The Curse of the Mistwraith

This time Lysaer wrapped his arms around his knees, content to let the spirits work their magic. The breeze whispered softly over the terrace and the terrible, alien constellations burned fiercely through the interval that followed.

In time, Dakar took another pull from the flask. He peered mournfully into the dregs. ‘Torbrand s’Ffalenn was a man of natural empathy, a master statesman, because he could sense what motivated his enemies. He ruled as duke in Daon Ramon, and the compassion of the Riathan Paravians formed the guiding light of his policies. Which means, my friend, that Arithon will forgive the knife that kills him. He cannot do otherwise. To understand and to sympathize with the needs of every living thing is his inborn nature, the forced gift of the s’Ffalenn line as bequeathed by the Fellowship of Seven.’

Lysaer took a moment to sort a cascade of revelations. This penchant for s’Ffalenn forgiveness explained many of the quirks of his half-brother’s personality; behaviour he had considered wayward, until he was given a key to understanding. It explained why Arithon would be vicious in contention up until the moment of defeat; how he could effortlessly shed any grudge for his balked desires, to embrace a crown he absolutely did not want without sign of bitterness or rancour. Lysaer stared at his hands, which were cold beneath their dressings. The blisters throbbed, but he had ceased to dwell on their discomfort. He badly wanted to beg back the flask of telir brandy, for in a heartbeat, his cheerfulness had vanished. Yet courage in the end became his failing. He had to ask. ‘And s’Ilessid? What gift from my ancestor do I carry?’

Morose, Dakar said, ‘You will always seek justice, even where none can be found.’

A moment later, Lysaer felt the flask pressed back into his poulticed hands. Careful not to fumble through his bandages, he swallowed brandy in gulps. For abruptly, his euphoria over Desh-thiere’s defeat had faded. Now he wanted to get drunk, to embrace the oblivion of forgetfulness before his busy mind could exhaust itself in perverse and futile review of past events. He could study a whole lifetime and probably never determine which actions were of his choosing and which others may have been influenced by those virtues bound by magecraft to his bloodline.

‘Arithon was wise to seek his bed,’ the prince concluded. ‘I’m certainly too tired for this.’

Generously leaving the last of the spirits for Dakar, he set the flask clumsily on the flagstones, rose to his feet and took his leave.

Dakar remained, solitary. Night breezes worried his unkempt hair, while he picked in turn at the immaculate wool of Asandir’s cloak. The Mad Prophet could wish until his heart burst that the flask by his elbow was still full; or that he knew a spell to conjure rotgut gin out of air. Any crude alcohol would have served to get him drunk enough to forget the nerve that had made him question the burns on Lysaer of Tysan’s hands. Maybe then he could sleep with the knowledge Asandir had revealed, in the hour before his departure.

Dakar shut his eyes, before the stars his prophecy had seen restored could blur through a welling flow of tears. ‘Daelion Fatemaster take pity! Why, Lysaer my friend, did you have to be the one used to block the Mistwraith’s assault bare-handed?’

But Asandir on that point had been unequivocally clear: in the hour of final conflict, when Desh-thiere had threatened to break free, Lysaer had been Kharadmon’s selection for the sacrifice. Dakar still agonized over Asandir’s heartless assessment, after the irrevocable event: ‘Dharkaron, Ath’s Angel of Vengeance may damn us for the act, but Dakar, what else could be done? Of us all, Lysaer was least trained to the mysteries. If contact with the flesh allowed Desh-thiere’s wraiths to access the mind, which of worse evil could we allow? To let such beings touch knowledge of true power might have led them to threaten all the universe. Sad as it is, tragic as the future must become, Lysaer’s exposure offered the lesser risk. Weep with us all, the decision was never made unmourned.’

‘Unmourned, by Ath that’s not enough!’ Alone on the windswept terrace, Dakar reached in sudden fury and hurled the flask and its priceless dregs away. It smashed against the wall, an explosion of flying shards that raked through air and settled to unsatisfying stillness. The events of the Mistwraith’s confinement would never on a prayer end in bloodless quiet in Ithamon. Reproached by the sweetish smell of telir that evaporated away on the wind, Dakar buried his face in dark wool and wept until his chest ached. ‘You heartless, unprincipled bastard!’ he shouted finally, in a vicious hope that Sethvir would overhear and channel all his rage straight back to his Fellowship master.

For the seeds of evil had been sown, well and deeply. All the telir brandy in Athera could never soften the chaos still to be reaped at the ill-omened coronation in Etarra.

Insurrection

True sunlight blazed down upon the city of Etarra, whose squat red walls and square bastions had known only the grey dankness of mist since the day the first footings were raised.

The merchant guilds hailed the event as catastrophe.

Trade stalled, from the moment the lampblacks raced yelling to the watchkeeps with word that the east sky dawned red like running blood. Sentries reported the same from forsaken posts of duty on the walls. Terrorstricken citizens huddled indoors waiting to die of Ath-knew-what sort of sickness, as day brightened to a fearful white dazzle. The phenomenon had to be sorcery: the sky was blue and the light burned harshly enough to make the eyes ache. Rumours ran rampant and legends from the time before the uprising were whispered behind shuttered windows stuffed with blankets. By night the city apothecaries opened their shops and fattened their purses on profits wrung from unguents to ward off blindness. When by the next day the herders holed up in their crofts failed to drive livestock to the butcher, city-folk went hungry. Flour ran short. The rich resorted to bribes until the enterprising poor began to rifle guild warehouses.

Nobody died of exposure.

The meanest of beggars suffered no impairment of vision, though the burglaries were accomplished in streets ablaze under sunlight. Ministers whose guilds suffered losses howled for justice, while dispatching assassins on the sly; trade consortiums took advantage of the chaos to bash rivals, and given no lawful satisfaction, robbed merchants resorted to lynchings.

Already corrupt, Etarra grew dangerous in unrest.

Since the uncanny sky showed no sign of clouding back to normal, Morfett, Lord Supreme Governor, prepared with a martyr’s stoicism to restore order and industry to his city. He dug out from under a massive heap of quilts, shed the clinging arms of his wife and forced his trembling, weeping house-steward to press his collar of state. When a morning spent sweating under the naked sun failed to inspire warring factions to resume commerce, he called Lord Commander Diegan to muster the city guard. At lance-point the most recalcitrant citizen would be forced to accept the risk of roasting under the Sithaer-sent scourge of harsh sunlight.

For some days, awnings sold at a premium.

Still, bribes were needed to get the crofters and the caravan drovers to brave the open country. The tax coffers dunned for the headhunters’ bounties by the end of that fracas stood empty. Lord Governor Morfett bolted comfits to ease his agitation. Pounds settled on his already ample girth and added pouches to his layers of sagging chins.

On the brink of restored equilibrium, worse happened.

A Fellowship sorcerer appeared on the city’s inner battlement.

No one had admitted him. He simply materialized, robed in maroon velvet, his eyes mild as pondwater over a beard like frizzled fleece. The last thing he resembled was a power remanifested out of legend. The duty-guard mistook him for somebody’s misdirected grandfather until a kindly effort to offer an escort home earned him a list of outrageous amendments to be appended to the city’s ruling charter.

Summoned in haste from his supper, Lord Governor Morfett stood thunderstruck in cold wind with his napkin still flapping in a tuck behind his collar ruffles.

‘You will also air out the guest suite reserved for state visitors,’ Sethvir said with an aplomb that disallowed reality; the Lord Governor had already repeated that his first petition was preposterous.

‘If it’s lodging you want,’ Morfett protested; and stopped. The words he had intended to utter concerning dispensation of charity were forgotten as the napkin in his collar suddenly seemed to bind up his throat.

The sorcerer said nothing, but gave back a maddening, poetic smile that somehow looked slick as a cat’s.

And though he insinuated himself into Morfett’s private dining-hall for the duration of the Lord Governor’s lunch, of a sudden everything went wrong. The crofters locked themselves indoors all over again; naturally without offer to return the city’s funds. The trade-guilds set up a yelping chorus of accusations and touched off repercussions like a fall of political dominoes. The poor in the streets threatened riots. Morfett only belatedly discovered that two more sorcerers had joined the first. More guest-rooms were aired in the Lord Governor’s private palace. His kitchens were cast into turmoil, and upon inquiry his own house steward informed him that his cooks were ransacking the larder in preparation for feasting royalty.

Livid could barely describe Morfett’s reaction. He had eaten too much for days and now, under pressure, regretted it. His throat swelled, his lungs filled and his fat jiggled as he prepared to countermand everything. But rage rendered him incoherent a fatal second too long.

Two more sorcerers materialized at his elbows, one portly and bearded, the other green-clad, elegant, in his eyes an unrighteous gleam of amusement. Before Morfett could recover speech he found himself whisked without benefit of doors or stairs to his chambers.

There, Sethvir politely offered him cold tea and with perfect diction recited the list of Morfett’s titles, a feat the city herald managed only occasionally without mistakes. Morfett choked. There was ice in his goblet, the crystal of which was finer than any piece in his wife’s dower cupboards. As three sorcerers regarded him with the piercing interest a bug netter might show a rare insect, he sketched a sign against evil and collapsed in a faint upon the carpet.

‘You’d think there’d need to be a backbone to support such a grand weight of lard,’ Kharadmon said tartly.

He ignored the black look shot him by Luhaine; while Sethvir by himself lifted a Lord Governor better than twice his size and weight and deposited his unconscious bulk upon an equally overstuffed sofa.

From his labours, the Warden of Althain raised eyes sparkling with glee. ‘Be careful. When Morfett recovers his wits he has a fast and crafty knack for hiring assassins.’

Kharadmon gave back a toothy grin. ‘Then, colleagues, we have every sane excuse to keep him flustered.’ Devilish in speculation, he said, ‘Do you think him a match for Arithon s’Ffalenn?’

Sethvir laughed. ‘We’re going to find out all too quickly.’

Upon his awakening, Morfett was told that he would be swearing fealty to a s’Ffalenn king within a fortnight, and that governance of Etarra would be made to conform to Rathain’s original royal charter.

The Lord Governor’s pouched eyes narrowed. ‘Over my dead body.’

‘If need be,’ Kharadmon said, unblinking.

Acute enough to differentiate a threat from a promise Morfett gave unctuous agreement, then launched on a vicious course of subterfuge.

Two days of intrigue yielded no satisfaction. Bribes failed to budge even the greediest factions. Worse than implacable, the farmers had somehow become obsessed by the idea that guild overlords no longer owned land-rights. They bandied legalities like barristers and backed their petition with threat of strikes. When hired assassins failed to silence their spokesman, Morfett discovered why. A soft-spoken stranger who wore a black hat had sown insurrection among the country folk with a tact that confounded. The city seneschal inscribed a writ for the man’s arrest, only to find that he was a sorcerer also.

The incident left the Lord Governor indisposed.

He lay ill on silk sheets while, in disregard of politics or loyalty, his wife and daughters surrounded themselves with seamstresses who laboured over sarcenets, brocades and pearl fringework to create a whole wardrobe of new gowns.

‘But this is the sensation of the season!’ his wife shouted indignantly through the bedchamber doorway. ‘If we’re going to be hosting blooded royalty, everybody important shall come calling. This prince might be welcomed as the devil but your daughters would surely become laughingstock were we all wearing last spring’s fashions!’

Morfett clapped his hands over his ears and groaned. His city and his household had slipped his control. Held miserably supine by his churning stomach, he concluded that Etarra’s citizens had been bewitched: only foul sorcery could corrupt them from five centuries of crownless rule. Storms, strikes, a plague of fiends, even the manifestation of Dharkaron’s divine chariot would have been kinder than this infestation of mages. The thought of kneeling before royalty caused Morfett to howl at his body-servant to attend him at once with the chamberpot.

He got instead the imposing, blue-clad sorcerer, Asandir, who cured his upset stomach directly and sent every servant within earshot scurrying to fetch official clothing.

‘Get up!’ This mage evinced none of Sethvir’s vague charm. ‘The council and trade ministers are convened in the oratory, and most of Etarra’s populace crowds the trade square in hot anticipation of your speech.’

The Lord Governor hauled his bulk upright and found himself stuffed unpleasantly fast into an embroidered shirt with gold clasps. He might have feigned the return of his cramps had Asandir’s steely manner not been impervious to falsehood.

Regaled in tasteful colours for the first time since his birth, Morfett, Defender of Trade, Protector of Justice and Lord Governor Supreme of the Northern Reaches, lumbered like a disgruntled bear from his lair to initiate due process to re-establish monarchy in Rathain.

Overviews

In a hall of gilt and alabaster, Lirenda, First Koriani Enchantress, delivers her report to the Prime: ‘Desh-thiere’s remains have been sealed under ward and imprisoned in the caves at Skelseng’s Gate. This disposition is intended to be temporary. When royal rule is re-established at Etarra, the Fellowship will transfer the Mistwraith to a place of more permanent captivity. We might learn then why they faltered at the end and preserved the fell creature alive…’

Under Strakewood’s evergreens in the northern reaches of Rathain, the clan gathering to celebrate new sunlight extends for a fortnight; bored with the feasting, too young yet to dance, a pair of barbarian boys break away from the festivities to play at raids on Etarra merchants…

In a tavernyard shadowed by the snow-capped peaks of the Mathorns, Elaira waters her bay mare while the horsemaster offers well-meant advice: ‘If it’s on to Etarra you’re bound, let the cook fill your saddlebags. Provisions are scarce in the markets there. The postriders all say the same. Farmers won’t sell to the townsmen and talk of sorcerers and monarchy has the trade-guilds lathered into an uproar…’

XIII. ETARRA

The Lord Governor Supreme of Etarra was never a man to worry off weight in a crisis. On the morning the royal heir was to arrive he found his carnelion studded belt pinched his waist. His best boots were tight around the calves and the bunions on his feet grown much worse. Small annoyances became major aggravations when one was forced to stand on display under sunlight too warm for brocades. Jostled by anxious city ministers who crowded the road and the verges before Etarra’s southern gate, Morfett squeezed another sigh past the constriction of his pearl-studded collar. Today, the sorcerer riding herd upon his obligations was Sethvir. Offended that the Warden of Althain should flaunt his own demands concerning finery by wearing a robe as threadbare and ink-stained at the cuffs as the one he had first appeared in, Morfett silently fumed. His head ached, made worse by the nuisance that his gold-sewn scarlet clashed offensively with maroon.

At least the post was not filled by Asandir, who was altogether less forgiving over matters of personal sensitivity.

‘Asandir will be escorting the prince,’ the Warden of Althain announced in uncanny response to private thought. He turned dreamy eyes upon the fidgeting person of the Lord Governor. ‘The ballads from times before the mists name him Kingmaker because every royal head in the history of humankind has been crowned by his hand.’

‘How uselessly sentimental.’ Morfett tugged at his jacket, the buttons of which pinched his breath.

The outer gates of Etarra overlooked a steep slope, the city itself wedged across the gap between the Mathorn’s eastern foothills and a west-jutting spur of the Skyshiels. Accessed by five roads, the approach from Daon Ramon was a switched-back conglomeration of mud bricks and shoring that broadened the original pack trail enough for the passage of wagons. What level ground remained before the gate turrets was already uncomfortably crowded, a forced stir through packed bodies indicating the arrival of still more city officials. The turnout commanded by the sorcerers was thorough enough to impress. Beside guild ministers, trade officials and council governors, many had brought along their perversely curious wives.

Still sore in the throat from the shouting required to keep his spouse and daughters properly at home, Morfett said, ‘The governor’s council will never acknowledge your pretender’s right to rule.’

Sethvir gave back his most wayward and maddening smile. ‘Give them time.’

Somebody coughed. Morfett twisted around and saw a lady in pearls and a gown edged in snow lynx raise a quick hand to her mouth. Her tissue-clad shoulders still shook, which betrayed her smothered laughter. At her side, cloaked in white ermine and official city scarlet, and bedecked with a dazzle of diamonds and gold chains, her brother Diegan, commander of the guard, looked stiffly furious. Oh no, concluded Morfett, neither time nor bloodshed would soften his city’s stance. The prince Etarra’s governors had been rousted out to greet was going to be driven from his attempt to restore the monarchy with tucked tail like a mongrel cur.

The sorcerer in his tawdry robe incongruously began to chuckle. ‘Dharkaron’s Chariot,’ he swore mildly. ‘I can’t wait to see what happens when you meet your royal liege.’

‘A boy, just barely grown,’ Morfett sneered. ‘He’ll be sorry to find that bribes won’t buy him sovereignty.’

At this, Sethvir seemed stunned speechless.

Lord Governor Morfett stroked his chins and fatuously gave himself the victory.

The prince’s party must have rounded the last switchback then, for shouts arose from the countryfolk gathered along the lower roadway. Their cheers were boisterously joyful, after the sorcerers’ promise to pry croft rents away from the land-guilds. Since the ministers whose authority had been bypassed had ratified no such relinquishment, of course, the blandishment was false. Morfett sweated in irritation. Though nothing could be seen yet from his vantage-point before the gatehouse, the officials all began to elbow and press in their eagerness. Shorter than his peers by a head, Morfett had to crane his neck like any bumpkin to retain his view of the valley.

He anticipated a cavalcade, resplendent with jewelled trappings and trailing banners; and wagons with silk streamers and canopies. That was what one would expect of a prince, or so his wife had speculated in her gossip with cronies for a week. Since pomp in Etarra established status, a royal retinue would only impress if it was blindingly, ostentatiously lavish.

Morfett saw just four horsemen, unattended, on mounts that wore no caparisons. They carried no banners or streamers; neither did they prove to be outriders for another larger party. Asandir was the one astride the black; at least, the dark, silver-bordered cloak that billowed in the gusts was unmistakably his austere style. The fat man in russet on the paint looked too undignified for a prince; his companion, a fair man, owned the bearing, but though his velvets were cut from indigo deep enough to raise envy from the cloth guild he wore no royal device.

That left the slight, straight figure on the dun with the irregular marking on her neck.

Morfett’s narrowed eyes fastened upon that last rider with the keenness of a snake measuring its distance to strike.

A green cloak with the silver heraldic leopard of Rathain muffled the man and most of the horse. The hands that gripped the dun’s reins were spare as any boy’s, and skilled. The dun was inventively difficult. From a distance the face of the rider looked fine-chiselled, and the black hair Morfett heard was distinctive of s’Ffalenn blew uncovered in the breeze.

The Lord Governor smiled in viperish glee. ‘A child,’ he exulted. His supposition to Sethvir fortuitously seemed confirmed: the pretender to Rathain’s throne was a green youth, and Etarran politics would devour him.

Expansive, nearly happy, the Lord Governor bestowed a dimpled smile upon the Warden of Althain, who now looked distractedly deadpan. ‘Sorcerer,’ Morfett mocked, ‘here’s my sanction. Let the affirmation ceremony for this prince’s right of ancestry take place on Etarran soil. His Grace has my leave to chill his feet in our dirt, may he grub the worms’ favour from the honour!’

Chuckles rippled through the ranks of Etarra’s officials. Women tittered while, like the boom of a storm surge against the slope below the walls, cries of redoubled welcome arose from the riff-raff of farmers.

‘Come forward,’ Sethvir invited over the noise. ‘Your word as given, Lord Governor, we’ll proceed to acknowledge Rathain’s prince.’

‘Then I don’t have to kiss his royal cheeks until he’s barefoot?’ Morfett roared with laughter; by Ath, he would retain the upper hand. ‘As you wish, sorcerer! Let us go on to the courtyard of the fountains, and let your puppet prince forgo this sham of receiving my welcome at the gate!’

Flushed as he enjoyed his huge joke, Morfett parked his rump on the combing of a terracotta retaining wall. The pruned stubble of rosebushes that hitched at his gold-stitched jacket scarcely merited attention, the charade to be enacted in the flowerbeds being far too rich to miss. In signal unconcern for their silks and their ribbons, high city officials and the pedigreed curious who were last to arrive jockeyed for position between rows of potted trees and greening topiary. The prince’s party entered. Jeers blended with the trickle of the fountains, while Asandir caught the dun mare’s reins to foil her spirited sidle. Her royal burden dismounted.

Up close, the green cloak more than ever overwhelmed the lightly knit frame of the prince.

‘Do you suppose he’s inbred, to be so delicate?’ muttered Diegan to a stifled explosion of hilarity. Somebody passed a flask of wine. Fanned by Morfett’s bold sarcasm, the mood of Etarra’s well-born displayed the viciousness gloved in gaiety that would have enlivened an out-of-season garden party. The courtyard’s eight foot high mortised walls reflected the women’s disparaging remarks with the clarity of an amphitheatre.

The dun’s reins were passed to an unseen attendant while the fair-haired companion in his elegant velvets unclasped the green cloak and bared the royal shoulders.

Morfett moistened plump lips and lingeringly assessed his enemy.

To Etarran eyes the prince who stood revealed was plainly clad to a point that invited ridicule. His tunic and shirt were cut of unadorned linen that anyone less lazy than a peasant at least would have bothered to bleach white. The natural fibres emphasized a complexion that looked tintless and porcelain-pale. When Asandir faced the prince and took slender fingers into his own to escort his royal charge forward, Morfett could have crowed. The s’Ffalenn wore no jewellery. The only gemstones on him were the emerald in his sword-hilt which, though well-cut, could not be called large; and an ordinary white gold signet ring that showed the battering of hard wear.

