Fugitive Prince (73 page)

Lirenda dreamed of a man and a melody, and awoke with tear-flooded eyes.

For one second, two, the sweeping immediate, razor-edged memory held her fast across the transition. Still, she could hear the rippling, sweet peal of struck notes. Plangent, silvered strings spoke their appeal just for her, a cry to flood joy through every unfulfilled cranny in her heart.

Weeping as a creature possessed, she suffered through the jarring reorientation of finding herself bereft, alone, and jostled in the rolling discomfort of a blue-water ocean passage. As her elbow struck an uncompromising edge of adzed wood, and the pull of the oars thumped in vibration to the beat of the coxswain’s drum, she recalled her true place aboard Prince Lysaer’s royal galley. That awareness revived her mazed will. The beguiling cascade of lyranthe notes lost their hold, snapped away like a net of burst thread.

She sat up, mired in a salt-musty snarl of damp linens. Protective as a provoked lioness, she let trained perception dissect the shreds of impression that even now slipped through her memory. At once, she picked out the familiar trace resonance of her personal crystal. She knew then. Her chain-lightning leap into fury kindled a startling sting:
the dream had ridden on the carrier tie between herself and her lost quartz.
By the aching wound opened by that one-shot bolt of compassion, then the pang of regret that was hers, inflicted as the harmony tangled and dispelled, she could surmise the hand of the meddler.

Her fleeting recall yielded the vision of shadowed green eyes. She still
felt
the deft empathy which had combed through the haunted depths of her mind, grasping after impressions to reclothe in music.

She knew;
and her rage brimmed over and outran all restraint. Arithon s’Ffalenn had come to inherit possession of her personal spell crystal. Her life-tie to the quartz lattice had betrayed her, let him bare every weakness she possessed.

Her frustration found no outlet aboard Lysaer’s galley. Alone in her cabin, surrounded by sleeping crown officers and men-at-arms sworn to the Alliance, she could not share confidence with anyone. The tedious, rolling beat of pulled oars offset nothing but the thrum of sea winds, and the hissed wash of cloven wavecrests. The dense heat of summer languished belowdecks and bathed her in trickles of sweat.

The repaired royal fleet rowed the last leg of the crossing from Corith to the mainland. But denied vital access to the channel of her crystal, Lirenda remained as blind to event as the common seaman on deck. She could do nothing but throw off stifling bedclothes and lie in her close, lampless berth, awaiting the moment when the masthead lookout sighted first land beneath the louring towers of seasonal thunder squalls.

Lirenda slept again just past dawn. Drugged by heat and the circling mill of her frustration, she suffered no dreams. This time no music came to haunt her. She emerged from a drowning, black well of oblivion to the filtered light of late afternoon. Clear over the groan of working timbers, she heard the running thump of sailors’ bare feet over the decking above her. She clawed clinging tangles of ebony hair off the damp skin of her collarbones. Fighting groggy senses, she arose to refresh herself.

While she dressed in her meticulous layers of silk skirts and gauzethin mantle of office, the activity on deck reached the fever-pitch anticipation provoked by an imminent landfall. She gathered from the bursts of excited talk and the flying strings of orders from the ship’s officers that the peppery little navigator had not failed with his charts. He had led the fleet safely in to Orlest on the southwest shore of Tysan.

Swathed in her wind-fluttered, violet silk, Lirenda swept up the companionway. She displaced two off-duty oarsmen to garner a view at the rambade. The stroke of the crew on the benches below seemed enlivened. While the tumult of anticipation quickened about her, the late weeks at sea seemed an interval removed, time sealed in a pocket of salt-scented tranquillity. The breeze led the change. It
brought smells of smoke and fish grease from the shoreside cookfires, mingled into the sour, muddy reek of tidal marshes. Shoaling waters between ship and shingle heaved in striated tones of green enamel. Gulls flew, dipped gold in the late-day sun, which slashed through clouds strewn like feathers. The headland itself lay slatted in shadow, citrine as new ale where the marsh grasses spread tasseled seed heads.

During the burning, dry months of high summer, when the storms threw their rains off the coast, the tidal estuaries of south Tysan were worked for deposits of salt. Amid the fringed reeds at slack water, women raked crusted cakes into piles, while half-grown children sewed the glittering harvest into burlap for transport.

