by Janny Wurts
'No choice,' snapped a voice. 'We'll just have to tend this.'
His shoulder was pinned in a grip like locked shackles. He flinched and whimpered, too wretched to choke back his animal screams as the buried steel bolt was cut free of the muscle, then the flange of the point pried from its wedged seat in his collarbone.
The brutal round of cautery that followed half killed him. For time beyond bearing, Jieret lay on his side, heaving and panting and broken past sanity by the stink of his own seared flesh.
Footsteps went and came again. Ruthless handling pried his mouth open. A tin cup rapped his teeth. Ice-chilly water slopped into his mouth, bitter sharp with the taste of ashes and the rusted tang of rinsed blood; evidently he had bitten his tongue, unawares. He choked; received a pounding slap on the back that cleared his throat and forced the unwilling reflex to swallow.
'Dharkaron's black vengeance!' he gasped through the ache as the cold reamed a pit in his belly.
'Damned well not!' snapped the Lord Commander in his clipped, Hanshire accent. 'Light as my witness, you hell-spawned demon, I'm going to see that you live.'
Jieret lay limp through the jostling discomfort of bandaging. Even without sight, he was astute enough to recognize an expert field dressing. The last chance extinguished, that he might pass Fate's Wheel by the grace of inept treatment and wound fever.
'My liege, forgive,' he implored as his senses revolved and slid over the brink, into spiraling darkness. Hindsight blistered with undying shame, that he had not thought to turn steel on himself and take the clean end that Arithon's last words had pleaded.
* * *
Jieret drifted in and out of pain-soaked dreams and brief periods of blackout sleep. When he woke, stiff and aching, the gnawing cold told him full night had finally fallen. The wind had shifted. Rising gusts from the north wore the keen scent of storm beneath the pall of charred brush. A crisp dryness burned his nostrils, clear warning of impending snowfall. Still bound hand and foot, he lay on his side. A wool blanket mantled his throbbing shoulder, soaked in the heat thrown off by a nearby campfire. To judge by the lessened sting to his skin, his burned face had been eased with grease salve, and a wet cloth swathed his light-scalded eyes.
Hearing informed him he was not alone. Another casualty moaned and shivered to his left, apparently delirious with fever. To judge by the oaths spat in flat Hanshire accents, the Alliance Lord Commander disliked his role of nursemaiding disabled prisoners.
Jieret heaved in a taxed breath. Though his parched larynx felt lined in ground grit, he made a rasping effort at speech. 'You could simplify matters, and just cut our throats.'
'Sithaer's demon minions!' came the ripping reply. A deadened thump shook the ground, as though a saddle or horse pack was cast down in a burst of irritation. 'I don't like spooning gruel, and I won't have your lump-head barbarian opinion concerning the fate of your betters!'
Made thick by discomfort, Jieret took a moment to unriddle the cause of the Hanshireman's pungent language. 'Oh, that's rich.' He wheezed, unable to stifle his barked laughter. The fit was short-lived. Aggravation wakened the ache in his shoulder and seized up his laboring chest. When the spasm unlocked, he resorted to words, which hurt just as much. 'You couldn't be suggesting that your daisy-faced godling has collapsed from overexcitement?'
'Let him hear you say that, he'd clip out your tongue!' The flint snap to Sulfin Evend's response gave rise to a revelation.
Jieret understood, with bleak joy, that he was not helpless after all. Amiable as the shark set at large among fry, he prodded, Why? Should s'Ilessid fear my voice? Or did his fair coloring mislead even you? Surely you know the sordid truth.'
The clink of Sulfin Evend's spurs hesitated, as though he froze between steps.
Into the dawning suggestive pause, Jieret punched out his surgical riposte, 'No one told you that Lysaer s'Ilessid is half brother to Arithon s'Ffalenn?'
A hard, disturbed silence, filled by the wail of fell winds, then the sickbed whimper of the invalid alongside, who had to he Lysaer, stricken prostrate by massive overuse of his gift. Presupposing that backlash had inflamed the s'Ilessid to an imbalanced state of high fever, Jieret goaded, 'You never heard that Avar s'Ffalenn got his son on the mother of your Blessed Prince?'
'Bastard! Pirate's get!' A riled disturbance as blankets were tossed off, and the invalid rose to the baiting. 'My mother's shame and a sorcerer's game piece!'
