by Janny Wurts
The seneschal shook his head. He would not offer platitudes, though concern for the princess was quite plainly chafing her young suitor ragged.
The exhaustion shading his handsome face was laid bare without the appointments of his state trappings. ‘Powers of mercy! Why must my hands stay tied? The princess who will share my future’s at risk! Each passing minute weighs on me like torture. Even your commoners are free to ride out, encouraged by the crown’s bounty. Prince Kailen has the relief of questioning the adventurers who come in claiming to have information.’
‘Well that’s no boon, really,’ the seneschal allowed, his mood raised to arid amusement. ‘Listening to every pig farmer and his cousin, insisting he’s found tracks in his barnyard, or the signs someone’s slept in his loft.’
The high prince glanced down, his silence turned searing, and his tea cup jammed between rigid hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ the seneschal said lamely.
‘If this were Devall, I would have every man in my father’s guard under orders, rousting those crofters’ barns with a warrant! In Sessalie, my marshal-at-arms is forced to sit idle, while, it appears, the best I can do is rely on a misfit ex-mercenary who comes and goes at his secretive whim, and who answers to no man’s authority.’ Crushed under pressure, the porcelain gave way. The prince hurled the fragments on to the tray, his face turned away to mask bursting anguish as a servant stepped in to stanch his gashed palm on a napkin.
The lackey inquired, ‘Your Highness, should I fetch your physician?’
‘Thank you, not now.’ The heir apparent of Devall knotted the stained linen tight, then regarded his visitor with flaming embarrassment. ‘My Anja is in danger, or worse! And I can do nothing at all but sip tea, wrapped up in the silk ties of protocol!’
The seneschal sighed. Kind-hearted beneath his thick crust of propriety, he cleared his throat and expressed sympathy. ‘Your straits are understandably difficult, your Highness. Yet Isendon’s officers are scarcely incompetent. Taskin has never failed Sessalie’s crown. His intelligence cannot be faulted. We may not know Captain Mysh kael as one of us, but his triumph at last summer’s tourney was a feat of spectacular skill. The commons have granted him sharp respect. They will answer his questions, where, truth to tell, your polished lowlanders might awe them to self-conscious silence.’
‘Well, what good is a war-trained swordsman against a nefarious covert plot?’ Lost to poise, deaf to statecraft, the High Prince of Devall jammed tense fingers through his hair. ‘Anja is everything to me. I cannot love and do nothing but wait for some desert-bred dog to paw through the sewers sniffing for clues!’
Again, the seneschal strove to console him. ‘The man impressed the king enough to win his royal trust. Until quite recently, his Majesty’s rule has been sound. Even failing, his wits are not always scattered.’
The high prince stayed sunk into cankerous despondency.
Spurred by his plight, the seneschal burst out, ‘Well, it is a fact that Mysh kael fought in the wars with Rathtet.’
‘What!’ The High Prince of Devall jerked up his head. ‘Did I hear you say Rathtet? But that’s not possible!’
‘Apparently so,’ said the seneschal.
‘Not possible!’ The heir apparent surged to his feet in agitation. ‘Where did you learn this?’
The seneschal blushed. ‘I overheard my king say so, months back, through a closed door in a private conference with his ambassador.’
‘By the nine names of hell!’ the prince swore, his face turned sheet-white, and his beautiful hands trembling beneath the lace hem of his cuffs. ‘If what you say holds the least grain of truth, then your realm of Sessalie lies under the shadow of an unspeakable threat!’
The seneschal blotted slopped tea from his robes, dismayed, but still striving to placate. ‘Your Highness, what are you saying?’
‘About Rathtet?’ The High Prince of Devall stalked up and back down the carpet. ‘Prince Al-Syn-Efandi was killed, along with all of his family. His people died when the capitol was savaged by Rathtet’s lines of raised sorcery!’
Shot to his feet, also, while the saucer and cup rattled in trembling hands, the seneschal stated, ‘Then you think Captain Mysh kael fought for the sorcerers?’
‘He had to!’ cried the prince, driven to shrill despair. ‘That war of invasion left not a single survivor among the Efandi defenders!’
The seneschal stared back, aghast. ‘Powers above! Then our Anja is in terrible danger, indeed. She could be dead, or far worse, a live puppet in the hands of a sorcerer.’
