by Wurts, Janny
When the bull-necked crofter refused to comply, the smaller fellow pitched sideways and dropped. Twisting with his tied wrists swung as a club, he chopped the bumpkin behind the knees. Both men tumbled into a disorderly heap. The bigger chap roared and punched back in raw fury.
The lashed victim resisted, at rank disadvantage. Fractionally quicker, he jack-knifed and rolled to wrest clear of the crofter’s hammering punishment. His adversary snagged a hold on his jacket; a jerk backwards flattened him beyond recourse. Through a blow to the jaw, then a knee in the groin that curled him, half-senseless, he still managed to shout across the vile insults heaped on him by his oppressor.
The phrases, cadenced in flawless Paravian, voiced an emphatic appeal: ‘Ama’idan eth erathiri awen nahil kithiran! Da i’liosmariennt, tur eth fadael s’roth-itieren kiranlaer, dasil’i’laire s’i’kewiar-seyshaleng ple ei criesient lesan’ii’eng s’lesh-llieriennt!’
The scout captain eased his bow-string and swore. No order to loose could be sanctioned, not now. Clanborn were fluent in the ancient tongue, and this stranger’s words were delivered in form to invoke an inviolate tradition: ‘Mercy for strangers arrived without welcome! By charter law, under the creed of guest-oath hospitality, grace us with a hearing for an honest request to seek sanctuary!’
Constrained by strict legality, the scout captain stood tall. Covered by his armed henchmen, he strode forward, his own level shaft kept aimed at half draw on the blond man’s struggling back. ‘Desist!’ he snapped, cold.
In seamless step, his squad of four also emerged from cover. All weapons stayed poised, with the scuffling pair pinned under the sun-caught gleam of keen arrow-points.
Their armed advance rattled Tarens back into sensible reason. Purpled with rage, he opened his hands, then glared in resentful defeat from a crouch that still ground his pinned trophy into the leaf mould. Underneath, bleeding, the surprise linguist gasped through split lips, momentarily too battered to speak.
The scout captain eyed that one with murderous calm and demanded in scornful town dialect, ‘Who is he?’
The sullen crofter squared his broad shoulders. Jaw raised, his mauled nose flushed livid, he glowered at the inimical archers. ‘In truth? I don’t know.’
‘Do you not?’ A muscled lynx faced by a wounded bear, the clan captain had little tolerance for a town-bred’s brute-fisted recalcitrance. His dark glance flashed, another swift stay for his hackled squad to hold their fire. Custom demanded! The mystery at hand must be answered forthwith. To the farmer, who should have been meat for the vultures, the lead scout said, impatient, ‘Your nameless baggage has spoken for you! Say why I should ignore my better instincts for the word of an upstart stranger!’
‘Because—’ Tarens began.
The pinned victim broke in, ‘Tadais ielt y’ne ei sielte, krav yadur-thal quenien.’ Despite the hacked cough that mangled his diction, a lilt of sly humour shone through: ‘Because he’s a good man. Just pigheaded ignorant.’
‘And you’re not just as foolish, whoever you are?’ The captain did not relax his weapon one inch. ‘What makes you believe we’d show bootless criminals the courtesy of a safe haven?’
‘The fair hearing, requested,’ said the man on the ground. Constrained under difficulty, he added, ‘No lie has been spoken. Our need for protection carries an urgency.’
The vengeful archers remained unappeased.
‘How many enemies are belike to come after you?’ the patrol captain snapped.
‘A full company,’ Tarens admitted, resentfully stiff, but not reckless beyond common sense. ‘Sunwheel lancers.’
The woman tracker among them showed teeth. ‘They’ll be on the lam, since Broken-Nose, there, accused his runt fugitive as a renegade sorcerer. The chase at their heels will draw deadly heat! Our exposure increases the longer we dawdle.’
The captain eased his bow-string and signalled for silence. ‘I agree, we can’t sort this mess here.’ To the squad whose vicious distrust kept aimed weapons, he ordered, ‘Two of you only, stand down. Disarm these outsiders. Then free that one’s wrists. Get him up on his feet. If he tries any tricks, take fair warning! The rest of my scouts shoot to kill.’ Bleak as nails, his glance raked the crofter. ‘Iyat-thos! Tarens! I’ll have the short answers, quick. What turn of misfortune makes you think you’ve been caught in league with a criminal sorcerer?’
