Hunched under shawls like a crow draggled down by wet plumage, she
waited in the flickering light of the resin torches with a patience her First
Senior could not match.
    Sustained by voracious ambition, Lirenda revelled in being the only one
chosen for active duty. Though it was well past midnight and her fellow
seniors had long since retired, out of pride she would not show weariness
and sit in the presence of her Prime.
    Sharing attendance upon Morriel's needs was the huge half-wit who
stood as her doorguard. Witness to more secrets than any living Koriani
senior, the man sat crosslegged in a corner, drooping in his effort to stay
awake. The streets outside were mostly quiet. Sometimes a late worker
from the brewery strode whistling by. The stillness in between magnified
the hiss of burning resin and the distant beat of combers off Instrell Bay. A
sudden clatter of iron as a horse arrived outside caused the half-wit to
startle up from his doze and hasten to unbar the door.
    Elaira's voice carried in on the gust that swept the threshold as she
dismissed the livery groom who would return her mount to the stable. She
entered a moment later. Hair blown loose from her braid was screwed into
wisps by the seaside humidity and her skin was like chalk with
exhaustion.
    She had ridden a hundred leagues in under three days. Chafed raw at the
knees from leathers stiffened with horse sweat, she made obeisance to the
Koriani mattlatch. The formal words of greeting came courageously steady
from her lips.
    Lirenda watched, avid, as Morriel beckoned Elaira closer. Under
browless hoods of bone, the Prime's deepset eyes did not merely study, but
raked the rider who stepped forward on command.
    Exposed full-figure in flamelight, Elaira withstood the inspection.
Awareness that the sisterhood's arts of observation would take in all, from
the scuffs on her boots left by pebbles kicked in impatience at post stables
too slow to tack her remounts; to the stains on her cloak where a drunk in a
wayside tavern had upset the broth she could not stay to have replenished.
The Prime observed, 'Your journey was trying, I see.'
    Eased by the unexpected kindness, Elaira straightened sore shoulders.
'Not so bad.' In wry humour that Lirenda found particularly grating, she
added, 'if the inns had lice in the bedclothes, at least I escaped finding out.'
    Morriel's lips twitched, perhaps in the ghost of a smile. 'Your spirits are
intact, I can see. When did you last eat?'
    Elaira paused for thought, which gave answer enough in itself. The crone
gestured to her half-wit. 'Quen, go next door to the brewers and buy some
bread and sausage.' To Elaira, in disarming solicitude, she added, 'Do you
wish beer?'
    Not so tired she failed to sense a trap, Elaira shook her head. 'On the
heels of an emergency summons, I think not, thank you. Unless I have
leave to go to bed?'

414


    'You have not.' But the Prime's approval was apparent, that the girl had
kept sharp wits. 'Though you deserve the rest, surely. I'm not unaware that
you had to bid against the trade guilds' couriers, jammed as the livery
stables have been with bearers carrying ill news.'
    Inordinate numbers of state messengers had crowded the roads as well,
but Elaira had been too pressed to hear gossip. 'Worse happened since I left
Etarra?'
    'A great deal.' Fog curled through the door as Quen slipped back in with a
steaming parcel. As the torches hissed and spat in the damp, Morriel
motioned toward the vat. 'Bring your meal while you study the water. I
would see you brought current with events, that you understand the
importance of the demands you've been called to attend.'
    To thank Quen for any service was to invite an embarrassment of
obsequious gratitude. Elaira patted his rough hand and took the food, half-
braced in pity in case his fawning should displease the Prime. But Quen
only ducked his head in pathetic ecstasy for her kindness, then retired back
to his corner.
    Elaira unwrapped greasy coils of sausage and trailed after her mistress
toward the vat.
    Lirenda knew bitterness that the order's most incorrigible junior initiate
should be casually stuffing her mouth, while beside her, Morriel Prime
prepared to admit her to the highest level of Koriani affairs, and for no
better cause than a disobedient escapade with a man.
    With no thought spared for Lirenda's disaffection, Morriel hitched up
one hip and with a drag of thick woollens, perched on the rim of the vat.
Graced by a balance at odds with her years, she hooked the crystal that
hung on fine chains at her neck and informed Elaira, 'The images you will
observe reflect events that occurred today.'
    Morriel dangled her jewel above the ruffled water, then completed a pass
that engaged spellcraft. Elaira leaned over a surface bound into mirror-
smoothness, while the vision induced by the Prime's clairvoyance overlaid
the madder-stained depths...

Morning sun tinted the square brick turrets of Etarra's watch-keeps and
struck shafts through the dust billowed up by the garrison that tramped
outbound from the northwestern gate. Its columns were narrowed by the
flanks of the Mathorn pass, and rank after rank of raised pikes and lances
gridded the pale, hazed sky. Windowed in water, men marched like toy
figurines given life, the gold and red banners of the city guard cracking in
the breeze like snipped cloth.

'Fatemaster's mercy,' Elaira murmured, her sausage cooling in fingers that
felt sapped of nerves. 'There's to be war, then?'
 For reply, Morriel shifted vantage to display Etarra's host in its entirety.

415


Ten thousand strong, spearheaded by caparisoned rows of mounted lancers
and trailed by the light cavalry under the standard of the headhunter's
league, the army advanced down switched-back roads like a serpent roused
hungry from its lair. Crowds packed the city ramparts to cheer, foremost
among them a tawny-haired woman in a glitter of gold-netted silk. Heralds
raised trumpets emblazoned with tassels and silent fanfare sounded for the
smiling, bejewelled figure of Lysaer s'Ilessid, mounted on his chestnut
horse, and flanked by Lord Diegan and Etarra's field general, the grim-
faced, leonine Gnudsog.

Shocked beyond thought for protocol, Elaira accosted her supreme
superior. 'Lysaer has raised Etarra? Daelion forfend, whatever for?'
    A gust hissed through the gapped warehouse, sour with the reek of dried
seaweed. Lirenda braced in expectation of immediate displeasure from the
Prime, but Morriel simply sighed and tugged with thin hands to rearrange
the burden of her shawls. The image in the dye-vat dispersed. Drily, the
crone said, 'I believe this next image should tell you.'
 She effected a second pass.

The water's glassine surface now showed the mild haze of a mid-spring
afternoon. Shadows pocked the stubble of a stripped hillside. Brown and
unobtrusive against mats of hacked bark and wilted greenery, a band of
barbarian scouts left the timber they had cut and packed in six foot
lengths onto sledges. They gathered presently in a clearing, where the
only man among them not dirtied from labour waited on his knees before
the blade of his own drawn sword. A start in her nerves from recognition,
Elaira beheld Arithon s'Ffalenn. Beside him, stiff-backed and vexed, stood
the rangy frame of the most powerful barbarian in the north: Steiven
s'Valerient, Caithdein of Ithamon and high chieftain of the clans of
Deshir.

'But this makes no sense.' Elaira abandoned her half-eaten meal in its folds
of steam-soggy paper. Just one breath away from a thunderous headache,
she raised hands to rub at her temples. 'The clans in Strakewood are no
match for the might of Etarra.'
    'They believe otherwise.' Morriel removed her jewel. The spell that
fuelled her clairvoyance snapped, and woodlands vanished, leaving waters
that flashed and puckered over a blood-dark silt of old dyes. 'Three valleys
along Tal Quorin's banks have been riddied with deadfalls to that end. War
is in the offing. The princes so fondly received by the Fellowship are
themselves at the root and cause.'

416


f    ~

    'No.' Elaira raised her chin in sick protest. 'The Seven wouldn't--' She
stopped, fought down dread for a slip that could betray her past trust with
Asandir. 'The sorcerers must surely intervene if their princes are caught at
the heart of this.'
    'Ah,' said Morriel, her flash of discovery well hidden, though across the
warehouse, Lirenda looked vindicated. 'But the sorcerers have all fled
Etarra. Like rats off a foundering ship, they abandoned their post of
responsibility   on the instant Desh-thiere's curse claimed the
half-brothers.'
Morriel paused. Acute, colourless eyes flicked aside to encompass
Elaira's strained face. 'Your friend Asandir made a mis-step.'
    The implication of collaborative association with a Fellowship sorcerer
went unnoticed before the disclaimer that stormed Elaira's thoughts: that
the power she had encountered in the loft of Enithen Tuer's was no likely
candidate for mistakes. If the Fellowship of Seven had withdrawn, they
must surely have done so deliberately.
    Morriel's eyes held her gaze like a snake's. Exposed to the Prime's sharp
dispassion, that would see past nuance and draw out frightful truths,
Elaira fought down raw nerves and dread. Too late, with both hands
locked in fear to the cold stone edge of the dye vat, she waited to be
denounced for far worse offence than a silly romantic entanglement.
    'Oh, yes, the truth behind your illicit visit to the Four Ravens Tavern
last autumn is known to us.' The Prime tucked her focus stone in her lap
with a clicking of hooked yellow fingernails. 'However, we deem your
visit to Asandir too petty for pursuit in light of the present crisis. Since
the actions of s'Ffalenn and s'Ilessid have brought Rathain's factions to
arms, a .character scan must be made of both princes. Our sisterhood
must know how five centuries of exile have altered the Fellowship's royal
lines.'
    The blow so long suspected fell at last as Morriel gathered her skirts and
stood erect. 'You have been summoned here, Elaira, as the only initiate we
have who has been in close enough contact with the royal heirs to
undertake the attempt.'
    Stunned as if her guts had come unhinged, Elaira thrust off from the dye-
vat. The Koriani order owned her, flesh and mind, but this demand
threatened to annihilate her. Perfect, unbiased recall, down to the smallest
detail of the princes' features, dress, and bearing, was required of her; or
Morriel's scrying would be useless, her delicate chains of deductions
fiddled with deadends and errors. Though every Koriani initiate had been
exactingly trained for clear recall, reproducing images for character scan
was a task given only to the most time-proven, gifted Seniors. The perils
involved were no secret. The ritual unleashed emotion, could and had
linked participants to depths of insight that a bond of sympathy with the
subject under study became near impossible to deny. As if poised on the
rim of a pit that beckoned her spirit to damnation, Elaira fought black

417


 despair. If this was the Prime Circle's test to determine wl~ether she had
 excised her attraction for Arithon s'Ffalenn, it was too much, far too
 cruelly soon.
    Wind wailed through the boarded windows; over the white noise of
breakers, a gull flew calling through the dark. Elaira shuddered, unnerved
by Morriel's regard still pinned on her.
    To protest a direct order from the Prime was to beg instantaneous
destruction. Hollow with dread, and hounded by Lirenda's antagonistic
wish to see her crumble, Elaira bowed to Morriel Prime. 'Your will.'
    The matriarch of the sisterhood said no more as she raised her crystal
spinning on its chains and rehooked the clasp at her neck. She snapped
bird-boned fingers for Quen, who hastened forward and offered Elaira a
small stone pipe and a sealed tin that held tobacco steeped in water mildly
infused with a tienelle extract. Less potent than the uncut, dried leaves,
the mixture used by junior initiates was still toxic enough to cause
multiple unpleasant side-effects.
    Elaira exchanged the items for her mangled chunk of sausage, and this
time found no thanks for the half-wit.
    Morriel said, not unkindly, 'Make yourself ready as you can. Do not
rush. When you have achieved a trance heightened by the drug, we shall
begin.'
    Minutes later, as the lighted fumes from the pipe curled through the
mildew-dank warehouse, Quen slept curled like a dog by the doorway.
Equally oblivious, though deadly pale, Elaira sat crosslegged, her eyes
closed and her back propped straight against the dye-vat. Her strength of
self-discipline could not be faulted as she laid the pipe aside and drew the
slow, measured breaths that indicated full surrender to the broadening,
glass-sharp awareness induced by the poisons in the herb smoke.
    Across a gloom deepened by the embered stubs of the torches, Lirenda
stirred. 'You were easy on her.'
    Morriel sighed. Fragile under crushing layers of shawls, she crossed the
floor and sank into the quilts her servant had prepared for her. 'You think
so?' The voice so precisely edged but a moment before now sounded
querulous and tired.
 Belatedly, Lirenda stirred to attend her Prime's comfort.
    Yet as she reached to assist with the blankets, Morriel fended her away.
'You pay no mind to your heart, First Senior. That is a most wasteful
fault.'
    Taken aback, Lirenda was forced to reconsider. 'Then Elaira is to think
she's forgiven for falling prey to distractions of the flesh, not to mention
the further possibility she has abetted the despoiler, Asandir?'
    Morriel clasped skeletal fingers. Her eyes as she looked up were empty,
like fog or featureless rain. 'Elaira played a girl's prank that placed her most
woefully in a bad place at the wrong time. She is intelligent, and gifted with
an insight that runs rare and true. Which strengths caused her to see the

418


s'Ffalenn heir through to his depths and let him touch her. I venture to
suggest that her reasons for attraction are real, and dauntingly powerful to
any mind born female. That is why you alone were called to witness the
scrying that shall take place tonight. I would shield our other Seniors from
exposure to fearful temptation. There is warning for you in this. Heed the
risk.'
    'You do feel sorry for Elaira,' Lirenda observed, thrilled by discovery that
Morriel had any softness left for sentiment.
  The Prime denied nothing. 'I pity the fact I have ruined her.'
    Lirenda would not believe this. Planks creaked as she crossed a fallen
trestle to brighten a fresh set of torches. 'Nobody asked Elaira to create that
scene in the taproom, or to seek Asandir out beforehand. The silly girl
ruined herself.'
    'No. She would have recovered from the mistake. Had done so quite
admirably, in fact, until I sent her afterwards to Etarra.' Hard to her core
now, and misliking the strengthened light which inked shadows in every
seam of her face, Morriel drew a short breath. 'You will learn from this,
First Senior, if you covet position as my successor. Elaira is a valuable tool,
a window into Arithon's character we're going to need sorely if we wish to
track the conflict the Fellowship has set loose upon the continent. We
must tenderly encourage that girl to keep discipline. She is dedicated. With
judicious handling, her botched insight will prove useful for a very long
time before she breaks. For as you guessed, if our order's training had held,
she should have rejected the curiosity that prompted her foray into Erdane.
Elaira is a flawed instrument. But she will serve as no other can, until the
day comes when she is driven to forsake her vows. Let her own shortfalls,
and not your vindictive perfectionism, be the quality that throws her to
destruction.'
    The Prime closed her eyes to snatch an interval to meditate, indication
enough that she had spent her reserves on talk. Lirenda as ever was wily
enough to respect the line that was drawn; too wily, the aged Prime
sometimes thought. Like many another former mattlatch, she wished the
last trial of initiation for the Koriani seat of Prime Power was not fatal to
most every aspirant.
    Lirenda was the forty-third hopeful selected to attempt the succession.
Morriel battled to separate her consciousness from the ache of her brittle
bones. She feared afresh to become the first to break the chain of
command: to become the Prime that death would overtake before an heir
survived to finish training.
    Old she was, and bitterly tired. Morriel snatched what solace she could
from the disciplines of her office. What Lirenda did through the minutes
that passed held no concern. Years since, the Prime had ceased to invest
interest in the particulars of any one candidate. The woman who
succeeded - that one only she could love. Since the death of the first, the
rest had been nothing but ciphers.

419


    Informed at length by the scent of charred herbs that the pipe had been
fully smoked, Morriel stirred. On the moment the narcotic peaked Elaira's
powers of recall, she shed piled blankets and arose. Lirenda had already
stationed herself over the dye vat, her rapt expression clear enough
indication that an image already lay in view. Careful of joints over-worn
from centuries of unnatural lifespan, the Prime Enchantress crossed the
warehouse to share what the waters would show.
    'A throwback,' Lirenda murmured, as the matriarch drew abreast. 'He
could almost be Torbrand's double.'
    Humbled by Elaira's courage, which had dared display Arithon
first, Morriel said nothing. Then she looked, and her heart would not
allow speech past the stunningly expressive detail in the image in the
vat.
    The chosen moment was one that Elaira had stolen; when the man had
foolishly supposed no observer with higher interests would be present. He
crouched in a filthy alley, attended by those who least cared for power, and
sorceries, and bloody contentions between factions. Surrounded by a
tattered pack of children, Arithon bent in the act of setting a brigantine
fashioned of shadows to capture the breeze in full sails.
    Elaira had caught him glancing up to see his illusion under way. His face
held untrammelled peace. A laugh of delight and satisfaction lightened the
corners of his mouth. His eyes were unshadowed and the sharp-angled
features of s'Ffalenn inheritance had fieetingly softened to expose, in vivid
clarity, the depths of generosity and caring that buttressed his musician's
sensitivity.
    The effect was spirit stripped naked. The accuracy of Elaira's recreation
gave the lie to every sharp edge, every cutting word, every difficult and
cross-grained reaction that Arithon had ever employed to defend this, his
vulnerable inner heart.
    'Daelion Fatemaster,' Morriel gasped. 'The girl's unmasked him for us,
wholly. I never believed it could be done.'
    Totally absorbed by the image, Lirenda never noticed that her nails had
broken under the force of her tightened grip on the scaled stone. 'He can be
brought down, though. The killing will unman him, finally, for s'Ffalenn
conscience must force him over time to back down.'
    Morriel gave the image long study, her head cocked in unexpectedly
grandmotherly fascination. 'Look again,' she urged. 'War will not be what
stops this prince.' When Lirenda made no response, she added, 'My point is
subtle. But plain to be read, if you study his hands before his eyes.'
    Obedient, Lirenda regarded Arithon's fingers, which were slim and
quick, and in this frozen moment of Elaira's recall, graceful in completion
of a difficult spell. The green eyes were deep, not dangerous. 'I fail to find
further conclusion,' the First Senior said with reluctance.
    Morriel's cackling laugh echoed through the ramshackle warehouse.
'But he is not clever! Not when he's truly honest. That means the deceit

420


Arithon so readily displays when provoked is not rooted in venal
ingenuity. No. Sadly not. What drives this prince's wit is not craftiness,
but the gift of true farsight imbued in the s'Ahelas royal line.'
    Lirenda considered this, while outside, something that crashed in an
alley disturbed a cat from a cranny with a yowl. Roused back to herself by
distraction, Morriel reached out and tapped Elaira's hand. 'Show us the
half-brother, now.'
    The image of Arithon slipped away, replaced momentarily by another.
Now the s'Ilessid prince stood in the fog of a pre-dawn garden, half-lit by a
shaft of lamplight that escaped through the gate from the street. He
leaned against the pedestal of a statue, his lashes and cloak beaded with
damp that sparked as he breathed like fine diamonds. The water was the
only iewel on him: for once, his clothing held no artifice. Even his hair lay
unbrushed. Although in public Lysaer maintained the flawless manners
of diplomacy, here, alone, his lordly fine looks lay hagridden by doubt as
he wrestled some inward dilemma his conscience could not resolve. The
pain on his face, in the bearing of his shoulders and the lamp-gilded
knuckles of clenched hands, was unanswerably intense. Elaira's observ-
ance had peeled back all poise to expose him in a moment of soul-rending
self-distaste.
 'Oh, Elaira, well done!' murmured Morriel.
    At her side, honed to heightened sensitivity by the fumes that trailed from
the pipe bowl, Lirenda felt her being struck and jangled by that chord of
conflicted emotions. She not only saw, but felt how s'Ilessid justice warred
with the s'Ahelas farsight inherited from the distaff side of Lysaer's
pedigree.
    His mouth in this captured instant held none of the tenderness that
adoring women back in Amroth had experienced while plying him for
kisses. Unyielding as tempered wire lay calculation threaded through by
royal upbringing, and the machinations of Desh-thiere's latent wraith. The
result charged the nerves to disquiet; as if for one heartbeat pity were
absent, and mercy an omitted concept.
    'We have seen what we must,' the Prime announced abruptly. To Elaira
she added, 'You're permitted to relax from your trance.'
    As the image dissolved, Lirenda looked up, sparked by unsated excite-
ment. 'Misfortunate luck. Both princes have inherited the gifts of two
royal houses.'
    Discoretired at last by trepidation, Morriel tucked her arms beneath her
shawls. 'Unlucky and perilous. Arithon's is an incompatible legacy. His
mind is fatally flawed. The Fellowship should never have sanctioned his
right of succession, for suffering shall dog his path as surely as seasons must
turn.'
    Elaira shuddered in transition back to consciousness, opened her eyes,
and whirely fought the first twinge of tienelle withdrawal. 'My Prime, you
mistake him,' she said shakily.

421


    Amazed she should dare contradiction, Lirenda shot swift glance at the
Prime.
 But Morriel showed no offence for the impertinence.
    Given this tacit liberty, Elaira insisted, 'Lysaer's the one who bears
watching. Ath's mercy, I've met him. He's a living inspiration, the flesh
and blood example of human kindness. The masses must flock to his
standard, for his cause shall be presented in passionate and upright
idealism. Then indeed there will be upheaval and suffering, since bias
toward noble principles offers a weapon already fashioned for a ruler of his
trained talents. All Prince Lysaer need do is pose in that mould, and set by
Desh-thiere's curse to turn his gifts toward bloodshed, he has no other
course.'
    'That's a predictable cycle,' Lirenda interjected, annoyed beyond re-
straint by the Prime's unfathomable licence. 'We know where Lysaer will
turn, and what will be the result. What can be anticipated can also be
controlled or prevented. Arithon owns no such stability.'
    Frustrated by narcotically enhanced perceptions, Elaira cried protest.
'But Arithon is a man devoted to harmony, a musician with a seer's
perception. He's conscious of his actions as Lysaer can never be!'
    'Which is precisely what makes him dangerous, Elaira,' Morriel
corrected sadly. 'For Lysaer's sense of justice and farsight will answer to
logic, and therefore be reconciled by compromise. But since when can
compassion ever be made to condone pain? S'Ahelas blood gives Arithon
full grasp of cause and effect; mage-training compounds this with
awareness of the forward reactions of power. These traits aligned against
the s'Ffalenn gift of sympathetic empathy cancels the mind's self-
defences. The shelter of petty hatred becomes untenable. Arithon is a
visionary placed at a nexus of responsibility. Desh-thiere's curse will
embroil him in violence he can neither escape nor master. Stress will
prove his undoing, for the sensitivities of poets have ever been frail, and
the broadened span of his thinking shall but inflame and haunt him to
madness.'
    'You're mistaken,' Elaira insisted, recalling the whiplash resilience
the living man had possessed. 'Ath be my witness, the conclusion
you've drawn from this is wrong.'
    'Time will tell.' Morriel motioned dismissal. 'You are excused to rest.
The widow will have a bed waiting, and a basin to wash. Remember to
drink enough water, lest you take harm from the tienelle poisons.'
    The traditional response all but caught in Elaira's throat. 'Your will.'
She dragged herself to her feet, managed a graceless curtsey, and before
the cramping that marked the aftermath of tienelle usage tore her
composure to shreds, contrived to walk out of the warehouse.
    Outside, wrapped in darkness with the dank winds cooling her sweaty
face and her back to the mildewed sill of a craft shanty, the tears came.
 Elaira could not cast off the ripping, unhappy remorse, that in keeping

422


loyalty to her order, she had effected a betrayal much deeper. Her every
intent had just misfired, to expose a man's private self, that his hidden
pregnabilities should win him the protection of Koriani sympathy. Yet
understanding had turned awry in her hands. Elaira ached with recognition
that she had only succeeded in granting a weapon to an enemy.

423


Daybreak

In a widow's attic bedchamber, First Senior Lirenda wakens once again~
restlessly entangled in her bedclothes; and the dream that spoils her sleep
is the same, of a man's green eyes imbued with a compassion deep enougl~
to leave her weeping and desolate in the icy chill before dawn...

As fog curls silver through the marshes flanking Tal Quorin, Deshir's
clansmen break fast on dry journey-biscuit and take up their shovels and
axes; and although they speak little on the fact their crown prince has been
absent since his oathtaking ceremony the previous afternoon, Steiven's
son Jieret overhears enough to become intrigued over Arithon's where-
abouts,..

In the chimney-warmed garret of a north-kingdom hostel, a caravan-
master nurses a flagon of spirits; between gulps and recriminations, he
cannot fathom what possessed him to give over the horse-thief's jewelled
pin to that dreamy-eyed greybeard in maroon who had met him in the alley
and simply asked for the gift, as if acorn-sized emeralds were proper t0
claim as charity from an absolute stranger...