Sulfin Evend's growled oath entangled with a scuffle, as he leaped to wrestle his royal charge flat. Lysaer's enraged words emerged through the fracas, deranged and deadly with spite. 'What is the man, but the cursed seed of an enemy bred and born just to gall my royal father to blind rages?'
Jieret suppressed a wicked thrill of glee. 'Ath's truth! A blood kinship exists between your false avatar and the one you name Spinner of Darkness.'
'No kin of mine!' snarled Lysaer in delirium. He fought, cursing Sulfin Evend's restraint, all the while railing in affront, 'What is the s'Ffalenn wretch but a criminal condemned for the wreck of a fleet? His damned sorceries, you know, were what sent me to exile!'
'Not divine calling, after all,' Jieret agreed.
'Stop this!' A heaped pile of faggots overset with a clunk, hard followed by a commotion across the fire pit.
Then a rasp of loose stone bespoke lightning movement. Jieret was slammed down by a clout that skewed the bandaging over his eyes. Stunned dizzy, he battled the fingers that clamped in sharp effort to silence him.
'Want a gag for your pains?' Sulfin Evend ground out. He mashed his victim's burned face to the snow. 'You've caused his Exalted Grace undue distress with your slander.'
Still vigorous, Jieret twisted his head and jerked free, then gasped on a scraping breath, 'Ah, I see! His exalted self might not care to discuss family history when he's flat on his back, sick and raving. A delicate quandary. Would the trade guilds still pay for his war camps and diamonds, or will they decide to expose his grand cause as a fraud?'
'Clan cur! You blaspheme!' Sulfin Evend used expert force and manhandled his barbarian antagonist facedown on the frost-hardened ground.
'Do I?' gasped Jieret, though his mouth filled with slush and the gritted tang of mulched leaves. 'Princess Talith learned better, during the weeks she spent in Prince Arithon's company. Perhaps that's why some well-placed jackal in Avenor's high council made certain she fell to her death.'
'She was a suicide, and already condemned. Her conviction for adultery and high treason stand as a matter of public record.' An unpleasant, short skirmish saw Jieret's maimed shoulder slammed down, then ground beneath the mailed weight of Sulfin Evend's bent knee.
'Murdered,' gasped Jieret- 'Why not collar Avenor's inner cabal and ask for the truth?'
'Enough, damn you!' The Alliance Lord Commander twisted sidewards. He snatched up his knife, hacked a seam, then shredded a strip from the edge of the blanket. 'I'll bind your mouth. Knotted rope would hurt most, but the nicety will have to wait.'
'Indulgence of cruelty won't change the unsavory facts. You zealots at Avenor are no better than string puppets played for a blood feud.' Breathless, near fainting, Jieret turned his face just in time.
The punch of Sulfin Evend's studded fist grazed his cheek, plowing pain from his scarcely scabbed burns.
'Coward!' Jieret kicked out his lashed ankles. The wrench ripped him out of his enemy's grasp just long enough to invite, 'Why not ask Lysaer which one of us abuses Ath's grace with presumptions?' Unable to gauge Sulfin Evend's reaction without eyesight, Rathain's caithdein risked all and provoked, 'Or are you afraid you've bent your pedigree neck to a mortal man who's a liar?'
'Honorless scum! I said, that's enough!' A scrambling lunge spat a spray of loose gravel. Enraged, but far too controlled to indulge the reckless urge to kill outright, Sulfin Evend rammed into the barbarian's back and neck and trounced him flat in a snowbank.
Jieret thrashed, tried to roll. His lips split, ground into frost-cracked rock and ice. He
lpless to fight back, he prayed for the swift slice of a blade at his throat. Again fortune jilted him. He received instead a shattering slam, as a wood billet cracked his nape like a bludgeon and cast him adrift into darkness.
* * *
Earl Jieret roused, gagging. The copper-sweet scent of blood clogged his nostrils. His mouth gushed. The drowning sensation of tepid liquid flooding his gullet wrenched him double. He choked, curled into a spasm of coughing. He tried to spit and clear his mouth. Yet the horror did not subside. The effort stunned him to wounding pain and a shocked surge of dizziness.
When he gathered himself and sorted the damage, the uncouth discovery unstrung him. His outcry of rage was reft wordless. Revolted body and mind, he curled in a knot, while appalled revulsion grasped his gut with barbed hooks and twisted him witless with nausea.
Had he known any way to stop reflex, he would have willed his ruined flesh to cease breathing.
