Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  Moments

  Autumn 5652

  Ensconced in his diplomatic post at Avenor despite the absence of the prince, Mearn s’Brydion receives a message from a street beggar sent by Arithon s’Ffalenn, and the note requests a clandestine inquiry into the disappearance of Lady Talith, Princess of Tysan…

  Far to the east of Miralt Head, where avid recruits line up to swear service against shadow before Lysaer’s sunwheel banner, Earl Jieret’s scouts intercept messengers calling town mayors in Rathain to Etarra to pledge for the Alliance of Light; and foreboding weighs on him for the inevitable fact that his clans must flee into deep cover…

  Against the strapped oak door to the observatory in the Koriani sisterhouse at Capewell, the peeress in charge delivers an ultimatum to her anxious colleagues in the stairwell: “No one opens this door, by Morriel Prime’s stated will! If she’s died from turned spellcraft, only one holds the right to gainsay that command. Her successor in training has been summoned. Until the hour of First Senior Lirenda’s arrival, what lies past this threshold shall bide behind seals, undisturbed.…

  V. Riverton

  Autumn 5652

  If tears were hardened stone to carve, inscribe my cry for life: Let no man raise his unsheathed sword, may no man draw his knife, that this, our sore and grieving land, waste no more hearts to strife!

  verse from the Masterbard’s lament for the widows of Dier Kenton Vale Third Age 5649

  For three hundred years, the rambling, old tavern had stood below the river fork where Ilswater joined the broad, placid channel which drained off the mudflats of Mogg’s Fen. Moss shagged its fired brick walls on the south-facing side. The north wings sliced the brunt of the winds that scoured the leaves from the roof shakes. Its warren of galleries and peaked dormer rooms lay packed, that stormy, cold night. Chimney smoke smudged the deepening gloom, sliced by the needle tracks of rainfall. Bargemen forsook the damp berths on their vessels; drovers left the miseries of open-air camps and thronged in for a copper to spread blankets on the common room floor. Driven indoors as autumn’s late chill threatened the first, freezing sleet, soaked wayfarers huddled elbow to elbow over mugs of soup and mulled wine.

  They would have squeezed the accommodations past full, even with no bard in residence.

  The racket would let no man rest until he lay drunk or exhausted by crude entertainment. The taproom was too packed for darts, and the landlord forbade arm wrestling, since wagers were wont to breed fights. Milling patrons banged the boards and whistled for service from the barmaids.

  The hour was just shy of midnight, with long ballads the sole remedy for boredom. The bard on his stool by the settle was kept too relentlessly engaged to retire.

  The inn’s kindly landlord held one room aside for his use at no charge, for the excessive demand on his talent. The mannerly threw money to keep him sweet. As each song drew to its closing, small coins sliced the gloom to chink on the boards at his feet. If the singer was built a trifle too fine, or his dress seemed a touch over-done, those delicate fingers on silver-wound strings wove sound like a net of enchantment. Through the chiming cascade of gift tokens, the whoops of approval, and a general hubbub of noise, the call of the mousy widow by the casement seemed the lost utterance of a ghost.

  “Pray Ath our bard didn’t hear that,” Dakar said where he lounged, feet braced on a trestle crammed under the jut of the staircase.

  “Hear what?” Wedged deep in the gloom with his back to the wall, Caolle elbowed the Mad Prophet’s side, then spoke his concern for a tankard left brimful all evening. “You don’t drink, man. When that happens, I worry if you’re sick.”

  Despite provocation, Dakar’s watchful eyes tracked the woman in her ribbons of mourning. “Trust me, I’m hale and dreadfully sober. The misery’s the same, nonetheless.” Then, on a break into fierce irritation, “Damn the silly bitch to black Sithaer! He’s noticed.”

  For the coins had ceased falling with the bard’s head still raised. All theatrical elegance in his slashed murray silk, he had not launched into some lilting dance tune to quicken the pace since his last air. Instead, he regarded the nondescript woman in stilled and striking intensity.

  That indefinable instant, the noise lagged. Rain drummed the slates and the windows, and the widow raised nerve to repeat her request. “Minstrel, play a memorial!” This time, her frail, porcelain treble reached every corner of the room. “Sing us a lament for the brave ones who died against Shadow in Dier Kenton Vale.”

