The Curse of the Mistwraith (7 page)

Prepared, when the pinched line of Arithon’s mouth broke and air shuddered into lungs bereft of control, the healer muffled the hoarse, pealing screams under a twist of bedlinen with the gentleness he might have shown a son. An assistant rushed to fetch a posset. In the interval before Arithon blacked out, his eyes showed profound and ragged gratitude.

The healer smoothed the damp, rucked linens and kneaded his patient’s contorted muscles until their quivering eased into stillness. Then, bone-weary, he pushed his stiff frame erect. Informed by his assistant that the sun had long since set, he exclaimed aloud. ‘Ath’s merciful grace! That man has a will like steel wire.’

By morning, the drug was no longer necessary. Through the final hours of withdrawal, Arithon remained in full command of his wits. Although such raw, determined courage won him the healer’s devoted admiration, no strength of character could lessen the toll on his health. Bereft of strength and depleted to the point where bone, muscle and vein stood in relief beneath bloodless skin, Arithon seemed a man more dead than alive.

When he woke following his first period of natural sleep, the healer consulted him. ‘The king shall not be told of your recovery until absolutely necessary. You need as much time as possible for convalescence.’

The prisoner reacted unexpectedly. Weary distaste touched the face of a man too spent to curb emotion. ‘That’s a costly risk. The king would execute you for daring such sentiment. And I will suffer precisely as long as mind and body remain whole enough to react.’ Arithon turned his head toward the wall, too fraught to frame his deepest fear: that grief and despair had unbalanced him.

That his fragile grip on self-restraint might snap under further provocation and tempt him to an unprincipled attack through magecraft. ‘If I’m to be scapegoat before the court of Amroth, let me not last an hour. Free of the drug, I believe I can achieve that.’ He ended on a wounding note of irony. ‘If you wish to be merciful, tell the king at once.’

The healer rose sharply. Unable to speak, he touched Arithon’s thin shoulder in sympathy. Then he left to seek audience with the king. All along he had expected to regret his dealings with the Master of Shadow; but never until the end had he guessed he might suffer out of pity.

Resplendent in silks, fine furs and jewels, officials and courtiers alike packed the marble-pillared council hall on the day appointed for Arithon s’Ffalenn to stand trial before the king of Amroth. The crown prince was present despite the incident at the victory feast that had set him out of favour with his father. Although the ignominy stung, that his chair as the kingdom’s heir apparent would stand empty on the dais, his ingrained sense of duty prevailed. Seated in the gallery normally reserved for royal guests, Lysaer leaned anxiously forward as the bossed doors swung open. Halberdiers in royal livery entered. The prisoner walked in their midst, bracketed by the steely flash of weapons. A sigh of movement swept across the chamber as high-born heads turned to stare.

Lysaer studied the Master of Shadow with rapt attention and a turmoil of mixed emotions. The drug had left Arithon with a deceptive air of fragility. The peasant’s tunic which replaced his torn cotton draped loosely over gaunt shoulders. Whittled down to its framework of bone, his face bore a withdrawn expression, as if the chains which dragged at wrists and ankles were no inconvenience. His graceless stride betrayed otherwise; but the hissed insults from the galleries failed to raise any response. As prisoner and escort reached the foot of the dais, Lysaer was struck by an infuriating oddity. After all this s’Ffalenn sorcerer had done to avoid his present predicament, he showed no flicker of apprehension.

Dazzled by the tiered banks of candles after long weeks of confinement, Arithon stood blinking before the jewelled presence of the court. Stillness claimed the crowded galleries as his sea-cold gaze steadied, passed over banners and richly-dyed tapestries, swept the array of dignitaries on the dais, then fixed at last on the king.

‘You will kneel,’ said the sovereign lord of Amroth. He had yearned thirty years for this moment.

At the centre of the cut-marble flooring, Arithon stood motionless. His eyes remained distant as a dreamer’s, as if no spoken word could reach him. A rustle of uneasiness swept the packed rows of courtiers. Only Lysaer frowned, troubled again by incongruity. The cold-handed manipulation he had escaped in
Briane’s
sail-hold had certainly been no coincidence. If a clever, controlled man who possessed a sorcerer’s talents chose a senseless act of bravado, the reason could not be trite. But the king’s gesture to the halberdiers arrested the prince’s thought.

