by Janny Wurts
The dilemma bequeathed him by Faery-toes had long since ceased to seem funny.
In the beleaguered light shed by one candle, the mayor's dais and desk loomed over the prisoner's dock, a marble edifice of gothic carvings and fluted supports and grotesque, hunch-backed caryatids, whose suffering poses were painted in shadows like scenes from Sithaer's bleak pits. The air smelled of wax, of parchment, of the dried citrus peel and Shandian spices used to overpower the stink of condemned men kept chained in straw acidified with rat urine. Behind the prisoners' enclosure, board benches lined the rear wall. On these gathered complainants in clean shirts and scrubbed boots; also the wives, the relations and the long-suffering friends of the day's accused, to wait in fidgeting silence. The curious came too, but unobtrusively. In Jaelot, a loquacious jailer told Dakar, a beggar who had taken illicit shelter in the Mayor's courtroom had lost all his fingers as punishment.
In this chamber, a merciful sentence might be a swift beheading; a severe one, a dismemberment, or breaking on the wheel before burning. Dakar shifted from foot to foot in an attempt to ease the drag of the chain; the unending bite of fetters whose steel, to one of magetrained sensitivity, scoured the awareness with the tang of past misery and old blood.
Self-contained in his distress, he noted little beyond the glowering arrival of the millwork's wronged carter; still, the benches were not empty of friends.
Halliron Masterbard had come, dressed in all the splendour of his rank. From the depths of the gloom, his neat cloak and slashed doublet of black watered silk lined in saffron shimmered like flame with caught light. Topaz studs and gold ribbon sparked and flashed in wry and stabbing satire, perhaps, that the mayor's state colours were the same. Stationed at his side, Medlir wore brown broadcloth, a modest brooch at his collar.
The carillons that signalled the hour boomed faintly down from the bell tower. Aching and irritable, Dakar endured the arrival of Jaelot's Lord Mayor with a dawning sense of the absurd. He had seen a high king's ceremonial open with less pomp.
The hall doors boomed back, held by bowing servants in sable livery. Halberdiers in black armour marched in double files, followed by pageboys who unreeled goldedged carpet, emblazoned each yard with Jaelot's snakebearing lions. A girl in a hooped farthingale fringed with jingling bullion chains strewed hothouse roses from a basket. She was trailed by two braces of secretaries in wool robes cuffed with marten, then their serving boys, bearing satchels and writing papers furled in yellow ribbon. Next, the judiciary, robed in black velvet and white ermine, and wearing a mitred felt cap edged with moth-eaten braid; the city alderman, burdened down like a moulting crane in layers of brocade and ruffled cuffs. After these, soft as pudding, the city's vaunted mayor, who swayed at each step, his voluminous robe billowed off his padded shoulders like sails let free of their sheetlines.
Forced to duck as a rose struck his face, Dakar stared in amazement as the processional ended. Like trained bears, the players arrayed themselves on the dais. There should have been music, he thought, as the flower maid emptied her basket in the precinct of the mayor's chair, and the boys unpacked the scribes' satchels as if laying a cloth for a picnic. The halberdiers dressed weapons with a clang of gold gauntlets, and the tubby mayor berthed himself in his overstuffed throne of state.
Beaked as a vulture beneath his tatty hat, the judiciary rattled a triangle and pronounced, 'The Jaelot City Court is in session.'
The alderman unrolled a list on parchment and called out Dakar's name.
'Well, thank Ath, we're first,' the Mad Prophet cracked in dry relief.
Two unamused men at arms who did not wear costly gauntlets caught him under the armpits, hauled him forward and threw him face-down before the dais.
There he was held by two booted feet pressed solidly into his shoulderblades. The alderman cleared his throat, pushed a spidery set of spectacles up his nose, and recited the list of offences: disruption of the city peace; obstruction of the public thoroughfare; wilful damage to the mayor's property; interference with commerce; negligent handling of horseflesh; and lastly, insolence to officers while in custody.
'What do you plead?' The judiciary peered over his spiked and scented beard at the accused crushed prone on the floor.
His jaw jammed against cold granite, Dakar tugged a breath into compressed lungs and swore. 'Impertinence while in court,' the alderman droned. Like synchronized vultures, four near-sighted secretaries dipped quills and scribbled the addition to their documents.
