Traitor's Knot (11 page)

No move eased the tension, no whisper of lace issued from the man in the chair.

The mayor moistened dry lips.

Before he spoke further, Lysaer bore in, furious, his majesty unimpeachable. ‘Ellaine is my wedded wife, and the mother of the child who was the crown heir of Tysan. Tell me this. Who has dared threaten the Princess of Avenor in her own home, under the Light of my justice?'

The mayor flushed crimson. ‘Your own crown council, who also arranged and paid for her predecessor, Talith's assassination.' While springing sweat matted his fur collar, he delivered the raw gist. ‘My daughter has seen documents, under Cerebeld's seal and signature, stating the name of the marksman who fired the crossbolt. Ellaine's testament, as proof, arrived in the pouch of our courier from Quarn. He rides routine post, and doesn't know where on his route the letter was slipped into his dispatches.'

A detail had changed: illness, perhaps, slipped the mask of cool sovereignty. After an unremarked little silence, Lysaer's stopped breathing resumed. ‘Cerebeld?' he said, glacial.

Lord Mayor Helfin wisely said nothing.

One royal palm turned. The fingers snapped, causing the by-standing servants to startle. ‘I'll have your state scribe draw up the indictment. Now!' cracked the living voice of Divine Light. ‘Be very sure of your evidence, my Lord Mayor. A sentence of treason does not carry an appeal. Upon your daughter's unimpeachable word, I will expose the truth. The trial will be public. The party responsible will be arraigned as a criminal. He and all who have served as collaborators will be put to death under the law. You will tell my commanding officer immediately, and say where my wife has sought shelter.'

‘I don't know where she is!' the Lord Mayor said, panicked. More than Avenor's commander of armies had moved him to blurt out, appalled, ‘My Blessed Prince, you didn't know!'

‘That my vested high priest has sanctioned a murder?' Lysaer's rebuke stung like bale-fire. ‘Do you think so little of the cause that I ask men to die for? I am no tool of politics, no weapon of factions that kill innocents in clandestine secrecy. Where is my wife, Princess Ellaine?'

Afraid, the Lord Mayor shook in his seat. ‘She hasn't told any-one her location. Her letter implied her earnest belief that your son also died by design. Blessed lord, I beg you, forgive her! How could the princess have known that your orders were not behind the criminal acts of your high council officers?'
Through a searing, drawn moment, flames crackled in the hearth. Dumb wind rattled the casements. Then Lysaer said, ‘I will read Ellaine's letter.'

The Lord Mayor of Erdane fumbled into his doublet. The creased sheet he surrendered had been made from pulped rags, unbleached for workaday commerce. The ragged, left edge might have been torn from some wayside inn's string-bound ledger.

Lysaer settled the document in his lap, to a flashfire glitter of rings. ‘Your amazement demeans all that is wholesome,' he responded, his voice chill as the gleam on a sword-blade. ‘As of this moment, every household resource you have has been requisitioned by the Light. My officers will spend every coin in your coffers to secure the life of your daughter, who is my princess. She is not your prestige. Nor is she my callous possession, to be discussed like a string of dropped pearls.' The rebuke gathered force, shame distilled to bleak venom. ‘No mercy! Those who have threatened her may ask for no quarter, whether or not she is brought home unharmed.' Lysaer ended the audience. ‘My Lord Mayor Helfin, you have leave to go.'

Laid raw, the fat townsman slammed to his feet. He stamped out in a rage that would empty his treasury, if only to protest the ruthless slur just dealt to his family pride.

As the door banged shut with hammering force, Sulfin Evend shoved straight, to applaud. Lysaer's statecraft was masterful. This superb play would replenish the coffers left emptied since Daon Ramon Barrens.

Yet Lysaer's expostulation cut across his commander's sardonic praise. ‘Leave!' The word smashed the composure of his hovering chamber servant. He jumped, with the page-boy hard at his heels. The valet hesitated, and found himself curtly dismissed by a summary gesture. The man went, contrite. In the emptied, cold room, light gleamed on blond hair: the Exalted Prince had tipped his head to rest against the high back of his chair.

Sulfin Evend was left to try tacit address. ‘My liege?'

