The Curse of the Mistwraith (69 page)

Steiven laughed. From his towering height, he embraced his royal liege like a son. ‘I’ve lived for it.’

Then, aware that Arithon’s exhaustion threatened collapse, he shouldered the prince’s weight as he had done for his own spent scouts and in peremptory command sent his clan elders packing to fetch bath water, hot food and dry blankets.

The war council resumed upon the moment Arithon’s needs had been attended. Etarra was capable of mounting an invasion force ten thousand strong: and with an understanding turned to grimness by five long centuries of hatred, Steiven dared not assume that the army sent after Arithon would be one man less than full muster.

Etarran lives would be counted cheaply for the ruin of the s’Ffalenn royal line.

‘I’ll need another message run through the relay,’ said the gaunt old Earl of Fallowmere, his single, unclouded eye fixed like a gimlet on his regent. ‘By tomorrow every scout I have of fighting age will march to support your Deshans.’

‘Well, they’ll get here too damned late!’ Caolle drove his poignard into the rough-split wood that planked the table. ‘You know that fey princeling is right. If we stand, we’re going to have a massacre.’

‘If we don’t stand, we’ll be slaughtered on the run, or else die of rot and fever in the boglands of Anglefen by summer.’ Quietly, Steiven added, ‘We’ll fight. But the field must be chosen to our advantage.’

‘Biggest, blood-spilling raid we’ll ever stage,’ said the last Earl of Fallowmere. ‘For myself, I wouldn’t miss it.’

Caolle glared.

In a warmth of brotherly bickering, the strategies were argued, discarded and reworked, chart after chart unrolled and shoved aside until parchments layered the carpets like quilting. A site was finally chosen in a range of valleys along the Tal Quorin where the current ran wide and shallow between a grassy verge of low banks.

‘All right then.’ Steiven raised his corded arms, the dull studs on his brigandine winking in sequence as he stretched. ‘Roust last night’s patrol. All our camps must relocate east to the river site. The first arrivals will need to start cutting timber to build the traps.’

‘And the prince?’ Caolle demanded. His chapped lips thinned at the softening he saw on his chieftain’s scarred face. ‘Ah, no, my lord, you’re not thinking to wait out his grace’s infirmity. This is unsafe territory and we need to break camp before nightfall.’

There followed a moment in which clanlord and war captain clashed glances across the candletops. In Deshir, the custom was unbending: any scout unfit for travel was given a mercy stroke and abandoned where he lay by the trail. In lands ranged by Etarra’s headhunters, litters for the wounded and the lame endangered those men still hale; and no man, however minor his injury, was ever left at risk of captivity.

‘You wake him,’ Steiven invited with a fierce flash of teeth. ‘I warrant he’ll walk, just to spite you. It’s the grey he rode in on we’ll likely be leaving for crowbait.’

Arithon came half-awake as a warm weight settled over his knees. Something else tugged at his hair and another touch trailed across the knuckles of his unbandaged hand that lay outside the blankets.

He drew breath and stirred, and the stiffness of his body caught him up in an ache that made him gasp.

‘You woke him up,’ a child’s voice piped anxiously.

‘Didn’t,’ said another, fast as echo, from the other side of the pallet.

Arithon opened his eyes.

‘Did too, see?’ said a brunette perhaps six years old, with tea-coloured eyes and dimples, who lounged against the ticking by his shoulder. ‘He might get mad.’

Exactly what he chose to do next became the focus of four pairs of eyes, from the auburn-haired angel astride his knees, to the tallest, regarding him with pre-teen dignity from the bedstead, to the least of them, as dark-haired as the father she resembled, sucking on two fingers and staring shyly from behind her eldest sister.

Arithon elbowed himself halfway upright, and froze as the slide of the blankets warned he was naked underneath. His sluggish thoughts scrambled to reorient and to integrate hide walls and the patchworked fur coverlets of a sleeping cubicle with his last waking memory, of an inadvertent nap in the saddle that had ended in a fall from a moving horse.

‘You aren’t mad, are you?’ said the sable-haired ten-year-old with another bounce against his knee.

He hurt everywhere. He was too tired still by half, and if he wanted to be annoyed, he lacked the will. Outnumbered, and pinned beneath the coverlets by a weight of small admirers, he adjusted his tactics to accommodate.