  “Merciful Ath!” Caolle shoved straight, gruff outrage slurred into mangled syllables by the spell-turned web of the glamour. “He’ll refuse her.”

  “His masterbard’s title won’t let him.” Dakar clamped a quelling hand on Caolle’s forearm. “This is sovereign territory to the crown of Tysan! Try and stop him, you’ll start a brawl and get us pitched out.”

  “Sithaer’s dark furies!” Caolle yanked free. “Are we girls, to flinch from a douse in cold rain?” Yet he subsided, if only to watch how Arithon would field the unpleasantness.

  The bard shifted the lyranthe in his lap. He regarded his hands, fine jointed and stilled, the image of languid elegance. The pose was misleading. To any who knew him, the mind underneath was as unperturbed as drawn steel. While the taproom grew hushed, and storm sluiced the eaves, he spoke in mellifluous courtesy. “Mistress, which of your loved ones was lost?”

  “My husband, rest him.” The woman cried, bitter, “May the Spinner of Darkness come to suffer Dharkaron’s damnation!”

  “Lady,” said the singer in plangent, fierce pity, “rest assured, he already does.”

  Then, as if unadorned words caused him pain, he flung back his head, shut his eyes, and struck a chord like a plummeting cry. No chance assemblage of minor notes, this opening, but the pure charge and power of a masterbard’s art, that ordered the air and snatched mortal heartstrings and twisted, until all the world became realigned to his measure of gripping, stark sorrow.

  A dreadful, ranging chill poured down Dakar’s spine. “Caolle,” he entreated, in haste to speak before music burned away reason, “tonight, I’ll need help. Keep vigil with me at Arithon’s bedside, and please Ath, leave your temper behind.”

  He never heard Caolle’s answer. The upwelling surge of an exquisitely made grief enthralled every listening mind. Arithon chose not to play to console. The deaths he had caused at Dier Kenton Vale were too harrowing a loss to soothe over. Instead, he spun melody in soaring lament and seized his hapless audience by the vitals. His notes sheared past thought like hooks in silk thread, unfurling a shimmering net of fine sound. The musician firmed his hold, dragged them under, then drowned them in a surge of emotion like tide.

  Fingers partnered to unbridled talent, the bard added song, distilled into lyrics to unhinge the mind and make the most callous soul weep.

  If tears were hardened stone to carve a monument to grief, would we let loss and trouble starve our spirits for belief?

  Our men have gone from home and hearth and faith has made us weep!

  Arithon played them their mortality in the pressed heat of that dingy riverside taproom; first like keening wind, and then like a blade to cleave through skin and viscera. This was no catharsis to soothe the bereaved. Each line of harmony demanded the question: for memory of those dead at Dier Kenton Vale, Arithon challenged every moral brought to bear, all principle raised as banner and cause for bloody war. He unwound reason, unstrung pride, then snapped the last thread of dignity in regret for the wasting ruin of broken lives. Barmaids and barge captains, beringed merchants and their coteries of servants; all, down to the coarsest, unwashed mule drover wept unabashed, that husbands and sons should ever leave home to kill for reasons of policy.

  The music surged on, relentless. No one escaped the leveling shame as those surgical tones unveiled the lie of just trappings. Arithon showed no pity for mourners. He endorsed no heroic act of sacrifice, but stripped away mankind’s penchant for self-righteous zeal to its core of arrogant
futility.

  No cause is scribed in fire and star—then whose truth must we heed?

  Why bind the will and blind the heart, more lives to rend and bleed?

  Our men have gone from home and hearth, and hate has made us weep!

  His last line dissolved in a flood of diminished harmonics. The bard damped his strings. Silence descended with the brutality of a public execution. One second passed, two, with the flames in the lanterns the only movement in the room and the sough of cold rains, the sole sound. People were statues, cast in bowed grief. Breath itself hung suspended.

  Then the bard raised his head. His face was bone pale and remote, as if the channels just tapped for his art had undone the ties to expression. His stance as he rose was unsteady. The fingers left gripped to the lyranthe’s slim neck seemed nerveless as winter-dry sticks.

