Fugitive Prince (26 page)
Authors: Janny Wurts
Hastily clad in his livery and sash, the mayor’s house steward issued frenetic instructions. Servants were rousted to light guest rooms and air linen. Grooms were kicked out of their pallets and sent running to accept the reins of blown destriers. Errand boys fetched out merchants to unlock their warehouses and amend shortfalls in wine and provisions. A healer arrived with bearers and litter to attend to the injured page boy.
Somehow amid the upsurge of commotion, the prince’s charger was missed. Inquiries flew.
The mayor’s flustered master of horse added his vehement insistence. “His Grace never entered my stable yard.”
Questions lacked answers. No one seemed to know the royal whereabouts.
“Ath save us!” the mayor’s house steward fussed in martyred agitation. “Suppose our exalted savior has taken offense at some fault in my lord’s hospitality? Daelion avert such misfortune from our house! He
can’t
have sought out a common tavern.”
Avenor’s Lord Seneschal repeated himself twice, then shouted to make himself heard. “His Grace has gone on to the shrine on High Street to give thanks for today’s safe deliverance.”
Word passed from mouth to mouth. A suitable retinue was assembled in haste. But the latecoming guardsmen discovered the way mobbed by curiosity seekers who choked the route to the square. The night streets of Miralt were teeming and charged into frenzied excitement. Even the dim byways held unsettled crowds, surging to glimpse the Prince of the Light, haloed in what seemed an exalted radiance as he made his devotion at the crossroads.
The thoroughfares went from tight to impassable. Not even the city guard could maintain their patrols. Balked citizens crammed into the taverns. Inebriated tosspots were displaced into corners as drudges rushed to light candles, and rumor sparked rampant speculation. The anomaly was noticed, that none of Lysaer’s weary guardsmen stripped weapons or mail to retire. Half of their hard-bitten number had remained at Ath’s shrine, firmly determined to stay through the night on bent knee in thankful prayer. Others whose tastes were more boisterous shed propriety and got themselves garrulously drunk. To throngs of avid listeners, they described miracles and lightning bolts that seared lethal arrows from clear sky.
“He’s blessed, our prince,” they pronounced in stark reverence. “We’ve borne witness with our own eyes. The shining powers of divine creation saved his Grace from a deadly attack.”
“Where’s the wretch who shot off the arrow!” some roisterer called from the sidelines.
That first, inflammatory remark was cut by a shout from a butcher. “There’s justice due! Where’s this filthy clansman who’s in league with the Master of Shadow?”
Noise swelled. Trestles swayed to the surging press of bodies as like-minded celebrants accosted the royal guardsmen over the fate of the prisoner.
“The Prince of the Light is all our defense against darkness,” a fist-shaking bystander insisted. “His murder would strand us without help or hope. Should we leave his attacker unpunished?”
More outcries arose. A touch match to tinder, the racket spilled out of the tavern’s close confines and erupted into the street. By then, wine and ale lit the mood of the mob to a vengeful, dog-pack frenzy. When an off-duty guard from Miralt’s garrison volunteered to force the cell where the infamous assassin was incarcerated, a jostling throng of vigilantes howled their eagerness to help.
The ringleaders seized torches. Less scrupulous citizens pried up cobblestones and hitching rails, or purloined bricks and sharp rocks from the mason’s yard. The yelling horde grew. A torrent in spate, folk poured into the deserted market. There, the zealots whipped them into bloodletting passion. They would visit vengeance upon Arithon’s henchman, who had dared to accost heaven’s grace and deprive them of their protector.
Up and down the side streets, the shuttered, wooden shop fronts echoed to the rush of running feet. A cutler’s stall yielded before battering assault. Stolen knives flashed between angry faces, and other fists brandished bludgeons. The mob surged through the commons, across the hollowed stones beside the city well, where women did laundry by day and ragged children begged coppers and filled the moss-crusty horse troughs for wayfarers. Miralt’s citizens rioted past the pillared stair to the baths, screaming vicious and frenzied imprecations.
