SHIPS OF MERIOR

By: JANNY WURTS

FICTION FANTASY

Synopsis:

This is the first book to follow Curse of the mist wraith by Jannie Worts.
Because of a curse, the prince of light continues to try to seek vengence
on his half brother, the prince of shadow.  The sorcers known as the league
of seven continue to battle to reunite these two brothers in an attempt to
save their world.


		WARS OF LIGHT AND SHADOW,

		BOOK ONE

Two princes, dark andfair

Cursed by the Mistwraith, Desh-thiere

Hate bound them

Blood crowned them

'Til cold death, war must hound them:

Viefor the shadows and the light

Die blind in shadows, burned in light

Cry, "Down the shadows, hail the light!"

VERSE FROM A CHILDREN'S GAME

FOURTH AGE 1220

1.  Miscreant In the morning the Fellowship Sorcerer who had crowned the
king at Ostermere fared northward on the old disused road, the five
years of peace precariously reestablished since the carnage that
followed the Mistwraith's defeat as yet showed no sign of breaking.

The moment seemed unlikely for happenstance to intrude and shape a
spiraling succession of events to upend loyalties and kingdoms.

Havish's coastal landscape, with its jagged, shady valleys, wore the
mottled greens of late spring.  Dew still spangled the leaf tips,
touched brilliant by early sunlight.

Asandir rode in his shirtsleeves, the dark, silver-banded mantle lately
worn for the royal coronation folded inside his saddle pack.

Hair of the same fine silver blew uncovered in the gusts that whipped
off the sea, that tossed the clumped bracken on the hillcrests and
fanned gorse against lichened outcrops of quartz rock.  The black stud
who bore him strode hock deep in grass, alone beneath cloudless sky.

Wildflowers thrashed by its passage sweetened the air with perfume and
the jagging flight of disturbed bees.

For the first time in centuries of service, Asandir was solitary, and on
an errand of no pressing urgency.  The ruthless war, the upsets to rule
and to trade that had savaged the north in the wake of the Mistwraith's
imprisonment had settled, if not into the well-governed order secured
for Havish, then at least into patterns that confined latent hatreds to
the avenues of statecraft and politics.  Better than most, Asandir knew
the respite was fated not to last.  His memories were bitter and
hurtful, of the great curse cast by the Mistwraith to set both its
captors at odds; the land's restoration to clear sky bought at a cost of
two mortal destinies and the land's lasting peace.

Unless the Fellowship Sorcerers could find means to break Desh-thiere's
geas of hatred against the royal half brothers whose gifts brought its
bane, the freed sunlight that warmed the growing earth could yet be paid
for in blood.  With the restored throne of Havish firmly under its
crowned heir, Asandir at last rode to join his colleagues in their
effort to unbind the Mistwraith's two victims from the vicious throes of
its vengeance.

Relaxed in rare contentment, too recently delivered from centuries of
sunless damp to take the hale spring earth for granted, he let his
spirit soar with the winds.  The road he had chosen was years overgrown,
little more than a crease that meandered through Thorn and brush brake
to reemerge where the growth was browsed close by deer.

Despite the banished mists, the townsmen still held uneasy fears of open
spaces, once the sites of forgotten mysteries.  Northbound travelers
innately preferred to book their passage by ship.

Untroubled by the afterpresence of Paravian spirits, not at all
disturbed by the foundations of ancient ruins that underlay the hammocks
of wild roses, the Sorcerer rode with his reins looped.  He followed the
way without misstep, guided by memories that predated the most
weathered, broken wall.  His appearance of reverie was deceptive.

At each turn, his mage heightened senses resonated with the natural
energies that surrounded him.  The sun on his shoulders became a
benediction, both counterpoint and celebration to the ringing
reverberation that was light striking shadow off edges of wild stone.

When a dissonance snagged in the weave, reflex and habit snapped
Asandir's complaisance.  His powers of perception tightened to trace the
immediate cause.

Whatever bad news approached from the south, his mount's wary senses
caught no sign.  The stallion snorted, shook out his mane, and let
Asandir rein him over to the verge of the trail.  Long minutes later, a
drumroll of galloping hooves startled the larks to songless flight. When
the messenger on his laboring mount hove into view, the Sorcerer sat his
saddle, frowning, while the stud, bored with waiting, cropped grass.

The courier wore royal colors, the distinctive scarlet tabard and gold
hawk blazon of the king's personal service snapped into creases against
the breeze.  No common message bearer, he owned the carriage of a
champion fighter.  But the battlebrash courage that graced his
reputation was missing as he hauled his horse to a prancing,
head-shaking halt.

The man was a fool, who eagerly brought trouble to the ear of a
Fellowship Sorcerer.

Briskly annoyed, Asandir spoke before the king's rider could master his
uncertainty.  "I know you were sent by your liege.  If my spellbinder
Dakar is cause and root of some problem, I say now, as I told His
Majesty and the realm's steward on my departure: there is no possible
difficulty that might stem from an apprentice's misdeeds that your high
king's justice cannot handle."

The messenger nursed lathered reins to divert his eye-rolling mount from
her sideward crab steps through the bracken.  "Begging pardon, Sorcerer.
But Dakar got himself drunk.  There was a fight."

Sweating pale before Asandir's displeasure, he finished in a crisp rush.
"Your spellbinder's got himself knifed and King Eldir's healers say
he'll bleed to death."

"Oh, indeed?" The words bit the quiet like sheared metal.

Asandir's brows cocked up.  Features laced over with creases showed a
moment of fierce surprise.  Then he started his black up from a mouthful
of grass and spun him thundering back toward the city.

Alone in the derelict roadway on a sidling, race-bred horse, the royal
courier had no mind to linger.  He was not clan kindred, to feel at ease
in the wild places where the old stones lay carved with uncanny patterns
to snag and bewitch a man's thoughts.  The instant his overstrung mare
quit her tussle with the bit, he nursed her along at a trot, relieved to
be spared the company of a Sorcerer any right-thinking mortal knew
better than to presume not to fear.

The city known as the jewel of the southwest coast flung an ungainly
sprawl of battlements across the crown of a cove.

Built over warrens of limestone caves once used as a smuggler's haven,
the architecture reflected twelve centuries of changing tastes, battered
as much by storms as by war, and bearing like layers in sediment the
mismatched masonry of refortifications and repairs.  Sea trade provided
the marrow of Ostermere's wealth.  Walls of tawny brick abutted bulwarks
of native limestone, scabrous with moss and smothered in lee facing
crannies by salt-stunted runners of wild ivy.  The whole overlooked a
series of weathered ledges that commanded a west-facing inlet, each her
crusted with half timber shops and slate-roofed mansions still gay with
bunting and gold streamers from celebration of the king's accession.  If
the merchant galleys docked along the seaside gates no longer flew
banners at their mastheads, if the guards by the harbonnaster's office
had shed ceremonial accoutrements for boiled leather hauberks and plain
steel, a charge of excitement yet lingered.

In all the realm, this city had been honored as the royal seat until the
walls at Telmandir could be raised out of ruin and restored to the
splendors of years past.  An alertness like frost clung to the men
handpicked for the royal guard.  Out of pride for their youthful
sovereign, they had the unused north postern winched open and the shanty
market that encroached upon its bailey cleared of beggars and squatters'
stalls when Asandir's stallion clattered through.

In a courtyard still gloomy under overhanging tenements, the Sorcerer
dismounted.  He tossed his reins to a barefoot boy groom grown familiar
with the stud through the months of change as town governance had been
replaced by sovereign monarchy.  Without pause for greeting, Asandir
strode off, scattering geese and a loose pig from the puddled runoff by
the washhouse.  He dodged through men in sweaty tunics who unloaded tuns
from an ale dray, avoided a bucket-bearing scullion, and crossed without
mishap through the tumbling brown melee of a deerhound bitch's cavorting
pups.

Just arrived, all but brushed aside with the same brisk lack of
ceremony, the captain of Ostennere's gamson pumped on fat legs to join
the Sorcerer.  A capricious gust snatched his unbelted surcoat.

Clutching scarlet broadcloth with both hands to escape getting muffled
by his clothing, he relayed facts with a directness at odds with his
untidy turnout, "It was a damnfool accident, the Mad Prophet so drunken
he could barely stand upright.  He'd visited the kitchens to meet a maid
he claimed he'd an assignation with.  Muddled as he was, he kissed the
wrong doxie.  Her husband came in at just the right time to lose his
temper." The city captain gave a one-handed shrug, his brows beetled
over his beefy nose.  "The knife was handy on the butcher's block, and
the wound-" Asandir cut him off.  "The details won't matter." He reached
the servants' postern, flung it open fast enough to whistle air, and
added, "Your gate guards are missing their gold buttons."

Ostermere's ranking captain swore.  An unlikely, swordsman's agility
allowed him to nip through the fast-,closing panel.  "The meatbrains got
themselves fleeced at dice.  Not a man of them will own up, but since
you ask, there were bystanders who fingered Dakar as the instigator."

"I thought so." Light through an ancient arrow slit sliced across
Asandir's shoulders as he traversed the corridor behind the pantries and
began in long strides to climb stairs.

Instructions trailed echoing behind him.  "Inform your royal liege I'm
here.  Ask if he'll please attend me at once in Dakar's bedchamber."

Dismissed with one foot raised to mount an empty landing, the city
captain spun about.  "Ask my liege, indeed!  I know a command when I
hear one.  And I'd beg on my knees for Dharkaron Avenger's own judgment
before I'd shift places with Dakar."

From far above, Asandir's voice cracked back in crisp reverberation.
"For the Mad Prophet's transgressions this time, Dharkaron's judgment
would be too merciful."

High-browed, intelligent, and shrewdly even-tempered for a lad of
eighteen years, King Eldir arrived in a state of disarray as striking as
his ranking captain's.  Swiping back tousled brown hair, sweat damp from
a running ascent of several flights of tower stairs, he heaved off
cloak, sash, and tabard, and shed a gold-trimmed load of state velvets
without apology onto a bench in a lover's nook.  In just dread of
Asandir's inquiry, he jerked down the tails of an undertunic threadbare
enough to have belonged to an apprentice laborer and mouthed exasperated
excuses to himself.  "I'm sorry.  But the drawers the tailors' guild
sent had enough ties and eyelets to corset a whore, and too much lace
makes me itch."

Eldir broke off, embarrassed.  The Sorcerer he hastened to meet was not
attending his injured charge, but standing stone still in the hallway,
one shoulder braced against the doorjamb and his face bent into shadow.

The young king paled in dismay.  "Ath's mercy!  We reached you too late
to help."

Asandir glanced up, eyes bright.  "Certainly not." He inclined his head
toward the door.  Muffled voices issued from the other side, one male
and labored, another one female, bewailing misfortune in lisping
sympathy.

Eldir's interest quickened.  Even in extremes, it appeared the infamous
Mad Prophet had pursued his ill-starred assignation.  Then, practical
enough to restrain his wild thoughts, Havish's sovereign sighed in
disappointment.  "You've healed him already, I see."

The Sorcerer shook his head.  Dire as oncoming storm, he spun in the
corridor, tripped the latch without noise, and barged into Dakar's
bedchamber.

The panel opened to reveal a pleasant, sun-washed alcove, cushioned
chairs carved with grape clusters, and a feather mattress piled with
quilts.  The casement admitted a flood of ocean air lightly tainted by
the tar the chandlers sold to black rigging.  Swathed like a sausage in
eiderdown, a chubby man Jay with a face wan as bread dough and a beard
like the curled fringe on a water spaniel.  Caught leaning over to kiss
him, the pretty blond kitchen maid with the knife-wielding husband
murmured into his ear, "I will grieve for you and pray to Ath to
preserve your undying memory."

"Which won't be the least bit necessary!" Asandir cracked from his
planted stance by the doorway.

At his shoulder, Eldir started.

The maid snapped erect with a squeal and the quilts jerked, the victim
beneath galvanized to a fish flop start of surprise.  A fondling hand
recoiled from under a froth of lace petticoats as Dakar swiveled
cinnamon eyes, widened now to rolling rings of white.

The tableau endured a frozen moment.  Already pale, the Sorcerer's
wounded apprentice gasped a bitten-off curse, then to outward appearance
fell comatose.

"Out!" Asandir jerked his chin toward the girl, who cast aside dignity,
gathered her skirts above her knees, and fled, trailing unlaced
furbelows.

As her footsteps dwindled down the corridor, the Sorcerer kicked the
door closed.  A paralyzed stillness descended, against which the rumble
of ale tuns over cobbles seemed to thunder off the courtyard walls
outside.  Beyond the opened shutter, the call of the changing watch
drifted off the wall walks, mingled with the bellow of the baker's oaths
as he collared a laggard scullion.  The yap of gamboling puppies, the
grind of wagons across Ostermere market, and the screeling cries of
scavenging gulls seemed unreal, even dreamlike, before the stark tension
in the room.

Asandir first addressed the king, who waited, frowning thoughtfully.
"Although I ask that the secrets of mages be kept from common knowledge
in your court, I would have you understand just how far my apprentice
has misled you." He stepped to Dakar's bedside and, with no shred of
solicitude, ripped away quilting and sheets.

Dakar bit his lip, poker stiff, while his master yanked off the sodden
dressing that swaddled the side the baking girl's husband had punctured.

The linen came free, gory as any bandage might be if pulled untimely
from a mortal wound.  Except the flesh beneath was unmarked.

King Eldir gaped in surprise.

"Dakar," Asandir informed, "is this day five hundred and eighty seven
years old.  He has longevity training.  As you see, the suffering of
wounds and illness is entirely within his powers to mend."

"He was in no danger," Eldir stated in rising, incredulous fury.

He folded his arms, head tipped sideward, while skin smudged with the
first shaved trace of a beard deepened to a violent, fresh flush.

That moment, he needed no crown to lend him majesty.  "For whim, the
realm's champion was sent out and told to run my fastest mare to death
to fetch your master?"

Naked and pink and far too corpulent to cower into a feather mattress,
Dakar shoved stubby hands in the hair at his temples.

He licked dry lips, flinched from Asandir, and squirmed.  "I'm sorry."
His shrug was less charming than desperate.

"Were you my subject, I'd have your life." Eldir flicked a glance at the
Sorcerer, whose eyes were like butcher's steel fresh from the whetstone.
"Since you're not my real man, regretfully, I can't offer that
kindness."

Sweat rolled through Dakar's fingers and snaked across his plump wrists.
His breathing came now in jerks, while lard at his knees jumped and
quivered.

Eldir inclined his head toward Asandir.  "Perhaps I should wait for you
without?" Mindful of his dignity, he sidestepped toward the door.

Alone and defenseless before his master, Dakar covered his face.

Through his palms, he said, "Ath!  If it's to be tracing mazes through
sand grains again, for mercy, get on with your traps and be done with
me."

"That wasn't what I had in mind." Asandir advanced to the bedside.  He
said something almost too soft to hear, cut by a wild, ragged cry from
Dakar that trailed off to sniveling, then silence.

Eldir rushed his step to shut the door.  But the panel was caught short
before it slammed, and Asandir stepped through.

He set the latch with steady fingers, turned around to regard the King
of Havish, and said succinctly, "Nightmares.  They should occupy the Mad
Prophet at least until sundown.  He'll emerge hungry, and, I sadly fear,
not in the least bit chastened."

Between one breath and the next, the Sorcerer recovered his humor.

"Do I owe you for more than your guardsmen's allotment of gold buttons?"

"Not me." Eldir sighed; strain and uncertainty returned to pull at the
corners of his mouth.  "The oldest son of the town seneschal staked his
mother's jewelry on bad cards, and I'm not sure exactly who started the
dare.  But the cook's fattened hog escaped its pen.  The creature wound
up in a warehouse and spoiled the raw wool consigned for the dyers at
Narms.

Truth to tell, the guild master's council of Ostermere is howling for
Dakar's blood.  My guard captain held orders to clap him in chains when
the fight broke out in the kitchen."

"I leave my apprentice to protect you for one day and find you exhausted
by a hard lesson in diplomacy." Asandir's grin flashed like a burst of
sudden sunlight.  He laid a steering hand on the royal shoulder and
started off down the corridor.  "From this moment, consider my
apprentice removed from the realm's concerns.  Your steward Machiel
should be able to guard your safety well enough, since you've managed to
hold Havish secure through Dakar's irresponsible worst.

I've decided exactly what I shall do with our errant prophet and I doubt
he takes it well."

"You'd punish him further?" The habits of an unassuming boyhood still
with him, Eldir paused by the window seat to gather his discarded state
finery.  "What could be worse than harrowing the man with uninterrupted
bad dreams?"

"Very little." Asandir's eyes gleamed with sharp irony.

"When Dakar awakens, you will send him from court on a traveling
allowance I'll leave for his reassignment.  Tell him his task is to keep
Prince Arithon of Rathain from getting murdered by Etarra's new division
of field troops."

Eldir stopped cold in the corridor.  After five years, accounts were
still repeated of the bloody war that had slaughtered two-thirds of
Etarra's garrison and left the northern clansmen real to Arithon nearly
decimated in the cause of defending his life.  Motivated by a feud
between half brothers embroiled in bitter enmity, lent deadly stakes by
the same powers of sorcery that had once defeated the Mistwraith, and
fanned hotter by age-old friction still standing elsewhere between
clanborn and townsman, the conflict had since brought the unified
opposition of every merchant city in Rathain.

The prince with blood-right to rule there was a marked and hunted man.

Every trade guild within his own borders was eager to skewer him in cold
blood.

Havish's emphatically neutral sovereign made a sound between a cough and
a grunt as he considered Dakar's penchant for trouble appended to the
man called Master of Shadow, that half of the north wanted dead.  "I
shouldn't presume to advise, but isn't that fairly begging fate to get
Rathain a killed prince?"

"So one might think," Asandir mused, not in the least bit concerned.
"Except Arithon s'Ffalenn needs none of Dakar's help just now.  On the
contrary, he's perhaps the one man alive who may be capable of holding
the Mad Prophet to heel.  The match should prove engagingly fascinating.
Each man holds the other in the utmost of scorn and contempt."

Petition

The next event in the widening chain of happenstance provoked by the
Mistwraith's bane arose at full summer, when visitors from Rathain's
clan survivors sought audience with another high chieftain in the
neighboring realm to the west.

Hailed as she knelt on damp pine needles in the midst of dressing out a
deer, Lady Maenalle bent a hawk-sharp gaze on the breathless messenger.

"Fatemaster's justice, why now?" Bloodied to the wrists, her knife
poised over a welter of steaming entrails, the woman who also shouldered
the power of Tysan's regency shoved up from her knees with a quickness
that belied her sixty years.

Feet straddled over the halfgutted carcass, the man's leathers she
preferred for daily wear belted to a waist still whipcord trim, Maenalle
pushed back close-cropped hair with the back of her least sticky wrist.
She said to the boy who had jogged up a Mountainside to fetch her,
"Speak clearly.  These aren't the usual clan spokesmen we've received
from Rathain before?"

"Lady, not this time." Sure her displeasure boded ill for the scouts,
whose advance word now seemed negligently scant on facts, the boy
answered fast.  "The company numbers fifteen, led by a tall man named
Red-beard.  His war captain Caolle travels with him."

"Jieret Red-beard?  The young s'Valerient heir?" Grim in dismay,
Maenalle cast a bothered glance over her gore-spattered leathers.  "But
he's Deshir's chieftain, and Earl of the North!"

A state delegation from across the water, no less; and led by Prince
Arithon's blood-pacted liegeman, who happened also to be caithdein, or
"shadow behind the throne," hereditary warden of Rathain.

Maenalle let fly a blistering oath.

Then, infected by spurious, private triumph, for she despised formality
and skirts, she burst into deep-throated laughter.  "Well, they'll just
have to take me as I am." She ended with a lift of dark eyebrows.  "I've
got time to find a stream to sluice off?  Good.  The hunting party's off
down the gorge.  Somebody ought to go after them and let my grandson
know what's afoot." She bit her lip, recalled to the deer, too sorely
needed to abandon for scavengers to pick.

The young messenger offered to take the knife in her stead.

"Lady, I can finish up the butchering."

Maenalle smiled.  "Good lad.  I thought so, but really, this should be
Maien's problem."

Her moods were fair-minded enough to let the boy relax.

"Lady, if you both meet Prince Arithon's delegation reeking of offal,
s'Gannley might be called out for insult."

"Imp." Maenalle relinquished her fouled blade and took a swipe at the
child's ear, which he ducked before he got blood-smeared.  "Titles
aside, Rathain's warden is very little older than you are.  If he cries
insult, I'll ask his war captain to cut down a birch switch and thrash
him."

Which words seemed a fine and suitable retort, until Maenalle's descent
from the forested plateau forced an interval for sober thought.

Chilled by the premature twilight of an afternoon cut off from sunlight,
she entered the hidden ravine that held her clans' summer refuge.  In
silence, she numbered the years that had slipped past, all unnoticed.
Red-beard was not a childish nickname.  Jieret s'Valefient in sober fact
was but one season older than Maien; no boy anymore, if not yet fully a
man.

Small wonder the young scout had stifled his smile at her mention of
birch canes and thrashing.

Hatefully tired of acting the querulous ruler, and greeting nobody she
passed, Maenalle crossed the dusty compound with its stinks of
sun-curing hide.  She barged into the comfortless hut that served as her
quarters, flicked up cuffs still dripping from her streamside ablutions,
and slammed back the lid of her clothes trunk.

Her hand hesitated over the folded finery inside, then snatched in sharp
resolve: not the indigo regent's tabard with its glittering gold star
blazon.  Instead Maenalle shook out a plain black overtunic, expensively
cut, and worn but once since its making.  She would don the caithdein's
sable, by tradition the symbol of power deferred, in the presence of her
trueborn sovereign.

If she still held the regency in Tysan, the office was not hers by
choice; the s'llessid scion forepromised by prophecy had returned to
claim his royal title.  But the Mistwraith he had lent his gift of light
to help subdue had avenged itself and cursed Prince Lysaer of Tysan to
undying enmity against Arithon, Master of Shadow.  For that, the
Fellowship Sorcerers entitled to crown him had withheld their sanction
for his inheritance.  Grieved beyond heartbreak for the betrayals which
had forced their judgment, the realm's lady steward tugged the dark
garment over her dampened leathers.  She belted on her sword, firm in
this one defiance.  Let black cloth remind the envoy sent by Arithon of
Rathain that the final call on clan loyalty in Tysan was not fully hers
to command, however desperate the cause they surely came here to plead.

A brisk knock jostled her door panel.  Maenalle raked quick fingers
through hair cropped close as a fighting man's, then straightened in
time to seem composed as Lord Tashan poked his white head inside.

"Your visitors have passed the last checkpoint." The rotten old fox was
smiling.  As age worn as she through long years of shared hardship, he
would guess she was flustered; and in hindsight, the blighted black
cloth was a mistake that would accent any pallor born of nervousness.

Tartly, Maenalle attacked first.  "I could go and maybe lend a semblance
of decorum if you'd make way and let me pass."

Before Tashan could move, she brushed by, still shrugging to settle the
tunic over her shoulders.  Canny enough not to query her forceful choice
of wardrobe, the old lord hurried his limp to flank her, while dogs
barked and dust flew, and sun-browned children in scuffed deer hides ran
in a game of hunters and wolves through the stream-threaded shade of the
defile.  Built under cover on either side, the rows of ramshackle cabins
sagged with the wear of storms and weather.  If unglazed windows and
walls laddered green under vines seemed uncivilized, Maenalle held no
bitterness.  Here, surrounded by inhospitable terrain, abutments of
knife-edged rock and slide-scarred crags where loose shale and boulders
could give way and break legs, the persecuted descendants of Tysan's
deposed liegemen kept a grim measure of safety.

Even the most fanatical town enemies were deterred from ranging too
zealously for fugitives.  Poor as her people were, at least the
mountains allowed them the security to raise children under timber roofs
and to keep horses in limited herds.

The old blood clans elsewhere had far less in the centuries since the
merchant guilds had overset kingdom rule, and headhunters rode to claim
bounties.

None of Arithon's envoy traveled mounted, which explained the scout's
misleading first report.  Maenalle reached the palings that served as
the outpost's main gate just as the arrivals from Rathain filed through.
Except for the eastern inflection as one commented, "Ath, will you look?
This place could pass for a village," the party might have blended with
one of her patrols.  Jieret's band were weatherworn, observant to the
point of edged wariness, and dressed in leathers lacking any dyes or
bright ornaments.  Their weapons had seen hard use, and every last man
carried scars.

The rangy, tangle-haired redhead who stepped out to present his
courtesies was no exception.  Near to her grandson's age he might be,
yet when he arose from his bow and towered over her, Maenalle revised
her assessment.  The eyes that met hers were chilly and wide, the mouth
amid a gingery bristle of beard, fixed and straight.  This was no green
youth, but a man of seventeen years who had seen his sisters and parents
die in the service of his liege.  Grief and premature responsibilities
left their mark: a boy of twelve had grown up with the burden of
safeguarding the north against the wave of vengeance-bent aggression
that had dogged his people ever since the year the Mistwraith's malice
had overset Rathain's peace.

In Tysan, where the feud between townborn and clan burned hotly enough
without impetus from geas-cursed princes, Lady Maenalle shrank to
imagine what extremity might bring this man to leave his native glens,
to abandon his people and risk an overland journey through hostile
territory to seek her.

"My lord earl," she murmured, "forgive the lackluster welcome, but
surely you bring us bad news?" She accepted his kiss on her cheek and
stepped back, unwilling to test her dignity too long against the younger
man's frightening sense of presence.

Jieret bent upon Tysan's lady steward the unsettling intuition inherited
from his late mother.  "We've surprised you."

The blood on her boots did not escape him, nor the reserve behind her
caithdein's black.  "Let me ease your mind.  We didn't call you back
from the joys of the summer night to armed support for the sake of my
liege lord, Arithon."

"Not hers to give, if you had," grumbled Tashan.

The comment fell through a misfortunate lull in the racket made by
curious children.  Stung into movement like a bothered bear, a grizzled,
fiftyish war captain with inimical black eyes elbowed past his young
chieftain's shoulder.

"Don't flatter yourselves for restraint." Caolle loosed a clipped laugh.
"His Grace of Rathain's quite vicious enough on points of pride without
anybody's outside help.  He'd spurn even gold that fell at his feet, did
it come to him struck with his name on it."

Unsettled to learn the prince himself had not backed this surprise
delegation, Maenalle forestalled the airing of issues more wisely
discussed in private.  "Your war captain sounds like a traveler sorely
in need of a beer."

"Well, beer won't help," Caolle groused.  "Just a fair chance at gutting
that blond-haired prandey who lounges in silk, and sends every trained
sword in Etarra and beyond thrashing the countryside to harrow us."

The trail scouts who guided the visitors stiffened, and a youngster
close enough to overhear shouted, "Hey!  That man called our lord prince
the Shandian word for a gelded pleasure ho-" Maenalle spun swiftly and
grabbed the child by the shoulder.  "Don't say such filth.

Your mother would thrash you.

And you shouldn't be concerned with your elders' speech when to my
knowledge you aren't on my council."

The miscreant gasped an apology, darted an enraged glance at Caolle,
then sidled away as his lady chieftain released him.  To the red-bearded
caithdein and his grinning, insolent war captain, the steward of the
Kingdom of Tysan finished in flat exasperation, "By Ath, this visit of
yours had betterjustify the aggravation."

To which Earl Jieret s'Valerient said nothing.  That the two gifted men
who had restored Athera's sunlight were entrapped in an enmity that bent
their bright and deadly talents against each other was a havoc too
heartsore for reason.

Neither was he inclined to dwell on ceremony.  Minutes later, seated by
an untouched glass of wine across the planks of the outpost's scarred
council table, he pulled a letter from the breast of his tunic.

The dispatch was speckled with bloodstains.  Since affairs between clans
were never committed to writing, Maenalle's eyes flicked at once to
discern which town seal impressed the broken wax.

Deshir's youthful earl saw her interest.  "The seal was royal, and
Tysan's." A reluctant pause, then his quick movement as he offered the
missive across the trestle.  "This was captured from a guild courier
riding the Mathom road under heavy escort.  A state copy, you'll see,
bound for official record with the trade guilds at Erdane.  Clan lives
were lost to intercept it.

We must presume the original reached its destination."

Maenalle accepted the folded parchment, its ribbons and gilded capitals
done in the ornate style of Etarran scribes.  She verified her kingdom's
star blazon in its couch of indigo wax.

Her glance at the flamboyant heading raised a flashfire rush of
antagonism.  "But our prince was disbarred from royal privilege!  Why
should he presume to write under Tysan's crown seal importuning the
Mayor Elect of Korias?"

"Read," growled Caolle.

White in dismay, Maenalle scanned down the lines, growing tenser and
angrier, until even Lord Tashan's dry-witted tolerance snapped.

"What's in that?"

"A petition." Jieret all but spat on the beaten earth floor.

"From a prince denied right of sovereignty demanding title and grant to
lands and city.  By claim of birth, Lysaer s'llessid seeks leave to
restore Tysan's capital at Avenor."

"He'll never get it," Tashan said, halfway to his feet in indignation.
"Never mind the merchant guilds won't stand a royal presence, the palace
is ruins, now.  Not one stone stands upright on a foundation since the
rebellion wrecked the old order.  Past fears will prevail.  Not a
townborn mason would set foot there, haunted as they believe the site to
be.  And no clan in this kingdom can endorse a s'llessid claim without
lawful sanction from the Fellowship."

"But that's half the point," Jieret said, too emphatically calm for a
man under twenty years of age.  "The trade guilds in West End have
nothing to lose.  If the old land routes are rejoined with the Camris
roads, they'll gain profits.  The Mayor Elect in Korias will draw up the
documents just for the chance to slight royalty.  He's isolated enough
not to know your deposed prince has the finesse to create the
impossible.

Daelion as my witness, in just five years, Lysaer's reconciled Etarra's
stew of rival factions.  He's got guild ministers and town councilmen
kissing like brothers, and every independent city garrison in the
Kingdom of Rathain conniving to exterminate my clansmen.  If Lysaer can
whip up armies to challenge a shadow master and a sorcerer, do you think
he can't get walls and barbicans built around the shades of a few
thousand ghosts?"

"Royal sanction or not, your prince won't lack funds for his
enterprise," broke in Caoile.  "The towns are bothered to panic.  To
curry favor with the man whose gift of light offers protection against
wild fears of Arithon's shadows, every trade guild owing notes to Etarra
has offered its gold to fund armies.  What townsman would pause to sort
the difference between Arithon's real liegemen and clanborn everywhere
else?" Caoile slammed opened hands on the table, causing the thick
planks to jump.  "Fiends!  They're not so damned stupid, citybred fools
though they be.  If his Grace of Rathain turned up in any clan haven
asking guest right, what chieftain would refuse him hospitality?"

"Havish's, under High King Eldir, would be wise to."

Maenalle shut her eyes, her fist with the letter bunched hard at her
temple, and her free hand nerveless on the tabletop.

Unless and until the Fellowship Sorcerers unriddled a way to break the
blood feud engendered by Desh-thiere's revenge, the perils were too dire
to deny.

These men at her table had seen the forefront of the war unleashed
between the cursed princes.  Even heard at second hand, the ruthless
scale of the conflict was enough to bring cold sweats.  When Prince
Lysaer had raised the Etarran garrison to cut down Rathain's royal heir,
one battle had seen two thirds of Deshir's clansmen fight to the death,
despite the unstinting protections of sorcery and shadows lent by the
liege lord they defended.  Losses to the attackers had been more
devastating.  Fears of further retaliation by magecraft had drawn Lysaer
to stay on in Rathain to unite its merchant guilds and quarrelsome,
independent city governments.

Against the rifts of old politics, he had seen stunning success.

Every summer, headhunters rode out in greater force to hunt down and
slaughter clan fugitives in their search for the Master of Shadow.

For centuries, townsmen had killed clansmen on sight; the stakes now
were never more dangerous.  The beguiling inspiration of the Prince of
the West lent city mayors powerful impetus to pool resource and
systematically exterminate enemies already driven deep into hiding.

Having met Lysaer s'llessid only briefly, Maenalle still sighed in
regret for a gifted statesman's skills twisted awry by Desh-thiere's
curse.  Through the course of just one past visit, her most reticent
scouts had warmed to their prince enough to sorrow rather than rage over
his treacherous alliance with town enemies.  As for Arithon of Rathain,
he was mage-trained: secretive, powerfully clever, and too fiendishly
innovative to crumple before whatever odds Lysaer would raise against
him.

"Where is your liege?" Maenalle asked.  "Does Arithon know his adversary
now looks to claim ancestral lands in Tysan?"

Because her eyes were averted, only Tashan saw the exasperated look that
flashed between the earl and his war captain.

To Jieret's staunch credit, he found courage to answer her directly. "We
came to give warning.  Of Arithon's intent, we've no clue.  When he left
us, he made his will plain.  He would not have his presence become a
target to encourage the geas that drives him and Lysaer to war."

Still bluntly irked over a clash of wills fully five years gone, Caolle
knotted ham fists on the trestle top.  "We haven't seen or heard from
our liege since the rite sung over our war dead.  Ath knows where he is.
His Grace himself won't deign to send word."

Which explained the hardness behind Jieret's focused maturity, Maenalle
concluded in silent pain.  To him alone had fallen the task of guarding
his people from Etarra's seasonal purge by headhunters.  The woman in
her ached for her grandson, who might come to taste the same griefs.

If Lysaer won title to Avenor, the rift engendered by Desh-thiere's
ills, that had sundered Rathain and sparked old hates to furious
bloodshed, must inevitably sweep into Tysan.

"Our clans will prepare for the worst," Maenalle concluded in
bitterness.  She arose, let the wrung parchment fall on the tabletop,
then offered the beleaguered young earl the courtesy due to an equal;
for whether he had gained the privilege of swearing fealty to a lawfully
sanctioned prince, like her, he was caithdein to a realm without a king.
His liege lord did not back him; by himself, Jieret had shouldered the
risk, had left Rathain's shores with the fourteen companions who were
his last surviving peers to bring word of Lysaer's false intent.

For all her sixty years, Maenalle felt tired and disheartened; beaten
down with sorrow enough to contemplate what this red-bearded stripling
would not, even for grief since the slaughter of his family: break down
and give way to hatred, abandon himself to vindictive killing.

"You don't resent your prince for going," she found herself saying in
unabashed awe.  Tashan turned around to stare at her, while Caoile
looked on, nonplussed.

Their reactions passed unheeded as Jieret gave her the first true smile
she had seen.  "I admire Arithon, much as my father did, though my
line's gift of Sight warned us both that my family would die in royal
service."

"I met your liege once," Maenalle admitted.  "Though I never saw him
work shadows or magecraft, Ath grant me grace, I wish never to cross
wits with him again."

Rueful in grim understanding, Jieret said, "Never mind Ath.  If my liege
has his way, you probably won't.  In obscurity I believe he finds
contentment."

Neither cynical Caolle nor Tysan's lady steward wasted breath to belabor
the obvious: that Prince Lysaer's public presence and insidious charisma
must eventually come to prevail.  Arithon of Rathain would awaken one
day, else be battered from his complaisance.

Grant

Talith, sister to EtarTa's Lord Commander of the Guard, could recall
when early autumn had filled the city with the smell of ripe apples.
Hauled in on the farm wains that toiled up the winding roads through the
passes, the fruit had been unloaded in piles on burlap in the raucous
expanse of the markets.  In imitation of the pranks of older gallants,
bored, rich young boys once delighted in upsetting the stacks to the
detriment of passing traffic.  Birds squabbled over the cidery crush
milled under by the cart wheels, and winds whisked their burden of
scraping, flying leaves, sharpened by frost off the peaks.

But if the sunlight restored since the Mistwraith's captivity had
increased the orchards' bounty, Etarra held widespread change.

Spurred to fears of attack by shadows and sorcery, and through promise
to aid armed resource with the powers over light that alone could
protect and counterward, the brilliant statesmanship of one man had
annealed strained politics into alliance.  Because of Lysaer s'llessid's
dedication, the disparate city governments inside Rathain's borders now
stood united in common cause.  The miracle of their accord brought
unprecedented cooperation.  Against the barbarian clans who had harbored
the fugitive Master of Shadow, every garrison in the north levied troops
to support Etarra's campaign.

.  Apples were now stacked in barrels to discourage pilfering, and the
season's turn jammed streets built wide enough to accommodate the
heaviest caravans with shipments of provisions and arms for the bursars.
Arranged like a hub in the Mathom Pass, the wealthiest trade center on
the continent spent its treasury to house and maintain a war camp
through the winter.  The hayfields nearest to the walls sprouted a
muddy, trampled maze of officers' shacks, supply tents, and barracks,
each block marked off like street signs by standards with sun-faded
banners.  Grown yearly more familiar, the taint of coal from the
Armorer's fires wrapped the rooftops in haze that deepened with dusk to
blue mist.

Lady Talith disdained to share in the commotion of the returning army.
She disliked loud-voiced men and salons packed with women nervously
desperate for news.  That the royal-born sorcerer Etarra's new field
host was intended to annihilate had so far refused to reappear did
nothing to blunt the unease in the streets: his spells and his shadows
had bought seven thousand deaths five years past in Deshir.

The grief and the terror remained, never to be forgotten.  The garrison
that endured sustained its festered rage by bloodying what remained of
Arithon's allies, clan barbarians systematically pursued and ferreted
out of the wilds.  For deeply personal reasons, Talith hated the
boastful stories of ambush and campaign, the reminiscences of past
seasons.  And so she disdained the invitations and the crush, and stood
with her chin pillowed on furred cuffs to gaze over the square brick
embrasure that faced the mountains.

When the troops first marched in, she had heard what mattered from
Diegan: the crack divisions deployed into Halwythwood's deep glens had
returned with markedly poor success.  No barbarian camps at all had been
found to be put to the sword.

Again, the brigands under Caoile and Jieret Red-beard had

made sport of the headhunters' efforts.  Except for one isolated

incident, their bands of clan scouts had escaped, despite repeated
complaints of raiding and couriers brazenly killed or waylaid as near as
the Mathom road.

Lysaer s'Ilessid had warned that the barbarians would organize, that
Arithon's ongoing disappearance presaged more devious plans.

Having met the Master of Shadow just once, Talith shared his unrest.

A light voice cut across her thoughts.  "I thought I should find you
here."

The postern door had opened silently and the step that approached was
dancer light.  Talith did not turn, though the hair pinned in coils by
her gold-wired pearls trapped heat at the base of her neck.

Haughtily still in her wrappings of tawny velvet, lined by the flicker
of the lamplighter's torch as he shuffled on his eventide route down the
wall, she loosed an invisible sigh.

The man most sought after and admired in all the rich halls of Etarra,
Lysaer s'llessid, called Prince of the West and savior of the city,
perched with poised grace at her elbow.  A pause developed as he
examined her; a man would be dead, not to suck a rushed breath for her
beauty.

Torchlight caught his sapphires like splintered ice as he added, "At
long last, I've had word."

Talith raked her teeth over her lower lip to redden and brighten her
pout.  "You've located your bane?  The Master of Shadow has been found?"

His stark and stubborn silence informed her that he had not.

From behind, glass chinked as the arthritic old servant fumbled to
unlatch the postern lamp's cover.  Lysaer pushed off the crenellation,
gave a casual flick of his hand.  A spark jumped from his finger across
empty air and snapped the wick into flame behind the smudged panes.

The lampsman gave a violent start and spun around.  Made aware of just
who stood with the lady, he gulped in pale awe and knelt.  "Your royal
Grace."

"Ath bless, you need not bow." Lysaer gave the man a grin and a silent,
conspirator's gesture to hurry along on his rounds.  Never one to flaunt
his gifted powers, this night the prince was jealous of his privacy.

"Ah," sighed the lampsman, recovering.  He returned a wink and hurried
off, trailing the oily reek of torch smoke around the bend by the
gatehouse.  Inside the wardroom, a guard lost his dice throw and cursed,
his epithets obscured as a wagon rumbled down the thoroughfare below.

Persistent despite interruptions, Talith said, "What word could move you
but the wish of your heart, to find out where Arithon's hiding?  Ath
knows, you've searched every cranny in Rathain."

The prince who had helped wrest the sun clear of mist was never an easy
man to nettle.  "If I'd unmasked that sorcerer's whereabouts, beloved,
your brother's troops would be marching, winter ice or not."

Unlike the fashion of the dandies, Lysaer wore no scent.  He required
none.  The closeness of him seemed to burn Talith through to the skin.

She needed to shed the clinging weight of her mantle, but dared not.

He touched her arm and gently turned her.  Even after five years, the
beauty of him stole her breath.  The flare of new lantern light fired
his gold hair, gilded perfect cheekbones ano sculpted chin and a bearing
instinctively royal.  As earnestly as the city gallants strove to
emulate such carriage, inherent majesty eluded them.  Then, forthright
as no man born Etarran would ever be, the prince cupped her face and
kissed her.

Passion flurried and tangled Talith's thinking.

He was excited by something.  His hands trembled and his eyes drank in
the sight of her with scarcely veiled anticipation.

Piqued enough by his secrecy to use looks that could bring men to their
knees, Talith drew back and struck him lightly on the jeweled sleeve of
his doublet.  "What have you learned?"

Lysaer laughed, a flash of perfect teeth.  "The best news.

Never mind the Master and his shadows." Eagerness let him speak of his
nemesis without his usual brooding frown.  "The Mayor of Korias has
finally set seal to my claim.  Avenor and its lands are to be mine." He
caught her waist and spun her, while around them, the flutter of night
insects battered hot glass in their fatal, blind swoop to the light. "We
can officially formalize our engagement.  That's if you can find heart
to marry a prince who has title, but no subjects, and fields gone to
briar and wilderness."

Talith looked into deep sapphire eyes and shivered.

"Everywhere you go you have subjects," she said.  "Not least that
decrepit old lampblack.  He'll brag to his grandchildren until he dies,
for your tricks.  Never say it was I who insisted on meaningless
propriety."

He reached, brushed back the loose curl at her temple, then began with
abandon to pluck out jeweled pins.  Neither of them noticed the dicers'
revealing silence in the gatehouse as a cataract of wheat gold hair
unreeled over his ringed knuckles.

Lysaer touched her brow with his lips.  "I could accept no estate as a
gift from Lord Diegan." His mouth trailed down her cheek, caressing.
"Not when I'm the one laying claim to his sole, magnificent sister." He
reached the left corner of her mouth.  As her lips parted to receive
him, he held back for one last rejoinder.  "I shall plunder this city,
nonetheless.  The ewe] of Avenor's restoration shall be your hand.  My
word as prince, your beauty and your children will become the crown
treasures of Tysan, and the ones most munificently cherished."

At long last he tasted her fully.

Down the battlement, the wide-eyed watch clapped and raised rough
cheers.  Lysaer inclined his head their way in courtly salute, then
turned his shoulder and rearranged tawny velvet to shield the face of
his beloved from their chaffing.

Talith melted into his embrace, every nerve in her stretched to match
the bent of his desire.  She could wish her heart was not cruelly held
captive; she could ache with the hard female knowledge this marriage to
come must eventually consume and destroy her.  Like the moths, she could
not steer away and save herself from the blinding.

The man in her arms was too much for her.  Foremost a prince, he was the
selfless instrument of others dependent on his protection.  His daunting
gifts already bound him to commitments far stronger than love.

The hands that tenderly cradled her, that had casually sparked flame to
a recalcitrant lamp, could as easily raise power with the virulence of
summer lightning.  Against the deceit of Arithon s'Ffalenn, and the
scars of a city that had survived a war fueled with the selfsame shadows
that had beaten back the Mistwraith, this man's defense had been
dedicated.

Exalted and imprisoned by shameless happiness, Lady Talith blinked back
rising tears.  What was Avenor to become, if rebuilt, but a broader base
of support for wider campaigns and more armies?  She understood with a
rage that drove her to hate the more fiercely.

Lysaer s'llessid would never have peace.  Nor would he become fully hers
until the day the Master of Shadow was found and run down, to be
finally, safely put to death.

Evasions

Taxed to aching exhaustion by another joint effort at scrying, the First
Enchantress to the Koriani Prime retorts in ragged exasperation: "We've
swept the lanes through five kingdoms, exhausted every clan haven in
Rathain, and set tag spells and trigger traps along trails and roads and
taverns for half a decade!  If the Master of Shadow had died, or fallen
off the face of Athera, we should have recovered some trace of him.  . .

Far to the east, in a city bounded by the waters of Eltair Bay, a
sweating, obsequious millwright stammers frightened excuses to an
official in black-and-gold robes emblazoned with the lion of mayoral
authority, "But of course, my word of honor, the errors in design shall
be corrected.  The crown molding for his lordship's lady wife shall be
redone and delivered to the city inside the next fortnight......

As autumn days shorten toward solstice and the stunted firs of high
altitude moan to the batter of cold winds, Dakar the Mad Prophet begs a
ride to the next town; and the charge laid on him the past spring, to
find and safeguard the most hunted man on the continent, remains
cheerfully ignored for the pleasures of beer and loose women....

Vagrant

Dakar the Mad Prophet opened his eyes to a view of the steamed-over
glass in some backwater tavern's Ddingy casement.  Rain spiked with ice
chapped against rondels filmed over with smoke soot.

The boards under his cheek were rudely cut, sticky with rancid layers of
grease and spilled ale.  His mouth tasted as if it had hosted a
convocation of snails.  Clued by the ache in his back that he had
probably slept where he sat, and familiar enough with his excesses to
know when the wrong move could hurt, he groaned.

No female rushed to soothe him; the slight noise instead spurred an
explosive pain in his head.  He stirred, eyes squeezed shut, and pressed
chilled hands to his temples.  His ankles were also ice-cold, result of
having parked nightlong in a draft with his feet still encased in wet
socks.  Both boots appeared to be missing.

The Mad Prophet moaned in self-pity, but softly.  With caution he
managed to straighten up.  His eyes refused to focus, a common problem;
he had been born nearsighted.  The point became moot, that Asandir's
tutelage had schooled him to correct the deficiency, as well as the
torment of bad hangovers.  To reverse any bodily ng, e need to so )er
and clear minded, neither one a state to be desired.  Dakar fumbled
through a succession of capacious pockets in quest of a coin to buy
beer.

Across the tavern's cramped common room, somebody screamed.

Drilled through the ears by the sound, Dakar shot bolt upright and
banged his knees against the trestle.  He aimed a bleary glare at a mule
drover who howled still, apparently over a winning throw at darts.

The tanner with the frizzled mustache stood up as his opponent doled out
the stake, while a half-toothless roisterer on the sidelines shouted,
"Where's your courage, man?  Try another game!"

Dakar winced and groped tenderly through another pocket.

As the barmaid whisked past bearing ale to the victor, he dredged up a
hopeful smile.

Blond and fast-tongued and inaccessible, she noticed his search through
his clothing.  "Your pockets are empty as your purse.  And no, you
weren't robbed while you slept."

The Mad Prophet absorbed this, lamenting that she moved too briskly for
him to land an effective pinch.  He stared owlishly as the flagon was
carried on to the victor.  Soon enough, the renewed thwacks of a fresh
game's thrown darts pierced through the complaints of the loser.

About then it dawned with awful force that his pockets contained only
lint.  He found himself destitute on the edge of winter in a
sheep-farming village in the Skyshiels.  Dakar's yell rivaled the mule
drover's, and the barmaid, incensed, hunted over and clanged her tray of
emptied crockery by his elbow.

While Dakar cringed back from the din, she ran on, "I said, nobody
robbed you.  What coppers you had barely paid for last night's ale."

To Dakar's softly bleared gaze, annoyance stole nothing from her charm.

"I see you don't remember?  That's odd.  You put away fifteen rounds."

Probably truth, Dakar reflected muddily; the state of his bladder was
killing him.  He braced chubby hands on the trestle, prepared to arise
and embark for the privy.

Warmed now to her tirade, the barmaid unkindly refused him passage. "The
only reason you weren't thrown out is because the landlord took pity for
the weather."

Since Dakar had yet to raise concern over what the day looked like
outdoors, he surveyed the room to fix his bearings.

The tavern was of typical backlands construction: two-storied, with the
ceiling beams that supported the second floor set low enough to bother a
tall man's posture.  The single lantern hissed and sputtered, fueled by
a reeking tallow dip that smoked far worse than the hearth.

In a dimness tinged luridly orange, darts flurried between support posts
into a shaggy straw target.  The mule drover cursed a wide throw, which
prompted a laugh from the tanner.  A gnarled old cooper in the corner
muttered slurred lines of doggerel, and sniggers erupted like the
feeding squeals of a hog's farrow.  Dakar, brimming and uncomfortable,
rolled long-suffering eyes.

When the bar wench failed to move, he succumbed to temptation and shoved
a hand down her bulging blouse.

No matter how unsteady he was on his feet, his fingers knew their way
about a woman.

The wench hissed in affront.  Her shove plonked the Mad Prophet backward
on the unpadded timber of the bench.  The air left his lungs in a
whistle.  Tediously, he started the effort of dragging himself upright
all over again.

"Slip on the ice," snapped the serving maid.  She snatched up her tray
to an indignant rattle of cheap crockery.  "The door will be barred when
you come back, and I hope your bollocks freeze solid."

Suffering too much for rejoinder, Dakar pried his gut from behind the
trestle and carved a staggering course toward the doorway.  As he
bypassed the party at the fireside, a dart flew to another barrage of
shouts.  The mule drover had hit another bull's-eye.

"Damn me to Sithaer," cried the tanner in beet-faced initation.

"You cheat like the Shadow Master himself!"

Dakar tacked sharply and caught himself a bump against the doorpost.
"Hardly," he volunteered to whoever was wise enough to listen.  "Yon
one's no man for harmless games.  His sort of tricks infuriate and kill
and make enemies."

But the Mad Prophet's slurred advice was preempted by warning from
another bystander.  "Don't speak that name here!  Would you draw him,
and the winds of ill luck?

Sorcerers hear their names spoken.  There's a burned patch, I've heard,
in Deshir, where the soldier's bones lie that will never again grow
green trees."

Dakar half turned to denounce this, but lost his chance as the latch let
go under his hand.  The door panel he leaned on suddenly swung wide and
spilled him outside in a stumble.  He yowled his injured shock as gray
slush soaked both feet to the ankles; no boots, he remembered belatedly.
The struggle to go back in and search for them entailed too much effort,
his hose being already sodden.

The innyard wore ice in sheets unsliced by the ruts of any cart wheels.
Unless there were east-running storms, travelers on the Eltair road were
unlikely to choose the byway through the foothills.

Beleaguered by gusts that cut straight off the summits of the Skyshiels
to rattle the signboard of the cooper's shack, stung by an unkindly fall
of sleet, Dakar yawed and slipped on his errand.  He collided with the
firewood hovel, a hitching rack, and a water trough, and cursed in dark
conclusion that mountain villages were an uncivilized place to suffer
the virulent effects of brewed hops.

Returned an interval just short of frostbite, with his points tangled
and his hair screwed to ringlets by the damp, he blundered back to the
tavern door.  He had sheltered in the privy until the cold came near to
killing him, and was ready primed with pleas in case the barmaid was
still piqued.  But the panel was not locked against him.

Intensely relieved, Dakar hauled his mushy socks into the taproom as
furtively as his shivering would allow.

Nobody noticed him.

The door had stayed unbarred in the bustle created by a new arrival, a
slender, aged gentleman even now being solicitously ushered to the
fireside.  The landlord had personally stirred from his parlor for this
service, and even the sour-tempered bar wench had brightened in her
haste to cheer the gloom with rushlights.

Probably some rich man stranded in the passes by a wrong turn in the
storm, Dakar supposed, until he noticed the dart players standing
stalled in mute awe with their coins abandoned on the table.

"Fiends plague me, I never thought to live as witness," the mule drover
said in a powerful whisper.  "The Masterbard himself, come to visit our
village?"

Dakar blinked in astonishment.  Halliron, here?

Beyond the smoke-grimed support beams, the newcomer tossed back his
sleet-crusted hood.  Shoulder-length hanks of white hair tumbled free,
caught with sparkles of unmelted ice.

Then, striking and clear as a signature, a mellowed voice addressed the
landlord.  "What a storm.  The passes are awful.

We have silver if you've got quarters for extra lodgers."

"Oh, no!" protested the innkeeper.  "That is, I have rooms.

All tidy.  Cleanest linen on the coast side of Highscarp.  But your coin
stays in your purse.  Every penny.  Your presence will draw customers
just for the news, even if you don't care to sing."

"Your commons won't go tuneless, for your kindness," Halliron promised.
Erect despite more than eight decades of age, he had a prominent,
aristocratic nose, and spaced front teeth that flashed in a smile.
"We'll need two beds.  My apprentice will be in as soon as he's stabled
the pony."

Crouched down to build up the fire, the landlord straightened up,
horrified.  "My boy, didn't he meet you in the yard?

Why, that laggard, no-goodThe door latch tripped amid the tirade.

Wind-driven sleet slashed in on the draft that breathed chill through
the rug from the fire as a figure muffled in wet woolens entered, moving
fast.  Dakar's parked bulk was sidestepped and a new voice cut in,
declaiming, "Your anger's misplaced.  Your groom is hard at work.

The harness was wet and needed oiling, and Halliron's pony hates boys.

My master would have told you, I usually tend him myself."

Impatient with his headache and his relapsed eyesight, Dakar squinted at
the latest arrival.  Layered as he was in tatty mufflers and a
cape-shouldered, nondescript mantle, there seemed more wool to him than
man.  A path cleared before him to the hearthside.  Caked ice cracked
from his clothing as he undid fastenings to disgorge a long, tapered
bundle laced in oilskins.  This he deposited carefully out of reach of
the fire's leaping heat.  A pair of wet gloves flew off after, to land
smartly on top of the settle.

Then movement at the corner of his vision caused the stranger swiftly to
spin.  "No," he said firmly.  "Let me."

And Halliron, who had reached to unfasten his cloak brooch, found his
wrists gently caught and restrained.

"You must spare those fingers," chided the Masterbard's apprentice.  All
unwittingly, he had managed to draw every eye in the room.

Too congenial to be embarrassed by public attention, the aged hard gave
a hampered shrug.  While younger hands worked to shed his weight of
sodden mantles, the innkeeper's spaniel-eyed sympathy raised his humor.
"Never get old.  It's a ridiculously uncomfortable process Ath Creator
should be made to find a cure for."

Remiss for his neglected hospitality, the innkeeper barked at his
barmaid.  "Mulled wine, girl, and hot soup.  And if the wife is still
dallying about the kitchen, tell her to cut the fresh bread."

While the wench hustled off, a thoughtful Dakar propped his swaying
balance against the nearest trestle.  As unabashed as the dart players,
he stared while the hard's apprentice left off attending his master and
turned to peel off his own heavy cloak.  The man revealed underneath
proved to be an indeterminate age in his twenties, compactly built to
the point of slenderness.  Nondescript ash brown hair fell lankly over
thin cheekbones, and his eyes were a muddy gray-hazel.

He was nobody Dakar knew.

While the visitors settled themselves, the landlord retired behind the
bar to industriously buff water spots off the few tankards he owned that
had glazing.  Over the flow of resumed conversation as the dart players
renewed their dropped game, the high-pitched exclamations of the tavern
mistress rang from the depths of a pantry closet, followed by a banging
of pots and hurried footsteps.  A drudge appeared with bristle brush and
bucket to scour the game from the boards, while Dakar took himself off
to an unobtrusive window nook, brightened by his upturn in prospects.
Penniless still, sober enough to be plagued by the grandam of all
headaches, he barely winced as other steps thumped the boards over his
head: some servant, dispatched no doubt to ensure the linens lived up to
the innkeeper's boasts.  The back door banged.

Outside, through the whirl of gray sleet, one of the innkeeper's
mop-headed children dashed to spread word that the Masterbard of Athera
had taken up residence for the night.

Soon enough, the stable boy came in with the hard's bundles of baggage.
The apprentice accepted the burden and was shown upstairs to their
lodgings, while the Masterbard sat by the settle to drink hot spiced
wine and share news with the early arrivals.  He had come down the cape
coast, not through Eastwall, he told the shepherd eager to know the
latest price of wool at the inland markets.  When somebody else inquired
if Minderl's trade galleys had safely put in for the winter, a silence
developed.  Halliron admitted he had bypassed the main road and shortcut
across the old, ruined trail that wound its way west from the cape.

"And no," he said quickly, before someone asked, "I saw no Paravian
ghosts.  Just old marker stones covered with lichen and acres of bracken
bent with rain.  The old routes are shunned for no reason under sky I
can see."

"Sorcerers use them," the mule drover muttered.  "And travelers see
strange lights on them at night."

Since the subject left folk uneasy, the serving wench was sent off in a
flounce of skirts to bring back a fresh round of tankards.  Dakar, who
held small aversion to the hauntings of ruins and unused roads, trained
crafty attention toward the bar.  In the interval while the girl made
rounds with her tray, and the self-important innkeeper held station in
the Masterbard's circle, the beer keg stood unattended.

Something Halliron said raised a round of knee-slapping laughter.

The Mad Prophet stood, and sidled, and in a move that bespoke long
practice, worked his bulk between the countertop and the broached
barrel.  His eyes turned innocently elsewhere, he trawled through the
suds in the washtub, hooked up a tankard, and positioned it upright for
filling.  No one looked his way, even through the ticklish task of
twisting the spigot behind his back.

Dakar darted a glance toward the fireside.  Aware to a hairsbreadth of
the interval needed for a large-sized tankard to brim over, and ready
with a vacuous smile, he rolled furtive eyes to make sure of the passage
to the kitchens.

A shadow loomed at his flank: the hard's hazel-eyed apprentice, arrived
without sound, and all but standing on top of him.  The Mad Prophet gave
a violent start that slopped foam in cold runners down his backside.

"I don't think we've been introduced," he assayed, caught up meanwhile
in a disastrous grab to stem the copious gush of the beer.

He fumbled the twist.  Brew rose hissing over the tankard brim and
pattered over the frayed heels of his socks.

The apprentice minstrel gave a wicked grin, leaned across, and deftly
turned off the spigot.  "I'm called Medlir.  And I suggest you're
mistaken.  I'm very certain I know you."

"From some bad line in a ballad, maybe," Dakar said, plaintively
concerned with rescuing a soap-slicked tankard from upset as he juggled
it from his backside to his front.  That small victory achieved, he
looked the hard's apprentice in the eye and began pouring beer down his
gullet.  When the tankard was three-quarters empty, it belatedly dawned
that the odd little man was going to keep quiet about his theft.

Dakar stopped swallowing to catch his breath.  His sodden hose squelched
in puddled beer as he pressed forward, intent now on making his escape.

Medlir sidestepped and blocked him.  "Don't be a fool." He tipped his
head a surreptitious fraction to show the barmaid, shoving toward them
in outraged determination.

The Mad Prophet's dismay darkened to a glare shared equally between the
girl and Halliron's obstructive apprentice.

"Ah, damn!" He prepared in martyred pain to scuttle his purloined brew
into the washtub.

"Not so fast." Medlir stopped the move with long, slender fingers and
flipped a silver with clanging accuracy into the bowl on the bar wench's
tray.  "Drink to my health," he invited Dakar.  "The change should pay
for the spill on the floor, and keep your throat wet through this
evening."

Startled speechless, the Mad Prophet let himself be ushered away and
seated with a squish of wet clothing at a trestle off to one side.

Oddly uneasy with the way his luck had turned, he sucked a long pull
from his tankard, licked foam from his mustache, and grimaced at the lye
taste of soap.

"Surely a ballad?" he ventured obliquely.

Medlir sat very still, his lank hair now dry and fallen in fronds
against his temples.  "Actually not.  I met your master."

A nasty, tingling chill started in Dakar's middle and ended in raised
hair on his neck.  "Asan dar?  Where?" He twisted on his bench, his eyes
edged white like oyster buttons.  Then, in stinging suspicion, he said,
"But of course!  You travel with Halliron.  The Masterbard's friendly
with the Fellowship."

"Should that trouble you?" Medlir signaled across a slat of shadow to
draw the attention of the barmaid.

"Oh no," Dakar said quickly.  The girl arrived, annoyed to a hip switch
of skirts that extended to grudging service in replenishing the
now-emptied tankard.  The Mad Prophet grinned at her, raised his drink
to Medlir, and added, "To your health."

The door banged open to admit yet another knot of villagers, men in
boots stained dark from the byte and cloaks that in dampness exuded an
aroma of wet sheep.  Matrons carried baskets of dyed fleece for carding,
or distaffs and spindles and tablet looms, or nubby old socks to be
darned.  The unmarried young came dressed to dance.  The village's
cramped little tavern quickly became crowded, and the laughter and chat
by the fireside mounted to a roar of jocular noise.

Aware that the trestles were filling, Medlir arose in clear-eyed regret.
"I'm needed.  Perhaps later, we can find time to talk."

Ever and always agreeable to the man who would keep him in beer, the Mad
Prophet grinned lopsidedly back.

"Here's to later," he said; and he drank.

Day progressed into evening.  Half-sotted, still in his stockings, and
wedged like a partridge between a swarthy little gem setter with a
squint, and a miner's fresh-faced wife, Dakar roared out a final, bawdy
chorus in excruciating, tuneless exuberance.  Overcome by wine and good
spirits, the woman beside him flung an arm around his shoulders and
kissed him.

Dakar, beatific, alternately sampled her lips and his tankard, by now
refilled enough times that it no longer tasted of washing suds.

The common room had grown from close to stifling, every available table
and chair crammed beyond sane capacity.

Planks sagged and swayed to the weight of packed bodies.

The floor bricks glistened with slopped spirits.  The air smelled of
sweaty wool and hung thick enough to cut, and the clientele, either
standing, sitting, or comatose in its halfunlaced linens, no longer
bothered with decorum.  Halliron had not played, but his apprentice was
skilled, and possessed of an energy that made the trestle planks bounce
to the beat of their stamping.

Which should not have surprised, Dakar thought, in a passing break
between reels.  Halliron had auditioned candidates for apprenticeship
lifelong.  This man he had chosen in his twilight years had been the
sole applicant to match his exacting standards.  Medlir applied himself
with abandon to the lyranthe, spinning for sheer pleasure the ditties,
the drinking songs, and the dances that an upland village starved for
entertainment in an ice storm could serve him in bottomless demand.

Midnight came and passed.  Two casks had been emptied to the dregs, with
a third one drained nearly dry.  The innkeeper, out of clemency, finally
elbowed to the fore and pressed a plate of stew on the musician.  Medlir
flashed him a fast smile, bent aside in consultation with his master,
and, at a nod from the old man, surrendered the lyranthe to Halliron.

The hum of appreciation dropped to sudden, awed silence .

Halliron Masterbard arose and regarded his audience in wry delight.  "By
Ath, you had better make some noise," he said, his voice pitched for the
sleepy child who slumped in a young matron's lap.  "Too much quiet, and
the folks near at hand will notice my knuckle joints crack."

Medlir arranged the stool and the Masterbard sat.  He adjusted the
lyranthe in blue-veined hands, and tested the strings for tuning.  The
pitch was perfect; Medlir knew his trade.  But the old man fussed at the
peg heads out of performer's habit.

The stillness swelled and deepened.  From the rear of the tavern, a
reveler called out, "Master singer!  Folk passing out of Etarra speak of
a battle fought in Deshir some years back against that sorcerer prince
who shifts shadows.  Do you know aught of that?"

Halliron's hand snapped off a run, distinct as a volley of arrows.

"Yes." He locked eyes for a second with Medlir, who set aside his meal
and said something contrite about forgetting to check on the pony.

To the rough-clad miner's request the Masterbard replied, "I can play
that ballad.  No one better.  For in fact, I was there."

A stir swept the room, loud with murmurs.  Folk resettled in their
seats, while Halliron damped his strings, bent his head, and veiled in a
fall of white hair, sat through a motionless moment.  He then made the
lyranthe his voice.  His fingers sighed across strings to spill a
falling minor arpeggio, from which melody emerged, close-woven and
transparent as a spell.  Notes climbed, and spiraled, and blended,
drawing the listeners into a fabric of shared tension.

"You won't feel too drunk when he reaches the ending of this one,"
Medlir said to Dakar as he passed on his way to the door.

The Mad Prophet was too besotted to respond beyond a grunt, but the gem
setter beside him ventured comment.  "How so?  Won't we be stirred by
the war's young hero, that blond-haired prince from the west?"

Medlir's lips thinned to tightness.  "What is any war but a massacre?"
Through the drawing beat of the secondary chords, he shrugged off
introspective impatience.  "Even without lyrics or story, Halliron's
melody by itself could wring tears from a statue."

The balding gem setter looked dubious; while Medlir melted into the
crowd to resume his course for the stables, Dakar tangled fingers in his
beard, fuddled by thought that the eyes of Halliron's apprentice should
be some other color than gray-hazel.

Then the spangled brilliance of the Masterbard's instrument was joined
by his beautiful voice, haunting and rich and clear-toned; in its thrall
every listener was transported to a morning in spring when the mists had
lifted over the marshes of the River Tai Quorin.  The odds in their
favor ten to one, a town garrison had marched on the forest-bred
clansmen who dared shelter Arithon s'Ffalenn, the renegade Prince of
Rathain also called Master of Shadow.

What law has sanctioned a warfor one life, when no bloodshed was sought
at Etarra?

Shadow fell in defense, for no man died by command of the prince to be
harrowed.

There came an uneasy shifting of feet, of creaking boards, and flurried
whispers that Halliron's art skillfully reined back short of outrage.
For this ballad's course commemorated no beloved savior in glittering
gold and sapphires, avenging with righteous bolts of light.

This spare, driving, tragic account held no bright hero at the ending,
but only men ruinously possessed by their hatreds to grasp the first
reason to strike down long-standing enemies.

Who shall weep, Lord Steiven, Earl of the North, for the refuge that
failed to spare your clan?

The prince in your care once begged to fare forth, then stayed; his
liegemen were fate-cursed to stand.

Notes struck the air now like mallet blows.  No one spoke.

None moved as the ballad unfolded, each stanza in pitiless stark cadence
unveiling fresh atrocity.  There were no heroics, but only desperation
in a Shadow Master's talents bent to confuse and detain; in unspeakable
measures undertaken in a defense without hope, when the dammed-back
waters of Tai Quorin were unleashed in reaving torrents to scythe down
Etarra's trapped garrison.  Nor did there follow any salve of vengeance,
but only bitter brutality, when a band of headhunter survivors lashed
back in a frustrated foray of slaughter against the encampment that
concealed the clan women and their children.  The spree of rapine
intended to draw their defenders into open ground for final reckoning
had seen abrupt and terrible ending.

Deshir's butcher and Prince Arithon's bane, Lysaer s'Ilessid loosed his
gifted light Sixty score innocents writhed in whiteflame for miscalled
mercy, blindjustice, and right.

Halliron's tones dipped and quavered, searing the pent air with images
of horror and tragedy.  His lyranthe in an unrelenting, lyrical sorrow
bespoke senseless waste and destruction.  In Deshir, by design of the
Mistwraith, the extraordinary talents of two princes had collided to
devastating losses, with nothing either proven or gained.

This day, under sky unthreatened by dark, the Etarran ranks march to
kindle strife.

Headhunters search the wide woodlands to mark onefugitive who owns no
wish to fight.

The last, slashing jangle of chords rang and dwindled in dissonance.

For a suspended moment, nothing stirred.  Only when Halliron arose and
made his bow, then bent to wrap his fine instrument did the shock of his
weaving fall away.  Listeners paralyzed in unabashed tears aroused from
stunned blankness and cracked into an explosion of talk.

"Ath's own mercy!  What a skill!  The lyranthe herself was made to
weep." A belated fall of silvers clanged across the boards by Halliron's
stool, mingled with a few muted bravos.

The Masterbard had not played for an encore; no one held doubts that
this ballad had been his last performance for the evening.  Though one
maudlin field hand shouted for the bar wench to bring out spirits, the
rest of the patrons arose and pressed, murmuring, toward the tavern
door.  As the room emptied, a woman's tones pierced through the crush.

"Had I not lost my jewels to those murdering clan scoundrels in Taemond,
I could almost feel sorry for the Deshans."

Dakar simply sat, eyes round as coins fixed morosely on the hands that
cradled a tankard of stale beer.  In time, some minutes after Halliron
had retired upstairs to his room, Medlir arrived, and sat down, and
unstoppered a cut glass decanter.

He produced two goblets of turned maple and poured out three fingers of
peach brandy, the rich smell piquantly sharp in the heated sea of used
air.

One the hard's apprentice pressed upon the Mad Prophet; the other, he
nursed for himself In companionable sympathy for a well-timed escape to
the stables, Dakar sighed, "These folk will go home tonight, and maybe
think.  By tomorrow, over sore heads, they'll say the Masterbard must
have exaggerated.  Deshir's barbarians are best off dead, they'll
insist, and shrug off what they heard entirely when the next Etarran
wool factor passes through.

What did your master hope to gain?"

Medlir swirled his brandy, his face without expression and his eyes
veiled under soot-thick, downtumed lashes.  "Why care?"

Dakar bestowed a shrill hiccup into a pudgy, cupped palm.

"You met my Fellowship master, so you said."

Strong brandy could make anybody patient.  Medlir waited.

Presently Dakar tucked up his stockinged feet and propped his bearded
chin on one fist.  "Well, you'll know Asandir's not the sort to be
lenient when he's crossed."

"No wonder you're driven to drink." Medlir hooked the flask from between
his knees and refilled Dakar's goblet.

"What have you done?"

"Nothing," Dakar said.  "That's my problem.  That bastard of a sorcerer,
the one the Deshans fought for?  I was sent off to find him, and save
him being mauled by his enemies.  But let me tell you, Halliron's ballad
aside, if you'd met him, you'd cheer Etarra's garrison."

Medlir took a sip from his goblet, leaned back against the trestle, and
closed his eyes.  "Why so?"

"He's crafty," Dakar said, fixed on the sway of the bar wench's hips as
she made rounds to darken the lanterns.

"Secretive.  He doesn't at all take to company that's apt to meddle in
his business."

"And what would his business be, do you think?" Medlir asked from the
darkness.

Dakar stuck out his lower lip and choked through a spray of fine
spirits.  "The Fatemaster himself only knows!  But Arithon's a
vindictive bastard with self-righteous aversions to liquor and ladies
and comforts.  I'd sooner take Dharkaron Avenger to be my drinking
companion."

"Ah," said Medlir.  He raised his lids and smiled, his eyes caught like
a cat's in the dying gleam from the fire.  "If you fear Asandir might
catch up with you, why not share the road with us?  We're headed into
the low country, then southward to Shand in easy stages." He arose,
stretched, then set the halfemptied flask companionably by Dakar's left
knee.

"Halliron's fingers get sore in the cold and lengthy hours of
performance tax his strength.  We seldom play long at one tavern.  As
our guest, you'd have free beer and most of the comforts you could
wish."

"Oh, bliss." Dakar laughed, drained his goblet, and licked the sweet
dregs from his mustache.  "I've just been kissed on the lips by lady
fortune." He hefted the decanter with slurred thanks, and savored the
brandy by himself until he passed out in a heap beneath the bench.

The Mad Prophet awakened thickheaded and tasting a tongue that felt
packed in old fur.  If lady fortune blessed him with her kiss the night
before, she had stomped on his head the next morning.  Peach brandy
dealt a hangover to rival the most horrible torments of Sithaer.

He could hardly have felt less miserable if somebody had sunk a pair of
fleecing shears up to their handles in both eyes.

His discomfort was not improved by the fact he sat wedged between
bundles of baggage in a jostling, low-slung conveyance that just now was
rolling downhill.  Small stones and gravel cracked and pinged under
iron-rimmed wheels that made as much noise as a gristmill.  Poked in the
ribs by something hard, buffeted to sorry chills by winds that smelled
of spruce and fresh ice, Dakar groaned.

"Oh, your acquisition is alive, I see," somebody observed with jilting
humor.  "Should we stop and offer him breakfast?

Or no.  Better ask first if he needs to piddle."

Dakar cracked open gummed eyes.  Granted a retreating view of a
switched-back road edged with evergreen, he groaned and rolled back his
head, only to be gouged in the nape by a flat griddle.  He was in the
Masterbard's pony cart, inveigled there by Medlir's sweet tongue and
imprudent consumption of alcohol.  Being stranded and broke in a
backcountry tavern in hindsight began to show merits.

The brandy had spun him wicked dreams.

Badgered through his sleep by a quick-tongued man with green eyes, black
hair, and the sharp-planed features of s'Ffalenn royalty, the Mad
Prophet wondered what prompted his mind to play tricks and prod him with
memories of the Shadow Master.

Then the cart jerked to a stop, which taxed his thought to a standstill.
A shadow fell over him.  Somebody not much larger than his nemesis in
build, but with intentions infinitely kinder said, "Do you have to pee?"

Dakar rubbed crust from his lashes.  Medlir leaned on the cart side and
watched him with eyes of muddied hazel.  His smile was sympathetic.  "I
don't imagine you feel hale.  Who'd have thought you the hero, to drain
that flask to the dregs?"

"If there'd been another just like it, I could've emptied that one as
well.  You would, too, if you knew the man I'm supposed to be
protecting." Dakar added with thick urgency, "Since you asked, the
bushes are a very good idea."

Medlir let down the tailgate, whose fastening pins and boards and
battered hinges combined to make a terrible racket.  Holding his head,
Dakar levered himself up and out from his nest amid the camp gear.  He
staggered into the roadway, not to relieve himself, but to find himself
a cranny in which to crouch and be sick.  He managed to reach the ditch
by the roadside.  There Medlir's thoughtful grip was all that kept him
from pitching head down into puddles scummed over in ice and stitched
with brambles.

That wretchedness finished, back upright on unsteady legs, Dakar
realized his feet were no longer unshod.  Somebody had kindly, if
carelessly, restored his mislaid boots.  The beer-damp stockings inside
had crumpled in a way sure to chafe him a wicked set of blisters.

Still, Dakar concluded as he hauled himself back to the wagon, he would
perish of a million wasting hangovers before he would bend to Asandir's
will concerning the Master of Shadow.  "If my life wasn't bothered by
sorcerers, maybe then I could stop drinking," he confided as he moled
his way under a carriage rug.

Halliron unbraced the brake and clucked to the shaggy buckskin between
the shafts.  The cart rattled south down the Eltair road, that ran like
a track of unreeled string, pinched between the black rock shores of the
bay and the snow-bearded range of the Skyshiels.  Cold winds scoured
with salt off the water parted the pony's rough coat.

Halliron drove with his hands layered in mittens, while Medlir walked,
his stride loose and long, and his mind preoccupied with recitation of
ballads, or some lilted line of melody to which his master would often
contribute comment.

A hard's apprenticeship involved rigorous study, as Dakar came to
appreciate in the hours while his hangover lifted.  Although Halliron
wore his age well, his years numbered eighty-seven.  The damp bothered
more than his hands, and although he seldom complained of his aches, he
was engaged in a desperate race to train his successor before vigor
failed him.

In an afternoon stop at a post station, where a room was engaged to
allow the old man to rest, Medlir admitted to Dakar that the trip to
Shand was for sentiment.  "The Masterbard was born at Innish on the
southcoast, where River Ippash meets the sea.  He would see his home
before he dies and have his ashes laid by the canals near his family.

"He has family?" Dakar said, surprised.  As many years as he had known
Halliron, he had never heard mention of roots.

"A daughter, I think." Medlir picked at a plate of sausage and bread,
too considerate for unrestrained gossip.  "The mother preferred not to
travel."

Thoroughly familiar with every road in the continent, Dakar weighed
distances and miles.  "You could make the southcoast by the summer."

"Well, yes." Medlir smiled.  "We hope to.  If every tavern in between
can stop flinging us blandishments to tarry."

The common room was nearly empty, the last relay of messengers from
Highscarp being mounted outside in the yard.  Flushed from the morning's
raw winds, or maybe the heat of the fire, Medlir appeared not to mind
the way Dakar surveyed him relentlessly: from slim, musician's fingers
that tapped whistle tunes on the edges of the crockery, to the unique
way he chose to style his shirts, with sleeves full and long to the
forearm, the cuffs tight laced over the wrists to end at the heel of his
hands.

In the hour of the Mistwraith's curse, Arithon had once fielded a strike
from a light bolt that left him welted from right palm to elbow, Dakar
remembered.  The unbidden association made him frown.  He stared all the
closer at Halliron's apprentice, who leaned back to stretch in the
sunlight that sloped through the casement.

His hands proved unscarred on both sides.

Dakar stifled an oath of self-disgust.  Paranoia was making him foolish.
The Master of Shadow was mage-trained.  To another eye schooled to know
talent, his aura should have blazed with unshed power against the
darkened paneling of this room.

By now sobered up enough to use Asandir's teaching, Dakar squinted and
peered, but detected nothing beyond the life force that should halo the
form of an ordinary man in prime health.  He relaxed and started to sit
back, then swore beneath his breath as he realized: such a detail could
be masked with shadow.

"What?" Medlir regarded him inquiringly.  "You seem bothered.

Are you certain you won't share my meal?"

The Mad Prophet looked into the man's guileless face,

then on impulse raised his hands and summoned power until his fingers
streamed trailers of mage-fire.

Gray eyes ticked with mustard flecks watched him back, neither dazzled
nor curious.  Not a lash or a lid quivered at Dakar's display; the
minstrel apprentice's pupils, widened in the dimness, failed to narrow
so much as a hairsbreadth.

"Forgive me," Medlir said.  "I wasn't thinking, of course.

You must still be feeling quite shaky." He pushed aside his plate,
leaned on his elbows, and peeled a flaked callus from a fingertip well
thickened from fret board and lyranthe string.

"We probably won't be moving on today, anyway.  Halliron slept poorly
last night.  Since he'll do best if he rests until tomorrow, I will play
in the common room to satisfy the landlord.  You can have a bed and hot
soup."

Now Dakar grinned slyly back.  "Actually, I'd rather hear you sing me
"The Ballad of the Cat and the Mead."

"Which version?" Medlir reached across the bench, lifted Halliron's
instrument, and began with enthusiasm to untie wrappings.  "There's the
one that's suitable for little children, and the one fit for nowhere but
the bawdy house, and a half dozen variations that fall in the range in
between."

"Oh, try the one that's obscene," Dakar said, his plump chin propped on
folded knuckles and his cheeks dimpled in contentment over his scraggle
of red beard.

"The one with eighty-eight verses and that awful repetitive chorus?"
Medlir tucked the lyranthe on his lap, made swift adjustment of the
strings, and caught Dakar's nod as he dashed off a run in E major to
test his tuning.  "Well," he said with a long-suffering patience that
Arithon s'Ffalenn had never owned, "about verse fifty, please remember,
you were the one who insisted."

Tribulation

When Halliron took a chill that left him unfit to travel for two days,
Medlir accepted the setback in stride.  In no haste himself to reach
Shand, he regarded his requisite nightly performance in the posthouse
taproom as time well spent in extra practice.

Confounded by his good nature, for the apprentice hard spent both
mornings and afternoons put to task under his master's critical ear,
Dakar warmed his feet by the hearth and his belly with flagons of ale.

He listened to Medlir's stock of drinking songs, ready to pounce if the
repertoire suffered repeats.

When the minstrel's inventiveness did not falter, he snatched sleep in
catnaps and escaped any dreams of vengeful sorcerers.

Their last night at the posthouse was made rowdy by a passing company of
mercenaries, ten men under a surly, sword-scarred captain who demolished
a platter of roast turkey in the best corner and smoked a pipe until the
air around his head blued to rug.  Still in their mail and rust-stained
tunics, his fighting company drank and gambled, enthusiastically abetted
by Dakar.

Between the jingle of gear and rattling dice, the bitten curses and
sarcastic slurs and rounds of big-bellied laughter, there came the
inevitable exchange of news.

"You come from northwards," the captain bellowed across the taproom to
Medlir.  He paused to pick gristle from his teeth.  "What've you heard?
We're bound that way into EtarTa.

Ship's Port was thick with rumor that the Prince of the West is hiring
on swords to build a retinue."

Medlir companionably shrugged, his hands in idle play upon his strings.
"Why should he?  The city council keeps him in comfort.  Last I heard,
he hadn't yet tired of the garrison commander's pretty sister."

The mercenary captain hunched forward like a bear.

Through the incisors clamped on toothpick and pipe stem, he said, "Well,
the recruiter sent out by the headhunters' league claimed Prince
Lysaer's been deeded Avenor's lands.  The grant came from the Mayor
Elect of Korias."

The silvery spill of notes changed character, became thinner, brighter,
more brittle.  "If so, the charter's hardly legal."

Nobody took umbrage; the comment was scarcely out of turn, Athera's
Masterbard being a keeper of traditions often consulted to clarify rules
of precedence.  As Halliron's probable successor, Medlir would be
trained for the day the supreme title might fall to him.

"Huh.  Swords, and not paper, will settle that issue." The mercenary
captain tossed away his toothpick and removed his pipe, which had
stubbornly smoldered and gone out.  "If there's pay being offered for a
winter position, we'd be fools not to go have a look.  At worst, we'd
weather till spring in Etarra, then sign with Pesquil's headhunters when
the new campaign season starts."

"Well, fortune to you," said Medlir, laughing softly.

"Avenor's a ruin.  One of the old sites that folk won't go near for the
hauntings.  There might be pay, if you fancy the chance to lay bricks."

"You've been there?" The mercenary captain stared at the minstrel
through the curling flame of his spill.

"No." Medlir launched off a sprightly jig, foot tapping, and a gleam to
his eyes at strange odds with his earlier humor.

"Ath grant I never live to see the place."

The following morning dawned to gray, misty rain and a clammy east wind
off the bay.  In the tidewater region of the coast, winter's hold
settled lightly.  The mild airs drawn north by ocean currents could brew
the occasional warm day.

Above Jaelot, the road lay softened to muck, through which cart wheels
sucked and splattered to the fitful grate of flint-bearing gravel.
Medlir strode at the buckskin's head to steady the bridle as the pony
skated and slid through league upon league of soupy footing.

Swathed in faded quilts on the driver's board, Halliron sat, looking
tired.

"I've no wish at all to stop in Jaelot," he insisted, unusually
quarrelsome.  "The town's a cesspit of bad taste.  I won't have you
wasting your talents there."

"Well, at least that's a first." Medlir steered the pony cart toward the
verge to allow a pack train bearing southern spices and silk bales to
make its labored way past.  Over the yips of the drovers, he said, "Not
long back, I recall your phrasing the matter quite the other way about,
that my fingering was too clumsy to inflict on a tinker, never mind any
public audience."

"Well, that was then." Halliron blotted his dripping nose and sniffed.
"You still have a great deal to learn."

Through the jingle of gear and harness, and the whip snaps as carters
forced their ox teams from drifting to scent the horses as they passed,
Medlir kept a weather eye on Dakar, perched like a woodchuck on a bony
chestnut gelding won over dice with the mercenaries.  More accustomed to
pack straps hung with cooking pots than to bearing saddle and rider, the
creature had walleyes and knock-knees and a tail stripped of hair like a
rat's.  The buckskin pony shied well clear.

More a shambling liability than a source of reliable transport, the
chestnut changed nature like a weathercock, friendly and fiendish by
turns.

Dakar's indifferent horsemanship was hampered further by short thighs
that stretched like a wrestler's to straddle his mount's width of
barrel.  Watching the pair careen through the pack beasts and drays,
reins flying loose and heels drumming to indignant slaps of the silly,
naked tail, Medfir was hardpressed not to chuckle.

Halliron looked in danger of swallowing his lips, until he resorted to
muffling his whoops behind quilts.

The last laden mule in the cavalcade passed, with the gelding spinning
left, and then right, in some doubt of its proper orientation.

Dakar thwacked its goose rump with his rein ends and hauled, to no good
effect.  The narrow, bony head on a great pole of ewe neck swiveled back
to stare where the leather had stung, its expression determinedly
flummoxed.

Medlir shut brimming eyes.

")Vbat's so funny?" howled Dakar.  He stabbed the gelding in its
cavernous ribs with his heels and flapped elbows until it ambled in a
sequence of steps by no means definable as a gait.

After one prolonged gasp against the buckskin's wet mane, Medlir tucked
his chin in his mufflers and stared without focus straight forward.
"Ah!" He made a manful effort, clutched his ribs, and said, "No one's
laughing.  Halliron has a terrible cough.  I could be suffering the
same."

Dakar's reply unraveled into oaths as the gelding's racketing shy
sallied the width of the roadway.  A stiff-featured Medlir applied
himself to guiding the pony cart from its parking place amid the
burdock, while Halliron wheezed and wiped rheumy eyes and murmured,
"Ath, now my stomach is aching."

Their journey resumed under mists spun to gold under late-breaking
sunlight.  Flocking gulls rose and wheeled in the sea breeze off the
tide flats.  To the right, at each turn in the road, steep-sided valleys
of evergreens yawned into gorges, some threaded with falls that spilled
like frayed floss, and others with deep, narrow lakes lying polished as
moonstones.

The country was beautiful, but wild, the foothills scarred by old
rockfalls and too steeply pitched to grow fodder.  Under sky like lucid
aquamarine, the storms seemed remote, that could lash without warning
off the bay and hurl salt spume against the mountains.  The trees and
the moss bore the scars in broken branches, and rock abutments burned
clean of lichens.  An equinox gale could wreck a steading in a night,
with the buildings rebuilt again out of the splintered rubble, or ships'
planks, washed in by the tide.  Hostels and posthouses were widely
spaced and nowhere inside a day's ride of a walled town.

When the sun swung behind the peaks and purpled shadow hardened the road
in the grip of early cold, Halliron began to shiver with chills.  His
nose was buffed red, and his eyes shone too bright, and his thickest
quilts lent no comfort.

Medlir said nothing, but watched his master in concern through the pause
as they watered the horses.

Embarrassed at last by his own misery, Halliron capitulated.  "Oh, all
right.  We'll shelter in Jaelot, to spare you the bother of tending an
invalid in the open."

"What bother?" Medlir redistributed the mud-flecked blankets over the
Masterbard's knees.  "If these townsmen have execrable taste, I could
always try those ballads we heard in the sailor's dives at Werpoint."

Halliron returned a choked cough, whatever he had in mind undone by
Dakar's antics as he fell off the same stone twice trying to remount the
brown gelding.

"You'll break your neck getting on that way," Medlir

called, his fingers busy taking the pony's surcingle up a hole.

Puffing, beet faced, in no mood for criticism from a man who understood
nothing about the trials of being fat, Dakar clambered back up the rock.
"Since when do you know so much about horses?"

"Maybe my parents were drifters," Medlir said.

"Hah!" The Mad Prophet achieved precarious balance on one foot.

"Foxes, more like.  You say crafty little about yourself."

A shallow smile touched Medlir's features, accompanied by ingenuously
raised brows.  "Foxes bite."

"Well, I know I'm prying." Dakar poised himself, leaped, and grabbed,
while his steed staggered into a clattering half passe.  The Mad Prophet
landed astride through a miracle, both fists balled in mane hanks to
arrest a pitch over the saddle's far side.  As his mount was coerced to
cease milling, he added, "Faery-toes makes better company."

"Faery-toes?  That?" Halliron poked his nose out of his blankets and
fixed dubious eyes on hooves that were round and fluted as meat
platters.

"Well of course," said Dakar, offended.  "The name suits him fine, don't
you think?"

The party moved on, into shadows that lengthened to gray dusk, swallowed
early by fog off the bay.

Darkness had fallen as they rounded the bend before Jaelot's wide gates.
Situated on a beak head of land that jutted out into the bay, the town
was walled with black rock.

Torches in iron baskets burned from the keeps, which were octagonal,
with slate roofs buttressed by gargoyles that loomed and leered and
lolled obscene tongues over gate turrets chiseled from white quartz.
These were emblazoned with rampant lions, each bearing a snake in its
mouth.

"Ugly." By now querulously tired, Halliron regarded the carvings in
distaste while the tarnished strips of tin hung as ward talismans
jangled and clinked in thin dissonance.  "The Paravian gates torn down
from this site were said to be fashioned of agate, and counterweighted
to swing at a hand's touch."

"This was a Second Age fortress?" Medlir asked.  "How surprising to find
it inhabited." He soothed the cross-grained buckskin to a halt as the
gate watch called down gruff challenge.  He had to answer without
hearing his master's return comment.  "We're wayfarers, two minstrels
and a companion.

We shouldn't be stopping here at all, except the old man needs shelter."

"Pull aside then." The watch captain lounged in his niche, his breath
plumed in flame light.  "The post courier's overdue from Tharidor, and
the gates'll be opened when he's in."

"There's courtesy for you," Halliron said between sneezes.

"I knew we should have made camp.  If the courier hasn't come to grief
in the dark, we'll have our choice of three inns, all of them
cavernously dim and dirty, and not a one of them honest."

"Which has the best ale?" asked Dakar.

"Who knows?" The Masterbard sighed.  "In Jaelot, they cut

the brew with water."

By chance, their wait became shortened.  While Medlir fussed over his
master, and Dakar communed with his mount, a barrel-chested wagonmaster
in sheepskins rolled in, swearing at his team and unhappy to be missing
his dinner.  He brandished his whip at the gatehouse, while his sweated
horses sidled and stamped and struck blue-edged sparks from the
pavement.  "It's that thrice-cursed shipment from the mill I'm carrying,
the one with the mayor's seal on it."

The gates were opened very swiftly indeed, while something clicked in
the brain of Dakar's camel-necked chestnut that said stable, and
comfort, and oats.  It pinned back rabbity ears and lunged to harry the
wagon team through.

The lead pair were blinkered.  The first the near one knew of
Faery-toes's attentions was a nip of yellow teeth at its flanks.

It veered to a bounding grind of singletrees, while Dakar, howling
mightily, sawed nerveless mouth with both reins and fell off.  He had
the aplomb to roll clear, while the carter whipcracked and cursed.

The lash caught the gelding on the nose.  He windmilled sideways on
splayed feet, rattail flailing.  Eyes rolled white, his nostrils
expanded into a snort that blew steam, he half reared and reversed to a
thunderous clatter of hooves.  His gaunt rump jammed the wheelhorse in
the shoulder.  It staggered, squealing.  The rest of the team careened
sideways and jackknifed the dray between the gate turrets, with
Faery-toes folded amidst them like a misguided log in a torrent.

Oaths became lost in the crack of shod hooves as a brief show of
stamping coalesced to a five-horse brawl amid the traces.

The carter clung to his swaying box like a man on a half-foundered
vessel, plying his lash and a poisonous stream of threats upon his
scuffling team to no avail.  Leather parted; terrets burst from collar
stuffing to a scream of splintering wood.  Unnoticed atop the swaying
wagon bed, lashings creaked and shifted loose.  A springy bundle of
cypress teetered, then tipped like an unfolding set of shears and
swan-dived onto the pavement.

The splintering crack of impact raised stinging reverberations under the
confines of the gate arch.  The wheel pair parted sideways in a violent
shy and the carter threw down his whip, crying murder, as eighty board
feet of rare molding custom carved to please the mayor's wife became
milled to pale slivers beneath his wheels.

Through a small, stunned second, the torches dimmed in a swooping gust
of wind.  Under their demonic flicker, the carter turned red and tore at
his sideburns with his fists.  The draft team milled, netted in
slackened traces and flighty as shoaling fish, while the misshapen cause
of the disaster stood nonplussed, conversing in great sucking gusts with
the wheelhorses.

"Curse of a fiend!" The carter unfurled from his box in a frog leap that
landed him beside the russet brown bundle that was Dakar.

"What in Sithaer will you do about that misbegotten insult of a horse?"

"Misbegotten?  Insult?" Dakar inspected the burly antagonist planted
over him, fists cocked for mayhem, and his hair screwed free of an oiled
felt cap like tufts of snarled wool on a shuttlecock.  "You're pretty
ugly yourself, you know."

Through the half breath while the carter was stunned speechless, the Mad
Prophet pushed past, retrieved trailing reins, and hauled Faery-toes out
backwards from the tangle of shafts and shredded harness.

While Halliron and Medlir watched amazed, a safe distance removed in the
pony cart, Dakar came back, towing horse.  He poised before the irate
carter, oblivious to the pounding from the adjacent gatehouses, as the
watch on duty pelted downstairs in armed readiness to forestall an
altercation.

"I suggest you forgive the old boy." When the nag butted a congenial
head against the carter's shoulder and knocked him back a step, Dakar
added, "How could you not?  He likes you."

The carter purpled and swung.  The suet-round face of his target
vanished as Dakar ducked and fled beneath the saddle girth.  Bunched
knuckles smacked against the barrel-sprung ribs of the horse, who
responded from both ends with a grunt and a fart like an explosion.

"Oh my," cried Dakar, stifling a chortle.  "Your wife's nose must look
like a pudding if that's your reaction to her kisses."

The carter dived under the gelding's neck in a fit of killing fury while
the horse, ears flat, parted gaunt jowls and snapped.

Teeth closed over greasy fleece, and the breeches of the carter burst a
critical seam.  The Mad Prophet sidestepped around the chestnut's
churning quarters, blithe in rebuke as he passed, "Leave him alone,
Faery-toes.  Your affection's a wee bit misplaced.  You know this fellow
you're undressing's about as nice as a hawk-pecked snake."

Arrived in a rush that packed the postern, Jaelot's guardsmen cracked
into laughter.

Faery-toes switched its nubby tail just as the carter began his rush.
Caught a dizzying lash in the face, and howling falsetto invective, the
man lunged with full intent to mangle just as the horse lost its poise.
Its knurled spine humped.

Enormous hooves battered for purchase as its hind end heaved up and
cleared the ground.  One hind leg hooked out in a cow kick that
demolished the front wheel of the dray.  A descant of splintering spokes
sounded above the crash as the hub hammered into the cobbles.

Set dancing in nervy refrain, the unattended team hit their collars. The
crippled vehicle dragged in their wake with a blistering screech that
harrowed up six yards of paving.  Some fast-witted bystander caught
their bits and muscled them to a standstill, all unnoticed in the
ongoing tumult beneath the archway.

The carter expended one last volley of monosyllabic epithets.

Fairy-toes, carried away in a careening sidle, lost the last of his
questionable footing.  He dropped belly down in a splay-legged heap to a
whistling grunt of astonishment.

Felled by peals of mirth, Dakar buckled to his knees not far off.

With both eyes squeezed shut and leaking helpless tears, he failed to
notice when the officer of the watch stopped sniggering.  Jaelot's
men-at-arms snapped to in dutiful propriety as a four-in-hand hitch and
black-lacquered coach thundered up the thoroughfare.  Gilded,
lion-blazoned doors sparked in the torchlight as the vehicle slowed and
pulled up before the obstruction that clogged the city gate.

Stiffened as pokers, watch gate captain's men saluted as boy grooms in
velvet livery leaped down to catch the bridles of the lead horses, which
were also black, and matched like images in mirror glass with smart
blazes and white stockings.

A footman dispatched from the driver's box strolled over to the carter,
even yet hopping back to escape the gelding's thrashing first effort to
rise.

"There is some difficulty?" the footman opened coldly.

The gold braid and blazon of the authority he represented glittered
through the smoke of the torches.

Speechless, the carter stabbed a skinned finger at the gelding, which
gathered its fantastic assemblage of joints and surged, snorting, to its
feet.

A woman's voice called from the carriage.  The footman nodded deference,
then turned his chin stiffly over his pearl-buttoned collar and
inquired, "May I ask, in the name of my Lord Mayor, what you have done
with the new crown molding?"

The carter straightened his ripped britches, sweat sliding slick down
his temples.  "I?  Vengeance of Dharkaron, that horse!"

Faery-toes curled an insouciant lip and shook like a dog amid a tempest
of flapping reins and stirrups.  The footman's regard turned skeptical
before he swung back to the carter.  "I doubt if that bundle of
incompetence is able to move four feet in consecutive order."

"Well, that says it all in a nutshell," cried the carter in
exasperation.

"Who owns the beast?" The glance of the mayor's footman ranged loftily
over the bystanders, flickered past the pony cart and its pair of frozen
figures, then lowered inexorably to the last, still wheezing on the
pavement.  "Who?"

Dakar's disordered features snapped sober.  "I just donated him to the
city almshouse."

The carriage door opened and slammed.  The footman gave way before a
robed secretary with overbred hands.  Mincing like a rooster with
hackles raised for combat, the official bore down upon the unkempt fat
man who, like his horse, belatedly scrambled upright.

"You will be chained and held in custody until tomorrow, when this
matter will be settled in the court hall of Jaelot to my Lord Mayor's
satisfaction.  I suggest until then that somebody competent puts that
creature away.  At least have it removed from the streets before it can
cause further mischief." To the carter, he added without sympathy, "The
guard will help clear your debris.  If you wish to claim settlement for
damages, attend the hearing and make your plea to the mayor's justice."

While the watch captain's men closed in armed force to take the Mad
Prophet into custody, and the retinue of Jaelot's mayor retired back to
the carriage and whisked off on gilded wheels, Halliron pressed mittened
hands over streaming eyes and groaned through the muffling fur.  "Ath, I
knew, I just knew!  We should never have come into Jaelot."

Trial

His lordship the Mayor of Jaelot was not disposed to rise early.

In his courts of law, appointments by hour were unheard of; the city
alderman sent his list daily to the watch captain, who detailed
men-at-arms to the dungeons.  The accused were fetched out without
breakfast and escorted to the annex chamber, a windowless, black-paneled
vault with groined ceilings built into a cellar beneath the council
hall.

There, cuffed in manacles that made it difficult to scratch accumulated
fleabites, Dakar the Mad Prophet was obliged to wait with two other men
and a woman, whose crimes ranged from public brawling to theft and
bloody murder.

Through the course of an uncomfortable night, he had cursed his careless
learning.  A brass lock or latch, he could have opened with spells, and
had, many times, in egress from the bedchambers of willing wives whose
husbands had come home untimely.  But the fetters and bars of Jaelot's
dungeons were never fashioned for decor in castings of soft, refined
metals.

Chilled yet from lying huddled on dank straw, Dakar ground his teeth
over dilatory habits, that had let him drift through his centuries of
Fellowship apprenticeship without fully mastering the contrary
properties of alloys bearing cold iron.

The dilemma bequeathed him by Faery-toes had long since ceased to seem
funny.

In the beleaguered light shed by one candle, the mayor's dais and desk
loomed over the prisoner's dock, a marble edifice of gothic carvings and
fluted supports and grotesque, hunchbacked caryatids, whose suffering
poses were painted in shadows like scenes from Sithaer's bleak pits. The
air smelled of wax, of parchment, of the dried citrus peel and Shandian
spices used to overpower the stink of condemned men kept chained in
straw acidified with rat urine.  Behind the prisoners' enclosure, board
benches lined the rear wall.  On these gathered complainants in clean
shirts and scrubbed boots; also the wives, the relations, and the
long-suffering friends of the day's accused, to wait in fidgeting
silence.  The curious came too, but unobtrusively.  In Jaelot, a
loquacious jailer told Dakar, a beggar who had taken illicit shelter in
the mayor's courtroom had lost all his fingers as punishment.

In this chamber, a merciful sentence might be a swift beheading; a
severe one, a dismemberment, or breaking on the wheel before burning.

Dakar shifted from foot to foot in an attempt to ease the drag of the
chain; the unending bite of fetters whose steel, to one of mage-trained
sensitivity, scoured the awareness with the tang of past misery and old
blood.

Self-contained in his distress, he noted little beyond the glowering
arrival of the millwork's wronged carter; still, the benches were not
empty of friends.

Halliron Masterbard had come, dressed in all the splendor of his rank.
From the depths of the gloom, his neat cloak and slashed doublet of
black watered silk lined in saffron shimmered like flame with caught
light.  Topaz studs and gold ribbon sparked and flashed in wry and
stabbing satire, perhaps, that the mayor's state colors were the same.

Stationed at his side, Medlir wore brown broadcloth, a modest brooch at
his collar.

The carillons that signaled the hour boomed faintly down from the bell
tower.  Aching and initable, Dakar endured the arrival of Jaclot's lord
mayor with a dawning sense of the absurd.  He had seen a high king's
ceremonial open with less POMP.

The hall doors boomed back, held by bowing servants in sable livery.
Halberdiers in black armor marched in double files, followed by page
boys who unreeled gold-edged carpet, emblazoned each yard with Jaelot's
snake-bearing lions.  A girl in a hooped farthingale fringed with
jingling bullion chains strewed hothouse roses from a basket.  She was
trailed by two braces of secretaries in wool robes cuffed with marten,
then their serving boys, bearing satchels and writing papers furled in
yellow ribbon.  Next, the judiciary, robed in black velvet and white
ermine, and wearing a mitered felt cap edged with moth-eaten braid, the
city alderman, burdened down like a molting crane in layers of brocade
and ruffled cuffs.  After these, soft as pudding, the city's vaunted
mayor, who swayed at each step, his voluminous robe billowed off his
padded shoulders like sails let free of their sheet lines.

Forced to duck as a rose struck his face, Dakar stared in amazement as
the processional ended.  Like trained bears, the players arrayed
themselves on the dais.  There should have been music, he thought, as
the flower maid emptied her basket in the precinct of the mayor's chair,
and the boys unpacked the scribes' satchels as if laying a cloth for a
picnic.  The halberdiers dressed weapons with a clang of gold gauntlets,
and the tubby mayor berthed himself in his overstuffed one of state.

Beaked as a vulture beneath his tatty hat, the judiciary rattled a
triangle and pronounced, "The Jaelot City Court is in session."

The alderman unrolled a list on parchment and called out Dakar's name.

"Well, thank Ath, we're first," the Mad Prophet cracked in dry relief.

Two unamused men-at-arms who did not wear costly gauntlets caught him
under the armpits, hauled him forward, and threw him facedown before the
dais.

There he was held by two booted feet pressed solidly into his shoulder
blades.  The alderman cleared his throat, pushed a spidery set of
spectacles up his nose, and recited the list of offenses: disruption of
the city peace; obstruction of the public thoroughfare; willful damage
to the mayor's property; interference with commerce; negligent handling
of horseflesh; and lastly, insolence to officers while in custody.

"What do you plead?" The judiciary peered over his spiked and scented
beard at the accused crushed prone on the floor.

His jaw jammed against cold granite, Dakar tugged a breath into
compressed lungs and swore.

"Impertinence while in court," the alderman droned.  Like synchronized
vultures, four nearsighted secretaries dipped quills and scribbled the
addition to their documents.

"Fiends and Dharkaron's vengeance!" Dakar pealed.

"What willful damage?  You saw my horse.  Did Faery-toes look at all
like the sort to attack passing drays out of hand?

Ath's own patience, you'd kick something yourself, if some lout hauled
off and rammed his fist in your ribs!"

on the benches, the carter gritted sturdy teeth and restrained himself
from springing to his feet to cry protest.

Caught up in its rut of due process, the court continued with the
prisoner.

"Insolence to superiors," said the alderman, displaying an unfortunate
lisp, while the pens of the secretaries twitched and scratched.

The mayor stifled a yawn and eased the silver-tipped laces on his
waistcoat.  "I never saw your beast." In tones of boredom marred by
faint shortness of breath, he admitted, "My wife was the one out in the
carriage.  The molding was cut to satisfy her whim.  Its destruction has
left her indisposed.  As the horse's owner, you are responsible for its
unprovoked fit.

Since the question of innocence does not arise on that charge, your
punishment must recompense the lady's losses."

The carter could no longer contain himself.  "Does my team and dray
count for nothing?  Two of my horses are lame, and wheelwright's
services are dear!"

"Be still." The judiciary looked up from adjusting his rings.

"City justice must be satisfied before any appeal for compensation can
be opened."

Hot and fuming in his town clothes, the carter sat down.

Halliron looked deadpan, a sign of irritation; Medlir's bemusement
masked disgust.

Pressed still to the floor, his face twisted sideways and his hair
tucked up like a snarl of wind-twisted bracken, Dakar rolled his eyes at
the crick that plagued his neck.  Heartily tired of embracing clammy
stone, he followed the proceedings with difficulty.

An exchange between the city alderman and the prim-faced judiciary again
roused the pens of the secretaries.

Nibs scratched across parchment like the scurry of roaches, and a page
boy jangled the triangle to some unseen administrative cue.

"Guilty on all counts." The judiciary produced a flannel handkerchief
and honked to clear his nose.  Then he adjusted his hat and tipped his
undershot chin toward the alderman.

"A fine and six months on the labor gang," that official pronounced,
then followed with a sum a prince would be beggared to pay.

"You already confiscated my saddlebags!" Dakar yelped in outrage.

"You'll know I don't carry any coin."

"You're not lacking friends." The mayor swiveled porcine eyes toward the
elegant figure of the Masterbard.  "They may balance the debt for you,
should they be so inclined.  It is to them you must now beg for
clemency."

"They have nothing to do with me," Dakar insisted between frog flop
attempts to wiggle free.

The lord mayor raised his eyebrows.  "Then what brings them to Jaelot?"

"You speak of Halliron Masterbard and his apprentice.  Dakar stopped
struggling, appalled to unwonted seriousness.

"They ask nothing more than license to practice their art.

There's not a town anywhere that wouldn't welcome their presence."

The alderman's fishy eyes completed their inventory of glittering silk
and cut topaz.  "Is this true?"

Halliron swept to his feet.  In a voice buffed rough by his cough, but
modulated to lyrical acidity, he said, "What's true is that no man alive
owns the sum Jaelot's court of justice sees fit to demand." The barbed
threat of satire behind his inflection rang without echo into silence.

The Lord Mayor fluttered a hand in capitulation.  "Well then.

We'll mediate the sentence, naturally.  Since my lady was the party
offended, it's fitting that she gain compensation.  The spoiled molding
cost four hundred royals, true silver.  The carter's list of damages
will be compiled and paid off to the penny.  The city's fine I will
waive on this condition: that Halliron Masterbard entertain my lady's
guests at the feast upon midsummer solstice." A glistening, toothy smile
parted the mayor's lips.  "License to practice your art, if you will,
before this city's finest.  If your playing matches your reputation, no
doubt, folk of pedigree will shower their gold at your feet.  You might
even earn a tidy profit."

Medlir's lightning surge to arise was stopped by a feather touch from
the hard.

From the floor, Dakar gagged in strangled outrage.  "That's rank
insult."

The secretaries' nibs scraped through a poisonous silence.

Halliron, white hair thrown back, light eyes fixed on a point midway
between ceiling groins and dais, said nothing.

Medlir's poised stillness showed tension more appropriate to a swordsman
than a singer, while the halberdiers, who were not one whit ceremonial,
shifted their balance to readiness.

Strangely desperate, Dakar said, "Don't answer.  I don't require it."

"What bargains you strike between yourselves are entirely your personal
affair." The mayor parked his hands amid the foamy lace of his
waistcoat.  "The city's terms will stand: either pay the fine or render
performance, with enforced restriction to remain inside city walls until
the terms of the sentence are met.  You have seven days in which to give
your decision."

At the edge of the candle's pooled light, the judiciary's smirk flashed
like the teeth of a feeding shark.  "Set the record." His attention
brushed Halliron, then bent dismissively to share his amusement with the
alderman.  "It's a convenient arrangement, since the offender's stint at
forced labor will expire near the same date." To the hard, he added
gently, "Of course you could decline the option.

Your companion would then languish in prison till he dies, or his debt
to Jaelot is paid."

On the dais, a striker flared in a scribe's veined hand.  The scent of
heated wax curled through the smell of roses, the tang of stale citrus
and the unwashed heat of despair that clung to the prisoners uneasily
awaiting their turn at trial.  The secretaries raised sharp knives and
busily resharpened their pens, while the alderman brandished the city
seal and impressed Jaelot's lions on four documents.

"Case dismissed," intoned the judiciary The carter pressed forward to
cite his damages, while before the marble dais, the men-at-arms hoisted
Dakar upright by his manacles and towed his bulk from the hall.

Stumbling and wordless, the insouciance of yesterday bled out of him, he
never once turned his head in appeal, while Halliron and Medlir made
swift departure through the crooked stair that led upward into the
daylight.

Later, in a dingy garret room where winter winds tore at loose slates,
and drafts flowed and creaked through the gaps in warped shutters,
Medlir sat over a mug of spiced wine, his flattened hands tapping a jig
tune on the chipped and dingy porcelain.  "Will you let him off'?"

"Was there ever any question?" Four hundred and sixty royals of their
store of coin had already been dispatched to the lumber mill and the
wheelwright's coffers.  Halliron sat on the pallet opposite, swathed in
quilts and coach rugs taken from the pony cart's baggage.

The inn's bedclothes had been banished into care of the laundress, if
this establishment maintained any servant to fill the post.

Scraping an idle fingernail through the grime on the bed boards,
Halliron was inclined to think not.  "Your obligation to Asandir must
take precedence."

Medlir jerked his chin up.  "It does not." The fluttering tallow dip
underlit his face, lending baleful emphasis to his anger.  "The
Fellowship Sorcerers would agree.  Your business is in Shand, not in
mending the Mad Prophet's excesses."

Halliron tisked gently.  His slow grin unveiled gapped front teeth.  "I
can teach you as readily here as in the south.  Shand can wait."

"If six months in Jaelot doesn't contrive to ruin us both."

Medlir's veneer of irritation dissolved as he arose to add billets to
the ill-vented hearth, burned down to a smoldering, sullen bed of coals
that belched smoke at each breath of wind.

As the new wood caught, he sighed.  "All of this concerns my life before
I accepted your apprenticeship.  I'd rather you weren't burdened."

"You're more to me, now, than an apprentice." Fresh flame curled up,
laying a bronze patina over the spider tracks of wrinkles that scored
the hard's skin, and gilding age-chiseled face bones still windburned
from the open road.  "And anyway, you're the one most inconvenienced.  I
shouldn't care to stand in your shoes when the Mad Prophet discovers
you've deceived him."

His back turned, Medlir shrugged.  "Forced labor won't give him much
chance."

Eyes clear as sky studied the tension in the younger man's shoulders,
noted the absorbed, almost desperate focus he bent upon the slate apron
beneath his boots.  As if his eyes could see into soot-dusted, grainy
layers of stone, and perceive the dance and spark of primal energies
that laced its matter into being; as indeed, Halliron knew, they once
had, before raw abuse of such powers in Deshir's defense had raised
barriers.

A mage once trained to know the mysteries was unlikely to forget the
awesome, wild winds of destruction a binding of unmaking could unleash.

Backlash and scarring had rendered the spirit blind and mute.

In a gentleness roughened by the congestion in his chest, the hard said,
"Be patient.  The sight will come back to you.

Nature offers more than one path to perception, and your musical gifts
may grow to compensate."

The one who named himself Medlir raised hands to cover his face, the
beaded ends of unstrung laces swinging and tapping against his knees. He
crouched so for a long moment, then gathered himself, stood up, and
turned toward his master an expression of unspeakable pain.

"I've felt the power stir in snatches, an echo here and there between
notes." His frustration revealed his difficulty, that he could not
accustom himself to the change.  The energies he had studied as pure
spirit light felt indecipherably strange, transliterated to vibration
and sound.

Halliron's smile held bedrock firmness.  "Well, work at it.

Six months in Jaelot will certainly leave you the time."

The Masterbard's apprentice returned a clipped sigh and bent to unwrap
the lyranthe.  He extended a foot in a swordsman's move and hooked the
chamber's one stool.  Its broken brace scarcely troubled his poise as he
perched on the rat-chewed rush seat.

"Give me "The Ballad of Taerlin Waters," Halliron said.

"Mind you don't slur the runs in the third bar, or the grace

notes that lead into the chorus."

Medlir flicked back the untied gusset of his cuffs to free

his fingers for tuning; here, where disguise was not needed,

firelight caught raw and red on a scar that grooved the flesh in a half
twist from right palm to elbow.  The hair that fronded his cheek as he
bent to the sweet ring of strings was no longer the bland, ash brown
Dakar knew, but glossy black as chipped coal.

His eyes, when he finally raised them to sing, were as penetrating a
green as the royal ancestor whose natural looks he had inherited.

Linlks

Before the spring winds thaw the Mathorn Pass, Lysaer s'llessid, Prince
of the West, rides out at the head of a cavalcade bound for ruined
Avenor, his fair betrothed at his side; with him, under heavy escort of
Etarran men-at-arms and ex-mercenaries sworn to real service, travel a
hundred wains bearing funds for his city's restoration, and tapestries,
chests, fine furnishings, and the jewels apportioned as his lady's
dowry....

The journey of the royal retinue is marked by covert bands of scouts who
relay word through messengers to the borders of Rathain and beyond;
until news of Lysaer's movement is shared by clansmen who muster in
deep, hidden glens against the day that Prince Arithon may have need of
them....

On the east-facing wall of Jaelot, whipped by cold airs off the bay, the
man who is prince and fugitive, Master of Shadow and Masterbard's
apprentice, sends a request intended for Sethvir, Fellowship Sorcerer
and Warden of Althain Tower; and his missive is not scribed on
parchment, but in his own blood upon a flake of slate that he dries over
live flame, then tosses into the heaving breakers at high tide....

First Infamy

Committed as an impulsive donation by Etarra's Governor Supreme to the
ruined city Prince Lysaer undertook to restore, Lord Diegan,
ex-commander of the garrison, sat his glossy bay war-horse and glared
through the pennons that cracked at the head of the unwieldy column
bound for Avenor.  The gusts off the Mathom's high slopes still bit like
midwinter; as unforgiving were Lord Diegan's eyes, bleak and flat as
black ice.

He wore the trappings of an Etarran dandy; intrigue still drove him as
naturally as each drawn breath, but five summers spent in the wilds on
campaign against forest barbarians had tempered him.  He knew when
boldness would not serve him.  Yet masterfully as a man could contain
himself, last night's argument had flared too hotly to be masked behind
banality.  Lord Diegan found himself glaring once again at the
blond-haired prince, who rode to his left.

Clad for travel in blue-dyed suede and a cloak of oiled wool, his hair
like combed flax under the gold-stitched velvet of his hat, Lysaer
s'llessid adjusted his reins in gloved hands and suddenly, generously
smiled.  Still looking forward, as if the roadway behind were not packed
with a chaos of groaning, creaking wagons and the whip snaps and
epithets of bored carters, he said, "Still angry?  At least that way
you'll keep warm."

Too raw not to rise to provocation, Diegan felt his horse startle and
jig.  Annoyed to have dug in a thoughtless spur, he snapped, "I still
can't believe you're dragging my sister Talith into this."

Lysaer turned his head.  Eyes as brilliant as glacial ice touched
Diegan, then flicked away.  "Be careful.  Don't let me think you believe
I take her so lightly as to cast her into needless danger."

Had Diegan not needed both hands to settle his sidling mount, he could
have struck the prince in exasperation.  "Ah, Ath, why won't you
listen?" No need to repeat those facts already thrashed through: that
town mayors in the Kingdom of Tysan had never seen the horrors of the
Shadow Master's powers; to them the massacre that broke an army in
Strakewood Forest was history told at second hand.  Of more immediate
concern were the fragmented archives which survived the ancient uprising
that first overthrew Athera's high kings.  If few guilds and merchants
recalled the truth, that the same barbarian clans who plundered their
trade goods once had ruled their cities, Erdane's mayor was not among
them.  Scathing letters from his barristers on the subject outlined the
ramifications: s'llessid blood made Lysaer the last legitimate royal
heir and no city in Tysan cared to risk a return to crown rule.

Heated now beyond restraint, Diegan burst out, "You know you'll be
arrested and condemned as a dissenter?  In Isaer, likely as not, they'll
throw you to the headhunters' mastiffs.  Sithaer's Furies, man, just for
some moldy historical right to lay claim to clan fealty, you're the
living embodiment of these peoples' fear of insurrection.  I don't care
to see two hundred Etarran soldiers give up their lives to keep you from
being savaged by a dog pack!"

"Well then," Lysaer said equably, "the Etarran division will be sent
home before any political misperception can arise to start any
bloodshed." In maddening, single-minded majesty, he looked straight
ahead as he added, "Diegan, this issue is greater than me, more
important than Tysan's disorders.  Somewhere in hiding, the Master of
Shadow weaves plots.  Sitting secure in Etarra flushing out barbarian
encampments is never going to make him show his hand."

To which Lord Diegan could do nothing but clench his jaw, wheel his
courser out of line, and pound off at a canter to review the order of
his troops.  Speechless in frustration, he wished he had a lance in his
hand and a living target to skewer.  For it was never Lysaer's
dedication to the cause of killing Arithon s'Ffalenn that had been under
contention; only the folly of allowing the Lady Talith to believe
herself secure amid the troop who rode out to renew s'llessid claim to
Avenor's charter.

Prince Lysaer's cavalcade traveled westward at a pace its seasoned war
captains concurred was better suited to the staging of an invalid's
retinue.  Those mercenaries having prior experience with moving troops
complained mightily to their superiors, then arranged rough drills in
the open camps to keep their cohorts smart.  Unused to being fresh and
idle, their menat-arms diced and got fractious with each pause.

Settlements and towns along the Mathom road were favorably disposed
toward Lysaer's retainers, since the barbarian raids out of Halwythwood
that distressed their trade had eased through Etarra's campaigns.  Lord
Diegan grew accustomed to state dinners followed by exhaustive mornings
of fielding grievances.

For the royal cavalcade grew longer, more massive, more weighed down
with gifts with every city it passed.  If the Prince of the West
journeyed into his ancestral kingdom to win allies against the Master of
Shadow, each mayor and guild left inside Rathain's borders set
themselves to ingratiate.

However they might disparage royalty, they needed Lysaer's goodwill lest
the dreaded sorcerer think to turn on them with impunity once the prince
who had defended Etarra was gone.

The aftermath became familiar unto habit.  Diegan sat in some drafty
tent with a lap desk, grim faced as he battled the breezes that snatched
at his lading lists and tiresome tallies of wagons.  From Narms, they
had five loads of carpets and woven silk, sumptuously colored; from
Morvain, downcoast, wool bales profitably traded for crystal from the
famed glassworks at Falgaire.  They had lanterns in wrought brass,
barrels of rare wines and brandies, and from some beneficent farmer,
foundation stock for a pig herd.

Lord Diegan came to wince at the creatures' squeals, much as he did when
the camp followers shrieked obscenities at cheating customers.

Whatever Lysaer believed, a war camp was no place for anybody's pedigree
sister.

Since the baggage train made transport by water impractical, the
prince's retinue crept by road around the shoreline of Instrell Bay.

Caught by a late-breaking ice storm, they crawled over the low pass at
East Bransing, which parted the weathered summits of the Storlains from
the furze-cloaked hills that northward gave rise to the loftier spur of
the Thaldeins.

Despite Lord Diegan's forebodings and a hostile letter of warning
delivered by mounted courier from Erdane's reigning mayor, the cavalcade
crossed with the thaws into the realm of Tysan, past seat of the
s'llessid high kings.

Camped in pastures, quartered in hay bytes, they bought wood, milk, and
early greens from red-cheeked country matrons.  To Diegan's everlasting
uneasiness, the company blatantly proclaimed itself to the eyes of every
passing shepherd.  The bellying, bullion-fringed standard with its
brilliant blue cloth bore a sigil not seen for five centuries: the royal
twelve-pointed star of pale gold.  The curious came out to stare in
droves.  Whatever the sentiments held by city governments and their
mettlesome packs of trade guilds, the crofters of Tysan lent tacit trust
once assured the prince's captains would pay for provender.

Young boys watched the marching men in their helms, shining mail, and
the bright, sharp steel of their longswords, and dreamed; or else turned
up in holed boots and motley tunics, reeking of cow dung from the
tilling and begging to be taken on for training.

Lysaer s'llessid turned none of them away.

"Why leave them on the lanns where their families must struggle to feed
them?" Oblivious to the squalor, he sat by the hearthside cracking nuts
for Lady Talith in a peasant's croft near Dyshent.

Crickets chirruped in the smoke-grimed shadows of the corners and
round-eyed children peered through the boards of the cattle stalls,
where the matron had locked them for safety.  Outside, amid a glitter of
campfires, the fighting force sprawled at their ease in the mild night,
while the off-duty watch laughed and cast bets, and the day's new
recruits dug pits for latrines behind the Thorn fence of a sheepfold.
Attentive to the timbre of the officer's calls that wafted through
opened shutters, Lysaer added, "These boys' skills will be sorely needed
later.  Any unsuited for our fighting force will be given land of their
own to husband, once Avenor's rebuilt."

