by Janny Wurts
'Your Grace of Rathain?' someone ventured in cautious response from a nearby screening of pine boughs.
'None other.' Poised, yet not smiling, Arithon dropped his cloak. Clad in hose, wet suede boots, and a nondescript jerkin, he was not armed. Though the Paravian blade would have affirmed his identity, his sheathed weapon and baldric had been left in the hands of his flaxen-haired liegeman.
The signal was silent. But twenty archers in plain leathers emerged from the wood with scarcely a rustle of evergreen. Mostly men, but not all; in clan fashion, some of the young women bore arms. Their bows were nocked with plain arrows and primed to be drawn at fast notice. Bristled with swords, long knives, and packed quivers, the party was winter lean and fit as a wolf pack gathered to hunt down rough quarry.
'I've seen head-hunters carry less bloodthirsty steel,' said Arithon in tacit greeting. Apparently careless, he hooked up his mantle and shook out the chaff of caught pine needles.
His nonchalant manner did not ease strained diplomacy. The bearded scout who stepped to the fore raked his person with tigerish appraisal. He noted the presence of the made double. His wary glance jumped as Dakar stirred behind. But the fat prophet only raised placating hands and parked his panting bulk on a deadfall.
Mindful of a past hot reception dealt him by the High Earl of Alland, Arithon draped the cloak back over his frame and offered his upturned wrist. 'What must I do to convince you I'm honest, or is Erlien lining his treasury for bounty gold?'
The circle of archers remained at the ready, while their spokesman accepted the courtesy. 'Nothing so shady as double cross, your Grace, though the price on your head defies reason.' The exchanged clasp of amity was brisk. 'This foray's been pulled off of an ambush gone bad. We're moving north, and in a smart hurry. The road will be crawling with townsmen by noon. Jumpy as wall-eyed ponies, the lot. They're wont to shoot crossbolts at bushes through each twitching change in the breeze.'
Arithon raised his eyebrows. 'The bullion train out of Atchaz, I hope? Or else, Ath on earth, I should worry in fact? It's Erlien's avarice after all?'
The scout loosened to wry laughter. 'Damn the Light's tribute. We were sent to snatch silk. Would've gotten it, too! Except the forsaken guild caravan chose to join up with the mayor's guard at Sanshevas. We still could have raided. Mind you, the goods would have gained a few blood-stains. We're not squeamish, your Grace. But the cloth's for a wedding. Lord Erlien wanted it clean.'
'No titles,' said Arithon. 'The formality's tiresome, and Dakar's too hot to stay thirsting for beer on a pine-log.'
Vhandon and Talvish were beckoned forward and introduced. Throughout, the taut scouts held their stance with raised bows. If they marvelled, wide-eyed, at Fionn Areth's resemblance, their predator's vigilance kept Arithon's paired liegemen drawn to the edge of snapped nerves. Caught in between, the Mad Prophet strove to disarm the cranked mood of hostility. 'Who's marrying? Not Erlien.'
While the female scouts masked their reproving grins, the touchy clan spokesman affirmed, 'Not Erlien.' His following gesture relaxed the scouts. Through the rustle as nocked arrows were slipped from gut-strings, he expounded, 'Our High Earl's got mistresses who'd have his head if he favoured one woman over the rest. They've all borne him children. It's his youngest son, Kyrialt, whose saucy wench has demanded a bride-gift of silk.'
From the side-lines, another scout snipped, 'The High Earl's sprig is a feisty stud, to think he'll hobble that vixen's feckless temperament!'
'She's a gamine?' asked Arithon, rapt as he sized up the company Shand's High Earl had dispatched to meet him. 'You'd think a few blood-stains would heighten the sport.'
The onlooking clanborn turned their heads, fast.
'Sport, is it?' Lithe and dark, and hackled to peppery pride, their spokesman narrowed his nailing regard. He had piercing eyes. Grey as pressed ice, they fixed on the prince. 'With a round hundred lancers in the vanguard alone? Sixty-four foot, the best half packing cross-bows. That's without counting the outriders consigned with the caravan guard. Their trackers wear head-hunter's badges from Ganish. They go nowhere without four dozen diligent fellows scouring the brush on the flanks at the front and rear. Erlien mentioned that you could be difficult. But how many dead would a visiting prince care to
(bring to the feast on the eve of his lordship's son's wedding?' Dakar remarked from the side-lines, 'Even for bullion, that many men seems an excessive protection.' A fresh tear in his breeches had made him reappraise the wisdom of sitting on deadfalls. Sidled in closer, he overheard the exchange with ever-increasing suspicion. He knew that bear-baiting style too well; had observed too many men being expertly tuned for who knew what guileful purpose.
