Fugitive Prince Read online

  Despite his need, the crone put a grudge in her remedies. His leg swelled and ached. Through curses of agony, he tore the dressing away and soaked off the salves in a stream. Feverish, limping, he thrashed his way south through the brush. A second pack of tracking dogs winded his scent and burst into yammering tongue. Freshly mounted, their masters tried to run him to earth against the guard spells of a grimward, which no man living might cross. There, he might have perished, inadvertently killed by Fellowship defenses set to keep trespassers from harm.

  But clan hunters from Taerlin heard the commotion and spirited him downstream in a boat. Safe at last under Caithwood’s dense cover, cosseted by a girl with cool hands, he slept off his lingering wound sickness.

  Six weeks, since he had left his wife in Deshir. Early spring exchanged lace-worked blossom and bud for the sumptuous mantle of summer. On the sandy neck of Mainmere Bay, Jieret was met by the clan chief whose ancestral seat lay in ruins across silvered waters. She had ridden hard to bear him a message, the scout in her company said.

  The hour was dusk, the sky, cloudless azure. Jieret crouched by her campfire under the eaves of scrub maples and spat out the bones of the rock bass netted for supper. While thrushes fluted clear notes through the boughs, and the deer emerged to nibble the verge of the bogs, he regarded the wizened little duchess who bore ancient title to Mainmere. She watched him eat, her gnarled hands folded. Along with age, she wore callus from sword and from bridle rein. The leathers belted to her waist were a man’s, and shaded under the fans of white lashes, her eyes met his own with stark pity.

  “What’s wrong?” Against the soft, sustained lisp of the breeze, Jieret sounded boisterous and unseasoned.

  Lady Kellis touched the battered satchel by her knee. “A documented accusation by Avenor, made against your sanctioned prince.” She resumed in her husked, worn alto. “My lord Maenol withheld this one writ from the packet, for your hand alone, he insisted. By your sworn duty, this becomes your legal charge as caithdein of Rathain.”

  Her fingers trembled as she loosened the strings of her parcel. “For this, we risk another passage to see you safe into Corith. There’s a chance the Khetienn’s departure was delayed. In the month when the ice broke, the Shadow Master heard of Lysaer’s proclamation of slavery. Word came back that he intended to make disposition on behalf of our clans.”

  “What’s the charge?” Jieret’s appetite fled. He rinsed his hands in the leather bucket used earlier to sluice down his whetstone, in no hurry to accept the offered document.

  But Lady Kellis had no reassurance to steady him. “I leave you to read,” she said in blank reserve. “Then you must act as your oath to your kingdom demands.”

  At first touch, the heavy, state parchment filled Jieret with trepidation. He unfolded its leaves, braced as though handed the news of a recent fatality. Then he perused the first lines of official script, and his fists knotted from helpless rage. “But there was never a trial to affirm this arraignment!”

  The Duchess of Mainmere gave a dry laugh. “Be thankful. If there had been, the towns would have seen your prince burn.”

  By the time Jieret finished, he was shaking. Traced bronze by the flame light, he bent his rangy shoulders and dammed silent misery behind the locked palms of his hands.

  A caithdein’s given charge was the testing of princes, if the Fellowship Sorcerers were preoccupied. The clans of Tysan were lawfully correct. Any accusation of dark sorcery against his liege belonged nowhere else but with him.

  Heavy of heart, Jieret tucked the document into his shirt. “I will go on to Corith. Find a boat quickly to bear me.”

  The grandame arose, touched his arm in mute sympathy, then left him to a comfortless night. While the stars shimmered through the puzzle-cut shapes of black leaves, the ugly duty before him at Corith lent spin to-his chafing fear. Rathain’s sworn caithdein could not shake his dread, that his prescient dream of a city execution and Avenor’s sealed writ of arraignment might share a fatal connection.

  Passage to the Isles of Min Pierens in a patched-up fishing smack took three weeks, beating against the season’s prevailing westerlies, and bouts of calm between squall lines. As the little craft wore through the islands off the headland, Jieret crouched on the deck, stripped down to his sun-scorched skin. Between his knees, he braced a bucket of damp sand against the wallowing roll of the deck. A monologue of curses marked his ongoing effort to scrub the green bloom of mold from his leathers.

