The Curse of the Mistwraith (78 page)

Wordless, Caolle extended his hand for the flagon. Steiven watched while his first captain drank, his eyes as deep with worry as his oldest confidante had ever seen them. ‘We must withdraw the girls and women as Arithon wishes. Seer or not, his objections and Jieret’s nightmare are too close to be a coincidence.’

‘The boys over ten years of age will have to disarm the fallen then,’ Caolle insisted, his eyes beneath the crag of his browline deepened to pits as the candle by his elbow fluttered out. ‘Those few absolutely can’t be spared.’

Steiven nodded, took back the wine, and paused with the neck of the flagon half-raised. As if he expected a rejoinder, he glanced around and across the darkened tent. ‘Where’s the prince?’

Caolle jerked his chin past his shoulder. ‘There. Fell asleep on the tactical maps, so I brought him.’ Deshir’s war captain folded thick arms in expectation of Dania’s scolding as she and Halliron emerged from soothing Jieret into bed.

‘Ah well.’ Steiven sighed, aware how little reprimand would accomplish with his war captain planted like a bull. Finally, softly, he set the flask aside. ‘Our Teir’s’Ffalenn’s entitled to his comforts, I would guess, if he spent last night smacking midges in the open.’

A rustle of skirts and more flickering from spent candles, and Lady Dania reached her husband’s side. ‘Arithon ought to sleep,’ she said tartly. ‘When he left here, he was unwell.’

Caolle smiled. While the Masterbard crossed the lodge to fetch his instrument, the captain stole the moment to bait her by hooking back the flagon. ‘A man can be unwell, and not be the least bit sick.’ He drank, his eyes on hers.

Dania gave no ground. The captain’s blistering insolence she suspected held a hint of jealousy; at least, Caolle had never subjected her to teasing before the day she had wed. Her lord shied well clear, since better than anybody else, his lady could keep the war captain in his place.

Dania’s mouth tautened in conclusion that Caolle’s antagonism toward Arithon was the same: that he would treat even a dog with contempt, if it dared to claim Steiven’s affection. As though the grizzled captain were an overbearing brother, she reached out and slapped the flagon from his mouth. ‘Now what would his Grace be drunk on, stream water?’

Caolle choked to kill an untimely burst of laughter. ‘He has a weak head, our royal heir, or maybe just a weak stomach?’

The discussion was cut short, as Halliron cried out from the corner, ‘Ath Creator,
how long has he been like this?
’

Steiven spun round on reflex; Caolle, with considering deliberation. Half-lost in the maze of deepened shadows, the Masterbard bent over Arithon, one hand clasped over the royal wrist and feeling in concern for a pulse.

‘Sithaer’s fires, man.’ Caolle rubbed his eyes, which were stinging tired from too much stress. ‘You act as if he’s dying. He only dropped off to sleep.’

‘He could be dying,’ Halliron said, his performer’s voice bladed to satire. ‘Did none of you notice the smell on him?’

‘Is something wrong?’ Steiven released the hand that cupped his wife’s waist as Dania moved to light candles.

Halliron made a sound of exasperation. When Caolle looked brazenly blank, and Steiven’s expression failed to clear, the Masterbard raised Arithon’s other wrist and hauled him into a half reclining posture that needed several pillows to support. As his fingers untied the prince’s shirtcuffs, he said, ‘Have you ever read anything on herb lore? In particular on the leaves of the mountain flower called tienelle?’

‘Seersweed?’ Shocked to quick action, Steiven yanked the flagon from Caolle’s grasp and crossed the tent. ‘Ath preserve us. Not the narcotic used by mages…’ He knelt, touched the prince’s clammy flesh, and bits of remembered trivia fell together with an alarming, unpleasant feel of truth. The prince had spoken of scrying. If tienelle had been part of his method, it would indeed induce visions; followed by illness from toxins that had no listed antidote. Enraged at the prince’s reticence, and then by his own slow perception, Steiven ripped out a word he had never used under his own roofpole, or in the presence of his wife.

‘He told us he was trained!’ Caolle protested.

‘And so he must be. I much doubt he would leave us by suicide.’ Steiven withheld his sympathy, while Caolle started to pace.

Halliron continued his ministrations, aggrieved to a depth that none but Lady Dania understood. Her hands trembled on the striker as for the second time that night she lit wick after wick in succession; while the Masterbard resumed condemnation. ‘How long did you delay him, badgering and questioning his manhood?’

‘Never mind that,’ cut in Steiven. ‘Just tell us what’s to be done.’

