Fugitive Prince (33 page)

Only the bard at the settle had elbow room. With the same stilled deception of a storm’s sunlit eye, he stirred the jammed room to a feverish, wild energy through a reeling succession of dance tunes. The crowd responded, and stamped, and roared with fine spirits, dry tinder raked for the spark.

Dakar’s clumsy, inebriated trip came perfectly timed to fetch against a bald sailor. The pair of them toppled in a tangling heap, and a trestle crashed over to a flying gush of spilled beer. A bystander’s screeched insult provoked
a swung fist. From behind their captain’s cordon, several of the brig’s crew laughed and shouted in scathing amusement. As though uncoiled from a spell, an agile little caulker whose dinner had been upset snatched a pitcher from a barmaid’s laden tray. He hurled its foamy contents to silence the ridicule and doused their small pocket of decorum. Through yells of blind outrage, the bard’s measures changed key, then leaped a surreptitious beat faster. His disingenuous skill burned the very air to abandon, while tempers frayed red, and brawlers set to and sowed mayhem across the packed taproom…

“Dharkaron
curse
the man’s effrontery!” Lirenda swore as scried vision dissolved and freed thought.

Lysaer’s handpicked sailhands had been fearlessly targeted, and a fool’s guess could forecast outcome. To sideline the men of unswerving crown loyalty assigned to choice berths on the brig, the bonesetters in Riverton would be given a busy night’s work. Arithon would claim his diabolical triumph as the scheduled shakedown raised sail with an alternate crew.

Burning to uncover how Morriel’s construct might serve the s’Ffalenn prince his comeuppance, Lirenda mapped a parallel strand in the weave. She found a fresh spring trap interlinked to a marvel of scried forecast, and already engaged by the Riverton launching. The construct arced across distance and time, and conjoined with another, inset with the trefoil seal of a sworn obligation. Some minor Name who bore oath of debt to the Koriani Order received his call to deliver due service.

In the stale dark of the observatory, under roof beams nicked scarlet by the agitated light thrown off by arcane powers, the First Senior set her will once again and pitched her crystal to imprint its moment of due consequence…

Amid the gaudy appointments of an Etarran hall of state, a lanky scholar with soft hands arose from his self-conscious bow. Clad in wine velvet, his bristled, white hair tamed by a cross-laced silk ribbon, he raised his chin to squint at the imposing, blond figure on the dais. Fingers damp, and heart pounding, he offered up the aged vellum he had asked private audience to deliver.

“Milord Prince of the Light, my translation is done. By Koriani request, the fruits of rare knowledge are to be freely given to your cause. What you hold in your hands is an early-Third Age treatise on the lost arts of ocean navigation.”

A deep, rolling thrill pricked Lirenda to gooseflesh. Morriel, in collaboration with Lysaer, against Arithon; the piquancy of that manipulative use of politics raised a sharp gasp of astonishment. Seldom before had a Koriani Prime used power to move sovereign players as pawns. Lirenda traced the spell’s ranging reach toward the future. Curiosity fed now on the drive of ambition, she
saw
the sealed dispatch from Cattrick which would soon prompt Prince Lysaer to assemble a picked following and leave Etarra in whirlwind secrecy and haste. Cause to consequence, the mighty construct converged, with Arithon flushed into desperate flight. Once he took to the sea, the grand plan would close on him, its culminating force dovetailed into an ingenious, orchestrated opportunity. The last stroke would fall amid the stormy, broad swells of Mainmere Bay. Lirenda reached
Alt,
the rune of closure, and the construct’s cycle showed the end game to crown its set purpose.

Morriel’s clandestine trap would strip Arithon defenseless, then bind his mettlesome fate into impotence through Koriani captivity.

On her knees before the last sigil, Lirenda pressed narrow palms to her lips to stifle vindictive laughter. Humiliation lanced through the rags of her mirth, that Morriel should judge her too fragile a vessel to bear knowledge of Arithon’s defeat. If the Matriarch died of such overweening arrogance, fate’s backhanded justice was worthy of Dharkaron Avenger.