"If we ever get there," Lord Diegan grumbled acidly.  Dark where his
sister was leonine, he dug his knuckles into eyes gritted raw from the
dust thrown up by his prince's ridiculous train of wagons, columns of
light horse and pack mules.  The rains ended earlier since the
banishment of Desh-thiere's mists; if the past plagues of bloodsucking
insects were lessened, the air hung as close as new summer.  "We'll need
to cut tents out of carpets, at this pace.  Next winter's frost will
catch us before we can raise a roof to keep the rust from our weapons
stores."

"Spend the cold season in Erdane with Talith, then," Lysaer said, and
grinned in suave provocation.  He wore neither doublet nor shirt.

Since his offer to sling yoke buckets in from the dairy, the matron had
carped until he stripped off his fine silk.  Afterward, nobody remarked
that his lack of finesse in the farmyard had left him bespattered with
milk.  Unjustly magnificent in fitted breeches of blue suede embroidered
with seed pearls, he leaned down and scooped another nut from the poke
by his ankles.

Across the cottage, the farmwife's daughter thumped her churn, her gaze
never leaving the beautiful prince, except to stab in envy at the
tawny-haired lady who curled like a cat at his knee.

"Or else go back to your Lord Governor in Etarra," Lysaer resumed, well
aware of his captain's coiled tension as he flipped up and fielded a
nutmeat.  "The Etarran division will return as I promised, once we reach
the crossroad to Camfis."

"You can't be serious about that!" Lord Diegan's sharp movement rucked
the braided hearthrug and upset the little sack, and nuts cascaded into
the embers.  "You're carrying the endowment to found a city, and-"

"And what?" Lysaer stretched and pecked a kiss on Talith's cheek,
letting her retire before the debate could encompass the Master of
Shadow.  Left to the censure of her brother, the prince stayed unmoved.

"This is Tysan.  My ancestors ruled here."

"For which Erdane's mayor sent an edict to draw and quarter you!"

Hot in his velvets, Lord Diegan endured discomfort rather than let the
dairy girl make unflattering comparisons.

"The fanatics on his council will have troops out to slaughter your
bodyguard before you'll gain passage through his town."

Lysaer looked back in reproach.  "These are my people, Diegan.

However I have to win my way past Erdane, whether my troops come to
shelter under carpets or windbreaks cut from our best murray silk, I
won't cross this land in such haste that I cannot understand the land's
needs."

"Sithaer take your royal principles, I'd do better arguing with a
half-wit!" Lord Diegan stood, the jingle of his spurs cut by the crunch
of scattered nuts as he stalked past the fire and escaped to nurse his
pique outside.

The cavalcade pressed on at its snail's crawl upcoast to Dyshent, over
roads rutted deep by the passage of the season's last lumber sledges.
While the chip fires used to season beech blocks skeined dusky smoke
above the houses, the prince's guard troop quartered in yards piled with
bark for the tanner's, or between their own laden wagons, parked amid
stacks of green planks.  In complete disregard for the craftsmen who
spat in the path of his retinue, Lysaer visited the guildhalls and the
town ministry.  Gold saw his officers billeted in the sheds used to
season rare woods, and his lordly good manners won over the councilmen's
wives.

Diegan waited, edgy as the captains who lost sleep to stop their men
from making trouble; but the deep-seated resentments toward Tysan's
royal blood failed to spark into contention.

Lysaer took leave of Dyshent's council and rode out in proud form before
his cavalcade.

Unappeased, Lord Diegan forced his mount to pace Lysaer's.  "This isn't
Isaer, or Erdane, where a few costly gifts can turn heads."

The peaked roofs of the city's mills were by then lost to sight.

Ahead stretched league upon league of wild downs.

Rounded, scrub-clothed hills cradled the stones of a Second Age ruin,
and chipped old arches lay throttled under greening trailers of bitter
vine.  There, where wispy marshlights flocked the fogs on dank nights
and the spirits of long-dead Paravians were rumored to wander abroad, no
townbred company cared to linger.  Astride his steaming, mud-spattered
courser, Lysaer drew firm rein, while behind, in a welter of belatedly
shouted orders, his massive column blundered to a stop.

Straight shouldered in a hooded cloak pinned with a sapphire, the prince
waited, while the mists licked through the air between.  "Are you for
me, or against?" he asked softly.

Lord Diegan ignored the chill that grazed the length of his spine.

He strove to stay angry, to outmatch that worldly gaze which caught and
pierced him to the heart.  But like an onset of sudden pain, emotion
wrung the truth from him.  "I fear for you, friend.  You're the only man
we have whose gift of light can match the Shadow Master's sorceries."

"Then give me your trust," Lysaer said.  "Worry does nothing, after all,
but undermine morale and abet the cause of an enemy ruthlessly prepared
to exploit every one of our weaknesses."

The next day, they reached the crossing of the Great West Road.

Against every reasonable inclination, Lord Diegan presided over commands
shouted through a misery of rainfall as the crack Etarran divisions he
had personally selected to protect his prince were split off and turned
back to Rathain.

Afterward, with the downpour a fringe of silver off his mantle, Lord
Diegan huffed through the tunnels that channeled through his mustache.
"By Ath, I'll trust you have a plan.  Would it strain your royal pride
too much to share it?"

"You couldn't guess?" As sodden as the house staff and officers who
attended him in gloomy huddles, but oddly outside of their misery,
Lysaer shook back wet hair and laughed.

"My lord, your Etarrans are too loyal.  All filled with brash courage
and intent to ruin Arithon, which is just what we'll do on a
battlefield.  But since their numbers are too small to flush out the
Shadow Master, just now their sentiments could cause problems.  For our
safety and theirs, they can't be risked."

The long-faced secretary intended for the post of Avenor's seneschal
looked ready enough to offer protest had the prince not spurred his
mount to a trot.  Any mercenaries who groused over his dispersion of
troops found themselves reassigned drover's work.  In rainfall and mud,
the caravan slogged its way westward under half its original armed
escort.

The trouble Lord Diegan expected found them soon after the Etarran
cohorts had passed from sight.  A body of lancers swept down on Lysaer's
company in fast-moving formation from the north.  Through trailing
curtains of rain, the men set as watch scouts squinted to make out their
banner; the wet rendered everything colorless, except for the axe blade
sigil done in silver, and encircled by a linked wheel of chain.

"That's a headhunter company out of Isaer!" identified an inbound rider.
"Here under orders to spill the guts of a royal pretender, I shouldn't
doubt."

The doleful secretary spun in agitation to the prince.

"Fiends plague your Grace's stubbornness, your captain at arms tried to
warn you.  The bounty offered for s'llessid blood won't have changed for
the past five centuries."

Silent and whitely bitter, Lord Diegan spurred his horse to try against
weather and odds to assemble a defensive deployment from mercenary
captains now scattered throughout the caravan.

But Lysaer's fist on the bridle rein jerked the Lord Commander's move
short.  "No, Diegan.  Stay.  Have your officers hold their position.
You'll start a pitched battle if our troops draw their weapons and I
don't want anybody killed.

Not when I'd hoped to be asked to pay respect to his lordship, the Mayor
of Isaer."

Then the moment for organized defense was lost as the headhunter lancers
thundered down and swarmed like badtempered hornets around the liveried
horsemen and banners that surrounded Prince Lysaer.

"We've come for the upstart who styles himself heir to s'llessid!"

The captain who shouted was bald, had a torn ear, and wore chain mail
and bracers set with wrist spikes.  The huge gray gelding who bore him
was ugly, but unscarred, and taken by a sudden, poisonous aversion to
standing still.  The beast backed and sidled in half circles, gouging up
spatters of soaked turf.  Its rider sawed reins and cursed, while the
younger of Lysaer's liveried page boys approached and bowed, then
announced in his clear child's treble that his Grace the prince was
pleased to accept invitation to call on the Lord Mayor of Isaer.

"Invitation!" The captain hammered his mount's neck with a fist, then
hauled its nose around to his stirrup to forestall a bucketing rear.
"What gall!  There's been no invitation!" His ire found no other outlet;
underneath him, his war-horse went berserk.

Ears flattened to streaming neck, it bit the air, crowhopped and danced
sideways on bunched hindquarters.  The headhunter captain stayed astride
by dint of determined fury, while the neat ranks of his riders were
bashed out of formation by the unraveling temper of his mount.

Lances dipped, wavered, and cracked into a tangle of cursing men and
disgruntled horseflesh.

Too cynical for surprise, Lord Diegan glanced aside to find Lysaer
watching the affray, his unruffled, wide-eyed dignity at odds with
innocent intentions.  The older page, half-hidden by his horsecloths,
was deviously engaged with a handful of smooth pebbles and what looked
like a rawhide bird sling.

A lifetime of Etarran politics lent Diegan the presence to mask
astonishment.  He was prepared and listening for the low-voiced string
of orders from his prince.  "The headhunter captain's horse is shortly
going to bolt.  Before it does, I'll need an honor guard assembled, a
delegation from our guild representatives and city officers, and the
wagon bearing Lady Talith and her servants.  This will be a state visit
to Isaer; I shall make it so.  But warn the men: on pain of punishment,
and despite the most grievous provocation, they must hold their tongues
and their tempers."

No fool, Lord Diegan did as he was bidden; and so he missed the moment
when the headhunter's huge gray at last tore free of restraint and
exploded kicking and snorting into a tail-streaming run.  Somebody
dispatched an equerry at speed to chase after the luckless captain.

Before the sergeant left as second-in-command could restore the wrecked
order of the troop, Lysaer rode forward to meet him.

"Never mind the formalities," the prince opened, magnanimously
forgiving, and sure enough in stature to shake the confidence of a
struck bronze monument.  He followed with a phrase that caused several
lancers to break into laughter.  While the sergeant was torn between
outrage, uncertainty, and an explosive attack of pure mirth, Lysaer
managed with lighthearted, lordly arrogance to make several sensible
suggestions.

The headhunter lancers sorted themselves back into order, to find
themselves seamlessly joined by the prince's personal honor guard, a
wagon bearing a woman beautiful enough to leave a man staring and silly,
and a dozen trade dignitaries who were fed up with rain, and expressing
thanks for the Mayor of Isaer's timely consideration.

At the sergeant's stirrup rode Lysaer, at patent length and diffidence
inquiring what sort of silk would compliment his Lord Mayor's coloring;
the other gifts, he added hastily, were less personal.  Unless the
mayor's lady wife had the misfortune to disdain Falgaire crystal?

Thoughtful, bemused, not entirely without sympathy for the sergeant who
stammered answers to the royal inquiries under Talith's distracting
regard, Lord Diegan rode silent through the rain.  In a humor that was
frequantly Etarran, he watched Lysaer's masterful diplomacy take the
city of Isaer by storm.

There followed six days of formal dinners and protracted hours spent
touring guild sheds where last year's flax harvest lay hackled for
bleaching.  Lord Diegan followed the talk as he once had ravished the
courtesans he seduced from the beds of wealthy patrons.

Yet even under close scrutiny, these discussions pursued the same topics
as others in cities to the south, once Isaer's mayor recovered from the
flustered irritation of being hazed into guesting the very same prince
he had dispatched his headhunters to set shackles on.  The city's guild
ministers in circuitous politeness inquired whether Lysaer intended to
launch from Avenor the same campaign he had spearheaded at Etarra: raise
a garrison to meld forces with the headhunters' leagues to clear Tysan's
wilds of barbarians.  Trade with Camris, they said, suffered unduly from
raids in the Thaidein passes.

Lysaer heard their woes in rapt sympathy.  When the banquet was finished
and the fine brandies poured, he graciously ventured opinion.

"The clans of Rathain were stamped out by Etarra because they fell to
ill usage by the Shadow Master." A frown marred his brows.  The glitter
of his hair and his jewels hung still in the lamplight as he paused in
disturbed reminiscence.  "Your difficulties in the passes of Orlan must
be approached carefully." In the face of poisoned fear-that as scion of
s'llessid he might lay claim to clan loyalty and upset rule in the
towns-he said outright, "If a way can be found to avoid outright
slaughter, I would seek that before war."

Silence fell, tensioned with threat.

While inimical stares from the councilmen sharpened around the table,
and the Mayor of Isaer whispered something to a servant that brought
guardsmen in full mail to block the doorway, Lord Diegan groped to draw
the hidden dagger in his sleeve.

The prince acknowledged none of this, but centered upon a careworn
alderman who fluttered his napkin in dismay.  "You can't suggest a
treaty with the clanborn!  Ath!  There's no way to reason with such,
uncouth as they are.  Like animals."

While the mayor's fat steward retreated without refilling the wine
goblets, he added with whispered distaste, "'Tis said of Maenalle
s'Gannley that she wears uncured animal skins."

For a moment Lysaer looked blandly mystified.  Then he roused and said
in forbearance, "Forgive me.  I can't support such hasty thinking."
Under the table, his hand clamped hard on Diegan's arm, locking the
little knife in its sheath.  "What would an armed campaign accomplish
except to drive Tysan's clans to share grievance with their brethren in
Rathain?  No.

Blood hunts are too dangerous an option, and Arithon s'Ffalenn too wily
an adversary to risk driving allies to his cause.  Of all things, I dare
not draw his interests to your land to threaten the industry of your
cities."

With a deftness that seemed natural chance, the discussion was deflected
to threats of shadow and sorcery; Lord Diegan swept into passionate
description of the heinous slaughter that had occurred on the banks of
Tai Quorin, when a grisly chain of traps had savaged Etarra's proud
garrison.

The telling set him in a cold sweat.  Deshir's clansmen had always been
killers; allied with Arithon s'Ffalenn and his demonic touch at
spellcraft, they had narrowly been stopped from threatening civilized
Rathain.  Hands clenched on his cutlery, Lord Diegan spoke, as if the
roar of Tai Quorin's flood still battered his ears, and the screams of
those troops swept away.

Sucked back into memory like nightmare, he heard the crack of arrows
sing through foliage and flesh; the ripping of timber and earth as
concealed spring traps and deadfalls left his lancers gutted and
bleeding out their lives in whimpering agony.  Death did not account for
all the losses.  Some men were permanently deranged by the maze wards
and shadows Arithon had used to bind them into confusion; others had
been broken in spirit, prone to fits and raving when relivings wrenched
them from sleep.

By itself, the account of the battle the Shadow Master had launched in
Strakewood was enough to inspire terror.  Isaer's council ministers
departed mollified; by direct command of their mayor, the men-at-arms
tactfully dispersed.

Later, lit by perfumed candles in a tapestried upper chamber, Lord
Diegan chose his moment and cornered Lysaer before the prince called his
valet to retire.  "What are you playing at?  I thought we agreed at
Etarra that barbarian havens anywhere were too ready a tool for the
Master's use and design!"

"You're worried?" The brandy had been particularly fine; yet an edge of
irritation burned through the prince's flush as he crossed the guest
suite's floral-patterned carpet.  Contained as smoothed marble, he said,
"Then rest content, the raids in the passes will be ended.

One way or another.  By armed force as a last resort."

Lord Diegan met and held those blue eyes, that could seem inhumanly
assured in their candor.  "Pretty manners and slick language might
disarm the mistrust in lsaer.  But tonight's talk at supper would get
you bloody and dead on the other side of the passes.  Don't fool
yourself.  Erdane's mayor won't be stood off with sweet talk and gifts."

A frown knitted Lysaer's brows.  "I thought as much." He sighed and
stifled a yawn behind a blaze of sapphire rings.

"It's inconvenient, I admit, but we're going to need every city's
loyalty against Arithon.  We'll just have to find something else to ease
the Lord Mayor of Erdane's antipathy."

To which Diegan could say nothing, but only turn on his heel and retire
to a bed where sleep did not ease him.

The following morning, the royal retinue left Isaer to rejoin its
abandoned caravan, now moved thirty labored leagues to the west.  After
the escorting honor guard trailed four ox wains crammed full of pottery,
patterned linen, and dyed feathers.

The mules bearing the last crates of Falgaire crystal took a dislike to
the ox teams, which occasioned much swearing from the drovers.

Surrounded by confusion that stirred a third of the cavalcade into a
brew of bawling animals and stopped wagons, Talith's suave brother
screamed orders until his teeth grated from inhaling airborne grit.  He
ignored the ragged crofters who had paused at their sowing to stare.

If he also missed the hoofbeats that approached through the din made by
children beating clappers to scare flocking sparrows from the seed
grain, Diegan obstinately faced forward as the rider arrived and fell in
alongside.

"Stop sulking." Lysaer laughed to his uncommunicative future
brother-in-law.  "When the snow comes, we can haul the fancy feathers
out for mattress stuffing."

"Did you look in those sacks?" Diegan reined around his dust-caked
mount, his calf gloves fringed with hanging threads where use had torn
off the beadwork.  "They hold goose quills.  Stiff ones, for pen nibs.
If you can coax my sister to sleep on those, I'll pick you nettles to
plump your pillows."

Caught on a hillcrest against sky, his gold hair wind ruffled against
racing fleeces of spring clouds, Lysaer regarded the riled profile of
Avenor's Lord Commander at Arms.  He said in teasing merriment, "That
merchant's vixen daughter refused you, I see." Which comment got him
shoved from his saddle into dung-spread furrows in just and indecorous
vengeance.

From astride his snorting charger, Lord Diegan glared down at his
prince, who accepted his demise without rancor for mud-spoiled velvets.

"In Erdane, the headhunters' league is lawfully sanctioned to torture
clanborn captives for public amusement.  As a prince in line for the
succession, they'd hold a festival over your ripped carcass."

Hurting in his affection as if his liege were an endangered brother,
Diegan finished, "Will nothing I say dissuade you?"

Lysaer picked himself up, dusted loose earth from his breeches and
cloak, then ascertained that one of his pages had recaptured his
cantering horse.  His eyes still pinned into distance, he said,
"Wherever the Master of Shadow lies hidden, whatever his current
machination, he's unlikely to be exposed without risks.  I set out to
bring these lands protection from his sorceries." Wide as sky, the blue
eyes lifted to regard Avenor's captain at arms.  "Diegan, don't ask me
to reject a whole city just because its governor is petty, and
terrified, and convinced royal blood can harm his position.  We will
ride through Erdane.  Should I come to die there, then Tysan will
require no prince.  A townborn man like yourself will go forward to
rebuild Avenor and unify this kingdom in my name."

The last time Lysaer had crossed the Thaldeins by way of the Orlan Pass,
the mountains had been mantled in mist and blizzard.  Hastened then in
the company of a Fellowship Sorcerer, he recalled no landmarks beyond
drifts and treacherous abutments of seamed rock.  With the visible sky a
ribbon of blue overhead, the scarp traversed today under knives of
morning sunlight looked savage and strange, a tableau of slate
overhangs, wind-chiseled ridges, and stands of gnarled evergreen slashed
and skewed with the boulder-strewn scars of old slides.  The road wound
and jagged between buttressed peaks, a mere lip in places over vast,
windy chasms of cold air.  The forested valleys unfolded below like
creases in a painted silk fan, delicately blued in haze and crisscrossed
by the gliding flight of hawks.

Here, a raffish band of barbarian scouts had once dangled Arithon
s'Ffalenn upside down from a rope over a precipice.

Lent abrasive reminder of a deceit that had once beguiled his trust and
friendship, Lysaer gazed down a cliff wall bared of snow and jumbled
with bone gray, splintered timber and stone shards.  He could wish now
that the knots in the noose had failed.

Had the Shadow Master fallen to his death on that day, seven thousand
Etarrans would still be alive with their families.

Over the bends and the rises, the wagons rattled and groaned, their hubs
scraping rocks scarred by a thousand such impacts, while the opposite
wheel rims flicked gravel in clattering spurts over the sheared edge of
the verge.  On the approach to the high pass, the carter's quips echoed
through the narrowing way, until Diegan sent outriders ahead to clear
the road.  Once committed, the drays could neither turn nor maneuver;
caught between their lumbering bulk, horses and mules could not pass,
should wayfarers meet them head-on.

Merchants who hauled goods through the Pass of Orian for that reason
eschewed use of carts.  Informed of the risks, Lysaer had ignored all
advice.  Mounted, exposed in the vanguard, he looked least surprised
when three riders positioned abreast approached and blocked off the
trail.

Their mounts were a matched set of bays in gold-beaded bridles; silken
manes and tails, and caparisons of loomed wool fluttered and tugged in
the wind.  Annoyed to see his advance guard had lapsed in their duty to
detain so small a party until the prince's retinue cleared the narrows,
Lord Diegan flicked his boot with his crop and began to swear.

His imprecations trailed tamely into silence as he noticed the leader of
the trio was mounted sidesaddle.  A woman; a boy in his late teens and
an elderly man her sole escort, she carried straight shoulders
impertinently mantled in a tabard bearing Tysan's royal blazon.  The
habit underneath was of flowing black silk, her gray hair, close cropped
as any earnpaign-bound mercenary's.  Slung at a practiced angle beneath
her belt lay a baldric and a gleaming sword.

"Fiends plague us all," Diegan said crossly.  "Who in Sithaer is she?"

Lysaer raised a hand to halt his column in the roadway.

"The lady is Maenalle s'Gannley, chieftain of the clans of Camris, and
if her records can be trusted for accuracy, empowered Steward of Tysan."
Then, his lips curved in welcome, he spurred his gelding forward to
greet her.  "To judge by the hang of her blade, I'd hazard a guess it's
the living hides of Isaer's merchants she hunts to furnish her wardrobe.

I've been expecting her most of the morning."

"You know her?  You've met her before this?" Belatedly pressed to neaten
his wind-crumpled mantle, Lord Diegan expelled a breathless laugh.  "You
do have a plan!" Lost to confounded delight, he urged his horse into
step.

Fifteen paces beyond his honor guard, Lysaer drew rein.

Uncrowned beyond the majesty of his sunlit gold hair, he seized royal
prerogative and spoke first.  "Lady Maenalle, well met." His nod
acknowledged the elder, whom he recalled as her seniormost peer, Lord
Tashan; his friendly smile was for the youngster, now grown, who had
attended him as page boy through his past brief visit, before he had
joined his gift of light with an enemy's shadows to banish Desh-thiere's
mists from the sky.  In brisk invitation, Lysaer addressed the lady
chieftain who had impressed him with her iron-willed fairness.  "I go to
raise Avenor out of ruin and hope you take joy in my tidings.  Will you
come, and bring your clans out of hiding to join in rebuilding the
sovereign city of old Tysan?"

"Alliance!" Shocked to white-faced incredulity, Lord Diegan rounded upon
the prince.  "Are you mad?  The realm's mayors will never condone this!"

In the clan chief's party, the grizzled aristocrat looked incensed.  The
young man seemed torn by a longing that drove his gaze sideward and
away; while the lady, resplendent in Tysan's state colors, held her
emotions so savagely in check that the sun-caught gold in her tabard
flashed only once and fell still.

Lysaer inclined his head toward his outraged commander at arms.

"Why waste the resource to retrain our new garrison to fight and
maneuver like headhunters?" He added in compelling reason, "The clansmen
these delegates represent are masters at wilderness tactics already."

Maenalle's mount recoiled as her hand snapped taut on the rein.

Amber pale eyes centered in black like a hawk's never left the features
of the prince.  Unlike the young grandson, who wore his heart in plain
view, and despite an unsettled royal bodyguard forestalled by the
interposed body of their own liege from stringing short bows to take her
down, she showed neither nerves nor defiance.  "There has been no oath
of fealty sworn here, nor any sanction for crown sovereignty given by
the Fellowship of Seven." The fine-grained lines on her face stayed
unsoftened.  "How dare you speak of annexing my clans as a fighting
force?  We have no cause to support your wars."

"Do you not?" The significance of her dress, with the colors of kingdom
authority overlying the caithdein's plain black, had not escaped
Lysaer's notice.  Diminished a little by sadness, he crossed his hands
on his saddle pommel and sighed.  "Let me pray, then, that you haven't
been beguiled into giving your loyalty elsewhere.  That would grieve me.

The clans of northern Rathain were all but wiped out for abetting the
Master of Shadow."

"They defended their sanctioned prince," Maenalle corrected.

"With children sent out to stab men in the back who were down and
wounded," Lysaer shot back in bitter truth.  "With sorceries and traps
that slaughtered seven thousand souls in a day.  The scion of Rathain is
a trickster without morals, a sorcerer who preys on the innocent."

"That's not how the Fellowship phrased it." Unflinching as sword steel,
Maenalle never glanced at her grandson, white-faced and stiff at her
side.  "Nor Jieret s'Valerient, Steiven's heir, whose parents and
sisters all died because of Etarra's invasion."

"Who were these people but deluded allies?" Lysaer's attentiveness
shifted to the boy.  "If you doubt me, my lady, look to your own, who is
of the right age to be influenced."

The young man raised his chin.  Silent, near to weeping from betrayal,
he touched his mount with his heels.  Hooves cracked like a shout
against silence as his horse obediently turned, presenting the straight
back of its rider to the man who once promised just sovereignty.

"Oh, but Maien was influenced," Maenalle said, as drawn now as the
grandson at her side, who held his station, trembling and flushed.

"But not by Arithon of Rathain.  The boy's loyalty was yours, and his
love, until Desh-thiere's curse wrecked the peace.  Let us not confuse
our issues and deny the sad facts of this feud.  You seek to kill a man
who is your half brother, who has these last six years made no effort to
outfit a war host against you.  My clansmen cannot support your towns
against him.  Nor may we acknowledge false claim to Avenor.

Our allegiance is to be held in reserve for the one of your heirs that
the Fellowship endorses to be crowned."

A catspaw of breeze fluttered the sigil on Maenalle's tabard.

Fresh with ice scent and evergreen, the air seemed too sharp to breathe.
Locked separate by nothing beyond glacial cold and state etiquette,
Lysaer and the lady steward regarded each other through a charged and
measuring silence.

"We're to be enemies then?" the prince said finally.  "I'm sorry.

That outcome isn't what I'd have chosen.  Let me be clear, for your
clans' sake: you are free at any time to change your mind."

Magnanimously regal, Lysaer finished, "If that happens, send me word.

And until then, may Ath show you mercy."

Maenalle's bold laugh sheared in flat echoes off the rocks.

"The creator need not concern himself.  As a guest who swore oath at my
table, you will be allowed to leave this place without being stripped of
your horse and arms.  The same can't be said for your escort."

"That's insolence." Prepared to add more, Lord Diegan

lost the chance as the wizened old clansman snapped off a hand signal.

The rock abutments by the roadside sprouted movement, followed by a
hissed thrum of sound.  The draft team harnessed to the lead wagon
abruptly slacked backward in their traces and collapsed with a
whistling, surprised grunt of air.

The drover at their lines took a moment to start shouting; then every
man within earshot shared his anger, that each fallen horse lay spiked
through its crest with the feathered shaft of a barbarian broadhead.
Creased by flawless marksmanship, the animals died in quivering spasms
that sent small pebbles clattering off the brink.

Erect and exposed in his saddle, provoked to lordly affront, Lysaer
raised his hands.

He would engage his given gift of light, Diegan saw, dazzled by the
lightning flare of power summoned at his prince's fingertips.  One
blanketing discharge, and the crannies that sheltered clan archers could
be scorched by immolating fires.

Prepared to seize the initiative, Lord Diegan drew his blade in a scream
of steel.  He called swift commands to his mercenaries.  Prompt action
could see Lady Maenalle and her party taken hostage; Erdane's mayor
would pay a rich bounty for their trial and execution.

But before the Prince of the West unleashed his annihilating burst, a
second flight of arrows sang down.  The barbarian volley chipped stone
in splintering explosion under the belly of his mount.

The powerful horse shied back on bunched haunches.  Forced to nurse the
reins and jab in spurs to curb a rear which threatened to toss him over
the ledge, his royal rider lost concentration.  The light bolts he
shaped dispersed in flat sheets that threw off a harmless burn of heat.

Above the scrambling batter of hooves, Lady Maenalle voiced her
ultimatum.  "Don't think to try killing with your powers, Lysaer
s'llessid.  Tell your men who draw steel to stand down.  Or a next round
will fly and take every life in your company."

"Isn't that what you planned?" Diegan shouted, his rage torn through
strangling mortification.  Fighting the horse that shied under him, he
snatched a glimpse down the switchback.

The trailing wagon in the column had wrenched crooked, its ox team
folded at the knees, as cleanly arrow shot as the horses.  The prince's
brash cavalcade was hemmed in from both ends and trapped at the mercy of
barbarians.  In a cry that rebounded through the winds above the
valleys, Diegan accused, "What are you, woman, but the pawn of the
Shadow Master, after all?"

"I am sworn only to Tysan," Maenalle said, her calm like snap-frozen
ice.  "As appointed steward of the realm, my duty upholds the crown's
justice until such day as the Fellowship Sorcerers declare a lawful
successor."

Lord Diegan whipped his horse straight.  "Where's the equity in robbery
and murder?"

"Don't resist and no lives will be taken." Maenalle tipped her chin at
the elder, who dismounted and passed his reins to the boy.

Still vigorous despite his weathered looks, he took charge, while scouts
in dust-grazed leathers deployed in fierce order to plunder.

Their lady commander ended in brevity that rang like a sentence after
trial.  "Only weapons will be confiscated, and those goods offered as
bribes by town mayors.  Be assured, any gold that might be used to
outfit an army for persecution of clan settlements will be turned to a
worthier cause."

Blade clenched in hand, Diegan dug in his spurs.  His horse belted
sideward in a crabstep, frustrated and dragged offstride by a
rough-looking girl with scarred hands who had managed to dart in and
snatch its bridle.  She jerked her head for him to dismount, while
someone else with painful force laid hands on his person to disarm him.

"Try a dagger in my ribs, you'll die with me," Diegan gasped,
struggling.

"Don't be a fool, Lord Commander," the prince said in glass-edged
urgency.  "I need you alive!"

The commander at arms cast a smoking glare at Maenalle.

Unable to speak as the muscles in his jaw spasmed taut, barely able to
breathe for the blow to his pride, he swung from his saddle.

The last, grinding irony hurt the most, that the horses and the mules
could not be maneuvered past either one of the disabled wagons.

Even had he wished to risk engagement, his men-at-arms could not bolt
over sheer cliffs to find cover.

While scouts poured like rats from the ridgetop and divested him of
jewels and purse, he hurled back insults in sweating, savage bursts.

They ripped off his cloak and took the beautiful, chased belt knife
bought to match his confiscated sword.

Down trail, the venomous oaths of the mercenaries marked the loss of
weapons well proven in battle.  The more-seasoned officers curbed
combative tempers before excuse could be found for barbarian arrows to
make bloody end to dissent.

Maenalle's scouts were thorough, immune as wild goats to steep rock and
bad footing.  At masterful speed, Lysaer's disabled caravan and fighting
company found itself weaponless and wagonless, then abandoned afoot in
the firn-walled gorges that led through the ford of the River Valendale.
Bitterness replaced their purloined baggage.

Although no man suffered harm, and Maenalle's matchless discipline had
prevented anything worse than wisecracks and whistles to befall Lady
Talith, no one inclined toward forgiveness.

The wainloads of goods that had been cursed every league across Atainia
now became cause for mortal affront.

Pacing at Lord Diegan's side, his affianced lady astride the one mount
that guest oath had held sacrosanct, Lysaer stayed withdrawn.  In boots
not fashioned for hiking, he blistered his feet with the rest on the
wretched, frost-cracked stone.  That he carried the only sword among two
hundred seasoned fighting men seemed not to concern him unduly.  While
the shadows swallowed the cliff walls and the day eased to cobalt
twilight, Diegan chafed at the silence.  His worried glance at his
prince was met and matched by a sidelong flicker of mirth.

In no mood for jokes, he spun with such force that a fir branch switched
him in the cheek.  "Fiends and Sithaer'S tury, your Grace, whatever are
you thinking?"

"You've got evergreen needles in your velvets," Lysaer observed.

He broke into a shocking, sunny smile.  "Do you miss your horse all that
much?"

Avenor's weaponless commander at arms stared, stupefied.

His spurs jangled as he kicked at a moss-coated rock, then recouped
sufficient dignity to glare at the prince to whom Etarra's lord mayor
had so highhandedly awarded his service.  When Lysaer absorbed his pique
in brazen merriment, he frowned.  "Ath!  I've seen you blast trees to
charcoal at the merest flick of a thought."

Lysaer said nothing.

Jabbed to suspicion, Diegan added, "You pulled your strike against those
archers on the slope!  You planned this whole thing, didn't you?"

A dying thread of sunlight bloodied sparkles in gold hair as Lysaer gave
back the barest shrug.  "Not precisely." His levity vanished and his
eyes went suddenly hooded.  "You might say I expected things might
happen as they have.  If I tried for a happier outcome, the end result
isn't setback.  No one can say, now, that Tysan's clans weren't fairly
offered their chance to lay due claim to s'llessid loyalty."

But the issue went deeper than that, Lord Diegan saw in awed respect. As
the impoverished victim of a clan raid, Lysaer s'llessid had bought
footing for condolence.  Bound on to Erdane as a charity case, not even
the city's irascible mayor might question his need to raise troops.  Far
from feeling threatened by the muster, his guilds would be moved to
endorse it: the prince's cause would win aid out of congenial
commiseration and sympathy.  Etarran enough to appreciate a master turn
of statecraft, Lord Diegan laughed in the teeth of the wind: "By Ath,"
he said in exultant admiration.  "You'll have your kingship of this
realm, then your army to harry out the Shadow Master.

After the scale of today's losses, the guilds and the town councils will
fall over themselves to lend you their funds to raise a garrison."

Messenger

Four days after the raid that beggared Prince Lysaer in the Pass of
Orlan, a messenger was dispatched at speed from the clansmen's mountain
outpost.  No matter that the hooves of his horse were dampened by
late-season snow, the muffled vibration of his passage was heard and
tracked by a mind a hundred leagues distant.

Through the five centuries since the Paravian races had vanished from
the continent, wardenship of the tower built to guard their artifacts
and culture had fallen to a Fellowship Sorcerer.  Most days he could be
found in a black-beamed chamber that creaked in the unquiet winds,
elbows braced on a library table heaped as a gull's nest with parchments
and opened books.  Scrolls stuffed the niches in between, trailing
moth-eaten ties, or else weighted flat at the corners by oddments of
tea-stained crockery and tinted glass inkwells missing corks.  Ensconced
amid his clutter like a pack rat, Sethvir sat with his ankles hooked on
a stool.  While his hair grew in untidy tufts, and his maroon robe
gathered dust and loose threads, he kept and catalogued records, and
tracked world events as they happened.

As long as Athera had lain fogbound, he had followed the

phases of the moon throu h the pull of the tides.  He felt the daily
tramp of Etarra's drilling armies shake the earth alongside prints in
dry dust traced by field mice.  A missive scribed in blood that had
passed through flame, then rinsed off in brine from the face of a thrown
bit of slate, touched him in fourfold vibration; amid the voices of a
billion dropped stones, that one he noted and marked apart.

He sensed the grand music of the planet's twelve power lanes, and the
warp through weft lacework of energies still channeled over land and air
by the residual dance of Paravian mystery.

So long had Sethvir's mage-sense been twined with the thunderous chord
of world life force, that his thoughts took on the patterned aspects of
stone, with but tenuous hold on the present.

When at length the clang of a sword hilt against the portcullis nine
stories down echoed through the bowels of his sanctuary, Sethvir already
knew the name and the errand of the courier; had been aware of both
since the moment Tysan's lady steward had dispatched her rider to his
tower.

Limned in the gloom of failing day, the Warden of Althain finished a
line of spidery handwriting.  He leaned sideward, rinsed his quill in
the tepid dregs of a teacup, then raised eyes of pale turquoise that
looked vacuous as sky; but in fact, held a relentless train of review as
the interstices of this moment's event unreeled to bear on the future.

Below him, marring the crystalline cry of first starlight, the swordsman
continued to hammer.  To Sethvir's ear, the metallic din bespoke forge
fire, and hill steel, and centuries of unrequited bloodshed.  "I'm
coming," he grumbled in a tone as tart as an old hinge.  He stood up.
Dust and bits of scribbled paper settled on a floor already littered
with outworn quill pens and the dropped caps of inkwells.  The Sorcerer
sneezed, peered down as if touched to unwitting delight by the faded
weave of the carpet, then stumped in his oversize fur buskins to the
casement, which had been unlatched for days, banging and creaking in the
gritty north gusts off the desert.

The bulwarks of Althain Tower were fashioned of granite, stark and gray,
the rough-chiseled grooves of a desperate need softened under green
seals of lichen.  Sethvir crossed his arms on the sill, took absent
notice of a hole chewed by moths in his sleeve, then leaned through the
casement and peered down.

"I'm not at all deaf", he chided gently.

Below him, lent an ant's perspective, a shaggy bush pony stood with its
hip cocked, its reins looped through the elbow of a man in the undyed
leathers of a clansman.  The shoulders energetically working flinched
and stopped.  The visitor glanced up, sheepish, from the tower's locked
entry and hurriedly sheathed his sword.  While the reverberations from
his pounding subsided to a rumble, then a whisper, he called, "I beg
your pardon.  Sethvir of Althain?"

Outlined against dusk by a halo of blowing white hair, the Sorcerer
grinned like a pixie.  "Your lady wishes me to bear a message to
Arithon, Prince of Rathain.  No, don't speak.  I know the contents.

What makes you think I'll deliver it?"

Hotly flustered, Maenalle's courier said, "The caithdein of

Tysan asks.  She said you were the only spirit in Athera who would know
where to seek the Shadow Master."

Sethvir hooked an ink-stained knuckle through his beard.

For a moment he appeared to forget himself, as well as the

anxious emissary down below.  His gaze encompassed the deepening arch of
the heavens as if the answers to unwritten

riddles could be read in the white ice of cirrus clouds.

Deferential to the ways of great mages, the courier waited,

while his pony dropped its head and cropped the weeds that

grew wild over the tower's sole doorsill.

Presently, Sethvir answered.  "I'll commit the Lady Maenalle's message
to a parchment inscribed to Arithon s'Ffalenn.  But tell her: the scroll
will be delivered at the time of my choosing."

The courier eased in relief.  "She will be satisfied.  11 He gathered up
his pony's reins, prepared to mount and ride immediately.

Sethvir's eyebrows arched at the lapse implied in his hospitality.

"No need to rush off.  I have oats for your horse in the barn.

It's a very long road back to Canuis, and tomorrow will be wretched with
rain.

You'd do better to weather the storm here.  Have a bath, and a bed, and
whatever you can scrounge from my larder.  Certainly there's plenty of
good tea."

While the clanborn courier hung poised between uncertainty and blind
courage, Sethvir withdrew from the casement, his voice a diminishing
echo from the unlit cavern of the library.

"Bide there.  I'll be down to unfasten the gates."

He moved on at sharp speed that belied his dreamer's appearance; take
the stairs too slowly, and the courier would be mounted and gone at a
pace his road-weary pony did not deserve.  The company of a Fellowship
Sorcerer had harmed no man; but legend told of many who had emerged
changed from the experience.  Whether Maenalle's appointed courier would
prove exempt from fate's handling was a fine point Sethvir was loath to
promise.

Eviction

After the confiscated brown gelding, Faery-toes, kicked his stall doors
to slivers, bit every groom within reach, and knocked the head hostler
off his feet, the alderman of Jaelot's undersecretary at last seized the
initiative to set seal to a writ to dispatch the beast to the knacker's.
He grumbled as he waited for the wax to harden.

Horsehide, glue, and dogmeat were not in high demand; the proceeds from
the slaughter of one swaybacked head of stock could scarcely defray all
the damages.

The head hostler narrowed his eyes and nursed his bruises.

"Keep the beast, then, and rack up more costs in wrecked boards."

The writ was slapped into his hands with the official seal still warm,
while in the next room, voices of higher authority heated and flared
into argument.  The difficulties posed by the horse's last owner, the
fat prisoner consigned by city justice to suffer forced labor until
solstice, were never as simply arranged.  While the hostler retreated
with the horse's death warrant, invective assailed the secretary's
headache through the shut panels of the doorway, as it had without cease
for a week: Dakar took ill in the drafty shacks where the convicts were
housed.  Poor food made him sick unto misery.  His feet swelled from
chilblains until he could not arise in the mornings without loud-voiced,
piteous complaint.

His fellow inmates used their fists to stop his whining.  His moans and
his mewling as he languished from their beating disturbed what little
sleep they could scrounge after days of backbreaking labor in the
mason's yard, dressing stone blocks for the seawalls that storms
crumbled down every spring.

With both eyes puffed shut with bruises, Dakar could not see to swing
his mallet.  Stone chips flew on wild tangents.  A guardsman was home
with a badly gashed face and an overseer limped on smashed toes.

Packed off to solitary confinement, Dakar passed his hours of punishment
with singing.  Even cold sober, he had no ear for pitch.

The yawling echoes created by his ballads made the prison sentries grit
their teeth, then brawl among themselves in driven fits of frustration.

A gag was attempted.  Dakar somehow ingested the cloth.  The coarse
fibers gave him a bellyache, but otherwise seemed not to faze him.

The healer dispatched to examine him emerged from the depths of Jaelot's
dungeon, his tongue clicking in amazement behind the scented kerchief he
carried to mask the stench.

"The man's crazed," he said in a nasal twang.  He removed the linen and
spat into it.  After eyeing the sputum with the reflexive habit of his
profession, he treated the head warden's sallow complexion to the same
disconcerting regard.  "Thinks he's immortal, your prisoner.  Insisted
he could survive a straight draft of deadly nightshade, and then offered
to show me, the mad fool.  Keep him chained on a diet of herb broth.

Then if you take my advice, send him on to the crazy house run by the
brothers of Ath's initiates."

Cocooned in fur vests to ease a chest cold, the head warder shrugged his
exasperation.  "That would be a frank relief, to be rid of him.  But the
judiciary's adamant.  It's the work team for Dakar till the advent of
summer, and naught short of death will shift the sentence."

"Well, let him lie," the healer said, repacking his satchel in sour
humor.  "He might get pox, or perish of rat bite.  At least, by
Daelion's justice, he should catch your cough and lose his voice.  Does
your wife brew cailcallow tea?"

The glum warden shook his head.  "No wife."

"Ah, too bad." The healer departed, whistling; and whatever sort of ills
beset Dakar's jailers, the prisoner proved maddeningly immune.

He caroled himself hoarse in the darkness, then rasped on in a blithe
and froggy baritone, while his guardsmen wore mufflers tied about their
ears in an effort to dampen the dissonance.

At midspring, with the hemp cloth smock worn by the condemned sagged
like empty sacking over his depleted belly, and skin turned mushroom
pale, the Mad Prophet informed the man sent down to fetch him that he
had never stayed sober for more than a fortnight, even as a babe at his
mother's knee.

Three months was a lifetime record, Dakar insisted, as if astounded
still to be alive.

Nobody succored him with beer.  He was prodded from his lair in the pits
of Jaelot's dungeon.  The blocks shaped at the mason's throughout the
winter were now being loaded onto flat ox wains and rolled in slow
rounds to the headland.  There, a team of men-at-arms in leather
brigandines raised their bull voices to harry on a wretched line of
workers.  Scoured by salt spray and the white-laced surge of high tide,
bleeding from barnacle grazes and stone cuts, Jaelot's convict labor
team bent their backs to restore the torn bulkheads and jetty.

Their work was cruel and dangerous; where currents had undercut the
seawall, the granite might shift and slide.  A man could break his hands
or his legs, caught in an unlucky place.

Incoming waves could crest and slam down without warning, and a seething
froth of brine would tumble the huge blocks like knucklebones stewed in
a cauldron.  Men died pinched like insects, or dragged under to drown in
the weight of their fetters and chain.

Dakar had no wish to end ground in shreds to be picked by the bay's
hordes of scavenger crabs.

While the wains were pulled up for unloading, he stole a moment while
the watch was diverted, and behind the move of blowing on chapped hands,
cast a sharp eye across the waves.  His month in the dungeon had left
him more time than he liked for uninterrupted concentration; his
eyesight was clear as a sailor's.

A gruff voice shouted behind him, "You!" A pikestaff hit Dakar across
the shoulders.  "Back to work!  And hurry on about it."

The Mad Prophet stumbled forward, caught short of a trip as he plowed
shoulder down into the stone block in process of being jockeyed from the
wagon bed onto log rollers for transport.  Men swayed.  The wagon
creaked.  The dressed mass of granite shifted, grating, then spun
off-balance and dived.

Those poles not instantly milled to slivers lumbered out of alignment,
while men jumped clear and swore, the slowest ones nursing whacked
shins.

"It's the fat idiot, again!" screeched the pikeman appointed to attend
the wain's unloading.

Wide-eyed in affront, Dakar regarded flat folds where once he had
sported a paunch.  "Fat?"

A mailed fist fetched him a ringing thump on the jaw.  "No talk.

Just work.  Or ye'll see yourself pressed to parchment under yon mother
of a rock."

Dakar staggered on rubbery knees and fell spectacularly flat on his
fundament.  Prods from the pike failed to raise him.

"Fiends plague us!" The watch captain arrived, the higher-pitched clink
of his accoutrements clear over the deeper tones of shackle chains.
"Drag the lout into the spray!

Cold water should rouse him soon enough."

Two convicts were waved over to manhandle Dakar clear of the work crew.
He lay sprawled at the edge of the seawall, a crumpled heap in stained
rags, bruised and apparently dazed, except that his face stayed raptly
turned toward the surf that pounded below.  At length, he stirred, not
because of the needling spray that sheeted over him, but because he
finally sighted the sign he sought amid the moiling whitecaps.

There were fiends in truth, out amid the breakers, riding the incoming
tide to replenish themselves.  Energy sprites native to Athera that drew
fuel from the tumble of the waters, invisible to the eye except as
crests that rose and broke, then subsided, unnaturally splashless, into
the current of the bay.

What the Paravian tongue named Lyats, or tricksters, for their tireless
penchant to make mischief.

Dakar's lip curled in an evil smile through split and bleeding
contusions.  He moaned for effect, rolled over, and propped himself on
his forearms.  Then, eyes clenched shut in a feigned fit of queasiness,
he mustered his skills as a spellbinder and inwardly massed a tight,
spinning core of focused energy.

Sloppily, as a novice might, he let the force bleed into his aura.

The miscast conjury was imperceptible, even harmless, little worse than
the flash of static discharge that might jump and ground to metal in a
dry freeze.  But as Dakar well knew from experience, the slightest
mismanagement of mage-force was irresistible fare to the appetite of an
unsated fiend.

Often enough in the past he had suffered, when negligent handling of his
lessons had attracted the sprites to plague him.

As much as Asandir tried to castigate him, Dakar's ways stayed
incorrigible.  Ever and always he remained an insatiable magnet for
fiends.

He felt a shiver thrill the air as they sensed his beckoning presence.
The splashiess fall of the wavecrests unraveled, spouting into joyous,
wild spray as the creatures arrowed from their sport and fastened upon
his signature of strayed power.

Never before had he reveled in the itches and small tingles that played
over his skin as they spun, drinking the energy spill off his aura.
Where one came, more followed.  lyats liked traveling in packs.

Prickled and lightly burned through the tuned perception of his
mage-sense, Dakar judged to the second when the fiends blithely gathered
to feed from his handout became charged and engorged beyond their simple
needs.

He groaned and groped and stood upright with just enough show to draw
the eye of the watching overseer.

For once in league with shouted oaths and harsh orders, the Mad Prophet
let the guardsmen prod him.  Chivvied, cursed, and shoved on by
impatient pike butts, he let himself be hazed into the thick of the work
crew, no longer unloading carts, but laboring and groaning to lever the
heavy blocks into place on the broken seawall.  The smells of salt-damp
wool and sweat combined with the squeak of ropes through blocks and
tackle, the grind of stone over stone.  Pressed amid the heat cif
straining bodies, made to shoulder his share of the weight, Dakar licked
crusted blood from his teeth and cut off his trickle of leaked energy.

The invisible fiends knit about him in spirals of distorted breezes.
They buffeted and pinched and tweaked at his hair in signal fits of
irritation.  When he refused to give in and fuel their wants farther,
they lent themselves in their madcap way to tease, to frustrate, to
annoy, that they might sip what stray spurts of emotion they could wring
from whatever victims were available.

In an eye blink, the work on the jetty erupted into chaos.

Stone chips and rocks sprang up and whirled airborne, clanging off the
helms of the officers and unmercifully pelting the conscripts.

Bruised and screaming in wild surprise, men heaved off the encumbrance
of their loads.  The massive dressed blocks misaligned and jarred awry,
then dropped with a thud to quake the seawall.  Granite rasped against
granite, grinding off falls of small pebbles that ripped aloft to sting
flesh.  Men coughed out curses and spat grit while the older blocks
already mauled by storms and ice loosened, cracked, and gave way, to
fall with thunderous, geysering spray into white petticoats of surf.

A waterspout kicked up where no breath of wind was in evidence.

It shrieked and snarled and snaked itself a passage like a whip through
mild air.  The lead ox teams scrabbled back, whuffing.  Pounds of solid
muscle strained against the constraints of leather and shafts, while the
stout cart behind struck a wall of rock and compressed.  The wagon bed
groaned and burst in a wreckage of timber.  The next dray in line
jounced and jammed two wheels in cracked paving, its hubs wrenched off
to a squeal of sheared linchpins.

Yards away, three stolid drovers appeared to entangle themselves in
their ox goads and fall flat.

"Ath spare us!" yelled the captain in charge.  He ducked too late to
miss the sliced foam off a wave top that poured itself down his back.
Red-faced, dripping, ready to murder for sheer fury, he hopped from one
leg to the other.  "We're caught in a damned plague of fiends!" The
pikestaff in his hands came alive with the urge to bang down and hammer
at his insteps.

Bleeding now from a dozen minor gashes, men-at-arms threw aside polearms
to slap at the hail of small pebbles.  While the oxen bucketed against
their yokes, and bedeviled carters strove to quiet them, Lyats possessed
the very reins in their hands and exuberantly undid the buckles.  The
dropped leather twined snake-fashion and laced around ankles and
fetlocks.

While the animals bawled and the convicts thrashed in their shackles,
the beleaguered guardsmen unsheathed their daggers.

They bent to hack themselves free, then stamped and slapped at cut bits
of leather that groped up their calves like maggots.

"Men, get the prisoners to form ranks!" shouted the harried captain.

While his troop pushed, punched, staggered, and shoved the distraught
work team into ragged columns, a sizable stretch of the seawall began in
bounding starts to unravel.

Rocks flew and cracked, whistling the air like slingshot.

"Back!" screamed the officer of the watch.  "Inside the gatehouse!  The
talismans there will fend off the fiends."

Braced on planted feet just shy of the crumbling jetty, the Mad Prophet
laughed through his reddish frizzle of beard.  If the little tin
fetishes that dangled from the gatehouse had once held power to ward,
time and attrition had drained the spells.

The residue that lingered might deflect one fiend; never a full pack
bent on a spree of wild mischief.  Against common belief, the jangle and
chime raised by wind-tossed strips of tin caused no warding vibrations.
Their sound was good for nothing but warning and the Lyats would pass
them unscathed.

Dakar knew from bleak experience: having tasted the heady discharge of
spell force on his person, the sprites were apt to dog his tracks for
days.

As unrepentant instigator, he set his jaw against the throttling tug of
his prison smock, that a smaller Lyat seemed bent on unraveling into a
garrote.  He marched in his shackles through splintered carts and the
steaming heaps of dung littered by the terrified ox teams, and felt
inordinately cheerful.

Singing bawdy ditties in confinement was vastly preferable to hard labor
that might see a man's bones ground for fish food; worth even the
torment of a plague-storm of fiends to regain a safe state of idleness.

Four days later, engrossed in a target shoot against Jaelot's second
captain of archers, the Masterbard's apprentice Medlir poised at the
butts in the practice yard to tally the score of his arrows.

An off-duty guardsman hailed him from the gate across the field.

"Hey, minstrel!  Did you hear?  That fat man your master must play to
redeem was let off his term of forced labor!"

Wrapped in a faded dun cloak, lashed about the ankles by

the wind-crumpled stands of spring grass that had finally pushed through
the mud, Medlir flicked back his hood.  Eyes as changeably flecked as
the lichen-tinged wall behind his shoulder widened under upturned brows.
"You speak of Dakar?  What's to hear?"

His shooting companions clustered around, sand piggins empty, their
shafts still jammed in straw targets.  The silver they stood to lose if
the count was completed left them amiably open to diversion.

Now able to laugh at the afternoon's pestering annoyance, the guard just
off watch in the dungeons strode over, his conical helm tucked beneath
his arm.  "Fool bailiff had to release him.  No choice.

Besides being crazy, the fat man's a breathing, walking lure for stray
fiends.  Brings them on like a lodestone draws iron, and not a blighted
talisman in the city seems to hold power for protection."

Arrived at the butts, and soldier enough to count and weigh odds at a
glance, he slapped Medlir on the shoulder.  "You're winning?  With that?
Against longbows?"

"I was." The minstrel gave a crooked smile.  Long, supple fingers
unstrung the horn recurve, then surrendered the weapon to a page boy for
return to common stores in the armory.  "You didn't tell Dakar the name
of the inn where we're quartering?"

The guardsman's brisk humor turned wicked.  "The city dungeon won't keep
him.  Who's left?  I hope you've got patience for waking up with your
bootlaces snarled into knots."

"Well, I don't." Energetically merry, Medlir laughed.

He kept to himself the piquant truth that a masterbard's art included
chords arranged in particular harmonic resonance to repel fiends.
Halliron had forbidden his apprentice to perform any music in public;
for himself, the old man avowed to make no appearance until the moment
he was compelled by the terms of the judiciary's bargain.  If Jaelot was
pestilent with Lyats because of Dakar's incarceration, the Masterbard
and his singer-in-training would retreat to their attic and share rich
appreciation of the havoc.

Spirit Tracks

Touched across distance by a prompt from the Warden in Althain Tower, a
raven flaps and rouses a Fellowship mage, who ignores the stiffness of
old wounds to arise, don his threadbare black cloak, and journey
eastward across Radmoore Downs toward the spell-guarded stronghold on
the edge of the dread mires of Mirthlvain....

In western lands, the same call is heard and declined by another spirit
mage, who stands watch over an enclave of enchantresses; in particular
one initiate with dark auburn hair and a guarded heart, entrapped in the
web of greater intrigue that surrounds the Master of Shadow....

Far removed from Athera's spinning orb and the sphere of Sethvir's
provenance, the discorporate awareness of a Sorcerer departs from a
world bound in ice and shackled under brooding bands of fog; and as his
conscious presence arrows on through the emptiness that freezes the
space between stars, he fears the next place he seeks to unlock the
Mistwraith's secrets may prove as lifelessly desolate as the last....

IV.  Convocation

Some days after the clanborn courier had taken leave of his tower eyrie,
Sethvir, Warden of Althain, laid out a fresh square of parchment.  With
one elbow braced against a tome on celestial mechanics whose listed orbs
and planetary bodies lay nowhere near his present world of inhabitancy,
he pondered; his hands out of fussy habit trimmed pen nibs the way a
duelist might whet fine steel.  Then, his left hand curled around a tea
mug, the Sorcerer penned out the message Tysan's lady steward had asked
him to send on to Arithon s'Ffalenn.  Moved by purposeful afterthought,
he added an inventory that filled twelve close-spaced pages.  The items
he catalogued had been on Maenalle's mind, too lengthy for a courier to
memorize.  Willing servant to her intent, Sethvir let the breeze dry the
ink.  Then he rummaged through a cupboard, salvaged a battered seal from
a tin full of oddments, and secured the document under the device of the
ancient princes of Camris, from whom the lady traced descent.

The waning night beyond the casements was the eve of the vernal equinox,
by custom a time for the Fellowship Sorcerers to gather in convocation.

Althain's Warden tucked the finished letter into a satchel already
packed for the occasion and descended to his equally cluttered living
quarters.  There he replaced his threadbare robe with another only
slightly less ink stained.  Outside, the sky lightened to dusky pearl.

Bright-eyed despite not having slept for several days, Sethvir continued
down the stairwell.

No cressets brightened the black iron wall sconces.  The commemorative
statues of Paravians housed on Althain's ground floor wore a gloom only
fitfully broken as the gleam that leaked through the arrow loops jinked
across gold braid and trappings.

Sethvir required no torch to see his way past the ranks of marble
unicorns, the horned majesty of centaurs that loomed above his head, the
waist-high maple pedestals that elevated the diminutive bronzes of sun
children.  If concern for the future burdened his thoughts, here, the
past weighed unquiet as well.  Through mage-sense, Sethvir felt the
vibrational echoes left by the steps of former visitors.  In winnowed
air currents like moving chiaroscuro, he could trace the tides of old
magics, ones wrought by Paravians in subliminal harmonics; and others
more recent, of Fellowship craft, that feathered the skin like a tonic.

Surrounding all, enduring as bedrock, lurked the guard spells that
sealed Althain Tower from the world and its troubles outside.

The Sorcerer bypassed the gold-chased panels, built to mask the massive,
geared chains and windlass that worked the tower's grand portal.  His
satchel slung like a knapsack, he knelt by an inset trapdoor and paused,
apparently overcome by reverie; in fact, his mind sharpened in search
and coursed outward, beyond Athera's cloud layer and into deep vacuum
through which the stars drifted like lamps.

But the far distant spirit of the colleague who journeyed to study the
Mistwraith's origin returned no response; nor had for an uneasy score of
months.

With Lysaer extending his influence into Tysan, the peace could scarcely
last.  Time to reclaim the cursed princes from the Mistwraith's geas was
growing sorrowfully short.

Raked by a shiver, Sethvir aroused, recalled to those troubles close at
hand.  A ring pull lifted to his touch; defense wards dissolved and the
heavy stone raised to a stir of moving counterweights.  The chamber's
miasma of aged cedar and wool gave way to the draft that welled up,
spiked like a storm breeze with ozone.  A stair shaft cut downward into
cold dark, limned like dust on ebony by the silver-blue glimmer of the
power focus set into the dungeon below.

Sethvir secured the trapdoor behind him and descended.

Daybreak was nigh, its song plain to read in the soft, bursting static
of the earth lane's magnetic signature.  Althain's Warden stepped off
the landing.  He crossed a concave depression paved with lightless black
onyx, then the focus itself, of concentric circles overscribed in
Paravian runes, mapped out in pearlescent phosphor.

Tingled by the unshielded play of elemental forces, he positioned
himself at the pattern's center.

His feet rested on the apex of a looping star interlace that met in a
nexus of five lines.

He closed his eyes, gripped his satchel, and waited.

Outside the tower, sunrise touched light through the mists.

A flux of wild energy crested along the lane, and the focus in the
cellar floor responded, crackling to incandescent white.

The moment sang into a chord of suspension, laced about with dire
powers.

Then the dawn sun surge peaked and passed.  The rune circles shimmered
to quiescence, and the Warden of Althain was gone.  Air displaced by his
departure eddied over gargoyle cornices and sighed to final stillness
through attrition.

Relocated three hundred and eighty leagues to the southeast, Sethvir
opened his eyes.  Through a lingering shudder of reaction, he sucked in
a breath dank as fog off a retting pond with the taint of mildew and
mold.  He wrinkled his nose.  "I'd forgotten how Meth Isle smelled."

"That's possible?" His host, the master spellbinder Verrain, stood in
straight quiet like a cattail, furled against the damp in a
mud-splashed, brown frieze cloak.  "I wasn't sure, I've been here so
long." Full lips that once had wrung sighs from Daenfal's fairest
maidens crooked in humorless irony.

"Welcome to the bogs of Mirthlvain."

Sethvir gave his spinning senses a moment more to settle, then stepped
off the lichened patterns of a lane focus centuries older than the one
at Althain Tower.  Gilded with flickers from the rushlight by the
doorway, he gripped the wrists of the apprentice mage, who had stood
guard over the dread spawn of Mirthivain for more years than any soul
deserved.

"You have tea?" asked the Fellowship Sorcerer.

His anxious note caused Verrain to grin.  "My cupboards are stocked." He
led off up a brick stair, hollowed by moisture and footfalls.  "The
others await you above."

The pair climbed in darkness alive with the tick and splash of
condensation.  From some bleak chamber down a corridor, a caged thing
chittered and screeled; the echoes cut at the nerves, caused the hair of
warm-blooded listeners to prickle and stab erect.

"Karth-eels?" Sethvir asked.

"A breeding pair." Verrain unbarred an upper doorway to a squeal of
rusted hinges.  He retrieved a staff of gray ash, while the spill of
filtered daylight traced over knuckles left scarred by bites, and claws,
and fell scratchings.  "A new mutation, I fear."

"Hardly fresh," Sethvir murmured, "if these ones you've caught are
amphibious, with fangs and webbed feet as well as the usual venomed
spines."

Verrain glanced aside in surprise, his eyes so bleak they looked
lightless.  "You've seen footed spawnings before this?"

"Actually, yes.  But not for five thousand years." In disquiet thought,
the Sorcerer hitched at the strap of his satchel.

"Certainly none since the hate-wraiths who caused the aberrations were
prisoned in Rockfell Pit."

"The records in the library don't list those." Verrain ducked to
traverse the peculiar, low arches of a connecting hall.  One of Meth
Isle fortress's many cats streaked past as he flung back the door to
another stairway.

"No.  They wouldn't." Moved to an airy shift of subject, Sethvir said,
"There's a most urgent reason why we chose to meet here for the
equinox."

The light strengthened with the climb, warmed to buttery, cloud-hazed
sunshine.  This far east, the morning was already several hours gone.
Windows battened under diamondmeshed grilles opened onto Meth Isle
fortress's vista of slate roofs and terracotta chimneys, tufted under
yellow moss and fungus.  Tiled gutters with gargoyle spouts loured over
a lakeshore scummed with lily pads and beyond them, darker, deeper
waters rippled and scaled silver with wind.

Mirthivain's landscape of steaming mires loomed in the distance, an
imprinted silhouette of marsh maple and cypress cobwebbed with trailing,
tattered moss.

But the inside air now carried welcoming heat and a perfume of
clean-burning birch.  An orange tabby bounded across the landing to
weave against Verrain's shins.  He crossed a marble antechamber
inhabited by beetles in lichened corners and led into the grand hall
beyond.

Past the braced doors, lofty hammer-beamed ceilings hung splotched acid
green from the damp.  A black iron cauldron steamed on the bob, and
there Sethvir's host gestured with the flick of a dimple on each cheek.
"Your tea water.  Sufficient to last out the day, I should hope."

The Sorcerer returned a pleased grin, then hastened on to greet the two
colleagues who waited, already seated.  Other carved chairs with
upholstery felted with cat hair sat empty before the stone gryphons that
fashioned the table's massive pedestal.

A white-and-tortoiseshell torn poured itself from Asandir's lap as he
arose.  "Sethvir!  Come sit.  How long has it been since you remembered
to eat?" Tall, windburned, worn lean from travelhe made room for
Althain's Warden, in the process displacing a sleepy kitten.

The black-clad Sorcerer opposite hunched over a plate of smoked fish and
scones, his mouth too full for speech.  But the raven perched on his
shoulder swiveled beady jet eyes and croaked.

"Hello to you too, little brother." Sethvir dumped his satchel on the
floor and sat, his diffuse gaze no longer bemused, but trained in sharp
inquiry upon the quieter of his two colleagues.

Traithe stayed riveted on his food.  His wide-brimmed black hat with its
tarnished silver band hung from the knurl on his chair arm.

The caped sable mantle he still wore failed to mask the tender movements
left over from crippling injuries; in the hour of the Mistwraith's first
invasion, Traithe had made tragic sacrifice to unbind the spells on the
South Gate portal and cut off the creatures' point of entry.

When his raven clipped him a peck on the ear, he looked up, his brown
eyes dark with affront.  "Yes," he snapped as though to an unwanted
inquiry.  "My scars ache today.  But since meeting was called for at
Mirthlvain, I presume we save our strengths for something more pressing
than small healing."

Above a twist of frosty hair the raven had tousled, Asandir and Sethvir
locked glances.  Had Traithe still possessed his full faculties, no one
need say that Mirthlvain's ills were quiescent.

"Actually," the Warden of Althain admitted, "this is the closest active
focus to Alestron, where one of us needs to pay a visit.  A copy of
Magyre's papers has apparently survived and fallen into the hands of the
duke's scholars."

"Black powder again?" asked Verrain, arrived with a stalker's silence to
settle on Traithe's other side.  He had shed his frieze cloak.  Lank
blond hair tied by velvet ribbons feathered through the ruffles of a
dandy's collar several centuries out of fashion.

Sethvir sighed.  "The very same old tired story." He looked askance at
Asandir, who had forgotten to pass on the scones.

"It's scarcely on your way, but you'll need to visit the city before
going north to Rockfell to check on the Mistwraith's confinement."

Then, mindful the cruelest of Traithe's distress would not stem from old
injuries, Sethvir tucked his hands in his sleeve cuffs.

Carefully, aloud, he said, "No, I have yet to hear word."

His inference was to Kharadmon, their discorporate colleague dispatched
across the gulf to resurvey the paired worlds left severed by the
closure of South Gate.  There, for a purpose beyond comprehension, the
abomination wrought of mists and trapped human spirits first became
amalgamated into the Mistwraith that endangered Athera.

Worries abounded.  The icy, lifeless void between stars was
inhospitable, even to the bodiless spirit; worse, the alienated worlds
presumably harbored the wraith's greater portion, still at large and
potently malevolent.  The calamity that resulted from the creature's
confinement here had unveiled frightening truths: for the mist's bound
spirits were intelligent, able to wrest the key to grand conjury from
another mind trained to mastery.  They had even proved capable of
movement and planning across the threshold of time.

Best of any, the Fellowship Sorcerers understood the ugly details.

The curse they undertook to unravel to reconcile two princes was
daunting in scope, and ranged about with perils that lay outside of all
augury.

Kharadmon's journey had been launched at unmentionable risk.  If he
suffered mishap and failed to return, far more than the hope of the
royal heirs' reconciliation would be lost.  The Fellowship itself might
never be restored to its original circle of seven sorcerers.

Amid bitter silence, and stalked by the interest of three cats, the
raven spread glossy primaries and dived in to peck at the scones.

Traithe beat it back to a flurry of wings, snatched the butter crock
away, then hissed until the bird retreated to fluff indignant feathers
on his chairback.  Since mention of one discorporate colleague brought
the other to mind, he said, "Luhaine has no plans to join us?"

"Sadly not." Sethvir rescued a scone the bird had mauled and dipped tip
a creamy scoop of butter.  "The Koriani witches have renewed their
efforts to find Arithon." He bit down and chewed with absent relish.
"For equinox, they've planned a grand scrying.  A circle of twenty-one
seniors, to be matrixed through the Skyron crystal.

Luhaine's needed to try and scatter their energies everywhere else but
toward Jaelot, a touchy task.  We'd rather his influence wasn't
noticed."

"Jaelot?" Verrain's expostulation reechoed off the vaults of the
ceiling.  "That cesspit of snobbery and bad taste?  Why Jaelot?"

Asandir sighed, the broad line of his shoulders looking tired.

"The affair involves an exploit of Dakar's that's too idiotic to
mention.  But to redeem the Mad Prophet's foolishness, Halliron is
confined there till solstice.  His apprentice naturally won't leave
him." The Sorcerer hooked his chin on steepled fingers, not needing to
add that a stay of such length left Arithon's identity as Medlir
vulnerable, and not just to auguries done on the balance point of
equinox.  Since the secret of the Shadow Master's alias was the fragile
linchpin that frustrated the directive of Desh-thiere's curse, Luhaine
was bound to be misleading enchantresses for some while yet to come.

"Well," murmured Traithe in dry conclusion, "this isn't so much a
convocation as a gossip list of our weaknesses."

"From which we can certainly spare a moment for minor healing," Sethvir
interjected, with a glance of prankish triumph toward his colleague.
"For the task that lies ahead of us tonight, we can't do without your
sense of humor."

A flick of amusement rekindled the laugh lines at the corners of
Traithe's spaniel eyes.  "What's amiss that's any worse than the
monsters mewed up in these mires?"

Turned blankly vague, Sethvir fiddled pastry crumbs out of the folds of
his cuffs.  "The Koriani Council's pursuit of Arithon s'Ffalenn.  But
let that bide for a little."

His wistful glance toward the cauldron moved Verrain to arise and fetch
mugs, and steep a pot of bracing tea.

When eventide dimmed the Mirthlvain marshes, the peepings and shrills,
the skreels and the croaks of its nocturnal denizens racketed across the
shallows of Methlas Lake.  The mists had not yet arisen, to lure out the
will-o'-the-wisps and the seeping flares of the marshlights.  Unquiet
waters lay black as a facet of obsidian, stippled by the light prints of
stars, and one anomaly:a thread of reflection sculled on the shore's
dying currents cast out into darkness by a firelit casement high up in
Meth Isle fortress.

There, around the stone table in a hall dimmed to cavernous shadow,
three Fellowship Sorcerers hunched in conference.  They concluded their
survey of far-reaching responsibilities, for they alone had been left as
guardians of Athera's ancient mysteries since the old races'
inexplicable disappearance.  Wards of protection that confined creatures
dangerous in malice had been checked over world gates and preserves.  As
always, defenses had weakened; four months of difficult travels lay
ahead for Traithe and Asandir.  The demands on them both were
relentless, with their discorporate colleagues committed elsewhere.  Of
two other Sorcerers outside tonight's active circle, none spoke: the
shade of Davien the Betrayer remained banished in seclusion since the
hour of the high kings' fall; Ciladis the Lost, still gone beyond reach,
on his failed quest to find the Paravians.

The sole augury that forecast the Seven's reunity, the last hope to
accomplish the old races' return: all remained jeopardized by the
Mistwraith's curse, and two princes shackled into enmity.  Brought at
last to that point, and the reason for gathering at Meth Isle, Sethvir
peered into his empty mug.  The tea leaves scummed in the dregs
deceptively appeared to absorb him, while his eyes mapped the sonorous
currents of the earth, and the fine, singing tracks of distant stars.

"It is time."

Gaunt and silent, Asandir arose.  He collected the used crockery,
Verrain's chipped pot with its sprung wicker handle, and the moth-eaten
quills filched from the library.  With hands that moved much more
freely, Traithe rolled up a marked map.  He slipped the parchment into
its case and across the cleared table, spread the black cloth of his
cloak.

Sethvir stooped by his chair to rummage something from his satchel.
While the cats piled next to Verrain's ankles scampered off, and the one
in his lap stretched and left, the Guardian of Mirthlvain out of habit
used mage-sense to tag the cause of their unrest.  But this time no
aberrated creature from the swamps had strayed inside to be hunted.
Verrain's query touched the edge of a cold ward, a boundary field laid
down to contain a flux of refined vibration.  He realized, alarmed, that
the Fellowship meant to cast strands.  The augury they could wring out
of still air and power would be exactingly accurate, and undertaken only
at grave need.  More disturbing still, the Warden of Althain
straightened up and offered him a tin canister and stone pipe.

Verrain need not unseal the container.  The pungency that seeped from
the dried herb inside charged his senses with dreadful remembrance of
its poisons.  Shaken, he said quickly, "I shouldn't need tienelle to
follow the progression of a strand pattern."

Sethvir did not back down, but cradled the master spellbinder's hands
within his own tepid palms.  "Tonight, we're not sounding the future."
Fallen into shadow as Asandir made a spell to darken the glow of the
fire, the Warden looked oddly wizened, momentarily no sorcerer at all,
but an old man rubbed spiritless and thin by a lifetime's uncountable
sorrows.

"You weren't told earlier.  But the Mistwraith's curse that sets Lysaer
and Arithon into conflict is far worse than a geas of fixation.

The knowledge which might shed light on their condition lies two ages
back in the past."

A creeping shudder harrowed Verrain's nerves.  "You wish to tune the
strands to examine the methuri that created the abominations here at
Mirthlvain?"

"Desh-thiere's binding over the princes is not far removed from the
corruptions effected by the hate-wraiths." Asandir folded his lean
length and sat with his usual economy of movement.  "Both arose from the
meddling of spirit entities.

Both were imprinted into living flesh, with bonds of compulsion that
can't be undone without losing the victim in death."

As Sethvir's touch slipped away, Verrain flicked open the little tin,
his dimples erased by trepidation as he cleaned and packed the stubby
pipe.  The biting smell of the tienelle enveloped him, fierce enough to
make him cough.  Just how a strand casting could be ranged across time,
he desperately wished not to learn.

Sethvir unkindly answered his thought all the same.

"Time's riddle is only opaque to those senses attuned through the
flesh."

Verrain's horrified start shot the canister lid in a clanging arc to the
floor.  "Ath forfend!  Can't we ask Luhaine to handle this?"

But already Asandir had slipped beyond hearing.  His tall, dark-robed
form lay slumped across the table, his cheek cradled on folded arms.

His flesh was a vessel emptied of spirit, with Traithe already set in
anguished silence by his shoulder to stand ward and guard.

The plain fact could not be forgotten, that just such a perilous scrying
had stripped Kharadmon to discorporate status.

Verrain snapped a flame off a fingertip that trembled and ignited the
herb in his pipe.  As drug-laden smoke twined in ghostly step to the
dance of some aimless air current, he called on six centuries of
discipline to wrest his uncertainty aside.

Then he drew on the stem and gasped as the tienelle's drug whirled
through his senses like wildfire.

Vertigo upended him in a savage, exhilarant rush.  There followed a
glass-sharp awareness that scoured his dross of flesh, until the
stillness of the room compressed his ears like cotton and his eyesight
gained hurtful clarity.  The lofty, crystalline expansion of awareness
overturned him like a plunge from great height.  He clung to his chair
in desperation to stay anchored, while around him the floor lost its
semblance of solidity.  Changed perception showed him the layers of
dizzy energies that bound its cool stone into matter.

Verrain fought to master the reeling hyperbole that savaged him.

As Sethvir's expectancy jabbed through his trance, he recalled his place
and purpose: for the knowledge to redeem Athera's cursed princes,
Asandir now twisted the ow of time.  The thread of his existence hung
poised in suspension on the threshold between life and death.

The spellfield the Sorcerer laid out above the black cloth on the
tabletop had limits; its influence encompassed little more than the span
of one cubic yard.  But the resonance where its edges grazed up against
the present raised a whine past the limit of hearing, and a
flesh-stripping ache that made human bone marrow shiver and jump like
kicked mercury.

Hazed by indescribable discomfort, his blond hair strung limp with
sweat, Verrain cobbled a grip on his frayed consciousness and spun out
three filaments of light.

Sethvir raised power and spoke.  An answering resonance of mage-force
tingled outward as his words parted drug-heightened senses like razors,
touched the strands hanging poised against darkness, and set over them a
signature that gave Name.

Ruled in parallel with the life currents that endowed Ath's creation,
the filaments quickened, interleaved into patterns the trained mind
could unriddle at a glance.  Verrain called forth another strand, and
another, while through some unseen linkage with the time pocket carved
out by Asandir, Setbvir spoke Names upon them that recreated constructs
of this stone, and that mud pool, then seeded them with plants, insects,
salamanders, and trees in their individual, teeming thousands.  Here lay
like pen strokes the growth and death of moss.  There, in skeined
interlace, the play of breezes through reed beds, ringed with black
water scribed by stitched curves that marked the life dance of fishes.
In glowing, intricate splendor against a dark like layered velvet, a
mile-square portion of Mirthivain's mire became replicated in a linear
analog of patterns.

Transfixed by awe, and a harmony that wrung him breathless, Verrain wept
as he realized: the bogland he viewed was still governed by nature.  The
creatures there had yet to be enslaved, corrupted and crossbred to birth
the monstrous perversions induced by the hate-wraiths' possession.

Softly out of shadow, Sethvir said, "Commence."

Verrain felt the hair stir at his nape as channeled power sparked
through the strands.

A pent sense of danger prevailed, like the quaver of a note too long
sustained, or the chill of sharp steel masked in cloth.

Now, any misplayed distinction between the quick force of life and the
raw burn of elemental energy might sunder the time-ward's fragile
balance and rip Asandir spirit from flesh.

Verrain trembled in his battle to keep the herb's explosive prescience
tied in to geometric augury as Sethvir alone called forth the final
strand, then shaped it to the Name of the methuri.

The matrix mapped an origin Verrain had studied only in ancient text:
here, in spikes and jagged angles, he experienced the leaked bit of
storm charge that had displaced half-formed beings from the
thought-shaped, nether realm of drake-dreams.

In twists and snagged knotwork, he saw anomalies that to this world were
half demon, half monster, change vibration and emerge to rampage and
slay.  The original methurien were creatures deranged by pain, animate
consciousness torn into breathing life from an existence of shadowy
apparition.  Their bodily deaths on Paravian weapons had served only to
release their twisted essence as free wraiths.

His centuries of handling the crossbred abominations left behind as
their legacy could not prepare Mirthivain's Guardian for the
concentrated, driving hatred the methuri had embodied.

Needled breathless by passions bent and whetted for destruction, Verrain
felt his consciousness twist to escape.  The drugs in the tienelle gave
no quarter, but held his awareness channeled open through the shivering
flinch of full contact.

"Steady.  Hold steady," Sethvir cautioned.

Verrain's fingernails split under the force of his grip on the table as
the first wraith ensnared a live victim.  The moment of its possession
was terrible to witness: clean-edged lines that delineated a mouse
unique unto itself in Ath's creation flickered and spiked into a chaotic
jumble that, even two ages later, seemed to shock the night air with
scream upon scream of torment.  Verrain stung as though every nerve in
his body had been sieved out and scorched in hot acid.

Locked into step with the strands' unfolding sequence, he watched the
signature pattern of the mouse blur, coil, then fix in a flare of cold
fire into something wholly wrong, in mind and matter remolded to a
parasitic hybrid that was irrationally, unthinkably other.  What moved
and breathed in the heart of the strands' reflection was a thing outside
the Major Balance, the warp and weft of its birthright wrenched contrary
to natural law.

Revolted to spasms of dry nausea, the spellbinder clamped hands to his
lips until the blood felt squeezed from his fingers.

He compelled himself to abide as Sethvir broadened his study: and
snakes, insects, otters, and frogs all suffered possession in turn.

The moment of change in each case was sliced free of time and dissected;
line for line, contortion for mauled contortion, the maligned detail of
the hate-wraiths' workings wrung out in white pain from their victims.
Life force itself became impressed and internally warped until only the
husk of the body remained, to spawn its altered, aberrant offspring. The
warped things birthed from such breedings in turn became subservient to
the whim of the host.

Drenched in a cold sweat, Verrain tracked Sethvir's analysis of the past
as methuri abominations insinuated a rift in earthly order, to knot a
linkage through the breathing essence of spirit and the energy coils
that underpinned fleshly matter.

The conclusion in the strands was most clear.  Not only would separation
trigger the dissolution of bodily substance, but the wraith in
possession could unkey the quickened flesh and impose willful change
with impunity.

Aghast, Verrain whispered, "You think Desh-thiere's curse upon the
princes may work in a similar way?"

Sethvir looked up, the strand-wrought, desecrated patterns imprinted in
frosty reflection upon his emotionless eyes.

"That's what we're here to determine." He succumbed to a shudder, as if
his detachment gave way and the horrors reeled off in cold augury
overcame him in one slamming wave.  Then he blotted damp palms on his
sleeve cuffs and spoke a single clipped syllable.  The knit mesh of
forces that energized the strands bled off in a crackle of sparks.

Asandir drew a racking breath and stirred, while Traithe stepped aside
and dropped into a chair as though his knees had failed him.

For an interval spanning several minutes, nobody cared to try speech.

Verrain finally pushed upright and made his unsteady way to the hearth
to unshield the fire and brew tea.  The toxins in the tienelle had left
him dehydrated and queasy; spurious starts of vision still snatched
through his senses like flares.  Tired to his bones, his hypersensitized
awareness cringing even from the rub of the gray torn just returned to
bask by the settle, the spellbinder struggled for the self-command to
weather the withdrawal and transmute the herb's fatal poisons.

Behind him discussion continued, Fellowship voices mazed in grim echoes
as comparisons were drawn from their study of the methuri, and the
Mistwraith's curse on the princes.  Verrain rubbed stinging eyes, unable
to quell his ripping shudders as truesight relived the hideous
aberrations the strands had etched into memory.  The hissing splatter of
boiled-over water yanked back his straying thoughts.  Cold and sick unto
lassitude, he bent to mind the cauldron.  He could never regard the
monstrosities of Mirthivain in quite the same fashion again; dangerous
as they were, and vicious, still, they deserved his full measure of
pity.

The chance that two sons of Athera's royal lines might suffer a similar
disfigurement offered liorror beyond sane belief.

Braced by hot tea and determination, Verrain reclaimed his chair.

He realized with renewed disquiet that the Fellowship prepared another
scrying.  Though this next divination was simple and harmless, an image
drawn from straight recall, Asandir looked hollow eyed.  His craggy
profile jutted into hot light as his large-knuckled hands attended the
task of striking fresh flame to a candlewick.  The wrist Traithe raised
to put aside his raven trembled in apprehension.

Even Sethvir seemed on edge.  Mantled in tawdry burgundy velvet, his
collar caught with hair like snagged fishline, he raised eyes touched to
fevered brilliance and regarded each of his colleagues.

"We're caught in a critical moment." To Asandir, whose part was to draw
the scrying, he said obliquely, "Will the reliving in depth be too
much?"

"Ath have mercy, it will become so, if uncertainty leads me to
procrastinate." Asandir's distress was noticed by the cats, who streaked
from dim corners to crowd his lap, lace through his ankles, and vie for
the chance to offer comfort.

His strong hands moved, returning their attentions in rueful, saddened
irony.  "Little brothers, I'm truly grateful.  But our night's work
isn't through yet."

The Sorcerer's words reached triangular pairs of ears and imparted
uncanny understanding.  As clear in their disdain of spell currents as a
chance-met douse in cold water, the cats dashed off in a twitching
flinch of back fur, a shaking of paws, and scything jerks of offended
tails.

Verrain might have chuckled at their haughtiness had the moment been
less distressed.  Whatever troublesome development was afoot, the
Sorcerers gave no explanation.  Asandir set aside the rusted striker and
poised in concerned stillness.

While his fierce eyes closed, that alone had witnessed the moment when
Desh-thiere's curse claimed its victims, the oddity recurred: this same
exhaustive search had been accomplished years since, in the hour the
disaster had befallen.

The spellbinder's puzzlement became crushed aside by a rising wave of
bright force.  Power coalesced, great enough to melt rock or ignite
metal like a twig of dry tinder.  Over the dusky weave of Traithe's
cloak, carved out by will and clean conjury, Asandir's augury re-formed
the sphere of the candle's fire, to re-create an event six years past
when Etarra's teeming thousands had turned out to celebrate the crowning
of Rathain's sanctioned prince ...

Spring sun flooded over the royal banners, streamered in Rathain's
colors of silver and green.  On a gallery overhanging the city's wide
square, above the surge of a multitude, one man's gold hair and fine
jewelry flared in caught light as he raised his arms in sudden violence.
His words scribed no sound in the window of Asandir's reconjuring; the
instant Desh-thiere's fragmented wraith enacted its possession over
Lysaer s'Ilessid, he raised his gift in a lightning bolt attack against
an enemy singled out ....

Despite knowledge that the Mistwraith's vengeance had exploited Lysaer,
that its meddling distortion of the justice a benevolent past conjury
had grafted into the s'llessid royal line had lent it the leverage to
wreak ill, nothing could prepare for the naked, wasting passion launched
against the Master of Shadow.  Racked by a spasm of visceral revulsion,
Verrain watched, riveted, as the moment continued to unfold.

The light bolt sheared on, a fateful, white arc offire that tore a
scream from roiled air.  The black-haired victim who was its sure target
thrashed to escape, while two terrified, burly merchants held him
pinioned at wrists and knees.  The sword he might have turned to cut his
way free as well had not been in his hand.  He ignored his captors'
efforts to wrest the blade away.  To Arithon s'Ffalenn, all else lost
meaning before the attack set against him by his half brother.

Pinned like a moth to a card by a needle of sick fascination, Verrain
saw the crystalline flicker that sheeted through the burn of Lysaer's
assault: an unexpected, warning blaze of Paravian spellcraft released by
Arithon's heirloom sword.

Then the weapon was wrenched away, to fall in mute motion to the
pavement.

As Rathain's disarmed prince raised his hand to shape shadow, Sethvir
interrupted like the slap of a whip striking flesh, "Stop it there."

In control that disallowed pity, Asandir locked the scrying.

Like a reflection cold frozen in a mirror, or a jewel spiked through a
raveled plane of darkness, he held a fragment excised out of time.

The result felt as rendingly ghastly as a dying man's drawn-out scream.
Again, Verrain wondered why the Fellowship Sorcerers should distress
themselves to launch this irrelevant review.

Arithon s'Ffalenn had tipped his face skyward.  Eyes widened to a
tourmaline blaze of anguish, he tracked a raven that arrowed inflight
above the mob etched motionless in the square.  The hand cocked back in
the first blooming burst of cast shadow showed his fingers flexed in
concentration.  The directive to guide the spell's homing was set for
Traithe's bird, dispatched at need to find Sethvir.  A heartbeat shy of
disaster, the prince's concern lay unmasked, not for himself but for a
wasp's nest of ramifications: that if the Fellowship Sorcerers went
unwarned of this crisis, far more than his own life and destiny were
going to fall forfeit in consequence....

"The farsight of s'Ahelas!" Verrain looked up, shocked by the evidence
before him.  "No one told me Rathain's prince had inherited the marked
gift of his mother's line along with s'Ffalenn compassion."

"To his sorrow and that of his half brother also," Sethvir affirmed in
quiet grief "Both carry the attributes of two royal families."

Across the table, embattled by raw recriminations, Traithe sucked a fast
breath and shut his eyes.  "Ath's blessed mercy, I should never have
lent him my raven."

"The bird's guidance changed nothing," Asandir disagreed in jarring
firmness.  Distanced from emotion by the fearful discipline he needed to
stabilize the scrying, he added, "You'll see as much once the vibration
is refined to show a clear imprint of the aura."

Unhappiness dwelled like a sore point, that such redefinition was only
required to match the shortfalls of Verrain and Traithe; or else for
some larger, interconnected reason that remained too elusive to place.

Then Sethvir cut in with an adamance to end Verrain's labored
speculation.  "Dare we overlook a single facet?  The Mistwraith and its
malice are unprecedented.  We might need every angle at hand to unkey
the riddle of the curse."

Asandir bowed his head and realigned the augury.  Still

mazed under influence of the tienelle, Verrain flinched as the image
shimmered into a delicate, prismatic fire of patterns.

These displayed the character and emotions of Rathain's prince through
the unshielded vibrations of his life force.  The outrage of the
merchants showed also, a rinsed flare of ruby that fringed the
peripheral edges.  But their coarse-textured hatred became discarded
like noise before the tight-meshed imprint that was Arithon.

Verrain shuddered, confounded by a waning urge to weep and hold his
breath.

The aura of the s'Ffalenn prince sang through the vision in

spare and forceful irony, even as Lysaer's must have done through the
hour of crisis when Sethvir and Asandir between them had disentangled
him from the possession of the wraith that had sealed Desh-thiere's
vengeance.

Distaste like sand in his gut, Verrain pushed past grief to see more:
through passage to Athera by way of the Red Desert, this prince had
acquired the matrix imparted by the Five Centuries Fountain, a structure
of riddles and spells built and abandoned by Davien the Betrayer in the
years before he raised the insurrection to overturn kingdom rule.

"Fatemaster's mercy." Verrain expelled a sharp exhalation.

"Both half brothers came here by way of the Worldsend Gate.

Are they equally marked by the Betrayer's enforced longevity?  If so,
this geas of Desh-thiere's could upset the whole continent through the
course of five hundred years!"

Sethvir's hand dropped, warm and steady on the spellbinder's shoulder.
"Save thought for more than despair.

Davien's gift of added life span might equally lend us grace to achieve
the princes' salvation." But in comfortless fact, his platitude held no
certainty.

That moment, driven to straight urgency by some unseen cue, Althain's
Warden cried, "Now!  Jump ahead to the moment of the curse."

The image in the candleflame unlocked to kaleidoscopic change; and
Verrain felt as a man sent to dam back a cataclysm with only a wish and
bare hands.

Lysaer's bolt struck.

A scintillantflash bisected the sphere of the vision.  Seared from palm
to right elbow, Arithon recoiled from worse than scorched flesh.

Jabbed and enveloped through the crux of half-frozen defenses, he opened
his mouth to scream as he tasted the measure of his downfall And peril
incarnate closed over him.  Lysaer's killing band of light shimmered and
exploded, to unveil the Mistvvraith's covert conjury: the bane-ward of
the curse, transferred inside an attack no schooled mind had ever
thought to suspect.

"Slow the sequence," Sethvir commanded in a sharp-etched whisper.

Verrain jammed his fists against his temples as the brilliance shed away
to unveil the stripped armature of the geas, a serried mesh ugly as
flung blood, but never random.  The spellbinder who shared its ruthless
symmetry could wish his own tears could scald and blind him.

"Dharkaron witness," he managed on a rasped catch of breath.  "The
creature baited its binding with Arithon's personal imprint."

"Lock and key." Sethvir's affirmation came oddly muffled by distance.
"The bystanders were safe, had we known it."

Traithe had no comment to offer; and Verrain could only ponder a third
time why this scrying should be rewrought in such depth.  One glance was
enough to establish plain fact: Desh-thiere's curse and the signature
pattern which comprised the extinct methuri held only chance similarity.
As the Fellowship certainly realized, no further help for their princes
could be garnered from Mirthlvain mire's dark history.

The present scrying edged forward.  In a hideous play of stopped motion,
the spell coils netted their victim.  Barbed tendrils flung out like
grapples and snagged, to shed pervasive currents throughout the
s'Ffalenn prince's being.

His torment, physical and mental, shivered, shocked, and rebounded in a
voiceless play of light.  Through pain enough to cripple thought,
Arithon fought back: in starbursts of mage-fire; in sigils and
counterwards knotted and thrashed in harried ink twists of shadow.

Yet Desh-thiere's malice had been configured to outflank and countermand
every turn of his desperate strength.

Verrain saw the clean bars of will wrapped and smothered, the brilliance
of purpose starkly crushed.  Through the heartbeat while Arithon's
self-awareness lay slapped back and stunned, the curse spun insidious
transformation.

"Odd, don't you think, that the creature made its incursion a static
one," the spellbinder ventured.  "How much simpler to go the next step
and force a degenerative erosion of the spirit."

Sethvir's mouth thinned amid a bracketing bristle of beard.

His uneasiness stayed unvoiced, that he feared such restraint held a
purpose.  The Mistwraith had set the princes against each other; it had
not overtly destroyed them.

That its works could have done so was plain as the vision unreeled.

Verrain combed through the locked snarl of energies, overwhelmed by the
evidence that this geas held no opening for reprieve.  Leaving the
s'Ffalenn personality symmetrical and intact, the bane spell had meddled
in cruel selectivity.  Like a spider staked out in a web, it insinuated
itself where hurt would be greatest: across will, emotion, and
integrity.  It waited, a dread vortex that consumed in cumulative
subtlety, evenas it pressed the incessant urge to battle its chosen
nemesis:to kill Lysaer, and no other, a compulsion harnessed in stepwith
life and spirit and consciousness.

The last coil sliced into place.  Scarlet trailers bound close as wire,
to vanish without trace in the quicksilver haze of the aura.

Conclusion shaped only despair: the curse which shackled the half
brothers was a mirror image construct that choked envenomed tendrils
around every nuance of the victim's being.  To cut or disturb the least
jointure would trip a flashfire backlash of dissolution.

Flesh would die and spirit be instantly annihilated.  The enslavement at
face value might seem less damaging, but its depths were more insidious
than any distortion inflicted by methuri possession.

Limp as old rags from a helplessness the Fellowship must have gauged in
advance, Verrain masked his face in his palms.  Five centuries was not
enough, he thought sadly, to solve a quandary of such reaching
proportion.

"Well the curse won't pass to the next generation," Sethvir offered to
ease the spellbinder's despondency.  "Should either prince engender
offspring, their heirs will be born unsullied."

"Small comfort," Traithe allowed, as he gathered his cloak from the
tabletop.  His resignation showed divided thoughts: whether to bless the
mage training that gave Arithon limited means to resist the banespell's
directive, or to curse the added peril his schooled talent could present
as the conflict renewed, at stakes inevitably more dire.

Made aware by the bound of a cat into his lap that the candle now burned
clean of conjury, Verrain welcomed the animal's small warmth against the
chills of withdrawal and grief.

Dawn shed a leaden glimmer through the casement.  Dulled as wind-beaten
linen in its light, Asandir stretched, his move to arise cut short by
Sethvir, who exchanged a weighted glance, then bent to recover his
satchel.

"You're headed north," the Warden of Althain said, settled erect with
his hands full.  "I'd be obliged if you could deliver this to Arithon
when his apprenticeship with the Masterbard ends."

Asandir's eyes snapped up, keen edged as steel raised to guard point.
"Not so soon!" he exclaimed.  Then in brittle capitulation, he reached
across the table and relieved Sethvir of the satchel.  Once his grip
closed over the ties, he knew the list of its contents.  "Nautical
charts and Anithael's navigational instruments?  Why?"

"Arithon asked for them," Sethvir replied in painful, unsmiling
directness.  "He hoped to hasten Halliron's passage to Shand.  But the
sea may have to answer a more urgent need, and the letter Lady Maenalle
sent as well."

The grievous implication hung through suspended quiet, that the six
years of peace Arithon had bought since the massacre at Strakewood
Forest, that he had wrested from his fate by denying his half brother
any viable target to strike at, might be threatened well before any
means lay at hand to challenge the Mistwraith's fell binding.

Unless and until Kharadmon came back successful from his quest, the
hands of the Fellowship remained tied.

Traithe jammed on his hat to mask trepidation.

Afflicted by more personal ties to the princes, Asandir pushed back his
chair and strode out with a speed that shed drafts and snuffed the spent
flicker of the candle.

Verrain could only clench his knuckles in cat fur, his throat closed
against questions too fearful to ask, and his eyes flooded from what he
hoped was flung smoke from the wick that glowed briefly and blinked out.

Disclosure

The irksome price of rushing passage across the continent by means of
tapping a power lane was the wrenching disorientation that lingered
after arrival.  Restored to his tower in Atainia with trouble enough on
his mind to threaten a thunderous headache, the Warden of Althain paced.
Each step squelched across the scarlet carpet in his bedchamber, soaked
since a squall had dumped rain through the casement left ajar in his
absence.  His thick, furry buskins wicked up the wet and added a smell
like damp dog to the mustiness already in the room.

"You know," a disembodied voice admonished in reedy bass, "there are
quite a lot of books in this tower that are going to flock and mold if
you don't amend your poor housekeeping."

Sethvir stopped short amid puddles and sundry furnishings burdened like
a fair stall with clutter.  "Luhaine?  You wouldn't leave the Koriani
witches unguarded for the simple pleasure of berating me."

The query raised a slow spin of air in one corner, which rocked a sagged
wicker hamper crammed to bursting with cast-off socks.  Several woolly
toes lolled over the brim, unraveled beyond help of darning; but
Sethvir's drifty attentiveness reflected no shame for his negligence.

A moment passed in suspension.

Then, typically sulky, the elusive voice proffered reply.

"After last night's exertions, what need to guard?  Just now, the
Koriani Senior Circle lie tucked up in quilts, comatose as buds in a
hard frost."

Undaunted by Luhaine's penchant for evasions in flowery language,
Sethvir sighed.  "Don't say our ruse went for nothing.  Asandir's temper
is touchy as if he'd swallowed pins, and though we needed our master
spellbinder's help for scrying dead methurien, Verrain need not have
been aggrieved by what else transpired last night."

"Well, the choice of decoy was never my idea, if you care to recall!"
Disturbed drafts huffed across the chamber, riffling the pages of a
dozen opened books.  "And ruse?  Dharkaron Avenger!  What a blundering
understatement."

Since the Koriani had powered their rites at equinox from the fifth
lane's heightened energies, and Asandir at the appropriate moment had
raised a facsimile of Arithon's aura pattern in the tower above Meth
Isle's focus with all the force and subtlety of a thunderclap, the
conclusion was shatteringly selfevident.  "Ath Creator could not have
stopped your projection from entangling the Koriani scrying to
perdition," Luhaine snapped.

The Koriani probe cast out to seek the Shadow Master had been drawn to
its match like a homing signal, and stuck there like nails in old oak.
If their Senior Circle had been powerless to separate the energies in
further search for the living man, the discorporate Sorcerer's testiness
was just.  The unavoidable sidebar had lent them unwise insight into
Arithon's character and potential.  Predictably, the enchantresses had
seized full advantage.

"So, how much did they learn?" Sethvir asked on a grainy note of
laughter.

The request engaged a shadowy blur that defined itself into the
corpulent image of the bodiless being he addressed.  Robed in scholar's
gray belted at the waist with a doubled band of leather that buckled
suspiciously like a harness girth, Luhaine stalked soundlessly forward.

Frowning over full cheeks and a wheat shock bristle of whiskers, he
stabbed a stumpy finger in accusation.  "Considering Dakar's ploys in
Jaelot?  By rights his plague of fiends should have drawn Koriani
interest like flies to dead meat to peddle talismans against that Lyat
bane.  I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate the enchantresses
let that slip past."

Sethvir raised bushy eyebrows.

The spirit who glided over the moist carpet seldom cursed, but his
agitation showed signs of turning stormy.  His rejoinder was not
delivered in words, but in a cobbled scrap of memory hurled like a slap
at his colleague.

For a second, Sethvir shared the tight and detailed vision of a wasted
crone in violet veils bent over an ebon table.

Around her like flesh-eating vultures in hoods the silky sheen of black
grapes, a circle of women followed her interest as she said, "Ah, but
his endowments are to be envied."

The subject under discussion was a shimmering web of light captured by
determined scrying: the life print of Arithon s'Ffalenn as unveiled the
past night over Meth Isle's focus.  As avidly as spiders might suck the
juices from a trapped insect, the enchantresses analyzed his attributes.
They dissected the spiraled framework of his power, both latent and
schooled: of a mage's chained discipline and a shadow master's wild
talent linked through the blaze of a visionary mind.  The cherished
potential of his musician's talents were picked out in all their
ethereal shadings, a silver-lace braid wound through a will stamped in
flesh like bright wire.  Here, the beacon symmetry of s'Ahelas farvision
tangled razor point edges with the nettle and gossamer tendrils of
undying s'Ffalenn compassion.

There, the enchantresses read the sorrow and despair in the moment of
Desh-thiere's conquest: Arithon's self-awareness like the fixed sting of
thorns, that hope and effort could buy him no better than failure.

Sethvir shrugged the burdensome image away with long-suffering patience.
"The Koriani Prime and her First Senior learned nearly as much from a
spying foray six years ago.  Although Arithon's personal Name pattern is
now shared in common with the Prime Circle, Morriel is little more
enlightened."

Luhaine sniffed, his bodiless bulk passing without mishap between a side
table stacked with gutted tea canisters and a clothes tree festooned
with worn bridles.  "Well, she certainly didn't know that Arithon and
Lysaer had drunk from the Five Centuries Fountain."

Sethvir stilled.  His eyes turned a dreamy, vacuous blue as he engaged
direct power to sample the consternation bought on the heels of that
revelation.  When he found the Prime Circle scurrying in agitation like
an anthill pounded by a hailstorm, he chuckled outright.  "The news
should keep them busy for a little.  Why trouble?  The only ramification
I can see beyond hysterics, is one especially deserving young initiate
will gain a course of training she would otherwise be forbidden to
merit."

Luhaine's lugubrious mood failed to brighten.

The Warden of Althain sighed.  As if conceding some unseen point, he sat
upon a cot he never slept in, folded veined hands on his knees, and
absorbed himself in muttering a cantrip that would banish the damp from
his rug.  When the binding was complete and the musty smell dispersed
along with the dregs of the water, he fidgeted gently and peered at the
vortex that comprised his discorporate guest.  "Luhaine?"

The portly apparition spun about in a noiseless whirl of gray.

"You can't say I haven't witnessed more than my share of the
Koriathain's grand councils.  They've fixed on the ironies of Arithon's
nature and see nothing beyond surface paradox.  That, they've concluded,
creates an explosive potential for instability.  Once their Senior
Circle divines the Shadow Master's chosen course and location, they're
not going to allow him free will.  He's the last of his line, and
Morriel's ancient with spite.  You know they're very likely to launch on
a quest to see him dead."

Sethvir seemed to hold to concentration with an effort.

"They don't know Arithon's mage powers were left impaired since the
battle at Strakewood.  Given that aura to study in depth, do you think
they're going to plunge in and meddle without caution?  We're speaking
of Torbrand's descendant, after all.  By Ath, at that, they'd be
entitled to suffer due consequences!"

But the immediacy of the Shadow Master's peril could not be so lightly
dismissed.

"I don't care how nasty a temper Rathain's prince has inherited.

If he gets himself compromised by enchantresses and we make an open move
to intervene, we're going to gain a whole world of trouble."

Luhaine's image bulked ominously dark against the lit square of the
casement.  "Tell me now," he insisted in point-blank demand much against
his stolid nature.

"How much time have we bought before the Koriathain try again?

They're bound to bring still more power to bear and we can't use the
same ploy twice.  How long before they have their way and unriddle
Arithon's disguise?"

"The outlook isn't good," Sethvir allowed in vague discomfort.  As
Luhaine's black eyes glared through him, he relented in a gritty snap of
grief.  "At my outside guess, three months."

"Midsummer solstice," Luhaine murmured.  "Daelion show us all mercy, we
don't even know if Kharadmon will survive, much less return before
then."

Crisis could fall well before the Fellowship was prepared to match their
powers against the Mistwraith's banespell.  This time, when no answer
was forthcoming, Luhaine lacked the will to badger Sethvir from his
silence.

Disruption

The sparrows who scrapped over the bread crusts on the windowsill
stopped pecking after crumbs and flurried away on startled wings.

Their shadows flitted across the worktable, cluttered with its melee of
opened herb jars, powdered roots, and tied bundles of dried flowers that
burdened the air with thick scents.

Determined to ignore whatever spurred their panicked flight, Elaira,
initiate Koriani enchantress, continued to brew the poultice paste she
hoped might treat the lame shepherd; one whose leg had mended awry from
a fall through a rockslide, and whom the hospice healers had tried to
turn off because his need was not urgent.  Though his fused joints made
him limp, he could walk enough to manage, if never to scale steep slopes
of Vastmark shale to drive his flocks to summer pasture.

No stranger to poverty, Elaira often shouldered illogical causes.

Confirmed as a misfit, she was left by her peers to pursue her studies
in a niche between the stills and the herb stores.  There, in solitary,
contented untidiness, she fed songbirds on crusts that were not moldy,
and concocted obscure remedies as she pleased.  A loosened coil of
auburn hair licked a cheek streaked yellow with powdered groundsel.

Steadily swearing in gutter dialect, pale eyes level in concentration,
Elaira strove to balance the conjury laid like ghostly embroidery across
the heated air above her crucible.

The delicate forces flickered and twined, scorched thin at the edges as
crux points strained to spin awry.  To reshape a mangled bone and
contracted knots of scar tissue took more than astringents configured
with seals of forced growth.

Renewal of any deformity required a death-spell tempered with runes of
rebirth, contrary and difficult fluxes for the most gifted healer to
balance-an energy binding Elaira knew better than to try while her mind
was tormented to distraction.

She bit her lip, pressed by a reasonless urge to throw a glass flask
just for the need to hear it shatter.  The alternative was to break
inside, to turn to face whoever had raised her door latch and scattered
the timid songbirds.  Elaira shut her lips in fierce denial, while the
filigreed energies she had wrought through the course of an unspeakable
morning collapsed in tangles and bled away.

She could bury herself in the pages of musty herbals and brew tisanes
until she rotted away into dotage without lifting a jot of her misery.
Her arcane sensitivity to water made the sea tides ring in her blood.
Awareness of the spring equinox was ingrained in her being, alongside
the scrying twenty-one enchantresses had undertaken on last night's lane
surge, to hunt down and locate one man.

Merciful Ath, Elaira begged silently, let the Koriani Senior Council not
have found Arithon s'Ffalenn.

Her plea with fate went unanswered.

"The Prime Enchantress requests your immediate presence," the intruder
in the doorway announced in a clear-edged child's treble.

No such summons would come to her if Arithon's position was not
compromised.  Elaira moved, stood, acknowledged the blond page boy who
looked young for his eight years in the order's quilted violet livery.

"Lead me to the matriarch."

Through a miracle, her voice came out steady.

Since the ill-starred battle at Strakewood, she had endured the years as
best she could, hedged and dogged by the surety that Arithon's anonymity
could not last, not when the Koriani Council had named his wild talents
a latent threat to society and her knowledge was their bridge to
understand him.

Elaira stepped into the corridor on the heels of the page, vexed with
her superiors enough to pity his adult composure.

On impulse, she said, "Let's take the shortcut through the service
vaults."

"You want to?" The child grinned around missing front teeth, then raced
ahead and nipped through a dingy, arched postern.

The ancient hospice abandoned to Koriani use by the initiates of Ath's
Brotherhood was an ungainly, rambling edifice, drilled like a battered
honeycomb into the limestone scarps south of Forthmark.  Its crumbling
warren of storerooms harbored perpetual, clammy humidity, fed by damp,
porous rock that seeped from the flow of underground hot springs.  The
spacious outer chambers used to house the sick were less oppressive,
spared by the beat of clean sunlight through south-facing casements.
There the pervasive must of mildew was scoured off by boy wards wielding
buckets and holystones to earn their keep.

Elaira's mood better suited the cavernous back staircases and
circuitous, low-ceilinged tunnels that twined through root cellars and
storage cells.  Cobwebs streamed in the drafts, glistening like shot
silk in the glow of widely spaced torches.  The air reeked of tallow
smoke and corroded metal, and the walls wore patinas of old soot.

Elaira hurried.  Her step made no noise, despite hard-soled boots and a
stone floor that threw back sharp echoes.  Orphan of a street whore,
raised from infancy by beggars until an unlucky brush with the law had
bound her into Koriani fosterage, she kept the sly habits of her
childhood.  Yet no matter how unobtrusively she passed, the silver-blond
fairness and amethyst silk tunic of Morriel's personal page boy drew
notice from every peer and scullion dispatched on errands to the
cellars.

Ones who did not merit summons before their Prime, and who were the
happier for it.

Elaira shrugged off the speculative whispers that hissed in the wake of
her steps.  Already marked apart for a worldly entanglement she was
helpless to alter or break, she took perverse pleasure in watching the
Prime's page boy spoil his formal grooming.  Past the steam-choked
laundry, where red-cheeked junior novices gossiped across their
washtubs, through a chattering procession of boy wards who hauled in
wood for the kitchen, Elaira's cavorting escort was remarked.

Aware to a fine point of the Prime Circle's use for her flaws, she dared
to ignore the hurry senior taking inventory, who brandished her tally
slates and scolded.

In breathless vindication, Elaira grabbed the child's hand and tugged
him to refuge in a pantry.  A hidden door at the back opened through the
annex by the wine stores, to the boy's smothered gasp of delight.

"Didn't know about this byway, did you?" Elaira grinned, scraped cobwebs
from her hair, and cupped the crystal that hung from the chain at her
neck.  "You'll like it.  The floorboards are infested with cockroaches."
As the power she focused brightened through her hands, she said, "Go on.
Catch a few if you want.  Just don't let me find you tweaking off any
legs or wings.  You can horrify your dorm mistress all you like.  But if
the insects take any harm from your pranks, I'll blister your tail with
a spell."

The page stifled a whoop and fell to, dirtying the knees of his hose as
he scavenged beneath an old grape press.  Elaira watched his deviltry in
sad silence.  The male children selected as Morriel's pages led
proscribed lives, chosen tools of Koriani higher purpose.  But unlike
her, whose vows constrained for life service, the boys regained freedom
at puberty.

She helpfully offered her handkerchief to net and secure the live
contraband, then doused her spell and hustled up the timber stair with
its rickety rope and tackle, originally strung to lower filled vats,
before Koriani tenure had uprooted the vineyards to grow herbs.

Elaira opened the stairwell portal.  Someone had smeared lard on the
hinges, probably a scullion sneaking off for assignation with a
milkmaid.  The enchantress shut her eyes, swept by unbidden association:
of long, musician's fingers flicking dry stems of hay from her hair.
Whether the tenderness in that memory had arisen from instinctive
s'Ffalenn compassion, or some deeper need that touched the heart, she
might never determine.  Her order's inflexible codes of conduct
disbarred her from amorous pursuits.  Elaira shook off forbidden
thoughts, while the page reassumed his lapsed duty.  He preceded her
down the corridor to the columned atrium Ath's initiates had originally
used for their devotions.

Before the casements had been paned with stout glass, the chamber had
been a terrace garden open to the sweep of mountain breezes.

Marble toned like fine, blue-veined flesh had lain under snow through
winter's freezes.  In the hot, amber days of Shandian summer, flowering
vines had laddered the pillars, shedding sweet fragrance and petals.

Now, the cracked stone planters were planked over as tables, or else
spell-sealed as vault space to preserve rare scrolls on arcane practice.
The fountains and pools were all mortared in, their scars masked under
purple carpets sewn in silver with Koriani seals of ward and guard.

Older sigils carved in the walls and the roof groins channeled more
potent powers still: a captured resonance of earth song, or the clear,
high vibrations spiraled in sympathy with the constellations along the
ecliptic.  Except for a poignancy instilled by time and death that
marked its brotherhood creators as mortal, the currents ran similar to
the ghostly, faded harmonies left imprinted upon the land by the
mysteries of the vanished Paravians.

But no past solace imparted by Ath's initiates could bring comfort to
the future.  Elaira pressed leadenly forward, into sunlight and space.

Unchanged by the grand turn of centuries, a ceremonial fire burned in
the squat bronze brazier set in the chamber's center.  Nested in the
cushioned chair behind, the Prime Enchantress of the Koriani Order
awaited audience.  She was old, emaciated as a dry stick.  The scrappily
withered features above her winged collar seemed fused with the
porcelain bone beneath.  Moriel wore her cloudy hair netted in diamond
pins.

The lavender-and-purple mantle of high office enveloped her torso like a
calyx, and fine knuckles reduced like storm-stripped twigs rested loose
in her lap.

"I heard you clearly," she was saying, her voice the reedy scrape of
dead leaves against granite.  "Your point does not signify in this
case."

The tall, graceful senior she addressed raised her chin.

Eyes of tigerish, tawny brown flashed under the silver-wired band of a
high initiate's cowl.  "The girl is weak and unsuited.

Dare we entrust such responsibility to a vessel twice proven to be
flawed?"

Morriel Prime gave a breathy scrape of laughter.  "Are you befitted to
judge?" She folded clawed hands, then restlessly laid them separate
since neither position eased their pain.  "Take heed and look inward,
First Senior.  Your view could well be as muddled.  For a fact, your
speech is unwarrantedly careless."

Quick instinct made Elaira break habit and allow her next footfall to
grate.

First Senior Lirenda whirled at the noise.  "You!" A flush stained her
aristocratic cheekbones, vivid above the pleated robe that yoked her
trim shoulders.  Her ebony hair was sleeked back in combs, no single
strand out of place.  "Given the nature of your origins, I should expect
you would lurk your way here through the cellars."

"It's quicker," Elaira provoked in the street drawl of her girlhood.
Unrepentant, she hurried her curtsy of obeisance to the Prime.  "Your
will, matriarch."

The crone watched her arise wide eyes black and colorless as rubbed
glass.  She did not speak, but studied, ruthlessly practiced in the
Koriani arts of subtle observation and analysis.  Elaira bore up, the
more fiercely determined since streetwise bravado could never face down
Morriel's weight of years and experience.  As if her very thoughts were
stamped into live flesh, the Koriani matriarch could read the question
that grieved her; would measure the assault against pride, that
eventually must crumple before need to ask outright for the results of
last night's scrying.

Stiff to her toes before the urge to bolt outright, strained to her
limits before a truth that held infinite capacity to wound her, Elaira
scarcely heard the words Lirenda used to scold the page.

Powerless, now, to assume the blame for the grime on his livery, the
young enchantress endured while the hidden handkerchief was discovered
and shaken out, to the First Senior's redoubled annoyance as its
six-legged cargo scuttled to shelter under her skirts.

A glint too cold to be humor touched the depths of Morriel's eyes.

"But our scrying was unsuccessful, girl.  We haven't yet managed to
discover the refuge of Rathain's last prince."

Elaira could not quite stifle her shuddering sigh of relief.

"You summoned.  How must I serve?"

"Sit." Morriel accompanied the command with a gesture clipped short by
exhausted tolerance and sore joints.  "Our efforts were bent awry by
chance interference from the Fellowship.  The timing in fact lent us
insight and our order has gained in the counterplay."

Past the edge of the carpet, First Enchantress Lirenda pulped a last
fleeing insect beneath her heel.  Intuitively sure the creature's swift
demise was impelled by more than harmless mischief, Elaira clasped her
hands in sweating dread.

"Show her," Morriel commanded.

Lirenda dismissed the chastised page.  Lips compressed in capitulation
that marred her air of hauteur, she stalked across the carpet.  The sun
at her back scythed her shadow over figured argent sigils and quenched
their surface glitter as she knelt in a crisp sweep of skirts before the
burning brazier.

Where Elaira's elemental affinities predisposed her to conjure through
water, Lirenda used fire for alignment.  At one with the will of her
Prime, she closed her eyes and settled into a light trance.

As the matriarch's successor-in-training, her powers were impressively
tempered.  Grazed by a thrum of current across her nerves, Elaira
struggled to quell her apprehension.  Too soon, the red gold blaze of
the embers changed character, became charged to cold blue that threw
neither light nor warmth.  Across the fire's altered energy, ethereal at
first as the spell-thread stitched into the rugs, a pattern formed,
fused, and blazed into a fixed configuration.  Revealed in clear focus
through Lirenda's consciousness, Elaira viewed a mesh of visionary
artistry, then ironies complex enough to storm through will and reflex,
and arrest her heart between beats.

She recognized the strand pattern analog of Arithon s'Ffalenn's living
aura, exposed in the fullness of Fellowship perception.

She gasped.  In uncompromising lines, the man's hidden self lay mapped
out in a nuance that damned.  As never before, she saw how vision and
compassion, power and sensitivity, strength and pity lay paired beyond
compatibility.  Morriel's fear was real, that the added burden of
Desh-thiere's curse might anneal the whole into a laceration of spirit
with tragic potential to seed madness.

Since the order's responsibility had never condoned power with any
latent bent toward destruction, the Prime would act before threat became
reality.  Elaira's rooted faith, that the Master of Shadow was resilient
enough to retain his grip on self-command, became exposed as baseless
conviction, too likely the blind offshoot of personal feelings held
against the wisdom of her seniors.

"Dharkaron Avenger!" Elaira blinked through a rising well of tears. "How
could any man support such a tangle for more than a natural life span?
Or am I mistaken?  Isn't that arc and counterseal an imposed pattern for
longevity?"

"Your insight runs true." Morriel snapped dry fingers, signal for
Lirenda to relax her discipline.  "The development caught us off guard,
but shouldn't have.  Both Lysaer and Arithon came to this land by way of
the Red Desert's World Gate.  Our natural assumption should have
followed, that they drank from the Five Centuries Fountain and succumbed
to Davien's geas."

"That's why you've summoned me," Elaira said, relieved as the pattern's
cruel quandary erased at last from the embers.

She blotted streaming cheeks on her sleeve, and so missed Lirenda's
transition from trance to waking consciousness.  A jealous, unguarded
expression crossed the First Senior's face, and a glare like distilled
venom drilled through the younger woman's back.

The Prime watched with hooded eyes as her chosen successor masked the
lapse.  Grim as steel, she held to her purpose.  "You were called to
serve, initiate Elaira.  Since we now know the conflict seeded by the
Mistwraith will afflict more than one generation, you are asked to
submit your crystal for enhancement.  You won't be forced.  Consider
carefully.  The fate of outliving your peers is not always happy or
desirable."

Lirenda maintained an elegant, stiff silence.  Only the hands pinched
into fists beneath her sleeves expressed her depths of resentment, that
a privilege reserved for proven seniors was being offered to a girl who
flaunted propriety.

Rough edged as a hoyden by comparison, Elaira confronted the emaciated
crone in her bulwark of robes and the ice point shimmer of her diamonds.
Morriel's life had extended well past a thousand years; centuries
reckoned for in joints worn eggshell thin, and flesh racked and drawn to
a husk of brittle fibers by powerful spells of preservation.

Unlike the Fellowship of Seven, whose direct grasp of grand conjury
could engender lengthened life in concert with physical law, Koriani
methods were limited to energy resonance enhanced by a power crystal's
lattice.

"There is pain, at first," Morriet continued, "but only until the body
reaches primary equilibrium with the stayspells.

After the first six months, degenerative aging is reversed until well
past seven hundred years.  Since Davien's mark holds influence for only
five centuries, you need not live on to endure the afflictions of
secondary interference."

Surrounded by the chipped majesty of the initiates' ancient carvings,
never so aware of the fall of clear sunlight, or the chirp of nesting
martins in the cornices outside, Elaira hugged her arms across her
breast.  The warning of her Prime and the antipathy behind Lirenda's
cool facade lost all impact before trepidation from another source.

Once in dusk by the seaside, a Fellowship Sorcerer had offered her
counsel in secret.  "I was sent to you," Traithe had said, "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." There was no decision to be made, Elaira understood
in bitter calm; and so her voice did not shake as she said, "I accept
the bidding of my Prime."

Silk rustled.  A breath of eddied lavender twined on the air as Morriel
inclined her head.  "So be it.  Surrender your jewel for attunement." A
wrist like bundled withies lifted from her lap, its claw-skinny hand
cupped to grasp.

Elaira freed a clear quartz pendant strung on braided chain like a
teardrop frozen in midfall.  Small boned and light-footed and trained to
dissemble as a pickpocket, she displayed a courage that embarrassed as
the jewel changed grasp.  A charged understanding passed between the
crone and the young woman who consented to a fate that might ruin her.

Then Elaira's lips bent into an insolent smile.  "I wish this course of
change, as well."

"The more fool you," snapped the Prime.  "You have virtues, but wisdom
isn't one of them." She snatched the relinquished chain and jewel to her
chest and said in querulous, point-blank demand, "Tell me.

Where do you suppose the Shadow Master is hiding?"

Shocked and stonily defensive, Elaira had no choice but to answer.

"Where is Lysaer?"

Lirenda bridled in affront.

But Morriel judged the query was not impertinence.

"Tysan's prince is marching for Erdane to claim his right to Avenor's
charter."

Elaira's stillness turned brittle.  In that same forbidden meeting,
Traithe had assured her that obedience to her Prime would cause no
additional threat to Arithon.  Against her deepest inclination, but
bound by the perilous nature of her Koriani vows, she answered, "Then
look for the Shadow Master in any town that borders the eastern sea.
He'll be found, I should guess, as far from Avenor as the confines of
dry land will allow."

"A sensible deduction.  At solstice, we shall scry the seventh lane and
test the truth of your theory." Worn from the interview, Morriel flicked
a terse finger in dismissal.

"You too," the Prime rapped to Lirenda, who lingered, poised to argue
further over Elaira's longevity privileges.

Distressed by an emerging flaw in her First Senior's character no longer
too slight to ignore, Morriel tugged her robes around the thin knobs of
her knees.  "I would meditate for an hour undisturbed."

Lirenda curtsied and swept out on Elaira's heels, the swish of her silk
sending drafts shimmering across the brazier's live coals.

Alone with disgruntled thoughts, the Koriani Prime tightened pallid
lips.  She lacked the time to wait for a more-qualified heir; if the
current First Senior had flaws needing discipline, she possessed an
extraordinary talent.  In truth, Moriel conceded, the temptation in this
case was not slight.

Stamped bright in recall, she held every angle and line and counterswept
curve that configured the s'Ffalenn prince's aura pattern.

The strength in the man was frightening.

Were she not old, and aching, and daily yearning the release of natural
death, she might have wept as Elaira had.

Instead her frail fingers clenched over the spell crystal surrendered to
her in forced trust.  Her eyes turned baleful as arctic night as she
muttered, "Curse you, son of s'Ffalenn."

