Fugitive Prince (74 page)

T
he handpicked company which rode out with the Prince of the Light pressed straight on through the night. They traveled light and without fanfare for speed, with only one bannerman to announce the royal presence. The muggy, moist heat of the flatlands clung like syrup over the land. Darkness rang loud with the clicks of singing insects. The men behind the torch-bearing outriders mopped tearing eyes from streamed trailers of oily smoke. They held their formation in columns two abreast and trusted their horses to negotiate the hard-packed alkaline footing.

They thundered down to the sea inlet as fast as the posthouses could supply their urgent demand for remounts.

On that hour, the sheltered cove by the ferry wharf lay wrapped in woolly fog, the herring gulls wheeling and crying unseen against the filtered, rose blush of dawn. While horseboys still tousled from sleep in the loft led off their blown mounts, the serving girls from the ferryhouse brought them a meal of bacon, hot bread, and steamed fish. Men grown slack from their long weeks at sea cursed their new saddle blisters and stretched the kinks from their legs.

“Damnfool waste of effort, all this rush,” a fresh recruit groused to a pair of weathered veterans who lounged by the tied boats at the waterfront. Experience had long since taught them not to waste themselves
fretting. They listened, noncommittal, working their way through hard cheese and buttered biscuit.

While the incoming tide slapped at the bollards, their less experienced colleague nattered on. “Those riders from Hanshire have been lost for months. Whatever dark sorcery led them astray, they’re probably dead. If not, what’s the difference? Another day, or a week are unlikely to matter.” Engrossed in self-pity, he failed to notice his companions had stiffened and stopped eating in disquiet. “If you ask me, we tire men and horses in a cross-country race to no purpose.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, hard fingers locked onto the whiner’s shoulder and jerked him face about toward the innyard.

“No man oathsworn to fight the shadow at my side shirks his given duty to his fellows,” cracked Lysaer s’Ilessid. The pale white of his tunic melding into the mist, he had moved up unseen.

The grief of his past night’s loss still marked him. Yet even through exhaustion and the incandescent fire of just anger, he noticed the ferryman’s youngest toddler, wandered in his wake from the guest-house. He knelt in the dust. “Go, child. The morning’s too fine to spoil with shouting when you can pick shells from the beach.”

As the girl wandered off, he straightened, confronted the miscreant, and resumed his lashing reprimand. “I will have it known beyond question that anyone needing help against the works of evil sorcery shall receive what they ask. Assistance will reach them with all the speed that crown resource can muster. My will on this matter shall brook no challenge. For today’s lack of diligence, consider yourself released from your oath of service to the Light.”

The recruit began a shocked protest.

Lysaer s’Ilessid cut him off. “Don’t trouble to speak. I won’t hear excuses.” His blue eyes as inexorable as arctic ice, he insisted, “There can be no faint hearts in my ranks. As we shoulder the coming war against darkness, every man must stand ready to give his life
without question.”

“Mercy, bright lord.” The young man fell to his knees, unmanned and broken to pleading. “Don’t cast me out of your service!”

Lysaer snapped his fingers. The royal guard’s captain stepped in on smart cue and ripped the sunwheel badge from the sleeve of the disgraced recruit’s tunic.

“Leave us,” commanded the Prince of the Light. “Stay clear of our crossing. The rest of this company has a task to accomplish in defense of this land and its people.” He turned his back, let his icy regard sweep the rest of the company. “Believe this! Any man who looks back will be dismissed as well. Before threat of sorcery, we must harbor
no weakness. Veer from our commitment for any man’s faults, and the victory can never be ours.”

Set against an ebb tide, the ferry passage to Middlecross required a half day to complete. The landing was accomplished amidst heat and haze in the close, summer fetor of a port town. While a dithering harbormaster recovered from receiving the royal party unwarned, Lirenda went her separate way and arranged passage by galley to Capewell.

The Prince of the Light saw her off with smooth courtesy, then made his presence felt among the town council through the due process of royal requisition. His small company prevailed against gathering crowds and deafening cries of adulation. On demand, his captain procured the fittest, fresh horses. Under the limp folds of the sunwheel banner, the two dozen mounted and rode out, watched by awed merchants and idle children, and by sailhands staggering drunk from the taverns who wandered upon the commotion. The prince’s guard left behind a furor of fresh hope, and rumor that would spread east and north by the trade couriers.

