The Ships of Merior (64 page)

Then his touch melted back and left her desolate.

Cold and alone in the wine-rich anonymity of the forest, Elaira let the tears slip through her fingers. Time itself blurred until the emotion welled dry and burned out of her.

She faced one last bitter thought.

What the Master of Shadow needed from Merior was the release his proscribed fate would not allow: for Lysaer’s armies were already moving west, to repeat and compound Strakewood’s tragedy in the coils of Deshthiere’s curse.

If the graceful brigantines mapped out in the sail-shed were not finished and launched by that hour, Arithon
s’Ffalenn would never survive to be hounded by his conscience. He would instead become torn out of life, cornered like a rat on the beach.

Summer sunset rinsed like a spill of scarlet dye over the spire of Althain Tower. Brassy heat fretted curls in the vine leaves latched over its age-gritted stone while the hour subsided into afterglow. Outlined by a window, and lined in sky clear as indigo-stained glass; diminished beneath his laden bookshelves, Sethvir listened to the squeak of a loose shutter and the dry, whispered winds off the desert. Beyond these, like a strand of silvered thread in common linen, he sensed the bright play of power that channelled through the third lane. Each facet of its grand mystery keyed into harmony with the wheeling stars. Scribed by the dance of sun, moon and tide, the strung, static matrix of harmonics plunged through a sliding shift in resonance: and the earth itself rang with the advent of solstice.

The Warden of Althain started erect. Touched by belated recollection of company about to arrive, he blotted his pen nib on his cuff.

His remedy for lapsed hospitality was to quarter the library like a fishing heron, snatching papers off his littered table. He raked his unshelved books into tipsy piles, grabbed bits of string and augury cards to use as
stopgap markers, then gave up and left the last covers flopped open, stacked in alcoves and unswept corners.

Inkwells that lacked stoppers remained where they stood, since every cupboard and aumbrey lay crammed already with oddments.

Asandir arrived at the lower gate before Althain’s Warden thought to rummage for a comb to clear the month’s tangles from his beard. His neglected grooming scarcely mattered. No others would come this season. Traithe was at King Eldir’s court in Ostermere to ease a dispute between the Elkforest clans and the merchants of Quaid; Luhaine remained entrenched at Meth Isle to assist its guardian spellbinder to quell a resurgence of karth-eels.

In Third Age Year fifty-six forty-five, the Fellowship’s solstice convocation of necessity was reduced to a partnership of two.

Worn by more than long leagues in the saddle, Asandir dropped into the seat by the casement. With him came a sulphurous tang of brimstone. His sleeve cuffs were marred with black-rimmed perforations pricked by a fall of live sparks. The ends of his shoulder-length hair hung tarnished and raggedly singed.

‘I’m fortunate not to have burns,’ Asandir admitted, just back from renewing the bindings which confined the fire-breathing Khadrim to the Sorcerers’ Preserve. The winged predators held an uncanny penchant for knowing when Fellowship reserves were taxed thinnest. Where they sensed weakness, they would harry like a wolf pack, inspired to a frenzy of bloodlust.

Too reticent for speech, the Warden of Althain roved a restless circuit of the table. He touched objects and book spines in aimless passing, his eyes not just distant, but glazed.

Asandir sharpened to attention.

His piercing, worried survey of Sethvir’s jumbled caches showed him a scraggle of dried herbs, three nuggets of amber glass, and a wren’s moulted flight feathers
scattered like slate knives amid a clutch of round stones from a stream bottom. These were netted in the gossamer winding of the usual visiting spider. Disturbed by the abandoned Look to the clutter, and nary a tea mug in sight, Asandir pinned his colleague with imperious concern. ‘What’s happened!’

Sethvir started, blinked, then thumped down in the nearest windowseat to a riled, dusty puff from a cushion. ‘What hasn’t! I have too much, news, and every bit of it grim.’

Since spoken words were a bother, Sethvir gave a haunted shrug, then shared, through a merciless, crystal-clear vision, an event scarcely ten hours old …

Cloudy dawn sheathed the peaks of the Thaldeins. The heavy air muffled the shod ring of hooves and flapped the fringed cloths of the banners: the crown and star of Tysan’s royal blazon paired with a new-made sigil, a sunburst ablaze on a white field that Princess Talith had sewn to commemorate the alliance against the Shadow Master. Now, the trained war host from Avenor laboured up the switched-back curves that laced rocky promontories, the men on foot flushed from exertion and each winded mount patched in sweat.