There, progress stalled, jammed from egress where the old harbor storm wall fronted the quays along High Street. From the wharfside mazes, and seamy brothels and sailor’s dives, new revelers streamed to make mayhem. The press grew acute as men elbowed and pushed to funnel into the neck of the avenue.
Then the route to the inner citadel became blocked by a mounted figure muffled in a nondescript cloak.
“What passes here?” he cracked. His imperious manner was too refined for a guardsman. Whatever his business, he traveled without escort. He appeared to carry no weapon.
“Make way, man!” yelled an instigator. “We have business afoot.”
“I said, what passes here?” The rider wheeled his horse and set its shoulder against the roiling surge of the crowd. A snarl of frustration greeted his stance. More than one hothead screamed epithets. In warning of tension a hairsbreadth from breaking, a brick flew and smashed a merchant’s window. Bodies surged and shouting yammered through the costly tinkle of glass.
The rider gave no ground to fury. Target for violence, his destrier jostled by a grinding weight of sheer numbers, he bore in with rein and spur as if clubs and stones held no power to threaten his person. “Halt there, I say!” His timbre of authority now blistered to anger, he cut through the rising clamor. “By my name and the Light, stand fast!”
A shutter clapped open above. Too deaf and blind to sense disaffection, a beldame leaned out of her mansion window and launched into shrill imprecations. “What’s become of Ath’s peace? You wastrels have worse than the manners of hogs, who shove for the slop in my close stool!” She made ranting promise the contents of that could be hurled on the heads of the rabble.
She ducked back inside to make good her intention, and the sconce from her bedchamber limned the rider below. The thin gleam of flame traced the crest of an unmistakable cream charger.
The front ranks cringed back. They knew whom they faced: Lysaer s’Ilessid, just returned from the shrine, and en route to the mayor’s hospitality.
To others behind, the detail was obscured. Due redress for a murdering, traitorous clansman seemed balked by one man, and the threat of a grandame’s tossed jakes.
“Just cut down the lamebrain!” shouted a knife-bearing smith.
Others howled in contempt and pummeled their way forward, determined to smash through all foolish opposition. Their fury drowned protest. “Gut the clansman!” came the chanted slogan. “Kill the barbarian traitor! See him burned as a sorcerer’s accomplice!”
The outraged old lady raised an arm to shy her chamber pot, then quailed before a roaring wall of noise. Below her, a cataract of humanity shoved and snarled in confinement, slashed here and there by the threatening sheen of bared steel.
The bottleneck of resistance, become focus for mayhem, the solitary rider fought his horse with magnificent skill to stand firm. His effort was futile. Despite ruthless courage, no inspired action could stem that onrushing tide. The prince must be forced to give way, or else trample and maim the front ranks who knew him. In seconds, he
would be pulled down in turn, a rag milled under the teeth of a lawless stampede.
Lysaer raised his fist. “This will stop!”
A shattering arc of light clove the darkness overhead. His warhorse reared up and dislodged his plain hood. Like an angel’s bright aureole, his crown of fair hair took fire from the glare of his gift. Then the illumination waxed unbearably bright, and banished the night in a wave of actinic brilliance.
The beldame fainted. The rabble recoiled, blinded and screaming. Their outcries were drowned as a thunderous report slammed over the merchants’ slate roofs. A howling clap of flash-heated air blistered paint from the woodwork of dormers and shutters. Rioters at the fore howled and shrank. They found no escape from the sting as the skin on their faces and hands became singed by the merciless fall of raw light.
“No man held in bonds for the sake of royal justice shall be subject to violence or bloodshed!”
Lysaer cried through the well of shocked motion. “Disperse and return to your wives and families, and leave the fate of clan criminals to me.”
“Why should he not die?” blustered a wainwright from the shadowed protection of a side street. “He’s the Shadow Master’s minion! Or why should the lightning have surged from on high to deliver your Grace from his bowshot?”
“He is but a man!” Lysaer rebuked. His gift snapped and blazed. Through that flood of dire brilliance, the diamond white silk and gold trim of his surcoat shot his presence in scintillant outline. “Alone with a bow, do you
really
believe one mortal clansman could bring down the righteous arm of the Light?”
