Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  By contrast, Arithon knelt with an enviable grace: that indefinably taut self-awareness instilled through a lifetime of training. Head tipped a critical fraction to one side, he assessed the pot’s pitch, then added a dollop of water. ‘Again.’

  Ladle met tin; the painstaking effort to contrive a mechanical means to sound fiend banes had been on-going for more than an hour. To Feylind’s ear, the latest attempt seemed exactly the same as the last.

  Yet Arithon winced, stabbed to visceral impatience. ‘No harmonic,’ he snapped. ‘The slosh acts as a damper. We’ve got to have clearer tonality.’

  He shoved erect, snatched the rope-handled bucket with intent to scoop up more sea-water. His step toward the rail seemed fluid enough, until like a fray in a fragile silk thread, the mask slipped and exhaustion exposed him. Arithon staggered. He caught himself short on the mainmast pin-rail, overcome by a febrile tremor.

  Metal flashed, under moonlight. Fionn Areth dumped his ladle and spoon and surged, empty-handed, to extend his help.

  Arithon sensed the move at his flank. As though seared, he shot straight in recoil.

  Aware what must come, Feylind shoved off the rail. ‘Sithaer’s fires! This can’t continue!’

  ‘Let them be!’ But the mate’s warning grasp missed her sleeve as she left him.

  Plunged down the companionway, Feylind thrust past the cook, just in time to catch the impact of Arithon’s scalding rebuff. Fionn Areth flinched and yanked back. His awkward weight slammed her breathless. First to recover, she shouldered the herder’s stung anger aside.

  ‘You won’t do this!’ cracked Feylind. ‘The boy’s right, you’re a cat’s whisker away from measuring your length on my deck!’ She caught Arithon’s arm, braced his weight, then clasped him.

  His eyes met her face without change of expression, wide-open and limpid in moonlight. His gasped oath was savage. Wrenched out of balance, now shaking in spasms, he twisted away from the bulwark of her support.

  ‘Bear up, damn you!’ Feylind hissed in his ear. ‘You can’t afford spurning an offer of friendship, no matter how much the pain rankles!’

  ‘Go castrate a bull with your mothering tongue,’ said Arithon with blistering clarity.

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ Feylind answered. Aware of the sparkle that rose in his eyes, though his adamant, turned face sought the darkness, she sighed. Then she shifted her grip, turned her palm, and cupped his exposed cheek in a desperate effort to shield him.

  His fingers convulsed in the cloth of her shirt.

  To Fionn Areth, who stared open-mouthed, then to the cook, and the riveted deck-hands, the captain rebuked, ‘He won’t stand hero-worship. Never has. Never will, though such foolish pride drops him prostrate. He can gut you with words. Don’t be fooled. He still needs you.’

  Arithon raked her over with resigned contempt. ‘Sheathe your harpy’s claws, will you? A man likes his pride given back without shreds. I only intended to rest on the pin-rail.’ His effort at boredom almost rang true. But the tremors had worsened to shuddering spasms. He could not command the pitch of his voice. Nor could he move: the hot moisture that welled beneath her spread fingers destroyed every effort at pretence.

  Aware that his legs would no longer bear weight, Feylind held on through the surge as Evenstar ploughed through a trough. She had always conceived of this prince as a giant. In fact, he was slight. Lean and finely made as an injured deer, his propped frame required almost no muscle.

  ‘Shredded pride has no place!’ she chided him gently. ‘If you’re going to buckle, you can’t fall down on Fionn. What if Vhandon or Talvish stepped in? They’d kill first and question appearances later. You’d have a dead Araethurian before either one realized the boy wasn’t caught in the act of a cold-blooded murder.’

  Arithon surrendered resistance and leaned. ‘Your brother bests all of my arguments, too.’

  As the gusting wind slammed the ship through the swell, Feylind experienced the taut weight of him: close-knit, compact, nothing like the easy, protective warmth she enjoyed with the mate. This man was different. The intimate sense of his aliveness suffused her, an electrical tingle that coursed through her being, and wakened a startling ripple of pleasure. The encounter was sensual, and something far more: a contact that quickened the vault of her mind, then hurled a soundless, ranging cry through the uncharted realm of her spirit.

  To that lyrical call, that beckoned beyond silence, she found her own voice as clay, without word or language to answer.

