Fugitive Prince (27 page)

“Sithaer’s black furies, Arithon!”

His cry raised no answer; too much to hope that the Prince of Rathain possessed anything near waking sanity. Arithon could be bent on who knew what mayhem, seized as he was in the grip of vile dreams, and unable to shake the ties of strong sleep spells wrought over him. Whipped to blind fight, few men alive were as dangerous.

Dakar plowed to his feet. Poor candidate for heroics, he whacked his shin on the stool, howled from frustration, and launched off in blundering pursuit. His toe hooked the table leg. The candle dish fell, splashing the floorboards with crockery. Too flustered to question why his mage-sight seemed trammeled, Dakar dove in a tackling pounce through the murk.

He struck flesh, grabbed. An elbow sledged into his jaw. “Merciful Ath! Arithon,
you’re dreaming! Wake up!”

The mazed creature he grappled spun about, bashed him spine first against the washstand. Basin and tin pitcher clattered askew, dousing his neck in cold water.

“Arithon!” Dakar ripped in a breath that shot branding fire through his chest. “Stop this! Now!” The next hammering blow broke his hold. He dropped, tasted blood from a bitten lip. The jolt as he crashed full length turned his head. Through dizzying pain and a fall of spun shadow, he heard the grind as the door bar slipped free. “Ath, no!”

The latch clanged, gave; the panel swung wide. An influx of chill air from the corridor wafted past Dakar’s damp face. He scrambled back upright, agonized to find his recovery came too late to matter.
He rushed anyhow, tripped over the tin basin, and skated through a swath of flung water. Beleaguered, half-stunned, and griped short of wind, he made a futile effort to call warning. This was
Tysan.
Should Arithon step out with no thought for disguise, fate might lead someone to recognize him. If he quenched any lamps in the taproom by means of wrought shadow, mayhem and bloodshed must follow.

No option remained. Dakar resorted to magecraft. He ripped out a rough-drawn spell to warp wood, then barbed its flight in permissions garnered from Arithon for use against extreme need. Currents of raised power coursed through his frame, already shocked into shivering. Dakar let fly his linked ward and construct with intent to trip his agile quarry in the doorway.

Nailed boards groaned and flexed in obliging reply, but not to block Arithon’s passage. Instead, Dakar himself caught the assaulting stir of warped forces. He yelped in vexation, too bruised to evade what he only
now
tagged as a mirror-keyed spell of deflection.

Then his own hasty conjury rebounded on its maker and accomplished its end like fell vengeance.

Dakar stubbed his toe on an uneven plank, crashed full length, and skidded. His palms caught a nasty scouring of splinters. The more frightening truth hurt worse than the pain:
beyond any doubt, the Master of Shadow was wielding his talent for magecraft.

“Curse me with fiends, that shouldn’t be possible!” Dakar scrambled upright, vexed to despair.

Always before, the block had remained beyond reach of Arithon’s resource, the trained powers of his upbringing shackled in guilt by his imposed royal gift of compassion. Too late now, to avert a disaster past imagining. The Mad Prophet launched in hotfoot pursuit. This was a realm where Lysaer’s crown campaign to eradicate sorcery brought victims to the stake without trial. Too real, the chance that Earl Jieret’s augury might come due in this backwater settlement.

Breathless, stabbed at each step by the grate of a cracked rib, Dakar reached the opened door. The hallway beyond showed him rows of closed rooms, the end by the stair banked in shadow. Dakar dammed back his rasping breath. Through the masking noise from the revelers, he listened, but detected no scuffle of footsteps. Arithon s’Ffalenn could move like a ghost, even with no gifts to hide him. The darkness he called to mask his escape hung too thick, even to pass the fine, signature energies which underpinned all things of substance. Dakar strained his mage-sight, but recaptured no glimmer of pattern to guide him.

Resigned, he plunged into that blind dark by touch. His best course lay in reaching the stables. Caolle deserved warning. After that, the flimsy hope must suffice, that their combined efforts would be enough to extricate the Shadow Master from whatever brawling havoc arose from his foray through the taproom.

Dakar tracked the wall with a palm stubbed with splinters and minced his hampered way forward. Above the racketing clamor belowstairs, he heard someone bellow: Caolle, returned from saddling their mounts against need, and confounded to find himself under attack as Arithon sought fugitive exit.

“Don’t let him get past!” Dakar rushed to stop Rathain’s prince from doubling back through the hallway.