The imperious face turned. Eyes wide, pupils distended with vacuous shock, Lysaer's unseeing gaze encompassed the ranking retainer his royal orders had installed in the bed.

He had no words in him, to dismiss this last witness, no strength left, to constrain his deep horror. He crumpled, undone by his heart-sore grief. His forehead rested upon his closed fist, while the tears welled and spilled, soaking the fine, thread lace of his sleeve and spoiling priceless white velvet.

‘She had your love,' Sulfin Evend said, his gravel-rough pity subdued.

‘My joy,' Lysaer gasped. ‘All my joy. Ended, I find, by an ambitious animal who had her dispatched by a thug with a quarrel.' Not Ellaine: his deceased
Talith
had moved him to agony. Pushed straight, rings trembling, he collected himself and considered the rest of his family. ‘What have I created under the sun, that corruption has twisted into a force that would slaughter a woman and child?'

‘Ambition serves power,' Sulfin Evend said, harsh. The lives burned to cinders in Daon Ramon Barrens
even still
kept him haunted beyond equanimity. ‘You were never Ath's sword, to see into small minds.'

‘I will have to be, now.' Lysaer's blue eyes stayed direct, still wide-open to turbulent grief, and a revulsion that stopped thought to witness.

Sulfin Evend threw off the bed-clothes. Naked, he strode over the rug, wrenched open the armoire, but found only rows of white-satin sleeves, and marmalade silk, cut for banquets.

‘I will have my weapons and armour returned.' He stood planted, uncaring that he had not a stitch of cloth on him. ‘This foolish pretence is over. I am not sick, and you are not god sent, and your Talith was surely cut dead by a faction whose backing is rooted in necromancy. The cultists are secretive. They are powerful enemies. You have no trained knowledge, and less overt power, to withstand their black spells and vile practice. I have not just risked my life, or set my spirit in jeopardy, to watch you destroy all you have built for a woman who's seventeen years in the grave. You must not return to Avenor! On my sword, if you try, I shall stop you.'

Lysaer was too depleted to rise from the chair. Yet the stare he returned raked with scouring contempt. ‘How dare you imply I should run for your sake.'

‘For all our sakes,' Sulfin Evend said, wild. ‘Now, what have you done with my clothing?'

‘You don't have the requisite power to stop me, with your breeches and sword, or without them!' Rushed, Lysaer appended, ‘I am not ungrateful. I trust you to leave, if you fear your life's compromised. Your possessions are there, in that chest. You may dress and take arms at will. Shall I date and sign your discharge today? Or will you deign to accompany my retinue, and maintain your post through the journey I'll make, by way of the south road, to Hanshire?'

Which insufferable dismissal at last insulted Sulfin Evend's intelligence. ‘You can't haze my nerve, that way'

Violent as a winter-lean wolf, he flung open the clothes-chest, but found he could not stop listening. The proposal to take the roundabout route to Avenor at least showed a shred of good sense. The strong-box, as well, was sequestered and safe. The thoughtful valet had left that dread charge discreetly wrapped in his field cloak.

All brisk business, the Lord Commander snatched up his breeches. ‘You'll need Hanshire's backing if you're set to pursue this. Also, the records found in the sealed vault underneath of Erdane's library. If the mayor is convinced to make free with those, he'll do so at sword-point, and not one bit for the love of his missing daughter.'

Gratitude restored the hint of a smile before Lysaer spoke, without adamancy ‘I must go back. A conspiracy has tainted my council at Avenor. Far more than my wife and child have been haplessly set in harm's way. I created
this government! Its soundness of principle is my avocation. As Tysan's regent, the challenge is mine, to restore a just rule. I will not rest, nor will your sword, until this rot has been exposed and cut out.'

‘Then you had best pray that Dharkaron Avenger will forgive your rank arrogance and drive his Chariot at your right hand. Naught else can save you.' Sulfin Evend's dark head vanished in twill, then reappeared, recent grooming undone. He hooked up his mail to a jangle of rings. ‘You won't have my sword right away, mercy on you.' His glare lost no edge as he ducked to slither the field armour over his shoulders. ‘I'll have to do my sweet best to advise, then rejoin you by galley after the ice breaks.'

