The Curse of the Mistwraith (42 page)

Lysaer huddled between the slow drip of a natural spring and a falling spray of run-off, shirtless, his cloak tossed across his shoulders. With a needle and thread borrowed from the supply-pack, he was immersed in determined effort to mend a tear where a briar had torn his sleeve. Attendant on his progress was the Mad Prophet, in rare high humour at the prospect of a meal of fresh meat.

‘You’re making that thing into ruffles better suited to a tavern doxie,’ Dakar said in unasked-for criticism.

Embarrassed by his ineptness when he had been surrounded by women at their embroidery all his life, Lysaer managed a laugh. ‘If the ruffles keep out the cold, I don’t care.’

Dakar sampled the contents of his supper pot, licked the spoon, and resumed stirring. ‘Don’t jerk the stitches so tight. Everybody knows you’re irritated.’

At a loss for subtle rejoinder, Lysaer welcomed the intrusion when Arithon stirred from the shadows and insinuated himself in the fray.

‘Don’t gloat,’ the Master advised the Mad Prophet. ‘Princes don’t freely choose to keep their clothes until they rot in rags off their backs.’

Laid open to insult by his threadbare and weather-faded plaid, Dakar subsided to a glower. To his half-brother, Arithon added, ‘If you don’t mind wearing what looks like a sail-maker’s patch, there’s a better way to fix that.’

Lysaer surrendered needle and linen with a gratitude that unfailingly melted hearts. ‘These clothes would hardly impress anyone before they were torn.’ To Dakar he added quietly, ‘The s’Ffalenn bastard’s made a fool of you again. You promised a scathing show of temper after Althain Tower. Now I’m left to wonder which of you is the more devious: Arithon, for an act that would fool a saint, or you, for a lying diversion to escape getting dressed down for rudeness.’

Dakar’s ebullience died. Rather than admit to his own bafflement at Arithon’s contrary manner, he hunkered down by his cooking-pot like a disgruntled broody hen. ‘Wait,’ he muttered morosely to the fair-haired and smiling prince. ‘Just wait till we get to Ithamon.’

After five days’ journey the hills of Daon Ramon lost their rocky crowns and became clothed and gentled by heather. Valleys that until now had been channelled with dried gullies and stunted stands of scrub-oak smoothed over into vales half hidden in fog. If the view had once been beautiful, Desh-thiere rendered everything bleak; the winds that never stilled gained the bitten edge of frost. For league upon league there seemed no living thing but grey-coated deer, rabbits furred in winter-white and the lonely, dissonant calls of hawks that sailed like shadows through the mist in search of prey.

The horses grew lean and tough, nourished more by the grain carried in by wagon than on the rank brown grass. Lysaer wearied of venison but was careful to keep the fact from his half-brother, who spent as many hours hunting as playing upon his lyranthe. As always fed up with abstinence, Dakar seized upon every opening to bemoan the dearth of beer.

Asandir kept his own counsel, forbidding as northfacing rock.

The closer the party drew to the heartland of Daon Ramon, the less the sorcerer bothered to chastise his spellbinder for whining. Well warned that such silence boded trouble, Lysaer noticed the moment when the Mad Prophet abandoned complaint. More sensitive than before to nuance, he watched for any circumstance that might find the Shadow Master discomfited.

But snow fell and the days passed in anticlimax. Arithon did not oblige Dakar’s expectations and grow darkly moody. He asked companionable questions of Asandir and spent hours regarding ice-scabbed trees, stunted brush and the white-clothed shoulders of the hills as though his mage-trained sight showed him wonders.

‘The Riathan Paravians,’ Dakar whispered, upon Lysaer’s puzzled inquiry. ‘Unicorns ran in these hills and bore young in the meadows here. The mystery of their presence lingers, even now.’

Wide-eyed, sceptical, Lysaer peered through dripping bangs. An unseasonal thaw had softened the trail to muck, and slush seeped rivulets of wet down slopes like rucked old burlap. As far as the mist would allow, nothing met his gaze but bleak landscape that lacked the redeeming comfort of a single man-made structure.

Perched on the dray’s hard buckboard, Dakar slapped the reins over the paint’s steaming back and jogged her abreast of the chestnut gelding. Swaddled like a vegetable in wet cloaks, a derisive grin splitting his beard, he called over the rumble of rolling wheels, ‘Don’t try to look with your eyes – use your feelings.’

‘To find what?’ Lysaer shrugged to vent frustration. ‘Every morning I wake up as though eyes are on my back, watching me, and each night I step away from the campfire, I get chills that have nothing to do with the cold. This place is unpleasantly deserted, as far as I can tell.’