Tarens swallowed. ‘My family took the wretch in off the road. We thought him a penniless vagrant. What I saw at the time bears up his claim, that he may have been held for years by the Order of the Koriathain.’
That moment, the scout who bent to release the tied prisoner shot straight and hissed through his teeth.
‘Ath forgive!’ cried one of the bowman, alerted by his fellow’s shocked discovery as the knotted bonds fell away. ‘Will you look?’
Bared to view, the captive’s right palm showed a whitened burn scar.
‘Fire and frost!’ the vexed captain swore. ‘Damn well be sure, first! Cut back his sleeve.’
A competent slash of the skinning knife parted both jacket and shirt. Flattened beyond struggle as the rags were peeled back, the dark-haired man grunted a protest. His green eyes widened with acid affront as the scouts’ brisk handling shoved Tarens aside, then rolled him over and straightened his arm to the detriment of the rope burns and abrasions left by the dedicate soldiers’ prior rough play.
‘Your custom of guest welcome has fallen to shame?’ he accused in acid contempt.
No one recovered the presence to answer. All stared dumb-struck at the exposed, older weal: a mark that looked to have been seared by lighting, scored into a half twist from wrist to elbow.
The captain recoiled a stunned step back. ‘Dharkaron’s flaming Black Chariot and Horses! If that’s what I think, we are stewed.’
While around him, unasked, the trained bows were lowered, his embarrassed regard flinched aside and encompassed the crofter’s confusion. ‘Iyat-thos, you luckless dupe, did you know? Likely you’ve tossed us the Koriathain’s most infamous prisoner and flung wide Sithaer’s gate to disaster!’
‘Have I so?’ Tarens folded his sturdy arms with unregenerate obstinacy. ‘Best ask him, yourself. Then make certain he’s speaking the truth when he tells you straight-faced he cannot remember.’
* * *
. . . the voices re-echoed, a shower of sound and harmonic light that ruffled through his presence as he resurfaced through glue-thick confusion, back towards wakened awareness. Adrift, his grasp of himself insubstantial, he felt the swirled buffet as tentative fingers stirred through the layers of his subtle aura. The touch raised disembodied ripples of sensation, then impact: a not-quite-comfortable pressure that triggered the heavier, distanced impression of his own aching, bruised flesh.
He vaguely recalled the unpleasantness of a recent bout of mishandling.
Before memory, cognizant function resurged, and the streaming music and colour of speech resolved into meaningful words.
An unfamiliar woman still spoke, her alto voice rust-grained with age. ‘Living mercy! What an intricate mapwork. I’ve never examined the like of such layered complexity.’ Her excited quaver resumed, hushed, as the bothersome source of the intrusive pressure probed upwards over his torso. ‘. . . there. I feel the resistance of yet another entrained working. Pure light. Most refined. Not a blockage, I think. Not like that balanced array for longevity but more of a functional affinity, or an attunement. If you tap there with cleared vision, what do you see?’
A second speaker, this one male, replied softly. ‘Can’t be doubt, this time. Your proof rests in the signature of the maker. That’s the genuine seal of Asandir’s sanction, the Fellowship stamp of acknowledged crown legacy, and beautiful! Though by glory, I’ve not witnessed this pattern, alive. Only recorded by touchstone, handed down through my teachers as a rote memory.’
Cloth rustled. After a tensioned pause, a third party clipped out with impatience, ‘Then he is who we thought! You will b
e expected to swear formal witness since the report on that point must be verified. But why in Ath’s grace does the prince not recall? How could he, or anyone, forget the feal charge of an endorsed royal legacy? Or wear the deep seal of a blood oath to a Sorcerer and not even carry the memory?’
The old woman sighed, irked. ‘I don’t know yet!’
‘Find out!’ Aggravation redoubled by bitterness drove that imperative snap. ‘The answer affects our very survival. If the Koriathain have dared to subvert a crown prince’s destiny—’
The male seer cut in with firm equanimity. ‘He’s not sent as a trap, if that’s what you fear.’
‘Prove it!’ The steel sharp voice hedged that abyss of distrust. ‘I cannot disarm the chieftains or the council with theories, no matter how certain the facts that confirm a true claim to crown blood-line.’
Through the blast of dissent, the subject set under discussion yet suffered the airy, persistent riffle of the crone’s dauntless investigation. Her nettlesome fingers quested upwards and hovered over his head. That intrusion tickled an etheric eddy that tightened his jaw till his teeth clenched.