Ahead, grunts of effort, then an alarming thump. A body cracked through the oak banister. Caolle snarled an oath. Someone’s knuckles smacked flesh. An incongruous reek of pitch smoke spiraled up from the stairwell. Dakar winced through a snort of laughter. Barbarian to his core, the clansman stuck by his cantankerous habit of lifting the coachmen’s torches from the stable yard to light his way within doors. Between prince and liegeman, the battle raged on, a no-holds-barred scuffle fought on the steps with fists and fire and fell shadow.

A wooden-sounding thunk bought a surcease from darkness. Dakar blinked to adjust abused eyesight. Against the filtered glare from the taproom, Caolle poised with one massive fist clenched to the haft of his cresset. The flame had extinguished. Sultry coals still flared from the tip, laced in demonic trails of spent smoke. Collapsed in a heap against his braced feet lay Arithon s’Ffalenn, a welted mass of newly raised blisters glistening across his forehead.

“Ath, he went mad!” Still brandishing his bludgeon, Caolle glanced past his shoulder as if he expected another assault from behind.

Dakar made neither excuse nor denial. “Lucky the meatbrains downstairs are flat drunk. We’d best move your liege before some sweaty john wheedles one of the barmaids upstairs.” He ignored his own throbbing chorus of aches, knelt over Arithon, and helped Caolle check for lingering injury.

“No broken bones. That’s better than he deserves.” Caolle for a mercy never stalled over questions. He licked a bloodied knuckle, jammed his spent torch in the stump of the banister, then bent to the task of hefting royalty. “Runt sized or no, his Grace fights like Sithaer’s furies.” An accusatory glower shot back as he straightened and took note of Dakar’s hitched stance. “Kicked you also, I see.”

“One rib. Only cracked.” Dakar raised a hand to wave off the matter, then gave up the gesture for speech that hurt just as much. “Won’t keep me from riding.”

Caolle let that pass with a dubious grunt and plowed onward with Arithon across his shoulders like bagged game. “Well, whatever undid him, I’ll hear a reason. For this, there’d better be cause fit to stop Dharkaron’s almighty justice.”

But time was not given, even for Dakar to outline the gist of disaster. On return to the room, Arithon stirred the moment Caolle laid him back on the bed. Since the damaged bindings of the sleep spell were now too perilous an influence to keep, Dakar effected their immediate release.

The Master of Shadow regained full awareness at once, his pupils black and wide in the flare of the candle Caolle brought to measure his reflexes.

“No concussion. You’re lucky,” Dakar pronounced. Too heartsick to meet the anguished recognition unveiled in those wakened, green eyes, he held out a ripped twist of linen, soaked in the spill from the washbasin.

Arithon took the offering. As wary himself of prying observation, he pressed the compress over his scorched forehead. He asked just one question; heard from Caolle of the torch used at need to take him down. Then he sucked a sharp breath through shut teeth and let the sting to his outraged flesh stall off unpleasant explanation.

Too brusque for tact, Caolle showed him no quarter. “Liege, what evil possessed you?”

“Ath, let him collect himself!” Dakar snapped, detesting the pity that made him speak in defense.

“I can’t be spared,” Arithon contradicted.

The ground-glass hurt in his voice set even Caolle aback. In wordless embarrassment, the clansman pawed through the fallen blankets to recover the stool. That evasion helped nothing. On the floor lay the Paravian-wrought sword; the bared sweep of black quillons offered stark enough proof of a trust gone desperately amiss.

“You reached for
Alithiel!”
Arithon cried, the name of the blade charged with horror.

The Mad Prophet lost his chance to soften the impact.

“Yes, it’s the curse!” Arithon snapped, the admission jerked out like barbed steel from a nerve. “Desh-thiere’s touch has warped me,
never for a moment forget this.”
For Caolle, he explained his razor-edged quandary. “The geas which drives me to destroy my half brother grows ever more uncontrollable. That’s why Dakar holds my
given permission to reach past my deepest defenses. So long as I keep my right mind, the preventative ought to be binding.”

A moment passed, rinsed in the buttery glow of the candle. “You’re not always sane,” Caolle summed up in his usual, hammer-blow bluntness.

