Fugitive Prince (79 page)

“Young lady!” Jinesse shouted, her china-frail features flushed into a delicate pink. “This is no ship’s deck. Remember your manners as you were brought up in this house!”

The girl twitched her shoulder in an insolent shrug, the blouse she had donned in token femininity worn untucked above button-front breeches and sailhand’s boots with brass buckles. “I speak the damned truth. You want me to sign on an Alliance ship? That’s a frank surprise, since the Master of Shadow himself has been given shelter in your attic.”

A cavernous silence filled the kitchen.

For drawn, disastrous seconds, the coal glow from the oven smudged sulfur light over the cracked and oil-stained flagstones. Outside the high window, disjointed with life, the clatter of hooves
heralded the noon change of watch, and the cry of a vendor spiraled from the tent stalls of the shanty market.

Then tension broke with the bang of a squall line as Feylind swore her annoyance. “Fiends and Dharkaron’s black bollocks!” Her expostulation tangled with Jinesse’s mortified explosion, pitched through the arched door behind her.

“Fiark! Come here this instant!” Incensed to dauntless, maternal rage, she snatched her skirts up in fluttery fingers. Her banty-hen march to the hallway collided with a solid young man in neat town clothes.

Fiark eased her balance, straightened the pleats of his clerk’s broadcloth doublet, then turned slate-colored eyes in smoking reproof upon his more volatile twin sister. “She wasn’t meant to know.”

“Ath’s two-eyed vengeance!” Feylind swore. One breath ahead of her mother’s renewed diatribe, she added, “I’m sorry, Fiark.”

“Arithon! Here?” Jinesse closed in again to confront her son, a bristling head shorter than he. “This is your doing?”

Her shrill incredulity clashed outright with Fiark’s nettled betrayal. “Feylind, you pest! How did you find out? The secret was never let loose in the stews at the dockside.”

From snatched refuge behind the bread bowl, hands gripped on glazed crockery as if she might press-gang the first solid object in defense, Feylind flashed a grin of pure devilment. “I met Dakar at the landing.”

Then the doorway darkened again. A voice with more gravel than Fiark’s rolled over Jinesse’s imprecations. “The spellbinder would have been honest to claim the invitation was mine.”

Jinesse spun about, her nettled agitation displaced against the genteel shabbiness of the kitchen. “Tharrick!” Her thin fist smacked his chest. Slight as a straw wisp before the towering bulk of her husband, who wore the studded leather brigandine and cuffed bracers of a gentleman’s guard captain, she nonetheless managed to prevail. “You did
what?”

Fresh from a street fight in front of his employer’s warehouse, Tharrick seemed caught aback that his morning round of scrapping had extended beneath his own roof. “I gave Arithon s’Ffalenn my leave to stay in the textile loft.” He squared his shoulders, brows raised. “As I should have, considering the debt that I owe him.”

Jinesse stiffened, her back ramrod straight beneath her limp muslin as she flew at him like a gnat. “You owe that man nothing, least of all charity.”

Tharrick caught his wife’s flying fists and restrained her before she tore her thin skin on his wrist studs. “Easy.” His mercenary’s stature made even the kitchen’s high southland ceilings seem cramped. “Not for love or fury will I share your dislike of Rathain’s prince.”

Jinesse glared at him, breathing too fast, her limbs in his grasp as pliant and slim as cut withies. The whorled scars which disfigured his arms above the top edge of his bracers spoke with more eloquence than language: she could never forget the hot-tempered men in Prince Arithon’s service who had put her husband to torture with hot irons during his absence.

“I sorely provoked them, but that scarcely matters,” Tharrick soothed in the face of her smoking silence. He dared conflagration and kissed her knuckles one by one. As if she had softened, he let her go, then eased the leg which had stiffened and sat himself at the plank table. “Come on, girl,” he invited Feylind. “We might as well suffer the wife’s disapproval together.”

When his stepdaughter relented and settled beside him, he flung a brawny arm across her young shoulders, as much to hold her down as he gave the subject his definitive dismissal. “You can’t run him out, anyway, Jinesse. His Grace of Rathain has already left.”

“What?” Feylind struggled to rise, spitting outrage like a doused cat. “He can’t have! Dakar would have told him I was just back in port!” Still wildly grappling against Tharrick’s restraint, she appealed to her twin. “Arithon would scarcely go without taking me along.”

Sober in his tailored doublet, Fiark returned his level regard, coupled with implacable silence.

