The Curse of the Mistwraith (76 page)

The water and the walk seemed to help. Arithon breathed more freely as movement and increased circulation eased the worst of his withdrawal. Through the hour’s hike back to camp, he regained at least the semblance of his accustomed equilibrium.

Which was well, because the mother of a boy who has lit off into open forest with no word of explanation was bound not to wait with complaisance. Lady Dania intercepted her miscreants at the flap of Steiven’s lodge. She had shed her daytime leathers for a tight-sleeved dress of lilac blue. Russet hair that Arithon had never seen unbraided trailed like undone crochet-work down her back. The effect of softened femininity hit him like a blow and he stopped, struck briefly speechless.

But his momentary awkwardness escaped notice as Dania latched onto her errant son. ‘Jieret! What possessed you? It shames me to see a boy of twelve behaving with less care than a toddler!’

Recessed in the shadow beyond the entry, Arithon interrupted. ‘The boy was with me, and quite safe.’

Lady Dania shot him a scorching glance.

Awed by the briskness with which she abandoned her scolding and ordered him off to bed, Jieret saw that, prince or not, Arithon was going to suffer all of his mother’s thwarted temper. Wary of his fate should he linger, the boy beat an escape through the curtain that separated the nook he shared with his sisters.

Dania cracked back the tentflap, cross to her core from the licence of intemperate royalty. She bent a severe gaze upon the culprit, who escaped her by standing stone-still in the darkness. Reminded afresh that Arithon could be disquieting and difficult, and that Caolle had warned earlier he might have remedied his nerves since the oathtaking with drink or some other indulgence, Dania too said nothing, but busied herself lighting candles.

While new flame fired the delicately embroidered patterns that bordered her bodice and hemline and sparked a brighter warmth of colour in her hair, she barbed her subtlety in a smile of sweetened welcome.

‘Steiven will be back shortly,’ she offered. When Arithon’s reticence remained, she dared him to try sheer bad manners. ‘Come in. Sit. Be comfortable while we wait for him.’

Appreciative of her heroic effort not to nag, and piquantly aware she would rifle what deductions she could from his appearance, Arithon slipped through the doorflap. Her mind matched his measure far too often to make him comfortable. He half-smiled to see that her rearguard attack had defeated him; not a cushion in the lodge remained in dimness enough for concealment. He countered her candles by an absolute refusal to settle. While Dania ducked past the privacy flap to make sure of young Jieret and tuck him with canny firmness into bed, Arithon gave rein to restlessness and paced.

This lodge was not so fine as the one left in storage at the last camp. Bereft of tapestries, fine carpets and permanent furnishings, the dwelling still displayed evidence of civilized inhabitance. One corner was flaked with wood chips and bark, where Jieret had whittled toys for his sisters. An opened book rested on a woven reed-mat, a half-spent candle close by. The text in the surfeit of lighting flashed as he stepped, with bright colours and gilt illumination. The wall behind had been painted over with an elaborate scene of a stag hunt. In the corner, cushioned on a pallet stuffed with evergreen, Halliron’s lyranthe lay abandoned.

Silver strings strung reflections like beads, numerous and scintillant as the candleflames. Arithon set his teeth, but could not quite manage to turn aside. Topaz settings and small emeralds beckoned for his attention amid the carved and inlaid bands that laced from the scrolled base to the peghead with its rows of ebony tuners.

Before thought could stop him, he had seated himself. He extended a finger and tentatively, lightly brushed the strings.

The timbre that answered wrung his heart, so perfectly did it match the voice of the instrument left and lost in Etarra. The maker’s rune stamped in pearl inlay on the back of the soundboard was not visible; but tone was all the signature Arithon required to identify Elshian’s handiwork.

The temptation could be too much.

Framed against a painted backdrop of deer hounds frozen in full cry, he lifted the lyranthe, set his hand to silver frets, and began very softly to play.

The burns where Lysaer’s light bolt had seared his right palm and wrist had barely started to heal. Tripped up as the pull of the wound marred his timing, Arithon struck out a rough and moody line of notes. Lost to his irritation, half-unmoored by lightheadedness, he had space in him only for song. He flexed his stiff hand, cursed mildly as the scab cracked, and launched off in a run that seemed to banish hide walls and let in space like cloud-blown sky.

Notes trilled and spattered across quiet in a statement that through unsullied expression of beauty negated his uncertainty and pain.

