The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

His clothing lay wrung with damp sweat and his flesh was drawn from dehydration. Since tienelle could kill if its lesser poisons were not rinsed from the body, he bent at once and tried a swallow from the stream.

  The water hit his stomach and set off a rolling bout of nausea. He clamped his hands to his mouth, unsettled by the fight he underwent to keep the precious moisture down. Worn through a brutal and difficult scrying, he recognized his judgement had blurred. Had he considered with his full wits about him, he should never have dared try this much tienelle in one session, far less in seclusion. He needed herbal tea, a bed and the presence of another mage to ward the thought-paths that yet lay vulnerably open. Lacking such comforts, he had no choice left but to wait. The herb must be allowed time to fade. Only with his senses released from its burning scope of vision would he be able to transmute the residual poisons the water could not flush through. Until then, he could tolerate no human company.

  Twilight fell. Birdsong stilled, and the boughs overhead became sprays of black lace against a sky pricked by pale stars. Engaged in private struggle against the fevers of withdrawal, Arithon sat with his head tilted back against an oak bole that kindly performed its appointed function and kept his body propped upright. The dark tunic lent by Lady Dania melted his form into shadow, while stray spurts of drug-born intuition stung him with unwanted revelation: that the clothing on his back had belonged to the lady’s younger brother, fallen wounded in a raid at fifteen. Caolle’s hand had delivered the mercy-stroke that gave the boy clean death. Arithon ground his knuckles in his eyes to drive off the scents of a forest clearing, and blood fallen hot on green ferns. Too beaten to avert the bounding starts of truesight that flickered like delirium through his consciousness, he schooled his thoughts to rough order by laboured, exhaustive reviews of longwinded ballads.

  Engrossed in Dakar’s favourite drinking song, which was long and lewd, and only funny if both singer and listeners were flat drunk, Arithon groped through the first stanzas. He might be stretched thin, but he did not lack the fibre to master himself. Yet when between the fifth and sixth chorus his whispered recitation went ragged, he stumbled to shivering silence and realized. Someone had invaded his retreat.

  Arithon felt his ears whine and his sinews draw tight under the eddying, electrical pull of another mind. Unlike the near-mystical calm radiated by birds or wild animals, this presence was unmistakably human. Its excitements, uncertainties and randomly chaotic energies tugged, burned and rebounded through the channels still defencelessly opened by the herb.

  ‘Come around where I can see you,’ he managed in a tone dragged husky by discomfort. Grateful that the falling darkness would conceal the worst of his weakness, he waited.

  Sticks cracked. A stand of hazels shivered, parted, and disgorged Jieret, who emerged looking sheepish from the depths of a nearby thicket.

  ‘How did you know I was there?’ Peevish to find himself discovered, Steiven’s son approached, bent down, and with a curiosity that brazenly challenged, hooked up the empty tienelle canister from the verge of the streambank. He sniffed the pungent odour that lingered inside, curled his lip and darted a sidelong glance toward Arithon.

  The boy expected a reprimand, Arithon knew; and also, he repressed the curious urge to ask if his prince was some sort of addict. His liege obliged him by saying nothing. Politeness triumphed. Jieret shrugged and set down the container, then fixed the man with an accusation quite spoiled for the fact that his tunic was plastered with damp leaves. ‘I made no noise.’

  Arithon concealed a shudder of dry heaves behind a chuckle and lied outright. ‘The mosquitoes told me.’

  ‘But I didn’t swat even one!’ Jieret objected.

  ‘Next time, don’t scratch,’ the Master of Shadow advised. A flinch escaped his restraint at the boy’s explosion of laughter.

  ‘You don’t miss much, your Grace.’ The implication remained unspoken, that drugs or drink should deaden the senses.

  ‘You will use no title, when you address me,’ said Arithon. ‘Your blade was not one I swore oath over, yesterday afternoon. You owe me no homage at all.’

  ‘But I was too young!’ Jieret dropped to his knees. ‘Here.’ He groped at his belt and proffered the knife he kept for whittling. ‘Take my steel now. I’ll be of age next season.’

  Arithon forced a smile over a discomfort that riled him to dizziness. The razor-edged perception of herb-prescience kept him humble, presented him bluntly with recognition that Jieret’s impetuous offer held no hero-worship. A piercingly observant child, his knife was a boy’s way of testing the mettle of a prince his clan elders but pretended not to scorn.

