The Curse of the Mistwraith

Dakar lowered his hand, startled. No hidden veil of meaning emerged to chastise his impudence. Complex and awesomely powerful as a Sorcerer of the Fellowship was, Asandir seemed wholly preoccupied. Too lazy to bother with amazement, Dakar dived in with a question. ‘Now will you explain why a serf carries a Paravian blade?’

Asandir’s brows rose in sharp surprise. ‘Is that all you saw? Best look again.’

Hunger forgotten, Dakar abandoned the vegetables. The sword still lay on the floor beside the hearth, the glitter of its jewel like ice against the rags. The Mad Prophet had not noticed the rune cut into the face of the emerald earlier. Now, the sight made his fat face crease into a frown. Absently blotting his bloodied thumb on his tunic, he moved closer. No, he thought, impossible. Anxious for reassurance, Dakar closed sweaty hands over chill metal and pulled.

The weapon slipped free of its scabbard with the dissonant ring of perfect temper. Flamelight sparked across the silver interlace which traced the blade; but the steel itself glimmered dark as smoked glass.

Dakar’s cheeks went white. ‘No!’ Outrage, then disbelief crumbled as he read the characters engraved on the crossguard. Confronted by undeniable proof he spun and faced Asandir. ‘Ath! That’s Alithiel, one of the twelve swords forged at Isaer from the cinder of a fallen star.’

Asandir stirred. ‘That should not surprise you. Arithon is Teir’s’Ffalenn.’

Stunned by the translation, which meant successor and heir, Dakar said, ‘What!’ He watched accusingly as the sorcerer pushed tangled bridles aside and seated himself on the settle.

‘You might at least have told me. If my prophecy’s disproved, I’d like to know.’

‘The Prophecy of West Gate is valid.’ Asandir loosed a long breath. ‘Blessed Ath, quite more than valid.’ This time, Dakar managed restraint enough to stay silent.

‘You predicted the Mistwraith’s bane, surely enough, but only through an aberration of every law designated by the Major Balance.’ Asandir looked up, bleak as spring frost. ‘Our princes are half-brothers through s’Ahelas on the distaff side. The affinity for power Sethvir once nurtured in that line has evolved unselectively on Dascen Elur, to the point where direct elemental mastery was granted to unborn children, all for a bride’s dowry.’

Dakar swallowed and found his mouth gone dry. Sworn spellbinder to Asandir, he had trained for half a century before learning even the basic craft of illusion. Elemental mastery lay beyond him still, for such power was limited only by the breadth of a wielder’s imagination. ‘Which elements?’

‘Light,’ said Asandir, ‘and shadow, granted intact upon conception. That’s enough to destroy the Mistwraith, but only if the half-brothers work jointly. I’ll add that our princes are opposites with a heritage of blood feud between them.’

Sensitized to the cold, deadly burden of the weapon in his lap, Dakar shivered. ‘Do the princes understand their gifts?’

‘One does.’ A log fell. Sparks flurried across an acid silence. Then Asandir reached down and tested the sword’s cruel edge with his finger. ‘Athera’s sunlight might be perilously bought.’

Suddenly stifled by the uneasy, hollow feeling that often preceded prophecy, Dakar surged to his feet. Steel flashed, fell, struck stone with a belling clamour which shattered the very air with discord. Dakar turned widened eyes toward the sorcerer, beseeching reassurance. ‘Have we any other choice?’

‘No.’ Asandir lifted the sword. Emerald light spiked his knuckles as he restored the blade to the sheath. ‘Man’s meddling created the Mistwraith. By the tenets of the Major Balance, mortal hands must achieve its defeat.’ The sorcerer set Alithiel aside, his bearing suddenly gentled. ‘The risk is not without counterbalance. The royal lines retain their founding virtues, despite five centuries of exile on Dascen Elur.’

Dakar managed a wry grin. ‘Teir’s’Ffalenn! I must have been stone blind.’

‘Hasty,’ Asandir corrected. ‘Some days I fear Dharkaron’s own vengeance couldn’t make you notice what’s in front of you.’

Arithon returned to awareness in the confines of an unfamiliar room. Burned low in an iron bracket, a tallow candle lit a shelf jumbled with whittled animals; a badger’s muzzle threw leering shadows across walls of rudely-dressed timber. Rain tapped against shingles, and the earthy smell of a packed dirt floor carried a sickly tang of mildew.

The Master stirred. A wool coverlet pricked unpleasantly at his naked, half-healed flesh. Lysaer lay on an adjacent cot. Cleansed of dirt and dust, blond hair fell like flax across a sun-darkened cheekbone. Arithon shivered, but not from chill. He threw off his blanket and arose.

Someone had laid out clothing on a chest in one corner. Arithon fingered linen cloth and frowned; such generosity seemed at odds with the poverty evidenced by the cabin’s rude furnishings. As a penniless exile, Arithon wondered what price might be demanded in exchange. The thought raised recollection of Mearth and nightmare; and the fearfully focused mastery in the hands which had restored his troubled mind. Recognition of power greater than any he had ever known stirred the hair at Arithon’s nape. He dressed swiftly in breeches and shirt too large for his thin frame.

Lysaer stirred while he fussed the laces tight. The prince opened blue eyes, gasped and rolled over. Startled by his surroundings, he drew a quick breath.

Arithon dropped his half-tied points and stopped the prince’s outcry with his hands. ‘Speak softly,’ he warned in a whisper.

Past his initial shock, Lysaer ducked his half-brother’s hold. ‘Why?’

‘Whoever gave us shelter does so for more than kindness’ sake.’ Arithon dumped the second set of clothes on his half-brother’s chest.

Lysaer shot upright. He snatched with both hands as neatly folded linen toppled. ‘How do you know?’

Arithon shook his head. He stared unseeing at the wan flicker of the candleflame. ‘Our benefactor is a sorcerer more powerful than any on Dascen Elur.’ One strong enough to found a World Gate, or bind added lifespan arcanely into water; but Arithon shied from voicing the thought.

Alarmed nevertheless, Lysaer shoved out of bed, disturbing an avalanche of cloth. Arithon stopped his brother’s rush with forceful hands. ‘Bide your time! Power on that scale never moves without purpose. We have no choice but to act carefully.’

Naked unless he accepted the clothing at his feet, Lysaer battled his pride. Suspicious of sorcerers and bereft of kingdom and inheritance, he misliked the thought he must rely on charity and a former enemy’s judgement. ‘What do you suggest?’

Arithon considered his half-brother’s dilemma and tried through his own uncertainty to ease the damage tactless handling had created. ‘Power without wisdom eventually destroys itself. This sorcerer is old beyond estimate. At present, I think we might trust him.’

Lysaer retrieved the fallen shirt. In silence he rammed taut fists into sleeves plainer than those he had known as crown prince.

Arithon watched, mildly exasperated. ‘Since neither of us has suffered any harm, I advise caution. Maintain your manners at least until our host reveals a motive.’

Lysaer paused, half-clad. ‘I hear you.’ The glare he turned upon his half-brother all but made the s’Ffalenn flinch, so clearly did the look recall the unpleasantness of Amroth’s council chamber. A moment passed, charged with tension. Then the prince swore softly and some of the anger left him. ‘By the Wheel, I’m tired of being shoved in beyond my depth!’

‘Your judgement isn’t lacking.’ But Arithon averted his face lest his expression betray the truth: Lysaer’s ignorance was insignificant, and all of Rauven’s learning a fevered dream before the presence which resonated against his awareness. Hounded to restlessness, Arithon paced to the door.

Orange light gleamed between crudely joined panels. The Master pressed his cheek to the gap and peered into the room beyond. Stacked logs cast drifts of shadow against mud-chinked walls. Herbs hung drying from the peaked beams of the ceiling, their fragrance mingled with woodsmoke. Before the hearth, on a stool of axe-hewn fir, a short man stirred the contents of a kettle; a rumpled tunic swathed his bulging gut and his hair was a nest of elflocks.

Arithon shifted, his hands gone damp with apprehension. On the settle sat a second man, so still his presence had nearly been overlooked. Silver hair gleamed against the curve of a grindstone wheel. A log settled in the fire; light flared, broken into angles against the man’s face. Arithon glimpsed dark, jutting brows and an expression of unbreakable patience. Though lean and stamped by time, the stranger himself defied age. Touched again by the impression of power, Arithon felt his breath catch.

‘What do you see?’ Lysaer leaned over his shoulder, expectant.

Unready to share his suspicions, Arithon stepped back from the door. Nothing could be gained if he allowed his mage-schooled perception to overwhelm his wits with awe. He shrugged to dispel his uneasiness. ‘The plump fellow will probably do the talking. But watch the other.’

Yet quietly as the Master raised the door-latch, the bearded man noticed at once. He looked around with the alertness of a fox and his plump hands paused on the spoon handle. ‘Asandir?’

The older man lifted his head. Eyes light as mirror-glass turned upon the two young men in the doorway. ‘Be welcome. Your arrival is the blessing of Athera.’

He phrased his words in Paravian, known to Dascen Elur as the old tongue. Lysaer frowned, unable to understand. But at his side, Arithon gasped as if shocked by cold. The sorcerer’s scrutiny caught him with his own awareness unshielded, and what self-possession he had left was rocked by a thundering presence of leashed force. Control failed him. Firelight and solid walls dissolved as his perception imploded, pinpointed to insignificance by the blinding presence of the infinite.

Lamely, the Master struggled to speak. ‘Lord, we thank you for shelter.’

‘The cottage does not belong to me,’ Asandir rebuked; but his expression reflected amusement as he rose from his place at the settle. ‘I hold no land, neither do I bear title.’

Dizzied to faintness, Arithon responded the only way he could manage. ‘I know. I beg forgiveness.’ He knelt abruptly and his following line struck through a stunned and sudden silence. ‘I had not intended to slight you.’

‘Arithon!’ Lysaer’s exclamation was followed by the clatter of a wooden spoon upon the hearth. Unable to contain himself, the fat man capped the uproar with an astonished yell. ‘Dharkaron!’ Then he clamped both palms to his mouth and blanched like a split almond.

Asandir gave way to laughter. ‘Have you all gone mad?’ In a stride he reached Arithon’s side and firmly raised him to his feet. ‘You must forgive Dakar. Your arrival has fulfilled his most important prophecy. Though he’s wagered enough gold on the outcome to founder a pack mule, I’ve forbidden any questions until after you’ve had a chance to eat.’

The sorcerer paused, embarrassed by Lysaer’s blank stare. He shifted language without accent. ‘Come, be welcome and sit. We’ll have time enough for talk later. If our greeting lacks courtesy, I hope our hospitality will remedy the lapse.’

Relieved not to be excluded from conversation, Lysaer relaxed and accepted the sorcerer’s invitation. He pulled out the nearest bench and seated himself at the trestle. But beside him, the Master hesitated.

Dakar swung the pot from the fire and began to ladle stew into crockery bowls. From tousled crown to boots of crumpled leather, he looked more like a village tavernkeeper than a gifted seer. Yet the curiosity which simmered beneath his unkempt appearance whetted Arithon to fresh wariness. He took his place next to his half-brother with carefully hidden foreboding.

Dakar’s interest suggested higher stakes than gold at risk on a wager. Unsettled by evidence that supported his initial concern, Arithon responded with firm inward denial. Karthan had taught him a bitter lesson: his magecraft and his music would not be sacrificed to the constraints of duty a second time. Though sorcerer and prophet held every advantage, Arithon intended to keep the initiative, if only to cover his intent with distraction. With the food yet untouched in his bowl, he caught the sorcerer’s attention and asked the first question that sprang to mind. ‘Who is Davien?’

Dakar gasped. He froze with the ladle poised over air and broth dripped unnoticed on the clay brick of the hearth. Lysaer looked on, stiff with uncertainty, as tension mounted round his half-brother like a stormfront.

Asandir alone showed no reaction. But his answer was sharp as a rapier at guard-point. ‘Why do you ask?’

Arithon clenched his jaw. Luck had provided him opening; he had not guessed his query would rouse such a disturbed response. Though he had urged Lysaer to avoid confrontation, he recklessly snatched his chance to provoke. ‘I think you already know why I ask.’

The stewpot clanged onto the boards. ‘Daelion’s Wheel!’

Asandir silenced Dakar’s outburst with a glance and turned impervious features upon Arithon. ‘Davien was once a sorcerer of Athera’s Fellowship of Seven, as I am. Contrary to the rest of us, he judged mortal man unfit to reign in dynastic succession. Five and a half centuries ago, Davien stirred the five kingdoms to strife, and the order of the high kings was overthrown. There has been no true peace since. By his own choice, Davien was exiled. Does that answer you?’

‘Partly.’ Arithon strove to keep his voice level. Though he knew all pretence was wasted on Asandir, Dakar observed also, rapt as a merchant among thieves. The Master spread his hands on the table to still their shaking. Prophecies rarely centred upon individuals with small destinies. Arithon gripped that fear, voiced it outright as a weapon to unbalance his opposition. ‘Are Lysaer and I promised to restore the prosperity Davien destroyed?’

This time Dakar was shocked speechless. For a prolonged moment the curl of steam rising from the stewpot became the only motion in the room.

Throughout, Asandir showed no surprise. But his economy of movement as he sat forward warned of ebbing tolerance. ‘A Mistwraith covered all Athera soon after the fall of the high kings. Its withering blight has sickened this world, and no clear sky has shone for five hundred years.’ The fire’s sibilant snap dominated a short pause. ‘A prophecy as old tells of princes from Dascen Elur who will bring means to restore sunlight to heal the land. You and your half-brother are that promise made real. Does that answer you?’

Arithon caught his breath. ‘Not directly. No.’

Amazingly, it was Lysaer who slammed his fist on the table with such force that stew splattered from the bowls. ‘Ath’s grace, man, did you learn nothing of diplomacy as heir of Karthan?’

Arithon turned upon his half-brother. ‘The lesson Karthan taught me—’

But the sentence died incomplete; a gap widened in the Master’s mind as Asandir’s block took him by surprise. Memory of Karthan’s conflict dissolved into oblivion. Puzzled by quenched emotions, Arithon pursued the reason with full possession of his enchanter’s reflexes.

Haziness barriered his inner mind. The Master drove deeper, only to find his self-command stolen from him. The anger which exploded in response was reft away also, numbed and wrapped against escape like an insect poisoned by a spider. Arithon lashed back. The void swallowed his struggle. Brief as the flare of a meteor, his conscious will flickered into dark.

Arithon woke, disoriented. He opened his eyes, aware that Lysaer supported his shoulders from behind.

‘…probably an after-effect from the geas of Mearth,’ Dakar was saying. Yet Arithon caught a look of calculation on the prophet’s features. The platitude masked an outright lie.

Lysaer looked anxiously down. ‘Are you all right?’

Arithon straightened with an absent nod; confusion ruled his thoughts. He recalled Mearth’s geas well. But strive as he might, he found nothing, not the slightest detail of what had caused his momentary lapse in consciousness.

‘You had a memory gap,’ said Asandir quietly.

Arithon started and glanced up. The sorcerer stood by the fire, his expression all lines and fathomless shadows. ‘You need not concern yourself. The condition isn’t permanent. I promise you full explanation when our Fellowship convenes at Althain Tower.’

That much at least was truth. Arithon regarded the sorcerer. ‘Have I any other choice?’

Asandir stirred with what might have been impatience. ’Althain Tower lies two hundred and fifty leagues overland from here. I ask only that you accompany Dakar and myself on the journey. Firsthand experience will show you the ruin caused by the Mistwraith which oppresses us. Then the destiny we hope you’ve come to shoulder may not seem such a burden.’

Arithon buried a reply too vicious for expression. The room had suddenly become too oppressive for him to bear. Stifled by dread of the sorcerer’s purpose, the Master rose and bolted through the door. Stout planking banged shut on his heels, wafting the scent of wet autumn earth. Lysaer stood, visibly torn.

‘Go to him if you wish,’ said Asandir with sympathy.

Shortly a second bowl of stew cooled, abandoned on the table. When the Mad Prophet also moved to follow, the sorcerer forbade him. ‘Let the princes reach acceptance on their own.’

Dakar sat back against the boards, his restriction against questions forgotten. ‘You placed the s’Ffalenn under mind-block, or I’m a grandmother,’ he accused in the old tongue.

Asandir’s eyes hardened like cut-glass. ‘I did so with excellent reason.’

His bleakness made the Mad Prophet start with such force that he bruised his spine against the planking. Unaware of the anguish behind his master’s statement Dakar misinterpreted, and attributed Asandir’s sharpness to mistrust of Arithon’s character.

The sorcerer startled him by adding, ‘He didn’t like it much, did he? I’ve seldom seen a man fight a block to unconsciousness.’

But with his dearest expectations thrown into chaos by intemperate royalty, Dakar was disgruntled too much for reflection. He seized an iron poker from its peg and jabbed sourly at the fire. ‘They’ll come to odds, half- brothers or not.’

Asandir’s response cut through a spitting shower of sparks. ‘Is that prophecy?’

‘Maybe.’ Dakar laid the poker aside, propped his chin on plump knuckles and sighed. ‘I’m not certain. Earlier, when I held the sword, I had a strong premonition. But I couldn’t bear to see five centuries of hope destroyed on the day of fulfilment.’

The sorcerer’s manner turned exasperated. ‘So you dropped Alithiel to distract yourself.’

‘Dharkaron break me for it, yes!’ Dakar straightened, mulish in his own defence. ‘If they are going to fight, let me be the very last to find out!’

Overview

In a cleft overlooking a mountain pass, Grithen, fourteenth heir of a deposed earl, huddled closer to the ledge which concealed his position from the trade-route below. Wind whipped down from the snowline, ruffling bronze hair against his cheek as he stared down the misty defile where the caravan would cross. Though his body ached with cold, he remained still as the stone which sheltered him. Hedged by storm and starvation, survival in the wilds of Camris came dear. But unlike the mayor who now ruled the earl’s castle in Erdane, Grithen had not forgotten his origins: he kept clan etiquette despite the leggings and jerkin of laced wolf-hide which differentiated him from the courtly elegance of his ancestors.

A metallic clink and a creak of harness sounded faintly down the trail. Grithen’s knuckles tightened on his javelin. The jingle of weaponry always roused memories, few of them pleasant As a boy, Grithen had learned of the uprising which had swept Erdane in the wake of the high king’s fall…

A tambourine had clashed in the minstrel’s hand, even as mail, swords and bridles did now. The ballad began with the slaughter of the earl in his bed. In clear minor tones, the singer described a castle bailey splattered red by torchlight as the mob claimed the lives of council and family retainers. Atrocity had not ended there. With dusky emotion the bard sang on, of refugees who struggled for survival in the wilds, hounded through winter storms by the headhunter’s horn.

When he was three, the ballad recounting the fall of the house of Erdane had scalded Grithen’s eyes with tears. At seven, the murder of his two brothers on the stag spears of the mayor’s hunting party stamped hatred in his heart for any man born within town walls. While most clansmen served scout duty in the passes by lot, Grithen stayed on by choice. No comfort in the lowland camps sweetened his mood like vengeance.

The caravan’s advance guard rounded the outcrop, featureless as ivory chess pieces in the close grip of the mist. The men-at-arms marched two abreast, weapons clasped with joyless vigilance. Five centuries past, such men might have served Grithen as retainers. Now, they rode as his prey. Product of his violent heritage, the young scout had marked this caravan for raid.

Iron-rimmed wheels grated over stone as the carts rounded the bend. A teamster cursed a laggard mule in coastal accents. Forgetful of the chill, Grithen studied wares well-lashed under cord: his eyes missed no detail. Bundles wrapped in oiled canvas would contain tempered steel if the caravan travelled from seaside. A brand on a cask confirmed this.

Eight wagons passed beneath the ledge. Grithen smiled with predatory glee yet made no other move. Caution meant survival. Town officials still paid bounties and a scout discovered by guardsmen was unlikely to die cleanly. The caravan passed well beyond earshot before Grithen rose. Preoccupied, he withdrew from his cranny and beat his arms and legs to restore circulation. A movement on the cliff above startled him motionless, until he identified the source.

An elderly clansman descended from the heights. Wind tumbled the pelt of his fox-fur hat and his weathered features were pulled into a squint by a scar.

Grithen bent his head in deference. ‘Lord Tashan.’

Silent through a lifetime of habit, the elder gestured at the road, empty now except for mist. ‘There can be no raid.’ A smile touched his lips as he explained quietly, ‘A bard rides with the baggage. He’s friend to the clan, protected by guest oath.’

Chilled, stiff and disgruntled, Grithen scowled. ‘But he plays for townsmen now, and I saw tempered steel on this haul.’

Tashan spat. ‘Earl Grithen? You speak like a mayor’s get, born lawless and bereft of courtesy! Next, you’ll be forgetting how to greet your liege lord.’

Colour drained from Grithen’s cheeks at the insult. Although the scout placed little faith in the prophecy which claimed the return of a s’Ilessid high king, he would defend clan honour with his life. There lay the true measure of his birthright. ‘As you will, Lord Tashan.’