‘She won’t stay there!’ Ripped to steel determination, the High Prince of Devall rammed a path towards the door, scattering anxious servants. ‘By glory, for Sessalie’s imperilled safety, now I must act! You need that desert-bred captain contained! I tell you, he’s unspeakably dangerous.’
The seneschal thrust his burden of porcelain aside. ‘Mysh kael can be arrested, and by the king’s writ. We only need proof of his perfidy’
The high prince turned down the hall towards his officers’ quarters, his brisk strides streaming the sconces. ‘Any proof?’
Trailing him, breathless, the Seneschal of Sessalie affirmed with sped haste, ‘The king’s case for trust is based on the foreigner’s record of honest service. Show he broke faith, or acted for evil, Lord Taskin will turn out the guard and not rest until the fell creature’s arraigned.’
The High Prince of Devall glanced sideways, his gold eyes angry as balefire. ‘I will have your proof! Whatever it takes. Can I ask your support?’ Contempt crossed his chisel-cut features, then sly irony, there and gone in a heartbeat. ‘At least you can’t mind if we listen at doorways to gather the facts to seal the arrest.’
Then and there, a gaunt form clothed in the night’s looming shadow, the Seneschal of Sessalie granted the High Prince of Devall his trembling assent. ‘Bright powers, for the sake of our princess, I’d do anything to see that sand-bred cur delivered to justice in irons.’
‘Justice?’ The high prince slammed open the door to his guards’ quarters, ripped to a snarl of laughter. ‘Oh, not justice. For Anja’s life’s sake, give the wretch over to me.’ The princess’s suitor clapped his hands to summon his marshal, his explosive, cold fury a force to prickle the hairs at the nape. ‘Do that, and I’ll have an accounting under Devall’s crown law! With knives and hot irons, I’ll tear out what your false captain knows from the cords of his screaming throat!’
Across the palace precinct, behind the west wing, the warren of servants’ tenements overlooked the block of the guards’ barracks. Commander Taskin mounted an outside stair that led to the one-room apartment where Jussoud had chosen to settle since leaving the steppe country far to the east. The windows were lit. Clay oil lamps brought from the tents of his homeland cast a carmine glow on the sills, hung with their boxes of medicinal plants, and the vines cultivated for tinctures. More pots of greenery crowded the landing, their sweet, mingled scents a mélange on the crisp spring air.
Taskin knocked at the entry, painted red in the eastern tradition, with the Serphaidian ideographs for prosperity and peace set into a gold-leafed cartouche.
A barefoot step answered. Jussoud opened the door, his silk robe tied by a broad sash, woven with an insignia of dragons. His hair was unbound, tumbled in braid-crimped black waves to his waist.
‘Commander,’ he said, his greeting surprised, and his silver-grey eyes turned inquiring. ‘You need me again? There is trouble?’ When Taskin did not immediately answer, he widened the door without hesitation.
The commander accepted the welcome, his dress and bearing no less than parade-ground precise. Yet the tension that rode the trim set of his shoulders suggested the distress of a man unaccustomed to losing his bearings.
Jussoud crossed his patterned carpet, the bracelets worn on his ankles a thread of gold light against his saffron skin. Not owning chairs, he offered the commander a grass-stuffed cushion. ‘Sit. You look like you need to. I can’t reca
ll ever seeing you appear this confused.’
Taskin showed no offence. Only a note of clipped exasperation inflected his upper-crust speech. ‘By every word for the havoc of hell, I can’t recall feeling this way, either.’
An iron pot steamed on a coal-fed brazier next to the flame of the oil lamp. ‘I have sennia, brewed from Sogion beans. Will you have some?’
The commander shook his silver head. ‘Thank you, no. I can’t fathom how you drink that damned tar, far less acquire the taste for it.’
Jussoud laughed. ‘Inborn habit, no doubt.’ He retrieved his goblet from the windowsill, a delicate vessel fashioned of shell and artfully twisted wire. Then he settled on to the opposite cushion, his innate grace a startling trait for a man of his massive stature. ‘Our mothers mix a black paste from the flowers to ease pain when their children cut teeth.’
Across the saffron glow of the lamp, Taskin sat still and said nothing.
‘Troubled, indeed,’ Jussoud observed. ‘What has Captain Mykkael done, now?’ At the commander’s snapped startlement, the healer’s round face showed a smile just barely suppressed. ‘No other man’s capable of testing your nerves. Did you come here for insight or facts?’