  Dakar roused first out of song-induced stupor. Before the bard assayed even one infirm step, he broke from his lethargy, squeezed past packed benches, and crossed the cramped space the audience had lent for performance. Coin offerings chinked and scattered to his step. Their dissonance snapped the Masterbard’s spell. People stirred out of stupor, then rocked the close room with sighs and frenetic exclamation.

  Whatever they tossed to acknowledge this performance, the reward was unlikely to be silver.

  Dakar shouted across a mounting swell of noise. “Come on!” His hand closed on Arithon’s moist velvets. The shoulder underneath was trembling, no surprise. The musician had played his very spirit into sound and kept no reserve for recovery. For a bard of such stature, the effects could rival the drifting exhaustion imparted by acts of grand conjury. Arithon swayed.

  “Damn you for a fool, don’t fold on me now.” The Mad Prophet scanned across lanternlit fug; gauged the mismatched cadres of patrons, the resilient ones rising, as yet wrung too limp to react in affront for their shattered equilibrium.

  Such backlash would come. The moment their recovery allowed a recap of Arithon’s composition, some inquiring hothead would connect that the lyrics suggested a treasonous dissent against Lysaer’s vaunted Alliance. Violence might be averted only as long as mass fury was given no target.

  “Arithon,” Dakar urged, “you’ve got to leave, now!”

  Then Caolle arrived, unquestioning and brisk, his broad shoulder set to brace his liege upright and barge them a path to the stairway.

  Behind a barred door in the upstairs chamber, a candleflame fluttered in a saucer of puddled wax. The gusts outside laced rain against the shingles, while shifting light stippled the dingy plaster walls and sprawled felted shadow across the floorboards. On the low pallet, stripped to hose and shirt, and warm under clean bedclothes, Arithon s’Ffalenn lay asleep. Black hair fringed the unlaced sleeve and forearm which cradled his face. The fair, slim semblance of the dandy had fled, the small workings of his birth gift erased under force of the spells newly wrought. His awareness lay immersed in dreamless oblivion, but peace had come at high cost.

  Worn from his battle to quiet the ferocious bite of s’Ffalenn conscience, Dakar slumped on a footstool, knees drawn up and fingers shoved through the bristle of hair at his temples. For all his care, he felt nagged by failure.

  “Those bindings I set may not hold,” he warned Caolle. His voice seemed unreal, like scratches on glass, to which rain burst in tireless applause.

  Caolle shifted his stance by the doorway, his reflexes set on flinching edge by the laughter which burgeoned downstairs. Each racketing burst from the taproom stewed louder, more shrill, touched to a raw pulse of hysteria. “You’re thinking we’d do best to ride out at

  once?”

  “That’s not possible just now.” Dakar chewed his lip, while the roistering celebrants rattled the floorboards beneath him. “If our horses are made ready and saddled, the precaution is probably sensible.”

  Caolle made no complaint for the weather, but snatched up his cloak and departed. The bursting swell of noise as he slipped through the door increased Dakar’s breeding tension. The crowd’s temper built to a vengeful edge, as each housebound riverman sought to rout grief through indulgence. Beer and carousing could not stem their blind urge for catharsis. No genius was needed to forewarn that their mood would grow ugly.

  When they turned, the bard who had kindled their emotions must be far beyond reach down the road.

  Dakar heaved erect and refastened the bar. The small garret chamber seemed beleaguered by storm and darkness outside, and by the fiery lusts of Sithaer from below. To mask his worry, the Mad Prophet scavenged the crumpled heaps of Arithon’s cast-off finery. He folded and smoothed ribboned velvets and fine lace, then repacked the saddlebags, attuned all the while to the prostrate form on the bed.

  Left no other diversion, Dakar fretted. His spurious talent for prescience stirred to the targetless hunch that peril stalked at his back. Rather than chafe his nerves into jelly, he delved past the wrapped bulk of Arithon’s lyranthe and took up the lethal, cold longsword left propped against the clothes stand. Even sheathed, the blade sang to his mage-sense of uncanny, Paravian origins.

  “Bloody death, let me not have to use this,” the Mad Prophet whispered. He locked sweaty hands to the stained leather scabbard and hunkered down with the sword laid across his plump knees.