‘Plain as a forest barbarian,’ jibed the minister of the weaver’s guild.

Sethvir raised his eyebrows in reproof. ‘Every s’Ffalenn to be sanctioned for succession came to his ceremony unadorned.’

But the spirit of exuberant contempt by now had infected the whole gathering.

The prince’s poise showed stiffness as he removed his boots. He assumed his place in the flowerbed, ankle deep in black soil hoed up by the gardeners and awaiting the sprouting of spring lilies. Asandir kept hold on his hands and intoned a ritual in a softly sonorous voice. None of Etarra’s elite cared to hold still enough to listen. Diegan’s sister was loudly pointing out to the half-deaf seneschal of the treasury that the royal ankles had scars exactly like marks made by felon’s shackles. The subject was snapped up in speculation by a junior clerk who gasped out improvised doggerel between whoops and snorts of stifled laughter. Morfett saw no need to offer reprimand.

The damned Fellowship mages had been duly warned how his council felt toward monarchy.

The prince knelt on cue. His sorcerer chaperone bent with him and scooped a double handful of earth which he lifted above wind-ruffled raven hair.

Morfett choked back a grin. Less restrained, Diegan murmured from behind, ‘Ath, did anybody check whether pig’s dung and ditch waste had been spread in for fertilizer yet?’

The sorcerer must have overheard. He cupped his burden nonetheless and his voice echoed back from sandstone walls, cutting through the busy buzz of satire. ‘Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn, direct line descendant of Torbrand, first High King of Rathain, I affirm your right of succession. As this realm will be yours to guard, so are you bound to the land.’

Diegan’s chuckles choked off, replaced by blank rage. ‘Right of succession? Who sanctioned this?’

Caught weeping tears of suppressed mirth, Morfett rounded in a dawning explosion of anger. Without care for the dearth of privacy, he loudly upbraided Sethvir. ‘You said the royal bastard was only to be affirmed in his ancestry!’

But the Warden of Althain had all too conveniently vanished. While the Lord Governor wildly sought to find him his peripheral vision caught a blurred flash of light. He whirled again to face the garden. There knelt the prince, and crowned, but not with soil or pig’s dung. A circlet of shining silver crossed his brow that had been nowhere in evidence before. Asandir’s hands fell away, and then steadied him back on his feet.

‘Ath!’ someone shouted in shaky awe. ‘Did you see? That sorcerer changed dirt into silver!’

Sethvir chose that moment to reappear. ‘It is done, the circlet of sanction wrought from the soil of Rathain. My Lord Governor. Time has come to congratulate your acknowledged prince.’

‘I gave no such consent! What has passed was done on false pretences!’ Morfett dug in his toes, his chin outthrust like a bulldog’s. Yet no sorcerer of the Fellowship forced him forward. Instead, Rathain’s prince came to him.

All his adult life Morfett had battled the misfortune that short stature forced him to peer up at even his lowliest scullion. The shock of meeting green eyes that were level with his own caused him an involuntary step back.

‘You need not kneel,’ informed the silver-crowned personage whose face turned out not to be delicate but as bloodless and defined as if chipped from white quartz. ‘I have not accepted your fealty.’

‘Nor will you!’ Trembling with mortification for being duped in public, Morfett curled his lip. ‘The governor’s council, of which I am head, refuses to acknowledge your existence.’

A breeze rattled the dry canes of the roses and flicked a twist of black hair from the circlet. Too late, Morfett saw that this prince had the look of a sorcerer: eyes that were piercing and level and strikingly devoid of antagonism. Like those Fellowship colleagues whose nefarious machinations had produced him, he could answer a man’s unspoken thoughts. ‘If you and your council rule justly, you need have no fear of me.’

The officials surrounding Morfett were belatedly recognizing the legalities behind Asandir’s late speech. From all sides, their ribald commentary was replaced by murmurs of incredulity and rage.

‘You have not been given any right of sovereignty in this city!’ Diegan, commander of the guard, interposed from behind his Lord Governor’s shoulder.

‘True.’ Arithon’s gaze left Morfett to encompass the courtier who had spoken out of turn, and whose dandyish cloak was thrown back to reveal a hand clenched on a sword hilt. The weapon was flashily bejewelled; if the steel behind its gold-chased quillons was something more than ceremonial, Arithon dismissed the threat. His brows twitched up in flippant challenge. ‘But if this contest were a footrace the outcome would hardly merit contest. Do you bet?’

‘All that I have,’ Diegan answered thickly. ‘That should warn you.’

‘Oh, I was warned,’ said Arithon with poorly concealed impatience. ‘Too well, too late and in rich and tedious detail. In some things, I’ve had less choice than you have.’

Too fast for verbal riposte, and in total disregard for the captain’s aggressive posture, he whipped around to address Asandir. ‘You’ve had your display. Whether or not the person who took charge of my boots reappears with intent to return them, I would be pleased to retire.’

The exchange ended so quickly that Morfett was left with his mouth open. The prince was whisked off amid his circle of sorcerers; but the edged and dangerous antagonism he had sown among the townsmen remained, festering and unsatisfied. Diegan stared after the departed royal party with his jaw clenched. Amid widening circles of loud talk, guildsmen in brocades were shaking fists, or banded together in disturbed groups. Etarra’s three fraternities of assassins were going to profit, to judge by the speed with which curses transformed into whispering. As husbands bandied plots like vigilantes, wives and daughters were being unceremoniously bundled back home.

Livid and speechless, and left no target for his outrage, the Lord Governor leaned gratefully on the hand that answered his need for support. ‘The effrontery of the bastard!’ he spluttered when he finally recovered his breath. ‘Footrace, indeed! Does he think us a pack of rank schoolboys?’

‘He can be difficult,’ an impressive personage with pale gold hair volunteered in commiseration. ‘But I have never known him to be anything less than fair.’

That instant Morfett realized that his benefactor was gently attempting to draw him apart from his councilmen. He yanked back, bristling fury. ‘Who are you?’ Blue velvet clothing might fail to jog his memory, but the green heraldic cloak folded over the stranger’s arm at once identified the prince’s blond-haired companion. ‘Never mind,’ Morfett snapped. ‘You’re one of the royal cronies, and assuredly no help to Etarra.’

Still smiling, Lysaer said, ‘Quite the contrary. I’m the one royal crony who’s not a sorcerer and also the only friend you have who understands the cross-grained nature of your prince.’

The commander of the guard perked up instantly. ‘I know a tavern,’ he invited and, grumbling, Morfett allowed himself to be swept along into their wake.

The heavy door boomed closed. Tired to his bones, Arithon s’Ffalenn leaned back against uncomfortable, brass-studded panels. Muffled, the voice of the Lord Governor’s wife nattered after him from the outside hallway. ‘Do make yourself comfortable, your Grace. Of course, my house staff and servants will eagerly attend to your needs.’

Arithon replied in tones of steelclad politeness. ‘Your kindness is generous. I shall be content to sleep undisturbed.’ The decorative studs that gouged his back impelled him to straighten as he finished his survey of the guest chamber.

The glitter made his head ache. Glass beading riddled the panelled walls, and gilt casements with rose-tinted panes clashed unmercifully with a floor laid out in tiles. These also were patterned, a blaring assemblage of lozenges done in saffron, amber and violet; the furnishings had raised knots in gold, every padded edge decked in silk twist and fringe. Even the carpets sported tassels.

A sortie from the bed to the privy would require lighted candles to forestall hooked toes and whacked shins.

Arithon shut his eyes and wished back the stark hills of Daon Ramon. The windswept ruins there at least kept the tatters of dignity.

‘You haven’t seen the fur quilts, yet,’ Asandir invited drily from the other side of the room. Against the chamber’s blinding opulence, his preferred midnight blue and silver made him grim as an aspect of Dharkaron dispatched to punish mortal vanity.

‘Excuse me.’ Arithon wished only to forget his first sight of Etarra; with copper-clad domes clustered thick as warts behind square bastions, the city resembled a fat toad squatted between weathered slate mountains. He sighed and reopened his eyes. ‘I presume Sethvir brought the records?’

‘If you can make out lettering between the flourishes affected by Etarra’s clerks,’ groused the Warden of Althain. Surrounded by leatherbound ledgers heaped in stacks in an alcove, he looked nothing less than besieged. ‘I hate to pain you further.’ He waved a haphazard scroll-case toward a pair of cherubs whose carved curls sprouted indigo candles. ‘But the lady of the house brought these when I asked for more light.’

‘Burn them, and the archives, too!’ Arithon’s laughter took on a baleful edge. ‘We’d save a lot of bother if we could level this atrocity and build a new city from the rubble.’

Sethvir waggled a quill pen at him. ‘Don’t imagine we haven’t been tempted!’ Then he blinked and looked vague and snapped his fingers: both cherub candles sprouted flame. The wax as it heated gave off a cloying perfume. A casement perforce was unlatched and in the draft, the new light wavered over features shaded toward concern. ‘A nasty night of reading for us both. You won’t like it. Etarran guilds resolve their disputes on the blades of hired assassins.’

Not too exhausted to field subtleties, Arithon hooked off his silver circlet. ‘How many wards of guard did you need to set over this room?’

Sethvir and Asandir exchanged a glance, but neither one gave him answer.

‘Never mind.’ Arithon hurled the royal fillet into the nearest padded chair. ‘If the governor’s council wants a knife in my back, by morning I’ll make them a reason.’

But reason had already been given, as the sorcerers had cause to know. They did not discuss the three paid killers who had earlier been unobtrusively foiled. The viper’s nest of factions that ruled the city stood united in their cause to see the s’Ffalenn royal line killed off. Vigilance over Arithon’s safety could never for a moment be relaxed.

For the rest of the afternoon and well on into evening, the Prince of Rathain and the sorcerers remained in seclusion, poring over old records. Dakar came back. An exhaustive tour of the taverns had affirmed his opinion that Etarra brewed terrible ale. Dispatched, staggering, to the scullery, he fetched back a light meal, chilled wine and candles from the servants’ wing that thankfully did not merit any scent. His errands finished, he sprawled full-length on the fur quilts, the boots he had forgotten to remove sticking through the rods of the bedstead.

At midnight, Lysaer stepped in, lightly flushed, a satisfied smile on his face. He hooked Arithon’s circlet off the chair, set it safely on a tortoiseshell sidetable, and sat. ‘Ath, this room is as overdecorated as the taproom I just came from.’ He sniffed, and grinning added, ‘It reeks in here like a brothel madam’s boudoir.’

Arithon baited blandly, ‘You should have been here when the candles were fresh. They would’ve given you an erection. And anyway, I’m surprised you can tell.’

At Lysaer’s mystification, Sethvir said, ‘You smell as if you bathed in cheap gin. By that, dare we presume you accomplished your assignment and lasted for the duration?’

Lysaer laughed. ‘When I retired, the elect of the guilds were banging their tankards on the table. The foppish-looking fellow who’s commander of Etarra’s guard was singing war-songs offkey and the barmaids were hoisting the Lord Governor into a brewer’s wagon to be delivered to the arms of his wife. Gentlemen, what news I have is good. Tomorrow would have brought foul and secret machinations against our prince, except that the messengers entrusted to spread word of the arrangements met with mishap. Kharadmon has an unsubtle touch, I must say, since one of them slipped in horse dung and apparently broke his elbow. His yelling disrupted half the prostitutes in the shanty district. The names he chose to curse at the top of his lungs were a frank embarrassment.’

‘That must have upset Commander Diegan’s sensibilities,’ Sethvir ventured, his head disappeared behind the pages of yet another yellowed ledger.

‘Oh yes.’ Lysaer forgot his distaste for orange tassels and tipped his head back into the chair cushions. ‘The Lord Commander of the Guard rousted out his head captain, Gnudsog, is it? The squat fellow with the muscles and the scars. He silenced the uproar with a battle mace by breaking the messenger’s jaw. The bonesetters are still busy. To mend appearances Etarra’s council will convene tomorrow morning behind barred doors, to formalize reformed laws to ban the monarchy. The guild ministers already bicker like fishwives. Hungover as they’re likely to become, they’ll lock horns over the language until noon.’

‘Oh dear.’ Sethvir forsook the accounts to jab fingers through a coxcomb of stray hair. ‘Are you saying you got them all in their cups?’

Dakar answered from the bed with his eyes still closed. ‘They were irked enough to dance on the tables, anyway. All Lysaer did was keep them filling their tankards.’

‘Who paid for the gin?’ asked Asandir.

‘That’s the beauty of it,’ Lysaer said, infectiously lapsed into merriness. ‘The tavern was owned by the vintner’s guild, and drinks were declared on the house.’

Lord Governor Morfett set the massive gold seal of the city into puddled scarlet wax. Then, while the guild ministers added their own signatures and ribbons, he shoved his knuckles into a fringe of damp hair and cradled his splitting head. A servant had to touch his sleeve twice before he realized: the pounding came from the doorway, echoing the throb inside his skull.

‘Let them in,’ he said through his palms. ‘The damned sorcerers can raise a commotion all they like. Our edict is signed into law, and their prince will be in irons by afternoon.’

A hagridden secretary scurried to unbar the door. He was all but knocked down as the panels burst inward, and a flood of agitated barristers barged through.

The newcomers started shouting all at once.

From the governor’s chair on the dais, Morfett screamed for order. By the time he made himself heard, his head was splitting. The councilmen around him were sweating or vainly covering their ears to ease their hangovers. Not a few looked ready to be sick.

When the men could be made to speak in more orderly fashion, their complaints added up to disaster.

The sorcerers and their prince had spent an industrious morning, beginning with a review of Etarra’s condemned. By the tenets of Rathain’s royal charter, it transpired that two thirds of the city’s prisoners were wrongfully tried and sentenced.

‘Pardons and reprieves from execution!’ Morfett howled.

‘Worse,’ a clerk interrupted. ‘The prince has also vouched treasury funds for reimbursement of unfair fines.’

‘His mother-accursed royal Grace can’t do that!’ Morfett jumped to his feet. ‘A Teir’s’Ffalenn has no right to set his seal to any documents unless and until there’s a coronation. The decrees are false! No such ceremony has been ratified!’

‘No,’ corrected Etarra’s seneschal sadly. He looked and sounded like a kicked hound. ‘But he could, and did, post documents that name the prisoners to be acquitted on the day he’s invested as high king.’

‘Along with which laws will be repealed, which taxes, eliminated and how many public servants shall be relieved from their posts without pay!’ This inveigling was worse than the feud ongoing between the ironmongers and the furniture-joiners, who captured and tortured each other’s apprentices to blackmail concessions for trade secrets. Morfett slammed his fists on the high table, spattering ink and official wax over mother of pearl inlay. ‘Is this what you’ve come here to tell me?’

Amid cringing rows of officials, not one met their Lord Governor’s furious outburst.

‘Dharkaron take you for a pack of piddling puppies!’ Morfett stuck out his hand toward his commander of the guard. ‘Give me our new writ! Then go at once and tell Gnudsog to muster a squad of enforcers. I’ll see that s’Ffalenn bastard in chains and flogged for fomenting insurrection. Fiends and Ath’s fury, no meddling Fellowship sorcerer’s going to raise a hand to stop me!’

‘No sorcerer will, but your people might,’ a voice volunteered from the entry. Sethvir stepped inside, bemused as a philosopher given new audience for his theories. ‘Have you been listening?’ He pushed the outer door panels open.

A wave of sound reverberated into the council hall. The mob in the streets beyond the antechamber were not outraged, but cheering, and against any law of nature, Sethvir’s mild tone carried clearly over the din. ‘Rumours spread that your ministers met to outlaw the royal charter. To keep an irate mob of farmers from storming your doors and tearing your councilmen limb from limb, the First City Alderman suggested the contrary; that the documents being drawn were in fact an abdication of the guilds from ruling power and an affirmation of s’Ffalenn right of sovereignty. Craftsmen and labourers took to the streets in celebration. The North Gate belltowers play carillons and the shanty-district whores are throwing posies. If you end this session without a writ for a royal coronation, your people of Etarra are going to riot.’

‘Let them!’ Diegan’s rebuttal rang like a whipcrack over the noise. ‘I’d rather find myself lynched than bend my knee to any high king.’

He made as if to push past, but the dignitaries beside him caught his wrists. There were others of the council not so staunch. Should the mobs turn lawless in the streets, the city guard could not stay them. Looting would be followed by bloodshed and the damage to trade would be incalculable. Pressured to give in by a mournful flock of peers, the Lord Governor of the city waved for Diegan to subside. Then he sat down abruptly with his knuckles jammed against his teeth. Today the sorcerers’ timing had them beaten. But the Fellowship could hardly shepherd the stew of Etarra’s politics indefinitely. Best to accept this defeat and save resources to upset s’Ffalenn rule another day. On the floor, trodden under the milling feet of the pedigreed elect of Etarra, the morning’s brave warrant to arrest the prince came to an ignominious end.

Diegan tugged free of the dignitaries, unpacified. ‘It won’t be that easy,’ he lashed at Sethvir. ‘The rabble might love the idea of a high king today. But when unrest drives them to turn, no blandishments your prince can offer will appease them.’

‘Blandishments?’ Sethvir looked thrilled as a madcap apothecary prepared to make gold from plain clay. ‘I rather thought his Grace would give them back their chartered freedom.’

Diegan’s lip curled in a snarl. Blithe as the Warden of Althain could appear, as much as he seemed a doddering elder of a stripe to knot strings around his wrists to nudge a senile memory, he was no such vague old fool.

He had Etarra’s council at bay and he knew it.

But his position was dangerously precarious. Moment to moment, any of a thousand missed details could erupt into bloody uprising as upheaval gave rise to panic. The citizens outside the council hall were far from tranquil, nowhere near under control. Only the poor and the disaffected roamed the streets. Sensible citizens of stature had barricaded their families inside their houses in dread. The Fellowship’s straits were not invisible. They could not be everywhere. Even as the governor’s council drafted their formal abdication, Diegan continued to collect reports.

Guilds were seizing the disruption as cover to wage less covert rivalries; five men of good families lay dead from unmarked knives. Asandir was busy protecting the moneylender who funded the treasury’s bottomless capacity to dispense bribes from a stone-throwing mob, who protested paying taxes for usury. Traithe, at the south ward armoury, barred Gnudsog’s deputies from the spare weapons stores while, impervious to attempts by all three fraternities of assassins, Arithon was being fitted for dress-boots by Etarra’s most fashionable cobbler.

The discorporate mages Kharadmon and Luhaine assuredly were behind the royal luck.

Before the wax on the writs that confirmed s’Ffalenn right of sovereignty grew cool, and despite the frustrated opposition of a governor’s council hazed like smoke-driven wasps, his Grace emerged in princely splendour to read the Royal Charter of Rathain in the square before the guild-halls. This time, the ceremony was engineered with enough glitter to make even Etarran excess seem drab.

Afterward, the populace could speak of nothing else.

The only man in the city less pleased than the Lord Governor and Etarra’s commander of the guard was Arithon s’Ffalenn himself. Set on display before the throng, he had managed his part as a musician might play to a rowdy taproom. Viewed as saviour by the poor, unrelentingly hated by the trade-guilds, he weathered the feast that followed less masterfully. Mantled in the green, black and silver of the s’Ffalenn royal blazon, he mingled awkwardly with a merchant aristocracy of faddish extremes. The fine food and wines did not distract them from their newest pleasure, which primarily consisted of prince-baiting. Intrigue poisoned the simplest word of courtesy, and while some wives and ladies battled for the chance to ingratiate, they had sharp, cunning minds that searched also for weaknesses to exploit.

This was a city where children were urged to select their playfellows according their parents’ rank and importance, and who were often as not sent out visiting with instructions to overhear all they could of the affairs of their schoolmates’ fathers.

Arithon handled the pressure with the jumpy nerves of a cat caught unsheltered in a rain shower.

Amid an obstacle-course of laden tables, heavy with gold appointments and pearl-stitched bunting, he needed his swordsman’s footwork to escape becoming entangled. At his elbow, steady in support, was Lysaer who deflected social ripostes with a wit that invited friendly laughter. Less skilled at diplomacy, Arithon buried distaste behind blandness. He escaped being targeted by insults by never for a minute staying still. He did not trust these people, in his presence or out of it. He most carefully followed conversations that took place behind his back. Hounded as quarry set after by beaters, he saw openings. Even Diegan’s hostility revealed ways to breach the arrogance, the mistrust, even the depths of antagonism that fenced him round. But the political complacencies such changes would demand of him played false to his musician’s ear.

Karthan, at least, had not been riddled with such viperish greed in brocades; though piracy was no honest trade, its thievery had been straightforwardly presented.

‘You don’t look well,’ murmured a female voice in his ear.

Rathain’s prince turned to acknowledge the source: Diegan’s tawny-haired sister who could drive a man silly with her looks, but who was poised in her carriage as a snake.

Arithon inclined his circlet-crowned head. Physically graceful in discomfort, he offered his hand. Too much rich food. Your city’s cooks have outdone themselves. Shall we dance?’