Newly returned from Jieret’s bedside, Lady Dania was arrested by the sound. Unwitting party to something not meant to be shared, she poised stock-still with the fringed end of the privacy curtain forgotten between her clenched hands.

A soaring arpeggio introduced a change in key like an epiphany. Major chord to minor, the lyranthe rang through a boldly personal statement that flashed with a grace like edged swordplay. Stirred through the stuffy, airless heat trapped inside hide walls, Dania shivered in delight. This prince could bind spells with his playing. Entranced beyond fear of impropriety, she smiled her appreciation and advanced.

The privacy flap smacked shut like a slap, but her attempt at warning passed unnoticed. The notes built and blended and sprang separate while Arithon laid his cheek against the curve of resonating wood. His eyes were closed, his whole being intertwined with the notes that danced under his hands.

A slipped finger shattered the spell. There came a pause while his wrist lifted. Then his hands dipped again, through a jarring, heavily plucked statement that skirted the edge of discord.

Arithon silenced the strings with an impatient caress, then turned his hand to find his cut split, and a bead of blood welling through.

Dania discovered herself half-dizzied from some reasonless urge to hold her breath. She moved another step, just as the prince looked up.

The emotion in his eyes struck her with the force of a stormfront alive with the beat of summer thunder.

She gave way and sat across from him. ‘I didn’t intend to eavesdrop. But I have to admit you have a gift even Halliron must envy.’

Mention of the Masterbard pricked Arithon to an irritable glance down. Had the instrument in his hands not awed him, he might have answered his first impulse, and flung it away as though his skin hurt. ‘Lady, your praise is far too generous.’

He did not blot the burst burn on his tunic. A tiny start unsettled her as she wondered if somehow he
knew:
the garment had been her deceased brother’s. His eyes were on her again. He saw, and she realized too well that her intuition set keen challenge against his intentions.

Dania absorbed the awkward moment by rearranging the skirt over her knees. Blue cloth settled a ring of twilight over a tawny landscape of flax hassocks, and her hands, like paired birds, nestled together in her lap. Arithon ducked quickly forward and hoped his fallen hair would shade his face. His breathing was harder to temper; Steiven’s wife had a vivid, magnetic beauty beneath the wear of hard living and the fullness lent by child bearing. The fact she tracked his mind without effort evoked an intimacy that played havoc with drug-heightened senses and provoked him to shameless response.

Preternaturally conscious of her quick, timid glance toward his face, he turned his head.

‘Something troubles you,’ she said. ‘Is that why you seek my husband?’

Her voice had that velvety timbre associated with wind through high grass. A fine-grained tremor shook him and he shut his eyes fast as the dregs of the tienelle fanned a flare of heat through his veins.

‘Some things are best let lie.’ He stamped down the flicker of vision too late. Prescience arose, full-bodied and ugly enough to choke him, of Lady Dania sprawled in black leaf mould, the leathers she wore for workaday ripped down to expose muddied thighs, and her throat slashed open by a sword stroke.

Dimly, he realized she was speaking. ‘If it were up to me, I would drop every weapon in Etarra into the bogs of Anglefen, and hire you as bard of Deshir.’

Arithon opened his eyes, flashed her a glance hot and molten as brass tailings stirred in a crucible. He said no word, but hooked back the lyranthe with an urgency concealed behind languidness.

Dania was not deceived. Neither could she deny the compulsion that drove him, rooted as it was in the gentleness that tonight for some reason he could not mask. The music he loosed with his hands held a spirit that gave easy surcease from talk.

He took the release she allowed him with gratitude that sang through E major, then plunged in sliding falls to tread deeper measures that rang lyrically placid and dark. He tempered his impatience in the mathematical progression of schooled notes. Pinched between physical discomfort and the horrific pageant of images inflicted at random upon his innermind, Arithon longed for Steiven to come, that he could finish this business and be alone. He wanted the forest, with the calls of whippoorwills and running water to smooth his abraded nerves. He needed delicate, exacting concentration to unbind the residual taint within his body. Yet the urgency of the final revelation which had shown him clan girls and wives lying slaughtered disbarred the solitude he required.

Arithon channelled himself into music as a substitute for thought until steps at the doorflap spoiled his cadence.

‘Must you deal behind my back?’ Halliron’s demand shattered the spell before the last note had quite faded.

