Fugitive Prince (67 page)
Authors: Janny Wurts
Oblivion remained.
Seconds passed, or eternity; time lost all meaning as the spiraling force of the crystal’s transmission ranged across distance.
Then, like smashed ice reformed through smelting heat and dire cold, new sensation reassembled. The seeress no longer beheld the sun-drenched beachhead by Mainmere, noisy with exuberant clansmen. The eyes she gazed out of were not her own, but those of First Senior Lirenda…
Under a sky silted in low-hanging stringers of cloud, the harbor at Corith lay untenanted except for the churned phalanxes of whitecaps as the brig
Lance
threaded her inbound course through the chain of flanking islets. She dropped anchor against a stiff wind. The rock basin which gleamed fired russet in sunlight, under dampness wore the blotched tang of rusted iron. Slate waters rolled, and the air smelled of wet rock, and the faint trace of ozone which warned of an oncoming gale.
By the aft rail, the Alliance captain deposed by Caolle’s bold strategy stared shoreward. His locked hands stayed braced on new varnish, while over and over, the unraveling spume of the breakers sheeted the jagged crescent strand. The testy temperament once raised in defiance of Koriani sailing orders had deflated to fretful humility since the loss of his flagship command.
His pride was ashes. Anxious to please lest the First Senior’s testimony reveal the sad fact of his damning lack of fight before surrender, he volunteered his opinion concerning the vacant anchorage. “The Alliance fleet from Hanshire included oared galleys. Weather’s set up to blow, as you see. If Prince Lysaer’s ships are still here, they’ll be tucked up tight in deep shelter. Captains who’ll row on blue water know weather, or they don’t survive. They’d have winched up on land, high and dry on log skids. Else they’re crammed into some cove behind a barrier reef, where Sithaer’s own demons couldn’t raise enough swell to kick up a rank sea into combers.”
Another gust thrummed through the stays. First Senior Lirenda clamped manicured fingers over her billowing silk. A wayward strand of dark hair escaped anyway, to stream and snap a refrain to her fierce irritation. Her lighter mantle buffeted against the captain’s oiled cloak, while the silence magnified her indifference toward particulars. Whether or not the Prince of the Light would agree to trade off hostages with a pirate crew loyal to the Shadow Master, the stakes to her personal dilemma stayed unchanged. Moment to moment, she lived in blank dread, besieged by the knowledge her bonded crystal was withheld on the mainland, guarded by enemy hands.
The Min Pierens archipelago, with its forbidding, scarred cliffs and wind-mangled stands of crabbed cedar, wore its mantle of storm cloud in savage reflection of her mood. Yet where nature could stir the unrestrained elements into primordial fury, she must guard her vulnerability behind a mannered facade of restraint. She could do
nothing
but suffer her impotent rage for talents removed beyond access. Beneath anger and poisonous humiliation, she wrestled the insidious fear, that mishap could unstring every thread of her ambition and ruin her beyond salvage.
She had scarcely spoken through the weeks since the
Lance
had made covert landfall in Havish. There the prize crew loyal to Arithon had boarded a mannerless cohort of fortune-seeking mercenaries. At sea, the men had no enemy but boredom. They wrestled and grew crapulous and picked fights. Rather than suffer their attacks of lewd humor, Lirenda stayed out of sight. The fortnight’s offshore passage to the Isles had been spent locked in the privacy of her cabin. She came on deck for the landfall well aware she must keep up the semblance of appearances. Clothed in the eighth-rank robes of a Koriani First Senior and the empty trappings of power, she despised her reduction to female uncertainty, disposition of her fate given into the hands of these rough-cut, fallible men.
The lookout hailed down from the crosstrees. “Longboat sighted! Bearing in on our starboard quarter, and flying the sunwheel blazon!”
