Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  The next snap of ordinary lightning unveiled no more than shredded drifts of smoke.

  Lirenda clawed back upright. She smoothed the disarranged folds of her mantle, raked back fallen hair, and through flash-burned vision, saw the Prince of the Light turned back once again to face her.

  His posture was straight as Daelion’s justice, and his eyes, the unrelenting, fierce blue of zenith sky.

  “For mercy,” he said, his gaze locked to hers. “Behold the true cost of your intervention in my plan. Every death upon that vessel must lie on your own conscience, lady.”

  When Lirenda tried speech, he cut her off with brute sovereignty. “Far more is at issue than the Shadow Master’s destruction. You will advise your Prime that mankind deserves a future unencumbered by the meddling intervention of factions who manipulate our society with magecraft.”

  Lirenda felt steel rise up with her gorge. “Why you arrogant butcher!” Sickened, appalled, she regrouped her shocked nerves. “Is this pique, for balked plans? Some berserk fit of hatred?” Summary justice was a high king’s right, and he, granted less than legal sanction as crown prince. “What have you done here, but show in cold blood you can self-righteously murder the innocent?”

  “Yes, but were they innocent?” Lysaer’s formal civility clashed at odds with the heat of her roused female outrage. “You alone would know, First Senior.” He took her hand, drew her to the cliff path with such vehemence she nipped her tongue. “Take warning, enchantress, lest your kind cross my wishes again.”

  Lirenda resisted his urge to call an end to the audience, even as the force of his close presence tested the depth of her ire. The rocks themselves conspired against planted feet. She stumbled, caught the hem of her mantle beneath her heel. Silk tore like the whisper of screams the wronged dead had been granted no time to utter.

  “You have no authority over Koriani affairs,” Lirenda snapped.

  “You believe so,” Lysaer corrected, and then qualified with that magisterial arrogance that brought the most obstinate guild ministers to their knees. “One captain, a ship’s crew, and a company of men-at-arms failed in completing my orders. Whether they did so through negligence, or if they were coerced by the power of your Koriani sisterhood does not matter. Their fate at my hand became a foregone conclusion on the instant they permitted the Lance to change course for a landfall in Havish.”

  Another step out of shelter, and the gale winds would tear away words. Lysaer let her pause to lend his conclusion due emphasis. “I can afford no loyal officer to fear others before me. Such a weakness could only open the sworn honesty of innocents to risk. Let your Koriani Order learn well from your mistake. The men in my Alliance will not be allowed to become the ready tools of outside powers. I will not have them suborned!”

  He let her go. The sudden release staggered her backward and bruised her heel against an unkind angle of rock. Men’s lives had been sacrificed, and an insolent ship’s boy, not for their own acts made in guilt or innocence, but for hers, as example to an absent Prime Matriarch.

  Lirenda pushed straight, shook the chaff of winter-burned moss from her robes, while the rising gale screamed, and lightning jagged like sullen cracks shot through crystal against the blackened horizon. Her eyes caught the glow, lit balefire in reflection, as she dismissed Lysaer’s face and fair person. “No prince, but a manslayer. Tysan’s clans were well advised by their caithdein not to entrust you with kingship.”

  His effrontery showed flawless and deferent manners as he clasped her hand to escort her away. “I’m gratified to see my point taken so courteously to heart.”

  Lirenda stiffened. She would not ask what measure of justice would befall the Shadow Master’s men, gone to ground as maroons with no shelter beyond the overturned keels of four longboats.

  Lysaer widened the breach by telling her in detail. “Traitors and pirates are condemned through fair trial under the written annals of the realm’s law. My governance of men who are not my sworn liegemen is a matter of public record. No harm will befall the fugitives from the Lance until they’ve been captured and arraigned by due process.”

  Lirenda drew breath to warn him: the renegade crew from the brig yet included the cleverest of Riverton’s turncoat shipwrights. Pure instinct stayed her. She observed the prince with her arts until the false complacency sprang stark to the eye and belied his impartial statement. The line of Lysaer’s mouth was too knowing, too hard. His quiet was not born of calm, but an act to smooth over a keen, introverted calculation.