The Masterbard’s smile was whitelipped and merciless, and directed to stop Caolle between strides. ‘Wake him up and ask,’ he invited. ‘I’m no mage at all. My tunes and your prowess at war in this case are no foil for fatal poison.’

‘Well, his Grace volunteered for the sacrifice,’ Caolle snapped. ‘Don’t make me slap him back to consciousness. I’d be too much tempted to break his neck.’

Nobody answered that outburst. Dania stood with the striker wrung between her fingers. Halliron steadied the prince’s head, while Steiven raised the flask and began forcing wine down the flaccid royal throat.

Arithon roused, bent in half by a cough that immediately progressed to nausea. Between spasms, he gasped for water. A basin was proffered. He drank and was sick. He drank again, his hands locked one on another in a torment that left Dania silently, desperately weeping.

This time the liquid stayed down. When the Master of Shadow raised green eyes rinsed blank by the force of will he needed to command his reflexes, no one present could escape recognition of the mettle he had masked behind laziness.

Arithon knew as much. Even through pain, his manner suggested the chagrin of a joke undone as his gaze locked level with Caolle’s.

Caught on his knees by the sick-bed, the captain of Deshir’s defence said no word, but gripped the basin as if blunt metal might sprout legs and kick him in the stomach.

The deep s’Ffalenn eyes never flickered, but the mouth twitched in a pinched-off, flippant smile. ‘I’ll try you at foils on the morrow,’ Arithon challenged, prepared to take bruises for his falsehood.

Grudgingly forced to revise his assessment of the s’Ffalenn prince yet again, Caolle snarled, ‘Save your steel for the heartblood of Etarra’s city guard.’

Work on the defences continued without relenting as Arithon rested from his debilitating bout with the tienelle. He did not rise to cross foils with the clan captain, but on Steiven’s enforced orders kept to his bed. He heard in thin-lipped silence that the participation of boys in the battle was a matter beyond his royal right to question.

If his initial reaction was too quiet, his response came typically obstinate. He waited until Dania’s back was turned, called young Jieret to his bedside, and with the blade of a boy’s knife for carving, nicked his left wrist. There and then he swore a blood pact of friendship with his
caithdein’s
only son.

Confronted minutes later by the father’s anger, Arithon gazed up from his pillows, peaceful with grieved affection. ‘That is the best I can do for you, whom I love as my brother. I can see your heir survives this war to continue your line and title.’

Struck speechless by emotion, Steiven whirled and left the prince’s presence. With his own death already a sealed fate, the Earl of the North could have asked no better parting from this life, save the chance to better know the spirit of the man who had graced him.

‘Ath lighten your burden, my prince,’ he murmured. And he stumbled on blindly across the lodge tent, into the arms of his wife.

Dania exclaimed in dismay at his kiss. She tasted salt tears on Steiven’s lips. Drowned in silent, close embrace, she pulled loose, caught his hand and guided him to slip the laces on her bodice.

Steiven accepted her invitation. In the sunwarmed air of their sleeping nook, he allowed her quiet touch and hot flesh to absorb his bitter brew of sorrow. But the pleasure of release was saddened by the knowledge that this moment was to be among the last.

Incarceration

Dakar the Mad Prophet stopped cold in his tracks, wiped at his streaming forehead, and glared askance down a sheer rockface toward a valley spread like quilting between a dizzying array of black peaks. Fresh sweat rolled off his temples. Left faint and sick from the effects of exertion and extreme altitude, he complained to a point of empty air, ‘You call this a trail? I say it’s a deathtrap. And I hope you have defence wards set. If a fiend chances by and possesses a loose stone, it’s sure to make mischief and trip me.’

Made the more mutinous as his outburst drew no response, Dakar plucked at the straps of his knapsack, which bulged from his back like the shell of some malformed turtle. ‘And anyway, I’d think you sorcerers wouldn’t chance my taking a fall, not lugging
this
, anyway. And I don’t see why I was appointed to act as the Fellowship’s pack-mule in the first place!’

A breeze flicked through a fan of alpine flowers near Dakar’s feet, perhaps provoked by Kharadmon’s invisible presence.

‘Oh, come on!’ Dakar griped. ‘A miser in a poorhouse has more to say than you! Why not admit you know why Asandir has me carrying his Ath-forsaken Mistwraith to the summit of Rockfell Peak?’

‘You need the exercise?’ Kharadmon quipped. A daisy fell out of nowhere and brushed past Dakar’s left ear.

