The Curse of the Mistwraith (61 page)

But the Fellowship sorcerer in attendance for once had no care for overhearing their seditious talk. Bleak as storm in dark velvets, Asandir presided over the aisle before the raised dais.

Morfett measured his stillness as he would have stalked an asp through his grape arbour. Let Arithon s’Ffalenn but once be caught unguarded and the interfering sorcerers who sheltered him would find a knife in his royal ribs.

‘Where’s Lord Diegan, anyway?’ the minister of justice complained. ‘Odd, that he should be late.’

‘Not at all.’ Morfett twitched at his cuffs, which were buttoned with pearls and too snug. Snappish with venom, he said, ‘Our Commander of the Guard invited that fair-haired flunky, Lysaer, for an after-breakfast social. His sister’s infatuation with the man has delayed them both, no doubt.’

Sourly, the Lord Governor eyed the damask-draped chair set up to enthrone the coming prince. Such panoply would hardly matter; any more than a white-gold crown set with emeralds could shield against mortality. Today, tomorrow or next year the Teir’s’Ffalenn would be overthrown. Etarra would never bow to royal rule. Never. Wishing ill on the day’s proceedings, Morfett saw Asandir spin around. The sorcerer gave no nod to smooth over the officials left gaping in offence at the abrupt presentation of his back.

Morfett smiled. Trouble, the Lord Governor wished fervently; upon the heads of the Fellowship, most ruinous, plan befouling bad luck.

Asandir offered no apology, but turned on his heel again and pressed in visible agitation through the councilmen still clustered in shared outrage. His rush to reach the doorway left a moil of rankled dignitaries whose robes were raked askew by his passage.

Morfett sailed into the gap left opened in the sorcerer’s wake. He arrived in the foyer just after Asandir passed the outer door, caught the ring pulls as the panels swung closed and shamelessly pressed an eye to the crack.

On the marble stair outside the entry he saw Asandir flag down Traithe.

‘Call your raven,’ the sorcerer instructed his colleague. ‘The bird may be needed to relay messages.’

The shorter mage in black and silver replied too low to overhear.

Asandir returned a slight nod. ‘Go inside. Smooth tempers, avert uneasiness and above all, let nobody hear we have problems. Sethvir’s just now sent warning: Lysaer’s in serious trouble. The pattern that encompasses his Name has drifted. Worse: Luhaine reports that Dakar’s been alarmed by premonition. Both events indicate that our s’Ilessid heir may harbour one of Desh-thiere’s wraiths, picked up through the moment of confinement. If so, the crisis forecast by the strands is upon us. One mistimed judgement and we’ll have no crowned king, nor a restored Fellowship, just panic and bloodshed in the streets.’

‘Ath speed you.’ Denied by impaired faculties to share further details through magecraft, Traithe touched his colleague’s shoulder before both went their separate ways.

Morfett straightened up from his eavesdropping and faced around. Prepared to announce the Fellowship’s quandary to every official within earshot, his excitement overshadowed small discrepancies: that the doors at his back failed to latch; and that his rush of elation overwhelmed him to the point where his utterance choked in his throat. He hopped forward a step and filled his lungs to shout.

His effort emerged as a gargle, since Traithe slipped through the cracked doorpanel, clamped a gloved hand from behind and gagged his mouth.

‘Ah, but you won’t,’ the mildest mannered of the sorcerers murmured into Morfett’s left ear.

The Lord Governor moaned. His eyes bulged out and he ground out a smothered growl. He elbowed and kicked backward at his assailant, but managed to strike only air.

He bit down next on black glove leather, and got back a dig that shot paralysing pain through his larynx.

Traithe called out cheerfully to those bystanders just turned to stare openmouthed at the scuffle. ‘Could I beg your help?’

The stir widened; polite conversation faltered. Before Morfett’s wheezes and moaned curses could impact the fast-spreading stillness, Traithe carried on in blithe chatter. ‘Your Lord Governor seems overcome. Is he prone to fits? Maybe he’s prostrate from the heat. Anybody might faint under such fashionable layers of heavy velvet.’

Pulled off balance, then downed by an ungentlemanly jab at the back of his knees, Morfett collapsed, mutely struggling, to the floor. A raven flapped down and lit on his chest. At least, that was the last thing his eyes recorded before he sank, dropped senseless by spells, upon carpets laid down for Arithon to tread in formal procession to the dais.

