by Janny Wurts
“Bind him up for trial and arraignment,” Lysaer s’Ilessid instructed. When his stunned guard captain failed to react, he added in gentle encouragement, “The wretch is unconscious, not dead. Any henchman of Maenol’s who holds murder in his heart can live on to pull an oar for just cause.”
Roused from its nerve-edged amazement, the prince’s company settled, reformed, no man quite bold enough to exchange banter with comrades, or speak. The misfortune of the page boy persisted, a knot of disharmony in their midst. Blanched from the pain of a broken collarbone, his forehead and cheek grazed in blood, he stood on shaken feet, supported by the royal valet.
The troop’s healer summed up his brisk examination and pronounced him unfit to continue astride on a horse that dragged at the bit, restive despite the groom’s efforts to calm it. “The boy can’t manage with one hand for the rein, and the break in the bone will fare poorly if he’s jostled about in a baggage cart.”
“Be still, we won’t leave you,” Lysaer chided the weeping boy. He then turned with crisp orders to his captain. “Mount the clan prisoner on the gelding and tie it to the back of a cart. Then set the page up behind me. My destrier’s gaits are the smoothest.”
The valet looked up, aghast, from the boy’s dusty limbs and bleeding abrasions. “But your Grace! With all due respect, your surcoat will be spoiled with stains.”
“Your Grace, I couldn’t,” the boy stammered.
Lysaer laughed. His blue eyes held the unshakable, kind censure that melted the hearts of his servants. “Should a man who follows my banner be worth less than a few yards of silk? I think not.” The diamond in his ring scribed fire on the air as he extended his hand toward the page boy. “Come, lad. Share my saddle, and save your brave face for some worthier fight against darkness.”
Once the captive was mounted and lashed and secured under guard, the cavalcade mustered in disciplined order to resume its northbound march. Surrounded by diffident officers, Lysaer s’Ilessid was pressed with advice not to camp on the open plain.
“Better we ride on through sundown,” urged the captain. “Your Grace should rest safely inside city walls, protected by a manned garrison.”
Lysaer refused the necessity. “We must not make our entry at Miralt unannounced. Our troops will need to be quartered and fed. As guests of the city, the late hour would pose a discourtesy.”
Then that objection was overthrown by the seneschal, who insisted that a cadre of scouts forge ahead to carry word in advance.
“We ride on,” the captain said, satisfied. “The mayor’s Lord Commander at Arms shall have his due notice of your Grace’s imminent arrival.”
The royal cavalcade closed the last league to the arched gates of Miralt before midnight. Despite the late hour, they were met by the town’s ranking officers in glittering, parade formation. These were accompanied by two dozen armed outriders with rich, matched trappings, agleam under streaming pitch torches.
Their approach was unhurried. Lysaer had time to note the fringed banners, the silver-gilt helms, and bright bardings stitched from costly dyed silk. His forbearing smile reflected his pleasure and dismay. “By the fanfare, dare we guess? Our scouts’ tale of a light bolt and a barbarian arrow must have caused an excited reception. Those lancers in front look like they’re packing half the city treasury on their backs.”
The seneschal, mounted at the prince’s right hand, squinted through the flare of the torches. “Don’t belittle their pride. That’s the mayor’s personal guard.”
Apparently unwilling to risk offense to an envoy shown the favor of divine intervention, the city of Miralt had turned inside out to arrange a ceremonial entrance.
A taciturn soul who took shocking joy in the occasional gaudy joke, the seneschal observed at bland length, “I imagine they’ve also planned rounds of slow, pompous speeches.”
“Ah.” Lysaer’s eyebrows rose. “If you’re tired, we could duck the long-winded welcome.” He inclined his head and addressed the page boy, whose chin bobbed against his left shoulder. “You’d prefer a soft bed and a posset, I suppose?”
When the child returned an appreciative mumble, a curve of lordly amusement bent Lysaer’s lips. “Well then, we’ll need to outmatch them for pageantry.” To his captain, he commanded, “Ready the men. On my signal, I’d have them dress weapons.”
“As your Grace wills,” assurance came back from the dark.
