Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  By the compact’s clear terms, their powers were sworn to preserve the Paravian mysteries; mankind might accept steering counsel and assistance on request, but the ultimate course of humanity’s survival must be shaped through self-will and free choice.

  “Your tea has arrived,” King Eldir prompted.

  Sethvir looked up, found a smile for the page, then exhumed his mug from the folds of his robe and set it upright on the table. Worn as he was, and tested by conscience, his gnarled grip held no palsy. Through the interval while a royal servant refreshed his cup, the Sorcerer unreeled his considered response in the form of three direct appeals.

  A call arrowed out to touch Asandir, just ridden the breadth of Tysan to test the new patterns of prejudice fanned by Lysaer’s campaign to repress mage talent.

  A second tracer flagged down Kharadmon, on watch amid the grand ward against a cold backdrop of stars; and tied in a request to the brewing spring storm in Athera’s arctic latitudes.

  A third touch raised the awareness of a patriarch tree, wind beaten and twice seared by lightning, and exchanged a pact of permission.

  One last vectored inquiry mapped cause and effect, and gauged their impact on the future. Sethvir foresaw no trend of enlightened understanding arise out of Arithon’s brash rescue of Felirin. The summer would bring on more trials, more burnings, more sunwheel recruits led to enlist by unsettled fears and strained politics. The spiraling trend of Prince Lysaer’s maligned belief would gain heated impetus, fresh spark to the trend which drew men to embrace the cause of the Alliance of Light.

  Misunderstanding of a sword’s gifted powers served only to ignite a new wave of fear. The price of Fellowship assistance as always touched off wider ramifications.

  Sethvir sought prosaic comfort from his mug of scalding tea. When he raised his tormented gaze to Eldir, he offered his sorrowful forecast, “Very soon you will be pressured to take sides on the issue of practicing sorcery. The mage talented will come seeking refuge within your borders before the advent of summer solstice.”

  “There’s no decision to be made,” Eldir said, his strong hands reaching to gather up the spelled parchment. “Tysan’s burnings are unjust. The condemned are not criminals.” For the scion of a line renowned for mild pragmatism, he finished in vehement force. “My crown is a mockery if Havish can’t provide them with sanctuary. We’ve already spoken for the refugees who flee Tysan’s persecution of the clanborn.”

  Sethvir touched his crabbed fingertips against his closed eyelids. Shadowed by the finials of the massive gilt chair, he could have been mistaken for an arthritic grandfather, mantled in velvets too voluminous for their framework of brittle, aged bones. His voice was subdued as he tendered the only bright truth he could offer. “Your Grace, because of your mercy, more than one irreplaceable clan bloodline will be saved. That could be the one act to salvage the balance on the hour when the Paravians choose to return.”

  The spin of the Fatemaster’s Wheel meantime would scarcely stop for a platitude. The Sorcerer diffused his attention back into fragmented awareness; while far off to the north, amid the hummocked landscape of Mainmere’s ruined keeps, Asandir drew rein, wheeled his stallion, and sent it thundering back down the road he had just traversed through Caithwood. Elsewhere, a storm gained intensity; a battered tree consented to the hour of its death; and the Hanshire captain named Sulfin Evend clattered into a Middlecross posthouse, shouting for provisions and remounts with a zeal the laziest horseboy must attend.

  Beyond these small happenings, hazed into momentous event with the passage of years; snicked warp through weft with the turn of seasons, and the fall of changed leaves, and the byplay of iyats, Sethvir saw sunwheel priests raise vast armies, to carpet the summer landscape. Rank upon rank crossed the Lanshire border to bring Lysaer’s cause by fire and by sword into the Kingdom of Havish.

  Unwilling to dwell upon the sorrows Desh-thiere’s curse might inflict on the future, he immersed himself in particulars. “Please extend to your bride my Fellowship’s profound regret,” he said. “Due to an unforeseen difficulty, Asandir will be late for your wedding.”

  “No matter.” King Eldir arose, staid as plain granite against the stitched silk of a tapestry. He thrust the rolled parchment under his arm and returned his rare, even smile. “We won’t see hurt feelings. Every city mayor and guild minister your colleague shamed into compliance for my coronation will more likely be silly with relief. They’ve complained in the past that Asandir’s scrutiny just makes them sweat rings through their expensive brocades.”

