Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  The older scout nodded. “I’ll fetch him. You’ll find his wife Feithan in the lodge tent, the one with the stag antlers hung on the javelin rack by the door flap.”

  “I’ll find my way.” Asandir peeled a glove, used the back of his wrist to scrape the ice from his eyebrows. His level gray eyes then measured the scout, who was shivering, his buckskins soaked through to the skin. He said in tacit handling of stiff pride, “When you find Jieret, give him my word. There are no headhunters out reiving within eighty leagues of this site. No need to stand guard until this weather has lifted. I left wards on my back trail and a spell of confusion to spin any tracking hounds widdershins. The seals won’t release for three days. If dogs or armed townsmen try to push through, they’ll just make themselves dizzy running themselves into circles.”

  “Ath bless you for that!” The scout’s reddened features broke into a pleased smile, masked as he shouldered head down through the gale.

  Asandir tucked his bare hand back under his mantle, then footed his way over iced rock and the rimed crusts of dead grass to the cluster of wind-beaten lodge tents.

  The antlers on the rack proved still fresh from the hunt, and the small, dark-haired woman who unfurled the door flap was wet to the wrists from a fatty emulsion of boiled deer brains.

  When she saw who awaited outside her threshold, her thin, gamine features blushed scarlet. “Come on in. The place reeks.” Her shrug framed apology as she let the flap fall, enclosing her visitor in a steamy fog of white woodsmoke and the odorous stench from the pot where two scraped hides were set curing. “Couldn’t be helped. If I waited for sunshine, the boys wouldn’t have the leggings they need to cover their new growth of ankle.”

  She stepped back to her labor, one skin draped and dripping over a rope stretched taut between the two lodgepoles. “Let me just wring this out, and I’ll see to your needs. No doubt you’re famished. Hang your cloak, if you want, by the fire.”

  With competent, chapped hands, she flipped the ends of the hide into a neat loop, tucked in the edges, then inserted a stick through the center and twisted. The raw leather gave up its burden of moisture, pattering runnels into the beaten earth floor.

  Asandir watched her in light, alert silence. The unassuming movements as he cracked the cased ice off his shoulders and peeled off his layers of soaked wool were deceptive, even ordinary. Yet Feithan’s blush remained high in tacit awareness that everything about her was being measured, from the sable coil of hair fallen loose at her neck, to the skinning knife on its thong that had thinned from too many years of sharpening. She felt like that steel: worn with use, but still strong, still keen, still able to cope with the hardships that seemed to increase with each year as Alliance patrols pinched and harried clan movements.

  “The scouts have gone for Jieret,” Asandir said. Unasked, he had bent. He caught up her forked stick and fished the next hide from the pot, his upturned smile flashed through his austerity like quicksilver. “I’m already wet, yes?” He slung the saturated buckskin over the rope and lent his arm to the heavy work of wringing.

  “You shouldn’t,” Feithan chided. “You’ll stink just like me.” Then she whooped like a girl as she realized just what he was doing with his hands.

  Magelight flared soft indigo over the wet hide, then brightened, changed, slid down the spectrum to bloom into clear, fiery scarlet. The leather steamed and unfurled, dry and warm from his spell seal, finished inside the span of one heartbeat for its final curing in smoke.

  “I won’t have to stretch this?” Feithan asked, dumbfounded.

  The Sorcerer shook his head, running his testing touch down the velvety surface. “Nor smoke it, either, unless you wish to darken the color.” Luminosity trailed where his fingertips passed. The thick air seemed to shimmer through an unheard song, as though a resonance of his blessing did honor to the dead buck. “The hide wouldn’t have dried before nightfall, and this storm could be better spent sewing. Do you wish me to treat the next one as well?”

  “I thank you, yes.” Flushed now with pleasure, Feithan stepped back and let him lift the moist pelt still draped on the rope. “Though, Ath, I could have used a few of your tricks on the morning I tackled the scraping. The camp boys were to help, but my truant of a husband spirited them off to go hunting.”

  She untied the taut cord, then knelt to collapse the frames used earlier for stretching and drying. Immersed in false brusqueness, she tried not to care how desperately her fingers were shaking. But her uneasy questions loomed too large to ignore, and the forceful quiet of Asandir’s presence was too palpably real at her back. She would mask her sharp worry in chatter before she dared to ask why a Fellowship Sorcerer should visit her hearth in the comfortless misery of deep winter.