424


,,ain,
leep
ugh

~r~s
nd
 en

XVI. AUG UR Y

In a place of his own choosing, well removed from the activities of the
clans, Arithon disengaged mage-trained senses from the webs of subli-
minal energy that delineated the surrounding forest. Gently the awareness
bled from him, of living leaves and dappling sunlight; of roots rejuvenated
by the Mistwraith's defeat groping warmed soil in new growth; and of birds
that flicked in bursts through the branches as they gathered small twigs for
their nesting. His touch upon the land's pulse had been thorough but light;
even the secretive night-lynx had not been disturbed where she slept
denned up with her young. Arithon opened his eyes at last to the fluting
calls of thrushes and the light-shafted haze of midmorning.
    Absent since his oathtaking the previous afternoon, Rathain's new
crown-prince laced his fingers and stretched kinks from his shoulders and
back. Worry he would have masked before others sat all too plain on his
face.
    Deep trance had absorbed him for twelve unbroken hours, a necessary
interval to ensure that this small, streamside glen would stay isolated
enough for the arduous scrying that lay ahead of him. Game deer within his
proximity browsed untroubled by hunters, the paths they tracked never
trodden by clan children sent out to forage for herbs and firewood.
    Muscles released from the demand of perfect stillness cramped as
Arithon arose. The gimp in his movement dismayed him, forced a
reckoning for a self-discipline sadly slackened since his apprenticeship at
Rauven. No small bit wrung by trepidation, he knelt. Alone beside one of
the Tal Quorin basin's many streamlets, that bent in dark courses through
towering oaks and tangled thickets of witch hazel, he dipped his hands and
drank.
    Icy water hit his empty stomach and shot a quiver through him. While
he rested on his heels for an interval to allow his body to settle, a half-smile

425


tugged at his mouth. His unexplained night in the open had hopefully
confirmed the feckless character he had fostered among Deshir's clans-
men. Let them think he went off to mope. Unless he shied clear of Lady
Dania's sharp perception and Halliron Masterbard's meddlesome curi-
osity, he could never have fasted to purge his system without becoming
embroiled in a Sithaer-bent mess of unwanted inquiries. No frivolous
excuse could mask the unbending requirements of spellcraft. Let the clans
suspect he was mage-trained and every deception he had played to win his
freedom would be irremediably spoiled. Concealed in place and purpose,
Arithon engaged his mastery and methodically centred his will.
    If the clans of the north were determined to stand to war against Etarra's
army, his oath to Rathain bound him to make sure that no man's life be
needlessly endangered. Given means to tap prescient scrying through
Rauven's teaching and the tienelle filched from Sethvir, Arithon took out
the stolen canister. Fearfully aware of risk to himself, he unwrapped the
stone pipe inside and packed the bowl with silvery, notched leaves that
sheared the forest air with their pungence.
    Narcotically expanded senses might sound whether Caolle's battle
strategies would deflect Lysaer's assault, but the perils could not be
ignored. Until the drug's influence faded, the scryer's awareness would be
hyper-sensitized, every nerve left unshielded before the risk of chance-met
interference. This was not Rauven or Althain Tower, ringed around with
defences and intricate wardspells to protect the unshuttered mind. And
Arithon had cast away the second safeguard instilled by his grandfather's
tutelage: that trance under influence of tienelle never be attempted while
alone. If he lost his iron self-command, if his concentration became shaken
by the maze of drug-induced visions, no one stood by to realign his frayed
concentration.
    Arithon smoothed a last leaflet into the pipe and rammed it firm. More
than his personal hope of happiness held him adamant. Events might have
cornered him against an inborn compassion he could not shed, but the
deeper danger still stalked him. He could not evade the certainty that his
oath to Deshir was a fragile thing before the curse Desh-thiere's wraith had
left embedded and coiled through his being. The endangerment to
Rathain's feal vassals must be shouldered, while every minute the
temptation to take and twist clan trust into a weapon to bring down Lysaer
ate like a darkness at his heart. Only a mage's sensitivity allowed Arithon
to separate that poisoned urge from active will; and the passage of days
wore him down with the draining, constant effort such distinction took to
maintain. Until he won free of royal obligation, and could dissociate
himself from any claim to sovereignty, the double-edged burden would
continue to chafe at his control.
    No cause must jeopardize the image of weakness so painstakingly
fostered among the clans. Though Halliron had breached that pretence, the
Masterbard was one that Rathain's new crown-prince least wished to

426


admit into confidence. The wild need to seize upon false escape, to accept
companionship and release through musical indulgence, could too easily
lure him into misstep.
    Finished preparing the pipe, Arithon arose. He braced his back against a
massive old oak and took a full breath, clean-scented with growing
greenery and the sharper pungence of evergreens. He invited the peace of
the forest to calm him. Absorbed by the lisp of current over moss-capped
rocks, and calls of chipmunks in a fallen log, he stilled his clamour of self-
doubt and drew on his mastery to create a spark.
    The herb in the pipe-bowl ignited. Silver-blue smoke trailed and twined
like ghost-spells on the breeze. Touched to a frisson of apprehension by the
sting of acrid fumes, Arithon collected his will. He set the pipe stem to his
lips and drew poisoned smoke deep into his lungs.
    Vertigo upended his physical senses. Well-prepared, he pressed against
the tree and let live wood reaffirm his balance. The kick as the drug fired
his nerves was harder by far to absorb and master. He gasped in near pain at
the explosive unreeling of his innermind as sights, smells, and sensations
launched him through a spiralling hyperbole.
    He was immediately grateful he had seen through the precaution of
fasting. The plants Sethvir had dried at Althain were fiercely potent and
pure.
    The trickle of the stream by Arithon's feet became an avalanche of sound
in his ears; the squall of a jay, a torment that flicked his hearing like a whip.
Battered to the verge of bewilderment, he clenched his right hand, let the
dig of his nails in half-healed burns anchor his scattered concentration.
The instant he had firm control, he cast his mind ahead into the many-
branching avenues of possible happenstance.
    Reeling holocaust met him. Fire and smoke swallowed all, while the
higher-pitched vibration of dying trees screamed across his lacerated
senses. Arithon cried out in forced empathy. Through a wilderness of
chaotic sensation he groped, and finally separated the cause: Lysaer's
army, waiting until the tinder-dry days of midsummer, then firing
$trakewood, that the windcaught blaze drive the clans out of cover to be
rounded up and slaughtered. Vistas followed, of razed timber and dead
men, blackened with ash and feeding flies. Clan children marched in
ragged coffies, then died one by one in a public display that packed Etarra's
square with vicious, screaming onlookers. Arithon's stomach wrenched at
the smell of the executioner's excitement, charged and whelmed to a
sickness of ecstasy by rivers of new-spilled blood.
    The Master of Shadow bit back horror and physical distress, and in
forced effort as difficult as anything he had undertaken throughout
training, transmuted revulsion to the icy detachment necessary to
reimpose control. The hideous sequence arrested, only to slip his grasp
again as sensitized perceptions careened off on a tangent.
 He saw a hillside strewn with corpses; banners fallen and snarled by the

427


 trampling passage of horses; and beyond these a clearing that held
 townsmen who were also Rathain's subjects, hideously disembowelled
 and hung by their ankles from game hooks.
     'No!' Arithon ground the heels of his hands in his eyesockets, then
 ripped in a shuddering, clean breath of air. Whirled by a firestorm of
 prescience, he grappled to recover mental balance, to reach past the reeling
 crush of nightmare for the single thread dictated by Caolle's prudently laid
 strategy.
  Control escaped him.
    Harrowed by atrocities that deluged his mind in shockwaves, Arithon
bent double in dry heaves. Gagged by the taste of bile, he sucked in another
fast breath. Sweat poured off him in runnels. His sensitized flesh recorded
the slide and fall of each salty drop. Another breath, this one deeper; his
mind cleared fractionally. He managed to pry his consciousness away from
the herb-induced barrage of far sight. He had been right to fear! One wrong
choice, one misplaced scout or mistimed attack, and all he had envisioned
might result.
    Arithon tightened his hold on concentration, then locked onto the
sequence he desired. His hand trembled as he shallowly drew on the pipe.
Prepared this time for raw carnage, he traced through the spinning nexus of
possibilities that deluged his innermind, to follow the single one that
mattered.
    Caolle planned to lure Etarra's thousands up the Tal Quorin's creekbed.
Upstream, where the river shoaled and fanned out into reedbeds and
swamp, the tight phalanxes of townsmen would be compelled to split their
ranks. The terrain as they progressed would divide them further, until two
rising, parallel ridges parted the garrison three ways. As battle became
joined with the clan scouts, Arithon reviewed the unfolding engagement
with deliberate slowness, while tienellednfiamed awareness touched off
in outbranching visions the thousands of alternate outcomes each action
in due course might take. Natural and man-made barriers would success-
fully disadvantage two of Etarra's split divisions. Archers placed in earth-
bank embrasures Caolle hoped would disable the third.
    Arithon paused to resteady himself. The bowmen would not be enough,
he saw, as prescience swooped and spun to frame a grim chain of disasters.
Etarra's guardsmen slaughtered clan scouts like meat behind over-run
embankments until the screams of dying men gave way to the croak of
sated crows, all because the left flank of Etarra's army would be
commanded by a man whose lifetime obsession had been the study of
barbarian tactics.
    The butcher had grizzled grey hair and hands that were narrow and
expressive. The face with its pocking of scars and out-thrust jaw was that
of Pesquil, Mayor of Etarra's League of Headhunters. His were the orders
that sent city officers upslope like terriers to secure the ridge-tops. Etarra's
west division of pikemen would split two ways, then weaken the cohesion

428


held
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of barbarian resistance by storming both ends of the ridge. Then the light
horse cohort dispatched single file through a ravine to the east would circle
back and eventually bottle the valley from the north. They would crush
the barbarian right flank and rejoin Gnudsog's troops in time to effect
rescue of the main columns bogged in the Tal Quorin marshes.
    Faint and sick, Arithon watched the Deshans left alive at that juncture
become herded into slaughter to a man.
    Attempts to forestall their fate by assassinating Pesquil saw three scouts
dead under torture. Whether fated by luck or by Daelion, the man would
remain in command on the morning that battle commenced.
    Sad recognition followed, that even the gravest misuse of shadow
mastery and sorcery could not clinch a fourth effort. Pesquil's Etarran
paranoia made him carry a talisman, an artifact passed down since the
rebellion that would ward against mischance by magic.
    Arithon wept then, for sure knowledge: that his hope and his preferred
future were forfeit. Left to their own resource, the clans were destined for
min. Whether he left them outright, or played through his charade of weak
prince and carried his sword at Steiven's shoulder made no difference. Did
he fight as a man, and not a sorcerer, his own corpse would be part of the
carnage.
    He yanked himself clear to escape a second reliving of the aftermath and
the children's executions in Etarra.
    Shivering, wrung by a storm of guilt and grief, Arithon rallied wits
enough to realize his pipe-bowl held only ashes. Though his body ached for
reprieve, he could not let go yet.
    The sweat on his lips mingled with a dampness salty enough to be tears,
as he forced unsteady hands to move and function. He pried the lid back off
the canister, repacked the pipe, then sucked in a redoubled dose of the herb
to use trance to sound an alternative.
    Back to the initial deployment, he reran the sequence of Caolle's battle
plan. Only this time, before Pesquil's cat-cunning strategies could unravel
clan defences, Arithon added pertinent contributions of his own. Inspired
to terrible invention by the breadth of tienelle awareness, he gave his
whole mind, bent the talents his grandfather had nurtured to full-scale
killing. Wrought of magecraft, and shadow mastery, and devious cunning,
he tested strategies that brooked no conscience. He toyed with the visions,
slanted and skewed them to tens and thousands of variations. He weighed
and recombined results; counted the dead and the wounded with a will
locked hard against any acknowledgement of suffering. To feel, to think at
all, was to lose the mind to sorrow. Dogged, driven half mad by his
oathtaken weight of responsibility, he inhaled more tienelle and threshed
through each chain of happenstance in exhaustive review for blind errors.
    By the end, spent to a weariness that soaked in dull pain to his bones, he
had garnered a handful of tactics that might yield the lowest toll of lives.
His work would hold only if no unforeseen circumstance arose to upset his

429


tested effect patterns; if against odds he had managed to circumvent all
possible avenues of probability.
    He was not Sethvir, to be tracking a scope of event as wide as the chance
interaction that could happen between eleven hundred human lives. He
could only try his best and leave his frailties to hope. The tienelle was finished off in any case.
    Arithon blew his lungs clear of the last, spent smoke. He sank on his
heels and let the empty canister drop between his feet. At the edge of
mauled senses, he sensed the quick, running tremors of withdrawal that
must be damped and subdued before they built and racked through his
body. He held motionless. Unlike the drug that had nearly ruined him in
Amroth, tienelle's toxins were not addictive. Once he had regained inner
stillness, he could use mastery to annul the poisons. The torment would
pass without craving. Arithon bent the lingering influence of the drug's
sensual enhancement toward steadying himself until his awareness could
stabilize and let time reassume natural proportions.
    The liquid call of a lark trilled through the glen. Eyes closed, Anthon
savoured the sorrowful melody. He had done well, he knew. Amid odds so
bleakly tipped toward defeat, he had ploughed an alternate path. Bitterness
squeezed his heart for what felt like a tragic failure. To the farthest-flung
limit of his abilities, a scant third of Steiven's clansmen could be kept
alive. How could a prince, mage or otherwise, brook the scale of such
sacrifice? Etarra would suffer greater losses; but the cost would be cruel for
a stalemate, particularly when mishap could yet play a hand, and snatch
back the chance of even that.
    No trick of magecraft could fully anticipate bad luck. All guarantees
were forfeit, since the day Etarra's garrison marched upon the north.
    Arithon rapped the ashes from the pipe bowl. The slightest attempt at
motion now shot lancing pains through his skull. Warned to pay heed to
common sense, he took swift stock of his condition.
    His clothing lay wrung with damp sweat and his flesh was drawn from
dehydration. Since tienelle could kill if its lesser poisons were not rinsed
from the body, he bent at once and tried a swallow from the stream.
    The water hit his stomach and set off a rolling bout of nausea. He
clamped his hands to his mouth, unsettled by the fight he underwent to
keep the precious moisture down. Worn through a brutal and difficult
scrying, he recognized his judgement had blurred. Had he considered with
his full wits about him, he should never have dared try this much tienelle
in one session, far less in seclusion. He needed herbal tea, a bed and the
presence of another mage to ward the thought-paths that yet lay ruiner-
ably open. Lacking such comforts, he had no choice left but to wait. The
herb must be allowed time to fade. Only with his senses released from its
burning scope of vision would he be able to transmute the residual poisons
the water could not flush through. Until then, he could tolerate no human
company.

430


    Twilight fell. Birdsong stilled, and the boughs overhead became sprays of
black lace against a sky pricked by pale stars. Engaged in private struggle
against the fevers of withdrawal, Arithon sat with his head tilted back
against an oak bole that kindly performed its appointed function and kept
his body propped upright. The dark tunic lent by Lady Dania melted his form
into shadow, while stray spurts of drug-born intuition stung him with
unwanted revelation: that the clothing on his back had belonged to the
lady's younger brother, fallen wounded in a raid at fifteen. Caolle's hand had
delivered the mercy-stroke that gave the boy clean death. Arithon ground
his knuckles in his eyes to drive off the scents of a forest clearing, and blood
fallen hot on green ferns. Too beaten to avert the bounding starts of truesight
that flickered like delirium through his consciousness, he schooled his
thoughts to rough order by laboured, exhaustive reviews of long-winded
ballads.
    Engrossed in Dakar's favourite drinking song, which was long and lewd,
and only funny if both singer and listeners were fiat drunk, Arithon groped
through the first stanzas. He might be stretched thin, but he did not lack the
fibre to master himself. Yet when between the fifth and sixth chorus his
whispered recitation went ragged, he stumbled to shivering silence and
realized. Someone had invaded his retreat.
    Arithon felt his ears whine and his sinews draw tight under the eddyrag,
electrical pull of another mind. Unlike the near-mystical calm radiated by
birds or wild animals, this presence was unmistakably human. Its excite-
ments, uncertainties and randomly chaotic energies tugged, burned and
rebounded through the channels still defencelessly opened by the herb.
    'Come around where I can see you,' he managed in a tone dragged husky by
discomfort. Grateful that the falling darkness would conceal the worst of his
weakness, he waited.
    Sticks cracked. A stand of hazels shivered, parted, and disgorged Jieret,
who emerged looking sheepish from the depths of a nearby thicket.
    'How did you know I was there?' Peevish to find himself discovered,
$teiven's son approached, bent down, and with a curiosity that brazenly
challenged, hooked up the empty tienelle canister from the verge of the
streambank. He sniffed the pungent odour that lingered inside, curled his lip
and darted a sidelong glance toward Arithon.
    The boy expected a reprimand, Arithon knew; and also, he repressed the
curious urge to ask if his prince was some sort of addict. His liege obliged him
by saying nothing. Politeness triumphed. Jieret shrugged and set down the
container, then fixed the man with an accusation quite spoiled for the fact
that his tunic was plastered with damp leaves. 'I made no noise.'
    Arithon concealed a shudder of dry heaves behind a chuckle and lied
outright. 'The mosquitoes told me.'
 'But I didn't swat even one!' Jieret objected.
    'Next time, don't scratch,' the Master of Shadow advised. A flinch
escaped his restraint at the boy's explosion of laughter.

431


'You don't miss much, your Grace.' The implication remained un-
spoken, that drugs or drink should deaden the senses.
    'You will use no title, when you address me,' said Arithon. 'Your blade
was not one I swore oath over, yesterday afternoon. You owe me no
homage at all.'
    'But I was too young!' Jieret dropped to his knees. 'Here.' He groped at his
belt and proffered the knife he kept for whittling. 'Take my steel now. I'll
be of age next season.'
    Arithon forced a smile over a discomfort that riled him to dizziness. The
razor-edged perception of herb-prescience kept him humble, presented
him bluntly with recognition that Jieret's impetuous offer held no hero-
worship. A piercingly observant child, his knife was a boy's way of testing
the mettle of a prince his clan elders but pretended not to scorn.
    Tenderly as his condition would allow, Arithon chose his answer. 'Lad,
you've a good ten years to grow yet before you can cross your father's will.
If Steiven forbade you to swear vassalage, I cannot dishonour his
judgement. We can share friendship, if you wish, but nothing more
weighty than that.'
    Jieret recoiled in affront and sheathed his knife. 'I'll be twenty in just
eight more years.' His presence a blur amid thickening gloom, he added,
'Tashka says I'm large for my age. But she's my sister, and what do girls
know?' His chin tipped up at a cocky angle his mother would have viewed
with trepidation. 'I'll fight with the men at your side, prince, when Etarra's
army invades our forest.'
    The blood-soaked visions still threatened. Arithon dragged back
wandering attention. 'I forbid you.'
    'But it's custom!' Jieret bounded to his feet. 'Friends always fight
together. And Halliron bet Elwedd you're even better with a sword than
Caolle is.'
    'The bard will lose his silver, then,' Arithon snapped, and at once
regretted his outburst. Unbalanced by his pounding head, he laboured to
restore his pose of harmless indecision. 'You can serve me best by staying
aside to protect your little sisters.'
    Jieret sneered. 'Caolle's right, you think like a town-born. Clan girls
don't need protection, a chief's daughters least of any. Except for Edal and
Meara, my sisters will be in battle too, disarming the fallen and catching
the enemy's loose horses.'
    Arithon gasped. Hurled into an explosion of prescience like a bloodbath,
he reeled, saved from toppling only by the tree at his back. His mind, his
heart, the very breath in his throat all but stopped as involuntary foresight
seared through him: of women and girls lying gutted in pitiful death. The
peace of forest night was swallowed by the din of future screaming.
Shocked to hot tears and futile fury, Arithon struggled to recover; while
the moss dug up by his spasmed fingers seeped warm red with the blood to
be reaped by the vengeance of Etarra's steel.

432


    Consciousness dwindled despite his best effort. He fought in a breath
that became a choked-off cry as his mind was wrenched and then jarred
back to focus by Jieret's grip tugging at his arm.
 'My prince.' The boy regarded him anxiously. 'Are you ill?'
    'No.' Arithon shuddered. While nightmare futures sawed through him,
he had only enough constraint to be gentle as he disengaged from the
child's touch. 'If I'm boring, that's because I'm worried. Take me back to
your father, boy. I have news of grave importance he needs to hear.'
    Dubious and critical as any scout on reconnaissance, Jieret looked on as
Arithon bent by the spring and swallowed water in sucking gulps. The
prince looked sick; was in fact shaking, and running with sweat that
smelled of fear. But Jieret had not lost sight of the fact that he trespassed; by
nature too canny to contradict, he accepted the conclusion that Halliron's
wagered coin would end up in Elwedd's purse.

The water and the walk seemed to help. Arithon breathed more freely as
movement and increased circulation eased the worst of his withdrawal.
Through the hour's hike back to camp, he regained at least the semblance
of his accustomed equilibrium.
    Which was well, because the mother of a boy who has lit off into open
forest with no word of explanation was bound not to wait with complais-
ance. Lady Dania intercepted her miscreants at the flap of Steiven's lodge.
She had shed her daytime leathers for a tight-sleeved dress of lilac blue.
Russet hair that Arithon had never seen unbraided trailed like undone
crochet-work down her back. The effect of softened femininity hit him
like a blow and he stopped, struck briefly speechless.
    But his momentary awkwardness escaped notice as Dania latched onto
her errant son. 'Jieret! What possessed you? It shames me to see a boy of
twelve behaving with less care than a toddler!'
    Recessed in the shadow beyond the entry, Arithon interrupted. 'The boy
was with me, and quite safe.'
 Lady Dania shot him a scorching glance.
    Awed by the briskness with which she abandoned her scolding and
ordered him off to bed, Jieret saw that, prince or not, Arithon was going to
suffer all of his mother's thwarted temper. Wary of his fate should he
linger, the boy beat an escape through the curtain that separated the nook
he shared with his sisters.
    Dania cracked back the tentflap, cross to her core from the licence of
intemperate royalty. She bent a severe gaze upon the culprit, who escaped
her by standing stone-still in the darkness. Reminded afresh that Arithon
could be disquieting and difficult, and that Caolle had warned earlier he
might have remedied his nerves since the oathtaking with drink or some
.t~d~cr indulgence, Dania too said nothing, but busied herself lighting
candles.

433


    While new flame fired the delicately embroidered patterns that bordered
her bodice and hemline and sparked a brighter warmth of colour in her
hair, she barbed her subtlety in a smile of sweetened welcome.
    'Steiven will be back shortly,' she offered. When Arithon's reticence
remained, she dared him to try sheer bad manners. 'Come in. Sit. Be
comfortable while we wait for him.'
    Appreciative of her heroic effort not to nag, and piquantly aware she
would rifle what deductions she could from his appearance, Arithon
slipped through the door flap. Her mind matched his measure far too often
to make him comfortable. He half-smiled to see that her rearguard attack
had defeated him; not a cushion in the lodge remained in dimness enough
for concealment. He countered her candles by an absolute refusal to settle.
While Dania ducked past the privacy flap to make sure of young Jieret and
tuck him with canny firmness into bed, Arithon gave rein to restlessness
and paced.
    This lodge was not so fine as the one left in storage at the last camp.
Bereft of tapestries, fine carpets and permanent furnishings, the dwelling
still displayed evidence of civilized inhabitance. One corner was flaked
with wood chips and bark, where Jieret had whittled toys for his sisters. An
opened book rested on a woven reed-mat, a half-spent candle close by. The
text in the surfeit of lighting flashed as he stepped, with bright colours and
gilt illumination. The wall behind had been painted over with an elaborate
scene of a stag hunt. In the corner, cushioned on a pallet stuffed with
evergreen, Halliron's lyranthe lay abandoned.
    Silver strings strung reflections like beads, numerous and scintillant as
the candleflames. Arithon set his teeth, but could not quite manage to turn
aside. Topaz settings and small emeralds beckoned for his attention amid
the carved and inlaid bands that laced from the scrolled base to the peghead
with its rows of ebony tuners.
    Before thought could stop him, he had seated himself. He extended a
finger and tentatively, lightly brushed the strings.
    The timbre that answered wrung his heart, so perfectly did it match the
voice of the instrument left and lost in Etarra. The maker's rune stamped
in pearl inlay on the back of the soundboard was not visible; but tone was
all the signature Arithon required to identify Elshian's handiwork.  The temptation could be too much.
    Framed against a painted backdrop of deer hounds frozen in full cry, he
lifted the lyranthe, set his hand to silver frets, and began very softly to play.
    The burns where Lysaer's light bolt had seared his right palm and wrist
had barely started to heal. Tripped up as the pull of the wound marred his
timing, Arithon struck out a rough and moody line of notes. Lost to his
irritation, half-unmoored by lightheadedness, he had space in him only for
song. He flexed his stiff hand, cursed mildly as the scab cracked, and
launched off in a run that seemed to banish hide walls and let in space like
cloud-blown sky.

434


tered
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Notes trilled and spattered across quiet in a statement that through
unsullied expression of beauty negated his uncertainty and pain.
    Newly returned from Jieret's bedside, Lady Dania was arrested by the
sound. Unwitting party to something not meant to be shared, she poised
stock-still with the fringed end of the privacy curtain forgotten between
her clenched hands.
    A soaring arpeggio introduced a change in key like an epiphany. Major
chord to minor, the lyranthe rang through a boldly personal statement that
flashed with a grace like edged swordplay. Stirred through the stuffy,
airless heat trapped inside hide walls, Dania shivered in delight. This
prince could bind spells with his playing. Entranced beyond fear of
impropriety, she smiled her appreciation and advanced.
    The privacy flap smacked shut like a slap, but her attempt at warning
passed unnoticed. The notes built and blended and sprang separated while
Arithon laid his cheek against the curve of resonating wood. His eyes were
closed, his whole being intertwined with the notes that danced under his
hands.
    A slipped finger shattered the spell. There came a pause while his wrist
lifted. Then his hands dipped again, through a jarring, heavily plucked
statement that skirted the edge of discord.
    Arithon silenced the strings with an impatient caress, then turned his
hand to find his cut split, and a bead of blood welling through.
    Dania discovered herself half-dizzied from some reasonless urge to hold
her breath. She moved another step, just as the prince looked up.
    The emotion in his eyes struck her with the force of a stormfront alive
with the beat of summer thunder.
    She gave way and sat across from him. 'I didn't intend to eavesdrop. But I
have to admit you have a gift even Halliron must envy.'
    Mention of the Masterbard pricked Arithon to an irritable glance down.
Had the instrument in his hands not awed him, he might have answered
his first impulse, and flung it away as though his skin hurt. 'Lady, your
praise is far too generous.'
    He did not blot the burst burn on his tunic. A tiny start unsettled her as
she wondered if somehow he knew: the garment had been her deceased
brother's. His eyes were on her again. He saw, and she realized too well that
her intuition set keen challenge against his intentions.
    Dania absorbed the awkward moment by rearranging the skirt over her
knees. Blue cloth settled a ring of twilight over a tawny landscape of flax
hassocks, and her hands, like paired birds, nestled together in her lap.
Arithon ducked quickly forward and hoped his fallen hair would shade his
face. His breathing was harder to temper; Steiven's wife had a vivid,
magnetic beauty beneath the wear of hard living and the fullness lent by
child bearing. The fact she tracked his mind without effort evoked an
intimacy that played havoc with drug-heightened senses and provoked
him to shameless response.

435


    Preternaturally conscious of her quick, timid glance toward his face, he
turned his head.
'Something troubles you,' she said. 'Is that why you seek my husband?'
Her voice had that velvety timbre associated with wind through high
grass. A fine-grained tremor shook him and he shut his eyes fast as the
dregs of the tienelle fanned a flare of heat through his veins.
    'Some things are best let lie.' He stamped down the flicker of vision too
late. Prescience arose, full-bodied and ugly enough to choke him, of Lady
Dania sprawled in black leaf mould, the leathers she wore for workaday
ripped down to expose muddied thighs, and her throat slashed open by a
sword stroke.
    Dimly, he realized she was speaking. 'If it were up to me, I would drop
every weapon in Etarra into the bogs of Anglefen, and hire you as bard of
Deshir.'
    Arithon opened his eyes, flashed her a glance hot and molten as brass
tailings stirred in a crucible. He said no word, but hooked back the lyranthe
with an urgency concealed behind languidness.
    Dania was not deceived. Neither could she deny the compulsion that
drove him, rooted as it was in the gentleness that tonight for some reason
he could not mask. The music he loosed with his hands held a spirit that
gave easy surcease from talk.
    He took the release she allowed him with gratitude that sang through
E major, then plunged in sliding falls to tread deeper measures that rang
lyrically placid and dark. He tempered his impatience in the mathematical
progression of schooled notes. Pinched between physical discomfort and
the horrific pageant of images inflicted at random upon his innermind,
Arithon longed for Steiven to come, that he could finish this business and
be alone. He wanted the forest, with the calls of whippoorwills and
running water to smooth his abraded nerves. He needed delicate, exacting
concentration to unbind the residual taint within his body. Yet the
urgency of the final revelation which had shown him clan girls and wives
lying slaughtered disbarred the solitude he required.
    Arithon channelled himself into music as a substitute for thought until
steps at the doorflap spoiled his cadence.
    'Must you deal behind my back?' Halliron's demand shattered the spell
before the last note had quite faded.
    Dania started and jerked her scented skirts aside to allow the bard space
to take a seat. 'How long have you been here?'
    Arithon damped the dwindling ring of silver strings and proffered
Elshian's lyranthe to her master.
    Halliron took back his instrument, derisively abrupt. 'I heard it all. The
fragment preceding as well.' Pale, hard eyes touched the prince with a look
as inimical as a knife-thrust. 'I know the voice of my lyranthe better than
that of my own child. You should have known she would call me. Did you
lack the guts, not to speak to me beforehand?'

436


    'I'm sorry.' Arithon's hands balled up. He forgot his torn scab and tension
rimmed one fingernail brightly scarlet. 'I was thoughtlessly selfish. Here's
my promise not to meddle, after this.'
    'Meddle!' Dania had never heard the bard's voice so charged with fury.
'You arrogant, manipulative young fool! Don't insult my intelligence by
playing your falsehoods on me. It's an Ath-given talent you've been hiding.
I say it here, you've no right to see that strangled.'
    Arithon sat back sharply, discomfort plain upon his face. The bard had
managed to shock him, as nobody else ever had, and his recovery lacked
courtesy or grace. 'That was not my intent.' For once too upset to try
pretence, he hitched his shoulders in dismissal. 'Of course, I'm touched by
your regard. But I saw no reason to inflict my inadequate fingering upon
you.' The sarcasm used in desperation bloomed now to drive back tearing
anguish. 'My sword, you'll recall, is now wedded to the cause of a
kingdom.'
    Halliron shrugged off the protestation. 'The mechanics of your playing
can definitely be improved upon.' He cradled the lyranthe against his
shoulder, set fingers to strings, and repeated several bars of Anthon's work.
Beneath his skill, melody emerged refocused into a rendition to make the
heart leap for pure pain.
    The effect left Dania with her fingers pressed to her lips, and the Prince
of Rathain dead white.
    Halliron damped the strings with a slap the exquisite soundboard
magnified like a shout. 'With work, you shall surpass me. Study, apply
yourself to life training, and no one alive could match your style.' The
Masterbard pressed his instrument back into Arithon's lap.
    'If, if, if!' Arithon spurned the invitation in a recoil that dragged air in a
whine across strings as he thrust the instrument aside. 'Where is Steiven?'
    'Stop evading.' Incensed, Halliron held to his subject. 'I've searched all
my life, and never heard the equal of your natural ability.'
    Arithon whipped taut with a speed that belied the indolence he had
adopted since his arrival. The weave of moving shadows as he thrust to his
feet plunged the painted stag into darkness, leaving hounds with bared
muzzles exposed to the merciless candlelight. To Dania he said crisply, 'If
Caolle is available, I'll speak to him instead.'
     Dismayed, the lady instinctively forestailed him. 'You haven't eaten,
your Grace. Let me bring wine and fresh bread.' Arithon abruptly shook his head.
    He was a man who never used gestures when a verbal backlash would
serve better. Alarmed, Dania surveyed his face. 'You're unwell.'
    'Which is not your concern, dear lady.' Arithon caught her hands and
kissed her knuckles, inspired to ruthless certainty that his clammy sweat
and fine trembling would set her off-balance enough to quiet her. 'Caolle or
your husband, it doesn't matter which. But I must speak with one of them
immediately.'

