Fugitive Prince (38 page)

Gusts battered at his progress, fetched him against stone in repeated, bruising impacts that tore through his shirt and skinned a shoulder. Then he reached the crenellation. He dragged himself up and through, and crouched head down, sheltered at last from the buffeting cold.

Had guards been stationed there on the wall walk, he should have died, betrayed by teeth that chattered from fraught nerves and chill. Yet no man-at-arms came to skewer him. Gray stone and pale brick wore nothing beyond ice, except where the reaching scour of the elements swept the battlement clean. Mearn thrived on escapades. He shrugged his scuffed clothing back to rights, licked a scraped knuckle, and raked his lovelock free of his collar.

The tower’s turret chamber had windows secured with oak-plank shutters strapped in iron. No light shone through the gaps at the edges. With his ear pressed to the wood, Mearn sensed no activity. A
questing touch confirmed a barred fastening, likely fitted with a lock and hasp from inside. The hinges were mounted prison fashion, onto the outer wall. Mearn unlaced the thong ties from his collar points, ripped off his shirt cuff to muffle stray noise, then looped the heads of the pins with the leather and worried until they slipped free.

Left the play in the hasp, and one side unanchored, the shutter gave just enough to allow him an opening to push through.

Mearn deferred his first move. While the gusts slapped and pried through the rip in his shirt, he peered into the stillness, poised as the predator who tested the lair of unknown and dangerous prey. Faint warmth touched his skin, dense with the charcoal smoke of banked embers and a lighter fragrance of lavender. He detected no movement, could see little beyond the bronze-bossed handles of what might be a lady’s clothes chest. Bulked corners of other furnishings lay limned in the starlight admitted by the breached shutter.

Mearn raised his thigh, tautened his grip, and hoisted soundlessly onto the broad sill. A feathered brush of his jerkin across studded wood, a whisper of calfskin on stone, and he was through, flattened to the curve of the inside wall.

He waited.

Nothing; just the breathy draw of coals in an unseen grate, and the fret of the wind outside. His wide, straining eyes discerned the frame of a curtained box bed, the harder gleam of a porcelain ewer on a stand, and the pale linen oblong of a towel. The chamber was appointed for basic comfort, but not in the grace of high luxury. An Etarran-bred princess accustomed to society and the gregarious convolutions of city intrigue would be like to go mad from sheer boredom.

That moment, from nowhere, fierce fingers grasped his lovelock.

Mearn whirled. His sudden, lithe reflex ripped off the hold. His wrist bone jarred metal. The shuttering cover of a hand lamp chinked back. Caught in the flaring, sudden haze of light, the woman he seized with a wrestler’s strength was all molten gold hair and pearl skin. She was fire, gilt-and-white porcelain, and a vision to stun a male witless. Widened bronze eyes flashed up to meet his, black lashed and deep, with pupils to drown him in primordial night.

The sound that impacted his closed throat wrenched his larynx. Mearn lost all grip on his senses. Swept head to foot by a physical awareness to freeze thought and unstring his reason, the swift, building pressure of desire in his loins ran him through like the shock of a sword thrust.

“Ath!” he gasped in a wrenched whisper. “Save us all, lady. You
are like the Avenger’s own spear, too sharp to touch without bleeding.” Cramped fingers could be forced to unlock; dumb flesh, be compelled to step back.

Her Grace, Princess Talith touched cool fingers to his lips. “Be wary. A handmaid sleeps in the chamber beneath, and her loyalty is not to me.”

Mearn shuddered and broke her restraint as though burned. He had heard all the rumors, even glimpsed Lysaer’s wife at state functions before her incarceration. At safe remove behind a retinue and attendants, she had been a sight to turn heads. Nothing alive could prepare any man for the impact of her at close quarters. Mearn discovered himself helpless to tear his gaze from her face. The delicate, ivory line of her shoulder entrapped him, and the sheer fall of the nightrobe whose folds by turns offered and obscured a form of breathtaking loveliness.

Words came like bruised increments of noise, struck by a faltering tongue. “You’re a prisoner, then?” Mearn forced a next sentence. “The party who sent me believed so.”

A brute turn of will let him recall the danger posed by the lamp; he snatched back the presence to lean through the casement and close the skewed board of the shutter. Faced away, wit and speech gained a measure of reprieve. “Word at court insists you’ve gone into retreat. Stress and overwrought nerves, Gace Steward says. The upset is attributed to barrenness.”