‘This is not resignation.' Lysaer smiled then, clean sunlight on snow. If his eyes shone too bright, the embarrassment escaped notice.

Sulfin Evend sat, busy with hose, boots, and spurs. ‘Help me find grace! I ought to be drunk, to be acting so feckless. I have an errand I have to run first. The bone-knife that enslaved you must be destroyed.'

Lysaer need say nothing. His point had been won. Wrung limp, he regarded his depleted hands and the letter caged lightly between them.

Sulfin Evend stood up. As he snatched in nettled haste for his baldric, his sideward glance settled and sharpened. He moved with dispatch after that, hung his scabbard, and wrapped up his discourse forthwith. ‘Liege, I'll be calling your servants to set you in bed. Then I'm making rounds of my war camp. After two days, I expect to find shambles. Once my officers have orders, I'm taking the best horse in your father-in-law's stables. Don't ask where I'm bound. Your vaunted principles assuredly won't stand it. If I come back unscathed, and if you're not waiting in state at Hanshire with every fit company we have at your back, then yes. By all means. Give my written discharge into the hands of my family'

Dressed and fully armed, the Alliance Commander bowed before his liege's chair. ‘Guard yourself well,' he murmured in parting.

Silence answered. Lysaer had passed beyond conscious awareness. The discovery yielded a poisoned advantage: a sane intervention was possible, now. Act upon spurious opportunity, and Sulfin Evend might strip the false tissue of the divine cause. He might break the course of his sovereign's willed future, through informed mercy and the brute force of his vested command.

Lysaer slouched in the huge brocade chair. His senseless hands lay loose in his lap, tucked over the desperate words of a wife he had played as a painted game-piece. Yet the hardness that drove every inhumane choice was not written into the man. Care-worn to exhaustion, exposed in the artless sleep of an all-too-human fallibility, the magisterial presence that had stood off Erdane's mayor should have seemed reduced to its thread of mortality. Instead, the brazen commitment just spoken lost its overtone of brash arrogance.

The raw courage behind Lysaer's resolve caught Sulfin Evend like a fist at the throat.

‘Mercy on you,' he whispered, and spun on his heel. Too proud, too heart-torn to break trust with such naked vulnerability, the Alliance Lord Commander retrieved the wrapped strong-box and fled headlong from the room.

Too late: two sworn oaths and the contrary grain of his honesty pursued him beyond that closed door. Peace had been destroyed by the conflict of loyalties now branded into his skin.

Late Spring-Summer 5670

While dark cultists regroup from their surprise set-back, and a secretive liegeman rides out of Erdane, Sethvir of the Fellowship faces dilemma: with no available help from the field, and no remedy for his invalid weakness, the necromancers who bid to suborn Lysaer's rule might yet rip the compact apart at one stroke…

Beating to weather against the stiff winds that presage the turn of the season, Feylind, who captains the merchant brig
Evenstar
, drives her vessel around the cliffs at Sanpashir, then wears ship, checks her yards, and ploughs a white streamer of wake toward her home port of Innish…

Trail-weary and silted with summer's thick dust, a lone clansman crosses the hills of Caith-al-Caen; just past summer's eve, he crosses the ancient Paravian way, and slips into Halwythwood, bearing the first confirmed news from the north concerning the Prince of Rathain…

Summer 5670

W
hile storm followed tempest, and incessant rain lashed the western kingdoms to deluge and mud, the lands east of the Storlain Mountains enjoyed a golden, mild summer. The light breezes pranked and whispered through the forested wilds of Atwood. Gusts skimmed through the fringe of the East Halla farm-steads, and riffled like billowing silk through the grain-fields that bordered the coastal lowlands. The trade-roads were dry, and forage was plentiful, which caused the Mad Prophet a cracking irritation.

Since Luhaine's deliverance from Shipsport's magistrate, his temper was not resigned. Denied the sharpened, fit edge of his talent by his forced regime of loose living, Dakar suffered a tipsy journey on foot, plagued by pounding hangovers and hay fever. This morning, with the heat a feverish blanket around him, his tight skull was played like hammer and tongs by tortuous fits of sneezing.