Invited for wine after breakfast in the richly appointed parlour of Etarra’s commander of the guard, Lysaer suddenly flushed. A wave of heat swept through him, followed by bone-deep chill. Quickly, he set down his goblet, before his unsteady hand sloshed the contents. Alarmed that he might have succumbed to sudden fever, Lysaer touched his forehead. A second wave of disorientation passed through him. He stiffened, transfixed by fear; for an instant he felt as if his mind spun to blankness, his self-awareness overturned by a will other than his own.

The sensation cleared a heartbeat later. Lysaer shivered in silly relief. He was just tired, not quite himself. Arithon’s coronation presented no crisis; his momentary faintness surely had been due to nerves and imagination, a residual distress left by the nightmares that had plagued him off and on since Ithamon. As the patterned brocade chair that supported him swam clearly back into focus, Lysaer looked up.

Lady Talith’s ringed hands had stilled in the curled fur of her terrier. She, her brother Diegan and the beribboned lapdog all regarded him in polite and expectant silence.

What had he just said? Lysaer struggled to recapture the thread of conversation. A gap seemed torn from his memory. Inattention could not explain this. Embarrassed for a lapse that in hindsight seemed faintly ridiculous, he stumbled to fill in with banality.

Diegan interrupted and took up what had been a bristling argument. ‘But the children who work in the warehouses are not the get of the free poor, as your puppet-prince led you to think.’ Etarra’s commander of the guard set down the crystal goblet that he had toyed with for the past half hour. His wine sloshed untasted as he said, ‘These wretches that Arithon would champion are in fact the offspring of condemned criminals, clanblood barbarians who have harassed the trade-routes with thievery and murder for generations.’

Heat chased cold across Lysaer’s skin. He resisted an urge to blot his brow, willed aside his unsettled condition and studied the city’s Lord Commander, whose finery and intellect made him more courtier than soldier and whose words fanned up like dry cobwebs the clinging spectre of past doubts.

S’Ffalenn pirates on Dascen Elur had repeatedly manipulated political sore points to stir unrest and further their marauding feud against Amroth.

Lysaer snapped back to present circumstance with an inward lash of chastisement. This was Etarra, not Port Royal and Arithon was not as his ancestors. More musician than buccaneer, he had been the sworn heir of a murderer in a past that no longer mattered. Fair minded, Lysaer pushed off his uneasiness. ‘Do you suggest Rathain’s prince would lie to discredit the city council?’

‘I suggest he’s in league with the Fellowship’s intent, to see Etarra given over to barbarians.’ Diegan leaned forward. Diamond studs sparkled across his shoulders as he planted his elbows on his knees. ‘For that end, would he not act as the sorcerers’ purpose demanded?’

Never at ease with Arithon’s mage-trained evasiveness, Lysaer re-examined matters from that angle. Only this morning, Dakar had staggered in from his rounds of the taverns and attested in slurred certainty that Arithon had not spent last night drinking in any man’s company. ‘
Wherever he was, only Daelion knows. His Grace himself’s not saying.
’

Lysaer blinked, pricked by association. This day’s musician, who begged to be spared from royal position, was one and the same man as the chained sorcerer who had burned seven ships, then baited Amroth’s council at trial with his own life offered as gambit.

‘I can see you have reservations,’ Lady Talith observed. Her tight-laced taffeta rustled as she crossed her ankles; the terrier displaced by her movement whined and jumped plaintively down. ‘For our part, if this coronation is to be stopped, there’s little time left to take action.’

In fact, there remained but an hour before the noon ceremony. Lysaer snapped to, the odd bent of his thoughts cut off by his ingrained habit of fair play. ‘Don’t think to suggest a conspiracy. I’ll not be party to treason. The Fellowship’s intentions toward your city are certainly not harmful, and Arithon’s rights of inheritance are not in my province to deny.’

‘But you doubt him,’ Talith pressed.

There, most squarely, she scored. Honour demanded that the integrity of any ruler should be challenged over issues of social justice. Repelled as if brushed by something dank, Lysaer arose. Good manners concealed his private qualms as he gathered his velvet cloak and offered his hand to Talith. Her beauty might bedazzle his vision but never his inborn integrity. He drew her suavely to her feet. ‘Lady, on behalf of your city, I’ll question your prince. Arithon is secretive, crafty and not always forthright about his motivations. But given direct confrontation, I’ve never known him to lie.’

Diegan jangled the bell for the maid to collect the crystal and the wine-tray. To Lysaer, he added, ‘You’ll tell us your findings before the coronation begins?’