The elder nodded with curt satisfaction. But Grithen followed him from the ledge with rebellious resolve. The next townsmen to cross the pass of Orlan would be expertly plundered, and neither bards, nor elders, nor force of arms would preserve them.

Preview

With an expression abstract as a poet’s, Sethvir of the Fellowship sat amid opened piles of books and penned perfect script onto parchment. Suddenly he straightened. The quill trailed forgotten from his hand and his cuff smeared the ink of his interrupted sentence.

I send word of the Mistwraith’s bane. Asandir’s message bridged the leagues which separated Althain Tower from the forests in Korias near West Gate.

‘Words alone?’ Sethvir chuckled, rearranged the contact and drew forth an image of the clearing where Asandir stood, heavily cloaked against the damp. Dakar waited nearby with two others of unmistakably royal descent.

The blond prince raised one arm. Light cracked from his hand, sharp-edged as lightning. As the mist overhead billowed into confusion a black-haired companion raised darkness like a scythe and cut skyward. Fog curdled in the shadow’s deadly cold. Flurried snow danced on the breeze.

The Mistwraith recoiled. Murky drifts of fog tore asunder and revealed a morning sky streaked with cirrus. Sunlight lit the upturned faces of sorcerer, prophet and princes, and for an instant the drenched ferns under their feet blazed, bejewelled.

Then the Mistwraith boiled back across the gap. Light died, pinched off by miserly fingers of fog.

Sethvir released the image and absently noticed the remains of his quill buckled between his fists. ‘Have you mentioned anything of the heritage due s’Ffalenn and s’Ilessid?’

No. Reservation hedged Asandir’s reply. Dakar had a premonition. The princes derive from a background of strife which may lead to trouble with the succession.

‘Well, that tangle can’t be sorted in the field.’ Pressured already by other troubles this further complication would not speed, Sethvir buried ink-stained knuckles in his beard. ‘You’ll be coming to Althain, then?’

Yes. Asandir’s touch turned tenuous as he prepared to break rapport. We’ll travel across Camris by way of Erdane. The perils of an overland journey will give the princes a powerful understanding of the problems they must inherit before sovereignty clouds their judgement.

Sethvir drew the contact back into focus with a thought. ‘Then you think the heirs are worthy of kingship?’

Asandir returned unmitigated reproof. That’s a broad assumption, even for you. Gravely serious, he added, Difficulties have arisen that will need tender handling. But yes, if their past history can be reconciled, these princes might mend the rift between townsman and barbarian.

Concerned lest any former rivalry should imperil the suppression of the Mistwraith, Sethvir absorbed the spate of fact and speculation sent by his colleague across the link. Behind eyes of soft, unfocused turquoise, his thoughts widened to embrace multiple sets of ramifications. ‘Mind the risks.’

The words faded into distance as Asandir’s contact dissolved.

Envoys

The Prime Enchantress of the Koriathain calls a messenger north to Erdane, and since late autumn promises unpleasant travelling, Lirenda suggests Elaira in hopes the journey might blunt the edge from her insolence…

A raven released from Althain Tower flies southeast over the waters of Instrell Bay, and each wingbeat intensifies the geas which guides its directive…

In the deeps of the night, an icy draft curls through the cottage where Asandir sits watchful and awake; and the disturbance heralds the presence of a bodiless Fellowship colleague, arrived to deliver a warning: ‘Since you mean to cross Tornir Peaks by road, know that Khadrim are flying and restless. The old wards that confine them have weakened. I go to repair the breach, but one pack has already escaped…’

V. RIDE FROM WEST END

The overland journey promised by Asandir began the following morning, but not in the manner two exiles from Dascen Elur might have anticipated. Rousted from bed before daybreak and given plain tunics, hose and boots by Asandir, Lysaer and Arithon hastened through the motions of dressing. This clothing fitted better than the garments borrowed from the woodcutter; lined woollen cloaks with clasps of polished shell were suited for travel through cold and inclement weather. The half-brothers were given no explanation of where such items had been procured; in short order, they found themselves hiking in the company of their benefactors through wet and trackless wilds. In the fading cover of night, Asandir conducted them to a mistbound woodland glen at the edge of the forest and baldly commanded them to wait. Then he and the Mad Prophet mounted and rode on to the town of West End, Dakar to visit the fair to purchase additional horses, and Asandir to complete an unspecified errand of his own.

Dawn brought a grey morning that dragged interminably into tedium. Arithon settled with his back against the whorled trunk of an oak. Whether he was simply napping or engrossed in a mage’s meditation, Lysaer was unwilling to ask. Left to his own devices, the prince paced and studied his surroundings. The wood was timelessly old, dense enough to discourage undergrowth, twistedly stunted by lack of sunlight. Gnarled, overhanging trees trailed hoary mantles of fungus. Rootbeds floored in dank moss rose and fell, cleft in the hollows by rock-torn gullies. Strange birds flitted through the branches, brown and white feathers contrasting with the bright red crests of the males.

Unsettled by the taints of mould and damp-rotted bark and by the drip of moisture from leaves yellowedged with ill-health, Lysaer slapped irritably as another mosquito sampled the nape of his neck. ‘What under Daelion’s dominion keeps Dakar? Even allowing for the drag of his gut he should have returned by now.’

Arithon roused and regarded his half-brother with studied calm. ‘A visit to the autumn fair would answer your question, I think.’

Though the smothering density of the mists deadened the edge from the words, Lysaer glanced up, astonished. Asandir had specifically instructed them to await the Mad Prophet’s return before going on to make rendezvous by the Melor River bridge when the town bells sounded carillons at noon.

Arithon said in distaste, ‘Would you stay and feed insects? I’m going in any case.’

Suddenly uneasy, Lysaer regretted his complaint. ‘Surely Asandir had reasons for keeping us here.’

Arithon’s mouth twisted in a manner that caused his half-brother a pang of alarm. ‘Well I know it.’ A madcap grin followed. ‘I want to know why. Thanks to Dakar’s tardy hide, we’ve gained a perfect excuse to find out. Will you come?’

Uncertainty forgotten, Lysaer laughed aloud. After the restraint imposed by arcane training he found the unexpected prankster in his half-brother infectious. ‘Starve the mosquitoes. What will you tell the sorcerer?’

Arithon pushed away from the tree trunk. ‘Asandir?’ He hooked his knuckles in his swordbelt. ‘I’ll tell him the truth. Silver to breadcrusts we find our prophet facedown in a gutter, besotted.’

‘That’s a gift not a wager.’ Lysaer shouldered through the thicket which bounded the edge of the woodland, his mood improved to the point at which he tolerated the shower of water raining down the neck of his tunic. ‘I’d rather bet how long it takes Dakar to get his fat carcass sober.’

‘Then we’d both eat breadcrumbs,’ Arithon said cuttingly. ‘Neither of us have silver enough to wait on the streets that long.’ Enviably quick, he ducked the branch his brother released in his face and pressed ahead into the meadow.

Fog hung leaden and dank over the land but an eddy of breeze unveiled a slope that fell away to a shoreline of rock and cream flat sands. An inlet jagged inward, flanked by the jaws of a moss-grown jetty. Set hard against the sands of the seacoast, the buttressed walls of West End resembled a pile of child’s blocks abandoned to the incoming tide. Looking down from the crest, the half-brothers saw little beyond buildings of ungainly grey stone, their roofs motley with gables, turrets and high, railed balconies. The defences were crumbled and ancient except for a span of recently renovated embrasures which faced the landward side.

‘Ath,’ murmured Lysaer. ‘What a wretched collection of rock. If folk here are dour as their town no wonder Dakar took to drink.’

But where the exiled prince saw vistas of cheerless granite, Arithon observed with the eyes of a sailor and beheld a seaport gone into decline. Since the Mistwraith had repressed navigational arts, the great ships no longer made port. The merchants’ mansions were inhabited now by fishermen and the wharves held a clutter of bait barrels and cod nets.

The mist lowered, reducing the town to an outline, then a memory. Lysaer shivered, his spurt of enthusiasm dampened. ‘Did you happen to notice where the gate lets in?’

‘West. There was a road.’ Arithon stepped forward, pensive; as if his timing was prearranged, bells tolled below, sounding the carillon at noon. ‘Our prophet is late indeed. Are you coming?’

Lysaer nodded, scuffed caked mud from his heel with his instep, and strode off hastily to keep up. ‘Asandir’s going to be vexed.’

‘Decidedly.’ Arithon’s brows rose in disingenuous innocence. ‘But hurry or we might miss the fun.’

A cross-country trek through sheep fields and hedgerows saw the brothers to the road beneath the gates. There, instead of easier going, Lysaer received an unpleasant reminder of his reduced station. Accustomed to travelling mounted, he dodged the muck and splatter thrown up by rolling wagons with a diligence not shared by other footbound wayfarers. Ingrained to an enchanter’s preference for remaining unobtrusive, Arithon noted with relief that the clothing given them to wear seemed unremarkably common: he and his half-brother passed the guards who lounged beside the lichen-crusted gate without drawing challenge or notice.

The streets beyond were cobbled, uneven with neglect and scattered with dank-smelling puddles. Houses pressed closely on either side, hung with dripping eaves and canting balconies, and cornices spattered with gull guano. Tarnished tin talismans, purpose unknown, jangled in the shadows of the doorways. Confused as the avenue narrowed to a three-way convergence of alleys, Lysaer dodged a pail of refuse water tossed from a window overhead. ‘Cheerless place,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t want to stop and admire the view here?’

Arithon left off contemplation of their surroundings and said, ‘Does that mean you want the task of asking directions through this maze?’

Lysaer pushed back his hood and listened as a pair of matrons strode by chattering. Their speech was gently slurred, some of the vowels flattened, the harder consonants rolled to a lazy burr. ‘The dialect isn’t impossible. On a good night of drinking I expect we could blend right in.’

The crisper edges to his phrasing caused one of the women to turn. The expression half-glimpsed beneath her shawl was startled and her exclamation openly rude as she caught her companion’s elbow and hastened past into a courtyard. Rebuffed by the clank of a gate bar, Arithon grinned at the prince’s dismay. ‘Try being a touch less flamboyant,’ he suggested.

Lysaer shut his mouth and looked offended. More practised with ladies who fawned on him, he stepped smartly past a puddle and approached a ramshackle stall that sold sausages. Sheltered under a lean-to of sewn hide, and attended by a chubby old man with wispy hair and a strikingly pretty young daughter, the fare that smoked over a dented coal brazier seemed smelly enough to scare off customers. At Lysaer’s approach, the proprietor brightened and began a singsong patter that to foreign ears sounded like nonsense.

Caught at a loss as a laden sausage-fork was waved beneath his nose, the prince tore his glance from the girl and offered an engaging smile. ‘I’m not hungry, but in need of directions. Could your charming young daughter, or yourself, perhaps oblige?’

The man crashed his fist on the counter, upsetting a wooden bowl of broth. Hot liquid cascaded in all directions. The fork jabbed out like a striking snake, and saved only by swordsman’s reflexes, Lysaer sprang back stupefied.

‘By Ath, I’ll skewer ye where ye stand!’ howled the sausageseller. ‘Ha dare ye, sly faced drifter-scum, ha dare ye stalk these streets like ye own ‘em?’

The girl reached out, caught her father’s pumping forearm with chapped hands and flushed in matching rage. ‘Get back to the horse fair, drifter! Hurry on, before ye draw notice from the constable!’

Lysaer stiffened to deliver a civil retort, but Arithon, light as a cutpurse, interjected his person between. He caught the sausageseller’s waving fork and flashed a hard glance at the girl. ‘No offence meant, but we happen to be lost.’

The vendor tugged his utensil and lost grip on the handle. Arithon stabbed the greasy tines upright in the ramshackle counter, and despite penetrating stares from half a dozen passersby, folded arms unnaturally tan for the sunless climate and waited.

The girl softened first. ‘Go right, through the Weaver’s lane, and damn ye both for bad liars.’

Lysaer drew breath for rejoinder, cut off as Arithon jostled him forcibly away in the indicated direction. Whitely angry, the prince exploded in frustration. ‘Ath’s grace, what sort of place is this, where a man can’t compliment a girl without suffering insult out of hand!’

‘Must be your manners,’ the Master said.

‘Manners!’ Lysaer stopped dead and glared. ‘Do I act like a churl?’

‘Not to me.’ Arithon pointedly kept on walking, and reminded by the odd, carven doorways and curious regard of strangers that he was no longer heir to any kingdom, Lysaer swallowed his pride and continued.

‘What did they mean by “drifters”?’ he wondered aloud as they skirted a stinking bait-monger’s cart and turned down a lane marked by a guild stamp painted on a shuttlecock.

Arithon did not answer. He had paused to prod what looked to be a beggar asleep and snoring in the gutter. The fellow sprawled on his back, one elbow crooked over his face. The rest of him was scattered with odd bits of garbage and potato peels, as though the leavings from the scullery had been tossed out with him as an afterthought.

Mollified enough to be observant, Lysaer did an incredulous double-take. ‘Dakar?’

‘None else.’ Arithon glanced back, a wild light in his eyes. ‘Oh, luck of the sinful, we’ve been blessed.’

‘I fail to see why.’ Lysaer edged nervously closer, mostly to hide the fact that his half-brother had crouched among the refuse and was methodically searching the untidy folds of Dakar’s clothing. ‘You’ll have yourself in irons and branded for stealing.’

Arithon ignored him. With recklessness that almost seemed to taunt, he thrust a hand up under the tunic hem and groped at Dakar’s well padded middle. The Mad Prophet remained comatose. After the briefest interval, the Master exclaimed on a clear note of triumph and stood, a weighty sack of coins in his fist.

‘Oh, you thieving pirate.’ Lysaer smiled, enticed at last to collusion. ‘Where do we go to celebrate?’

‘The horse fair, I think.’ Arithon tossed the silver to his companion. ‘Or was that someone else I heard cursing the mud on the road below the gatehouse?’

Lysaer let the comment pass. Thoughtful as he fingered the unfamiliar coinage inside the purse, he said, ‘This must be a well-patrolled town, or else a very honest one, if a man can lie about in a stupor and not be troubled by theft.’

Arithon skirted the sagging boards of a door-stoop.

‘But our prophet didn’t leave anything unguarded.’

Lysaer’s fingers clenched over the coins, which all of a sudden felt cold. ‘Spells?’

‘Just one.’ The Master showed no smugness. ‘From the careless way the bindings were set, Dakar must have a reputation.’

‘For being a mage’s apprentice?’ Lysaer tucked the pouch in his doublet as they passed the front of a weaver’s shop. Samples of woollens and plaids were nailed in streamers to the signpost but the door was tightly closed and customers nowhere in evidence.

‘More likely for scalding the hide off the hands of any fool desperate enough to rob him.’ Arithon tucked unblemished fingers under his cloak as if the topic under discussion was blandly ordinary.

They arrived at the end of the alley, Lysaer wondering whether he could ever feel easy with the secretive manner of mages. A glance into the square beyond the lane revealed why activity on the gateside quarter of town had seemed unnaturally subdued: West End’s autumn horse fair became the centrepiece for a festival and the stalls that normally housed the fishmarket were hung with banners and ribbon. Picketlines stretched between and haltered in every conceivable space were horses of all sizes and description. Urchins in fishermen’s smocks raced in play through whatever crannies remained, scolded by matrons and encouraged by a toothless old fiddler who capered about playing notes that in West End passed for a jig. To Arithon’s ear, his instrument very badly needed tuning.

Wary since the incident with the sausageseller, the half-brothers spent a moment in observation. Except for a pair of dwarf jugglers tossing balls for coins, the folk of the town seemed an ordinary mix of fishermen, craftsmen and farm wives perched upon laden wagons. The customers who haggled to buy were not richly clothed; most were clean, and the off-duty soldiers clad in baldrics and leather brigandines seemed more inclined to share drink and talk by the wineseller’s stall than to make suspicious inquiries of strangers. Still, as the brothers ventured forward into the press, Arithon kept one arm beneath his cloak, his hand in prudent contact with his sword hilt.

A confectioner’s child accosted them the moment they entered the fair. Though the half-brothers had eaten nothing since dawn, neither wished to tarry for sugared figs, even ones offered by a girl with smiling charm. Lysaer dodged past with a shake of his head, and in wordless accord Arithon followed past a butcher’s stall and an ox wagon haphazardly piled with potted herbs. Beyond these sat a crone surrounded by crates of bottled preserves. Tied to a post by her chair stood a glossy string of horses.

Lysaer and Arithon poised to one side to examine the stock. Nearby, ankle-deep in straw that smelled suspiciously like yesterday’s herring catch and surrounded by a weaving flock of gulls, a farmer in a sheepskin vest haggled loudly with a hawk-nosed fellow who wore threadbare linen and a brilliantly dyed leather tunic.

‘Seventy ra’el?’ The farmer scratched his ear, spat and argued vigorously. ‘Fer just a hack? That’s greedy over-priced, ye crafty drifter. If our mayor hears, mark my guess, he’s sure to bar yer clan from trading next year.’

The hag amid the jam boxes raised her chin and mumbled an obscenity, while the colourfully-dressed horse dealer ran lean hands over the crest of the bay in question. ‘The price stands,’ he finished in a clear, incisive speech only lightly touched by the local burr. ‘Seventy royals or the mare stays where she is. Just a hack she might be, but she’s young and soundly bred.’

‘Ath, he’s hardly got an accent,’ Lysaer murmured in Arithon’s ear.

The Master nodded fractionally. ‘Explains a great deal about the way we were received.’ All the while his eyes roved across the animals offered for sale. His half-brother watched, amused, as his interest caught and lingered over a broad-chested, blaze-faced gelding tied slightly apart from the rest.

‘I like that chestnut too,’ Lysaer admitted. ‘Nice legs, and he’s built for endurance.’

The old woman twisted her head. She stared at the half-brothers, intent as a hawk and unnoticed as the farmer departed, cursing. Before another bidder could come forward, Arithon stepped into the gap and said, ‘What price do you ask for the chestnut?’

The horse trader half spun, his features wide with astonishment. His glance encompassed the bystanders, confused, and only after a second sweep settled on Arithon and Lysaer, who now stood isolated as the farmers on either side backed away. ‘Daelion’s hells! What clan are you from, brother, and is this some jest, you here bidding like a townsman?’

Arithon ignored both questions and instead repeated his query. ‘How much?’

‘He isn’t for sale,’ snapped the trader. ‘You blind to the tassels on his halter or what?’

That moment the crone began to shout shrilly.

Unnerved as much as his brother had been at finding himself the target of unwarranted hostility, Arithon cast about for a way to ease the drifter’s temper.

Before he could speak, a smooth voice interjected. ‘The tassels of ownership are obvious.’ Townsmen on either side heard and started, and hastily disappeared about their business; and the grandmother by the jam bottles stopped yelling as the sorcerer, Asandir, touched her shawl and strode briskly in from behind. To the man he added, ‘But the finer horses in the fair are sold already and my companions need reliable mounts. Will you consider an offer of three hundred royals?’

The drifter met this development with raised eyebrows and a startled intake of breath. He took in the weathered features, steel grey eyes and implacable demeanor of the sorcerer with evident recognition. ‘To you I’ll sell, but not for bribe-price. Two-hundred royals is fair.’

Asandir turned a glance quite stripped of tolerance upon the princes who had disobeyed his command. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Untie the chestnut and for your life’s sake, keep your mouths shut while I settle this.’ To the drifter the sorcerer added, ‘The horse is your personal mount. Take the extra hundred to ease the inconvenience while your next foal grows to maturity.’

The drifter looked uncomfortable, as if he might argue the sorcerer’s generosity as charity. But the grandmother forestalled him with a curt jerk of her head: Asandir produced the coin swiftly. Before the culprits who had precipitated the transaction could attract any closer scrutiny he cut the tassels of ownership from the gelding’s halter and led his purchase away. Lysaer and Arithon were swept along without ceremony.

The sorcerer hustled them back across the square. Fishermen turned heads to glare as chickens flapped squawking from under his fast-striding boots. They passed the butcher’s stall, crammed with bawling livestock and strangely silent customers. The chestnut shied and jibbed against the rein, until a word laced with spell-craft quieted it. Dreading the moment when such knife-edged tones might be directed his way in rebuke, Lysaer maintained silence.

Arithon perversely rejected tact. ‘You found Dakar?’

The sorcerer flicked a look of focused displeasure over one blue-cloaked shoulder. ‘Yes. He’s been dealt with already.’ Asandir changed course without hesitation down the darker of two branching alleys. Over the ring of the chestnut’s shod hooves he added, ‘You’ve already left an impression with the drifters. Don’t cause more talk in West End, am I clear?’

He stopped very suddenly and tossed the chestnut’s leading rein to Lysaer. ‘Stay here, speak to no one, and simply wait. I’ll return with another horse and a decent saddle. Should you feel the urge to wander again, let me add that in this place, people associated with sorcerers very often wind up roasting in chains on a pile of oiled faggots.’

Asandir spun and left them. Watching his departure with wide and unmollified eyes, Arithon mused, ‘I wonder what fate befell Dakar?’

