Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  The Mad Prophet rubbed sweaty palms on his thighs and swore at the grit that the land breeze sifted over everything. A decision to put about and sail back to Tysan meant shouldering the risks still left hanging by Earl Jieret’s fragment of augury. With Arithon left mage-blind, the unwelcome burden of scrying fell on the spellbinder’s shoulders. He had small choice but to sound the future for the source of the execution that Rathain’s caithdein had foreseen three years in the past.

  Dakar felt inadequate. His birthgiven talent for prophecy had always been unpredictable. Despite five centuries of Fellowship training, his unruly, chance-met bouts of vision still blundered roughshod over his efforts to impose reason or mastery. The gift had ever been an affliction to upset the planned course of his life. Even worse, the stresses of backlash inevitably wrecked his digestion and left him sick as a dog.

  “Ah, fiends plague!” he groused to his audience of desolate, stern boulders. “It’s a born sap who dies of stupidity.”

  A fool’s self-preservation should have kept him from opening his mouth to volunteer. Too late, he wished he had capsized Khetienn’s dory, and seized the lamebrained excuse to beg off, sopping wet. Most of all, he dreaded to see what his ill-advised search might discover.

  Arithon’s hot-tempered remark to Earl Jieret still retained its damnable accuracy. Too many factions wished the Shadow Master’s death. The question became less the timed moment of his end, but which one of his enemies would snatch first opportunity to slaughter him.

  A whistle signaled the change in the ship’s watch. Dakar hugged his arms to his barrel chest, while the sere, desert breezes fingered the crimped screws of his sweat-runneled hair. He steadied plucked nerves. In trepidation and solitude, he centered his will, cast his thoughts still, and channeled the untrustworthy powers of his gift. His failure or success would support no observers, far less the discerning eyes of the prince whose confounding integrity had trapped him in friendship and loyalty.

  Dakar held no illusions. He was no sorcerer, no grand power to toy with events. Kathtairr’s vast emptiness diminished all that he was, left him puny as a dust speck afloat on dark waters as he narrowed his scattered awareness. He resisted the pull of a lifetime’s rank cowardice and a sidestepping inclination to indulge in aimless woolgathering. Tonight, for the sake of Arithon’s life, he opened the undisciplined aperture of his talent while the sweat of cold dread slid in drops down his temples and moistened his thatched ginger beard. The salt taste on his lips reminded of tears before the blameless, bitter kiss of the seaspray lately splashed by his inept hand at the oar.

  Time passed. Dakar held on in obdurate stillness. His gift could be stubborn. Countless times, he had sat with no reward gained but the yowl of a belly pinched to hunger. Yet even as he prayed tonight’s scrying would draw blankness, his mind sank into that cavernous silence that seemed etched through a void of black crystal. Forewarned by the first, creeping tingle in his gut that his awareness tipped over the edge, he shook to a drenching chill of apprehension. Then vertigo swooped down and hurled him headlong through an unraveling stream of wild prescience.

  He saw pine trees, a bright shoreline where turquoise waters purled into spume, and there, Arithon s’Ffalenn on his knees in white sand, his black sword Alithiel drawn and upraised; and through the bone-hurting chord of grand harmony thrown off by the blade’s spelled defenses, a unicorn poised in the rampant, first thrust of a charge aimed to gore him.

  Dakar screamed aloud, earthly flesh unable to bear the beauty and the pain, as the sword Alithiel flashed, then blazed through its star-captured peal of ward resonance. The Riathan Paravian dipped his silver-maned head, a scything horn set to reap; and vision scattered…

  Darkness rolled over him, unrelenting and bleak, stabbed through by the rippling, clean harmony of a lyranthe given voice by the hands of a master. Notes plucked out in Arithon’s best style fell like sprays of dropped jewels, or sleet tapping brass, while decades slipped by in a drawn-out, mindless slow agony…

  “No,” Dakar whispered. He strove to reach out, hook the freewheeling thread of his talent and bind it; but change ripped through him regardless…

  He saw priests clad in vestments with sunwheel emblems, chanting litanies against the vile works of the dark.

