The Curse of the Mistwraith (91 page)

As begrimed as any clansman, though his shirt was embroidered and cuffed in fine silk and his lyranthe stayed strapped on his shoulder, the Masterbard calmly gave answer. ‘I’ll not leave.’ He pushed on through a stand of low maples. ‘Don’t punish yourself over hindsight.’

Caolle sucked an offended breath. ‘I should have listened. We could’ve scattered and separated the women.’

‘The men would still be as dead. The divided families could not survive.’ Halliron finished in quiet certainty, ‘Your children would have died in Etarra. Arithon told me. He saw their executions in the course of his tienelle scrying.’

Loath to be reminded, Caolle pushed past. ‘Ath. If you have to tag after me, the least you can do is to stop talking.’ But the bard’s tenacity impressed him. Though no fighter, Halliron tended to show up where he was useful. If in this fire-seared abattoir his touch with the wounded and dying was unlikely to offer any benefit, his unstinting service had earned him the right to go on.

The pair moved ahead, oddly matched; the stocky, grizzled warrior in simmering, sceptical bitterness; and the lean musician whose flared boots and court clothing were unsuited for rugged terrain, but whose grace stayed unmarred by the setting.

They came across a slain Etarran pikeman. The man did not lie as he had fallen. Someone had laid his fouled weapon aside, removed his helm, and turned his young face to the sky. Eyes closed, he now rested straight with his hands gently crossed on his breast.

‘Odd.’ Caolle coughed out the stench of ash. ‘One of ours wouldn’t bother. Fellow must’ve had a companion.’

Halliron said nothing, but raised his head and peered into the murk of the grotto.

‘You know something,’ Caolle accused.

‘Maybe.’ Halliron pressed on.

After the fifth such corpse, this one a clansman’s, the discrepancy became irksome. Caolle stopped square in the moss where a dead scout had been as tenderly arranged.

‘You never heard the ballad of Falmuir?’ Halliron asked softly. ‘I think we are seeing its like.’

‘Ballad?’ Caolle straightened. He scrubbed his face with his knuckles, as if tiredness could be scraped from his flesh. ‘You pick a damned odd time to speak of singing.’

Halliron stood also. A warm glint of challenge lit his eyes. ‘And you don’t out of reflex view every man you meet, and measure his potential as a fighter?’

‘That’s different.’ Caolle sighed. ‘Maybe not.’ He rechecked the hang of his sword and his knives, and stalked from the riverbed into shadow. ‘Then what should I know about Falmuir?’

‘That two cities took arms over marriage rights to an heiress.’ Halliron slowed to negotiate a wash of dry river pebbles where a misstep could easily turn an ankle. ‘The girl,’ he resumed, ‘had a seer’s gift. She begged her guardian to allow her to wed an uninvolved suitor as compromise, and to forfeit her rights of inheritance. For greed and for power her wishes were refused. A war resulted, with losses very like this one.’

Caolle led deeper into the defile, his disgust rendered bodiless in full gloom. ‘These Etarrans had only to mind their manners and stay home. Their city was never assaulted.’

Which truth could be argued, from the viewpoint of townsmen terrorized by shadows they could hardly be expected to know were harmless. Cut off ahead of his conclusion, Halliron pondered the clan captain’s impatience. ‘You suspect another treachery lies ahead?’

‘What else?’ The defile narrowed. Sturdy, as silent in motion as a predator, Caolle drew his knife. With the river fallen behind, the thrash of white waters diminished. In darkness now humid with dew the casualties lay thick on the earth. Clansman and foe alike were arrayed in still rows, head to feet aligned north to south and weapons pulled clear of folded hands.

Caolle checked each one anyway to ascertain no body still breathed.

Above the soft scrape of his bootsoles, Halliron said, ‘You won’t find what you think.’

‘So we’ll see.’ Nettled as a wolf over a disturbed cache, Caolle adhered to his wariness.

Cautioned by the angle of the captain’s shoulders, Halliron let ballads and conversation both lapse. The ravine they trod held an unsettled feel. Where deer should have bounded from their watering, the song of the crickets rang unpartnered. Here only bats flitted and swooped erratic circles between the scarred walls of the rimrocks.

And then between steps the mosses that cushioned the trailbed were seared to papery dryness. Trees became fire-stripped skeletons, while ahead the grotto lay ravaged and razed to split stone filmed over with carbon.

The air hung poisoned with taint.