437


    Silence followed his demand, a rugged war of wills that Halliron finally
broke because he misliked risking Deshir's lady to the edged temper of the
s'Ffalenn heir. 'Steiven and Caolle are closeted in the tent that serves as
armoury. They're taking inventory, and probably won't mind the interrup-
tion.'
    Arithon gave the bard a smile of astonishing gratitude. Then he kissed
the lady's hands again. 'My respect, and my thanks for your hospitality.'
Need before gentleness commanded him as he released his touch and
departed.
    The lodge-flap sighed closed on his heels, and infused the close tent with
the night-scent of dew-soaked evergreen. Lady Dania stared blindly across
an emptiness left brilliant with candles, her arms hugged forlornly across
her chest. 'He tries hard to make us think he takes us lightly.'
    Wordless in sympathy, Halliron caught her shoulders. He turned her, sat
her down and fetched her wine. This once in his life unwilling to seek
music to quiet an uneasy mind, he poured a second goblet for himself. 'It's
fate that's his enemy, not ourselves.' He drank deep, to dull a grief he could
not bear, that his search for a successor had found its match in a man who
had no use at all for an apprenticeship.

Underlit by the glow of a single candle, the war captain of Deshir's clans
crouched, counting unfietched arrows in their bins while Steiven marked
numbers on a tally. Caolle was first to look up as the tent flap stirred and
admitted a drift of night air. A smile broke through his weathered scowl.
'Well, well. Look who's come.'
    Arithon stepped through the entry. Burdened with a rolled set of
parchments, and in no mood to be subtle under needling, he had done
nothing to ease his withdrawal symptoms beyond a pause to drink at the
river. The water had not settled well. By that, he knew he had very little
time to make his point before weakness forced him to retire. Driven to fast
movement to conceal a resurgence of cramps, he chose a table arrayed with
swords set aside for the armourer's attention in the morning. These he
swept aside with a belling clangour that made Steiven jump to his feet.
    'Your Grace?' The clan chieftain left his captain, the tally slate
abandoned in his haste.
    Caolle tossed aside an arrow, lifted the candle, and followed. His distaste
intensified as Arithon shed a cascade of scrolled documents and whipped
them fiat across the tabletop. The parchments so callously handled were
the tactical maps that culminated painstaking labour and days of vocifer-
ous debate.
    Annoyed enough that his gorge rose, Caolle's steps became deliberate. 'If
you're finished with moping for the day, perhaps you'd care to tell us the
name of the man presently in command of Etarra's reserve corps of
archers?'

438


    Braced against the table to steady a nasty rush of dizziness, Arithon tried
to answer. His throat was already bone-dry. The drink at the river had not
been sufficient to satisfy the demands of withdrawal. Warned that his
neglect had now set him on dangerous ground, that the effects of herb
poisons would have him unconscious if he pushed without care, he looked,
but saw no place to sit down.
    'Or have the sulks clouded your memory?' Caolle goaded. 'You need not
trouble. Our plans have already been set.'
    Arithon returned an impatient lift of his head. 'The commander's name
is Hadig. And you're going to have to change tactics.'
    Caolle gave a gruff, low laugh and at once confronted his clan chief. 'This
womanish daydreamer suggests that our councils have been wasted. Do
we leave our arrows uncounted, just to let him show us better?'
    Arithon neither acknowledged the insult, nor allowed Steiven's puzzled
regard any interval to unravel his personal state. He reached with a hand
forced to steadiness and swept across an inked arc of symbols that his
fickle mind twisted into bodies, bent and broken and bathed in congealed
blood. 'Here,' he half gasped. 'And here. I'll suffer no man's mother or child
in the path of Etarra's armies.'
    Lip curled in contempt, Caolle said, 'You think us gutless as towns-
men. '
 'I took an oath!' Arithon locked eyes with him. 'I speak out of concern.'
    Caolle set down the candle and leaned on bunched hands across the
charts. 'You'd make a prime town governor.'
    'You'll listen,' Arithon returned, a jab of command in his tone. 'Would
you ruin your people for sheer pride? My objection has no grounds in
sentiment.'
    'Sentiment? Fiends, are you blind?' Caolle's scarred fists crashed onto
the table top, jarring swordblades in ringing counterpoint while the candle
guttered and spattered hot wax across the maps. 'There are nine-hundred-
sixty of us of age to wield weapons. That includes every man of the
northeast forest clans, who will not, cannot, even with Ath's help, get here
in time to make a difference. Ten to one odds, had you counted. Dharkaron
Avenger couldn't balance such stakes. And you've the puking gall to fly in
my face with objections.~'
    'Caolle! Recall you address your sovereign lord.' Steiven reappeared out
of shadow with camp stools salvaged from a field kit. He distributed the
seats around the table and said as sharply, 'Your Grace, if you wish
changes, speak your reason. Argument serves no purpose here.'
    The clanlord sat down then, and in iron-clad example directed his
attention to the maps. If a night of communion with nature had jolted
Arithon out of apathy he would never ridicule the change. This prince's
hand had helped to banish Desh-thiere; if the powers used then could help
now, he must be encouraged to offer them. Yet, confronted by Arithon's
unsteady bearing as he pulled up the stool and sank onto it, Steiven

439


wondered silently if Caolle's supposition had been right, and his liege had
retired from the oathtaking to get himself royally drunk.
    Arithon rested his chin on folded fingers. 'I've had warning,' he opened
without preamble. 'The lives of every clan woman and child will be lost if
they are sent out to stand against Lysaer. Butchery best describes the
method. I could sound no alternative sequence.'
    Caolle for a mercy stayed silent, while Steiven adjusted to this implied
application of mage schooled prescience with a care he might have used
when taking aim on a half-startled buck. 'Can you be more specific?'
    'Unfortunately not.' Arithon resumed a tone beaten level by an
unpleasant ringing in his ears. 'Your son disrupted my scrying. Small talk
of his sisters provoked a precognition. His presence masked further
development. I suggest, and not lightly, that you take full heed and arrange
safeguards.'
    Steiven regarded his prince and desperately suppressed the thought that
rose inside him like a scream: that his own life already had been pledged. It
seemed most cruelly unjust that loyalty to this Teir's'Ffalenn might claim
his wife and five young ones as well. He said only, 'You wish me to remove
the women and younger children from the lines?'  'At the very least.' Arithon sounded strained.
    'Suicide,' Caolle interrupted. He stuck broad thumbs in his belt and
licked his teeth. 'We cannot act in fear of who will,die. If we hold back any
one resource, where do we stop? We'll have no need at all for fussy strategy,
if our lines get overrun and all of our fighting strength falls jack-dead on
the field!'
    'There are alternatives,' Arithon interjected. At his word, the candle
flicked out, though no hand had moved to pinch the flame.
    When Caolle leaned out to test the wick, Steiven stopped him on
instinct. 'Don't. Snuffed candles usually smoke. I smell none, which must
mean the light is still burning.'
    'The sun can be blackened as easily,' Arithon's voice resumed out of
darkness. 'Mine is full command of shadow. Though I am loath to kill by
trickery, the night can be a formidable weapon.'
    He released the captive candle as abruptly, and in a steady, undisturbed
spill, flamelight glinted in multiple reflection on the helms and scale
brigandines of a dozen men-at-arms, conjured from nowhere and arrayed
behind the prince's chair.
    Caolle broke his chief's hold. He surged erect. His hands ~ frenzied
urgency sorted through the weapons that weighted the map-ends for just
one blade with a serviceable edge.
    Arithon's grating laughter stopped him cold. 'Illusion only,' the prince
admonished. His magery dispersed into thin air, with Caolle left blinking
and foolish, his fists interlocked behind the crossguard of an ill-balanced
antique broadsword.
 The prince said with stinging coolness, 'I'm hardly the green boy you

440


,had

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imagined. By the grace of my grandfather's upbringing, I hold the sole
alternative. Listen and live. Or I'll step back, reject my oath, your feal
defence and every last trace of your memory.'
    As if taunting the temper that, in one move, could finish a swing up to
gut him, the Shadow Master held the clan captain's gaze in tightdipped,
bristling antagonism. Until, suspicious that the prince might not be drunk,
but rather driving for the opening to provoke, Steiven intervened. 'Caolle,
put down that blade. Whether or not you've been mocked, I can tolerate no
violence against a guest who's sworn at my hearth.'
    Caolle settled, hunched as a mastiff forced to give ground. He watched
with hot eyes as Arithon applied a stick of charcoal to the map and re-
formed the deployment of Deshir's forces. As the fine, unsteady hands
revitalized the plans with new strategy, the irascible veteran was forced to
revise his impression of the s'Ffalenn heir. The prince was impressively
clever, if weak. His hands trembled, and the green eyes burned beneath
slack lids as though driven to fever by high-strung nerves. Battle experi-
ence might toughen him enough to make him a passable sovereign, Caolle
thought; but he kept his opinion to himself.
    Near the end, they suffered interruption. Framed suddenly against the
torchless blackness of the doorway, a scout in weapons and leathers made a
hasty entrance. 'Your Grace. Lord Caolle. The Lady Dania requires the
presence of her husband. Your Jieret has had another nightmare and is out
of his senses with grief?
    'Forgive me,' Steiven blurted, on his feet and gone in a bound that riffled
stacked maps in his wake.
    Relieved to be quit of his message, the scout came fully inside and
settled on the stool his chief had vacated. He gave Caolle an apologetic
shrug. 'Ath ease his suffering, poor young one.' For Arithon's benefit, he
explained, '[ieret has Sight, as his father does.'
    'lieret has natural prescience?' Hunched over crossed arms on the
tabletop, Arithon snapped straight in wild-eyed, sweating attention. 'Ath's
mercy, why did nobody think to tell me?'
    Cynical before this unlooked-for burst of concern, Caolle drummed his
knuckles on his swordbelt and watched; while the scout, less dour, let out
a sigh. 'No kind gift for a boy, to be sure. Whatever he's dreamed broke his
heart.'
    'I'll tell you what he saw.' Arithon shot a vicious glance toward Caolle.
'The slaughter of every living relative. If I'd known that child had Sight, I'd
never have allowed him to stay near me. I was still half-tranced from
scrying, and my defences at the time were wide open. If he's gifted, he'll
have picked up the sequence from me. Mine the blame, if he's taken any
harm.'
    Mageeraft and jargon left no impression upon Caolle, who disdained
~~utbursts of any sort. He pulled his skinning knife from his boot sheath,
and in the extreme and failing candlelight expertly shaved off a hangnail.

441


'You worry for nothing,' he said to Arithon. 'Deshir's young are hardly
fragile. Any such weakness in clan bloodlines, town headhunters have
long since stamped out.'
    The reassurance appeared to settle Arithon's mind, for by the time the
captain looked up to sheath his blade, the prince had apparently fallen
asleep. His black hair feathered a pillowing wrist, with the other hand
outflung across the map; as if he had started to surge to his feet, then
surrendered the inclination.
    If arcane scrying had exhausted the prince to the same degree as his
recent flight from Etarra, the man was a fool who tried to roust him. The
scout said as much, his long face gloomy in disgust.
    For his part, Caolle gave grudging credit for Arithon's contribution to the
defence strategy: he did not curse his liege lord's failing out loud, but in
tones of mulish reserve, requested help to shift Arithon back to Steiven's
lodge tent.
    'That's twice in a week our chief's left us to haul deadweight like deer-
dressers,' the scout grumbled. The candle fluttered at his movement as he
kicked back Steiven's stool, leaned over and hooked his forearms under
Arithon's shoulders. 'Phew. What's he got on his clothes? Smells like
burnt spice or something.'
    Caolle shrugged. The finicky habits of mages being outside his province
to fathom, he hefted the royal legs without comment.
    As both men manoeuvred their prince around the chart-strewn table, the
scout gave a breathless, short laugh. 'Well, he's small enough, Ath be
thanked. Easy to sling as a puppy. If I have to strain a sword hand for my
liege, I'm glad to know I'll do it killing townsmen.'
    'Ye'11 do it standing extra turns at duty!' Caolle snapped, moved at last to
vent the spleen he had too long bent aside to please his chieftain. 'Get back
to your post where you belong, and leave yon princeling's nursing to me.'
The mettlesome captain of the Deshans shouldered the unconscious
prince like a game carcass and huffed on alone to Steiven's lodge tent.
    Dania's extravagant expenditure of candles by this hour had burned low;
those few wicks that still struggled alight fed on drafts, half drowned in
puddled wax. Other candles snuffed to conserve resources stood tall white
in a gloomy play of shadows. As conscious of their cost as of the life in the
burden he carried, Caolle took care not to knock against them as he bore
Arithon toward the cushions in the corner where Halliron's lyranthe lay
propped, unshrouded still, if not forgotten.
    Caolle shucked his load, tugged straight a twist in his tunic, and
considered his duty to his sovereign completed. He raised a forearm to blot
his brow, caught a whiff of his leather bracers and nearly spat. The exotic
reek from whatever rite of magery the prince had trifled with had
transferred itself to his person. Moved to seek fresher air outside, Caolle
spun to depart, but checked halfway to the doorflap as Steiven re-emerged
from the alcove set aside for his children.

442


hardly
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To forestall answering for the prince, Caolle asked, 'Is [ieret settled?'
Steiven sighed, strolled crunching through scrolls of dry birch bark and
uncorked the wine flagon his wife had left out for the Masterbard. 'He's
coherent. Halliron's telling him a story. If we're lucky, he'll choose some-
thing boring that will ease the boy back to sleep.'
    'The nightmare was truesight, then?' Ruled by habit, Caolle braced broad
shoulders against the king post and regarded the master he had first raised
and now served without question. Neither man could have named the day
when duty had deepened to respect; the nuance of who was master had never
mattered between them. 'Did Jieret say what he dreamed?'
    Caught in mid-swallow, Steiven parked the flagon on his forearm. He
shook his head. 'Dania says he told nothing beyond the name of Fethgurn's
daughter. Though what Teynie has to do with an ugly precognition, Daelion
Fatemaster knows. My boy cannot tell us. Whatever Jieret dreamed, it's too
much for him to bear. His mind has closed to recall, as mine did, once.' And
he stopped, knowing Caolle would remember: it had been the captain's gruff
hands that had soothed him, the night before his father found his death.
    A shiver swept over Steiven. His regard lay heavy with understanding
upon his captain: too soon, Etarra's troops would invade these valleys.
    Wordless, Caolle extended his hand for the flagon. Steiven watched while
his first captain drank, his eyes as deep with worry as his oldest confidante
had ever seen them. 'We must withdraw the girls and women as Arithon
wishes. Seer or not, his objections and Jieret's nightmare are too close to be a
coincidence.'
    'The boys over ten years of age'will have to disarm the fallen then,' Caolle
insisted, his eyes beneath the crag of his browline deepened to pits as the
candle by his elbow fluttered out. 'Those few absolutely can't be spared.'
    $teiven nodded, took back the wine, and paused with the neck of the
flagon half-raised. As if he expected a rejoinder, he glanced around and across
the darkened tent. 'Where's the prince?'
    Caolle jerked his chin past his shoulder. 'There. Fell asleep on the tactical
maps, so I brought him.' Deshir's war captain folded thick arms in expecta-
tion of Dania's scolding as she and Halliron emerged from soothing Jieret
into bed.
    'Ah well.' Steiven sighed, aware how little reprimand would accomplish
with his war captain planted like a bull. Finally, softly, he set the flask aside.
'Our Teir's'Ffalenn's entitled to his comforts, I would guess, if he spent last
night smacking midges in the open.'
    A rustle of skirts and more flickering from spent candles, and Lady Dania
reached her husband's side. 'Arithon ought to sleep,' she said tartly. 'When
he left here, he was unwell.'
    Caolle smiled. While the Masterbard crossed the lodge to fetch his
instrument, the captain stole the moment to bait her by hooking back the
flagon. 'A man can be unwell, and not be the least bit sick.' He drank, his eyes
on hers.

443


    Dania gave no ground. The captain's blistering insolence she suspected
held a hint of jealousy; at least, Caolle had never subjected her to teasing
before the day she had wed. Her lord shied well clear, since better than
anybody else, his lady could keep the war captain in his place.
    Dania's mouth tautened in conclusion that Caolle's antagonism toward
Arithon was the same: that he would treat even a dog with contempt, if it
dared to claim Steiven's affection. As though the grizzled captain were an
overbearing brother, she reached out and slapped the flagon from his
mouth. 'Now what would his Grace be drunk on, stream water?'
    Caolle choked to kill an untimely burst of laughter. 'He has a weak head,
our royal heir, or maybe just a weak stomach?'
    The discussion was cut short, as Halliron cried out from the corner, 'Ath
Creator, how long has he been like this?'
    Steiven spun round on reflex; Caolle, with considering deliberation.
Half-lost in the maze of deepened shadows, the Masterbard bent over
Arithon, one hand clasped over the royal wrist and feeling in concern for a
pulse.
    'Sithaer's fires, man.' Caolle rubbed his eyes, which were stinging tired
from too much stress. 'You act as if he's dying. He only dropped off to
sleep.'
    'He could be dying,' Halliron said, his performer's voice bladed to satire.
'Did none of you notice the smell on him?'
    'Is something wrong?' Steiven released the hand that cupped his wife's
waist as Dania moved to light candles.
    Halliron made a sound of exasperation. When Caolle looked brazenly
blank, and Steiven's expression failed to clear, the Masterbard raised
Arithon's other wrist and hauled him into a half reclining posture that
needed several pillows to support. As his fingers untied the prince's
shirtcuffs, he said, 'Have you ever read anything on herb lore? In particular
on the leaves of the mountain flower called tienelle?'
    'Seersweed?' Shocked to quick action, Steiven yanked the flagon from
Caolle's grasp and crossed the tent. 'Ath preserve us. Not the narcotic used
by mages...' He knelt, touched the prince's clammy flesh, and bits of
remembered trivia fell together with an alarming, unpleasant feel of truth.
The prince had spoken of scrying. If tienelle had been part of his method, it
would indeed induce visions; followed by illness from toxins that had no
listed antidote. Enraged at the prince's reticence, and then by his own slow
perception, Steiven ripped out a word he had never used under his own
roofpole, or in the presence of his wife.
  'He told us he was trained!' Caolle protested.
    'And so he must be. I much doubt he would leave us by suicide.' Steiven
withheld his sympathy, while Caolle started to pace.
    Halliron continued his ministrations, aggrieved to a depth that none but
Lady Dania understood. Her hands trembled on the striker as for the
second time that night she lit wick after wick in succession; while the

444


Masterbard resumed condemnation. 'How long did you delay him,
badgering and questioning his manhood?'
 'Never mind that,' cut in Steiven. 'Just tell us what's to be done.'
    The Masterbard's smile was whitelipped and merciless, and directed to
stop Caolle between strides. 'Wake him up and ask,' he invited. 'I'm no
mage at all. My tunes and your prowess at war in this case are no foil for
fatal poison.'
    'Well, his Grace volunteered for the sacrifice,' Caolle snapped. 'Don't
make me slap him back to consciousness. I'd be too much tempted to break
his neck.'
    Nobody answered that outburst. Dania stood with the striker wrung
between her fingers. Halliron steadied the prince's head, while Steiven
raised the flask and began forcing wine down the flaccid royal throat.
    Arithon roused, bent in half by a cough that immediately progressed to
nausea. Between spasms, he gasped for water. A basin was proffered. He
drank and was sick. He drank again, his hands locked one on another in a
torment that left Dania silently, desperately weeping.
    This time the liquid stayed down. When the Master of Shadow raised
green eyes rinsed blank by the force of will he needed to command his
reflexes, no one present could escape recogmtion of the mettle he had
masked behind laziness.
    Arithon knew as much. Even through pain, his manner suggested the
chagrin of a joke undone as his gaze locked level with Caolle's.
    Caught on his knees by the sick-bed, the captain of Deshir's defence said
no word, but gripped the basin as if blunt metal might sprout legs and kick
him in the stomach.
    The deep s'Ffalenn eyes never flickered, but the mouth twitched in a
pinched-off, flippant smile. 'I'll try you at foils on the morrow,' Anthon
challenged, prepared to take bruises for his falsehood.
    Grudgingly forced to revise his assessment of the s'Ffalenn prince yet
again, Caolle snarled, 'Save your steel for the heartblood of Etarra's city
guard.'

Work on the defences continued without relenting as Arithon rested from
his debilitating bout with the tienelle. He did not rise to cross foils with the
clan captain, but on Steiven's enforced orders kept to his bed. He heard in
thindipped silence that the participation of boys in the battle was a matter
beyond his royal right to question.
    If his initial reaction was too quiet, his response came typically
obstinate. He waited until Dania's back was turned, called young Jieret to
his bedside, and with the blade of a boy's knife for carving, nicked his left
wrist. There and then he swore a blood pact of friendship with his
caitbdein's only son.
 Confronted minutes later by the father's anger, Arithon gazed up from

445


his pillows, peaceful with grieved affection. 'That is the best I can do for
you, whom I love as my brother. I can see your heir survives this war to
continue your line and title.'
    Struck speechless by emotion, Steiven whirled and left the prince's
presence. With his own death already a sealed fate, the Earl of the North
could have asked no better parting from this life, save the chance to better
know the spirit of the man who had graced him.
    'Ath lighten your burden, my prince,' he murmured. And he stumbled
on blindly across the lodge tent, into the arms of his wife.
    Dania exclaimed in dismay at his kiss. She tasted salt tears on Steiven's
lips. Drowned in silent, close embrace, she pulled loose, caught his hand
and guided him to slip the laces on her bodice.
    Steiven accepted her invitation. In the sunwarmed air of their sleeping
nook, he allowed her quiet touch and hot flesh to absorb his bitter brew of
sorrow. But the pleasure of release was saddened by the knowledge that
this moment was to be among the last.

446


Incarceration

Dakar the Mad Prophet stopped cold in his tracks, wiped at his streaming
forehead, and glared askance down a sheer rockface toward a valley spread
like quilting between a dizzying array of black peaks. Fresh sweat rolled off
his temples. Left faint and sick from the effects of exertion and extreme
altitude, he complained to a point of empty air, 'You call this a trail? I say
it's a death-trap. And I hope you have defence wards set. If a fiend chances
by and possesses a loose stone, it's sure to make mischief and trip me.'
    Made the more mutinous as his outburst drew no response, Dakar
plucked at the straps of his knapsack, which bulged from his back like the
shell of some malformed turtle. 'And anyway, I'd think you sorcerers
wouldn't chance my taking a fall, not lugging this, anyway. And I don't see
why I was appointed to act as the Fellowship's pack-mule in the first
place!'
    A breeze flicked through a fan of alpine flowers near Dakar's feet,
perhaps provoked by Kharadmon's invisible presence.
    'Oh, come on!' Dakar griped. 'A miser in a poorhouse has more to say
than you! Why not admit you know why Asandir has me carrying his Ath-
forsaken Mistwraith to the summit of Rockfell Peak?'
    'You need the exercise ?' Kharadm~n quipped. A daisy fell out of nowhere
and brushed past Dakar's left ear.
    The Mad Prophet swiped it away. He scraped forward, his shoulder
pressed to the mountain, until the narrow ribbon of trail reached a
switchback half-blocked by boulders. There he seized the opportunity to
plump himself down. The perch he chose was moss-grown. Seepage from a
glacial spring made him grimace and huff like a walrus, yet laziness
triumphed. A soaked rump notwithstanding, he bent at the waist and
shucked off the knapsack. Inside, girdled with tingling guard-spells, lay the
flask that bottled Desh-thiere. 'I should heave this off the nearest

447


precipice, and see you all juggle spells to catch it back,' the Mad Prophet
suggested nastily.
  'Try,' Kharadmon invited.
    Dakar's glower deepened. 'A damned iyat has more sense of fun than
you.'
    'I should hope so.' Below their vantage, the slow-falling speck that was
the daisy winked out. A second later, Kharadmon's image unfurled,
extravagantly poised in midair. 'Or I'd throw you off the cliff, and see
how far and long you'd bounce.'
    'Do that.' Dakar sighed. 'Break my back. I'd like to lie down and rest for
six months or maybe a year.'
    Kharadmon stroked the spade-black beard that thrust from his chin.
Piebald hair streamed on the winds that whipped off the snowfields
higher up and his green eyes glinted, shrewd. 'You're thinking your
master has misused you?'
    'Not me,' Dakar snapped. 'I said so before: Prince Lysaer.' Cautious not
to try Kharadmon's impatience, he heaved to his feet, and with a mar-
tyred roll of his eyes, resettied his pack on sore shoulders. 'Sithaer take
your Fellowship's grand plans, you used a good man and then broke him.'
    'Ah.' Kharadmon flicked away into nothing. A cold draft at odds with
nature, he flowed upslope against the wind.
    Dakar resumed inching up a track better suited for small goats. 'You
don't agree,' he said sourly.
    The discorporate mage surprised with an answer. 'You've seen Asandir
take deer for the supper pot.'
    'He never hunts anything I ever saw.' The Mad Prophet bent, clawed
out a pebble that had worked its way into his boot-top, then sidestepped
through a hair pin bend, his buttocks pressed to sheer rock while his
beer-gut jutted over sky. 'Asandir just goes out and sits in a thicket
somewhere. Eventually a buck happens along, lies down, and dies for
him.'
      'He projects his need and asks,' Kharadmon corrected tartly. 'The deer
chooses freely, and its fate and man's hunger end in balance.'  'You're not saying Lysaer volunteered,' Dakar protested.
    The trail doubled back, its frost-split stone scoured lifeless except for
mustard and black flecks of lichen. From ahead, Kharadmon sent back,
'No. Your prince answered circumstance according to his inate character.
The Fellowship imposed nothing outside his natural will and intentions.'
    Dakar viewed the next span with trepidation, and ended by scrabbling
forward on hands and knees. Gravel loosened by his passage slid and
bounced, and finally rocketed into the abyss that was Rockfell vale.
Between stertorous panting, he gasped, 'You can't claim...
Desh-thiere's wraith... submits to any law of the Major Balance.'
    'Where opening did not already exist, the creature could not have
gained foothold,' said Kharadmon.

