by Janny Wurts
Amid brittle silence, subject to shatter, Daliana parted her lashes. Lysaer sat beside her, his stamped features in profile. He still wore his soiled dress from the road, the heraldic doublet peeled off to expose a creased shirt and shoulders rammed too stiff for the light-weight cloth. His cheeks were unfamiliarly hollow, and more remarkably, still unshaven. Dakar slouched in a stuffed chair nearby, a ravaged food tray perched on his lap. His mud-splashed breeches were tucked in wool stockings that showed frayed holes at the toes, without boots. Spaniel brown eyes displayed the bruised circles of a man bludgeoned sleepless for days, kept astride despite cruel fatigue.
Both combatants locked stares with clamped jaws.
Before one or the other destroyed the veneer of civil restraint, Daliana ventured from her silken pillow, ‘I daresay you need us both.’
The galvanic discovery she was awake jerked Lysaer into recoil as though struck in the palm by a viper.
Thrown the advantage, Daliana scooped up her spread hair and elbowed erect. Two-handed, she combed and released the cascade down her back; which artful move let the coverlet slip. The clean shift that draped her scarcely masked the youthful, curved flesh underneath.
Atop frank embarrassment, the sight was sufficient to stagger male nerves like a thunderbolt. Amid the impelled shift in focus, and over Lysaer’s stopped breath, she announced, straightly reasonable, ‘You look kicked to exhaustion, my Lord Mayor. How long have you been in the saddle, and when was the last time you snatched proper rest? Since you’ve tired yourself to secure my release, I shall thankfully cede you my place in your bed.’
Lysaer back-stepped. ‘I have political fires to quench. Affairs that can’t wait. A maid will be sent to assist you.’
Before Daliana enacted her threat and tossed off the blankets in bold provocation, Lysaer spun on his heel and made a singed retreat that carried him through the doorway. Safely past the threshold, he summoned his chamber steward. ‘Have the kitchen bring a fresh tray. Since,’ he concluded, ‘the Mad Prophet’s already demolished the meal brought to ease the privation of my guest’s unjust incarceration.’
Daliana slouched back into the pillows, then met and matched Dakar’s smitten stare, unabashed. ‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.
‘Just now?’ Dakar blinked, beyond smug. ‘I won’t say. If you don’t yet know whose remembrance torments him, I won’t be the one to whet the killing edge on that knife. Asandir should have left warning. You’re an exquisite weapon. Just what kind, and how sharp, might bestow too much leverage.’
But the fixed focus of her tawny eyes was like staring down a crouched tigress. Daliana repeated, ‘What happened? No games! I will not be bandied about like skinned meat for the sake of masculine innuendo.’
Dakar cleared his throat. Glanced down. ‘You should meet Elaira,’ he said, then flushed pink and plunged into the pitfall his maladroit side-step had failed to avoid. ‘If you ask what took place on the Mathorn Road, I escaped getting fricasseed. Barely.’
Daliana pushed back. ‘Barely’s a victory dance, in this case. That temple diviner was truly an unaware innocent?’
‘His equerry wasn’t.’ Dakar cut to the chase. ‘That’s who tucked the active fetch in the saddle-bag underneath Lysaer’s water-flask. And the one who admitted, when pressed, that he had planted the construct at his Lord Examiner’s orders. The diviner was forced to expose his superior, or else face Lysaer’s punitive wrath. Which fate would you choose?’
‘As part and party to a vile assault, aimed to overthrow more than Etarran sovereignty? I’d be terrified.’ Daliana shoved back the sheets and stood up. ‘Sulfin Evend’s old notes make one point dead clear. Lysaer’s not likely to drop his enmity towards the Koriathain.’
‘A miscalculation the True Sect high priesthood at Erdane may rue, set in flames at the forefront of war.’ Dakar hunched like a turtle and dug in to clean the last crumbs off the tray. One hand, exposed, showed a welted bruise. The other, nursed in his lap, appeared singed, untidily bound up in bandaging. Chewing, Dakar peered sidewards and caught Daliana’s morbid interest. ‘I got stepped on,’ he said. ‘Temple dedicate’s boots have hobnails and heel caps, very painful.’ He swallowed, sweating beneath her regard, since the fabric that covered her breasts was too sheer. ‘Before you ask, yes. Three charged fetches existed to manipulate Lysaer. They burn when disarmed. You were wise to have done for the first with a throwing knife.’