If by his mere existence Arithon of Rathain came to corrupt more than
Elaira's impulsive heart, if his character upset the discipline of the
First Senior chosen to be groomed as prime successor, Morriel vowed by
the cold fire in her joints that she would see him suffer in full
measure for her misery.

Should Lirenda fall short in her training, should she fail to survive
the trials of Koriani primacy, the added century Morriel must cling to
breathing life to select and mold another candidate yawned frightfully
cruel and dark.

Farings

While the trees unfold lush canopies of leaves, Lysaer s'Ilessid makes
his penniless entrance into the city of Erdane; and as the city's
reigning mayor jettisons fixed policy to host a guest of royal birth,
Lord Diegan is the sole party unsurprised to learn that although the
weaponless mercenaries in the prince's train have gone three weeks
without pay, their loyalty remains unshaken....

In the burgeoning warmth of southern latitude, a handpicked circle of
Koriani Seniors leaves Forthmark on an overland journey; by command of
Morriel Prime, who rides with them swathed under quilts in her
palanquin, their intent bends toward the solstice yet to come, when
another scrying will seek yet again to unmask the elusive Master of
Shadow....

Seated in the heart of Alestron's inner citadel, the Fellowship Sorcerer
Asandir weighs the claim of the duke's distraught seneschal, that the
lord of the city and his brothers are absent to arrange a betrothal; and
though a sweep of the grounds reveals no trace of foundries, nor
proscribed treatises on black powder, the official is hedging around the
hard fact that the armory walls bear recent traces of an earth witch's
marks of concealment....

V.  Masque

The door to Halliron's attic chamber slammed with a gusto that rattled
frame and hinges, but failed to disrupt the dancing play of arpeggios
through an exercise in descending sevenths.  The notes a seamless
cascade beneath his fingers, Medlir raised his eyebrows at Dakar,
tempestuously returned from the public baths with his nose buffed apple
red.

His clothing still hung half-unlaced, his hair was a wet, draggled
fringe, and a virulent reek of altar of roses trailed from the bristles
of his beard.

"I didn't know we'd given you coin for perfume," Medlir said.

Peevish for being limited to an allowance too small to keep himself
drunk, Dakar shoved aside a bundle of Halliron's correspondence and
flopped onto a hassock.  Since his liberty relied on the personal bond
of the Masterbard, he managed a civil reply.  "The stink's a kissing
present from a doxie."

"Ah." The scale chords never faltered in their falling, melodic
progression.  "You've brought new gossip?"

Dakar fiddled to extricate his shirt cuffs, wadded inside the ribboned
sleeve of an orange-and-green doublet he had scavenged from some
backstreet used clothing stall.  "Well the city alderman's wife's giddy
with another affair.  Dull news, really, since she throws out a lover
every month." Defeated by a knotted lacing, the Mad Prophet resumed.
"Better, you know that fat-assed proprietress at Madame Havrita's? Well,
she got herself a bloody eye.  Caught the brunt of a scratching battle
after insulting that spinster dressmaker on Threa nee le Street.  Both
claim their shop's more overworked than their rival's, and each one
insists their designs will set the fashion for the ladies at the
solstice feast."

The door latch clicked.  Dakar swiveled in time to catch the arrival of
Halliron Masterbard, back from a shopping excursion with a packet tucked
through one elbow.  "You know," the Mad Prophet volunteered through the
trill of Medlir's practice, "this te the mayor's brewing around your
appearance is causing catfights in the ladies' parlors."

"They can choke on their ribbons and pearls," Halliron grumbled
uncharitably.

Critical of Medlir's touch on the lyranthe strings, he tipped his head.
Even his exacting ear could not be other than satisfied.  The months
cooped up in the inn's cramped garret had set the finishing edge on
Medlir's style.  Drawn in by the liquid transition of sevenths to
fifths, the Masterbard felt a shiver thrill through him.  He had always
suspected his chosen successor might be gifted enough to outmatch him.

But actually to hear the notes of repetitive practice raised to a lyric
emotion his best technique could not equal stirred him to speechless
delight.  All he had left to desire in the world was reunion with his
estranged wife and daughter.

Seven days remained until solstice.  Then at last he would be free to
resume his stalled journey to Shand.

"Look," groused Dakar.  "If it's sausage I smell in that package, are we
going to eat?  Leave meals to you, and we'd die of starvation to
arpeggios in all eight keys."

Dragged back to mundane matters, Halliron wended a path through the
garret's clutter of tin whistles, spools of silver wire and little
clamps used to wind lyranthe strings, the faded scrolls Medlir bought
from the salvager's bins, and dog-eared leaves of rice paper with their
scribbled variations of old ballads.  He elbowed aside an awl and an
inkpot, and dropped his package on the tabletop, nailed together from
scrap boards on the day the tea upset once too often.  The inn's
original rickety trestle had ended up feeding the hearth fire.  If his
apprentice's hand at joinery showed a style more suited to a ship's
deck, the result at least was stable.  Nothing spilled or fell off
through Dakar's vociferous pounce to be first to lay hand on the food.

Halliron settled on the hassock left vacant and gave the musician's
labors their due.  "You aren't needing my instruction any longer."

Medlir rounded off a last arpeggio and deftly damped the strings.

"I'm not yet willing to do without it." His look held more than humor as
he added, "There's one ballad left you haven't taught me."

"You guessed that?" Halliron bent his attention to stretching his
fingers to keep them supple.  "What a pity Jaelot's mayor won't have you
play in my stead." He flicked his apprentice a piercing glance, then
shrugged.  Even on the edge of summer, stiff breeze off the bay made the
streets salt damp and chilly; the climate went ill with his joints.
"What's the rumor in the barracks?"

Leather scraped a plaintive whine from tensioned strings as Medlir
slipped wrappings over the priceless instrument.  "A scandal's afoot
over coin for the soldiers' pay."

"No!" Halliron slapped his knees in evil pleasure and whistled a
fragmented melody.  "Don't say!  The town bursar's an embezzler?"

"Better." Medlir set the lyranthe safely down in a corner and grinned.
"Word goes he's sold his sister-in-law's ruby bracelets to hire an herb
witch to hide how taxes from the town treasury found their way into the
coffers of Gadsley's pleasure house."

"The one that peddles little boys?  That's rich." Halliron spun around
in time to snatch a slice of bread away from Dakar.  "I heard the
mayor's shrew of a wife intends a surprise announcement.  Her feast's to
have a festival theme.  The page who serves her table told me she
intends to cut out any couple who can't afford to buy a mask."

Medlir's eyes lit.  "Dakar!  There's a secret you can leak to your
doxie.  How awkward, if the back quarter courtesans had the hat shops
engaged, and respectable ladies had to settle for second shrift."

"Maybe Havrita's other eye will get scratched," the Mad Prophet said
through a cheek crammed with sausage.  He tore off another chunk of
bread, quiet as Medlir joined him at the table and exchanged easy banter
with the Masterbard.  As long and as hard as Dakar listened, he had yet
to trace any regional accent in the younger man's speech.

Although a musician with a well-trained ear might be adept enough to
change his intonation, the fact that Medlir's relaxed moments betrayed
no distinguishing trait preyed on Dakar's nerves.  Almost as much as the
oddity that, throughout an entire year, even since provoking a plague of
fiends thick enough to draw reprimand from Althain, Asandir had yet to
pursue him.  Despite blatant disregard of orders to seek out and protect
the Shadow Master, no Fellowship Sorcerer had appeared to call down his
misconduct.

Drunk, Dakar wouldn't have troubled to lay one question alongside of the
other; sober, he mentally thrashed himself to cold sweats in paranoia
the anomalies might be connected.

How demeaning, if Arithon s'Ffalenn turned out to be holed up in Shand,
with himself all unwittingly being drawn there.

With the eve of summer solstice just five days away, preparations for
the mayor's masked feast reached a hysterical pitch.

Artisans labored and swore over tubs of wet plaster, mixed to make
molded figurines, while the gilder's apprentices lined up to adorn them
perched idle on their paint pots and called jibes.

The confectioners' shops were plunged into frenzy, and the thoroughfare
through the southern gate was jammed into turmoil by the entrance of yet
another mule train bearing cut flowers and myrtle.

Footmen wore out boot soles delivering invitations; or else they stole
kisses from the serving girls as they carried up parcels of ribbons, or
jewelry ordered new for the occasion.  Lamps burned in the dressmakers'
all night, as women changed their fancy or their shape.

The mayor's oldest daughter lost herself to excitement and ate enough
comfits to spoil her waistline.

Havfita snatched at opportunity like a barracuda and won the commission
to sew her new ball gowns.  "A lot of teeth

gnashing on Threadneedle Street," Dakar reported, back from

an assignation with a shopgirl.  "But no more bloodied eyes."

Between the Mad Prophet's excursions from baths to brothels, and
Medlir's acquaintances among the city guard, all rumors reached the
attic, where Halliron spent increasing hours closeted in private with
his lyranthe.  He was disturbed just once, by two liveried footmen, who
knocked with a small trunk of clothing furnished by the mayor for use on
the night of the feast.

All but trampled by the pair's flying haste to depart, Medlir stepped
into the garret to find the Masterbard cursing in unmatched couplets,
his rare and red-faced fervor focused to a frightening bent of rage.

When the old man's tantrum at last succumbed to breathlessness, Medlir
caught his wrists and sat him down.  "Care to say what's happened?"

Halliron shot back up the instant his apprentice loosed his grip.

Pacing, distraught, his collar laces swinging undone and the hair at his
temples hooked to snarls by the rake of his vehement fingers, he
gestured toward the window that faced the inn's muddy courtyard.

"Never have I stayed to play for a man who insults me not once, but
repeatedly!"

Medlir set his shoulders against the doorpost to keep from stepping back
as the topaz eyes swiveled toward him, wide and snapping with fury.
Quiet, he folded his arms.

"Well, the nerve of Jaelot's mayor, to dare to suggest what I should
wear in the presence of his ridiculous wife!" Halliron whirled, kicked
the low cot to an explosion of dust from the ticking, and staggered a
hopping half step to end bent double in a sneeze.  The paroxysm
effectively sobered him.  He regarded his knotted fists, and the wry
twist to his lips unraveled in a burst of sudden laughter.

"Dharkaron have mercy!

Could you see me wearing some dandy's tight-assed hose?  In pink, no
less, against a doublet with chartreuse shoulder ruffles?"

Medlir choked back a smile.  "Imagination fails me.  Did his lordship
send a mask as well?"

"Ath.  A lamb's head.  You can picture that!" The Masterbard collapsed
on his mattress, loose limbed as a puppet whose midriff had suddenly
lost its stuffing.  "I'll be deliriously happy to be quit of this town."

Far from disarmed by the subject change, Medlir clicked the door shut
with his heel.  "You didn't say what Jaelot's mayor sent for me to
wear."

"No, I didn't," Halliron cracked back in caustic, protective sharpness.
"You at least will stay out of this."

"Well, there we disagree." The flexible humor Dakar could never shake
disappeared.  Suddenly more killer than singer, his stance radiating
leashed force, the man in the doorway shook out his right sleeve and
used his teeth to yank more tension in his cuff ties.  "I'm going. Don't
pretend you won't need me."

The Masterbard locked eyes with the musician he had apprenticed, and the
whetted determination he encountered threw him back six years to the
memory of a prince's oath swearing in a woodland dell.  "I'm no match
for Torbrand's temper," he said quickly.  "But if you make this your
duty, and harm comes to you, I'll go to my grave without forgiveness."

"Oh Ath," Medlir said on a queer note of change.  "If you're worried
only for me, then surely there's hope left for both of us."

The sunset on summer solstice blazed over a city fragrant with
fresh-split birch and cut flowers.  Long since finished with his
dressing, Halliron leaned on the sill of the opened casement, kneading
the joints of his fingers.  "Sithaer take it, we have a visitor."

Caught while threading his points, Medlir said sharply, "Another servant
of the mayor's?  After today, I wouldn't expect such a one would dare to
show his face here."

"You still believe there's a man in this town who was born with any
sense of shame?" At the thump of footsteps on the landing, Halliron
wrenched the door open in the face of the startled arrival and demanded,
"Where's Dakar?  Or is it true that armed guardsman snatched him off the
streets in the middle of Beckbum market?"

The mayor's footman tugged down his waistcoat, ridden up

over the dome of his belly in his puffing ascent of the stairs.

Taken aback by the tall elder in his black silk doublet, he fell back a
step and ventured, "You speak of the mayor's prisoner?"

"I speak of a man who carries my personal word as bond on his civil
behavior." Halliron did not look aside as Medlir snatched his belt and
stepped to his shoulder to back him.

The footman cleared his throat.  "I wouldn't know anything about that."

"But you do know where Dakar is," Medlir cut in.  "Stop hedging."

Dusk had fallen.  Uncertain light from the chamber's single candle
played into the gloom of the hall and raised hard sparkles from the trim
on Halliron's dress clothes.  A dimmer gleam of sweat sheened the
footman's pink forehead as he fluttered his hands in ruffled cuffs.

"Well, I'm not to blame," he began, then flinched back, though no one
moved forward to threaten him.  "Your prophet's set in chains in the
banquet hall.

My lord mayor decreed his fetters shall be struck only after the
Masterbard has delivered his promised performance."

From the street three stories below, a carriage rumbled by, the harness
bells on the team a sweet trill behind a woman's airy laughter.

A dog barked, and a scullion banged the door to the midden as life in
the precinct of the innyard ran its indifferent course: in contrast,
confined, unspeaking tension gripped the close little garret.

Then Halliron spun on his heel to a near-soundless whisper of rich silk.
None of his temper showed, nor did his words reflect rancor as he said
in terse quiet to his apprentice, "Ath forgive me, you were right.  In
every sense, I will need you."

Unobtrusive in his tunic of dove gray linen, Medlir had no words.

The silver-tipped laces of his shirt sleeves tapped and chimed as he
hooked the last studs on his boot cuffs.  He fetched his master's
wrapped lyranthe from its corner peg behind the bed, and wondered in
silent and venomous fury whether any other ruler in Athera's history had
grossly flaunted such ignorance, to repudiate a masterbard's given word
before his very face.

"Come on now." The footman edged toward the stairwell.

"My lord mayor has a carriage ready outside to collect you."

Another insult: by ancient custom, a masterbard came and went at no
man's pleasure.  Halliron said still, tell your mayor I would break all
my fingers before I accepted the ride."

The brass buttons on the footman's waistcoat flashed to his protesting
breath.  "But-"

"The weather is fine.  We will walk."

Anchored against rage by the guiding touch of Medlir's hand on his
shoulder, the Masterbard of Athera swept the mayor's cringing servant
aside.

He left behind a garret picked clean of belongings and a paid-up account
with the landlord.  The pony cart also waited, packed to roll at a
moment's notice, in the post stable nearest to the gate.

"Dawn," Medlir murmured.  "It can't come soon enough."

Master and apprentice reached the base of the stairs and by unspoken
agreement turned down the service corridor that let into the alley
beyond the kitchen.  Behind, the tavern bulked massive and dark, its
high, gabled roof line like folded black paper against a sky pricked
with midsummer stars.  The sea breeze reeked of salt and the fish offal
spread to dry for fertilizer.  Birch smoke drifted from the festival
fires alight in the markets by Dagrien Court.  The thready, wild notes
of a fiddle spun through the dark, clipped by the slap of harness
leather and the grinding turn of wheels as the mayor's carriage team was
shaken up and reined around to leave the stable yard, its conveyance
empty of passengers.

Halliron set a brisk pace.  The palace lay in the fashionable quarter
across from the council hall, a distance made difficult by crooked
streets and cobblestone byways that rose and fell with the terrain, or
zigzagged unexpectedly into staircases cut into the ribs of the
headland.  After six months, Medlir knew every shortcut; given the gifts
of his mastery, darkness held no impediment.

Tempered back to reason by the anonymity of the night, Halliron gave a
rueful sigh.  "I should have worried more about footpads."

"Why?  Because of your jewels and gold chains?" Medlir grinned and
turned his shoulder to guard the wrapped bulk of the lyranthe as he
passed through a narrow archway.  "Take a closer look at yourself, my
friend."

The Masterbard glanced down, rocked by a start to see his glittering
court finery masked to featureless black.  "Ath!  Your shadows?  I
should have guessed."

"Pray the thieves won't," Medlir said.  "There's little risk to use my
power here.  No one knows my reputation well enough to send an informer
to Etarra.  And anyway, if you'd set foot in that carriage, I would have
broken the mayor's head.  I still might.  Do your joints hurt?"

"Not so much." Halliron glanced at the prosperous tall-fronted houses
limned in the bronze glow of torches.  A high-wheeled phaeton rattled
by, driven by a dandy bedecked in peacock plumes.  "Where are we?"

"Spicer's Row," Medlir said around a small cough.  The last female to
share the phaeton's upholstery had bequeathed enough perfume to shed a
cloud of patchouli in the wake of the vehicle's passage.  "But never
mind if you can't smell the cinnamon.  Turn here."

They crossed a formal courtyard, where Medlir out of mischief flushed an
amorous tomcat from yowling serenade beneath a rosebush.  A shutter
cracked open overhead, and a toothless matron emerged, shouting
invective.

Laughing as he ducked through an arbor of flowering vines, Medlir
unlatched a side gate that let into the gutter behind the courthouse.

"Mind the horse piss."

"Or not," Halliron commented.  "If I stink enough to turn heads, do you
guess the mayor's wife would throw me out?"

"She'd doubtless roast Dakar for the lapse, then sidestep sensibility by
giving you a replacement pair of shoes, fancy ones with satin ruffles."
Medlir offered an arm to steady his master across the puddle.  Through
his thin sleeve, the old man trembled shockingly.

"It's not much farther.  We can cut through the guards' barracks."

"That's not necessary." Halliron squared trim shoulders.  "I need the
walk to cool my temper."

Companionably silent, the pair passed sights grown unwontedly familiar
through the course of their enforced stay in Jaelot: the scarred stalls
of the butcher's sheds, and fishmonger's baskets stacked like nested
eggs in the starlit gloom of the alley.  Halliron broke step to fling
silver into a beggar's bowl.  The mournful, deep bells in the guard
tower chimed the hour, rousting up a flapping flock of pigeons.  The
birds wheeled above the city's muddled skyline, smudged into soot from
coal fires lit to cut the sea damp.

"It's hard to believe this place was once the site of Paravian
mysteries," Halliron commented over the clop of horses and the grind of
gilt-striped carriage wheels.  Foot traffic crowded the road, couples
cloaked and masked and laughing as they hurried to dance at the festival
fires in lighthearted contrast with hawkers trudging homeward with
handcarts of unsold pastries.  "The sixth lane resonance once channeled
through this headland.  At solstice, you'd think I'd feel the pulse of
the earth's song through my very boots.  Everywhere else the unicorns
danced, at least a ghost echo lingers."

Medlir shook his head, what sensitivity he had once possessed struck
mute by forces less forgivable than Jaelot's tasteless arrogance. Smells
of jasmine and lavender warred with the mess some lady's lapdog had
excreted in the gutter.  In some cranny beyond reach of lamplight, a rat
chittered through the patter of a street waif's running footsteps.
Farther off, the surf from the bay boomed in tireless refrain against
the breakwater.

From the corner of Broadwalk Way, wreaths of climbing roses strewed a
litter of leaves and petals that the wind chivvied across the pavement.
The pillared facade of the mayor's palace loomed at the end of the
cul-de-sac like some layered, white-iced confection, the rondeled
mullions of its bow windows spangled in reflected candleflame.

"With luck, we'll have missed the silly dinner." Halliron mounted the
stair like a man about to face his executioner.  His steps sank
soundless into the black-and-gold carpet runner spread for the occasion,
each riser bearing like soldiers on parade an array of bronze urns
crammed with peonies.

One of the footmen on duty by the door reached to take the lyranthe.
Medlir sidestepped the offer as though a viper had struck at him, to the
servant's acrimonious displeasure.  A chubby, bald butler scurried out
to quell the disturbance.  He nearly bowled over the Masterbard, who
topped him by a head, and who waited to the right of the threshold in
the unveiled elegance of his topaz studs and roped chains.

"Ath, it's yourself," the butler snapped.  "My lord mayor's vexed.

Come inside.  Quickly, quickly!  Most awkward you've arrived so late,
they're nearly finished with dessert."

Medlir and Halliron suffered the man's proprietary prodding across a
vestibule banked with cut flowers, and on through the double doors into
the grand hall.  From the bowl of a recessed mosaic floor to the spans
of its vaulted ceiling, the enormous chamber lay rinsed in dazzling
brilliance.  Wax candles and overdressed bodies pressed the air to
steaming warmth.  The reek of rich meats, fine sauces, and expensively
perfumed humanity stifled the senses in a wave.

Halliron ran a jaundiced glance over fake kiosks of gilded pillars,
streamered in ribbon and decorated with cast-plaster orchids that
dripped in swagged archways over tables packed to sagging capacity.  The
drone of too many voices stewed into punishing roulades of echoed noise.

Divested of feathered masks for their feasting, the aristocrats of
Jaelot lounged on cushions, arguing stylishly, or exchanging
sharp-witted jokes.  Gilt cosmetics and jewels stung the eye in
spattered flecks of light.  The tinseled ruffles of discarded finery lay
rowed like a milliner's wares under silk and paper arbors crammed with
sprites, whose rosy cheeks and blush-tinted bare buttocks were presented
on display with the same artless candor.

A statement of brute contrast, a cleared space in the center of the
floor held a scaffold transfixed by a post.  There, the miserable figure
of Dakar languished, chained hand and foot in his laddered, striped hose
and soiled shirtsleeves.  The scuffle to retake him into custody had
apparently cost him his garish orange garment sleeved with ribbon.

"Well, the doublet's gone, I'm glad to see.  Somewhere in Jaelot,
there's a guardsman with a natural sense of elegance."

Halliron's dry sarcasm gave way to outrage as he added, "The chains are
an offense beyond forgiveness." He never once glanced at the painted
stool, waiting in vacant anticipation before the dais that raised the
head table.

Behind him, moved by unsettled instinct, his apprentice loosed the
lyranthe's wrappings and softly started tuning silver strings.  Since
Medlir's adroit placement in the doorway forestalled the butler's
entrance, no one announced their arrival.

The still form of the Masterbard in his stark black and gold raised no
stir, until, cued by the whispers of a table servant, a guest in the
back rows pointed.  Conversation in her presence flurried and flagged,
and stillness fanned outward like ring ripples cast by a flung stone
into a trout pool.

The Mayor of Jaelot froze with a bite of confection halfway into parted
lips, Elbowed by his wife, whose dark, painted eyes acknowledged
Halliron's presence over her pink-feathered fan, he lowered his spoon
and rearranged himself to begin a pompous speech.

The Masterbard seized his moment, lifted the unsheathed gleam of his
instrument from Medlir, and outmatched the mayor's blustering
introduction.  "I play nothing for your guests until the bonds are
struck from the man I've pledged to redeem."

Satiated diners stirred to languid interest as he bade his apprentice to
wait, then descended the inner stair.  His steps were marked by stifled
whispers, while several ladies the worse for fine wine tittered behind
hands laced with rings.

Halliron paid no notice.  Bareheaded, his silver hair combed in waves
over his gold-bordered collar, he advanced through the gallery of
plaster arches and presented himself before the dais.

The Mayor of Jaelot smiled at him.  "The prisoner will be freed when
your word is made good.  I don't indulge impertinence in my hall, or
before my lady wife and her guests.  Have a care for propriety.

Oath breakers by law can be executed."

He signaled with one finger.

Liveried halberdiers advanced from behind the plaster kiosks.

Others joined them from the side doors and vestibule.

Poised at the stair head, Medlir found himself flanked by the ungentle
prick of bare weapons.  He turned not a hair in response.  His attention
stayed riveted on his master, while the leather and cord wrappings
lately stripped from the lyranthe wrung and twisted into knots between
his hands.

Halliron wasted no voice in pointless argument, but spun on his heel to
a fire-caught flash of topaz.  He set his boot on the cushioned stool,
cradled a lyranthe the last of its kind in five kingdoms, and snapped
off a run to test the pitch.  His apprentice's touch at tuning was never
less than perfect; reft by circumstance from his customary love of
theatrics, Halliron clapped down his palm, silenced his strings, and
flung back his head in vivacious challenge.

Melody erupted under his hands.  The notes were fast paced, keyed to
major, and led off in tripping, drunken joy through the brash tilt of a
dance tune.  Guests grown torpid with rich food turned jaded faces in
surprise.  Whatever they had expected, this spree of cheerful melody
fell incongruous as a slap dealt in anger with a feather.

In sheer, provocative genius, Halliron Masterbard drew them in.

The happy jinking melody stroked air and grabbed heartstrings and
softened the best blood of Jaelot to smile and neglect fashion and tap
their feet.

Stone still between the shafts of two halberds, Medlir shut his eyes
against anguish.  Alone in awareness, consumed by crawling dread, he
knew this was the ballad written for Jaelot that Halliron had refused to
let him hear.

A chord pattered out, and another, soaring and quick as a swallow's
flight.  Somebody began to clap in rhythm.  The lord mayor was smiling
fatuously.  His wife's purse string lips hung open behind laced fingers,
while her fan drooped like a wing-broken bird over the rim of her cake
plate.  Another moment, and decorum would give way to dancing; except
that Halliron tipped back his chin and opened his throat in song.

The words were all nonsense, syllables strung together for their
resonance and rhythm.  Against the superlative weave of the lyranthe,
the counterplay of consonant and vowel sparked like gems in a tapestry.

The heart leaped in step for pure wonder.  Ladies laced tight in quilted
bodices began to sway in their seats like tavernmaids.

Husbands by their sides whooped and stamped and applauded, while the
song unreeled in merry measures that had even the mayor's guardsmen
tapping weapon butts in time against the tile.

The change came with such masterful subtlety, Medlir alone could name
the moment when senseless strings of syllables converged into order and
meaning.  Carried on exuberant melody, three stanzas passed before any
guest of the mayor's noticed the first prick of satire; another appalled
interval before they connected the tales in the balladry to familiar
names and faces.  Distilled from six months of gleaned rumor, Halliron's
art exposed with rib-tearing viciousness the secrets of boudoir and
council chamber, affairs of the heart and affairs of ambition that
flaunted the rank lust and incompetence that riddled the channels of
city government.

The foot stamping faltered and quieted.  Husbands glared at unfaithful
wives, or elbowed each other aside to glower and curse at rivals who had
made them dupes and cuckolds.

Society listened, transfixed by the sick fascination of seeing their
neighbors reviled, and breathless in dread lest their own reputations
become next in line to be sullied.  For the corruption exposed within
his precinct, and for his laughably faithless marriage, the city
alderman squirmed as if he sat nude on live coals.  Paralyzed, silent,
held spellbound by the song's provocative suspense, the best blood of
laelot hung on each verse while one after another, their best-respected
families were raked over by Halliron's gilded tongue.

A masterbard's enmity could call down an unkind legacy.

For a city that ignored codes of justice, for the slights and
denigration of his station, Halliron laid bare explosive internal
hatreds that would either heal themselves swiftly by cautery, or else
linger on, to malign and poison lives and factions unto generations yet
unborn.

The last ecstatic measures laced the air to shimmering harmony and
trailed away into quiet.  The hard dropped his leg from the cushion.

He swept down his instrument, stepped smoothly forward and bowed.

The chatter of chair legs as Jaelot's Lord Mayor sprang upright
stuttered like a rip across silence.

"How dare you," he gasped in strangled outrage.  "How dare you dishonor
my guests so!"

"You've had a song to epitomize your city's hospitality," said Halliron,
his beautiful voice harshly dry.  He held his dignity and his ground as
the mayor slammed his fists on the trestle, and pink-ribboned
tablecloths ruffled by the force jolted platters and clinked with
slipped crystal.  "My art is no coin to be coerced and exposed to public
ridicule.  I have matched to the letter the measure of your demands."

His statement snapped away the song's last veil of poisoned, hypnotic
fascination.  Citizens stabbed raw in the throes of betrayal shoved from
their seats, gesticulating and fired to angry talk.

Spurred by the temper of their fury, hampered from action by two
halberds, Medlir cursed in despair from the stair head.

Any use of his shadow mastery to extricate Halliron would force full
exposure of his identity.  Constrained by horror, unwilling to seed
broad-scale bloodshed by letting his name draw Lysaer's armies, he
snapped the leather and cord he had twisted like a whip across the eyes
of the left-hand guardsman.

The man fell back.  Medlir sidestepped the blind thrust of his weapon.
The other halberdier assigned to hold him had been a friend he had
sparred with; aware he was unarmed, that one dropped his polearm,
rushed, and locked arms in a vise grip to pin him.

The savagery of their scuffle passed unnoticed as the men at arms near
the mayor converged to seize the Masterbard.

Before they could close, their heavyset captain dealt a brute-fisted
swing launched solidly out of his shoulder.

Halliron twisted by reflex to shield his priceless lyranthe.

The blow struck him behind the temple, flung him staggering backward.
Tripped by the stool, he overbalanced and fell.  The crack as his frame
smashed through split rungs entangled with Medlir's wordless cry.

Splintered wood spun across tiles, for the suspended span of a heartbeat
the only motion in the room.  Then the packed ranks of guests erupted
into noise and pandemonium; except for Halliron, who lay stunned and
still, his jewels like flecks of dropped flame.  A streak of scarlet
meandered through his silver hair, while the lyranthe his fragile flesh
had shielded nested unharmed in the silk-clad hollow of his shoulder.

Blanched and distraught in his chains, Dakar alone held an untrammeled
view as Medlir pitched free of the guardsman.

He arrowed through the pack of outraged bystanders, jabbing knuckles,
elbows and knees into velvet-padded flesh with a viciousness jarringly
out of character.  More than one dandy sprawled moaning in his wake;
weeping ladies nursed bruised arms or wrists.

Bent to his knees beside his master barely seconds after the injury,
Medlir unpinned Halliron's ribboned collar and probed with shaking hands
for a pulse.  "Hurry.  Send a man for a healer and a litter."

Instead he received the bite of armored hands as the mayor's halberdiers
caught him up on both sides and hauled him headlong to his feet.

From the dais, the Mayor of Jaelot met his shouted protest with
narrowed, furious eyes.  "I'll have entertainment that befits my wife
and guests.  You will play in your master's stead.  Carol for us sweetly
as a lark, or else get no litter, and no healer.  Just the executioner's
sword for the lot of you."

Breathing in terrible, deep gasps, his eyes distended in an expression
no man could read, Medlir snapped hard against the guards' hold.

The mayor's captain slapped him.  "Be sensible, lad.  What's a night's
performance worth?  Surely less than the lives of your mentor and
friend."

On the scaffold, his fists dragged white knuckled against his fetters,
Dakar watched in sick anger as the shoulders under gray linen shivered
still beneath the gauntlets of the guardsmen.  Medlir's face was turned
away; given the man's oblique nature, the Mad Prophet had no means to
measure his response to threats outside mercy or decency.

Since Halliron's satire had broken no promise, grounds for further trust
were now forfeit.  tempered as a cornered mastiff in the public throes
of stung pride, the Mayor of Jaelot would see bloodshed before he backed
down and embraced either reason or compromise.

Arrested in sadistic curiosity, onlookers edged reluctantly aside to
admit the servants who converged to sweep up the stool's scattered
fragments.  One hardly more than a boy disentangled the lyranthe from
Halliron's slackened grasp, while a sandy-haired coachman fetched from
outside bent to the chore of shifting the old man from the hall.

The sight of his master being hefted like a slab of skinned beef, and
the further provocation of a cherished, rare instrument at the mercy of
a stranger's inept handling at last unlocked Medlir's voice.

"For the Masterbard's life, and the prisoner's, I will play."

The Mayor of Jaelot stroked his fat belly and smiled.

Head turned to track the brute who shouldered his unconscious master,
Medlir did nothing to acknowledge his liberty as the guardsmen's
restraint fell away.  Controlled beyond emotion, or else simply dazed,
he held his sight on the side door until the burdened coachman vanished.
Then he surveyed the breadth of the hall.  Sea cold and lightless, his
gaze brushed past his flushed and vindictive audience: the men in their
shimmering dazzle of jewels; ladies who wetted lips with pink tongues,
their feathered trains and ostentatious finery jostled awry in the
press.  Defined by an incandescence of candlelight, the mayor's guests
crowded and whispered among themselves, thrilled by the prospect of a
spectacle.

Murmured comments tracked Medlir's smallest move.

Exposed through a private and merciless anguish, the slight-boned
minstrel weathered the inimical regard of Jaelot's bluest-blooded
society.  In a shirt oddly tailored and tight laced at the wrists, his
simple dress like dull mold against the flower petal brilliance of silks
and velvets and brocades, he reclaimed the lyranthe from the mayor's
servant.  Then he backed four steps and perched his hip against the
rough-cut boards of the prisoner's scaffold.  As if he were the only one
breathing in the room, he set his hands to silver strings and
nervelessly restored them to pitch.

The sweet struck vibrancy of his tuning cracked the queer limbo of
tension.  "He's trying to stop his hand from shaking," a heckler
ventured from the sidelines.

The joke raised high-strung laughter.

More jibes, some voices shrill with the tight, high ring of damped
hysteria.  "No, look, he's checking to see that his fingers haven't
jamtned from stage fright."

Medlir adjusted a peghead, patient as tide, deliberate as formed ice in
a frost crystal.  Like his master before him, he launched into song
without any pause for introduction.

The lyranthe strings whispered, sighed, then rippled into melody like
the plangent tap of autumn rain.  The musician did not choose satire for
vengeance.  His free-running arpeggios sparked through sniggers and
barbed sarcasm like pearls flung off a snapped string.

Notes round and perfectly spaced and wholly without sting or anger
framed a statement so powerfully at odds with the antipathy of his
listeners that its overture became an act of daring.

Dakar, who was nearest, was first to feel the tingling thrill of true
magic raised through a masterbard's art.  The tune thrummed in waves
through his bones, its siren pull too sweet to deny.  Reft beyond will
and deprived of his anger, he bent his head to chained wrists and shed
defeated tears against the post.  Medlir did not play in rancor.

In bruised and demented compassion, he spun cadence to settle and heal;
and then, when he had commanded attention by the sheer depth and majesty
of his pity, he struck silver strings a glancing, sliding stroke and
racked sound through a sharp change in key.

Like the curl of a breaker against rock, the blend of chord and notes
framed a statement that forced the doors of the mind.  Between the wolf
pack animosity and bloodlust, over the sour human drive to belittle and
mock to hide smallness, the music cast a glittering net.

In lifting, soaring, unfolding purity, Medlir flung out like jewels
before beggars his eulogy for Halliron.

A masterbard's gift could encompass a spirit, weave its essence in a
tapestry of sound.  So the lyranthe could be used to heal, to ease a
stricken consciousness into death, or to summon back life and awareness
for a week, or an hour, or to shape final tribute in grief.  Medlir
possessed as inexorable a perception.  He used his talent now as Dakar
had never heard him, his harmonies set in moving counterpoint as stark
as clean sunlight over snow.  In complex and awesome exactness, he
unveiled before the citizens of Jaelot the nature of the hard they had
tormented.  He made them see Halliron through his own eyes, as a
generous spirit of moral courage who had sacrificed his heart to
humanity through his song, at the cost of love and hearthstone for
himself Shame cut Jaelot's perpetrators sharper than satire, deeper than
their most visceral fear.  Mourn with me, the notes cried; weep for what
may have been destroyed.  Then tears did fall, thick enough to blind,
hot enough to scald, fast enough to fleck bright silk and velvet with a
diamond spatter of pure sorrow.

The lyranthe rang with a power to wound and to bind, but did neither;
its strains became a gift that turned to scourge breathing flesh in
exultation.  Pressed shaking against the oak post, Dakar felt the
vibration of each fresh stanza ring through the steel of his chains.
What mage-sense he owned showed the answering resonance Medlir's gift
carved from the earth and the air.  The very candleflames danced and
dipped in their sconces in tribute to Halliron Masterbard; and still the
song poured out, the minstrel lost in the throes of his art like a man
drowned senseless by revelation.

Bent over flying fingers and the shimmering leap of silver strings, open
body and spirit to a music that packaged his grief in bright sound,
Medlir played.  Half-unhinged from his senses, he more than struck
notes.  He became the chord, the spun line of melody shaped between
hands and heart.  He heard, like a ripple through darkness, the jarring
stew of pain that was Jaelot; and beneath that dissonance, another
measure reawakened by his playing: a time-lost whisper of smothered
melody that neglect had nearly canceled out.

The fragment's poignancy tugged at his sensitized nerves.

Since the part of him that was s'Ffalenn prince and Shadow Master feared
to end the song, which was all that stayed him from violence, he plunged
on to embrace the thready remnant.

His fingers as willing servant reclothed its hidden measures in new
sound.

The dawning emergence of changed theme raised the elements to primal
awareness.  Snatched into unexpected rapture by the harmonics called
from substance and flesh, Medlir experienced a flashfire bolt of
inspiration.  He yielded in consent before its riptide of insight: and
the song that lurked dormant in the stones of old Jaelot quickened in
rebirth and possessed him.

Chained by steel that chimed and warmed in shared resonance, Dakar
experienced a chest-bursting joy that tore a cry of sheer wonder from
his throat.  He looked up, startled to awed disbelief-, for the strains
that thrummed from Medlir's strings in a golden white bloom of roused
power were bitterly, fearfully uncanny.  Somehow the hard's talent had
tapped the lost measures the Paravians had danced in past celebration of
the solstice.

Like a reed plucked to sound by a squall wind, the musician added voice
to his instrument; and at the center of the mayor's palace, in a
blistering sudden flare of magelight, the spirit forms of Riathan
Paravians resolved to retread the old patterns.  No mortal present
failed to see them.  Pale in form as spun gossamer, clothed in the
glimmering coils of earthforce that spindled into focus to frame them,
unicorns wheeled in ethereal splendor through the spell-caught weave of
the music.

The spectacle was one to steal thought and stop the breath, to cauterize
sight in grace and beauty.  Ecstasy like reunion came paired with fierce
heartbreak, a grinding, insufferable grief of recognition, that amid all
the kingdoms of Athera, no living marvel existed to match these
creatures whose ghost presence mirrored perfect purity.

"Ath, oh Ath, let them go," Dakar pleaded.

His hurt was shared by every man, woman, and child in the feast hall;
from petty-minded, mollified old gossips to the most grizzled captain at
arms; from the richest of merchants to the meanest scullion, no one was
exempt.  The guardsman who had struck down Halliron wept on his knees in
appalled disgrace.  Pride vanquished, the Lord Mayor of Jaelot clung
sobbing and bereft in the arms of his sorrowfully humbled wife.

Consumed by a rapture too deep for mortal flesh, the musician who was
instrument and kindling for a reconfigured invocation of the mysteries
noticed none of his oppressors' punctured vanity.  Long since, he had
surrendered self-awareness to the consuming demand of true song.  His
playing framed the air and the earth, shocked out surging vibrations.

Dakar sagged appalled against his fetters.  Wiser than Jaelot's
enthralled citizens, he knew the solstice rite once held by Paravians
served a purpose beyond celebration.  As a boy before Desh-thiere's
conquest, he had witnessed the ritual that husbanded magnetic power into
arrows of turned force, to flow diverted from their lane-beds and
channel across latitude and enrich the green-growing hills.  Arrays of
stone monuments, live trees, and natural landmarks had guided the
energy's current, a balanced network of markers that Jaelot's trammeled
heritage had long since defaced or paved over.

In dismay akin to terror, the Mad Prophet felt the nexus summoned back
by Medlir's playing swell to an ascendance of poised force.  The mystery
would answer the song's call and reclaim its seasonal passage without
regard for mortal folly and the structures raised through ignorance in
its path.

"No," Dakar shouted.  "Medlir, damp your strings!"

His warning went unheard.

The only man blind to the grace of the spirit forms, the only one tone
rendered deaf, the musician bent still to his playing, his being now
locked in alignment with the intricate lilt of the dance.  While the key
changed register to impel the litany's consununation, the Mad Prophet
looked down in desperation.

He saw in an awesome, gut twist of dread that Medlir's brown hair had
transformed to raven's wing black.

False identity had seared off like wax before the unalloyed blaze of
pure energies.  In shocked recognition, the Mad Prophet beheld the
spirit's unveiled form.

Then impotent rage rammed him hard against his chains and he screamed
the name of Arithon s'Ffalenn.

Around him, the song reached crescendo.  The surge of primal forces
burgeoned into climax with no trained hand to turn or guide them; not,
Dakar agonized, as a thousandfold layers of intonation pealed showers of
clear sound from the elements, that the act of mage or man could now
stifle that mighty flux to silence.

The axis of the song unfurled power in streaming vectors that plowed up
a fountainhead of floor tiles.  Ribbon streamers flagged and snapped.
Columns and kiosks swayed; the gaudy, painted ornaments and
cherub-studded arches crashed over in pul just an smas p aster.  Fanned
by warped air, pummeled by chaos as feast tables overset and fine
crystal chimed and shattered, Dakar cowered against the humming fibers
of an oak post that impossibly quickened and sprouted leaves.

Sieved through by the bone-huning chord of grand harmony, he barely
heard the screams as panic overwhelmed the mayor's company.

Guests and servants shoved, clawed, and knocked each other down in
mindless stampede to reach the doorway.  Their flight mowed through
puddled wine and spilled food, and trampled the gems and crumpled
feathers of cast-off masks.  Neither were the honored officials at the
head table spared as they scrambled back in shrieking terror from a dais
whirled into sudden flame.

Over the stink of smeared meats and the angry orange glare of stagged
glassware ripped winds as untamed as a squall line, and yet unutterably
kinder: every breath drawn in panic enriched living flesh like a tonic.
The stone walls that shocked into cracks and the tapestries that
unraveled in burst threads did not unbind in destruction, but yielded
before the surge of renewed life force that yearly called flowers from
frost, and sprouts from the germ of quickened seed.

Somewhere between cursing Arithon and shivering with the exultation of
the elements, Dakar divined the reason for the backlash: underneath the
mosaic in the recessed expanse of floor, the mayor's grand ballroom held
the masked-over heart of the ancient, sixth lane power focus.  Its rune
rings captured the rising earthforce and burned through the veneer of
grout and masonry.  Long-buried patterns reconfigured in lines of
smoking char.  To touch the ash over such sigils bare-handed would bring
no sensation of heat.  But terrified citizens dared not halt in
midflight to examine what seemed like black sorcery.  In shrieking,
unstrung fear, they poured through the vestibule, into town streets that
offered no haven.

The power streamed on its course like flung phosphor.  Its passage hazed
torches and lamps, and roused families in alarm from their beds.

Women wept, and infants laughed outright.

Men rushed in their night robes to grab weapons.  Festival fires flared
up in conflagration, scattering circles of dancers; while everywhere
along the old energy paths, the rooftrees of shops and houses groaned
and flexed and erupted into growing twigs and buds.

Pulverized slates and chimney bricks kicked aloft in whining fragments.

Every tower and wall and stone building built counter to natural
alignments rang out in bell tones, then caved into collapse as the
resurgence of a ritual denied for six centuries reclaimed its
interrupted conduit.

Ruinous though the backlash became to human property, life and limb
caught haplessly in its path took small harm beyond bruises and
abrasions.  A few who were elderly or worn with mortal sickness died
with smiles on their lips; and miracles happened along the flux lines.

A blind little girl was restored back to sight.  Two cripples tried
their legs and walked.  A demented woman wept for sanity restored, while
an accountant fell into wailing madness as he obdurately tried to reason
through events outside the pale of mortal logic.  Swept into the majesty
of the solstice surge, no spirit in Jaclot passed untouched.

While walls and breakwaters and cottars' sheds tumbled to dust and
smashed fragments, people gave way to joy and panic, and every shade of
passion in between.  The reawakened chord of mystery fanned outward, to
blaze in renewal across the continent.  In the damaged palace, amid the
wreckage of the feast hall, the musician at last stilled his strings.

He sat, slumped and drained, his forehead pillowed on the warm wood of a
masterbard's instrument and his slack fingers dangling as the forge fire
heat of inspiration dwindled to thunderous silence.

The only individual still present to observe was the prophet chained
fast on the scaffold.  The wood that fastened his fetters rustled
half-reborn into greenery, or else whittled wholesale into slivers.
Dakar wrestled in a racked breath and said through his chattering teeth,
"Daelion Fatemaster witness!

This city will burn you for a sorcerer.  That's if Koriani witches don't
descend on you first and rip your flesh like bloodsucking harpies."

Limp at the feet of his accuser, the Crown Prince of Rathain stirred,
straightened.  He turned the dry fabric of his sleeve cuff to wipe the
sheen of oil from his lyranthe strings.

Very slowly he stood up.  The inimical eyes at his back could have
speared holes in his dampened shirt as, in an edged and dangerous
weariness, he said, "Then it would be best, don't you think, if we
left?"

For answer, Dakar slammed down his wrists to a murderous clang of solid
chain.

Arithon s'Ffalenn cringed from the sound.  "Please don't," the whisper a
plea, or a threat; given the nature of his bloodline, telling which
could be hazardously troublesome.  Black hair fronded across his collar,
he tipped his head and whistled a sharp, fluting note charged still with
the arts of a masterbard.

A resonance coursed through gleaming metal, and the locks that fastened
the cuffs to Dakar's limbs snicked in sharp succession and snapped open.
"You might have done that earlier, damn you."

"I couldn't," Arithon said faintly through the rasping dissonance of
fallen steel.  "The power was beyond me until a moment ago."

Dakar stopped in the act of rubbing chafed wrists, shot out a rough
hand, and spun the smaller man to face him.  The prince swayed, loose
limbed and graceless as a scarecrow.

Amid the severe planes of s'Ffalenn features, deep-set eyes caught the
light in flat reflection, unfocused as tinted green glass.

The Mad Prophet saw, and swore mightily.  "Dharkaron's Black Chariot and
Spear!  A lifetime spent mage-wise, and look at you!

Wrecked to your boot soles, and played clean out of talent like a fish.

You're going to be sick from this later."

He gestured at the scorched pattern that demarked the unmasked lane
focus.  "You raised the old mysteries on spiteful purpose, didn't you?"

Arithon's brows twitched into a difficult frown.  "Halliron's

eulogy was my idea.  The rest was intuition.  I'm certainly not about to
be sorry." Self-effacing in his disregard, that a lesser man might have
been destroyed by the powers he had thoughtlessly channeled, he cradled
his borrowed lyranthe against his shoulder while the sweat sprang at his
temples and trickled in drops down his jaw.  "And I can't be sick.  Not
until we've pulled Halliron out of here.  Since you're sober enough to
try scrying, can you stay your grudges long enough to find him?"

"Not if I have to carry you," Dakar replied in bitten fury.

Afraid less for his own skin than for the sure retribution he would earn
from his master should Arithon come to any harm, he smacked his thighs
with his fists.  "Fiends eat my liver!

How Asandir must be laughing!" Then, as Arithon shuddered, he was forced
to grab him wrist and shoulder in a support he found abhorrent.

"Come on.  The servants took the Masterbard to a servant's pallet near
the pantry.  If we're lucky, they'll have run off and left him."

Unmaslking

By the pull of the sea tides in her blood, Elaira knew before she opened
her eyes that moonless, indigo night still deepened the arched casements
of the Koriani hospice.  This was not one of the bad times, waking up.
The smells of herbal soap and the familiar astringency of a cailcallow
tisane gently told her she lay in the wards with the sick.

Three months past, she had busied herself brewing such potions.

Now, in unpleasant irony, she was the invalid being dosed;
crystal-resonance realignment for longevity was no course for the
fainthearted.

Elaira gingerly shifted position.  The sheets clung sweat damp to flesh
that weighed like an unfamiliar burden.  Her head ached, and her veins
felt as if their delicate insides had been systematically reamed and
scalded.

Morriel Prime might forewarn of the pain, but no one had mentioned the
secondary effect of the dreams.

A breeze wafted in, perfumed by frangipani and the fruity bouquet of
flowering vines that laced the old hospice's south facade.  Goat bells
tinkled somewhere outside; fainter and farther off trailed the notes of
a flute played by the flock's child herder.

Elaira clung to basic awareness, of smells and sounds, and the fierce,
blazing tapestry of midsummer constellations.

On nights such as this, she even dwelled on raw pain to maintain her
grip upon wakefulness.  Any means at hand to serve as anchor against the
ripping shoals of nightmare that stole upon her unawares; dreams which
sucked her down into suffocating horror, then left her, shaking and
sobbing and bereft of any memory to name what fear had overwhelmed her.
At other times she relived the sordid terrors of her girlhood, driven to
heart-pounding flight from the constable's watch through the dingy brick
alleys of Morvain.  The beggars and thieves who had befriended or
betrayed her loomed more real than the immediate present.

Afterward she aroused to find herself a stranger locked in a grown
woman's body, dissociated from identity, cast adrift from mind and self
by the alignment effects of her spell crystal.  When such transition
caught her alone, for sweating, tortured minutes, she might gasp in
confusion, desperate to recapture the scattered threads of an unstrung
self-awareness.

if the process failed to kill her, the longevity attunement undertaken
at the Prime's command would be complete in another three months. Elaira
vowed then to rediscover how to laugh; she would live on to a despicable
old age and hound First Senior Lirenda to twitching fits of irritation.

Such fancy tugged forth a battered half smile, quickly stifled since
even that slight movement raised a tingle like a stabbing of small
needles down her nerves.  The urge to shut her eyes against discomfort
overpowered her, and her mind spiraled downward into sleep.

A vivid dream arose to claim her, unlike any other known before.

She walked on a spit of silvered sands.  Spent waves lapped foam like
wet lace around her ankles and stars wheeled in their summer courses
above her wind-tossed hair.  The polestar rode at a higher angle, and
the pull of flood tide bespoke a northern latitude in the hour
approaching midnight.  Through the grit of each separate sand grain, in
the tang of salt-braced air, Elaira felt, like an oncoming storm, the
advent of midsummer solstice.

Tugged by an augury of danger; stalked by some unseen threat, she faced
inland.

Nothing sinister seemed to be in evidence.

Above the curved sills of the dunes, an ancient ruin fronted the surf,
half-razed towers and storm-beaten bulwarks thrust like crumbled
sculpture against sky.  A lingering, haunted harmony of line identified
the site as Paravian.  By the forces that arrowed through the soil,
Elaira sensed a power focus there: stone eons old, laid down in
patterns; mantled now in clumps of black moss and pried at by invading
sedges.  The resonance bespoke the seventh lane's vibration, but an
intrusive, dissonant irregularity purled through its magnetic play of
static.

There; the nagging, creeping uneasiness intensified to a shiver.

Elaira cupped her temples to tighten her concentration and trace the
uneasy sense of wrongness.

This power was neither dead nor forgotten, but the glittering,
interlocked links of fresh conjury raised by twenty-four enchantresses
sealed in a spell-circle at Athir.

A distant voice shimmered through her dream.  "You must be aware, an
outside spirit has tracked us."

Elaira had no chance to be afraid.  The sands on which she walked
overturned and dissolved, while her isolate awareness reeled through a
well of hazeless dark.  Power snatched down like the nip of steel
pincers, then clamped, and closed and held her pinned.  When light came
again, she beheld an upward view through the blue-tinged facets of a
prism.  A ring of female faces veiled in gauze regarded her downward in
return.

"It's the initiate Elaira," someone identified in frosty, disdainful
consonants.

No sleep-induced dream brought her here, but the perilous vision of
clairvoyance.  A jolt of pure terror sheared her viscera as she
overheard Morriel's reply to the dismayed senior who had spoken; whose
safe-wards her disjointed consciousness had all too unwittingly
blundered through.

"The intrusion is scarcely a surprise.  The Skyron jewel was used to
align Elaira's crystal for longevity.  Since the stones are still paired
in resonance, and our solstice scrying is tuned for the Master of
Shadow, her infatuation would naturally draw her into sympathy."

Another voice ventured in brassy disapproval, "A ward must be set to
block her, then."

"Let her bide," Morriel contradicted.  "I rather think her presence may
help turn the search in our favor."

Shackled like waking nightmare by her tie to the master crystal, Elaira
raged that her empathy for Arithon s'Ffalenn should be forced into usage
to break his guarded privacy.  She could do nothing but endure in
despair as the quartz stone that altered the live tissues of her body
blended with the pulse of the greater jewel held in resonance above the
seventh lane focus, a thousand leagues north and west.

Power licked through joint consciousness, as twenty-four Koriani Seniors
shaped their geas of compulsive summoning.

Methodically dispassionate, they first re-created the personal pattern
that mapped the character of Arithon s'Ffalenn.

To this, they keyed layers interlocked like ring ripples, spell overlaid
upon seal in sticky webs of attraction: entrapments as natural as the
drawing force between iron and magnet; the pull between sun, moon, and
tide, or the honey that beckoned live bees to a flower.  The Prime laced
darker themes in counterpoint, as relentless as insane obsession, or the
mindless craving of drug addiction, that could marry flesh with
substance in drawn-out physical torment.

Heart tied in compassion for Arithon, Elaira could feel the weaving's
cruel pull.  On her cot in the hospice at Forthmark, her body thrashed
and whimpered, as the Koriani Circle hooked out from Athir and plucked
up the core of her deepest shame.  Their callous theft left her
violated, soiled, as they drew from a love unasked and unwanted, and
intermeshed its innocent essence to enhance their poisoned noose.

Clear as a chimed note, the moment of solstice midnight swept the lane
to the east.

The power focus at Athir flared like a crucible with the vibrancy of
captured earth power.  More than waves and old stone drank its current.
Even across vast distance, Elaira could not escape the awful moment when
the Koriani scrying meshed into the lane's swelling surge.

The freed construct coursed outward, pitched to seek union with its
counterpart in blind and pitiless potency.

Hide, Elaira begged the memory of a black-haired prince whose spirit had
banefully marked her.  Stay still; make no move to draw notice.

Better, surely, had she died before her fateful past encounter with the
Master of Shadow.  Whatever haven Arithon had found to evade the draw of
Desh-thiere's curse, with his personal signature from the Fellowship
linked in tandem with forced power, no shelter under earth or sky could
withstand the probe of this summoning.

Tears of misery and betrayal welled up, to spill down Elaira's temples.
Grief consumed her, and futile anger, while under layers of tucked
bandaging, the sliver of crystal conjoined to her being rang in helpless
concert with the geas channeled outward to seek Arithon.  The scrying's
unconscionable demand blazed through her, remorseless in its passage as
a sunbeam shot to focus by a lens.

Even her pain lent no respite.  Fueled by the sweep of earth's solstice,
fanned down the conduit of the seventh lane, the geas pattern combed and
sieved through farmsteads and cities and village settlements.  Elaira
shivered in revulsion as a thousand hapless lives were encountered and
winnowed aside like the toss of so much dry chaff.

The scrying allowed no quarter.  Broadcast outward as a mindless set of
urges, raised like a damned thing to measure its need against all life
in its path, it keened in insatiable demand of its match.

In a second compressed to the detail of hours, the summoning embraced
the wind-raked scarps at Northstor, then cascaded through the chain of
port cities set along the crescent coastline that edged the Cildein
Ocean.

Elaira lay limp with exhaustion before the tingling rush of solstice
midnight passed, and the lane surge sank and subsided.  The Koriani
summoning slackened with the ebb, until, in the sleepy fishers' shacks
of Merior, it eddied back on itself in a snarl of unrequited symmetry.

Its siren call to the Master of Shadow remained miraculously unanswered.

Amid the dank and shadowed mazes of Athir's ruined walls, the Koriani
Circle broke off, confounded.  One by one, the order's most accomplished
enchantresses stirred from the throes of deep trance.

They pushed back gauze veils, bewildered, stunned, while the energies of
their failed scrying frayed around them like so many wisps of torn
floss.

Elaira could have laughed at the thwarted defeat on their faces.

Her intuition had played them false.  Ceded a victory that pierced for
its sweetness, she reveled in giddy relief.

Wherever the wily s'Ffalenn prince was sequestered, he was no place
along the seventh lane.

The enchantresses regrouped in disgruntled frustration.

Governed by discipline, they engaged rituals to disperse their bands of
power; but seared through their silence while the spell seals were
isolated and banished through strictly set counterwards, the unspoken
fact remained: Arithon s'Ffalenn had slipped through their net once
again.

Only one rebellious spirit was lapped in the sphere of the Skyron
crystal's influence: Elaira alone favored the cause of their quarry.

She was left defenselessly exposed as the vindictive suspicion of
several seniors burgeoned into open accusation.

"Desist!" cried the Prime in flat rebuke.  "No charge can be called
against Elaira.  No mere initiate could have sheltered Rathain's prince
from the draw of a grand scrying."

"What sorry pass have we come to?" seconded another caustic peer.

"Had we not misplaced the Great Waystone, we could have had Rathain's
prince crawling belly down to find us!"

"Silence!" Moriel cracked back.  "Our efforts are wasted in groundless
blame or misplayed regrets for what's lost.  Either the Fellowship
itself maligns our work, or the Teir's'Ffalenn turns his guile in a
direction we never thought to search.

Whichever reason has balked us, no more can be accomplished tonight."

Crumpled in abject weariness, Elaira overheard the order for the Skyron
crystal to be locked away in its coffer.  But even as the appointed
senior moved to gather up the great focus stone, the inexorable turn of
time carried the progression of solstice midnight westward.  As the
moment crossed the sixth lane, the massive aquamarine revitalized in a
sudden, unbidden burst of power.

Elaira shared the shock of recoil.

Then all thoughts, all fears, were canceled by a rolling charge of
harmony that surged through the jewel's unshielded lattice.  At one with
Morriel's circle of seniors, she reeled, blind and dazed, as the
sensitized planes of the aquamarine erupted and blazed, incandescent in
song-struck vibration.  In Athir, the power focus under its tangled
wrack of weeds also magnified that resonance.  Its coils blazed to
sudden life in a captured peal of joy so pure it kissed earth like the
union of desire and perfect fulfillment.

Swept up through the link to her spell crystal, Elaira endured, along
with twenty-three senior initiates slammed to witless exultation, as the
life force of forgotten Paravian mystery tolled its wakened chord across
the continent.

Morriel alone retained her sense of self-command.  "Ath's grace, where
is this coming from?  We dare not languish in blank ignorance."

The Skyron aquamarine was not as the Great Waystone, vanished in the
chaos of the rebellion; its lesser capacity could not channel several
tasks without one purpose bleeding into another.  And so as cold power
was returned into alignment, Elaira shared the vision that emerged, as
the flow of the night's uncanny vortex was traced down to its source.
Along with Morriel's seniors, she tracked walls and stonework torn apart
and scattered like straw chaff; chimney bricks rammed askew from
rafters, and roof beams clothed green in budded leaves.  She heard the
wails of Jaelot's terrified populace, that had seen half their town come
unhinged.  There at the core of destruction, exposed amid smoking mosaic
and the overset tables of a feast hall, the hands that had unleashed the
wild mystery: the mortal singer who had keyed the release of an
earthforce held mute through five centuries.

The proved a man slight in stature.  A disarranged swath of black hair
could not quite mask green eyes, or the steep, angled features that
marked the royal bloodline of s'Ffalenn.

"Ath preserve us all!" Morriel Prime's appalled outrage cut like glass
through the Skyron link.  "A city has been all but destroyed!

Innocent people have suffered!  How much unconscionable meddling shall
this prince be free to inflict upon our world before the Fellowship
Sorcerers deign to admit their mistake?" Harsh as scaled iron, she
added, "Last of his line or not, Arithon s'Ffalenn shall be curbed.

Dharkaron as my witness and be damned to the Seven, who would in blind
folly preserve such dangerous stock."

That moment, with scarcely a flicker of warning, the Athir contact cut
off.

Released to the scent of summer flowers, and the night quiet of her bed
in the hospice, Elaira stifled a shuddering sob against the heel of her
hand.  The terrible wait was over; her peace irrevocably fled.  The
Master of Shadow was betrayed, not by her, but worse, by his passionate
love for the music he held dearest to his heart.

Awed and shaken and concerned for him, Elaira turned her face to bury
her misery in her pillow, and froze, her skin pricked to shivers by a
draft.

Her room was no longer empty.

A figure poised by her bedside: not the initiate healer who brought her
tisanes for the pain, but the uncanny presence of a broad, bearded man
too ghostly still for breathing flesh.  His florid features held a frown
of thunderous proportions.  He stood, fists planted on a belt like an ox
collar, his eyes trained upon her as lightless as new sable velvet.

Elaira blinked.  The creature she confronted could be nothing less than
the wraith of a Fellowship Sorcerer.

"The diligence of your senior enchantresses has been rewarded," Luhaine
opened, the shyness he held for outsiders girded behind unimpeachable
ceremony.  "Arithon has been found in Jaelot."

The Sorcerer's portly form looked somehow tired, standing.  Elaira
started to slide over on her pallet to allow him the space to sit down,
then recalled; a disembodied spirit would retain no need for such
comfort.  "Why are you here?"

Wind from the casement brushed through Luhaine's image without stirring
his wiry beard.  "To warn and to help."

"I can already guess how Morriel plans to use me." Elaira was careful to
muffle her voice.  To be caught in conversation with a Fellowship
Sorcerer would call down the direst consequences.  "How are you minded
to help?"

Had Luhaine still been enfleshed, he would have rubbed the pink knob of
his nose.  "Well," he said, abashed to evasion, "Sethvir said you were
direct."

"I'm afraid," Elaira admitted.  "If the duty watch chances to see you, I
could be broken for treason." Her initiate's ties to the Koriani Order
went beyond fleshly obedience; should Morriel exercise the extreme
penalty, the vow Elaira had sworn over crystal could be turned to reduce
her to a mindless husk.

"Whoever should glance through this doorway will assume you talk in your
sleep," Luhaine said, deeply miffed.  "I was never sent to endanger
you."

"That's scarcely flattering, and I'm not reassured." The logic seemed
sound, that without trouble pending, no sorcerer at all would have
visited.  Elaira regarded Luhaine's scowl, her care for the Shadow
Master's safety too burdensome to contain.  "I think you should worry
for your fugitive."

His lecturer's condescension back in force, Luhaine stirred an impatient
half step that raised no echo from stone walls.

"Lysaer's still amassing his army.  Unless your sisterhood informs him,
he won't know Arithon's been unmasked."

A pitifully small consolation; Elaira shuddered through a spasm of
discomfort, penalty of the crystal's reattunement.

"Don't tell me anything more about either half brother." She averted her
face, ashamed as she admitted, "Morriel will use every asset I have, no
matter who comes to be hurt."

"Not quite," Luhaine rebuked softly.  "Some things you'll keep for
yourself." His image never stirred against starlight.

But the unseen power he engaged in gentle pity folded the enchantress on
the pallet into a painless sleep without dreams.

Elaira gave way to his mastery with a whispered sigh of release.

The strain that pinched her eyes and mouth settled and slowly relaxed.

Entangled amid a sweep of auburn hair, a nose and chin too angular to be
delicate smoothed over like fine-polished ivory.  When she was not
frowning, Luhaine thought, her allure was mischievous and innocent,
touched as though from within by the promise of lyric passion.

Determination lent her the illusion of ruggedness; and the burden of
betrayal that Koriani service set in conflict with her empathic link
with Arithon.

Against the sworn obedience that ruled this woman, Luhaine could do
nothing.  But the longevity realignment she had undertaken for the sake
of Sethvir's augury: that was another matter.  Fellowship intervention
had set stakes on the attraction that tied her to Arithon's fate.  For
that she would not be left to suffer; nor would his Fellowship
colleagues sanction the surrender of her spirit to a second life binding
to a Koriani spell crystal.

Elaira was not conscious to feel the warm swell of power that licked
beneath her bandaged wrist.  Closed eyes could not track the lacework
intricacy of the spellcraft Luhaine wrought in her behalf.

She would wake in the morning and feel refreshed, and even Morriel would
never discern that the crystal's unnatural attunement had been arrested,
then erased, its forced effect of lengthened life span realigned to a
kinder patterning sourced by the laws of grand conjury.

She would live the same years as Arithon, but suffer no ill effects.  If
the hour came that conflicted interests broke her faith with the Koriani
Order, the Prime who presided in judgment would gain no further power
through the white quartz matrix of Elaira's personal crystal.  Her vows
of initiation upon the Skyron jewel alone would hold influence against
her.

"Serve your Prime matriarch as you must," Luhaine murmured in words that
arrowed across the veils of sleep.  "But for the sake of your care for
the last Teir's'Ffalenn, the Fellowship may sometimes intercede."

A second later the apparition left her side, faded with as little
ceremony as a star in the gray chill of dawn.

Nightmare

Lysaer s'llessid snapped awake with a coarse, ripping gasp.

Bathed in sweat and shivering violently, he thrashed off the bedclothes
that constricted his legs and chest.  Driven nerves and instinct shot
him halfway to his feet, one fist ablaze with a halo of light he had not
consciously called his gift to raise.  The darkness that threatened to
suffocate him shattered, and with it, the last, vicious remnant of the
dream that had torn him headlong from sleep.

Scalding glare bit flashes of reflection off gilt molding and from the
garish enamels of the cloisonne washbasin his valet had left by the
window bay.  Lush woolen tapestries muffled the cries of the sentries,
alarmed from their posts on the walls outside by the fiery glare through
the casement.  Lysaer squeezed his eyes shut.  The appointments of the
state guest chamber loaned by the Mayor of Erdane mocked him in
undisturbed quiet.  Subsided to his knees on the mattress, the light
still cupped in his hands, he loosened locked jaws and forced in a deep,
calming breath.

Memory of his black-haired nemesis hovered still in his mind, secretive,
elusive, and maddeningly removed beyond reach.  "Dharkaron as my
witness," he swore to the empty room.  "By your shadows and fell
sorceries, you can't evade justice forever!"

An instant later, the latch clicked.

Lysaer started sharply.  The light in his hands scalded into actinic
brilliance before he caught back raw reflex and curbed his fury to a
force less likely to ignite the bedclothes.  The whipcord tension in him
relented a mere fraction as Lord Diegan rushed into the room, his dark
hair tousled from his pillow, and his body half-clothed in last night's
crumpled hose and shirt.

One glance at Lysaer, and he snatched an unlit candle from a wall
sconce, crossed the carpeted floor, and tipped the wick into the flash
point corona that yet burned between the prince's palms.

Over the hiss of hot wax as the candle flared into flame, the commander
of a cityless garrison said in caustic care, "If you dreamed of the
Master of Shadow again, that makes the third time this week."

"I don't need you to remind me." Lysaer parted his hands, and the light
shredded asunder and quenched like a beacon fire doused before an enemy.
Surrounded now by soft dark that did nothing but exacerbate his
edginess, he launched off the bed and strode to lean out the opened
casement.

To the guardsmen clustered in agitation on the embrasure below, he
called, "Naught's amiss.  Feel free to resume your patrols."

While they dispersed, Lysaer remained at the window, no longer
shivering, but chilled to the bone nonetheless.  He tried to ignore the
brisk footfalls as Diegan spiked the candle in a holder on the carved
oak table, laid over with the drawings and maps that outlined his new
city of Avenor.  The flick of wool cloth passed unacknowledged as a
cloak was unfurled over his nakedness.

At his shoulder, Diegan said, "If the strain's been too much, at least
take Talith to your bed.  Your handfasting's lasted for years.

As her brother, I won't stand on ceremony now if you decide not to wait
for the wedding."

"She's to be Avenor's queen, not my courtesan."

Distraught enough that it showed, Lysaer scrubbed his knuckles over his
stiff face.  "She'll have a state ceremony in my rebuilt capital.  No
vagary of the Shadow Master's will drive me to consider any less."

Diegan reached across, caught the frame of the casement, and pulled
closed and latched the mullioned panes.  "If you're going to talk
sedition over mayoral authority in Tysan, at least try not to be
overheard."

"I won't need to supplant any trade city's governance."

Lysaer straightened tense fingers and blotted icy sweat on the
gold-edged weave of his cloak.  "Once the Prince of Rathain makes his
move, his sorceries will drive town loyalty into my hands by itself.  I
alone will command the resource and the light to combat him."

Diegan sought out a cushioned chair and wearily folded himself into it.
"Ath, he's been hidden for six years.  If I hadn't been at hand to
witness the slaughter he effected in Deshir, I'd wonder, as your new
mercenaries do, whether Maenalle of Tysan was right in her claim that
Arithon had no wish for war at all.  Man, you can't gather crack troops,
then sit them idle indefinitely!"

"We've been quartered in Erdane far too long," Lysaer agreed.  He chose
not to mention the balance of his fear, nor the dream image that moved
in lockstep with remembrance of his enemy's secretive ways.  His
thoughts were harrowed in equal measure by the blood that had soaked Tai
Quorin's riverbanks in the first battle fought against the Shadow
Master.

Thousands had died.  For the sake of those lives thrown away through
irresponsible haste, he must hold fast to his plan.

Arithon was ruthless, a sorcerer.

No matter how eager the troops were to fight, their commanders must
never again be left at liberty to underestimate the foe they raised arms
to destroy.

Lysaer snapped away from the window to pace the carpet.

Beyond the shut casement, a homeward bound drunkard riled the
headhunters' tracking dogs.  The kenneled pack erupted into sharp,
excited barks, answered by every alley-strayed mongrel, and the shriller
yaps of a lapdog cooped up by a merchant's wife.  As frustrated by his
own inactivity, vexed still by overplayed nerves, the prince caught up a
dozen fresh candles and lit them one by one.  Rinsed in patterns of
moving flame light, he brooded over certainties he could not put into
words: that the needling, insatiable drive that ate at him day and
night, to seek out the Shadow Master and see him dead, was not a force
to heed reason.

He controlled the urge by iron force of will, his every act bent to
serve the people whose safety was his pledged responsibility.  If he
weakened before the drive of antipathy, if he gave way to the
exhortations of Etarra's Lord Governor and allowed the combined eastern
garrison to march too quickly, many more lives might be ruined.

Even still, the need to wait for new gold to be levied through Rathain
to fund his endeavor in Tysan chafed raw holes in his patience.

The passage of solstice had spurred a restlessness in him that mounted
now to a screaming ache.  He started under sunlight at ordinary shadows.
He sweated each minute in directionless certainty that some new
development was afoot.

The letter just delivered by westbound courier, that affirmed the dearth
of rumor concerning any sorcerer who matched the Master's description,
did nothing to ease his conviction.  Despite the unified support of
Rathain's cities, Pesquil's headhunters had routed out no barbarian
camps through the past three summers' campaigns.  Their scarcity
compounded his certainty that the clans had organized as well.

Lysaer beat down his angry passion.  The lesson instilled by Tai
Quorin's massacre was his charge and his personal burden.

The lack of any target to strike at was a frustration his allies must be
cajoled to abide.  Against the Master of Shadow, any weakness in them
would be turned to grievous liability.  The campaign that succeeded must
have no such flaw to exploit.

Lysaer well respected the two-edged, deadly game the Teir's'Ffalenn was
wont to play.

Restored back to regal equilibrium, he caught the cloak's rich fabric
about his damp flesh.  A small smile turned his lips as he reviewed the
engineer's drawings of Avenor's proposed fortifications.

However well intentioned, his commander at

arms was mistaken.  A woman in his bed could never blunt his

ardor to see Rathain's prince bleed on his sword.  Yet by Ath,

if he had to set the example of restraint, a gesture was needed

in counterbalance.

"I shall send a rider west to Karfael tomorrow, Lysaer resolved.

"Let my writ be given to the merchants' guilds, that a thousand royals
in gold will reward any man who brings back confirmed news of any
unnatural event.  Arithon of Rathain is a sorcerer.  Sooner or later, he
must make a mistake, or be forced by circumstance to show his hand.

The Governor of Etarra will send out additional couriers.  Our troops
can train here while Avenor's rebuilt."

Made aware by the stillness that his frustrated humor had transferred
like contagion to his commander at arms, Lysaer tossed back gold hair
and laughed.  "Don't you see, Diegan?

We'll twist even time to our advantage.  The longer Arithon hides, the
farther he runs, the larger the army we'll have ready on the field to
slaughter him."

"I don't know where you find your tolerance." Diegan arose in one
nettled movement, jerked open a cupboard, and hooked out the flagon of
wine he needed in sudden desperation.  He scrounged up two goblets and
poured.  "But no doubt that's the only way we'll have a net strong and
wide enough, that a conniving sorcerer can't slip through."

Lysaer accepted the glass he was offered.  Candleflame burned hot
reflections in his eyes and bloodied the depths of the wine as he
touched unsmiling lips to the rim and swallowed.  "Depend on that,
Diegan.  Let's both drink a pledge to that end."

Crosscurrents

Diverted from his course to check on the Mistwraith's person at Rockfell
Peak, Asandir drives his black stud at urgent speed through gray dawn,
over the long-unused southern pass through the Skyshiels toward the
lowland road that skirts Eltair Bay....

Lee rail awash against whipping morning winds, a trim brig under command
of a laughing captain threads in dancing flight between the shoals that
whiten the channel through Vaststrait, while three galleys packed with
armed men and bearing official requisitions for boarding and
confiscation of contraband thrash to windward in futile pursuit....

Under summer noon on the arch above Erdane's west wall, Lady Talith
watches her betrothed and a picked guard of troops begin their march to
the ruins of Avenor; and though her finger bears the diamonds and royal
sapphires as token of Lysaer's pledge, she twists the jeweled ring in
stiff outrage, that his will to keep her safely sheltered has compelled
her to stay behind....

Guards swept house to house through Jaelot.  The shaking pound of their
boots up loft stairways, and the Amailed assault of fists on wooden
planking disturbed sleepers, as they banged open root cellar doors and
riffled through dusty attics in search of last night's fugitives.  Their
fervor suffered frenetic confusion as city officers in charge of the
hunt embroiled themselves in vociferous, fist-waving arguments.  By
daybreak, in cold reason, no two groups could be reconciled over the
physical appearance of Halliron Masterbard's apprentice.

The criminal fact remained that his sorcery had dismembered half their
city.

Eyewitnesses from the mayor's feast hall only convulsed the quarrel to
fresh hostility, a complication that provoked disgruntled shop owners;
ones whose wares had been spared from the vortex of the lane surge, only
to be ransacked and turned upside down to satisfy the suspicions of
furious officials.

The prime suspect stayed undiscovered, along with Halliron and the stout
convict for whom his Masterbard's word had sworn surety.

Half the morning passed before the meaty-faced hostler who ran the
livery stables by the gatehouse was shaken awake to be questioned.

Twitching straw from the clothes he had slept in, and belligerently
cross from a headache, he worked his stubbled jaw around a yawn and
frowned at the captain who pressured him.  "Pony cart?  Yes, one was
quartered here last night.  A dark man came for it, very late.

A fat man was with him."

"Dark?" yelped the beribboned secretary of the alderman.

He bounced on his toes and flapped his hat behind a stifling press of
bystanders.  Since no one gave way to admit him, he jettisoned dignity
and burrowed like a mole through the ranks of gawping grooms and
nerve-jumpy men-at-arms.  "How do you mean, dark?"

The hostler hawked, spat on the cobbles, and squinted as though at an
imbecile.  "Black hair.  Do I look blind?"

"You're sure?" the secretary pestered.  "It was night.  You aren't
mistaken?  His color could have been brown?"

"Dharkaron!  Do I look stupid too?" The hostler jabbed off an obscene
gesture.  "The man was dark as coal soot.  Green eyed, he was, and quick
with his tongue as a flayer's knife.

Lordly bad tempered, not to be denied, and no, he didn't say where he
planned to be going!"

"Sorcerer's likely past the gates by now," yelled a drayman perched on
his load of corn sacks.  "You want him, why not chase him down?"

But none of the guardsmen on gate watch had seen any fugitives escape.
Sweating over this setback in the breezeless haze of noontide, the
commander of Jaelot's garrison cleared his throat and diffidently tried
to shift the blame: the minstrel and his party must have slipped out of
Jaelot by boat.

Turmoil transferred to the dockside as fishing smacks were commandeered
to sweep the coves and the bay.  To placate the sloop captains who
grumbled in disagreement, mounted patrols fanned out to scour the
coastal road.

The cart and its widely sought occupants by then lay well south, pulled
up in the sticks of a hazel copse to evade the headhunter teams who rode
in hot hopes of a bounty.  Freckled with sun-dolloped shade and fuming
biliously, Dakar the Mad Prophet straddled the driver's seat, the lines
hooked over his raised knee.  Never a spirit to hold a grudge quietly,
he cursed fate that relentless pursuit out of Jaelot should befoul his
raw urge to pick a fight.

"You asked for cold water?" Sullen as a bear with a canker, he tipped
his chin over his shoulder.  "There's a glacial stream down that gully."

The royal personage he addressed unfurled from a tortured crouch in the
wagon bed.  Arithon surveyed the surrounding thicket through
sweat-plastered strands of black hair.  Taxed by the effort to raise
himself, he climbed over the pony cart's tailboard.  The Mad Prophet
observed in viperish satisfaction as he made his way downhill, ill
balanced as a man with a gut wound.  The backlash he suffered was doubly
well deserved, Dakar thought; the earth power wantonly channeled through
Jaelot was enough to scour sanity and leave any mortal deathly sick.

Galled past forgiveness for the trick that had played him straight into
Asandir's design, the Mad Prophet curbed his impulse to bash his fist on
his leg.  "Bastard," he mouthed after the form that lurched down the
streambed.

A slurred objection arose from the blankets nested in the wagon bed.
"How unoriginal.  If you're minded to try insults with Arithon, you'll
need something better than a truth he's likely bored with hearing."

"Halliron?" Diverted from his angst, Dakar twisted farther to find the
Masterbard wakened and regarding him.

The old man looked unwell, his complexion sickly gray except where a
spreading, mottled bruise blackened his cheekbone and temple.  Since the
appalling blow that had felled him, he lapsed often into
unconsciousness.  The muscles on the battered side of his face sagged in
paralysis; the opposite eye, tenuously open, was black and unnaturally
dilated.

Aware such symptoms boded ill, Dakar vented his heartsick frustration
against Arithon.  "You're an outright fool to defend him.

And twice the fool, for last night.  You shouldn't have let him talk you
into traveling."

Halliron's lips twitched in lopsided resignation.  "Better to be
uncomfortable than dead.  Which we would be, make no mistake, had we
tried taking cover in Jaelot.  I never liked their mayor's penchant for
burning accomplices to sorcery alive on a pile of oiled faggots."

Palsied fingers fluttered and plucked at the blankets that springtime's
moths had pricked holes in; gravely, the Masterbard added, "I heard what
Arithon played.

All of it.  His art crossed the bounds of unconsciousness.

There's a greatness in him now that even you must appreciate."

"By force, and in wretched sobriety," Dakar answered, his eyes upturned
and venomous, and glazed in reflection with a sun-caught matting of
summer leaves.  "There you have my troubles in a nutshell."

He would have capped with epithets, had the passage of more mounted
lancers not precluded the wisdom of retorts.

"You're not inclined to go back either, I see," the Masterbard observed
dryly.

Dakar lapsed into glowering silence until the object of his spite
returned to nettle him.  Back from the gully, stripped down to
shirtsleeves and hose, Arithon held in shaking hands the tunic he had
just soaked in stream water.  Braced against the wagon side, he forced
the concentration to fold the garment into a compress.

As he bound its wet cold to ease the Masterbard's ugly swelling, the old
man made an effort, but failed to damp the shudder of pain that recoiled
through his frail body.  "It's poor thanks you're getting, for winning
us passage out of Jaelot."

"I beg your pardon." Pale himself as torn parchment, and scruffy from
strain and lack of sleep, Arithon dredged up a smile.  "Dakar has shown
astounding generosity.  He's made six offers to abandon me, and I have
accepted each one."

"Just wait until we reach Tharidor!" the Mad Prophet snapped in choked
fury.  "Then I promise, you'll see me keep my word."

With that maddening, false complaisance which had marked his alias as
Medlir, Arithon raised his head.  "Well if that's true, you can help by
watering the pony." No change of stance offered warning; he shot a hand
into the stores box, hooked out the leather bucket, and in pure
s'Ffalenn temper pitched it at Dakar's middle.

The Mad Prophet fumbled the catch.  Smacked hard in the gut, he whooshed
out a gusty belch of air that cost him the breath for rejoinder.  As he
stalked off in stick-snapping pique, the Master of Shadow resumed with
unbroken mildness, "How are you feeling?"

Halliron closed his functional eye.  Denied its vibrancy, his seamed
skin draped like wet paper over his nose and cheekbones.  His eyebrows
sketched a pale smear above sockets sunken into his skull.

"My bones don't take kindly to knocking about," he admitted on a
near-soundless breath.

Arithon swallowed.  Sorrow overcame his spent strength.

He shored up his weight on clenched fists; and for long-drawn, agonized
minutes, only the uting calls o t s es pain through the gurgle of brook
water.  Yet another company of mounted lancers thundered past the bend
in the road, while below the bank of the gully, Dakar cursed and
blundered to a chorus of thrashed bracken and turned stones.

"Arithon," Halliron said with sudden force, the more wrenching as numbed
lips slurred his speech from its trained and mellifluous clarity.  "You
must inherit my lyranthe.  My left hand has lost feeling.  The fingers
won't move.  Let the last song I leave to Athera be the musical
tradition you continue."

The knuckles clenched against the wagon boards flexed once in soundless
protest.  Beyond that, Arithon never moved.

His answer came simple and steady.  "I'd be honored."

Released as if cut from a wire, the Masterbard relaxed beneath the
blankets.  "Bless your directness." A half smile tugged his seamed
cheek.  "You shall be great.  I'm not wrong.

Your skill shall surpass my best talent, perhaps restore the grace of
the Paravians our troubled kingdoms have forgotten."

"You speak of dreams," Arithon interrupted.  While the buckskin gelding
in the traces flicked its tail and twitched off flies, he twisted aside
to mask an anguish grown suddenly too fierce to stamp down.

"No dream." Halliron freed his arm and clasped the wrist of his
successor in a reassurance undercut by icy weakness.  "One day the old
races shall return.  The Fellowship has never lost hope."

His truncated smile stretched wider.  "I shall live to see the sun shine
over the river delta at Innish." The one, lightless eye flicked up
briefly and enlivened pinched flesh with wry amusement.  "I had that
much of Dakar." As if the admission stole vitality, the Masterbard's
hand slid down, limp.  His unswollen lid drooped closed again.  "So you
see, I really didn't mind playing the fool to win the Mad Prophet's
freedom, nor to give that horrid mayor his comeuppance.  There's only
home left ahead, now.  I want to die reconciled with my family.  .

Arithon stirred, straightened, and with the rags of his unstrung
dignity, smoothed down the rucked blankets.  "Rest easy.  Sleep if you
can.  The moment it's safe, I'll find you a bed and a healer."

Yet when twilight settled over the roadway and mantled wooded hillsides
under felted layers of dark, the pony cart bearing the Masterbard
labored scarcely three leagues farther to the south.  Twice more, Dakar
pulled aside into hiding, with Arithon forced to spin shadow to mislead
determined headhunters.  Resolved not to quit empty-handed, the
returning trackers and riders dispersed in formation to sweep the cobalt
gloom of every spruce thicket they passed.

Clouds rolled in after sunset and sifted down veils of fine drizzle.
Dakar hunched in hostile silence; slack reins left the pony free to pick
its own course through the ruts, while the cart's painted wheels
splashed and serried the pewter gleam of shallow, scattered puddles.
Tucked dry under spread canvas, Halliron rested unmoving.

By the tailgate, damp to the skin, his arms folded over drawn-up knees
to contain the cramps that knifed through him, Arithon endured the
ongoing physical reaction to his past night's performance with scarcely
a whimper of expelled breath.  The Mad Prophet knew magecraft well
enough to guess how each jolting bump fed his suffering.  Since misery
to his deceiver would just gratify his passion to retaliate, Arithon
clenched his jaw and managed not to plead for respite.  The cart must
stop shortly for Halliron's sake.  A camp would be chosen in the open on
a site that allowed for immediate flight.

Except for the wet, the weather stayed mild.  High summer tasseled the
verges in groundsel and vetch, and feathered the grasses in seed heads.
Too long constrained by town walls, Arithon savored the rain-drenched
scent of meadow flowers, spiked by the pitchy bite of evergreen.  Now
and again the east wind's breath wafted salt-scoured taint off the bay.
Attuned to the dance of the seasons in sound, where his mage-sight had
deserted him, he bent thought to pick out the chord of the earth through
the rocketing creak of the wheels; in notes subtly echoed in the warning
pipe of killdeer, and between the nighthawks' thrumming, madcap flight.
With closed eyes, by ear alone, he could delineate the junction of
horizon and sky, while the high, sweet harmonics of stars beyond cloud
chimed just outside his wakened perception.

At that moment, Dakar snapped erect and ripped out a venomous oath.

Rein leather hissed through the terrets.  The buckskin snapped up its
rain-dripping head and the pony cart jerked to a stop.  Yanked back to
the stresses of overplayed nerves, Arithon raised his head in alarm from
the wrists crossed and draped on his knees.

But the patrol he presumed had overtaken them seemed nowhere in
evidence.  There arose no thunder of spurred horses, nor the shouts of
exultant guardsmen.  Blurred through the drizzle, the way stretched
empty ahead, alive with the rasping trill of tree frogs, and the swish
and drip of breezes that riffled across soaked leaves.  Nothing appeared
to be amiss.

Except the buckskin pony stood with raised neck, black-tipped ears
pucked through his sodden swag of mane.

"Fiends plague me for a mush-brained idiot," Dakar carped.

"I should've expected no less." He snapped the driving lines across his
palm, then cursed the more fiercely for the sting the wet leather
delivered.

Arithon blinked water from his lashes and saw, stamped in the gloom
above the puddles, the blacker form of a horseman, cloaked and waiting
with a statue's nerveless patience across the road in their path.  The
pony whickered greeting through moist drifts of steam.  It fretted the
bit against Dakar's hold, then stamped to a silver spray of runoff.

The black ahead never flicked a muscle.  He could have been a phantom's
horse, he stood so still; until his rider's crisp speech dispelled
illusion.  "Bring the cart on.  There's a dry cave nearby with a fire
lit where the smoke is unlikely to raise notice."

The voice was Asandir's.

Arithon shut his eyes in relief, while in dire trepidation, Dakar
swallowed complaint and eased his death grip on the pony.

The Sorcerer led the way off the road to an overhang chiseled into a
hillside.  Some long-dry flow of springwater had etched the floor into
hollows, quilted now by the musty detritus of last year's fallen leaves.
The slope of the hill and the cart parked outside broke the brunt of the
wind.  Asandir tended a small birch fire beneath a seam that formed a
natural chimney.  Beside its sweet burning warmth, Halliron rested in
blankets.  Throughout the labor of unloading supplies, Dakar kept the
scowl that had ridden his features since Jaelot, his lips pulled into a
downturned bow as if crimped by an overtaut stitch.  Too brusque to
humor his grudges, Asandir summarily ordered him out to mind the horses.

Without more delay, the Sorcerer shed his dark mantle and knelt at the
Masterbard's shoulder.  As his light touch explored the bruised flesh
and hot swelling beneath the limp fronds of white hair, he said to
Arithon, "Forgive me.  Your own discomfort must wait."

Seated on Halliron's other side with his knees drawn up and his chin
cupped, Arithon scarcely stirred an eyelash.

"Don't you think I'd help you if I could?"

The unalloyed shame in the words gave Asandir pause.

Then his hands resumed their review, while firelight played disappearing
games with the creases scribed on his craggy face.  Night sealed the
cave in misty dark.  Summer moths blundered in erratic circles through
the updrafts raised by the smoke.  Scorched out of flight, a delicate
blue-and-mauve one snagged in Asandir's robe.  There it battered a dying
tattoo and powdered dusky crescents against the weave of the wool.

Outside, the carol of a late-singing mockingbird entangled with Dakar's
snarl at the buckskin to hold still; dampness had swollen the harness
leather and jammed the tongues in the buckles.  In methodical, quiet
contrast, Asandir finished his examination.  He touched a hand to
Halliron's injured temple, and the other, fingers spread, across a
forehead bruised like a plum.  His gaze trained on the face of his
charge as he addressed the cause behind Arithon's statement.

"I gather that when Etarra's army attacked the clans of Strakewood, you
engaged a spell of unbinding that has left your mage talents crippled."
A log settled and spat off hellish sparks.  For a second the Sorcerer
was limned with red glare, a still figure poised in cold patience who
held power to forgive or condemn.  Then the shadows settled back and
gentled him.

Just as deceptively he seemed an old man, as worn by life's turns as
Halliron.  "Just a little spell against a crossbow bolt, true enough,
but your knowledge of grand conjury was abused.

The consequence of that is most grave.  Would you care to tell me the
details?"

Arithon muffled a sound against the tight-shuttered palms of his hands,
then raised a bloodlessly white face.  "Daelion forgive me, I've been
over and over the memory.  I relive the moment in nightmare and despise
myself.  But I can't think what other choice I had.  Young Jieret
survived.  That's all that seemed to matter at the time."

"Guilt," Asandir said dispassionately.  "There's part of it, yes."

His next line stung like flung gravel.  "So, prince, are you guilty?"

Balled in a knot to quell his shaking, Arithon lashed back in
desperation.  "Dharkaron Avenger only knows!"

"Then leave it there and be done with it!" His rebuke at sharp odds with
his unhurried manner, Asandir moved a hand, traced a symbol on
Halliron's chest, then transferred his touch to probe underneath the
faded blankets.  Aware that Dakar might blunder in at any moment, he
added, "As your maternal grandfather was remiss not to teach, you have
only the present in your power."

"Oh, but I don't," Arithon said in gritty truth.  "Let me once encounter
my half brother and I'll kill him.  Certainly he's kept himself busy,
training new armies to stalk me.  Desh-thiere's curse wasn't cast to be
selective.  Or is it better I'm stripped of my mage talent?  When we
fight, I can't misuse such gifts to slaughter every misled wretch sent
against me."

Behind this, the other grief sawed like dull wire: he should

never have allowed his passion for music to slip his judgment in Jaelot.
Had he not been overset by fury at the mayor's petty arrogance, had he
not succumbed to the beguiling resonance instilled in Paravian mystery,
the Mistwraith's curse might still be deranged, its geas of obsessive
hatred denied any tangible target.

But Asandir gave that fallacy short shrift.  "Since Lysaer's resolve to
restore Avenor, you knew you'd soon be forced from anonymity.  Sethvir
saw the same.  He chose to grant most of your request." A clipped
gesture indicated the satchel tucked beside the stallion's heaped saddle
packs.  "Those items sent from Althain may help.  Have a look.  I'll see
to your health the moment Halliron is comfortable."

While Arithon mustered his self-command to move and examine the bundle,
and Tain fell, and Dakar's bitten epithets shifted target to malign the
black stud, Asandir raised his hands from the hard's body and traced a
sigil of peace upon the air.  "How are you faring, Halliron, son of
AI'Duine?"

Eased by the Sorcerer's ministrations, the hard stirred and awakened. "I
do well enough, for a cripple." In flame light, his wide, opened eye
appeared brighter, its pupil no longer distended; a faint blush of rose
suffused the sills of his cheekbones.

Asandir traced his fingertips down the line of jawbone, neck and
shoulder.  Then, very gentle, he raised and massaged the numbed arm.

His gaze all the while stayed locked with the old man's, now rekindled
to a frenetic spark of life.  The Sorcerer said with meticulous care,
"The Mayor of Jaelot will end his life badly, in pain of his own
devising."

Halliron's slur-red syllables refound their rhythm and came back in
ringing sincerity.  "I'm sorry, then."

"You would be." Asandir's tension broke before a fresh smile.

"You're content?"

Neither one glanced aside as Arithon freed the last knot in the satchel
and started to survey its wrapped contents.

"Should I not be?" Halliron managed a one-shouldered shrug that somehow
missed seeming awkward.  "Dakar promised.  I'll live to see Innish.
That's the last of my desires."

"The Mad Prophet claimed that?" Asandir's working fingers kept on, but
his gaze assumed a jarring glint of iron.

"He's gifted with truesight.  He wouldn't dare lie for your happiness."

"Well then," Halliron said peacefully, "I'm more than content.  My
lyranthe passes to Arithon."

Asandir glanced across the cleft in query.

Engrossed, the Master of Shadow still knelt with the lists that
companioned Maenalle's letter.  The set of brass instruments pulled from
Sethvir's emptied satchel sliced out scintillant reflections as the
Sorcerer cut through his thought.

"You're fully aware of the implications, Teir's'Ffalenn?"

At the unwelcome use of that title, Arithon started and looked up.

"Forgive me, implications of what?"

"That Halliron leaves you his lyranthe." Asandir never broke rhythm as
he massaged the nerves in the hard's deadened wrist; but his eyes, fixed
on Arithon, were metallically bleak and bright.

"Our Masterbard kindly offered as much." Arithon creased the parchment
into folds between wildly trembling fingers.  "I accepted as a
formality, since I hoped Sethvir might send me the instrument I lost
when the coronation went wrong at Etarra.  She isn't here with the
charts and the cross-staff."

Asandir spoke fast to deflect the inevitable question.  "No, your own
instrument is not safe in storage at Althain." Braced to mete out a
cruel test, he added, "She was smashed in pieces, at Lysaer's hand, by
instigation of Desh-thiere's wraith."

In one coiling move, Arithon shot to his feet.

"Lysaer!" The hatred behind his shocked outburst tore through and
possessed him in an explosion all the more hideous for being mute.  For
a racking, volatile moment, exposed to a cruel glow of flame light, the
Shadow Master became the instrument of the Mistwraith's geas: a living,
breathing weapon charged and driven to achieve his half brother's death.

Still stressed to sickness from overplayed nerves, every snarling tic
naked on his face, Arithon advanced three stalking steps.  By the fire's
edge, he checked sharply.  A quiver wrung through him.  His very heart
seemed to stop.  The fists at his hips uncurled into shaking as he
expelled his pent breath in a rasping succession of gasps.

In still, fraught silence, Asandir measured the extreme act of will, as
the Shadow Master fought his way back to sanity and coherence.

Arithon turned his face aside, then, his first shaken words for
Halliron.  "Forgive me.  I'd hoped you would change your bequest once
you learned I held an instrument of similar quality.  My word to you was
made in that belief."

Halliron dredged up his one-sided smile.  "Be at peace.  The lyranthe I
carry by tradition accompanies Athera's masterbard.

Don't say you didn't feel the change in Jaelot.  True music has tuned
you to empathy.  The power now flows through your hands, and the title
is unequivocally yours."

Arithon's shift into torment was sharp as a fast-breaking stick.

"Ah, Ath, what have you given me if not another weapon for this feud?"

Aware of his grief, wise enough to stop protest, Halliron pushed
half-erect and achieved the timbre and inflection he once commanded to
arrest men's minds in mid-sentence.  "Yes.

And you will make me no promises, not to use to the fullest what you've
earned." Steadied by Asandir's quiet grasp, unfazed by the threat of
s'Ffalenn fury, the hard added, "You forget.  I have lived to see the
sun's reemergence, and your part in the Mistwraith's defeat.

If a masterbard's music can one day spare your life, or that of your
loyal defenders, you will use it so, and without any binding ties to
conscience."

Arithon spun away in trapped pain.  "And if I twist that power to
inflict more bloodshed and murder?"

Halliron pursued in fatherly forbearance.  "The gift was never given,
but claimed."

A widening pause ensued, while Arithon stood and grappled with the
concept through tortured, horrified reassessment.

As the fire sighed and crumbled in a vermilion fall of embers, the hard
gently added, "So it was with me, and every one of my predecessors back
to Paravian times.  I was wrong, perhaps, not to tell you in advance.  I
was not wrong to nurture your talent.  That is my legacy to Athera."

Eased back to rest by Asandir, the elderly singer closed his eyes.

"Abide this success.  I'll have no oath from you.  And, your royal word
as given, you will accept the lyranthe that is your due."

Arithon jerked around.  Robbed of all grace, he stumbled past the fire.
As if every tendon in his knees let go, he folded beside Halliron's
blankets, bent his head, and embraced the musician's withered shoulders.
"You have my gratitude, always, for everything.

The joy you have given can't be measured."

He withdrew his touch quickly, unable to master his grief, while Asandir
used swift and subtle spellcraft to banish Halliron's suffering into the
settled peace of sleep.

As the hard's labored breathing steadied and deepened, the eyes of the
Fellowship Sorcerer and Athera's new Masterbard met and locked.

"He's dying, isn't he?" Arithon said.

The large-knuckled hands draped on Asandir's knees looked
uncharacteristically helpless.  "Dakar has promised his return to
Innish."

Arithon pressed, "Was that his guilt speaking, or true prophecy?"

In response to the Sorcerer's glance toward the invalid, he did not
resist the tactful grip that raised him by the wrist and guided him away
from the fire.

"Dakar's promise will need all my help to carry out.  But that quandary
must bide for the moment." Firm that the admission was not to be dwelled
on, Asandir bent, unbuckled a supply sack, and tugged out another
blanket.  "Yours can't."

Before the musty wool could be unfurled across his shoulders, Arithon
snatched its folds, stepped back, and assumed the burden of his own
infirmity.  He sat on the studded chest that held Halliron's court
clothing, and the gesture almost looked natural enough to hide that his
strength had given out.

A corner of Asandir's mouth twitched, the reflex of a smile suppressed.
"Every s'Ffalenn prince since Torbrand preferred his dignity over
comfort." He stepped behind the little coffer and laid hands as light as
air over Arithon's muffled collarbones.

"Leave me the indignity and discomfort.  Spare me the burdens of my
ancestry." A rapid, sweeping shudder coiled through the flesh under the
Sorcerer's touch.

Asandir shifted, trailed his thumbs up the sides of Arithon's neck, then
resettled precisely spread fingertips.  Under the damp coils of black
hair, the scalp he probed burned as if wasted by fever.  Over the snap
of the embers and the tunnels of rain over rock, he said, "The
vibrations that endow the earth mysteries are very finely attuned.

Like the source that fuels grand conjury, too much exposure too fast can
strike an imbalance between spirit and flesh.  The rite you channeled
through music in Jaelot was meant to be loosed under wards.

Always in the past, the raw outflow was controlled by a circle of
Paravian singers."

Relaxed by a tingling influx of healing that settled and then gently
eased him, Arithon bent his head and sighed.  Sudden sweat sparkled on
his temples and painted gilt tracks across the downtumed slant of his
cheekbones.  In a catch of breath too quick to allow hope, he said,
"Dakar warned I'd be sick.  It's simple overextension, then?"

"Hardly simple." Asandir flattened his hands over the crown of the
Shadow Master's head and pressed down.  "But had you lost the inherent
source of your mage talent, I can promise you would be dead, as any
other untrained mortal would be, who bridged the path for such powers."

To mask the sharp tremor that ripped him, Arithon said, "But if that's
true, I have no access.  The acts I committed in Strakewood have left me
blank and blind."

"The channels that transfer the higher vibrations are still intact,"
Asandir admitted, dispassionate.  "The spells of unbinding you meddled
in brought their own measure of damage.  The magnetic flow of your aura
suffered some misalignment.  Given time, you have full potential to
heal.  But first your spirit must win self-forgiveness past the tenets
of your own s'Ffalenn conscience."

Arithon recoiled as though scalded.  "Ath!  Not that.  I am cursed.
Where are the sureties?  You know when Lysaer's armies find me,
Desh-thiere's geas will just drive me to repeat the very same
atrocities."

Asandir's hands reclaimed their grip and clamped down like unmerciful
shackles.  "You wanted the truth.  If you mend, you must find your own
path back to balance." Then, sorrowfully aware that the shudders under
his hands were no longer due to cramping, but to a silent, bitter
struggle against despair even weeping could not ease, the Sorcerer
engaged his power with stunning force, and felled Rathain's prince into
sleep.

Once the blankets were rearranged, and slack limbs laid straight and
made comfortable, he looked up to find the Mad Prophet poised against
the tinseled fall of rain, arms clenched through bundled loops of
harness.

"Dakar?  Did you think I didn't notice you were listening?"

The brass chime of buckles accompanied a shamefaced step forward, and a
terret caught light, round and gold as a wyvern's eye.

"Arithon's blinded his mage-sight?"

The Sorcerer arose from his crouch in a spill of disturbed air.

"Did you think I assigned him your protection for mere whim?"

"Why am I last to be informed?" Dakar tossed his load in a clashing
slither beside the unloaded gear from the pony cart.

"Great Ath, I've served you both as plaything since the wintertime."

"I sent Rathain's prince to collect you," Asandir corrected acidly.  "If
he chose to keep you outside his confidence, that was his privilege.
Should you wish his trust, you're going to have to earn it."

Affronted past speech, Dakar slung off his dripping cloak.

He stamped to the fire to warm his hands, the back of stooped shoulders
presented toward his Fellowship master.

But Asandir was nowhere near finished.  "Whatever anger you may feel,
however sorely you take the fact that your faults make you easy to
manipulate, nothing under Ath's sky can justify the promise you have
groundlessly made to Halliron."

Dakar cringed, eyes darting rapidly sideward in vain search for excuse
to escape.  "I only said-" Asandir cut him off, ruthless.  "The old
Masterbard will not make Innish in his current state of mind."

Trapped, the Mad Prophet continued, "But I thought"No power inside the
Major Balance can heal against the will of the spirit," Asandir
interrupted again.

Chastened to nervous habit, Dakar caught up a branch and stirred the
embers.  Sparks flared, brightening his sweaty flush.

"But Halliron has reason to live!  With all his heart, he longs to
rejoin his family."

"A man's destiny is not ruled by desires alone, though to judge by your
loose habits, you might mistakenly think so."

Sorrowful beneath his clipped tone, Asandir said, "Mortal fate is more
often subject to deeply buried human fears."

Obstinate with guilt and confusion, Dakar parked his bulk on the
woodpile.  Outside, an owl hooted.  Two spell-wrapped figures slept easy
under blankets, while the rain fell and sluiced down the gully toward
the hollow where the stream ran.  Rasped to stripped nerves by the prick
of the Sorcerer's regard, Dakar jerked a birch log out from under his
knee and hurled it into the fire.  As draft-caught bits of ash winnowed
and flared, harried upward by spiraling eddies, he said, "Bother and
fiends!  Do me the kindness just once of telling me plainly where my
fault lies."

"The music that called Halliron to leave his family is now secure in the
hands of a successor." Inscrutable behind a billowed haze of birch
smoke, Asandir sat down on an outcrop near the abandoned array of
navigational instruments and rolled sea charts.  "His need to reconcile
with his daughter and wife is undermined by dread.  Halliron worries
they will blame and reject him.  On that point, I could give no
reassurance.  The wife is deeply bitter after so unkind an absence.

The daughter was a child when her father left, too young to shape a firm
opinion of his character."

Reduced to cowering misery, Dakar said, "Can anything be done?"

Asandir regarded him, merciless through a span of rippled air.

"Are you asking my help to mend your thoughtless pride?

Or do you truly care for Halliron's sake?"

"Dharkaron's Black Chariot!" Dakar exclaimed, shocked at last.

"What pride do I have?  Had I never stepped whistling into Jaelot, the
Masterbard would be hale, and by now reunited with his family!" He
gulped a fast breath, jammed his knuckles in his beard, and finished in
shattering defiance.  "I don't like Arithon.  Punish me for that.  But
for what Halliron has sacrificed for me, and for my failures in his
behalf, I beg you to lend him every consolation within reach of
Fellowship powers."

"You ask a very great deal." Dim in silhouette against the seamed grain
of shale, the Sorcerer weighed and prefaced his decision.

"There's only one possible option.  I can defer my review of the
Mistwraith's prison and drive Halliron back to Jaelot in the pony cart.

From the reactivated power focus there, I can spell-transfer us both to
the waste of Sanpashir, forty leagues southeast of Innish."

The last facts were listed, in dispassion as pitiless as Ath's avenging
angel.  "Halliron might not survive the transfer.  He could die while
crossing the desert.  Or he might live to have an hour in the company of
his wife and his daughter."

The Mad Prophet made his choked plea.  "If there's hope of that much,
then do it."

"Blind haste got you into this quandary," Asandir cautioned.  "I cannot
engage grand conjury in the middle of the mayor's palace without
upsetting Jaelot's citizens.  The blame for the disturbance will
certainly fall to Arithon.  You are his assigned protector.  When the
call for your service comes due, are you prepared to share the price
that he must inevitably come to shoulder?"

"If I must!" Twisty as a cornered rat, Dakar glared at his tormentor.
"But you ask the wrong man.  What in five kingdoms would Arithon not
give for the Masterbard's fulfillment?"

Asandir's sudden laugh rang unpleasant as pumice scraped on steel.

"That's the first time you've judged this prince fairly." He knelt and
started bundling the scrolls and instruments sent at Arithon's request
from Althain Tower.  "Very well, Dakar.  At dawn, I shall leave to
convey Halliron to Shand.  You will stand by the Master of Shadow, and
woe betide you if you fail him."

Preoccupied with easing off the sticks and nubs of kindling that had
unkindly jabbed dents in his backside, Dakar took belated notice of the
items in the Sorcerer's hands.  He shot to his feet amid a clattering
fall of billets.  "I don't believe it!" he cried, rebounded with
unmollified speed from whipped recrimination to curiosity.  "Those are
Leinthal Anithael's charts."

"His cross-staff and compass, also." As if the instruments that had
belonged to the legendary Paravian navigator were of no particular
significance, Asandir tied off the fabric of each packet.  "What did you
think?  That Sethvir keeps his storage shelves stocked like a
commonplace chandler?"

"Never." Dakar kicked clear of the miring faggots.  "You aren't giving
those to the Shadow Master."

When the only reply he received was the whickering snap of the birch
fire, he wisely abandoned the subject.  Much later, brooding and awake
in damp blankets, he saw the answer was self-evident after all.

Begotten by a seafaring pirate prince on the splinter world of Dascen
Elur, Arithon would naturally incline toward blue water.  Since Athera's
arts of offshore navigation had been lost with the Mistwraith's
invasion, on shipboard he could steal the advantage.  The armies his
enemy amassed on dry land could scarcely cross trackless water to harry
him.

After midnight, a freshening wind splattered droplets across Dakar's
face.  He awakened and barely in time, bit back a reflexive string of
expletives.  Flat on his back, eyes rolled upward in prayer, he
listened.

Nothing stirred beyond crickets, scraping musically in the rock clefts.
The embers of last night's fire picked out the arched bridge of
Halliron's nose, the jut of one snowy eyebrow a chalked curve against
pillowing wool.  His left hand trailed free of the blankets, skilled
fingers that would never again grace a fretboard fanned out in
loose-knuckled sleep.

Dakar clenched his jaw.  Determined not to dwell on a sorrow beyond his
means to remedy, he peered through the gloom.  The cloak-wrapped forms
which reclined beyond the hard seemed equally quiet and oblivious.  To
the rear of the cleft, the seep of a spring plinked an erratic melody.
Through the reedy draw of the coals and the rhythm of steady breathing,
the Mad Prophet judged that Arithon and the Sorcerer were asleep.

He wormed forward on his elbows and tensed, stock-still.

When his movement aroused no disturbance, a crafty smile split his
beard.  He slipped out of his bedroll, fumbled in the dark for a cloak
damply redolent of horse, and groped after'his boots.

Adept enough at sneaking from his countless nightly escapades with
paramours, he stole to his feet.  Wishing for carpets in place of
moldered leaves, and for predictable furnishings instead of heaped
crates haphazardly unloaded from the pony cart, he eased his way ahead
in furtive care.

Harness leather looped his leading ankle and roused a staccato chink of
brass.  Dakar paused, eyes widened as he mouthed a soundless epithet.

Nothing happened.

Only silence abraded his nerves.  Convinced good fortune was still with
him, he bypassed the obstruction and crept to the mouth of the cave.
Mist gray lit by moonglow coiled past his silhouette, framed in a
backward glance of apprehension with his footgear tucked under his
elbow.

He reached the ravine undetected, jig-stepped a stride in relief, and
scarcely minded as mud and bits of gravel sieved through the weave of
his socks.  To a slither of loose shale, he blundered through a
sinkhole, found a convenient rock, and sat down to don his boots.

He fussed a long time with the laces.  Breeze lightly spiced with green
balsam brushed his hair; above the ridge, an owl hooted.  Lifted to
giddy high spirits, Dakar thrust upright and pursed his lips to whistle.

A shadow barred his path: one cloaked in midnight blue and silver, that
even the wind treated gently.

Dakar's ditty wailed wildly off-key and died in a sucking gasp of
breath.

"Avoiding nightmares?" Asandir asked in silken politeness.

"Actually, no." A bit too shrill, the Mad Prophet shrugged.

"I drank too much water before I slept.  Could you step aside?  I need
to- " Still conversational, the Sorcerer said, "You took the money bag
with you for that?"

Through an eloquent, frustrated stillness, Dakar shut his teeth with a
click.  "Merciful Ath, I hate boats!  You know how I suffer from
seasickness."

Asandir sighed over the skein of the wind through damp foliage.

"This time, you broke more than just my bidding.

Your word as given, my errant prophet.  You will render the service you
promised."

Overhead, the clouds parted.  Shafts of white moonlight lit the mist
beneath the pine boughs and blackened the shadows into velvet.

The Sorcerer's spread hand seemed pale and poised as the censure of an
apparition.  The soundless, lightless burst of conjury that followed
harrowed Dakar clean through to the pith of his bones.

He blinked and stumbled back, struck to wordless outcry.

But spellcraft speared through him and passed without pain.  In
suspicion, he assessed, but nothing seemed changed in him at all.

What have you done to me?" Plaintive and shaken, he clenched his arms to
contain the dread that yawned a sudden hollow in his chest.

The Sorcerer's reply came frigidly precise.  "Nothing, unless you break
your oath of loyalty."

Excuses died.  Dissolved to bleak honesty, Dakar stopped his

hand-wringing affectations.  "You have no mercy and no heart.

Why in the breadth of creation could you not see fit to assign me to
Prince Lysaer's retinue?  He at least was my friend"' At the Sorcerer's
fixed silence, the Mad Prophet ranted on.

"Arithon's a cheat and a trickster.  He sent young children out

to kill with Deshir's clansmen.  You know this!  How can you sanction
the works and the cause of such a man?"

"I sanction nothing." Asandir caught Dakar's shoulder in a

vise grip and shoved him back up the ravine.  "You have only to keep
your charge alive."

Long strided, even over rocks in total darkness, the Sorcerer made no
allowance for the foot-dragging clumsiness of his apprentice.

Behind his stony silence lay wider obligations the Mad Prophet rejected
in blind obstinacy; laughably ironic, that Dakar himself had been the
seer to shape the prophecy which held all their fates in its coils.

If the last living scion of the s'Ffalenn royal line chose to fare
seaward to stall the compulsions of an unnatural geas, the tactic might
stave off another war; might with just a little help buy the time for
Kharadmon to complete their knowledge of the Mistwraith's origins.  The
least upset in unstable chains of event offered quandaries too dire to
contemplate: on Arithon's life and future rested the Fellowship's
reunity back to Seven, and the key to the augury that balanced Athera's
course and restored the lost presence of the Paravians.

Apparition

Jaelot's south towers speared through cobwebs of ground mist, and
torches adjacent to the guard posts threw a muted snag of orange against
predawn gloom like black pearl.  Poised on a rise not far off, Asandir
stood in studied stillness.  One hand gripped the bridle of Halliron's
buckskin gelding; the other fretted knots from its sweat-damp mane,
while farm vehicles gathered and milled in the road for the horn call to
signal the gate's opening.  Exposed to plain view on the verge though he
was, no one glanced Asandir's way.

The air hung dense with sea salt, fragrantly sweetened by summer-cut hay
hauled in to stock the lofts above the carriage sheds.

The plod of draft beasts and the creak of battered vegetable crates wove
through the imprecations of a goodwife who nagged at her spendthrift
husband.  Not two yards distant from the Sorcerer, a courier with the
mayor's lion blazon on his saddlecloth reined in his foam-flecked mount.

The pony cart might as well not have been there, for all the notice it
drew.  While Halliron slept under blankets, Asandir measured the timbre
of his breathing and swept the sky with anxious eyes.  Night was waning
too swiftly.  The beacon light by the quay shed a sullen, smothered
halo, while the dirge-deep toll of the fog bell slammed the air with
vibrations.

The pony gently lipped the Sorcerer's sleeve, then, for no apparent
reason, jerked his head sharply and snorted.

The next instant, an icy lick of breeze showered the dew from the
grasses.

It flattened Asandir's tunic to gaunt shoulders and flicked the ends of
his hair against the weathered hollow of his cheek.

Roused in mild query, he asked, "Luhaine?"

"Sethvir had a notion you might need me." A blot in the dimness resolved
into the rotund image of his discorporate Fellowship colleague.  Luhaine
interlaced plump fingers and reviewed the press before the gatehouse. "I
gather you're wanting a concealment ward and probably a diversion for
these countryfolk?  A spell of misdirection?"

Petulant as a librarian with a clutched load of books, the discorporate
mage peered down his nose.  "Never mind that such arts of trickery are
much better suited to Kharadmon's profligate style."

"I regret to offend your principles," Asandir said agreeably.

"But Kharadmon isn't here."

"No." Luhaine affected a sniff.  "Well then.  You can't very easily
attend Halliron's needs and engage a major power focus while every lout
in Jaelot stands as witness.  Though truthfully, I shouldn't mourn the
tiniest bit if society here perished from the shock."

Confounded by his colleague's quirky penchant for lofty language and
lectures, Asandir ran out of tact.  "Daybreak is all but upon us."

"You always did like to rush," Luhaine grumbled.  "If I still lived
enfleshed, I should much rather drive Halliron's gelding than play
pranks and spells on armed guardsmen."

For answer, Asandir climbed back behind the buckboard, flicked the
reins, and rolled the pony cart into the roadway amid its jostling
trains of oxen; its highbred, liveried couriers; and packs of
cross-gartered, sunburned farmers who ruminated over summer rains and
crop blight.

Luhaine's image unraveled into a swirl of cold that caused draft beasts
to blow and shy against their traces.  The farmers at their lines needed
full attention to control their jostling teams.  Wives and field hands
brought along as helpers became engrossed in grabbing baskets of onions
and vegetables that threatened to topple, or hogs that squealed and
suddenly shouldered to burst enraged from their crates.  Luhaine's craft
was seamless enough that even little children on their mothers' knees
never blinked as the hard's painted cart passed them by.

"I suppose you also expect me to contrive something to prod the watch to
raise the gates." Without Kharadmon's jibes to divert him, Luhaine liked
to complain.  "That's a great deal to ask, at brief notice."

But then, the grand conjury required to transport Halliron to

Shand would become vexingly more difficult without assistance from the
dawntide surge across the ancient power focus.

Resigned to an exasperated eddy, the discorporate Sorcerer departed.  A
moment later, movement harried through the guardsmen on the gate turret.
Their captain at arms shouted something querulous up the stairwell, his
phrase bent by Luhaine into unintelligible echoes.

The misinterpretation did not happen by chance; the horn call for
daybreak winded its mournful note with the sky still gray as smoked
quartz.

Over the consternation that convulsed the duty watch to argument,
Asandir murmured words that no other living ears overheard.  A puff of
miffed breeze, Luhaine flicked by in acknowledgment.  As the windlass in
the gatehouse groaned and turned and Jaelot's grand portals cracked
open, a scowling churl with a cartload of chickens discovered a spurious
reason to divert his team and trade gossip with a sheep drover.  The
Sorcerer steered the cart smartly through the gap and trotted the pony
through the arch.

The hanging tin talismans that had failed to repulse Lyats jangled sour
protest as the draft that was Luhaine trailed after him.  Never
loquacious, Asandir shot a scathing glance toward the space his
colleague now occupied.

"Well, certainly you needed none of my assistance with the gate guards,"
Luhaine admitted.  A ribby mongrel scavenging garbage amid the wreckage
of a cookshop raised brindled hackles and growled in his direction.  A
pebble dropped out of nowhere.  Lightly rapped on the nose, the cur
tucked tail and bolted, while Luhaine resumed, a touch sulky.  "Let's
say it's a matter of subtlety.  I know what you've done to ease
Halliron.

Don't pretend that buckskin pony drew this vehicle nightlong without
your arcane intervention.  Such needs have taxed you, I should think,
without the added burden of Jaelot's hysterical fear of sorcery."

Asandir's lips turned down in chiseled disgust.  Above, the sky had
brightened.  Limned in shaded gray, the thoroughfare ahead lay jammed
with flung wreckage where the earth's heightened energies had surged in
exultation on the solstice.

Roofs shorn of shingles and planking lifted skyward in spindly
silhouette.  For the follies of masons grown deaf to the mysteries, for
the human obstinacy of blind greed, Asandir loosed a soft sigh.  The
little cart rattled bravely around a mangled stoop and past a brick
mansion with all of its shutters torn off.

Where the street cobbles were not plowed up wholesale, the wheels grated
over smashed flowerpots, and crushed stalks of festival poppies whose
leaves, against nature, had not wilted.

A hacked signpost leaned beside a lilac tree frothed in unseasonal
bloom.  The perfume thickened the sea air, underhung by rotted offal
from the markets.

"Folk here are unlikely to forgive or forget the way Arithon spoiled
their holiday," Asandir allowed finally.

He guided the pony down Broadwalk Way, strewn still with petals and
scorched garlands, the buckled slabs of flagstone paving sfitched
through by improbable grass.  A lampblack who sauntered through a side
alley turned his head at the ring of hooves and wheels.  When his
searching glance encountered nothing solid to partner the sounds that
approached, he dropped his satchel and fled in wild panic.  Then just as
suddenly he stopped, his fear rearranged to blank puzzlement as
Luhaine's concealing ward touched him.  While the byway fell behind, the
Sorcerers overheard him, scratching his beard and musing on the perils
of strong drink as he retrieved his tools from the gutter.

The cart reached the head of the grand boulevard, masked by a freezing
ring of spells.  At Asandir's urging, the pony arched its neck, threw
its chest against the collar, and hauled its painted burden up the
shallow marble stairway before the entry to the mayor's palace.

Glass from burst rows of bow windows gleamed in the growing light.

Between skewed columns and pilasters spiderwebbed with cracks, the doors
gaped apart, wrung half off their hinges and trailing the shreds of
blistered paint.  The buckskin snorted to a jangle of bit rings, then
clattered over the lip of the upper landing.  There Asandir steadied the
reins.

The grate of iron wheels across satin-finished stonework whispered to a
stop in the foyer.

A flare of grease torches burned in the cavernous chamber beyond.

Unaware of any visitors, a weary band of drudges labored with baskets
and shovels to clear debris and stagged tiles from the mayor's
devastated banquet hall.

The icy vortex that was Luhaine poised above their heads, an arc of
disturbance only Asandir could see.  "Now you perceive why Sethvir
deemed my presence might be needful.

Unless your wish includes transport for twelve local servants to the
desert flats of Sanpashir?"

"Confound every one of them to Sithaer!" Vexed by the jostling Halliron
had taken in the course of ascending the stair, Asandir raised his
brows.  "They're about to be treated to the scare of their lives in any
case.  At least in the middle of a wasteland, more ignorant talk
couldn't cast further doubt on the character of Rathain's prince."

"A most telling point." The discorporate mage winnowed his way to the
floor through a gloom mazed in smoke, now steeped in growing blue by the
east-facing casements.  "But do please remember your earlier insistence,
that sunrise won't wait for debate."

Already moving, Asandir looped the reins and stepped down from the
buckboard.  He bent to Halliron, touched the hard's slackened limbs
through the blankets, and measured the ebbing signature of life force.

Where the current snarled or faltered, he trailed gentle lines of power
and coaxed the flow even and straight.  He set healer's sigils to
stabilize and runes to preserve.  His delicate work left trailers like
sparks, that faded softly through the wool and revitalized the flesh
underneath.

Presently, Halliron opened his one eye.  Above him, etched in sharp
clarity against a meaningless background, he beheld the Fellowship
Sorcerer, Asandir, who regarded him closely in return.

"Kingmaker," he addressed, the title taken from the lines of an ancient
ballad.  Pained by a voice gone gritted and slurred, he drew breath to
clear his throat and was stopped by the barest pressure of spread
fingers against his chest.

"Don't waste your speech," said the Sorcerer, his eyes as fathomless as
silvering on a new mirror.  "I'm taking you homeward, to Innish.  The
passage ahead will be rough.  Before we go, is there any word you would
have me say to your family?"

