Fugitive Prince Read online

  “This is a strict issue of sovereignty!” the clansman pealed back through the sawn and inimical silence. “Your royal inheritance has been disbarred by the Fellowship of Seven because your fitness to rule has been compromised. We serve no cause outside of our land’s founding charter! This war you pursue against Arithon of Rathain is engendered by the curse laid on you both by the Mistwraith.”

  The Lady Maenalle s’Gannley had said the same words in the hour of her execution. The heavyset Mayor of Isaer might have borne witness, since she had been tried and condemned in his city, under his justiciar’s tribunal.

  Havish’s ambassador himself could confirm that the statement held more than a grain of hard truth. But his king’s will kept him silent, even as the other dignitaries expressed their searing disbelief. Ill feeling already ran hot on both sides. However the thundering crosscurrents of hatred bent truth to imperil the prisoner, Havish’s representative could do naught but observe.

  Lysaer’s control was not absolute. Despite his impressive majesty, no matter how staunch his self-command, distrust of old blood royalty made his claim to the throne controversial; more telling still, the question just raised against the morality of his dedicated conflict. Fresh losses still stung. Inside one year, the campaign he pursued against the Master of Shadow had seen the eastshore trade fleet sundered and burned at Minderl Bay, then the clash as the armed might of four kingdoms ended in an abattoir of spilled blood at Vastmark.

  As new uncertainty threaded tension through the gathering, all eyes fixed on the prince in his tabard of flawless white and gold.

  His stance held straight as an arrow nocked to the drawn bow. He perused the assembled dignitaries, nestled like plumed birds in roped pearls and winter velvets; acknowledged the military captains with their muscled impatience; then diverted, to touch last on the single man in the chamber born to a laborer’s status. One whose stiff, uneasy stillness stood apart from languid courtiers like a stake hammered upright in a lily bed.

  “How I wish the threat posed by the Master of Shadow were due only to the meddling of Desh-thiere.” A disarming regret rode Lysaer’s pause. Then, as if weariness cast a pall over desperate strength, he relinquished his advantage of height, sat down, and plunged on in bald-faced resolve. “But far worse has come to bear on this conflict than rumors of an aberrant curse. This goes beyond any issue of enmity between the Shadow Master and myself. Hard evidence lies on record in the cities of Jaelot and Alestron. Twice, unprovoked, Arithon s’Ffalenn wielded sorcery against innocents with destructive result. Now, in the course of the late war in Vastmark, a more dire accusation came to light. Since it may touch on the case here at hand, I ask this gathering’s indulgence.”

  The prince beckoned for the plain-clad man to mount the stair to the dais. “Your moment has come to speak.”

  The fellow arose to a scrape of rough boots, his occupation plain in his seaman’s gait and hands horned in callus from a lifetime spent hauling nets. Too diffident to ascend to the level of royalty, he chose a stance alongside the accused clansman. His embarrassed gaze remained fixed on his toes, unscuffed and shiny from a recent refurbishing at the cobbler’s.

  “I was born a fisherman at Merior by the Sea,” he opened. “When Arithon’s brigantine, the Khetienn, was launched, I left my father’s lugger to sign on as one of her crewmen. Under command of the Master of Shadow, I bore witness to an atrocity no sane man could sanction. For that reason, I deserted, and stand here today. Word of his monstrous act at the Havens inlet must be told, that justice may come to be served.”

  Then the words poured from him, often halting, tremulous with remembered horror. Too desperately, he wished to forget what had happened on the summer afternoon as the Khetienn put into one of the deep, fissured channels, where the high crags of Vastmark plunged in weather-stepped stone to the shoreline of Rockbay Harbor. Today, pallid under the window’s thin sunshine, the seaman recounted the affray, when two hundred archers under Arithon s’Ffalenn had dispatched, without mercy, a company five hundred and thirty men strong.