'Try amethysts,' said Arithon, stripped of smiling charm. 'Mined from the Tiriacs by a rogue prospector who neglected to honour the principles of land rights. Difficult, surely? And Lord Erlien's charge, since the offender has crossed his ill-gotten gains into Shand.'
'By Ath! How'd you know this?' Flustered to shock, the scout spokesman reddened.
The seething mutters exchanged by his company gave rise to a dissident voice. 'There's a crook in the road not two leagues distant that we could have primed with an ambush. Looted minerals, you say? For this, we'd have dug a pit trap with stakes, scalpers with cross-bows or not!'
'Leash that! We're too sorely outnumbered.' To the prince's gadding comment, the scout spokesman explained, 'Our crowd of crack bowmen was sent back to camp. We could thwart the horsemen through a covert strike from the bluff. But without heavy cover and dense flights of arrows in support, we'd be dead meat the moment we moved onto the roadway to rifle the carts.'
The affable interest on Arithon's features chased a grue through Dakar's bones. Talvish and Vhandon stirred, touched uneasy, which in turn cued Fionn Areth.
'These guards,' pressed the Master of Shadow, conversational. 'Do they travel in state?'
To his left, a wiry scout bowman spat. 'With the tribute chests for the Light, bound to Southshire? You're kidding. They're flagged and tasselled and prinked for the ball-room, except the damned weapons are lethal.'
The threatened smile gave rise to a chuckle that caught the clan reivers aback. 'I'd hand you that silk,' said Rathain's brash prince. 'And the looted stones, too, without any-one pricking a finger. Are you up to the challenge?'
The lead scout stared back, breathless. 'The bride's name is Glendien, and she'll hack your bollocks to mincemeat for sure.' He eyed the slight frame of the royal before him, still trying to measure the fitness beneath the unassuming, loose shirt. 'That's if Kyrialt doesn't dismember you first, for starting a war on his wedding day.'
'No deaths,' promised Arithon. 'Every townsman who marched from Sanshevas this morning will be left hale enough to salve his disgrace in the arms of the harlots at Southshire.'
The clan spokesman shifted his piercing regard. To Vhandon, whose greying hair and old scars suggested more sober experience, he questioned, 'Your liege is delirious?'
'Moonstruck? Not in this case.' The veteran swordsman nodded towards Talvish, whose long fingers were tapping a fretful tattoo on the held scabbard of Arithon's sword. 'We were Duke Bransian's, before we swore oath to Rathain. Though we serve here by choice, the Sorcerer Luhaine was the one who passed us the appeal for the violation done in the Tiriacs. Our liege plans to answer. If you don't come along, I can assure you, he's committed enough to finish the errand alone.'
Talvish broke in, off-handedly mocking. 'As you see, he's born reckless, and mettlesome, besides. Why leave him to claim all the glory?'
Which vaunted dare, no young creature from Alland could pass off. Not in front of five cheeky foreigners whose pressuring taunts tossed them the rank provocation. The clan spokesman returned a caustic grin. 'West,' he said briskly. 'Better not regret. If the fat prophet lags, we'll have no choice but to leave him.'
The company of scouts coalesced and moved out, swift as wraiths through the resinous shade of the forest. Fionn Areth earned their jeeri
ng comment as his footfalls snapped twigs, with Talvish's tirades in his defence giving even their raffish tongues pause. Arithon's tread made no sound on the matted needles, and his eyes, like sheared emerald, watched everything. 'Why are you conniving?' Dakar pressured point-blank. A low branch hooked his beard. He clawed the sprig off, puffing at a short-strided trot in his effort to stay abreast.
The Prince of Rathain flashed him a fathomless glance. The quiet in him was a fearsome force since his return from the maze under Kewar. Deepened into a secretive well, his presence seemed immutable as the patriarch pines, whose moss-hoary trunks wore a silence to outlast the snags of mortality. 'A bride-gift,' was Arithon's simplistic reply. But from him, such self-honesty always raised far more goading questions than answers.