  Stilled as old oak, his silvered hair lying lank on broad shoulders, the Sorcerer spoke as if he heard her thought anyway. “I’m here to Name the next heir to Jieret’s title.”

  Feithan closed her eyes. The rank smell of deer brains all at once seemed to unstring her senses. Fighting a tight chest, then wheeling faintness, she crouched half-unmoored, as if the dependable solidity of the earth must give way to a yawning void. She hung on, her lips clamped shut against desperate fear, and her arms clutched into an awkward embrace around a disjointed bundle of ash sticks.

  While the moment hung, she forced her stunned thoughts to sort out what the Sorcerer had told her.

  Jieret’s life was not endangered. An heir for his title as steward of Rathain was only chosen by the Fellowship when the s’Ffalenn royal line became threatened.

  No confirmed ill news, then; not an immediate disaster to her family, but too likely a larger one pending for the realm. In mechanical habit, she continued to tidy the collapsed slats of the hide frame. Then she drew on raw courage and a forced, hammered steadiness. “Which son should I call?”

  A hand touched her shoulder, light as a moth’s wing, and uncannily warm for a traveler just spared from the battering siege of harsh weather. “Neither son, lady.”

  Asandir had reached her side in one long, soundless step. Another move saw the wood lifted out of her hands. His understated strength raised her upright and gripped her in bedrock support. “Dismiss every fear for your husband as well. He stays here in Rathain, under my binding command if need be. This appointment of succession is but a formality and, life willing, should stay so for many years to come.”

  Steadied enough to stop shivering, Feithan tipped up her angular face. She surveyed the Sorcerer, who topped her by a head, his patience like glacial scarred granite. Then the wonder broke through and wakened a flutter in her veins. “You want Kei?”

  Asandir’s smile was quietly luminous, subtle and fleeting as the spill of a moonbeam in the sultry flare of spent coals. “She will be Kei no longer. And yes. Be proud. Your daughter shall become the next Teiren’s’Valerient, steward to the royalty of Rathain.”

  “She’s with the neighbor,” Feithan explained, straightened now with relief. “The smoke from the tanning sometimes bothers the newborns. Let me just rinse my hands and fetch her back.”

  The Fellowship ceremony for Naming the caithdein’s heir took place in hurried solemnity. There was no feast, no celebration, no joyous gathering of far-flung clans the tradition usually warranted. Only Jieret and his wife attended the ritual when Asandir in his travel-stained leathers accepted the infant from Feithan’s arms.

  On that day scarcely one month old, she was tucked in a sheepskin laced at the front with plain thongs. Her gems were the glints of melted sleet caught in silk of the fleeces. Her wide eyes were blue, still uncolored from birth, but tracking the Sorcerer’s finger as he traced a glyph in white light over the dome of her forehead. “You who were Kei shall be Jeynsa Teiren’s’Valerient henceforward.”

  Translation from the old Paravian meant successor to power. For a moment, the Sorcerer’s presence seemed raised to a levei that transcended mortality. His hair, his large hands, the very life in his veins seemed to sing with a su
bliminal silvery aura. The babe in his grasp seemed both flesh and light, surrounded and infused by the majestic force of a power too fierce to be captured by reason. Feithan raised cramped knuckles to dash away tears. Jieret stood silent, perhaps in remembrance of his own hour of oath taking, years past in Strakewood when his parents stood living beside him.

  Slashing winds and the singing whine of the sleet ruled the moment as Asandir’s arcane rune sank and touched. Its intricate angles blazed bright as a meteor, and then dimmed, softly melded against the smooth warmth of the girl child’s skin. “Jeynsa, little spirit, be strong. Prove worthy of the destiny you will come to carry forward from the time-honored lineage of your ancestors.”

  Then the choosing was done. The Sorcerer raised the bundled child. Smiling and dazzled, she was returned to the care of her mother. More than Name had changed. Jeynsa’s future was sealed. A sign like a gossamer tracing in starlight gleamed under the rim of her hood.

