beachhead, a small knot of clan scouts were pounding each other’s backs and whooping in ecstatic celebration.

The kaleidoscopic chaos of this scrying resisted even the best-trained discipline. The seeress shifted her seeing crystal and probed for the reason. The scenes jerked and spun, spliced one to the next, tethered by what looked like a sparkling strand of silver chain. Darkness and blinding sunlight interfaced at random as the viewpoint swirled and jounced through a packed mass of bodies clad in the plain fringe of forest clansmen. A voice filtered through, distinct above others. “Ath, be careful! That trinket’s no booty to send to your sweetheart, but the spell crystal of a Koriani witch, and bound for another hand than yours.”

The seeress’s horrified gasp ripped the sanctity of Morriel’s bedchamber.

“What has happened?” came the Prime’s drilling treble.

“I’m not sure yet.” The seeress clasped her stone, desperate not to break ugly news until she could verify her first impression. “Let me make better sense of the images.” Sweat stuck her skirts to her thighs as she engaged a sigil to force order through whirling turbulence. Imagery continued to assault her trained senses. The smelting heat in the bedchamber dulled her touch as she grappled to find a thread to seize continuity.

“What do you see?” Morriel asked, querulous. Her hand twitched on the coverlet. “Has mishap befallen my First Senior?”

Eyes closed, hands cupped light as a butterfly’s shut wings around the warmed sphere of quartz, the seeress at last captured one angle of contact. She framed another sigil of control and froze the vision in place, then engaged the trained logic of observation to assess the stilled scene by its content. “I see a beach where clansmen weep, run, and shout in celebration. They are hunters or scouts, to judge by the carved-bone talismans laced into the cuffs of their boots. One is a chieftain, the son of a duchess by the four stranded knots in his braid.
In the cove, at anchor, ride two blue-water brigs. They’re not under command of Lysaer’s Alliance of Light. The banner flying at their masthead is no sunwheel, but a crude rendition in dark colors.” She paused, tipped the crystal, but failed to extract any further helpful detail.

On the high bed, Morriel hissed in displeasure. “So. My plan failed at sea.
What went wrong?
I had allowed for every possible setback and contingency.” She ranted on, relentless, her words the grate of dead leaves dragged over unyielding granite. “What of my First Senior? She should have sailed with those ships. Is she held captive among enemies?”

The seeress swallowed, her dampened palms clouding a fog on the crystal’s slick surface. “Matriarch, no.” In distress and uncertainty, she blotted the moisture on her sleeve and exerted her powers of analysis. “I keyed my scrying to Lirenda, as you asked. It would seem that I did not find her directly. Instead, I appear to have captured the resonant signature of her personal quartz pendant.” A pause, while she braced to conclude the unthinkable. “What I read is not the First Senior herself, but the crystal that has come to be separated from her presence.”

The closed quiet of the chamber acquired the tension of the drawn bow, or the measured arc of the spear as it rushed to transfix flinching tissue. On the bed, the silk coverlet stirred to snatched movement as the Prime’s fingers closed into fists. “Who has caused this desecration?” She never asked whether Lirenda still lived; that fact was made obvious. A long-distance scrying could not have connected in the first place if the imprinted crystal had lost its energetic tie to the woman.

Gilt touched with sweat as she leaned to trim the wick of the candle, the seeress resisted the folly of platitudes. Well aware Morriel’s ire would find small surcease, she bent again to peruse her crystal. Past the flames’ renewed glow, the sealed darkness soaked her in thick, scented silence. No sound intruded. Remote with trance, the seeress suspended cluttered thoughts and quested through the deep focus of her quartz sphere. Now aware her linked imagery arose through an unfiltered contact with the matrix of another mineral, she aligned her intent to compensate for the random sequence of imagery.

Somewhere inside the stone’s spiraling lattice, caught in frozen light, she should find an imprint of the desecrating thief who had dared to strip a First Senior of her focus jewel. The stored memory would be encoded as a sequence of vibration from which her linked stone could reassemble a sequential string of events. Through the powers of sigils designed to draw truth from falsehood, she might sift
through the traces and unveil the purpose of the stone’s present-day mishandling.

Long minutes passed, pressed in the musty atmosphere of sun-heated felt. Morriel’s breath rasped in and out, stirring through the stale musk of age. The astringency of brewed herbs hung over a room that resonated with the hollow stillness of a sealed drum. Silence reigned, fraught with the Prime’s brooding fury. The candle burned, a smokeless, bright finger in its graceful bronze stand, the floor tiles and the tapestries glinting rich colors only inside of its inadequate light. The spun gold of its touch edged a corner of silk counterpane, and mapped each infinitesimal crease surrounding Morriel’s black eyes. Nothing else moved. The Prime’s features seemed a cast-porcelain impression, assembled from a caricature of knotted old rags pinned on a framework of skull. Her fingernails gleamed dulled ivory, the skin shriveled beyond any inclination to give or take simple pleasures.

