Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  Legacy

  Early Spring 5653

  The rain still smoked down over the marshlands of Mogg’s Fen, ruffling the pools to a sheen like dark pearl, and greening the spears of the sedges. Through the passage of day and into the next night, the singsong language of running water seemed to leach endless tracks through Mearn’s dreams. Undone in delirium, he raged aloud for Dharkaron Avenger to give him a place in Sithaer where, if he suffered, his nerves might be spared from the trials of incessant moisture.

  Hands touched him, pressed him back and down into a maddening mire of clinging, smothering dampness. Mearn shouted. His protest emerged muffled against the rag somebody forced to his mouth.

  A voice that splintered into a roar like flood tide implored him to be silent. Since he could not swear his outrage, or make his will known, he struggled, inflamed by the red rage of fever. Nobody succored him. A woman came instead, her hair strung with feathers. Red cheeked, dark eyed, and wrinkled as a harridan, she dealt his wet cheek a ringing, hard slap, then shoved a sticky wad of medicinal herbs into his mouth. Then more hands clamped his jaw while foul juices numbed his tongue, and the world spat white sparks and turned black.

  Later, he rubbed open sleep-crusted eyes. Detached from all rage by debilitating weakness, he blinked. The sky had rearranged from weeping gray clouds to an opaque roof of pressed mud and sticks. He swallowed, and discovered his throat scraped nearly raw and a tongue furred in what felt like the wrack from a bird’s nest.

  Off to his right, somebody groaned. Mearn shut swollen lids, aching and limp, and too spent to unravel the straits that had left him flattened and disoriented with illness. His sinuses felt wadded with red-hot rags. Someone he could not recall had peeled his leathers from his body. A throw of sewn rabbit skins covered his nakedness. If the tanning was poor, his clogged head mercifully blocked his sense of smell. He lay, too inert to fight his discomfort, though the silky fur clung to his sweat-runneled neck, and gave rise to pestilent itches.

  Reason eventually assembled the awareness that he sprawled on dank clay, enclosed by the dim mud-daub walls of a fenlander’s hovel. The dwelling had no windows, just one door of rough planks set into an uneven frame of peeled logs. A rushlight burned in a niche lined with slate. The groans of human misery he had heard in his sleep were not any figment of dreaming. Arranged like bundles of inert cloth around him, he made out the shadowy forms of faces and limbs strapped in splints and stained bandages.

  Mearn wrinkled his nose in distaste. He had seen enough field hospitals to recognize the close and fetid quarters where men thrashed in the throes of wound fever.

  “Ath, how did I get here?” he croaked out in cankerous irritation. He struggled to sit up. Assaulted by immediate, wheeling faintness, he swore, then started halfway out of his skin as somebody gripped his left shoulder.

  “Lie easy. You’re safe.” The deep voice of assurance was male, and sure in the grain as burled oak. “The fenlanders brought you among friends.”

  Mearn swiveled his head, his neck still mired in the garroting cling of damp fur “Maenol? Lord s’Gannley of Camris?” Horrible, chilling fear ran him through. He might already be too late, with the casualties around him brought down by the very Alliance cordon he had tried and failed to thwart by his timely warning. “How long have I been ill?”

  “A day and a night.” The hold on him released, and the backlit shadow at his side revealed itself as the square, solid presence of the caithdein of Tysan. Sympathetically aware of Mearn’s burning question, he answered in the same measured steadiness, “The men here were hurt several days ago. Their tactics delayed the Alliance’s first march on Riverton.”

  Not too late; sapped by relief, Mearn clawed the offending fur from his throat and rubbed his lids to clear his clogged vision. Even dim rushlight showed him too much. The young man who held chieftainship of Tysan’s clans looked more worn, more drawn, his dependable nature fretted into a hagridden mask of desperation since their meeting on the tideflats by Hanshire. Strips of white-and-black hide laced into his clan braid signified mourning for the blood cousins who had died to take warning to the Master of Shadow in Riverton. Raw endurance remained, of a stripe to rival a mountain for tenacity.

  “My sorrows are yours, for the lives of your kinfolk,” Mearn began. “I see you have word of their fate already.”

