Fugitive Prince (32 page)

That moment the chain jerked. Its tethered crystal snapped the links rigid and hung as if nailed to the earth.

Lirenda wrung out a sigh of relief. Her nerve was iron and her left hand precise as she raised power and engaged the prime successor’s cipher through the heart of her focus crystal. The quartz flared acid yellow in reply. As that key answered its matching lock, a handspan arc of the ward circle flickered from blue to acidic gold. The access point opened.

Lirenda crossed the abyss. Dread forces held in abeyance through her passage scoured her nerves into tingles. Her skin felt scraped by razor-edged steel and her vision blanched into static. She had no perception, no balance, no will. Only faith assured safe completion of her step. Reason and substance reassembled at last as her foot came back down on solid stone. She was through.

The blinding veils tore away.

Around her, entombed stone and dusty darkness hung with an alkaline scent of chalk. Hemmed by the impeccable vibrations of the wards, Lirenda settled her riled senses. Her course was committed. From the moment she engaged with the spell’s inner workings, the sigil which granted her entry would fade. Should Morriel still live, the pattern must be followed through to its end without disturbing the least, subtle vector of laid force. Had Morriel died, Lirenda must survive to contain whatever raging chaos had brought her Prime Matriarch’s downfall.

Possessed by a clean, analytical calm, Lirenda surveyed her prospects. Behind her, the defense wards glimmered their fixed, arctic blue. Ahead, scribed in lines like hot fire, the active core of the conjury blazed like a slow fuse, bound to its preset course. The slate slabs underfoot wore a glimmer of chalked sigils, the inaugural runes dimmed to spiderworked tracks where the energy had consumed itself in completion. Among them, Lirenda picked out bronze pans of spent ashes arrayed at each point of the compass. The scents of charred herbs had long since melded into the ambient dust, yet the
placement tied the construct through space and distance in ritual alignment with the land.

Lirenda wadded her cloak hem and skirts into the grip of cramped fingers, that no haphazard eddy could smear the febrile chains of dead ciphers. She eased her way along the inner rim of the ward circle until she found the Paravian rune,
An,
which meant prime, or one, or beginning, and without which no work of Koriani spellcraft could be engaged on Athera.

The significating figure interlaced with that rune seemed a knotwork of arcs, configured with maddening intricacy. Lirenda paused there, confounded. This elaborate work of conjury did not frame the foil she expected against interference by Fellowship Sorcerers. Hampered by the unsettled light, the Prime Senior freed her quartz and chain for another arcane sounding. She dangled the crystal above the faint chalk lines, hopeful, yet no residual energy remained for the stone to recapture in resonance. She had no alternative but to refire the sigil, lend it a spark from her own conjured will to trace its original vibration. The quartz as her focus, she bent her will through the matrix. A lifetime of training enabled its virtue to channel her talent into an applicable force.

She stilled curiosity to listening silence, then threaded a tenuous connection. The lines on the floor responded and flared a fleeting, subliminal purple. Their imprinted resonance surged through the quartz link, and touched her ready awareness.

She grasped that the construct framed the individual Name for a man, but no more.

Her sounding of his analog presence stormed through her like tide, an unassailable, blanketing warmth of connection that shattered all pride and restraint. Lirenda could summon no breath for denial; her stunned mind allowed her no grace for retreat. His innate compassion sheared like struck lightning across the quartz interface, to flash-burn her frozen emotions. Unwanted fascination held her in thrall, while integrity unraveled before a force like winged song, an aching, pure expression of melody that pealed through her woman’s heart and filled all the hollowness within her.

Lost as she touched what could never be hers within bounds of the Koriani Order, Lirenda cried out. However she cringed and postured, this one man held the potential capacity to know her. His intuitive awareness could strip away pretense and lay bare the self she kept hidden.

Every buried sorrow escaped from containment as water might burst from shocked glass: all of a young girl’s mute yearning to refute
her mother’s withering criticism. Cosseted by wealth and strict expectations, hounded to polished deportment, Lirenda still harbored the sawing, helpless misery left by her childhood feelings of uselessness. Her bleeding retreat from self-expression, then the refuge she carved out of rigid perfectionism had matured to a gnawing ambition. Hurt long denied now became pleasure thwarted, until the mask she wore ripped away. Her present existence became useless motion, a dance step play of meaningless shadows.