Only power remained, a dragon’s balefire caged in sapped flesh by the thorns of bound duty and a dauntless, implacable dedication. Though each passing second bespoke final failure, and the allure of oblivion and death, the Prime’s obsidian pupils stayed focused and sharp, sparked by a dangerous impatience.

If that last, held bastion of will should give way, the Matriarch would pass from her office unsucceeded. None other than she could measure the scope of such loss, or comprehend the risk of backlash into cataclysm as prime power ranged free with no prepared vessel at hand to contain the accumulated burden of stored consciousness. Too aware of the fragility holding the balance, the seeress responded, her words like scratched glass against her Prime’s nettled expectation. “The crystal was parted from our First Senior by a liegeman of Prince Arithon’s. He bore the name Caolle.”

“What?”
Morriel’s screech of astonishment shocked the dense quiet, and the quilts jumped to the lash of her fist. “That man should have perished in Riverton of blood loss brought on by a sword thrust!” Hurled into rage beyond reach of aged strength, the Prime Matriarch ranted on in a whisper.
“What has my First Senior done?”

“Your pardon, matriarch. I do not know.” The seeress cringed, shaken out of contact with her talents. “I cannot see her. The crystal will not show her presence, no matter where on the continent I search.”

Morriel blinked, her eyes two jet rivets. “That’s because she is masked by salt water.” One forearm twitched, as if under the skin, the nerves leaped to jolts of pure fire. Next to the duller agony of stiff
joints, the torment of pure gall burned the hotter. The Koriani Prime had spent painstaking centuries grooming a successor, only to suffer this balking defeat at the hands of a dying clan swordsman. “More to the point, where is Lirenda’s spell crystal now? Who guards the imprinted key to her life, and for what unprincipled purpose?”

Another strung interval, while the seeress bent her head and sought answers across time and distance. Behind tight-latched mullions, the curtains did not stir to the crack of the late-afternoon sea breeze. Morriel lay, her shut lids like blued eggshells. In one of the windows, a trapped fly buzzed and battered for freedom. Its wings striking glass made her nerves flare and sear in sparks of pain from the sound.

In the end, submersed in a suffocating tension, the seeress’s answer came clear as flung acid with the impacting force of ill news.

“The crystal resides in the hands of Lord Maenol’s barbarians. They have instructions to give it into Prince Arithon’s keeping. There can be no chance of its rescue, even by the invasion of Caithwood by the Alliance troops. The clan scouts are jubilant with the fresh news that the ships out of Riverton’s royal yard were retaken. Due to Caolle’s intervention, and our First Senior’s coercion, every one of the Shadow Master’s condemned henchmen escaped from captivity while at sea.”

Morriel’s eyes flickered open, her weighted quiet an obsidian knife that could have scored lines in new iron. “There has been a betrayal,” she announced at raw length. Her clawed forefinger crooked on the counterpane. “Come here,” she directed. “I would know where our First Senior hides now. I can find out by means of your talents, but only if your link to her spell quartz is given over to my disposal.”

The seeress swallowed. Sweat trickled at her throat. Though she knew her free will was demanded in sacrifice, her vows left no recourse to refuse. Her talents were at the command of her order to spend for the greater good of humanity.

“You will come to no harm,” Morriel assured, brisk, and beckoned again for close contact.

The seeress arose; not young herself, her knees stiffened in complaint from the hour spent seated on bare flooring. She offered the crystal between her cupped hands in surrender to the will of her Prime Matriarch.

Morriel extended a skeletal finger. Her palsied touch traced a dark sigil over the quartz sphere. If her body was wasted, her powers were immense. A force rocked the sealed room like the shock of a thunderclap. The seeress quailed outright, chilled by recognition that she witnessed
none other than the cipher of prime dominion, imprinted upon each initiate who swore oath. The one mighty cipher set a brand like a shackle, and granted the Koriani Matriarch her authorized ascendancy over all aspects of free will.

The sigil sieved into the clear quartz like a stain, a shadow wrought from the stuff of deep nightmare that spilled and frayed and darkened the crystal’s bright depths. There, the force hovered, pulsing with currents that shocked through live flesh and negated the most passionate coil of desire. Lightless and cold, it realigned the core matrix of the quartz, then spilled over and laid claim to the seeress’s awareness.

She flinched in recoil. The crystal’s transmission released a shearing sting of heat against her cradling palms. Engulfed by vertigo, she was unable to move as Morriel Prime pronounced the guttural words to key mastery. The sigil fired and took form. Its barbed force claimed thought and mind, then erased the last imprint of individuality. The resonance of subjugation shattered the frail web of the seeress’s consciousness. Will, self, and senses sucked away into vacuum, first dashed to powder, then whirled into void by a tide of cyclonic intervention.