  The sturdy line of the shoulders under Maenol’s mud-spattered leathers stayed unbowed. He said gravely, “You informed me yourself, though not in the mannered condolence you wished.”

  As Mearn stiffened, horrified, the Lord of Camris held him down. “No offense. Quite the contrary. In delirium, your rude opinion of Riverton’s mayor and council delivered a more satisfying consolation. ” Nor was this caithdein’s settled patience in any way forced as he waited for an invalid to compose scattered thoughts and rejoin the tumbling mainstream of life.

  Mearn drew in a breath like dipped fire. “Sky and earth! How much was I raving? The maps—”

  “They are here. Your message of the Alliance invasion has reached us.” Maenol’s pale eyes, intense as his mother’s, saw deeper than most through a difficulty. In response to an agonized, unspoken question, he said with sparse clarity, “When the fenlanders brought you in, you carried three map cases with seven sets of tactical instructions. If that’s your concern, we have already acted.”

  Mearn sank back amid the drowning clasp of the furs. A hard chill speared through him. He had to struggle to keep his teeth from chattering. “Too late,” he ground out. “I stumbled into that Alliance encampment by chance. By the time I lifted those plans, Lysaer’s cordon was already in place and closing.”

  The wind whipped against the gapped planks in the door. Traced in flickering rushlight, Maenol leaned forward, his rawboned hands clasped to his drawn-up knees. “Not all is lost. We’ve set lines in defense, and no few traps to slow the Alliance advance. Hounds can’t trail in these fenlands. Many of the women and young ones may yet find escape through the mountains.” Born of harsh times and a cruel practicality, he faced the unflinching truth with an unyielding equanimity. “We still have our hidden refuge in the Thaldein passes. That will just have to serve to safeguard those bloodlines that survive through another generation.”

  Mearn swallowed, silenced by the overwhelming weight of sorrows Maenol tacitly faced without speech: that the high mountain defiles might foil the Alliance campaign for a short time. The caithdein knew, none better, that long-term safety for his people could not be assured without the ships just torn beyond reach by the Koriani conspiracy at Riverton.

  “You stay to fight,” Mearn managed at last. “Why?”

  In the dimness, the hiss of the rushlight became the thread upon which existence loomed its firm fabric. A wounded man groaned. The wind outside bespoke more rain pending, and time stood as the comfortless enemy. Maenol regarded his interlaced fingers. His features were too grim for his twenty-five years, and the conviction that shaped the steel of his character lent his answer the grit of scaled carbon. “As Tysan’s caithdein how could I leave? We are kingless. The land’s charter, therefore, becomes mine to uphold, in line with my ancestors before me. I will not see living acreage carved up into boundaries, or trees and streams and hillsides exchanged as spiritless deeds of writ that ignorant men believe can be bought and sold without penalty. Earth’s life and town greed share no common ground, and I have no stomach for compromise.”

  “Brother,” Mearn said. He fought a hand free of encumbering furs and touched Maenol’s wrist in the sympathy of their common heritage. In Third Age Year One, clanblood had been consecrated to uphold the Paravian law of unity which kept the earth’s mystery intact. The world’s bounty and heritage were the binding fiber to hold Ath’s design, and no man’s to unwind for the divisive reasons of domination and profit.

  “We are not yet defeated.” Maenol shifted, straightened, the dignity knit into the blood and the bone of him like the dauntless, stilled majesty the rooted oak must show the
honed axe blade. “While there is one patch of forest in Tysan still free, I stay to resist the wrong thinking that threatens the peace of the Fellowship’s compact.”

  “My heart would stand with you,” Mearn s’Brydion said fiercely.