  “Man, lend it mercy,” drawled the craft’s only deckhand, perched like a limpet halfway up the mast with orders to watch out for shoals. “Keep on that, and just weep when yer bollocks tumble out and dangle right pretty through the holes.”

  Jieret looked up, a squint to one eye as he took vengeful aim with the holystone.

  But the sailhand’s snide interest had swung toward the land, where the high, russet rock notched the sky in crazed patterns. Tumbled walls crowned the summit, bleached with sun, and the broken, eggshell rims of the keeps which remained of a Second Age fortress. Beyond, unveiled by the sliding shift of vantage as the fishing smack nosed downwind, there arose a trim set of masts stripped of canvas, and a dark, lean hull, rocking serene at her anchorage.

  “Swamp me for a half-wit!” cried the sailhand. “Who’d have risked coin to wager? The Khetienn hasn’t sailed after all.”

  Jieret reached his feet in a rushed, thoughtless movement, and the bucket overset; a wet sludge of sand flooded over the offending set of leathers. “Fiends plague!”

  The language loosed next won a laugh from the boat’s swarthy captain. “Ach, let her go, lad! The deck won’t see harm. For your stripped buttocks, we’ll scrounge a loan from our slop chest.”

  “My naked arse isn’t like to be burned for dark sorcery,” Jieret groused, his distress not at all for soaked garments. He glowered across the closing gap of water. The brigantine’s satin brightwork mocked him back, insolent, unmarred by the damage rough weather might cause to drive her back into shelter. Nor did her decks hold industrious crewmen, but languished untenanted in the heat. Jieret’s foreboding deepened. His liege should be long away from known waters, with no trouble too dire to stay him.

  The hard-run little fishing smack put in and launched her dory over the side. “We’ll hold off for your signal,” said the captain from his squint-eyed perch at the rail.

  Jieret settled into the tender’s stern seat, still damp, but presentable. He brooded throughout the approach to the strand, limned in the flat glare of noon, the shade like slopped ink beneath the cedars. As the craft neared the shore, a figure built plump and round as a partridge bobbed amid the rocks, craned a short neck, then erupted into spectacular strings of epithets.

  The oarsman listened, awestruck. “D’ye suppose yon one caught a hornet in his breeks?” He reversed his stroke, and the dory spun about in the wash of a slack tide breaker. “A collection like that’s a rare masterpiece. Never heard the like, not in any cutthroat dive the length of the westshore dockside.”

  His speculation foundered against a peculiar, chilly reticence as, boots gripped in hand, his profile like the anviled rim of a thundercloud, the muscled young chieftain from Strakewood splashed thigh deep in the shallows.

  “Well then,” the crewman said, stoic. “I’ll be off. Show us a light from the point if ye want passage back to the mainland.”

  Oars creaked. The dory reversed direction, leaving Jieret to wade through the surf.

  The diatribe from the headland hiccuped through a pause, then switched key to outraged recognition. “Ath! It’s yourself!” Jieret forbore to glance shoreward.

  “He’s not with you!” The fat man on the beach hopped the last steps to the tidemark, shook his lard fist, and erupted, “Damn his licebrained, sow-eared, rutting stubborn mind! He’s bent on getting himself killed.”

  Jieret arrived on dry shingle. “Not with me?” he echoed. Stopped erect in noon glare while salt droplets sluiced runnels down his ankles, he gazed fro
m full height into an unkempt, round face and smoldering, cinnamon eyes.

  “Turd-stupid, string-plucking goose,” said Dakar, erstwhile spellbinder to a Fellowship Sorcerer, and known far and wide as the Mad Prophet. He licked bearded lips, then clapped his mouth closed, belatedly aware that the clansman who loomed over him brimmed like dammed acid with temper. Dakar’s layers of mismatched clothing heaved as he dredged up an ingratiating shrug. “Well, maybe not a goose, exactly.”

  “You refer to my liege, Prince Arithon?” Jieret tossed a clipped nod past his shoulder. Behind him, a wing-folded raptor on the settled arc of the sea, the brigantine seemed juxtaposed on the view, a wild thing imprisoned by the natural stone revetments which bordered the harbor basin. “Don’t you dare claim he isn’t here.”

  The Mad Prophet screwed his eyes shut. Wheezing like a martyr from his headlong rush to the beachhead, he raised chubby, exasperated hands and tugged at his fox brush beard.

