The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  On the far bank, the men split into teams to scale the rocks. In deference to Lysaer’s strapped arm, Pesquil dispatched scouts to find him an easier route. Pain and exhaustion by now had outstripped the first numb shock of injury. Lysaer moved with gritted jaw, his skin grey. He would not let the men ease the pace. Slipping, sliding, grunting, he laboured upslope, past stunted cherry trees with their wild fruits green on the stem; over weather-split granite and twisted brush, and washed out gulches where the gravel turned under his boots and the jar of every wrong step made his breath jerk and spasm in gasps. The headhunters who accompanied him as escort might have disdained their assignment at first; but when at last they reached the ridgetop and rejoined their commander, Lysaer’s determination had earned their guarded respect.

  By then action in the steep-sided glen was nearly wrapped up, the initial attack supported from behind by the stationed crossbowmen, who now cast about for the last living targets trapped against the walls of the canyon. Down through the fronds of ferns and cross-laced trailers of hanging ivy, Lysaer saw the sprawled bodies, bloody and hacked beyond anything recognizably female, or else near-unmarked except for feathered bolts that left flowering stains on the backs of deerskin jerkins. Half-sick from his hurts, too spent for strong emotion, the prince felt wretched and maudlin. For the first time in life he understood his royal father, who also had been provoked to require annihilating attacks on villages allied to the s’Ffalenn. That such forays had mostly come to nothing drove his sire to lifelong frustration. Lysaer, who in distant lands and exile had not failed, looked upon his dead with flat eyes and tried not to fret whether any of the corpses had been pregnant.

  A headhunter lieutenant touched his shoulder. ‘Come. The able-bodied fighters are beaten down and our scouts say the tents are surrounded.’

  They would fire the hides, Lysaer gathered. He braced his sore side and stiffly moved on. Of the hike up the canyon rim, he remembered little. The lowering sun hurt his eyes and patchy bouts of dizziness made progress difficult.

  Pesquil seemed in rare high spirits. He spat his wad of bark and playfully tossed his bone-hilted dagger with its peculiar blade, curved and sharp on both edges. Since the need had passed for surprise and silence, he grew expansive, calling boisterous jokes to his lieutenants.

  The men, too, seemed ebullient. Too drained to attend to their talk, Lysaer gave cursory study to the high ground where they stopped. The sun’s angle had lowered, throwing the ravine into premature twilight. Under shaded rim-walls and deeper cover of palings and thickets clustered the painted hide walls of the clan tents. Faintly, from the inside, came the wailing cry of an infant, swiftly muffled.

  Lysaer found a broad old maple and rested against the trunk while the men whistled and laughed and kindled fires. Too battered to join the activity, he stayed, while the arrows were wrapped and the bows strung and the wool tips set soaking in oil.

  ‘All right.’ Hands on hips, his lantern jaw outthrust in broken profile against the shimmers of black smoke on the wind, Pesquil delivered his order. ‘Fire them out.’

  Lots were drawn. The losers, grumbling, chose bows. Fighting an insidious detachment that felt like the onset of delirium, Lysaer hardly noticed the arrows crack down until the reek of burning hide wafted out of the ravine. The tents were well aflame. Heat beat in waves from the fissure. Orange light played across the rocks, and above the grotto, green leaves began to shrivel and wilt. Lysaer closed his eyes against the glare, vaguely aware of screaming. The archers now fired to kill infants, and the cries of bereaved mothers beat and shrilled against his ears.

  Pesquil’s tart sarcasm punched through. ‘You seem just a touch overcome.’

  Lysaer pushed straight and forced his eyes back to clear focus. In fact, there was a lot of screaming, in pitch and timbre quite different from hand to hand battle had caused earlier; neither were these the incomprehending cries of newborns. Sickness fled before anger.

  ‘You aren’t killing them cleanly,’ Lysaer accused. He shoved hard away from the tree.

  ‘Killing them?’ Pesquil grinned, startled to savage delight. ‘That wasn’t quite the idea. Not for the pretty women, anyway. My men accomplished what Etarra’s garrison couldn’t. Do you think they haven’t earned their bit of sport?’

  Lysaer pushed past toward the rimrocks. The sound of a slap ricocheted up from the canyon. A man guffawed, while a woman’s voice wept obscenities.

  ‘Better gag her,’ someone advised in cheerful encouragement. ‘She’d gnaw your face off for sheer spite.’