No one arose to dare argue that challenge. The prince on his horse was implacable, cut marble, ablaze in unearthly powers. His fierce gaze searched out one man, then another, and finally encompassed the whole crowd until stones dropped from abashed hands. Purloined knives were cast down in fierce shame.
“No criminal act can be healed by rash action,” the Prince of the Light exhorted. “This clansman you would burn was misled by evil. Before execution, he deserves all your pity. My law has sentenced him to chained service at the oar, a miserable fate. He’ll know the whip and the indignity of slavery, sore enough suffering for the error of his ways. No one,
no matter how outraged,
will take his life out of hand! Death will deliver him from the galleys soon enough, but only on the hour appointed by powers outside mortal judgment!”
No sound from the mob. Two men near the fore were reduced to
stifled weeping. In rustling movement, others sank to their knees in spontaneous plea for forgiveness.
“Go home, now,” Lysaer said, his fury reduced to gentle care. The radiance softened and dimmed from his fist, benevolent as mellow spring sunshine. “Take my peace to your hearthstones, and my blessing to your kinfolk. For every man’s sake, spare weapons and rage for better causes. If by tomorrow you still burn to fight, my captain at arms will take down the names of new recruits. Should war come again to drive back the Shadow, then every brave heart will be welcome.”
For a half second longer, that struck silence held.
Then Prince Lysaer reined his destrier around. Moved to emotion by the fading of his gift, darkened to loss by his departure, a lone voice pealed out his name.
The first cries took root. A man more inspired led into a worshipful chant: “Hail the blessed lord! Hail the Light! Death to the Spinner of Darkness!”
Autumn 5652
Ensconced in his diplomatic post at Avenor despite the absence of the prince, Mearn s’Brydion receives a message from a street beggar sent by Arithon s’Ffalenn, and the note requests a clandestine inquiry into the disappearance of Lady Talith, Princess of Tysan…
Far to the east of Miralt Head, where avid recruits line up to swear service against shadow before Lysaer’s sunwheel banner, Earl Jieret’s scouts intercept messengers calling town mayors in Rathain to Etarra to pledge for the Alliance of Light; and foreboding weighs on him for the inevitable fact that his clans must flee into deep cover…
Against the strapped oak door to the observatory in the Koriani sisterhouse at Capewell, the peeress in charge delivers an ultimatum to her anxious colleagues in the stairwell: “No one opens this door, by Morriel Prime’s stated will! If she’s died from turned spellcraft, only one holds the right to gainsay that command. Her successor in training has been summoned. Until the hour of First Senior Lirenda’s arrival, what lies past this threshold shall bide behind seals, undisturbed.…
Autumn 5652
If tears were hardened stone to carve, inscribe my cry for life: Let no man raise his unsheathed sword, may no man draw his knife, that this, our sore and grieving land, waste no more hearts to strife!
verse from the Masterbard’s lament for the widows of Dier Kenton Vale Third Age 5649
F
or three hundred years, the rambling, old tavern had stood below the river fork where Ilswater joined the broad, placid channel which drained off the mudflats of Mogg’s Fen. Moss shagged its fired brick walls on the south-facing side. The north wings sliced the brunt of the winds that scoured the leaves from the roof shakes. Its warren of galleries and peaked dormer rooms lay packed, that stormy, cold night. Chimney smoke smudged the deepening gloom, sliced by the needle tracks of rainfall. Bargemen forsook the damp berths on their vessels; drovers left the miseries of open-air camps and thronged in for a copper to spread blankets on the common room floor. Driven indoors as autumn’s late chill threatened the first, freezing sleet, soaked wayfarers huddled elbow to elbow over mugs of soup and mulled wine.
They would have squeezed the accommodations past full, even with no bard in residence.
The racket would let no man rest until he lay drunk or exhausted by crude entertainment. The taproom was too packed for darts, and the landlord forbade arm wrestling, since wagers were wont to breed fights. Milling patrons banged the boards and whistled for service from the barmaids.