The Mad Prophet swiped it away. He scraped forward, his shoulder pressed to the mountain, until the narrow ribbon of trail reached a switchback half-blocked by boulders. There he seized the opportunity to plump himself down. The perch he chose was moss-grown. Seepage from a glacial spring made him grimace and huff like a walrus, yet laziness triumphed. A soaked rump notwithstanding, he bent at the waist and shucked off the knapsack. Inside, girdled with tingling guard-spells, lay the flask that bottled Desh-thiere. ‘I should heave this off the nearest precipice, and see you all juggle spells to catch it back,’ the Mad Prophet suggested nastily.

‘Try,’ Kharadmon invited.

Dakar’s glower deepened. ‘A damned iyat has more sense of fun than you.’

‘I should hope so.’ Below their vantage, the slow-falling speck that was the daisy winked out. A second later, Kharadmon’s image unfurled, extravagantly poised in midair. ‘Or I’d throw you off the cliff, and see how far and long you’d bounce.’

‘Do that.’ Dakar sighed. ‘Break my back. I’d like to lie down and rest for six months or maybe a year.’

Kharadmon stroked the spade-black beard that thrust from his chin. Piebald hair streamed on the winds that whipped off the snowfields higher up and his green eyes glinted, shrewd. ‘You’re thinking your master has misused you?’

‘Not me,’ Dakar snapped. ‘I said so before: Prince Lysaer.’ Cautious not to try Kharadmon’s impatience, he heaved to his feet, and with a martyred roll of his eyes, resettled his pack on sore shoulders. ‘Sithaer take your Fellowship’s grand plans, you used a good man and then broke him.’

‘Ah.’ Kharadmon flicked away into nothing. A cold draft at odds with nature, he flowed upslope against the wind.

Dakar resumed inching up a track better suited for small goats. ‘You don’t agree,’ he said sourly.

The discorporate mage surprised with an answer. ‘You’ve seen Asandir take deer for the supper pot.’

‘He never hunts anything I ever saw.’ The Mad Prophet bent, clawed out a pebble that had worked its way into his boot-top, then sidestepped through a hair pin bend, his buttocks pressed to sheer rock while his beer-gut jutted over sky. ‘Asandir just goes out and sits in a thicket somewhere. Eventually a buck happens along, lies down, and dies for him.’

‘He projects his need and asks,’ Kharadmon corrected tartly. ‘The deer chooses freely, and its fate and man’s hunger end in balance.’

‘You’re not saying Lysaer
volunteered
,’ Dakar protested.

The trail doubled back, its frost-split stone scoured lifeless except for mustard and black flecks of lichen. From ahead, Kharadmon sent back, ‘No. Your prince answered circumstance according to his inate character. The Fellowship imposed nothing outside his natural will and intentions.’

Dakar viewed the next span with trepidation, and ended by scrabbling forward on hands and knees. Gravel loosened by his passage slid and bounced, and finally rocketed into the abyss that was Rockfell vale. Between stertorous panting, he gasped, ‘You can’t claim…Desh-thiere’s wraith…submits to any law of the Major Balance.’

‘Where opening did not already exist, the creature could not have gained foothold,’ said Kharadmon.

Squatted now on his hams and blowing harder, Dakar squirmed to shift the bite of the packstraps. Already blistered on his heels, his temper had abraded to match. ‘But Sethvir as much as admitted the s’Ilessid inborn gift was at fault. Had Lysaer not been driven to seek perfect justice, the wraith would have found nothing to exploit.’

Frostily unmoved, Kharadmon said, ‘If so, our Fellowship has a reckoning to answer for.’

Dakar took a second to recognize capitulation. ‘Well then!’ he cried, and closed for the kill. ‘Why in Ath’s name did you surrender Lysaer knowing he’d have no defence?’

The flicks and slaps of breeze that expressed Kharadmon’s displeasure died into ominous stillness. Even the winds off the ridges dared not cross the imposed circle of his silence. ‘Because,’ his reply cracked back at length, ‘Ath Creator himself did not insist that his works spring perfectly formed from the void. We are permitted our mistakes, for which, my fat prophet, you should kiss the earth daily and be grateful.’

Hunkered like a bear on damp haunches, Dakar prepared to argue further. But a second voice admonished from below: ‘Best give less thought to Lysaer’s business and more to your own, which is jeopardized. The outcrop where you’ve chosen to pontificate is not terribly well anchored to the scarp.’

The Mad Prophet ejected a filthy word. Sweated over more than bad footing, he scooted forward and cautiously peered downward.