Fugitive Prince (49 page)

The Etarran camp erupted like a nest of kicked wasps, but not to a wild stir of noise. Men reacted in a chilling, oiled flow of discipline, tearing down tents and searching through every nook and cranny of
packed baggage. Twenty minutes after the stunning discovery, the officer of the day watch stood in straightlaced formality and delivered the raw news to his captain.

“The man’s not in camp, though his horse, his sword, his saddle and cloth are still here. The outlook is no good. He slit the tent canvas with a dagger and crawled into the armory. All the tactical maps are taken from the locked chest. He snatched an excellent sword, then caused enough mischief to make us all choke in embarrassment.”

“Sabotage?”

The officer swallowed. “Yes sir.” He shifted huge shoulders under his mail, braced his nerve, and recited the list. “All the steel broad-heads were cut from their shafts, and the fletching stripped off the arrows. Sword blades were unwound at the tang and separated from their hilts. At the horse lines, we found all the bridles cut apart. We’d fix them with string, but no one in camp can find a damned bit for his horse, or a girth that has any buckles.”

“Embarrassment, you say?” The captain stabbed his eating knife upright in the crust of his scarcely touched bread loaf. “I call it mayhem. ” His eyes narrowed with thought and a chilling, leashed temper, he snapped his strong fingers, causing the page who knelt by his elbow to jump. “Go. Fetch my parchment and seal.”

Then he leveled his blue eyes at the duty officer, and said, “You’re not finished?”

The man caught under scrutiny fidgeted, the sweat rolling from under his steel helm. “No, sir. The kennelman claims the meat for the dogs was tainted. At least, since he fed them, every last one’s fallen sick.”

The account suffered a break as the page boy returned, bearing the troop commander’s lap desk and the tied leather bundle which protected the state seal with its sunwheel blazon of authority.

“Keep talking, man.” Resigned to the setback that spoiled his breakfast, the captain unburdened the page boy. His hard fingers flipped open the lap desk. “If our scouring of the clans is no longer a surprise, the other troops have to be warned. You can talk while I write.” He accepted the wrapped packet containing the sunseal, then paused, his frosty brows snagged in a frown.

“Something wrong, sir?” The duty officer blotted his moist face.

The troop commander showed his teeth, an animal response to murderous fury as he snatched up his knife and slashed the thong ties. The rolled leather fell away and revealed an old knotted root left in place of the sunwheel seal to attest crown authority. “Why, that slithering get of a snake! For this, I’ll see his entrails torn out by dogs and his scalp taken under my dagger!”

The page boy launched into panicky excuses. “The lock wasn’t loose on your coffer, sir. No papers were missing.” Then the damning worst, from the lips of foolhardy innocence. “Whoever stole the seal from your things had to know just where to look.”

“Be silent.” The captain fingered his steel, his temper leashed through hardened experience, and his slate-colored eyes fixed back on the man whose report was unfinished, and whose perspiring features showed inordinate lack of surprise. “There’s
more?”

“Yes, sir.” The forbearing sigh this time seemed to rise from the harried man’s boot soles. “The groom on the picket lines was given a requisition order, sealed and signed in what looks to be precise forgery.”

“What did that groom give, say quickly.” No idiot, the troop captain thrust to his feet. “The facts are by far more important than the blame.”

The reporting officer braced himself. “Six horses, half of them saddled and bridled, and the last three apparently on lead reins. We’ve examined the tracks. The creatures were roped in pairs. The dawn patrol saw someone they believed to be ours, leaving with remounts in tow. He carried packeted orders under your wax seal, and we can’t fault them, the sunwheel blazon was genuine. A short distance from our outer line, the trail scouts say the horses slowed down. Then their tracks diverge to all points of the compass.”

“You tried dogs?” said the captain, not truly expecting the obvious had not been covered.

“First thing, sir.” The watch officer rubbed his moist hands on his surcoat. “The two bitches well enough to stand up lost the scent next to the picket lines. That’s where the groom said the rogue mounted. We can follow that horse, but that’s wasted motion.” This spy had proven inventively clever. He had likely climbed from one saddle to another before he sent the loose horses packing.

