by Janny Wurts
Jieret bit his lip to stifle his urge to vent curses in mounting anxiety. He waited, taut strung. His eyes like chilled glass from the strain of his unblinking vigil, he picked out a shape distorting the animal's forehand.
The two-legged fugitive moved on foot, a sinuous blur at the horse's left shoulder, his stride like a stalking, male panther's.
Chills chased Jieret's spine. Never in life had he observed any man, scout or otherwise, skulk with such focused intensity. A savage, stripped grace kept each footfall economical; then the listening pause to assess front and back trail, while the gusty, thin snowfall sifted powder over scabs of patched ice, and the fanned clumps of gorse hissed refrain.
A fluid leap vaulted the rider astride, with no fumbling claw for a stirrup. He made no sound, nor delivered a visible signal. Yet his small band of horses forged ahead at an unhurried trot, the crisp crunch as their hooves punched through the snow crust diminished by the reach of Daon Ramon's vast emptiness. Down the throat of the vale, he came on like a predator, every line of him spring-wound to lethal alertness.
Jieret shivered outright. He groped, but found no words to disarm such hunted defenses. One wrong step, a chance rustle of caught brush, would flick such tuned instincts into the hair-trigger reflex of a killer. Heart pounding, he gripped a gloved fist to his sword, prepared for the frightening mischance that he might need to defend himself.
The four horses approached, the mounted one trailing. The man in the saddle stayed pressed to its mane, his presence masked from chance-met sight, and his low profile a foil for enemy archers.
At a distance of fifteen paces, he drew rein. Braced tense, he raised his head. The expression half-glimpsed under the masking, fur hood showed remote, chiseled pallor under the cloud-filtered spill of the moonlight. The face was no man's, but a specter's, pared hollow by privation and burred by the ebon tangles of ungroomed hair and beard.
Caithdein beheld his sworn liege of Rathain, reduced to a shell more unkempt than a starved, wild animal.
A gapped instant passed, wrenched from time and reason by the impact of shock and grief. Undone as he battled a weakness of nerves, Jieret could not command the steeled will to arise. The fear turned him craven, that he might discover the creature before him irretrievably lost, broken by months of desolate flight and abandoned to nightmare insanity.
Then Arithon spoke, his chosen phrase whispered in the Paravian tongue, as though week upon week of forced solitude left him accustomed to addressing ghosts. 'Ean cuel an diansil?' which translated from the most ancient of dialects, Are you one who is friendly?'
Jieret gasped his affirmative in the same tongue, and in painstaking caution, stood up.
The tableau froze there, but for the wrapped hand that Arithon jerked from the snarl of the horse's mane. 'Caithdein?' he breathed. When the bulked figure before him did not thin and fade into an apparition, the rusted grain of his voice cracked into an unstrung sob of disbelief. 'Earl Jieret?'
'Liege, I'm here for you.' Shamed for his momentary lapse into cowardice, Jieret rushed forward and caught the slight frame of his prince in a bear hug as he let go and slid from the saddle.
Too aware of the prominent bones pressed through the layers of hide clothing, Jieret sought swift distraction in talk. His rescuing words shaped the fondly shared memory, of himself as a boy who had spied on his prince from the brush. 'How did you know, this time, that somebody waited?'
'Without any telltale mosquitoes?' Eyes shut, the strain in him tempered to mercuric conditioning that ran too close to the surface, Arithon repressed the urgent need to glance warily over his shoulder. Though civil conversation must have seemed a fool's act of intrusion, he contained his raw instincts and answered. 'Your bearskin smells like woodsmoke, not new snow, and the goose grease you use to keep rust from your weapons carries a stone's throw downwind.'
'Daelion avert,' Jieret murmured. 'The most difficult points of your nature don't change.' He sensed as he spoke that the long years elapsed since their last meeting in Caithwood had not passed by without impact. Whatever the scathing scope of events, through his hands, already, he understood that his prince required a brother's attention in private. He broached the most challenging problem straight on, and hoped against nature the surprise of reunion would blunt his liege's thrice-thorny temperament.
'For a start, we'll have to attend to your wounds.' He might have laughed at the irascible draw of Arithon's breath, had their meeting been in safer country. 'Don't think to argue. You're in no fit state. My whole war band is here to support me.'