Halliron blinked.  He showed no distress at the inference that the
spell-ridden journey might stress his frailty beyond salvage.  "I wrote
a song for my wife and daughter that I am too ruined to perform.

Arithon knows it.  Let him sing my words for me, when he can.  If he
plays just once for my family, they will hear of my love.  His art will
gain their understanding, that he is my legacy to Athera."

Asandir gathered the cold, limp fingers of the hand left nerve dead from
injury.  "Cherish my hope, master minstrel.

You'll be there to sing for yourself."

"You sacrifice too much on my behalf," Halliron whispered, suddenly
adrift in spinning weariness.

The Sorcerer cradled the hard's temple in one steady hand.

"For the deep happiness you have lent the Prince of Rathain, and for
your years of unstinting service, our Fellowship would grant you sky and
earth."

The touch warmed like gentle fire through an aching pressure of cold
mist.  Halliron let the air spin out of his throat.  His eye drifted
closed.  Asleep or unconscious, he never felt the scalding lattice of
mage-force that Asandir raised to ward the wagon that cradled him.

When the Sorcerer finished, nothing inside could be seen through the
unshielded glare of raw spells.

Beyond the low stair, two laggard servants departed in haste through a
side door; Asandir stifled a grin for the geas Luhaine had chosen, which
harried them to leave in a pressing false need that their bladders
required relief.

Then his levity faded.  "There's a problem I've had to leave
unfinished." Aware of Luhaine's attention like a quill prick against
exposed skin, Asandir qualified.  "The Duke of Alestron and his brothers
were absent when I visited to see if they meddled in forbidden armament.
I agree with Sethvir: their evasion hides purpose.  Would you mind
looking in on them?"

Then, too pressed to wait while Luhaine assembled his usual lugubrious
reply, Asandir stepped to the pony's bridle and guided its skittery,
nervous progress down tiled risers left scoured and trenched with cold
scorch marks.  Behind him, the iron-rimmed cart wheels banged and
slammed, and chipped parallel grooves of fresh cracks.  The vehicle
jounced onto level floor and scrunched across fragmented flooring.

Luhaine admonished on a surly nip of frost, "No doubt you want the
wardings checked on Desh-thiere's prison at Rockfell Peak beforehand?"

"Well, sunrise won't wait," Asandir threw back, insouciant.

Overhead, muted light slit the high, lancet windows miraculously still
paned in filmed glass.  Asandir reached the ash-blackened edge that
traced the near rim of the power focus.  He stroked the pony's nose,
murmured into its ear, then straightened.  He spoke his next incantation
in Paravian, each lilted cadence and musical vowel cut and measured to
stamp the air into arcane seals like edged foil.

Power answered.

Too mighty a flux for concealment, the force rocked a tremor through the
building.  Now each consonant snapped out and hammered into echoes that
sifted falls of plaster from the ceiling groins.  Ozone tanged the hazed
spill of dust.  Then stillness locked down, fixed as light trapped in
glass, and the pattern underfoot flared alive.

A silver-blue shimmer raced through the old runes.  The cart rolled over
their heatless light, and the pony loosed a gusty, frightened snort. Its
hooves jinked and rattled over glassy chips of tile as it sidled, uneasy
in the traces.

Asandir soothed a hand over sweating buckskin hide, his touch now all he
could spare to calm the pony's frayed nerves.

For need, he attuned his awareness through his boot soles to gauge the
flow of forces in the focus.  The static of the lane-pulse jagged in
white bursts, sparked by the advent of sunrise.  Careful to sound its
resonance lest the pattern's function had been impaired or corrupted by
time, the Sorcerer quickened step.  He crossed the two inner circles,
then positioned the cart on the interstice at the center where the axis
of all lines converged.

Brightening glare lined his chin with hard light as he braced in
preparation.  "Luhaine."

On that spoken signal, he ceded the powers he had awakened to the
control of his discorporate colleague.  All ties to sensation left him.

The sole thread that grounded his consciousness to flesh became his
gentling hand on the pony.  The nexus of his will bent into a craft
honed through thousands of years of experience.  Nothing else mattered.

Nerve and bone would unravel before he lost hold on his wards to shield
Halliron from the wrenching flux of spell-transfer.

Daybreak charged the lane.

Power whined and crested.  The pattern flared, then shattered past
visible light into a pealing vibration.  Luhaine's deft mastery trapped
the enabled current, then directed an unruly dance of forces to turn,
mesh, and ignite wild power into an orchestrated explosion.

A crack ripped the unshielded air.  Winds blasted.  The torn seams of
tapestries whipped to frayed threads, and every glass flask and
windowpane left whole in the mayor's palace burst to sugared powder and
blew outward.  For an awful, time-rending instant the confines of the
feast hall lay scoured in primal glare.

Then normality reasserted.  Eddies of mauled air spun and died.

Tile fragments raked into crannies, then skittered and chinked back to
rest.  The spellcraft raised through the focus pattern pulsed and
dimmed, and slowly died.  The Sorcerer, the cart, and its occupant were
gone, delivered to a ruins in Sanpashir's desert.  The place they had
occupied in Jaelot held only a smoking curl of dust and a pile of
steaming manure.

For that, for the crazed marks of wheels and the crescentshaped dents
that the pony's shod hooves had gouged in the marble stairway, a second
Sorcerer whose spirit was discorporate had no polite means to fix.
Luhaine departed, a drifting wisp of cold, as drudges, servants, and
blue-blooded residents gave way to hysterical screaming.

A blind fool could guess that Halliron's apprentice sorcerer had
revisited, to terrorize the city with more spells.

In due course, disheveled officials raised in haste from their beds
converged to assess the fresh damage.  They called guardsmen to set
chains on the perpetrators; except there were none to be found.

The Mayor of Jaelot's smashed feast hall lay uncannily

empty.  The roster was changed, the day's patrols recalled from

the gatehouse, while his lordship fumed and paced.  The lyranthe-playing
sorcerer Whom the judiciary wanted burned had escaped Hallucination
through thin air, beyond all reach of due process.

Dakar awakened late to the cinders of a burned-out fire.

Halliron, the Sorcerer, and the pony cart bearing them had departed
before first light, with a note left behind in explanation.

The black stud remained, pawing restlessly by the tree that tethered its
headstall.  Grumpy and sore from scanty sleep, Dakar stumbled out of his
blankets to root for a snack amid the cache of supplies.

Nearby, damp haired from a wash at the stream, Arithon crouched over the
Sorcerer's saddle packs, immersed in thoughtful study as he fingered a
heavy gold coin.  Clearly recovered from the past night's distress, he
looked up at Dakar's blundering.  His expression seemed as affable as
the manner he had affected in disguise as a masterbard's apprentice.

Curdled to distrust, Dakar stared until he tracked the elusive
discrepancy: a striking, indefinable tension infused the Shadow Master's
presence.  Stripped of the shadows he had used to veil his features, his
poise reminded of a wildcat set to stalk.

"This coin is riddled with spell-wards," he opened, his flexible voice
inquiring.  "I hear them.  But without more experience, I couldn't
unravel the purpose behind their harmonics."

Dakar squatted, rifled the nearest canvas bundle, and fished out a
wrapped loaf of bread.  Guardedly wary, he settled on his hams and broke
the crust.  "If Asandir left that to pay the black's stabling, it's
rotten with magecraft, sure enough." Through a bulging mouthful, he
qualified.  "You'll see that bit of gold get passed from hand to hand,
from hostler to horse trader, and the stud, whether sold or rented to
post riders, will find his way back to his master.  He'll be where
Asandir next has need of him, glossy and fit, and have not a whip mark
on him."

Arithon's interest turned rueful.  "My worry was wasted, I see."

The sailing instruments; Dakar kicked himself for lapsed wits.

With Arithon bound seaward, a horse would be useless as tits on a fish.

Disgusted to find the bread as unpalatably stale as the ship's biscuit
he heartily detested, the Mad Prophet stamped off to the stream to wash
down the crumbs and relieve himself.

Arithon used the interval to pack the small camp and scatter the dead
embers of the fire.  When Dakar puffed back uphill, he was waiting, the
black stallion's bridle reins looped through one hand.

Spattered green-gold in new sunlight, his black hair thrown back from
angled cheekbones, the prince who was Master of Shadow appeared absorbed
by the trill of the woodlarks that flitted through the boughs overhead;
except the eyes he turned upon Dakar stayed emerald hard and measuring
as a trap cocked and baited to draw blood.

The Mad Prophet stopped.  Determined to stay nonchalant, he hitched
chubby fingers in his belt.  "You plan to ride."

"To Ship's Port, I think." The invitation casual, Arithon added, "We'll
take turns in the saddle, if you wish."

The rage rose thick and hot, until Dakar felt he might strangle.

"Do as you please.  I'm not going."

"I'd thought not." Arithon slipped a thong at the saddlebow; a canvas
packet slithered loose.  He flicked a neat wrist and tossed it.

Slammed in the chest by the bundle, Dakar staggered backward, gasping
into the smoke-tainted cloth reflexively clutched in his arms.

"That's your share of our stores." Astride the tall stallion, Arithon
finished, "Don't waste the coin on cheap doxies."

"Bastard!  You planned that I wouldn't be coming." The last imprecation
flurried the woodlarks away on scared wings.

"You insufferable son of a bitch!"

"Yes, to the first, who denies it?" Touched to a wicked edge of
laughter, the Shadow Master raised his eyebrows.  "But the last?

Dakar!  How unfortunate for Lysaer." The black stud snorted and
shouldered ahead at the brush of his rider's heels.

"We did after all share a mother."

Jostled aside, then dealt a buffeting sting by the whisk of the black's
departing tail, Dakar kicked a log and howled insults until his ears
rang.  The fit gained him no satisfaction.

Never mind the small blessing that the rain had dried up; from the
moment the Mad Prophet set off hiking, the day grew perversely less
pleasant.

South of Jaelot, the coast road jagged inland, to the east hemmed by
rock-slashed ravines capped in fir, ruched and ruffled like a widow's
collar around the stripped peaks of the Skyshiels.  To the west, in
summers when storms stayed mild, rolling meadowland quilted the hills in
a sun-drenched patchwork of hayfields.  Between pocketed hollows where
the farmers' crofts clustered, blooming larkspur twined sprays of indigo
amid daisies, and yarrow splashed in drifts like white foam.  Under
wide, cloudless sky; across broad, wind-combed acres, any spirit escaped
from an onerous duty might revel in newfound freedom.

Yet Dakar took no joy from leagues of magnificent scenery.  By noon, his
eyes itched and his nose ran; country air had never agreed with him.
Each step he took reminded him how much he detested travel on foot.

The nap he snatched to refresh himself became spoiled by the diabolical
placement of an ants' nest.  Scratching and twitching and shaking out
his clothing, he sought second refuge by a streamlet.

There he fell asleep in comfort, only to discover as twilight came on
that foraging muskrats had ripped open his pack and devoured every crumb
of his food.

Too lazy to regret the wardspells he might have set to protect himself,
Dakar flagged a ride with a merchant's drover bearing candles and
beeswax.  Since the heat of full day would damage the wares, the wagon
traveled to market by night.  The Mad Prophet tucked into a niche behind
the buckboard, contentedly primed to share gossip.

At midnight, beaten down by judicious wheedling, the drover shared his
meal of barley bread and ham.  Dakar cheerfully stuffed his belly, only
to waken shortly afterward, doubled over and moaning with cramps.

The meat had likely been spoiled.  Far too crafty to voice such
suspicion, the Mad Prophet rocked and clutched his belly.

"That stream water must have been tainted."

The drover met the excuse with the same sappy nonsense he used to soothe
his draft mules.  Self-absorbed in a misery that spiked like white fire
through his groin, Dakar missed the moment when his benefactor's
sympathy changed to shouted imprecations.

His next clear sensation was the dry jab of weed stalks prickling into
his cheek.  A pungency of road dust and pepper grass made him sneeze, a
detail which forced recognition: the uncharitable drover had pitched him
out on the verge.  Dakar sweated through the bothered conclusion.  He
might languish of bellyache until crows came to peck out his eyes; not
precisely the plan he had intended to escape his obligation to Asandir.

Too wrung by discomfort to care, the Mad Prophet closed his eyes.

Small use to dwell on dying when he could dream more pleasantly of hot,
lusty tavern girls and foaming tankards of ale.

He got instead a disruptive intervention by brisk hands that first
rolled him over, then latched his armpits in a grip like torture and
peeled him up from the ground.  Sunlight hit his face and his eyes like
a slap, while the world upended and spun.

After disjointed thoughts, he unriddled the indignity that he dangled
facedown over somebody's saddlebow.  The shoulder of the horse that bore
him was sweat sheened and black; the girth unfocused inches from his
nose had been stitched with sigil patterns to discourage wear.

After centuries of being collected comatose from binges, Dakar knew
precisely where he was.  He groaned at the gouge of the pommel in his
gut until unconsciousness mercifully reclaimed him.

The most vile hangover he had ever suffered hounded him back to
awareness.  He sensed darkness and a fire.  A demon rode his skull, one
that wore spurs a half an inch long and delightedly stabbed heels
through his eye sockets.  Clear minded enough to bemoan the unfairness,
since no drop of spirits had passed his gullet, he clamped sweaty hands
to his temples.  "Gaaah," he grated through parched tissues.  "I feel
all ground into ruts by the wheels of Dharkaron's filthy Chariot.

Where in Sithaer am I?"

A rapid-fire shower of lyranthe notes drilled like bodkins through his
ears.

"It appears we came to share the saddle after all," observed Arithon
from some unseen place beyond the embers.  "Since you asked, you are
currently sprawled on dry oak leaves, halfway down the road to
Tharidor."

The Mad Prophet ripped out a scatological epithet, then winced at the
sting of his own vehemence.

"It could be worse." Athera's new Masterbard dampened his instrument,
careless of the string that sawed out a sullen buzz against the
white-gold setting of his signet ring.  Amused by Dakar's flinch, he
added, "You might still be lying in a ditch, abandoned to the crows and
the insects.  Do you get migraines often?  The wax merchant's drover
decided you had plague.  He carried on about pestilence until you're
lucky the northbound couriers didn't overhear.  They'd have rousted the
watch back out of Jaelot with faggots to burn your diseased carcass."

"Never migraines." Dakar sniffed in corrosive irritation.  "I got
indisposed from eating spoiled ham."

He covered his ears, whimpering and uncommunicative.

Though his sour stomach relented by morning, he maintained an offended
silence throughout three days of hard travel.  Since the man was a fool
who risked the temper of any s'Ffalenn prince, Dakar sneaked away by
night and begged passage into Tharidor on the slats of a salt merchant's
cart.

By noon, a whistle on his lips, he kicked open the door of the city's
most commodious tavern.  Blinking through the fusty murk of pipe smoke,
he breathed in the smells of acid oak casks, unperfumed humanity, and
thicker odors of hot grease and chicken meat roasting on spits in the
kitchen.

The inevitable pack of idlers clustered by the hearth.  Dakar nodded
greeting and chose a bench between a group of whispering merchants,
fastidious in their summer silks and lace, and a foursome of sun-cured
deckhands.  "Beer," he demanded to the bar wench who scoured the stones
by the hob.  "The best brew the house has to offer, and also, a plate of
spiced chicken."

The deckhands renewed their squabble over a dice throw made by a
cheater, while Dakar's order arrived.  He licked his lips as the head
foamed over clean glassware, then raised the tankard to catch the thick
stream in his mouth, eyes closed in beatific anticipation.

The taste hit his tongue, bitter enough to scour the linings of his
sinuses.  He huffed and slammed backward in recoil that rattled the
floorboards.  His eyes bulged.  Tears streamed down the flushed apple
curves of both cheeks and he choked through a spray of expelled
droplets.

"Fiends alive!" snapped the sailor across the trestle.  "If you're
minded to sprinkle, do it elsewhere, matey.  Or else, understand, I'll
see your stinking lard carved up and stewed into lamp oil."

Through a half-strangled fit of pure rage, Dakar spat into his tankard.
Too husky to shout, he beckoned to the barmaid.

"Look here, what's this?  The drink you serve is vile.  Pure lye."

His tirade gained volume as the pucker in his throat began to loosen.
"Do you habitually try to poison customers?"

Drawn from the kitchen by the commotion, the landlord appeared, a meat
spit clamped in hand like a battle mace.  "I won't have this!" He strode
past the flabbergasted merchants and shook his iron implement at Dakar.
"My establishment serves the finest fare in Tharidor."

"Oh?" Dakar folded his arms in mulish challenge.  "Then standards
hereabouts must need a boost to lick the belly of a snake."

The spit banged into the trestle and stuck there quivering, a
hairsbreadth from Dakar's planted elbow.  The landlord loomed over him
and bristled with both fists cocked on his hips.  "You've no cause to
sling lies and insults.  If you can't handle a man's brew, go back to
drinking fresh cider."

Wide eyes averted from the metal that skewered the table, Dakar coughed
into his cuff.  "Well, look, you try this." He gave the tankard a shove
with his forearm.  "I'll be fair and admit to poor manners if what slops
inside doesn't scald your mouth to perdition."

The sailhands' dice clicked and stopped in suspended

stillness.  By the hearth, the graybeard idlers leaned forward in
fascination as the landlord scooped up the glass.  The merchants looked
on, more discreet in curiosity, as he quaffed the contents in one
draught.  Then he sighed, his features hard with animosity as he licked
the foam from bearded lips and thumped the drained vessel rim downward
beside the upright meat fork.  "You have a lively imagination, the sort
that makes trouble I don't like."

A jerk of his chin called two enormous thugs from the one dim cranny
Dakar had neglected to watch.  These grasped his elbows in bruising,
cruel fingers and forcibly pitched him out.

Hours later, parked on his rump in the gutter with three knuckles
skinned and one side throbbing to the ache of bruised ribs, the Mad
Prophet ran tender fingers over a swelling black eye and conceded to
woebegone defeat.  He had sampled beer vats and wine shops the breadth
of arion and not a potable drop.  The town tosspots making their evening
rounds singled him out for ridicule, until the last tavern he visited
paid heed to rumor and as firmly as though he were afflicted or insane,
turned him away at the door.

The meat from the sausage stall he visited as consolation caused his
belly to churn and rebel.  Wary by now of offended proprietors, Dakar
stilled his complaint.  As his sensitized innards clenched into fierce
cramps, he squeezed back tears of aggravation, paid for his scarcely
touched meal, and turned his back on the puzzled vendor to sit by the
gutter to regroup.

In dark thought and vile temper, the Mad Prophet weighed the temptation
to ease his troubles between scented sheets in a bawdy house.  But even
the thought of a paid doxie's comforts shot an unpleasant, warning
tingle through his crotch.

Bearded chin propped morosely on the knuckles folded over his knees, his
hair stuck like crimped yarn to his brow by the stifling, seaside
humidity, Dakar began serious cogitation.

While elegant, lacquered carriages and dusty drays rolled to whipcracks
and jingling harness past his perch, his stumbling thought met
enlightenment.

"Ath!" His burst caused an alley cat to streak behind a

stack of barrel hoops.  A street child clad in motley stopped scavenging
handouts to regard him with startled eyes.  Dakar paid neither any mind.
"Fiends plague that interfering Sorcerer, what I really need is an herb
witch!"

The street child sidled nearer and gave him a winsome smile.

"Master, I know such a person.  For a half silver, I'll take you to her
cottage."

Dakar glowered at the waif, whose bare feet and rags masked a
disingenuous, well-fed frame.  "Miserable robber."

But hunger and thirst overcame his will to haggle, and he grudgingly
doled out the coin.

The herb witch brazen enough to practice her craft in Tharidor kept a
squalid shack in the alley behind the tanner's yard.

Shown to her sagging entry by the street waif, who bolted immediately
afterward, Dakar pinched his nose with sweaty fingers and regretted his
need to continue breathing.  The reek that drifted from the tanner's was
overpowering, even without the witch's rain barrel, heaped under in
desiccated entrails and alive beneath a sun-caught swirl of flies.  The
eyes of scavenging rats gleamed from the shadow under the footings, then
flashed in darting retreat at his irritable rap on the door.

The warped, unpainted planks cracked to a squeal of tin hinges.

Fingers curled around the edge, the nails ragged and fimined with dried
blood.  "Who calls?" came a scabrous whisper.

Gagged beyond speech from the stench, Dakar jingled his wallet.

His name and his origins now a moot point, the herb witch opened her
door.

Daylight struck through into clutter and darkness, and roused a dusky
rustle of wings.  A sleepy rooster crowed, answered by a second, while a
stinging billow of herbal smoke and incense swirled out into the street.
The woman who straddled the sill peered outward with red-rimmed eyes.
Her hair was a nest of pale, unwashed hair, stuck with thyme sprigs and
a white fluff of breast feathers that looked to have drifted and caught
there.  She wore deer hide painted with sigils and food stains, and her
skin was blue with ingrained soot.

"What're you wantin'?  A love knot?  A health philter?" She stabbed a
knotty forefinger at the bulge of her visitor's gut.

"Must be a philter, yes?  Woman left you for someone more strapping, is
it?  Acting shy won't change the truth."

Dakar blinked and coughed out bad air in affront.

"Actually, I need to have a geas lifted."

The crone cackled as coarsely as her hinges.  "Some girl's put the
come-hither on you, then?  Ach, that's a pretty enough lie.  You expect
me to believe it?"

"This has nothing to do with problems concerning a woman!" Dakar
snapped.  "Besides, if you have to slit open chickens to work an
unbinding, I've certainly picked the wrong party."

He spun to leave, but a pale hand shot out and clamped the wrist holding
the money bag.  "Such hasty thinking, foolish man." A breathy exhalation
cracked into another wheezing laugh.  "And as for slitting chickens,
some clients expect it, which is all to the good if they pay.

But one does tire of stewed fowl for supper."

Too late for trepidation, Dakar was jerked face about and dragged inside
by a grip like steel pincers.

The herb witch pushed him down on a chicken crate, and kicked her
rickety door shut with the back of a bare, bony heel.  She then bent her
elbows and drummed skinny fingers on her hips, while surveying her
newest client through a twining maze of incense smoke.

The reek of tanner's vats and offal crept undaunted through the musk of
perfume.  Breathing in tortured, shallow gulps, Dakar realized that,
except for the chicken coop he sat on, the cramped little cottage was
clean, if oddly furnished.  Crates and cages for pigeons and barnyard
fowl supported a trestle table, and a cot bright with woven shepherds'
blankets.  Bundles of herbs dangled from the rafters, their thrown
shadows entangled with talismans sewn of felt and glass beads, and the
dried, yellow claws of mummified birds' feet.

"My wares," the crone admitted in brittle amusement.  She bent,
scrounged up a Cloisonne tin of incense, and lit a fresh stick with a
snap of her nail and a cantrip ripped out in burred consonants.  Then
she blew on the tip to fan the ember and fluttered her fingers toward
the artifacts.  "Mostly charms to ward drowning for sailors.  Waste not,
want not, I should say, and the hens' feet add a nice touch of mystery."
She shrugged.

"Tharidor's fashionable types aren't big on spending for spellcraft."

Pecked on the buttocks by the birds cooped up behind the slats where he
perched, Dakar fidgeted.  He looked everywhere else but at the woman,
who shuttled and wove around his person, muttering and tracing odd, red
symbols with her incense.

Smoke trailed from the ember like demon writing, distorted and erased on
the drafts.  The gloom clearly outlined to mage-sight the halos of
warped spells entangled in each gruesome little charm bundle.

The witch worked her craft in blood magnetism and the deep, earthy
mystery that sang through the roots of eldritch plants.  The draw of the
moon infused the wards over her shack and less clean things, which made
the knotted seals that Koriani enchantresses amplified through crystal
seem clear and straightforward by comparison.

Pressed by rising uneasiness, Dakar sought excuses to escape.

"I'm not at all sure you can help me."

The crone snapped erect, rustily cursing.  Her eyes flashed baleful as
the rats' as she stubbed out the stick in a brass tray cupped inside a
bird skull.  "Certain it is that I cannot!" She jabbed splayed fingers
through the last spent embroidery of smoke.  "That's Fellowship
magecraft laid on you!  How dare you set me at risk, asking to break a
geas of Asandir's making?  Well, I don't meddle with that sort of
binding, set as it is over your own given word."

Chickens flapped and squawked as Dakar twisted to face her.

"That's impossible.  I never-" He stopped in remembrance and caught his
full lower lip between his teeth.

The crone peered at his crestfallen expression through her

maniacal tangle of hair.  "So," she concluded.  "You are trapped.

Well and truly bound, and with only your fool self to

blame." Her knees creaked under her deerskins as she leaned

aside, scooped a pouch from a coffer, and spilled out a painted set of
knucklebones.  She spat once to dampen them, rolled

them in her palm, and cast them skittering across the floor.

The last one whispered to rest against the toe of Dakar's boot.

Beaked heads tilted behind the crate slats as the chickens fluffed and
dropped guano in suspicious scrutiny.

"I can offer you only an augury, prophet." The herb witch resumed in a
rasp like rust across velvet, "The man you must attend can be found two
days hence, at sundown, in the shrine of Ath Creator by Ship's Port."

Dakar crashed his fists on the bird coop and cried protest over the
cackle of distressed fowl.  "And if I refuse to rejoin him?"

The herb witch lifted thin shoulders.  "Then, as you have seen, the geas
of your Fellowship master will react in force and sour every pleasure of
the flesh, even to the food and drink your body requires to survive."

Dakar cursed in a mixture of languages and dialects.  When he ran out of
breath for his viciousness, a crafty look crossed his face.

"This geas.  It ties me to the living presence of a man I consider an
enemy.  Is that where its limits lie?"

The herb witch nodded.

"Living presence?" Dakar prodded.

The flick of a dirty nail gave affirmation.

"Then I'll kill him," he promised, the rage embedded in his heart like
gravel pressure forced into glacial ice.  "If that's what it takes to
win free of his company, Dharkaron as my witness, I'll see the last
Prince of Rathain well and thoroughly dead." The Mad Prophet shoved to
his feet, fumbling after his silver.

But the crone snapped her chin aside and refused payment.

"Save yourself, sorry man.  To reach Ship's Port in time for a
rendezvous, you'll need all your coin to rent post-horses."

VII.  Journeys

Shadowed under gold-edged dunes in Sanpashir, while the ceaseless winds
worry the carved ruts of cart tracks, a Ship's Port Fellowship Sorcerer
bows his head in mourning, then stirs and veils the face of the
departed, who breathed through the glory of one last southern sunrise,
but not long enough to know the coral walls and spindled towers of his
native Innish....

Eventide dims the sea mists to lavender, and softens the jagged shrine
to honor Ath Creator which lay well outside the walls and shattered drum
towers of Tysan's abandoned city of walled harbor of Ship's Port.

No ceremonial building Avenor; above the ruin, on a hillock clothed in
myrtle, the Tmarked the site, nor ever had; the old beliefs took after
s'llessid prince just arrived laughs in the teeth of ancient fears,
Paravian ways, that an edifice of man's design need not glorify and
assures the uneasy retainers at his back, "Here will I raise the prime
power that had made and Named all creation.  Only a walls and a family,
and the armies that will march to claim worn, dusty path indented across
the gray cliffs above the bay victory over the Master of Shadow.  .  .

gave evidence of any activity beyond the swoop of gulls and nesting
ospreys.  Shadows striped the grasses as Dakar slid While a lone rider
on a black stud fares southeast, the Koriani stiffly off the back of his
lathered mount.  He looped the reins First Senior reports of his journey
to her Prime: "Arithon is over a weathered deadfall, too worn to care if
the hack shied making for Ship's Port, surely bound for the open sea.
He's back and tore the bridle.

escaped us before on dry land.  Over water, how shall we track
Exchanging horses in relays, he had been in the saddle two him?" And
Morriel's reply, "By means as old as time.  Elaira days.  Sores galled
his backside and knees like fresh shall be sent after him at my
directive, to insinuate herself as vengeance; mere pittance beside the
rancor that griped him his mistress.  .  .  because of Asandir's geas.

Riled as a smoke-hazed hornet, the lowering sunlight a flood of heat at
his back, Dakar stalked down the narrow, stony defile toward the site of
the shrine.

No voice disturbed the sour calls of fishing birds.  The susurration of
surf funneled up from the strand seemed the last sound in the world. The
solitary trace of human presence was a musk of sublimated wax unreeling
on the drafts between the crags.  Dakar used the stone to brace his
balance.  Light-headed as wind itself from days of thirst and hunger,
even the thin fumes of candles turned his senses.

The cliff path plunged in descent.  Ahead and to the left it loomed a
grotto, cut off from sound and sunlight.  Cherished by no priest or
attendant, water welled melodiously from the dark earth, to twine in
splashing rungs toward the tide flats.

Above the spring's seeping brim, niches stepped into the natural rock
cradled a sediment of congealed wax, dingy with trapped carbon and
grained with lichens and moss.

Amid the remains of uncounted offerings left to celebrate Ath's mystery,
fresh beeswax dips shone ivory and gold, flames fluttered in the humid
sea air.  Limned in their crawling halos, Arithon, Master of Shadow,
stood in the shrine exactly as the herb witch in Fharidor had foretold.

He would have died in that moment, had Dakar carried a knife.

Bereft of any weapon, pained enough that his gorge rose for the fact his
knowledge fell shy of banespells or riddles of unbinding, the Mad
Prophet stopped in helpless hatred.

If the enemy he passionately wished to throttle heard the scraped steps
of intrusion, he never turned, but sparked flame to a final candle, then
spiked the light on the ledge alongside hundreds of others.  Minutes
passed, The sky beyond the grotto purpled and sank into indigo, while
inside, the uncertain fires hissed and dwindled, to drown one by one in
puddled wax.

Still, Arithon did not turn.  Left no channel for his anger, Dakar fumed
until reason intruded to argue why a man might burn candles alone in
Ath's shrine at dusk.

"He isn't gone!" the Mad Prophet burst out.  "Daelion Fatemaster grant
me one prayer.  Tell me Halliron didn't die before Asandir got him home
to Innish."

Arithon bowed his head.  "He passed the Wheel this morning.  Just after
sunrise." Whisper quiet and level, he added, "Sethvir informed a
soothsayer, who sought me out to bring word."

Dakar swallowed awkwardly.  "I'm sorry.  Ath, I'm so sorry."

Immersed in grief and self-pity, he fumbled to a spur of rock, and sat,
and lost to his impulse to weep.  In respect for the departed hard's
dignity, he found the restraint to keep silent until the final candle
consumed itself in a spitting flare of wax; one drowned flame among
thousands, an honor lit for a master singer talented beyond reach of
millions.

Night by then had netted the last of the light.  A movement in darkness,
Dakar blotted streaked cheeks on his cuffs.  He raised his head, shoved
sticky hair from his temples, and discovered the shrine's niche left
vacant.

A moment's search revealed Arithon standing outside, nervelessly still
in a gloom that, for him, held no obstacle.

Lined by the pale cream of surf, his black breeches and full sleeves
fitted and neat, he faced Dakar with his head tilted an intent fraction
to one side, much as he had in the past while he unriddled some melodic
nuance of Halliron Masterbard's teaching.

Antagonized by a mannerism drawn from his former, false identity as
Medlir, Dakar stiffened.  "You knew!  You heard the resonance of the
geas Asandir laid upon me and never bothered to warn."

"I did ask about the coin, if you recall," Arithon stated.

"The harmonic pitch set about your person has strikingly similar
overtones."

Dakar fired back a filthy epithet, but got no reaction for his trouble.
Riled all the more since Arithon's patience could outlast him, he
blurted, "Well, what do you intend to do now?"

"I'm overdue to visit a certain tavern on Harbor Street."

The Master of Shadow pushed away from the rocks.  "You look as if you
need a beer."

"Ath, no," Dakar cut back.  "Not again.  That ploy won't serve anymore
to keep me pliant and drunk." To thwart Asandir's geas and compromise
the Shadow Master, he would need subtle planning and clear thought. "Now
that I know it's your company I keep, you won't catch me muddling my
wits."

A stir of white shirt in the gloom, Arithon shrugged.  "As you wish. The
truth is, I could do with a beer."

"Daelion's pity!" Dakar bristled in disgust.  "Where's your respect? The
hard who loved you enough to share a master's training lies dead!  Is
this how you honor his memory?  By running straight off to get sotted?"

No expression on his face, Arithon murmured a line in liquid Paravian
lost to hearing through the thrash of the surf.

Surprised not to suffer the expected scalding retort, the Mad Prophet
was caught flat-footed as the subject of his rebuke shouldered past.
Compelled to scramble after, the fat prophet tripped and stubbed toes
all the way back up the cliff path.

From sundown till dawn, the harborside quarter of Ship's Port brewed up
a teeming moil of racket and crowds.  Here, where tricksters juggled
flaming torches, and the pawn stalls stayed open all night for sailors
to trade trinkets for coin, the raucous parade of whores and the reeling
celebration of deckhands on leave packed into kaleidoscopic hubbub.  If
the alleys overlooked by the gable-roofed shops seemed thronged as a
holiday fair, the taverns were jammed to bursting.

Overdressed or half-clothed, a stew of sweating humanity gathered in the
frenzied determination of sailors to cram nine months of pleasure into
their first night ashore.  Most rampaged and caroused until their coin
ran out, then stumbled to the purser of an outbound trader to sign for
another voyage.

The taproom of the Kittiwake Inn claimed distinction as the wildest dive
on Harbor Street.  Since it lay nearest to the wharves, deckhands still
rolling on sea legs swayed in for their first drink and often passed no
farther.  Smugglers' crews gathered there, sober and wary, ready for
swift orders from their captains, that illicitly laden ships might slip
hawsers ahead of the harbormaster's officers for flight to a hidden
cove.

At the Kittiwake, if a newcomer wanted beer or a table, he was likely to
need bribes for the privilege.

Helplessly tied by Asandir's geas, Dakar forwent his urge to complain.
His resolve to stay sober in the cause of bloody murder now enforced by
a shortage of coin, he cursed and jabbed elbows to plow aside revelers
in his need to keep pace with Arithon.

Small and unfairly quick on his feet, the s'Ffalenn prince could
shoulder through crowds like an eel.  He already had the ear of the
landlord, a tower of a man with red-veined cheeks and an ingrained stoop
left over from service as a ship's cook.

The pair engaged in a conversation that Dakar was of two minds about
overhearing, torn as he was between nosy habit and newfound, poisonous
animosity.

Never mind that drunken song and laughter and the squealing shrieks of
pinched barmaids would naturally defeat his best effort.

The height of summer in a seaport was an unhealthy season in which to
swnple taverns.  The Kittiwake's stone and plaster walls dammed in a
suffocating, sweat-humid heat, and the knife-scarred beams that braced
the ceilings thumped to more racket upstairs.  Resigned to
claustrophobia and sour boredom, Dakar unstrung every one of his shirt
laces, jerked open his collar and cuffs, and stowed his bulk against a
post.  He endured in dripping impatience, deaf to the jeers thrown his
way over the unraveled state of his clothing; apparently the herb
witch's chickens had picked his seat to hanging threads.  That
misfortune should hardly matter, Dakar sulked, since salt air and moldy
ships would rot the breeks off a man anyway.

Something Arithon said caused the landlord to nod in enlightenment.  His
booming reply could not be missed.

"Captain Dhirken?  From the Black Drake?  Ship's crew's here, sure
enough.  Her master likes the table in the corner where the air's
fresh."

A coin changed hands and Arithon backed up, fast reflexes alone averting
collision with a prostitute's overflowing bodice.

He grinned at her disappointment, dropped a half silver down the maw of
her cleavage, and cheerfully bypassed temptation.

"You heard?" he called to Dakar.  "Well, come on, then."

As he nipped on between two contentious stevedores, the Mad Prophet made
determined effort to follow.  But the gap proved too tight to admit his
fat girth.  Cut off, jostled by tarstinking celebrants, he cursed,
craned his neck, and located the window in question, placed between the
weather-checked tits of a wooden mermaid and a party of caulker's lads
who linked arms in rollicking song.  The panes in the worn sash casement
were filmed with grease, and cracked open because the tired frame had
stuck that way.

"Fresh air," the Mad Prophet grumbled under his breath.

"Didn't know this port had any that didn't reek of ship's bilge and
fish."

Arithon by then had plowed the last yard to the table.  A luck nothing
short of miraculous allowed him an empty stool.

He settled across the boards from a doxie with a waist-length black
plait and immediately started to talk.

By now parched enough to regret his resolve not to drink, Dakar
glowered, but failed to recapture the Shadow Master's attention.  If the
confounded prince chose to flirt on the eve of Halliron's death, that
weakness might as well lend advantage; in particular since the vessel he
hoped to charter was a matter of public record.

Dakar's beard hid a smile rowed with teeth like a barracuda.  He
measured the Kittiwake's bawling crush of patrons, chose his mark, and
launched himself toward a pigtailed pack of gainers in vindictive intent
to cause mayhem.

His sally bowled aside a rat-thin pickpocket and fetched him with a
thump against a bench where a bald brute with notched ears and
tar-blackened knuckles dealt out a quicksilver stream of cards.

Dakar hiccuped through a contrite smile.

"'Sense," he slurred on an approximate note of apology.

Graceless enough to seem intoxicated, he affected a reeling stagger,
stumbled, and hooked an ankle between one rickety leg and its cross
brace.  The bench upset.  Dingy cards, dice, and silver cascaded in all
directions.  Only a seaman's fast reflex let the bald lout regain his
feet.

"You there!" he screamed in indignation, jostled and poked as
enterprising bystanders dropped in a seething crush to snatch and
scrabble after coins.

Before the offended gambler could ram through to defend his scattered
cache, Dakar raised an earsplitting shout.  "Are you Captain Dhirken's
scumbag lackey?"

The surrounding celebrants dropped into electrified silence.

Swarthy bodies pressed into a close ring.

Cut off from the happy din at the fringes, red eyed in a hellish play of
lamplight, the bald brute licked broken teeth.

"What if I am?" He flexed his fists.  Sun-browned, hairy forearms bulged
with sliding knots of muscle.

A broad-hipped serving girl burdened with a tray saw trouble brewing and
wisely changed course.

"What quarrel have you got with Dhirken?" someone screamed from the
sidelines.

Dakar backstepped and rolled his eyes.  Cramped by hostile shoves from
slit-eyed, tattooed sailors, he jabbed his thumbs in his belt.

"Nothing, nothing." On the tail of a disarming smile, he shrugged.

"Or nearly nothing, surely.  I simply heard about a rumor..."

"What rumor?" The bald man kicked aside the upset bench to a forlorn
flutter of disturbed cards.  He sauntered closer.

"Better speak.  Or believe this, I'll pound your front teeth clean down
through your bladder."

Dakar edged from foot to foot, his round face blanched suet white.

"Are you one of Dhirken's men?"

"Aye, so I am.  The Black Drake's first mate, in hard fact."

A curl of a thickened lip, a glower hot enough to sear, and a last
brisk- step brought the mate within range to strike.  "State yer piece,
you sniveling piggin of fish bait."

"All," Dakar swallowed and contrived to look pathetic.  "Well, in the
square by the harbormaster's, somebody mentioned that Dhirken's crew
were slow as tar in a hard frost.  A man I know wants to hire the Drake.
Well, he shouldn't, if this is the truth."

"You believe that?" the bald giant shouted.

Quiet had spread like flung poison to the farthest corners of the room.
Every ear awaited Dakar's answer; every eye measured his unease.

The hiss of oil lamps blended with the whisper of heavy breathing,
against which Dhirken's mate cracked his knuckles, the pop of each
gristled joint distinct as the snap of flung gravel.  He spat on both
palms and dried them on the tar-stained thighs of his slops.

"Oh," declaimed the Mad Prophet, his bulging eyes fastened on the fists
cocked and ready to fight, "I only came here to ask.  But really, if the
Drake's a slack ship, you've shown me no proof to the contrary."

From behind, a rawboned sailor chuckled deeply.  "Matey, here's facts,
if you want to hear straight.  Dhirken's a mincing girlie a man could
knock flat with a whistle, and the crew o' the Drake ?  They're a pack
o' lisping sissies that my lame little brother could whip spitless!"

"You think so?" An erstwhile cardplayer scrambled erect, brass earrings
flashing.  The knuckles of both hands were packed with coin winnings,
now cheerfully brandished as cudgels.

In beet-faced, maniacal belligerence, the Drake's bald mate replied with
a battering fast fist.

Adroit enough when it counted, Dakar dropped flat upon the floor.

Knuckles whistled just over his frizzled head and smacked with dull
impact into the bystander just behind.  One whose lame little brother
proved agile as a snake, and nastily gifted at knife play.

Further conniving was unnecessary.  This was Ship's Port's dockside,
where brawling was akin to breathing reflex.  The mixed crowd hemming
the instigators heaved, roared, and dived joyously into the fight.
Patrons caught in the cross fire scuttled like an upset basket of crabs,
the timid to leap behind trestles and barricade themselves into shelter.
The most hardy broke their beer mugs into jagged-edged weapons and
pitched howling into the fracas.

Between one breath and the next, the Kittiwake's overcrowded taproom
erupted into bedlam with the wholesale abandon of a fiend storm.  Whores
snatched up skirts and petticoats and pulled out concealed bludgeons, or
thin-bladed, pearl-handled daggers.  Plates sailed and crashed against
the walls; bodies flew airborne and hammered into chairs, and anything
not tied down got snatched and brandished as bludgeons.  Drawn by the
bellows of their mate, Black Drake's insulted sailhands rallied into a
knot bent on bloodshed and murder.  Fisticuffs and grunts and raucous
bouts of shouting dismembered civilized conversation, while Dakar
scrabbled to safety on hands and knees, an overweening smile on his
face.

Let Arithon try now to hire Captain Dhirken, he would justly get his
liver diced for crab snacks.

By the streetside window, spattered with meat shreds and stew broth, the
stoic mermaid figurehead looked on with paintless eyes as the
Kittiwake's landlord rammed shoulder down to confront someone seated at
the table.  While shrill questions erupted into argument, Arithon
watched, cat still and poised, his face a mask of straight-lipped irony.

Even from his vantage on the floorboards, that expression moved Dakar to
a pin stab of dread.  The surge of the fight now behind him, he regained
his feet, ducked a flying bottle, and sidestepped a wrack of splintered
chairs.  Somebody had drawn a cutlass; above the belling clang of
parries, and a woman's spitfire obscenities, he cocked his ear to track
the altercation.

The landlord demanded payment for his damages, the sum he named
exorbitant enough to redecorate a high-class brothel.

"Come now," Arithon said, his singer's tone liltingly amused.

"You're no stranger to the habits of sailors.  This tavern's weathered a
hundred such frolics.  Any man with eyes can see every trestle in the
place is still seeping green sap from the millwright's."

Behind the landlord's planted stance, a pigtailed topman nipped into the
rafters with his rigging knife.  He screamed epithets at somebody else
down below.  Invective floated upward in reply.  The chandelier swayed,
cut loose from its mooring, and whooshed down.  The spectacular crash as
it struck the top of the bar made an end to further insults.  Bottles
toppled, fell; sloshed spirits sprayed through the wicks of rolling
candles.

Nobody stirred to run for water; the Kittiwake's floors were fired
brick.  As the puddles spat into curls of blue flame, the fighting near
at hand jammed on its course like a hiccup.

Pugilists and bystanders dodged and fell flat in a sliding crush to
escape, while leaping tongues of fire blistered and licked at ankles and
buttocks and casualties.

Intent on the brawl's fresh developments as a tax collector calculating
tithes, the landlord wrung his hands in chin-thrusting refusal to be
placated.  "The Drake's crew are trouble.

Always have been.  On your word of surety, I let them in here.

Well, now I've lived to be sorry.  Any pack of scoundrels with a captain
who's a-"

"Don't say it," snapped a silken alto voice.

The landlord squeaked, blinked, and ceased speaking, his widened eyes
turned downward to track the naked cutlass that indented the belly of
his waistcoat.

"Don't," repeated the woman with the glossy, black braid, her consonants
frigidly emphatic.  She uncoiled to her feet, 	 neatly compact, every
inch of her primed for a stop thrust.

	"Presume again to say	how my men should be handled,
and I'll spit your guts just for joy.  The Kittiwake's damages will be
squared to my satisfaction; but only after my crew gets done with
mending the slight to their competence."

Dakar stiffened in his tracks.  Slack jawed, he looked askance at
Arithon.  "Captain Dhirken?" he mouthed, shaken silly by the concept
that she had been female all along.

The corners of Arithon's lips twitched.  "No other.  You should have
noticed.  Whores don't generally dress in sea boots."

Dakar fumbled behind his back, hooked a fallen stool, set it upright,
and sat down.  "A woman," he mouthed again.  Then, plaintive and much
louder, "Ah, fiends!  What stakes in Sithaer's chaos are you playing
for?"

But the Shadow Master's focus had already shifted beyond him to survey
the taproom, and a turmoil whose direction was far from random.

The rawboned man and most of his fellow dicers were heaped prone and
passed out cold, while shoulder to shoulder like brothers, the Drake's
crew were acting in ferocious concert to level those combatants left
standing.

Recovered from his terror of the cutlass, the landlord had begun to
natter on again.

Dakar was past listening.  Incensed by his victim's nerveless patience,
well aware the saucy captain would seize due revenge for every separate
provocation, he indulged his vicious urge to crack the s'Ffalenn
equilibrium.  "Why so hot a bother, miss?  Your crew seems to like their
recreation."

Dhirken whirled on him, her face a slim, tanned oval seattered across
nose and cheeks with freckles like fine sienna ink.

"You!" Her cutlass whistled and changed target.  "Haven't I enough
problems on me without your baiting my mate for sheer fun?  Take your
meddlesome self elsewhere before I slit your gizzard to oil the Black
Drake's brightwork."

"Lady," Arithon said, softly laughing.  "Desist, please.  That one's on
our side."

Caught at a loss, too dignified to gape, Captain Dhirken spiked an
exasperated glance toward the pair of them.  She shrugged, finally,
helpless to stay angry before Arithon's infectious bent of humor.

"Sithaer's damned, a conspiracy?" She loosened strong fingers and
sheathed her blade with a hiss of whetted steel.  "If you wanted my
attention, you have it.  But by Dharkaron's hairy bollocks, your
business had stinking well better make me rich!"

Arithon gestured toward the table, pulled out a bench, and settled to a
quiet round of bargaining.  Outfaced and excluded from the conversation,
the landlord stalked off to tally every coin weight of his losses. Dakar
stood in flat-footed amazement, forgotten as a useless piece of
furniture.  Disgruntled, sullen, stinging from every scrape collected
through his hands and knees scuttle across the bricks, he dragged up his
stool and parked his elbows on the trestle to rethink the failure of his
strategy.

A tavernmaid ventured out to bring whiskey.  No mugs being available,
she left an opened crock, which Arithon and Dhirken passed between them,
the latter with her sea boots propped crossed in front of her.  She
braced her back against the opened window sash, and through placid,
half-lidded eyes, gauged the ongoing progress of the fight.

Over a volley of fresh shouting and a soprano spray of breaking glass,
she said, "If my mate winds up crippled or killed, I'll press-gang you
both as common seamen." She swallowed, passed the crock, and waited
while Arithon drank in turn.

Dakar could not choke down his sarcasm.  "Last I saw, your precious
first mate was tearing the face off some ugly brute who went at him with
a butcher's cleaver.  At best, your worries are misplaced."

Captain Dhirken took back the jug.  Her hands were large knuckled,
callused; no stranger at all to a whiskey crock.  She downed her drafts
straight, and softened into a dreamy, full-lipped smile that somehow
fell short of reassurance.

"Well, that's my mate's style, sure enough.  Got his ears notched by a
bully when he was ten.  Steel's made him jumpy ever since.  Almost
killed my cook, in one of his sick bouts of nerves.  Remember that.  He
slit a man's belly while sleepwalking, once."

Unfazed by the grotesque, Dakar scavenged a plate of roast chicken lying
abandoned on a windowsill.  Beyond the split trestles, over the snapped
struts of downed benches, he could see that the remaining roisterers
were part of Drake's infamous crew, or else hapless onlookers fallen by
chance onto the winning side.  The Kittiwake was settling.  A drudge
with a broom and a basket sallied out to sweep up splinters and smashed
crockery.  Here and there in the corners, survivors gathered to exchange
boasts and nurse cuts and compare bruises.

The landlord rounded up his bannaids, shrewd enough to judge that good
custom would be lost if beer and spirits were not available.

Then, too crafty to indulge herself in drunkenness, Dhirken banged down
the crock and pushed loose sleeves back to her elbows.  Over an end of
gnawed bone, Dakar sighed in disappointment: whether the captain's
wrists were delicate or mannish, no connoisseur's eye could tell.  She
wore leather bracers studded with brass and laced on with wrapped silver
wire.

"You set the stage," she said in tart opening.  "My men performed.

Meet their damage fee and I'll hear out your offer.  But first you must
let me clear them out of here."

Arithon gave a nod and tipped a clanging spill of coins across the
trestle.

"That's too much," snapped the lady captain.  Brass studs scraped the
table as she leaned toward him.  "Since I don't like bribes, what's the
show for?"

"Rum, to celebrate the Black Drake's triumph at the Kittiwake."

Possessed of a hard's charm when it suited him, Arithon grinned.

"Piggin, firkin, or by the whole barrel, whichever vessel gives your
heart pleasure."

Dhirken regarded the glimmering wealth with jaundiced disdain.

"Not for my pleasure, matey.  That of my men, more likely, and for them,
it's me who speaks.  Let it be a piggin apiece, since it's my intent to
have them wakeful to sail on the ebb tide at midnight."

"As you wish." Arithon masked his disappointment, that the bulk of his
sweetening offer remained on the table.  The captain shoved off to
collar her rollicking crewmen and awarded him not one glance back.

Dakar worked a shred of gristle out from behind a rear molar.

"Are you possessed, or simply in love?"

"It's too early to tell, don't you think?" Too cold nerved to be baited,
Arithon stretched.  "I wanted the boldest captain to ply Eltair Bay.
Dhirken fits that requirement.  She handles the men well."

A true observation, Dakar allowed, while across the littered taproom,
her crew of ruffians gathered mollified around her, blotting cuts and
split lips and jostling in back-slapping high spirits.  The last few
still engrossed in combat broke off at the first direct order from their
captain.  Whatever she said in her lecture did not carry; but return
phrases struck through with "insulted" and "provoked" carried over the
rising stew of voices as the tavern's battered patrons resumed their
rowdy entertainments.

His last wing now stripped of its cartilage, Dakar crooked a finger at a
bar wench and ordered another plate of food.

"Anyway, how did she come by her ship?"

"Brig," Arithon corrected.  "The story goes that Black Drake was her
father's.  He died of fever while at sea.  The first mate tried to seize
command.  That version holds that she cut out his heart with a cutlass
and named herself master, and nobody else cared to argue."

Dakar blotted grease on his sleeve.  "And the other version?"

Arithon hitched his shoulders into a tight little shrug.  "That she was
the original captain's lover and cut out his heart with a cutlass, and
nobody else- "

"I believe the second tale," Dakar cut in, his gaze torn between
searching out his coming meal, and the female captain in her fitted
scarlet breeches and loose, seaman's tunic that spilled in uninformative
folds over what he could see of her chest.  In sullen and contrary
conclusion, he added unthinkingly aloud, "Probably binds her dugs flat,
if in fact she has any."

"You think you'll pinch her to find out?  Don't whine to me when she
gelds you." Lit to merciless merriness, Arithon tipped back the rum jug.
"Since I plan to buy up her services, you're just going to have to get
along."

"Fatal starvation on the dockside might be preferable," Dakar flared
back.  When the barmaid arrived with a plate of thick bread,
batter-fried vegetables, and a bowl of fish stew, he chose in scowling
forethought to amend his three days of starvation.  Enough silver lay
strewn on the tabletop; Arithon could well afford to pay.

Except for bruised and battered faces, and the occasional set of
bloodied knuckles, the fight might as well not have happened.  The
least-pummeled patrons in the Kittiwake righted trestles and resumed
their disrupted pleasures, the wounded consoled themselves with doxies
or strong drink, and the noise level swelled, as newcomers stepped over
the prone and the unconscious to vie for their chance at the whores.

Black Drake's crew were not among them.  Their high-hearted cheers as
Captain Dhirken announced a rum ration could not obviate her final
warning.  "Keep yourselves in hand!  I'll hear no excuses for layabouts.
Black Drake sails with the tide.  My business here won't take long.  I
want my gig smart and waiting, and any man who's swilled too much to
handle himself in the rigging gets pitched on the shoals for the
sharks."

Dismissed back to shipboard, the men dispersed in grumbling, happy knots
and steered through the crush toward the doorway.  Dhirken returned to
the table, the lift of her hip as she sat less a flaunt of her sex than
practical allowance for the hang of her brute-sized saber.

Immersed in his meal, Dakar let discussion flow across him as captain
and Shadow Master settled to haggle over terms.

Arithon's list of requirements caused the woman to narrow dark eyes.

"Say again?" She leaned on crossed arms, the fingers hooked into her
coarse linen sleeves tensed to a sudden, stark white.  "You want the
Drake, for time unspecified, to sail to a destination, also unspecified,
with added contract, that your judgment overrules mine in unfamiliar
waters?  Lunacy.  What about cargo?  My holds are filled.

Or are your very bodies the contraband?"

Only Dakar caught the fleeting, bitter irony that prefaced Arithon's
smile.  "I only have cargo for pickup, and it's held in another harbor.
Outbound, I don't care what you carry.  The return run's all that
concerns me."

Dhirken blinked.  "Lunacy," she repeated.  "You've wasted my time and
gained an unkindly debt, through your friend's stupid meddling with my
crew."

Her phrasing raised a sudden, queasy thrill that flattened Dakar's
appetite.  He ceased chewing, a half-gnawed fin dangling in one hand and
grease glistening in his beard.  For the Shadow Master across from him
did nothing, ever, without thought; he had embraced a hostile try at
insurrection without a ripple of annoyance.  Yet whatever tangled wiles
coiled behind his mild calm, his expression stayed guileless and
shuttered.

"Think about this," he said to Dhirken, a little amused, but not
patronizing.  "Black Drake would become the fastest, richest ship to ply
the ports of the continent."

"Hah!" Dhirken straightened, hooked the flask, and banged it to a
strident clash of coins between Arithon's hands, which lay relaxed on
the table, soft next to hers.  Not horned in callus like a sailor's, but
with fingers long and fine as the musician he was, under his deep layers
of subterfuge.  With a scorn that presumed him inept with a sword, she
gave him her sneering refusal.  "Drink, fool, and dream.  My brig is
already fast enough to outrun the patrols in the strait.  I don't need
to risk her planks to a ham-fingered idiot who would likely see her
smashed on a shoal."

The pair locked eyes, Arithon unwilling to rise to provocation, and
Dhirken, cross enough to knife him.  As if drawn by their dissent, the
Kittiwake's owner strode back to claim his due for damages.

By chance, Dakar saw, his final accounting matched the quantity of the
silver on the table.  Not without forethought, the landlord was
accompanied by two brute-thewed giants armed with cudgels.

"Pay my reckoning," he demanded.  Confident the loom of his heavies
would leave the slighter man cowed, he bent to scoop up the coins.

Snake quick, Arithon moved.  The landlord's grab entangled with the
brandy jug.  One thrown silver glittered spinning through gloom, caught
before it landed by a street waif halfhidden in the cranny behind the
wooden mermaid.

Dirty, ragged, grinning through missing front teeth, the creature tugged
a bundle from the depths of his niche, and said, "Master, here is your
instrument."

Arithon stood.  He accepted the wrapped bulk of the lyranthe, his amity
toward the landlord turned baleful.  "You'll have your coin, I gave my
word.  What made you think you'd need force to claim my debt?"

"Fiends!  You're a hard?" The landlord chewed his lip, less apologetic
than uncertain.  The last musician to show his face in the Kittiwake had
left with his lyranthe in splinters.  Flanked by Dhirken's cynical
regard, and the dull-witted interest of his thugs, he hesitated just
long enough to note the gleam of fine metal and jewels as Arithon
unveiled the priceless instrument bequeathed him by a master now dead.

Then the last veiling leather fell away.  Arithon braced his hip on the
trestle edge, scattered off a run like white sparks, and tenderly nursed
the abalone and ebony pegs that tuned fourteen silver-wound strings.
Bright sound sheared across the Kittiwake's din.

By the time he had finished, conversation had lapsed.  Heads turned, and
fraught silence webbed the close air to the dimmest alcove in the room.

For an instant the musician paused, head tilted that familiar fraction
to one side, fingers poised above fret and string as he measured the
temper of the crowd.  They offered no easy, willing audience.  Their
wants were varied as their roughest tastes and trades: the tar-stained
sailhands with wenches like gaudy birds in their laps; the cordwainers
from the shipyards, shirtless, their muscled arms glistening hot sweat;
the knife-scarred, off-duty garrison soldiers grouped in tight knots
over a battered pair of dice.

Before that suspended opening could pass, Arithon reeled

off through a dance tune.  He played saucy and fast, in heartfelt,
glorious tribute to Halliron's best style.  And the Kittiwake's riffraff
roared back an approval that rattled the crockery on the shelves.

The landlord backed off, stupefied.  Past the first, stiff moment of
surprise, Dhirken laid her elbows in spilled spirits and coins, her chin
cupped in her palms to listen.

The measures spun faster, and faster still, alive as the crackle of
summer lightning.  A few of the doxies sprang up to dance a jig, and
soon the floor planks were shaking.  In minutes the whole Kittiwake
rocked in celebration, while more customers packed in from the street.

By then, Arithon had bent his head to his soundboard.  Black hair veiled
his expression, wholly; even Dakar, who was closest, never noticed the
flash of the tears that splashed and wet his flying knuckles.

Halliron Masterbard was dead; gone.  In a headlong, passionate harmony
of celebration, the man proven fit to succeed him made the most
coarse-mannered dive in Ship's Port reel with ruffians who stamped and
clapped and shrieked.  As if by whipping up joy to bring catharsis, he
could fill the bereft void in his heart.

Dakar aroused from the thick dark of sleep at the gouge of stiff fingers
in his ribs.

He groaned, stirred, and scrubbed bleary eyelids with his fists.

The unheard of surprise that he was not hung over shocked him enough to
sit up.  In a dimness red lit by the flicker of a last, failing oil
lamp, he squinted to assess his surroundings.

Against a backdrop of wildly sprawled bodies, he made out the slight
form of Arithon, standing impatient with the lyranthe furled up and
slung from a strap at his shoulder.

"Tide's turning," said the Shadow Master in a low, urgent whisper.

"If you're sailing with me, I leave now."

Dakar blinked, still turgid from sleep.  He cradled pained hands over
his distended belly and none too softly, belched up the aftertaste of
cod.  "You spell-touched the whole house into sleep with your
masterbard's gift, you unprincipled bastard."

"You ate too much," said Arithon in rejoinder.

"What about them?" Dakar's groggy gesture encompassed the patrons heaped
and snoring over trestles and bricks.

"Brandy or beer, does it matter?  The Drake will be ready to weigh
anchor.  Are you coming or staying?"

"Coming." Dakar heaved to his feet.  "For nothing else, just to see you
hurt for this."

A soft thread of laughter mocked him back.  "Don't trouble.

Dhirken's crew will likely be at my throat before your wits have had
time to wake up." Arithon flicked an airy, tight-cuffed wrist.

"Do you want to lend a hand?"

Dakar peered, made out in wavering flame light the slumped form of
Dhirken's shoulders.  Her hands with their blunt, close-trimmed nails,
her tanned cheek, and the wind-wisped, flamboyant plait trailed through
puddled brandy and wet coins.  "Dharkaron!  You do ask for trouble.

How'd you convince her to take your contract?"

"I didn't." Efficient without seeming hurried, Arithon reached out,
caught a wrist as lean boned as a belaying pin, and tugged the lady
captain upright on the bench.  Her body lolled backward against his
chest and the taut cloth of her tunic pressed the round swell of small
breasts.

"Well, there's one question answered without you risking your bollocks,"
Arithon said.

He flashed a fast grin, unstrapped the heavy cutlass, and thrust
baldric, weapon, and the unstung weight of his lyranthe into Dakar's
arms.  Then he bent and hefted the woman in a seaman's carry across his
shoulders.  Her weight made him stagger a half step.  Wrist and feet
dangling, her hips folded close against his nape, she was easily larger
than he was, a limp body difficult to balance.  He shrugged her bulk to
ease a pressure point, and even that slight change in his stance raised
a sweet-chinking clangor of metal.

The floor around the table lay spangled with silver, coins struck by the
foundries of a dozen different port towns: the tribute of the
Kittiwake's revelers to a masterbard whose night's entertainment had
pleased them.  As though embarrassed by their generosity, Arithon gave
another hitch to his load.  "Well, I've settled my debt to the tavern.

The landlord should be satisfied, don't you think?"

Dakar looked at him, eyes round as an adder's and his brows pinched in
unaccustomed thought.  "Dhirken," he said.

"If you wanted her service, why not spare the bother and just lie to
her?"

"Because I happen to need her trust." Green eyes reflected the
expectant, curbed patience a hale man might show a blind half-wit, until
the silence stretched too long.  "Oh, Dakar," the Master of Shadow said
finally, his words drenched in irony thatjabbed.

"Trust you?  Dharkaron's Black Spear and Chariot!" Dakar sucked in a
breath, hot to launch into a tirade, then stopped.

"Her men," he ventured through a pregnant pause.  "For this, you had to
be rid of them."

Arithon waited, quietly subtle as slow poison.

"Oh, you bastard," gasped Dakar, slammed sick by the recognition that
his rage had been teased and then used, himself a dumb pawn
strategically advanced to further his enemy's design.  The brawl in the
Kittiwake had offered no setback at all, but played straight into
Arithon's hand.

The wrapped, fragile instrument in Dakar's arms became all that stayed
him from violence.  His hatred soared to fresh dimensions, directed as
much at himself for falling prey to a ploy so smooth he had never
thought to guard.  Speechless, breathless, thwarted enough to kick his
own shin from sheer fury, he barged ahead.  Through the Kittiwake's
common room, stumbling over slack and snoring bodies, blundering around
benches, he slammed at last through the doorway to reach the night air
in the street.  On his heels in uncanny quiet for a man with a burden,
Arithon bore Captain Dhirken.

"A woman," Dakar groused, his beard hairs caught and tweaked by a tangle
of baldric straps and studs.  In case he might just be dreaming, or
sick, he twisted to recheck his bearings.  But the pair that emerged
from the Kittiwake's torpid gloom were solidly, dishearteningly real.

"Your neck's going to stiffen if you lug her like that," he stated in
unhelpful satisfaction.

Arithon bore him no rancor.  "I'll be lucky if that's the

worst that befalls me." As Dakar plowed on toward the quayside, he
tipped his chin a hampered fraction sideways.  "No, turn left.  I've
things to retrieve from my lodgings."

	Pulled up short in the gloom by the gate	to the
harbormaster's office, Dakar threw back a blank glare.

	"Navigational instruments," Arithon	prodded gently.

	"Charts.  How could you forget?  They're	the point of
this 	whole sordid exercise."

Which was unlikely to be the innocent truth, Dakar knew; not when the
perpetrator was Arithon s'Ffalenn, whose motives ran to mazes of
trickery the Fatemaster himself would be pained to unravel.

Blaclk Dralke

Captain Dhirken awakened thickheaded.  Before she opened gummed eyelids,
she knew by the slap and rush of the wake that her brig was well under
way.  The creak of burdened canvas laid the Black Drake over on port
tack.  Since the captain's elbow and hip were not jammed alee in her
berth, she judged the weather was mild.  The gusts that wafted through
the overhead hatch grating smelled dry and unlikely to freshen.

A kick of white spray off the rudder and a thrummed note of strain in
the cordage meant staysails and topsails were set aloft.

Attuned to her vessel as other women were to their lovers, she knew the
square main should be braced around slightly more to starboard to
balance the trim of the jibs.

Moved by habit, Dhirken rolled to arise, when a male voice dispatched
crisp orders.  Her mate acknowledged.  Feet thumped on deck as sailhands
moved to obey, followed by the squeal of lines through the mainsheet
blocks.  Drake rocked and settled, docile as a stroked maiden, into
harmony with wind and heading.

Odd, mused Dhirken, still drowsy as her feet met cold planking.

Her mate's skill at the helm had never been so deft.

She braced against a bulkhead, unsettled to find she had slept in her
clothes; never a habit of hers, unless a storm was brewing.  The bracers
she chose for her forays ashore had gouged her side into dimples, and
the hair wisped loose from yesterday's braid held a clinging, smoky reek
of used tobacco.

The voice on the quarterdeck called another order, and awareness woke
late that its timbre matched none of Drake's officers.

Dhirken ripped into an explosive, whispered fit of swearing.

Impelled by sheer rage, she dredged up the memory of a sticky table in
the Kittiwake, and the blandishments offered by a green-eyed,
silver-tongued hard.  His jug of strong spirits had not turned her wits.
She recalled every meandering thread of his conversation, and a proposal
too brash for any right-minded captain to endorse; which apparently had
not stopped the scheming dog from believing he could force her will by
trickery.

Balanced like a dancer as her brig rollicked over a swell, knuckles
braced against a deck beam, Dhirken made a blind snatch toward the hook
by the unlit lantern.  The brass-strapped scabbard of her cutlass
slapped into her groping palm.

Relieved to find her weapon hung in its proper place, reassured that her
ship's boy at least still minded his duty, Dhirken steadied enough to
rein in the raw worst of her fury.  "Lad?"

she called through the gloom.

Every boy to sign with the Drake answered to the same address; they
earned names when they mastered the skills of deep water sailors, and
outgrew any instinct that tempted her to tousle their hair like lost
little brothers.

This particular brat was a sluggard.  "Lad!" Dhirken repeated in a
stabbing whisper.  "Roust out!  Now!  I need you."

She poked with the sheathed tip of her cutlass and entangled the mesh of
an empty hammock.

A scrape at the companionway made her crouch and whirl around.

"Cap'n?" A boy's lisp accompanied a rustled movement, and a narrow face
lifted in the gloom.  "Is it wash water you're wanting?"

"No." Dhirken flicked her blade free and beckoned the child closer. "Not
yet." Through the roll as Drake mounted a crest and sloughed through,
she weighed the groaning creak of her working vessel.

Nothing seemed amiss or unfamiliar: not the thickened smells of hemp
cordage and tar, nor the musk of sea-swollen planking made pungent by
coal smoke from the galley fire.  Past the stern windows, foam ruffled
off the wake, flurried over in a scatter of sparks as a crewman trimmed
the wick in the deck lantern.  Though the dark was not close or foggy,
neither stars nor moon scribed their reflections on the swells.

No distant sparkle of watch beacons lined the coast to guide the course
of night-sailing traders.  Gripped by a primal urge to yank her steel
screaming from its sheath, Dhirken tipped her crown against the
bulkhead.

Gritty as scraped rust, she asked, "Lad, last night when I was brought
back on board, who came with me?"

"A fat man.  And the other captain, who's steering now.  The one who
said Black Drake's going to be the fastest, richest brig ever to plow
the deeps of the Cildein." In a child's unvarnished curiosity, Lad
finished, "They said you were pleased over that.  How much rum did you
drink?"

Dhirken clamped a forearm across her belly to lock back an oath like a
mastiff's snarl.  "Not enough to save their miserable hides.

The fat man, where is he now?"

Lad snickered.  "Bent over the leeside rail.  Ever since we weighed
anchor, he's been belly down and heaving."

"Well, here are my orders." Dhirken spoke fast and low, then gave Lad a
brisk push.  The hinges on her bulkhead door were superbly kept; the
boy, well trained, moved as silently.  In the interval after he slipped
out, the captain picked out her plait, used her tortoiseshell comb, and
retied her dark hair for hard action.

No crewman lasted on a smuggler's brig if he failed to attend orders
without noise.  Dhirken whipped the last knot in her thong when the door
latch ticked up.  Her barefoot, rangy topman and Drake's slab-thewed
cook padded in on a breath of salt air.

Between them, white and moist as a shelled oyster, they bundled Dakar
the Mad Prophet.  A dish sponge crammed in his mouth stayed his outcry,
and both plump wrists were creased by lashings his desperate struggles
could not slip.

"Well done!" Dhirken grinned, a flash of bared teeth in the gloom. "Dump
him on my close stool.  We'll see how he likes to talk."

Plonked down with less ceremony than a biscuit sack, Dakar collapsed in
a jelly-legged heap.  The instant the cook yanked the sponge from his
mouth, he moaned and bent double into dry heaves.  The edge of Dhirken's
blade against his bared nape could scarcely make him sweat faster,
wringing wet as he already was from sick misery and the salt spray that
doused off the bow.

"Who is that dark-haired upstart, and what does he want with the Drake?"
Dhirken pressed him.

"Ah, captain, 'twas a dismal poor effort, I know."

Wrenched breathless by another spasm, Dakar rolled his eyes.

"But in my own fashion, I tried very hard to turn your crew from the
Master of Shadow."

Astonishment whetted Dhirken to fresh anger.  "Master?

Shadow!  You refer to the mad prince who slaughtered Etarra's army?  Do
I look the fool, to swallow such rubbish?" Her steel niggled down
another fraction.  "That meddling little string plucker who's
commandeered my brig is anything but royal and a sorcerer."

"I beg your pardon." Dakar cringed away until his forehead ground into
his cramped knees.  He said in muffled injury to his trousers, "I lie
well enough when I have to.  Never, ever about that man." Despite the
hands lashed behind his back, he managed a soulful shrug.  "His string
plucking lulled you unconscious, a hard's spell few could equal.

That's hardly the worst.  Look outside.  It's black, though true night
is past.

Arithon has spun clever shadows to make you think you see a shoreline.
But where are the signs of solid land?"

The first, creeping chill ruffled Dhirken's composure, while the cook
made a sign to avert evil.  Unnerved enough to venture opinion, Drake's
most fearless topman said, "Captain, something is queer, I said so
earlier.  Damn me, I couldn't finger what.  But now it's mentioned, the
wind carries all the wrong smell."

Dhirken feathered her cutlass against the creased fat beneath her
victim's earlobe.  "I should cut you dead here and be damned to the
mess.  You've caused me a packet of trouble.

"Kill Arithon instead," Dakar suggested, reamed already by cramps that
made beheading seem merciful by comparison.

"It's a fair bet I hate him more than you do."

"I don't bet," Dhirken answered, clipped.

Amid the Kittiwake's raucous turmoil, she had seemed staunchly
determined; here, in cramped quarters kept so ascetically neat they
scarcely felt inhabited, her presence loomed volatile as a touch match
dropped head down on dry lint.

Dakar shivered in the throes of his nausea, helpless to guess which way
female fury might turn her.

Then, with a move that slapped air, the Drake's captain lifted her
weapon.  Habit drove her to finger an old scar that extended past the
end of her bracer.  "Depend on this," she finished, with an edge that
caused her seamen to shrink where they stood.  "I will wrest back my
command."

At her gesture, the cook jammed Dakar back upright.  The topman stuffed
the sponge back into the prisoner's mouth and twisted it tight with his
tar-stained shirt.  A discreet tap sounded against the boards beneath
the Dhirken's berth.  A mercuric arc of reflection marked the changed
angle of her cutlass as she peeled aside ticking and blankets and pried
up a concealed hatch beneath.

Lad's towhead and angular body emerged amid a gush of sour air from the
bilges.  "Your men on deck say they're ready, captain."

On a predatory flash of teeth, Dhirken slipped out of her cabin.

The ship's cook and the topman padded like mismatched shadows on her
heels.

Lad stayed, the galley's best flensing knife clenched in his hand, with
instructions to fillet the prisoner if he sought to raise the alarm.

An idiotic and unfair precaution, Dakar sulked, his pouched eyes
squeezed shut as he retched in balked spasms against his gag.  A knife
in the gizzard was no sort of thanks for infonnation given in good
faith; and even had illness lent respite for the purpose, he would
cheerfully choose strangulation before he gave warning to spare the
confounded Prince of Rathain.

Outside the swinging halo of heir running lamp, Drake lay shrouded in
darkness.  Pricked in salt rime, shrouds and rigging angled upward from
the spooled rail and lost form against a featureless sky.  The bearing
creak of filled canvas and the chafing squeal of trusses reduced hidden
masts and tackle to a ghost presence overhead.  If any shoreline bounded
the horizon, neither light nor beacon tower showed.

Dhirken tightened grip on her cutlass.  She smelled neither shingle nor
sheepcote; no fragrance of green-growing fields.  The air held only
clean scoured salt, and the tarry bite of blacked cordage.

Her brig settled easy over fair weather swells, not a sail in her rig
set amiss.

Master of Shadow or master singer, the man at the helm knew his
seamanship.

Which competence brought no forgiveness; Dhirken tapped the wrists of
her topman and cook to signal her intent.  Then, wraith still by the aft
companionway, she gestured, and other crewmen rousted by Lad to lie in
wait for her order moved ahead.  Movement answered from the darkness. In
grumbling pairs, laden with buckets and holystones, they filed from the
forecastle and invaded the quarterdeck.  There, amid cheerful oaths and
grousing, they industriously knelt to swab planks.

The black-haired upstart stationed at the helm voiced a mild query.

A hulking mass at his shoulder, Drake's first mate waved the seamen on
about their business.  "Our captain keeps a trim vessel," he assured.
"Any land dirt left on her ship's decks by dawn, and she'll roust up our
bosun to flog backs."

"Land dirt," mouthed Dhirken, convulsed by a soundless chuckle.

"How perfectly apt." She flicked her sleeves clear of her bracers,
jerked her chin for the cook and second mate to back her only as needed,
then swung alone up the ladder to the quarterdeck.

Limned in orange by the stern lantern, the conniving little hard who had
played the Kittiwake's scum to a standstill stood in still grace before
the binnacle.  He still wore his oddly tailored shirt.

Silver-pointed cuff ties chimed at the wrist held negligently crooked
around a wheel spoke.  His pose of inattention was deceptive; the brig
kept her heading like a gannet.  Languid as poured honey, Dhirken
stepped up to meet her adversary.  He did not loom dangerous enough for
a sorcerer, she thought; he lacked the grand majesty of a prince.

Beyond hands too slim for their office, he could have been a ship's boy
with wind-ruffled black hair, bare feet braced against the heeled deck.

Only the gaze that flicked aside to greet her was too sardome and deep
for a child's.

"Uncommon fine weather for sailing," Dhirken opened in tearoom courtesy.
She fielded a fractional nod from her mate, her sharkish smile for the
foreign upstart who had dared to give orders on her ship.

While her challenge fixed his attention, crewmen armed with knives and
cudgels grappled over the rail at his back.  Arrived from a circuitous
route through the bilges, they scaled the sterncastle by way of her
cabin window, masked by the industrious scrape of holystones.

"Ah, lady," the foreigner said in his lyrical, singer's chagrin.

"Would you meet me with a threat?" Timed to a masterful fine point, he
loosed the helm, whirled face about, and confronted the stalkers poised
to jump him.

A following crest slammed the rudder.  The unattended wheel spun like a
ratchet and veered the brig off her heading.

Aloft, heavy canvas sucked flat, then backwinded with a bang and a
rattling thrash of slack blocks.  Drake's crewmen were hurled back a
half step as the deck lurched in violent response.

Seasoned sailors, they recovered by reflex.

"I haven't said whether I wanted you taken alive," Dhirken remarked in
joyous spite.

"Should that concern me?" As her men lunged, and the brig slewed and
shuddered broadside against the swells, Arithon smiled.

The darkness blasted away.

Sunlight ripped down, its glare at full noon like the blistering stab of
sheared iron.

"Sorcery!" someone screamed, while the attackers fell back in sharp
terror.  "It's truth!  He's the Master of Shadow!"

Arithon stood still and denied nothing.

Above other shouts of fear and dismay, and the dashing rush of shot
spray, Dhirken's pealed order stopped panic.  Her sun-blind mate found
the wheel by touch, flung the helm down, and slewed the brig head to
wind.  Reviled by their captain's razor-edged tongue, the assault party
firmed sweaty grip on their cudgels and regrouped.

Unruffled, unarmed, the man now revealed as the prince whose powers had
leashed the Mistwraith let them close to surround him.  "Do as you
please," he invited through the hammering thunder as gear thrashed
aloft.  "I have no wish to start a fight."

"I'd say it's a bit late for such niceties," Dhirken snapped.

To her men, she added, "Take him, fools.  Hold on to him tight!

Sorcerer or not, he's all mine."

For a heartbeat, no movement crossed the deck beyond the whipping snake
of slack sheet lines.  Then, needled on by their quarry's bold
amusement, the sailors obeyed orders in a sudden, vindictive surge.

Grasped and yanked spread-eagle by men who outmatched his strength and
weight, Arithon tossed his head to clear fallen hair from his eyes.

Through wrenching discomfort, he gasped, "Dakar.  I presume he's saved
trouble and already told you my name?"

No one answered.  The men glanced about and shuffled uneasy feet.

Dhirken stood stripped of her bluster.  Tintless as fine porcelain, her
freckles stippled dark across the bridge of her nose, she spun on her
heel and stared for searching minutes under her visored fingers.

Quandary met her, unpleasant and real; for as the fat man had
threatened, the sea lay empty on all quarters.

Water scribed a landless, flat line to the farthest rim of the horizon.

For a heartbeat only, Dhirken stayed at a loss.  Then the flog of loose
canvas displaced her shaken nerves and the scope of the Drake's problem
overshadowed all else.  She whirled to face her mate, who now gripped
the wheel with the desperate, whippeddog absorption of a man who wished
himself elsewhere.

"Where's the log?" She had to shriek like a harpy to be heard over the
wind-pummeled fury of thrashed tackle.

"What's our heading?  Speed?  What course?  How lon have we been under
way, and where do you place our position?"

The huge man blew rolling sweat from his mustache.  "Your bargain," he
stammered.  Too large a man to cringe neatly, he darted a glance to his
shipmates.  When no one stepped forward to back him, he swallowed and
spoke out alone.  "The foreign cap'n was to navigate."

"Fiends alive!" Dhirken made a whistling jab and stopped her cutlass
just shy of taking flesh.  "We could be anywhere in Eltair Bay by now!"

The mate feared to look at the weapon that trembled at his heart.

He thumbed his slit earlobe, plumbed dry of words, while the sun glinted
off his bald crown.

At length, his captain lunged away, her gaudy scarlet shirt molded to
small breasts by the riffling pressure of the breeze.

In a reviling cascade of filthy epithets, she dispatched the gawkers on
the sidelines to stow their buckets and holystones, then scramble aloft
and furl sail.  "Move lively, you louses!  For every thread thrashed off
my staysails, I'll have me a patch of flayed arse!"

Freed at last to vent her spleen upon the primary offender, Dhirken
braced against the brig's wallowing roll.  Light scalded off her studded
bracers as she raised her cutlass and caught the tip through the ties at
her prisoner's shirtfront.

"Don't think to bluff your way through this.  I was never drunk in the
Kittiwake last night.  You heard me plainly when I said the terms of
your contract were fool's play."

"Ah," grunted Arithon, a hitch to his breath as a seaman bent his arm a
notch higher.  "Since you didn't give me an answer, it's fair that I'm
offering again."

Dhirken twisted her weapon.  A lacing sheared through with a thin rasp
of sound and exposed a soft triangle of skin.  "What makes you think
you've got aught beside your bollocks left to bargain with?"

"For one thing, I know where we are." Under his chin, another lacing
parted.  Arithon held steady, even as Dhirken's blade dipped, snagged
white linen, and nicked in a vicious downward tear.  The sea plunged the
brig through a bucketing roll and smacked her down in a trough.  Spray
pattered over decking and sailhands, and Dhirken's jarred blade
stenciled a scratch in new blood.

The sting provoked Arithon to scalding impatience.  "Go on and cut a bit
lower," he challenged.  "You'll find a parchment from Sethvir tucked
into my waistband that states to the copper what I'm worth."

"Sethvir?" Dhirken reached out, grabbed, and dragged cloth across steel
in a howling rip that left him stripped to the waist.  "Sethvir of
Althain?  What is he but a legend told to sniveling little babes by
their mothers?"

"Look and see," said Arithon, the gleam to his eyes no less dangerous
for the fact he was weaponless and trapped.

Aloft, the sailhands' learned efforts gradually reduced the Drake's
canvas.  While the deck crew minded belaying pins and tackle, loosened
sheets and whipped blocks subsided to a tidier thrum as the wind skeined
over taut cable.  Speech could be heard with less effort now, but
Arithon volunteered nothing else.

Beneath the fluttering shreds of his shirt, he did in fact carry a
scroll, several sheaves thick, fastened with ribbon and bearing a
cracked seal that looked very elegant and old.

Dhirken used her cutlass to hook the ties and fish it out.

"You're welcome," its owner said equably.  "The seal, which is genuine,
belongs to s'Gannley.  The line ruled as princes in Camris.

Go on.  Read.  I invited you."

The captain snatched the parchment off her weapon tip.  Cut ribbons
fluttered overboard on the breeze as she flattened the sheet and scanned
the lines.

"Lady?" Arithon offered in grave diffidence.  "May I suggest you fetch
someone who can read?" Subject to the captain's venomous glower, he gave
a hampered, apologetic shrug.  "You're holding the sheet upside down."

"Fiends alive!" Dhirken grinned in icy enjoyment, despite herself
pleased by his boldness.  "You're going to die very slowly.  Maybe one
finger at a time, until we've attracted enough sharks for the rest of
you." The gold loops in her ears spat hard glints as she flipped the
parchment into the startled grasp of her slit-eared first mate.

"What does it say?" she commanded.

The brig's helm was hastily passed off to a sailhand.

Embarrassed to be handed a scribe's chore in public, the mate snarled at
his smirking crewmates.  "Anybody laughs, I'll gut him later." He
cracked the scroll straight, puckered up in a squint, and in hesitant,
strangled diction, plowed his way through the first page, with its lists
of gold in coin weight, its itemized inventory of Falgaire crystal, fine
silk, and Nanns carpet.  Wealth beyond the wickedest dream of avarice
drew every deckhand within earshot to crowd his elbows in excitement.

"Keep alert!" Dhirken snapped.  "If there's riches, we haven't seen one
whit more than some straggly marks on a parchment!" As the mate fumbled
through the next page, she cut off his recitation and regarded her
prisoner, who, despite the agility of a weasel, had not managed to ease
the suspended posture her men maintained to force him passive.

"These goods of yours." She laughed.  "You're telling me you came by
them honestly?"

"Now that would be prying." Arithon stretched to extreme limits and
managed to claw a toehold on the deck.  Perhaps annoyed that the sailors
who pinioned his finely made wrists seemed determined to strangle his
circulation, he added, "I didn't ask how you acquired the lading list in
your hold."

"And you didn't seek to hire a smuggler's ship without particular
reason, I see that." Left the predicament that her brig was adrift
beyond sight of bearings or shoreline, Dhirken fingered her cutlass.

Before she could render final judgment, Arithon cut in, sweetly
reasonable.  "You have nothing to lose by listening.

For the trouble I've caused, why not hear what you stand to gain?"

Shadows like cabled cobweb crawled across sanded wood and the leached
white grain of drying planks.  The slit-eared mate worried the corners
of the parchments, while the deckhands watched their captain, stone
still.  The squeal of the steerage gear, and the creak of the yards to
Drake's wallowing assaulted the unsettled silence.

Locked eye-to-eye with a prisoner no taller than she was, Dhirken sensed
his taunting irony: as though death itself were a gambit tossed out to
serve some reckless need.  Since the habit of command made her cautious
of allowing any miscreant to have his way, she hesitated; and the moment
ceded a dangerous awareness that her crewmen sized her up like a wolf
pack.

She had been challenged before them, by a man.  Pitched to grasp at the
first hint of weakness, they waited to see if she was afraid of him.

That fact alone saved his life.

"You've caused no trouble," Dhirken pronounced at careful length.

"Inconvenience, perhaps.  Drake's still in Eltair Bay, and not lost.

If I steer to any heading but east, we're bound to recover the
shoreline."

"Ah, but where?" Arithon matched her play like a cardsharp.  "The
constables at Whitehold have a price on your head.  Jaelot would
imprison you and confiscate your ship if you can't meet their fines for
unpaid tolls on strait passage.

What if your landfall's at Tharidor?  I don't know the Drake's
transgression, but the harbormaster there said he'd retire for the
pleasure of hanging you without a court of law."

"Enough!" Determined not to seem flattered by the scope of his ability
to sort gossip, Dhirken reached out left-handed, peeled a raised
splinter from the wheel mount, and proceeded to pick her front teeth.
"My history and problems won't matter one whit if you're dead," she said
around her clenched bit of wood.  "Right now I see no reason not to
silence your singing and throw off your bones for the fish."

"You could do that," Arithon agreed.  "Or, better, we could wager.

Choose any city, any place in the bay or on the continent where you
prefer to make landfall.  By the forgotten arts of navigation, I'll
steer the Drake to that harbor."

"Sorcery!" Dhirken spat out a small shred of spruce.  "I've no use for
such."

"Knowledge," Arithon countered.  "Imagine if you could sail straight out
to sea, lose the merchant's patrols over the horizon, then carve a
straight course for whatever haven your fortune should favor?"

"I don't bet." Dhirken flung away her sliver, prepared to reacquaint him
with her cutlass.

"You don't read, either," Arithon shot back.  "Change just those two
habits, and no contraband runner in these waters could match you."

"Captain," the seaman at the wheel volunteered in tremulous diffidence,
"listen to the man.  We could kill him anytime.

But if he's not lying, every one of us could be rich."

"I will say, he has a sure hand on a ship," the mate added.

"Ath, you pulling puppies!" Dhirken sneered.  "Would you plead for him,
then, liar that he is, and shadow-bending sorcerer as well?"

When none of her crewmen dared to meet her eyes, the captain weighed her
own counsel.  In the yards overhead, sailhands faltered in their furling
to eavesdrop; aware they were idle by their motionless shadows on the
deck, Dhirken snapped off a brusque warning.  To her prisoner, she said,
"If what you say is true, if this navigation isn't sorcery, then anybody
here could learn it?"

"Anybody," Arithon assured.  "My hands could be tied.

Given proper instruments and my instruction, you could make and plot the
sightings by yourself."

"Then your hands will be tied and your feet also." Pleased to snatch
triumph from opportunity, Dhirken dispatched a sailhand to scrounge in a
locker for spare cord.  "The landfall I choose is the harbor at Farsee.
Get us there.  Or I'll see the crabs feed on your carcass."

A busy interval later, bent over the contents of Arithon's satchel,
Drake's captain completed her amazed inspection of gleaming, strange
instruments and charts.  Wakened to the fact she was hungry, she drew
breath to call Lad, then recalled the seasick accomplice, left gagged
and trussed like a turkey below decks.  She stood in disgust.

Unless the fat landlubber had tossed up his guts and suffocated in her
quarters, she was going to have to cut him loose.

Blade drawn in hand, Dhirken descended the companionway.

The shadowed dark of her cabin seemed much too quiet.

She swore as her eyes adjusted, and swore again as she saw Lad, fallen
dead asleep on her berth.  The cook's best knife had fallen clear of
slack fingers.  An edge of reflected blue in the light through the
opened stern window, the blade had impaled itself spare inches from the
prisoner's boots.

But Dakar was too far gone in misery to grasp the advantage

of the moment.  His complexion was green and his hair lay screwed in
sweaty snarls.  Dhirken noted in amazement he had managed to gnaw
through the gag.  Of the galley sponge, she found no sign, even when she
bent to recover the dropped knife.

Above her, between moans likely due to colic from

ingested shreds of sponge, the prisoner gasped, "Where's Arithon?"

"Tied to the mizzenmast pinrail, damned unpleasantly tight, if you
please." A moment's forethought, and Dhirken sheathed her cutlass, the
cook's steel being handier to hack through knotted twine.  "There your
man stays 'til Black Drake makes port where he's promised."

As his bonds gave way, the Mad Prophet chafed scored wrists.  "How many
seamen did he kill before you trussed him?"

Knelt down to free Dakar's ankles, Dhirken looked up sharply.

"None," she said in irritation.  "Why ask?  He gave himself freely."

"Ah, lady." Dakar heaved a soulful sigh.  "You don't know him at all.
That's trouble.  Whatever you think, whatever Arithon led you to
believe, be certain of this.  If he didn't kill, then you dance to his
design."

Dhirken stood, her eyes like sheared rivets in the gloom, and her dagger
hand thoughtfully steady.  "You don't like him one bit.  I don't find
that reassuring."

Dakar shook his head, then snapped his palms to his mouth to dam back
another seizure.  As he groaned an apology and stumbled through the
companionway to be sick, Dhirken looked after him, her arms folded in
tight trepidation across her breast.

"Well, by Ath, I don't trust either one of you," she confided to her
cabin's creaking bulkhead.  "Whatever the outcome, until I see a motive,
I'm going to use my own judgment."

Attrition

Along the coast of Eltair Bay, late summer hazed the jumbled,
steep-sided valleys in their mantle of hardwood and evergreen.

The oaks hung gemmed with acorns.  Larks ceased singing to mark off
territory, their fledged young gone from their nests.

But in the mountains to the west of Jaelot, where Luhaine fared on the
errand deferred to him by Asandir, cruel cold ruled the upper altitudes
with small regard for changing seasons.  On cloudless mornings, the
loftiest peak in the Skyshiels pricked the sky like a knife up-thrust
for a sacrifice.  Ice clad, glistening white, or else scoured of cover
like a hammered scrap of unforgiving black iron, it shadowed even the
deepest gorge glazed by snowmelt through the clefts of Rockfell Vale.

Under mist or in storm, its edged northern scarp split the winds.

On days when the gusts raged the hardest, the wail of sheared air keened
like a haunt through the glens and broken foothills beneath.

Foresters from Daenfat who worked traps in these wilds never tarried
over their snares.  They claimed the mountain's brooding could be felt
in the sough of the breeze; a solitary man could go mad here, listening
too long or too carefully.

In the hour the Fellowship envoy arrived to resurvey the Mistwraith's
prison, the rain that drenched the green lowlands rampaged in blizzards
across the heights.  Gusts whirled over cliff wall and ice face, shrill
as war steel dragged sharp across a whetstone.  Driven snow scoured the
incongruous stone stair cut into the scarp at the whim of Davien the
Betrayer.  The baroque scrolls of newel posts and chiseled, glowering
gargoyles poked through blank drifts, sheeted like age-rotted dustcovers
over frivolously abandoned furniture.

To Luhaine's mage-tuned perception, the eyes of the carvings were not
dead.  Spells of guard wakened by his passage flared to coronas of
energy just past the range of natural sight.

Wild rocks would have shown indifference to his trespassing; the
obsidian-flecked bones of Rockfell Peak were not dumb, but aware and
watchful of encroachment.

Yet where an intruder who lacked Fellowship guidance might press upward
unheeding, misguided to believe that this sky-framed, wind-burnished
pinnacle would permit an unsanctioned presence, Luhaine paused.  An
unseen vortex more chill than frost, around which the gusts sucked and
skirted like a current rechanneled by obstruction, he unreeled a tendril
of awareness downward, touched the mountain, and tacitly requested a
permission.

A vibration answered from the deep, a bell stroke chord reminiscent of
earthquakes, mournfully slow and drawn out.

Too subtle to stir mortal senses, the language of stone held a grandeur
so vast that time seemed dwindled and meaningless.

To Luhaine, whose fussy penchant for austerity counted music a
scatterbrained dalliance, the enduring character embedded in primal rock
made the quickened lives of plants and animals seem chaotic and shrill
by comparison.

Rockfell's bleak depths lay cloaked by a dignity that humbled; its
consent had extended through long-suffering centuries, to house and
imprison those myriad entities bent in malice against the Law of the
Major Balance.  The latest of these was the Mistwraith, and there, even
Luhaine's obstinate patience must bow in salute to the mountain's
steadfast endurance.

Granted leave to resurvey the wardspells that bound Desh-thiere's warped
spirits captive, Luhaine diffused his presence.  No longer a contained
vortex of fine energies, he settled and sank downward into the heartrock
of the mountain.

Snow, ice, and surface cliffs gave way to striated black mineral never
harried by air or sunlight.  The hidden depths whispered of earthsong
and ores, and buried trickles of subterranean springs stitched a
darkness interlaced with magecraft.  Luhaine's perception could discern
each gossamer strand, laid down in resonance and spun to shining harmony
by his disparate Fellowship associates.

Davien the Betrayer had cut the original shaft, and also the five-sided
chamber at its base that shaped the stone bounds of Rockfell's prison.
Seamlessly pragmatic on first encounter, a blunt-cut statement of
purpose that Luhaine knew well not to trust, the fiber of grand conjury
that underpinned Davien's works held twists like kinked cord, and eddies
like current under trout pools.  Stealthy forces moved and moiled,
outside of sound and beyond the pale of visible light.  When enfleshed,
Luhaine recalled such vibrations had pressured him to headaches.  As
spirit, he felt as if the spiked legs of insects prickled nerves he no
longer possessed.

He deepened his search, skeined past the remnants of spells used to
drill through the fastness of rock; beyond flickers, like sparks sieved
through velvet, of older Paravian magecraft.

Beneath the settled striations of the earth, shafts of unmined crystal
rang still to the horn calls of vanished centaur guardians.

Here, like a glimmer of drowned starlight, rang the blessing of a
unicorn's dance; there the captured echo of a sunchild's song.  Had
Luhaine retained the means to show physical emotion, the remembrance of
faded beauty preserved in Rockfell's roots might have moved him to weep.

The only recourse left to him as spirit was to pour his balked pain into
methodical labor.  The mist-based entities that had driven off the
Paravians remained here, alive, unquiet and too dangerous in malice to
be entrusted to the mischance of fate.

Desh-thiere lay incarcerated behind three seals of stone, inside
interlocked sigils, each one structured to impound by the most ruthless
deployment of energies.  These shackles were not mazed like the defenses
set over Althain Tower, that a trained master could slip through and
leave undisturbed.  The bindings closed over the Mistwraith would admit
nothing living, whether encased in quick flesh, or unclothed as pure
spirit.

To sound the integrity of the completed ward, Luhaine could only settle
into absolute quiet and take painstaking stock of the vibrations where
anchor points fixed the spells to Rockfell's immutable granite.

He must listen, unwind and verify each signature telltale fashioned by
his Fellowship colleagues.  Every mite of worked power must be inspected
and mapped, the resonance instilled in each seal rune swept through
exhaustive cross-checks for anomaly.

The construct itself shed a perilous corona, unquiet emanations whose
very strength could spread an ache fierce enough to ravage bones and
flesh.  Its dire presence sieved through Luhaine's being as unkindly,
muddling his aura into dissonance like a flame played along a bared
nerve.

Asandir's intricate discipline had coerced cold stone to part and change
shape and encompass; his handling rang forthright as the arced flight of
swallows, or the trail of a falling meteor.

Kharadmon's capricious energies cajoled order from raw chaos, then
jagged spindles of white light across time and dimension, to stabilize
the ward glyphs into balance.

Were that flamboyant spirit not absent from Athera, he would no doubt
have dropped in unannounced to crack some scathing comment.

Luhaine dismissed a stab of loss.  Annoyed that the antagonistic rival
he shared with Kharadmon could invade on stray thought and distract him,
he realigned his lapsed concentration.  The interfering ghost had
scarcely been missed, and the risk did not brook a second thought, that
his search beyond Athera for the Mistwraith's origin should end in
tragedy and silence.  A Sorcerer who affected such caustic lack of
manners would scarcely go astray through the course of a crossing
between worlds.  Any peril grave enough to leave Kharadmon compromised
would be of far-reaching proportion.

Luhaine distanced his distress by immersing himself in the onerous
tedium of work.

The energy coils fused in imprisoning resonance still sang in flawless
balance.  Piqued afresh by the masterful powers woven into the
irreverent cartouche that finished one of Kharadmon's ward seals,
Luhaine, in sheer irritation, repeated his last step.  A crawling,
half-sensed movement slipped through the slow probe of his awareness.

As if hooked by a Thorn in clean grass, he stopped, backtracked, and
re-sounded the passage just traced.

The magic's structure gleamed whole, its symmetry unsullied.

Luhaine paused.  While the energies that bound Rockfell's mass into
matter danced to the creator's vast design, he combed through the seals
once again.  Nothing seemed amiss.

And yet, elusive as a slivered bit of glass, the anxiety persisted.  He
distrusted the integrity of his own findings.

Possessed by the soul of a countinghouse clerk, Luhaine pondered a
whorled loop of spellcraft at random.  In the laborious, jaundiced
suspicion that Kharadmon could never resist baiting, he retested its
anchor to the living stone.

Perfection rang back, every dying sigh of echo in predictable,
harmonious register.

Luhaine could bore a mastiff for sheer, lockjawed tenacity.

He could worry a conundrum for an hour, or a century, until he had tried
every one of his colleagues to exasperated fits of frustration.

He set up wards to shield the emanations of his presence.

Then he threaded his damped probe through the energy coils.

Inside them, wrapped under spidery nets of illusion foiled at last by
his masked approach, he discovered an infinitesimally small rip through
the barrier of Asandir's wards.

He poised himself, examined the rent, then the tinseled veil of shields
that hid its presence.  The fact that Kharadmon's work still rang sound
was significant.  Grand conjury worked by a spirit form naturally
differed from the binding of a mage tied to breathing flesh.

If one colleague's work showed no flaw, and the other bore sign of
attrition, the change would be no anomaly.

A day and a night passed.  The storm over Rockfell cleared to a crystal
dome of stars, while Luhaine hounded every facet of this nuance to its
frightening, unequivocal conclusion: the peril presented by the
Mistwraith had widened.

Withdrawn from the deeps of Rockfell Pit, the Sorcerer dispatched prompt
warning to the Warden at Althain Tower.

"The wards that guard Desh-thiere have deteriorated, and the work is the
Mistwraith's own.  It pains me to say this, but no outside party can be
faults& the stolen knowledge the fell creature used to work its mischief
bears the stamp of Arithon's training.  Our dread is quite real, that
the schooling he received from the masters at Rauven might one day key
the power to set the captive wraithsfree."

Sethvir gave harried reply.  "This curse that binds our princes
confounds itself more by the hour.  Our hope lies in Kharadmon's
charge."

Embroiled in the irrefutable aftermath, that the wards over Rockfell
would require swift intervention and the help of a corporate colleague
to mend, Luhaine dared not ask what else galled Sethvir to rare temper.
Since an unpartnered spirit could not penetrate Rockfell's bindings, he
must perforce stand guard at the pit until Asandir could journey north
from Shand.

"I regret to vex you further," Luhaine added, "But this problem of black
powder at Alestron is going to have to bide a while longer."

"It can't." Like a whip-crack through still air, Sethvir's irritation
spanned the distance to Rockfell Peak.  "The duke's foundry has been
casting in secret again.  I can't send Traithe to look in on this.  He's
busy curbing a plague of Lyats that have set a string of housefires in
Ghent."

"Well have Dakar address Alestron's bit of mischief," Luhaine cracked
back in a flayed-up whirlwind of snowflakes.

"That's the least the useless drunkard could do, andjust compensation,
for his ruinous caper in Jaelot."

The notion was absurd, if not dangerous.  But the straits exposed by the
Mistwraith's activity posed too grave a threat.

The Fellowship's affairs were strained to the point where Alestron's
dilemma became secondary.

Precedents

Under Westwood's summer foliage, a company of Avenor's field army
dispatched to test its new-fledged might against the barbarians who
plague the trade route reaps reward on its threshing bloodied swords;
and twenty-eight clanborn men taken captive are marched to receive
sentence under the mayor's justice in Karfael....

In a sunbaked glen within Alestron's domain, a man in dusty scholar's
robes sets a touch match to a tube of bronze, and a spark flies, to
unleash a booming roar and a belch of thick smoke; and a whining ball of
stoneshot hammers into an oak grove, splintering green boughs like burst
bone....

Far off in Atainia, jolted from reverie by the scream of rent greenery
the width of a continent away, Sethvir of Althain raises a care-lined
face and traces an eddy of wind, laden still with the acid pall of
burned brimstone; a pledge centuries old leaves him no choice but to
send Dakar with all haste to plumb the ducal armory at Alestron for its
secrets....

VIII.  Renewal

Avenor had been a small city.  Abandoned through the centuries since the
uprising, a line of Oweather-stripped, crumbled foundations marked the
inner, Paravian-built citadel, where an elegant cluster of round keeps
and a curtain wall had rested like a jewel's bezel on a knoll above the
west seacoast.  The setting commanded a broad, lowland valley, crowned
still with stately oak and alive with game and deer.

Through the reign of Tysan's past high kings, merchant trade and
shipping had fared farther south, from the generous cove harbor at
Hanshire.

Since the current ruling mayor remained adamantly opposed to any form of
royal alliance, the s'llessid prince who came to restore his ancestral
seat could not resume the tradition of mooring rights.  The diminished
elegance of the Paravian ruin was too narrow for Lysaer's plans.  He
would build something larger, grander, a city like no other on the
continent to stand as a monument for change.

The summer began with vetch lacing green runners over the tumbled walls
that overlooked the Westland Sea, and ended in mud, noise, and the rich,
humid reek of slashed earth.

Under blazing, dust-silted sunlight, through drizzling rain that hazed
the hills like grayed muslin, the Prince of the West ordered the old,
carved megaliths undermined and torn from their settings.  If Paravians
had once danced their blessing on this site, if the glimmering spirits
of horned Riathan mourned the present desecration, Lysaer lacked
mage-sight to perceive them.  In past company of a Fellowship Sorcerer,
he had walked other Second Age ruins; the experience had impressed full
awareness that such structures preserved a channel to renew the
mysteries of the earth.  If the prince was saddened by the fears of his
citybred following, who looked unkindly upon the old ways, he must not
let sentiment rule him.

What stones could be broken and dressed square for new use were
unemotionally salvaged.  Others too frost cracked, too hard, or too
stubbornly incised with old carvings, were dragged aside and piled on a
hillock where bitterroot vine laced them over.  There, when he craved
solitude, Lysaer retired to think, or to practice his hand at refining
the powers inherent in his given gift of light.

If an uncanny disharmony seemed to linger in that graveyard of riven
blue granite, its disquiet only charged him to reaffirm his commitment.
Once the Master of Shadow lay dead, new peace could reunite the rifts
between factions.  Then the old knowledge set aside for expedience could
be the more splendidly restored.

While the late day sun slanted long, barred rays above the leaden heave
of the breakers, Lysaer raised his chin from his fists and swept back
hair tarnished with perspiration.

The voice that broke his sanctuary came again, pitched in exasperation
from beyond the jumbled rim of the stone pile.

"His Grace is up there.  Nowhere else.  My Lord Diegan insisted, and he
knows the prince's moods like a brother."

A lull in the breeze framed someone's dubious reply.

Resigned to untimely interruption, Lysaer stood.  Ambient light snagged
in the bullion on his sleeves as he flicked crumbled lichen from his
hose and waved to disclose his location.

"Your Grace?" A sergeant at arms in a byrnie and the muted tan surcoat
of Karfael's garrison spun and looked up in surprise.  "Who'd have
guessed!  What's in this place but creepy old carvings that even the
gulls won't make nests in?"

As the visitor hitched his shoulders to even the weight of his mail
shirt for the climb, Lysaer shouted, "Don't trouble yourself!

I'll come down."

Though no state visitors were expected, his informal dress dependably
never compromised his charge of sovereign responsibility.

His doublet was cut of summer-weight silk, with gold trim and a discreet
badge of rank.  Close up, he needed no circlet or trapping to command
the respect of his stature.  By blue eyes unflinching in candor, and a
majesty impressed since birth that no costly show of finery might
replicate, the eye of the least-discerning stranger must know him at
once for a prince.

Disarmed by unwonted admiration, Karfael's road-dusty sergeant at arms
was moved to offer him a bow.

"Please rise." Lysaer offered his hand in courtly concern.

"The day's too hot for formalities.  Forgive my impatience, but did your
mayor allow me that company of archers whose service I begged leave to
borrow?"

"The bowmen, certainly, your Grace." Caught out, still coated in grime
from his march, the men-at-arms received the prince's direct touch with
embarrassment.  "Your quartermaster assigns them a barracks as we speak.
My captain awaits you with news from the north, and a gift with my lord
mayor's compliments."

"Something that wouldn't keep, I trust." Lysaer let Diegan's equerry
fall in step behind as he strode through the sun-seared stalks of
goldenrod, left mangled from the grind of the sledges used to drag the
recalcitrant old stones.  Beyond the forlorn hill with its discard
mound, the site of Avenor's rebirth spread ochre and sable, the muddy
wounds of gashed earth peopled by work crews like ants.  The snap of ox
goads and the ring of chisels peppered through the shouts of the
stonemasons who directed the layout of new footings.

Lysaer paused to savor the sight.  Immaculate in his trimmed doublet,
his hair spun by wind to tangled filigree, he seemed a figure stamped
out of legend, the blue of his eyes enriched to satisfaction for the
vista of dreams spread before him.  Over these ragged beginnings he
pictured the high, square towers he would erect in sandy, gold brick;
from staked chalk strings, his mind raised curtain walls and
battlements, a fortified and defended city tranquil under banners and
slate roofs.

Progress was already evident.  Across acres of plowed soil, past the
riding school and its fixed rows of picket lines, above the meadows
fenced aside for growing fodder, and the mowed greens where his troops
drilled, he drank in the tang of coal fires.  His heart thrilled to the
clamor of the smiths' hammers that forged steel strapping for Avenor's
future gates.

In this valley bequeathed by his s'llessid forbears, he laid down the
marrow and the sinew for the army to become his honed weapon to defeat
the Master of Shadow.

Inside the orderly works of his new demesne, the company in Karfael's
colors stood out like a jerked strand through knit.

Straggled through their midst was a double file of men, half-naked and
pressed by armed riders into the parade yard behind the tent barracks.

"That's no troop of archers," Lysaer said in brisk surprise.

The glance he cast toward Karfael's sergeant was less an inquiry than a
royal demand.

"No, your Grace." In proud eagerness, the officer qualified.

"The reserve troop you dispatched to patrol the north road against
clansmen met with good fortune in Westwood.  A barbarian encampment was
surrounded and ambushed, with twenty-eight prisoners taken.  Our mayor
in Karfael stayed their execution, in your name.  He felt the wretched
brutes would be better used as labor on Avenor's new walls."

Lysaer launched off in long strides, his informal mien of the moment
before banished to grim-faced reserve.

The guard sergeant had to stretch to stay abreast.  "Your Grace?

What's amiss?"

His concern was regally ignored.

"Here." The prince clawed off his belt and spun back toward the equerry.
"Take this." In sharp disregard of manners or ceremony, he proceeded to
remove his doublet, then bundled it into the attendant's arms.  Stripped
down to tinseled silk hose and the wind-snapped lawn of his shirt, he
bolted downhill at a run.

Caught at a flat-footed standstill, the sergeant punished road-weary
sinews to give chase.  "What's happened?" His breath snatched short over
the rough ground, he pumped to keep pace with the prince.

"Your mayor meant well, certainly," Lysaer flung back.

"But he acted beyond his authority when he thought to send prisoners as
a gift."

Battered by sticks through a brush brake, coughing dust from a shortcut
across a meadow of cut hay, then hampered to slow agony by the
additional drag of helm and surcoat and bymie, the sergeant labored to
right a painful disadvantage in diplomacy.  "How may I help?"

"Your blade," Lysaer gasped.  "Let me borrow it."

The sergeant unsheathed his short sword.  The instant the weapon was
given over, the prince redoubled his pace.

Outstripped in a plunge down the earthworks for the moat, the hapless
men-at-arms yielded before punishment and slackened back to a walk.

The dignified royal who had greeted him showed no qualms about
scrambling through ditches.  Whether the spring-fed muck at the bottom
contained sewage or stagnant water, Lysaer plunged in to the waist to
wade across.  The sheen of his gold-striped silk doused in filth, he
climbed the benn, vaulted the raw, chiseled edges of the wall's new
foundation, and vanished to the cries of masons startled from their
labor.

Practical in his abandonment, Karfael's rumpled sergeant at arms trudged
off to find the road back to the barracks.

Overheated and set out of sorts, he concluded the contrary foibles of
old blood princes were better off left to his captain's more experienced
discretion.

At that moment, the ranking officer in command of the borrowed company
sat his horse in a state of astounded inattention.

Professional enough to be engrossed by the activities that occupied
Avenor's new recruits, he rubbed his bristled chin with the back of a
scaled gauntlet, and gaped at the volleys of arrows that rattled and
smacked in even flights to the marks.

Few missed.  Such accuracy by itself was unnerving.

Across the practice field, other men rode armed with lances.

Their agility in the saddle was breathtaking, despite the chaos that
wove through their midst, as another team of foot, ambushed in drill,
collapsed a field camp, complete with armory tents and kitchen, and
massed into bristling defense.

For a captain who had resigned from mercenary service to settle in a
garrison command, the sight was one to strike awe, and then envy, and
then a profound and weak-kneed relief that such superbly trained cohorts
would never face his troops as enemies across a drawn line of battle.

"Merciful Ath, will you look at that," murmured the staffer who waited
at his stirrup.  "They're using bulwarks of soaked hides to douse fire
arrows."

Karfael's captain twisted in his saddle and paused, as someone he did
not recognize plunged headlong into his idle ranks of guardsmen.  A
shout followed, and a roil of sudden turbulence.  Then the runner burst
through, streaming water and spattered with black mud.  The sweat-limp
shirt on his heaving shoulders billowed at the waist like a peasant's
smock.

Disheveled from head to foot, the young man charged on, straight into
the roped knot of captives.

He held an unsheathed blade in his fist.

Caught lounging with dropped stirrups, Karfael's heavyset captain
unhooked the knee draped on his pommel.  With townbred, fashionably
bland interest, he held his immediate order to intervene.  Every veteran
knew how it felt to suffer the wiles of forest barbarians.  If a
steel-bearing maniac was bent on private vengeance, the escorting
men-at-arms would be decidedly inclined to enjoy a bit of fun before
they took action in restraint.

But the intruder turned his blade to whistling use, not to maim
prisoners, but to sever the cordage that yoked them.

The captain's bull-throated bellow sheared above the nerve-racking beat
of the masons' mallets.  He would sooner see barbarians dead in cold
blood than suffer even one to go free.  "Who is that upstart?  By Ath,
pull him off!"

Four guards in his troop snapped to and dismounted.  As they jostled to
enter the milling knot of captives, the perpetrator leaped at them,
shouting.  "By Ath Creator, this is an offense!" The sword spun,
whining.  Startled guards and half-naked clansmen shrank back to escape
getting slashed.

"I'll not have slaves here!  No man serves Avenor in shackles!"

The commotion turned heads on the wall works.  Masons and mule drovers
left off their labor, while the mounted lancers at the edge of the
practice field coalesced from their war drills to stare.

Unmindful of outside observation, deaf to someone's rising call of
inquiry, more guardsmen from Karfael elbowed into the fray to defend
their assigned responsibility.  Their captain screamed his indignation.

"What are these worthless wretches to you?  Who cares if they perish
where they stand?  Ropes are too kind for their sort.  Let the prince
who receives them bind shackles on them all, that no softhearted dolt is
like to cut.

The fair rescuer flung back a wild fall of hair.  Hedged in by bared
weapons that licked in on all sides through the dusty, dazed bodies of
the captives, he rammed his sword in dry earth, then clawed loose his
cuff ties, peeled back filthy cloth, and raised his wrist's before him.
"Well, chain me first, then!" he raged.  A shocking, glacial blue
against his flushed summer tan, his eyes held a warning to freeze
thought.  "No man born in this realm shall be lashed like an animal
before I should suffer the same!"

"Fiends plague my mother, a philanthropist!" The guard captain rolled
his gaze skyward, pleased to deliver the order.

He stretched his toes and recovered his stirrups, unmoved through the
commotion as his men swooped to spread-eagle the rash idiot amid his
coffle of clansmen.

The deed was accomplished with small resistance.  Half the barbarians
were wounded; the rest were too dazed and exhausted from the march to
try more than token trouble.  The tall scout they jabbed to make room
for the newcomer was swollen nearly blind from a bruise.  In touching
and deferent courtesy, that one stepped aside, while a lieutenant
volunteered the pole off his mace.  The blond dissident found his wrists
tied immobile and his elbows threaded through behind his back in less
time than he had taken to speak out.

"What's going on here?" cried an authoritative voice from the sidelines.
"Your Grace?"

Made aware that his position was now hedged in by onlookers, Karfael's
captain knew his job well enough to keep his eyes fixed on his
guardsmen.  As they straightened to attention after securing the new
prisoner, he bellowed without turning around, "Where's Avenor's vaunted
prince?  We've brought him a gift, and with it, a problem in
discipline."

Closing pressure from behind began to upset the stance of his destrier.
The guard captain fought the animal steady in skilled play at the reins.
Since he would make a shameful impression as an envoy if it turned to
war training and kicked a bystander, he flung back an irritable shout.
"If your prince is not present, then send for him!"

A ripple stirred through the prisoners; the bound, blond insurgent
strode to the limit of his noose and tipped up his mud-splashed face.

Tugged a half step as the added strain dragged the ropes, the lanky,
one-eyed barbarian inclined his head in jeering satire.  "If you wish
the attendance of Prince Lysaer s'llessid, unless my sight lies, you
behold him."

The captain from Karfael blinked in horrified astonishment at the
scruffy personage he had issued crisp orders to abuse.

"You?" he said.  "The Prince of the West?"

Lysaer gave back a glare that could have raised curds on new milk.

"Tell your Lord Mayor," he said in furious, regal arrogance, "he may
fight clansmen who rob caravans and kill them in battle.  He may take
them alive and try them on criminal charges.  If they are guilty, he may
exercise his lawful right to execute them.  But I will suffer no enemy
of civilized society to be set in chains as slave labor."

The burly captain swung his leg over his high cantle and dismounted.
"Your Grace, forgive my ignorance." Not waiting for his squire to take
his horse, he gave mollified apology and drew his dagger.  "Let me cut
you loose, and quickly."

"Not yet." Mantled in self-possession that should have been beyond a man
strapped erect in dirty clothing, Lysaer issued correction.  "Every
clansman here shall be restored to liberty first.

For your presumption, to mete out Avenor's justice without my leave,
they will stay free, to depart or join my cause as they choose."

"That's rank insult!" The angle of his blade no longer civil, Karfael's
guard captain gave the nearest rope a vicious jerk.

"These men are my lord mayor's convicts!"

"Not when they stand in Avenor," Lysaer said on a yielded step to avert
a stumble.  His magisterial presence never wavered.  "Back down.

Their fate is in my hands, not yours.  Or else claim my sovereignty and
my pledge to fight the Shadow Master, and plunge your damned knife
through my heart."

A madman might make such a statement, except the blue eyes clear lit in
summer glare showed only steel-clad resolve.

The guard captain hesitated, his jaw set and every sinew primed for a
thrust he could not in decency complete.

Barbarian eyes watched him, mocking through their misery.

Then the unfriendly presence that harried his back broke through.

His cordon of guardsmen parted their line and gave ground, cowed to
unequivocal surrender.  Surrounding his men and the unfortunate coffle
were the glittering lancers from the practice field.  Hard as nails,
poised on their hair-trigger leash of fine discipline, they were led by
the jeweled and magnificent person of Avenor's dark-haired Lord
Commander.

"You will do his Grace's bidding," Lord Diegan demanded from the back of
his tall, bay courser.  Beyond the sun-struck dazzle that laced his
naked longsword, his brown eyes stayed fixed and inimical on Karfael's
cornered envoy.  "If you're minded to argue the matter further, you'll
be offered an audience after the prince has withdrawn for the chance to
be properly clothed and refreshed."

As a competent but unrefined veteran who had risen to his post through
the ranks, the captain dispatched as his lord mayor's emissary much
preferred to argue out his differences in the sweat of a spar over
weapons.  Given the luxury of an attended bath, eased by servants who
fussed over his old injuries and clothed him in lace and court velvets,
he struggled to throw off embarrassment.  When assigned this tour of
duty, he had given little thought to the prerogatives of royal
hospitality.

Hot in his layers of borrowed finery, nakedly vulnerable without his
arms, he pitched himself to weather his formal meeting with
temperamental blooded royalty.  His mistake had been accidental; a
prince who ran about half-clothed and dirty ought not to cavil at
insults from town-raised strangers who, at best, were distrustful of his
station.

If the jewels, the candles, and the splendors of the court were not
beyond his scant learning to recount, the captain resolved to salvage
the more pleasant memories of his experience to delight his wife and
small children.

But Avenor's grand hall was as yet a foundation, roofed over with summer
haze and stars.  Torn between disappointment and jittered nerves,
Karfael's envoy was escorted to the shingled shack used by turns for
tactical meetings between the ranking officers, and by Avenor's shrewd
old seneschal to manage the city's diverse finances.

The interior with its rough plank floor was scantily furnished.

It held no carpeted dais.

The trestle at its center, draped in white damask and arrayed with
glittering crystal, could have been a jewel fallen out of its setting
into the hovel of a thief.

Attended only by the pedigreed elegance of his Lord Commander at Arms,
Lysaer pushed back his chair.  "I owe you my royal apology, captain."
His tabard of indigo velvet flashed as he rose, spattered with
reflections thrown off gold braid and seed pearls and sapphires.

A captured sheen of lamplight played over his tinseled sleeves, and fair
hair, now clean, bound under a gold wire fillet.  The shoulders that
filled out the doublet were not broadened by padding; the face, in
planes like masterworked sculpture, needed no crown to heighten its
nobly wide brow.

Thrust unschooled into refinements outside his experience,
professionally shamed before the military excellence displayed unabashed
on the practice ground, the guard captain squared his jaw.

Lysaer met his unease with a self-effacing smile.  "The strictures of my
upbringing got the better of my temper this afternoon.  A sorry lapse,
since, as you see, I have no hall yet, and no proper state for guesting
visitors.  Come, be welcome and sit.  The wine won't be rough, or the
food."

A servant stepped from the shadows and pulled out a padded leather
chair.  The guard captain sank into the place he was offered, startled
to scarlet embarrassment by the squeak of the horsehair upholstery.

"Your Grace, how was I to know you?" he burst out.  "The clan captives
were not sent to offend.  My Lord Mayor wished to be helpful."

"No harm done." Lysaer arranged his wrists on his chair arms, while the
servant went on to serve wine from a cut crystal decanter.

"But you must understand, far more lies at stake than a matter of
idealistic principle.  To chain hostile clansmen within a loyal enclave
is letting the viper into our midst.  Such men could become a ready tool
for our downfall, should an enemy steal in and cut their chains.

As oppressors, our ranks would stand weakened.  I'll sanction no such
liability in the heart of my city, to risk the security of my
following."

His goblet now filled with red claret, Lysaer turned the glass in
jeweled fingers.  "So you see, the offense was not yours, but against my
own royal trust, a private integrity I am oath sworn as sovereign never
to bend or to break." Arrows of 1, stained light bloodied his rings as
he looked across in earnest entreaty.  "Best to kill cleanly, or else
let any who oppose our new order stay at liberty to amend their reiving
ways."

"A worthy thought." The guard captain raised his glass and swallowed,
ill at ease, but at least lent fair grounds on which to argue.  "But
what of my lord mayor's prisoners?  Karfael restored your charter to
these lands.  His city's confidence has been breached, since he
entrusted men into your hands who have done injury to his merchants.

In setting them free, you have spurned him."

Swift to resume an ongoing point of contention, Lord Diegan agreed.  "My
liege, there's been an insult.  You can't just let the issue rest."

No glazing graced the crude casements.  Summer moths pattered into the
pool of the lamplight, to dance in crazed circles and die wing charred.
The damask tablecloth held a litter of tiny corpses, fluttering and
maimed, or fallen limp.  As if they were human, and bloody, Lysaer
sighed, pained as few ever saw him.  "I understand the mayor's cause for
outrage.

But the sordid outcome of this case should be obvious."

When the look on the captain's shaved features remained blank, the
prince gripped his goblet and dashed off a neat swallow, as though to
erase the sharp taste of bitterness.  "The clansmen I released were
weary enough to drop where they stood.  Most were wounded.  Where can
they run?  They are weaponless.  When darkness fell, a discreet troop of
headhunters with tracking dogs were set after them.  This far removed
from their bolt holes in Westwood, I doubt if a man of them survives."

"They could be lucky," Lord Diegan interrupted.  "The drifters who raise
horses in the meadows of Pasyvier could offer them shelter."