  Tenderly as his condition would allow, Arithon chose his answer. ‘Lad, you’ve a good ten years to grow yet before you can cross your father’s will. If Steiven forbade you to swear vassalage, I cannot dishonour his judgement. We can share friendship, if you wish, but nothing more weighty than that.’

  Jieret recoiled in affront and sheathed his knife. ‘I’ll be twenty in just eight more years.’ His presence a blur amid thickening gloom, he added, ‘Tashka says I’m large for my age. But she’s my sister, and what do girls know?’ His chin tipped up at a cocky angle his mother would have viewed with trepidation. ‘I’ll fight with the men at your side, prince, when Etarra’s army invades our forest.’

  The blood-soaked visions still threatened. Arithon dragged back wandering attention. ‘I forbid you.’

  ‘But it’s custom!’ Jieret bounded to his feet. ‘Friends always fight together. And Halliron bet Elwedd you’re even better with a sword than Caolle is.’

  ‘The bard will lose his silver, then,’ Arithon snapped, and at once regretted his outburst. Unbalanced by his pounding head, he laboured to restore his pose of harmless indecision. ‘You can serve me best by staying aside to protect your little sisters.’

  Jieret sneered. ‘Caolle’s right, you think like a townborn. Clan girls don’t need protection, a chief’s daughters least of any. Except for Edal and Meara, my sisters will be in battle too, disarming the fallen and catching the enemy’s loose horses.’

  Arithon gasped. Hurled into an explosion of prescience like a bloodbath, he reeled, saved from toppling only by the tree at his back. His mind, his heart, the very breath in his throat all but stopped as involuntary foresight seared through him: of women and girls lying gutted in pitiful death. The peace of forest night was swallowed by the din of future screaming. Shocked to hot tears and futile fury, Arithon struggled to recover; while the moss dug up by his spasmed fingers seeped warm red with the blood to be reaped by the vengeance of Etarra’s steel.

  Consciousness dwindled despite his best effort. He fought in a breath that became a choked-off cry as his mind was wrenched and then jarred back to focus by Jieret’s grip tugging at his arm.

  ‘My prince.’ The boy regarded him anxiously. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘No.’ Arithon shuddered. While nightmare futures sawed through him, he had only enough constraint to be gentle as he disengaged from the child’s touch. ‘If I’m boring, that’s because I’m worried. Take me back to your father, boy. I have news of grave importance he needs to hear.’

  Dubious and critical as any scout on reconnaissance, Jieret looked on as Arithon bent by the spring and swallowed water in sucking gulps. The prince looked sick; was in fact shaking, and running with sweat that smelled of fear. But Jieret had not lost sight of the fact that he trespassed; by nature too canny to contradict, he accepted the conclusion that Halliron’s wagered coin would end up in Elwedd’s purse.

  The water and the walk seemed to help. Arithon breathed more freely as movement and increased circulation eased the worst of his withdrawal. Through the hour’s hike back to camp, he regained at least the semblance of his accustomed equilibrium.

  Which was well, because the mother of a boy who has lit off into open forest with no word of explanation was bound not to wait with complaisance. Lady Dania intercepted her miscreants at the flap of Steiven’s lodge. She had s
hed her daytime leathers for a tight-sleeved dress of lilac blue. Russet hair that Arithon had never seen unbraided trailed like undone crochet-work down her back. The effect of softened femininity hit him like a blow and he stopped, struck briefly speechless.

  But his momentary awkwardness escaped notice as Dania latched onto her errant son. ‘Jieret! What possessed you? It shames me to see a boy of twelve behaving with less care than a toddler!’

  Recessed in the shadow beyond the entry, Arithon interrupted. ‘The boy was with me, and quite safe.’

  Lady Dania shot him a scorching glance.

  Awed by the briskness with which she abandoned her scolding and ordered him off to bed, Jieret saw that, prince or not, Arithon was going to suffer all of his mother’s thwarted temper. Wary of his fate should he linger, the boy beat an escape through the curtain that separated the nook he shared with his sisters.

