Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  A soft sound, to the left, as Sidir responded. He gathered Feithan’s slight form as she swayed, lent the shield of his shoulder, while Jeynsa uncoiled and rose to full height, untamed as a wounded lioness. ‘Then where is his Grace? Why is he not here? Why are you and Luhaine sent to speak in his place?’

  Braggen’s stripped attention stayed on her. ‘His Grace couldn’t,’ he said, numbed. ‘To evade Lysaer’s war host and escape certain doom through the madness of Desh-thiere’s curse, Prince Arithon claimed refuge by entering the maze in the Mathorns.’

  ‘Kewar!’ Sidir was rocked.

  Eriegal stared, aghast, while Feithan pushed straight, and Jeynsa, wild with malice, burst into jagged laughter. ‘Oh, how apt! The score of his blood debts shall kill him, no doubt.’

  But it was Sidir whose grave intellect interpreted Braggen’s strained face. ‘His Grace hasn’t died, has he?’

  The Companion shook his head, anguished. ‘In fact, he survived. I’ve been charged to bring word by the Fellowship Sorcerers. The Prince of Rathain withstood the harsh challenge. His Grace is fit, and still sane.’

  ‘And?’ whispered Eriegal, as the pause grew prolonged.

  ‘Barach should hear this,’ Feithan broke in.

  Yet Jeynsa’s merciless, challenging stare impelled the reluctant answer.

  ‘The last living blood of Rathain has been granted sanctuary, embraced by the old code of guest welcome. His haven is Kewar, and his host is no less than the Sorcerer, Davien the Betrayer.’

  ‘A fine, abrasive pair they will make,’ Jeynsa snapped. ‘I wish I could be there to watch the fur fly as they tear each other to ribbons.’ She spun and stalked out, just barely careful to mask the light as she pushed through the door flap.

  The shocked quiet lingered, a speechless abyss: the last survivor of Rathain’s royal line remained with the renegade Sorcerer. Davien, whose incentive had fomented rebellion, raised the towns, and broken the rule of the high kings over five hundred years ago.

  Against cracking tension, Eriegal moved, crossed the lodge, and rescued the forgotten tray of refreshments. Braggen accepted the brandy thrust into his hand. Then he watched, brooding, as Feithan was coaxed to a seat on Sidir’s dauntless insistence.

  She looked frail as cut paper, though her hands, bare of rings, did not tremble. As Eriegal poured a cup for her, Braggen spoke with a tact he had never possessed. ‘No, lady. You will not apologize for Jeynsa’s behaviour.’

  ‘Her defiance is setting a terrible precedent.’ Feithan sighed. ‘Ath knows, we’ve all tried. I can’t make her listen.’

  ‘Prince Arithon will handle her,’ Sidir assured, the wing of white in his hair a moonlit patch against darkness. His words offered hope. Of the four who remained, he knew the prince best, having shared the harrowing campaign in the mountains at Vastmark.

  Braggen knocked back his drink. Yet no fire in his belly could warm his heart. He had too much to say: the uneasy details that had allowed Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn to evade certain death inside Lysaer’s closed cordon. The Companion who had partnered his Grace must choose whether to disclose the last words exchanged between prince and sworn liegeman, and whether to reveal the tenacious desperation behind Earl Jieret’s terrible sacrifice. Until Barach arrived, and while Feithan regained her composure, Braggen sat with his forehead laid on his fist. Quiet, among friends, he wished he was numb. The trophy foxtail stayed tied to his belt, promised but not delivered to Jeynsa by the father lost in Daon Ramon. Who had broken the heart of his youthful successor because he had commanded another to stand in his place and, inevitably, had not come home.

  Summer 5670

  Home Port

  The merchant brig, Evenstar sheared into Innish, crammed with barrels of dried orange peel, Elssine steel, and candied peaches from the orchards of Durn. She was warped to the dock, while the shore factor’s stevedores called ribald comments, half-naked in midsummer heat. They waited, observing with ferret-sharp eyes, while the brig’s well-disciplined crew raised her hatches to unlade her hold.

  Yet the slim, blonde captain who incited their best gossip had already gone, whisked ashore from the anchorage by the oars of a lighterman. While her first mate settled affairs at the wharf, Feylind rushed up the stairs to her brother’s office, a garret-room set above the tenements and shop-fronts overlooking Innish’s harbour. She found the door locked. Scarcely pausing for expletive, she hammered the oak panel.