She took his fingers and her fine, arched brows sketched a frown that was swiftly erased. She had not expected his callouses. The tightening around her eyes made plain that the discovery would be passed to her brother: that despite the appearance of delicate build, this prince’s palms were no stranger to the sword. ‘I find conversation more interesting.’

‘How disappointing for both of us. Too much talk has been driving me mad.’ Arithon returned a regret as impenetrable as chipped quartz. ‘For clever conversation with a lady, I must defer to Lysaer’s charm.’ Gently, firmly, he deposited her on the arm of the blond companion, who disengaged from discussion with two ministers with a panache any statesman must envy. ‘Lord Commander Diegan’s sister, Talith,’ Arithon introduced, and his grin came and went at his half-brother’s blank instant of appreciation.

The lady in her black-bordered, tawny brocades was enough to disrupt conscious thought.

‘My lady, Lysaer s’Ilessid.’

‘Commander Diegan mentioned you,’ said Talith in chilly politeness. She turned her head quickly, but Arithon was gone, melted into the crowd as neatly as a fugitive iyat. Her annoyance this time creased her forehead. He had defeated her before she had quite understood that her methods were under attack. Her stung pride would show, if she put aside dignity and chased him. No prince should have been able to vanish that swiftly, burdened as he was in state clothing. The gossips might be right to name him sorcerer.

‘Allow me,’ Lysaer interrupted her thought. ‘Poor substitute though I may be, in truth, his Grace can be terrible company.’

Talith turned back, to find her pique met by a surprisingly earnest concern. Lysaer’s elegant good looks did nothing to ease her thwarted fury. ‘He said he wanted to dance. I should have accepted.’

Lysaer set her down on a chair and as if by magic a servant appeared to pour wine. ‘Arithon anticipated your refusal.’ Smiling in the face of her crossness he added, ‘Given his perverse nature, and his penchant for solitude, that’s precisely the outcome he desired. He’s much easier to collar when alone. Will you take red wine or white?’

‘White, please.’ Talith accepted the offered goblet and raised it. ‘To his absence, then.’ She drank, surprised to discover herself mollified. Lysaer’s sympathy held nothing of fawning. He appreciated her misjudgement and refrained from questioning her motives, suave behaviour that was piquantly Etarran. Gauging the interested sparkle in his eyes, she smiled back. One missed opportunity could as easily be exchanged for another. From Lysaer, she could glean as much, or perhaps more to help the city’s cause, than from the irksome s’Ffalenn prince himself.

Not until very much later, when her brother the commander of the guard visited her chamber to ask what she had garnered, did she realize how thoroughly she had been beguiled.

Throughout the evening spent with Lysaer she had done most of the talking.

‘His charm is tough to resist,’ her brother grumbled. He loosened the amethyst buttons of his collar with fingers much softer than the prince’s, and smoothly unmarred by scars. ‘Damned fair-haired conniver is a diplomat down to his shoes. Too bad he wasn’t born townsman. We could’ve used one with his touch to restore our relations with the farmers.’

At council the following morning the acknowledged Prince of Rathain was conspicuous by his absence. Worn by the tact needed to smooth down mutinous factions of councilmen, and strung up from picking apart intrigues that clung and interwove between the guilds like dirtied layers of old cobwebs, Lysaer decided he needed air. Of late he had been troubled by a succession of fierce headaches. Threatened by another recurrence, he begged leave of the proceedings when Sethvir called recess at noon.

Lysaer seemed the only one bothered enough to pursue his half-brother’s irresponsibility.

A hurried check on the guest chambers at Lord Governor Morfett’s mansion revealed Arithon nowhere in evidence. The bed with its orange tassels had not been slept in; the servants were quick to offer gossip. Laid out in atrociously warring colours over the divan by the escritoire were the gold-worked shirt and green tabard that should have attired the prince.

Alone with his annoyance in the vestibule, Lysaer cursed softly, then started as somebody answered out of the empty air.

‘If you want your half-brother, he’s not here.’

‘Kharadmon, I suppose,’ Lysaer snapped: the morning’s dicey diplomacy had exhausted his tolerance for ghosts in dim corners who surprised him. ‘Why not be helpful by telling me where else he isn’t.’

Equably, the discorporate sorcerer said, ‘I’ll take you, unless you’d rather charge about swearing at empty rooms.’

‘It’s unfair,’ Lysaer conceded, ‘but I’m not in the mood to apologize. Help find my pirate bastard of a half-brother, and that might improve my manners.’

Kharadmon obliged by providing an address that turned out to be located in the most dismal section of the poor quarter.

‘You don’t seem concerned about assassins,’ Lysaer noted, his crossness now equally due to worry.

‘Should I?’ Kharadmon chuckled. ‘You may have a point, at that. It’s Luhaine’s turn for royal guard-duty.’ Etarra’s back-district alleys looped across themselves like a botched mesh of crochetwork. The paving was slimy and frost-heaved. Lysaer ruined his best pair of boots splashing through sewage and spotted his doublet on the dubious fluids that dripped from a brothel’s rotted balconies. He lost his way twice. The street of the horse knackers where he arrived at last reeked unbearably of rancid tallow and of the waste from unwholesome carcasses.

He wanted to kick the next beggar who solicited him for coins; he had already given all he had and against his promise to Kharadmon his temper had done nothing but deterioriate.

Blackly annoyed for having volunteered responsibility for this errand, he stalked around the next corner.

Laughter lilted off the lichen-stained fronts of the warehouses, as incongruous in that dank, filthy alley as the chime of carillon bells.

The sound stopped Lysaer short. The joy he recognized for Arithon’s, as joltingly out of character for the man as this unlikely, dreary setting.

Pique replaced by curiosity, Lysaer edged forward. Past the bend, under the gloom of close-set walls, he saw a band of raggedy waifs, his errant half-brother among them. The prince of Rathain had spurned fine clothes for what looked like a ragpicker’s dress. The elegant presence of yesterday had been shed as if by a spell, leaving him noisome as his company, whose unwashed, cynical faces were enraptured by something that transpired on the ground.

Lysaer stepped cautiously around a maggot-crawling dump of gristle and tendons. His step disturbed older bones. Flies buzzed up in a cloud and his eyes watered at the stink. He covered his nose with his sleeve, just as a brigantine fashioned of shadows scudded out from between one child’s bare legs. Of unknown sex under its rags and tangled hair, the creature screamed in delight, while the ship caught an imaginary gust in her sails and heeled, lee-rail down, through a gutter of reeking brown run-off.

But the smell was forgotten as Lysaer, also, became entranced.

The little vessel cleared the shoals of a clogged culvert, rounded and curtseyed over imaginary waves. Banners flying, she executed a saucy jibe and with the breeze now full astern, surged on a run straight for the mouth of the alley.

Lysaer’s presence blocked her course. Caught by surprise, Arithon lost his grip on the complex assemblage of shadows that fashioned her planking and sails. His beautiful little vessel unravelled in a muddied smear of colours that dissolved half a second before impact.

Heartsick to have spoiled the illusion, Lysaer looked up.

To the children, his silks and fine velvets had already marked him for a figure of upper-crust authority. Huge eyes in gaunt faces glowered at him in accusation. Arithon showed a flat lack of expression. The moment’s overheard laughter now seemed passing fancy, a dream put to rout by abrupt and unnecessary awakening. Had Lysaer not sensed the entreaty most desperately masked behind each hostile expression, he might have felt physically threatened.

One of the taller figures in a tatterdemalion blanket sidled away into shadow. A second later, running footsteps fled splashing through a side alley too narrow to be seen from Lysaer’s vantage.

Trapped in the role of despoiler, he gave way to irritation. Although Arithon had not spoken to inquire what brought him, his opening came out acerbic. ‘Do you know I’ve been smoothing over your absence from the governor’s council all morning? The guild ministers here are slippery as sharks, and just as quick to turn. The commander of the guard and his captain would wind your guts on a pole for mere sport. There cannot be a kingdom where now there is discord if you don’t show them a prince!’

‘Such affairs are your passion, not mine,’ Arithon said in desperate, forced neutrality. Several more children bolted despite his denouncement. ‘Why ever didn’t you stay there?’

He had not denied his origins.

The accusing stares of his audience were quick to transfer to him. The girl nearest his side recoiled in betrayal, that the man who had thrilled with his marvels was other than the beggar he appeared. Arithon reached out and cupped her cheek. His attempt at reassurance was pure instinct; and remarkable for its tenderness since every other sinew in his body was pitched taut in unwished-for challenge.

Rebuked by such care for the feelings of a vermin-infested urchin, Lysaer relented. ‘Arithon, these governors are your subjects, as difficult in their way to love as thieving children are to the wealthy whose pockets they pick. Show the councilmen even half the understanding you’ve lavished here and you’ll escape getting knifed by paid assassins.’

Arithon abandoned his effort to hold his audience: their fragile trust had been broken and one by one they slipped off. Deserted in his squalid clothes amid a welter of stinking refuse, Arithon’s reply came mild. ‘This bunch steals out of need.’

‘You feel the governor’s lackeys don’t? That’s shallow! You’re capable of truer perception.’ Lysaer shut his eyes, reaching deep for tact and patience. ‘Arithon, these merchants see in you an anathema made real. Records left from the uprising have been passed down grossly distorted. Etarrans are convinced the Fellowship sorcerers mean to give them an eye for an eye, cast them from their homes and expose their daughters to be forced by barbarians. They need so very badly to see the musician in you. Show them fairness they can trust. Give to them. They’ll respond, I promise, and become as fine a backbone for this realm as any king could ask.’

‘Well, why come here and trouble me? You seem to understand everything perfectly!’ Arithon visibly resisted an urge to hammer his fist against a shanty wall. ‘You’ve stated my fears to a faretheewell, that this city will ingratiate itself to become my indispensable right hand.’

‘What in Athera can be wrong with that?’ Whipped on by Arithon’s expert touch at provocation, Lysaer lost to exasperation.

This!’ Arithon gestured at the mildewed planks that enclosed the back of the knacker’s shacks. ‘You socialize amid the glitter of the powerful, but how well do any of us know this city: Did Diegan’s lovely sister tell you the guilds here steal children and lock them in warehouses for forced labour? Can I, dare I, stroke the Lord Governor and his cronies, while four-year-old girls and boys stir glue-pots, and ten-year-olds gash their hands and die of gangrene while rendering half-rotten carcasses? Ath’s infinite mercy, Lysaer! How can I live?’ The fury driving Arithon’s defence snapped at last to bare his nerve-jagged, impotent frustration. ‘The needs of this realm will swallow all that I am, and what will be left for the music?’

Lysaer stared down at the dirty rings that crawled up his gold-sewn boots. ‘Forgive me.’ He allowed his contrition to show, for after all, he had been presumptuous. ‘I didn’t know.’

Arithon’s sorrow subsided to a gentleness surprisingly sincere. ‘You shouldn’t want to know. Go back. I appreciate your help with the diplomacy, but this problem is mine. When I’m ready, never doubt, I’ll give it my best effort.’

Indiscretion

Dusk thickened the shadows over the forested roadway that led southward out of Ward. This stretch of highway, that snaked like a chalk scar over the frost-bleak hills toward Tal’s Crossing, was the dread of every Etarran merchant. Caravans passed between the northern principalities of Rathain heavily armed, or they failed to reach their destinations. Yet a raid by marauding barbarians seemed not to concern the solitary old man who guided his ponycart over the cracked flagstones laid down by the decree of long dead s’Ffalenn kings.

His conveyance was open, low-slung and in sorry need of fresh paint: the beast between the shafts, a glossy buckskin with a tail like black wire and a feisty dislike of boy grooms. He carried his ears cocked back as if listening for excuse to flatten them down in displeasure.

By contrast, the driver was ascetically thin. He sat atop his jolting board seat with a slouch that gave with the bumps; if his narrow face was creased by eight decades of life, the fingers laced through the reins were clean, supple and sure. He whistled between widely-spaced front teeth and his jaunty melody carried over the creak of harness and cartwheel to a pair of barbarian children lying flat in the brush above the verge.

Twelve years of age and bold as coin brass, Jieret puffed a rust-coloured tangle of hair from his lips. He frowned in stormy concentration. Bored with long feasting, impatient since the returned sunlight had disrupted the passage of caravans to raid, he elbowed his younger companion. ‘Ready, Idrien?’

The other boy shifted a sweaty grip on the stick he had sharpened for a javelin. Sneaking out of camp had been Jieret’s idea. When their play at scouting had surprisingly turned up a victim, the excitement of plunder and ransom somehow lost their dashing appeal. A touch scared, Idrien wished himself back at the feast, tossing out nuts to the squirrels. ‘You know, his relatives might not be so rich.’

Jieret grinned through another unruly red curl. ‘You saw the topaz brooch that fastens his cloak. Are you chickening out on me?’

Wide-eyed, Idrien shook his head.

‘Well, come on, then.’ Jieret wormed from the thicket, too brash to care if he snapped twigs.

Idrien followed, cautious in his uncertainty. Appearances could deceive: the man’s jewel might only be glass. Yet already Jieret scrambled to his feet and charged full-tilt down the hillside. Clan honour demanded that his companion not shirk him support.

Jieret slithered into the open roadway, hampered by a bouncing fall of stones. His jerkin had torn and slipped over one shoulder and his javelin wavered despite his determination to threaten the elder in the cart. ‘Halt, as you value your life!’ He shrugged up his deerskin to unburden his throwing arm, then fought for balance and decorum as Idrien plunged down the bank and crash landed into his back.

The whistled melody ceased. Under threat of two sharpened sticks, capable hands tightened on the reins. The buckskin bared teeth and rolled eyes as it sidled and stopped between the shafts. Keeping tight hold on its mouth, the raid victim bent his light, startled gaze upon the dirty, briar-scraped pair of boys. His lips pulled crooked in a smile and silver-tipped brows twitched up underneath his hood.

‘Get out of the cart and disarm. Slowly!’ Jieret elbowed Idrien to take the pony’s bridle.

The old man hesitated. Then he released the reins and stepped down carefully, the gold silk lining of his cloak a fitful gleam in failing light. As if ready for Idrien’s howl as the buckskin snaked its head down to nip, he shot out a fist and hammered the pony with an expert blow at the juncture of shoulder and neck. The creature grunted in curbed belligerence and sullenly shook out its mane. Its master, nonplussed, removed an ornamental dagger from his belt, turned the blade and offered the handle to Jieret. He stood quietly while Idrien’s grubby fingers rifled his rich clothing in a vain search for concealed weapons.

At length, threatened by his own knife as well as the brace of whittled sticks, he offered up ringless hands. ‘Whose captivity have I the honour of accepting?’ His voice was pleasantly pitched, unmarred by the quaver that characterized the very old.

Jieret scowled. Hostages ought to show fear, not make genial greetings. Since the pony was demonstrably nasty-tempered, he settled for binding its owner’s hands with the reins, then made him lead the miserable beast. He and Idrien clambered onto the buckboard and directed their mismatched draft team to haul the cart off the road.

The boys punched each other’s sides, intoxicated by their success. A man taken for ransom; the clanlords would surely praise their prowess! The stranger might fetch the price of a sword, or better, a horse. Then, in consternation, the raiders recalled they had neglected to choose cover beforehand.

‘Stupid,’ Jieret whispered, crestfallen at the lapse. ‘We can’t drag a cart through the forest.’

Idrien sucked his lower lip. ‘Drive to the dell and unhitch?’

‘Maybe.’ Jieret nicked bark off his stick in serious thought. ‘Wind smells of rain. Our booty could get a good soaking.’

At this point, the captive good-naturedly interrupted. ‘A storm won’t hurt. The tarps are new enough not to leak.’

‘Quiet!’ Idrien glanced around in fresh worry. ‘Too much chatter will fetch the scouts.’

Their captive considered this, his long, lean legs quick to compensate for the buckskin’s short-strided trot. ‘Young raiders don’t have their own scouts?’ He might have been laughing; or not, dusk had deepened too much to tell.

Jieret skinned his knuckles in a belatedly frantic search, but found neither socket nor driving whip. He tried to hasten the pony’s pace by flapping his arms. The buckskin snapped up its round quarters. Hooves banged vengefully against the buckboard. Smacked through the soles of his boots, and stinging mightily, Idrien scowled.

Jieret clung grimly to propriety. ‘Our scouts are off to find other marks,’ he lied grandly. ‘If you hope to stay alive to be ransomed, keep silent.’

For all their unplanned excitement, the boys guided the little cart swiftly through the darkness. In a natural declivity between chalk bluffs they ordered the pony unhitched. Idrien held the old man at stickpoint, while Jieret piled brush to conceal their booty. Then, smothering back whoops of exhilaration, the boys chivvied their captive through the forest to the clan gathering they had forsaken to seek adventure.

Control broke on the camp perimeter. Jieret burst into shouting, while Idrien startled the dancers into uproar by casting his toy javelin straight into the central fire. Sparks flew; the celebration unravelled in confusion as leather-clad scouts scrambled to grab weapons, and others on guard patrol converged from the wood with drawn steel.

Blinking against the shifting glare of torches, the captive stumbled to a halt. Jieret braved the buckskin’s teeth to grasp a fistful of black and gold cloak and drag his catch a reluctant step closer to the fires.

‘Here!’ He waved to the tallest of the approaching men. ‘A sure ransom we’ve brought, father, and a pony for Tashka.’

Steiven, reigning regent of Rathain, was a hard man to miss, even in uncertain light amid his pack of leather-clad scouts. Lanky, dark headed, he ran with the grace of a deer. His eyes, deep hazel, were wary as any forest creature’s whose kind has been too long hunted. His hands were large and strongly made; his clean-shaven chin was square. The bones of his face hinted at a rough-cut, handsome beauty, an impression spoiled at first sight by a scar that grooved his cheekbone and jaw to end in a ridged knot of flesh above his collarbone.

A wild boar’s tusk might have ripped such disfigurement; in fact, Steiven’s looks had been ruined by a harness buckle heated red-hot by a caravan master when, at ten years of age, he had chased the wagon that carried his brothers’ scalps for credit as a bounty hunter’s kill.

He had been fortunate to escape with his life.

The sight of his half-grown son gambolling into camp with a captive clad in town clothes gave Steiven a start that had much to do with memories that recurred in nightmares. Yet he was a man for listening before action; half a lifetime of chieftaincy had taught him to be exactingly fair. Though his heart beat too fast and he wanted to strike his boy for this latest insanely foolish prank, he forced himself to think and to walk; and then the captive raised his head. Spaced front teeth flashed in a smile and a snag of white hair escaped his hood.

Steiven stopped cold, the drift of Jieret’s chatter disregarded. His fists uncurled. ‘Bare your head,’ he commanded.

For answer, the old man half-turned.

The clan chief’s ruddy complexion turned pale. ‘Dharkaron, forgive us.’

At his tone, Jieret faltered into silence. Sweating, aware he had earned himself a hiding, he stared wide-eyed as his father drew his dagger and with shocking diffidence toward a townborn, cut the ties from the captive’s wrists.

The elder raised his freed hands and pushed back his hood. Black cloth lined in yellow silk fell away to expose a knife-blade nose and a spill of shoulder-length silver hair.

‘Grant us pardon, master,’ Steiven said softly. Then he rounded in fury on his son. ‘You captured no merchant, foolish boy! Shame you’ve brought your clan, not ransom. You stand before the Masterbard himself.’

‘Him?’ Jieret’s insolence rang defensively loud as he gestured with his sharpened stick.

Steiven ripped the makeshift weapon out of his child’s hands. ‘Didn’t you find the lyranthe when you reviewed his possessions for arms?’

Jieret started to tremble.

‘Ah,’ said Steiven. He caught the Master bard’s desperate attempt to hide amusement, and regained his own equilibrium. He effected a ferocious scowl anyway. ‘Not only did you raid the wrong man, son, you also kept slack discipline!’

Somebody giggled on the sidelines; Jieret’s older sister Tashka. Humiliation would serve the boy better than a strapping in private. Steiven decided to pass off the affair as a stupidity beneath the notice of grown men. ‘Apologize at once and offer Halliron your hospitality. Or else amend your insult by meeting his demand for honourgift, and give him escort back to the road for the stupid bit of nuisance you’ve caused.’

Jieret looked wildly around but Idrien had seized his chance to vanish. Crestfallen, but still brazenly unapologetic, he straightened before the tall minstrel.

‘Don’t speak,’ Halliron said with a wicked twinkle in his eyes. ‘Instead, I’ll thank you to care for my pony and fetch back my lyranthe from the cart.’ Solemnly, he surrendered his buckskin’s hacked-off reins into the hands of the miscreant.

At Jieret’s first tug at the headstall, the pony snapped back black-tipped ears. A forehoof flashed up in a snake-fast strike and the boy, yelling curses better suited to a caravan drover, jumped back to escape getting whacked.

‘He can handle cross-grained horses, I trust?’ said Halliron to the father, only to find the huge man sitting down without warning in wet leaves. Steiven’s arms were clutched to his ribs as though he might tear a gut stifling laughter. ‘Fair punishment,’ the regent of Rathain snorted between wheezes. ‘A pony for Tashka, indeed! That creature would as likely rip his poor sister’s hand off.’

