The Curse of the Mistwraith

Eyes shielded, Dakar heard Asandir give his colleague word. A violent crack cut the air. Heat flashed across the pit, stinging exposed skin, and accompanied by spitting rains of sparks that left behind an acrid scent of brimstone.

‘It’s safe to look,’ Asandir said presently.

Dakar lowered his hands, to find the flask at the centre of the pit encircled by a cold blue halo. If the light was subliminally faint, its effects upon the mind were not: just standing within the ward’s proximity caused a bone-deep, aching discomfort. Whatever arcane unpleasantness the Fellowship sorcerers used to fashion their prisons, Dakar refused to know.

Asandir also seemed reluctant to endure the ward’s resonance since he started immediately up the ladder. Dakar hastened after, glad to be quit of Rockfell with its dread overtones of magic and the supremely dangerous entity left there in incarceration.

Morning sunlight washed through the opening to the outside by the time Dakar crawled off the ladder. Never so pleased to breathe in cold air in his life, he did not even mind the prickle against his skin as the icier draft that was Kharadmon flowed from the well on his heels.

‘Are you entirely clear?’ Asandir asked his discorporate colleague.

Kharadmon shot off a phrase in the old tongue that surprised Dakar to incredulity. Before the Mad Prophet could take stock and appreciate the discorporate mage’s use of expletives, Asandir said, ‘Help me drag the cover back over the well.’ He indicated the massive round slab that rested ajar across the opening.

Dakar glared at the offending rock. ‘Don’t be saying I need the exercise,’ he griped before Kharadmon could bait him further.

‘You know,’ Kharadmon observed in blithe enthusiasm, as Dakar grunted and heaved and the stone grated, and slowly gave way to brute force. ‘Be careful how you place that. I much doubt you can see round that beer gut of yours to tell if you’re going to crush your toes.’

Caught with every muscle straining and the veins in his neck about to burst, Dakar could do naught but grit his teeth. When at length the pit was covered over, he was too breathless to effect a rejoinder. His pique lasted all the way through the setting of the secondary wards. Hours passed. By the time the Fellowship mages finished raising spells and guard circles to assure permanence, the chamber floor showed no flaw to indicate the existence of any pit.

Outside, Dakar expected, fully exposed to the weather, the pair would repeat the exhaustive process until the cliff-face was impenetrable. ‘By Ath,’ he commented sourly. ‘You’ve taken precautions enough to repel Dharkaron himself. One would hope after this, that Rockfell pit would prove more secure than ever it has in the past.’

Asandir cast a jaundiced eye at his apprentice. ‘It might, you know, if we tried dark practice, and chained a slain spirit to stand as sentinel.’

‘Oh no.’ Dakar backed up a step and crashed heavily into spelled stone. ‘You’d hardly drag me up mountains for exercise if you’d wanted to make me a sacrifice.’ Nonethless, he moved his fat bulk with alacrity through the portal onto the outside ledge. While the Fellowship sorcerers resumed painstaking labour and set their final seal over the rock at the head of Davien’s stair, he remained inordinately quiet.

By noon, Rockfell Peak was secured. The trio of visitors departed, leaving behind them the Betrayer’s watching gargoyles and serried banks of clouds that drifted to the play of frigid winds. Confined the Mistwraith might be, but its toll of damages upon their world remained yet to be measured. For down in a lightless pit of rock, sealed behind fearful rings of wards, Desh-thiere’s wraiths brooded in confinement, awaiting the vengeance curse laid on two half-brothers to burgeon into bloodshed and war.

Warning

Unsettled through the days since the scrying in the dyeyard warehouse, Elaira walked the tideflats of Narms. Around her, twilight cast grey veiling over wind-ripped clouds and fine drizzle. Here the rush of incoming waves dampened the bayfront clamour of barking dogs and the hurried curses of wagoners who threaded low-slung fish-carts back from market. A stiff breeze off the water carried away the endless bickering of children and singsong cries of woodvendors and the boys who sold buckets of steamed crabs layered in straw to keep them hot. Ahead, a meandering shadow against gloom, a beggar scavenged the tidemark for cork floats or broken slats from fish crates that could be salvaged for firewood.

Elaira heard only the waves and the crying gulls who dipped and whirled, minutes away from night roosting. Troubled already in spirit, she was wearied from playing at pretence. She would not return to a meal with Morriel’s entourage at the hostel, to pick at food when she had no appetite. She refused to retire, to huddle frustrated under blankets touched dank by the salt-laden fogs that smothered Narms after dark. This one night she would resist the demands of sleep; would not close her eyes and dream again of fine-chiselled s’Ffalenn features that reproached her in aggrieved accusation.

What could not be forgiven, she had done. The repercussions could not be reversed. The Prime Circle had sealed their final decision; formal verdict would be sent out at midnight, when the lane tides ran least disturbed by static thrown off by the sun. The Prime’s decree concerning the latent danger Arithon presented to society allowed for no mitigating circumstance: his moves were to be exhaustively tracked. Wherever his intent could be hampered and dogged, Koriani would act to disadvantage him.

Elaira sidestepped a patch of seaweed thrown up in tangles on pale sand. Ahead, the beggar paused to rest on a rock, the rags that tied his hooded head flapping in the wind. She passed him by without greeting, which was unlike her, since his kind had replaced her family through early childhood.

She rounded a jumble of boulders, then picked her way over the breakwater that protected Narms harbour from the sea. Sheltered there, fishing smacks and trader galleys loomed at anchorage, or sat low on their marks, made fast to the bollards at the wharf. Deck lanterns threw greasy orange streaks across waters pocked with light rain. At the taffrail of the nearest vessel, a woman crooned a melody, her knees tucked up under a fishing tarp as she peeled vegetables for her supper. Down the docks a bent grandfather trundled a wheelbarrow of cod toward the street, while a boy and his brother mended nets. The reek of fish offal and the squabble of the gulls that dipped and dived through dank pilings checked Elaira as if she had run against a wall.

She deliberated, aware that to go forward was to tread the safer path. What she wanted more was seclusion; and a salt pool left behind by the tide that she could use to attempt forbidden scrying.

She shivered under her damp cloak. The intention that lurked at the edge of her thoughts was dangerous; foolish. Still, she turned back toward the beach.

She found herself alone with temptation. The beggar had gone, the rocks where he had perched glistening with barnacles burnished by the torchlight off the street. The bayside surf was overlaid by deeper thunder, as two stout brewer’s boys rolled tuns from an ale dray parked outside a tavern. Sailors caroused in the side alley, laughing, while the shrieks of a bawdywoman taunted them to sport their prowess in her bed. The din of workaday humanity seemed remote and without overtones of comfort. Made aware that her months in the fenlands of Korias studying herb lore had retuned her nature to prefer silence, Elaira sighed. Change had overtaken her too fast since her unlucky foray to meet Asandir. She picked a spot where the breeze blew clean off the water and sat, her head propped in her hands. She watched the incoming surf, but tonight no iyats rode the waves to refuel their energies on the forces of winds and tides.

Night fell gloomy and damp. At her feet, ruffled over in pewter-edged ripples, lay the tidepool she longed for. Torn by indecision, she wondered which of her loyalties she should suffer for: the one, to Arithon, already breached; or the other, now cruelly strained, which tied her to Koriani service through sworn bond to a spell-crystal that Morriel would certainly use to break her.

Eyes closed, her hearing awash with the seethe of salt foam, Elaira reviewed the unalterable absolutes that imprisoned her in misery. Where once she could have lightened her mood with flippant behaviour and sarcasm, now the frustrated, circling grief of knowing a man with indelible intimacy ate at her, night and day. The surcease of physical release was denied her. That one act of spirited curiosity had caused her to be culled, and now used, as Morriel’s personal instrument to map Arithon’s motivations, could neither be escaped or avoided.

But interlinked with this were other trusts acquired in her visit to Enithen Tuer’s Erdane garret.

‘Girl, you’re shaking, and not at all from the cold,’ said a kindly voice from the shadows.

Elaira started, then exclaimed aloud as a hand lightly grasped her shoulder.

The beggar had not left her, but stood, guarded from prying eyes and wind by an overhang of sea-beaten rock. His earlier appearance had deceived. Clad all in black, he wore no ornament. None of his clothing lay in tatters. What had first been mistaken for a frayed headcloth was revealed now as a raven, hunched and damp on its master’s shoulder, regarding her with eyes too wise for a bird’s.

‘Who are you?’ Elaira blurted. But before he gave answer, she knew. His eyes upon her were too still and deep to encompass any less than the vision of a Fellowship sorcerer.

A wave that was larger than most hurled and broke against the shore. Fingers of foam clawed up the rocks, then splashed back in silver lace. His voice as he addressed her held the same ageless timbre as the sea. ‘I am Traithe, sent by Sethvir to give you a message from the Fellowship.’

As Elaira moved to speak, he restrained her. Though his step was careful and lame, his hands could grip hard enough to bruise. ‘No. Say nothing. You’re aware that the wrong words could set your vows to your order in jeopardy.’

She stilled, shocked by his bluntness.

Traithe said, ‘Understand, and clearly, that my purpose here is to shield you from any such breach in your loyalty.’

Stung still by guilt-ridden thoughts, Elaira’s sensibilities fled. She wrenched off Traithe’s hold and stepped back. ‘My Prime might command my obedience. She does not own me in spirit!’

‘Well spoken.’ Traithe sat, which irritated the raven to a testy flapping of wings. He raised a scarred knuckle to soothe its breast feathers, then peered slantwise at her, chagrined as a grandfather caught in a bout of boy’s mischief. ‘Hold on to that truth, brave lady.’

Yet his affirmation of natural order could not undo vows sealed to flesh through a Koriani focus-stone. A piece of herself that Elaira was powerless to call back had been given over into Morriel’s control. Her ambivalence toward the traps that Traithe most carefully never mentioned gave rise to an outraged admission. ‘Ath’s mercy, I was six years old when the Prime Circle swore me to service. They claim, always, that power must not be given without limits. But lately, I suspect my seniors prefer their trainees young, the better to keep their talent biddable.’

Traithe reached out and touched her, a bare brush of fingers against her hand. Yet warmth flowed from the contact, and a calmness that lent her surcease to think.

Unsure his kindness did not mask warning like a glove, Elaira chose a rock and sat also. ‘Courage saved nothing two days ago.’ She laced unsteady hands around her knees, self-conscious in the sorcerer’s frank regard.

‘If you speak of Arithon, he doesn’t need any man’s saving.’ Petulant and ready to roost, the raven sidled and clipped its master a peck on the ear. Traithe called it a rude word, which prompted Elaira to smile.

‘Better.’ The sorcerer had a crinkle to his eyes that bespoke a readiness to laugh. ‘The occasion wasn’t meant to be solemn.’ He pushed his bird from his shoulder, then watched with what seemed his whole attention as it croaked indignation, and finally settled in a nook and tucked its head under one wing. ‘Let me say what I was sent for, and see if your heart doesn’t lighten.’ As Asandir had done once before to ease her nerves, Traithe bent down and made a small fire. The kindling he used was a beggar’s gleaning of broken cork-floats and bits of jetsam. Flame caught with a hiss in the dampness, and shed fine-grained haloes in the drizzle.

Oddly content to be still, Elaira wondered whether some spellward of quietude had been set along with the flames.

Traithe answered as though she had spoken. ‘What peace you feel is your own, but it may perhaps be helped by the ward of concealment placed over this space between the rocks.’ He grinned in gleeful conspiracy. ‘To your sisterhood, this fire doesn’t exist.’

Elaira said, ‘Then you know about—’

He sealed her lips fast with a finger. ‘Let me say what we know. Otherwise,’ he stopped, let his hand fall. Inscrutable as a stone in a millpond, he studied her a moment with his head cocked, then yielded before her straight strength to his impulse. ‘Otherwise, Sethvir was most plain, the misery of remorse will later drive you to use this tide pool. In saltwater that will fail to protect you from discovery, you will attempt to send warning of your sisterhood’s doings to the one of my colleagues who might listen.’

On her feet before she could react rationally, Elaira backed at bay against the rocks. Even her lips were white.

As if she had not budged, Traithe continued. ‘Which act would be treason against your Prime Senior’s directive.’ He tipped up his face, sharply and brutally blunt. ‘Unnecessary treason, brave lady, which is why you will sit back down. Morriel may not own you in spirit, but she does command your absolute obedience. The Fellowship can shield from her what happens by our actions, but not what you undertake in free will.’

The rush of waves through sand and stone seemed to consume all the air for the moment while Elaira poised, half on the edge of panicked flight. In the end, she sat because her legs gave out; and because Fellowship sorcerers would hardly stand back and allow the half-brothers to commit a whole kingdom to war without some emphatically sound reason that Koriani intervention of any kind might shortsightedly come to disrupt. In a croak more like the raven’s than human speech, Elaira capitulated. ‘Say your piece.’

‘Well,’ said Traithe. Less solemn in his ways than Asandir, he was smiling. ‘For one thing, you need not warn us of an event that Sethvir already knows. Morriel doesn’t breathe, these days, without some sort of surveillance from Luhaine.’

‘You shouldn’t confide in me,’ Elaira said in a gasp of smothered surprise.

As if she had piqued him with a riddle, Traithe’s brows rose. ‘Morriel’s aware of the fact. It’s a sore point she won’t tell Lirenda, so I doubt she’ll challenge you to make it public.’ He went on, his manner as piquant as any matron sharing gossip at a well. ‘Furthermore, if your Prime has chosen to meddle with Arithon s’Ffalenn…’ The gleam in his eyes hot with mischief, the sorcerer shrugged ruefully. ‘Let’s by all means stay plain. I’m not saying she’s resolved on such an action. But if she should, her pack of conniving seniors will be richly entitled to the consequences.’

‘You imply that Arithon is defended?’ Intrigued despite her better judgement, Elaira edged closer to the fire.

Traithe tucked back a flap of her cloak that the breeze pushed dangerously near the sparks. ‘I’m saying the Teir’s’Ffalenn himself is well able to guard his own interests. ‘ When Elaira looked dubious, he gave back a look that happily embraced shared conspiracy. ‘Fatemaster’s judgement, lady, the Fellowship itself had a tough time trying to shepherd that spirit! Let me tell you what happened once, when Morriel tried a scrying on Arithon.’

His hands stuck out to warm near the fire like any innocuous old man’s, the sorcerer went on to describe in satirical detail exactly what transpired the day the wards over Kieling Tower had been breached during conflict with the Mistwraith.

Traithe gave the telling no embellishment, but used humour and bluntness like scalpels to bare a rotten truth. He spared nothing. Not Lirenda’s furious humility, nor Morriel’s arrogant overconfidence. Least of all did he avoid Arithon’s vicious reaction to the fact that Elaira’s private feelings had been used as a tool for unscrupulous prying.

Choking and spluttering through a mirth just shy of a seizure, Elaira tried and failed to picture Lirenda upended in her own tangled skirts. ‘A worthy prank.’ She caught her breath finally, stung from her laughter by real grief. ‘I’m a game piece.’ She, who most questioned Koriani tenets and practices, had unwittingly become their most indispensable cipher in the course of the coming conflict.

‘Arithon knows that,’ Traithe said, equally serious and plain. ‘He doesn’t like it. Should Morriel cross him again on those grounds, he’s going to hit her back with far more than a harmless warning. Have you access to the histories of the high kings?’

As she nodded, he said, ‘Good. Read them and see what happens when past scions of s’Ffalenn were pressed to embrace open enmity. Make no mistake when I tell you Arithon has inherited all of his line’s rugged loyalty. He’s got Torbrand’s temper too, intact as I’ve ever seen it.’

The scanty bits of fuel had burned now to a scarlet nest of embers. Across a rising puff of smoke, Elaira looked at the sorcerer whose forthcoming nature came and went like broken clouds across sunlight. Traithe had turned reticent again. Though his eyes never shied from her regard, and his kindly air of listener remained intact, his stillness invited her to question him on her own. ‘You’re asking me to trust Arithon’s judgement?’

‘I ask nothing,’ Traithe amended gently. ‘I offer only the observation that Arithon is qualified to defend himself from any Koriani interference that originates through you. And he will do so, never asking your preference on the matter.’

Hands clasped hard beneath her cloak, Elaira chuckled. ‘I see. He breaks none of my vows in the process and therefore I won’t get hurt. Very neat. I shall allow him to act as my protector and endeavour to be the dutiful initiate.’ She gathered her skirts to rise, a lump in her throat brought by surety: that this time, the Fellowship’s intervention had diverted her from breaking Koriani mores. But in fact, the measure was stopgap. Traithe’s concerns had the more firmly grounded her self-knowledge, that the vows of her order were as unsuited to her nature as crown and kingdom were to the music that fate had forced Arithon to stifle.

Which of the pair of them would be first to break, she wondered, as she watched Traithe douse the sparks of their fire with effortless spellcraft. The incoming tide would sweep off the ashes and leave sands smoothed clean of footprints.

Traithe stood and roused his raven, which croaked like a drunk with a hangover and hopped sullenly to its master’s wrist. Never so absorbed by his bird as he appeared, the sorcerer said suddenly, ‘You’re not alone, brave lady. Nor are you entirely Morriel’s plaything. Not since the day you chose to seek out Asandir in Erdane.’

‘Ath,’ said Elaira in a futile effort to bury her anguish behind toughness. ‘Now didn’t I think that one escapade touched off my troubles in the first place?’

The sorcerer returned a look that drilled her through and gave no quarter. ‘Never sell yourself so short!’

‘Take care of him,’ she blurted, in heartfelt reference to the s’Ffalenn prince.

Poised to leave, unobtrusive as the beggar she first had mistaken him for, Traithe reached out and stroked her cheek, as the father she had never known might have done to reassure a cherished daughter. As his hand fell away, she cupped the place he had caressed; and now the tears fell and blinded her.

‘Lady, great heart.’ He sighed gently. ‘The love within you is no shame. And since you fear to ask, I’ll tell you: there is no secret to be kept. The Fellowship stepped back at Etarra because the grace of spirit we know as life lay in danger of permanent imbalance. Asandir urged, but never forced your beloved. Arithon chose his kingdom ahead of music, by his own free will.’

‘What?’ Elaira stared back in ice-hard fury and disbelief. ‘Why would he?’

Suddenly bleak as the clearest winter starfield, Traithe said, ‘Because he would not be the one man to stand in the path of the Paravians’ return to this continent.’

‘Well,’ said Elaira wretchedly. ‘For his sake, I hope the creatures prove worth it!’

‘That you must judge for yourself.’ A wistfulness haunted Traithe’s manner. ‘I can tell you as fact, that the Riathan Paravians are the only unsullied connection we have to Ath Creator and that their return is the cornerstone for the future harmony of this world. But words impart meaning without wisdom. To understand, you and Arithon must both survive to experience a unicorn’s living presence.’ A wave broke. Driven on by rising tide, salt spray showered down, mixed in coarser drops with the drizzle that never for an instant ceased to fall. ‘I must leave you now, brave lady. The fire is out, and the wards on this place will soon dissipate.’

Elaira blotted a dripping nose and tried through resentment to recover courtesy. ‘I owe you thanks.’

Seamed features lost beneath cloth that the raven sidled under to take shelter, Traithe shook his head. ‘Take instead my blessing. You need the consolation, I suspect. I was sent to you because an augury showed the Warden of Althain that, for good or ill you’re the one spirit alive in this world who will come to know Arithon best. Should your Master of Shadow fail you, or you fail him, the outcome will call down disaster.’

Elaira resisted an ugly, burning urge to stop her ears. ‘And if neither of us fails?’

Traithe soothed his bird with his fingers, that being the only comfort he could offer to any breathing creature at this juncture. ‘Ah, lady, we’ve been entrusted with this world and free will, which certainly cancels guarantees.’ He touched her hand in aggrieved farewell. ‘Never doubt. At the Ravens, your action was right and fitting.’

He turned and departed, while wind and thin rain reduced him to a fast-striding shadow against smothering fog and white sea. Elaira stayed on alone until the waves that surged with flood-tide encroached on the rocks and soaked her feet. Dragging wet skirts above her ankles, she felt ready to return to her colleagues. The depression that had weighed on her earlier had lifted, replaced by milder sadness shot through by the bold and heady challenge of exhilaration.

Morriel might command her to Koriani loyalty and obedience; but where Elaira chose to give her heart was a choice reclaimed for her own.

