The Curse of the Mistwraith (70 page)

The contempt the boys copied from their elders, that Rathain’s royal scion was weak, or maybe helpless, was a trait it might suit him to foster, Arithon thought. The frustration he had leashed behind forced and mild courtesy perhaps was a perverse sort of kindness. Nights and days in the saddle had worn his body; in spirit, the wrenching realignment that had taken place in the course of Desh-thiere’s curse lay compounded by reckless overuse of spellcraft. Resisting the creeping and insidious urge to turn back to Etarra and attack Lysaer claimed further toll upon his strength. His depleted grip on self-command made mastery of the herb’s ill effects too risky to try until he rested: in the throes of the poison’s withdrawal symptoms Arithon knew he would be lucky to be able to walk.

Better if these clansmen believed him overbred to the point of uselessness. Once they had repulsed Etarra’s invasion, his shadows and his aid would not be needed. Their disdain might drive them finally to release him from the blood bonds of Rathain’s sovereignty.

Charged with perverse and bitter humour, Arithon left the canister’s deadly contents for later. He retrod his course through the wheeling pine-sparrows to Lady Dania, where, seemingly overcome by her distressed protestations, he allowed himself to be talked out of his earlier insistence that he help with a share of the packing.

In the course of the next four days, Arithon let slip the stern barriers imposed by a lifetime of mage training. For his puzzles and his oddments of sleight-of-hand illusion, he won the undying adulation of Dania’s daughters, who had never known a grown man to play games with them. The clan boys stayed aloof, until he captivated the smallest with a whistle carved of beechwood and given voice with shaved shims of river reed. After that, Arithon spent every waking hour the domestic camp was not moving on the trail seated by someone’s fireside, whittling.

For a morning, their going was made raucous by the young, hooting on their new toys. They laughed at their daring, to be making noises unnatural to the wakened wood; but the whistles were confiscated, and Arithon was chastised by a weatherbeaten woman who would have borne arms alongside the fighting men, had she not been near-term with a pregnancy. ‘You’ll have headhunters on us with your addle-headed ways. Our boys are needing no such silly influence!’

Arithon regarded her with green-eyed, languid resignation, and murmured soft apology. The woman left in disgust.

‘Royal he may be, but what use have the clans for a dreamer!’ he heard her exhorting some others, in a rest-stop farther down the trail.

He let the comment pass, though heads turned to see whether he had overheard, and what would be his reaction. He gave them back his closed eyes, and crossed hands behind his head, to all appearance asleep with his back against a tree so rough that the bark had turned silver with dried moss.

The whistles had drawn no headhunters, because he had set arcane defences against any outside seeker who should chance to track their company. The entrapments were subtle, a fooling of the eye to make sight linger on the flick of a leaf in the breeze, or deflect thought into futile reflection to read meaning in some willow’s gnarled roots.

Dania had to shake him out of trance, when the time came to move on.

During nights by the fireside, with one or another of Dania’s daughters fallen asleep across his lap, Arithon immersed himself in Halliron’s music. The M’asterbard had an exquisite, expressive style upon the strings, and he did not shy from imparting passionate emotion into his playing. The lyranthe he carried was ancient and ornate in a sparely elegant way. Her voice was so like the one that Arithon had been forced to abandon at Etarra that she, too, might have been crafted by a Paravian maker. Arithon dared not touch her fretboard to look for Elshian’s rune. The feel of polished wood, of responsive, silver-toned strings, would have overcome his defences like drugged wine. The hope could hurt too much, that the chance of reprieve from kingship seemed a scant step closer.

Those evenings by the fireside, Halliron’s ballads wove their mystery as though just for him. He chuckled at their merriness and let the tears track unabashed down his face. The whispers this created suited his purpose. By daylight, while he walked abandoned to reverie down the trail, he replayed in his mind Halliron’s polished arpeggios, his trills of ornamentation, the clean, meticulous cadences whose simplicity shaped naked force. At such times, when the stares of Deshir clanswomen turned aside in disgust, he would draw the eyes of the bard.

Halliron had depths of subtlety well disguised by his congenial nature. Since the oddity intrigued him, that the prince so taken with his music had never sought closer acquaintance, he took pains to hide his interest.