Arithon shut his eyes. The rag in the mangling grip of his fist could scarcely mask his expression. Forced to yield his unwilling confidence, he lowered his hand, limp now, the knuckles scuffed red from warped violence. “Yes.” A shiver coursed through him. “The curse has invaded by way of my dreams. Apparently, there, it just claimed me.” He looked up then, his shaming appeal made the worse by his unflinching dignity. “I’m no fit prince to lead Rathain’s clans anymore. Caolle, I beg you, accept my release here and now. Take back your oath of fealty before the worst happens. Before-”

“Before I die by your own hand?” Caolle slammed to his feet. “Never.” He spun and paced, his wheeling shadow too large for the cramped room. “Liege, my death is not the worst that could happen. By your oath, sealed in blood before Fellowship Sorcerers, I stand fast. Even if your charge to stay alive was not binding, my heart could not do less. You are the hope for my Lord Jieret’s future. The heritage of your bloodline is not revocable, your Grace, any more than my own sworn trust.”

“Caolle, could you step out,” Dakar pleaded, as much to stop that lacerating contest of wills as to seek word with Arithon in private.

“No. Caolle remains, by command of his prince, if he’s too much the fool to disown me.” Arithon sat straight, faced them, the spark in his eyes too baleful and steady to wear down. “If he stands endangered through guarding my flank, he’ll not take those risks in ignorance.”

Aware that statement was pitched to provoke, Dakar joined forces, not just to turn Caolle, but to make Arithon withdraw before ruin overtook them. “This time, your Grace, you tapped into your training. You worked talent and wrought conjury against me.”

Arithon went white.

“Not once, but twice.” Dakar steeled his nerve and bored in. “My sleep spells were bent back in deflection against me, and not by an outside act of sabotage. When I used force at need to bar your way, all your sworn permissions were revoked.”

“You’re quite sure?” Arithon looked as if his own knife had slipped and stabbed him through to the heart. “Ath save us all, then the curse has subverted even my royal-born gift of compassion.” The forearm half-raised to mask his stark shock dropped nervelessly back in his lap.

“Not when you’re conscious,” Dakar amended quickly. Aching too much to endure forced bravado, he looked aside, and noticed that Caolle retreated also. As if care for this prince posed too punishing a trust, the gruff clansman busied his large hands to right the crashed washstand and retrieve the dented tin basin.

Dakar strangled pity out of fear and resumed. “Your Grace, we can’t argue facts. A masterbard’s gift grants you linkage through sound to something akin to your mage-sight. Any performance which recalls the Mistwraith’s influence, like tonight’s lament for Dier Kenton’s fallen, may well open channels for its curse to exploit.” While Arithon weighed this, Dakar nailed home his point. “I think you know it’s dreadfully unwise to proceed with your mad plots in Tysan.”

“I must,” Arithon insisted. The entreaty on his features too anguished, too vivid, he bared himself to explain. “We need more ships to seek the Paravians. The clans here require sound vessels and crews to spare them enslavement on the galleys. Lord Maenol’s people won’t survive the next generation if they are forced to stay landbound. They have no recourse left, since their former
caithdein
gave her life to declare them my allies. Against Lady Maenalle’s execution on my conscience, I pledged them my word I would help.”

No sensible counsel would move him. A swift, sideward glance showed that Caolle saw as well. Bull stubborn, or maybe cow stupid, Dakar tried again all the same. “You do realize that any encounter with Lysaer could send you over the edge. Not just your sanity, but the whole of this world would be threatened.”

“I have to go on.” A wry bent of humor flexed Arithon’s mouth as the stew downstairs roared to crescendo. Still unapologetic, he delivered his adamant conclusion. “What’s left but to run? And if I turn tail, that solves nothing.
You must understand:
this curse just compounds as time passes. Evasion will bring the same downfall. Actions and will are all I have left to stave off my own self-destruction. Worse than Lysaer, despair is my enemy.”

“Are you sure?” Dakar pressed. “Do you speak true? Or is your thinking corrupted by the Mistwraith’s geas itself?”

“Come ahead and find out,” Arithon invited. A testy, backhanded delight lit his face, almost welcome for the change as he shoved to his feet in familiar, acid-bright temper. “I’ve always liked fighting my demons up front. Since I’m dangerous, asleep, we may as well embrace folly headlong and ride on for Riverton tonight.”

Dawn blazed over the deep estuary at Riverton, a veiling of cirrus like cloth-of-gold fringe strewn across dove gray silk. Against that gilt
backdrop, the walled inner city spiked a bristle of towers and battlements, streamered with pennons and pricked by the rake of ships’ masts. Seventeen centuries of commerce had overrun the original citadel. The flats where the barges docked along the river delta spread crammed to bursting with wharves, the arched gateways of coach inns set chockablock with boathouses and ferryman’s lighters.