'I don't always argue with unstoppable forces.' Arithon demurred. 'Just give your promise, when you strip off the bandages, you won't cave in to demand that I should be served with a mercy stroke.'
'That bad?' Jieret said, unfazed by the reference to the bitter clan custom of dispatching the crippled before risking exposure to enemies. 'Then my scouts can be left to attend to your horses. Best we keep moving into the camp while you're still upright and walking.' Concerned for the stained dressing that showed through the torn glove on his prince's right hand, he sent the owl's call to signal his waiting companions.
* * *
The leaden, iced course of the River Aiyenne looped a meandering channel across the winter white dales of Daon Ramon. Where the lazy coils bent through layered rock, over centuries, the placid, inexorable current had carved over the deposits of petrified sediment. As ice froze and refroze through an epoch of seasons, the softer sandstones and limestone wore away until the buttressed banks became sculpted to undulant chains of hanging formations and scooped clefts.
Slack water fell at midwinter, the thaws that would swell the Aiyenne to a race of white foam a promise withheld until spring. The deeper recesses stayed dry in the cold months, and there, Jieret's war band took shelter from the flaying north winds. A hoarded store of charcoal and seal oil gave them small, smokeless fires and spare light.
A tight watch was posted. The s'Ffalenn prince just welcomed into their midst brought them a sharp increase in danger. Etarra's combined forces advanced a day's march to the east. With Lysaer's additional headhunters from Narms inbound to cap their set bottleneck, the clan war band became quarry exposed upon open ground. Earl Jieret chose not to take undue chances. Clan sentries patrolled from six outlying camps, while the hill ponies fanned over the country between in compact, separate herds, with mounted scouts set to guard over them. Cloud swallowed the new-risen moon. Night lay on the land like unpressed black felt, silted with deadening flurries of snowfall that muffled the howls of the wolf packs.
Prince Arithon was sequestered in the deepest, recessed cavern, the entry closed in by a rubble of boulders that baffled the flare of stray light. The declivity of rouged sandstone and gold ocher concretion shed false warmth in the spill of a fired-clay oil lamp. Cast shadows crawled on the sooted rock ceiling. Jieret, on his knees, nursed a pannikin of water, steeping herbs for the mash of a drawing poultice.
A grated step on loose gravel, then the subsequent absence of sound presaged the approach of a Companion. Braggen, Jieret presumed, since the man's dauntless nature most often saw him elected as spokesman for the rest. Too taxed to handle uncomfortable questions, the Earl of the North cached a cut snarl of stained dressings under the fleeces of Arithon's shed jacket. He darted a glance sidewards, reassured. Rathain's prince would stay settled despite interruption, enveloped like a lost child in the cinnamon pelt of his caithdein's borrowed bear mantle.
A split second later, Braggen squeezed his ox frame into the throat of the cleft. His inquisitive survey took in the pale, s'Ffalenn features, eyes closed in oblivious sleep. 'How bad is he?' The studs on his jerkin scraped in complaint as he settled on his heels in a niche, forearms crossed on the briar-scarred hide of his leggings. 'The men outside want to know. Can't pretend they don't notice the rank stink on the breeze as the aftermath of a cautery.'
Earl Jieret looked up, the ends of his beard dipped bronze by the coals just used to heat hi
s second-best knife. 'Do they want the whole list, or just the details that are worrisome?'
Braggen snatched a glance of stamped apprehension at the dark, rumpled head engulfed in its calyx of fur.
'Say all you like. His Grace won't awaken.' Jieret shared a grin of rueful commiseration. 'I dosed him unconscious with valerian.'
'He let you?' Braggen's eyebrows bristled, shot upward by stunned surprise. 'By Dharkaron's Black Spear, never thought I'd see that day.'
Jieret blotted his dampened knuckles on his jerkin, unable to mask that his sleeve cuffs were spotted with blood. 'Well, you didn't see the proud flesh to be scraped away, or the tendons exposed on the back of his hand.'
'Ath, not his sword hand!' Braggen shot an appalled glance at the prone figure swathed in the bearskin.