  A glance was enough. Lysaer wheeled back, white to the lips, and possessed by a frightening control. Coldly, clearly, he said, ‘Call them off.’

  Pesquil stood and stroked his crescent knife. ‘In due time, prince. Not to worry. My men aren’t picked for sentiment. They can kill well enough when their pleasure’s met. We won’t be bringing home any doxies.’

  More laughter erupted, and sobbing cries that seemed barely more than a child’s. Lysaer never flicked a muscle. ‘Call your men back.’ He took a fast breath. ‘Or I will.’

  ‘Such scruple!’ Pesquil crooned. Then, as Lysaer broke from stillness, the captain’s mockery fled and his manner abruptly went stony. ‘Man, man, you’re serious.’ He reached out in swift purpose and snatched back the shoulder tightly strapped under wrappings the exact instant Lysaer called out.

  Bone grated under his fingers. Lysaer doubled with a gasp, his eyes wide black with pain and fury.

  ‘My men wouldn’t take your command,’ Pesquil warned. The crescent knife remained in his right fist, its angle now openly threatening. ‘Prince.’

  Lysaer chopped with his good arm and broke the headhunter captain’s hold. The blade at his midriff as well had been air, for all the attention he spared it. ‘Call them off!’

  ‘Ath, you soft fool.’ As if he reasoned with an idiot, Pesquil said, ‘You want the barbarian clans dead, do you not? And the neck of one black-handed sorcerer? Well, leave my men to their business! If they don’t force the girls and make plenty of noise, how else d’you think we’re going to draw their eight hundred odd fathers and brothers out of cover and into reach of our weapons?’

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ Lysaer gritted, wrenched by the spasm of abused muscles.

  ‘Oh, many times. Though I admit, never in quite such choice quantity.’ The sneer was back. Touched with sweat, Pesquil’s pockmarks glistened orange. On the floor of the ravine the tents threw up shimmering curtains of flame. Nothing alive remained inside their cover. Beyond the fires fringing the guy ropes, outside a circle of red-soaked and motionless bundles, men whooped and tore buckskins with abandon. Pesquil’s gaze lowered to his knife, still pointed at the prince. ‘It’s a time-proven tactic, your Grace.’

  Lysaer straightened, breathing hard. Sunlight through the tree crowns played over his gold head, and a breeze flickered mote touched his grazed cheek to gilt. The mauling he had taken had spoiled his elegance. Nothing distinguished remained about his ripped surcoat and mud-crusted mail or the bruises glazed with sweat that darkened neck and chin and temple. Yet a forceful sense of majesty clothed him all the same, that made even Pesquil reassess.

  The s’Ilessid prince laid no hand on his sword in dispute. He weighed his case and made judgement in the solitary arrogance of a king. Then he turned his back on the silver crescent blade and called upon his birthborn gift of light.

  His bolt sheared the grotto like bladed lightning and slammed in bursting brilliance through the charred and blackened leather of the tents. Flash-fire exploded. Sparks flew and a barrage of deep-throated thunder smote the air. Where hides had flamed, nothing burned any longer. If no one had been harmed by the blast, still, the ground showed a black, seared circle, while toppled kingposts flaked with ash trailed sullen smoke over the previously broken bodies of little children.

  From the grotto, the screaming had ended. Men in the act of lust felt engorged flesh shrivel from the heat of ravished girls, while in stunned
terror they scrambled back and took stock of wisped hair and blisters and outer clothing lightly singed upon their bodies.

  Into stupefied stillness, across someone’s low whimpers of fear, Lysaer delivered crisp orders. ‘Townsmen! Cover your nakedness and stand aside. Let any who are clad form a shield-ring and herd every girl and woman inside. Let none of your company handle them except as necessary. For peril of your lives, do as I say.’

  ‘You can’t let them go,’ Pesquil protested. A tremor threaded his voice, and all his sour mockery had vanished.

  Lysaer looked at him. ‘No.’ As devoid of contempt as Dharkaron Avenger, he added, ‘But I will end them cleanly.’

  ‘To what purpose, your Grace?’ Stubborn in recovery, Pesquil flung his knife hilt deep into the dirt. ‘We’ve clan menfolk still left to deal with.’

  ‘They’ll come.’ Lysaer’s dispassionate regard flicked back to the grotto and stayed there as the half-stripped girls and women were shoved tightly into one group. ‘I’ll draw in Steiven’s barbarians. When I do, be sure of this, the s’Ffalenn bastard with his shadows will be unable not to come with them.’