Inner barriers crumbled as the male presence tied through Morriel’s spell invited her to discard empty posturing and anneal her whole being into change.

Stranger to herself, spun giddy by a siren call to cast off restraint and embrace the freedom of laughter, Lirenda understood that her armor of reserve might dissolve at a touch and bare her vulnerable heart. One man might command such power to change her. She gasped, torn through by a savagery of need beyond the bounds of her past experience. Fear snapped her poise. She gave way to a firestorm of tears, when in callous fact, she had never before let self-pity over-whelm her.

Her violated pride at last sparked true rage, to stab through rank turmoil and redeem her.

Hurled back into still, dusty dark and the comfortless flare of sealed spells, Lirenda knelt in the suffocating velvet of her formal robes of high office. Her quartz pendant and chain hung slack in her hands, as though bone, flesh, and nerve had been scorched. Ath,
Ath preserve,
she knew this man’s nature, with his devastating, forthright perception of hidden truths. Never mind he was a living danger to the world, with no thought at all for her dedicated life inside the Koriani Order. His existence was a threat to unstring heart and mind, then whirl her like a moth to its brainless immolation in a lantern flame.

Alone in chill darkness, Lirenda gasped a vengeful curse on his name. For the lynchpin of the construct Morriel had conjured held none else but the imprinted signature for Arithon, Prince of Rathain.

The discovery wounded like double-edged steel, that the Shadow Master’s fate lay entangled with Koriani destiny. Lirenda locked her teeth in frustrated resentment. Of course, the Prime Matriarch must suspect her hidden weakness for the ill-starred Teir’s’Ffalenn. No other reason explained Morriel’s need to tie his movements in dire spells and secrecy.

Lirenda stood. A twisted cry escaped her. Arithon, unholy fires of creation,
Arithon s’Ffalenn
had been the instrument of disaster to trigger the Matriarch’s downfall. The irony all but choked her, that he
might also became the signal turn of fate to transfer the reins of prime power into her impatient hands. The reason why remained twined with the riddle behind Morriel’s grand conjury.

Between the glacial glimmer of the defense ward and the surging, core brilliance of active magecraft, the chalked chains of ciphers which keyed the spell’s purpose extended in tangling spirals. Lirenda released the crushed links of silver embedded into her palm. Unable to quell the tremor in her knees, she buffed the clammy fog of perspiration from her crystal. The misfortune of Arithon’s Name as significator posed a most thorny complication.

Her annoyance found voice in startling venom. “Merciful Ath, prince, if Morriel’s died of this, you’ll regret the light of day that saw you born.”

Lirenda grasped her quartz and rapped out a cantrip to raise a spark of illumination. Its firefly glow caught the rune
Shayn,
for two, stitched through the seals of a tracking spell. The locus which keyed its activation sprang from a riverside inn along the Ilswater in Tysan. Slaved to that sequence, Lirenda uncovered the Name form for Dakar, then Caolle’s as well, hooked and tagged by the spellbinder’s glamour to disguise his native clan accent. The reason for the triad presented no mystery. Morriel had wished to trace Arithon’s movements. As safeguard against his wily nature, she tied in his henchmen to assure an unbroken connection.

The lines off the third figure held branching complexity. Lirenda recognized the triplicate axis of the seer’s rune, then the mazed ciphers for diversion and secrecy, joined to trigger threads for a delicate array of spring traps. The spell became more than a straightforward scrying. Morriel had wrought against the code of the Koriani Order to curtail the freedom of a prince.

Lirenda refused to pass judgment for that transgression of founding principle. Arithon s’Ffalenn was a catalyst of unprecedented and volatile potential. Discomfited herself by unruly attraction, she saw too well how his influence had once spoiled the faith of a promising young initiate. Perhaps in the greater reach of her wisdom, Morriel Prime saw past Elaira’s tragic defection to some threat to the sisterhood at large. Or worse: the might of this construct may well have been raised to shield Lirenda herself from temptation. Koriani code held no recourse. Any romantic entanglement would disbar her from prime succession.

“Never that,” the First Senior avowed, shamed by demeaning possibility. Hatred scorched through her, that the man could exist with potential to tear the least flaw in her loyalty.

