recognized everything he scried, not according to type, but in Name, that
unique understanding of every object's individuality. He held the signature
of each plant, from the seed that had thrown up its first sprout, to the days of
sunlight and storms that marked its growth, to the twigs and every turned
leaf ever shed by the grown tree. One oak he would know from every other
oak, living or decayed or unsown, on the basis of just one glance. Stresses,
disease or the robustness of perfect health were delineated plainly to his eye.
He knew frost crystals, not as frozen water, but as single and separate
patterns in all of their myriad billions. Their Names were as visible to him as
signatures. He knew the pebbles of the dry water course, each and every one
by touch, and the tangles of bundled energies that signified each grain of
sand. The detail, the sheer magnitude of caring such depth of perspective
demanded, dwarfed the watching spirit.
    Arithon found himself weeping. Not only for himself, and the deadness of
his senses, but for the beauty of common weeds, and the unendurable
complexity of the shed husk of a beetle's wing. He saw again, through finer
eyes, the resonance of Paravian presence, and saw also that the coarseness in
a clod of horse dung was held into balance by the same singing bands of pure
energy. In Asandir's pass across the ruins of Ithamon, Arithon realized just
how shallow was his own knowledge, and how inadequate. In punishing
clarity, he understood the scope of just what he had abandoned when he had
left Rauven, and yielded himself to another will, another fate, another
calling; now, most bitterly, the loss would repeat arid compound, as he
assumed a second unwanted crown.
     Then Asandir closed down his field of concentration. Released from that
 terrible mirror of truth that embodied a Fellowship mage's awareness,
 Arithon came back to himself and recalled the dangers that had prompted
 the search.
     For all its awesome depth, the scrying disappointed. Tumbled stonework
 had harboured nothing untoward, only the mindless tenacity of lichens
 living dormant under the mantle of winter night. The sorcerer had unreeled
 his probe past the city's edge, across untold miles of Daon Ramon's heart-
 land, but no sign had he encountered anywhere of those aspects of Desh-
 thiere that had launched attack with such startling virulence.
     No movement could be found but the flight of night-hunting owls; no
 death beyond the grass roots grazed by hares; no sound but the play of wind
 through dry brush. The Mistwraith's fog was just that- mist coiled cold in
 the hollows, lifelessly damp and inert.
     Asandir snapped off the last of his vision in a curtness born of frustration. 'I
 cannot find it.' His voice held a scraped edge of pain, not for humiliation that
 his resource seemed short for the task, but for failure and heartsore apology,
 that the Fellowship's oversight had imperilled two princes whose safety
 was his charge to secure.
     'But how can that be?' Dakar cried, his hands too cramped to pick up the
 spoon to stir the stewpot.

273


    And Arithon wondered the same. The arts of grand conjury were
wrought from the force that quickened the universe. Asandir's vision had
but confirmed Rauven's teaching: that all things were formed of energy,
arrangements of bundled light that were subject to natural law. The
awareness of this truth, defined to absolute perfection, granted the mage-
trained their influence. To know a thing, to encompass its full measure in
respect was to hold its secrets in mastery. Life-force was the basis of all
power; as a confluence of collective entities, Desh-thiere's consciousness
should have been vividly plain. That its nature could in any way stay
hidden seemed outside of sane comprehension.
    To anyone trained to the subtleties of power, it felt as if an evil of
unknown proportions had sown chaos across the fabric of natural order.
    His plaintiveness a mask for desperation, Dakar said, 'What in Athera
could escape the vigilance of the Seven?'
    'Nothing of Athera.' Arithon shifted gaze to the sorcerer, his earlier
antagonism set in abeyance. 'I was blind to the Mistwraith's aspects also,
until the moment they chose to attack.'
    Asandir stirred. 'Neither strands nor seer can read Desh-thiere, only its
effects. That this trait may also apply to the moment we know as the
present is dangerous enough, but pursuit of the reason must wait. My first
concern stems from need to build sound defences, that our efforts don't call
down some worse threat.'
    Dakar watched, afraid to move, as Fellowship mage and s'Ffalenn prince
shared a deep understanding. Jolted to fey sight by the combined effects of
exhaustion and fear and disillusion, for a split second, Dakar perceived the
scintillant brilliance of Asandir's being in mirmr-image, alike except in
dimension to the pattern that was Arithon.
    Then the trickster play of firelight and the fusty smell of drying wool
over-rode the spellbinder's fickle talent. The tableau shrank back to the
unremarkable: a careworn, weatherbeaten old man in a rumpled mantle
bent over a younger one left limp and tired.
    To the Master so narrowly delivered from the malice of the Mistwraith
he had pledged to subdue, Asandir said, 'Sleep. Let the problem bide in my
hands until morning.'
    A gentle edge of spellcraft laced the words. Calm to a depth that
transcended pity, Asandir waited for the prince he had betrayed to sort his
feelings. Although the offering of serene rest might have been rebuffed by a
thought, Arithon capitulated with a gratitude that gave the sorcerer
startled pause. Despite the new depths of yearning unveiled through
tonight's shared scrying, no grudge remained in this prince who had been
shackled in guilt to a fate he had not wanted. The very s'Ffalenn
compassion that sealed the trap in the end prevailed to bring absolution.
The wounding begun in Caith-al-Caen, that no effort at indifference might
heal, would be carried into kingship in selfless silence.
  Humbled by a forgiveness he had never expected to receive, Asandir

274


stood stunned and still. Then he smiled as if touched by light, reached out
with hands that could wring raw force from bedrock, and in a visible effort
not to fumble, rearranged the blankets around the Master of Shadow. He
tucked the musician's fingers with their contradictory scars and callouses
into the warmth of dry wool and set a binding of peace upon his handiwork.
    When at length he straightened to address his apprentice, his face had
assumed the bleakness of glacier-scarred granite. 'We have a full night
ahead. Lysaer had none of his half-brother's protections, and we must not
presume him unharmed. Luhaine has been called to our aid. Kharadmon is
already back at Althain, since Sethvir believes our princes' encounter
could key insight into how Traithe came to be crippled. If we cannot
unmask the nature of the enemy, we must determine what lets it slip at
will through any but Paravian safe-wards. Otherwise, there can be no
restored sun, for we'll have no means to contain the part of Desh-thiere
that is spirit.'
    From his refuge on a bench by the settle, Dakar caught the poker from its
peg. Clumsy in movement, his stocky calves dangling above the floor, he
leaned to stir up the fire. The fact he had neglected to mind the supper-pot
this once in his life did not irk him. 'If the thing is alive,' he surmised in
reference to the Mistwraith, 'we cannot follow through and kill it, can we?'
    'If it is alive,' Asandir corrected, impatient as if drawn on wire. 'If the
life-forces we witnessed were not born of illusion, if it is a being or beings
embodied into mist, think, Dakar. We let our princes "kill" it, reduce its
confining vessel of fog, what then will be left?'
    Hunched as a terrified child, the poker dangling from deadened hands,
Dakar whispered, 'Pure spirit. Ath's mercy, we'd actually be setting the
thing free.'
    'So I fear, my prophet,' Asandir allowed. 'If, like our disembodied
colleagues of the Fellowship, the creature as unfettered spirit could shift
its vibration and continue to manifest in this world, so I most desperately
fear.' He followed with swift instructions that called for another trip out
into the inclement night to set more wards of guard over the inner citadel.
    Dakar glared at the stewpot, and the hot supper that must, of necessity,
be eaten in savourless haste. With his chin cupped in his hands, and the
ratty muffler he felt too chilled to shed trailing in twists about his ankles,
he looked morose as a vagabond evicted from an alehouse. 'Now why
couldn't I have chosen to be a tinker?' he demanded of the leaping fire.
'Fixing holed pots would be better fun than banishment of invisible ghosts
at night in a wind-plagued min.'
    'I agree,' snapped Asandir. 'Now get moving.' Crisper than a whipcrack,
the sorcerer stepped to where Lysaer lay under tidy heaps of blankets. 'If
we don't make certain this prince took no hurt from Desh-thiere, the leaky
pots in this land aren't going to matter very much.'

275


Backsearch

The blizzard whirled in off the Bittern Desert, and eddied snow through the
casement fanned a diamond dusting of ice across the carpet in Althain
Tower's copy chamber. Sethvir's ink-pots had frozen with their quills
stuck fast where they stood; yet the sorcerer appeared not to care. Clad in
rumpled robes, his hair raked into tufts like some itinerant roadside
fortune-teller's where he had savaged it with his knuckles, he glared at the
dregs in his tea mug, cooled now to a mush of bitter leaves. As though the
turnings of the world could indeed be read in the floating debris, he
addressed a chamber that appeared to hold only books. 'The damage, if that
broad a term can apply to an attack of such focused proportion, has already
been done.'
    Kharadmon's voice replied out of empty air, near a hearth heaped with
ash that had not been raked since Asandir's departure. 'But then the
disturbance left by the Mistwraith's meddling should be obvious. To wit, a
contradiction: Luhaine and Asandir found nothing amiss with Prince
Lysaer.'
    'They checked in depth, I know,' Sethvir said, brusque since the past
night's report from Ithamon left him frustrated. Barring self growth and
maturation of character, Lysaer was, spirit and flesh, the same young man
who had entered Athera through West Gate.
    The Warden of Airhain cocked his wrist, idly swirling his tea leaves as if
the point in debate were not dire, and demanding of his closest attention.
To Kharadmon, he admonished, 'You're analysing the nature of the
universe, based on one view through a keyhole.'
    'Analogies again?' Cold air swirled snowflakes across the chamber;
when embodied, Kharadmon had tended to pace, and as spirit, his
restlessness was constant. 'Which keyhole, then? Back your theory.'
 A rise of tufted eyebrows evinced Sethvir to be miff~l. 'Hunch,' he

276


corrected. He set the tea mug aside with contradictory care; as if soggy
herbs could change nature at whim, and become brittle and subject to
shatter. 'My keyhole is present time, and Traithe's plight should bear out
my conjecture.' His inkstained fingers cupped air. An image flickered to
life as defined as a flame on a freshly lit candle. The reflected scene was not
new. Time after weary time, in strands and in fire, the Fellowship sorcerers
had reviewed the moment of South Gate's closing, and the fate of the
colleague who had single-handedly stemmed the disaster...

The porphyry pillars of South Gate reared white-edged in the static flash
of stressed energies. Weather-forces skewed out of balance and a storm-
charged sky raked the earth with lightning. Thunder' slammed and rain
sheeted like a fall of silver needles through the hellish play of light. Even
after five centuries the view could still inspire dread, as Desh-thiere
erupted through the portal between worlds. It came on, gale-driven
masses of fog like the boiled over brew from a witch' s cauldron. Toward
the streaming influx at the gate, a lone figure ploughed its way forward:
Traithe, fighting a cyclone of disturbed air that twisted his robes, and
harried his progress to a standstill...

There the image poised, with Traithe's face obscured behind the wind-
flagged fabric of his sleeve. One hand raked out to fend off what seemed
empty air, or perhaps a questing tendril of mist. Even locked against
motion, the recalled moment from the past was confused by the violent
extremes of the light.
    'We interpreted the turbulence as wind-shear,' Sethvir murmured,
'caused by the current through the gate. Now, I think differently.'
    'An attack by Desh-thiere?' Kharadmon's stillness was telling. 'The
vortex centres upon Traithe, true enough, but its content is no more than
mist. Sentient life force is nowhere in evidence.'
    'Apparently.' Sethvir loosed his binding, and the vision continued
forward once again. The sting of its following sequence hurt no less, for
being a foregone conclusion...

The revealing sleeve cracked away as Traithe raised his hands. His
expression no longer reflected the calm of a sorcerer in control of his craft,
but revealed a man in abject agony. Thunder reverberated, cut through by
his scream as storm and mist tightened down into a whirlwind that
battered him to his knees. He rallied in an extremity of effort. Power
answered. Raw, white and wild as elemental lightning, it stabbed down
at his call, wrapping like light-jagged w~re around his wrists and arms. It
flowed un trammelled in to his em brace, flowering in to dazzling brilliance

277


that slapped the eyes like a nova, blinding, impenetrable and dedicated to
ruin. The Mistwraith recoiled, radiant with an afterglowof live charge. Its
coils rolled back and separated, to lay bare the pearlescent span of South
Gate. During the moment while its invading flow was interrupted a
charred figure in spark-shot robes dragged itself up from prostration. It
raised hands seared with burns and traced a seal of binding upon the air.
Broken with agony, Traithe croaked out the Names that comprised the
chant of ending. And like a sling cord released from great tension, spells
sheared asunder; the webwork of time bonds and energies that enabled
South Gate as a grand portal parted like singed silk, and dissipated.
    The Mistwraith's connection was severed, its vapours denied further
invasion. Rain lashed across the soil between the dead gate. It pocked
light-edged arrows in the puddles that interlaced into streamlets of runoff.
Tr aithe remained, a cramped silhouette that could have passed for a pile of
discarded rags, but for the fact that he wept with the deep, shaking sobs a
child might utter in pain and terror.

Again the image paused; and like a file scraping rust from old steel, Sethvir's
commentary resumed.
    'What if the backlash that maimed Traithe was not the mishandling of
grand conjury we first supposed? By intent, our colleague may have caused
his own binding to be grounded through his flesh. The sacrifice makes sense,
if in desperation, he sought to burn out an incursion of the enemy.'
    Cryptic as always, and now on the far side of the chamber, Kharadmon
said, 'You suggest Desh-thiere's aspects besieged his mind.'
    'Yes. Traithe opened himself to its essence, to find its Name, and gain
ascendancy over it. He should not have been vulnerable, unless the beings
he sounded were out of phase from our time sense, removed from our
present a half-step into the future.'
    Kharadmon seized the logical progression. 'Traithe would naturally raise
wards. But his countermeasure perforce would have been a fatal fraction too
slow, perpetually behind the leading edge of Desh-thiere's attack.'
    'So I surmise.' Sethvir stared at the space where the spirit of his colleague
now rested. Neither of them spoke the painful truth, that to know a true
Name in all of its individual ramifications was to hold power to unmake its
being. Paradox, and at times cruellest irony, that mages who survived to gain
such depths of wisdom were disbarred by understanding of the universe
from use of the spells of Unbinding.
    Sethvir fixed again on the image he had raised from five hundred years past
and resumed the dropped thread of conversation. 'I postulate that Traithe
seared away half of his awareness, truncated his own vision by blasting it out
with raw power, that Desh-thiere could be stopped from enslaving him. He
burned it out as a hill-warrior might hack off a limb with a septic wound, by
his own hand rendering himself crippled.'

278


    Traithe had lost memory in the process, and the greater vision that
founded his faculties, and all trace of the Name of the being that had
brought him to the brink of total min.
    In a pass made savage by sorrow, Sethvir waved away his conjured image.
'We are warned too late. Last night in Ithamon, Desh-thiere's aspects did
not challenge Asandir's wards. Neither did they retreat; they simply
passed elsewhen. Into another time. That implies their purpose was
complete. My guess is our Teir's'Ilessid shows no sign of disparate change
because the moment when tonight's damage shall manifest is still yet to
come, and of a surety chosen most carefully.'
    'Arithon's coronation in Etarra,' Kharadmon summed up grimly. 'It will
be there. Desh-thiere's intervention caused the strands to converge with-
out digression.'
    Ferociously grim, all without words, Sethvir and Kharadmon shared
their night's surmises: that if Desh-thiere's aspects were advanced enough
to slip the constraints of time, the Fellowship as it stood could do little
more than bind temporary wards against recurrence.
    'A bit like closing the barn door after the cattle have been raided,'
Kharadmon raged, and snowflakes Whirled like dustdevils from one side of
the carpet to the other.
    'Restored back to Seven, we could resolve this.' Sethvir sighed. As papers
and parchments started to flap and whirl across the disarray of his writing
table, he grabbed frozen ink-pots and pressed them into service as
paperweights. 'Either still yourself, or stop the natural wind by closing the
casement. My belongings cannot handle both at once.' Sorrowfully mild,
the Warden of Althain added, 'We are as ants, scurrying in vain to stay a
rock slide. You know that if we are ever to see an end to this threat, the
coronation at Etarra must be permitted to run its disastrous course.'
    'I was aware, and wondering why rats and Dakar's prophecies were ever
let into Ath's creation.' The casement swung closed with a bang and brass
latches snicked into their settings. Left ringing across windless silence was
Kharadmon's sardonic parting statement. 'Like the raven in advance of the
war, I go to call Traithe to the bloodletting.'

279


Dispatch

The fenlands of southeast Tysan were a deserted and miserable wilderness
to be caught in a snowfall, on the shortened days past solstice. On foot in
the mire, deep in a thicket of leafless willows and marsh maples, Elaira
braced an arm on her mare's steaming shoulder. She scraped ice from a lock
of hair that had escaped her hood, while flakes flecked with sleet whirled
and rattled across frozen pools and the stalks of last seasoh's cattails.
Called away by Morriel's summons from the Koriani hostel by Hanshire,
she had avoided the trade roads along the coast. The Prime Circle by this
season would have resettied in winter quarters near Mainmere, where a
mined fortress deserted since the fall of the high kings of Havish
overlooked the coast. The southern pass through Tornir Peaks offered the
safest route, since the marshes and sink-pools that edged the high country
were too sparsely settled to interest the headhunters who ranged through
Korias and Taerlin seeking Caithwood's clansmen as trophies.
    However more secure the boglands might be, amenities for travellers
were nonexistent. The mare had cast a shoe in sucking mud, and if she
were to escape going sore on the rockier ground in the highlands, Elaira was
obliged to find a smith.
    'As if any right-thinking craftsman would choose to keep shop in a
swamp,' she complained to the sedges that hooked her ankles, and her only
live companion, the horse. The bay nosed her h~od, her breath a warm
cloud in the damp.
    'Why couldn't you rip off your shoe in the drifter's country?' The
enchantress squelched over a hummock. 'Better horsemen aren't born in
Athera. Here, we'll be lucky to find a trapper who knows how to work
iron.'
    The mare stamped, and the skin of frozen water overtop of oozing mud
chinked like shattered glazing over the knees of the oak roots.

280


    'All right, we'll go on, then.' Elaira picked her way to the next hummock
without any thought to remount. Footing was chancy in the fens, where
falling snow and fog could blend with Desh-thiere's mist and turn
visibility to a wall of featureless white. A traveller could stray from the
trail between one step and the next and stay lost, to die of starvation or
drowning. Sometimes old bones resurfaced in the sink-holes, clean-picked
by scavenger fish.
    Elaira slogged through a hollow, her boots already sodden from the iced-
over, peat-brown puddles that never quite managed to take her weight. The
cold was so bitter it hurt. To take her mind off discomfort, she noted the
plants as she passed: the fibrous, half-rotted stems of marshmallow and
sword-blade stands of cattails. Her mind catalogued them all, from the
renwort whose berries brewed poison, to the cailcallow and willow bark
valued to ease fevers. She saw through winter's sere mantle where
watercress would flourish and which hollows, clear of snow, held
hotsprings that might harbour green felscrine. Healing herbs were part and
parcel of Koriani learning, and lately Elaira had devoted herself to
memorizing tedious recipes for tisanes.
    As if with the annals of granny-lore and crumbled texts passed down by
generations of dead herbalists she might help to bury the memory of one
inopportune encounter in a tavern hayloft.
    So intense was her concentration, and accustomed as she had become to
the startling, raucous calls of marsh pheasants and the whirr of their
wingbeats as they flew from her step, that she failed to notice the children
until they were nearly upon her.
    A motley band of seven, they were flying across the frozen streambeds
on skates, clad in the same buff and browns as any other native creature of
the fens. Yelling, screaming for pure pleasure, they raced and jostled
through the stands of willow and mudbrake, until the mare shied back
from their exuberance.
    The snort of a horse where strangers seldom passed startled them. Heads
turned, half-seen through the stands of silver-barked, vine-choked maple;
then a chickadee's trill cried warning. Their play ended in a scraping slide
of bone runners as they whirled into hiding behind the thickets, hushing
the youngest, who was frightened and starting to cry.
    'It's all right!' Elaira's call raised no echo across what now seemed empty
marsh. The pools lay pewter-grey against peat-black verges and the snow
like salt-rime on the hummocks; the sleet had let up to a whisper. Through
streaming shreds of mist, even the sedges did not rustle. 'I won't harm any
of you. I don't even carry a weapon.'
    'Show us,' shouted a boy whose voice had just finished changing. 'Throw
off your cloak.'
    Elaira swore under her breath. Wet as she was, the cold would cut
through to her skin. She unhooked her ring brooch and shed the heavy
wool, in time to get a drenching as the ungrateful mare shook her mane.

281


    The enchantress wore no belt beyond a sash of knotted wool. The only
metals on her were three talisman buttons fashioned of copper coins,
charms she still wore out of sentiment from her days as a street thief, for
luck; and the hunting knife last used to strip branches for snares that
most maddeningly had trapped nothing. Yesterday's supperpot had stayed
empty.
 'Turn around,' said the boy.
    Elaira held her arms outstretched, and did so, though briars caught at
her clothing. 'I could use a dry place to sleep, and fresh supplies.' Fighting
a shiver that made her teeth chatter, she added, 'I can pay.'
    Around her, the children had begun to creep from concealment. They
ranged in age from ten years, to late teens, the bloom on their cheeks the
only bright colour about them. Their clothing was fashioned of leather,
small furs stitched together, and the woven fibres of fenland flax, all
undyed. If most of them were dirty, their hair was brushed or braided, and
each one carried little talismans of feathers, believed to be ward against
drowning. Elaira threw on her cloak, which had fully had time to grow
cold. She confronted a closing ring of wide, curious eyes, and said, 'Of
course, you do have a village.~'
    They led her off the trail, their shyness loosening into chatter. By their
accent, Elaira guessed them to be descendants of farmers displaced by the
rebellion; survivors sometimes banded with exiles, outcast from the
coastal settlements for some petty misdeed committed forgotten genera-
tions in the past. Refuge could be found in the fens, or the mountains, or
the wilds too open or too barren to support the more numerous clanborn.
Forage in such backlands was scarce and the trust of the inhabitants
reserved~ yet they understood the grace of hospitality more than rich
families in the towns. By the time Elaira had reached the circle of huts
built of mud-brick and thatch, her mare carried two boys and a girl, all
solemnly trying in their excitement not to spur the beast who bore them
with the bone-bladed runners of their skates.
    'Traveller!' shouted the oldest boy, and out of the huts came the fen-
folk.
    Reed-thin, gnarled as swamp roots, they looked unremittingly dour.
Their generosity was not. Like their young ones, they made Elaira
welcome once assured she was unarmed. Within an hour, her mare was
settled in a pen of woven withies, and she, blessedly bathed and dry, sat
before a peat fire sipping tea brewed from plants she had heretofore torn
clothes on. The children stayed clustered around her, asking questions
and staking buttons on the game of knucklebones she had taught them.
Too young to be fascinated by gambling, the youngest squatted on the
furs at her feet, picking up the unlaced ends of her bootlaces, and trying to
stuff them in his mouth.
    'Come away.' Elaira reached down through the press to raise the baby
clear of temptation. 'I don't think the mud will help the taste.'

282


The thwarted child shrieked. His noise did nothing to obscure another,
louder scream, this one issuing from outside.
    Elaira startled to her feet. The cry repeated, now identifiably the voice of
the hut matron, gone out at dusk to haul in fresh water for the stewpot.
    Elaira set the boy child aside on the stool, while the others ran like rabbits
into the crannies between tied coils of basket reed. Trouble was no stranger
to them, and even the little ones did not whimper. Grasping the crystal that
hung at her neck, the enchantress leaped over the boys' abandoned
knucklebones and burst out into icy winter air.
    There she poised. Behind her, the hut door creaked closed on leather
hinges. While the slush slowly numbed her dry toes, she struggled to
fathom the source of the trouble. For off in the fens where the springs rose
warm from the ground, the woman still screamed, wrenchingly, piercingly
panic stricken.
    The sleet had stopped; the wind smelled oddly sharp. Elaira blinked. Her
eyesight was all wrong.
    The shadows lay everywhere, crisp as knives and too blue. The diamond
whiteness of the drifts hurt the eyes. Against them, reeds and winter-
stripped thickets seemed to leap out, starkly honed as sword-edges. Maples,
swamp-oaks and willows showed their details in unnatural sharpness, their
top branches delineated like entangled skeins or blown ink. Elaira gulped a
quickened breath. The mist had gone. Vanished. Around her, the night was
fogless and bright. The spell crystal slipped forgotten from her fingers as she
tipped her head, wondering, to view the sky.
    There, between the black frames of bare branches, for the first time in life
she saw stars: more beautiful than Morriel's diamonds, adrift in an indigo
field that looked deep and vast as forever. Elaira was swept by a primal shiver
of elation that transformed to a pealing shout of joy. 'They've done it! Bless
the blood royal of Athera, the West Gate Prophecy is accomplished! Come
out and look! Desh-thiere is beaten to retreat!'
    But the door to every wattle and mud hut stayed fast shut. Elaira's
wonderment was rudely knocked short as the howling, terrorstruck fen-
wife clawed past ~n a head~long dash to reach safety.
    Elaira picked herself out of the mud in resignation. The rank smell of
swamp was an offence she would not be escaping for some while yet to come.
Disenchantment still could not touch her. Euphoria and the undreamed of
beauty in the sky lent her boundless capacity to forgive. The soft, silvery
light that limned the fens was a wonder, more miracle than magic, less
substantive than breath. Elaira's honest nature could not shirk the truth: if
not for Asandir's gift of trust, and without her privileged access to Koriani
archives she would have been as ignorant of the sky behind Desh-thiere as
these fenlanders who cowered in abject terror.
    For the rest of the evening she tried to make amends. She rescued stew-
pots from burning to char over abandoned fires; she wore herself hoarse
cajoling the fen-folk out from under blankets or barricades of upended

283


furniture thrown hastily against doorways and root cellars. She used her
crystal, set seals of peace and of calm until her fingers ached from making
sigils in the air with the precision an enchanter's art required. Her success
at such efforts was debatable. The settlement's headman found solace in a
pottery jar of crude spirits, while one elderly grandmother continued to
shriek and weep obscenities from under a mountain of bedclothes.
Grateful to be spared from the wider-spread bedlam that must have
afflicted the towns, Elaira finally yielded to weariness and answered her
own need for quiet.
    She threw on her cloak. Outside, in solitude, she stared at the miracle of
unveiled stars in an amazement that renewed with each passing moment.
    The deep-bound silence of the fenlands that always before had oppressed
her, now invited exploration of new mystery. Trees looked different,
dappled in subliminal shadow and the fine-spun subtleties of starlight. Ice
looked more silver than grey, and hollows soft in their shadows as rich
men's velvets. The amazing acuity of outdoor vision she absorbed in sheer
delight. Other avenues of thought she forbade through brute force of will.
    Discipline like iron let her look upon beauty and never once con-
template a desolate site in Daon Ramon, where a black-haired prince
laboured with his half-brother to bring such a miracle to pass. Morriel's
warning was serious, and had in sober fear been taken to heart. For whole
days, Elaira had succeeded in allowing no chink for regret. She prided
herself on unshaken performance through this supreme test, of bared skies
and her first sight of stars.
    She trembled, excited to imagine how untrammelled sunlight was going
to look. Envy did not sting her as she realized that those sister initiates
assigned the quieter duty of lane watch most likely already knew. Elaira
wrapped her hands in her leathers. Contented despite cold and loneliness
and the desolation of the marsh by midnight, she awaited the advent of
dawn.
    During that hardwon moment of balance, the message from the First
Senior reached her. It smote her through the pulse of the second lane
energies, and its directive shattered all peace:

'To Elaira, revised orders from the Prime Enchantress: upon the Mist-
wraith ' s defeat at Ithamon, the Fellowship of Seven has plans to arrange
the high king's coronation at Etarra. You are commanded to journey
there, to bring back for Koriani scrutiny your most intimate insights into
the royal princes' characters.'

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Guard, Ward and Bard

The gusts that sweep the broken outer walls of Ithamon join force with a
second current, not natural, that twists the dead grasses and kicks up dry
leaves in drifts; looking to the eye like a wind devil, the discorporate
sorcerer Luhaine lays wards against Desh-thiere that cut across time as
well as worldly dimension...

When sunlight breaks finally over Havistock, the sorcerer Traithe takes
his leave of the craftsman who stands as fosterparent to the growing heir to
Havish: 'Prince Eldir will assume his inheritance after Rathain's succes-
sion has been settled in Etarra. But let us be clear that until then, his
studies continue. He is not to be excused from the dyevats...'

North, in the town of Ward, under skies still greyed by Desh-thiere's mists,
an elderly bard contains bitter disappointment as he rips down the message
posted in bright hope the day before: 'Auditions for an apprenticeship to be
held, beginning the following noon. Apply to Halliron at the tap in the
Straw Cock Tavern...'

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XII. CONQUEST

The change in season brought buffeting winds to Daon Ramon Barrens,
even as every spring had before the loss of sunlight to the mist. In past
years, turbulent gusts mingled the fragrances of wildflowers and
sweetgrass that mantled the backs of the greening hills. Unicorns had
rejoiced with the quickening earth. But that had been before man's
meddling had diverted the Severnit's waters from their natural course,
Asandir reminisced as he stood vigil under the lichened span of Ithamon's
wrecked southern gate. The valleys outside were robbed of their carpet of
flowers. Saddened by the taint of mould and rot that Desh-thiere's hold had
lent to the seasonal breezes, the sorcerer trained his mage's perception
upon the land until physical form became overlaid by the vision of his
innermind. Before him all things stood revealed in primal patterns of light.
    Beyond the imbalance marked upon the landscape by centuries of
warped weather, he sensed something else; a more subtle wrongness, built
of pent expectation and a near to subliminal tingle, as if between air and
the solidity of the earth, violence lay coiled in ambush. Asandir delved
deeper. The anomaly faded before his probe, eluded him so thoroughly that
for a moment he stood disoriented, unsure if he had chased some spectre of
his own uncertain thoughts.
    He released his focus, frustrated. His feet were clammy in dew that
natural sunlight would long since have burnished dry. Asandir sucked in a
deep breath. His fears loomed real enough, perhaps, to corrupt even true
seeing. And yet he remained unconvinced that the sick things half-sensed
between the shimmer of life-force were phantoms inferred by apprehen-
sion.
    This day began the chain of events that must culminate in a s'Ffalenn
king's coronation at Etarra. During the next hours, and spanning the
course of several weeks to follow, Desh-thiere's meddling would skew the

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world's fate beyond reach of augury or strands to reflect any certain
outcome. With luck and persistence, these hills could be restored to their
former fairness. Yet although the moment had come to complete the
Mistwraith's defeat, Asandir remained grim. Contrary to nature, his cloak
hung in straight folds off his shoulders: winds that should have whipped in
off the downs to strafe the mined wall walks were this moment quelled by
a barrier ward fashioned by his discorporate colleagues. When complete,
the spell worked by Luhaine and Kharadmon would be a masterwork that
twisted even time to subservience.
    A catspaw of air through the archway sent a dry leaf scratching. Aware
the disturbance marked an arrival, Asandir drew breath and addressed,
'Ithamon is secure.~'
    Kharadmon replied from the mist-murky shadows, a sulky note to his
tone. 'Luhaine's not satisfied.' A pause ensued. 'There's clear sunlight not
a dozen yards above the mists at the outer walls.'
    Asandir flicked back damp cuffs to chafe blood back into cool hands. 'So
Lysaer said. He sensed as much through his gift. That excited him to the
point where he took himself off to practice sword forms. Dakar is still
finishing the breakfast the others were too tense to eat.'
    Amid stillness, and a chill that gripped more than cracked stonework,
Kharadmon's amusement whetted to anticipation. 'You want your appre-
ntice rousted from his comforts?'
    'Not by your methods, ghost.' In a lighter moment, Asandir might have
chuckled. 'I've no patience today for soothing prophets with bruised
dignity, particularly one griped by a bellyache brought on through
overindulgence.'
    'And Arithon?' The discorporate sorcerer's sarcasm blurred in reverbera-
tion through the gateway.
    Asandir broke his pose of quietude and strode up the vine-tangled
avenue that led to the inner citadel. Ahead of his step, leaves rustled in a
burst of agitation as an iyat skulked out of his path. 'Right now, the
Shadow Master's tuning his lyranthe with an intensity better suited to a
man whetting steel for bloody vengeance. You're welcome to provoke that
one by yourself.'
    Kharadmon barked a laugh and kept pace, an unseen flow of cold air. 'A
formidable weapon, Elshian's lyranthe.'
    'In Arithon's hands, not just yet,' Asandir snapped. Then he sighed.
'You've caught me as testy as Luhaine, this morning.' But the wards by
themselves were enough to have done so, without Kharadmon's provoca-
tion. Since the effectiveness of any arcane defence stemmed from Name,
no spell could perfectly thwart what lay outside of the grasp of true seeing~
to balk an essence wrought of mist and multifaceted sentience posed a
nearly impossible task, like trying to fence darkness with sticks. Despite
the combined efforts of four sorcerers, Asandir could not shake a sense of
helplessness. The strands had augered for failure. The strongest of conjured

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defences might well prove inadequate to contain Desh-thiere's many
entities. Its mist might be confined and Athera's weather restored only if
nothing went wrong; only if the princes who centred the hope of two vital
prophecies could be protected through the wraiths' final binding.
    Not so preoccupied as he seemed as he picked steps over fragmented
friezework, Asandir pursued the topic sidelined earlier by his colleague.
'Luhaine's not satisfied, you say.'
    Cold air became a snap of frigid wind near in vehemence to an oath as
Kharadmon said, 'Last I saw, Luhaine was upending rocks in the river-
course and rousting up salamanders in droves.'
    'Would that were all,' cracked a rejoinder from the entity Kharadmon's
blithe tones just maligned. Arrived in time to defend himself, Luhaine said
indignantly to Asandir, 'We can't make a ward to plug every Ath-forsaken
bolt-hole in the earth!'
    'Meaning?' Asandir frowned toward the matrix of energies that mage-
sight picked out as the essence of the spirit he addressed.
    If Luhaine intended answer, Kharadmon stole the initiative. 'Even
spread over three acres, Desh-thiere's concentration of malice is the most
powerful threat we've ever handled. To pare it down further will add to its
unpredictability. What happens when the princes cut it to a scrap, a
shadow, small enough to scatter and hide?'
    Asandir spoke the unpleasant thought outright. 'Nameless, it cannot be
traced.' His mouth thinned. 'Find another choice, I'd embrace it.'
    Kharadmon returned no glib comment. Luhaine lost his inclination to
expound upon the nuance of every risk. Today, and until the upheaval
augered for the time of Arithon's coronation, perils could not be avoided.
All things, including lives, must be considered expendable, except one: the
continuance of the great mystery imbued in earthly form, the survival of
the Paravian races. The silence of Asandir's discorporate colleagues
stretched the more ominous, in the absence of the seasonal winds.

The battlement atop Kieling Tower stayed wrapped in the same dire
stillness when Asandir took stance alongside his discorporate colleagues.
Voices echoed from a stairwell near his feet: Lysaer's, raised in some
jocular quip, and Dakar's reply, hotly truculent.
    'First, they don't have telir brandy in Etarra. Mention spirits distilled
from fruits that the mist has turned sour for centuries, and the governor's
minister of justice will howl, then see you staked through the arse. They're
hysterically scared of hearing legends.' Dakar paused to puff. The stair was
very long and steep. Still bitter, he added, 'Sorcerers are regarded even
worse. Admit you ever saw one, and they'll roast you whole without a
hearing. l'm bored of this wasteland as you are, but damned if I'm eager to
rush on to that stew of corruption and prejudice!'
 'Well then,' said Lysaer, stubbornly and spiritedly agreeable, 'when

289


Desh-thiere is vanquished, and we get there anyway, I'll buy the beer till
you're passed out in your cups.'
    'You can try.' Dakar's tousled head emerged into the mist, twisted aside
for rejoinder down the stairwell. 'First, when it comes to knocking back
drink, I'll have you under the table, prince. Next, Etarrans don't brew beer
worth pissing. They like gin, from which half the populace gets headaches.
You'll find their governor's council badtempered.'
    Lysaer trailed Dakar onto the battlement, saw his half-brother aiready
poised between merlons with his knees tucked under folded arms. He
called greeting. 'Let's hurry and set th~ last of this fog under a cork.'
    Arithon nodded absent~y, then addressed what seemed like vacant air.
'We're not going to finish this here, are we?'
    Blocked by Lysaer's shoulder, Dakar craned his neck to follow this
exchange until something unseen in between prompted a string of fervent
curses.
    Caught in the crossfire, and unconvinced that epithets which mingled
blasphemies with the properties of fresh cow dung should be rightfully
applied to his person, Lysaer said, 'I seem to be missing some point.' His
good nature remained stiffly in place as he rounded to face his tormentor.
'Could you stay the abuse until after you've explained?'
    Dakar rolled his eyes; while behind Lysaer's back the ghost-silent
images of Luhaine and Kharadmon manifested upon the battlement. Each
in their way looked inconvenienced: Luhaine's rotund figure and
schoolmasterish frown at perpetual odds with Kharadmon's cadaverous
slenderness.
    Still puzzled, Lysaer turned around again, to find himself confronted by
strange sorcerers. Only royal poise curbed his startled recoil. Creditably
courteous in rebound, he said, 'We've not been introduced, I believe.'
    Kharadtnon raised tapered fingers and flipped back his hood. Streaked
piebald locks tumbled over his caped cloak as he swept through a courtier's
bow. 'My prince, we are colleagues of the Fellowship, members in spirit
since the day that flesh suffered mishap.' And he arose, confronting Lysaer
with cat-pale eyes that studied in sardonic provocation.
    Luhaine tucked his thumbs into a belt stout enough to halter a yearling
bull. As flesh, he had always been careful to regale his portliness with
restraint; as spirit, he forwent adornment as a frivolous waste of conjury.
Against an appearance unrelentingly prim, his words seemed weighed like
insult as he said,,'The buffoon who speaks is Kharadmon, your Grace of
Tysan.'
    'Buffoon?' Kharadmon curled his lip. 'Luhaine! Can your wit be that
tired, to find you floundering for epithets?'
    'After two ages suffering your lame taste, such failing would carry no
shame.' His eyes joylessly reticent, Luhaine measured the blond prince
whose dignity made light of unpleasantness. Given Lysaer's staunchness
of character, it seemed unnatural that the strands should unremittingly

290


forecast war. Aggrieved that such beautifully trained poise might come to
be channelled toward deceit, Luhaine turned sharp. 'You think we should
get on with defeating Desh-thiere.Z' He flicked a thick finger in reproach. 'I
say it's a fool who would rush to meet danger.'
    Taken aback, Lysaer flushed. Asandir set a hand on his shoulder and
spared him from further embarrassment. 'Kharadmon and Luhaine have
worked nightlong to establish protections.' He shot a pained look at both
spirits. 'Excuse their rudeness, please. Their labours have left them
disagreeable.'
    Motionless up until now, Arithon abruptly stood. He did not speak and
Lysaer, unsmiling, found grit to ignore Kharadmo'n's challenging regard.
'Since the last attack by Desh-thiere's aspects, I thought your Fellowship
determined its hostilities couldn't be warded?'
 Asandir said in honest discomfort, 'We can't be sure.'
    Lysaer glanced at his half-brother. But Arithon stayed quiet as Luhaine
shed his disapproval to explain.
    'Permit me. What spirits the Mistwraith embodies cannot pass the
tower safewards. Should your efforts with shadow and light drive its
yapours to final extinction inside Paravian protections, the self-aware
essence would become sundered from the bounds of the fog that enshrouds
it. In brief, its wraiths would be winnowed separate, even as kernel from
chaff.' Warmed to his topic, Luhaine raised spread palms. 'After that, our
Fellowship cannot be sure whether natural death would banish such
spirits. Should the entities have ways to evade Ath's law and continue
existence as free wraiths, they might go on to possess our world's creatures
with dire and damaging results.'
    'The methuri that plague Mirthlvain Swamp were created by a similar
calamity,' Asandir pointed out. 'That might lend you perspective.'
    'Indeed yes.' Now set for a scholarly diatribe, Luhaine opened his mouth,
then caught a glare from Kharadmon. Nettled, he said, 'I must sum up.'
    Kharadmon hitched up an eyebrow. 'Do go on.' He tipped his palm in
invitation as a courtier might, to defer to a lady in a doorway.
    Luhaine stiffly turned his back and resumed with his speech to the half-
brothers. 'To counter the risk of loosing free wraiths, you must drive
Desh-thiere to captivity outside of arcane protections. The wards set over
Ithamon must serve as your bastion, and also as defence for the land in case
of mishap.'
    'Brief, did you say?' accosted Kharadmon. Despite an image that stayed
fixed in serenity as a painting, his impatience was plain as he said, 'We
waste time.'
    Unperturbed, Asandir gave the half-brothers his quiet reassurance. 'The
perils are not insurmountable. On faith, we have Dakar's prophecy, and
the strands' further augury that the Mistwraith can be conquered. Yet
there won't be satisfaction if we stall over details until sundown.' He
tipped his head at Lysaer. 'Prince?'

