Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  “You worry for nothing.” Lirenda arose to a breezy rustle of silk. The crack in the wall flickered as she crossed through the light to leave by means of the companionway. “The Master of Shadow will come readily to heel once he learns of our cargo of hostages.”

  “Are you mad?” The captain of the brig banged frustrated fists on his chart table. “The man’s a fell sorcerer and a thrice-confirmed killer! Do you actually believe he’d give himself up to spare a mere coffle of lackeys?”

  The latch clicked and held as Lirenda paused at the threshold. Her conclusion came freighted with menace to seize the hottest man’s blood. “Then, captain, you must lay us a course for the Lanshire coast on the strength of my Koriani Order’s requirement.”

  Lashed prone in his hammock, Caolle measured the stakes and weighed his own judgment concerning Prince Arithon’s chances. He held no false hope. Set against the entrenched s’Ffalenn gift of compassion, the undermining sense of guilt engendered by just one accursed sword thrust seeded the opening for disaster.

  Caolle understood he was not made as the realm’s sworn caithdein, to test and grapple the fires of s’Ffalenn royal conscience. Nor could he swerve from implications that nagged like a poisonous aftertaste. He could not stand down, not for his life’s sake: not after overhearing the harsh, focused hunger which charged the First Enchantress’s tone at each mention of Prince Arithon’s name.

  Forty years with the burden of command left Caolle a sharp judge of character. Whatever Morriel’s successor believed, her reasons for seeking the Shadow Master’s ruin were entrenched and intensely personal enough to raise the hair at his nape. In defiance of despair, and the straits of mortal pain, Caolle gritted his teeth. He linked his fists through hemp netting and began in stark need to chafe the linen bound over his poultices.

  Midnight brought the change in the watch, with the flagship leading her sister vessels on a dogleg course which would bear straight offshore for a clandestine passage, then bend on a rhumb line to make landfall through Mainmere Narrows. The fleet of three ran before following winds when the Koriani healer closed off the mate’s cabin and laid down her satchel of remedies at Caolle’s side. Each night and noon, she came to renew the regenerative spells on his wound, that strict schedule kept since the First Senior had remanded his care to her charge.

  The lantern lit by the ship’s boy at sundown had burned low, its weakened flicker made worse by the strong pitch of the swells kicked up by the equinox shift in the wind. The brig tossed stem to stern in long, rolling corkscrews, doused under back-fallen arcs of carved spray. New varnish sweated to the influx of sea damp. Snatched in crawling shadows and sliding spears of wan light, the convalescent stirred in his hammock. A groan escaped his clenched teeth.

  Moved to pity for the wearing discomfort caused by the rigors of sea passage, the enchantress sighed and deferred her intent to trim the neglected wick. The sigils she required to reverse fatal wounding carried an unkindly resonance. Enspelled tissues closed at the price of nagging pain, and the clansman was stubborn as grit. He rejected those possets she mixed to bring ease through the gift of oblivious sleep.

  Yet tonight, even his stiff pride seemed forced to bow before the demands of his suffering. “Something’s not right,” Caolle ground through a gasp. “The dressing’s turned sodden.”

  “Easy. We’ll see.” The enchantress touched his brow, found him clammy with chill. Her frown deepened. She thrust a palm under the blanket. Caolle’s shoulder and chest were also running fresh sweat. “You’re fevered,” she soothed in that bedside gentleness she used to disguise deep concern.

  For the ciphers and seals still actively binding spirit to flesh were far from safe or beneficent. If Caolle’s wound had gone septic, the same conjuries which regenerated torn tissue would outrace their proper intent. Sigils as a rule were unselective, a vectored spell of forced impetus. A starting suppuration would engage their figured energies, then turn on itself and run rampant. All risks came redoubled. Misread the first signs, and Arithon’s liegeman could die in an hour, consumed from within by infection.

  Now grateful for the dimness which masked peripheral distractions, the Koriani healer hooked out the silver chain which hung her spell crystal from her neck. She dangled the jewel above Caolle’s flank, then shut her eyes and smoothed her awareness into trance. The peace of her craft settled over her mind and distanced the ship’s clamor of stray noise. The squeal of the rudder cables dimmed into the mirth of the hands who idled on the afterdeck to share a lewd joke with the quartermaster. Channeled to heightened sensitivity through the attuned matrix of her quartz, the enchantress sounded each of the sigils intermeshed with the clan liegeman’s life energies. Naught seemed amiss. The layered streams of vitality interlaced through his aura showed no ominous stain of dull gray. She listened, diligent, and rechecked her findings. The first sign of dissonance could be subtle in warning of fresh inflammation.