“All right,” said the captain, all ironbound purpose. “I want action. Now. Each one of those horses will be tracked and brought in, I don’t care if their trail leads through Sithaer itself. Every man will be questioned. If anyone saw this traitor’s face clearly, I want his detailed description. Next, we assume he’s barbarian blood. Why else steal the tactical maps, if not to send word to the enemy? We’re marching north anyway. Last night’s little blunder just lit the fires under our order of march a bit hotter. At the end, we’ll face men who are warned and desperate. By the Light, if there’s justice, our line sentries are going to stand front and center when we close with the murdering fugitives.”

A searing, short pause, as the captain recalled the humiliation that he had no seal for his orders. Nor could he verify his dispatch to Avenor to send formal complaint of the infamy.

“Damn the motherless, slinking little weasel!” he exploded in livid heat that promised a reckoning in bloodshed. “When we net his close kin, I will personally sew their damned scalps as a fringe on my saddlecloth. ”

By noon, sweating in the humid spring warmth that chafed blisters under gambesons and made chain mail weigh like poured lead, the men ran down the last horses. Not one bore a rider. The spy’s tracks were not found, though the hound couple which survived the morning’s bout of poisoning whuffed and milled in baffled circles. They sprawled on their sides, muddied and panting, while their irritable handlers persisted. The next hour entailed the miserable, wet labor of leaping across hummocks and scouring the verges of the waist-deep, dank pools in the fenland. Sedges and cattails waved in the wind. Half-budded maples trailed lichened branches and tough roots into the peat black waters of the sinkholes. Hard effort flushed nothing but otters and the flap of displaced crows. Nothing moved but the high-flying hawk, while clouds gathered and plumed like combed silver overhead and threatened more rain before nightfall.

In due course, the search was called off. The guileful courier had left no trace of his passage, and his clanblood relations would inevitably receive the premature warning of trouble.

The setback raised grumbles, but no loss of morale. These were seasoned fighters who had marched against clansmen before. They knew to expect balking tricks and sly tactics that time and again deferred victory. This campaign might go hard, but the ending was assured. Without ships, the barbarian enclaves in south Tysan were doomed, soon to be reaped by the vengeful steel of Lysaer’s Alliance of Light.

In the late afternoon, the gathering storm rode the west winds raking in off the ocean. The rain drizzled, then gushed, then hammered down in white sheets. The barrage chased the dark pools in the marshes to stippled pewter, and glazed the bent limbs of the maples. Mearn s’Brydion waded shin deep to keep dogs off his scent, his wet leathers clinging like glue at each stride, and his fingers locked to the straps of three rolled leather map cases. The brass-capped ends bashed his thigh when he stumbled, his ankles caught back by the sawing tangles of sedges. Only the relentless chill kept him wakeful.

His thoughts came in fragments, their meaning unmoored by the expanding spirals of exhaustion.

He slogged his way past another islet of hummocks. The sucking pull of the mud continually mired and slowed him. Yet he dared not traverse the high ground, not with an Alliance armed force at his back, enraged by his suborning trickery. Some of the dogs might survive the pulped water hemlock he had used to taint their dried meat. Etarran field troops were not fools in the wilds, and no lack of bridles and girths would swerve them from their orders to march north.

Breathless, shivering, gnawed to the bone by the ache of spent muscles, Mearn perched his hip on a deadfall. Rain pocked the water in rings at his shins. Premature dusk banked deep shadows beneath the stained boles of the trees. The low, misting clouds showed no sign of lifting. Rain blew and swirled and trickled from his eyebrows, and rinsed streams through the garlands of watercress plastered over his thighs. Failing light was going to upset his bearings. Mearn tipped back his head and fought off a flattening rush of disheartenment. He had only the lichens for orientation. On the south sides of trees, the salt winds from Mainmere burned off their splotched growth; and the shag moss did not grow north-facing.

Mearn shut stinging eyes, every nerve end and instinct alive to his danger. Range too far east, he would find only distrustful fenlanders in their lowly wattle-and-mud huts. Pass too far west, and he would encounter high ground, fair game for a second armed troop the maps showed would be beating a line inland from Hanshire. South lay the Etarrans he had riled like jabbed hornets, and north, and if luck saved him, he might find the armed bands of Lord Maenol’s scouts who had foiled the Alliance’s cordon of Riverton.

Geese called in the reeds. Daylight was fast waning. The gloom seemed cast in lead silver between the plummeting curtains of rainfall. Mearn shoved off through the vast, empty maze of stilled bogland, no longer able to mind his own noise as he snapped through the sticks of the thickets. He tripped again, slamming his shoulder on the knob of a willow bough. “Forgive,” he gasped, breathless, by timeworn clan custom acknowledging the mistake of his own clumsiness. The nurturing trees might overlook his offense, but the needs of his body could not be deferred for much longer.

