Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

The seer broke off her staring survey of the shack, and replied through the sleeve pressed against her disdainful nose. ‘How do you bear this?’ A flap of her elbow encompassed the rude table, its paraphernalia of the herbalist’s trade spread over boards sliced and stained by the knives a past generation of fishwives had used to gut cod and split mussels. The damp off the wharves never tired of resurrecting the stink.

  Elaira laughed, her gray eyes direct. ‘Perhaps I’ve never liked the sort of company who insisted on a neat house.’

  The seeress stiffened to instant formality. ‘I have brought a summons. You’re to leave inside the hour, dressed to ride. Pack only what you will need for the road. A novice will come for your things here.’

  Her hands foolishly dripping in chapping air, Elaira sighed. ‘And my destination? Do you know?’

  A faint shrug lifted the seeress’s shoulders, rustling lavender silk. ‘Daenfal, at all speed, and then on to Jaelot. The mayor there suffers from crippling gout. By the Prime’s will, you’ve been appointed to serve as his personal healer.’

  Elaira shut her eyes, the fear like a leaden yoke on her shoulders. Unbidden, she sensed the dire change in the wind. The city of Jaelot was Prince Arithon’s implacable enemy; her forced change of residence could only mean Lirenda’s cruel plan to use Fionn Areth’s destiny could not but hang in the balance. She had cast all her trust upon the Shadow Master’s cleverness; now the hour approached for the payoff. Either Arithon s’Ffalenn could prevail against fate, or Fionn Areth would be played as the pawn to draw him into a Koriani snare.

  ‘You must make haste,’ the seeress insisted. ‘The Prime’s command requires you to reach Daenfal inside the next fortnight.’

  ‘But that’s a hundred leagues distant!’ In despair, Elaira daubed her hands on her skirts. ‘To reach there will cost me a fortune in post mounts.’ Her sarcasm bit as she gestured. The dilapidated walls of her current abode could scarcely safeguard any treasure from the beggars and desperate, crippled seamen who wandered these squalid back alleys. ‘What coppers the whores can pay for my emollients scarcely see me through a day’s bread.’

  ‘We live to serve. If snow closes the Skyshiel passes, the mayor’s suffering will extend through the winter, untreated.’ The seeress arose. ‘Coin from the order’s coffers will cover the additional expenses to speed your journey. A saddled horse awaits you at the Morvain sisterhouse. You may pick up the purse when you claim him.’

  Denied choice or argument, and unable to share her suspicion that her assignment entailed more than the routine charity of dispensing trained herb lore, Elaira watched the Koriani seeress depart in an immaculate sweep of crisp silk. The door slammed on a gusting breeze off the bay, rude closure to a forced ending.

  She fought the lump that arose in her throat as she surveyed her still and her herb jars, now to become part of the common stores under charge of the Morvain sisterhouse. Her life, her home, the mean livelihood she had carved for herself, in trade for a traveling purse and a nondescript gelding to be exchanged for a fresh horse at the first inn on the edge of Halwythwood. She ought to have known, when she met the s’Ffalenn prince, he would come to cost all her peace.

  Elaira shook off self-pity, then laughed aloud at her maundering, to be sniveling like some cantankerous grandmother before her hair had turned gray. Only one route led to Daenfal from the coast, and that, the old towpath which laced high and dry along the granite slabs channeling the thrashing flow of the River Arwent. The season was brisk. Maples and oaks would be frost touched to a tangling riot of color. She had two hundred leagues of open-air travel to enjoy before she reported for duty at the mayor’s palace in Jaelot.

  As Elaira rummaged in her chest after her thick cloak and riding leathers, she embraced the bare truth. She was tired of city crowding and the mud reek of tideflats. A headlong gallop through the brambles of Halwythwood would serve to clear out her head, before the jaws of the trap started closing.

  All ways to Daenfal eventually converged to parallel the great river. From the moorlands of Araethura, the undulating hills converged into a high plateau. Here, the winds swept like waves through a sea of high grass and black scrub. The bared, burled granite of the earth scuffed through where the weathering of ages had winnowed away its thin covering of loam. Thirsty, hungry, and blistered across the fingers from resisting his pony’s persistent efforts to graze, Fionn Areth followed a path cut by the meandering tracks of wild goats. Fifteen days after leaving his father’s steading, he reached the Rim, where the snaking torrent of the Arwent smoked down the gorge at the border of Daon Ramon Barrens. The land fell away into a series of stepped bluffs capped by rustling yellow grass, or else dropped sheer from granite escarpments, into ledges with trees clinging at desperate angles, their roots like exposed, gnarled hands. Sixty spans down, the river roared and muttered, tossing silvery coils of spume.