'Fiends and Dharkaron's vengeance!' Dakar pealed. 'What wilful damage? You saw my horse. Did Faery-toes look at all like the sort to attack passing drays out of hand? Ath's own patience, you'd kick something yourself, if some lout hauled off and rammed his fist in your ribs!'
On the benches, the Carter gritted sturdy teeth and restrained himself from springing to his feet to cry protest. Caught up in its rut of due process, the court continued with the prisoner.
'Insolence to superiors,' said the alderman, displaying an unfortunate lisp, while the pens of the secretaries twitched and scratched.
The mayor stifled a yawn and eased the silver-tipped laces on his waistcoat. 'I never saw your beast.' In tones of boredom marred by faint shortness of breath, he admitted, 'My wife was the one out in the carriage. The moulding was cut to satisfy her whim. Its destruction has left her indisposed. As the horse's owner, you are responsible for its unprovoked fit. Since the question of innocence does not arise on that charge, your punishment must recompense the lady's losses.'
The Carter could no longer contain himself. 'Does my team and dray count for nothing? Two of my horses are lame, and wheelwright's services are dear!'
'Be still.' The judiciary looked up from adjusting his rings. 'City justice must be satisfied before any appeal for compensation can be opened.'
Hot and fuming in his town clothes, the Carter sat down. Halliron looked deadpan, a sign of irritation; Medlir's bemusement masked disgust.
Pressed still to the floor, his face twisted sideways and his hair rucked up like a snarl of wind-twisted bracken, Dakar rolled his eyes at the crick that plagued his neck. Heartily tired of embracing clammy stone, he followed the proceedings with difficulty.
An exchange between the city alderman and the primfaced judiciary again roused the pens of the secretaries. Nibs scratched across parchment like the scurry of roaches, and a pageboy jangled the triangle to some unseen administrative cue.
'Guilty on all counts.' The judiciary produced a flannel handkerchief and honked to clear his nose. Then he adjusted his hat and tipped his undershot chin toward the alderman.
'A fine and six months on the labour gang,' that official pronounced, then followed with a sum a prince would be beggared to pay.
'You already confiscated my saddle bags!' Dakar yelped in outrage. 'You'll know I don't carry any coin.'
'You're not lacking friends.' The mayor swivelled porcine eyes toward the elegant figure of the Masterbard. 'They may balance the debt for you, should they be so inclined. It is to them you must now beg for clemency.'
'They have nothing to do with me,' Dakar insisted between frog-flop attempts to wiggle free.
The Lord Mayor raised his eyebrows. 'Then what brings them to Jaelot?'
'You speak of Halliron Masterbard and his apprentice.' Dakar stopped struggling, appalled to unwonted seriousness. 'They ask nothing more than license to practise their art. There's not a town anywhere that wouldn't welcome their presence.'
The alderman's fishy eyes completed their inventory of glittering silk and cut topaz. 'Is this true?'
Halliron swept to his feet. In a voice burred rough by his cough, but modulated to lyrical acidity, he said, 'What's true is that no man alive owns the sum Jaelot's court of justice sees fit to demand.' The barbed threat of satire behind his inflection rang without echo into silence.
The Lord Mayor fluttered a hand in capitulation. 'Well then. We'll mediate the sentence, naturally. Since my lady was the party offended, it's fitting
that she gain compensation. The spoiled moulding cost four hundred royals, true-silver. The carter's list of damages will be compiled and paid off to the penny. The city's fine I will waive on this condition: that Halliron Masterbard entertain my lady's guests at the feast upon mid-summer solstice.' A glistening, toothy smile parted the mayor's lips. 'License to practise your art, if you will, before this city's finest. If your playing matches your reputation, no doubt, folk of pedigree will shower their gold at your feet. You might even earn a tidy profit.'
Medlir's lightning surge to arise was stopped by a feather touch from the bard.
From the floor, Dakar gagged in strangled outrage. 'That's rank insult.'
The secretaries' nibs scraped through a poisonous silence. Halliron, white hair thrown back, light eyes fixed on a point midway between ceiling groins and dais, said nothing. Medlir's poised stillness showed tension more appropriate to a swordsman than a singer, while the halberdiers who were not one whit ceremonial shifted their balance to readiness.
Strangely desperate, Dakar said, 'Don't answer. I don't require it.'