  Feylind jerked back her unreeled breath. For good reasons, Arithon kept his touch reserved and shied off from physical contact. Impelled by need, one moment of weakness laid bare what could not be masked: initiate mastery augmented the presence of him, at close quarters. Even unstrung, his reactive sensitivity engaged life with an intricacy that her practical nature could never stretch to encompass.

  The grief struck, too poignant: that his aware mind and uncanny affairs lay too far outside her reach. Evenstar was endangered, with all her stout company, and for no better reason than the fact that this one, complex spirit had led her first steps past a fisherman’s daughter’s horizons.

  Feylind swallowed, looked up, saw the mate at the fringes. He would read her features as no one else could. This moment of tearing discovery was never going to escape him.

  Worse, the rare talent she held in her arms also recognized her tangling turmoil. Caught helpless, Arithon could not respond. Her braid pressed against the raced pulse in her neck by the weight of his head on her shoulder, and with his shuddering balance reliant upon her closed arms, Feylind ached. The binding cruelty spared no one. Two men must share the tremulous wrench as she chose for the life that she led. The one that gave her two inquisitive children, and the more limited challenge as mistress of a blue-water ship.

  ‘Take him, Teive,’ she said, her throat tight. ‘Bear him below. Better hope the fat spellbinder knows what to do or can conjure a remedy to ease him.’

  For the bane of the iyats had now devolved to a trial of brutal endurance. Evenstar’s resistance could last only as long as Arithon could stave off collapse.

  The Master of Shadow was taken from the main-deck down to the hold, closely trailed by Fionn Areth. There, the buffeting darkness swarmed with hazed fiends. The air reeked of sulphur and ozone. Confronted by the thrashed wreck of the cargo, Teive paused in his tracks, and swore murder. If the damage to sails and rigging above skirted the grim edge of ruin, the Atchaz silk and the wool bound for Los Mar were rendered a total loss. Wisped lint from the ripped bales whipped by in the crazed eddies, while fragmented wood and odd stones cartwheeled past, picked out of black air by the silvered glow thrown off by the Paravian long sword.

  The mate stared aghast through the pause, while Arithon mustered the rags of his resource and engaged his masterbard’s gift. A brief, whistled threnody carved them a course through the seething of the fiend pack. As they crossed into the ranging protection cast by the blade’s active resonance, the Mad Prophet shoved to his feet and took charge.

  ‘Your liege is played through, no mistake,’ the mate said, glad enough to relinquish his burden.

  Arithon was eased onto the wrapped pile of casks.

  ‘Just over-extended,’ Dakar surmised, his tangled head bent for a cursory examination. ‘I did warn him. His talent’s been pushed far beyond prudent limits. Here, could you help? I need him propped upright.’

  Blanched as paper, Arithon showed no response, even as the spellbinder shifted the lamp, peeled back a slack eyelid, and measured the sluggish response of the pupil.

  ‘What’s to do?’ the mate asked. ‘Has he fainted?’

  ‘No. He’s still with us.’ Dakar shoved up Arithon’s unlaced sleeve-cuff. The stark lack of protest at such public handling became as much cause for concern as the clammy skin and raced pulse. Even so, the awareness braced up by the mate’s solid grasp was anything else but unconscious. Hard-pressed to the edge, Arithon now fought to sustain the concentrat
ion that kept the warding sword active.

  ‘He’s worn-out, not dying.’ Amid rolling shadows, through the tumultuous motion and noise as the brig sheared ahead through rough waters, Dakar gave his bitter prognosis. ‘The best we can do is attend to his comfort, then sit by his side and share vigil.’

  ‘I won’t lie down. Can’t,’ husked the Masterbard faintly. While the Mad Prophet shifted a blanket for warmth, and the mate eased away his support, the protest sawed on at a whisper. ‘I’m too likely to drift off to sleep.’

  ‘Be still!’ Dakar’s sideward glare warned off Fionn Areth, who had crowded close, still observing. Then, more gently, ‘Be still. We’re all here. Whatever you need, we’ll assist you.’

  Arithon subsided. Limned in the sword’s glare, and the hot spill of the lantern, his features seemed cut into knife-edged angles of strain.

  ‘All right,’ said the mate. ‘We’ll set watches in shifts. First Vhandon, then Talvish, then me. Dakar stays. We can send down more blankets, dry bread, and small comforts. I’ll station a sailhand next to the hatch. He’ll run your errands as needed.’