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    Relieved to be excused from the friction between a ghost pair of sorcerers
who deeply unsettled him anyway, Lysaer called power through his gift.
Light sheeted from his raised fist, a crackling, broad-banded flash that
shocked through the murk overhead. Desh-thiere hissed in recoil. A
backwash of steam fanned Kieling Tower, tom short as Arithon's shadow-
wrought counterthrust sliced across the breach. Dark flicked the air and
the temperature plunged. Snow flutried over the battlement, struck gold
by filtered sunlight as the mist layer seared nearly through. The heavens
moiled like dirtied water as Desh-thiere surged to choke the gap. Barriers of
wrought shadow razed it short, and ice dusted the hollow before the
crenels where the image forms of Luhaine and Kharadmon had vanished
away, unremarked.
    The half-brothers broke off the first stage assault, breathing hard; and as
always, the moment they snatched in recovery cost them.
    The mist massed in upon itself. Purple-grey and sinister as
thunderheads, Desh-thiere battened the winds in dank darkness and
settled over the patch of true sky. Lysaer's fair nature turned grim. Always
the fog became thicker and more troublesome to manage after the initial
attack. Charged to resentful revenge, grown adept at shaping his craft as a
weapon, Lysaer hammered killing power into the gloom that oppressed the
landscape.
    The grease-thick miasma above the tower flared white, then burned to
incandescence as the charge struck. Shadow ripped out in reply, and snow
crystals scoured by the gusts slashed across the exposed stone parapet. The
mists bulked denser, poisonously thick as poured oil. Lysaer's tunic
dampened with sweat, and Arithon's hair whipped to tangles against
dripping temples.
    The half-brothers fought, while morning gave way to afternoon. Slowly,
grudgingly, the Mistwraith's bounds were harried inward. Sunlight
speared down and silvered Ithamon's knoll with its interlocked stubble
of foundations. Notched battlements and broken walls drowned the next
minute under yet another countersurge of fog. Light and then shadow
punched back. Again a ragged hole appeared. Sky appeared over Kieling
Tower, besieged at once by rolling curtains of murk. Arithon cried out as
the wraith-driven mists burst his barriers. Stonework shook to a thunder-
ous report as Lysaer extended to heroic lengths to shock back the break in
the attack line.
    His light slashed into gloom that churned, congested as a blood-gorged
bruise. Shadow answered him strongly. Snowfall snatched up into
whirlwinds as stress-heated air snapped and shrieked through pocketed
blizzards of ice.
    And then a sudden and peculiar twist of change: interwoven through the
violent play of energies, something tugged subtly out of balance. Across
the concussive boom of backlash and a gale like a rising scream, Arithon
shouted to Asandir, 'We're in trouble!'                           ,

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     Less trained to nuance, Lysaer saw no cause to pinpoint. A third charge
 gathered in his hands, his sight congested by a darkness dense enough to
 suffocate, he groped to define his uneasiness. Aware of voices, but cut off
 from the others by the mist he closed his fists.
  And knew terror, for his gifted powers failed to dissipate.
     Lysaer reached to recover control but another will struggled against him:
 as if the mists had changed nature, without warning turned from a
 stubborn, resistant barrier that needed ever to be driven, into something
 repellently uncanny: a creature voracious and alive, that now fed off the
 very energies summoned to achieve its defeat. Lysaer felt the graze of
 unseen presences across his flesh. Things seemed to twist at his clothing
 and hair, while a heaviness dragged his thoughts.
    Then a surge of overweening elation displaced all trace of alarm. They
had triumphed! Desh-thiere now collapsed in a sucking rush toward
annihilation.
    A shout from Asandir ripped through that giddy unreality. Lysaer's mad
urge to crack the sky with his powers became dashed as someone's hands
snatched his wrists apart. Spell force slapped over his unshed light like
soaked woollens thrown down to douse a wildfire.
    No victory had been immanent on Kieling. Lysaer gasped in recovery.
Murk wrapped him, dank as marsh-vapours, and his body dripped sour
sweat. 'What happened?'
    'Desh-thiere!' cried Asandir above winds that keened like death angels
whetting their arrnoury of scytheblades. 'It's hurled itself into the breach
for a purpose!'
    Magelight flashed and the air cleared, or seemed to. Only a circle closed
off by some boundary of sorcery answered to Asandir's will. Beyond
Kieling's walls pressed darkness, damp and impenetrable as shroud felt.
Lysaer blinked streaming eyes. Brushed by settling snow, he not~:ced the
winds no longer buffeted his body. Instead he felt crowded by noxious
warmth the characterless temperature of shed blood. Pressured by name-
less foreboding, Lysaer braced to continue, then flinched as Asandir cruelly
tore his wrists apart again.
    Affronted by the physical handling, Lysaer tensed to strike off restraint.
Asandir met his glare, wordless, until reason displaced princely pride.
Shaken to discover how near vanity had come to eclipse his good sense,
Lysaer squared his shoulders to apologize.
    Asandir forestailed him. 'I'm not offended and you were never rude. This
Mistwraith has aspects that can tt~rn the mind, and now you are warned.
Stay guarded.'
    Upset and humiliated, Lysaer strove to pick sense out of chaos. 'The
mist flung itself on us like a suicide.'
    From across the battlement, Arithon said in a voice scraped and hoarse,
'That last assault sheared out more vapour than we ever burned away
through a half-day. I presume the damage is done?'

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'We'll see. Luhaine!' His hold still tight on Lysaer's wrists, Asandir
cracked out, 'How diminished is the radius of the fog?'
    The discorporate mage forwent his tendency to patronize. 'Only Kieling
Tower remains enveloped, which leads me to suppose we have problems. If
Desh-thiere's entities were subject to natural death, why should they rash
their destruction?'
    Kharadmon agreed. 'It's too dangerous, now, to finish outside the tower.
Whether our wards are found wanting or not, to cut the mist down on open
ground is to beg a bid for escape. These ruins offer a thousand crannies. If
the wraiths escape their bindings, they'll surely scatter and hide.'
    'That's Desh-thiere's intention, no doubt,' Luhaine snapped. 'Or
wouldn't it just lure us to take an outside stand, then make the two princes
its target?'
    'It could be attempting to do both.' Asandir looked like a man faced with
torture as his hands slackened, then at last released Lysaer. 'We have a
second choice of action.'
    'No!' cried Dakar in protest, half-forgotten where he huddled on the
sidelines. He strode to the centre of the battlement. Nose running, eyes
bloodshot, his hands bunched in fists before his chest, he bristled like a fat
banty rooster. 'You wouldn't dare sully the wards of compassion on this
tower! Merciful Ath, how could you think to disarrange the irreplaceable
work of ages, and draw evil inside these protections?'
    Asandir visibly hardened. 'I would do so, of sheer necessity.' His look
blazed back at his apprentice. 'These wards are all that can dependably
fence the Mistwraith. I will open them, and let Desh-thiere be driven
inside, and see this land safe under sunlight. For the survival of the Riathan
Paravians who sanctified this haven, you'll lend your strength to that
cause.'
Shocked, shaking, visibly afraid to hold his ground, nonetheless, Dakar
stayed stubbornly rooted.
    'Desh-thiere has three times shown us guile,' said Luhaine, his image
indistinct through the turmoil of darkness and mist. 'We could be the ones
driven, and purpose{ully, to try just such a desperate action.'
    'The risk must be taken.' Lysaer came forward. 'Of us all, I'm the least fit
to weigh risks. Yet I cannot set my life above the need to confine this
monster. Kieling's protections will not fail the land. Though we all were to
die here, sunlight for Athera would be secured.' His hair like drowned gold
in the gloom, he deferred to Asandir. 'I prefer to trust you can protect us
from the wraiths, as you did on the night my half-brother and I were
attacked.'
    That mishap had occurred well before Desh-thiere's teeming entities
had been crowded inside shrunken boundaries; yet Asandir kept dread to
himself as he switched his most merciless regard back to the Teir's'Ilessid.
'So be it, Lysaer. But let your heart not falter. When I call, you will act, and
do so without question, to the utter dregs of your strength. Your gift of light

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will partner Arithon's shadows, and burn mist until all of Desh-thiere's
entities are driven inside of ward boundaries.'
    The words and their depth of commitment struck Lysaer with strange
force and finality, as if magic would be bound to his consent. Though
wamed he must forfeit any later change of will, he scraped up a ragged
smile. 'What resources I have are freely yours.'
    Wary though he remained, Asandir showed sincere respect. 'Ath's
blessing on you, s'Ilessid prince. You do seem to understand the stakes.'
    Ever the pessimist, Luhaine said, 'Let Dakar leave the tower now, then.
Should the worst befall, someone must stay outside to guard until Sethvir
can set seals on this tower to permanently block chance of reentry.'
    'I'll get my nose sunburnt and blistered for nothing, waiting for you to
come out!' Yet in his eagerness to quit the site of conflict, Dakar tripped
over his feet in the stairwell. His peeved oaths faded with his hurried steps,
first muffled by the close-pressed mists, and finally drowned by the moan
of the eddying winds.
    Desh-thiere swathed Kieling's battlements in unremitting gloom as the
sorcerers made preparations. Kharadmon appointed himself the task of
safeguarding Lysaer. Luhaine's image dissolved also, but wearing an
acerbic expression that cautioned Arithon to restraint. Whether moved by
precocious knowledge or by edgy s'Ffalenn temperament, any attempt to
broach Fellowship guardianship would be handled with flat intolerance.
    Lysaer wiped sweating palms. Before he could imagine what arcane
alefences might demand of him, a circle of blue-white force cracked around
him. His eyes were flash-blinded and his senses tipped spinning into
vertigo. The wards set over his person by Kharadmon not only laced the
surrounding air; they invaded and flared through his most private self with
a persistence that raised primal rebellion. Lysaer felt every hair on his body
stab erect. For a horrible, drawn out moment, his mind and flesh lay
outside self-command, frozen in subjugation to another will. The un-
pleasant feeling soon faded. Mage-light no longer etched his body to
incandescence. Lysaer stretched in reaction. He flexed his hands, then his
toes, relieved to find them not locked in paralysis. Then he tried a breath,
and felt, like a spike hammered through the grain of growing wood, the
ward's immutable presence.
    He retained bodily control, but only as Kharadmon's protections
allowed.
    Moved to consternation by the scope of the strictures imposed by his
open consent, Lysaer had no chance to wonder how Arithon reconciled
such a pact. Above the moan of the wind, and through the ear-stinging
pitch of ward resonance, Asandir delivered fast instructions.
    'Once I've merged awareness with Kieling Tower's protections, I won't
be able to respond. Should trouble arise, the discorporate sorcerers who are
linked with you will sense your needs and give help as the situation
requires.' Asandir paused.

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    His eyes, light, brilliant, piercing, studied the half-brothers who, for the
cause of restored sunlight and Paravian survival were about to place body,
mind and spirit into jeopardy.
    Pressed by unspoken anxieties, Asandir added, 'I'll seek to key an opening
in the wards and signal you when that's accomplished. Engage the Mist-
wraith then. With all of your strength and will drive it inside the tower's
protections. Once the last bit of fog is drawn in, I'll reseal the wards. After
that, Luhaine and Kharadmon will strive with you to fend off Desh-thiere's
hostile entities. If Paravian spellcraft can be plumbed for inspiration, and if
forces of compassion that were created to be unconditional can be made to
yield to necessity, I'll try to fashion a containment of wardspells. With luck,
we can imprison Desh-thiere and keep this tower unsullied.' He hesitated,
then finished off, 'Hold to this through the worst: the auguries cast at
Althain Tower did not forecast any deaths here.'
    But dying was hardly the worst fate to suffer, Lysaer reflected: possession
was more to be dreaded. Kharadmon's apprehension thrummed as a deep,
subliminal tingle through his flesh. This host of mist-bound wraiths that
their party of five must incarcerate yet owned the malice that had disabled
Traithe.
    'I wish you all sure hands and good hunting.' A figure of shadow against
the charcoal toil of the fog, Asandir bent and slipped off his boots and hose.
Barefoot in the cold, he scuffed through the crust of sleet and arranged his
stance on freezing stone. Then he raised his hands. Rigidly still, his eyes a
chill vista of emptiness, he held motionless for an interval that stretched
Lysaer's nerves to the snapping point. To stave off morbid misgiving, the
prince cupped his hands and fiercely concentrated to muster back will to use
his gift.
    A concussion of air smacked his face and a high-pitched ping like pressure
cracks cold-shocked through a glacier ripped the sky. The tower seemed
rinsed in white light. Lost in a dazzle that blinded, Asandir cried out in what
could have been ecstasy or the absolute extremity of mortal pain. Then
darkness opened in the brilliance, virulently black and stonework that had
stood firm through two ages shuddered under waves of vibration.
    'Now!' screamed Asandir. The joined jasper of tower and battlement
seemed to jar into brittleness with his cry.
    Lysaer released light in a concatenation of sparks. Heated wind seared his
cheeks. Black fell, velvet-dense, then a buffet of frigid air that he attributed
to backwash from Arithon's counterthrust of shadow. Next a subliminal
purple glow bathed Lysaer's skin, driving before it a sting like a thousand
venomed needles. He struggled to breathe, to think, while Kharadmon
slapped a goad through his mind to gather his strayed wits and fight.
    Lysaer struck at the encroaching mists in bursts of force like bright
knives. He battled, though entities leered from the fog, gnashing fanged jaws
and milling through darkness to reach and then claw him down. Savaged by
the killing fields of energy demanded from his gift, Lysaer flung up latticed

296


walls of lightning. Flash-fire burned the wraiths back until his eyes were
left stunned and sightless.
 'Now! Again!' exhorted Kharadmon.
    The battlements seemed wildly to tilt. Wrong out and disoriented,
Lysaer could not tell if the stonework dissolved from beneath him, or
whether natural law still held firm. Past the ongoing blaze of the wards,
he sensed Luhaine and teamed with him, Arithon, still slamming the
Mistwraith with shadow spun frigid as the void before Ath's creation.
    Lysaer choked on a breath that was half snow. Frost bit his lungs and
kicked off an explosion of coughing. The air felt all strange, too thick and
stiff to pass his nostrils. Gust~eddied ice raked his face. He ached with a
sensation like suffocation, while Kharadmon pressed him to resume.
    Driven to expend himself through his gift until he became as a living
torch, Lysaer cried out. Charge after charge of pure light raked from him,
until his flesh felt mauled and reamed through, a bare conduit to channel
his gift. The light torn out of his centre slashed from him, a brilliance of
chiselled force that the one mote of consciousness undrowned by the
torrent recognized for the work of a stranger.
    No more than a puppet impelled by a sorcerer's whim, Lysaer felt
stripped and crushed. The darkness and vertigo that assailed him were no
longer solely the effects of spell-wards and Mistwraith. His body was
starved for breath to the point where he barely stayed conscious.
And still the light ripped from him, in crackling, searing white torrents.
His disorientation tripped off panic. While instinct screamed that he
was being immolated, consumed by a scintillant spellcraft pressured
outside of sane control, he clung in desperation to his willing consent to
the Fellowship, and the honour that bound his given oath: to battle the
Mistwraith for as long as he held to life. Yet his endurance was only mortal.
    Undercut by sharp anguish, that royal blood, and pride, and heart-felt
integrity of purpose were not enough by themselves to sustain him,
Lysaer lost grip on dignity and wept.
    And then there was no thought at all, only grey-blackness more neutral
than mist, more terrible than the dark door of death.
    A harrowing interval passed. Sound reached Lysaer in a burst like
tearing fabric. Then came voices, shouting above a roar like a millrace in
his ears.
    Vague pain resolved into bruises on shoulder, knee and cheek. Evid-
ently he had collapsed on his side, for he lay face down in thin snow. Too
shaken yet to move, Lysaer shivered. Through air that pressed down like
sulphurous smoke, voices whined and gibbered, moaning, mewling, and
countless as $ithaer's damned. It hurt to breathe; tissues of his throat and
lungs stung as if rasped by ground ice. Then hands were gripping him,
tugging him urgently to rise.
 'Get up,' cracked Asandir.

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    Wasted and haggard, the sorcerer was gratingly hoarse, as if he too, had
been screaming. Or else the powers he had engaged to reconfigure Kieling's
protections had required focus through multiple incantations.  The winds had ominously stilled again.
    Lysaer gained his knees. 'The wards,' he gasped. 'Did you open them?' As
dizziness slowly released him, he glanced about. 'My half-brother. Is he all
right ?'
  'Over there.' Asandir pointed.
    Arithon rested a short distance off, his back propped straight against the
battlement. Had expenditure of shadow also drained him to a husk, Lysaer
could not tell. Heavy mist blurred clear sight.
    'Well done,' the sorcerer added, his tone a touch less rough. 'We have the
wraiths' collective presence contained inside Kieling and the ward
energies safely resealed. If the virtue that founds this tower's strength is
not to be abandoned to desecration, we'll have to confine the creatures
further.'
    On his feet now, and shaky as if wasted by a fever, Lysaer tried a light
stab at humour. 'I'm spent enough already that I wouldn't have the spark to
charm a maid. The Mistwraith I hope needs less tact.' At a sidewise glance
from the sorcerer, his foolery dissolved. 'You'll have my best effort, in any
case.'
    But even before Asandir looked away, the prince recalled: Kharadmon's
presence was quiescent within him, but not withdrawn. The Fellowship
would have more than his best effort, though final cost became his life.
    Mortified by doubts that the strain yet to come might break him, Lysaer
snatched back the initiative. 'What next?'
    Asandir flung him a harried smile. 'Let no one ever question that the
strengths of s'Ilessid are not yours. The most difficult trial lies ahead.' And
he gestured toward a narrow stone flask that rested amid a dip in the
stonework that floored Kieling's upper battlement.
    Lysaer shoved back awareness that his courage had been frayed to
undignified, whimpering shreds. Neither the container nor the declivity
where it rested had existed previously. Its cylinder seemed wrought from
the same grained jasper that framed Kieling's fortifications.
    'Yes, the vessel to imprison Desh-thiere was cut from the rock of this
tower,' said Asandir in unprompted explanation. 'Its wards were patterned
from Paravian bindings, and there lies the heart of our challenge. The
Mistwraith is self-aware enough to recognize its peril. We can expect a
bitter fight to send it into final captivity.'
    Arithon offered no comment. Given his trained grasp of his gift, his quiet
gave rise to trepidation. Lysaer hugged his arms across his chest. If he
thought, if he hesitated, he could not in cold sanity continue. Dread sapped
the dregs of his nerve. Raised to inflexible duty, he had learned at his
father's knee that a king must always act selflessly. The needs of land and
people must come first. If at heart he was human, and terrified, the justice

298


that ruled the s'Ilessid royal line now imprisoned his conscience like
shackles. Lysaer raised hands that he wished were not trembling. From
the core of him that was prince, and steadfast, he let go control and self-
preservation and surrendered himself wholly to his gift.
    The raised light stung him in answer, as though his flesh balked at a
talent that demanded too much. The eerie dark eclipsed time sense. It
could be afternoon, or well past sundown; or days beyond the pall of the
world's end. The louring smoke-faces that comprised the Mistwraith
veiled the tower, impenetrably dense with roused evil.
    'Try now,' urged Asandir. 'You'll get no better chance. When your
strength is gone, Desh-thiere will stay free inside Kieling. Ath help us all
if that happens, for the flask and its wards of confinement cannot be
locked into stability until we complete the final seal.'
    Touched to quick anger that yet another personal frailty jeopardized
this dire expedient, Lysaer forced speech. 'Brother, are you ready?'
    For reply, Arithon wrought shadow. It sprang from his hands like a net,
laced, Lysaer could see, with fine-patterned rune chains and sigils.
Together the Master and Luhaine entwined spellcraft to augment their
assault against the mist.
    Desh-thiere churned into recoil like steam dashed against black ice. Its
wraiths lashed virulently back. Even as Lysaer kindled light, the demonic
aspects embodied by the fog writhed and twisted, tearing and swirling
around him. Their touch stung his skin as if corrosive, and each gust felt
edged with slivered glass.
 'Now!' Arithon shouted.
    And Lysaer struck, his light a goad to impel the accursed fog down a
gauntlet of shadow toward the flask. As glare scoured his sight, he sensed
Kharadmon twining spellcraft into his effort. The fog burned, acid-rank,
and the faces gnashed hideous teeth. Claws seemed to rake at his person
and voices to whisper in his head. Lysaer shivered in a cold sweat.
 'Again!' shouted Arithon in jagged stress.
    Lysaer punished his body to response, though shadows and fog marred
his vision, and the churn of the wraiths obscured the flask. Guessing, he
slashed out spears of lightning. Faces recoiled, hissing, and Arithon's
warding shadows wavered like curtains in a draught.
    Elusive as air, the Mistwraith surged to spiral clear. Lysaer blocked it,
panting, his gut turned queasy from the spell-work contributed by Luh-
aine. He called light, and light again, white sheets that had no flaw for the
sinuous wraiths to exploit. And still Desh-thiere's entities danced free.
Spell and shadow hammered what looked like nothing, but resisted like
immovable granite. Through the gust-ripped air, and the acrid, burning
presences that hedged the neck of the flask, Asandir called encourage-
ment.
    'Keep driving! The endurance of the wraiths is not limitless. In time,
they must yield to fatigue.'

299


    Lysaer felt emptied, a brittle husk. The demands of the attack were
insatiable. No oath could prepare for a harrowing such as this, that
exhausted reserves and cut past, to the uttermost unravelling of spirit. The
mists battled viciously back. The lessons of survival imposed by the Red
Desert became as a mere inconvenience before the suffering required to fuel
his gift.
  'There,' shouted Asandir. 'It's retreating!'
    A dull ache suffused Lysaer's inner being. The light that left his hands
seemed force bought in blood, fuelled at cruel cost to mortal flesh. Im-
personal no longer, Kharadmon's presence hammered into him, viciously
taking to keep the light coming in torrents.  But Desh-thiere was at last giving way.
    Eyes stung by salt, or maybe tears, Lysaer discerned a brighteningin the air
about the tower. Arithon's barriers of shadow showed clearly now, skeined
about with purple interlace that were spells lent his efforts by Asandir. Into a
cone fashioned out of darkness and suspended over the mouth of the flask,
Desh-thiere's coils were chased and burned and funnelled onward by flailing
tails of light.
    Lysaer had no spark left for exultation, that the Mistwraith verged on
defeat. He could only heave air into lungs that felt scorched, and obey the
rapacious demand of Kharadmon, who whipped him past endurance to
shape light.
    The mist-wrought wisps whipped and darted in retreat past the spelled
maw of shadow. Lysaer felt drained to his core. Wholly under duress, the
summoned force sprang from his hands, screaming through air like rage
given over to pure malice. A blinding flash sheared the murk, to lash the
possessed mists inside the barriers.
    Arithon's net of shadows wavered in recoil. The outlines blurred, soft-
ened, distended, as the trapped vapours inside thrashed to escape. The
desperate strength of two mortal men and three Fellowship mages shrank to
a pittance before the rage of thousands of meshed entities. Lysaer saw the
ward shadows bulge, thin and threaten at a stress-point to crack.
    One leak and Desh-thiere would burst loose all over again; only now
mortal limitations had reached an irreversible crux. Lysaer understood that
a second assault could not be mounted. Played out, undone by weariness,
the defenders found themselves beleaguered as Desh-thiere's uncountable
wraiths recoiled at bay and attacked.
    To lose grip on the barriers above the flask was to die, and leave Kieling
Tower forever defiled.
    Arithon knew. Or perhaps the controlling essence of Luhaine compelled
his hoarse shout to his half-brother, to fire off another blast of light. Asandir
had no encouragement to offer, besieged as he was within coil upon coil of
defence seals. Though Lysaer desired with all his heart to respond, he found
his spirit beaten listless by the over-extended forces of his gift. Only
Kharadmon's iron grip bore him upright and lent him the grace to respond.

300


    Lysaer raised his hands and called light. The effort sheared through him as
agony, leaving trembling that would not ease. His hands flared white then
dazzled. His palms stung to the rush of raw power as, ruled unequivocally by
a sorcerer, he bent to his knees before the flask.
    In the moment he lifted his arms, he felt himself released to free choice.
Gloved in fiery light, Lysaer fell back on a fibre he never knew he possessed.
Driven by need to the sacrifice, he reached to smother the impending break
in the shadow wards with the incandescent flesh of his hands.
    He touched no moment too soon, The barrier underneath unravelled and
the wraiths ripped hungrily through.
    Mist met light with a virulent shriek. Unwarded, the illumination his
inadequate protection, Lysaer cupped his hands to cap the breach. A raging
sting blistered his palms. Then the wraiths were on him, inside him, alegion
of needles in his brain.
    Light answered, a hedging dazzle of wards thrown up by Kharadmon.
Trailing half a beat behind, the sorcerer's protections failed to guard.
Lysaer suffered jumbled impressions that overwhelmed the hurt to his
hands. The tumult within him screeled to a whirlwind, scattering
memories like debris. Through a ripped up jumble of impressions, he sensed
Fellowship spellcraft flash lines of fire through past and future, hounding
the Mistwraith's assault.
    The chase re-echoed down every channel of Lysaer's being. Impressions
surged and recoiled, his own mixed with others too alien for comprehen-
sion. Past moments snapped out of recall with edged clarity: the Lady of
South Isle's lips on his, and her warm fingers twined in his hair... a night
from early childhood when he had sat on the palace battlement with the
chancellor's arm around his waist, as he recited the names of winter stars.
    Then, in punishing detail, a later experience wrought of harsh sun and
burning winds, and a thirst in his throat like torture.
    Dissociated wholly from the present, cut off from joined conflict with the
Mistwraith, Lysaer tumbled face-down once again in the scorching sand of
the Red Desert. Arithon s'Ffalenn stood over him, blood-streaked features
contorted with unforgotten antagonism.
     'Get up!' the command a lash across a mind pinned by a vice-grip of
sorcery. Pain followed, lacerating the last bastion of conscious will. 'Get up!'
    Then himself, a prince born royal, broken and screaming as personal
dignity was trampled down and violated by the bastard half-brother who
was ever and always Amroth's enemy.
    Lysaer shuddered, racked once again by annihilating hatred for the
sTfalenn born to mastery of shadows. Only now, in forced reliving, righte-
ous s'Ilessid fury was shared and fanned hotter by a ravening horde of demon
spirits.
    The pain this time raged redoubled as sorcery flared and sparked in an
effort to hack the wraiths away.

301                                    ~


    The psyche in torment turned to tricks. Spiralled down a tunnel like
delirium, Lysaer glimpsed another place, a railed wooden gallery atop an
outdoor staircase that overlooked a vast public square. The space between
brick-faced halls and mansions was packed with a seething mob; and amid
that multitude, one face: of a black-haired enemy who was wholly and
unforgivably s'Ffalenn.
    The scene folded in on itself and vanished. Fire blistered Lysaer's hands.
He screamed for a torment more terrible still, of sorcery scourging his
inner mind. The invading hordes of wraiths shrieked and gibbered inside
his skull. Their cries stormed together, tangled then merged to a mindless
blast of noise. Raw force answered their wail and a barrage of sparks as
thick as scalding rain. The spirits broke and threshed into spinning flight
like singed leaves. Lysaer felt sucked under by tides of faintness and
confusion.
    Voices that were human turned distant, broken then surged back clearly
as a hand strongly steadied his elbow.
    'Well done!' The tones, Asandir's; the touch, that of a sorcerer enfleshed.
Kharadmon's enslaving presence had withdrawn.
    Lysaer leaned into the support, breathing hard, and dizzied past reach
of self-control. His mind felt scoured; empty. Even his gifted sense of
light seemed deadened, consumed as flaked ash in a smelter's pit.
Fragments of nightmare flitted through his grasp and faded even as he
grasped to recall them. A frustrated urgency remained, disrupted as
Asandir spoke again.
    'Lysaer? You've been party to a miracle. The Mistwraith's captivity is
accomplished.'
    Belatedly aware he still breathed, that his palms stung with blisters that
could heal, Lysaer at last managed speech. 'It's bottled?'
    For answer, Asandir drew him gently to his feet and forward two
stumbling steps.
    The narrow jasper cylinder still rested upright on the battlement. Ward-
light shimmered over its contours, which now showed no opening at all.
The container was permanently sealed seamless, and the sky, cloaked in
natural darkness, showed a terrifying tapestry of stars.
    They were hard-white, blue, and stinging violet, too bright by half to be
mistaken for the heavens of Dascen Elur that Lysaer had known through-
out childhood. None of the constellations matched any taught him by the
chancellor.
  The meaning took a long, sweaty moment to register.
    'Desh-thiere,' Lysaer croaked. 'It's banished.' His handsome, weary
face showed the grace of relief before he crumpled in exhaustion against
Asandir.
    For a moment the sorcerer who supported him showed an expression of
unalloyed sorrow.
  Then, roused to purpose, he called brisk command to the Shadow Master

302



braced against the wall. 'Help me get your brother down to shelter. After
that, if you can manage the lower stair, call Dakar in. He's going to be
needed to doctor burns.'

303


Legacy

The evening after Asandir had ridden south with his discorporate
colleagues to better secure the imprisoned Mistwraith, Lysaer sat with his
back to the lee of a stone embrasure that once had been favoured as a
trysting place by generations of s'Ffalenn princesses. Between hands
swathed in bandages and healing unguents rested a flask of telir brandy,
left as a courtesy by the sorcerer before his departure. The contents were already half-consumed.
    Disappointed to have slept through the first day of restored sunlight, the
s'Ilessid prince applied himself to belated celebration as he pondered
Athera's savagely brilliant constellations, strewn in cloudless splendour
overhead. 'To our victory,' he toasted and offered the flask to his half-
brother, who paced, too quietly for his step to be heard through the ongoing
sigh of the winds.
    Arithon paused, a dark silhouette against a million points of light. 'No,'
he said softly. 'I'd drink instead to the crown that awaits you in Tysan.
You've fully earned your right to royal privilege.'
    The expected note of bitterness was absent from his half-brother's
manner. Taken aback, that the Shadow Master's quirky nature should
relentlessly continue to confound him, Lysaer smiled as Arithon accepted
the brandy, took a token swig and gently handed back the flask.
    'You can't be looking forward to Etarra,' Lysaer pressed. 'There's more
on your mind than you let on.' He touched the bottle to his lips. The telir
brandy went down with hardly a burn in the throat; the warmth came
later, a glow like a bonfire in the belly. 'You might feel better if you drank.'
    Arithon returned a quiet chuckle. 'I don't feel bad. Just monstrously
tired. Still.'
    'Still, what?' The liquor was subtle: it undid barriers as a rake would
seduce a prim virgin. When Arithon forbore to respond, Lysaer frowned in

304


mildly euphoric irritation. 'You'd think, after Desh-thiere's defeat, the
almighty Fellowship of Seven could reward you by finding a replacement
hero to shoulder Rathain's throne in your place.'
    Arithon turned smoothly and set his hands on the wall. For a time he,
too, seemed absorbed by the stars. 'They won't because they can't, I
suspect.'
    'What?' Lysaer elbowed up from his slouch, setting off a gurgle of sloshed
spirits. 'What do you mean by that? I hate to match sweeping leaps of logic
while I'm tipsy.'
    A disturbance sounded from inside the roofless chamber that fronted the
flagstone terrace. 'Dakar,' Arithon observed, though he had not turned to
look. 'Hot on the scent of the brandy, no doubt.'
    Sounds of a stumble and a muffled curse from the ruins affirmed his idle
supposition.
    Yet Lysaer on a binge could be bullishly stubborn; in judgement
impaired further by fatigue, he resisted the interruption. 'You're implying,
friend, that our Fellowship of Seven might not have a choice as to whose
head they crown at Etarra?'
    Not exasperated, but only lingeringly weary, Arithon said, 'I think not.
My best guess being that, with or without our ancestor's knowledge,
somebody meddled with our family history.' Silent, perhaps frowning, he
tipped his head sidewards in inquiry.
    'Consent was given,' affirmed Dakar from the depths of the archway that
led to the terrace. 'On behalf of your line, sealed in blood by Torbrand
s'Ffalenn, on the day Rathain's charter was drawn by the Ciladis of the
Fellowship.'
    'There you are,' Arithon said in light irony to his half-brother. He
accepted the brandy that s'Ilessid diplomacy offered out of instinct to
console; after a deep swallow and a sigh he relinquished the flask and
ended, 'I leave you all the joys of the night. I'm certainly too spent for witty
company.'
    The Shadow Master vanished into the archway, even as the Mad Prophet
emerged, wearing an unlikely combination of ragged tunics layered one
over another like sediment. These were topped by Asandir's cloak, the
silver-banded hem of which dragged the flagstones around Dakar's stocky
ankles.
    Lysaer studied the Mad Prophet's choice of wardrobe with raised
eyebrows, while Dakar, vociferously defensive, slouched against the wall
that Arithon had lately vacated. 'I'm getting a cold,' he said, in excuse for
the purloined cloak.
    Since the timbre of Dakar's voice held no sign of a stuffy head, Lysaer
sensed a lecture coming on the effectiveness of telir brandy as a medicine
for pending coughs. He forestailed the diatribe by offering the flask, and
stuck like a terrier to his topic. 'What did Arithon mean, and what consent
did his ancestor give at the writing of Rathain's charter?'

305


    Caught in mid-swallow, Dakar choked. He recovered himself, began
afresh and sucked at the flask until forced to stop and gasp for air. Then he
sniffed. 'You don't know what you're asking.'
    'Obviously not.' Too bone-tired for finesse, Lysaer hooked the brandy
bottle back. He regarded Dakar's spaniel eyes and said equably, 'I need not
inquire, if that were true.'
    Dakar started to blot his dribbled chin with the cloak hem, then recalled
the garment's true owner in time to use his sleeve cuff for the purpose.
'Damn and damn,' he said softly.
    'Once for the brandy, which I won't share unless you speak,' Lysaer
surmised. 'The other for the trouble you'll have earned, when Asandir
discovers you've borrowed his best cloak without leave.'
    'All right.' Dakar shrugged in resignation. 'The royal bloodlines are
irreplaceable, as Arithon already guessed.'
 'Due to prophecy?' Lysaer swished the flask suggestively.
    'No.' Peevish, Dakar gazed fixedly on the brandy. 'The Fellowship chose
three men and two women to found Athera's royal lines. They were
selected, each one, for a dominant trait that would resist corruption and
other pressures that power brings to bear on human nature. It is a grave
thing to alter or to influence unborn life. Yet that is what the sorcerers did,
to ensure fair rule through generations of dynastic succession. They set a
geas ward that would fix those chosen virtues in direct line of inheritance.
Your ancestor gave them consent, for all the good that does you.' Here,
Dakar's own bitterness showed, for an apprenticeship that more times
than not seemed the result of manipulation.
    Always smooth, Lysaer passed over the flask. Information desired from
Dakar on the nature of the Fellowship's workings was invariably touchy to
extract. 'What does that mean for Arithon?'
    Brandy vanished down the Mad Prophet's gullet in prodigious swallows,
and this time Asandir's best cloak did not escape usage as a napkin. 'Ah
well,' sighed Dakar. 'It means that our arrogant Master of Shadow can
never escape his nature.'
    This time Lysaer wrapped his arms around his knees, content to let the
spirits work their magic. The breeze whispered softly over the terrace and
the terrible, alien constellations burned fiercely through the interval that
followed.
    In time, Dakar took another pull from the flask. He peered mournfully
into the dregs. 'Torbrand s'Ffalenn was a man of natural empathy, a master
statesman, because he could sense what motivated his enemies. He ruled
as duke in Daon Ramon, and the compassion of the Riathan Paravians
formed the guiding light of his policies. Which means, my friend, that
Arithon will forgive the knife that kills him. He cannot do otherwise. To
understand and to sympathize with the needs of every living thing is his
inborn nature, the forced gift of the s'Ffalenn line as bequeathed by the
Fellowship of Seven.'

306


    Lysaer took a moment to sort a cascade of revelations. This penchant for
s'Ffalcnn forgiveness explained many of the quirks of his half-brother's
personality; behaviour he had considered wayward, until he was given a
key to understanding. It explained why Arithon would be vicious in
contention up until the moment of defeat; how he could effortlessly shed
any grudge for his balked desires, to embrace a crown he absolutely did not
want without sign of bitterness or rancour. Lysaer stared at his hands,
which were cold beneath their dressings. The blisters throbbed, but he had
ccased to dwell on their discomfort. He badly wanted to beg back the flask
of telir brandy, for in a heartbeat, his cheerfulness had vanished. Yet
courage in the end became his failing. He had to ask. 'And s'Ilessid? What
gift from my ancestor do I carry?'
    Morose, Dakar said, 'You will always seek justice, even where none can
be found.'
    A moment later, Lysaer felt the flask pressed back into his poulticed
hands. Careful not to fumble through his bandages, he swallowed brandy
in gulps. For abruptly, his euphoria over Desh-thiere's defeat had faded.
Now he wanted to get drunk, to embrace the oblivion of forgetfulness
before his busy mind could exhaust itself in perverse and futile review of
past events. He could study a whole lifetime and probably never determine
which actions were of his choosing and which others may have been
influenced by those virtues bound by magecraft to his bloodline.
    'Arithon was wise to seek his bed,' the prince concluded. 'I'm certainly
too tired for this.'
    Generously leaving the last of the spirits for Dakar, he set the flask
clumsily on the flagstones, rose to his feet and took his leave.
    Dakar remained, solitary. Night breezes worried his unkempt hair,
while he picked in turn at the immaculate wool of Asandir's cloak. The
Mad Prophet could wish until his heart burst that the flask by his elbow
was still full; or that he knew a spell to conjure rotgut gin out of air. Any
crude alcohol would have served to get him drunk enough to forget the
nerve that had made him question the burns on Lysaer of Tysan's hands.
Maybe then he could sleep with the knowledge Asandir had revealed, in
the hour before his departure.
    Dakar shut his eyes, before the stars his prophecy had seen restored
could blur through a welling flow of tears. 'Daelion Fatemaster take pity!
Why, Lysaer my friend, did you have to be the one used to block the
Mistwraith's assault bare-handed?'
    But Asandir on that point had been unequivocally clear: in the hour of
final conflict, when Desh-thiere had threatened to break free, Lysaer had
been Kharadmon's selection for the sacrifice. Dakar still agonized over
Asandir's heartless assessment, after the irrevocable event: 'Dharkaron,
Ath' s Angel of Vengeance may damn us for the act, but Dakar, what else
could be done? Of us all, Lysaer was least trained to the mysteries. If
contact with the flesh allowed Desh-thiere's wraiths to access the mind,

307


which of worse evil could we allow? To let such beings touch knowledge of
true power might have led them to threaten all the universe. Sad as it is,
tragic as the future must become, Lysaer' s exposure offered the lesser risk.
Weep with us all, the decision was never made unmourned.'
    'Unmourned, by Ath that's not enough!' Alone on the windswept
terrace, Dakar reached in sudden fury and hurled the flask and its priceless
dregs away. It smashed against the wall, an explosion of flying shards that
raked through air and settled to unsatisfying stillness. The events of the
Mistwraith's confinement would never on a prayer end in bloodless quiet
in Ithamon. Reproached by the sweetish smell of telir that evaporated
away on the wind, Dakar buried his face in dark wool and wept until his
chest ached. 'You heartless, unprincipled bastard!' he shouted finally, in a
vicious hope that Sethvir would overhear and channel all his rage straight
back to his Fellowship master.
    For the seeds of evil had been sown, well and deeply. All the telir brandy
in Athera could never soften the chaos still to be reaped at the ill-omened
coronation in Etarra.