That subject was one that his half-brother preferred not to contemplate. Suddenly inimical to the Master’s provocations, Lysaer turned his back and made his acquaintance with the chestnut.

Asandir returned after the briefest delay, leading a metal-coloured dun with an odd splash of white on her neck. His own mount trailed behind, a black with one china eye that disconcertingly appeared to stare a man through to the soul. Piled across its withers was an extra saddle allotted for Lysaer’s gelding.

‘You brought no bridle,’ the former prince observed as he undertook a groom’s work with fleece pads and girth.

‘The drifters of Pasyvier are the best horse trainers in Athera, and that gelding was a clan lord’s personal mount. It won’t require a bit. If you’re careless enough to fall, that animal would likely side-step to stay underneath you.’ His say finished, the sorcerer tossed the dun’s reins to Arithon. ‘She’s not a cull, only green. Don’t trust her so much you fall asleep.’

From an urchin by the gates, the sorcerer collected a pony laden with blankets and leather-wrapped packs of supplies. Attached to its load by a rope length was the paint mare belonging to Dakar. The Mad Prophet himself lay trussed and draped across her saddle bow. Someone had dumped a bucket of water over his tousled head, and the damp seeped rings into clothing that still reeked faintly of garbage. The wetting had been as ineffective on Dakar’s snores: he rasped on unabated as Asandir drove the cavalcade at a trot through West End’s east-facing gate.

Once the farmlands surrounding the town fell behind, the road proved sparsely travelled. The surface had once been paved with slate, built firm and dry on a causeway that sliced a straight course through the boglands that flanked the coast. Centuries of passing wagons had cracked the thick stone in places; the criss-crossed muck in the wheel-ruts grew rooster-tails of weed. The mists pressed down on a landscape relentlessly flat and silver with the sheen of tidal waterways edged by blighted stands of reed. The air hung sour with the smell of decomposed vegetation. The chink of bits and stirrups, and the clink of horseshoes on rock offered lonely counterpoint to the wingbeats of waterfowl explosively startled into flight.

Reassured that the sorcerer had yet to denounce anyone for the illicit visit to the West End market, Lysaer spurred his horse abreast and dared a question: ‘Who are the drifters and why do the people dislike them?’

Asandir glanced significantly at Arithon, who fought with every shred of his attention to keep his mare from crabbing sideways. The company of three departed the instant the half-brothers gained the saddle. Asandir led, and did not add that his choice in horses had been guided by intent; he wanted Arithon kept preoccupied. ‘Since the rebellion which threw down the high kings, the drifters have been nomads. They breed horses in the grasslands of Pasyvier and mostly keep to themselves. The townsmen are wary of them because their ancestors once ruled in West End.’

The party crossed the moss-crusted spans of the Melor River bridge while the mare bounced and clattered and shied to a barrage of playful snorts. Masked by the antics of the dun, Asandir added, ‘There are deep antipathies remaining from times past, and much prejudice. Your accents, as you noticed, allied you with unpopular factions. My purpose in asking you to wait in the wood was to spare you from dangerous misunderstanding.’

Lysaer drew breath to inquire further but the sorcerer forestalled him. ‘Teir’s’Ilessid,’ he said, using an old language term that the prince lacked the knowledge to translate. ‘There are better times for questions and I promise you shall be given all the answers you need. Right now I’m anxious to set distance between the town and ourselves before dark. The drifters are not fools and the folk who saw you will talk. The result might brew up a curiosity far better left to bide until later.’

Lysaer considered this, his hands twisting and twisting in the chestnut’s silken mane. Less than sure of himself since the loss of his heirship, he regarded the dismal, alien landscape, and tried not to smile as his half-brother battled the flighty, scatter-minded dun through one disobedient rumpus after another.

The incessant clatter of her footfalls at first overshadowed Dakar’s moans of returned consciousness. These soon progressed to obscenities, also ignored, until a full-throated yowl of outrage brought the company to a precipitous halt.

A look back showed that the Mad Prophet’s distress was not solely caused by his hangover: tied still to the paint’s saddlebow, Dakar kicked in a red-faced, fish-flop struggle that stemmed from the fact that his cloak had somehow coiled itself around his neck and more peculiarly appeared to be strangling him.

‘Iyats,’ Asandir said shortly, but his mouth turned upward in unmistakable amusement. ‘What folk here most aptly name fiends.’

Dakar swivelled his head and eyes, and with the aggrieved determination of a bound man whose face dangled upside-down, gagged out, ‘You planned this.’

Possessed by an energy sprite native to Athera, the cloak slithered inexorably tighter around his throat. The fullness of the Mad Prophet’s cheeks deepened from red to purple. ‘Tortures of Sithaer, are you just going to watch while I choke?’

Asandir urged his black forward and drew rein with ineffable calmness. ‘I’ve warned you time and again to restrain your emotions when dealing with iyats. Your distress just goads them on to greater mischief.’

Dakar spluttered and gasped through a tightening twist of fabric. ‘That’s fine advice. You aren’t the one under attack.’

As if his sarcasm sparked suggestion, the cloak very suddenly went limp. The whoop as Dakar sucked in a starved breath quite wickedly transformed into laughter as a puddle peeled itself away from the ground and floated upward, precariously suspended in mid air.

While Lysaer and Arithon stared in astonishment, Asandir calmly regarded the churning, muddy liquid that threatened to douse his silver head. Without any change in expression he raised his hand, closed his fingers, then lowered his fist to his knee. As if dragged by invisible force, the iyat-borne puddle followed; until the sorcerer snapped his fist open, and the mass lost cohesion and exploded in a spatter of grit-laden droplets.

Well drenched by the run-off, Dakar uttered a bitten obscenity. ‘That’s unfair,’ he continued on a strained note that stemmed from the fact he was overweight, and sprawled face downward over a saddle that for some while had been galling his belly. ‘You’ve a reputation for quenching fiends and they know it. They don’t go for you in earnest.’

Asandir raised one eyebrow. ‘You make a fine mark for them. You won’t leash your temper. And they know it.’

Dakar squirmed and failed to settle his bulk into a more accommodating position. ‘Are you going to cut me free?’

‘Are you sober enough to stay mounted?’ The sorcerer fixed impervious, silver-grey eyes on his errant apprentice and shook his head. ‘I think it would be appropriate if you spent the next hour contemplating the result of your untimely binge. I found our two guests at large in the horse fair at West End.’

Dakar’s eyes widened like a hurt spaniel’s. ‘Damn, but you’re heartless. Can I be blamed because a pair of newcomers can’t follow direct instructions?’

Asandir gathered the black’s reins. Silent, he slapped the paint’s haunches and passed ahead without turning as the animal lurched into a trot that threatened to explode Dakar’s skull with the after effects of strong drink. Deaf to the moans from his apprentice, Asandir answered Lysaer’s avid question, and assured that the iyat would not be returning to plague them.

‘They feed upon natural energies – fire, falling water, temperature change – that one we left behind is presently quite drained. Unless it finds a thunderstorm, it won’t recover enough charge to cause trouble for several weeks to come.’

The riders continued westward through a damp, grey afternoon. Although they stopped once for a meal of bread and sausage from the supply pack, Dakar was given no reprieve until dusk when the horses were unsaddled and the small hide tents were unfurled from their lashings to make camp. By then exhausted by hours of pleas and imprecations, he settled in a sulk by the campfire and immediately fell asleep. Tired themselves and worn sore by unaccustomed hours in the saddle, Arithon and Lysaer crawled into blankets and listened to the calls of an unfamiliar night bird echo across the marsh.

Despite the long and wearing day, Lysaer lay wide-eyed and wakeful in the dark. Clued by the stillness that Arithon was not sleeping but seated on his bedding with his back to the tentpole, the prince rolled onto his stomach. ‘You think the sorcerer has something more in mind for us than conquest of the Mistwraith, Desh-thiere.’

Arithon turned his head, his expression unseen in the gloom. ‘I’m sure of it.’

Lysaer settled his chin on his fists. The unaccustomed prick of beard stubble made him irritable; tiredly, resignedly, he put aside wishing for his valet and considered the problems of the moment. ‘You sound quite convinced that the fate in question won’t be pleasant.’

Silence. Arithon shifted position; perhaps he shrugged.

Reflexively touched by a spasm of mistrust, Lysaer extended a hand and called on his gift. A star of light gleamed from his palm and brightened the confines of the tent.

Caught by surprise, a stripped expression of longing on his face, Arithon spun away.

Lysaer pushed upright. ‘Ath, what are you thinking about? You’ve noticed the sickly taint the fog has left on this land. In any honour and decency, could you turn away from these people’s need?’

‘No.’ Arithon returned, much too softly. ‘That’s precisely what Asandir is counting on.’

Struck by a haunted confusion not entirely concealed behind Arithon’s words, Lysaer forgot his anger. There must be friends, even family, that the Shadow Master missed beyond the World Gate. Contritely, the prince asked, ‘If you could go anywhere, be anything, do anything you wanted, what would you choose?’

‘Not to go back to Karthan,’ Arithon said obliquely, and discouraged from personal inquiry, Lysaer let the light die.

‘You know,’ the prince said to the darkness, ‘Dakar thinks you’re some sort of criminal, twisted by illicit magic and sworn to corruption of the innocent.’

Arithon laughed softly as a whisper in the night. ‘You might fare better if you believed him.’

‘Why? Wasn’t one trial on charges of piracy enough for you?’ That moment Lysaer wished his small fleck of light still burned. ‘You’re not thinking of defying Asandir, are you?’

Silence and stillness answered. Lysaer swore. Too weary to unravel the contrary conscience that gave rise to Arithon’s moodiness, his half-brother settled back in his blankets and tried not to think of home, or the beloved lady at South Isle who now must seek another suitor. Instead the former prince concentrated on the need in this world and the Mistwraith his new fate bound him to destroy. Eventually he fell asleep.

The following days passed alike, except that Dakar rode astride instead of roped like a bundled roll of clothgoods. The dun mare steadied somewhat as the leagues passed: her bucks and crabsteps and shies arose more in spirited play than from any reaction to fear. But if Arithon had earned a reprieve from her taxing demands, the reserve that had cloaked him since West End did not thaw to the point of speech. Dakar’s scowling distrust toward his presence did not ease, which left the former prince of Amroth the recipient of unending loquacious questions. Hoarse, both from laughter and too much talk, Lysaer regarded his taciturn half-brother and wondered which of them suffered more: Arithon, in his solitude, or himself, subjected to the demands of Dakar’s incessant curiosity.

The road crooked inland and the marsh pools dried up, replaced by meadows of withered wildflowers. Black birds with white-tipped feathers flashed into flight at their passing and partridge called in the thickets. When the party crossed a deep river ford and bypassed the fork that led to the port city of Karfael, Dakar took the opportunity to bemoan the lack of beer as they paused to refill their emptied water jars.

Asandir dried dripping hands and killed the complaint with mention that a merchant caravan fared ahead.

‘Which way is it bound?’ Dakar bounded upright to a gurgle and splash of jounced flasks.

‘Toward Camris, as we are,’ Asandir said. ‘We shall overtake them.’

The Mad Prophet cheerfully forgot to curse his dampened clothing. But although he badgered through the afternoon and half of the night, the sorcerer refused to elaborate.

On the fourth day the roadway swung due east and entered the forest of Westwood. Here the trees rose ancient with years, once majestic as patriarchs, but bearded and bent now under mantling snags of pallid moss. Their crowns were smothered in mist and their boles grown gnarled with vine until five men with joined hands could not have spanned their circumference. Daylight was reduced to a thick, murky twilight alive with the whispered drip of water. Oppressed by a sense of decay on the land, and the unremitting grey of misty weather, no one inclined toward talk. Even Dakar’s chatter subsided to silence.

‘This wood was a merry place once, when sunlight still shone,’ Asandir mused, as if his mage’s perception showed him something that touched off maudlin thoughts.

They passed standing stones with carvings worn until only beaded whorls of lichens held their patterns. Aware that Arithon studied these with intent curiosity, Asandir volunteered an explanation. ‘In times past, creatures who were not human tended these forests. Attuned to the deepest pulses that bind land and soil to Ath’s harmony, they left stones such as these to show what ground and which trees could be taken for man’s use, and which must stay whole to renew the mysteries. Once, the protection of sacred ground was the province of the high king’s justice. Pastures and fields were cut only where the earth could gracefully support them. But now such knowledge is scarce. The name for the guardians who dwelled here meant giants in the old tongue.’ But the huge, gentle beings Asandir described were more clearly a breed of centaurs.

When Lysaer inquired what had become of them, the sorcerer shook his head sorrowfully. ‘The last of the Ilitharis Paravians passed from the land when Desh-thiere swallowed sunlight. Not even Sethvir at Althain Tower knows where they have gone. Athera is the poorer for their loss. The last hope of redeeming their fate lies in the Mistwraith’s defeat.’

Dakar glanced aside and caught Lysaer’s attention with a wink. ‘Small wonder the old races left these parts. No taverns, no beer and wet trees make lousy company.’

Fed up with rain and nights of smoking fires and bedding down on dampened ground, the former prince could almost sympathize. He joined Dakar in questioning the existence of Asandir’s caravan, and was almost caught off-guard when they overtook the fugitive by the wayside.

The man wore brilliant scarlet, which spoiled his attempt to escape notice by the approaching riders. The hem of his garment was sewn with tassels. One of these caught on a briar and flagged the attention of Asandir, who reined up short in the roadway and called immediate reassurance. ‘We’re fellow travellers, not bandits. Why not share our fire if you’re alone?’

‘On that, I had no choice,’ came the chagrined reply. The man spoke rapidly in dialect, his accents less burred than the prevailing variety in West End. Rangy, tall and carrying what looked like a grossly misshapen pack, he stepped out from behind the moss-shagged bole of an oak. ‘A supposedly honest caravan master already relieved me of my mount, so luck has forsaken me anyway.’ He approached at a pained gait that revealed that his boots were causing blisters, and the hand left white-knuckled on his sword hilt betrayed distrust behind his amiable manner.

‘You may also share the road if you can keep up,’ Asandir offered back.

Dakar assessed the oddly bulky pack for the possible presence of spirits, and was first to announce the stranger’s trade. ‘You’re a minstrel!’ he burst out in surprise. ‘By the Wheel man, why are you starving in the wilderness when you could be singing comfortably in a tavern?’

The man did not reply. Close enough now to make out details and faces, he was engrossed by Asandir. ‘I know you,’ he murmured, half awed. He pushed back his hood and a shock of wavy hair spilled over his collar. The revealed face showed a mapwork of laughlines and a stubble of half-grown beard. The eyes were hazel and merry despite the swollen purple weals that marred him, forehead and cheek.

Asandir’s sharpness cut the forest silence like a whiplash. ‘Ath in his mercy, we are come on ill times. Who in this land has dared to abuse a free singer?’

The minstrel touched his battered skin, embarrassed. ‘I sang the wrong ballad. After being stoned from an inn on the coast I should have learned better. Tales of old kingdoms are not appreciated where mayors rule.’ He sighed in stoic dismissal. ‘This last one cost me my horse and left me stranded into the bargain.’

Asandir cast a glance toward Arithon: if argument existed in favour of shouldering responsibility for restoring this world to sun and harmony, here walked misfortune that a fellow musician must understand. Before the sorcerer could emphasize his point, the minstrel raised his trained voice in a mix of diffidence and amazement.

‘Fiend-quencher, matched by none; white-headed, grey-eyed one. Change-bringer, storm-breaker; Asandir, King-maker.’

‘You,’ the minstrel added, and his theatrical gesture encompassed Dakar. ‘You must be the Mad Prophet.’

Aware of a sudden guardedness behind Arithon’s stillness, Asandir responded carefully. ‘I won’t deny your powers of observation, Felirin the Scarlet. But I would urge that you use more caution before speaking your thoughts aloud. There were innocents burned in Karfael last harvest upon suspicion they had harboured a sorcerer.’

‘So I heard.’ The bard shrugged. ‘But I learned my repertory from barbarians and something of their wildness stayed with me.’ He looked up, his swollen face bright with interest. There must be good reason for a Fellowship sorcerer to take to the open roads.’ And his gaze shifted to the half-brothers who travelled in Asandir’s company.

Dakar opened his mouth, quickly silenced by a look from the sorcerer, who interjected, ‘This is no time to be starting rumours in the taverns. And should I be aware of another way into Camris beyond the road through Tornir Peaks?’

Felirin understood a warning when he heard one. He shifted his bundle, prepared to fall into step as the sorcerer’s black started forward; but Arithon abruptly dismounted and offered the reins of the dun.

‘You have blisters,’ he observed, ‘and I have sores from the saddle that an afternoon on foot might improve.’

The excuse was a lie. Dakar knew. He watched the Master’s face and saw the buried edge of something determined; but the shadowed green eyes held their secrets.

Peaks of Tornir

The caravan that had stranded Felirin the bard stayed elusively ahead through the coming days of travel. Dakar diverted his frustration each evening by badgering incessantly for drinking songs. As a result, the campfires through the eastern quarter of Westwood became rowdy as a dockside tavern, and many a nocturnal predator went hungry due to the din. When Dakar became too hoarse to frame an intelligent request, the bard would delve into his store of ancient ballads that told of times before the Mistwraith. When pressed, he admitted he did not believe in the sun as the woodland barbarians did; but lore and legend fascinated him and he collected old tales as a curiosity. None could deny that the melodies set to such fancy were lyrically complex, a dance on fret and string that a musician could devote a lifetime of skill to perform.

As the hills steepened and the winds of increased altitude caused the company to huddle closer to the fire for warmth, more than once Felirin caught Arithon studying his hands as he played. After days of cleverly rebuffed questions Arithon’s fixation with the lyranthe was the only opening the bard had managed to discern. Inspired by a fractional movement of the dark-haired man’s fingers as a fallen log fanned up the flames, Felirin silenced his strings in mid-stanza and rubbed his knuckles on his jerkin. ‘Damn the weather,’ he said.

Dakar predictably complained. ‘You aren’t stopping, Felirin, not so soon. Better we freeze to a misplayed tune than abide our sobriety in silence.’

The bard feigned a yawn to hide his smile. ‘Arithon plays,’ he said in sly suggestion. ‘Why not ask him for a song?’

‘Arithon?’ Dakar puffed up his cheeks. ‘Play music?’ He darted a glance to either side; with Asandir off to check the picket-lines, he dared a whisper in conspiracy. ‘I’ll bet you silver he doesn’t.’

Felirin watched through peripheral vision and saw Arithon become utterly still. Lysaer sat up and took interest. ‘How much would you stake me?’ asked the bard.

The Mad Prophet laced his hands across his paunch. ‘Ten royals. Double as much if I’m wrong.’

Felirin chuckled, and still smiling, extended his instrument toward the cloaked figure to his left. ‘Indulge me. Give us a tune.’

Arithon returned a dry chuckle. ‘I’ll establish your mastery by contrast,’ he threatened. But Felirin had plotted to a nicety: after days of unmerited provocation, Arithon took his chance to humble Dakar.

His movements as he lifted the soundboard to his shoulder were recognizably reverent. Arithon poised tentative fingers, sounded a shower of practised harmonics, and found an interval off. He corrected the pitch, neatly and precisely. When he looked up, his eyes were laughing.

Dakar muttered something stinging concerning close-mouthed brigands who betrayed a comrade to wasted silver. Lysaer politely held back comment, and Felirin silently congratulated his powers of intuitive perception. Then all three of them lost track of surface thoughts as Arithon started to play.

The first chords rang across the firelit dell with a power of sheer captivation. Arithon tested and quickly found the instrument’s mettle; at once he broke his opening into an intricate theme that threaded, major to minor, in haunting sweeps across keys. By then no one remembered this magic had been instigated by an interchange of grudges and a bet.

Startled into rapt concentration, Felirin realized he had discovered a treasure. Whoever Arithon was, whatever his origins and his purpose in accompanying a sorcerer, he had been born with the natural gift to render song. There were rough patches in his fingering and fretwork that could be smoothed over with schooling; skilled guidance could ease some awkwardness in his phrasing. His voice lacked experience and tempering. But even through such flaws, the bard could appreciate his raw brilliance. With Lysaer and Dakar, his heart became transported from the discomforts of a drafty campsite and led on a soaring flight of emotion as a tale of two lovers unfolded like a jewel in the firelight.

Arithon stilled the strings at the end, and the spell shattered.

‘Young man,’ the bard demanded. ‘Play again.’

Arithon shook his head. ‘Collect your winnings from Dakar.’ If he had regrets, they stayed invisible as he slipped the instrument back into the lap of its owner. ‘Your lyranthe is very fine. She plays herself.’

‘That’s foolishness!’ Felirin reached out more demandingly than he intended, and caught hold of Arithon’s sleeve. The wrist beneath his touch was trembling. To ease what he took for self-consciousness, the bard added, ‘You’re gifted enough to apprentice.’

Arithon shook his head and moved to disengage, but Felirin’s grip tightened angrily. ‘How dare you waste such rare talent? Can’t you accept your true calling?’