"That's a long shot." Lysaer flicked a dying insect from his sleeve in
sudden, nerve-fired impatience.  "If there are survivors, my point isn't
lost.  Word will be carried to the clans, and our troops here will learn
a painless lesson.  This is Avenor, where all men are entitled to the
terms of royal justice.  Any who disrupt trade or prey upon the roads
will be handled according to their deserts." He settled on his elbows,
his blue eyes spiked with reflections thrown off by the lamp.

"Diegan, this is one thread in a weave of whole cloth.  We must start
thinking for the future.  When my garrison marches to war against the
Master of Shadow, they mustn't he divided in purpose.  We can't maintain
the burden, then, of guarding the roads in friendly territory.

How can we ever clear the wilds of clan pests if we continue to fan the
old hatreds?"

Impressed enough to shed his self-consciousness, Karfael's captain gave
a grainy laugh.  "Wise tactics, if any clanborn barbarian can ever be
made to know his place.  But why ask for archers?  I watched your bowmen
at the butts.  They are marksmen.  Why borrow ours?"

Lysaer's formal sovereignty broke before a grin of boyish merriness. "My
own troops balked at their orders."

Pained, Lord Diegan drained his goblet, then waved back the servant who
bent to replenish his wine.  "No.  Drink won't help.  I need my head
clear instead." But a suspect brightness to his glance showed him
already sunk in his cups.  To the Karfael man, he said in stabbing
sarcasm, "His Grace could scarcely order floggings for men who objected
to "Lord Diegan," Lysaer cut in firmly.  "Not now.  We've been through
this.  I won't change my stance."

Still nettled by the terrifying fervor Lysaer's lancers had turned
against his veterans that afternoon, the captain coughed as the wine
stung his throat in the course of his clumsy swallow.  "What's this?"

"A topic we'll save for tomorrow morning." Still rueful, Lysaer motioned
to the pages piled up on the sidelines, burdened down with trays and
steaming platters.  "Spare me from the temper of my cook, instead.  If
we don't make an effort with his sauces and meats, he's going to be out
here with the knives he uses to joint beef.  Slow spoken as he is, he
moves like a weasel.  If we let him think his efforts at the spit have
been slighted, he'll skewer us faster than anybody's company of crack
archers."

All night, the burly captain from Karfael dreamed of the deadly, precise
turn of teamwork displayed by Avenor's foot troops and mounted lancers.
At sunrise, awakened in twisted blankets and running cold sweat, he
wondered afresh why Lysaer s'llessid should require his troop of
lackluster bowmen to muster and march inland to a secluded defile.

The haze of morning mists had yet to burn off and disperse.

His beard and eyebrows grizzled with condensation, his mail shirt a
grinding weight that hampered every effort to slap off the insects that
whined in the absence of a breeze, the captain nursed a foul mood.

To judge by reddened eyes and a disheveled state of grooming, Diegan
beside him suffered the same fierce headache, courtesy of Lysaer's
expensive brandies.  At least, the fine skin around his eyes tightened
each time his bay horse stamped and jingled its bridle.

Whatever service Karfael's archers were to bestow on behalf of Avenor,
the city's Lord Commander remained opposed.

"How much longer do we stand idle on the hilltops?" The captain could
all but feel his gear rusting in the damp.

Lord Diegan turned his head, the expression mirrored in the rim of his
gilded visor tightly drawn and cynical.  "Not long.

Only until the mist lifts enough to signal your bowmen on the ridgetops.
Blond hair should stand out in early sunlight.  They won't find it hard
to see their target."

"You want my men to shoot arrows at his Grace?  Ath Creator!" The guard
captain's horse jibbed sideward in response to his stiffened fists.
Playing at the reins to resettle it, he said in pale outrage, "The
rumor's true then?  The Prince of the West would test his gift of light?
If this trial goes wrong, you know what will happen!

Dharkaron's Black Spear and Chariot!  We'll have a massacre.  Your elite
garrison at Avenor will run riot in misplayed loyalty and butcher my
field troop like crowbait!"

"My liege insists it won't go wrong," Diegan said in disparaging
boredom.  "He's practiced for months.  He claims he's mastered a
refinement of his talent.  Said he'd burn the shafts to white cinders
long before they fall and endanger him."

"Why?" cried the captain.  "Why should he risk his royal person?"

"Well, I couldn't talk him out of it," Diegan snapped.  "My men wouldn't
take the order.  If yours won't either, his royal Grace spoke his
intention to march without escort and invite Hanshire's garrison to
indulge him.  Since Lord Mayor Garde would likely send heavy infantry
with orders to provoke open war, and Lysaer won't harm any soldier he
considers his ally, here we are happily slapping midges."

In some unseen, mist-mantled glen, a wood thrush sang in falling
triplets.  A hare grazed under a gorse bush that had been invisible the
moment before.  Weak sun melted through, flooding the valley with mellow
warmth.  Lord Diegan straightened his chased helm, flicked beaded
dewdrops from the crest feathers, and gave way to the misery that chewed
him.  In the arrogance he once used to provoke Etarra's dandies to rash
escapades, he said, "His Grace won't see reason.  He made a fool of you
yesterday.  Are you townsman enough to dare to use his princely hide for
a target shoot?  Or did his manners at dinner overawe you enough to
trade in your bollocks as a royalist?"

Karfael's captain returned a low laugh at the jibe.  "There's still
bounty offered for royal scalps." He gathered his reins, prepared to
ride personally to his sergeants.  "Why not make this a sporting event?
Eighty royals says your prince winds up bloody and dead."

"Done," said Diegan with quick recklessness.  But his face stayed
averted, as though his expression might betray him.  "If you win, let's
hope the coin buys me peace.  I'm tired of being heart torn and angry."

The captain paused, no fool in his reading of men.  "You love him that
much.  I can't fathom it."

"Don't stay here, then," Lord Diegan flung back, still adamant in his
need to look elsewhere.  "Prince Lysaer has a way about him no man can
resist.  Every night I thank Ath that the Master of Shadow wasn't born
with the same natural gift."

Day brightened.  The mist shredded in drifts above a landscape patched
with swatches of summer foliage.  With an agony that pinned him
breathless, Lord Diegan heard cadenced hoofbeats as the captain's
destrier cantered off; in dull misery he marked the shouted orders to
the sergeants, followed by Lysaer's assent, absorbed without echo by the
slopes.

Avenor's Lord Commander looped his reins in his elbow and masked his
face in gloved hands.

Then a whining flight of arrows split the air, their sound as evil, as
deadly, as any fallen on another summer's day, ones that had wreaked a
bloody slaughter on the flood-trampled banks of Tai Quofin.

Pierced through by past horrors and present dread, Lord Diegan listened
in suspension.  But the moment gave back no crack of broadheads, nor the
rattle as fletched shafts sliced and flickered deflected paths through
snatched leaves.  He heard no strike of steel into flesh, no screaming.
Just a whispered shriek of air, and a heat that swept his skin in a
fleeting, flashfire burn of wind.

Over the settled silence left by the departed wood thrush, Karfael's
captain bellowed in astonished incredulity, "Ath!

Almighty Ath, here's a miracle!"

Eyes scalded blind behind a screen of soaked leather, Diegan heard
Lysaer's peal of gladdened laughter.  "No miracle , good man.  But now,
at last, I can answer to Maenalle's barbarians.  I have means to defend
my army from her ambush on the day they must cross the passes of Orlan
to challenge the Master of Shadow."

Unnerved and unmanned, Lord Diegan slumped weak kneed in his saddle. His
horse had dropped its neck to crop greenery; he understood he would have
to dismount to recapture his reins, slithered down the beast's crest to
loop behind its gold-trimmed headstall.

By the time Karfael's envoy cantered back to rejoin him, Lord Diegan
stood in the grass.  Dry eyed, at least lent the semblance of dignity by
his veneer of Etarran cynicism, he looked up into the face of a veteran
captain enraptured as if touched by light, as indeed, he likely had
been.

Lysaer's presence did that to a man.

Crisp in his surcoat cut of silk, Lord Diegan regarded the town delegate
in shaken, heartsore humility.  He could not have given the order to
fire; not even to test whether Lysaer's gift of light could be raised as
shield and defense.  The ache in his chest finally loosened enough to
release its hold on his tongue.

"You owe me eighty royals," he said to the captain.  Then he smiled in
elation that pierced him more sweetly than his fiercest climax with a
woman.  "My prince isn't bloody and dead."

"Did you see that?" cried the captain, too bemused still to acknowledge
the outcome of the bet.  "His Grace of Tysan raised light and not an
arrow in a thousand could touch him.

He is invincible, and the army at his back cannot fail."

Sacrifice

Hard by the trade road that wound northward to the city of Etarra, the
old ford that once channeled the River Severnir spread dust dry in the
gloaming, a weed-choked bed of naked rocks and bent grasses, loud with
the strident clicks of summer insects.  The clansmen who hastened like
shadows through the gloom made little noise.  They had the last prisoner
from the caravan bound and gagged before twilight darkened the
west-facing rimrocks; and a stillness too uneasy to be mistaken for
peace settled over the jumbled ravines etched through the Skyshiel
foothills.

The ox teams used to draw the laden wagons sprawled where their drovers
had last reined them, collapsed in dead, folded heaps amid the slackened
leather of their traces.  Throat wounds inflicted in practiced slaughter
were spared the sucking predation of flies only by the advent of night.
The drays themselves had not been rifled.  The tarps still secured their
trade wares and goods since this raid had not been made for plunder.

Sickened by the coppery reek of fresh blood more than pride would admit,
Caolle, war captain of Strakewood's last clansmen, stood with his foot
propped on a rock.  He cleaned his blades on a courier's black felt
saddlecloth, careful to avoid the bullion fringe that might scrape and
cause stray noise.  Small difference that the deaths were of beasts, and
not human.  To any who followed the old ways, all wasteful killing was
offense.

But in Caolle's experience, any milksop too squeamish to take life was a
fool unlikely to survive.  Etarra's Northern League of Headhunters saw
to that, all the more since Lysaer's fresh alliances, which drove the
clans' current need to waylay any caravan traveling in the company of a
message rider.

Quiet footsteps approached to Caolle's fight.  Since just one

man alive dared creep up on him while he held unsheathed steel, the war
captain jerked up his bristled chin.  "Did you find that courier's
dispatches yet?" The dagger in his hand moved a querulous fraction.  "If
you haven't, I'm minded to squeeze his throat a bit.

Get him dizzy, he'll sing out his answer that much faster."

Lanky, tall, as self-possessed as cool marble, Jieret Red-beard stopped
a careful, clear sword's length away.  "That won't be necessary."

Caoile studied the lion crest on the cloth in his hand one last time,
then straightened, his obstreperous nature focused to an assassin's
piercing interest.  "You've read the satchel's contents already, I see."
Gold fringe shed a sullen sparkle as he tossed the felt where it would
not mire his feet.  "If the news is bad, let me hear it." War steel
chimed in the gloom as he sheathed his dagger and tucked a blade that
matched him for wear in the crook of one elbow.

The parchment in Jieret's fingers crackled as it passed into Caolle's
ruthless grip.  "Our liege lord finally made his presence known."

"And about time, isn't it?" Caolle squinted at the pages, snapped them
straight to net the last, failing light, then coughed in surprise as he
picked out the same lion crest in the seal.  "Jaelot?  You're saying
Prince Arithon was there?"

The Earl of the North had tact enough to know when his war captain's
questions were best ignored.  While Caoile read, he surveyed the unkind
fruits of a raid most rapaciously executed: the huddle of bound
survivors; their disjointed muddle of wagons, with hulks of felled draft
animals in unbreathing, splay-legged heaps; and beyond, bunched movement
in the gloom, the restless, milling mass of the outriders' horses strung
together by scouts who worked in expedient silence.

Every extra mount would be needed to leave this place quickly despite
the added risk of leaving tracks.  While the weather favored enemy
patrols, clansmen in Rathain did not travel burdened; nor did they camp
in one place for more than a snatched night's rest.

"Apprenticed to Halliron Masterbard?" Always a deliberate

reader, Caolle paused between paragraphs to ruminate.  "A typical
s'Ffalenn bit of cleverness; why didn't we guess his Grace might try
that?"

"I doubt our liege acted for a ploy." The boyhood memory remained all
too clear, of the night Jieret had lain awake to overhear the old
Masterbard berate a prince for squandered talents.  Stung to reminder of
a past when his family had been alive, the earl clenched his jaw.

He waited with held breath through the moment of profound shock, as his
war captain deciphered the last lines, which listed the damage Arithon
s'Ffalenn had inflicted through his music on the night of the mayor's
solstice feast.

"Dharkaron Avenger!" Caolle cranked the parchment into a tight roll, and
metal scraped, dissonant, as the movement fretted his studded brigandine
against the hilt of his broadsword.

"We have to presume that dispatch rider knows the content of this."

The young Earl of the North stared into the gathering night, while
breeze feathered the grass heads against boot cuffs spattered with the
drying tang of blood.  He could not watch as Caolle retraced the
pitiless course of logic: that if the courier knew the name behind the
desecration of Jaelot, he would have talked.  Every drover in the
caravan might already be primed to repeat his gossip, facts that at all
costs must be kept from reaching the governor of Etarra.

"Ath's mercy, the damned prisoners outnumber us."

Caolle's blunt fingers closed, crushing the report with its
black-and-gold ribbons and cracked seal.  "I wiped my steel clean too
soon, I see." The implied death warrant for two dozen lives sounded
level and matter-of-fact.

But Jieret knew his captain better than the father he had lost, and no
gruff bluster might fool him.  "We can't take the risk." Behind his
tortured acceptance lay a grief no years might tame, for the last time
Etarra's army had found cause to march against Arithon s'Ffalenn, his
people had nearly been exterminated.  "The others can move out ahead of
us.  No need to say what we've found."

The parchment fluttered to the ground as Caolle's stocky hand closed
over his chieftain's wrist.  "No, boy," he said, though the earl at his
side was anything but a child.  "They'll have to know.  We can silence
this caravan, and maybe the next, before Pesquil's patrols infest these
hills with trackers.

But word must leak out eventually.  Just count ourselves lucky we've had
warning."

Yards off in the gathering darkness, a clansman cracked a joke to a
burst of stifled laughter.  Through a breeze-snatched hoot of rejoinder,
Caolle said, "You ride out with the others.

Leave me to deal with what's here.  I'll see it's done fast and clean,
while the townsmen are sleeping and unaware."

Jieret's expelled breath shuddered through the touch shared between
them.  "You can't spare me!"

"No." Caolle scraped his stubbled chin with the back of a gore-flecked
wrist.  "We can't spare our liege lord, either.  That doesn't mean we
won't try.  Now go.  The longer we tarry in this place, the greater the
danger.  Another caravan's outriders could find the ruts where the
wagons left the road.  We daren't be tracked and found here."

Sound advice, Jieret knew.  At such moments, he understood his father's
past silences all too well.  No townsman could be faulted for paying
bounty to headhunters when the horror of tonight's work came to light.
But worse, far more lasting, were the consequences if Etarra's army
found Arithon, and Avenor's new forces joined with them, as must happen,
in time, despite this most ruthless precaution.  Maenalle's reports out
of Tysan were unremitting and grim.  The army Lysaer shaped to hunt the
Shadow Master promised a ruthless opposition that would suffer no clan
ally to live.

"We'll need to pick a site to make rendezvous," Jieret said at last.

As always, Caolle's thoughts ran ahead of him.  "At the Farl Rocks, deep
in the Barrens' " No merchant would follow them there, and a headhunter
tracking team, with great reluctance: the site had once been Paravian,
and the old, carved markers that crowned its hills were firmly believed
to be haunted.

Faced by the prospect of a hard, dusty ride on horses of uncertain
quality, Jieret clasped wrists with his war captain in hurried salute.

"Make it quick," he begged in an agonized whisper.

Then he strode off, uncannily quiet for a man of his loose-limbed build.
His father had moved that way, too, Caolle remembered; no surprise. Both
had learned their scoutcraft at his knee, to his own exacting standards.
The grief at times stabbed through him, that despite every forced lesson
in survival, his efforts could still fall short.  Every advantage he
could wring out of blood and experience might not keep this last scion
of the earl's line alive long enough to marry and raise a grown heir.

Once Etarra's army marched, their life's hope could be wasted, to see
the clans restored to rule under a s'Ffalenn high king at Ithamon.

A breeze flicked the offending twist of parchment into tumbling flight
across the grass.  Caolle bent with an angry chink of steel and speared
the dispatch with his blade.  He would burn the writ, then grind his
dagger sharp on a whetstone.  That his liege lord would never sanction
the blood about to be spilled for his sake made no difference.

Arithon of Rathain was not here to gainsay.  Still, Caolle shrugged off
a lingering, unpleasant recollection of green eyes that saw far too
much, and a burden of conscience too deep for most men to sustain his
Grace's locked glance.

"Be damned to you, prince," the war captain muttered into the bristles
of his beard.  "If niceties counted for everything, you'd have left us
to die in your absence along the banks of Tai Quorin."

While Jieret called the muster through the velvety night, and the chink
of bit rings and stirrups stabbed through furtive movement as the scouts
tightened girths to ride out, Caolle pried the official writ clear of
his sword with a shrieking, dry scrape.  For himself, he never imagined
any life beyond the bloody heritage the fugitive clanborn had lived
since the uprising.  Yet the unwilling lesson learned in the teeth of
Etarra's army had forced a view his dead lord, Steiven, could never in
life make him see: some crimes against nature existed which no force of
arms could put right.

That Arithon of Rathain should be placed in sovereign responsibility
while set under a curse of violence was one of them.

The very least a liegeman of Caolle's disposition could do was to slit a
few townborn throats.

The war captain did not revel in murder; but as one who had buried too
many bodies left spitted and scalped by marauding headhunters, the act
carried little of Arithon's lacerating burden of remorse.

The sun threw a harsh, orange pall over hills that unfolded in hazed
ranks to the horizon.  Rain-thirsty soil crumbled, dusty, between
shriveled heads of yellow grass that in a past age had spread a
waist-high, rippling green carpet over the fells.  Once a meadow that
rustled to the light dance of unicorns, the dry ground of Daon Ramon
Barrens now thundered to the beat of an approaching rider.

Caolle had reached the Farl Rocks.  His late arrival did nothing to
alleviate Jieret Red-beard's taxed mood.

Informed where he stood on the flat-topped megalith he had climbed to
use as a vantage point, he swore at the cloudless sky.  "By Dharkaron,
he has salt, to presume we'd still be camped here."

Powdered lichens fanned away on the breeze as the Earl of the North
leaped down to face his informer, a Companion, one of fourteen young
boys who had survived the slaughter at Strakewood to grow with him to
manhood.

"We left him a horse," Jieret ranted, angry now he was relieved of cause
to worry.  "Mounted, he should have reached here three days ago."

"Well, he isn't alone." Blond and easy tempered, the Companion who
ventured this tidbit stretched, the flat iron studs on his brigandine
too dull to catch the day's brassy light, and sword steel too polished
glancing bright as if dipped in acid.

Jieret shut his teeth in a silent snarl.  Spoiling for a fight, he
strode off the grassy hillock and into the shadow of the defile where
his company had slept on small stones through three long and fireless
nights.  If no man had seen a Paravian ghost, the site held a presence
that somehow pierced the heart and left a man maudlin and sorrowful.

The horse just ridden in stood apart from the others.

Through a lattice of drought-stunted alders, Jieret could see it, bridle
fixed to a leading rein, and bearing a rider too narrow in the shoulders
to be Caoile.

"Fiends plague us all, I thought so!" he cried, and exploded a finch to
arrowed flight.  Aware trouble would compound if he lingered, he
threaded apace through the saplings, not snapping sticks despite his
rage.

His war captain heard his approach anyway.  Tired enough that his
shoulders hunched, Caolle sucked a mouthful from his waterskin and spat
in a hurry to free his tongue.  "She has two brats."

Jieret stopped, knee deep in blighted grass, and surrounded by a
disgorged flurry of leafhoppers.

One look at Caolle's tortured stiffness, and the last of his anger
drained away.  "I thought only males drove that caravan."

The war captain grunted, lifted the waterskin, and slopped the dregs
over his head.  A spill of droplets darkened hair the color of filed
iron, and channeled through seams that just now looked quarried into the
crags of his face.

His eyes, bleak as charcoal, locked with Jieret's.  Through the years
since the tragedy at Strakewood, no Companion had ever confronted him
over the past, when his insistence had overruled Arithon's plea to
withhold the clan's children from the battle on Tai Quorin's fateful
banks.  Since the slaughter that had drenched summer moss in the next
generation's young blood, Caolle was least likely to forget the cost of
his personal misjudgment.  "These were hidden in the carpet rolls.

Don't worry.  I got them out before they saw the bodies."

Jieret shut his eyes and somehow found the grace to hold his tongue,
while more insects disturbed by Caolle's ablutions blundered in flight
over his leathers and boots.

"Some things I can do well enough," Caoile finished in a tone stripped
bare of any insolence.  "But not even for the life of my liege could I
draw steel on a woman or a child."

The Earl of the North allowed himself an exasperated look at the
unwanted prisoner who sat, bound astride the tired gelding.  She was
brown haired, neatly made, and no doubt comely when she was not dirty
and shaking tired.  The reddened eyes that glared above the twist of rag
which silenced her were frightened and fierce with defiance.  She
clutched a child of perhaps three years against her shoulder; a second
infant slept in a saddlebag, a filthy thumb tucked in his mouth.

"Don't tell me," Jieret prodded, antagonized by the prick of her regard.
"She screams if you take off the gag, and she's tried to knife you in
the back?"

"Well, I did kill her brother," Caolle allowed.  He shook out his hair,
drops flying off him like an ill-mannered dog after a swim.  "Our cause
was sound enough.  Every drover in that caravan knew about Jaelot.  The
news can't be kept close for long."

But Jieret had expected that much.  To the woman, he said, "You'll go
free, but only if you don't disrupt my men."

She tossed her chin and looked daggers, most likely convinced she would
be forced regardless, or abandoned in the wilds unprotected.

Both prospects were tempting enough to a company who had seen every
woman in Strakewood cut down without mercy by townsmen.  Clan numbers
were pared back to the point where children would be a blessing to
foster, whether stolen or begotten by violence.  Only the helpless
anguish of knowing the brutalities suffered by his mother and sisters
kept Jieret on the side of moral decency.  He reached out, caught
Caolle's soggy sleeve, and drew him away down the defile.

Once out of the prisoner's earshot, he said, "One of us needs to find
Arithon."

"Just how do you plan to do that?" Caolle rubbed a trickle of moisture
off his chin and winced at the sting of small scabs.

To judge by the state of his wrist, the woman not only scratched, but
could land a bite like a champion.  Seldom caught out in embarrassment,
Caoile hunched like a bear with a Thorn and gruffly pursued his
objection.  "After the disaster our liege unleashed in Jaelot, the
mayor's guard sent out a sweep of armed patrols.  Neither they nor their
packs of headhunters with beaters and twenty-three couples of hounds
could track a royal hair of him."

Too hardened not to guess the vivid means by which Caolle had extracted
this information, Jieret bypassed the point without questions.  "Lady
Maenalle, Steward of Tysan, asked for a rendezvous in a cove in the Gulf
of Stormwell.  Since Sethvir of Althain saw fit to pass on her request,
we can presume that someone sent by Arithon will answer."

"Well let me go," Caolle said, much too eager for a man just in from
hard travel.

Jieret returned an evil grin.  "Not a chance.  Since you've brought us
three extra mouths to feed, you can stay here and suffer the
consequences.  That poor chit's virtue is yours to guard as of now.

I'll have to travel fast and light.  Even with luck and good weather,
I'll scarcely reach the northcoast before winter."

"Ath, boy," protested Caolle.  "I'm your more expendable resource."

"No." Every inch as forceful as his father, Jieret would not be swayed.
"Arithon's life is worth both of ours.  He is all the clans' hope for
the future.  You'll stay, and raid the roads, and hold that woman
captive until what facts she knows become common knowledge.  If fortune
runs against us, the wait will be short.  Too soon, my captain, you'll
have that chance you burn for, to balance our feud with Etarra."

Duplicity

When notice was served from Althain Tower appointing Dakar to search
Alestron's guarded armory for the presence of black powder weaponry,
Sethvir's contact caught him in his usual shipboard posture, folded
double over Black Drake's lee rail.  Even half-paralyzed by nausea, the
Mad Prophet cursed the wretched complications the assignment was bound
to entail.

The ruling Teir's'Brydion had a temper like a viper, and three younger
brothers whose manner toward strangers ran to bloodletting distrust. Any
fool who approached their citadel with intent to meddle in their weapon
stores was likely to find himself spitted before he could pick the first
lock.  Denied breath to denounce his fate by the piteous heave of his
stomach, Dakar wished a pox on the Warden of Althain, until opportunity
dawned like an epiphany, that every one of his miserable predicaments
might be solved at a single stroke.

The Mad Prophet coughed, his beard split in crocodilian malice.

"Oh, perfect," he confided to the lisping slap of Black Drake's foamy
wake.  How convenient, if the Master of Shadow should suffer mishap in
the course of the Fellowship's benighted service.  Asandir could
scarcely hold anyone to blame if the brothers s'Brydion came to slice
Rathain's prince into mincemeat; and since Sethvir's gift of charts and
navigational tools, Arithon, with his tender s'Ffalenn conscience, would
be hard-pressed to refuse any favor in return.

Dakar habitually sang while he plotted.  Hoarse from days of gut-heaving
sickness, light-headed in euphoric anticipation, he hummed off-key
ditties in tones like ground gravel, until the cook set Lad to shy peas
at him to drive him away from the galley.

The Black Drake bowled on through her offshore passage to Farsee with
Arithon fastened to the spooled posts of her stern rail.  Since the
cook's flat refusal to hand-feed a prisoner, the captain had grudgingly
allowed him the use of his hands.

Where another man's pride should have rankled when twine lashings were
replaced with the leg shackle kept to restrain malcontents, Arithon's
humor stayed intact.  His patience seemed unforced, even through
Dhirken's irritable progress in learning the arts of navigation.

On calm days, he made copies of the nautical charts sent for his use by
Sethvir.  Sailhands who lounged between duties cheerfully called jibes
and stared, while the nervous, hamfisted purser passed him charcoal and
inks, and badgered him with endless questions.  Arithon's amiable
answers needled Dakar to fits of suspicion.

"Trust me, he wants something badly," the Mad Prophet insisted to anyone
he could snag into listening.  When cornered on the subject, Dhirken
picked her teeth with a shim of carved ivory, her thoughts veiled behind
watchful eyes.

The focus of wagers and conjecture in the forecastle, Arithon stayed
unperturbed, except once, when constant exposure to spray threatened him
with saltwater sores.  He had no choice then but to yield before need
and shed his tattered shirt.

The rope burns on his limbs had already faded, leaving an older, uglier
set of scars he deeply preferred to keep hidden.

As the speculative comments of the crewmen turned goading, he met them,
word for word, in a striking, vicious satire that forced their grudging
respect.

Days passed.  Sun bronzed the prince's torso like a Shandian
fisherman's, and since his lady captor withheld the kindness of comb or
razor, he gained a piratical growth of stubble.  The constant draw of
wind off the spanker snagged his black hair into elf locks.  The fact he
was clean the favor of the squall that had drenched him in passing that
morning, he sat engrossed over a contrivance of wood being fashioned by
the ship's laconic joiner.

His absorption proved deceptive; or else confinement served to sharpen
his mage-taught, cantankerous alertness, since his head snapped around
at the barest scrape of a bootheel behind his back.  Met by a
slim-hipped outline against the morning's acid glare, his frown smoothed
over at once.

"You seem just a touch impatient.  Don't be.  The channel to Farsee's
harbor shall hale into view before sundown."

Clad with the dash and flair expected of captains who ran contraband,
Dhirken hooked her thumbs through the bronze-studded crossbelts slung
over her calfskin doublet.

"We do, or you die.  The stakes haven't eased in the slightest."

The joiner cast a doubtful glance at the unbroken swells that bounded
the forward horizon.  Then he sighed, licked a scuffed knuckle, and
resumed his nasal carping.  "I'm nobody's jeweler, to do brass with
those bitty fine marks of engraving.

Arithon turned over the half-complete copy of Leinthal Anithael's
cross-staff.  "There has to be a hand in the forecastle with some sort
of talent for scrimshaw.  The scale could be notched on the shinbone of
a cow, then blackened in with ink."

"Didn't think," the joiner admitted in mournful respect.  He reclaimed
the original tool and tucked its superlative craftsmanship into his
pitch-stained apron.  "I'm off to try, then."

Still shaking his head over imagined inadequacies, he sauntered off the
quarterdeck, grousing.  "But mind you don't blather to me if the marks,
when they're done, don't match yon beauty for perfection."

Inimical silence remained like welded air between the Drake's master and
her captive.  Uneasy to be trapped between them, the helmsman looked
everywhere else but at his captain, while the thrum of taut rigging and
the work of the steerage tackle pitched the tension ever higher. Dhirken
did not worry her cutlass hilt.  Controlled to the tips of her newly
pared nails, her very stillness crackled with brazen intent to pick a
fight.  Deferent to her mood, or else inspired by insolence, Arithon
lounged at ease against the quarterdeck rail.

His eyes stayed closed, as if he might snatch a nap in the sun; only his
lips showed a faint, ironic smile until the lookout cried from the
masthead.

"Land!  Land sighted off our bow and three points to starboard!"

The shout brought every hand above decks to share in a gush of fast
talk.

Unmoved to stir more than an eyelash, the Shadow Master ventured, "The
key to the shackle would be a kindness."

Dhirken laughed.  "You speak too soon.  No key and no freedom until
we've sighted the beacon fires to tell where we've made landfall.

How do I know you've not set us off course to Varens?" But her voice
betrayed wild excitement.

"As you wish, lady." Arithon looked up, guileless, the grate of steel
damped between his palms as he tucked his bound ankle beneath his thigh.
"But we're not set downcoast.  You know it, since you made today's
sightings and corrected Drake's course for yourself.  Shall we deal? You
must decide very soon.  Our further relationship depends on how well you
keep your word, because my own plans have undergone a change."

"Have they now?" Dhirken's hostility gave way to sarcasm.

"I'm defeated by curiosity.  Do you always get your way through glib
bargaining?" The key had been palmed in her hand all along.  She tossed
it hard, intrigued to test whether his reflexes were sharp enough to
intercept its arc toward the sea.

Forced to snatch like a starved wolf, Arithon just managed the catch.
"This was easy?" He settled back, released the lock, and in studied
offense rubbed the ankle the shackle had chafed raw.  "Ath forfend,
don't let me hear about hard.  Particularly since I need the Drake to
sail north to recover my treasure without me."

Dhirken flushed.  Caught speechless before her gawking crew, she clapped
both palms to her cheeks.  When Arithon had the grace not to laugh, she
spun on her heel to hide uncertainties she would have died before
sharing.  "That's trust.  Far more than I merit, maybe."

Arithon arose to his feet.  "I'll be the judge of that."

The awareness of his freedom vivid as a brand against her back, Dhirken
kept her face turned away.  Only locked limbs and will masked her
trembling as he stepped close, trapped her hand in light fingers, and
slipped the key back in her palm.

The fact she was ice-cold and sweating in the heat could not possibly
escape him.  Cornered by old fears he must never gain leverage to pry
at, she strove to regain her frosty distance.

"You could lose everything."

"I've lost everything twice over already," Arithon said.  His past
recklessness stood as living proof.

The deck seemed abruptly too small; or his presence beside her loomed
too large.  She whirled to go, the fist with the key clenched in
white-knuckled tension, and her other arm raised to fend off inquiries.

Arithon's touch checked her rush, a feathery brush against her cheek
made in thoughtless response to blind sympathy.

She recoiled an involuntary half step, and the wakened understanding
behind his close glance shocked them both.

"All, fiends take your damned bardic gifts," Dhirken snapped, her fear
of his sex molten fire in her blood, and her words a strained, metallic
whisper.

Rumor named her a killer who had gutted the rogue who tried to steal her
legacy in the Black Drake; but the sordid truth was more desperate.  As
a victim dealt an annihilating lesson in survival, she had use for no
man's pity.

If the secret shame now threatened by clean empathy held pain enough to
shatter her, neither was Arithon scatheless.

Blindsided by a masterbard's power too freshly gained to be governed, he
lost grip on his careful layers of subterfuge.  For just a split second,
she saw through to his core, and recognized more than he wished.

Whatever his part in the massacre at Strakewood, he bore the scars of a
loss more crippling.  He had survived what could not be reconciled.  For
that, he would not belittle her weakness; he had too great a heart to
seize advantage.

Eyes too bright, her throat closed against the invective she needed to
drive off her avid crewmen, Dhirken cursed his selfless silence, that
left her independence unbreached.  Undone by the depth of his sympathy,
she could not do less than his bidding.  Before he ever asked, she
accepted: Drake would sail north and recover his contraband, and deliver
every coin weight and bale anywhere on the continent he desired.

"I leave you Leinthal Anithael's dividers and cross-staff, and with
them, all the broad leagues of the ocean.  The bounds of your command
shall be limitless." Arithon's fleeting smile masked regret, that for
him, simple flight held no refuge.  "My gift will grant you freedom from
the shoreline and the space to seek your release."

Dhirken jerked her chin up, stunned to an embarrassment perilously close
to tears.  But the quarterdeck was empty except for the staid presence
of her quartermaster; in an uncanny turn of sensitivity, the slit-eared
first mate had rousted every sailor back to duty.

Gloating over how easily Arithon had been inveigled to share the
Fellowship's emergency appeal to investigate Alestron's armory, Dakar
raised no objection to crossing the East Halla peninsula.  The route was
heavily traveled, with hospices, inns, and posthouses built between
towns along the way.  If they begged rides in merchants' wagons, or
rented the use of a hack, the journey could be made inside a fortnight.

Dakar chewed on a corner of his beard to forestall his satisfied smile.
While fishermen in cod-stained oilskins cursed the Drake's gig for
obstructing the landing, he scrambled onto the rickety wharves of Farsee
at the heels of the prince he swore to ruin.

Arithon took his leave of Dhirken's sailhands, unwarrantedly cheerful
for a man who had not seen a bed for five days.

If the dockside miasma of tide wrack and fish, and the shuttling flight
of screaming gulls wakened memories of his native shores, where he had
been mage and heir to a pirate king, he displayed no trace of sentiment.
In need of a bath and a grooming as any penniless seafarer, he possessed
only the rolled bundle of Sethvir's charts, slung with his lyranthe
across his shoulder.  His scarred wrists were masked under sailor's
bracelets braided from the rags of his shirt, and the fingers of both
hands were swollen from overexposure to salt water.

To Dakar's dubious glance, he replied in pained honesty, "No, I can't
play for our keep just yet.  But there's no damage done that won't mend
in three days.  While we wait, I'll find a tailor with an eye for
quality linen."

Backed by a citrine dawn sky, forced to duck the sliding mesh of a
fishnet that a sloop's crew hauled down the docks, Dakar planted his
fists on his hips and balked.  "That's a grand idea.  Except you don't
have any coin."

Arithon flashed a sly grin.  "Well, your pockets jingle enough to tell
me Dhirken's deckhands had rotten luck at dice.

Since you've sworn off beer, why not stake me to a new shirt?

The silver points cut off my old one will pay for modest lodging as long
as you don't start any bar riots."

Careful not to seem too agreeable, Dakar expelled an epithet.  The
journey to Alestron would be made in close quarters.

Although Arithon had blinded his mage-sight, his unflagging penchant for
observation must not be given cause for suspicion.

A fortnight and four days passed.

Dakar found the need for constant subterfuge as wearing as any despised
rigor of travel.  The post-horse he straddled to finish the journey was
not the plug-lazy nag he had paid for.

Possessed by a devil, determined to fray any tender patch of flesh that
disagreed with a saddle, the creature jibbed, snorted, and crab-stepped
in its ongoing effort to bolt.  Dakar sawed its mouth and tried not to
fall off in the scythed-down stubble of the hayfield where, masked from
view by a hedge, Arithon had pulled off the thoroughfare to study the
grim holdfast fastened like a barnacle to the crest of the hilltop
ahead.

"Alestron," Dakar said in a note of bothered smugness.

"The brothers s'Brydion keep their secrets like oysters, and their gates
like a farmer's virgin daughters.  Have you a plan yet?"

"What, before I've set foot in the city?" Reduced to an outline against
the fog that still pocketed the lowlands, Arithon leaned forward and
settled on crossed wrists against his gray gelding's crest.

Having milked every roadside taproom since Farsee, he came primed with
hearsay about Alestron's ruling family.  Their citadel at a glance
looked formidably impregnable against a brightening corona of daylight,
an eyrie clutched with bristling keeps that overhung the notch of the
valley.

The brothers s'Brydion held aversion to sieges, any man could tell at a
glance.

The vale had been razed of timber to afford untrammeled visibility.
Beyond the meshed fields with their late-season haystacks, walls, and
stone crenellations knit like the clamped, mossy jaws of a trap around
clusters of whitewashed outbuildings, craft compounds, and a limited
common for grazing livestock.  A steep, switched-back causeway led up to
the stronghold itself.  Mortar set with jagged ends of glass offered
cruel reception to scaling ladders.  A sapping team would need to bore
through solid rock to undermine the high battlements, prinked now in
light like sequins sewn onto a lady's veil, or ruled by hard shadows
thrown off the barbazons, riddled like wormholes with arrow slits.

Alone among cities on the continent, Alestron had not fallen in the
uprising that dethroned the old high kings.  Five centuries past, the
merchant guilds' bid to overturn clan rule had been crushed by force of
arms inside the rammed splinters of the south postern.  The tenacious
s'Brydion dukes had maintained their ancestral power ever since.  They
suckled their heirs on the rough arts of war, and skirmished with
rapacious ingenuity when the rival cities that flanked the narrow inlet
to the sea set blockades to jam their trade at the harbor mouth.

In those rare intervals between wars, Alestron's ruling family nursed a
maniacal distrust of their neighbors, then salved their fixated nerves
by stockpiling weapons of every shape and description.

Framed as casual conversation, Dakar said, "You know we can't set foot
through the upper city gate without proof of legitimate business."

"Well, I do have a plan for that." Clever hands firm on his reins as a
flock of blackbirds startled raucously from gleaning, Arithon stole a
glance slantwise.  "You won't like the first part.

I'll need you to squeeze into that dandy's pair of hose and fancy
doublet."

Dakar rolled his eyes.  "Ath's pity!  Whatever for?"

The awful, ribboned garments had been the insistent gift of an inn
matron enraptured by Arithon's playing.  The plain fact the clothing was
tailored for the ox frame of a mercenary had given rise to ribald jokes
since Tirans.

Broad where the fit was cut slimmest, the Mad Prophet saw no humor in
the prospect of being squeezed into slow suffocation.  In case the idea
was a crack at his expense, he added, "You can't be serious."

Arithon nudged his gelding into stride back toward the road.

"I don't see what choking to death in red velvet has to do with spying
out a heavily guarded keep." Dakar wrestled through a pause as his mount
jabbed its head down to buck.  "A man could turn gray while waiting for
you to answer a simple question."

"I need you to pass for a merchant," Arithon replied, oblique enough to
fray a stone's patience.  "You didn't hear the rumor?

Parrien s'Brydion needs a courting present to win a lady to the prospect
of marrying into a war camp."

Dakar blinked, digested this, then sensed like the wave of pressed air
that preceded a hit in the gut, intimations of a wider design.

"Ah, no!" He sneezed out the dusty smell of hay in distress.

"Not your kingdom's crown jewels.  You can't mean to sell the earl's
brother the emeralds of Rathain."

"Well, I hardly think the s'Brydion would waste their day over fakes,"
Arithon said reasonably.  "Since we haven't the time for any better
overture, the gems will have to suffice."

Now was scarcely the moment to lend credence to a notion Arithon more
than likely angled to disclose: that to Fellowship concerns, Rathain's
crown jewels held far more than sentimental value.  The emeralds in fact
formed a matched set of focus stones whose arcane properties were held
in trust for future generations.  Wary of the power and training already
at Arithon's disposal, the Sorcerers had set painstaking wards to
preserve the gems' secrets from the prince.

Dakar cursed afresh for the touchy complication to his plans while the
sweat rolled in drops down his spine.  "You have no appreciation for the
legacy your ploy could set at risk.

Not one of those stones can be replaced."

"Then you'd better charge for them dearly." Arithon set off at a brisk
canter.

While Dakar stewed in silenced dread and wrestled with rein and heel to
curb his headstrong mount, the Master of Shadow met the morning with
mettlesome insouciance, whistling a set of jaunty jigs.

Warp and Weft

In autumn, within the city of Etarra, a headhunter endures in fretful
stillness, the velvets required for state audience an uneasy substitute
for his weapons and mail; while, trampling like a bull over sumptuous
carpets, his lace collar crumpled beneath double chins, the Lord
Governor Supreme takes issue with his complaint: "How should I know why
the couriers from the east are delayed?  It could be the weather.  It
could be the air.  More likely, it's the marauding of barbarians, and
isn't that your captain's vaunted duty to determine...

Evening darkens Rockfell Vale, and though frost rimes the oak leaves as
it would on any other autumn night, the fox, the lynx, and the
night-grazing hare do not stir from their lairs; for the summit of the
peak looming over the valley is drenched in an uncanny glare of power,
as the Sorcerers Asandir and Luhaine labor to restore the wards which
confine Desh-thiere....

In the citadel of Alestron, a sandy-haired captain appoints the day's
sentries to guard the keep that houses the duke's armory; while in the
grand hall, the burly lord himself pushes the muzzle of his favorite
mastiff off his knee, then calls for his brothers to admit the fat
merchant who had arrived to peddle emeralds the day before....

IX.  Second Infamy

The chamber the s'Erydion heirs used for close business was situated
like an eyrie in a drum tower deep within TAlestron's inner citadel.  In
keeping with most things undertaken by the family, all three siblings
attended Parrien's decision to examine the rare emeralds for his
bridegift.

Ascending four stories of narrow, turnpike stairwells made the Mad
Prophet sweat and gasp.  His round cheeks purpled to beet from the
squeeze of his beribboned red doublet.  By the time he staggered through
the upper doorway the manservant swung open to admit him, he was
snatching each breath in jerks like a gill-netted fish.  To an impostor
afflicted with swimming senses, the sumptuous, gold-fringed Narms carpet
on the floor felt deep and treacherous as a mire.  No better haven, the
vast oaken table offered an unaccommodating surface upon which to drop
due to faintness.  Dakar glanced from side to side, desperate.  But in
poses that ranged from straight attention to slouched ease, the brothers
s'Brydion occupied all the available chairs.

Committed irrevocably to Arithon's demise, Dakar plonked his strongbox
down, unlatched the lid, and smiled through clamped teeth as the bearded
giant who sat nearest raised battle-scarred fingers to rifle through its
priceless contents.

Despite the neat stool and desk framed with square cupboards for
parchments, and library walls lined with a scholar's collection of
books, the chamber was misleading in its air of harmless gentility.

Stabbed through the mild scents of papers and ink, a miasma of metal and
oil gave warning that weapons were scoured clean of rust in this place
more often than scribes penned new manuscript.

Across the wide table, the tawny-maned earl expelled a whistle through
his teeth.  "Sithaer's damned, will you look at these!" He tipped the
little coffer.  The chilly patch of sky through an arrow loop raised
glints of live fire in the heart of Rathain's crown jewels.

Tinged biliously viridian, four heads bent to closer inspection.

His complexion no less green, Dakar wrung dampened palms on limp sleeves
a handspan too long.  "I'm sorry."

"Sorry?" Lord Bransian s'Brydion, Duke of Alestron, straightened up, by
a head the largest man present.  He wore his barbarous, wheat shock hair
hacked short to accommodate a mail coif.  The beard underneath grew
untamed as bristled wire, and the surcoat that mantled his massive
breadth of shoulder would have engulfed a lesser frame like a tent.

Except for a linked chain of office as old and weighty as his title, he
looked every inch the hard-bitten mercenary.  His two brows met, scraped
iron over eyes flecked like grit stuck in ice.  "No need to apologize,
merchant.  Your wares are as true as your promise.  Never have I seen
emeralds of such quality, even through the traders out of Shand."

Dakar cleared his throat and eyed the other heads still huddled over the
jewel cache.  Each had the same mink brown hair, two tied alike with
worn leather, and braided in the antiquated style the old clans once
wore for battle.  The last crown was cropped as a shearling, except for
the lovelock curled in solitary splendor between neat and tapered
shoulder blades.  If young Meam looked least imposing in the
bull-muscled company of his brothers, his volatile, jumpy reflexes made
his presence no whit less dangerous.

Parrien and Keldmar, who could have passed for twins, tossed the
priceless gemstones between them like play dice, engrossed in irreverent
bickering over which of them should break an intractable colt they both
fancied.  They insulted each other's horsemanship.  With cheerful bad
grace, they elbowed Meam, but failed to convince him to arbitrate.
Aligned cheek by jowl, their faces were alike as a matched set of
carpenter's mauls; the knuckles, chisel cut from one mold.

Dakar mustered ebbing courage.  As if he reached into a nest full of
asps, he clapped down the lid of the strongbox.

"Regretfully, these emeralds aren't for sale."

Like puppets entangled in the same jerked string, the four brothers
rounded to face him.

Parrien's broad knuckles bunched bloodlessly white, while Meam shot off
his stool in a fiery, incredulous burst of temper.

"What's this?  Some jape?"

Above the commotion as Bransian crashed erect to slam and lock the
chamber door, Keldmar said, "Did you take us for imbeciles?"

Dakar braced his nerve and owned up.  "The gems were my ploy to gain a
private audience, and for an urgent reason.  I came to give warning.  At
this very moment, a spy has breached the security of your secret
armory."

There followed the barest clash of locked glances.  Then the family
s'Brydion reacted in voiceless concert.

Parrien seized the coffer with the emeralds.  "Surely," he insisted as
Dakar howled in dismay.  "You've lied to us once.

We'll just impound these until we've made certain you're not an
impostor, too."

Caught unarmed in the crisis, Keldmar flicked back his battle braid,
vaulted his chairback, and wrenched open a gryphonbossed chest.

A taint of oiled metal arose from the linen he tipped away to reach the
longswords stored inside.

Fluid as fanned flame, Mearn skirted the table.  Before Dakar could
retreat to a defensive position against the wall, the point of a
stiletto pricked his back between the looped and braided ribbons of his
doublet.

Parrien whipped off his studded belt.  Berating his weaponless brother's
lack of foresight, he plunged in and strapped the erstwhile gem dealer's
fat wrists.

"Ath," Dakar gasped as his captor jerked the leather tight.

"Is this how you treat guests who volunteer friendly advice?"

Meam twitched his dagger tip into the nap of the overtight scarlet
velvet.  "A breach in security's not friendly."

Across the chamber, stripped of his state collar and muffled under the
half-shucked folds of the alizarin and gold ducal surcoat, Bransian
launched into interrogation.  "A spy?  Which city sent him?" He yanked
his head clear of fine cloth and tossed the wadded mass across a chair
seat.  "Was it Tirans this time?

Kalesh?  Or that interfering Mayor of Dim?"

Justly afraid of getting skewered, Dakar hedged, "Does it matter?"

"Not really." Keldmar straightened, a sword in each hand, his laugh
slick as snowmelt chilled to ice.  "Whoever he is, he'll tell us before
he dies."

"I'll wait here in the meantime." Dakar edged a hopeful step sideways
and stopped, stung first by the knife point, and then by two blades at
his breast.

"No." Meam leaned close, keyed to the fervor of a starved ascetic.  "I
say you'll come."

Bransian flung wide the chamber door.  Parrien bowed, extravagant as a
gallant giving way before a rival.  His look-alike brother put up his
swords, curled his lip, and pushed by.  Then Parrien shed his mummery
for main strength and dragged Dakar toward the throat of the stairwell.

The Mad Prophet dug in his heels, to no avail.  Towed like a spaniel on
a leash, he had no chance to see where Rathain's emeralds had been
stashed.  No one answered when he pleaded.

Instead, he found himself manhandled into a pounding descent of steep
stairs by four wrathful brothers who cared not a whit for his safety.
Between cursing the fancy hose that slithered down his ankles, Dakar
prayed in frantic entreaty.  If Meam with his diligent stiletto chanced
to trip, one innocent prisoner was going to die skewered like a sausage
on a turnspit.

Keldmar redoubled that concern.  Around the first landing, down the
spiraling turn of the next story, he launched into a series of energetic
flourishes to test which blade was better balanced.  Steel whickered and
whined to his cuts, while Parrien offered unhelpful criticism.

"If you reach the spy first, be my guest." Braid flying behind and foot
extended, Keldmar sallied into a classic stop thrust across the breadth
of a landing.  "Dissect his guts with all the pretty style you like. But
should I find the wretch, he'll just get butchered."

"Not before we've pried out who's sent him," Duke Bransian interjected
through a flurried torrent of echoes.  To Dakar, he added, "Better tell
us how you came to know of this SPY."

They reached the base of the keep.  About to keel over from dizziness,
jabbed in prevention by Mearn's knife, Dakar grasped to find a credible
reply.  "I'm a craftsman.  Quite often great men neglect to guard their
tongues in my presence."

"Great fools, more like." Bransian lowered a mailed shoulder and bashed
through the outside door.  "Why warn us?  You could as easily have kept
silent."

"Money," Dakar managed between his piteous, whistling effort to suck
breath.  "Wars play havoc with honest trade.

Armorers demand pay, and jewels get requisitioned as taxes."

Keldmar bared his teeth.  His partial emergence into sunshine kissed his
restless steel like the flash of strayed lightning against the deeper
shade in the bailey.  "Won't be spit for peace now." He sounded
cheerful.  "Whichever mayor sent this spy has bought himself a thumping
bloody fight."

Meam worried the knife against the small of Dakar's back.

"By Ath, you'd better run instead of chatter.  Or we won't catch the
slinking rat at all."

The prisoner had yet to recover his wind.  Unable to match the s'Brydion
brothers' long-strided sprint, he bobbed against his bonds like a
flounder dragged on a trawl line, while a dairymaid burdened with pails
and settling pans dashed clear of their path in dismay.

Bransian kicked through a flock of loose hens and scattered them into
squawking flight.  Feathers flew like torn leaves in a sirocco.

Dakar, flushed purple, inhaled one and sneezed.  The damnable red
doublet throttled him, armpits to groin, until his guts felt crimped in
a barrel hoop.  Had Meam owned a shred of natural pity, he could have
used his nasty dagger to slit the back seam and relieve an undue share
of human suffering.

But the s'Brydion would slacken pace for no man while the secret in
their armory stood in jeopardy.

The keep set aside for their weapon stores loomed above a spiked ring of
battlements, its lichened crenellations notched into sky.

Panting, limp as sloshed cream in a bowl, Dakar expected to expire of
exertion long before his captors could herd him to the top.  Even
Bransian's ox thews would suffer from the strain to haul him up
stairwells like deadweight.  Firm in his plan to faint and gain a rest,
then slip off the moment he was abandoned, Dakar groaned and lurched to
his knees.

Two pairs of hands latched his armpits like meat hooks and slung him
wrenchingly onward; apparently Parrien and Keldmar could ignore their
bickering differences when presented with sufficient provocation.

While a muleteer freighting beer kegs to the lower district market
jerked his team short of collision, Mearn's chilling chuckle pierced
through the clatter of sliding hooves.  "Now, why should I have a
strange feeling this pigeon we've caught isn't quite pleased to come
along?"

Nobody answered.  Teeth latched tight in winded misery, propelled in a
headlong dash across the noisome runoff from the butcher's alley,
hoisted over loose bricks to whacked shins and the howls of the
infuriated mason left ankle deep in the mortar upset from his handcart,
Dakar wished the worst of s'Brydion ill temper upon the head of Arithon
s'Ffalenn.

Ahead, in a bellow fit to split rock, Duke Bransian questioned the
sentries posted by the arched upper postern.  Dakar scarcely followed
their round of emphatic denial.  "We've seen nothing, my lord Duke.  No
intruders have passed in our watch."

Four stares accusatory enough to scald skin, and a knife on the
trembling edge of murder impelled Dakar clear of his muddle.  "The spy's
mage-trained," he managed between gasps.

"He'll have ways to slip past unseen."

"Through six guards and twelve locked posterns?"

Bransian's brows knotted in fierce disbelief.  His pale eyes fastened on
Keldmar, who responded and jammed the sword he liked least through his
belt.

Bransian hooked the ring that jangled at his hip, twisted off a key, and
tossed it into his brother's freed hand.  "The captain on duty is
Tharrick.  Let him into the keep through the guardroom and take a dozen
men armed for skirmish.  If the rest of us sally by way of the lower
passage, we can flank this spy in the dungeon."

"Do you suppose Tharrick forgot his sword, too?" Parrien murmured.  He
twitched at the belt that secured Dakar.  "If so, I'll just flay the
intruder at my leisure."

"You say," Keldmar shot back.  The leather tails of his fighter's braid
snapped to his vehemently turned head, his shout dwindling behind as he
left to skirt the base of the keep.

"What prissy bits of swordplay you practice are much better suited to
helping the scullions shell peas."

"Hah!  So we'll see!" Parrien flung back in challenge.  Left no other
outlet for his spirited temper, he gave another jerk at Dakar's bonds.

Keys still in hand, the Duke of Alestron elbowed past his sentries and
disappeared.  The Mad Prophet blinked stinging sweat from his eyes.

Snapped through a splay-legged stagger by the belt, he managed to make
out a dank, narrow doorway under the shadow of the postern.

Within that maw of gloom, at the base of a shallow stairwell, Bransian's
lips split in unholy delight through his unkempt bristle of amber beard.
Then he turned the oiled lock and tripped up the latch.

"Come on.  Or else Captain Tharrick and our brother are going to snatch
all the fun."

"Over one spy's dead body." Parrien dealt Dakar a neck-cracking push
that plunged him down through the darkened doorway and into the throat
of an underground shaft.

There followed more flights of stairs, ranged downward or up in patterns
that seemed random; they crossed over landings discolored from the slow
seep of springs, or ones caked in dry-rotted fungus.  The tunnel reeked
of mold and stagnant water.  Oil from the cressets that flamed in iron
sconces threw off a murk of fine soot.  Bransian helped himself from the
casks filled with unlit spares.  Burning brands clamped upright in both
fists, a dozen more thrust cold through his belt, he looked like a
warder from Sithaer itself, primed for mayhem from his hobnailed boots
to the crimped frizz that haloed his crown.

Like demons, his two brothers pressed at his heels.

They hauled their stout-bodied prisoner in his flamboyant clothes over
the streaked, black water that flashed molten bronze and crimson agate;
past the whickering flames dragged flat and torn dim by their hasty
passage down the corridor.

They stopped at short intervals to question the guards posted along the
way.  Men armed with daggers, crossbows, and swords, who stood their
turns of duty, locked in.  An enemy who sought entry could kill them or
try torture; their watch captain alone held the keys to the doors they
defended.

Bransian's inquiries were hasty and rough.  His impatience hammered
echoes above the clang of locks and bars, while the sentries answered
back in fearful care.

The last one to be pressured was emphatic.  "My lord, there's been
nothing alive in this passage.  Not even a cockroach or a rat."

"Well that may be," snapped the duke.  "But we've been told there's a
spy in the armory.  You'd better think well before you speak."

The guard stared back in straight courage.  "A spy?

Dharkaron strike me dead, my lord, I've seen nothing!"

"Nothing is it?  Blind and deaf, both, are you?" Parrien launched
forward, Dakar still in tow.  He snatched the guard's surcoat with his
free fist and twisted until the man's mail cowl crushed painful links
into his throat.  "Were you bribed, man?

We'll have the truth."

"Let up, brother," Bransian boomed in complaint.  "How can he talk if
you choke him?"

Parrien released fast and kicked the man sprawling on a floor slimed
with silt from past flooding.  "No bribe, lord," the guard gasped.  "No
spy.  On my life, I swear this."

"Your life will be asked, if you've lied," muttered Meam, his blade
withdrawn from Dakar's back as he thrust past to tongue-lash the
guardsman.

In a rushed and grating jangle of iron, Bransian unlocked the next
portal.  The steel-bound grille swung wide to admit sucking drafts.

These flagged the torch flames to sullen embers, and split shadows
danced like cavorting gargoyles.

Shaking with sick fear, Dakar flexed numbed muscles against the pressure
of Keldmar's belt.  While still another lock, latch, and bar were
unfastened, and a braced oaken panel yielded to Bransian's heave with a
pealing rasp of stiff hinges, the Mad Prophet fretted that his spurious
plot had placed him in more than dire straits.

For a man to slip past this keep's defenses defied the sane bounds of
credibility.

Arithon was blinded to mage-sight; that left his masterbard's gift to
raise the pitch which Named steel.  But any sound ventured in this
underground warren would have stirred echoes to roust up a corpse.  And
even if such heavy defenses could be jostled open by resonance; even
given the vicious scope of s'Ffalenn cleverness, the last stretch of
passage lay blocked by a massive, geared iron gate.  This ground
tortuously upward on tracks, assisted by mechanical counterweights and a
windlass worked by brute strength that made Bransian's sinews bulge like
corded meat.

If the promised spy had not gained his entry, Dakar would be treated to
the nasty sort of death he had angled to gain for Arithon s'Ffalenn.

Over the ratcheting din of rusted chains, Meam ventured, "Will you look?
I see no footprints in the moss." He shot a scathing glare at Dakar.

The portal screeched to rest with a reverberating clank.

Bransian jabbed a chewed wedge of wood through the gears to lock the
windlass, then stooped unperturbed to fetch his torches.  "You want to
take chances?  That herb witch we hired made less sound than a spider.
Likely sorcerers don't leave any tracks."

A more-distant groan of steel and a crash through the upper bowels of
the keep evinced Keldmar's progress above stairs.

Parrien sidled, impatient.  "You're blocking the passage, Mearn.

If you don't step aside to let this fat man squeeze past, I swear I'll
use your knife to end the problem."

"You may need to slit his throat anyway," Mearn said tartly.  "If the
armory's secure, the odds would suggest that perhaps this wretch is the
spy."

"Stop talking." Bransian planted himself, bearded chin thrust forward.
"I want to listen."

No sound met his stillness.  A catspaw of draft teased the torches, then
passed.  The weave of the flames crawled upright and held, sparkless and
steady and hot.  Crowded by his brothers with Dakar leashed in tow,
Bransian plunged into the pit black cavern of the dungeon.

There followed another long pause, filled by the burning hiss of
oil-soaked rags and half-suspended breathing.  No other light or sound
stirred the dust-laden air.  The nearest racks of shelving loomed dark
as catacombs, twelve feet high, and picked out in the teased play of
light.  Floor to ceiling, the velvet darkness lay stamped with dull
gleams where steel, riveted, hammered, and forged in the myriad shapes
used for war, chipped back intermittent reflections.

"Nobody's in here," Parrien said in cracking, incredulous fury.

Bransian slapped him in the chest to make him quiet.  To the prisoner,
who wheezed at his elbow, he said, "How long do you guess your spy's had
access?"

"An hour or less," Dakar answered.

"That's if he exists at all!" Meam's stiletto flashed a hot line in the
dimness as he snared one of Bransian's torches.

"Oh, but he does," the Mad Prophet insisted in grim desperation.

"Be careful, he's clever as a fiend."

Then, with a vindication that both maddened and humbled, a bright voice
called answer from behind a wedged pile of barrels.  "Why Dakar, how
wonderfully imaginative!"

Like wind vanes in a stiff change of breeze, the brothers s'Brydion spun
about.

Just beyond sight, the speaker was blithe.  "What did you trade for my
emeralds, my friend?  Arbalests?  Lances?  Shall we count?"

Dakar gulped air to retort.  Before he found words, a twist at his
wrists bent him to his knees on the floor.  A heartbeat later, he
struggled to accommodate as Bransian thrust all three smoking torches
between his nerve-dead fingers and rattled low orders to his brothers.

Their chase would be hampered: the low shelves were too tightly packed
to step through; and the intruder could be armed with whatever-style
weapon he might find amid the stores to strike his fancy.

While the brothers fanned out in a stalking pattern, Arithon resumed his
ripping satire.  "A high king's crown jewels for a load of tempered
steel, or Dakar!  Could my life be the stakes that you bargained for?"

A stitch of reflection in stygian dark revealed Mearn in position to
pounce.  The voice paused in its monologue.  A barrel canted to a rasp
of shifted contents.  A slight hesitation, like a held-back breath; then
the cask toppled, upsetting its contents in a cascading, ear-stunning
crash.  Steel helms bounced from straw nesting.  Numerous as the sins of
the damned, they rolled on in a burst of winnowed chaff, to scatter
across the stone floor.

Parrien shied clear, swearing.  Bransian's path toward a lashed stock of
spears was rudely disclosed as a nasal hooked on his instep.

While the intruder's dancer-light footsteps pattered back out of range,
Mearn brandished his stiletto and pranced to keep his footing amid a
glorious, belting clamor of raw noise.

"Over there," Dakar yelled as a shadow crossed his sight.

"He went right."

"What?  No honor among spies?" Nimble as a sailor, Arithon swarmed up
the nearest rack to hand.  "Well, look, what have we here?"

Poised near the ceiling, first his shoulders, then his feet vanished
through a crack into gloom.

A spear bit the wood he had clung to.  A second shaft cocked back to
throw, Bransian skidded to a stop beneath the shelving, braced his
stance, and took better aim.  A sack of spare fletching ripped above.

His cast went wild as a blizzard of feathers frothed down over his head.
Spitting sour dust, snagged with small quills like a fox run amok in a
goose pen, he roared out a blasphemy, while his airborne lance rapped
jagged splinters off a post, and glanced off a hanging cuirass.

Metal screamed on metal, with Panien forced to dive flat to escape the
plunging fall of his brother's weapon.

Furtive rustles sounded the length of the shell The fugitive was moving
again.  Meam elected to try climbing, while over the cuirass's
diminished vibration, his brothers traded curses in tandem.  Their
imprecations were defeated as a banshee shriek creased the air.

Arithon had discovered the sheaf of signal arrows.  A short recurve bow
designed for mounted archers strung and poised in his hand, he watched
his first missile silence itself with a vengeful crack a fraction shy of
Dakar's posterior.

"There's one from behind, for treachery," he chided.  The bowstring
creaked into another draw.  "And a second for predictable obsessions."

The next screamer knifed across the dark, sliced a dry thong, and cut
loose a suit of old chain mail.  The mass descended, jingling, and
snagged Mearn like a cod in a lead-weighted net.  Ripped off his perch,
he went down.  A thump, a grand puff of dust, and a screech of rude
words through the byrnie marked his landing across the furled canvas of
his grandfather's moldered field pavilion.

"Slings, two dozen, for small stoneshot," the intruder listed
cheerfully.  He slithered on and read another label.  "Leather bracers
with brass studs, six score." A faint sniff pocked the recitation.

"Dry-rotted, for shame.  Someone neglected their goose grease." A box
sailed down from the heights, struck another barrel of helmets, and the
subsequent grinding avalanche of metal cut Parrien off at the ankles.

He staggered, measured his length, and slammed himself dizzy on the
strut of a handcart packed with sandbags.

The racket masked the grind of a bar from the stairhead.

Across the fifty-foot chamber, the upper level postern crashed back.
Light cracked the dark, and soldiers poured through, Keldmar in the
lead.  Captain Thartick raced a half step behind, the spill of his torch
a gleam on pale hair like blood on a sheaf of hackled flax.

"Our enemy's up in the shelving," warned Meam.

Another box flew and burst, this time against the wall above the
stairway.  Objects rattled and pinged down the risers.

Peppered by ricochet, the soldiers lost impetus, windmilled, and yelled
as their boots turned on footing made treacherous by a deluge of small
stoneshot.  Swords flashed helter-skelter.

The scrape of blades and armor struck sparks against the was as men
collided and crashed on their buttocks.

Unscathed on the landing, Keldmar embarked in cold fury to light
torches.  Cloaking darkness burned away in the blaze.

Too dazzled by glare to make use of his bow, the instigator became a
backlit target.

Bransian hurled another javelin.

The sheaf of whistle arrows toppled over the shelf rim as Arithon shed
the recurve and dropped flat.  The weapon skimmed over his head, nicked
a ceiling beam, and clattered end over end into the aisle adjacent.

Battered into retreat yet again by the shower of jettisoned signal
arrows, Bransian shouted to his brothers.  "Axes!  Hack through the
braces to the shelving and let the whole her collapse." To the soldiers
who sorted themselves to rights on the staircase, he ordered, "Find
bows.  Set up a cross fire.  I want that spy pinned down."

Parrien reappeared from a side aisle, his braid leaking blood, and fists
locked around the haft of a double-edged war axe.  Meam, more
resourceful, had raided the field pavilion's gear for the woodcutter's
hatchet in the cooking kit.  In paired force, their first crashing
strokes hewed at the braces, to a sullen, clanking chime of jarred
contents; while in a stirred blaze of cressets by the landing, Keldmar
and Tharrick regrouped the soldiers in teams and dispersed them on
course to fetch longbows.

That moment all the torches flicked out.

A few ragged shouts, cut off by Tharrick's order; then no sound beyond
the echoing thunder of axe blows, and a low-voiced, insolent
remonstration.  "Mind your feet."

Keldmar became noosed in a snarl of flung bowstrings.

Then a crash of wood and metal set the soldiers into howling disarray.
"Crossbows, ten dozen, and be careful the cocking latches don't get bent
to perdition by the hobnails you wear in your boots."

The laughing voice issued from the right, no longer in the

swaying mass of shelves.  Meam stopped hewing, too late.  A rope had
been strung from the top her.  Hemp gave a wasp thrum in warning; the
unstable mass teetered, then cracked and heeled over to bash into the
next row of racks.  A sandpaper rasp of slipped contents continued, and
a spill of boxed, baled, tied, and crated contents rocked airborne in a
cataract that thudded burst wire and litter across the flooring.

The soldiers sent off to string longbows were blocked or hammered flat
by a matchwood bristle of splintered wreckage.

Keldmar gave fast orders to seal the upper doors, while Dakar was kicked
and half-trampled by Parrien's sprint to block return access through the
passageway.

Too encumbered to nurse his bruised shin, assured by the blistering fan
of heat across his knuckles that the torches in his hands remained
alight, if blackened by Arithon's weave of shadow, Dakar said, "I warned
you, this spy is a sorcerer.

Whatever's in this armory to attract the eyes of enemies, he'll go there
before he tries escape."

"The culverin," muttered Parrien, and trailed off with a guttural curse.

A furtive scrape, a muffled sneeze, and a muted jink of metal betrayed
the forecast's astuteness: the intruder was one shelf over, and moving
fast in the opposite direction from the doorway.  Meam's lunge to flank
his progress down the aisle immediately fouled in a crash, as meshed
crossbows dropped minutes earlier to foil soldiers mired his ankles in
turn.

"Entanglements, snares, and misfortune," the spy chided in unabashed
hilarity; well aware the phrase was borrowed from a ribald ballad about
an adulterer's mistimed assignation, Bransian aligned his gaze to match
the sound.  A whoosh combed through the air above, knit through by a
soprano clink of curb chain.  Caught flat-footed and staring upward, the
duke was clobbered by a snaking mess of harness.

Half-throttled by the drag of the horse collar, laced head to foot in
oiled strap goods, he ripped out his dagger and began in frantic bursts
to dice leather.

Having clattered through the last of the crossbows, his woodcutter's
hatchet cocked to slash, Mearn poised in the darkness, listening.  The
armory threw back a sullen stew of echoes.  Bransian's quick and
murderous breaths timed to the chink of dropped buckles, offset by
Keldmar's exhortations to Tharrick's soldiers, engaged in grumbling
effort to regroup and string longbows, to refrains of smacked shins and
stubbed toes.

A finger of breeze brushed Mearn's skin.  Then his ears caught a
telltale creak of wood.  A whispered brush of cloth chafed over metal;
the spy had alighted from the shelving but a half pace away from his
position.

Meam dropped his arms in a powerful downswing.  The torches burst back
to a dazzle of full flame, and a lithe, compact body folded to one knee
under the descent of the hatchet.

Black haired, green eyed, and merrily sardonic, the spy met the stroke,
a sword upraised in each hand.  Steel screamed as the hatchet sheared
and grabbed on crossed blades braced to guard.

"Bad luck," said the spy on a grunt as the shock knocked him breathless.
He let go of his weapons.

Meam's backstep and his jerk to clear the helve from his opponent's
entangling parry met no resistance.

The hooked blades obliged and flew airborne.  Inherent fine balance lent
their trajectory vengeful life as they arced toward shocked and widened
gray eyes and a mouth etched with grim determination.  Meam jumped, cat
quick in avoidance, while his quarry tucked, rolled, and disappeared
through the space beneath the shelf.

Meam's thrown weapon hissed a half beat behind, nailed wood, and bit off
an appalling gouge.

Still meshed in looped harness, Bransian lost patience and charged.
Helmets pealed, thrashed back to belting life as his progress raked the
scattered debris in a snaking wrack of traces and hames.  Bit rings and
buckles snagged on bowstocks and flanges, and the racket drowned all
hope of tracking.

"Dharkaron's Black Spear!" Parrien screeched.  "Will you shut those
things up?" Irate enough to abandon his post by the tunnel, he rolled
onto his toes, then stopped his rush as the armory went dark a second
time.

Bransian ground to a halt amid a petulant chime of dragged

m

steel.  Captain Tharrick and Keldmar had used the brief respite to
regroup the soldiers.  The intermittent rattle of strayed slingshot
betrayed their closing move to quarter the one aisle left untrammeled.

While over the stealthy brush of footsteps, the muted grate of weapons
and mail, a soft voice pattered in monologue: "Halberds, four score,
admirably polished.  Daggers for swordplay, eight dozen, boxed.

Longswords, less quillons and pommels, two chests' worth."

"By Ath, he's taking an inventory!" cried Keldmar in hoarse incredulity.

"Very good," the spy remarked.  "Only a lunatic would come here to count
your nice sharp swords for his health." A distinctive, ratcheting clank
issued from the bowels of the dark.

Always quickest with details, Meam remarked, "That's the large arbalest
he's cocking!"

Keldmar yelled orders, and Captain Tharrick's men deployed in a
two-pronged assault intended to sweep the third corridor.  Running feet
slapped stone, punctuated by the ping of a trigger latch, a creak of
laminated wood, and a whine of taut-strung wire.

"'Peppermint, rosemary, thyme, and mace,"' the spy chanted.

"'Beware evil weeds that grow apace."' His weapon clicked and
discharged.

The bolt hissed through the darkness and struck, its target a packed
store of breastplates.  Their shelf disgorged them in thunderous,
skull-splitting noise.  The three leading soldiers were scythed down
outright, while plate armor spun and clattered on to unmercifully whack
heads and batter elbows.  The disarrayed ranks carried forward
undaunted.  The arbalest ripped out a second shot.

Stacks of targes swayed and upended; their leather covered frames were
spiked and studded with bronze, a punishing hindrance as they rolled
every which way, and pared the soldiers' ranks even further.

Survivors dispatched to complete the advance tripped a pace later and
crashed flat.  The spy, while he counted, had strategically jammed
halberd poles in the bracing.  Spurred on by white fury and Keldmar's
imprecations, the soldiers scrambled upright, charged three steps, and
blundered through a musty string of signal flags.  Mold dust billowed
up.  The assailants staggered on, folded in virulent sneezes, while the
spy clambered up a pike rack and slung himself sideways into the
farthest her of shelving.

Bolstered by Bransian and Meam, his pursuers recovered their impetus and
converged like a wolf pack down the aisles on either side.

The frustration scalded, that sixteen men could be quartering the finest
collection of weaponry in East Halia, and still find no target to
skewer.

"'Cailcallow tea, for easing the cough,"' the spy resumed in mad
recitation.  "'Groundsel and willow, for fever.  "' A flurried agitation
in darkness, the soldiers maneuvered to flank his lofty perch.

The recipes for herb potions and tisanes suffered a jagged break in
meter.  "For threats, we'll just have to improvise."

Unseen hands heaved something.  A hamper of buckles upset; then a cask
of tempered steel broadheads hissed down and burst, followed fast by two
crates of crossbow bolts.  Men swore and leaped and pussyfooted through
another jangling impediment, while their luckless lieutenant howled and
fell to his knees to find an arrowhead jammed through his sole.  His
wounding was unlikely to be received as an accident.

Dakar alone guessed differently as a coffer of loose rivets showered
earthward: Arithon seeded the floor with anything at hand to contrive
noise.  Master of Shadow he might be; but with his mage-sight blinded,
the dark of his own making must slow him.  He strove to compensate
through his masterbard's ear, to wrest every nuance he could wring out
of sound and to map the proximity of his enemies.

Dakar's thwarted spite allowed no admiration, that despite an
unpardonable betrayal and a rude disadvantage in numbers, the Prince of
Rathain seemed determined to finish the review asked by the Fellowship
Sorcerers.

"Spears, maces, momingstars." A heavy something plummeted and struck off
a burst of red sparks.  The soldier poised halfway up the shelving
grunted and dropped, a fist-sized dent in his helm.  His demise ripped
down two companions while darkness flowed back, and Keldmar, poised like
an owl on a bracing, flexed his knife-wielding forearm and stabbed.

His blade met a belting parry.  His next stroke gutted a field hammock.
He lunged again, nicked flesh that bled, and snatched.  His knuckles
barked into a tossed sack of flints.

"Curse you!  Your accent's not townbred.  Who sent you?"

A rattle of seasoned yew issued from the blackness in reply.

"He's into the new stock for longbows!" Keldmar shouted.

"Close in from the west.  We'll have him boxed against the stairs." A
stealthy touch at his shoulder made him flinch and curse: his younger
brother had joined him on the scaffolding.

"Better kill before you ask questions," Mearn advised.

"Another blunder, and Parrien's sure to lose his reason and abandon his
guard by the passages."

Keldmar gave a noncommittal grunt.  The boards beneath his knees began
to shake; Captain Tharrick had set more men to climbing.

Someone more agile dropped, slithered, swung onto the lower her, and
doubled back.  "He's under us," Meam whispered.

Keldmar peered outward, knife cocked above his head.  A sour reek of
leather flared his nostrils, then a piquant bouquet, chokingly laced
with ammonia.

"Rats have been nesting in your hide stores," the ruffian remarked.

Keldmar curled his lip and threw.  His dagger smacked into something
soft; leather, or maybe, human flesh; the angle was awkward to be
certain.  He leaned out to check.  A supply net lashed up, caught, and
whipped around his waist.  Laced like a whore in a corset, he struggled
and clawed at twining hemp, thumped an elbow into Mearn, and got himself
tackled from behind by an overzealous soldier just arrived.

"He's ours, you fool!" Enraged as a singed cat, Mearn seized a mace and
clubbed the blunderer unconscious.

Keldmar sat back up in a slither of slackened mesh.  Dazed and rubbing a
skinned shoulder, he chuckled.  "That was a bit harsh, brother."

"Don't go soft on me just because you feel faint." Mearn gave his
brother's wrist an insistent jerk.  "If that spy breaks through
Tharrick's cordon, he's going to run over our culverin."

"You think we should drop at the north end and cut him off?"

Keldmar was a large man who hated to move in a hurry.

Opponents tended to forget that he could, which made for lucrative bets
on his wrestling; and Meam disliked being still.

The pair hit the floor running.  Two steps, and Keldmar's toe struck an
object that launched off a stunning, bell tone clash of steel.

"Damned helmets." Meam cursed again, much louder, as Captain Tharrick
mistook his presence for the spy's, and barely reneged his order to
attack.

The shadows lifted without warning.

Torchlight surged back to flood shelving and stone walls; a limp fringe
of signal banners; the jerked sparks of reflection off jumbled-up swaths
of spilled metal.  Soldiers clung to the scaffolding, fish eyed and
blinking, while Bransian waved a fresh cresset toward the cranny that
lay dimmest and farthest from the stair shaft.  "He ran that way."

Meam whirled in tandem with Keldmar; and the fleeing spy charged
straight into them.

"Demon!" Keldmar sidestepped, snatched a quarterstaff from a barrel, and
laced into a whistling attack pattern that blocked all escape down the
aisle.

Meam drew his belt knife and threw.

The spy dropped, tucked head over heels.  He struck the floor rolling, a
blur of packaged motion, while the knife flew high and stuck quivering
in a ballista.  Keldmar spun his stave upright, vengeance bent as a
farmwife harrying a cockroach with a poker.  One steel-shod tip rapped a
near miss against flagstone and snagged out a twist of black hair.
Shouts and a clatter of running footsteps converged.

Tharrick's least-flustered soldiers lined up and fired off arrows.

The barrage battered stone and rebounded.  A better shot by Bransian
snatched a rip in a sleeve already ragged.

Cracked a glancing blow by the stave, the spy shot out both hands and
grabbed.

Over a hotly contested length of wood, stance braced to wrench free his
quarterstaff, Keldmar caught a wide, green-eyed glance that blistered in
joyful irony.  Then the torches blinked out again.  Caught blind in the
instant the miscreant released his grip, the yank he achieved sat him
down hard on his buttocks.

Mearn yelled, leaped his brother's crashed bulk and pounced.  His
knuckles skinned through the ballista's cross brace.  The intruder had
gone under, but Meam was as fast, and very nearly as slight.

Undaunted, he wormed through the streamered silk of cobwebs in pursuit.

His brother Keldmar's quarterstaff banged his heel with a sting that
half lamed him, and a second blow caromed off a strut.  Deafened by the
impact, Meam yelled, "You'll break the wrong skull, you oaf!"

Keldmar's disgruntled rejoinder entangled with the tardy arrival of
Tharrick's benighted soldiers.  "Ath!  Why not get out of my way, then?"

Meam snatched a breath, lost wind to a maniacal burst of laughter, and
scrabbled on after his quarry.

He reemerged at the end of the aisle, panting hard enough to spoil his
hearing.  A pole racked with war gear tipped up.

Meam caught a faint, hissed scrape and a dusky whiff of old leather.
Reflex turned his head, and sliding, a dozen studded saddles hammered
straight into his face.  Bowled over backward and pummeled
half-senseless, he heard through the creak of abused leather what he
thought was a breathless apology.

Rage turned him berserk.  He heaved up, shucking girths.  A field lance
abbed his gut, butt first.  He sat.  Bereft of wind, close to paralyzed,
he could do nothing but gasp like a trout.

The dropped weapon clanged next to him, followed hard by a fusty quilt
of harding, which flapped down from above and battened him in wool and
old horsehair.

"Sweet dreams," wished a faint, merry voice.

Meam punched at the fabric, coughed out the salty taste of scurf, and
yelled as a running soldier rammed him flat over backward.  A scuffle
erupted, and ended, with Tharrick's man moaning in agony; the stray
lance had turned and stuck in his thigh, which to s'Brydion sense of
justice served him right.

On his feet spitting venom and blood, Meam blinked.  The torches were
burning again; or one was.  Past the bare frames of the war chariots,
limned in a gush of yellow light, the spy held a filched brand aloft in
a scuffed and dirty hand.  He was staring at the most dearly held secret
in Alestron, the great weapon painstakingly created from the proscribed
writings left by Magyre.

The culverin was not much to look upon: a mere tube of cast bronze,
strapped to a wooden frame conveyed by a harness of pull ropes.

Stacked to one side were its missiles: round spheres of stone at a crude
weight of thirty pounds; and slung in a barrel, the accoutrements of its
firing, assorted wands and hooks whose use was not obviously apparent.
Ramming tools, touch matches, and a half dozen hundredweight casks that
wore a faint reek of brimstone, lay stacked alongside some sewn canvas
bundles the size of a man's doubled fists.

The spy was too clever not to guess the strange contrivance held a
purpose connected with warfare.  "Behold, Sethvir, your rare siege
weapon," he murmured.

Then, in stunning ignorance, he tossed his torch in a hard throw over
his shoulder.  His intent was to divert the guards who secured the
aisieway behind him; then he spun, the conflagration as his cover, to
bolt and make good his escape.

Fire spat through a long, burning arc.  It landed, malicious in
accuracy, in the maw of an upset cask, rolled the full length of the
armory, and wisped with the loose straw that had bedded the garrison's
spare helmets.

Meam screamed, snatched the harding from his legs, and plunged to stifle
the flames.

The spy ducked from his path with faintly raised eyebrows, and an
expression of madcap surprise.  He had expected to divide his pursuit to
fight the blaze, but the panic that ensued seemed disproportionate as
Bransian converged from another aisle, Alestron's red bull banner ripped
from its standard and flapping like an apron at his knees.  In
single-minded effort, the duke smothered his offering over Mearn's
smoldering horsecloths, unconcerned if he blistered his flesh.

The air recoiled in smoke and a reek of singed wool and silk.  Low and
urgent, Tharrick set his soldiers running to converge and cut off access
to the underground passage.  A barrel of oil upset in their path.  The
flooded stonework shimmered black and gold in spreading ripples.  Their
quarry took to the scaffolding, unsullied.  While the skirmishers
skidded and splashed and collided, and went down in a thrashing tangle,
his chin pocked a triangle in the gloom above the leaned shelf where the
recurve still swung on a nail.  His quick hands snatched the bow.  A
wisp of lint floated down; the sort a besieger would wind overtop of a
broadhead to make fire arrows.

"No," Keldmar croaked.  The fumes clogged his voice.  He raised
blackened hands and gestured to flag down the brother still posted by
the passage doorway.

Parrien saw.  Galvanized to instantaneous fear, his flesh prickled by
the proximity of a danger unimagined by the fugitive in the bracing, he
ripped out a pealing yell.  "Ath's grace, man!  Don't be setting off
sparks in this place."

"For my pains and your trials, a gift," said the spy, a catch to his
tone that at last revealed his cornered desperation.

A touch match hissed.  The first arrow arched down in a sizzling line,
traced by a, fluffed trailer of smoke.  Then the shaft struck, and
splashed roiling flame on the upset staves of another barrel.  Red,
gold, and yellow flowered up in a welling spree of wild light.

The armory had no ready source of water, little cloth beyond dust-dry
canvas, and horse harding too eaten with moth holes to smother the air
from greedy flame.  Of least concern, now, was the enemy who launched
the disaster.  To prevent an explosion that would decimate their keep
now preoccupied the s'Brydion to the exclusion of everything else.

"Get the chariots," Bransian shouted.  "We'll use them to wheel the
powder kegs clear!"

Parrien charged in, still gripping his war axe.  A glance showed the
duke's plan would be hampered.  "The shafts won't clear the turn around
the shelving."

"Hack them off." Meam snatched back blistered fingers and yelled over
his shoulder.  "Tharrick, set your men to help!"

But the soldiers, under Keldmar, were already busy throwing field tents,
camp stools, and infantry banners in frenzied effort to dam the oil from
its downhill trickle toward the stoneshot.  A wafted bit of fletching
snagged in an updraft, flared alight, and disintegrated into a falling
rain of sparks.

Flame sprouted, stinking of singed hide, and an oil-soaked chest of
woolen gambesons whooshed up in the hellish, crackling tongues of a
bonfire.

Charged with innocent intent, Arithon seized his chance and scuttled
like a thief from the shelving.  "You'll want to leave while the
bullyboys are busy," he said to Dakar, who had jettisoned the spent
stubs of three torches, and now labored to rise, no easy feat for a fat
man with his wrists lashed in leather.

The Mad Prophet flopped through another galvanic heave.

"Help me up," he gasped.

"There's some urgent reason why I should?" Arithon looked on in staid
inquiry over a cheek scuffed with dust and grazed bloody.  "You seemed
cozy enough with the duke just a bit ago."

Dakar glanced up in piercing focus.  "This fire you've started's going
to kill us.  We need to run, very fast, right away.  Those casks by the
wall will explode."

Mage-taught to interpret small details, Arithon saw past Dakar's
theatrics, grasped his genuine, sweating terror, and blessedly dropped
further questions.  "Raise your hands."

He held a knife clenched in skinned knuckles.

Dakar shut his eyes in blind relief.  A kiss of chill metal, a swift
tug, and the belt was slashed off his pinched wrists.  He poised for the
arm-wrenching yank that would haul him headlong to his feet, but none
came.

The Master of Shadow had left him to fate, in an armory stockpiled with
black powder.

Smoke rolled in billows off the burning oil.  The lowest tiers of
shelving straddled spread lakes of fire and flung off a confused weave
of shadows.  Running silhouettes flitted across the glow.  Thanick's
soldiers dragged off their wounded without any pause to fashion litters.
Every other hale man bolted toward the stair, while the s'Brydion
brothers, in heart-wrung desperation, gave ground before necessity.
Engulfed in flaming wreckage and debris, they charged headlong toward
the tunnel.

Before them fled the flittering forms of the dungeon's resident rats.

Dakar heaved stumbling to his feet.  He lumbered to chase after Arithon,
until hands snatched his collar and snagged him short.

"You're ours," said Parrien, soot blackened and furious.

The doorway darkened as Duke Bransian plunged through, closely followed
by Keldmar and Meam, the latter one limping.  One of them ripped out the
wedge from the windlass.

Chain squealed.  A rat blundered over Dakar's foot, and another one
collided with his ankle.  Then Parrien slammed him in the small of the
back, and he pitched forward, running for his life.

The steel portal clashed down behind.  The brothers sprinted, hazing
Dakar ahead like a bear at a baiting.  Another door slammed.

The Mad Prophet stubbed his toes in a crack, caromed off a wall, and
staggered down a flight of shallow steps.

Beyond this, a crook in the corridor; wheezing fit to burst, he pounded
up some steep, uneven stairs.

Then an awesome, booming roar shook the earth.

Flying debris of splinters and steel showered and clanged and scattered
against the corner wall as if raked by the thrust of a tornado.

A fist of hot air struck Dakar's back from behind and flattened his
escort like ninepins.

Deafened, blistered, coughing bitter smoke and gritted cinders, the Mad
Prophet snatched an instant to wonder if Bransian's huge frame had him
pinned belly down on any rats.

Wits failed him.  His head ached in reverberated pain like the stew of a
mallet-struck pudding.

Too undone to finesse the spells he might have tried as a restorative,
Dakar offered up a muzzy prayer to Ath for a speedy, smooth pass beneath
the Wheel.

The alternatives did not amuse.  Rat bites made ghastly infections; the
s'Brydion would slowly disembowel him; and by far worst of all, Arithon
was away, scot-free.

Cringing in mortified failure for the stunning misdirection of his plot,
the spellbinder knew death itself might not save him.  His irate
Fellowship master would commandeer Dharkaron's own Chariot for first
crack at his disembodied spirit.

Interrogation

When the brothers s'Brydion resolved to interrogate a miscreant ,
niceties fell by the wayside.  Since the deepest and dimmest of
Alestron's dungeons lay explosively gutted, the work crews who
extinguished the fires now labored to shovel away wet ashes and wipe the
carbon from salvageable steel.

The only other keep not jammed to capacity with weapons held a ring of
glass traders incarcerated for fraud.  Rather than suffer the delay
while they were moved, Lord Bransian chose to weigh the blame for his
ruined armory in the sanctum of his private study.

Collared and dragged by the mailed fists of guardsmen back up the same
tiresome tower staircases, then heaved with humorless force through the
doorway, Dakar staggered into candlelight.  The chamber where he had
shown Rathain's emeralds was lit now by massive candelabra on stands at
the four points of the compass.  Grazed with patched blood and bruises,
whooping in starved gulps of air, he sagged to his knees against the
wall chest, left open since morning, when Keldmar had snatched his
paired swords.  The brothers were nothing if not thorough.

Dakar's hands were trussed afresh in stout cord, beyond liberty to grope
to see if other weapons remained swaddled in the oiled rags that lined
the bottom.

If the Mad Prophet held out hopes to ease his plight through fast talk,
the speed of events soured his opening.

When Guard Captain Tharrick had no ready explanation for a spy who had
slipped through his posted watch, the brothers s'Brydion lost patience.
They ordered him stripped and flogged with supreme unconcern for
bloodstains on their rich carpets.

Quaking and sick, Dakar shut his eyes against the poor wretch's screams
as the lash fell.  Tharrick was innocent of accepting any bribe, and
zealous as any man might be in adherence to loyal duty; against the wily
Master of Shadow, no sentry in Alestron had a chance.

Unaware he had spoken his opinion out loud, Dakar started as a bandaged
hand clamped his nape.

"What was that you just said?" Meam's unquiet pacing had carried him
within earshot.  Changed out of his dandy's velvets, he now wore scarlet
riding leathers scaled across the shoulders with brass plates.

His lovelock had singed to a frizzle.  He had a marked cheek, a heel too
tender to bear weight, and both hands poulticed for burns.

The sting inflamed his already volatile temperament like the inexorable
blaze of a slow match.

Dakar tried a noncommittal mumble.

"Say again!" shouted Bransian with a curt gesture to his left.

The mottled, ugly henchman who wielded the whip stopped his stroke, and
Dakar's reply rang incensed across silence.  "I warned you before.  You
dealt with a sorcerer.  And I said, you punish the wrong man."

"Indeed?" The duke leaned out and snatched the dangling tail of the
lash.  Still in his scuffed and carbon-filmed armor, he twined the
bloodied leather between skinned fingers, snapped hard, and jerked the
stock from the grip of his lackey.  "If Captain Tharrick is guiltless,
you are not." A flourish of the swinging handle saw two hyperalert
guardsmen jump to cut the luckless officer down.  "Get him out,"
Bransian ordered.

"But don't set him free just yet."

With one eye puffed to a meaty, purple slit, the other half-lidded and
speculative, he raked a sharp gaze over Dakar.

"Indeed, you haven't told us much of your connection in this.

Who was this Shadow Master who has made such a wreck of our interests?
How did he come to know you, and most of all, why did you betray him?"

"You have some fancy explaining to do if you're going to leave here
alive," Meam added.

Fixated on Bransian's square, crimsoned knuckles, clenched and working
through wet leather, Dakar licked his lips.  "Of course, I'll tell you
everything.  Where should I start?"

But no display of obsequious eagerness could deflect four s'Brydion
primed to exact painful vengeance.  Keldmar and Parrien arrived back
from their baths.  Each had a gingerly hitch to their stride, suggestive
of stiffening bruises.  Other tender patches were soothed in silks and
ribbon-laced velvets in place of leather brigandines and studs.  Still
enraged, scuffed with nicks still oozing from scabs, they were quick to
point out that the oaken table was sturdy enough to use to strap down a
victim.  If the inquisition grew prolonged, and torture was needful,
chairs were at hand, and servants could be called to supply drink and a
tray of cold lamb.

The guardsmen who had lately manhandled their luckless captain knew
better than to risk their duke's displeasure by lounging in wait for
direct orders.  Before Dakar could draw breath to confess his first
word, they hefted him upright, sliced his bonds, and stretched him flat
on his back.  This time, the men-at-arms shed their belts to restrain
him.  Dakar winced as buckles and studs bit through his thin hose to
gouge at the bones of his wrists and ankles.  Fear of greater pain set
him talking.

Belabored by stark disadvantage, that knotting a clever screen of
half-truths and lies was no laughing matter in distress, Dakar lapsed
into long pauses.  To augment his miseries, any brilliant fabrication he
could spin out of words would scarcely save him from unpleasant
handling.  Quite the contrary: Duke Bransian had already made clear his
intent to serve his prisoner's gizzard up raw, then toss his twitching
carcass to the not so tender pleasures of Alestron's public executioner.

Dakar licked dry lips and seized on the obvious inspiration.

An explosion, a fire, then the vociferous, bloodletting trial of a guard
captain should leave most men naturally thirsty.  Any novice versed in
granny simples knew the darker runes and seals that could compound the
urge to drink into a driving obsession.

Though the setting of any geas lay in breach of the Major Balance, Dakar
held the infraction as insignificant beside the certainty of being drawn
and quartered as the cohort of Arithon s'Ffalenn.

To engage even the most rudimentary spell of ill while crimped in an
overtight doublet posed a problem; after several botched tries, Dakar
had to settle for tracing the symbols with his toe.  As adverse to
concentration were skinned knees, the blisters raised by cinder burns,
and the honid pull of leather straps that threatened to dislocate both
his arms at the shoulders.  The s'Brydion flung him questions in a
rapid-fire barrage, often shouting each other down to be first to make
their point.  Parched enough by himself to be susceptible to his own
arcane blandishments, Dakar scarcely managed the presence to maintain
his string of lies, far less to mouth cantrips to activate his construct
and fan the desires of four bellicose brothers to encompass a craving
for spirits.

Not least, his dire worry: that the s'Brydion style of viciousness might
turn the more sullen when drunk.

When the cold supper demanded by Keldmar arrived in the care of a
servant, Dakar rolled his eyes until they threatened to twist from their
sockets.  At the cost of an unholy crick in his neck, he managed a
cursory inventory: the tray held a carafe of wine, five brimming flasks
of dark ale, and a tally that fell short at three mugs.

In obstinate disdain of his older siblings' appetites, thin, nervous
Meam did not drink.  While the candleflames sank in pooled craters of
wax, and his brothers wolfed down strong cheese and meat pies, he
regarded the fat prisoner in narrow-eyed, acid incredulity.

"You expect me to believe one such as yourself consorts with Fellowship
Sorcerers?  That's not even plausible, it's foolish!"

Since his connection with Asandir was the single incontrovertible truth
in the unlikely course of his confession, Dakar showed justifiable
injury.  "Fiends and Dharkaron's vengeance!  If you'd met my master just
once, you'd realize such a tie is the last thing a man would dare to lie
about."

Bransian stretched to snatch the last ale flask from the tray before
Parrien drained it dry himself.  "Wretch, I don't care if you sprang
fully formed from the dungeon in Althain Tower."

Through a grand, steady pause, Alestron's disheveled duke poured dark
ale down his throat.  In words not the least bit encouragingly slurred,
he finished, "Never mind your nonexistent master.  Just tell us where
this Master of Shadow has taken himself to ground."

"I don't know that.  I said so before." Had Dakar's hands not been
dragged white by cruel straps, he would have torn his beard in
frustration.

"You've said a great deal that adds up to nothing," Keldmar grumbled. He
shook the dregs of the wine carafe, then bellowed to a guardsman to
collar the lazy steward and fetch up more food and drink.

"A man calls for a meal, and just on account of a pitiful few stairs, he
gets a spread that's scarcely suited for a ladies' tea."

"You ought to leave off the wine," Mearn snapped.  He sprang up again
and paced the carpet, sulky as a falcon mewed up for molt.

Keldmar bared his teeth in a smile.  "The day I wish my little brother's
advice on my pleasures, I'll certainly lie flat in my coffin."

"Fiends and death, stop your bickering!" Bransian crashed the drained
flask on the table with force enough to dent oak, and redouble the
headache that slammed in reverberation through Dakar's skull and
sinuses.

"Such temper," murmured Parrien.  "If you're minded to thump something,
my lord brother the Duke, why not use the prisoner for the purpose?  If
he's going to keep prattling nonsense, I'd much rather listen to him
howl."

Alarmed lest his straits should deteriorate further, Dakar unlocked his
tongue and embroidered on his woeful tale of subterfuge.

Two hours passed.  The guard on the wall walk outside had changed twice.
At ground level, Alestron's streets lay wrapped in fog and night
silence, but for the distant clank of sheep Is bells and the
intermittent tramp of the night sentries.  In the tower, the candles
flickered and dipped, their frayed flames half-drowned in hot wax.  At
least six wine bottles stood emptied to the lees.  Dakar ached too much
to maintain strict count on the ale.  His extremities had gone numb
where the straps pinched, no improvement: extended hours with his limbs
stretched immobile had knit his back in screaming knots.  The wearing
necessity of renewing the sordid energies inherent in his geas of
compulsion left him sapped to gut-sick prostration.

For all his expenditure of effort, the results were appallingly scant.

Parrien alone had succumbed.  He lay sprawled gently snoring on the
tabletop, his slack wrists folded underneath his velvet collar, and his
cheek pillowed on Dakar's ankle.  To one side, Keldmar nodded, looking
owlish.  Except for combative glares between statements, Duke Bransian
seemed little changed.

Mearn was still upright despite his pronounced limp.

Restless as a draft-teased spill of water, he quartered the chamber in
unabated agitation.  He fidgeted, impervious to every seal of
suggestion, that nervous movement should strain body and spirit.

Long since, Dakar felt, the man should have given way to a spell-turned,
insatiable need for sleep.

Awake and cold nerved as a fish, Meam stabbed a finger into his oldest
brother's shoulder.  "The fat wretch is feeding us a hotchpotch of lies.
It makes me ill, that you let him keep it UP."

Bransian blinked like a tiger at the jostling, wiped beer foam from his
whiskers, and pontificated.  "Undoubtedly he lies.  What I want to know
is why he set himself up for the fall?" Another long swallow, a belch
heaved up behind a massive, cupped hand; the duke gave his ale-soaked
conclusion.

"That slinking little spy never struck me as a fool.  You did notice, he
caused damage, but never once struck to kill."

"Well, seven of our garrison were lost in that explosion.

I'm tired of games." Mearn stalked toward the table.  The scales on his
shoulders sparked gold fire as his bandaged fingers clawed at the knife
hilt in his belt.  "You and Parrien and Keldmar can drink till you're
witless.  I'm going to hear some truthful answers."

The blade sheared from its scabbard with a sour, cold ring, and the
sweat already beaded on the prisoner's face trickled in copious runners.
Dakar's frantic squirm creaked a protest from the straps.  He
desperately wet ashen lips.  "I've told you.  The man is the Master of
Shadow!  No locked and guarded door in all the five kingdoms could stand
against his fell wiles."

As though tripped on cue, the latch clicked.  The door spun open with
decisive, oiled speed, and a dark-cloaked figure strode through.

Tall, silver haired, commanding in movement, the arrival flicked a cold
gaze across the prostrate figure on the tabletop.  "Pray, don't let me
interrupt," he said.

"Asandir!" Dakar forgot himself, gave a reflexive heave, and yelped as
his bonds all but dislocated every joint in his limbs.

Knife in hand, Mearn started full circle, then fell back before the
Sorcerer's first glance.  Keldmar more simply succumbed to the wine.  He
swayed, eyes squeezed shut, then crumpled beneath the table with an
aristocratic ease cut off by a thud as his head came to rest against the
carpet.

Lord Bransian rubbed his black eye and said solemnly, "Ath, it's another
uninvited guest.  If you're selling anything, I hope it isn't emeralds."

The Sorcerer gave no reply.  Beaten haggard, he stood cloakless in his
travel-stained leathers, while draft from the door left ajar at his back
flared and harried the stubs of the candles.  He smelled of horse sweat
and the crushed stalks of meadow grass, the last likely place he had
snatched a nap.  His demeanor showed every sign of having burned
reckless power to keep a horse from flagging underneath him, through a
journey of untold leagues.

No Fellowship Sorcerer ever spent such reserves, or drove a dumb beast
without cause.

Pressed by fatigue to a hardness like fired enamel, fixed in cold temper
with no spark available for pity, he opened as though the duke and his
brothers were not present.  "I came here at speed from Rockfell."

A dreadful, uncontrolled shudder raked Dakar from head to foot.

If the threat of Meam's knife no longer held impetus, the fate he would
suffer for his plot to harm Arithon defied imagination.

Asandir came straight to the point.  "Why should I trouble to punish
you?" He took a step, the look he trained on his apprentice as depthless
as glazed winter sleet.  "Arithon can handle his own slights."

He raised a hand still grimed from lathered horse, sketched a rune upon
the air above the spellbinder's body, and murmured a lyric phrase in
Paravian.  As if plucked to life, the air shivered through a cry like
struck crystal.  Its peal of layered harmonics felt very like another
set of notes, set off by Arithon's whistle on the scaffold in the feast
hall in Jaelot.  The straps that bound the Mad Prophet ripped asunder;
no less a constraint, every last brass button on his doublet flew off
and pinged off the ceiling.  Showered in their back-falling numbers,
Dakar grasped after the fast-fading edges of an unbinding spell he would
trade his right leg to remember.

But fear rinsed his will to stark blankness as Asandir resumed speech.
"Get up.  Go.  Luhaine's safe-conduct will see you past the guard and
through Alestron's outer gates."

In slinking humility, Dakar forced hurting sinews to move, to rise.  No
s'Brydion voice protested his freedom; none dared.

Asandir's forbidding presence charged the room like new frost.

Dakar tripped and reeled in his haste.  Aware of Duke Bransian's glare
like a coal dropped on his bare flesh, harried on by Mearn's thwarted
bloodlust, he stumbled through the open doorway in a running plunge for
the stair.

Behind him, the half-sotted Duke of Alestron ventured in an acid show of
courage, "Apparently the fat man didn't lie about his ties with
Fellowship Sorcerers.  Is he your lackey or that of the Master of
Shadow?"

Then Asandir's reply, never loud, but emphatic enough to pierce through
the ironbound portal as it shut: "As soon as you and your brothers sober
up, we need to have a serious discussion."

When midnight came, Arithon still waited in the hayrick alongside the
oak grove.  The neat linen shirt tailor-made for him in Farsee hung torn
at the elbows, grimed with oil and sooty dust.  His left cuff was
scorched, legacy of a fire arrow.

The laces of the right were sliced and blood soaked, courtesy of a
s'Brydion knife throw; another shallow gash scored his ribs.  A jagged,
clotting scab marred one steep, s'Ffalenn cheekbone, and the soft,
cloudy drizzle that had dampened him since sunset wicked up the
sulfurous reek of smoke that hung about his person.

Absorbed in the act of digging splinters from his palm, he looked up as
something clumsy thrashed through the brush beneath the trees.  A
muffled curse followed, then the sound of cloth tearing, and a thud as a
body collided with a low-slung branch.

A sharper oath issued through the rustle of the bough, and a dewed fall
of droplets pattered into deadening leaves; apparently Luhaine's escort
to Alestron's city gates had included no pause for the purchase of a
fourpenny lantern.

Without moving, Arithon said, "Prophet of Madness.  Lost your
mage-sight, I see, to fatigue?" He sheathed his stolen dagger and
caroled a line of balladry in lyrical, lilting satire.

"'And whither went thy trust, that thee abandoned?...

Dakar clawed his way into the open.  Adorned like a springtide celebrant
with sticks and sprigs of plucked oak leaves, he took a planted stance
above his nemesis.  "Ath, what possessed you to start a fire?"

Arithon looked, up, stilled as old rock in the darkness.  "And what did
you expect, since you sent me in unwarned?  Those casks contained a
firespell, or some other seal of unbinding destruction, and I'm
mage-blind!  People died.  I was made the instrument.  If you chose me
as your proxy to fulfill some promised duty to Sethvir, I'd say you got
far less than you deserved."

A dangerous fury sparked within the green eyes.

Chastened to fear, wary with the knowledge that affairs had gone beyond
a simple baiting, Dakar shrugged off a raking chill.  Then, struck by
the leashed temper in Arithon's regard, his own hot rage rose and
shattered into stunned recognition.

"Fiends!  You guessed I would betray you!"

"Guessed?" Arithon stood.  Robbed by bruises of his usual easy grace, he
caught up his lyranthe and belongings.  "More than that, my blindsided
seer.  My strategy hinged upon that single fact.  But don't be asking my
gratitude."

The damning train of past events stitched together, of an endless narrow
corridor; of locked and barred doors; and of Guard Captain Tharrick,
weeping broken on his knees, pleading still as the whip fell and fell,
that no sentry posted under his command had done any less than maintain
Alestron's security.  Now, through abrasions and dirt and a racking,
sharp ache of stiffened muscles, Arithon regarded the agent whose
predictable betrayal had unkeyed those inviolably guarded posterns.  His
face showed contempt, and a brittle impatience as he slung satchel and
lyranthe across his shoulders.

Dakar felt kicked breathless as a man just bludgeoned in the belly. "May
Daelion speed your spirit to the darkest pit in Sithaer.

You've been using me all along!  What have I been but a living tool
tofurther your unsavory wiles!"

"By all means, place the blame where it's properly due," said Arithon in
ringing, hard warning.  "I don't require self-indulgence.  I never asked
you for loyalty.  But step softly.

This time innocents have suffered.  Cross me again at your peril.

Dakar swung a fist to smash those fine-boned, impervious royal features.
His blow deflected off a stinging parry.  Then hated hands gripped and
spun him, hurled him off-balance into the wet, wooded darkness.

Words equally scathing pursued him.  "Just like my half brother, you'd
give all in your power to kill me." Arithon laughed in glass-edged
malice that Halliron would have known for a foil to mask underlying
anguish.  "You'll have to do that in cold blood if you can, my injured
prophet.  But wait for tomorrow.  Unless you like the company of the
brothers s'Brydion, we had best flee to Kalesh and catch a fast ship at
slack tide."

Trust

Lord Bransian, Duke of Alestron, awakened to the bother of wrapped,
insistent hands pestering his shoulder until his teeth rattled.  His
gummed eyelids cracked open.  Early light bit through his lashes like a
raw stab of needles to the brain.  Last night's drizzle had cleared off
to clean sunshine, a change he would rejoice to do without.  He groaned
and tucked his face into the crook of one arm, while Meam resumed
worrying at his elbow with the brainless tenacity of a rat terrier.  The
ducal head felt thick as a melon.  His temples throbbed like the
stretched skin of a war drum pounded by sticks furred in felt.

"Begone." Bransian flailed a clumsy, thick fist to fend off his
disruptive brother.

His aim flew wide by a yard.  The physical half of Meam's torment let up
without dampening his wild spate of chatter.

Since peace could only be recovered through an answer, Bransian moaned,
pushed erect, and groped to recoup his bludgeoned wits.

Minutes passed before he attached any meaning to Meam's invective.

His first response was outright laughter.  Absurd to believe, that he
and his three siblings should be confined to their own keep by the whim
of some Fellowship Sorcerer.

"Meam, if I didn't know better, I'd suspect that you tried beer and
hallucinated." Alestron's reigning duke pushed stiff fingers through the
short hair at his temples, his swollen face reddened with affront.

A shadow fell cold across the sunlight.

Too peevish to notice, Lord Bransian snorted through another chuckle.
"By Ath, this is my city, after all.  No sorcerer can usurp my
authority."

"Which point could be struck flat in a law court," injected a pointed,
level voice that scarcely troubled to appreciate the humor.

"Read your city's charter, as granted by Melhalla's twelfth high king."

Bransian stubbed grit from the one eye that worked with knuckles puffed
red from scrapes and scabs.  He blinked, peered, forced gritty vision
into focus, and felt reality return with a thud.  Before his very chair
stood a lean, tall personage, wrapped in silver-bordered wool, and
watching him in thin-lipped acerbity.  The manner of his presence was
stark peril swathed in velvet, and his regard could unpick a man's
thoughts.  This was nothing if not a Fellowship Sorcerer, solidly
arrived in displeasure.

In keeping with his bloodline, no s'Brydion heir would forgo bristled
pride to apologize.  "Pox and Daelion's fury," Bransian groused.  "I
wish you were a nightmare brought on by fatigue and bad wine.  Since
you're not, you can lighten my headache by leaving."

Asandir laughed and sat down.  "We've a lengthy bit of business to
attend, first.  Do you want breakfast before we start?"

"No breakfast." His flush tinged green at the edges, the duke scraped
back his chair.  "You're forgetting-I rule here."

He thrust to his feet in magisterial arrogance, then spoiled all dignity
by shambling from the chamber on an unsteady quest for the privy.

The brothers left behind were scarcely more amenable.

Keldmar and Parfien nursed the same furred tongues and evil hangovers,
and Meam's thin nostrils were pinched white at the corners, sure sign he
was mad enough to murder.  Too distrustful to sleep in a stranger's
presence, far less one announced as a sorcerer, he had paced away the
night in fuming idleness.

The friends he habitually met for cards had gambled the week's stake
without him.  Some rival he should have beaten easily would be smirking
over a winning cache.  For that, Meam sat and drummed his poulticed
fingers on the tabletop.

The pucker between his eyebrows suggested he preferred to be flaying
mage hide in strips with a knacker's knife.

Bransian barged back through the doorway.  He stretched until his
knuckles brushed the ceiling beams and all of his joints popped and
cracked.  Then he spun a chair backward and alighted.  Disturbed air
fanned by his movement bore a miasma of carbon and ash and singed hair.

While the sturdy oak beneath him settled creaking to his weight, he
treated his Fellowship visitor to a flat-eyed, inimical regard.

"You didn't answer my question, last night."

Straight and age worn as antique steel, Asandir smiled.  "I came as no
man's lackey, but as the keeper of a trust sworn two ages before you
were born."

Pained by the prospect of a lecture, Parrien clapped his palms over
tousled hair and wishfully muffled his ears.  A planted, stubborn pace
beyond his shoulder, Mearn looked primed to interrupt.

Keldmar seemed too fuddled to try speech, his stubbled chin propped on
listless fists, and his bleary eyes half-lidded; yet it was he who spoke
out of turn.  "By the Fellowship's presence alone, I presume the weapon
we developed is proscribed?" At his eldest brother's snarling glare, he
added crossly, "Well, you can scarcely pretend our damnfool culverin's
still a secret.  Not when the armory went up in black smoke and a bang
to dunt the siege bells in their cradles."

"No such secret could stay masked from Sethvir at Althain Tower in any
case," Asandir cut in.

"Why should your Warden stick his sniping nose in Alestron's private
business?" Too fastidious to endure the chamber's frowsty tavern reek,
Meam crossed the carpet to avail himself of the cleaner breeze through
an arrow slit.

"How plain must I be?" Asandir no longer looked either tolerant or
amused.  "You've discovered that saltpeter, potash, and brimstone can be
mixed and ignited to cause a mighty explosion.  You have turned this to
destructive purpose, and fashioned a weapon more lethal than blade or
crossbow.  This culverin you've developed has small art to its usage. As
yesterday most ably demonstrated, any ignorant fool with a torch can
precipitate broad-scale harm."

An accusatory burst from the Duke s'Brydion, "Then that was your spy!"
entangled with Meam's declaiming shout, "But the weapon was made for our
defense!"

While sore heads alone stayed Parrien and Keldmar from compounding the
altercation, the Sorcerer raised a hand to stay outcry.  "Power by
itself has no morals.  What is to prevent the greedy man from turning
this new force on his fellows with intent to exploit and force
dominance?"

"We certainly don't plan on sharing our discovery," Keldmar snapped,
then regretted his vehemence and winced.

"Sithaer!  Why else keep the weapon and shot locked away, under guard
day and night by crack sentries?"

"Who will your heirs be?" Asandir arose.  "Can you guarantee their
self-restraint?" Too tactful to pursue the contradiction implied by a
captain's flecked blood on the carpet, he jerked out an empty chair and,
on the strength of a glance, recalled Meam across the chamber to settle
down.

"You built this culverin from a treatise written by Magyre," the
Sorcerer resumed like struck iron.  "Had you met him, you'd know he was
a frail old scholar whose conscience balked at swatting flies.  He
discovered black powder by accident, then pursued his study to make
displays of fire and noise to amuse his grandchildren on feastdays.

The Fellowship set our case before him, as I shall for you this morning.
Under guidance of our counsel, Magyre set aside his experiments.

Later, we learned he had cached several copies of his papers.

For vanity, he could not bear to burn all his records, since his works
had brought the young so much pleasure.  Here we sit, scarcely one
generation later.  Already you have turned these pretty flames and loud
bangs into a weapon to make widows and orphans.  Magyre would weep, were
he alive to know, but the damage is done.  Your armory is ashes, your
citizens are terrified, and no secret can be harbored past a lifetime."

Too rankled by the wreckage in their dungeon to listen to reason with
equanimity, the brothers set squared jaws and exchanged a round of
glances underlaid by bedrock resistance.

Bransian thumped a mallet-sized fist on the table edge.  "If you're
asking us never again to fire a culverin, you waste your time.

We're not timid scholars to be cowed by what might shape the future, but
a city surrounded by enemies.  We'll yield up none of our advantage."

"You will cast no more such weapons," Asandir contradicted.  A change
touched his aspect, potent and frightening, as a storm charge might
gather before lightning.  "This was never a choice.  A different
decision will confront you before I leave.

When I have finished, you'll know why."

Brash as they were, and fierce in contempt, not one of four brothers
could muster a whimper of protest.  The Sorcerer gathered himself a
moment in preparation, head bowed over the knuckles left folded on the
golden, oak grain of the table.

Far below, cheerful voices floated up from the courtyard as a guardsman
cracked a coarse joke.  Thin smoke from the brickyard furnaces laced the
first stir of breeze as laborers began the day's firing.  Such
commonplace details fell strangely on the senses, distanced like a
dimmed, surreal dream.

By contrast, in the study within the drum tower, details seemed cased in
clear glass.  Littered trays and emptied goblets and the gold-leafed
spines of books assumed a transcendent sense of being.  Sun through an
arrow loop smote Asandir's crown and gouged the shadows from his creased
face.  For an instant, limned in light that burned away the stains of
travel and the marks and bitter trials of past ages, he assumed the very
image of a fair, untried mortal youth.

And then he spoke, his timbre as compelling as a masterbard's that no
man within earshot could deny.  "From such weapons will grow others that
cause ruin and death to a scope beyond your imagining, and on the power
and tyranny enforced by such horrors, you will build a civilization
driven by fear."

"How can you know?" demanded Bransian.

The sturdy, capable fingers, tucked one inside of another, spasmed tight
as Asandir looked up.  "I know because I was one of seven who caused
such a thing to happen, on a scale this land will never see."

The merciless flood through the arrow slit touched eyes gone limitlessly
bleak.  The humanity in them was a fearful thing, paired to a burden
more desolate and weary than any charge borne by a mortal.

"It scarcely matters to you here," Asandir said.  "The horrors I helped
to create were inflicted on another world, far distant, and
inconceivable centuries in the past.  They are the reason for the
Seven's sworn Fellowship, as Athera became our choice to protect."

Duke Bransian loosed a wordless grunt.  Parrien, thoughtful, drew a
wicked little dirk, and in silent, balked fits of annoyance, tested its
edges by slicing off ribbons from his cuff.

"There's a fugitive spy on the run while you blather," Mearn complained.
When Asandir's regard encompassed him directly, he dug at an exposed
cuticle, ripped skin to the quick, and fisted his fingers to damp the
sting.

"The plight of that man is the least of your worries," the Sorcerer
declared.  The leashed power in him devoured the very air and leached
off inclination for more argument.

Lent what passed for patience by his tender head, Keldmar stirred out of
silence.  "You say he's not yours.  Why protect him?  He broke into our
armory and inflicted untold damage."

"It is the culverin that brought me," Asandir corrected.  "My Fellowship
has a sworn covenant with the Paravian races, and by its law, that sort
of weapon is forbidden.  I am going to allow you to understand why
before your final choice is presented."

He went on to speak of the First Age legends, that preceded the time
when Paravians or men came to settle the five kingdoms.  Before them had
lived the greater drakes, creatures of a vast and wild beauty, but
ancient in clever intelligence.  From the riddle of Ath's deepest
mysteries, they spun dreams that Named, their unbridled ambition to
expand the living fabric of the cosmos.  Theirs was a deeply mistaken
belief that higher mastery could be theirs for the taking.  But they
forgot, in their pride, that the creator founded the birth of the world
in compassion.  In the end, the fruits of the drakes' making escaped
their control altogether.

"Let me be plain," Asandir said.  "The dragons did not originate evil,
they spun energies that embodied senseless destruction.  Their meddling
with the mysteries spawned fearsome predators called Seardluin that
lived for the dark thrill of killing.  These creatures are not fables.
Our Fellowship saw the last of them die at the close of the Second Age,
and we count ourselves favored to be alive.  Athera still harbors drake
spawn that survive from that era: the lesser Lyats are among them.

Wyverns and Khadrim still fly and mate, but if any of the greater worms
yet lie deep in volcanic caverns, they are diminished, and have abjured
the temptations of true dreams.  Since the Paravians vanished from the
continent, Sethvir keeps continual watch."

The sun mote slanted with the day's progression; Asandir's seated frame
slipped gradually into shadow.  Not one of the s'Brydion brothers held
mesmerized and listening ever noticed the change as his speech took on
the soft, rolling cadence of the Paravian tongue.  Whether his voice
wove a seer's spell, or whether power enspelled the words themselves,
only the Sorcerer could have said.  His meaning formed in direct imprint
upon the mind, beyond definition of sound and symbol; the brothers
experienced the past through Asandir's recounting, as sharply as though
they stood witness.

A herd of deer grazing in a misted vale suddenly raised their heads,
listening.  There came no warning, no sound, not even the shower of dew
from disturbed grass; just a sudden, explosive burst of motion as
something massive and dark erupted from the brush beside the dell A
ripple of muscle under black, maned hide; a blurred feline shape and a
lightning swipe of claws; then the scream of a dying animal.  The herd
bolted, spun, and bolted again, but the predator circled them, faster.

A snap of a scaled tail, the gore of a horn, and another deer went down,
tawny legs threshing; then another, neck broken in the clash of fanged
jaws.  Too swift to flee, in a sinister, blurred grace, the Seardluin
killed and killed again, until the dell lay bathed in steaming carnage,
and the last doe lay gutted and still Threaded underneath the immediacy
of vision, Asandir's account wove in sorrow.

"The Seardluin killed for sheer rapture, as a weasel may, drunk on the
fill of its senses.  Perhaps, like the dragons, they could sense forces
of animal magnetism loosed in fresh-spilled blood, and such power fed
their excitement.

Whatever warped inclination drove their nature, they would slay until
the soil itself was sodden muddy red.  The great drakes themselves lost
young to their predation."

The rest, written in scripture preserved at Althain Tower, told how such
depths of misguided ignorance came to be offered enlightenment through
the brightest of power and knowledge.  The creator sent a gift to heal
the ruin the dragons in their arrogance had set loose.  Alone of all
worlds, Athera became blessed with new children of Ath's making.

The Paravians became the affirmation that order bound all structure into
balance.  Their kind embodied the divine example, that the quickened
life misbegotten through the drake's reckless dreaming might in time be
redeemed.

"And so came the three blessed races to Athera," Asandir explained.
"Centaurs, Ilitharis, whose strength was to nurture the growing earth,
and defend it with their blood if need be.

Ath sent the small ones, the Sunchildren, to celebrate life's undying
joy.  Lastly, the creator gave the Riathan, the unicorns, who formed the
living bridge, the linked connection to all that is and will be.  To
stand in their presence is to know, unsullied, the unconditional love
that embraces all things that exist."

The histories preserved in Althain Tower catalogued the course of two
ages of tragic confrontation.  The world was both bright and desolate,
since even the shining grace of the Paravians failed to turn the
Seardluin's ungovernable viciousness from the heat and passion of the
kill.  The creatures organized into armies, and bound the drake spawn
into fell service.

Wars were fought, and tragedy abounded, and Paravians lost their lives
until their numbers dwindled nearly past hope of recovery; in those
days, even the greatest and oldest of drakes mourned and repented for
the suffering unleashed by their tampering.

"Our Fellowship was drawn here by drake-dream," Asandir confided at
last.  "The power of old dragons has a very long reach, and it chose us
because we were deemed masters without parallel in the terrible arts of
destruction.  The engine we had taken to flee the horrors of our past
was plucked from its transit across the deeps between stars.

Crater Lake in Araethura marks the site where the forces arisen from the
drake's desperate need hurled it earthward.  We were given our
deliverance there from the guilt and the agony that harrowed us since
our acts.  And though bloodshed by then was abhorrent to us, we fought
to ensure Paravian survival until the last of the Seardluin lay dead."

For the Fellowship, responsibility had not ended with the Second Age.
Men came to Athera, refugees cast loose by the very cataclysm their
earlier works had engendered.  The homeworlds left decimated were
cinders, now, and elsewhere, survivors suffered wretched, ugly lives,
doomed always to repeat the terror and the tragedy of their past, for
they sprang from a society ruled by want and senseless fear, and they
knew of no other way to live.

The Paravian races had fulfilled Ath's directive by ending the strife
arisen through the dreams of the dragons.  Since a peace bought through
war was never their creator's intent, to ease their sorrows and their
losses, Athera's rich lands were ceded to their inheritance.

Theirs also, the decision whether mankind should have leave to settle in
cohabitation.  At the council where humanity's fate was debated, the
Fellowship interceded.

"A covenant was sworn," Asandir said, gruff with the wear of a service
that spanned inconceivable centuries of strife.