308


Insurrection

True sunlight blazed down upon the city of Etarra, whose squat red walls
and square bastions had known only the grey dankness of mist since the
day the first footings were raised.
 The merchant guilds hailed the event as catastrophe.
    Trade stalled, from the moment the lampblacks raced yelling to the
watchkeeps with word that the east sky dawned red like running blood.
Sentries reported the same from forsaken posts of duty on the walls.
Terrorstricken citizens huddled indoors waiting to die of Ath-knew-what
sort of sickness, as day brightened to a fearful white dazzle. The
phenomenon had to be sorcery: the sky was blue and the light burned
harshly enough to make the eyes ache. Rumours ran rampant and legends
from the time before the uprising were whispered behind shuttered
windows stuffed with blankets. By night the city apothecaries opened their
shops and fattened their purses on profits wrung from unguents to ward off
blindness. When by the next day the herders holed up in their crofts failed
to drive livestock to the butcher, city-folk went hungry. Flour ran short.
The rich resorted to bribes until the enterprising poor began to rifle guild
warehouses.
 Nobody died of exposure.
    The meanest of beggars suffered no impairment of vision, though the
burglaries were accomplished in streets ablaze under sunlight. Ministers
whose guilds suffered losses howled for justice, while dispatching as-
sassins on the sly; trade consortiums took advantage of the chaos to bash
rivals, and given no lawful satisfaction, robbed merchants resorted to
lynchings.
 Already corrupt, Etarra grew dangerous in unrest.
    Since the uncanny sky showed no sign of clouding back to normal,
Moffett, Lord Supreme Governor, prepared with a martyr's stoicism to

3O9


restore order and industry to his city. He dug out from under a massive
heap of quilts, shed the clinging arms of his wife and forced his trembling,
weeping house-steward to press his collar of state. When a morning spent
sweating under the naked sun failed to inspire warring factions to resume
commerce, he called Lord Commander Diegan to muster the city guard. At
lance-point the most recalcitrant citizen would be forced to accept the risk
of roasting under the Sithaer-sent scourge of harsh sunlight. For some days, awnings sold at a premium.
    Still, bribes were needed to get the crofters and the caravan drovers to
brave the open country. The tax coffers dunned for the headhunters'
bounties by the end of that fracas stood empty. Lord Governor Moffett
bolted comfits to ease his agitation. Pounds settled on his already ample
girth and added pouches to his layers of sagging chins.
 On the brink of restored equilibrium, worse happened.
 A Fellowship sorcerer appeared on the city's inner battlement.
    No one had admitted him. He simply materialized, robed in maroon
velvet, his eyes mild as pondwater over a beard like frizzled fleece. The last
thing he resembled was a power remanifested out of legend. The duty-
guard mistook him for somebody's misdirected grandfather until a kindly
effort to offer an escort home earned him a list of outrageous amendments
to be appended to the city's ruling charter.
    Summoned in haste from his supper, Lord Governor Moffett stood
thunderstruck in cold wind with his napkin still flapping in a tuck behind
his collar ruffles.
    'You will also air out the guest suite reserved for state visitors,' Sethvir
said with an aplomb that disallowed reality; the Lord Governor had already
repeated that his first petition was preposterous.
    'If it's lodging you want,' Morfett protested; and stopped. The words he
had intended to utter concerning dispensation of charity were forgotten as
the napkin in his collar suddenly seemed to bind up his throat.
    The sorcerer said nothing, but gave back a maddening, poetic smile that
somehow looked slick as a cat's.
    And though he insinuated himself into Morfett's private dining-hall
for the duration of the Lord Governor's lunch of a sudden everything
went wrong. The crofters locked themselves indoors all over again;
naturally without offer to return the city's funds. The trade-guilds set up
a yelping chorus of accusations and touched off repercussions like a fall
of political dominoes. The poor in the streets threatened riots. Morfett
only belatedly discovered that two more sorcerers had joined the first.
More guest-rooms were aired in the Lord Governor's private palace. His
kitchens were cast into turmoil, and upon inquiry his own house ste-
ward informed him that his cooks were ransacking the larder in prepara-
tion for feasting royalty.
    Livid could barely describe Morfett's reaction. He had eaten too much
for days and now, under pressure, regretted it. His throat swelled, his lungs

310


filled and his fat jiggled as he prepared to countermand everything. But rage
rendered him incoherent a fatal second too long.
    Two more sorcerers materialized at his elbows, one portly and bearded,
the other green-clad, ol. egant, in his eyes an unrighteous gleam of
amusement. Before Moffett could recover speech he found himself
whisked without benefit of doors or stairs to his chambers.
    There, $ethvir politely offered him cold tea and with perfect diction
recited the list of Morfett's titles, a feat the city herald managed only
occasionally without mistakes. Moffett choked. There was ice in his
goblet, the crystal of which was finer than any piece in his wife's dower
cupboards. As three sorcerers regarded him with the piercing interest a bug
netter might show a rare insect, he sketched a sign against evil and
collapsed in a faint upon the carpet.
    'You'd think there'd need to be a backbone to support such a grand
weight of lard,' Kharadmon said tartly.
    He ignored the black look shot him by Luhaine; while Sethvir by himself
lifted a Lord Governor better than twice his size and weight and deposited
his unconscious bulk upon an equally overstuffed sofa.
    From his labours, the Warden of Althain raised eyes sparkling with glee.
'Be careful. When Morfett recovers his wits he has a fast and crafty knack
for hiring assassins.'
    Kharadmon gave back a toothy grin. 'Then, colleagues, we have every
sane excuse to keep him flustered.' Devilish in speculation, he said, 'Do
you think him a match for Arithon s'Ffalenn?'
 Sethvir laughed. 'We're going to find out all too quickly.'

Upon his awakening, Morfett was told that he would be swearing fealty to
a s'Ffalenn king within a fortnight, and that governance of Etarra would be
made to conform to Rathain's original royal charter.
 The Lord Governor's pouched eyes narrowed. 'Over my dead body.'
 'If need be,' Kharadmon said, unblinking.
    Acute enough to differentiate a threat from a promise Morfett gave
unctuous agreement, then launched on a vicious course of subterfuge.
    Two days of intrigue yielded no satisfaction. Bribes failed to budge even
the greediest factions. Worse than implacable, the farmers had somehow
become obsessed by the idea that guild overlords no longer owned land-
rights. They bandied legalities like barristers and backed their petition
with threat of strikes. When hired assassins failed to silence their
spokesman, Moffett discovered why. A soft-spoken stranger who wore a
black hat had sown insurrection among the country folk with a tact that
confounded. The city seneschal inscribed a writ for the man's arrest, only
to find that he was a sorcerer also.
 The incident left the Lord Governor indisposed.
 He lay ill on silk sheets while, in disregard of politics or loyalty, his wife

311


and daughters surrounded themselves with seamstresses who laboured
over sarcenets, brocades and pearl fringework to create a whole wardrobe
of new gowns.
    'But this is the sensation of the season!' his wife shouted indignantly
through the bedchamber doorway. 'If we're going to be hosting blooded
royalty, everybody important shall come calling. This prince might be
welcomed as the devil but your daughters would surely become
laughingstock were we all wearing last spring's fashions!'
    Morfett clapped his hands over his ears and groaned. His city and his
household had slipped his control. Held miserably supine by his churning
stomach, he concluded that Etarra's citizens had been bewitched: only foul
sorcery could corrupt them from five centuries of crownless rule. Storms,
strikes, a plague of fiends, even the manifestation of Dharkaron's divine
chariot would have been kinder than this infestation of mages. The
thought of kneeling before royalty caused Moffett to howl at his body-
servant to attend him at once with the chamberpot.
    He got instead the imposing, blue-clad sorcerer, Asandir, who cured his
upset stomach directly and sent every servant within earshot scurrying to
fetch official clothing.
    'Get up!' This mage evinced none of Sethvir's vague charm. 'The council
and trade ministers are convened in the oratory, and most of Etarra's
populace crowds the trade square in hot anticipation of your speech.'
    The Lord Governor hauled his bulk upright and found himself stuffed
unpleasantly fast into an embroidered shirt with gold clasps. He might
have reigned the return of his cramps had Asandir's steely manner not been
impervious to falsehood.
    Regaled in tasteful colours for the first time since his birth, Morfett,
Defender of Trade, Protector of Justice and Lord Governor Supreme of the
Northern Reaches, lumbered like a disgruntled bear from his lair to initiate
due process to re-establish monarchy in Rathain.

312


Overviews

In a hall of gilt and alabaster, Lirenda, First Koriani Enchantress delivers
her report to the Prime: 'Desh-thiere's remains have been sealed under
ward and imprisoned in the caves at Skelseng's Gate. This disposition is
intended to be temporary. When royal rule is re-established at Etarra, the
Fellowship will transfer the Mistwraith to a place of more permanent
captivity. We might learn then why they faltered at the end and preserved
the fell creature alive...'

Under Strakewood's evergreens in the northern reaches of Rathain, the
clan gathering to celebrate new sunlight extends for a fortnight; bored with
the feasting, too young yet to dance, a pair of barbarian boys break away
from the festivities to play at raids on Etarra merchants...

In a tavernyard shadowed by the snow-capped peaks of the Mathorns,
Elaira waters her bay mare while the horsemaster offers well-meant
advice: 'If it's on to Etarra you're bound, let the cook fill your saddlebags.
Provisions are scarce in the markets there. The postriders all say the same.
Farmers won't sell to the townsmen and talk of sorcerers and monarchy
has the trade*guilds lathered into an uproar...'

313



XIII. ETARRA

The Lord Governor Supreme of Etarra was never a man to worry off weight
in a crisis. On the morning the royal heir was to arrive he found his
carnelion studded belt pinched his waist. His best boots were tight around
the calves and the bunions on his feet grown much worse. Small
annoyances became major aggravations when one was forced to stand on
display under sunlight too warm for brocades. Jostled by anxious city
ministers who crowded the road and the verges before Etarra's southern
gate, Morfett squeezed another sigh past the constriction of his pearl-
studded collar. Today, the sorcerer riding herd upon his obligations was
$ethvir. Offended that the Warden of Althain should flaunt his own
demands concerning finery by wearing a robe as threadbare and ink-
stained at the cuffs as the one he had first appeared in, Moffett silently
fumed. His head ached, made worse by the nuisance that his gold-sewn
scarlet clashed offensively with maroon.
    At least the post was not filled by Asandir, who was altogether less
torgiving over matters of personal sensitivity.
    'Asandir will be escorting the prince,' the Warden of Althain announced
in uncanny response to private thought. He turned dreamy eyes upon the
fidgeting person of the Lord Governor. 'The ballads from times before the
mists name him Kingmaker because every royal head in the history of
humankind has been crowned by his hand.'
    'How uselessly sentimental.' Moffett tugged at his jacket, the buttons of
which pinched his breath.
    The outer gates of Etarra overlooked a steep slope, the city itself wedged
across the gap between the Mathorn's eastern foothills and a west-jutting
spur of the Skyshiels. Accessed by five roads, the approach from Daon
Ramon was a switched-back conglomeration of mud bricks and shoring
that broadened the original pack trail enough for the passage of wagons.

315


What level ground remained before the gate turrets was already uncomfort-
ably crowded, a forced stir through packed bodies indicating the arrival of
still more city officials. The turnout commanded by the sorcerers was
thorough enough to impress. Beside guild ministers, trade officials and
council governors, many had brought along their perversely curious wives.
    Still sore in the throat from the shouting required to keep his spouse and
daughters properly at home, Moffett said, 'The governor's council will
never acknowledge your pretender's right to rule.'
    Sethvir gave back his most wayward and maddening smile. 'Give them
time.'
    Somebody coughed. Morfett twisted around and saw a lady in pearls and a
gown edged in snow lynx raise a quick hand to her mouth. Her tissue-clad
shoulders still shook, which betrayed her smothered laughter. At her side,
cloaked in white ermine and official city scarlet, and bedecked with a dazzle
of diamonds and gold chains, her brother Diegan, commander of the guard,
looked stiffly furious. Oh no, concluded Morfett, neither time nor
bloodshed would soften his city's stance. The prince Etarra's governors had
been rousted out to greet was going to be driven from his attempt to restore
the monarchy with tucked tail like a mongrel cur.
    The sorcerer in his tawdry robe incongruously began to chuckle.
'Dharkaron's Chariot,' he swore mildly. 'I can't wait to see what happens
when you meet your royal liege.'
    'A boy, just barely grown,' Moffett sneered. 'He'll be sorry to find that
bribes won't buy him sovereignty.'
 At this, Sethvir seemed stunned speechless.
    . Lord Governor Moffett stroked his chins and fatuously gave himself the
victory.
    The prince's party must have rounded the last switchback, then, for
shouts arose from the countryfolk gathered along the lower roadway. Their
cheers were boisterously joyful, after the sorcerers' promise to pry croft
rents away from the land-guilds. Since the ministers whose authority had
been bypassed had ratified no such relinquishment, of course, the blandish-
ment was false. Moffett sweated in irritation. Though nothing could be seen
yet from his vantage-point before the gatehouse, the officials all began to
elbow and press in their eagerness. Shorter than his peers by a head, Morfett
had to crane his neck like any bumpkin to retain his view of the valley.
    He anticipated a cavalcade, resplendent with jewelled trappings and
trailing banners; and wagons with silk streamers and canopies. That was
what one would expect of a prince, or so his wife had speculated in her gossip
with cronies for a week. Since pomp in Etarra established status, a royal
retinue would only impress if it was blindingly, ostentatiously lavish.
    Morfett saw just four horsemen, unattended, on mounts that wore no
caparisons. They carried no banners or streamers; neither did they prove to
be outriders for another larger party. Asandir was the one astride the black;
at least, the dark, silver-bordered cloak that billowed in the gusts was

316


~fort-
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unmistakably his austere style. The fat man in russet on the paint looked
too undignified for a prince; his companion, a fair man, owned the bearing,
but though his velvets were cut from indigo deep enough to raise envy from
the cloth guild he wore no royal device.
    That left the slight, straight figure on the dun with the irregular marking
on her neck.
    Morfett's narrowed eyes fastened upon that last rider with the keenness
of a snake measuring its distance to strike.
    A green cloak with the silver heraldic leopard of Rathain muffled the
man and most of the horse. The hands that gripped the dun's reins were
spare as any boy's, and skilled. The dun was inventively difficult. From a
distance the face of the rider looked fine-chiselled, and the black hair
Morfett heard was distinctive of s'Ffalenn blew uncovered in the breeze.
    The Lord Governor smiled in ripefish glee. 'A child,' he exulted. His
supposition to Sethvir fortuitously seemed confirmed: the pretender to
Rathain's throne was a green youth, and Etarran politics would devour
him.
    Expansive, nearly happy, the Lord Governor bestowed a dimpled smile
upon the Warden of Althain, who now looked distractedly deadpan.
'Sorcerer,' Moffett mocked, 'here's my sanction. Let the affirmation
ceremony for this prince's right of ancestry take place on Etarran soil. His
Grace has my leave to chill his feet in our dirt, may he grub the worms'
fayour from the honour!'
    Chuckles rippled through the ranks of Etarra's officials. Women tittered
while, like the boom of a storm surge against the slope below the walls,
cries of redoubled welcome arose from the riff-raff of farmers.
    'Come forward,' Sethvir invited over the noise. 'Your word as given, Lord
Governor, we'll proceed to acknowledge Rathain's prince.'
    'Then I don't have to kiss his royal cheeks until he's barefoot?' Morfett
roared with laughter; by Ath, he would retain the upper hand. 'As you
wish, sorcerer! Let us go on to the courtyard of the fountains, and let your
puppet prince forgo this sham of receiving my welcome at the gate!'

Flushed as he enjoyed his huge joke, Morfett parked his rump on the
combing of a terracotta retaining wall. The pruned stubble of rosebushes
that hitched at his gold-stitched jacket scarcely merited attention, the
charade to be enacted in the flowerbeds being far too rich to miss. In signal
unconcern for their silks and their ribbons, high city officials and the
pedigreed curious who were last to arrive jockeyed for position between
rows of potted trees and greening topiary. The prince's party entered. Jeers
blended with the trickle of the fountains, while Asandir caught the dun
mare's reins to foil her spirited sidle. Her royal burden dismounted.
    Up close, the green cloak more than ever overwhelmed the lightly knit
frame of the prince.

317


    'Do you suppose he's inbred, to be so delicate?' muttered Diegan to a
stifled explosion of hilarity. Somebody passed a flask of wine. Fanned by
Morfett's bold sarcasm, the mood of Etarra's welbborn displayed the vic-
iousness gloved in gaiety that would have enlivened an out-of-season garden
party. The courtyard's eight foot high mortised walls reflected the women's
disparaging remarks with the clarity of an amphitheatre.
    The dun's reins were passed to an unseen attendant while the fair-haired
companion in his elegant velvets unclasped the green cloak and bared the
royal shoulders.
 Morfett moistened plump lips and lingeringly assessed his enemy.
    To Etarran eyes the prince who stood revealed was plainly clad to a point
that invited ridicule. His tunic and shirt were cut of unadorned linen that
anyone less lazy than a peasant at least would have bothered to bleach white.
The natural fibres emphasized a complexion that looked tintless and
porcelain-pale. When Asandir faced the prince and took slender fingers into
his own to escort his royal charge forward, Morfett could have crowed. The
s'Ffalenn wore no jewellery. The only gemstones on him were the emerald
in his sword-hilt which, though welbcut, could not be called large; and an
ordinary white gold signet ring that showed the battering of hard wear.
  'Plain as a forest barbarian,' jibed the minister of the weaver's guild.
    Sethvir raised his eyebrows in reproof. 'Every s'Ffalenn to be sanctioned
for succession came to his ceremony unadorned.'
    But the spirit of exuberant contempt by now had infected the whole
gathering.
    The prince's poise showed stiffness as he removed his boots. He assumed
his place in the flowerbed, ankle deep in black soil hoed up by the gardeners
and awaiting the sprouting of spring lilies. Asandir kept hold on his hands
and intoned a ritual in a softly sonorous voice. None of Etarra's elite cared to
hold still enough to listen. Diegan's sister was loudly pointing out to the
half-deaf seneschal of the treasury that the royal ankles had scars exactly
like marks made by felon's shackles. The subject was snapped up in
speculation by a junior clerk who gasped out improvised doggerel between
whoops and snorts of stifled laughter. Moffett saw no need to offer rep-
rimand.
    The damned Fellowship mages had been duly warned how his council felt
toward monarchy.
    The prince knelt on cue. His sorcerer chaperone bent with him and
scooped a double handful of earth which he lifted above wind-ruffled raven
hair.
    Morfett choked back a grin. Less restrained, Diegan murmured from
behind, 'Ath, did anybody check whether pig's dung and ditch waste had
been spread in for fertilizer yet?'
    The sorcerer must have overheard. He cupped his burden nonetheless and
his voice echoed back from sandstone walls, cutting through the busy buzz
of satire. 'Arithon, Teir's'Ffalenn, direct line descendant of Totbrand, first

318


High King of Rathain, I affirm your right of succession. As this realm will
be yours to guard, so are you bound to the land.'
    Diegan's chuckles choked off, replaced by blank rage. 'Right of succes-
sion ? Who sanctioned this ?'
    Caught weeping tears of suppressed mirth, Moffett rounded in a
dawning explosion of anger. Without care for the dearth of privacy, he
loudly upbraided Sethvir. 'You said the royal bastard was only to be
affirmed in his ancestry!'
    But the Warden of Althain had all too conveniently vanished. While the
Lord Governor wildly sought to find him his peripheral vision caught a
blurred flash of light. He whirled again to face the garden. There knelt the
prince, and crowned, but not with soil or pig's dung. A circlet of shining
silver crossed his brow that had been nowhere in evidence before.
^sandir's hands fell away, and then steadied him back on his feet.
    'Ath!' someone shouted in shaky awe. 'Did you see? That sorcerer
changed dirt into silver!'
    Sethvir chose that moment to reappear. 'It is done, the circlet of sanction
wrought from the soil of Rathain. My Lord Governor. Time has come to
congratulate your acknowledged prince.'
    'I gave no such consent! What has passed was done on false pretences!'
Morfett dug in his toes, his chin out-thrust like a bulldog's. Yet no sorcerer
of the Fellowship forced him forward. Instead, Rathain's prince came to
him.
    All his adult life Moffett had battled the misfortune that short stature
forced him to peer up at even his lowliest scullion. The shock of meeting
green eyes that were level with his own caused him an involuntary step
back.
    'You need not kneel,' informed the silver-crowned personage whose face
turned out not to be delicate but as bloodless and defined as if chipped from
white quartz. 'I have not accepted your fealty.'
    'Nor will you!' Trembling with mortification for being duped in public,
Morfett curled his lip. 'The governor's council, of which I am head, refuses
to acknowledge your existence.'
    A breeze rattled the dry canes of the roses and flicked a twist of black hair
from the circlet. Too late, Moffett saw that this prince had the look of a
sorcerer: eyes that were piercing and level and strikingly devoid of
antagonism. Like those Fellowship colleagues whose nefarious machina-
tions had produced him, he could answer a man's unspoken thoughts. 'If
you and your council rule justly, you need have no fear of me.'
    The officials surrounding Morfett were belatedly recognizing the
legalities behind Asandir's late speech. From all sides, their ribald
commentary was replaced by murmurs of incredulity and rage.
    'You have not been given any right of sovereignty in this city!' Diegan,
commander of the guard, interposed from behind his Lord Governor's
shoulder.

319


    'True.' Arithon's gaze left Morfett to encompass the courtier who had
spoken out of turn, and whose dandyish cloak was thrown back to reveal
a hand clenched on a sword hilt. The weapon was fiashily bejewelled; if
the steel behind its gold-chased quillons was something more than
ceremonial, Arithon dismissed the threat. His brows twitched up in
flippant challenge. 'But if this contest were a footrace the outcome would
hardly merit contest. Do you bet?'
'All that I have,' Diegan answered thickly. 'That should warn you.'
'Oh, I was warned,' said Arithon with poorly concealed impatience.
'Too well, too late and in rich and tedious detail. In some things, I've had
less choice than you have.'
    Too fast for verbal riposte, and in total disregard for the captain's
aggressive posture, he whipped around to address Asandir. 'You've had
your display. Whether or not the person who took charge of my boots
reappears with intent to return them, I would be pleased to retire.'
    The exchange ended so quickly that Morfett was left with his mouth
open. The prince was whisked off amid his circle of sorcerers; but the
edged and dangerous antagonism he had sown among the townsmen
remained, festering and unsatisfied. Diegan stared after the departed royal
party with his jaw clenched. Amid widening circles of loud talk, guilds-
men in brocades were shaking fists, or banded together in disturbed
groups. Etarra's three fraternities of assassins were going to profit, to
judge by the speed with which curses transformed into whispering. As
husbands bandied plots like vigilantes, wives and daughters were being
unceremoniously bundled back home.
    Livid and speechless, and left no target for his outrage, the Lord
Governor leaned gratefully on the hand that answered his need for support.
'The effrontery of the bastard!' he spluttered when he finally recovered his
breath. 'Footrace, indeed! Does he think us a pack of rank schoolboys?'
    'He can be difficult,' an impressive personage with pale gold hair
volunteered in commiseration. 'But I have never known him to be
anything less than fair.'
    That instant Morfett realized that his benefactor was gently attempting
to draw him apart from his councilmen. He yanked back, bristling fury.
'Who are you?' Blue velvet clothing might fail to jog his memory, but the
green heraldic cloak folded over the stranger's arm at once identified the
prince's blond-haired companion. 'Never mind,' Moffett snapped. 'You're
one of the royal cronies, and assuredly no help to Etarra.'
    Still smiling, Lysaer said, 'Quite the contrary. I'm the one royal crony
who's not a sorcerer and also the only friend you have who understands
the cross-grained nature of your prince.'
    The commander of the guard perked up instantly. 'I know a tavern,' he
invited and, grumbling, Morfett allowed himself to be swept along into
their wake.

320


The heavy door boomed closed. Tired to his bones, Arithon s'Ffalenn
leaned back against uncomfortable, brass-studded panels. Muffled, the
voice of the Lord Governor's wife nattered after him from the outside
hallway. 'Do make yourself comfortable, your Grace. Of course, my house
staff and servants will eagerly attend to your needs.'
    Arithon replied in tones of steelclad politeness. 'Your kindness is
generous. I shall be content to sleep undisturbed.' The decorative studs
that gouged his back impelled him to straighten as he finished his survey of
the guest chamber.
    The glitter made his head ache. Glass beading fiddled the panelled walls,
and gilt casements with rose-tinted panes clashed unmercifully with a
floor laid out in tiles. These also were patterned, a blaring assemblage of
lozenges done in saffron, amber and violet; the furnishings had raised
knots in gold, every padded edge decked in silk twist and fringe. Even the
carpets sported tassels.
    A sortie from the bed to the privy would require lighted candles to
forestall hooked toes and whacked shins.
    Arithon shut his eyes and wished back the stark hills of Daon Ramon.
The windswept ruins there at least kept the tatters of dignity.
    'You haven't seen the fur quilts, yet,' Asandir invited drily from the
other side of the room. Against the chamber's blinding opulence, his
preferred midnight blue and silver made him grim as an aspect of
Dharkaron dispatched to punish mortal vanity.
    'Excuse me.' Arithon wished only to forget his first sight of Etarra; with
copper-clad domes clustered thick as warts behind square bastions, the
city resembled a fat toad squatted between weathered slate mountains. He
sighed and reopened his eyes. 'I presume Sethvir brought the records?'
    'If you can make out lettering between the flourishes affected by Etarra's
clerks,' groused the Warden of Althain. Surrounded by leatherbound
ledgers heaped in stacks in an alcove, he looked nothing less than besieged.
'1 hate to pain you further.' He waved a haphazard scroll-case toward a pair
of cherubs whose carved curls sprouted indigo candles. 'But the lady of the
house brought these when I asked for more light.'
    'Burn them, and the archives, too!' Arithon's laughter took on a baleful
edge. 'We'd save a lot of bother if we could level this atrocity and build a
new city from the rubble.'
    Sethvir waggled a quill pen at him. 'Don't imagine we haven't been
tempted!' Then he blinked and looked vague and snapped his fingers: both
cherub candles sprouted flame. The wax as it heated gave off a cloying
perfume. A casement perforce was unlatched and in the draft, the new light
wavered over features shaded toward concern. 'A nasty night of reading for
us both. You won't like it. Etarran guilds resolve their disputes on the
blades of hired assassins.'
    Not too exhausted to field subtleties, Arithon hooked off his silver
circlet. 'How many wards of guard did you need to set over this room?'

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Sethvir and Asandir exchanged a glance, but neither one gave l~im answer.
'Never mind.' Arithon hurled the royal fillet into the nearest padded
chair. 'If the governor's council wants a knife in my back, by morning I'll
make them a reason.'
    But reason had already been given, as the sorcerers had cause to know.
They did not discuss the three paid killers who had earlier been unobtru-
sively foiled. The viper's nest of factions that ruled the city stood united in
their cause to see the s'Ffalenn royal line killed off. Vigilance over Arithon's
safety could never for a moment be relaxed.
    For the rest of the afternoon and well on into evening, the Prince of
Rathain and the sorcerers remained in seclusion, pouring over old records.
Dakar came back. An exhaustive tour of the taverns had affirmed his
opinion that Etarra brewed terrible ale. Dispatched, staggering, to the
scullery, he fetched back a light meal, chilled wine and candles from the
servants' wing that thankfully did not merit any scent. His errands finished,
he sprawled fulldength on the fur quilts, the boots he had forgotten to
remove sticking through the rods of the bedstead.
    At midnight, Lysaer stepped in, lightly flushed, a satisfied smile on his
face. He hooked Arithon's circlet off the chair, set it safely on a tortoiseshell
sidetable, and sat. 'Ath, this room is as overdecorated as the taproom I just
came from.' He sniffed, and grinning added, 'It reeks in here like a brothel
madam's boudoir.'
    Arithon baited blandly, 'You should have been here when the candles
were fresh. They would've given you an erection. And anyway, I'm surprised
you can tell.'
    At Lysaer's mystification, Sethvir said, 'You smell as if you bathed in
cheap gin. By that, dare we presume you accomplished your assignment and
lasted for the duration?'
    Lysaer laughed. 'When I retired, the elect of the guilds were banging their
tankards on the table. The foppish-looking fellow who's commander of
Etarra's guard was singing war-songs off key and the barmaids were hoisting
the Lord Governor into a brewer's wagon to be delivered to the arms of his
wife. Gentlemen, what news I have is good. Tomorrow would have brought
foul and secret machinations against our prince, except that the messengers
entrusted to spread word of the arrangements met with mishap. Kharadmon
has an unsubtle touch, I must say, since one of them slipped in horse dung
and apparently broke his elbow. His yelling disrupted half the prostitutes in
the shanty district. The names he chose to curse at the top of his lungs were a
frank embarrassment.'
    'That must have upset Commander Diegan's sensibilities,' Sethvir
ventured, his head disappeared behind the pages of yet another yellowed
ledger.
    'Oh yes.' Lysaer forgot his distaste for orange tassels and tipped his head
back into the chair cushions. 'The Lord Commander of the Guard rousted
out his head captain, Gnudsog, is it? The squat fellow with the muscles and

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the scars. He silenced the upr9ar with a battle mace by breaking the
messenger's jaw. The bonesetters are still busy. To mend appearances
Etarra's council will convene tomorrow morning behind barred doors, to
formalize reformed laws to ban the monarchy. The guild ministers already
bicker like fishwives. Hungover as they're likely to become, they'll lock
horns over the language until noon.'
    'Oh dear.' Sethvir forsook the accounts to jab fingers through a coxcomb
of stray hair. 'Are you saying you got them all in their cups?'
    Dakar answered from the bed with his eyes still closed. 'They were irked
enough to dance on the tables, anyway. All Lysaer did was keep them
filling their tankards.'
 'Who paid for the gin?' asked Asandir.
    'That's the beauty of it,' Lysaer said, infectiously lapsed into merriness.
'The tavern was owned by the vintner's guild, and drinks were declared on
the house.'

Lord Governor Morfett set the massive gold seal of the city into puddled
scarlet wax. Then, while the guild ministers added their own signatures
and ribbons, he shoved his knuckles into a fringe of damp hair and cradled
his splitting head. A servant had to touch his sleeve twice before he
realized: the pounding came from the doorway, echoing the throb inside
his skull.
    'Let them in,' he said through his palms. 'The damned sorcerers can raise
a commotion all they like. Our edict is signed into law, and their prince
will be in irons by afternoon.'
    A hagridden secretary scurried to unbar the door. He was all but knocked
down as the panels burst inward, and a flood of agitated barristers barged
through.
 The newcomers started shouting all at once.
    From the governor's chair on the dais, Morfett screamed for order. By the
time he made himself heard, his head was splitting. The councilmen
around him were sweating or vainly covering their ears to ease their
hangovers. Not a few looked ready to be sick.
    When the men could be made to speak in more orderly fashion, their
complaints added up to disaster.
    The sorcerers and their prince had spent an industrious morning,
beginning with a review of Etarra's condemned. By the tenets of Rathain's
royal charter, it transpired that two thirds of the city's prisoners were
wrongfully tried and sentenced.
 'Pardons and reprieves from execution!' Morfett howled.
    'Worse,' a clerk interrupted. 'The prince has also vouched treasury funds
for reimbursement of unfair fines.'
    'His mother-accursed royal Grace can't do that!' Morfett jumped to his
feet. 'A Teir's'Ffalenn has no right to set his seal to any documents unless

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and until there's a coronation. The decrees are false! No such ceremony
has been ratified!'
    'No,' corrected Etarra's seneschal sadly. He looked and sounded like a
kicked hound. 'But he could, and did, post documents that name the
prisoners to be acquitted on the day he's invested as high king.'
    'Along with which laws will be repealed, which taxes, eliminated and
how many public servants shall be relieved from their posts without pay!'
This inveigling was worse than the feud ongoing between the ironmongers
and the furniture-joiners, who captured and tortured each other's app-
rentices to blackmail concessions for trade secrets. Moffett slammed his
fists on the high table, spattering ink and official wax over mother of pearl
inlay. 'Is this what you've come here to tell me?'
    Amid cringing rows of officials, not one met their Lord Governor's
furious outburst.
    'Dharkaron take you for a pack of piddling puppies!' Moffett stuck out
his hand toward his commander of the guard. 'Give me our new writ! Then
go at once and tell Gnudsog to muster a squad of enforcers. I'll see that
s'Ffalenn bastard in chains and flogged for fomenting insurrection. Fiends
and Ath's fury, no meddling Fellowship sorcerer's going to raise a hand to
stop me!'
    'No sorcerer will, but your people might,' a voice volunteered from the
entry. Sethvir stepped inside, bemused as a philosopher given new
audience for his theories. 'Have you been listening?' He pushed the outer
door panels open.
    A wave of sound reverberated into the council hall. The mob in the
streets beyond the antechamber were not outraged, but cheering, and
against any law of nature, Sethvir's mild tone carried clearly over the din.
'Rumours spread that your ministers met to outlaw the royal charter. To
keep an irate mob of farmers from storming your doors and tearing your
councilmen limb from limb, the First City Alderman suggested the
contrary; that the documents being drawnwere in fact an abdication of the
guilds from ruling power and an affirmation of s'Ffalenn right of
sovereignty. Craftsmen and labourers took to the streets in celebration.
The North Gate belltowers play carillons and the shanty-district whores
are throwing posies. If you end this session without a writ for a royal
coronation, your people of Etarra are going to riot.'
    'Let them!' Diegan's rebuttal rang like a whipcrack over the noise. 'I'd
rather find myself lynched than bend my knee to any high king.'
    He made as if to push past, but the dignitaries beside him caught his
wrists. There were others of the council not so staunch. Should the mobs
turn lawless in the streets, the city guard could not stay them. Looting
would be followed by bloodshed and the damage to trade would be
incalculable. Pressured to give in by a mournful flock of peers, the Lord
Governor of the city waved for Diegan to subside. Then he sat down
abruptly with his knuckles jammed against his teeth. Today the sorcerers'

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timing had them beaten. But the Fellowship could hardly shepherd the
stew of Etarra's politics indefinitely. Best to accept this defeat and save
resources to upset s'Ffalenn rule another day. On the floor, trodden under
the milling feet of the pedigreed elect of Etarra, the moming's brave
warrant to arrest the prince came to an ignominious end.
    Diegan tugged free of the dignitaries, unpacified. 'It won't be that easy,'
he lashed at Sethvir. 'The rabble might love the idea of a high king today.
But when unrest drives them to turn no blandishments your prince can
offer will appease them.'
    'Blandishments?' Sethvir looked thrilled as a madcap apothecary pre-
pared to make gold from plain clay. 'I rather thought his Grace would give
them back their chartered freedom.'
    Diegan's lip curled in a snarl. Blithe as the Warden of Althain could
appear, as much as he seemed a doddering elder of a stripe to knot strings
around his wrists to nudge a senile memory, he was no such vague old fool.
 He had Etarra's council at bay and he knew it.
    But his position was dangerously precarious. Moment to moment, any of
a thousand missed details could erupt into bloody uprising as upheaval
gave rise to panic. The citizens outside the council hall were far from
tranquil, nowhere near under control. Only the poor and the disaffected
roamed the streets. Sensible citizens of stature had barricaded their
families inside their houses in dread. The Fellowship's straits were not
invisible. They could not be everywhere. Even as the governor's council
drafted their formal abdication, Diegan continued to collect reports.
    Guilds were seizing the disruption as cover to wage less covert rivalties;
five men of good families lay dead from unmarked knives. Asandir was
busy protecting the moneylender who funded the treasury's bottomless
capacity to dispense bribes from a stone-throwing mob, who protested
paying taxes for usury. Traithe, at the south ward armoury, barred
Gnudsog's deputies from the spare weapons stores while, impervious to
attempts by all three fraternities of assassins, Arithon was being fitted for
dress-boots by Etarra's most fashionable cobbler.
    The discorporate mages Kharadmon and Luhaine assuredly were behind
the royal luck.
    Before the wax on the writs that confirmed s'Ffalenn right of sovereignty
grew cool, and despite the frustrated opposition of a govemor's council
hazed like smoke-driven wasps, his Grace emerged in princely splendour
to read the Royal Charter of Rathain in the square before the guild-halls.
This time, the ceremony was engineered with enough glitter to make even
Etarran excess seem drab.
 Afterward, the populace could speak of nothing else.
    The only man in the city less pleased than the Lord Governor and
Etarra's commander of the guard was Arithon s'Ffalenn himself. Set on
display before the throng, he had managed his part as a musician might
play to a rowdy taproom. Viewed as saviour by the poor, unrelentingly

325


hated by the trade-guilds, he weathered the feast that followed less
masterfully. Mantied in the green, black and silver of the s'Ffalenn royal
blazon, he mingled awkwardly with a merchant aristocracy of faddish
extremes. The fine food and wines did not distract them from their newest
pleasure, which primarily consisted of prince-baiting. Intrigue poisoned
the simplest word of courtesy, and while some wives and ladies battled for
the chance to ingratiate, they had sharp, cunning minds that searched also
for weaknesses to exploit.
    This was a city where children were urged to select their playfellows
according their parents' rank and importance, and who were often as not
sent out visiting with instructions to overhear all they could of the affairs
of their schoolmates' fathers.
    Arithon handled the pressure with the jumpy nerves of a cat caught
unsheltered in a rain shower.
    Amid an obstacle-course of laden tables, heavy with gold appointments
and pearl-stitched bunting, he needed his swordsman's footwork to escape
becoming entangled. At his elbow, steady in support, was Lysaer who
deflected social ripostes with a wit that invited friendly laughter. Less
skilled at diplomacy, Arithon buried distaste behind blandness. He
escaped being targeted by insults by never for a minute staying still. He did
not trust these people, in his presence or out of it. He most carefully
followed conversations that took place behind his back. Hounded as
quarry set after by beaters, he saw openings. Even Diegan's hostility
revealed ways to breach the arrogance, the mistrust, even the depths of
antagonism that fenced him round. But the political complacencies such
changes would demand of him played false to his musician's ear.
    Karthan, at least, had not been fiddled with such viperish greed in
brocades; though piracy was no honest trade, its thievery had been
straightforwardly presented.
  'You don't look well,' murmured a female voice in his ear.
    Rathain's prince turned to acknowledge the source: Diegan's tawny-
haired sister who could drive a man silly with her looks, but who was
poised in her carriage as a snake.
    Arithon inclined his circlet-crowned head. Physically graceful in dis-
comfort, he offered his hand. 'Too much rich food. Your city's cooks have
outdone themselves. Shall we dance.~'
    She took his fingers and her fine, arched brows sketched a frown that was
swiftly erased. She had not expected his callouses. The tightening around
her eyes made plain that the discovery would be passed to her brother: that
despite the appearance of delicate build, this prince's palms were no
stranger to the sword. 'I find conversation more interesting.'
    'How disappointing for both of us. Too much talk has been driving me
mad.' Arithon returned a regret as impenetrable as chipped quartz. 'For
clever conversation with a lady, I must defer to Lysaer's charm.' Gently,
firmly, he deposited her on the arm of the blond companion, who

326


disengaged from discussion with two ministers with a panache any
statesman must envy. 'Lord Commander Diegan's sister, Talith,' Arithon
introduced, and his grin came and went at his half-brother's blank instant
of appreciation.
    The lady in her black-bordered, tawny brocades was enough to disrupt
conscious thought.
  'My lady, Lysaer s'Ilessid.'
    'Commander Diegan mentioned you,' said Talith in chilly politeness.
She turned her head quickly, but Arithon was gone, melted into the crowd
as neatly as a fugitive iyat. Her annoyance this time creased her forehead.
He had defeated her before she had quite understood that her methods were
under attack. Her stung pride would show, if she put aside dignity and
chased him. No prince should have been able to vanish that swiftly,
burdened as he was in state clothing. The gossips might be right to name
him sorcerer.
    '~l'fow me," f~ysaer interruptecf her thought. 'Poor substitute though I
may be, in truth, his Grace can be terrible company.'
    Talith turned back, to find her pique met by a surprisingly earnest
concern. Lysaer's elegant good looks did nothing to ease her thwarted fury.
'He said he wanted to dance. I should have accepted.'
    Lysaer set her down on a chair and as if by magic a servant appeared to
pour wine. 'Arithon anticipated your refusal.' Smiling in the face of her
crossness he added, 'Given his perverse nature, and his penchant for
solitude, that's precisely the outcome he desired. He's much easier to
collar when alone. Will you take red wine or white?'
    'White, please.' Talith accepted the offered goblet and raised it. 'To his
absence, then.' She drank, surprised to discover herself mollified. Lysaer's
sympathy held nothing of fawning. He appreciated her misjudgement and
refrained from questioning her motives, suave behaviour that was
piquantly Etarran. Gauging the interested sparkle in his eyes, she smiled
back. One missed opportunity could as easily be exchanged for another.
From Lysaer, she could glean as much, or perhaps more to help the city's
cause, than from the irksome s'Ffalenn prince himself.
    Not until very much later, when her brother the commander of the guard
visited her chamber to ask what she had garnered, did she realize how
thoroughly she had been beguiled.
    Throughout the evening spent with Lysaer she had done most of the
talking.
    'His charm is tough to resist,' her brother grumbled. He loosened the
amethyst buttons of his collar with fingers much softer than the prince's,
and smoothly unmarred by scars. 'Damned fair-haired conniver is a
diplomat down to his shoes. Too bad he wasn't born townsman. We
could're used one with his touch to restore our relations with the farmers.'