Eventide

His hook-nosed profile hard-lined in shadows and torchlight, Gnudsog of the Etarran guard brings word from the war council held at the border of Strakewood Forest: ‘Diegan and Lysaer are reconciled,’ he informs his captains who wait in the meadow. ‘We take the sure route tomorrow, poison the river and the springs to kill the game, then methodically starve out each campsite. Pesquil’s plan is best. Children are the future of the clans, and without women the wretched breed will die…‘

Deep under the eaves of the forest, in a valley riddled with traps, clansmen under Steiven s’Valerient sharpen their swords and their knives, and for the last time wax their bowstrings; while on a lyranthe the last of its kind, Halliron Masterbard plays ballads and bright songs from better days, to inspire their hearts to a valour he grieves will be futile…

Returned to his post at Althain Tower, Sethvir bends his regard toward Rockfell Peak to check the wards which bind the Mistwraith. He finds no flaws, and a small ease of mind, for though Arithon could build on his training and possibly unravel those securities, having suffered to subdue such an evil, Rathain’s prince was least likely to meddle in foolishness…

XVII. MARCH UPON STRAKEWOOD FOREST

Dressed out in clean tunics edged in city colours of scarlet and gold, gleaming under polished helms and smart trappings; and bearing on their backs and in their scabbards the newly wrought arms and chain-mail purchased by the merchants’ treasury at cost of eight hundred thousand coin-weight, fine gold, the men of Etarra’s garrison formed up and marched just past dawn. Set like a sapphire in their midst, Lysaer sat his bridleless chestnut. Lord Commander Diegan and Captain Gnudsog were positioned at either flank, while the bannerbearers of the greater trade houses, and message riders on their lean-flanked mounts clustered in formation just behind. Four companies of standing army and reserves paraded after, in disciplined units twenty-four hundred strong.

Lysaer made no conversation. Groomed as befitted his past stature, every inch the princely image of restrained pride, he was disinclined to trivialize his first foray against the s’Ffalenn who had demolished a fleet on Dascen Elur. Fighting was ugly business. No pennons, no style and no fanfares could mask that these men in their brilliance and finery marched, some to die in blood and suffering. Still, a heart not made of stone must thrill to the muffled thunder of war destriers. Each tight square of troops boasted ninety mounted lancers, four hundred crossbowmen and archers, and a perimeter of pikemen numbering nearly two thousand. Deep within their protection rolled the supply wagons and support troops and rearwards the additional thousand light cavalry under the black kite standard of the northern league of headhunters.

Weather was also in their favour. The last spring rains had finally lifted; the rivers ran placid and shallow.

Sunlight pricked the horizon, edged to the east by the black trees that rimmed Strakewood Forest. For a time as the air warmed, the companies marched knee-deep through mists that swathed the meadows in blue-grey. These dispersed last from the hollows, to bare rolling hills and the dew-spangled grass of early summer, bespattered and dappled with patches of red brushbloom and weathered rock. A craggier landscape than Daon Ramon, the plain of Araithe wore the season like a cloak of rippling new silk, lush and sweet with flowers, overwhelming the senses in living green.

Lysaer gazed across the vista, untrampled yet by the advancing mass of his army. In his birthland of Amroth, such rich forage would have been grazed short by sheep. He promised himself that if barbarian predation were to blame for the lack of shepherds, his campaign against Arithon would amend this. Then, in belated reassessment, he realized that had these hills been used once as pastures they should be crisscrossed by the remains of stone fences and sheepfolds.

There were none, nor any foundations of ruined cottages.

These acres had possibly stayed untouched by man’s industry through the ages since Ath’s first creation. Why such obviously prime pastureland should go wasted puzzled Lysaer, until his thought was broken off by the hoofbeats of an outrider returning at a gallop.

The scout wheeled his mud-splashed mount and reined into step beside Gnudsog. ‘Lord,’ he saluted to Diegan, and then his commanding field officer, ‘Captain.’ But he looked at Lysaer as he delivered his report, which was startling enough to call a halt to the advance.

Six barbarian children had been spotted, practising javelin casts in a glen just upriver of the ford across the Tal Quorin.

‘A stroke of luck, your Grace,’ Diegan said. To avoid embarrassment, he allowed Lysaer the titular courtesy due his birthright. Since no honorific at all implied a labourer’s stature and thus demeaned both parties in conversation only socially acceptable between equals, other Etarran officials had followed suit. ‘To find barbarians so easily, and they, overtaken unaware.’

Stolid on his horse as a figurehead, Gnudsog scowled his annoyance. ‘Clan scouts are never so careless!’

‘Elders, surely,’ Lysaer agreed. His clear gaze swung toward the scout. ‘But children? What would you guess were their ages?’

The answer held no hesitation: the largest had looked no more than twelve.

‘Rat’s get all, and bad cess to them.’ Gnudsog slapped a fly that landed, but had no chance to bite his horse. ‘They’ll know every inch of this country, Deshir’s scouts. Likely as not, they’re part of a camp that’s laid in an ambush farther on.’

‘Against an army?’ Diegan grinned, the gilt scrollwork on his helmet and the plumes on his bridle and harness the fashion of the daredevil gallant. ‘The odds would hardly be sporting.’

‘Barbarians don’t play at odds,’ came a querulous interruption from the sidelines. ‘In these parts, they prefer pits lined with sharpened stakes and spring-traps that rip out a man’s guts, or tear the axles off wagons.’

Smart in a black and white surcoat over chain-mail dulled with grease and years of polishing, Pesquil rode up to determine the cause of the delay. At the head of the column, he jerked short his brush-scarred gelding that he liked best for its toughness. ‘So you chase those children thinking to find an encampment of scouts you can surprise, eh? Well, try that. Then find yourselves bloody.’

Lysaer regarded the dip of the hills that unfolded in curves toward the ford. Chilly in courtesy he said, ‘Would you send your ten-year-old son out as gambit before the weapons of a war host?’

‘Perhaps. If the stakes were arranged in my favour.’ Sallow, pockscarred and quick with nervous energy, Pesquil shrugged. ‘For sure, I’ve known clanborn chits who’d dangle out their newborns if they thought any gain could be wrung from it. The slow plan we follow is safest.’

But Diegan was ill-pleased to spend a summer swatting insects and enduring rough camp in the open when a bolder victory might be possible. ‘Send in a small troop of light riders,’ he ordered Gnudsog. ‘See where the children flee and let the army follow if it’s safe.’

Pesquil reined around so hard his mount grunted in pain from the bit. ‘Fools,’ he muttered. ‘Idiots.’ And he spurred to a canter back through the lines to his headhunters.

Gnudsog watched him go, his huge hands crossed at his saddle pommel. Then his eyes, black as rivets, swung to Lysaer. ‘What do you think, prince?’ From his lips, the title implied insult.

Lysaer raised his head in genteel challenge. ‘Send in your riders,’ he suggested. ‘If a trap exists, then spring it with fewest losses.’

‘You don’t think it’s a trap.’ Deigan soothed his restive destrier. Then, his regard in speculation upon Lysaer, he raised a gauntlet chased in glittering gold to signal the columns to rest at ease. ‘Why?’

‘Because I saw Arithon in a back alley with a band of knacker’s conscripts once when he didn’t think he was being watched.’ Fair-skinned as an ice figure in the early sunlight, the prince stroked the black-handled sword newly forged for his use in the field. Rumour held that the blade had been engraved with Arithon’s name in reverse runes, which may have been at the armourer’s insistence, for shaping a blade to kill a sorcerer. Lysaer did not look superstitious or afraid, but only pragmatic as he said, ‘The Shadow Master has few scruples. But I know him well enough to hedge that he’d sanction no ambush that involved any use of small children.’

At this, even Gnudsog reconsidered. ‘You could be right.’ Supporting evidence lay with the arrangements for the escape of the knacker’s brats. Arithon’s bribes had been lavish enough that hard measures had been needed to pry loose the names of which parties had treated with him. Etarra’s field captain scraped an itch underneath his right bracer. ‘Let’s prove Pesquil a sissy.’

Forty riders were dispatched to track the children. From the rear of the column, Pesquil watched them go, his narrow lips clamped in disdain. ‘Those lordly fops Gnudsog has to nursemaid didn’t listen. We’ll keep our distance, then.’

The mounted lieutenant at his elbow stopped fingering the scalplocks that fringed his saddle, and widened seamed eyes at his commander. ‘They’re going in with the army, you think? And you’d send our league riding after?’

‘Any trap laid by Deshans is bound to be placed deep in Strakewood.’ Head cocked in consideration, Pesquil picked his teeth with a fingernail. ‘We’ll go in, yes.’ He clipped out a breathy laugh. ‘With two whole divisions of garrison troops ahead, and another pair blundering on each flank, whatever surprise the barbarians fixed’ll be sprung before we try the trail. Even Steiven’s dirty tactics can’t murder ten thousand troops without exposure. We’ll win our bounties in the mop up.’

‘I hope your score’s well squared with Daelion Fatemaster.’ The lieutenant adjusted studded reins in laconic resignation. ‘They say we fight a sorcerer who weaves darkness. For myself, Sithaer, I’d always planned I’d die rich.’

As Etarra’s two score light riders crested the rise above the ford, six young boys snatched up javelins and bolted like hares for the forest. Whether they had defied their parents to play in the open, or whether they had been posted in plain view for bait became moot as the riders spurred their mounts and charged after them. They were quarry, and fear for their lives drove their flight. Flat out across dew-tracked greensward, enemies with drawn blades swept down at their heels. The boys made straight course for shelter, vaulting the switched back curves of marshy streamlets on the butts of their toy wooden weapons.

They were small and light, and shod in deerhide that made little mark on the hummocks, while the steel-rimmed hooves of the horses bit deep through the soft turf and sank. The riders were forced to take a zigzagging course over firm ground, or tear their mounts’ tendons in the bog. They shouted and whipped on their horses and brandished sabres in a show of blood-thirsty frustration, their orders plain. The clan boys were to be routed, not killed. Pursuit must hound them into Strakewood until they tired, then slacken off and appear to give up. Trackers would take over from there. The youngsters would be followed in stealth back to their parents’ encampment; a sensible plan, which pleased the garrison’s light horsemen, carefully chosen as fathers who might condone the slayings of headhunters, but who had little inclination themselves for the horror of skewering youngsters.

Hardbitten to bitterness by the atrocities of his profession, Gnudsog was not given to foolish chances.

His forty light riders crashed into the hazels and saplings that edged the forest just seconds behind the last straggler. Thickly tangled summer scrub swiftly isolated children from hunters. Crows startled up from feeding on blackberries flapped away with raucous calls of warning. Squirrels scattered chattering in alarm. Raked by briars and low branches, the horsemen determinedly pressed onward. Their mud-flecked mounts gouged through dead sticks and moss, the odd hoof-fall a dissonant chink of steel against buried scarps of granite.

Ahead, all but invisible in their deer hides, the barbarian children raced in fierce silence, the one towhead among them picked out in the gloom by the chance-caught flicker of filtered sunlight.

Intent on keeping him in sight, the lead rider never saw the wooden javelin left braced at an angle in the path. His mount gathered stride and cleared a rotten log, then crashed, shoulder down, impaled. Its scream of mortal agony harrowed the dawn-damp wood, while the rider, thrown headlong, struck a bough at an angle and broke his neck.

First casualty of the Deshir barbarians, he died with his eyes still open and the taste of blood on his tongue.

Attracted to the site by the thrashing convulsions of dying horseflesh, the survivors gathered and pulled up. With spur and rein they stayed their mounts’ panic, while the first man in called the verdict.

‘He’s stopped breathing.’

A still, stunned moment progressed to passionate contention over whether to stop now and call the army, or to ride down verminous whelps whose parents had trained them for murder.

‘Dharkaron’s Spear!’ raged one rider. ‘I’d say there’s no clever trap waiting! Or the Sithaer-begotten brats would just draw us on, and not bother stopping to kill!’

That outcry was silenced, and grimly, by an officer given his authority through Etarra’s pedigreed elite. ‘We stick with orders and track. One man will go back as spokesman. Lord Diegan’s no coin-grubbing headhunter. He may roust up the garrison. Else risk finding himself a laughingstock, as craven.’

Which recast the affair as rank insult, for a boy’s prank with a wooden spear to have killed a man before the armed might of Etarra.

Shouts of agreement endorsed this plan, while the dismounted volunteer asked for help. Willing hands lifted the slain man and tied him over the saddle for transport back to the main troop.

Fled in swift silence up the marshy course of Tal Quorin, the children were long since lost to sight. But in the beds of green moss, under the sills of the sedge clumps, water pooled in a flurried progression of footprints. These the iron-clad hooves of the destriers milled under, as the main strength of Etarra’s garrison ploughed past. The ground was left harrowed to brown mud that sucked and spattered, causing the horses to stumble, and the riders to curse as their tassels and trappings became begrimed. Lances hooked in the greenbriar, and the foot troops slogged silent to the rear.

The supply wagons perforce had stayed behind. If Gnudsog had opposed the decision to turn the main army up the riverbed, he knew better than to belabour the mistake. His mouth a grim slash in his hardened leather face, he brought his lancers forward with professional determination.

Noon passed. No ambush seemed in evidence. The fall of the floodplain sloped more steeply and the ground firmed, though the soil beneath its canopy of deep wood still reeked strongly of bog. Swarming gnats remained in force. The heavier shade at least curbed the growth of brambles, and as the footing improved so did spirits and eagerness. Aware for some time that the hemming effect of the hillsides was crowding his troops along the bank, Gnudsog consulted with Lord Diegan and received permission to regroup.

‘I mislike the feel of this entirely,’ he grumbled, his eyes on his men as their ranks wheeled and reformed to order despite the unsuitable terrain. The garrison split and regrouped, two companies to divide and cross the ridges on either side. These would advance up adjacent valleys and flank the main force along the river. Gnudsog kept ruminating in monologue. ‘Too easy.’

At his side, stripped of his helm to adjust a crest plume disarranged by low branches, Diegan raised his eyebrows. ‘Does everything have to be difficult?’

‘Here? Against Steiven’s clans?’ Gnudsog curled his lip and spat. ‘Yes.’

‘But the clan chief might not be in command,’ Lysaer pointed out, his regard, chilly blue, on the veteran captain, and his hands, lightly crossed, on his sword.

‘Well.’ Gnudsog cleared his throat. ‘Yon thieving little stoat of a sorcerer’s clever enough, if your cant to our council held truth.’ Unfazed before lordly affront, he grinned through his yellow, broken teeth. ‘You and my Lord Commander will ride behind with the second division. And if we go back proving you hazed the city ministers like the ninnies they are, so much the better. I like my killing quick, with the advantage of superior numbers. Should things fail to get grim, you can always strip me of rank. It’s my pension I’m risking, not your necks.’

His helm half raised, his reins looped over one forearm, Lord Diegan stiffened in the costly glitter of his accoutrements.

Aware the Lord Commander would protest, and quick to see Gnudsog was earnest in a concern he lacked any polish to express, Lysaer diplomatically intervened. ‘No one loses pensions for good sense.’ He stroked his horse’s neck, smiled and said to Diegan, ‘Since I spoke truth to your council, we’ll ride behind. Whether or not this clan encampment is taken by surprise, should Arithon s’Ffalenn be with them, we must expect counterthrust by sorcery. Our presence may well be needed to bolster the middle ranks.’

‘My sister will call you fainthearted,’ Diegan warned.

‘She may.’ Lysaer’s smile never faltered. ‘Better that than have her weep for me, dead.’ He nudged his horse around and made his way to the river’s verge to find a place when the second column passed. Diegan jammed on his helm, disgruntled, and hastily rearranged his streamered reins. When the Lord Commander of Etarra’s guard had trotted his horse beyond earshot, Gnudsog spat again, this time in rare admiration.

‘Dresses like a daisy, like they all do who sport pedigree,’ he confided to the sergeant who awaited the order to march. ‘But yon royal puppy is canny at handling men. He might be a priss at his swordplay, still I don’t think I’d want him for my enemy.’

Unable to find an appropriate reply to criticism involving his betters, the sergeant complained instead about the gnats.

‘Well,’ cracked Gnudsog, out of patience. ‘Sound the horn for the advance! Clansmen are waiting, I know it, so we might as well call them to the bloodbath.’

In moving waves of pennons and lances that juddered and cracked through the greenwood, the army surged on upriver. Half-lost in the creak of armour, and the jingle of stirrup and bit, a jay squalled in raucous complaint.

Up the valley, a second jay answered. Striped in shadow behind a paling of saplings, charcoal smeared in patterns across his face, Caolle hustled six breathless children past him and on upslope, toward safety. To the runner crouched at his elbow, he whispered a hasty, ‘All clear.’

Soundless in his boots of beaten deerhide, the messenger departed. Branches slithered back into place across the thicket, and through slits between trembling leaves, Caolle measured the advance of Etarra’s thousands as they crashed up the riverbed below his vantage. The last cohort passed, and carefully counted, the last rank.

Two divisions; in line with every hope and plan. The other pair had parted ways from the main troop, to quarter the valleys to either side. Caolle smiled.

A third jay called from the marshes.

‘Now,’ Caolle mouthed. The hand he held raised for the signal dipped and raised and then fell.

The command was seen and relayed upriver by a dozen scouts in concealment, until it reached the head of a dried streambed that sliced like a scar across the hill.

‘Hie!’ yipped a barbarian teamster. His whip fell with a crack like the snap of a quick-broken twig and four horses slammed weight against their collars. Ropes whipped taut through oiled blocks. As the strain transferred, mechanically redoubled, the huge logs which braced a timber dam sucked and shifted in mud settings. Again the clansman urged his draught team. Veins bulged in the necks of the horses and their hooves bit deep as they strained.

A brace gave; others canted and the dam bowed, its log joints streaked black with the first jetting trickles of leaked water. While the structure creaked and gave outward, the clansman slashed his team free and drove them to a canter up the bank.

The dam burst apart on their heels. Timbers flew like splinters, driven by the loosed force of waters held in check through the last weeks of northland spring rains. The torrent reclaimed its balked course with a roar, fanged in its froth by a burden of sharpened stakes. The clansman soothed his draught team to a halt just barely out of reach. While the torrent swept by like a demon, tearing up mats of elder and birch, his pulse leaped in excitement. The thunder of racing waters was answered from five other sites throughout the valley, where other holding ponds in Tal Quorin’s watershed were simultaneously released to rampage through rock-stepped courses by the weight of held gallons and gravity. The plain alongside the riverbank in moments became a gouged maelstrom of boulders and white flood.

On the banks of the river Tal Quorin, the birds in the marshes fled. A herd of deer took bounding flight over mallow and cattails, then veered in fresh panic as they caught wind of the oncoming army. About then, the lead horses began to snort and sidle and shy, while men cursed and spurs dug and Gnudsog raised his chin listening.

Too late, he heard what animals sensed ahead of him: the booming growl of thunder, with no cloud visible overhead. The sound was deep and oncoming and weighty in voice to shake the earth. His fist on his destrier’s reins like iron, even as the forward scout outriders crashed shouting and gesticulating through the brush, Gnudsog spun his horse on its haunches and slammed sideways into the lighter mount of his message-bearer.

‘Ride!’ he screamed. ‘Find Lord Diegan and the prince, and tell them to seek cover on high ground.’ Next, he barked orders for the troops to wheel, though ranks were disordered and broken, and half the war horses were mindless with fear, jammed one on another in herd instinct to bolt.

Locked against motion by the weight of their own vast numbers, the lead ranks saw the flood coming.

It rampaged over a snake-twist curve in the river, a towering, tumbling brown wall jagged with logs, uprooted trees and slashed greenery. The vanguard of Etarra’s proud army was allowed a split second of terror, but no escape.

The water hit.

Men, mounts, and bright pennons crumpled as if struck by the log-mailed fist of doom. Horses screamed, upended, their cries as one with their riders who were crushed, and scythed under, and drowned. The foaming jaws that crested over Tal Quorin’s banks thrashed on in a welter of chaos, to cut down everything standing; to smash living flesh without quarter and to turn the snapped shafts of the lances against those maimed, to impale and gut, and club unconscious with a force more furious than man’s.

The passage of the flood was cataclysmically swift, and it dragged on its course the mangled destriers, the rent and sodden banners and the dismembered, drowned and dying men of all but the extreme flanks of Etarra’s first division.

Given warning by the dispatch of Gnudsog’s staff messenger, Lord Diegan did not turn tail and abandon his second company in a bolt for higher ground. In a rapid-fire string of orders, he commanded four reliable men to escort Lysaer out of danger, then called to muster the ranks behind for a speedy retreat from the riverbank.

The ground was soggy. The suck and splash of many horses and men drawn to a halt in one place foiled the most effective shout; and Diegan lacked Gnudsog’s bull bellow. So that when the soldiers he had dispatched to attend the prince closed instead around his own horse and insistently grasped at the bridle, he thought his first orders had been mistaken.

‘The prince!’ he cracked out in white anger. ‘I said, you escort his Grace, Lysaer.’

The men continued to seem deaf.

Lord Diegan spun in his saddle, suspicion in his eyes as bright as the glint on his jewels.

And Lysaer met him, harder still. ‘Go! This was my error. My fight. Let me save what I can. For I fear the worst still awaits us.’

Enraged and far from willing to desert his post of command, Lord Diegan hauled to wheel his horse. Between his hands, the reins recoiled into slack: his own men had cut the leather at the bit-ring and were traitorously goading his mount to trot away from the river and his troops.

‘Damn your royal effrontery to Sithaer!’ cried Lord Diegan.

