Fugitive Prince (70 page)

Already in dread of the consequences, he sat back on his haunches,
blinking. Birdsong laced the treetops. A dragonfly lit on his forearm, unfazed by the stink of singed wool and the holes where volcanic cinders had burned through the weave of his jerkin. Dimly he realized that he wore the wrong clothes for the season. The steady, rich warmth of high summer laced sweat through his cold chills, while the rattled clan sentry slammed out of the brush and repeated his challenge again.

Eyes shut, Dakar rediscovered the function of language. “Where in the name of Sithaer’s furies are we?”

Clipped accents changed from belligerent surprise to indignant complaint. “Ath! Is that Dakar? You’re in Caithwood, as if dropped through the sky by a lightning bolt. If you planned to whisk Rathain’s prince out of Riverton by means of magecraft and thunderclaps, did you need to keep him stashed for
three months?
Earl Jieret half killed himself in a cross-country run through Havish. Then the Sorcerer Traithe came, and both of
them
vanished also. The comings and goings have been fair hard on the nerves, these past weeks.” The scout paused as he took in the sorry condition of the bay gelding, then accused, “We’ve worn out a dozen couriers trying to find all the folks who’ve gone missing, in particular since the crew of the
Lance
left us some liegeman’s ashes to be given the grace of last rites.”

“The
Lance?
Brought
Caolle’s
ashes?” Dakar raised his head and cracked open bloodshot eyes to find three muzzled horses with cinders in their manes regarding him in mournful reproach. “Then he didn’t die in Koriani hands at Riverton?”

“Aye, well, she did, and damn well, he didn’t.” The scout was a young man with frizzled brown hair, and foxy, irrepressible good humor. He peered over the hindquarters of Felirin’s gray. His plain leathers were soaked through, though the sky showed no rain in evidence.

“You’re wet,” Dakar blurted.

“Aye, well.” The scout swiped runoff from the fringes of his buckskins. “I fell arse first into the stream when your ruckus erupted from nowhere.” He blushed, still disgusted enough to try and excuse his bruised dignity. “Who wouldn’t? An arrival like yours was damnwell nothing canny. The game will be scattered for miles.”

To Dakar’s stiff and forbearing patience, he laughed. “You’re behind on events?”

The Mad Prophet scrubbed at his face with his knuckles as if a smith had forged spikes through his temples. “Last memory I have, it was springtime.”

The scout squeezed his wet braid, wrung out his cuffs, and plunged
in with loquacious relish. “Lysaer’s new flagship made landfall here, but flying Rathain’s royal leopard. Came in last month with word that Caolle had killed a Koriani witch before he found grace and passed the Wheel. There’s a feat by a clansman worth a masterbard’s eulogy!”

Dakar planted his palms into grass in determined effort to ground out his giddy rise of dizziness.

The scout rattled on in excited adulation. “What a fighter, was Caolle! His pyre was laid out with full honors. The raid plans he left when he gave his last wishes won two other vessels for Prince Arithon. Then the
Lance
took on mercenaries and set sail for Corith. They say she burned there, but not before her crew had freed every clansman that Lysaer’s royal fleet held in chains. Under cover of a gale, they stole back the
Cariadwin
and left Avenor’s force stranded with holed galleys. Near two hundred clansmen sailed home to their families, and we’ve had to feed a whole pack of refugee shipwrights. They have nothing to do, but they say they won’t leave until they find out if the Master of Shadow will return with plans to employ them. Where is Rathain’s prince, anyhow?”

“I’m sorry,” Dakar said. “We’ve missed all the news.” Then feeling overcame him. He ducked his head between his knees, caught between bursting laughter and tears, and a rush of overpowering relief.
Caolle had not died by Arithon’s hand after all. Nor had the men at the outpost at Corith been abandoned wholesale to the Alliance. The joy seemed unreal, that the Riverton ships were reclaimed to fight the oppression of Maenol’s clans.
Life and breath suddenly became unimaginably precious. A friend could dare to hope for the reprieve those snatched victories might bring to the Teir’s’Ffalenn.

Hunched and dripping and loquaciously oblivious, the young clansman circled the nose of the gray and poked an inquisitive finger into what seemed a wadded lump of charred rags draped over the animal’s neck. The bundle shifted to expose the marble features of Felirin the Scarlet.