“Well, then, how dare he?” Feylind’s features gained a violent, fresh flush. She strained hard against Tharrick’s imprisoning arm. Slight as she was, ship life had muscled her. The man grunted. Jostled as though he battled a tiger, he braced his fist against the trestle, which rocked to their locked clash of wills.

Jinesse’s protest went unnoticed as Feylind continued to howl. “His Grace can’t leave me stranded on a merchant brig for another pig-rutting year!” While her mother resignedly dove past to rescue the bread dough, Fiark backed from the fray to spare his neat clothing a cross-fire dusting of flour.

“Damn him thrice over, and fiends plague his rigging for his slippery, finagling tongue!” Feylind snarled past the leather and studs of her stepfather’s chest. “The Shadow Master
knows
how I hate those brigs with their wallowing round bottoms.” A rebellious kick caught the trestle, which swayed with alarming violence. She snapped, “Sithaer’s howling haunts, Tharrick! Will you damned well let me get up?”

The stepfather shot her twin a questioning glance, his forearm locked and unrelenting.

“Let her go,” Fiark said from the scullery doorway. “Force has never stopped her before, and she keeps a mean grudge when she’s furious.”

On Tharrick’s release, Feylind uncoiled from the bench and bolted before anyone but her twin sensed the tears behind her fierce anger. Her flying footsteps dwindled through the doorway and tapped over the scuffed floor tiles which adorned the run-down grace of the sea-quarter houses of Innish.

Lacking the spitfire heat of her presence, the workaday kitchen seemed suddenly airless and dead. Jinesse rubbed the stuck wisps of hair from her temples. Pale against the age-darkened paneling, she breathed in the mingled scent of beeswax and stale cooking, then sat in defeat beside Tharrick. “That girl could so easily come to a bad end, and for what? Arithon s’Ffalenn needs none of her help. She’s headstrong and wild, and no one’s good sense has the impact to mold her opinions.”

Since Tharrick had no sound consolation to offer, he gathered his wife’s tired shoulders to his side and caressed a smear of flour from her cheek.

“Let her be.” Fiark moved the chipped bread bowl to the drainboard, puffed away the few stray flecks on his sleeves, then lent his good-natured advice. “Doesn’t anyone notice? Feylind takes care of herself. She listens to Arithon. We’ll just have to trust his sound planning will keep her out of harm’s way.”

Tharrick raised craggy brows, his eyes on his stepson grown piercing. “Better speak if you know something you haven’t told us.”

Fiark’s subtle, secretive nod burst his restraint and exposed a conspirator’s grin. “Arithon’s own planning. You’ll see.”

Moments later, an earsplitting scream slapped echoes back down the corridor. Jinesse startled. From mercenary’s instinct, Tharrick reached for the broadsword he forgot he always left at the armory.

When the cry changed pitch into shattering joy, Fiark took pity on his mother’s confusion. “The Master of Shadow left her a letter.”

Above the approaching patter of Feylind’s swift feet, and another pealing crow which set tremors through the crockery on the shelves, Fiark answered Tharrick’s puzzled inquiry. “Rathain’s prince has bound us over clear title to the merchant brig,
Evenstar.
She’s mine to ship cargoes, and Feylind’s to captain. So I much doubt my sister will curse round-bottomed tubs after this. In fact, I’ll lay silver her share of the vessel never gets sold to meet her woman’s need for a dowry.”

Now Jinesse straightened with surprising distress. “How long does he plan to be gone?”

Tharrick stared, amazed. “Then you’re not glad he’s left?”

“He was a friend,” Jinesse stated in perfect aplomb. She shot up and paced to the small copper sink and splashed water over her face. “I just don’t approve of his Grace’s activities where the safety of my daughter’s concerned. Now answer my question. When does he come back?”

Tharrick’s honest features showed a disconcerted unease. “Never.” His attentive regard held upon his wife’s back as he qualified with soft sympathy. “Arithon made his will plain in absolute terms. He would hear no plans to renew ties on this continent for the rest of his natural life.”

Far removed to the northwest, amid the firelit heat of her cramped room in Capewell, Enchantress Lirenda swore as she cleared her mind from the vivid scene in the quartz sphere. “Damn him! Fiends curse him for a conniving, clever bastard!”

No s’Ffalenn prince since Torbrand had ever welcomed anyone’s prying; Arithon’s unearthly, clever machinations made her problem by lengths more difficult.