Lysaer gave him back an insouciant wave, while he directed cracking strings of directions that effected a miracle of smooth deployment among the troops. As Lord Diegan was dragged up the rise toward the forest, his last, venomous thought was that no man alive should be blessed all at once, with looks, toughness and such surpassing talent for leadership; grudging resignation followed that perhaps this was why the Fellowship had insisted on restoring royal rule to start with.

Three-quarters of the men were clear of the rivercourse when the spate gushed from the narrower channel of the upper valley and raced to claim the marshy stretch of flatland. Tal Quorin’s fury was less spent than engorged on its burden of disembowelled horses and racked men. Laced in dirty foam, and encumbered by stripped caparisons and bodies both thrashing and lifeless, the flood bore down upon the second division of Etarra’s city garrison.

Lysaer heard the hiss and splash; felt the thunderous shake of the pummelled earth translate from the ground through his horse. He did not turn. Although every nerve in his body was keyed to the disaster about to overtake him, he continued in his clear, even voice to issue concise instructions to convey the next cohort of pikemen to the safe ground.

The men who dragged Diegan by force up the rise from the marshlands watched helpless as the waters closed threshing down. They saw the fear scribed on the faces of their front-rank companions, impossibly trapped; they saw and could do nothing to stem the disordered burst of panic and the tragic unravelling of an order that against odds had held until now. And they saw, some of them weeping, the prince on his magnificently trained chestnut struggle with spur and seat to hold his ground.

The Lord Commander they had spared from destruction ceased in that moment to fight them, but drove his fist again and again in balked fury against the mailed flesh of his thigh. No man could do aught, now, but watch. The gelding was schooled to the sternest standards by the best gifted horsemen in the continent. But as the waters crashed hungrily down, bridleless, it reverted to instinct. The Lord Commander and his escort in the wood saw it rear, and then bolt like an arrow through straw, straight into the pressed ranks behind. The army seethed in a mass stampede of berserk flight. Footmen were trampled, and companions shoved and even stabbed as soldiers clawed to reach the high ground. Then the flood closed over all with a slap that diminished the screams, the shouts and every other futile mortal protest.

Because the pair, mount and rider, were moving with the flow, the crest did not at once immolate them. Heads surfaced, upflung in struggle, noble chestnut with an eye rolling white, the other sleeked wet and shining blond. Lysaer had discarded his helm, but could do nothing to shed the chainmail that could drown him. Then the unseen thrust of a log, or maybe a submerged corpse entangled in shed loops of harness battered and encumbered the swimmers. The horse rolled and went under in the sucking rush of current. Of the rider, they saw no more sign.

Lord Diegan’s fury went cold. ‘You and you!’ he said through clenched teeth to the men who still held his horse’s bridle. ‘Knot my reins to the bit!’ He snapped the severed leather in their faces without caring if he took out an eye. Then he spurred down the bank and reclaimed his post with a shout that carried even over the gush of Tal Quorin’s black torrent. ‘Etarrans! To me! Reform ranks.’

Somewhere upstream lurked the clansmen who had arranged this disaster. They would die very messily, Diegan swore, as he reviewed for losses and discovered still wider calamity. Of the first and second companies of Etarra’s guard, scarcely a quarter remained standing. These waded, dripping, toward the bank. They towed the maimed and the dying; still, these were the luckier ones, since horror did not end with the flood. For the troops Lysaer’s considered logic had sent clear in advance of the waters, the hillsides now offered poor haven. Where the riverbanks appeared most solidly inviting, the footing lay undermined in a maze of deadfalls and traps. The ground gave way beneath the lancers’ destriers. Their screams rent the air as they fell twisting into pits lined with sharpened stakes.

‘Stay in the shallows!’ Diegan cried. He muscled his mount by main force off dry ground, then ploughed girth-deep through rushing waters to rally his straggle of survivors. The horse cloths wicked up water, dragging his mount at each step. He cut them away. Since they bore his house blazon and badges of rank, a grazed and bleeding lieutenant lashed them up crudely to a pike pole. Around that dripping, swamp-sodden standard, the second company struggled to reform denuded ranks. They gathered, hauling in their moaning wounded, and killing in deft mercy those horses unable to rise. The flood torrent crested and passed to leave a foam-laced train of muddy rapids, pocked into rills and potholes that were not caused by rocks, but by the flesh, bone, and sinew of Etarra’s brave fighting force, with its eighteen hundred lancers, its silk pennons, its hand-picked recruits and its chainmail and arms, bought new from the merchants’ levy.

As the diamond lines of stiff current eased into slackwater ripples, the river receded to yield up its toll of carnage and dead. Of the body of a drifter-bred chestnut gelding, there was no sign, nor had any man of Diegan’s company seen trace of its royal rider.

Of Lysaer, no one spoke; but his absence weighed on the calm that fell as the roar of Tal Quorin diminished. On the bank, a band of archers fussed with spoiled fletching and stretched bowstrings. Knee-deep in muck and flattened sedges, pikemen drew daggers and slashed the drenched pennons that unbalanced their polearms in desperate, grim-faced need to seek out clan enemies and kill. Hardly a man was not bleeding. Scarcely a horse was not lame.

The only outcry to be heard was the cross scream of a jay.

Something whipcracked through the foliage. A standing man staggered and collapsed and around him, others started shouting.

The clanborn were firing off arrows.

Another man buckled against Diegan’s horse. He fought the beast’s sidewards shy; felt a whisper of wind flick his cheek. The flights came, not in volleys but singly, shot at leisure from a point of heavy cover up the slope. The shafts snicked and cracked through pale birches. They whined through windless air, to smack with the malevolent skill of scout marksmen into the stranded ranks in the marshes.

Diegan cried orders for the sensible counter-move, to retreat and duck shoulder deep in water, to seek bulwarks behind hummocks and the brush-caught mounds of dead horses. As he used the flat of his sword to belt his bucketing mount into the reed beds, only a seasoned few followed.

Unmoored by a lust for blood and vengeance, the hotter blooded men and fresh recruits charged at the origin of the crossfire.

The deadfalls, the spring-traps and the slip nooses set in waiting all claimed their inevitable toll of lives. Steiven’s scouts owned a gristly ingenuity and their toil’s harvest laced the greenwood yet again with the agonized screams of townsmen, who died, slaughtered, without one blow struck in defence.

Four hundred yards downstream, creeping silent and unmounted through marshes flash-flooded under waters rinsed opaque with yellow clay, Captain Mayor Pesquil’s advance scouts found Lysaer s’Ilessid. Stranded on a sandbar with swift waters sheeting past on either side, he stood skin-wet and shivering, one forearm bathed in blood. His face was grazed, his clothing ripped. His sword also was scarlet, though the right hand gripped white to the pommel showed no wound.

Half unmoored from thread settings, sapphires hung like clots from his surcoat, each sparking cold fire at the ripping jerk of each breath. At the prince’s feet, mudcaked as his boots, sprawled the corpse of a fine chestnut gelding with a log staked through its lean barrel. Its throat had been cut. Questing flies already sucked its filmed eyes.

Knee deep in a current still treacherous with debris, the scout who encountered the pair discreetly queried, his voice a bare breath above a whisper, ‘Your Grace?’

Lysaer whipped around. He had a black bruise on his chin. The rest of his face was white to the bone and his eyes, bright and empty as his jewels. Clumsily staunched with a knotted rag, his arm seeped from a nasty gash. Faced forward, the reason for his unsteady breathing was disclosed by the plum-coloured swelling pressed against the burst rings of his mail.

No stranger to injuries, the scout added, ‘You appear to have broken your collarbone.’

He received no answer. A nearly imperceptible tremor swept the man before him from head to foot.

‘It is shock. You must sit.’ The scout stepped forward fast, prepared for the chance his charge might faint.

‘Not here.’ As if the drowned and disembowelled corpses wadded like rags in the sullied waters did not exist, Lysaer shifted his regard back to the horse at his feet. ‘Never here.’ Beyond him, a clot of logs and brush rolled in the current. Sunlight silvered the crescent bill of a pike, its sodden streamers fanned across the cheek of a corpse left in openmouthed surprise: his jaw had been fully torn away. Lysaer dropped his sword, raised his hand, and masked the side of his face between the arch of his forefinger and thumb.

Since he looked on the edge of collapse, the scout presumed and gripped the royal elbow in support.

A shudder jarred the prince in recoil. Lysaer’s head snapped up. He wrenched free, and the scout saw in dawning horror that his Grace suffered no confusion at all, but a self-revulsion so deep it shocked the watching spirit to behold.

‘I was wrong,’ Lysaer said with the same, self-damning clarity. ‘Daelion’s pity upon me, every man who has died in this place has been ruined for a misplaced belief and my idealistic folly.’

Pesquil’s scout stumbled to find a banal reply. ‘Clan tactics are ever without honour, your Grace.’

But it was not the barbarians’ touch at warfare that had splintered Lysaer’s heart into rage; it was the knowledge, delivered on two companies’ ruthlessly massacred bodies, that he had been masterfully deceived.

Arithon was a trickster to make his s’Ffalenn forbears in Karthan seem as mere simpletons in comparison. For this trap to have been baited with children, meant the scene over the shadow brigantine in Etarra’s back alleys, had all been a sham, most carefully engineered, most exactingly executed. Here, over the corpse of a horse, amid a riverbed swollen still in carnage, Lysaer understood that the joy, the compassion, the agonized self-sacrifice Arithon had shown toward the brats conscripted to the knackers’ yards had been nothing, nothing at all. Just another ruse, another play of diabolical sleight-of-hand and seamless guile.

This man, this bastard of shadows, had no scruple, but only an unholy passion for lies of a stripe that could cajole human sympathy, and then turn and without conscience rend all decency.

Quite aside from Desh-thiere’s curse, Lysaer rededicated himself to moral purpose. His half-brother, so gifted in magecraft and so superior in unprincipled cunning, was a blight and a threat to society. With a continent riddled with encampments of barbarians, each one a ready weapon for his hands, no bound existed to the havoc Arithon might choose to create.

Lysaer stirred. Seared to numbness by the enormity of his mistake, he bent, closed his hand and retrieved his sword. The blade he cleaned on his surcoat and the scout’s banality he ignored. ‘My horse is dead,’ he said crisply. ‘I shall need another.’

‘No man goes mounted with my headhunters,’ interjected a severe voice from the side. Unseen, unnoticed, Captain Mayor Pesquil waded the last strides toward the sandspit, several scouts arrayed at his heels. The interruption in his patrol had been noticed, and reported with a zeal that suggested his underlings knew what their posts were worth.

Lysaer disregarded the impertinence. Wide and unflinching in candour, his eyes transferred to the commander of Etarra’s league of headhunters. ‘This was my mistake. Since my ignorance has led to disaster, I’m ready to listen. But in one thing, I will not be swayed. Arithon s’Ffalenn will be stopped. And killed. And if you deem it necessary to slay children to keep a weapon such as Steiven’s clansmen from his hands, I shall no longer obstruct you.’

Pockscarred and twitchy with a flame of nervous energy, Pesquil’s black eyebrows arched. If he was startled, his mocking inquisitiveness stayed unblunted. ‘Did my Lord Diegan survive?’

‘I hope so. I sent him to cover on the bank with all of the men I had time to send out of danger.’ Tartly polite, Lysaer added, ‘Is the interrogation finished?’

Now Pesquil was astonished, and not quite glib enough to hide it.

Urbanely defensive, Lysaer said, ‘If my judgement was lacking, my first duty was to see the men didn’t lose their commander by it.’

The lanky, curled braid that Pesquil wore for battle slapped his cheek as he jerked his head. ‘To Sithaer with your honour. I would ask, rather, how you got any pedigreed scion of Etarra to agree to take orders from anybody.’

Now Lysaer’s expression turned arch. ‘Simply put, there are certain advantages to being born and raised a king’s heir.’ A heartbeat later, he smiled. ‘The nasty minded sort of arrogance that stops a man being gainsaid is one of them.’

‘Hah!’ Pesquil slapped his thigh in contempt; but around him, the men who knew him best hid grins. Lysaer saw as much, and understood they had reached an agreement. And so he kept his humour when Pesquil added, ‘Well, then, prince. There won’t be much advantage if you choose to keep up bleeding, and wind up keeled over on that horse.’

Stiffly, for his dignity balked at public handling, Lysaer extended his badly-wrapped arm that by now dripped messily scarlet. The man Pesquil signalled stepped forward, and with a deft expertise took charge. The binding and split bracer beneath were pulled away; the gash examined and bandaged.

Of the men, only Pesquil dared comment. ‘You’re lucky. The cut is deep, but it runs with the line of the muscle. You’ll scar but have no loss of function.’

Neither grateful nor relieved, Lysaer half-turned his face as his collarbone also was examined, the arm he did not need for a sword slung and strapped immobile. Beneath the hauberk at his neck as they had cut away the padding to probe the bone, his pulsebeat could be seen, heavy and rapid with anger. He said in a tone almost level, ‘How many do you think survived this?’

‘None.’ Pesquil squinted across muddied waters, while snarls of brush drifted by and a corpse trailed, moored by a rack of ripped trappings. ‘There would have been deadfalls, of course. Pits and spring-traps that rip to disembowel. These are Steiven’s clans you have marched on.’

When Lysaer endured this, still steady in silence, Pesquil’s lips quirked in a sneer. ‘Ah, Gnudsog, you are thinking. Why not say so? The veteran who saw fit not to question, despite his years and experience…’ The officer who led Etarra’s headhunters through a career of blazing obsession studied Lysaer with pity. ‘You should know, about Gnudsog, that his brother and young son died at the hands of barbarians. They fell with a merchant’s train on their way to East Ward, to attend a cousin’s wedding. Etarra’s great captain got his start hunting heads, as anyone would readily tell you. He stopped, because he loved it too much. Dearer than his own life, he once told me.’ Irked now, and bristling because this prince was listening sincerely, as no scion of fine pedigree would deign to do, Pesquil curled his lip. ‘If he thought he could kill a few barbarians, old Gnudsog would’ve thrown every soldier he had to Daelion and the pits of Sithaer.’

‘I was the one who did that,’ Lysaer corrected with quick acerbity; the scout finished with his dressings and withdrew, embarrassed as the discussion went on as if both men were private. ‘I thought I was waiting for you to say what was left to be done. We still have the companies on our flanks.’

Pesquil laughed, but softly. ‘Do we?’

And across from him, Lysaer’s gaze wavered, as cold remembrance touched him: that bad as the river had been, they had yet to encounter any shadows. He collected himself in a breath. ‘Are you afraid to find out?’

‘No.’ Come to his decision, Pesquil dispersed his scouts on a hand-signal. As they fanned out, efficiently soundless, and vanished in pursuit of lapsed duty, their leader backstepped into the shoaling waters of Tal Quorin. ‘Come, then, your Grace,’ he invited. ‘But this time, we hunt Deshans my way.’

In stealth, they worked upriver; past the sprawled dead with their eyes and their mouths clogged with mud; past scarlet-rinsed puddles and broken swords: and the destriers, the curve of their bellies like whales on a beach, but for the straps of breastplate and saddlegirth, or the brush-jammed arch of a stirrup. Lysaer did not flinch from the carnage. When Pesquil demanded that he rip the jewels from his surcoat to kill their chance sparkle in the sunlight he obeyed; for clansmen were stationed in these woods. Upstream, less faintly as they progressed, they could hear sounds of shouting, and the high, shrill screams of dying horseflesh.

The barbarians were still at their slaughter.

From pale, Lysaer had gone sick white. It took every shred of self-control and a humility more demanding than courage to keep still; to stay with Pesquil, moving silent from a thicket of reeds to the shadowy pool beneath a deadfall, keeping each step shallow, so their boots did not break water and cause a splash.

They stopped again. Lysaer clenched his teeth against the pain of his cuts and contusions, and the flaring stabs that resulted when his side or his collarbone was jostled. Movement came, ever so soft, in the fronds of a willow by the riverside. A scout returned. Head bent, Pesquil received the report.

Lysaer could not hear the words, though in the forest, no birds called. The rush and tumble of high waters had receded also, and the gnats were swarming, bloodthirsty. They bounced off his nose and his ears in maddening circles, and inhaling, he had to struggle not to sneeze.

From upstream, also, came silence.

Ankle deep in flat water, Lysaer gripped himself hard to keep from shivering in a paroxysm that had nothing to do with cold or shock. Several moments passed before he became aware that Pesquil stared at him from under half closed lids.

Under that piercing scrutiny, court training alone enabled him to speak with no reflection of urgency. ‘You have news?’

Pesquil’s upper lip twitched, then relaxed in a one-sided smile that held no shred of joy. ‘Shadows,’ he said clearly. ‘Shadows and traps, to the west of us. More traps and archers, over the ridge to the east. The flanking divisions have not passed unscathed. But unlike those drowned by Tal Quorin, there are numbers enough to stand, fighting.’

Arithon was here. Confirmation triggered in Lysaer a tumultuous anticipation.

In a vice of self control tighter than anything he had needed previously, the prince stayed his sword-hand from ripping blade from scabbard in a curse-driven lust to rend and kill. Etarra’s troops were still dying of his mistakes. Their needs claimed his first responsibility. ‘Up this valley there were living men left, just a bit ago.’

‘I know.’ Pesquil surged ahead, lightly mocking to hide admiration. ‘We’ll pass upstream first, never worry.’

The sun beat down and the flow of falling water subsided. Here and there, marsh reeds pricked out of beds slicked into herringbone patterns, dulled with a velvet of drying silt. The air hung thick and quiet. Lysaer chafed at this progress, which stayed slow since Pesquil insisted their advance remain cautious and covert. Tossed across the sheen of bared flats like wads from a rag picker’s pack lay the limp dead of Etarra’s garrison, conspicuously lacking both wounded and living horses. Not all had perished of drowning; not all bore macerating wounds. Lysaer paused in the act of stepping over the body of a petty officer, and the jolt of what eyesight recorded transferred like a blow to his belly.

The man’s throat had been cut.

Choked by an explosion of nausea, Lysaer felt a hand chop the small of his back and propel him forcibly onward. ‘Such surprise,’ Pesquil said sourly. ‘You didn’t really think, did you, that the river could’ve done for them all?’

The heat, the swimming reflections off wet mud, the fall of drops from draggled cattails all conspired to turn Lysaer’s head. He fought back the dizziness, enraged at how long he needed to recapture the semblance of self-command. ‘Whoever did this could not have murdered two divisions without suffering one single loss.’

‘Damn near,’ murmured Pesquil, paused to receive yet another report from a scout. ‘Lord Diegan is alive, at least. He’s downriver, safe, but unable to fight. My surgeon is just now picking an arrowhead and sundry bits of chain mail out of the gristle of his flank.’

But the news that Etarra’s Lord Commander had survived brought Lysaer little reprieve. ‘I’ve seen no barbarian dead.’

‘I have.’ The scout had silently vanished. Pesquil now scanned the wood ahead intently. ‘But precious few, my prince. No clansman will fight when he can ambush. He will not leave cover until his killing is accomplished and even then he’ll do so warily. To catch him and engage him, you must creep close and never let him sight you. And then you must lie in wait with the patience of almighty Ath.’ Pesquil suddenly froze and caught Lysaer back by the shoulder. ‘Don’t answer,’ he breathed sharply; and as the prince stiffened to his touch, ‘Don’t move.’

His attention was trained into the shadows, away from the lit expanse of flats. Lysaer too watched the forest. Past the sun-flecked dances of gnats, under the silvered boughs of beeches that upheld their vaultings of copper leaves, he saw gaping holes torn in the ground, and the slashed earth that marked where horses had struggled as the footing gave under their forelegs. He saw the white gleam of a fallen sword; the gilt fringes torn off a caparison; he saw too the bundled dead, with arms outflung, or hands slackly curled over the shafts of the arrows that had killed them. Through the raw beat of pulse through his veins, and a fury too bitter for expression, Lysaer forced himself to exhaustive search and to read, beyond omission, in ripped brush and scarlet-tipped stakes and desecrated flesh, the fates of the men who had fled the river.

Steiven’s clansmen had been nothing if not thorough.

A man whimpered, unseen in the gloom. Lysaer tensed to rise, prepared to succour survivors. Pesquil snatched him back with a grasp that jarred the broken ends of his collarbone, and also the cracked ribs in his left side that the scout who strapped him had not found. Next, Pesquil’s horny palm closed over his face, stifling even the hissed air that was all his expression of pain.

On a breath scented in garlic, Pesquil mouthed in his ear, ‘Keep silent. The wrong move, the slightest noise, and you kill us all.’ He maintained his suffocating grip, while, in cruel vindication of his warning, the unseen soldier’s suffering became cut off in mid cry.

There followed a bubbling sigh whose cause could not be mistaken. Somewhere very close by, barbarians were yet about their business of slitting the fallen men’s throats.

Slowly, deliberately, the headhunter captain released his restraint. Lysaer blotted his cheek where the studs of Pesquil’s bracer had gouged a scab, the look he returned a blast of stifled frustration.