Under sparse clouds like melted enamel, they left the trade road and crossed into the flats with a local guide to lead them. Across the windswept leagues of tilled farmland, past barking dogs and the stares of herders and goodwives, they pressed lathered horses. Four men were left when remounts ran short, and the day bled away toward sunset. Angled light stabbed flecks in the mica which crusted the striated rock. In ragged order, the company clattered across barren crests and dried gullies. They churned, slapping midges, through the mud of the sinkholes where the fog was first to gather, then camped by the glow of a three-quarter moon veiled under bridal-lace mist.

Astride once more in the half-light of dawn, the sea fogs like smoke about them, they passed the last inhabited farmstead; then its outlying sheep stanks of tumbledown stone, crusted in moss and gray lichen. Except for chinking bits and the creak of saddle leather, the riders might have been ghosts. They poured through the crossstitched fronds of the willow thickets and exchanged no chatter at all.

Prince Lysaer led, his gleaming gold hair and scintillant jewels unearthly against the bald slabs of striated granite which scabbed that desolate setting.

The men at his back had outworn their will to raise spirits through railing banter. While the fogs rolled and shredded, and hazed sun speared down and raised trickling sweat under padded gambeson
and helm, they dared set no words to their dread. No mind among them could grapple the horrors they might be required to face.

Somewhere ahead, forty competent soldiers had been swallowed alive by fell magic. The ones who rode now in sworn duty to try rescue owned no better protection than steel swords and their obdurate faith in the Light.

For Lysaer s’Ilessid himself, the bleak landscape left unpleasant, slack hours to think. His aching grief for Talith’s loss became a torment of wretched persistence. As though the mainstay to his intellect had splintered like glass, pain left its branding reminder. Circling memories reopened old scars. The cycle of betrayal and abandon begun by his s’Ahelas mother now magnified and replayed, until he wished he was numb to all passion.

The friend who might have shared his hour of mourning lay dead, slain along with the war host massacred by the dark on the field at Dier Kenton Vale.

Nor could the Prince of the Light claim the luxury of solitude, even with the onset of night. The warren of scrub willow where the field troop made camp afforded no privacy for grief. Lysaer spoke and ate where necessity demanded. Duty bound to the needs of his men, he lay wakeful and watched the summer constellations melt slowly into the mist. The hour saw him more alone than he had ever been since the hour of his birth. Isolated by his royal rank, and by the cause that he shouldered to amend the defenseless plight of humanity, he still could not hide from himself.

Around him, no sound but the dry scrape of crickets; the plink of seeping water from a rock spring could not lull him to the forgetful oblivion of sleep. Nor could he silence his rampaging hurt.

Once, his marriage to a single woman had threatened to seduce him from his oathsworn obligation to bring down the Master of Shadow. Now Talith was gone. Temptation removed, he had not gained relief. Death had not brought him one iota of freedom from the drawing agony of her allure, which had dreadfully threatened to snap his integrity and undermine all his high principles. He felt newly lost. No grand cause could bridge the terrible vacancy love had left torn through his heart.

The only fire that remained to be fanned was his hatred for Arithon s’Ffalenn.

The Shadow Master’s cleverness had manipulated Princess Talith to betrayal. In the months of her abduction, his accursed, scheming wiles had orchestrated her estrangement. Lysaer s’Ilessid endured the chill fact that he owned nothing dear in the world on which to build a

bright future. Empty himself, royal justice demanded he not shirk his responsibility for the needs of his people. His life had meaning only if he delivered their destiny from the manipulative powers of the mageborn.

Yet even the comfort of resolve left him hollow.

Lysaer locked his teeth against flooding, bitter rage as the scourge of his faithless mother’s s’Ahelas farsight mocked him to gritty self-honesty. At least for tonight, he could not mask the lie: he shouldered the challenge of the grimward for raw need, that the rooted aversion he held for all sorcery might drown out the pain of his loss.