Green eyes flashed up, and almost – only Lysaer could recognize it – Arithon drew breath for rebuttal in the same vicious style he had used at his trial by Amroth’s council. Then confusion seemed to flicker behind his eyes. The Master looked away. He worked gently free of the bard’s fingers. ‘Daelion turns the Wheel. One cannot always have the choice.’

He arose, quietly determined to retire, and managed to avoid Asandir, returned from his check on the horses.

The bard turned his puzzlement on the sorcerer. ‘What did the lad mean by that?’

Asandir sat on the log that the Master had just left vacant and settled his dark cloak around his knees. ‘That these are troubled times for all of us, my friend. Arithon has the gift, none can doubt. But music cannot be his first calling.’

Dakar suggested hopefully that spirits could ease the most wretched of life’s disappointments. His quip was ignored. No one inclined toward light heartedness. Felirin abandoned the fireside to pack away his lyranthe, followed by the crestfallen prophet. Only Lysaer lingered. Aware of the steel beneath Asandir’s stillness, and unwarmed by the wind-fanned embers by his feet, the s’Ilessid recalled his half-brother’s reaction to a past, insensitive query. ‘Never to go back to Karthan’ Arithon had said in unresponsive wish to kill the subject. Lent fresh perspective by tonight’s discovery, his half-brother shared insight into a misery that no heroic calling could assuage. Some men had no use for the responsibilities of power and renown. The coming quest to suppress the Mistwraith that restored meaning to Lysaer’s life became a curse and a care for Arithon, whose gifted love for music must be sidelined.

Morning came. Hunched against a wind that whined through tossing branches, the party passed into the foothills of Tornir Peaks. The great trees of Westwood thinned in concert with the soil, and the road wound between stripped, rock-crowned promontories sliced by stony gullies. Sleet had fallen during the night, and the slate paving was icy in patches, treacherous even at a walk. Arithon led his flighty dun by the bridle. Lysaer flanked him on foot, while Felirin took a turn in the chestnut’s saddle.

The cold and the cheerless landscape buoyed no one’s spirits, but Dakar’s irrepressible tongue stayed unaffected. ‘Damn you for a thief, Felirin, I swear you conspired against me to win that bet last night.’

The bard twisted back and checked the ties which secured his lyranthe to the saddle for the third time since he had mounted. Balked yet by Arithon’s reticence, his reply came back clipped. ‘Forget the bet. Just buy me an ale when we get to Erdane.’

‘Now there speaks a guilty man,’ the Mad Prophet pronounced. He kicked his paint forward and set the dun dancing as he drew alongside the Master. ‘Did the two of you plan to split the take?’

Jerked half off his feet as his mare skittered sideways, Arithon returned a quick laugh. ‘Why bother? As I remember, I needed no rigged wagers to part the silver from your belt.’

Reminded of his mishap in the alley in West End, Dakar turned purple. He bent over his saddlebow and spoke so that Felirin could not hear. ‘You’ll pay for that.’

‘You say?’ Arithon brought the dun under control by rubbing her ear to distract her. When she settled he slapped her fondly and added a remark concerning slipshod spells.

Dakar deflated in moody silence.

‘You’ve made a clam of him,’ Lysaer observed with a smile. ‘Thank Ath. My ears were tired.’

But the friendliness in the comment did not warm. Apart from the others, and keenly wishing an hour of solitude to sort through troubled thoughts, Arithon strode at the dun’s shoulder while a round of banter designed to bait Dakar developed between Felirin and Lysaer.

The party rounded a bend where the road snaked beneath an overhang, and the talk suddenly died. A driving clang of hoofbeats echoed down from the rise ahead. A horse approached through the mist at a headlong gallop that begged for a fatal fall. The bridleless chestnut flung up its nose and neighed.

‘Hold here!’ called Asandir.

The next instant, a riderless grey stallion thundered into view through the fog. He clattered downslope in lathered, wild-eyed terror, his reins flying, broken, from the bit rings. The smoke-dark mane was fouled and dripping blood. Dakar’s paint caught the scent first. It spun and tried to bolt. Arithon cursed with eloquent force and fought his shying dun; Lysaer stepped hurriedly to aid him.

Astride the quivering but obedient chestnut, Felirin recognized the martial style of the runaway animal’s tack. ‘Hey, that’s one of the horses from the caravan guard!’

Only the black that bore Asandir seemed immune to alarm. Under the sorcerer’s guidance it advanced in spell-wrought, nerveless calm, swung across the road and blocked the way. The riderless animal checked in a sliding scrabble of hooves, then stood with lifted tail, blowing hard and rolling white-rimmed eyes. Asandir dismounted, slowly. He held out his hand and spoke a word, and the frightened horse appeared to settle. Then, his own black left unattended, the sorcerer advanced and with perfect lack of ceremony captured the stallion’s bridle.

‘Maybe he should have a turn at Arithon’s dun,’ Lysaer suggested. But no one appeared to be listening.

Dakar had lost his impertinence and Felirin showed open alarm. As Asandir approached, leading both the black and the stallion, all could see a shallow, ragged gash in the animal’s neck. Deeper marks clawed through the seat of the saddle, and bloodstains marred the leather that had not been left by the horse.

‘Daelion Fatemaster,’ Lysaer swore. ‘What sort of predator caused that?’

‘You don’t want to hear,’ said Felirin. He raised his voice and called to Asandir. ‘There are Khadrim in the pass, yes?’

‘I fear so.’ The sorcerer halted the horses. With quick fingers he unbuckled the reins from the black’s bridle and hitched them to the caught stallion’s bit. Then he cut off the ends of the broken pair and offered the animal to the bard. ‘I want everyone mounted.’

The remark included Arithon, who looped his reins over the dun’s ears, while Felirin slid off Lysaer’s chestnut and accepted possession of the grey. The bard asked, and received permission to leave his lyranthe where it was; no sense in trusting a strange horse with an awkward and unaccustomed burden. ‘This was the guard captain’s mount,’ the bard said ruefully as he adjusted the leathers for his much longer legs. ‘This fellow is probably trained handily for war but damn, his saddle was made for a man with narrow buttocks. What little stuffing the Khadrim might have left has blown away on the wind.’

‘Sit down too hard on the armour studs and you’ll find yourself singing soprano,’ Dakar retorted smugly.

The bard shot him a dark look and dabbed at drying bloodstains before he set foot in the stirrup and mounted. ‘At the end of this day’s ride, I’ll be thankful to count only bruises.’ He settled his reins and addressed Asandir. ‘I presume we’re going to be crazy and continue on, not turn back?’

The sorcerer nodded. His gaze fixed on the half-brothers through a brief, measuring moment. ‘There could be danger, but the risk will stay manageable if nobody loses their head. Keep together, whatever happens. Arithon, when I tell you, and only when, draw your blade.’

The Mad Prophet slapped his forehead. ‘Ath!’

Asandir’s eyes went wide with incredulity. ‘Dakar! You scatterbrain, don’t tell me you’d forgotten the sword?’

‘I did.’ The Mad Prophet returned a pouting scowl. ‘Small wonder, with the rest of you conspiring to rig my bets.’

The sorcerer disgustedly turned and remounted his black. ‘Remind me never, ever, to rely on your memory in a pinch.’ He noticed and answered Arithon’s look without pause to turn his head. ‘Boy, your sword was forged ten and a half thousand years past, expressly for war against the Khadrim.’

‘War,’ interjected Lysaer. ‘Then the creatures are intelligent?’

Arithon barely heard Asandir’s affirmative reply; he ignored Felirin’s curious query and the hilt which protruded from the scabbard at his hip with absolute, icy detachment. Whatever curiosity he might once have held for his inherited weapon, he had never owned an inkling that the blade might be so ancient. That he carried spell-wrought steel was undeniable, though the nature of its powers had escaped the wisdom of Dascen Elur’s mages. The chance the sword might bind him further to a duty he wanted no part of became just another weight upon his heart.

Having lost his royal inheritance, Lysaer would treasure the chance to bear a great talisman; Arithon caught the suppressed flash of envy in his brother’s blue eyes. Yet before the Master could offer his last true possession as a gift, Asandir came back with rebuttal.

‘You can never relinquish that blade, except to your own blood heir.’

Arithon knew an inward surge of protest, a fleeting, angry impression that he had cause to take exception to the sorcerer’s words. Yet as had happened before when Felirin had pressured him over music, the Master could not quite frame the concept. As he tried, his thoughts went vague, and his perceptions scattered, disoriented. By now he had learned that if he stopped fighting back, the confusion would quickly pass; the unreliable dun distracted him sufficiently in any case. Yet each successive incident left Arithon less satisfied with Asandir’s explanation in the woodcutter’s cottage. The gaps in his memory were not natural: that Dakar watched him with predatory speculation each time he recovered lent evidence to justify suspicion. Arithon guessed some telling fact had been withheld from him. Before he could be cornered in a position he could not escape, he determined to find out what and why.

Beyond the draw where they captured the runaway horse the road steepened sharply. The crags on either side reared up to ever more jagged promontories, their lofty, looming summits lost in mist. Patches of early snow mottled the northern faces, cut by rockfalls and boulder-choked ravines where vegetation clawed desperate foothold. Here the slate paving showed the abuse of harsh winters, split and heaved crooked by frosts. The horses picked carefully over uneven footing and the air took on the reek of cinders. When they rounded a switched-back curve, they saw why.

The stud balked, snorting with alarm. Ahead, between the smoking wreckage that remained of two dozen wagons, the drovers of the caravan who had ousted Felirin lay strewn across the way like dirtied rags. Man and mount and cart-mule, there were no survivors. Corpses littered the ledge. Charred clothing clung to exposed bones and whatever flesh remained had been mauled to ribbons by something not interested in hunting for the sake of sustenance. Lysaer cupped a hand to his mouth, sickened by the sight of an eviscerated woman and a horse with half its hindquarters seared to stinking, blackened meat. Something with monstrous jaws had snapped the head off the neck.

Stung into memories of strife and battle by the bodies of so many slain, Arithon looked quickly beyond. What drained the blood from his face was something black and scaled that lurked, half-glimpsed in the mist: a creature straight out of legend, with silvery, leathered wings that extended an impossible sixteen spans from the ridge of the armoured breastbone to each outstretched, claw-spurred tip.

‘Stay close,’ commanded Asandir. He reached across one-handed and calmed Felirin’s sidling grey with a touch, then scanned the sky with worried eyes.

‘There are more of them, and not far off,’ Dakar said in an odd and unusual briskness.

That moment a shrill whistle split the mist overhead. The sound was eerie, rich and complex with harmonics that seemed to tantalize the edge of understanding. Other whistles answered, echoing from a gallery of unseen cliffs. A huge, shadowy form shot above the roadway and the acrid breeze of its passage set every horse in the company trembling outright in fear.

‘Now, Arithon,’ Asandir said quietly. ‘Give yourself space and draw your steel.’

The dun mare surged forward the instant her rider gave rein. Arithon set his back against her and curbed her hot impulse to bolt; but the mare was too wild to settle. She skittered sideways, carved an angry pirouette by the overturned hulk of a wagon and bucked. One rebellious hind hoof banged against the wreck and a welter of clothgoods spilled loose from the torn canvas cover. The edges of the bolts were singed and horribly spattered with blood. The sudden movement and the smells of death and burned silks caused the mare to rip into a rear.

‘Arithon!’ shouted Asandir. ‘The sword!’

His cry was cut by a screeling bellow from the mist directly above. The sound reverberated with stinging incalculable fury that wounded the ears with subsonics. The dun mare arched higher, striking the air with her forelegs. There she swayed, ears flattened and tail clamped to her croup in taut panic. Arithon pressed into her neck and soothed with hands and voice to coax her down.

That moment, while horse and rider struggled vulnerably to regain balance, the Khadrim stooped to the attack.

It descended in a rush of furled wings, a bolt of killing black streamlined from the dagger-claws of fang and talon. It arced down as a spear might fall, red-eyed and fork-tailed, and purely bent on murder. Arithon glanced up. Through the mare’s streaming mane, he saw the nightmare in its earthward rush to take him.

‘The sword!’ screamed Asandir. Violet light flashed as he raised his hands to shape wizardry.

The Khadrim saw the spell, snapped out wings broad as sails and sliced into a bank. Before the sorcerer could strike it from the sky its neck curved back, blackly scaled and sinuous as a venomous snake. For an instant the monster’s red eyes turned unwinking on the man and the horse standing separate. Then the armoured jaws opened and a torrent of fire spat forth.

Flame roared in a crackling whirlwind and entirely engulfed the dun mare. Her rider became an indistinct silhouette, then a shadow lost utterly in the heart of the conflagration.

The Khadrim clashed closed its jaws. Hot, seared air dispersed in a coil of oily black smoke, fanned away under the wingbeat of the terrible creature as it swooped and shot back aloft.

On the roadway, within a seared circle of carbon, Arithon sat his quivering, mane-singed mare, untouched and cursing in annoyance.

Felirin screamed out a stupefied blasphemy.

The Khadrim doubled back in mid-air and roared its frustrated rage; while Arithon freed a fist from the reins and finally set hand to his sword.

The dark blade slipped from the scabbard with a sweet, cold ring. From the instant the tip cleared the guard-loop, Arithon was touched by a haunting sensation like song, like loss, like a peal of perfect harmony set vibrating upon the air. His ears rang to a timbre so pure his heart flinched; and the sword in his hands came alive. Light ripped along the silvered lines of inlay, blindingly intense, a shimmer like harmony distilled to an exultation of universal creation.

The Khadrim shrieked in pain. Like some great, broken child’s kite tossed in the grip of a gale, it flung sideways and crashed with a threshing flurry of wings against the mountainside. The forked tail lashed up rocks, hurled stunted bits of vegetation downslope in a rattling fall of flung gravel. Then its struggles ceased, and it wilted to final stillness, a black-scaled, hideous monstrosity couched in a bed of bloodied snow.

For a moment longer, the sword in Arithon’s hand flashed through a silver glare of spells. Then the phenomenon faded to a glimmer and died away. The Master of Shadow stared at plain black steel chased with patterns that no longer appeared familiar. There were tears in his eyes, dripping unheeded down his cheeks.

None of the wisdom at Rauven had approached this. Arithon had been awed by the forces held in check within Asandir; for all the sorcerer’s perfectly-schooled strength, his powers seemed a brute statement compared with the energies laid down in perfect stillness in a span of tempered steel. Arithon had known magework but never had he touched a force that left him feeling bereft, as if the world where he stood had grown coarser, more drab, somehow clumsy and lacking in a manner that defeated reason. Arithon stared at the blade in his hand and felt lacerated for no reason under sky he could name.

‘The Khadrim have gone,’ Asandir called; and the wounding stillness was broken. ‘You may sheath your weapon.’

‘Dharkaron, avenging angel,’ Felirin swore in falsetto. ‘Who is that man, to pass unscathed through living flame, and what in Sithaer made that sword?’

Asandir turned bland eyes upon the much-shaken minstrel. ‘He is Arithon, Master of Shadows, and if you’ll help raise a cairn over the unfortunate dead from your caravan, I’ll give you explanation for the sword.’

Dakar the Mad Prophet raised a hand and touched the shoulder of Arithon’s utterly crestfallen half-brother. In a voice of conspiratorial conciliation he said, ‘Lysaer, don’t feel slighted. Your moment will come in due time.’

Alithiel’s Story

The five riders bound for Camris suffered no second attack by Khadrim, though for safety’s sake through several of the narrower defiles, Asandir asked Arithon to ride with his sword unsheathed in his hand. The blade evinced no glow of warning, and then the pass fell behind. The pitch of the road became less rugged and the jagged crags rounded to hills. At twilight the company made camp in a cave on the far slopes of Tornir Peaks.

The shelter was often used by summer caravans, and passing generations of wagoneers had built in some comforts over time. Benches of split logs surrounded a rock-lined fire-pit and a crude stand of fencing had been erected beneath the underhang of a natural outcrop. In places, moss-grown remnants of stone walls showed where sheds and an earlier inn had been levelled in some forgotten past conflict. Once the horses were unsaddled, and Dakar sent off to gather wood, Asandir crouched down with kindling and chips and began clearing away the ashes left by last season’s travellers. He gestured through the failing light as Lysaer knelt to help. ‘If the mist were to lift off the valley you could see lights from here, wayside inns on the plain of Karmak. The roads of north Korias might have gone wild, but the trade-routes from Atainia cross Camris. The lands are better travelled there, and on the east shore ships still ply the bay.’

Lysaer stared out into gathering darkness but his eyes saw only mist. Descended from an island culture, he could not imagine the vast spread of continent described by the sorcerer’s words. ‘It must have been hard, seeing your civilization shrink to a shadow of its former greatness. ’

Asandir paused, his hands quiet on his knees. His eyes turned piercing into distance. ‘Harder than you know, young s’Ilessid: But the sun will shine over us again.’

Felirin and Arithon entered, adding the smells of healing herbs and wet leaves to the dusky scent of dry charcoal. The wound on the grey stallion’s neck had been washed and cared for. The bard carried a handsome, silver-bossed saddle, his own, recovered that day from the corpse of his former palfrey. Asandir had retained a replacement set of reins, but the rest of the wagons and goods they had burned, lest unwitting passersby linger for salvage and tempt the Khadrim to further massacre.

Outside the cave the wind picked up, moaning through a stand of stunted pines. ‘Winter’s coming early,’ Felirin observed. ‘Seems to move in a little sooner every year.’

Unaware that such shifts in the seasons were the ongoing effects of Desh-thiere, he dumped his saddle over a log bench and sat, the skirt-flap a welcome backrest after exhausting hours astride. As Asandir’s efforts graced the cave with a curl of pale flame, the bard inspected his hands and cursed. The fingernails he needed to pluck his strings were split to the quick from shifting rocks. Arithon’s were no whit better and made bold by shared commiseration, Felirin gathered nerve and made inquiry.

‘I don’t recall any stanzas that mention a Master of Shadow.’

Asandir settled back, his face washed gold by flamelight. ‘That song has yet to be written.’ Gently as an afterthought, he added, ‘Felirin, it would not do to speak of this yet in the taverns. But you could see stars and sun within your lifetime.’

The bard gaped in astonishment, his glibness at a loss for reply. Asandir allowed the import of his words a moment to sink in. Then he said, ‘Lysaer and Arithon are the potential of a restored sky made real, the Mistwraith’s bane promised five centuries ago by Dakar’s Prophecy of West Gate.’

Caught dumbfounded, Felirin struggled to recover something resembling equanimity. He swore once, hoarsely. Then, left only his performer’s dignity, he said, ‘How many of the old ballads are not myth, but true history?’

‘Most of them.’ Asandir waited, his look gravely steady, as this became assimilated through another shaken interval of silence. ‘You are one of a chosen few who know.’

Dakar picked that moment to return, puffing under an armload of damp faggots. He had not bothered to shear off the dead branches, and his laziness had torn his better shirt. The ordinary intensity of his irritation became an anchor upon which Felirin hung sanity. Informed that his whole world stood poised on the brink of upheaval and change, the bard caught a shivering breath. ‘For the sake of one commonplace mortal, save the rest until after we’ve had supper. I’m hungry enough to hallucinate, and hearing the impossible doesn’t help.’

Later, warmed by leek stew and the coals of a generous bonfire, the sorcerer gave the history of Arithon’s sword. The tale was lengthy, beginning over eighteen thousand years in the past when twelve blades were forged at Isaer by the Paravian armourer, Ffereton s’Darien, from the cinder of a fallen star.

‘Ffereton was Ilitharis, a centaur,’ Asandir began. ‘The Isaervian swords were his finest, most famed creation, wrought at need to battle the vast packs of Khadrim that were the scourge of the Second Age. The histories that survive claim each blade took five years’ labour, a full decade if one were to count the sorceries that went into the sharpening. When Ffereton finished, the steel held an edge that time nor battle could blunt.’

Here, the sorcerer paused and asked Arithon to bare his blade from the scabbard. ‘You’ll see there are no nicks, no flaws from hard usage. Yet Alithiel has known the blows of two ages of strife.’ Asandir turned the quillons between his hands and firelight flashed on the inlay which twined the dark length of the blade.

‘The swords were given over to the fair folk, called sunchildren, for finishing. It was they who made the hilts and chased the channels for the inlay, no two patterns the same. But perhaps the greatest wonder is the metal set into the runes themselves.’ Asandir ran a finger over the inscriptions and as an answering flare of silver traced his touch, his voice softened into reverence. ‘Riathan, the unicorns, sang the great spells of defence. Masters of the lost art of name-binding, they infused the alloy with harmonics tuned to the primal chord of vibration used by Ath Creator to kindle the first stars with light. Legend holds that twenty-one masters took a decade to endow Alithiel alone.’

Asandir slipped the sword back in the scabbard with a soft sigh of sound. ‘The enchantment was balanced to peak in defence of the sword’s true bearer, dazzling the eyes of his enemy, but only if the engagement was just. Very few causes that drive a man to kill are righteous ones. Probably Arithon’s father never knew the nature of the weapon he left to his son.