‘That wasn’t my question. I won’t be put off.’ But the servant’s tread that approached from the corridor threatened to disrupt their privacy. Daliana stabbed for the crux straightaway. ‘You’ve been Arithon’s ally. Lysaer’s not wont to trust you again. I haven’t the right to rely on your training, or ask you to stay at the risk of your life. Not if you long to be elsewhere.’
Dakar grunted, caught at odds, since nothing remained on the plate to consume. He toyed with the silverware, his moon-calf face veiled and his thick lids obstinately lowered. ‘Lysaer might throw me out on my ear,’ he admitted, too canny to bare his feelings.
Daliana pressured him, traumatized yet by her narrow escape from the murderous temple examiner. ‘The True Sect and the sisterhood will not back down. You’ll still help?’
‘You’ll need more than help!’ Dakar looked up, flushed and deeply offended. ‘Because if Lysaer falls to Desh-thiere’s geas, the Master of Shadow is next to helpless.’
‘My concern is not for Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn.’ Daliana hurled that name like a thrown gauntlet, then watched the stout spellbinder for his reaction. ‘Where does your primary interest lie, Dakar? I have to know, before I’m tripped again by my green inexperience. I don’t have the background to be the sole shield against the wiles of the Koriathain.’
The latch lifted. A flustered maidservant burst through the entry, bearing an armload of clothes. Another followed hard at her heels with a laden tray from the kitchen. Curiosity made them fall over themselves in their eager rush to cosset the Lord Mayor’s new favourite.
Daliana shoved away from the bed, in no mood to be fodder for gossip. She sent both women packing. She would tend herself, and not let the Mad Prophet slide by without an honest answer defining his loyalty. ‘Better say which half brother you’ll move to protect.’
‘I don’t know!’ Dakar discarded the fork in his hand, pushed aside the picked bones of his meal, and glared back. ‘Girl, I’ve lived for too many years, with far too much unassuaged heart-ache.’
Daliana said nothing. She also refused to ease the pressure lent by her piquant state of undress.
Granted no quarter, Dakar’s explosion was the more fearsome for being silent. ‘Since you’ve never encountered his Grace of Rathain, believe me! You’re too fresh to weigh the distinction, or measure the dicey strengths of the one man set against the other. Besides, the problem’s already come to roost for Lysaer, right here.’ He gestured with impatience and, grumbling over the trials inflicted by hard saddles and horseflesh, stirred his bulk and arose. Adroit when it counted, he side-stepped the hazard of female temptation, gimped to the window, and widened the dagged velvet curtains.
More than crystalline sunlight sliced through the uncovered glass. Raw noise slammed like storm surf from the street below: the unruly crowd gathered to witness the trial now milled against the brick wing of the palace. The bestial sound surged to a deafening crescendo when Dakar unlatched the frame and flung open the casement.
‘Just one of the snags in Lysaer’s grandiose plan,’ he shouted over the full-throated roar of acclaim, surely kindled by the recent dramatic display in the court-room. ‘What will your liege do to wean these people from their fixated worship? Better think on how you’ll disarm that problem! Or the starry-eyed flock will be knocked to their knees every time dire straits press his nibs to raise light to enforce his inborn drive to seek justice.’
‘The awed masses don’t worry me,’ Daliana admitted, the source of her personal terror ripped naked instead, as she sorted the clothing left for
her use: Lysaer, or someone, had shown the presence to send to her mother’s town house. The garments were hers, taken from her own wardrobe. Throat tight, she battled an uprush of tears for the grace of perception behind that small kindness.
‘Lysaer won’t fail these people,’ she managed at length. ‘Not unless the temple’s armed posturing leads to bloodshed on the field of war. I must seize every narrow advantage, meantime, since my liege will try to shoulder the impossible load of everyone’s responsible care. He can’t salvage this harrowing mess on his own. Not beset by a Light-struck multitude of fools who can’t think or stand on their own merits. Fanatics don’t choose to stop blinding themselves. His Lordship’s more at risk of becoming the figure-head steered by the needs of the mob.’
‘What man who leads a pack of followers isn’t?’ Dakar challenged back. ‘Above everything, Arithon’s brisk handling taught me the wary wisdom of true independence.’ Turned away from the window to add something more, the stout prophet lost wind as though kicked in the groin.
