Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  In the late afternoon, the gathering storm rode the west winds raking in off the ocean. The rain drizzled, then gushed, then hammered down in white sheets. The barrage chased the dark pools in the marshes to stippled pewter, and glazed the bent limbs of the maples. Mearn s’Brydion waded shin deep to keep dogs off his scent, his wet leathers clinging like glue at each stride, and his fingers locked to the straps of three rolled leather map cases. The brass-capped ends bashed his thigh when he stumbled, his ankles caught back by the sawing tangles of sedges. Only the relentless chill kept him wakeful.

  His thoughts came in fragments, their meaning unmoored by the expanding spirals of exhaustion.

  He slogged his way past another islet of hummocks. The sucking pull of the mud continually mired and slowed him. Yet he dared not traverse the high ground, not with an Alliance armed force at his back, enraged by his suborning trickery. Some of the dogs might survive the pulped water hemlock he had used to taint their dried meat. Etarran field troops were not fools in the wilds, and no lack of bridles and girths would swerve them from their orders to march north.

  Breathless, shivering, gnawed to the bone by the ache of spent muscles, Mearn perched his hip on a deadfall. Rain pocked the water in rings at his shins. Premature dusk banked deep shadows beneath the stained boles of the trees. The low, misting clouds showed no sign of lifting. Rain blew and swirled and trickled from his eyebrows, and rinsed streams through the garlands of watercress plastered over his thighs. Failing light was going to upset his bearings. Mearn tipped back his head and fought off a flattening rush of disheartenment. He had only the lichens for orientation. On the south sides of trees, the salt winds from Mainmere burned off their splotched growth; and the shag moss did not grow north-facing.

  Mearn shut stinging eyes, every nerve end and instinct alive to his danger. Range too far east, he would find only distrustful fenlanders in their lowly wattle-and-mud huts. Pass too far west, and he would encounter high ground, fair game for a second armed troop the maps showed would be beating a line inland from Hanshire. South lay the Etarrans he had riled like jabbed hornets, and north, and if luck saved him, he might find the armed bands of Lord Maenol’s scouts who had foiled the Alliance’s cordon of Riverton.

  Geese called in the reeds. Daylight was fast waning. The gloom seemed cast in lead silver between the plummeting curtains of rainfall. Mearn shoved off through the vast, empty maze of stilled bogland, no longer able to mind his own noise as he snapped through the sticks of the thickets. He tripped again, slamming his shoulder on the knob of a willow bough. “Forgive,” he gasped, breathless, by timeworn clan custom acknowledging the mistake of his own clumsiness. The nurturing trees might overlook his offense, but the needs of his body could not be deferred for much longer.

  The willow grove thinned. Hedged by gathering darkness, the ground snaked away into tarnished, dull pools inked with the knees of dead tree roots. A lightning-struck oak thrust a blackened shell skyward, the stripped husks of burned saplings angled like spears through the rioting tangle of briar. The past fire had scorched off the moss and the lichen. A few sloshing steps brought the water waist deep. Mearn paused, half-immersed. He wiped streaming wet from his eyes, while the wind slapped and battered at his hair and his clothing. He hitched the map cases up to his shoulder to protect their waxed hide from immersion.

  Rain blurred the landmarks. The sere, muddy banks held no sign of an otter’s den, or any other small animal burrow to hint which direction lay south. Only the unreliable, buffeting west winds lent their unkindly semblance of guidance.

  These fens were not safe to traverse after dark, with mud sinks that could swallow a man’s foot in one step and suck down his bones beyond finding.

  Mearn slogged ahead, splashed into a hole, then managed a clawing recovery back to raised ground. He would have to double back. The effort would certainly turn him around. Trail instinct did not apply in this land, with its puzzle-cut maze of tangled, brown hummocks, and meandering pools inscribed by hammering rainfall.

  Immersed in deep thickets, clawed raw by green thorns, he lost his bearings again. Faced by a deeper stand of water than before, he now shivered uncontrollably. The relentless chill stole his body’s reserves. He knew his survival hinged upon finding immediate shelter and food. Sleep now was his enemy. To yield to his craving for overdue rest would see him a skeleton picked clean by predators. The urgent warning he carried would become lost, and the maps, which detailed the Alliance sweep through south Tysan for the purpose of eradicating clan bloodlines.