‘Probably not.’ Halliron smiled, watching thoughtfully as bystanders scattered and the buckskin’s striped rump bucked and sidled through the leaping ring of torchlight. ‘The little imp only hates boys. And, truth to tell, I’m not sorry. A storm rides the wind, can you smell it? Not even an initiate’s hostel graces this stretch of forest. I expected to endure a nasty night.’

When the weather finally broke, young Jieret was hours in bed and Halliron comfortably settled on cushions in the lodge tent of the regent of Rathain. Although no one had asked the Masterbard to perform he had generously offered his talents to the clan chieftain’s family until nature’s fury defeated even his trained voice. The storm struck Strakewood from the south, battering with windy fists and rattling rain over oiled hide with such force that the crack and roll of thunder could barely be heard above the noise.

Steiven came in wet from helping the scouts secure the horse lines. ‘Strange,’ he mused as he peeled his sodden jerkin and swiped dripping hair from the unmarred side of his face. ‘We don’t often get squalls from the south. Usually they spend themselves over the Mathorns and rattle the mansions in Etarra.’

‘Greater changes are afoot than mere weather, since the return of true sunlight.’ Halliron hooked the final ties on the fleece-lined case that protected his lyranthe, and took wine from the hand of Steiven’s lady. ‘You’re too kind,’ he thanked her, and raised the flagon in tribute to clan hospitality.

Clad in rare finery, her magnificent, heavy russet hair braided with sequins worn for dancing, Dania shone with pleasure. ‘We’re blessed. Your singing is a treasure unequalled.’

Her warmth sparked sorrow from the bard, who seemed suddenly absorbed with savouring the taste of his wine.

‘No successor yet,’ the lady sympathized with an insight that tended to disorient grown men. She shared a quick glance with her husband, who knelt and tugged a fresh shirt from a chest alongside the wall.

Halliron sighed. ‘Not for want of trying, lady. I’ve auditioned candidates by the thousands. Many had talent. Yet I was never satisfied. Something indefinable seemed lacking.’ He tried and failed to shrug off a bitterness at odds with a nature smoothed over by advanced years. ‘I’ve earned the reputation of an overbearing old crank. Perhaps justly.’

But the bard’s face by candlelight showed only heartsore regret. Halliron’s the tragedy, Dania thought, that no apprentice had been found to inherit his title, perhaps the deepest regret of his long and gifted life.

‘Dania,’ Steiven said gently. ‘Bring out the telir brandy and refill the Masterbard’s cup.’

The lady moved with the lightness of forest-bred caution to fetch the cut-crystal flask, while the bard’s attention strayed toward the shadows that dimmed the rear of the lodge. Lord and lady followed his gaze, to find Jieret slipped from his bedroll, the heavy curls that matched his mother’s tousled still from sleep.

‘Afraid of the lightning, are you?’ Halliron said in gentle satire.

‘Like Dharkaron he is.’ Steiven straightened up in annoyance. Muffled by a thick layer of linen as he belatedly donned his dry shirt, he said, ‘Jieret, haven’t you stirred up trouble enough for one night?’

The boy licked his lips. As he took a hesitant step closer, the light fell full on him and revealed his alarming pallor. Shaking, he announced, ‘Father, I had a dream.’

‘Ath, it’s the sight,’ Dania exclaimed. Sequins sparkled like wind harried droplets as she sprang across the carpets and swept her young son in her arms. ‘Steiven, he’s cold. Find a blanket.’

The bard was on his feet with a speed that belied his age. He flung the lady his own silk-lined cloak, then stood aside for Steiven, arrived in a flurry of untied laces. He lifted the boy from his wife and bundled him to the chin in rich black wool lined with silk.

Halliron helped the shaken mother to find a seat upon the scattered cushions. ‘The forevision runs in your line, my lady?’

Trembling now as violently as her son, a woman who was seasoned to disasters, and who had sword scars on her from past raids, gasped against the bard’s shoulder. ‘Steiven’s line. He has the gift also.’ She swallowed, her dark, fine eyes fixed worriedly on the crown of red hair that poked through the folds of the cloak. ‘The visions are too often bloody.’

Halliron recovered his flagon, refilled it with brandy and pressed Dania’s icy fingers around the stem. ‘You need a blanket also.’ He fetched one, while the lodge poles rattled to a booming crash of thunder.

Throughout, the murmur of Steiven’s voice never faltered. ‘What did you see? I know you’re frightened, son, but tell me.’

Jieret answered unsteadily that he had seen the king ride from Etarra.

‘Blessed Ath.’ Steiven pressed his scarred cheek into his boy’s crown to hide eyes that flashed with suspect brightness. After a moment, muffled by fox-brush hair, he said, ‘And how did you know him for your king?’

‘He wore a silver circlet and a tabard with the leopard of s’Ffalenn.’ Ever an observant child, Jieret added, ‘His face matched the portrait of Torbrand that you keep in the cave with the sceptre.’

Steiven swallowed. Fighting to keep his tone light, he said, ‘You’re a scout reporting for a raid. I want the particulars, carefully and accurately.’

‘His Grace was alone,’ Jieret said. ‘Armed with only a sword and shorter of stature than Caolle. He rode in haste. His horse was winded almost to death and by his handling of the reins, his right palm or wrist was likely injured. He was pursued.’ The boy stopped, wrung by a fresh bout of trembling.

‘Who pursued?’ pressed Steiven. He stroked the boy’s back with a firm touch but his eyes, when he raised them, were hard as rain-rinsed granite.

Doggedly, Jieret finished. ‘Twoscore lancers, Etarra city garrison.’

‘That has the ring of true vision.’ Steiven set the boy back on his feet. ‘Did you happen to recall if it was raining?’

Dania held her breath. Halliron reached out and patted her hand as the boy across the lodge tent frowned in tight concentration. At length Jieret raised eyes intent as his father’s and said, ‘Funny, that. I saw snowfall. But the trees were green with new leaves.’ His chin raised, determinedly defiant. ‘I’m not lying. What I dreamed was real.’

‘Then dress yourself and fetch Caolle,’ Steiven instructed his son. In response to Dania’s startled cry, he managed a bitter-edged smile. ‘Lady, would you have our king catch us sleeping? If snow is going to fall on spring leaves and Etarra’s guard fares out hunting, the future is going to bring trouble. Warning must be carried to Fallowmere and the scouts assigned road-watch must be doubled.’

Introspections

Lysaer jerked awake in a tangle of sodden sheets. The nightmare that had ripped him from sleep still lingered, a sense of terror just beyond grasp of his consciousness. He slugged a heavy feather pillow out of his face in a choked-back fit of frustration. Guard-spells set by the Fellowship might avert those threats that were tangible, but not the formless ills that harrowed his dreams. This was not the first night since Desh-thiere’s defeat that he had awakened to a pounding heart and skin running with sweat.

Unsettled, caught shivering in the grip of reaction, he kicked free of his bedclothes. Though the casements showed no hint of brightening dawn, he arose and flung on yesterday’s discarded clothing. He needed to move, to walk; even veiled in darkness the close opulence of the bedchamber oppressed him. Having learned that one of the discorporate sorcerers maintained a guarding presence over the room at all times, he announced, ‘I’m going out. Into the garden, probably.’

Luhaine’s reproving tone answered. ‘You’ll want your cloak. There’s heavy fog.’

Lysaer raised his eyebrows in surprised question. ‘You’d allow dreary weather on the eve of Arithon’s coronation?’

‘There should have been rain,’ Luhaine admitted, a touch curt. Although he allowed for the need to avoid any sort of bad omen he liked disturbing nature even less. ‘But Kharadmon diverted the storm northward. The ground mist will burn off before noon.’

As Lysaer fumbled a course toward the wardrobe he passed other beds in the chamber whose fur quilts lay undisturbed. Dakar would be out drinking. Despite his insistence that Etarrans brewed terrible hops he was willing enough to remedy the lapse with gin; and if the prince of Rathain chose to spend his last night before lifetime commitment to a troubled kingdom in his cups, no friends would fault him for indulgence.

Still overheated, Lysaer tossed his cloak over one shoulder and quietly let himself out.

The high-walled garden that adjoined the guest-chamber lay silvered and fringed with dew. Chilled to gooseflesh as dampness hit his wet skin, Lysaer sucked in a deep breath. The air brought no refreshment. The heavy oils burned in the street torches threw off dense smoke which stung his nose and throat. Mingled scents from the incenses used to mask the stench from the sewers also overwhelmed the natural fragrance of earth and unfurling spring lilacs. Two dogs snarled in the distance; a woman shouted shrill imprecations, while nearer at hand, running steps pattered ahead of a night-sentry’s tramp. Despite Lysaer’s preference for cities Etarra possessed an evasive, disturbing restlessness. The more determinedly he strove to grasp the deep currents of intrigue, to empathize with the needs of the guild ministers who held the reins of power, the greater his reflected unease. As little as he had liked Ithamon’s desolation, he felt still less at home here.

He made his concession to the damp, finally, and flicked his cloak over his back. Where he had been overheated, now his discomfort derived from chill. Certainly, he held no envy for the kingship that Arithon was pledged to inherit.

Slowly, insidiously, Etarra’s corruption had grown to haunt Lysaer in ways that undermined his beliefs.

Aching from too many sleepless nights, he parked his shoulder against a pedestal that supported the bust of a dignitary. Crickets cheeped in the flowerbeds; beyond them, the woman’s shouting faded and finally ceased. The distant dogfight dwindled to yelps and the sentry passed, grumbling, around the corner of the streetside wall. Lysaer absorbed the sounds of an unfamiliar world and bitterly reflected upon how deeply the children in the street of the horse knackers had upset his priorities.

As prince on Dascen Elur he had held his people’s trust. Their needs had become one with his own, taken into his heart as fully as he had striven to embrace understanding of Etarra’s governor’s council. The high officials were responding; even Lord Commander Diegan had softened his stance to proffer an easy friendship. Confidence in his ability to mete out fair treatment had always before given Lysaer the focus to satisfy his inborn drive to seek justice.

Up until today, honour had seemed a tangible, changeless absolute, that made each choice clear-edged.

The urge to pace, to storm across the dark garden to escape the entanglement of some unseen trap became nearly too strong to deny. Lysaer forced himself to stillness. He sucked in the perfume of the lilacs and made himself examine why five minutes in the poor quarter should shatter his viewpoint’s simplicity. The dilemma held multiple facets. One could not serve the guilds without destroying the children enslaved in the workhouses; the merchants’ rights to safe trade could not be enforced without condoning headhunters and the butchery that visited bloodshed upon the woodland clansmen.

Whose cause took priority? In this world of divisive cultures and shattered loyalties, no single foundation of rightness existed.

The Fellowship sorcerers withheld opinion. They would use their formidable powers to set a prince on a throne and yet would enact no judgement; they did not guide or expect, but encouraged their chosen royal heir to rule by his gifts and his conscience.

That stock of responsibility became suffocating. Lysaer laid his head against the stonework that supported his shoulders and agonized over a justice no longer obvious. Principles were what a man made them. Sheltered since birth by the cares of a straightforward kingdom, he found himself painfully lost at formulating law for himself. Etarra tormented him by ploughing up doubts and possibilities: his own lost realm of Tysan might bear equal measure of thorny, insoluble suffering. He had been taught his statesmanship there and had perhaps never seen beyond the walls of his palace to notice.

‘Daelion Fatemaster, what a muddle!’ he exploded in tight frustration.

He believed himself to be alone. When a woman’s voice answered from the gate trellis, he started and banged his shoulder against the scrolled beard of the statue.

Surprise caused her words to escape him. ‘What? Who’s there?’ He looked, but saw no one in the foggy murk between the topiary.

‘Not an enemy.’ Her voice was cool and pleasantly modulated, her crisp accent, other than Etarran. She moved, appeared out of the mists on the path as a silhouette muffled in cloaks; not elderly, by her grace, but impossible to judge as to age.

‘Who are you?’ Vaguely familiar as she seemed, Lysaer could not push past recent memories of Talith to place where he may have encountered her.

‘We’ve met, but so briefly you might not recall. In the house of Enithen Tuer.’ She had better night-sight than he; at least, she sat without groping on a stone bench set invisibly in a cranny beside the hedge. A passing dray’s lantern shot fuzzed diamonds of light through the latticed gate. Stray beams brushed copper glints in the hair that trailed loose from her hood.

‘The enchantress,’ Lysaer said in recognition. He added, accusing, ‘But Arithon knew you better than I.’

A night-time visit to the hayloft in the Ravens Tavern hung unmentioned between them. Elaira tucked her hands beneath her cloak, that Lysaer might not see how her nerves had been shaken. ‘You don’t approve of your half-brother’s midnight excursions.’

Her guess was accurate; also, on the tail of his self-examination, hurtfully near the meat of his recent uncertainties. Unsure whether she toyed with him, Lysaer pushed away from the pedestal. He crossed the gravel path to gain a better view of her features. The layers of her hoods kept her veiled. He decided to risk honest answer. ‘I’m not sure. Arithon takes unconscionable risks, looking for pearls among beggars. I prefer the simpler reality, that the means to uplift the unfortunate are better controlled from the council chamber. A man can feed the hungry and clothe beggars all his life and not change the conditions that make them wretched.’

The lady considered a moment then offered, ‘Your vision and Arithon’s are very different. As a spirit schooled to power, his perception stems from one absolute. Universal harmony begins with recognition that the life in an ordinary pebble is as sacred as conscious selfhood. Both views are equally valid.’

Lysaer responded in stifled antagonism. ‘And just what’s your stake in all this?’ He felt hagridden enough, without her unasked for exploration of his conscience.

She was stung; her sigh was drawn out and hinted at diffidence. Still, she did not shy back from the truth. ‘I was sent. Direct orders from my superiors: to seek out the princes given sanction to rule and to interact enough to test their mettle.’

He stepped back, felt the dripping lip of a second stone bench and sank down facing her. Fiercely he said, ‘What have you found?’

That Etarra offers entanglement enough to torture any man and suffering very clearly bares the spirit. As a prince must, you place love and care for the masses before individual suffering.’ Her hood moved; perhaps she looked down in embarrassment for her snooping. Arithon trapped under such scrutiny would have cut off further inquiry through sarcasm; Lysaer more civilly chose silence. Drawn to shared sympathy by his tact, Elaira said, ‘I saw your half-brother earlier, when he made ships out of shadows in the knackers’ alley.’

Lysaer could not stem his curiosity, nor did he hide his concern for the strain on Rathain’s prince that even the sorcerers could not ease. ‘Arithon spoke to you then?’

‘No.’ She was sharp. ‘I dressed in disguise as a lad. He was never allowed to see my face. And please, I would mind very much if you told him.’

The vehemence she could not quite curb sparked Lysaer to exclamation. ‘You were the lady he acted to defend when Koriani scryers tried to spy out our affairs in Ithamon!’

‘I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’ She forestalled his impulse to explain, angry, or intensely afraid. ‘Keep still. If it concerns the Koriani Senior Circle, I’m far better off left ignorant.’

‘Arithon cares for you,’ Lysaer said, his first impulse to soften her distress.

‘He weeps for the grass that he treads on.’ Elaira stiffened, indignant at his solicitude. ‘You should know, as a scion of s’Ilessid, that the s’Ffalenn royal gift is forced empathy!’ She stood in a reckless haste that showered dew from the bushes as her cloak caught. ‘I have to go.’

‘But your errand.’ Lysaer stood also. Effortlessly considerate, he bent and unhooked the snagged cloth without touching her. ‘Surely your purpose is incomplete?’

Elaira shook her head as he straightened. The dark had begun to lift with the earliest glimmer of dawn; the eyes that met his from under voluminous layers of clothing sparkled, filled with tears that only magnified their intensity. Yet when she spoke, her voice was hammered and level. ‘I have what I came to this garden for. You do not, if you left your bed to find calm.’

Lysaer gently took her arm. ‘I’ll see you to the gate,’ he said politely.

Relieved to discover he was gentleman enough not to pry, she smiled in piercing gratitude. In a sympathy tuned so closely to his inner dilemma that this time no sensibilities were offended, she said, ‘Speaking strictly for myself, I would spill blood to release those clan children from slavery in the knacker’s yard. But then, female instinct drives me to condemn exploitation of the young. A man might arrange his priorities differently.’

Lysaer steered her past the spears of the spring’s sprouting lilies, his hand warm and sure on her arm. ‘It is not what you would do, or what I would. Pity Arithon, for as he said, tomorrow Etarra becomes his problem. I only pray that the guildsmen don’t murder him before he’s had his chance to act at all.’

They had reached the gate. Lysaer’s touch dropped away as he raised the latch and opened the panel to let her through.

Elaira passed beneath the trellis. ‘What this realm will kill for certain is your half-brother’s musical talent. Mourn that.’

And then she was gone, a shadow vanished into foggy streets that no lantern could fully illuminate.

Preparations

As dawn silvers the cloud-cover above the forested hills of Deshir, relays of barbarian couriers race at speed through thinning rains bearing the call-to-arms for clan encampments to the north and east…

Guarded from outside interference, sealed in a seamless stone flask, the uncounted entities that comprise the Mistwraith, Desh-thiere, brood upon two half-brothers whose gifts have seen them doomed to oblivion…

Grey seas heave off the north coast of Fallowmere, where a rainstorm spends the torrents that should have fallen upon lands far south; while skies brighten flawless aquamarine and citrine above the square bastions of Etarra, the sorcerer responsible for nature’s violation touches runes of well-binding upon plants, soil, and wild creatures, and begs their forgiveness for his act…

XIV. CORONATION DAY

At the hour past sunrise on the day appointed for Arithon’s coronation, the door to Morfett’s guest-chamber banged open. Dakar sallied in from the hallway, his head and torso eclipsed behind a towering mound of state clothing. He tottered across the tile floor, shed his armload across the nearest divan and announced, ‘These are yours. Asandir’s orders.’ Gloating, insouciant, rumpled from a night’s hard drinking and the full- blown effects of a hangover, he added, ‘I’m told to watch you dress to make sure that you leave nothing out.’

Curled in the windowseat with his lyranthe lying silent across his knees, Arithon regarded the spilled velvets and silks, shot through each fold with costly metallic threadwork. Dead sober, if a touch haggard from lack of sleep, he made a study of Dakar and grinned. ‘Silver to broom-straws your master’s orders were directed toward you as well. Anyway, you don’t deck out in pearl buttons and brocades by any choice I ever saw.’

Dakar scowled, ashamed to discover that his offering also held garments of brown broadcloth too generously cut for anybody’s frame except his own. ‘Get on with this.’ He folded his arms across his chest, ‘or by Dharkaron’s vengeance, I swear I’ll call Morfett’s valets in to help!’

Arithon raised his cheek off the curve of his lyranthe and said, ‘You couldn’t get them. The entire household is too busy keeping the master from falling prostrate into his breakfast plate.’

‘Well, let’s say your accession to Rathain’s throne isn’t a balm to anybody’s temper!’ Still distressed over Lysaer’s endangerment at the time of the Mistwraith’s confinement, Dakar vented his resentment upon the prince at hand. ‘Where were you last night?’

‘Not drinking, nor with a woman.’ Lightly, lovingly, Arithon dusted a finger across his strings. A haunting minor chord sighed forth; then, since even that slight sound galled like salt in an open sore, he laid his instrument aside. The eyes he turned upon Dakar were sharp and terrible for their emptiness. ‘Is there anything else?’

But the Mad Prophet refused to be baited. ‘If you were gallivanting again in the poor quarter you’d better have taken a bath.’

‘What? The velvets aren’t perfumed?’ Arithon arose and stretched linked hands above his head. The linen he wore was plain, not dirty. He advanced through the flare of sunlight that fell through the amber lozenged windows and Dakar saw in relief that the hair at his collar was in fact still damp.

Arithon stripped off his shirt. Marked yet by the physical scars from his past failed effort at sovereignty, he surveyed the array of kingly trappings in bright-eyed, self-mocking distaste. ‘Let’s have this over with.’

He dressed himself while Dakar passed garments in roughly the appropriate order: silver-grey hose, white silk shirt, black tunic with leopard-fur edging. Next, the ceremonial accessories that symbolized a sovereign’s tie to the land: the belt of wooden discs inlaid with royal seals in abalone; the deer-hide boots studded with river stone and tied with feather-tipped thongs; the cabochon emerald set in silver that he pinned above his heart. The fabrics held no scent beyond a hint of sweetgrass that lingered from the ritual blessing worked an hour earlier by the Fellowship. The fine-stitched tracery of interlace borders, the ribboned cuffs and hems bespoke tailoring unmatched in Etarra. When and where such masterwork had been done, Arithon refused to ask.

Dakar volunteered, just to needle him. ‘Sethvir sews superbly, don’t you think?’

‘Ath,’ said Arithon in flat vehemence. ‘Not this, I hope.’ He raked through the garments still left and hooked out the ugly bit that jarred: a heavy, lacquer-worked sword-sheath, hung from a baldric bossed with carbuncles.

Dakar looked sourly on. ‘Not that.’