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At council the following morning the acknowledged Prince of Rathain was
conspicuous by his absence. Worn by the tact needed to smooth down
mutinous factions of councilmen, and strung up from picking apart
intrigues that clung and interwove between the guilds like dirtied layers of
old cobwebs, Lysaer decided he needed air. Of late he had been troubled by
a succession of fierce headaches. Threatened by another recurrence, he
begged leave of the proceedings when Sethvir called recess at noon.
    Lysaer seemed the only one bothered enough to pursue his half-brother's
irresponsibility.
    A hurried check on the guest chambers at Lord Governor Morfett's
mansion revealed Arithon nowhere in evidence. The bed with its orange
tassels had not been slept in; the servants were quick to offer gossip. Laid
out in atrociously warring colours over the divan by the escritoire were the
gold-worked shirt and green tabard that should have attired the prince.
     Alone with his annoyance in the vestibule, Lysaer cursed softly, then
started as somebody answered out of the empty air.  'If you want your half-brother, he's not here.'
    'Kharadmon, I suppose,' Lysaer snapped: the morning's dicey diplomacy
had exhausted his tolerance for ghosts in dim corners who surprised him.
'Why not be helpful by telling me where else he isn't.'
    Equably, the discorporate sorcerer said, 'I'll take you, unless you'd rather
charge about swearing at empty rooms.'
    'It's unfair,' Lysaer conceded, 'but I'm not in the mood to apologize. Help
find my pirate bastard of a half-brother, and that might improve my
manners.'
    Kharadmon obliged by providing an address that turned out to be located
in the most dismal section of the poor quarter.
    'You don't seem concerned about assassins,' Lysaer noted, his crossness
now equally due to worry.
    'Should I?' Kharadmon chuckled. 'You may have a point, at that. It's
Luhaine's turn for royal guard-duty.'

Etarra's back-district alleys looped across themselves like a botched
mesh of crochetwork. The paving was slimy and frost-heaved. Lysaer
ruined his best pair of boots splashing through sewage and spotted his
doublet on the dubious fluids that dripped from a brothel's rotted
balconies. He lost his way twice. The street of the horse knackers where
he arrived at last reeked unbearably of rancid tallow and of the waste
from unwholesome carcasses.
    He wanted to kick the next beggar who solicited him for coins; he had
already given all he had and against his promise to Kharadmon his
temper had done nothing but deterioriate.
    Blackly annoyed for having volunteered responsibility for this errand,
he stalked around the next corner.

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    Laughter lilted off the lichen-stained fronts of the warehouses, as
incongruous in that dank, filthy alley as the chime of carillon bells.
    The sound stopped Lysaer short. The joy he recognized for Arithon's, as
joltingly out of character for the man as this unlikely, dreary setting.
    Pique replaced by curiosity, Lysaer edged forward. Past the bend, under
the gloom of close-set walls, he saw a band of raggedy waifs, his errant
half-brother among them. The prince of Rathain had spurned fine clothes
for what looked like a ragpicker's dress. The elegant presence of yesterday
had been shed as if by a spell, leaving him noisome as his company, whose
unwashed, cynical faces were enraptured by something that transpired on
the ground.
    Lysaer stepped cautiously around a maggot-crawling dump of gristle and
tendons. His step disturbed older bones. Flies buzzed up in a cloud and his
eyes watered at the stink. He covered his nose with his sleeve, just as a
brigantine fashioned of shadows scudded out from between one child's
bare legs. Of unknown sex under its rags and tangled hair, the creature
screamed in delight, while the ship caught an imaginary gust in her sails
and heeled, lee-rail down, through a gutter of reeking brown run-off. But the smell was forgotten as Lysaer, also, became entranced.
    The little vessel cleared the shoals of a clogged culvert, rounded and
curtseyed over imaginary waves. Banners flying, she executed a saucy jibe
and with the breeze now full astern, surged on a run straight for the mouth
of the alley.
    Lysaer's presence blocked her course. Caught by surprise, Arithon lost
his grip on the complex assemblage of shadows that fashioned her planking
and sails. His beautiful little vessel unravelled in a muddled smear of
colours that dissolved half a second before impact.
 Heartsick to have spoiled the illusion, Lysaer looked up.
    To the children, his silks and fine velvets had already marked him for a
figure of upper-crust authority. Huge eyes in gaunt faces glowered at him
in accusation. Arithon showed a flat lack of expression. The moment's
overheard laughter now seemed passing fancy, a dream put to rout by
abrupt and unnecessary awakening. Had Lysaer not sensed the entreaty
most desperately masked behind each hostile expression, he might have
felt physically threatened.
    One of the taller figures in a tatterdemalion blanket sidled away into
shadow. A second later, running footsteps fled splashing through a side
alley too narrow to be seen from Lysaer's vantage.
    Trapped in the role of despoiler, he gave way to irritation. Although
Arithon had not spoken to inquire what brought him, his opening came
out acerbic. 'Do you know I've been smoothing over your absence from the
governor's council all morning? The guild ministers here are slippery as
sharks, and just as quick to turn. The commander of the guard and his
captain would wind your guts on a pole for mere sport. There cannot be a
kingdom where now there is discord if you don't show them a prince!'

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    'Such affairs are your passion, not mine,' Arithon said in desperate,
forced neutrality. Several more children bolted despite his denouncement.
'Why ever didn't you stay there?' He had not denied his origins.
    The accusing stares of his audience were quick to transfer to him. The
girl nearest his side recoiled in betrayal, that the man who had thrilled
with his marvels was other than the beggar he appeared. Arithon reached
out and cupped her cheek. His attempt at reassurance was pure instinct;
and remarkable for its tenderness since every other sinew in his body was
pitched taut in unwished-for challenge.
    Rebuked by such care for the feelings of a vermin-infested urchin, Lysaer
relented. 'Arithon, these governors are your subjects, as difficult in their
way to love as thieving children are to the wealthy whose pockets they
pick. Show the councilmen even half the understanding you've lavished
here and you'll escape getting knifed by paid assassins.'
    Arithon abandoned his effort to hold his audience: their fragile trust had
been broken and one by one they slipped off. Deserted in his squalid
clothes amid a welter of stinking refuse, Arithon's reply came mild. 'This
bunch steals out of need.'
    'You feel the governor's lackeys don't? That's shallow! You're capable of
truer perception.' Lysaer shut his eyes, reaching deep for tact and patience.
'Arithon, these merchants see in you an anathema made real. Records left
from the uprising have been passed down grossly distorted. Etatrans are
convinced the Fellowship sorcerers mean to give them an eye for an eye,
cast them from their homes and expose their daughters to be forced by
barbarians. They need so very badly to see the musician in you. Show them
fairness they can trust. Give to them. They'll respond, I promise, and
become as fine a backbone for this realm as any king could ask.'
    'Well, why come here and trouble me? You seem to understand
everything perfectly!' Arithon visibly resisted an urge to hammer his fist
against a shanty wall. 'You've stated my fears to a faretheewell, that this
city will ingratiate itself to become my indispensable right hand.'
    'What in Athera can be wrong with that?' Whipped on by Arithon's
expert touch at provocation, Lysaer lost to exasperation.
    'This!' Arithon gestured at the mildewed planks that enclosed the back
of the knacker's shacks. 'You socialize amid the glitter of the powerful, but
how well do any of us know this city: Did Diegan's lovely sister tell you the
guilds here steal children and lock them in warehouses for forced labour?
Can I, dare I, stroke the Lord Governor and his cronies, while four-year old
girls and boys stir glue-pots, and ten-year-olds gash their hands and die of
gangrene while rendering half-rotten carcasses? Ath's infinite mercy,
Lysaer! How can I live ?' The fury driving Arithon's defence snapped at last
to bare his nerve-jagged, impotent frustration. 'The needs of this realm will
swallow all that I am, and what will be left for the music?'
 Lysaer stared down at the dirty rings that crawled up his gold-sewn

330


boots. 'Forgive me.' He allowed his contrition to show, for after all, he had
been presumptuous. 'I didn't know.'
    Arithon's sorrow subsided to a gentleness surprisingly sincere. 'You
shouldn't want to know. Go back. I appreciate your help with the
diplomacy, but this problem is mine. When I'm ready, never doubt, I'll give
it my best effort.'

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Indiscretion

Dusk thickened the shadows over the forested roadway that led southward
out of Ward. This stretch of highway, that snaked like a chalk scar over the
frost-bleak hills toward Tal's Crossing, was the dread of every Etarran
merchant. Caravans passed between the northern principalities of Rathain
heavily armed, or they failed to reach their destinations. Yet a raid by
marauding barbarians seemed not to concern the solitary old man who
guided his ponycart over the cracked flagstones laid down by the decree of
long dead s'Ffalenn kings.
    His conveyance was open, low-slung and in sorry need of fresh paint: the
beast between the shafts, a glossy buckskin with a tail like black wire and a
feisty dislike of boy grooms. He carried his ears cocked back as if listening
for excuse to flatten them down in displeasure.
    By contrast, the driver was ascetically thin. He sat atop his jolting
board seat with a slouch that gave with the bumps; if his narrow face
was creased by eight decades of life, the fingers laced through the reins
were clean, supple and sure. He whistled between widely-spaced front
teeth and his jaunty melody carried over the creak of harness and
cartwheel to a pair of barbarian children lying flat in the brush above the
verge.
    Twelve years of age and bold as coin brass, Jieret puffed a rust-coloured
tangle of hair from his lips. He frowned in stormy concentration. Bored
with long feasting, impatient since the returned sunlight had disrupted the
passage of caravans to raid, he elbowed his younger companion. 'Ready,
Idnen?'
    The other boy shifted a sweaty grip on the stick he had sharpened for a
javelin. Sneaking out of camp had been Jieret's idea. When their play at
scouting had surprisingly turned up a victim, the excitement of plunder
and ransom somehow lost their dashing appeal. A touch scared,~Idrien

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wished himself back at the feast, tossing out nuts to the squirrels. 'You
know, his relatives might not be so rich.'
     Jieret grinned through another unruly red curl. 'You saw the topaz
brooch that fastens his cloak. Are you chickening out on me?'
 Wide-eyed, Idrien shook his head.
    'Well, come on, then.' Jieret wormed from the thicket, too brash to care if
he snapped twigs.
    Idrien followed, cautious in his uncertainty. Appearances could deceive:
the man's jewel might only be glass. Yet already Jieret scrambled to his feet
and charged full-tilt down the hillside. Clan honour demanded that his
companion not shirk him support.
    Jieret slithered into the open roadway, hampered by a bouncing fall of
stones. His jerkin had torn and slipped over one shoulder and his javelin
wavered despite his determination to threaten the elder in the cart. 'Halt,
as you value your life!' He shrugged up his deerskin to unburden his
throwing arm, then fought for balance and decorum as Idrien plunged
down the bank and crash landed into his back.
    The whistled melody ceased. Under threat of two sharpened sticks,
capable hands tightened on the reins. The buckskin bared teeth and rolled
eyes as it sidled and stopped between the shafts. Keeping tight hold on its
mouth, the raid victim bent his light, startled gaze upon the dirty, briar-
scraped pair of boys. His lips pulled crooked in a smile and silver-tipped
brows twitched up underneath his hood.
    'Get out of the cart and disarm. Slowly!' Jieret elbowed Idrien to take the
pony's bridle.
    The old man hesitated. Then he released the reins and stepped down
carefully, the gold silk lining of his cloak a fitful gleam in failing light. As if
ready for Idrien's howl as the buckskin snaked its head down to nip, he shot
out a fist and hammered the pony with an expert blow at the juncture of
shoulder and neck. The creature grunted in curbed belligerence and
sullenly shook out its mane. Its master, nonplussed, removed an
ornamental dagger from his belt, turned the blade and offered the handle to
Jieret. He stood quietly while Idrien's grubby fingers rifled his rich clothing
in a vain search for concealed weapons.
    At length, threatened by his own knife as well as the brace of whittled
sticks, he offered up ringless hands. 'Whose captivity have I the honour of
accepting?' His voice was pleasantly pitched, unmarred by the quaver that
characterized the very old.
     Jieret scowled. Hostages ought to show fear, not make genial greetings.
 Since the pony was demonstrably nasty-tempered, he settled for binding
 its owner's hands with the reins, then made him lead the miserable beast.
 He and Idrien clambered onto the buckboard and directed their mis-
 matched draft team to haul the cart off the road.
     The boys punched each other's sides, intoxicated by their success. A
 man taken for ransom; the clanlords would surely praise their prowess!

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The stranger might fetch the price of a sword, or better, a horse. Then, in
consternation, the raiders recalled they had neglected to choose cover
before hand.
    'Stupid,' Iieret whispered, crestfallen at the lapse. 'We can't drag a cart
through the forest.'
  Idrien sucked his lower lip. 'Drive to the dell and unhitch?'
    'Maybe.' Jieret nicked bark off his stick in serious thought. 'Wind smells
of rain. Our booty could get a good soaking.'
    At this point, the captive good-naturedly interrupted. 'A storm won't
hurt. The tarps are new enough not to leak.'
    'Quiet!' Idrien glanced around in fresh worry. 'Too much chatter will
fetch the scouts.'
    Their captive considered this, his long, lean legs quick to compensate for
the buckskin's short-strided trot. 'Young raiders don't have their own
scouts?' He might have been laughing; or not, dusk had deepened too much
to tell.
    lieret skinned his knuckles in a belatedly frantic search, but found
neither socket nor driving whip. He tried to hasten the pony's pace by
flapping his arms. The buckskin snapped up its round quarters. Hooves
banged vengefully against the buckboard. Smacked through the soles of his
boots, and stinging mightily, Idrien scowled.
    [ieret clung grimly to propriety. 'Our scouts are off to find other marks,'
he lied grandly. 'If you hope to stay alive to be ransomed, keep silent.'
    For all their unplanned excitement, the boys guided the little cart swiftly
through the darkness. In a natural declivity between chalk bluffs they
ordered the pony unhitched. Idrien held the old man at stickpoint, while
lieret piled brush to conceal their booty. Then, smothering back whoops of
exhilaration, the boys chivvied their captive through the forest to the clan
gathering they had forsaken to seek adventure.
    Control broke on the camp perimeter. Jieret burst into shouting, while
Idrien startled the dancers into uproar by casting his toy javelin straight
into the central fire. Sparks flew; the celebration unravelled in confusion
as leather-clad scouts scrambled to grab weapons, and others on guard
patrol converged from the wood with drawn steel.
    Blinking against the shifting glare of torches, the captive stumbled to a
halt. lieret braved the buckskin's teeth to grasp a fistful of black and gold
cloak and drag his catch a reluctant step closer tothe fires.
    'Here!' He waved to the tallest of the approaching men. 'A sure ransom
we've brought, father, and a pony for Tashka.'
    Steiven, reigning regent of Rathain, was a hard man to miss, even in
uncertain light amid his pack of leather-clad scouts. Lanky, dark headed,
he ran with the grace of a deer. His eyes, deep hazel, were wary as any forest
creature's whose kind has been too long hunted. His hands were large and
strongly made; his clean-shaven chin was square. The bones of his face
hinted at a rough-cut, handsome beauty, an impression spoiled at first

334


sight by a scar that grooved his cheekbone and jaw to end in a ridged knot of
flesh above his collarbone.
    A wild boar's tusk might have ripped such disfigurement; in fact,
Steiven's looks had been ruined by a harness buckle heated red-hot by a
caravan master when, at ten years of age, he had chased the wagon that
carried his brothers' scalps for credit as a bounty hunter's kill. He had been fortunate to escape with his life.
    The sight of his half-grown son gambolling into camp with a captive clad
in town clothes gave Steiven a start that had much to do with memories
that recurred in nightmares. Yet he was a man for listening before action;
half a lifetime of chieftaincy had taught him to be exactingly fair. Though
his heart beat too fast and he wanted to strike his boy for this latest
insanely foolish prank, he forced himself to think and to walk; and then
the captive raised his head. Spaced front teeth flashed in a smile and a snag
of white hair escaped his hood.
     Steiven stopped cold, the drift of Jieret's chatter disregarded. His fists
uncurled. 'Bare your head,' he commanded. For answer, the old man half-turned.
The clan chief's ruddy complexion turned pale. 'Dharkaron, forgive us.'
At his tone, Jieret faltered into silence. Sweating, aware he had earned
himself a hiding, he stared wide-eyed as his father drew his dagger and with
shocking diffidence toward a town-born, cut the ties from the captive's
wrists.
    The elder raised his freed hands and pushed back his hood. Black cloth
lined in yellow silk fell away to expose a knife-blade nose and a spill of
shoulder*length silver hair.
    'Grant us pardon, master,' Steiven said softly. Then he rounded in fury
on his son. 'You captured no merchant, foolish boy! Shame you've brought
your clan, not ransom. You stand before the Masterbard himself.'
    'Him?' Jieret's insolence rang defensively loud as he gestured with his
sharpened stick.
     Steiven ripped the makeshift weapon out of his child's hands. 'Didn't
you find the lyranthe when you reviewed his possessions for arms?'
 ~ieret started to tremble.
    'Ah,' said Steiven. He caught the Masterbard's desperate attempt to hide
amusement, and regained his own equilibrium. He effected a ferocious
scowl anyway. 'Not only did you raid the wrong man, son, you also kept
slack discipline?'
    Somebody giggled on the sidelines; Jieret's older sister Tashka. Humilia-
tion would serve the boy better than a strapping in private. $teiven decided
to pass off the affair as a stupidity beneath the notice of grown men.
'Apologize at once and offer Halliron your hospitality. Or else amend your
insult by meeting his demand for honour-gift, and give him escort back to
the road for the stupid bit of nuisance you've caused.'
 Jieret looked wildly around but Idrien had seized his chance to vanish.

335


Crestfallen, but still brazenly unapologetic, he straightened before the
tall minstrel.
    'Don't speak,' Halliron said with a wicked twinkle in his eyes. 'Instead,
I'll thank you to care for my pony and fetch back my lyranthe from the
cart.' Solemnly, he surrendered his buckskin's hacked-off reins into the
hands of the miscreant.
    At Jieret's first tug at the headstall, the pony snapped back black-tipped
ears. A forehoof flashed up in a snake-fast strike and the boy, yelling
curses better suited to a caravan drover, jumped back to escape getting
whacked.
    'He can handle cross-grained horses, I trust?' said Halliron to the father,
only to find the huge man sitting down without warning in wet leaves.
Steiven's arms were clutched to his ribs as though he might tear a gut
stifling laughter. 'Fair punishment,' the regent of Rathain snorted be-
tween wheezes. 'A pony for Tashka, indeed! That creature would as
likely rip his poor sister's hand off.'
    'Probably not.' Halliron smiled, watching thoughtfully as bystanders
scattered and the buckskin's striped rump bucked and sidled through the
leaping ring of torchlight. 'The little imp only hates boys. And, truth to
tell, I'm not sorry. A storm rides the wind, can you smell it? Not even an
initiate's hostel graces this stretch of forest. I expected to endure a nasty
night.'

When the weather finally broke, young Jieret was hours in bed and
Halliron comfortably settled on cushions in the lodge tent of the regent of
Rathain. Although no one had asked the Masterbard to perform he had
generously offered his talents to the clan chieftain's family until nature's
fury defeated even his trained voice. The storm struck Strakewood from
the south, battering with windy fists and rattling rain over oiled hide
with such force that the crack and roll of thunder could barely be heard
above the noise.
    Steiven came in wet from helping the scouts secure the horse lines.
'Strange,' he mused as he peeled his sodden jerkin and swiped dripping
hair from the unmarred side of his face. 'We don't often get squalls from
the south. Usually they spend themselves over the Mathorns and rattle
the mansions in Etarra.'
    'Greater changes are afoot than mere weather, since the return of true
sunlight.' Halliron hooked the final ties on the fleece-lined case that
protected his lyranthe, and took wine from the hand of Steiven's lady.
'You're too kind,' he thanked her, and raised the flagon in tribute to clan
hospitality.
    Clad in rare finery, her magnificent, heavy russet hair braided with
sequins worn for dancing, Dania shone with pleasure. 'We're blessed.
Your singing is a treasure unequalled.'

336


    Her warmth sparked sorrow from the bard, who seemed suddenly
absorbed with savouring the taste of his wine.
    'No successor yet,' the lady sympathized with an insight that tended to
disorient grown men. She shared a quick glance with her husband, who
knelt and tugged a fresh shirt from a chest alongside the wall.
    Halliron sighed. 'Not for want of trying, lady. I've auditioned candidates
by the thousands. Many had talent. Yet I was never satisfied. Something
indefinable seemed lacking.' He tried and failed to shrug off a bitterness at
odds with a nature smoothed over by advanced years. 'I've earned the
reputation of an overbearing old crank. Perhaps justly.'
    But the bard's face by candlelight showed only heartsore regret.
I-Ialliron's the tragedy, Dania thought, that no apprentice had been found
to inherit his title, perhaps the deepest regret of his long and gifted life.
    'Dania,' Steiven said gently. 'Bring out the telir brandy and refill the
Masterbard's cup.'
    The lady moved with the lightness of forest-bred caution to fetch the
cut-crystal flask, while the bard's attention strayed toward the shadows
that dimmed the rear of the lodge. Lord and lady followed his gaze, to find
Jieret slipped from his bedroll, the heavy curls that matched his mother's
tousled still from sleep.
 'Afraid of the lightning, are you?' Halliron said in gentle satire.
    'Like Dharkaron he is.' Steiven straightened up in annoyance. Muffled
by a thick layer of linen as he belatedly donned his dry shirt, he said, 'Jieret,
haven't you stirred up trouble enough for one night?'
    The boy licked his lips. As he took a hesitant step closer, the light fell full
~~n him and revealed his alarming pallor. Shaking, he announced, 'Father, I
had a dream.'
    'Ath, it's the sight,' Dania exclaimed. Sequins sparkled like wind harried
droplets as she sprang across the carpets and swept her young son in her
~ns. 'Steiven, he's cold. Find a blanket.'
     The bard was on his feet with a speed that belied his age. He flung the
 l:~dy his own silk-lined cloak, then stood aside for Steiven, arrived in a
 !!~~rr of untied laces. He lifted the boy from his wife and bundled him to
 t~:~c dain in rich black wool lined with silk.
     Halliron helped the shaken mother to find a seat upon the scattered
 . ~tsbi~ms. 'The forevision runs in your line, my lady?'
     rcmbling now as violently as her son, a woman who was seasoned to
 disasters, and who had sword scars on her from past raids, gasped
 ~amst the bard's shoulder. 'Steiven's line. He has the gift also.' She
 swallowed, her dark, fine eyes fixed worriedly on the crown of red hair
 tiTat poked through the folds of the cloak. 'The visions are too often
 i~]~)(~dy.'
     Halliron recovered his flagon, refilled it with brandy and pressed
 Dania's icy fingers around the stem. 'You need a blanket also.' He
 I~:tched one, while the lodge poles rattled to a booming crash of thunder.

337


    Throughout, the murmur of Steiven's voice never faltered. 'What did
you see.~ I know you're frightened, son, but tell me.'
Jieret answered unsteadily that he had seen the king ride from Etarra.
'Blessed Ath.' Steiven pressed his scarred cheek into his boy's crown to
hide eyes that flashed with suspect brightness. After a moment, muffled by
fox-brush hair, he said, 'And how did you know him for your king?'
    'He wore a silver circlet and a tabard with the leopard of s'Ffalenn.' Ever
an observant child, Jieret added, 'His face matched the portrait of Totbrand
that you keep in the cave with the sceptre.'
    Steiven swallowed. Fighting to keep his tone light, he said, 'You're a
scout reporting for a raid. I want the particulars, carefully and accurately.'
    'His Grace was alone,' Jieret said. 'Armed with only a sword and shorter
of stature than Caolle. He rode in haste. His horse was winded almost to
death and by his handling of the reins, his right palm or wrist was likely
injure6. Pie x~a~ p'a~,e.e. ct.' Ttte boy stopped, wrung by a fresh bout of
trembling.
      'Who pursued?' pressed Steiven. He stroked the boy's back with a firm
touch but his eyes, when he raised them, were hard as rain-rinsed granite.
  Doggedly, Jieret finished. 'Twoscore lancers, Etarra city garrison.'
    'That has the ring of true vision.' Steiven set the boy back on his feet.
'Did you happen to recall if it was raining?'
    Dania held her breath. Halliron reached out and patted her hand as the
boy across the lodge tent frowned in tight concentration. At length Jieret
raised eyes intent as his father's and said, 'Funny, that. I saw snowfall. But
the trees were green with new leaves.' His chin raised, determinedly
defiant. 'I'm not lying. What I dreamed was real.'
    'Then dress yourself and fetch Caolle,' Steiven instructed his son. In
.response to Dania's startled cry, he managed a bitter-edged smile. 'Lady,
would you have our king catch us sleeping? If snow is going to fall on spring
leaves and Etarra's guard fares out hunting, the future is going to bring
trouble. Warning must be carried to Fallowmere and the scouts assigned
road-watch must be doubled.'

338


Introspections

Lysaer jerked awake in a tangle of sodden sheets. The nightmare that had
ripped him from sleep still lingered, a sense of terror just beyond grasp of his
consciousness. He slugged a heavy feather pillow out of his face in a choked-
back fit of frustration. Guard-spells set by the Fellowship might avert those
threats that were tangible, but not the formless ills that harrowed his
dreams. This was not the first night since Desh-thiere's defeat that he had
awakened to a pounding heart and skin running with sweat.
    Unsettled, caught shivering in the grip of reaction, he kicked free of his
bedclothes. Though the casements showed no hint of brightening dawn, he
arose and flung on yesterday's discarded clothing. He needed to move, to
walk; even veiled in darkness the close opulence of the bedchamber
oppressed him. Having learned that one of the discorporate sorcerers
maintained a guarding presence over the room at all times, he announced,
'I'm going out. Into the garden, probably.'
    Luhaine's reproving tone answered. 'You'll want your cloak. There's
heavy fog.'
    Lysaer raised his eyebrows in surprised question. 'You'd allow dreary
weather on the eve of Arithon's coronation?'
    'There should have been rain,' Luhaine admitted, a touch curt. Although
he allowed for the need to avoid any sort of bad omen he liked disturbing
nature even less. 'But Kharadmon diverted the storm northward. The
ground mist will burn off before noon.'
    As Lysaer fumbled a course toward the wardrobe he passed other beds in
the chamber whose fur quilts lay undisturbed. Dakar would be out
drinking. Despite his insistence that Etarrans brewed terrible hops he was
willing enough to remedy the lapse with gin; and if the prince of Rathain
chose to spend his last night before lifetime commitment to a troubled
kingdom in his cups, no friends would fault him for indulgence.

339


Still overheated, Lysaer tossed his cloak over one shoulder and quietly
let himself out.
    The high*walled garden that adjoined the guest-chamber lay silvered and
fringed with dew. Chilled to gooseflesh as dampness hit his wet skin,
Lysaer sucked in a deep breath. The air brought no refreshment. The heavy
oils burned in the street torches threw off dense smoke which stung his
nose and throat. Mingled scents from the incenses used to mask the stench
from the sewers also overwhelmed the natural fragrance of earth and
unfurling spring lilacs. Two dogs snarled in the distance; a woman shouted
shrill imprecations, while nearer at hand, running steps pattered ahead of a
night-sentry's tramp. Despite Lysaer's preference for cities Etarra pos-
sessed an evasive, disturbing restlessness. The more determinedly he
strove to grasp the deep currents of intrigue, to empathize with the needs of
the guild ministers who held the reins of power, the greater his reflected
unease. As little as he had liked Ithamon's desolation, he felt still less at
home here.
    He made his concession to the damp, finally, and flicked his cloak over
his back. Where he had been overheated, now his discomfort derived from
chill. Certainly, he held no envy for the kingship that Arithon was
pledged to inherit.
    Slowly, insidiously, Etarra's corruption had grown to haunt Lysaer in
ways that undermined his beliefs.
    Aching from too many sleepless nights, he parked his shoulder against a
pedestal that supported the bust of a dignitary. Crickets cheeped in the
flowerbeds; beyond them, the woman's shouting faded and finally ceased.
The distant dog fight dwindled to yelps and the sentry passed, grumbling,
around the corner of the streetside wall. Lysaer absorbed the sounds of an
unfamiliar world and bitterly reflected upon how deeply the children in
the street of the horse knackers had upset his priorities.
    As prince on Dascen Elur he had held his people's trust. Their needs had
become one with his own, taken into his heart as fully as he had striven to
embrace understanding of Etarra's governor's council. The high officials
were responding; even Lord Commander Diegan had softened his stance to
proffer an easy friendship. Confidence in his ability to mete out fair
treatment had always before given Lysaer the focus to satisfy his inborn
drive to seek justice.
    Up until today, honour had seemed a tangible, changeless absolute, that
made each choice clear-edged.
    The urge to pace, to storm across the dark garden to escape the
entanglement of some unseen trap became nearly too strong to deny.
Lysaer forced himself to stillness. He sucked in the perfume of the lilacs
and made himself examine why five minutes in the poor quarter should
shatter his viewpoint's simplicity. The dilemma held multiple facets. One
could not serve the guilds without destroying the children enslaved in the
workhouses; the merchants' rights to safe trade could not be enforced

340


without condoning headhunters and the butchery that visited bloodshed
upon the woodland clansmen.
    Whose cause took priority? In this world of divisive cultures and
shattered loyalties, no single foundation of rightness existed.
    The Fellowship sorcerers withheld opinion. They would use their
formidable powers to set a prince on a throne and yet would enact no
judgement; they did not guide or expect, but encouraged their chosen royal
heir to role by his gifts and his conscience.
    That stock of responsibility became suffocating. Lysaer laid his head
against the stonework that supported his shoulders and agonized over a
justice no longer obvious. Principles were what a man made them.
Sheltered since birth by the cares of a straightforward kingdom, he found
himself painfully lost at formulating law for himself. Etarra tormented
him by ploughing up doubts and possibilities: his own lost realm of Tysan
might bear equal measure of thorny, insoluble suffering. He had been
taught his statesmanship there and had perhaps never seen beyond the
walls of his palace to notice.
'Daelion Fatemaster, what a muddle!' he exploded in tight frustration.
He believed himself to be alone. When a woman's voice answered from
the gate trellis, he started and banged his shoulder against the scrolled
beard of the statue.
    Surprise caused her words to escape him. 'What? Who's there?' He
looked, but saw no one in the foggy murk between the topiary.
    'Not an enemy.' Her voice was cool and pleasantly modulated, her crisp
accent, other than Etarran. She moved, appeared out of the mists on the
path as a silhouette muffled in cloaks; not elderly, by her grace, but
impossible to judge as to age.
    'Who are you?' Vaguely familiar as she seemed, Lysaer could not push
past recent memories of Talith to place where he may have encountered
her.
    'We've met, but so briefly you might not recall. In the house of Enithen
Tuer.' She had better night-sight than he; at least, she sat without groping
on a stone bench set invisibly in a cranny beside the hedge. A passing dray's
lantern shot fuzzed diamonds of light through the latticed gate. Stray
beams brushed copper glints in the hair that trailed loose from her hood.
    'The enchantress,' Lysaer said in recognition. He added, accusing, 'But
Arithon knew you better than I.'
    A night-time visit to the hayloft in the Ravens Tavern hung unmen-
tioned between them. Elaira tucked her hands beneath her cloak, that
Lysaer might not see how her nerves had been shaken. 'You don't approve
of your half-brother's midnight excursions.'
    Her guess was accurate; also, on the tail of his self-examination,
hurtfully near the meat of his recent uncertainties. Unsure whether she
toyed with him, Lysaer pushed away from the pedestal. He crossed the
gravel path to gain a better view of her features. The layers of her hoods

341


kept her veiled. He decided to risk honest answer. 'I'm not sure. Arithon
takes unconscionable risks, looking for pearls among beggars. I prefer the
simpler reality, that the means to uplift the unfortunate are better
controlled from the council chamber. A man can feed the hungry and
clothe beggars all his life and not change the conditions that make them
wretched.'
    The lady considered a moment then offered, 'Your vision and Arithon's
are very different. As a spirit schooled to power, his perception stems from
one absolute. Universal harmony begins with recognition that the life in an
ordinary pebble is as sacred as conscious selfhood. Both views are equally
valid.'
    Lysaer responded in stifled antagonism. 'And just what's your stake in all
this?' He felt hagridden enough, without her unasked for exploration of his
conscience.
    She was stung; her sigh was drawn out and hinted at diffidence. Still, she
did not shy back from the truth. 'I was sent. Direct orders from my superiors:
to seek out the princes given sanction to rule and to interact enough to test
their mettle.'
    He stepped back, felt the dripping lip of a second stone bench and sank
down facing her. Fiercely he said, 'What have you found?'
    'That Etarra offers entanglement enough to torture any man and suffering
very clearly bares the spirit. As a prince must, you place love and care for the
masses before individual suffering.' Her hood moved; perhaps she looked
down in embarrassment for her snooping. Arithon trapped under such
scrutiny would have cut off further inquiry through sarcasm; Lysaer more
civilly chose silence. Drawn to shared sympathy by his tact, Elaira said, 'I
saw your half-brother earlier, when he made ships out of shadows in the
knackers' alley.'
    Lysaer could not stem his curiosity, nor did he hide his concern for the
strain on Rathain's prince that even the sorcerers could not ease. 'Arithen
spoke to you then?'
    'No.' She was sharp. 'I dressed in disguise as a lad. He was never allowed to
see my face. And please, I would mind very much if you told him.'
    The vehemence she could not quite curb sparked Lysaer to exclamation.
'You were the lady he acted to defend when Koriani scryers tried to spy out
our affairs in Ithamon!'
    'I don't have a clue what you're talking about.' She forestailed his impulse
to explain, angry, or intensely afraid. 'Keep still. If it concerns the Koriani
Senior Circle, I'm far better off left ignorant.'
'Arithon cares for you,' Lysaer said, his first impulse to soften her distress.
'He weeps for the grass that he treads on.' Elaira stiflened, indignant at his
solicitude. 'You should know, as a scion of s'Ilessid, that the s'Ffalenn royal
gift is forced empathy!' She stood in a reckless haste that showered dew from
the bushes as her cloak caught. 'I have to go.'
 'But your errand.' Lysaer stood also. Effortlessly considerate, he bent and

342


unhooked the snagged cloth without touching her. 'Surely your purpose is
incomplete ?'
    Elaira shook her head as he straightened. The dark had begun to lift with
the earliest glimmer of dawn~ the eyes that met his from under volumin-
ous layers of clothing sparkled, filled with tears that only magnified their
intensity. Yet when she spoke, her voice was hammered and level. 'I have
what I came to this garden for. You do not, if you left your bed to find calm.'
 Lysaer gently took her arm. 'I'11 see you to the gate,' he said politely.
 Relieved to discover he was gentleman enough not to pry, she smiled in
 piercing gratitude. In a sympathy tuned so closely to his inner dilemma
 that this time no sensibilities were offended, she said, 'Speaking strictly for
 myself, I would spill blood to release those clan children from slavery in
 the knacker's yard. But then, female instinct drives me to condemn
 exploitation of the young. A man might arrange his priorities differently.'
    Lysaer steered her past the spears of the spring's sprouting lilies, his hand
warm and sure on her arm. 'It is not what you would do, or what I would.
Pity Arithon, for as he said, tomorrow Etarra becomes his problem. I only
pray that the guildsmen don't murder him before he's had his chance to act
at all.'
    They had reached the gate. Lysaer's touch dropped away as he raised the
latch and opened the panel to let her through.
    Elaira passed beneath the trellis. 'What this realm will kill for certain is
your half-brother's musical talent. Mourn that.'
    And then she was gone, a shadow vanished into foggy streets that no
lantern could fully illuminate.

343


Prepara tion s

As dawn silvers the cloud-cover above the forested hills of Deshit, relays of
barbarian couriers race at speed through thinning rains bearing the call-to-
arms for clan encampments to the north and east...

Guarded from outside interference, sealed in a seamless stone flask, the
uncounted entities that comprise the Mistwraith, Desh-thiere, brood upon
two half-brothers whose gifts have seen them doomed to oblivion...

Grey seas heave off the north coast of Fallowmere, where a rainstorm
spends the torrents that should have fallen upon lands far south; while
skies brighten flawless aquamarine and citrine above the square bastions
of Etarra, the sorcerer responsible for nature's violation touches runes of
well-binding upon plants, soil, and wild creatures, and begs their forgive-
ness for his act...

