Fugitive Prince (22 page)

Reclad in a laced set of riding leathers of sable, and a wool tunic trimmed in dark scarlet, the Shadow Master tipped a sheet of reed paper above the streaming brown fumes off the oil wick. In his hands, what looked like a laborer’s tally sheet changed form. Invisibly inked lines first written in lemon juice burned to reveal a message in fugitive
script. He read, while the words glowed sienna between the callused, sea tan of his fingers. “Princess Talith confined?
For vapors, due to barrenness, and delicate health?
I don’t believe it!”

The clansman gathered his finished arrows, licked a finger, and bundled them with a deerhide thong. “Hearsay. But word from clan sources shows the same. The princess hasn’t been seen in public for three years. When Lysaer assembled the train for his journey, our scouts on the west road were sure that no pedigree lady traveled with him.”

“Lysaer’s left Avenor?” Dal ar interjected, snapped erect and belatedly alert.

Arithon threw him an exasperated glance. “You were snoring through that part. But yes.” He tapped the report in Mearn s’Brydion’s frenetic script, now flattened across his left knee. “Lysaer’s taken the road to Etarra to ply his honey tongue in diplomacy. Toss a pinch of salt, sinister, for sheer luck. There’s an unguarded henyard left for us foxes once again.”

“Scarcely that.” All at once too aware of the cold, Dakar hooked up his dropped blanket and snugged the disagreeable scrape of wool under his chin. “I wasn’t asleep for that bit about the herb witch who got stoned in Quarn. Or the part about Avenor’s troop rolls being tripled in number since Vastmark. Nor would I lay any coin on dim odds, that our spirits stay clear of the Fatemaster’s Wheel if you make fires on the snake’s home ground.”

“Our home ground, too,” the clansman retorted.
“Caithdein,
Lord Maenol, has stayed his blood grievance four years preparing for this day.”

Arithon broke in, “Then the wait for my timing hasn’t chafed?”

“It has, and unbearably.” A shrug, then the bald-faced admission, “There were prideful hotheads who railed against your liaison. Only one was given my lord’s leave to pursue vengeance. That man had a just cause. He’d just lost his sons in a coffle bound for Lysaer’s galleys.”

Dakar knew better than to waste futile argument with any party joined to Arithon in conspiracy. He shut his lips and his eyes, while the talk wound down. But sleep left him stranded in weariness. The awful, circling dread of bad prospects harried his mind beyond rest. He kept no illusions in his service to Rathain’s prince. Three years of suffering tasteless ship’s rations and battering ocean gales now seemed a time of seclusion in paradise. Not least, when the winter ahead promised criminal machinations under the armed nose of Tysan’s elite royal garrison.

Morning broke cold and clear as the shell of a robin’s egg. Dakar crept from the furling layers of his cloaks like a grub from a collapsed
cocoon. His predawn hours of restless tossing had given way to an inadequate, heavy sleep. His mind felt logy and thick. The chirping twitters of foraging sparrows drilled his ears like the stab of tinker’s pins to the brain. Frost traced the leaves at the cave mouth. Dakar bemoaned the lack of any fire as he dressed, and wished for cheese instead of hardtack and jerky to appease his growling belly.

He sat for some time, head propped between his hands, before he noticed the voices outside, raised in ongoing contention.

“You should be with your earl,” Arithon said, a snap to his tone to scale iron.

Dakar thrashed through the intervening curtain of brush and peered, his nearsighted squint like a mole emerged from its burrow. Amid dazzling shafts of early sunshine, he made out the discreet band of clansmen from Caithwood who guested them. Their scout captain stood near, his eye patch raked low, and the reins of two saddled horses looped in each hand. Beyond their maned necks, past the steaming back of a third horse which drooped its head from hard usage, another man stood dismounted. The newcomer was built broad, an obstinate thrust to his massive, squared shoulders. His head wore its cropped hair like filed steel, bristled to cowlicks at the crown. Born ornery, or else given to brainless bravery, he confronted the slightly made Prince of Rathain, feet planted like a balked mastiff’s.

“Caolle?” Dakar called in disbelief. Neither combatant glanced his way.

“Here I stay, liege,” carped the northern-born clansman who had resigned his life’s post as Earl Jieret’s war captain. “My sword guards your back. Live with that gift or behead me for treason.”

Dakar missed Arithon’s gloved velvet reply. Whatever the content, the sally made the rugged, older swordsman flush crimson.