  “They were murdered!” the sailhand pealed in distress. “The vanguard were cut down in ruthless waves as they scrambled, exposed on the cliff trails. More fell while launching boats in retreat. They were dropped in their tracks by volleys of arrows shot out of cover from above.” The long-sighted seaman’s eyes were raised now, locked to a horrified memory. As if they yet viewed the steep, shadowed cliffs; the wave-fretted channel of the inlet; the still-running blood of men broken like toys in the brazen, uncaring sunlight. As though, beyond time, living flesh could still cringe from the screams of the maimed and the dying, scythed down in full flight, then tumbled still quick in their agony into the thrash of the breakers.

  “Such slaughter went on, unrelenting.” Before listeners strangled into shocked quiet, the damning account unfolded. Impelled now by passionate outrage, scene after scene of inhumane practice were described in the fisherman’s slow, southcoast accent. “Those wretches who fled were killed from behind. Any who survived to launch longboats did so by shielding their bodies behind corpses. Their valor and desperation made no difference. They were cut off as they sought to make sail. Every galley turned in flight was run down and fired at the mouth of the inlet. No vessel was spared. Even a fishing lugger burdened with wounded was razed and burned to her waterline. Mercy was forbidden, at Arithon’s strict order. By my life, as I stand here, and Dharkaron as my judge, the killing went on until no man who tried landfall was left standing.”

  The fisherman stirred, came back to himself, and shifted his feet in self-consciousness. “All that I saw took place before the great rout at Dier Kenton Vale.”

  The last line trailed into appalled, awkward stillness. City officials sat in their numbed state of pride, pricked down the spine by an incomprehensible fear. Their poise like struck marble, every veteran commander sweated inwardly, forced to accept that the wretched, slaughtered companies could as easily have been their own men.

  The moment hung and then passed. Deep breaths were drawn into stopped lungs. Bodies shifted and hat feathers quivered, and humid hands fumbled through scrips and pockets in quest of comforting handkerchiefs.

  Then the floor loosened into talk all at once.

  “Ath show us all mercy!” The minister of the weaver’s guild fanned a suety face with the brim of his unwieldy bonnet. “What sickness of mind would drive a human being to command such a letting of blood?”

  “The killing appears to have been done for no reason,” the Khetienn’s deserter stressed mournfully. “No one who landed at the Havens survived. The wyverns there scavenged the corpses.”

  But the ambassador from Havish weighed the sailor’s lidded gaze, that darted and shied from direct contact. Instinct suggested this witness had withheld some telling fact from his speech. For malice, perhaps, or personal rancor against his former captain, he might slant his account to spark vengeful impetus to Lysaer’s ongoing feud.

  “But Arithon s’Ffalenn never acts without design.” The passionate impact of Lysaer’s rebuttal spun electrifying tension in contrast. “No man alive is more clever, or sane. This Spinner of Darkness would have his reason, cold-blooded, even vicious, to have timed and effected such slaughter.”

  Lysaer stood, fired now by conviction which no longer let him keep still. The light shimmered across his collar yoke of diamonds, template to his distress. “We know the scarps above Dier Kenton Vale were splintered into a rock fall. Earth itself was suborned as a weapon to break the proud ranks of our war host. If the rim walls in that territory are prone to slides, the ruin rained down on our troops was a feat beyond all bounds of credibility. What if more than exploitation of a natural disaster were the cause? Could sorcery in fact have been used to cleave a new fault line? Even weaken the structure of the shale?”

  Disturbed murmurs swept the benches. Feathers rippled and velvet hats tipped, as men shared their fears with their neighbors.

  “Arithon s’Ffalenn was born
to mage training!” Prince Lysaer exhorted above the noise. “Through his seemingly wanton slaughter at the Havens, could he not have tapped the arcane power to rend the very fabric of the earth?”

  On orchestrated cue, the shriveled little man in scholar’s robes started up from his unobtrusive dreaming. “The premise is not without precedent,” he affirmed in a drilling, treble quaver. “There are proscribed practices that herb witches use to tap forces of animal magnetism.”

  A stunning truth. Every common man-at-arms who ever bought an illicit love philter had observed the filthy practice.