The hour was just shy of midnight, with long ballads the sole remedy for boredom. The bard on his stool by the settle was kept too relentlessly engaged to retire.
The inn’s kindly landlord held one room aside for his use at no charge, for the excessive demand on his talent. The mannerly threw money to keep him sweet. As each song drew to its closing, small coins sliced the gloom to chink on the boards at his feet. If the singer was built a trifle too fine, or his dress seemed a touch over-done, those delicate fingers on silver-wound strings wove sound like a net of enchantment. Through the chiming cascade of gift tokens, the whoops of approval, and a general hubbub of noise, the call of the mousy widow by the casement seemed the lost utterance of a ghost.
“Pray Ath our bard didn’t hear that,” Dakar said where he lounged, feet braced on a trestle crammed under the jut of the staircase.
“Hear what?” Wedged deep in the gloom with his back to the wall, Caolle elbowed the Mad Prophet’s side, then spoke his concern for a tankard left brimful all evening. “You don’t drink, man. When that happens, I worry if you’re sick.”
Despite provocation, Dakar’s watchful eyes tracked the woman in her ribbons of mourning. “Trust me, I’m hale and dreadfully sober. The misery’s the same, nonetheless.” Then, on a break into fierce irritation, “Damn the silly bitch to black Sithaer! He’s noticed.”
For the coins had ceased falling with the bard’s head still raised. All theatrical elegance in his slashed murray silk, he had not launched into some lilting dance tune to quicken the pace since his last air. Instead, he regarded the nondescript woman in stilled and striking intensity.
That indefinable instant, the noise lagged. Rain drummed the slates and the windows, and the widow raised nerve to repeat her request. “Minstrel, play a memorial!” This time, her frail, porcelain treble reached every corner of the room. “Sing us a lament for the brave ones who died against Shadow in Dier Kenton Vale.”
“Merciful Ath!” Caolle shoved straight, gruff outrage slurred into mangled syllables by the spell-turned web of the glamour. “He’ll refuse her.”
“His masterbard’s title won’t let him.” Dakar clamped a quelling hand on Caolle’s forearm. “This is sovereign territory to the crown of Tysan! Try and stop him, you’ll start a brawl and get us pitched out.”
“Sithaer’s dark furies!” Caolle yanked free. “Are we girls, to flinch from a douse in cold rain?” Yet he subsided, if only to watch how Arithon would field the unpleasantness.
The bard shifted the lyranthe in his lap. He regarded his hands, fine jointed and stilled, the image of languid elegance. The pose was misleading. To any who knew him, the mind underneath was as
unperturbed as drawn steel. While the taproom grew hushed, and storm sluiced the eaves, he spoke in mellifluous courtesy. “Mistress, which of your loved ones was lost?”
“My husband, rest him.” The woman cried, bitter, “May the Spinner of Darkness come to suffer Dharkaron’s damnation!”
“Lady,” said the singer in plangent, fierce pity, “rest assured, he already does.”
Then, as if unadorned words caused him pain, he flung back his head, shut his eyes, and struck a chord like a plummeting cry. No chance assemblage of minor notes, this opening, but the pure charge and power of a masterbard’s art, that ordered the air and snatched mortal heartstrings and twisted, until all the world became realigned to his measure of gripping, stark sorrow.
A dreadful, ranging chill poured down Dakar’s spine. “Caolle,” he entreated, in haste to speak before music burned away reason, “tonight, I’ll need help. Keep vigil with me at Arithon’s bedside, and please Ath, leave your temper behind.”
He never heard Caolle’s answer. The upwelling surge of an exquisitely made grief enthralled every listening mind. Arithon chose not to play to console. The deaths he had caused at Dier Kenton Vale were too harrowing a loss to soothe over. Instead, he spun melody in soaring lament and seized his hapless audience by the vitals. His notes sheared past thought like hooks in silk thread, unfurling a shimmering net of fine sound. The musician firmed his hold, dragged them under, then drowned them in a surge of emotion like tide.