344


XIV. CORONATION DAY

At the hour past sunrise on the day appointed for Arithon's coronation, the
door to Morfett's guest-chamber banged open. Dakar sallied in from the
hallway, his head and torso eclipsed behind a towering mound of state
clothing. He tottered across the tile floor, shed his armload across the
nearest divan and announced, 'These are yours. Asandir's orders.'
Gloating, insouciant, rumpled from a night's hard drinking and the full-
blown effects of a hangover, he added, 'I'm told to watch you dress to make
sure that you leave nothing out.'
    Curled in the windowseat with his lyranthe lying silent across his knees,
Arithon regarded the spilled velvets and silks, shot through each fold with
costly metallic threadwork. Dead sober, if a touch haggard from lack of
sleep, he made a study of Dakar and grinned. 'Silver to broom-straws your
master's orders were directed toward you as well. Anyway, you don't deck
out in pearl buttons and brocades by any choice I ever saw.'
    Dakar scowled, ashamed to discover that his offering also held garments
of brown broadcloth too generously cut for anybody's frame except his
own. 'Get on with this.' He folded his arms across his chest, 'or by
Dharkaron's vengeance, I swear I'll call Morfett's valets in to help!'
    Arithon raised his cheek off the curve of his lyranthe and said, 'You
couldn't get them. The entire household is too busy keeping the master
from falling prostrate into his breakfast plate.'
    'Well, let's say your accession to Rathain's throne isn't a balm to
anybody's temper!' Still distressed over Lysaer's endangerment at the time
of the Mistwraith's confinement, Dakar vented his resentment upon the
prince at hand. 'Where were you last night?'
    'Not drinking, nor with a woman.' Lightly, lovingly, Arithon dusted a
finger across his strings. A haunting minor chord sighed forth; then, since
even that slight sound galled like salt in an open sore, he laid his

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instrument aside. The eyes he turned upon Dakar were sharp and terrible
for their emptiness. 'Is there anything else?'
    But the Mad Prophet refused to be baited. 'If you were gallivanting again
in the poor quarter you'd better have taken a bath.'
    'What? The velvets aren't perfumed?' Arithon arose and stretched
linked hands above his head. The linen he wore was plain, not dirty. He
advanced through the flare of sunlight that fell through the amber
lozenged windows and Dakar saw in relief that the hair at his collar was
in fact still damp.
    Arithon stripped off his shirt. Marked yet by the physical scars from his
past failed effort at sovereignty, he surveyed the array of kingly trappings in
bright-eyed, self-mocking distaste. 'Let's have this over with.'
    He dressed himself while Dakar passed garments in roughly the
appropriate order: silver-grey hose, white silk shirt, black tunic with
leopard-fur edging. Next, the ceremonial accessories that symbolized a
sovereign's tie to the land: the belt of wooden discs inlaid with royal seals
in abalone; the deer-hide boots studded with river stone and tied with
feather-tipped thongs; the cabochon emerald set in silver that he pinned
above his heart. The fabrics held no scent beyond a hint of sweetgrass that
lingered from the ritual blessing worked an hour earlier by the Fellowship.
The fine-stitched tracery of interlace borders, the ribboned cuffs and hems
bespoke tailoring unmatched in Etarra. When and where such masterwork
had been done, Arithon refused to ask.
    Dakar volunteered, just to needle him. 'Sethvir sews superbly, don't you
think?'
    'Ath,' said Arithon in fiat vehemence. 'Not this, I hope.' He raked
through the garments still left and hooked out the ugly bit that jarred: a
heavy, lacquerworked sword-sheath, hung from a baldric bossed with
carbuncles.
 Dakar looked sourly on. 'Not that.'
    'The stones look heavy enough to sink a four-days bloated carcass.'
Arithon dangled the item aloft, his combativeness blunted by resignation.
'This wasn't, by chance, a gift from the ladies of Etarra?'
'Bang on.' Dakar stifled a chortle. 'Asandir said wear it anyway.'
Arithon glanced suspiciously back. He raised the jewel-encrusted
leather to his nostrils and immediately laughed. 'Damn you! It doesn't
smell of sweetgrass. Is this your prank, to curse me with an ill-wish in
addition to this joy-forsaken realm?'
    'Well,' said Dakar, shrugging. 'Leave it out and the ladies will be
offended for sure. How could they know they'd made their contribution
too late for the Fellowship's blessing? No ward I've heard of could make
that thing look less hideous.' Philosophically, he added, 'Bear up. You've
got the tabard and sash yet to go before you need concern yourself with
weapons.'
 'That thing is a fit weapon, to strike a man blind at first sight.' Arithon

346


discarded the atrocity and at Dakar's urging took the damask-lined velvet
of the tabard.
    The heraldic leopard sparkled as he pulled it over his head. Its weight of
rich cloth seemed to burden his shoulders, while Dakar bound on the black
sash with its silver wire wrapping. As if to delay the moment when he
must gird on the tasteless scabbard, Arithon took up the circlet that
^sandit's spellcraft had fashioned from Rathain's earth. Symbol of an
unwanted succession, he gripped the cool metal with a tension that
whitened his knuckles. Regret played across his expression. Then, firmly
silent, he raised the fillet and pressed it over his black hair. It rested with
deceptive lightness across his brow, as a crown yet to come never would.
    Dakar chose that moment to look up. Imprinted against the amber
casement, he saw Arithon's face crossed by the shining band that preceded
Rathain's vested sovereignty. Chills toughened the Mad Prophet's flesh.
One split-second of vertigo was all the forewarning he received.
 Then in a rash, his seer's talent claimed him wholly as instrument.
    Trance shocked through him with such force that his mind became
emptied. Dakar dropped to his knees.
    A vision burned through: of a square milling with people, among them
Arithon, who drove in heedless, driven panic between tight-packed
factions of Etarra merchants. The image formed fully and shattered,
buried by a static blast of whiteness as a second shock slammed Dakar's
innermind.
    Vaguely aware that his voice shouted meaningless phrases, the Mad
Prophet felt himself falling. His downward rush into darkness was
suddenly and sickeningly arrested by a hand that caught and yanked him
back.
    He returned to himself with a wrench that left him disoriented. His face
dripped sweat. Released to a welter of dizziness, he waited, panting, until
orderless colour resolved into the orange and purple tiles that floored the
Lord Governor's guest-chamber. Arithon had an arm around his shoulders.
That support was all that held Dakar upright as he swayed, helplessly
unbalanced.
     'Ath,' the Mad Prophet gasped as vertigo progressed into nausea.
'Whoever named farsight a gift had the warped inclinations of a torturer.'
 'You should lie down.' Arithon strove to lift him toward the divan.
 Powerless to assist as his frame was shaken by spasms, Dakar doubled
 over. His breakfast stayed down, barely; the accomplishment seemed
 moot. He felt wretched. As Arithon helped him to straighten, he saw his
 morning's work wasted.
    The royal tabard was rucked askew. Both of the prince's silk sleeves were
blotched with perspiration. Whatever slight tolerance Arithon had at-
tained toward kingship appeared to have fled in a moment. Against skin
shocked to pallor, the hair dragged fiat beneath the circlet crossed his
forehead like penstrokes scribbled upon parchment. Wild-eyed as any

347


cornered animal, the Shadow Master half-forced, half-propelled Dakar
across the floor.
    Too miserable to resist, the Mad Prophet collapsed across the divan. He
had no strength to care for crushed velvets. That the scabbard with its
carbuncles gouged his backside mattered less: the ugly gift from the
dignitaries' wives now seemed some poor jest from a nightmare. 'What
happened?' he gasped; but the gut-sick aftermath of major prophecy was
much too familiar to support pretence. 'For Ath's sake, tell me what ! said.'
    Arithon withdrew his hands, which were shaking. 'You foretold
disaster.'
    Terror hit Dakar in the pit of his unsettled stomach. He fought another
twisting cramp as every formless uncertainty that had agonized his
imagination since Ithamon replayed as a possible reality. 'Lysaer. Desh-
thiere has some hold on him, doesn't it?'
    Mere supposition drove Arithon to an explosive step back. 'Would that
were all.' He snatched up the sword which rested unsheathed near the
regalia he had not yet put on. 'Where's the sorcerer who should be here on
guard?'
    But a search of the dimmest alcoves where a discorporate mage was wont
to lurk showed Luhaine nowhere in evidence. In dread that some dire facet
of Dakar's prophecy had compelled the Fellowship guardian to abandon
him, Arithon spun back toward the divan. 'Where's Asandir!'
    Dakar pressed his hands to his temples. Still trapped on the cusp of major
prophecy, he cradled a skull on fire with headache. His thoughts dragged,
too dim to keep pace with events, far less attach meaning to questions.
Dully he repeated, 'What in Daelion's province did I predict?'
    Fast movement blurred his eyesight. The next second he was slapped by
a blow that seemed to come out of nowhere. He crashed backward into the
folds of the royal mantle. Over him towered Arithon, so consumed by
dread he seemed possessed. The black and silver length of Alithiel pressed
enpointe against the Mad Prophet's throat.
    Shielded from bared steel by nothing beyond his shirt collar, Dakar
shrank back. 'Have you gone crazy?'
    'Not yet.' The words seemed lucid; but the insouciance Arithon usually
flaunted in the face of trouble was swept away by his ragged fast breaths.
'Where can I find Asandir? I have no moment to waste!'
    Dakar measured the steel, then the terror that racked the man behind
the swordgrip. ~Asandir's in the council hall. Keeping the city ministers
from revolt before your processional.'
    The weight of the weapon lifted. Arithon spun on his heel, stopped;
came back. The heraldic leopard worked into his tabard flashed as if
tainted by unclean light as he jerked the plain cloak intended for Dakar
from under its owner's supine bulk. He cast the garment over his finery as
he bolted headlong for the doorway.
  'Arithon!' Dakar shoved up on one elbow. 'What did I see in that trance?'

348


    For a split second it seemed Rathain's prince would not stem his frantic
rash. But as the latch wrenched open under his hand, he threw back in
anguished haste, 'Dakar, as you love peace, if you care for my half-brother,
keep him from me! For if we're brought face to face the terms of your
prophecy shall be met. The result will end in a bloodbath.'
    'What's happened?' Dakar exploded off the couch. The black-lacquered
scabbard hooked on his knuckles and fell in a clattering spin across the floor.
He rushed forward, caught his toe on a carbuncle and crashed shoulder down
into an armchair. Too winded to curse, he pressed on, though the backlash
and dizziness from prescience had yet to fully release him.
    'It's not what's happened, but what will. Desperate steps must be taken.'
Arithon ducked out.
Dakar gained the entry just as the door panel slammed in his face.
'Fiends take you!' He hammered unyielding wood until his fists bruised
before reason caught up with the obvious: that if Arithon had dispatched
him to protect Lysaer, the outside latch would not be braced.
    The next thought hit with more significance, that Luhaine had neither
answered, nor intervened to curb Arithon's distress.
    Dakar kicked open the door and abruptly ran out of energy. Pinned by
another wave of faintness, he thumped to rest against the doorframe and
sweated over implications he had no fit way to assess. His second
spontaneous prophecy now entangled with the conditional forecast made
earlier, the Black Rose Prophecy that tied all the threads of future hope to
the event of Arithon's accession. Luhaine's absence meant much more
than the half-brothers' safety that had been cast to the four winds and
jeopardy.

The vaulted council hall of Etarra was no longer stuffy and cavernously
curtained as it had been kept throughout Morfett's clandestine councils to
thwart the return of Rathain's monarchy. Bedecked now for the corona-
tion, the lofty chamber with its white marble friezework and gilt pillars
stood transformed. The faded, dusty trade-guilds' banners stood jostled
aside on their rods, overshadowed by the leopard blazon of s'Ffalenn.
Lancet windows once darkened behind dagged scarlet drapes were flung
open to the morning air. Light rinsed floors freshly sweetened with wax;
sunbeams warmed the graining of maple parquet, and sparked reflections
in the gems and tinselled silks donned for the occasion by the city's
ranking ministers, who clustered whispering in their cadres, and cast
nervous glances to all sides.
    But the Fellowship sorcerer in attendance for once had no care for
overhearing their seditious talk. Bleak as storm in dark velvets, Asandir
presided over the aisle before the raised dais.
    Morfett measured his stillness as he would have stalked an asp through
his grape arbour. Let Arithon s'Ffalenn but once be caught unguarded and

349


the interfering sorcerers who sheltered him would find a knife in his royal
ribs.
    'Where's Lord Diegan, anyway?' the minister of justice complained.
'Odd, that he should be late.'
    'Not at all.' Moffett twitched at his cuffs, which were buttoned with
pearls and too snug. Snappish with venom, he said, 'Our Commander of
the Guard invited that fair-haired flunky, Lysaer, for an after-breakfast
social. His sister's infatuation with the man has delayed them both, no
doubt.'
    Sourly, the Lord Governor eyed the damask-draped chair set up to
enthrone the coming prince. Such panoply would hardly matter; any more
than a white-gold crown set with emeralds could shield against mortality.
Today, tomorrow or next year the Teir's'Ffalenn would be overthrown.
Etarra would never bow to royal rule. Never. Wishing ill on the day's
proceedings, Morfett saw Asandir spin around. The sorcerer gave no nod to
smooth over the officials left gaping in offence at the abrupt presentation of
his back.
    Moffett smiled. Trouble, the Lord Governor wished fervently; upon the
heads of the Fellowship, most ruinous, plan befouling bad luck.
    Asandir offered no apology, but turned on his heel again and pressed in
visible agitation through the councilmen still clustered in shared outrage.
His rush to reach the doorway left a moil of rankled dignitaries whose
robes were raked askew by his passage.
    Moffett sailed into the gap left opened in the sorcerer's wake. He arrived
in the foyer just after Asandir passed the outer door, caught the ring pulls as
the panels swung closed and shamelessly pressed an eye to the crack.
 On the marble stair outside the entry he saw Asandir flag down Traithe.
    'Call your raven,' the sorcerer instructed his colleague. 'The bird may be
needed to relay messages.'
The shorter mage in black and silver replied too low to overhear.
Asandir returned a slight nod. 'Go inside. Smooth tempers, avert
uneasiness and above all, let nobody hear we have problems. Sethvir's just
now sent warning: Lysaer's in serious trouble. The pattern that
encompasses his Name has drifted. Worse: Luhaine reports that Dakar's
been alarmed by premonition. Both events indicate that our s'Ilessid heir
may harbour one of Desh-thiere's wraiths, picked up through the moment
of confinement. If so, the crisis forecast by the strands is upon us. One
mistimed judgement and we'll have no crowned king, nor a restored
Fellowship, just panic and bloodshed in the streets.'
    'Ath speed you.' Denied by impaired faculties to share further details
through magecraft, Traithe touched his colleague's shoulder before both
went their separate ways.
    Morfett straightened up from his eavesdropping and faced around.
Prepared to announce the Fellowship's quandary to every official within
earshot, his excitement overshadowed small discrepancies: that the doors

350


at his back failed to latch; and that his rash of elation overwhelmed him to
the point where his utterance choked in his throat. He hopped forward a
step and filled his lungs to shout.
    His effort emerged as a gargle, since Traithe slipped through the cracked
doorpanel, clamped a gloved hand from behind and gagged his mouth.
    'Ah, but you won't,' the mildest mannered of the sorcerers murmured
into Morfett's left ear.
    The Lord Governor moaned. His eyes bulged out and he ground out a
smothered growl. He elbowed and kicked backward at his assailant, but
managed to strike only air.
    He bit down next on black glove leather, and got back a dig that shot
paralysing pain through his larynx.
    Traithe called out cheerfully to those bystanders just turned to stare
openmouthed at the scuffle. 'Could I beg your help?'
    The stir widened; polite conversation faltered. Before Morfett's wheezes
and moaned curses could impact the fast-spreading stillness, Traithe
carried on in blithe chatter. 'Your Lord Governor seems overcome. Is he
prone to fits? Maybe he's prostrate from the heat. Anybody might faint
under such fashionable layers of heavy velvet.'
    Pulled off balance, then downed by an ungentlemanly jab at the back of
his knees, Moffett collapsed, mutely struggling, to the floor. A raven
flapped down and lit on his chest. At least, that was the last thing his eyes
recorded before he sank, dropped senseless by spells, upon carpets laid
down for Arithon to tread in formal procession to the dais.

Invited for wine after breakfast in the richly appointed parlour of Etarra's
commander of the guard, Lysaer suddenly flushed. A wave of heat swept
through him, followed by bone-deep chill. Quickly, he set down his goblet,
before his unsteady hand sloshed the contents. Alarmed that he might
have succumbed to sudden fever, Lysaer touched his forehead. A second
wave of disorientation passed through him. He stiflened, transfixed by
fear; for an instant he felt as if his mind spun to blankness, his self-
awareness overturned by a will other than his own.
    The sensation cleared a heartbeat later. Lysaer shivered in silly relief. He
was just tired, not quite himself. Arithon's coronation presented no crisis;
his momentary faintness surely had been due to nerves and imagination, a
residual distress left by the nightmares that had plagued him off and on
since Ithamon. As the patterned brocade chair that supported him swam
clearly back into focus, Lysaer looked up.
    Lady Talith's ringed hands had stilled in the curled fur of her terrier. She,
her brother Diegan and the beribboned lapdog all regarded him in polite
and expectant silence.
    What had he just said? Lysaer struggled to recapture the thread of
conversation. A gap seemed torn from his memory. Inattention could not

351


explain this. Embarrassed for a lapse that in hindsight seemed faintly
ridiculous, he stumbled to fill in with banality.
    Diegan interrupted and took up what had been a bristling argument. 'But
the children who work in the warehouses are not the get of the free poor, as
your puppet-prince led you to think.' Etarra's commander of the guard set
down the crystal goblet that he had toyed with for the past half hour. His
wine sloshed untasted as he said, 'These wretches that Arithon would
champion are in fact the offspring of condemned criminals, clan-blood
barbarians who have harassed the trade-routes with thievery and murder
for generations.'
    Heat chased cold across Lysaer's skin. He resisted an urge to blot his
brow, willed aside his unsettled condition and studied the city's Lord
Commander, whose finery and intellect made him more courtier than
soldier and whose words fanned up like dry cobwebs the clinging spectre of
past doubts.
    S'Ffalenn pirates on Dascen Elur had repeatedly manipulated political
sore points to stir unrest and further their marauding feud against Amroth.
    Lysaer snapped back to present circumstance with an inward lash of
chastisement. This was Etarra, not Port Royal and Arithon was not as his
ancestors. More musician than buccaneer, he had been the sworn heir of a
murderer in a past that no longer mattered. Fair minded, Lysaer pushed off
his uneasiness. 'Do you suggest Rathain's prince would lie to discredit the
city council?'
    'I suggest he's in league with the Fellowship's intent, to see Etarra given
over to barbarians.' Diegan leaned forward. Diamond studs sparkled across
his shoulders as he planted his elbows on his knees. 'For that end, would he
not act as the sorcerers' purpose demanded?'
    Never at ease with Arithon's mage-trained evasiveness, Lysaer re-
examined matters from that angie. Only this morning, Dakar had
staggered in from his rounds of the taverns and attested in slurred certainty
that Arithon had not spent last night drinking in any man's company.
'Wherever he was, only Daelion knows. His Grace himself' s not saying.'
    Lysaer blinked, pricked by association. This day's musician, who begged
to be spared from royal position, was one and the same man as the chained
sorcerer who had burned seven ships, then baited Amroth's council at trial
with his own life offered as gambit.
    'I can see you have reservations,' Lady Talith observed. Her tight-laced
taffeta rustled as she crossed her ankles; the terrier displaced by her
movement whined and jumped plaintively down. 'For our part, if this
coronation is to be stopped, there's little time left to take action.'
    In fact, there remained but an hour before the noon ceremony. Lysaer
snapped to, the odd bent of his thoughts cut off by his ingrained habit of fair
play. 'Don't think to suggest a conspiracy. I'll not be party to treason. The
Fellowship's intentions toward your city are certainly not harmful, and
Arithon's rights of inheritance are not in my province to deny.'

352


 'But you doubt him,' Talith pressed.
    There, most squarely, she scored. Honour demanded that the integrity of
any ruler should be challenged over issues of social justice. Repelled as if
brushed by something dank, Lysaer arose. Good manners concealed his
private qualms as he gathered his velvet cloak and offered his hand to Talith.
Her beauty might bedazzle his vision but never his inborn integrity. He drew
her suavely to her feet. 'Lady, on behalf of your city, I'll question your prince.
Arithon is secretive, crafty and not always forthright about his motivations.
But given direct confrontation, I've never known him to lie.'
    Diegan jangled the bell for the maid to collect the crystal and the wine-
tray. To Lysaer, he added, 'You'll tell us your findings before the coronation
begins ?'
    Cold now, and unsure what should motivate him to undertake such a
promise at inconveniently short notice, Lysaer found himself saying, 'You
have my formal word.'
    The room, the wine and the company seemed suddenly too rich. Lysaer
strove to recoup his composure. Sleepless nights and troubled dreams had
sown his mind with unworthy confusion. For even if Arithon's sympathies
were misguided, the thorns in seeing justice done remained: the labourers
enslaved in guild service were still children, ill fed, inadequately clothed
and poorly housed. Although for simplicity's sake it would relieve a vicious
quandary to fault them for the crimes of their ancestors, their plight
deserved unbiased review. If Arithon would champion their cause, he must
defend his decision to repudiate the city council's policies. Lysaer dodged
the terrier that playfully circled his feet and strode with firm purpose for the
door.
 'My lord, my lady,' he said in parting.
 A bang and a thump sounded in the passage outside.
    The inbound commotion came accompanied by Dakar's voice, plain-
tively arguing with a servant. Protests were cut by Asandir demanding to
know what was amiss.
    Lysaer pressed his thumb on the do0rlatch. The fastening seemed queerly
to have jammed. A violent wrench failed to dislodge the obstruction.
    Lord Diegan shoved the maid away from the wine-tray in his haste to
reach Lysaer's side. Their combined attempt to free the door caused the
scrolled brass to spark white light. Heat followed, intense enough to raise
blisters.
    Lysaer noticed instantly that his skin took no mark from the encounter.
No stranger to the effects of small sorceries, he cried out a reflexive warning.
'Spellcraft!'
    Diegan regarded him intently, while inexplicable heat and chills chased
through his body once again.
    This bout proved more fierce than the last. Lysaer swayed. For an instant
the surrounding room seemed to flicker in and out of existence. His vision
quickly steadied, but his ears were left buzzing with unnameable, untrace-

353


able sound. Rage touched him. The emotion came barbed with a thougl~t
so clearly delineated, it seemed more solid than the lintel he caught to
brace his balance. Who but Arithon would have dared to interfere; the
poisoned conclusion followed, that if the s'Ffalenn bastard was to blame,
distrust of Etarra's council was emphatically misplaced.
    Vindicated by Lysaer's dismay, Diegan said, 'We're betrayed!' He
matched a grim glance with his sister.
    The servant in the outside corridor had fallen silent; the chambermaid
cowered in a corner. Dakar's reply to Asandir breached the sealed parlout
with damning, irrefutable clarity. 'But of course I set wards to bind the
doorlatch! Arithon begged me at all costs to keep him separate from
Lysaer!'
    'Where's the prince of Rathain?' The sorcerer must have glowered
fearsomely, for Dakar's answer rose to a pitch very near to hysteria.
    'He went out. Into the streets, to look for you. If Luhaine's ghost still
guards him, it's being obstinately close-mouthed. Didn't you see either
one of them on your way over here?'
    'No.' Asandir's step approached the closed doorway. 'Too late, now, to
wish differently. Your prophecy bars us from action. You say Lysaer's
inside?'
    In mutinous self-defence, Dakar said, 'Diegan's servants insist he never
left.'
    Lysaer felt a hand on his forearm, Talith's, pulling him quickly aside. A
shock like a spark ripped through him; not for her beauty, which could
stun any man, but for her unmannerly presumption. Before he had space to
question his oddly irascible reaction, the feeling became swept aside and
an urge he also could not trace prompted him to fast speech. 'I promised I'd
find Anthon and ask him for the truth. Can you get me out?'
    Diegan grinned. 'Every house in Etarra has a closet exit, and hidden stairs
to an outside alley. Talith will show you. I'll delay the sorcerer.'
    'You'll try.' Lysaer surrendered his hand to the lady, who breathlessly
hurried him forward. 'Be careful. No Fellowship sorcerer has compunc-
tions against prying into your private thoughts.'
    If the warning gave Diegan reservations, Lysaer was not to find out.
Talith sank her nails into his wrist and bundled him through a doorway
that had miraculously opened through the back wall. Thrust into a musty
stone passageway, Lysaer heard only Talith, softly cursing the dust that
grimed the gold hem of her dress before she dragged the panel closed and
shut them in cobwebs and darkness.
    In the parlour, the terrified maid began to sob. Balked from following its
pretty mistress, the terrier's yapping changed pitch to barks and growls.
The next instant the latch on the hallway door discharged a static shower
of sparks. The dog bounded sideways, trailing ribbons, while the panel
explosively burst inward.
 Asandir slammed into Lord Diegan's guest parlour with Dakar hard on

354



his heels. They were met by the commander of the guard, blandly seated,
thc decanter of wine he had been on the verge of pouring frozen in his
hand in mid-air.
    His typically Etarran urbanity made no impression upon the sorcerer,
whose gaze flicked to the other set of goblets that rested on the tray, their
half-consumed contents abandoned. As the terrier subsided snarling
under the nearest stuffed stool, Asandir studied Diegan with a chilling,
unpleasant intensity. 'Where has Lysaer gone ?'
    To the amazed admiration of Dakar, Diegan's nerve never faltered. He
replaced the wine crystal on its tray with a faint, controlled clink. 'Your
man left to have words with his crony, the Teir's'Ffalenn. Should that
disturb you?'
    'We'll know shortly.' Asandir stepped past the casement. His shadow
swept over the commander of the guard, dimming the glitter of
gemstones that studded his ceremonial pourpoint. Before Diegan's
magnificence, the sorcerer's dark robe hung sheenless as a pauper's cheap
felt. 'I want you to think, and answer carefully. While in your presence,
did Lysaer show a loss of awareness? Did his attention seem to drift, even
for a second?'
    As Diegan made to brush off the question, the sorcerer advanced again
and forestailed him. 'I said, answer carefully. For if you noticed such a
lapse, your friend could be endangered. One of Desh-thiere's separate
wraiths may have evaded captivity. If, unbeknownst to us, such a
creature came to possess Lysaer, all of Etarra could be threatened.'
    Diegan gave the matter his dutiful consideration, then raised his goblet
to curled lips and sipped. His eyes reflected black irony as he said, 'When
Lysaer left this chamber, he seemed in perfect self-command.' 'And before then?' Asandir sounded worried.
    'Never mind the commander of the guard,' Dakar burst out. 'He's got
lying written all over him.'
    'Then keep him here under house-arrest!' Asandir stalked on across the
carpet. 'We don't need a call to arm the garrison to complicate disaster
any further.' He paused at the far wall, studied the bookshelf and after a
second's hesitation reached out and thumbed the hidden catch. The false
panel swung open, wafting telltale traces of Talith's lavender perfume.
After an irritated glance toward Lord Diegan, Asandir departed in Lysaer's
footsteps, through the bolt-hole that led to the street.
    'Fiends take you!' Dakar yelled after his master. He charged to the
panel and wedged it before it could quite fall shut. Though the gloom
beyond by now held only drafts, he shouted anyway. 'Will somebody
bother to tell me what in Ath's creation I have prophesied?'
    He received no answer; just a rip in his hose from the terrier, which in a
belated fit of courage scuttled out from hiding and bit his ankle. Dakar's
defensive kick cleanly missed. The door fell to with a thud. As the dog
retreated to snarl over its pillaged shred of stocking, Diegan herted his

355


decanter toward the invader still left in his parlout. 'Share a drink to soften
misfortune ?'
    Dakar groaned. Already riled beyond sense by the effects of clairvoyance
and a hangover, he pressed fat palms to his temples. 'Wine won't help. The
entire universe has gone crazy.'
    Diegan offered a chair and pressed a filled goblet upon the Mad Prophet.
'Then let's forgo sanity also and both get rippingly drunk.'

No sooner had the curtains been lowered over the windows of Etarra's
great council hall, than a hammering rattled the main entry. Despite the
fact Traithe had sealed the doors with a minor arcane binding, one heavy
panel cracked open. A raw streak of daylight slashed the foyer, raising a
sparkle like a jewel-vault across the agitated assemblage of officials in their
wilting feathers, dyed furs, gold chains and gem-studded sashes of rank.
    Since none of Etarra's citizens held magecraft to challenge his warding,
Traithe straightened hurriedly from the prostrate body of the Lord
Governor. The raven on his shoulder kept balance to a flurry of wingbeats
as he turned around to confront the disturbance.
Arithon's voice pealed out through the gloom. 'Where's Asandir?'
Rapacious to recover their plundered advantages, every Etarran official
not overawed by Morfett's collapse pressed forward, blinking against the
sudden daylight. The few who were closest recognized the dishevelled
figure through the glare; the rest saw and identified the shining circlet that
betokened Rathain's rights of royal sovereignty.
    'Sorcery!' someone cried from the fore. Heads turned, hatted, bald and
formally beribboned and jewelled. 'Here's the prince, burst through spells
of protection. All the dread rumours are true!'
 A surge crossed the gathering like a draft-caught ripple through a tapestry.
    More muttering arose. 'It's him. Teir's'Ffalenn. A sneaking sorcerer,
after all. His Grace of Rathain.'
    The prince in the doorway called again. 'In Ath's name, is there any
Fellowship sorcerer present ?'
    Traithe thrust through the press that jammed the foyer, his attention
narrowed to include only Arithon's pale face. Though loath to create a
public spectacle, he had no choice but bow to need. 'Asandir's gone to find
your half-brother. Sethvir's at the south gate armoury. The streets are not
at all safe.'
    Heartsick to realize he could not beg help, denied even privacy to speak
plainly, Arithon called back, 'I can't stay here!'
    Assuredly, he could not. The high council was keyed to animosity. If
Traithe's presence momentarily stayed bloodshed, that abeyance would not
long suffice. Every minister's layers of lace and brocades held hidden daggers
and jewelled pins that could be turned in a moment to treachery; not a few
would have in attendance paid assassins masquerading as secretaries.

356


    Having interposed his own person between the threatened prince and
the dignitaries in the chamber at large, Traithe sorted limited options.
That Luhaine seemed nowhere in evidence was sure indication that the
nexus of change forecast in the strands at Althain Tower had fully and
finally been crossed. The wrong intervention now might displace the
sequence of events that framed Dakar's Black Rose Prophecy. Traithe
raged at his impaired powers; unlike his colleagues, he could not gauge the
broad import of this crisis at a glance. The best he could offer was a gesture.
'My bird will lead the straightest course toward Setbrit.'
    The raven might have been a lifeline to salvation, for the relief that
touched Arithon's face. This, the governing officials of Etarra observed.
They began to press Traithe's back like wolves grown bold before
weakness. Another moment, and the pack of them would turn as
ungovernable as any mob in the streets.
    'Go,' Traithe called. The raven arose, flapping. Air hissed across splayed
feathers as it shot through the gap in the door. Arithon shouldered the
panel closed, just as the foremost ranks of the guild masters broke in a rush
to tear him down.
    Crippled, Traithe was, but not powerless. As aggression crested around
him, and elbows jostled him aside, he sensed to the second when the minds
o~ the governor's council became aligned in mass will to wreak violence.
Traithe seized his opening through their passion. He attached an entangle-
ment of energies and their intent to commit murder was bent aside and
bridled as his warding snapped into the breach.
    Shouts trailed off into quiet, cut by a sigh of rich cloth. The battering
rush toward the doorway juddered to a slow fall forward as every man who
wished harm to his prince folded at the knees and collapsed. No townsman
at the end was left standing. Nestled in their crumpled brocades, lying
across flattened hats and fur-trimmed cloaks, every official in Etarra's high
government settled where he lay, fast asleep.
    Alone on his feet, one scarred, sfiver-haired mage regarded the rows of
prostrate bodies, his heart aggrieved at too small a victory, won too late.
The irony cut him, that but for Dakar's infernal predictions concerning the
Fellowship's recovery, Arithon might now have returned here for sanctu-
ary until the raven could summon Sethvir.
 The downed councilmen snored on, oblivious.
    'May every last one of you be hartowed by nightmares for your
ignorance!' Traithe cursed in surly, sorrowful fervency. Then he
straightened his wide- brimmed black hat and applied himself to the task
of setting wards of guard over every door, every window, every closet and
cranny in the chamber, that the ministers of Morfett's council should stay
mewed up until the course of the tragedy forecast by the strands could
guarantee what hope could be salvaged for the ill-starred Black Rose
Prophecy.

357


Lysaer closed his eyes as a third, fierce tingle played across his flesh. A still
part of him analysed this, and concluded that Fellowship sorcerers must be
seeking him through spellcraft. Heated elation followed. In uncanny
certainty, he realized he was no longer quite what he had been; the pattern
sought out by the sorcerers' probe had ceased to match his personality.
Once he should have felt alarmed by an insight more appropriate to a
mage-taught perspective. Obsessed now by compulsion to serve justice, he
never questioned what caused the deviation, or his odd self-knowledge of
its existence.
    The paradox passed unregarded, that he lurked like a fugitive in an alley,
all for a promise to call his half-brother to task. To Lysaer, this moment, the
urge to uncover any latent breach of faith became overridingly important.
    Every quandary that tormented his conscience and broke his night's rest
with disturbed dreams had narrowed into sudden, lucent focus.
    Lysaer gave a laugh in self-derision. He had fought so hard to give
Arithon the benefit of the doubt that objectivity itself became obstructive.
He shivered and sweated, berating his idealistic foolishness. He had only to
question all along. For if Arithon was established as a liar, the ongoing
weeks of heartsick recrimination might at one stroke become banished.
Avar's bastard as a proven criminal presented Lysaer with moral duty to
defend the merchants and townsmen.
    A resolution in fayour of complaints he understood would be a frank
relief.
    'I'11 find you,' he swore to the shadows, Arithon's name behind the vow.
His tingling discomfort now replaced by fanatical resolve, he moved on.
    Stray dogs that skulked across his path whined and shrank from his
scent. When a braver bitch snarled and hounded his track, he dispatched a
flick of light and stung her to yelping flight.
    That cruelty to any animal would have been beyond him just minutes
before never once crossed Lysaer's mind. He picked his way over cracked
paving and discarded bits of broken pottery and emerged from the alley
into the brighter main thoroughfare.
    People crowded the avenue, converging toward the square to attend the
royal coronation. A sun-wrinkled farmwife stared at Lysaer's emergence,
chewing toothless gums as she leaned on a strapping, dark skinned
grandson. Children darted past on both sides, tossing painted sticks in a
throwing game that held careless regard for the neat clothing bestowed by
their steadfast merchant parents. These, Arithon's intended victims,
Lysaer greeted courteously. He smiled at a cake vendor, and paused to help
her boy push her cart across the gutter.

The servant in attendance at Morfett's front doorway knew Lysaer by
sight. Politely admitted inside, he asked and was granted leave to see
himself to the guest suite on his own.

358


    No sorcerer guarded the back stairwell: Luhaine's wards were all faded.
The room where Arithon quartered held only a still warmth of sunlight
through latched, amber-tinged casements. Lysaer paused, breathing hard
on the threshold. He surveyed the chamber more closely.
    The callous character of its occupant stood revealed to casual inspec-
tion: in a king's cloak left crumpled into the cushions of a divan, and the
gift of a carbuncle scabbard spurned and abandoned on the floor.
    Lysaer scowled, that the sacred trust of royal heritage should suffer such
careless usage. Only the lyranthe lovingly couched on the windowseat
gave testament to the heart of the man.
    Urged by a pang so indistinct he could not fathom its origin, Lysaer
crossed the echoing floor. By the time he reached the alcove, his feelings
had fanned into rage. He shouted to the room's empty corners, 'Are
Rathain's people of less account than minstrelsy?'
    Silence mocked him back. The silver strings sparkled sharp highlights,
mute, but all the same promising dalliance.
    Rathain's prince would be reft from distractions; Etarra's needs would
be served. Lysaer reached out and struck the instrument a flying blow with
his forearm.
    Parchment-thin wood, spell-spun silver, all of Elshian's irreplaceable
craftwork sailed in an arc above the floor tiles. The belling dissonance of
impact lost voice as the lyranthe's sound-chamber smashed and each
scattered splinter whispered separately to rest in a swathe of trammelled
sunlight.
    'You cannot hide, pirate's bastard' Lysaer vowed. Heat and chills racked
his flesh as he spun, crunching over fragments, and burst back through the
breached doorway.

The streets outside were packed by a crushing mob. Every tradesman and
commoner turned out with their families now crowded toward the square
before the council hall. Even a few white-hooded initiates pledged to Ath's
service had left their hospices in the wilds to attend. Lysaer let the flow of
traffic carry him. He felt no remorse for his destruction of Arithon's
lyranthe; besieged by his drive to right injustice, he gave full rein to the
ingrained gallantries of his upbringing. Lysaer touched shoulders and
patted the cheeks of children, offered kind words to the plain-clad people in
the streets. They stood aside for him, gave him way where the press was
thickest and smiled at his lordly grace.
    Rathain's prince must be like him, they said; tall and fair-spoken and
pledged to end the corruption in Etarra's trade guilds and council.
    Lysaer did not disabuse the people of their hope. The whispered
turbulence of his thinking bent wholly inward as the untroubled faith of
Etarra's commonfolk caused him to measure his own failing. He too had
allowed himself to be misled by the prince of Rathain; he, Amroth's former

359


heir, who had host blood kin to s'Ffalenn wiles, should at least have stayed
forewarned.
    A touch upon his arm caused Lysaer to start. He glanced in polite
forbearance at the matron with the basket of wrinkled apples who gave
him a diffident smile. 'Did you lose track of your folk, sir?'  'Madam, no.' Lysaer smiled. 'I'm alone.'
    Abashed by his extreme good looks, the woman gave a little shrug. 'Well,
even by yourself, sir, you'd get a better view from the galleries.' She raised a
chapped hand from her knot-worked shawl and pointed.
    Lysaer squinted against sunlight so pure it seemed to scour the air with
its clarity. From his vantage at the edge of the square, the balconies of the
guild ministers' mansions arose in tiers above street level. Their wood and
wrought-iron railings striped shadow over a singing knot of cordwainers
who boisterously shared a skin of spirits. As their least tone-deaf ringleader
paused to take his swig, their ditty drifted cheerfully off-key. 'I have no
invitation,' Lysaer said above the noise. 'And anyway, by now the best
places are all spoken for.'
    'Well, that may be.' Made bold by his friendliness, the matron gave him
swift appraisal. 'But I've a cousin who has lodging at the front of the square.
At my asking a bit of space could be found.'
    Lysaer did not ask if the cousin perhaps had a marriageable daughter and
fond hopes to attract a wealthy suitor. Neither did he accept on false
grounds as he clasped the woman's wrist and kissed her palm. 'You're most
kind.'
    The dreams and the lives of just such honest folk were the first things
Arithon's machinations would tear asunder.
    Lysaer gently captured the matron's basket. 'Let me. Any burden must
hamper you terribly in this press.'
    'Not so much.' But her fingers surrendered the wicker handle. Won to
trust by his sincerity, the matron took his arm. 'Come on. Hurry or we'll
miss the procession.'
     Minutes later, squeezed between the granddaughters of a furniture
 maker and three strapping cousins who wore guild badges as vintners,
 Lysaer took the place he was offered.
     From a third-storey gallery accessed by an outdoor stairway, he gazed
 over the square's gathered thousands which eddied below like currents
 pressed counter by fickle winds. The jewelled and leathered finery of the
 rich mixed uneasily with poorer fare, common labourers and beggars still
 clad in their jetsam of motley. Angry, outraged, curious or joyful, the
 factions mingled uneasily. Etarra had turned out for Arithon's coronation
 in a welcome well leavened by enmity.
     The atmosphere on the gallery where Lysaer came to roost was festive.
 The lads had been staked a cask by their master, and wine was freely passed
 around. The sharpness of red grapes mingled with the sweeter scent shed
 by apples doled out to the children.

