Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
The bedding rustled. A lavish fall of hair stroked his back, then a cheek, laid against his taut shoulder; his wife, arisen behind him, to link calming hands at his waist.
His tension would tell her the portent was ugly. Too often, in sleep, the prescient vision he inherited from his father warned him of death and trouble.
Jieret raked long fingers through his ginger beard. He braced his nerve, spun, and enfolded his lady into his possessive embrace. “I’m sorry, dove.” The soft, misted peace of the greenwood seemed suddenly, desperately precious. “I shall have to travel very far, very fast. The life of our prince is at stake.”
She would not question his judgment, not for that. Arithon s’Ffalenn was the last of Rathain’s royal line. Should he die with no heir, his feal clansmen would forfeit all hope to reclaim their birthright.
Feithan’s fingers unclasped, brushed down Jieret’s flanks, and withdrew. “How much spare clothing will you carry?” She caught up the blanket, still warm from their sleeping, and spread it to pack his necessities.
Jieret bent, caught her wrists, and marveled as always. The strength in her was a subtle thing, her bones like a sparrow’s in his hands, which were broad and corded beyond his youthful years from relentless seasons of fighting. Their eyes met and shared mute appeal. “I’ll take weapons and the leathers on my back, and you, first of all.” A smile turned his lips. The expression softened the fierce planes of his face, and offset the hawk bridge of his nose. “Leave the blanket.”
He rocked her against his chest, his touch tender. An urgency he could scarcely contain spoke of the perils he must weather on the solitary trek that would take him to Tysan’s western shore. Bounties were still paid for captured clansmen. Headhunters plied the wilds in bands, their tracking dogs combing the thickets. Towns and trade roads were no less a hazard, choked with informers and guardsmen sent out recruiting to replenish the troops lost in Vastmark.
The wife in Jieret’s arms would not speak of the risks. Strong as the generations of survivors who had bred her, she absorbed his need, then massaged to ease his old scars with skilled hands, until he kissed her and slipped free to dress.
Jieret s’Valerient, called Red-beard, was in that hour twenty-one years of age. Supple, self-reliant, clean limbed as the deer he ran down in the hunt, he was rangy and tall, a being tanned out of oak bark. War and early losses had lent his hazel eyes more than a touch of gray flint. Jieret’s inheritance of the caithdein’s title had fallen to him during childhood, both his parents and four sisters slain in one day by town troops on the banks of Tal Quorin. On his wrist, even then, his first badge of achievement: the straight, fine scar from the knife cut which bound him lifelong to the honor of blood pact with his prince.
Proud of his rugged courage, too shrewd to voice fear, Feithan reached beneath their mattress of spruce boughs and tossed him his worn, quilloned knife.
She smiled, a nip of white teeth. “The sooner you go, the better the chance you’ll be back to my lodge before autumn.”
Then she folded slim knees behind her crossed arms and watched him bind on sheath and sword belt. If she wept, her tears were well masked behind tangles of ebony hair. Not on her last breath would she voice her disappointment. If her young husband did not return, his line must live on in the child she knew to be growing within her. She would endure, no less than any other clan woman widowed in a sudden, bloody raid.
Her husband was the oathsworn caithdein of Rathain, his birthright an iron bond of trust. The needs of kingdom and prince must come first, ahead of survival and family.
Feithan held no rancor. If the Teir’s’Ffalenn died, no clanborn babe in Rathain could have peace. The future would be kingless, while the townsmen continued their centuries-old practice of extirpation. Headhunters would keep sewing scalps of clan victims as trophy fringe on their saddlecloths, until at last the survivors dwindled, their irreplaceable old bloodlines too thinned by loss to sustain.
“Go in grace, my lord husband,” were the last words she said, as her man kissed her lips and stepped out.
Three days on foot through his native glens in Strakewood saw Lord Jieret to the shores of Instrell Bay. There, a bribe to a Westfen fisherman secured his safe crossing to Atainia. From landfall just north of the trade port of Lorn, Jieret faced an overland journey of a hundred and fifty leagues. Anviled, rocky ridges arose off the coast, the country between summits guttered in dry gulches, and the scrub thorn which clawed stunted footholds in the sands of the Bittern Desert.
Here, where a man made a target against the luminous sky, Jieret kept to the gullies. Sweat painted tracks through his coat of rimed dust. He jogged, walked, jogged on again, refusing to measure the odds that his errand was already futile.
The winter storms had abated. Any day, the Master of Shadow would raise sail to ply the world’s uncharted waters. He would seek the fabled continent beyond the Westland Sea, and finally know if Athera held a refuge beyond reach of the Mistwraith’s curse.
The Sorcerer, Sethvir, Warden of Althain could have named Prince Arithon’s location. Yet at dusk on spring equinox, when Jieret passed his tower, the Fellowship held convocation. Where Sorcerers worked, the elements paid uncanny homage. The night air seemed charged to crystalline clarity, the land lidded under a transparent sky with its winds preternaturally silenced. Ozone tinged the silvered glow which speared in beams from the keep’s topmost arrow slits, and earth itself seemed to ring to the dance of ancient arcane rhythms. Though the clans did not share the widespread fear in the towns toward the powers called from natural forces, the man was a fool who held no mortal dread of disrupting the Sorcerers’ conjury.
Dawn saw Jieret on his way. His lanky stride ate the distance, through the rocky, slabbed washes bedded with black sand, puddled still from the snowmelt off the lava crags to the north. Before the ford, he veered west, to give the trade roads to Isaer wide berth. He kept to ditches and hedgerows through the flax bogs and farmlands, and moved softly by night where the headhunters scoured the flats. A stolen horse saw him to cover in the tangled stands of spruce which patchworked the Thaldein foothills.
There, better mounted by clansmen from Tysan, he galloped south with the relays who carried news between their fugitive enclaves in Camris.
The first scouts insisted the Master of Shadow would have left his winter haven at Corith.
Flanked by a campfire, the first cooked meat in his belly since the desert, and his undone braid fanned in hanks upon shoulders still glazed from a wash in a freshet, Jieret said, “I know that.” The bronze bristle of his jaw thrust out and hardened. “I have to try anyway.”
The scout who lounged across from him spat out the stem of sweetgrass he had meticulously used to scrub his teeth. “Fiends plague, then. Keep your bad news to yourself. We’ve heard enough already from Avenor to turn our hearts sore with grief.”
Every restive sinew in Jieret’s body coiled tense. “What’s happened?” A late-singing mockingbird caroled through the gloom with a sweet and incongruous tranquillity. “What has Lysaer s’Ilessid done now?”
The scout spat into the embers and spoke, and amid the fragrant, piney gloom beneath the Thaldeins, Jieret Red-beard first heard of the edict which endorsed live capture and slavery.
“Spring equinox has passed, with the ultimatum given,” the scout finished off in bitten rage. “Our Lord Maenol would never swear, but sent the false prince his black arrow proclaiming no quarter.”
Lysaer’s life, among the clans who by right should grant him fealty, was now irrevocably called forfeit. Jieret had no words. The event posed a vicious and unnatural tragedy, a warping of tradition provoked at its root by the evil of the Mistwraith’s curse.
The breeze carried the odd chill, breathed down from the snowfields, bathed pristine white under starlight. Jieret felt as if the cold inside had closed stealthy knuckles around the heart. He sat, eyes shut, and his knees clamped behind his clasped hands. “Events have turned grim in ways even Ath could scarce believe. How are you set when the headhunters start the spring forays?”