Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
Lysaer’s Alliance regroups, but mark me. Then we’ll see sorrows.”
For a moment, like the drawn-out whisper of old grief, the wind stroked through the greening briar. Then the scout tipped his graying head. “You’ll need to go back,” he urged, gentle. “Our people will carry your message from here. No better can be done. The Khetienn will have sailed. If she has, your wait for your prince could be lengthy.”
The stiff pause came freighted with facts left unspoken: that whether or not the Master of Shadow had passed beyond reach, the headhunters’ leagues in Rathain were ever in Lysaer’s close confidence. The defeats freshly suffered at Arithon’s hand, then the loss of their late captain Pesquil by Jieret’s own arrow, had fanned their clamor for vengeance to fresh fervor.
“You see what must happen,” the scout said in staid logic. “Skannt’s going to claim sanction from Etarra’s fat mayor to harrow Rathain’s feal clans the same way.”
“I know that.” Jieret erupted in strung nerves, reached his feet, and resisted the blind urge to slam his fist into a tree. “Ath, for chained slavery? The guild merchants will cheer and donate the coin to forge manacles. Morality’s no deterrent. For years now, Etarrans have used our child captives as forced labor.” His back to the fire, he seemed a man racked, the passage of each breath made difficult. “I have to go on. What I know must not wait. Nor should my liege hear my word at second hand.”
By the embers, the scout swore in sympathy.
Forced to the crux of a terrible decision, Jieret summed up troubled thoughts. “My clans are more to me than the spirit in my body, but I am not irreplaceable. The Fellowship can appoint a new caithdein for Rathain if my liege is not at hand to make his choice. My spokesman, Deshir’s former war captain, Caolle, would agree. He knows the warning I bring is an augury which bears on Prince Arithon’s life.”
The last of his line, this fugitive Teir’s’Ffalenn; threat to him ended all argument.
“Ath guard your way, then,” the scout said, blunt as hammered metal. “May the clans in the south speed your journey.”
Jieret crossed the Thaldein passes, dismissed his friendly escort, and grew lean and browned from hiding in ditches through the Valendale’s sun-drenched, plowed farmsteads. He took no careless step. But headhunters picked up his trail west of Cainford. He left five hounds dead, and two men, and limped on with bound ribs and a calf with a festering dog bite. The hedge witch he challenged at knifepoint for healing cursed his barbarian tongue, then tried to sell him an amulet snagged together from squirrel skin and the strung vertebra of a grouse.
Jieret refused her the price of a cut lock of his bronze hair.
“‘Twould be useful for bird snares,” the crone muttered. She sniffled over her sticky decoction, then knotted a bandage over an ill-smelling poultice with vindictive and sharp ferocity.
“I like the birds free, and myself most of all.” Jieret wanted to flinch at her handling, but dared not, with his dagger point pressed to her back. The crone’s hovel had nesting sparrows in its eaves, and the pot on her brazier leaked. Poverty and townborn contempt for her simples had leached all her pride in her trade. Jieret harbored the cynical suspicion that any offering from his person would be sold back to headhunters by nightfall, twined into a tracking spell to trace him.
Despite his need, the crone put a grudge in her remedies. His leg swelled and ached. Through curses of agony, he tore the dressing away and soaked off the salves in a stream. Feverish, limping, he thrashed his way south through the brush. A second pack of tracking dogs winded his scent and burst into yammering tongue. Freshly mounted, their masters tried to run him to earth against the guard spells of a grimward, which no man living might cross. There, he might have perished, inadvertently killed by Fellowship defenses set to keep trespassers from harm.
But clan hunters from Taerlin heard the commotion and spirited him downstream in a boat. Safe at last under Caithwood’s dense cover, cosseted by a girl with cool hands, he slept off his lingering wound sickness.
Six weeks, since he had left his wife in Deshir. Early spring exchanged lace-worked blossom and bud for the sumptuous mantle of summer. On the sandy neck of Mainmere Bay, Jieret was met by the clan chief whose ancestral seat lay in ruins across silvered waters. She had ridden hard to bear him a message, the scout in her company said.
The hour was dusk, the sky, cloudless azure. Jieret crouched by her campfire under the eaves of scrub maples and spat out the bones of the rock bass netted for supper. While thrushes fluted clear notes through the boughs, and the deer emerged to nibble the verge of the bogs, he regarded the wizened little duchess who bore ancient title to Mainmere. She watched him eat, her gnarled hands folded. Along with age, she wore callus from sword and from bridle rein. The leathers belted to her waist were a man’s, and shaded under the fans of white lashes, her eyes met his own with stark pity.
“What’s wrong?” Against the soft, sustained lisp of the breeze, Jieret sounded boisterous and unseasoned.
Lady Kellis touched the battered satchel by her knee. “A documented accusation by Avenor, made against your sanctioned prince.” She resumed in her husked, worn alto. “My lord Maenol withheld this one writ from the packet, for your hand alone, he insisted. By your sworn duty, this becomes your legal charge as caithdein of Rathain.”
Her fingers trembled as she loosened the strings of her parcel. “For this, we risk another passage to see you safe into Corith. There’s a chance the Khetienn’s departure was delayed. In the month when the ice broke, the Shadow Master heard of Lysaer’s proclamation of slavery. Word came back that he intended to make disposition on behalf of our clans.”
“What’s the charge?” Jieret’s appetite fled. He rinsed his hands in the leather bucket used earlier to sluice down his whetstone, in no hurry to accept the offered document.
But Lady Kellis had no reassurance to steady him. “I leave you to read,” she said in blank reserve. “Then you must act as your oath to your kingdom demands.”
At first touch, the heavy, state parchment filled Jieret with trepidation. He unfolded its leaves, braced as though handed the news of a recent fatality. Then he perused the first lines of official script, and his fists knotted from helpless rage. “But there was never a trial to affirm this arraignment!”
The Duchess of Mainmere gave a dry laugh. “Be thankful. If there had been, the towns would have seen your prince burn.”
By the time Jieret finished, he was shaking. Traced bronze by the flame light, he bent his rangy shoulders and dammed silent misery behind the locked palms of his hands.
A caithdein’s given charge was the testing of princes, if the Fellowship Sorcerers were preoccupied. The clans of Tysan were lawfully correct. Any accusation of dark sorcery against his liege belonged nowhere else but with him.
Heavy of heart, Jieret tucked the document into his shirt. “I will go on to Corith. Find a boat quickly to bear me.”
The grandame arose, touched his arm in mute sympathy, then left him to a comfortless night. While the stars shimmered through the puzzle-cut shapes of black leaves, the ugly duty before him at Corith lent spin to-his chafing fear. Rathain’s sworn caithdein could not shake his dread, that his prescient dream of a city execution and Avenor’s sealed writ of arraignment might share a fatal connection.
Passage to the Isles of Min Pierens in a patched-up fishing smack took three weeks, beating against the season’s prevailing westerlies, and bouts of calm between squall lines. As the little craft wore through the islands off the headland, Jieret crouched on the deck, stripped down to his sun-scorched skin. Between his knees, he braced a bucket of damp sand against the wallowing roll of the deck. A monologue of curses marked his ongoing effort to scrub the green bloom of mold from his leathers.
“Man, lend it mercy,” drawled the craft’s only deckhand, perched like a limpet halfway up the mast with orders to watch out for shoals. “Keep on that, and just weep when yer bollocks tumble out and dangle