Lirenda throttled the urge to cross the deck and gawk alongside the sailhands. Nor would she acknowledge the vanquished captain’s self-blinded lift of optimism. The rippling gilt snap of Prince Lysaer’s banner against the crocheted heave of the wavecrests promised her no deliverance. Reprieve from captivity would not remove her from jeopardy. Not when a thousand ways existed to erase the attuned bindings which linked her lost quartz to the spells that extended her vitality. If few rituals offered the horrific severance that Caolle had arranged for the healer, some were deadly innocent enough to occur through ignorant mishap.
A moment’s inept handling might plunge the stone into the sea. Saltwater cleansing would follow, a gentle dissolution of the wards that would span the course of several days. The first symptom might bloom with a nagging, dull headache. Weakness would follow. Then a fumbling loss of reflex, which would progress into fits of sick trembling and convulsions, until she died at last of paralysis, as her internal organs failed and ruptured, torn apart by the unleashed backlash of stayed time.
The slap of raw winds made her feel her mortality, and the unblemished hand held clenched to the rail only mocked her: she could wake any morning and find herself trapped in the witless, shriveled body of a hag.
Jostled movement beside her upset her dark thoughts. Lysaer’s displaced captain had turned aside to make inquiry, while on deck behind, a clipped shout in clan accents called for the deckhands to sway out a boat.
“Koriathain, my lady?” The deposed captain faced back and addressed her. “Signals have been relayed through an officer from Lysaer’s royal galley.” Uncertainty checked him. His palm left a broad, misty print on new varnish as he shifted to scrape at the beard stubble he now owned no blade to raze off. “The clan brigands agreed I should plead for an exchange of prisoners with the Prince of the Light.”
“Those plans have changed?” Lirenda gave him her haughty attention. “State what you wish.”
The man cleared his throat, his diffidence laughable. Deprived of her crystal, Lirenda owned no powers to cow him beyond glacial manners and deportment. If keen observation could still let her fathom the gist of his disorganized thinking, no schooled methodology could restore her lost key to access the complex sigils of spellcraft. “State
your wish,” she repeated. To hide her distaste for his jettisoned male pride, she fixed her tigerish gaze on the tumbled and desolate shoreline.
The man’s knot of dread and embarrassment loosened. “An officer from the Alliance flagship has insisted, by word of his Grace, that you be the one sent to speak for the hostages.”
Which warped twist of fate held a piquant justice; Lirenda could have howled for the irony. Had her towering rejection of intimacy not forced her need to defeat Arithon s’Ffalenn, Morriel Prime’s design to ensnare him would have succeeded without setback. No fool’s round of bargaining over prisoners and slave oarsmen would need under-taking at all.
Caolle would have passed the Wheel back in Riverton, with Lirenda spared from her present coil of entanglement.
The First Senior made certain as she sealed an empty promise that her voice masked her sorry self-derision. “If human lives can be redeemed from the Shadow Master’s henchmen, the vows of my order require me to act to the absolute limit of my resources.”
Individual awareness reawakened. The seeress snapped back into herself, disentwined at a stroke from Lirenda’s close thoughts, and the leveling sting of shared shame. Jerked back into the heat of a Capewell afternoon, she raised her damp head. Her heart raced too fast. The lingering horror reeled through her from the secondhand taste of the First Senior’s appalling disgrace. The seeress blinked, then shuddered in revulsion, unable to bear the closed, cloying dimness of the Prime Matriarch’s bedchamber.
The quartz burned, the etheric web of its matrix torn by the masterful force of the sigil Morriel Prime had rammed through its transmission. Pillowed in stained lace, the Matriarch lay motionless. Her features were an expressionless skull, swathed in crimped skin, only animated by the devouring intensity of jet eyes. Her glance in that hour could have pierced flesh and bone to plunder thought straight from the mind. Of all harbingers of disaster, this day’s scrying had delivered the penultimate stroke of ill news.
No setback could strike with such profound impact: the continuance of Koriani power had hung on Lirenda, First Senior.
Terrified to breathe lest any slight motion rip the dread stillness and ignite Morriel’s leashed wrath, the seeress froze in suspension. Alive to the unseen currents of danger, she hesitated to ask back her scrying sphere from the Prime Matriarch’s clasped fists.