Snake silent, the commander of Etarra’s headhunters dispatched a series of hand-signals to the hidden ranks of his scouts. Then he touched Lysaer’s wrist and crept deeper into the forest.

Progress was more cautious than before. Since deadfalls and traps might lurk unsprung between the trees with their matted mantles of creepers, Lysaer learned a headhunter’s way of probing the soil with a weapon before inching forward, and to stalk head down, careful to leave undisturbed any brush or vine or loose root that might hide the trigger for a spring trap. The scents of burgeoning summer foliage hung unsettled with the reek of recent death, and often the tufted mosses squelched under hand or knee with the wet heat of fresh-spilled blood. The gloom deepened. Ahead, his attention trained forward, Pesquil poised. With fingers pinched to steel to damp stray sound, he slowly, silently drew his blade.

Lysaer crept abreast and followed his guide’s line of sight.

Through a lattice of birches and black firs, a light-footed squad of boys busied themselves among Etarra’s fallen. Clad in deerskin, furtive in movement as wild creatures, they were there to pilfer weapons, Lysaer presumed; until his eye was arrested by a telltale glimmer of steel. Horrified incredulity shook him. The shaded depths of the thickets no longer masked the fact the boys’ hands were bathed scarlet to the wrists. Small fingers and sharp daggers ensured that town-bred wounded never rose. Before his stunned eyes he saw a son of Deshir’s clans end a man pleading for mercy with a practised slash across the windpipe. Other victims who sprawled unconscious, or moaned face down in their agony died as fast, of a well placed stab in the neck. The butchery was done in speed and silence, and ruthless efficiency without parallel.

‘The little fiends!’ Lysaer gasped softly.

‘Vengeance,’ Pesquil whispered. ‘This time we have them. There won’t be another trap waiting.’

Etarra’s league of headhunters deployed with oiled care, and at length the little rise lay triply ringed with poised men. When Pesquil signalled the attack, only the inner rank charged. They cut directly for the kill and did not mind if a child or two slipped past. The outer lines would mop up any fugitives.

At the forefront of the strike-force, Lysaer thrust his sword inside the guard of youngsters’ daggers with no more hesitation than a man might feel who stabbed rats. This was not war, but execution, the lives he destroyed of tainted stock. Royal requisites inured a man to cruel decisions; if they sickened him, it must not show, and if they softened him, he was no fit vessel to rule.

If Arithon s’Ffalenn used children for his battles, the scar upon the conscience must be his.

First Quarry

On a thicketed knoll amid the valley adjacent to Tal Quorin, the half-brother that Lysaer had sworn to kill sat in a brushbrake alongside five of Steiven’s archers. Young Jieret knelt, restless, at his shoulder, wielding a bow with a nervous prowess the equal of any grown man’s. Arithon himself bore no weapon. Empty handed, he perched with his legs drawn up, his wrists dangled lax on his knees. Head bent and eyes half lidded, he appeared on the lazy edge of sleep.

In fact, he kept his immediate senses detached out of bleakest necessity.

Clan runners had earlier confirmed that the s’Ilessid prince had marched with the doomed divisions that advanced up Tal Quorin’s banks. His fine chestnut horse had been seen to go down, but that its rider survived both flood and deadfalls was never for an instant in doubt.

The burning urge of Desh-thiere’s curse continued insidiously to gnaw at Arithon’s inner will. He felt it always, a tireless pressure against reason, an ache that pried between every thought and desire. The knowledge of Lysaer’s presence played on his nerves like a craving, volatile as a spark fanned dangerously close to dry tinder.

The nightmare was too substantial, that he could not encounter his half-brother alive and retain his grip on self-will. Had Deshir’s clans not relied upon his gifts for survival, he should have been far from this place.

‘Here, Jieret,’ one of the scouts chided, as the boy retested the tension of his bow and at full draw pretended to take aim. ‘Don’t be wasting your shots, boy. Use up those arrows that suit you for length, and we’ve not got spit for replacements.’

‘I know that.’ Jieret glowered, his fingers running up and down, up and down, the new gut string of his recurve. He wore his hair tied back in a thong like the men and tried brazenly hard to hide dread. Ever since the prescient dream that slipped his recall he had been moody and difficult to manage.

A word from Arithon might have eased him. But the Master of Shadow this moment had no shred of perception to spare anyone. No mage would willingly broadcast his finer vision across a field of war. The wrench as quickened spirits were torn from life in the bursting pain of mortal wounds could and had unhinged reason. Barriered as tightly as he had ever been through his nerve-haunted stay at Ithamon, Arithon engaged his talents with the delicate precision of a clockmaker winding the coil for a mainspring.

Throughout the previous night, he had walked the valley barefoot, crossing and recrossing familiar ground as he laid in spell and counterspell and anchored them in fragile tension to the subliminal pull of the compass points. This oak, and that stone, and eastwards to west, a sentinel line of brush and saplings and old trees; a thousand points of landscape became his markers. Now he played his awareness across the fine-spun net of his night’s labour; he tuned his wards, or moved them, or cajoled them from strength to dormancy, the results all balanced to a hairsbreadth to spin a maze-work of shadows across the vale. To this, the strategy painstakingly wrought from the fruits of his tienelle scrying, he layered energies to warp air and deflect the natural acoustics.

If he did not engage his talents in direct intervention to take life, the distinction was narrowly made.

By his hand, the neat ranks of Etarra’s right flanking division blundered abruptly into darkness. The rocks, the mires, the twisted stands of runt maples broke their advance into chaos. Calls of inquiry rebounded between distressed soldiers, while the orders of officers to rally split to untrustworthy echoes and sent whole cohorts stumbling awry through rock-sided ravines and marshy dells.

The shadows themselves defied nature. A townsman who spun round to backtrack would see his path open to clear sunshine. If he yielded to fright and instinct and fled that way in retreat, he encountered no further hindrance. But any Etarran soldiers high-hearted enough to use that reprieve to recover their bearings at next step became swallowed by darkness. Blinded and lost to direction, they thrashed through branches and bogs, twisted ankles and bruised shins on an unkindness of rocks and crooked roots. The terrain funnelled them north, where they floundered, battered and disoriented, into a dazzling brilliance of sudden sunlight.

Arrows met them in whispered, even flights loosed off by hidden clan marksmen. Soldiers screamed, and crumpled and died; others warned of ambush by the cries of their fallen ducked back toward the cover of the shadows, to be cut down in turn by companions too rattled to distinguish town colours from the deerskins of enemies.

Bewildered shouts and groans of agony, all rebounded into echoes, recaptured by webs of complex conjury. Arithon sensed like ebb-tide the continuous draw on his resources. Like a killing frost out of season, the spellcraft taught by his grandfather mixed uneasily with murder. The line was most critical where mage-craft subsided and dying men spasmed like seines of dredged fish, gasping their final breaths. As though he wound silk past raw flame, Arithon worked to a perilous paradox: attuned to the outermost demands of sensitivity, while sealed still and deaf within self-imposed strictures of silence. He heard, but did not answer the quips between the archers as they sorted fresh arrows, or passed around waterskin and dipper. Pressed by doubt, and by knife-edge awareness that townborn enemies must only be allowed to break through in manageable numbers, Arithon beat back the weariness that pressed aches to the core of his flesh. Should he slip, lose track and grip on just one lancer or foot cohort, Steiven’s clansmen could be swiftly overrun. Engrossed in concentration that must target exactly which victims to release, he sensed nothing momentous as, by the river course over the east ridge, the lifeblood of Deshir’s young sons soaked on the banks of Tal Quorin.

But young Jieret, who had Sight, cried aloud, ‘Ath, Ath, it’s Teynie!’ He threw down his bow and tugged Arithon’s shoulder in dawning, agonized horror. ‘Hurry! She’s going to betray them all.’

Dazed and burdened with his interleaved mesh of maze-woven shadows and defence wards, Arithon neither heard the words, nor felt the boy’s urgent touch. He roused anyway. The oath lately sworn with Steiven’s son had been a blood-ritual, and for the mage-trained such things became binding beyond a mere promise; his life and the boy’s were subtly twined. Like a man slapped out of a coma he mustered back full awareness and moved; but not in time.

Lost to panic and raw grief, Jieret shoved past the archers and vaulted the palings that served as cover.

No chance existed for second remedy. Arithon dropped hold on the spells, let them collapse in a tangling cascade of frayed energies. The shadow-barriers being easiest to stabilize, he locked a lightless pall across the valley that would partially hamper Etarra’s troops. ‘You’re on your own,’ he informed in clipped apology to the archers. ‘Stand or retreat as you will, but at least send a runner to warn your fellows.’

Then he was over the breastworks and after Jieret with his sword sliding clear in mid-air.

Of the scouts posted with him, half remained. The rest grabbed up weapons and bows and jumped after, hailing companions as they went. ‘Jieret’s run off, the prince after him. Divide your numbers and come, they’ll need support.’

Dodging through elders and thin brush, Arithon spared no thought for regret. Had Jieret’s spurious talent recaptured the vision that led to the slaughter of Deshir’s innocents, any futures traced through his tienelle scrying would now carry unknown outcomes.

If Deshir’s clans were beyond saving, he had vowed that Steiven’s son be spared.

He poured all his heart into running, slammed through a last stand of birch, and at last overtook the fleeing boy. Once abreast, he made no effort to stop, but matched stride and gently guided, bending the child’s flight toward the thicker stands of forest on high ground. ‘Easy. Up here. That’s better. Fewer pikemen, and don’t forget the swamp.’

Jieret choked back a sob and plunged through a gully in a furious rush that tripped him up.

Arithon caught him as he stumbled, steadied him through the moss-slicked rocks up the bank. Between heaving breaths he kept talking. ‘Explain. What about Teynie? We’re bloodsworn. It’s my oath to help.’

‘The tents!’ Jieret pushed through a stand of witch hazel, whose downy spines powdered his jerkin. ‘She’s going to lead headhunters to the tents!’

Slammed by a wave of foreboding, and fending off branches that raked his face, Arithon squeezed the boy’s hand. ‘Don’t talk,’ he gasped. ‘Just think in your mind what you dreamed and imagine that I can see it too.’

But panic had already impelled the vision to the forefront of Jieret’s awareness. The instant Arithon opened a channel to test the boy’s distress, the ties of the bloodpact took over. Jieret’s terror became his own. The prescient vision that tienelle scrying had snatched back in fragments unfolded now in entirety. The scrub-grown hillside seamed with weather-stripped gullies blurred out of vision as mage-sight unveiled another place…

…of torn earthworks and slaughtered bodies, where Pesquil’s advance troop of headhunters tracked prints across blood-rinsed earth. In swift, efficient silence they exchanged swords for daggers and cut scalps to claim bounty for their kills.

The corpses raised by the hair for the knife-cut were small, the faces smudged in leaf mould and gore unlined by life and years…

Boys, Arithon realized with a choke that all but stopped his heart. He tripped hard on a stone, felt the tug of Jieret’s grip save his balance. Present awareness slapped back, along with anguished recognition of total helplessness. The deed was done: the sons of Deshir dead. All hacked and disfigured, were the little ones Caolle had insisted be sent to dispatch the enemy wounded because men for that task could ill be spared; amid whose company Jieret would have been, if not for a bloodpact of friendship.

‘Jieret, they’re gone,’ Arithon gasped out in defeat. ‘We’re too late.’

But Jieret’s mute and furious headshake forced back unwanted recollection that the appalling scene by the riverside had failed to include the fated girl. At what point does the strong mind falter, Arithon wondered in a cascade of renewed despair. The feud between Karthan and Amroth had inspired atrocities enough to wring from him all tolerance for suffering. Between town born and clan, the hate ran more poisonous still.

Ground creepers tore at his footfalls as he fought toward the crest of the ridge. At his side, Jieret was labouring, his eyes stretched sightless and wide, as if he viewed vistas of horrors, but lacked any breath to cry protest.

At what point should the strong heart shy off, and preserve itself from wanton self-destruction? To go on was to risk every shred of integrity to the mad drives of Desh-thiere’s curse. Arithon swore in fierce anguish. He tightened grip on his sword, braced tired nerves, and cast off the protective barriers that confined his sight to Jieret’s dream. Every prudent precaution he had taken was tossed away as he reached out direct with his mage-sight.

Disciplined, efficient, too well-versed in the ways of forest clansmen to suffer delay or needless noise, Pesquil rattled off orders. His men crammed dripping trophies in their gamebags. Nearby, wiping a sword whose blade bore chased patterns of reversed runes, a strong, straight man in a ruined surcoat clenched his jaw against the hurt of cracked bones.

Framed in that place, over the bodies of slain children, that man’s lone figure imprinted stark as flame against a scorchmark, and wakened the pattern of Desh-thiere’s curse. Backlit by a slanted shaft of sunlight, the soft, feathered greenery of pine boughs knit a backdrop for disordered blond hair and a regal profile grazed and scratched, but unmarred in expression by any furrow of remorse…

Arithon gasped as if hit. His stride faltered, despite Jieret’s efforts, shouting and tugging, to urge him on. He heard nothing, felt nothing beyond nerves pitched and twisted to a geas-driven impulse to attack.

Vision and reflex merged. Alithiel’s blade sang through air. The sour, belling whine as swordsteel sheared through sticks and green bracken jolted turned senses back to reason.

Arithon stood, breathing hard, the sweat drenched over him in runnels. He caught one breath, two, the hand gripped white to his sword hilt trembling in waves of reaction. Fingers could be relaxed into stillness. The mind could be forced to shake off madness. Eyes closed, quivering as if racked by a fever, Arithon called every shred of his training to repress the screaming urge to fling aside Jieret and bolt, not to rescue, but to kill. Through him and through ran the sick recognition that he had tasted worse than his fears. He had fatally near underestimated the havoc that even indirect scrying on his half-brother could unleash through the core of his being.

Half-undone by despair, for there existed no escape from this quandary, he gathered self-command and looked up.

Attending him in staunch readiness were Jieret and eleven clansmen who had without questions left their defenceworks to support him. Enmeshed as he was in sorry fears and the unmistakable throes of wrecked dignity, their kindness offered temptations a curse-marked spirit could ill afford.

Enraged as a scalded cat by the flaw that twisted through his character, Arithon’s first impulse was to let fly with words and send them packing, away from his reach lest he wantonly compromise their safety.

Humility stayed him, and grief. If Deshir’s wives and daughters were still threatened, these men owned their right to defend them, and he must find courage to see how.

Wordless, he turned his grip on Alithiel and pressed the hilt into Jieret’s startled hands. Then he stripped off his swordbelt and thrust it toward the nearest of the scouts. ‘Take this. Bind my ankles. Somebody else, unbend a bowstring and lash my wrists tight behind my back.’

The clansman regarded him, stupefied.

‘Do it!’ Arithon snapped. Salt sweat burned his eyes, or maybe tears. ‘Dharkaron take you, it’s necessary.’

The belt buckle swung from his fingers, flaring in bursts of caught sunlight. No one made a move to take its burden.

‘Mercy of Ath, tie my hands!’ cried their prince, his voice split and baleful with anguish. ‘I’ve a scrying to try that’s very dangerous, and I can’t say what might happen if I’m free.’ He waited no longer, but spun toward Jieret. ‘I beg you, do as I ask.’

‘Don’t put such a task on a boy!’ A blunt, scarfaced man shoved to the fore, prepared in hot outrage to intervene.

Arithon bit back retort, that worse things had been asked and done already. ‘Loop it tight,’ he insisted as the man bent, and tentatively began to lash his ankles.

‘You’ve gone mad,’ someone murmured from the sidelines.

Arithon, eyes blazing, said, ‘Yes.’

He had no time to explain. To Jieret, standing braced with the black blade cradled flat across his forearm, the Master said emphatically and calmly, ‘You’re oathsworn. Now listen to me. I’m going to try sorcery to find out what’s amiss on the riverbank. You must keep my sword and hold it ready. If my body is taken by a fit, call my name. If that fails to rouse me, or if any of these restraints breaks away, you must cut me deep enough to bleed.’

‘But why?’ a man pealed in protest.

Arithon’s attention never shifted from the child.

Under that sharpened scrutiny, Jieret s’Valerient did not waver. The steel rings sewn to his boy’s brigandine flashed in time to rapid breaths and his eyes, grey hazel, never turned. Of them all, only he and Arithon yet knew of the butchery that drenched the moss by Tal Quorin. Between bloodpacted prince and young protégé an understanding passed, that word of the atrocity must be kept from the men. The small, square chin, so like Steiven’s and the dark red hair that was Dania’s caused Arithon a spasm of grief.

‘Will you trust me?’ he asked. Man to boy, he made no effort to hide his misgiving. ‘For your family’s sake, can you do this?’

Jieret answered him, faintly. ‘I’ll try.’

For a second the severely steep planes of the s’Ffalenn face eased; straight lips bent almost to a smile. Then Arithon crossed his wrists behind his back and waited in stiff impatience while a clan archer diffidently tied him. ‘For your very lives,’ he finished in soft threat. ‘Don’t any of you change my instructions.’

The bowstring was knotted tight and tested. Far off, a woodthrush trilled a liquid cascade of arpeggios. The breeze fanned trembling through fern and birch and pale elder, and the smell of pine mulch and soil filled the senses like a mother’s embrace. Torn by the pull of such comforts, Arithon squeezed his eyes closed. He let go into trance in skittish haste, lest nerves and strength both forsake him. The men close-gathered around him ceased to matter, nor did he feel the touch and slide of light-patterned leaves that raked his body as his knees loosened and gave way. He slipped unceremoniously to the ground, conscious only of another place…

Buried from sight behind a thicket of fir, someone gave a retching cough. Bent over the corpse of a boy with talisman thongs braided at his neck, Pesquil jerked erect and froze listening. Around him, spattered like reivers in a stockyard, his jubilant headhunters did likewise. The sound did not repeat itself. Never patient with waiting, and apprehensive of being spotted by an unseen patrol of Steiven’s scouts, Pesquil deployed his lieutenants to secure the area and beat the brush.

Before the ring closed, a child bolted into the open, running hard. This one carried no dagger. In place of a leather jacket sewn with rings or bone discs, this youngster wore a tunic smutched with river mud and briars. Barely seven years of age, he ran in gasping panic away from the headhunters with their terrible crimsoned swords. A man-sized fox cap offered a fleeting glimpse of cinnamon as it bobbed from mottled light to forest gloom.

‘Give chase,’ Pesquil clipped out. His teeth flashed in a smile that became a low whistle as the new quarry ducked a trailing vine.

The fur hat was snatched off to free a rippling banner of dark hair.

‘Daelion’s Wheel!’ exclaimed Lysaer. ‘That’s a girl!’

‘Obviously.’ Pesquil hefted his sword. ‘Come on. A scalp isn’t valued by sex and if I’m right, we’re about to find the camp Gnudsog died for.’

‘She shouldn’t be here, then?’ Lysaer braced his bandaged forearm against his side in readiness to run. ‘Not even as some sort of lookout?’

‘She probably tagged after her brother.’ Fired to haste, an unholy spark behind his humour, Pesquil gave the prince a pock flecked leer. ‘Are you going to just talk, or join the fun?’

Lysaer clamped his jaw against the ache of ribs and collarbone and grimly matched pace with the headhunters.

The scrying shattered.

A scream of crazed frustration ripped from Arithon’s throat. Pain lanced his shoulder, followed by a coruscation of white light. A ringing, pure chord of harmony exploded bleak insanity with a shock that sieved through his bones. He fell back, weeping and panting, unprepared for tearing heartbreak as the thundering brilliance of Paravian spellcraft ebbed away, leaving him hollow and desolate.

The earth felt fragile underneath him as he opened his eyes to the fast fading glimmer of the star-spell inlaid in the blade of his own weapon. Alithiel poised above him like a bar of smoked glass, edged in his own bright blood. Jieret held the grip in shaking fingers, tears tracked in streaks across his cheeks.

‘It’s all right.’ Aghast to find his larynx torn raw, Arithon need not meet the scouts’ embarrassed faces to derive that he had howled like an animal. He could tell by the burn of fresh abrasions that he had flipped and wrenched against his bonds. And nothing was right, nothing at all. The wasted lives by Tal Quorin were only the prelude to disaster. In this, his second encounter with Lysaer by scrying, only his sword’s arcane defences had arrested his reaction to Desh-thiere’s curse. For the moment he commanded his wits. As long as he kept his distance and strictly eschewed the use of mage-sense, he could hold against the urge that coursed through him, driving, needling, hounding him to rise and to run: to find his half-brother and call challenge and fight until one or both of them lay dead.

Jieret had quieted. Silent, straight, he regarded his sovereign prince in haunted trust, while a contrite scout knelt to lend assistance. The movement as Arithon was helped to sit pulled at his shoulder, but the scratch was neat and shallow, a credit to the boy’s determination.

‘The bonds can be loosened,’ Arithon said gently. He added instructions to be sent at speed to Caolle, and tried not to let them see it mattered, that nobody cared to meet his eyes.

‘Your hands, they’re ripped bloody,’ said the man who attended his wrists. ‘At least, these scars.’ He faltered, then burst out, ‘You’ve done scryings like this one before?’