448


d Prophet

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 his
 :ket
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    Squatted now on his hams and blowing harder, Dakar squirmed to shift
the bite of the packstraps. Already blistered on his heels, his temper had
abraded to match. 'But Sethvir as much as admitted the s'Ilessid inborn gift
was at fault. Had Lysaer not been driven to seek perfect justice, the wraith
would have found nothing to exploit.'
    Frostily unmoved, Kharadmon said, 'If so, our Fellowship has a reck-
oning to answer for.'
    Dakar took a second to recognize capitulation. 'Well then!' he cried, and
closed for the kill. 'Why in Ath's name did you surrender Lysaer knowing
he'd have no defence?'
    The flicks and slaps of breeze that expressed Kharadmon's displeasure
died into ominous stillness. Even the winds off the ridges dared not cross
the imposed circle of his silence. 'Because,' his reply cracked back at
length, 'Ath Creator himself did not insist that his works spring perfectly
formed from the void. We are permitted our mistakes, for which, my fat
prophet, you should kiss the earth daily and be grateful.'
    Hunkered like a bear on damp haunches, Dakar prepared to argue
further. But a second voice admonished from below: 'Best give less thought
to Lysaer's business and more to your own, which is jeopardized. The
outcrop where you've chosen to pontificate is not terribly well anchored to
the scarp.'
    The Mad Prophet ejected a filthy word. Sweated over more than bad
footing, he scooted forward and cautiously peered downward.
    Soundless, graceful, in a stroll that disallowed fourteen thousand feet of
vertical drop, Asandir ascended the switchback just below. Grey hair, grey
cloak, with both wrists adorned by talisman bracelets tuned in white
metal, he was silver from head to foot.
    'Where did you disappear to this morning?' Dakar shot back. 'I cooked
some breakfast and found you gone, and never a word of instruction as to
what you wished me to do.'
    Asandir stopped. His brows lifted. The mouth underneath never moved.
He looked at Dakar and said acidly, 'That's no reason to threaten to pitch
Desh-thiere off any handy vertical precipice.'
    'Ah, fiends,' moaned Dakar. 'A man can't say one word without you
hearing it.' He hugged the cliff face resignedly and hauled himself back
upright.
    'Sethvir heard you, too.' By then, Asandir had hooked the loops of the
knapsack. As the Mad Prophet obligingly shrugged off straps, the sorcerer
reappropriated custody of Desh-thiere's flask.
    Lightened enough to try boldness, Dakar stole a glance slantwise at his
master. 'What were you doing, anyway?'
    Asandir attended the packstraps, in need of commodious readjustment
to fit his slimmer anatomy. 'What did you use here, spider's knots?' He
abandoned the tangle, and more efficiently called a spell to clear the ties.
 'I'm no sailor, to be handy with strings or a sewing awl.' It served any

449


sorcerer properly, Dakar thought, to have lett him in cl~arge of such
matters. He watched, envious, as the rawhide slithered free of itself with a
sinuous ease of living snakes. 'How did you do that?'
      Silver-grey eyes now flicked up, keenly bright in their scrutiny. 'Which
question did you actually want answered?'  Hopeful, Dakar said, 'Both.'
    But Asandir's mood since Etarra had not been the least bit forgiving.
'When a peak such as this has served through two ages as a prison,
prudence would dictate a check to be sure the rock is still willing to absorb
the antagonism of the entity we wish to confine.'
    'And how does one bribe old stone into becoming a sewer for human
refuse?' Dakar smirked.
    Asandir looked back at him, serious. 'Rocks outlast all our doings.
Longevity gives them great respect for politeness, a tendency you would
benefit from copying.'
    'You can have your stones and your trees, and your communion with
both for permissions,' Dakar retorted. 'I'll save my appreciation for a paid
woman, if we don't break our necks on this peak.'
    A warning shift in Asandir's regard prompted Dakar to spin around and
resume clambering up the trail. As stones gouged his knees, he vowed
under his breath that henceforward he would restrict his inquiries to spells
that could untie string. Then the next time he attracted a pack of
mischief-bent iyats, he need not cut his laces to pry his boots off.
    The ledge faded out at the snowline. Confronted by a rock face cracked
into vertical ladders and packed under scabs of blue ice, Dakar swallowed.
'We're not going up that.'
    Nobody answered. He blinked, rubbing sweat from his eyes. 'Well, I'm
not going up that.'
    'You could spend the night here,' Asandir agreed. 'You might even be
comfortable, before the storm.'
    'What storm?' Dakar studied at the sky, which deepened now toward
clear aquamarine. Sunset was nigh, but the air smelled of glacier, not snow.
'There aren't any clouds! I could spit and hit the moon.'
    Asandir kept climbing. The Mad Prophet fidgeted from foot to foot while
arcanely frigid air eddied upward, as Kharadmon also passed him by.
    Dakar scrubbed his face on his tunic sleeve, then reviewed his position.
The pitch they had already climbed was frightful, Rockfell's southeastern
exposure a needle to split the wind. The nethermost spine of the Skyshiels
nipped the horizon all around, while below, hulking as somnolent dragons,
two ridges hoarded the valley between. Farthest down, dark tarnish in a
gloom of cut-off sunlight, river Avast's ice-fed streamlets wound through
forested ravines napped and ledged like rumpled velvet.
    Just looking made Dakar's head spin. He could wait, but if he nodded off
to sleep for one second he would tumble off the cranny that marked the
trailhead. Above, sharp rocks as bleak as nightmare swooped up, lost in

450


clouds gilt-hemmed by failing daylight. Asandir had already disappeared.
    Beaten at last to resignation, Dakar stuffed his fat hands in a cleft and
inched upward toward fog that was powdered with whirling snow. He
inhaled the flakes repeatedly as he climbed. Eyes squeezed shut, he spoke
through teeth clamped against a sneeze, and hoped to Sithaer that Asandir
would take pity on him. 'How much further?' His muscles felt wrapped in
hot wire.
    Kharadmon's chuckle answered. 'Not far at all. Unless you prefer to keep
scrabbling along by your fingernails?'
 Suspicious of some prank, Dakar risked a look.
    Then he, too, laughed aloud. Not half a pace to his left, some capricious
carver had fitted a staircase into the rockface. Elegant to the point of
absurdity, the risers were black marble adorned at edge and corner with
leering, haughty gargoyles. An extravagance of scrolled newel posts had
once supported railings, until weather had scoured the brass away. Now
only fastening holes remained.
 'Damn me,' exclaimed Dakar. 'What fool engineered thkt?'
    'Davien.' As if bemused by the quirks of his mountebank colleague,
Kharadmon qualified. 'Fifteen centuries back, when he f~/shioned the pit
into Rockfell, Davien insisted the stone of the mountain might decide one
day to shrug him off. He was right to assume that anyone who braves the
ascent thus far does a mage's business here.'
    Crabbing sideways across the face, Dakar was ill-inclined to argue with
the Betrayer's skewed sense of logic. He caught a post, swung onto the stair,
then bit back his relief as the inimical gazes of gargoyles seemed to follow his
progress hungrily. He tested the risers with suspicion. Everything else
Darien had built was untrustworthy and clever with traps; if this stairway
was either harmless or safe, it should be the glaring exception. Dakar almost
wished he was clinging like an insect to wild rock.
    Dewed with clammy fog, the Mad Prophet broke through the cloud
layer. Ahead, the last sunshine glared off Rockfell's knifepoint summit.
Suspended between that pinnacle which supported heaven, and a
netherworld floored with combed cotton and shaded rose and purple by the
encroaching twilight, Dakar sucked in a nervous breath. Dire cold froze
the hair in his nose. He coughed, which caused Asandir to beckon
impatiently from the ledge where Davien's stairway ended.
    The pack by then rested at Asandir's feet, a lump of weather-stained
canvas that Dakar gave a wide berth upon his arrival. The thing might
appear as innocuous as somebody's bundled picnic, but even an appren-
tice's awareness could sense the hedging sting of guard-wards from two
paces away.
    Asandir poised before a vertical slab of black rock, his ear pressed to its
mirror-smooth polish and his palms resting flat on either side. He seemed
prepared to spend motionless hours that way, while his apprentice
shivered, abandoned to boredom.

451


 A whining snap split the air.
'Kharadmon,' Asandir commanded, and suddenly, sharply, stepped back.
Dakar smelled ozone, then all but fell over as a bolt stark as lightning
seared across the blank stone. A mapwork of convoluted spell craft flared
across the face, chiselled with charged lines of runes. Lit blue by a chained
might that dazzled and dwarfed him, Asandir stood unmoved, while from
below, the fog moiled up in disturbed billows to hedge Rockfell round with
anvil formations like thunderheads.
    Though only nature responded in reaction to the proximity of energized
coils of power, the likeness to the moving mists of Desh-thiere left Dakar
hollow with dread. The sun had dipped low. What sky remained visible
glowed aquamarine, the moon a burning disc as fey in its light as the
dagger-edged fire of raw spells. But these rang in high, subliminal
vibration, haloed by silver-blue veilings of disturbed fog. Then abruptly as
the power had been raised, it flickered, flared violet, and faded.
  Where rock had been lay a door.
  Dakar gaped. 'How did you do that?'
    Asandir muttered words about physical rearrangement, and briskly
hooked up his pack. A second later he vanished into the square black vault
that formed the unsealed entrance to Rockfell.
    Flash-blind and blinking, Dakar advanced more cautiously. Swallowed at
once by the dark, he felt oppressed to the point of suffocation. But the air
came and went from his lungs, unrestricted. The innards of the mountain
were dry, bone-cold and smelled like metal filings and dust. The doorway at
his back seemed a cube rinsed with light, as dangerously transient as a
tienelle vision. 'You didn't happen to bring candles ?' Dakar asked wistfully.
    Out of pity, Kharadmon made a light. Its spark spread through gloom to
reveal a bare chamber carved on floor and walls in complex patterns and
runes of guard. At the centre rested a slab, set askew to reveal a pit
containing a bottomless well of blind darkness. The cobwebbed rungs of a
ladder poked through, its origin swallowed in shadow.
    Asandir herted the sack with the flask and started down. Before he had
done three steps, dry wood gave way beneath his boot. Slivers whispered
falling through air and long seconds elapsed before their impact echoed
back, proving the shaft had a bottom. The well was dreadfully deep.
    Unfazed at being poised on rotten footing over what amounted to an
abyss, the sorcerer said, 'Kharadmon? You'll need to strengthen the ladder
or Dakar will surely break his neck.'
    'I'm not going down there!' The Mad Prophet folded his arms across his
chest and obstinately planted his toes.
    'If you don't, you're quite likely to freeze.' Pragmatic, Asandir waited
while the rungs under his hands flared red under Kharadmon's binding. He
moved on, his hair stirred by air currents that funnelled down into the pit.
 Dakar steeled himself and swung onto the ladder that dropped away into

452


the unknown. His hands left sweatmarks on wood still warmed from
enchantment. He forced himself to start down, while Kharadmon's light
travelled with him until he was encircled by stone walls. The descent
seemed to go on forever. His calves quivered as overstressed muscles bore
his weight. The Mad Prophet could not shake the impression that the well
had been cut deeper than the roots of Rockfell mountain itself.
    The jar as his foot struck the bottom almost startled him out of his skin.
He looked about. The shaft ended in a five-sided cell, scrawled with
entangled sigils and spiralling lattices of power that made the eyes burn
and the head swim in vicious, twisty dizziness.
    'Don't stare,' Asandir cautioned. 'The patterns here both dazzle and
bind. You could lose your mind in this maze of wards to the point where
even I can't call you back.'
    Such were the safeguards upon the chamber that the sorcerer's warning
fell dead against the air. Even the echoes were trapped. Dakar ripped his
gaze away, then knuckled his eyes until they teared. 'What was the last
thing confined here?'
    Kharadmon snorted in contempt. 'You might better ask what last
escaped. Everything ever shut in here eventually worked its way out.'
    'Not the iyats,' Asandir contradicted. He ran his fingers over the walls.
His touch raised uneasy vibrations in the air that riled the skin but made
no sound. Green sparks danced from the contact causing Dakar to grit his
teeth. Unperturbed, the sorcerer added, 'Those were released, you'll
remember, to add havoc to Davien's rebellion.'
    'We're not going to sleep here,' Dakar interrupted. He felt
claustrophobic, and strongly inclined to throw up.
    Asandir glanced abstractedly over one shoulder. 'I advise you to try.
You'll feel less ill with your eyes closed, and rechecking the symmetry of
these wards will likely take most of the night.'
 'You didn't need me,' Dakar retorted. 'Why insist that I come.~'
    'But Kharadmon told you already.' Impatient, Asandir abandoned the
intricacies of his spellwork. He turned full around and gave Dakar a
regard that was testy enough to peel skin. 'Your body needed the
exercise. '
    Which point incensed Dakar to black rage. He filled his lungs to shout
imprecations.
    No word emerged. His jaw opened, shut and opened again like a fish's.
His eyes bulged. Then, in some odd fit of difficulty that had no visible
cause, his features crumpled in frustration and his knees buckled. His
Fellowship master caught him before he collapsed.
    Laughing, Asandir lowered the Mad Prophet's bulk the rest of the way to
the floor. 'How timely.'
    Kharadmon's ripe chuckle answered. 'Quite.' His image unfurled, posed
in satisfaction over Dakar. 'He'll sleep through the night. Good. That
should leave us some peace in which to work.'

453


The next thing Dakar knew, Asandir was shaking him awake.
    'Get up,' the sorcerer insisted. 'You're lying across space we need for the
final defence ward.'
    Dakar grumbled, and finally yielded to the prodding that urged him back
to his feet. His bones ached from hours spent on hard and chilly stone, and
his eyes felt bored through by a blast of unbearable light. He determined after
a moment that the glare emanated from the centre of the pit. He blinked,
squinted through hurting vision and at the heart of the dazzle, barely made
out the shadowy outline of the flask that contained the Mistwraith.
    About then he noticed that his skin tingled as if drenched by a tonic, and
all of his body hair had lifted. Throughout his service with Asandir, he had
never witnessed such a presence of raw force. For once in his life awed to
silence, he gaped.
    From behind him, Asandir's voice rose and fell in incantation. The words,
Dakar noticed uneasily, were not in any language ever spoken upon the soil
of Athera; and the halo of light that netted Desh-thiere's flask.was not solid,
but seemed as he stared to be composed of flecked light that shuttled in
convoluted, interlocking spirals that ached the eye's attempt to follow.
    Then a grip closed on his wrist and tugged him back. 'Cover your face. At
once,' Asandir commanded. 'Or the energy flare as Kharadmon sets the ward
will leave you blind.'
    Dakar began to comply, then paused. 'Wait,' he said on impulse. 'Let me
help.'
    'You can't.' Asandir's curtness stemmed from weariness. He worked to
soften his delivery as he added, 'I can't. The energies involved would
vaporize flesh. The final binding must be sealed by Kharadmon alone.'
    Eyes shielded, Dakar heard Asandir give his colleague word. A violent
crack cut the air. Heat flashed across the pit, stinging exposed skin, and
accompanied by spitting rains of sparks that left behind an acrid scent of
brimstone.
 'It's safe to look,' Asandir said presently.
    Dakar lowered his hands, to find the flask at the centre of the pit encircled
by a cold blue halo. If the light was subliminally faint, its effects upon the
mind were not: just standing within the ward's proximity caused a bone-
deep, aching discomfort. Whatever arcane unpleasantness the Fellowship
sorcerers used to fashion their prisons, Dakar refused to know.
    Asandir also seemed reluctant to endure the ward's resonance since he
started immediately up the ladder. Dakar hastened after, glad to be quit of
Rockfell with its dread overtones of magic and the supremely dangerous
entity left there in incarceration.
    Morning sunlight washed through the opening to the outside by the time
Dakar crawled off the ladder. Never so pleased to breathe in cold air in his
life, he did not even mind the prickle against his skin as the icier draft that
was Kharadmon flowed from the well on his heels.
 'Are you entirely clear?' Asandir asked his discorporate colleague.

454


    Kharadmon shot off a phrase in the old tongue that surprised Dakar to
incredulity. Before the Mad Prophet could take stock and appreciate the
discorporate mage's use of expletives, Asandir said, 'Help me drag the
cover back over the well.' He indicated the massive round slab that rested
ajar across the opening.
    Dakar glared at the offending rock. 'Don't be saying I need the exercise,'
he griped before Kharadmon could bait him further.
    'You know,' Kharadmon observed in blithe enthusiasm, as Dakar
grunted and heaved and the stone grated, and slowly gave way to brute
force. 'Be careful how you place that. I much doubt you can see round that
beer gut of yours to tell if you're going to crush your toes.'
    Caught with every muscle straining and the veins in his neck about to
burst, Dakar could do naught but grit his teeth. When at length the pit was
covered over, he was too breathless to effect a rejoinder. His pique lasted all
th~ way through the setting of the secondary wards. Hours passed. By the
time the Fellowship mages finished raising spells and guard circles to
assure permanence, the chamber floor showed no flaw to indicate the
existence of any pit.
    Outside, Dakar expected, fully exposed to the weather, the pair would
repeat the exhaustive process until the cliff-face was impenetrable. 'By
Ath,' he commented sourly. 'You've taken precautions enough to repel
Dharkaron himself. One would hope after this, that Rockfell pit would
prove more secure than ever it has in the past.'
    Asandir cast a jaundiced eye at his apprentice. 'It might, you know, if we
tried dark practice, and chained a slain spirit to stand as sentinel.'
    'Oh no.' Dakar backed up a step and crashed heavily into spelled stone.
'You'd hardly drag me up mountains for exercise if you'd wanted to make
me a sacrifice.' Nonethless, he moved his fat bulk with alacrity through
the portal onto the outside ledge. While the Fellowship sorcerers resumed
painstaking labour and set their final seal over the rock at the head of
Davien's stair, he remained inordinately quiet.
    By noon, Rockfell Peak was secured. The trio of visitors departed,
leaving behind them the Betrayer's watching gargoyles and serried banks
of clouds that drifted to the play of frigid winds. Confined the Mistwraith
might be, but its toll of damages upon their world remained yet to be
measured. For down in a lightless pit of rock, sealed behind fearful rings of
wardS, Desh*thiere's wraiths brooded in confinement, awaiting the
vengeance curse laid on two half-brothers to burgeon into bloodshed and
war.

455


Warning

Unsettled through the days since the scrying in the dyeyard warehouse,
Elaira walked the tideflats of Narms. Around her, twilight cast grey veiling
over wind-ripped clouds and fine drizzle. Here the rush of incoming waves
dampened the bayfront clamour of barking dogs and the hurried curses of
wagoners who threaded low-slung fish-carts back from market. A stiff
breeze off the water carried away the endless bickering of children and
singsong cries of woodvendors and the boys who sold buckets of steamed
crabs layered in straw to keep them hot. Ahead, a meandering shadow
against gloom, a beggar scavenged the tidemark for cork floats or broken
slats from fish crates that could be salvaged for firewood.
    Elaira heard only the waves and the crying gulls who dipped and whirled,
minutes away from night roosting. Troubled already in spirit, she was
wearied from playing at pretence. She would not return to a meal with
Morriel's entourage at the hostel, to pick at food when she had no appetite.
She refused to retire, to huddle frustrated under blankets touched dank by
the salt-laden fogs that smothered Narms after dark. This one night she
would resist the demands of sleep; would not close her eyes and dream
again of fine-chiselled s'Ffalenn features that reproached her in aggrieved
accusation.
    What could not be forgiven, she had done. The repercussions could not
be reversed. The Prime Circle had sealed their final decision; formal
verdict would be sent ~'out at midnight, when the lane tides ran least
disturbed by static thrown off by the sun. The Prime's decree concerning
the latent danger Arithon presented to society allowed for no mitigating
circumstance: his moves were to be exhaustively tracked. Wherever his
intent could be hampered and dogged, Koriani would act to disadvantage
him.
 Elaira sidestepped a patch of seaweed thrown up in tangles on pale sand.

456


Ahead, the beggar paused to rest on a rock, the rags that tied his hooded
head flapping in the wind. She passed him by without greeting, which was
unlike her, since his kind had replaced her family through early childhood.
    She rounded a jumble of boulders, then picked her way over the
breakwater that protected Narms harbour from the sea. Sheltered there,
fishing smacks and trader galleys loomed at anchorage, or sat low on their
marks, made fast to the bollards at the wharf. Deck lanterns threw greasy
orange streaks across waters. pocked with light rain. At the taffrail of the
nearest vessel, a woman crobned a melody, her knees tucked up under a
fishing tarp as she peeled vegetables for her supper. Down the docks a bent
grandfather trundled a wheelbarrow of cod toward the street, while a boy
and his brother mended nets. The reek of fish offal and the squabble of the
gulls that dipped and dived through dank pilings checked Elaira as if she
had run against a wall.
    She deliberated, aware that to go forward was to tread the safer path.
What she wanted more was seclusion; and a salt pool left behind by the tide
that she could use to attempt forbidden scrying.
    She shivered under her damp cloak. The intention that lurked at the edge
of her thoughts was dangerous; foolish. Still, she turned back toward the
beach.
    She found herself alone with temptation. The beggar had gone, the
rocks where he had perched glistening with barnacles burnished by the
torchlight off the street. The bayside surf was overlaid by deeper thunder,
as two stout brewer's boys rolled tuns from an ale dray parked outside a
tavern. Sailors caroused in the side alley, laughing, while the shrieks of a
bawdywoman taunted them to sport their prowess in her bed. The din of
workaday humanity seemed remote and without overtones of comfort.
Made aware that her months in the fenlands of Korias studying herb lore
had retuned her nature to prefer silence, Elaira sighed. Change had
overtaken her too fast since her unlucky foray to meet Asandir. She
picked a spot where the breeze blew clean off the water and sat, her head
propped in her hands. She watched the incoming surf, but tonight no
iyats rode the waves to refuel their energies on the forces of winds and
tides.
    Night fell gloomy and damp. At her feet, ruffled over in pewter-edged
ripples, lay the tidepool she longed for. Torn by indecision, she wondered
which of her loyalties she should suffer for: the one, to Arithon, already
breached; or the other, now cruelly strained, which tied her to Koriani
service through sworn bond to a spelbcrystal that Morriel would certainly
use to break her.
    Eyes closed, her hearing awash with the seethe of salt foam, Elaira
reviewed the unalterable absolutes that imprisoned her in misery. Where
once she could have lightened her mood with flippant behaviour and
sarcasm, now the frustrated, circling grief of knowing a man with indelible
intimacy ate at her, night and day. The surcease of physical release was

457


denied her. That one act of spirited curiosity had caused her to be culled,
and now used, as Morriel's personal instrument to map Arithon's
motivations could neither be escaped or avoided.
    But interlinked with this were other trusts acquired in her visit to
Enithen Tuer's Erdane garret.
    'Girl, you're shaking, and not at all from the cold,' said a kindly voice
from the shadows.
    Elaira started, then exclaimed aloud as a hand lightly grasped her
shoulder.
    The beggar had not left her, but stood, guarded from prying eyes and
wind by an overhang of sea-beaten rock. His earlier appearance had
deceived. Clad all in black, he wore no ornament. None of his clothing lay
in tatters. What had first been mistaken for a frayed headcloth was revealed
now as a raven, hunched and damp on its master's shoulder, regarding her
with eyes too wise for a bird's.
    'Who are you?' Elaira blurted. But before he gave answer, she knew. His
eyes upon her were too still and deep to encompass any less than the vision
of a Fellowship sorcerer.
    A wave that was larger than most hurled and broke against the shore.
Fingers of foam clawed up the rocks, then splashed back in silver lace. His
voice as he addressed her held the same ageless timbre as the sea. 'I am
Traithe, sent by Sethvir to give you a message from the Fellowship.'
    As Elaira moved to speak, he restrained her. Though his step was careful
and iame, his hands could grip hard enough to bruise. 'No. Say nothing.
You're aware that the wrong words could set your vows to your order in
jeopardy.'
  She stilled, shocked by his bluntness.
    Traithe said, 'Understand, and clearly, that my purpose here is to shield
you from any such breach in your loyalty.'
    Stung still by guilt-ridden thoughts, Elaira's sensibilities fled. She
wrenched off Traithe's hold and stepped back. 'My Prime might command
my obedience. She does not own me in spirit!'
    'Well spoken.' Traithe sat, which irritated the raven to a testy flapping of
wings. He raised a scarred knuckle to soothe its breast feathers, then
peered slantwise at her, chagrined as a grandfather caught in a bout of boy's
mischief. 'Hold on to that truth, brave lady.'
    Yet his affirmation of natural order could not undo vows sealed to flesh
through a Koriani focus-stone. A piece of herself that Elaira was powerless
to call back had been given over into Morriel's control. Her ambivalence
toward the traps that Traithe most carefully never mentioned gave rise to
an outraged admission. 'Ath's mercy, I was six years old when the Prime
Circle swore me to service. They claim, always, that power must not be
given without limits. But lately, I suspect my seniors prefer their trainees
young, the better to keep their talent biddable.'
  Traithe reached out and touched her, a bare brush of fingers against her

458


hand. Yet warmth flowed from the contact, and a calmness that lent her
surcease to think.
    Unsure his kindness did not mask warning like a glove, Elaira chose a
rock and sat also. 'Courage saved nothing two days ago.' She laced
unsteady hands around her knees, self-conscious in the sorcerer's frank
regard.
    'If you speak of Arithon, he doesn't need any man's saving.' Petulant and
ready to roost, the raven sidled and clipped its master a peck on the ear.
Traithe called it a rude word, which prompted Elaira to smile.
    'Better.' The sorcerer had a crinkle to his eyes that bespoke a readiness to
laugh. 'The occasion wasn't meant to be solemn.' He pushed his bird from
his shoulder, then watched with what seemed his whole attention as it
croaked indignation, and finally settled in a nook and tucked its head
under one wing. 'Let me say what I was sent for, and see if your heart
doesn't lighten.' As Asandir had done once before to ease her nerves,
Traithe bent down and made a small fire. The kindling he used was a
beggar's gleaning of broken cork-floats and bits of jetsam. Flame caught
with a hiss in the dampness, and shed fine-grained haloes in the drizzle.
    Oddly content to be still, Elaira wondered whether some spellward of
quietude had been set along with the flames.
    Traithe answered as though she had spoken. 'What peace you feel is your
own, but it may perhaps be helped by the ward of concealment placed over
this space between the rocks.' He grinned in gleeful conspiracy. 'To your
sisterhood, this fire doesn't exist.'
 Elaira said, 'Then you know about -'
    He sealed her lips fast with a finger. 'Let me say what we know.
Otherwise,' he stopped, let his hand fall. Inscrutable as a stone in a
millpond, he studied her a moment with his head cocked, then yielded
before her straight strength to his impulse. 'Otherwise, Sethvir was most
plain, the misery of remorse will later drive you to use this tide pool. In
saltwater that will fail to protect you from discovery, you will attempt to
send warning of your sisterhood's doings to the one of my colleagues who
might listen.'
    On her feet before she could react rationally, Elaira backed at bay against
the rocks. Even her lips were white.
    As if she had not budged, Traithe continued. 'Which act would be
treason against your Prime Senior's directive.' He tipped up his face,
sharply and brutally blunt. 'Unnecessary treason, brave lady, which is why
you will sit back down. Morriel may not own you in spirit, but she does
command your absolute obedience. The Fellowship can shield from her
what happens by our actions, but not what you undertake in free will.'
    The rush of waves through sand and stone seemed to consume all the air
for the moment while Elaira poised, half on the edge of panicked flight. In
the end, she sat because her legs gave out; and because Fellowship
sorcerers would hardly stand back and allow the half-brothers to commit a

459


whole kingdom to war without some emphatically sound reason that
Koriani intervention of any kind might shortsightedly come to disrupt. In a
croak more like the raven's than human speech, Elaira capitulated. 'Say
your piece.'
    'Well,' said Traithe. Less solemn in his ways than Asandir, he was
smiling. 'For one thing, you need not warn us of an event that Sethvir
already knows. Morriel doesn't breathe, these days, without some sort of
surveillance from Luhaine.'
'You shouldn't confide in me,' Elaira said in a gasp of smothered surprise.
As if she had piqued him with a riddle, Traithe's brows rose. 'Morriel's
aware of the fact. It's a sore point she won't tell Lirenda, so I doubt she'll
challenge you to make it public.' He went on, his manner as piquant as any
matron sharing gossip at a well. 'Furthermore, if your Prime has chosen to
meddle with Arithon s'Ffalenn...' The gleam in his eyes hot with
mischief, the sorcerer shrugged ruefully. 'Let's by all means stay plain. I'm
not saying she's resolved on such an action. But if she should, her pack of
conniving seniors will be richly entitled to the consequences.'
    'You imply that Arithon is defended?' Intrigued despite her better
judgement, Elaira edged closer to the fire.
    Traithe tucked back a flap of her cloak that the breeze pushed
dangerously near the sparks. 'I'm saying the Teir's'Ffalenn himself is well
able to guard his own interests.' When Elaira looked dubious, he gave back
a look that happily embraced shared conspiracy. 'Fatemaster's judgement,
lady, the Fellowship itself had a tough time trying to shepherd that spirit!
Let me tell you what happened once, when Morriel tried a scrying on
Arithon.'
    His hands stuck out to warm near the fire like any innocuous old man's,
the sorcerer went on to describe in satirical detail exactly what transpired
the day the wards over Kieling Tower had been breached during conflict
with the Mistwraith.
    Traithe gave the telling no embellishment, but used humour and
bluntness like scalpels to bare a rotten truth. He spared nothing. Not
Lirenda's furious humility, nor Morriel's arrogant overconfidence. Least of
all did he avoid Arithon's vicious reaction to the fact that Elaira's private
feelings had been used as a tool for unscvapulous prying.
    Choking and spluttering through a mirth just shy of a seizure, Elaira
tried and failed to picture Lirenda upended in her own tangled skirts. 'A
worthy prank.' She caught her breath finally, stung from her laughter by
real grief. 'I'm a game piece.' She, who most questioned Koriani tenets and
practices, had unwittingly become their most indispensable cipher in the
course of the coming conflict.
    'Arithon knows that,' Traithe said, equally serious and plain. 'He doesn't
like it. Should Morriel cross him again on those grounds, he's going to hit
her back with far more than a harmless warning. Have you access to the
histories of the high kings?'