  Since on their last meeting, Dakar had been the Master of Shadow’s implacable enemy, Jieret added, “We are speaking of the same man?”

  Dakar flounced stiff. “Nobody else drives me to fits of sick fury, and anyway, you should know best. This isn’t the first time he’s had you come chasing his shirttails the length of the continent.”

  Too wary to mind insults, Jieret kept his fierce glower. Dakar for a miracle was not wallowing drunk. Though the clownish, suffused features were still slack from loose living, the spirit inside his dissipated flesh seemed transformed into change. The pouched eyes held a glint of shrewd purpose. A queer incongruity, and one at sharp odds with the Mad Prophet’s scapegrace reputation.

  The silence extended too long.

  “What’s amiss?” pestered Dakar. “Something’s turned wrong. Or Ath’s own Avenger couldn’t have dragged you to sea.”

  “Oh, there’s trouble, well enough.” Jieret parked his hip against a boulder and jammed on his boots to mask his outright anxiety. “Perhaps you’d best say where Prince Arithon went.”

  “Ashore,” Dakar said. Sweating in his seamy, worn clothes, he looked all at once beaten down, just another bit of flotsam cast up by storm to wilt on the waterworn rocks. “His Grace is alone, back on the mainland.”

  Jieret confronted the Mad Prophet’s moon features like a swordsman stunned silly by a mace. “The mainland,” he echoed in stark disbelief. “Please Ath, not now. He can’t be.”

  “Best come up.” Sly eyes swiveled askance; Dakar surveyed Rathain’s tall caithdein, bitter himself with shared sympathy. “You look like you need to be out of the sun, and besides, there’s a risk. We oughtn’t discuss his royal affairs so freely here in the open.”

  Jieret looked blank. “What?”

  “Koriani,” said Dakar. “Damn prying witches and their bothersome spells.” Then he rolled his gaze skyward, remiss. “I forgot. You wouldn’t know how far things went wrong last autumn in Vastmark. The Koriani Prime Enchantress tried her level best to have Arithon s’Ffalenn assassinated.”

  Jieret shot tense, hand clasped on his knife, his color gone shatteringly white. “On my oath as caithdein, is every living faction on Athera dead set to end my liege lord’s life?”

  “Damned near.” Dakar closed his moist grip on the larger man’s elbow and tugged. “You haven’t brought dispatches in with the sloop? Just yourself? Best move along, then.” He nodded toward the cliff path. “I’ve got quarters up in the old fortress.”

  Cicadas buzzed amid the crumbled rock stair that jagged up the flank of the headland. The dry air scarcely stirred, thick with the resin taint of cedar. Gray lichens silted like ash in the crannies, and the only visible inhabitants were the finches, flitting in startled bursts through the vines netted over bent limbs and black needles.

  From the heights, the isle was a fissured, clenched fist, the fretted shoreline worried by tides, and seamed in jagged grottos, hazed over in lavender shade. Here, in the First Age, Paravian seers had held council with dragons, who flew the world’s skies no more. Against the vicious aberrations spawned by the drakes’ wild magic, defenders from four races had languished, besieged, in the cramped, ragged bounds of the curtain wall. Now strewn like kicked block, the last ridge of foundation housed basking, gold lizards which skittered away into cracks.

  The eldest living dragons had spun their dream of desperation and appeal within these baked, cratered keeps, to draw to Athera the aid of the Fellowship Sorcerers. But if any ghost presence from that past remained to haunt Corith’s ruin, the land retained no thread of dissonance. Just bare stone, tuned shrill by the blaze of summer noon, and loomed on the untrammeled song of bundled energies which underpinned all the substance of creation. Centuries of wind and battering storms had swept even the deepest, layered bedrock clean of the imprint of violent vibration.

  “Through here,” Dakar puffed. He beckoned into gloom and reappeared beyond a crumbling archway.

  Jieret followed, but saw no sign of tenancy. The temporary, safe haven for a Third Age fugitive felt abandoned, as if the site had been owned for all time by naught but the wind and the seabirds.

  The stillness sawed at Jieret’s suspicion. “Where are my liege’s people? The crew of the Khetienn? Daelion, Master of Fate, save his Grace, has he kept none but you to stand by him?”