Fingers partnered to unbridled talent, the bard added song, distilled into lyrics to unhinge the mind and make the most callous soul weep.
If tears were hardened stone to carve a monument to grief, would we let loss and trouble starve our spirits for belief?
Our men have gone from home and hearth and faith has made us weep!
Arithon played them their mortality in the pressed heat of that dingy riverside taproom; first like keening wind, and then like a blade to cleave through skin and viscera. This was no catharsis to soothe the bereaved. Each line of harmony demanded the question: for memory of those dead at Dier Kenton Vale, Arithon challenged every moral brought to bear, all principle raised as banner and cause
for bloody war. He unwound reason, unstrung pride, then snapped the last thread of dignity in regret for the wasting ruin of broken lives. Barmaids and barge captains, beringed merchants and their coteries of servants; all, down to the coarsest, unwashed mule drover wept unabashed, that husbands and sons should ever leave home to kill for reasons of policy.
The music surged on, relentless. No one escaped the leveling shame as those surgical tones unveiled the lie of just trappings. Arithon showed no pity for mourners. He endorsed no heroic act of sacrifice, but stripped away mankind’s penchant for self-righteous zeal to its core of arrogant futility.
No cause is scribed in fire and star—then whose truth must we heed?
Why bind the will and blind the heart, more lives to rend and bleed?
Our men have gone from home and hearth, and hate has made us weep!
His last line dissolved in a flood of diminished harmonics. The bard damped his strings. Silence descended with the brutality of a public execution. One second passed, two, with the flames in the lanterns the only movement in the room and the sough of cold rains, the sole sound. People were statues, cast in bowed grief. Breath itself hung suspended.
Then the bard raised his head. His face was bone pale and remote, as if the channels just tapped for his art had undone the ties to expression. His stance as he rose was unsteady. The fingers left gripped to the lyranthe’s slim neck seemed nerveless as winter-dry sticks.
Dakar roused first out of song-induced stupor. Before the bard assayed even one infirm step, he broke from his lethargy, squeezed past packed benches, and crossed the cramped space the audience had lent for performance. Coin offerings chinked and scattered to his step. Their dissonance snapped the Masterbard’s spell. People stirred out of stupor, then rocked the close room with sighs and frenetic exclamation.
Whatever they tossed to acknowledge this performance, the reward was unlikely to be silver.
Dakar shouted across a mounting swell of noise. “Come on!” His hand closed on Arithon’s moist velvets. The shoulder underneath was trembling, no surprise. The musician had played his very spirit into sound and kept no reserve for recovery. For a bard of such
stature, the effects could rival the drifting exhaustion imparted by acts of grand conjury. Arithon swayed.
“Damn you for a fool, don’t fold on me now.” The Mad Prophet scanned across lanternlit fug; gauged the mismatched cadres of patrons, the resilient ones rising, as yet wrung too limp to react in affront for their shattered equilibrium.
Such backlash would come. The moment their recovery allowed a recap of Arithon’s composition, some inquiring hothead would connect that the lyrics suggested a treasonous dissent against Lysaer’s vaunted Alliance. Violence might be averted only as long as mass fury was given no target.
“Arithon,” Dakar urged, “you’ve got to leave,
now!”
Then Caolle arrived, unquestioning and brisk, his broad shoulder set to brace his liege upright and barge them a path to the stairway.
Behind a barred door in the upstairs chamber, a candleflame fluttered in a saucer of puddled wax. The gusts outside laced rain against the shingles, while shifting light stippled the dingy plaster walls and sprawled felted shadow across the floorboards. On the low pallet, stripped to hose and shirt, and warm under clean bedclothes, Arithon s’Ffalenn lay asleep. Black hair fringed the unlaced sleeve and forearm which cradled his face. The fair, slim semblance of the dandy had fled, the small workings of his birth gift erased under force of the spells newly wrought. His awareness lay immersed in dreamless oblivion, but peace had come at high cost.
Worn from his battle to quiet the ferocious bite of s’Ffalenn conscience, Dakar slumped on a footstool, knees drawn up and fingers shoved through the bristle of hair at his temples. For all his care, he felt nagged by failure.