When the lanterns on the city walls hove into view, Lysaer laid the reins of his weary charger in one hand, raised his right fist, and discharged his gift in a hazed, gold corona over the vanguard of his retinue.
Gemstones and bullion leaped into dazzling clarity. Mail sparkled. Light hazed the sweated coats of the destriers to the gloss of polished satin. A crisp, clear call from the head of the royal column, and the guards in the train raised pennoned lances in salute. The sunwheel standard fluttered in the wash of warmed air, while night became riven to high noon.
Lysaer s’Ilessid in his brilliant white surcoat became the shining center point in their midst. From battlements and gate arch, the rowed ranks of Miralt’s garrison watched his advance in gaping awe. Those city ministers and guildsmen called from home by peremptory summons forgot their complaint. The prince’s unearthly presence might have seemed an arrogant excess of pageantry, but for the young page riding pillion behind.
As the pair neared the gates, all eyes could see the rich surcoat was not stainless white, but marred with bloodstains and dirt. The boy who besmirched its purity was tear streaked, an ordinary mousy-haired victim of mischance who clung in pain-shocked need for solace. The contrast between the child’s needy suffering and the Prince of the Light’s remote majesty framed an indelible image of mercy.
The Mayor of Miralt forgot every word of his hastily scribed formal welcome. The herald stationed in the gate keep hid his face, reduced to gawping silence as the prince drew rein in the roadway.
Before any minister could recover the aplomb to smooth over the lapse in state manners, Lysaer raised his voice and blessed the city in flawless formal language. In seamless diplomacy, he begged leave of needless courtesies. His train had suffered an assassin’s attack. “No man was wounded, but my page boy suffered a battering fall from his horse.”
If ceremony could be excused, a healer was asked, and swift disposition for the men, who were hungry and tired.
Dazzled half-blind, awash in shed glare from the unveiled heat of Lysaer’s majesty, the Lord Mayor managed a stammered assurance. His garrison barracks would house Avenor’s retinue, and the comforts of his own palace would be placed at the prince’s disposal.
Lysaer inclined his head. “Light’s blessing on you,” he said, the gracious assurance behind such acknowledgment no less than his regal due.
To relief on both sides that the speeches were dropped, Avenor’s captain at arms marched his columns through the stone portals into Miralt. Curious onlookers lined the thoroughfare to witness the blessed prince’s passage. Shutters cracked open; balconies filled as the sleep of the righteous was shattered by the fiery, fierce light that knifed through the glass in their casements. Folk stumbled blinking from their pillows to gawk. Only when the royal cavalcade reached the city square did Lysaer mute the splendor of his gift. The furor kept on, fueled now by pure force of momentum. As the word spread, the whole city was raised, the streets packed as a midsummer festival.
Hastily clad in his livery and sash, the mayor’s house steward issued frenetic instructions. Servants were rousted to light guest rooms and air linen. Grooms were kicked out of their pallets and sent running to accept the reins of blown destriers. Errand boys fetched out merchants to unlock their warehouses and amend shortfalls in wine and provisions. A healer arrived with bearers and litter to attend to the injured page boy.
Somehow amid the upsurge of commotion, the prince’s charger was missed. Inquiries flew.
The mayor’s flustered master of horse added his vehement insistence. “His Grace never entered my stab
le yard.”
Questions lacked answers. No one seemed to know the royal whereabouts.
“Ath save us!” the mayor’s house steward fussed in martyred agitation. “Suppose our exalted savior has taken offense at some fault in my lord’s hospitality? Daelion avert such misfortune from our house! He can’t have sought out a common tavern.”
Avenor’s Lord Seneschal repeated himself twice, then shouted to make himself heard. “His Grace has gone on to the shrine on High Street to give thanks for today’s safe deliverance.”
Word passed from mouth to mouth. A suitable retinue was assembled in haste. But the latecoming guardsmen discovered the way mobbed by curiosity seekers who choked the route to the square. The night streets of Miralt were teeming and charged into frenzied excitement. Even the dim byways held unsettled crowds, surging to glimpse the Prince of the Light, haloed in what seemed an exalted radiance as he made his devotion at the crossroads.