‘That’s the point.’ Dakar puffed up his cheeks and looked smug. ‘Asandir and Arithon might appreciate what’s missing from this Ath-forsaken wasteland, but I suspect like me you’d rather be in a crowded tavern knocking back mugs of spiced ale.’

Although Lysaer did not precisely share Dakar’s sentiment, he would have welcomed any human presence to allay the aching, hollow
something
that tugged at his nerves like pain. At each bend in the road, behind every storm-stunted bush, he seemed to see the lady he was to have married, her eyes liquid with tears, and her hands held out in entreaty. He remembered how her auburn hair had blown in the sea-breeze off South Isle and echoes of her lost laughter ached his heart. No noble dedication to purpose could ease his longing for home in this wilderness. His suffering stayed silent out of pride; and until the Mad Prophet had spoken, he had not guessed that his depression might arise from a source outside himself.

At noon riders and wagon paused for a cold meal beside a spring whose waters rose bubbling through a cleft in milk quartz rocks. Snow rendered the site grey on white, slashed by the arched-over stems of dead briars.

Sent down to the pebbled edge of the pool to refill water flasks, Arithon returned whitely shaken. ‘You might have warned me,’ he lashed at Asandir in tones dragged flat by upset.

The sorcerer did not answer but accepted the dripping flasks to stow back into the wagon. Then he turned eyes as chilly as the weather upon the s’Ilessid prince who watched the exchange. ‘A centaur was beset during the rebellion and pulled down here. Moss does not grow where his blood spilled. The sunchildren sang a lament to commemorate his passage and the words and the melody still ring upon the wind, to any with sensitivity enough to listen.’

Stung by what felt like rebuke, Lysaer straightened in affront, then doubled over with a gasp, robbed of his royal dignity by an elbow in the ribs from the Mad Prophet. Finished graining the horses, Dakar thrust himself headlong between sorcerer and s’Ilessid with oat chaff bristling from his hood.

‘What was that for?’ Lysaer demanded, outraged.

‘To quiet your foolish tongue, prince.’ As Asandir turned away about his business the Mad Prophet winked sidelong in conspiracy. ‘For a sorcerer this place is hurtful to walk past, let alone stop and linger.’

‘That Fellowship mage has feelings?’ Lysaer shot back, his eyes following Asandir’s hands as they laced and jerked tight the lashings that secured the oiled canvas over the supplies in the wagon bed.

Dakar picked a seed-head from his sleeve and looked thoughtful. ‘My ever-so-powerful master is doing his best at this moment to keep from weeping outright.’

‘You say.’ A billow of mist rolled past, rendering horses, men and dray as featureless as silhouette. Lysaer raised his eyebrows.

‘Well,’ the Mad Prophet amended. ‘I’ve lived with Asandir for centuries, my friend. I know this place bothers him, and I’d wager one thing further. He stopped here on purpose, to use its effect as a weapon. If you think I’m lying,
look at your half-brother.
’

The prince forgot pique and did so.

Still dead pale, his eyebrows snarled into a frown, Arithon had remounted his dun mare. He hunched against the wind as if he were wounded and bleeding and tears traced silver down his face.

Embarrassed as if caught eavesdropping, Lysaer spun back to face Dakar. ‘Why don’t you feel anything? Why don’t I?’

The Mad Prophet clawed back an untidy lock of hair. Cold had reddened the tip of his nose and his eyes looked unwarrantedly bloodshot; yet a dignified majesty cloaked him all the same as he said, ‘Do you want to?’

The question hit hard. Driven to see into himself with uncanny depth and clarity, struck naked before his own judgement, Lysaer perceived that the confusion that had harried him since exile held a core of ugly truth. No longer did the glamour of noble purpose veil fact: that his brave resolve to Traithe in Althain’s storeroom had been rooted in vanity and pride. He had renounced a difficult path of study and vowed instead to redress the wrongs of a kingdom for his own personal glory. As though revolted by a foul taste, Lysaer sucked in a fast breath. He could hope his self-disgust was not exposed on his face, but Dakar regarded him strangely.

‘
Do
you feel nothing?’ The Mad Prophet slapped the straw from his cloak with sudden, biting sharpness. ‘I’d venture not. I’d say this place moves you as deeply as the rest of us.’

Lysaer looked back, unflinching. However this spirit-cursed place afflicted others, his ingrained sense of fairness forced honesty. ‘My true heart stayed behind in Port Royal, I see, with my love, and my family, and my people. If that is a failing, it’s at least no more than human. The problems that beset this land are not mine. Yet I will do my best to help right them.’