Yet Jieret's pained nod spoke as much for the music as for concern with potential impairment of his prince's skilled use of weapons. 'Given rest and adequate time to heal over, the fingers will still function well enough to grip steel. But no simple or remedy we have in the field can reverse the damage from scarring.' The sorrow stopped words, that Athera's titled Masterbard might never recover the matchless, fierce brilliance of his performance on the lyranthe.
But Braggen had not shared Jieret's past trip to Innish, nor the summons by the Fellowship to Caithwood; along with most of the Companions from Strakewood, he had never heard Arithon play. 'His Grace is unfit?'
Jieret swallowed, returned a brisk headshake while he forced his closed throat to unlock. 'No. Except for the hand, which is serious, he has several scabbed-over gashes, some toes nipped to frostbite, and a case of nervous exhaustion.' He leaned to one side, caught up the green stick kept to stir up the embers. 'I expect a full night of well-guarded sleep should set the worst back to rights.'
'I'll tell the men.' Braggen scraped a thumb under his beard, a pinched and dubious cast to his squint as he measured the unearthly, stilled form of his prince. 'When you want relief keeping watch, cast a stone. The scout by the river will hear and send someone.'
'This vigil is mine,' Earl Jieret insisted, then swore a fierce oath as his jab to turn the coals beneath the pannikin shot up sparks that scorched a new hole in his buckskins. 'Go on. I know how you hate guarding invalids.'
'His royal Grace, anyway.' Braggen's lips twitched with distaste. 'Has a damned flaying tongue when he's hurting.'
'You remember that much?' Jieret cast down the stick as the pot spat steam and started to boil.
'Not me.' Braggen shrugged. 'My old uncle sat with his Grace after the fight at Tal Quorin. That's where he said he picked up his best collection of insults.' His teeth flashed and vanished into shadow as he rose. 'I'll leave you like the hawk set to brood on the snake. Don't expect you're not going to get bitten.'
Jieret gave back a choked snort of laughter. 'Ath grant you're wrong. If not, you owe me a fox tail as fine as the ones Theirid ties in his clan braid.'
Caught aback, Braggen poised in the cleft where the wind shrilled and sighed between boulders. 'You'd wear that?'
'Me?' Appalled, Jieret fumbled the tied packets of herbs borrowed from Arithon's saddle pack. 'Sithaer's howling furies, no. I promised I'd bring one for Jeynsa.'
'Well, she'll need more than fox tails to fill your boots, brother.' Despite his gruff humor, the worry leaked through as Braggen hitched his strapping bulk through the exit. 'Be sure you make time to sleep for yourself. We don't need you thickheaded and stupid on the hour we bearbait that daisy-faced godling's new army.'
* * *
Restored to safe solitude, Jieret kept his hands busy, nursing his small clutch of charcoal. He boiled the crusted rags of old bandages, then soaked them in an infusion of sweet herbs and tallow soap. He swabbed out the dirt ingrained in chapped skin, bathed and untangled the unkempt black hair. Nor did he stop there, but turned back the bearskin and cleansed everything else not strapped in dressings or poultices. Last of all, he honed his knife and gently commenced on the neglected tasks of shaving and trimming.
'Ath's blinding glory!' Theirid's awed comment sniped from the shadows. 'Were his Grace wakeful, he'd have some choice thing to say, if not use that wee blade to gut you.'
Jieret whirled face about, the raised steel in his hand no less than rock steady for his startlement. 'Damn you, I know that. Do you always have to sneak up on a man like you're hunting?'
Indistinct in the darkness fronting the entry, Theirid shrugged. 'Just checking up. Didn't think I'd catch you playing nursemaid.'
The Earl of the North resettled himself, exasperation and challenge in the set of his shoulders as he clipped another shoulder-length lock of dark hair. 'He can't do this himself without wetting the fresh dressings I've set on his injured hand. Nor can he very well wash his own clothes when we have to be moving by dawn.' Jieret's gray hazel eyes snagged the reflected flash off of the steel's wicked gleam. 'Look there.' He nodded to an unkempt pile of cloth, stitched through its grime with the odd satin facing, and the crimped gleam of abused silver ribbon. 'You're assigned, for impertinence. Take the good balsam soap. There's a break in the ice at the verge of the river and no lack of stones to pound laundry.'