  “My mark will bear witness, she is Fellowship chosen.” Diminished once again to a weathered old traveler, sturdy, but worn from long service, the Sorcerer gave last instructions. “The sign will fade in one cycle of the moon. Raise the girl to bear the proud title of caithdein, with all of the powers and charges therein. She will swear formal service to her prince in the fullness of time.”

  Earl Jieret touched his daughter’s soft cheek. Still wrapped in the crumpled furs he had worn in the thorn brakes, his wolf-pelt hat dripping ice melt through his braid, he raised his bearded chin and regarded the Sorcerer who stood unmoving before him. In all of Athera, he was one of the few who stood tall enough, and bred of a stern enough fiber to endure a prolonged, level stare. “You’re not staying?”

  Asandir’s silence became palpably heavy. For a second, he seemed a phantom figure, pressed out of velvet against the dimmed hides of the lodge tent. “I can’t,” he admitted at unpleasant length. “The Koriani witches have been much too busy for anyone’s peace of mind.” The regret in his words held the masked strain of dangers unfit to be shared.

  Yet Jieret was no man to settle for platitudes, far less from a Fellowship Sorcerer. “If the enchantresses pose any danger to my prince, best tell me.” His courage was agony and his heart, hammered steel, as he refused to back down under pressure. “I know from Dakar that Morriel Prime once laid a plot to assassinate him.”

  Asandir did not try to evade brutal truth; neither would he answer directly. “Your liege has Caolle at his side. Bide here. There’s nothing more you can do for your crown prince or your realm in the west, except suffer the most ugly of deaths.”

  When Jieret drew breath out of protest, the Sorcerer spun away, snatched his cloak from the stool by the fireside, and flung it, still wet, over the squared frame of his shoulders. “No, Jieret. You cannot come with me. I am bound now for the focus circle at Caith-al-Caen, and from there, with all speed, on a mission more urgent than this one.”

  Hands clutched to a child whose life was now promised to the service of people and realm, Feithan sucked back a small gasp for the hurt unexpressed behind Jieret’s wooden dignity.

  Asandir fastened his cloak. In the close, reeking air, still befouled with smoke and the lingering, grease stink of tanning, he shook out his damp gloves. Deliberate in each precise movement he made, and with no spell expended for comfort, he slipped the chill leather over his capable hands. Then he looked up. His eyes were rinsed slate, utterly blank and unreadable. “Jieret, we are not stewards of any man’s life, no matter how precious his bloodline. What can be done, will be. Sethvir has cast auguries. His assurance was this: the enchantress who works healing in the moorlands of Araethura has not been recalled by her Prime Matriarch. Whatever the Warden at Althain perceived, he said, keep you here in Rathain. Until the Koriani initiate named Elaira is pressed back into active service by her order, your prince should fare well enough under Dakar’s wards and protection.”

  Jieret bent his head. Better than most, he understood the strict limits the Law of the Major Balance set over Fellowship actions. The fists at his sides locked in helpless, white tension. Unwittingly recast in the image of his father, his anguish screamed through every restrained joint of his bearing. “You will tell me, at once, if there’s anything I can do?”

  Asandir reached out his gloved hands and grasped the caithdein of Rathain by both forearms. “Trust us that much. For now, for your people, there will be small reprieve. Lysaer’s convocation at Etarra is going to lose impetus. All the armed resource the guilds raised for the Alliance to scour the forests of Rathain will soon be diverted elsewhere. Pack up your camp when the storm breaks. For this year at least, you can summer in Halwythwood with no more than the usual precautions.”

  There was no more to say. Too proud to plead, too stubborn to ask where Lysaer’s crack officers at Etarra would march troops, if not into Rathain’s hidden glens to hunt clansmen, Jieret watched in numbed frustration as the Sorcerer touched Feithan and murmured his formal farewell. Then he slipped back into the chaos of the storm, drawn away by more desperate crisis.

