Fugitive Prince (11 page)

“Ignore it, unless the
Khetienn’s
search fails.” Arithon’s bitterness scraped through like old rust. “What can I do anyway? My mage-sight’s still blind. Given your help, I couldn’t even scry through to find a sane outcome in Vastmark. Ath knows, since that blunder, naught’s changed.”

“Stop,” Dakar snapped. “You can’t let your past write the future.” Like ill omen, the fading last flame in the torch dipped to an ember and died. This moment, Dakar found no comfort in darkness. “Right now you would do best by sleeping,” he advised.

An oath ripped back in sharp, precise syllables. Bedding rustled. Arithon settled prostrate on the cot. His limbs did not move, but through mage-sight, Dakar sensed his eyes were still open. When an hour passed, and his needling conscience kept him wakeful, he loosed a soft word in resignation.

The spidered threads of the spell already prepared between Dakar’s hands enfolded his consent on a thought. The wide, tortured gaze became masked by the sweep of black lashes. Tight breathing steadied. Arithon s’Ffalenn relaxed fully at last, the unquiet gnaw of his lacerated spirit eased back into dreamless rest.

Weary, aching, the Mad Prophet arose from long vigil. He shuffled his way to the keep’s narrow doorway, and in the drawing pull of the earth through his bone marrow, measured the interval before dawn. Another figure bulked dark alongside the drum tower’s threshold. Lord Jieret lay curled there, his great sword at hand, and his hawk features set in repose. A contradictory tautness knit through his body
warned of the fact he was wakeful. Dakar chose not to speak, but stepped out, his intent to seek solitude and settle drawn nerves on the heights overlooking the sea.

A grip like fixed iron trapped his ankle. He tripped, crashed flat, and bit back an outraged howl as his cheek slapped into a mud puddle. Then outcry became moot. Rathain’s
caithdein
rolled over his felled form and pinned him facedown in the dirt. A predatory hand vised his nape and a knife bit a slanting, cold line across the pouched skin of his throat. Dakar gasped. Contact with the blade shot a dull jolt of misery through his mage-sense. The kept steel of its edge still shrilled with the strung resonance of despair, dark imprint of a crown prince’s blood oath.

“Jieret,” he grunted. “For pity, let up.”

“Ath, you’ve a fine sense of arrogance to try and keep me from my liege’s confidence!” But the hold loosened. The ugly touch of the knife blade lifted. Lord Jieret backed off and squatted on his haunches while his victim rolled upright and swiped a slurry of grime from his beard.

“You were eavesdropping,” the Mad Prophet accused, plaintive.

“Aye, and where else does any
caithdein
sleep, but across his sworn prince’s threshold?” Met by affront, the clan chieftain muffled a cough of laughter behind his wrist. “Dharkaron’s immortal bollocks, you forget. My forefathers were standing down testy s’Ffalenn princes while yours were still pissing in swaddling bands.”

Dakar blotted his moist face with napped cuffs, spat something gritty, and forcibly noosed back his temper. “You couldn’t have helped. And your suspicions are wasted. I’m no longer Arithon’s enemy.”

“Does that even signify?” Jieret snicked his knife back home in its sheath, careful to damp the steel silent. “I sat with my liege through the night when my people died for him at Tal Quorin. Again, the time he was forced to burn the trade fleet at Minderl Bay. I’ve seen how he weeps for the nightmares. I know his fear, that the ones he’s come to love will lose their lives.” All purpose, he finished, “My place is to stand at his side.
Caith d’ein,
shadow behind the throne.”

“I’m unlikely to test his given will on that matter,” said Dakar. “He wants you safely back in Rathain. And he’s right. You can’t steward his realm from the uncharted sea aboard his brigantine.”

Jieret looked away through a tigerish pause, the jut of his profile outthrust against the film of fine mist. “What do you know that you aren’t saying, prophet?”

“Fiends plague, your whole line was bred to be difficult!” Dakar
plowed mulishly erect. “Before you flattened me, I’d planned to take a long walk. The rocks here are practiced at minding themselves, and your liege is secure. I set wards.”

The clan chief rose also, his oiled stride shortened to pace the Mad Prophet’s bobbling progress. The unlikely pair crossed the compound, captured in mismatched reflection through the silver-plate scattering of puddles. Beyond the gapped walls, the cliff path lay fogbound, shadowed in the refrain of wild surf hewing the obdurate shoreline.