Arithon confirmed this with a nod but did not speak. Haunted by his encounter with the sword’s arcane powers, he feared to betray the dread that partnered such mystery: that some role waited to be asked of him to match such a grand weight of history. Determined to control his own fate, the Shadow Master sat with locked hands while, with the skilled resonance of a storyteller, Asandir continued: ‘The Isaervian blades were crafted for the hands of six great Lords of the Ilitharis and the six exalted lines of the sunchildren. Alithiel was the oddity. She was forged for Ffereton’s son, Durmaenir, a centaur born undersized. The blade was tailored to match his proportions, from the length to the balance of the grip. In the wars that followed thousands of Khadrim died, their last memory the flaring brilliance of an Isaervian sword’s enchantment. Sadly, Durmaenir was one of the fallen. His grieving father passed Alithiel to the king’s heir.’

Arithon heard this and restrained a forcible wish to stop his ears, walk away, even shout nonsense; any reaction to halt this brilliant, weighty tapestry of names and sorrows far more comfortably left to the ghosts of forgotten heroes. Yet the stilled powers in the sword by their nature commanded his respect; he could not bring himself to interrupt.

If Asandir noticed Arithon’s distress, he held back nothing.

‘The prince at that time was a sunchild, and true to type for his kind, he stood just one span in height. The sword’s length reached nearly to his chin. He had a shoulder scabbard fashioned for ceremonial appearances and took up the traditional king’s blade upon accession at his predecessor’s death. Alithiel was given over to the line of Perhedral. They too were sunchildren, ill-suited to the weight of a large weapon. When King Enastir died childless the Teir’s’Perhedral claimed the kingship. Since another sword accompanied the crown, Alithiel remained in the treasury until another rise of Khadrim threatened peace. A centaur lord wielded her through the war that followed, but the blade handled like a toy in his huge grip. Afterwards, the sword Alithiel changed owners again, this time becoming the property of the high king’s cousin by marriage. It passed through his heirs to Cianor, who earned the honorific of Sunlord.’

This drew a gasp from Felirin who knew at least a dozen ballads made in praise of the Sunlord’s long reign.

Asandir smiled. ‘May the memory of those days never fade. Yet Cianor Sunlord did little but possess the sword. He assumed the Paravian crown in Second Age 2545, and as others before him, took up the king’s blade out of preference. By then Alithiel carried a second name, Dael Farenn, or kingmaker, because three of her bearers had succeeded the end of a royal line.

‘But if the sword brought kingship to her wielder, she never became a cherished possession. Awkward size made her handling a burden and though the Isaervian blades that survived the mishaps of time were coveted, no Paravian lord cared to claim one that carried a tragic reputation.

‘Cianor eventually awarded Alithiel to a man, for valour in defence of his sister, Princess Taliennse. Her Grace was rescued from assault by Khadrim in the very pass we just crossed.’ Here Asandir nodded in deference to Arithon. ‘The emerald in your sword was cut by a sunchild’s spells. The initial in the leopard crest changes with the name of the bearer, and since the blade fits the hand of a man to perfection, each heir in your family has carried her since.’

Asandir folded long hands. ‘Arithon, yours is the only Isaervian blade to pass from Paravian possession. To my knowledge, she is the last of her kind on the continent.’

Lysaer regarded the polished quillons with rueful appreciation. ‘Small wonder the armourers of Dascen Elur were impressed. They held that sword to be the bane of their craft, because no man could hope to forge its equal.’

Asandir rose and stretched like a cat. ‘The centaur Ffereton himself could not repeat the labour. If, in truth, he still lives.’

Felirin raised dubious eyebrows. ‘Did I hear right? Could a centaur be expected to survive for eighteen thousand years?’

The sorcerer fixed the bard with a bright and imperious sadness. ‘The old races were not mortal, not as a man might define. The loss of the sun touched them sorely, and even my colleagues in the Fellowship can’t say whether they can ever be brought to return. The tragedy in that cannot be measured.’

A stillness descended by the fireside, broken by Asandir’s suggestion that all of them turn into their blankets. The weather was shortly going to turn, and he wished an early start on the morrow. Arithon alone remained seated, the sword handed down by his ancestors braced in its sheath across his knees. The flames flickered and burned low and subsided at last to red embers. Hours later, when the others seemed settled into sleep, he put the blade aside and slipped out.

Mist clung in heavy, dank layers beneath the evergreens, and the darkness beyond the cave was total. Yet Arithon was Master of Shadow: from him, the night held no secrets. He walked over rocks and roots with a catsure step and paused by the rails that penned the horses.

‘Tishealdi,’ he called softly in the old tongue. ‘Splash.’

The name fell quiet as a whisper, but movement answered. An irregular patch of white moved closer and a muzzle nosed at his hand; the dun, come begging for grain. Arithon reached out and traced the odd marking on the mare’s neck. Her damp coat warmed his cold hands and the uncomplicated animal nearness of her helped quiet the turmoil in his mind. ‘We can’t leave, you and I, not just yet. But I have a feeling we should, all the same.’

For he had noticed a thing throughout Asandir’s recitation: while in the presence of the bard, the sorcerer took care to avoid any mention of his, or Lysaer’s surname.

The mare shook her head, dusting his face with wet mane. Arithon pushed her off with a playful phrase that died at the snap of a stick. He spun, prepared for retreat. If Dakar or the sorceror had followed him, he wanted no part of their inquiries.

But the accents that maligned the roots and the dark in breathless fragments of verse were the bard’s. A bump and another snapped stick ended the loftier language. ‘Daelion’s judgement, man! You’ve a miserable and perverse nature to bring me thrashing about after you and never a thought to carry a brand.’

Arithon loosened taut muscles with an effort concealed by the night. ‘I don’t recall asking for company.’

Felirin tripped and stumbled the last few yards down the trail and fetched against the fence with a thud that made the boards rattle. The dun shied back into the snorting mill of geldings, and the grey, confined separately, nickered after her.

The bard looked askance at the much-too-still shadow that was Arithon. ‘You’re almost as secretive as the sorcerer.’

Which was the nature of a spirit trained to power, not to volunteer the unnecessary; but Arithon would not say so. ‘Why did you come out?’

Felirin returned a dry chuckle. ‘Don’t change the subject. You can’t hide your angst behind questions.’

Arithon said nothing for an interval. Then with clear and deliberate sting he said, ‘Why not? You know the ballads. Show me a hero and I’ll show you a man enslaved by his competence.’

The bard took a long, slow breath. A difficult man to annoy, he had neatly and nearly been goaded to forget that Arithon’s mettlesome nature defended a frustrated talent. ‘Listen to me,’ Felirin said quickly. An honest desperation in his entreaty made Arithon ease off and give him space. ‘Promise me something for my foolishness. There’s a singer, a Masterbard, named Halliron. If you meet him, I beg you to play for him. Should he offer you an apprenticeship, I ask for your oath you’ll accept.’

Silence; the footfalls as curious horses advanced from the far side of the corral. Then a chilly gust of air rattled through the trees. Arithon pushed off from the fenceboards and cursed in an unfamiliar language through his teeth. ‘Like sharks, you all want a part of me.’ His voice shook; not with fury, but with longing.

Felirin smiled, his relief mixed with guilt-tinged triumph. ‘Your oath,’ he pressured gently. ‘Let me hear it.’

‘Damn you,’ said Arithon. In a shattering change of mood, he was laughing. ‘You have it. But what’s my word against the grandiloquent predictions of a maudlin and drunken prophet?’

‘Maybe everything,’ Felirin finished gently. ‘You’re too young to live without dreams.’

‘I wasn’t aware that I didn’t.’ Lightly firm in his irony, Arithon added, ‘Right now, I wish to go to bed.’ He walked away, left the bard to thwarted curiosity and the crowding attentions of the horses.

Backtrail

On the downs of Pasyvier, by the flames of a drifter’s fire, a seer speaks sharply to a grande dame returned from the autumn horse fair. ‘Say again, you saw a sorcerer? And with him a blond-haired stranger who spoke the speech of the true-born? I tell you, if you did, there will be war…

In the hall of judgement in West End, seated on his chair of carved oak and carnelian, a town mayor listens, sweating, to a similar description from the half-wit who played fiddle in the square…

Under mist in the Peaks of Tornir, a wild, screeling wail calls Khadrim in retreat back to spell-warded sanctuary; and the harmonics ring of death by spell-cursed steel not seen for a thousand years…

VI. ERDANE

The walls of Erdane had been raised at the crossroads two ages before the uprising which threw down the high kings had bloodied its maze of narrow streets. Now, five centuries later, the city wore change like a tattered, overdressed prostitute. Guild flags and a mayor’s blazon fluttered over the Grand West Gate, built by Paravian hands of seamless, rose-veined quartz. The stone at street level was left pitted and scarred by siege-weapons, and greyed by the passage of uncounted generations of inhabitants. Had the sentries in the mayor’s guard been as vigilant as their counterparts in times past, they would have challenged the woman in the shepherd’s cloak who passed the gatehouse, hooded. Boots of sewn sealhide showed beneath her ankle-length skirts, but their soles were not made for walking. Her hands were calloused from the bridle-rein, and her eyes a clear and disturbing grey.

But the captain of the watch barely glanced up from his dice game and the teenaged soldier who lounged on his javelin stayed absorbed by a whore, who paraded her bedizened attractions for the eyes of a loud-voiced drover.

Elaira, Koriani enchantress and message-bearer for the Prime, entered Erdane unremarked between a wagon bearing three sows and the rumbling wheels of an aleseller’s dray. She was the first of her kind to pass the city gates for close to four hundred years and the only one to try without any sanction from her seniors. Had she been recognized for what she was, she would have been stripped and publicly burned after barely a pretence of a trial.

Other women had suffered that sentence inside the past half-decade. If the mayor of Erdane suspected the charges against those accused were false, his conscience never bothered his sleep. What troubled his guildmasters and council to cold sweats was the fear that powers from the past might arise out of legend and claim vengeance. For unlike the commoners and the craftsmen, the Lord Elect of Erdane had access to archives that detailed a history of conspiracy and murder. To him, to his council and his general of armies, the sun was no myth, but a harbinger of sorcery and certain doom.

Elaira was cognizant of the risks. She kept her knotworked hood pulled low over her forehead and took care not to pass between the flirtatious whore and her sources of male attention. When the ale dray pulled up precipitously to avoid a running urchin, the enchantress ducked out of the main thoroughfare. She hastened down streets of marble-fronted guild-halls, threaded across the artisans’ district, then turned through a moss-dark arch.

The alley beyond was barely wider than a footpath. Fallen slates and rat-chewed ends of bone clogged the gutters. Seepage dripped in mournful counterpoint to the moss-crusted planks of half-rotted, open-air stairways; and from spell-charmed strips of tin nailed up to ward off iyats. Unlike many such talismans, these held true power to guard. Elaira could sense the faint resonance of their protections as she wound her way past ill-smelling puddles and locked shutters.

This slum by the edicts of town law should never have managed to survive: it had no wineshops or pot-traders on the lower levels. Dirty children did not play in the gutters, and drunks did not snore off binges; whores sought no customers here, nor did headhunters with old campaign scars loiter between assignments to boast of kills. This was a street whose inhabitants Erdane’s mayor sorely wished to eradicate; except that in the teeming maze of the wall district, its location was most difficult to know. Wayfarers came seeking the archway and found themselves inexplicably side-tracked. They might blink and miss the entry, or be distracted by a noise or a thought; and before they had grasped they had missed something, they would have passed on by.

For anyone untrained in spellcraft to pause here, even for a second, was to become lost in a mage-worked tangle of deception.

Elaira found the stairwell with carved gryphons on the newels. This was the house; here. She had all but sold her jewel for directions. For the Koriani matron who had received the scrolls from the Prime had been garrulous enough to repeat rumour. If she was right, the mayor’s most persistent nightmare was already half-way realized: a Fellowship sorcerer and two old-blood princes were temporarily in residence within Erdane.

Elaira mounted the alarmingly shaky stairway and paused on the landing at the top. With a shiver of sinful anticipation she knocked and asked for entry. ‘Is this the home of Enithen Tuer?’

A muffled clang, then the ring of a bar being drawn back; the door cracked and a white-lashed milk-pale eye peered through. ‘Ath’s Avenger, it’s a witch,’ rasped a reedy, aged voice. ‘Girl, you’re very brave or just stupid.’

Elaira tightened her grip on her cloak laces. ‘Probably stupid.’ She held back a nervous laugh. ‘Are you going to let me in?’

The eye blinked. ‘I will. You may be sorry.’

‘I will be sorry.’ Elaira threw an unsettled glance over her shoulder; the alley remained empty, dimming rapidly in the falling dusk. Nobody watched from the rows of shuttered windows. Still, her proscribed visit would be noticed very fast if she tarried too long in the open. As the door creaked wider, Elaira stepped through in a rush that betrayed apprehension.

A tiny, hunchbacked crone bounced backward out of her path. ’Yeesh. Came here without sanction, did you?’

Elaira pushed back her hood. The room did not match the alley’s run-down squalor but was snug and comfortably furnished. Candles lit the enchantress’s face like a cameo against the purple-black silk of a second cloak concealed underneath the rougher wool. Inside, somewhat mussed by the muffling layers, coiled a braided knot of bronze hair. ‘Maybe I just want my fortune told.’

The crone grunted. ‘Not you. And anyway, you don’t need a seer to tell your future’s just branched into darkness.’

‘Sithaer,’ Elaira sucked an unsteady breath. ‘So soon?’ She fumbled at the ties of her wraps and caught sight of two young men who watched her, interested, over a half-completed game of chess.

Elaira’s eyes widened. They were here! And unmistakably royal, the bloodlines perpetuated over many generations still apparent as the nearer one rose to meet her. Light from the sconces edged pale s’Ilessid hair in shining gold. The prince possessed an elegance that went beyond his handsome face. His eyes were jewel-blue. He carried his well-knit frame with the dignity of a man schooled perfectly to listen, and a pride unselfconscious as breathing.

‘Lady, may I?’ he asked in courtly courtesy; and hands tanned dark by alien suns reached out and slipped the shepherd’s cloak from her shoulders.

Unused to male solicitude, Elaira blushed and evaded his smile, and found her sight drawn to the other prince, whose black hair at first glance had caused him to blend into shadow.

This one regarded her with eyes of s’Ffalenn green, and something else: the still, small shock of an awareness that recognized power. Elaira repressed stark surprise, while the s’Ilessid prince said something polite that her mind interpreted as background noise.

Before she could recover the poise to apply her trained skills to draw intuitive deductions through observation, the seer, Enithen Tuer, caught her elbow. Crabbed hands spun her toward a doorway which opened to reveal the Fellowship sorcerer she had defied her order’s strictures to visit.

Asandir proved taller than Elaira had expected from images garnered through lane-watch. Lean as toughened leather, he wore plain clothing with a bearing she had always before thought imperious. In person, she revised that to a stillness that brooked no wasted motion. His hands were still also, the straight, tapered fingers clean as bleached bone on the latch. The face beneath the trimmed silver hair was carved by years and experience to a fierce mapwork of lines. The eyes in their deep-set sockets regarded her with a serenity that unnerved and exposed.

‘What brought you here, Elaira of the Koriathain?’ said Asandir of the Fellowship of Seven.

‘She wasn’t sent,’ the seer interjected. A palsied nudge sent the enchantress forward toward the imposing figure in the doorway.

‘I see that.’ As if aware that the leashed force in him intimidated, Asandir caught Elaira’s elbow and steered her toward a chair. His touch was light as a ghost’s, gone the instant it was noticed as he stepped back and away and closed the door.

Elaira sat for lack of the nerve to do otherwise. Feeling nakedly foolish, she buried unease in a study of her surroundings. The room was crowded with shelves, a work-place that smelled of herbs, and waxed wood and oiled wool; a basket of carded fleece sat in one corner, beside the worn frame of a spinning wheel. The woven rug underfoot had faded with age to a muddle of earth tones and greys, and the walls were piled high with crates of yarn and old junk.

‘What brought you here, lady?’ the sorcerer asked again. He bent with a servant’s unobtrusiveness and began to build up the fire. Flame brightened as the birch logs caught and lined his hard profile in light.

Elaira stared down at her boots and the muddied hem of her skirts which now gave off faint curls of steam. All the excuses, every elaborate and reasonable-sounding word she had rehearsed through the afternoon fled in the rush of her fast-beating heart. She was out of her depth. She knew it; before she could think, she spoke honestly. ‘I was curious.’

Asandir straightened up. Stern, but not unkindly, he looked at her, from her splashed skirts to her open, angular face. His eyes were penetrating, yet utterly without shadow. The awful strength behind his presence spoke of purpose rather than force. He reached out, hooked a stool from beneath the spindle and sat with his back to the lintel by the grate. Then, hands folded on his knees, he waited.

A hot rush of blood touched Elaira’s cheeks. With utmost tact and patience, he expected her to compose herself and qualify on her own. Oddly released from her awe, she unlaced shaking fingers. She slipped the violet cloak of her order over the chairback and tried to assimilate the particular that, unlike a Koriani senior, this sorcerer would pass no judgement upon her; no debt would be set on her demands.

She gathered her nerve and blurted, ‘I wanted to see, to know. If the Prophecy of West Gate was filled, and whether Desh-thiere’s Bane has come at last to Athera.’

Asandir regarded her, unblinking. ‘You passed its substance on the way in.’

He would elaborate nothing unless she pressed him. Her betters insisted as much, endlessly: Fellowship sorcerers gave up nothing freely. Eager to test that platitude for herself, Elaira dared a question. ‘I observed that the Teir’s’Ffalenn has been initiated to the disciplines of power. Is this what gives him ability to dominate the Mistwraith?’

Asandir straightened, sharpened to sudden attention. ‘That took both initiative and courage, neither one a praiseworthy attribute in the entrenched opinion of your sisterhood.’ He smiled in gentle humour. ‘I intend to give you answer, Elaira, but in the expectation you will treat the information with a foresight your superiors might hold in contempt.’

Elaira suppressed astonishment, that a Fellowship sorcerer in his multiple depths of power might share frustration with her colleagues’ preoccupation with the present.

But her interest was cut short as Asandir said, ‘In the times of the rebellion, when four of the high kings’ heirs were sent to safety through West Gate, the Fellowship granted foundational training to the Teir’s’Ahelas to increase her line’s chances of survival. Her descendants on Dascen Elur continued her tradition but forgot certain of the guidelines. In the course of five centuries of isolation, the mages there achieved what the Seven could not.’

‘Is that possible?’ Elaira interjected.

Asandir’s silvered brows tipped up. ‘What is possible does not always coincide with what is wise.’

Instantly Elaira felt stupid.

And yet, perversely, instead of rebuke for her thoughtless words, Asandir chose to explain the bride-gift which granted two men an inborn command of elemental mastery. ‘Together, our princes can vanquish Desh-thiere. Separately, you must know, their gifts might potentially inflict greater harm than the wraith their powers must defeat.’

Arrogance did not admit fallibility and reticence did not offer explanation; about the Fellowship, the Koriani Senior Circle was emphatically mistaken. Just accorded the insight of a colleague or an equal, Elaira sat stunned and still.

‘You have noticed in the Teir’s’Ffalenn a familiarity with the inner disciplines,’ Asandir continued, his eyes turned down toward his hands. ‘He spent his boyhood with the s’Ahelas mages, and their teaching was not wasted on him. One can hope that the sensitivity inherent in his lineage will keep his eyes opened to responsibility. In that, he will have all the support the Fellowship can offer.’

Floundering through a quicksand of overturned beliefs, Elaira said, ‘Then the success of Dakar’s prophecy is not assured?’

‘Could it be? Men created Desh-thiere. The hands of men must bring it down. Exchanges of power on that scale are never bought without peril. Athera must endure the price. And your question has been answered now, I think.’

In response to his note of finality, Elaira rose from her chair. She gathered her violet cloak, her normally impertinent nature repressed behind a frown.

As if attuned to her thoughts about him, Asandir said, ‘Your order has ever been dedicated to intolerance.’

Elaira steeled herself and looked up into those terrifying, unruffled eyes. ‘My seniors hate to admit to incompetence.’

‘Lesser strength does not add up to uselessness.’ The sorcerer crossed the room.

The enchantress followed, reluctant. ‘Our First Enchantress to the Prime, Lirenda, would disagree.’

Asandir regarded her as he lifted the doorlatch. ‘But you are different.’

He warned her. Elaira understood as much as he guided her through the door with the same feather-touch that had admitted her; as if his hands innately knew their capacity to unleash cataclysm, and in wariness adhered to gentle opposite. She would do well to apply the same principle and curb her outspoken brashness.

‘You have a clear eye for truth,’ the sorcerer said. ‘Don’t replace one mistaken set of principles for others as narrow-minded.’

Elaira quailed before the thought that Asandir had credited her with far too balanced a mind. She was not impartial where her seniors were concerned; and yet that seemed what this sorcerer expected her to become. She crossed the outer room, where the chess board had been set to rights and two chairs now stood empty. The seer Enithen Tuer sat in her rocker, blinking clouded eyes through the smoke of an aromatic pipe. If the crone saw past a dark and tangled future, she offered no advice as the younger enchantress gathered up her shepherd’s cloak and quietly let herself out.