The prince’s conviction was so far at odds with the future forecast by the strands that Dakar shied back, baffled. To cover his foreboding, he clambered back behind the dray’s buckboard and sorted his tangled loops of rein. ‘Ath in his mercy, but I could use a flagon of dark beer and a fire.’

‘That makes two of us, friend.’ Lysaer remounted his chestnut gelding, unsure whether the lingering traces of Paravian tragedy or the unendingly dreary landscape caused him to hurt as if the chill cut his flesh to the marrow.

At Asandir’s word, wagon and riders pressed onward through an afternoon that wept cold drizzle. Now the trail wound like tattered ribbon between Daon Ramon’s vales and downs, intermittently flanked by stone markers capped with lichens and moss. No trees grew, only bracken and tasselled grasses beaten down by wind and early storms. Dirtied ice lay scabbed in the hollows. Braced in his saddle against the cold, and resigned to yet another sleepless night on soaked ground, Lysaer did not realize their destination lay in sight until, rounding the crest of a hill, Arithon gasped and yanked his dun mare to a halt in the roadway.

She danced a piaffe at his roughness, her hooves clanging loudly on slate. Jostled in his saddle as his own mount bunched in reaction, Lysaer looked ahead.

Looming in eerie outline through the mantling mist rose Ithamon, city of legend and seat of the high kings of Rathain.

The sight was one to stop the breath, even through the fog of Desh-thiere. No previous feature of landscape could prepare the traveller for the broad sweep of valley, slashed across by a rock-strewn scar of dry riverbed. At one time walls of rose-grey stone had arisen from the banks, but what remained lay torn to wreckage.

Landslides left less ruin.

The greensward beyond was overrun with briar, what had been orchards, gardens and tourney fields now choked by weed and bitter-root vine. A second wall had bounded the inner edge of the common. Embraced within gapped, half-gutted watchkeeps, the tumbled shells of townhouses clung to the hillside’s ever steepening pitch. Dismembered foundations marked off a tangle of narrow lanes and briar-ridden courtyards. As if a mighty army had once razed the buildings stone from stone with battering rams, the craftsmen’s cottages, market stalls and merchants’ mansions all lay jumbled in chaos. Gabled roofs had caved inward, beams rotted away in the sunless damp of Desh-thiere. A scatter of fallen slates in what may have been a market court reflected the rain like coins thrown out for a beggar.

The devastation of the lower tiers was total, a memorial to unbridled violence. Yet as if moved by some powerful unseen force, the viewer found his sight drawn upward, where, slightly north of centre, the native granite of the earth sheered up through soil and rock into a near-vertical outcrop. The triangular summit on the clifftop was encased by embrasures of seamless, blue-black granite. Inside, an unkempt eyrie of broken walls and spires marked the site of the inner citadel, the castle where generations of Paravians, and after them, the s’Ffalenn high kings, had held court.

There the eye hung captive, unable to draw away.

Amid that graveyard of ravaged splendour, of artistry spoiled by war in a cataclysmic expression of hatred, arose four single towers, each as different from the other as sculpture by separate masters. They speared upward through the mist, tall, straight, perfect. The incongruity of their wholeness against the surrounding wreckage was a dichotomy fit to maim the soul: for their lines were harmony distilled into form, and strength beyond reach of time’s attrition.

The rain still fell relentlessly into soggy earth; the wind keened and stung like a dulled skive in a cobbler’s shop. No one noticed. Even the horses seemed strangely content to be stopped in their tracks in the roadway. The sordid, everyday miseries of winter and weather lost meaning. Into that suspended silence, Asandir began to speak.

‘Ithamon was raised by Paravians in the First Age of Athera. The outer walls were levelled twice, by Seardluin, hostile creatures native to this world that by the Second Age had been battled to extinction. The old races abandoned the city then, for its purpose as a fortress had been fulfilled. The lower tiers stayed in ruins until the dawn of the present age, when men rebuilt the double walls upon the remains. The third tier wall left standing and the four surviving keeps were part of the original city. Built by the centaurs, refined by sunchildren, they were Name-bound and warded by the unicorns.’

‘Don’t say any more!’ Arithon cut across, his bard’s voice queerly strangled. ‘I beg you, don’t!’ Bloodlessly pale, his hands clenched and shaking on the rein, he sat his mare and regarded the site where his ancestors had ruled as if he were held chained and in thrall. ‘Please,’ he finished in a whisper.