by Janny Wurts
Arithon supported that stripping care, moment upon moment, not breaking. 'I have had Elaira beside me' he said. 'Sidir will wed Feithan. Mearn's with his wife and new-born, secure under protection at Methisle Fortress, and for my misspent sacrifice in let blood, my writ commands pardon for Parrien.' He stretched out his arm, and retrieved a tied scroll from within the cover for his lyranthe. 'I trust you'll know when to apply this.'
Asandir accepted the offering. Though his glance never flickered, he noted the wax seal, impressed with Rathain's royal leopard. 'You've softened' he tested. 'Enough to set your signature under the blazon of your crown birthright'
'Have I?' Arithon's smile unveiled his edged challenge. 'Try this, instead. Shand's caithdein, the High Earl of Alland, will place his grievance for Kyrialt's death with the Crown Steward of Melhalla. I suffered a duke's brother's assault subject to her kingdom, also. Kindly as the Teiren's'Callient is, tendering soup to rude strangers, would she brook any less than my sanctioned signature at trial, for a murderer's binding reprieve?'
Asandir's frown remained purposefully grave, although Talvish, behind, caught the impression such bristled composure was kept for appearances. 'Melhalla's charter would not accept less. Never, under my Fellowship's oversight! Not for a wounding stroke meant to be fatal, against the unarmed talent, entitled as Masterbard.'
'Then I rest my case.' His lyranthe protectively tucked in his arms, Arithon did his utmost not to show that the stinging correction struck home. 'My name under seal set against a man's life? Thrown the miring weight of your crown, I will use its power at my convenience.'
'What of the folk still at risk in Alestron?' Asandir inquired point-blank.
While Talvish, behind, recoiled in dread, the Sorcerer bore in, unblinking.
His eyes mirror brilliant, he held out until, beyond mercy, Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn lost the poise for his jabbing defence.
'I thought so.' Asandir's murmur held more than mere gentleness. 'Where you've tried and failed, perhaps I might succeed. Your writ can be honoured where Parrien's concerned, though I will take your liberty to choose the timing to repeal the crown's pending charges. Meantime, let's see what else might be done for the people still trapped under Bransian's protection.'
As Arithon stared, fighting tears, the Sorcerer eased his promise for Alestron's reprieve with even more nerve-stripping tolerance. 'Your convenience has done a fine job for three realms. The rude stranger won't find us ungrateful. My earnest gesture awaits you, outside, one that I trust will delight you. If you're done belabouring Talvish's patience? Torbrand also masked over his frightful heroics with no end of testy disclaimers.'
Arithon laughed. 'Who's to blame, there?' Disarmed at last, he set down his lyranthe and stood, now willing to give the grace of a free singer's courtesy. 'I don't guess that my forebear volunteered for your throne. What blandishment did you offer him?'
'Complete your accession,' Asandir said, straight-faced. His height a forcefully shameless advantage, he peered down at the miscreant. 'I promise, your Grace, on that day, you'll find out.'
Gangling as he was, and as marked by hard service, the field Sorcerer owned blinding speed when he chose to move. The roofless courtyard was vacated before Arithon managed his scathing rejoinder: that Jeynsa s'Valerient had certainly proven her mettle to steward the throneless plight of Rathain.
Talvish side-stepped the Sorcerer's precipitate departure, then dodged again, to escape being flattened by a second rushed figure, mcoming.
'Just hobble the insolent yap on his Grace!' he groused, pleased, as Elaira flew across the cleared threshold into Arithon's startled embrace.
* * *
The battered fishing lugger engaged by the Sorcerer plied a lumbering passage southbound from Athir across the narrows of Vaststrait. Tossing, she rounded the headland at Northstor. Cantankerous as a balked cow, worked to windward, she seeped at the seams, with rust streaked down the strakes at her chain-plates. The ripe stink of mackerel fouling her bilges earned jeering contempt from the galleys passing down wind.
Parrien s'Brydion suffered the ignominious crossing under Fellowship custody, and was not requested to navigate. While the grizzled captain and his hardbitten hands plied their nets, Dakar underwent a rigorous study of weather wards and elementals. Asandir pushed those new skills to the limit, until the spellbinder grumped that his eyesight sparkled with distortion, and his aching head pounded, near back-lash. The decrepit vessel made port only once: an afternoon's dockage at Perdith to replace a patched sail and reprovision. The harbour officials pinched their disdainful, pink noses, and declined a thorough inspection.