“So just damn the day of your birth, while you’re at it!” Caolle cracked back. “Since you refused the good grace to die on delivery, Rathain has got a living prince.” Immovable oak when charged with his duty, he hurled his next line like a gauntlet. “I serve the kingdom. Since you plan to hang yourself out in Tysan as bait, you’ll have me along for the sacrifice.”

The Mad Prophet shoved through the thicket in clawing dread. He closed the last steps to an obliterating crackle of dry leaves, too late again to catch Arithon’s riposte. Caolle maintained his stance, reduced to contentious, stiff silence. His eyes were red rimmed, as if he had ridden all night through rough country, and a disfiguring, fresh scar crossed his jawline that had not been there in Vastmark.
Those weathered, blunt features that had not changed at all wore a frown like black basalt, and the hand closed upon the sheathed hilt of his sword could have been etched into place.

“You might try a smile of welcome, your Grace,” Dakar bored in, well aware how the title would rankle. He pressed brashly on, came between the too-careful expression of blandness that Arithon presented toward his liegeman. “Ice could be turned into sunshine on a wish before you’ll talk Caolle home to Strakewood. He’s by lengths more stubborn than you are, and besides, this time he happens to be right.”

“Say that again to my face, should Jieret’s young son lose his father to a slave galley,” Arithon ripped back in blank rage. “By my oath as Rathain’s crown prince, if that day happens, I’ll see you both bleeding and dead for it.” All smoldering grace, he spun away, caught the reins of the nearest horse Caithwood’s clansmen held ready, then vaulted astride without pause to measure his stirrup length. “For today, keep up if you can.”

No more words, and no thanks did he offer his clan hosts, but closed his heels and shouted and startled his mount standing to a canter.

Caolle surged to remount his blown gray.

Dakar grabbed, first the reins, then the wrist of the clansman’s right hand. “No. You’ll founder a good horse, and for nothing. We’ll get you a remount and breakfast, too, if you’re hungry.”

“Damn breakfast!” Caolle swore.

The Mad Prophet held on, well aware he risked a sword thrust if his grip should give way. Fat, but not gutlessly soft as he had been, he still felt as if he shouldered the part of the numbskull who grasped a bear by the leg at a baiting.

“Curse you, let go!” Caolle dropped his shoulder to battle in earnest, his desperation made vicious by fast-departing hoofbeats as his prince widened his lead through the forest.

The Mad Prophet clung. Despite tendons set on fire by his charge’s effort to wrench free, he said, “Don’t be a donkey!” Bashed backward, fetched a punch that rattled his brains and left him too jellied to duck the fighter’s move set to fell him, he gasped out, “Caolle, have done! I know where Arithon’s bound.”

Kicked hard behind the knee, Dakar hit cold moss on his back. The jolt robbed his wind. He tasted fresh blood; had ridiculously bitten his tongue for the damnfool belief he could wring reason from the selfsame rock-headed clansman who had raised young Jieret to manhood.

“I’m listening,” Caolle prompted, not yet softened, but towering against a sky embroidered with evergreen. He waited in searing impatience, arms folded on his cross-belted chest.

Dakar wheezed, rolled back brown eyes, and let his spinning head thump against a tree root.

“No use,” said Caithwood’s mustached chief scout where he observed from the sidelines, still holding the horse saddled for the Mad Prophet. “He’s down like a clubbed trout.” Then, laughing at Caolle’s knotted pose of frustration, he stepped in and slapped the victim’s cheek with long-suffering familiarity. “Don’t worry, prophet. Rathain’s henchman can’t go ‘til we’ve found him a mount, and none of my scouts are flat stupid. No one in camp’s going to waste himself trying to force you to ride without breakfast.”

Four days later, in the crowded, grease-pungent taproom of a bargeman’s hostel built by the ford over Ilswater, a fat man dressed as a tinker shrugged off the saddle packs slung across his shoulder. He scanned the scattered assortment of patrons seated at trestles and lounging in talk against the upright posts which supported the roof trusses. The light blocked off from the casements in the press was replaced by candle lanterns set behind glass. Their panes had been cleaned of soot, and faces underneath glowed like lit parchment.

The tinker studied them all. His traveler’s wise eye marked the dusty boots and badges of the ox drovers; then the barge captains, with their booming, boastful voices and broad hands; and after them, the lean-bodied caravan masters in oiled wool and leather. His survey brushed past the merchant’s factors draped in cerecloth capes to protect their brocade clothes as they bargained passage for trade goods by the water route across Korias to Riverton.