“What trouble did you bring us? You know this one’s out cold?” Reverted on a breath to forest-bred wariness, the scout took fast stock of the second form tied to the back of the mare. “Is the other one brought for last passage rites, also?”

“You’d better hope not!” Dakar snapped, recovered enough to scramble erect. “That’s his Grace of Rathain, and if he’s not tended, I’ll let your
caithdein
apologize to Earl Jieret for your mannerless lapse of hospitality.”

The scout raised his eyebrows, prepared to repeat his glib testimony that Earl Jieret had disappeared, leaving no tracks.

His words were lost to sound as a stupendous thunderclap rocked sky and earth into recoil. The horses startled. Dakar was thrown to his knees with the lead reins clutched in blistered hands. He yelled warning to the scout, who moved just in time to catch Felirin’s unconscious tumble from the saddle.

“Ath’s very grace!” The scout staggered under the minstrel’s slack weight, caught in a misstep as his sword scabbard swung and hooked the back of his knees. “Why’d you
do
that?”

“I didn’t.” Dakar barely managed to calm the stressed horses before their deranged instincts shredded the last patch of whole skin on his fingers. “You can lay the singer down in the grass before you trip and fall flat.”

The scout looked offended. “Is he sick?”

“I don’t think so. He probably fainted.” The Mad Prophet had no chance to see whether Arithon suffered the same problem.

The next second, a bursting flash of light erupted from behind the trees. Dakar howled as the horses shied all over again. A deafening report shivered the ground, but this time he managed to tag the signature phrase of the spellcraft. “That’s a Fellowship ward circle coming down!” he cried, before the scout lost his last wits and bolted. “Hold steady.”

A confused, milling moment, while Dakar tugged the bridle of the mare and shouldered the bay gelding from trampling his toes into stew meat. “Steady.” His assurance lacked confidence. Whatever protective binding the Sorcerer had raised was being released in blind haste. The pungency of ozone raked through the sweet scent of the meadow and a razing spin of energies puckered his mage-sense as a slipstream in time intercepted with the present, and shook like a wind through the leaves.

The horses milled in terror, despite every effort to stay them.

Then the problem was lifted from Dakar’s stripped hands as a black raven swooped down. White light trailed from its wingtips, combing disturbed energies back into alignment under the remote guidance from Sethvir’s earth-sense. The horses snorted and settled, while the wild gusts slackened, reduced to small eddies that winnowed and spiraled through the grass heads.

“Traithe?” Dakar said. Pelted by grasshoppers and the odd butterfly released from the dissipated vortex, he surveyed the wood. Presently, a familiar figure in dark clothing and a broad-brimmed black hat emerged, limping from the shadow.

At the Sorcerer’s shoulder strode another, his large hands clenched to an unbelted bundle of weapons, among them a matched set of
bone-handled throwing knives. Dakar took in the tall frame and wolfish stride with a leap of glad recognition. “Earl Jieret s’Valerient!”

The
caithdein
of Rathain looked like a man just shaken from sleep. His clan braid was undone. The mane of red hair fanned over his strong shoulders was caught with odd tangles and small twigs. A bandage covered his right wrist. His windburned, cragged face and hawk nose wore a blank frown, and he failed to acknowledge Dakar’s greeting.

Traithe touched his wrist, directing his bemused attention to the cluster of horses in the glen. “Look there. You’ve succeeded.”

Jieret turned his head. As if drawn by a magnet, his eyes fixed and locked on the figure of his prince, still tied over the neck of the exhausted mare. His disoriented bearing transformed on a cry of alarm. “My liege!”

He cast down his weapons, uncaring, and sprinted, too centered to respond to Dakar’s reassurance that Arithon s’Ffalenn still breathed.

“He won’t for much longer if you don’t lend your help,” Traithe said, arrived in uncanny quiet to clasp the spellbinder’s elbow. “We need a fire. At once. Can you see to it?”

Dakar knew enough not to delay for questions. He surrendered the reins of the horses to Traithe, who turned his scarred fingers to unbuckling girths and bridles. He heaved off the bay’s saddle and addressed the stupefied scout, “Explanations can wait. If you have provisions, stew and a blanket would be helpful.”

“I have only jerky.” Aroused to the crisis, the clansman snapped to and stepped in to assist stripping tack. “There’s a buried cache in the glen with a cooking pot, but no meal. We always forage at this season.”

“Then go hunting, please, once these horses are turned loose. As I know Sethvir, you’ll find a deer waiting if you allow my raven to lead you.”