Inside the ruin where the tents had stood, limned like a ghost in soft starlight, knelt a man.

Breath hissed through Caolle’s clenched teeth. His knife hand lifted, caught back from a throw by Halliron.

His urgency queerly muffled, the bard said, ‘Don’t. That’s no enemy.’

‘His Grace of Rathain. I can see.’ Tension did not leave Caolle’s arm. ‘By Ath, I could thrash him! Why in Sithaer should he bother with corpses while our wounded lie unfound and suffering!’

‘You misunderstand him, you always have.’ The Masterbard released his restraint, and jumped back at the speed with which the clan captain turned on him.

‘And you don’t?’ Caolle enforced incredulity with a whistling gesture of his knife.

Recovered, Halliron stood his ground. The night breeze stirred his white hair, and his face, deeply shadowed, stayed serene. ‘This moment, no. I think it best you don’t disturb your liege.’ Then, his tone changed to awe, he added, ‘It is like Falmuir. “
To free the dazed spirits, and reclothe cold flesh in fair flowers.”’
At Caolle’s look of baffled anger, the Masterbard said, ‘Prince Arithon’s mage-trained. You don’t know what that means?’

‘I’d be hardly likely to, should I?’ Caolle presented his shoulder, his profile like a hatchet cut against the soot-stained dark of the grotto. ‘Killing’s my trade, not fey tricks with poisons and shadows.’

And behind the captain’s harshness, in a knifeblade demarked by a trembling thread of reflection, Halliron perceived the grief of crushing losses: a clanlord gone, and Dania and four daughters cherished as if they had been Caolle’s own. The present was robbed and the future stretched friendlessly bleak. A difficult task must for love be repeated all over again; another young boy to be raised for the burden of leading the northland clans: first Steiven and now, when a man was ageing and weary of adversity, Steiven’s orphaned son.

That Caolle’s sullen nature would greet such desertion in anger Halliron well understood. What could not for tragedy be permitted was that blame for Deshir’s ills stay fastened on the Teir’s’Ffalenn. Time had come for the bard to ply the service he was trained for. There and then in the darkness, amid the charred ground where the dead lay, he unwrapped the cover from his instrument.

Caolle snapped, ‘Ath, we’ll have ballads again?’ He made to surge forward and stopped, caught aback by the bard’s grip on his wrist. Court manners or not, Halliron could move nimbly when need warranted.

‘You’ll not touch him,’ the bard said in reference to the man, still kneeling, who had neither looked up nor shown other sign he had heard them. The schooled timbre of a masterbard’s voice could fashion an outright command. ‘Sit, Caolle. Hear the tale of Falmuir. After that, do exactly as you please.’

Disarmed as much by exhaustion, Caolle gave way. If he chose not to sit, he had little choice but to listen, as any man must when a singer of Halliron’s stature plied his craft. For a masterbard, the edges of mage-sight and music lay twined to a single wrapped thread. The lyranthe had been fashioned by Paravian spellcraft and under supremely skilled fingers she evoked an allure not to be denied.

From the opening chords, Caolle looked aside. By the close of the first verse his stiffness was all pride and pretence. As his knife hand relinquished its tension, and his face eased from antipathy, he heard of the siege of Falmuir, where a princess had walked out alone on a battlefield where defenders and abductors lay slain. Lent refined vision by the spelled weave of words and bright notes, Caolle was shown in humility the legend of the ballad re-enacted here, in the grotto of Deshir’s slain.

His gaze at some point drifted back to Arithon. Even as a princess had once done in grief and total loss, the Shadow Master poised amid the burned remains of clan kindred. His fine-boned hands were filmed with black ash for each of the corpses he had settled. His hollowed cheeks glittered with the tracings left scoured by tears. He was speaking. Each syllable rang with compassion, and each word he spun formed a name. He summoned in love, and they came to him, the shades of tiny babes and silent women, of girls and grandmothers and daughters and wives, sundered from life in such violence that their spirits were homeless and dazed. They formed around him a webwork of subliminal light, not burned, but whole; no more aggrieved, but joyous, as he added words in lyric Paravian that distanced the violence that had claimed them.

Arithon gave back their deaths, redeemed from the horror of murder. One by one he cherished their memories. In an unconditional mercy that disallowed grief, they were fully and finally freed to the peace of Ath’s deepest mystery.