A short interval later Steiven’s wife Dania peeked into the alcove. She carried a bowl of bread dough braced against her hip, and was fumingly prepared to dress down daughters warned all morning to leave their guest in peace.

The miscreants had found a length of rawhide. Five heads bent together over a puzzle that, with the help of tiny hands and much patient instruction from the prince, was forming into an intricate piece of knotwork.

Dania’s reprimand died unspoken. Quietly, carefully, she moved to slip the privacy flap closed. But he had heard her, involved as he was, even through the giggles of the girls.

‘It’s all right. Tashka has told me the camp is to move this afternoon. I should have been wakened soon in any case.’ Green eyes turned in question toward the doorway, made the more vivid by close proximity of the oldest child’s fiery hair. ‘You have beautiful daughters, lady. They are yours, I see, and Lord Steiven’s? The resemblance is too striking to overlook.’

The bread bowl suddenly seemed an encumbrance. Aware that as her sovereign he deserved a semblance of courtesy, Dania froze with the intuition that if she curtseyed, she was going to see him angry.

Her youngest displaced one awkwardness by creation of another.

‘Mama, look!’ Edal called pulling her hands too fast from hide lacing. Oblivious to her sisters’ cries of dismay as the pattern collapsed into tangles, she seized Arithon’s wrist in chubby hands and said loudly, ‘Look, the prince has scars.’

‘Everybody who escapes from Etarra has scars, Edal,’ Dania scolded in gentle exasperation. ‘But it’s never polite to speak of them.’ She raised the bread bowl as if it were a shield before her breast and delivered a succession of orders that set her daughters to flight like butterflies. As the last one vanished, she discovered the prince still regarding her. He did have scars, she knew from attending him the night before; ones not in keeping with his station, and except for the queer burn on his arm, too old to have happened in Etarra.

The awkwardness remained. Unused to strangers, far less ones born royal, Dania wished her curiosity could be deflected as easily as her daughters’, by a ploy with a scrap of hide string.

He found words that had equal effect. ‘I should like to help with the packing.’

Gracefully turned to practicalities, Dania said, ‘Your clothing is still wet from being washed. There are leggings and a tunic that should fit you in the chest by the wall. When you’re dressed, we’ll see about food.’

‘The Masterbard,’ asked Arithon in the same light tone of conversation. ‘Is he still with the clans?’

‘Yes.’ Despite diffidence, Dania smiled. The expression lifted cares from her face and softened the seams of hard living and weather. ‘Halliron groused too much to refuse. Danger, he said, went hand in hand with history. At his age, he claimed he’d expire from impatience before he’d hear news at second hand.’

Something retreated behind Arithon’s expression, though his eyes like shadowed emerald never shifted in their framework of gaunt flesh. It stung her not to know why the Masterbard’s presence should cause upset; aside from prodigious talent as a musician, Halliron was the very soul of kindness. When Arithon graciously dismissed her with his thanks, Lady Dania was relieved to escape to undertake the much tidier frustration of punching bread dough.

Arithon arose and stiffly dressed in the black-dyed leathers offered for his use from the chest. These were sewn of deerhide, beaten soft and adorned with pale threadwork at collar, shoulder and hem. The silk needle-work was finely embroidered; but there was no silver lacing. In Deshir’s forest, one did not wear garments that might inadvertently flash or catch the light. Dania’s mention of damp clothing was likely an excuse to wean away the coronation finery that was ill-suited for the trail.

Arithon emerged from the alcove to find, embarrassed, that the only clan lodge tent still standing had been the one under which he sheltered. Every other hide dwelling sat on the beaten earth in a pine clearing, furled tight as puffballs just sprouted after a rainfall. A team of children appeared immediately to begin striking the s’Valerient tents. Dania’s daughters were everywhere under the feet of the boys who yanked stakes and unreeled spun cordage to coax collapsing hide to fall in folds. They all carried knives, though the eldest among them looked not a day past fourteen.

Nowhere did Arithon encounter signs of grief or burial of the dead child he had borne from Etarra. At first impression, these clanfolk seemed more hardened even than Maenalle’s, more scarred, more grim, more ingrained by desperate necessity. By overhearing stray comments, Arithon gathered the men had marched ahead of the camp to the site on the south-east edge of Deshire forest, where pitched battle would be fought with Etarra’s army.