  Lirenda’s trained perceptions pierced that facade and exposed the underlying face of the truth: that for the linked network of Prince Arithon’s supporters, the end would come later, upon the hour of Lysaer’s choosing. Whatever rebellion their actions fomented would first be used to leverage further impetus toward Alliance consolidation of power, and then to extend the quest to wreak the Shadow Master’s downfall into a force of dominion to command every kingdom on the continent.

  “You think I don’t mourn for the waste of good lives,” Lysaer said. “I’ve watched as you base your calculations upon the careful begetting of a power base. But your thinking is flawed. You reason without pity Otherwise you must see, I act for this cause because there is no one else capable.”

  Lirenda stopped cold on the path as the impacting power of Lysaer’s sincerity rocked her. Game pieces and conflict acquired new meaning. Now she could not evade the overwhelming recognition of the pain he had managed to hide behind the artful trappings of state dignity.

  “The Fellowship of Seven refused the burden,” Lysaer admitted as her gaze returned to reassess every majestic angle of his face. The barest note of leaked bitterness strained through as he dismissed her from private audience. “Today, to my sorrow, I have found your Koriathain cannot be trusted to act with me for the common good.”

  The gale pounded over the Isles of Min Pierens in bands of rampaging winds and white rain squalls. In the cliff caves where the main body of Lysaer’s fighting companies and ships’ officers took refuge, the gusts took voice and fluted in diminished minor tones where the eddies snagged across rock. The caverns had been carved by water and winds, before the mazed array of branching tunnels had been bored by the hot breath of dragons.

  Attrition still reigned. Like the fortress above, time crumbled the stoutest stone bastions. Flooding and springs had crystallized limestone into a petrified silt that smoothed over the scored marks of drakes’ claws.

  Amid echoed bickering, men vied over the best alcoves to hunker down with their bedding. The convoluted ceiling allowed but one fire, and that was reserved for their prince.

  First Senior Lirenda kept to herself. Given a dry cranny, a meal of smoked fish and ship’s rations, and the blankets an officer shared out of courtesy, she observed the royal men-at-arms as they diced or bandied lewd jokes and smart talk; in grumbling, closed groups, they polished the rust the sea air raised on their weapons and mail. One boisterous party chalked out a circle, stripped their shirts, and arranged bouts of wrestling. The enchantress in their midst was ignored. Whether at Lysaer’s order, or through the inherent dread most townborn felt toward spellcraft, every man in the company gave the Koriani First Senior wide berth.

  Like any other who had sworn life service to the sisterhood, Lirenda was inured to overt signs of distrust. Long experience let her disregard the unsettled glances, the furtive signs to ward spellcraft cast her way when men believed her attention lay elsewhere.

  Not all of the posturing sprang out of ignorance. Lysaer’s ranking officers kept their scrupulous distance as well. The Koriani First Senior was excluded from their council concerning the sprung news that the Spinner of Darkness had slipped through their net. Nor did any man in her hearing mention the summary execution of those comrades just burned alive in the hold of the Lance.

  Whether Lysaer s’Ilessid had given them notice of his justice, or whether they would be left to believe the vessel had been sunk by a stroke of natural lightning, Lirenda
was not privileged to know. Reduced to the rankling role of an eavesdropper, she strained to catch what fragmented conversation she could as a rain-sodden courier came in with word from the fleet snugged down in safe anchorage.

  “…galleys are hove up in the coves on the lee side of Caincyr Isle, as planned.” The young man peeled off his dripping oilskin. His rough-cut features and perfect teeth gleamed with avid good spirits, touched to copper relief by the fire. “The convict oarsmen and the other Corith prisoners are held in chains ashore, under close guard by the ships’ crews.”

  Lysaer’s reply lost itself in a dissonant screeling of steel as two zealous Etarrans put their shoulders into sharpening halberds. Lirenda caught no more than the clipped inflection of the royal query, implying some detail failed to satisfy. She gathered the gist concerned the prize Cariadwin, surrendered to the Alliance, but having no loyal crew of her own.