  On the Araethurian side, a trail continued south, slotted with the confused prints of livestock driven to the lakeshore markets. On the river’s far bank, the gentle crests rolled away toward the great basin once drained by the south-flowing Severnir, until townsmen had dammed and diverted its course to empty into Eltair Bay. Late-autumn sun burnished the famed hills, which in these times bore little resemblance to the silver-tipped grassland of legend. Fionn Areth regarded the swept, mottled scrub, cross-laced with briar, and burned from the frosts etched by the whistling north winds. The trail on the north bank wore the scarred ruts of the wagons that rolled the goods upland from the barge docks, where the towpath through Halwythwood ended.

  Poised on the brink with the chill kiss of winter ruffling through his dark hair, his first freedom sweeter than wild honey, Fionn Areth could encompass nothing but the grand vista of the view. His herder’s background gave him no letters, no education, and no knowledge of lore to encompass the ages gone before. He heard the cry of hawks and the scream of the winds, and did not mourn the deep notes of past centaur horn calls. Nor did he guess that the ledges notched over the tumbling waters had once held the rookeries of predatory wyverns.

  All the young man felt he lacked in the world was a sword of Elssine steel.

  ‘No need to camp early to snare rabbit tonight,’ he said to his pony’s backturned ears. ‘We’ll be inside town walls and begging for charity to find ourselves shelter by evening.’ He tugged the rope hackamore and veered southward, eager to encounter the destiny he had left his family to claim.

  Daenfal’s old city clung to the cliff wall overlooking the Arwent gorge. North and east, a crumbling battlement marked the bounds of what had first been a Paravian watchtower. Through the centuries of the Third Age, that edifice had been enlarged, new walls lapping outward like concentric ripples cast out of gravel and clay. To the south, a graceful revetment of red sandstone fronted the waters of an upland lake. To the west, the town required no defense. There, the outflow thundered over the rim in a mighty falls, and the spume thrown into the air with raw fury settled and streamed like spilled varnish over a precipice of scoured granite.

  To gain entrance to the city from the Araethurian side, a traveler must first bypass the gorge. A broad, dusty track scored by ponies and livestock wound through grass hummocks and switched-back curves to the lakeshore. There, a ferry drawn on rope cables breasted the mighty roil of the outflow, propelled by the naked, sweating muscle of chained convicts and the whip of a sharp-nosed overseer.

  Crammed between the fragrant backs of three cows, and a farmer’s bushels of squash, Fionn Areth clutched his cloak over his nervous pony’s head, anxious himself, but determined to stand fast as the barge slammed and jerked in the plowing rush of the current. He fretted, while the sun dappled the western hills with lowering, purple shadow. In a town, he could not nestle in a bed of fallen leaves when the knifing, thin cold came at nightfall. His only copper had been spent for passage. Nor was he fit company to seek work in exchange for a meal at an inn. Not with his hair lying lank and unwashed on his neck. The thick gray felt of his herder’s
boots was sorrowfully wicking up muck from the cattle, who had all dropped manure and urine in bawling terror as the barge lurched through the first spinning eddies.

  The sky had drained to a lucent, pale cobalt when at last the ferry nestled into the stone jetty by the water gate. Put ashore and still fighting the pony, which rolled eyes and flagged its thick tail at the clatter of its own milling hooves on the cobbles, Fionn Areth stared upward. The last sun washed the wall to rose gold. Above fretted crenellations, the sky was diminished; herringbone jumbles of rooftrees and gables arose, fitted in stone or massive, carved beams, and flying the mayor’s turquoise pennons. Raised on the open, rolling moors, the young man had never imagined so many buildings compressed into such a tight space.

  ‘Move on, yokel,’ cracked the overseer, impatient. ‘This was the last ferry. Can’t unchain these convicts ’til all the civilians are clear, and the watch won’t be pleased if some dawdler keeps them waiting to close the gates. They’ll be just as anxious as I am to go for their off-duty beer.’

  The pony clattered into a jerking shy, in no mood to fare anywhere but backward. Fionn Areth could not hope to forestall her tantrums with a mere length of knotted rope. He followed, rather than allow her to drag him and skin open his scarcely scabbed blisters.