  Mearn thrashed into another grove of maples, hampered by closing darkness. A gray heron startled into flight from her fishing. He recoiled from the noise. Twigs clawed at his burden. He caught back the loosened bundle before the straps gave, and clasped the rolled leather to his chest. Breath sucked through his locked teeth. He no longer knew if the whine in his ears was the shrilling of spring peepers, or yet another warning of overtaxed senses about to let go and fail him. He kept moving regardless, unwilling to give way to the beckoning void that offered him painless unconsciousness.

  Through the sheet-lead expanse of another shallows, Mearn lost north again. He groped for a tree, a stripped stump, any firm object that might still harbor a telltale colony of shag moss. His touch met cold mud. Reeds slapped his face. Cattail down snagged in his nostrils and smeared yellow fuzz on his eyelids. He coughed into darkness that seemed too thick to breathe, and shoved on against a battering tempest of cold wind. The rain sluiced and hissed and rinsed through wet leaves. He knew he must stop, find some sort of shelter, and wait out the night or the storm. Vertigo threatened to unstring his balance. Already he could have become turned around and be moving back into the armed camp of the enemy.

  Time slipped. He became aware that he sat underneath the dripping crown of a marsh maple. Gusts roared through the branches, and clattered the loosened, dead runners of vines. Far past feeling cold, he crimped his hands on the straps that secured the purloined map cases. Fear and worry were numbed, his cognizance flattened to insipid and dangerous lassitude. The rain drove down, relentless, and scattered thin trickles off the wicked ends of his hair. Only the otters fared well in this weather. Mearn heard the splash as they dove from the banks, hunting small crayfish, or cavorting for sport in the darkness.

  Or perhaps their noise masked the doings of men. He could no longer tell. The vise grip of exhaustion left his skull feeling packed with wet cotton. Overcome by inertia, he attempted more than one brutal measure to regain his feet and keep moving.

  Nothing changed. His last strength was long spent. Mearn sat, huddled with his forehead bowed on his knees, and his smeared wrists tucked at his ankles. Weariness sapped his last spark of vitality, but not stubborn will. He still held the map cases clenched to his breast. Asleep or unconscious, he did not respond as the splashing disturbance approached him. Nor did he stir in the flare as someone unshuttered a wick lantern. The breath of the storm winnowed the reek of hot fat, then the must of wet clothes, sewn from the skins of small animals. A skiff made of bark glided through the shallows. From a perch in the bow, a wizened little grandmother raised a horn lantern, while two younger male relatives pointed and whispered in the singsong dialect of the fenlands.

  The poleman paused. Shoved by contrary wind, his boat drifted.

  On the greening bank, the spearpointed sedges bent and flattened, streaked like ruby glass with reflections. The juddering light picked out the arrivals, with their stitched leather caps tied with talismans fashioned from feathers, and strung acorns, and little stars woven of flax straw.

  “It’s a man sitting there. Has no boots on, that’s odd,” the grandmother observed in a mollified, half-toothless warble.

  Rain slanted through the purl of the mist. “Could be dead,” mused the squat uncle, who rinsed the offal from the last kill from his hands. He jabbed a thumb rubbed shiny from endless hours spent twisting fish twine. “Has a sword, see? Could be dangerous.”

  “Isn’t mov
ing,” the third party ventured.

  The skiff jostled closer. The thwart gouged the peat bank.

  “Still breathing,” said the trapper, kneeling down. “Just barely.” He stabbed his bloody knife into the reed basket shining with the scales of gutted fish, while his companions reached out tentative hands and lightly fingered the stranger gone lost in the bogs.

  “Clanborn, and in trouble,” the grandmother determined.

  Another chimed in soft counterpoint, “Shelter then.”

  In silent efficiency, the two men arose from the skiff and stepped onto the marshy bank. Shadows wheeled, stitched with carnelian where plummeting raindrops sliced through the flickering lamplight. They bent, grasped Mearn’s arms at the elbow and shoulder, then startled back with hissed breaths as their find stirred and lifted his head.