Past the low ground, flocks of goats grazed the stepped, rocky bluffs, raised like rucked baize above the path where a herdboy raced to warn the town of the arriving fleet.

Lirenda knew Orlest as a galleymen’s haven. Here, captains put in to replenish provisions on their coast-hopping runs between the Riverton inlet and the rich ports past Hanshire.

As the oarsmen muscled the flagship against the chop of ebb tide, the town hove into view, tucked in a fold of the shoreline. Impressed in haze, and bounded in front by the scarred pilings of the traders’ wharf, the crescent-shaped settlement was ruled by the running swell off Mainmere Bay. The low-lying houses were built upon stilts against the floods whipped in by offshore storms. Trapped heat rippled the sprawl of limed fishing shacks, their humped roofs thatched with cut reeds, and netted down with pendulous stone weights. Beside their unassuming stolidity, Sailhands’ Alley stood out like a gaudy twist of silk, with its signboard array of brothels and wineshops.

The town also hosted a seasonal fishing fleet. While Lysaer’s galleys steered a bending course through the cork floats of vacant moorings, word of their arrival ran ahead. Doors banged and craftshops emptied. A burgeoning crowd lined the docks as the flagship drove in, sunwheel banners streaming.

As the oarsmen’s stroke sheared her patched hull shoreward, from rail and rambade, one could pick out the pristine white tunics of oathsworn Alliance guardsmen cutting an agitated swath through the gawkers like the mismatched gleam of thrown ice.

“Something’s afoot,” the watch officer remarked, creased eyes trained ashore. “Or why would a contingent of royal men-at-arms be billeted in force at Orlest?”

The steersman chimed in, “They would come to hold news for his Grace.”

A likely enough guess; Orlest or Tideport were the logical sites to await an inbound fleet from Min Pierens.

Lirenda tapped manicured fingers on the rail, raked over by rabid frustration. Her curtailed powers would not let her access lane auguries at a glance, and the ignominy burned. The possibility for upset could not be dismissed: her misjudgment over Caolle’s life may well have allowed Arithon s’Ffalenn to seize bold advantage on the continent.

She must have unwittingly mused her irritation out loud.

“But of course, the enemy would not stand idle through the summer.” The reply intruded a pace from her shoulder; Lysaer s’llessid had apparently crept up through her moment of self-absorbed brooding.

He also had dressed for the landfall. Offset by the delicate sheen of her silk, his presence lost none of its magnificence. His impeccable, trimmed hair shone as burnished as filigree, and his pearls were cold fire in the sunlight. He was not smiling.

Anyone less than a Koriani observer would have missed his subtle satisfaction, as he added, “Did you truly believe the Shadow Master could be driven to unchecked flight without unpleasant repercussions?”

Lirenda’s expression was fine marble veneer, impenetrable and aloof. A mere hour ago, she could have agreed without any sense of conflict. Now self-betrayed, subverted through access to her undefended quartz, she found herself battling phantoms. A masterfully tailored line of melody tugged her emotions on wild tangents, as if the imprinted perception of Arithon’s intent gave the lie to his half brother’s conviction.

Discomfited by Lysaer’s probing interest, Lirenda returned a stare like chipped amber. “Why jab in pretense?” Her impulse for vengeance sparked out as small malice. “New discord but serves you. Bring down the Master of Shadow, by all means. Should I do less than applaud the picked course of your destiny?”

Lysaer laughed in that forthright honesty which effortlessly recaptured the heart. “Lady, your barbs are magnificent, but misplaced. Let us weigh the ill tidings before we presume to salvage the fruits of disaster.”

Yet as the royal galley tied up at the wharf, no deft planning, nor calculated strategy of advance handling could smooth over the tumult which awaited the Prince of the Light.

Full night lay over the harbor, heavy as syrup with trapped warmth. Between the summer flicker of heat lightning, the rippled waters lapped like dark tarnish against the pilings, spindled with reflections from the torch pans set alight at the quayside. Amid that cast tangle of jittering light, Lysaer s’Ilessid stepped ashore.

The bystanders gathered to greet his return roared with one voice at first sight of him. Man, woman, and child, they surged against the men-at-arms who pressed to clear space for his egress. The prince took such mannerless enthusiasm in stride. All white silk and fitted elegance, he left the gangway, unhurried. As he passed down the wharf, his path became flanked by a wall of grasping, outthrust hands. The boldest strained against the cordon of soldiers, striving to touch his person for shared fortune, or to pluck at his glittering garments for a ribbon or lace to treasure as a memento.