  ‘Fiark! I know you’re in there!’

  Her brother’s voice answered, nonplussed, through her racket. ‘No, Feylind. Don’t bother. I’m not going to burst myself arguing, and you’re sailing upcoast beyond Shand. There is famine. I have signed the lading bills to send succour. The shore warehouse already holds your next cargo. My secretary’s primed with the tax-stamped documents, at the custom-house to receive you.’

  Shut out in the musty dark of the corridor, Feylind howled a filthy word through her teeth.

  ‘Beans,’ her twin spoke back in rejoinder. ‘Also salt pork in barrels, dried corn, and flour. Spirits and wine—because of rains and flooding, the low-country cisterns have become uselessly tainted. Children have sickened. You’ll be carrying medicinals. Oh yes, and some nets of fresh limes, dropped by fast galley from Southshire.’

  Feylind smiled like lightning unleashed. Captain to a crew of twenty, all male, she unslung her boarding axe and let fly. Moulding and varnish smashed to uncivil splinters as she razed off the outside latch.

  ‘Feylind, you maniac!’

  The lock turned with alacrity. Sunk steel was wrenched from its setting as Fiark jerked open the mangled panel. Feylind immediately began her next stroke. As the door swung wide, the raised blade topped its arc. She snapped her wrists; changed its falling trajectory.

  The haft left her hands, and the edged helve impaled in the rim of her brother’s desk. Quill-pens fluttered air-borne. Stacked ledgers toppled. Piles of correspondence disgorged their lead weights, and sluiced in white sheaves to the floor-boards.

  Fiark’s fair brow relaxed. Immaculate in his dark velvet and pale lawn, he sized up his twin sister’s strapping, tanned arms, and the sailor’s slops she wore hacked to frayed threads above bare feet and neatly turned ankles. His sigh masked a smile. ‘After the scars from your hobnailed boots, today’s flourish is scarcely significant.’ He met her eyes, of identical blue. ‘You are not sailing east. King Eldir needs a skilled captain, and Evenstar’s the only bottom we have with no dicey political strings on her registry’

  ‘Bugger that, with a goat,’ Feylind said, furious. ‘You can kiss your High King’s land-lubbing arse! Give him your mouthful of sweet consolation, because I am not sailing to Havish.’

  ‘I will not start a war!’ Fiark snapped. ‘And dare spew that filth to King Eldir’s face, he’d have your tongue for gutter-snipe insolence.’

  Feylind hooked her chapped thumbs in her belt. ‘You know who missed his backup rendezvous at Alestron.’

  Her volatile change in subject need mention no name. Fiark shut his eyes, only half in forbearance. ‘Ath, you’re obsessed.’ Then, ‘Yes, I was aware.’ Without pause to tidy the wreck of his desk, he reached for his key, closed and locked his breached door, and valiantly called for a stand-off. ‘Since the taverns at this hour are too hot for arguing, we’ll discuss the matter at home?’

  ‘Yours?’ Feylind said. ‘Not Mother’s.’

  Fiark grinned. ‘She won’t give up trying to put you in skirts? Or are you concerned that your language will finally hound the poor lady to drink?’

  Feylind laughed. ‘It’s the subject we’re hell-bound to discuss. His affairs. If she overhears us, she’ll have a nerve storm. Last time I spoke of his doings in her kitchen, she doused me down with a milk-pail, then just about dinged me unconscious.’

  ‘Using what? Her straw basket of sewing silk?’ Fiark needled sweetly.

  ‘Sithaer’s raving furies, nothing so kind.’ Feylind pattered down the dim stairway. ‘Mother gives the impre
ssion she’s fifty and frail. But raise her temper, we’re more alike than you know. She went for my nape with her flat-iron.’

  ‘To keep you in the house? And it worked?’ Fiark burst into unbridled delight. ‘Is that why you’re packing your boarding axe? Ath, I wondered. After all, you’re not dressed to repel panting suitors.’

  ‘The ones who pant get my boot in their teeth.’ Paused under the arch at the outer arcade, a flamboyant, slim figure stamped against the glaring noon sunshine, Feylind paused. Her freckled face sobered. ‘With Mother, you don’t get the grace of a warning. I swear I saw swimming lights for a week, with a bump fit to rival a peacock’s egg.’

