Warhost of Vastmark. Janny Wurts

       I. SECOND CONVOCATION

      Sethvir of Althain soaked in his hip bath those rare times when he suffered glum spirits. Lapped like a carp in warm water, his hair frizzled over the sculptured bones of thin shoulders, he sulked with his chin in his fists while the steam whorled up through the hanks of his beard and dripped off the white combs of his brows. Misted and half-closed with melancholy, his eyes seemed to cast their brooding focus on his gnarled toes, now perched in a row on the tub’s rim.

      The nails curled in neglected need of trimming.

      Of more telling concern to Sethvir, Prince Arithon’s brilliant strike at Minderl Bay had still failed the wider scope of his intent. If the allied northern war host recruited to hound him had been dismantled with lightest losses, Lysaer s’Ilessid’s misled following had not awakened to perceive the stark truth: that what had destroyed their sea fleet at Werpoint had been less a bloody ploy of the Shadow Master’s than the mishandled force of Lysaer’s own gift of light, maligned by Deshthiere’s curse.

      The one ship’s captain lent the insight to know differently lay slain, beset in a dingy dockside alley. The footpads who knifed him had been hired by Avenor’s Lord Commander for political expediency, Sethvir knew beyond doubt. As Arithon’s sole witness, and a man who had viewed the unalloyed directive of the Mistwraith’s geas firsthand, the seaman had been killed before he could cast any pall of public doubt upon Prince Lysaer’s judgment in defence. Remanned by a crew of less-questionable loyalty, his benighted brig would sail south with the tide for Alestron, Lysaer s’Ilessid and the pick of his officers on board.

      The sorry conclusion weighed like a stone in the heart.

      If Arithon had just demonstrated his fullest understanding of the curse that shackled his will, if this second encounter at Minderl Bay had increased his respect for its fearful train of ill consequence, his half-brother Lysaer owned no such searching self-awareness. Misconstrued by the gift of the s’Ilessid royal line, which bound his relentless pursuit of justice, Tysan’s lost prince remained the sad puppet of circumstance. To the root of his conscience, he stayed righteously assured that he held to honourable principles. He believed his born cause was to hunt down and eliminate a confirmed minion of evil.

      Sethvir glowered into the soap-scummed surface of his bathwater, then blinked, as if for the barest, fragmentary second he had thought to see stars in the suds clinging about his knobby knees.

      Stars’ idle musing sharpened into farsight. The muddled distance in the Sorcerer’s blue-green eyes snapped into sudden, sharp focus. His wet skin stabbed into gooseflesh, Sethvir bolted from his tub. Water splashed jagged stains in his abused scarlet carpet. He snatched up his robe, burrowed it over his wet head, then paused through a drawn-out, prickling shudder as dread raked through him once again.

      Grazed against the limits of his awareness, beyond the world’s wind-spun cloak of living air, an event of chilling wrongness carved a line. Its fire-tailed passage jostled the harmonics of the stars into thin and jangling discord.

      Sethvir