360


    Courteous but aloof, Lysaer smiled and offered compliments when the
inevitable pretty daughter was presented. After that, though the girl in her
neat paint and layered silk dresses shot him admiring glances filled with
hope, he spared her little attention as he engaged in a predatory survey of the
crowd.
 Her little sister was more forthright.
    She toddled forward and plucked at his rich sleeve. With her dimpled chin
dribbled with apple juice, she demanded, 'Who are you looking for?'
    Behind her, older cousins were whispering, 'It's him. The very one who's
companion to the prince. Nobody else in Etarra wears indigo velvet like
that.'
    The child with her fruit sticky hands was pulled back to allow the exalted
guest space.
    Lysaer gave the family who hosted him scant notice as his gaze caught and
fixed on an anomaly: above the sunwashed square with its heaving, raucous
throng, a raven flapped, deep as shadow against the cloudless brilliance of
the sky.
    Heat and cold flashed through Lysaer, and a tremor coursed his flesh.
Then the bird, sure harbinger of Traithe and the doings of the Fellowship, the
next heartbeat ceased utterly to matter.
Beneath the raven's flight path, a lone man shoved through the press.
Lysaer noted details in preternatural clarity. The fugitive had shirt cuffs
worked in ribbons of green, silver and black and edged with bands of
leopard fur. A plain cloak thrown on to conceal a heraldic tabard had been
torn, and threadwork glistened through the holes. The royal blazon might
not show, but in his haste Arithon s'Ffalenn had neglected the circlet of
inheritance that even now crossed his brow.
    The face beneath was taut with a desperation that touched Lysaer to stark
anger. 'He's running away!' he murmured incredulously. 'Breaking his
commitment to the realm.'
    'Who's running away?' cried the vintner's drayman, full of red wine and
brash fight.
    Heat and cold and chills merged into scalding resentment. 'Your prince,'
Lysaer snapped back. 'The truth must be told. Your promised Teir's'Ffalenn
is a criminal and a pirate's bastard, raised and corrupted by sorcerers.'
    The youngest children were staring, their half-gnawed apples in their
hands. To Lysaer, the innocence in their faces reflected a whole city's
deluded defencelessness.
 Something inside of him snapped.
    'Get the little ones inside, they're not safe here!' His command was
instinctive, and charged with a regal prerogative that none on the balcony
dared gainsay. A grandfather helped the house matron bundle her young
through a side door.
    The confused wails of the children, the scrape of a door bolt, the
sudden cringing deference shown by family members still left on the

361


gallery made no impression upon Lysaer. From his unobstructed place at
the rail, he drew himself up to full height. Delineated by a nimbus of
sunlight, his hair gleamed bright gold and his presence seemed charged
with righteous wrath as any angel sent from Athlieria to scour the land
of bleak evil.
    Lysaer raised his hand and singled out the slight, dishevelled fugitive
that elbowed and shoved to escape the square, then lifted his voice in a
thunderous shout.
    'People of Etarra, behold the prince you would crown king and hear
truth! Your lands have been restored to fair sunlight, yet one lives who
can wield darkness more dire than any mist! Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn is full
Master of Shadow, a sorcerer who would succour barbarians and waste
your fine city to ashes!'
    The roar of the multitude overwhelmed any further accusation; but the
velvet-clad figure on the balcony drew notice. People thronging the great
square stopped and tipped their faces up to stare. Lysaer's pointing finger
and the circling flight of Traithe's raven drew notice to the other figure in
that strange, partnered tableau.
    Arrested in mid-flight by the grasp of two stolid merchants, Arithon
cast a fraught glance at the bird.
    To Lysaer, watching, the gesture affirmed s'Ffalenn guilt. A prince who
was innocent of machinations would never count a dumb beast above his
subjects or his own threatened fate. Jolted to savage antagonism; unaware
he was the manipulated instrument of Desh-thiere's fugitive wraith,
Lysaer raised rigid hands to call his gift...

Buffeted by the crowd that streamed through a side-street, an illusion cast
over his person that lent him the semblance of somebody's benevolent
grandfather, Asandir ceaselessly scanned the grand square. Then an odd
flare of light drew his eye to the rail of a nondescript balcony. 'There!' he
whispered, his word too quiet to be overheard. His thoughts framed the
image he saw: of Lysaer, poised in an unmistakable effort to summon
light.
    Although nowhere near the tumultuous scene by the council hall,
Sethvir picked up the communication. He could do nothing, embroiled
as he was in his own difficulties. His head cocked, one hand braced
against the doors of the south gate wardroom, the Warden of Althain
sent back acknowledgement. Under his palm stout planking shuddered
and bounced, assaulted from without by a ramming squad under
Diegan's acting captain. Ordered to disrupt the coronation, Gnudsog had
pulled every sentry from the gatehouse with intent to breach the sealed
armoury. Busied with stayspells and bindings to withhold more
weapons from the chaos in the streets, $ethvir had no chance to express
relief.

362


     Quartering the city mobs for Lysaer had been worse than seeking a
 needle in a haystack. Where steel and straw could at least be winnowed
 separate by Name, the wraith that Desh-thiere had insinuated into the
 matrix of Lysaer's spirit posed a quandary. Without means to command its
 true essence, no stop-gap spell of transfer could rescue the possessed
 victim from his stance of attack upon the balcony.
     Sorrow and grief the strands foretold, were the Fellowship to stand
 restored to Seven; but with a second, unanticipated forecast entangled on
 top of the first, the validity of Dakar's Black Rose Prophecy stood
 threatened. Caught in the critical crux, the Fellowship raged with tied
 hands. They dared use no power to divert, but could only inadequately
 observe the blow as inevitably, it must fall.
    'We can't even shift Arithon to safety,' chimed in a sending from
Luhaine, who tracked the s'Ffalenn prince's progress on the outside chance
that the coronation might yet be salvaged. 'Two interfering merchants
have grabbed hold of him.'
    From his stance on the streetside, Asandir loosed one of Dakar's randiest
oaths; an offended mother glared in his direction and scooped her toddler
beyond earshot.
    On the balcony above the crowd, Lysaer's hands bunched to fists. A
crack split the air and light flared raw brilliance across the sky.
    'No!' Arithon's horrified cry tangled with Lysaer's scream of triumph.
The Shadow Master under attack tore his forearm out of a man's grip,
twisted and thrust up his sword.
    Silver-white light flared in a starburst that dazzled and blinded:
Alithiel's Paravian-wrought protections sheared out a chord of pure heart-
break, sure proof the defending cause was just. Asandir saw, and despaired.
    The light-bolt that speared from the balcony was wholly the work of
Desh-thiere's vengeance and the wraith that now fully possessed Lysaer.
    Arcane energies collided in wrenching dissonance high over Arithon's
head. He thrashed, but despite a madman's contortions failed to evade the
vigilantes who tackled him across shoulders and knees. His sword arm was
seized and torn downward.
    That he might have turned his blade and cut to kill never seemed to
occur to him; as if the only peril that held meaning lay in Lysaer's
unprovoked assault.
    Asandir's hand was forced, the full might of his protections engaged to
shield helpless bystanders from harm. He cursed fate, agonized that
Dakar's new vision had upset the strands' forecast and precipitated crisis
too soon. No coronation could take place now. On every side of the square,
people were screaming, flash-blinded and whipped to stampede in raw
terror that their city was being savaged by sorcery.
    As light-bolt and sword-flash sheeted through the maze of his own
conjury, Asandir mourned that Alithiel's bright magic would offer Arithon
no shred of defence. The spells of Riathan Paravians were never wrought to

363


take life, but only to dazzle an opponent, and divert or deflect unjust attack.
    Lysaer's was full command of light; his sight would be unimpaired by a
ward that flashed just to blind.
    The revenge engendered by Desh-thiere's possession arced on toward its
targeted victim.
    Isolate from the ward-light that shielded the chance-caught bystanders,
Arithon yanked a wrist clear of encumbrance. He no longer held his sword.
Only shadow cracked from his spread fingers: for defence of Traithe's raven,
Asandir saw in split-second, grief-sharp perception.
    Uncaring who noticed, the sorcerer wept as Desh-thiere's offensive
hammered down.
    The bolt struck Arithon's raised palm and snaked in a half-twist down his
forearm. Scalded flesh recoiled in agony. Worse horror bloomed upon
impact, as conjury well beyond Lysaer's means burst from his killing band of
light.
 Arithon screamed.
    Red lightnings jagged over his body. The merchants who struggled to bear
him down were tossed away like ragdolls, leaving the Shadow Master a
figure alone, strung through and threshed by patterns like tangled wire.
    Asandir gasped in sick shock. The inconceivable had happened: Desh-
thiere' s wraith had delivered a banespell against the half-brother beyond
reach of possession. Transferred by Lysaer's bolt of light, the evil mesh of its
geas entangled in Arithon's aura.
    Thunder pealed. For a heartbeat the packed square was rinsed scarlet, a
tableau borrowed from nightmare. As Desh-thiere's curse claimed its
foothold, Arithon's expression shifted from resistance and pain to a hatred
that abjured all redemption. In purest, bloody-hearted passion, he howled
and wrought shadow in answer to Lysaer's betrayal.
    The air stung under a savage bite of frost and darkness slammed over
Etarra.
    Night swallowed all without distinction, from Traithe's raven that yet
flew unharmed on its faithful straight course for Sethvir, to four vigilante
merchants exposed to the backwash of murdering force shed from the
Shadow Master's person. Cut down in sudden death, they lay twitching and
seared amid smouldering brocades. Citizens scattered in fear from a carnage
past the grasp of sane experience.
    Blackness dropped also like a curtain over the most ill-starred victim of
them all, the s'Ilessid prince enslaved and ruined by the usage of Desh-
thiere's loose wraith. Emptied by the powers that had driven him, Lysaer
folded at the knees and collapsed against the gallery rail.
    A last peal of thunder rattled the mansions that edged the square and
boomed off the scarps of the Mathorns.
    'Now,' Sethvir sent in sorrow. 'The cusp that rules the prophecy has
passed. We can try to heal the smashed pieces.'

364


Backlash

The armoury that adjoined the south gate wardroom became the
Fellowship's site to regroup after Desh-thiere's machinations struck the
half-brothers. Sethvir by then had secured the stout doors to both
chambers. Ongoing assault from the outer bailey by Gnudsog's squad of
besiegers became reduced to muffled thunder by thick oak. Should the
sheared-off lamp-posts pressed into service as rams at length splinter down
the braced panels, enchantments would remain that none but the mage-
trained might cross.
    Inside, ill-lit by a single torch, oil and leather and the staleness of old
sweat sullied the air with the leftover grimness of past wars. Dust from
dryrotted fietchings filmed the floors, smeared by tracks left from Sethvir's
pacing and other marks scoured by the arbalists and pitch barrels he had
dragged to clear space between the close-stacked stores.
    After, his robe like old blood in the dimness, Sethvir stilled. As if,
overcome by reverie, he had forgotten to move between steps. In contrary
fact, his appearance masked a concentration so keen, nothing alive could
escape him. Beyond distraction from the ram's thudding impacts, he
unreeled his awareness beyond keep walls to measure the pulse of all
Etarra.
    Like individual currents in a cataract, he sensed the mobs that rampaged
through streets battened black under shadow; restive city guardsmen who
formed bands and drew steel to skewer any sorcerer they could search out
and harry to final reckoning. Sethvir knew families mewed up in locked
houses; he touched the spilled blood of the innocent, heard the cries of the
raped, knew the rage and despair of the looted. Need left scant space for
grief. He could set only small seals of peace.
    The effects were infinitesimal: amid dusty cobwebs in a wine-cellar, an
infant hidden by its parents ceased its hysterical crying. Three huddled

365


siblings quieted in relief, their terror of the dark given surcease; while in
the air high above Traithe's raven was rescued from blind circling and
guided through black sky to safe roost. Yet of thousands of woes the
Warden of Althain encountered, he eased but a very few. His greater
reserves of necessity stayed poised, as, stone-patient, he scanned the
welter of Etarra's disgruntled humanity, inset with the odd pool of calm
that was Traithe's spell of ward upon the governing officials, asleep and
barred inside their council hall.
     Sethvir might have found humour in their predicament, had the signal
he awaited not chosen that moment to manifest. 'Reach,' the Warden of Althain responded.
    On a balcony in the darkened main square Asandir acknowledged, then
stepped into a net of forces held ready to receive him. His foot left the
platform of a gallery redolent with spilled wineskins and bruised apples,
passed through a nexus of spatial distortion and came down in dust and
steel filings on the floor of the south keep armoury.
    Sethvir stepped clear as the shadows cast by the weaponracks rearranged
to embrace his colleague's tall form. In his arms, Asandir cradled Lysaer
s'Ilessid, unconscious. One jewelled, silk-clad wrist dangled down, and
hair fanned gold strands across the shoulder of the sorcerer's dark robe.
    Clear-cut as a cameo, the prince's profile reflected the inborn nobility of
his lineage; no shadow showed of the evil that had blighted life and honour.
Unwitting pawn of ill circumstance, Lysaer had yet to waken and feel the
change that disbarred him from royal inheritance.
    Sethvir avoided Asandir's eyes, which were steel-bleak. The hands, too
fierce in their grip, that crinkled fine lace and blue tinsel; his stance, forced
and graceless from the sorrows unspoken between them: that after today's
unconscionable sacrifice, the s'Ffalenn coronation had not happened.
    The result did not bear mention, that the precarious Black Rose
Prophecy, which keyed Davien the Betrayer's repentance and the return of
Ciladis the Lost, should be left unresolved and in jeopardy.
    Desh-thiere had been allowed its ugly vengeance, yet the reunification
of their Fellowship they had traded Athera's peace to guarantee had
escaped its conditional link to the future. The drum-boom of the siege-ram
allowed no space for regret, that every atrocity that swept Etarra's streets
might have been set loose in vain.
    'Lay him there.' The Warden of Althain indicated the weathered canvas
litter he had braced off chill flooring with upended casks of catapult shot.
Asandir shed his burden and knelt to rearrange blue velvets before they
became napped with grime and oil.
    'You cannot blame yourself,' Sethvir said quickly. He did not add empty
platitudes, that Arithon might one day rise beyond the day's betrayals and
change heart to embrace his inheritance; that Rathain's mismanagements
and hatreds, now vastly worsened, could somehow be healed without
scars.

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    Left bleak and empty-handed, Asandir slipped his dark cloak and
covered the fair-haired prince still left in their charge. Soft as a fall of
shadow, heavy wool veiled the glitter of rich threadwork that proved
Lysaer still breathed. 'We were remiss not to look for possession,' Asandir
said finally.
    'Across time?' Sethvir closed his eyes, savaged by awareness that
continued to span the warp through weft weave of reactions that marked
a city's plunge into turmoil. The strain did not just leave him vague~
today, he looked whitely haggard. 'Had we Name for the one wraith
responsible, we might have unriddled its intent. But prevent? The
conflict etched by the strands has not altered. And Arithon is in retreat,
not dead.'
    Which was close as he could bear to come to pleading faith in a major
miracle.
    In answer to unvoiced forebodings, the torch-flame streamed in its
bracket, then extinguished as Luhaine's presence unfurled with untoward
violence in the armoury. 'I've lost him,' he announced in reference to
Arithon. The ongoing thud of the rams clipped his words as he added, 'I
managed to track him across the square but his life-pattem's drifted
severely. I mislike the evidence, that Desh-thiere's wraith wrought black
sorcery whose taint has afflicted both half-brothers.'
    'It's accomplished more than possession, we've confirmed.' Sethvir's
admission came tired as he joined Asandir beside the litter and cradled
both hands under Lysaer's head.
 'But not what,' Luhaine fired back.
    'Let Cal work and he'll tell you.' That Asandir used Sethvir's ancient
and all but forgotten mortal name laid bare the depth of his distress.
    Luhaine disregarded the lapse. 'No one of us can afford to stand idle
while you check!' He departed in a whip-snap of wind more Kharadmon's
style than his own.
    Fibres of dry-rotted fletching spiralled away on the draft, faintly visible
to mage-sight against a chiaroscuro of dark.
 'It's bad,' Asandir concluded softly. 'How bad?'
    'Ah, the unsuspected craftiness of the creature.' Sethvir's voice seemed
blurred to distraction as his awareness realigned with his flesh. 'Desh-
thiere's plot has been deviously thorough.' He sighed and smoothed the
ruched laces of Lysaer's formal collar. 'It understood that its bane was
comprised of paired strength. What better protection than to sunder our
princes through hatred and set their gifted talents against each other?'
    'It cursed them to enmity, so.' That implied long-range planning, a
chilling fact. Asandir shared Sethvir's unsettled wariness, that the
wraiths left under ward at Skelseng's Gate were far from secure as they
stood.
 But that complication must wait.
 'What else?' Asandir prompted gently.

367


 Abject in misery, Sethvir released his findings.
    Not surprisingly, the Mistwraith's malice had begun that night when
the half-brothers had been cornered outside of Pararian protections at
Ithamon. Cognisant of them as its enemy, Desh-thiere had imprinted their
personalities then. The Fellowship's night-long search to uncove? damages
in the aftermath had been wasted effort: the wraiths had done no meddling,
not then.
    In shock and raw pain Asandir voiced the appalling conclusion. 'Desh-
thiere had already encompassed the scope of Arithon's training in that first
split-second of contact!'
    Fenced by battered racks of weapons, the Warden of Althain propped his
forehead on laced knuckles. 'Worse.' His words fell deadened against his
sleeves. 'The wraiths withheld from action, brooding upon what they had
learned.' And then when language failed him, he set his ugly findings into
thought. Deep damage had not occurred until Lysaer's barehanded, heroic
exposure, in the throes of the last struggle to confine the entities at
Ithamon. New knowledge reshaped the decision to shield Arithon's
learning to a tragedy of broader proportions.
    'Our protections were wrongly aligned,' Asandir whispered, anguished.
'We sought harm too soon and protected craft teachings too late.' Woe to
Lysaer, his integrity left ruthlessly forfeit to an enemy that took him
defenceless. The irony wounded, that Arithon's schooled protections
might have deflected the attack; or at least sensed the presence of an
invading wraith before it could move to possess. 'Dharkaron damn us for
fools, we threw the wrong prince into jeopardy.'
    Too late in hindsight, to reverse a choice miscalled through crisis and
desperation. Sethvir closed dry, chapped fingers over his colleague's wrist.
'Without Desh-thiere's true Name we were blinded. And still are.' Gently,
despondently, he clarified: that a stolen memory from Lysaer's trials in the
Red Desert had offered foothold for Desh-thiere's revenge; when for the
sake of survival, Arithon had once resorted to magecraft to break the.
recalcitrance of a half-brother whose hatred eclipsed hope of reason.
    'The Mistwraith seized upon discord, then borrowed deeper knowledge
from the bindings Kharadmon attached to Lysaer's consent on Kieling
Tower,' Sethvir said. 'The spell-curse just cast interlinks with the half-
brothers' life-force. To dissolve or countermand its hold would separate
spirit from flesh.'
    'Death,' Asandir mused bitterly. His remorse did not lighten, for past
mistakes. While the Mistwraith's entities encompassed such grasp of the
mysteries, the Fellowship and two princes from Dascen Elur had achieved
no small feat to bind and confine all but one. There remained the
unresolved menace of Lysaer's possession and an entity that must of
necessity be exorcised now.
    'Are you ready?' Sethvir asked. Though the eyes of his colleague
mirrored trepidation, the two sorcerers took position across the makeshift

368


pallet and placed hands upon the prince's brow and chest. Around them, the
gleam of a thousand weapons lay quenched in darkness, kept keen for
blooding mortal flesh. Yet against a phantom entity, steel offered only brute
ending; the sharp, final agony of the mercy stroke that exchanged live
suffering for the grave.
    Cruel comfort. Asandir snatched a shaky breath. 'You know, if we fail,
we'll have to kill him.'
    Sethvir chose not to answer. At some point the shivering boom of the ram
had stopped. Deep quiet spread over the armoury until a sorcerer's profound
concentration could pick out the sigh of each settling dust-mote. Aimless
air stroked the blades in their racks and rang from them tone that sang of
death. Distanced from such distractions, Sethvir stilled into trance. His
awareness merged into Lysaer's to ferret out the elusive energies which
comprised the enemy wraith.
    No simple exorcism, this delicate unravelling of spirits, since the entity
they sought to extricate stayed unnamed.
    To Asandir fell the task of safeguard. $ubmersed in Sethvir's labours, he
paced a hunt through the complex, interlocking auras that comprised
Lysaer's spirit. Like inventory, each strand and loop and whorl of light
became mapped; those that belonged to s'Ilessid were set under ward by
^sandir. Any that felt alien, Sethvir marked aside. The nuances of identity
were perilous, slight; in some cases outside logic or intuition. A wrong
choice would cause a fragment of the victim to splinter off, an amputation of
the soul more permanent than the most devastating bodily mutilation. Yet
without Name to compel the invasive spirit out of its entrenched posses-
sion, the Fellowship had no other recourse. The risk of error widened with
the taint of the spell-curse that bound the half-brothers into enmity.
Firsthand, Asandir was forced to share the anguish of Sethvir's prior assess-
ment. For the hatred instilled into Lysaer for his half-brother was so
thoroughly intermeshed with his life-force that it defeated outside help to
unravel. The geas to take down Arithon both was and was not a part of the
s'Ilessid prince's essence. To miscall just one twist of its bindings would be
to condemn Lysaer to death.
    Sweating, frustrated, intermeshed in life-threads complex enough to fray
reason to the bittermost edge of bewilderment, Asandir grasped why Sethvir
had met his last statement with silence.
    More likely their attempted exorcism would go awry and kill the victim,
than any aspect of an unnamed wraith be left at large to require an execution.
    Time lost meaning. The paired sorcerers submerged in the immensity of
their task made countless agonized choices. Near the end, in ragged exhaus-
tion, they examined their respective progress.
    The patterns that comprised the known wraith were layered too thinly to
be credible.
    'That can't be all of it,' Sethvir sent in ringing despair. 'Where in Ath' s
name can it be hiding?'

369


    They began afresh, untangled Lysaer's memories strand for strand. Some
rang false; far too few. The wraith's entirety yet escaped them. Sick with
trepidation, Asandir said, 'We had better re-examine what was artificial at
the outset.'
    Sethvir's grief came back barbed with white anger. That Desh-thiere's
aspect might attach its possession to the given gift of the s'Ilessid royal line
was unthinkable. And yet, there it was: the rest of its meddling essence
enmeshed so subtly with Fellowship sorcery that their own review had
missed it out.
    'Dharkaron, Angel of Vengeance? Sethvir all but wept. 'No wonder the
ill creature had him! It gained entry through the one avenue of conscience
he was spell-charged never to question!' The fault and the weakness were
never Lysaer's but the Fellowship's own, for sorrowful lack of foresight.
    That moment a key rattled in the outside lock to the wardroom.
Gnudsog's bass shout cut off on somebody's testy command, this followed
by a mortal yelp of pain.
    Dakar said, his diction slurred and quarrelsome, 'Well, I warned you
there'd be wards. Let me.'
 Sethvir sighed. 'Company. We had better finish this quickly.'
    The rush sat poorly with Asandir. But if the panic driven bloodshed in
Etarra's streets was to be curbed, Lysaer's talents would be needed to
dissolve Arithon's barrier of shadows. Crisis allowed no time to triple-
check steps that at best were uncertain business anyway. Asandir steadied
the defences set to shelter Lysaer's spirit. Then, braced as if for a cataclysm,
he said, 'Go.'
    Sethvir unleashed counter-bindings like a trap over the parasitic wraith.
Light crackled over Lysaer's body. A convoluted mesh traced like fire upon
the air, reflected in swordsteel and polearms. Asandir felt a burn of force
tear against his wards as the wraith interlaced through its victim's being
thrashed to maintain its hold. The pull increased, terrible as the tug of a
rip-tide or the wrench of barbed grapples from seasoned oak. Asandir
resisted. To lose grasp on even one strand of the pattern was to cede a bit of
Lysaer with the wraith.
    Sethvir's draw spells sharpened. Stress-points flared cold blue, and the
lines over Lysaer's body blurred and spiked where they dragged one against
another like entangled wires pried to separation. The wraith clung, obdurate.
    Sorcery peaked to compensate. On the litter, Lysaer spasreed taut. The
pain of the forced unbinding cut even through unconsciousness and ~
harrowing wail tore from him.
    The cry as well had been Asandir's, for the prince's torment became
shared. No resource could be spared for small healing, absorbed as the
sorcerer was in holding spirit united with flesh. Even as powers twisted
and flashed at his directive, he could not shed the feeling that this exorcism
was going too hard. As if the wraith had sunk fangs into some part of

370


Lysaer, it seemed intent upon ripping him asunder rather than relinquish
its possession.
    And then on the heels of that uncertainty, the wraith came unravelled
from Lysaer's being so abruptly that recoil hit like a slap. Spellcraft sheared
last connections and pinned the creature down in mid-air. For good or ill
the deed was done. The trapped wraith froze, burning in malice like a
marsh candle; the freed man lay dazed senseless on the litter. The sorcerers
braced at his side regarded each other, beaten and drained from their
labours. Between them passed understanding: that cost had been set upon
this unbinding. The s'Ilessid gift of true justice, bent to ill usage by the
wraith, had suffered untold further damage.
    Asandir ventured hoarsely, 'The curse that sets Lysaer against Arithon
had sullied the s'Ilessid gift in any case.'
    Hunched with his chin on clasped knuckles, Sethvir sighed. They dared
correct nothing now. Not without risk of disturbing Desh-thiere's binding
and chancing the s'Ilessid prince's life. 'There's always the next genera-
tion,' he said sadly. 'The wraith, at least, is defeated.'
    The barest hitch to Sethvir's statement snapped Asandir to keen
scrutiny. The Warden of Althain avoided contact, his mind held shuttered
and dark. His eyes stayed stubbornly averted. Asandir said, 'There's more.
You've got Name for the ilbstarred being, haven't you?'
    Now Sethvir did look up, bleak as ice on spring blossoms in the sickly
glimmer shed by the wraith. 'Once, the creature was human.'
    Stunned by cascading implications, scraped raw by a forced reassess-
ment of the countless doomed spirits imprisoned under wards at
Skdseng's Gate, Asandir lost speech. Dread burdened him, as each
wraith's disfigured humanity set his Fellowship too bleak a quandary. A
s~)rcerer's judgement was not Ath's authority, to trap unconsenting spirits
in a limbo of indefinite imprisonment. Neither could the riddle of Desh-
thiere's nature be unwound to free those damned thousands, until the
Fellowship stood at full strength, their number restored back to Seven.
    All and more swung in pivot upon one chancy cipher: the life of the last
s'Ffalenn prince.
    As Sethvir and Asandir shared this final, most vivid disclosure com-
pounded of miscalculated risks and urgency, immediate troubles returned
to roost.
    The bar on the armoury door clanged up. A stay-spell flared dead and
steel hinges wailed open as, bemoaning a headache in a carping counter-
point, Dakar pitched sideways into the breach. The shoulder that hit
against the lintel was all that kept him upright.
    'It's dark!' Diegan's complaint shivered the still air with echoes.
'Dharkaron take your drunken whimsy, I heard no screams. Nobody's in
here.'
    'Oh yes.' Dakar launched off and rocked two tipsy steps across the
threshold. 'They're here. Trust me. Sethvir just forgets to light candles.'

371


    Suspicious, still bristling from the force required to stand down Gnudsog
and his squad at the ram, Diegan sniffed. An acridity like cinders yet
lingered, as if a torch had gone out not long since.
    'There.' Dakar swayed on braced feet, forgetful that darkness masked the
area where he pointed.
    The space proved not to be empty. Clipped and grainily hoarse, Asandir
said in ghostly rebuke, 'You call this keeping Etarra's captain of the guard
under house-arrest?'
  Diegan nearly started out of his jewelled doublet.
    Dakar lost his balance and sat. 'The wine,' he admitted on the tail of a
soulful grunt. 'We drank both flagons, and Diegan pleaded. Where's
Lysaer?' Then, as muddled wits or his eyesight recovered, he noticed the
nearly subliminal glow fixed under ward before Sethvir. Dakar squinted,
identified the configurations for a seal of imprisonment and inside, a
whirling, twisted light that made his stomach heave. Not the after-effect of
indulgence, this sickness, nor the clench of impending prophecy: his
nausea stemmed instead from reaction to something warped outside of
nature.
 Dakar's stupor cleared. 'You knew!' he accused.
    Asandir's correction was instant. 'Suspected. Without command of
Name we had no means to foresee how Desh-thiere's harm would ch~sc
to manifest. And with your second bout of prophecy made in conflict with
the first, we had no clear path to choose.'
    'I don't even know my second prophecy.' Deflected by personal m iury,
Dakar looked down as if to make sure of the floor. That led him to cast
about for something solid to lean on, until sight of Lysaer on the pallet
refuelled his disrupted train of enquiry. 'So you did nothing,' he berated his
Fellowship masters, and rage bled away into a sorry, drunken grizzle. 'Ah,
Ath, like us all, Lysaer trusted you.'
    Through the cracked-open panels of two siege-doors beat the roar of
an enraged populace, cut across by Gnudsog's bellowed orders. Words
carried faintly, reviling mages and royalty. The rabble had begun to
chant.
    Against that backdrop of ugliness, Diegan confronted the two sorcerers.
'So, will you also do nothing now?'
    Sethvir arose. At his wave, flames burst afresh from the torch stub. Hot
light flooded across the armoury, snagged to sparks on the metal filings
scattered in swathes from the sharpening wheel; on the racked gleam of
blades that soon would run dull with new blood; and on the amethysts and
diamonds sewn on Diegan's doublet, which jerked to his passionate
breaths.
    Mild as sunfaded velvet before the whetted weapons that ringed him
round, the Warden of Althain blinked. 'Do you wish our help?'
    'I wish Dharkaron's curse upon you all, never more fervently than now!'
Diegan shoved briskly forward; bullion fringes snapped at his boot cuffs as

372


he stopped and stared down at Lysaer. 'What have you done to him? Killed
him? Because he spoke out against your prince?'
    'They wouldn't harm him,' Dakar interrupted. 'Lysaer's gift of light will
be needed to lift off Arithon's blight of shadows.'
    'So, it's true!' Diegan's black eyes flicked from Sethvir to Asandir. 'The
king you tried to foist on us is one of you, a sorcerer born and trained. You
forced our governors to stand down, on threat of riots. Well, we have them
now regardless. Guild houses are afire. The minister's palace and gov-
ernor's hall are being stormed this moment by the rabble.'
    To every appearance unruffled by Diegan's accusations, Sethvir fingered
his beard. Of Lysaer he said to his colleague, 'I do regret releasing him
before we know Arithon's fate.'
    'We don't have any choice.' Asandir set his hands upon the blond head of
the prince on the litter and engaged a gentle call to wake. Sethvir's
appalling disclosure of one wraith's botched humanity had overturned
every priority. The disposition of Desh-thiere to safer captivity at Rockfell
perforce must take precedence, and Etarra survive its own course. The Lord
Governor's standing had been undermined past the point where his
authority could be salvaged. Lysaer alone could bum off Arithon's
stranglehold of shadows and stop the spread of panic and misdirected
bloodshed; even if afterward Desh-thiere's curse would drive him to turn
the city garrison as a weapon against his half-brother.
 The strands, after all, had converged in this forecast of war.
    'You shall have what you asked for.' Asandir met Diegan's rancour with
a calm made terrible by perception. 'Battle, misunderstanding and a cause
to perpetuate bitter hatred.'
 Under his ministrations, Lysaer stirred and moaned.
    Diegan knelt quickly and shook the s'Ilessid prince's arm. 'Are you all
right? Friend, did they hurt you?'
    Lysaer opened his eyes. He looked lost for a moment. Then he turned his
head, frowned, and focused clearly upon Asandir. 'Ath forgive me,' he whisp-
ered. 'I had a nightmare. Or is it true, that I smashed Elshian's lyranthe?'
    Asandir all but flinched; his glance of inquiry hardened to misery as, from
the sidelines, Sethvir gave sad affirmation.
    Pity toughened his words as he said, 'Whatever you recall was no dream.
Etarra has been driven to riot. Since your actions have discredited Rathain's
prince, your talents are needed immediately to restore the city to order.'
    Only then did the grinding noise of the mob reach Lysaer's notice. He sat
up, saw Diegan, then flushed as other memories flooded back. 'Arithon.
Whatever I said, he's caused mayhem, set shadows and terror in the streets.'
Then, his inflection so changed that it jarred, he added, 'Where is he?'
    'You speak of your half-brother/Sethvir rebuked, hoping against chance
to shock back some buried spark of conscience.
    But Desh-thiere's curse had imbedded irrevocably deep, and old malice
resurfaced in force. 'He's bastard-born, and no relation of mine.'

373


     'Ill-feeling cannot alter fact, Teir's'Ilessid,' Asandir cracked back. 'You
 go to spill a kinsman's blood.'
     Lysaer was unmoved. 'I go to redress an injustice. Mark this. When I find
 your lying get of a s'Ffalenn pirate, I'll see him dead and thrown in pieces to
 the headhunters' pack of tracking dogs!'
     'Then we have no more to say.' Asandir arose, cold to his core. He
 stepped over Dakar, who drowsed in an inebriated heap.
     Lord Diegan, commander of Etarra's garrison was first to move toward
 the door the sorcerer swung open. Tightdipped in vindication, he said to
 Lysaer, 'I admire your ambition. But first, my friend, we have to hunt down
 this prince of shadows.'
     'He's prince of nothing! And finding him should be simple.' Lysaer
 matched step beside the elegant Lord Commander. Urgently speaking, he
 departed without a backward glance.
    From the wardroom, Lord Diegan's shout cast back echoes. 'Gnudsog!
Forget about the spare arms. Assemble a patrol double-quick! Dispatch
them to the warehouse district to scour the alleys. If fortune favours, the
Master of Shadows will be there. Hustle, and we'll take him in the act of
freeing convicts!'
    The wardroom doors boomed closed. Shut off from the din in the streets,
a contrary draught eddied between bowstaves and halberds and showered
red sparks from the torchflame. Left amid crawling shadows and the slow-
falling dust of the armoury, Asandir sat on a shot cask. The glance he cast
after the vagrant breeze was balefully focused and grim. 'Arithon's been
and gone from the warehouse quarter, I trust.'
    Luhaine's staid tones answered. 'I couldn't be sure. The child convicts
were released within the hour. The locksmith and the waggoners hired to
free them were paid off with gold acquired from pawning a crown emerald.
The gem took some trouble to recover.'
    'The children?' Sethvir cut in. For a fast check into the district had
revealed the same wagons overturned by the fury of the mob.
    Dispersed. They'll hide like rabbits, then bolt for open country as they
can.' Luhame resumed his report. 'Arithon's horse is gont. from the stables.
A half-canister of the narcotic herb tienelle was taken from Sethvir's
saddle -packs.'
    The Warden of Althain brightened. 'Let Arithon keep it. He's not
unschooled in its use, and against Etarra's armed garrison he's going to
need every advantage.'
  'So I thought, also.' Luhaine paused. 'I contacted Kharadmon.'
    'To reverse the storm?' Sethvir sucked in his cheeks to stifle a harried,
madcap smile. 'But that's brilliant! If Diegan's going to roust out the
garrison, let his search-parties rust their gear to a fare-thee-well in a cold
northeasterly downpour.' Next moment, his expression distanced into
self-satisfied relief. 'Bless Ath, he's shown sense.'
 'Arithon?' Asandir cut in. 'You found him?'

374


 No small bit irked, Luhaine said, 'How? Where?'
    Long used to untwisting the myriad affairs of five kingdoms, the Warden
of Althain tugged out a tangle he found in his beard. 'There's but one dun
mare in this region with a white splash marked on her neck.' Then, in
delight undimmed by the reproof of expectant colleagues, he answered the
original question. 'She's past the main gate, and driving at speed down the
north road. Which means Arithon eventually must ride into the patrols of
Steiven, regent of Rathain.'
    'That's no good news,' Dakar grumbled from his pose of flat-out
prostration.
    Luhaine was swift in agreement. 'Steiven has just one ambition, and
that's to collect every Etarran guildmaster's severed head.'
    Sethvir threw up his hands. 'Bloody war's a fine sight better than the
s'Ffalenn royal line cut dead by a sword in an alley!' He subsided in belated
recollection that Luhaine was yet uninformed; the renewed priorities
forced on them by the Mistwraith's warped ties to humanity had yet to
realign his opinion.
    While Asandir in tart chastisement jabbed a toe in the ribs of his
apprentice, who seemed inclined to drop off snoring. 'Arithon dead, don't
forget, would doom your Black Rose Prophecy to failure.'
    'You wan t Davien back?' The Mad Prophet opened drink-glazed eyes in
martyred affront. 'That's fool rotten logic, when his betrayals were what
dethroned your high kings in the first place!'

375


Muster

Shadow lay thick over Etarra's streets, the torches in their rusted brackets
smothered to haloes of murky orange. The strife, the cries, the clash of
steel weaponry and Gnudsog's gruff oaths sounded eerily muffled; as if the
unnatural darkness lent the heavy air a texture like wet batting. Kept
insulated from the jostle of the mobs, embedded like fine treasure amid the
fast-striding tramp of armed escort, Diegan regarded the ally but lately
forsworn from the Fellowship sorcerers' grand cause.
    Lysaer looked angry-pale: white skin, gold hair, bloodless lips. His
expression remained remote as smoothed marble as they passed some rich
man's door-page being bullied by ruffians from the shanties. The curve of
Lysaer's nostrils did not flare at the stench of spilled sewage that slimed
the cobbles. His wide, light brows never rose at the measures the guard
escort took to clear a rampaging gang of masons who had smashed a
butchef's door to steal cleavers. Torches and halberds reflected in those
eyes; but their gem-stone hardness stayed untouched.
    From a side-alley too squalid for lanterns a woman cried entreaties. ^
man's bellowed curses ended with the sound of a smack against flesh, and a
cur with raised hackles raced into the vanguard ranks, caught, a boot in the
flank, and tumbled yelping. The advance guard turned another corner in
their progress toward the town hall, and Lysaer stepped over the crippled
dog with barely the flicker of a glance.
    Diegan fastened his braided cloak ti~s against a shiver of discomfort. 'Is
it true?' he asked softly.
    That splintered sapphire gaze disconcertingly turned on him. 'What?'
Lysaer blinked, and seemed partially to come back to himself. 'Is what
true?'
    Cold eyes, warm voice; Diegan steeled himself. No coward despite his
dandy looks, he forced the necessary enquiry. 'Your lineage. Are you

376


royal? Does that sorcerer's upstart really share your blood as half-
brother?'
    Lysaer's look went straight through him. 'Would you claim kinship with
a byblow forced upon a queen by abduction and rape?' The little falsehood
came easily, that his mother's flight to embrace her s'Ffalenn paramour
had never extended through a year of willing dalliance. A frown marred
Lysaer's features as he wondered upon the memory that, he would once
have spoken differently; that he had in some other time challenged his
~oyal father to intercede for the pirate bastard's comfort.
    That event seemed distant, as cut off as a stranger's memory. Brave,
Lysaer had seen himself then; honourable and just. Now, his past pity
seemed the puling naivete of a fool, to have invited his own downfall and
thrown away heirship in Amroth for adherence to one painful truth. A lie
cost so little, in comparison; and by today's outcome, his losses being
permanent and Arithon having shown his true nature, the fib to Diegan
might as well have been the plain truth. Feeling giddy and light, as if the
burden of heaven's arch had been unyoked from his houlders, Lysaer
almost laughed.
    'You're royal as he, then,' Diegan murmured in dark conclusion. He
caught Lysaer's fierce flare of mirth and reassessed: both hysteria and the
queer lack of emotion were quite likely the effects of profound shock.
Moved to sympathy, the Lord Commander softened his accusation. 'That's
difficult. Most awkward.'
    'Not at all.' The next lie came easily to Lysaer's tongue. 'I may be a king's
son, and legitimate, but not on Athera's soil. What inheritance I could
claim by birthright lies beyond the span of a worldgate, unreachable, reft
from me by the doings of s'Ffalenn.'
 'A prince in exile, then?' pressed Diegan.
    Lysaer's smile was sudden as spring-thaw. 'No prince at all, friend. I was
formally disinherited, a victim of sorcerer's wiles, as you are. Etarra's
people shall have my help for their own sake. Rest content. I find just
vengeance sufficient.'
    They passed the juncture of another alley; Diegan scanned the cross-
street out of ingrained habit: such sites were prime places for high-bred
officials to be ambushed. 'Then your mother was not s'Ffalenn.~'
    'No, can't you guess?' Lysaer grimaced on an edge of pain deep buried
from childhood. 'My mother, may Dharkaron Ath's Avenger visit judge-
ment on the seed of her shame, was the sadly ravished queen.'
    Ahead loomed the market square, its arched entry ghost-lit by the lamps.
In the strange and strangled light, the luck-shrines tucked under carven
gables were grotesquely clotted with wax from the candies left lit by
ambitious merchants. The little tin talismans that should have jangled to
warn of iyats hung silent, gripped fast in the windless dark.
    The mob pressed thicker, where farmers won over to the cause of
restored monarchy hurled insults and loose bricks at guild tradesmen.