  In the cool, whitewashed kitchen with its azure tiles, the light fell like rippled water through roundels of glass. Feylind sat at ease at the trestle, a robust toddler astride her bent knee. Summer had bleached the child’s hair from its dark brown to the mixed hues of pulled taffy. His flushed face resembled his pert mother, while the blue eyes that surveyed the ship’s captain, beyond mistake, favoured Fiark.

  ‘That’s not a toy,’ Feylind murmured, prying curious fingers away from the hilt of her rigging knife. ‘Just haul on my earring. There’s a fine little man.’ She grinned as the wife laid out fruit and pale wine. ‘My son’s aboard ship?’

  ‘And your daughter.’ The neat woman smiled. ‘Tharrick took both of them. They were wrecking the peace until they could visit their father.’

  Feylind raised her eyebrows, head tipped to forestall the mauling yank at her ear-lobe. ‘They saw the flags on the custom-house?’

  ‘Flags! They know the lines of a ship and her sail rig,’ Fiark corrected from the side-lines. ‘The boy’s been begging for months to ply his hand at the oar as a lighterman.’

  The wife sat beside him, perhaps to revive the exhausted admonishment, that long since, Feylind should have wed her first mate.

  ‘Don’t start,’ Feylind warned. ‘The randy goat’s already married to Evenstar, besides.’ Her strong hands set down the squirming child, then unsheathed the disputed blade and began to dismember peaches. ‘Our boy’s too young for the lighters, as yet. He could run errands for the chandler’s, if he’s keen. You don’t mind them underfoot?’

  ‘Shore rats.’ Fiark grinned. His elegant, buckled shoes were propped up on a chair seat. Fair-skinned, but without his sister’s lined squint, he leaned back with his collar and doublet unlaced. ‘You’d have them on Evenstar’s deck? The sea’s in their blood, there’s no question.’

  ‘To mimic my sailhands’ randy habits?’ Feylind chuckled. ‘Not on your life. I’d set them a ruinous example as a mother, forbye. No. The pests can stay safe in the nursery with yours.’ She pinned her brother’s sapphire stare. ‘Since, after all, I am not bound for Havish.’

  Fiark’s pigeon of a wife shoved erect and bristled. ‘You promised! No language!’

  Feylind shrugged. ‘That’s up to Fiark. He doesn’t need to provoke me with reasons to go back on my given word.’

  ‘In fact, I must.’ Her brother lunged. Faster than his rich clothing suggested possible, he snatched his son short of his clamber up Feylind’s knee. At his nod, the mother whisked the wailing child out. ‘We’re going to argue in earnest, I see.’

  ‘Argue!’ Feylind glowered like a shark, regretting the axe left behind in the garret office.

  Fiark’s brows were set level, now, as their need to mince pronouns was discarded. ‘Feylind. There were set-backs. Arithon never reached Eltair’s coast. His escape plan from Jaelot met failure.’ He told the rest quickly. ‘His Grace is safe, but holed up in the Mathorns.’

  That Arithon was now the guest of Davien was a fact far too volatile to reveal, given Feylind’s impulsive temperament. In no mood to try her with subtle explanations, Fiark waited, intent.

  When his sister said nothing, he caught her wrist. ‘Feylind, his Grace is safe! I’ve had confirmed word by fast courier, through Atchaz. Dakar and the rescued double are also secure with the s’Brydion at Alestron. That’s a milk run, damn it! A coastal lugger and a hired crew of fishermen can collect the pair, and Khetienn can be flagged down for an off-shore rendezvous.’

  Feylind stared, drained under her sea-going tan. ‘Leaving Arithon land-bound? Merciful death. I can’t bear it!’

  ‘For now,’ Fiark stated. ‘The idea is his choice. I can’t cross his royal will on the matter, and neither can you.’

  When his twin swallowed, anguished, he held his breath, hoping that somehow good sense would prevail.

  ‘The weather’s not canny’ Uncomplacent, Feylind squared her shoulders. ‘They say it’s done nothing but dump rain in the west.’

  Fiark released his sister’s taut limb. Sympathy, from him, would destroy her tough strength. She had not married, as both of them knew, because her unswerving devotion tied her heart to the cause of the Crown Prince of Rathain.

  She stirred finally, stabbed the knife into a melon, and folded her arms at her breast. ‘Why couldn’t his Grace have made me the acting captain of the Khetienn?’ she whispered in plaintive longing.

  Fiark need not answer. The reason was self-evident: Feylind was bound as master to an honest brig because Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had sworn his royal oath not to set her at risk. Once, years ago, a female captain had been killed, mistakenly condemned as the Master of Shadow’s associate. The trumped-up charges had been an act of spite, inflicted by frustrated enemies.

