Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  ‘I was aware.’ The sorcerer who was the Crown Prince of Rathain added with slicing contempt, ‘We won’t know, now, will we, what measure of welcome eavesdrops in the crannies to meet me?’

  The insult whipped Jeynsa onto her feet. The razor-edged knife lately used to incise decorations slithered out of her lap. She snatched, recaptured the dropped steel by reflex, while the cumbersome strap of boiled hide thumped to earth at her feet, wrapped her ankles, and tripped her.

  She crashed into the trestle. Her left-handed grab saved her from a fall. But no timely reaction could salvage her livid humiliation.

  Sidir’s exclamation, ‘She’s a rash adolescent!’ clashed outright with Arithon’s jabbing mockery. ‘Is she, by Ath? I’d have pegged her age at five years younger!’

  Civility snapped. Jeynsa lunged. In the dark, her tormenter was a slight, faceless stranger, despoiling her home with his cruel jibes and his ungrateful, insupportable arrogance. Rage impelled her. She forgot the small dagger clenched in her fist.

  Her royal nemesis was not taken off guard. His hard, agile parry caught the keen steel in the rain-cloak bunched over his forearm.

  Shocked to outcry, Jeynsa felt her well-tended blade stab into shielding cloth. Her recoil failed. His advance jammed her strike. Though her grip had gone slack, the dirk pierced the folds and snicked into flesh. She felt the horrific, slick gush of a wounding. Then the heavy, oiled fabric yanked back and jerked the snared weapon out of her grasp.

  Sidir’s effort at last sparked a flame. As his pine torch flared into dazzling light, Jeynsa was caught aback yet again: the whirled cloak dropped from nowhere and battened her face. Her ruthless royal adversary reeled her in. Then his wrenching tug spun her. Left forearm pinned under his bleeding wrist, hard against his unlaced shirt front, Jeynsa sensed the warm skin at his breast, and far worse, the beat of his heart, that did not race. Arithon displayed no sign of startlement, a sure sign her hostility had been expected.

  ‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear!’ Eriegal gasped in struck shock. He shoved forward, prepared to pull Jeynsa away. As Braggen’s rough fist caught him back by the shoulder, he pealed on in shamed disbelief, ‘She’s the Fellowship’s marked choice as caithdein’s heir, and Ath save us, she’s just tried to kill you!’

  ‘Nothing like!’ came the prince’s granite response. ‘Braggen, shut him up. Sidir, no questions. Clear every-one out. You all have just witnessed the start of an oath sharing. Leave now. I would finish in privacy’

  Choked under oilcloth, outraged to be served this unwanted excuse that would bestow an unequivocal exoneration, Jeynsa struggled. His firm grip clamped down. Her entrapped arm became savaged by a locked hold that was going to leave bruises, later.

  ‘Go, now!’ lashed the prince, no doubt pushed to speak twice because the Companions distrusted her temper. Yet they would not gainsay a royal command.

  The cloth impaired hearing; masked footsteps and movement; but not the squealing creak of the bench or the muffled slap of the door flap. The prince’s excruciating grasp scarcely slackened. Although Jeynsa had never intended to fight, her shivering rancour betrayed her. He sensed her core hatred, kept her immovably pinned as a wrestler. Then his expert hold shifted. He did not sit her down. Her left hand and forearm stayed clamped to his chest, slick with the let warmth of his blood.

  Beyond resentful, still livid with anger, Jeynsa felt his quick breath. She closed her eyes, braced.

  Yet Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn did not scorn her with reprimand. Instead, he invoked the Paravian rune of beginning. Then, centered in calm, he began the ritual of a mage’s sworn bond of protection. ‘“Your self: as my own. Your breath: twined with mine. Two bodies: one flesh for this lifetime.”’

  Jeynsa shivered, struck helpless. Daughter of s’Valerient, she had the born talent to sense the bright power as his initiate oath wove about her.

  ‘“Your spirit to my heart: bound unto death.”’

  Whirled beyond protest, Jeynsa could not move, could not shout, could not recoup her resistance. Lifted to a sudden spinning euphoria, enclosed in shining warmth, she sensed the currents of mage-bonded light as they stitched themselves over, and through her. The moment commanded: she shared Arithon’s heart. The gift he bestowed gloved her being in tenderness, undid her like water, and cradled her form as though precious.