460


    As she nodded, he said, 'Good. Read them and see what happens when
past scions of s'Ffalenn were pressed to embrace open enmity. Make no
mistake when I tell you Arithon has inherited all ot his line's rugged
loyalty. He's got Torbrand's temper too, intact as I've ever seen it.'
    The scanty bits of fuel had burned now to a scarlet nest of embers. Across
a rising puff of smoke, Elaira looked at the sorcerer whose forthcoming
nature came and went like broken clouds across sunlight. Traithe had
turned reticent again. Though his eyes never shied from her regard, and his
kindly air of listener remained intact, his stillness invited her to question
him on her own. 'You're asking me to trust Arithon's judgement?'
    '! ask nothing,' Traithe amended gently. 'I offer only the observation that
Arithon is qualified to defend himself from any Koriani interference that
originates through you. And he will do so, never asking your preference on
the matter.'
    Hands clasped hard beneath her cloak, Elaira chuckled. 'I see. He breaks
none of my vows in the process and therefore I won't get hurt. Very neat. I
shall allow him to act as my protector and endeavour to be the dutiful
initiate.' She gathered her skirts to rise, a lump in her throat brought by
surety: that this time, the Fellowship's intervention had diverted her from
breaking Koriani mores. But in fact, the measure was stopgap. Traithe's
concerns had the more firmly grounded her self-knowledge, that the vows
of her order were as unsuited to her nature as crown and kingdom were to
the music that fate had forced Arithon to stifle.
    Which of the pair of them would be first to break, she wondered, as she
watched Traithe douse the sparks of their fire with effortless spellcraft.
The incoming tide would sweep off the ashes and leave sands smoothed
clean of footprints.
    Traithe stood and roused his raven, which croaked like a drunk with a
hangover and hopped sullenly to its master's wrist. Never so absorbed by
his bird as he appeared, the sorcerer said suddenly, 'You're not alone, brave
lady. Nor are you entirely Morriel's plaything. Not since the day you chose
to seek out Asandir in Erdane.'
    'Ath,' said Elaira in a futile effort to bury her anguish behind toughness.
'Now didn't I think that one escapade touched off my troubles in the first
place?'
    The sorcerer returned a look that drilled her through and gave no quarter.
'Never sell yourself so short!'
    'Take care of him,' she blurted, in heartfelt reference to the s'Ffalenn
prince.
    Poised to leave, unobtrusive as the beggar she first had mistaken him for,
Traithe reached out and stroked her cheek, as the father she had never
known might have done to reassure a cherished daughter. As his hand fell
away, she cupped the place he had caressed; and now the tears fell and
blinded her.
 'Lady, great heart.' He sighed gently. 'The love within you is no shame.

461


And since you fear to ask, I'll tell you: there is no secret to be kept. The
Fellowship stepped back at Etarra because the grace of spirit we know as
life lay in danger of permanent imbalance. Asandir urged, but never forced
your beloved. Arithon chose his kingdom ahead of music, by his own free
will.'
'What?' Elaira stared back in ice-hard fury and disbelief. 'Why would he?'
Suddenly bleak as the clearest winter starfield, Traithe said, 'Because he
would not be the one man to stand in the path of the Paravians' return to
this continent.'
    'Well,' said Elaira wretchedly. 'For his sake, I hope the creatures prove
worth it!'
    'That you must judge for yourself.' A wistfulness haunted Traithe's
manner. 'I can tell you as fact, that the Riathan Paravians are the only
unsullied connection we have to Ath Creator and that their return is the
cornerstone for the future harmony of this world. But words impart
meaning without wisdom. To understand, you and Arithon must both
survive to experience a unicorn's living presence.' A wave broke. Driven
on by rising tide, salt spray showered down, mixed in coarser drops with
the drizzle that never for an instant ceased to fall. 'I must leave you now,
brave lady. The fire is out, and the wards on this place will soon dissipate.'
    Elaira blotted a dripping nose and tried through resentment to recover
courtesy. 'I owe you thanks.'
    Seamed features lost beneath cloth that the raven sidled under to take
shelter, Traithe shook his head. 'Take instead my blessing. You need the
consolation, I suspect. I was sent to you because an augury showed the
Warden of Althain that, for good or ill you're the one spirit alive in this
world who will come to know Arithon best. Should your Master of
Shadow fail you, or you fail him, the outcome will call down disaster.'
    Elaira resisted an ugly, burning urge to stop her ears. 'And if neither of us
fails?'
    Traithe soothed his bird with his fingers, that being the only comfort he
could offer to any breathing creature at this juncture. 'Ah, lady, we've been
entrusted with this world and free will, which certainly cancels
guarantees.' He touched her hand in aggrieved farewell. 'Never doubt. At
the Ravens, your action was right and fitting.'
    He turned and departed, while wind and thin rain reduced him to a fast-
striding shadow against smothering fog and white sea. Elaira stayed on
alone until the waves that surged with flood-tide encroached on the rocks
and soaked her feet. Dragging wet skirts above her ankles, she felt ready to
return to her colleagues. The depression that had weighed on her earlier
had lifted, replaced by milder sadness shot through by the bold and heady
challenge of exhilaration.
    Morriel might command her to Koriani loyalty and obedience; but
where Elaira chose to give her heart was a choice reclaimed for her own.

462


Eventide

His hook-nosed profile harddined in shadows and torchlight, Gnudsog of
the Etarran guard brings word from the war council held at the border of
$trakewood Forest: 'Diegan and Lysaer are reconciled,' he informs his
captains who wait in the meadow. 'We take the sure route tomorrow,
poison the river and the springs to kill the game, then methodically starve
out each campsite. Pesquil's plan is best. Children are the future of the
clans, and without women the wretched breed will die... '

Deep under the eaves of the forest, in a valley riddled with traps, clansmen
under Steiven s'Valerient sharpen their swords and their knives, and for
the last time wax their bowstrings; while on a lyranthe the last of its kind,
Halliron Masterbard plays ballads and bright songs from better days, to
inspire their hearts to a valour he grieves will be futile...

Returned to his post at Althain Tower, Sethvir bends his regard toward
Rockfell Peak to check the wards which bind the Mistwraith. He finds no
flaws, and a small ease of mind, for though Arithon could build on his
training and possibly unravel those securities, having suffered to subdue
such an evil, Rathain's prince was least likely to meddle in foolishness...

465



    XVII. MAR CH
STRAKEWOOD

UPON
FOREST

 Dressed out in clean tunics edged in city colours of scarlet and gold,
gleaming under polished helms and smart trappings; and bearing on their
backs and in their scabbards the newly wrought arms and chain-mail
purchased by the merchants' treasury at cost of eight hundred thousand
coin-weight, fine gold, the men of Etarra's garrison formed up and marched
just past dawn. Set like a sapphire in their midst, Lysaer sat his bridleless
chestnut. Lord Commander Diegan and Captain Gnudsog were positioned
at either flank, while the bannerbearers of the greater trade houses, and
message riders on their lean-flanked mounts clustered in formation just
behind. Four companies of standing army and reserves paraded after, in
disciplined units twenty-four hundred strong.
     Lysaer made no conversation. Groomed as befit his past stature, every
 inch the princely image of restrained pride, he was disinclined to trivialize
 his first foray against the s'Ffalenn who had demolished a fleet on Dascen
 Elur. Fighting was ugly business. No pennons, no style and no fanfares
 could mask that these men in their brilliance and finery marched, some to
 die in blood and suffering. Still, a heart not made of stone must thrill to the
 muffled thunder of war destriers. Each tight square of troops boasted
 ninety mounted lancers, four hundred crossbowmen and archers, and a
 perimeter of pikemen numbering nearly two thousand. Deep within their
 protection rolled the supply wagons and support troops and rearwards the
 additional thousand light cavalry under the black kite standard of the
 northern league of headhunters.
     Weather was also in their favour. The last spring rains had finally lifted;
 the rivers ran placid and shallow.
     Sunlight pricked the horizon, edged to the east by the black trees that
 rimmed $trakewood Forest. For a time as the air warmed, the companies
 marched knee-deep through mists that swathed the meadows in blue-grey.

465


These dispersed last from the hollows, to bare rolling hills and the dew-
spangled grass of early summer, bespattered and dappled with patches of
red brushbloom and weathered rock. A craggier landscape than Daon
Ramon, the plain of Araithe wore the season like a cloak of rippling new
silk, lush and sweet with flowers, overwhelming the senses in living green.
    Lysaer gazed across the vista, untrampled yet by the advancing mass of
his army. In his birthland of Amroth, such rich forage would have been
grazed short by sheep. He promised himself that if barbarian predation
were to blame for the lack of shepherds, his campaign against Arithon
would amend this. Then, in belated reassessment he realized that had
these hills been used once as pastures they should be crisscrossed by the
remains of stone fences and sheepfolds.
 There were none, nor any foundations of ruined cottages.
    These acres had possibly stayed untouched by man's industry through
the ages since Ath's first creation. Why such obviously prime pastureland
should go wasted puzzled Lysaer, until his thought was broken off by the
hoofbeats of an outrider returning at a gallop.
    The scout wheeled his mud-splashed mount and reined into step beside
Gnudsog. 'Lord,' he saluted to Diegan, and then his commanding field
officer, 'Captain.' But he looked at Lysaer as he delivered his report, which
was startling enough to call a halt to the advance.
    Six barbarian children had been spotted, practicing javelin casts in a glen
just upriver of the ford across the Tal Quorin.
    'A stroke of luck, your Grace,' Diegan said. To avoid embarrassment, he
allowed Lysaer the titular courtesy due his birthright. Since no honorific at
all implied a labourer's stature and thus demeaned both parties in
conversation only socially acceptable between equals, other Etarran
officials had followed suit. 'To find barbarians so easily, and they,
overtaken unaware.'
    Stolid on his horse as a figurehead, Gnudsog scowled his annoyance.
'Clan scouts are never so careless!'
    'Elders, surely,' Lysaer agreed. His clear gaze swung toward the scout.
'But children? What would you guess were their ages?'
    The answer held no hesitation: the largest had looked no more than
twelve.
    'Rat's get all, and bad cess to them.' Gnudsog slapped a fly that landed,
but had no chance to bite his horse. 'They'll know every inch of this
country, Deshir's scouts. Likely as not, they're part of a camp that's laid in
an ambush farther on.'
    'Against an army?' Diegan grinned, the gilt scrollwork on his helmet and
the plumes on his bridle and harness the fashion of the daredevil gallant.
'The odds would hardly be sporting.'
    'Barbarians don't play at odds,' came a querulous interruption fn~m the
sidelines. 'In these parts, they prefer pits lined with sharpened stakes and
spring-traps that rip out a man's guts, or tear the axles off wagons.' Smart i~~

466


a black and white surcoat over chain-mail dulled with grease and years of
polishing, Pesquil rode up to determine the cause of the delay. At the head
of the column, he jerked short his brush-scarred gelding that he liked best
for its toughness. 'So you chase those children thinking to find an
encampment of scouts you can surprise, eh? Well, try that. Then find
yourselves bloody.'
    Lysaer regarded the dip of the hills that unfolded in curves toward the
ford. Chilly in courtesy he said, 'Would you send your ten year old son out
as gambit before the weapons of a war host?'
    'Perhaps. If the stakes were arranged in my favour.' Sallow, pockscarred
and quick with nervous energy, Pesquil shrugged. 'For sure, I've known
clan-born chits who'd dangle out their newborns if they thought any gain
could be wrung from it. The slow plan we follow is safest.'
    But Diegan was ill-pleased to spend a summer swatting insects and
enduring rough camp in the open when a bolder victory might be possible.
'Send in ~ small troop of light riders,' he ordered Gnudsog. 'See where the
children flee and let the army follow if it's safe.'
 Pesquil reined around so hard his mount grunted in pain from the bit.
'Fools,' he muttered. 'Idiots.' And he spurred to a canter back through the
lines to his headhunters.
    Gnudsog watched him go, his huge hands crossed at his saddle pommel.
Then his eyes, black as rivets, swung to Lysaer. 'What do you think,
prince?' From his lips, the title implied insult.
    Lysaer raised his head in genteel challenge. 'Send in your riders,' he
suggested. 'If a trap exists, then spring it with fewest losses.'
    'You don't think it's a trap.' Deigan soothed his restive destrier. Then,
his regard in speculation upon Lysaer, he raised a gauntlet chased in
glittering gold to signal the columns to rest at ease. 'Why?'
    'Because ! saw Arithon in a back alley with a band of knacker's
conscripts once when he didn't think he was being watched.' Fair-skinned
as an ice figure in the early sunlight, the prince stroked the black-handled
sword newly forged for his use in the field. Rumour held that the blade had
been engraved with Arithon's name in reverse runes, which may have been
at the armourer's insistence, for shaping a blade to kill a sorcerer. Lysaer
did not look superstitious or afraid, but only pragmatic as he said, 'The
Shadow Master has few scruples. But I know him well enough to hedge
that he'd sanction no ambush that involved any use of small children.'
    At this, even Gnudsog reconsidered. 'You could be right.' Supporting
evidence lay with the arrangements for the escape of the knacker's brats.
Arithon's bribes had been lavish enough that hard measures had been
needed to pry loose the names of which parties had treated with him.
Etarra's field captain scraped an itch underneath his right bracer. 'Let's
prove Pesquil a sissy.'
    Forty riders were dispatched to track the children. From the rear of the
column, Pesquil watched them go, his narrow lips clamped in disdain.

467


'Those lordly fops Gnudsog has to nursemaid didn't listen. We'll keep our
distance, then.'
    The mounted lieutenant at his elbow stopped fingering the scalplocks
that fringed his saddle, and widened seamed eyes at his commander.
'They're going in with the army, you think? And you'd send our league
riding after?'
    'Any trap laid by Deshans is bound to be placed deep in Strakewood.' Head
cocked in consideration, Pesquil picked his teeth with a fingernail. 'We'll ~o
in, yes.' He clipped out a breathy laugh. 'With two whole divisions ~f
garrison troops ahead, and another pair blundering on each flank, whatever
surprise the barbarians fixed'11 be sprung before we try the trail. Even
Steiven's dirty tactics can't murder ten thousand troops without exposure.
We'll win our bounties in the mop up.'
    'I hope your score's well squared with Daelion Fatemaster.' The
lieutenant adjusted studded reins in laconic resignation. 'They say wc fight
a sorcerer who weaves darkness. For myself, Sithaer, I'd always planned l'd
die rich.'

As Etarra's two score light riders crested the rise above the ford, six y~un~
boys snatched up javelins and bolted like hares for the forest. Whether they
had defied their parents to play in the open, or whether they had been posted
in plain view for bait became moot as the riders spurred their mounts and
charged after them. They were quarry, and fear for their lives drove their
flight. Flat out across dew-tracked greensward, enemies with drawn blades
swept down at their heels. The boys made straight course for shelter,
vaulting the switched back curves of marshy streamlets on the butts of their
toy wooden weapons.
    They were small and light, and shod in deerhide that made little mark
the hummocks, while the steel-rimmed hooves of the horses bit deep
through the soft turf and sank. The riders were forced to take a zig-za~gin,~
course over firm ground, or tear their mounts' tendons in the bog. Thc
shouted and whipped on their horses and brandished sabres in a show ~f
blood-thirsty frustration, their orders plain. The clan boys were to be r~uted,
not killed. Pursuit must hound them into Strakewood until they tired, then
slacken off and appear to give up. Trackers would take over from there.
youngsters would be followed in stealth back to their parents' encampmcnt;
a sensible plan, which pleased the garrison's light horsemen, carefully
chosen as fathers who might condone the slayings of headhunters, but who
had little inclination themselves for the horror of skewering youngsters.
    Hardbitten to bitterness by the atrocities of his profession, Gnudsog was
not given to foolish chances.
    His forty light riders crashed into the hazels and saplings that edged the
forest just seconds behind the last straggler. Thickly tangled summer scrub
swiftly isolated children from hunters. Crows startled up from feeding on

468


blackberries flapped away with raucous calls of warning. Squirrels
scattered chattering in alarm. Raked by briars and low branches, the
horsemen determinedly pressed onward. Their mud-flecked mounts
gouged through dead sticks and moss, the odd hoof-fall a dissonant chink
of steel against buried scarps of granite.
    Ahead, all but invisible in their deer hides, the barbarian children raced
in fierce silence, the one towhead among them picked out in the gloom by
the chance-caught flicker of filtered sunlight.
    h~tent on keeping him in sight, the lead rider never saw the wooden
iavclin left braced at an angle in the path. His mount gathered stride and
dc~~red a rotten log, then crashed, shoulder down, impaled. Its scream of
pa~rtal agony hatrowed the dawn-damp wood, while the rider, thrown
headlong, struck a bough at an angle and broke his neck.
    First casualty of the Deshit barbarians, he died with his eyes still open
and the taste of blood on his tongue.
    Attracted to the site by the thrashing convulsions of dying horseflesh,
the survivors gathered and pulled up. With spur and rein they stayed their
~n~tmts' panic, while the first man in called the verdict. 'He's stopped breathing.'
    A still, stunned moment progressed to passionate contention over
~vhcthcr to stop now and call the army, or to ride down verminous whelps
~vh~sc parents had trained them for murder.
    q)harkaron's Spear!' raged one rider. 'I'd say there's no clever trap
w~nting! Or the Sithaer-begotten brats would just draw us on, and not
b~thcr stopping to kill!'
    That outcry was silenced, and grimly, by an officer given his authority
tt~,~gh Etarra's pedigreed elite. 'We stick with orders and track. One man
~, t l ~ back as spokesman. Lord Diegan's no coin-grubbing headhunter.
~t, ~y must up the garrison. Else risk finding himself a laughingstock, as
L]~', ~ll.'
 \\ i~tcl~ recast the affair as rank insult, for a boy's prank with a wooden
't'~ ~' t,, have killed a man before the armed might of Etarra.
    ~!~. ~uts of agreement endorsed this plan, while the dismounted volun-
'., ,. ~,l<t,d for help. Willing hands lifted the slain man and tied him over the
.~t~ c. t~,r transport back to the main troop.

~i~ '. ~n swift silence up the marshy course of Tal Quorin, the children were
1,,~: ,~ nee lost to sight. But in the beds of green moss, under the sills of the
.~!::.~ clumps, water pooled in a flutried progression of footprints. These
:i~ t~n-clad hooves of the destriers milled under, as the main strength of
Lt~. ~'s garrison ploughed past. The ground was left harrowed to brown
:;~. thz~t sucked and spattered, causing the horses to stumble, and the
:~dc~ to curse as their tassels and trappings became begrimed. Lances
::~l<ed in the greenbriar, and the foot troops slogged silent to the rear.

469


    The supply wagons perforce had stayed behind. If Gnudsog had opposed
the decision to turn the main army up the riverbed, he knew better than to
belabour the mistake. His mouth a grim slash in his hardened leather face,
he brought his lancers forward with professional determination.
    Noon passed. No ambush seemed in evidence. The fall of the floodplain
sloped more steeply and the ground firmed, though the soil beneath its
canopy of deep wood still reeked strongly of bog. Swarming gnats remained
in force. The heavier shade at least curbed the growth of brambles, and as
the footing improved so did spirits and eagerness. Aware for some time
that the hemming effect of the hillsides was crowding his troops along the
bank, Gnudsog consulted with Lord Diegan and received permission to
regroup.
    'I mislike the feel of this entirely,' he grumbled, his eyes on his men as
their ranks wheeled and reformed to order despite the unsuitable terrain.
The garrison split and regrouped, two companies to divide and cross the
ridges on either side. These would advance up adjacent valleys and flank
the main force along the river. Gnudsog kept ruminating in monologue.
'Too easy.'
    At his side, stripped of his helm to adjust a crest plume disarranged by
low branches, Diegan raised his eyebrows. 'Does everything have to be
difficult?'
'Here? Against Steiven's clans?' Gnudsog curled his lip and spat. 'Yes.'
'But the clan chief might not be in command,' Lysaer pointed out, his
regard, chilly blue, on the veteran captain, and his hands, lightly crossed,
on his sword.
    'Well.' Gnudsog cleared his throat. 'Yon thieving little stoat of a
sorcerer's clever enough, if your cant to our council held truth.' Unfazed
before lordly affront, he grinned through his yellow, broken teeth. 'You and
my Lord Commander will ride behind with the second division. And if we
go back proving you hazed the city ministers like the ninnies they are, so
much the better. I like my killing quick, with the advantage of superior
numbers. Should things fail to get grim, you can always strip me of rank.
It's my pension I'm risking, not your necks.'
    His helm half raised, his reins looped over one forearm, Lord Diegan
stiflened in the costly glitter of his accoutrements.
    Aware the Lord Commander would protest, and quick to see Gnudsog
was'earnest in a concern he lacked any polish to express, Lysaer
diplomatically intervened. 'No one loses pensions for good sense.' He
stroked his horse's neck, smiled and said to Diegan, 'Since I spoke truth to
your council, we'll ride behind. Whether or not this clan encampment is
taken by surprise, should Arithon s'Ffalenn be with them, we must expect
counterthrust by sorcery. Our presence may well be needed to bolster the
middle ranks.'
 'My sister will call you fainthearted,' Diegan warned.
 'She may.' Lysaer's smile never faltered. 'Better that than have her weep

470


for me, dead.' He nudged his horse around and made his way to the river's
verge to find a place when the second column passed. Diegan jammed on
his helm, disgruntled, and hastily rearranged his streamered reins. When
the Lord Commander of Etarra's guard had trotted his horse beyond
earshot, Gnugsog spat again, this time in rare admiration.
    'Dresses like a daisy, like they all do who sport pedigree,' he confided to
the sergeant who awaited the order to march. 'But yon royal puppy is canny
at handling men. He might be a priss at his swordplay, still I don't think I'd
want him for my enemy.'
    Unable to find an appropriate reply to criticism involving his betters, the
sergeant complained instead about the gnats.
    'Well,' cracked Gnudsog, out of patience. 'Sound the horn for the
advance! Clansmen are waiting, I know it, so we might as well call them to
the bloodbath.'
    In moving waves of pennons and lances that juddered and cracked
through the greenwood, the army surged on upriver. Half dost in the creak
of armour, and the jingle of stirrup and bit, a jay squalled in raucous
complaint.

Up the valley, a second jay answered. Striped in shadow behind a paling of
saplings, charcoal smeared in patterns across his face, Caolle hustled six
breathless children past him and on upslope, toward safety. To the runner
crouched at his elbow, he whispered a hasty, 'All clear.'
    Soundless in his boots of beaten deerhide, the messenger departed.
Branches slithered back into place across the thicket, and through slits
between trembling leaves, Caolle measured the advance of Etarra's
thousands as they crashed up the riverbed below h~s vantage. The last
cohort passed, and carefully counted, the last rank.
    Two divisions; in line with every hope and plan. The other pair had
parted ways from the main troop, to quarter the valleys to either side.
Caolle smiled.
 A third jay called from the marshes.
    'Now,' Caolle mouthed. The hand he held raised for the signal dipped
and raised and then fell.
    The command was seen and relayed upriver by a dozen scouts in
concealment, until it reached the head of a dried streambed that sliced like
a scar across the hill.
    'Hie!' yipped a barbarian teamster. His whip fell with a crack like the
snap ~)f a quick-broken twig and four horses slammed weight against their
collars. Ropes whipped taut through oiled blocks. As the strain transferred,
mechanically redoubled, the huge logs which braced a timber dam sucked
and shifted in mud settings. Again the clansman urged his draught team.
Veins bulged in the necks of the horses and their hooves bit deep as they
strained.

471


    A brace gave; others canted and the dam bowed, its log joints streaked
black with the first jetting trickles of leaked water. While the structure
creaked and gave outward, the clansman slashed his team free and drove
them to a canter up the bank.
    The dam burst apart on their heels. Timbers flew like splinters, driven
by the loosed force of waters held in check through ~he last weeks of
northland spring rains. The torrent reclaimed its balked course with a
roar, fanged in its froth by a burden of sharpened stakes. The clansman
soothed his draught team to a halt just barely out of reach. While the
torrent swept by like a demon, tearing up mats of elder and birch, his
pulse leaped in excitement. The thunder of racing waters was answered
from five other sites throughout the valley, where other holding ponds in
Tal Quorin's watershed were simultaneously released to rampage
through rock-stepped courses by the weight of held gallons and gravity.
The plain alongside the riverbank in moments became a gouged
maelstrom of boulders and white flood.
    On the banks of the river Tal Quorin, the birds in the marshes fled. A
herd of deer took bounding flight over mallow and cattails, then veered in
fresh panic as they caught wind of the oncoming army. About then, the
lead horses began to snort and sidle and shy, while men cursed and spurs
dug and Gnudsog raised his chin listening.
    Too late, he heard what animals sensed ahead of him: the booming
growl of thunder, with no cloud visible overhead. The sound was deep
and oncoming and weighty in voice to shake the earth. His fist on his
destrier's reins like iron, even as the forward scout outriders crashed
shouting and gesticulating through the brush, Gnudsog spun his horse on
its haunches and slammed sideways into the lighter mount of his
message-bearer.
    'Ride!' he screamed. 'Find Lord Diegan and the prince, and tell them t~
seek cover on high ground.' Next, he barked orders for the troops t0
wheel, though ranks were disordered and broken, and half the war h~)rscs
were mindless with fear, jammed one on another in herd instinct t~ bolt.
    Locked against motion by the weight of their own vast numbers. the
lead ranks saw the flood coming.
    It rampaged over a snake-twist curve in the river, a towering, tumbling
brown wall jagged with logs, uprooted trees and slashed greenery. The
vanguard of Etarra's proud army was allowed a split second of terra)r, hut
no escape.
 The water hit.
    Men, mounts, and bright pennons crumpled as if struck by the log-
mailed fist of doom. Horses screamed, upended, their cries as one with
their riders who were crushed, and scythed under, and drowned. The
foaming jaws that crested over Tal Quorin's banks thrashed on in a writer
of chaos, to cut down everything standing; to smash living flesh wnht~ut
quarter and to turn the snapped shafts of the lances against those

472


maimed, to impale and gut, and club unconscious with a force more
furious than man's.
    The passage of the flood was cataclysmically swift, and it dragged on its
course the mangled destriers, the rent and sodden banners and the
dismembered, drowned and dying men of all but the extreme flanks of
Etarra's first division.
    Given warning by the dispatch of Gnudsog's staff messenger, Lord
Diegan did not turn tail and abandon his second company in a bolt for
higher ground. In a rapid-fire string of orders, he commanded four reliable
men to escort Lysaer out of danger, then called to muster the ranks behind
for a speedy retreat from the riverbank.
    The ground was soggy. The suck and splash of many horses and men
drawn to a halt in one place foiled the most effective shout; and Diegan
lacked Gnudsog's bull bellow. So that when the soldiers he had dispatched
to attend the prince closed instead around his own horse and insistently
grasped at the bridle, he thought his first orders had been mistaken.
    'The prince!' he cracked out in white anger. 'I said, you escort his Grace,
Lysaer.'
 The men continued to seem deaf.
    Lord Diegan spun in his saddle, suspicion in his eyes as bright as the glint
on his jewels.
    And Lysaer met him, harder still. 'Go! This was my error. My fight. Let
me save what I can. For I fear the worst still awaits us.'
    Enraged and far from willing to desert his post of command, Lord Diegan
hauled to wheel his horse. Between his hands, the reins recoiled into slack:
his own men had cut the leather at the bit-ring and were traitorously
goading his mount to trot away from the river and his troops. 'Damn your royal effontery to Sithaer!' cried Lord Diegan.
    Lysaer gave him back an insouciant wave, while he directed cracking
strings of directions that effected a miracle of smooth deployment among
the troops. As Lord Diegan was dragged up the rise toward the forest, his
last, venomous thought was that no man alive should be blessed all at
once, with looks, toughness and such surpassing talent for leadership;
grudging resignation followed that perhaps this was why the Fellowship
had insisted on restoring royal rule to start with.
    Three-quarters of the men were clear of the rivercourse when the spate
gushed from the narrower channel of the upper valley and raced to claim
the marshy stretch of fiatland. Tal Quorin's fury was less spent than
engorged on its burden of disembowelled horses and racked men. Laced
in dirty foam, and encumbered by stripped caparisons and bodies both
thrashing and lifeless, the flood bore down upon the second division of
Etarra's city garrison.
    Lysaer heard the hiss and splash; felt the thunderous shake of the
pummelled earth translate from the ground through hi.s horse. He did not
turn. Although every nerve in his body was keyed to the disaster about to

473


overtake him, he continued in his clear, even voice to issue concise
instructions to convey the next cohort of pikemen to the safe ground.
    The men who dragged Diegan by force up the rise from the marshlands
watched helpless as the waters closed threshing down. They saw the fear
scribed on the faces of their front-rank companions, impossibly trapped;
they saw and could do nothing to stem the disordered burst of panic and the
tragic unravelling of an order that against odds had held until now. And
they saw, some of them weeping, the prince on his magnificently trained
chestnut struggle with spur and seat to hold his ground.
    The Lord Commander they had spared from destruction ceased in that
moment to fight them, but drove his fist again and again in balked fury
against the mailed flesh of his thigh. No man could do aught, now, but
watch. The gelding was schooled to the sternest standards by the best
gifted horsemen in the continent. But as the waters crashed hungrily
down, bridleless, it reverted to instinct. The Lord Commander and his
escort in the wood saw it rear, and then bolt like an arrow through straw,
straight into the pressed ranks behind. The army seethed in a mass
stampede of berserk flight. Footmen were trampled, and companions
shoved and even stabbed as soldiers clawed to reach the high ground. Then
the flood closed over all with a slap that diminished the screams, the
shouts and every other futile mortal protest.
    Because the pair, mount and rider, were moving with the flow, the crest
did not at once immolate them. Heads surfaced, upfiung in struggle, noble
chestnut with an eye rolling white, the other sleeked wet and shining
blond. Lysaer had discarded his helm, but could do nothing to shed the
chainmail that could drown him. Then the unseen thrust of a log, or maybe
a submerged corpse entangled in shed loops of harness battered and
encumbered the swimmers. The horse rolled and went under in the
sucking rush of current. Of the rider, they saw no more sign.
    Lord Diegan's fury went cold. 'You and you!' he said through clenched
teeth to the men who still held his horse's bridle. 'Knot my reins to the bit!'
He snapped the severed leather in their faces without caring if he took out
an eye. Then he spurred down the bank and reclaimed his post with a shout
that carried even over the gush of Tal Quorin's black torrent. 'Etatrans! To
me! Reform ranks.'
    Somewhere upstream lurked the clansmen who had arranged this
disaster. They would die very messily, Diegan swore, as he reviewed for
losses and discovered still wider calamity. Of the first and second
companies of Etarra's guard, scarcely a quarter remained standing. These
waded, dripping, toward the bank. They towed the maimed and the dyingl
still, these were the luckier ones, since horror did not end with the flood.
For the troops Lysaer's considered logic had sent clear in advance of the
waters, the hillsides now offered poor haven. Where the riverbanks
appeared most solidly inviting, the footing lay undermined in a maze of
deadfalls and traps. The ground gave way beneath the lancers' destriers.