  ‘I stay as well.’ Sea legs still clumsy, Fionn Areth moved in with intent to take charge of the lamp. ‘One watch should be mine, that a man can be spared.’

  Evenstar’s mate disapproved, his glance caustic. ‘No.’ His stiff arm resisted the goatherd’s thrust forward. ‘What you actually want is Rathain’s prince, alone. On this ship, you don’t ask for a trust that’s not warranted.’

  ‘Trust, you say!’ Rankled, the Araethurian attacked. ‘Such a creature could see your Feylind destroyed and never look back on the carnage!’

  ‘Watch your tongue.’ Large, mild-natured, the mate seemed unmoved. ‘My captain believes the man won’t let her down.’ Yet his taut jaw fairly shouted with warning: he would settle the score with far more than harsh words, if his beloved’s impetuous faith should ever come to be broken.

  ‘Let Fionn stay, Teive.’ Arithon dredged up a brittle smile, couched in recline on the casks. ‘Like the nettle, and the burr, and the thorn in the rose, his badgering pricks keep me wakeful.’

  The mate shrugged. ‘Your risk. I’ll send down Vhandon.’ Brave enough in the pinch of necessity, he regarded the fiends, weaving like ripples through uneven glass outside the sword’s sphere of radiance. ‘That’s if you still have an ounce of grit left to get me away through the swarm.’

  That cynical jab opened Arithon’s eyes. He said, stripped earnest, ‘I could load the small boat with provisions and leave.’

  The mate paused, raw fists empty. ‘And your double with you? Would that stop the attack?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The admission came thin through the groan of the ship’s timbers.

  Dakar swore at Rathain’s prince and pushed straight. ‘What are you doing? You swore oath at Athir!’ To the mate, he explained, ‘A blood binding stands in force, to the Fellowship, that his Grace must use any and every known resource to stay on this side of Fate’s Wheel.’ Turned on Arithon, he said, desperate, ‘We’ve gone too far out. Even if you could reach the coast at this season, in an oared boat without shelter, how many would die? You’d still have to deal with that ambush through sorcery! Wrecked galleys won’t win you the prize reassurance, that Evenstar won’t face an impoundment. Her crew might yet suffer a criminal arraignment by town justice as your associates. And Feylind—’

  ‘No, Dakar.’ Arithon stirred a hand, pleading silence. ‘Teive’s her man. Let him speak.’

  ‘Her man, you say!’ The mate cracked. The festering scab tore away at one stroke and savaged his sturdy complacency. ‘If you accept that, then why did you come here?’

  Arithon met spiking rage without flinching. ‘The same reason you did. For Feylind.’

  Teive swallowed. ‘Then give me one reason why you think you should rightfully stay’

  No barrier lay between the two men: one whose steadfast love nurtured the welfare of a woman, and the other, the enticing, mysterious stranger whose entangled affairs had now set her at dreadful risk. The shocked moment stretched. Against thrashing noise, as the brig pitched on her reckless east bearing, and the iyats pinned down between sword and sigil strained to feed on the flaring hostility, the question burned, a heart-beat removed from fracturing violence.

  Drawn white, Arithon tendered his answer. ‘Koriathain have bid to claim her, as pawn. But I am the piece they want off the game-board. Should they take us with me still aboard, she’ll survive. Better yet, my protections may hold. Granted respite, I can destroy that sigil, then salvage this brig’s reputation. We all go free. Without prey, the coastal ambush disbands. The Alliance fanatics row home to their wives, without needless fracas and bloodshed.’

  ‘Or they’ll regroup to fight us another day. You can’t keep your grip, not indefinitely’ Once started, the mate hurled down the same fears he had worked to allay, in his crewmen. ‘Your capture is likely to happen right here. This keel could take too much damage and sink. Your enemies won’t guard our survival, your Grace. Should we resist and go down for your feud? Or waste and die, lost at sea in the tenders?’

  ‘If that happens,’ said Arithon, ‘I will be dead. The witches won’t have my surrender.’

  The mate nodded once. His quittance was brisk. ‘I can ask for no more. Sing me out.’

  Head bent, his scraped fingers pinched on crossed wrists, Arithon did as requested. While the mate went his way through the packed flock of fiends, Fionn Areth crouched by the lamp and vented his wretched confusion. ‘How can you risk the lives of such friends? Have so many died that they’ve become ciphers, dismissed by a callous heart?’