  Arithon’s sprawl on the inn’s saggy mattress never shifted. The uncertain spill from the candle played over his tight-knit frame. Fanned snarls of black hair seemed to drink the faint light, while his slackened fingers curled on the sheet seemed masterfully carved out of alabaster. Such stillness unmasked a frightening vulnerability, a humanity grown too sharply defined in muscle and tendon and bone. Never a large man, Arithon had become alarmingly thin and worn. His wrist might be circled by one finger and thumb, and the cleaved edge of his cheekbone stood demarked in drawn flesh.

  Dakar tried to recall the last time he heard the prince laugh. “For mercy, how long can this go on?” he asked an unlistening stillness.

  No answer came. Just the unending chap of the rain through the rowdier din from the taproom. Dakar rubbed his eyes. The sword in his lap seemed a wrapped bar of ice, his body like storm-sodden clay. He shifted his shoulders, then ordered his mind in a ruthless effort to stay alert. His gaze drifted anyway. The mingled, fusty scents of wool and hot wax conspired to clog his trained senses.

  Then the candle fluttered in spent fuel and went out. Dakar grumbled an oath, loath to rise up and scrounge a fresh light. He never remembered falling asleep. But the transition back into wakefulness came like a drowning douse in warm syrup. The Mad Prophet raised his head. Vaguely alarmed, he fought lassitude and wondered why his mind should seem bogged in a spell weave. He mumbled a cantrip of unbinding by reflex, then chastised himself for absurdity. He could scarcely be misdirected enough to succumb to his own arcane workings.

  Yet the counterspell ripped the blank fog from his mind all the same.

  “Arithon, damn you!” Fully roused to annoyance, Dakar scrambled upright. His fists flailed limp cloth, the bedclothes his ungrateful royalty had thrashed off. The sword no longer lay near to hand. Dakar dived for it, groped, found its firm length fallen beneath tumbled blankets. He snagged a hangnail, tugged. The hilt remained mired past reach of his burrowing fingers. He shoved erect, frantic, and almost fell flat in collision with a fast-moving body.

  “Sithaer’s black furies, Arithon!”

  His cry raised no answer; too much to hope that the Prince of Rathain possessed anything near waking sanity. Arithon could be bent on who knew what mayhem, seized as he was in the grip of vile dreams, and unable to shake the ties of strong sleep spells wrought over him. Whipped to blind fight, few men alive were as dangerous.

  Dakar plowed to his feet. Poor candidate for heroics, he whacked his shin on the stool, howled from frustration, and launched off in blundering pursuit. His toe hooked the table leg. The candle dish fell, splashing the floorboards with crockery. Too flustered to question why his mage-sight seemed trammeled, Dakar dove in a tackling
pounce through the murk.

  He struck flesh, grabbed. An elbow sledged into his jaw. “Merciful Ath! Arithon, you’re dreaming! Wake up!”

  The mazed creature he grappled spun about, bashed him spine first against the washstand. Basin and tin pitcher clattered askew, dousing his neck in cold water.

  “Arithon!” Dakar ripped in a breath that shot branding fire through his chest. “Stop this! Now!” The next hammering blow broke his hold. He dropped, tasted blood from a bitten lip. The jolt as he crashed full length turned his head. Through dizzying pain and a fall of spun shadow, he heard the grind as the door bar slipped free. “Ath, no!”

  The latch clanged, gave; the panel swung wide. An influx of chill air from the corridor wafted past Dakar’s damp face. He scrambled back upright, agonized to find his recovery came too late to matter. He rushed anyhow, tripped over the tin basin, and skated through a swath of flung water. Beleaguered, half-stunned, and griped short of wind, he made a futile effort to call warning. This was Tysan. Should Arithon step out with no thought for disguise, fate might lead someone to recognize him. If he quenched any lamps in the taproom by means of wrought shadow, mayhem and bloodshed must follow.

  No option remained. Dakar resorted to magecraft. He ripped out a rough-drawn spell to warp wood, then barbed its flight in permissions garnered from Arithon for use against extreme need. Currents of raised power coursed through his frame, already shocked into shivering. Dakar let fly his linked ward and construct with intent to trip his agile quarry in the doorway.

  Nailed boards groaned and flexed in obliging reply, but not to block Arithon’s passage. Instead, Dakar himself caught the assaulting stir of warped forces. He yelped in vexation, too bruised to evade what he only now tagged as a mirror-keyed spell of deflection.