  But Sethvir sensed how the lightness was forced. He and Havish’s king matched an agonized glance of understanding.

  Then Althain’s Warden clasped the royal wrist. “Trust your heart, your Grace. Your decisions today have been fitting and right.”

  No longer did the Sorcerer seem aged, or careworn unto fragility. His myopic air of fuddled inattention could not mask what he was: a spirit annealed to unassailable strength through a past few others would survive. He owned the endurance to brave trials yet to come, and King Eldir s’Lornmein was too wise to stay blind to consequence: the impact of the day’s event would not happen in his reign, but must fall like a blow upon the shoulders of his unborn descendants.

  Impasse

  Spring 5653

  Days later, shivering in the predawn chill of the Korias flats, Dakar the Mad Prophet licked blood from a nicked thumb and cast his stone construct into the shallow current of a streamlet. He ached from the soles of his mud-spattered boots to the uncombed crown of his head. His vision held the treacherous shimmer brought on by overstrained hours of mage-sight. He linked pudgy hands and stretched a kink from his back, then swore aloud for the misery that the landscape offered dim prospects for a trio of fugitives. Driven off the coast road, a rider could find himself mazed amid farmsteads, with their yapping dogs and screaming geese, and where treacherous stands of pasture fencing could yield up angry bulls or lethal delays spent backtracking from unexpected cul-de-sacs. The low roll of the fields carried sound far too clearly, and extended visibility for miles. Those expanses too thin for tillage or grazing formed a vast, washed floodplain of poor, stony sand, patched over with scrub too sparse to mask fleeing hoofprints.

  Huddled amid a witch-hazel thicket wadded with morning fog, the horses nosed the ground for straggling shoots of sawgrass, ears limp and coats matted into dry whorls of sweat. Felirin could do little to tend them. Salt leached into the raw burns on his hands, though every plain shirt in his saddlebag had been torn up at need to make dressings. Arithon had packed the worst blisters and weals with burdock sprouts beaten in egg whites before he himself had succumbed to his backlash. The inevitable penalty he must pay for channeling unrefined earth powers with his mage talent blinded left him drained near to incapacity.

  Prone amid the stripped saddles with his head cradled on his locked arms, he made small complaint, though the tight-lipped expression he wore when he moved told Dakar how deeply he suffered. Nor had the sorrows inflicted at Riverton been lifted by his keeping good faith with his charged duty as Masterbard. Like snags in deep current, that unseen despondency leeched him, ebbing his reserves without letup. He needed henbane tea and a bed warmed with stones to ease the spasms which racked him. But sunwheel guardsmen searched door-to-door. Farmwives would sell him to his enemies out of fear before they would offer him shelter.

  Faint gold rinsed the clogged, misty air. The fog was starting to thin. Dakar clutched his ribs to suppress a chill, aware that the thicket provided inadequate shelter. The mists would lift in less than an hour, leaving horses and riders a sitting target for the oncoming Alliance patrol.

  The mare chose that moment to fling up her head and whinny a deafening inquiry. Dakar swore. “Just let the whole world know we’re here, you worthless bundle of dog meat.” He dealt a pebble by the streamside a temperamental kick.

  The stone arced aloft, but the predictable crack of its impact never happened.

  War
y, Dakar glanced up.

  Five paces ahead, an inked phantom against mist, a black horse and cloaked rider confronted him, their approach uncannily silent. Even the clang of shod hooves on rinsed rocks failed to raise telltale clatters. The horse halted, meeting Dakar’s sharp start with pricked ears, but no trace of a shy. A ghost eye gleamed like frosted glass through the veils of dawn mist. Under a dark mantle, the rider stirred. A hand unfurled from a gray-banded sleeve, and let the abused pebble drop to the streambed with a murmured phrase of apology.

  “You!” Dakar cried. “Did you have to scare a hunted man out of his living skin?”

  The Sorcerer Asandir inclined his head in reproof, his regard on the spellbinder’s thumb. “You did send a summons.”