"We Seven undertook responsibility for ensuring the steps were never
taken that could engender the means for mass destruction.  For the sake
of the Paravians, this world is protected, and shall be for as long as
men endure."

Around the oaken table, the s'Brydion brothers sat, dazed sober by the
after shock of visions.  Parrien's knife lay abandoned to one side, its
point impaled amid a creped litter of ribbons.  Mearn regarded a chewed
nail, this once in his life wholly still, and Keldmar's keen rivalry
with his next oldest brother was displaced by unwonted respect.

Mollified by visions of unicorns dancing, or stately, tall centaurs with
stag-horned crowns and dripping, battle red weapons, Bransian scrubbed
his scabbed knuckles through his beard.  "Our culverin, then, is to be
forbidden."

"I will say plainly that black powder is a first step on that path that
led your forebears to destruction." Asandir straightened, as if flicked
by a creeping small frisson of chill.  "A first step, and a tiny one, of
seeming insignificance.  But the insidious progression of change its use
will bring is well known to us.  The result over time would spoil the
green earth, then breed an enslavement of the mind beyond your most dire
imagining."

The time had come to broach the subject of choice.  Asandir clamped his
hands on his forearms, his expression gone desolate as a man eaten
hollow by old pain.  "Your family is not the first.  Once, we sent men
with inclinations such as yours to dwell in the splinter worlds through
South Gate.  They, in their turn, built a civilization based upon the
machines that are proscribed here.  The misguided, self-blinding madness
inherent in such ways created the scourge you have known as the
Mistwraith, and our greatest grief.  The Paravians were driven from the
continent by its dominance, and the restoration of clean sunlight has
not recalled them."

"Then the Fellowship's covenant failed after all," Duke Bransian
observed, surprised by the poignancy of his sorrow.

Asandir sighed before that painful truth.  "Desh-thiere's ills are ours
to put right if we can.  The choice you face is no less cruel a
quandary." He drew a fast breath, backlit now by the beat of noon sun
against the stone beyond the arrow slits.

"You may allow Fellowship intervention to excise all memory of your
culverin and the powder that kills."

He encompassed the brothers in a glance sheared to purpose that
perfectly disallowed pity.  "Or else you shall not leave this chamber
for the rest of the days of your lives."

"That's no choice!" cried Meam, spiked to his feet by raw outrage.

Asandir looked at him, desolate.  "That's the sole option in the
Fellowship's power to offer while our active numbers are diminished."

He surveyed each brother in turn.  "Think carefully.  I can't stay here
beyond sundown."

Minded to raise protest, Meam gave way before Bransian's right to speak
first.  "No need to dally here quibbling.  The culverin will be
forgotten, as you wish." The Duke of Alestron raised his chin in a
concession that held bravado and the rags of mulish dignity.  "You have
my consent.  Do what you must and be done with us."

"The others must choose their course separately," Asandir said.

In what seemed idle habit, he extended a forefinger to configure a
pattern on the tabletop.  If to direct eyesight, no design appeared
evident, the far fringes of peripheral vision sometimes tagged his
tracery in hair-fine trailers of phosphor.

Upon closer study, the effect would be mistaken for the glister of
reflection touched across lines of puddled water.

Too earthy to dwell on any puzzle wrought of magecraft, Parrien pressed
his back against his chair, lips curled in a tomcat's grin.  "I don't
much fancy being held here while my betrothed ups and marries some
beardless rival.  It would be a chill bed with only memories of a
culverin to lie with.  Do as you wish with me, Sorcerer."

Keldmar snapped off a nod.  "Me also, though I won't pretend I like it.
We earned that culverin through five years of hard work, not counting
for injuries and the powder burns."

Last to capitulate, Meam said, "We'd be free to pursue yon muckle clever
spy?"

Asandir spared no second thought.  "Pursue all you wish.

He's a difficult man to catch."

Meam gave his scowling, ungracious acquiescence, and for a second the
room seemed to blur.  The books, the varnished secretary, the bronze
stands of the candelabra with their waxdribbled sockets all rippled as
if marred by a wash of pressed air.  The smells of baked stone and
sheared steel and musty parchment acquired a transcendent edge of
clarity.  Then darkness crossed sight like a footprint.

Restored to cleared senses, the brothers sat alone around

their table.  A space lately occupied by a Sorcerer lay vacant,

the memory of his presence gone with him.  Sunlight angled in yellow
bars from the arrow slits, shot through a haze of stirred dust motes.

First to move, Parrien rubbed thick fingers at his temples.

"Ath," he said, bewildered.  "What possessed me to drink

myself stupid on wine?"

Keldmar's bleared gaze fixed and focused on the dangling remains of
burst straps.  "Which of you oafs turned soft and released the fat
prisoner?"

Through the vociferous, insult-slinging quarrel that followed, not one
of the s'Brydion could agree on any culprit, nor could they recall what
had immured them in close conference through a night and half the next
day.

"There's a spy running free while we scrap over nothing!"

Meam interrupted in withering disgust.

Duke Bransian shoved to his feet in a jangle of displaced armor,
shouldered his youngest brother from the arrow loop, and bellowed down
to the sentry on duty to roust out his best troop of lancers.  Beneath
his enthusiasm like sand in a blister rubbed a queer and infuriating
hunch: that the fugitive sorcerer who had ruined his armory was by now
beyond reach of reprisal.

"The double-crossing criminals can't hide themselves forever," said
Keldmar, still glaring at a span of empty oak.

Parrien knuckled bloodshot eyes and ground out a derisive snort of
laughter.  "They will if you don't stir off your arse.

Are you coming?"

Ignited to a madcap race to muster weapons, four brothers pounded
shouting down the stairwell to launch their belated hue and cry.

Resolves

"We've found where to send Elaira on her assignment to compromise
Arithon s'Ffalenn," the Koriani First Senior announces to Morriel Prime;
in hand she holds the day's report from the sixth lane watch: The
smuggler's brig Black Drake has sailed to recover the riches heldfor the
Shadow Master's use by Lady Maenalle; and the cove specifiedforfinal
delivery will be south, at Merior by the Sea....

In Althain Tower, on the verge of twilight, Sethvir pauses between
penned lines of manuscript to receive Asandir's news from Alestron: "The
brothers s'Brydion hold no more memory of black powder or culverin;
Rathain's crown jewels are recovered for return to storage at Althain
Tower.  Luhaine has destroyed the drawings and dismantled the molds at
the bronze founders.  Since the explosion in the armory was too widely
witnessed to recontain, sadly, Arithon must stand as our scapegoat.  .

In a cell beneath Alestron Castle, an imprisoned guardsman languishes
with a whip-torn back; and through each hour of his agony, he renews his
cold vow of vengeance, to take down the Master of Shadow whose tricks
had undone a lifetime of honest service....

X.  Merior by the Sea

mmersed in sulky bouts of brooding since the disaster in Alestron's
armory, the Mad Prophet evolved his own brand of consolation.  Since the
Shadow Master's wiles could turn even the acts of an adversary to abet
his most secretive design, Dakar would ease his stung pride and blunt
the horrid quandary by drinking himself senseless as deadweight.

Through the four-week voyage down the continent's east coastline, while
Rathain's prince acquired the crazed instincts of a pack rat and a
variety of seasoned lumber from the millwright's in Telzen, Dakar sucked
down beer, and rum when he could supply himself, with the joyless
abandon of a fish.  No brand of liquor could obviate the unpleasant
truth: the prince whose affairs he was geas-bound to share was accursed
by Desh-thiere.  Over time, the destructive drive which had seen
thousands slaughtered in Strakewood must reemerge with intent to kill
Lysaer, who once had been Dakar's best friend.

Primed to denounce the first sign of geas-bent aggression, the Mad
Prophet kept beady-eyed vigilance in those maudlin moments between
binges.

But the Master of Shadow could maintain seamless subterfuge, as his
disguise as Medlir had well established.

Since patience was never Dakar's strength, his wits were well sodden on
the day the patched sloop engaged to ship the new planks reached the
southernmost call on her route.  Jostled semiconscious by a lurch,
disturbed further by the muttered creak of towlines rigged to warp the
weedy hull hard aground for her yearly refit and careening, Dakar
fumbled to discover his flask lay empty.  Too bone lazy to regret the
oversight, he lapsed back, eyes closed, and eavesdropped on the
conversation currently in progress on the main deck.

Clear above the cries of gulls, and the thump of sailors' feet over the
pawl of the turning capstan, he heard the Master of Shadow announce his
intent to disembark in the tiny cove at Merior.

Too bored to examine s'Ffalenn motives, fuddled beyond recall that
Merior was a sleepy, tropical backwater comprised of little but
fishermen's shacks, the Mad Prophet crawled from his shadowy lair
between decks.  He wove past piled cargo crates, Arithon's lashed spruce
from the sawmiller's, and smacked both shins and one elbow in ascent of
the companionway ladder.  Undeterred by bruises, or by the scathing
oaths of sailhands who sprang to untangle the lines left befouled in his
wake, Dakar blundered onward, while at safe remove from the rigging
above, other seamen called cheerful encouragement.

"Hold your grief!  If the fat lubber's going ashore, let him take his
sandy boots, and good riddance!"

Dakar swayed on in a reeling cloud of whiskey down the newly set gangway
to the beachhead.

The whitewashed cottages of Merior nestled in a little crescent cove,
fringed with sea oats and palms, and notched into the narrow peninsula
that bent like a hook to enclose the aquamarine basin of Sickle Bay.
Here, the great combers that rolled in off the Cildein's vast deeps
burst white and unraveled against a landspit scarcely three leagues
across.  Shadowed day and night by their thunder, this village offered
the last, lonely settlement.  Beyond, a wind-raked ribbon of barrier
sands dwindled into bars and scattered coral reefs, where surf churned
and creamed at Scimiade Tip.  The neat, seaside anchorage was too
cramped for trader ships.  It boasted no breakwater and dock.  The
slatted wooden tower burned a beacon light for fishing craft, which
moored in bad weather to battered cork buoys scattered like beads amid
the chop.

The instant Dakar's step met immovable dry strand, he staggered, tripped
backward, and sat.  A grunt of forced air entangled in his throat, and a
hiccup squealed through his larynx.

The only folk at hand to marvel were two barefoot, tow-haired urchins
who sat on a barrel and smirked, then burst into shrieking gales of
laughter.

Dakar blinked at them owlishly.  Peevish before ridicule from children
scarcely eight years of age, he unhooked a trailer of seawrack from one
ankle and clasped his head to ease its gruesome pounding.  The sky was
blue and cloudless enough to hurt.  Against a senied mesh of palm fronds
spread a smelly, drying hatch of fishnets, jewel strung with glass
floats and stamped clay seals to repel Lyats.  A dog's distant yaps
pocked the bawl of a lighterman who ferried another line from the ship.
Fierce southern sunlight glared off sugar sands, and other things
suspect and glistening strewn amid the jetsam at the tidemark.  Too
fordone to care if he sat in something noisome, the Mad Prophet flopped
back on his elbows.  To the sniggering towheads, he said, "I don't see
what's so funny."

A shadow darkened his face, cast by Arithon, just come ashore with an
unwieldy beam braced across his shoulders.

"Are you cap'n?" shouted the nearer child.  The pair looked alike as
halved oysters, all brown legs and gray eyes and simmering curiosity.
Their unbleached trousers were grimy and ragged, and each wore a smock
shirt, clumsily cut down from a man's size.  The coltish angles of
forearms and shins were sequined in iridescent cod scales, and the
narrow feet with their sturdy, splayed toes had likely never seen shoes.

"I'm not this ship's captain," Arithon declaimed.  He sounded as though
he was smiling.

"Then you're captain of a bigger one, surely," the other chimed in,
while the first interrupted in shrill-voiced, pointblank demand.

"Who are you?"

"'He's master of all things bleak and dangerous,"' the Mad Prophet
misquoted, inspired by faulty memory of a gate arch inscription on an
initiate's hostel that attrition had degraded to a brothel.

"The master, the master, the master," chattered one child in monotone.
The other sprang up and awarded Dakar a petulant frown.

"He's not Daelion Fatemaster!"

While fingers slim and dirty as a thief's entangled in a wisped,
sun-bleached curl, the first child intoned in changed rhythm, "The fat
man's a liar, the fat man's a liar."

Dakar tucked in his chin, the better to glare down his nose.

"Boy, you know little.  In a contest of falsehood, I would certainly
lose to this black-haired mountebank you champion."

His attempt to defend his impugned character met with indignant failure.

"I'm no boy!" The urchin shot erect beside her sibling.

"My name's Feylind."

Dakar raised his brows.  "Well, brat, I'm sorry." A scuffedup shower of
grit pattered over the holed knees of his hose.

"Tell your sister to stop flicking sand on me."

"He's not a girl, he's my brother!" Feylind shrieked, to her twin's
renewed peals of glee.  "Are you stupid?  You must be, to lie in the sun
like a sausage." This pearl of wisdom delivered, she turned her inquiry
elsewhere.

Arithon had lowered his burden.  Braced upright against hip and
shoulder, the beam threw his angled features into shadow.

Too pert for shyness, the child addressed him.  "Will you go back on the
sloop?"

"I thought I was taking wood off her." Apparently not in a hurry, he
added, "Your brother must have a name, too."

"Fiark," that small person supplied.  "Would you take us aboard?"

"The fat man can carry the board instead of you." Feylind elbowed a
place at her brother's side.  "Anyl>ody can see he's a layabout.  The
work should do him good."

"I'm no man's servant," Dakar pronounced, dropped bonelessly prone with
his eyes closed.

For answer, the monstrous beam walloped flat on the strand a handspan
from his right ear.  Riled to a leap of shocked nerves, Dakar unwisely
scrambled upright.  A ticklish flood of sand grains trickled down his
collar and clung to his sweatdampened skin.  "Damn you!  I won't fetch
and haul as your laborer!"

Alone with a vacant barrel and a gouged smattering of footprints, the
Mad Prophet spun around to find the Master of Shadow halfway back up the
gangway.  On his heels, irrepressible, Feylind capered, with Fiark
behind, stamping on the planks to make them bounce.

Dakar cupped his temples to contain his throbbing agony and shouted,
"You can't take those youngsters on board!  The captain will never allow
it."

Arithon ignored him.  Feylind twirled about and stuck out her tongue,
while Fiark screamed back an obscenity, then taunted, "He's master.
He'll do as he pleases!"

Dakar shrugged in a last, fruitless effort to jog the grit out of his
clothing.  Through the pounding in his skull and the reeling assault of
strong sunshine, a chill stabbed over his skin.

For just an instant, the salt breeze in his nostrils hung tainted with
fire-caught smoke.

Too cross to sort whether his distress was due to overindulgence, or
some stillborn pang of gifted prophecy, he slapped his forehead and
hauled off in pursuit.

The tide had turned.  Sluiced by receding waters, the sloop's keel
grounded and wedged fast.  Her sails were inelegantly stripped.  Agleam
in a coat of wet varnish, her bare gaffs creaked and swung as her decks
laid over and canted.  Her waist was a cat's cradle of lines and topping
lifts, unstowed since her spars were unshackled.  Progress for the
inebriated became a trial of slipped steps and hooked ankles, overseen
by jeering, half-naked sailors.  Wise enough not to assay the slope of
afterdeck companionway, the Mad Prophet latched his hands to the
ladder's top rung and fastened himself upright to eavesdrop.

The vessel's grizzled captain braced against the dazzle of white
decking, one brawny arm crooked through the backstay.

"The lighterman will ferry your dowels of locust wood," he was saying to
Arithon s'Ffalenn.  "The heavier planks will be delivered by a fisherman
who hires himself out as stevedore.

That covers the last of your lading list.  I saw your plans.

She'll be a pert little craft."

"Thank you." Attended by the twins, Arithon fished out a small pouch.
"The arrangements are sufficient." Fiark admired the clever fingers as
they dealt out smart payment in royals.  "If you're willing, I need
another service."

The coin changed hands and vanished into a greasy leather purse.

Politely attentive, the captain said, "Name your wants."

"Shipwrights." Bored by the talk, the twins began to tag each other's
toes around the pinrail, while Dakar strained his ears over their rowdy
noise to catch the last of Arithon's request......  and one master
craftsman if he brings journeymen versed in his trade."

The captain's leathery forehead furrowed.  "Whatever for?

You've got only one set of tools."

"They're prototypes." Arithon sidestepped to avoid getting clobbered as
the twins fell reeling into giggles and tussled like puppies at his
feet.  "The smith here at Merior will be skilled enough to make more."

"If not, there's a chandler's downcoast in Shaddom.  That harbor's more
sheltered, if you want my opinion, and the southcoast trade galleys call
there." The captain chewed his mustache, distracted from inquisitive
speculation by a shout and a lurch as the ship keeled another three
degrees and a loose object banged below decks.  He leaned sideward to
bellow down a hatch grating.  "I thought you had everything stowed!"

The cabin steward's invective spiraled up.

"Well blight take your excuses!  Get a line and lash the forsaken thing
down!" He turned back to his client with scarcely veiled interest and no
measurable improvement in temper.

"When do you want these craftsmen?"

"Spring will do." Jostled by eight-year-old exuberance, Arithon knelt,
flung out an arm, and rescued Fiark or Feylind from a skidding slide
through the cordage.  Blond curls mingled with black as he arose with
the child pinned in his embrace.

The captain scratched his ear.  "Autumn would be easier.

Skilled men without ties are tough to come by."

Arithon swayed as the other twin fastened like a lamprey to his thigh.
"I can offer rich pay, for everybody." The coins he produced with the
finesse of a spell arched through the air, light licking gold faces as
they fell.

The captain fielded the bribe and bared his sly teeth in a smile.

"Your shipwrights shall arrive with the violets."

"What are violets?" shrieked the twin who pounded on Arithon's hipbone.

Feylind, presumably, answered.  "They're flowers, fishhead.

The ground here's too salty to grow them."

"You don't know everything," Fiark retorted.

"No, she doesn't," Arithon agreed, and silenced the fracas by prying the
sister off his neck.  "Don't bicker, or you won't get your tour below
decks." To the captain, laughing, he added, "Would you mind?"

Drawn grinning into conspiracy, the hard-bitten waterman relented.

"Take them yourself, but go lively.  In another half hour, this bitch'Il
be aground hard as Sithaer, and ornery as a half-skint wyvern for the
pinch o' the sand in her planks.  Keep clear of the hold lest the
ballast shifts."

Slithered in a heap at the base of the companionway to evade notice as
the conference ended, Dakar hugged his knees in stark misery.

"I knew it," he mused in private conclusion.  "I just knew it!

He's brought planks to build a damned war fleet."

Immediately above, Arithon's face eclipsed the light.

"Right now, just one small sloop.  You needn't fret.  We haven't the
coin left to arm her." Under pressure from Feylind's impatience, a
malicious glint stirred the green eyes.

"You're not in the mood to get stepped on, I trust."

"The fat man's in the way again!" the insufferable Fiark proclaimed.
Forced to give ground in a cloud of ill grace, Dakar heaved up his tipsy
bulk and moved.

From the stern, his weathered face crinkled in calculation, the sloop
captain tracked Arithon's answers to the children's eager questions.
"Knows his lines and halyards like a man born to blue water." The old
salt cast his moody gaze at the horizon as though stalked by invisible
foul weather.  "Why in the name of mayhem would anyone found a shipyard
in a site that grows not a stick of native timber?"

But the fat drunkard who might have lent insight now snored in an
oblivious sprawl by the gangway.  The captain spat downwind in disgust,
then dispatched a sailhand to heave the sot ashore before he tumbled
overboard and drowned underfoot in the shallows.

In obstinate refusal to permit the earlier, unsettled stir through his
senses to give rise to his spurious talent for prescience, Dakar slept
off his hinge.  Wakened to an aftertaste of dread, as if the visions
jammed irresponsibly beyond recall had scalded their imprint in dreams,
he sat hunched over dinner at a split plank trestle in Merior's only
boardinghouse.

The tea grounds in his mug streaked the landlady's white porcelain in
ominous, unlucky patterns, and his brooding bought no peace of mind.

While southern moths like antique lace battered the smoke-hazed tin
lantern overhead, Arithon plied thread and needle to patch his
second-best shirt.

"Shipwrights!" Fired by long-delayed pique, Dakar curled his cup in a
rocketing slide that scattered through knives, chinked the honey pot,
and caromed off a platter littered with fish bones.

Arithon shed his mending on hair-trigger reflex and rescued the mug
before it shot off the table rim.

Balked of even that destructive satisfaction, the Mad Prophet raged,
"Who's going to finance your fool's notion, anyway?  There's not enough
coin in this whole village for you to sing for your upkeep."

"Then you might be more gentle with the landlady's crockery.  Or
tomorrow we'll eat baitfish served raw on a cutting block." Green eyes
regarded him, thoughtful; and in the same tone as the banter came the
answer Dakar least expected.  "I thought the crown of Rathain should
bear the expense."

"Your emeralds are safe back at Althain." Had the tea mug remained in
his hands, Dakar would have thrown to draw blood.

The knife-edged start of a smile compressed the line of Arithon's mouth.
"A pity, since you're hot to lay into me for something."

Too tender to provoke s'Ffalenn temper head-on, Dakar attacked on a
tangent.  "Well where will we live in the meantime?  You can't want to
stay until spring." He dared not spell out the obvious: that the
upheavals in Jaelot and Alestron were going to stir trouble.

Elsewhere, two armies amassed to kill off the s'Ffalenn bloodline could
scarcely stand idle at the news.

As though content to do nothing in response, Arithon watched the moths
flare up and die in fitful spits of flame.  A milk-warm, tropical breeze
played through latched-back, diamond-paned casements, textured with salt
and the taint of tide wrack and fish.

"Winter is coming everywhere else," Dakar prodded.  "The Scimlade
peninsula doesn't get frost, but in case no one told you, it rains
buckets here."

"I've leased the shell flats by the abalone cutter's."

Arithon spun the mug in a curling slide that missed soup bowls and
plates by narrow margins, then thumped in an accurate jab to the nerve
in the Mad Prophet's dimpled elbow.  "If you want to try carpentry,
we've plenty of wood for a shack."

"I can scarcely drive nails when I'm sober." The Mad Prophet lapsed into
offended silence.

By morning, he was once again comatose, and Arithon had to borrow a
handcart to remove him to the site where his lumber lay.  Dakar snored
on through the ride, his arms and knees dangling, and his bearded chin
tipped to the sky.  Arithon dumped him in the shade to sleep off his
poisoned stupor, then took stock of his future boat, stacked now in neat
piles that beckoned to be shaped with adze and saw and plane.

The twins found him in less than an hour.  Every minute after that, they
infested the shell flats like a hopping plague of locusts, until every
step a man took seemed encumbered.  The Mad Prophet was slowest to
differentiate between them.  When he misnamed Feylind, she screamed at
him until his ears rang; her brother preferred to throw stones.  Arithon
never minded their boisterous noise.  Obstructive whenever the future
was mentioned, he tousled the twins' hair as if they were young puppies
and stopped Fiark's arguments by letting him hold the ends of his chalk
strings.

"They just lost their father to the sea," the Shadow Master explained on
the day Dakar woke to find his bootlaces kinked into knots.  Lately
discharged of a vociferous lecture on the topic of children who should
be home in strict charge of their family, he was in no mood to listen as
Arithon added, "The mother has forbidden them to sail since he drowned,
and in case you hadn't noticed, in Merior, only infants and the sick
stay ashore."

One boot half-off, the other ingeniously entangled, Dakar looked up into
green eyes untrustworthy for their mildness.

"So why do you stay ashore?"

"For my amusement," the Shadow Master said.

Rankled again by the queer, warning ripple of impending prophecy, Dakar
bit his lip, hard.  The coppery taste of blood killed the vision's
deployment fast enough.  But peace of mind did not return.

Eaten by nameless foreboding in the face of Arithon's complaisance, the
Mad Prophet found no comfort in his vices.  Every girl he pinched was
somebody's wife, and twice he got pummeled by packs of brothers led by a
wronged and vengeful husband.  Merior's villagers were closemouthed and
reserved, and their town, a dull backwater that made the bigoted stews
of Jaelot seem a wistfully remembered time of paradise.

The days shortened; the fishing Tuggers sailed reefed to stronger winds,
and the sandspit south of Scimlade Tip abided in its customary idyllic
isolation.  Arithon made no clandestine effort to stay abreast of events
in the north.  His easygoing humor under needling was just another sham,
the sort of masterful, guileless fabrication his s'Ffalenn wiles
employed to mask havoc.  His work might seem unhurried, as he measured
his fine wood in whistling patience.  But the little sloop's keel was
laid and her sternpost set in the sort of studied, sustained effort that
admitted no loophole for setback.

Like the baitfish before the barracuda, Dakar discovered he was unable
to bury himself in detachment.  Complaints became excuse to provoke
arguments.  "A man could get permanently griped on a diet of saltfish,"
he broke in after a labored visit to the privy.  "And sleeping under
sail canvas has me rotten with sores like the pox."

"That might not be the case had you bought black beans and figs instead
of that beer keg from the market." Arithon bent to shape a raw plank,
shirtless, the shiny lines of old scars browned by the sun.

"Curse you!" Dakar dug his fingers behind his waistband to scratch.
"They haven't sold figs or beans since the last cart returned from
Shaddom, and that's been better than a week."

The adze sheared off a pallid scroll of wood.  "Six days."

"Curse you!" Tired of the ocean, the heat, and the unending,
brain-stabbing headaches brought on by the dastardly hours of banging
required for maritime construction, Dakar jettisoned tact.  "All so that
you can wreak vengeance in ships crammed to the gunwales with
arbalests."

Arithon paused, his loot stilled in warning between strokes.

"You speak like a master taleteller," he said in pleasant deceit.

"Halliron would have applauded.  I've only got enough wood for one
vessel.  A sloop.  Thirty feet to the inch, and if I use sword steel or
stoneshot for ballast, the quarries in Elssine will have run out of
honest gray stone."

Half-inebriated, his tunic undone to the waist, Dakar lashed back in
cornered fury.  "Who are you fooling?  You know you are cursed.

Lysaer is amassing armies while you dawdle, and-"

"What am I supposed to do?" The adze scythed down in a vicious, white
flare of reflection and sheared off a sliver of spruce.  "Agree?  Make
you promises?

Confide?" In the sudden stabbing sarcasm he used when a nerve had been
struck, Arithon smiled.  "Much better to leave you dangling, Prophet.

You're far less bother to me, drunk.  Failing that, you might consider
washing your underclothes.  They're stiff enough to stand by themselves.
If they rot from neglect, we'll all watch you greet Etarra's armies bare
arsed."

"Oh, but you're careful, and nasty in your arrogance."

Dakar narrowed foxy eyes, suffused to a high, purple flush.

"You daren't mention your nemesis by name, do you?  What about this
town?  It is innocent.  You'll draw the danger to your web, sure enough.
Do you tell me, will the children once again pay the cost?"

He had gone too far.

Blood drained on a breath out of Arithon's face.  His green eyes
watched, flat and fixed as a cat's.  Lanced in the grip of raw fear,
Dakar scrambled back, hands upraised to discharge a spell-ward of guard
at the first twitch of movement from his enemy, for one twist of muscled
hands could hurl the adze in a stroke pitched to murder.

"Ath forfend!" said Arithon s'Ffalenn.  He raised a wrist and stifled
back a belly whoop of laughter.  "Dakar, what are you thinking?

This is a pleasure sloop, and when she's launched, I'm sailing her to
Innish!"

A matter of a song and a widow denied reunion with her husband; the
promise sworn at Halliron's deathbed that Arithon now claimed his full
intent to honor.

Caught aback inside a spitting crackle of sparks thrown off by the
collapse of an inept conjury, lent no grounds to attack unimpeachable
decency, Dakar broke off his challenge, unsatisfied.  The sop he had
been tossed to force his silence assuredly did not include the truth.

A month passed, and the graceful frame of Arithon's stoop took shape on
her ways on the shell flats.  Fishermen returned from their dories began
to stop and share news, or sometimes a fish from their catch.  The reek
of cod or halibut toasting over an open fire pervaded Dakar's
whiskey-soaked dreams.  The autumn equinox marked the feastdays, and the
twins brought yarn strung with folded paper talismans.  Through the
lattice of the palm groves, candles burned on every cottage windowsill.

Amid the bonfires and the dances to celebrate the summer's harvest came
the inevitable change to the wind patterns, and the driving, seasonal
rains.

The deluge caught Dakar in a desperate, furious bout of hammering.

Indignant when the villagers dared to appreciate his discomfort too
much, he retorted, "Well how can I see to bang a nail with Ath-forsaken
water in my eyes?"

"Wait till the rain stops," Arithon suggested.

Dakar missed stroke and mashed himself a black thumbnail.  His
subsequent explosion exhausted filthy epithets acquired through five
centuries of debauchery.  Every curse and full blame for the weather
attached to the Master of Shadow, and the twins, apt mimics, filched the
best phrases to malign Dakar.

Arithon gripped his ribs, a suspect expression on his face, while white
runners streamed off his hair.  Since the downpour doused the coal fire
that fueled his steam box, he used the chance to wash his clothes in a
nail keg.

The children were kept home the next day.

"In bed with coughs, their mother said," offered a fisherman in a
syrup-slow, southshore dialect.  Close with his words as a pinchfist
doling coins, he trudged with his fellows to launch the dories.  But the
wink he tossed over his shoulder gave fair warning: the widow whose
household had been outraged by an influx of rough language might be
along later to scold.

A moment of forethought, and Arithon sent Dakar on an errand.

The woman came between showers, a thin, stoop-shouldered figure swathed
in the black skirts of mourning, her wisped hair muffled under an
enormous oilskin.  She carried sprigs of sage to ease her passage
through the fish markets.

Against the white sands and the wheeling gulls, and the silver-banked,
cloud-silted sky, the storm harried her like an omen in beggar's rags.

Lent a shorebird's gait in her pattens, she picked her way past the
puddles in the workyard as if apologetic for the crunch of her tread on
the shavings.  Met by sour smells of pine and wet oak, her swift,
darting glance took in Dakar's crude shack, the gapped, miscut boards
and bent nails a flute for the tireless sea winds.  The rough-sawn
windows boasted no shutters, nor candles in honor of equinox.  The
little paper talismans brought by her twins hung tacked to the eaves,
soggy and entangled in their tethers.  Austere as fine muslin, she
rounded the building and stopped with caught breath at the absolute
shock of discrepancy: before her, in grace that bespoke patience and a
loving touch with raw wood, rose the clean curves of a sloop's frames.
Neat, tight pegs fastened the sternpost to her keel, under damp like a
patina of new varnish.

A glance told the widow why the fishermen of Merior gave this outsider
their respect.

The yard at first sight seemed deserted.  Then the rhythmic tap at first
mistaken for a woodpecker fell silent.  A man crouched half-under the
unfinished hull stood up, compact, well made, a mallet and chisel in his
hands.  Sawdust and shavings twined through his dark hair.  He wore
canvas knee breeches tied with fish twine, the cut ends whipped deftly
in round splices.  Too well raised to stay shirtless in her presence, he
snatched a soaked smock from a saw trestle and wrung out the water.  She
caught a disturbing glimpse of scars as the cloth dropped over his head.
Too reserved to make comment, she strove not to stare as he flicked off
scrolled shavings, then moved with his hand out to meet her.

His approach jarred her to an inadvertent step back.  His build was
small and light boned as a hawk's, where the twins had painted a giant.
"You're the one called the Master?" She knew of no other address for
him; even when maudlin and drunk, the stout companion never spoke his
surname.

"Friends call me Arithon." Eyes of a piercing summer green flickered
over her.  Then he smiled.  Thwarted from shyness by warm fingers that
touched and then steadied her elbow, the widow averted her eyes.  Her
reason for coming was not going to please him, and his manners left no
excuse for brevity.

"You must be Jinesse," he said.  "Here, come and sit." He steered her
the necessary steps across ground littered with angles of scrap wood,
the sort the twins had often dragged home to whittle by the bob in the
kitchen.  A tarpaulin was whisked aside.  Arithon set her down on the
fine-grained teak stacked aside to become his sloop's brightwork, then
melted back out of contact.  "These boards are dry, and more tidy than
Dakar's lair indoors."

Jinesse stared at her feet, and then, less comfortably, to one side,
where she saw in mute shock that he had outflanked her.

Adjacent to her perch rested the finished hulls of two dories the
tarpaulin had also masked from view.  Gripped fast to the greens, her
hands clamped together in paralyzed dread, for the sloop now in progress
on the shell flats was too small to tow any more than one boat as
tender.  By Arithon's intent look of pleasure, she guessed: the craft
had been made for her children.

Alarm tensed her shoulders and made her look achingly brittle.

"You don't make this easy."

The Master upended an empty nail keg and seated himself, his wrists
clasped loose at his knees.  "I know very well you've come to say the
twins are best off without my company."

Jinesse flinched.  To stop the wild tremble transmitted through her
posy, she opened bird-boned fingers and flung away the wilted sprigs. No
matter how difficult, the dory perforce must come first.

"You should know they are destined to be apprenticed to a craftsman."

His vantage below her defeated her armor of oilskins.

Intimate as touch, his study mapped her dry-skinned, aging fairness,
then the pale hair wisped at her temples.

Annoyed by her nervous leap of reaction, Jinesse understood he was not
going to grace her with an opening.  "My children lost their father to
the sea.  I would not see them drowned offshore in a lugger, and their
acquaintance with you makes that hard." She stopped, wrung mute by the
sound of her own rough-sawn fear.

Arithon was first to break their locked gaze.  Through fallen dark hair,
his expression stayed masked as the beauty of his voice leached the iron
from her determination.  "I agree."

"You'll sell the second dory, then." Her business coneluded, she stirred
to arise and encountered an immediate obstacle.  Unless she wished to
hike up her skirts and step over him, the loom of the woodpile tra ped
her.

I p The smile that bent the near corner of his mouth revealed the
disadvantage was intentional.  "The dory will not drown your little
ones.  Nor will the sea of itself bring them harm.

Lack of knowledge will certainly do both."

Nettled past diffidence at last, Jinesse exclaimed, "Trust a man to make
a simple thing impossible."

"This is not simple," Arithon said.

"I won't have their future tied to fishing, can't you understand?"

He had been in Merior long enough to have seen the crippled old men
while away their afternoons on the guesthouse porch; the horribly
swollen arthritic hands, or ones maimed and scarred, that could no
longer draw nets from the sea.

But Arithon did see, Jinesse realized as he faced her directly.

The compassion in his challenge, and the stillness of his patience made
her wonder if he, too, had weathered losses.

He said, "The twins' father has died.  Would you give them your fear as
their legacy?  Will you force them to ignorance, where now there is
laughter, when the sea is born into their very blood?"

Against a terrible, ripping urge to break down and weep, Jinesse
whispered, "Don't argue.  Let us go, build your sloop, and leave this
village."

"I will do all of that," Arithon promised.  A less-sensitive man might
have tried to reassure her by touch.  This one did nothing but speak, in
that voice which relentlessly stripped the protections she had patched
over raw and stinging grief.  "But first I would leave you a gift.  Let
me teach your twins a mariner's skills, as my father taught me.  I will
give them the sea, and a freedom beyond fishing boats, and you can face
your heart and learn to abide without terror."

He moved.  Before she could frame any protest, he had risen.  As he
pressed a warm weight into her chilled fingers, she almost missed the
welted scars that disfigured one palm and both wrists.  "Here.

Take my pledge.  Your children shall be given all they need to stay
safe, and you will find joy in their accomplishment."

Jinesse turned over the token he offered in trade for her personal
weakness: a scratched signet of white gold set with an emerald and
incised with a rampant leopard seal.  The ring was an heirloom, and with
it, he granted a trust.  Merior was too small for a man of his presence;
all the village wondered why he needed refuge, and what sort of trouble
he was fleeing.

The sigil offered means to unriddle his surname and his origin, hers to
pursue if she wished.

The gravity in Arithon's manner suggested power in that knowledge, and
the key to his deepest reserve.  "Jinesse, if after six months you still
wish your children to stay ashore and apprentice in a craft shop, I
shall help underwrite your decision'.  But let them have the dory until
then.  Give me that time to win your faith."

"Let the craft be launched on the bay side," she begged, the more
wretched for the tremor in her plea.

He laughed, a chime of relief like bright music.  "I'd actually planned
on Garth's pond.  You don't have to watch.  I'll look after their
lessons myself."

The sky darkened.  A stiff, sudden wind flagged the palms by the harbor,
and rattled the shack's ill-hung door.  Chipped wood scudded like
autumn-tossed leaves, to scrape and catch in her mourning skirts.

A fresh downpour spun sudden silver over the dories strung out on cork
moorings, empty in wait for the fishing fleet's return.  Aching still
for one left unpartnered, Jinesse clenched chapped hands beneath the
humid chill of her oilskins.

Afraid of the secrets that surrounded this outsider, of what else he
might soften if she lingered, she allowed him to escort her across the
shell flats to the wicket gate by the market.

And then the bleak rain fell and swallowed him.

By the time she reached her tiny cottage with its roof of moss-draped
cedar, and its front door painted with talismans which had done nothing
to spare her goodman from the waves, the storm pounded in torrents
across the spit.  Arithon's ring was an icy Jump in her palm.

For days she left it untouched in the bottom of her wicker sewing
basket.  She was no gossip, with naught else to do but pry into an
outsider's past.

Yet in the dark of the night when the twins were abed, and the sea
boomed relentlessly against the headland to remind of its cruel theft,
the toll of grief and loneliness chiseled away her resolve.  She took
down the basket, scrounged the dark emerald from its nest of thimbles
and thread, and made an impression in candle wax.  She used chalk to
copy the leopard seal, then marked out the slanting, graceful runes that
inscribed the inside of the band.

With the drawings wrapped in a packet the next morning, she hopped a
ride on an old, creaking tinker's cart bound downcoast to Shaddom.

An enclave of Ath's initiates still kept a hostel in a remote cove by
Sickle Bay, and there she stopped to make inquiry.

Rumor held the disappearance of the Paravians had set the old order into
decline.  Certainly the long, winding lane that led to the hostel was
hedged on both sides by rank woods.  Its buildings were stone, dressed
out in moss-flecked sigils that were uncanny to the eye, and which
touched Jinesse's skin to odd starts of gooseflesh.  The grounds
themselves looked unkempt, waist deep in dog fennel and exuberant
runners of wild vine.  Unaware that initiates revered all growing things
for their place, like most unversed visitors, the widow mistook their
way of blessing for neglect.

Afraid to shout lest she find the silence one of desertion, she startled
at movement, and was greeted by a white-robed old woman who answered her
request before she spoke.

"Claithen's the brother who could help.  Bide a bit.  He will come for
you."

Jinesse was offered a bench beneath the knees of a hoary, crowned
cypress.  She cooled her feet in the trickle of a spring and worried her
packet in fretful hands.  The peace of moss-bearded hardwoods and an
unpruned riot of citrus was broken by blackbirds who flapped and
shrieked like viragos over seed grain that a wizened little cook tossed
out of the door from the scullery.  Unseen in a thicket, a quail called.

"You have a seal you need identified?" questioned a peppery voice.

Jinesse started, spun, and confronted a squat man with leaf-dark eyes, a
bald crown, and a book clutched tight to his chest.

He gave her a jolly, wrinkled smile.  "I thought we should look for it
here, that Ath's blessed sun shed his light on the knowledge you seek."

The bench was wide enough for two, if tall for the brother's bandy legs.
He sat, feet swinging like a child's, and balanced his fat tome on his
knees.  The serenity he commanded seemed to stare her through and finger
every trouble in her heart.  "You've brought a drawing," he prompted to
crack her shyness.

She picked the string off her packet.  Ath's blessed sun made the
leopard seem ineptly drawn, a sad and unexpected embarrassment.  The
original had been like the man, elegant in grace, with a captivating
fierceness noticed too late for the safety of hapless small prey.

Claithen regarded her chalked copy in silence.  Then he smoothed open
flocked pages and bared the selfsame blazon, except this one was
beautiful, painted in silver gilt and black, on a field as deep green as
fine emerald.

Jinesse need not know letters to interpret the crown above the sepia ink
of the house name.

"The royal arms of s'Ffalenn," Claithen murmured.  Hands as age flecked
as the pages eased the book's boards closed.  He reached out, touched a
forefinger to the chalk-marked leaf in her lap, and traced an intricate
pattern.

Whether the sign stood for blessing or curse, Jinesse had no way to
know.  But power translated across the touch; even through paper, she
felt a flash point tingle of mystery cross her flesh.  Her fabricated
tale to explain her curiosity died unspoken.  Never mind that the story
was plausible: curious bits of jetsam were brought up all the time,
oddments from the past, sea crusted and strange, nested with the fish in
the nets.

Yet with a tact that pierced, Claithen's quiet made a lie too wretched
to contemplate.

"Who would wear such a seal?" Jinesse asked finally.

The initiate pushed back his ivory linen cuff and threaded a knobby
finger along her unpolished scrawl of runes.  "It says here: 'To my
sons, from their forebears, back to Torbrand." Your man is the scion of
Rathain.  There's a prince of that line returned, by Ath's grace.

His shadows helped return the true sunlight."

Jinesse shut her eyes and swallowed hard.  The outsider who sheltered in
Merior by the Sea owned powers more dangerous than silver-tongued
persuasion, skills more dire than any simple love of ships.  She wished
no involvement with his sorcerous secrets.  Appalled fear for her
children left her sick.

"You look tired," said Claithen.  "In the buttery, we have herb tea in
stone jars and new biscuits."

"No thank you." Jinesse stood up quickly, the paper cnunpled in hands
now smudged in damning, scarlet smears of chalk.  "I have to walk back
to Merior.  You've been helpful.  I'll send down a basket of jam the
next time a wagon comes by."

Claithen peered up in gentle censure.  "No need.  The world in its
wisdom provides." He freed a hand from his book and gestured toward the
sprawl of the citrus grove.  "If it is Arithon of Rathain you have met,
believe this.  He shall do you no harm.  The heritage of his bloodline
will permit him no cruelty, and Ath's greater mercy walks beside you."

Jinesse jerked back a step, breathless.  Her children must never know
the breadth of this quandwy: their friend was the Master of Shadow, and
if he stayed, his enemies would be visited upon Merior.  He required
refuge from the whole of the north, and their village offered too small
a haven.

"I know very little of mercy," Jinesse whispered; her husband had died
of Ath's storms.

"Then life and Prince Arithon will teach you." No longer placid, the
initiate brother bobbed to his sandaled feet.  He gave her a last,
searching glance that, like the bitter taste of aloes, seemed to curdle
the dread in her breast.  "In time, we shall come to meet again in this
place.  For now, I will see you to the gate since, sadly, my library
holds no more help for YOU."

Every step of the way back to Merior, Jinesse thrashed through agonized
doubts.  She weighed her children's recent triumph over grief, and the
fragile, trusting gift of their happiness against the dark rumors that
surrounded the revealed name of their benefactor.  The truth behind
Arithon's reticence burdened her, and chafed with the memory of his
kindness.  If he harbored deceits, their depth lay outside her grasp.

Timid in the end, loath as she was to confront him, she let the days
pass one into another, and did nothing to forbid the twins' friendship.

Another outsider came to Merior, a woman who rented a cottage and set up
a small custom selling simples.  The convenience was appreciated.
Before, the only apothecary was south in Shaddom, and when a babe
sickened or a fisherman suffered injury, the hostel of Ath's Brotherhood
was a long, rough cart ride away.  Goodwives gossiped with the village's
two shopkeepers, and wondered if the woman's anival might be connected
to the other outsiders who currently inhabited the shell flats.  Only
Jinesse knew their questions were well founded, and she kept her own
wary counsel.

Tiny as Merior was, folk there kept distance from strangers.

Word of the woman's presence never reached the pair most likely to be
interested, and despite the villagers' keen curiosity, her visit to the
shell flats was unannounced.

She went, her cloak of gray wool snapped by harsh gusts off the sea, and
her way directed by an elderly tosspot who informed in slurred gravity,
"You'll find the man, lady.  Just follow the footpath toward Scimlade
Tip and listen for the sound of the hammers."

The autumn season had been fortunate; no deadly storms had whipped in
off the Cildein to savage the exposed eastern shoreline.  The mangroves
that fringed the sheltered inlet dripped and tossed branches mantled in
glossy foliage.

Sheared stems of deadwood past gales had ripped down lay masked in
weed-bound shadow.  The cedar-shingled shack on the shell flats shook to
the thrum of the winds, as the halfdecked little sloop cradled on braces
did not.

The sky hung streamered and low as drenched wool, and the hammers, that
morning, lay mute.

Skirts lifted clear of runoff from the fish market, the visitor picked
her way through damp-rotted oat grass and crossed through a wicket gate
festooned with Dakar's holed stockings, left out for the weather to
launder.  The hesitant crunch of her footsteps stopped as a voice, light
with a humor few ever overheard, raised clearly across the yard's
stacked lengths of lumber.

"Bless you, no, that isn't elegant.  You need to go with the grain of
the wood, not across." Framed by the lyre curves of the unfinished bull,
the speaker bent over two intent towheads, set lean fingers over a
child's stubby, dirty ones, and redirected the stroke of the plane.

Under sure guidance, the blade sang across new spruce and scrolled up a
ribbon-thin shaving.  The child with the tool shouted in pleasure, while
the other tugged at the man's idle arm and begged vociferously for a
replay.

At that moment, Arithon of Rathain looked up.

The enchantress who intruded upon his privacy was relentlessly trained
to interpret every nuance through detail.  She took in the sailor's
tunic, decently clean, but rumpled in emphatic rebuttal of royal
birthright; the dark, uncut hair that cast an air of benevolent
untidiness over a perception still mage-trained, and keen as a razor;
the sea tan and shirt style that minimized old scars, and beyond these,
surprise, masked behind the polite lift of black eyebrows.

The rasp of the plane died away.  Two twins turned pitch-sticky faces
and stared.  The one to whom persistence had ceded the tool blew chips
from the blade and demanded, "Who's she?"

"Is that how your mother greets strangers?" the lady admonished,
smiling.

"Are you a stranger?" Arithon countered, his guard nearly good enough to
mask an underlying alarm.

Unprepared for the lurch of her heart as he regarded her, the visitor
traced the end of the spar with her finger.  The loving care that had
guided its shaping sang through every fiber of the wood; as immediate,
to her, the awareness of the hands that enacted the labor.

Her shield of banality crumpled.  "I don't know."

"But who is she?" persisted the twin who was female, her grip on
Arithon's arm grown possessive out of blind instinct.

"The lady's called Elaira," Arithon said.  His hard's tongue made music
of the name, and offered back skilled reassurance as he re-addressed his
visitor directly.  "Were you bidden to see me, or Dakar?"

Cautious of his empathy, now schooled to sharp strength by his study
under Halliron, the enchantress defended, "I came as a friend."

"But your kind go nowhere without purpose." Arithon's sudden, flat
expression set a sting to that truth as he gestured toward the crooked
lintel of the shack.  "You may as well come in." A corner of his mouth
crawled up.  "Or is it a Koriani preference, to address their affairs
while standing ankle deep in a mud puddle?"

Aware in that moment of the seeping, wet rings that darkened the hem of
her skirts, Elaira stepped back.  Her laugh of embarrassment was
graciously passed over as Arithon dismissed his small admirers.

"Over there," he said to the children.  "See that plank?  You can prop
it on the trestles and practice with the plane.  If your work is very
neat, I'll let you help finish with the gaff."

This suggestion greeted with a whoop, the twins moved off, chattering.
"She has pretty hair.  Red and brown all at once.  Is he going to kiss
her, do you think?"

The reply drifted back, rife with scorn.  "Feylind!  You ninny!

Why should he want to do that?"

Finished wringing out her damp hemline, Elaira straightened up to find
Arithon beside her.  His grip as he took her elbow was more firm than
she recalled, and each steely, flexible finger seemed to sear through
her sleeve like a brand.  His sailor's dress and disheveled grooming
made him exotic and strange, too immediate a presence to bridge a
prolonged gap of years and separation.

Then he drew her past the rude doorway into close gloom.

By the feeble light threaded through chinks in the artless board walls,
Elaira glimpsed coils of new hemp, a box jammed with cleats and oak
blocks bought used from the local fisherfolk, and incongruous in the
clutter, a level set of pegs that hung the Masterbard's lyranthe, his
sword, and a new woolen cloak and an oilskin.  Then Arithon closed the
leather-hinged door.  The shrill talk of the twins, and the hesitant,
rasping first strokes of the plane came through muffled, while something
amorphous slouched in the corner choked through a stertorous snore.

Elaira's small start transmitted to Arithon's hand.

Moved to amused exasperation, he called, "Dakar!"

The mass gave a moan, unfurled, and dug plaintive fingers into a thatch
of screwed hair.  An epithet emerged.  Then the fat hands groped blindly
and closed on a whiskey crock as though the contents offered sustenance
and life.  To a belch and a fanfare of rank language, the Mad Prophet
cracked open bleared eyes.

"A woman!" He shot erect too quickly, slopped an astringent spill of
spirits, and yanked down his shirt to cover the pink dome of his belly.
The pleased smile he began froze and died as the female in Aiithon's
company crossed the unshuttered window.

"Dharkaron's Spear and Black Chariot!" Dakar battered to his feet in
alarm.  "What are you doing here?" To Arithon, he cried in agitation,
"Send her out!  Now.  She's Koriani, and worse than a plague-storm of
fiends." Hazed by raw nerves, he hefted his crock.

The draft he slugged down left his eyes squeezed tight shut.  As if
respite from sight lent him patience, he finished in forced enunciation,
"If Asandir knew you'd let her kind in, he'd bring down the roof on your
head."

Arithon steered Elaira past a brimming bucket.  "If you continue to
shout, you'll achieve as much by yourself."

"Damn you," Dakar swore.  "This isn't funny.  Mark me, if you don't send
that witch packing, the one secret you can't afford to share will be in
Morriel's ear by evening."

Elaira's breath caught.  The nuance of Kofiani observation inferred the
entreaty was genuine; that despite a master's training at magecraft and
every informed and formidable defense, Dakar believed Arithon to be
vulnerable.

Desperate that the order's plans for her should not yield any unexpected
windfalls, Elaira wished herself blind and deaf as Dakar resumed his
invective.  "Don't claim I didn't warn you."

Despite a tipsy sway that undermined his will to stay upright, he
lurched in determination for the doorway.  "When Asandir makes his
inquiry, tell him I had no part in this."

The glare he shot Arithon held a beacon flare of hatred.

Elaira sensed its passion like the flung-off, sudden sting of static,
nothing like the disgruntled imitation the Mad Prophet had shown while
intoxicated in the past.  Unsettled by the profound depth of change in
him, she watched him trip on unsteady feet and bang headlong into the
door panel.  A hinge burst from the abuse.  Then the cobbled-together
raft of planks gave way.  Ejected amid a spill of razed boards, Dakar
measured his length upon his belly.

The filtered rasp of the plane faltered and stopped, replaced by shrill
laughter from the twins.

Dakar snarled a curse, ripped his doublet off the claws of bent nails,
and rescued his dropped crock just as the dregs escaped the neck.  "Ah,
Ath," he grumbled.  "Should I be surprised there's no luck in the
presence of a witch?" After a last scathing glower through the doorway,
he heaved himself off to console his unhappiness sew're. The renewed
scrape of the plane over wood kept time to a peaceful stillness.  In
gloom scarcely mitigated by the additional influx of light, Elaira
picked out a fungus colony of pans and rusted buckets scattered across
the shell floor.

"You have to credit our spellbinder for originality."

Arithon pulled out the only available stool for her, then settled
himself on an emptied beer keg.  "Dakar set all the windows in the
roof."

Elaira sat.  Her fine linen skirt rasped on the saw-grained wood of the
bracing, and her foot bumped an ill-fitted peg.

The room's split personality haunted: ramshackle joinery at silent war
with the lone, level trestle, spread with parchments lined with fine
chalk.  Sketched in a hand unmistakably Arithon's lay the plans of his
thirty-foot sloop.

"Best keep your prophet's hands off the shipbuilding," Elaira remarked
with a dry smile.

Arithon laughed.  "The twins won't let him come near.

'Keep your fat fingers off, y'old drunk!" His incisive imitation of
childish scorn cut off in sudden sobriety.  "Enchantress.

Kofiani.  How did you find me?"

Denied the easy, instinctive rapport of their first meeting, Elaira
stayed still enough to mark the moisture that ticked off her soaked hem.
She matched his gaze and gauged his reserve through her arts; and
deduction implied the question pertained more to Lysaer s'llessid and
his massed armies than to her, or any meddling of her order.  "I think,"
she said, husky, "you could guess."

"Jaelot," he surmised.  Green eyes that threatened to dissect her heart
like sharp knives turned down and fixed on the hands which had wrought a
great and joyous miracle on the solstice: an artist's unfettered
celebration of beauty that a fate cursed by geas had recast to invite
his downfall.

His guilt filled an unpleasant interval, that his passion for music had
led him to careless betrayal of the very foundation of his principles.
Then he said, "Are you here to help or to hinder?"

Elaira swallowed, set back by his directness.  "You don't know?"

That made him look up, pitched taut with an anger so virulent, she lost
any footing to fathom its origin.  "What should I know?" His sarcasm
raked her.  "Hasn't your order's prying interest in my affairs unearthed
enough sorry facts?"

"I couldn't guess, not being privy to the secrets of the Senior Circle,"
Elaira said, too wise to give ground to his temper.  Her trained eye had
caught the minute change in tension as he braced for her condemnation.

When she gave no reaction, he drew breath to say something less
forgivable.

But the wry, patient tilt to her eyebrows set him back, and the malice
he used to defend his deepest feelings bled away.

His attention combed over all of her then, from the heavy auburn hair
spilled, loose from the braid that constrained its unruly fall, to the
three coins for luck a thief's superstition made her sew to the turned
back lining of her cuff, to the silly wet drape of her hem.  Her eyes in
the gloom were soft opal and mystery, and firmly determined in kindness.

Disarmed, he laughed with the warmth she remembered.

"You won't be put off by ill manners, I see." The compassion

that kept his fate hurtful rasped through.  "I'm still in your debt for
past service, but Dakar is forced company enough.  Can

you respect my flawed intentions and leave Merior?"

"That's what you want?" Elaira asked, amazed to find herself steady. Let
him answer, and she would have excuse to evade the entrapment set by
Sethvir's prophecy and Morriel's invidious plots.

"What I want hasn't merited much priority." Arithon pushed to his feet.
A gust raked the shed; the mirrored liquid in the pans shattered into
rings touched off by fallen droplets.

Outside, the plane lay silent, the twins fled off home as a barrage of
fresh rain pocked the gapped shakes of the roof.  "Stay if you wish.  I
can't stop you.  Once the sloop's fitted out, I will sail."

Fretted by currents too dreadful to fathom, he paced, his quick energy a
challenge: should her Koriani arts attempt to finger the changes
Desh-thiere's works and a masterbard's gifts had stamped in him, the
insight was not offered freely.

Elaira arose.  On parting she gave him the two truths she had
unentangled in her oathbound obligations: "Merior has no one trained in
herbals and healing.  And the prophet you keep in your company would as
soon put a knife in your ribs as offer you comfort or friendship."

That evening, tied by Morriel's immutable will, she unpacked her jars
and her remedies and arranged room and rent for an extended stay.

Dakar passed out senseless on the boardinghouse porch, while the
fishermen who crossed the shell flats on return from their dories were
arrested by a cascade of lyranthe notes.  The melodies burned like
sparks through the dusk, by turns exalted to a tingling joy, or else
plangent with a sorrow to uproot the heartstrings and make the very
stars seem to shimmer through the clouds like strewn tears.

Dispatch

Captain Mayor Pesquil, commander of the Northern League of Headhunters,
straightened up from his examination, knee deep in grass rimed with
frost.  His expression stayed as closed as a steel trap as he surveyed
the site of the latest massacre.  The dead did not reek any less in the
cold, nor for having been chewed on by predators.  Neither was Pesquil
inclined to waste effort in fits of useless swearing.

"This was barbarian work, for a surety," he announced.  Bland as a bust
in a tearoom, he regarded the hands left befouled from close-up study of
corrupt flesh.

The green-faced officer at his side swallowed noisily.  "But the wagons
weren't robbed!  Why should clan reivers slaughter bound men, then leave
fine Southland silks behind to molder?"

Pesquil's thin lips curled, dimpling the scars left gouged in his cheeks
from a childhood infection of the pox.  "I recognize the knife work. You
would as well, were you seasoned enough to have seen the barbarian brats
under Arithon's command slitting the throats of our wounded beside the
Tai Quorin."

Folded over by involuntary reaction, the city garrison officer crouched
beneath the turned leaves of a hazel bush to retch.

The headhunter captain's dry scorn pursued him.  "Better puke fast and
be done.  You're riding at once for Etarra." A leathery, thin figure in
a dust-drab surcoat, Pesquil moved off to mete out a round of brisk
orders.

His personal troop would remain and mount a stiff guard on the road,
while the division of city garrison split off from patrol and returned
at speed to the Mayor of the Northern Reaches.

Propped back erect, blanched and shaking, the officer wiped his chin and
waved toward the corpses rowed in bound bundles beyond the angular,
fib-splayed skeletons of oxen still yoked in the mold-furred leather of
rotting harness.  "My lord, before we ride out, surely we should spare
an hour and see the fallen are decently burned."

Paused beside his stocky, brush-scarred gelding, Pesquil reached for his
saddle pack and freed a waterskin from its hide lacing.  He yanked out
the stopper with his teeth.  While the officer attended him, diffident,
he used the last, warm dregs to sluice the corruption from his fingers.
At length, around the plug of moist cork, his thin lips pulled back in
conclusion.

"Let the bodies stay as they lie."

Not too shaken to show outrage, the officer gathered himself.

"But-" Pesquil spun about, killed refutation with a glare like sheared
iron, then ejected the cork into a horny palm.  "I said let them lie."

Unhurried, but efficient, he recapped the flask, gouged a shred of
gristle from a thumbnail, then reached beneath his mail to blot his damp
knuckles on his gambeson.

"Tactics before sentiment, always.  I don't wish Red-beard's Companions
warned off by any smoke.  Let his barbarians stay encamped in this
region, unaware.  And when they raid again, we'll be prepared for them.
My men will gain the bounties they merit.  Better than last rites that
yon murdered bones have no use for, your victims will be granted due
revenge."

Through narrowed, joyless eyes, Pesquil watched the shaken officer
hasten to rejoin his troop.  Then he set his boot in the stirrup,
mounted, and dug in spurs and bit to rein his mount around and ride out.
The time had come to act on his gnawing suspicion, that these late
bloody raids were not done for spite, nor for revenge.  In the unerring
instinct that had won him his commission, the headhunter commander
sensed this slaughtered caravan lay connected with the Shadow Master.

A fortnight later, the stench of corrupt flesh a memory that rankled no
less, Captain Mayor Pesquil cast his jaundiced regard on the
gold-bordered curtains, the ebony and ivory inlaid footstools, and a
sumptuous tasseled carpet which silenced his predatory tread, and
clashed in evil virulence against green and purple tiles of fired
enamel.  The tastes of the city seneschal were typically Etarran.  The
embers in the hearth discharged enough heat to wilt a hothouse flower.

Snake still in his formal black-and-white surcoat and silver gauntlets,
Pesquil parked his lean length before a massive, carved desk.  He worked
his jaw muscles in irritation as the bootlicking little secretary
scurried to fetch the mayor's seneschal from his nap.

The courtesy expected as that personage appeared, yawning and
straightening his furred brocades and gold chains, was no custom Pesquil
subscribed to.  No bow did he give, no preamble in flowery language; he
scorned men of pedigree and privilege as naturally as he hated
barbarians.

He presented his case with the ripping flat brusqueness of a slap dealt
to shame an incompetent.  "When was the last time this city received any
courier or message from the southcoast?"

The city's chubby seneschal crumpled into his upholstered chair.

A florid man with watery eyes, he rearranged his feathered hat, turned
his knuckles to admire the sparkle of his rings, and raised his penciled
black eyebrows.  He took his time answering; men arrived without
appointment to make demands with crude manners well deserved to wait
upon his pleasure.

"Summer, I should think.  Why care?"

Pesquil clamped his fists in forbearance.  "Lord Commander Harradene's
still out on campaign?" A drawn pause; a languid nod; Pesquil's next
question rapped back fast as a ricochet.

"Who's acting captain of the garrison?"

Etarra's seneschal stiffened his spine, disdainful.  "You scarcely
needed to disturb me to ask what any servant could tell you."

A moment of locked wills, while bleak, cold black eyes stared down the
pompous official.  At length the seneschal blotted moisture from his
fashionably powdered cheeks and gave in.  "Gharmag's sick with the
cough.  His senior staff sergeant holds the temporary command."

Another pale-cheeked puppy with pedigree whose father deemed he needed
hardening, Pesquil remembered.  No twitch of disgust crossed the raised
bones of his features.  Etarra's army had lost more than a skilled
captain with Gnudsog's death in Strakewood; a strategist of unrefined
tastes and no pretensions, he had at least kept a finger on the pulse of
rumor in the drovers' dives and taverns.

"Let me tell you what I learned in one hour from four caravan guards
just in from North Ward," Pesquil said.

The seneschal bristled.  "But this is outrageous!  To barge in and
berate me for not consorting with riffraff in the streets.  For your
insolence, I should demand a review o your competence."

"Try." Pesquil bared yellowed teeth, his mailed fist at ease on the
sword responsible for harvesting more clan scalps than any other blade
in the northern reaches.  "This city's ignorant riffraff, as you name
them, have word of the Master of Shadow.  They bandy tales in our
taverns that every misbegotten sailor's told his grandmother since the
traders' galleys berthed in winter dry dock!"

The overbred smirk on the seneschal's face dissolved like wax left near
a fire.  "What?"

"On the night of summer solstice, the city of Jaelot was half torn to
wreckage by a sorcerer who lived there for months in disguise, but left
with black hair and green eyes." Unmoved by the seneschal's pasty-faced
shock, Pesquil inflected his next lines like the cut and riposte of
lethal steel.  "Alestron, downcoast, suffered an explosion inside a
locked armory that killed seven men.  Although the s'Brydion duke is no
fool, and his best troops combed the countryside for a fugitive who bore
the selfsame description, no culprit was found.

Arithon s'Ffalenn has come out of hiding in Melhalla.  If the guild
ministers' council has not paused to wonder, or take steps to see why no
messengers came through from that region, somebody had better act now.
Or I'll personally roust Lord Governor Morfett away from counting jewels
for his daughter's trousseau over this."

"Right away, right away!" The seneschal flurried a hand to dispatch his
limp secretary on the errand.

Pesquil watched the agitated hurry raised by his news in stone-faced,
scalding ill humor.  Braced for days of political maneuvering while
Etarra's beribboned city governance primed in agitation to act, he
decided, cold nerved, that he would arrange to carry the dispatches sent
to Avenor himself.

A handpicked contingent of his headhunters would ensure information
reached Prince Lysaer with all speed.

Shalkedown

On the morn that Pesquil's company embarked from Etarra under dismal,
sleeting skies for their arduous winter journey to Avenor, balmy
southern winds flapped the petitions of a newly launched sloop, moored
amid a damascened circle o re ection in the distant, turquoise waters of
Merior.  The Shadow Master, whose misdeeds were named in Governor
Morfett's sealed dispatches, scarcely looked the mage-trained minion of
evil.  Clad in a plain linen shirt and loose trousers, he carried no
weapon beyond a rigging knife.  The tanned hands that drove the sweeping
stroke of his oars as he rowed the sloop's tender ashore were innocent
of spells or subterfuge.

Certainly no villager knew him for the author of uncivil deeds as he
leaped barefoot into the shallows, beached his dory, and strode through
the dunes and shoulder-high oat grass to call at the whitewashed cottage
of Mistress Jinesse.  Two fishermen who idled on shore leave grinned in
lewd interest, for the widow's battened windows gave clear indication
that she wished no truck with any visitor.

Arithon s'Ffalenn stood braced in the sun-washed sand of her yard, a
crooked grin on his lips.  Then he drew his rigging knife, pried the
blade between the shutters, and slit the loop of cord that hooked the
inside fastening pegs.  As the loosened panels creaked wide, he laid a
hand flat on the sill, saluted the watchers, and neatly vaulted through.

A dauntless shriek and a fishwife's imprecations drifted through the
cracked boards.  A mockingbird settled on the rooftree startled in a
flash of barred wings.  Then the bolt grated back and the widow's
painted door crashed open, not to eject an impecunious male caller, but
to liberate her towheaded twins, who bounded through, yelling their
excitement, an overstuffed duffel slung between them.  The panel flapped
agape in the sea breeze.  Something suspiciously like crockery crashed
and broke against an inside wall.  Moments later, Arithon emerged, the
widow held in tow by her wrists.

"Really!" She tried to plant her feet, overbalanced, and stumbled into
him.

Not about to waste the opportunity, Arithon grinned and snaked an arm
around her waist.  She pounded his shoulder with the fist just freed,
and fingers pulled untimely from the mixing of bread dough shed small
puffs of blown flour.

Jinesse shrieked, "It's the woman who brews simples you should be
dragging to your lair, not 1, and certainly not my two children!"

"I do have nicer manners than to haul you unwilling to the shell flats,"
Arithon admonished.  His smile only widened, and she realized: they were
bound due east for the beach.  She turned her red face, and through
disarranged hair, saw the little sloop perched like a gull on jeweled
waters.

Her cheeks drained to ghastly white.  "Fiends and devils take your
interfering spirit.  I don't like boats.  Let me be."

"Quite the contrary," Arithon demurred, his smooth voice jarred by her
struggles, "I've decided the first lady to board Talliarthe should be
one afraid of the sea."

Jinesse howled.  "You named your blighted vessel Talliarthe!" Her terror
now spurred by indignation, she emphasized with a chop that glanced
scatheless off the hard-knit muscles of his chest.  "How fitting!"

"Well, yes," said Arithon, agreeably pleased; his sloop's namesake was
the legendary sea sprite reputed to spirit off maidens who wandered
inside the tidemark.  "Don't be angry.

Your girl Feylind made the suggestion." Staggered as a woman two fingers
taller than his height thrashed and battered at his composure, he tucked
his chin, changed grip, and hoisted.

Jinesse gave a pealing yell that all but deafened his right ear, then
found herself tossed belly down over his shoulder.  A flock of feeding
rails scattered and took wing like thrown birch chips.  The twins
ignored her cries and launched the dory, while Arithon made a gallant's
apology and waded undaunted through the surf.

"You know I don't swim!" The widow's plea cut off on a racked jolt of
breath as he ducked.  The horizon spun through a sickening circle.
Through the disheveled locks ripped loose from lost pins, Jinesse saw
herself deposited with the duffel on the stern seat.  Panic overwhelmed
her.  She grabbed an oar and slashed to beat off her kidnapper, now
waist deep in green water with both hands clamped on the thwart to hold
the dory against an onrushing comber.

Arithon dodged the whistling attack.  The oar blade smacked short in
necklaced foam.  Gouged spray sheeted skyward and left him drenched and
still laughing.  "Don't say," he gasped, breathless.  "If you could
swim, you'd jump ship.  It's Ath's own blessing you don't."

Jinesse spat out the taste of brine.  She mopped a plastered swath of
hair from her neck, her glare fully spoiled by the trickling sting of
salt water.  Then his firm push shot the dory ahead through the froth,
and fright ripped a scream from her throat.

Arithon breasted the crest.  Sleeked in wet clothes and lean as an
otter, he vaulted the gunwale.  Diamond streams of runoff spattered from
his hair, no impediment as he twisted his purloined loom out of the
widow's locked grasp.  While shrieks that would credit a wild harpy
shredded the midmorning quiet, he proceeded with his abduction.

Watching from shore, Merior's idle villagers absorbed every nuance and
chuckled themselves into stitches.

"Well, it's fitting!" declared the boardinghouse landlady, drawn to her
porch with her broom still in hand to oversee the outcome of the fracas.
"That Jinesse has been too straitlaced for health since the sea took her
husband.  Yon's a comely enough young man, for an outsider.  His company
just might lend a bloom to her cheeks.  Mayhap then she'll stop fussing.

To hear her carry on, you'd swear those poor twins were like to drown in
Garth's pond!"

A kindly neighbor volunteered to douse the widow's fire and close up her
vacated cottage.  Over their laundry and their baking, Merior's gossips
warmed to loquacious speculation.

Lulled under mild southern sunlight, they remained unaware that larger
threads of happenstance tied their favored visitor to an imminent muster
of armies.

The prophet whose gift of sight might have warned them held himself
oblivious by acrimonious design.

Having twice stifled the onset of his talent for prescience, Dakar
sprawled in a drunken stupor in the berth he had inhabited since the
hour of the little stoop's launching.  He moaned green faced in his
blankets, while the waters broke into chop and shoaled with the tide off
Scimlade Tip, and the neat, painted dory bobbed to her destination.

The vituperative outrage of the widow mingled with gull calls and the
delighted shouts of children.  Talliarthe's insolent, black-haired
master boarded his passengers and cleated his tender to a towline.

Then he slipped the pretty sloop's mooring and spread smart, tanbark
sails to the wind.

Five days of fair weather winds coaxed Jinesse from the grip of pale
nerves.  The sloop sailed through her shakedown like a pert, saucy lady,
the slack as the breeze stretched new stays drawn in daily, and the
promise of her design proven through in a smooth dance of passage.

Jinesse emerged from clenched fear to final, exhausted recognition that
her dread of blue waters gnawed her hollow and sick to no purpose.

The twins thrived on clean sun and hours spent fishing from the stern
rail.

Arithon's company proved polite but evasive.  His assiduous good manners
at last reassured her that his plans matched his stated intent: to wean
away her visceral distrust of the sea.

At dusk, with the black, notched forests of the southcoast a lacework
border to a cobalt sky strung with stars, the little sloop's decks
offered peace.  While the moon spilled a path of molten light on dark
waters, Talliarthe sailed lightly west.

Soothed by the whisper of the wake against the crocheted caps on the
wavecrests, the widow perched on the cabintop with her knees tucked up
in clasped arms.  The strung tension she had suffered since her
husband's loss had eased with the days.  She could breathe the sea air,
content, while the breeze off the sail combed her loose hair and spun
the ends into tangles.

A lithe shadow against the frame of the cockpit, the Prince of Rathain
stood in his loose linen shirt and plain jerkin, the tiller braced in
hands that other nights, in quiet anchorage, had woven wizardly magic on
his lyranthe.  The twins slept below, entangled like kittens in a berth;
Dakar lay wedged in the forepeak, his bilious temper stilled by the ale
provisioned in casks at Shaddom.

Enspelled by the moment's tranquillity, enervated by the unaccustomed
freedom of having no household and no cares, Jinesse gave timid rein to
curiosity.  "Why did you come to Merior?"

Arithon's face turned, his steep, angled features inscrutable against
stars and sky.  His answer came back unhurried, in the form of a chorus
from a sailor's chantey.  "'Where sands lie like sugar, heave, me
bullyboys, ho!  Whereflowers bloom red, and the lily fair maids, boys,
the maidens never say no."' When his light lines met with prying
silence, he did not again shy from the subject.  "Why ask?"

"Somebody must." A film of moisture cemented her palms to her shins.
"Nobody harmless has scars such as yours, and you made a free gift of
your blazon."

The sloop rocked over a swell, cupped a gust in taut gear, and thrummed
into a complacent heel.  Arithon braced a foot against the leeside
locker and nursed his weight against the helm as water chuckled past the
rudder.  "No secret there.

Dakar will spill anything, drunk."

Jinesse matched his evasion with flat truth.  "He hasn't, you know. He's
wary of you as the man who burned his tongue once too often at the
feast."

Arithon flashed her a smile.  "Well he should be.  Did you dare ask him
why?"

Warned by a note like the slick draw of steel from its scabbard, Jinesse
raised thin fingers to hook wind-ruffled hair from her lashes.

"The cobbler's wife tried.  She said afterward she'd take the simpler
challenge and pry open an oyster barehanded."

Arithon gave a musical, soft laugh.  "You know who I am.

You'll have heard the dire rumors.  Since you never exposed me, I prefer
the belief that my conduct has lent foothold for trust." A headsail
whispered into a luff.  He stretched, flicked a line off a cleat, and
with the strength that was his most understated attribute, hardened a
line with deft precision.  The sloop quickened and sheared ahead to a
clipped lisp of foam.

Disturbed phosphorescence scattered like dropped sparks in the plowed
black waters of her wake.

Jinesse bit her lip, uncertain.  If the prince who had knit a torn
thread in her destiny seemed content to leave matters there, she owned
no such depths of self-assurance.  "If your purpose in bringing me is
served," she pressed, "then why not put about and sail back?"

That annoyed him; the line of his shoulders stiffened under the rippling
play of his shirt.  "It is night.  There is quiet.  Why pick at
intangibles like a harridan?"

Hers, now, the power of reticence.  Her children were below decks, all
their safety given into his hands.  If he was not a criminal, she wished
him to explain why the talk of the traders should malign him.

An impatient moment later, Arithon answered, inflectionless and curt. "I
have not deceived.  I have business to attend in Southshire, and a
personal pledge to meet at Innish."

A puff of wind dashed the sloop forward.  The challenge Jinesse barely
dared to utter fell eclipsed in the leap of white spray from the bow.
"Why not return me to Merior first?"

He heard anyway; over the work of the tiller, she met his blunt
exasperation.  "Because I am not free, lady.  Time is the hunting pack
set at my heels, and the future, the Thorn in my conscience.  Your dread
of seafaring is assuaged.  Your children are able to develop their given
gifts as they mature.  At Southshire, you need not go ashore."

"And at Innish?"

A queer catch of grief half strangled itself in his throat.  He said in
forced lightness that had everything to do with shedding defenses he had
no wish to lower, "Did you never think that I might need comfort or
reassurance in return?  What awaits me at Innish is a bereaved wife, and
a grown daughter who never knew her father.  Their loss is not beyond
pity to encompass.  But as a man raised in the absence of close family,
I find myself disadvantaged.  The ways of women's hearts are written in
no chart.  I go as a dead friend's emissary into a hostile home. Forgive
my presumption, for asking the kindness of a stranger for my guide."

Shamed, Jinesse averted her face.  But the damage was done, his veneer
of contentment peeled away.  Her questions had distressed his faith in
her trust beyond her small powers to mend.

"You wish a swift end to this passage, lady?" Arithon prodded.

With scarcely a pause, he bent, caught a line and lashed his tiller.
Needled to sharp, restless energy, he leaped onto the foredeck to end a
conversation she had no more heart to pursue.  The topsail and flying
jib were broken out and trimmed in merciless hard curves to slice the
wind.  Talliarthe responded.

The heel of her deck became animated, then violent, in concert with her
master's mood.  Arithon returned, soaking wet, to shoulder the pull of
her tiller.  He forced her painted bow three points nearer to the wind;
and halyards and rigging thrummed to the plaintive keen of forced speed.

To remain abovedecks was to become showered with spindrift raked up like
blown ice off the bow.

Stung by cruel salt and whipped by a dank lash of hair, Jinesse retired
to her berth.  A last glimpse through the hatchway before she fell
asleep showed Arithon's profile notched in silhouette against a
frost-point backdrop of white spray.

Withdrawn and determined, he pitched his sloop before the brute winds as
though the triumph of his handiwork against the elements could vindicate
her rejection of his integrity.

Even had Jinesse been inclined to resume her appraisal of his conscience
and character, Arithon s'Ffalenn gave her no chance.  He drove his
little sloop in a wreath of white wake to Southshire, made landfall in
the dead of night, and rowed himself ashore before his passengers
wakened at dawn.

Left no tender at an anchorage outside the moorings used by the traders'
galleys, too distant to hail a shoreside lighterman, Dakar paced the
decks and fumed.  Like Jinesse, unless he wished to swim the broad mouth
of the channel, he could do naught else but wait.

Arithon returned before nightfall in a dory laden with fresh provisions.
The sacks of flour and the casks could not account for the telltale
scent of tarred rope and sawdust, or the madcap glint in his eyes.  If
he refused to confide in the joy of his success, neither did he keep
overt secrets.  The papers he cached in the sloop's tiny chartlocker
were contracts, ribboned with the seals of the shipwright's guild.  His
commerce had been with craftsmen and ropemakers; a blind half-wit could
deduce his intent to found a shipyard.  What use he would make of that
asset, Jinesse balked to contemplate.  She shared, where she could, the
blooming, self-sufficient contentment of her children and left Dakar to
muddle his wits with beer.

As plainly as she might, she let the Prince of Rathain keep his peace
with the secrets of his past.  Her tolerance did little to win back his
easy company; no ploy she tried stayed his drive to pitch himself and
his sloop to the bleak, willful limit of performance.

Talliarthe made landfall at Innish a fortnight past the winter solstice.

To her dying day, Jinesse would recall her first sight of the city; the
spindled, coral towers meshed into sky, a gilt-edged silhouette that
turned slowly rose against a fringe of dawn clouds.

While Feylind and Fiark curled at her sides, she marveled at the long,
lean lighters that ferried the ships' crews ashore, black shapes like
cut paper, with talisman scrolls or carved heads of beasts snarling at
bow and stern.  The cries of fish sellers drifted over lavender water,
then the riffling stir of wind, with its mudsoaked scent of green river
delta skeined with incense from the balcony braziers lit in brothels and
rich ladies' boudoirs.  Jinesse watched the light brighten the
lace-roofed, pennoned towers; the scalloped merlons of the curtain walls
where Shand's old blood royalty had walked; the pastel drum towers with
their odd, paned windows where the high king's council once held its
yearly court; and in her ears rang sweet showers of harmonics as the
living prince of quite another kingdom tuned a new set of strings on his
lyranthe.

Innish was famed as the jewel of the Shand.  As though spell wrought,
the moment held nothing mundane: no blackening smoke from a chimney
fire, no wind-borne taint of rot from the tanneries.  Even the catcalls
the sailors flung at the whores who plied the dockside sounded lyric,
slurred as they were in the broad-voweled southcoast dialect.

Then Arithon damped his last, ringing chord and arose, a groomed
stranger in a black doublet corded with silver.  He wore hose and boots
with embroidery and buckles, and a silk shirt with points tipped with
pearls.  Jinesse slipped her grip on the twins, kissed them both, and,
unasked, remained in position at the sloop's rail.

"If you desire my presence, I'm ready," she said.

That won his most fleeting smile.  "Dakar has been bludgeoned into
sobriety.  If he falls overboard, do you trust your twins to fish him
out of the harbor?"

Arithon waited until her nerves softened, then lashed the fleeces to
protect the lyranthe, slipped thin, gray gloves over his fingers, and
handed her down into the bobbing dory.  He climbed in himself and
settled to his rowing with wordless, defined concentration.

Seen up close, the wharfside of Innish wore her decor like a tawdry,
overdressed grandame fallen from wealth on hard times.  The pilings were
shagged green with weed, like harbor landings anywhere else.  The air
reeked of grease, decayed fish, and blood sausage, and the pretty pastel
arches that reared above the crowd wore a pox of gray mildew and mold.
The whores by city edict were required to wear bells.

Their jingle chimed in sour descant over the oaths of the longshoremen
bent under loads of boxes and bales.  The gutters lay pooled with sewage
dammed from egress down the culverts by thrown offal from the vendors,
who cleaned hares for roasting over ramshackle portable braziers.

"I'm sorry," Arithon said as Jinesse shrank from the stench.

He peeled off a glove.  "Here, cover your nose.  The streets will be
cleaner past the waterfront." He left the dory in the paid care of a
street child, took her arm, and drew her into turmoil like a carnival.

Brushed and buffeted, harried by stall keepers who pressed her to buy
pins and ribbons and braided loaves of sesame bread, Jinesse longed for
sleepy Merior, with its palm-shaded beaches and its huckstering
squabbles between the gulls that flocked and dipped above the women who
sat salting the fish barrels.

By the time they had crossed the dockside market and climbed the low,
graded streets that led into the affluent upper town, Jinesse looked
overset.  Arithon sat her down beside the lip of a public spring, shaded
by the stooped branches of a damson tree.  A girl with a goose switch
and three honking charges loaned her a jug for a drink.

Inside a grilled mansion window, a caged bird trilled.  A fat gander
chuckled its bill in the water that ran, metallic with iron, over the
jaws of a gryphon's head fitting.

"The house isn't far," Arithon said presently.  While her head had been
spinning, he must have asked for directions.

Jinesse gave back his glove and looked up as he helped her to rise.  She
found his face shuttered like quartz.  "You dread this."

His step stayed deliberate on the cobbles.  The polished buckles on his
boot,cuffs reflected trapped bits of sky as the leaf-filtered light
flicked across them.  "No," he said finally.

"But I do feel inadequate for the burden my master laid upon me."

His hand tightened, unthinking, on the cover of his lyranthe, and she
realized he had reached his destination.

The painted little town cottage had once been a milking parlor, though
the narrow, high windows were now graced with shutters, and the double
door fastened with wrought brass.  Nestled in a border of carob trees,
walls of baked clay kept out the heat, and moss caked the barrel-tiled
roof.  Poised on the grained marble doorstep, Arithon gripped the
knocker and tapped.

The door snapped open, as if the rawboned woman inside had been watching
the street through a spy hole.  She wore straw-colored hair swept back
in combs, and despite a cherry round nose and full lips, her expression
was pinched and unfriendly.

"The Sorcerer said we might expect you," said Halliron's daughter in
clipped greeting.  Her gaze swept the hard and the woman in his company
as if she hoped to find something to lend her the excuse to send them
packing.

Only Jinesse knew the man well enough to discern the tension in his
shoulders; his voice as he spoke was civil.  "My name is Arithon
s'Ffalenn.  As you have surmised, I was your father's last apprentice."

"We were told.  You've taken your time, have you not, to deliver his
final bequest?" The woman jerked the door wide.

"By all means, come in and get this over with.  I can't imagine the
experience will mean very much, though my mother may feel differently. I
could ask that you not make her cry.  She hasn't been well, and further
suffering will scarcely be a boon to her."

Arithon entered the gloom of a pretty, tiled foyer.  Potted flowers in
enameled crockery mantled the air in perfumes that failed to cut the
underlying astringency of herbal pastes dispensed for sore joints.  The
woman gave a self-conscious sniff, fingered a crock as she passed in a
habitual check for dust, then led onward, over floors of fired tiles
that made civilized replacement for rows of wooden stanchions for
cattle.  In a quiet parlor, she bade her visitors to wait.

"Let me see whether Mother's awake." She did not look back as she spoke,
but bustled in prim hurry through a door sleek with old copal varnish.

Arithon glanced about, at the tasseled, stuffed hassocks, scattered
footstools, and cushioned chairs with their painstaking squares of
embroidery; at walls tiered with shelves and glass cabinets jammed with
alabaster ornaments, figurines twined out of jeweler's wire, and
Cloisonne flasks too small to be other than bric-a-brac.  He turned
once, full circle.  Small as he was, the room begrudged even his neat
grace.  The seats set waiting at every quarter were a bastion, a wall,
that had failed to repel boredom and solitude.  Pressed on all sides by
collected clutter, mute evidence of empty lives crying out to be filled,
Arithon bent his head, hands folded on the cord that hung his lyranthe.

Jinesse bit her lip, half-suffocated.  In this house, she recognized a
trace of herself, and a fate but narrowly escaped; widowed, embittered,
she had nearly done as this mother had, and hemmed in her children
between tidy walls and old grief.

Talliarthe had delivered her from far worse than fear, but she had no
chance to share gratitude.

The closed door whisked open and Halliron's daughter beckoned the pair
of them on.

Arithon stepped through into a bedroom alcove deep and musty with
shadows.  Jinesse entered on his heels, into air that smelled of age and
sickness and lye soap.  An armoire held a clutter of creams and jars,
prinked with hard glints off cut glass.

The bed, made up in ivory linen, cradled a narrow-eyed crone, propped
board straight amid a froth of lace-edged pillows.

"We know how he died," the former Masterbard's goodwife opened in
quavering, vitriolic rudeness.  "We heard he lived like a wastrel,
traveling between towns in a cart."

Arithon managed a smile with his bow.  "Dame Deartna," he said in formal
greeting.  "I am sent at Halliron's bequest.

Have I leave?"

The hag jerked a clawed wrist.  "It was the music, he insisted.

That's what took him from us." Her mouth tucked into colorless pleats.

"I much doubt his blankets stayed empty, all those years."

Discomfited by the beldame's evil glance, Jinesse looked in vain for a
place to sit down.  The bedchamber's single chair was already occupied
by the daughter's angular bulk, which left only a footstool for Arithon.
He took it, uncomplaining.

His ringless hands wasted no motion as he unstrung the cord and slipped
the lyranthe from her wrappings.

Jinesse found an unobtrusive corner by the clothes chest.

The daughter tapped an impatient foot.  The old lady jerked out a
handkerchief and honked her nose while, nerveless in patience, the
musician corrected the pitch of his strings.

"We have no use for songs, you know," the daughter said in jaundiced
scorn.

A last harmonic speared the gloom, cut in midflight as Arithon stopped
off the string.  His regard swept the invalid in the bed, measured the
uptilted chin of the daughter.  Their insults seemed to prick him like a
challenge as he said, "Ladies, let us see if you also have no use for
pity." His study lingered on them through a moment of trying quiet. Then
he set fingers to fret and string and tore the locked stillness into
melody.

One measure, two; the passion of his fingering arrested the air, and
then remelted it into a cry.  Notes winnowed free like leaves ripped on
storm winds, blended into cascades that transfixed the heart with
regret.  The music wrung out under Arithon's hands begged no forgiveness
for an abandonment of home and ties, but appealed for understanding
through an offering of a beauty too wild, too forcefully inspired to be
held or shackled in promises.

Arithon sat rapt, head bent to his playing.  When he raised his voice in
song, he did not see the elderly lady raise crabbed hands to her cheeks
to brush off tears.  Only Jinesse, herself half-paralyzed by his spell,
saw the mask of aggressive indifference crack from the face of the
daughter.  The woman hunched, still and dumb, while the denial and
resentment known throughout life unraveled to bare the unanswered pain
of a fatherless child's yearning.

The unsubtle, searching scald of verses gave back husband and father,
not as his family wished him to be, but as he had lived, delineated in
imperfections and grand strengths.  This was not the eulogy Arithon had
delivered for Halliron in Jaelot, but in fierce words and harmony the
hard's own statement, that given a mortal's years to live and to love,
the mastery of his calling had demanded to be shared in lands far
removed from his hearthstone.

By the time the last stanza was sung to its close, and the final chord
rang thin and faded, the old lady sat dry eyed.  Her hands rested
composed on the counterpane, while the young musician sent as emissary
damped his lyranthe and looked up.

Arithon waited, suspended in stillness, until she was ready for speech.

"My husband taught you." Her desiccated voice had softened from censure.
"Did he mention that he played that selfsame song on the very day he
departed?  But he did not style it your way.

Steady under interrogation, Arithon laced his lean fingers over the
lyranthe's silenced strings.  "The notes and the lyrics were Halliron's,
as written.  But by his straight bequest, the arrangement was to be my
own."

The daughter in her corner all but ceased to breathe.  Too suddenly
confronted by a Masterbard's empathy that owned power to bind her into
change, the beldame looked away.  "My husband taught you," she murmured.
"You, not his family, were his legacy."

As though pressed to sorrow, Arithon said, "I was his choice for the
next link in a chain that extends back to Elshian's time.  I chose to
reveal what Halliron bequeathed me.

In truth, that is all I can answer for." His gaze on the crone's averted
face did not waver, though the room had grown close, its tied muslin
curtains sealing in the reek of strong remedies.

In an atmosphere thick enough to suffocate, Arithon gathered himself to
finish.  "You should know.  Your goodman was on his way south to be with
you both for his retirement.  An obligation of mine caused his delay.
Blame me, not him, for the untimely manner of his death."

"The Fellowship Sorcerer who returned my husband's

ashes claimed most emphatically otherwise." The old lady

raised a crippled hand from the tight-laced breast of her bedrobe.

"He said, prince, that you were not to be faulted.

But my heart won't heal for a sorcerer's excuses.  I ask a boon to
discharge your debt.  Since my husband died far from home, I would have
you remain in this city through the rest of the season to play.  It is
fitting.  Once Halliron earned mastery , he never returned.  The people
of Innish should be given their chance to share the fruits he has reaped
through your talent."

"Mother, that's hardly fair," the daughter broke in, but Arithon waved
her silent.

Suspended in silence, Jinesse watched the hard, and inwardly begged him
to refuse.  The tranquil retreat he had chosen at Merior held a purpose,
perhaps key to his survival against the threat from the armies in the
north.  He was Teir's'Ffalenn, and royal, and answerable to no soul in
Shand.

Never had the Master of Shadow revealed more of himself than at this
moment, when he arose in compassion and bowed.

In words unflawed by impatience, he answered the lonely, vengeful
request of Halliron's abandoned widow.

"I will play the taverns of Innish, and gladly.  But on condition that
you and your daughter will agree to be present at every performance."

The irony dogged Jinesse, over and over, as a return trip was made to
the harbor to engage a reliable merchant galley to carry herself and her
twins home to Merior: that had Arithon's playing been one whit less
brilliant, the old crone would surely have refused him.

Visions and Voyages

A winter gale threads uneasy drafts through a taproom in Narms, while
Captain Mayor Pesquil spills a moneybag over a tabletop and shouts down
the balky argument of a merchant captain: "You will rig your damned
vessel for a northern passage.  The message I bear is urgent and I won't
stand idle for half measures.  Better to risk delay iced into some
benighted cove than be waylaid in the Thaldein passes by Maenalle's
barbarians.  I'll sail to north Camris and arrive in Avenor by
springtide, whatever the price for your service......

In a dockside bordello, abovestairs from the taproom where a Masterbard
plies his lyranthe, the Mad Prophet stirs from replete stupor, wrung
sick by the tingle of impending prophecy; while the doxie who shares his
bed giggles through his fit, he cries words of warning concerning a
discorporate spirit away on a desperate errand that stirs Sethvir at
Althain Tower to alann....

Sped by the last winter storms, the smuggler's brig Black Drake plows
bold passage between the gray whitecaps of Minderl Straits, and beside
her lady captain on the quarterdeck, Jieret, Earl of the North, chafes
in restlessness, bearing news of grave import for a sovereign prince he
has not seen for seven years....

XI.  Disclosure

he trader brig Captain Mayor Pesquil engaged from Narms by main force
made safe port at Miralt Head Twith her cargo of crystal and iron ore,
her fine southern wines and dyed fabric, and her rigging rimed with
dirty ice.

She would shelter through the season and refit gale-torn sails, then
return on the milder airs of spring, laden with furs and seat oil, to
rich profits at each destination.

For the headhunter captain and his hardened troop of scouts, the
prospects ahead were less rosy.  To cross the Plain of Karmak at
midwinter meant a journey of commensurate discomfort.  The inland roads
had few inns.  What farmsteads and village hostels would cater to
travelers kept their custom for seasonal caravans.  In the cold months,
their guest beds were stripped bare behind locked shutters, their
mattress ticking haven for mice.  Once the roads lay hardened under
drifts and white ice, and the trade traffic waned, fare for travelers
sold at a premium.  Fuel and supplies could not be replenished before
spring, and since storms off the gulf made each year's thaws chancy and
difficult to predict, proprietors were sparse with provender.

The mobile, armed company enroute from Etarra grew to hate the whine of
the winds, and the slash of driven ice that clung in each fold of their
cloaks.  Helms lined with fleeces sang to the rattle of sleet.

Nights were bitter and long, the ones spent unsheltered frosty with
stars, while the howls of wolf packs rang through the frozen glens and
made the horses drag, snorting, at their picket lines.

The first thing Captain Mayor Pesquil desired upon his arrival at the
crossroads town of Erdane was the bath he had done without since the
night of his landfall in Miralt.  As an officer of the headhunters'
league, he was entitled to take lodging at half price; as an ally of
Lysaer's, and an accredited affiliate of Etarra's armed garrison, the
Mayor of Erdane extended due courtesy and offered him a minor guest
suite in the palace.

The scouts were given cots in the barracks, and silver to seek their
pleasures in the wall district.

Sunk in a brass tub of suds and hot water, his bristled face wreathed in
white steam, Pesquil laced a sinewy, hard-knuckled hand over the knob of
one knee; with the other, he sloughed off the flaked gray skin gnawed by
frostbite between his splayed toes.  His silt-colored eyes were shut
when the soft tap came at his door.  Since he expected a servant with a
razor, he raised a voice gruff as a cutler's rasp and granted permission
to enter.

Instead of a liveried attendant, he received a rustle of damascened
silk, a wafted assault of perfumed air, and a stifled explosion of
giggles.

A train of ladies invaded his chamber, not the painted, brazen hussies
he frequented after hard campaigns, but ones of impeccable pedigree.
These had fine skin and tiny ankles threaded with pearls, and kidskin
slippers.  Their hair lay piled in pinned loops, or dangled down in pert
ringlets, and jewels winked from the ribbons of their gossamer gowns
like fruit rind baked in a solstice cake.

The two with dark hair and cheeks like new apricots were in fact the
mayor's cosseted daughters.  But seen alongside the tawny-haired one in
the lead, the pair might as well have been servants.  Collared in ermine
and lace-worked gold, swathed below in pearied silk and gold tissue
spangled with a seafown glitter of aquamarines, the third lady had a
complexion translucent as alabaster and lashes like the nadir of night.
Even without the magnificent cut of her clothes, her presence seemed
designed by Ath Creator to arrest a man's breath in his throat.

Flushed to the dewlap folds of his neck, Pesquil jammed his shanks
straight.  The wet leather scrape of his buttocks made the brass tub
give tongue like a horn, and soapsuds and water slopped over the rim, to
ring him, glistening, his naked flesh cupped like an embryo amid a flood
of smashed egg.

Proprietary as a hunting tigress, his visitor's glance raked over the
stringy, scarred muscles of his torso.  Her coral pale lips bent before
an amusement whose withering sting left no impact, sheer force of beauty
having long since anesthetized reason.  Galled on by reflex, Pesquil
plunged his hands beneath the scummed water.

An ugly man possessed of an iron dedication, the headhunter captain held
his ground as a wolf might, nipped at by mastiffs.

"Captain Mayor Pesquil," addressed Lady Talith, the affianced bride of
Prince Lysaer s'llessid.  "I much doubt you would travel the breadth of
the continent just to sample Erdane's hospitality.  Since barbarian
scalps are not in season until spring, I trust you carry news of the
Shadow Master?"

Outside the window, gray clouds sheeted the sky.  A sentry called, and a
polearm clanged to signal the change of the watch.  Beyond the open and
violated inside doorway, a woman's voice raised down the corridor,
scolding a child for wet feet.

Talith skirted the rim of the puddle, selected a bulky brocade chair,
and slid it squarely in front of the wardrobe that contained the
captain's fresh clothes.  There she settled herself, while the elder of
the mayor's tittering daughters produced a chatelaines key ring, spun
about, and locked the door.  Her younger sister moved to the hearth,
peered askance with a girlish blush, and snatched up the towels left out
to warm.

"I did not ask for bath attendants," Pesquil said with a grate like the
rough scrape of chain mail.

Talith laced slender fingers in her lap, her eyes direct and her smile,
honey spread over poison.  "You shall have two, if they can break the
latch and escape from the linen closet where we impounded them.  I
suppose some drudge will eventually hear their noise and set them free.
The gossip should be lively, once the mayor's house steward finds we're
all here, quite cozy with his lowborn guest.  Is your silence worth the
displeasure of your host?"

A sinew jumped in Pesquil's lantern jaw.  He had few illusions; his most
guarded point of pride was his station, won through achievement and
competence rather than the accident of pedigree.  Lady Talith was
Etarran, no stranger to sordid jokes played for intrigue.

The Mayor of Erdane's flighty daughters were scarcely in her league,
though their lllvvu, darting glances showed them thoroughly intrigued
with an escapade.

Although Pesquil scorned the confined standards of morality the westland
cities imposed on their women, the mayor's hospitality implied a trust
he misliked the principle of spurning.  Uncomfortably aware of the
youngest girl's fascination with the cockscomb whorls of hair that
seamed the midline of his chest, forced on display before Talith's
dizzying charms, the headhunter willed his hard limbs to relax.  A
rebellious ache beneath the waterline, another bodily part of him
cheerfully rejected self-control.

He was male, after all, and not bloodless.

An absurd pull of laughter twitched Pesquil's mouth.  If he shot up,
streaming sour water to stride naked across the tiles and eject his
unsuitable company, Talith would fairly scream with laughter.  The
daughters' too avid curiosity was unlikely to cause them to faint.

The situation should have been uproarious, had he not been so roundly
outflanked.

He cleared his throat, reached up and tugged off his last stitch, a
greasy lace of leather, then shook hair like iron filings from its
battle braid.  "You want something from me.  The least you can do is
pass the soap."

Talith found the small cake in a tray the upset water had skidded near
her feet.  She bent in a rustle of scent and fine cloth, and obliged his
whim with a vengeance.

The soap cake hurtled across the room.

"Temper!" Pesquil had reflexes like a striking snake; the suds scarcely
rippled around his loins as he stretched and fielded the catch.  "I
gather you don't like Erdane?"

"Is your bath too hot9" Talith's lashes dropped and halfway veiled her
sultry glance.  "If the attentions of the servants are inadequate, you
should be in prime position to judge."

Too aware of his high flush, and while sweat nicked over his
pock-scarred brow, Pesquil lathered his chest.  Highborn chatter and
double entendre never excited him to empty games of wit.  Silence was
more efficient, by his creed, and despite the leap and race of his
pulse, he was cold nerved enough to hold his tongue.

The ladies could blasted well wait until he had washed himself down to
the last puckered scar.  They would discover soon enough he was just a
coarse soldier, prepared to call their bluff.  Were he thrown out of
Erdane, the mayor's lasses would be punished for their silliness.  The
vital news he bore would reach Lysaer that much sooner.

If the pretty dark daughters standing guard upon the doorway showed
unease at his balky character, Talith's fresh poise only heightened
under challenge.  "I am no ornament to be left waiting on a shelf." She
stood, jerked open a drawer, and plucked out the clean holland shirt
scarcely wrinkled from its storage in a saddle pack.

"You have news of Arithon s'Ffalenn.  That will mean war.  I don't
intend to sit here while you rouse my betrothed to muster his armies and
quarter the continent to fight him." A backstep carried her to the
casement.  She flicked the catch, pressed open the leaded panes, and
tossed the shirt upward onto the snow-covered slates of the dormer peak.

Thin through cold air, a whistle spiraled up from the sentry who stood
duty on the wall walk.

"You bloodsucking minx!" Pesquil snapped soapy fingers to the sides of
the tub, while the water sucked and splashed, and the draft raked his
leathered skin to gooseflesh.

Talith smiled.  She would toss out his clothes, and be damned to his
dignity.  His scars would be the talk of every barracks in Erdane, as
well as the boudoirs of the ladies.

There were limits.  "I don't know where the Master of Shadow is laired
up.  But he's disrupted the peace and caused havoc in one city, and
killed seven men in another through an explosion of fire and sorcery.
His movement has been traced southward, along the eastern coastline."
Pesquil's lips quirked like wire in his bristle of black beard.  Eyes as
flat as marsh mud glared upward at Talith, who weighed options as she
might select a ball gown, a pair of hose and breeches in each hand.

"Lady," Pesquil snapped, "that's hardly enough to set armies marching,
and it happens to be the sum of my news."

"You come personally as courier," Tatith contradicted.  The hose
fluttered in the swirl of the wind, then snapped up to join the shirt in
its icy eyrie.  The girls smothered giggles; Talith inspected the
trousers for inspiration, hooked the breech points in playful fingers,
and began to unlace them, strand for strand.

No pity in her, Pesquil judged, that she would neglect the least detail
and fail to fling the towels, and even the benighted sheets off the bed.

"Why?" Talith pressured.

"Because your fussy pack of Etarran dignitaries was too soft for a
winter passage." Fuming through risen veils of steam, Pesquil gave a
barked, ruthless laugh.  "By myself, I'll make sure the message gets
through without barbarian interference.

Prince Lysaer will receive this news before spring.  I leave on the
morrow, and if the Great West Road through Tomir Peaks is closed due to
storms, I'll fare on by way of Teal's Gap."

"That's a fool's errand!" broke in the mayor's older daughter, her hands
clenched white on the door key.  She darted a worried glance at Talith.
"Lady, the pass this madman proposes to cross lies in the Sorcerers'
Preserve."

Every child in the westlands knew tales of that place, where
fire-breathing creatures once the scourge of past ages flew on pinioned
wings sixty spans long.  Whenever the wards at its boundaries weakened
or failed, caravan drovers brought back nightmare accounts of draft
stock slaughtered wholesale, or charred in their traces to bones and
papered carbon.

"If the Khadrim don't flame you to a cinder, or tear you limb from limb
with their jaws, there are hot springs, and mud pots, and lava wells,
and no guide to choose a safe trail." The girl cautioned, "Better to
stay neglected here in Erdane than to find yourself boiled alive."

"Wise advice," Pesquil said, eyes slitted.  "If you think my headhunters
will serve as your escort to Avenor, Lady Talith, I'll skid my bare arse
over every rooftree in this city just to prove you wrong."

"You will take me," Talith said.  The breeches hooked on her fingertips
fluttered out the window, snagged on a flagstaff above the rampart, and
streamed, displaying frayed seams to the wind.  Etarran to her devious
core, she spared not a glance for her nervous accomplices.

Pesquil confronted her tawny magnificence, the water that embraced his
hips chill enough to dampen the dregs of any man's ardor, and the soap
squeezed to pulp in his fists.  "I won't."

Talith held his gaze, locked eye-to-eye.  But her lip trembled ever so
slightly.

Like a kick in the belly, Pesquil recognized that the motive which drove
her was love.  He would not shake that, not if he killed her.

That moment a knock sounded at the locked door.

"The serving lad, arrived to mow off your stubble," Talith said on a
wicked note of triumph.  "We shall both be denounced and thrown out of
Erdane, since I'm the indisputable bad influence."

A truth, Pesquil allowed, as her fluttery accomplices froze short of the
last, outrageous act.

Lysaer's future wife left the gutted armoire and pried the key out of
the one girl's pinched grasp.  She turned the lock, flung the door wide,
and watched like a cat with a mouse in its paws as the page on the far
side gasped and stumbled back in surprise.

"Do you see, I left the bedclothes untouched," she said, and pealed into
a last, merry laugh.

"Lady Talith!" her male victim ground out on a note of teeth-gnashing
fury.  "I'll wear you a set of saddle blisters such as you'll pray for
death to escape!"

Then, as the page dropped his basin and razor and fled, and the
daughters embraced their conspirator in girlish bravado and wished her
safe journey and good health, Pesquil shied the pulped soap out the
window in the wake of his purloined apparel.  Girt in the tepid
discomfort of his bath, he concluded that any prince mad enough to marry
a pedigree Etarran lady deserved to suffer merry hell and intrigue on
the home front.

Just as well the Master of Shadow would afford a sound reason for a
husband to stay absent in the cause of bloody war.

Lysaer would need the violence just to stay sane with that
brazen-mouthed vixen in his bed and ever busy, stitching steel claws
through his vitals.

The first sound heard by visitors to the prince's new city of Avenor was
the sweet, high ring of the armorer's mallets shivering the air between
the stripped branches of the oak groves.

Worn by a long and arduous journey, weary of the suck and splash of her
mount's hooves through the rime of late-season snow, Lady Talith pushed
back her fur-lined hood, the better to take in the view as Pesquil's
cavalcade of headhunters crested the last rise and passed the gap in the
hills.

Ahead, the clear, cold line of the sea slashed a sky like dirty ice.
Flocks of gulls settled like caught twists of paper against the dunes,
crusted with salt-eaten drifts.  The city's unfinished walls commanded a
high knoll, smirched with smoke from the brickmaker's kilns, and alive
as an ants' nest with activity.

Windburned to a high flush, her silken hair silted in the collar of her
cloak, Talith sorted through the jumbled supply sheds, the cruck-built
officer's hall, then squinted against sunlight torn through a broken
cloud layer to pick out the raveled outline of keeps and revetments and
gate turrets.  Inside the honeycomb shapes of partial structures, a
single tower arose, near complete, the spoked beams of its roof line as
yet bare of slate.  The distant snaps of the ox drovers' whips, the
limpid stream of banners, and the squeals of a hog bound for slaughter
strained through the white rush of surf and the trumpet calls of an
officer.

Even through inclement weather, the practice field lay in

use.  Directed by a mounted officer, a field kitchen spread
halfdismantled in churned mud.  A tent billowed flat to shouts and a
timed release of guy ropes, while mule teams jostled supply wagons into
position r o ing.  ar csmen cross )OWS at the butts; grooms with buckets
swarmed up and down the horse lines to tend steaming charges led in hot
from heavy exercise, while the men just dismounted shed empty quivers
and short, compound bows, to take up pikes and renew their drill in the
disciplined formation of foot companies.

When Lysaer's army marched against the Shadow Master, every soldier in
the ranks would be hard trained and multiply skilled in the arts of
warfare.

"I warned you, lady." Pesquil reined his horse into step beside hers,
engrossed in professional survey.  "This place is more barracks than
city.  Your comforts are left back in Erdane."

Talith said nothing, nor moved.  But her horse tossed its head to a
shivering jingle of belled bridle reins before she stabbed in her heels
and sent it downhill at a canter.

"She must have hide like a crocodile," the headhunter lieutenant
complained.  "It's unnatural she should feel so fresh after six ugly
weeks in the saddle."

The journey from Erdane had been trying beyond endurance, even without
the unwanted presence of the lady.

Harried by blizzards, all but frozen to starvation in the Tomir passes,
delayed a fortnight in wait for safe crossing over the ripping torrents
of the Melor River ford, the headhunter party was fortunate to have
reached Avenor before the first thaws.

"Well," said Pesquil in dry humor, "if her nibs strains her mount's
tendons by miring its legs in a ditch, the problem at least will be
Lysaer's."

"Well give her credit, she's anxious for her prince," the lieutenant
grumbled.  "At least she didn't whine about the hardship."

He reined his horse carefully over patched ice and into the rutted mud
where lately the mounted archers had fired volleys into straw sacking.

Servants moved, drab against the mire, recovering those few shafts that
strayed and scoring their markings on a tally.

Pesquil turned his head to eye the bristled targets, then raised
eyebrows spiked like frizzed wire through the fur that lined his conical
helm.  He faced forward, shrugged off a rare thrill of admiration, and
recovered the lapsed thread of his thought.  "You didn't look at her
eyes, man.  That minx isn't eager.  She's vexed.

I'll lay you three royals against your chased silver spurs: the pair'll
meet and have a row like a thunderclap."

Minutes later, unmindful of the sensation she had created in her ride
across the tilt yard, the lady pried herself out of the suffocating hug
her brother had clapped over her on sight.

"Talith, Talith!" His welcome came tempered with consternation.

"What in Sithaer are you doing here?"

Lightly mussed, her furs left ruffled to bent hair and the taint of
lathered war-horse, she tipped up her chin to view the brother parted
from her for a year.

Diegan had grown harder, leaner.  His elegant jewels were replaced by
thick mail and leather that showed the rubbed shine of hard wear.

The dark, handsome features were knit taut to the bone, rugged now with
new angles where the flesh of languid living had burned away.

"By the look of you, I shall have to learn tactics if I'm to share in
the dinner conversation," Talith said.  "You seem a proper commander of
armies.  Though you have busy fellows doing more than one job like
cuckoos packed into a hawk's nest, I didn't count many troops.  Did you
set all your soldiers to laying bricks?"

"Yes, in fact." Diegan swept his fair sister into the buffeting activity
that clogged the invisible division between the armed camp, and the
domain of the masons and laborers.  Over the creak of a dray laden down
with hewn beams, the Lord Commander qualified.  "His Grace insisted the
experience would teach our soldiers some fine points that might help
with future sieges.  You should have seen the mercenaries' expressions
when they heard they'd serve a turn at taking orders from the master
mason."

"And did they?" asked Talith in sidelong malice.

Diegan laughed,strangely bitter.  "Under Lysaer?  He has a gift."

He dodged aloose goat, a handcart crusted with dried mortar, and ducked
the invitation of a blowzy woman festooned in scarlet ribbons.

"For our prince, they would do a groom's chores and whistle.  I could
use your tongue, sister, to scale the rust from my mail." While a pack
of recruits stopped, staring and silly, directly in the midst of the
causeway, he cupped her elbow in his gauntleted hand and gave a firm
steer toward the largest of the camp's timbered buildings.  "Don't mind
the tenderfeet.  Our most seasoned field troops are on campaign."

At Talith's stark glance of surprise, Diegan warmed further to his
subject.  "Our southshore trade routes don't close in winter, and the
Caithwood road is rife with marauding barbarians.

We hire out our finished companies as caravan guards.  They gain
hardening, our treasury takes a share of the merchants' profits when the
goods are sold on destination, and the guilds pay the troops' daily
upkeep."

"How perfectly sensible and dull." Talith raised the mud-splashed hem of
her habit and mounted the gritty, planked steps to the hall.

"And naturally, Prince Lysaer fights beside them?"

"In fact, no.  I thought I was taking you to him." Suave before her
blighted scorn, Diegan hurled back in piquant challenge, "Perhaps I
should pack you straight back to Erdane without a meeting."

Talith bristled against his hand.

"Why are you here, sister?" Direct in a manner she had never seen
before, Diegan searched her face as he might measure an enemy.  "Have
you come to cast off his Grace?"

Behind her smile, Talith was furious.  "You'll have to wait and see." In
Etarra, the gallants would have eaten her alive, were her thoughts to
appear so transparent.

For a second, Diegan poised, mailed fingers spread flat on the
unvarnished door panel.  Then he bashed the portal open, drew her
inside, and the slanting light cut off at his back flashed obliquely
over his teeth.  Caught somewhere between oaths and laughter, he said,
"Lady sister, leave him if you can."

m

Thrown into uncertainty by a reaction too difficult to interpret, Talith
resisted her brother's pressure on her back as he traversed the unlit
hallway.  "Diegan, wait.  We should talk first."

Obstinate, he quickened stride.  "If you are here to break off your
handfasting, by all means, do so.  I shall not stand in your path."

The smells of wax and wet horse rode the shadows; the wool runner was
swept, if continually damp from the traffic of men who shed snow off of
muddy boots.  The boards underneath had been pegged while still green;
seasoned now by the warmth of the hearth peats, they squeaked even to
Talith's light tread.

Conscious of a closed door ahead, and of a heart that beat much too
fast, Talith sidestepped, but could not evade her brother's grip.

Puzzled by the odd, tormented tension that hardened him, she pushed back
in diamond-cool clarity.

"Diegan, the man who led my escort is Etarra's best headhunter, your old
friend Captain Mayor Pesquil."

That halted him.  With a freezing jingle of disturbed mail, Diegan shot
out a fist and gripped his sister's shoulder.  Hair the glossy black of
new ribbon ruffled in the nap of his gambeson as he pulled her a stiff
step closer and searched her face in the dimness.  "Pesquil?

Here?  I saw no banner.  Ath Creator, what has happened?"

Unspoken between them in a corridor too narrow for comfort hung the name
of the Master of Shadow.

In calculated, smiling obstruction, Talith knew just how to twist.

"Why not go ask the Lord Mayor and find out?"

Once, her brother would have shot back some barb to blunt the fresh
thrill of her victory.  Now, determination rode like a stranger on
features she had known all her life.  The Lord Commander who managed
Lysaer's armies simply left her, the swept hilt of his sword dragged in
a screaming scrape across the board wall as he jostled past.

A breath of sudden cold, and the door banged.  Ceded her privacy in the
pent, dreary gloom of the corridor, Talith chewed her lip in hesitation.
She had come here to break off her promise to Lysaer s'llessid.  Love by
itself was not enough to ease the ache of his prolonged absence; her
brother's queer challenge was not rational.  She was Etarran, and
beautiful, and knew her own mind; she never failed to get what she
wanted.

From within the closed chamber ahead, she heard the rise and fall of
someone speaking.  Too proud to eavesdrop like a servant, she shook out
the habit her brother had left wrinkled, stepped forward, and raised the
crude door latch.

The hinges gave without a sound.

She stepped into a late spill of sun, flared through diamond-paned
windows.  Lozenged in thin, patterned light, a carpet woven in the
exquisite taste of Narms's master guildsmen brightened the rough plank
floor.  The walls were paneled, and muted further in tapestries.  A
pearl-inlaid secretary sat at right angles to a desk, and two cushioned
benches carved in ebony.  The rich, leather smell of books and parchment
and a lingering trace of heated wax combined to frame an air of power
and wealth.  A page's velvet cap lay on a footstool by the hearth.
Hedged between a pair of massive candlestands and a table half-buried
under charts, the crown of a golden fair head bent close to that of an
earnest little boy.

"We don't yet have a scribe, that's not civilized, I know," said Lysaer
s'llessid to the child.  "But that doesn't matter.  A page should know
how to fold and seal a document for the day he grows up to be a lord."

The boy said something in dulcet, shy tones.

"The job is only boring before you learn how it's done." A sculptured
hand reached up, snagged a ribbon in Tysan's royal colors from a cache
between quills and inkwell, and resumed patient instruction.  "Here, and
here," Lysaer said, a smile on his lips to tear the heart.  "Now the
knot.  Use two hands this time, and try not to smear the royal star."

A striker changed hands, then the heavy brass seal with the star and
crown sigil of Tysan.  Undone by the page's worshipful concentration as
he backed up with his burden to try afresh, Talith held her fingertips
pressed to her lips as Lysaer s'llessid straightened up.

The light fringed his hair to a leafed blaze of gold.

Unsoftened by the coarser glow of candles, his austere face showed an
unearthly beauty no memory could preserve with due justice.  The impact
of cobalt blue eyes stunned like a physical shock.  The frozen moment,
while Prince Lysaer sized up her waiting presence, spun the last shred
of breath from Talith's throat.

His Grace of Tysan was not in rough attire, as she had expected, but
ablaze with gold studs and a chain worked in pearls and small sapphires.
His cuffs and collar were damascened silk, and his tabard, of trimmed
velvet, looked cut from the shadow of a snowdrift.  Every inch of him
lordly, he poised for the space of a heartbeat.

Then a sudden, blinding smile enlivened his face with affection.

"Lady Talith!" In one fluid movement he vaulted the table.  His rush set
the candleflames streaming.  Sooner than she wished, he reached out and
touched, and enveloped her in welcoming arms.

The firm, muscled strength underneath his soft clothes lifted her, spun
her, set her down.  Talith was consumed, then ignited by his flame of
vital heat.  She sensed the sped pace of his heart as his knuckles sank
in her damp ermine, and his lips seared a kiss on her forehead.

"You are just the person I wished to see, beloved.  My writ was to reach
you in the hands of the next messenger.  Yesterday, our wedding date was
set."

Her anger in trembling ruins, Talith recovered her breath with a gasp.
"What?"

"We shall marry when the orchards are in blossom." Lysaer consumed her
with his gaze, then took swift advantage of her openmouthed, speechless
surprise.

'Leave him if you can,' her brother had mocked.

Wrapped in the prince's embrace, sealed to his lips in a branding flush
of passion, that challenge rang sadly diminished.  As though drugged, or
enspelled, Talith felt her resolve sublimate like wax set in flame.

The kiss ended and left her bereft.

"By Ath, you crossed the passes.  No wonder you're peaked.  The journey
had to be terrible." Still talking, Lysaer set her down on one of the
cushioned benches.  With the same seamless charm, his page was
dispatched to fetch mulled wine and scones from the bakehouse.  Then,
while she was still heady with his presence, Lysaer, Prince of Tysan,
raised both her hands and savored them, captive in his grip.

Only now did she notice the calluses inscribed by sword and lance and
bridle rein, the telltale smudges of fatigue in the hollows of his face.
The stamp of cold purpose lay on his good looks like the blued gleam of
steel from the forge.

And like the first ice to trammel clear waters, reason caught up and
flawed his joy.  "My dear, you are magnificent.  No doubt my best
officers are all stumbling into walls at the sight of you, but what
possessed you to leave Erdane at this season?"

Talith had no more will to frame answer; then, as Pesquil's nasal tones
intruded from the outside corridor, she lost all need to use words.

Lysaer stepped away.  His jewels spat indigo sparks in the gloom, and
candles winnowed by spurts of disturbed air threw wavering, ominous
shadows.  His pleasure erased before a turbulent frown, the prince flung
wide the door to his private study.

Left, but not forgotten on her bench, decimated beyond reprieve by
Lysaer's magnetic charm, Lady Talith sat in dumb misery while her
brother and the Captain Mayor of Etarra's league of headhunters made
free and entered, and dispatched the news that the Master of Shadow had
sown havoc through two cities in the east.

Throughout, Lysaer listened, not rigid with outrage, but distilled
instead to a leashed-back, frightening fury.  The glow from the casement
etched his rapt profile and splintered through the gold ribbon on his
sleeves.

"I have no verified facts from either government," Pesquil hastened to
add.  "But the rumors are spread through more than one source.  Jaelot
and Alestron are unlikely places for spurious tales of fancy to arise."

A glint of sharp distress charged the depths of Lysaer's eyes as he
reeled off a string of fast conclusions.  "They are port towns.  It is
s'Ffalenn design, and wantonly inflicted on innocents." Passion frayed
through as he added, "The instant the weather lets the trade galleys
sail, we'll send for documented evidence.  At last I'll gain the
leverage I need to turn Tysan's guildsman.  The threat this man presents
is dire, but until now, only cities in Rathain saw the proof."

Pesquil tapped the worn steel in his scabbard, his sidelong glance
whittled shrewd.  "Erdane's offered you three hundred reserves already,
upon presentation of hard evidence."

Lysaer dealt the headhunter captain a spirited slap on the shoulder.
"Well done!" He surged behind his desk, seized pen and paper, and
scribbled a rushed line of notes.  "We have much to accomplish in a
matter of days.  As you must be aware, you've earned a reward.  I had a
thousand royals posted for the man who brought the first word of the
Shadow Master."

"Use the gold to pay soldiers," Pesquil said in a sudden red flush of
embarrassment.  "Your army, they're prepared?"

Lord Commander Diegan broke in, "The men are more than ready.  On
command, they would march against Dharkaron himself."

"Weather won't delay us overlong," Lysaer added.  "A third of our forces
already lie south in Caithwood, on hired campaign against barbarians.
Word can be sped by fast courier.  Those divisions can be marched east
directly." Rapidly, he outlined his intent to gather Avenor's high
officials and every ranking officer from the barracks.

Then he spun and met the irate glare of Talith, who believed herself set
aside and forgotten.

"You may wish the chance to freshen up from your journey," the prince
suggested.

Entrapped like a netted songbird, swept over by the eerie, concentrated
focus still engaged by the impact of Pesquil's news, Talith endured as
Lysaer's regard encompassed her closed features and after, every soiled
nuance of her dress.  He grasped her loose hands, found them cold, and
his urgency gentled to concern.  "You'll want a lady's maid, of course.

Wait in the anteroom.  My page will deliver you refreshment there and my
equerry will build up the fire.  At least you'll be warm until I can
arrange for a suitable attendant."

Talith snapped back from his touch in offended fury.  'No thank you, my
lord prince.  If you're going to draw up plans to slay your nemesis, I
shall stay exactly where I am."

"But of course." Lysaer stroked a fallen curl from her cheekbone, his
tenderness too sincere to be patronizing.  "I expect you back once
you've changed.  This is no mayor's realm, to keep women at home
uninformed." He smiled, sternly royal, and admonished, "You shall be
Avenor's princess on the equinox feast.  Could you doubt for a minute?

The responsibility to defend Athera's cities must be shared.  Your place
through this war council is nowhere if not by m '  side."

Outflanked and speechless, Talith inclined her head.  She gathered
mud-splashed skirts and swept headlong from the study.

Just past the door, she lost composure.  Weakened and shaking, she
braced against the saw-cut boards of the corridor while Pesquil's rapid
consonants rang through the panel at her back.  "Provisioning's your
worst obstacle.  How many veterans can you send at first thaw to earn
their passage as caravan guards?"

The Captain Mayor's point was too obvious: if Lysaer chose Etarra as the
site to muster troops, the long march must be sustained across Tysan,
through cities not yet won to his cause.  To support an armed force
across the continent before the harvest would require extensive planning
and diplomacy.