‘The stones look heavy enough to sink a four-days bloated carcass.’ Arithon dangled the item aloft, his combativeness blunted by resignation. ‘This wasn’t, by chance, a gift from the ladies of Etarra?’

‘Bang on.’ Dakar stifled a chortle. ‘Asandir said wear it anyway.’

Arithon glanced suspiciously back. He raised the jewel-encrusted leather to his nostrils and immediately laughed. ‘Damn you! It doesn’t smell of sweetgrass. Is this your prank, to curse me with an ill-wish in addition to this joy-forsaken realm?’

‘Well,’ said Dakar, shrugging. ‘Leave it out and the ladies will be offended for sure. How could they know they’d made their contribution too late for the Fellowship’s blessing? No ward I’ve heard of could make that thing look less hideous.’ Philosophically, he added, ‘Bear up. You’ve got the tabard and sash yet to go before you need concern yourself with weapons.’

‘That thing is a fit weapon, to strike a man blind at first sight.’ Arithon discarded the atrocity and at Dakar’s urging took the damask-lined velvet of the tabard.

The heraldic leopard sparkled as he pulled it over his head. Its weight of rich cloth seemed to burden his shoulders, while Dakar bound on the black sash with its silver wire wrapping. As if to delay the moment when he must gird on the tasteless scabbard, Arithon took up the circlet that Asandir’s spellcraft had fashioned from Rathain’s earth. Symbol of an unwanted succession, he gripped the cool metal with a tension that whitened his knuckles. Regret played across his expression. Then, firmly silent, he raised the fillet and pressed it over his black hair. It rested with deceptive lightness across his brow, as a crown yet to come never would.

Dakar chose that moment to look up. Imprinted against the amber casement, he saw Arithon’s face crossed by the shining band that preceded Rathain’s vested sovereignty. Chills roughened the Mad Prophet’s flesh. One split-second of vertigo was all the forewarning he received.

Then in a rush, his seer’s talent claimed him wholly as instrument.

Trance shocked through him with such force that his mind became emptied. Dakar dropped to his knees.

A vision burned through: of a square milling with people, among them Arithon, who drove in heedless, driven panic between tight-packed factions of Etarra merchants. The image formed fully and shattered, buried by a static blast of whiteness as a second shock slammed Dakar’s innermind.

Vaguely aware that his voice shouted meaningless phrases, the Mad Prophet felt himself falling. His downward rush into darkness was suddenly and sickeningly arrested by a hand that caught and yanked him back.

He returned to himself with a wrench that left him disoriented. His face dripped sweat. Released to a welter of dizziness, he waited, panting, until orderless colour resolved into the orange and purple tiles that floored the Lord Governor’s guest-chamber. Arithon had an arm around his shoulders. That support was all that held Dakar upright as he swayed, helplessly unbalanced.

‘Ath,’ the Mad Prophet gasped as vertigo progressed into nausea. ‘Whoever named farsight a gift had the warped inclinations of a torturer.’

‘You should lie down.’ Arithon strove to lift him toward the divan.

Powerless to assist as his frame was shaken by spasms, Dakar doubled over. His breakfast stayed down, barely; the accomplishment seemed moot. He felt wretched. As Arithon helped him to straighten, he saw his morning’s work wasted.

The royal tabard was rucked askew. Both of the prince’s silk sleeves were blotched with perspiration. Whatever slight tolerance Arithon had attained toward kingship appeared to have fled in a moment. Against skin shocked to pallor, the hair dragged flat beneath the circlet crossed his forehead like penstrokes scribbled upon parchment. Wild-eyed as any cornered animal, the Shadow Master half-forced, half-propelled Dakar across the floor.

Too miserable to resist, the Mad Prophet collapsed across the divan. He had no strength to care for crushed velvets. That the scabbard with its carbuncles gouged his backside mattered less: the ugly gift from the dignitaries’ wives now seemed some poor jest from a nightmare. ‘What happened?’ he gasped; but the gut-sick aftermath of major prophecy was much too familiar to support pretence. ‘For Ath’s sake, tell me what I said.’

Arithon withdrew his hands, which were shaking. ‘You foretold disaster.’

Terror hit Dakar in the pit of his unsettled stomach. He fought another twisting cramp as every formless uncertainty that had agonized his imagination since Ithamon replayed as a possible reality. ‘Lysaer. Desh-thiere has some hold on him, doesn’t it?’

Mere supposition drove Arithon to an explosive step back. ‘Would that were all.’ He snatched up the sword which rested unsheathed near the regalia he had not yet put on. ‘Where’s the sorcerer who should be here on guard?’

But a search of the dimmest alcoves where a discorporate mage was wont to lurk showed Luhaine nowhere in evidence. In dread that some dire facet of Dakar’s prophecy had compelled the Fellowship guardian to abandon him, Arithon spun back toward the divan. ‘Where’s Asandir!’

Dakar pressed his hands to his temples. Still trapped on the cusp of major prophecy, he cradled a skull on fire with headache. His thoughts dragged, too dim to keep pace with events, far less attach meaning to questions. Dully he repeated, ‘What in Daelion’s province did I predict?’

Fast movement blurred his eyesight. The next second he was slapped by a blow that seemed to come out of nowhere. He crashed backward into the folds of the royal mantle. Over him towered Arithon, so consumed by dread he seemed possessed. The black and silver length of Alithiel pressed enpointe against the Mad Prophet’s throat.

Shielded from bared steel by nothing beyond his shirt collar, Dakar shrank back. ‘Have you gone crazy?’

‘Not yet.’ The words seemed lucid; but the insouciance Arithon usually flaunted in the face of trouble was swept away by his ragged fast breaths. ‘Where can I find Asandir? I have no moment to waste!’

Dakar measured the steel, then the terror that racked the man behind the swordgrip. ‘Asandir’s in the council hall. Keeping the city ministers from revolt before your processional.’

The weight of the weapon lifted. Arithon spun on his heel, stopped; came back. The heraldic leopard worked into his tabard flashed as if tainted by unclean light as he jerked the plain cloak intended for Dakar from under its owner’s supine bulk. He cast the garment over his finery as he bolted headlong for the doorway.

‘Arithon!’ Dakar shoved up on one elbow. ‘What did I see in that trance?’

For a split second it seemed Rathain’s prince would not stem his frantic rush. But as the latch wrenched open under his hand, he threw back in anguished haste, ‘Dakar, as you love peace, if you care for my half-brother, keep him from me! For if we’re brought face to face the terms of your prophecy shall be met. The result will end in a bloodbath.’

‘What’s happened?’ Dakar exploded off the couch. The black-lacquered scabbard hooked on his knuckles and fell in a clattering spin across the floor. He rushed forward, caught his toe on a carbuncle and crashed shoulder down into an armchair. Too winded to curse, he pressed on, though the backlash and dizziness from prescience had yet to fully release him.

‘It’s not what’s happened, but what will. Desperate steps must be taken.’ Arithon ducked out.

Dakar gained the entry just as the door panel slammed in his face.

‘Fiends take you!’ He hammered unyielding wood until his fists bruised before reason caught up with the obvious: that if Arithon had dispatched him to protect Lysaer, the outside latch would not be braced.

The next thought hit with more significance, that Luhaine had neither answered, nor intervened to curb Arithon’s distress.

Dakar kicked open the door and abruptly ran out of energy. Pinned by another wave of faintness, he thumped to rest against the doorframe and sweated over implications he had no fit way to assess. His second spontaneous prophecy now entangled with the conditional forecast made earlier, the Black Rose Prophecy that tied all the threads of future hope to the event of Arithon’s accession. Luhaine’s absence meant much more than the half-brothers’ safety that had been cast to the four winds and jeopardy.

The vaulted council hall of Etarra was no longer stuffy and cavernously curtained as it had been kept throughout Morfett’s clandestine councils to thwart the return of Rathain’s monarchy. Bedecked now for the coronation, the lofty chamber with its white marble friezework and gilt pillars stood transformed. The faded, dusty trade-guilds’ banners stood jostled aside on their rods, overshadowed by the leopard blazon of s’Ffalenn. Lancet windows once darkened behind dagged scarlet drapes were flung open to the morning air. Light rinsed floors freshly sweetened with wax; sunbeams warmed the graining of maple parquet, and sparked reflections in the gems and tinselled silks donned for the occasion by the city’s ranking ministers, who clustered whispering in their cadres, and cast nervous glances to all sides.

But the Fellowship sorcerer in attendance for once had no care for overhearing their seditious talk. Bleak as storm in dark velvets, Asandir presided over the aisle before the raised dais.

Morfett measured his stillness as he would have stalked an asp through his grape arbour. Let Arithon s’Ffalenn but once be caught unguarded and the interfering sorcerers who sheltered him would find a knife in his royal ribs.

‘Where’s Lord Diegan, anyway?’ the minister of justice complained. ‘Odd, that he should be late.’

‘Not at all.’ Morfett twitched at his cuffs, which were buttoned with pearls and too snug. Snappish with venom, he said, ‘Our Commander of the Guard invited that fair-haired flunky, Lysaer, for an after-breakfast social. His sister’s infatuation with the man has delayed them both, no doubt.’

Sourly, the Lord Governor eyed the damask-draped chair set up to enthrone the coming prince. Such panoply would hardly matter; any more than a white-gold crown set with emeralds could shield against mortality. Today, tomorrow or next year the Teir’s’Ffalenn would be overthrown. Etarra would never bow to royal rule. Never. Wishing ill on the day’s proceedings, Morfett saw Asandir spin around. The sorcerer gave no nod to smooth over the officials left gaping in offence at the abrupt presentation of his back.

Morfett smiled. Trouble, the Lord Governor wished fervently; upon the heads of the Fellowship, most ruinous, plan befouling bad luck.

Asandir offered no apology, but turned on his heel again and pressed in visible agitation through the councilmen still clustered in shared outrage. His rush to reach the doorway left a moil of rankled dignitaries whose robes were raked askew by his passage.

Morfett sailed into the gap left opened in the sorcerer’s wake. He arrived in the foyer just after Asandir passed the outer door, caught the ring pulls as the panels swung closed and shamelessly pressed an eye to the crack.

On the marble stair outside the entry he saw Asandir flag down Traithe.

‘Call your raven,’ the sorcerer instructed his colleague. ‘The bird may be needed to relay messages.’

The shorter mage in black and silver replied too low to overhear.

Asandir returned a slight nod. ‘Go inside. Smooth tempers, avert uneasiness and above all, let nobody hear we have problems. Sethvir’s just now sent warning: Lysaer’s in serious trouble. The pattern that encompasses his Name has drifted. Worse: Luhaine reports that Dakar’s been alarmed by premonition. Both events indicate that our s’Ilessid heir may harbour one of Desh-thiere’s wraiths, picked up through the moment of confinement. If so, the crisis forecast by the strands is upon us. One mistimed judgement and we’ll have no crowned king, nor a restored Fellowship, just panic and bloodshed in the streets.’

‘Ath speed you.’ Denied by impaired faculties to share further details through magecraft, Traithe touched his colleague’s shoulder before both went their separate ways.

Morfett straightened up from his eavesdropping and faced around. Prepared to announce the Fellowship’s quandary to every official within earshot, his excitement overshadowed small discrepancies: that the doors at his back failed to latch; and that his rush of elation overwhelmed him to the point where his utterance choked in his throat. He hopped forward a step and filled his lungs to shout.

His effort emerged as a gargle, since Traithe slipped through the cracked doorpanel, clamped a gloved hand from behind and gagged his mouth.

‘Ah, but you won’t,’ the mildest mannered of the sorcerers murmured into Morfett’s left ear.

The Lord Governor moaned. His eyes bulged out and he ground out a smothered growl. He elbowed and kicked backward at his assailant, but managed to strike only air.

He bit down next on black glove leather, and got back a dig that shot paralysing pain through his larynx.

Traithe called out cheerfully to those bystanders just turned to stare openmouthed at the scuffle. ‘Could I beg your help?’

The stir widened; polite conversation faltered. Before Morfett’s wheezes and moaned curses could impact the fast-spreading stillness, Traithe carried on in blithe chatter. ‘Your Lord Governor seems overcome. Is he prone to fits? Maybe he’s prostrate from the heat. Anybody might faint under such fashionable layers of heavy velvet.’

Pulled off balance, then downed by an ungentlemanly jab at the back of his knees, Morfett collapsed, mutely struggling, to the floor. A raven flapped down and lit on his chest. At least, that was the last thing his eyes recorded before he sank, dropped senseless by spells, upon carpets laid down for Arithon to tread in formal procession to the dais.

Invited for wine after breakfast in the richly appointed parlour of Etarra’s commander of the guard, Lysaer suddenly flushed. A wave of heat swept through him, followed by bone-deep chill. Quickly, he set down his goblet, before his unsteady hand sloshed the contents. Alarmed that he might have succumbed to sudden fever, Lysaer touched his forehead. A second wave of disorientation passed through him. He stiffened, transfixed by fear; for an instant he felt as if his mind spun to blankness, his self-awareness overturned by a will other than his own.

The sensation cleared a heartbeat later. Lysaer shivered in silly relief. He was just tired, not quite himself. Arithon’s coronation presented no crisis; his momentary faintness surely had been due to nerves and imagination, a residual distress left by the nightmares that had plagued him off and on since Ithamon. As the patterned brocade chair that supported him swam clearly back into focus, Lysaer looked up.

Lady Talith’s ringed hands had stilled in the curled fur of her terrier. She, her brother Diegan and the beribboned lapdog all regarded him in polite and expectant silence.

What had he just said? Lysaer struggled to recapture the thread of conversation. A gap seemed torn from his memory. Inattention could not explain this. Embarrassed for a lapse that in hindsight seemed faintly ridiculous, he stumbled to fill in with banality.

Diegan interrupted and took up what had been a bristling argument. ‘But the children who work in the warehouses are not the get of the free poor, as your puppet-prince led you to think.’ Etarra’s commander of the guard set down the crystal goblet that he had toyed with for the past half hour. His wine sloshed untasted as he said, ‘These wretches that Arithon would champion are in fact the offspring of condemned criminals, clanblood barbarians who have harassed the trade-routes with thievery and murder for generations.’

Heat chased cold across Lysaer’s skin. He resisted an urge to blot his brow, willed aside his unsettled condition and studied the city’s Lord Commander, whose finery and intellect made him more courtier than soldier and whose words fanned up like dry cobwebs the clinging spectre of past doubts.

S’Ffalenn pirates on Dascen Elur had repeatedly manipulated political sore points to stir unrest and further their marauding feud against Amroth.

Lysaer snapped back to present circumstance with an inward lash of chastisement. This was Etarra, not Port Royal and Arithon was not as his ancestors. More musician than buccaneer, he had been the sworn heir of a murderer in a past that no longer mattered. Fair minded, Lysaer pushed off his uneasiness. ‘Do you suggest Rathain’s prince would lie to discredit the city council?’

‘I suggest he’s in league with the Fellowship’s intent, to see Etarra given over to barbarians.’ Diegan leaned forward. Diamond studs sparkled across his shoulders as he planted his elbows on his knees. ‘For that end, would he not act as the sorcerers’ purpose demanded?’

Never at ease with Arithon’s mage-trained evasiveness, Lysaer re-examined matters from that angle. Only this morning, Dakar had staggered in from his rounds of the taverns and attested in slurred certainty that Arithon had not spent last night drinking in any man’s company. ‘Wherever he was, only Daelion knows. His Grace himself’s not saying.’

Lysaer blinked, pricked by association. This day’s musician, who begged to be spared from royal position, was one and the same man as the chained sorcerer who had burned seven ships, then baited Amroth’s council at trial with his own life offered as gambit.

‘I can see you have reservations,’ Lady Talith observed. Her tight-laced taffeta rustled as she crossed her ankles; the terrier displaced by her movement whined and jumped plaintively down. ‘For our part, if this coronation is to be stopped, there’s little time left to take action.’

In fact, there remained but an hour before the noon ceremony. Lysaer snapped to, the odd bent of his thoughts cut off by his ingrained habit of fair play. ‘Don’t think to suggest a conspiracy. I’ll not be party to treason. The Fellowship’s intentions toward your city are certainly not harmful, and Arithon’s rights of inheritance are not in my province to deny.’

‘But you doubt him,’ Talith pressed.

There, most squarely, she scored. Honour demanded that the integrity of any ruler should be challenged over issues of social justice. Repelled as if brushed by something dank, Lysaer arose. Good manners concealed his private qualms as he gathered his velvet cloak and offered his hand to Talith. Her beauty might bedazzle his vision but never his inborn integrity. He drew her suavely to her feet. ‘Lady, on behalf of your city, I’ll question your prince. Arithon is secretive, crafty and not always forthright about his motivations. But given direct confrontation, I’ve never known him to lie.’

Diegan jangled the bell for the maid to collect the crystal and the wine-tray. To Lysaer, he added, ‘You’ll tell us your findings before the coronation begins?’

Cold now, and unsure what should motivate him to undertake such a promise at inconveniently short notice, Lysaer found himself saying, ‘You have my formal word.’

The room, the wine and the company seemed suddenly too rich. Lysaer strove to recoup his composure. Sleepless nights and troubled dreams had sown his mind with unworthy confusion. For even if Arithon’s sympathies were misguided, the thorns in seeing justice done remained: the labourers enslaved in guild service were still children, ill fed, inadequately clothed and poorly housed. Although for simplicity’s sake it would relieve a vicious quandary to fault them for the crimes of their ancestors, their plight deserved unbiased review. If Arithon would champion their cause, he must defend his decision to repudiate the city council’s policies. Lysaer dodged the terrier that playfully circled his feet and strode with firm purpose for the door.

‘My lord, my lady,’ he said in parting.

A bang and a thump sounded in the passage outside.

The inbound commotion came accompanied by Dakar’s voice, plaintively arguing with a servant. Protests were cut by Asandir demanding to know what was amiss.

Lysaer pressed his thumb on the doorlatch. The fastening seemed queerly to have jammed. A violent wrench failed to dislodge the obstruction.

Lord Diegan shoved the maid away from the wine-tray in his haste to reach Lysaer’s side. Their combined attempt to free the door caused the scrolled brass to spark white light. Heat followed, intense enough to raise blisters.

Lysaer noticed instantly that his skin took no mark from the encounter. No stranger to the effects of small sorceries, he cried out a reflexive warning. ‘Spellcraft!’

Diegan regarded him intently, while inexplicable heat and chills chased through his body once again.

This bout proved more fierce than the last. Lysaer swayed. For an instant the surrounding room seemed to flicker in and out of existence. His vision quickly steadied, but his ears were left buzzing with unnameable, untraceable sound. Rage touched him. The emotion came barbed with a thought so clearly delineated, it seemed more solid than the lintel he caught to brace his balance. Who but Arithon would have dared to interfere; the poisoned conclusion followed, that if the s’Ffalenn bastard was to blame, distrust of Etarra’s council was emphatically misplaced.

Vindicated by Lysaer’s dismay, Diegan said, ‘We’re betrayed!’ He matched a grim glance with his sister.

The servant in the outside corridor had fallen silent; the chambermaid cowered in a corner. Dakar’s reply to Asandir breached the sealed parlour with damning, irrefutable clarity. ‘But of course I set wards to bind the doorlatch! Arithon begged me at all costs to keep him separate from Lysaer!’

‘Where’s the prince of Rathain?’ The sorcerer must have glowered fearsomely, for Dakar’s answer rose to a pitch very near to hysteria.

‘He went out. Into the streets, to look for you. If Luhaine’s ghost still guards him, it’s being obstinately close-mouthed. Didn’t you see either one of them on your way over here?’

‘No.’ Asandir’s step approached the closed doorway. ‘Too late, now, to wish differently. Your prophecy bars us from action. You say Lysaer’s inside?’

In mutinous self-defence, Dakar said, ‘Diegan’s servants insist he never left.’

Lysaer felt a hand on his forearm, Talith’s, pulling him quickly aside. A shock like a spark ripped through him; not for her beauty, which could stun any man, but for her unmannerly presumption. Before he had space to question his oddly irascible reaction, the feeling became swept aside and an urge he also could not trace prompted him to fast speech. ‘I promised I’d find Arithon and ask him for the truth. Can you get me out?’

Diegan grinned. ‘Every house in Etarra has a closet exit, and hidden stairs to an outside alley. Talith will show you. I’ll delay the sorcerer.’

‘You’ll try.’ Lysaer surrendered his hand to the lady, who breathlessly hurried him forward. ‘Be careful. No Fellowship sorcerer has compunctions against prying into your private thoughts.’

If the warning gave Diegan reservations, Lysaer was not to find out. Talith sank her nails into his wrist and bundled him through a doorway that had miraculously opened through the back wall. Thrust into a musty stone passageway, Lysaer heard only Talith, softly cursing the dust that grimed the gold hem of her dress before she dragged the panel closed and shut them in cobwebs and darkness.

In the parlour, the terrified maid began to sob. Balked from following its pretty mistress, the terrier’s yapping changed pitch to barks and growls. The next instant the latch on the hallway door discharged a static shower of sparks. The dog bounded sideways, trailing ribbons, while the panel explosively burst inward.