  Then the closure rang down and locked his sealed will into irrevocable finality. ‘“Dharkaron as my dark witness, my Word as sealed by my Name in Ath’s light, none to sunder. Yours to call, mine to answer, until the Wheel of Fate grants one of us crossing. Anient,”’ he said. ‘Done.’

  Already, Jeynsa felt his rigid clasp opening. Half-unmoored, she scarcely noticed the tactful support as Rathain’s prince sat her down within saving reach of the trestle. After that, mercy moved him. His touch retreated. Left veiled in the cloak, she could endure the desperate tears that streamed over her cheekbones.

  Jeynsa wept out the storm. Outside the muffling shelter of cloth, the lodge tent seemed to be empty. Yet she dared not presume that her sovereign had left or called an end to his spontaneous audience. Therefore, she held out until her eyes dried before she relinquished the pretence of privacy.

  When she tossed off the cloak, her suspicions proved true: the insufferable prince had not left her. He sat on the other side of the trestle, stilled enough that even her forest-bred senses could have overlooked his immediate presence. A tallow-dip burned, lit by craft and not striker: the scrape of a flint would have broken the silence. The offending knife rested next to her hand, its cleaned blade a cold gleam in the dimness. Busy presumption had not ended there. Arithon had helped himself and fetched the flask of spirits from Feithan’s provisions. Two cups waited, empty, between them, a mute invitation to seed amity.

  Jeynsa refused to look at his face. Her antagonized nerves remained too disjointed. The unbearable care she had sensed in his oath would not let her encounter him fully.

  Sight of his hands could not be avoided, cast into relief by the pooled spill of flame. The scarred right rested loose on the trestle before her, while the left pressed the shredded wreck of his sleeve to stanch the red seep of the knife-cut.

  The brutal fingers that had rendered her helpless were exquisitely fine, though ringless as any clan scout’s. Jeynsa noted their mirrored imprint gouged into the skin of her wrist. The more searing memory would outlast abused flesh. Her fresh anger accosted the crown figure whose absence had shadowed her life, and whose errant doings had destroyed her father. ‘I will not be cozened to lean on your grand oath. Nor will I ever reciprocate.’

  The words satisfied for their perfect, chill ring.

  ‘I hear you.’ The velvet tone that had shown its trust first picked up again after a moment. ‘Your preference is honoured.’

  But that promise mocked, set against another that demanded her iron devotion. ‘You would gainsay the Fellowship’s choosing?’ Jeynsa stiffened, affronted. ‘Or are you afraid that in cold-blooded fact I might take my next chance, and back-stab you?’

  His stark pause affirmed that a caithdein’s vested power would endow her with the lawful right to stand as his judge and condemn him. Arithon’s response showed his razor-edged care. ‘You are Jieret s’Valerient’s daughter.’

  No fool, he had not poured the brandy.

  Wrung breathless by her resurgent pain, Jeynsa seized the cup on her half of the trestle and placed it onto its side. In case he failed to recognize that symbolic rejection, she said, ‘Craven! How dare you invoke my sire’s good name to beg surety!’

  When Arithon ventured no token response, she hooked up the dropped cloak and scoured off the smeared trace of his blood from each of her quivering fingers. On her feet before thought, she glared downwards. In vivid impression, the insightful awareness: that he was small— light-boned as a cat before her taller stature and hardened fitness. The immediate recall cracked her equilibrium: of his expert, sharp handling, that had just imposed a demeaning submission with an ease
that had made her seem childish.

  ‘I saw how my father died!’ Jeynsa exploded. ‘Wielding sorcery as your proxy, he choked out his last breath with your half-brother’s sword through his heart. He was tortured. Crippled! Spat on by enemies before their unblessed fire destroyed his torn carcass.’

  Arithon regarded her. Unwashed from his ride, with his lean face unshaven and his dark hair tousled by weather, he should have seemed raffish. A renegade reduced to his seamy humanity, flawed, and beneath her contempt: except the intensity of his focus would not dismiss. He showed no pity; did not denigrate her tear-stained cheeks or broach the outrageous precedent of her shorn hair.

  His eyes spoke, all too eloquent in the whipped spill of flame-light.

  Jeynsa watched him back, hardened, aching to receive the brisk quittance that his crown rank entitled through protocol.

  Instead, Arithon elected to treat without artifice. ‘You did not cut off your hair to spite me. You did that for grief, to acknowledge the shame that your father endured. Your act reminded you not to forget the harsh price he paid for my life, that his dying act left as a bartered legacy’

  Such relentless insight tore past all pretence. The bereft beheld her deep agony, mirrored.