In time, no more forms shone in soft light; but only a man alone, who rose unsteadily to his feet; while the sad cadence of Halliron’s voice delivered the Princess of Falmuir’s final lines: ‘
She went not to wed, nor to comfort or rest, but to free the dazed dead, and to reclothe cold flesh in fair flowers.
’

But in this cleft of sere earth and split rock, there were neither bodies to bury nor blossoms to seed over gravesites. Caolle blotted his cheeks with the knuckles still clenched to his skinning knife. His gesture encompassed his prince, as gruffly he said, ‘The man was sent to bed once. If he faints on his feet, he’s like to whack his head on a rock.’

‘Let him be.’ Halliron stroked the ring of fading strings into silence. ‘What he does brings solace we cannot.’

‘It’s healing he needs,’ Caolle groused. ‘Though by Daelion, I don’t like the post of royal nursemaid.’

Attuned to the change in the captain’s railing, the masterbard tied up his instrument. Too grave to be accused of amusement, he waited while a shamefaced Caolle noticed and then sheathed his knife. Then, unspeaking, they trailed Arithon’s progress up the grotto; they sorted out and administered to the living, Rathain’s prince to his uncounted dead.

Night passed. The bard’s face showed every sleepless hour, and Caolle wore an expression like boiled leather. While grey dawn crept in, and the forest rang with birdsong undisturbed by mankind’s sad strivings, they reached a dell scattered with the shafts of fallen arrows, and beyond, a broad beech, ringed with casualties so closely fallen that one lay entangled upon the next like tidewrack stranded by storm.

Roused from the half trance that had sustained his passage through the grotto, Arithon reached out sharp and suddenly, and touched Halliron on the wrist. ‘Let me work alone, here. There won’t be any wounded among these fallen.’

To kill a man untimely with a blade was not the same as using magics to twist his destiny, to overrule his fate by ill usage of the forces that endow life. To release those spirits cut down in Jieret’s defence was a costly, exhaustive undertaking more taxing than anything accomplished previously.

For these dead did not welcome intervention, but shrank from Arithon in stark fear. He was more than their killer; he was a master who had betrayed them on levels they had no conscious means to guard. To bind them long enough to free them, he had to expose to them all that he was. He had to lower his defences and let them shriek curses to his face. He had to endure their pain, let them hurt him in turn, until his passivity left them mollified and quiet.

And when the blessing of the Paravian release let them go, the peace they took with them was not shared. Arithon looked desolate and haunted, and remorse had stolen even tears.

Long before the end, Halliron found he could not watch.

Caolle, who had no gift to know the scope of what was happening, saw only that Arithon suffered. ‘Why should he do this? Why?’

But the answer the bard gave was inadequate, that this prince was both musician and king. Caolle understood only that the heart of the mystery lay beyond him.

When the captain who thought he knew all there was to sample of human grief could no longer abide the awful silence, he spoke the greatest accolade he could offer. ‘Arithon is greater than Steiven.’

‘You see that,’ said the Masterbard. ‘You are privileged. Many won’t, and most will be friends.’

By then, the town dead had been numbered and most of the clansmen. There remained now only Madreigh, open-eyed, his loose hands empty and outflung and a gaping hole in his chest. Aching in body, riven in spirit, Arithon paused in a moment of stopped breath. He looked upon the face of one scarred old campaigner not twisted in rigor, but content with the peace of the seasons.

This, the man who had defended his back, while, for Jieret, he had shaped baneful conjury. A cry wrung from Arithon’s throat before sluggish thought could restrain it. ‘Dharkaron Avenger witness, you should have had better than this!’

Shaking in visible spasms, he brushed back grey hair, and cupped Madreigh’s face between his palms. Blind to daylight, deaf in grief, he closed his eyes, and spoke Name; and met, not blankness or confusion but the abiding fall of spring rains, and snow, and warm sunlight. He encountered the peace of the trees.

The awareness shocked him. The spell that ensnared more than fifty to spare one had inadvertently preserved another life.

Rathain’s prince tilted back his head. Halliron and Caolle loomed above him. His balance tipped toward dizziness, and what seemed the yawning dark of Dharkaron’s censure opened before his wide eyes. ‘This one, also, I saved,’ he said as if pleading forgiveness. ‘Tend him well. I would beg that he lives.’

‘My liege,’ said Caolle. He knelt quickly; and when nerve and consciousness faltered, he was there to catch Arithon in his arms.

First Resolution