Theirid opened his mouth, cut off from protest by his clan chieftain's snap of authority. 'His Grace kept us alive at Tal Quorin. His works since that day have come to spare every one of Tysan's clan bloodlines. We'll wash his soiled shirts, and resharpen his knives, and take pride in the hour we die for him!'
'Which won't ease your hurt in the least,' Theirid said, touched by impulse and wounding sympathy. He bent without rancor, his stalker's quiet displaced as he scooped up the ruckle of clothing. 'You're dreading the moment you'll send his Grace on, with not man at his shoulder to guard him.'
Jieret's knife jerked, rinsed bloody red by the embers. 'Fiends' plague, man! Your stalking ways are quite wretched enough without picking fights with my state of mind.'
'Companion, Caithdein,' Theirid rebuked as he shouldered his load and edged toward the recess to depart. 'You don't stand by yourself. Each of us feels the same way.'
Then Theirid was gone, with no snatched chance for rejoinder to lighten the ache that rode on the heels of cold truth. Clansmen by nature did not indulge grief; attachments to sentiment too often abraded the inborn will to survive. Ruggedly stoic, Earl Jieret resumed his quiet work. For a brief, settled interval, rare for its intimacy, he applied his steady knife and large hands to barbering the damp strands of Prince Arithon's hair.
Peace reigned for an hour, gentled by the popping whistle of hot embers and the thrumming refrain of the winds. Jieret finished his trimming, wiped and sheathed his fine knife. While the stars above Daon Ramon wheeled and crossed a meridian masked under snowstorm at midnight, he leaned forward to discard the stray clippings in the fire.
'Save those, they'll be needed.' The acid instruction arose from the sleeper arranged in the bearskin.
Jieret jerked, startled, now watched by green eyes alert with disturbing lucidity. 'You shouldn't be wakeful. I gave you a Dose of valerian strong enough to drop a young horse for a gelding.'
Arithon pushed to sit up, discovered his flesh naked, and swore with inventive irritation. He bundled his bare shoulders in cinnamon fur, then jackknifed his torso erect against the smoothed sandstone behind him. 'Mage training taught how to transmute certain poisons. In the case of soporifics, the response can become ingrained reflex.' Returned to the awkward subject of clippings, he added, 'You should mask those in silk.'
'You weren't conscious,' Jieret insisted, emphatically unwilling to be sidetracked as he folded the loose hair into a rag and weighted the packet under a rock. 'How much should I worry?' Dakar had once warned that the spurious resurgence of Arithon's talent might be provoked by Desh-thiere's curse.
'Always.' That kernel of honesty delivered, Arithon refused elaboration, but probed the new wrapping over a hand that certainly pained him like wildfire. 'Thank you,' he said through the ghost of a wince. 'I see you've been thorough. Maybe
this time the injury can be given the chance to close over.'
No complaint, for the heartache of his spoiled music; just acceptance flat and hammered as lead, that spurred Jieret's concern worse than anything. Unswerving despite the smooth effort of evasion, he pressed, 'You know Lysaer's marching.'
The affirmation, too calm, 'I feel him. Northwest of here, and pressing ever closer as we speak.'
'Moving?' Jieret probed the shadowed, green eyes, alarmed as he sought the first warning of trouble. 'Not at night, surely?'
'Do you want reassurance?' Arithon as always cut past surface meaning, his head tipped to wearied rest against rippled striatums of sandstone. 'We're not talking good judgment, but the drive of a curse that won't rest until one of us crosses Fate's Wheel.' An infinitesimal, strained pause, filled by the pop of an ember. A flurry of small sparks rode the draft in gyration, then snuffed into smothering gloom. 'You can't trust my intentions. I daresay that's why you're holding my sword and every last stitch of my clothing?'
Unable to soften that self-wounding analysis, Jieret bristled. 'You don't need your sword while mine's here to guard you, and your clothes, I might add, were offensive. A Companion's at the riverside, washing them as we speak.'
But the stakes were driven too high and too deep to retreat for a kindly meant platitude. 'Jieret, Caolle died because all the safeguards broke down.' Arithon's left hand clamped taut in the bearskin, the surreal, refined beauty of each rigid finger demarked by the hard gleam of bone through the skin. 'Don't ask me to take the same risks with your life! Here and now, I'm going to refuse them.'