The thoroughfares went from tight to impassable. Not even the city guard could maintain their patrols. Balked citizens crammed into the taverns. Inebriated tosspots were displaced into corners as drudges rushed to light candles, and rumor sparked rampant speculation. The anomaly was noticed, that none of Lysaer’s weary guardsmen stripped weapons or mail to retire. Half of their hard-bitten number had remained at Ath’s shrine, firmly determined to stay through the night on bent knee in thankful prayer. Others whose tastes were more boisterous shed propriety and got themselves garrulously drunk. To throngs of avid listeners, they described miracles and lightning bolts that seared lethal arrows from clear sky.
“He’s blessed, our prince,” they pronounced in stark reverence. “We’ve borne witness with our own eyes. The shining powers of divine creation saved his Grace from a deadly attack.”
“Where’s the wretch who shot off the arrow!” some roisterer called from the sidelines.
That first, inflammatory remark was cut by a shout from a butcher. “There’s justice due! Where’s this filthy clansman who’s in league with the Master of Shadow?”
Noise swelled. Trestles swayed to the surging press of bodies as like-minded celebrants accosted the royal guardsmen over the fate of the prisoner.
“The Prince of the Light is all our defense against darkness,” a fist-shaking bystander insisted. “His murder would strand us without help or hope. Should we leave his attacker unpunished?”
More outcries arose. A touch match to tinder, the racket spilled out of the tavern’s close confines and erupted into the street. By then, wine and ale lit the mood of the mob to a vengeful, dog-pack frenzy. When an off-duty guard from Miralt’s garrison volunteered to force the cell where the infamous assassin was incarcerated, a jostling throng of vigilantes howled their eagerness to help.
The ringleaders seized torches. Less scrupulous citizens pried up cobblestones and hitching rails, or purloined bricks and sharp rocks from the mason’s yard. The yelling horde grew. A torrent in spate, folk poured into the deserted market. There, the zealots whipped them into bloodletting passion. They would visit vengeance upon Arithon’s henchman, who had dared to accost heaven’s grace and deprive them of their protector.
Up and down the side streets, the shuttered, wooden shop fronts echoed to the rush of running feet. A cutler’s stall yielded before battering assault. Stolen knives flashed between angry faces, and other fists brandished bludgeons. The mob surged through the commons, across the hollowed stones beside the city well, where women did laundry by day and ragged children begged coppers and filled the moss-crusty horse troughs for wayfarers. Miralt’s citizens rioted past the pillared stair to the baths, screaming vicious and frenzied imprecations.
There, progress stalled, jammed from egress where the old harbor storm wall fronted the quays along High Street. From the wharfside mazes, and seamy brothels and sailor’s dives, new revelers streamed to make mayhem. The press grew acute as men elbowed and pushed to funnel into the neck of the avenue.
Then the route to the inner citadel became blocked by a mounted figure muffled in a nondescript cloak.
“What passes here?” he cracked. His imperious manner was too refined for a guardsman. Whatever his business, he traveled without escort. He appeared to carry no weapon.
“Make way, man!” yelled an instigator. “We have business afoot.”
“I said, what passes here?” The rider wheeled his horse and set its shoulder against the roiling surge of the crowd. A snarl of frustration greeted his stance. More than one hothead screamed epithets. In warning of tension a hairsbreadth from breaking, a brick flew and smashed a merchant’s window. Bodies surged and shouting yammered through the costly tinkle of glass.
The rider gave no ground to fury. Target for violence, his destrier jostled by a grinding weight of sheer numbers, he bore in with rein and spur as if clubs and stones held no power to threaten his person. “Halt there, I say!” His timbre of authority now blistered to anger, he cut through the rising clamor. “By my name and the Light, stand fast!”
A shutter clapped open above. Too deaf and blind to sense disaffection, a beldame leaned out of her mansion window and launched into shrill imprecations. “What’s become of Ath’s peace? You wastrels have worse than the manners of hogs, who shove for the slop in my close stool!” She made ranting promise the contents of that could be hurled on the heads of the rabble.
She ducked back inside to make good her intention, and the sconce from her bedchamber limned the rider below. The thin gleam of flame traced the crest of an unmistakable cream charger.