  Nervelessly still, his head tipped back to rest, Arithon quashed Dakar’s steamed intervention with the barest flick of a glance. Then he said, ‘Feylind is as close to me as a daughter, and this, her ship’s crew, is her family’

  ‘You would kill them all, and yourself as well, just for the well-being of strangers?’ Fionn Areth gripped his knees, if only to stay his blazing urge to shatter the self-contained presence before him. ‘Why spare the Alliance? I don’t understand.’

  Arithon closed his eyes. ‘Because these people here understand why they fight. Their love and their loyalties are freely given, and based on the truth, however unsavoury. Their choice has not been triggered by fear, or embellished by self-righteous vainglory’

  When the goatherd’s locked fury failed to dispel, the Master of Shadow mustered his overtried patience. ‘An honest end among friends won’t lack meaning. Each will sacrifice what they can for the other in acts that arise out of caring. Their fight is sourced in survival and love. By contrast, those fools on the galleys have sharpened their swords for a lie. Their lives and their faith have been cozened from them. First deluded and set against me by Lysaer, then whipped on by meddling Koriathain, they have been sent blindfold to the slaughter. Like thousands of others cut down by my hand, they would cross Fate’s Wheel for reasonless hate, and their deaths would serve nothing but ruin.’

  Left silent with thought, Fionn Areth lost wind, while Dakar allowed his claimed place by the lamp in a storm-cloud of stifled censure.

  A taut interval passed. Amid grinding noise and pervasive, dank chill, the gyrating corkscrews of each breasted swell framed a trial of bruising endurance. To lie down was to suffer bone-rattling discomfort. For any man tested by sleepless exhaustion, the jostling effort to sit by itself became a draining exertion. Hour upon hour, Arithon’s taxed face showed the focus required to hold mage-sourced intention in wakeful alignment.

  If Fionn Areth regretted his choice, his obstinate need to plumb truth from falsehood kept him tenaciously rooted.

  Then Vhandon arrived, brisk-tempered and swordless. His grizzled frown and his veteran’s strength seemed displaced, clutching a bundle of blankets. If the shrilling tones of Arithon’s whistle brought him unscathed through the rampaging iyats, he emerged, no less discomposed. ‘This is havoc!’

  His baleful glance raked the assemblage
of stacked casks, marked out which of the dark-haired doubles to guard, then fastened on Dakar, who now looked more rumpled and dissolute than he had on the hour he woke from his bingeing. ‘He’s ailing, you say?’

  The clipped line referred to the Master of Shadow, arranged with his slackened hands in his lap, and his head lolled back with closed eyes.

  ‘Mage-trance,’ said Dakar. ‘Best not to disturb him.’

  ‘Sithaer, don’t worry’ The intrepid liegeman unloaded his burden. ‘I’d just wring his royal neck for the folly of sticking his head in the noose.’

  ‘You’d rather he should break his oathsworn promise?’ Fionn Areth inquired from his perch next to Arithon’s feet.

  ‘Should I answer?’ Vhandon’s lip curled. ‘You’re dangerous as ice on a hot spring, young fool. Nobody knows which damned way you’ll erupt. Were I the man who trained you for the sword, you’d be digging latrines and nowhere near handling weapons!’

  Fionn Areth’s sparked temper crashed against Dakar, who shoved a placating arm in between. ‘Vhan, let him be. Of course he can’t think! His peers had no further use for edged steel beyond shearing and slaughtering livestock.’

  Vhandon shrugged, his blunt manner unravelled by an irrepressible chuckle. ‘All right, whelp. Hear the truth. His Grace’s stickling way with a promise is why he needs such as me to protect him. By my call, you’d have died on the scaffold, and bad cess to Jaelot’s warped justice. Therefore, you will mind your tongue. My fist at your throat, if you try my patience. I won’t waste my breath on a warning.’

  As the pigheaded herder subsided, the liegeman turned his stolid back. ‘Grudges just feed the iyats, besides.’

  While Dakar rearranged the blankets for warmth, Vhandon surveyed the rest of the hold. His vigilant eye tracked the ripped tufts of silk, then the flotsam of spoiled cargo: the smashed barrels and cracked rock, with the wink of a game card, flitting an aimless, fiend-driven course through the gloom outside of the ward ring. ‘Until now, I never appreciated the old centaur magics laid through the stones of Alestron’s walls.’ His icy regard fixed back on Dakar. ‘What’s to do?’