She pressed on to shed her embarrassment. Meticulous strings of sigils fanned into a widening net, until Arithon’s movements were not only traced, but stalked outright. As the first chains of circumstance branched right and left to rearrange destiny and entrap, Lirenda felt no surprise. By then, leading evidence established his role as Morriel’s earmarked quarry. The progression unfolded with diabolical care, the Prime’s plot stitched unerringly through Arithon’s machinations at Riverton to suborn Lysaer’s royal shipyard.

Lirenda deciphered the unwinding course of events, forced to admire the artistry of invention, as a bard’s salty repertoire made the Laughing Captain a haunt for sailhands and shipwrights. Through a season’s cagey dealings with Cattrick, while Dakar blunted his worries through drink, Morriel’s neat craft passed unnoticed. Spring trap and trigger, Arithon’s course became flanked in a narrowing channel, scribed in surreptitious power and plain chalk.

Lirenda paused to stretch a cramp from her hand. The crystal on its chain had warmed from hard use. She nestled it between her palms and chanted clearing cantrips, while her arcane connection to a fragment of happenstance reeled on to display a spectral recast of a dialogue spoken days since. The trace resonance of sound preserved by spent sigils cast whispered echoes through the deadened air of the observatory…

‘When’s the next launching?’
murmured a flaxen-haired bard in a voice unmistakably Arithon’s, while from a tucked pose in a scarletcushioned window seat, the broad-shouldered master of Tysan’s royal shipyard weighed his every word with the slit-eyed contention of a lynx.

‘Next week,’
Cattrick drawled.
‘The gilders are still fussing with her brightwork. If the riggers and splicers are left to their gnashing row over topping lifts, the shakedown could stretch a bit longer.’
A pause for a smile of provocative, white teeth.
‘You know this brig’s going to be tougher. The disappearance of the last was blamed on green officers, so this time they’ve assigned the tried and trusty.’

The bard sheared a needle-bright chord from his lyranthe. Under his hands the music held laughter, belied by the shaded intensity of the gaze stilled and trained upon Cattrick.
‘Your craft is the building of excellent ships. My share of the fun is to steal them.’

The spelled record dimmed, faded back into fusty trails of chalk. Lirenda blinked, brought back to herself. She had screened the
final, spent frames of the construct. Ahead stretched the fire-strung nets of live power, preset for events yet to come.

The interface with the present spread at her feet, and the next sounding she touched would be volatile. Contact might jar the uncoiling precision of the spell’s influence. Arithon s’Ffalenn still possessed trained awareness. Blind instinct could warn him if she raised a disturbance. Now, the least misstep would unbalance the conjury. The smallest disruption of pent power could destroy her if an inadvertent move chanced to unravel the delicate bindings.

Lirenda blotted a forehead rinsed in sweat. Around her, the observatory seemed a sealed tomb; cold dark wrapped its core of inferno. Loop upon loop of slaved power lay spring wound and cocked, awaiting the moment of release. Lirenda strove to read the fine lines inked like magma across the dark. The dazzle whirled her to dizziness, and the Great Waystone remained beyond view. Aware she must risk direct contact through visions, she knew visceral fear. The danger before her was no longer malleable. Should she once lose control inside those nets of voracious power, naught would remain of frail flesh and bone but an immolated silt of white ash.

Carried by her unbending determination, Lirenda stilled her awareness. Blank as cooled glass, she stamped down her traitorous, cringing unease, raised her jewel on its chain, and doused its bared facets in the surging, live current of the spell. As the upending rush of seer’s vision claimed her, she braced herself to receive…

The taproom was jammed to an airless, close heat of packed bodies and uproarious noise. By nightfall, drawn in from the frost and the leaden chill of coastal winter, every yard craftsman and beached sailhand in Riverton crammed into the Laughing Captain. Celebration ruled the hour. That day had seen a successful royal launching. The new brig rode at anchor behind the seawall, sparkling with lanterns hooked to her yards as the riggers tied in her last running lines. The crew selected to man her for shakedown attended the madhouse festivity. They sat apart, under orders to moderate their drink. Despite the close eye of an iron-willed captain, they howled with laughter and accepted the beer mugs passed across by congratulatory friends.