Cold now, and unsure what should motivate him to undertake such a promise at inconveniently short notice, Lysaer found himself saying, ‘You have my formal word.’

The room, the wine and the company seemed suddenly too rich. Lysaer strove to recoup his composure. Sleepless nights and troubled dreams had sown his mind with unworthy confusion. For even if Arithon’s sympathies were misguided, the thorns in seeing justice done remained: the labourers enslaved in guild service were still children, ill fed, inadequately clothed and poorly housed. Although for simplicity’s sake it would relieve a vicious quandary to fault them for the crimes of their ancestors, their plight deserved unbiased review. If Arithon would champion their cause, he must defend his decision to repudiate the city council’s policies. Lysaer dodged the terrier that playfully circled his feet and strode with firm purpose for the door.

‘My lord, my lady,’ he said in parting.

A bang and a thump sounded in the passage outside.

The inbound commotion came accompanied by Dakar’s voice, plaintively arguing with a servant. Protests were cut by Asandir demanding to know what was amiss.

Lysaer pressed his thumb on the doorlatch. The fastening seemed queerly to have jammed. A violent wrench failed to dislodge the obstruction.

Lord Diegan shoved the maid away from the wine-tray in his haste to reach Lysaer’s side. Their combined attempt to free the door caused the scrolled brass to spark white light. Heat followed, intense enough to raise blisters.

Lysaer noticed instantly that his skin took no mark from the encounter. No stranger to the effects of small sorceries, he cried out a reflexive warning. ‘Spellcraft!’

Diegan regarded him intently, while inexplicable heat and chills chased through his body once again.

This bout proved more fierce than the last. Lysaer swayed. For an instant the surrounding room seemed to flicker in and out of existence. His vision quickly steadied, but his ears were left buzzing with unnameable, untraceable sound. Rage touched him. The emotion came barbed with a thought so clearly delineated, it seemed more solid than the lintel he caught to brace his balance. Who but Arithon would have dared to interfere; the poisoned conclusion followed, that if the s’Ffalenn bastard was to blame, distrust of Etarra’s council was emphatically misplaced.

Vindicated by Lysaer’s dismay, Diegan said, ‘We’re betrayed!’ He matched a grim glance with his sister.

The servant in the outside corridor had fallen silent; the chambermaid cowered in a corner. Dakar’s reply to Asandir breached the sealed parlour with damning, irrefutable clarity. ‘But of course I set wards to bind the doorlatch! Arithon begged me at all costs to keep him separate from Lysaer!’

‘Where’s the prince of Rathain?’ The sorcerer must have glowered fearsomely, for Dakar’s answer rose to a pitch very near to hysteria.

‘He went out. Into the streets, to look for you. If Luhaine’s ghost still guards him, it’s being obstinately close-mouthed. Didn’t you see either one of them on your way over here?’

‘No.’ Asandir’s step approached the closed doorway. ‘Too late, now, to wish differently. Your prophecy bars us from action. You say Lysaer’s inside?’

In mutinous self-defence, Dakar said, ‘Diegan’s servants insist he never left.’

Lysaer felt a hand on his forearm, Talith’s, pulling him quickly aside. A shock like a spark ripped through him; not for her beauty, which could stun any man, but for her unmannerly presumption. Before he had space to question his oddly irascible reaction, the feeling became swept aside and an urge he also could not trace prompted him to fast speech. ‘I promised I’d find Arithon and ask him for the truth. Can you get me out?’

Diegan grinned. ‘Every house in Etarra has a closet exit, and hidden stairs to an outside alley. Talith will show you. I’ll delay the sorcerer.’

‘You’ll try.’ Lysaer surrendered his hand to the lady, who breathlessly hurried him forward. ‘Be careful. No Fellowship sorcerer has compunctions against prying into your private thoughts.’

If the warning gave Diegan reservations, Lysaer was not to find out. Talith sank her nails into his wrist and bundled him through a doorway that had miraculously opened through the back wall. Thrust into a musty stone passageway, Lysaer heard only Talith, softly cursing the dust that grimed the gold hem of her dress before she dragged the panel closed and shut them in cobwebs and darkness.

In the parlour, the terrified maid began to sob. Balked from following its pretty mistress, the terrier’s yapping changed pitch to barks and growls. The next instant the latch on the hallway door discharged a static shower of sparks. The dog bounded sideways, trailing ribbons, while the panel explosively burst inward.