Fugitive Prince (68 page)

“Caolle, who once served as war captain to Steiven s’Valerient, and later, to the heir, Jieret Red-beard? My lowliest Etarran foot soldier would have weighed that man’s character with better prudence.” Dangerous now as struck flame, Lysaer faced the sea. A sudden, sheeting flare of lightning scoured his profile to the ennoblized stamp on a coinface. “Such a man could never be harmless until he lay dead.” He waited again in sly pressure, prepared to let silence condemn her.

Lirenda would not stoop to volunteering the Koriani role behind the question he posed by implication.

Lysaer raised his eyebrows in acidic irony. “Weren’t you planning to importune me about hostages? Or does the
Lance
not sail under a barbarian crew, with my sworn company of Etarrans held locked in her hold as their captives?”

“Is that an issue?” For surely he had noticed: the inbound storm stripped the night’s secrets. For minutes on end, Lirenda had marked the ongoing flurry of activity around the hull of the anchored
Lance.
Another bolt of lightning rinsed the ocean dull pewter. From the cliff top, wrapped in the scent of gathering rain, one could make out the busy flotilla of oared boats bearing fugitives off the moored ship. As she watched, the leading party made a sheltered landing in a cove notched into an offshore islet.

“Of course,” Lysaer said, “we came for the view, since the script is too obvious. My men-at-arms and original sailhands are still imprisoned on board the flagship. Since they’d not be left free, the crew in the boats are undoubtedly Arithon’s, leaving. They work for a pirate. What would they expect except shiftless treachery, no matter whose word should be asked as surety for their safety? Dogs forced to skulk know well when to cringe. As my father learned in Amroth, to his everlasting sorrow, there is no dealing with s’Ffalenn hirelings through any honorable exchange.”

Lirenda uncrimped her hands from balled silk, displeased to find herself sweating. “Why make them a display for my benefit, then?”

Lysaer gave her his complacent survey, as if he might memorize the precise pattern of loose hair trailed across her domed forehead, or set a mold to the secretive slant of her eyelids. “For my own men, naturally, there can be no choice. And I asked you here to bear witness.”

Full night had fallen. Beyond the white crash of breakers on the headland, the dark between forks of lightning became a wind-textured veil of black air, pinpricked in distance by the solitary flame of the abandoned flagship’s stern lamp. Lysaer in his doublet of milk satin and worked pearl seemed no ordinary man, but an avatar sent down to earth in a form wrought of silvery light. Lirenda saw him turn from her, his expression resolved into a stern serenity she found terrifying for its perfect absence of uncertainty. Then he raised his right arm.

She foresaw his intent a heartbeat too late.

“Mercy on them, you can’t!” Her cry entangled with a tortured shriek as his raised gift of light slammed land and sky into recoil.

Thunder fit to crack rock shook the ruins. This was no discharge brewed by natural forces and clean storm, but the retort of lethal fury unleashed as an act of vengeful judgment. Heat sheared in backlash. The fresh-whetted tang of ozone rode the air as the bolt arced down to meet the sea and its defenseless target: the fragile, wood-chip frailty of the ship which swung unsuspecting at her anchorage.

Deafened, dazed half-blind, Lirenda reeled backward against crumbled stone. She saw the point of impact as a blooming, orange star. Timbers and furled canvas and cordage ignited, and with them, Tysan’s entrapped subjects exploded amid a horrific maelstrom of fire and debris.

Then all light extinguished. The pealing echoes of spent force quaked the hills and slapped the ground, while the gusts dispersed clotted streamers of flame. Wreckage and cinders settled and snuffed out amid a scrim of storm-racked waves.

The next snap of ordinary lightning unveiled no more than shredded drifts of smoke.

Lirenda clawed back upright. She smoothed the disarranged folds of her mantle, raked back fallen hair, and through flash-burned vision, saw the Prince of the Light turned back once again to face her.

His posture was straight as Daelion’s justice, and his eyes, the unrelenting, fierce blue of zenith sky.

“For mercy,” he said, his gaze locked to hers. “Behold the true cost of your intervention in my plan. Every death upon that vessel must lie on your own conscience, lady.”