The front ranks cringed back. They knew whom they faced: Lysaer s’Ilessid, just returned from the shrine, and en route to the mayor’s hospitality.
To others behind, the detail was obscured. Due redress for a murdering, traitorous clansman seemed balked by one man, and the threat of a grandame’s tossed jakes.
“Just cut down the lamebrain!” shouted a knife-bearing smith.
Others howled in contempt and pummeled their way forward, determined to smash through all foolish opposition. Their fury drowned protest. “Gut the clansman!” came the chanted slogan. “Kill the barbarian traitor! See him burned as a sorcerer’s accomplice!”
The outraged old lady raised an arm to shy her chamber pot, then quailed before a roaring wall of noise. Below her, a cataract of humanity shoved and snarled in confinement, slashed here and there by the threatening sheen of bared steel.
The bottleneck of resistance, become focus for mayhem, the solitary rider fought his horse with magnificent skill to stand firm. His effort was futile. Despite ruthless courage, no inspired action could stem that onrushing tide. The prince must be forced to give way, or else trample and maim the front ranks who knew him. In seconds, he would be pulled down in turn, a rag milled under the teeth of a lawless stampede.
Lysaer raised his fist. “This will stop!”
A shattering arc of light clove the darkness overhead. His warhorse reared up and dislodged his plain hood. Like an angel’s bright aureole, his crown of fair hair took fire from the glare of his gift. Then the illumination waxed unbearably bright, and banished the night in a wave of actinic brilliance.
The beldame fainted. The rabble recoiled, blinded and screaming. Their outcries were drowned as a thunderous report slammed over the merchants’ slate roofs. A howling clap of flash-heated air blistered paint from the woodwork of dormers and shutters. Rioters at the fore howled and shrank. They found no escape from the sting as the skin on their faces and hands became singed by the merciless fall of raw light.
“No man held in bonds for the sake of royal justice shall be subject to violence or bloodshed!” Lysaer cried through the well of shocked motion. “Disperse and return to your wives and families, and leave the fate of clan criminals to me.”
“Why should he not die?” blustered a wainwright from the shadowed protection of a side street. “He’s the Shadow Master’s minion! Or why should the lightning have surged from on high to deliver your Grace from his bowshot?”
“He is but a man!” Lysaer rebuked. His gift snapped and blazed. Through that flood of dire brilliance, the diamond white silk and gold trim of his surcoat shot his presence in scintillant outline. “Alone with a bow, do you really believe one mortal clansman could bring down the righteous arm of the Light?”
No one arose to dare argue that challenge. The prince on his horse was implacable, cut marble, ablaze in unearthly powers. His fierce gaze searched out one man, then another, and finally encompassed the whole crowd until stones dropped from abashed hands. Purloined knives were cast down in fierce shame.
“No criminal act can be healed by rash action,” the Prince of the Light exhorted. “This clansman you would burn was misled by evil. Before execution, he deserves all your pity. My law has sentenced him to chained service at the oar, a miserable fate. He’ll know the whip and the indignity of slavery, sore enough suffering for the error of his ways. No one, no matter how outraged, will take his life out of hand! Death will deliver him from the galleys soon enough, but only on the hour appointed by powers outside mortal judgment!”
No sound from the mob. Two men near the fore were reduced to stifled weeping. In rustling movement, others sank to their knees in spontaneous plea for forgiveness.
“Go home, now,” Lysaer said, his fury reduced to gentle care. The radiance softened and dimmed from his fist, benevolent as mellow spring sunshine. “Take my peace to your hearthstones, and my blessing to your kinfolk. For every man’s sake, spare weapons and rage for better causes. If by tomorrow you still burn to fight, my captain at arms will take down the names of new recruits. Should war come again to drive back the Shadow, then every brave heart will be welcome.”
For a half second longer, that struck silence held.
Then Prince Lysaer reined his destrier around. Moved to emotion by the fading of his gift, darkened to loss by his departure, a lone voice pealed out his name.
The first cries took root. A man more inspired led into a worshipful chant: “Hail the blessed lord! Hail the Light! Death to the Spinner of Darkness!”
