The Curse of the Mistwraith (93 page)

Lysaer laughed. ‘Pesquil made your scribes miserable jotting letters to headhunters’ leagues the breadth of the continent before our casualties were tallied.’ For Pesquil, the near total loss of his troop had been a sore point, alleviated by moody bursts of elation that, after feuding years and too little funding from city council, the Earl Steiven’s dominion over Strakewood had been decisively broken.

‘I shall have to buy manuscripts on strategy,’ Diegan said in mixed recrimination and distaste. ‘They’re longwinded and boring, I presume. Hardly entertainment for the parties.’ But fall season would be dreary as it was, with so many ladies forced to mourning. Diegan drifted for some minutes near sleep, while the prince, who knew far more about armies and the art of command than he, attended him in tactful respect. Finally, eyes closed, Lord Diegan murmured, ‘Come back to us safely in the autumn. My sister Lady Talith will be waiting.’

‘Tell her…’ Lysaer paused, gravely pleased, while the captain at the head of the column shouted orders, whips snapped in the hands of cursing drovers and carts began, groaning, to roll forward. Striding alongside Diegan’s wagon, the sun in his hair like sheen on the wares of a silk spinner, Lysaer spoke from his heart. ‘I’ll return to pay court to the lady. No Master of Shadow with his darkness shall be permitted to keep us apart.’

Last Resolution

The deadfalls, stripped of stakes, became grave-pits to bury the fallen, Deshir’s clansmen accomplished the work in whirlwind expedience, laying loved ones on top of dead horses or the bodies of enemies still clad in plumed helms and mailshirts. Plunder entered nobody’s mind. On a field holding slain by the thousands there were more abandoned weapons than living men to wield them; and by long and bitter custom, Deshir’s clans gave no time in respect for their fallen that might endanger the living.

Of Strakewood’s complement of nine hundred and sixty, scarcely two hundred men lived, half that number wounded; fourteen boys of Jieret’s generation were all that survived Etarra’s campaign against Arithon. The Tal Quorin’s waters rolled muddied and stinking, and a swathe of ancient greenwood lay razed and fire scarred and smoking.

Unless the hunters ranged far into the mazed back glens of the river basin, game for the stewpots was thin and scarce.

As hungry and tired as the men who had lost their families and their lifestyle to defend their rights of territory, Arithon s’Ffalenn raised a stone still clotted with mud and moss and placed it against the cairn that marked the burial of Steiven, Earl of the North,
caithdein
and Warden of Ithamon. Interred at his side rested his beloved Lady Dania, whose piercing wit and intuition would provoke and delight no man further. Silenced by remembrance, the Master of Shadow scuffed dirt from split fingers on the leathers her kindness had provided him. Then he bundled an arm about the shoulders of the boy who stood motionless at his side.

‘Your parents were fine people, Jieret. I was proud to know them. Forgive me if I can’t always match up to your memory of their example.’ Under his hands, the boy quivered.

Arithon tactfully let him go.

Jieret pushed back his sleeve cuffs and pulled out the whittling knife he had used to carve toys for his sisters. He turned it over and over like a talisman while, careful not to watch the boy’s tears, Rathain’s prince knelt on earth still thrashed and torn from the passage of heavy destriers. ‘Here,’ he said, and gently removed the dagger from the boy’s hand. With a care that appeared to consume his attention, he began to scratch runes of blessing and guard on the river slate that crowned the cairn.

The patterns used in the ritual configuration of magic held a certain stark beauty; each traced line captured thought in severe simplicity which offered its own consolation. As Arithon sketched the intricate angles, the circular curves and interlocked ciphers, he spoke. ‘A kingdom and its prince are only as strong as their warden.
Caithdein
, when you come of age, I’ll be honoured to swear oath on your blade. I can already say you’ve served this land’s prince. If not for your courage, Rathain’s royal line would be ended, and your father’s fine work gone for nothing.’

Jieret dashed his cheek with the back of one dirt-grained wrist. Red hair sprang like wire between the folds of a bandage, cut from the silk shirt sewn by Sethvir for the ceremony of Arithon’s coronation. The peculiar sharp attentiveness he had taken from his mother stayed trained in unswerving contemplation of the gravestones. In words not those of a child he said, ‘Your Grace, my father’s life was never wasted in your service. He made me understand as much, when he told me he knew he was going to die. One day, perhaps before I come of age, you will need me again.’