  “The brig’s keel drew too much water,” the courier explained, shoulders squared and voice risen in loyalty to the royal fleet’s commanding admiral. “Daelion preserve! My Lord said to tell you her blue-water captain has a temperament like a spring nettle. As he was the Shadow Master’s minion, he won’t cooperate, and our galleymen get twitchy under sail in strange waters. Would your Grace risk men’s lives? The shoals in those inlets shift with each tide. The rutter we’re using with a gale at our backs is six centuries old, and written in archaic language!”

  A pause, while someone with seagoing experience injected a quelling comment; then laughter, cut by Lysaer’s stark inquiry, “Well, if the Cariadwin’s not in the coves with the galleys, where in the Light did your officers decide to snug her down?”

  “At anchor, your Grace. She’s secured in the narrows of the cut.”

  Silence, of yawning and disastrous proportion; the spirited factions by the wrestlers stilled. Men honing weapons were asked to desist. Even the rowdiest dicers held their next throws, heads turned to follow the rising altercation.

  “What’s wrong?” asked the courier, made the isolate center of attention by the revealing firelight. “The brig is unmanned, for common sense. Storm could snap her cables any time and set her down on the rocks. No crew could save her. She’d break up in minutes. Riptide’s too fierce the way the swell’s running to allow a stranded company to launch off boats if she wrecked.”

  Across the weather-stained vaults of the cave, over the heads of men-at-arms and Alliance officers, Lirenda saw Lysaer glance her way. His eyes were hard blue, and scarcely amused: the cliff-top vantage of his audience with her, and the summary act of his judgment had not yet been shared with his people. None of them knew that men loyal to Arithon had been left at large in the storm. Since the longboats which accomplished furtive escape could not have been seen from the shoreline, she alone shared the clandestine awareness that Arithon’s crew from the Lance had more than likely survived.

  Those men could not be traced now. The ferocity of the gale would have covered their tracks, even if a boat could venture the crossing to the islet where they had sought refuge.

  “Your fleet admiral said risk no lives for the prize,” the courier answered in earnest response to the sudden outburst of questions. “If a watch crew stayed aboard, what good could that do? They’d be left to fate’s mercy. The brig can scarcely beat her way out. Wind’s like a funnel at the eastern inlet. To the west lie the Snags, submerged reefs and rocks fit to mill a hull’s timbers to wreckage.”

  Lirenda arose. Having breached Lysaer’s trust, she felt moved to offer a gesture to salvage what she could of her order’s damaged integrity. She gathered her damp mantle and stepped through the grouped men, while hands snatched their strewn dice up out of her path, or made signs against spellcraft at her back. She paid the inimical gestures no mind. The smells of moist cloth and oiled steel and humanity oppressed her as the mass of the company quieted. All eyes fixed her way. Her wet kid shoes made less sound than a wraith as she traversed the sweating limestone floor to reach the fireside enclave with the prince.

  “Loan me one of your diamonds,” she said.

  Lysaer asked no question, but drew his knife and cut a stud from his doublet. His hands retained their enviable poise as he placed the gem into her keeping.

  Lirenda knelt before the fire. She pushed back the lush, sable fall of her hair. The beat of close flame dewed a sheen on her forehead as she turned the small jewel between her fingers. She rotated the chased setting and measured the illumination which played through the starred planes of its facets, until an arrow of frozen light threw its focused reflection across the centerline of her palm. The stone’s imprint was not dedicated to her; she could exert no will through its matrix. But given the sensitivity of her inborn talent, and guided by knowledge of runelore, she might link the stone’s resonance into Lysaer’s need to know, and shape a rudimentary scrying.

  The enchantress closed out the furtive rustles as the curious gathered at her back. Her mind brooked no distraction. She unreeled her awareness deep into the stone’s core until she captured the still point at its heart. Then she raised her distanced vision across the fire’s emission of rippling smoke and hot sparks. She narrowed her eyesight upon the planes of Prince Lysaer’s face, that no nuance of expression should escape her.