  He had gray eyes, the pupils wide and black with shock. The two fen folk poised, stilled as scared rabbits, while the rain sang and splashed unabated. The man squinted through the downpour. His vision seemed reluctant to focus, as if the skiff and its occupants were a nightmare come visiting, or a madman’s distortion of Dharkaron Avenger’s Black Chariot, filled with wizened little people with bloodied knives and insistent plucking fingers.

  Then he spoke, the ingrained courtesy of his ancestors set in the antique speech of his breeding. “Please. I beg help. If you know, if you can spare a runner to seek, let these cases I carry reach Lord Maenol s’Gannley or his kinsmen with all possible speed.”

  The grandmother clicked her tongue through shut teeth. “Whist, bring him in. Or this one that he seeks will receive his cold bones for naught but last rites and a burial.”

  Appeals

  Early Spring 5653

  At Althain Tower, the mood changed from downcast to grim in the darkened, chill hours before dawn. Sethvir sat, chin on fist, at the massive stone table in the library chamber, half-swallowed by the gloom which gathered under the star-patterned beams of the ceiling. As his mind ranged through yet another chain of auguries, his forehead stayed pinched into creases. The last such cast sequence had already fretted the white ends of his beard into finger-caught tangles. The dark, polished table before him was swept clear of books. By his elbow, a filled mug of tea had gone cold. The casement windows at his back were latched shut, the tight fastenings kept under tireless siege by a barrage of sharp winds that, farther south, coalesced as a rainstorm.

  The one dribbled candle alight in the stand fluttered anyway, tormented by the gyrating presence of a visiting discorporate colleague. “Just say what you see,” Kharadmon urged at length, his pique the snarl of a mewed-up predator, and his worry unsubtle as the flaying edge of a storm front. “I’m well aware the news out of Tysan bodes no good. Can the details make things any worse?”

  Sethvir shut his eyes. Unmoving, he answered, “Dakar’s warning framed an accurate judgment. Arithon eats, but his body rejects sustenance afterward. He speaks, he perseveres. He stubbornly enacts all the movements of living. But the fire, the passion, his sense of selfworth and entitlement have all been strangled by grief. Like the Paravians, who waste away in the absence of hope, our Teir’s’Ffalenn tries to endure against the grain of his born nature. He keeps the very letter of his oath to survive.”

  Through a plangent, fierce pause, Kharadmon spun in suspension. “Say on. I can already guess.”

  “Oh, the gist isn’t new.” Sethvir stabbed distraught hands through the hair at his temples, the farseeing span of his vision all bitterness. Morriel Prime had foreseen this crux years ago, that Arithon’s inheritance from two royal bloodlines created an incompatible legacy. “The gifts of s’Ahelas foresight cross-linked with s’Ffalenn compassion poisons all that he does, all that he thinks. Now he’s forced to betray the loyalties he holds sacrosanct, he has no defense against guilt and despondency.”

  While his colleague’s roving angst churned a crock of quill pens into rustling agitation, Althain’s Warden summed up. “In the absence of grace, entropy triumphs. The flesh loses its natural drive to renew itself.”

  “Then you fear our Teir’s’Ffalenn will succumb into wasting disease, over time.” Kharadmon’s presence sheared over the bookshelves, raising dust like fine smoke from the rows of old, musty covers. Pages flipped madly on another opened tome propped on a lion-carved lectern. “Well give him some news.” The self-contained tempest paused on its course, reversed direction, and whirled the quill pens on the opposite spin like small weathercocks. “Find him some word of encouragement.”

  The Warden of Althain simply looked up, his gaze the blank blue of a robin’s egg.

  Kharadmon stopped, a poured well of cold that exuded biting frustration. “There are moments your mind’s just like knotted string, too vexingly layered to unravel.”

  Sethvir stirred, unfolded crimped fingers, and with a fingernail showing a black rim of ink, traced a circle on the obsidian tabletop. “You won’t like what you see.”

  “Well, that’s nothing fresh,” Kharadmon breezed on. “These times are rank chaos. Though Luhaine is a pessimist, and his theories are galling, I have to agree that entropy’s been winning since Desh-thiere came calling through South Gate.”

  “Peace, here.” Althain’s Warden traced a glyph in blue light on the air.

  Then he laid light palms on the table and pronounced a phrase in the slow, rolling consonants that awakened the Name for the primal awareness of this stone which held his attention. A permission was exchanged in language and pitch beyond range of ordinary hearing. Sethvir traced another glyph inside the closed figure, and awaited an inward alignment.