The tinker’s brown eyes touched, then fixed upon a slim man by the hob who had hair like bleached flax, quick eyes of a heathery gray-green, and whose clothing was embroidered and garnished with river pearls. Two tavemmaids fluttered over him like moths. He gave no appearance of leading them on, but his sweet words and kind manner left them desperate in their wish that he had.

A smile twitched the tinker’s tucked lips. He raised a wrist to scratch his snub nose, and behind cover of his sleeve whispered, “That one.”

Across the dim room, the ranked trestles and packed benches, and the brimmed felt hats of the bargemen, through the autumn tang of cinnamon and cider, the fair-haired dandy said something which set the girls laughing.

“No.” A hulking, thick shadow against paneled walls, the tinker’s companion raised eyebrows like the grizzled pelt of a badger. Half of his leathery face lay swathed in bandages that seeped pus from a suppurating wound. Black gimlet eyes flicked aside and gleamed back in hot disbelief. Then a dubious mumble emerged from beneath the caked dressing.

“Oh, that’s him, make no mistake,” the tinker insisted under cover of metallic commotion as a chubby scullion stacked empty tankards on a tray. “He kept fancy clothes aboard the sloop with his lyranthe.”

More indeterminate grumbles from beneath the bandages, from which the word “wager” emerged clearly.

The fat tinker cracked a chuckle that turned nearby heads, but notably, not that of the blond man. “So we’ll see.” He shoved his packs into the arms of his rawboned companion. “Find us a bench in a corner and wait. I’ll order beer and pay a visit to the privy. My silver laid on eight to three, the first one who follows me out will be none other than your royal liege.”

Riverfront taverns in south Tysan were all similar, built of mud brick and split pine beams and lath. The hearths were always large enough to roast a calf, and the bar tops, a vast slab of fieldstone like a bastion, behind which the barrels were stored and kept guarded by landlords as seasoned as siege captains. On a meat hook behind hung the inevitable cleaver, kept sharp to carve the huge wheels of cheese bought from the dairies in Korias. In rough seasons, the same steel might chop fingers from unlucky pilferers, to mark them for thieving ways. Customs along the river route south of Mogg’s fenlands were swift and direct, only generous if a man were honest in his habits, or straightforward about his need in ill fortune.

The tinker was soft-spoken and carefully polite. He jostled no patrons, nor pinched the flame-haired wench who bent to shake out the straw matting by the back entry. He offered her a copper, asked directions to the privy, and stepped out the rear door, whistling.

The path he pursued was well beaten, dusty under the glazed gold sun of late autumn. Leaves burned brown at the edges by frost crackled beneath his slowed step. A breeze blew crisp off the Ilswater, skeined in the scents of wet reeds and black mud, stitched close at hand by the taint of sour leather and urine from the mucky compound of the ox pens. From downriver, a drover called encouragement to his team. A barge rocked at the landing bollards to a whispered creak of chafed lines.

Flecked in the rippled ink shadows of the alders already stripped by the season, the tinker reached the board privy. He heard no one’s
step on his heels. Just the uncanny sensation of movement at his back, a split second before hard fingers bit into his shoulder and jerked him face about.

The blond man from the hearthside confronted him, his fine, beaded doublet masked under a bargeman’s caped wool. “Come,” he said in the razor-cut diction of Arithon s’Ffalenn. “We need to take a little walk.”

The pair turned right, into the dappled shade of the wood which fronted the river, then veered again, into pine-scented dimness removed from the bustle of the teamsters who plied the towpath.

“That took a great deal of nerve, risking Caolle in there,” Arithon opened. “You’ll answer to me if harm comes to him.”

The fat tinker drew a breath in trepidation better suited to his role as a prophet. “I won’t take that blame. You might have accepted his offer in Caithwood.”

Arithon stopped cold and clawed back the straw wisp of hair the busy wind flicked at his cheek. “You’re risking his life!”

“He’s risking his life,” Dakar corrected. “I’m flattered if you think my efforts could stop him.”

Looking frail boned in his pale-haired disguise, half-swallowed by the bargeman’s cloak, Arithon started forward with a visible effort to keep a tight rein on his temper. “We could be quartered in Riverton for months.” His bard’s instinct for sound seemed to guide his footing. His step fell almost noiseless through the race of loose leaves in the gusts. He went on, “A winding or two of ill-smelling bandage can’t hide a clan accent from headhunters!”