'What bargains you strike between yourselves are entirely your personal affair.' The mayor parked his hands amid the foamy lace of his waistcoat. 'The city's terms will stand: either pay the fine or render performance, with enforced restriction to remain inside city walls until the terms of the sentence are met. You have seven days in which to give your decision.'
At the edge of the candle's pooled light, the judiciary's smirk flashed like the teeth of a feeding shark. 'Set the record.' His attention brushed Halliron, then bent dismissively to share his amusement with the alderman. 'It's a convenient arrangement, since the offender's stint at forced labour will expire near the same date.' To the bard, he added gently, 'Of course you could decline the option. Your companion would then languish in prison till he dies, or his debt to Jaelot is paid.'
On the dais, a striker flared in a scribe's veined hand. The scent of heated wax curled through the smell of roses, the tang of stale citrus and the unwashed heat of despair that clung to the prisoners uneasily awaiting their turn at trial. The secretaries raised sharp knives and busily resharpened their pens, while the alderman brandished the city seal and impressed Jaelot's lions on four documents.
'Case dismissed,' intoned the judiciary.
The carter pressed forward to cite his damages, while before the marble dais, the men at arms hoisted Dakar upright by his manacles and towed his bulk from the hall. Stumbling and wordless, the insouciance of yesterday bled out of him, he never once turned his head in appeal; while Halliron and Medlir made swift departure through the crooked stair that led upward into the daylight.
* * *
Later, in a dingy garret room where winter winds tore at loose slates, and draughts flowed and creaked through the gaps in warped shutters, Medlir sat over a mug of spiced wine, his flattened hands tapping a jig tune on the chipped and dingy porcelain. 'Will you let him off ?'
'Was there ever any question?' Four hundred and sixty royals of their store of coin had already been dispatched to the lumber mill and the wheelwright's coffers. Halliron sat on the pallet opposite, swathed in quilts and coach rugs taken from the pony cart's baggage. The inn's bedclothes had been banished into care of the laundress; if this establishment maintained any servant to fill the post. Scraping an idle fingernail through the grime on the bed boards, Halliron was inclined to think not. 'Your obligation to Asandir must take precedence.'
Medlir jerked his chin up. 'It does not.' The fluttering tallow dip underlit his face, lending baleful emphasis to his anger. 'The Fellowship sorcerers would agree. Your business is in Shand, not in mending the Mad Prophet's excesses.'
Halliron tisked gently. His slow grin unveiled gapped front teeth. 'I can teach you as readily here as in the south. Shand can wait.'
'If six months in Jaelot doesn't contrive to ruin us both.' Medlir's veneer of irritation dissolved as he arose to add billets to the ill-vented hearth, burned down to a smouldering, sullen bed of coals that belched smoke at each breath of wind. As the new wood caught, he sighed. 'All of this concerns my life before I accepted your apprenticeship. I'd rather you weren't burdened.'
'You're more to me, now, than an apprentice.' Fresh flame curled up, laying a bronze patina over the spidertracks of wrinkles that scored the bard's skin, and gilding age-chiselled face-bones still windburned from the open road. 'And anyway, you're the one most inconvenienced. I shouldn't care to stand in your shoes when the Mad Prophet discovers you've deceived him.'
His back turned, Medlir shrugged. 'Forced labour won't give him much chance.'
Eyes clear as sky studied the tension in the younger man's shoulders; noted the absorbed, almost desperate focus he bent upon the slate apron beneath his boots. As if his eyes could see into soot-dusted, grainy layers of stone, and perceive the dance and spark of primal energies that laced its matter into being; as indeed, Halliron knew, they once had, before raw abuse of such powers in Deshir's defence had raised barriers. A mage once trained to know the mysteries was unlikely to forget the awesome, wild winds of destruction a binding of unmaking could unleash. Backlash and scarring had rendered the spirit blind and mute.
With a gentleness roughened by the congestion in his chest, the bard said, 'Be patient. The sight will come back to you. Nature offers more than one path to perception, and your musical gifts may grow to compensate.'
The one who named himself Medlir raised hands to cover his face, the beaded ends of unstrung laces swinging and tapping against his knees. He crouched so for a long moment, then gathered himself, stood up, and turned toward his master an expression of unspeakable pain. 'I've felt the power stir in snatches, an echo here and there between notes.' His frustration revealed his difficulty, that he could not accustom himself to the change. The energies he had studied as pure spirit light felt indecipherably strange, transliterated to vibration and sound.