The ceremonial grandeur of the chamber left abundant space for free movement; banners and trappings rippled in the disturbed air as nine feet of studded beech lifted and turned in a guardsman’s fists. Steel flashed and descended, the weapon’s metal-shod butt aimed squarely at the s’Ffalenn back. Yet with uncanny timing and a grace that maddened the eye, Arithon dropped to his knees. The blow intended to take him between the shoulder blades ripped harmlessly over his head.

The halberdier overbalanced. The step he took to save himself caught, sliding, on links of chain. He went down with a jangle of mail in full public view of the court. Somebody laughed. The guardsman twisted, his face beefy with outrage, but the lunge he began in retaliation was forestalled by Arithon’s rejoinder.

‘The wisest of sages have said that a man will choose violence out of fear.’ The Master’s words were expressive, but cold, and directed toward the king. ‘Is your stature so mean that you dare not face me without fetters?’

A flurry of affront disturbed the council. The king responded without anger, a slow smile on his lips. The courtiers stilled to hear his reply. ‘Guardsman, you have been personally shamed. Leave is given to avenge yourself. ’

The halberdier recovered his feet and his weapon with the haste of a bad-tempered bear. The stroke he landed to restore his dignity threw Arithon forward on his face. Hampered by the chain, the prisoner could not use his hands to save himself. His cheek struck the marble edge of the stair and blood ran bright over pale skin. With the breath stopped in their throats, Amroth’s finest noted the royal gesture of dismissal. The halberdier stepped back, his eyes still fixed on his victim.

Lysaer searched the sharp planes of the s’Ffalenn face, but found no change in expression. Arithon stirred upon the floor. Subject to a thousand inimical stares, he rose to his feet, movements underscored by the dissonant drag of steel.

The king’s hand dropped to the sceptre in his lap. Candlelight splintered over gem stones and gold as his fingers tightened round the grip. ‘You exist this moment because I wish to see you suffer.’

Arithon’s reply came fast as a whipcrack. ‘That’s a lie! I exist because your wife refused you leave to use mastery of shadow as a weapon against s’Ffalenn.’

‘Her scruple was well betrayed then, when you left Rauven.’ The king leaned forward. ‘You sold your talents well for the massacre of s’Ilessid seamen. Your reason will interest us all, since Lysaer never sailed with a warfleet. He never wielded his gift of light against Karthan.’

Lysaer clamped his fists against the balustrade, stung to private anger by the remark. No scruple of the king’s had kept him ashore, but Rauven’s steadfast refusal to grant the training that would allow him to focus and augment his inborn talent.

If Arithon knew that truth, he did not speak. Blood ran down the steep line of his cheek and splashed the stone red at his feet. Calm, assured and steady, he did not chafe at his helplessness; neither did he act like a man distressed for lack of options. Bothered by that cold poise, and by the courtiers’ avid eagerness, Lysaer wrestled apprehension. Had he sat at his father’s side, he could at least have counselled caution.

‘Well?’ Gems flashed as the king raised his sceptre. ‘Have you nothing to say?’

Silence; the court stirred, softly as rainfall on snow. Lysaer swallowed and found his throat cramped. Arithon might have engaged sorcery or shadow; the fact he did neither made no sense, and the unbroken tranquillity reflected in his stance failed to match the earlier profile of his character. Annoyed by the incongruity, Lysaer pursued the reason with the tenacity of a ferret burrowing after rats.

The king shifted impatiently. ‘Would you speak for your freedom?’

Poised between guardsmen, unmercifully lit by the massive bronze candelabra, Arithon remained unresponsive. Not an eyelash moved, even as the royal fingers clenched and slowly whitened.

‘Jog his memory,’ said the king. Sapphires sparked blue in the candleflame as he let the sceptre fall.

This time the captive tried no last-minute trick of evasion. The halberdiers bashed him headlong onto his side. Arithon struck the floor rolling and managed to avoid the step. But after that he might have been a puppet mauled by dogs, so little effort did he make to spare himself. The guardsmen’s blows tumbled his unresisting flesh over and over before the dais, raising a counter-strophe of protest from the chain. Not yet ready to see his enemy ruined by chance injury, the king put a stop to the abuse.

Arithon lay on his back adjacent to the carpeted aisle that led back through the crowd to the antechamber. His undyed cotton tunic hid any marks of the halberdier’s ministrations. The guards had been careful to avoid crippling damage; which perhaps was a mistake, Lysaer thought. The bastard’s insufferably remote expression remained unchanged.