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 Now and again the crossfire of debris would clang off the face of a targe.
 More soldiers had bolstered Diegan's escort. These newcomers brought
 the fire-caught glint of gilt trappings and the weapons they brandished
 were still streamered with ceremonial colours. Drawn from the squads
 originally posted to keep order through the coronation processional, their
 splendid appointments lent Gnudsog with his scars and nicked field-gear
 the hard-bitten look of a felon.
     Disturbance ruffled the ranked columns. A messenger in governor's
 livery burst through, breathing hard, his cheek disfigured by a bruise. He
 cried above the din for Lord Diegan.
    'Here's news!' bellowed Gnudsog to his commander. 'You can't want it
now, lord. Better to hear inside sanctuary, after we reach the council, hall.'
    'No!' The courier's voice cracked in terror. 'Not there! The hall's been
locked fast by fell sorcery.'
    'Traithe,' Lysaer said tersely. At Diegan's taut-jawed flare of outrage, he
raised a placating hand. 'The ministers inside won't be harmed.'
    Amethysts and diamonds spat glints through murk as the commander of
the guard spun around. 'Send the man through. I'll hear him now.'
    Soldiers gave way to admit the courier. His shirt was torn at the
shoulder, and the knuckles of one hand were skinned raw. 'I'm lucky to
have reached you at all, lord. Looters have kicked down the lamp-posts for
quarterstaves, with three city aldermen battered dead.'
  'You have news?' Diegan yanked the man up by his collar.
    Just then aware of who attended his Lord Commander, the messenger
gasped and flung away. 'But my lord! That blond man is lackey for the
sorcerers!'
    High tempered, about to hail Gnudsog to end the fool's dithering by
blows, Diegan started at a touch upon his arm. He swung, restrained by the
steady gaze of Lysaer.
    The prince who had abjured all rights to royal rank said gently, 'No. After
Arithon's betrayal, any man's enmity is fair. Let me prove myself worthy
of trust, his, yours, and Etarra's.' The prince in his tinsel velvets showed a
proud, unpractised majesty, and the result of unprepossessing humbleness
clothed in grace and shining wealth combined to powerful effect.
    The messenger was moved to stand down. 'Your pardon, great lord.'
He bent to touch his forelock and stopped, aghast at his dripping
knuckles.
    Lysaer startled him from embarrassment with a kindly clap on the
shoulder. 'Forget titles. Against the Master of Shadow, we are equal in
station, you and I.' Then, as if screaming, rampaging mobs were not being
thumped by Gnudsog's soldiers, as if no darkness choked sight, he probed
with gentle questions for information.
    Diegan watched, awed, as the messenger stopped quaking and answered.
Very quickly they learned that Traithe's spells disbarred the council lords
from action. Surly as an old, scarred tiger, Gnudsog allowed that while his

378


squads could batter down doorpanels well enough, wards of sorcery were
another matter.
    'Then we won't use force,' Lysaer said equably. To the courier, he added,
'You've crossed the main square by the council hall. What's become of the
grand dais built for the s'Ffalenn pretender's speeches?'
    The courier rolled his eyes. 'Rioters been having at it, sure enough. A
pack o' guild apprentices came with prybars and staves to tear it down, but
farmers with drays blocked it off, flying leopard banners and swearing
they'll enforce the crown charter for their land rights.'
    'Extremists from both factions?' Lysaer grinned. 'That's perfect.' He
laughed and turned shining, exultant eyes toward Diegan, who remained
mystified, and Gnudsog, who kneaded the scars on his sword arm in fixed
and unholy irritation. 'Since your councilmen cannot act to calm their
city, here is how we'll do it for them.'

They marched briskly and gained the square. Gnudsog formed his men
into a flying wedge and bashed through the rioting apprentices from the
rear. Swords and steel-shod halberd butts made short work of wooden
staves; the dray with its spilled crates of melons and string-tied half-
trampled chickens afforded only minimal delay. Gnudsog's men used
polearms for levers and had the vehicle set upright in a trice. By then,
combatants on both sides screamed curses, united in common cause
against the soldiers.
    While the fighting shifted focus, Lysaer mounted the unguarded stair,
littered with torn-down snarls of bunting, and leopard banners that
beleaguered torchlight re-rendered from s'Ffalenn green and silver to
funereal black. Fired by righteous purpose, he paused to comfort a farm lad
who knelt with his gashed cheek compressed with the wadded-up tail of a
streamer. A word, a touch, a light joke, and the boy was induced to smile.
Today's ripped face would leave a scar that would win him no endearments
from the tavernmaids. Another bit of ruin to swell an already vicious score.
Unmindful that a curse drove his enmity, Lysaer reached the upper
platform where a s'Ffalenn turned traitor to his birthright should have
pledged Etarra his protection.
    The Fellowship had chosen a site of favourable visibility and accoustics.
Lysaer paused between the stripped and splintered awning poles, given
vantage to every corner of the square.
    Before him spread the city's tragic turmoil. Picked out in pallid
lanternlight, small episodes stood out: the screaming craftsmen who
brandished tools and uprooted stakes from the awning ties; the drunken
laughter and gyrating celebration of a raggedy band of looters; a woman
clutching a torn dress. And an elderly burgher beset in extremity, his cane
struck away, the rim of a broken flowerpot his last weapon to fend off his
attackers.

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    Misgiving for their plights dispelled the disorientation that lingered since
Lysaer's reawakening. Desh-thiere's realignment of his loyalties was
irrevocably complete.
    His hour under the wraith's possession he now blamed on spells laid to
daze and confuse him; that the Fellowship would act to abet Arithon's
escape was a foregone conclusion, since they had persistently refused to
lend credence to any of his past crimes of piracy. That fallacy must no longer
be allowed to hinder mercy. Neither could widespread riots be stopped
through hard-edged action. Restored to compassionate perception, Lysaer
saw he had been callous to presume that he could loose the full might of his
gift and crack the pall of shadow from the sky.
    A populace driven by mass panic might well mistake a violent counter-
strike for an attack by enemy sorcery; no act, however well4ntentioned,
must lend further impetus to panic. A subtle approach would encourage
reason; light must flow gently as a balm over a city whose loyalties were
ripped open like bleeding wounds.  Lysaer raised his hands.
    His gift had become more malleable to his will through the months of
battle against Desh-thiere; further, the hours spent working in partnership
with Arithon lent Lysaer every confidence that he could plumb any weaving
of shadow.
    The shouts, the screams, the crack of wood against steel as roisterers
harried Gnudsog's line of soldiers faded before deep concentration as Lysaer
sent a subliminal tracer glow aloft. Quietly, subtly he tested the bindings of
darkness the Shadow Master had set over the city.
    The probe was swallowed utterly. A dark inexhaustible as ocean, as
seamlessly wrapped as a death caul seemed to make mockery of his effort.
Lysaer clamped down on fresh anger. No pall could be infinite. Not even the
Fellowship commanded limitless power. Lysaer turned reason and objec-
tivity against the heat of his enmity. His next probe picked up the thread of
magecraft cleverly intermeshed with the shadows. Not only had the illu-
sion tricked him to assume the night had no boundaries, Lysaer exposed a
second error of presumption, that Arithon must be inside city walls.
     Stay-spells anchored these shadows. A sorcerer's training allowed the
 Master's spun darkness to abide outside of his presence.
     Very likely the daylight had been banished to cover a bolt to escape. Lysaer
 found no cause to forgive, that the attack had not been turned in direct
 malice against Etarra's citizens. Riots had arisen from the upset. By royal
 duty, the man who should have been first to keep peace had without scruple
 seized the most damaging means at hand to duck his responsibility.
     Justice would be served, Lysaer vowed. For each life lost, for each hurt
 caused by negligence, Arithon s'Ffalenn would be brought to account.
     The dark-ward must be lifted straightaway. Lysaer extended his arms. A
 glow bloomed upward. Golden as late-day sunlight on an autumn meadow,
 the halo he cast from his person could never be mistaken for torchlight.

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    Across the rush and tumult in the square, through the barricade of raised
polearms wielded by Gnudsog's guard, eyes turned toward that source of
indefinable illumination. Etarra's traumatized citizens saw one man
casting brave challenge against the dark.
    Someone shouted. Hands raised in the press, pointing toward the glow
that spread from the lone blond figure on the dais. The fighting nearest
Gnudsog's embattled lines faltered. Farmers stared, bricks and cart-axles
torn out for bludgeons dangling forgotten in their hands as belligerence
gave way to wonder. Rough men who prowled to steal and pillage spun
from doorways suddenly rinsed clean of shadow. Stripped of their cover,
they dodged away into side-streets to avoid arrest by the watch. Guild
bands of more directed hatreds paused on their way to disadvantage rival
factions. Least brazen, the craftsmen and the shopkeepers clustered in
their fearful bands cried out at the rebirth of the light that would spare their
property and livelihood. 'We are saved!'
    Lord Diegan answered from the dais stair. 'By the grace of Lysaer of the
Light, our city shall recover prosperity!'
    'Lysaer of the Light!' hailed a mason with toughened hands. His chant was
taken up, until the central square of Etarra rang to a thousand raised voices.
    The golden circle widened, waxed brighter. Lysaer's hands seemed
bathed in a fountainhead of gilt sparks. Light burnished his hair like fine
metal and glanced off the tinsel stitching banding his lace cuffs and
pourpoint. The face tipped upward under that swathe of illumination
showed no change at the clamour of the crowd. Fine-chiselled in
concentration, the lord from the west who wrought miracles seemed an
angel sent down into squalor from the exalted hosts of Athlieria.
    Even Gnudsog was inspired from dourness. 'He has the look on him, like
a prince.' Eyes dark as swamp-peat swivelled and fixed on Lord Diegan.
'l)on't let your ninnies in the council be handing him a crown in silly
gratitude.'
    Not entirely mollified as the chanting swelled to rattle the farthest
windows of the square, Etarra's Lord Commander gave back a grim grin.
'What Lysaer wants for his service is the head of the prince of Rathain.'
    'Good.' Gnudsog smiled. On his grizzled features, the expression made
n~ improvement; the scars and chipped teeth from past scraps made him
baleful enough to inspire prayers of deliverance from a headhunter. 'For
that, on my sword, he'll have my help.'
    The subject of Etarra's adulation alone remained oblivious; Lysaer's
engagement with Arithon's sorceries required total concentration. Even
t~nder barrage by pure light, the shadows proved stubborn to shift. Like
inkstains set in pale felt, they resisted with a fierceness that at times made
them seem to push back. Again, Lysaer stepped up his countermeasure.
Time passed. As the light poured steadily from him, he tracked only the
retreat of the dark. Blind to all else, deaf to Diegan's encouragement, he
missed the exultant moment when Etarra lay lit from wall to wall by the

381


fiery glow of his gift. Lamps and torches brightened even the dimmest
back-alleys where Gnudsog sent patrols to quell any unreformed rioters.
    By afternoon, the merchants unlocked their mansions. Drawn by wild
rumours and by the burning, continuous flow of light, people from all
quarters of the city re-emerged to pack the main square. The chanting
subsided and later died into an awe-struck silence.
    Locked in his private crusade against the dark, Lysaer did not stir when
the city governors reawakened to discover their council hall doors were
fastened closed by nothing beyond everyday bolts and latches. At some point, unseen, the sorcerer Traithe had departed.
    Humbled as they heard of the s'Ilessid prince who had shouldered their
cause against monarchy, Etarra's high officials gathered on the dais. Amid
splintered laths and ripped silk, they stood in vigil at Lysaer's side.
    Lost to their presence, bathed in a blinding dazzle, Lysaer wrestled the
frustration that Arithon's greater training had defeated him. Determina-
tion held him steadfast. Etarra's plight would be spoken for until his last
strength became spent. The shadows by now were beaten back outside the
walls. Beyond hearing that the bloodshed had ended: driven past the point
of caring by the curse-born obsession to obliterate the works of his half-
brother, Lysaer hammered out light in singleminded ferocity.
    Diegan was closest when the wide-spread arms began to shudder. The
light-rinsed hands finally spasmed to fists in the extremity of advanced
exhaustion, and a tremor racked Lysaer's body. He swayed on his feet, and
there at his side was Etarra's Lord Commander to lend him support as he
crumpled.
 Lysaer's eyes flicked open then, agonized in abject defeat.
    Moved to compassion, Lord Diegan said, 'Lysaer, it's all right. The riots
are ended. You've done well enough to stop the bloodshed, and the
shadows are cleared past the gates.'
    'All is not right!' His next line a whisper of unrequited fury, Lysaer
collapsed in Diegan's arms. 'Nothing is ended. Neither dark nor the prince
of darkness shall rule in Rathain while I live.'
    Spoken from the dais where a crowned king should have sworn oath to
uphold the royal charter, the accoustics arranged by the Fellowship picked
up the softest words. The passion in Lysaer's promise carried clearly to the
edges of the square.
    Silence reigned for perhaps a dozen heartbeats. Then air itself seemed to
shatter as the gathered mass of Etarra's thousands released its pent breath
and cheered in full-throated approval. The roar of the accolade shook the
earth. Yet the prince who had won their reprieve from pure terror heard no
sound at all, having fainted in Diegan's embrace.

The shadows set over Etarra by Arithon s'Ffalenn cleared shortly after
midnight of their own accord. By then, the populace had become

382


enamoured of the hero in their midst; ramour attributed deliverance to the
blond-haired prince from the west. The last band of looters languished in
irons. Too taciturn to show satisfaction for a long day's work well done,
Gnudsog sat enthroned in the windowseat alcove of Lord Governor
Morfett's best guest suite.
    He looked out of place as a botched carving amid violet and gold tassels
and amber cushions. Stripped of his field gear, clad still in the sweaty fleece
gambeson he preferred to wear under chainmail, he slugged wine from a
huge brass tankard. His peat-bog eyes watched, brooding, as the city's
governing elect crowded the rest of the room's furnishings and argued in
overheated elegance over disposition of his troops.
    Their wilted ribbons and sadly creased sarcenets lent the chamber the
feel of a second rate bordello. Couched in their midst, resplendent as any
in his velvets and the frost-point fire of his sapphires, Lysaer s'Ilessid lay
unconscious or dead asleep in the aftermath of exhaustion. The healer
who had examined him said to let him rest, then left without daring a
prognosis.
    Apt to be ambivalent over fine points, Gnudsog drank. He cracked his
knuckles in impatience. The cant of the councilmen irked him. Repeated
searches had established beyond doubt that every Fellowship sorcerer
appeared spontaneously to have vanished; squads had turned the ware-
house district inside out, to no avail. The meat knacker's conscripts had
scarpered. Little further justice could be done until one shadow-bending
criminal could be traced in his flight and eventually arraigned for
execution. To which end, Gnudsog ran the house steward's pages
breathless, sending dispatches to his lieutenants and to his far-flung
network of scouts.
    When the long-sought news came back to him, along with incontrovert-
ible proof that Arithon's trail had been picked up, no one heard him
through the din of raised voices.  Gnudsog lost his temper.
    He cracked his tankard down with such force that wine geysered over
the brim. Silence fell. The governing elect of Etarra turned heads, balding,
curled, and hatted with felts pearled and feathered, to glare down superior
noses at the author of untimely poor manners.
    Sublimely untroubled by protocol, Gnudsog wiped his stubbled chin on
the back of one hirsute wrist. 'As I said, he is found. Your shadow-meddling
little sorcerer has fled down the north road. By now, he has five hours' lead,
on straight course for the clans of Deshir.'
     The pronouncement launched the room into uproar. The minister of the
 dyers and spinners guild fired off into maundering monologue, while the
 mayor of the south quarter fiailed his chair arm with his bonnet in a vain
 attempt to recall order. His thumps were overwhelmed by an excited
 jabber of speculation, shrilly over-cut by the governor of trade's expostula-
 tion. 'Ath preserve us! We are lost! Against sorcery and shadows, our best

383


troops will be cut to bleeding dogmeat. What use are good swords, unless
the Prince of Light can be convinced or coerced to give us aid?'
    The heads swivelled back, belatedly covetous of the jewelled asset
ensconced in their midst. Only now, the blue eyes were opened. Lysaer had
wakened to their bickering.
    Gnudsog chuckled at the speed with which Etarra's high officials
rearranged themselves in solicitude. The most prideful and disdainful of
pedigreed high-bloods bent to their knees at the side of their intended
$aviour.
    Amused a bit by their pandering, Lysaer sat up. Thoughtful, frowning
through dishevelled gold hair, he said seriously, 'My support was never in
question.' Declaiming voices stilled to listen. 'You have my help, as long
and as much as you need it. But Etarra must act without hesitation. There
will be war, if Arithon survives to win allies. With the northern clans
behind him, he could escape justice altogether.'
    'The barbarians may be troublesome but they can't mount a serious
threat,' interjected Pesquil, sallow and lean in the sable sash that denoted
top rank in the northern league of headhunters. 'Our city garrison could
wipe out the clans. That much was never at issue. For years, we've mapped
the campaign. We know the barbarians' campsites, their bolt-holes, even
the location of their caches. What was ever and always the deterrent was
allocation of funds to send troops.'
    Lord Governor Morfett blotted streaming temples on the draggled lace of
his cuffs. 'After today's display of sorcery and shadows, I much doubt the
treasury will stint.'
    As the minister of city finances cleared his throat to argue, Lysaer
s'Ilessid arose. 'Ath spare us the war, why wait?' He caught Diegan's nod of
approval, and added, 'Strike now with a mounted division, and we might
need nothing more than a block and a scaffold for execution.'
    'Twenty lancers already ride.' Across the chamber, Gnudsog was
smiling as the officials again heeded his presence. 'They left the north gate
half an hour ago.'
    Lysaer regarded the grizzled captain with engaging concern and respect.
'Your city could be indebted for your foresight, but lancers might not be
enough. Arithon s'Ffalenn is as wily and ruthless as the pirate who fathered
him. The more time he gains, the more dangerous he becomes. If we are not
to be taken unaware, we must assume now that he will evade your patrol
and reach the northern barbarians. Gentlemen, for all your safety, I urge
your city to muster immediately for war.'
    'We have a quorum!' Diegan cracked out from his perch of cat-comfort
amid the fur quilts. 'Shall we take the issue to vote?'
    Hands were raised, a count taken and Gnudsog's smile became vorac-
ious. He redirected the outgoing stream of pages to scare up scribes and ink.
The city seals were sent for as an afterthought. Within the hour Morfett's
ornamental tables were pressed into service as desks and Gnudsog's horny

384


fists became weighted with requisitions for provisions, arms and draft
teams. Throughout, Lysaer paced the chamber, consumed by restless
passion, haranguing reticent officials and cajoling the minister of finance
to yield up the keys to the treasury. 'Strike thoroughly and at once,' he
stressed. 'Or I can promise you'll have trouble on a scale your histories
have never seen.'
    In all of Athera, he was the sole man qualified to measure the damages
that sTfalenn wiles could inflict. His greatest fear was in making the
Etatrans understand just how perilous an enemy they had against them.

Just past dawn, Gnudsog's troop of light cavalry clattered into the citadel's
north bailey. Tired riders dismounted amid the noisy, uprooted industry of
a city arming for war. By then the governor's council looked toward one
saviour for guidance. The patrol's weary officer was sent apace to Lysaer
with news that his riders had failed in their mission to capture Arithon.
    Presented across a table littered with crumb-scattered plates and charts
spread helter-skelter with the inked-over marks of evolving strategy, the
young lancer finished his report. 'We could not overtake him, my lords.
The Shadow Master had a wide lead already, even without Sithaer's own
darkness and a cold that dropped snow to hide his tracks. When we learned
he'd snatched a remount from a caravan, we had no choice but turn back.
To continue was useless, with our horses winded near to foundering.'
    Sunlight slanted across creased layers of parchments that crackled as
Diegan leaned on them; that sound, and the rasp as Lord Governor Moffett
scratched his fleshy, stubbled jaws filled an interval of stillness. None of
the men had slept or refreshed themselves throughout a night spent
planning.
 The lance captain shifted from foot to foot, justly nervous.
    'Why didn't you commandeer fresh horses from the caravan's road-
master?' Diegan demanded at length.
    'My Lord Commander, the merchant who owned the pack-train wasn't
under Etarran jurisdiction.' Still bitter, the captain added, 'Even so, we
might have had help, had we been able to bribe his road-master a tenth as
generously as the renegade.'
    Lysaer frowned. Beaten pale by fatigue, long past finesse, he said, 'But
you claimed that Arithon stole the horse.'
    'He did.' The captain clamped his teeth against frustration. 'Your
Shadow Master dared not attempt a fair offer as his speech, like yours,
begging pardon, my lord, is very like the barbarians'. Rather than risk
being skewered the instant he opened his mouth, he fired a supply tent for
diversion, brought his shadows down and made off with a carthorse. Asked
no man's leave, mind, but left a cloak pin fixed to the picket-line set with
an emerald big enough to choke on. The road-master was sick drunk on
beer by the time my lancers had the story. The hired troop guarding the

385


caravan were Sithaer bent on having a holiday, and in no mood lot cl~asmg
any fugitive.'
    Lysaer slammed both hands into the clutter. Crumbs bounced, and an
ink-flask tottered to the chime of a disarranged butter knife. 'How like the
bastard, Dharkaron Avenger take s'Ffalenn cunning!'
    At the prince's expostulation, Lord Diegan showed the fashionable
bland interest, while Governor Moffett started from the act of dabbing
smeared butter from his chin. 'I beg your pardon, my lord?'
    Lysaer's glance flashed anger. 'Arithon is quick, innovative as a fiend,
and aware of our weaknesses to a fine point. I've seen his family's work
before. Given any chance, he will play us one against another, until we are
driven to spoil our own cause for the havoc. But this time will be different.
Arithon's twisted strategies will be turned back against him. When that
happens, Daelion grant that I be on the field to break him.'
    Roused from obsession by the lance captain, who cringed in his dust-
streaked cloak and sweaty boots, Lysaer softened to sympathy. 'I see you're
tired. Rest assured, your competence in this matter was never for an
instant in question.' As naturally as if loyalty were his due to praise, he
finished, 'Should all of Etarra arise against the prince of shadows with
service as willing as yours, his death will be swiftly accomplished.'

386


Sojourns

Lane-watch report reaches Prime Enchantress Morriel, that Etarra musters
for war; her summons to her First Senior is immediate, and her orders,
stingingly curt: 'The Fellowship sorcerers have misplayed the s'Ffalenn
succession. Arithon is in flight as a fugitive, and your guess was apt: if
Elaira was forewarned of this development, her escapade at Erdane held
more than infatuation. Recall her westward to Narms, and pack for travel.
We shall meet her there with all speed...'

Bearing the last wraith exorcised at Etarra across the deepest wilds of Daon
Ramon, Asandir and the Mad Prophet press on toward Skelseng's Gate
with intent to remove Desh-thiere to a place of better security; while
across the sky at their shoulder, sunset burns angry scarlet on a snarl of
storm-clouds that Kharadmon has unleashed, to close over lands to the
north...

While on the plain of Araithe, pounding at a gallop away from the city of
Etarra, a fugitive mounted on a stolen draught-horse rides hunched against
the falling slash of rain...

387



XV.

STRAKEWOOD

The last of the equinox storms that Kharadmon released to pass southward
encountered the fierce dark of Arithon's shadows some leagues to the
north of Etarra. The result warped nature. For a long time, snow fell like a
madman's tangle of lacework and patterned lands barely clothed by green
spring.
    Covered by darkness, given a clear road by the biting, unnatural cold,
Arithon spread spells of illusion and concealment over the hillsides he
travelled, until his reserves burned dry within him. His protections lifted
finally because fury and strength were spent to lassitude.
    The snowfall thawed to sleet, and then to rain that slashed in blinding
torrents; soaked soil heaved porous by frost churned up to a froth of mud
and puddles. The deep footing made his horse labour. All gaits past a walk
became a rolling, sliding misery that begged for torn tendons and lameness.
Out of pity for the dun mare, Arithon turned her loose to wander the
sedge-grown downs before she stone-bruised or crippled herself.
    Her markings made her far too conspicuous to keep anyway; for all the
good sense in his decision, her relinquishment stung, which surprised
him. Since Ithamon and Etarra, he had not expected to have any place left
in him for sentiment.                              ~
    The carthorse he stole to replace his spent mare fared worse. Ill-shod and
less sure-footed, it stumbled and careened, until Arithon at last dropped
the reins and let it go forward as it could. He had abandoned his saddle, the
dun's girth being too short to accommodate a draught breed. Rain soaked
both mount and rider to the skin, the only warm patch shared between
them where human seat and thigh made contact with steaming wet horse.
    Contrary to belief in Etarra, Arithon had not chosen the north road by
design, but only because he had been driven, and because south, there lay
only Ithamon.

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    Three days and two nights of blind flight had left him so wrung by
exhaustion that when the scouts sent by Steiven to intercept him closed in
a ring to bar his way, he had neither strength nor inclination to wheel his
head-hanging mount and try even token resistance.
    They brought him under escort to a camp in a copse between the hills
channelling a river that wound its course north toward the sea. Dawn had
broken and the storm had slackened to drizzle. A silvery patter of droplets
off leaves and budding twigs interlaced with bright notes of birdsong.
Except for small sounds, the chink of bits and soft snorts from an inbound
scout's mount, sign of human habitation remained scant. No smoke
trailed from any firepits, and no dogs whined or barked.
    Confirmed in his suspicion of an encampment in enemy territory,
Arithon dismounted. The wet ends of his cloak dragged streaks through
the muddied lather caked to the gelding's heaving sides. Barbarian hands
steadied him as he swayed on his feet. The draught-horse was led away,
while a scout pointed toward a hide tent pitched a short distance off
through the trees.
 'Lord Steiven awaits you within, your Grace,' she said.
    Arithon followed her direction, too weary to disclaim the royal title. To
move at all required daunting concentration. His hips felt on fire, and
extended hours astride had left him a jelly-legged mess of hurting muscles.
He stumbled into the lodge tent, bringing the scents of skinned grass and
fusty wet wool into an atmosphere of warmth, tinted in autumn colours by
fine-patterned carpets and candlelight. As the tent flap slapped shut on his
heels, he stood blinking, vaguely aware that a cluster of people regarded
him expectantly. A rustle of motion shifted their ranks.
    Belatedly he understood that they had not simply sat down at the low
table scattered across with quill nibs, tin flagons and battered rolls of
parchment. Instead, all four were kneeling behind the clutter: one young
man, one middle-aged female and two elders. The fifth, a dramatically
imposing man who wore a russet leather brigandine said in deep-voiced
command, 'Honour and welcome to s'Ffalenn, your Grace.'
    Arithon flinched. A right-handed gesture of denial spattered droplets
from pleated cuffs and laces sadly ingrained with dirt. His left arm held
something bulky cradled amid the spoiled and wadded wool of his cloak,
while, touched to hard highlights in the candle-glow, the circlet of Rathain
gleamed forgotten through a rain*plastered swathe of black hair. He spoke
finally, in a rasp that sounded dredged from his bootsoles. 'I ask guest-
welcome as a supplicant and a stranger. None here owes me any fealty.'
    His eyes were adjusting to the dimness, but the dazzle of candles
defeated what clarity of sight he regained. The speaker arose, smiling in
welcome, and in a nerve-stressed flash of intuition, Arithon beheld his
aura as a mage would. This man with his scarred face and arresting dignity
had a seer's gift. Forevision had revealed this moment to him, and his
manner held no fear for compromise as he said, 'You are Teir's'Ffalenn, and

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sanctioned for succession by the hand of Asandir. I am sworn to serve your
line, as my forefathers before me were appointed regents of the realm until
return of Rathain's true high king.'
 'Caithdein,' Arithon whispered, white-lipped.
    A stir swept the others at his use of the old tongue, but the phrase for
'shadow behind the throne' merely caused the large warrior's smile to
broaden. 'I've preserved Rathain's heritage and fighting strength only in
the absence of a royal heir. Claim your inheritance, my prince. My regency
is ended.'
    Arithon clamped his teeth against anger. 'Tell your clansmen to stand
up.' He was too tired for this. The light hurt his eyes and his head spun, and
the burden wrapped up in his cloak could not be put off for much longer.
'I'm a bastard son,' he added desperately. 'I lay claim to no man's loyalty.'
    'Your Grace, that does not matter.' The aristocratic elder at the clan
chieftain's shoulder was silver-haired and attired as if for court in a black
tunic elegantly slashed and lined with gleaming saffron silk. Sure in stride
and bearing, he left his place and crossed the piled carpets to bow in quiet
style before the prince. As he rose, wing-tip eyebrows turned up. A mouth
seamed deep by humour revealed a flash of spaced front teeth. 'Birth
cannot negate your birthright. Illegitimacy has never before deterred the
line of s'Ffalenn succession. Back to Torbrand's time, direct descent has
always ranked above the claims of cousins or siblings by marriage. I can
name a dozen ballads as quick example.'
    Arithon stared at the straight-backed, spare-voiced old man, and
weariness spread across his steep features. 'Who are you?' he whispered.
    The gentleman ignored his question and instead raised a voice too
flawless to be mistaken for anything less than a singer's. 'You are of
s'Ffalenn blood, and the Fellowship of Seven themselves have marked you
heir.'
    'Who are you?' Arithon repeated, strain setting edges to a tone already
rough.
    'I'm called Halliron and I, too, have claimed guest welcome of the clans
of the north.'
    Colour drained from Arithon's features. The irony hit him like pain:
before him stood the Masterbard, the single individual in Athera's five
realms who could grant his heart's first desire; had an unwanted throne not
spoiled opportunity.
    A candle burned on a staked brass stand not a foot from Arithon's elbow.
He reached out and pinched the wick, a half a second too late; light had
already betrayed his naked longing to every stranger present.
    He seized his only diversion and unfurled the wadding of his cloak. 'Take
her,' he said as veiling cloth fell away from the blue-tinged corpse of the
child he had carried in his arms since Etarra. Perhaps five years old, she was
stunted and drawn by starvation. The bony arm curled and stiff across her
breast showed the ravages of a wound gone septic, and the hand half-

391


hidden by its stained shreds of bandage reeked overpoweringly of corrupted
flesh.
Those clan councilmen not already standing shot to their feet in distress.
'She died in the night,' Arithon said. 'She was one of yours, conscripted
to serve Etarra's horse-knackers. Others enslaved with her were freed to
make their way home as they could. This one was too sick to walk.'
    Someone spoke an oath in the old tongue. Someone else hurried forward
to relieve him of the dead child's weight. This last was a woman clad in the
leathers of a scout, and in more ways than her hardness reminiscent of
Maenalle of Tysan. 'It's Tanlie's girl, can't be doubt. No other had that
mole on her earlobe.'
    Caught aback by the sudden change in his balance, and the loosening of
an arm bound by cramps, Arithon fought a battering wave of sorrow.
'Please, then, offer Tanlie my sympathy. Her girl died bravely, none better.'
He slipped the sodden velvets of his tabard and offered Rathain's leopard
blazon for her shroud.
    The woman accepted with tears in her eyes. Before the shock could pass,
Arithon rounded on the others who advanced to surround him. 'I bring you
no legacy but strife!'
    His cry halted nothing. Quite the contrary: their tall, scar-faced
chieftain said firmly, 'Tanlie's girl is no grief we've not seen, and many
times, in the generations since Ithamon was torn to ruins.'
    'No. Not this grief.' Arithon broke through hoarseness to achieve a tone
that finally, mercifully, checked them cold. 'I've been bound and spell-
cursed by Desh-thiere to fight my half-brother, Lysaer s'Ilessid. There is no
sanity in the hatred that drives us both, only unbridled lust to kill. Lysaer
has raised Etarra against me, and their garrison will march within days.
Would you spend your lives for a stranger not even born in this world?'
    Concern rather than force shaded the clan chieftain's rebuke. 'Towns-
men have held our lives cheaply since centuries before your birth, and for
less cause than butchering horseflesh. Tanlie's girl lived for naught if she
failed to teach you that.' His glance toward the snuffed candle betrayed his
suspicion that his liege's inveigling tactics hid infirmity. 'By right of
Rathain's charter, the northlands clans have cause to stand in your
defence.'
    'Will you listen?' Arithon lost grip on his temper. 'Oppose Lysaer, and
you'll call down certain ruin on your loved ones. Rights are not at issue.
Causes are fallacy. We are speaking of geas-driven obsession, a madness
that holds to no limits. Against my half-brother, I have no shred of
conscience. For that most basic fact, I refuse the responsibility. Your clans
would become no defence for me, but just another weapon to be
squandered.'
    A stir rippled through the gathered clan lords, while a sough of breeze
spattered raindrops across the tent roof. The storm outside might be
ending: the one brewing inside threatened to break into open contention.

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The fugitive arrived among the clans was unquestionably of s'Ffalenn
blood but he spoke with the forevision of a sorcerer, reminding them
uncomfortably that his were the powers of the West Gate Prophecy,
that had banished Desh-thiere from the sky. He might wear Torbrand's
image; yet he was a stranger, unknown and unnamed, promising disaster
and pleading release from his birthright. Hotly awaited though his arrival
had been, lives hung in the balance. The council would be wise to listen.
    Blunt-faced, his hair greyed as worn steel by years of ambush and
skirmish, Caolle urged his chieftain to stay wary. The rest marked his
words in respect, for the toughened veteran presented opinions few others
cared to voice.
    Steiven was moved, but not to caution. He left his place by the council
table and took stance beside Halliron. His rangy frame dwarfed the
Masterbard, who was not short, and his hazel eyes shone bitter as he
admitted, 'I have Sight. For years I have lived with foreknowledge of the
moment and manner of my death. There is no option, your Grace of
Rathain, elders. Etarra will march upon the northlands whether or not a
Teir's'Ffalenn is given sanctuary among us.' He half-turned to face down
Arithon, his large hands hooked in the lacing that clasped his belt with its
row of black-halted throwing knives. 'My liege, our destiny is to defend
you. The city garrison will campaign against us, and we must stand to
fight. Your choice is simple. Shall we die for an empty title, or a living,
breathing sovereign ?'
    Arithon measured the taller man. His stillness bespoke distaste, for the
claim upon his conscience was shameless; also double-binding as $ithaer's
traps for the damned since the plea gave proof of the clan chief's supreme
dedication. Only the tap of the rain across canvas, and the whispered hiss
of hot wax as draft fanned the candle flames lent sound to the tensioned
atmosphere.
    Arithon's response, when it came, was pitched for the chieftain's ears
alone. 'My lord. Ath and Daelion Fatemaster have conspired. They should
have sent me a regent I could hate, a man drunk on power and tied to petty
interests. Where the unlucky accident of my birth would never bind me,
your courage leaves me humbled and tied. As the sovereign cause of your
death, what is left? It's a shabby, spiritless gesture, to beg in advance your
forgiveness.'
    'That you have,' said the clan chieftain of Deshir, neither speechless, nor
subdued. 'But in exchange I ask your friendship, Arithon of Rathain.'
    The prince managed to curb his recoil at the unexpected knowledge of
his name. tDid your dreams spoil all of my secrets?' And then strain and
sleeplessness undid him. He had to cover his face with both hands to
mask unbidden emotion. 'What are you called?' he said through his
fingers.
 'Steiven s'Valerient, Earl of Deshir.'
 A shudder jarred the prince. The oddly-singed silk of his shirt sleeve

393


slithered back to reveal a seared weal that snaked the length of his right
forearm, to vanish under cloth at the elbow. Arithon ignored the murmurs
that broke out among the clan lords, as through blistered, shaking hands he
swore guest-oath.
    'To this house, its lord, and his sworn companions, I pledge friendship.
Ath's blessing upon family and kin, strength to the heir, and honour to the
name of s'Valerient. Beneath this roof and before Ath, count me brother,
my service as true as blood-kin. Dharkaron witness.'
    Arithon's fingers fell away, to uncover features as hollowed as stripped
bone. 'You've seen this before,' he accused.
    Steiven laughed. From his towering height, he embraced his royal liege
like a son. 'I've lived for it.'
    Then, aware that Arithon's exhaustion threatened collapse, he should-
ered the prince's weight as he had done for his own spent scouts and in
peremptory command sent his clan elders packing to fetch bath water, hot
food and dry blankets.

The war council resumed upon the moment Arithon's needs had been
attended. Etarra was capable of mounting an invasion force ten thousand
strong: and with an understanding turned to grimness by five long
centuries of hatred, Steiven dared not assume that the army sent after
Arithon would be one man less than full muster.
    Etarran lives would be counted cheaply for the ruin of the s'Ffalenn royal
line.
    'I'll need another message run through the relay,' said the gaunt old Earl
of Fallowmere, his single, unclouded eye fixed like a gimlet on his regent.
'By tomorrow every scout I have of fighting age will march to support your
Deshans.'
    'Well, they'll get here too damned late!' Caolle drove his poignard into
the rough-split wood that planked the table. 'You know that fey princeling
is right. If we stand, we're going to have a massacre.'
    'If we don't stand, we'll be slaughtered on the run, or else die of rot and
fever in the boglands of Anglefen by summer.' Quietly, Steiven added,
'We'll fight. But the field must be chosen to our advantage.'
      'Biggest, blood-spilling raid we'll ever stage,' said the last Earl of
Fallowmere. 'For myself, I wouldn't miss it.' Caolle glared.
    In a warmth of brotherly bickering, the strategies were argued, discarded
and reworked, chart after chart unrolled and shoved aside until parch-
ments layered the carpets like quilting. A site was finally chosen in a range
of valleys along the Tal Quorin where the current ran wide and shallow
between a grassy verge of low banks.
    'All right then.' Steiven raised his corded arms, the dull studs on his
brigandine winking in sequence as he stretched. 'Roust last night's patrol.

394


All our camps must relocate east to the river site. The first arrivals will
need to start cutting timber to build the traps.'
    'And the prince?' Caolle demanded. His chapped lips thinned at the
softening he saw on his chieftain's scarred face. 'Ah, no, my lord, you're
not thinking to wait out his grace's infirmity. This is unsafe territory and
we need to break camp before nightfall.'
    There followed a moment in which clanlord and war captain clashed
glances across the candletops. In Deshit, the custom was unbending: any
scout unfit for travel was given a mercy stroke and abandoned where he
lay by the trail. In lands ranged by Etarra's headhunters, litters for the
wounded and the lame endangered those men still hale; and no man,
however minor his injury, was ever left at risk of captivity.
    'You wake him,' Steiven invited with a fierce flash of teeth. 'I warrant
he'll walk, just to spite you. It's the grey he rode in on we'll likely be
leaving for crowbait.'

Arithon came half-awake as a warm weight settled over his knees.
Something else tugged at his hair and another touch trailed across the
knuckles of his unbandaged hand that lay outside the blankets.
    He drew breath and stirred, and the stiffness of his body caught him up
in an ache that made him gasp.
 'You woke him up,' a child's voice piped anxiously.
 'Didn't,' said another, fast as echo, from the other side of the pallet.
 Arithon opened his eyes.
    'Did too, see?' said a brunette perhaps six years old, with tea-coloured
eyes and dimples who lounged against the ticking by his shoulder. 'He
might get mad.'
    Exactly what he chose to do next became the focus of four pairs of eyes,
from the auburn-haired angel astride his knees, to the tallest, regarding
him with pre-teen dignity from the bedstead, to the least of them, as
dark*haired as the father she resembled, sucking on two fingers and
staring shyly from behind her eldest sister.
    Arithon elbowed himself halfway upright, and froze as the slide of the
blankets warned he was naked underneath. His sluggish thoughts
scrambled to reorient and to integrate hide walls and the patchworked fur
coverlets of a sleeping cubicle with his last waking memory, of an
inadvertent nap in the saddle that had ended in a fall from a moving
horse.
    'You aren't mad, are you?' said the sable-haired ten-year-old with
another bounce against his knee.
    He hurt everywhere. He was too tired still by half, and if he wanted to
be annoyed, he lacked the will. Outnumbered, and pinned beneath the
coverlets by a weight of small admirers, he adjusted his tactics to
accommodate.