The note of awed epiphany in his voice incensed Arithon to revulsion. ‘Ath, no!’ He did not qualify, but kicked the loosened belt from his ankles, surged to his feet, and took back the burden of his sword.

‘Run,’ he snapped, and then did so, fighting off acid futility. They were too far from the grotto where Deshir’s girls and women were hidden, too hopelessly distant to bring reprieve. But knowing Pesquil’s headhunters were hot in pursuit of Fethgurn’s daughter, he had to make the attempt; for when Deshir’s clansmen discovered the extent of their losses, the grief of husbands, kin and fathers would for a surety touch off another bloodbath.

Last Quarry

The girl-child flushed by Pesquil’s headhunters led them on an arduous chase upstream. Above the initial site of the ambush, the valley narrowed. Tal Quorin’s bed sliced Strakewood in a steep-walled ravine, while springs that fed whitewater currents splashed in plumed falls from high gullies. Here the late afternoon shadows slanted through serried banks of broken, sunlit rock.

Pesquil disliked any country where the least chance noise would reverberate to a dance of wild echoes. Crannies between buttressed cliffs devolved into narrow, crooked grottos, any of which might contain a hidden camp. To search each one with a strike party would be fool’s play.

‘Noise and numbers would wreck all our chance of surprise,’ he complained in dry annoyance to Lysaer. ‘Clansfolk holed up in this place won’t be waiting about cowering like mice.’

While Pesquil debated over a dozen nooks where clan sentries could be posted, Lysaer fought drifting concentration. He felt faint. His bruises had settled into stiffness that cased the steady ache of cracked bones. The strapping on his wrist showed a damp patch of red, and he wondered how much blood he may have lost. The ferocity had not blunted from his anger, quite the contrary; but his reserves were worn away and temper by itself was no longer enough to sustain him.

Resolved on his course of precautions, Pesquil prepared for the moment when the fleeing girl crossed back into open ground and brought his best man with a crossbow to the fore.

‘Shoot clean,’ he whispered softly. ‘I want it to seem as if she tripped.’

The marksman set his quarrel with a steadiness Lysaer could only envy, aimed his weapon and lovingly squeezed the trigger.

The click and hiss of the bow’s release blended with the susurration of tumbling water.

Up slope, the running child missed stride.

‘Perfect shot!’ Pesquil said.

The bolt had struck her lower back in the soft flesh between ribs and hip. Her outcry rang and rebounded, multiplied from rock to rock as she folded to her knees. A dragged escort of small stones marked her fall in flat arcs and dust, swept off in the leaping rush of rapids. But the girl snagged on an outcrop at the water’s edge and hung there, one limp arm swinging.

From the vantage in the thickets, her dark hair could be discerned, fanned back from her face with the trailed ends sleeked by the spray.

‘Damn!’ Pesquil wiped sweat from his cheeks then rubbed his palms on his leathers. ‘Bad luck. If she’d hit the river, they might not suspect an assassin.’

Lysaer s’Ilessid stifled any flicker of revulsion. As strategy, Pesquil’s move was unassailable; nor had his effort been wasted. High in the rocks, a leather-clad woman left cover to rescue what looked from above to be the wounded victim of a misstep.

Poised in tensioned stillness, the more explosive for the fact he dared not fidget, Pesquil spent a moment in furious thought. He waited until the clan scout negotiated the most precarious segment of her descent, then touched his marksman on the wrist. ‘Again,’ he whispered. ‘Messier, this time. Have this one die yelling.’

The bowman muffled the ratchet of his weapon under a borrowed surcoat and wound it cocked. Smooth-faced and taciturn in concentration, he selected and slicked the feathers of another bolt. Weapon raised, he nervelessly fired again.

The clan woman windmilled into space, gut-struck and screaming in agony.

‘Move!’ Pesquil signalled his men. ‘Hurry, fan out, and keep close watch on the rocks.’ Beside him, the young marksman readied another quarrel, his instruction to dispatch the woman fast if her howls showed any sign of coherency.

Sweated and chafed under the quilted gambeson rucked in wet wads beneath his mail, Lysaer gritted his teeth and refrained from comment. Revulsion did not excuse responsibility. Toward his sworn purpose of destroying Arithon s’Ffalenn, he had sanctioned Pesquil’s foray against the clansfolk. No matter how unpleasant, duty demanded that he see the action through.

Again the crossbowman loosed his trigger. Quiet restored, the hiss and splash of the river once more swirled over sink holes and rocks. Pesquil picked a green stick while reports from his scouts were relayed in.

Movement had been sighted three different places along the rocks. Crouched beneath an undercut bank whose tree-trunks angled drunken reflections on broken waters, and chewing a scraping of sour bark, Pesquil sent stalkers to reconnoitre. Based on their findings, he used his stripped twig to sketch a crude map between his knees. ‘Here’s how we’ll deploy.’ The instructions he gave his lieutenants erased the last doubt he may have earned his command through any nicety of Etarran politics.

At a speed Lysaer found inconceivable, headhunter parties were called up from downriver and dispatched in wide, covert patterns that lined the canyon rims with crossbowmen. Pesquil’s design unfolded like well-oiled clockworks: the frontal attack designed to distract; the word at first engagement, that the grottos held only female defenders and small children; then Pesquil’s smirking comment to Lysaer before they crossed the river on strung ropes. ‘Man, don’t expect an easy victory. Clan bitches fight like she-devils.’

On the far bank, the men split into teams to scale the rocks. In deference to Lysaer’s strapped arm, Pesquil dispatched scouts to find him an easier route. Pain and exhaustion by now had outstripped the first numb shock of injury. Lysaer moved with gritted jaw, his skin grey. He would not let the men ease the pace. Slipping, sliding, grunting, he laboured upslope, past stunted cherry trees with their wild fruits green on the stem; over weather-split granite and twisted brush, and washed out gulches where the gravel turned under his boots and the jar of every wrong step made his breath jerk and spasm in gasps. The headhunters who accompanied him as escort might have disdained their assignment at first; but when at last they reached the ridgetop and rejoined their commander, Lysaer’s determination had earned their guarded respect.

By then action in the steep-sided glen was nearly wrapped up, the initial attack supported from behind by the stationed crossbowmen, who now cast about for the last living targets trapped against the walls of the canyon. Down through the fronds of ferns and cross-laced trailers of hanging ivy, Lysaer saw the sprawled bodies, bloody and hacked beyond anything recognizably female, or else near-unmarked except for feathered bolts that left flowering stains on the backs of deerskin jerkins. Half-sick from his hurts, too spent for strong emotion, the prince felt wretched and maudlin. For the first time in life he understood his royal father, who also had been provoked to require annihilating attacks on villages allied to the s’Ffalenn. That such forays had mostly come to nothing drove his sire to lifelong frustration. Lysaer, who in distant lands and exile had not failed, looked upon his dead with flat eyes and tried not to fret whether any of the corpses had been pregnant.

A headhunter lieutenant touched his shoulder. ‘Come. The able-bodied fighters are beaten down and our scouts say the tents are surrounded.’

They would fire the hides, Lysaer gathered. He braced his sore side and stiffly moved on. Of the hike up the canyon rim, he remembered little. The lowering sun hurt his eyes and patchy bouts of dizziness made progress difficult.

Pesquil seemed in rare high spirits. He spat his wad of bark and playfully tossed his bone-hilted dagger with its peculiar blade, curved and sharp on both edges. Since the need had passed for surprise and silence, he grew expansive, calling boisterous jokes to his lieutenants.

The men, too, seemed ebullient. Too drained to attend to their talk, Lysaer gave cursory study to the high ground where they stopped. The sun’s angle had lowered, throwing the ravine into premature twilight. Under shaded rim-walls and deeper cover of palings and thickets clustered the painted hide walls of the clan tents. Faintly, from the inside, came the wailing cry of an infant, swiftly muffled.

Lysaer found a broad old maple and rested against the trunk while the men whistled and laughed and kindled fires. Too battered to join the activity, he stayed, while the arrows were wrapped and the bows strung and the wool tips set soaking in oil.

‘All right.’ Hands on hips, his lantern jaw outthrust in broken profile against the shimmers of black smoke on the wind, Pesquil delivered his order. ‘Fire them out.’

Lots were drawn. The losers, grumbling, chose bows. Fighting an insidious detachment that felt like the onset of delirium, Lysaer hardly noticed the arrows crack down until the reek of burning hide wafted out of the ravine. The tents were well aflame. Heat beat in waves from the fissure. Orange light played across the rocks, and above the grotto, green leaves began to shrivel and wilt. Lysaer closed his eyes against the glare, vaguely aware of screaming. The archers now fired to kill infants, and the cries of bereaved mothers beat and shrilled against his ears.

Pesquil’s tart sarcasm punched through. ‘You seem just a touch overcome.’

Lysaer pushed straight and forced his eyes back to clear focus. In fact, there was a lot of screaming, in pitch and timbre quite different from hand to hand battle had caused earlier; neither were these the incomprehending cries of newborns. Sickness fled before anger.

‘You aren’t killing them cleanly,’ Lysaer accused. He shoved hard away from the tree.

‘Killing them?’ Pesquil grinned, startled to savage delight. ‘That wasn’t quite the idea. Not for the pretty women, anyway. My men accomplished what Etarra’s garrison couldn’t. Do you think they haven’t earned their bit of sport?’

Lysaer pushed past toward the rimrocks. The sound of a slap ricocheted up from the canyon. A man guffawed, while a woman’s voice wept obscenities.

‘Better gag her,’ someone advised in cheerful encouragement. ‘She’d gnaw your face off for sheer spite.’

A glance was enough. Lysaer wheeled back, white to the lips, and possessed by a frightening control. Coldly, clearly, he said, ‘Call them off.’

Pesquil stood and stroked his crescent knife. ‘In due time, prince. Not to worry. My men aren’t picked for sentiment. They can kill well enough when their pleasure’s met. We won’t be bringing home any doxies.’

More laughter erupted, and sobbing cries that seemed barely more than a child’s. Lysaer never flicked a muscle. ‘Call your men back.’ He took a fast breath. ‘Or I will.’

‘Such scruple!’ Pesquil crooned. Then, as Lysaer broke from stillness, the captain’s mockery fled and his manner abruptly went stony. ‘Man, man, you’re serious.’ He reached out in swift purpose and snatched back the shoulder tightly strapped under wrappings the exact instant Lysaer called out.

Bone grated under his fingers. Lysaer doubled with a gasp, his eyes wide black with pain and fury.

‘My men wouldn’t take your command,’ Pesquil warned. The crescent knife remained in his right fist, its angle now openly threatening. ‘Prince.’

Lysaer chopped with his good arm and broke the headhunter captain’s hold. The blade at his midriff as well had been air, for all the attention he spared it. ‘Call them off!’

‘Ath, you soft fool.’ As if he reasoned with an idiot, Pesquil said, ‘You want the barbarian clans dead, do you not? And the neck of one black-handed sorcerer? Well, leave my men to their business! If they don’t force the girls and make plenty of noise, how else d’you think we’re going to draw their eight hundred odd fathers and brothers out of cover and into reach of our weapons?’

‘You’ve done this before,’ Lysaer gritted, wrenched by the spasm of abused muscles.

‘Oh, many times. Though I admit, never in quite such choice quantity.’ The sneer was back. Touched with sweat, Pesquil’s pockmarks glistened orange. On the floor of the ravine the tents threw up shimmering curtains of flame. Nothing alive remained inside their cover. Beyond the fires fringing the guy ropes, outside a circle of red-soaked and motionless bundles, men whooped and tore buckskins with abandon. Pesquil’s gaze lowered to his knife, still pointed at the prince. ‘It’s a time-proven tactic, your Grace.’

Lysaer straightened, breathing hard. Sunlight through the tree crowns played over his gold head, and a breeze flickered mote touched his grazed cheek to gilt. The mauling he had taken had spoiled his elegance. Nothing distinguished remained about his ripped surcoat and mud-crusted mail or the bruises glazed with sweat that darkened neck and chin and temple. Yet a forceful sense of majesty clothed him all the same, that made even Pesquil reassess.

The s’Ilessid prince laid no hand on his sword in dispute. He weighed his case and made judgement in the solitary arrogance of a king. Then he turned his back on the silver crescent blade and called upon his birthborn gift of light.

His bolt sheared the grotto like bladed lightning and slammed in bursting brilliance through the charred and blackened leather of the tents. Flash-fire exploded. Sparks flew and a barrage of deep-throated thunder smote the air. Where hides had flamed, nothing burned any longer. If no one had been harmed by the blast, still, the ground showed a black, seared circle, while toppled kingposts flaked with ash trailed sullen smoke over the previously broken bodies of little children.

From the grotto, the screaming had ended. Men in the act of lust felt engorged flesh shrivel from the heat of ravished girls, while in stunned terror they scrambled back and took stock of wisped hair and blisters and outer clothing lightly singed upon their bodies.

Into stupefied stillness, across someone’s low whimpers of fear, Lysaer delivered crisp orders. ‘Townsmen! Cover your nakedness and stand aside. Let any who are clad form a shield-ring and herd every girl and woman inside. Let none of your company handle them except as necessary. For peril of your lives, do as I say.’

‘You can’t let them go,’ Pesquil protested. A tremor threaded his voice, and all his sour mockery had vanished.

Lysaer looked at him. ‘No.’ As devoid of contempt as Dharkaron Avenger, he added, ‘But I will end them cleanly.’

‘To what purpose, your Grace?’ Stubborn in recovery, Pesquil flung his knife hilt deep into the dirt. ‘We’ve clan menfolk still left to deal with.’

‘They’ll come.’ Lysaer’s dispassionate regard flicked back to the grotto and stayed there as the half-stripped girls and women were shoved tightly into one group. ‘I’ll draw in Steiven’s barbarians. When I do, be sure of this, the s’Ffalenn bastard with his shadows will be unable not to come with them.’

Three Valleys

Streaming sweat from an arduous sprint, the runner sent from the west valley arrives at the breastworks where Caolle and the bulk of Deshir’s clansmen fight unassisted by sorceries or flooded rivers, against Etarra’s right flanking division who outnumber them three to one. ‘Tell Lord Steiven,’ he cries, gasping, ‘I’ve come from our liege. Arithon said you would know what he meant, that the disaster he foresaw has not been stopped…’

Plunging through woods toward the grotto where the women and young hide for safety, Arithon, Jieret and eleven clansmen hear screams and male shouting cut off as a burst of light shears through the trees; lost in a ground-shaking report of fell thunder is Arithon’s abject denial, ‘Lysaer, oh Ath, Lysaer, no!’

In the vale to the west of Tal Quorin, a shadow-wrought barrier ward shatters and lifts, which leaves half a company of Etarra’s beleaguered garrison fighting mad and unimpeded to regroup and engage the handful of clan enemies who no longer can shelter behind sorceries to inflict damages and death with impunity…

XVIII. CULMINATION

‘She went not to wed,

nor to comfort or rest,

But to free the dazed dead,

and to reclothe cold flesh

in fair flowers.’

Last stanza,

ballad of the Princess of Falmuir

Thunder cracked the air to whirlwinds as bolts of light ripped the grotto in sheets that immolated trees to flayed skeletons. On protected ground some distance from the rimrocks, checked by flares etched like lightning through gaps in forest greenery, Arithon caught the back of Jieret’s brigandine. In a despair too horrorstruck for expression, he yanked the boy cold from his run and bundled him into an embrace. Around their locked forms, the coruscation flared and died. Gusts spent themselves to a fall of unmoored leaves, while echoes raged on in vibrations that slapped and slammed through Tal Quorin’s chain of ravines. Arithon pressed his cheek to red hair, while under his tight hands the orphan he had sworn bloodpact to protect convulsed into sobs against his shoulder.

As clansmen they had outstripped in their rush caught back up, nothing could be done except end their hope quickly. ‘It’s over. We’re too late. Stay here.’

The reverberations from the blast rumbled and faded into quiet. Arithon stared unseeing as three older men caught back a teenager whose berserk rage impelled him to plunge ahead toward the grotto regardless.

Held arm locked and struggling, the young scout pealed wild protest to his prince. ‘They can’t all be killed, some were sword-trained.’

Arithon, icy, cut him off. ‘They are dead, every one. You can’t help them.’

No one could: the brutality of Jieret’s vision had been graphic, of bodies tossed and charred, flash-burned in an instant to flaked carbon and bones crisped beyond all recognition. To the scout still driven to argue, Arithon said baldly, ‘It’s your clansmen we’ll have to save now.’

Against him, Jieret moved impatiently. ‘Our liege speaks truth.’ Though muffled by the cloth of his prince’s sleeve, the boy’s dull pronouncement was still clear enough to be heard. ‘I had Sight. None in the grotto survived.’

The scout subsided to stunned quiet and guarded companions let him go. In response to Jieret’s push, Arithon also loosened his arms. He cupped the boy’s chin in the hand not burdened by Alithiel and gave him a searching study.

Jieret had seen, in merciless, involuntary prescience; three sisters burned and one forced, and a mother lying bloody in dead leaves. The dream’s memory stamped his child’s face with a hardness that might not, now, ever leave him.

‘I would have spared you, if I could,’ Arithon said in a voice so racked, not a man in the company overheard him.

Jieret looked up into green eyes that held no barriers against him. Offered depths and mysteries whose difficulties were beyond him, he could answer just one shared pain. ‘My liege lord, behold, you have done so.’

Arithon’s touch jerked away. ‘Ath,’ he said on a strangled note of pure rage. ‘Just don’t let me close with my half-brother.’

To the scouts who saw only rebuff, uncomprehending in scope and viciousness just how far Desh-thiere’s curse might turn him, the Master of Shadow said plainly, ‘Run. Back downstream and find Caolle. Keep the men out of the canyons.’

‘I’ll go.’ The younger scout pushed forward, desperate to distance grief with action. ‘On the way, I can recall the boys.’

Jieret made a sound in protest; pressed past tact, Arithon shook his head. ‘Forget them. Just go straight to your captain.’

‘Forget them!’ Raw with emotion, the scout rushed him. ‘What are you saying?’

‘That they’re beyond help.’ Not a quiver of reflex changed Arithon’s stance. Weariness tautened his face, and he seemed not to care whether or not he was assaulted. He said, ‘I’m sorry. Just go now and stop thinking.’

The scout drew up short of striking him because Jieret interposed himself between. Shamed by the boy’s stiff loyalty, and by the disbelief that paralysed his fellows, he regarded his prince, who had drawn, as he warned, the might of Etarra to the clans. ‘Sorry! Sorry isn’t enough.’ He spun away and blindly sprinted.

‘Don’t mind him.’ White-haired and scarred to stoic toughness, the scout Madreigh offered brusque sympathy. ‘That boy’s not badhearted, only sore. Next month he was to marry.’ The others were content to leave him as spokesman as he tactfully fingered his sword edge. ‘We should send another runner after Steiven?’

Arithon moved not at all, but only closed tortured eyes.

‘Ath!’ said Madreigh. ‘Forget I ever asked.’ Then, in a queer catch of breath he caught Arithon’s wrist and clamped down. ‘Trouble’s here.’

A metallic click cut the quiet. The scout just sent off reached a distance of fifty paces then pitched in a spinning fall, a crossbow bolt through his neck.

Arithon broke free and flung Jieret violently behind him. ‘Boy, stay out of this, as your sovereign, I command you.’ His sword whistled up to guard-point, while he backed behind the thickest tree to hand, an old beech raked rough where bucks had shed their summer velvet. He pinned Steiven’s heir with his body as shield, while the clan scouts fell in around him to enclose the boy.

Their rush to reach the beleaguered women could have drawn them to spring the perfect trap. Hidden troops could lie anywhere in ambush. The crossbows were their greatest liability; shadows their surest defence. But Arithon dared not try his gift openly lest he pinpoint his presence to Lysaer, and invite an uncontrolled confrontation with the compulsions of Desh-thiere’s curse.

Three clansmen armed with recurves and full quivers began to climb the tree to snipe for the crossbowman. Arithon gave the shortest one a boost. Fast and furiously thinking, he said, ‘They have quarrels, why wait? Why don’t they drop us where we stand?’

‘They’re bounty-men.’ Madreigh showed a grim flash of teeth. ‘Arrow kills make fights over scalp claims.’

Quite probably the headhunters’ best marksmen would still be stationed on the rimrocks, or deep in the chasms of the grotto, where orders would shortly recall them.

‘The bolt had red fletching,’ Jieret added.

‘It’s Pesquil’s league that’s against us,’ another scout picked up explanation. ‘We’ll be surrounded already. They’ll attack us with numbers, hand to hand.’ He jerked his stubbled chin toward the exquisite weapon held steady in his liege lord’s grip. ‘I hope you’re good with that.’