‘Truth,’ Taskin blurted, amazed by the stumble the moment he opened his mouth. As often as he had watched the masseur pry open a man’s heart to facilitate healing, he had never experienced the skilled technique applied to his guarded reserve. No use but to fling wide the floodgates, now, since emotion had sprung the first breach. ‘Mykkael said you were born to a royal house.’
‘Why have I never confided?’ Jussoud’s threatened smile became a soft laugh that wove through the hiss of the oil lamps. ‘Because the blood of my origins is a manyfold blessing, common as grass on the steppe. Kings there are measured by the wealth of their harems. The old despot who fathered me has no fewer than one hundred and eighteen wives. That was the count of four years ago. The old terror will assuredly have more women, now, and eight times their number in grandchildren.’ The healer sipped at his goblet, his measured gaze thoughtful as his northern-born friend strove to assimilate his explanation. ‘Nomad children from the great houses are encouraged to leave home and travel the world, and return one day, bearing knowledge. That is my heritage. Choice brought me to Sessalie. Preference keeps me. Your crown serves my pay. However, you have become a great deal more than my employer.’
As Taskin’s relief swelled the following pause, Jussoud added, ‘No, don’t speak! What’s the use? You haven’t the words in you, anyway’
Taskin shook his head, astonished as the depth of compassionate friendship soothed him back into contentment. He relaxed, made at home amid the shelves of stacked scrolls, and the cedar boxes crammed with glass jars of rare oils and remedies. ‘Well,’ he confessed, ‘I came for an inquiry, after all.’
‘I thought as much,’ Jussoud said. ‘You had Mykkael cornered, did you not? Or why else would he strike out with that chosen fact to upset your self-assurance?’
‘Why? You tell me.’ Restored to business, Taskin rested his chin on the steepled tips of his fingers. ‘The man’s too damned secretive. He refuses to give sureties. The demands that he makes tear holes through my security wide enough to let in an invasion!’
‘Why don’t you start at the front of the problem,’ Jussoud suggested with equanimity.
‘Very well.’ Taskin shrugged. ‘You’ll have to bear with the tangents.’ He dug into the scrip at his belt, and removed a sprig of fresh cedar. ‘Could you burn this for me?’
Jussoud accepted the snippet of greenery without question. He touched the frond to the oil lamp, then let the haze of fresh smoke flare up and winnow around him. ‘I routinely burn certain herbs for protection in this space,’ he admitted. ‘An added round of cleansing won’t be taken amiss.’
The commander shifted his weight, discomfited by much more than his barbaric perch on a cushion. ‘Such uncanny precautions are necessary, where you lived on the steppe?’
‘Sometimes.’ Jussoud scooped a clay bowl from the shelf. The flat bottom was lined with sand and used ash. The nomad struck the burning evergreen upright and allowed the small fire to consume itself undisturbed. ‘We don’t suffer attacks by cold sorcery, if that’s the assurance you seek.’
Satisfied the room held no uncanny sign of demonic visitation, Taskin emptied the leather bag from Mykkael and handed over the last copper talisman. ‘What do you make of this?’
Jussoud noted the disturbing pattern of the knots straight away. Turned cautious, he examined the disc in his palm. One glance at the engraving cut into its face, and he closed his large hand, eyes shut as he sucked a deep breath.
‘You’ve seen this sort of talisman before,’ Taskin stated.
The masseur’s fingers stayed clamped, though his silver eyes had reopened. ‘Yes, I have. It’s an artefact from the wars with Rathtet.’
Taskin scowled, eyebrows bristled above the blade of his aristocratic nose. ‘You were there also?’
‘No.’ Jussoud sighed. The mane of dark hair spilled over his shoulders shadowed his sobered expression. ‘My sister owns one.’
‘Sister!’ Taskin stiffened, shocked, prepared to apologize. But the nomad lifted his unburdened left hand, and banished the need with a gesture.
‘No words. It’s all right.’ The knotted thong swung as Jussoud extended his shut fist into the lamplight. ‘By this, I presume that Mykkael has asked me to speak for him?’