Asandir slammed into Lord Diegan’s guest parlour with Dakar hard on his heels. They were met by the commander of the guard, blandly seated, the decanter of wine he had been on the verge of pouring frozen in his hand in mid-air.

His typically Etarran urbanity made no impression upon the sorcerer, whose gaze flicked to the other set of goblets that rested on the tray, their half-consumed contents abandoned. As the terrier subsided snarling under the nearest stuffed stool, Asandir studied Diegan with a chilling, unpleasant intensity. ‘Where has Lysaer gone?’

To the amazed admiration of Dakar, Diegan’s nerve never faltered. He replaced the wine crystal on its tray with a faint, controlled clink. ‘Your man left to have words with his crony, the Teir’s’Ffalenn. Should that disturb you?’

‘We’ll know shortly.’ Asandir stepped past the casement. His shadow swept over the commander of the guard, dimming the glitter of gemstones that studded his ceremonial pourpoint. Before Diegan’s magnificence, the sorcerer’s dark robe hung sheenless as a pauper’s cheap felt. ‘I want you to think, and answer carefully. While in your presence, did Lysaer show a loss of awareness? Did his attention seem to drift, even for a second?’

As Diegan made to brush off the question, the sorcerer advanced again and forestalled him. ‘I said, answer carefully. For if you noticed such a lapse, your friend could be endangered. One of Desh-thiere’s separate wraiths may have evaded captivity. If, unbeknownst to us, such a creature came to possess Lysaer, all of Etarra could be threatened.’

Diegan gave the matter his dutiful consideration, then raised his goblet to curled lips and sipped. His eyes reflected black irony as he said, ‘When Lysaer left this chamber, he seemed in perfect self-command.’

‘And before then?’ Asandir sounded worried.

‘Never mind the commander of the guard,’ Dakar burst out. ‘He’s got lying written all over him.’

‘Then keep him here under house-arrest!’ Asandir stalked on across the carpet. ‘We don’t need a call to arm the garrison to complicate disaster any further.’ He paused at the far wall, studied the bookshelf and after a second’s hesitation reached out and thumbed the hidden catch. The false panel swung open, wafting telltale traces of Talith’s lavender perfume. After an irritated glance toward Lord Diegan, Asandir departed in Lysaer’s footsteps, through the bolt-hole that led to the street.

‘Fiends take you!’ Dakar yelled after his master. He charged to the panel and wedged it before it could quite fall shut. Though the gloom beyond by now held only drafts, he shouted anyway. ‘Will somebody bother to tell me what in Ath’s creation I have prophesied?’

He received no answer; just a rip in his hose from the terrier, which in a belated fit of courage scuttled out from hiding and bit his ankle. Dakar’s defensive kick cleanly missed. The door fell to with a thud. As the dog retreated to snarl over its pillaged shred of stocking, Diegan hefted his decanter toward the invader still left in his parlour. ‘Share a drink to soften misfortune?’

Dakar groaned. Already riled beyond sense by the effects of clairvoyance and a hangover, he pressed fat palms to his temples. ‘Wine won’t help. The entire universe has gone crazy.’

Diegan offered a chair and pressed a filled goblet upon the Mad Prophet. ‘Then let’s forgo sanity also and both get rippingly drunk.’

No sooner had the curtains been lowered over the windows of Etarra’s great council hall, than a hammering rattled the main entry. Despite the fact Traithe had sealed the doors with a minor arcane binding, one heavy panel cracked open. A raw streak of daylight slashed the foyer, raising a sparkle like a jewel-vault across the agitated assemblage of officials in their wilting feathers, dyed furs, gold chains and gem-studded sashes of rank.

Since none of Etarra’s citizens held magecraft to challenge his warding, Traithe straightened hurriedly from the prostrate body of the Lord Governor. The raven on his shoulder kept balance to a flurry of wingbeats as he turned around to confront the disturbance.

Arithon’s voice pealed out through the gloom. ‘Where’s Asandir?’

Rapacious to recover their plundered advantages, every Etarran official not overawed by Morfett’s collapse pressed forward, blinking against the sudden daylight. The few who were closest recognized the dishevelled figure through the glare; the rest saw and identified the shining circlet that betokened Rathain’s rights of royal sovereignty.

‘Sorcery!’ someone cried from the fore. Heads turned, hatted, bald and formally beribboned and jewelled. ‘Here’s the prince, burst through spells of protection. All the dread rumours are true!’

A surge crossed the gathering like a draft-caught ripple through a tapestry.

More muttering arose. ‘It’s him. Teir’s’Ffalenn. A sneaking sorcerer, after all. His Grace of Rathain.’

The prince in the doorway called again. ‘In Ath’s name, is there any Fellowship sorcerer present?’

Traithe thrust through the press that jammed the foyer, his attention narrowed to include only Arithon’s pale face. Though loath to create a public spectacle, he had no choice but bow to need. ‘Asandir’s gone to find your half-brother. Sethvir’s at the south gate armoury. The streets are not at all safe.’

Heartsick to realize he could not beg help, denied even privacy to speak plainly, Arithon called back, ‘I can’t stay here!’

Assuredly, he could not. The high council was keyed to animosity. If Traithe’s presence momentarily stayed bloodshed, that abeyance would not long suffice. Every minister’s layers of lace and brocades held hidden daggers and jewelled pins that could be turned in a moment to treachery; not a few would have in attendance paid assassins masquerading as secretaries.

Having interposed his own person between the threatened prince and the dignitaries in the chamber at large, Traithe sorted limited options. That Luhaine seemed nowhere in evidence was sure indication that the nexus of change forecast in the strands at Althain Tower had fully and finally been crossed. The wrong intervention now might displace the sequence of events that framed Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy. Traithe raged at his impaired powers; unlike his colleagues, he could not gauge the broad import of this crisis at a glance. The best he could offer was a gesture. ‘My bird will lead the straightest course toward Sethvir.’

The raven might have been a lifeline to salvation, for the relief that touched Arithon’s face. This, the governing officials of Etarra observed. They began to press Traithe’s back like wolves grown bold before weakness. Another moment, and the pack of them would turn as ungovernable as any mob in the streets.

‘Go,’ Traithe called. The raven arose, flapping. Air hissed across splayed feathers as it shot through the gap in the door. Arithon shouldered the panel closed, just as the foremost ranks of the guild masters broke in a rush to tear him down.

Crippled, Traithe was, but not powerless. As aggression crested around him, and elbows jostled him aside, he sensed to the second when the minds of the governor’s council became aligned in mass will to wreak violence. Traithe seized his opening through their passion. He attached an entanglement of energies and their intent to commit murder was bent aside and bridled as his warding snapped into the breach.

Shouts trailed off into quiet, cut by a sigh of rich cloth. The battering rush toward the doorway juddered to a slow fall forward as every man who wished harm to his prince folded at the knees and collapsed. No townsman at the end was left standing. Nestled in their crumpled brocades, lying across flattened hats and fur-trimmed cloaks, every official in Etarra’s high government settled where he lay, fast asleep.

Alone on his feet, one scarred, silver-haired mage regarded the rows of prostrate bodies, his heart aggrieved at too small a victory, won too late. The irony cut him, that but for Dakar’s infernal predictions concerning the Fellowship’s recovery, Arithon might now have returned here for sanctuary until the raven could summon Sethvir.

The downed councilmen snored on, oblivious.

‘May every last one of you be harrowed by nightmares for your ignorance!’ Traithe cursed in surly, sorrowful fervency. Then he straightened his wide- brimmed black hat and applied himself to the task of setting wards of guard over every door, every window, every closet and cranny in the chamber, that the ministers of Morfett’s council should stay mewed up until the course of the tragedy forecast by the strands could guarantee what hope could be salvaged for the ill-starred Black Rose Prophecy.

Lysaer closed his eyes as a third, fierce tingle played across his flesh. A still part of him analysed this, and concluded that Fellowship sorcerers must be seeking him through spellcraft. Heated elation followed. In uncanny certainty, he realized he was no longer quite what he had been; the pattern sought out by the sorcerers’ probe had ceased to match his personality. Once he should have felt alarmed by an insight more appropriate to a mage-taught perspective. Obsessed now by compulsion to serve justice, he never questioned what caused the deviation, or his odd self-knowledge of its existence.

The paradox passed unregarded, that he lurked like a fugitive in an alley, all for a promise to call his half-brother to task. To Lysaer, this moment, the urge to uncover any latent breach of faith became overridingly important.

Every quandary that tormented his conscience and broke his night’s rest with disturbed dreams had narrowed into sudden, lucent focus.

Lysaer gave a laugh in self-derision. He had fought so hard to give Arithon the benefit of the doubt that objectivity itself became obstructive. He shivered and sweated, berating his idealistic foolishness. He had only to question all along. For if Arithon was established as a liar, the ongoing weeks of heartsick recrimination might at one stroke become banished. Avar’s bastard as a proven criminal presented Lysaer with moral duty to defend the merchants and townsmen.

A resolution in favour of complaints he understood would be a frank relief.

‘I’ll find you,’ he swore to the shadows, Arithon’s name behind the vow. His tingling discomfort now replaced by fanatical resolve, he moved on.

Stray dogs that skulked across his path whined and shrank from his scent. When a braver bitch snarled and hounded his track, he dispatched a flick of light and stung her to yelping flight.

That cruelty to any animal would have been beyond him just minutes before never once crossed Lysaer’s mind. He picked his way over cracked paving and discarded bits of broken pottery and emerged from the alley into the brighter main thoroughfare.

People crowded the avenue, converging toward the square to attend the royal coronation. A sun-wrinkled farmwife stared at Lysaer’s emergence, chewing toothless gums as she leaned on a strapping, dark skinned grandson. Children darted past on both sides, tossing painted sticks in a throwing game that held careless regard for the neat clothing bestowed by their steadfast merchant parents. These, Arithon’s intended victims, Lysaer greeted courteously. He smiled at a cake vendor, and paused to help her boy push her cart across the gutter.

The servant in attendance at Morfett’s front doorway knew Lysaer by sight. Politely admitted inside, he asked and was granted leave to see himself to the guest suite on his own.

No sorcerer guarded the back stairwell: Luhaine’s wards were all faded. The room where Arithon quartered held only a still warmth of sunlight through latched, amber-tinged casements. Lysaer paused, breathing hard on the threshold. He surveyed the chamber more closely.

The callous character of its occupant stood revealed to casual inspection: in a king’s cloak left crumpled into the cushions of a divan, and the gift of a carbuncle scabbard spurned and abandoned on the floor.

Lysaer scowled, that the sacred trust of royal heritage should suffer such careless usage. Only the lyranthe lovingly couched on the windowseat gave testament to the heart of the man.

Urged by a pang so indistinct he could not fathom its origin, Lysaer crossed the echoing floor. By the time he reached the alcove, his feelings had fanned into rage. He shouted to the room’s empty corners, ‘Are Rathain’s people of less account than minstrelsy?’

Silence mocked him back. The silver strings sparkled sharp highlights, mute, but all the same promising dalliance.

Rathain’s prince would be reft from distractions; Etarra’s needs would be served. Lysaer reached out and struck the instrument a flying blow with his forearm.

Parchment-thin wood, spell-spun silver, all of Elshian’s irreplaceable craftwork sailed in an arc above the floor tiles. The belling dissonance of impact lost voice as the lyranthe’s sound-chamber smashed and each scattered splinter whispered separately to rest in a swathe of trammelled sunlight.

‘You cannot hide, pirate’s bastard,’ Lysaer vowed. Heat and chills racked his flesh as he spun, crunching over fragments, and burst back through the breached doorway.

The streets outside were packed by a crushing mob. Every tradesman and commoner turned out with their families now crowded toward the square before the council hall. Even a few white-hooded initiates pledged to Ath’s service had left their hospices in the wilds to attend. Lysaer let the flow of traffic carry him. He felt no remorse for his destruction of Arithon’s lyranthe; besieged by his drive to right injustice, he gave full rein to the ingrained gallantries of his upbringing. Lysaer touched shoulders and patted the cheeks of children, offered kind words to the plain-clad people in the streets. They stood aside for him, gave him way where the press was thickest and smiled at his lordly grace.

Rathain’s prince must be like him, they said; tall and fair-spoken and pledged to end the corruption in Etarra’s trade guilds and council.

Lysaer did not disabuse the people of their hope. The whispered turbulence of his thinking bent wholly inward as the untroubled faith of Etarra’s commonfolk caused him to measure his own failing. He too had allowed himself to be misled by the prince of Rathain; he, Amroth’s former heir, who had lost blood kin to s’Ffalenn wiles, should at least have stayed forewarned.

A touch upon his arm caused Lysaer to start. He glanced in polite forbearance at the matron with the basket of wrinkled apples who gave him a diffident smile. ‘Did you lose track of your folk, sir?’

‘Madam, no.’ Lysaer smiled. ‘I’m alone.’

Abashed by his extreme good looks, the woman gave a little shrug. ‘Well, even by yourself, sir, you’d get a better view from the galleries.’ She raised a chapped hand from her knot-worked shawl and pointed.

Lysaer squinted against sunlight so pure it seemed to scour the air with its clarity. From his vantage at the edge of the square, the balconies of the guild ministers’ mansions arose in tiers above street level. Their wood and wrought-iron railings striped shadow over a singing knot of cordwainers who boisterously shared a skin of spirits. As their least tone-deaf ringleader paused to take his swig, their ditty drifted cheerfully off-key. ‘I have no invitation,’ Lysaer said above the noise. ‘And anyway, by now the best places are all spoken for.’

‘Well, that may be.’ Made bold by his friendliness, the matron gave him swift appraisal. ‘But I’ve a cousin who has lodging at the front of the square. At my asking a bit of space could be found.’

Lysaer did not ask if the cousin perhaps had a marriageable daughter and fond hopes to attract a wealthy suitor. Neither did he accept on false grounds as he clasped the woman’s wrist and kissed her palm. ‘You’re most kind.’

The dreams and the lives of just such honest folk were the first things Arithon’s machinations would tear asunder.

Lysaer gently captured the matron’s basket. ‘Let me. Any burden must hamper you terribly in this press.’

‘Not so much.’ But her fingers surrendered the wicker handle. Won to trust by his sincerity, the matron took his arm. ‘Come on. Hurry or we’ll miss the procession.’

Minutes later, squeezed between the granddaughters of a furniture maker and three strapping cousins who wore guild badges as vintners, Lysaer took the place he was offered.

From a third-storey gallery accessed by an outdoor stairway, he gazed over the square’s gathered thousands which eddied below like currents pressed counter by fickle winds. The jewelled and feathered finery of the rich mixed uneasily with poorer fare, common labourers and beggars still clad in their jetsam of motley. Angry, outraged, curious or joyful, the factions mingled uneasily. Etarra had turned out for Arithon’s coronation in a welcome well leavened by enmity.

The atmosphere on the gallery where Lysaer came to roost was festive. The lads had been staked a cask by their master, and wine was freely passed around. The sharpness of red grapes mingled with the sweeter scent shed by apples doled out to the children.

Courteous but aloof, Lysaer smiled and offered compliments when the inevitable pretty daughter was presented. After that, though the girl in her neat paint and layered silk dresses shot him admiring glances filled with hope, he spared her little attention as he engaged in a predatory survey of the crowd.

Her little sister was more forthright.

She toddled forward and plucked at his rich sleeve. With her dimpled chin dribbled with apple juice, she demanded, ‘Who are you looking for?’

Behind her, older cousins were whispering, ‘It’s him. The very one who’s companion to the prince. Nobody else in Etarra wears indigo velvet like that.’

The child with her fruit sticky hands was pulled back to allow the exalted guest space.

Lysaer gave the family who hosted him scant notice as his gaze caught and fixed on an anomaly: above the sunwashed square with its heaving, raucous throng, a raven flapped, deep as shadow against the cloudless brilliance of the sky.

Heat and cold flashed through Lysaer, and a tremor coursed his flesh. Then the bird, sure harbinger of Traithe and the doings of the Fellowship, the next heartbeat ceased utterly to matter.

Beneath the raven’s flight path, a lone man shoved through the press.

Lysaer noted details in preternatural clarity. The fugitive had shirt cuffs worked in ribbons of green, silver and black and edged with bands of leopard fur. A plain cloak thrown on to conceal a heraldic tabard had been torn, and threadwork glistened through the holes. The royal blazon might not show, but in his haste Arithon s’Ffalenn had neglected the circlet of inheritance that even now crossed his brow.

The face beneath was taut with a desperation that touched Lysaer to stark anger. ‘He’s running away!’ he murmured incredulously. ‘Breaking his commitment to the realm.’

‘Who’s running away?’ cried the vintner’s drayman, full of red wine and brash fight.

Heat and cold and chills merged into scalding resentment. ‘Your prince,’ Lysaer snapped back. ‘The truth must be told. Your promised Teir’s’Ffalenn is a criminal and a pirate’s bastard, raised and corrupted by sorcerers.’

The youngest children were staring, their half-gnawed apples in their hands. To Lysaer, the innocence in their faces reflected a whole city’s deluded defencelessness.

Something inside of him snapped.

‘Get the little ones inside, they’re not safe here!’ His command was instinctive, and charged with a regal prerogative that none on the balcony dared gainsay. A grandfather helped the house matron bundle her young through a side door.

The confused wails of the children, the scrape of a door bolt, the sudden cringing deference shown by family members still left on the gallery made no impression upon Lysaer. From his unobstructed place at the rail, he drew himself up to full height. Delineated by a nimbus of sunlight, his hair gleamed bright gold and his presence seemed charged with righteous wrath as any angel sent from Athlieria to scour the land of bleak evil.

Lysaer raised his hand and singled out the slight, dishevelled fugitive that elbowed and shoved to escape the square, then lifted his voice in a thunderous shout.

‘People of Etarra, behold the prince you would crown king and hear truth! Your lands have been restored to fair sunlight, yet one lives who can wield darkness more dire than any mist! Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn is full Master of Shadow, a sorcerer who would succour barbarians and waste your fine city to ashes!’

The roar of the multitude overwhelmed any further accusation; but the velvet-clad figure on the balcony drew notice. People thronging the great square stopped and tipped their faces up to stare. Lysaer’s pointing finger and the circling flight of Traithe’s raven drew notice to the other figure in that strange, partnered tableau.

Arrested in mid-flight by the grasp of two stolid merchants, Arithon cast a fraught glance at the bird.

To Lysaer, watching, the gesture affirmed s’Ffalenn guilt. A prince who was innocent of machinations would never count a dumb beast above his subjects or his own threatened fate. Jolted to savage antagonism; unaware he was the manipulated instrument of Desh-thiere’s fugitive wraith, Lysaer raised rigid hands to call his gift…

Buffeted by the crowd that streamed through a side-street, an illusion cast over his person that lent him the semblance of somebody’s benevolent grandfather, Asandir ceaselessly scanned the grand square. Then an odd flare of light drew his eye to the rail of a nondescript balcony. ‘There!’ he whispered, his word too quiet to be overheard. His thoughts framed the image he saw: of Lysaer, poised in an unmistakable effort to summon light.

Although nowhere near the tumultuous scene by the council hall, Sethvir picked up the communication. He could do nothing, embroiled as he was in his own difficulties. His head cocked, one hand braced against the doors of the south gate wardroom, the Warden of Althain sent back acknowledgement. Under his palm stout planking shuddered and bounced, assaulted from without by a ramming squad under Diegan’s acting captain. Ordered to disrupt the coronation, Gnudsog had pulled every sentry from the gatehouse with intent to breach the sealed armoury. Busied with stayspells and bindings to withhold more weapons from the chaos in the streets, Sethvir had no chance to express relief.

Quartering the city mobs for Lysaer had been worse than seeking a needle in a haystack. Where steel and straw could at least be winnowed separate by Name, the wraith that Desh-thiere had insinuated into the matrix of Lysaer’s spirit posed a quandary. Without means to command its true essence, no stop-gap spell of transfer could rescue the possessed victim from his stance of attack upon the balcony.

Sorrow and grief the strands foretold, were the Fellowship to stand restored to Seven; but with a second, unanticipated forecast entangled on top of the first, the validity of Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy stood threatened. Caught in the critical crux, the Fellowship raged with tied hands. They dared use no power to divert, but could only inadequately observe the blow as inevitably, it must fall.

‘We can’t even shift Arithon to safety,’ chimed in a sending from Luhaine, who tracked the s’Ffalenn prince’s progress on the outside chance that the coronation might yet be salvaged. ‘Two interfering merchants have grabbed hold of him.’

From his stance on the street side, Asandir loosed one of Dakar’s randiest oaths; an offended mother glared in his direction and scooped her toddler beyond earshot.

On the balcony above the crowd, Lysaer’s hands bunched to fists. A crack split the air and light flared raw brilliance across the sky.

‘No!’ Arithon’s horrified cry tangled with Lysaer’s scream of triumph. The Shadow Master under attack tore his forearm out of a man’s grip, twisted and thrust up his sword.

Silver-white light flared in a starburst that dazzled and blinded: Alithiel’s Paravian-wrought protections sheared out a chord of pure heart-break, sure proof the defending cause was just. Asandir saw, and despaired.