When the sailhand huddled wakeful by the notch to the harbor failed to challenge their passage, Jieret raised gingery eyebrows. “You’ve set spells of concealment? What do you fear? Or do you already know from the Fellowship Sorcerers that Arithon’s course carries risk?”

“Damn you for being your mother’s son after all. She always guessed far too much.” Dakar snatched an irritable swat at his nape where a bloodsucking insect had bitten. “I share some wider knowledge from Sethvir of Althain, and Arithon as well, since the Paravian charts he was given to steer by were lent for his use by the Sorcerer.”

The Mad Prophet stalled, hopeful, while the grate of his tread over chipped rock and gravel silenced crickets, and the mist silted droplets in his hair. Jieret ranged beside him, his panther’s stride soundless, and his expectancy taut as strung wire.

“Shark,” Dakar ripped out. “One taste of blood, you keep circling.” He swiped past the dripping boughs of a cedar and resumed without apology for his companion’s adroit duck to avoid a slap in the chest. “Very well, yes, there’s more danger than you know, even granted your heritage as clanblood.” The Mad Prophet found a boulder, damp but sheltered from the wind. He sat to explain the gift of the grand earth link ceded to the Sorcerer Sethvir by Athera’s last guardian centaur.

“The network ties the Sorcerer’s consciousness to everything on Athera, animate life or still matter. But the Seven have postulated the connection may hold selective blind spots. Its weave could be subject to guarding wards set by the old races themselves.” Dakar stabbed fleshy fingers toward the masked edge of the horizon. “The evidence lies in default. The Paravians appear to have vanished from Ath’s creation. And yet, though diminished, through strands and deep auguries, their presence still figures in the weave of Athera’s life pattern.”

Simple words, to frame this world’s penultimate mystery. Dakar paused in sorrowful reflection, his brows snarled down above his pug
nose, and his chin bristled out beneath his beard. What eluded the arcane acts of scrying might yet be uncovered by a manned expedition. The oceans girdled the far side of the world, immensely vast and wide. If an isle existed, wrapped under wards, or some hidden, green haven lurked on the shores of the far continent, Arithon would set sail in the
Khetienn
to seek.

“Your prince hopes to beg sanctuary from the Mistwraith’s fell curse,” Dakar ended. “That scarcely offers much hope for your clans, but the Fellowship Sorcerers agree, Paravian protection offers his surest possibility of reprieve.”

Broad-shouldered as a sentinel against drifting mist, Jieret stared out to sea. “The Fellowship Sorcerer, Ciladis, set off on that quest almost two centuries past. He has never come back.”

“Nobody argues the choice harbors peril!” Dakar snapped. “The old races have no desire to be found, else their presence would be known to Sethvir.” He paused, choked silent by memories very few left alive could understand: of the awesome, pure grace of the unicorns dancing, that could sear sight to blindness from too terrible a surfeit of ecstasy. His very marrow ached for the deep, drowning peace of a centaur’s presence, or the lyrical harmonies in a sunchild’s song. These mysteries, once experienced, could draw mortal minds to forget food and drink, and waste away, lost, until the spirit forsook the body, lured beyond all common things of earth.

Aggrieved beyond words for the loss done the world by the Paravians’ passing, Dakar was jerked back to the trials of the present by Jieret’s harsh grip on his wrists. “Take care of my liege. By my charge as
caithdein,
see him happy and secure, or bring him back whole. Else by Dharkaron’s bleak vengeance, I will scour the world’s four quarters to find you, and make sure you suffer my judgment.”

Dakar gave a raw, hooting chuckle. “That threat cuts both ways, you barbarian wolf. To harry me for my failures, you must first stay alive, and free of a galley slave’s coffle.” He shrugged, disengaged from the clan chieftain’s hold, and heaved his short bulk off the boulder. Around them, the last of the dark was fast fading. Gulls screamed above the jumbled, gray crags, and the knifing wind wore the smells of seawrack and salt. Dakar clasped his arms to ward off the chill, while the charcoal sky brightened and limned his stout form against a lucent pearl backdrop. “Go where your heart calls. The sleep spell I left won’t hold in full sunlight. Your liege will wake and feel rested. He’ll want to see your face and be sure you are well before the hour comes to sail. Give him that much, for the journey he embarks on could easily span the next decade.”