Ahead lay the Pass of Orlan.

Nervous officers mustered their companies into tighter formation. Over the bunched columns, wary of ambush by barbarian archers, Lysaer s’Ilessid projected his gift in a magnificent blanket of hazed light. The ward glowed as starlight on snow, a gossamer shimmer sheeted through veilings of cloud.

The footsoldiers marched fully-armoured for battle. Ahead stretched the defile where their liege’s proud company had once been reduced to a pauper’s march to Erdane. A dire score remained to be settled from that raid,
since Lysaer’s stolen wealth had come to be transferred into the Shadow Master’s cause. Restitution had been promised for the slight to the realm. Blood would be claimed for due justice.

Yet no barbarian ambush lurked at the height of the pass. Only the whine of the winds met the scouts sent to search, and white mist, and cruel scarps, and dark rock.

The cavalcade crawled on through the defiles. The challenge appeared first as a shadow sketched against darker grey: the
caithdein
herself, clad in no finery at all. Lady Maenalle’s leathers had never been dyed, a significant slight, though perhaps only Lysaer understood. This time their meeting did not signify even the dignified colour of her office, the black traditionally worn in the presence of sovereign blood.

The badge of Tysan’s regency was sewn at her breast, indigo and gold: the hues of sun and sky that shone through and framed her between precipice and vertical rock.

Straight as a sword, but weaponless, the
caithdein
of Tysan stood afoot in the path of the advance riders, the standard-bearers, the tall lancers three abreast that formed the block of the elite royal bodyguard. The officer in the vanguard drew rein before her and signalled his column to a halt.

The crack of hooves subsided. A horse snorted to a jingling chime of bit rings. Silence abided, shrill with the mewling cries of hawks. The gusts of high altitude moaned across stone, while the tight-meshed columns behind disarranged to make way for Lysaer s’Ilessid.

Caithdein
, Lady Maenalle, offered the prince no obeisance. She stepped forward, her cropped hair wind-whipped and bare of even a circlet. She offered no royal address, but glanced in contempt at the golden bloom of light sheeted through the breaking clouds overhead.
‘Does your Grace fear an ambush? Send out scouts. Search the rocks. They are empty.’

‘Once before they were not.’ Lysaer reined back his mount, who protested restraint and jibbed sideways. ‘Your clans have earned little footing for trust. Do you presume and come asking my forbearance?’

‘You have my word there are no archers in this pass,’ Maenalle replied.

‘If there were, they would be dead men.’ Lysaer lifted a gloved fist. The ward he had raised as a shield against arrows flared white-hot, then burned away in a dazzling snarl of sparks. While the horses in his company shied and plunged at his back, and his officers steadied them, cursing, he added, ‘Speak quickly. My mood isn’t kindly or patient.’

Maenalle met his arrogance as she might treat with an importunate child. ‘You’ve dared to claim Avenor and stand to arms by right of your bloodline, although you’re unsanctioned for ruling power. As a man who would wrest advantage from this realm in pursuit of a personal feud, I make my formal protest. For the good of this kingdom, I demand you abandon your campaign to kill the last Prince of Rathain. Arithon s’Ffalenn is no threat to Tysan. The Fellowship of Seven has named your cause false, and my duty lies first to the land.’

Lysaer gave back cold contradiction. ‘In that loyalty you are forsworn already.’ Breeze ruffled his hair and the trappings on his mount in a running pale fire of stirred gold. ‘What are the Fellowship, if not in league with the Master of Shadow? You also have lent him your support. Against that specifically, I warned.’

Maenalle’s hawk-yellow eyes never wavered. ‘Coin and goods levied in Rathain were sent back to their sovereign prince, through the sorcerers’ auspices. To what end the Teir’s’Ffalenn disposes of what’s his is no affair of mine, nor yours either, get of s’Ilessid. This I will say, before witnesses. If you are still the man you were born
to become, a prince true to your heritage with Tysan’s given charter as your law, you will turn about. Command your captains to retire your troops and leave Rathain’s affairs in peace.’

Lysaer inclined his head in heavy sorrow. ‘You ask too much. Arithon s’Ffalenn is a danger to us all. For the safety of innocents, no scion of my line worth his name could stand down.’

‘Dare you be first then, to spill the blood of a
caithdein
of the realm?’ Maenalle said.