Daliana regarded his poleaxed shock, her slender hands busy threading silk cord through the eyelets of her brocade bodice. ‘Were you planning to stay on and gawp while I dress?’ Her sweet smile had teeth. ‘I think not. This discussion is ended.’
Late Winter 5923
Caper
Since High Earl Cosach s’Valerient could not barge his armed war band headlong into Tysan’s sovereign territory, the explosive risks to salvage a crown prince left at hazard hung up in thorny debate for a fortnight. Still, Rathain’s closed council thrashed at sharp odds, even after the need for cool wits summoned Laithen s’Idir south from Deshir. By then, the chafed tempers and unresolved argument tensioned all of the Halwythwood settlement.
Not only adults aired their snappish frustration over the threatened fate of Rathain’s royal blood-line.
Forbidden outright to sit with his father, and indignant to be shut out of the affray as the caithdein’s heir designate, Esfand seized the resourceful initiative. Currently, he shivered in the outside cold, belly down on the lodge hall’s roof. Vivaciously quick to share any prank, his cousin Khadrien stretched at his side, a knobby assemblage of elbows and knees flopped into a lanky sprawl. The pair had been eavesdropping on their rankled elders on and off for a week. Both were old enough to start shaving. Shamelessly brash at fifteen years of age, they possessed enough discipline to endure the misery of hours spent in motionless silence. Stealthy as scouts on enemy turf, they pressed their attentive ears against the shagged moss that crusted the weathered shingles.
The tempest beneath them showed no such restraint. Another thunderous bang on the map trestle pocked the clamour, as Cosach roared in retort, ‘You’d have our best talent mince in there, unarmed and under strength, across borders defended by two entrenched war hosts? Just suppose your tiptoeing foray stalks through without getting slaughtered! What then?’
A cool bath of water, Laithen’s logical calm supported her High Earl’s ferocity. ‘Taerlin is crawling with temple diviners!’ Which obstacle was unlikely to change, with the True Sect stirred into an uproar by the Koriathain, and the outbreak of the first true use of Shadow witnessed in living memory. ‘Worse, the word of Caithwood’s haunted glens is hell-bound to spike town-born nerves. The mayors need no other excuse to be frightened to rife paranoia.’ Any talent not clothed in a Sunwheel robe would be suspect, if not hounded and marked for death by the zealot examiners. ‘Tell me,’ Laithen snapped, ‘how would you mask our true-seer’s aura, thrown into that seething school of sharks to search for our crown prince? May as well drop an oil-primed torch in a drought, just to spot the chance gleam of a needle!’
None could refute the risk. Isolated for two hundred years by relentless persecution, until graced with the haven of Lysaer’s justice, Rathain’s clan blood bred a concentration of gifted talent. Outside the free wilds, their kind would shine like lit beacons, obvious to the Matriarch’s scryers, or the temple-trained Sight of the True Sect’s diviners.
‘Ath wept!’ Cosach snorted. ‘With Tysan at the boil to capture rogue talent, any experienced band we might send would find themselves hunted for bounty. They’d be chained on the scaffold and burned for religion before our scout trackers could blink!’
Shouts erupted. Steel clanged, as someone rapped a knife blade against an unsheathed sword in a vain effort to restore order. ‘We should languish for cowardice?’ somebody cried. But the clan chief’s bellowed denouncement stood down the furious outcry. ‘I forbid the attempt!’
The blast of that ultimatum raised hackles, even outside in fresh air. Esfand rolled his eyes and traced a circle with a raised forefinger, the covert stalker’s signal for hazed game that spun and trampled its own trail in confusion.
Khadrien’s freckled features returned an infectious grin. All beaky nose and carroty hair, he mimed the chopped blow to the wrist for the brainless ineptitude that led a fool to hack off his own limb.
Esfand did not laugh.
Inclined to snap choices and mercuric moods, Cosach’s heir hated slanging with words as much as his short-tempered sire. Shamed by his father’s unnatural post-sitting, Esfand bottled his desperate fury as the striped shade cast by the overhead boughs lengthened towards another sunset. The meeting below would drag on into nightfall with the same propositions chased to a standstill. Esfand clenched his fists in frustrated agony. How much more precious time would slip past, while Rathain’s crown prince languished, endangered? Why did his father enforce the delay? For Arithon’s need, Cosach should have rammed a plan through by fiat long since. His leadership had quelled his detractors at sword-point before, to quash a split council’s dithering.