The willow grove thinned. Hedged by gathering darkness, the ground snaked away into tarnished, dull pools inked with the knees of dead tree roots. A lightning-struck oak thrust a blackened shell skyward, the stripped husks of burned saplings angled like spears through the rioting tangle of briar. The past fire had scorched off the
moss and the lichen. A few sloshing steps brought the water waist deep. Mearn paused, half-immersed. He wiped streaming wet from his eyes, while the wind slapped and battered at his hair and his clothing. He hitched the map cases up to his shoulder to protect their waxed hide from immersion.

Rain blurred the landmarks. The sere, muddy banks held no sign of an otter’s den, or any other small animal burrow to hint which direction lay south. Only the unreliable, buffeting west winds lent their unkindly semblance of guidance.

These fens were not safe to traverse after dark, with mud sinks that could swallow a man’s foot in one step and suck down his bones beyond finding.

Mearn slogged ahead, splashed into a hole, then managed a clawing recovery back to raised ground. He would have to double back. The effort would certainly turn him around. Trail instinct did not apply in this land, with its puzzle-cut maze of tangled, brown hummocks, and meandering pools inscribed by hammering rainfall.

Immersed in deep thickets, clawed raw by green thorns, he lost his bearings again. Faced by a deeper stand of water than before, he now shivered uncontrollably. The relentless chill stole his body’s reserves. He knew his survival hinged upon finding immediate shelter and food. Sleep now was his enemy. To yield to his craving for overdue rest would see him a skeleton picked clean by predators. The urgent warning he carried would become lost, and the maps, which detailed the Alliance sweep through south Tysan for the purpose of eradicating clan bloodlines.

Mearn thrashed into another grove of maples, hampered by closing darkness. A gray heron startled into flight from her fishing. He recoiled from the noise. Twigs clawed at his burden. He caught back the loosened bundle before the straps gave, and clasped the rolled leather to his chest. Breath sucked through his locked teeth. He no longer knew if the whine in his ears was the shrilling of spring peepers, or yet another warning of overtaxed senses about to let go and fail him. He kept moving regardless, unwilling to give way to the beckoning void that offered him painless unconsciousness.

Through the sheet-lead expanse of another shallows, Mearn lost north again. He groped for a tree, a stripped stump, any firm object that might still harbor a telltale colony of shag moss. His touch met cold mud. Reeds slapped his face. Cattail down snagged in his nostrils and smeared yellow fuzz on his eyelids. He coughed into darkness that seemed too thick to breathe, and shoved on against a battering tempest of cold wind. The rain sluiced and hissed and
rinsed through wet leaves. He knew he must stop, find some sort of shelter, and wait out the night or the storm. Vertigo threatened to unstring his balance. Already he could have become turned around and be moving back into the armed camp of the enemy.

Time slipped. He became aware that he sat underneath the dripping crown of a marsh maple. Gusts roared through the branches, and clattered the loosened, dead runners of vines. Far past feeling cold, he crimped his hands on the straps that secured the purloined map cases. Fear and worry were numbed, his cognizance flattened to insipid and dangerous lassitude. The rain drove down, relentless, and scattered thin trickles off the wicked ends of his hair. Only the otters fared well in this weather. Mearn heard the splash as they dove from the banks, hunting small crayfish, or cavorting for sport in the darkness.

Or perhaps their noise masked the doings of men. He could no longer tell. The vise grip of exhaustion left his skull feeling packed with wet cotton. Overcome by inertia, he attempted more than one brutal measure to regain his feet and keep moving.

Nothing changed. His last strength was long spent. Mearn sat, huddled with his forehead bowed on his knees, and his smeared wrists tucked at his ankles. Weariness sapped his last spark of vitality, but not stubborn will. He still held the map cases clenched to his breast. Asleep or unconscious, he did not respond as the splashing disturbance approached him. Nor did he stir in the flare as someone unshuttered a wick lantern. The breath of the storm winnowed the reek of hot fat, then the must of wet clothes, sewn from the skins of small animals. A skiff made of bark glided through the shallows. From a perch in the bow, a wizened little grandmother raised a horn lantern, while two younger male relatives pointed and whispered in the singsong dialect of the fenlands.