‘I’ll do less.’ Lysaer s’Ilessid uttered sentence. ‘I will invoke town law and bid Isaer’s executioner to end the life of a thief who plunders caravans.’ He gestured to his officers, gloved fingers a raked blaze of jewels against a sudden lance of full sunlight. ‘Take her.’

Two captains dismounted at his bidding. At need, they borrowed lead reins from their mounts’ harness in readiness to bind a prisoner.

Lady Maenalle spared their approach not a glance. Bred to serve at the right hand of princes, her pride of bearing approached a near physical force, tempered well to stand royalty down. ‘Think what you do! Appoint my death and you forswear guest oath, given in amity at my hearthstone.’

Over the heads of his hesitant officers, Lysaer snapped a rebuttal. ‘Better I be forsworn as a man than the justice of this realm become debased. No affectation of courtesy will mitigate the punishment due for your act.’ Implacable in regret, he added, ‘Who am I, to uphold my personal honour before the protection of my townsfolk? They are untrained in magecraft, reliant upon my gift for their defence. Are Rathain’s people any less helpless than they, to be abandoned to a sorcerer turned criminal?’

Unbending, Maenalle gave him back her freezing silence.

And still her captors vacillated. A sharp word from their sovereign was required to jolt them to resume their given duty.

The elderly woman did not flinch, even as they laid hands on her unadorned wrists, jerked them together and bound them in leather. Throughout the course of their handling, while the gold star blazon was torn from her jerkin, Lady Maenalle’s wide eyes remained locked upon Lysaer’s face.

Only when they finished and cast her trussed on her knees before the hooves of the royal charger did the
caithdein
deliver her last word. ‘Beware, oathbreaker. The authority of my office shall pass through the Fellowship sorcerers to my grandson. Tysan’s clans remain loyal to your line, false prince, but for you, our goodwill is forfeit. From this day forward, expect an arrow from the shadows, poison in your cup, and a knife at your throat, among my people. My life is offered, that they will know you for what you have become: no saviour, but the slave of the Mistwraith’s design.’

Lysaer regarded the woman he had ordered broken through a moment of pitying quiet. Then he said, ‘To your sorrow, brave lady, and to the waste of your life, you are misled. I ride to war as defender of peace against a man who was born with no conscience. The great of this land, of which you were one, diminish us all when they fall sway to endangering influence. If the crown of this kingdom was once under Fellowship province to bestow, for the good of all people, I claim it back.’ He gathered his reins without triumph. ‘Where lies the virtue in tradition and what good is law, when its use has been turned to threaten innocents? I give you my hope, that when the Master of Shadow has been thwarted, your clans may one day come to welcome me.’

‘They may live to swear fealty to your sons,’ Maenalle said. ‘If my life should fall to the sword of Isaer’s headsman, on my heart’s blood, I promise, never you.’

The vision snapped apart like age-rotted tapestry scattered to dust in a gale. Sethvir hunched by the casement, his beard clasped in thin, inkstained fists. He said in haggard grief, ‘Lysaer was prince enough to keep his men in hand. They did not mishandle her beyond the indignity of shackles, but placed her under guard in a mule cart to bear her for formal arraignment.’

Asandir locked his fingers, knuckle on bone, in a white mesh of fury on the tabletop. Head bent, eyes shut, he scarcely felt the stroke of desert air across his skin. While the power in him shimmered in leashed stasis, and his flesh, a vessel too well-tempered to crack, stayed locked into stillness, he wept in straight sorrow, and lamented an event his Fellowship could not stay.

True sight must not be undone before emotion. Root and cause for Maenalle’s downfall lay in the Mist-wraith’s curse. Even if the means lay at hand to sunder its hold upon the princes, for the lady who was the dedicated
caithdein
of Tysan, salvation must come too late.

Fifteen days would see her dead on a scaffold in Isaer, by town law and s’Ilessid command.

A
caithdein
with the courage of lions and an integrity more steadfast than diamond, struck down in dishonour by the hand of her own prince: the epitaph carried a venomous sting. For Maenalle, there could be no more ugly an ending, no more bitter a wreckage of cherished hopes.

‘We are indeed come on ill times,’ said Asandir, chastened by remembrance of the Mistwraith’s first entry through South Gate, then the uprising that dethroned the high kings. Beset by such trials five centuries in the past, not a living member of his Fellowship had conceived how the tangle would breed tragic consequence.