Then the decision was spared her. Morriel unlocked her grasp on
the quartz, though nothing else moved under the tucked layers of the counterpane. The pleats at her brow seemed starched into place. Her bitterness poisoned the stifling shadows that speared where the candle’s flame faltered. Her seamed lips held the limpid pallor of killed fish as she waved the seeress back from her bedside. “You may sit.”
“Your will.” The enchantress sank down, unsure whether she dared ask permission to cease further efforts at scrying. She knew of no precedents. If a betrayal had ever happened this high in the ranks during the order’s long history, none of her colleagues remembered. Lirenda’s defection left her stunned to incapacity, with the Prime’s disappointment an unvoiced anguish all the more deadly for being suppressed through an invalid’s weakness.
Nor had the seeress ever witnessed an augury cast across open salt water. She had always believed such a practice lay past the reach of the most advanced Koriani arts. The chill truth struck home, that the Matriarch’s seat required more preparation and knowledge than a senior enchantress imagined. Given the harsh fact, the enormity became crushing, that the one groomed successor had failed to maintain her integrity.
“Well you should fear,” said Morriel Prime. “There is only one glyph that can span the salt ocean. That is the sigil of mastery which I hold over each and every one of you, impressed on your oath of initiation. Spells spun through its vortex will track an enchantress, beyond every defense and safeguard. No place in this world lies exempt. There is no hiding. One who breaks faith cannot escape forfeit, no matter how far her flight takes her. Even death grants no surcease. Such spells have been used at need to call halt on the spirit in its final passage across the Wheel.”
The seeress knotted wet hands, shaking now, and unable to discern whether her Prime’s words were a warning, or a threat laid against the damaging evidence of Lirenda’s disobedience.
Nor did Morriel waste hoarded strength to volunteer clarification. “Leave me. Your duty is finished. You will tell nobody what you have witnessed concerning our order’s First Senior.” If setback and defeat at last undermined the tenacity of the Prime’s will, she yielded no sign. Her faint, husking voice still delivered her authority in snapping short consonants and clipped vowels. “The matter must bide until Lirenda returns. I will choose the day and the hour when she stands before me to receive my formal charge against her conduct.”
Summer 5653
Inside the circle of the Paravian grimward, Asandir defers his exhaustion and looses another net of spells to hold the dream of the ghost drake stable; while inside the bewildering coil of its spiral, yet another sunwheel soldier meets oblivion in spilled blood, leaving but three survivors of the original forty who followed the Hanshire captain, Sulfin Evend, in pursuit of the Master of Shadow…
In the null gray mists between the veil of the mysteries, Jieret s’Valerient’s naked spirit rides the winds, called ahead by the draw of a blood bond with his prince; and on the faint trail of his passage flies Traithe’s raven, bearing the tracking presence of Sethvir, who waits and watches at Althain Tower in the poised hope of effecting a rescue…
Steaming mists rise off the pools of Mogg’s Fen, where Lord Maenol crouches with a blooded band of scouts; and they move to crash the lines of yet another Alliance patrol, as yet uninformed that the campaign to break his clan foothold in Tysan has been defanged in the south: that two brigs from Riverton have made landfall at Mainmere, but flying the leopard blazon of Rathain…
Summer 5653
L
irenda’s meeting with Prince Lysaer was not to take place in the warmed comfort of a state galley’s cabin, but ashore, on the open cliff top. The same shattered ring of First Age foundations had sheltered the Shadow Master’s sailhands before his unfruitful voyage to Kathtairr. No trace remained now of that habitancy. Six years of winter storms had scoured off the ashes of the cooking fires. The bones of fish and hunted game tossed onto their midden were long since cleared off by scavengers. Even the sail canvas Dakar had used to roof the shell of the sole standing watchkeep had rotted, the frayed threads picked away by industrious kittiwakes to line their nests in the rocks.