Except to glance at the king, Arithon spoke without altering position. ‘The same sages also wrote that violence is the habit of the weak, the impotent and the fool.’ His final word was torn short as a guardsman kicked his ribs.

The king laughed. ‘Then why did you leave Rauven,
bastard?
To become impotent, weak and foolish? Or did you blind and burn seven ships and their crews for sheer sport?’

Again Arithon said nothing. Lysaer restrained an urge to curse. Something about the prisoner’s defiance rang false, as if, somehow, he sought to tune the king’s emotions to some unguessed at, deliberate purpose.

‘Speak!’ The king’s bearded features flushed in warning. ‘Shall I call the healer? Perhaps a second course of drugs would improve your manners.’

Arithon spread his hands in a gesture that might have suppressed impatience. But Lysaer’s spurious hope that the prisoner’s control might be weakened died as Arithon dragged himself to his feet. His upturned face sticky with blood, he confronted the king. ‘I could talk the fish from the sea, your royal Grace. You would hear nothing but the reflection of your own spite.’ Forced to lift his voice over swelling anger from the galleries, Arithon finished. ‘
Still, you would remain impotent, weak and a fool.
’

The king succumbed to fury. He shouted to the guardsmen, and mailed fists smashed Arithon to his knees. More blood spattered the tiles, while Amroth’s aristocracy vented its approval with cheers.

Lysaer sat frozen through the uproar. Unsettled by the turn of events, his thoughts churned like a millrace. A halberd spun. Arithon’s head snapped with the impact. Black hair fanned over the toe of a guardsman’s boot. The man-at-arms laughed and pinned it beneath his heel. The next blow fell full on the prisoner’s exposed face, while onlookers howled their approval.

Sickened by the violence, Lysaer was arrested by the sight of the prisoner’s outflung arm. The fine fingers were limp,
relaxed.
Memory of that same hand all splayed and stiffened with agony rose in the prince’s mind. Revelation followed. The odd calm which had puzzled Lysaer throughout was nothing else but indifference. Quite likely, Rauven’s training enabled Arithon to divorce his mind from his body;
certainly now he felt no pain at all.

The conclusion followed that the halberdiers might kill him. If death was the goal Arithon had striven with such cunning to achieve, this time no man could be blamed but the king. The feud would be ended in a messy, honourless tangle of animal savagery. Shamed to find himself alone with the decency for regret, the crown prince of Amroth rose sharply to leave. Yet before he could duck through a side door, a deafening crackle of sorcery exploded over the dais steps.

A shadow appeared in the empty air. The blot darkened, then resolved into the image of a woman robed in the deep purple and grey worn by the Rauven sorcerers. With a horrible twist, Lysaer made out the fair features of his mother under the cowled hood. If Arithon chose to repeat his tactics from the sail-hold in full public view of the court, his malice had passed beyond limit. Alarmed for the integrity of the king, and this time in command enough to remember that his gift of light could banish such shadows, the crown prince reversed his retreat and shoved through the press of stupefied courtiers. Yet his dash for the throne was obstructed.

Around him, the council members shook off surprise. A yammering cry erupted from the galleries. The king drove to his feet. The sceptre hurtled from his hand, passed clean through the apparition’s breast, and struck tile with a ringing scream of sound. The halberdiers abandoned Arithon; with levelled weapons they converged at a run to surround the ghostly image of the queen.

‘She’s only a sorcerer’s sending!’ From his pose of prostration on the floor, Arithon pitched his voice cleanly through the clamour. ‘An illusion threatens no one with harm. Neither can it be dispelled by armed force.’

Lysaer was blocked by a well-meaning guard; slowly the panic subsided. Silence blanketed the chamber. The bastard rolled and pushed himself upright, while the king glared at the image of his wife, his face stamped with alarming and dangerous animosity.

Arithon reached his feet. No guard restrained him as he moved against the drag of his chains to the base of the dais. Before the spectre of the queen, he stopped and spoke a phrase in the ancient language used still on Rauven. When the woman did not respond, Arithon tried again, his tone fiercely commanding.

The image remained immobile. Taut with uncertainty, Lysaer watched as Arithon shifted his regard to the king. Wearily, the Master said, ‘The spell’s binding is keyed to another. I cannot unlock its message.’