  Dakar glanced down, caught aback, then closed shaking fingers over his still bleeding cut. “We need help,” he admitted. “I’ve scried warning. The patrol I can’t shake will close in by noon. If Sethvir doesn’t already know. Earl Jieret’s had Sight of a public execution, the condemned man being Prince Arithon.”

  Asandir sat the black stud, patient, but without speech.

  The Mad Prophet flushed slowly crimson. “I ask for Arithon’s survival, ” he defended.

  The Sorcerer touched the black’s neck, soothing it from stamping off the midges which swarmed at its mud-spattered fetlocks. “Arithon suffers backlash, yes? As well he should expect from his prior experience, when he raised the Paravian mysteries at Jaelot.”

  “You won’t see him?” Dakar demanded.

  “He has not asked.” The Sorcerer touched his horse again, and as if language had passed between master and beast, the stud backed a half step and wheeled to go. While Dakar stood, helpless, his bleeding hand clenched to a frustrated fist, the hooded head turned. Silver eyes met his, and one bristled brow tipped up. “How you’ve changed,” Asandir commented. “I should have expected at least an impertinent question demanding to know where I’m bound.”

  One moment; two; the birdsong rang loud through the thicket, and the horse stamped. Asandir gave him rein, and nearly too late, Dakar caught the drift of abstruse insinuation.

  “Wait!” He surged forward, hopeful, while the stud snorted his annoyance at being checked back to a halt. “Where are you bound?”

  Asandir glanced over his shoulder, his mien like graven flint. “There’s a Paravian grimward northeast, did you know? I will be testing its guarding boundary for soundness, and since Luhaine is busy, no one will check on my back trail. A foolhardy traveler might stray inside. Should that happen, the perils are unforgiving.”

  Well aware he was cued, and blanched to hollow nerves by the implied suggestion, Dakar recited, “Kill no beast, break no branch or leaf from a living tree, set no fire and remove no twig or pebble.”

  “Just so.” Asandir’s smile seemed lit as a shaft of breaking sunlight touched his mouth underneath his deep hood. “A horse should be muzzled to stop him from browsing. Let Arithon rest, he’ll recover. And bring Felirin with you to Shand. If the friends you have there won’t take him in, Halliron’s daughter surely will. She’s been lonely and morose since her mother’s death, and the city could use a new storyteller.”

  Dakar drew a weak breath to proffer his thanks, but an influx of fog surged between. When the air cleared, both horse and Sorcerer were gone with no sound to mark their departure.

  “Did you have a successful scrying?” husked a voice at the Mad Prophet’s shoulder.

  The spellbinder gave yet another bounding start. “Dharkaron’s black vengeance!” he hissed to Felirin, crept up on poulticed feet. “Does everyone in creation have to sneak in here and scare me out of my skin?”

  “I’m sorry.” The singer padded to a halt, his soiled cloak tucked around his shoulders like a blanket. He had always possessed elegance, with a handsome, straight nose and cleft chin. Stress made his prominent bones appear gaunt, and the hair that once spilled in waterfall waves to his shoulders now clung to his skull, frizzled and singed like matted wool in the damp. “I thought I heard you say something. Wouldn’t you rather somebody checked to make sure you weren’t lost in a fit of prescient trance?”

  The spellbinder focused his discomfort toward his boots, as if the hard, stony soil underfoot might sprout untrustworthy sinkholes. “I’ve had guidance from the Fellowship, after a fashion.”

  “And they said?” Felirin probed.

  “Daelion’s bollocks!” The outburst set a meadowlark to flight, but did nothing to lift the Mad Prophet’s rumpled scowl as he stomped off to untie the horses. “We’re to lose our pursuit by crossing through a grim ward.”

  Felirin blanched. Hazel eyes still inflamed from the pyre showed bloodshot rings of disbelief. “You do know it’s said that those sites guard the sleep of the great drakes. Perhaps the very ones whose true dreams led this world to the brink of destruction before the dawn of the First Age.” He slipped a wrapped hand from the layers of his cloak to discourage a sprig of briar that latched its green thorns in a tassel. “Are those legends true, as the sun was?”