If the rushed pace was meant to defuse the madcap thrust of the enterprise, the tactic fell short. The prince's two liegemen proved as fit as steel nails, and his young double, too pridefully game to give way. Dakar stayed the course from tenacious concern for the havoc he hoped to subdue. Arithon himself kept his jocular spirits. The scurrilous tales he shared with the clan archers provoked groans, which devolved into breathless, choked laughter.
'A damned masterbard's memory,' Dakar groused, sorely tried, his arms crossed to clamp down a chuckle. Even to his jaundiced ear, the collection of gossip was dazzling.
Wiser than before, Fionn Areth said nothing. Padding at heel behind Vhandon and Talvish, he watched the slight man who wore his mirrored face use bold humour to refigure the archers' distrust. The method held a certain deft familiarity. With engaging skill, Arithon tried the Shandian scouts, sparking their differences of character and temperament much as he had done with the Evenstar's sail crew. His teasing barbs, in fact, were not playful. Inside an hour, he must weave this band's loyalty into a force that would risk life and limb at a word.
For the smallest misjudgement must surely tempt fate; the mistake enacted by one hesitation would bring down the hornet's nest on them. Cold sober amid the snatched bursts of hilarity, Vhandon admitted the odds of assaulting the caravan were tantamount to a suicide. He did not appear unduly concerned, which drew tacit inquiry from one of the female archers.
'This isn't about killing,' Talvish agreed. 'Yon prince has his ways. He'll shred your nerves, easily, six times in a day But he doesn't go back on his promises.'
They reached the sand bluffs with an hour to spare, a reckoning that would be reliable. Selkwood's clansmen knew the habits of every road-master plying the coast-road from Sanshevas to Southshire. Sprawled in the shaded brush at the crest, and avid as weasels awaiting their moment to fall on the boastful fox, they watched Arithon s'Ffalenn size up the terrain. They noted the fact he took nothing for granted, but tested the dry, crumbled slope for assurance the footing would be a hindrance to horseflesh. His prowling assessed the sun angle and vantage, then measured the curve of the road-bed below. Immersed in their bristling, insular silence, the scouts approved: his activity did not hush the scrape of the crickets. His soft step left the weeds undisturbed. The clan spokesman dispatched a fleet messenger and another hidden observer, with instructions to keep watch past the western rise. Then he hooked a brown, callused thumb through his belt, obstructively primed to thrash every detail of the prince's forthcoming deployment.
Contrariwise, Arithon suggested the interim amusement of a high-stakes contest of darts.
The archers were thunderstruck. Arrived on location, they expected the tight planning that trade-marked a successful foray. Shown this dismissive, frivolous attitude, their morale devolved to disgust. The Master of Shadow, oblivious, began naming tree knots for targets. Head bare, cloak discarded, he paced out distances and set the lines. Talvish looked on with impervious jade eyes. Of Vhandon, standing with folded arms, somebody asked, breathless, if his Grace was light-witted, or drunk.
A splutter of laughter greeted the jibe.
Arithon gave back his effusive amusement. 'A splendid idea, if we had any beer. Perhaps we should start? Or we won't have the time to settle our bets on the champion.' From inside his jerkin, he produced a wrapped bundle, which, unrolled, contained twelve feathered darts. He passed three to Fionn Areth. 'First round at ten yards. Show these infants what fibre you're made of?'
His double flushed with surprise and accepted. Fionn's style turned out to be enviously precise. Shown a calm disregard for their festering contempt, and left with a score that would tax the steadiest eye of their favourite, the scouts joined the match out of devilment. Their first man threw well, and their second, still better. Pitched to simmering curiosity, their spokesman held back. He would wait to see how this prince caught their back-lash when the caravan appeared with its escort of three hundred strong.
Fionn Areth lost at darts when the winded look-out' arrived to announce the approach of the cavalcade, and a negligent throw by Rathain's prince as he turned capped the Araethurian's score by a point. The nettled clansmen closed in a tight ring, as the quarry's deployment was mapped in detail. Arithon heard. His dark head stayed bent, his down-turned gaze fixed on the ground without focus. Dakar, who owned mage-sight, saw past daft distraction and noted a man who listened with more than his five mortal senses.
'Watch out for the lancers. They're hot, but not drowsy,' the impertinent runner summed up. 'Their mounts still act fresh. The stinging flies will be keeping them restive, never mind that the league out of Ganish won't hire themselves out to nurse-maid a trained pack of fools.'