395


    A short interval later Steiven's wife Dania peeked into the alcove. She
carried a bowl of bread dough braced against her hip, and was fumingly
prepared to dress down daughters warned all morning to leave their guest
in peace.
    The miscreants had found a length of rawhide. Five heads bent together
over a puzzle that, with the help of tiny hands and much patient
instruction from the prince, was forming into an intricate piece of
knotwork.
    Dania's reprimand died unspoken. Quietly, carefully, she moved to slip
the privacy flap closed. But he had heard her, involved as he was, even
through the giggles of the girls.
    'It's all right. Tashka has told me the camp is to move this afternoon. I
should have been wakened soon in any case.' Green eyes turned in
question toward the doorway, made the more vivid by close proximity of
the oldest child's fiery hair. 'You have beautiful daughters, lady. They are
yours, I see, and Lord Steiven's? The resemblance is too striking to
overlook.'
    The bread bowl suddenly seemed an encumbrance. Aware that as her
sovereign he deserved a semblance of courtesy, Dania froze with the
intuition that if she curtseyed, she was going to see him angry.
Her youngest displaced one awkwardness by creation of another.
'Mama, look!' Edal called pulling her hands too fast from hide lacing.
Oblivious to her sisters' cries of dismay as the pattern collapsed into
tangles, she seized Arithon's wrist in chubby hands and said loudly, 'Look,
the prince has scars.'
    'Everybody who escapes from Etarra has scars, Edal,' Dania scolded in
gentle exasperation. 'But it's never polite to speak of them.' She raised the
bread bowl as if it were a shield before her breast and delivered a succession
of orders that set her daughters to flight like butterflies. As the last one
vanished, she discovered the prince still regarding her. He did have scars,
she knew from attending him the night before; ones not in keeping with
his station, and except for the queer burn on his arm, too old to have
happened in Etarra.
    The awkwardness remained. Unused to strangers, far less ones born
royal, Dania wished her curiosity could be deflected as easily as her
daughters', by a ploy with a scrap of hide string.
    He found words that had equal effect. 'I should like to help with the
packing.'
    Gracefully turned to practicalities, Dania said, 'Your clothing is still wet
from being washed. There are leggings and a tunic that should fit you in the
chest by the wall. When you're dressed, we'll see about food.'
    'The Masterbard,' asked Arithon in the same light tone of conversation.
'Is he still with the clans?'
    'Yes.' Despite diffidence, Dania smiled. The expre. ssion lifted cares from
her face and softened the seams of hard living and weather. 'Halliron

396


 goused too much to refuse. Danger, he said, went hand in hand with his tory.
 ~kt his age, he claimed he'd expire from impatience before he'd hear news at
 ~econd hand.'
    Something retreated behind Arithon's expression, though his eyes like
Shadowed emerald never shifted in their framework of gaunt flesh. It stung
her not to know why the Masterbard's presence should cause upset; aside
~~om prodigious talent as a musician, Halliron was the very soul of kindness.
When Arithon graciously dismissed her with his thanks, Lady Dania was
relieved to escape to undertake the much tidier frustration of punching
bread dough.

Arithon arose and stiffly dressed in the black-dyed leathers offered for his
use from the chest. These were sewn of deerhide, beaten soft and adorned
with pale threadwork at collar, shoulder and hem. The silk needlework was
finely embroidered; but there was no silver lacing. In Deshir's forest, one did
not wear garments that might inadvertently flash or catch the light. Dania's
mention of damp clothing was likely an excuse to wean away the coronation
finery that was ill-suited for the trail.
    Arithon emerged from the alcove to find, embarrassed, that the only clan
lodge tent still standing had been the one under which he sheltered. Every
other hide dwelling sat on the beaten earth in a pine clearing, furled tight as
puffballs just sprouted after a rainfall. A team of children appeared immedi-
ately to begin striking the s'Valerient tents. Dania's daughters were every-
where under the feet of the boys who yanked stakes and unreeled spun
cordage to coax collapsing hide to fall in folds. They all carried knives,
though the eldest among them looked not a day past fourteen.
    Nowhere did Anthon encounter signs of grief or burial of the dead child he
had borne from Etarra. At first impression, these clanfolk seemed more
hardened even than Maenalle's, more scarred, more grim, more ingrained by
desperate necessity. By overhearing stray comments, Arithon gathered the
men had marched ahead of the camp to the site on the south-east edge of
Deshire forest, where pitched battle would be fought with Etarra's army.
    Found at her baking over an open-air trestle, Dania pushed a fallen coil of
hair from her cheek with the back of one floury wrist. 'We'll need journey-
cakes for the trail. These are hard and savourless, so I've made sweet bread.
Edal's gone to the ovens so you can have yours hot.' She turned her head,
prepared to call, when a tardy daughter reappeared with steaming bread in a
linen napkin. 'Eat,' Dania urged, still absorbed with the batter that clung to
the bowl. 'You must be famished.'
    He was. Three days and four nights with too little food had left him faint to
the edge of sickness. Arithon took the linen and lifted the bread, forced
despite his hunger to pick at it slowly. Even bland sustenance sat uneasily in
his painfully empty innards. He realized that he was being treated as an
invalid. 'Last night.' His voice was very soft. 'What happened?'

397


    Dania banged her hands down so hard the wooden bowl close to cracked.
'Ath, you would ask.' Although her back was turned, motherly instinct
pinpointed little Edal's eager regard. Dania reflexively packed her daughter
off to fetch back a bucket of clean water. 'You were too tired to ride. Any
fool could have seen. But the men, they've lived with troubles for so long
that I sometimes think we've come to value all the wrong sort of things.'
  'I didn't ask for excuses,' Arithon interrupted mildly. 'What happened?'
    She was blunt. 'You fell off your horse. My Lord Steiven took you up
across his saddlebow.'
    That jogged his recall. Fragments came back to him of Caolle's sarcastic
comment that he should be left in the mud by the trail, that the clans had
outgrown any need for royal sovereignty; of somebody else in drier tones
suggesting he should be lashed to a packhorse like deadwood, that the scars
chafed on his wrists were enough indication that this sort of happenstance
might not be new.
    Dania began to stack up dirtied spoons and bowls to allow him the
chance to let down his odd barrier of silence, maybe broach what had
hounded him out of Etarra in the first place with only clothes fit for
feasting on his back.
    When his stillness became prolonged, she risked a peek and found him
gone, the napkin filled with crumbs abandoned in neat folds upon the rock
where he had been sitting.
    The clouds and the rain had passed and left the air redolent with
evergreen, underlaid by the mustier wet of shed needles. Arithon strolled
the hard-beaten paths of what had once been a long-term campsite. He
should have been unobtrusive in his soft black leathers, under sun-striped
shadows beneath the trees; but he was the only man in a company of older
women, bearing mothers and young children. Busy enough with securing
leather bundles, or sealing wrapped belongings in oaken casks, they
seldom gave more than a glance at his approach. Behind his back, they were
all wont to stare.
    He allowed them, of a mind to make observations himself. Small birds
with gold-banded wings foraged, pecking at the dirt where the lodge tents
had set. They took off in fan-shaped flocks, wove and wheeled, to alight
again just ahead. A small girl told him they were pine-sparrows. Arithon
thanked her, and moved on.
    Like the last, this camp kept no dogs. Infants rode on their mothers'backs;
toddlers too young for chores laughed at their play, but did not stray into the
pinewoods. Half-clad, or wearing leather patched with motley, they tussled
at sticks and ball between mounds of household goods left stranded by the
furled lodges. The casks, the chests lashed in protective layers of oiled
leather, the thick-woven carpets with their bright colours hidden in rolls; all
were tied and stacked in piles, to be carried off to a warren of hidden root-
cellars dug into the woodland floor. The bitter conclusion was inescapable.
The site the clans were leaving was a home of sorts, familiar and often

398


revisited. The place they were going to on account of their prince was bare
and temporary, and necessities would be carried on their backs.
    Arithon fingered the little tin canister purloined from Sethvir's
saddlebags. He had not hesitated to take the tienelle in the heat of his
escape from Etarra; still less did he regret the theft now. Against Lord
Diegan's army, the defenders of Strakewood Forest would be outnumbered
nine to one. That quandary added weight to the ache of total weariness. If
he were to shy from using his talents, directed by every scrap of augury he
could draw from the herb's narcotic visions, the people who sheltered him
must rely upon chance for survival. But in order to smoke the leaves to
sound the future he required absolute privacy. In that he was already thwarted.
    Even if there had been a refuge between the bustle where no one would
disturb or remark on him, the packers were hurrying to complete their
tasks by afternoon. Aware that two boys had sneaked up to dog his steps in
exaggerated imitation of his gait, Arithon regarded the rain-matted
detritus of pine needles that his boots passed across without track. A
thought and a chill ran through him: he might escape by becoming too
visible. At once, with some savagery, he scuffled his heels to foster false
impression of his ignorance, that these folk needed less than a secretive
caution necessary to survival in the wild.
    The contempt the boys copied from their elders, that Rathain's royal
scion was weak, or maybe helpless, was a trait it might suit him to foster,
^rithon thought. The frustration he had leashed behind forced and mild
c~urtesy perhaps was a perverse sort of kindness. Nights and days in the
saddle had worn his body; in spirit, the wrenching realignment that had
taken place in the course of Desh-thiere's curse lay compounded by
reckless overuse of spellcraft. Resisting the creeping and insidious urge to
turn back to Etarra and attack Lysaer claimed further toll upon his
strength. His depleted grip on self-command made mastery of the herb's ill
effects too risky to try until he rested: in the throes of the poison's
withdrawal symptoms Arithon knew he would be lucky to be able to walk.
    Better if these clansmen believed him overbred to the point of useless-
ness. Once they had repulsed Etarra's invasion, his shadows and his aid
would not be needed. Their disdain might drive them finally to release him
fr(~m the blood bonds of Rathain's sovereignty.
    Charged with perverse and bitter humour, Arithon left the canister's
deadly contents for later. He retrod his course through the wheeling pine-
sparrows to Lady Dania, where, seemingly overcome by her distressed
protestations, he allowed himself to be talked out of his earlier insistence
that he help with a share of the packing.

In the course of the next four days, Arithon let slip the stern barriers
imposed by a lifetime of mage training. For his puzzles and his oddments of

399


sleight-of-hand illusion, he won the undying adulation of Dania's daugh-
ters, who had never known a grown man to play games with them. The
clan boys stayed aloof, until he captivated the smallest with a whistle
carved of beechwood and given voice with shaved shims of river reed. After
that, Arithon spent every waking hour the domestic camp was not moving
on the trail seated by someone's fireside, whittling.
    For a morning, their going was made raucous by the young, hooting on
their new toys. They laughed at their daring, to be making noises
unnatural to the wakened wood; but the whistles were confiscated, and
Arithon was chastised by a weatherbeaten woman who would have borne
arms alongside the fighting men, had she not been near-term with a
pregnancy. 'You'll have headhunters on us with your addle-headed ways.
Our boys are needing no such silly influence!'
    Arithon regarded her with green-eyed, languid resignation, and
murmured soft apology. The woman left in disgust.
    'Royal he may be, but what use have the clans for a dreamer!' he heard
her exhorting some others, in a rest-stop farther down the trail.
    He let the comment pass, though heads turned to see whether he had
overheard, and what would be his reaction. He gave them back his closed
eyes, and crossed hands behind his head, to all appearance asleep with his
back against a tree so rough that the bark had turned silver with dried
moss.
    The whistles had drawn no headhunters, because he had set arcane
defences against any outside seeker who should chance to track their
company. The entrapments were subtle, a fooling of the eye to make sight
linger on the flick of a leaf in the breeze, or deflect thought into futile
reflection to read meaning in some willow's gnarled roots.

Dania had to shake him out of trance, when the time came to move on.
    During nights by the fireside, with one or another of Dania's daughters
fallen asleep across his lap, Arithon immersed himself in Halliron's music.
The Masterbard had an exquisite, expressive style upon the strings, and he
did not shy from imparting passionate emotion into his playing. The
lyranthe he carried was ancient and ornate in a sparely elegant way. Her
voice was so like the one that Arithon had been forced to abandon at Etarra
that she, too, might have been crafted by a Paravian maker. Arithon dared
not touch her fretboard to look for Elshian's rune. The feel of polished
wood, of responsive, silver-toned strings, would have overcome his
defences like drugged wine. The hope could hurt too much, that the chance
of reprieve from kingship seemed a scant step closer.
    Those evenings by the fireside, Halliron's ballads wove their mystery as
though just for him. He chuckled at their merriness and let the tears track
unabashed down his face. The whispers this created suited his purpose. By
daylight, while he walked abandoned to reverie down the trail, he replayed

400


 in his mind Halliron's polished arpeggios, his trills of ornamentation, the
 clean, meticulous cadences whose simplicity shaped naked force. At such
 times, when the stares of Deshit clanswomen turned aside in disgust, he
 would draw the eyes of the bard.
     Halliron had depths of subtlety well disguised by his congenial nature.
 Since the oddity intrigued him, that the prince so taken with his music had
 never sought closer acquaintance, he took pains to hide his interest.
    The domestic camp moved by night and rested only after full daybreak.
On the morn they were to reach their destination, the mists of early dawn
ripped and dispersed into tatters, cut by slanted shafts of white sunlight.
The birds were loud at their nesting calls. Like strands of silvered silk
wound through its green forest tapestry, the river Tal Quorin re-emerged
in a bend to flow once again beside the trail. The thin, acid soil of the
heights gave up its black mantle of pines. The fertile trough of the
watershed here lay broken into long, irregular valleys. Winding through
hollows and glens, the river current lisped over glacial deposits of
smoothed granite, and skeined eddies around willow roots like the
knobbled knees of old men. The demise of Desh-thiere had brought
change. Little plants pressed up through moss and pine-needles, and
opened coloured petals for the first time in five centuries untrammelled
by the sooty prints of fungal spores.
    Steiven's daughters clung to Arithon like shadows as together they
enjoyed discovery of each new bud and petal; where the wild flowers
matched those he remembered from Rauven's deep woodland glens, he
gave their names. Where they did not, he knelt, the sun warm across his
back, and shared wonders otherworldly and strange in drifts of dew-
drenched leaf mould.
    His absorption was not so complete that he overlooked the faint, sour
ring of steel that threaded through the trilled cries and fast-beating wings
of disturbed marsh flickers. Halliron's fascination had not stopped at
appearances, for all that the camp women had already dismissed their
prince as a fanciful dreamer. Only the bard remained observant enough to
spot the brief frisson that shocked through the prince's bearing.
    Puzzled, Halliron tossed damp hair from his temples the better to watch
as Arithon straightened up from contemplation. Swift words from him and
the children ranged eagerly ahead to scout their next find on their own.
Arithon hung behind, a shadow in dark leathers under the light-flecked
boughs of a hazel thicket.
    From the crest of an unseen hillside, the axe blows reached ragged
crescendo. The tree bole under punishment gave a juddering crack and fell
to earth in a whipping tangle of greenery that hissed like a rip through
warm air. Arithon recoiled. He turned as if jabbed by sharp pain and his
eyes passed unseeing across the bard, standing not twenty feet behind,
with the forest shade hatching his elegant court velvets that stood out too
plainly to be missed.

401


    Another tree cracked and fell. Exposed full face to an observation he
would have avoided, Arithon paled in the grip of some deep, introspective
discomfort.
    And Halliron caught his breath in comprehension. Acquainted with the
Warden of Althain, befriended by Asandir, he saw into this prince and
recognized like a watermark in fine paper the stamp of a mage-trained
awareness.
    Arithon's interest in trailside wildflowers had been a rose to mask an
tension linked to the deeper mysteries of the forest. Caught as he was in
partial trance, the axe-cut, dying trees sent a scream of pain across his
nerves. An unprepared part of him was bark and leaves and running spring
sap, slashed untimely from its taproot by blows from sharpened steel. The
shock momentarily upset his mastery. He struggled, stumbling slightly, to
tear his stung consciousness free.
    Pushed by reflex before thought, Halliron hastened forward and caught
the prince by an elbow to support his unsteady step.
    The touch caused Arithon to snap stiff. His head came up, around, and in
green eyes the Masterbard caught a flare that looked like smothered anger.
The impression was false. Halliron saw past hostility to what perhaps was
an envy sprung from offence; indisputably the resentment was directed
fully and personally toward him.
    Halliron's startlement caused him to let go, simultaneous with
Arithon's instinctive jerk backward, with the result that sensitive
musician's fingers recorded an instant impression. The forearm under its
covering of water-spoiled silk was wiry and fit, not at all the constitution of
the fine-drawn dandy the prince purported to affect.
    Arithon spun away to hide an expression Halliron would have bribed in
gold to have read. Between the two men lay a silence heavy with secrets,
and as if their burden were at once too much, the prince abruptly sat down.
He fingered the edge of a rock hoarded like some hoary, moss-crusted jewel
between the miserly grip of old roots. 'I'm sorry.' His apology was too quick
and cold. 'I believed I was alone.'
    Halliron absorbed this display with narrowed, tawny eyes. He observed
on intuition, 'You had wards set, and not just to hide the notes of whistles.'
    'If so, that's no business of yours.' Arithon let his knuckles fall loose in
dry grass, left wind-broken from winter's snowfall like the bundled small
bones of dead birds. He had regained control. At least, he no longer shivered
as the axe-falls rang. Only the earth seemed to shudder in vibration as each
quick trunk slammed the ground.
    After a moment, the bard said, 'If you want Deshir's clans to disown you,
desert them.'
    That touched a nerve. Arithon's smile at the barb was full lipped, and
brimmingly, off-puttingly merry. 'Desert me, instead. Your perceptions
feel like a tinker's spilled needles: a punishing trap for false steps.'
 Halliron was not easily irritated. Years of settling vain, even senile

402


 patrons and short-tempered, envious peers had taught him to treat with
 human nature sparely, to unwind misunderstanding like a snarl in fine-
 spun wool. Intrigued by Arithon's reticence, he gave no ground, even as
 Arithon pressed to escape and regain untrammelled access to the trail.
     There was no gap. Halliron had him boxed between a stand of dense
 brush and the seamed, ungiving face of another rock.
     Spoiled as his behaviour suggested, the Teir's'Ffalenn did not have the
 nerve or the anger in him to shoulder an old man aside to have his way.
     'I could ask,' Halliron said in the Shandian drawl that seeped back
 occasionally from his boyhood, 'why, when you first met me, did you react
 as if I were a threat to you?'
     'Because,' Arithon began, and on impulse, switched liquidly to the
 Paravian. 'Cuel ean i murdain ei dath-tol na soaren'; which translated,
 'you are the enemy I never expected to meet'.
     His accent was flawless. And the coiled hardness in him this time would
 not be denied. Halliron moved aside before he was indeed physically
 shoved.
     Undeceived by the show for a moment, the Masterbard watched the
 scion of Rathain's murdered high kings stride away. The man was not
 angry. However desperately he wished to foster that impression, to a bard's
 ear for nuance, it was obvious that Arithon was unbearably distressed.
    Halliron resumed his walk in pensive thought. For some pernicious
'reason he felt guilty for even this slight an intrusion into the
Teir's'Ffalenn's altogether raptly-guarded privacy. If anything left the bard
irked, it was his suspicion that Steiven's daughters were entrusted with an
honesty nobody else in the camp seemed to merit.

The clans of Deshir were altering the landscape in the valleys to either side
of the Tal Quorin's watercourse. The woods rang with the noise of their
feverish haste, of axes and falling timber and the grinding over stones of
makeshift sledges. A party of raiders had stolen draught teams. The chink
of chain and harness fittings blended with drovers' calls. Even Halliron's
pony was pressed into service, hauling hampers of cut brush.
    Upon arrival, the women left tents and belongings still furled in their
packs in a clearing. Every free hand was set to work, while the children and
the elderly were sent out to forage or dress the game sent in by the hunting
parties who ranged the glades further afield. The racket had scattered the
deer, the birds, and even the beavers were driven into hiding by rafts of cut
logs sent downstream.
    Lord Steiven was south, below the white-water rapids where the river
fanned into sheets of open water between grassy green swards of marsh.
There he oversaw the remaking of innocent landscape into traps to mire
tarra's army. Arithon did not join him. Neither did he lend his strength to
the shifting of logs and stones. Conspicuous for his idleness, for even the

403


Masterbard had volunteered to help the cooks, Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn sat
in the shade through the morning, apparently taking a nap. Nobody saw
him move, nor as much as open an eye.
    When the work-crews returned to eat at midday he was still there and
had to be wakened for the meal.
    And yet, he must have stirred. A scout who passed through the
armoury lodge found the tactical maps disturbed. Penned in the margins
of a supply draft in fussy, over-omamented script were concisely drawn
summaries of the weapon and training profile of Etarra's garrison troops,
along with names, numbers and insightful characteristics of most of its
ranking officers.
    Since the prince never mentioned this contribution, the matter became
overshadowed. The contempt of the clan's womenfolk became all the
deeper entrenched by Arithon's current absorption, of drawing puzzles in
the dirt with the toddlers. His laughter tangled with the talk of the men
at the boards and the scrape of knives as they sawed and hammered the
dry waybread into chunks to soften in hot gravy. Veiled looks were cast at
the prince between bites. The younger scouts began to sound bitter, while
the most campaign-scarred grew silent. Steiven was not present to stem
the quietly acid speculation, which Arithon joyously ignored. His mood
stayed isolate, as unshakeable as if he were deaf, or a half-wit.
    Afternoon saw the Teir's'Ffalenn kneeling amid the patchworked shad-
ows of a beechgrove to receive oath of fealty from the fighting scouts of
the clans. The timing of the ceremony had been at Steiven's orders: men
grumbled in dour, closed knots that the roster might have been changed if
their earl had come back from the lower valley in time to hear gossip
from his wife.
    But delayed until the last minute, Steiven arrived still winded from his
hurry to reach the glen. That Strakewood's clansmen had gathered in his
absence, half-stripped and muddy, or sweating in leathers still grimed
from their labours on the defenceworks, was in tribute to the loyalty
given their chieftain rather than respect for the prince about to become
their liege lord.
    Steiven assumed position a half-step to one side of the s'Ffalenn prince.
Except for recovery of Asandir's circlet that was proof of his sanction for
succession, Arithon still wore the black suede tunic and leggings that had
once belonged to Lady Dania's younger brother. As at the earlier cere-
mony in Etarra, Arithon carried no ornament beyond his father's signet.
The smoke-dark blade forged by Paravian mastery was struck upright
into the earth at his elbow, the emerald in the pommel a hard green
sparkle underlying the reflections of the foliage. Already in place on one
knee in the crumbled detritus of last season's fall of copper leaves, he met
no one's interested glance. His attention seemed absorbed more by the
cheep of nesting wrens in the branches than in the greeting murmured by
his regent.

404


     For a moment Lord Steiven knew regret that an occasion as momentous
 as this should be held at short notice in the greenwood. The last such
 ceremony would have taken place in Ithamon, under beautiful vaulted
 ceilings rich with jewelled hangings and banners. Customarily held on a
 prince's twentieth birthday, past events had been preceded and followed by
 grand celebration and feasting.
     $addened by the sombreness of this gathering, and moved to a crush
 of emotion that would barely allow speech, that he had lived for this
 day; that he, of all his exiled ancestors should be the one to stand
 witness to the returned s'Ffalenn scion, Steiven drew breath to renew a
 ritual many thousands of years old. 'I, Teir's'Valerient, appointed Regent
 of the Realm and Warden of Ithamon through my father, and his fathers,
 back to the last crowned sovereign, bring before you Arithon, son of
 ^var, sanctioned heir and direct descendant of Torbrand s'Ffalenn,
 founder of the line appointed by the Fellowship of Seven to rule the
 principalities of Rathain. Let any man who questions the validity of this
 prince's claim now stand forth.'
     Feet shifted, deadened from sound by damp earth. The shrill cry of a
 hawk hung loud in the air.
     Steiven resumed. 'Arithon, Teir's'Ffalenn, turn your back. A prince who
 would accept oath of fealty must trust those he would lead and defend. If
 any among this gathering have earned your ill-will, state their names for all
 to hear, that they may be excluded.'
     Seeming delicate as porcelain before his regent's scarred height,
 Arithon tipped up his face. 'I bear no man grudge.' The words were clear, for
 all that his eyes were barriered. His fingers shook as he gripped and pulled
 ^lithiel's blade from the earth. 'I appoint you my guardian against
 treachery.' His raised knee shifted; he pivoted, and neatly, still kneeling,
 turned his back.
    According to time-worn ritual, Steiven positioned himself at Arithon's
'shoulder, facing the waiting company. 'Let those who would be feal
companions of Arithon, son of Avar, step forward and present a weapon in
pledge of service and defence.'
     The clan chieftain then drew his own sword and ran its point into the
 ground. One by one his scouts and his fighting men, his hunters and his
 women who had no family representative to swear for them, filed forward.
 They passed with bent neck beneath the unsheathed threat of Alithiel
 guarding the royal back and left knives, daggers, poignards or heirloom
 swords in token of their trust. When the last of them had returned to their
 place, Arithon was permitted to turn around.
     But not, even yet, to arise. On his knees, white now as any mayor's
 bleached linen, he bowed his head before that hedge of steel and crossed
 apparently fragile hands over the hilt of the nearest sword.
     Thin and weary as a fox run to earth, he drew breath to renounce
 personal claim to the life he had found in Athera. 'I pledge myself, body,

405


mind and heart to serve Rathain: to guard, to hold unified and to deliver
justice according to Ath's law. If the land knows peace, I preserve her:
war, I defend. Through hardship, famine or plague, I suffer no less than
my sworn companions. In war, peace and strife, I bind myself to the
charter of the land, as given by the Fellowship of Seven, strike me dead
should I fail to uphold for all people the rights stated therein. Dharkaron
witness.'
    'Arise Arithon, Teir's'Ffalenn and Crown Prince this moment of
Rathain.' Steiven stepped back, smiling, as his liege at last gained his feet.
'Ath grant you long life, and sound heirs.'
    Arithon laid hand on the chieftain's huge bastard sword and drew its
weight from the earth. He offered the weapon back to Steiven with his
royal blessing. And one by one, for what seemed like an hour, other
weapons were returned in like fashion, binding their owners to loyal
service. The steel was their oath; the burden of their lives and safety, now
and forever, Arithon's; as he was now theirs, until death.
    The muttering over his weaknesses cut off sharply, as Steiven's barked
orders sent each team back to felling trees and digging pitfalls for the
incomplete defenceworks.
    As the clearing rapidly emptied, Arithon met his Lord Regent's regard.
His green eyes not quite yet rinsed to bleakness, he said, 'My first act will
be the rending of that oath.'
    Steiven's easy humour vanished as he proffered Alithiel to his prince.
'I've heard. The talk doesn't fool me. And you dwell on the matter, your
Grace, like one blind to the lay of the weather. Etarra's hatreds smoulder
hot enough that it takes no spark at all to set them burning.'
    Arithon accepted back the icy weight of Alithiel. The haste under
which he had fled his coronation had kept the blade without a sheath: he
was obliged to slide her bared length through a belt that was nicked and
sliced from such usage, and the force as he rammed the weapon home
roused an angry ring from the steel. 'Lysaer is not fit to be judged by
rational men. He has been cursed, as I have, and feuds or justice have no
bearing on his actions. I would not see your clansmen become the tool
that Etarra's garrison has.'
    He brushed past before Steiven could answer. Without further word to
anyone, Arithon left the clearing in the opposite direction to the camp.
Steiven started after him, but a hand on his forearm caught him back.
'Let him go,' murmured Halliron in that musical gentleness that
could and had stopped killing fights. 'My heart tells me this prince
knows all too clearly what he's about. You cannot shoulder what
troubles him.' A smile revealed the sly gap in front teeth. 'Besides, if
he's touchy as the ballads name his forebears, he'll tolerate no man's
interference.'
    Steiven swore explosively. 'I know that. You know that. But likeness to
his ancestors isn't going to satisfy my clansmen. If this womanish

406


brooding continues, my war captain has vowed he'll strip the royal person
to his short hairs to find out if they hide a castration. By Ath!' the former
regent ended with rare and exasperated fierceness, 'If Caolle tries, it's on
my mind I'm going to let him!'

407


A ttraction

Etarra prepared for war. The clang of the armourers' mallets rang frorr
smithies day and night, counterpointed by the whack and slap of pra~
staves as last year's recruits were drilled to professional polish. Alr
overnight it seemed that every young man of fighting age appeared ir
streets wearing half-armour.
    Not all would be leaving for battle. The highborn elite, those wl
pedigrees traced back without taint to the original burghers who
overthrown the old monarchy, found themselves sidelined in the bt
created by the renegade prince. Their exploits, their mischief and t
profligate gambling debts were no longer the talk of the ladies' park
Arithon's name had supplanted them, and out of fear of his sha&
mistresses and favoured courtesans turned fickle in sudden preferenc
strapping big fellows with less refined manners and swords.
    The parties of the rich and young grew the more frenzied to compen~
From Diegan, Lady Talith heard details: of how the bluest-blooded
brashest had drunk claret until they staggered, and then staged a rac
the alarm tower to see who could be first to swing from the bass b
clapper. The winner had emerged miraculously unscathed. Those
lucky, judged by the nature of their scars, became heroes, or the bu
scathing jokes which was the fashionable way to test their charm.
gallant had twisted an ankle. Another had fallen through a railing
suffered two broken wrists. He appeared in splints at the soirees
bragged that the ladies could kiss him on both cheeks at once, as he la~
a sound hand to fend them off.
    Once, Lady Talith would have sat front and centre to egg on admirers
dae foolish feats to gain her favour. She would have laughed at
cleverest wit and gleaned all the gossip to unravel the fierce tapest~
intrigue that underlay the glitter of Etarran society.

408


    But this night found her separate from the festivities, breathing in the
outdoor airs that perfumes inside the ballroom behind her were selected
with care to overpower. There was nothing attractive by night in damp
stone; starlight, to her, was too uncomfortably new to feel safe. The
laughter, the dancing and the delicate sparkle of light through the pierced
porcelain of a thousand candle-shades should have drawn her back like a
moth to flame. Her gown of costly damask was new, and her jewels simple,
but dazzling.
    But the parties now seemed silly shamming. She resisted the creeping
ennui to no avail and just as fiercely fought to deny its cause; to avoid
setting name to the day, no, the moment, when the wild antics of the men
had become reduced to just games, and empty ones at that.
    Diegan had experienced a similar change. Though brother and sister had
not compared thoughts, his humour had been fiat for days. Where once he
would have battled jealously to retain his circle of admirers, now they were
deserting his side like ebb-tide, with himself the one least dismayed. It felt,
Talith decided, as if somebody had entered her childhood home and
maliciously rearranged all the furniture.
    She could not flee the recognition that her life seemed dreary since
Lysaer s'Ilessid had stepped into it.
    Talith leaned over the balustrade. Never before then had she known
admiration that did not arise from fiamboyance; humour that did not
belittle; power not bought through brutish intrigues or bribes.
    The man's direct nature had cut through Etarra's convoluted greed and
excesses like a sharpened knife through mould rinds.
    A breeze whispered through the garden, loosing a small blizzard of petals
and almost masking the footfalls that approached from across the terrace.
She was annoyed. She had fended off four dandies on her way to the
doorway.
     'Go away.' Cold, disastrously discourteous, she refused to look aside and
so much as acknowledge the identity of the man she dismissed. The footsteps stopped.
    Warm hands reached out and gently gathered the twist of hair that
trailed down the nape of her neck. She stiflened, dismayed to realize she
could not spin and deal a slap for the impertinence. His fingers had
tightened too firmly: like a boat, she was effectively moored.
    'They insisted inside that you had grown tired of the party,' Lysaer
s'Ilessid said in greeting.
    She shivered. Then blushed; and would have slapped him then for his
boldness, that had wrung from her such a reaction. She was unaccustomed
to being played like a fish.
    He let her go. Cool air ruffled through the strands his fingers had parted.
Mulberry blossoms showered in a swirl of white, and eddied in the lee of
the railing.
 Talith stepped around, prepared to use her pretty woman's scorn to drive

4O9

LIBRARY


him off-balance. He deserved as much for his confidence that everywhere
he went he would be welcomed.
    Wonder stopped her cold. Strung in his hands was a chain of lights,
delicate as flame hung on beadwire.
    Lysaer smiled. His eyes sparkled with reflections; his face, struck out
in shadow and soft light, held a beauty to madden a sculptor to fits of
missed inspiration. The pale, fine hair that just brushed his collar was his
sole ornament.
 The effect stopped Talith's breath.
  'Do you want me to leave?' Lysaer teased.
    Pique snapped her out of entrancement. 'You haven't been invited to
stay.' But her glance betrayed her, as she marvelled at the shining string
that quivered and danced between his hands.
 His smile deepened at the comers. 'No jewel can compare.'
    He looked down at the bauble, made it gleam and spit sparks like
stirred embers. 'This cannot compare. It's a poor, flashy phantom. A
worthless illusion sprung from light. But if you insist on hiding in the
darkness, at least if you wear it, you'll be gilded.' He reached up, stepped
closer and with a gesture that brushed the bared skin of her collarbones,
settled his spell around her neck.
    The lights were neither warm nor cold; in fact, their presence against
her flesh raised no tactile sensation at all. That for an oddity made her
ache. As if, like a gem or a pearl, she should feel something tangible from
his gift.
    'Gold suits you,' Lysaer murmured. He watched in quiet pleasure as
she experimented with his handiwork, let it spill like captive fireflies
through her fingers.
    And then, too suddenly, he gave the reason for his coming. 'The army
marches out on the morrow.'
    She looked up, her head tipped provocatively sideways; the necklace of
lights brightened her chin to fine angles. 'Should that trouble me?'
    Lysaer paused, thoughtful. He seemed not offended or set back. 'I don't
think anyone in this city understands the threat in the man we leave to
cut down.'
    'Arithon?' Talith tossed back her mane of hair, about to say, dispara-
ging, that even allied to barbarians the deposed prince could hardly
challenge a fortified city.
    Lysaer stepped to her suddenly and caught her arms below her bared
shoulders. He did not shake her. Neither did he raise his voice to chastise.
His touch stayed soft and the eyes that stared down into hers were wide
open, very blue and anguished only with himself. 'Lady, I fear for your
city, for your safety, for your happiness. And about Arithon s'Ffalenn, I
can make nobody comprehend.'
    'What else is there to know?' She looked back at him, graceful as some
tawny cat assured of its power to captivate.

410


    Lysaer slid his palms down her arms lightly as a breath. He backed away,
set his hands on the balustrade and stared out over the darkened garden. He
was deeply troubled and she realized with a snap of vexation that her allure
had not even touched him. He gave her no chance to retaliate, but said
quickly, 'I grew up in a land that was terrorized by the predations of the
s'Ffalenn. We in Amroth had wealth, good ships, skilled men with quality
weapons to defend us. We should have triumphed easily, for the isle of
Karthan the pirate kings ruled was little more than a sandspit. The people
were poor, with few resources, fewer men. But what they had, they used
with the cleverness of demons.'
    He stilled for a moment. Talith saw that his hands had balled into fists.
Unsure whether his tension might be troublesome to cross, she waited,
patient because his lordly display of dedication was novel enough to
intrigue her.
    Presently, Lysaer spoke again. 'The killing and the grief went back for
generations, through my great-grandfather's time. Both of my uncles were
lured into traps and sent back to us pickled, for burial. Grief left my father
unreasonable, even mad. He lost a wife, before my mother. Two daughters
died with her, who would have been my half-sisters, had I known them. No
one told me they existed until I was twelve, when I forced my father's
seneschal to say why the royal crypt held an unmarked vault.'
    Lysaer took a breath. 'All my life, I remember the campaigns, the fleets
and the generals sent out to eradicate the s'Ffalenn. We accomplished little
for great efforts. We managed to burn villages, poor shanties whose loss
seemed scarcely to hurt. Karthish lookouts would spot the inbound fleets
and warn the people to escape. Men sent ashore to track refugees would
scour the desert to no avail. Sea engagements went as badly. Our ships
were lured into exhaustive chases, wrecked in shoal waters because the
artisans who drew our charts were once fed false information. Ou~ captains
and crews died fighting against lee shores in gales. They died of thirst,
hunger, mutiny and fire because the weapon of the s'Ffalenn was ingenuity
that seemed inexhaustible as the tides. The pirate princes revelled in
feuding. Their trickery never repeated itself and they sailed to no
predictable pattern.'
    Remembered anguish drove Lysaer to straighten from the balustrade.
'These past captains were only men, clever and hungry for bloodshed. The
last of their line, the s'Ffalenn heir bequeathed to Athera, is far more. He
was born to an enchantress, raised to the ways of power. A sorcerer, a
shadow master, his tricks will come barbed in spells.'
    His eyes at last turned and met Talith's, dreadfully deep and revealing.
'Arithon fooled even me, lady. He drew me to believe he was harmless,
then cozened true friendship from me. If not for your brother's apt
questions, if not for the doubts he reawakened, no one might have acted in
time. Arithon might never have stood before Etarra and revealed his true
nature in the square.'

411


    Lysaer ended in harsh and personal discomfort. 'That is what I cannot
teach your people to know and fear.'
     Caught up in fascination exotic enough to make her shiver, Talith said,
'But you are lord over powers of light. You can defend against witchery.'
  'I'm a man,' Lysaer amended. 'Men fail.'
    Uncertainty flawed Talith's entrancement. She had been affected inside,
and surprised by that recognition, she wanted his hands on her. 'You'll
come back. Diegan's army will win that black sorcerer's head.'
    Breeze stirred a drift of mulberry petals between them. They dusted
Talith's cheeks and caught in her hair and on the abalone tips of lacquered
pins. With a gentle hand he brushed them away. 'We can try. We can hope.'
He cupped her face, bent and kissed her with maddening lightness.
    She reached to pull him closer, but the slithering drag of her caped
sleeves warned him in time to draw back. From a safe half-pace away he
smiled at her. 'No. Not now. You'll wait for me, lovely lady. When Arithon
s'Ffalenn is vanquished and your city is safe, I'll return. If your desire for
my presence still endures, we shall build something great between us
then.'
    She swallowed back her annoyance, the more amazed because he did not
mock her frustrated passion as Etarran men might have done. 'What if you
don't come back?'
    His lightness vanished. 'Then you'll be left to find out why Etarra's army
lost. In my memory, you'll use such knowledge to warn your people, so
that Arithon's predations don't catch them unprepared when the time
comes to fight him again.'
    'You can't believe you'll be defeated!' Talith cried, forgetting in distress
to be artful.
    'I can't be so cocky as to think for a second I might not.' He gave a stiff
shrug in apology. 'S'Ffalenn pirates in the past have ruined better men than
me.'
'You're all we have.' Talith corrected herself with passionate sharpness:
'All I have.'
    Inside the ballroom the musicians struck up a merry tune. Past the
opened doubled doors dancers gathered, formed lines and began to tread
the first measures. Their movements seemed meaningless. Mute in her
appeal, Talith saw with a relief that made her tremble that Lysaer would
not, after all, depart without thought for her happiness.
    'One dance.' The s'Ilessid prince laughed gently and gathered her, silk,
pearls and ruffled, layered skirts, as delicately as if she were a blown bit ot
thistledown captured in the circle of his arms.

412



Deduction

Under a breeze from the east, the soured mud of bare tidefiats and the
dyeworks of Narms swept a reeking pall over the town, which consisted
of box-fronted wooden mansions, one storey warehouse sheds, and a
harbour. A craft centre from first to last, the place recognized no
elegance beyond the bustling purpose of commerce.
    Up-coast, where the beautiful yarns spun and dyed in these wind-
raked, ramshackle shops were woven into famed rugs and tapestries,
Cildorn's stone buildings held the deeper mystery of more ancient sites:
a resonance that lingered from Pararian inhabitance still drew the
earth's forces to flow very near to the surface. For the advantage such
powers lent to spellcraft, the Koriani Prime would have preferred to
conduct her errand there. But since the Fellowship's gross misjudgement
over Arithon's failed coronation, Elaira could make Narms with better
speed.
    The building let for Morriel's use was owned by the widow of a
f(~rrner Koriani boy-ward. Since his death, hard times and slatternly
management had caused his dyeworks to fail. Long abandoned to the
whines of stray iyats, the yard stood cluttered with cracked buckets
silted wrist-deep in dead leaves. The shop, crudely shuttered, lay
sandwiched between a brewery and the mudfiats. Storms in winter
sometimes flooded the warehouse. The building smelled now of mould-
ered rags and worm-rotted planking, underlaid by the taint of hops and
fish.
    One lingering fiend had to be chased from the rafters. Then the sole vat
not cursed with slow leaks was dragged inside by Morriel's servant,
wedged level on packed sand flooring, and filled for scrying. A yarn rack
propped up and sumptuously padded with quilts which had been prepared
for the comfort of the Prime, but disdained by the Koriani matriarch.

413