Lirenda paced the prince one step behind, daunted by the sheer volume of noise, and by the relentless needy scramble of the crowd. The wharf narrowed past the jut of the ship’s chandlery, with its stacked hogsheds of salt pork and beef. Royal guardsmen jostled a clear path with difficulty. The enchantress found herself unable to break away, even to lend polite semblance of privacy when the royal courier stepped to the fore.

He carried urgent news for Avenor’s prince, a personal message too dire to withhold. “Your Grace, there’s been tragedy. Best hear now, and quickly.”

Caught in unwanted proximity, Lirenda shared the formal language of state which informed that his bewitchingly beautiful wife, Princess Talith, had passed the Wheel three months ago.

“By her own hand, your Lord Seneschal pronounced.” Heads turned. The cheering near at hand faltered; still the messenger had to shout to make himself heard through the clamor. “Her Grace fell to her end. Succumbed to despair for her childless state and jumped from a high tower window.”

Despite his matchless instinct for statecraft, Lysaer s’Ilessid missed stride.

For that given instant, he was no savior, no prince, no shining example to his people, but only a man, stunned by an unexpected, dark anguish. Grief exposed his humanity with leveling force. He faltered, stopped short. The flare of the firepans etched him in unmerciful light, each tremor of shock magnified by his jeweled studs and stitched seed pearls.

The sight of him humbled by wounding mortality struck Lirenda with inexplicable force.

She lost her own breath at the devastated speed with which his sustained strength came unraveled. The draw of his charisma had claimed her, unwitting, his dedicated campaign against the Master of Shadow became a mainstay she required to buoy her tripped sense of balance.

As a hapless observer, she felt strangely bereft; as if perfect quartz cracked like glass under polishing, or clouds on a whim had transformed into lead, to crush the green earth with blind force.

Lysaer seemed oblivious to the presence of an audience. Eyes closed, his ethereal majesty transformed to unalloyed sorrow, he murmured aloud in his anguish, “My dear, my dear! If not for the machinations of the enemy, I should never have strayed from your side.”

The First Senior moved on blind instinct. She would offer her mantle, try any inadequate, stopgap gesture to shield his shattered poise from the insatiable maw of public curiosity.

Yet fast as she reacted, another pushed past and reached the s’Ilessid prince ahead of her.

This one wore the sweat-stained leathers of a courier who had transferred from post horse to post horse with small break for rest or refreshment. The chalky dust of the flats lined tired features, and his person wore the smell of hot horses and urgency.

He caught Lysaer’s hand and dropped onto one knee. “Great lord, forgive me. I bring unpleasant tidings.”

The Prince of the Light raised his head, eyes open and direct, if suspiciously bright. “Speak,” he bade the man. “No tragedy of mine is so great that I cannot respond for my people.”

Then he waited in all of his shattered splendor for a second round of ill news.

Lirenda stood near enough to overhear the fact that forty of Hanshire’s finest men-at-arms had pursued Arithon s’Ffalenn into a cloudy veil of magecraft.

“That event happened some time ago. It’s not canny, to have escaped official notice this long. But the first courier sent to Avenor was waylaid by a freak accident. His report was delayed for two months.” The dazed messenger tipped his face up to the prince, torn into terrified appeal. “Search parties have swept the flats east to west, until the worst can’t be doubted. The whole company of forty has disappeared, and left not a trace on the landscape.”

Lysaer met the entreaty head-on, the shimmer of the tears he would not shed apparent to his circle of observers. “My loss, and my people’s loss is not so different.” Even in grief, his acute sense of kindness prevailed. “Had you kin among the missing?”

The messenger looked devastated. “A brother.”

He received the hand of the prince on his shoulder. “Then we sorrow together, as we act side by side.” Lysaer summoned a voice like grained iron. “There are widows in Hanshire this day who are bereaved by the loss of a mate, as I am. For them, you will go now and arrange mounts for myself and twenty-five of my personal guard. Find a guide who knows the countryside. Tell him he may ask any sum he desires from my treasury if he will show us the place on the flats where this happened.”