While the fishermen gutted and sold their ripe catch, and Parrien stewed, constrained aboard, the Sorcerer visited a chandler's shop that sewed pennons. He returned, brightly whistling, a streamer of deep, midnight blue rolled up under his arm.
His word set the lugger's crew back ashore, smug and smiling with callused hands stuffed in their smock pockets.
'Save that Sorcerer from all mothering storms!' crowed the craft's relieved captain. What was left, but carousing to celebrate his astounding turn of good fortune? The round sum paid off by Asandir's charter would commission a handier vessel. 'For such brash generosity, we'll have us a tight, snappy lady that'll breast the cold easterlies without straining her caulking.'
'Won't miss the leaks that drizzled the berths.' The fishing crew exchanged a jubilant toast, as their tired old darling cast off. Their derelict, meant for the wreckers come spring, instead ploughed away on her wallowing route south.
Dakar's tasked lessons with wind and water resumed, while Parrien chewed over curses and languished. His slit-eyed ill humour lifted just once, when the lugger wore ship rounding Kalesh, and Asandir unfurled his new pennant to run up the peeling mast. The triangular cloth was slashed, contrary, by a diagonal white bar, with the upper quadrant marked by a six-pointed star: a device not observed by a town on the continent for more than five hundred years.
'Ath!' declared Parrien s'Brydion, awed, his piratical beard allowed to run wild. 'What I'd not give to sit above deck! Lounge at this tub's rail and laugh when the port blockade's excisemen try their damnable sanctions, enforced in the breach by archers with lints tipped in fire!'
'If they don't know the banner,' Asandir agreed, 'the lapse in town history just might go down a bit hard on them.'
Which double-edged warning hushed Parrien, fast, and left Dakar advised to tread softly. The lugger plunged onwards, groaning under loose stays. With the odd flag streaming like night under sunlight, she tacked again, side-slipping in churned foam to leeward. Then change occurred, seamless: wind and tide bowed before her worn tackle. More than the ancient banner declared presence, as her blunt prow came about, and suddenly cut an unerring, straight wake against the roiling ebb.
Fiasco ensued as she sliced the blockade, in flagrant disregard of extortionate fees and war edicts. On both sides of the strait, customs men from Kalesh and Adruin scrambled onto their barges to give chase. Harbour officials in overdone finery yammered threats through their bull-horns.
Commands to heave to and declare for the Light were ignored. The lugger showed them the gouged paint of her stern, as hot pursuit trailed her course through the estuary.
The fire archers, perforce, were commanded to shoot, whereupon the natural bent of wave and weather went crazy. No one agreed, afterward, about squalls in clear air. Yet the evidence stayed incontrovertible. The volleys of arrows bent awry in the gusts and kindled embarrassing wild fires. Errant shafts torched off the customs shacks, first; then the spired roofs of the towns' guild-halls. Both of the mayors' mansions went up, ignited by wind-borne sparks. The blazes blackened the view of the narrows, while the final round the bowmen unleashed quenched harmlessly into the sea.
Strayed in the clogged air, the customs fleet's barges fetched up in a snarl of oars on the shoals. There, the hysterical occupants howled, clinging in soaked misery upon canted decks, until the slack tide permitted a
rescue.
The rogue lugger, meantime, thrashed away down the narrows, ramming up spume like a juggernaut. Kalesh dispatched fast couriers at a lathered gallop. By dint of post-horses changed every league, the riders smoked blisters on leather to outstrip the moth-eaten fishing craft's run towards Alestron.
* * *
Breaking news of the inbound blockade-runner reached Sulfin Evend at his morning conference in the command tent. He was standing, irritable, sparkling in state regalia, dark hair tied back beneath his shining helm. His mailed fists stayed planted on the table-top where his war council sat dead-locked in another snapping dispute. Day upon day, he was forced to crush the next clamour to waste troops in a frontal assault through the breach at the Sea Gate.
'Damn you all for a flock of rockhead spring rams!' he snapped in his withering accent. The citadel's garrison's starving and cold! By now weakened enough to succumb to disease, if not dropping within the next fortnight. Bedamned if you think your bickering can wear down my sensible patience. I'll have no more widows! The victory is ours. Naught's left to be done, beyond wait for it!'