Arithon stirred. Ten to the cart-load with a round fifty, slogging at head and tail. The league scouts are the problem. Dakar, you'll divert them? Something petty that sends them astray. Sun in the eyes? A snakes' den in the rocks? I won't need even ten minutes.'
If mirth still threatened the ghost of a smile, the crisp phrasing redressed the earlier lack of authority. Nor had the contest at darts, after all, been a gambit launched out of whimsy. The six clansmen ranked behind Fionn Areth found themselves called out in succession. Each was issued two darts and told to seek a concealed position at spaced intervals above the highway. There, they would wait upon Arithon's signal.
'Pink the mules where your missiles will cause the least harm. Your task is to incite pandemonium, then to pull back. Under no circumstance will you risk being seen,' Arithon finished off, firm. 'If one of the lancers throws straight with a knife, I won't drag a carcass where a strong back could have been better used to haul booty.'
Released to their posts, the dartmen slipped away through the scrub fringing the rim of the bluff.
The Prince of Rathain made his last dispositions. 'Fionn, your sword will guard Dakar's back. Will someone loan Vhandon and Talvish a bow? They'll shoot to wound on the odd chance any head-hunters blunder through the Mad Prophet's spelled screen of diversion.'
The assigned parties moved out, which sensible bent began to appease the scout spokesman's outraged sensibilities. Rathain's sworn liegemen could be trusted to defend their own. In positions that carried the most critical risks, this prince had not placed his casual reliance upon strangers sized up through banter. The avid pause hung. Wolves on a scent, the rest of AUand's clan company awaited the follow-up plan for the raid.
Yet the Prince of Rathain bestowed no more orders.
The scouts shifted, impatient. They exchanged pointed glances. A few fingered their knives as no further development happened. Arithon stepped to the edge of the bluff without another word spoken. There, he settled, his weathered jerkin melding his form into the patched shade of a thicket.
Left at a loss, the clan spokesman closed in and pushed the exasperated question of tactics. 'A dozen target darts in some mules will leave us the prey of three hundred enraged men-at-arms.' As his pique raised no impact, he flushed slowly scarlet. 'If you've evolved a supporting plan, we're waiting to hear before the damned vanguard's on top of us!'
'Catch the spoils,' said Arithon. Unswerving, his gaze remained on the road. 'You'll need your hands free. The method at hand being an untried experimen
t, the silk you've promised to Kyrialt's bride might wind up wedged in the tree-tops.'
'Dharkaron's black vengeance!' the clan spokesman ranted. 'For this I've left my best bowmen to risk a fatal encounter with scalpers?'
'Risk?' Arithon faced around and encompassed the scouts, now formed into a mutinous cordon. Slightly made, drawn erect, his hands loose at his sides, he displayed unconcern that verged upon lethal insult. 'Your initial objection was bloodshed, I thought? My word as given, those terms won't be compromised.'
Fenced in by stiff silence, the Master of Shadow raised his eyebrows. 'Mounted lancers and men-at-arms travelling in state will not scale a sand scarp for the sake of a few jabbed draft teams. Your companions were told to stay outside harm's way. Do you fear they might compromise orders?'
'What does such a prank have to do with lifting secured goods from the hands of an armed division?' The clan spokesman forestalled several hotheaded scouts, who shoved in a murderous thrust forward. Just as openly cross, he let fly in contempt. 'Your Grace. You cannot expect our score of bowmen to hold open the bleeding breach.'
'I don't.' Arithon's brazen calm was raw flame, to raise hackles and spark conflagration. 'Unless you wish yourselves martyred for no reason at all, you will leave the armed townsmen to me.'
'Arrogant upstart!' The incensed spokesman would end the charade. Prepared to allow his chafed company to draw steel, he issued his final warning. 'You are dangerous, prince! I swear by the forebears who hallowed my lineage, royal bastard or not, the protection you offer is folly. Call off the raid. Stand down and disarm. Or I will cut you off at the knees as a creature who's lost to insanity!'
'Do that!' cracked Arithon. 'For I need to know now whether Erlien's finest have the nerve I will need to curb a false religion without starting a massacre. How long do you think your clans can survive the unified onslaught of Lysaer's new breed of fanatics? Today, I admit, we're redeeming poached crystals. Tomorrow, next week, the stakes are no less than the blood heritage of your families. We are talking the future fate of the free wilds that uphold the compact in Shand.'