Between a breath and a heartbeat, the Mad Prophet was gone, vanished into the raw cotton mist as if his presence had been knit out of dreams. Jieret was left to the desolate splendor of the cliff head, consumed by worried thoughts, while the throaty crash of flood tide slammed white torrents over the seamed rocks below. Suspicion remained. The Mad Prophet had not disclosed all he knew. A shiver touched Jieret as he measured how subtly the spellbinder had changed.

While playing the drunkard, Dakar made it easy to forget his five centuries of study under Fellowship auspices.

Disarmingly masked behind vexed words and bother, the fat prophet scored his clear point: he could have exerted his trained will at any moment, used powers of sorcery to set one blustering, young clan chief firmly into his place.

Jieret flushed, then loosed a chagrined shout of laughter. He checked the hang of his weapons out of habit and started back toward the ruined fortress.

For Arithon’s sake, Dakar had indulged him. Whatever reason underlay the vicious slaughter at the Havens, the shifty little spellbinder had entrusted Rathain’s prince with the dubious benefits of his loyalty. From that, the realm’s
caithdein
must salvage what peace of mind he could; his liege would not sail westward into peril without an ally to guard his left shoulder.

“Though Ath Creator,” Jieret ripped out, as if air itself would carry his balked temper back to the Mad Prophet’s ears, “I’d rather be boarding the
Khetienn
myself than turning tail back to Rathain.”

For Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, the rage still burned white-hot, even eight months after her failed attempt to assassinate the Master of Shadow. Due to the intervention of a bungling, fat prophet, Arithon s’Ffalenn still breathed. Morriel shut her eyes. As if by cutting off the daylight which flooded her quilted chair by the casement, she could deny the thorny fact the prince still walked on this side of Fate’s Wheel. Old, withered, reduced by years and longevity spells to a husk of sagged flesh wrapped over porcelain bones, she endured the weary pulse of blood through her veins; each heartbeat a throb of endlessly unquiet pain.

More than anything she wished the oblivion of death.

Yet the haven of final rest lay beyond reach. First she must unyoke the chains of command and transfer the massive burden of prime power to the hands of a proven successor.

Forty-three women before this had perished attempting the trials of succession. Fear remained, to poison all pretense of patience. The years spent training the current candidate might be wasted, despite all her promising talent.

Morriel breathed in the humid sea air of the southcoast. Decades of handling critically potent forces had chafed her senses to unwonted sensitivity, until the ceaseless barrage of sound, form and smell besieged the desperately held order of her mind. Even removed to this high tower, confined in isolation above the sleepy commerce of Thirdmark’s narrow streets, Morriel battled the distractions. The
moldered damp of age-rotted stone, even the salt crystal scour of the breeze through the casement flushed her thoughts to patternless noise. Her cognizance at times felt strung thin as cobwebs, until the air currents themselves seemed to separate into voices. Each passing second tapped a pulsebeat against her dry flesh.

Moment to moment, she denied the seductive lie. Inanimate matter
could not
quicken in sentient vibration. She would not permit inert reality to rock off reason’s track, slip the boundaries of discipline, and seduce her to embrace dreaming madness.

She had handled too many sigils of power in the course of her unnatural, long life. The very currents of her aura had been sealed into containment, to interrupt, then deny nature’s cyclic rhythm of death. Attrition thinned the veil between senses and perception. The spin of bridled power eroded Morriel’s control, until one day no bulwark would remain upon which to snag the purling thread of insanity.

The Koriani Prime endured with the dangerous knowledge that her age was now more than ten centuries. She had clung to breathing flesh far too long. None of her predecessors had dared test the limits so far beyond earthly balance.

Her will on the matter had been gainsaid by fate; and now, yet again, Arithon’s persistent survival reduced all her works to futility. The augury she held as fair warning galled most for its absolute, ruthless simplicity: this last living scion of Rathain’s royal line would disrupt the Koriani destiny, destroy a body of knowledge that stretched back into history to the time before catastrophe and war had driven humanity to seek refuge on Athera.

Morriel listened to the cries of the gulls skimming the breeze above the tideflats. She had never felt so wretchedly helpless. Her acquired depth of vision only mocked her. Earth turned, day to night, careless, herself a mote on its skin no more significant than any other unsettled speck of dust.