  “These distasteful creatures will slay a live animal, then cast binding spells from the spilled effervescence of its life essence. How much more potent the power to be gained, if the sacrificial victims were human?” The scholar cast his accusation above an uneasy, incredulous anger. “Be sure, the massed deaths of five hundred spirits would be enough to cleave the very mountains in twain to wreak that unconscionable destruction on our troops!”

  “The question is raised,” Avenor’s deep-voiced justiciar sliced through the uproar. He nodded in respect to his prince, then addressed the bound clansman. “If the Master of Shadow engages dark magecraft, the preeminent arcane order on this continent has not stepped forth to denounce him. The Fellowship Sorcerers have not spoken. Nor have they acted to curb his vile deeds. The Warden of Althain himself is said to feel each drop of blood spilled in Athera. Every death at the Havens would be known to him. Why should he let this atrocity pass?”

  A mayor in the front row raised an imperious fist. “The opposite has happened, in practice!”

  A scathing point; more than once, the Sorcerers had stood as Arithon’s spokesmen.

  Havish’s royal ambassador stiffened, then stamped down his urgent protest. In even-handed fairness, hard against their better judgment, the Fellowship Sorcerers had also endorsed today’s return of the princess’s purloined ransom. Lysaer’s avoidance of that truth was duplicitous. Pained by the loyalty due his own king, the ambassador endured through the unjust malignment, while Avenor’s justiciar widened the charges in his sonorous, gravelly bass.

  “What is the Fellowship’s silence, if not evidence of collaboration? By this lack of intervention, events would suggest that the Sorcerers may support all of Arithon’s actions against us.”

  “They gave their vaunted sanction to Rathain’s crown prince,” Etarra’s Lord Harradene allowed. “If the Fellowship stands together as the Shadow Master’s ally, the consequence can’t be dismissed. They may have become corrupted. If they deem the use of dark magecraft as no crime, Prince Lysaer, as the public defender of the innocent, would naturally be obstructed in his legitimate claim to rule Tysan.”

  The clan prisoner’s sharp protest became shouted down by another voice as accented as his own. “Now there’s a braw, canting spiel, well fitted for a mealymouthed lawyer!”

  Mute on the benches, the ambassador from Havish shut his eyes in relief.

  Volatile as spilled flame in the red-and-gold surcoat of Alestron’s unvanquished clan dukes, Mearn s’Brydion, appointed delegate of his brother, sprang up in pacing agitation. “While you bandy conjecture in mincing, neat words, let us pay strict attention to procedure! If this slaughter at the Havens ever happened, where’s hard proof?” He cast suspicious gray eyes toward the sailhand, impervious himself to the looks turned his way by townsmen distrustful of his breeding. “Or will you sheep dressed in velvets let yourselves be gulled by the word of a man disaffected?”

  As the deckhand surged forward, flushed into outrage, Mearn raised a finger like a blade. “I’ve not said you’re a liar! Not outright. Arithon’s a known killer, that much I grant. I witnessed the debacle he caused in our armory. But whether his slaughter of these companies at the Havens took place as a blood crime, or some cruel but expedient act of war, the killing was done on the soil of Shand. Can’t mix your legalities for convenience. Town law won’t apply to a kingdom. Under sovereignty of Shand’s founding charter, as written by the Fellowship of Seven, Prince Arithon’s offense is against Lord Erlien, High Earl of Alland. As caithdein of that realm, the Teir s’Taleyn is charged to uphold justice in the absence of his high king. The question of Prince Arithon’s guilt falls under his province to determine.”

  “What is the old law to our city councils?” cried the plump, ribboned spokesman from Isaer. “Just hot wind and words! The caithdeins’ authority was broken when the uprising threw down crown rule. And even if our mayors cared to bow to dead precedents, has this new evidence against Arithon not tainted the clans’ legal claim? What if the Fellowship’s morals are debased? Shall we wait and watch our cities become victimized?”

  Talk rose, scored through by a treble run of panic. Even the sallow, bored Seneschal of Avenor thumped his stick fist to be heard. “Should we risk being deceived, or stay willfully blind, then suffer the same ruin that leveled whole buildings in Jaelot?”