  The explosive attack took her without warning. A hand grabbed her hair and yanked her headlong toward the hammock. Trance dulled her reaction. The sharp break from mage-sight hurled her dizzy, and the shock never let her assemble her balance to strike back.

  Too late, she regretted her reckless compassion, to treat a man’s pain before thinking to test the intent he might hold in his mind. Something hard clubbed her neck. She toppled with scarcely a cry. Panic coalesced into split-second instinct. She framed a sigil of air to alert her First Senior. Then power of defense slipped her grasp altogether as ruthless fingers snagged her spell crystal. The quartz tore from her hold. She felt the chain snap as her senses upended in spinning descent through bleak darkness.

  Jerked out of sound sleep by an air-fired sigil of distress, First Senior Lirenda shoved erect on her berth in the stern cabin. The detested inconvenience of seafaring extracted rough payment for haste; her head thumped into the deck beams. “Motherless hell!” She thrashed free of damp blankets, her hatred of ships unabated as she rammed an elbow on the timbers which crowded the edge of her mattress.

  “Dharkaron avenge!” She stood up and staggered as a bucketing roll nosed the brig down the face of a swell. No friend to water, the more so since her gifts of power were founded in firesign, she clawed back tumbled hair in annoyance.

  Whatever mismanaged turn of disaster had upset the healer, ill temper would lend her no asset. Lirenda soothed her rattled nerves back to cool equilibrium. Gooseflesh raked her bare skin. She groped through the darkness to find the hook which hung her violet overrobe, then listened as she wrapped the silk over her shoulders. She sensed no overt disturbance.

  Canvas and timber worked to the drive of fair winds. No deckhands shouted. Since naught seemed amiss with the crew, she chose not to summon the watch officer. The draw of filled sails and the surge of rucked foam rushing under the counter would defeat her best effort to keep her inquiry unobtrusive.

  The captain’s outspoken show of dissent still rankled the subordinate seamen. All on board knew the brig’s easterly course had been charted under duress, and the enchantress was a fool who would give the ship’s officers fresh grounds to challenge Koriani authority. Whatever had arisen to upset her colleague, the First Senior would have facts before she abandoned discretion.

  Lirenda cupped her white crystal on its chain. Clad in the anklelength fall of her robe, her porcelain shoulders doused under drizzledink snarls of hair, she strode on bare feet from her cabin.

  The signature trail of the sigil led her past the chart room. The plank door was shut; she engaged her quartz focus to augment her senses, but no waking activity stirred in the darkness behind. The brig’s captain slept, or else walked the deck, fine-tuning his vessel through shakedown.

  Beyond the stepped bulk of the mizzenmast, the entry to the mate’s quarters cracked open. The streamed phosphor track of the sigil originated within. Lirenda stole closer. She extended her awareness in tacit, light contact with her crystal, prepared at need to raise conjury.

  The brig slogged throu
gh a trough and rose at the bow. Newly forged hinges swung free to her roll, and the panel gaped further open. The sultry glow of a failing wick etched the interior of the cabin, with the bulk of Caolle’s hammock a dim silhouette overtop. Lirenda heard a woman’s groan. Quickened to alarm, she made out a female form, held pinned and struggling beneath the rucked folds of a healer’s mantle.

  “What ails you, wench?” teased Arithon’s liegeman in muffled, derisive clan accents. “Only boys mind a virgin. Keep still and enjoy the fine sort of fun you’ve been missing.”

  A hissed breath of rage escaped Lirenda’s clenched teeth. “How dare you!” She closed the last steps, shouldered into the small cabin, and unfurled a barbed spell to stun the male occupant of the hammock into unconscious paralysis.

  “First Senior, my lady,” murmured Caolle in obliging regret, from behind, as the door panel crashed shut at her heels.

  Before she could whirl, something hard struck her nape. Lirenda lost wind to curse her mistake as she measured her length on the decking.