When Lirenda tried speech, he cut her off with brute sovereignty. “Far more is at issue than the Shadow Master’s destruction. You will advise your Prime that mankind deserves a future unencumbered by the meddling intervention of factions who manipulate our society with magecraft.”

Lirenda felt steel rise up with her gorge. “Why you arrogant butcher!” Sickened, appalled, she regrouped her shocked nerves. “Is this pique, for balked plans? Some berserk fit of hatred?” Summary justice was a high king’s right, and he, granted less than legal sanction as crown prince. “What have you done here, but show in cold blood you can self-righteously murder the innocent?”

“Yes, but
were
they innocent?” Lysaer’s formal civility clashed at odds with the heat of her roused female outrage. “You alone would know, First Senior.” He took her hand, drew her to the cliff path with such vehemence she nipped her tongue. “Take warning, enchantress, lest your kind cross my wishes again.”

Lirenda resisted his urge to call an end to the audience, even as the force of his close presence tested the depth of her ire. The rocks themselves conspired against planted feet. She stumbled, caught the hem of her mantle beneath her heel. Silk tore like the whisper of screams the wronged dead had been granted no time to utter.

“You have no authority over Koriani affairs,” Lirenda snapped.

“You believe so,” Lysaer corrected, and then qualified with that magisterial arrogance that brought the most obstinate guild ministers to their knees. “One captain, a ship’s crew, and a company of men-at-arms failed in completing my orders. Whether they did so through negligence, or if they were coerced by the power of your Koriani sisterhood
does not matter.
Their fate at my hand became a foregone conclusion on the instant they permitted the
Lance
to change course for a landfall in Havish.”

Another step out of shelter, and the gale winds would tear away words. Lysaer let her pause to lend his conclusion due emphasis. “I can afford no loyal officer to fear others before me. Such a weakness could only open the sworn honesty of innocents to risk. Let your Koriani Order learn well from your mistake. The men in my Alliance will not be allowed to become the ready tools of outside powers.
I will not have them suborned!”

He let her go. The sudden release staggered her backward and bruised her heel against an unkind angle of rock. Men’s lives had been sacrificed, and an insolent ship’s boy, not for their own acts made in guilt or innocence,
but for hers,
as example to an absent Prime Matriarch.

Lirenda pushed straight, shook the chaff of winter-burned moss from her robes, while the rising gale screamed, and lightning jagged like sullen cracks shot through crystal against the blackened horizon. Her eyes caught the glow, lit balefire in reflection, as she dismissed Lysaer’s face and fair person. “No prince, but a manslayer. Tysan’s
clans were well advised by their
caithdein
not to entrust you with kingship.”

His effrontery showed flawless and deferent manners as he clasped her hand to escort her away. “I’m gratified to see my point taken so courteously to heart.”

Lirenda stiffened. She would not ask what measure of justice would befall the Shadow Master’s men, gone to ground as maroons with no shelter beyond the overturned keels of four longboats.

Lysaer widened the breach by telling her in detail. “Traitors and pirates are condemned through fair trial under the written annals of the realm’s law. My governance of men who are not my sworn liegemen is a matter of public record. No harm will befall the fugitives from the
Lance
until they’ve been captured and arraigned by due process.”

Lirenda drew breath to warn him: the renegade crew from the brig yet included the cleverest of Riverton’s turncoat shipwrights. Pure instinct stayed her. She observed the prince with her arts until the false complacency sprang stark to the eye and belied his impartial statement. The line of Lysaer’s mouth was too knowing, too hard. His quiet was not born of calm, but an act to smooth over a keen, introverted calculation.

Lirenda’s trained perceptions pierced that facade and exposed the underlying face of the truth: that for the linked network of Prince Arithon’s supporters, the end would come later, upon the hour of Lysaer’s choosing. Whatever rebellion their actions fomented would first be used to leverage further impetus toward Alliance consolidation of power, and then to extend the quest to wreak the Shadow Master’s downfall into a force of dominion to command every kingdom on the continent.

“You think I don’t mourn for the waste of good lives,” Lysaer said. “I’ve watched as you base your calculations upon the careful begetting of a power base. But your thinking is flawed. You reason without pity Otherwise you must see, I act for this cause
because there is no one else capable.”