‘He didn’t ask,’ Taskin qualified quickly. ‘He hoped, if I made the approach, that you might.’ Every inch the commander of the king’s guard, he marshalled his unruly resources. ‘As you say, let’s begin at the front of the problem. First of all, that disc may be needed for your protection. I have one also. So does the king. Three have gone to my finest guardsmen, including Captain Bennent. Another is held by the Duchess of Phail. Will you wear the last, and become my silent observer, unknown to all others but me?’
‘Mykkael gave these to you?’ Jussoud asked. ‘If he has, you are honoured. They indicate you might hold something more than his personal trust.’
‘Better say what you mean,’ Taskin said, oddly ruffled to discover he might have been granted an unsought burden of commitment. ‘I have given the captain his provisional freedom, bearing on what you care to tell me.’
‘Nothing’s changed, since we spoke in Dedorth’s observatory.’ The talisman still snugged inside his bunched fist, Jussoud spread his hands. ‘I don’t know whether Mykkael came to Sessalie under the pay of another employer. If he has, or has not, his mere presence is deadly’
‘Then why not tell me what you know of the man?’ Taskin’s insistence was gentle, warned as he was that the ground he assayed must be guarded by emotional pitfalls. ‘I’ll bear the tactical burden of decision myself, whether the captain should be entrusted to uphold his crown duty to Sessalie. The desert-bred told me, if your tribe was Sanouk, you might have a relative who served under him. Am I right to believe that person may be your dead sister?’
‘Not dead,’ Jussoud corrected, his delivery made rough by reluctance. ‘She was one of the unlucky survivors.’
Taskin held, unblinking and still, by the wavering fire of the oil lamps. ‘Unlucky?’
‘Yes.’ The healer unsealed his tight fist. While the breeze through the casement breathed chill off the glaciers, the clean shear of ice interwoven with the incongruous summer sweetness of flowers, he regarded the engraved copper disc. Then he looped the stained thong over his head as though the uncanny metal might burn him. He pulled his midnight hair clear of the leather. The copper talisman dropped over his heart, framed between the embroidered dragons stitched on his wide sash and the open lapel of his robe. He spoke then, his proud face trained ahead, and his unfocused eyes staring into a grim past. ‘Orannia was one of the eighteen who walked out of the Efandi capitol alive. Like most of the rest, she suffered from madness beyond any power to remedy’
‘Mysh kael was her acting captain?�
�� Taskin probed carefully.
‘More.’ Jussoud arose. Barefoot, he strode to the window. For a racking, drawn interval, he regarded the black rim of the mountains reared above the faint, starlit shine that defined the slate roofs of the barracks. ‘Mykkael was in love with her,’ he said at last. ‘They had expected to marry. My father, the old despot, forbade the match, and banished Mykkael from the Sanouk.’
Taskin would not soften his driving impatience. ‘Dishonoured?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’ Jussoud changed his stance, faced back into the room, his features brushed gold against the night casement. ‘He had brought her home through great difficulty. Like the desert tribes, my people have trained shamans. But their chanting could not cure her, or restore her to her right mind. Our law says the mad may not marry, and Mykkael would not abide.’
Taskin looked at him, testy. ‘Bright powers! Then you’ve known that desert-bred’s background and name all along?’
Unmoved to rancour, Jussoud shook his head. ‘I never met him, you understand. Only heard of his history by way of correspondence with my distant relatives.’ The nomad healer left the window, paced past his boxes of remedies, and pinched out the flame on one of the lamps, which was failing. While he scrounged for the phial to refill the reservoir, he resumed his measured explanation. ‘We are an insular folk, not apt to welcome a stranger. The written record inscribed in the tribe’s chronicle used the Serphaidian ideograph for “dark foreigner” to reference Mykkael’s petition to wed into the royal clan. Orannia and I share a father, a name. She chose the road to her heritage as a fighting sword among mercenaries. I had not seen her since girlhood, and I did not revisit the family until after the year she returned.’
Taskin glowered through the flare as the lamp was relit. ‘Well, certainly you must have suspected Sessalie’s captain might be the same man!’
‘Not really. Even last night, when I saw the vizier’s mark under his hair, I could not be sure. The captain who loved Orannia was a southern-born swordsman. The troops who fight sorcerers often bear Scoraign blood, since the culture lends an advantage. Many veterans wear similar tattoos, laid down for shielding protection. Our tourney champion might have been a survivor from any one of a dozen campaigns. Though he bore two styles of geometry, overlaid, Eishwin’s lines are more subtle in nature, and the light in the cellar was dim.’