  ‘You a fool, boy?’ called one of the guardsmen from the shadowy depths of the gate arch. ‘Move that nag out!’

  The mare crow-hopped and reared, threatening to slip Fionn’s grasp altogether. Over the hammering beat of his heart and the rampaging clatter of hooves, he saw no choice but to turn the mare’s setback into an opportunity.

  ‘You there, who’s shouting!’ he hollered in defiance. ‘I’ll have you think better of my horse before I respect any order from you.’

  The guardsman bristled and stepped into the open, a bald, broad-shouldered brute with a jingling byrnie and a longsword with a swept hilt. ‘Do you say, lad? Not mind my order, and you but a snip with naught but a knife that’s never done much but stick goats?’

  Fionn Areth gave the rope an almighty yank, and the mare for a mercy came down. She stood, spraddle-legged and blowing, while he spun. Arrogant green eyes flicked the guardsman up and down. ‘Had I more than a knife, be most sure, I could fight and disarm you.’

  The guardsman roared, laughing, while his peers in the gatehouse poked their heads from the embrasures in amusement. ‘Now that’s worth a wager,’ one shouted, egging on the guardsman whose pride had been challenged.

  ‘I’ll bet this pony,’ Fionn said, cool as new snow despite his backcountry accent. ‘If I win, let me keep your week’s beer coin. If I lose, then this mare will be left to defend her own pigheaded honor. I’ll watch while you drag her off of the dock.’

  The huge guardsman was incensed, but scarcely a bully. ‘Get out of here, goatherd. Use the good sense Ath gave your father’s herd billy! Touch a blade, you’d most likely lop off your own leg.’

  Fionn Areth swiped fallen hair from his brow. ‘If I shear off a limb, it won’t be my own.’

  ‘Well, fight him, Uray,’ a fellow guard heckled. ‘Why not win some horse meat to fatten your new hound? Fool jackanapes can use my sword if he wants to murder himself for a boast.’

  ‘Give him some bruises,’ another guard chimed in. ‘Teach him a lesson to manner his ripe grasslands insolence.’

  ‘I accept!’ Fionn shouted, before the bald guard could back down. He tossed the reins of the pony’s headstall to the dumbfounded overseer and strode down the jetty toward the gatehouse. ‘Bet on my victory,’ he said, and laughed outright as the guard, Uray, bristled with a frown that promised bloodshed for being cornered into dancing the steps of a farce.

  The man at the gate windlass emerged to make good the loan of his sword. He was older, tough, and wiry, with an extravagant mustache. His surcoat was sun faded over the shoulders, and his helm showed the dents of two decades of service and etched spots left by rust that had outpaced his diligence with a polishing rag. The weapon he offered was just as hard used, and honed to an evil, glittering edge. Its balance in the hand proved fine enough to lend impetus to the cleaving stroke that would part tendon and bone.

  ‘Mind now,’ warned the owner, ‘if you blood this, you’ll be the one cleaning her.’ His assessment turned suddenly slit eyed and critical as Fionn Areth tested the grip. ‘Mess up your form and parry with the edge, I’ll tear me a strip of your hide for each nick the armorer files out.’

  Fionn Areth just nodded, couched the blade on his toe and his opposite thigh as he freed his hands to yank the lace from his shirt cuff. He tied back sable hair, wiped his palms on his jerkin, then took up the sword and stepped forward. ‘I’m ready.’

  He did not sound anxious. Excitement woke a gemstone glitter in green eyes, but his tanned forearm was steady as he confronted Uray at guard point.

  The man was not so sunk in contempt that the herder’s assured poise did not touch him. He resorted to bluster in the uneasy hope he could lay bare some sign of cowed nerves. ‘Think twice, stripling. You could end up a cripple, and for what? The silver I carry is only as much as a man might toss to a beggar.’

  ‘But I don’t beg,’ Fionn Areth said loudly. ‘And that’s silver I haven’t got to pay for safe lodging and supper.’ Since Uray still hesitated, he seized the initiative and launched off the first, testing lunge.

  Uray snapped his blade in a bruising, hard parry, uncaring whether his weight and man’s strength were too much for an unseasoned amateur. Steel rang and slid and gave way like a lover, teasing him into a lunge.