Lirenda stopped cold on the path as the impacting power of Lysaer’s sincerity rocked her. Game pieces and conflict acquired new meaning. Now she could not evade the overwhelming recognition of the pain he had managed to hide behind the artful trappings of state dignity.

“The Fellowship of Seven refused the burden,” Lysaer admitted as her gaze returned to reassess every majestic angle of his face. The barest note of leaked bitterness strained through as he dismissed her
from private audience. “Today, to my sorrow, I have found your Koriathain cannot be trusted to act with me for the common good.”

The gale pounded over the Isles of Min Pierens in bands of rampaging winds and white rain squalls. In the cliff caves where the main body of Lysaer’s fighting companies and ships’ officers took refuge, the gusts took voice and fluted in diminished minor tones where the eddies snagged across rock. The caverns had been carved by water and winds, before the mazed array of branching tunnels had been bored by the hot breath of dragons.

Attrition still reigned. Like the fortress above, time crumbled the stoutest stone bastions. Flooding and springs had crystallized limestone into a petrified silt that smoothed over the scored marks of drakes’ claws.

Amid echoed bickering, men vied over the best alcoves to hunker down with their bedding. The convoluted ceiling allowed but one fire, and that was reserved for their prince.

First Senior Lirenda kept to herself. Given a dry cranny, a meal of smoked fish and ship’s rations, and the blankets an officer shared out of courtesy, she observed the royal men-at-arms as they diced or bandied lewd jokes and smart talk; in grumbling, closed groups, they polished the rust the sea air raised on their weapons and mail. One boisterous party chalked out a circle, stripped their shirts, and arranged bouts of wrestling. The enchantress in their midst was ignored. Whether at Lysaer’s order, or through the inherent dread most townborn felt toward spellcraft, every man in the company gave the Koriani First Senior wide berth.

Like any other who had sworn life service to the sisterhood, Lirenda was inured to overt signs of distrust. Long experience let her disregard the unsettled glances, the furtive signs to ward spellcraft cast her way when men believed her attention lay elsewhere.

Not all of the posturing sprang out of ignorance. Lysaer’s ranking officers kept their scrupulous distance as well. The Koriani First Senior was excluded from their council concerning the sprung news that the Spinner of Darkness had slipped through their net. Nor did any man in her hearing mention the summary execution of those comrades just burned alive in the hold of the
Lance.

Whether Lysaer s’Ilessid had given them notice of his justice, or whether they would be left to believe the vessel had been sunk by a stroke of natural lightning, Lirenda was not privileged to know. Reduced to the rankling role of an eavesdropper, she strained to catch
what fragmented conversation she could as a rain-sodden courier came in with word from the fleet snugged down in safe anchorage.

“…galleys are hove up in the coves on the lee side of Caincyr Isle, as planned.” The young man peeled off his dripping oilskin. His rough-cut features and perfect teeth gleamed with avid good spirits, touched to copper relief by the fire. “The convict oarsmen and the other Corith prisoners are held in chains ashore, under close guard by the ships’ crews.”

Lysaer’s reply lost itself in a dissonant screeling of steel as two zealous Etarrans put their shoulders into sharpening halberds. Lirenda caught no more than the clipped inflection of the royal query, implying some detail failed to satisfy. She gathered the gist concerned the prize
Cariadwin,
surrendered to the Alliance, but having no loyal crew of her own.

“The brig’s keel drew too much water,” the courier explained, shoulders squared and voice risen in loyalty to the royal fleet’s commanding admiral. “Daelion preserve! My Lord said to tell you her blue-water captain has a temperament like a spring nettle. As he was the Shadow Master’s minion, he won’t cooperate, and our galleymen get twitchy under sail in strange waters. Would your Grace risk men’s lives? The shoals in those inlets shift with each tide. The rutter we’re using with a gale at our backs is six centuries old, and written in archaic language!”

A pause, while someone with seagoing experience injected a quelling comment; then laughter, cut by Lysaer’s stark inquiry, “Well, if the
Cariadwin’s
not in the coves with the galleys, where in the Light did your officers decide to snug her down?”

“At anchor, your Grace. She’s secured in the narrows of the cut.”

Silence, of yawning and disastrous proportion; the spirited factions by the wrestlers stilled. Men honing weapons were asked to desist. Even the rowdiest dicers held their next throws, heads turned to follow the rising altercation.