The easy living left Fionn Areth too much time for his badgering questions. ‘I thought you said East Halla raised mercenaries, not crops,' the young man ran on. ‘I've seen no army. Only cud-chewing cattle, defended by nothing but grasshoppers.'

‘So you're meant to think.' Dakar pressed a handkerchief to his livid nose. ‘Look again. That's not a byre, and those aren't windmills, and for the sweet tits Ath puts on a virgin, keep your hat on your head, and your foolish hand off your sword-hilt!'

Fionn Areth grinned, his brown cheek flecked with the light that scattered through his straw hat's brim. ‘We'll be spitted like geese at a field shoot?' He had noticed the arrow-slits; the looped apertures for cross-bows; then the
sinister fact that, beneath timber sheathing, the croft buildings were stone, built two spans thick and recessed with galleries for arbalists.

‘The s'Brydion have a dagger set into their fists when the midwife cuts the cord at their birthing. They get dandled by fathers who wear mail shirts to bed, and are blood-suckled on the arts of warfare.' Dakar rolled red eyes sidewards. ‘You'll see soon enough. There's the citadel.'

‘Where?' Fionn Areth craned over the shoulder-high corn, tasselled and droning with insects.

‘There.' Dakar pointed. ‘Don't act cocky. The look-out's seen you. He'll have counted that blade at your belt, first of all. At the gate, they'll already know the coin worth of your buckles and buttons.'

A winkle of light flared through the sea haze, banked above the horizon.

Fionn Areth stared, enchanted. A moment's search, and he made out the outline, grey overlaid on a palette of slate: the high teeth of stone battlements, seemingly cast adrift above the shimmering scarf of the barley-fields. ‘The watch surveys the road, do you say? Just how, in that steam-bath of mist?'

‘Are you simple?' Dakar honked noisily, veiled in the dust thrown up by couriers and drays returning unladen from market. ‘We've been under their eye from those windmills, since dawn. The signals are passed on with mirrors.'

Foot-sore from the iron-hard ruts, Fionn Areth pressed on toward the stronghold of the Duke of Alestron, whose clan family, Arithon s'Ffalenn had once said, were “warmongering lions who judge a man first by his armament.”

They reached the walled citadel in the slatted shadows of late afternoon. Perched on its promontory above the sea, the massive, tiered bastion of Alestron reared up like a cliff-face, its flint stone notched with arrow-slits, and its mortar glittering with embedded glass. From the soot shade under the outer gate, beneath the teeth of its massive twin portcullis, a man would be flattened by the inbound traffic before he could count even half of the murder holes.

‘I feel like a seamstress's pincushion, already,' Fionn Areth murmured in awe. Shown what the duke's men considered a guard's standard issue of weaponry, he added, chilled, ‘Or I should have said, collops and mince. Do these folk have any enemies left alive with the warm bollocks to breed offspring?'

‘If they didn't, they'd thrash up some more in a heart-beat,' Dakar said. ‘They're wont to pick fights like starved wolves dumped fighting mad into a cur pack.'

For him, the steep, switched-back road past the gate carried too many damnable memories. The last time he had called on the lord of Alestron, he had come on an errand for Sethvir, with Arithon of Rathain made the butt of a personal plot laid as a double cross. Even after twenty-six years, Dakar winced at the outcome. S'Ffalenn cunning had defanged his set trap. Without intervention from a Fellowship Sorcerer, Dakar would have seen himself spitted on the venom of s'Brydion vindictiveness.

Today, escorting Arithon's shapechanged double, he sweated by turns, clammy dread superseded by his eagerness to see Fionn Areth receive his long-overdue comeuppance.

‘They don't like besiegers, I see that much,' the young man allowed. Just as anxious to give the spellbinder his brisk quittance, he turned his admiring regard to the gate barracks, and the brick bailey just visible through the portal, where the guard checked arms for the watch change at sundown. ‘Where should I go to sign with the field troops who fight for the Alliance of Light?'

‘A trained swordsman like you? March with the foot ranks?' Dakar's sidelong glance showed contempt.

Fionn Areth drew himself up, his pleased surprise at the compliment stifled behind a thick scowl. ‘The day sergeant could have told me,' he insisted, dodging a wine tun rolled by a boy in a stained-leather brigandine, ‘where I should go to sign on the rolls as an officer.'