  She roused to the chill splash of water on her face. Restored awareness brought her the sawing throb of a headache. Her hands, her ankles, and her mouth were bound with strips of bandage filched from the healer’s satchel. She was still in the mate’s cabin, the velvety gloom thick with the scents of copal varnish and new planking. The ship’s heel pressed her backwards. Someone had propped her shoulders like a doll’s against the shut door to the companionway.

  Runnels of water seeped down her brow and combed through the strands of her lashes. She blinked to clear her bleared vision.

  “Now, don’t ye look fit to murder.” Caolle mused in soft threat. Not a half pace away, he sat braced on the sea chest with his back to the hanging locker. His feet were still fettered. The heavy iron chains had been inventively muffled with a slit length of sleeve off an oilskin.

  He had unhooked the gimbaled lantern during the interval while his victim recovered full consciousness. The wick was now trimmed. A clear, bright flame stabbed mirrored reflections in the depths of inimical, dark eyes. “Foolish, to think I’d sully myself with a witch who kept me living as bait to bring down my liege. Not to mind,” he ran on, as Lirenda jerked stiff. “She’s there, in the hammock, triced up neatly as you are. How obliging of her to struggle and moan just as you made your appearance.”

  Caolle paused, flexed his shut jaw, and shook through a visible tremor. “Oh, I know I might die for my troubles,” he admitted when the spasm of pain let him speak. “That’s why we’ll rush things along. Take my point straightaway, I’m a man who makes promises rather than blustering threats.”

  He raised his left hand. Something bright skittered and flashed to the bucketing toss of the hull: a quartz crystal on a sparkling length of fine chain.

  “This belongs to your colleague,” Caolle said. “But you’re damned right to worry. Your own isn’t still linked around your pretty neck.”

  Eyes pinned wide, pupils expanded and black in a stark and impotent hatred, Lirenda matched his stare like a baited tigress. Her dignity was rags. Whatever the cost to her rankled pride, she dared wait no longer to summon the help of a crewman. Bereft of her voice, she raised her bound ankles to hammer her heels on the deck.

  Her captor had already foreseen that resistance and muffled her feet with nothing less than the folds of her mantle of office. That moment, the lingering chill of the draft gained a horrid and leveling significance. The gag stopped her shriek. Stripped naked as well as bound wrist and ankle, Lirenda paled to an explosion of rage all the more deadly for being mute.

  “I didn’t like being fingered by ladies I don’t know, either,” Caolle agreed in unswerving complaisance.

  The length of his forearm was laced in fresh blood. His struggle to strip off both poultice and dressing had torn open his wounds, a just and fitting penalty for the unwise demands made upon half-healed flesh. Lirenda savored the petty satisfaction that the pain undid his dexterity. He made a rough job of tilting the lamp. Several minutes fled by while he fumbled to lift the latch which fastened the pane.

  Yet he was not unnerved. Every ruthless art of Koriani observation failed to strip his cragged profile for other significant weakness. Bodily discomfort did nothing at all to blunt his tactician’s mind. Caolle watched her conclude this, unfooled. He was too seasoned a campaigner to entertain false belief that an enemy held captive was no threat. In stony dispassion, he raised the strung jewel above the opened cover of the lamp. The healer’s dedicated quartz jounced and spun on its tether as his unsteady grasp teased it back and forth through the flame.

  Given liberty for speech, Lirenda could have explained that the wards on the stone would offset the ravages of fire. She displayed no uneasiness, that the attuned focus of her colleague’s born talents should become this deadly man’s plaything.

  “She’s a bonny enough flower.” Caolle inclined his head toward the healer, his features filed iron, each suffering hollow bruised in dull shadow where crinkled flesh masked the bone. Never had he looked more the part of the hardened killer.

  The healer who had obeyed direct orders to spare him watched back in glazed fear, her shining loops of blond hair netted through the rope mesh of the hammock. Each roll of the hull rocked her trussed form to and fro like a sausage.

  “Would you say that her youth’s an illusion?” Caolle mused. “There’s a fact or two whispered in the lore of our clans concerning the ways of your kind.” He lifted the gemstone, heated now, the unquiet shimmer of its facets thinly tarnished under a layering of soot. “Do you know, I’ve a perverse curiosity to find out how ancient your colleague really is.”

