Traitor's Knot (Light & Shadow 07)

by Janny Wurts

  As the Sorcerer Asandir rides his black stallion south and east from the focus circle at old Mainmere, and another cloaked rider masked under his warding fares south from Avenor, alone, a conclave of conspirators casts a shielded scrying, then confers as their select prey boards his sunwheel guard onto galleys at Tideport: 'He's coming by way of Hanshire, not good news,' then the reply, 'Who will he have in defence, beyond the one untrained liegeman? This time, no contest, we take them . . .'

  As day breaks, a disgruntled priest and his sunwheel retinue retrace their journey back to Kalesh; and packeted for dispatch to Cerebeld in the west are the attested facts that will pivot the strategy aimed to fragment the peace: that Princess Ellaine has claimed shelter with the s'Brydion of Alestron, who have also seen fit to employ a shipwright accused of high treason for past acts of sabotage at Riverton . . .

  Late Autumn 5670

  VII. Bind

  Nightfall on the day following the Koriani spring trap saw the Evenstar reaching off shore, the wind on her port quarter. Few of her crew had seen rest, beyond catnaps, and the ship's cooper, not at all. Hammers banged upon chisels, abovedecks, where men laboured to fish a broken spar in the bowsprit under the gleam of a wan, gibbous moon. Others wore their hands raw mending chafed lines and tattered sails.

  Red-eyed after a sleepless night, Feylind tossed back her ragged braid, chilled fingers tucked under crossed arms. 'We look like a tub that got trounced by a gale.'

  His raw-boned hands empty for the first moment since dawn, the mate scraped at the crusted salt that itched his stubbled chin. His hair was in tangles, and his clothing, left fusty from dousings inflicted by iyats . No rock in a storm could have owned his staid calm: a solid, dependable shadow, he assessed the soaked crewman hunched at the wheel, then rechecked the set of the stars overtop of the mast-head.

  For now, the brig's course was aligned by the heavens, the compass being apt to wander in circles at erratic intervals. 'I'll say this,' the mate answered with slow-spoken care. 'Cattrick's proven his worth as a man who knows how to lay a ship's timbers. We still have a keel underneath us.'

  The crew did not share that unscathed assessment. Cut and bruised, half the hands sprawled prone at their posts, dozing between calls to man braces. These were blue-water sailors paid to ship cargo, and not war-hardened fighting men. No merchant brig could carry the man-power to run on shortened watches or withstand a prolonged assault.

  'Some of the men must stand down,' the mate said, too wise to ignore prudent limits.

  Feylind rousted the ship's boy to relieve the look-out. The lad arrived, limping. Tired or sore, he fumbled his clasp on the rigging as he slung himself into the crow's nest.

  'Keep a hand for the ship, you!' Feylind barked in warning. To the mate, low-voiced, she shared her distress, 'We can't keep this up. Not without risking a fatal mistake.'

  They had three down, already: two from broken bones, and one with a concussion. Iyats were still being lured by the sigil. As Evenstar's charted course led her seaward, the spell-bound attractant moved with her. Fiends plying the waves and the winds for raw charge flocked in like flies to a carcass. Under darkness, the sailhands' ragged exhaustion made them easy bait for mishap and malicious sport.

  Yet a lamp under canvas posed too dire a risk.

  Annoyed to explosion, Feylind clamped her fists. 'Dharkaron avenge! I could skewer those witches! We can't even risk using the damned jack-lines.' Spare rope rigged for safety just posed one more chance to be snapped up for use as a garrote.

  The latest effort to ease their dire straits seemed an uncertain prospect at best: again, the chiming tap of a tin bowl with a spoon carried up from the ship's waist. Tucked against the brisk breeze, two black-haired figures attended the brig's stolid cook, who had hauled his store of bashed pots up on deck at the Masterbard's urgent request. The vessels not put to immediate use had been stacked in the scuttle-butt for convenience. The rest were nested in bights of rope to secure them against the tossing heel of the deck. Two kettles were partially filled up with sea-water. Bent over a third, a spoon and a ladle in hand, one alike man watched the other, who added water in measured increments, poured from a battered tin cup.

  'Strike it again,' said Arithon s'Ffalenn to his Araethurian double. A wearied burr husked his tone as he added, 'Try the ladle, this time.'

  The duplicate rapped the pot under scrutiny. Slightly taller, his square-shouldered frame resisted the ship's plunging reach with the matter-of-fact stance of a post.

  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 Talvis
h 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 Arithoh'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 concentration 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.'