Dawn saw him the first man arisen from his blankets. He still led the company through the baked heat of high morning. Starburst reflections jumped off the mica from the flood of sun overhead. Where bare rock was covered, the horses plowed chest high through topaz tassels of goldenrod and saw grass. Their hooves thudded over sod matted with gorse and bracken in the gullies which still hoarded moisture.

The land seemed empty, a circle of silence sealed under limitless sky. Then, with no warning, the horses took alarm. They snorted, necks rigid, their tails and ears raised, as if some uncanny presence raised distrust. No effort would settle them. Spur and rein, and feats of skilled horsemanship failed to restore their willing temperament.

“We’ll dismount.” Lysaer vaulted off his skittering mount, then waved for the hook-nosed local shepherd who served as guide to approach for immediate consultation. “Are we near the place where the men disappeared?”

“Your Grace, no.” The man rammed the cork in the neck of his skin flask, mopped his dripping mustache, and glanced uneasily over both shoulders. “That site lies another day’s ride to the east.”

Down the ranks, a man slapped a fly. The report caused the guide to start out of his skin. “We should leave here. Animals are wiser to danger than we.”

“I didn’t come this far to run at the first breath of trouble.” Lysaer raised his head, squinting against the glare of full noon. The strained quiet extended, while around him, the breeze stilled and died. Men shuddered with odd chills and gooseflesh. An insidious need stole over the mind to turn tail and beat swift retreat.

Chin up, eyes forward, his dust-caked surcoat straight on trim shoulders, Lysaer s’Ilessid masked the icy, first onset of fear. Only his stance of unmalleable determination kept the men steadfast at his heels.

A horse stamped. On a choking intake of breath, the local guide
whirled and ran, thrashing a headlong course through the brush in blind panic to take himself elsewhere.

“Steady, keep sharp!” barked the captain. “Docked pay for any man who breaks from his place in the ranks!”

Suddenly the air gained an unsettled density, unsubtle and heavy as quartz. Sunlight fell magnified in unexplainable brilliance, as though the sky itself had turned refractive. The stabbed reflections off mail shirts and metallic gear caught in queer, actinic sparkles that befuddled clear vision. Then all natural sense of direction dissolved.

“By the light, we’re being witched!” the bannerman gasped, shaken.

Lysaer touched the man’s shoulder with quelling strength. “Be still.” In reckless defiance, he raised his fist high and issued his own challenge in pure light.

The bolt seared aloft like the quenching shriek of hot steel. Its dazzling radiance slammed into resistance and summoned a veil of blank fog. Gray wisps eddied and curled, first as disorganized rags of vapor, then as a frothing, impenetrable veil which expanded to mask the known landscape.

To the men-at-arms rooted in trembling obedience, the surge of Lysaer’s gift seemed to collide with an uncanny barrier of mage-force.

“Light save us!” the royal equerry cried through the murmur of another man’s prayers.

The words rang flat and echoless with distance. Seared blind by the stifled, white radiance of his effort, Lysaer s’Ilessid fed the hard edge of his terror through the inborn channels of his talent. The more fight he raised, the more tightly he felt the unmalleable vortex of force twine like wire about his person. He sensed the connection. On the shaken verge of panic, he burned his gift like balefire, determined to rout the magecraft which bore down as if he had been chained as its target.

Visceral fear ripped through him.

Then the veil which masked mortal sight from the infinite tore across and shattered into light. The beacon this time
was not
of his making; his birth mastery could not grapple or bind it.

He beheld no land, no rock,
no live body.
Around him and through rang the dance of pure energy that fired the chord of Ath’s mystery. A fist of dauntless power embraced him. He could not move, could not think,
only be,
melded as one with the forces which pealed to unbearable crescendo and Named him out of the void.

A cry like a shard of clear crystal lanced his mind.

“Lysaer, Prince of the Light, deliver me safe from the darkness!”

For one sustained second, ephemeral as moonlight on snow, or the whisper of thermals through a hawk’s wing, the whole substance of displaced reality seemed to pivot and spin on its balance.

Then a peal of thunder cracked the luminescent air. Vibrations slapped his person with ranging force, tearing earth and sky back into solidified existence.