The domestic camp moved by night and rested only after full daybreak. On the morn they were to reach their destination, the mists of early dawn ripped and dispersed into tatters, cut by slanted shafts of white sunlight. The birds were loud at their nesting calls. Like strands of silvered silk wound through its green forest tapestry, the river Tal Quorin re-emerged in a bend to flow once again beside the trail. The thin, acid soil of the heights gave up its black mantle of pines. The fertile trough of the watershed here lay broken into long, irregular valleys. Winding through hollows and glens, the river current lisped over glacial deposits of smoothed granite, and skeined eddies around willow roots like the knobbled knees of old men. The demise of Desh-thiere had brought change. Little plants pressed up through moss and pine-needles, and opened coloured petals for the first time in five centuries untrammelled by the sooty prints of fungal spores.

Steiven’s daughters clung to Arithon like shadows as together they enjoyed discovery of each new bud and petal; where the wild flowers matched those he remembered from Rauven’s deep woodland glens, he gave their names. Where they did not, he knelt, the sun warm across his back, and shared wonders otherworldly and strange in drifts of dew-drenched leaf mould.

His absorption was not so complete that he overlooked the faint, sour ring of steel that threaded through the trilled cries and fast-beating wings of disturbed marsh flickers. Halliron’s fascination had not stopped at appearances, for all that the camp women had already dismissed their prince as a fanciful dreamer. Only the bard remained observant enough to spot the brief frisson that shocked through the prince’s bearing.

Puzzled, Halliron tossed damp hair from his temples the better to watch as Arithon straightened up from contemplation. Swift words from him and the children ranged eagerly ahead to scout their next find on their own. Arithon hung behind, a shadow in dark leathers under the light-flecked boughs of a hazel thicket.

From the crest of an unseen hillside, the axe blows reached ragged crescendo. The tree bole under punishment gave a juddering crack and fell to earth in a whipping tangle of greenery that hissed like a rip through warm air. Arithon recoiled. He turned as if jabbed by sharp pain and his eyes passed unseeing across the bard, standing not twenty feet behind, with the forest shade hatching his elegant court velvets that stood out too plainly to be missed.

Another tree cracked and fell. Exposed full face to an observation he would have avoided, Arithon paled in the grip of some deep, introspective discomfort.

And Halliron caught his breath in comprehension. Acquainted with the Warden of Althain, befriended by Asandir, he saw into this prince and recognized like a watermark in fine paper the stamp of a mage-trained awareness.

Arithon’s interest in trailside wildflowers had been a ruse to mask attention linked to the deeper mysteries of the forest. Caught as he was in partial trance, the axe-cut, dying trees sent a scream of pain across his nerves. An unprepared part of him
was
bark and leaves and running spring sap, slashed untimely from its taproot by blows from sharpened steel. The shock momentarily upset his mastery. He struggled, stumbling slightly, to tear his stung consciousness free.

Pushed by reflex before thought, Halliron hastened forward and caught the prince by an elbow to support his unsteady step.

The touch caused Arithon to snap stiff. His head came up, around, and in green eyes the Masterbard caught a flare that looked like smothered anger. The impression was false. Halliron saw past hostility to what perhaps was an envy sprung from offence; indisputably the resentment was directed fully and personally toward him.

Halliron’s startlement caused him to let go, simultaneous with Arithon’s instinctive jerk backward, with the result that sensitive musician’s fingers recorded an instant impression. The forearm under its covering of water-spoiled silk was wiry and fit, not at all the constitution of the fine-drawn dandy the prince purported to affect.

Arithon spun away to hide an expression Halliron would have bribed in gold to have read. Between the two men lay a silence heavy with secrets, and as if their burden were at once too much, the prince abruptly sat down. He fingered the edge of a rock hoarded like some hoary, moss-crusted jewel between the miserly grip of old roots. ‘I’m sorry.’ His apology was too quick and cold. ‘I believed I was alone.’

Halliron absorbed this display with narrowed, tawny eyes. He observed on intuition, ‘You had wards set, and not just to hide the notes of whistles.’