“Lies,” Talith said on a barb of stung spirit. “My bed has been barren.” Bitterness made her laugh, but in venomous, smothered quiet. “No husband, no seed, hence, no child. It is Lysaer who fails to get us an heir.” She dimmed the small lamp and restored it to a soot-streaked niche in the wall. “For hatred of his half brother, the prince thinks to put me aside.”

“The abduction by Arithon caused this?” Mearn straightened and set his back against stone, acute in his private discomfort. The lady’s tower quarters were too cramped to pace. If he stirred one step in any direction, his retreat would not bring him more than an arm’s length from her. “But why? Eight hundred thousand coin weight in gold brought you home with your virtue intact.”

Talith flung back a ripple of bright hair and regarded him. The contempt that fired her topaz eyes seemed to roil the very marrow in his bones. “You say. Yet what proof can I show for my loyalty?”

Mearn swore. A stride carried him to the box bed, impelled by a pity too fierce to keep still. “Prince Lysaer’s a fool. I can’t change that.” He locked hands to the spare rope coiled across his shoulders,
flamed to ridiculous, boyish embarrassment for his sweaty state of dishevelment. Torn shirt, ripped fingers, and wind-tangled hair, he felt rough as an unsanded plank. “But I can offer means to escape.”

“To what?” Talith answered. This time, she spun away in swift violence.

Not in time; Mearn saw the lucent, gold rims of her eyes dim to a sudden flood of tears. He ached to take her into his arms, to circle her glass-and-gold-leaf fragility inside a bastion of comfort. Pride stopped him, then the first, warning prick of intuition. “You still love your husband.”

Her rancor a core of iron in silk, the princess rebutted, “Should my heart lie with duty, in Avenor?”

But the statement struck cold to a gambler’s ear. Hatred could breed twisted passions, Mearn knew. He watched. The lady opened a drawer and fished out a striker and candles. Her hand stayed too steady as she lit the fresh wicks. Tears might still glitter through her ebony lashes, and vulnerability sharpen an allure like thin crystal, and yet, she had been born a pedigree Etarran. A clansman forgot at his peril: her breed fed on intrigue and betrayal since infancy.

Three years of solitary contemplation in this tower might foment a thousand deadly hopes of revenge. If Lady Talith of Avenor wished no escape, she would angle to gain something else.

“I need to conceive a child,” she announced without prelude.

“What?”
Mearn exclaimed.

“You risked much to find me. I trust you like women?” She gave no more warning, but closed in and cornered him, one exquisite, warm shoulder exposed by an artful slip of her night rail. The curve of her breast underneath was too perfect to endure without touching. Mearn felt the bang of raw physical sensation hammer the center of his chest. Her soft scent filled his mind. Rife chaos struck through his labored, trapped logic. “You want,” he began in emasculated anger.

She tipped back her head, cupped his jaw in fine hands, and did not smile at the violent flush to his skin. “Don’t be a hypocrite. However much you posture and prickle, you want me in bed well enough.”

“That has little to do with good sense,” Mearn gasped. His breath failed him. His next utterance came out strangled. “A child-”

Reason fled, words dissolved to a groan as she stretched up and laid her softened lips against the sped pulse in his neck. His arms closed around her through no sane volition. Touched off by explosive, violent need, he pressed her slim heat against him. The fingers still torn and stinging from his climb locked in her cascade of bright hair.

Her seduction was no longer passionless or steady as she slipped her hands through his collar. Prolonged years of loneliness ripped away pretense. “You are very fine,” she murmured beneath his chin. “Brave also. Sire us a prince to make the realm proud.”

“Ath, this is madness!” Mearn twisted free. “My get would be half-bred.” He caught her wrists, his birth accent snapping. “Lady, you have
no idea
what you’re asking.”

“Oh?” Talith laughed, deep and low in her throat. If his strength was too harsh, she did not pull away. Chin lifted, her taut, aroused nipple a hairsbreadth from his tormented flesh, she let her pose become her sweet challenge, well assured he could not resist.

Mearn cursed.

Talith returned a slow smile. “Can a princess be faulted for taking a lover if she is cast off in neglect? Let the court in Avenor hear I’m not barren, the disgrace will become my fresh victory. My child of course won’t be Lysaer’s. For that, his much vaunted manhood will be laughingstock.”