  Dania cracked back the tentflap, cross to her core from the licence of intemperate royalty. She bent a severe gaze upon the culprit, who escaped her by standing stone-still in the darkness. Reminded afresh that Arithon could be disquieting and difficult, and that Caolle had warned earlier he might have remedied his nerves since the oathtaking with drink or some other indulgence, Dania too said nothing, but busied herself lighting candles.

  While new flame fired the delicately embroidered patterns that bordered her bodice and hemline and sparked a brighter warmth of colour in her hair, she barbed her subtlety in a smile of sweetened welcome.

  ‘Steiven will be back shortly,’ she offered. When Arithon’s reticence remained, she dared him to try sheer bad manners. ‘Come in. Sit. Be comfortable while we wait for him.’

  Appreciative of her heroic effort not to nag, and piquantly aware she would rifle what deductions she could from his appearance, Arithon slipped through the doorflap. Her mind matched his measure far too often to make him comfortable. He half-smiled to see that her rearguard attack had defeated him; not a cushion in the lodge remained in dimness enough for concealment. He countered her candles by an absolute refusal to settle. While Dania ducked past the privacy flap to make sure of young Jieret and tuck him with canny firmness into bed, Arithon gave rein to restlessness and paced.

  This lodge was not so fine as the one left in storage at the last camp. Bereft of tapestries, fine carpets and permanent furnishings, the dwelling still displayed evidence of civilized inhabitance. One corner was flaked with wood chips and bark, where Jieret had whittled toys for his sisters. An opened book rested on a woven reed-mat, a half-spent candle close by. The text in the surfeit of lighting flashed as he stepped, with bright colours and gilt illumination. The wall behind had been painted over with an elaborate scene of a stag hunt. In the corner, cushioned on a pallet stuffed with evergreen, Halliron’s lyranthe lay abandoned.

  Silver strings strung reflections like beads, numerous and scintillant as the candleflames. Arithon set his teeth, but could not quite manage to turn aside. Topaz settings and small emeralds beckoned for his attention amid the carved and inlaid bands that laced from the scrolled base to the peghead with its rows of ebony tuners.

  Before thought could stop him, he had seated himself. He extended a finger and tentatively, lightly brushed the strings.

  The timbre that answered wrung his heart, so perfectly did it match the voice of the instrument left and lost in Etarra. The maker’s rune stamped in pearl inlay on the back of the soundboard was not visible; but tone was all the signature Arithon required to identify Elshian’s handiwork.

  The temptation could be too much.

  Framed against a painted backdrop of deer hounds frozen in full cry, he lifted the lyranthe, set his hand to silver frets, and began very softly to play.

  The burns where Lysaer’s light bolt had seared his right palm and wrist had barely started to heal. Tripped up as the pull of the wound marred his timing, Arithon struck out a rough and moody line of notes. Lost to his irritation, half-unmoored by lightheadedness, he had space in him only for song. He flexed his stiff hand, cursed mildly as the scab cracked, and launched off in a run that seemed to banish hide walls and let in space like cloud-blown sky.

  Notes trilled and spattered across quiet in a statement that through unsullied expression of beauty negated his uncertainty and pain.

  Newly returned from Jieret’s bedside, Lady Dania was arrested by the sound. Unwitting party to something not meant to be shared, she poised stock-still with the fringed end of the privacy curtain forgotten between her clenched hands.

  A soaring arpeggio introduced a change in key like an epiphany. Major chord to minor, the lyranthe rang through a boldly personal statement that flashed with a grace like edged swordplay. Stirred through the stuffy, airless heat trapped inside hide walls, Dania shivered in delight. This prince could bind spells with his playing. Entranced beyond fear of impropriety, she smiled her appreciation and advanced.

  The privacy flap smacked shut like a slap, but her attempt at warning passed unnoticed. The notes built and blended and sprang separate while Arithon laid his cheek against the curve of resonating wood. His eyes were closed, his whole being intertwined with the notes that danced under his hands.

  A slipped finger shattered the spell. There came a pause while his wrist lifted. Then his hands dipped again, through a jarring, heavily plucked statement that skirted the edge of discord.

  Arithon silenced the strings with an impatient caress, then turned his hand to find his cut split, and a bead of blood welling through.