‘We’ll know in a moment.’ Arithon withheld encouragement that his sorceries might offer them salvation. Any ward against combined assailants required time and concentration to arrange. No moment was given for response. From the glen that led toward the rimrocks, shadows flitted, and occasional chance gleams of metal. These fits and starts of movement resolved into a wave of charging foes. The instant before they closed, Arithon noticed worse: shouts, then the distant clash of steel as a skirmish broke out in the river gully farther downstream.

‘Caolle’s men?’ Alarmed, Madreigh added, ‘Ath, what could press them to strike openly? Etarra’s garrison’s still behind them. They’ll be engaged on two fronts and torn apart.’

Inarguable fact, as Arithon knew. But even Caolle’s blunt savvy could hardly stay fathers just come from discovery of the scalped and slaughtered bodies of their sons; clansmen who tracked the reivers upstream to find headhunters awaiting them in force, and who attacked without the knowledge that their families in the grotto were past saving.

‘If you pray, beg Steiven’s division won’t be with them,’ Arithon said.

Then the enemy was upon them. A rough face, a sword and a fouled set of gauntlets absorbed all of Arithon’s attention. Alithiel whined once, twice, in flurried parries. His opponent was large and heavy handed. Arithon lunged, then blocked another thrust. His riposte was controlled, an understated springboard for the feint which followed. A disengage on the next thrust finished the attacker. Arithon yanked Alithiel clear, sidestepped the headhunter’s dying thrash, and in speed that blurred, caught the next man behind in a stop thrust.

Hard-pressed himself, the adjacent clansman turned his shoulder to cover Arithon’s extended body through the moment of recovery. ‘Elwedd’s wasted a wager, I see. How’d the Masterbard know you were gifted at bladework?’

‘Escape this, and we’ll ask him,’ Arithon said.

Though joyless, the scout’s grin gave endorsement that his liege was capable enough to be entrusted with full share of Jieret’s defence.

Which fine point would shortly mean nothing, with the headhunters too thick to beat off and more of them coming by the second. Arithon saw this. Braced against the tree, forced to close-quarters, his style was cramped. Crushed moss and roots hampered footwork, and fallen enemies were adding to the hazard. The archers up the tree were less encumbered, but one of them already dangled head-down and dead in the branches. The headhunter crossbowman was still busy. Arithon could not see past the heave of the fighting to approximate his location. Another bolt whacked through green leaves and torn shreds of foliage spiralled down.

Inevitably more crossbowmen must arrive; and Caolle’s men could hardly drive a foray through to rescue Steiven’s heir since they could not know he was pinned down. Arithon beat aside a blade that thrust at him and fought a slipping stance in wet leaves. A friendly arrow from above dispatched the brute in the conical helm who shoved in to grapple, and Arithon escaped with a bruise and a graze. Behind him, Jieret had out his dagger, determined to enter the fray.

‘Not now,’ said Arithon. ‘Jieret, this isn’t your fight.’

Three swords came at him. He ducked one, felt the flat of a second jar his cut shoulder and met the third in a screaming bind. Locked steel to steel with an enemy, and exposed on his left side to fate, he saw his choices reduced to the one that, in Karthan, had undone him.

He must use magecraft to kill, or allow Jieret and Steiven’s grief-crazed clansmen to die as victims of Desh-thiere’s curse.

Arithon turned the wrist above Alithiel’s guard, felt his steel catch his opponent’s crossguard.

The headhunter anticipated the wrench that would leave him disarmed. A burly man, and well trained, he gave with the pressure, then grunted in surprise as Arithon’s right-footed kick added force to his counter-move and staggered him sideways. He crashed across other headhunters who thrust through an opening no longer opportune. Slashed and half-skewered through the side he went down, two men’s steel mired in his fall, and a third man bashed off balance into the tight-pressed advance of his fellows.

While the knot in the fighting swirled momentarily backward, Arithon dropped his blade, leaped and caught a treebranch, then swung hard. His boot lashed another attacker and upended him over the foeman who engaged Madreigh. ‘Guard Jieret,’ ordered Arithon. ‘What needs to be done, I can’t accomplish from here.’

‘You’ve got spells for a miracle?’ grunted the clan scout, his blade busy. He sidestepped into his prince’s vacated position, feinted low, and cut. Blood pattered down, filming the leaves, the tree-trunk and Jieret, buffeted and jostled by his defenders as he watched his liege lord hoist himself after the archers who were now, all three, dead of crossbow bolts.

Another quarrel snicked bark by Arithon’s head. He ignored it, gave a quick smile downward to Jieret which held more worry than reassurance. A sailor’s move and a slither saw him up and then prone on a treebranch.

Below him, Madreigh fought half-blind from a gash that trickled blood off his brow and right eye. Arithon drew his belt knife, threw and took down an opportunist who bent for a low stab at Jieret.

Madreigh finished the action by stomping the fallen man’s face. He said, blade-harried, ‘If you know something that’ll save us, just do it!’

Already two more clansmen lay dying, with another one wounded about to follow. Torn that such bravery should go wasted, Arithon stilled his nerves and focused his mind to cold purpose. The crossbowman perforce must come first.

He cast about the wood, but could not pinpoint the man’s cover. That was the bitterest setback, since his purpose must be accomplished without broadscale use of shadows, or any wide sweep of illusion that might terrify an army into rout. Unless he maintained his anonymity among the clans, everything that mattered would go for naught.

Amid a battle that assaulted concentration, Arithon distanced his senses, walled off awareness of everything outside a discrete sphere of air that immediately surrounded his person. The ward snare he shaped was risky and difficult, an amalgamation of illicit magelore and inspiration he would on no account have attempted to save himself; nor had he, to spare his own father.

But to Deshir’s clansmen, he was oathbound. Steiven’s people would never have faced annihilation if not for his tie to Rathain.

The forces he tapped were forbidden by any right-thinking mage. The tiniest miscalculation, just one slipped step and the vortex he fashioned could rend himself, the tree and the last of Jieret’s defenders. Arithon pitched the far fringes of his knowledge against dependency that, with his person offered as target, the town bowman would shoot to kill. The attention must be poised like strung wire: he must not feel his cut shoulder, must not rouse at the choke of dying men, nor even spare thought to question whether his clansmen might already lie slain. Ringed in perilous energies, Arithon touched the air, became the air, as one with its currents and small breezes that skeined through uncounted spaded leaves.

Air did not feel death: it registered screams only as rhythms, intricately concentric as ring-ripples spread through a pool. There was peace and the terrible beauty of Ath’s order, until a rip of turbulence bored through, swift and barbed for death as only man-made ingenuity could contrive.

Arithon closed the net of a ward just finished, but not yet tested for weaknesses. Too fast for care, too late for regrets, too utterly final to abort, the headhunter’s quarrel whistled in.

A small thing, the dart, comprised of a handspan of wood and steel, wound string, glue and dyed feathers; but a shaft notched and barbed, that sped with a force to pierce mail. Each particle of its substance had Name; each grain of its mass, an energy signature for which Arithon had subverted Ath’s order and patterned a banespell.

By nature, any snare of unbinding held a lawless compulsion to annihilate. Counter to the Major Balance and in parallel with chaos, frail strictures bent to harness the ungovernable were wont to spin dangerously awry.

In raw fact, Arithon’s effort was only plausible through a tangle of tricks and paradox, a loophole in the world’s knit that hinged on a theoretical blend of fine points: that the object to be over mastered was itself made for death, and that its uninterrupted natural action must set forfeit the conjurer’s life.

Everything, everything depended upon the headhunter crossbowman having scored a lethal hit.

And if the man was such a marksman and his aim did not drift, and the baneward successfully intercepted his bolt before the instant it broached living flesh, the result offered perilous instability. The safeguards contrived to limit the unbinding’s ill effects were by no means infallibly sure.

Doubts were all Arithon had, and stark fear, when the quarrel hissed into his defences.

To unmake any particle of Ath’s Creation came at hideous cost. Arithon shuddered, then blocked a scream with his knuckles as the mote he had captured exploded in a battering burst. Tied to his conjury, his body convulsed in a spasm that seemed to crush out his marrow as law and matter unravelled in a whistling rush of wild energies. Arithon felt the nexus of his uncreation graze his protections, burning for entry to twist, tear and unravel his whole flesh as well as any other thing that lay within range of its reach. Inflamed as though he noosed magma, he flung out the shielding second stage of his counterspell.

He deflected his ugly package of wrecked order through air, back along the disturbed eddies traced by the quarrel’s first flight path, then trailed with a stop-ward set to the resonance of wrought steel.

A hiss arced through space above the skirmishers that partnered no physical projectile. Arithon opened his eyes, running sweat and winded as if he had been whipstruck. With every nerve screaming he waited.

Until, behind a thin screen of alder, the crossbow exploded in the hands of its wielder.

Splinters and wound wire and metal burst like shrapnel and flayed the headhunter’s face. He dropped, choking, holes torn through his chest and his abdomen, and blood spattered like thrown ink across the bleached trees. The only bit of his weapon not fragmented was the trigger latch, the first steel to contact the spell and engage its limited safeward.

That stricture at least had worked and cancelled the unholy destruction. Arithon shivered in relief. Let there be no more archers among the enemy, he hoped, gasping as he clung to the treebranch. If there were, then Deshir’s clans were finished. He lacked stomach to repeat those defences. Torn by nerve-sick reaction, he regretted the victim, whose death was not needed, but who could not in the pinch of the moment be distanced from the means that destroyed his weapon.

Below the beech tree fighting still raged. Casualties mounted ferociously. Only five clansmen remained standing. Madreigh battled on one knee, his right arm useless and his blade in his left hand, parrying. Jieret had taken up Alithiel in braced readiness for the moment when his last adult defenders should be cut down.

Again, Arithon stamped back the temptation to grasp at the easiest expedient. Whoever he might spare by using shadow he could later kill without compunction in the grip of Desh-thiere’s curse. No risk was worth the chance he might draw Lysaer. Hedged by untenable choices, Arithon recouped a concentration that felt as if sloshed through a sieve. Need drove him again to abjure safe limits and to further violations of integrity that were going to cost bitterly later.

He must not think of that. Now, all that mattered was the preservation of Jieret’s life and after him, any other clansman who could be saved.

Clammy with chills, hollowed by weakness that sapped like the aftermath of fever, Arithon rested his cheek on the tree limb. He closed his eyes, inhaled the peppery scent of damp bark, and let that fuse with his being. He quieted. His clasped hands settled and sensitized to the languorous flow of sap. His thoughts became the whisper of leaves, the sunlit flight of pollinating bees, the unfurling of green shoots that thickened with each season’s turn, into stately crown and mighty wood branches. His consciousness spiralled down to encompass the thick black depths of earth, the firm anchored network of tap roots.

Through the irreproachable pith of the living tree, Arithon twined his spell. Like the buds, the leaves, the branches, all groping outward for new growth, he spun the fine tendrils of his wards away from the trunk, that any defender who used its bulk to shield his back would be spared. But any attacker facing inward would find his eyes drawn and subtly captured, while his thoughts slowed to syrup, then to the languid drip of sap.

A human mind ensnared in the consciousness of a tree will sleep, immersed in slow dreams that measure time in stately rhythms, of clean sun and silvered snow and seasons that slide one into another like the rain-kissed drift of autumn leaves.

Which meant, Arithon knew, that any Deshan still standing would slaughter his victims in the half-second their reflexes dragged and the hand on driving blade faltered. Unlike the Etarrans entrapped by the shadow maze in the adjacent valley, these townsmen were given no reprieve. Mastery of their fate was reft from them, with no offered moment of free will in which they could choose to turn aside.

Against a powerful temptation to shelter with them in sunwashed oblivion, Arithon disentwined his consciousness from the tree’s green awareness. He opened his eyes too soon. The part of him still paired to heart-sap and earth peace ripped away into noise and the blood-reek of animal carnage. Below him, the beech roots were mulched over with dead men, their wide open eyes still dreaming, imprinted with sky caught reflections of bark and boughs and leaves.

Arithon retched, then forced a tight grip on raw nerves. He clasped the branch in sweated hands and through guilt and revulsion, took charge of the fruits of his conjury.

Madreigh was down and wounded, Jieret at his shoulder with Alithiel bloodied in his hand. Two clansmen, both injured, were still on their feet, while outside the canopy of the beech tree, enemies crumpled to their knees, lost to mind and awareness. Beyond these, more headhunters checked in fear of the bane that had invisibly struck down their fellows. Outrage would soon overcome their apprehension and drive them to vigorous retaliation.

‘Don’t face inward, don’t look at the tree,’ Arithon instructed the surviving clansmen. He then asked numb limbs to move, and proved shaking hands could still grip. Somehow he swung to the ground. Hands tried to steady him as he swayed. He pushed them impatiently away. ‘Don’t trust what you’re going to see. The reinforcements will all be mine.’ He caught his sticky blade from Jieret’s grasp. ‘Just run, and don’t for any reason turn back.’ To the boy’s alarmed look, he added quickly, ‘I’ll be with you. Go.’

He punctuated his instruction with a light slap on Jieret’s shoulder. Then, leaning on Alithiel to keep balance, he knelt, bent his head and spun illusion.

Even depleted as he was, his inborn gift would always answer. Now he was alone and the risks were to himself, he dared risk shadow in limited countermeasure. Darkness flowed freely to his use as water might beat from a cataract. And as he had done another night in Steiven’s supply tent, he bent conjury into the shape and form of warriors.

They emerged from brush and thicket with weapons gleaming, and bows nocked with broadheads in their hands. If their faces lacked character, if their step was inhumanly silent, discrepancy was covered by the scream and clash of fighting that echoed from the grottos by Tal Quorin. Since the appearance of reinforcing clansmen befitted a strategy to cover the flight of three fugitives, any headhunters not turned by the sleep-snare were scarcely minded to pause in analytical study. Caught inside arrow range when Arithon’s shadow-men knelt and pulled recurves, most wisely, Pesquil’s men who still had wits and footing broke and dived under cover.

Their panicked haste might have amused, had the arrows when they arced not been made up of fancy and desperation.

Arithon stirred, looked up, and tried to muster resource to rise and continue after Jieret. He managed neither. His miscalculation was not surprising, after the strictures he had broken. Before the foot and the knee that failed his will lay Madreigh, a tear in his chest that welled scarlet over his buckskins at each gasp.

‘Ath,’ Arithon said. He sat. Stupid with weakness, he met the eyes of the man, which stayed lucid through a suffering that should have eclipsed recognition.

‘My liege.’ Madreigh drew a scraping breath. ‘Go on. After the boy. You’re oathbound.’

A scathing truth; one Arithon understood he had to answer for. Except he was drained to his dregs from misused expenditure of magecraft. Since he could not immediately master himself, he did as he wished and snatched up Madreigh’s wrist. In a whisper that seemed the utterance of a ghost he said, ‘I also took oath for Rathain and look, you die for it.’

Beyond speech, Madreigh looked at him.

Arithon spread the clansman’s limp fingers and pressed them, already chilled, against the bole of the beech tree. He closed his own hands over the top. Then with a gesture that lanced blackness and sparks through his mind, he wrenched back the fast-fading glimmer of his spellcraft and let it flow like a mercy-stroke over the clansman’s consciousness.

Sleep took Madreigh’s tortured frame. His face under its grit and grey hair gentled, all sorrows eased into the sundrenched serenity of ancient trees.

Empty with remorse, Arithon opened his fingers. Half-tranced from exhaustion he regarded his circle of quiet dead, clad in leather and blood; or wearing city broadcloth and chain mail pinched with weedstalks and dirt. The only censure for the mage-trained, he sadly found, was adherence to truth and self-discipline. No mind with vision was exempt; creation and destruction were one thread. One could not weave with Ath’s energies without holding in equal measure the means to unstring and unravel.

The blood had left his head. He understood if he tried to move, he would only fall down spectacularly. Oblivious to the shouting and the battering scream of killing steel, he cupped his chin and surrendered to the shudders that racked him. He had acted outside of greed or self-interest, had to the letter of obligation fulfilled his bound oath to the Deshans. Duty did not cleanly excuse which lives should be abandoned to loss, or which should be taken to spare others: Steiven’s clansmen, last survivors of savage persecution, or Pesquil’s headhunters, still heated from their spree of unlicensed rapine and slaughter. No answer satisfied. No law insisted that justice stay partnered by mercy.

The day’s transgressions abraded against s’Ffalenn conscience like the endless pound of sea waves tearing bleak granite into sand. Through a fog that forgot to track time, Arithon noticed the rhythmic well of fluid from Madreigh’s chest had slowed or stopped. Whether this was death’s doing or the endurance of sap laid deep for long winter, he had no strength to examine.

He managed to recover his sword, and after that, his footing, before the disorientation that distanced him bled away and snapped his bemused chain of thought. His senses reclaimed the immediate. The belling clang of battle had now overtaken and surrounded him and arrows sleeted past in flat arcs that gouged up trails of rotted leaves.

Not shadows, this time. The beech tree was solid at his hip. None too steady, Arithon backed against it. Though reawakened to his needs and obligations, his mind stayed bewildered and unruly. Disjointed details skittered across his awareness: that the sun had lowered; that copper leaves in red light trembled as if dipped in blood; that the brawling and the noise were distracting because they were caused by fighters, not shadows dressed up as illusion. Clansman and headhunter and dishevelled knots of city garrison were engaged in annihilation as ferocious as a scrap between mastiffs.

Caolle had not sent reinforcements. The clansmen Arithon recognized were Steiven’s division and they battled to a purpose that was anything other than haphazard. For their wives, their children, for their sons sadly slaughtered by the riverside, they were vengeance-bent on killing headhunters.

Though it cost them their last breathing clansmen, Pesquil’s league would not live to leave Strakewood to cash in their loved ones’ scalps for bounties.

Waste upon waste, Arithon thought, brought to sharp focus by anger. As Rathain’s sworn sovereign, he would stop them, separate them, ensure that Jieret had a legacy left to grow for.

Careful only not to tread on fallen bodies, Arithon launched himself into the skirmish that ringed the trees, knotting and twisting through undergrowth and hummock, the lightning flicker of swordstroke and mail like thrown silver against falling gloom. He engaged the first headhunter to rush him, inspired beyond weariness by necessity. He fought, parried, killed in rhythmic reflex, all the while searching the mêlée for sight of just one of Steiven’s officers. Given assistance, he held half-formed plans of using magecraft to stage some diversion that locked combatants might be separated. He would control the berserk clansmen, bully them, or fell them wholesale with sleep-spells if he must. Though as his stressed muscles stung with the force of a parry, he recognized the last was pure folly. His earlier unbinding had left damage, and he was lucky to stay on his feet.

‘Arithon! My liege!’

The call came from his right, toward the downslope that devolved toward the grottos. The Master of Shadow beat off an attacker and spun. The patter and hiss of sporadic bowfire creased the air and snatched through veilings of low foliage. Through a drift of cut leaves and air dusky with steep shafts of sunlight, Arithon searched but never found who had shouted.

His gaze caught instead on a clustered squad of headhunters led by a pockscarred man in muddy mail; then another, tall, straight, of elegant carriage in a ripped blue surcoat, gold-blazoned and bright as his hair.

Lysaer.

They saw each other the same instant.

Arithon felt the breath leave his chest as if impelled by a blow. Then Desh-thiere’s curse eclipsed reason. He was running, the air at his neck prickling his raised hair like the charge of an incoming storm. Sword upheld, lips peeled back in atavistic hatred, he closed to take his half-brother without heed for what lay between.

A baleful flash brightened the trees. Lysaer, as curse-bound as he, had called on his given gift of light.

Arithon expelled a ragged laugh. They were matched. No bolt, no fire, no conflagration lay past reach of his shadows to curb. Strakewood could burn, or be frozen sere as barren waste, and supporters and armies would be winnowed like chaff in the holocaust. The end would pair Lysaer and himself across the bared length of steel blades, with no living man to intervene.

Lysaer raised his right hand and the headhunters around him fanned out.

Savouring eagerness, Arithon slowed. He felt someone grasp at his shoulder, heard shouting like noise in his ears. Owned by the curse, he shook off restraint, then backhanded whoever had interfered.

When the light-bolt cracked from Lysaer’s fist, he let it come, a snapping whip of lightning that parted the wood like a scream. Through its glare, Arithon saw the men around Lysaer kneel and raise white-limned weapons to their shoulders. Crossbows, he realized in undimmed exultation.

Arithon toyed with them, used mage-schooled finesse to twist shadow with a subtlety his enemy could never match. The headhunters who aimed were struck blind to a degree that negated they had ever walked sighted.

Some screamed and threw down their weapons. The rest fired a barrage of wild shots. Quarrels whined through a rising bloom of incandescence.

Arithon laughed and let the fire of Lysaer’s own making char the bolts to oblivion. Then he cancelled the force ranged against him with a veil of neat shadow, even as he once had deflected the fires of a Khadrim’s fell attack. He barely cared that he trembled in a backlash of overstressed nerves, but revelled in his powers to smother all light to oblivion.

The earth shook to a thunderous report. Throughout, straight-shouldered and animated by the geas that enslaved him, Arithon withheld any countermeasure. His quickest satisfaction lay with steel, and holding Alithiel poised, he waited untouched at the apex of a singed swath of carbon.