Set ashore by her escort of officers, First Senior Lirenda had been left to manage the ascent by herself. On that hour, the low-flying storm scud wore the gloom of a premature dusk. The gusts which lashed and moaned through bent cedars, in these heights shrilled across barren stone. Lirenda’s light mantle flailed and snapped at the hem. Each blast assaulted her layers of silk robes, as if the elements conspired to strip her naked. Her pinned coils of jet hair succumbed as well, first torn from confinement, then flogged into tangles like whipped ink against the flushed pink of her cheeks. The dark, congested clouds overhead streamed like frothed smoke in a vat, chased by intermittent thunder.
Raised in cosseted wealth, accustomed ever since to the mannered regime of Koriani sisterhouses, Lirenda held no love for wild heights. She minced over stones too rough for kid soles, and battled to keep the proud, erect grace of her carriage. Stressed to primal nerves by the oncoming gale, she chewed her lip, while the discharge of far off lightning glazed mercury over the upthrust tangs of sharp rock. She could imagine no motive for Prince Lysaer to insist on holding an audience in the midst of a ruined fortress.
Logic spurred on her intuitive unease.
The setting was all wrong.
Based on the observations drawn from years of Koriani lane watch, the indulgence of demeaning gestures matched nothing of Lysaer’s ruling style.
Denied her reflexive access to power, Lirenda felt her nerves the more keenly as she swept the barren summit in search of a sheltering pavilion. No such royal trapping met her eye. Just the wind-fluted rims of tumbled-down walls in the poured tones of rust, lead, and ink. Stone here had been witness to violent death, and under bruised cloud, the sorrows of antiquity seemed to cry out for the voice of a bard to waken their brooding memory. When the fortress at Corith had stood in defense, the site had been burned desolate by drakefire. Abandoned to wreckage, even the tenacious island cedars could not pry a stunted foothold to take seed. Too late, Lirenda considered the pitfalls. The Prince of the Light had ever been wont to wrest full advantage from the lofty affectations of court ceremony. His character did not incline toward brooding. Never before this had he been a man to choose a glowering, windswept terrain to conduct his crown business of state.
She saw him at last, against every precedent unattended where he stood against a backdrop of gale-ravaged sky. His elegant silk doublet leaped out like the sheen of found pearl amid the stripped blocks of a rampart’s foundations.
A gust screamed. Lirenda wrestled the billowing tug of her mantle, then snagged its purple folds in a death grip to keep it from flagging like a sail. If she wished to turn back, the moment was forfeit. Prince Lysaer turned his head and caught sight of her.
No option remained but to close the last yards over treacherous, uneven footing.
Lirenda’s fluttery uneasiness could not be dismissed in brash pretense. Koriani life was communal. Those rare occasions she had spent in male company afforded untrustworthy insight. No man within her living memory had owned the presence of this prince, daunting and polished to flawless grace as he inclined his head and acknowledged
her arrival. He offered his hand to steady her last step, his grasp firm and warm around her cool fingers, and his hair like snagged gold against the jeweled edge of his collar.
“Come,” he greeted in unsmiling courtesy. “I invited you here to share the spectacular view.”
Three steps down a defile, one sharp turn to the right; the abrupt cessation of the wind all but rocked Lirenda off-balance. Lysaer’s sure strength caught her back from a stumble. He steered her downward into the niche where the ancient foundation arched over a gully in the cliffside. They halted in that isolate pocket of hushed air, while the gusts shrieked on unabated up above, and balked eddies careened through the defile, shearing through spindly stands of racked trees and harrying their branches like weed stalks. Far beneath, the strand met the sea in stepped ledges, a jumbled bulwark of silt gravel and boulders where the raging surf hurled itself ragged.
The gale was still building. Already the bay wore the loomed stripes of spindrift, where wind sluiced the tops from the wavecrests.
On the pending edge of twilight, the beaten stretch of shoreline tugged the heart with its pristine splendor. Time could be felt here, the mighty deeds of bygone ages compressed against the present like a telescoped view through a jewel facet. Lirenda gripped her thin silks, diminished by awe, and eroded by the demeaning recognition that her life span mattered to the earth not at all. She gave way to a contradictory relief, that she did not wear her crystal in this place. Had her quartz been in hand, its channels would be quickened. The past might have burst forth and shaken her with the vast, deep tones of the horns that centaurs once used to call dragons.