  “I never asked,” Dakar admitted, his moon face furrowed in distress. “Althain’s Warden himself never said. Asandir refused to discuss the grimwards, except to relate they were ceded to Fellowship trust when the old races fled from the continent. Ath knows what those circles confine. I could wish we’d never find out.”

  Anothe. rolling billow of sea fog shredded itself under sunlight. By the time the horses were saddled, the land would be laid nearly bare.

  “I hope you like Shand,” Dakar finished, the spur of haste driving him breathless. “Because if we escape from the sunwheel guardsmen, there’s a very good chance you’ll end up there.”

  Chain of Event

  Spring 5653

  On the Korias flats at the hour of noon, a headhunter tracker soothes his cringing hounds and refuses to cross the shimmering light which frames the boundary of the Paravian grimward; despite all advice to the contrary, the brash captain from Hanshire swears through his teeth, calls his forty select men, and overrides their quavering dread to continue pursuit of the Master of Shadow…

  Three days later, a gale off Stormwell Gulf brings rain and winds that raze trees like a scythe, and one of those fallen is a patriarch oak which sweeps a sunwheel courier from his saddle; he recovers from a sharp blow to the head, forgetful of the tidings which dispatched him to Avenor: that of the riders who followed Sulfin Evend into the Paravian grimward, nary a one has returned…

  In the observatory at the Koriani sisterhouse at Capewell, the last spiraling glimmer of power fades from the grand conjury made to trap Arithon s’Ffalenn; and like old, dried paper, the ancient Prime stirs from her coma and opens sealed eyes to the galling discovery that her quarry has slipped through her net without scathe…

  XII. Grimward

  Late Spring 5653

  Inside the shimmering, mercurial barrier which bounded the Paravian grimward, the natural progression of time dissolved. As spellbinder, Dakar noticed the alarming development when his subliminal connection to sun, moon, and stars became cut off like snipped thread. Footsore, exhausted, and snappish from hunger, he shut his eyes and milked his recalcitrant memory. He retained a shamefully sparse store of facts for his years spent in Asandir’s tutelage. What fragments he gleaned could be counted on three fingers, jumbled as trivia between detailed reminiscence of his past trysts and wistful hours spent wenching.

  By contrast, each one of his two-silver harlots stood out with a jewel’s exotic clarity. The quirk moved him to teeth-grinding worry, that the fragment of lore that might key their survival would stay obscured by the decadent pursuits of his past.

  “Well how was a drunk to know what his life might come to depend on?” Dakar snapped to Felirin’s sensible inquiry.

  Distempered and soaked in cowardly sweat, the Mad Prophet drummed his heels against his horse and drove its balky steps through the ward’s shifting bands of coiled energy. The bard and the Shadow Master rode behind him like shadows, the
former reduced to a petrified silence, and the latter, too undone to care where his mare’s herd instincts might lead him.

  The Mad Prophet wished in jangled irritation that Arithon’s wits were not scattered. This once, the other man’s unmerciful perception would have posed an indisputable advantage. For his own part, the spellbinder found such exactitude wearing. Escape into thoughts of a lush woman’s favors seemed resounding good sense beside the outright insanity of braving the perils now at hand.

  Dakar yanked a wrinkle from the knee of his trousers before he chafed a new saddle sore. He needed no scholar’s insight; nothing about a Paravian grimward would seem canny to human awareness. The location of all seventeen known phenomena might be charted at Althain Tower, but whole years at a stretch, a man might pass those marked sites and encounter no trace of their presence. Through his five centuries as a Fellowship apprentice, Dakar could not remember one time when the Sorcerers did not attend to the grimwards alone.

  The protections which turned the inadvertent traveler from a disastrous step through their boundaries were laid down with ruthless potency. When the seals required adjustment or rebalancing, the task was always shouldered by Asandir or Sethvir. Their discorporate colleagues Kharadmon and Luhaine might sometimes assist from the sidelines by misdirecting strayed game or even the occasional two-legged trespasser, but Dakar retained the distinct impression that such places held consummate danger for any spirit left unshielded by mortal flesh.

  At any cost, a man must not come to die here. Not unless he wished to be struck from the Fatemaster’s Wheel for all time. Of all the trials suffered in Prince Arithon’s service, this one trod the surest course to folly.