Oddly caught out in embarrassment, Arithon paused. ‘Well. On that, Ath forfend, I hope you’re wrong.’ The figure under his hands was complete. He lifted the blade and studied the balanced geometrics of patterns learned when his fingers were barely old enough to grip a chalk stick. But unlike his childhood scrawlings on slate in his grandfather’s study, he sensed no subliminal surge of energy. Whether this mark in Strakewood held power to ward, or whether its lines were just pretty scratchings copied over by rote from memory, he had no means in him to tell. The odd, static flashes of mage-sight that had plagued him since shaping the banespell had diminished, until finally he could summon no vision at all.

The self-discipline learned at Rauven remained; but to the craft he had mastered, his senses had gone dumb and dead. Arithon sought the essence of the trees and the air but perceived only as other men saw.

Grief remained, of a depth he could share with no one. Not for the first time since his choice to pursue his s’Ffalenn inheritance, he missed the counsel of the cantankerous s’Ahelas grandfather who perhaps still lived in Rauven’s master tower. Dascen Elur with its wide oceans lay behind, forever lost. Here spread a land whose sky, hills and rivers held secrets only partially studied. Cut short in the midst of discovery, Arithon felt deprived of an arm or a leg; or as an artist suddenly blinded to colour in a hall filled with masterworks.

Across the glen, through the sun-dappled pillars of lichened trunks, the layered harmonics of a lyranthe being tested for pitch threaded the forest. As personal as written signature, Halliron’s favourite tuning phrase spattered fifths like a running spill of coins. Each note pierced Arithon’s perception, separate as the impact of small darts. As if in counterbalance to reft senses, his awareness of sound had grown acute. Birdsong never rang so pure in his ears, and the clang of pickaxe and steel as graves were covered over never clashed so wincingly dissonant.

Still on his knees, Arithon stabbed Jieret’s knife into dirt. He bowed his head. As he had the past night laid hands to cold flesh, today he touched his palms to old stone and stilled his inner awareness. He had personally accomplished the ritual to free the sundered spirits of these, his lost friends. Something of residual peace should emanate from the bones now embraced in quiet earth.

Nothing; he felt nothing at all.

Arithon sighed, a tightness to his shoulders the only sign of the ambivalence that wrenched him. Even the cairn stones were mute. Where the least fleck of sand from the creek bed should ring in its essence with the grand energies that defined all existence, these disparate rocks gave back the scrape of rough edges against the uncalloused burn barely scarred over since Etarra. Left only memory, Arithon touched nothing of the true reality known to mages at all, but saw only the flat spectrum of visible light. The ghostly resonance left on this land by Paravian inhabitance, that Asandir had attuned to his being in the hills of Caith-al-Caen, would neither thrill nor harrow him, now. If he wished he could walk Ithamon’s ruins and not be haunted.

Mastery of his shadows remained; but no knowledge to suggest whether time would heal his other gifts.

‘They’re starting.’ Jieret touched his prince’s wrist to rouse him. The shadows had moved. An interval had passed that Arithon found difficult to measure. Deshir’s survivors at some point had set aside tools to gather into a circle for the rite to honour their dead.

Arithon recovered Jieret’s knife from the earth and straightened up. ‘I’ll listen from here.’ He began to return the small blade to the boy, then impulsively hesitated. ‘Let me keep this,’ he asked. ‘As the steel we used to swear bloodpact, I’d like to have it. To use. To have you know that I think of you often.’

‘You’re leaving us.’ A statement; Jieret did not sound surprised. Not yet a man, more than a boy, he had too much pride to ask why. In a manner that reminded painfully of Steiven, he said, ‘You forget, I think, that I offered you that same blade already.’

Arithon tossed it, absorbed by the flash of the river pearl handle as it turned and landed with a slap in his palm. ‘When I’d finished the tienelle scrying. I remember.’

‘That’s a good knife for carving willow whistles,’ Jieret said. ‘I shan’t be needing it any longer.’ And he gestured toward its replacement, a narrow, quilloned main gauche he wore strapped to his belt. ‘Ath go with you, my prince.’

Arithon tucked the little knife into the tight-laced leather that cuffed his shirt. Then he pulled Jieret to him and exchanged a fierce embrace that he broke with a quick push to send the boy off toward his people.

Within the latticed sear of strong sun that striped through branches singed of foliage, Deshir’s clansmen in their war-stained, ragged leathers joined hands. Their circle parted to include Jieret, then unravelled a second time as a stocky figure in studded belts and black bracers broke away. Caolle, Arithon identified by the vehement thrust of the man’s stride. The clan captain had keen intuition, but in the absence of Dania’s sisterly intolerance, he retained all the style of thrown brick.