Lirenda closed her eyes, the fine tendrils of hair at her temples licked to her flushed, sweating face. She put off her disgruntled longing for the comforts of a cool, scented bath. The knot held her tied. While her future swung in the balance, her quarry was no longer conveniently ill, languishing in cosseted vulnerability at Innish.

Again, Arithon had escaped to the open sea, where the lane scryers held no chance in creation of finding a trace of his movements.

Neither could she devise any way to predict the erratic, close secrecy of those landfalls he chose to arrange. If Morriel Prime expected a plan by the time Sethvir reached Isaer Circle, three days remained to deliver. The last avenue of inspiration was the quartz sphere which reflected the baked downs at Araethura, where the ostracized initiate Elaira sat in the hot dirt, drawing stick figures of animals beside a tattered shepherd urchin.

Stabbed by pinprick resentment for the carefree innocence of their play, Lirenda took up the scene reflected in the crystal’s stone heart. The dry days that foreran the ending of summer touched the downs to a sea of gold grass. Woman and child shared the antique glaze of buttery, late-day sunlight. The herder’s boy seemed an ordinary enough creature, his bare feet rimmed with powdery dust, and his
sturdy wrists thrust out of ragged cuffs where growth had overtaken his wardrobe.

Elaira shared a like-minded untidiness. Her knuckles were briar scraped from foraging herbs, and her blouse of a faded, mulberrydyed cotton clashed with the jarring, hard fire of her wind-tangled auburn hair.

Lirenda surveyed the exchange, secure within her groomed elegance. Her kohl-lined lids slitted with contempt that verged upon boredom until the child chanced to look up.

Through fronding black hair, his eyes were the identical, piercing green of any royal-born scion of s’Ffalenn. His expression of innocent entreaty gouged up the unbidden association: woke the echo of a grown prince’s compassion with the opening force of a thunderbolt.

Lirenda froze with stopped breath.

In the quartz, trapped unguarded in the same moment, Elaira’s tanned face recorded her unwitting and identical response: a flash-point surge of tender emotion, brought to light on the wings of a memory.

For the span of one fated second, the displaced First Senior felt as if the whole universe had rocked and resettled in her hand.

Then logic reasserted. The penciled arch of Lirenda’s brow smoothed. Clear thought reengaged and stamped back the unbridled contamination of wild fancy. A high-order senior and a streetorphaned field herbalist held nothing at all in common. Resentment remained, that Elaira’s headstrong fascination with Prince Arithon’s character had been the original catalyst to bring Morriel’s disfavor on them both.

Lirenda tapped an impatient nail against the crystal. Inspiration bent her thoughts to exquisite, fine malice. How better to amend a shared fall from grace than to see Elaira swept into the center of the plot to take down Arithon s’Ffalenn?

In the quiet, sealed room, wrapped in the musk of her heat-sodden silk, Lirenda sat straight. The quartz sphere itself seemed to kindle with fire as inspiration unfolded into a hard plan of action. Through Elaira, sure means could be formulated to match Morriel’s demand. Satisfaction curved Lirenda’s coral lips, then widened to a smile as sensuous and sure as the stalking crouch of a panther.

If Arithon s’Ffalenn could not be bought with gold, or tracked with spells, or snared into captivity through dark lures of compulsive magic, he still had one weakness for which he would hold no rearguard defenses. The s’Ffalenn royal gift of compassion could not be gainsaid. He must come to the net of his own accord if the stakes were aligned, and the bait for her trap was an innocent.

In the overfurnished sitting room of a cottage at Innish, Felirin the Scarlet winces and casts his lyranthe aside, resigned that his fire-scarred hands can no longer play for his living; nor is he aware of any observer until Halliron’s spinster daughter addresses him from the doorway: “Never mind. This house cries out for the retired bard it never came to shelter. I would be pleased if you would consent to make your permanent home here with me…”

At Avenor, faced across the pearl-inlaid lacquer of a table in a fashionable tavern, Mearn s’Brydion pours fine brandy for a drunken palace scribe, and presses the inveigling question he has waited like a snake to present: “Never mind principle. For the Light, I’d pay gold to congratulate the stout man who sent his letter to Etarra, betraying the Shadow Master’s interests at the Riverton shipyard…”

When the Paravian focus circle inside the Second Age ruin at Mainmere flares active to receive the spell-turned energies of Sethvir’s crossing, Morriel Prime rules on the proposal Lirenda presents at Capewell: “Your plan to take Arithon has one severe drawback, and that, the fifteen-year span to achieve his final defeat. Yet the premise is sound. The quarry will succumb. You have my permission. Proceed…”