Found at her baking over an open-air trestle, Dania pushed a fallen coil of hair from her cheek with the back of one floury wrist. ‘Well need journey-cakes for the trail. These are hard and savourless, so I’ve made sweet bread. Edal’s gone to the ovens so you can have yours hot.’ She turned her head, prepared to call, when a tardy daughter reappeared with steaming bread in a linen napkin. ‘Eat,’ Dania urged, still absorbed with the batter that clung to the bowl. ‘You must be famished.’

He was. Three days and four nights with too little food had left him faint to the edge of sickness. Arithon took the linen and lifted the bread, forced despite his hunger to pick at it slowly. Even bland sustenance sat uneasily in his painfully empty innards. He realized that he was being treated as an invalid. ‘Last night.’ His voice was very soft. ‘What happened?’

Dania banged her hands down so hard the wooden bowl close to cracked. ‘Ath, you would ask.’ Although her back was turned, motherly instinct pinpointed little Edal’s eager regard. Dania reflexively packed her daughter off to fetch back a bucket of clean water. ‘You were too tired to ride. Any fool could have seen. But the men, they’ve lived with troubles for so long that I sometimes think we’ve come to value all the wrong sort of things.’

‘I didn’t ask for excuses,’ Arithon interrupted mildly. ‘What happened?’

She was blunt. ‘You fell off your horse. My Lord Steiven took you up across his saddlebow.’

That jogged his recall. Fragments came back to him of Caolle’s sarcastic comment that he should be left in the mud by the trail, that the clans had outgrown any need for royal sovereignty; of somebody else in drier tones suggesting he should be lashed to a packhorse like deadwood, that the scars chafed on his wrists were enough indication that this sort of happenstance might not be new.

Dania began to stack up dirtied spoons and bowls to allow him the chance to let down his odd barrier of silence, maybe broach what had hounded him out of Etarra in the first place with only clothes fit for feasting on his back.

When his stillness became prolonged, she risked a peek and found him gone, the napkin filled with crumbs abandoned in neat folds upon the rock where he had been sitting.

The clouds and the rain had passed and left the air redolent with evergreen, underlaid by the mustier wet of shed needles. Arithon strolled the hard-beaten paths of what had once been a long-term campsite. He should have been unobtrusive in his soft black leathers, under sun-striped shadows beneath the trees; but he was the only man in a company of older women, bearing mothers and young children. Busy enough with securing leather bundles, or sealing wrapped belongings in oaken casks, they seldom gave more than a glance at his approach. Behind his back, they were all wont to stare.

He allowed them, of a mind to make observations himself. Small birds with gold-banded wings foraged, pecking at the dirt where the lodge tents had set. They took off in fan-shaped flocks, wove and wheeled, to alight again just ahead. A small girl told him they were pine-sparrows. Arithon thanked her, and moved on.

Like the last, this camp kept no dogs. Infants rode on their mothers’ backs; toddlers too young for chores laughed at their play, but did not stray into the pinewoods. Half-clad, or wearing leather patched with motley, they tussled at sticks and ball between mounds of household goods left stranded by the furled lodges. The casks, the chests lashed in protective layers of oiled leather, the thick-woven carpets with their bright colours hidden in rolls; all were tied and stacked in piles, to be carried off to a warren of hidden root-cellars dug into the woodland floor. The bitter conclusion was inescapable. The site the clans were leaving was a home of sorts, familiar and often revisited. The place they were going to on account of their prince was bare and temporary, and necessities would be carried on their backs.

Arithon fingered the little tin canister purloined from Sethvir’s saddlebags. He had not hesitated to take the tienelle in the heat of his escape from Etarra; still less did he regret the theft now. Against Lord Diegan’s army, the defenders of Strakewood Forest would be outnumbered nine to one. That quandary added weight to the ache of total weariness. If he were to shy from using his talents, directed by every scrap of augury he could draw from the herb’s narcotic visions, the people who sheltered him must rely upon chance for survival. But in order to smoke the leaves to sound the future he required absolute privacy.

In that he was already thwarted.

Even if there had been a refuge between the bustle where no one would disturb or remark on him, the packers were hurrying to complete their tasks by afternoon. Aware that two boys had sneaked up to dog his steps in exaggerated imitation of his gait, Arithon regarded the rain-matted detritus of pine needles that his boots passed across without track. A thought and a chill ran through him: he might escape by becoming too visible. At once, with some savagery, he scuffled his heels to foster false impression of his ignorance, that these folk needed less than a secretive caution necessary to survival in the wild.