474


Their screams rent the air as they fell twisting into pits lined with
sharpened stakes.
    'Stay in the shallows!' Diegan cried. He muscled his mount by main
force off dry ground, then ploughed girth-deep through rushing waters to
rally his straggle of survivors. The horse cloths wicked up water, dragging
his mount at each step. He cut them away. Since they bore his house
blazon and badges of rank, a grazed and bleeding lieutenant lashed them up
crudely to a pike pole. Around that dripping, swamp-sodden standard, the
second company struggled to reform denuded ranks. They gathered,
hauling in their moaning wounded, and killing in deft mercy those horses
unable to rise. The flood torrent crested and passed to leave a foam-laced
train of muddy rapids, pocked into rills and potholes that were not caused
by rocks, but by the flesh, bone, and sinew of Etarra's brave fighting force,
with its eighteen hundred lancers, its silk pennons, its hand-picked
recruits and its chainmail and arms, bought new from the merchants' levy.
    As the diamond lines of stiff current eased into slackwater ripples, the
river receded to yield up its toll of carnage and dead. Of the body of a
drifter-bred chestnut gelding, there was no sign, nor had any man of
Diegan's company seen trace of its royal rider.
    Of Lysaer, no one spoke; but his absence weighed on the calm that fell as
the roar of Tal Quorin diminished. On the bank, a band of archers fussed
with spoiled fietching and stretched bowstrings. Knee-deep in muck and
flattened sedges, pikemen drew daggers and slashed the drenched pennons
that unbalanced their polearms in desperate, grim- faced need to seek out
clan enemies and kill. Hardly a man was not bleeding. Scarcely a horse was
n~)t lame.
 The only outcry to be heard was the cross scream of a jay.
     Something whipcracked through the foliage. A standing man staggered
and collapsed and around him, others started shouting. The clanborn were firing off arrows.
    Another man buckled against Diegan's horse. He fought the beast's
sidewards shy; felt a whisper of wind flick his cheek. The flights came, not
in volleys but singly, shot at leisure from a point of heavy cover up the
slope. The shafts snicked and cracked through pale birches. They whined
through windless air, to smack with the malevolent skill of scout
marksmen into the stranded ranks in the marshes.
    Diegan cried orders for the sensible counter-move, to retreat and duck
shoulder deep in water, to seek bulwarks behind hummocks and the
brush-caught mounds of dead horses. As he used the fiat of his sword to
belt his bucketing mount into the reed beds, only a seasoned few followed.
    Unmoored by a lust for blood and vengeance, the hotter blooded men and
fresh recruits charged at the origin of the crossfire.
    The deadfalls, the spring-traps and the slip nooses set in waiting all
claimed their inevitable toll of lives. Steiven's scouts owned a gristly
ingenuity and their toil's harvest laced the greenwood yet again with the

475


agonized screams of townsmen, who died, slaughtered, without one blow
struck in defence.

Four hundred yards downstream, creeping silent and unmounted through
marshes flash*flooded under waters rinsed opaque with yellow clay,
Captain Mayor Pesquil's advance scouts found Lysaer s'Ilessid. Stranded
on a sandbar with swift waters sheeting past on either side, he stood skin-
wet and shivering, one forearm bathed in blood. His face was grazed, his
clothing ripped. His sword also was scarlet, though the right hand gripped
white to the pommel showed no wound.
    Half unmoored from thread settings, sapphires hung like clots from his
surcoat, each sparking cold fire at the ripping jerk of each breath. At the
prince's feet, mudcaked as his boots, sprawled the corpse of a fine chestnut
gelding with a log staked through its lean barrel. Its throat had been cut.
Questing flies already sucked its filmed eyes.
    Knee deep in a current still treacherous with debris, the scout who
encountered the pair discreetly queried, his voice a bare breath above a
whisper, 'Your Grace?'
    Lysaer whipped around. He had a black bruise on his chin. The rest of his
face was white to the bone and his eyes, bright and empty as his jewels.
Clumsily staunched with a knotted rag, his arm seeped from a nasty gash.
Faced forward, the reason for his unsteady breathing was disclosed by the
plum-coloured swelling pressed against the burst rings of his mail.
    No stranger to injuries, the scout added, 'You appear to have broken your
collarbone.'
    He received no answer. A nearly imperceptible tremor swept the man
before him from head to foot.
    'It is shock. You must sit.' The scout stepped forward fast, prepared for
the chance his charge might faint.
    'Not here.' As if the drowned and disembowelled corpses wadded like rags
in the sullied waters did not exist, Lysaer shifted his regard back to the horse
at his feet. 'Never here.' Beyond him, a clot of logs and brush rolled in the
current. Sunlight silvered the crescent bill of a pike, its sodden streamers
fanned across the cheek of a corpse left in openmouthed surprise: his jaw had
been fully torn away. Lysaer dropped his sword, raised his hand, and masked
the side of his face between the arch of his forefinger and thumb.
     Since he looked on the edge of collapse, the scout presumed and gripped
 the royal elbow in support.
     A shudder jarred the prince in recoil. Lysaer's head snapped up. He
 wrenched free, and the scout saw in dawning horror that his Grace suffered
 no confusion at all, but a self-revulsion so deep it shocked the watching
 spirit to behold.
     'I was wrong,' Lysaer said with the same, self-damning clarity. 'Daelion's
 pity upon me, every man who has died in this place has been ruined for a
 misplaced belief and my idealistic folly.'

476


Pesquil's scout stumbled to find a banal reply. 'Clan tactics are ever
without honour, your Grace.'
    But it was not the barbarians' touch at warfare that had splintered Lysaer's
heart into rage; it was the knowledge, delivered on two companies'
ruthlessly massacred bodies, that he had been masterfully deceived.
    Arithon was a trickster to make his s'Ffalenn forbears in Karthan seem
as mere simpletons in comparison. For this trap to have been baited with
children, meant the scene over the shadow brigantine in Etarra's back
alleys, had all been a sham, most carefully engineered, most exactingly
executed. Here, over the corpse of a horse, amid a riverbed swollen still in
carnage, Lysaer understood that the joy, the compassion, the agonized
self-sacrifice Arithon had shown toward the brats conscripted to the
knackers' yards had been nothing, nothing at all. Just another ruse,
another play of diabolical sleight-of-hand and seamless guile.
    This man, this bastard of shadows, had no scruple, but only an unholy
passion for lies of a stripe that could cajole human sympathy, and then turn
and without conscience rend all decency.
    Quite aside from Desh-thiere's curse, Lysaer rededicated himself to
moral purpose. His half-brother, so gifted in magecraft and so superior in
unprincipled cunning, was a blight and a threat to society. With a
continent riddled with encampments of barbarians, each one a ready
weapon for his hands, no bound existed to the havoc Arithon might choose
to create.
    Lysaer stirred. Seared to numbness by the enormity of his mistake, he
bent, closed his hand and retrieved his sword. The blade he cleaned on his
surcoat and the scout's banality he ignored. 'My horse is dead,' he said
crisply. 'I shall need another.'
    'No man goes mounted with my headhunters,' interjected a severe voice
from the side. Unseen, unnoticed, Captain Mayor Pesquil waded the last
strides toward the sandspit, several scouts arrayed at his heels. The
interruption in his patrol had been noticed, and reported with a zeal that
suggested his underlings knew what their posts were worth.
    Lysaer disregarded the impertinence. Wide and unflinching in candour,
his eyes transferred to the commander of Etarra's league of headhunters.
'This was my mistake. Since my ignorance has led to disaster, I'm ready to
listen. But in one thing, I will not be swayed. Arithon s'Ffalenn will be
stopped. And killed. And if you deem it necessary to slay children to keep a
weapon such as Steiven's clansmen from his hands, I shall no longer
obstruct you.'
    Pockscarred and twitchy with a flame of nervous energy, Pesquil's black
eyebrows arched. If he was startled, his mocking inquisitiveness stayed
unblunted. 'Did my Lord Diegan survive?'
    'I hope so. I sent him to cover on the bank with all of the men I had time
to send out of danger.' Tartly polite, Lysaer added, 'Is the interrogation
finished.2'

477


 Now Pesquil was astonished, and not quite glib enough to hide it.
    Urbanely defensive, Lysaer said, 'If my judgement was lacking, my first
duty was to see the men didn't lose their commander by it.'
    The lanky, curled braid that Pesquil wore for battle slapped his cheek as
he jerked his head. 'To Sithaer with your honour. I would ask, rather, how
you got any pedigreed scion of Etarra to agree to take orders from anybody.'
    Now Lysaer's expression turned arch. 'Simply put, there are certain
advantages to being born and raised a king's heir.' A heartbeat later, he
smiled. 'The nasty minded sort of arrogance that stops a man being
gainsaid is one of them.'
    'Hah!' Pesquil slapped his thigh in contempt; but around him, the men
who knew him best hid grins. Lysaer saw as much, and understood they
had reached an agreement. And so he kept his humour when Pesquil added,
'Well, then, prince. There won't be much advantage if you choose to keep
up bleeding, and wind up keeled over on that horse.'
    Stiffly, for his dignity balked at public handling, Lysaer extended his
badly-wrapped arm that by now dripped messily scarlet. The man Pesquil
signalled stepped forward, and with a de~t expertise took charge. The
binding and split bracer beneath were pulled away; the gash examined and
bandaged.
    Of the men, only Pesquil dared comment. 'You're lucky. The cut is deep,
but it runs with the line of the muscle. You'll scar but have no loss of
function.'
    Neither grateful nor relieved, Lysaer half-turned his face as his collarbone
also was examined, the arm he did not need for a sword slung and strapped
immobile. Beneath the hauberk at his neck as they had cut away the padding
to probe the bone, his pulsebeat could be seen, heavy and rapid with anger.
He said in a tone almost level, 'How many do you think survived this?'
    'None.' Pesquil squ,_'nted across muddied waters, while snarls of brush
drifted by and a corpse trailed, moored by a rack of ripped trappings. 'There
would have been deadfalls, of course. Pits and spring-traps that rip to
disembowel. These are Steiven's clans you have marched on.'
    When Lysaer endured this, still steady in silence, Pesquil's lips qmrked
in a sneer. 'Ah, Gnudsog, you are thinking. Why not say so? The veteran
who saw fit not to question, despite his years and experience...' The
officer who led Etarra's headhunters through a career of blazing obsession
studied Lysaer with pity. 'You should know, about Gnudsog, that his
brother and young son died at the hands of barbarians. They fell with a
merchant's train on their way to East Ward, to attend a cousin's wedding.
Etarra's great captain got his start hunting heads, as anyone would readily
tell you. He stopped, because he loved it too much. Dearer than his own
life, he once told me.' Irked now, and bristling because this prince was
listening sincerely, as no scion of fine pedigree would deign to do, Pesquil
curled his lip. 'If he thought he could kill a few barbarians, old Gm~ds~.~
would've thrown every soldier he had to Daelion and the pits of Sithacr.'

478


    'I was the one who did that,' Lysaer corrected with quick acerbity; the
scout finished with his dressings and withdrew, embarrassed as the discus-
sion went on as if both men were private. 'I thought I was waiting for you to
say what was left to be done. We still have the companies on our flanks.'
 Pesquil laughed, but softly. 'Do we?'
    And across from him, Lysaer's gaze wavered, as cold remembrance
touched him: that bad as the river had been, they had yet to encounter
any shadows. He collected himself in a breath. 'Are you afraid to find
OUt?'
    'No.' Come to his decision, Pesquil dispersed his scouts on a hand-
signal. As they fanned out, efficiently soundless, and vanished in pursuit of
lapsed duty, their leader backstepped into the shoaling waters of Tal
Quorin. 'Come, then, your Grace,' he invited. 'But this time, we hunt
Deshans my way.'
    In stealth, they worked upriver; past the sprawled dead with their eyes
and their mouths clogged with mud; past scarlet-rinsed puddles and
broken swords: and the destriers, the curve of their bellies like whales on
a beach, but for the straps of breastplate and saddlegirth, or the brush-
jammed arch of a stirrup. Lysaer did not flinch from the carnage. When
Pesquil demanded that he rip the jewels from his surcoat to kill their
chance sparkle in the sunlight he obeyed; for clansmen were stationed in
these woods. Upstream, less faintly as they progressed, they could hear
sounds of shouting, and the high, shrill screams of dying horseflesh. The barbarians were still at their slaughter.
    From pale, Lysaer had gone sick white. It took every shred of self-
control and a humility more demanding than courage to keep still; to stay
with Pesquil, moving silent from a thicket of reeds to the shadowy pool
beneath a deadfall, keeping each step shallow, so their boots did not break
water and cause a splash.
    They stopped again. Lysaer clenched his teeth against the pain of his
cuts and contusions, and the flaring stabs that resulted when his side or
his collarbone was jostled. Movement came, ever so soft, in the fronds of
a willow by the riverside. A scout returned. Head bent, Pesquil received
the report.
    Lysaer could not hear the words, though in the forest, no birds called.
The rush and tumble of high waters had receded also, and the gnats were
swarming, bloodthirsty. They bounced off his nose and his ears in
maddening circles, and inhaling, he had to struggle not to sneeze. From upstream, also, came silence.
    Ankle deep in flat water, Lysaer gripped himself hard to keep from
shivering in a paroxysm that had nothing to do with cold or shock.
Several moments passed before he became aware that Pesquil stared at
him from under half closed lids.
    Under that piercing scrutiny, court training alone enabled him to speak
with no reflection of urgency. 'You have news?'

479


    Pesquil's upper lip twitched, then relaxed in a one-sided smile that held
no shred of joy. 'Shadows,' he said clearly. 'Shadows and traps, to the west
of us. More traps and archers, over the ridge to the east. The flanking
divisions have not passed unscathed. But unlike those drowned by Tal
Quorin, there are numbers enough to stand, fighting.'
    Arithon was here. Confirmation triggered in Lysaer a tumultuous
anticipation.
    In a vice of self control tighter than anything he had needed previously,
the prince stayed his sword-hand from ripping blade from scabbard in a
curse-driven lust to rend and kill. Etarra's troops were still dying of his
mistakes. Their needs claimed his first responsibility. 'Up this valley there
were living men left, just a bit ago.'
    'I know.' Pesquil surged ahead, lightly mocking to hide admiration.
'We'll pass upstream first, never worry.'
    The sun beat down and the flow of falling water subsided. Here and
there, marsh reeds pricked out of beds slicked into herringbone patterns,
dulled with a velvet of drying silt. The air hung thick and quiet. Lysaer
chafed at this progress, which stayed slow since Pesquil insisted their
advance remain cautious and covert. Tossed across the sheen of bared fiats
like wads from a rag picker's pack lay the limp dead of Etarra's garrison,
conspicuously lacking both wounded and living horses. Not all had
perished of drowning; not all bore macerating wounds. Lysaer paused in
the act of stepping over the body of a petty officer, and the jolt of what
eyesight recorded transferred like a blow to his belly. The man's throat had been cut.
    Choked by an explosion of nausea, Lysaer felt a hand chop the small of
his back and propel him forcibly onward. 'Such surprise,' Pesquil said
sourly. 'You didn't really think, did you, that the river could've done for
them all?'
    The heat, the swimming reflections off wet mud, the fall of drops from
draggled cattails all conspired to turn Lysaer's head. He fought back the
dizziness, enraged at how long he needed to recapture the semblance of
self-command. 'Whoever did this could not have murdered two divisions
without suffering one single loss.'
    'Damn near,' murmured Pesquil, paused to receive yet another report
from a scout. 'Lord Diegan is alive, at least. He's downriver, safe, but
unable to fight. My surgeon is just now picking an arrowhead and sundry
bits of chain mail out of the gristle of his flank.'
    But the news that Etarra's Lord Commander had survived brought
Lysaer little reprieve. 'I've seen no barbarian dead.'
    'I have.' The scout had silently vanished. Pesquil now scanned the wood
ahead intently. 'But precious few, my prince. No clansman will fight when
he can ambush. He will not leave cover until his killing is accomplished
and even then he'll do so warily. To catch him and engage him, you must
creep close and never let him sight you. And then you must lie in wait with

480


the patience of almighty Ath.' Pesquil suddenly froze and caught Lysacr
back by the shoulder. 'Don't answer,' he breathed sharply; and as the
prince stiflened to his touch, 'Don't move.'
    His attention was trained into the shadows, away from the lit expanse of
flats. Lysaer too watched the forest. Past the sun-flecked dances of gnats,
under the silvered boughs of beeches that upheld their vaultings of copper
leaves, he saw gaping holes torn in the ground, and the slashed earth that
marked where horses had struggled as the footing gave under their forelegs.
He saw the white gleam of a fallen sword; the gilt fringes torn off a
caparison; he saw too the bundled dead, with arms outflung, or hands
slackly curled over the shafts of the arrows that had killed them. Through
the raw beat of pulse through his veins, and a fury too bitter for expression,
Lysaer forced himself to exhaustive search and to read, beyond omission,
in ripped brush and scarlet-tipped stakes and desecrated flesh, the fates of
the men who had fled the river.
 Steiven's clansmen had been nothing if not thorough.
    A man whimpered, unseen in the gloom. Lysaer tensed to rise, prepared
to succour survivors. Pesquil snatched him back with a grasp that jarred
the broken ends of his collarbone, and also the cracked ribs in his left side
that the scout who strapped him had not found. Next, Pesquil's horny
palm closed over his face, stifling even the hissed air that was all his
expression of pain.
    On a breath scented in garlic, Pesquil mouthed in his ear, 'Keep silent.
The wrong move, the slightest noise, and you kill us all.' He maintained
his suffocating grip, while, in cruel vindication of his warning, the unseen
soldlet's suffering became cut off in mid cry.
    There followed a bubbling sigh whose cause could not be mistaken.
Somewhere very close by, barbarians were yet about their business of
slitting the fallen men's throats.
    Slowly, deliberately, the headhunter captain released his restraint.
Lysaer blotted his cheek where the studs of Pesquil's bracer had gouged a
scab, the look he returned a blast of stifled frustration.
    Snake silent, the commander of Etarra's headhunters dispatched a series
~~f hand-signals to the hidden ranks of his scouts. Then he touched Lysaer's
wrist and crept deeper into the forest.
    Progress was more cautious than before. Since deadfalls and traps might
lurk unsprung between the trees with their matted mantles of creepers,
Lysaer learned a headhunter's way of probing the soil with a weapon before
inching forward, and to stalk head down, careful to leave undisturbed any
brush or vine or loose root that might hide the trigger for a spring trap. The
scents of burgeoning summer foliage hung unsettled with the reek of
recent death, and often the tufted mosses squelched under hand or knee
with the wet heat of fresh-spilled blood. The gloom deepened. Ahead, his
attention trained forward, Pesquil poised. With fingers pinched to steel to
damp stray sound, he slowly, silently drew his blade.

481


 Lysaer crept abreast and followed his guide's line of sight.
    Through a lattice of birches and black firs, a light-looted squad of boys
busied themselves among Etarra's fallen. Clad in deerskin, furtive in
movement as wild creatures, they were there to pilfer weapons, Lysaer
presumed; until his eye was arrested by a telltale glimmer of steel.
Horrified incredulity shook him. The shaded depths of the thickets no
longer masked the fact the boys' hands were bathed scarlet to the wrists.
Small fingers and sharp daggers ensured that town-bred wounded never
rose. Before his stunned eyes he saw a son of Deshir's clans end a man
pleading for mercy with a practiced slash across the windpipe. Other
victims who sprawled unconscious, or moaned face down in their agony
died as fast, of a well placed stab in the neck. The butchery was done in
speed and silence, and ruthless efficiency without parallel. 'The little fiends!' Lysaer gasped softly.
    'Vengeance,' Pesquil whispered. 'This time we have them. There ~,&~,'e
be another trap waiting.'
    Etarra's league of headhunters deployed with oiled care, and at length
the little rise lay triply ringed with poised men. When Pesquil signalled the
attack, only the inner rank charged. They cut directly for the kill and did
not mind if a child or two slipped past. The outer lines would mop up any
fugitives.
    At the forefront of the strike-force, Lysaer thrust his sword inside the
guard of youngsters' daggers with no more hesitation than a man might
feel who stabbed rats. This was not war, but execution, the lives he
destroyed, of tainted stock. Royal requisites inured a man to cruel
decisions; if they sickened him, it must not show, and if they softened him,
he was no fit vessel to rule.
    If Arithon s'Ffalenn used children for his battles, the scar upon the
conscience must be his.

482


First Quarry

On a thicketed knoll amid the valley adjacent to Tal Quorin, the half-
brother that Lysaer had sworn to kill sat in a brushbrake alongside five of
Steiven's archers. Young Jieret knelt, restless, at his shoulder, wielding a
bow with a nervous prowess the equal of any grown man's. Arithon
himself bore no weapon. Empty handed, he perched with his legs drawn up,
his wrists dangled lax on his knees. Head bent and eyes half lidded, he
appeared on the lazy edge of sleep.
In fact, he kept his immediate senses detached out of bleakest necessity.
Clan runners had earlier confirmed that the s'Ilessid prince had marched
with the doomed divisions that advanced up Tal Quorin's banks. His fine
chestnut horse had been seen to go down, but that its rider survived both
flood and deadfalls was never for an instant in doubt.
    The burning urge of Desh-thiere's curse continued insidiously to gnaw
at Arithon's inner will. He felt it always, a tireless pressure against reason,
an ache that pried between every thought and desire. The knowledge of
Lysaer's presence played on his nerves like a craving, volatile as a spark
fanned dangerously close to dry tinder.
    The nightmare was too substantial, that he could not encounter his
half-brother alive and retain his grip on self-will. Had Deshir's clans not
relied upon his gifts for survival, he should have been far from this place.
    'Here, ~ieret,' one of the scouts chided, as the boy retested the tension of
his bow and at full draw pretended to take aim. 'Don't be wasting your
shots, boy. Use up those arrows that suit you for length, and we've not got
spit for replacements.'
    'I know that.' ~ieret glowered, his fingers running up and down, up and
down, the new gut string of his recurve. He wore his hair tied back in a thong
like the men and tried brazenly hard to hide dread. Ever since the prescient
dream that slipped his recall he had been moody and difficult to manage.

483


    A word from Arithon might have eased him. But the Master of Shadow
this moment had no shred of perception to spare anyone. No mage would
willingly broadcast his finer vision across a field of war. The wrench as
quickened spirits were torn from life in the bursting pain of mortal wounds
could and had unhinged reason. Barriered as tightly as he had ever been
through his nerve-haunted stay at Ithamon, Arithon engaged his talents
with the delicate precision of a clockmaker winding the coil for a
mainspring.
    Throughout the previous night, he had walked the valley barefoot,
crossing and recrossing familiar ground as he laid in spell and counterspell
and anchored them in fragile tension to the subliminal pull of the compass
points. This oak, and that stone, and eastwards to west, a sentinel line of
brush and saplings and old trees; a thousand points of landscape became
his markers. Now he played his awareness across the fine-spun net of his
night's labour; he tuned his wards, or moved them, or cajoled them from
strength to dormancy, the results all balanced to a hairsbreadth to spin a
maze-work of shadows across the vale. To this, the strategy painstakingly
wrought from the fruits of his tienelle scrying, he layered energies to warp
air and deflect the natural acoustics.
    If he did not engage his talents in direct intervention to take life, the
distinction was narrowly made.
    By his hand, the neat ranks of Etarra's right flanking division blundered
abruptly into darkness. The rocks, the mires, the twisted stands of runt
maples broke their advance into chaos. Calls of inquiry rebounded
between distressed soldiers, while the orders of officers to rally split to
untrustworthy echoes and sent whole cohorts stumbling awry through
rock-sided ravines and marshy dells.
    The shadows themselves defied nature. A townsman who spun round to
backtrack would see his path open to clear sunshine. If he yielded to fright
and instinct and fled that way in retreat, he encountered no further
hindrance. But any Etarran soldiers high-hearted enough to use that
reprieve to recover their bearings at next step became swallowed by
darkness. Blinded and lost to direction, they thrashed through branches
and bogs, twisted ankles and bruised shins on an unkindness of rocks and
crooked roots. The terrain funnelled them north, where they floundered,
battered and disoriented, into a dazzling brilliance of sudden sunlight.
    Arrows met them in whispered, even flights loosed off by hidden clan
marksmen. Soldiers screamed, and crumpled and died; others warned of
ambush by the cries of their fallen ducked back toward the cover of the
shadows, to be cut down in turn by companions too rattled to distinguish
town colours from the deerskins of enemies.
    Bewildered shouts and groans of agony, all rebounded into echoes,
recaptured by webs of complex conjury. Arithon sensed like ebb-tide the
continuous draw on his resources. Like a killing frost out of season, the
spellcraft taught by his grandfather mixed uneasily with murder. The line

484


was most critical where mage-craft subsided and dying men spasreed like
seines of dredged fish, gasping their final breaths. As though he wound silk
past raw flame, Arithon worked to a perilous paradox: attuned to the
outermost demands of sensitivity, while sealed still and deaf within self-
imposed strictures of silence. He heard, but did not answer the quips
between the archers as they sorted fresh arrows, or passed around
waterskin and dipper. Pressed by doubt, and by knife-edge awareness that
town-born enemies must only be allowed to break through in manageable
numbers, Arithon beat back the weariness that pressed aches to the core of
his flesh. Should he slip, lose track and grip on just one lancer or foot
cohort, Steiven's clansmen could be swiftly overrun. Engrossed in con-
centration that must target exactly which victims to release, he sensed
nothing momentous as, by the river course over the east ridge, the
lifeblood of Deshir's young sons soaked on the banks of Tal Quorin.
    But young Jieret, who had Sight, cried aloud, 'Ath, Ath, it's Teynie!' He
threw down his bow and tugged Arithon's shoulder in dawning, agonized
horror. 'Hurry! She's going to betray them all.'
    Dazed and burdened with his interleaved mesh of maze-woven shadows
and defence wards, Arithon neither heard the words, nor felt the boy's
urgent touch. He roused anyway. The oath lately sworn with Steiven's son
had been a blood-ritual, and for the mage-trained such things became
binding beyond a mere promise; his life and the boy's were subtly twined.
Like a man slapped out of a coma he mustered back full awareness and
moved; but not in time.
    Lost to panic and raw grief, Jieret shoved past the archers and vaulted the
palings that served as cover.
    No chance existed for second remedy. Arithon dropped hold on the
spells, let them collapse in a tangling cascade of frayed energies. The
shadow-barriers being easiest to stabilize, he locked a lightless pall across
the valley that would partially hamper Etarra's troops. 'You're on your
own,' he informed in clipped apology to the archers. 'Stand or retreat as you
will, but at least send a runner to warn your fellows.'
    Then he was over the breastworks and after Jieret with his sword sliding
clear in mid-air.
    Of the scouts posted with him, half remained. The rest grabbed up
weapons and bows and jumped after, hailing companions as they went.
'Jieret's run off, the prince after him. Divide your numbers and come,
they'll need support.'
    Dodging through elders and thin brush, Arithon spared no thought for
regret. Had Jieret's spurious talent recaptured the vision that led to the
slaughter of Deshir's innocents, any futures traced through his tienelle
scrying would now carry unknown outcomes.
    If Deshir's clans were beyond saving, he had vowed that Steiven's son be
spared.
He poured all his heart into running, slammed through a last stand of

485


birch, and at last overtook the fleeing boy. Once abreast, he made no effort
to stop, but matched stride and gently guided, bending the child's flight
toward the thicker stands of forest on high ground. 'Easy. Up here. That's
better. Fewer pikemen, and don't forget the swamp.'
    Jieret choked back a sob and plunged through a gully in a furious rush
that tripped him up.
    Arithon caught him as he stumbled, steadied him through the moss*
slicked rocks up the bank. Between heaving breaths he kept talking.
'Explain. What about Teynie? We're bloodsworn. It's my oath to help.'
    'The tents!' Jieret pushed through a stand of witch hazel, whose downy
spines powdered his jerkin. 'She's going to lead headhunters to the tents!'
    Slammed by a wave of foreboding, and fending off branches that raked
his face, Arithon squeezed the boy's hand. 'Don't talk,' he gasped. 'Just
think in your mind what you dreamed and imagine that ! can see it too.'
    But panic had already impelled the vision to the forefront of Jieret's
awareness. The instant Arithon opened a channel to test the boy's distress,
the ties of the bloodpact took over. Jieret's terror became his own. The
prescient vision that tienelle scrying had snatched back in fragments
unfolded now in entirety. The scrub-grown hillside seamed with
weather-stripped gullies blurred out of vision as mage-sight unveiled
another place...