  Three Valleys

  Streaming sweat from an arduous sprint, the runner sent from the west valley arrives at the breastworks where Caolle and the bulk of Deshir’s clansmen fight unassisted by sorceries or flooded rivers, against Etarra’s right flanking division who outnumber them three to one. ‘Tell Lord Steiven,’ he cries, gasping, ‘I’ve come from our liege. Arithon said you would know what he meant, that the disaster he foresaw has not been stopped…’

  Plunging through woods toward the grotto where the women and young hide for safety, Arithon, Jieret and eleven clansmen hear screams and male shouting cut off as a burst of light shears through the trees; lost in a ground-shaking report of fell thunder is Arithon’s abject denial, ‘Lysaer, oh Ath, Lysaer, no!’

  In the vale to the west of Tal Quorin, a shadow-wrought barrier ward shatters and lifts, which leaves half a company of Etarra’s beleaguered garrison fighting mad and unimpeded to regroup and engage the handful of clan enemies who no longer can shelter behind sorceries to inflict damages and death with impunity…

  XVIII. CULMINATION

  ‘She went not to wed,

  nor to comfort or rest,

  But to free the dazed dead,

  and to reclothe cold flesh

  in fair flowers.’

  Last stanza,

  ballad of the Princess of Falmuir

  Thunder cracked the air to whirlwinds as bolts of light ripped the grotto in sheets that immolated trees to flayed skeletons. On protected ground some distance from the rimrocks, checked by flares etched like lightning through gaps in forest greenery, Arithon caught the back of Jieret’s brigandine. In a despair too horrorstruck for expression, he yanked the boy cold from his run and bundled him into an embrace. Around their locked forms, the coruscation flared and died. Gusts spent themselves to a fall of unmoored leaves, while echoes raged on in vibrations that slapped and slammed through Tal Quorin’s chain of ravines. Arithon pressed his cheek to red hair, while under his tight hands the orphan he had sworn bloodpact to protect convulsed into sobs against his shoulder.

  As clansmen they had outstripped in their rush caught back up, nothing could be done except end their hope quickly. ‘It’s over. We’re too late. Stay here.’

  The reverberations from the blast rumbled and faded into quiet. Arithon stared unseeing as three older men caught back a teenager whose berserk rage impelled him to plunge ahead toward the grotto regardless.

  Held arm locked and struggling, the young scout pealed wild protest to his prince. ‘They can’t all be killed, some were sword-trained.’

  Arithon, icy, cut him off. ‘They are dead, every one. You can’t help them.’

  No one could: the brutality of Jieret’s vision had been graphic, of bodies tossed and charred, flash-burned in an instant to flaked carbon and bones crisped beyond all recognition. To the scout still driven to argue, Arithon said baldly, ‘It’s your clansmen we’ll have to save now.’

  Against him, Jieret moved impatiently. ‘Our liege speaks truth.’ Though muffled by the cloth of his prince’s sleeve, the boy’s dull pronouncement was still clear enough to be heard. ‘I had Sight. None in the grotto survived.’

  The scout subsided to stunned quiet and guarded companions let him go. In response to Jieret’s push, Arithon also loosened his arms. He cupped the boy’s chin in the hand not burdened by Alithiel and gave him a searching study.

  Jieret had seen, in merciless, involuntary prescience; three sisters burned and one forced, and a mother lying bloody in dead leaves. The dream’s memory stamped his child’s face with a hardness that might not, now, ever leave him.

  ‘I would have spared you, if I could,’ Arithon said in a voice so racked, not a man in the company overheard him.

  Jieret looked up into green eyes that held no barriers against him. Offered depths and mysteries whose difficulties were beyond him, he could answer just one shared pain. ‘My liege lord, behold, you have done so.’

  Arithon’s touch jerked away. ‘Ath,’ he said on a strangled note of pure rage. ‘Just don’t let me close with my half-brother.’

  To the scouts who saw only rebuff, uncomprehending in scope and viciousness just how far Desh-thiere’s curse might turn him, the Master of Shadow said plainly, ‘Run. Back downstream and find Caolle. Keep the men out of the canyons.’

  ‘I’ll go.’ The younger scout pushed forward, desperate to distance grief with action. ‘On the way, I can recall the boys.’

  Jieret made a sound in protest; pressed past tact, Arithon shook his head. ‘Forget them. Just go straight to your captain.’