Night had fallen, dense in the absence of any lamps. Elaira’s progress down on the moss-caked stair became careful and slow with uncertainty. She had taken on more than she bargained for. As she applied the nuances of her training to analyse the interview in retrospect, she realized how easily Asandir had tuned her expectations, lulled her sense of caution with a touch of human fragility and an air of attentive solicitude. Now, aware in the chill of the alley how subtly she had been pushed to think beyond her limits, the enchantress shivered outright. The sorcerer had not used her. But he could have, deftly as a potter turning unformed clay on a wheel.

The Prime Circle’s obstinate fears were not in the least bit unfounded.

Elaira roused herself, mechanically continued until she reached the base of the stair. Asandir had warned of consequences. Through queasy, unsettled nerves, the enchantress who had dared the unthinkable sorted out the single thread that mattered. A Fellowship sorcerer had trusted her. Why remained a mystery, but were she to reveal what she had learned – that the Mistwraith’s bane rested solely in the hands of two men bred to rule, and that the Fellowship itself could not directly limit the result – the Koriani Prime Circle would be roused to bitterest anger, or worse, outright obstruction.

Elaira kicked a loose piece of slate; her boots sloshed through puddles with only minimal awareness of the wet. She could not escape a reprimand; if under questioning by her seniors she were to conceal that her knowledge of the two princes had derived from a confidence shared by Asandir, some other escapade must replace it. Before the enchantress on watch duty touched her presence she must contrive another circumstance to match the surface facts. Or else the larger truths that she had most unwisely asked to know could not possibly be kept hidden.

‘Daelion, Master of the Wheel,’ she swore to the inkdark night. ‘What in Dharkaron’s conscience can I do that’s more outrageous than meeting with a sorcerer of the Fellowship?’ She paused a second, her breath clouding in the close and misty dark.

Struck by sudden inspiration, Elaira spun around. She left the alley by way of another arch and asked after the Inn of Four Ravens. There, if rumour and luck held good, she would find Dakar the Mad Prophet drowning his miseries in mead; for word went that the taskmaster Asandir had hurried his charges across the breadth of Karmak and not spent one night in a tavern.

The Four Ravens

After Erdane’s gates closed at dusk, the taproom at the Inn of Four Ravens was a rough and ill-considered place for a woman to linger by herself. Located in the disreputable wall district, the tavern was the nightly hangout of headhunters, coarse-voiced labourers and a hard-bitten, boastful contingent of off-duty garrison soldiers. The air reeked of overheated humanity, spilled beer and unscrubbed layers of cooking grease. The hearth smoked. By the quantity of large-busted barmaids and the well-sleeked look of the innkeeper, the upstairs rooms were obviously rented for activities other than lodging.

The Ravens’ ruffians were habitually too deep in their cups to discriminate between those girls who were goods and others who might be paying customers. Wedged between a drover who smelled like his mules and a bone-skinny journeyman cobbler, Elaira jerked her braid out of the indigo fingers of a dyer who leaned across three dicers to proposition her. She looked into the moist brown eyes of Dakar and said, ‘You’ve lost. Again.’

She turned the last battered cards in her hands face-up on the sticky trestle.

Dakar blinked, stirred from his stupor and glared intently at painted suits and royalty. ‘Damn t’Sithaer.’

A stir erupted to Elaira’s left as her blue-handed admirer tried to shoulder through the press to crowd closer. As if he did not exist, the enchantress leaned across the table toward the Mad Prophet. ‘Your forfeit. Answer my question. Tell the name of the dark-haired man who shares your travels with Asandir.’

Dakar shoved straight. ‘I’m drunk,’ he announced with injured cunning. ‘Can’t remember.’

Elaira waited with persistent determination. She dared not reach for her focusing jewel. Even a fool would not try spell-work in this place: not to bring clarity to Dakar’s muddled mind, nor to drive off unwanted male advances. Erdane’s citizens had aversions that ran to violence when confronted by any form of witchery; a disproportionate mix of the most zealous seemed to patronize the taproom at the Ravens. Dakar was crazy to come here at all; except that his sorrowfully rumpled appearance did not equate with his station as apprentice to a Fellowship sorcerer.

Artlessly innocuous, he huddled like a lump on his bench, his cheeks crumpled up under eyes like dreamy half-moons. He leaned on stump-fingered fists and sucked on his lower lip until Elaira desperately wanted to shake him. ‘Arithon,’ Dakar said at last, in snarling, petulant concession.

Elaira bit back triumph. A neatly-timed thrust of her elbow interrupted the dyer’s amorous swoop. Gouged in a place that made him grunt, he backed off and was fortuitously rescued by a bar wench. Laughter arose, and a smattering of ribald comment, as the pair ploughed a path toward the stairway.

Sweating, tired and faintly queasy from nerves and smoke, Elaira raked the cards in a pile. What relief she might have felt was cancelled twice over by aggravation. The junior enchantress assigned lane watch was lazy: she should have disclosed the location of her errant colleague hours since and dutifully reported to her senior. Until the gambling match needed for an alibi became substantiated, Elaira of necessity could not depart.

The minstrel in the corner stopped playing and laid aside his lyranthe. One of the listeners who arose from his circle would doubtless come pawing for favours, this man more drunken and lecherous than the last. Trapped, Elaira shuffled the dog-eared pack and began to deal another hand.

Dakar reached out and hooked her sleeve before the first card hit the trestle. ‘Tankard’s dry.’

Elaira looked for herself and resignedly signalled the barmaid.

‘No ale, no bets.’ Dakar managed a beatific smile.

The tavern door opened. A chill wafted through stale air as the crowd jostled to admit a newcomer. Roused by the draft from outside, the Mad Prophet laced his fingers across his paunch. He swayed a moment, hiccuped and suddenly shot upright. Something he saw over Elaira’s shoulder caused his eyes to show round rings of white. Distinctly, he said, ‘Like the tax collector, here comes trouble.’

Then the excitement and the drink undid him all at once, and he slumped on his face and passed out.

Elaira cried a frustrated epithet. Left no partner for a stake ostensibly set up to explain what she knew from Asandir, she threw down her cards and shoved from her seat to kick the Mad Prophet from his stupor.

Yet something in the quality of the disturbance at her back made her pause. She turned around and craned her neck over the jostling press of male bodies, and her eyes went wary as Dakar’s.

Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn and Prince of Rathain, had entered the Ravens unaccompanied.

He stood just three paces inside the doorway. His hood lay half turned back from his face, the knuckles of both hands clenched on the fabric as if he had frozen in mid-gesture. Elaira traced the direction of his gaze and realized at once what transfixed him. Nailed to the grease-darkened rafters above the bar was a banner all torn and faded with years, its blazon the gold-on-blue star that times past had been sigil of s’Ilessid, sovereign dynasty of Tysan. In Erdane, since the rebellion, the taproom’s coarse-minded celebrants had used the standard for target practice. Two arrows, a tatty collection of darts and more than one rusted throwing knife skewered the artifact dead centre.

Arithon stared at the desecrated banner, a look of shocked confusion whitening the planes of his face. He took a step toward the bar, caught his weight on his hands as if dazed and unwittingly jostled someone’s elbow.

The bump slopped beer from a tankard, for which the owner snapped a furious obscenity.

Arithon apologized like a diplomat and the edged clarity of his accent turned every head in the room.

Conversations died to blank silence. Arithon’s chin jerked up. His confusion fled as he recognized his error and his danger, both disastrously too late.

A headhunter slammed back his chair and shouted. ‘Ath defend us, he’s barbarian!’

Someone else threw a tankard, which missed; the wench behind the bar ducked for cover. Then the whole room surged into motion as every besotted patron in the Ravens leaped to lay hands on the intruder. They thought the man they chased was an old-blood clansman who had dared to come swaggering inside town walls.

A moment ago, Arithon might have been dizzy, as well as dangerously ignorant; but he was cat-fast to react under threat. He side-stepped the first swung fist. As his aggressor overbalanced and stumbled against the rush of surging bodies, he dodged through a fast-closing gap and nipped behind the nearest trestle table. Plates, hot soup and chicken bones flew airborne as he upended the plank into his attackers.

Curses and yells erupted as the foremost ranks were borne backward. Diners still seated on the bench made a grab at the wretch who had upset their meal.

Arithon was already gone, raised by his arms and a half-kick into a somersault over the ceiling beams. He descended hard on a soldier, slammed the man’s jaw against his breastplate and sprang off as his victim went down.

‘Hey!’ an ugly voice responded. ‘Turd who was born through his mother’s asshole! Yer gonna die here, an’ not by the mayor’s executioner.’

Hotly pursued, Arithon jumped and caught hold of a wrought iron torch-sconce. As hands grabbed for his heels, he hoisted himself up out of reach into the cross-braced timbers of the rafters. Nimble as a sailor, he footed the width of the taproom, target for a crossfire of crockery. He somehow shed his cloak between sallies. With the fabric he netted a plate and sundry items of cutlery before a toss accomplished on a follow-through mired two pursuers in the folds. The casualties tangled and crashed in a clatter of dropped knives and wool. Stripped to shirt-sleeves and tunic, Arithon ran_; and his enemies saw he was unarmed.

Elaira knew sudden, draining fear. The irreplaceable heir to a kingdom could be pulled down, beaten to his death by these roistering, ignorant townsmen. Dakar snored away in drunken oblivion, and the only soul in the taproom who had the decency to look concerned was the scarlet-clad singer by the fireside.

Arithon had no allies to call on for rescue. The Ravens’ enraged riffraff swarmed onto trestles and benches, the most maddened and aggressive among them bearing down from two sides on the bracing beams. Arithon leaped across air to the adjacent span of rafters. Cornered against the far wall, he laughed at the mob and called challenge. Elaira fretted over the chance that he might resort to shadow mastery or magic; but better sense or maybe instinct restrained him. He crouched instead and seized a pot-hook from the peg beside the chimney. Back on his feet in an eyeblink, he spun his purloined implement like a quarterstaff and rapped the legs from under his closest pursuer. The man toppled into an arm-waving plunge that ripped down a swaying knot of combatants.

Arithon reversed stroke and jabbed. The next soldier in line nearly fell as he windmilled back out of range. Arithon moved to press his hard-won advantage. Then someone in the mêlée flung a dagger.

Warned by a flash of steel, Arithon swung the pot-hook. The blade clanged against iron and deflected point-first in a plunge that grazed the forearm of a bystander. At the sight of his own running blood, the afflicted broke into shrill screams. The mood of the mob changed from ugly to murderous. The headhunters pressed now for revenge instead of bounty and the off-duty guardsmen drew swords. Everyone else abruptly seemed to acquire weapons, and all without exception converged on the prince poised vulnerably in the rafters. Aware he was exposed, Arithon dropped.

His pot-hook blurred in a stroke that whistled the air and intimidated space on the floorboards. He landed and two men with longswords engaged him. The clang of thrust and parry rang dissonant over the shouting. Elaira saw Arithon side-step and swing to position a wall at his back. Wholly engaged in self-defence, he appeared not to notice that his stand had been made against a doorway.

‘Merciful Ath,’ cried the minstrel from the fireside. ‘Someone in the scullery’s going to sally from the pantry and skewer him.’

Elaira spun in her tracks and fastened in desperation on the bard. ‘That entrance connects to the kitchens, back there?’ Answered by a worried nod, she made a ward-sign against misplaced trust and begged a favour of a total stranger. ‘Make me a diversion.’

The scarlet-clad minstrel rose to the occasion with a floor-shaking shout of discovery. ‘Ath preserve us, there are clansmen outside the windows!’

A dozen attackers abandoned Arithon and rushed to assess this new threat; and in the moment while the fracas stood diverted, one frightened-witless enchantress centred her mind in her focusing jewel. She cobbled together a glamour of concealment and disappeared.

Elaira did not physically vanish, but assumed an aura of sameness, one that mirrored the grain of worn pine, dented pewter and sanded floorboards. Had anyone amid the Ravens’ tumult paused and actually searched for her, she would instantly have been spotted. As it was, the press of the brawl directed Arithon’s aggressors everywhere else but toward her. The enchantress slipped rapidly across the taproom, unnoticed as she skirted upset trestles, bands of fist-waving craftsmen and barmaids who scuttled on hands and knees in a frantic attempt to rescue crockery.

Elaira reached the side door undetected. The lamp there had gone out: screened by convenient shadows, she fumbled at her collar and pulled out the white crystal she wore tethered to her neck by silver chain. She cupped the jewel in her palm and murmured litanies to refocus her inner mind. Her hand shook. So did her voice. She ignored impending panic and prayed instead that the junior initiate on lane watch would not choose this moment to expose her; far from an afterthought, she added her plea that no swordsman had attention to spare beyond Arithon’s fast-moving pot-hook. Acting with unconscionable recklessness, Elaira closed her gathered energies into a hard rune of binding.

Tiny, violet sparks snapped across the hinge-pins at Arithon’s back: the doorway stood secured. By then, Elaira was sprinting in a breathless charge that carried her headlong through the scullery. Cooks and pot-boys scattered from her path. She dodged the swing of the knife-waving drudge by the spit, slipped someone else’s grasping hands, then tripped over a pastry rack and stumbled through a rain of falling scones to snatch up the rolling pin that lay in a bowl of dough beyond. Before the befuddled kitchen staff could catch her, Elaira darted into the pantry closet, trailing a dusting of flour. The scrambles at her back became more frantic. All but within reach of her goal, she gasped, ‘Ath, stand back! There’s a riot out there, can’t you hear?’

Then she elbowed through a hanging string of onions and reached the narrow doorway to the taproom. A barrage of threats and thuds issued from the opposite side. Elaira recovered her wind, reassured. The s’Ffalenn prince still fought vociferously for his life. The wood under her palms bounced and vibrated to the rasping clash of swordplay, then the thump of a body fallen and somebody’s bitten-off oath. Elaira tripped the latch, readied her stolen bludgeon, then snapped the spell-bindings on the hinges with a shuddering whimper of fright.

The door crashed open and shoved her staggering as Arithon’s shoulder bashed the panel inward under force of a narrowly-missed parry. A sword blade whined through string: onions bounced helterskelter as five men harried the prince backward. Their eagerness hampered their weapons, which ironically worked to help spare him: the pot-hook had long since fatigued under punishment and Arithon defended himself with only the stub of the sheared-off handle. Elaira caught her balance and retreated as the fight erupted wholesale into the pantry. Bruised against corners of shelving, she received an impression of furious faces, a battering circle of steel and the tense, hard-driving brilliance of Arithon’s close-pressed defence. Then she caught her enchantress’s jewel in a grip that gouged her palm and struck the pastry roller on the crown of the prince’s dark head.

He folded at the knees, eyes widened in a moment of shocked surprise. His look became what might have been prelude to laughter before the charm Elaira wrought to fell him blanked his mind. He collapsed on the floor at the enchantress’s feet. She jumped past, committed beyond heed for further risks. Her crystal burned against her skin as once again she raised power. Her hastily-wrought net of spells caught and strained to stay the mob who now surged to butcher an unconscious victim.

‘Stop!’ Elaira shouted clearly. ‘This one’s mine. I claim his life as spoils.’

The front-rank aggressors rocked to a stupefied stop, hostility stamped on every red and sweating face; the swords flashed at angles still eager for slaughter. Trembling before that hedge of raised weapons, Elaira held her ground. Should even one man control hatred enough to see reason, the whole crowd would discover she was not the painted doxie her glamour made her appear.

Yet grudges in Erdane ran obsessively deep.

Startled by female intervention and emotionally charged from adrenalin, the furious ones were easiest to deflect. Elaira’s mazework of confusion hooked their anger and carved out a foothold for change: in something like sheepish embarrassment men glanced at the prince behind her knees. Their minds recalled no barbarian impostor, but instead saw a wine-raddled street-rat who had carelessly offended someone else.

The few who had sustained injuries were far less easily diverted. Some of these shoved forward, waving bludgeons of snapped-off chair legs; not a few still wielded knives and the fellow who had tumbled from the rafters was howling in self-righteous indignation. Sweating, Elaira strove to extend her spell of influence. But her fragile fabric of illusion only thinned and shuddered near to breaking: she had no more resource left to spare.

Beyond hope, past all recourse, she faced defeat. Erdane’s ongoing feud with the past was going to end her life and that of the prince she had rashly tried to rescue.

Then like a miracle, the voice of the minstrel offered surcease. ‘Let the doxie have him and be done! Dharkaron knows, he’s filthy enough to disgust a hog. Probably going to leave her with the Avenger’s own pox to remember him by.’

The slur raised a wave of scattered laughter.

‘Sithaer, now,’ Elaira added, somehow through terror and an unstable grip on two spells finding a note that approximated disgust. ‘It wasn’t my bed I’d be offering him!’

A weatherbeaten captain toward the fore loosed a bellowing guffaw. ‘Leave him to her!’ he said. ‘She’ll probably scald his ears well enough.’ He shrugged to unlock a battered shoulder, then sheathed his steel; around him, other off-duty companions backed off smiling. The most rabid of the headhunters wavered and in that instant of reprieve, Elaira hooked the door adjoining pantry and commonroom and slammed the panel closed. For the benefit of the kitchen staff who gawked in the path of her retreat, she jabbed her fallen prize in the ribs, then launched into spiteful imprecations.

‘Daelion mark ye in the hereafter for stinking bad habits! Ye wasted lump of a lout, ye dare te be stealin’ my hard-earned coin fer spendin’ on tankards at the tap!’

The cook stepped into the breach and shook Elaira’s arm. ‘Wench, if you’re minded to scold, spare us some peace and do it elsewhere.’

The enchantress whirled in crazed fury. ‘How will I, with himself sprawled there with the onions and limp as dead dogmeat into the bargain?’

She waved the fist with the pastry roller and set a row of canisters tottering. The cook snatched the implement away from her, jerked his greasy bangs toward his staff, then barked a command to lift the unconscious object of this madwoman’s scorn and forcibly heave him out.

The pot-boys grinned and lent their efforts to the cause. Arithon was hefted under the armpits, dragged through dustings of spilled flour and the grease-scummed runoff from the dish tubs and ejected through an exit that led to the rear of the tavern.

Elaira followed, crying curses. She swore with redoubled vehemence upon discovery they had pitched her hard-won royalty headlong into the midden.

She shrilled at the fast-slamming door, ‘Dharkaron break ye for rogues, now I’ve got te wash his blighted clothing!’

The panel banged shut and a bar dropped in place with a final, sour clank.

Elaira subsided, shaking.

The alley behind the Four Ravens was dark and damply cold. Feeling the chill to her bones, the enchantress sucked a breath past her teeth that came shudderingly near to a choke as she gagged on the rank stench of garbage. ‘Sithaer and Dharkaron’s Five Horses,’ she muttered to the form at her feet. ‘What in this life am I to do with you?’

The prince, sprawled limply in a nest of wilted carrots, returned an involuntary groan; then, from the shadow to one side, a sane voice proffered reply: ‘Where do you think he would be safe?’

Startled, Elaira spun and released a hissing gasp. The speaker proved to be the singer, leaning against the alley wall with the prince’s salvaged cloak draped on his wrist. He smiled in quick reassurance. ‘You probably saved his life back there. He’d better thank you properly for the risks you undertook. If he doesn’t, make sure to break all his fingers, then tell him I gave you permission.’

Weak in the knees with relief, Elaira slumped against the midden door. ‘You know this man?’

‘We’re acquainted.’ The bard picked his way through the compost and crouched to check the victim’s prone body. Satisfied to find no lasting damage, he clicked his tongue. ‘Now where are you wanting to hide him? Or do you trust him so much you’d have him wake up alone and maybe blunder into further mischief?’

Elaira thought quickly. ‘The hayloft, please.’ Since the gates closed at sundown, no mounted travellers could be expected to arrive or depart from the tavern until day-light; the grooms would be carousing and the horseboy predictably asleep.

‘All right then,’ the bard said agreeably. ‘Help me lift him before some churl inside sits up and notices I didn’t duck out to use the privy.’

The loft above the Ravens’ innyard was dusty with the meadow-sweet scent of hay and warm from the couriers’ mounts and coach-horses stabled in stalls down below. Couched in a cranny between haystacks and the high, windowless north wall with Arithon sprawled by her knees, Elaira bent over a bucket and wrung out a strip of linen torn at need from the lining of her shepherd’s cloak. Lit by a glimmer from her crystal, the enchantress dabbed caked dirt and sweat from the unmistakably s’Ffalenn features of the prince. Belatedly, she discovered blood in his hair. His scalp had been split by the pastry roller.

She bit her lip, chagrined. She had surely not struck him so hard: his current unconscious condition was more due to her stay-spell than to the head blow staged to disguise her foolish use of magic.

Why then was she reluctant to free him?