  Turnings

  Late Winter 5653

  In the fullness of night, amid pelting sleet, Lysaer s’Ilessid and his closest retainers mount in urgent secrecy; given covert knowledge of the Shadow Master’s piracy at Riverton, they ride from Etarra’s postern gate and swing west on the Mathorn Road, their intent to seek passage by sea out of Narms and effect swift return to Avenor…

  Late night, under broken clouds and the stabbing-bright glints of hard starlight, Earl Jieret walks the wind-beaten crests of Daon Ramon and curses his Sight for the snatched, fickle dream, which has shown him no sign of his liege’s predicament; but only a circle of Koriani Seniors, gathered whispering around a white crystal, while a Fellowship ward of protection is smashed wholesale, and the cries of winged predators whistle enraged off a backdrop of snow-covered mountains…

  Dakar the Mad Prophet suffers fitful, ill dreams until a flash of prescient talent rips him awake with an entangled warning of danger laced in dark images of fire and smoke, and hot blood on a battered main gauche; through the course of another violent row, he entreats Arithon s’Ffalenn to leave Riverton, with no more success than before…

  VII. Hunters

  Late Winter 5653

  Since Arithon made his covert request for an inquiry into the fate of Princess Talith, Mearn s’Brydion grew back his lovelock. A thorough and leisurely round of seductions of ladies-in-waiting and chambermaids would yield him sure word whether Lysaer’s public declaration of retirement covered a madwoman’s seclusion, or incarceration of an unwilling prisoner. When pillow talk bought Mearn no more than the court knew, and uproarious drinking with the palace garrison drew owlish blank looks and speculation, his prowling search slipped past locked doors. By night, he perused the private ledgers kept by Avenor’s tight-faced Minister of the Treasury.

  Even there, outright facts stayed elusive. One odd, recurrent entry for high-council security allotted gold to six guardsmen without recorded names. Another, in Lord Eilish’s fussy capitals, awarded a stipend for the princess’s retreat that was suspiciously meager to support a full staff and the comforts for a cosseted royal wife.

  Mearn’s lips quirked in jaundiced thought where he crouched, lightly clad in bitter air, his chosen vantage now the wind-raked slates atop the ornate, spired roof of the council hall.

  Yesterday’s snowfall had cleared off to a brilliance of winter constellations. Beneath, emptied streets traced a gleam of tarnished silver, frozen to ruts sliced by cart wheels. The respectable taverns had closed for the night, their banked kitchen fires trailing thin smoke from the chimneys. The upper-story window frames lay paned in dimmed glass, pocked by the odd candleflame where a restless eccentric clung to sleepless activity. Mearn’s furtive presence passed unseen. Left a cold trail by the happier pursuits of loose-living females and beer, he snugged coiled rope across his trim shoulders, then chalked resin on the soles of his thinnest kid slippers.

  By
the dark of the moon, he set out to test the one lead pried loose by dint of his maternal grandmother’s advice.

  ‘Townborn will always dissemble and cheat,’ he recalled her admonishing through a youthful attempt to talk his way through a scrape. ‘That’s what nature breeds out of landowning avarice.’ White haired, diminutive, as flawlessly neat as a porcelain lily, she peered up at him, her chuckle all vinegar delight as she jabbed home her point with the blackthorn stick she brandished in old age like a weapon. ‘Ath above, boy! You keep all your brains in your cock? To know a statesman’s true heart, you must first track his wealth. Only his gold never lies.’

  By coin’s sterling testament, the keep which fronted Avenor’s state palace held the realm’s most fugitive secret. At least, Mearn had learned after tailing the self-important senior clerk who paid wages, the anonymous six guardsmen played watchdog to the locked and barred tower attached to the building’s south wing. The structure was hexagonal, built of the fired fawn brick used to expedite the restoration of Tysan’s capital. From Mearn’s stance by the pillars which braced a dome vaulting, the keep’s north facade cut a ruled silhouette through the smoke silver stipple of stars. No pennon flew from its blunt, leaded roof. The banded masonry beneath the upper battlement held no carved follies or gargoyles. Only the simple sunwheel emblem graced the dressed-granite lintels of the entry below, a cavernous portal of strapped oaken doors, studded in steel and square bosses. This, Mearn discovered, stayed barred to all but a handpicked cadre of the realm’s highest officers.

  Avenor’s new fashion of zealous idealism made bribes too chancy to contemplate. Hands tucked in the crook of his elbows for warmth, Mearn suppressed a dry snort. Never mind his recent, scapegrace reputation, earned in the boudoirs and wineshops; as the ducal ambassador for his clanborn brother, Lysaer’s officials clung to their prejudice against his credibility.