'Your tongue was cut out,' said a steely voice from a point not far overhead. 'My Lord Commander, Sulfin Evend, wielded the knife. Had he not addressed the matter forthwith, you would not have been spared. The same act would have come at my command.'
Blind, now reft dumb, Jieret clamped bloodstained teeth. If he must weep, the bandages masking eyes hid his shame. No such kindly recourse existed, for hearing. He refused to cringe, or whimper like some pitiful, trapped beast as the speaker addressed him again.
'Surely you realize your worth as a hostage?' Such seamlessly detached majesty could only belong to Lysaer s'Ilessid himself. 'If you regret your insulting, brash words, you'll have no more chance to complain.'
A pause, while Jieret fought his spasming throat to locked silence.
The Divine Prince leaned closer, his magisterial tone shaded to contempt. 'Try to write, and I promise, both your hands will be put to the sword. The foul rumors you broached were not only ugly, but dangerous.'
Degraded beyond bearing, unable to avoid the slimy puddle of his own filth, Jieret turned his face to the ground. He raged to lash back that such goading was moot. Crushed and bleeding, overwhelmed by abject despair, he could write nothing at all with bound hands. The hurt squeezed his heart, that he should have lived to become a tool in the hands of his enemies.
Prince Arithon must be left free to prevail, unimpaired by encumbrance or hostages. The outside hope waned, that Sulfin Evend could be moved to question his unbending loyalty. The small seed of destruction that Jieret had planted had found no fertile ground, to have earned a vindication of such vile proportions.
Footsteps approached, tagged by chiming spurs. 'At least dose him with poppy,' suggested the Lord Commander. If he felt any, pity at all, his following line came dry with laconic practicality.
'You want a live prisoner, we'll need to do something humane to ease his condition.'
'He's a meddling black sorcerer!' snapped Lysaer s'Ilessid. 'There will be justice served for that, and the longer list of civil crimes committed against my city of Etarra.'
Sulfin Evend abandoned his argument. A matter of firm record, Red-beard's marauding raids had preyed upon innocents for years. The Northern League of Headhunters kept a damning tally of the number of caravans with drovers and draft animals slaughtered. By Etarran account, this slinking clanbred assassin had shot the marked arrow that cost Lord Mayor Pesquil his life. Worse, he had stood as the Master of Shadow's collaborator when the fleet burned at Minderl Bay.
The finish carried the cold ring of finality as the Blessed Prince made disposition. 'Let the murderer languish. His trial of nightmares and suffering will answer for each of our men who has died.'
Tortured awareness was all that remained.
Jieret was left sprawled upon stony ground, condemned to a grinding extension of life that promised indescribable agony. His bound limbs had already stiffened with chill, until every joint ached with persistence. A blind man could not mark the passage of nightfall. He could wrest no comfort from measuring the critical three days of grace, through which Arithon s'Ffalenn might sustain his perilous refuge under the masking spells holding his spirit apart from his flesh.
Minute to minute, the uncertainty racked Jieret, that his liege's survival might lie beyond all redress.
Caithdein of the realm, he wept then, a silenced outpouring of grief. He could do nothing, only beg for the descent of Dharkaron's Black Spear to lay waste useless flesh and bring him the surcease of release.
He received no deliverance. Only Sulfin Evend, with a bitter decoction of willowbark and betony. 'His Blessed Grace is resting. Bedamned if I've taken this much trouble just to sit by and watch you succumb out of shock.'
Jieret averted his face and refused the strong drink.
'Devil!' his tormentor gasped under his breath.
Locked teeth were pried open and the remedy dribbled into the prisoner's lacerated mouth. Reflex made him swallow. Fed gruel and rebandaged and cleansed of his own filth, Jieret struggled, cuffed and pinned down like a puppy until the dregs of his pride lay in tatters.
He sprawled listless afterward, too spent to move, while the virtues of healing herbals slowly dampened his rioting pain. His poisoned, trapped thoughts now ranged free of distraction, gnawing his spirit without surcease. Guilt raked him, that Arithon's parting word had been a plea to die fast and cleanly.
Jieret tipped his head toward a clouded sky his ravaged eyes could not see. Light snowfall dusted his bandaged cheek. His other companion, a prankish southeast wind, tossed him scraps of conversation. His deprived mind seized on those fragmented bits, a hunter's skill Caolle had drilled into his being until he reacted by instinct.