Elaira regarded Arithon’s still face, its severe planes and angles unsoftened by her jewel’s faint radiance. Under her hands she felt the corded tautness of him, the light-boned, lean sort of strength that was easiest of all to underestimate. His handling of attackers and pot-hook had proved him no stranger to violence; and the raw new scars that encircled his wrists hammered home the recognition that only his bloodline was familiar. The man himself had a past and a personality unknowably separate. He had not even been raised on Athera.

The intuitive deduction that marked Koriani origins shot Elaira’s uneasiness into focus. She had been mistaken to bring this prince here, alone. Even incapacitated his person bespoke a man wayward in judgement and decisively quick to take action. The association that had set him off-balance when he entered the Four Ravens must run deeper than a defaced kingdom banner: he had not expected to be attacked. When he woke, Arithon, High Prince of Rathain, was bound to be mettlesomely, royally enraged.

Elaira blotted flour off miraculously ungrazed knuckles: the fingers seemed too finely made for the offensive delivered by the pot-hook. She tossed aside her rag as if it burned her. The remiss young junior on lane watch still had not touched her presence; worse yet, Elaira had no clue how she should handle the man, or herself, when the moment came to wake him up.

Arithon stirred on his own in that wretchedest moment of uncertainty. Elaira had time to panic and jack-knife clear as the heir apparent to a high kingship gathered his wits and sat up.

An immediate grimace twisted his face. He reached up, touched the swollen cut in his scalp, and looked at her. ‘Which wheel from the afterlife did you spare me from, Daelion Fatemaster’s or those of Dharkaron’s Chariot? I feel as if I’ve been milled under by something punishing from the Almighty.’

‘How could you be so utterly, unbelievably stupid!’ Elaira burst out. Damn him, he was laughing! ‘They could have killed you in there, and to what purpose?’

Arithon lowered his fingers, saw blood and thoughtfully hooked the rag she had discarded. He folded the frayed edges neatly over on themselves and pressed the compress to his scratch. ‘Now that’s a question you might answer for me.’

‘Dharkaron, Ath’s avenger!’ Elaira was fast becoming exasperated. ‘You’re in Erdane! Your speech patterns are perfectly barbarian. And the Ravens is a headhunters’ haunt!’

Very still, Arithon said, ‘Whose heads are the hunted?’

His curiosity was in no wise rooted in insolence. Filled by creeping disbelief Elaira said, ‘Asandir never told you? They pay bodyweight in gold for the fugitive heirs of the earls. Half-weight for clan blood and probably every jewel off the mayor’s chubby daughters for anything related to a prince.’

Arithon lazed back on one elbow in the hay, his face tipped unreadably forward as he knotted the cloth around his head. ‘And what do you know of any princes?’

Elaira felt her heart bang hard against her ribs. ‘Do you mean to tell me, that you don’t know who you are?’

His response came back mocking. ‘I thought I did. Has something changed?’

‘No.’ Elaira gripped both hands in front of her shins: two could play his game. ‘Your Grace, you are Teir’s’Ffalenn, prince and heir-apparent of the crown of Rathain. All that pompous rhetoric means true-born son of an old-blood high king. Every able man in this city, as well as the surrounding countryside, would give his eldest child to be first to draw and quarter you.’

A sound between a choke and a gasp cut her short.

Elaira glanced up to find Arithon’s hand fallen away and his head thrown back. The face beneath the black hair was helplessly stripped by confusion.

He had not been baiting her: he had plainly not been told. That was not all; around Arithon’s person Elaira sensed a gathering corona of power, invisibly triggered and unmistakably Asandir’s. She had a split-second to note that the forces that rang in opposition to Arithon’s will were in fact an ingeniously-laid restraint; then the gist of what she had said lent an impetus that provided him opening. He reacted with a practised unbinding, and the fabric of the ward sheared asunder.

A snap like a spark whipped the air.

Then Arithon did get angry, a charged, blind-sided rage that left him wound like a spring and staring inward. ‘Teir’s’Ffalenn,’ he said flatly. His Paravian was accentless and fluent and the repeated term translated to mean ‘successor to power’. In the glow of the jewel the ratty twist of rag around his head lent the shadowed illusion of a crown. ‘Tell me about Rathain.’

His command allowed no loophole for refusal; afraid to provoke an explosion, Elaira chose not to try. ‘The five northeastern principalities on this continent were territories in vassalage to Rathain, whose liege lord once ruled at Ithamon.’ She shrugged wretchedly. ‘Since sovereignty of Athera passed from Paravians to men, the high king crowned there by the Fellowship has always, without exception, been s’Ffalenn.’

Arithon moved, not fast enough to mask a flinch. He ripped the rag from his head as though it were metal and heavy, and an anguish he could not bury needled his reply to sarcasm. ‘Don’t tell me. The people of Rathain are subject to misery and strife and Ithamon is a ruin in a wasteland.’

In point of fact he was correct; but even rattled to shaking, Elaira was not fool enough to say so. There had to be a reason why Asandir had kept knowledge of this prince’s inheritance a close secret.

Arithon arose from the hay. He paced in agitated strides across the loft and barely a board creaked to his passing. At length he spun about, his desperation sharp as unsheathed steel. ‘What about Lysaer?’

Elaira tried for humour. ‘Oh well, there’s a kingdom waiting for him too. In fact, we’re sitting in the middle of it.’

‘Ah.’ Arithon’s brows tipped up. ‘The banner in the Ravens. And perhaps such unloving royal subjects were the reason for Asandir’s reticence?’

Careful to suppress other more volatile suppositions, the enchantress nodded placating agreement. She watched the s’Ffalenn prince absorb this and wondered what enormity she had caused, what balance had shifted while Arithon went from tense to perceptively crafty.

‘I can keep this fiasco from Asandir,’ he said in answer to the very thought that had made her bite her lip.

Elaira widened her eyes. ‘You?’ Merciful Ath, had he failed to perceive the awful strength in the ward she had accidentally lent him leverage to unbind? ‘How? Are you crazy?’

Arithon inclined his head in the precise direction of the Ravens, though the barn wall before him had no window. ‘Lady, how did you get across the taproom?’

Elaira reached up and smothered the light of her jewel in time to hide her expression. In the taproom, diverted by fighting, he could not have seen through her glamour.

A breath of air brushed her face out of darkness: Arithon was moving again, restless, and his words came turbulently fast. ‘Asandir won’t have expected me to break through a block of that magnitude.’ Hay rustled as he gestured, perhaps with remembered impatience. ‘Sithaer’s furies, I’d been trying to achieve its release for long enough. Trouble was, if I pushed too hard, I went unconscious.’

Elaira turned white as she connected that the banner in the taproom had initiated Arithon’s compulsive moment of unsteadiness. ‘I wonder why the sorcerer didn’t tell you?’

Hands caught her wrists; deceptively and dangerously gentle they pulled her fingers away from the jewel. Light sprang back and revealed Arithon on one knee before her, his expression determinedly furious. ‘Because I happen not to wish the burdens that go with a throne!’

He let her go, shoved away as though he sensed her Koriani perceptions might draw advantage from his stillness. ‘Kings all too often get their hands tied. And for what? To keep food in the mouths of the hungry? Hardly that, because the starving will feed themselves, if left alone. No. A bad king revels in his importance. A good one hates his office. He spends himself into infirmity quashing deadly little plots to make power the tool of the greedy.’

Elaira looked up into green eyes, frightened by the depth of their vehemence. She argued anyway. ‘Your friend Lysaer would say that satisfaction can be found in true justice.’

Arithon stood up and made a gesture of wounding appeal. ‘Platitudes offer no succour, my lady. There’s very little beauty in satisfaction and justice rewards nobody with joy.’ He lowered his hands and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. ‘As Felirin the Scarlet would tell you.’

He referred to the minstrel in the Ravens who had abetted his narrow escape. Not the least bit taken in by his show of surface excuses, Elaira drew her own conclusion. Arithon had slipped his sorcerer chaperone and ventured abroad in Erdane looking expressly to provoke. He might not have known the townsmen’s pitch of antagonism; or he might have simply not cared. His wildness made him contorted as knot-work to decipher.

In a typically rapid shift of mood, he managed a civilized recovery. ‘I owe you, lady enchantress. You spared me some rather unpleasant handling, and for that you have my thanks. Someday I hope to show my gratitude.’

Which was prettily done, and sincere, but hardly near the point. ‘I saved your life,’ Elaira said in bald effort to shake his complacency.

He just looked at her, his clothing in disarray and his face a bit worn, and his reticence underhandedly reproachful. He had not been defenceless. The pot-hook was only a diversion, since he had both training and shadow-mastery carefully held in reserve. Touched by revelation, Elaira saw that indeed he had not been backed against the passage to the pantry by any accident but design.

Beginning to appreciate his obstinacy, Elaira choked back a snort of laughter. ‘You were on course for the midden in any case?’

Arithon smiled. ‘As the possibility presented itself, yes. Have you lodgings? I’d like to see you back safely.’

‘Oh, that’s priceless,’ Elaira gasped. Her eyes were watering. She hoped it was only the dust. ‘You’re a damned liability in this town.’

‘In any town.’ The Shadow Master paid her tribute with a bow. ‘You shouldn’t worry over things that I’m too lazy to bother with.’

‘That’s the problem exactly.’ Elaira allowed him to take her hand and draw her up to her feet. His strength was indeed deceptive, and he seemed to release her fingers with reluctance. She said, ‘I can find my way just fine. The question is, can you?’

She did not refer to the wards that concealed the location of the seeress’s house where he lodged.

Her deliberately oblique reference did not escape him. ‘Asandir knows I went out for air.’ Arithon made a rueful face at the odoriferous stains on his clothing. ‘There are several suitably smelly puddles in the alley near Enithen Tuer’s. And dozens of hazardous obstacles. A man prone to odd fits of dizziness might be quite likely to trip.’

He reached out and began with light hands to pluck the loose hay from her hair. That moment, when all care for pretence was abandoned, the junior initiate on lane watch stumbled clumsily across Elaira’s presence.

The enchantress stiffened as the energies of her distant colleague passed across her, identified her and responded with a jab of self-righteous indignation. The backlash hurt. ‘Sithaer’s furies, not now!’ Elaira capped her dismay with a fittingly filthy word.

Taken aback, Arithon stepped away. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You did nothing,’ Elaira assured, her mind only half on apology. Apparently there were worse offences than visiting sorcerers of the Fellowship, or even engaging in card games with disreputable apprentice prophets: by the repercussions sensed in the background, Elaira understood that speaking with princes in haylofts after midnight was undeniably one of them. Yet to explain the particulars of her crisis would take by far too much time. ‘I have a scrape of my own to work out of – my personal version of Asandir.’

Arithon grinned and melted unobtrusively into the shadows. ‘Then I commend you to subterfuge and a fast, soft landing in a midden.’

She heard his soft step reach the ladder.

‘Farewell, lady enchantress.’ Then he was gone, leaving her alone with a larger dilemma than the one she had found in the loft at Enithen Tuer’s.

Guardian of Mirthlvain

Cupped like a witch’s cauldron between the jagged peaks of the Tiriacs and the north shore of Methlas Lake, Mirthlvain Swamp was not a place where even the boldest cared to tread. Submerged under vaporous mists, the pools with their hummocks of spear-tipped reeds spawned horrors in their muddy depths that the efforts of two civilizations had failed to secure behind walls. Yet a man did dare the dangers and walk here, on the crumbling stone causeway that remained of an ancient and long over-run bulwark. Grievously shorthanded as the Fellowship sorcerers had been through the years since the Mistwraith’s conquest, never for an instant was Mirthlvain Swamp left unwatched.

The master spellbinder Verrain crouched on a precarious span of stonework with his elbows braced on his knees. A rust-coloured cloak lay furled at his feet and untrimmed blond hair fringed his collar with beads of accumulated damp. He had poised for a very long time, motionless, his large, capable hands with their puncture scars from old bite wounds curled over an equally battered staff.

Wavelets flurried fitfully against the decayed wall, disturbed by something that lurked unseen in the depths; then the waters subsided to oily stagnation. A line creased Verrain’s brows and one ivory knuckle twitched. Black eyes regarded blacker water, both invisibly troubled.

The misted sky reflected in the pool shivered faintly, as if bubbles sprang from the muck underneath and rose in a sequin shimmer; except that no trapped air broke the surface. Verrain pursed lips that a very long time in the past had been the delight of Daenfal’s barmaids. He loosed a hand from his staff and slowly, carefully, extended his arm above the pool.

He spoke in accents as antiquated as the doxies, who were all six centuries dead. ‘Show yourself, spawn of the methuri.’

Then he closed his fingers. The ribbon of power he held leashed in readiness uncoiled through lightless fathoms.

Ripples bloomed to a curl of froth as a whip-thin tail sliced the surface, splashed and vanished.

‘Ah,’ said Verrain thoughtfully. ‘I am not so easily evaded.’ He murmured a word that unbound a restraint: a force like an arrow speared through the murk in pursuit of a creature that zig-zagged in patterns of wild flight.

Muck flurried up from the depths. Then the peaty waters moiled and burst into spray as a serpentine shape slashed through. The snake was narrow, its head the distinctive wedge of a viper. The eyes it pinned on its tormentor were scarlet as jewels, and malevolent.

The spellbinder forced himself not to recoil. Though aware the sculling serpent was fully capable of a strike, he traced a symbol upon the air. A shimmer remained where his finger passed.

The snake stayed trained upon the ward glyph as, crouched on the heels of worn boots, and bare of any artifice or talisman, Verrain transformed thought into power. His palms began to glow faintly. He handled raw energy as though it were solid and twisted it into a strand. The serpent hissed, fighting the ward that held it bound and its tail flicked a silver fin of water into the tangled banks of reed.

Verrain’s forehead ran with sweat. Faster now, his fingers wove spell-thread into a snare which he cast over the creature that knifed the water.

The pool exploded into spray. Unnaturally vocal for its kind, it screamed like a rabbit as the ward clamped over its coils.

The hair prickled on Verrain’s neck as it twisted. He blocked its attempt to dive. The snake screamed again. The spellbinder’s nostrils flared against the vapours thrown off by churning water. Grim with concentration and braced as if for a blow, he released the rest of the energies he had pooled throughout motionless hours of waiting.

Light pulsed across his fine-knit spells. The mesh unravelled in a flash and the serpent’s cry ceased as if pinched. A last reflexive surge shot it full length from the marsh before it fell back, limp.

Verrain snatched up his staff. Fast as a swordsman, he hooked one flaccid coil before it could sink beyond sight. A practised snap of his wrist flipped the serpent clear of the pool. Its dripping four-foot length spilled with a slither on the moss-rotten stone of the wall.

Exposed to full view, it gleamed sleekly black. A row of barbs ridged the length of its spine. Verrain prodded the head into profile. The red eyes were slitted like a cat’s. An ivory diamond patterned the throat; the rest of the underbelly was dark. Verrain pried open the mouth and extended the fangs from their membrane sheaths. Venom seeped out, odourless and diamond-clear; but the drop that splashed the rock left a caustic, smoking stain.

Verrain scrambled back beyond reach of the fumes. His wide, expressive mouth lost all trace of the fact he ever smiled. He had expected this serpent might be a fresh variation; the creatures bent into mutation in past ages to serve as hosts for methuri, or hate-wraiths, interbred with persistent success. Although the Fellowship of Seven had exterminated the last of these iyat-related parasites five thousand years back, Mirthlvain Swamp continued relentlessly to brew up left-over crossbreeds.

Diamond-throated meth-snakes cropped up in many forms, ranging from harmless to virulently poisonous. This one Verrain had snared as a formality, never suspecting its bite might carry a cierl-ankeshed toxin. He shuddered to think of the risk he had taken, to Name-trance the creature bare-handed. Weak in the knees, he leaned on his staff and thanked Ath Creator he was unharmed and still standing upright.

Even skin-contact with that deadliest of poisons caused a wasting of the nerves, a screaming firestorm of agony that resulted in twitching paralysis. His body might have lain on this wall and suppurated for days before the life finally left it.

Aware through Sethvir that the Fellowship was taxed thin by an outbreak of Khadrim and the development of the West Gate Prophecy, Verrain frowned. His discovery was not going to please; cierl-ankeshed was a threat that his masters securely believed had been eradicated.

Suddenly drained by his weariness, the spellbinder who was Guardian of Mirthlvain straightened. He shook out his rust-brown cloak, raised up his staff and nudged the dead snake from the wall. The corpse fell with a splash but did not sink. Even as Verrain moved away, his footsteps cautious on the unstable stone of the wall, the ink-black waters behind him boiled up in a froth as scavengers converged in a frenzy to devour the meth-snake’s remains.

Observations

In the city of Castle Point, a raven drops out of misty sky and alights on the shoulder of a sorcerer who wears black, and whose dark, sad eyes are shadowed further by a broad-brimmed hat with a patterned silver band…

Southward, beneath the shattered spires of the old earl’s court, the enchantress of the watch bears report to the Prime that Elaira has culminated an illicit visit to Erdane with clandestine meetings with a prince in a tavern hayloft…

Sethvir, sorcerer and archivist at Althain Tower to Asandir, in residence at the home of Enithen Tuer: ‘Cross Camris promptly. Trouble pending: migrant strain of meth-snakes with cierl-ankeshed venom confirmed in Mirthlvain swamp…’

VII. PASS OF ORLAN

The morning following Arithon’s escapade at the Four Ravens, Asandir recalled the horses from the smithy where they had been reshod, then rousted a hung-over Dakar from the brothel that had sheltered him through the night. Whether the Mad Prophet had been sober enough to enjoy the doxie whose bed had warmed him appeared dubious; he sat the paint’s saddle with a pronounced list. Yet the malaise that unstrung his balance seemed not to dampen his complaints.

‘When I pass beneath the Wheel, Dharkaron Avenger’s going to seem like an angel of mercy.’ He crooked his reins in one elbow, cradled his head and managed with well-practised grumpiness to direct his injury toward Asandir. ‘You said we’d be in Erdane for two more days.’

The sorcerer replied too softly to overhear; but the effect upon Dakar was profound.

His cheeks went white as new snow. Suddenly straight in his saddle, he swung the paint’s head and promptly spurred down the lane toward the gates. No further protest escaped him, even when the party clattered out of Erdane and turned eastward at a pace guaranteed to inflame his hangover.

Lysaer for once forbore from teasing. Aware that his half-brother had stolen out last night by himself, and disappointed not to have been asked along, he gained no chance for tactful inquiry; Arithon’s night-time outing remained unexplained. No mention was made of the tunic which a peculiarly wakeful Enithen Tuer had snatched off to wash before dawn. Asandir’s mood seemed preoccupied and brisk and had been so since daybreak. Had Dakar felt inclined to be talkative he might have offered a fellow miscreant fair warning: with a Fellowship sorcerer, silence on any topic boded trouble.

Yet Arithon was disinclined to worry in any case. With the mystery behind his mind-block resolved, the cutting edge eased from his reserve. Left less wary than watchful now that he understood the stakes involved a kingship, he trusted time and circumstance would show him an opening to overset Asandir’s prerogatives. Until then, he rode at his half-brother’s side and not even his restive mare diverted him from rapid-fire conversation. Lysaer welcomed the entertainment. Since too much quiet let him brood over the undermining losses of his banishment, he fielded Arithon’s quips in a spirited enthusiasm that outlasted interruptions by fast-riding couriers and packed farm-drays, and once, a dusty band of cattle whose herd-boys yipped and goaded their charges to market.

Then, as with West End, the farmlands thinned and ended. One hard day’s travel beyond Erdane the way became wild and untenanted. The scrublands of Karmak gave rise to forested downs laced with streamlets. The mist seemed alive with the rush of running water and the air keen and brittle with coming snow. More than once, the party started deer from the thickets. If the bucks were royally antlered, their incoming winter coats were flat and lacking gloss; even after summer’s forage, the does were sadly thin.

The mist’s blighted legacy afflicted more than creatures in the wild.

After nightfall, perhaps due to the chill, Asandir relented and engaged a room at a run-down wayside tavern that in better times had been a hospice tended by Ath’s initiates.

‘What became of them?’ Lysaer asked.

‘What happens to any order of belief when its connection to the mysteries becomes sullied?’ Asandir chose not to entrust his tall stallion to the ill-kempt groom, but attended to his saddle girths himself. ‘Desh-thiere’s darkness disrupted more than sunlight on this world. The link that preserved was lost along with the Riathan Paravians.’

The pent-back sorrow in his statement did not invite further inquiry; and if the carved gates at the innyard were still intact, the beautiful, patterned sigils of ward had lost any power to guard. The tavern’s musty attic proved to be riddled with iyats, which perhaps explained the dearth of clientele.

By the time the sorcerer banished the pests the hour had grown late; the commonroom with its great blackened beams stood lamentably empty. While here the accents of outland strangers did not provoke hostilities, still the stooped old innkeeper took care not to turn his back. He served his odd guests in silence, while his wife stayed hidden in the kitchen.