‘If so, that’s no business of yours.’ Arithon let his knuckles fall loose in dry grass, left wind-broken from winter’s snowfall like the bundled small bones of dead birds. He had regained control. At least, he no longer shivered as the axe-falls rang. Only the earth seemed to shudder in vibration as each quick trunk slammed the ground.

After a moment, the bard said, ‘If you want Deshir’s clans to disown you, desert them.’

That touched a nerve. Arithon’s smile at the barb was full lipped, and brimmingly, off-puttingly merry. ‘Desert me, instead. Your perceptions feel like a tinker’s spilled needles: a punishing trap for false steps.’

Halliron was not easily irritated. Years of settling vain, even senile patrons and short-tempered, envious peers had taught him to treat with human nature sparely, to unwind misunderstanding like a snarl in fine-spun wool. Intrigued by Arithon’s reticence, he gave no ground, even as Arithon pressed to escape and regain untrammelled access to the trail.

There was no gap. Halliron had him boxed between a stand of dense brush and the seamed, ungiving face of another rock.

Spoiled as his behaviour suggested, the Teir’s’Ffalenn did not have the nerve or the anger in him to shoulder an old man aside to have his way.

‘I could ask,’ Halliron said in the Shandian drawl that seeped back occasionally from his boyhood, ‘why, when you first met me, did you react as if I were a threat to you?’

‘Because,’ Arithon began, and on impulse, switched liquidly to the Paravian. ‘
Cuel ean i murdain ei dath-tol na soaren’;
which translated, ‘you are the enemy I never expected to meet’.

His accent was flawless. And the coiled hardness in him this time would not be denied. Halliron moved aside before he was indeed physically shoved.

Undeceived by the show for a moment, the Masterbard watched the scion of Rathain’s murdered high kings stride away. The man was not angry. However desperately he wished to foster that impression, to a bard’s ear for nuance, it was obvious that Arithon was unbearably distressed.

Halliron resumed his walk in pensive thought. For some pernicious reason he felt guilty for even this slight an intrusion into the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s altogether raptly-guarded privacy. If anything left the bard irked, it was his suspicion that Steiven’s daughters were entrusted with an honesty nobody else in the camp seemed to merit.

The clans of Deshir were altering the landscape in the valleys to either side of the Tal Quorin’s watercourse. The woods rang with the noise of their feverish haste, of axes and falling timber and the grinding over stones of makeshift sledges. A party of raiders had stolen draught teams. The chink of chain and harness fittings blended with drovers’ calls. Even Halliron’s pony was pressed into service, hauling hampers of cut brush.

Upon arrival, the women left tents and belongings still furled in their packs in a clearing. Every free hand was set to work, while the children and the elderly were sent out to forage or dress the game sent in by the hunting parties who ranged the glades further afield. The racket had scattered the deer, the birds, and even the beavers were driven into hiding by rafts of cut logs sent downstream.

Lord Steiven was south, below the white-water rapids where the river fanned into sheets of open water between grassy green swards of marsh. There he oversaw the remaking of innocent landscape into traps to mire Etarra’s army. Arithon did not join him. Neither did he lend his strength to the shifting of logs and stones. Conspicuous for his idleness, for even the Masterbard had volunteered to help the cooks, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn sat in the shade through the morning, apparently taking a nap. Nobody saw him move, nor as much as open an eye.

When the work-crews returned to eat at midday he was still there and had to be wakened for the meal.

And yet, he must have stirred. A scout who passed through the armoury lodge found the tactical maps disturbed. Penned in the margins of a supply draft in fussy, over-ornamented script were concisely drawn summaries of the weapon and training profile of Etarra’s garrison troops, along with names, numbers and insightful characteristics of most of its ranking officers.

Since the prince never mentioned this contribution, the matter became overshadowed. The contempt of the clan’s womenfolk became all the deeper entrenched by Arithon’s current absorption, of drawing puzzles in the dirt with the toddlers. His laughter tangled with the talk of the men at the boards and the scrape of knives as they sawed and hammered the dry waybread into chunks to soften in hot gravy. Veiled looks were cast at the prince between bites. The younger scouts began to sound bitter, while the most campaign-scarred grew silent. Steiven was not present to stem the quietly acid speculation, which Arithon joyously ignored. His mood stayed isolate, as unshakeable as if he were deaf, or a half-wit.