  “Save us, you cannot!” Maenol’s objection turned forceful. “Lysaer’s Alliance has no respect for limitations. The day must never come, that your duke in Alestron should face the same forces of destruction our cursed prince has unleashed in Rathain and Tysan.” Too large a spirit for the cramped gloom of the hovel, Maenol exhorted in sorrow, “Our people are scattered. Every man and woman who carries a bow has a vengeance arrow with the name of Lysaer s’Ilessid engraved on the point. There is no joy in this impasse. I implore you, do nothing. The very suspicion you had betrayed Lysaer’s interests would break a most fragile balance. That would serve nothing, but call down sure ruin on your fugitive clans in Melhalla. ”

  “A sword in the hand would feel better, nonetheless.” Mearn’s frame sagged into his rough pallet of rushes, but his eyes held the banked fires of resentment. “The truth gives no ease. Not when the wind is likely to blow the Alliance’s troubles our way anyhow.” Hating the fact he must deliver ill news while lying flat on his back, he gave terse explanation why those engraved arrows were unlikely to find the man they were fashioned to bring down. “Koriani duplicity ran far deeper than we knew.”

  Diminished by the caithdein’s sudden, prepared stillness, Mearn faltered. The chills as his fever broke racked him in waves, and the difficult words he must now assemble weighed like piled rock on his chest. “Lysaer sailed for Corith, not Riverton,” he forced out at length. Pinned now under Maenol’s unnerving attention, he related how Koriani design had enspelled a fetch of Lysaer s’Ilessid to awaken the Mistwraith’s geas and drive Arithon s’Ffalenn into madness. “The spells did exactly as the witches had planned, and set him to purposeless flight.”

  The pause as Tysan’s caithdein measured the root cause for the ruin of his people, contained a stunned force of sorrow to etch the moment into wretched clarity. The next breath Maenol drew could have made the air bleed, or the rain to change into salt tears in midfall.

  When the first shock let go, and speech could be managed, the caithdein of Tysan had but one word. “Why?”

  Mearn shook his head, without answer. “Who knows the mind of Morriel Prime? Her works always have run contrary to Fellowship concerns.”

  One of the wounded stirred from thick sleep. Maenol arose. All stripped grace and silent economy of movement, he crossed the hovel, dipped water from a leather pail, then borrowed the fenwoman’s long-handled horn cup and made rounds. For the power of responsibility he carried, he wore neither ornament nor jewel, nor any token of finery to set him apart from his scouts. His brown, weathered hands offered drink to the wounded without care for rank. He gave encouragement as he could to those whose voices were fretful. With the natural dignity of a man who had never been pampered by servants, he rearranged soiled bedding for others who had slipped beyond conscious awareness.

  On the cot, helpless and weak in the sweat of his broken fever, Mearn s’Brydion watched the care the caithdein held for his doomed people. He knew, then, whose hands had tended him through his own illness. The rage rose up, blistering hot with the bite of an unendurable grief. He had read every one of those maps before Maenol, had seen how improbable lay the margin for hope. Truth and plain tactics held no ambiguities. Of the clansmen who had embarked to delay Lysaer’s Alliance from containing Arithon s’Ffalenn in Riverton, few would escape to reach safety. The routes into the mountains from Caithwood would be sealed by armed troops within days. That would leave only the coastline, already set for blockade at Mainmere by the selfsame ships that, by Arithon’s intervention, could have opened the way for clan freedom.

  In the squalid, dense gloom of a fenlander’s hovel, the sturdy caithdein in his ordinary leathers seemed unmarked by the immanent finger of fate. Divested of his weapons, except for a hunting knife, he paused on one knee to laugh at a woman’s rough joke. He flipped back his braid of ash-colored hair, abandoned to a moment of boyish embarrassment as an older woman half-hidden in shadow called something back in rejoinder.

  “My grandmother should be alive to hear that,” Maenol said. Fingers still busy, he replaced a slipped bandage in frowning concentration. Then, as if disaster were not present and closing to put an end to the spirited joys of small byplay, he moved on, in meticulous care attending the needs of his wounded.

  Mearn shut his eyes, too agonized to watch. Though his family was not fugitive, he knew forestborn customs too well not to shrink. In these wilds, the clan codes of survival imposed since the uprising held no space for pity or compromise. Any scout here who was unfit to walk would not be permitted to fall into the hands of the enemy. With Alliance troops marching in force on Mogg’s Fen, those wounded would ask for a mercy stroke rather than burden their hale companions.

  Under the faltering flare of the rushlight, whether man or woman, each face showed determined calm in the face of such shattering uncertainty. It was the outsider among them who battled the urge to stem fate and scream outrage for the injustice imposed by a prince turned false to his bloodline.