The fare was bland and too greasy; Lysaer left his plate barely touched. Arithon had seen worse on a ship’s deck. After sighs and a martyred show of eye-rolling, Dakar righteously forwent ale for mulled cider and a bowl of the inn’s insipid stew. The bread had no weevils that he could see, so he ate it, and Lysaer’s portion, too. Then he stalked from his emptied bowls to a bed that he swore would have lice and mildew in the blankets.

This failed to secure him permission to retire in the hayloft. Perhaps as a precaution, Asandir sat all night in the hallway, his back against the door panel.

‘Unforgiving as a reformed priest,’ Dakar commiserated to Arithon; yet whether the sorcerer stood vigil to curb the excesses of his apprentice or to curtail further outings by the Master of Shadow, or whether he simply wished space for clear thought, the Mad Prophet was too wise to ask. He flopped crosswise on a mattress of dusty ticking and his chain reaction of sneezes changed into snores that would have done credit to a hibernating bear.

Busy scooping ice from the enamelled ewer of washwater, and striving to rise above low spirits, Lysaer regarded the sleeping prophet with a mix of laughter and distaste. ‘If he weren’t apprenticed to a sorcerer he would have made a splendid royal fool.’

‘What a curse to lay on a king,’ Arithon observed from the corner where, stripped down to his hose, he spread out his blankets on bare floor. A cockroach scurried up from a crack near his foot; he reacted fast enough to crush it, changed his mind and let it race to safety under the baseboard. ‘Not mentioning that every princess within reach would have her bottom pinched to bruises.’

Lysaer splashed frigid water on his face, gasped and groped for his shirt, that being the nearest cloth at hand; the innkeeper was too stingy to provide towels. The prince chaffed his half-brother, ‘I’d say that upbringing by mages left you cynical.’

By now half-muffled under bedclothes, Arithon said in startled seriousness, ‘Of course not.’

Lysaer rested his chin on his fists and his damply crumpled shirt. Statesman enough to guess that the meat of the matter sprang from Arithon’s ill-starred heirship of Karthan, and not eased that the thrust of s’Ffalenn wiles now bent toward contention with Asandir, he gently shifted the subject. ‘Well, the loss of your roots doesn’t bother you much.’

One corner of Arithon’s mouth twitched. After a moment, the expression resolved to a smile. ‘If it takes sharing confidences to prove that you’re wrong, there was one young maid. I was never betrothed, as you were. Sithaer, I barely so much as kissed her. I think she was as frightened of my shadows as I was of telling her my feelings.’

‘Perhaps you’ll find your way back to her.’ The wind whined mournfully through the cracks in the shutters and a draft stole through the small room; touched by the chill, Lysaer shrugged. ‘At least, we could ask Asandir to return us to Dascen Elur once we’ve defeated the Mistwraith.’

‘No.’ Arithon rolled over, his face turned unreadably to the wall. ‘Depend on the fact that he won’t.’

‘You found out something in Erdane, didn’t you,’ Lysaer said. But his accusation dangled unanswered. Rebuffed and alone with his thoughts, and hating the fate that left him closeted at the whim of a sorcerer in the fusty lodgings of a second rate roadside tavern, he shook out his damp shirt and blew out the candle for the night.

Two days later the riders in Asandir’s party reached Standing Gate, a rock formation that spanned the road in a lopsided natural arch. Centaurs in past ages had carved the flanking columns into likenesses of the twins who founded their royal dynasty. Since before the memory of man the granite had resisted erosion: the Kings Halmein and Adon reared yet over the highway, their massive, majestic forelegs upraised in the mist and their beards and maned backs stained the verdigris of old bronze with blooms of lichen.

Mortal riders could not pass beneath their shadow without experiencing a chill of profound awe. Here the footfalls of the horses seemed to resound with the echoes of another age, when the earth was fresh with splendour and Paravians nurtured the mysteries. Standing Gate marked the upward ascent to the high valley pass of Orlan, sole access through the Thaldein mountains to Atainia and lands to the east.

But even under the frosts of coming winter, in the years since the fall of the high kings, travellers who fared through Standing Gate never passed unobserved.

Asandir’s party proved no exception, as Arithon discovered in a pause to water his mare on the bank of a fast-flowing creek. Muffled against the stiff breeze, he sat his saddle with both stirrups dropped and his reins slipped loosely through his fingers. Suddenly the dun flung her head up. Her rider did not see what had startled her; the woollen hood of his cloak masked his peripheral vision as she snapped sideways and wheeled. Stalled from bolting by an expert play on the reins, the mare crab-stepped, stopped and blew noisily. Her sable-edged ears pricked toward a stand of scrub pine that rattled and tossed in the gusts.

Nothing moved that did not appear to belong there.

Yet when Arithon urged the mare on she stamped and rigidly resisted. Warned by her keener senses, he recovered his stirrups and stroked her neck in pretence of coaxing her away; at the same time he centred his mind and cast an enchanter’s awareness over the thicket.

A man crouched there, motionless, clad in jerkin and leggings of sewn wolfskin. Weather had roughened his face beyond his years and his ruddy hair had tangled from the wind. The consciousness Arithon touched held a predator’s leashed aggression paired with tempered steel: a matched set of long knives and a javelin with a braided leather grip.

Although to face away from the thicket as if no armed man watched his back was a most unwelcome exercise, Arithon pressed his mare forward in earnest. The instant the rocky footing allowed a faster pace, he trotted his horse and caught up with the others.

Dakar regarded him slantwise as the dun overtook his paint. ‘How was the assignation? Or did you dawdle to swim?’

‘Neither.’ Arithon returned a grin of purest malice. ‘Remind me to recommend you as chaperone for some jealous pervert’s catamite.’

He ignored the Mad Prophet’s thunderous scowl and disturbed Asandir’s preoccupied silence. ‘We’re being watched.’

The sorcerer’s gaze stayed trained ahead, as if he saw beyond the misty road which wound upward between steepening rocky outcrops. ‘That’s not surprising.’

Wise to the subtleties of mages, Arithon withheld unwelcome questions; presently the sorcerer’s steely eyes turned from whatever inward landscape he had been contemplating. ‘This is the townsmen’s most dreaded stretch of highway. The clans that ruled Camris before the rebellion make their stand here. If we were a caravan bearing metals or clothgoods we would require an armed escort. Not being townborn, our party has little to fear.’

‘The Camris clans were subject to the high king of Tysan?’ Arithon asked.

Asandir returned an absent glance. ‘The old earls of Erdane swore fealty. Their descendants will not have forgotten.’

Unfooled by the sorcerer’s apparent inattention, Arithon reined in his mare. As she curvetted and recovered stride by the shoulder of Lysaer’s chestnut, the green eyes of her rider showed a glint of veiled speculation. Covered by the clang of hooves on cleared rock, he said, ‘We’re going to see action in the pass.’

Lysaer rubbed a nose nipped scarlet by the chill, his expression turned gravely merry. ‘Then someone better tell Dakar to tighten his saddle girth, or the first quick move his paint makes will tumble him over on the rocks.’

‘I heard that,’ interjected the Mad Prophet. He flapped his elbows, his reins and his heels, and contrived to overtake the half-brothers without mishap. To Lysaer he said, ‘Let’s be sporting and wager. I say my saddle stays put with no help from buckles, and you’ll kiss the dirt before I do.’ Brown eyes slid craftily to the Shadow Master. ‘And one thing further – there won’t be any trouble in the pass.’

‘Don’t answer,’ said Arithon to his half-brother. ‘Not unless you fancy pulling cockle burrs from your saddle fleeces.’

‘That’s unfair,’ Dakar retorted, injured. ‘I only cheat when the odds are hard against me.’

‘My point precisely.’ Arithon ducked the swing the Mad Prophet pitched in his direction, then sidled his mount safely clear as the paint’s saddle slid around her barrel and disgorged her fat rider in an ignominious heap on the trail.

By the time the commotion settled and Dakar had righted the paint’s maladjusted tack, flurries eddied around the rocks. The snowfall thickened rapidly. Within minutes all but the nearest landmarks became buried in whirlwinds of white. The storm that had threatened through the past day and a half closed over the mountains, whipped in by a dismal north wind.

The riders continued over ever-steepening terrain. Bothered by Arithon’s mention of trouble, Lysaer urged his horse past a stand of boulders to find opening to speak with Asandir.

‘When we reach the next town, might I sell my jewels to buy a sword?’

The sorcerer returned a look like blank glass, his cragged brow sprinkled with settled snow. ‘We’ll cross no more towns before arrival at Althain Tower.’

More forthright than his half-brother, Lysaer persevered. ‘Perhaps we could find a tavern keeper with a spare blade available for purchase then.’

Asandir’s vagueness crystallized to piercing irritation. ‘When you have need of a weapon, you shall be given one.’

The sorcerer urged his mount on with speed. Concerned lest the road became mired too deeply for travel, he allowed no stop until dusk, and then only for the barest necessities. The riders fed their horses and swallowed a hasty meal. Sent out to assess conditions, Lysaer returned to report that even should the blizzard slacken, the gusts had increased; drifting might render the mountains impassable by daybreak.

‘We’ll be through the pass before then,’ Asandir stated flatly. Despite outspoken resentment from Dakar, the sorcerer quenched the fire and ordered the horses resaddled.

The riders pressed eastward through a long and miserable night. All but blind in the blizzard, they made tortuous headway through the dark. The road narrowed to a trail hedged by knife-edged promontories and sheer drops, each dip and ditch and gully smoothed innocently over by drifts. Horses floundered through heavy footing or clattered perilously across ice-sheened rock. The winds buffeted all the while with heavy, relentless ferocity. Manes and cloaks became mantled in ice. The driving sting of snow crystals needled any exposed patch of flesh and hands and feet ached from the penetrating cold.

The horses forded the icy current of the Valendale and emerged, dusted with hoarfrost from spume thrown off by the waterfalls. In times before the Mistwraith, the cascades could be seen falling like ribbons of liquid starlight as the feed springs of hundreds of freshets tumbled over clefts into the gorge.

Daybreak saw the riders deep into the pass of Orlan. By then the snowfall had eased, but Desh-thiere’s mists sheathed the saw-toothed ridges and the wind still cut like a sword. The riders traversed the high notches submerged in whipping snow-devils as gusts stripped the black rock of the Thaldeins and harried across a desertscape of drifts.

At times visibility closed until only the mage-trained could maintain sure sense of direction. Asandir and Arithon broke trail by turns, relieved on occasion by Dakar; yet despite the cold and the rough, floundering gait of his horse through the snow, the Mad Prophet unreliably tended to fall asleep in his saddle. Since a rider who blundered over a precipice was unlikely to be found before the thaws, and Asandir stayed wrapped in his silences, the chance to take fate by the horns became too tempting for Arithon to resist.

He chose his moment to volunteer, then pressed his dun to the fore. Throughout the next hour he drew gradually ahead, until a lead of fifty paces separated him from the others.

Here, at the storm-choked heart of the pass, the road dropped sheer on the north side, cliffs of trackless granite fallen away into a gulf of impenetrable mist; south, escarpments towered upward to summits buried in storm. The drifts lay chest-deep and packed into layers by the gusts. Curtained in wind-whirled snow, Arithon spoke gently to his mare as she shouldered tiredly ahead. His deadened hands gave rein as she stumbled; he balanced her, coaxed her forward with the promise of shelter and bran as she clawed toward a scoured expanse of rock. Stung by a gust that watered his eyes, Arithon ducked his face behind his hood just as the mare struck out off packed footing. Her legs skated wildly. Pitched against her neck as she scrambled, Arithon kicked free of the stirrups and dismounted. He flung his cloak over her steaming back and freed his dagger. When the mare steadied he lifted a foreleg and chipped out the ice ball that had compacted in the hollow of her hoof. The relentless snows had long since scoured away the preventative smear of grease applied on the banks of the ford.

When a glance backward showed the others halted to tend their own mounts similarly, Arithon straightened. Hopeful the barbarians were still watching, he hooked the dun’s reins and led her off without troubling to dust the accumulated snow from his shoulders. His jerkin had soaked through in any case, with his cloak left draped across the flanks of his mount. The mare was dangerously weary and chilled, and if her reserves became spent, the pass offered no shelter.

Arithon crossed the cleared patch, battered by blasts of driven ice. Beyond, where the gale’s direct force was cut by an overhanging rock spur, the drifts lay piled and deep. The mare sank to her brisket and floundered to an uncertain halt.

While the weather continued to howl outside this one pocket of stillness, a voice called challenge from above.

‘Don’t move.’ The accents were crisp, commanding, and by town standards, purely barbarian. ‘Make one sound and you’ll gain a dead horse.’

The dun snorted hot-headed alarm. Grasping for advantage in mired footing, Arithon dug his knuckles in her ribs. As she shied face-about toward the cliff, he snatched the cloak from her flank, cracked the cloth to fan her alarm, then let the force of her spin fling him sideways. The mare was a fast-moving target when the barbarian made good his threat. An arrow shot from a niche overhead nicked a gash across her shoulder, then buried with a hiss in rucked snow.

The sound and the sting undid the dun. She bolted in panic, her gallop striking sparks from exposed stone as herd instinct impelled her to backtrack. She hit the last expanse of drifts in a white explosion of snow-clods, then disappeared completely as a gust roared like smoke across the trail.

Sheltered under cover of the eddies, Arithon dropped his cloak, drew Alithiel and flattened his back against the underhang. The wind lulled. Tumbling snow winnowed and settled to unveil chaos as the mare charged through the oncoming riders. Her loose reins looped the nose of the chestnut and spun him plunging in a spraddle-legged stagger. Lysaer kept his seat through skilled horsemanship, but could not avoid collision with Asandir’s black. Both mounts floundered sideways. Nose to tail just behind, the paint and the pack pony rocketed back on their hocks. Pans clanged and a poorly-tied tent flapped loose. The pony ripped off a buck that scared the paint, and caught sound asleep in the scramble, Dakar toppled head-first into a snowdrift. He flopped back upright shouting epithets referring to bitch-bred donkeys; while bearing their food-stores and necessities, the pack-pony joined the paint and the dun in headlong stampede down the trail.

Arithon seized the moment while the others were delayed and took swift stock of his surroundings. In a cranny above his sheltered hollow he caught his first glimpse of his attacker: a gloved hand, a sleeve trimmed in wolf-fur and the dangerously levelled tip of a deerarrow, the broad, four-bladed sort designed to rip and kill by internal bleeding. Arithon repressed a shiver through a moment of furious reassessment. Chance had favoured him: his horse had escaped without worse damage than a scratch. But if his spurious ploy was not to bring disaster, he would have to do something about Lysaer. Like the spirited dun, the prince had too much character to meet any threat with complacency.

The drawn broadhead abruptly changed angle; Arithon jammed himself tight to the rock as the archer’s torso momentarily reared against the sky.

The man wore leather and undyed wolf pelts. Hair spiked with frost fringed the rim of his brindled cap and an impressive breadth of shoulders matched the recurve bow held poised at the rim of the abutment. Motionless, afraid to exhale lest the plume of his breath disclose his position, Arithon grinned outright as his adversary took painstaking aim down the defile.

‘Move away from the rocks!’ the archer called. ‘I have you covered.’ The moan of a rising gust drove him to urgency. ‘Move out! Now!’

The wind peaked. Snow sheeted in a blanketing shower and the barbarian fired blind. As the shaft slashed through his discarded cloak, Arithon scaled the rockface, sobered by discovery that clansmen balked at killing not at all. He kicked through a cleft and sought the lair of the bowman before his reckless ploy had time to backfire.

The gust passed and the air cleared. As the archer leaned out to account for his hit, the Master stalked, his footfalls silenced by snow.

The archer discovered his error, cursed and whirled to cover his back. He caught his erstwhile quarry in the act of a counter-ambush. Unfazed by surprise and fast for his bulk, he nocked another arrow. Arithon’s thrown dagger sliced his bowstring in mid-draw. The bow cracked straight in backlash. Snapped around by a severed end of cordage, the arrow raked the clansman’s wrist.

‘Fiends!’ the scout cursed. He disentangled his arm from his disabled recurve, not quite soon enough. Arithon closed his final stride and poised Alithiel for a fatal thrust through the throat.

Brown eyes met green through a tigerish instant of assessment. Though larger by a head and doubly muscled, the barbarian chose not to risk a grab for his dagger; the blade at his neck was too nervelessly steady.

‘Try not to be foolish,’ Arithon said. He looked up at his bulkier adversary with an expression implacably shuttered. ‘By the love of the mother who bore you, I urge you to think. Ask why I would do a thing, then forfeit all I had gained.’ Slowly, deliberately, he turned his blade and dropped it point downward between the cross-laced boots of his captive.

Steel sliced through snow and stood quivering, the dark metal with its striking silver tracery the dangerous invitation to a riddle. The clansman bridled fury with an effort. A moment passed, filled by the howl of wind and the wet swirl of snow, and the slow drip of blood from the fingers of a weapon-calloused hand. The smoke-dark steel in the drift stayed untouched amid gathering spatters of scarlet. Then, as if nothing untoward had just happened, the barbarian’s lips twisted into a vexed and humourless smile. ‘Move and you die,’ he told Arithon. ‘Behind you stand six of my companions, every one of them armed.’

Arithon felt a prick at his lower spine. At bay on the point of a javelin, his complacency remained unshaken. ‘I’m required to surrender twice?’

His unforced clarity of speech caused a stir through the band that had trapped him.

The bowman alone stayed unmoved. ‘Take the upstart,’ he snapped.

‘Grithen, you’re wrong,’ somebody protested; the voice sounded female. ‘This catch is certainly no townsman.’

‘You say?’ The red-headed ringleader swore. ‘Do you see clan identification anywhere on this bastard? Accents can be faked. If this man were clanborn but in league with the mayors, he’d know better than to leave town walls.’

Arithon looked at Grithen, calm through an uncomfortable blast of wind. ‘And if I am neither?’ His indecipherable expression stayed with him. ‘What then?’

‘Well, whoever values your foolhardy hide will pay us a bountiful ransom.’ Grithen signalled left-handedly and this time, his henchmen responded.

Arithon found himself pitched forward into the snow. Hands searched his person for weapons, found none and pinioned with a thoroughness that hurt. Arithon twisted his head sideways. ‘Furies of Sithaer!’ he exclaimed in derisive and blistering consternation. ‘Had I wanted a fight, don’t you think I’d have knifed something more than a bowstring?’

‘Then why trouble with decoy and ambush in the first place?’ Wolfishly contentious, Grithen exacted payment for the shame of his earlier misjudgement. ‘Bind him.’

Jerked to his feet, Arithon watched with a sailor’s appreciation as the scouts cut their rawhide laces and expertly tied up his wrists. Then he averted his gaze, spat blood from a cut lip and endured an ignominious interval while more cords were looped tight around his ankles. ‘The heart of the dilemma,’ he conceded to Grithen in a final, acid afterthought. ‘Did I act out of purpose or folly? You’d better figure out which, and quickly.’

Down the trail, Asandir’s party had successfully recovered their strays; they were starting back up the pass with obvious urgency and concern, and though no one appeared to watch them, their progress was covertly marked.

‘Suppose I had a companion too prideful to submit to a threat.’ Arithon looked keenly at his captor, who was frowning and flicking blood from his leathers. ‘Say my friend had no fear of danger and he forced you to harm him to make your capture. That might be a pity. His skin is pricelessly valuable.’

Grithen whistled and shot a triumphant glance at his henchmen, one of whom was indeed a scarred and grim-faced woman. Then his leonine beard parted in a grin of forthright appreciation. ‘Which one is he? I assure you, we’ll handle him as delicately as a flower.’

Arithon raised his brows. ‘Flower he isn’t, but don’t worry. If he doesn’t co-operate and surrender, my life will surely be forfeit.’

Grithen caught up the hilt of Arithon’s relinquished blade and tested the balance, his smile turned suddenly corrosive. ‘You’re a boy-lover,’ he concluded in disgust. ‘That’s why you gave yourself up. To protect your beloved.’

‘By Dharkaron,’ Arithon murmured, ‘how you’ll wish that was true.’ He showed no rancour at the insult; and at long last his barbarian captor saw past his hostage’s wooden expression. The wretch he ordered manhandled and tied and dragged toward the edge of the outcrop was desperately struggling not to laugh.

‘Mad,’ Grithen concluded under his breath. He traced the sword’s edge with a fingertip and flinched as the steel nicked flesh. Uneasy, but too rabidly committed for retreat, he whistled the call of the mountain hawk and alerted the band still in hiding to initiate the next stage of his ambush.

The dun mare shied back, snorting over the jingle of bit rings and gear as the riders approached the promontory where their companion had lately come to grief.

‘Whoa,’ Lysaer soothed gently. Astride his disgruntled chestnut and leading his half-brother’s mount by the bridle, he slacked rein as the mare jibbed backward. ‘Whoa now.’ The patience in his voice overlaid a worry that burned his thoughts to white rage. Obstinate the Master of Shadow might be, and most times maddeningly reticent; yet as Lysaer combed through wind-whipped snow for a man perhaps fallen and injured, he did not dwell on past crimes or piracy. However cross-grained, no matter how secretive or odd a childhood among mages had made him, Arithon’s motives before exile had likely not been founded in malice.