  Russet light wheeled as he shifted the lamp. The bent of his cruelty struck through at last as First Senior Lirenda realized he held an iron bucket braced between his tucked knees.

  Her cry pealed into a defeating wad of cloth.

  “Yes, the water was dipped from the sea,” Caolle said in affirmation of her ghastliest nightmare. “Salt water and an iron bucket, I believe, were the talismans listed for the ritual to ground and clear a spelled crystal.”

  ‘But not elemental fire, never that,’ Lirenda raged in gagged anguish. Caolle’s jet eyes held her pinned like a shark’s as he opened his fingers. The chain with its irreplaceable pendant slipped free.

  Hot quartz struck cold water. A sharp hiss, a shot geyser of steam, as the crystal shocked out of resonance and shattered. The fragments sliced in terrible, thin clangs against the metal confines of the bucket. Trapped helpless in mage-sight, Lirenda beheld a cloudy burst of static. Then an actinic flare of silver bloomed above the rim as wrought sigils let go, and a lifetime’s figured energies bled off and vanished into air.

  On the hammock, death visited with wrenching finality as the stabilized seals to retard aging gave way. The healer’s slim body bucked once. An inhuman screech shrilled through the linen wound in layers across her mouth. Muscle, nerve, and bone, her body convulsed, shivering the hammock on its rings. Her bound limbs thrashed. Joints cracked and cartilage popped to the lash of unnatural stresses. Spasmed hands jabbed and fought their restraints, then seemed between heartbeats to shrivel. Tendons contracted. Splayed knuckles bent. Bone clenched to bone, leaving not fingers, but claws, cranked tight into rigor like the leg-folded husks of dead spiders.

  Then the fit which contorted the woman’s wasted sinews let go. The remains sagged limp and the covering cloak slid away.

  “Daelion Fatemaster’s mercy,” Caolle gasped, despite himself stunned into pallor. Throughout his rough life, he had killed countless times, but never so hideously as this.

  For the hammock now cradled the shriveled corpse of a hag which could have languished three centuries in the grave. Leached cobwebs of hair trailed off the wax skull, swaying to the roll of the ship.

  Caolle recovered himself first. Having grappled the horrors of death all his days, he averted his eyes, more concerned with the living enchantress held captive at his feet.

  Lirenda gave
him back a sheet-gold glare of pure murder.

  For of course, he possessed a second purloined crystal to spin in cold threat above the lantern flame. Despite features pinched by sleeplessness and suffering pain, his glacial deliberation left Lirenda in no doubt that her peril was real. This was the clan war captain who had helped Arithon s’Ffalenn engineer the atrocities at Tal Quorin and the Havens, and after these, the most unconscionable of all, the thirty thousand casualties which had bloodied the field in one hour at Dier Kenton Vale. He owned no unmoored nerve to revolt. The First Senior watched, wholly defenseless, as Caolle hooked up the braided chain which fastened her personal crystal. He rebalanced the lamp, played the stone through the flame, his ultimatum served up in a silence like dammed acid.

  No threat, but a promise: he could repeat his lethal act if he chose, and strangle his conscience pangs afterward.

  “I’m glad that you grasp the true reach of the stakes,” he observed as he measured her stillness. “Now listen up sharp, because here’s how we’re going to play this.”

  Lirenda heard him through, racked by humiliation. The shame bled her sick, that she had ever dared to take personal liberties with Morriel Prime’s intricate plan. When she stayed Caolle’s death, she should have recalled he was a scarred veteran, clanbred to serve s’Ffalenn royalty. Liegeman to the bone, he would see her killed, and care not a whit if he lost his own life in the balance. The pitfall of her pride lent him his foothold for victory.

  He survived by her weakness, and refused her even the face-saving mercy of asking her word of agreement. Pragmatic as earth, he rifled the dead healer’s satchel, then used her stone knife to slice through the ties which bound his live victim’s ankles. While Lirenda’s fire-hot quartz swung suspended over the maw of the bucket, he skidded the blade across the wood deck for her to fumble and clasp. Through seemingly endless, awkward minutes, she wrestled to manipulate tied wrists and brace the haft between her bare knees. She was left to saw her bonds free on her own, and to cut away the sour knots of the gag.