  From all quarters of the chamber, heads turned. Ones bare and close cropped to accommodate mail, and others fashionably coifed. Earrings swung, and jewelry chinked, as every face trained on the Prince of the Light. He alone could speak for both factions, through hard-won respect and ties to an old blood inheritance.

  Yet it was Lord Shien, joint captain of Avenor’s field troops, whose remark stormed the floor into quiet. “If the barbarian before this council was sent as an envoy to declare his chieftain’s enmity, we have sure trouble here at home!” A large man, with meaty, chapped knuckles and a frown that seemed stitched in place, he raised the bull bellow he used to cow recruits. “And whether or not the Master of Shadow has embraced wickedness, or sacrificed lives to buy power, dissent from the clans will give him a free foothold here to exploit. We dare not allow such a weakness. Not before such dire threat.”

  Attention swung back. Like blood in the water amidst schooling sharks, men fastened their outrage upon the offender held bound within reach. “Sentence the archer! Condemn him for treason! Let him die as example to his brethren!”

  “Do that,” interceded the long-faced justiciar, “and according to town edict, he dies on the scaffold, broken one limb at a time.”

  “He was sent to contest a legitimate point of law!” Mearn s’Brydion warned. “Take his life in dishonor, and your clans here will never be reconciled.”

  “A child knows better than to break into state chambers bearing arms!” a southcoast mayor bristled back.

  Inexorably, sentiment aligned. The delivery of the chieftain’s message had been insolent, a mockery of civilized practice. No townsman remembered the bygone tradition, when a ceremonial arrow gave symbolic exchange of a high king’s censure from his liegemen. Where those old ways once forestalled needless bloodshed, now, they were seen as provocation. The trade guilds had suffered too many losses in clan raids to trifle with forgotten forms of etiquette. Nor was Lord Shien inclined toward forgiveness. Not when his divisions had been held home in Tysan, guarding the roads from the spree of vengeful ambushes launched after Lady Maenalle’s execution. His blood burned in balked rage for those companies marched south, every comrade in arms to perish untimely of a sorcerer’s fell tactics in Vastmark.

  Only the ambassador from Havish regarded the clan prisoner with pity. The man waited, his stance easy. His attention never shifted from the face of the prince on the dais.

  Lysaer s’Ilessid withheld intervention. Serene as smoothed marble, his form touched in light like the finished planes of a masterpiece, he allowed the dissonant chaos of argument to roll and rebound and gain force. He listened for the moment when his disparate factions became unified, their imprecations a shouted resonance of passion, crying for blood in redress.

  Then he held up one hand. A spark snapped from his palm, the smallest manifestation of his gift. But the flare of illumination cracked like a whip through raw noise and engendered immediate silence.

  Before venomous animosity, he stayed detached, his diamonds like frost on a snowfield. Then he inclined his head to
the captive before him. “You’re fully aware, a vote cast now will condemn you. Town law has small mercy. You could suffer a brutal public maiming before death.”

  The clansman said nothing.

  Lysaer used the pause. While the atmosphere simmered in fierce anticipation, his study encompassed every minister, hard breathing in velvets and furs. The officers of war endured his regard, unflinching, then the mayors, with their gnawing, hidden fear. The prince they had signed into power was royal, closer in ties to clan ancestry than they wished. The price of their protection from the Spinner of Darkness might come at the cost of their coveted autonomy.

  Yet to refute the traditions of city law outright, Lysaer had to know, he would flaw the amity of their support. Foremost a statesman, he showed no hesitation. “The case of your clans might have fared best by waiting. Before you shot down your colorful ultimatum, you could have heard out my answer to this document.” He fingered the torn scroll of parchment in unfeigned regret, as he added, “For you see, I have no intent to accept the burden of crown rule at this time.”

  After the first, indrawn gasp of surprise, a stunned stillness, as if the overheated air had hardened to glue, with every man gaping at the prince.

  Lysaer showed long-suffering equanimity. “There are truths to this conflict against the Master of Shadow even I have withheld from general knowledge. I wish above all to avoid seeding panic. After the failure of our late campaign, we need order more than ever to rebuild.”