Fugitive Prince (56 page)

R
umpled, hungry, all but giddy with fatigue, the Mad Prophet reined his rackety oxcart alongside the wayside tavern’s stone wall. After a seven night of sleeping in thorn brakes, he smelled little better than his draft animals. The beasts stood with lowered heads, tails switching to dislodge the black, biting flies which descended upon the Korias flats from the moment the sun thawed the soil.

“Ath, are you certain you’re up to this?” He filched a glance sidewards, not trusting appearances as the Masterbard stepped down, his lyranthe slung from a strap at his shoulder, and the silence like poured lead between them.

The lacerating despondency settled since Riverton this morning seemed tightly leashed. Arithon had washed and shaved at a streamside. His torn shirtsleeves were mended in meticulous stitches; the tailored cuffs cleaned, old bloodstains bleached away by the lye soap begged from a dairymaid. His dark leathers had been brushed until the singed patches were scarcely noticeable. Gaunt from eight cold, wet days of foraged meals, the Master of Shadow looked more the part of a courier or light swordsman than a bard on itinerant sojourn; until he turned his head.

Then the light touched his face and revealed what he was: a self-haunted fugitive with exhaustion etched down to each fitted angle of bone.

“You’re unwise to try music in public so soon,” Dakar berated, concerned for the exposure an honest performance must demand.

“We have to eat. We haven’t got a coin between the two of us, and I’m up to this because it’s safer than risking my fingers trying to skin coneys with a main gauche.” The gathered, black brows let go of their frown and tipped up in acidic inquiry. “Unless you prefer snaring songbirds? I thought not.”

“Sithaer’s dark furies,” Dakar swore. “Why do I stay with you?”

“For maudlin entertainment, no doubt.” But against every precedent, Arithon s’Ffalenn was first to turn aside.

One charged moment led into another, an abrasive progression unbroken since the hour Caolle had fallen. Beyond the wall, a woman soothed a crying child, and a stableboy’s rush broom scraped rhythmically through the lazy spring warmth.

Standoff, while the Mad Prophet held his mutinous seat on the buckboard. Then the Shadow Master’s lips curled in sarcasm like a razor cut, at odds with his careful speech. “We haven’t seen a patrol in two days. Stop looking over your shoulder and fretting, or I’ll have to mix goose grease and wintergreen to treat you for cricks in the neck.”

Dakar felt too heartsick to return the slight. “You aren’t up to this,” he insisted.

Arithon hitched up his lyranthe with hands that betrayed all his stress in fine tremors. “All right, I’m not up to this. That’s why we agreed. You’re staying to mind the wagon.” His departing stride held that tigerish poise which warned when his temper was rankled.

Dakar watched the sunlight fall like white ice over his trim shoulders and back, the sleek ends of black hair feathered into the drawstring ruffles of his collar. In the nerve-racking boldness which trademarked his style, Arithon refused a disguise. People, he insisted, were least observant of things left out in plain sight. He passed the inn’s gate, and the broom of the stablehand stilled to his clear call of inquiry.

Abandoned in the company of cud-chewing oxen, Dakar crossed his arms to muffle his yowling stomach. Unease scraped his nerves, though the road stretched empty north and south. The ruts carved up by recent thaw lay hemmed in puddles, tinted lapis and moonstone under a sky sliced by diving black swifts. Brisk trade moved by sea on the southcoast of Tysan until spring dried the mud and the grass offered fodder for caravans. Midmorning was too late for the farm-girls bearing spring eggs to the Middlecross markets, and too early for the afternoon relays of post couriers to clatter in asking for remounts.

An early breeze riffled the blossoming apple trees. The droning industry of bees cut the air, and the thin bleats of lambs, grazing at large with their dams on the flats.

Dakar sulked. His natural penchant for long naps in bright sunlight seemed permanently displaced. He had small taste for idle lurking in a rattletrap cart that made him a creeping target for sunwheel guardsmen and headhunters’ arrows.

Nor did he like stringy game eaten cold in the brush, a practice now likely to continue. From inside the wall, Arithon’s mild speech raised a howl of vehement distress.

“Another bard? Here? Spare us all, send him packing!” A heavy door slammed. Then a hail of agitated footsteps slapped across the cobbled yard, and a voice of indignant propriety cut off Arithon’s next question. “I’m sorry. You mustn’t stay, times aren’t safe. An herb witch got herself stoned last week. She only sold a girl a love simple, but that was enough to raise trouble. Tysan’s Crown Examiner came with a half company of sunwheel soldiers who could ride back any moment and clap you in irons for singing the wrong sort of ballad.”