‘Ah, here,’ murmured the woman, oblivious. ‘This stay throws off spikes. Almost like a sigil, but actually nothing like any I’ve ever encountered. The working in question was not meant to last. I’d say this prince has been blocked by a remnant adjustment, which now appears a bit frayed. Which explains his lapsed recall. Right here, have a look.’
A second person’s touch laced into hers. Combined, the invasive tingle slapped into a star-burst of disturbance. Recoil followed and woke him to razor-edged, forceful resistance. His body arched, a reflexive shudder that savaged him to a gasped breath.
Quick hands pressed him down to restrain the convulsion. Direct, unexpected, the sudden force burned. Skin and bone, he flinched as his shocked awareness crashed back into sensitized flesh. Full cognizance returned with a brutal rush. He woke all at once, blistered by the embarrassment that he thrashed naked in blankets. Bruised and unstrung, his head wheeled, dizzied by a state of mild suffocation that muzzled his natural reflexes.
‘Ath above!’ swore the woman. ‘Mage-trained, indeed. And with a vengeance! I’ve never seen anyone burn off a valerian posset this quickly!’
Helped by another, her grip tightened down on him. His struggles were pinned against a mattress of deer-hide, fragrantly stuffed with pine needles. Battened in softness, the nightmare recall resurged: of a prison spun like a cloud silver cocoon that once had enveloped him in cruel isolation, until he felt buried alive.
He cried out. Fury exploded through him and launched the wild urge to strike out and retaliate.
‘Easy!’ exhorted the testy old woman. ‘Your Grace! Lie still! We gave you the drug to lay down your defenses. For the need to verify your identity, you asked if someone could sound for the cause of the damage afflicting your memory.’
But her reasonable appeal failed to pierce through the roar of his rage-driven anguish.
‘Let him go! Now!’ Seer-gifted as empath, only the male attendant was equipped to ease the raw gap. ‘A’liessiad, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn!’ he exhorted, enforced by the calm of emotional peace. ‘You are free.’
The invasive hands that wrestled him prostrate released him and melted away.
Threat subsided before the tenuous dawn of self-recognition. Offered the true Name bestowed at his birth, Arithon opened his eyes. A breath let him ground himself back to cleared alignment. Another restored him to sharp self-command, while the reflex schooled by past initiate training swept through him again as a shimmer of heat. His skin beaded, then streamed with a purging sweat that stung his abrasions and bruises. ‘Si seysha’d,’ he acknowledged, Paravian for, ‘I hear.’ Flushed and fevered, he subsided through the flicker of back-lash, while his body burned off the last traces of drug-induced lassitude.
A grey shaft of daylight sectioned the gloom, hazed through an open-flap doorway. He lay under the rooftree of a cramped hide tent, hovered over by the small, wizened woman who served the clan camp as healer and herbalist. The talented seer who partnered her efforts was a much younger man, stilled in her assertive shadow. His wary, cocked stance showed a wind-burned, lean face and a scout’s buckskin leathers and knives, worn to the shine of hard use.
A rigorous existence, dogged by scant supply, spoke through such rough dress. Both parties wore shirts of coarse linen, and the woman’s leather leggings were layered under a threadbare cloth tunic sewn with an unfamiliar insignia. Typical of poking meddlers everywhere, she pursued her fascination with arcane infirmities as though her subject were deaf.
‘Did you catch the same vision that I glimpsed,’ she gushed. ‘That last working’s maker was a female talent, ancient with years, and white-haired.’
Several paces removed, the third onlooker appointed to satisfy the clan council cut in with rattled concern, ‘He’s suborned by the Koriathain?’
‘Oh, certainly not!’ the male seer reassured. ‘This interaction was recent and forceful; no wicked Prime Matriarch’s ploy, but clearly an effort aligned in direct opposition.’
Jolted to an astonished step forward, the peppery authority revealed himself as a man of middle years, with a badger’s bristle of greying hair and the squint of a crafty intelligence. ‘Then she was the party who set this prince free?’
‘That’s likely. I think so.’ The seer fingered his clan braid, his brow furrowed with thought. ‘She did not appear to have tribal ancestry. Yet I could sense that power alive in her. Yes, I’ll stake the certainty. The lines evoked by the Biedar who work the Dark’s mysteries at Sanpashir are quite unmistakable.’
‘Daelion avert!’ the clan healer exclaimed, shoved aside to rinse her wrinkled hands. The water in the clay ewer splashed briskly as she expounded, ‘Few dare to meddle with their sacred wisdom! Even unwound by partial attrition, that seal might cause harm under an ignorant attempt to rescind it. I won’t try. Desert elders guard their secrets too fiercely. No talent steps afoul of their wards without getting viciously burned.’