The light-bolt that speared from the balcony was wholly the work of Desh-thiere’s vengeance and the wraith that now fully possessed Lysaer.

Arcane energies collided in wrenching dissonance high over Arithon’s head. He thrashed, but despite a madman’s contortions failed to evade the vigilantes who tackled him across shoulders and knees. His sword arm was seized and torn downward.

That he might have turned his blade and cut to kill never seemed to occur to him; as if the only peril that held meaning lay in Lysaer’s unprovoked assault.

Asandir’s hand was forced, the full might of his protections engaged to shield helpless bystanders from harm. He cursed fate, agonized that Dakar’s new vision had upset the strands’ forecast and precipitated crisis too soon. No coronation could take place now. On every side of the square, people were screaming, flash-blinded and whipped to stampede in raw terror that their city was being savaged by sorcery.

As light-bolt and sword-flash sheeted through the maze of his own conjury, Asandir mourned that Alithiel’s bright magic would offer Arithon no shred of defence. The spells of Riathan Paravians were never wrought to take life, but only to dazzle an opponent, and divert or deflect unjust attack.

Lysaer’s was full command of light; his sight would be unimpaired by a ward that flashed just to blind.

The revenge engendered by Desh-thiere’s possession arced on toward its targeted victim.

Isolate from the ward-light that shielded the chance-caught bystanders, Arithon yanked a wrist clear of encumbrance. He no longer held his sword. Only shadow cracked from his spread fingers: for defence of Traithe’s raven, Asandir saw in split-second, grief-sharp perception.

Uncaring who noticed, the sorcerer wept as Desh-thiere’s offensive hammered down.

The bolt struck Arithon’s raised palm and snaked in a half-twist down his forearm. Scalded flesh recoiled in agony. Worse horror bloomed upon impact, as conjury well beyond Lysaer’s means burst from his killing band of light.

Arithon screamed.

Red lightnings jagged over his body. The merchants who struggled to bear him down were tossed away like ragdolls, leaving the Shadow Master a figure alone, strung through and threshed by patterns like tangled wire.

Asandir gasped in sick shock. The inconceivable had happened: Desh-thiere’s wraith had delivered a banespell against the half-brother beyond reach of possession. Transferred by Lysaer’s bolt of light, the evil mesh of its geas entangled in Arithon’s aura.

Thunder pealed. For a heartbeat the packed square was rinsed scarlet, a tableau borrowed from nightmare. As Desh-thiere’s curse claimed its foothold, Arithon’s expression shifted from resistance and pain to a hatred that abjured all redemption. In purest, bloody-hearted passion, he howled and wrought shadow in answer to Lysaer’s betrayal.

The air stung under a savage bite of frost and darkness slammed over Etarra.

Night swallowed all without distinction, from Traithe’s raven that yet flew unharmed on its faithful straight course for Sethvir, to four vigilante merchants exposed to the backwash of murdering force shed from the Shadow Master’s person. Cut down in sudden death, they lay twitching and seared amid smouldering brocades. Citizens scattered in fear from a carnage past the grasp of sane experience.

Blackness dropped also like a curtain over the most ill-starred victim of them all, the s’Ilessid prince enslaved and ruined by the usage of Desh-thiere’s loose wraith. Emptied by the powers that had driven him, Lysaer folded at the knees and collapsed against the gallery rail.

A last peal of thunder rattled the mansions that edged the square and boomed off the scarps of the Mathorns.

‘Now,’ Sethvir sent in sorrow. ‘The cusp that rules the prophecy has passed. We can try to heal the smashed pieces.’

Backlash

The armoury that adjoined the south gate wardroom became the Fellowship’s site to regroup after Desh-thiere’s machinations struck the half-brothers. Sethvir by then had secured the stout doors to both chambers. Ongoing assault from the outer bailey by Gnudsog’s squad of besiegers became reduced to muffled thunder by thick oak. Should the sheared-off lamp-posts pressed into service as rams at length splinter down the braced panels, enchantments would remain that none but the mage-trained might cross.

Inside, ill-lit by a single torch, oil and leather and the staleness of old sweat sullied the air with the leftover grimness of past wars. Dust from dryrotted fletchings filmed the floors, smeared by tracks left from Sethvir’s pacing and other marks scoured by the arbalists and pitch barrels he had dragged to clear space between the close-stacked stores.

After, his robe like old blood in the dimness, Sethvir stilled. As if, overcome by reverie, he had forgotten to move between steps. In contrary fact, his appearance masked a concentration so keen, nothing alive could escape him. Beyond distraction from the ram’s thudding impacts, he unreeled his awareness beyond keep walls to measure the pulse of all Etarra.

Like individual currents in a cataract, he sensed the mobs that rampaged through streets battened black under shadow; restive city guardsmen who formed bands and drew steel to skewer any sorcerer they could search out and harry to final reckoning. Sethvir knew families mewed up in locked houses; he touched the spilled blood of the innocent, heard the cries of the raped, knew the rage and despair of the looted. Need left scant space for grief. He could set only small seals of peace.

The effects were infinitesimal: amid dusty cobwebs in a wine-cellar, an infant hidden by its parents ceased its hysterical crying. Three huddled siblings quieted in relief, their terror of the dark given surcease; while in the air high above Traithe’s raven was rescued from blind circling and guided through black sky to safe roost. Yet of thousands of woes the Warden of Althain encountered, he eased but a very few. His greater reserves of necessity stayed poised, as, stone-patient, he scanned the welter of Etarra’s disgruntled humanity, inset with the odd pool of calm that was Traithe’s spell of ward upon the governing officials, asleep and barred inside their council hall.

Sethvir might have found humour in their predicament, had the signal he awaited not chosen that moment to manifest.

‘Reach,’ the Warden of Althain responded.

On a balcony in the darkened main square, Asandir acknowledged, then stepped into a net of forces held ready to receive him. His foot left the platform of a gallery redolent with spilled wineskins and bruised apples, passed through a nexus of spatial distortion and came down in dust and steel filings on the floor of the south keep armoury.

Sethvir stepped clear as the shadows cast by the weaponracks rearranged to embrace his colleague’s tall form. In his arms, Asandir cradled Lysaer s’Ilessid, unconscious. One jewelled, silk-clad wrist dangled down, and hair fanned gold strands across the shoulder of the sorcerer’s dark robe.

Clear-cut as a cameo, the prince’s profile reflected the inborn nobility of his lineage; no shadow showed of the evil that had blighted life and honour. Unwitting pawn of ill circumstance, Lysaer had yet to waken and feel the change that disbarred him from royal inheritance.

Sethvir avoided Asandir’s eyes, which were steel-bleak. The hands, too fierce in their grip, that crinkled fine lace and blue tinsel; his stance, forced and graceless from the sorrows unspoken between them: that after today’s unconscionable sacrifice, the s’Ffalenn coronation had not happened.

The result did not bear mention, that the precarious Black Rose Prophecy, which keyed Davien the Betrayer’s repentance and the return of Ciladis the Lost, should be left unresolved and in jeopardy.

Desh-thiere had been allowed its ugly vengeance, yet the reunification of their Fellowship they had traded Athera’s peace to guarantee had escaped its conditional link to the future. The drum-boom of the siege-ram allowed no space for regret, that every atrocity that swept Etarra’s streets might have been set loose in vain.

‘Lay him there.’ The Warden of Althain indicated the weathered canvas litter he had braced off chill flooring with upended casks of catapult shot. Asandir shed his burden and knelt to rearrange blue velvets before they became napped with grime and oil.

‘You cannot blame yourself,’ Sethvir said quickly. He did not add empty platitudes, that Arithon might one day rise beyond the day’s betrayals and change heart to embrace his inheritance; that Rathain’s mismanagements and hatreds, now vastly worsened, could somehow be healed without scars.

Left bleak and empty-handed, Asandir slipped his dark cloak and covered the fair-haired prince still left in their charge. Soft as a fall of shadow, heavy wool veiled the glitter of rich threadwork that proved Lysaer still breathed. ‘We were remiss not to look for possession,’ Asandir said finally.

‘Across time?’ Sethvir closed his eyes, savaged by awareness that continued to span the warp through weft weave of reactions that marked a city’s plunge into turmoil. The strain did not just leave him vague; today, he looked whitely haggard. ‘Had we Name for the one wraith responsible, we might have unriddled its intent. But prevent? The conflict etched by the strands has not altered. And Arithon is in retreat, not dead.’

Which was close as he could bear to come to pleading faith in a major miracle.

In answer to unvoiced forebodings, the torch-flame streamed in its bracket, then extinguished as Luhaine’s presence unfurled with untoward violence in the armoury. ‘I’ve lost him,’ he announced in reference to Arithon. The ongoing thud of the rams clipped his words as he added, ‘I managed to track him across the square but his life-pattern’s drifted severely. I mislike the evidence, that Desh-thiere’s wraith wrought black sorcery whose taint has afflicted both half-brothers.’

‘It’s accomplished more than possession, we’ve confirmed.’ Sethvir’s admission came tired as he joined Asandir beside the litter and cradled both hands under Lysaer’s head.

‘But not what,’ Luhaine fired back.

‘Let Cal work and he’ll tell you.’ That Asandir used Sethvir’s ancient and all but forgotten mortal Name laid bare the depth of his distress.

Luhaine disregarded the lapse. ‘No one of us can afford to stand idle while you check!’ He departed in a whip-snap of wind more Kharadmon’s style than his own.

Fibres of dry-rotted fletching spiralled away on the draft, faintly visible to mage-sight against a chiaroscuro of dark.

‘It’s bad,’ Asandir concluded softly. ‘How bad?’

‘Ah, the unsuspected craftiness of the creature.’ Sethvir’s voice seemed blurred to distraction as his awareness realigned with his flesh. ‘Desh-thiere’s plot has been deviously thorough.’ He sighed and smoothed the ruched laces of Lysaer’s formal collar. ‘It understood that its bane was comprised of paired strength. What better protection than to sunder our princes through hatred and set their gifted talents against each other?’

‘It cursed them to enmity, so.’ That implied long-range planning, a chilling fact. Asandir shared Sethvir’s unsettled wariness, that the wraiths left under ward at Skelseng’s Gate were far from secure as they stood.

But that complication must wait.

‘What else?’ Asandir prompted gently.

Abject in misery, Sethvir released his findings.

Not surprisingly, the Mistwraith’s malice had begun that night when the half-brothers had been cornered outside of Paravian protections at Ithamon. Cognizant of them as its enemy, Desh-thiere had imprinted their personalities then. The Fellowship’s night-long search to uncover damages in the aftermath had been wasted effort: the wraiths had done no meddling, not then.

In shock and raw pain Asandir voiced the appalling conclusion. ‘Desh-thiere had already encompassed the scope of Arithon’s training in that first split-second of contact!’

Fenced by battered racks of weapons, the Warden of Althain propped his forehead on laced knuckles. ‘Worse.’ His words fell deadened against his sleeves. ‘The wraiths withheld from action, brooding upon what they had learned.’ And then when language failed him, he set his ugly findings into thought. Deep damage had not occurred until Lysaer’s barehanded, heroic exposure, in the throes of the last struggle to confine the entities at Ithamon. New knowledge reshaped the decision to shield Arithon’s learning to a tragedy of broader proportions.

‘Our protections were wrongly aligned,’ Asandir whispered, anguished. ‘We sought harm too soon and protected craft teachings too late.’ Woe to Lysaer, his integrity left ruthlessly forfeit to an enemy that took him defenceless. The irony wounded, that Arithon’s schooled protections might have deflected the attack; or at least sensed the presence of an invading wraith before it could move to possess. ‘Dharkaron damn us for fools, we threw the wrong prince into jeopardy.’

Too late, in hindsight, to reverse a choice miscalled through crisis and desperation. Sethvir closed dry, chapped fingers over his colleague’s wrist. ‘Without Desh-thiere’s true Name we were blinded. And still are.’ Gently, despondently, he clarified: that a stolen memory from Lysaer’s trials in the Red Desert had offered foothold for Desh-thiere’s revenge; when, for the sake of survival, Arithon had once resorted to magecraft to break the recalcitrance of a half-brother whose hatred eclipsed hope of reason.

‘The Mistwraith seized upon discord, then borrowed deeper knowledge from the bindings Kharadmon attached to Lysaer’s consent on Kieling Tower,’ Sethvir said. ‘The spell-curse just cast interlinks with the half-brothers’ life-force. To dissolve or countermand its hold would separate spirit from flesh.’

‘Death,’ Asandir mused bitterly. His remorse did not lighten, for past mistakes. While the Mistwraith’s entities encompassed such grasp of the mysteries, the Fellowship and two princes from Dascen Elur had achieved no small feat to bind and confine all but one. There remained the unresolved menace of Lysaer’s possession and an entity that must of necessity be exorcised now.

‘Are you ready?’ Sethvir asked. Though the eyes of his colleague mirrored trepidation, the two sorcerers took position across the makeshift pallet and placed hands upon the prince’s brow and chest. Around them, the gleam of a thousand weapons lay quenched in darkness, kept keen for blooding mortal flesh. Yet against a phantom entity, steel offered only brute ending; the sharp, final agony of the mercy stroke that exchanged live suffering for the grave.

Cruel comfort. Asandir snatched a shaky breath. ‘You know, if we fail, we’ll have to kill him.’

Sethvir chose not to answer. At some point the shivering boom of the ram had stopped. Deep quiet spread over the armoury until a sorcerer’s profound concentration could pick out the sigh of each settling dust-mote. Aimless air stroked the blades in their racks and rang from them tone that sang of death. Distanced from such distractions, Sethvir stilled into trance. His awareness merged into Lysaer’s to ferret out the elusive energies which comprised the enemy wraith.

No simple exorcism, this delicate unravelling of spirits, since the entity they sought to extricate stayed unNamed.

To Asandir fell the task of safeguard. Submersed in Sethvir’s labours, he paced a hunt through the complex, interlocking auras that comprised Lysaer’s spirit. Like inventory, each strand and loop and whorl of light became mapped; those that belonged to s’Ilessid were set under ward by Asandir. Any that felt alien, Sethvir marked aside. The nuances of identity were perilous, slight; in some cases outside logic or intuition. A wrong choice would cause a fragment of the victim to splinter off, an amputation of the soul more permanent than the most devastating bodily mutilation. Yet without Name to compel the invasive spirit out of its entrenched possession, the Fellowship had no other recourse. The risk of error widened with the taint of the spell-curse that bound the half-brothers into enmity. Firsthand, Asandir was forced to share the anguish of Sethvir’s prior assessment. For the hatred instilled into Lysaer for his half-brother was so thoroughly intermeshed with his life-force that it defeated outside help to unravel. The geas to take down Arithon both was and was not a part of the s’Ilessid prince’s essence. To miscall just one twist of its bindings would be to condemn Lysaer to death.

Sweating, frustrated, intermeshed in life-threads complex enough to fray reason to the bittermost edge of bewilderment, Asandir grasped why Sethvir had met his last statement with silence.

More likely their attempted exorcism would go awry and kill the victim, than any aspect of an unnamed wraith be left at large to require an execution.

Time lost meaning. The paired sorcerers submerged in the immensity of their task made countless agonized choices. Near the end, in ragged exhaustion, they examined their respective progress.

The patterns that comprised the known wraith were layered too thinly to be credible.

‘That can’t be all of it,’ Sethvir sent in ringing despair. ‘Where in Ath’s name can it be hiding?’

They began afresh, untangled Lysaer’s memories strand for strand. Some rang false; far too few. The wraith’s entirety yet escaped them. Sick with trepidation, Asandir said, ‘We had better re-examine what was artificial at the outset.’

Sethvir’s grief came back barbed with white anger. That Desh-thiere’s aspect might attach its possession to the given gift of the s’Ilessid royal line was unthinkable. And yet, there it was: the rest of its meddling essence enmeshed so subtly with Fellowship sorcery that their own review had missed it out.

‘Dharkaron, Angel of Vengeance!’ Sethvir all but wept. ‘No wonder the ill creature had him! It gained entry through the one avenue of conscience he was spell-charged never to question!’ The fault and the weakness were never Lysaer’s but the Fellowship’s own, for sorrowful lack of foresight.

That moment a key rattled in the outside lock to the wardroom. Gnudsog’s bass shout cut off on somebody’s testy command, this followed by a mortal yelp of pain.

Dakar said, his diction slurred and quarrelsome, ‘Well, I warned you there’d be wards. Let me.’

Sethvir sighed. ‘Company. We had better finish this quickly.’

The rush sat poorly with Asandir. But if the panic driven bloodshed in Etarra’s streets was to be curbed, Lysaer’s talents would be needed to dissolve Arithon’s barrier of shadows. Crisis allowed no time to triple-check steps that at best were uncertain business anyway. Asandir steadied the defences set to shelter Lysaer’s spirit. Then, braced as if for a cataclysm, he said, ‘Go.’

Sethvir unleashed counter-bindings like a trap over the parasitic wraith. Light crackled over Lysaer’s body. A convoluted mesh traced like fire upon the air, reflected in swordsteel and polearms. Asandir felt a burn of force tear against his wards as the wraith interlaced through its victim’s being thrashed to maintain its hold. The pull increased, terrible as the tug of a rip-tide or the wrench of barbed grapples from seasoned oak. Asandir resisted. To lose grasp on even one strand of the pattern was to cede a bit of Lysaer with the wraith.

Sethvir’s draw spells sharpened. Stress-points flared cold blue, and the lines over Lysaer’s body blurred and spiked where they dragged one against another like entangled wires pried to separation.

The wraith clung, obdurate.

Sorcery peaked to compensate. On the litter, Lysaer spasmed taut. The pain of the forced unbinding cut even through unconsciousness and a harrowing wail tore from him.

The cry as well had been Asandir’s, for the prince’s torment became shared. No resource could be spared for small healing, absorbed as the sorcerer was in holding spirit united with flesh. Even as powers twisted and flashed at his directive, he could not shed the feeling that this exorcism was going too hard. As if the wraith had sunk fangs into some part of Lysaer, it seemed intent upon ripping him asunder rather than relinquish its possession.

And then on the heels of that uncertainty, the wraith came unravelled from Lysaer’s being so abruptly that recoil hit like a slap. Spellcraft sheared last connections and pinned the creature down in mid-air. For good or ill the deed was done. The trapped wraith froze, burning in malice like a marsh candle; the freed man lay dazed senseless on the litter. The sorcerers braced at his side regarded each other, beaten and drained from their labours. Between them passed understanding: that cost had been set upon this unbinding. The s’Ilessid gift of true justice, bent to ill usage by the wraith, had suffered untold further damage.

Asandir ventured hoarsely, ‘The curse that sets Lysaer against Arithon had sullied the s’Ilessid gift in any case.’

Hunched with his chin on clasped knuckles, Sethvir sighed. They dared correct nothing now. Not without risk of disturbing Desh-thiere’s binding and chancing the s’Ilessid prince’s life. ‘There’s always the next generation,’ he said sadly. ‘The wraith, at least, is defeated.’

The barest hitch to Sethvir’s statement snapped Asandir to keen scrutiny. The Warden of Althain avoided contact, his mind held shuttered and dark. His eyes stayed stubbornly averted. Asandir said, ‘There’s more. You’ve got Name for the ill-starred being, haven’t you?’

Now Sethvir did look up, bleak as ice on spring blossoms in the sickly glimmer shed by the wraith. ‘Once, the creature was human.’

Stunned by cascading implications, scraped raw by a forced reassessment of the countless doomed spirits imprisoned under wards at Skelseng’s Gate, Asandir lost speech. Dread burdened him, as each wraith’s disfigured humanity set his Fellowship too bleak a quandary. A sorcerer’s judgement was not Ath’s authority, to trap unconsenting spirits in a limbo of indefinite imprisonment. Neither could the riddle of Desh-thiere’s nature be unwound to free those damned thousands, until the Fellowship stood at full strength, their number restored back to Seven.

All and more swung in pivot upon one chancy cipher: the life of the last s’Ffalenn prince.

As Sethvir and Asandir shared this final, most vivid disclosure compounded of miscalculated risks and urgency, immediate troubles returned to roost.

The bar on the armoury door clanged up. A stay-spell flared dead and steel hinges wailed open as, bemoaning a headache in a carping counterpoint, Dakar pitched sideways into the breach. The shoulder that hit against the lintel was all that kept him upright.

‘It’s dark!’ Diegan’s complaint shivered the still air with echoes. ‘Dharkaron take your drunken whimsy, I heard no screams. Nobody’s in here.’

‘Oh yes.’ Dakar launched off and rocked two tipsy steps across the threshold. ‘They’re here. Trust me. Sethvir just forgets to light candles.’

Suspicious, still bristling from the force required to stand down Gnudsog and his squad at the ram, Diegan sniffed. An acridity like cinders yet lingered, as if a torch had gone out not long since.

‘There.’ Dakar swayed on braced feet, forgetful that darkness masked the area where he pointed.

The space proved not to be empty. Clipped and grainily hoarse, Asandir said in ghostly rebuke, ‘You call this keeping Etarra’s captain of the guard under house-arrest?’

Diegan nearly started out of his jewelled doublet.