“Fiends eat my liver and lights!” The Mad Prophet snapped up straight, shot off the buckboard, and raced to the heads of the oxen. “Back! Hup!” He grabbed at their headstalls, snatched green-slobbered bits, and gave an almighty jerk. “You splay-footed whoresons,
move now!
Or by Ath, I’ll singe your hairy rumps to blisters! We’ll have roast tongue for supper. While I think of it, we’ll hack the rest piecemeal and string out your entrails for fly bait.”

The oxen rolled reproachful brown eyes. They shook their capped horns, bawled through whiskered nostrils, and begrudged him a lumbering half step. The shaft groaned, jackknifed, and the wain squealed to a chorus of gapped boards and stressed pegs. While the Mad Prophet yowled epithets, all four misfitted wheels rocked askew on warped axles and jammed.

Dakar clenched his teeth in forbearance. “For mercy,” he pleaded into four tureen ears. “For Daelion’s sake,
save
your miserable hides!” The fact he could hear no oncoming hoofbeats offered him small reassurance; a dozen crown mercenaries could be taking their ease unseen in the innkeeper’s taproom. Still hauling rein leather, he sized up the merits of hazing the beasts with his drover’s cape.

Then another cool hand slipped over his hot ones. Arithon’s voice said, “Desist. We’re not followed.”

“I should believe you?” Dakar cranked his head around like a turtle who suffered a pinched tail. A bay, muscled shoulder filled his whole view.

The Master of Shadow pried the spellbinder’s fingers off the lines and replaced them with a supple length of bridle rein. “Leave the cart. We’re going astride.”

“What?” Dakar gawped at the post horse attached to his fist. “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

A fine-boned, race-bred mare snorted behind the bay, ears rammed flat, as a barefoot horseboy hauled in her girth with indecorous haste. The horse nipped in protest, caught short by an elbow as Arithon looped his lyranthe to her saddlebow. Dakar’s urgent questions were ignored. Back turned, the Shadow Master scrounged underneath the cart’s filthy cargo of sacking, then straightened, buckling on his baldric with its sheathed burden of sword and dagger.

From the innyard, the fussy infant wailed on through commotion, while some unseen servant shouted to a scullion, “Hurry up and fetch that satchel from the loft!”

“Damn you! What’s afoot?” Dakar shoved between stamping horseflesh, his cloak wadded up in the crook of his elbow, and his feet in grave threat of maceration. “No innkeeper in his right mind trades prize post mounts for two bone-skinny oxen and a wain overdue to be hacked up for kindling.”

Arithon flipped the mare’s reins over her high neck and mounted. “There’s a free singer in trouble.” His fingers, flying, adjusted the hang of a stirrup. “Time’s short. You’ll hear as we ride.”

Dakar stuck his toes in to argue, while the horseboy disappeared. A potbellied graybeard scurried from the yard, burly arms clutched round a saddlebag. Slung across his shoulder was a fleece-wrapped bundle that looked to contain a second lyranthe.

“Here.” The man wheezed to a stop and unloaded his burden into Dakar’s already taxed charge. “The singer naturally couldn’t take his belongings. Left here in irons, poor wretch.” A coin sack teetered onto the top of the load, forcing Dakar to bobble sidewards to avert a spill.

“There’s his silver, as well,” the innkeeper explained. “Mine’s an honest house. Won’t take advantage of a man caught aback by misfortune.”

“What misfortune?”
Dakar ejected through the horse-reeking leather of the saddlebags.

“You didn’t hear?” The landlord scrubbed moist hands on his apron. “Sunwheel soldiers and a weasel-faced examiner arrested the minstrel I had quartered here. Condemned him to burn. They said that the singing of legends threatens innocents. I tell you, what’s happened to good sense? Unkempt louts drew cold steel in my taproom and bedamned to any grace of hospitality. Never mind it’s my inn will suffer the blame and the satires.”

“This has nothing to do with us,” Dakar insisted. He juggled his load, and ineffectively tried to return the unwieldy collection. The lyranthe slipped and banged his knee with a ringing, hollow clunk, and a harness buckle snagged in his mustache. “Will you listen?” he cried in breaking, fresh temper. “My companion and I are not interested. ”

But the landlord only shouted to roust up some laggard from the tavern. “Wenj! Jump on it! They need those provisions now, not next week!”

The prospect of victuals deflated Dakar’s protests. He stood, breathing hard, while the innkeeper narrowed incensed, dark eyes, saying, “Dharkaron’s Spear strike the unsavory brutes! My reputation’s in ruins. Better I ask for the Fate Wheel’s turning than see a free singer take harm during his stay in my tavern. There’s curse and misfortune in the breach of a bard’s right to shelter.”