  “Ath show me mercy, no!” The Mad Prophet struggled, his yanked breath drawn too fast, lungs afire as if he had sprinted flat out with some ravening terror at his heels. “No.” He grasped after trained strictures, clawed for the will to wrest back some semblance of control. The vision he wanted was one that Earl Jieret had dreamed…

  He saw blinding summer sun, and the red, bloodied length of a sword laid across an altar spread in a gold-edged, white cloth.

  The image jolted through him, almost slammed his heart still. Screaming now, the Mad Prophet reached anyway, tried to rip past his grief to back-trace the event to its source. But the blood was too fresh, too red, too real. In slowed motion, the vermilion drops soaked the white silk, ragged stains scribing an ending too vivid to escape. Dakar shied back, wrung helpless by dread, and the channel of his talent exploded through white sparks to static. His unsteady control crumbled after, like an unfired clay vessel dissolved on a tap to blown dust.

  Sunwheel became sun, sinking red to a horizon of weather-stripped hills: Daon Ramon. Before the light palled into featureless night, he beheld a new city embedded in tangled black canes of old briar. Somewhere, somebody sobbed in the throes of a gut-wrenching agony…

  His own voice, perhaps. Dakar had long since lost wits to tell. String after string of prescience reeled through him, a spate grown too fierce to divert by means of sane thought or strong discipline.

  A city, sheeted in fire and burning; a child, dead in the dust.

  Milled under and weeping, Dakar let go. The dream claimed his measure. His senses rushed on in the plummeting slide into the numb haven of escape. His last thought before unconsciousness drowned him was his desperate craving to get drunk.

  Much later, there were stars. Dakar pieced together the awareness that he lay on his back with his eyes open. Returned senses imprinted an excruciating impression of harsh rock jabbed into limp flesh. The pain rushed back then, resolved itself into a skull-splitting headache, to which every nerve in his body responded in a sapping chorus of aches.

  Nausea knifed through him. He needed to sit up, but lacked the vitality.

  A shadow arrived at the edge of his vision. A touch breathless, the voice of a bard phrased an oath ripe enough to scale fish. Then hands left ice-cold from a plunge in the sea grasped his shoulders and hauled him erect.

  That succor given just barely in time; the first, rending spasm failed to catch the Mad Prophet facedown. Grateful not to lie heaving in his own filth, he coughed, spat, shivered, groaned, and finally croaked the name of his rescuer. “Arithon?”

  “Lie easy.” When that instruction became impossible to carry out, the Master of Shadow held on until the Mad Prophet’s stomach stopped churning.

  Dakar sagged into the lean, steady arm that settled him back against the lumpy support of a boulder. “I could see nothing certain,” he husked out, unwilling to sustain the unspoken query for one second longer than necessary. “Arithon, I’m sorry. You’re too strongly fated. The futures involved are too powerful to sort. I have no sure course of counsel to offer. Every fragment called in poured through me as uncontrolled vision.”

  He rolled his head sidewards to interpret the other man’s stillness; no need to repeat what events at the Havens and Vastmark had already proved in spilled blood. Any prescience he tapped in the form of ranging visions was subject to change with the pressures of shifting event.

  Seconds passed, filled by the rush of white foam gnawing the bleak, stony shingle. With no word spoken, Arithon settled in the darkness, his shoulders braced to the same rock. No sailhand from the Khetienn accompanied him; he had swum from the anchorage rather than roust out the crew to sway out a longboat. The crossing left him drenched as a sea
l, and shirtless. Kathtairr’s hazeless starlight sheened the flex of his fingers as he worked the cork from a wine crock, ferried ashore in one of the mesh nets young Feylind tied to catch shiners.

  “Ath bless you,” Dakar murmured as the welcome, earthy weight was passed into his hands, then guided through the arc to his mouth. He swallowed, eyes closed in relief. One slug, two, and the sour taste of sickness rinsed away. He savored restored taste, eased and mellowed by the sublime, tart bouquet of a rare vintage red from Orvandir.

  A sigh unreeled through a throat skinned raw from mindless screaming. “Bless you again, for generosity. I thought you were saving that bottle for—” Dakar stopped, would have slapped his own forehead for stupidity, had he retained any strength.

  The barren rocks of Kathtairr harbored no cause at all for celebration; he had known very well since the day four years past, when the brigantine had first weighed her anchor for Corith.