Dakar tucked a strategic cough behind his fist. ‘They would not,' he said, eyes watering from stifled laughter. ‘This is Alestron. Charter law rules here, and promotions to rank go by merit. However,' he said, snatching his companion's sleeve, before he ducked back toward the barracks, ‘if you wish to be seen as more than a green recruit, you could come along to the upper citadel. I might present you in person to the reigning s'Brydion duke.'

Fionn Areth stopped short, almost run down by a wagon filled with crates of squabbling chickens. Oblivious to the carter's oaths and the blizzard of down dusting over his hat, he said, ‘No! You're damned to the dark as a minion of Shadow! In such company as yours, I'd likely be lopped into mincemeat the moment you opened your mouth!'

‘You think so?' Dakar's grin widened. ‘More likely, my friend, I'd be cut dead for standing next to your face. You're so blissed at the prospect of killing for glory, you've forgotten whose features you're wearing?'

Fionn Areth flushed. ‘Well, maybe I'm thinking I'd be better off if somebody else introduced me. Your name's too well known, for a certainty'

‘By all means,' the Mad Prophet mocked. ‘You can try. But without my credentials, I'll tell you now, you won't pass the gate to the inner citadel.'

‘And you can?' Fionn Areth marched onwards. ‘Show me a marvel I can believe, like a chick from an egg-hatching donkey!'

‘I'm the apprentice spellbinder to a Sorcerer. Charter law answers to crown justice, and, grass-lands idiot, no offence to your ignorance, crown justice upholds the compact
as granted
by the grace of the Fellowship of Seven.' Smug as a swindler, Dakar sidled into an alley with a steep, twisting stair, without pause to see if his mark followed. ‘The s'Brydion will not only receive me, they'll provide board and bed, and a bath with a willing maidservant.'

Fionn Areth raised his eyebrows, prepared to retort. But Dakar's wheezing seemed cruelty enough, as the ascent robbed him of breath for dignified speech.

At the top, disgorged on a road like a cliff-rim, they passed through another
wall, and another gate, this one more heavily guarded. Here, a plank-bridge spanned a vertical ditch, with keep towers on either side. The streets beyond snaked up the promontory, overhung by slotted-wood hidings. These had murder holes also. The unwary traffic moved underneath, drowned in a blue gulf of shade. Footmen and carriages, horsemen and drays breasted the seething press. Squeezed into the slot of another close, Fionn Areth realized the craft shops and houses were built chock-a-block, their fortified facings pierced with notches for bowmen.

‘S'Brydion don't like besiegers,' Dakar agreed, puffing to recoup his wind where a matron's herb pots soaked up a thin slice of sun.

Upwards again, they passed the rock-springs and the cisterns; then the chopped turf of the tilt-yards; another barracks and armoury, attached to a smithy. The heat wafted through the crossbuck door smelled of charcoal, and the clangour of hammers was deafening. Fionn Areth stepped, crackling, over curled shavings, whisked on the breeze from the cooper's shacks; dodged a boy rolling rims to the wheelwright's. Higher, three muddy children tugged a squealing pig on a string, past a fat woman who scolded. Pigeons flew in flurries of slate wings, and gulls perched, white, on the cornices. They passed the brickmaker's kilns, and the steaming vats where the renderers stirred fat to make yellow soap, and a sweating girl boiling fish-glue. Dakar puffed a complaint that his chest would split, and asked for a stop at a wine-shop.

‘Only one glass,' he promised. ‘It's our chance to take in the gossip.'

Fionn Areth sat in a dimmed corner, his hat-brim pulled low, while a man who made rivets flirted with the barmaid, and others with sword scars shot dice. In the streets, he had noticed that most men bore the marks of campaigns; or else the s'Brydion sergeants taught their recruits with sharpened weapons.

‘This whole town's a war camp,' he murmured to Dakar, as they paid up to leave.

The comment earned him a moon-calf glance. ‘It's a wasp's nest,' Dakar amended, then belched into his hand. ‘I thought you would feel quite at home here?'