Dakar lost his balance and sat. ‘The wine,’ he admitted on the tail of a soulful grunt. ‘We drank both flagons, and Diegan pleaded. Where’s Lysaer?’ Then, as muddled wits or his eyesight recovered, he noticed the nearly subliminal glow fixed under ward before Sethvir. Dakar squinted, identified the configurations for a seal of imprisonment and inside, a whirling, twisted light that made his stomach heave. Not the after-effect of indulgence, this sickness, nor the clench of impending prophecy: his nausea stemmed instead from reaction to something warped outside of nature.

Dakar’s stupor cleared. ‘You knew!’ he accused.

Asandir’s correction was instant. ‘Suspected. Without command of Name we had no means to foresee how Desh-thiere’s harm would choose to manifest. And with your second bout of prophecy made in conflict with the first, we had no clear path to choose.’

‘I don’t even know my second prophecy.’ Deflected by personal injury, Dakar looked down as if to make sure of the floor. That led him to cast about for something solid to lean on, until sight of Lysaer on the pallet refuelled his disrupted train of enquiry. ‘So you did nothing,’ he berated his Fellowship masters, and rage bled away into a sorry, drunken grizzle. ‘Ah, Ath, like us all, Lysaer trusted you.’

Through the cracked-open panels of two siege-doors beat the roar of an enraged populace, cut across by Gnudsog’s bellowed orders. Words carried faintly, reviling mages and royalty. The rabble had begun to chant.

Against that backdrop of ugliness, Diegan confronted the two sorcerers. ‘So, will you also do nothing now?’

Sethvir arose. At his wave, flames burst afresh from the torch stub. Hot light flooded across the armoury, snagged to sparks on the metal filings scattered in swathes from the sharpening wheel; on the racked gleam of blades that soon would run dull with new blood; and on the amethysts and diamonds sewn on Diegan’s doublet, which jerked to his passionate breaths.

Mild as sunfaded velvet before the whetted weapons that ringed him round, the Warden of Althain blinked. ‘Do you wish our help?’

‘I wish Dharkaron’s curse upon you all, never more fervently than now!’ Diegan shoved briskly forward; bullion fringes snapped at his boot cuffs as he stopped and stared down at Lysaer. ‘What have you done to him? Killed him? Because he spoke out against your prince?’

‘They wouldn’t harm him,’ Dakar interrupted. ‘Lysaer’s gift of light will be needed to lift off Arithon’s blight of shadows.’

‘So, it’s true!’ Diegan’s black eyes flicked from Sethvir to Asandir. ‘The king you tried to foist on us is one of you, a sorcerer born and trained. You forced our governors to stand down, on threat of riots. Well, we have them now regardless. Guild houses are afire. The minister’s palace and governor’s hall are being stormed this moment by the rabble.’

To every appearance unruffled by Diegan’s accusations, Sethvir fingered his beard. Of Lysaer he said to his colleague, ‘I do regret releasing him before we know Arithon’s fate.’

‘We don’t have any choice.’ Asandir set his hands upon the blond head of the prince on the litter and engaged a gentle call to wake. Sethvir’s appalling disclosure of one wraith’s botched humanity had overturned every priority. The disposition of Desh-thiere to safer captivity at Rockfell perforce must take precedence, and Etarra survive its own course. The Lord Governor’s standing had been undermined past the point where his authority could be salvaged. Lysaer alone could burn off Arithon’s stranglehold of shadows and stop the spread of panic and misdirected bloodshed; even if afterward Desh-thiere’s curse would drive him to turn the city garrison as a weapon against his half-brother.

The strands, after all, had converged in this forecast of war.

‘You shall have what you asked for.’ Asandir met Diegan’s rancour with a calm made terrible by perception. ‘Battle, misunderstanding and a cause to perpetuate bitter hatred.’

Under his ministrations, Lysaer stirred and moaned.

Diegan knelt quickly and shook the s’Ilessid prince’s arm. ‘Are you all right? Friend, did they hurt you?’

Lysaer opened his eyes. He looked lost for a moment. Then he turned his head, frowned, and focused clearly upon Asandir.’ Ath forgive me,’ he whispered. ‘I had a nightmare. Or is it true, that I smashed Elshian’s lyranthe?’

Asandir all but flinched; his glance of inquiry hardened to misery as, from the sidelines, Sethvir gave sad affirmation.

Pity roughened his words as he said, ‘Whatever you recall was no dream. Etarra has been driven to riot. Since your actions have discredited Rathain’s prince, your talents are needed immediately to restore the city to order.’

Only then did the grinding noise of the mob reach Lysaer’s notice. He sat up, saw Diegan, then flushed as other memories flooded back. ‘Arithon. Whatever I said, he’s caused mayhem, set shadows and terror in the streets.’ Then, his inflection so changed that it jarred, he added, ‘Where is he?’

‘You speak of your half-brother,’ Sethvir rebuked, hoping against chance to shock back some buried spark of conscience.

But Desh-thiere’s curse had imbedded irrevocably deep, and old malice resurfaced in force. ‘He’s bastard-born, and no relation of mine.’

‘Ill-feeling cannot alter fact, Teir’s’Ilessid,’ Asandir cracked back. ‘You go to spill a kinsman’s blood.’

Lysaer was unmoved. ‘I go to redress an injustice. Mark this. When I find your lying get of a s’Ffalenn pirate, I’ll see him dead and thrown in pieces to the headhunters’ pack of tracking dogs!’

‘Then we have no more to say.’ Asandir arose, cold to his core. He stepped over Dakar, who drowsed in an inebriated heap.

Lord Diegan, commander of Etarra’s garrison was first to move toward the door the sorcerer swung open. Tight-lipped in vindication, he said to Lysaer, ‘I admire your ambition. But first, my friend, we have to hunt down this prince of shadows.’

‘He’s prince of nothing! And finding him should be simple.’ Lysaer matched step beside the elegant Lord Commander. Urgently speaking, he departed without a backward glance.

From the wardroom, Lord Diegan’s shout cast back echoes. ‘Gnudsog! Forget about the spare arms. Assemble a patrol double-quick! Dispatch them to the warehouse district to scour the alleys. If fortune favours, the Master of Shadows will be there. Hustle, and we’ll take him in the act of freeing convicts!’

The wardroom doors boomed closed. Shut off from the din in the streets, a contrary draught eddied between bowstaves and halberds and showered red sparks from the torchflame. Left amid crawling shadows and the slow-falling dust of the armoury, Asandir sat on a shot cask. The glance he cast after the vagrant breeze was balefully focused and grim. ‘Arithon’s been and gone from the warehouse quarter, I trust.’

Luhaine’s staid tones answered. ‘I couldn’t be sure. The child convicts were released within the hour. The locksmith and the waggoners hired to free them were paid off with gold acquired from pawning a crown emerald. The gem took some trouble to recover.’

‘The children?’ Sethvir cut in. For a fast check into the district had revealed the same wagons overturned by the fury of the mob.

‘Dispersed. They’ll hide like rabbits, then bolt for open country as they can.’ Luhaine resumed his report. ‘Arithon’s horse is gone from the stables. A half-canister of the narcotic herb tienelle was taken from Sethvir’s saddle-packs.’

The Warden of Althain brightened. ‘Let Arithon keep it. He’s not unschooled in its use, and against Etarra’s armed garrison he’s going to need every advantage.’

‘So I thought, also.’ Luhaine paused. ‘I contacted Kharadmon.’

‘To reverse the storm?’ Sethvir sucked in his cheeks to stifle a harried, madcap smile. ‘But that’s brilliant! If Diegan’s going to roust out the garrison, let his search-parties rust their gear to a fare-thee-well in a cold northeasterly downpour.’ Next moment, his expression distanced into self-satisfied relief. ‘Bless Ath, he’s shown sense.’

‘Arithon?’ Asandir cut in. ‘You found him?’

No small bit irked, Luhaine said, ‘How? Where?’

Long used to untwisting the myriad affairs of five kingdoms, the Warden of Althain tugged out a tangle he found in his beard. ‘There’s but one dun mare in this region with a white splash marked on her neck.’ Then, in delight undimmed by the reproof of expectant colleagues, he answered the original question. ‘She’s past the main gate, and driving at speed down the north road. Which means Arithon eventually must ride into the patrols of Steiven, regent of Rathain.’

‘That’s no good news,’ Dakar grumbled from his pose of flat-out prostration.

Luhaine was swift in agreement. ‘Steiven has just one ambition, and that’s to collect every Etarran guildmaster’s severed head.’

Sethvir threw up his hands. ‘Bloody war’s a fine sight better than the s’Ffalenn royal line cut dead by a sword in an alley!’ He subsided in belated recollection that Luhaine was yet uninformed; the renewed priorities forced on them by the Mistwraith’s warped ties to humanity had yet to realign his opinion.

While Asandir in tart chastisement jabbed a toe in the ribs of his apprentice, who seemed inclined to drop off snoring. ‘Arithon dead, don’t forget, would doom your Black Rose Prophecy to failure.’

‘You want Davien back?’ The Mad Prophet opened drink-glazed eyes in martyred affront. That’s fool rotten logic, when his betrayals were what dethroned your high kings in the first place!’

Muster

Shadow lay thick over Etarra’s streets, the torches in their rusted brackets smothered to haloes of murky orange. The strife, the cries, the clash of steel weaponry and Gnudsog’s gruff oaths sounded eerily muffled; as if the unnatural darkness lent the heavy air a texture like wet batting. Kept insulated from the jostle of the mobs, embedded like fine treasure amid the fast-striding tramp of armed escort, Diegan regarded the ally but lately forsworn from the Fellowship sorcerers’ grand cause.

Lysaer looked angry-pale: white skin, gold hair, bloodless lips. His expression remained remote as smoothed marble as they passed some rich man’s door-page being bullied by ruffians from the shanties. The curve of Lysaer’s nostrils did not flare at the stench of spilled sewage that slimed the cobbles. His wide, light brows never rose at the measures the guard escort took to clear a rampaging gang of masons who had smashed a butcher’s door to steal cleavers. Torches and halberds reflected in those eyes; but their gem-stone hardness stayed untouched.

From a side-alley too squalid for lanterns a woman cried entreaties. A man’s bellowed curses ended with the sound of a smack against flesh, and a cur with raised hackles raced into the vanguard ranks, caught a boot in the flank, and tumbled yelping. The advance guard turned another corner in their progress toward the town hall, and Lysaer stepped over the crippled dog with barely the flicker of a glance.

Diegan fastened his braided cloak ties against a shiver of discomfort. ‘Is it true?’ he asked softly.

That splintered sapphire gaze disconcertingly turned on him. ‘What?’ Lysaer blinked, and seemed partially to come back to himself. ‘Is what true?’

Cold eyes, warm voice; Diegan steeled himself. No coward despite his dandy looks, he forced the necessary enquiry. ‘Your lineage. Are you royal? Does that sorcerer’s upstart really share your blood as half-brother?’

Lysaer’s look went straight through him. ‘Would you claim kinship with a byblow forced upon a queen by abduction and rape?’ The little falsehood came easily, that his mother’s flight to embrace her s’Ffalenn paramour had never extended through a year of willing dalliance. A frown marred Lysaer’s features as he wondered upon the memory that, he would once have spoken differently; that he had in some other time challenged his royal father to intercede for the pirate bastard’s comfort.

That event seemed distant, as cut off as a stranger’s memory. Brave, Lysaer had seen himself then; honourable and just. Now, his past pity seemed the puling naivete of a fool, to have invited his own downfall and thrown away heirship in Amroth for adherence to one painful truth. A lie cost so little, in comparison; and by today’s outcome, his losses being permanent and Arithon having shown his true nature, the fib to Diegan might as well have been the plain truth. Feeling giddy and light, as if the burden of heaven’s arch had been unyoked from his shoulders, Lysaer almost laughed.

‘You’re royal as he, then,’ Diegan murmured in dark conclusion. He caught Lysaer’s fierce flare of mirth and reassessed: both hysteria and the queer lack of emotion were quite likely the effects of profound shock. Moved to sympathy, the Lord Commander softened his accusation. ‘That’s difficult. Most awkward.’

‘Not at all.’ The next lie came easily to Lysaer’s tongue. ‘I may be a king’s son, and legitimate, but not on Athera’s soil. What inheritance I could claim by birthright lies beyond the span of a worldgate, unreachable, reft from me by the doings of s’Ffalenn.’

‘A prince in exile, then?’ pressed Diegan.

Lysaer’s smile was sudden as spring-thaw. ‘No prince at all, friend. I was formally disinherited, a victim of sorcerer’s wiles, as you are. Etarra’s people shall have my help for their own sake. Rest content. I find just vengeance sufficient.’

They passed the juncture of another alley; Diegan scanned the cross-street out of ingrained habit: such sites were prime places for high-bred officials to be ambushed. ‘Then your mother was not s’Ffalenn?’

‘No, can’t you guess?’ Lysaer grimaced on an edge of pain deep buried from childhood. ‘My mother, may Dharkaron Ath’s Avenger visit judgement on the seed of her shame, was the sadly ravished queen.’

Ahead loomed the market square, its arched entry ghost-lit by the lamps. In the strange and strangled light, the luck-shrines tucked under carven gables were grotesquely clotted with wax from the candles left lit by ambitious merchants. The little tin talismans that should have jangled to warn of iyats hung silent, gripped fast in the windless dark.

The mob pressed thicker, where farmers won over to the cause of restored monarchy hurled insults and loose bricks at guild tradesmen. Now and again the crossfire of debris would clang off the face of a targe. More soldiers had bolstered Diegan’s escort. These newcomers brought the fire-caught glint of gilt trappings and the weapons they brandished were still streamered with ceremonial colours. Drawn from the squads originally posted to keep order through the coronation processional, their splendid appointments lent Gnudsog with his scars and nicked field-gear the hard-bitten look of a felon.

Disturbance ruffled the ranked columns. A messenger in governor’s livery burst through, breathing hard, his cheek disfigured by a bruise. He cried above the din for Lord Diegan.

‘Here’s news!’ bellowed Gnudsog to his commander. ‘You can’t want it now, lord. Better to hear inside sanctuary, after we reach the council hall.’

‘No!’ The courier’s voice cracked in terror. ‘Not there! The hall’s been locked fast by fell sorcery.’

‘Traithe,’ Lysaer said tersely. At Diegan’s taut-jawed flare of outrage, he raised a placating hand. ‘The ministers inside won’t be harmed.’

Amethysts and diamonds spat glints through murk as the commander of the guard spun around. ‘Send the man through. I’ll hear him now.’

Soldiers gave way to admit the courier. His shirt was torn at the shoulder, and the knuckles of one hand were skinned raw. ‘I’m lucky to have reached you at all, lord. Looters have kicked down the lamp-posts for quarterstaves, with three city aldermen battered dead.’

‘You have news?’ Diegan yanked the man up by his collar.

Just then aware of who attended his Lord Commander, the messenger gasped and flung away. ‘But my lord! That blond man is lackey for the sorcerers!’

High tempered, about to hail Gnudsog to end the fool’s dithering by blows, Diegan started at a touch upon his arm. He swung, restrained by the steady gaze of Lysaer.

The prince who had abjured all rights to royal rank said gently, ‘No. After Arithon’s betrayal, any man’s enmity is fair. Let me prove myself worthy of trust, his, yours, and Etarra’s.’ The prince in his tinsel velvets showed a proud, unpractised majesty, and the result of unprepossessing humbleness clothed in grace and shining wealth combined to powerful effect.

The messenger was moved to stand down. ‘Your pardon, great lord.’ He bent to touch his forelock and stopped, aghast at his dripping knuckles.

Lysaer startled him from embarrassment with a kindly clap on the shoulder. ‘Forget titles. Against the Master of Shadow, we are equal in station, you and I.’ Then, as if screaming, rampaging mobs were not being thumped by Gnudsog’s soldiers, as if no darkness choked sight, he probed with gentle questions for information.

Diegan watched, awed, as the messenger stopped quaking and answered. Very quickly they learned that Traithe’s spells disbarred the council lords from action. Surly as an old, scarred tiger, Gnudsog allowed that while his squads could batter down doorpanels well enough, wards of sorcery were another matter.

‘Then we won’t use force,’ Lysaer said equably. To the courier, he added, ‘You’ve crossed the main square by the council hall. What’s become of the grand dais built for the s’Ffalenn pretender’s speeches?’

The courier rolled his eyes. ‘Rioters been having at it, sure enough. A pack o’ guild apprentices came with prybars and staves to tear it down, but farmers with drays blocked it off, flying leopard banners and swearing they’ll enforce the crown charter for their land rights.’

‘Extremists from both factions?’ Lysaer grinned. ‘That’s perfect.’ He laughed and turned shining, exultant eyes toward Diegan, who remained mystified, and Gnudsog, who kneaded the scars on his sword arm in fixed and unholy irritation. ‘Since your councilmen cannot act to calm their city, here is how we’ll do it for them.’

They marched briskly and gained the square. Gnudsog formed his men into a flying wedge and bashed through the rioting apprentices from the rear. Swords and steel-shod halberd butts made short work of wooden staves; the dray with its spilled crates of melons and string-tied half-trampled chickens afforded only minimal delay. Gnudsog’s men used polearms for levers and had the vehicle set upright in a trice. By then, combatants on both sides screamed curses, united in common cause against the soldiers.

While the fighting shifted focus, Lysaer mounted the unguarded stair, littered with torn-down snarls of bunting, and leopard banners that beleaguered torchlight re-rendered from s’Ffalenn green and silver to funereal black. Fired by righteous purpose, he paused to comfort a farm lad who knelt with his gashed cheek compressed with the wadded-up tail of a streamer. A word, a touch, a light joke, and the boy was induced to smile. Today’s ripped face would leave a scar that would win him no endearments from the tavernmaids. Another bit of ruin to swell an already vicious score. Unmindful that a curse drove his enmity, Lysaer reached the upper platform where a s’Ffalenn turned traitor to his birthright should have pledged Etarra his protection.

The Fellowship had chosen a site of favourable visibility and acoustics. Lysaer paused between the stripped and splintered awning poles, given vantage to every corner of the square.

Before him spread the city’s tragic turmoil. Picked out in pallid lanternlight, small episodes stood out: the screaming craftsmen who brandished tools and uprooted stakes from the awning ties; the drunken laughter and gyrating celebration of a raggedy band of looters; a woman clutching a torn dress. And an elderly burgher beset in extremity, his cane struck away, the rim of a broken flowerpot his last weapon to fend off his attackers.

Misgiving for their plights dispelled the disorientation that lingered since Lysaer’s reawakening. Desh-thiere’s realignment of his loyalties was irrevocably complete.

His hour under the wraith’s possession he now blamed on spells laid to daze and confuse him; that the Fellowship would act to abet Arithon’s escape was a foregone conclusion, since they had persistently refused to lend credence to any of his past crimes of piracy. That fallacy must no longer be allowed to hinder mercy. Neither could widespread riots be stopped through hard-edged action. Restored to compassionate perception, Lysaer saw he had been callous to presume that he could loose the full might of his gift and crack the pall of shadow from the sky.

A populace driven by mass panic might well mistake a violent counterstrike for an attack by enemy sorcery; no act, however well-intentioned, must lend further impetus to panic. A subtle approach would encourage reason; light must flow gently as a balm over a city whose loyalties were ripped open like bleeding wounds.

Lysaer raised his hands.

His gift had become more malleable to his will through the months of battle against Desh-thiere; further, the hours spent working in partnership with Arithon lent Lysaer every confidence that he could plumb any weaving of shadow.

The shouts, the screams, the crack of wood against steel as roisterers harried Gnudsog’s line of soldiers faded before deep concentration as Lysaer sent a subliminal tracer glow aloft. Quietly, subtly he tested the bindings of darkness the Shadow Master had set over the city.

The probe was swallowed utterly. A dark inexhaustible as ocean, as seamlessly wrapped as a death caul seemed to make mockery of his effort. Lysaer clamped down on fresh anger. No pall could be infinite. Not even the Fellowship commanded limitless power. Lysaer turned reason and objectivity against the heat of his enmity. His next probe picked up the thread of magecraft cleverly intermeshed with the shadows. Not only had the illusion tricked him to assume the night had no boundaries, Lysaer exposed a second error of presumption, that Arithon must be inside city walls.

Stay-spells anchored these shadows. A sorcerer’s training allowed the Master’s spun darkness to abide outside of his presence.

Very likely the daylight had been banished to cover a bolt to escape. Lysaer found no cause to forgive, that the attack had not been turned in direct malice against Etarra’s citizens. Riots had arisen from the upset. By royal duty, the man who should have been first to keep peace had without scruple seized the most damaging means at hand to duck his responsibility.

Justice would be served, Lysaer vowed. For each life lost, for each hurt caused by negligence, Arithon s’Ffalenn would be brought to account.

The dark-ward must be lifted straightaway. Lysaer extended his arms. A glow bloomed upward. Golden as late-day sunlight on an autumn meadow, the halo he cast from his person could never be mistaken for torchlight.

Across the rush and tumult in the square, through the barricade of raised polearms wielded by Gnudsog’s guard, eyes turned toward that source of indefinable illumination. Etarra’s traumatized citizens saw one man casting brave challenge against the dark.