  The prince who sat in iron quiet beside him seemed to have shed his rancor for that. Arithon reached, recaptured the wine, pulled a deep draft in turn. Starlight strung sparks through the phosphorescent runnels on his skin, and streaked premature silver through black hair as he swallowed. He seemed to think better of speech and, instead, restored the crock into Dakar’s needful grasp.

  The Mad Prophet drank deep to drown a lancing, sharp urge to weep. When he next looked, Arithon s’Ffalenn had clasped both his wrists with exquisite, fine-jointed hands, a habit he kept to mask the disfiguring marks of old scars.

  Dakar shivered. The hour had grown late. Kathtairr’s harsh terrain had traded the day’s heat for the keening, cold winds off the interior. But the gusts which sluiced over his sweat-dampened clothes scarcely touched him, aware as he was of the deeper chill. With his mind still awash in the harrowing images just snatched from the uncertain future, words slipped his grasp before thought. “How can you bear this, year after year? How can you live, self-aware as you are, of the fate that hangs on your choices?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Arithon admitted. His skin pricked into sudden gooseflesh. His thumb traced the thin line healed crosswise overtop of the weals once chafed by iron fetters. The gesture arose from unpleasant recollection of his blood oath, irrevocably given to hold him to life by every means at his command. The terrible vow had been sworn to Asandir just after the destruction of Lysaer’s fleet at Minderl Bay.

  Sensitive now to the one burning question Dakar had never dared ask, Arithon offered his confidence. “You wonder how the Fellowship Sorcerers won my consent to that binding.” A brief pause, while the stars burned in chill unconcern. “I was told the world might not live if I surrendered the struggle in death.” Rathain’s prince tipped his dark crown to rest against striated rocks that sprouted no kindly lacework of lichen. The steep planes of his face might have been sculpted alabaster, except for the small, tensioned wrinkles which nipped at the corners of his eyes. “I saw that I couldn’t trust myself, Dakar. Not once I heard what was left on the gate world of Marak.”

  “Marak!” The Mad Prophet shot straight to a gurgle of sloshed protest from the wine. “Ath, Marak! A crisis on a link world across South Gate. Of course! What else but the severed body of the Mistwraith could frighten the Fellowship dizzy? Dharkaron avenge! The Sorcerers bound you for that?”

  “You need not upset yourself.” Arithon’s disarming, peaceful tone but reminded that he owned a masterbard’s tongue. Dissembling cleverness was his second nature. Dakar knew too much not to guess at the pain, and beyond that, to forgiveness that was genuine, as the Shadow Master finished, “If the Fellowship Sorcerers sought to divert me to Kathtairr, they will have had urgent reason.”

  “They’ve been building wards. I’ve seen them in dreams when the powers crest on the solstices.” Dakar found his palms sweating on cold crockery. He required a single-minded and desperate care not to fumble as he tipped the bottle to his lips. “The bindings they weave are unimaginably vast. As if the Sorcerers strive to stave off the advent of their own defeat.”

  Arithon replied after a short silence, his fingers knuckled white to his wrists. “We have to find the Paravians, Dakar. For all of our sake, they offer the only sane hope of reprieve.”

  Those half-glimpsed fragments of augury could bite too viciously, after all. Dakar choked back misery, hating the savage sting that inevitably arose to sour the fruits of his gift. He sucked down wine in one guzzling burst, too racked to set voice to the irony, that he had indeed seen a unicorn in his vision, and read death for Rathain’s prince in the same moment. Life held no sureties. His talent for prescience was more fickle than a courtesan. One storm in the path of the Khetienn’s charted course, and that goring on the beach might never come to see daylight.

  A gust whipped the chisel-sharp summits of stone. Hazed by the sting of airborne sand, Dakar wiped tearing eyes. He tipped the bottle again, and cursed when it ran empty. The wine had left him stranded far short of the drunken oblivion he wished for.

  The torment on his moon-round face must not, after all, have been due to the grit, since Arithon said in that level compassion that always sliced straight to the quick, “Let’s get you back. There’s more wine on the brigantine, and just as well. If I’m going to get in my cups along with you, it’s better done after I’ve launched and rowed your dory from the strand.”

  Dakar shut his eyes, beholden beyond utterance. Quick temper and subterfuge aside, the Master of Shadow could be trusted to keep the most damnable letter of his word.