‘Will you fight?’ he called to Lysaer, derisive. ‘Or will you stand out of reach and play at fireworks just to waste time and show off?’

‘Defiler!’ Lysaer screamed back. His handsome face twisted. Cuts and bruises made his expression seem deranged. ‘Weaver of darkness and despoiler of children, your crimes have renounced claim to honour!’

Unsmiling, Arithon took a step. As the distance narrowed and panicked headhunters scrambled from his path, he noted that Lysaer looked peaked. The left arm beneath its muddied velvets was bandaged and strapped as though injured. A wolfish thrill shot through him, that the enemy before him was disadvantaged. Arithon said, ‘That’s your blade? Did you really think reverse runes could charm my death?’ He flourished Alithiel, inviting, ‘Find out. Come fight.’

‘Why cross blades with a bastard?’ Contempt in his bearing, a mirrored obsession in his eyes, Lysaer shot his hand aloft again.

Sensitized to air that flowed over his skin, Arithon felt the ingathering of force Lysaer drew to call light. This effort would be more than a killing bolt, as devastating as any formerly pitched to carve the Mistwraith into submission. Shadow could still shield him, but the broad trees of Strakewood would burn. Clansmen and game would crisp in a burst of wildfire, and earth itself would char to slag.

Mage-taught instincts clamoured in warning and alarm, but against the overpowering ascendance of Desh-thiere’s curse, any stir of uneasiness lost voice. Arithon advanced. His whole being resonated hatred, his oath to Rathain just meaningless words, the rasp of dry wind and dead intent. So long as Lysaer was before him, he had eyes only for his enemy. Like a puppet pulled on wires he would close with the blond nemesis leagued against him. Over parched ground or quick, their swords would cross until one of them died, and whatever impediments were swept aside beforehand became simple sacrifice to ensure this.

The air seemed to sing in its stillness. The chasing on Alithiel’s dark blade appeared bodilessly inscribed on the gloom. Since the sword was now pointed with the grain of ill geas and enmity, its Paravian star-spell stayed mute. More nerve worn than the curse would permit him to acknowledge, Arithon slipped without volition into mage sight. His vision recorded the interlocked litanies of leaves, of branches, of men partnered in useless struggle on the fringes, embodied even while killing in the light-dance that founded all life. The soil beneath his step shimmered with the mysteries of rebirth, and even these lost their power to redeem him.

The drive of Desh-thiere’s curse overwhelmed all.

At the palm of Lysaer’s raised hand, light burned and then glared, and then erupted to a core of hot brilliance. The nexus swelled, fountained, raged into coruscation that ravaged the forest with backdrafts. Lysaer by now stood isolate, his headhunter allies driven back by the gathering fury of his assault.

Opposite him, a wind-whipped silhouette with a hand lightly gripped to a sword’s hilt, Arithon faced him in challenge. Unarmoured, clad in the same spattered deerhides as any of Steiven’s scouts, he seemed a figure diminished; until, half-seen through lashed tangles of black hair, an expression bent his lips that held no regret but only derisive impatience.

The flaring brilliance lit the s’Ffalenn features to inescapable clarity. The detached assurance, the sheer nerveless arrogance on that face slapped back remembrance of the manipulation that had undone Amroth’s king and councilmen. Swept by a countersurge of antipathy, Lysaer shrieked his ultimatum. ‘By Ath, you unprincipled bastard, your wiles shall cause no more damage. This time, not counting for cost, the justice of my people will be served!’

If such justice was wholly subverted by the workings of Desh-thiere’s curse, Lysaer endorsed usage with consent. He screamed and surrendered to his passion, and something inside him snapped. That instant he hurled his bolt.

Arithon surged to meet the attack. Gripped by queer exultation, still wakened to mage-sight, he perceived with a lucidity that damned that the curse had overmastered his half-brother. Lysaer’s offensive had erased the bounds of sanity and self-preservation. As at Mearth, when a crossing through a world-gate had been snatched beyond grasp by adversity, the s’Ilessid prince now channelled the whole of his being through the destructive aspects of his gift.

The light of his own making would martyr him. Strakewood with its armies and its clansmen would be immolated at a stroke. Whether Arithon could shield himself in shadow became a point most gloriously moot. Desh-thiere’s purpose would be served.

At least one of the half-brothers that comprised its bane would be expunged from the face of Athera.

Arithon howled at the irony. Swept to madness by the wraiths’ savage triumph, he flung wide his arms, taunting the light to come take him, to lock with his shadows and let his enemy be destroyed in one fiery burst of self sacrifice.

In that moment of consumed self-control, that ecstatic certainty of victory, Arithon felt his sword arm caught and his hip blunder into something moving. Enraged, shoved off balance, he squinted through a blooming flare of incandescence. Whoever had meddled would die for it.

‘Your Grace of Rathain, we are oathsworn!’ cried a boy in shrill-voiced terror. ‘I came back as you asked, to keep you apart from your half-brother.’

A blood oath bound and sworn by a mage set its ties to the living spirit.

‘Sithaer, Jieret!’ Arithon shouted, his cry split from him as the exultation of Desh-thiere’s vengeance became flawed by his pact with Steiven’s son. The unholy pleasures of the instant transformed to torment as enslaved consciousness and true will became torn between opposite masters. Then the irony, of crippling proportion: that any shadow spun to save the boy must also spare the s’Ilessid prince from the forge-fires of the curse’s conniving.

Anguished between personal care and the lure of the curse’s directive, tainted by the seductive truth, that to forswear s’Ffalenn conscience and leave Jieret betrayed would buy Lysaer’s death and final freedom, Arithon wrenched his will into alignment against Desh-thiere’s geas.

For ill or for folly, the paradox would be permitted to renew itself; Lysaer had no training to understand or control how Desh-thiere’s meddling had twisted him. Assured of his righteousness, avowed to bring justice, he would use his survival to labour until this day’s atrocities were repeated. That colossal futility made a mockery of will, that perhaps reprieve came too late. One victim’s lamed effort at compassion might buy only failure at the end.

A split second shy of annihilation, Arithon jerked Jieret inside the arc of a sword-blade dropped sidewards to guard.

The ache of exhaustion, the sucking drain against resources long overstrained seemed to founder his mind and his reflexes. Obdurate, Arithon fought. He called, commanded and savaged from his gift demands that edged the impossible. The curse pulled and hampered him. He wrestled its treacherous crosscurrents while his shadows flared and snapped. Darkness arose like a howling gale, unleashed to run rampant across torrents of unchained light. The air itself seemed to scream in white agony as the gifts of two half-brothers collided.

Men-at-arms wailed and fell prone, their weapons discarded as they locked shaking arms to shield their heads. Trees tossed and rattled, wrenched into splinters by snaking trails of wildfire. Still trapped in mage-sight, Arithon heard the shriek of natural energies battered and tortured out of true. He felt the frosts of his own conjury flash freeze living greens to glassine hardness that shattered in the pound of the winds. Intermixed were cries that were human. He groaned, wept, plundered intuition and training to force his reserves without mercy for the power he required to compensate. With his fists pressed to Jieret’s back, his eyes blind and his senses spinning, Arithon widened his defences.

And as he had once done at Etarra, his conjury cloaked Strakewood in darkness.

He could not see to know fate’s joke was actualized; that Lysaer had collapsed from blood-loss and stress and that Pesquil and a dedicated lieutenant now laboured to draw him clear of the conflict. Arithon could not breathe the air for the smells of dead earth and burning. He could barely stand upright, for the voracious demands of weaving shadow.

Jieret said something. The words faded in and out unintelligibly. Then hands caught at Arithon’s arms and shoulders, lifting, cajoling, supporting his legs that would not any longer bear weight.

A touch that had to be Jieret’s peeled his fingers away from his sword, then clasped his hand in steady warmth.

‘Ath,’ said a scout, appalled. ‘You sure he isn’t hurt?’

‘Leave him be,’ snapped another, maybe Caolle. ‘If he loses his hold on these shadows, every clansman in these woods will be doomed.’

Arithon held on. He clung to consciousness and craft with a determination that bled and then racked him. Spinning impressions whirled through him, of burning trees, and falls of water, and bodies blacked and crisped on sere ground. That made him cry out.

Such visions must be lent him by mage-sight; he prayed and he begged this was so. When he could sort out no distinction, he punished drowned senses for reassurance, that a dark deep as felt, starless, lightless, battened Strakewood in defences that could smother any outburst of reiving flame.

An indeterminate time later, he shivered and snatched a breath of air. ‘Are they safe yet?’

‘Soon,’ answered Jieret, or maybe Caolle. The word flurried without echo through the wails of eight thousand dead.

At some point after that, the last shred of awareness slid away from Arithon’s control. The dark and the shadows he conjured seeped through his frayed concentration, and then he knew nothing more.

Arithon reawakened on his back, to stars set like jewels between a black lattice of oak leaves. A soft cry burst from him as nightmare and reason collided, and he thought at first that he looked upon a dead landscape formed of carbon and char.

Then his nostrils filled with the sweet scent of sap, the resins of pine not far off. At his side, someone said kindly, ‘Strakewood is green, still. Your shadows preserved. There are clanborn survivors.’

Arithon lacked voice for his bitterness, that what lives had been saved must be few, with none of them a woman or a child. For a long time he could do nothing except shut his eyes and silently, fiercely weep.

The tears cleared his mind; no mercy. Raw as he was and helplessly unable to barrier himself in detachment, he was forced to take full stock.

‘Jieret?’ he asked first, the word a bare rasp of breath.

‘At your side,’ came the answer, reassuring. ‘He sleeps. Except for singed hair, he’s unharmed.’

Arithon released a pent sigh. ‘Steiven fell. Where?’

‘Does that matter?’ The voice held an edge now, and a movement in darkness marked out the form of a clan scout, seated crosslegged a short distance off.

Stubborn and silent, Arithon waited.

‘All right,’ the scout relented. ‘Caolle said make you rest, but if you’re going to be difficult, I’ll tell you.’

A sceptical quirk turned Arithon’s lips. ‘Caolle said nothing of the sort.’

The stillness grew expansive with surprise. ‘All right.’ The scout sighed. ‘Caolle cursed you. Jieret insisted you needed rest.’

The boy, now earl of Deshir, caithdein of a kingdom, thrust into inheritance of Rathain’s stewardship an orphan scarcely twelve years of age. The facts were given quickly after that, starting with Steiven’s response to Arithon’s first warning of disaster; orders that his war captain had begged on his knees to be released from: to gather and withdraw from the fighting by force if need be three hundred hand-picked young men. Steiven s’Valerient had then led the rest into ill-fated vengeance at the grottos.

‘He was among the first to fall,’ the scout said, his tone flat and tired, and his hands wrung with tension around his knees. ‘A crossbow quarrel caught him before we cleared the marshes, which was well. He never saw the scars of the burning, or what happened to his lady in the dell.’

‘I know how she died,’ Arithon grated. ‘Caolle broke orders, didn’t he?’

Snapped past the memory of the brutalities beside the Tal Quorin, the scout shrugged a shoulder and resumed. ‘The three hundred circled wide and approached the mêlée from upstream. As well they did. Jieret and two wounded scouts could hardly have pulled you out alone.’

Quiet, Arithon absorbed this. If he had done nothing else, his final intervention with shadows had spared most of those clansmen Steiven had selected to survive. After an interval, he prodded, ‘And now?’

‘The headhunters’ league are mostly destroyed and Lysaer’s Etarrans in retreat. We expect they’ll regroup outside Strakewood. The ones not nerve-broken or wounded will probably stay on and poison springs to destroy the game and starve us out.’ A breeze wafted through the trees, edged with the acrid tang of ash. The scout drew a dagger and tested the edge with a thumb, over and over seeking flaws. ‘Caolle won’t give them satisfaction. His plan is to abandon Strakewood and join up with earl Marl’s band in Fallowmere.’

Somewhere a wakeful mockingbird loosed a melodic spill of notes. A hunting owl cried mournfully. Jieret stirred in the depths of some dream, and the scout cut a stick in thick silence and nicked off a rattling fall of chips.

Arithon lay still and noticed other things: that his body was clothed still in blood-tainted leathers, though somebody thoughtful had bound his cuts. In fits and starts of mage-sight he recognized the neat work as Caolle’s. By the odd flares of light that scoured the edge of his vision, and by his current inability to keep focused on the physical aspects of reality, he knew he still suffered the effects of overplayed nerves. His twisted misuse of spellcraft had caused damage beyond distress to the body. His thoughts had an odd start and hitch to them, as if pulled to the border of delirium. The curse of itself had left ravages. His opposition by shadows had plundered also, when he had wrenched that thundering torrent of enslavement aside to reclaim his free will.

He dared not guess how much time must elapse before he could sleep without nightmares. A nagging ache in his bones warned how greatly his resources were depleted. Pain and plain restlessness drove him finally to stop circling thoughts by getting up.

The scout abruptly stopped whittling. Knife poised, chin raised in query, he said, ‘Where in Sithaer are you off to?’

Over his shoulder as he departed, Arithon flipped back an insouciant quote from a ballad. ‘“To free the dazed spirits, and reclothe cold flesh in fair flowers.”’ Whether his line was delivered in Paravian words did not matter; his mood was too shattered to translate.

As if nature held light as anathema, no moon shone over Strakewood in the aftermath of Etarra’s assault. Traced by faint starlight or by the fluttering, uncertain flames of small torches, Caolle and Deshir’s clan survivors moved through the fields of the dead. They went armed. The body that groaned in extremity might not be a kinsman’s but an enemy’s; the hand that stirred in trampled mud might not reach in acceptance of succour but instead hold a dagger thrust to maim. Scouts too tired for sound judgement searched logs that looked like fallen clansmen and gullies that conspired to conceal them. Through swamp and on hillside there came decisions no repetition could ease; of whether to send for a healer or to deal a mercy-stroke and finish an untenable suffering.

Each call for the knife underscored the sorrow that clan numbers had been almost decimated.

Quiet as any man born to the wood could cover deep brush, warily as he tried to guard his back, he sometimes flushed living enemies who for hours had blundered through ravine and thorn thicket, lost, frightened and alone. Townsmen caught out of their element who were jumpy and keyed to seize retribution for their plight.

With one valley quartered, the acres still left to patrol seemed a punishment reserved for the damned.

Sticky clothes, and dulled blades, and hands that twinged from pulled tendons did nothing for Caolle’s foul mood. His years numbered more than fifty, and this had been a battle to break the stamina of the resilient young. As he crouched over yet another corpse, a young boy in chainmail so new it looked silver, he cursed the caprice of fate that he should be alive instead of Steiven. The losses of friends that had passed beneath the Wheel had yet to be tallied. Nobody wanted to number the kinsmen their own knives had needfully dispatched.

Ahead, jumbled and jagged against a sky like tinselled silk, the rock-cliffs in their seams and webbed shadows narrowed toward the mouth of the grottos. No wounded waited in the charred glen beyond, only dead that rustled in the winds like dry paper. To Halliron, who walked at his shoulder, Caolle said, ‘You might just want to turn back.’

As begrimed as any clansman, though his shirt was embroidered and cuffed in fine silk and his lyranthe stayed strapped on his shoulder, the Masterbard calmly gave answer. ‘I’ll not leave.’ He pushed on through a stand of low maples. ‘Don’t punish yourself over hindsight.’

Caolle sucked an offended breath. ‘I should have listened. We could’ve scattered and separated the women.’

‘The men would still be as dead. The divided families could not survive.’ Halliron finished in quiet certainty, ‘Your children would have died in Etarra. Arithon told me. He saw their executions in the course of his tienelle scrying.’

Loath to be reminded, Caolle pushed past. ‘Ath. If you have to tag after me, the least you can do is to stop talking.’ But the bard’s tenacity impressed him. Though no fighter, Halliron tended to show up where he was useful. If in this fire-seared abattoir his touch with the wounded and dying was unlikely to offer any benefit, his unstinting service had earned him the right to go on.

The pair moved ahead, oddly matched; the stocky, grizzled warrior in simmering, sceptical bitterness; and the lean musician whose flared boots and court clothing were unsuited for rugged terrain, but whose grace stayed unmarred by the setting.

They came across a slain Etarran pikeman. The man did not lie as he had fallen. Someone had laid his fouled weapon aside, removed his helm, and turned his young face to the sky. Eyes closed, he now rested straight with his hands gently crossed on his breast.

‘Odd.’ Caolle coughed out the stench of ash. ‘One of ours wouldn’t bother. Fellow must’ve had a companion.’

Halliron said nothing, but raised his head and peered into the murk of the grotto.

‘You know something,’ Caolle accused.

‘Maybe.’ Halliron pressed on.

After the fifth such corpse, this one a clansman’s, the discrepancy became irksome. Caolle stopped square in the moss where a dead scout had been as tenderly arranged.

‘You never heard the ballad of Falmuir?’ Halliron asked softly. ‘I think we are seeing its like.’

‘Ballad?’ Caolle straightened. He scrubbed his face with his knuckles, as if tiredness could be scraped from his flesh. ‘You pick a damned odd time to speak of singing.’

Halliron stood also. A warm glint of challenge lit his eyes. ‘And you don’t out of reflex view every man you meet, and measure his potential as a fighter?’

‘That’s different.’ Caolle sighed. ‘Maybe not.’ He rechecked the hang of his sword and his knives, and stalked from the riverbed into shadow. ‘Then what should I know about Falmuir?’

‘That two cities took arms over marriage rights to an heiress.’ Halliron slowed to negotiate a wash of dry river pebbles where a misstep could easily turn an ankle. ‘The girl,’ he resumed, ‘had a seer’s gift. She begged her guardian to allow her to wed an uninvolved suitor as compromise, and to forfeit her rights of inheritance. For greed and for power her wishes were refused. A war resulted, with losses very like this one.’

Caolle led deeper into the defile, his disgust rendered bodiless in full gloom. ‘These Etarrans had only to mind their manners and stay home. Their city was never assaulted.’

Which truth could be argued, from the viewpoint of townsmen terrorized by shadows they could hardly be expected to know were harmless. Cut off ahead of his conclusion, Halliron pondered the clan captain’s impatience. ‘You suspect another treachery lies ahead?’

‘What else?’ The defile narrowed. Sturdy, as silent in motion as a predator, Caolle drew his knife. With the river fallen behind, the thrash of white waters diminished. In darkness now humid with dew the casualties lay thick on the earth. Clansman and foe alike were arrayed in still rows, head to feet aligned north to south and weapons pulled clear of folded hands.

Caolle checked each one anyway to ascertain no body still breathed.

Above the soft scrape of his bootsoles, Halliron said, ‘You won’t find what you think.’

‘So we’ll see.’ Nettled as a wolf over a disturbed cache, Caolle adhered to his wariness.

Cautioned by the angle of the captain’s shoulders, Halliron let ballads and conversation both lapse. The ravine they trod held an unsettled feel. Where deer should have bounded from their watering, the song of the crickets rang unpartnered. Here only bats flitted and swooped erratic circles between the scarred walls of the rimrocks.

And then between steps the mosses that cushioned the trailbed were seared to papery dryness. Trees became fire-stripped skeletons, while ahead the grotto lay ravaged and razed to split stone filmed over with carbon.

The air hung poisoned with taint.

Inside the ruin where the tents had stood, limned like a ghost in soft starlight, knelt a man.

Breath hissed through Caolle’s clenched teeth. His knife hand lifted, caught back from a throw by Halliron.

His urgency queerly muffled, the bard said, ‘Don’t. That’s no enemy.’

‘His Grace of Rathain. I can see.’ Tension did not leave Caolle’s arm. ‘By Ath, I could thrash him! Why in Sithaer should he bother with corpses while our wounded lie unfound and suffering!’

‘You misunderstand him, you always have.’ The Masterbard released his restraint, and jumped back at the speed with which the clan captain turned on him.

‘And you don’t?’ Caolle enforced incredulity with a whistling gesture of his knife.

Recovered, Halliron stood his ground. The night breeze stirred his white hair, and his face, deeply shadowed, stayed serene. ‘This moment, no. I think it best you don’t disturb your liege.’ Then, his tone changed to awe, he added, ‘It is like Falmuir. “To free the dazed spirits, and reclothe cold flesh in fair flowers.”’ At Caolle’s look of baffled anger, the Masterbard said, ‘Prince Arithon’s mage-trained. You don’t know what that means?’

‘I’d be hardly likely to, should I?’ Caolle presented his shoulder, his profile like a hatchet cut against the soot-stained dark of the grotto. ‘Killing’s my trade, not fey tricks with poisons and shadows.’

And behind the captain’s harshness, in a knifeblade demarked by a trembling thread of reflection, Halliron perceived the grief of crushing losses: a clanlord gone, and Dania and four daughters cherished as if they had been Caolle’s own. The present was robbed and the future stretched friendlessly bleak. A difficult task must for love be repeated all over again; another young boy to be raised for the burden of leading the northland clans: first Steiven and now, when a man was ageing and weary of adversity, Steiven’s orphaned son.