  “Stare through the flames and gaze deep into the matrix of the diamond,” she instructed. “Hold to your wish. Let your thoughts not stray from your purpose. While you own your desire to its fullest extent, I’ll scribe an amplifying rune-field. If your will stays steadfast and fortune favors, the answer you seek will become manifest in the fire.”

  As Prince Lysaer concentrated, Lirenda stretched and extended her awareness. The distraction of the fighting company dissolved as relaxation stilled her outer senses. Preternaturally conscious of the grounding quiet rooted throughout the cavern, she embraced the weighty tonnage of the earth, then expanded her consciousness beyond. The gale outside touched her nerves as a tantrum of wind and element. She felt the white waves which drummed through Corith’s headland, and the vibration of thunder through bedrock. This place, which had been the past lair of great drakes, made her effort feel sadly diminished. She fought the sudden, overwhelming futility, that her order’s works seemed little more than the industry of ants, which died to raise cities from sand grains.

  Through the muffling calm of her inner alignment, she heard Lysaer’s word of dismissal. Changed air brushed her skin. She sensed the dispersal of men from the fireside, and wondered what secret the Prince of the Light wished to keep from his ranking officers. Then her last thought dissolved into full trance. Held in suspension between prince and diamond, she raised her hand and scribed the opening cipher for the first ordained rune of power…

  The bright scrim of the flames gave way to combed sheets of rain, and another live fire, quenched in a darkness measured between the static bursts of new lightning. The scrying lent vision where the storm reigned supreme, and the waters of a rock-bounded estuary lay thrashed to boiling lead by the brunt of the whipping winds. The snubbed hull of a brig loomed in faint silhouette through the veiling rags of spindrift. The Cariadwin had been secured by competent seamen, her spars and topmasts struck for foul weather, with spring lines made fast and a double length of cable payed out for added security. Storm made a mockery of even the most stringent precautions. The brig tossed and slammed like a maddened beast. The sheltering influence from the islet to windward afforded her scanty protection. Behind the roll of her counter, the peril of a lee shore: a spit of raw boulders sieved through by ribbons of green water and spume. Jagged reefs gnashed the froth in the shallows, seething up geysers of spray.

  Despite the fury of wind and wave, the brig’s decks held men, struggling against the murderous elements to hoist her topsail yards to her caps. In determined struggle, sails were bent on, with spunyard stops, and gaskets cast off, to ready her canvas for setting on instantaneous notice. The spellcaught vantage sharpened into focus and revealed their desperation: the slipped hand or foot as
gusts raked the ratlines; the cried orders lost or not heard at all as rain and waves drummed white torrents on her decks. And yet, even blind, even deafened by the gale’s thundering tumult, the men worked in concert. They cajoled the ship like a reluctant maiden. First foresails and main yard were hauled aback; then the silvered stroke of an axe blade chopped her anchor line at the hawse.

  The wind claimed her then for its own.

  A bone in the teeth of a maelstrom, the Cariadwin spun, slewed abeam as her foresail was cut free. She heeled under her flogging yards of canvas. Then more sails bloomed from mizzen and spanker gaff. To the peal of someone’s exuberant whoop, she backed, stern to. Another unheard, frantic order sent crewmen scurrying to haul the braces. The helm was reversed. Stressed sails slammed full, laid for a starboard tack.

  “Saved!” cried her distant, gamecock captain in a paean of exultation. Through a brash feat of daring in defiance of all odds, the brig recovered in Prince Arithon’s name skirted the foaming fangs of the reef and ran the open channel, to be lost into howling dark.

  “Show me the cove where my galleys are snugged down,” Lysaer broke in with hard urgency. But cold logic scarcely required a scrying to confirm the extent of the enemy’s resourceful sabotage. The Lance’s crew had included forty war-hardened clansmen set free by King Eldir’s justice. They had predictably matched a choice opportunity with thorough tactics. Nor had they shown any mercy in vengeance for the kinsmen they found enslaved with the royal fleet. In shadowy images, the bad news emerged: of hulls left holed and unfit for passage, and a score of dead sentries, dropped at their posts with slashed throats. All that remained of the two hundred clan convicts Lysaer’s justice had chained for the oar were the sheared-off ends of their fetters.