  Shepherded back aboard the Khetienn and installed under blankets in the stern cabin, the Mad Prophet was plied with shared wine and sympathy until his maudlin mood gave way to exhaustion. By the hour he passed out, Arithon had not forsaken sobriety, though dawn blushed the sky to the east. The last crock stood drained to the lees. Dakar snored in a muddled heap with his cheek pressed flat to the chart desk. Arithon s’Ffalenn tucked the blanket over his slumped shoulder, then returned to the quarterdeck, and shouted crisp orders to roust out the watch. “Stand by to make sail!”

  As the sun sliced the rim of the horizon, his seamen turned the capstan to clacking life and raised anchor. Sailhands clambered at speed up tarred ratlines, then lay aloft to slip gaskets.

  “Clear away the flying jib! Loose and let fall topsails and main course! Man halyards, sheets, and weather braces! Out spanker! Sheet home!”

  Canvas the color of old blood slithered free and cracked taut, and the Khetienn gathered way, bound back to old risks on the continent.

  Athera’s sea winds changed with the advent of autumn, blew in hard, veering gusts, northwesterly, then due north under skies raked in cirrus as the days shortened. Bowled ahead with the wind on her quarter, then abeam, the Khetienn logged off the leagues, her exhilarating passage made under cascading sheets of spray. The crew kept light spirits, shearing fast course for known waters. Dakar stayed alone in trepidation. Given his most drunken spree of imagination, he could never have foreseen the uncoiling speed with which planning gave birth to event.

  Landfall at Corith occurred after dark, a ghosting, windward approach made on spanker, staysails, and jibs. A coin silver moon threw the archipelago’s notched summits into chipped coal relief. Tension gripped the deckhands. Drugged by the scent of bearing land and live earth after month upon month of salt winds and Kathtairr’s seared rock, the off-watch crew crowded the foredeck. What scraps of dialogue wafted astern detailed their eagerness to escape an endless diet of salt pork and beans, and hardtack infested with weevils.

  “Don’t let me see another ration o’ fish soup with the pepper stores gone,” groused another, eyes rolled furtively over his shoulder to be sure the cook’s ear was turned elsewhere.

  Still as a wraith at the quarterdeck rail, Arithon s’Ffalenn held a ship’s glass trained on the bulking dark shoreline. His close, raking survey scoured the unfolding jut of the headland, nicked like a tarnished engraving with the unraveling foam of spent breakers.

  Dakar, given mage-sight, required no glass
to see that the harbor at Corith was not empty.

  “Daelion’s arse,” he swore in a gust of ill feeling. “Damn Lysaer’s industry, those are masts! Wear ship! We’re pointed straight into an ambush.”

  Arithon snapped the glass closed on a smile of silken patience.

  Too sharply aware of smothered chuckles from the quartermaster, Dakar reinterpreted the Shadow Master’s quiet with an unholy surge of disbelief.

  “You didn’t smell the breeze?” Arithon laughed, the predatory flash of his teeth all the more vivid by moonlight. “I doubt we’re in danger of attack from that brig. She doesn’t bear a fighting company scrambling to span arbalests. Just a hold crammed with casks shipped in from the orchards of Korias.”

  “Apples.” A mystified frown puckered Dakar’s forehead. He shoved back the rumpled screw of hair that the wind flicked back in his eyes. “Why apples?”

  A whispered dance of bare footfalls, Feylind arrived aft to claim her place at the Shadow Master’s side. His equal for height, and grown into a saucy, long-legged, eighteen, she snatched the closed ship’s glass from his hand. The roped braid slid off her shoulder to lick her small breast as she deployed the brass segments. She raked piercing study in turn over the vessel limned dark against needle-worked reflections cast by a low-riding moon.

  “Dharkaron’s hairy bollocks!” She gave a clear whistle. “The varnish still shines on her figurehead’s tits. It’s a mermaid, and look!” Fired outrage snapped through. “The ship’s carvers at Riverton are a raunchy band of goats. Bedamned if her nipples aren’t gilded!”

  “Don’t lose our heading,” gasped Arithon to the quartermaster, who had folded his grizzled face into his elbow to stifle an inopportune smirk of humor.