At the centre of the circle, incongruous in the slashed elegance of black silk and gold, Halliron stood in the restored splendour of his court clothing, his lyranthe tuned in his hands. He called.

But with Steiven dead and himself left trustee of the clans Caolle deferred to no one. He stamped across the churned ground with his bootcuffs slapping and his shoulders hunched up, and his whiskered chin jutted for argument.

Behind him, somebody said something commiserating and the clansmen quietly closed the gap.

Craggy from strain and sleeplessness, grazed by brush burns and patched red from accumulated midge bites, Caolle looked ready to murder. ‘You’re leaving us,’ he accused.

Suppressing a wince as his tone grated against an almost painful sensitivity, Arithon felt no answering anger. ‘I must.’ He looked back in forceful directness that forestalled Caolle’s bluster. Across the thicket the soft, sad notes of Halliron’s lyranthe gentled the quiet: the opening phrases of the ritual to sing Deshir’s dead into memory. This was the first open sentiment any clansman had shown, and would firmly and finally be the last.

The flight to take refuge in Fallowmere would begin immediately following the ceremony.

Caolle waited, fumingly impatient. Then as the poignance of Halliron’s playing touched even his bearish mood, he hooked large-knuckled thumbs in his swordbelt. ‘You can tell us why.’

Unflinching, Arithon continued to regard him. ‘I think you know. Where I go, Lysaer’s armies will follow.’ He drew a breath.

As though daring insults or evasions, Caolle clamped his hands under taut forearms. He was a man who liked his clothing loose and his belts tight; the blades that were visible on his person drew all the quicker, while the invisible ones stayed unobvious. He regarded his silent liege lord, his black eyes inimical as shield-studs.

The Prince of Rathain gave no ground. Sincere where before he had been secretive, he said, ‘I can neither repay nor restore your losses. Nor would I cheat you with promises I’m powerless to uphold. You gave me life and offer a kingdom. Your lord shared a friendship more precious. In return I give my word as Teir’s’Ffalenn that I won’t squander these gifts.’

That softness covered a will like steel wire, as Caolle had cause to respect. Touched by an uncharacteristic patience, he recalled the ballad of Falmuir and the uncanny tableau up the grotto. Forbearance allowed him not to rise to the hurt, that even after Etarra’s armies, this prince seemed too reticent to place his full trust in the clans.

In the clearing, at the centre of the circle, Halliron raised voice in cadenced expression of pure sorrow. Laid bare by the music, Arithon lost all composure. His throat closed and he half spun away, ashamed of the tears he could not curb. The music broke his will and his feelings for these stern, unbending people undid him. He felt Caolle’s hand close on his shoulder, as it had many times to comfort Jieret.

‘You could be my bastion,’ Arithon admitted, rarely vulnerable. ‘Except for Lysaer. Any who shelter me will become target for his armies. I would not see your great-hearted clans exterminated for my sake. And so I ask your leave to depart, unsupported and alone until such time as I can return and fulfil your cherished hope, to rebuild a city in peace on the foundations of old Ithamon.’

‘I’ve misjudged you.’ Caolle withdrew his gruff touch, and for a long minute the rise and fall of Halliron’s beautiful voice resounded through wood and clearing. Both men listened, each haunted by different regrets. Then Caolle raked back his scruffy, iron-grey hair. ‘I’ll do so no more. But in return, I ask your sanction to raise the clans of Fallowmere, and after them, clansmen the breadth of the continent.’

‘I’m against it.’ Arithon spun around. If his eyes blazed through a sparkle of unshed tears, the force in him was that of a sword unsheathed. ‘I wish no more killing in my name.’

Caolle’s stiff stance rendered the short silence eloquent.

And Arithon gave a sigh that seemed wrung from his very depths. ‘My wife and children were not murdered by headhunters.’ Gentled in a way Caolle would once have disparaged, the Prince of Rathain traced the rune on the clan chieftain’s marker with fingers too fine for the sword but that could, and had, killed in battle. ‘My losses are as nothing to yours. I say that raising an army begs a repeat of this tragedy. But I’m not cold-hearted enough, or maybe I’m no true king at all. I haven’t the nastiness to refuse you. My blessing is yours, if not my approval. Go in grace, captain. Care for Jieret, whom I love as my brother.’