Sudden, rushed footsteps from outside turned heads. The heated talk stalled as a courier burst in through the tent-flap. 'Bad news, your lordships, brought at speed from Kalesh!'
Breathless, the fellow unburdened. 'Sorcery!' he gasped. 'Light save us from evil, with our Blessed Prince gone to Avenor!' Into an atmosphere whiplashed from fractious anger to disbelief, he announced, 'Raise arms! We're set under assault by the powers of Darkness!'
Mayhem erupted. Alarmed officers shoved to their feet. Against their hoarse outcry, Sulfin Evend banged the trestle and raised a field officer's shout. 'Silence! Sit down!'
No one subsided. Blocking the rampage to roust idle troops out for battle, the Light's first commander snatched the hysterical courier by the collar. A shove backed his whining against the oak table, where harder questioning plumbed his message for clarity. 'You mentioned a strange banner flown by a lugger that sails contrary to natural forces?'
'Yes, my Lord!' The pinned courier swallowed. "The craft bears a flag the port look-outs cannot identify' Hedged by glittering steel, surrounded by volatile tempers, the stammering description emerged: of a deep blue, triangular streamer, marked with specific white symbols.
'Ath, I know that device.' Sulfin Evend's sharp features turned pale. 'No attack!' He released his grip, a lone voice in the crush, as the Light's fractious officers surged to seize charge.
He flung his state chair against the stampede. Hurled himself bodily into the breach, clubbing back the armed bodies that shoved to displace him. 'Hold your lines, on my order!'
Under dire threat, as the jostling unsheathed killing steel, Sulfin Evend pealed warning. 'Fools! That lugger's defended by powers your Blessed Prince could not thwart. Interfere by assault, and you'll seed wrack and ruin. Stay your swords! Though your faith in the Light might insist that aggression can triumph, weapons cannot prevail! I forbid an attack. At your peril, defy me.'
'Wise choice,' declared a disembodied voice, arrived to a snap of stark cold. The uncanny draught billowed a shrieking rip in the canvas roof overhead. Its tight blast also checked the murdering rush against the staunch ultimatum declared by Lysaer s'Ilessid's foremost captain.
'Oathsworn to the land, Sulfin Evend, you are called to serve!' cracked Kharadmon.
The next instant, the Sorcerer's image unfurled standing four-square before the Alliance's Lord Commander at Arms. 'Under the auspices of the Fellowship of Seven, the assault on Alestron is ended. Your troops make war upon ground ruled under old law, and threaten a citadel defended within charter grant under the Crown of Melhalla. King's justice, as served by the Teiren's'Callient, shall administer the terms by which the combatants will lay down their arms under truce.'
A smile curled the Sorcerer's lips, wickedly framed by his coal-black moustache and spade-point beard. 'At your peril,' Kharadmon repeated with a joy that simmered toward impatience. 'Upset your ranking officer's order and leave me the pleasure of shredding your war camp!'
* * *
The hour of summons found Lord Bransian in a temper, haranguing his mutinous cooks. 'I don't care blazes if you pucker up at the taste! You will butcher those rats! Every squeaking wee carcass! Stew their plucked flesh to a mush even your shrinking gut will take kindly. My fighting men can't hold the walls without rations. Serve up what you're given! Or by the unvanquished name of my fathers, you'll be set in chains and left to gnaw your own turds in my rodent-free dungeon!'
The boy runner sent by Sevrand plucked up his courage again. This time, he tugged at the duke's pumping arm. Through stammering fright, his message was finally heard. 'A patched lugger flying the standard of the Fellowship of Seven has tied up to the ruined landing.'
'Dharkaron's black bollocks!' Duke Bransian scowled. 'If this is my cousin's idea of a joke, I'll chop off his right arm to thicken the gruel in that pot.'
Yet the startling truth already wrought change: the hollow-eyed duty watch had pulled a dispirited team off the trebuchets. While the men rigged a new cable to replace the torched lift, the duke pelted to convene his blood family for a Fellowship reception.
'Confound the Sorcerers' he gasped, hooking clasps, while his wife thrust his scarlet surcoat and state collar past the equerry, just suborned to clean his scuffed boots. 'Why couldn't they have made their timely appearance six months ago, when we weren't reduced to pulling brass tacks and boiling the leather off the good furniture?'