Traithe accepted a headstall from the scout’s hand, then slapped the bay’s rump with the gentle admonishment, “Go roll, brave heart. Eat grass and find water and rest.”

Once assured the animals would be competently handled, Traithe strode through the grass and knelt by Felirin’s prone form. He ran swift hands over the minstrel’s body, while the raven flew circles over his hat, a slice of cut nightfall set intaglio into the hazed summer brilliance of sunlight.

“How bad is he?” Dakar asked, returned strewn with leaves and an armload of dead oak branches clutched to his chest. His plump hands left sweated prints as he shifted his hold to contain the unruly, loose wood.

“Nervous exhaustion.” Traithe moved tacit fingers above Felirin’s scorched tunic, touching unseen points in the air. A spark jumped from his fingers each time he paused. The raised power diffused into a bloom of faint light, which misted downward into the free singer’s aura, then sank and absorbed through the cloth into flesh.

“Sound sleep will set him right.” Traithe’s ministrations moved down the right arm. There, he held still, with the singer’s limp wrist clasped left-handed, as his right trailed over the grimed rags that covered the burns. “His hands are another matter,” he concluded sadly. “The fire left damage.”

“He already knows he’s lost his fingertips.” Dakar thumped the wood at his feet, too nettled to wrestle the earth’s gravity. “He’s said he can turn his bard’s talent to storytelling. Asandir suggested he’d find a warm welcome at Innish.”

Neither spellbinder nor Sorcerer belabored the tragedy, that if Traithe’s faculties were still whole, or if this crisis had been met by any other member of the Fellowship, Felirin’s disfigurement might be ameliorated.

After all that had happened, the frustration flared too hot to contain. Dakar bent and began snapping dead sticks into kindling, determined to offer what sympathy he might. “Truth lies with the fact we stand here together. Don’t count the small losses. Without your assistance, none of us would have wakened to see air and sunlight, nor walked on Athera’s soil again.”

A shadow flicked over Traithe, cast by Jieret Red-beard, who approached with the slack form of Arithon s’Ffalenn cradled like a child in his arms. “He’s cold as death and scarcely breathing.”

“I don’t wonder.” Traithe’s lined face tipped up, drawn with concern. “Lay him down in the sun and get him stripped to his skin. We’ll need his clothes. Also every cloak you can find in the saddle packs.”

The Mad Prophet stood, stricken. His glance flickered quickly past Arithon’s slack face, then flinched from the pale, lifeless hands that dangled, grooved on the backs from the prints of the hobbles, which for expedience had secured him to his horse. The normally scintillant aura of the Masterbard seemed dimmed and gray to his mage-sense.

Alarmed by the rapid ebb of a life that could not at any cost be replaced, Traithe turned brusque. “Dakar! If you’re planning to grow roots with that bundle of wood, the fire’s more important. We’ll also need a pit dug in the open.”

The rumpled, fat spellbinder wasted no argument. “You’ll use hot rocks?”

Traithe’s smile came out like the sun, rekindling the lost lines of humor that ran in starbursts from the corners of his eyes. “Yes. Choose willing ones so they don’t shatter. There’s a creek bed ten paces inside the trees. And find six straight saplings that are willing to make sacrifice.”

Dakar moved off, intent, to reaccess the rusty tenets of his training. Caithwood was sealed under Paravian law, which demanded strict form and fine harmony with the earth, no live wood taken without proper blessing and a clear gift of permission. “Fiends plague,” he muttered, still fighting a thick head. “We haven’t come back just to lose Rathain’s prince for want of a sweet-tempered tree!”

“Just use plain language and say whose life’s at stake,” Traithe suggested. “Without Arithon s’Ffalenn, the Alliance will triumph. Clan bloodlines will die, and every green thing in this forest is well aware no centaur guardians will return if Desh-thiere survives and claims final conquest.”

The clan scout dragged the cleaned carcass of a buck into the glen an hour later. As he broke through trees, the pleased whistle carried over from his successful hunt died into openmouthed silence.

Miracles had happened in his absence. At the center of the clearing, on a bent framework of willow poles, Dakar finished tying the drover’s cloak and the gaudy layers of the free singer’s court doublets into a shaded enclosure. Traithe stooped by the entrance, bearing a long-handled stick. The fork at the end cradled a stone from the riverbed, baked red by fire, and crackling to the caress of the breeze which kissed its glowing surface.