  When Maenol had finished, he returned to Mearn’s side, bearing the sewn-leather bucket and horn dipper. The citrine gleam of the rushlight traced the stubble on his cheek, and the gaps torn in the fringe on his deerskin where thongs had been cut off at need to mend, or tie bandages or tourniquets. Lives and blood would be given as generously to defend the needs of the land.

  Mearn labored to regather the lost thread of his composure. Before accepting the same care from the hands of the man who was Tysan’s reigning caithdein, he demanded in rankling honesty, “My Lord of Camris, why are you still here?”

  The unaccustomed use of his formal title touched the younger man to stiff wariness. He crouched. The water dipper all but snapped as his hand clenched, and his face showed a startled and sudden vulnerability that exposed the youth in his twenty-five years. Carefully, slowly, he set down the water. Clan habit did not waste the gifts of the earth, nor take life’s bounty for granted. He settled on his heels, strong wrists draped on his knees, while the carnelian glow of the rushlight mapped the small scabs ripped by briars, and the deeper scars left by war on his knuckles. In the same grave steadiness that flinched from no hardship, he answered, “I had to ask a boon of you, in behalf of my clans.”

  Thirst forgotten, Mearn refused the wringing weakness in his limbs and elbowed himself half-erect. Inadequately braced against the wadded mat of the rushes, he shook back the stuck ends of his hair and matched the other man’s courage headlong. “Whatever you need will be given. My word on s’Brydion clan honor.”

  Maenol looked away, perhaps overcome. “I accept that word from you. Ath bless your willing heart.” He paused, then added through a harsh burr of regret, “Sleep now. We’ll speak of this later.”

  He arose, clasped his benefactor’s shoulder in salute. Moved by uncharacteristic reticence, he averted his direct glance, and Mearn, in suspicion that the caithdein was weeping, did not press, but left the man to his dignified privacy.

  The fever had left him light-headed in any case. Drained from his effort to keep focused composure, he gave in to the sapping demand of his flesh and lay back. Despite his fierce worry and his musty, uncomfortable nest of damp fur, sleep came like an ambush and dropped a black cloth over his thought and his senses.

  When Mearn s’Brydion reawakened, the rain had cleared into a chill, gusty night. The rushlight burned now by the cracked open doorway, where a fenwoman bent, stirring fish stew in a cauldron. She was typical of her breed, built rawboned and short. Hair of an indeterminate color was bundled beneath a string cap. Feathers swung from hoops in her earlobes, and her layered skirts were sewn with dark threads into queer, whorled patterns and luck signs. Three purses made from the shells of marsh turtles dangled from a cincture at her waist, and two raggedy children suck
ed their fingers and peered from the well of deep shadow behind her. A third infant waved from the carry sack she wore strapped to her back.

  If her household was typical, her fenlander husband would be faring out in his skiff, trapping and fishing for the family.

  Mazed in the lassitude left by his illness, Mearn took too long to notice the hovel was emptied of wounded. The furs where the clan scouts had languished were rolled in neat bundles, lashed with fiber twine twisted from wild flax. Maenol s’Gannley was gone, replaced by a toothless elder smoking a root pipe. Beside Mearn’s shoulder sat the last of the clansmen, a boy of twelve years. He had blond hair tied into a neat braid, and hands too large for his still-growing frame. Sword and knife rode in sheaths at his waist. His belt was his only ornament, sewn with simple designs of wooden beads and otter fur. He waited, stiff backed and composed in the tight, sober silence that came over the young in times of crisis.

  Touched by foreboding, Mearn fisted the hand hidden under the covering furs. “My word as given,” he said at careful length. “Just what have I bound into promise?”

  The boy started. His dark eyes went wide, the pupils dense black as he realized his charge was awake. He said nothing, but instead drew two letters out of his jerkin and passed them across to Mearn’s keeping. Then he rose. He seemed all knobby joints, rail thin for his growth. Despite tender age, he knew how to move to accommodate the adult weapons he carried. His voice had just started the change to a man’s bass timbre, yet the cracking child’s treble which intruded as he addressed the fenwife put no crimp at all on his dignity.