“Things aren’t that simple,” Mearn wrenched out. She was too close, too desirable. Her appeal for just vindication was too potent to let him think. Nor had he the means to let her down with any proper kindness or subtlety. “I can’t. Lady, your spirit is great, and your beauty unmatched. I could lie with you for sheer pleasure. But I can never, ever presume the right to make a new life between us.”

She broke then, her tears a bright, rolling spill over her flawless cheekbones. “Ath’s mercy, help me! Won’t you see how I need this? A shamed wife could gain freedom, some measure of autonomy. Yes, the worst could befall. Lysaer may cast me off. At least I could return to my cousins in Etarra.”

“I can’t,” Mearn said, helpless before her unhappiness. “It’s a matter of honoring my family bloodline.”

Her features stayed blank, confounding Mearn’s pity. Etarra was a city founded too late to have any record of the uprising. Unlike the persistent guild minister from Erdane, Talith would not know of the facts behind clanborn descent.

Mearn shut his eyes, anguished. He dared not explain; not after the clandestine overture just presented to Lysaer’s high counselors. Clan numbers in Rathain were dangerously dwindled from the impact of the Mistwraith’s curse. The damaging truth in Etarran hands, that the old family bloodlines were not replaceable, might hasten their final destruction.

“Lady,” he said through bleak anguish, “let me help you escape.
Once free, you can flee to Etarra if you like, or even conceive your bastard at will on any other man that you choose.” She did not answer.

Mearn sensed the stir, then the chill kiss of draft on his skin as she widened the distance between them. As he looked, and interpreted her proud determination, he felt as if his powers of cognition had suffered a dousing in ice water. “Lady,” he said, more dangerous now, “what do you know? There’s something to this you’re not telling me.”

Talith smiled. Her neat, narrow fingers adjusted her night rail and reclothed her inviting nakedness. “Tell all and give nothing? How like a man who has bloodline, but apparently no measure of heated blood in him. Why am I not surprised? I should be asking, instead, who has sent you.”

Mearn grinned. “You sound like my grandmother Dawr. Sharp as vinegar and sand when her males won’t do as she pleases. I have no intention of saying which party takes active interest in your predicament. Shall I end our sweet impasse and go?”

That shook her. “We are bargaining, bloodless man.” The glass edge of solitude had eroded her strength. Both fear and contempt rang true as she spoke. “Did you plan to climb down as you came? Then I’ll have your rope and grapple to reel in once you set down on the council-hall roof. Deliver my note to my lover of choice and let
him
scale the wall for my favor.”

Mearn inclined his head. “I’ll bear your note. The rope I would leave you in any case, to escape or invite whom you will. The person who sent me shall hear of your plight without any need for persuasion.”

He shrugged off the hemp coils, nettled by more than fresh scrapes and the stinging of his grazed fingertips. His refusal of her sex lodged an ache of unassuaged need in his gut. Still, he felt her gaze track him, fierce as the heat thrown off magma.

“If you’re dedicated as you seem to the cause of Lysaer’s Alliance, this won’t matter,” Talith said in sudden, terse resolve. “But if you speak to other clansmen, or have sympathy for ones in Tysan at risk of enslavement, I offer this much. The Koriathain are in league with Prince Lysaer against Arithon. Their kind have sent word: my lord husband has left Etarra. He returns to Avenor with all speed, in secret, for he knows the Master of Shadow has suborned the shakedown crews at his shipyard.”

Mearn blinked. Set upon dangerous ground since no suspicion of doubt must touch on s’Brydion loyalty, he tossed off an insouciant grin. “You lay claim to a knowledge of state secrets,
from here?”

Talith met him with the thinnest of smiles, spiked in thorns and malice. “You didn’t know?” She stepped sideward, flicked back a felt curtain, and seated herself in the box bed. “Beneath lies my jailer and handmaid, who also is mistress to Lysaer’s appointed High Priest of the Light, Cerebeld. I married a man who now claims to be god sent.”

She paused. Mearn said nothing, preferring to listen, while his thoughts spun on tangents of frightful speculation.

The focused intensity of his stillness must have reached her. “Oh yes, you suspect the very truth,” Talith affirmed. “The meetings in this tower seek to seed a religion. Cerebeld and his mad-dog fanatic, Vorrice, have been consecrated to carry out a divine mission. Lysaer makes long-range plans to unleash a holy war against the Master of Shadow.”