“You’ll have no such bad luck,” Arithon assured, then beckoned for haste as the horseboy trotted out with a third mount, this one a fancy iron gray gelding with snowflake dapples, and a bridle which trilled, sewn with bells and flamboyant red tassels.

“The singer’s own palfrey,” the landlord explained through Dakar’s flabbergasted glare of mutiny. “Bless you both! If you can spare that poor wretch from the fire, the horses are yours with my compliments. That’s the best I can do. Grain-fed mounts aren’t easy to come by, not since the season’s been harsh. But you’ll need the advantage to outrun the sunwheel guardsmen.”

“Guardsmen?” The sidling horse trod on Dakar’s toe. Before he fell over in an avalanche of goods, the horseboy stepped in, hooked the lyranthe and packed saddlebags from his wobbling grasp, and secured them onto the palfrey.

“Rip off the bells,” said Arithon, succinct. “We don’t need the noise to betray us.”

“If you think we can save anybody, you’re mistaken,” Dakar snapped.

“Oh dear.” The innkeeper wilted. While the horseboy paused, the plink of bronze bells choked in dispirited fists, he implored, “Who else is left?”

Dakar shot a venomous glower at Arithon. Green eyes watched him back, implacable as glints in sheared emerald, with all the fresh sorrows of Riverton like a spiked canker beneath.

The Shadow Master insisted, “I gave my promise.”

No plea, but a warning; Dakar shut his teeth in balked temper. As the inn’s kindly matron fluttered out with a bulging pannier of
provender, he shrugged; and discovered the coin sack still grasped in the hand underneath his rucked cloak. That saving fact raised his smile like gilt on bad tin. “Well then. We’ll give your bard’s rescue our diligent best.”

Dakar crammed the silver down the neck of his shirt before the innkeeper recovered his aplomb. The venture perhaps made plausible sense. Gifts of coin and horses were no sort of boon for two fugitives to spurn for the overnice scruple of honesty. While the innkeeper gushed his effusive relief, and Arithon took directions to the hamlet, the Mad Prophet busied himself checking the bay’s girth to make sure his fat bulk could stay mounted.

“The burning was to happen between the flour mill and the glassworks, ” the inn matron finished, while the horseboy tossed over the palfrey’s neck rope, and Arithon set heels to the mare.

Caught flat-footed, Dakar forgot to shut his mouth. Departing hooves churned up a gobbet of mud, which vengefully clipped him in the teeth. Hornet mad, he spat grit, clambered astride, and gave chase, while stirrups too long to suit his short legs clanged and battered his dangling ankles.

A league down the road, stretched flat at a gallop, he shouted through a stinging lash of mane. “You can’t mean to try this. The risks are enough to serve up our guts raw on the sword of Lysaer’s executioner! Even if we bolt now, someone will remember our foolish exchange at the tavern. Since you chose such rash lengths to be quit of those oxen, we’d be wise to turn off of the thoroughfare.”

“I spoke in good faith,” Arithon flung back, breathless, while the horses careened neck and neck through a turn. “Didn’t you recognize the silver bosses on the gray palfrey’s saddle?”

Dakar’s rank epithet allowed he had not.

Arithon steadied his mare’s stride and urged greater speed, rankled to acid impatience. “The free singer they’re to execute is Felirin the Scarlet.” As his mount stretched her nose and thundered ahead, his voice eddied back through the turbulence. “You’ll remember Felirin once helped save my life.”

“Red tassels, oh Ath, of course!” The Mad Prophet regained recollection; as well as loud clothes, the free singer affected complete indiscretion before bone-headed, townborn intolerance. “Felirin always did know just the right ballad to set headhunters brawling with fists.” Dakar tried and failed to match his companion’s sinuous agility astride. His seat smacked the saddle, his mount jibbed and pecked; left trailing by three lengths, he hollered admonition, “You know you’re turning one minstrel’s misfortune into a lunatic’s play for disaster.”

But Arithon by then had forced too wide a lead to bother to frame a reply.

The Mad Prophet scrubbed sweat from his neck and sagged against the gapped boards of the glassmaker’s shed. “Ath, I’m too old and fat for this.”

His breathing ran ragged. His heart sped too fast. The muffled thunder in his ears came as much from the beat of his own rushed blood, as from the rumble of the mill’s vanes, turning. The two frame buildings notched the mild rise, and beyond them, the tide-driven thrash of sea breakers, ripping a white, sandy headland. The hollow between held a spindly row of cottages, a cobbler’s shop, and a blacksmith’s: the hamlet they had lathered good horses to reach before the free singer’s burning.