Any shortfalls created by logistics and supply must not disrupt the
chance for alliance in the future.

"Much care is needed," Lysaer agreed.  "At least until we reach
Rathain."

Most of the army had no choice but to hold back until the grass greened
enough to graze for fodder.  The roads would have dried, and oxcarts
would not mire in mud left softened by the thaws.

"Diegan claims your men are ready," Pesquil interjected.  "I would ask,
are they good?"

Lysaer answered in guarded excitement.  "We have four thousand,
enlisted.  An hour remains before sundown.  Let us F o and observe them,
and see if their achievements can impress you."

As Talith overheard, her bitterness deepened, that once again her love
must make way before the great quest to stalk down the Shadow Master.
Her autonomy could not be sustained against Lysaer, and her anger fell
powerless before yearning.  She moved off, beaten humble by misery, to
seek refuge in the quiet of the anteroom.

Pesquil's last question pursued her.  "You can move armies from here to
Sithaer and back, prince.  There's little to stop you.  Except how will
you know, once your muster is accomplished, where to corner the Master
of Shadow?"

"Trust my foresight," Lysaer replied in ironclad surety.

"When the time comes to march, I possess a sure means to find out."

Rendezvous

Like a vulture cramped in a roost sized for finches, the brig Black
Drake dominated the tiny cove harbor of Merior.

Crowded by the swing of her cable, the moored dories of each absent
fishing lugger wallowed in her hulking shadow.  Jieret Red-beard lounged
at her rail, peeling across his hawk nose from the burn of the strong
Southland sun, the quilloned knife just used to pare his nails still
unsheathed in his hand.  Relaxed though he seemed, the sailhands who had
shared winter passage from the Gulf of Stormwell maintained their
distance.

The lad had cold eyes and no patience for the fool who dared cross him
while he simmered with impatience.

A raucous flock of gulls arrowed up, disturbed by the sight Jieret
waited for: rapacious under timed oarsmen, Drake's tender sheared
through a wind-caught slash of spray to pull under the brig's leeward
side.

The only black head on board was Captain Dhirken's.

"He isn't here," Jieret said, nettled.  The thunk as his weapon struck
upright in the rail rang across a closing gap of water.

"Not," Dhirken cracked, her jet braid dangled down her back as she aimed
a poisonous glower upward.  "And damn you for scarring my brightwork in
pique for your prince's bad promise.  There's ale enough in my hold to
nurse yer mate temper till ye're witless, flat out, or paralyzed."
Poised in the bow to snatch the line tossed down by a deckhand, she made
the boat fast to a cleat.  To the jinking swing of her cutlass, she
scaled the side battens in scorching irritation.

Regaled in a man's velvet knee breeches, red shirt, and a flamboyant
vest with pearl buttons, the event of her presence had raised a storm of
wild gossip in the sleepy fishers' village where Arithon s'Ffalenn had
signally failed to keep his rendezvous.

The settlement was pitilessly remote, its quiet less idyllic than a calm
that threatened stagnation, with its rows of shuttered cottages and a
near-deserted market stacked with fish barrels, rancid and reeking in
the turgid noon heat.  Impatient with the soporific rustle of palm
fronds, and the chink of clay charms to keep Lyats from unraveling tired
fishnets, Jieret It wondered why his liege had chosen the site in the
first place.

The longboat rocked as the rowers shipped oars.  Arrived at the rail,
their captain talked still with inspired venom.  "May the whore's pox
plague your vaunted prince.  If he's light with his word as all that,
I'm sore tempted to act in kind.  Myself and my mates, we could live
like fat mayors on his contraband."

Jieret freed his blade and stepped back as Dhirken vaulted aboard.

"You know where to look for Prince Arithon?"

Dhirken's lips split into a nasty grin.  "Aye.  He's at Innish.

So said a wee, pale snip of a woman.  It's to do with a promise he chose
to honor."

"You'll sail there?" Jieret pressed.

Poised on braced legs, her back stiff as nail stock, Dhirken shrugged.
"If I don't, you'll walk, is that so?  With all his blighted treasure on
your back?  You've got lint between your ears to think he's worth it."

A pause ensued, while the busy wind flicked through the laces on
Jieret's jerkin and ruffled his raw-spun copper beard.

The tropical sky scored glints in hazel eyes that seemed to view a very
different sight.

When Dhirken snapped her rings against her cutlass hilt to recoup his
attention, the Earl of the North stated baldly, "If not for my liege, I
wouldn't stand here alive."

"Well at least sheath that dirk before you stick somewhat else with it."
Brazen in distaste for loyal sentiment, Dhirken spun away to chastise
the longboat's oarsmen, now crowding the rail at her shoulder.

"Do I pay you my silver to gawk?

Smarten up and haul in that tender!"

"We're sailing for Innish." Jieret grinned unrepentant over his knife
blade.  "And don't say for the sake of sparing my dastardly back."

"The whore's pox on you, also!" Dhirken's sidelong glance in malice
scored somewhere in the middle of the earl's chest.

"Your royal friend left no charts for the southcoast.  If you don't want
to dance on the equinox as shreds for some crab on a reef, you'd better
pray there's a merchant's galley laid in at Shaddom willing to sell her
spare rutter."

Baleful enough to scald air, the lady captain turned her raunchy
invective to send her hands flying to make sail.

Burdened under full canvas, Black Drake ran hull down, driven by the
hard, pranking winds that partnered the shift in the season.  The coast
slipped past, green and gilt, the land breeze a pomade of citrus blossom
spiked through with the resin of slash pine.

At Shaddom, a fickle squall and a running, high swell had the traders'
galleys battened down in sheltered waters like boiled crabs salted in a
barrel.

"Damned merchant captains!" Incensed and soaked from a rain shower,
Dhirken peeled off her oilskins in the musty gloom below decks.

"Stupid down to their toenails.  My Drake tries on an honest charter
forbye, and look at them!  All huddled together like sheep gone spooked
by a wyvern."

She stalled her tirade long enough to accept a mug of soup from the
cook.  "No charts for sale, they say." Broth sloshed the rim as she
gestured in sulky frustration.  "It's all spite.  Just because I
tail-whipped their tubs in the Eltair ports and undercut their prices,
they'll nurse useless grudges and obstruct us every way they can."

Days were lost as sails were reefed to slow their passage.

Drake nosed her way forward, a leadsman in her chains to call the mark,
and a lookout posted aloft to spy out reefs lest shoaling waters set her
aground.  Forced to find anchorage each night by dark, Dhirken stalked
her brig's quarterdeck like a panther, while Jieret cursed the tropical
airs that moldered his leathers and patched rust on his daggers and
sword.  He refused to think of his clansmen.  By now, the news out of
Jaelot had reached Etarra; in the lapsed months since he left to track
Arithon, a storm of war would be brewing.

Weather at least showed him favor.  The winds stayed fair through the
Drake's coast-hopping run down to Southshire.

Tucked between the hill country and the oak hammocks of Selkwood, the
seaport's shingled roofs pricked taut angles through the smoke from the
rendering of resins and turpentine.

A coin tossed to a lighterman across shining water bought Dhirken her
assurance: the maze of the Harbor Street markets included a chartmaker's
stall.  Packing a minor arsenal of knives along with her favored
cutlass, Drake's captain rowed herself ashore.  While her crewmen
grumbled on shipboard mending sail, she quartered the city on foot.

The thoroughfare was packed.  Gourd sellers burdened under poles and
baskets plodded between rumbling drays from the stone quarries at
Elssine, behind mules panniered in silk bales from Atchaz, and abalone
shell from Telzen, bound for the furniture makers.  Chipped wood
littered the gutters by the shipyards, with the half-shaped hulls of
galleys rowed like picked bones on their ways.  Under wind-flapped
awnings, Dhirken prowled the shaded alleys of the shoreside market, with
its glassblowers and snake venom sellers, its fragrant crates of citrus
and its stalls that reeked of strong cheese, where robed bands of
Sanpashir nomads drove nimble goats.

Dhirken elbowed through a begging squad of urchins to reach the
chartmaker's shop, slammed inside, and confronted a gnomelike old man
enthroned amid pens and colored inks.

His moist eyes regarded her in scholarly curiosity.  Then a cheery smile
stirred his drooping mustache.  "I expect you're after maps for the
coastline to Innish?"

At the captain's stiff glare, he waggled a moth-eaten goose quill.

"Ach, there'd scarcely be two of you, yes?  The young master sent word
in a letter last month, along with pay to see your needs met."

The cartographer bobbed beneath his counter, rattled aside rulers, tufts
of string and worn nibs, and popped erect with a ribboned roll of
parchment.  "Your chart, lady captain, with yon mannerly gentleman's
compliments."

"Dharkaron's hairy bollocks!" Dhirken advanced a nettled step.

"I'm nobody's bound lackey!  It's naught but a stray slip of fortune
that I bothered to visit here at all!"

"Aye, well, you needn't stay riled for my sake." The little man's
spirits stayed unshaken.  "Yon fellow made demands of the shipwrights
that were fair preposterous.  They howled just as loudly.  He still got
everything he wanted.  Are you going to take this, or spit on it?"

Dhirken snatched up the offering as if it held poison.  Back in the
street, she fished out the notepaper nestled inside.  The strong,
concise hand that had first taught her letters requested her to off load
two bullion chests at the shipwright's mansion near the harbormaster's
office.

"Smoke his Grace out for a louse!" Dhirken snapped through gritted
teeth.  "Let the Prince of Rathain pay his own debts."

But the shipwright had evidently received another letter, for when the
captain reached her command, hot and distempered, a tender manned by a
liveried lackey lay tied to the Black Drake's anchor cable.

The first man she met after off-loading coin chests was Earl Jieret,
slouched with his boots braced in bald-faced insolence on her chart
desk.  "Daelion's two-eyed vigilance," she swore.

"Is your liege lord always as conniving in his ways as a thief'.?"

Eyes underlit by jittered reflections as he whetted the blade of his
longsword, Jieret shrugged.

Too aware the selfsame steel would be turned against her in challenge
should she balk at resuming the brig's course, Dhirken gave a wicked,
joyous laugh.  "Oh, I'll sail on to Innish, if only to deliver to
Arithon's royal face my word on his bloody-handed arrogance." She
breathed deep and added in stringent offense, "But damn you, earl or no,
if your loutish feet stay parked on my chart locker, we'll not stir up
sweat getting out of this port!"

Black Drake made Innish by the spring equinox.  Anchored out of
smuggler's habit in position for speedy departure, Dhirken needed no
invective to see her sails stowed and longboats launched in a stream of
seamless industry.

"What did you promise them?" Jieret asked from his armed stance by the
portside companionway.

Hard by the mainmast pinrail, shredding a leg of roast lamb with neat
teeth, Dhirken tipped him a guileless glance.  "What else but shore
leave, to scour the taverns in search of yon mountebank prince?"

"Ath forfend!" Jieret threw back his bearded chin and laughed.

"I wish I could go along, just to watch your mate break townborn heads."

"Just pray that's all he dunts." Dhirken shut ale-dark eyes, mouthed a
silent wish, and tossed her stripped bone landward in a sailor's habit
that kept the harbors infested with glossy rats.  "My mate's in a fair
rotten temper, let me warn you.  The tropics give him itches in places
he'd rather use to tup doxies."

Pitched to a sulky froth of tension herself, she licked grease off her
fingers and grimaced.  "Your prince, when we find him, had better show
something more than a whim for veering off his course.  Southcoast ports
are too lax to charge tariffs.  As a contraband runner in these waters,
we're wasting and useless as whore's bells strung on a corpse."

"Don't have me speak for my liege," Jieret said, too apprehensive
himself to show sympathy.  "It's a likely guess his Grace won't welcome
the tidings I bear from the north."

"Don't think to weep on my shoulder," Dhirken retorted.

"A thousand times, I've wished I'd never met the man."

Packed with crewmen in ribald, high humor, the Drake's longboats raked
shoreward across waters pooled molten brass under sunset.

Earl Jieret remained alone at the brig's rail, too proud to shelter in
the stern cabin despite full awareness that by city law, his clipped
clanbred accent was enough to arraign him for execution.  He leaned on
damp wood, his cold-cast patience a mask for wound nerves and anxiety.
Once again, he waited, fingering the worn quition dagger, looted seven
years past off the corpse of a headhunter killed for the murder of his
family.

The touch of whetted steel made him wonder whether Arithon s'Ffalenn
still cherished the boy's knife for whittling given that day for
remembrance.

A breeze frisked ripples on the harbor.  Up the river delta, a fitful
flash like turned mica, a millwheel revolved in lowered light.

A cormorant flew, pursued by squabbling gulls.  Jieret breathed in the
tang of cinnamon from a spicer's shed and watched the southern waters
fade from rose to ice purple between the peaked rambades of the galleys.
The daytime commerce of the dockfront wound down, chanting stevedores
replaced by the fluting whistles used to summon lightermen.

Dogs barked, and cliff swallows skimmed in the dying glow above
shell-colored towers.  Vendors' carts and ale drays rumbled to the
clatter of mule teams while the working crowd dispersed homeward, to
reappear, thicker, clad in festival ribbons and bearing a weaving swarm
of brands.  The massive brass fire pans on their pilings were lit, each
one twelve spans apart, and crackling hot sparks across the quay.

Lamps burned in the brothel galleries, on the decks of ships at anchor,
to skein on black waters a serried, fire dance of reflections.

The towers blazed in necklaces of candles, and the cymbals of street
singers chimed through the dusk.  The feast of spring equinox, at
Innish, was a mad, dizzy whirl of gaiety dressed out in lights.

Aboard the darkened Drake, jumpy as a caged wildcat for the fact he lay
surrounded by enemies, Jieret listened to the shrieks of the doxies, and
the deeper rasp of male rejoinder; the frenetic laughter from the puppet
theaters, and the thumps on the water as boats collided to slurred
apologies from handlers too drunken to trifle over chipped paint or
marred brightwork.  Haunted by distant memories of the spring bonfires
from his childhood, Jieret tried not to wonder how the feast might be
celebrated, had his clans not been hunted by townsmen, and were his
prince not accursed by Desh-thiere.

An overloaded boat crammed with roisterers rocked under the stern.

Screaming laughter, lit by a frenzy of lamps, the rowers banged their
oars against the strakes at the load line and demanded feastday alms.

"Call down a blessing for the night, good master!  Toss us a copper.

Or we come aboard to bring you joy."

Jieret jerked back from the rail, hand gripped to his dagger.

He dared not reply, even to send the beggars packing; as a clanborn earl
taken captive in a town, he would be publicly maimed before death.

While the pranksters thrashed oars to maneuver their boat alongside, he
gripped his knife and weighed hopeless odds, that he could stay alive
long enough to deliver the news of Lysaer's muster to his liege.

Amidships, something banged in the galley.  "Muckle plague o' fiends!"
The heavyset cook came on deck, a kettle slung in meaty hands.  He
peered in harried temper at the straggle of dandies, who passed a
wineskin as their fellows argued and drew lots to determine which man
should lead the boarding party.

Jieret flourished his blade in grim salute, while below, to a tempo of
mistimed oars and obscenities, the pair of gallants who picked the short
straws swayed upright and clawed to locate the strakes.

"Look how they sparkle, the pansies.  Mighty lot o' jewels on a bunch
come whining for largesse." The cook turned a soulful lance to Jieret.
"No need for that hog sticker, man.

This is the Drake they're bothering, and our Dhirken, she don't like
visitors." His take on the matter neatly practical, he raised his pot
and tipped out a scalding rain of broth.

A scream, a shout, a fat splash, followed by a tangle of shrill curses;
the boat rocked off, the occupants who remained less merry and reeking
of chicken stock.  The drunk one thrown overboard yelled and thrashed,
half-gagged by the weeds of his finery.  The cook gazed down at the
fracas, intrigued.  "Should we wager how long he tries to swim before he
thinks to jettison that platter of a hat?"

Wound taut as wire in a half crouch, Jieret said nothing as the prow of
a lighter eclipsed the swimmer.

"Ah, pox!  We'll change terms," the cook coaxed, reasonable in the face
of setback as the passing boatman offered the victim a grip on his
thwart.  "Let's say five silvers on whether yon lighter makes the quay
without fouling an anchor chain and capsizing."

But again Jieret Red-heard did not answer.  Over the receding clamor of
scalded revelers, amid the warp through weft racket of voices that
rebounded from the stews at the harborside, his forest-trained senses
had picked out one whose singular timbre he recognized.

Neither was the cook as engrossed in amusement as he seemed.

"Look smart.  Our captain's back."

A longboat sliced across the weave of the lightermen's lamps, rowed to
the reach of timed oars.  Her crew reversed stroke and backwatered, and
the craft glided into the shadow beneath the Black Drake's hull.  The
cook stowed his soup pot and tossed out a line.

Seconds later, seamen scrambled up the battens, cursing skinned knuckles
and bruises in scarcely suppressed tones of triumph.

"Dear lady, a note sent ashore would have found me," retorted a firm
voice, but animated now, its inflection reschooled to sound townbred,
and vastly more carefree than Jieret's past memories from his father's
lodge in Strakewood Forest.

Dhirken cracked into ripe laughter.  "'Twere fair reckoning, prince,
after the Kittiwake.  I gave my men full leave to roust you by any means
they saw fit."

"Yes, well," said Arithon s'Ffalenn from a poised step on the side
battens.  Unaware of any listener above him, he added in laughing
exuberance, "My Innish patrons didn't fancy the Black Drake's crew.  I
kept my bargain despite them and left not a second before midnight, but
more than one tavern in the upper city will never again be the same for
it." He reached the rail, arranged neat, fingless hands to vault over,
and light from the half-shuttered lantern on deck washed black hair,
then the spare, foxy angles of a face seven years had changed not at
all.

Jieret pressed through the crowding sailhands, knelt, and bent his head
to the man he had last seen over the grave cairn of his slaughtered
parents.  "My liege of Rathain."

Time stopped.

Arithon's fingers locked on grained wood.  The breath spun out of him as
if impelled by a suffocating weight.  The young man on the ship's deck
before him might have been a ghost restored to flesh, for the grief that
marked his blanched features.  For one numbed second, dread for returned
obligations made Arithon recoil in pain.

Then his unbearable apprehension by itself forced the moment to snap.

The Shadow Master hurled himself over the rail in a welcome that burst
all restraints.  "Jieret!" He caught the young man by the wrists and
raised him, stunned all over again as the earl last seen as a
twelve-year-old boy arose to full height and dwarfed him.  Arithon fell
back a step, his joy overwhelmed by amazement.  "By Ath, man!  Caolle
must be proud.  You've grown into the very image of your father."

Jieret blinked through a suspect brightness, flushed with pleasure and
odd shock, that the neatly made prince before him still fit the mold of
his memory.  "Your Grace, I'll come of age before winter.  I ask your
indulgence, that you accept my formal service now.  The news that I
carry won't wait." In a doubled hand grip, he offered the old quillon
dagger carried off the bloody field in Strakewood.

Exposed before Dhirken's curiosity, jostled by the press of Drake's
crewmen, Arithon turned the blade over in recognition.  Fine fingers
still sensitized by the lyranthe string recorded the nicks of hard
usage.  As if the separate, belting vibrations of the blows the steel
had staved off, and the life spilled from each opened wound stung his
senses, he said, "Mine the honor, Earl of the North."

In complete disregard that the moment was not private, to the speechless
amazement of hard-bitten sailhands who knew nothing of customs kept by
old high kings, blooded royalty knelt before his prospective vassal.
With a clarity wiped to acid by his singer's trained diction, Arithon
swore the traditional oath of sovereign prince to liegeman that sealed a
pact of guardianship, and ended with the lines, "For the gift of real
duty, Earl Jieret s'Valerient, my charge of protection; for your
loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until
my final living breath.  Dharkaron witness.

Take back this blade as token of my trust, and with your true steel, my
royal blessing."

Arithon arose, smiling and steady, unlike the past oath taking to
Jieret's father, that had taxed him beyond reach of all peace.  Unknown
to any present watcher, a blood pact sworn under the full influence of
his mage power had already forged a life tie to the grown boy before
him, that bound their two fates more strongly still.

The Master of Shadow commandeered the chartroom for his meeting, and in
words that asked only friendship, requested Dhirken to attend.

"What about the fat prophet?" the captain asked, cool as granite in the
cramped companionway, despite her sharp desire to be away.  "My crew ran
across him in a brothel.  My mate could be sent to fetch him out."

Seated before the stern window, featureless in outline against panes of
glass starred by the glide of passing lanterns, Arithon gestured his
refusal.  "Let Dakar bide.  I was to leave the port of Innish in the
morning, in any case.  Dawn is soon enough to roust him out."

Dhirken's steward trimmed the gimbaled lamps, then departed without
sound and shut the door.

His ambiguity banished with the shadows, Arithon looked not a whit older
than in the hour he last left Strakewood.

Haggard, then, beset as any of Deshir's clan survivors, he contained
himself now in tight-reined calm that implied an unbreakable composure.
Elegant in a hard's clothes trimmed in silver and onyx, his shirt of
pale silk tailored close to narrow wrists, he folded hands that were
callused only on the fingertips from an artistry confined to fret and
string.  The boy's knife accepted by the grave cairn in Deshir would
have been used to trim lyranthe pegs, if the gift was remembered at all.

No detail of this masterbard's mien suggested the unconscionable,
merciless strategy once spun out of magecraft and shadow to spare the
clans from decimation on the weapons of Etarra's garrison.

Daunted by sudden uncertainty, that perhaps he did not know his prince
at all, Earl Jieret assumed the seat opposite.

By size and dress set apart, he wore his deer hide jerkin unadorned,
laced with ties that would not catch stray sunlight, or betray him by
chance-made noise.  His flecked hazel eyes devoured the royal presence,
while the red hair that matched his dead mother's spilled in wind-caught
tangles over shoulders grown broad in new manhood.

Dhirken slouched against the bulkhead.  Discomposed as a cat flicked by
raindrops, prepared in her way to be obstructive, she watched in still
malice as the earl launched his case to press his prince to reclaim an
abandoned sovereignty.

"Lysaer gathers forces to march a war host against you, even as we
speak.  Despite Caolle's best effort, word of your doings in Jaelot
broke through and reached Etarra's governor."

"No one could stop that," Arithon said.  His green eyes stayed wide,
almost black in the lamplight, and his concentration harrowed as he
said, "Jieret, what price did you pay for those few months of silence?
How many died?"

He did not refer to fallen clansmen.

Under that horrified, knife-point regard, Jieret remained as unflinching
in the face of necessity as ever his father had before him.

"My war captain knows.  I left before Jaelot's disaster became public,
to seek your Grace and bring word.  How many died is no issue, then or
now.  These armies mean death for my clans, and your liegemen.

I would know whether to count on your help to see how many of our own we
can save."

He paused, the large fists clenched beneath the tabletop halfbraced for
an explosion that never came.

Arithon said in stifled quiet, "You've come a long way for this
audience.  You have my attention.  Go on."

Jieret swallowed, then forced a game shrug.  "By my father's memory, I
should have guessed you wouldn't welcome this.  Lady Maenalle sends
warning.  The force in training at Avenor is highly skilled and designed
for swift expansion with mercenaries.  Caolle has figured the muster
from Rathain's allied cities could be thirty-five thousand strong."

Pale as if spun out of glass, Arithon threw off his impulse to give way
to fury.  "When the war host closes, Lord Jieret, you have my promise
here and now.  Your clansmen need stand no ground for my sake.

What bloodshed cannot be avoided shall happen far from the soil of
Rathain."

"You would inflict your grand slaughter on the turf of uninvolved
innocents?" Dhirken interrupted, despite herself drawn in.  "Merciful
Ath, just to feed itself, a force of that size would strip the
countryside like a howling plague of locusts!"

Arithon scarcely glanced aside at her.  "Can an army march upon the sea?
Can a fleet pursue me while blinded in shadow?

Lysaer's backing comes from merchant trade.  How long will the guilds
pay him to waste their profits trying to chase and trap a fugitive who
can elude them at will?  If I can possibly arrange things, there shall
be no pitched battle at all."

"You might escape, but not easily," the captain admitted.

"The oceans can't hide you forever and I won't charter Black Drake to
serve under Rathain's royal banner."

"There even I draw the line," Arithon countered, whip-crack fast.

"The vessels at risk shall be mine, built in a temporary shipyard at
Merior." A flick of amusement twitched his lips.  "I will need the Drake
at the outset, but only to run messages and timber.  And I offer an
exceptional rate of pay."

The grip of Dhirken's fingers on her forearms warned of argument, if not
an outright rejection.  Arithon plunged ahead before she could speak and
asked Jieret to detail all he knew of Etarra's buildup in the north.

Laid out in detached recitation, the facts were unrelenting.

Lysaer's skilled diplomacy had long since knit every city in Rathain
into a unified alliance.  The upset at Jaelot had renewed cause for fear
and spurred old hatreds to a fresh fervor.

"My liege," Earl Jieret ended in stripped candor, "your loyal clans have
been hard-pressed.  To escape the summer forays by headhunters,
chieftains as far south as Halwythwood have been forced to seek refuge
deep in Daon Ramon Barrens.

For fear of the old ruins and Paravian haunting, companies hesitate to
track there.  But such sanctuary cannot last."

A pause, while Jieret hooked his knuckles and waited.

Dhirken used the interval to loosen the knots that tied her bracers,
then pick out laced wires and draw them off.  The uneasy spatter of
lantemlight traced long, shiny scars that marred the length of both
wrists.  As minutes marched by and Arithon s'Ffalenn withheld comment,
the silence seemed to glaze the very air.  The Drake swung at her
anchorage, paired to the waltz of night winds, while the distant, happy
roar of the festival crowds dinned in the background like a dream.

Earl Jieret looked up at last.  Locked to his sovereign lord's patent,
knowing gaze, capitulation jarred through him like crossed steel.  "Yes,
there is more, your Grace.  At Alestron, Duke Bransian s'Brydion would
beggar his state treasury to have the head of the sorcerer who wrecked
his armory.  The description on his writ for arrest fits your person so
closely that Lysaer can play on the connection and gain armed support
for the asking."

"And Alestron, when pressed, can present a force of fifteen thousand on
the field," Arithon sliced back without humor.

The beaded silver tips on his cuff ties flashed in strangled movement,
then held as if nailed by a spell.  "There's no secret.

S'Brydion gold has staked the upkeep of enough mercenaries to repopulate
most of East Halla."

Jieret coughed back the grin that arose despite his plucked nerves.  "I
should have guessed yon byplay to be yours."

Intuitively bold as his mother before him, he challenged his liege's
coiled patience.  "You have your royal reasons for close confidence, no
doubt.  But the s'Brydion line is clanblood.  A canny prince in your
position should have approached them as possible allies."

"I don't want allies!" Arithon bit back.  "This time, I'll have no clan
following stand their ground to bleed in my name.  I need ships and two
years in which to build them."

"Your enemy',s armies won't stall for that." Dhirken weighed the
razor-edged interplay, intrigued despite her better instincts.  "I've
heard the talk in the seaports.  Let me tell you, the s'Ffalenn name is
anathema."

Arithon's head snapped around, his eyebrows arched first in an acid
surprise that expanded to venomous delight.  "What did you think?

That I did nothing better since Jaelot than play ditties in taverns for
small coin?  You've delivered the cargo sent by Maenalle of Tysan for my
use to deplete this vaunted war host.  Let me say how I plan to spend
the proceeds."

The Master of Shadow began in measured phrases to speak.

Long before he finished, Jieret's strained censure had dissolved into
rapt attention.  He did not ask, after all, what became of the signet
ring with Rathain's blazon that he noticed its Teir's'Ffalenn no longer
wore.  Captain Dhirken seemed unable to tear her gaze from the clever,
musician's hands, folded and quiet on her chart table.  A coldness
invaded the pit of her stomach, that she had ever dared to mishandle
this man, or chain him like a miscreant to her taffrail.

His mind worked level upon level in a subtlety that nipped her skin into
gooseflesh.  On his travels, Arithon had quartered his kingdom.  What he
noticed, he remembered, and all things he put to a singular and ruthless
analysis.  He a stu e every turn of Rathain's roads, traversed in
Halliron's pony cart.  He knew each hollow where an army could be
ambushed, and each hillcrest where its scouts would be exposed.  He knew
his cities; had read them, mayor and council and guildhall, and reduced
their strengths and weaknesses to one or two pared phrases.  That his
touch for subversion and strategy had plotted the ruin of Etarra's
forces in Strakewood was confirmed beyond equivocal doubt.  Whether, as
Lysaer s'llessid insisted, his person should be hunted down and killed,
Dhirken lacked the moral will to say.

But every maudlin and drunken warning the Mad Prophet had tried to
deliver through an ill-advised passage to Farsee had been nothing less
than honest truth.

What the Shadow Master had done in his months as hard's apprentice was
to arrange an information network of astonishing breadth and depth.

The dispatches would collect in taverns and ports, to be picked up by an
agent he would specify; and not a one of the contacts held the whole
pattern, or knew to whom the letters would be passed.

"If Captain Dhirken would consider running message packets for me,
there's no move Lysaer's army can make that I won't hear in advance,"
Arithon summed up.  "If they march before time, Jieret, your clans can
disrupt their supply lines with very little exposure.  I can build my
ships and be gone from known shores, and this dangerous, misguided war
host will melt away under the weight of its own unwieldy upkeep."

Dhirken braced against the table, this once caught unbalanced by the
drift of the ship underneath her.  "You bear no grudge toward these
townsmen for this uprising raised in your name," she forced out in
gritty admiration.  "Ath forbid, and woe to us all, if that poor fact
should ever alter."

"I agree." Arithon stood in fraught impatience.  "Will you undertake
this one task?  I would pay any price you demand."

"I think I don't have much choice," Dhirken said.  "The sooner you're
off the continent, the better, I should say.  Or everything afloat will
be conscripted at the ports and forced into service for war transport."
She gave him a bargainer's grin.  "I'll have my fee in advance, though.
If you fail, or get killed, or mishap fouls your rudder, I want to be
rich enough to lay the Drake by until the bad times pass over."

"By all means." Arithon stepped back and unlatched the companionway with
a debonair flourish.  "Let's retire to your hold and see what sort of
wealth strikes your fancy."

For the treasure was fully accounted for, the lading list accurate to
the last crate and bale.  Circled in musty lanternlight, Arithon and
Dhirken pressed between the packed cargo: the stacked crates of Faigaire
crystal, wrapped and nested in straw; the iron-strapped bullion crates
stamped with guild seals, and the carpets packed in lavender to
discourage moths.

Fine silks; exquisite tapestries; bronze lanterns paned with blown
glass; the wine tuns and the rare brandies; the glazed pottery; to the
last, breathtaking bolts of datnascened silks and patterned linens.

Pleased by her settlement, Dhirken braced her hip on a wine barrel and
flicked back the wisped end of her braid.

"What'll you do with the rest of this?"

"Sell it in the markets here at Innish.  The proceeds will

fund my small fleet." Arithon trailed his fingers along a bullion chest,
his madcap inventiveness struck into sudden sobriety.  "The seals on
this chest are Etarran."

"You didn't know?" Outside the glow of the lamp, Jieret stooped under
the deck beams.

"Know what?" Arithon spun to face him, his elegant silks

marred with grime and a sharpened frown on his face.  "Lady Maenalle's
letter said she wished to stake a fortune to undermine Lysaer's armed
strength.  I wouldn't see her clans suffer undue persecution at the
hands of Avenor's war host, but if I wasn't desperate not to play for
killing stakes, the donation would have been refused."

"Donation?" Earl Jieret elbowed past a bundled her of carpets.

"Your Grace, when I saw Tysan's caithdein, she insisted she was
returning what belonged to Rathain's crown in the first place." A
vindictive smile split his beard.  "Everything in this hold was hauled
overland from Etarra by Lysaer s'llessid, then torn out of his hands in
clan ambush atop the Pass of Orlan."

"Oh, that's rich!" Dhirken folded into helpless laughter over the rim of
her barrel.  "Dharkaron drag you to the devil, prince!  You'll do all
you say and take to blue water, underwritten by your foe's stolen
fortune!" In admiration tinged with regret, she regarded the man etched
against the hold's murky darkness.  "A pity for you.  The time you need
to complete your grand plan is one year too much to expect."

Arithon's smile cut the gloom like edged lightning.  "That's scarcely a
setback, lady captain.  Lysaer can muster his force at Etarra.  He can
outfit and march them the breadth of the continent at vast and ruinous
expense.  But to engage and wreak my ruin, he first has to find me. That
will cost him a long and merry search."

The Shadow Master stretched, caught the lantern from its peg, and flung
an expansive gesture toward the ladder that led to the hatch.

"What do you say?  We could broach that cask you're perched on.

Let's drink like old friends to the charter you've earned, and my most
cherished hope of freedom."

Bargain

The cherry trees in Tysan cast off their spring mantles, and flurries of
pink and white blossoms gusted over the fringe of the war banners.
Petals sprinkled the surcoats of the men in the cavalcades and strewed
the lashed tarps on the supply wagons which furrowed black tracks in the
mud beneath Avenor's north gate turrets.  With the equinox feast and the
prince s state wedding a month gone, his royal city rededicated its
heart to the coming war against the Master of Shadow.

Lysaer's new bride had no choice but to endure through the massive
upheaval involved with launching the campaign.  Her husband was rarely
at her side.  Surrounded by advisors and officers, he could be glimpsed
between trips to the armories and stock sheds; or some days not at all,
closeted as he was through lengthy meetings with his secretaries and his
seneschal.  The dispositions, the inventory lists, the arrangements for
wagons and supplies seemed grindingly endless.

Nights in the fast quiet of their high tower chamber became a guarded
time of solace for them both.  Clenched in the passion of her husband's
embrace, Talith unleashed every charm she possessed to kindle his
ecstasy, then storm his keyed nerves until his ongoing worries became
seared away by blind passion.  She melted to Lysaer's skilled touch
until her own starved response touched off his rapture in turn, to
eclipse and scald out self-awareness.  In his arms, she let nothing
intrude; not the discipline of fractious young officers, nor frayed
temper from the trials created by marching armed companies across
leagues of bad roads; or allotments wrung from a dwindled treasury, to
hire galleys for crossing Instrell Bay to reach established supply lines
in Rathain.

Talith had no hope to change fate.  Prince Lysaer's peace of mind was
inextricably linked to his drive to kill the Master of Shadow.

A third of Avenor's garrison had already marched in hired passage as
caravan guards.  The rest embraced a feverish schedule to set final
polish on training already knit into close discipline.  Talith lived in
dread of the moment when the meadows burst into high flower.  However
sweet a nest she could weave with new love, once the season could
provide for the draft teams, Avenor's last divisions would depart.  Her
splendid royal husband would be nowhere else but in the dust of the
vanguard with his officers.

But this morning the war horns were still silent.  The casement panes
loomed blank as pearl inlay while the dawn slowly quenched the last
stars.  Birds outside roused and chirped in sleepy twitters against the
tap of a wall sentry's step.  Talith rolled over.  Her hair a dragged
spill of honey from her term pies, she slid her flattened hand beneath
quilted silk in a sensuous quest for warm flesh.

Strong arms enfolded her from behind.  The embrace robbed the bite from
chill air, even as the coverlet slipped off her creamy shoulders.

Lysaer nestled his chin in her nape and murmured into her ear.  "I can't
take time for you this morning, my love."

She twisted to face him.  The rasp of his suede doublet against her skin
raised the disturbing discovery that he was already dressed.

"The sun isn't up.  You aren't wearing silk."

Apprehension cranked her tone a pitch higher.  "Where are you going?"

Lysaer kissed her, languorous and light until she struggled to fling off
the bedclothes that mired her hips and knees.  His touch infallibly
drove her to heat until she ached in surrender.

Before she recovered from the storm to her senses, he melted back, lost
in the shadows by the armoire.

A whispered flick of strap leather and a chink of dangled spurs
disclosed his intent to pull on his boots without the service of his
valet.  Before her alarm could find voice, Lysaer spoke.  "In the land
of my birth, by old custom, the king would ride into the wood and slay a
spring boar to prove his prowess.

Not to be shamed by tradition, beloved, I've set the day aside to go
hunting."

"You're mad!" Talith shot erect in a churned-up calyx of silk sheets.
"Why rush off to bloody some hapless, mean creature?" Etarran enough to
make her pique sting, she flared, "Does the Master of Shadow not offer
sport enough?"

A dangerous, brittle stillness claimed the space where Lysaer stood.
Then the hiss of his expelled breath tore through his protracted quiet.
"Dare you question my love for you?"

Talith gasped.  "Ath show me mercy, how can it compete?"

And the tears came, hot and stormy, for the way his honest hurt could
devastate her defenses.  "is it so hard?" With sadly swallowed pride,
she admitted, "I dread the day you must leave me."

A boot dropped with a thud against the carpet.  Then the mattress gave
to his knee.  Cool fingers cradled Talith's chin, turned her stiff neck.
Lysaer's lips molded to hers and shared the salt on her mouth.

"One old boar shouldn't keep me past nightfall if I'm quick and skilled.
As for my regard, lady wife, how can that be measured against a
commensurate evil?

You've married a prince who is human flesh and blood." Like the rip of
cold iron, he added, "If you, who are closest, think my heart isn't
torn, then rejoice, for I have triumphed.  Every man bound to follow me
onto the field must never guess how this duty chafes my spirit.  Did you
forget?"

His grip tightened.  "The criminal I go to ruin is my mother's bastard
son.  I beg you, bear up and be brave.  The killing of a half brother is
burden enough on my conscience."

No touch from her could soothe his inner pain; no word existed to hold
him: Lysaer slipped gently away.

By the time Talith's misery relented enough to meet his need for her
smile, new sun bronzed the east casement.  Long since, her prince had
summoned his huntsman and gone.

His quest for the royal boar turned inland and wound through the glens,
bedecked in new spring like worked lace.  The cool shadows still
pocketing the hill flanks gave way to tepid light.

Lysaer went attended by three men-at-arms and his equerry.

His sole badge of rank, the star and crown embroidered on his
saddlecloth, stabbed a prick of unquiet reflection.  His hounds ran
collared in stitched leather; his horse's trappings were plain.  The
polishedash boar spear socketed in his lance rest sported no ribbonsor
inlay.  Its sharpened head snicked and fretted through thegreenery as he
rode, a flame of silvered steel wreathed in yellow puffs of disturbed
pollen.

Beyond the tangled bittervines netted over the banks of a marsh, the
huntsman encountered fresh boar's slots.  The black, boggy earth lay
hacked and churned where the creature had savaged the ground, perhaps
rooting up fallen acorns, or else testing its own rank strength.  The
hounds were given the scent.

A ridged moil of black and tan bodies, they surged baying down the glen
to a whipped, pale turbulence of ferns.

The Prince of Tysan set spurs to his mount, his hair like sun-caught
flax and his gloved hands easy on the reins.  Eager and restive beneath
him, his blooded horse crashed through saplings and brush, and scattered
winged tempests of finches.

"Fiends plague us!" groused the taciturn captain at arms as the royal
escort mustered to follow.  "Your wives had better like sewing.

Here's good clothes we're going to shred to rags."

The hounds streamed through the underbrush in a primal, belting frenzy.
In his sensible cross-gartered hose and leather jacket, the huntsman
blew his horn to speed his pack, while riders ducked branches and
splashed through the sky-printed mirrors of puddles in chase.

Through the course of that first, mad gallop, the party lost sight of
their prince.

The pack was whipped off at the first check and a search begun for the
man.  Avenor's master huntsman proved a skilled tracker.  He found the
prince's horse inside the hour, grazing knee deep in meadow grass and
marsh mallow, its saddle flaps caught with pinched leaves.  Both
stirrups dangled.  The boar spear was gone from its socket and the reins
rested looped, neither broken nor trailed on the ground.

Of Lysaer s'llessid, they found no sign.

While the hounds milled and snuffled and whined their frustration, then
lolled panting on their ilies, the leathery old huntsman pursed bearded
lips and fingered his coiled rawhide whip.  "I see no sign of any
accident.  If you'll hear my opinion, let be and go home.  His Grace
wanted time to himself."

"You would take such a chance?" The burly captain flicked bruised leaves
off his thighs and adjusted the sour leather of his gauntlets.

"His Grace holds our hope of deliverance.

Enemies know it.  This could be a barbarian trap." His order sent the
equerry back to summon Captain Mayor Pesquil and muster men for an
organized search.

"You waste effort." Too laconic to be rankled over doubts about his
competence, the huntsman raked back streaked hair and snapped his
fingers to break off a growling confrontation between a hound couple.

"I'd know, were barbarians about.

The ground's too mired to hide footprints.  If enemies lay waiting in
ambush close by, no blackbirds would scold in the brush.

Your prince will return when he's ready.  If you trouble the headhunter
captain to check, mark me, he'll tell you the same."

Poised beyond view in dense brush on a knoll, the royal subject of the
argument listened as the voices of his retinue grew heated.  Lysaer
grinned in smothered amusement, then crept away through the trees.

He turned south, determined to stay solitary.  For the wise old huntsman
had interpreted his wish like a brother: this day's work had little to
do with a ceremonial hunt to kill a boar.

The season was too new for the trees to be leafed in full canopies.
Patched, ephemeral shadows imprinted the ground like a cat-tangled skein
of loose yarn.  Black earth and rotted oak mold breathed through the
burgeoning fragrance of greenery and undergrowth sprigged in yellow
buds.  Too warm in his suede jerkin, Lysaer slid damp hands along the
grip of his boar spear.  In all ways, he dreaded this errand.

But a meddler in force who used magecraft to terrorize and kill, a
reiver in whose name clan barbarians committed outright slaughter, such
a one deserved no stay of mercy.  While unwary cities were attacked out
of hand, no upright sovereign dared waste the time to search through
conventional trackers.

To ferret out the Master of Shadow's location, a prince sworn and
dedicated to his people's defense must not cavil at a liaison that might
yield results through arcane scrying.

But even for moral right and mercy, the prospect of sorcery left Lysaer
deeply unsettled.

Truly alone for the first hour since the machinations of a sorcerer had
banished him through a World Gate into exile, shouldered since with
responsibility bequeathed by long-forgotten ancestors, Lysaer thought of
the mother he had barely known.  Lost when e was ur into t e arms o a
s'F enn lover, she had been the only daughter of a high mage.  From her
had come his given gift of light and Arithon's deadly touch at weaving
shadow.  Lysaer's last memories of her were indelibly twined with the
scents of citrus and spices; of delicate jewels and silver chains, and a
rippled fall of pale hair.  The Lady Talera had made no spells in his
presence that he could recall.

More clearly he remembered his father's savage rages, the acrimony of
the kingdom's prim seneschal, and the lengthy, hushed sessions of the
kingdom council following her repudiated marriage vows.

Horror still revisited through his recollection of the trials, the
miasma of late-burning oil lamps intermingled with the sweaty fear of
the accused.  Then the weeping agony of the families through the purges,
as every man, woman and child suspected of sorcerous activity, or in
sheltering the queen in her escape, was sent to the executioner's block
for justice.  The poisoned, vicious anger of his royal father still cut,
at his request to ask his mother's family for the training to develop
his born talents to full advantage.

Whatever cloaking spells and trickery Queen Talera had used to shame her
lawful marriage and beget her bastard, her cuckolded husband never bed
his passionate distrust of magecraft.  Her legitimate firstborn had
grown to manhood without so much as an herb witch to tell him whether he
had inherited any further arcane potential from the distaff side of his
bloodline.

Whereas Arithon had been raised by the high mage himself.

His powers had been molded by the arduous discipline demanded by a
master's training.

Lysaerjabbed the butt of his spear into the loam of the deer path.

The breeze had died.  Sun cloaked his shoulders in unpleasant heat as
his track meandered through the bottomlands, crossed like sable braid
with the trickles of spring-fed freshets.  His uneasy mind spared no
thought for the splash of startled frogs and the whirred wings of marsh
wrens and blackbirds.  Distaste for his charge warred with childhood
jealousy, never quite silenced by the principles expounded by his
father.

The words still haunted, burred with the memory of the wax-scented gloom
of the privy chamber as the royal spate of rage finally cooled.

'My son, ideals and strengths and the foundation of sound rule are never
so simply reconciled.  A king who values his subjects will treat with
them as a fellow man.  Power to upset natural order goes ill with royal
office, that by nature must wield influence over lives.  The concepts of
justice and fairness are not born through greater strength.

They spring instead from sympathy with the lowliest weakness." The King
of Amroth had looked upon his heir, the seams of a lifetime's bitter
decisions softened to entreaty on his face.  'The judgments you make for
the crown when you inherit will be hard enough on the heart.

You will need a mind undivided between the laws that must govern
humanity and the uncanny secrets of the mysteries." Experience lent
vicious validation to such counsel.

Queen Talera had been moved to desert her family for something more than
spiteful vengeance.  She had gone, she insisted, to right a balance,
then been lonely enough to bury the grief of her sacrifice in the
comfort of illicit love.

Briefly beguiled into friendship with her bastard, Lysaer had seen the
insidious way fine knowledge of power could corrupt mercy.  The secret
fear rode his heart: how the means to sway fate might corrode a man's
spirit to forget his humanity and embrace an abstruse creed without
pity.  Wider knowledge could blind the eye to suffering; or why else
should Athera's greatest arcane order give even indirect sanction to a
prince who had turned the shining wisdom of his upbringing toward acts
of unconscionable slaughter?

Shadows had been used to entrap an army; magecraft itself, to bind and
kill.

And yet the Fellowship Sorcerers who held the sure resource to forbid
such offenses stood back and did nothing at all.

Lysaer refused to resent the sorry fact that he stood alone in his
resolve.  He would act and risk perilous consequences to find whether
the Koriathain were willing to lend their arts to help him track down a
felon.

The enchantress's cottage lay deep in the glens.  Upon Lysaer's arrival,
late day spun cobwebbed shadows across vibrant green moss and tender
grasses.  Shoots of sprouting herbs and the whiskered leaves of
coltsfoot grew in hoed rows by the snaggled sprawl of a withy fence.

The dilapidated dwelling beyond sagged in the roof beams like a
toadstool leaning to rot.  But the shutters were whitewashed and the
stone step swept.  clean of debris.  Footsore, thirsty, his heartbeat
rushed by apprehension, Lysaer strode up to knock.

The panel swung open to his touch.  From a gloom flecked by the unsteady
eye of one candle, a cracked porcelain voice

bade him enter.

The boar spear was too unwieldy to carry indoors.  Lysaer rested its
shaft against the outside lintel.  The hasty breath he snatched to brace
his nerve was ingrained with must, tallow and unwashed fleeces, and a
fierce tang of aromatic grease, a herbs.  Beneath lurked a taint of
less-pleasant things: of stale ash and husked insects trapped in
cobwebs; of rust and dried blood and grated rootstock.  A tingle kissed
his nape as he stepped in to a shrill squeak of floorboards.

Something moved beyond the light like the smooth slide of bone against
cloth.  "You do not come to hunt beasts, son of s'Ahelas."

Startled to be named for his mother's kin, Lysaer sidestepped in failed
effort to escape the glare of the candle.

Stopped by the touch of something iron against his knee, he sensed the
bundles of dried herbs in the rafters, and wool hooks draped with pallid
skeins of yarn.  "I came to seek counsel."

The tart voice snapped in correction.  "You came to ask to know the
refuge of your half brother, Arithon, your purpose to arrange for his
death." In flame-rimmed outline, a withered hand lifted.  An unseen
treadle creaked, and the starred spokes of a spinning wheel squeaked to
life in a sudden whir of air.

Rinsed with trickled sweat, Lysaer made out the crone's form.  She sat,
swathed in dull cloth, hair like spun glass and spider's thread an
uncombed blur in the darkness.  Hooded eyes fixed him, sunken pits in a
skull.  The cleft lips looked as if they were stitched the way paupers
dressed corpses out for burial.

Lysaer raised his courage to open a distasteful negotiation.

"Do the Koriathain condone the wanton use of arcane power?

Walls and buildings in Jaelot were unlaced, stone from stone, and none
who suffered saw justice."

The spinning wheel settled into rhythm.  "You speak of an event on a
coastline far beyond the chartered boundaries of Tysan." A sibilance of
cloth, a scratch of dry fleeces and yarn turned off the spindle, teased
between waxy, crabbed fingers.

"Rathain's own liege lord was the instigator." Calm under questioning,
Lysaer said, "Do the powers of Athera permit such a prince to despoil
the same cities bound under his sovereign protection?"

The crone's chin lifted.  "For this you set yourself to pluck a man's
life from the hands of Daelion Fatemaster?"

Bored through by a gaze like struck flint, measured in every detail,
even down to the trembling gold highlight on his hair, Lysaer forced a
bold step.  "I would defend the weak and the innocent against any man
whose misuse of grand conjury caused them harm."

The whickered turn of the wheel held steady.  Pinwheel shadows flared
over a plank table, a leather chest, and a hamper or laced withies in
one corner.  "If I grant you the scrying you desire, you will use it to
violate the peace.  Our Koriani creed cannot sanction bloody war."

Lysaer advanced to preserve the initiative.  "I haven't come
empty-handed."

"A bribe?  That's impertinence, to presume earthly wealth could sway any
sister of my order." The crone heaved up a coarse scratch of laughter.
"Prince, you waste time.  Take up your spear and go hunt the boar.  He
would show you more sport for less danger."

Hands clasped before him in cool censure, Lysaer said, "I give the
beggars in my court a better hearing."

A creased palm slapped the whirling wheel to a stop.

"Would a beggar offer blood price to take his half brother's life?"

"Would you let a point of kinship overset a whole kingdom's right to
justice?" Across darkness, through eddyless air clogged with the rancid
reek of tallow, Lysaer felt the probe of the enchantress's regard like
subliminal pressure against his bones.  Iron to his core, ruled every
breath by royal dignity, he quelled the swift prick of affront, that
this enchantress should dare to question his morals, or doubt his
fitness to act on behalf of a jeopardized society.  "In allowance for
mercy, I would say instead that I petition for help to mete out a swift
act of cautery.  Who else is qualified to outmatch this evil?  Or should
civilization be abandoned to suffer, and a people see ruin for a
sentimental principle, hinged on an accident of birth?

Do we shelter one life, regardless of ancestry, then sanction the act of
mass murder?  Answer me fairly: can the breach between townsman and
clanborn ever hope to be healed for as long as Rathain's prince remains
alive?"

The treadle squeaked again and revived the lagged spin of the wheel.
"You imply the Koriani Senior Circle is remiss?

For Arithon s'Ffalenn, Morriel Prime has already made disposition." A
tuft of wool flitted free of the crone's grasp and drifted like an
errant spirit across the candle's thin halo.  "You mistake us.  We are
not as the Fellowship, to turn blind eyes to events.  I can lend your
endeavor this much, Prince of Tysan: you shall suffer no interference.
Should you find your quarry and run him to ground, force of arms shall
be left to prevail."

"You would dismiss me unheard?" Lysaer cried.

An invisible movement jerked the lint on a draft, and a snake hiss
whisper lashed the gloom.  "How dare you!"

But the implied admission stood: that the Koriani Prime already knew the
Shadow Master's whereabouts.

Lysaer outfaced the crone's ire.  "Before the Mistwraith invaded Athera,
your order did not trifle with nursing the sick.

They peddled no petty charms for Lyat bane and let herb witches attend
birthings and sick livestock.  Koriani magecraft at one time was said to
cure mortal wounds.  Initiate sisters weren't culled from your
orphanages, but sent to your hospices by parents, lest their talents
languish without teaching.

What of your hopes to restore such lost influence?  Is your sisterhood
content to remain overshadowed by events?  As a prince pledged to mend
this land's rifts and sad hatreds, I would suggest your Prime's goal and
mine at heart aren't so terribly different."

The crone's gaze devoured him now, sharply enough to raise a flush.
Hazed by his own rapid heartbeat, Lysaer finished on a drawn note of
acid.  "I beg to suggest this exchange is no tawdry bargain, but a just
restoration of a moral balance.

I once visited Althain Tower.  Sethvir's storerooms hold treasures that
perhaps should be brought into daylight."

"You meddle beyond your depth, prince!" But the enchantress faltered in
her spinning.  The wheel lost impetus.

Slackened a bare instant from firm tension, the yarn snapped into spring
loops and tangles, unnoticed as her eyes pinned his face.

Riled by the disparate sense of being memorized for future study, Lysaer
lifted his spread palm and raised the bright current of his gift.

Light bloomed from his fingertips.  The sediment of gloom flowed away as
though strained from murky water to unveil the cramped room in its
poverty: the threadbare coverlet on the truckle bed, moth nipped and
fringed with raveled seams; furnishings worn to a patina of hard use;
and walls swagged in warped shelves, crammed with an herbalist's
collection of flasks and packets of rootstocks.

The enchantress proved an angular woman with sunken cheeks and puffed
hands.  Her shapeless brown twill hung speckled with wax and napped to
frayed seams at the cuffs.

Brown walnut eyes might have been warm, were they not touched to an
impervious glitter that stabbed even the dead air for its secrets.

"Speak your bribe then, prince." Her face a leather mask, she added, "If
you seek to gain, you must abide by my judgment.  Your case will be
weighed on grounds of moral merit, but beware.  You trespass in affairs
beyond your depth."

Lysaer drew breath and found himself trembling after all.

Necessity impelled him to commit himself.  "I have seen in the store
vaults at Althain a weighty sphere of cut amethyst.

Traithe named that jewel the Waystone of the Koriathain."

The crone gave a clipped cry.  A candle-caught sparkle of tears rinsed
her cheeks, quarried in seams and tired hollows.

"We never knew," she said in a shattered whisper.

Misplaced since the time of the uprising, the Great Waystone held
capacity to channel the trained awareness of one hundred and eighty
enchantresses.  The crystal had stood as the keystone of Koriani power.

Since its disappearance, the sisterhood had been as a body blinded,
reduced to crippling weakness.

If means could be found to restore its possession into the hands of the
Prime, the order could rebuild its lost influence.

The Koriathain might regain their former strength to steer events in
mercy and compassion; to alleviate those trends of daily suffering the
Fellowship in its arrogance deemed unworthy of attention.  Through the
Great Waystone, the medicinal virtues of herbals could be raised beyond
individual treatment, plagues could be averted, the course of storms
bent aside, earthquake and wildfire forced quiescent.  Once more the
order could act to spare the world from its imprint of senseless,
natural disasters.

The crone sat bemused, her hands draped loose amid the carded wool in
her lap.  "Ath bless your vision, Prince of Tysan." Flushed to deep
gratitude, she attended the matter of his asking price.  "Approach and
stare into the candleflame.

My art shall grant the augury you ask of us."

Lysaer dispelled the blaze of his gift.  While the shadows rushed back
and veiled her in obscurity, he crossed the worn, creaking boards.

The isolate flame glowed through his hair, the tips of each strand fired
bright as spun wire.  He aligned his sight as the crone had directed,
and inhaled the fragrance of lavender and pennyroyal and mint, and the
fox musk scent of whatever had been used to cut the oil from raw
fleeces.

The crone neither spoke nor moved.  Her lashes stayed parted as her eyes
glazed blindly into trance.  The knuckles in her lap twitched once and
stilled, chapped to cracks like the glaze on cheap crockery.

Tense, lightly sweating, Lysaer waited empty-handed for the magic to
touch him.  Seconds passed.  The candle's fire bent and wavered and
thrashed up its rippled, thready fumes.  His eyes burned with the strain
of fixed focus.  The transition that plunged into present dream fell
seamless and silent, outside his five senses to fathom.

One moment he stood in the enchantress's cramped cottage.  The next
breath he was nowhere at all, a disembodied presence shot through a
swoop of uneasy distress.  Then his awareness contracted into a sharp,
focused vision that encompassed a vista far distant....

...  the azure harbor sparkled under mild, salt winds, creased by the
satin splash of breakers.  Against a fan ofpalm trees and the fluffy,
low clouds of the tropics, a man in sailor's garb closed a bargain with
an aproned craftsman.  "My shipyard will be settled at Merior by the
Sea, " he infor?ned.  "Your contract will extendfor two years, through
the course of building ten brigantines.  " As he turned to depart, the
fall of southern sunlight limned glossy black hair and a face of steep
planev and narrow angles; eyes clear-cut as dark tourmaline revealed him
as the scion of s'Ffalenn....

The mirror-bright clarity of the scrying splintered, savaged by a claw
rip of hatred.  Lysaer screamed in thwarted rage.  The curse-driven
impulse to draw steel, to dismember an enemy beyond reach unstrung his
reasoned, royal bearing.  He thrashed a step backward and spun, to seek
the cottage doorway where his boar spear waited ready to his hand.

But the walls, the blurred spice of herbs, the candle and crone: all
were banished.  His foot raised no squeak of waxed floorboards.

Instead, he crashed through damp branches.

Lysaer jerked short in bewilderment.  The unconsummated passion raised
by the scrying sheared through his body in waves.  Banished back to the
wood by some twist of fey spells, he stood at the verge of a glen.  The
air wore a diaphanous mantle of twilight; grass and fiddlehead ferns
drooped to a tarnish of dew.

Lysaer shuddered in the cold air.  His oak spear lay at his feet.

He snatched up the weapon, still fired in every nerve by an untamed
blaze of animosity.

Movement across the clearing caught his eye.

Embedded in shadow beneath the tree limbs, a boar waited, head down and
bristling to challenge the disturbance in its territory.

Failing light printed the curves of its tushes, varnished with spittle.

The pits of mean eyes scanned the gloom to a twitch of pricked ears.

Lent a hunter's concentration by the riptide shock of Desh-thiere's
curse, Lysaer had no space for fear.  The scrying had shown him his
enemy, and now the berserk need mauled through him, to tear living flesh
and draw blood.  He raised his weapon, leveled its barred crosspiece,
and crouched to meet the boar's attack.

His move broke the beast's snuffling uncertainty.  It gnashed razored
ivory, lowered its coarse neck, and charged.

Dew scattered before a snapping click of cloven hooves.

The boar came on, a brute mass of churning sinew and foul, snorted
breath.

But Lysaer saw no animal bearing down on the braced tip of his spear.

Imprinted against the vague darkness, he aimed instead at the black,
glossy hair; the detested, trickster features of his half brother.

Lysaer's lips peeled back in poisoned exultation as the boar pounded
headlong toward his vitals.  The spear graced his hands like a smoothed
bar of light, nervelessly steady and sure.

Perhaps the crazed beast sensed its doom; or else the fickle wind cast
the scent of oiled metal, poised ready to be sheathed in hot hide.

At the crux of the last closing stride, the boar swerved.  The spear
jabbed its shoulder and ripped deep.

Impetus drove the weapon home through its straining mass of muscle. Bone
hammered and grated in vibration through the wood in Lysaer's grasp.

The wound he dealt was mortal, but not quick.  The boar squealed its
agony and thrashed.  It tussled to gore, to a spray of gouged turf and
bruised grasses.  Its killer held fast to the spear shaft, partnered in
a battering dance of death.  Raised to sick thrill, Lysaer savored
fierce strength brought to helpless, thwarted rage; he gloried in his
ascendance, and as his victim weakened, he reveled in its pain.

He twisted the spear, felt the blade slide past bone and bite deeper, to
hack and ravage and bleed white.  Through his curse-driven fervor of
elation, he gloated in the knowledge that finally, his half brother lay
within reach.

Before the turn of the year, the unprincipled creature dying on his
steel would be the Shadow Master, Arithon s'Ffalenn.

He hacked at the boar's carcass long past the final quiver of life. Then
a last, savage shiver rocked through him.  Chilled in running sweat,
smeared with torn greens and the hot copper reek of spilled blood,
Lysaer felt his obsessed fit of fury drain away.

Awakened to shamed honor, he discovered just how far from sanity the
witch's filthy scrying had driven him.

The spear fell from his slackened fingers.  Drained from the after shock
of magic, he bent, arms hugged to his breast.  The stink of death and
feces revolted his civilized senses.  He crouched, overcome, and was
rackingly sick on the grass.

Captain Mayor Pesquil sighted him there, huddled in the muck beside the
butchered boar, steaming in the cold air of twilight.

Prince Lysaer flinched at the swish of soft steps in the grass.

He gathered himself and shoved erect.  "Don't touch me," he said.

Pesquil looked him up and down, careful not to study the remains that
lay mauled beyond salvage as a trophy.  In damning, steely quiet, he
noted, "I see you took your beast without any contest at all."

Untouched by remorse, Lysaer recovered the sticky shaft of

his weapon and braced his bruised body to full height.

"Avenor's army will march to sure victory, now.  I know

where our enemy lies hidden.  The main muster shall take place

at Etarra.  Then we'll need galleys, as fast as we can hire them, to
sail our war host southward to Merior."

"What are you talking about?" Pesquil snapped.

"Arithon S'Ffalenn." Over bloodied fingers, Lysaer s'llessid smiled. "We
shall find him holed up in Merior, building ships to prey on merchant
commerce.  His pirate father did the same.  If we can cross the
continent and put our war host to sea, the Master of Shadow will lie in
his grave by the winter."

Feeling cleansed, Lysaer understood that the Koriani witch had been wise
in her way to arrange his tryst with the boar.

The catharsis of violence had restored his control.  He could review her
scrying now with equanimity.  A detail slipped past in the first heat of
vision pricked now to the forefront of his mind.

The bullion chest in the sand by his half brother's foot, offered to
bind honest craftsman, had carried an Etarran guild brand as well as the
wax seal of Tysan.  The Master of Shadow could never have acquired such
a coffer, except through Lady Maenalle's collaboration.

Stiffened to sharp outrage, Lysaer said, "Ath's mercy on her.  We have
beyond doubt been betrayed." There and then in Pesquil's presence, he
swore his royal oath to wreak vengeance upon the caithdein of Tysan.
"Mark my word, Lady Maenalle's life is forfeit.  She has forsaken her
realm and sent all my raided gold to serve the cause of Arithon
s'Ffalenn."

Interstices

In the glens beside Tysan's seacoast, a boar's blood clots in matted
grass; a candle stub charged with energies from a dangerously
significant scrying dusts trailers of failed smoke through an abandoned
cottage; a prince rejoins his worried retinue; but unlike every other
night, the Warden of Althain fails to track these events from his tower,
immersed as he is in the deeps between stars in search of a colleague's
lost spirit....

Within Alestron's state chamber, a dishonored captain marked with raw
whip scars stands straight to receive the sentence of his duke; but the
words that condemn him to exile mean less than the knowledge that an
envoy fides north to seek word of the war host being raised to hunt the
Master of Shadow....

In Avenor, under low-bellied clouds and fine drizzle, the last companies
gather under Tysan's royal banner, then form up in smart columns to
march east; while before the arch of the gatehouse, Lady Talith sheds
tears of farewell in her husband's embrace, saying, "Kill the felon
swiftly and return."

XII.  Elaira

rithon's sloop Talliarthe slipped back into Merior's tiny anchorage
after a late-night passage.  The fisherAmen abroad in the pearl gray of
dawn simply saw her, returned without fanfare, and tied off to an unused
mooring.

By sunup, Jinesse's young twins repeated the discovery.  Their bout of
ecstatic shouting rang shrill through the glassine air.

Through the wheeling flocks of seabirds startled from the watchtower,
the children rowed out in their dory and came back an hour later. Braced
in the little boat's bow lay an exquisite bowl of Falgaire crystal
crated in straw and a bolt of blue silk for their mother, sent with
Arithon's compliments.

Disturbed at her washing by the widow's confounded dismay, the
boardinghouse mistress offered counsel.  "Keep his gifts or sell them
for silver, but don't be silly over nothing!

Yon outsider's a man who knows his own mind." The large woman thrust out
the dripping end of a bed sheet.  "Hold this."

Her strong, collected hands wrung the cloth.  "You'll offend him, and
deeply, if you slight him by sending them back."

Returned to her cottage with her apron spattered with soapsuds, and her
hair tugged into a shag of wild ends by the sea breeze, Jinesse slammed
her door and shot the bar.  Then, unsettled to note how the shimmery,
pastel silk heightened her thin-skinned, fair coloring, she locked the
bolt away in her dower chest.  The crystal bowl was too delicate for the
kitchen.  It lay unused behind glass in her dish cupboard, its luxury
displaced as diamonds tossed in burlap.  Even in gloom when the candles
were cold, stray light struck the cut facets and woke a vibrant, rainbow
shimmer, too rich to belong beside vessels of commonplace clay.

Then the gossip stormed through Merior like wildfire.  In the front room
of her herb shop, the Koriani enchantress still in residence received
word from a young mother who stopped to collect an infusion for a
convalescent child.

"The outsider's back, and no one knows why, except to use our village
for a smuggler's haven." In no hurry to leave, the goodwife offered a
half copper, and tucked away the wrapped remedy in return.

She fussed at the fringe on her shawl and added, "You heard about that
black brig which stopped here in his name?  Well, she carried a cargo of
gold and rare riches.

The cobbler's wife says the whole cache was sailed west and buried in
the sands of Sanpashir."

When this comment raised nothing but silence, the woman tried a fresh
angle.  "You know that rough woman captain and the outsider are in
league.  Both carry scars from past violence.

Jinesse may well come to grief through her friendship.  I should fear,
were I in her place."

"I don't believe Jinesse will suffer," Elaira said firmly.

Unbound hair mantled her shoulders, dimmed to brown smoke in the'shadow
as she stepped past the dormer.  She dropped the coin into the milk
crock that served her as strongbox, then returned.

If she knew more of the outsider's doings, she was unwilling to talk.
Wide open and direct, eyes the fathomless, pale sheen of electrum stayed
level and pinned on her client.

Disturbed by that close a scrutiny, or perhaps frozen out by the
silence, the mother made haste and departed.

Elaira sighed and decided to brew tea to ease the starting, tight pangs
of a headache.  In place of relief, she felt deep unease, that intuition
had served her correctly: Arithon s'Ffalenn had come back.

Spared the painful indignity of chasing his shirttails to Innish, as
Morriel's orders would eventually have insisted, the enchantress shook
off the unreasonable desire to throw down everything as the twins had,
and run with skirts flying to the beach.

Temptation could mount to an insidious ache, to invent some excuse to
call on Mistress Jinesse and ask if she had seen him, or talked, or knew
how he had weathered the winter cooped up in the incense-soaked taverns
of the southcoast.

An interval later, slouched on one elbow at her worktable surrounded by
stubs of chalk, snipped lengths of brown string, and twists of figured
tin laid out to fashion sigils to repel Lyats, Elaira stirred from
troubled thought.  She rubbed long-boned fingers at her temples,
startled by the diced slant of sunlight t roug t e casement; er an s a
am i e t roug t e morning.  In the sandy yard outside her window, the
goat bells had stilled, each animal tucked on folded knees under the
patched shade of the scrub them.

Elaira grasped her oak stylus and selected a ribbon of metal.

Resolute in concentration, she embossed the unquiet ciphers that
fashioned a spell of go-hither into the wafer-thin alloy.  Arithon
s'Ffalenn had returned to Merior.  If he planned to stay, hearsay would
inform her soon enough.

But the impact of the Shadow Master's intentions outpaced even the
villagers' loose talk.  Black Drake sheared into port by sundown.  Hard
in her wake came three merchant galleys crammed to their load lines with
lumber from the Teizen mills.

The fleet had brought its own lightermen and stevedores.  The next day
Merior's cramped quay seethed like a kicked ants' nest with oared boats,
while cargoes of imported planking were offloaded and set down in stacks
on the sandspit beyond the village.  The arthritic old sailors left the
boardinghouse porch to observe, and even the most clouded eye among them
could not mistake seasoned oak; the sawn boards of spruce and fragrant
cedar; the beech; the rare locust; the fine teak that rimmed the raked
crests of the dunes like buttresses.

Delivered to the beaches above Merior to the last beam and billet came
the marrow to fashion blue water ships.

Speculative gossip led to spirited wagers, met by cheers from the
winners when yet another galley bearing tools hove in from Southshire.

Feylind took interest in Black Drake, then threw a swaggering tantrum
when balked in her desire to have a red shirt like Captain Dhirken's.

The trading sloop that used the Scimlade beaches for her yearly
careening haled into port out of season.  She delivered a master
shipwright and seventeen journeyman craftsmen.

Onto the strand of Merior, seemingly overnight, came the sinew and
skilled labor to begin the manufacture of hundredton keels.  As
suddenly, the load-bearing fleet raised anchor.

To the beat of the drum and a white thrash of oars, or the crack and
belly of filled canvas, the vessels made way and returned to their
customary trade routes.  Gusts from the north bore the tang of fresh
timbers, then the rattling hail of hammer, saw, and chisel, as crude
shacks sprang up to house the influx of outsiders.

Merior's hardy villagers met over beer in jammed parlors, and lashed up
a storm of troubled talk.

In plain words, Arithon told any who asked of his plans.  He would build
ten brigantines, dismantle his craftyard, and leave Merior unchanged by
his tenancy.

Certainly his choice of location bore out the spirit of his promise.
"Not to fret," said the gouty old fisherman who diced with his cronies
beside the boardinghouse steps.  "Or why should yon outsider lay the
bedlogs for his ways on the Scimiade sandspit?  First heavy blow from
the east, and Ath's seas'll scour his works away.  Not being a
landgrubbing fool, that's his stamp o' surety his roots aren't for
keeping."

"He's treated fair with Jinesse," the wife who poured lager chimed in.
"Nobody's cheated.  And he's said, for the noise and the bother, he'd
fix any lugger's broken tackle and take no fee like a neighbor."

But as the first timbers were sunk and fared smooth, men with comely
young daughters found their worries less easily settled.  The craftsmen
who bunked in their ramshackle cabins earned silver with no place to
spend it.  Merior boasted no ready tavern or house of entertainment, as
Dakar had gained bruises to determine.  Approached in the sapphire
twilight by a knot of fishermen off the Tuggers, Arithon heard through
their complaint and made immediate contingency.

His warning was posted by dark, that any worker who caused trouble would
be turned off without hearing; then that problem averted long before it
arose, a boat was hired to bear the craftsmen in shifts for leave time
downcoast in Shaddom.

Throughout the days of upheaval, the villagers' wild conjecture, the
disorders of change adroitly smoothed over, Elaira kept to her shop. She
cast no patterns of divination to mark the activity of the prince she
had come to Merior for the unparalleled cold purpose of binding with
ties of affection.  Progress at the yard was on everyone's lips, through
the week as the whipsaw pit was fashioned.  Under Arithon's swarm of
laborers, pole buildings for the joiner's shop, loft, and steam shed
were raised and roofed.  Summer winds off the ocean swept inland and
raked up buttresses of thunderheads to lash squalls across Sickle Bay;
in contrast, the peninsula's weather inclined to stay dry.  The shakes
for the walls were left stacked aside, while through the close, humid
heat of afternoons, over the grumble of distant thunder, the first keel
for an eighty-foot brigantine was laid between stern and sternpost.
Beset from sunrise to dark by the feverish clangor of hammers as the
frames were set up and dubbed fair, Elaira employed no feminine
artifice.

If the mores of the Koriani Order commanded her to offer herself as
bait, for stubborn pride she would do no less and no more than maintain
an obligatory residence.  The village was too small, too close.  If
Arithon s'Ffalenn could avoid her throughout the two years ordained to
build his fleet, his effort of itself framed a statement.

In the cool airs each dawn, she arose and lit her brazier to brew the
day's decoctions and tisanes.  In the wind-torn late afternoons, while
storms flared and cracked across the bay, she walked the dunes to
collect seaweed to distill into tincture of iodine.  The weather might
settle to its sultry summer pattern, but the days failed to pass
unremarked.  Teased by awareness of Arithon's presence, her thoughts
stayed hooked to distraction, as though the boundaries of controlled
quiet and trance were made unruly and permeable.  The disciplined
stillness required for her arts gave no surcease, but chafed and
pressured her innermost nature to reclaim its desired alignment.

The small magecraft Elaira worked through her crystal, by

which she enhanced the efficacy of her remedies, stroked her nerves to
unwanted sensitivity until, on the wings of slipped thought, she could
sense even Arithon's footfalls through the shared, sandy ground of
Scimiade Tip.

Frustrated, irritable, she heaved a gusty sigh and battled her
reluctance to face another morning fixing simples.  Amid her bundles of
dried goldenrod, tansy, and the skinned stems of aloe selected to mix a
paste for lacerations, she cast a jaundiced glance over stoppered glass
bottles in sorry need of her attention; her depleted stores of comfrey,
gentian, and mint, perpetually in demand for babes who suffered from
colic.  A coil of hair slithered down her bare forearm, glinted with
auburn like copper chipped through dark rust.  She snapped the offending
lock over her shoulder, and noticed the time lost to daydreams.

Brisk in self-reproach, Elaira rummaged behind her still for the
poultice pot, dipped water from her pail, and chained it from the tripod
to boil.  The open doorway at her back let in the sea breeze, and the
inventive notes of mockingbirds who caroled to mark their spring nests.
Cats from the fish market strolled in at will to rub through her ankles
or sprawl in silken languor at her feet.

She resisted the temptation to rise and serve them the leftover cod from
her breakfast.  Ruled by iron will and the Koriani creed to ease what
she could of mortal suffering, she murmured the litany to focus her
innermind, and stopped, midphrase, as the light changed.  A mild chill
crossed her spine.

Subtle as a wisp of cirrus might dampen the fall of a sun mote, the cool
sensation between her shoulder blades resolved to clear warning that a
presence observed her from the doorway.

Thrilled through by a ridiculous rush of joy, she broke off, considered,
then bit her lip, quelled her smile, and turned around.

Arithon s'Ffalenn leaned like a waif against her lintel.

Restrained by the nuance of mages, he would not cross her threshold
without an express invitation, though in sun-faded breeches, laced at
the calf, and no shoes, he looked common as a journeyman carpenter.  His
shirt was full sleeved and open.

Ringless, loose hands were tucked in folded arms, and hair straight and
glossy as a crow's spread primaries fanned the tanned wedge of his brow.
His lips stayed chiseled and serious, an odd contradiction to the
strung, wary poise behind his candor.

Just barely, Elaira quashed her impulse to speak first.  Her eyes, pale
slate, awaited his pleasure in bland inquiry.

Arithon averted his glance, tapped a finger too fine jointed for a
laborer's against his elbow, then smiled and gave back the ground he had
stolen through surprise.  "The shipyard's master has learned how I like
things done.  Since the works can be left to themselves for the morning,
I thought I might call."

The pot over the brazier burbled to a boil.  In pretense of seeming
busy, Elaira bent to shorten its chain, then reached for the mint and
the stone-bladed knife she preferred over steel for cutting herbs.  In
careful, measured increments she trimmed and crumbled the leaves on a
clean square of linen.  "You don't suffer from contusions or colic?
That's ill timing."

She felt his attention flick over her, sharpened.  Before his study
could read her, she rocked him off-balance again.

"Come in, or go, or say what you want.  I'm not going to fly out the
window."

He laughed, but stepped no closer.  "You know herbals and remedies.  I'd
a mind to ask if you'd teach me."

Jarred by his unexpected request, Elaira dropped her knife with a
clatter.  The tip struck an earthenware crock and snicked off a chip of
enamel.  "Why?" she said, then instantly regretted as she sensed through
his fractional recoil an answer too painfully obvious.

Arithon s'Ffalenn had been mage-trained.  The strictures of his
discipline would insist on fair balance: spell paired with counterward;
any application of force, no matter how small, matched in its kind by
restraint.  Hounded by a curse that might demand bloodshed on a field of
unbridled violence, straight principle would drive him to seek a
surgeon's knowledge to bind wounds and set bones and heal.

"Ath, I'm sorry," Elaira blurted.  "Never mind.  My tongue runs ahead of
sound thought all the time; it's the monumental failure of my
upbringing."

Not quite disarmed, Arithon looked back in spare amusement as she faced
him.  "I don't believe it."

Elaira grinned.  "Well, it's true.  Ask how many birch rods my seniors
broke trying to retrain my attitude.  They say I have a rotten, stubborn
mind."

"Is that a refusal?" His voice held a note she would have sold her
crystal to decipher.

But the clamor of her feelings rang far too insistent to leave any space
for intuition.  Elaira dusted crumbled herbs from her fingers while the
poultice pot steamed and spat at her elbow, its agitation as thick as
her thoughts.  Acutely attuned to just who this man was, of what he
might come to mean to her, she balanced her own desperation against the
spun thread of his control.  Although he would leave without protest if
she asked, Morriel had bidden her to solicit his interest, no matter the
means or the cost.

"I might teach you herbs and their physical handling," Elaira said at
last, and hesitated.

He came to her immediate rescue.  "I'm certainly aware some constraints
must be set." How else to protect the arcane secrets she was sworn to
keep within her order?  But he left this unspoken in natural reticence,
as any spirit must who had schooling in the subtleties of power; his
background in all likelihood lent him access to such knowledge, since
many of the plants used for medicines held magical properties as well.

He finished, "Even with the connections to ritual left out, your recipes
would be better founded than any I could get from a hedge witch."

The moment hung, while Elaira fought through a turmoil of indecision.

Arithon could not know what he laid in her hands: the one opening her
heart could not deny, hand in glove with the opportune chance Morriel
Prime desired to bind him.  The sculptured grace of his fingers stayed
vulnerable and stilled, while his eyes watched, the same suspended green
of a tide pool poised between flood and ebb.  Then, as the interval grew
prolonged, a sharp, marring change pricked him into dismay.  "Ath in his
mercy, not you as well.  You can't be afraid of me also."

Impelled from uncertainty by a response too self-honest to deny, Elaira
waved him inside.  "By all means, if you're worried, come in and terrify
me further.  The upset is frankly quite welcome." The crease between her
brows eased to pleasure.

"Won't grubbing for rootstock spoil your hands?"

"I can hope I'll enjoy finding out." Irrevocably then, Arithon crossed
over her threshold, and through the one vital moment she needed to read
him, the light interfered and hazed his form from behind.

Her cottage was small, two meager rooms conjoined by a single doorway.
Elaira felt each of his light, restless steps, while his busy mind
surveyed her dwelling.  She wondered what he saw, since meticulously
little of her character lay exposed for prying eyes.

The rafters supported a storage loft, accessed by a narrow ladder.

On pegs spiked into the beams, the roots she had foraged through the
winter months hung in string bundles to dry.

Glare through the salt-filmed dormers caught on the incised clay seals
to fend off mold and stray Lyats.  Beyond her plank table, a mismatched
rack of shed deer antlers hung her cloak.

Straight boards in Merior became seats for dories, so her cottage
boasted no shelves.  Her jars of prepared remedies were stacked in
willow hampers along the wall, sorted and labeled, and preserved by
runes scribed in ink ground from minerals.  A brick oven and the coiled
glass tubes of an apothecwy's still jammed the hearth, the overburdened
mantle above crammed with jars of wooden spoons and mismatched kitchen
crockery.

As impersonal as the room were the clothes Elaira wore, of gray twill
and cambric edged with flax ribbon dyed with mulben-y.

She disdained earrings; kept no jewelry beyond a braided silver bracelet
dulled from careless wear.  The quartz pendant strung on light chain at
her neck was no ornament, but the working badge of her order.

Her feet and her hands were brown and bare, hatched at wrists and ankles
in tiny scabs and white scars from briar scratches taken while foraging.

Conscious of Arithon's regard like a play of pressed air across her
skin, Elaira added comfrey and thyme to her mix.

She talked to dispel her unease, while he quartered her workroom again,
his caged panther passage too deft to cause disturbance, and his clasped
hands not touching anything.  "Do you know how to bless and cut oak?  If
so, you can start by building yourself a stool.  I'd have you sit down.
Is it some older habit, or piratical dishonesty, or did Halliron let you
pace like a ghost?"

Poised alongside the thin paper spread with flowers too delicate to
preserve by hanging, Arithon spun in wide surprise.

"You'd rather instruct a blunderer?"

"I don't know," Elaira said, truthful.  Aware as Jinesse had never been
of his capacity to perceive nuance in others, but to be misunderstood
himself, she added, "You could say I've just undertaken to find out."

Her unexpected barb let him laugh.  "Ath, you are forthright.

After two weeks of bargaining with unctuous sawmillers, I find that a
welcome relief."

"Well it can't last." Elaira grinned also.  "People aren't fond of ticks
or midges that nip too close to the skin.  Or so said the old thief who
raised me.  He was wise enough at least not to die on a felon's
scaffold." She raised the square of linen and tipped the crushed herbs
into her pot.  "I'd planned to go foraging this afternoon.  Unless you
like watching poultices boil, we'll meet then?

No study of herbals can start anywhere else but with the live plants in
the field."

"Lady, consider me enchanted to accept." Arithon returned an unfettered
smile, then bowed and as soundlessly left her.

So began an odd, suspended interval, fractured from connection to past
or future like a jewel unencumbered by a setting.

Spring flowed across the Scimlade peninsula, ephemeral as reflections on
glass, the seasonal cycles of trees, moon, and tides more subtle in
tropical latitude.  Only the discerning observer could track the changes
as vegetation quickened and renewed, to the flight of ocean birds in
migration.  Arithon had been well taught by the mage who had raised him.
He knew to walk barefoot in her medicinal garden, and to dig for roots
with wooden implements.  He had a sharp eye for detail.  By day, they
walked the marshes where blue heron stalked fish, he with his coarse,
sailor's trousers rolled above the knee and a collecting bag slung at
his shoulder, and Elaira with her skirts kirtled up.

The virtues of purslane, stargrass, and marsh mallows were partially
familiar to him.  He could lay hands on the trunks of red maples and
willows, and in an odd, listening stillness, sense the quickened flow of
spring sap.  Her guidance was scarcely needed to show which bark to
harvest, or how much to cut from one tree.  The small herbs and mosses
native only to Athera or partial to southern climate, Elaira pointed out
and explained as they perused the sun-drenched glens and sandy scrub for
tasselflower, poke, and boneset, or the deepest shade of the oak
hammocks for galls.  She was pleased to see he did not learn her lore by
rote, but lingered on his knees in the hot, sandy soil to draw into
himself the nuance of each plant, to seek the hidden, intuitive secrets
inherent in leaves and flowers and roots.

As he knelt in clean earth, his hands cupped beneath the tiny, starred
bell of a nightshade's flower, Elaira stole the moment for herself, to
align the surface traits of the living man with the aura pattern
revealed by her First Senior.  The oddity struck her, that an
uncharacteristic diffidence flawed his bearing as he bent a queerly
desperate intensity over the plant under study.

A scarcely visible tremor flawed his touch, before he curled his fingers
shut and knuckled his fist against his forehead.

Wary of a half-glimpsed gap in his defenses, Elaira froze where she
stood.  Something had upset his mage-sight.  Warned by deep instinct
that incautious words would drive him to protect himself through temper,
she scarcely dared to breathe.

The stricken depth of her silence translated through to him anyway.

After a second, Arithon glanced up at her, his gaze something more than
shadowed, and his black hair whorled against his damp skin by the
anguished pressure of his fingers.  "You know, don't you," he accused in
blunt defense.

Elaira lowered her basket to the ground.  With the mild, slow moves a
beekeeper might use to steal honey from a smoked hive, she settled in
the meadow beside him and arranged her mud-splashed skirt around her
ankles.  A killdeer ran piping to draw notice from its nest, while high
overhead, a black vulture scribed spiraling circles.

"I've guessed something's wrong," she admitted at length.

"Common nightshade is a poison and a narcotic.  Used for healing, the
extract can act on the eyes, and the heart, or ease a child with the
colic.  But it has no property to induce prying that I was ever aware
of."

The tiniest twitch of a smile turned his lips.  "Subtle lady," he said,
but chose not to share whatever pain had grazed so near the surface. The
elbow she used to prop her shoulder rested scant inches from his thigh.
As always, he made no move in avoidance; but as scrupulously, he also
never touched.

Even by chance, over the roughest of trails, he maintained a meticulous
distance.

To pressure that barrier as Jinesse had done would be a grievous
mistake.  Through reticent silence, Elaira sensed recrimination.

Unwittingly, he had relaxed too much.  The ease of her company had laid
siege to a reserve he had no inclination to slacken.

But before he found the courtesy to escape from her presence, Elaira
shot him a sidewise grin.  "What was that ruckus at the yard the other
morning?"

Green eyes widened through a second of surprise.  Then, in an explosion
impelled by relief, Arithon snorted into laughter.

"Dakar.  What else?  We've hired in a blind rope splicer with a tongue
like a viper.  The framers took bets on a contest of insults, the winner
to mete out some prankish punishment."

Elaira peeled the sticky hair from her nape, then flicked out the ends
to rebraid them.  "And Dakar lost?  What was the forfeit?"

His glance drawn to admire her dark locks, that sparked to bronze fire
where the sun touched, Arithon set his chin on crossed wrists.

"Old Ivel bet the lads that our prophet was too fat to squeeze into an
empty tar cask.  Dakar managed, of course, as a point of sore pride.

But when his elbows got jammed, and he asked for help to get out, an
enterprising joiner clapped on the lid and nailed him in.  He wound up
adrift in Garth's pond."

"Jinesse's twins fished him out?" Elaira asked between gasps.

"No." Arithon wiped his eyes and snatched the breath to answer.

"Are you kidding?  Feylind would as likely raise cheers while he
drowned, and Fiark would sling rocks at his tombstone.  Dakar shouted
and pounded until the staves sprung and began to take in water.  The old
men who idle on the boardinghouse porch finally netted him to shore and
broached the cask.  But they filched his beer store as payment."

Restored to companionable ease, Arithon gathered himself to his feet.
Against custom, he offered his hand to assist Elaira up, and in gifted
inspiration, she released his warm fingers a half instant before he did
so on his own.

Their eyes met.

"Rare lady," he said again.  But the shadows were gone and he smiled.

After that, he relaxed in her presence as Halliron Masterbard must have
known him, freed for a brief space in time from the burdens inflicted by
Desh-thiere's curse and royal bloodline.  The work at the shipyard drove
him to relentless hard labor, while the frames were beveled, then set
erect and dubbed fair, to be followed under the harsh sunlight by
keelson, side keelsons, and bilge stringers.

The hour after the knightheads were set, he reappeared at the cottage,
his clothing pungent with a resinous sprinkle of spruce shavings.  Every
moment he could spare was spent in Elaira's company.

Foraging trips drew them farther afield, into the deep, still bayous
that fringed the shores of Sickle Bay, alive with cormorants that
startled from their step with awkward cries, and the singing hum of
summer insects.  By noon, they found refuge in trackless glens of red
cedar, alive with jeweled moths clinging wing folded in the undergrowth.
They carved foot ' prints over the sand hills, amid the clacking,
arrowed flit of dragonflies.  In a silence removed from the shipyard's
brisk clamor, Arithon allowed the salve of Elaira's companionship to
ease his veneer of tight reserve.  Time and again she resisted any foray
into topics that leaned toward the personal.  Unlike everyone else, she
never once questioned his integrity.  He began to laugh easily, and
spoke more than once of the high mage who had raised him on the world
beyond the West Gates.

"My grandfather was sparing in his praise of apprentices," Arithon
volunteered on a night outing.  They had gone to gather herbs for
talismans of ward best harvested under influence of the moon, and now
rested side by side on a fallen log while a fox barked deep in the
brush.  Arithon toyed with a storm-broken branch, exploring by touch the
tiny, green buds of a live oak's acorns, that ripened light tan and jet
black.  "My grandfather insisted we think for ourselves and achieve for
our own satisfaction.  Deep study of the mysteries was its own tough
path, he always said.  To live for approval of others was a pitfall that
begged a false turning."

Cued by a queer little hole in her gut, that now was the moment she had
angled for, Elaira refused to look at him as she said, "And do you seek
approval from others to know you did right in Etarra's attack on Deshir
forest?"

Her reference to the children killed with the clans in his defense made
him surge to his feet in recoil.  The oak branch thudded earthward with
a dropped thrash of leaves and his eyes bored down at her, anguished.
"Who else beside the clansmen who survived could be aware that the
deaths of those children were beyond fate's grasp to prevent?

Daelion Fatemaster show his mercy in fair judgment for their murders.

There is no absolution, no redress.  For I can never be reconciled with
what happened in my name that day on the banks of Tai Quorin."

"You swore an oath as Rathain's prince to protect your real clans."
Elaira looked up, her features traced in silver light.  If he wanted to
flee or strike out at her presumption, he was stopped by the tears that
sheened her eyes.

"What makes you take my troubles for your owns" The veined silk of the
oak leaves shivered as he began and checked a step forward.  A moonbeam
cast through the boughs overhead played like a wisp of dropped floss
over the edge of his cheekbone, then grazed insubstantial as spirit
light across his full sleeve and the attenuated knuckles of one hand.

"I wasn't, in fact," Elaira said in dry rebuke.  "It's an entrenched bad
habit, like saving wing-broken birds and rescuing waterlogged spiders
out of horse troughs." She threw back a damp smile, unwilling to draw
unfair advantage from the birth-gifted empathy that ran in him deep
enough to lacerate.

"Did I ever tell you what I did as a penniless chit on the day I caught
the Mayor of Morvain's son tormenting a mongrel in an alley?"

"Rare lady," he said, softened at last to ease his guard, "you did not."
A shadow limned against gauzy plumes of ground mist, he bent, twitched
the oak branch aside, and resettled himself at her feet.

While the small Southland finches rustled in the treetops, he listened
as she told of the exploit that left a young boy with injured fingers,
and which set an end to her freedom of the streets, to place her in
Koriani fosterage.

"The herb witch who sold simples to the prostitutes had always insisted
I had talent," she finished, her hands nested tight on her knees and her
hair channeled into silky torrents by the bleached linen pleats of her
blouse.  "If I also suspected the amethyst in the pin I'd just stolen
had once been a mage's scrying crystal, the dog was terrified and about
to end up hamstrung, and I was too angry to care.

Right or wrong, I copied the symbol I had seen the poor quarter herb
witch use to ill-wish patrons who cheated her.  I recall not being
surprised, or even horrified, as the knife slipped in falling and
stabbed the mayor's son through the wrist."

Enfolded in the milky warm air of the night, steadied by Arithon's
silence, Elaira eased knotted fingers and shrugged.

"I escaped sentence and burning because the Koriani undertook to heal
the child in exchange for a claim to take me into permanent fosterage.
They said if they hadn't intervened, the boy would never have recovered.
His nerves had been severed.

Not by the steel, but by an ill wish wrought of raw magic."

She looked aside at him, her eyes like flawed quartz, and the evanescent
scent of her melded warp through weft with the heavier perfume of cedar.
"If I can presume, I may understand, just a little, how wretched you
must feel."

She ended with a clipped cough to mask a shiver.  "Do you

know, it often still haunts me.  I never knew if the mongrel was
spared."

Amid the rich, living fabric of the woodland, the man at her feet seemed
a clamped knot of silence, turned in on himself in stark brooding.
Alarmed, that perhaps she had dared too much, Elaira summoned full
command of her art and looked at him; and what she read in every locked
joint and in the raised tilt of his head was a longing of unbearable
proportion.  She ached to reach out, to test his emotion and see whether
she could shape from one vulnerable moment a bond of immutable trust.
She wished to touch him as she had never yearned for anything else in
all of her proscribed life.

But instinct reared through desire and stopped her.

Without knowing why, she broke his mood, sharply, and led him off on a
tangent.  "What words would your s'Ahelas grandfather have for me, to
care more for a dog than a child'?"

"He would have said, of such a child, that the dog was the
more-blameless spirit.  In my case, he warned on no uncertain terms.

The powers of mages and the burdens of a ruler make an incompatible
legacy." Arithon clasped his arms around drawn up knees, his admission
burred rough as he added, "Once, I could have listened and been free."

Over the rasp of spring crickets, a whippoorwill called its slurred
triplets.  While Arithon pursed his lips and whistled back like a mimic,
Elaira reviewed his phrasing, for as a hard, he was wont to be precise;
and swift as a prick through crowding thoughts, she grasped the
implication to his statement: "For I can never be reconciled with what
happened in my name.  .  ."

"You knew!" she exclaimed with a force that scared the bird silent.
"Before Etarra's armies ever marched, you understood the northern clans
were going to be slaughtered."

He regarded the sequined edges of the leaves, his lashes widened as if
by some force of concentrated focus, he could interpret the tracks of
the wind as it brushed through the palms.  Beyond these, across stands
of saltmarsh dusted soot gray in the moonlight, the stippled prints of
stray gusts threw pewter sheets over the jet waters of the bay.

But the soft anonymity of the night had lost any power to

calm.

"Their chieftain had Sight," Arithon confessed on a struck note of
anguish.  "Steiven's vision held truth, more's the pity.  I backed up
his claim with a tienelle scrying."

In his royal presence or his absence, Deshir had been fated to suffer
Etarra's invasion.  The pain of past dilemma sharpened every angle in
the face of the Teir's'Ffalenn charged and tied to an unwanted royal
heritage.

"So, prince, are you guilty?" Asandir had once asked of an event too
entangled to separate a whole verdict with clean certainty.

Elaira mapped the surge of trapped feelings in a man seldom given to
shared confidence, her fingertips touched to her spell crystal to
enhance her clarity of sight.  But nothing of pity could stiffen her for
the blow as Arithon turned toward her, and disclosed, "The clans of
Deshir should have died to a man, had I not stayed and used sorcery in
defense.  That was all that held me to the letter of my sovereign oath.

So you see," he ended in an agony he might never unburden, "it might not
matter, to know if the puppy was saved.  More than two hundred clansmen
survived the fight at Tai Quorin.  But there is no settlement to be
found in such a victory.  I can't sort past the deaths and the bloodshed
to say if their lives matched the cost."

A slow breath unreeled from Elaira's throat.  Eyes closed, her knuckles
pressed to her lips to stem the fatal urge to cast off her vows and tell
him the damaging intent of her Prime Senior's directive, she locked down
a cry of pure misery.

Morriel Prime had been mistaken, and Lirenda dead wrong, to seek a
binding to track this prince's movements.  The Fellowship of Seven had
judged well to insist that the s'Ffalenn compassion in Arithon's
character had ruled his actions to a pernicious degree.  Yet if
mitigating circumstances argued his case for the butchery of Etarra's
army in Deshir, the future offered no such remission.

Indeed, no sounder option existed than to choose as Arithon had, to
build ships to escape in extended exile.

Elaira had not even realized she wept until droplets

splashed hot on her knuckles.  She sensed a rustle of movement, and then
Arithon was standing, a bleak silhouette against the boughs with their
netted sparkle of spring stars.

Two hands pressed briefly on her shoulders, warm and something less than
steady.  "I'm sorry, rare lady." He sighed with a sibilance like pearls
rubbed in velvet.  "I've done you no kindness tonight.  If I grieve for
any small thing, it is that."

Then his touch melted back and left her desolate.

Cold and alone in the wine-rich anonymity of the forest, Elaira let the
tears slip through her fingers.  Time itself blurred until the emotion
welled dry and burned out of her.

She faced one last bitter thought.

What the Master of Shadow needed from Merior was the release his
proscribed fate would not allow: for Lysaer's armies were already moving
west, to repeat and compound Strakewood's tragedy in the coils of
Desh-thiere's curse.

If the graceful brigantines mapped out in the sail shed were not
finished and launched by that hour, Arithon s'Ffalenn would never
survive to be hounded by his conscience.  He would instead become torn
out of life, cornered like a rat on the beach.

Beacon

Summer sunset rinsed like a spill of scarlet dye over the spire of
Althain Tower.  Brassy heat fretted curls in the vine leaves latched
over its age-gritted stone while the hour subsided into afterglow.

Outlined by a window, and framed in sky clear as indigo-stained glass,
diminished beneath his laden bookshelves, Sethvir listened to the squeak
of a loose shutter and the dry, whispered winds off the desert.

Beyond these, like a strand of silvered thread in common linen, he
sensed the bright play of power that channeled through the third lane.

Each facet of its grand mystery keyed into harmony with the wheeling
stars.  Scribed by the dance of sun, moon, and tide, the strung, static
matrix of harmonics plunged through a sliding shift in resonance: and
the earth itself rang with the advent of solstice.

The Warden of Althain started erect.  Touched by belated recollection of
company about to arrive, he blotted his pen nib on his cuff.

His remedy for lapsed hospitality was to quarter the library like a
fishing heron, snatching papers off his littered table.  He raked his
unshelved books into tipsy piles, grabbed bits of string and augury
cards to use as stopgap markers, then gave up and left the last covers
flopped open, stacked in alcoves and unswept corners.

Inkwells that lacked stoppers remained where they stood, since every
cupboard and aumbrey lay crammed already with oddments.

Asandir arrived at the lower gate before Althain's Warden thought to
rummage for a comb to clear the month's tangles from his beard.  His
neglected grooming scarcely mattered.  No others would come this season.
Traithe was at King Eldir's court in Ostermere to ease a dispute between
the Elkforest clans and the merchants of Quaid; Luhaine remained
entrenched at Meth Isle to assist its guardian spellbinder to quell a
resurgence of karth-eels.

In Third Age 5645, the Fellowship's solstice convocation of necessity
was reduced to a partnership of two.

Worn by more than long leagues in the saddle, Asandir dropped into the
seat by the casement.  With him came a sulfurous tang of brimstone.

His sleeve cuffs were marred with black-rimmed perforations pricked by a
fall of live sparks.  The ends of his shoulder-length hair hung
tarnished and raggedly singed.

"I'm fortunate not to have burns," Asandir admitted, just back from
renewing the bindings which confined the fire-breathing Khadrim to the
Sorcerers' Preserve.  The winged predators held an uncanny penchant for
knowing when Fellowship reserves were taxed thinnest.  Where they sensed
weakness, they would harry like a wolf pack, inspired to a frenzy of
bloodlust.

Too reticent for speech, the Warden of Althain roved a restless circuit
of the table.  He touched objects and book spines in aimless passing,
his eyes not just distant, but glazed.

Asandir sharpened to attention.

His piercing, worried survey of Sethvir's jumbled caches showed him a
scraggle of dried herbs, three nuggets of amber glass, and a wren's
molted flight feathers scattered like slate knives amid a clutch of
round stones from a stream bottom.

These were netted in the gossamer windings of the usual visiting spider.
Disturbed by the abandoned look to the clutter, and nary a tea mug in
sight, Asandir pinned his colleague with imperious concern.

"What's happened?"

Sethvir started, blinked, then thumped down in the nearest window seat
to a riled, dusty puff from a cushion.  "What hasn't?  I have too much
news, and every bit of it grim."

Since spoken words were a bother, Sethvir gave a haunted shrug, then
shared, through a merciless, crystal-clear vision, an event scarcely ten
hours old....

Cloudy dawn sheathed the peaks of the Thaldeins.  The heavy air muffled
the shod ring of hooves and flapped the fringed cloths of the banners:
the crown an star o Tysan s toy blazon paired with a new-made sigil, a
sunburst ablaze on a white field that Princess Talith had sewn to
commemorate the alliance against the Shadow Master.  Now, the trained
war host from Avenor labored up the switched-back curves that laced
rocky promontories, the men on foot flushed from exertion and each
winded mount patched in sweat.

Ahead lay the Pass of Orlan.

Nervous officers mustered their companies into tighter formation.

Over the bunched columns, wary of ambush by barbarian archers, Lysaer
s'llessid projected his gift in a magnificent blanket of hazed light.

The ward glowed as starlight on snow, a gossamer shimmer sheeted through
veilings of cloud.

The foot soldiers marched fully armored for battle.  Ahead stretched the
defile where their liege's proud company had once been reduced to a
pauper's march to Erdane.  A dire score remained to be settled from that
raid, since Lysaer's stolen wealth had come to be transferred into the
Shadow Master's cause.  Restitution had been promised for the slight to
the realm.  Blood would be claimed for due justice.

Yet no barbarian ambush lurked at the height of the pass.

Only the whine of the winds met the scouts sent to search, and white
mist, and cruel scarps, and dark rock.

The cavalcade crawled on through the defiles.  The challenge appeared
first as a shadow sketched against darker gray: the caithdein herself,
clad in no finery at all.  Lady Maenalle's leathers had never been dyed,
a significant slight, thou-h perhaps only Lysaer understood.

This time their meeting did not signify even the dignified color of her
office, the black traditionally worn in the presence of sovereign blood.

The badge of Tysan's regency was sewn at her breast, indigo and gold:
the hues of sun and sky that shone through and framed her between
precipice and vertical rock.

Straight as a sword, but weaponless, the caithdein of Tysan stood afoot
in the path of the advance riders, the standardbearers, the tall lancers
three abreast that formed the block of the elite royal bodyguard.  The
officer in the vanguard drew rein before her and signaled his column to
a halt.

The crack of hooves subsided.  A horse snorted to a jingling chime of
bit rings.  Silence abided, shrill with the mewling cries of hawks.

The gusts of high altitude moaned across stone, while the tight-meshed
columns behind disarranged to make way for Lysaer s'llessid.

Caithdein, Lady Maenalle, offered the prince no obeisance.

She stepped forward, her cropped hair wind whipped and bare of even a
circlet.  She offered no royal address, but glanced in contempt at the
golden bloom of light sheeted through the breaking clouds overhead.
"Does your Grace fear an ambush?

Send out scouts.  Search the rocks.  They are empty."

"Once before they were not." Lysaer reined back his mount, who protested
restraint and jibbed sideways.  "Your clans have earned little footing
for trust.  Do you presume and come asking my forbearance?"

"You have my word there are no archers in this pass," Maenalle replied.

"If there were, they would be dead men." Lysaer lifted a gloved fist.
The ward he had raised as a shield against arrows flared white hot, then
burned away in a dazzling snarl of sparks.  While the horses in his
company shied and plunged at his back, and his officers steadied them,
cursing, he added, "Speak quickly.  My mood isn't kindly or patient."

Maenalle met his arrogance as she might treat with an importunate child.
"You've dared to claim Avenor and stand to arms by right of your
bloodline, although you're unsanctioned for ruling power.  As a man who
would wrest advantage from this realm in pursuit of a personal feud, I
make my formal protest.  For the good of this kingdom, I demand you
abandon your campaign to kill the last Prince of Rathain.  Arithon
s'Ffalenn is no threat to Tysan.  The Fellowship of Seven has named your
cause false, and my duty lies first to the land."

Lysaer gave back cold contradiction.  "In that loyalty you are forsworn
already." Breeze ruffled his hair and the trappings on his mount in a
running, pale fire of stirred gold.

"What are the Fellowship, if not in league with the Master of Shadow?
You also have lent him your support.  Against that specifically, I
warned."

Maenalle's hawk yellow eyes never wavered.  "Coin and goods levied in
Rathain were sent back to their sovereign prince, through the Sorcerers'
auspices.  To what end the Teir's'Ffalenn disposes of what's his is no
affair of mine, nor yours either, get of s'llessid.  This I will say,
before witnesses.

If you are still the man you were born to become, a prince true to your
heritage with Tysan's given charter as your law, you will turn about.
Command your captains to retire your troops and leave Rathain's affairs
in peace."

Lysaer inclined his head in heavy sorrow.  "You ask too much.

Arithon s'Ffalenn is a danger to us all.  For the safety of innocents,
no scion of my line worth his name could stand down."

"Dare you be first then, to spill the blood of a caithdein of the
realm?" Maenalle said.

"I'll do less." Lysaer s'llessid uttered sentence.  "I will invoke town
law and bid Isaer's executioner to end the life of a thief who plunders
caravans." He gestured to his officers, gloved fingers a raked blaze of
jewels against a sudden lance of full sunlight.  "Take her."

Two captains dismounted at his bidding.  At need, they borrowed lead
reins from their mounts' harness in readiness to bind a prisoner.

Lady Maenalle spared their approach not a glance.  Bred to serve at the
right hand of princes, her pride of bearing approached a near-physical
force, tempered well to stand royalty down.  "Think what you do! Appoint
my death and you forswear guest oath, given in amity at my hearthstone."

Over the heads of his hesitant officers, Lysaer snapped a rebuttal.
"Better I be forsworn as a man than the justice of this realm become
debased.  No affectation of courtesy will mitigate the punishment due
for your act." Implacable in regret, he added, "Who am 1, to uphold my
personal honor before the protection of my townsfolk?

They are untrained in magecraft, reliant upon my gift for their defense.
Are Rathain's people any less helpless than they, to be abandoned to a
sorcerer turned criminal?"

Unbending, Maenalle gave him back her freezing silence.

And still her captors vacillated.  A sharp word from their sovereign was
required to jolt them to resume their given duty.

The elderly woman did not flinch, even as they laid hands on her
unadorned wrists, jerked them together, and bound them in leather.

Throughout the course of their handling, while the gold star blazon was
torn from her jerkin, Lady Maenalle's wide eyes remained locked upon
Lysaer's face.

Only when they finished and cast her trussed on her knees before the
hooves of the royal charger did the caithdein deliver her last word.
"Beware, oath breaker.  The authority of my office shall pass through
the Fellowship Sorcerers to my grandson.  Tysan's clans remain loyal to
your line, false prince, but for you, our goodwill is forfeit.

From this day forward, expect an arrow from the shadows, poison in your
cup, and a knife at your throat, among my people.  My life is offered,
that they will know you for what you have become: no savior, but the
slave of the Mistwraith's design."

Lysaer regarded the woman he had ordered broken through a moment of
pitying quiet.  Then he said, "To your sorrow, brave lady, and to the
waste of your life, you are misled.  I ride to war as defender of peace
against a man who was born with no conscience.  The great of this land,
of which you were one, diminish us all when they fall sway to
endangering influence.

If the crown of this kingdom was once under Fellowship province to
bestow, for the good of all people, I claim it back."

He gathered his reins without triumph.  "Where lies the virtue in
tradition and what good is law, when its use has been turned to threaten
innocents?  I give you my hope, that when the Master of Shadow has been
thwarted, your clans may one day come to welcome me."

"They may live to swear fealty to your sons," Maenalle said.  "If my
life should fall to the sword of Isaer's headsman, on my heart's blood,
I promise, never you."

The vision snapped apart like age-rotted tapestry scattered to dust in a
gale.  Sethvir hunched by the casement, his beard clasped in thin,
ink-stained fists.  He said in haggard grief, "Lysaer was prince enough
to keep his men in hand.  They did not mishandle her beyond the
indignity of shackles, but placed her under guard in a mule cart to bear
her for formal arraignment."

Asandir locked his fingers, knuckle on bone, in a white mesh of fury on
the tabletop.  Head bent, eyes shut, he scarcely felt the stroke of
desert air across his skin.  While the power in him shimmered in leashed
stasis, and his flesh, a vessel too well tempered to crack, stayed
locked into stillness, he wept in straight sorrow, and lamented an event
his Fellowship could not stay.

Truesight must not be undone before emotion.  Root and cause for
Maenalle's downfall Jay in the Mistwraith's curse.

Even if the means lay at hand to sunder its hold upon the princes, for
the lady who was the dedicated caithdein of Tysan, salvation must come
too late.

Fifteen days would see her dead on a scaffold in Isaer, by town law and
s'llessid command.

A caithdein with the courage of lions and an integrity more steadfast
than diamond, struck down in dishonor by the hand of her own prince: the
epitaph carried a venomous sting.  For Maenalle, there could be no more
ugly an ending, no more bitter a wreckage of cherished hopes.

"We are indeed come on ill times," said Asandir, chastened by
remembrance of the Mistwraith's first entry through South Gate, then the
uprising that dethroned the high kings.  Beset by such trials five
centuries in the past, not a living member of his Fellowship had
conceived how the tangle would breed tragic consequence.

Now, he dreaded to ponder what shape the future might take.

Huddled by the casement, Sethvir turned his old man's profile toward the
first, scattered stars, his beard like hooked yarn in the pestering play
of the wind.  Better than any, he knew Maenalle's mind.

His sighted talent had tracked the bitter hour as she had weighed her
course of action, then made her choice to dispatch her messenger to
Althain Tower.  As if his train of thought had been spoken, the Warden
of Althain concluded, "She saw in the Teir's'Ffalenn a hope of
protection for her clans, should the worst befall and Desh-thiere's
curse lead to more cruel persecution.  I could do no less then, but
match her steel courage and see her missive passed on to Arithon."

Given the burdens inherent in his post, Sethvir's pragmatic wisdom
displayed daunting toughness.  Pained to humility by the decisions home
alone by Althain's long-suffering Warden, Asandir forced a change of
subject.  "What do you know of Kharadmon?"

Sethvir shook his head in befuddled irritation and fired back visions in
jumbled summary.

The hastily vacated cottage of the Koriani Senior who inhabited a glen
near Avenor; then the old enchantress herself, veiled and cloaked and
swathed in sigils of secrecy, on foot to seek her Prime with a message
of pressing importance; then the bones of a boar in a trampled dell, the
skull laced still in the spent, pallid glimmer of the Koriani summoning
spell that had goaded it onto the spear.  Nearby, abandoned, lay the
death weapon, imprinted by the geas-turned hatred that had driven the
motive of its killer...

"The upshot?" Asandir prompted, as yet too perturbed by the news out of
Camris to track his colleague's vaulting chains of logic.

Rare exasperation flared blue-green eyes to full focus.

"You didn't note the energy signature for exchange and consent, nor the
telltale discharge invoked by Desh-thiere's curse?" Sethvir qualified.
"Lysaer s'llessid struck some bargain in exchange for a Koriani scrying.
He's certain to know Arithon's in Merior."

"At what price?" Asandir said.

Distempered enough to tug at the knots in his beard, Sethvir snapped
back to the displaced thread of conversation.

"I don't know.  At the time, I was too deep in trance in search of
Kharadmon to track the event at its origin.  Whatever mischief's afoot,
the upshot will surface soon enough."

That time, Asandir caught the infinitesimal hitch in the fabfie of
Sethvir's explanation.  "Kharadmon," he blurted, a stab of alarm through
his vitals.  "That's what has you vexed!  Ath's infinite pity, what
worse disaster did you find?"

Sethvir shot out of his nook in a galvanic heave of distress.

"That's the problem," he whispered from the shadows, his mind locked
again on mit ess s tug t casement.

"I found no trace of Kharadmon at all."

Asandir braced spread hands against the table as if the very floor had
rocked under him.  "Nothing," he mused.  The word faded without echo
into the dust and trapped heat of the chamber, soured with must and
parchment, and the peculiar, gritty reek of years upon years of used
ink.  No comfort could be drawn from the spin of clean breeze from the
hills, nor even from the fast and warded stone that framed Althain
Tower's protections.

If Kharadmon had suffered mishap, their hope to defeat the Mistwraith's
curse was rendered a lost cause at a stroke.  The Black Rose Prophecy,
which linked the Fellowship's return back to seven with the event of
Arithon's willing kingship, became fully undone before time and fate
could let it flower.

Too fierce to believe the future had been lost on the day that set
prince against prince in spelled enmity; too raw now to endure another
grief in vanquished stillness, Asandir pushed erect and glared at his
colleague's turned back.

"Let us set such a beacon that the sky will burn," he announced in
chiseled rage.  "Wherever Kharadmon has strayed, whatever ill keeps him
captive, I would carve out power from the heart of this earth and
configure a spell of white light to draw him homeward.  Or all we have
done to give mankind a home amid the grace of the Paravians has gone for
naught but wrack and ruin!"

"We can set the first wards on the solstice tide, but it's certainly
inconvenient." Sethvir found an ant fallen trapped in a saucer and
ushered it to safety with a feather touch.  "I hate to undertake such a
difficult binding at a time when I've run out of tea."

Asandir's mouth twitched.  "Ath.  You know better.  Have I ever shown up
here without a fresh supply?  This must be the first occasion in a
thousand years of trials you've neglected to know in advance what
simples I brought in my saddlebags."

"I've been busy," Sethvir said on a wistful, sad note of reprool Long
gone were the days when he had the leisure to grow strawberry leaves and
chamomile and enspell them to flower out of season.

The dungeon chamber in Althain Tower had no windows cut through its
white marble walls; and yet, on the eve of summer solstice, while the
latent play of lane force shimmered through the power focus set in its
smoky onyx floor, the meadow-rich fragrance of catmint and sweetgrass
twined through the storm-charge scent of ozone.  As if the cut hay
essence of the season itself partnered the forces that coursed through
its ancient rune circles.

Barefoot, draped in an ankle-length robe abraded to threads at the hem,
Sethvir set beeswax candles in the black gargoyle sconces arrayed at the
points of the compass.  Asandir stalked beside him in daunting silence.
Stripped down to shirtsleeves and the scorch-marked leathers he had
ridden in, he crossed corded forearms over his chest and spoke the
incantation to call down a spark from the polestar.  When the energy
answered, as it must to a mage of his stature, and white starfire burned
tame in his hand, he knelt in thanksgiving and homage and ignited the
wick of the north taper.

Sethvir summoned flame to light the south one.  East and west were set
burning with sun ray and moonbeam, while over the tower's lofty
battlement, the turning constellations spiked and danced the measured
seconds before midnight.

To fashion a beacon-spell potent enough to recall a kindred spirit
across the deeps between worlds, the Fellowship Sorcerers laced bridles
of pale energies through the rune circles.  To each interstice in the
focus pattern, they fixed precise markers, attuned to a facet of the
mysteries.  Through their hands flowed the tides of distilled wisdom:
secrets bought from centuries of knowledge and observation, from the
filament of silence that enacted the stealth of an owl's flight, to the
quickened burst of seed into sprout.  They invoked the endurance of oak
trees, singly by Name, until thousands of forest-tapped roots were
called aware to volunteer their grounding as anchor.  They braided the
voices of sweet summer stars, and the staid pull of planets to their
courses.  Wild wind and grass were coaxed into coercion, and their
million, partnered voices whispered measures in counterpoint and litany.

Mountains were asked to lend solidity, and the dark heart of stone gave
back its sure self, to bell subvocal vibrations and waken the somnolent
earth.  The third lane shrilled now to a higher-pitched current.  Waves
of summoned e iergy dashed in succession into the construct formed amid
th,- focus pattern.

The Paravian runes glittered, then lashed to spitting life like the
splash of molten metal over coals.

The interlaced mesh of static tore the ears, and the air bled a stinging
wash of ozone.

Unlike a Koriani binding, amplified through crystal and fettered in raw
domination, the layered weave of spells conjoined through Althain Tower
held no constraint of forced mastery.

Asandir and Sethvir worked in strict balance with the signature chord of
the earth, reaffirmed in all its grand mystery, then exalted and wrapped
through by the untamed exuberance that sourced the light-dance of life.

Midnight arrived.

The onyx floor tolled like struck bronze as the solstice charge surged
down the lane.  Gathered powers seared active with a scream of white
light.  Partnered in cold concentration, the paired Sorcerers
encompassed the mesh of their weaving, spoke a word, and on the strength
of request, locked the whole into seamless stasis.  The air stressed to
recoil inside the tower, while the rune circles channeled the lane-pulse
into silken arrows of harmony.

Asandir and Sethvir rested for an hour, seated side by side at the foot
of the stairwell with their backs pressed against warmed stone.

Althain's Warden used the moment to unfold the clasp knife he used to
sharpen pens and pare the yellow rims from his toenails.  Asandir
settled back against snow-grained marble and slept, his callused hands
quiet in his lap.  Two hours before solstice dawn, the keening of the
setting stars roused him.  Sethvir stared into space, his eyes misted
over and vacant.  Asandir touched his shoulder, arose, and stretched the
cramps from his limbs.

Midsummer daybreak found them back on station at the focus.  They
repeated last night's binding in the scald of the sun surge, and again
at noon; at sunset; at midnight.

By then the stone tower sang like a tuning fork to the powers leafed
into stasis within.  The burn of leashed energies coiled bright enough
to blind, and sear unprotected flesh to carbon.  The air itself seemed
to glister with pent force, and the stone of the floor to breathe in
counterpoint.

Heightened to peak activity, the focus could not be left unguarded for a
minute.  Asandir remained below to stand watch and steady the emergent
flaws incited by the lane's random properties.  Sethvir retired to his
sanctum in the upper library.  There, he brewed tea and pored over books
on celestial mechanics, and filled page upon page with columns of
mathematical figures in the minuscule, sharp-edged black script he used
for his personal notations.

The navigational wards to guide the spell-beacon required fifteen days
to formulate.  Sethvir worked alone, ensconced within a subliminal
spiral of linked strictures, light scribed in air and in darkness.  He
gentled each layer in sigils stamped whole from the elements.  Sun and
storm lightning; wind and driven rain; fire and water and frost; he
forged direction into spells like an arrowhead in flight, then bore the
spitting, crackling mcsh of seated conjury down to Asandir at the focus.

The coupling of raw power to the intricate spell of guidance required
another day and a half.

"I can't recall feeling this tired since the hour the Mistwraith broke
our barrier wards at Earle." Asandir raked back hair wicked with sweat
and gazed askance at the blaze of their parallel conjury.  Only a fool,
or an unschooled spirit, would dare face the construct head-on.

A beauty shuttled through its coils to beguile the unwary mind.

To stare too long was to risk being drawn in by a harmony that gloved
bitter peril, its currents too pure for mortal flesh.  Direct exposure
would bring blind, witless madness, for reasoned thought could not
sustain the unshielded chord of world life force.

In the shadow by the stairwell, poised between steps, Sethvir made a
small, shocked sound.  Asandir spun around, locked eyes with the Warden,
and deduced the sure source of his distress.  "Don't speak.

It's the Lady Maenalle, is it not?"

Sethvir said no word, but an image bled through, of a packed square in
Isaer, where townsmen thronged before a scaffold hooted and called jibes
at the condemned, lashed in cruel isolation to a post.

Neither Sorcerer moved while a handful of seconds shredded themselves in
suspension.

Then Asandir loosed a terrible cry that rocked echoes off close marble
walls.  "Shall we not let her die unremarked?"

A hammered glint of temper simmered through the mist of Sethvir's tears.
"Indeed, let us not."

He and Asandir whirled in unison.  In flawless accord, they locked step,
advanced to the heart of the pattern, and joined hands.  To the last,
unfinished thread of their construct, they laced the signature of
Kharadmon's signal Name.

Sethvir bowed his head.  His consciousness divided into distance and
held through his body's fine trembling; while on that far scaffold, a
hooded executioner drew back a silvered blade of steel.

On the cusp of its fall, the Warden of Althain said, "Now."

Asandir severed the spell's ground ties to the trees.

Power unfurled and howled.  Light blossomed until the very air seemed to
melt and burn and rage airborne.  The beaconspell fashioned to summon
back Kharadmon roared aloft toward the stars embedded in its homing. Its
grand departure stabbed light across the sky like a portent of Ath's
fury unleashed.

In Isaer, the scorching banner of its passage was the last sight Lady
Maenalle beheld as the sword slammed home through her heart.

Healing

Attuned to an herbalist's sensitivity, Elaira tracked the near to
invisible change in the light through the long days, while growing life
on the Scimlade peninsula embraced the full bounty of summer.  She
watched, too, the subtle shifts in Arithon's mood through the weeks
after the solstice.  In him, like a breath held suspended against an
influx of poisoned air, she sensed the pressure of outside events that
passed tiny Merior by.  Upcoast, in cities plied by the trade galleys,
news would be spoken of the muster in Rathain.  Arithon sent no overt
dispatch to inquire.  Nor did he make any obvious effort to gain word of
the enmity his acts had seeded in Alestron or Jaelot when the tinker's
wagon visited from Shaddom.

He spent his days in grueling, sweaty labor alongside the joiners who
steamed the planks to bend over the trued frames of his brigantine.

If a night's deep talk by the bay shore had caused him to forgo their
past hours of foraging, he came every eventide, his hair tousled wet
from his bath, and his temper still brisk as sheared granite from
managing his disparate teams of shipwrights.  While darkness fell, and
the gulls over Merior's fish market screamed and settled to roost,
Elaira instructed him in the healing arts.  He learned every nuance she
knew to stop bleeding, to splint broken bones and tie sutures.  She
brewed tisanes and explained their banes and virtues, mixed poultice
pastes to ease arthritic joints, and treated the myriad lacerations and
small injuries that arose amid the fleet and at the shipyard.

Wherever possible, she gave him space and distance.  If no caring
contact could ease his unreconciled agony of conscience, her dry barbs
of wit could make him laugh.

Whether her deepest suspicions were true, and Tai Quorin's past tragedy
had damaged him further, she stifled her desire to pry.  Some facts were
better off left to bide beyond range of her order's covetous grasp.

"You aren't paying attention," Elaira admonished on the night he asked
what her life had been like as a Koriani novice.

"We spent a lot of time learning to draw sigils to drive out rats, and
if you burn your fingers on that flask, there'll be no music for the
wedding."