That Caolle’s sullen nature would greet such desertion in anger Halliron well understood. What could not for tragedy be permitted was that blame for Deshir’s ills stay fastened on the Teir’s’Ffalenn. Time had come for the bard to ply the service he was trained for. There and then in the darkness, amid the charred ground where the dead lay, he unwrapped the cover from his instrument.

Caolle snapped, ‘Ath, we’ll have ballads again?’ He made to surge forward and stopped, caught aback by the bard’s grip on his wrist. Court manners or not, Halliron could move nimbly when need warranted.

‘You’ll not touch him,’ the bard said in reference to the man, still kneeling, who had neither looked up nor shown other sign he had heard them. The schooled timbre of a masterbard’s voice could fashion an outright command. ‘Sit, Caolle. Hear the tale of Falmuir. After that, do exactly as you please.’

Disarmed as much by exhaustion, Caolle gave way. If he chose not to sit, he had little choice but to listen, as any man must when a singer of Halliron’s stature plied his craft. For a masterbard, the edges of mage-sight and music lay twined to a single wrapped thread. The lyranthe had been fashioned by Paravian spellcraft and under supremely skilled fingers she evoked an allure not to be denied.

From the opening chords, Caolle looked aside. By the close of the first verse his stiffness was all pride and pretence. As his knife hand relinquished its tension, and his face eased from antipathy, he heard of the siege of Falmuir, where a princess had walked out alone on a battlefield where defenders and abductors lay slain. Lent refined vision by the spelled weave of words and bright notes, Caolle was shown in humility the legend of the ballad re-enacted here, in the grotto of Deshir’s slain.

His gaze at some point drifted back to Arithon. Even as a princess had once done in grief and total loss, the Shadow Master poised amid the burned remains of clan kindred. His fine-boned hands were filmed with black ash for each of the corpses he had settled. His hollowed cheeks glittered with the tracings left scoured by tears. He was speaking. Each syllable rang with compassion, and each word he spun formed a name. He summoned in love, and they came to him, the shades of tiny babes and silent women, of girls and grandmothers and daughters and wives, sundered from life in such violence that their spirits were homeless and dazed. They formed around him a webwork of subliminal light, not burned, but whole; no more aggrieved, but joyous, as he added words in lyric Paravian that distanced the violence that had claimed them.

Arithon gave back their deaths, redeemed from the horror of murder. One by one he cherished their memories. In an unconditional mercy that disallowed grief, they were fully and finally freed to the peace of Ath’s deepest mystery.

In time, no more forms shone in soft light; but only a man alone, who rose unsteadily to his feet; while the sad cadence of Halliron’s voice delivered the Princess of Falmuir’s final lines: ‘She went not to wed, nor to comfort or rest, but to free the dazed dead, and to reclothe cold flesh in fair flowers.’

But in this cleft of sere earth and split rock, there were neither bodies to bury nor blossoms to seed over gravesites. Caolle blotted his cheeks with the knuckles still clenched to his skinning knife. His gesture encompassed his prince, as gruffly he said, ‘The man was sent to bed once. If he faints on his feet, he’s like to whack his head on a rock.’

‘Let him be.’ Halliron stroked the ring of fading strings into silence. ‘What he does brings solace we cannot.’

‘It’s healing he needs,’ Caolle groused. ‘Though by Daelion, I don’t like the post of royal nursemaid.’

Attuned to the change in the captain’s railing, the masterbard tied up his instrument. Too grave to be accused of amusement, he waited while a shamefaced Caolle noticed and then sheathed his knife. Then, unspeaking, they trailed Arithon’s progress up the grotto; they sorted out and administered to the living, Rathain’s prince to his uncounted dead.

Night passed. The bard’s face showed every sleepless hour, and Caolle wore an expression like boiled leather. While grey dawn crept in, and the forest rang with birdsong undisturbed by mankind’s sad strivings, they reached a dell scattered with the shafts of fallen arrows, and beyond, a broad beech, ringed with casualties so closely fallen that one lay entangled upon the next like tidewrack stranded by storm.

Roused from the half trance that had sustained his passage through the grotto, Arithon reached out sharp and suddenly, and touched Halliron on the wrist. ‘Let me work alone, here. There won’t be any wounded among these fallen.’

To kill a man untimely with a blade was not the same as using magics to twist his destiny, to overrule his fate by ill usage of the forces that endow life. To release those spirits cut down in Jieret’s defence was a costly, exhaustive undertaking more taxing than anything accomplished previously.

For these dead did not welcome intervention, but shrank from Arithon in stark fear. He was more than their killer; he was a master who had betrayed them on levels they had no conscious means to guard. To bind them long enough to free them, he had to expose to them all that he was. He had to lower his defences and let them shriek curses to his face. He had to endure their pain, let them hurt him in turn, until his passivity left them mollified and quiet.

And when the blessing of the Paravian release let them go, the peace they took with them was not shared. Arithon looked desolate and haunted, and remorse had stolen even tears.

Long before the end, Halliron found he could not watch.

Caolle, who had no gift to know the scope of what was happening, saw only that Arithon suffered. ‘Why should he do this? Why?’

But the answer the bard gave was inadequate, that this prince was both musician and king. Caolle understood only that the heart of the mystery lay beyond him.

When the captain who thought he knew all there was to sample of human grief could no longer abide the awful silence, he spoke the greatest accolade he could offer. ‘Arithon is greater than Steiven.’

‘You see that,’ said the Masterbard. ‘You are privileged. Many won’t, and most will be friends.’

By then, the town dead had been numbered and most of the clansmen. There remained now only Madreigh, open-eyed, his loose hands empty and outflung and a gaping hole in his chest. Aching in body, riven in spirit, Arithon paused in a moment of stopped breath. He looked upon the face of one scarred old campaigner not twisted in rigor, but content with the peace of the seasons.

This, the man who had defended his back, while, for Jieret, he had shaped baneful conjury. A cry wrung from Arithon’s throat before sluggish thought could restrain it. ‘Dharkaron Avenger witness, you should have had better than this!’

Shaking in visible spasms, he brushed back grey hair, and cupped Madreigh’s face between his palms. Blind to daylight, deaf in grief, he closed his eyes, and spoke Name; and met, not blankness or confusion but the abiding fall of spring rains, and snow, and warm sunlight. He encountered the peace of the trees.

The awareness shocked him. The spell that ensnared more than fifty to spare one had inadvertently preserved another life.

Rathain’s prince tilted back his head. Halliron and Caolle loomed above him. His balance tipped toward dizziness, and what seemed the yawning dark of Dharkaron’s censure opened before his wide eyes. ‘This one, also, I saved,’ he said as if pleading forgiveness. ‘Tend him well. I would beg that he lives.’

‘My liege,’ said Caolle. He knelt quickly; and when nerve and consciousness faltered, he was there to catch Arithon in his arms.

First Resolution

When the tors on the plain of Araithe were raked at sunrise by the winds, the mists still clung like combed cotton in the valleys as they had the dawn before. Only now the tick and splash of droplets of dew-soaked rock mingled with the moans of wounded soldiers. Wrapped in the tatters of his surcoat, his camp blanket long since given up to alleviate the shortage of bandaging, Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid knelt to hold the hand of yet another lancer who shivered and thrashed in mindless suffering.

‘Delirium, this time,’ the healer diagnosed: this victim raved from wound fever, not as some of the others, in a madness brought on by terrors of sorcery and shadows. His raw hands helpless and empty, the healer straightened up from his patient. He had abandoned his satchel, there being no more medicines to dispense. Needles could not suture without thread, and last night’s case-load of fatal injuries had burned him stark out of platitudes.

Not in a lifetime of service had he seen a war cause such damage as this one. To the prince still determined to lend comfort, he added, ‘I doubt this lad knows why you’re there. The wagons are loaded. Did you want to see Lord Diegan on his way?’

‘I’ll go in a moment.’ His head bent, the damp ends of his hair flicked in coils over his arm sling, Lysaer let the healer study him in a mix of exasperation and approval before, fed up and weary, he finally gave in and stalked off. One dying garrison soldier might well be past solace. But the prince responsible for the strike into Strakewood needed the interval to think.

Lysaer buried his face in the hand not strapped up in bandaging. Far off, the pop of a carter’s whip sounded over someone’s hoarse shouting; another officer striving to curb the paranoia that had men drawing steel at plain shadows.

No one who had tangled with Arithon’s sorceries in Strakewood would ever again view darkness as friendly.

Grooms hauling buckets to the picket lines observed Lysaer’s pose of despair. They murmured in sympathy for his exhaustion, for all the camp knew he had not rested. The prince had laboured with Pesquil to compile losses too massive to list. Commanding despite his discomfort, he had been on the riverbank to encourage each wave of tired soldiers who emerged alive from the forest. He had walked beside litters, talking, reassuring. Cracked bones had not stopped him from breaking up disputes, or throwing steady light with his gift to quell massive hysterical fear. Throughout a long and terrible night, he had chaffed frightened squires and bloodied his hands beside the surgeon to clean and staunch open wounds. However a man might deplore royalty, this prince had accepted no cosseting.

To find his ragged magnificence still among them in the cheerless grey of the morning made men break their hearts to meet his wishes. That Etarra’s concerns were foremost in his mind, no town survivor ever questioned. Without Lysaer’s light to stay the shadows, many more would have died by the grottos or been abandoned to the mindless distress induced by Arithon’s maze wards that had ensorcelled the troop in the west valley.

If not for Prince Lysaer, Lord Commander Diegan himself would not have left Tal Quorin’s banks alive.

In nervous speculation and vehement rage, Etarra’s garrison made clear whom they blamed for the carnage. Men hailed the prince, then brandished weapons and cursed the shifter of shadows their campaign had failed to take down.

Unsettled by his reflections, Lysaer stirred. At his knees, the soldier tossed and groaned, an arrow that had not quite killed lodged deep inside his lower gut. His suffering would be prolonged and painful and a peppery barmaid who wore his trinkets would be widowed with no parting kiss to cold lips. Without enough wagons for the wounded the dead must be interred where they lay, amid the flinty soil of the tors with only piled stones for their markers.

‘I’ll see you avenged,’ the prince vowed in a spiking rush of sincerity. He touched the man’s shoulder and arose.

While darkness had lasted, the cries and the noise of arriving stragglers had filled the camp, queerly amplified by the fog. The scope of disaster had loomed through the night, still possible to deny. But now as day brightened and the mists shredded away, the damages became appallingly apparent. In a campaign planned for easy victory, two thirds of a war host of ten thousand had been decimated in a single engagement. Lysaer walked as the impact of sight rocked the campsite, men’s voices tangled in anger and shrill disbelief. The worn band of officers struggled yet again to rechannel shock and grief into tasks, while others exhorted crushed and silent men to gather for biscuit and beef around the cookfires.

Raised to rule, well hardened for the trials of leadership, Lysaer shared the burden where he could. He spoke and touched shoulders, and once faced down a man who had wildly drawn a dagger and raved to anyone who would listen that he intended to lead a foray to go reiving back into Strakewood. Sympathetic to the men but possessed of a cool self-containment the s’Ilessid prince reviewed the wreck of Etarra’s garrison with no incapacitating pang of conscience.

Where he passed, his unassailable assurance touched the men and left them silent with awe. His equilibrium could encompass seven thousand casualties. He could feel haunted and sad that Arithon had engaged in unscrupulous use of little children but not have lasting regrets that the wholesale elimination of barbarian women and young had been necessary to guard town security. No city could recoup from a defeat as terrible as this, were they left with belief such casualties could recur again.

‘Your Grace, have you eaten?’ A fat cook tagged at his shoulder, diffident and anxious to please.

Lysaer inclined his head in courtesy. ‘I’ve hardly noticed I was hungry.’ He let himself be led to a fire; politely tasted the soup that was handed to him.

Haunted by association as his gaze became tranced by the flame, he found himself reliving the moment when he had actually endorsed self-destruction to buy the Shadow Master’s death.

Although no cost could be counted too great to eradicate the s’Ffalenn bastard before more innocent lives could fall prey to his wiles, in daylight and cold reason, hindsight recast self-sacrifice as an impulse of hot-headed idiocy. Lysaer shivered, set his soup bowl with a clink on the board the cook used to stack utensils. No guarantee insisted that Arithon should have died in that strike. He was clever enough to escape, perhaps; Rauven’s teaching lent him tricks.

The stalking uncertainty lingered, that the inspiration to risk martyrdom for the cause might not have been Lysaer’s own.

Once in Briane’s sail-hold, and another day in the Red Desert, Arithon had used mage craft to turn his half-brother’s mind. Plagued by doubts, Lysaer wondered. Had the bastard plotted the same way in Strakewood? For if mockery and goading had been paired with sorceries to eliminate the only man with powers over light that might threaten him, the evil inherent in such design upheld a frightening conclusion.

How better for Arithon to win licence to toy with this world as he pleased, than to dedicate his enemy to self-destruction? Lysaer burned inside with recrimination. If faintness from blood loss had not disrupted his attack, worse horrors could have visited Athera than seven thousand dead Etarran soldiers.

‘Your Grace?’ interrupted a staff messenger.

Lysaer glanced up and identified livery with the black and white blazon of the headhunters’ league. Immediately contrite, since the boy could have stood several minutes awaiting acknowledgment, he said, ‘Pesquil sent you?’

‘The wagons are ready to leave, your Grace.’ Embarrassed by the intensity of Lysaer’s attention, the boy regarded the grass, in this place trampled and muddied by the grinding passage of men seeking comfort to ease their misery. ‘My lord Pesquil said Lord Commander Diegan is awake and asking after you.’

Lysaer dredged up energy to give a quick smile of reassurance. ‘Would you lead me to him?’

The boy brightened. ‘At once, your Grace.’

Together, they crossed the camp. The mist was thinning quickly now. Grooms stood in for tired messengers, since sorrowfully decimated horse lines left them short of duties. Some of the watch fires were doused. Between the leaning scaffolds of weapon racks and the comings and goings from the officers’ pavilions, patrols prepared to ride out. The nearer circuits would be quartered on foot, sound mounts being precious and few.

Lysaer assessed all with the sure eye of a ruler and where he made suggestions he was given deference and respect. He took care to acknowledge every greeting with a nod, a smile, or with names, if he knew the speaker: Pesquil’s young staff-runner was overwhelmingly impressed.

In subdued little groups, conversation underscored by the screeling hiss of busy grindstones, the veteran pikemen mended gear. A few commiserated over losses. Most others slept sprawled on wet ground, their blankets reapportioned first for litters and then used for pallets and rough bandaging. Past the phalanx of the supply stores, unloaded in haste from the wagonbeds and lashed under tarps by the carters, the racket and confusion of the night was subsiding. In sunlight, the green recruits who had seen their companions half-butchered or drowned were less driven to seek blind relief in scraps and hysterical boasting. Shrieks from the campfollowers’ tents raised in dissonance over the sobs of refugees from the west valley still deranged by terror of the dark.

The core of the army remained, Lysaer assessed. Carefully handled, these men could be reforged into a troop of formidable strengths. All he lacked was excuse to stay; already his authority was not questioned.

The wagon-train bound for Etarra formed up, its escort of fifty lancers in twitchy lines as men made last minute adjustments to tack and gear. One of the few banners not lost in the river flood flapped erect at the column’s head. Pesquil gave instructions with rapidfire gesticulations to the dispatch rider who would report to Lord Governor Morfett. A mule strained at its lead rein to graze, bearing a lashed bundle in city colours; Captain Gnudsog’s remains, to be interred in the mausoleum gardens reserved for the city’s most revered.

The rest of the wagons bore wounded, ones with privilege and pedigree foremost. The little space remaining had been allotted to men with irreplaceable skills or standing, and then grudgingly, to the staff and supplies needful for a slow journey home.

The cart draped in the Lord Commander’s horsecloths was easy to spot. Lysaer dismissed his young guide with a word of praise that left him blushing. Then he crossed the open ground, threaded past an ongoing, heated dispute and dismissed a hovering servant.

Lord Diegan lay under blankets, dark, untidy hair emphasizing a drawn face and eyes that wandered unfocused from soporifics not fully worn off. He murmured in question as Lysaer’s shadow fell over him, then settled as his sight recorded a sun-caught head of gold hair.

The prince said gently, ‘I am here.’

‘Your Grace?’ Diegan struggled with a fuzzy smile that dissolved into discomfort. He struggled painfully to concentrate.

‘Don’t trouble,’ Lysaer said. ‘I shall speak for both of us.’

‘We lost Gnudsog.’ The Lord Commander plucked at his blankets. ‘You knew that?’

Lysaer captured the wandering fingers and caged them in gentle stillness. Clearly, firmly, he said, ‘Pesquil has charge of the garrison. He’s got twenty good men left who will instruct on barbarian tactics. Enough men remain to finish our original intent. If you still want to destroy the Deshans, Strakewood’s springs will be poisoned and the game by the river shall be hazed and killed. With nothing to hunt, the few clan survivors will be starved out of the forest. The north will be cleared of such pests. No disaster such as happened by Tal Quorin shall visit these northlands again.’

Colour flushed Diegan’s cheeks in patches. ‘They say you’re staying with the troops.’

Lysaer smoothed the Lord Commander’s hand and let go. ‘I must. If I cannot bear arms, I will use my gift of light to safeguard our forays against sorcery.’

Weakly, Diegan cursed. ‘He survived then.’

The name of the Shadow Master hung unspoken between them as an answering grimness touched Lysaer. ‘We haven’t lost. The Deshir clans are finished, there will be no next generation. And your city now knows the measure of its enemy.’

Lord Commander Diegan shut his eyes. A frown pulled at his brows, and shadows of stress and fatigue seemed etched in the hollows of his bones. ‘This pirate’s bastard. You know we can’t take him alone. Without your gift of light, any army we send to the field would be ensorcelled and ruinously slaughtered.’

Lysaer weighed the wisdom of pursuing this subject with a heartsick man who was also drugged and gravely ill. Heavy between them lay the unspoken accusation: that Lysaer had sent Diegan into safety on Tal Quorin’s banks and by risking himself to the river had exposed them all to unconscionable peril. Aware that Lord Diegan had rallied himself and was watching in fragile-edged fury, Lysaer smiled. ‘I’ve had all night to ponder regrets. Here’s my promise. No more exposure on the front ranks for me. The next campaign you launch should be planned and executed to make use of every advantage. Years will be needed to prepare. I could suggest you have the headhunters’ leagues train the garrisons, then sharpen their field skills in small forays to eradicate barbarians. And when the army is readied and equipped to perfection, send out heralds to recruit allies. The burden should not fall to Etarra alone.’

Diegan shifted in distress. ‘You say nothing of yourself.’

‘I am royal,’ Lysaer said, his eyes clear blue and direct. ‘Once, you thought that a liability.’

Lord Commander Diegan swore explosively, then curled on his side in a spasm of wrenched muscles and bitter pain. ‘If I get Lord Governor Morfett to issue an invitation under the official city seal, would you stay?’

Lysaer smiled. ‘Do that, and I shall labour with you to mobilize cities the breadth of Rathain. Then we shall march upon Arithon s’Ffalenn, and we shall take him with numbers no sorceries can overwhelm.’

Lord Commander Diegan relaxed in his blankets, his eyes veiled in drug-hazed speculation. ‘I like your plan. Pesquil agrees?’

Lysaer laughed. ‘Pesquil made your scribes miserable jotting letters to headhunters’ leagues the breadth of the continent before our casualties were tallied.’ For Pesquil, the near total loss of his troop had been a sore point, alleviated by moody bursts of elation that, after feuding years and too little funding from city council, the Earl Steiven’s dominion over Strakewood had been decisively broken.

‘I shall have to buy manuscripts on strategy,’ Diegan said in mixed recrimination and distaste. ‘They’re longwinded and boring, I presume. Hardly entertainment for the parties.’ But fall season would be dreary as it was, with so many ladies forced to mourning. Diegan drifted for some minutes near sleep, while the prince, who knew far more about armies and the art of command than he, attended him in tactful respect. Finally, eyes closed, Lord Diegan murmured, ‘Come back to us safely in the autumn. My sister Lady Talith will be waiting.’

‘Tell her…’ Lysaer paused, gravely pleased, while the captain at the head of the column shouted orders, whips snapped in the hands of cursing drovers and carts began, groaning, to roll forward. Striding alongside Diegan’s wagon, the sun in his hair like sheen on the wares of a silk spinner, Lysaer spoke from his heart. ‘I’ll return to pay court to the lady. No Master of Shadow with his darkness shall be permitted to keep us apart.’

Last Resolution

The deadfalls, stripped of stakes, became grave-pits to bury the fallen, Deshir’s clansmen accomplished the work in whirlwind expedience, laying loved ones on top of dead horses or the bodies of enemies still clad in plumed helms and mailshirts. Plunder entered nobody’s mind. On a field holding slain by the thousands there were more abandoned weapons than living men to wield them; and by long and bitter custom, Deshir’s clans gave no time in respect for their fallen that might endanger the living.