  ‘Don’t ever forget, Jeynsa,’ urged Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. ‘Grow back your clan braid. Let me stand in this world as your steadfast reminder for as long as I live to draw breath.’

  His tactful correction struck like a slap: that the span of his days could extend beyond hers. The Master of Shadow might seem untouched by time. Yet his actual age was older than Feithan; his birth had preceded the Companions. A Sorcerer’s working imposed a longevity that was going to bind him for centuries.

  Stung by his poignant censure, Jeynsa scoured his features. At close quarters, she yearned to unearth the glib falsehood: the facile mask that would catch him short and lay bare underlying insincerity.

  No subterfuge met her. Only the clarity of an initiate mind, voluntarily stripped of defences.

  Arithon laid open his mage-sense, and touched, and the talented prompt of s’Valerient Sight arose to that calling, and answered.

  Jeynsa sensed herself falling, awareness unreeled through the vaulting reach of a sorcerer’s lucent experience. She was left ungrounded. Even as her father, years before this, bore the horror of Tal Quorin’s massacre, she knew the encounter would not leave her unchanged. No foothold existed to save shattered balance. She could not disown Arithon’s value. Shocked by the scope of his inward devastation, Jeynsa realized: the crown prince’s desolate hurt outmatched hers. Jieret’s death had once reft him beyond hope of healing. He still carried the scar of that crippling despair. A severance that damaged both will and integrity had left behind an unassuaged longing that, if Arithon escaped the trap of Desh-thiere’s curse, must outlast her own grief for untold generations to come.

  Yet unlike her, he had not yielded to pain. The unearthly calm posed by his acceptance itself was the cry that challenged her wound and pressed her for endurance to match him.

  ‘How have you survived?’ Jeynsa blurted.

  ‘I nearly didn’t.’ The admission stayed level. Before her anguished, peeling regard, Arithon held himself naked. ‘The crossing came hard, but need not have. In Kewar’s maze, when I shared the grace of a centaur’s presence, I saw Jieret’s choice reconfigured by light as an act of exultant triumph. His love superseded my limitation. I could reject him, and die. Or I could embrace the gift as he meant: not as the dutiful burden of heritage, but done as an accolade, without condition.’

  Jeynsa slammed the bared boards. This, she could not endure. No prince, but a man, and a stranger, offered up his core self, all the while aware that he must fall short. All that he was could never replace the father—the friend—whose courageous heart and generous strength dealt a priceless loss, shared between them.

  She suffered because her father had set this one spirit ahead of a safe return to his family. Nor was Jieret’s hideous death rendered empty, or foolish, or in any way the mistake of a devalued sacrifice.

  Arithon had not tried to console, or excuse. He did not demean by apology. That seamless humility shaped a force too unnervingly whole to withstand.

  Jeynsa clawed back her dagger. Goaded on by her ungoverned denial, she dashed the two cups aside. A second blow smashed the decanter. Shards flew. Brandy gushed and spilled. Doused by the flood, Rathain’s prince never flinched, though his lost calm revealed the fresh hurt her rejection tore through him.

  Past her, he saw Steiven, and Dania, and Jieret, and the hacked bodies of four daughters, violated. Through Jeynsa, his ghosts spoke, a gale-wind from a storm that scattered the hope he might reach her.

  ‘Go on!’ whispered Jeynsa. ‘Admit how I hate you, before your ripped flesh has stopped bleeding.’

  Silent, he held, while she quivered and broke, spirit dashed on the wrong side of quietude.

  ‘I can’t drink,’ she snarled, bitter. ‘Can’t swear you a welcome. I look at your face, and I hear father screaming. His burned eyes and cut tongue were the cost of your lineage. The sound of your name is accursed in my ears. The shame of his degradation will not find redress for as long as you live.’

  Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn inclined his head, a small move made in resignation. The tension of contact snapped in release.

  Unstrung, Jeynsa bolted, heedless as a hazed deer. Hard and fast as she left him, she could not escape. In life, her father had never denied the depth of Prince Arithon’s compassion. At her core, Jeynsa knew: Earl Jieret had written his own fate, that dreadful hour upon Daon Ramon Barrens. He had crossed Fate’s Wheel by a choice that was given, for a love that was both right and true.

  The lie did not hold. Pretence gave no shelter. The crown prince whose oath bonded her in protection remained, then and now, everything else but unworthy. No breathing creature should burn with such grace, to eclipse the ache of her abandonment.