  Dania discovered herself half-dizzied from some reasonless urge to hold her breath. She moved another step, just as the prince looked up.

  The emotion in his eyes struck her with the force of a stormfront alive with the beat of summer thunder.

  She gave way and sat across from him. ‘I didn’t intend to eavesdrop. But I have to admit you have a gift even Halliron must envy.’

  Mention of the Masterbard pricked Arithon to an irritable glance down. Had the instrument in his hands not awed him, he might have answered his first impulse, and flung it away as though his skin hurt. ‘Lady, your praise is far too generous.’

  He did not blot the burst burn on his tunic. A tiny start unsettled her as she wondered if somehow he knew: the garment had been her deceased brother’s. His eyes were on her again. He saw, and she realized too well that her intuition set keen challenge against his intentions.

  Dania absorbed the awkward moment by rearranging the skirt over her knees. Blue cloth settled a ring of twilight over a tawny landscape of flax hassocks, and her hands, like paired birds, nestled together in her lap. Arithon ducked quickly forward and hoped his fallen hair would shade his face. His breathing was harder to temper; Steiven’s wife had a vivid, magnetic beauty beneath the wear of hard living and the fullness lent by child bearing. The fact she tracked his mind without effort evoked an intimacy that played havoc with drug-heightened senses and provoked him to shameless response.

  Preternaturally conscious of her quick, timid glance toward his face, he turned his head.

  ‘Something troubles you,’ she said. ‘Is that why you seek my husband?’

  Her voice had that velvety timbre associated with wind through high grass. A fine-grained tremor shook him and he shut his eyes fast as the dregs of the tienelle fanned a flare of heat through his veins.

  ‘Some things are best let lie.’ He stamped down the flicker of vision too late. Prescience arose, full-bodied and ugly enough to choke him, of Lady Dania sprawled in black leaf mould, the leathers she wore for workaday ripped down to expose muddied thighs, and her throat slashed open by a sword stroke.

  Dimly, he realized she was speaking. ‘If it were up to me, I would drop every weapon in Etarra into the bogs of Anglefen, and hire you as bard of Deshir.’

  Arithon opened his eyes, flashed her a glance hot and molten as brass tailings stirred in a crucible. He said no word, but hooked back the lyranthe with an urgency concealed behind languidness.

  Dania was not deceived. Neither cou
ld she deny the compulsion that drove him, rooted as it was in the gentleness that tonight for some reason he could not mask. The music he loosed with his hands held a spirit that gave easy surcease from talk.

  He took the release she allowed him with gratitude that sang through E major, then plunged in sliding falls to tread deeper measures that rang lyrically placid and dark. He tempered his impatience in the mathematical progression of schooled notes. Pinched between physical discomfort and the horrific pageant of images inflicted at random upon his innermind, Arithon longed for Steiven to come, that he could finish this business and be alone. He wanted the forest, with the calls of whippoorwills and running water to smooth his abraded nerves. He needed delicate, exacting concentration to unbind the residual taint within his body. Yet the urgency of the final revelation which had shown him clan girls and wives lying slaughtered disbarred the solitude he required.

  Arithon channelled himself into music as a substitute for thought until steps at the doorflap spoiled his cadence.

  ‘Must you deal behind my back?’ Halliron’s demand shattered the spell before the last note had quite faded.

  Dania started and jerked her scented skirts aside to allow the bard space to take a seat. ‘How long have you been here?’

  Arithon damped the dwindling ring of silver strings and proffered Elshian’s lyranthe to her master.

  Halliron took back his instrument, derisively abrupt. ‘I heard it all. The fragment preceding as well.’ Pale, hard eyes touched the prince with a look as inimical as a knife-thrust. ‘I know the voice of my lyranthe better than that of my own child. You should have known she would call me. Did you lack the guts, not to speak to me beforehand?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Arithon’s hands balled up. He forgot his torn scab and tension rimmed one fingernail brightly scarlet. ‘I was thoughtlessly selfish. Here’s my promise not to meddle, after this.’

  ‘Meddle!’ Dania had never heard the bard’s voice so charged with fury. ‘You arrogant, manipulative young fool! Don’t insult my intelligence by playing your falsehoods on me. It’s an Ath-given talent you’ve been hiding. I say it here, you’ve no right to see that strangled.’