... of torn earthworks and slaughtered bodies, where Pesquil's advance
troop of headhunters tracked prints across blood-rinsed earth. In swift,
efficient silence they exchanged swords for daggers and cut scalps to claim
bounty for their kills.
    The corpses raised by the hair for the knife-cut were small, the faces
smudged in leaf mould and gore unlined by life and years...

Boys, Arithon realized with a choke that all but stopped his heart. He
tripped hard on a stone, felt the tug of Jieret's grip save his balance. Present
awareness slapped back, along with anguished recognition of total
helplessness. The deed was done: the sons of Deshir dead. All hacked and
disfigured, were the little ones Caolle had insisted be sent to dispatch the
enemy wounded because men for that task could ill be spared; amid whose
company Jieret would have been, if not for a bloodpact of friendship.
  'Jieret, they're gone,' Arithon gasped out in defeat. 'We're too late.'
    But Jieret's mute and furious headshake forced back unwanted recollec-
tion that the appalling scene by the riverside had failed to include the fated
girl. At what point does the strong mind falter, Arithon wondered in a
cascade of renewed despair. The feud between Karthan and Amroth had
inspired atrocities enough to wring from him all tolerance for suffering.
Between town born and clan, the hate ran more poisonous still.

486


Ground creepers tore at his footfalls as he fought toward the crest of the
ridge. At his side, Jieret was labouring, his eyes stretched sightless and
wide, as if he viewed vistas of horrors, but lacked any breath to cry protest.
At what point should the strong heart shy off, and preserve itself from
wanton self-destruction? To go on was to risk every shred of integrity to
the mad drives of Desh-thiere's curse. Arithon swore in fierce anguish. He
tightened grip on his sword, braced tired nerves, and cast off the protective
barriers that confined his sight to ~ieret's dream. Every prudent precaution
hc had taken was tossed away as he reached out direct with his mage-sight.

Disciplined, efficient, too well-versed in the ways of forest clansmen to
suffer delay or needless noise, Pesquil rattled off orders. His men crammed
dripping trophies in their gamebags. Nearby, wiping a sword whose blade
bore chased patterns of reversed runes, a strong, straight man in a ruined
surcoat clenched his jaw against the hurt of cracked bones.
    Framed in that place, over the bodies of slain children, that man's lone
figure imprinted stark as flame against a scorchmark, and wakened the
pattern of Desh-thiere's curse. Backlit by a slanted shaft of sunlight, the
soft, leathered greenery of pine boughs knit a backdrop for disordered blond
hair and a regal profile grazed and scratched, but unmarred in expression by
~my furrow of remorse...

Arithon gasped as if hit. His stride faltered, despite Jieret's efforts, shouting
and tugging, to urge him on. He heard nothing, felt nothing beyond nerves
pitched and twisted to a geas-driven impulse to attack.
    Vision and reflex merged. Alithiel's blade sang through air. The sour,
helling whine as swordsteel sheared through sticks and green bracken
i~elted turned senses back to reason.
    Arithon stood, breathing hard, the sweat drenched over him in runnels.
He caught one breath, two, the hand gripped white to his sword hilt
trembling in waves of reaction. Fingers could be relaxed into stillness. The
mind could be forced to shake off madness. Eyes closed, quivering as if
racked by a fever, Arithon called every shred of his training to repress the
screaming urge to fling aside Jieret and bolt, not to rescue, but to kill.
Through him and through ran the sick recognition that he had tasted worse
than his fears. He had fatally near underestimated the havoc that even
indirect scrying on his half-brother could unleash through the core of his
being.
    Half-undone by despair, for there existed no escape from this quandary,
hc gathered self-command and looked up.
    Attending him in staunch readiness were Jieret and eleven clansmen
wh~ had without questions left their defenceworks to support him.
Emncshed as he was in sorry fears and the unmistakable throes of wrecked

487


dignity, their kindness offered temptations a curse-marked spirit could ill
afford.
    Enraged as a scalded cat by the flaw that twisted through his character,
Arithon's first impulse was to let fly with words and send them packing,
away from his reach lest he wantonly compromise their safety. Humility
stayed him, and grief. If Deshir's wives and daughters were still threatened,
these men owned their right to defend them, and he must find courage to
see how.
    Wordless, he turned his grip on Alithiel and pressed the hilt into Jieret's
startled hands. Then he stripped off his swordbelt and thrust it toward the
nearest of the scouts. 'Take this. Bind my ankles. Somebody else, unbend a
bowstring and lash my wrists tight behind my back.' The clansman regarded him, stupefied.
    'Do it!' Arithon snapped. Salt sweat burned his eyes, or maybe tears.
'Dharkaron take you, it's necessary.'
    The belt buckle swung from his fingers, flaring in bursts of caught
sunlight. No one made a move to take its burden.
    'Mercy of Ath, tie my hands!' cried their prince, his voice split and
baleful with anguish. 'I've a scrying to try that's very dangerous, and I can't
say what might happen if I'm free.' He waited no longer, but spun toward
Jieret. 'I beg you, do as I ask.'
    'Don't put such a task on a boy!' A blunt, scarfaced man shoved to the
fore, prepared in hot outrage to intervene.
    Arithon bit back retort, that worse things had been asked and done
already. 'Loop it tight,' he insisted as the man bent, and tentatively began
to lash his ankles.
  'You've gone mad,' someone murmured from the sidelines.
  Arithon, eyes blazing, said, 'Yes.'
    He had no time to explain. To Jieret, standing braced with the black
blade cradled fiat across his forearm, the Master said emphatically and
calmly, 'You're oathsworn. Now listen to me. I'm going to try sorcery to
find out what's amiss on the riverbank. You must keep my sword and hold
it ready. If my body is taken by a fit, call my name. If that fails to rouse me,
or if any of these restraints breaks away, you must cut me deep enough to
bleed.'
  'But why?' a man pealed in protest.
  Arithon's attention never shifted from the child.
    Under that sharpened scrutiny, Jieret s'Valerient did not waver. The
steel rings sewn to his boy's brigandine flashed in time to rapid breaths and
his eyes, grey hazel, never turned. Of them all, only he and Arithon yet
knew of the butchery that drenched the moss by Tal Quorin. Between
bloodpacted prince and young protdg~ an understanding passed, that word
of the atrocity must be kept from the men. The small, square chin, so like
Steiven's and the dark red hair that was Dania's caused Arithon a spasm of
grief.

488


     'Will you trust me?' he asked. Man to boy, he made no effort to hide his
misgiving. 'For your family's sake, can you do this?' lieret answered him, faintly. 'I'll try.'
    For a second the severely steep planes of the s'Ffalenn face eased; straight
lips bent almost to a smile. Then Arithon crossed his wrists behind his back
and waited in stiff impatience while a clan archer diffidently tied him. 'For
your very lives,' he finished in soft threat. 'Don't any of you change my
instructions.'
    The bowstring was knotted tight and tested. Far off, a woodthrush trilled a
liquid cascade of arpeggios. The breeze fanned trembling through fern and
birch and pale elder, and the smell of pine mulch and soil filled the senses
like a mother's embrace. Torn by the pull of such comforts, Arithon
squeezed his eyes closed. He let go into trance in skittish haste, lest nerves
and strength both forsake him. The men close-gathered around him ceased
to matter, nor did he feel the touch and slide of light-patterned leaves that
raked his body as his knees loosened and gave way. He slipped unceremoni-
ously to the ground, conscious only of another place...

Buried from sight behind a thicket of fir, someone gave a retching cough.
Bent over the corpse of a boy with talisman thongs braided at his neck,
Pesquil jerked erect and froze listening. Around him, spattered like reivers
in a stockyard, his jubilant headhunters did likewise. The sound did not
repeat itself. Never patient with waiting, and apprehensive of being spotted
by an unseen patrol of Steiven's scouts, Pesquil deployed his lieutenants to
secure the area and beat the brush.
    Before the ring closed, a child bolted into the open, running hard. This one
carried no dagger. In place of a leather jacket sewn with rings or bone discs,
this youngster wore a tunic smutched with river mud and briars. Barely
seven years of age, he ran in gasping panic away from the headhunters with
their terrible crimsoned swords. A man-s~zed fox cap offered a fleeting
glimpse of cinnamon as it bobbed from mottled light to forest gloom.
    'Give chase,' Pesquil clipped out. His teeth flashed in a smile that became
a low whistle as the new quarry ducked a trailing vine.
 The fur hat was snatched off to free a rippling banner of dark hair.
 'Daelion's Wheel!' exclaimed Lysaer. 'That's a girl!'
    'Obviously.' Pesquil hefted his sword. 'Come on. A scalp isn't valued by
sex and if I'm right, we're about to find the camp Gnudsog died for.'
    'She shouldn't be here, then.Z' Lysaer braced his bandaged forearm against
his side in readiness to run. 'Not even as some sort of lookout?'
    'She probably tagged after her brother.' Fired to haste, an unholy spark
behind his humour, Pesquil gave the prince a pock flecked leer. 'Are you
g~~ing to just talk, or join the fun?'
    Lysaer clamped his jaw against the ache of ribs and collarbone and grimly
matched pace with the headhunters.

489


 The scrying shattered.
     A scream of crazed frustration ripped from Arithon's throat. Pain lanced
 his shoulder, followed by a coruscation of white light. A ringing, pure
 chord of harmony exploded bleak insanity with a shock that sieved
 through his bones. He fell back, weeping and panting, unprepared for
 tearing heartbreak as the thundering brilliance of Paravian spellcraft ebbed
 away, leaving him hollow and desolate.
    The earth felt fragile underneath him as he opened his eyes to the fast
fading glimmer of the star-spell inlaid in the blade of his own weapon.
Alithiel poised above him like a bar of smoked glass, edged in his own
bright blood. Jieret held the grip in shaking fingers, tears tracked in streaks
across his cheeks.
    'It's all right.' Aghast to find his larynx torn raw, Arithon need not meet
the scouts' embarrassed faces to derive that he had howled like an animal.
He could tell by the burn of fresh abrasions that he had flipped and
wrenched against his bonds. And nothing was right, nothing at all. The
wasted lives by Tal Quorin were only the prelude to disaster. In this, his
second encounter with Lysaer by scrying, only his sword's arcane defences
had arrested his reaction to Desh-thiere's curse. For the moment he
commanded his wits. As long as he kept his distance and strictly eschewed
the use of mage-sense, he could hold against the urge that coursed through
him, driving, needling, hounding him to rise and to run: to find his half-
brother and call challenge and fight until one or both of them lay dead.
    Jieret had quieted. Silent, straight, he regarded his sovereign prince in
haunted trust, while a contrite scout knelt to lend assistance. The
movement as Arithon was helped to sit pulled at his shoulder, but the
scratch was neat and shallow, a credit to the boy's determination.
    'The bonds can be loosened,' Arithon said gently. He added instructions
to be sent at speed to Caolle, and tried not to let them see it mattered, that
nobody cared to meet his eyes.
    'Your hands, they're ripped bloody,' said the man who attended his
wrists. 'At least, these scars.' He faltered, then burst out, 'You've done
scryings like this one before?'
    The note of awed epiphany in his voice incensed Arithon to revulsion.
'Ath, no!' He did not qualify, but kicked the loosened belt from his ankles,
surged to his feet, and took back the burden of his sword.
    'Run,' he snapped, and then did so, fighting off acid futility. They were
too far from the grotto where Deshir's girls and women were hidden, too
hopelessly distant to bring reprieve. But knowing Pesquil's headhunters
were hot in pursuit of Fethgurn's daughter, he had to make the attempt; for
when Deshir's clansmen discovered the extent of their losses, the grief of
husbands, kin and fathers would for a surety touch off another bloodbath.

490


Last Quarry

The girbchild flushed by Pesquil's headhunters led them on an arduous
chase upstream. Above the initial site of the ambush, the valley narrowed.
Tal Quorin's bed sliced Strakewood in a steep-walled ravine, while springs
that fed whitewater currents splashed in plumed falls from high gullies.
Here the late afternoon shadows slanted through serried banks of broken,
sunlit rock.
    Pesquil disliked any country where the least chance noise would
reverberate to a dance of wild echoes. Crannies between buttressed cliffs
devolved into narrow, crooked grottos, any of which might contain a
hidden camp. To search each one with a strike party would be fool's play.
    'Noise and numbers would wreck all our chance of surprise,' he
complained in dry annoyance to Lysaer. 'Clansfolk holed up in this place
won't be waiting about cowering like mice.'
    While Pesquil debated over a dozen nooks where clan sentries could be
posted, Lysaer fought drifting concentration. He felt faint. His bruises had
settled into stiffness that cased the steady ache of cracked bones. The
strapping on his wrist showed a damp patch of red, and he wondered how
much blood he may have lost. The ferocity had not blunted from his anger,
quite the contrary; but his reserves were worn away and temper by itself
was no longer enough to sustain him.
    Resolved on his course of precautions, Pesquil prepared for the moment
when the fleeing girl crossed back into open ground and brought his best
man with a crossbow to the fore.
 'Shoot clean,' he whispered softly. 'I want it to seem as if she tripped.'
    The marksman set his quarrel with a steadiness Lysaer could only envy,
aimed his weapon and lovingly squeezed the trigger.
    The click and hiss of the bow's release blended with the susurration
of tumbling water.

491


 Up slope, the running child missed stride.
 'Perfect shot!' Pesquil said.
    The bolt had struck her lower back in the soft flesh between ribs and hii
Her outcry rang and rebounded, multiplied from rock to rock as she folde,
to her knees. A dragged escort of small stones marked her fall in fiat arc
and dust, swept off in the leaping rush of rapids. But the girl snagged on a~
outcrop at the water's edge and hung there, one limp arm swinging.
    From the vantage in the thickets, her dark hair could be discerne~
fanned back from her face with the trailed ends sleeked by the spray.
    'Damn!' Pesquil wiped sweat from his cheeks then rubbed his palms o~
his leathers. 'Bad luck. If she'd hit the river, they might not suspect a~
aSSassin.'
    Lysaer s'Ilessid stifled any flicker of revulsion. As strategy, Pesquil'
move was unassailable; nor had his effort been wasted. High in the rocks,.
leather-clad woman left cover to rescue what looked from above to be th~
wounded victim of a misstep.
    Poised in tensioned stillness the more explosive for the fact he dared no
fidget, Pesquil spent a moment in furious thought. He waited until the cla~
scout negotiated the most precarious segment of her descent, then touche{
his marksman on the wrist. 'Again,' he whispered. 'Messier, this time
Have this one die yelling.'
    The bowman muffled the ratchet of his weapon under a borrowe~
surcoat and wound it cocked. Smooth-faced and taciturn in concentration
he selected and slicked the feathers of another bolt. Weapon raised, h~
nervelessly fired again.
    The clan woman windmilled into space, gut-struck and screaming i~
agony.
    'Move!' Pesquil signalled his men. 'Hurry, fan out, and keep close watd
on the rocks.' Beside him, the young marksman readied another quarrel
his instruction to dispatch the woman fast if her howls showed any sign 0
coherency.
    Sweated and chafed under the quilted gambeson tucked in wet wad~
beneath his mail, Lysaer gritted his teeth and refrained from comment
Revulsion did not excuse responsibility. Toward his sworn purpose 0
destroying Arithon s'Ffalenn, he had sanctioned Pesquil's foray against th~
clansfolk. No matter how unpleasant, duty demanded that he see th~
action through.
    Again the crossbowman loosed his trigger. Quiet restored, the his:
and splash of the river once more swirled over sink holes and rocks
Pesquil picked a green stick while reports from his scouts were relayel
in.
    Movement had been sighted three different places along the rocks
Crouched beneath an undercut bank whose tree-trunks angled drunke~
reflections on broken waters, and chewing a scraping of sour bark, Pesqui
sent stalkers to reconnoitre. Based on their findings, he used his strippel

492


twig to sketch a crude map between his knees. 'Here's how we'll deploy.'
The instructions he gave his lieutenants erased the last doubt he may have
earned his command through any nicety of Etarran politics.
    At a speed Lysaer found inconceivable, headhunter parties were called
up from downriver and dispatched in wide, covert patterns that lined the
canyon rims with crossbowmen. Pesquil's design unfolded like well-oiled
clockworks: the frontal attack designed to distract; the word at first
engagement, that the grottos held only female defenders and small
children; then Pesquil's smirking comment to Lysaer before they crossed
the river on strung ropes. 'Man, don't expect an easy victory. Clan bitches
fight like she-devils.'
    On the far bank, the men split into teams to scale the rocks. In deference
to Lysaer's strapped arm, Pesquil dispatched scouts to find him an easier
route. Pain and exhaustion by now had outstripped the first numb shock of
injury. Lysaer moved with gritted jaw, his skin grey. He would not let the
men ease the pace. Slipping, sliding, grunting, he laboured upslope, past
stunted cherry trees with their wild fruits green on the stem; over
weather-split granite and twisted brush, and washed out gulches where the
gravel turned under his boots and the jar of every wrong step made his
breath jerk and spasm in gasps. The headhunters who accompanied him as
escort might have disdained their assignment at first; but when at last they
reached the ridgetop and rejoined their commander, Lysaer's determina-
tion had earned their guarded respect.
    By then action in the steep-sided glen was nearly wrapped up, the initial
attack supported from behind by the stationed crossbowmen, who now
cast about for the last living targets trapped against the walls of the canyon.
Down through the fronds of ferns and cross-laced trailers of hanging ivy,
Lysacr saw the sprawled bodies, bloody and hacked beyond anything
rec~)gnizably female, or else near-unmarked except for feathered bolts that
left flowering stains on the backs of deerskin jerkins. Half-sick from his
hurts, too spent for strong emotion, the prince felt wretched and maudlin.
For the first time in life he understood his royal father, who also had been
provoked to require annihilating attacks on villages allied to the s'Ffalenn.
That such forays had mostly come to nothing drove his sire to lifelong
frustration. Lysaer, who in distant lands and exile had not failed, looked
upon his dead with fiat eyes and tried not to fret whether any of the corpses
had been pregnant.
    A headhunter lieutenant touched his shoulder. 'Come. The able-bodied
fighters are beaten down and our scouts say the tents are surrounded.'
    They would fire the hides, Lysaer gathered. He braced his sore side and
stiffly moved on. Of the hike up the canyon rim, he remembered little. The
lowering sun hurt his eyes and patchy bouts of dizziness made progress
difficult.
    Pesquil seemed in rare high spirits. He spat his wad of bark and playfully
tossed his bone-hilted dagger with its peculiar blade, curved and sharp on

493


both edges. Since the need had passed for surprise and silence, he grew
expansive, calling boisterous jokes to his lieutenants.
    The men, too, seemed ebullient. Too drained to attend to their talk,
Lysaer gave cursory study to the high ground where they stopped. The
sun's angle had lowered, throwing the ravine into premature twilight.
Under shaded rim-walls and deeper cover of palings and thickets clustered
the painted hide walls of the clan tents. Faintly, from the inside, came the
wailing cry of an infant, swiftly muffled.
    Lysaer found a broad old maple and rested against the trunk while the
men whistled and laughed and kindled fires. Too battered to join the
activity, he stayed, while the arrows were wrapped and the bows strung
and the wool tips set soaking in oil.
    'All right.' Hands on hips, his lantern jaw outthrust in broken profile
against the shimmers of black smoke on the wind, Pesquil delivered his
order. 'Fire them out.'
    Lots were drawn. The losers, grumbling, chose bows. Fighting an
insidious detachment that felt like the onset of delirium, Lysaer hardly
noticed the arrows crack down until the reek of burning hide wafted out of
the ravine. The tents were well aflame. Heat beat in waves from the
fissure. Orange light played across the rocks, and above the grotto, green
leaves began to shrivel and wilt. Lysaer closed his eyes against the glare,
vaguely aware of screaming. The archers now fired to kill infants, and the
cries of bereaved mothers beat and shrilled against his ears.
    Pesquil's tart sarcasm punched through. 'You seem just a touch
overcome.'            ,
    Lysaer pushed straight and forced his eyes back to clear focus. In fact,
there was a lot of screaming, in pitch and timbre quite different from hand
to hand battle had caused earlier; neither were these the incomprehending
cries of newborns. Sickness fled before anger.
    'You aren't killing them cleanly,' Lysaer accused. He shoved hard away
from the tree.
    'Killing them?' Pesquil grinned, startled to savage delight. 'That wasn't
quite the idea. Not for the pretty women, anyway. My men accomplished
what Etarra's garrison couldn't. Do you think they haven't earned their bit
of sport?'
    Lysaer pushed past toward the rimrocks. The sound of a slap ricocheted
up from the canyon. A man guffawed, while a woman's voice wept
obscenities.
    'Better gag her,' someone advised in cheerful encouragement. 'She'd
gnaw your face off for sheer spite.'
    A glance was enough. Lysaer wheeled back, white to the lips, and
possessed by a frightening control. Coldly, clearly, he said, 'Call them off.'
    Pesquil stood and stroked his crescent knife. 'In due time, prince. Not to
worry. My men aren't picked for sentiment. They can kill well enough
when their pleasure's met. We won't be bringing home any doxies.'

494


    More laughter erupted, and sobbing cries that seemed barely more than a
child's. Lysaer never flicked a muscle. 'Call your men back.' He took a fast
breath. 'Or I will.'
    'Such scruple!' Pesquil crooned. Then, as Lysaer broke from stillness,
the captain's mockery fled and his manner abruptly went stony. 'Man,
man, you're serious.' He reached out in swift purpose and snatched back
the shoulder tightly strapped under wrappings the exact instant Lysaer
called out.
    Bone grated under his fingers. Lysaer doubled with a gasp, his eyes wide
black with pain and fury.
    'My men wouldn't take your command,' Pesquil warned. The crescent
knife remained in his right fist, its angle now openly threatening. 'Prince.'
    Lysaer chopped with his good arm and broke the headhunter captain's
hold. The blade at his midriff as well had been air, for all the attention he
spared it. 'Call them off!'
    'Ath, you soft fool.' As if he reasoned with an idiot, Pesquil said, 'You
want the barbarian clans dead, do you not? And the neck of one black-
handed sorcerer? Well, leave my men to their business! If they don't force
the girls and make plenty of noise, how else d'you think we're going to
draw their eight hundred odd fathers and brothers out of cover and into
reach of our weapons?'
    'You've done this before,' Lysaer gritted, wrenched by the spasm of
abused muscles.
    'Oh, many times. Though I admit, never in quite such choice quantity.'
The sneer was back. Touched with sweat, Pesquil's pockmarks glistened
orange. On the floor of the ravine the tents threw up shimmering curtains
of flame. Nothing alive remained inside their cover. Beyond the fires
fringing the guy ropes, outside a circle of red-soaked and motionless
bundles, men whooped and tore buckskins with abandon. Pesquil's gaze
lowered to his knife, still pointed at the prince. 'It's a time-proven tactic,
your Grace.'
    Lysaer straightened, breathing hard. Sunlight through the tree crowns
played over his gold head, and a breeze flickered mote touched his grazed
cheek to gilt. The mauling he had taken had spoiled his elegance. Nothing
distinguished remained about his ripped surcoat and mud-crusted mail or
the bruises glazed with sweat that darkened neck and chin and temple. Yet
a forceful sense of majesty clothed him all the same, that made even
Pesquil reassess.
    The s'Ilessid prince laid no hand on his sword in dispute. He weighed his
case and made judgement in the solitary arrogance of a king. Then he
turned his back on the silver crescent blade and called upon his birthborn
gift of light.
    His bolt sheared the grotto like bladed lightning and slammed in
bursting brilliance through the charred and blackened leather of the tents.
Flash-fire exploded. Sparks flew and a barrage of deep-throated thunder

495


smote the air. Where hides had flamed, nothing burned any longer. If no
one had been harmed by the blast, still, the ground showed a black, seared
circle, while toppled kingposts flaked with ash trailed sullen smoke over
the previously broken bodies of little children.
    From the grotto, the screaming had ended. Men in the act of lust felt
engorged flesh shrivel from the heat of ravished girls, while in stunned
terror they scrambled back and took stock of wisped hair and blisters and
outer clothing lightly singed upon their bodies.
    Into stupefied stillness, across someone's low whimpers of fear, Lysaer
delivered crisp orders. 'Townsmen! Cover your nakedness and stand aside.
Let any who are clad form a shield-ring and herd every girl and woman
inside. Let none of your company handle them except as necessary. For
peril of your lives, do as I say.'
    'You can't let them go,' Psquil protested. A tremor threaded his voice,
and all his sour mockery had vanished.
    Lysaer looked at him. 'No.' As devoid of contempt as Dharkaron
Avenger, he added, 'But I will end them cleanly.'
    'To what purpose, your Grace.~' Stubborn in recovery, Pesquil flung his
knife hilt deep into the dirt. 'We've clan menfolk still left to deal with.'
    'They'll come.' Lysaer's dispassionate regard flicked back to the grotto
and stayed there as the half-stripped girls and women were shoved tightly
into one group. 'I'll draw in Steiven's barbarians. When I do, be sure of this,
the s'Ffalenn bastard with his shadows will be unable not to come with
them.'

496




Three Valleys

Streaming sweat from an arduous sprint, the runner sent from the west
valley arrives at the breastworks where Caolle and the bulk of Deshir's
clansmen fight unassisted by sorceries or flooded rivers, against Etarra's
right flanking division who outnumber them three to one. 'Tell Lord
$teiven,' he cries, gasping, 'I've come from our liege. Arithon said you
would know what he meant, that the disaster he foresaw has not been
st~pped . . .'