Lirenda regarded the inner circle of traced, dusty ash and singed herbs. The arced patterns of ending and ward were precise. She sobered to fact, that the old Prime had left no loose ends. Past the dribbled stubs of dead candles, beyond the ceremonial braziers burned cold on their stands, the amethyst Waystone gleamed in sullen quiescence. No vestige of strayed power smoldered unchecked to draw backlash. Lirenda would require no ritual rune of passage to cross this last ward of protection.

These vital defenses, set to shield the spell’s creator from the scalding blast of fused energies, had been breached long since. The break had been instant. No vestige of guarding virtue had survived long enough to bleed away through attrition.

Lirenda raised her skirt hems in shaking fingers, irrationally reluctant to disturb the fine lines whose sigils had failed to protect. She encountered the reason for the lapse soon enough. A girl scarcely sworn to initiate service lay sprawled across the perimeter, hands outflung on the charred slate floor. She breathed in a queerly arrested rhythm, her hollowed, pale features stamped in frozen panic by the passage of arcane forces.

Deep rage shattered Lirenda’s dispassion.

Morriel Prime had not fallen to a flux of miscast energies. She had been betrayed. The failed nerve of this inadequate chit had undone the entire circle. Recognition followed, that the Matriarch had anticipated, even planned for disaster. Seven chains of stayspells wrought over the observatory kept the construct in fugue through that unbinding moment of crisis. Awe remained, that Morriel had called up the strength and sheer will to force her spell to consummation. In mortal pain, perhaps dying, she had impelled her grand construct to live on.

Lirenda straightened up and moved on, leveled to realize she owned no such depths, nor any grand bent for self-sacrifice. Beneath the scintillant eye of the Waystone, she confronted the last tragic figures. They lay in their layers of crumpled robes, youth and age like two dolls dropped through a fracture in time. The first throat she probed for a life sign lay cold; the steadfast initiate who had held to her vows had perished, her life’s spirit drained out of ruthless necessity, that the Prime might survive long enough to stabilize the conjury.

One bundle remained, cast down like dry sticks in a shroud of fine velvets. Lirenda sucked in a steadying breath. Lit by the gleam of the Waystone’s chill presence, she knelt down and braced herself to touch.

The wrist she raised felt insubstantial as bleached parchment wrapped over substanceless bone. But a pulse still threaded the blue network of veins. Though cool, the flesh was not corpse chill.

Against all adversity, Morriel Prime still survived. Unconscious, weakened, perhaps strayed beyond recall, indomitable will kept her breathing.

Lirenda bent her head, while heated tears welled through her eyelids. There and then, amid the musky, flat ash of spilled offerings and the alkaline tang of scraped chalk, she weighed an unthinkable choice: to collapse the grand construct and draw Morriel clear, or to let the spell burn on undisturbed to completion, and hope the Prime’s tenuous reserves could hang on until the last sigil reached its planned closure.

Arithon’s freedom weighed against Morriel’s life; Lirenda snagged her lip between teeth like small pearls, shredded in the cruel crux between desire and ambition. Prime power in hand, and the chance to seize her autonomy; or a sheltered subservience with demeaning awareness that one man, still at large, held the means to unstring her whole character.

Lirenda arose. A laugh ripped from her patrician throat, shrill with
leashed-back self-loathing. She was prideful and flawed, too desperately consumed by desire to rule. Temptation had set its steel claws in her vitals, and she was too threatened to tear free.

Alone in the dark, without voice beyond conscience, Lirenda turned her back on the fallen Prime. She shouldered the task of retracing her steps without jostling the spell’s course of alignment. She held no regrets. At heart, she was exactly what her mother had claimed: a spirit born lacking the female kindness Ath granted to natural womanhood. The man who might have unchained her closed spirit held too potent a power to ruin her. Once she was confirmed as Koriani Prime Matriarch, her authority would be unassailable. No one alive need ever know of the emptiness masked at her core.