  Suddenly exposed before dangerous antipathy, Dakar stopped, sliding, to chinks in complaint from loose stone. “I’m not your prince’s enemy, not anymore. And he’s kept the Khetienn’s crew, her full complement. They’re all here, and safe, masked under my ward of concealment.” A note of plaintive unhappiness crept through. “That’s why, Ath forgive me, I had to stay. Given the choice, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Jieret regarded Dakar’s sweating tension. “I know the s’Ffalenn temper, none better. You were told to hide the brigantine, if galleys happened on her?”

  Dakar nodded, miserable. “Or fire her, should my spells of illusion fall short.” He shuffled breathlessly on. “Man, I couldn’t stop him from going. His Grace has a will to stand down the Avenger’s Five Horses, and no mercy on the fool who interferes. If he gets himself butchered on some mayor’s scaffold, I can’t argue his right to tempt fate.”

  At Jieret’s worried start, Dakar raised his hands. “No, rest assured. Arithon’s not taunting a death wish. He couldn’t if he wanted. The Fellowship of Seven forced him to take blood oath last winter. He’s bound and sworn to life, whatever the cost, against future threat from the Mistwraith.”

  “Mercy on him,” Jieret whispered, shocked. In all Athera’s history, so strict a measure had never been asked of a crown prince. “I didn’t know.”

  “That happened after you parted at Minderl Bay.” Dakar reached a gap in the masonry. Beyond him, the hazed jointure of sea and sky dimmed into distance, snagged with fluffs of white cloud. Innocent now, those scattered fleeces would mass into towers by late afternoon, and anvil into a squall line. Just as untrustworthy, Dakar turned right and vanished into clear space.

  Jieret’s startled shout entangled with a prosaic reassurance, flung backward. “Pay no mind to the wards. They’re illusion. The footing’s quite safe.”

  Faced by a jagged opening, then a yawning gap into air, the clan chieftain muttered imprecations against the spellbinder’s feckless character. A clutch of fractured boulders overhung the drop, ready to launch from their settings at the first wrong breath of the wind. No coward, Jieret stepped down.

  Chills roiled and rippled across his flesh. His senses upended. A fierce, hot tingle sang through his nerves, then stopped with a bracing jolt.

  The Earl of the North bit back a yelp, the steel hilts of his weapons turned hot to his hand. He blinked, wits recovered, to find himself standing in a dusty, flat compound, scattered with tents sewn from sailcloth. Nor was Corith any longer untenanted. A circle of sailhands hunkered in the shade of a gnarled cedar. The ones near at hand looked aside at him, bored, then resumed quarreling over a dice throw, the winning stakes a collection of sticks notched with tally mar
ks. The crescent knife used to keep count flashed in the fist of a prune-skinned little desertman, who stabbed air and hurled his scathing invective at a ship’s boy for rigging the odds.

  “The defense spell is spliced reflection,” Dakar said, smug. “Those cliff rocks, and that span of ocean were borrowed intact from a site halfway down the north slope.” As the fracas erupted into knee-slapping mirth over the ship’s boy’s scurrilous rejoinder, the spellbinder admitted, “Of course, the noise was more difficult to mask.”

  Case in point, a shout pealed out like steel put to the hammer.

  The urchin shot erect from amid the pack of dicers. All coltish brown limbs and angular grace, the creature had blond hair tied in a glistening, long braid. The end was cross-laced with a frippery of ribbon bleached to rust. A second glance at a body clad in scruffy sailhand’s cottons showed the first, shy curves of a girl at the threshold of maturity.

  “Arithon wasn’t on that fishing craft?” she shrilled across the brassy wash of sunlight.

  At Dakar’s headshake, she crowed her wild triumph. “Well then you owe me six royals! He wasn’t to embark ‘til the winds changed, and the weather’s stayed contrary this season.”

  “There are still three days left before solstice,” Dakar hurled back. “Your silver’s not won before then.” Soured by the prospect of forfeited coin, he confided to Jieret, “That’s Feylind, the pest. I misspoke myself teaching that girl to wager. She attached herself to Arithon at Merior by the Sea, and for her talent, your liege thought to train her. She’s gifted at navigation and seamanship when she isn’t cheating numbers on the dice.”

  “She has spirit, give her that.” Jieret watched her spin back to defend her hoarded spoils, then realized: this girl must be one of the twins that Arithon had spoken of granting his oath of protection. Years passed. Feylind had grown beyond childhood; nor would her brother Fiark remain beardless much longer, wherever his own fate had sent him.