  A connection closed like a spark in his mind. He framed his intent and sank his awareness into the dance of meshed energies which bound the obsidian into solidity. His grasp of grand conjury accomplished what no other arcane order on the continent could achieve on the wings of pure thought: he invoked shift in resonance, and raised the vibrational frequency of dense matter.

  Within his drawn circle, the stone’s matrix dissolved, transmuted to a state of pure light.

  Rinsed in a flare of actinic brilliance, Althain’s Warden reached out again. He said, hand poised, the spiked snow of his eyebrows trained toward Kharadmon’s breezy fidgeting, “The fish, at least, led the proper fishermen to the catch. I give you the brightest thread in the tapestry.”

  “Well, we can’t all be scatterbrained and capture such nuance by dreaming.” But this once, Kharadmon’s baiting humor fell short.

  Althain’s Warden did not smile as he touched the field of unformed matter with his forefinger and imprinted the reenactment of a scene drawn in through his tie to the earth link…

  Rain splashed and guttered through the reeds in Mogg’s Fen, where a soaked party of marsh trappers poled their skiff northward through night’s inky maze of shoals and mudbanks and flat water. Wrapped in furs and greased hide, a shuddering clansman lolled half-unconscious, raging curses against an Alliance invasion in feverish fits of delirium…

  “Mearn s’Brydion? Taken north? But you know his warning will come far too late.” Kharadmon wheeled over the shadowy aumbries, sarcastically unimpressed, since Lysaer’s gathered forces were already present and closing upon Maenol’s clansmen. “What’s one coal raked from the flames of a building conflagration? Merciful Ath! If that’s a success, you’d better show me the failures. Or Luhaine will claim I’ve traded my bollocks for outright, shrinking faintheartedness. ”

  Sethvir bowed his head. “Wiser, perhaps, to discount pride and praise the one gift as a blessing.” But he honored Kharadmon’s bidding and set the small linkage between transmuted stone and his powers of earth-linked perception. The scenes he translated through the ring of his scrying were indeed unrelenting bad news.

  Lysaer’s war galleys swept down on the Isles of Min Pierens and overran Arithon’s small outpost at Corith. The site had no defenses. The ramshackle sheds, the tools, the small sail loft which refitted the stolen hulls from Riverton were razed and burned inside the first hour of l
anding. The laborers had been trapped, killed as they resisted, or run down and captured as they fled through the brush by headhunters and trained packs of tracking dogs. The handful of survivors now languished in chains with the wounded, shortly to see the Alliance destroy their last outside hope of a rescue.

  Into the harbor, unsuspecting, ran the Cariadwin with her crew of freed galley slaves and her hold filled with clan scouts just signed on as untrained volunteers. These expected to man three forthcoming new ships, and were yet unaware of the setbacks inflicted by Koriani intervention. None of them knew of the launching just gone bad at Riverton; neither they nor their captain realized as they sailed that an Alliance trap lay in waiting.

  Sethvir spoke a word, and time bowed to his bidding. The colors in the scrying on the tabletop bled into the ghostly gray prescience that unveiled the unformed future. The sequence firmed into sharpening focus, as the few tracks of possibility in play merged into a remorseless junction. Kharadmon saw that the coming sea fight at Corith would end in a vicious defeat. Against an outfitted war fleet, caught in confined waters, the Cariadwin’s fierce defense was foredoomed.

  “Alt,” Sethvir murmured, the Paravian rune that marked closing. The silver-point tones of unborn event bled away, replaced by another vision, this one a view of the Alliance shipworks at Riverton, grained in a mist of falling rain.

  “What you see next occurred just this afternoon,” Althain’s Warden added in subdued explanation; and Kharadmon shared all the sorrowful details of Caolle’s survival, now entangled with the last thread in the Koriani design that devolved from the arraigned yard workers and sail crews kept hostage to force Arithon’s capitulation. Sethvir’s scrying perused the firelit chamber where Lirenda, First Senior, signed the requisite papers of extradition in the smug company of Riverton’s mayor. With a crystal wineglass poised in one hand, and an expression serene as milk porcelain, she delivered her order for the prisoners to sail on the dawn tide three days hence.