  ‘Forget them!’ Raw with emotion, the scout rushed him. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘That they’re beyond help.’ Not a quiver of reflex changed Arithon’s stance. Weariness tautened his face, and he seemed not to care whether or not he was assaulted. He said, ‘I’m sorry. Just go now and stop thinking.’

  The scout drew up short of striking him because Jieret interposed himself between. Shamed by the boy’s stiff loyalty, and by the disbelief that paralysed his fellows, he regarded his prince, who had drawn, as he warned, the might of Etarra to the clans. ‘Sorry! Sorry isn’t enough.’ He spun away and blindly sprinted.

  ‘Don’t mind him.’ White-haired and scarred to stoic toughness, the scout Madreigh offered brusque sympathy. ‘That boy’s not badhearted, only sore. Next month he was to marry.’ The others were content to leave him as spokesman as he tactfully fingered his sword edge. ‘We should send another runner after Steiven?’

  Arithon moved not at all, but only closed tortured eyes.

  ‘Ath!’ said Madreigh. ‘Forget I ever asked.’ Then, in a queer catch of breath he caught Arithon’s wrist and clamped down. ‘Trouble’s here.’

  A metallic click cut the quiet. The scout just sent off reached a distance of fifty paces then pitched in a spinning fall, a crossbow bolt through his neck.

  Arithon broke free and flung Jieret violently behind him. ‘Boy, stay out of this, as your sovereign, I command you.’ His sword whistled up to guard-point, while he backed behind the thickest tree to hand, an old beech raked rough where bucks had shed their summer velvet. He pinned Steiven’s heir with his body as shield, while the clan scouts fell in around him to enclose the boy.

  Their rush to reach the beleaguered women could have drawn them to spring the perfect trap. Hidden troops could lie anywhere in ambush. The crossbows were their greatest liability; shadows their surest defence. But Arithon dared not try his gift openly lest he pinpoint his presence to Lysaer, and invite an uncontrolled confrontation with the compulsions of Desh-thiere’s curse.

  Three clansmen armed with recurves and full quivers began to climb the tree to snipe for the crossbowman. Arithon gave the shortest one a boost. Fast and furiously thinking, he said, ‘They have quarrels, why wait? Why don’t they drop us where we stand?’

&n
bsp; ‘They’re bounty-men.’ Madreigh showed a grim flash of teeth. ‘Arrow kills make fights over scalp claims.’

  Quite probably the headhunters’ best marksmen would still be stationed on the rimrocks, or deep in the chasms of the grotto, where orders would shortly recall them.

  ‘The bolt had red fletching,’ Jieret added.

  ‘It’s Pesquil’s league that’s against us,’ another scout picked up explanation. ‘We’ll be surrounded already. They’ll attack us with numbers, hand to hand.’ He jerked his stubbled chin toward the exquisite weapon held steady in his liege lord’s grip. ‘I hope you’re good with that.’

  ‘We’ll know in a moment.’ Arithon withheld encouragement that his sorceries might offer them salvation. Any ward against combined assailants required time and concentration to arrange. No moment was given for response. From the glen that led toward the rimrocks, shadows flitted, and occasional chance gleams of metal. These fits and starts of movement resolved into a wave of charging foes. The instant before they closed, Arithon noticed worse: shouts, then the distant clash of steel as a skirmish broke out in the river gully farther downstream.

  ‘Caolle’s men?’ Alarmed, Madreigh added, ‘Ath, what could press them to strike openly? Etarra’s garrison’s still behind them. They’ll be engaged on two fronts and torn apart.’

  Inarguable fact, as Arithon knew. But even Caolle’s blunt savvy could hardly stay fathers just come from discovery of the scalped and slaughtered bodies of their sons; clansmen who tracked the reivers upstream to find headhunters awaiting them in force, and who attacked without the knowledge that their families in the grotto were past saving.

  ‘If you pray, beg Steiven’s division won’t be with them,’ Arithon said.

  Then the enemy was upon them. A rough face, a sword and a fouled set of gauntlets absorbed all of Arithon’s attention. Alithiel whined once, twice, in flurried parries. His opponent was large and heavy handed. Arithon lunged, then blocked another thrust. His riposte was controlled, an understated springboard for the feint which followed. A disengage on the next thrust finished the attacker. Arithon yanked Alithiel clear, sidestepped the headhunter’s dying thrash, and in speed that blurred, caught the next man behind in a stop thrust.