“You may sit,” Lysaer said, breaking through her inadvertent absence of mind. In seamless, reserved grace, he handed her onto a fallen slab of coping.
She would not cast off pride. Rather than decry her spell-blinded straits, she bent her cool gaze to wring the uttermost from her Koriani arts of observation. “In my sisterhouse, it would be I granting you that permission.”
Lysaer smiled, his candor a weapon’s cleared edge. “This site adheres to its own grand sovereignty, except for the Shadow Master’s meddling.”
“We need not stand upon dignity for that.” Lirenda gathered the spilled folds of her mantle and made space for him on the stone.
He chose to stay standing. She scrutinized his poise, unblinking and still as a snake that sized up choice prey. Lysaer met her regard without qualm, a feat few men dared to sustain beyond the brute
span of a moment. The bedrock calm that lent this prince majesty was in fact the intent of a spirit schooled into a seamless, listening patience. Whatever she did or said in his presence would be heard without personal prejudice. No judgment would be passed until their exchange had been weighed in its entirety.
That striking attentiveness, paired with the grave impact of male beauty, lent the man his stunning charisma. Lirenda searched his clean features for the fine, marring evidence of selfishness, and found no line in the flesh out of harmony with its framework of bone. He was all substance and firm moral courage. His skin wore its youth like an oak tree’s new leaves, and yet, he was not young. Lirenda tried to imagine him as a boy with scraped knees and tousled hair; and failed utterly.
Even here, where the elements lent no man contrived artifice, Lysaer’s natural bearing bespoke inborn royalty stamped all the way to the marrow.
Made aware through her own armor of deportment that she and this prince shared more similarities than differences, Lirenda gave rein to her impulse. “If you could have chosen the course of your life, would you be here today?”
Lysaer did not lift his regard from her, nor did the scoured, limpid blue of his eyes once deviate from directness. “I was born a king’s heir. I know nothing else.”
But his hands gave the lie, unrelaxed against the foil thread of his hose. Lirenda sensed a glass edge to his poise, as though he had made his first stance on the cliff top in challenge, daring the gale to rise up and smash his works into oblivion.
Lirenda said, “This seems an odd site for a king’s heir to hold audience. What made you come here?”
“I needed solitude in which I could be myself.” His answer yielded no shred of shared trust as he settled his shoulder to the rocks. “However, even here we are not alone. Our ties of responsibility still bind us. Can you see them?”
The seed pearls on his sleeve pocked the gloom as he pointed toward the carnelian gleam where the
Lance’s
stern lantern bobbed amid saw-toothed wavecrests.
Lirenda maintained her tight survey of his face. “Do you speak of the hostages who are offered in exchange for the clan slaves kept chained on your galleys? You could bend to demand. Or do you believe the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s allies drive too high-handed a bargain?”
“A prince must give way to no man. His guide must be the principled tenets demanded by justice and mercy.” Yet new lines crimped
the corners of Lysaer’s eyes. A fractional tautness to his jaw exposed his fleeting, raw edge of discomfort.
Some recent event still caused him an intense and personal anguish. A thrill piqued Lirenda’s interest, that Koriani arts might allow her a glimpse of his most private core.
“The common subjects of the realm must receive the same law as others born to wealth and position,” Lysaer qualified. “My will is not at issue, lady enchantress, now or at any time. Today, I must pass sentence on men who failed in their orders. Tomorrow, for the weal of the realm, I may have to sign an execution for treason against the woman I took to wife.”
There lay the hidden vulnerability, a raw nerve betrayed in the trembling flash of his jewels. In Princess Talith lay the source of the agony Lysaer lacked human outlet to express. “You loved her,” Lirenda accused, aware through his front of equanimity that the confidence she probed for was unlikely to be shared with anyone.