From inside, the endless debate nattered on as someone else rose to deliberate. ‘…how many to venture! By what devious route? How do we locate our hunted prince to make contact, to start with?’
‘We pick someone to journey to Tysan, first off. Sure as frost, his Grace stays at risk while we’re parked on our arses, chewing the fat!’
The back-lash of shouting made that point moot as an accurate, tossed pebble stung Khadrien’s forearm in warning. Stout third in conspiracy, a northern-bred daughter to s’Idir, Siantra posted their alert watch from the ground. Serious, quiet, and lately grown to a willowy height that topped the s’Valerient heir by three fingers, she could move like a wraith. If she avoided a bird’s call to alert him, then the threat of discovery was imminent. Khadrien nudged his cousin and rapidly hand-signalled. Already, the tramp of footsteps approached, mingled with conversational voices. Foragers, likely, just back from the hunt, and a problem, since they would be endowed with game-sense. Even dead still under camouflaged cloaks, the young lurkers could be detected by an adult tracker’s skilled awareness.
Both miscreants ducked. Scout-trained to be agile, they scuttled over the far side of the roof, then scrambled down a drooping oak branch. The instant they dropped to the ground, Siantra snagged their shoulders in steely fists. She shoved them ahead before they tumbled into the snow for their usual tussle. ‘Run!’ she breathed.
‘What, from a foraging party?’ Esfand mimed a cough of disgust.
‘No, infant!’ Siantra flipped back her deep brown braid and smothered a giggle. ‘Khadri’s grandmother’s one step behind. She’s angry.’ Eyes the clear grey of her ancestral lineage pinned down her friend’s darting glance, which shone a limpid, too-innocent blue. ‘You were expected back at the home lodge,’ Siantra guessed. ‘Something about splitting fire-wood for the oven?’
Khadrien flushed to the tips of his ears, which stuck through his unkempt, curly hair. ‘Dharkaron Avenger’s Black Spear! I traded off that chore to my little brother for my best stag-handled knife. If the whelp ditched the bargain, I’ll be chewed meat!’
‘Bloody shreds, thrown out for the head-hunter’s dogs!’ Esfand teased. ‘Your grandame’s got a butcher’s arm with a cleaver.’
The three took to their heels, unwilling to test the beldame’s fierce temper. High
spirits took them out of the settlement by way of the narrow cleft that plunged downhill towards the river. The more sensitive perimeter scouts likely sensed the flicker as their wild run crossed the guarded lines set against an outside intrusion. They were not stopped for their truant exuberance since their flight made no careless noise. Clan young were encouraged to think for themselves. Guile was not only needed, but prized. For the skills the old blood-lines required to survive, such youthful high jinks received tolerance: provided the rascals were not clumsy or foolish enough to get caught.
The riverside terrain at the edge of spring thaw posed a challenge to anyone hurried. The three friends avoided the south-facing mud-banks, heaved by frost, where the lightest of steps would leave footprints. Likewise, they skirted the black clots of leaves, choked in the caved slush heaped after the last blizzard. They trod instead on the jutted dry rocks, racing each other at break-neck speed beneath the bare oaks and marsh maples that knotted the steepening bank. Like wind, they slipped past the springs where the yellow fronds of the willows trailed in flounced curtains down to the ground. The exultant clouds of their puffed breaths joined the gilt notes of bird-song, jarred here and there by the scolds of disturbed jays and chickadees.
The ravine tightened down, roofed over by deadfalls capped in glaze ice that plunged into gloom. Here, the branch streamlet they followed lay frozen, buckled to rills that tumbled over the log-jams and boulders. With Khadrien leading, Esfand and Siantra dodged through, bundled tight in their cloaks to avoid snagging the furs. Shared grins acknowledged their scatheless escape, with the settlement fallen behind them.
Khadrien dared a low whoop, as the steepened pitch of the gulch dipped sharply towards the main river-course. Reckless enough to savour rough thrills, he barreled ahead onto the crusted ice, then flopped on his back and tucked up his feet. Momentum hurtled him into the bowl, where the falls splashed in summer and swirled the green depths of a trout pool.