'You gave Kharadmon's diplomacy a blithe lick and a shrug,' Liesse pointed out with acerbity. She added, before fielding obscene imprecations, 'Sindelle and Tiassa are already dressed. And no! There's not a single wax candle left in the citadel, unless you've got a stash tucked away in the armoury.'
'None, you bloodsucking shrew! I have not stooped to lies among family' Bransian bent his bare head, morose, as the ruby seal on its chain settled around his hunched neck. 'What about lamp oil?'
'Gone up with the Sea Gate.' Liesse sighed. 'Trust me, a spouse with no spine would have poisoned you on your wedding night' She tied her laced bodice, too bitter and gaunt, and more drawn than the short rations warranted. 'I've taken the liberty of opening Dame Dawr's apartments. The south casements there at least will provide light for this cheerless arrival.' But no warmth, the last fuel being reserved for the kitchen's vile stew, by the duke's enforced orders, that morning.
Bransian's chapped lips cracked to show teeth. 'Let the Sorcerer freeze his rump in a cold seat. He can chew on rat's arse, if he's hungry.' But the bite to his bluster was sheer bravado, as his trembling wife surely knew.
'Which of the Seven, do you think?' she whispered in dread, gripping her husband's stout arm in descent through the frigid staircase. 'Sethvir won't have dispatched a shade on this errand.' For no boat and no lift tackle would be needful for a visitation, breezed into their midst.
'It would be Asandir' Duke Bransian snarled, 'since Traithe would scarcely announce himself flying that brazen pendant! Never bang in the eyes of the blood-sucking towns that host the Alliance's war host.'
* * *
Hard on the heels of the scrambling servants who snatched off the sitting-room's dust-sheets, Asandir assumed the winged chair that had once belonged to Dame Dawr. The seat still commanded the space before the stone pilasters of the darkened fire-place. To his left, the latched casements spilled in streaming sun, brilliant day to storm-lit, azure night, where his velvet mantle draped upright shoulders.
Since Bransian s'Brydion was too massive to slink, he stalled until the last moment. Sevrand and both bereaved wives sat in silence, as his bold-as-brass tread crossed the threshold and hammered the carpet. He settled his duchess with immaculate deference. She was forced to fold her hands in her lap, or else risk her lace cuffs to destruction: the scarred trestle pulled in haste from the armoury had stayed bare in the rush to accommodate. Yet the juxtaposed setting of rich comfort and rude function was thrown into eclipse by stilled po
wer, leashed in waiting to address Alestron's duke.
Bransian chose to remain on his feet, his last refuge his heavy-weight muscle.
'Old law still reigns here,' Asandir opened in declarative quiet. 'When did you think you became the exception, wielding the privilege of title above the terms of sworn service accorded to this ancestral seat?'
Though the steel in that gaze raised a glaze of flushed sweat, Bransian answered directly. 'My banner still flies above walls not yet overtaken in conquest. I may not be applauded for every mistake. Fact remains, my defence has not faltered.'
Asandir laced his large fingers; leaned forward, his face chiselled bare of expression. 'Defence by extortion, manipulation, and conspiracy?'
Cloth rustled, down the table. 'Prince Arithon spoke for his liegeman, and Jeynsa, who has been released without harm,' Sevrand dared. A brief pause ensued. 'Lawful terms put the grievance to rest,' he went on in his kinsman's defence.
A mistake: the Sorcerer's drilling attentiveness only resharpened upon the duke's steaming discomfort. 'My selection for the late high earl's post in Daon Ramon, as Arithon's intended caithdein, but a girl not yet sworn, in her teens. She was not sent home in corrected disgrace! Intrigue and collusion saw her brave folly reduced to bloodshed and bullying abuse. Rathain may have accepted compensation for damaging injury,' the Sorcerer amended in blistering censure. 'But no foreign prince on Melhalla's ground can usurp the right to declare for the crown's arbitration.'
'We are at war!' Duke Bransian pealed, laid raw as Liesse masked her face to stifle her ashamed tears. 'What of the enemies hounding our walls, laying siege while my people are starving? What of the holocaust that razed our farmsteads, and slaughtered our innocent villagers?'