The temper of his voice came back like sheared metal. “The Shadow Master knew. He sought to use her to ruin me.”
Lirenda studied Lysaer’s shuttered features, the pain embedded so deeply that not even tears might flow; a wounding as bloodless as the blued tang of steel broken off inside vulnerable flesh. If this was how love could mangle free choice, she was all the more determined to keep her own spirit unencumbered. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Did you not guess?” Rings and gold braid sparked to a faint play of lightning. “This is a trial, your hearing, for my impartial royal judgment, since the
Lance
has not delivered the Master of Shadow in chains. Your order’s part was to drive my enemy to flight out of Riverton. I want to know how he chanced to gain warning of my trap set and waiting here at Corith.”
Lirenda all but shot to her feet in stunned shock. Barely in time, her reflexive poise slapped back the impulse and saved her. She pulled in a chain of deep breaths.
Lysaer watched, his eyes on her impartial as sky-printed water.
Relief surged over her like a shot pail of ice as she recouped bludgeoned wits and reminded herself he was not yet aligned in decision against her. The Prince waited, prepared to hear her explanation, the only ruffled part of him now the gilt hair left snarled by the wind.
“You must understand,” he pressed, gentle as though he mistook her silence for reluctance to name a guilty party. “No inquest could be made in the presence of the men-at-arms who serve with my fleet. Each has lost brothers and loved ones in the war against the true dark. For the fact that Arithon s’Ffalenn slipped the net, they would
respond like a dog pack. Unveil a conspirator, and they’ll cry for fresh blood until a death has righted the balance.”
Some sly fact stayed unsaid. Lirenda caught the shrewd set to his stillness, alongside the unpleasant insight that more than royal judgment would be passed in this unwitnessed hearing. Like his half brother, Lysaer s’llessid bore the royal gifts of s’Ahelas on the distaff side of his pedigree. However he pronounced sentence for the misplay at Riverton, his indictment would bear a calculated stake in the future. While the night deepened, and the storm broke in turbulent force against the headlands, she realized that Koriani observers too often neglected to allow for the mother’s inherited farsight.
“The wise man knows the master always outlives his hounds,” Lirenda threw back in provocation.
“Only one opportunity has been lost to take down the Spinner of Darkness,” Lysaer s’Ilessid allowed. “We agree, that’s no cause to indulge in the hysteria of disappointment.”
Against five centuries’ longevity, the event lost its impact. The Prince of the Light would not trifle with recriminations. He would instead reshape this setback in deliberate calculation to steer later events to his purpose. Lirenda’s suspicion bloomed into swift anger. Morriel Prime would be mortified to learn any Koriani Senior had strayed inside the reach of such usage.
“Is this royal prerogative?” Lirenda provoked. “Are we not to brand your conspirator in public?”
Lysaer withheld response; and the fear shot cold through her, since she had no way to fathom how much he knew, or how much he relied upon guesswork, concerning the reverses brought on by her meddler’s choice to prolong Caolle’s survival.
Across gale-torn waters and thickening gloom, the firefly dance of the ship’s lantern mocked her. She found herself mortal and exposed in this crux as the
Lance’s
miserable, deposed captain. The gutted pride of her First Senior’s rank made her loath to cross moral wits with the man hailed as Prince of the Light.
This moment’s freight of uncertainty became as grueling a punishment as the loss of her link to prime power. Against masterful statecraft, Lirenda had no true shield, but only bare wits and a scathing self-contempt.
At length, without censure, Lysaer gave his answer. “There can be no conspiracy. The orders you follow are not yours, but your Prime’s.”
The multiple snares of innuendo bit deep. “Must you insist on attaching blame?” Cornered behind her last shred of confidence,
Lirenda fell back upon pretense. “If so, you have no guilty party, but only a poor choice of scapegoats. No man broke your faith. For reasons of mercy, my order spared a liegeman of Arithon’s. Caolle’s wounding was mortal. At the end of his strength, no one foresaw he might become the weapon to turn in the hand and wrest the Shadow Master’s capture off course.”