  Outside, Jieret’s daughter careened into Eriegal’s stout arms and howled until she was emptied.

  Arithon remained within the lodge tent, his face masked behind his braced hands. The winnowed flame of a tallow-dip circled his motionless person in light. His torn, unlaced sleeve sopped up the spilled brandy amid scattered slivers, and two overset cups whose promise had failed to forge amity.

  If his undressed wrist had ceased bleeding, the small wound kept its venomous sting.

  And already, the tenor of the fallen quiet drew someone’s inquiring notice:

  Sidir had not left the lodge tent. Beside Feithan through the turmoil of young Jeynsa’s royal audience, he cracked the flap that divided the sleeping-quarters, then gently dared a step through. Since service in Vastmark, he held to wise limits. His undisguised footfall volunteered the tact that signalled an invasion of privacy.

  ‘You’ve come to inform me that Feithan’s heard everything.’ The phrase was split rock, for its brevity. When Arithon stirred, his glance showed disgust for the sordid mess on the trestle. He arose, sharply fast. His snatch caught the heaped cloak from the bench, then cast its folds over the wreckage. He blotted the sopped mess, raked up cloth and fragments, and thrust the disaster into the Companion’s capable grasp. ‘Get rid of this!’

  His rushed gesture happened scarcely in time.

  Behind Sidir’s stance, the curtain trembled, then moved. Illumination spilled from beyond and slashed across the cleared trestle. No help for small details: the close air still wore the sickly tang of splashed brandy. Arithon could do nothing about his wrecked shirt, or the wound, which would smart like fell vengeance if he tried to mask it under his spirit-soaked sleeve.

  Unable to effect kindly subterfuge, he stepped forward, all grace. Before Earl Jieret’s widow, he bent his dark head, then knelt on bare earth at her feet. ‘My Lady Feithan, don’t speak.’ He raised his upturned palms and caught the rough hands of the woman come forward to meet him. ‘My condolence is too little, done far too late, and your daughter is already forgiven.’<
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  Masterbard, he had been well schooled to rise to a difficult passage. Direct words availed little: the moment hung, anyway. Feithan was caught looking down at the disordered black hair that fronded his opened collar, and past that, to a knife-cut placed with a precision that left his wrist unimpaired. This could not be chance. Feithan trembled. Upright, she encountered the prince she had never met, while the tears she wished she could have kept from him flooded her eyes.

  ‘You already knew,’ she accused. ‘About Jeynsa.’

  Arithon nodded. His touch, upon hers, said all that words could not: that he had fielded her daughter’s hatred, prepared, and provoked his slashed arm by design.

  Sidir’s sharp wits stayed unfazed by the gallantry. ‘Who broke our silence?’

  ‘No,’ Feithan murmured, as Arithon bridled, his grasp locked to hers with fresh tension. ‘You have done enough, your Grace.’ Her narrow grip raised him.

  He came to his feet with a seamless speed that almost avoided the flame-light. But the weariness scored into his face showed grim endurance, not hackled anger.

  Sidir nonetheless pressed his inquiry. ‘Among ourselves, we had agreed to spare you from Jeynsa’s misconduct, at least until Feithan or Earl Barach could give you a suitable welcome.’

  ‘Well, don’t dress down your scouts.’ Arithon flashed Jieret’s widow the ghost of a smile as he watched an unflappable man stung to a rare burst of outrage. ‘Sit down, Sidir. The brangle killed no one. You thought to strangle the loose tongue of rumour?’

  Arithon’s attention flicked back to Feithan. Her leashed-back tears did not mislead him: her vital strength possessed the bold nerve to address his wracked state of exhaustion. He thwarted her scolding, hooked the hassock, and perched, then tucked his slashed arm in his lap. ‘Two warnings reached me. Dame Dawr was specific. Melhalla’s caithdein, kind soul, was concerned I’d be served with a public embarrassment. The snag I foresaw, and the sole point that mattered was to make Jeynsa draw my blood willingly.’

  Rasped hoarse at last, Arithon included the steadfast Companion, whose reliable insight had never once fallen short under pressure. ‘I promised her father,’ he informed Sidir. ‘My oath was the last thing he asked, by the Aiyenne. The girl’s free to hate me. I frankly don’t care. Keep her clear! She’ll stay living. Whatever should come to befall me hereafter, my bond of protection will try no one’s poise.’