“Those bindings I set may not hold,” he warned Caolle. His voice seemed unreal, like scratches on glass, to which rain burst in tireless applause.
Caolle shifted his stance by the doorway, his reflexes set on flinching edge by the laughter which burgeoned downstairs. Each racketing burst from the taproom stewed louder, more shrill, touched to a raw pulse of hysteria. “You’re thinking we’d do best to ride out at
once?”
“That’s not possible just now.” Dakar chewed his lip, while the roistering celebrants rattled the floorboards beneath him. “If our horses are made ready and saddled, the precaution is probably sensible.”
Caolle made no complaint for the weather, but snatched up his cloak and departed. The bursting swell of noise as he slipped through the door increased Dakar’s breeding tension. The crowd’s temper built to a vengeful edge, as each housebound riverman sought to rout grief through indulgence. Beer and carousing could not stem their blind urge for catharsis. No genius was needed to forewarn that their mood would grow ugly.
When they turned, the bard who had kindled their emotions must be far beyond reach down the road.
Dakar heaved erect and refastened the bar. The small garret chamber seemed beleaguered by storm and darkness outside, and by the fiery lusts of Sithaer from below. To mask his worry, the Mad Prophet scavenged the crumpled heaps of Arithon’s cast-off finery. He folded and smoothed ribboned velvets and fine lace, then repacked the saddlebags, attuned all the while to the prostrate form on the bed.
Left no other diversion, Dakar fretted. His spurious talent for prescience stirred to the targetless hunch that peril stalked at his back. Rather than chafe his nerves into jelly, he delved past the wrapped bulk of Arithon’s lyranthe and took up the lethal, cold longsword left propped against the clothes stand. Even sheathed, the blade sang to his mage-sense of uncanny, Paravian origins.
“Bloody death, let me not have to use this,” the Mad Prophet whispered. He locked sweaty hands to the stained leather scabbard and hunkered down with the sword laid across his plump knees.
Arithon’s sprawl on the inn’s saggy mattress never shifted. The uncertain spill from the candle played over his tight-knit frame. Fanned snarls of black hair seemed to drink the faint light, while his slackened fingers curled on the sheet seemed masterfully carved out of alabaster. Such stillness unmasked a frightening vulnerability, a humanity grown too sharply defined in muscle and tendon and bone. Never a large man, Arithon had become alarmingly thin and worn. His wrist might be circled by one finger and thumb, and the cleaved edge of his cheekbone stood demarked in drawn flesh.
Dakar tried to recall the last time he heard the prince laugh. “For mercy, how long can this go on?” he asked an unlistening stillness.
No answer came. Just the unending chap of the rain through the rowdier din from the taproom. Dakar rubbed his eyes. The sword in his lap seemed a wrapped bar of ice, his body like storm-sodden clay. He shifted his shoulders, then ordered his mind in a ruthless effort to stay alert. His gaze drifted anyway. The mingled, fusty scents of wool and hot wax conspired to clog his trained senses.
Then the candle fluttered in spent fuel and went out. Dakar grumbled
an oath, loath to rise up and scrounge a fresh light. He never remembered falling asleep. But the transition back into wakefulness came like a drowning douse in warm syrup. The Mad Prophet raised his head. Vaguely alarmed, he fought lassitude and wondered why his mind should seem bogged in a spell weave. He mumbled a cantrip of unbinding by reflex, then chastised himself for absurdity. He could scarcely be misdirected enough to succumb to his own arcane workings.
Yet the counterspell ripped the blank fog from his mind all the same.
“Arithon, damn you!” Fully roused to annoyance, Dakar scrambled upright. His fists flailed limp cloth, the bedclothes his ungrateful royalty had thrashed off. The sword no longer lay near to hand. Dakar dived for it, groped, found its firm length fallen beneath tumbled blankets. He snagged a hangnail, tugged. The hilt remained mired past reach of his burrowing fingers. He shoved erect, frantic, and almost fell flat in collision with a fast-moving body.