'. . . no other survivors,' Sulfin Evend was saying. The clipped chink of rowels told of purposeful strides toward the picket where, by the smell, Lysaer's horse had been tied. 'Just myself, and your mount. . .' A gust tore a gap, then,'. . . can't last three days on the rations left in my pack.'
Lysaer's response was spiked with testy consonants.
Avenor's Lord Commander gave him back unsympathetic practicality. 'Well, there's not much alternative. Unless you care to share carrion with the vultures?'
A ripped intake of breath, then a curt phrase from Lysaer, from which the word 'sorcery' stood out with etched clarity.
Leather harness creaked. A girth buckle clanged upon rock. Sulfin Evend evidently saddled the one horse. His exasperation wafted through a snort as the animal shrank from the embrace of cold trappings. '. . . foolish belief you could match mortal troops against the Spinner of Darkness unscathed! I've said fifty times, do I need to repeat this? Meddle with a demon who's been trained to mastery, you've no choice at all but to defend with arcane protections!'
A shrill hiss masked the following line as snow was dumped on the hot ring of stones where the fire burned. '. . . rejoin the Etarrans,' Lysaer ended, his cool equanimity restored as the coals subsided to steam and wet ashes. 'Their priest has dispatched a half company to meet us. The rest have been told to stay encamped until the ones who are scattered can regroup.'
'Then we should wait here for them,' Sulfin Evend objected. His voice strengthened as he turned back toward camp and shook out the white stallion's bridle. 'Forgive my presumption, my Lord Exalted. But we have no scouts and not a standing man for protection. The wise course is to lie low right where we are. Let the Etarran trackers find us.',
Silence, from Lysaer, who perhaps had sat down. The rustling friction of wool cloth and silk mantles became lost in the rise and fall of the wind.
'Bedamned to your sacred mission to destroy the minion of Shadow!' Sulfin Evend resumed, apparently undaunted by what must have been a scathing glare of displeasure. 'We are as two straws amid a burned landscape that doesn't have spit left for landmarks!'
No response, just the magisterial bustle of hands, stubbornly repacking a saddlebag.
Sulfin Evend's tirade resurged in earnest. 'Have you gone mad? A storm's moving in. You're not recovered. In harsh fact, you look likely to measure your length if you stand up to em
pty your bladder. This horse has singed legs. He can't bear two riders. Let me tell you, that barbarian prisoner's too injured to shoulder a journey on foot. We've thwarted the last reason he has to keep living. Push on, strain him further, he'll tip over the edge. Might as well draw your sword and just kill him.'
Stillness descended, the wind's wail touched through by the whistle as an ember expired in the fire pit. Lysaer never moved. When he spoke, his collected tone held the dangerous tang of sheared iron. 'What will be said to the widows at Narms, if we make no effort to pursue? Could you tell them the Spinner of Darkness went free for the sake of a road-raiding murderer's safety? We break camp, no matter the cost. If you think the barbarian hostage too weak, then I'll fare on foot. Let him be the one to go mounted.'
* * *
The eagle circled high overhead, a stealthy shadow knifing through spangling flakes of light snowfall. He observed the racking indignity as Jieret was hauled upright and lashed to the back of the horse, while the unseasonal, cold wind hissed down from the north and tweaked the brushed bronze of his leathers. Over the land, patched charcoal and white, the late winter closed in, the iced freshets gnarled like twists of wrapped steel through frost-hardened soil that languished for sign of coming spring.
'It's due to lane imbalance,' Davien supplied, the enchantress whose awareness rode with him sharing his relentless reconnaissance. 'Weather can't break until the winds shift their pattern, a cycle unlikely to see change before the midsummer solstice.'
That bit of ill news would bring famine in the north. Late-planted crops might have no time to yield, before next autumn's frosts spoiled the harvest.
Yet Elaira was unable to focus for long upon worries concerning the future. Far beneath, an ant figure in byrnie and helm, Sulfin Evend slogged ahead. The burdened stallion plodded on a lead rein at his heels, its coat smirched ivory against the watered-milk flurry of snowflakes. Lysaer s'Ilessid accompanied on foot, morose in his soot-grimed finery. The gold-and-white sunwheel mantle now hung ragged at the hem, irretrievably soiled by cinders. Storm and gloom cast his gilt trappings in tarnish, and his steps betrayed stumbling unsteadiness.