‘Or Koriathain!’ the council’s spokesman insisted. ‘They will be in hot pursuit of this prince. We are thrust in waters over our heads, pinched between such intractable factions.’
At which point, irritation sparked blazing impatience. ‘Am I a prisoner?’ Arithon broke in.
All parties suspended their discourse and stared.
‘No, your Grace,’ the man with position hedged carefully. ‘Our own record recalls you once shared a guest cup under the formal welcome of Maenalle s’Gannley. More—’
But Arithon was no longer listening. Braced for the savage complaint of his bruises, he flipped back the blankets and, careless of cold and decorum, shoved to his feet. ‘Where is my clothing?’
The empath jumped, fast, to appease that rankled question, while the exasperated healer continued to natter across the unveiled wrack of his contusions. ‘Rest, first!’ Drying her prim hands on a cloth, she bustled up to take charge. ‘Those wrists need a poultice to draw down the swelling. Afterward, you may consult with our loreist. She should be more than pleased to recite the history of your ties to Caithwood’s clan heritage.’
Arithon ducked her purposeful treatment. ‘Is Tarens restricted?’ he asked of the authority, who nodded, adroit enough to avoid the scrap as the slighted healer gave chase.
‘Then if my royal status bears weight, release him at once on my surety!’
The council’s man understood when to cut losses. He nipped from the tent on a blast of rushed air, while Arithon’s irritation fastened back on the old woman and dared her outright to lay hands on his nakedness. ‘The crofter can sit at the feet of your loreist while I take my own path to recovery.’
‘The roots of your memory will lie in Rathain,’ the affronted healer pushed tact to suggest.
Arithon’s smile flashed back at her, edged. ‘Have I gathered the events that exonerate me took place before the Koriathain seized me in captivity?’ Not waiting
for more, he acknowledged the seer’s astute alliance and snatched on his worn breeches. Still speaking, he accepted back his defaced shirt and jacket, neatly mended by someone’s contrite needle and thread. ‘Tell me, good mistress, perchance were you also alive then?’
Faced down at last by his ruffled dignity, the silenced healer flushed scarlet.
The more tactful empath staunched his amusement to disarm the explosive stand-off. ‘Your Grace, I’m told your last interaction with Caithwood’s clans took place well over two hundred years ago. A Fellowship Sorcerer in fact bore witness. Should I apologize? Our camp doesn’t have Asandir in tame residence to provide the first hand account.’
‘Then I won’t rely upon second hand words.’ Still squared off with the healer, Arithon cracked, ‘Have you a stock of dried seer’s weed, instead?’ Which bruising effrontery killed the one-sided discussion since none cared to broach the indelicate question of whether his mastery was versed to handle the herb’s lethal after-shock. Vindictive, the healer rifled her stores and fulfilled his upstart request.
In the turbulent wake of the royal departure, the young empath straightened up the rumpled cot while the nettled herbalist tidied up her corked flasks and stacked her strewn packets of remedies. She slammed her box shut, then collapsed on the lid, limp with effusive relief. ‘Ath spare me the temper of Torbrand’s descent!’
Her associate chuckled. ‘On that count, at least, the tales of the grandmothers weren’t coloured by fancy?’
The jaundiced healer huffed, then raked back the lank hair pasted to her craggy temples. ‘I’d rather wrestle an angry cobra! The drastic exploits his Grace used to fight the oppression of Avenor’s s’Ilessid pretender ought to have lent us fair warning. Convalescent, in those days, that fettlesome s’Ffalenn bastard singed everyone to murderous fits and raised hackles.’
‘Best to save your sympathy for our harangued council,’ the seer soothed, which summed up her black sentiment exactly.
Fair weather stiffened the fresh breeze that raked the hidden encampment where the patrol scouts took pause to survey the problem that strapped their resources. Aware they sheltered two dangerous state prisoners, now they must rise to meet the catastrophic imperative and provide sanctuary to hunted royalty. Arithon measured their limited assets: a meager handful of oiled-hide tents hidden under the loom of the older-growth forest, where Caithwood’s silvery towers of beech and ancient oak rose out of the low ground expanse of the river flats. The lace-worked vault of winter’s shorn branches threw mottled shade over the site, selected for fast retreat and quite useless for defensible cover.