  Fionn Areth sidestepped like a soft breath of air, shed the force of the thrust just enough to allow the blade to pass over his shoulder. Like a typical garrison soldier accustomed to sparring with the same partners over and over, Uray was that split second slow to recover his overplayed balance. The boy gave way, backwards. He let his blade scissor against his opponent’s, then rotated his wrist and effected a bind. Steel snarled on steel. Uray swore, surprised, as his thumb turned and wrenched in the loop of his sword guard. The weapon left his hand with a singing, stressed clang. The clamor as it struck the stone of the jetty belled into a dumbfounded silence.

  Fionn Areth flipped back the few strands of hair that had tugged free of the thong. While the guardsmen, the overseer, and the barge convicts gawped, he pressed the loaned sword back into the hand of its owner, and demanded of Uray, ‘Pass over the silver you owe me.’

  He stepped across the fallen sword, accepted the washed leather wallet that Uray fumbled and gave him. While a chattering throng of blackbirds winged overhead, he retrieved his pony from the overseer. Her tantrums by then had played out. She followed, demure, as he collectedly resumed his interrupted course toward the gatehouse.

  ‘Daelion’s cock!’ swore the owner of the sword as the pony’s sorrel tail vanished into the gloom of the archway. ‘A goatboy who’s a prodigy, who would have guessed?’ He reached out and clapped a mollified Uray on the shoulder, then bent and retrieved the man’s dispossessed sword from the causeway. ‘I’ll buy you beer, man. I owe you that much. After all, it was I who browbeat you into that contest.’

  Uray shook his head, still looking bemused as he rubbed the wrenched tendons of his wrist. ‘D’you know,’ he said, thoughtful, ‘if we played things just right, we could win my week’s beer coin right back using that boy’s talent.’

  The mustached guard whistled. ‘Why in Sithaer not? He wouldn’t have to disarm an opponent. Just hold his own for long enough to outlast expectations.’ Teeth flashed in a grin of pure devilment. ‘I know just the man to finagle into taking the challenge. Do you suppose that boy would agree to the match if I offered him his pick of the second-rate swords in the armory?’

  ‘Captain Jussey?’ Uray lit into wicked conspiracy. ‘Himself against a grass-seedy moorlands goatherd? By Ath, that would be a glorious comeuppance for the bruises we’ve suffered in the practice yard!’

  Edged in step by step to join the conversation, the overseer l
aughed. ‘Ask the herder, why not? And if he accepts, tell him I’ll pay his night’s lodging along with the stabling costs for that ornery witch of a pony.’

  Day spilled like molten gold across Eltair Bay, the long, slanting rays of early sunlight nicked through racing bands of wind-torn, low-bellied clouds. Yet Morriel Prime had no care for the magnificence of the view outside the open curtains of her palanquin. Still laced with the damp of yesterday’s driving storm, the cold bit like a flayer’s knife. Yet anger, more than the frost in the air, flushed the ancient Prime’s nose a brilliant pink. Her black eyes narrowed, couched amid rice-paper wrinkles of displeasure as she snapped a command for her bearers to halt on the verge.

  The column of her escort bunched into a racketing snarl as wagons, sumpter mules, and her mounted escort came to a disorderly stop on the steep, rutted track leading into the mountains from Highscarp.

  Morriel’s querulous demand sliced through the jingle of bits, and creaking axles, and the thin, lonely cries of the marsh birds flocking the misted flats at the bayside. ‘Send a circle of six seniors to my side, now!’

  A towheaded page boy darted from the shade of the palanquin to gather the peers she required.

  Morriel waited, her delicate, claw hands clenched to an obsidian scrying ball. The stone’s glassy surface imprinted no natural reflections. Instead of plain sky, or the brightening light sequined over the shifting, gray waters to the east, its black depths showed a scene like an etching stippled in silvered shadows and moving smoke.

  In colorless mime between the Prime’s palms, a black-haired boy and a surly-faced captain at arms circled, feinted, and crossed swords in a match fight. Above the ghostly and flickering ranks of agitated spectators reared the queer, gabled roofs with stone carvings and talisman dragons that distinguished the city of Daenfal.

  ‘Imbecile boy!’ Morriel muttered. Although she had provoked his departure from Araethura as a ploy to unbalance Lirenda, this prank outpaced expectations. She fumed in searing, helpless impatience, while her summons traveled the length of her train and brought robed seniors indecorously scurrying from the comfort of their enclosed wagons. Ill at ease in the wilds, they stumbled in soft shoes over the loose stones and snagged their red-bordered hems in dead burdock.