  ‘You would break his heart, sister,’ Fiark said, a quiet truth. Day by day, the Alliance’s influence strengthened. The network of correspondence he handled was becoming increasingly dangerous. ‘You will sail for Havish. There are people suffering. Even as we speak, the Evenstar’s being loaded to relieve them.’

  Feylind reached out and halved the melon, first sign that she might capitulate. Yet her truce held razor-edged warning. ‘There will come a time when the promise his Grace swore to our mother will not be enough to restrain me.’

  Fiark released the pent air in his lungs. His smile was calm, and his eyes, very bright, as their minds at last reached concord. ‘On that day, if it comes, and if his Grace requires your sniping interference, you’ll cast off your hawsers and sail with my whole-hearted backing.’ At her laughing breath, the trade factor who master-minded Arithon’s shoreside affairs let his guarded worry evaporate. ‘You didn’t doubt?’

  ‘Never you,’ Feylind stated. Aware she was hungry, she attacked the hacked melon. ‘Though I wonder sometimes, watching you mince about with your gentrified manners, and your pompous velvets and lace. Let’s see how you manage when Mother grabs for her iron and brains you for keeping dishonest company’

  Not chastened at all, Fiark replied in the fishing-village vernacular of their childhood. ‘Leave mother to Tharrick. It’s the wee snip I married who’s the more apt to snatch her pot-hook and geld me for agreeing to your feckless risks.’

  Summer 5670

  Incursions

  When the Fellowship Sorcerer Kharadmon appeals to Althain Tower for help to curb an invasion of free wraiths that threaten Athera, Sethvir must defer the request, since Luhaine cannot leave the Peaks of Tornir before restraining the Khadrim who fly and slaughter the caravans bearing relief supplies into Camris…

  Snapped awake from a vivid nightmare, the acting steward of Etarra, Raiett Raven, discovers the priest dedicate of the Light lurking next to his bed and muttering queer lines of incantation; ‘A guarding ward to defend against Shadow,’ the robed man declaims, brazenly insisting the irregular intrusion should not merit an instant expulsion…

  Daybreak at Avenor, in distant contact with the same Etarran acolyte, High Priest Cerebeld receives the private sequence of passwords to access Raiett Raven’s established network of spies; immediately after his morning devotions, he applies that suborned resource to his thwarted search after Lysaer’s runaway princess…

  Summer-Autumn 5670

  IV Refuge

  Once Lysaer s’Ilessid recovered his strength, he applied his state influ
ence with muscular will and accessed the vault housing Erdane’s old records. The mouldering texts he perused showed how narrowly close he had brushed with disaster. A friend’s desperate courage had spared him, unscathed. If that depth of loyalty warmed his cold days, his icy resolve only hardened.

  As Prince Exalted, for the common trust, he would see such dark works cleansed from the face of Athera.

  Past solstice, as the flooding rains scoured the fields, and the north winds howled unabated, he took the rote steps that must guard his onward journey to Hanshire. He learned to frame lines of intent by clear thought and to bind his innate autonomy through affirmations. Fear gnawed him to doubt. The power of his naked word felt inadequate as he tired, and the vivid freight of his own memory closed in. Distorted faces sometimes appeared to gibber and leer from the shadows. He memorized Paravian cantrips to stave off the menacing nightmares that shredded his sleep in the chill hours past dark.

  On sobering terms, Lysaer saw where his pride had led him to blinded folly. Sulfin Evend’s insistence on arcane defences had never been empty advice. While the Blessed Prince held his council in diamonds and silk and received the reports from his couriers, the cultists who coveted his influence would not rest. Lysaer brooded less on Shadow and sorcery and more on the treason that stalked his state hall at Avenor.

  He answered correspondence and leaned without mercy upon Erdane’s treasury to regroup his campaign-shattered companies. When the roads dried, and the drays could be moved for supply, he was hale enough to wear armour and sword, and ride, surrounded by the hand-picked cadre of guards Sulfin Evend had detailed to attend him. Protected at night by herb-scented candles, he began his staged journey to Cainford, and thence to a borrowed manor at Mainmere. There, his officers mustered new recruits. Lysaer placated trade ministers, heard the blustering Mayor of Barish, and arranged for state galleys to transport last year’s surplus grain stores. As Tysan’s regent, he invoked martial law to ease shortage as blighted crops failed from the damp.