They climbed again, past dormered houses, then another deep ditch, and a wall notched with razor-toothed barbicans. The gatehouse held embrasures for ballistas, and a sand arena contained the full-scale array of a field camp. Horsemen were at practice, and other men, stripped, were perfecting the aim on a trebuchet.

‘You will notice, there's been no standing timber for five leagues,' said Dakar. ‘If an attacking host wishes to assault with siege weapons, it must import the timber, then cross that naked valley by ox carriage. Plenty of time for that monster, there, to hammer such toys into match-sticks.' He finished with wine-scented gravity. ‘You don't want the s'Brydion clan for your enemies.'

Higher, they climbed, past stables and commons, while the swooping rooks
wheeled in the salty gusts whisked off the channel inlet. They sheltered in a doorway as an armed troop clattered by drilled to a cutting-edge of obedience. The captain who led them had eyes like his steel, sharpened and ruthlessly wary.

‘There, just ahead.' The Mad Prophet panted. His wave encompassed two high towers, and a slit in between, which glowered down over a cleft like a quarry. The gulf was spanned by a thin, swaying bridge suspended on cables and forged chain. ‘That's the Wyntock Gate to the inner citadel. Here's where the war host that sacked the royal seat at Tirans was broken, then crushed, in the uprising over five hundred years ago. They say the ditch, there, ran knee deep in blood at low tide, with the heaped fallen seething with ravens and vultures.' Overhead, there were such birds, now, circling high on the air-currents. Dakar mopped back his screwed hair and shoved off toward the bridge. ‘They bring up dray teams and supply wagons by winch from the sea-gate, and now, the defences get serious.'

The approach took them through another set of twinned keeps, pierced by a narrow, cobble-stone ramp, pitched too steep for a cart. Planks had been laid, ribbed with nailed strips. The wood had been gouged into slivers by horses shod with screwed caulks.

‘In war, they will unshackle the span of the bridge, then take up the planks and sluice down this causeway with grease,' Dakar said. ‘Foot-troops can't pass then. See those embrasures? That's where the archers lie back and slaughter each wave of attackers at leisure.'

‘They don't advance under frameworks and hides?' Fionn Areth asked, breathless.

‘They try, and they burn like a torch.' Dakar added grimly, ‘Look up.'

Overhead lay a spider-work track of forged metal, where an iron cart bearing boiling oil, or pitch-soaked batts could be dumped to scorch any force pressed against the meshed gate.

At the top, stopped by hard men with bared steel, Dakar gave his name. ‘He's with me.' A jerk of his chin set the sentries' cold glance sweeping over Fionn Areth. ‘My surety,' the Mad Prophet informed them, then said, ‘We're expected. If you don't wish to trouble the duke or his brothers, Vhandon or Talvish can speak for us.'

The man in charge grinned, his helm polished over the scratches of veteran service. ‘Brave man, you say my lord's family knows you? Better pray, if they don't. The two captains you mentioned will vouchsafe your identity, or else you'll soon be greeting the rooks who clip the dead eyes from your carcass.' He surveyed them again, lingering over Fionn Areth's plain sword and blunt hands. ‘Go across. Since I don't know your faces, expect that you're going to be challenged.'

The watch-officer stepped back. High overhead, someone yelled, ‘It's a maybe?'

The sentry nodded. Another man must have dispatched a signal, for torchlight winked in smart reply from a mirror in the far keep.

Past the narrows of the Wyntock Gate, goatherd and prophet stepped onto the bridge, whose gouged planks heaved under their load like sea-rollers. The steel links of the chain pinched a swatch of snagged tail hair.

‘They can't cross a horse here!' Fionn Areth protested, clenched sick by the irregular, bucking sway and the creak of taut cordage beneath him.

‘They do,' Dakar rebutted. ‘Hand-picked light cavalry and stronghold couriers, the animals are ridden or led over one at a time.' He paused, queasy, as a raven soared down the ribbon of shade cast by the span underneath them. ‘The animals are trained as sucklings beside their dams. Legend holds the original mares were hand-picked, starved for water, then lured over to drink under a blindfold. You don't,' he finished, ‘presume the impossible with s'Brydion. Foes who have tend to rue the experience.'