Halliron's smile held bedrock firmness. 'Well, work at it. Six months in Jaelot will certainly leave you the time.' The Masterbard's apprentice returned a clipped sigh and bent to unwrap the lyranthe. He extended a foot in a swordsman's move and hooked the chamber's one stool. Its broken brace scarcely troubled his poise as he perched on the rat-chewed rush seat.
'Give me the Ballad of Taerlin Waters,' Halliron said. 'Mind you don't slur the runs in the third bar, or the grace notes that lead into the chorus.'
Medlir flicked back the untied gusset of his cuffs to free his fingers for tuning; here, where disguise was not needed, firelight caught raw and red on a scar that grooved the flesh in a half-twist from right palm to elbow. The hair that fronded his cheek as he bent to the sweet ring of strings was no longer the bland, ash brown Dakar knew, but glossy black as chipped coal.
His eyes, when he finally raised them to sing, were as penetrating a green as the royal ancestor whose natural looks he had inherited.
Links
Before the spring winds thaw the Mathorn Pass, Lysaer s'Ilessid, Prince of the West, rides out at the head of a cavalcade bound for ruined Avenor, his fair betrothed at his side; with him, under heavy escort of Etarran men at arms and ex-mercenaries sworn to feal service, travel a hundred wains bearing funds for his city's restoration, and tapestries, chests, fine furnishings and the jewels apportioned as his lady's dowry ...
The journey of the royal retinue is marked by covert bands of scouts who relay word through messengers to the borders of Rathain and beyond; until news of Lysaer's movement is shared by clansmen who muster in deep, hidden glens against the day that Prince Arithon may have need of them ...
On the east facing-wall of Jaelot, whipped by cold airs off the bay, the man who is prince and fugitive, Master of Shadow and Masterbard's apprentice, sends a request intended for Sethvir, Fellowship sorcerer and Warden of Althain Tower; and his missive is not scribed on parchment, but in his own blood upon a flake of slate that he dries over live flame, then tosses into the heaving breakers at high tide ...
III. FIRST
INFAMY
Committed as an impulsive donation by Etarra's Governor Supreme to the ruined city Prince Lysaer undertook to restore, Lord Diegan, ex-commander of the garrison, sat his glossy bay warhorse and glared through the pennons that cracked at the head of the unwieldy column bound for Avenor. The gusts off the Mathorn's high slopes still bit like midwinter; as unforgiving were Lord Diegan's eyes, bleak and flat as black ice.
He wore the trappings of an Etarran dandy; intrigue still drove him as naturally as each drawn breath, but five summers spent in the wilds on campaign against forest barbarians had tempered him. He knew when boldness would not serve him. Yet masterfully as a man could contain himself, last night's argument had flared too hotly to be masked behind banality. Lord Diegan found himself glaring once again at the blond-haired prince who rode to his left.
Clad for travel in blue-dyed suede and a cloak of oiled wool, his hair like combed flax under the gold-stitched velvet of his hat, Lysaer s'Ilessid adjusted his reins in gloved hands and suddenly, generously smiled. Still looking forward, as if the roadway behind were not packed with a chaos of groaning, creaking wagons and the whip snaps and epithets of bored carters, he said, 'Still angry? At least that way you'll keep warm.'
Too raw not to rise to provocation, Diegan felt his horse startle and jig. Annoyed to have dug in a thoughtless spur, he snapped, 'I still can't believe you're dragging my sister Talith into this.'
Lysaer turned his head. Eyes as brilliant as glacial ice touched Diegan, then flicked away. 'Be careful. Don't let me think you believe I take her so lightly as to cast her into needless danger.'
Had Diegan not needed both hands to settle his sidling mount, he could have struck the prince in exasperation. 'Ah, Ath, why won't you listen?' No need to repeat those facts already thrashed through: that town mayors in the kingdom of Tysan had never seen the horrors of the Shadow Master's powers; to them the massacre that broke an army in Strakewood forest was history told at second hand. Of more immediate concern were the fragmented archives which survived the ancient uprising that first overthrew Athera's high kings. If few guilds and merchants recalled the truth, that the same barbarian clans who plundered their trade goods once had ruled their cities, Erdane's mayor was not among them. Scathing letters from his barristers on the subject outlined the ramifications: s'Ilessid blood made Lysaer the last legitimate royal heir and no city in Tysan cared to risk a return to crown rule.