Ph~nging through woods toward the grotto where the women and young
    for safety, Arithon, Jieret and eleven clansmen hear screams and male
sh~uting cut off as a burst of light shears through the trees; lost in a
gr~und-shaking report of fell thunder is Arithon's abject denial, 'Lysaer, oh
   L~zsaer, no!'

In the vale to the west of Tal Quorin, a shadow-wrought barrier ward
shatters and lifts, which leaves half a company of Etarra's beleaguered
garrison fighting mad and unimpeded to regroup and engage the handful of
clan enemies who no longer can shelter behind soreeries to inflict damages
and death with impunity...

497



XVIII.

  'She went not to wed,
  nor to comfort or rest,
 But to free the dazed dead,
 and to reclothe cold flesh
 in fair flowers.'

     Last stanza,
ballad of the Princess of Falmuir

CULMINATION

Thunder cracked the air to whirlwinds as bolts of light ripped the grotto in
sheets that immolated trees to fiayed skeletons. On protected ground some
distance from the rimrocks, checked by flares etched like lightning
through gaps in forest greenery, Arithon caught the back of |ieret's
brigandine. In a despair too horrorstruck for expression, he yanked the boy
cold from his run and bundled him into an embrace. Around their locked
forms, the coruscation flared and died. Gusts spent themselves to a fall of
unmoored leaves, while echoes raged on in vibrations that slapped and
slammed through Tal Quorin's chain of ravines. Arithon pressed his cheek
to red hair, while under his tight hands the orphan he had sworn bloodpact
to protect convulsed into sobs against his shoulder.
    As clansmen they had outstripped in their rush caught back up, nothing
could be done except end their hope quickly. 'It's over. We're too late. Stay
here.'
    The reverberations from the blast rumbled and faded into quiet. Arithon
stared unseeing as three older men caught back a teenager whose berserk
rage impelled him to plunge ahead toward the grotto regardless.
    Held arm locked and struggling, the young scout pealed wild protest to his
prince. 'They can't all be killed, some were sword-trained.'
Arithon, icy, cut him off. 'They are dead, every one. You can't help them.'
No one could: the brutality of Jieret's vision had been graphic, of bodies
tossed and charred, flash-burned in an instant to flaked carbon and bones
crisped beyond all recognition. To the scout still driven to argue, Arithon
said baldly, 'It's your clansmen we'll have to save now.'
    Against him, Jieret moved impatiently. 'Our liege speaks truth.' Though
muffled by the cloth of his prince's sleeve, the boy's dull pronouncement
was still clear enough to be heard. 'I had Sight. None in the grotto
survived.'

499


    The scout subsided to stunned quiet and guarded companions let him
go. In response to Jieret's push, Arithon also loosened his arms. He
cupped the boy's chin in the hand not burdened by Alithiel and gave l~im
a searching study.
    Jieret had seen, in merciless, involuntary prescience; three sisters
burned and one forced, and a mother lying bloody in dead leaves. The
dream's memory stamped his child's face with a hardness that might not,
now, ever leave him.
    'I would have spared you, if I could,' Arithon said in a voice so racked,
not a man in the company overheard him.
    Jieret looked up into green eyes that held no barriers against him.
Offered depths and mysteries whose difficulties were beyond him, he
could answer just one shared pain. 'My liege lord, behold, you have done
SO.'
    Arithon's touch jerked away. 'Ath,' he said on a strangled note of pure
rage. 'Just don't let me close with my half-brother.'
    To the scouts who saw only rebuff, uncomprehending in scope and
viciousness just how far Desh-thiere's curse might turn him, the Master
of Shadow said plainly, 'Run. Back downstream and find Caolle. Keep
the men out of the canyons.'
    'I'll go.' The younger scout pushed forward, desperate to distance grief
with action. 'On the way, I can recall the boys.'
    Jieret made a sound in protest; pressed past tact, Arithon shook his
head. 'Forget them. Just go straight to your captain.'
    'Forget them!' Raw with emotion, the scout rushed him. 'What are you
saying?'
    'That they're beyond help.' Not a quiver of reflex changed Arithon's
stance. Weariness tautened his face, and he seemed not to care whether or
not he was assaulted. He said, 'I'm sorry. Just go now and stop thinking.'
    The scout drew up short of striking him because Jieret interposed
himself between. Shamed by the boy's stiff loyalty, and by the disbelief
that paralyzed his fellows, he regarded his prince, who had drawn, as he
warned, the might of Etarra to the clans. 'Sorry! Sorry isn't enough.' He
spun away and blindly sprinted.
    'Don't mind him.' White-haired and scarred to stoic toughness, the
scout Madreigh offered brusque sympathy. 'That boy's not badhearted,
only sore. Next month he was to marry.' The others were content to leave
him as spokesman as he tactfully fingered his sword edge. 'We should
send another runner after Steiven?'
 Arithon moved not at all, but only closed tortured eyes.
    'Ath!' said Madreigh. 'Forget I ever asked.' Then, in a queer catch of
breath he caught Arithon's wrist and clamped down. 'Trouble's here.'
    A metallic click cut the quiet. The scout just sent off reached a distance
of fifty paces then pitched in a spinning fall, a crossbow bolt through his
neck.

500


    Arithon broke free and flung Jieret violently behind him. 'Boy, stay out
of this, as your sovereign, I command you.' His sword whistled up to
guard-point, while he backed behind the thickest tree to hand, an old beech
raked rough where bucks had shed their summer velvet. He pinned
$teiven's heir with his body as shield, while the clan scouts fell in around
him to enclose the boy.
    Their rush to reach the beleaguered women could have drawn them to
spring the perfect trap. Hidden troops could lie anywhere in ambush. The
crossbows were their greatest liability; shadows their surest defence. But
Arithon dared not try his gift openly lest he pinpoint his presence to
Lysaer, and invite an uncontrolled confrontation with the compulsions of
Desh-thiere's curse.
    Three clansmen armed with recurves and full quivers began to climb the
tree to snipe for the crossbowman. Arithon gave the shortest one a boost.
Fast and furiously thinking, he said, 'They have quarrels, why wait? Why
don't they drop us where we stand?'
    'They're bounty-men.' Madreigh showed a grim flash of teeth. 'Arrow
kills make fights over scalp claims.'
    Quite probably the headhunters' best marksmen would still be stationed
on the rimrocks, or deep in the chasms of the grotto, where orders would
shortly recall them.
 'The bolt had red fietching,' Jieret added.
    'It's Pesquil's league that's against us,' another scout picked up explana-
tion. 'We'll be surrounded already. They'll attack us with numbers, hand
to hand.' He jerked his stubbled chin toward the exquisite weapon held
steady in his liege lord's grip. 'I hope you're good with that.'
    'We'll know in a moment.' Arithon withheld encouragement that his
sorceries might offer them salvation. Any ward against combined as-
sailants required time and concentration to arrange. No moment was
given for response. From the glen that led toward the rimrocks, shadows
flitted, and occasional chance gleams of metal. These fits and starts of
movement resolved into a wave of charging foes. The instant before they
~'~r~~d, Anthon noticed worse: shouts, then the distant clash of steel as a
skirmish broke out in the river gully farther downstream.
    'Caolle's men?' Alarmed, Madreigh added, 'Ath, what could press them
to strike openly? Etarra's garrison's still behind them. They'll be engaged
on two fronts and torn apart.'
    Inarguable fact, as Arithon knew. But even Caolle's blunt savvy could
hardly stay fathers just come from discovery of the scalped and slaughtered
bodies of their sons; clansmen who tracked the reivers upstream to find
headhunters awaiting them in force, and who attacked without the
knowledge that their families in the grotto were past saving.
  'If you pray, beg Steiven's division won't be with them,' Arithon said.
    Then the enemy was upon them. A rough face, a sword and a fouled set of
gauntlets absorbed all of Arithon's attention. Alithiel whined once, twice,

501


in fiurried parries. His opponent was large and heavy handed. Arithon
lunged, then blocked another thrust. His riposte was controlled, an
understated springboard for the feint which followed. A disengage on the
next thrust finished the attacker. Arithon yanked Alithiel clear,
sidestepped the headhunter's dying thrash, and in speed that blurred,
caught the next man behind in a stop thrust.
    Hard-pressed himself, the adjacent clansman turned his shoulder to
cover Arithon's extended body through the moment of recovery. 'Elwedd's
wasted a wager, I see. How'd the Masterbard know you were gifted at
bladework?'
 'Escape this, and we'll ask him,' Arithon said.
    Though joyless, the scout's grin gave endorsement that his liege was
capable enough to be entrusted with full share of Jieret's defence.
    Which fine point would shortly mean nothing, with the headhunters too
thick to beat off and more of them coming by the second. Arithon saw this.
Braced against the tree, forced to close-quarters, his style was cramped.
Crushed moss and roots hampered footwork, and fallen enemies were
adding to the hazard. The archers up the tree were less encumbered, but
one of them already dangled head-down and dead in the branches. The
headhunter crossbowman was still busy. Arithon could not see past the
heave of the fighting to approximate his location. Another bolt whacked
through green leaves and torn shreds of foliage spiralled down.
    Inevitably more crossbowmen must arrive; and Caolle's men could
hardly drive a foray through to rescue Steiven's heir since they could not
know he was pinned down. Arithon beat aside a blade that thrust at him
and fought a slipping stance in wet leaves. A friendly arrow from above
dispatched the brute in the conical helm who shoved in to grapple, and
Arithon escaped with a bruise and a graze. Behind him, Jieret had out his
dagger, determined to enter the fray.
 'Not now,' said Arithon. 'Jieret, this isn't your fight.'
    Three swords came at him. He ducked one, felt the fiat of a second jar his
cut shoulder and met the third in a screaming bind. Locked steel to steel
with an enemy, and exposed on his left side to fate, he saw his choices
reduced to the one that, in Karthan, had undone him.
    He must use magecraft to kill, or allow Jieret and Steiven's grief-crazed
clansmen to die as victims of Desh-thiere's curse.
    Arithon turned the wrist above Alithiel's guard, felt his steel catch his
opponent's crossguard.
    The headhunter anticipated the wrench that would leave him disarmed.
A burly man, and well trained, he gave with the pressure, then grunted in
surprise as Arithon's right-looted kick added force to his countermove and
staggered him sideways. He crashed across other headhunters who thrust
through an opening no longer opportune. Slashed and half-skewered
through the side he went down, two men's steel mired in his fall, and a
third man bashed off balance into the tight-pressed advance of his fellows.

502


dr(~pped his blade, leaped and caught a treebranch, then swung hard. His
boot lashed another attacker and upended him over the foeman who
engaged Madreigh. 'Guard Jieret,' ordered Arithon. 'What needs to be done, I
can't accomplish from here.'
    'You've got spells for a miracle ?' grunted the clan scout, his blade busy. He
sidestepped into his prince's vacated position, feinted low, and cut. Blood
pattered down, filming the leaves, the tree-trunk and Jieret, buffeted and
jostled by his defenders as he watched his liege lord hoist himself after the
archers who were now, all three, dead of crossbow bolts.
    Another quarrel snicked bark by Arithon's head. He ignored it, gave a
quick smile downward to Jieret which held more worry than reassurance. A
sail{)r's move and a slither saw him up and then prone on a treebranch.
    1~dow him, Madreigh fought half-blind from a gash that trickled blood off
his brow and right eye. Arithon drew his belt knife, threw and took down an
t~pportunist who bent for a low stab at Jieret.
    Madreigh finished the action by stomping the fallen man's face. He said,
blade-harried, 'If you know something that'll save us, just do it!'
    Already two more clansmen lay dying, with another one wounded about
to follow. Torn that such bravery should go wasted, Arithon stilled his
nerves and focused his mind to cold purpose. The crossbowman perforce
must come first.
    He cast about the wood, but could not pinpoint the man's cover. That was
the bittcrest setback, since his purpose must be accomplished without
broadscale use of shadows, or any wide sweep of illusion that might terrify
an army into rout. Unless he maintained his anonymity among the clans,
everything that mattered would go for naught.
    Amid a battle that assaulted concentration, Arithon distanced his senses,
walled off awareness of everything outside a discrete sphere of air that
immediately surrounded his person. The ward snare he shaped was risky
and difficult, an amalgamation of illicit magelore and inspiration he would
on n~ account have attempted to save himself~ nor had he, to spare his own
father.
    But to Deshir's clansmen, he was oathbound. Steiven's people would
never have faced annihilation if not for his tie to Rathain.
    The forces he tapped were forbidden by any right-thinking mage. The
tiniest miscalculation, just one slipped step and the vortex he fashioned
cot~ld rend himself, the tree and the last of Jieret's defenders. Arithon
pitched the far fringes of his knowledge against dependency that, with his
person offered as target, the town bowman would shoot to kill. The
artoration must be poised like strung wire: he must not feel his cut shoulder,
must not rouse at the choke of dying men, nor even spare thought to
question whether his clansmen might already lie slain. Ringed in perilous
energies, Arithon touched the air, became the air, as one with its currents
and small breezes that skeined through uncounted spaded leaves.

5O3


    Air did not feel death: it registered screams only as rhythms, intricately
concentric as ring-ripples spread through a pool. There was peace and the
terrible beauty of Ath's order, until a rip of turbulence bored through, swift
and barbed for death as only man-made ingenuity could contrive.
    Arithon closed the net of a ward just finished, but not yet tested for
weaknesses. Too fast for care, too late for regrets, too utterly final to abort,
the headhunter's quarrel whistled in.
    A small thing, the dart, comprised of a handspan of wood and steel,
wound string, glue and dyed feathers; but a shaft notched and barbed, that
sped with a force to pierce mail. Each particle of its substance had Name~
each grain of its mass, an energy signature for which Arithon had subverted
Ath's order and patterned a banespell.
    By nature, any snare of unbinding held a lawless compulsion to
annihilate. Counter to the Major Balance and in parallel with chaos, frail
strictures bent to harness the ungovernable were wont to spin dangerously
awry.
    In raw fact, Arithon's effort was only plausible through a tangle of tricks
and paradox, a loophole in the world's knit that hinged on a theoretical
blend of fine points: that the object to be over mastered was itself made for
death, and that its uninterrupted natural action must set forfeit the
conjurer's life.
    Everything, everything depended upon the headhunter crossbowman
having scored a lethal hit.
    And if the man was such a marksman and his aim did not drift, and
the baneward successfully intercepted his bolt before the instant it
broached living flesh, the result offered perilous instability. The safe-
guards contrived to limit the unbinding's ill effects were by no means
infallibly sure.
    Doubts were all Arithon had, and stark fear, when the quarrel hissed into
his defences.
    To unmake any particle of Ath's Creation came at hideous cost. Arithon
shuddered, then blocked a scream with his knuckles as the mote he had
captured exploded in a battering burst. Tied to his conjury, his body
convulsed in a spasm that seemed to crush out his marrow as law and
matter unravelled in a whistling rush of wild energies. Arithon felt the
nexus of his uncreation graze his protections, burning for entry to twist,
tear and unravel his whole flesh as well as any other thing that lay within
range of its reach. Inflamed as though he noosed magma, he flung out the
shielding second stage of his counterspell.
    He deflected his ugly package of wrecked order through air, back along
the disturbed eddies traced by the quarrel's first flight path, then trailed
with a stop-ward set to the resonance of wrought steel.
    A hiss arced through space above the skirmishers that partnered no
physical projectile. Arithon opened his eyes, running sweat and winded as
if he had been whipstruck. With every nerve screaming he waited.

504


Until, behind a thin screen of alder, the crossbow exploded in the hands
of its wielder.
    Splinters and wound wire and metal burst like shrapnel and fiayed the
headhunter's face. He dropped, choking, holes torn through his chest and
his abdomen, and blood spattered like thrown ink across the bleached
trees. The only bit of his weapon not fragmented was the trigger latch, the
first steel to contact the spell and engage its limited safeward.
    That stricture at least had worked and cancelled the unholy destruction.
Arithon shivered in relief. Let there be no more archers among the enemy,
he hoped, gasping as he clung to the treebranch. If there were, then Deshir's
clans were finished. He lacked stomach to repeat those defences. Torn by
nerve-sick reaction, he regretted the victim, whose death was not needed,
but who could not in the pinch of the moment be distanced from the means
that destroyed his weapon.
    Below the beech tree fighting still raged. Casualties mounted feroci-
ously. Only five clansmen remained standing. Madreigh battled on one
knee, his right arm useless and his blade in his left hand, parrying. Jieret
had taken up Alithiel in braced readiness for the moment when his last
adult defenders should be cut down.
    Again, Arithon stamped back the temptation to grasp at the easiest
expedient. Whoever he might spare by using shadow he could later kill
without compunction in the grip of Desh-thiere's curse. No risk was worth
the chance he might draw Lysaer. Hedged by untenable choices, Arithon
recouped a concentration that felt as if sloshed through a sieve. Need drove
him again to abjure safe limits and to further violations of integrity that
were going to cost bitterly later.
    He must not think of that. Now, all that mattered was the preservation
of lieret's life and after him, any other clansman who could be saved.
    Clammy with chills, hollowed by weakness that sapped like the
aftermath of fever, Arithon rested his cheek on the tree limb. He closed his
eyes, inhaled the peppery scent of damp bark, and let that fuse with his
being. He quieted. His clasped hands settled and sensitized to the
languorous flow of sap. His thoughts became the whisper of leaves, the
sunlit flight of pollinating bees, the unfurling of green shoots that
thickened with each season's turn, into stately crown and mighty wood
branches. His consciousness spiralled down to encompass the thick black
depths of earth, the firm anchored network of tap roots.
    Through the irreproachable pith of the living tree, Arithon twined his
spell. Like the buds, the leaves, the branches, all groping outward for new
growth, he spun the fine tendrils of his wards away from the trunk, that
any defender who used its bulk to shield his back would be spared. But any
attacker facing inward would find his eyes drawn and subtly captured,
while his thoughts slowed to syrup, then to the languid drip of sap.
    A human mind ensnared in the consciousness of a tree will sleep,
immersed in slow dreams that measure time in stately rhythms, of clean

505


sun and silvered snow and seasons that slide one into another like the
rain-kissed drift of autumn leaves.
    Which meant, Arithon knew, that any Deshan still standing would
slaughter his victims in the half-second their reflexes dragged and the hand
on driving blade faltered. Unlike the Etarrans entrapped by the shadow
maze in the adjacent valley, these townsmen were given no reprieve.
Mastery of their fate was reft from them, with no offered moment of free
will in which they could choose to turn aside.
    Against a powerful temptation to shelter with them in sunwashed
oblivion, Arithon disentwined his consciousness from the tree's green
awareness. He opened his eyes too soon. The part of him still paired to
heart-sap and earth peace ripped away into noise and the blood-reek of
animal carnage. Below him, the beech roots were mulched over with dead
men, their wide open eyes still dreaming, imprinted with sky caught
reflections of bark and boughs and leaves.
    Arithon retched, then forced a tight grip on raw nerves. He clasped the
branch in sweated hands and through guilt and revulsion, took charge of
the fruits of his conjury.
    Madreigh was down and wounded, Jieret at his shoulder with Alithiel
bloodied in his hand. Two clansmen, both injured, were still on their feet,
while outside the canopy of the beech tree, enemies crumpled to their
knees, lost to mind and awareness. Beyond these, more headhunters
checked in fear of the bane that had invisibly struck down their fellows.
Outrage would soon overcome their apprehension and drive them to
vigorous retaliation.
    'Don't face inward, don't look at the tree,' Arithon instructed the
surviving clansmen. He then asked numb limbs to move, and proved
shaking hands could still grip. Somehow he swung to the ground. Hands
tried to steady him as he swayed. He pushed them impatiently away.
'Don't trust what you're going to see. The reinforcements will all be mine.'
He caught his sticky blade from Jieret's grasp. 'Just run, and don't for any
reason turn back.' To the boy's alarmed look, he added quickly, 'I'll be with
you. Go.'
    He punctuated his instruction with a light slap on Jieret's shoulder.
Then, leaning on Alithiel to keep balance, he knelt, bent his head and spun
illusion.
    Even depleted as he was, his inborn gift would always answer. Now he
was alone and the risks were to himself, he dared risk shadow in limited
countermeasure. Darkness flowed freely to his use as water might beat
from a cataract. And as he had done another night in Steiven's supply tent,
he bent conjury into the shape and form of warriors.
    They emerged from brush and thicket with weapons gleaming, and bows
nocked with broadheads in their hands. If their faces lacked character, if
their step was inhumanly silent, discrepancy was covered by the scream
and clash of fighting that echoed from the grottos by Tal Quorin. Since the

506


appearance of reinforcing clansmen be fitted a strategy to cover the flight of
three fugitives, any headhunters not turned by the sleep-snare were
scarcely minded to pause in analytical study. Caught inside arrow range
when Arithon's shadow-men knelt and pulled recurves, most wisely,
Pesquil's men who still had wits and footing broke and dove under cover.
    Their panicked haste might have amused, had the arrows when they
arced not been made up of fancy and desperation.
    Arithon stirred, looked up, and tried to muster resource to rise and
continue after Iieret. He managed neither. His miscalculation was not
surprising, after the strictures he had broken. Before the foot and the knee
that failed his will lay Madreigh, a tear in his chest that welled scarlet over
his buckskins at each gasp.
    'Ath,' Arithon said. He sat. Stupid with weakness, he met the eyes of the
man, which stayed lucid through a suffering that should have eclipsed
recognition.
    'My liege.' Madreigh drew a scraping breath. 'Go on. After the boy.
You're oathbound.'
    A scathing truth; one Arithon understood he had to answer for. Except
he was drained to his dregs from misused expenditure of magecraft. Since
he could not immediately master himself, he did as he wished and
snatched up Madreigh's wrist. In a whisper that seemed the utterance of a
ghost he said, 'I also took oath for Rathain and look, you die for it.'
 Beyond speech, Madreigh looked at him.
    Arithon spread the clansman's limp fingers and pressed them, already
chilled, against the bole of the beech tree. He closed his own hands over the
top. Then with a gesture that lanced blackness and sparks through his
mind, he wrenched back the fast-fading glimmer of his spellcraft and let it
flow like a mercy-stroke over the clansman's consciousness.
    Sleep took Madreigh's tortured frame. His face under its grit and grey
hair gentled, all sorrows eased into the sundrenched serenity of ancient
trees.
    Empty with remorse, Arithon opened his fingers. Half-tranced from
exhaustion he regarded his circle of quiet dead, clad in leather and blood; or
wearing city broadcloth and chain mail pinched with weedstalks and dirt.
The only censure for the mage-trained, he sadly found, was adherence to
truth and self-discipline. No mind with vision was exempt; creation and
destruction were one thread. One could not weave with Ath's energies
without holding in equal measure the means to unstring and unravel.
    The blood had left his head. He understood if he tried to move, he would
0nly fall down spectacularly. Oblivious to the shouting and the battering
scream of killing steel, he cupped his chin and surrendered to the shudders
that racked him. He had acted outside of greed or self-interest, had to the
letter of obligation fulfilled his bound oath to the Deshans. Duty did not
cleanly excuse which lives should be abandoned to loss, or which should
be taken to spare others: Steiven's clansmen, last survivors of savage

507


persecution, or Pesquil's headhunters, still heated from their spree of
unlicenced rapine and slaughter. No answer satisfied. No law insisted that
justice stay partnered by mercy.
    The day's transgressions abraded against s'Ffalenn conscience like the
endless pound of sea waves tearing bleak granite into sand. Through a fog
that forgot to track time, Arithon noticed the rhythmic well of fluid from
Madreigh's chest had slowed or stopped. Whether this was death's doing or
the endurance of sap laid deep for long winter, he had no strength to
examine.
    He managed to recover his sword, and after that, his footing, before the
disorientation that distanced him bled away and snapped his bemused
chain of thought. His senses reclaimed the immediate. The belling clang of
battle had now overtaken and surrotmded him and arrows sleeted past in
fiat arcs that gouged up trails of rotted leaves.
    Not shadows, this time. The beech tree was solid at his hip. None too
steady, Arithon backed against it. Though reawakened to his needs and
obligations, his mind stayed bewildered and unruly. Disjointed details
skittered across his awareness: that the sun had lowered; that copper
leaves in red light trembled as if dipped in blood; that the brawling and the
noise were distracting because they were caused by fighters, not shadows
dressed up as illusion. Clansman and headhunter and dishevelled knots of
city garrison were engaged in annihilation as ferocious as a scrap between
mastiffs.
    Caolle had not sent reinforcements. The clansmen Arithon recognized
were Steiven's division and they battled to a purpose that was anything
other than haphazard. For their wives, their children, for their sons sadly
slaughtered by the riverside, they were vengeance-bent on killing head-
hunters.
    Though it cost them their last breathing clansmen, Pesquil's league
would not live to leave Strakewood to cash in their loved ones' scalps for
bounties.
    Waste upon waste, Arithon thought, brought to sharp focus by anger. As
Rathain's sworn sovereign, he would stop them, separate them, ensure
that Jieret had a legacy left to grow for.
    Careful only not to tread on fallen bodies, Arithon launched himself into
the skirmish that ringed the trees, knotting and twisting through under-
growth and hummock, the lightning flicker of swordstroke and mail like
thrown silver against falling gloom. He engaged the first headhunter to
rush him, inspired beyond weariness by necessity. He fought, parried,
killed in rhythmic reflex, all the while searching the m~l~e for sight of just
one of Steiven's officers. Given assistance, he held half-formed plans of
using magecraft to stage some diversion that locked combatants might be
separated. He would control the berserk clansmen, bully them, or fell
them wholesale with sleep-spells if he must. Though as his stressed
muscles stung with the force of a parry, he recognized the last was pure

508


folly. His earlier unbinding had left damage, and he was lucky to stay on his
feet.
 'Arithon! My liege!'
    The call came from his right, toward the downslope that devolved
toward the grottos. The Master of Shadow beat off an attacker and spun.
The patter and hiss of sporadic bowfire creased the air and snatched
through veilings of low foliage. Through a drift of cut leaves and air dusky
with steep shafts of sunlight, Arithon searched but never found who had
shouted.
    His gaze caught instead on a clustered squad of headhunters led by a
pockscarred man in muddy mail~ then another, tall, straight, of elegant
carriage in a ripped blue surcoat, gold-blazoned and bright as his hair.
 Lysaer.
 They saw each other the same instant.
    Arithon felt the breath leave his chest as if impelled by a blow. Then
Desh-thiere's curse eclipsed reason. He was running, the air at his neck
prickling his raised hair like the charge of an incoming storm. Sword
upheld, lips peeled back in atavistic hatred, he closed to take his half-
brother without heed for what lay between.
    A baleful flash brightened the trees. Lysaer, as curse-bound as he, had
called on his given gift of light.
    Arithon expelled a ragged laugh. They were matched. No bolt, no fire, no
conflagration lay past reach of his shadows to curb. Strakewood could
burn, or be frozen sere as barren waste, and supporters and armies would be
winnowed like chaff in the holocaust. The end would pair Lysaer and
himself across the bared length of steel blades, with no living man to
intervene.
Lysaer raised his right hand and the headhunters around him fanned out.
Sayouting eagerness, Arithon slowed. He felt someone grasp at his
shoulder, heard shouting like noise in his ears. Owned by the curse, he
shook off restraint, then backhanded whoever had interfered.
    When the light-bolt cracked from Lysaer's fist, he let it come, a snapping
whip of lightning that parted the wood like a scream. Through its glare,
Arithon saw the men around Lysaer kneel and raise white-limned weapons
to their shoulders. Crossbows, he realized in undimmed exultation.
    Arithon toyed with them, used mage-schooled finesse to twist shadow
with a subtlety his enemy could never match. The headhunters who aimed
were struck blind to a degree that negated they had ever walked sighted.
    Some screamed and threw down their weapons. The rest fired a barrage
of wild shots. Quarrels whined through a rising bloom of incandescence.
    Arithon laughed and let the fire of Lysaer's own making char the bolts to
oblivion. Then he cancelled the force ranged against him with a veil of neat
shadow, even as he once had deflected the fires of a Khadrim's fell attack.
He barely cared that he trembled in a backlash of overstressed nerves, but
revelled in his powers to smother all light to oblivion.

509