Dania started and jerked her scented skirts aside to allow the bard space to take a seat. ‘How long have you been here?’

Arithon damped the dwindling ring of silver strings and proffered Elshian’s lyranthe to her master.

Halliron took back his instrument, derisively abrupt. ‘I heard it all. The fragment preceding as well.’ Pale, hard eyes touched the prince with a look as inimical as a knife-thrust. ‘I know the voice of my lyranthe better than that of my own child. You should have known she would call me. Did you lack the guts, not to speak to me beforehand?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Arithon’s hands balled up. He forgot his torn scab and tension rimmed one fingernail brightly scarlet. ‘I was thoughtlessly selfish. Here’s my promise not to meddle, after this.’

‘Meddle!’ Dania had never heard the bard’s voice so charged with fury. ‘You arrogant, manipulative young fool! Don’t insult my intelligence by playing your falsehoods on me. It’s an Ath-given talent you’ve been hiding. I say it here, you’ve no right to see that strangled.’

Arithon sat back sharply, discomfort plain upon his face. The bard had managed to shock him, as nobody else ever had, and his recovery lacked courtesy or grace. ‘That was not my intent.’ For once too upset to try pretence, he hitched his shoulders in dismissal. ‘Of course, I’m touched by your regard. But I saw no reason to inflict my inadequate fingering upon you.’ The sarcasm used in desperation bloomed now to drive back tearing anguish. ‘My sword, you’ll recall, is now wedded to the cause of a kingdom.’

Halliron shrugged off the protestation. ‘The mechanics of your playing can definitely be improved upon.’ He cradled the lyranthe against his shoulder, set fingers to strings, and repeated several bars of Arithon’s work. Beneath his skill, melody emerged refocused into a rendition to make the heart leap for pure pain.

The effect left Dania with her fingers pressed to her lips, and the Prince of Rathain dead white.

Halliron damped the strings with a slap the exquisite soundboard magnified like a shout. ‘With work, you shall surpass me. Study, apply yourself to life training, and no one alive could match your style.’ The Masterbard pressed his instrument back into Arithon’s lap.

‘If, if, if!’ Arithon spurned the invitation in a recoil that dragged air in a whine across strings as he thrust the instrument aside. ‘Where is Steiven?’

‘Stop evading.’ Incensed, Halliron held to his subject. ‘I’ve searched all my life, and never heard the equal of your natural ability.’

Arithon whipped taut with a speed that belied the indolence he had adopted since his arrival. The weave of moving shadows as he thrust to his feet plunged the painted stag into darkness, leaving hounds with bared muzzles exposed to the merciless candlelight. To Dania he said crisply, ‘If Caolle is available, I’ll speak to him instead.’

Dismayed, the lady instinctively forestalled him. ‘You haven’t eaten, your Grace. Let me bring wine and fresh bread.’

Arithon abruptly shook his head.

He was a man who never used gestures when a verbal backlash would serve better. Alarmed, Dania surveyed his face. ‘You’re unwell.’

‘Which is not your concern, dear lady.’ Arithon caught her hands and kissed her knuckles, inspired to ruthless certainty that his clammy sweat and fine trembling would set her off-balance enough to quiet her. ‘Caolle or your husband, it doesn’t matter which. But I must speak with one of them immediately.’

Silence followed his demand, a rugged war of wills that Halliron finally broke because he misliked risking Deshir’s lady to the edged temper of the s’Ffalenn heir. ‘Steiven and Caolle are closeted in the tent that serves as armoury. They’re taking inventory, and probably won’t mind the interruption.’

Arithon gave the bard a smile of astonishing gratitude. Then he kissed the lady’s hands again. ‘My respect, and my thanks for your hospitality.’ Need before gentleness commanded him as he released his touch and departed.

The lodge-flap sighed closed on his heels, and infused the close tent with the night-scent of dew-soaked evergreen. Lady Dania stared blindly across an emptiness left brilliant with candles, her arms hugged forlornly across her chest. ‘He tries hard to make us think he takes us lightly.’

Wordless in sympathy, Halliron caught her shoulders. He turned her, sat her down and fetched her wine. This once in his life unwilling to seek music to quiet an uneasy mind, he poured a second goblet for himself. ‘It’s fate that’s his enemy, not ourselves.’ He drank deep, to dull a grief he could not bear, that his search for a successor had found its match in a man who had no use at all for an apprenticeship.