"What wedding?" Arithon snatched up a linen rag to shield his grip on
the hot container.

"Can't you take pity on the matchmaking goodwives in this village?"
Elaira scolded in fond exasperation.  "You'll spoil their gloating over
six months' hard work, then break their hearts since your calls at my
cottage create their juiciest hours of gossip."

"And you told them?" he said in stifled alarm.

Elaira returned a glare of owlish propriety.  "That with Dakar in tow,
your new ships were going to need extremely potent talismans to avert
incompetence, misfortune, and Lyats."

Rathain's prince grinned through the flame-rippled air off the brazier.
"Plain truth."

The sorrow struck Elaira at sudden, odd moments, that such joy must
become the first thing to wither when Arithon's cursed fate overtook
him, and the contradictory ironies embedded in his nature came to exert
their inevitable pressures.

Bound to a course of inescapable violence as he was, she could not shake
her dread that Morriel's belief would prevail, and his very strengths of
character become the catalysts to drive his mind to destruction.

Whether the compassionate intelligence that sourced Elaira's fascination
had engaged his deeper feelings in return, he lent her no chance to find
out.  To Jinesse, who maintained a tenuous, dutiful friendship, he
seemed as he always had: willing enough to speak when addressed, but
disinclined to volunteer his confidence.

Despite a reluctance too elusive to finger, he played to brighten the
wedding of the cobbler's daughter and the freckled youngest son of the
abalone cutter, who had no touch for his father's trade and sailed as
hired crew with the fishing fleet.  An adept from Ath's Brotherhood came
to bless the ceremony, hooded in robes of stainless, white linen,
threaded at the hems and collar with interlocked seals of gold and
silver.  The feast lasted long after the summer twilight faded.

Dancers whirled in carefree circles around the bonfires, while smoke
tanged the humid air, rich with the aromatic oils burned to repel
swarming insects.  Seen through the celebrants' capering shadows, the
groom looked smart in his new broadcloth jacket, his bride flushed and
radiant under curled lemon hair, wreathed in oak greens and scarlet
ribbons.  The bronze bells sewn on her slippers chimed merry time to her
joy.

Seated by Jinesse, her hands filled with spiced bread and hot fish,
Elaira mellowed to the fast-paced, seamless peal of lyranthe notes that
stitched out the polished, brilliant rhythm.

But for the widow who recalled Arithon's performance on Talliarthe's
deck and again, more forcefully, at Innish, the measures described by
the hard's skilled fingers seemed as mere surface ripples thrown out to
mask the grand depths.

Where Elaira was drawn by curiosity to inquire, Jinesse chewed her lip
and admitted, "His mind is elsewhere, tonight.

His heart is not in his music."

The twins chose that moment to badger their mother for

taffy.  Through their engaging, boisterous noise, Elaira found

no graceful way to reopen the lapsed conversation.

The next week a squall line raked in from the east and upset the run of
fair weather.  Battered fishing Tuggers beat under reefed sails for the
shelter of Merior's harbor.  In perennial mixed blessing, the fleet's
safe return came accompanied by the indiscriminate misfortune that
abounded among men who worked at sea.

Tinseled in falling rain that hissed through her firebrand, Elaira
struggled up the exposed spit toward the shipyard.  The night was a
roaring black maelstrom around her.  Freak winds battered wet skirts
against her shins and shredded spindrift in bursting, white sheets off
the breakers.  Exposed to the storm's raw brunt, the pole sheds shook to
the blasts, while a loosened plank banged a madman's tattoo, and dilute
flares of lightning lit the anviled clouds to stirred sulfur.

Elaira picked an uncertain path between obsidian puddles and dune grass
streamered like frayed ribbon.  Against the heave of roiled surf, the
looming frame of the half-complete brigantine combed the gusts to shrill
vehemence.  Nearer to hand bulked the mass of the chart loft, needles of
candleflame pricked through its ill-fitted shakes.  Inside the sole
building to be graced with four walls, the yard's roisterous laborers
gathered over trestles to eat supper, compare conquests, and shoot dice.

Arithon's workers were unattached men.  Given an hour of unsupervised
freedom, they would drink to ease boredom, and become crapulous; divided
by disparate origins and rivalries, not a few were wont to pick fights.

Resigned to plain fact, that every black eye and skinned knuckle would
arrive on her doorstep for treatment come the morrow, and that Arithon's
visits would lapse while the wrongfully battered sued for their rights
to restitution, Elaira marched up to the chart loft and hammered a fist
on the door.

Her torch spat sparks like thrown sequins.  The rain laced a damascened
fall off the drenched ends of her hair, her plain cuffand the layered
hems of cloak and skirt.  Her insistent rapping took a moment to be
noticed.  More seconds passed as voices declaimed inside, before a chair
scraped and somebody moved to raise the latch.  The portal creaked
inward and faces peered out, sallow in the glow of cheap tallow dips, or
brosy with drink and primed to proffer lewd comment.

Elaira spoke first, her voice a steel ribbon through the background
clamor of banging tin flagons and a buffeting roar of conversation.
"Fetch your master."

Movement heaved through packed bodies.  Arithon appeared, disheveled
from the press, his attentiveness masked behind inquiry.

"Mere's been an accident to a fisherman," Elaira shouted through the
scream of the gust that flagged her torch flame.

"You're needed."

Shadowed in the swoop of the draft, Arithon pulled in a careful breath.
"You're mistaken if you think I can help."

Behind the arm he held braced against the doorjamb, two burly craftsmen
elbowed each other and exchanged ribald leers.  Hampered by the total
lack of privacy, Arithon stepped into the rain and let the storm slam
the door shut behind him.

He said nothing more.  The hard wind flogged his black hair into
tangles, before the wet slashed the strands and bared his expression to
the fickle rags of torchlight.

Presented with a wall, Elaira bent on him every power of observation she
could wring from her Koriani arts.  The gusts lagged for an instant. The
recovered leap of the cresset showed him unmoving in the beat of the
downpour; except the light dashed and flared across the abalone beads
that weighted the ties of his shirt.  His breathing was fast and
unsteady.  Through his hard-leashed control, the enchantress found no
foothold to determine why he might meet her request for help with
falsehood, or what hidden circumstance should fracture his mood in
distress.

As always when his reticence thwarted her, she met him head-on with
plain honesty.  "The boy who just married caught his wrist in a line
during an attempt to strike sail.  The damage is extensive.

Broken bones, torn flesh, and dislocation.

Without arcane help, he'll stay crippled.  The union you just helped to
celebrate in such joy will come to be dissolved."

Recoiled to astonishment, Arithon burst out, "But why?"

"Local custom," Elaira said, disgusted.  Despite his sympathy, she dared
not give in to her urgency and grasp his arm to hasten him away from the
chart shack.  "Your masterbard's training at law can't cover every
regional backwater.  With regard to marriage, some places keep stubborn
traditions.

Shepherds' enclaves in Vastmark shun women for lack of fertility.

Settlements above Waterfork in Lithmere demand a tax to be paid before
nuptials.  For Merior, a bride's father holds the right to nullify her
contract at any time before her first childbirth if the match is ruled
unfavorable.  The law was first written to curb wife beating.  Its
practice has extended to include cases where a husband loses his
livelihood.  What chance does this boy have?  And you saw the girl.

She adores him."

Arithon s'Ffalenn stood a second longer, his features veiled in the
drowning thunder of rainfall.  Then he said, "Wait.  I shall come."

He pushed back inside, to return a minute later with the leather-wrapped
bundle of his lyranthe.

"Ath's mercy!" Elaira exclaimed, her patience torn through

by his obstinacy.  "It's your mage-sight that boy requires, not any
comfort drawn from music!"

"For that, I'm sorry, rare lady." Arithon tucked her sodden fingers
through his elbow and drew her into the darkness.  "But since the battle
on the banks of Tai Quorin, my hard's gift is all I can offer."

"Can't?  Or won't?" Distraught and furious to believe he might obstruct
her through some tangle of guilt-induced conscience, Elaira raised the
flittering torch and let the light fall full on his face.

His contact with her hand jerked away as he twisted, muscle meshed to
bone in an anger not quite savage enough to mask a grief of immeasurable
proportion.  Through the thrash of storm wind and water, amid harried
black puddles that seemed utterly to swallow the tormented flame above
her fist, Elaira felt Koriani talent and intuitive instinct noose
disparate memories into painful focus: Dakar, haranguing a man he
believed to be vulnerable; then like hammered echo, the unnerving study
Arithon had once subjected to a growing stalk of wild nightshade.

More than blood had been sacrificed to Desh-thiere's curse in the
massacre at Tai Quorin, Elaira perceived in horrified discovery.

Arithon s'Ffalenn had lost touch with his mage-born talent.

Transfixed by shared pity, she wrenched to a stop in her tracks.

Arithon paused also, aggrieved enough to have laid flat all his
defenses.  "El ciard'huinn," he said in lyric Paravian, which
translated, I am exposed.  "I could wish that MorTiel shouldn't know."

Appalled to concede just what she had forced him to betray, Elaira
swallowed.  Words failed.  Apologies were useless.  Numbed and uncaring
if the sluiced wet on her cheeks held some droplets that fell hotly
salted, she ached, sieved through by mute misery.

His eyes brilliant green, his manner recaptured into calm that deferred
all blame, Arithon pried the torch from her.  He resettled the
lyranthe's strap across his shoulder, reached again, and recovered her
chilled hand.  "Rare lady, the grief is not yours.  It's hardly worth
the lad's future happiness."

of sleeve, a mangled mess of wrecked meat and bone beyond help of splint
or compress, Arithon replied, "So I did.  But knowing what you're called
is scarcely the same as the way you would say it yourself."

The boy heaved in another taxed breath and whispered his agonized
answer.  Arithon said something back in a murmur of syllables, too
softly for Elaira to understand.  Then he moved off a step, caught up
his instrument, and untied its stormdrenched wrapping.

In Paravian, he added, "That's a very ugly injury.  The bones are too
shattered to set.  I presume you plan to draw his spirit from his body
and knit the torn sinews by surgery?"

"Surgery won't be enough," Elaira gave terse reply.  "I'll have to set
up a power field and sigils, to force a regeneration.

The spells by their nature are cross-grained and difficult.  We very
well might lose him."

"Don't even think that." Arithon reappropriated the stool and couched
his shining instrument on his knee.

A harmonic pealed through the rattle of freshened rain on the shingles.
The wind's sour moan wove in ragged refrain, then a spill of notes like
dropped crystal, sliced by a tingling play of chords.  One by one,
fourteen fine strings were adjusted to stinging, true pitch.

Then Arithon tested the mettle of his instrument as Elaira had never
before heard him.

The whining complaint of the gale seemed immediately diminished into
distance.  Braced by a framework of ringing, clear measures, Elaira
fetched kindling and lit the brazier.

With hands that shook less, she set clean water to boil.  From her
hampers she selected her stoppered flasks of tinctures, then patterned a
ritual blessing to enhance the virtues of a chosei mix of restoratives:
wild thyme and tansy to ward against infection; goldenrod and black
bryony for poultice; betony and devil's bit to speed healing; groundset
to slow bleeding and dittany to ease fever.  In an unremarked moment
between ordinary tasks, the trial flow of melodies reached a consummate
perfection, then slid through a figured change of key.

Heightened to preternatural focus by the sound, Elaira had no space to
question the nature of the change that flowed through her.  On a square
of bleached linen, she shaped the sigils to deaden pain.

Against the white cloth, in ordinary candlelight, the silver-weave mesh
of the foundation spells took shape under her hands.  The spiraled
configuration of renewal grew in painstaking steps like linked chain.

Each subsequent ward traced its own signature of energy, fine drawn as
silk from her fingertips.  Where her own skills left off, the spell
weave became snatched and quickened into resonance by the emergent,
cascading harmonies that reeled from Arithon's strings.

Keyed by pure sound to primal potency, rune meshed to rune, the pale,
phosphor glimmer of the set seal at last joined complete and burned
active in a fired surge of light.  Through vision left fractured by
welling, sudden tears, Elaira gasped, touched to awe.  In perfected
beauty to wound the imperfect mind, she saw the delicate interstice of
her sigils bend into balance with the lyranthe chords, then lock against
themselves and spark into flares of raised power.

Channeled into depth by bardic talent, the refigured mystery of wards
she had handled half her life spiraled into coils of contained force.
The very air seemed to vibrate, its essence shaved thin, as if chiseled
by frost or high altitude.  The life force that flowed through her veins
and her bones felt recast to silk and white diamond.

The impact on breathing flesh was too wild to sustain.  Like a stress
tear in tissue, her concentration wavered.

Elaira cried out to warn that her art had slipped her grasp.

Her hold on tuned energies buckled.  The next instant would see her
share in the work crumple in a roaring flashburn of backlash.

Arithon murmured a Paravian encouragement.  His limpid flow of music
changed pitch.

A soaring progression of chords razed the dross from her mind, firmed
her courage, then whirled her to rarefied clarity.

Resteadied in a step, then launched still farther, into resharpened
vision akin to the scope of a tienelle trance, Elaira clamped aching
fingers to her temples.  Scarcely able to breathe, she battled to ground
the intensified nexus of awareness cast into her hands by a channel
carved out of clean sound.  Whirled into trance, inspired to join the
musician's lightning dance and pair her energies to a limitless flight
of skeined song, she let go and rode the wave of her instincts.

She came back to herself on her knees, chalk in hand.

Where each patterning had started and finished, she held no clear
memory.  Yet the figured circles now blazed complete under her hands: of
watch and protection, each safeguard to cradle a spirit drawn out of the
flesh.

The alien, vital splendor of her handiwork and Arithon's shimmered in
joined vibration, to etch weary sight and half blind her.

Shaking, Elaira recouped scattered wits and arose.  She lit beeswax
candles to mark the major points of the compass.

Peril stalked her.  The cottage was a vessel aflood in roused power.
Sharp currents nicked over her skin and jagged sparks from the
lyranthe's silver strings.  The four walls enclosed a space etched in
vibrant, poised arrows of dire force.  Now she dared not suffer misstep.
The parameters she trod were unforgiving.  Arithon also must not fail to
be aware that his slightest slipped note might strike a dissonant
tangent and lash up a lawless burst of ruin.

The gale outside seemed faded to insignificance, the drumroll of
wind-driven downpour made deadened as if swathed under a caul.  Lapped
in thick shadow, the musician bent over his lyranthe, arched fingers a
flying, deft dance over frets nicked gold in tepid flame light.  Drawn
on by his knife-edged harmonics, teased by rolling roulades of bright
chords, the forces that gouged the wild limits of chaos were coaxed
stable, then teased into balance.

Then the hard raised his head and locked eyes with the enchantress whose
gifts interleaved with his music.

The contact set off a small shock, a prick like a needle through fire.
Elaira sensed in advance the precise instant when Arithon flattened his
hand and silenced the ringing call of his strings; melded in wordless
awareness, she felt every barrier and bulwark of the mind shred between
them.

No wall remained.

The art that his masterbard's skill had seized into resonance had been
her own, made malleable like metal in a crucible, then recast to
intensified vibration.  The drawing force of the music had fused their
two spirits into a single current.

Afraid to move, hurled beyond the tears that ached to be shed, Elaira
stood transfixed, his touch softly still in her mind.

The unveiled compassion in the contact stopped her breath; would through
sheer force have felled her, had the lyranthe not spoken again.

The measures woven now shaped a clear affirmation, notes layered into
patterns that invoked Name.  Compounded through remembered strictures
from his mage training, and the deepest gift of bardic empathy, Arithon
recaptured in song the essence of the boy's self-perception.

This he framed into a mirror turned inward against itself.

To theme, he added slow, tolling chords to lull the mind.

Coaxed past reach of worldly pain, the injured boy on the table eased
into sleep.  The lyranthe cajoled, then beckoned, each progression of
chords netted into beguiling illusion that lured the tranced spirit and
enfolded it in a clarion blanket of ecstasy.

Led to stunned awe by the sensitivity of Arithon's perception, shown
wonders through the vision of trance state, Elaira saw tight-laced
bundles of notes strike and winnow the uncertain air.  The forged lines
of power called forth from bare elements unreeled into ribbons of
refined light.  Blind to his own gifts, the hard perceived none of the
form wrought by his genius.  He played on by instinct to fashion a spell
as unerring as any construct brought to focus by a master of magecraft.

Arms hugged to her chest, Elaira endured the precise, tearing force as
vibrations pealed out like fine wire to halter the boy's stunned
consciousness.  She watched the musician draw, like thorns from bleeding
flesh, the life essence out of breathing tissue.

A snap cracked the room.

Her spell circle flared like wind-fanned coals.  Each painstaking sigil
blazed and closed fast, to contain the unmoored spirit of the boy.

The hard's line of melody trod one last measure, then dwindled away into
silence.  A fearful weight of leashed force charged the cottage.  All
that tied the boy to the vacant housing of his body was a filament
spanned over oblivion, less tangible than a spun thread of thought.

"Merciful Ath," Elaira cried on a scraped whisper.

She had witnessed spells cast by senior enchantresses, through crystal
resonance and amplified alignment; she had studied under healers in the
greatest hospice in Athera; but nothing in her grasp of the mysteries
prepared her for the frightful turn of mastery Arithon had shaped and
then strung to binding ties through an intuitive rendition of pure
melody.

"Rare lady," he answered in response to shocked thought, "have you not
guessed?  Your vision itself was my sounding board."

Through a ripped hitch of breath, meaning reached her: his mind was with
her still, a bright, steely line sheathed deep inside her awareness.
Hand in glove with that presence, she saw beyond the veil, past the
privacy he kept before every man living.

Shattered in reaction, then answered warp through weft by response like
a peal of wild harmony, Elaira felt the tuned chord inside her arise to
accept its perfect match.

She understood unequivocally and finally, that the conduit forming the
bridge to the man was emotion: affection of equal depth and breadth to
the regard she already held for him.  She saw the love he had
systematically, even ruthlessly stifled before the damning assumption
that her interest was no more than a ploy arranged by Morriel Prime to
track his personal affairs.

Elaira had no chance to savor the exultation of their mutual rapport.

All wonderment became reft from the moment by need: the injured boy's
condition was too critical to suffer even the smallest delay.

Years in the healer's wards had shown how the diurnal shift in the
mysteries could blur all boundaries.  The bindings between spirit and
flesh lay the weakest while the balance between dark and dawn hung
poised on the axial turn of the earth.  Through the nadir of night, the
mortally ill were most wont to strike fleshly ties and pass beneath
Daetion's Wheel.

If the boy on her table was to survive, her work must be prompt and
precise.

Elaira bludgeoned stunned wits back to sharpness.  With her spell
crystal cupped between her damp palms, she bent once again to her
invalid.  The damage looked all the more daunting for the boy's
scarce-breathing flesh.  From Arithon she borrowed the courage to ignore
the clamor of better sense, that for prudence and safety, such a mass of
mangled tissue should be dressed out for a clean amputation.

Nothing if not stubborn, whipped on by the cry of her heart for the
waste of a life at the threshold of uselessness, Elaira hurled her will
through the core of her crystal's white focus.

For whatever end, she shouldered the supreme risk and began the arduous
course to align sigils with seals, then pair their arcane forces with
the properties of herbs to rebuild the boy's mangled wrist.

Bone, blood, muscle, and cartilage, each required separate sets of
spells.  The delicate flux of forces brought to bear must align to match
the body's own magnetism.

Elaira scarcely marked the moment when music first partnered her
efforts.

But when her hand trembled in closing a difficult sigil, a chord rang
out to steady her.  If her heart sped in fear, if strain threatened to
crack her for the complex flux she must guide by trance through her
spell crystal, reassurance pealed back and enfolded her in a shower of
calming notes.  Again and again her disciplined suspension was annealed
through the focus of Arithon's playing.

The miracle shimmered through air and through flesh.  As slivered bits
of bone were slotted one into another like puzzle pieces, then stapled
in place with fine magic, perfection ruled every move.  Like a construct
of engineered geometry, Elaira held her grasp on the multilayered
balance of spells.  The hard's gift sustained her hands and her mind as
she reconstructed ripped cartilage and restored the ligaments to rebind
each disarranged wrist bone.  Her sight did not blur through meticulous
removal of flayed bits of rope fiber, any one of which might seed a
lethal infection.

Then each vein and capillary had to be refigured; riven sinew repaved in
light tracks to reconnect the ends of sheared nerves.

Tendons must be sewn whole, and frayed muscles drawn together in
painstaking rows of gut stitches.  Elaira toiled on in agonized
concentration.  Sweat dewed her temples and rolled down her jaw.  Yet
the needle in her fingers did not slip that a dancing, merry measure did
not shepherd her back to dexterity.

Sweet melody braced her still as she slathered the closed wounds in
poultice paste and bound on splints and clean bandages.

The candles by then had burned low.  In shadows that flickered to each
breath of draft, Elaira pushed herself unsteadily erect.  She snuffed
the wax lights on the spell circles.  Tired beyond grace, strained past
clear thought, she fumbled and found her reed broom and dusted away the
grand axis that sealed the power in the ritual chalk lines.

Still tranced through the lattice of her spell crystal, her
consciousness moved in mage-sight.  As pent forces and stay-spells gave
way, a sound like rent fabric sheared across the throb of blood in her
ears.  The wards burst asunder and the spirit bound captive reeled free.

Seconds passed, measured in uncertain terror, that flesh might cease
effort, unquickened.  Then the boy on the table stirred and moaned.

Elaira felt the breath reel out of her.  She slid to her knees, lost to
dizziness.  This time, no music leaped to ease her.  She found herself
too drained to rise, too spent to insist that the invalid stay quiet
while she mixed the necessary draft to bring sleep.  The enchantress
buried her face in laced hands, unstrung by a running fit of trembling.

The boy could die yet.  She wept for frustration as exhaustion yawned an
impossible gulf between what was needed, and a vacuum that sucked away
energy.

Too late, too faintly, a gilded play of lyranthe notes rocked

through the span of stilled air.  Elaira struggled to rise and recover
the willpower to match them.

Failure dragged her down.  The grand nets of harmony seemed frayed
beyond reach, diminished and tinny with distance.

Pressed by the fogs of unconsciousness, she grasped after the hard's
measures and understood: his melody was not tuned for her after all. The
irresistible call of each fretted chord was pitched to settle suffering
and smooth her patient into sleep.

Elaira thrashed against the honeyed compulsion to surrender all ties to
awareness.  Arithon must not be abandoned with the burden of securing
the boy's weakened life signs.  Hours would pass before his body
stabilized from the fluxes of a major, forced healing.  But thought bled
away in a fierce, sucking rush.  Thrashed by the demands of channeled
power, bruised by the aftertides of a backlash too savage to grapple,
the enchantress collapsed against the grain of cold floorboards, beaten
down into darkest oblivion.

The febrile flutter of a single candle became the first harbinger of an
awareness that returned in slow stages.  Her lashes cracked open.

Still set adrift in a welter of confusion, Elaira clung to that pinpoint
of light.  She sensed like an odd and unwonted peal of sorrow the silent
absence of a melody.

As stunned senses rearranged to sustain reason, she pieced together bits
from her surroundings: the storm had abated to a fitful splash of
droplets off the shingled cedar of the eaves.

The shutters of her bedchamber, swung and latched open, let in the raw
thunder of the breakers churned up by strong winds.

Each contrary draft came freighted with smells of salt and tide wrack
and soaked foliage.

A solitary cricket rasped from the cranny behind her clothes chest.  Its
song sounded wracked out of true, a coarse intrusion after the masterful
play on fret and string that had beguiled her spellcraft in
sweet-ringing waves to new heights.

Best not to recall that partnership too clearly; Elaira squeezed her
eyes closed.  The sting of loss lanced her, regardless.

The grinding, dull throb of taxed nerves released her one limb at a
time.  She noticed she lay half-supine on her pallet.  A warmth beneath
her cheek held a scent of clean skin and the muffled rhythm of another
heartbeat.  Snapped back on a breath to full consciousness, Elaira came
aware that she rested in the circle of Arithon's arms.

He had not taken time to retrieve his damp shirt.  The same hands that
had commanded the lyranthe to high art cradled her cheek and her waist.
The disfiguring scars on his wrists were left unabashed in plain view.
His hips were twisted underneath her, his bare feet still braced on the
floorboards; as if he had sat, her weighthome in his arms, with intent
to settle her to rest.

And aphrase, not her own, rose and burst across her thoughts:some
temptations could be too sweet.

Languid in the throes of exhaustion, Elaira absorbed the possibility an
empathic link might still be in place between herself and the Shadow
Master.  The spells they had handled in paired resonance had been strong
ones.  The aftershocks to the mind could hitch and start in a thousand
unpredictable directions.

Content with inclinations left in harmony with his, she melted to the
pleasure he drew from this brief, stolen moment: the comfort of her,
body secure within his care, her narrow, lean limbs folded neatly.

Man and prince and musician knew peace.  Arithon held in the tender
awareness that this happiness might never come again.

Elaira cherished each detail along with him.  The rich, auburn hair he
had braided while wet now spread, combed and shining, to mantle her
shoulders.  No drag of wet skirts weighted her ankles, only the nap of a
blanket.  Underneath, she wore very little beyond the linen of her
shift.

A kinetic sense of her wakening must have reached him.

"Elaira?" Arithon inquired, softer than a sigh.  "The lad rests quietly.
Forgive me, but for you, I had to stay to be certain.

Someone had to watch over your recovery."

A frown marred Elaira's forehead, for his need to excuse what was
obvious: had she failed to awaken from this backlash on her own, he
alone held the masterbard's talents required to revitalize spirit with
flesh.  The initiates of Ath's Brotherhood owned the knowledge to help,
but her collapse was immediate and their hostel lay leagues down the
road.

Arithon had ignored no contingency.  His lyranthe lay as he had left
her, leaned against the wall by the headboard and ready to his hand if
need required.  The filaments of fourteen silvered strings scribed lines
in reflection, captured intact from the candleflame.

Delivered into warmth from the haze of oblivion, Elaira realized another
thing.  Arithon s'Ffalenn had never before spoken her name while alone
in her presence.  That belated recognition shot a prickle of reaction
clear through her.

Attuned to the uneven catch to her breathing, Arithon lifted his hand
from her waist.  As he had many times through the hours of the night, he
trailed reverent fingers through her hair to smooth an unruly wisp from
her temple.

The barest taut frisson knit the length of her back in response.

A sound of dismay escaped him; as though he willed her to stay peaceful
in her daze, and felt deprived by the speed of her recovery.

Elaira could have laughed in that moment for sheer joy.  His presence of
itself had called her back, as no other living spirit ever could.

Then event caught up with reality.  Imprinted against the sounding board
of his body, she felt him gather himself tense, to disengage and rise at
once.  Her plea escaped before thought.

"Please stay."

His words vised to indifference, Arithon said, "Lady, I'm relieved to
see you waken.  On my way, I'll send Jinesse to attend you."

The desperate force of will in his effort to pull free shuddered through
the contact between them.  An awful, uglier truth arched across their
tuned empathy: that what feeling he had would be denied out of
self-preservation.  He still believed her interest was false, created on
command by Koriani aim to manipulate him.

And anger shocked through Elaira like white fire, that her attraction
had been genuine long and long before Morriel's hideous plotting had
seized on her love as a gambit.  This she determined to let him see,
before the consequences ruined them both.

Strong, sun-browned from her hard days of foraging, Elaira stirred
against his move to rise.  She pressed him back and looked up, and
locked his gaze with her own.  "Before Ath, before life, I love you.

That's been true, I think, since a rash escapade led to a hayloft in an
innyard."

She had just one moment to realize how weary he was himself, and how ill
prepared.  No defense did he have, no ready barrier, as she moved in his
arms, then closed the embrace and laid her lips against his in
surrender.

An immediate quiver lanced through him.  The hands at her back closed
hard and locked.  His kiss met hers in a riptide of unleashed passion.
Scalded, consumed, uplifted, exalted, for the unforgettable space of a
heartbeat they were one flesh and one mind.  The harmony between them
stopped thought and waived every limiting fear for the future.

Then Arithon s'Ffalenn made a sound like a man lashed to torture.

His head turned, broke her hold, and snapped aside.  He jerked upright
in a wildcat recoil, as a creature roped down for the knife might escape
its deathblow in a slaughter pen.

"Ath, oh Ath!" he gasped, his voice broken.

Elaira sought his expression, and saw the face of a man betrayed.

Her own pain reechoed in devastated imprint, she saw his eyes, stretched
wide and bleak in the candlelight as he forced his breath back into
stopped lungs.  "What have I done?

Dharkaron show us both mercy, yourfeelings are as mine, and I thought
Morriel had sent you!"

Pinned on the prongs of that ugly, dual truth, Elaira lost words.

She had spirit in her only to endorse the more honest obligation.

Spurred by the overriding cry of her heart, she raised a hand in comfort
to cup the side of his face.

Her touch never connected.

A whirlwind of motion heaved her up, flung her back.

Arithon's hands turned wholly ruthless as he twisted out from underneath
her.  Discarded in a shivering heap upon the bed, Elaira clawed back
tumbled hair and blinked to clear her vision from a ruinous, blinding
fall of tears.

She never heard his step cross the room.  But his pose said all his
speech could not: back turned, head bent, his expressive fingers fanned
in white outline against the board wall, while his shirtless body was
raked and raked over in wretched, quivering spasms.

"Don't come," he forced out as he sensed her intent to arise.

The slithering fall of the blanket turned informer, or maybe the shift
of air across his skin: she would disregard his plea.

This time, he would be pressured too far.  Integrity, joy, the bright,
tragic fabric of the miracle shared between them would unstring all of
his control.  "Don't come.  I beg you, for your life's sake, don't."

"For my life?" Elaira gasped.  Her surprise yawned as wide as the night
that pressed inward, to drown the failing candle on its stand.

"Beloved, what is there of me that is not yours before anything?"

She advanced a step toward him, and the creak of a loose floorboard
seemed to peel his raw nerves and wring out a drawn, silent scream.

The next second, her raised hand would touch him.

He sucked an agonized breath, then in scalpel-sharp diction, launched
into flat recitation: "All states offleshly desire to renounce, this I
vow.  All ties of the heart, offamily, of husband and lover to put
aside, this I vow."

Elaira stopped, stunned, between steps.

The words fell and chilled her, unflinching as steel sliced through a
fall of running water, and familiar: hatefully abhorrent to the last,
most damning consonant.  Arithon gave her, line by line from a
masterbard's knowledge of law, the binding oath sworn by a Kofiani
initiate over the Prime's master crystal.

The phrases continued, implacable.  "And should I weaken or falter and
come to forswear my commitment, all that I am shall be for .feit, body
and mind.  This I vow, no witness beyond the Prime Circle, no arbiter
beyond the crystal matrix into which I surrender my Name and my imprint
as surety through all my living days."

There came a space, rasped to dissonance by the chirp of thecricket.

Elaira masked her face and muffled her ears, helpless.  She

could not escape fate.  No move forward was possible, now,

even to unman him, even to defeat the unassailable integrity

that acted in sacrifice to spare her: not without admitting that

her Prime Matriarch had a hand in this design.  To say that leave had
been granted to break her order's primary vow was to gut an inviolable
trust.

What Elaira felt for this man was real, untarnished.  Yet she could not
wrench hope back into her hands, nor cross the gulf, nor complete the
desire between them.  Not without sullying forever the shining truth of
her love, that Morriel's manipulation had no part of.

No word existed under earth or sky to explain that her presence here was
less due to Koriani intrigue than to the burden of Sethvir's warning
prophecy.

She must have made a sound in her torment.

For Arithon gathered himself again and forced speech.

"Lady, for the love that I bear you, let me leave.  Your order's vows
cannot tolerate my claim.  Give me torture and loss, give me death,
before I become the instrument that seals your utter destruction.  Of
all the atrocities I have done in the past, or may commit in the future,
that one I could never survive."

There was nothing to do, nothing at all, but stand aside, mute, and let
him pass.

Convergence

While the craftsmen at Merior's shipyard whisper among themselves that
the night at the healer's has brought their master back changed, his
tolerance thin drawn as wire, the brig Black Drake makes port bringing
word that city garrisons in Rathain have been called to muster at
Etarra; and the news causes Arithon to send his request, asking
rendezvous with a clan lord who dwells in the forest of Selkwood....

Since the portent which slashed the night sky in the hour of Lady
Maenalle's execution raised the city of Isaer into panic, and while
Lysaer's officers labor to dispel fraught dread among the troops,
Asandir rides out from Althain Tower to seek the clan encampment along
the Valenford River and invest the caithdein's grandson with Fellowship
sanction to inherit her powers of office....

When word from the watcher on the seventh lane reaches the Koriani
Council that Elaira's attempt to bind the Shadow Master through
affection has been met with flat failure, Morriel Prime issues sharp
rebuke as her First Senior questions the outcome: "Our initiate did not
fail to gain Arithon's trust.  On the contrary, rather her prince has
outmaneuvered us, and through flaws in our own design.  .  .

XIII.  War Host

igh summer cast blistering light over the anviled stone summits and
knife-edged cornices of the Mathorn HMountains.  Under their frowning
rims, the taint of pine resin filled the copses, huddled in their
tangles of black shade.  Witch hazel grew riot in the defiles, floored
in moss and speared sedges, and hazed silver in clouds of midges where
springs trickled down from the heights.

But where the garrisons from Rathain's allied cities mustered on
campaign, to destroy the Shadow Master, the land bore a seamed, brown
scar.

Sunset glared over Etarra's brick walls, a dull, red eye through the
dust churned up by its war camp.  Lysaer s'llessid and his force from
Avenor were a fortnight overdue.  Under crowding and the added strain of
delay, the masses of idle troops and their uneasy convocation of
commanders strained loyalties and stressed the ties of diplomacy.

Men grew to hate the scrape of crickets in the scrub as they quartered
the stripped hillsides to meet the insatiable need for wood to fuel
their cookfires.  Outside the high walls, the heat at day's end hung
over the stubble of grasses, sucked brown by the rainless season or else
milled to chaff by the hooves of foraging livestock.  The breezes
settled at nightfall, to leave a rank, unhealthy morass: the reek of
urine-soaked muck from the picket lines; of unburied garbage and open
latrines; and the meadow scent of hayfields flattened under the burden
of field pavilions and provision tents.  Each day brought more arrivals,
with yoked teams of thin-flanked oxen hauling their groaning supply
wagons past the knots of beasts and the stalled carts of the trade
caravans displaced by right of war.

Last to arrive, Avenor's companies marched in to the snap of blazoned
flags and the horn calls of officers.  Wilted as any other troop in
their sweat-dampened surcoats, the discipline on them sparkled.  In
deadly, polished order, they raised their camp in a landscape powdered
ghostly monochrome by the endless haze of gritted dust.

The Prince of the West made his entry through the city gates at twilight
to a thunderous welcome from the populace.

Under the cut brass light of a dozen torches, his jewels sparked like
fallen stars amid his attendant guard of riders.  At his side, Lord
Commander Diegan cut a proud figure, resplendent in his silk and white
diamonds and his hair ruffled sable under the bullion fringe of the
royal standard.  Poor folk and craftsmen thronged the wayside to throw
rose petals and call appreciation.  The wealthy, the guild merchants and
their families, cheered and waved scarves from the balconies, which made
the horses curvette and shy.  The brick-trapped heat arose off the
cobbles.  Even the scent of the flowers crushed under the hooves of the
destriers became clogged with the alkaline tang of parched earth.

Diegan regarded his sovereign lord with critical care.  Fear had blunted
support from the cities in Tysan after the sorcerous portent that
crossed the sky during the barbarian chieftain's execution.

Lysaer had exhausted himself in diplomacy to ease the guilds' entrenched
suspicion of wizardry.  Only Pesquil's ironclad handling had kept the
troops in discipline through the confines of a near-windless crossing to
reach port at Narms.

Now, strain and weariness masked in gay decorum, Prince Lysaer caught a
posy thrown by a blushing young girl in a window.  He inclined his head
to a row of clapping merchants, and through teeth clamped in a fixed
smile, said to Diegan, "These were your people, once.  You could show
them a bit of gracious interest."

Straight in his saddle despite the suffocating heat, Diegan stayed stiff
lipped and obstinate.  The laughing, lighthearted gallants who called
his name were as strangers to him, changed as he was from the man who
had ridden from these same streets two years before.  Now, chiseled lean
by rough training, in fact more than title the hard commander of troops,
no change in physical prowess could blunt the instinct for politics bred
into his bones since childhood.

"You're stepping into a snake pit!" he snapped to his prince.

"Sithaer's devils and furies!  You've left the garrison captains of
sixteen cities alone for hours to fret and wait upon your pleasure.

Don't be astonished when their arguments np your plans to useless
shreds.  They'll never let your officers have charge of their commands.

They'd cut their own throats or see you dead, first."

"To the everlasting victory of our enemy," Lysaer replied in that
honeyed tone which dealt reprimand like a slap.  Eyes the heavy blue of
his sapphire studs stayed trained on the throngs in the street.  Still
smiling, he tossed the posy in his hand to a grinning, toothless
grandmother, then curbed his mount hard to forestall a shy as a sprig of
dried lavender winnowed down from the dormer of a perfumer's shop.

"If the prospect of bearding a few snakes leaves you squeamish, I don't
need you at my side."

"I wouldn't miss this." Reckless in challenge, Diegan countered,
"Etarra's guilds have a nasty, short memory for favors, and for years
your sweet war camp at Avenor's been a bottomless drain on their
treasury.  If you're offering yourself for political sacrifice, be very
sure I want to stay and watch."

A double-edged pride backed Diegan's stab of mockery, as much for the
masses of craftsmen and brown-clad apprentices who made deferent way for
their cavalcade, as for the wedge of officers, turned out in glittering
and lethal perfection at their backs.  This city had been his turf.  The
pedigree birthright he had forsaken to serve Avenor and Lysaer s'llessid
brought a swell of tightness to his chest.  As they rounded the last
corner of the thoroughfare, by perverse urge, he wished the whiplash
instability of Etan-an intrigue to unstring this prince's
self-assurance: to have just one unanticipated setback carve his
insufferable royal confidence to proportions more malleably human.

None but a fool would refuse to fight beside Lysaer s'llessid against
the Shadow Master.  But on the advent of new war, against the ugly,
blood-soaked memories still carried from the past campaign in
Strakewood, Lord Commander Diegan desperately wished back his lost
equilibrium.  He needed the cat-cool independence of the dandy he had
been that gave no man leave to lead his heart.

Heat rode the air like a blanket, thick with the reek of packed
humanity.  Oily fumes drifted from the great bronze pans of the
braziers, lit to commemorate the arrival of s'llessid royalty.  Above
the swept marble stair, the copper-leafed doors of the council hall
stood closed and latched behind guards in red-and-gold livery who held
back the crowding, raucous throng which loitered to stare and speculate.

Inured to the flare and temper of Etarran street mobs, secure amid the
ring of Lysaer's captains, Lord Commander Diegan dismounted.  He left
his horse with the prince's equerry.  Humidity bogged the night like
liquid glass, freighted with the calm of pending storm.  Lysaer should
have looked hot in his mantling layers of state finery.  For this
meeting, no symbol of dress had been spared: the fingers of both hands
flashed jewels; his full-sleeved, damascened shirt was hemmed with
bullion braid; and bracelets cuffed the bones of his wrists.  Over a
tabard of indigo silk, he wore Avenor's linked chain of office.

Dusky red against the purer gleam of his hair lay the gemmed circlet of
his royal rank.

Every move he made embroidered by the flash of costly tailoring, he
mounted the shallow stair.  The duty guardsmen made way to admit him
with servile humility.

The royal escort entered the foyer, with Lord Diegan tense enough to
suffocate.  The knit weight of his mail bore him down beneath his
surcoat, and the hair at his temples clung with sweat.  To affirm his
unease, the clash of the officers' weapons and the grate of their tread
across the tiles became overwhelmed at once by the clamorous argument
that raged inside the great hall.

Amid a shouted uproar and the crash of someone's banging, vain efforts
to restore order, Etarra's minister of city finances mounted to a pitch
of hysterical fury.  "Would you beggar the treasury?  To move
thirty-five thousand to sea before winter cannot be done without ruinous
use of borrowed funds."

"Cost be damned!" cut in Lord Commander Harradene in his grinding,
martial bellow.  "You want this Shadow Master dead?  Then use the two
eyes Ath gave you and take a long look at the map!"

"Listen to Harradene," a garrison captain interrupted in the clipped
style of Rathain's northern coast.  "It's a dead simple case of wise
tactics!  Merior's the Fatemaster's very nightmare of a place to mount a
large-scale attack.  The coast road through Shand is no option.

Did your counting clerks think of supply costs over a thousand-league
march?  Never mind we'd have no morale left to fight with.  Yon sorcerer
would've flown his little coop before we could hack our way down the
peninsula."

"Ath!" In the hallway, Lord Diegan spun in alarm to his prince.

"Who told them Arithon's location!  I'll have the head of the fool who
spilled the secret!"

"That could be awkward," Lysaer said with a maddening, mild glance.
"Since the fool, as you call him, was myself."

Diegan's attempted rejoinder was lost as Commander Harradene's
declaiming bellow rattled the glass in the sconces.

"To Sithaer with your whining trade ministers!  The only chance we have
is to surround and attack in force by sea.

Harry the sorcerer against a lee shore.  Once he's dead, you can natter
over debts and owed interest till you kill yourselves with sheer worry.
At least our people will be safe!"

While captains representing a dozen city garrisons raised a storm of
yelping objections, and the thumping for order on the tabletops gave way
to a clangorous bell of steel, the steward on duty by the entry took
notice of the movement behind him: the quiet guard of officers,
advancing, then the bejeweled presence they escorted.  Obsequious in
relief, he hurried to offer obeisance.  "Your Grace, my lord, they are
frantic.  Let me announce your anival."

Lysaer advanced a sharp step and touched the man's wrist in restraint.
"If you please, just open the door without fanfare."

To Avenor's Lord Commander, straight lipped and furious at his side, he
flipped an insouciant shrug.  "What became of your Etarran taste for
blood sport and nasty politics?"

Diegan returned a tiger's smile.  "Allow our sworn allies to argue
themselves to paralysis?  Well if you fail to master the pack this time,
and Pesquil doesn't murder you for indecent lack of priorities, I'll
personally remedy the lapse."

He trailed his prince through the archway to accost Etarra's grand war
council.

Under the musty fringe of trade guild banners, mewed in by dagged drapes
of red velvet pulled over the hall's lancet windows, the war commanders
in their blazoned surcoats, dyed leathers, and mail, and the trade
ministers in ribbons and creased sarcenets locked horns in belligerent
contention.  The hall rocked with echoes.  Marble friezework and groined
arches resounded to a hell-bent boil of high temper.  Secretaries
scribbled notes and ran messages.  Every man a seasoned master of
dissent, the trade ministers connived in stifled whispers, faces masked
beneath the deep brims of their exotic feathered hats.

Atop the high dais, crammed into a conspicuous gilt chair, the Lord
Governor Supreme of Etarra dabbed sweat off his quivering double chin.
Flushed in his overtight layers of brocades, he flailed like an agitated
puppet, and failed at each turn to make himself heard through the clash
of raised voices.

Cryptic good sense drove one visiting foreign dignitary to avoid the
crush on the benches.  Keldmar s'Brydion of Alestron leaned on a square
gilt pillar, an arras at his back and one negligent shoulder turned
toward the gathering.  His other hand masked beneath his cloaked elbow,
he kept gripped fast to his dagger.  Appointed by his brother to
represent Alestron's case against the Shadow Master, he had to display
the earl's blazon everywhere he went, lest his accent get him skewered
for a forest barbarian each time he opened his mouth.

After seven days of insults stopped just shy of bloodshed, and apologies
from fools invariably attached to commiseration over the political
misfortune of his speech, Keldmar's countenance was slit eyed, his mood
jumpy, and his contempt for the doings of pompous officials explosive as
live eels in a cask.

When the seneschal's harebrained assistant had the temerity to leap into
the face of the black-bearded veteran, Commander Harradene, then pulled
his eating knife to batter the table to seize attention, Keldmar stifled
a burst of laughter behind upturned, sardonic lips.

Etarra's vaunted alliance was about to erupt and run riot.  The ranking
officers of Rathain's city garrisons were inflamed enough to draw steel
and gut the trade ministers and their secretaries, to say nothing of the
other nattering windbags in stuffed velvet who objected to the costs of
campaign warfare.

Keldmar cheerfully prepared to field whatever mayhem swirled his way. He
weighed the prospect of pinking a few lamebrains who had dared mistake
him for the get of the fugitive clanborn, while the spat between war
captains and the hatted ranks of ministers climaxed in screaming
crescendo.

A crack of whipped air rocked the chamber, to an actinic burst of white
light over the central dais.  Shouted invective died as if slammed by a
thunderclap into stunned and terrified silence.

"Ath have mercy on you all!" pealed an acrid, carrying voice.

"For believe it, the Master of Shadow will show none when his ships are
built and he takes up the piracy of his ancestors!  " Blinking through
flash-blinded vision, Keldmar saw a vivid, fair-haired figure stride
through the press from the doorway.  Laced in a dazzle of gold and the
ice point sparkle of royal sapphire, the newcomer's advance was attended
by a dark man muscled lean from hard training, then a compact knot of
officers in a smart polish of accoutrements.

"What a perfect, meek target we offer, bent one against another, and
over a matter as transient, as petty as expense."

Lysaer s'llessid, Prince of Tysan, mounted the dais with quick grace.
Every eye in the chamber fastened on his person.

Sizzling silence met the outraged fury that charged him from head to
heel.  The royal presence of him towered.  Before the chair of EtaTra's
Lord Governor Supreme, he spun and glared over at the gathering.
"Arithon s'Ffalenn is indeed ensconced at Merior.  His location has been
chosen most carefully, and I warn, to trap him there won't be simple.
War against any scion of s'Ffalenn has never been bloodless.  This
campaign will cost more than gold, more than lives, more than
heartbreak, if we bicker ourselves into failure.  Give anything less
than total effort, and I promise: no city in the land will stay
scatheless.

No innocent life will escape suffering."

The alderman of Etarra's south quarter swiped his bonnet off his bald
head, inflated for passionate rebuttal.

Lysaer rounded fast and cut him off.  "Seven thousand lives were lost
against the Master of Shadow in Deshir.  Would you make that ten
thousand more?  Twenty?  This encounter against a criminal sorcerer must
be fought on his own chosen ground-a deadly proposition.  We must
overcome any odds set against us, else give this man time to complete
the fleet of ships the barbarians of Camris have funded.  Let that
happen and you'll see a scourge upon your sea-trading galleys such as
you have never imagined."

Splendid in rage, Prince Lysaer played his words like shot arrows,
straight enough to flatten pride, kill objection, shame petty and
divisive rivalries that would undermine his sworn cause.  Keldmar
s'Brydion curled his lip at the deference shown by the cowed city
ministers.  The garrison captains, too, were mollified, dressed down
like children caught brawling.

They might not relinquish their commands outright.  But as they gave
this prince full attention, their allegiance would be pulled in and
knotted like so much wound string.  Gold would be given for ships at
Werpoint to transport the war host downcoast.

The Duke of Alestron had dispatched two brothers to attend his complaint
against the Shadow Master.  Meam had carried formal protest in appeal
for kingdom justice to the clanborn regent of Melhalla.  As envoy to
Etarra to gather news, Keldmar had neither authority nor desire to tie
s'Brydion interests into alliance.  The family quarrel lay with Arithon
Teir's'Ffalenn, a claim of blood price for seven guardsmen and the
wanton ruin of their armory.  Keldmar need only rrtum to tell his
brother's captains to engage a blockade, then smoke the slinking
sorcerer out of Merior by the Sea.

On the dais, impassioned in his tirade, Lysaer glimpsed movement at the
edge of the grand hall.  Attuned to every small shift in the ranks, he
turned his head and caught a flash of scarlet on gold: the too-prominent
blazon of Alestron's grand duke, that signaled an untimely departure.
His discreet and timely signal wakened an answering deployment from the
royal officers beneath the dais stair.

Once Keldmar s'Brydion worked clear of the press and slipped through the
pillared arch to the foyer, four of Avenor's glittering captains barred
his way to the street.

Tall enough to intimidate, his clansman's plait as haughty a statement
of his bloodline as the tabard that clothed his straight back, Keldmar
measured each officer with narrowed, stone-colored eyes.

"Am I a prisoner?" he asked, his challenge flung into their very teeth.

Yet the discipline instilled at Avenor would not rankle at words.

"You are the prince's invited guest," said the senior man among them.

"His royal Grace would not have you leave without extending his
hospitality."

No use to argue the points clan custom held in difference with merchant
city law; that to bow to sovereign power from another kingdom's prince
denounced Melhalla's founding charter.  Avenor's officers closed about
their quarry, gracious, but unsmiling.  Since the sincerity of the
s'llessid intent could only be tested through steel, Keldmar s'Brydion
held his temper and went along.

Permitted to go mounted, his escort saw him from the posthouse where his
horse was stabled to a field camp wedged between the rising ridge of the
Mathom Mountains on Etarra's northern quarter.  The site commanded a
view across the Plain of Araithe, with its broad roads branching east
and north.  In glittering disarray, like opals spilled by haphazard
hands into folded sable velvet, the campfires of the Rathain city's war
host flickered and burned across the lowlands.

Black as an ink spill to the east spread the marshes that fed the
headwaters of the River Valsteyn, the croaking tempo of night-singing
frogs scared mute by the shouts of men dicing away hours in idleness, or
quarreling for the favors of camp followers.

A sullen wind prowled the hills, stirring through layers of muggy heat
and the louring pall off the cookfires.  Churned dust hazed the
moonbeams, shot through broken clouds above an earth that wore its
burden of armed troops like a beggar's rags of motley.  Keldmar awaited
his appointment on a cushioned stool, a goblet of good wine in his hand,
while the tap of bullion fringes edging velvet hangings whispered of
pending storm.  Lysaer's equerry, a liveried manservant, and two pages
hovered in the shadows to serve his slightest want.

The pavilion's rich appointment masked no softness; its doorway boasted
two outside sentries, and beyond them, the competent deployment of a
first-class field troop at rest.

Keldmar knew war.  No fault could be found with the force Lysaer
s'llessid had mustered and trained at Avenor.

Three thousand four hundred eighty-three men; the captain who lingered
from the escort expressed his regrets for another seven hundred, forced
to remain behind at Isaer.

"Why were they left?" Keldmar asked, to carry the conversation.

He heard then of the execution that had ended in chaos when a terrible,
sorcerous portent crossed the sky.

"Our liege could ill spare the men," the captain finished.

"But Avenor couldn't shirk its due part in suppressing the unrest
expected from Tysan's clansmen.  The condemned was Lady Maenalle
s'Gannley, descended, they say, of the old Camris princes."

Keldmar sipped his dry wine and scarcely marveled.

Townborn upstarts dared to describe the honoriess act of a caithdein's
murder to his very face because competence such as this camp possessed
required no excuse for effrontery.

His own brother was an old blood duke; that Alestron remained governed
under the charter granted at the hand of a duly crowned high king was no
pittance.  Without prior cause against Arithon s'Ffalenn, for the lady's
ill usage, Keldmar would have spurned the cup for his dagger.

Only for the sake of shared enmity would the Prince of the West receive
his hearing.

The hour grew late.  Pages set out fresh candles, while campfires in the
valleys dulled to a glaze of red embers.  The coming and going of
wakeful men gave way to the tramp of posted sentries.  Clear above the
camp's settled quiet came the sound of jingling harness.  Then a man
called in challenge and was answered.  A ripple of awareness like a
biting snap of frost passed over those field tents still lit.

Warned by the signs that stamped brisk command, Keldmar arose as the
horsemen drew rein beyond the tent flap.  The equerry hastened through
to grasp the reins of a gold-stitched bridle.

Then a stuttering flicker of torchlight licked over a tabard flecked in
jewels and bullion, and Lysaer s'Ilessid strode in from the dark.  He
peeled off his fine gloves and circlet, tossed both with a smile to the
younger of his pages.  The elder one handed him a goblet and flask.
Hands burdened, the prince crossed the thick carpet, replenished
Keldmar's empty cup unasked, then poured for himself and sat down.  The
camp chair cupped his fratne in easy grace despite the encumbrance of
state clothing.

"I'm sorry for the inconvenience of your wait, my lord."

Up close, his eyes were unflawed as a zenith sky, direct and sharp under
brows the stretched arc of a hawk's wings.

Burnished in candle glow, his straight cut hair gleamed a pale, fallow
gold as he added, "I envied your escape from the tedium.

Etarra's minister of the treasury is slow as old frost when it comes to
sealing writs for supply drafts."

"Then you won your gold to hire a fleet," Keldmar surmised, the curl to
his lips very much an amusement, and his hand on his goblet pinched
white.  "Did you also gain consent for your officers from Avenor to
displace the captains of your allied garrisons?"

Lysaer sipped his wine, sparked to a lucent thread of laugnter.

"My designs are so obvious?"

Keldmar's false levity tore away.  "I judge what I see.  Your camp is
professional.  Has resentment on the part of Rathain's city captains
indeed tied your vaunted royal hands?"

Unmoved, unstung by the sudden probe, Lysaer looked down; the charged,
ruler's presence about him lent a stillness akin to sorrow.

"If our disparate commanders can't pull themselves together, I'd have
them mend that weakness early.  For against Arithon s'Ffalenn, the rank
and file who follow their orders shall have no second chance at all."

"They rejected your officers, the green fools." Keldmar did not mock.
The untouched wine in his goblet hung like pooled ruby against the
brighter scarlet of the ducal tabard.

"A folly to be cauterized in bloodshed.  It stands to reason," Lysaer
said.  The late meeting had fretted away his serenity, and yet he was
proud; he refused to give rein to restless pain and pace in the private
comfort of his pavilion.

"Our late crossing through Halwythwood passed without incident, but my
headhunter captain, Mayor Pesquil and 1, share agreement.

Rathain's clansmen only wait upon our weakness, our disorder, and our
sorry, unwieldy lack of unity.

They'll strike between here and the coast.  We can't take the easy route
to East Ward.  That road crosses low country where our supply carts
could bog down at each rain.  Nor can we risk the trade galleys to an
unsheltered northcoast harbor.  Our march is for Werpoint, and harder.
It's a cruel step to suffer, but the trials ahead will force our war
host to its temper.  The army that sails from Minderl Bay will be my
honed weapon by then."

Keldmar regarded the royal person, his admiration silent before
challenge.  Let Lysaer be first to broach what lay between them,
intangibly thick as the storm now brewing in the dust-flat, sultry
night.

Like the sword tempered to welcome hard blows, the Prince of the West
opened the match.  "The Master of Shadow despoiled your armory by
sorcery and killed good men in your service.  For that, you would fly
south and raise your garrison at Alestron, and attack him in his haven
at Merior.  Why should your duke wait, you will say, upon a balky
alliance of town garrisons?  Why bide, while we argue among ourselves
and leave the enemy at large to slip away?"

"You left one thing out," Keldmar said, and slammed his filled goblet on
a side table.  "You have Daelion's own bollocks, for expecting my
brother to swear you s'Brydion loyalty."

Lysaer looked up then, degrees colder than the frost-point gleam in his
sapphires.  "I know clanborn pride, none better," he said.  "I put Lady
Maenalle to death."

A moment passed in glaring silence while, royal to the bone, the prince
in his majesty refused outright to explain or excuse his summary act.

Blistered by that courage, then forced to unwilling respect, Keldmar was
first to look away.

Lysaer's smile warmed then like a sudden fall of new sunlight.  "I don't
ask your duke's word in vassalage.  How could I dare?  You've lost an
armory and seven worthy lives to the wiles of Arithon s'Ffalenn.  Over
wine, for an evening, let me tell you what my father and grandfather
suffered.  At the end, I will ask, and you will answer as your brother's
interest requires: to wait, and time Alestron's attack in concert with
mine, or to risk your loyal following alone in unsupported action."

When Keldmar drew breath to retort, Lysaer forestalled him.  "No,
listen.  Let me tell you why your fifteen thousand, no matter how
trained will never seal your success." And in the sultry dark, across
veiling candleflame and above the growl of distant thunder from the
ridges, he spoke of the sea raids on the world of his birth that had
brought his father's kingdom to its knees.

The storm broke over the Mathoms at dawn, smacking the oiled canvas
tents like sails and upsetting the horses on the picket lines.

Lightning flared across clouds churned like dirtied fleeces, until the
rains fell and rinsed the air gray.  Lord Commander Diegan found his
royal liege still curled in his chair, his head cradled in forearms
clothed yet in the sparkle of last night's crumpled finery.

A virulent slam of thunder shocked the earth.  Lysaer's recoil from the
overwhelming bang scribed in the arc and flare of every unmerciful band
of braidwork.

Lord Diegan grinned over the litter of emptied wine flasks at the
prince's disheveled state of grooming.  "Well," he said, cheerful, "did
you win him?"

"If I survive the hangover, I think so." Lysaer pitched his words in
precarious care through the shuttering rungs of ringed fingers.  "Is it
raining?"

"Ath," Diegan said, appalled to an evil grin.  "The vintage must have
been excellent.  The sky is gushing floods to swamp the frogs.

Are you going to move?  Or shall we call off that tactical meeting you
scheduled for first thing this morning?"

"I hadn't forgotten." Lysaer stirred and settled tenderly erect.

"Mind you remember when we meet the Duke of Alestron, in case the trait
runs in the family.  Keldmar s'Brydion has a demon's own tolerance for
drink."

The war host gathered to rout out the Shadow Master organized itself,
and arranged its vast lists and supply lines, and coalesced in a
seething morass of steel helms and spears and ox drays.  The last march
began to cross one hundred and twenty leagues of road between Etarra and
the port on Minderl Bay.  On departure, the banners snapped in fresh
wind and horn calls wailed salutes from the city battlements.

Within an hour, the panoply paled.  The columns labored east in a soup
of sucking mud, while supply carts stuck and foundered to curses from
the men, stripped bare to the waist, who levered the mired axles from
greedy earth.  Horses lost shoes, and wet leathers chafed sores that
stung to the run of salt sweat.  Through the final, sweltering grip of
late summer, the ground baked hard, and the dust rose, choking, to sting
nose and throat and rim the eyes red to a punishing sting of raw glare.

Garrison banners and the surcoats of the officers lost their colors to a
settled layer of grime.  Man and beast and ox dray groaned under a
brassy arch of sky.  Like toiling ants, the army crawled across the dry
plain toward the city of Periom.  Supply wagons gouged the way into
ruts, their teams harried on by the flat snap of ox goads.  By night,
the provisions were sheltered in palisades built by the vanguard as drop
points, each one defended by its allotment of bored guards.

If barbarians watched from the thickets and the dank, rocky seams of the
gullies, the most vigilant outrider never saw them.

That clansmen lurked there, Captain Mayor Pesquil never for one instant
ceased to doubt.  He ran his squads of headhunters to the bone on
scouting forays, and engineered foxy diversions to catch lapsed sentries
and roust laggard companies back to discipline.  He bullied and exhorted
and had hard cases whipped where he caught standards slackened more than
once.

But his officers could not be everywhere.  The garrison companies were
unused to the wilds, resentful of the hard ground, and sour, smoked
meat, and nights spent slapping off insects.  When the first leagues
passed without incident, the young and the untried, the old and
complacent, were first to let down their guard.

The morning dawned when eighteen divisions discovered the bungs pfised
out of their water barrels.  The casks in neat stacks were drained to
the dregs, and their draft teams and oxen dropped dead of slit throats
at the picket lines.  Other tales of woe traveled up the lines, of cart
axles broken and food supplies fouled beyond salvage.

Over the cooling carcasses of dead beasts, Pesquil dispatched his
trackers.  They rode out with dogs in tight, guarded teams, and ran
circles over false trails.

"Barbarians dragged the ground with a fresh deer hide, or a fox pelt,"
he reported, dty as the parched rocks that bfistied the landscape, and
wholly unsurprised.  "This is the work of Red-beard's scouts." He hawked
phlegm from a corner of his mouth.  "No use to hunt them.  They know how
to choose easy targets."

His hair a gilt beacon against hills feathered with browned grasses, and
his hands at ease on his destrier's reins, Prince Lysaer listened
without censure, even as Pesquil spat again.

"My headhunters are better spent staging false raids to keep our own
sentries alert!" His eyes like jet beads in crimped leather and his
jawline grizzled in pepper and salt stubble, the headhunter captain
finished in disgust.  "These raids aren't staged to kill, but to delay
us.  They could succeed.  Storms and cold won't wait while we flounder."

Between prince and captain, the frustration crackled, that the officers
from Avenor had been trained to counter just such petty harassment.

"The garrison commanders must come to us, asking," Lysaer replied in the
steel calm he wielded these days like a weapon.  "Their captains must be
willing, or their people won't give their heart for us.  Later, you know
that could get them well killed."

Pesquil returned a sour grunt.  "You won't let me rattle their nerves
into line, well, they're going to have to get bloodied.

Nothing for it.  Pedigree pride hates to bend." He shook his head, raked
a lank fall of hair from his temples, then crammed on his conical helm.
"Fools.  It's their greenest young boys will get buried for their
blunders."

Forced on short rations, men learned to set a sharper edge on their
vigilance.  The change earned small respite, too late.  In one chilling
move, the barbarian raiders adjusted their tactics to compensate.
Through the heavy dawn mist, leather-clad figures were sighted while
stealing away from the picket lines.

Men rousted half-clothed from their blankets seized horses and swords,
and gave chase to find themselves lured into the deep brush and
surrounded, then picked off at whim by hidden archers.

A day was lost to rage and panic, and a second to rites for the fallen.

The fact that the town garrisons had been singled out confirmed
Pesquil's theory of planned and leisurely scoutwork.

"No mistake, the ground and the victims were chosen." The headhunter
captain's tactless summary assigned heavy blame on the pedigree captains
packed into Lysaer's field tent.

"We've rid the ranks of some useless brash fools.  Maybe now your
highbred officers won't howl so loudly if my men ride undercover with
their patrols."

"They'll be welcome, but the lesson's understood," assured the captain
from Narms who had suffered the most humiliating losses.  "Next time, no
man of mine will rush to react in hot haste."

"No, they won't," Pesquil answered, inimical.  "Red-beard's

Earl Steiven's own son, and clansmen don't replay their tricks twice."

His words were home out before noontide when the next ranks to die
tumbled into a pit trap sunk into the clay of the roadbed.  The snare
had been dug through the night, over a span where wagons had rolled
scatheless at sundown.  The location had been selected for exhaustive
inconvenience, on a banked causeway over a gully.  The ditches were too
steep for wagons, laced with cracks and sharp shale to lame even
unburdened horses.  Where the terrain offered safe crossing, if a
headhunter scout was not at hand to warn of spring traps and nooses, men
died.  The lucky were cut down choking, but still alive.  The less
fortunate broke their necks, or thrashed in screaming agony, ripped on
stakes and disemboweled.  A courier sent from the head of the column
drew rein in a sliding sting of gravel to inform that more snares had
been sprung up the road.  The way to Perlorn was cut off, supply wagons
stopped until work crews could fill in the pits.

Scouts were doubled; then doubled again, and the empty road itself set
under watch.  The barbarians struck like wraiths and vanished into the
summer broom.  Outriders who were careless died beyond sight of their
fellows, or were killed when their dart-shot mounts spooked and bolted,
jerked neck broken from their saddles by thin cords left strung through
the scrub.  The raids came at random.  Ox teams were shot down with
arrows, or men taken as they sought some thicket to relieve themselves.
Harried like an elephant by hornet stings, the war host lumbered onward.
The weather broke into rain again as the road wound and steepened and
scrolled through the slab-faced hills that framed the upper range of the
Skyshiels.

"Ath, this can't go on," wept a young recruit whose sergeant had died in
his arms on a desolate, rocky stretch of road.

"It can.  It will.  Damned clans'll show you worse before Werpoint,"
cracked Pesquil, paused to water his brush scarred gelding at a mountain
spring between patrols.  "A smart soldier toughens up and survives."

But hungry men managed setbacks less smoothly.  Rations were shortened
again, as supplies became hard to replenish.

Anger built as losses mounted.  Time could ill be spared to mount a task
force to scour the brush to rout out elusive bands of barbarians.  To
fire the grass and haze them off was no option in dry weather.  A wrong
change in the wind could as easily turn the conflagration and smoke back
upon them to the ruin of the crawling ox wagons.

"Remember, they're Arithon's allies," Lysaer said on night visits to
bolster morale around the campfires.  "If our war force fails to make
Werpoint before the storms, we have lost good men for no cause.

To lose heart and falter now will just abet the Shadow Master's design."

The prince's exhortations might bind the men to fresh putpose, but no
effort might cool the biting frustration as the war host lumbered into
the high country, a month behind its set schedule.

Then the last summer heat wave shattered before a driving line of
storms.  Rain lashed and fell in wave upon wave of fierce cloudbursts.

Water splashed in rungs off the uplands rock to pool in murky torrents
and flood the low ground.  The ravines swelled and boiled into white
water fanged with gray rock, treacherous to ford, and at times
impossible for the draft teams.  The wagons were lightened, the food,
the tents, the supplies drawn across on strung ropes, then the carts
laboriously lashed together and planked over as makeshift bridges.

More days were lost, while armor and weapons rusted and the spirits of
the men corroded to depression and gloom.

Then the storms cleared before a sweeping wave of cold.

Huddled in the frost-stiffened folds of their blankets, men slept as
they could, or shivered on watch under silverpoint, glittering
starlight.  Winds off the Skyshiels were the cause of early frost, but
here fell the first warning, in the breath of fickle gusts that would
build and brew up the winter storms.

"The howl of wolf packs would be more welcome," Lord Commander Diegan
said to Lysaer when a wayward blast through their pavilion extinguished
the lamps yet again.

"Fiends plague the hindmost, we're scarcely past halfway to Periom!"

The worst of the route lay ahead, in Pesquil's relentless opinion.

Midmorning showed them the ravine through Valleygap, and a road traced
with thin ruts over scattered rock and moraine, between stony
embankments grizzled with stunted stands of trees.  Higher, the
escarpments broke into crags littered about the knees with trunks like
slivered bone where tapestried stands of black fir lay rent through by
debris from past slides.

Under the gliding sail of hawks, Pesquil regarded the saw-toothed rim
walls, holed by black caves and peppered with crannies for ambush.

"Calves to the slaughter," he murmured to his prince.  "You want to be
quit of your dandybred captains?  Let them all pass this gap decked out
in their pretty blazoned surcoats." His bearded lips split into a cough,
contempt choked just short of laughter.

Lysaer looked aside, his eyes flat enamel while his horse pawed the
gravel underneath him.  "They will not dress plainly.

My advice was ignored.  Our troops from Avenor, and Harradene's
veterans, and your headhunters had best jump to compensate.  My charge
to all divisions who are wise to clan ways is to shoulder responsibility
for this war host and get them through Valleygap safely."

"As well hand young Red-beard your royal life on a salver," Pesquil
said, and spat, while cold gusts tapped the lacing against the scratched
steel of his bracers.

"My life rests in your hands, first, Captain Mayor." Lysaer s'llessid
straightened before his officer's surly mockery.

Whetted to an icy, royal tone of command, he added, "If Jieret Red-beard
would lay traps to ruin good men, your designated task is to forestall
him.  For I shall ride with our weakest link, the garrison companies out
of Narms."

Pesquil uttered a volley of bitten oaths.  While rude words slapped back
in echoes off the forbidding ramparts of the rock, he glowered down the
swale, mindful that his prince was no fool.

All the same, the task ahead made his nerves crawl.  A made haven for
barbarians, perfect eyrie for spring traps and stone falls, the scarps
that notched the way promised dire trouble and murder.  Irked to his
bones, Pesquil reined round his scarred gelding and spurred off to issue
harsh orders.

Grouped into tight, defensive phalanxes, the war host paused in its
tracks.  Neither man nor beast would enter the defile until Valleygap's
heights were made safe.  For that, Captain Mayor Pesquil dispatched his
best trackers and scouts to scour the rimrocks on either side.  The
paired groups of two hundred advanced up the slope in fanned formation,
three to lead each foray team, then a backup band of six to a dozen
trailing, to move in support if enemies were flushed, or point men ran
into snares.

The footing across the Skyshiel ridges was a fiendish mix of slate and
black shale that splintered under boot soles and shot spinning, chinking
fragments downslope.  These sliced through the greenery and caused
furtive rustles.  Men would spin, hands gripped to their weapons, while
the rattle of every descending ricochet slapped taut nerves to razor
response.

Stealth of any sort was impossible.  The scout who eased his vigilance
on the presumption that such disturbances were haryntess would be the
one downed first by covert archers.

The sun blazed down like a scourge, bit glare off the rock faces and
dazzled from every sluiced spring and puddle.

Assaulted at each turn by the surfeit of light, the eyes struggled and
ached to compensate; to unriddle the deep shadows blanketing the defiles
and fir groves.  Anything motionless could hide there, unseen.

The summit ridges were exposed to the rake of the wind, scoured clean by
the snow and weather, then chiseled to split edges by frost.

To stand upright was to offer a target outlined in sky; to crawl or worm
forward became torturous misery, over shale points that shredded the
hands and the knees bloody, or through the low furze that stabbed
prickles through mail and clothing.

The terrain was of a stamp to make a man's spine crawl in constant,
uneasy shivers.  Against a savage beauty that presented an unrelenting
danger, the veteran teams searched through the caves and the crannies to
smoke out any clansmen poised for ambush, or to disarm death traps set
above the road.

They advanced with their teeth clamped in silent prayer and fretted
their nerves into knots.

Barbarians would be ensconced and waiting to kill, not a scout among
them ever questioned.  The unnatural creatures were fiends at coven
murder and Valleygap's vicious, untrustworthy gullies presented
opportunities too perfect to pass up.

Hours passed.  Sweating out wary impatience on the road at the horns of
the gap, Pesquil received his reports.  Nothing, and nothing; the rocks
stayed empty of sign.  He paced.  He loosened his gelding's girth, then
tightened his bracers and swore.

Perched on the tarps of a wagon nearby, a long-faced captain from
Anglefen twisted his mustache and questioned the Captain Mayor's
agitation.

The headhunter commander spun on his heel, his face a contorted, black
scowl.  "Ath!  Those rocks are rotten with bolt holes.  Clansmen lurk up
there bent purely on massacre.  I'll stake my life on the certainty."

"Obsession, more like," groused a drover, but softly; the Captain
Mayor's temper was respected.

Another hour passed, uneventful.  Troops made to wait in formation under
the blasting noon heat became irritable, then restless.  Their sergeants
sent increasing requests down the line, urging the decision to resume
march.

"Nobody moves!" Pesquil cracked to Lord Diegan.  "Are they deaf?

When the road's safe, I told them.  Only then.  Let them fret and
rejoice to stay breathing!" To the paired scouts who hovered at his
elbow for fresh orders, he said, "You, take the north ridge; you, the
south.  Go topside and slow the teams down.  I don't want anybody
getting slack and complacent."

A derisive hoot erupted from the garrison columns.

Another voice carped on the Captain Mayor's dwindling courage, to stall
and delay, when Valleygap's crags were so obviously untenanted.

Pesquil stood his ground and ignored all the remarks, his black eyes
stark as bog water and the sinews in his jaw cable tight.

Minutes later, the prince drew rein at his shoulder.

From astride, dewed with sweat beneath the shadow of his visor, Lysaer
regarded the headhunter captain's corked-back, fiery unease.

"You're worried," he said in careful inquiry.

Pesquil snapped off a nod.  "I don't like this.  Not one bit.

I'd sleep better under rockfalls and log traps.  My trackers say they
have yet to find so much as a wretched bent fern."

"What do your hunches suggest?" Lysaer tipped off his helm and shut his
eyes as a breath of fir-scented wind ruffled the stuck ends of his hair.

"My hunches?  They're screaming." Pesquil scanned the slow circle of a
carrion bird above the cliffs, then cracked the knuckles of his sword
hand in deliberate succession.  "We're not the cats in this game, your
royal Grace.  Count on my instinct, we're the mice."

Lent no sign upon which to hang reason, after the next hour, he
relented.  His trackers could descend from the summits in stages, to
quarter the slopes to the valley floor.  Hard on the heels of his
directive came report of twenty-six fatalities from the north face.

"Missteps and falls," said the scout, breathing in jerks from his run.
"The men standing said nothing looked amiss.  The casualties just
stepped on solid rock that gave under them."

Pesquil threw the reins of his gelding to the staff sergeant at his
elbow.  "Go back up," he told the scout.  "And get another man to run
relay to the south ridge.  All teams are to stop where they are.

These were no accidents, nor just bad luck.  Let no one advance any
farther until I've unearthed the reason."

To Prince Lysaer, he added, "Tell your garrisons to make camp.  We won't
be moving before sunset, that's certainty.

Warn the captains.  Their divisions must be kept on a very tight leash.
It could take days to clear this pass."

Squat, and staid in his stride as quarried rock, Lord Commander
Harradene of Etarra arrived in a sour chink of mail.  Eyes of china doll
blue seemed at odds with his grizzled black eyebrows, pulled now into
the scowl that his recruits nicknamed "the bear's lair."

"Pesquil, your runner from the south face is down with a broken leg.

Seventeen falls off the slope, from his side.  He wished you to hear his
report before the bonesetters numb his wits with a posset."

"Tell him the matter's already in hand." Pesquil rolled his shoulders,
bent, and let the heavy mail shirt he preferred for mounted use slither
off by its own weight.  He heaved the limp mass over his saddlebow,
unlashed a light brigandine from the roll behind the cantle, then
dragged that over the rust-streaked leather of his gambeson.  The
sergeant led his gelding off unasked.

Corded like a grizzled old predator, Pesquil checked his weapons before
Commander Harradene's florid presence.

"Hold the garrisons to order with an iron fist," he said in crisp haste.
"No man leaves camp.  Not even to forage for firewood.

Believe this, I dread what I'll find up there.  The traps to welcome our
army through this defile have been long months in the planning."

Shadows painted the deep vale of Valleygap in virid, umber, and purple.
The cart ruts snaked between the loufing slabs of slate, cut against a
sky like lucent silk.  Here and there setting sunlight licked a pinnacle
to a lingering flame of red-gold.  On his knees in a thicket beneath the
dank jut of an overhang, Pesquil jammed his knife into its sheath and
crouched back on his heels.  Always when his blood ran hottest, the
curses stuck cold on his tongue.

"The Ath-forsaken rock's been trapped," he said.  "I expected as much,
but here's proof." He sifted his fingers through a litter of stone
crushed into the moss by his knee.

"Litter left by a chisel.  Steiven was bad, but Dharkaron avenge,
Red-beard his son is a demon."

A moan cut the gloom from a man sprawled downslope, pinned in place by
the agony of broken bones.  Whether his hurts included fatal bleeding,
no one dared reach him to check.

The hale scouts poised at their Captain Mayor's shoulder were too
bitterly experienced to give way to the concern that tore at their
hearts.

Pesquil stood up, his iron gray hair at one with the gloaming in the fir
thickets.  "Pass my orders.  Have teams make their way down to the
wounded, but on ropes where the rock is laid bare.  Check your footing.
This ravine's a natural death trap, a rock slide just screaming to
happen.  Let's not be the fools to set one off."

The scouts organized to depart.

"One more thing," Pesquil called after them.  "Any man not rescued by
nightfall stays where he lies.  All territory we've covered that's clean
stays guarded.  I want no barbarian foray skulking in to foul our
backtrail in the dark."

Hand signals answered; his men were efficient, those few inclined to
argue long since broken to sharp discipline.  The scouts who served in
the headhunters' league knew very well: the ones who followed orders
stayed alive.

Yet even for scouts grown crafty through experience, Valleygap offered
no respite.  The spring traps set waiting in the path of the teams who
labored to help the wounded were not set to kill, but to cripple.

"The scrub is full riddled," a shaking veteran reported, arrived with
the litters into the safety of the camp.  Behind him, borne gasping in a
stupor of pain, came the fallen, the arms which had attempted to help
their fallen comrades staked through with sharpened slivers of wood; or
their legs, gashed white to the bone, if the bones themselves were not
snapped.

Under full night, the moon scored the ridges like polish on ivory above
the black swale of Valleygap.  Hunched in a hellish flare of torchlight,
Pesquil counted the best of his scouts among this first round of
casualties.  Gripped by brittle patience, he regarded each one's
suffering, then cracked orders that made men leap to fetch garrison
healers to attend them.

"Let every town-coddled lancer see the cost of fighting Red-beard's
barbarians.  Then let them hear till they shake in their boots, for when
they face the Master of Shadow on the field, they will suffer a thousand
times worse!"

Anger brewed like live current around the campfires.  Wood was too
scarce for the cooks to bake bread; the brick ovens stayed dismantled,
while men choked down dry chunks of biscuit and chewed leathery slabs of
sour cheese.  Over talk and the measured tread of sentries, above the
soft snorts of horses who pawed in complaint for scant fodder and the
low of disgruntled oxen, they heard the brisk concern of their officers.

Then chilling as nightmare came the shattering screams as a

deep gash was cauterized, or a bone set straight for the splint.

The cliff scarps shredded every cry into echoes.  Clean woodsmoke laced
through the sickening stink of charred flesh.

The men mustered to bring war to the southern spit at Merior lay that
night in their blankets, unsleeping and stifled by raw dread.

Caithdein of Shand

Two days prior to autumn equinox, the workers in the shipyard at Merior
cut seasoned lengths of pitch pine to start the new brigantine's
decking.  Arithon was not on hand to mark the occasion, nor would he be
present as the keel was laid down to begin the construction of the
second.  Withdrawn from the company of his workers, he ferried the
comatose person of Dakar aboard his little painted sloop.  He had not
returned to the Koriani herbalist's cottage even for the hour when the
last splints were removed from the boy's wrist to show bone and muscle
healed straight and smooth beneath a spider-laced mesh of pink scars.

The same morning, remarked by the fishwives, Talliarthe slipped her
mooring and set sail.

The course she steered through fair weather swells was due northwest off
the reefs; the passage she accomplished was brief.  She made port in the
harbor at Telzen to place orders at the mills for new lumber and to pick
up a packet of dispatches.

Bent to dark brooding by ill news from the north, and a recount of
unmentionable tragedy, Atithon pressed on upcoast and dropped anchor in
a forested cove twenty leagues distant from Elssine.  Alone in the blaze
of a cloudless, calm morning, he rowed his dory to the beach.

At a time and place most carefully appointed, he grounded the boat in an
exploding flock of terns and dragged her up beyond the tidemark.

Wrapped in air that smelled of scrub pine and seawrack, surrounded by
the plaintive calls of fishing birds, he whistled a clear major triplet.

Then he perched on the trunk of a storm-toppled palm and waited, hopeful
that his past request for a rendezvous had been received in good grace.
In time, a lanky clansman clad in deer hide emerged from the brush to
meet him.

No rustled foliage betrayed the presence of others, though such scouts
were certainly there, crouched in concealment amid the vine-choked
thickets and oat grass, and alert behind their strung bows.

Well versed in his dealings with clansmen, Arithon understood the wrong
move would see him skewered with a hail of broadheads at short range.
Unprepossessing, a target limned in full sunlight, he showed no sign
that he cared.

The clansman spoke, and was answered by prearranged words in Paravian. A
carved wooden token changed hands.

His other lean fist never far from his knives, the scout fingered the
incised falcon set against a shaved crescent moon, device of Shand's
past high kings.  "Ath!" He pulled a vexed frown.  Beneath mottled
streaks of stain to mask the line of his profile, he looked little older
than Jieret.  "It's his Grace of Rathain?  Our chieftain's going to lose
silver.  He wagered on a galley flying banners and a retinue prinked
with large emeralds.  Is your vaunted prince still on board?"

A smile flicked Arithon's lips as he rose.  "My sloop holds a fat
prophet with a bellyache.  He was much too sick to come ashore."

A pause ensued.  When the visitor listed no further passengers, the
young scout recovered slack manners with a flush that left him dusky to
the hairline.  The unassuming figure before him was given a second,
piercing study, though prior assessment had been accurate: the
black-haired arrival carried no visible badge of rank.  Small and neatly
made, he wore the loose, shabby dress of a fisherman and carried no
weapon beyond a tongsword in black metal, the sleek line of its
sweptback quillons half-buried in a fold of linen shirt.  "Arithon
Teir's'Ffalenn?  Your Grace?"

"Just Arithon, if you please.  As well, you can call off your hunting
pack."

The clan scout jerked up his chin.  "Not so fast.  Any man could carve
out an old high king's device or parrot a phrase in the old tongue. Show
me proof.  I'd be certain of your bloodline."

"None but a fool would lay claim to my name, with half of the north
roused to arms." Turned brisk in distaste, Arithon yanked loose his
right cuff tie.  He peeled back the sleeve and bared for inspection the
deep, welted scar seared into the length of his forearm.  The brand had
been left by the light bolt cast against him by his half brother that
had doomed him to Desh-thiere's curse.

"That will satisfy." Relieved to be spared a proving wrought of
magecraft or shadows, the scout pursed his lips and shrilled the piping
call of a plover into the thicket behind him.

A movement behind the pine branches revealed the form of a man, who
unfolded from a crouch and emerged on a cat's stride onto the sandy
verge.  He topped the seed tufts of the oat grass by a head.  A
black-and-tan laminate bow made of horn hung from his immensely broad
shoulder.  He had a beard like rooted wire, clipped short.  A fat black
pearl strung on a braided cord nested in the tanned hollow of his
throat.  His hair capped his skull, glossy as a sable's pelt licked
through with silver, and salted pure white at the temples.  The bones of
his face were like fitted, stamped bronze, and imposing, coupled with
straight brows and eyes of lucent turquoise.

"As your Grace may see, the hunting party consisted of one," he
addressed in a baritone flawed in the grain like burred oak.

He sidestepped to display the arrows in his shoulder quiver, fletched
with gray heron quills and pointed for small game.

The sword he carried was a masterwork of arms, figured with interlace
that made its great size appear deceptively delicate.

Arithon tilted his head to measure the frame that towered over him.  He
did not repeat the error of the scout.  "Lord Erlien s'Taleyn, High Earl
of Alland?"

"To a prince who wears rags, plain Erlien will do." Frost crystal eyes
swept the scion of Rathain and dismissed the whole man in fierce
challenge.  "Your mother descended from our own s'Ahelas royalty, it's
said.  Well, I set no truth to the claim.  The blood of the kings my
forebears served was substantial, and you but a mouse with scarcely the
growth to do more than bloody my kneecap."

Arithon shrugged, grave faced.  "Be warned then, my lord.

Since I favor my father, that should charge you to keep careful guard on
your kneecap.  What's more, if you've lost any silver over galleys and
flags, I shall pay off the debt myself."

Erlien burst into deep-chested laughter, while the pearl at his neck
danced on its tether of thong.  "Dharkaron himself!  I'll admit we
tested your presumptions.  Since in fact you have none, you're most
welcome to the Kingdom of Shand." He drew a black-handled dirk from the
back of his belt, kissed the reversed blade, then intoned in overdone
courtesy, "As caithdein and this realm's steward, my life's pledge as
surety for visiting princes.  I beg for the sake of tradition that you
leave my poor shanks intact."

"Dharkaron witness, I might." Arithon stretched his stride to fall in
step as the chieftain and his scout led off through the undergrowth. Not
about to seem cowed by the massive man looming beside him, he added,
"Should my sloop be left anchored in plain sight?"

"Don't trouble." Erlien flashed back a bear's lazy grin, hands flexed in
a disquieting, powerful contrast as he sheathed his enormous knife.
"Your boat's a fine morsel of bait.  Should a galley put in to
investigate, we'll lighten her cargo as forfeit.

City captains well know to steer clear of these coves.  We've sunk the
keels from under the rash ones, or any who played cocky and forgot."

Affable, even easy as the chieftain's manner seemed, the stalking grace
of his tread reflected resounding unease.  He carried paired dirks in
the cuffs of his boots, and he skirted his native thickets like quarry.

Vexed to quick chills by his bardic intuition, Arithon offered, "I'll
surrender my sword, if that would reassure you."

Erlien slammed to a stop.  Spattered with sun through the chinks in high
pine trees, his shoulders stayed unrelaxed.  The eyes turned to Arithon
were narrowed and sullen amid a wind-lined mesh of crow's feet.

"And that would do me good with your full command of shadows at my
back?"

"It might." Arithon sustained that burning, light gaze, though his palms
broke into a fine sweat.  "The blade is the same one carried by my
ancestors.  She bears the name Alithiel."

"Paravian wrought.  I'd heard of her." As a thrush took wing in a whir
of drab feathers, Erlien smothered a hair-trigger start.  "Then the
legend is true, that your sword is enspelled to dazzle an attacker into
blindness?"

"Only if the defending cause is just," amended Arithon.

"We'll both keep our sight.  I didn't come here to force any favors
through sorcery."

"Yet you're a peril in our midst all the same." Erlien tapped his weapon
hilt, the fringes on his buckskins the only ripple in resinous air.  Cut
off from the sea breeze, the scrub forest was stifling, the sky through
green and bronze needles cerulean as fired enamel.  "If you'd give up
your arms, what would you balk at?  Being tied, or blindfolded, or
dragged through the salt bogs at knife point?  To put the issue baldly,
does any means exist to disarm the dire powers of your birthright?"

The scout drawn in as witness of a sudden looked jaggedly unsettled.

Very still, his eyes wide open under spiked, dark lashes, Arithon forced
his stance to stay easy despite the prickles that stabbed down his
spine.  "Dharkaron as my witness," he said at length.  "If when you're
finished I can stop Lysaer's headhunters from reiving through Shand
after scalps, no paltry indignity you might name lies outside the reach
of my patience."

"And if I prevented you leaving?" Ertien pressed.  "There's a price on
your head, in Alestron."

The scout momentarily forgot to breathe, as the bristling tension
between the two men strained thinner and tighter and more Y.

"For that cause, I would certainly fight." In a blinding, smooth move,
Arithon unsheathed his longsword.  Paravian steel sang faintly at the
kiss of the air to its edge.  The black metal shimmered flint sharp with
highlights: scribed along its length, the interlaced angles of silver
runes gleamed, rainbowed like chipped crystal, but raised to no pulse of
ancient magic.

Only the commonplace reflections of green pine and bright sunlight
grazed its polish as Arithon held the tip at guard point.

"Why fence with manners?" invited the Prince of Rathain to Shand's
top-ranking chieftain.  "Let's settle this now, then talk like sane men
afterward."

"To first blood, then," Erlien agreed in fierce pleasure.  He shrugged
off his bow and quiver and cleared his own steel to do battle.

With no appointed arbiter and not a second's breath of warning, he
attacked with all the force of his muscular height and stature.

Arithon matched that killing thrust with a parry that staggered him
backward.  Small, compact, he moved like wind itself.  But no feat of
quick footwork could counter Erlien's greater reach.  The high earl
pressed his advantage of size to the fullest.  His weapon slapped back
in riposte with a skill that whistled air; clanged into Arithon's guard
like a forge hammer.

The dismayed scout jumped back in avoidance, while paired blades whined
and clashed, flat ground to flat in a nerve-painful scream of
separation.

Whatever Erlien's claim at the outset, the offensive he waged against a
man not an enemy implied no possibility of quarter.

Caged in caught sunlight, the whickered beat of steel was unsparing of
life and limb.  Before the clan lord's bracing, fast offensive, Arithon
was driven hither and yon like a wasp at the whim of a gale.  The
shocking clash of each parry left him no space for recovery.  He
required full strength to turn the battering blows, to deflect the
chieftain's larger blade away from a crippling strike.

The ground itself offered hazard.  Rotted trunks lay matted in creepers
and thicket, any open space between laced with roots and littered in
sticks and fallen pinecones.  Too beset to mind his footing, unable to
glance behind to secure a clean path for retreat, Arithon ducked and
twisted by cat's reflex.

Only the catch of greenbriars against a calf, or a poke of stemmed scrub
warned when his way lay impeded.  Sand and matted needles offered dismal
purchase, a sore disadvantage.

He must meet each of Erlien's strikes in perfect form, or risk a slipped
step.  To be jostled off-balance would bring disaster.

He would be run through or cut before he fell, and time and again, the
treacherous soil gave and parted under his light tread.  Too
hard-pressed for speech, he pitched his body to the limits of speed and
reflex in a stripped labor of self-defense.

Inevitably, the strain told on Arithon first.  Blade locked to blade in
a screaming bind, his hands ran hot sweat, and his lips peeled back from
his teeth as wrist and sinew resisted the twisting pressure that sought
to disarm him.  The spiked limbs of a deadfall hedged his back.  He
could not spring clear, but had to muscle his sword against Erlien's,
for agonized seconds bearing up under the levering brunt of the
chieftain's remorseless weight.  A twist of his body unlimbered his
sword from Erlien's.  He jumped left, the only way open to him.

And ready for that saving step yet again was a whistling blue fence of
steel.

Taxed sinews this time could not respond soon enough.

Arithon had his blade up, but not positioned.  The blow whined into
black steel and slid through, diverted from a chest strike, but not
clear of his left upper arm.  A line of scarlet opened through Arithon's
sleeve.

"First blood!" the scout cried in close to hysterical relief.

"My lord, the match is yours."

But the same hair-trigger instinct that had saved Arithon from being
mired in a thicket warned him now not to lower his guard.

Erlien's next riposte clanged into a solid parry, and the next and the
next, the very same.  Driven into a hollow bristled with saplings, the
Shadow Master thrashed a near-fatal step into the grabbing twigs of the
brush.  Then, inspired perhaps by extremity, he leaped backward into the
deep undergrowth.  To reach him, Erlien must follow.  Swords pinged and
sheared through green sticks.  Pruned bits of foliage took scything
flight.

Arithon burrowed backward like a rabbit and emerged on clear ground,
while Erlien smashed blundering after him.  For the first time since the
duel started, they were parted by more than a sword's length.

Arithon stood, desperate for respite, heaving painful, fast breaths, his
sleeves plastered to lean limbs by running sweat and blood.  He did not
look like a mage or a prince.  Beaten to graceless exhaustion, he had no
breath for words, no vitality left to frame expression.  The sword still
raised over an arched mesh of briars trembled in the struck fall of
sunlight through the high crowns of the trees.

No less tired, his buckskins patched dark on his shoulders and his
fringes flecked in hacked leaves, Erlien lowered his blade, braced the
pommel against his hip, and, deliberately stripped to the waist.  Then,
without speech, he discarded his shed leathers, caught up his weapon,
and resumed.

Every rule of mercy was abrogated.  To the scout, watching agonized as
blade met blade in a screech of choked-off vibration, disaster seemed
unavoidable.  The odds had been pushed too far.

Cornered beyond recourse against an opponent who outmatched him, Arithon
was going to be forced to use sorcery or shadows just to avoid getting
butchered.

The driving brilliance had gone from his speed.  His steps in retreat
were clumsy.  Snatched off his rhythm by roots and dense brush, time and
again he had to grasp his blade twohanded to stave off Erlien's assault.
Blood flew in shocked droplets from the marked arm that, even bracing,
quivered from sapped strength.

Fatigue had blunted the edge from Erlien's style also.

Pared to a bare framework of training, he was solid and methodically
sure.  The force of his body behind each attack wore and worried and
hammered his slighter opponent past telling.  Blade sheared on blade
through a harried retreat that strained the nerves in suspension.  Each
riposte that threatened ending became snatched back and sustained by
Arithon's beleaguered guard, enjoined in dogged effort to defy his
inevitable fate.  He took a cut on the elbow, shallow, but distracting
for the sting; then in short succession, two more marks on his shoulder.

Sawn to a tortured pitch of tension, the scout scrubbed sweat from his
eyes.  He watched Arithon crash into another thicket.  Twigs whipped.
Steel snicked through leaves and clanged in indignant embrace.  Tattered
greens fluttered down to the whistling grunt of effort through locked
teeth as Arithon smashed sideward through sticks to evade a lethal cut
to the head.

There came a screeling cry of steel on steel, blade raking blade from
tip to crossguard.  Borne backward into a whippy mass of saplings,
Arithon dropped, twisting, to one knee.  The sword in his hand sang
protest, locked still to Erlien's cross guard.

The chieftain found himself hampered in the narrowed press of the
branches.  Smaller, slighter, better able to move in close quarters,
Arithon snatched his sole chance.

In a flying, sun-caught arc, he wrested his blade clear and hooked the
point.  Metal bound to metal.  The chieftain lost grasp on his weapon to
a stinging clamor of stressed sound.

Through a short, hampered flight through close brush, the sword tangled
and sliced down, point first, to impale itself in dark earth.

Erlien backstepped to recover, hooked a leg, and crashed onto his rump.
Head flung back, blue eyes of feral intensity wide open, he sprawled
with his chin upturned to meet the black blade that descended in fine,
ringing temper to lick the bared cords of his throat.

Running blood, scuffed and nicked by briar and brush, Arithon glared
through a soaked fall of hair.  Sweat glued his hands to a sword that
quivered in unsteady, light-caught spasms.  "Why?" he gasped, his voice
husked out of true by his wracking tremors of exhaustion.

Erlien glared up that bared ribbon of steel and said nothing; and
silence itself spoke as signal.

A ring of clan archers rose from hiding.  They gripped bows with nocked
arrows and their aim was trained at short range upon Arithon s'Ffalenn.

He greeted their presence with a wordless cry, spun on his heel, and
cast his sword away.  The black blade tumbled through the briar with a
sharp, outraged ring, then thudded to rest at the feet of the scout, who
dared make no move to recover it.  Back turned, his arms braced between
the trunks of two trees as though he begged help to stay upright,
Arithon waited.

The expression on his face was not relief, not fear, not impatience: it
was anger, naked and hot enough to wrench through his body in spasms.
When the command to loose was not given

m

to the archers, he pulled in a screaming breath.  With all of his
masterbard's diction, he demanded, imperious, "Why?"

Erlien's first word was to his bowmen, a curt command to stand down. His
answer to Arithon came inflectionless and short.  "As the clan chief
responsible for this realm, I found it needful to test your mettle."

"With your very life?" Fury overlaid with incredulity, his fine hands
clamped into fists, the Shadow Master spun again to face the clan chief.

"Did your man Steiven leave you in ignorance?  That's how it's given to
caithdeinen to test princes, if need provides no other way."

Erlien mustered his will and arose, brush scraped and weary, but
unscorched by the royal ire bent upon him.

"You heard how Lady Maenalle of Tysan came to die?"

A wretched, prolonged shiver wrung Arithon from head to foot.  "I heard
two days ago, about Maenalle." Then he shut his lips, aggrieved and
grim, not only for the fate the Lady s'Gannley had suffered at the hand
of her prince, but for the goods that funded his shipworks, that laid
guilt for her death at his feet.  Erlien's statement also forced him to
reassess a past the more painful, for indeed, it had been with his life
that Earl Jieret's father, Lord Steiven, had compelled his prince to
swear crown oath before the bloody battle at Strakewood.

To this living steward who sought to try him to the bitter limits of
integrity, Arithon said, "Your reason hasn't answered my question."

"Because it's obvious." Erlien brushed off the leaf mold that clung to
his sweat-damp knuckles.  "You're living bait for a war host thirty-five
thousand strong.  If you come here to involve my clansmen, I would
measure firsthand what took place on the banks of Tai Quorin.

Did your sorcery and your shadows defend your real following, or in
fact, merely shield your own life?  I was duty bound to find out."

As Arithon stiffened, Erlien raised a swift hand.  "I wished to know,
too, if you could fight.  Before Ath, I've sworn!  I'll not offer my
people as a shield for a weakling prince who lacks courage.  And if you
proved true to honor and seized no advantage through fell powers, though
you died on my sword here and now, there's a balance met.  Shand would
he spared from your nasty coil of contention."

"With my body sent off to Alestron for bounty?" Arithon unbent his fists
to peel back the hair slicked to his forehead and temples.

The anger had gone out of him as water might spill from a sieve.

He looked and moved as if his wounds stung, though his sarcasm bit as he
added, "You made just one bitter mistake.  I didn't come here to ask any
clansmen to stand in my defense."

Lord Erlien looked chagrined as a bear caught by bees while licking a
muzzle glued with honey.  "Fiends plague!

Then why are you here?"

Arithon gave a sour laugh.  Touched to distaste by the widening stains
on his shirt, surrounded by the avid band of scouts, he said, "When I've
finished being the subject of a bleeding exhibition, I'll recover my
manners and tell you."

The council arranged by Lord Erlien at Arithon's request had been called
under open sky.  Present were clan chiefs from Atwood in East Halla, and
others from Orvandir's hill country.

Not a few had traveled an inconvenient distance to be present.

Given the nature of the caithdein who ruled Shand, the smell of tired
horseflesh, the dry rounds of whispers, and the poisonous curiosity that
pervaded the encampment scarcely came as a surprise.

Few of the elders called into attendance were inclined to share counsel
with a stranger.

Lent the afternoon to apply his insight into the character of Alland's
high earl, Arithon reviewed his conclusions.  Erlien's authority was
trademarked by a quick, inquisitive mind.  In love with talk, jocular in
dismissal of his guarding ranks of archers, his strength was quirky
humor and an unfailing eye for detail.  He liked surprises, encouraged
combative rivalries among his captains, and seemed to thrive on keeping
light guidance on disordered, freewheeling enterprise.

Gathered without ceremony at twilight beneath the sandstone ledges of an
abandoned quarry, the inner circle of Shand's old blood clansmen waited
around a communal fire.

The introduction Lord Erlien offered his guest came typically pointed in
acid.  "On my honor, I've determined this prince is not here to claim
loyalty for the distaff side of his pedigree."

"Did he try, he would die here," a hook-nosed grandame in a snowy battle
braid cracked through the gathering dusk.

"My clan elders," Erlien presented.  He jostled Arithon forward with an
expansive, bold gesture toward the tight-gathered band who owed the
realm of Shand real allegiance.  "As you see, your welcome won't be
tender." His broad, tanned palm clapped the slighter man's shoulder in
yet another boisterous round of challenge.

Braced like still iron as the blow fell, his unbound scabs crusted to
discomfort, Arithon gave way but one step.

In vicious approval, Alland's earl finished, "Master them, mage, if you
can.  For by Ath, they're a bloodthirsty bunch.  All week they've been
vying for the chance to be first to stake out your carcass for the
ravens."

"Despite your pledged life as my surety?" Arithon's bow answered cold as
a slicked glint of steel.  The rent and bloodied edges of his shirt
fluttered, plucked by the pine-scented breeze which flowed over the
quarry's far rim.  Above jumbled stones clothed over in creepers, the
sky paled to lavender, stippled by faint early stars.

Erlien assumed the high seat, a flat-topped boulder set apart by a woven
red throw rug.  Replete as a sun-wanned adder, he surveyed his
disgruntled pack of clan chiefs and chuckled.

"'Ware Torbrand's temper.  I've tasted its sting.  Rathain's royal line
might breed runt sized, but there's mettle enough for all that.

His Grace has come to bring warning.  By right of arms, he's earned his
chance to speak."

Arithon did not sit, but strode into the cleared ground by the fire. His
footfall made scarcely any sound, even over washed gravel tailings.
Splashed in the copper play of firelight, he was a form rendered in
planes and shadow, the hawksharp angles of cheekbone and chin seared
into profile against the gloom.  His glance raked over the hard-bitten
company who waited to hear him bearing weapons and bows, and no small
measure of distrust.  Arrogance bracketed one elder's mouth; hard
patience stiffened another's back.  A flaxen-haired woman near the
sidelines stared in frank curiosity, while others projected unsettled
hostility on faces lined like worn leather from lifelong exposure to
southern sunlight.

Exposed on all quarters to unfriendly stares, Arithon would not be
hurtled.  He measured them all, to the last, most inimical grandame,
until not a clan chief among them could mistake the stamp of his
presence.

This prince was s'Ffalenn, and touched bitter by his past, and above any
other thing, dangerous.

Run short of patience since his trial at sword point, Arithon plunged
straight to the crux.  "A war host thirty-five thousand strong is on the
march to the coast of Minderl Bay.  Although the real clans of Rathain
have been given my leave to cause their companies delay as they can,
without additional intervention, the army could put to sea before
winter.  A fleet of galleys for transport is already mustering at
Werpoint."

He let no shred of sorrow show for the fact that Lord Jieret and his war
captain were belike to use his royal sanction to spill townborn blood in
punishing revenge for past losses.

Focused at need on necessities, Arithon let the chisel-cut buttresses of
sandstone throw back the temper in his voice.  "If any portion of this
army wins through, they'll eventually sail here to Alland.  I've
undertaken to escape, self-sufficient to sea by that hour.  My departure
should draw any threat away with me.  But the best-laid plans are not
enough.  The curse Desh-thiere has woven over me is remorseless, a
compulsion inflicted without quarter.  I would have you understand what
that means."

Evoked to a masterbard's command over language, he described the fearful
loss of control he had suffered, when, on the banks of Tai Quorin, he
had come to face his half brother.

The moment, wrenched out of harrowing memory, when nothing and no one
had mattered; when the last of his integrity had been torn away and
undone, consumed by a storm of blank hatred.  Terror remained.  The
truth could not be glossed over or evaded.  He would have sacrificed all
without compunction, from the green-growing land to the life of his last
real clansman to meet the curse's insatiable demand for the life of
Lysaer s'llessid.  While the geas held sway, all his love and conscience
and humanity could be twisted to count for nothing at all.

In the bleak depths of nightmares, Arithon still tasted the poisoned
ecstasy which had gripped him through that past second in time.  Once,
his half brother's life had lain in his hand to crush without mercy,
without thought.

Only young Jieret's intervention had averted irremediable disaster.

"The compulsion I bear lies beyond sane control," the Master of Shadow
said in summary.  His forced, iron stillness lent a civilized mask over
scouring humiliation.  Through every day that he woke and breathed, he
fought to withstand the vicious irony: despite his most diligent effort,
the horror might happen again.

"If I chance to be cornered," Arithon finished.  "If I should once
encounter my half brother on the field, my actions will brook no
conscience.  Shadows, sorcery, or human lives, whatever lies to hand
will be seized as a means to wreak destruction.  Lysaer's obsession with
my death will stop at nothing, and I am mindful this is your land.

The scope of the peril I may draw here is without precedent, and I've
come to entreat your clans to withdraw to safety until this pass is
finished.  I've made plans as I may to distance myself from my enemy,
but there can be no guarantees.  Before the drive of the Mistwraith's
curse, my best-laid strategy could run afoul."

The stunned and thinking silence that gripped the council circle lasted
for scarcely a heartbeat.

"You can't expect us to turn tail!" snapped a frost-haired scout on the
fringes.  "The false prince murdered his caithdein.

Before we see his annexed war host run riot through our territory, we'd
sooner quash their effort at the start."

Shouts haled back in agreement.  "Who needs foreign headhunters riding
for scalps here in Alland!  Even without their interference, an army
that size would strip the land as it passes."

Braced for the wrong sort of argument, Arithon rounded on Lord Erlien in
incredulous, exasperated dismay.  "Are your elders all deaf?

Have none of them heeded a single word I've said?"

The regent of the realm twitched his huge shoulders the way a wolf might
shrug away flies.  "For Shand, we judge as we see fit."

"If you're offering help to fan the fires of this war, I refuse you."
Scalded to impatience, Arithon flung bac an ultimatum.

"This time, I'll give townsmen no cause at all o link my name with clan
defenders."

Erlien stretched, unbiddably tempered in mischief.  "In that case, my
friend, you should've lost a certain sword fight."

There was more; a depthless black malice gleamed in the clan chief's
eyes, even through the shifting play of firelight.

"You've cause to oppose Lysaer already, I see," Arithon probed in hedged
caution.

"Prince Lysaer's no clansman's friend," Alland's high earl allowed. "Not
since he proclaimed and enforced the execution of Tysan's sworn
caithdein." Sharp enough to note the Shadow Master's catch of grief, he
added, "You're no uninvolved bystander.  Clan news passes more swiftly
than before.

The affray by Tai Quorin saw to that."

A locked moment passed while Shand's chieftains looked on.  Then Erlien
grinned like a shark and confessed to Arithon, "I drew steel in addition
to address a complaint on behalf of the caithdein of Melhalla.

Your attack on Duke Bransian's armory at Alestron was unprovoked, and
against one of her real vassals.  Since you crossed into Shand, by
kingdom law, form demanded her claim should pass to me."

"Oh Ath," said Arithon, suddenly laughing.  "I thought that's why you
tried to take my head." He pressed a forearm to his stinging ribs,
rueful enough to be honest.  "Your ally should get her facts straight,
though.  That wasn't an attack.  I had a charge that turned awry to lend
help with Fellowship business."

Erlien's smile stretched wider.  "Well, prince, for my part, by right of
arms, you're acquitted.  I found out well enough.

You don't use your sorcery for spite.  The s'Brydion line

always did have a nose for foolish trouble.  When Duke Bransian's liege
lady asks, I shall say you disarmed me, yet mind well: Lysaer s'llessid
may have revoked his right to safeconduct, but the s'Brydion of Alestron
are clanblood.  Should that hawk come to roost in a nest outside your
favor, the duke's within his fights to claim your life."

"Should he come to me for due reckoning," Arithon said dryly, "I will
answer him fairly on my own."

Satisfied at last to dispense with past grudges, Lord Erlien stretched
the kinks from his shoulders.  His slant-eyed glance of appreciation
encompassed Arithon's too-straight stance.

The prince looked more than ever like a boy who had suffered a beating,
each tender move considered in advance to minimize stiffness and
discomfort.  "Well, be advised to give Alestron wide berth until your
scabs heal." Enjoying Arithon's glare of black rancor, he added, "Where
are you bound in that toy of a sloop, after you leave our forest?"

A log fell.  The sullen leap of sparks flicked a dancing, hot gleam in
the depths of Arithon's eyes.  "North." A corner of his mouth crawled
up.  "Why rely on the fickle course of storms?

I'd a mind instead ' to try to turn Lysaer's fleet before he can sail
from Werpoint harbor."

Eriien sank his knuckles in black beard and gave his chin a vigorous
scratch.  "Well you're not my sworn prince.  That being beyond your
power to change, you lack any grounds to deny my clansmen their due
share of the fun should the Fatemaster turn your plots astray.  If
you've got a mind to stir a hornet's nest through sabotage, let me tell
you, in Shand, we're crack experts at cattle raids."

Indeed, armies could not move, even by galley, without

sustenance in the form of beasts.  A whoop erupted from a clan

lord.  Someone else shouted for a cask to be broached.  With a
burgeoning flare of enthusiasm, leatherjacks were fetched out,

and someone unrolled a dog-eared set of charts from a saddle

pack.  Played across by moving shadows as the chiefs he commanded
plunged headlong into plans for their most cherished pastime, Erlien
summed up in complacence, "Yon false prince from Tysan can recruit his
fine army as he pleases.  He may find it tough to invade foreign country
if his men have nothing to eat."

Arithon's scathing rebuttal was forestalled as a scout in a braided
leather vest dug his sore ribs in laughing sympathy.

"Accept your lot and be merry.  Anyone who bests our clan chief at
swords, Lord Erlien adopts as a brother."

Once started, the idea of resistance gained momentum with wild
enthusiasm.  While the fire collapsed to red embers, the celebration
grew rowdy to cement shared friendship and genius.  A half-drunken
contest at archery commenced with a torch on a pole as a target.  The
air gained a taint of singed fletching, and silver changed hands in
spirited wagers as contestants compared bows and cracked disparaging
remarks.

Erlien's clan lords drew lots and shot against a vicious and inventive
interference to spoil the aim of close rivals.

No one noticed until the cask reached the lees that Arithon s'Ffalenn
had left their company.

The band of scouts dispatched to the shore in haste brought back their
belated report: Talliarthe had sailed, most surely under cover of
shadow.  Despite four men set as sentries, the cove where she had
anchored lay black and empty under the moon.

Erlien s'Taleyn, High Earl of Alland, received the news with a
head-shaking, throaty spill of laughter.  "Dharkaron himself!  Should
yon Shadow Master think we are quits after he's fairly disarmed me in a
-fight, he shall in due time be shown better.  If this false prince,
Lysaer, and his war host plies south, we shall give him sharp welcome,
with or without s'Ffalenn sanction!"

Tidings

As near as Koriani scrying could determine, the Fellowship of Seven met
the imminent collapse of the peace with indifference, despite the fact
that Athera's royal lines were their own irresponsible creation.  While
war against the Shadow Master mounted to a certainty, the Sorcerers kept
close in their own affairs, as reticent as they had ever been at the
time Etarra was abandoned to the destruction unleashed by Desh-thiere's
curse.

Whatever crisis had shaken them to mount an earth-shaking conjury from
Althain Tower on the force of the past summer's solstice, the cause
continued to elude the most diligent Koriani seers.

The mood of their Prime Enchantress grew brittle under the pressure as
events outpaced the scope of her informants Where once the Great
Waystone bad enabled her Senior Circle to track the Fellowship's intent,
now, they could only hurl probes and futile auguries against
impenetrable warns.

When Sethvir of Althain chose secrecy, he could circle his tower in
guard spells as opaque as Paravian ironwork.

Tenaciously unwilling to leave to the passions of geas-cursed princes to
run their fell course unremarked, at the head of an order founded on
principles of merciful intervention, Morriel Prime settled in for autumn
equinox at the orphan's hostel maintained in the coastal fortress at
Whitehold.  Situated where the flats of a lowland peninsula jutted north
into Eltair Bay, the high, pale buttresses of the citadel's inner ward
shaded a cobbled courtyard that rang to the shouts of parentless
children by day.  By night, the high, mortised walls contained the
chalked circles and candles laid out for spell rites performed in
seasonal rhythm I s under starlight.  If the sentries posted over the
gatehouse were troubled by the uncanny vibrations of sealed ritual, they
were bound to withhold their complaint.

Since history held that a former Senior Circle had once saved the city
from flooding under a tidal surge through the might of a winter storm,
Whitehold's welcome toward the enchantresses remained an entrenched
tradition.  The orphanage over the years had preempted the brick
mansions on both sides of the narrow street.

The Prime commandeered a high, pillared chamber, once the solar of a
rich shipping merchant.  Rows of paned casements aflood with east
sunlight warmed the damp air on clear mornings.  The view overlooked the
strand.  Beyond the workaday clutter of lighters beached like seined
fish on the sands, the bearded combers hurled themselves in ranks of
filigreed foam and exploding spray.  Vacant mooring buoys beaded the
heave of leaden waters.  Every galley available for charter had sailed
north to Werpoint to serve Lysaer s'llessid as troop transport.

Morriel basked in the window seat to case the cruel ache in her joints.
Gone were the days when she could meditate without the distracting, soft
comfort of cushions.  Intolerant of cold, less patient with setbacks,
she forbade the attendance of her First Senior since Elaira's failure to
establish herself as Arithon's mistress.  On the night the younger
initiate had unmasked the man's defenses and roused him to passion, the
direct force of his character coupled with s'Ffalenn compassion had
shocked a signal the clear length of the seventh lane.

A grave enough obstacle to the transfer of prime power, First Senior
Lirenda's fascination with the Shadow Master must be shielded from added
temptation through the polishing phase of her training.

Morrie] assumed the knotty burden of tracking the s'Ffalenn prince's
movements since his recent departure from Merior.  For this purpose, a
coffer filled with blown glass spheres lay open to her inspection.
Embedded inside each fragile globe, suspended in miniature reflection by
an initiate whose talents were manifest through air, morsels of live
event had been captured by the dawn's lane-watchers.

The Koriani Prime bent in focused intent over each detailed imprint.
Hooded in shawls like a fonune-teller, she prodded

the orbs to and fro and arranged them in patterns by subject.

Throughout the past month, the disparate collection of happenstance
gleaned from the continent's east coast narrowed steadily toward a
convergence.

Only those subjects charged and weighted with emotion would impress
themselves into the lane flow: in Merior only that morning, a set of
towheaded twins had badgered a blind splicer who worked rope for a
brigantine's ratlines.  Morriel cradled the glass with their image,
sharp in analysis of the spirit and loyalty to Arithon impressed in
those paired young faces.  Her clawed nail rolled that sphere aside.

Another, captured from close council within the walls of Atestron,
showed Duke Bransian s'Brydion and his brothers immersed in fierce
discourse over maps.  By the patterns of the marker pins under their
hands, Morriel gleaned their intent to join their armies with Lysaer's
war host in the campaign to trap Arithon on the sands of the Scimlade
hook.  Associated, but contained in a smaller glass, a dishonored guard
captain clad in beggar's rags hunkered over a stolen bread crust.  No
less fervent in dedication, this one ached for the chance to claim
vengeance.  His hatred burned hot against the Shadow Master, who had
undone his claim to pride and credibility.

Northward, under octagonal towers at Jaelot, merchant guildsman grumbled
over the edict from their mayor's council that conscripted their fastest
galleys and dispatched the fleet northward to serve the allied muster at
Werpoint.

Transactions abounded up and down Eltair Bay, where vessels of
load-bearing capacity changed hands, or were chartered out for Etarran
gold.

Morriel marked one image orb aside for its oddity: a flotilla of
derelict fishing Tuggers moored in a hidden cove off Crescent Isle that
should have passed unnoticed but for the curiosity of a passing school
of dolphins.  Since Lysaer's affairs were infallibly couched in
ceremonious, forthright candor, the Prime tapped the glass that failed
to fit in irritable speculation, then moved on with her methodical
review.

While affairs on the waterfront transpired apace, the war host itself
remained bogged down in Valleygap, low on supplies, and harried by
outbreaks of clan raids.  The latest trap had sprung a rockfall across
the narrow roadway.  Reduced under glass like black ants, soldiers
labored with shovels and ox teams, shifting boulders to clear the choked
pass.

Of Jieret Red-beard and his clan Companions, the lanewatchers had traced
no sign.  Either their scouts had abandoned the site since the ambush,
or they slept by day and no man among them dreamed with sufficient
intensity to deflect the lane's magnetic flux.

Morriel curled crabbed fingers in yet another spasm of stray pain.

Eyes bead bright in concentration, she considered the last three spheres
in the coffer whose meaning lay provocatively obscured.

In the first, Black Drake's wily captain scoured the sailors' dives at
Highscarp, recruiting a disreputable stamp of crewmen even her
smuggler's brig should hesitate to sign for passage.

In the next, a graceful, painted sloop lay tucked in a secluded
anchorage by the fir groves of Ithilt.  The Mad Prophet curled like a
leaf against her headstay, croaking drunken ditties, his pudgy hands
clasped around the whiskey crock he had nursed since his mishap with the
vat in Garth's pond.  The Master of Shadow was not on board.  The image
trapped under glass replayed its maddening, repetitive cascade of surf;
the cove's crescent beach showed no tracks.

Another sphere garnered a league to the northeast showed a herd of deer
fleeing some disturbance.  Twinged by impatience, Morriel traced the
slick, cold surface of the glass.

Tonight's lane watch, perhaps, could pursue these disparate threads to
their origins.  The order's most gifted scriers had been advised to sift
events in Talliarthe's vicinity.

Dakar's presence offered proof: the Prince of Rathain had returned to
his kingdom, sure sign he angled for conflict.

Outside Elaira's influence, Arithon's mind was a maze of subtle
intrigues a mere image could scarcely hope to track.

Whatever he plotted, incessant lane-watch offered tantalizing glimpses,
but seldom enough insight to back a forecast.

Though Elaira had affirmed that the s'Ffalenn prince had impaired his
mage-sight, he had not lost the disciplines of his mastery.  A trained
awareness and a masterbard's instincts yet enabled him to batten his
emotions in stilled silence.  The lane flow picked him up rarely, and
almost never when his movements displayed intent.

Balked to a hissed sigh of anger, the Koriani Prime snagged hands as
fleshless as bird's claws in the dark purple silk of the quilts.

How many hours of her life had slipped past in such futile analysis of
circumstance?  When her order had wielded a grand power focus, events
had been drawn direct, causes joined sequentially to consequence by
their links of energy resonance.

Knowledge had reigned in place of these hours of sifting and guesswork.
Dhirken's unlikely recruiting; the mass of wilted, cut pine boughs in
Ithilt that disrupted the foraging deer; perhaps even the derelict
fishing Tuggers would have shown indisputable connection to Arithon's
designs; or they would not.

Perhaps no such ties existed.

Morriel pinched colorless lips.  The doubts, the error, the wearisome
differences of opinion that evolved as her Senior Council argued out
points of probability made a pitiable grasp of world affairs.

Stymied by circling thoughts, harassed by the hyperacute hearing
inflicted by the seals to stall death, Morriel longed for the luxury of
thick wool tapestries, that just for this hour, might ease the barrage
of distractions.  A colicky baby wailed through the voice of a house
matron, scolding.  In the courtyard beneath the arched casements, a boy
ward chopped wood for the kitchens.  A door groaned open on a lower
floor to admit a chattering group of girls sent off to draw water from
the well.

A servant thumped through the shelves in the scullery, while the cook
banged down a tin bucket to catch the wax peelings off a new wheel of
cheese.

Moriel wrenched strayed attention from the disparate clamor, stitched by
the winds off the bay that thrummed sullen notes through the shutters,
and the clear, high peal of an officer's horn that signaled a galley
weighing anchor.  Eyelids thin as blue eggshells twitched closed as she
sought refuge in the calm of meditation.

The gnawing pain in her body pursued, even through the veils of iron
discipline.  Stillness brought no peace, but cased her thinned bones in
aches that never for a second relented.

Deep sleep in these hours lay beyond reach, and the frail, shallow
whisper of each arrhythmic breath seemed to span the very width of
eternity.

The day must inevitably come when she would fail to attain the peace of
higher consciousness.  Between herself and her long-sought release, at
every turn of fateful event, hung the specter of Arithon s'Ffalenn.
Elaira's love had captured his heart well enough, but had failed to win
through to his bed; far better for First Senior Lirenda if the cursed
prince had succumbed to plain lust.

A knock at the door snapped the threads of conjecture.  The Koriani
Prime roused like an unhooded falcon, blinked through a quick stab of
pain, and in a scraped whisper of signal displeasure, demanded the
reason for disruption.

The latch snicked up and the portal cracked to admit an oval face netted
in coils of black hair.  Lirenda, First Senior, did not step inside, but
swept down in an arrowed mass of skirts until her forehead pressed her
bent knee.

The contrast struck at odd moments, between this grown woman and a vain
young initiate from a pedigree family who had begged to be taken in for
training.  Even humbled by desire, Lirenda had been too haughty for
obeisance.

Prodigious talent had burned in her like live coals, almost too wild to
contain.

Blooded pride was still there, but tempered now by ambition.  The
driving desire to win, and the lonely heart that had prompted the girl
to affect conceit now lay buttressed by ironshod discipline.  Morriel
pondered the change, satisfied that the precepts of mercy could be
taught.  Heartfelt emotion was less biddable, a fearful point of
vulnerability in a candidate appointed for prime succession.  Against
the highest of stakes, Lirenda must be molded to survive.

Ever testing to expose any trait that might admit loophole for failure,
Morriel's censure cut the fused moment of silence.

"You dare much."

Abased in the confines of the doorway, Lirenda did not flinch at the
omission of her title.  "I dare nothing.  News has arrived for your ears
alone."

"What under Ath's sky cannot be made to wait?" Morriel Prime
contradicted.  "If you came to say something important, let me hear."

Lirenda's frosty poise never wavered.  "I beg you, reconsider.

The subject is too weighty to broach without due precautions."

Too subtle a creature to show disdain or approval, the Koriani Prime
snapped fingers like dry sticks.  "Rise, then.

Admit the one who awaits in the corridor behind you as well."

At Lirenda's rebellious catch of breath, Morriel gave a cracked
exhalation.  "Do you think to gainsay my wishes?

That's unwise.  I already know the source of your news.

Another senior has traveled from Tysan to see me, yes?  She was ordered
to keep watch on events at Avenor.  She would scarcely leave her post
for a pittance."

"Matriarch, beldame Haltha is here," Lirenda admitted through a rustled
hitch of skirts.  "Shall I lay down a ward to preserve privacy?"

"No.  Fetch the news bearer.  I shall attend what protections are needed
myself." While Lirenda withdrew to obey, Morriel Prime veiled the glass
image spheres in a shawl.  Then she shrugged off her quilts with
laborious care and stood upright.

Her lavender robes dragged at her skeletal form like the wings of an
exotic moth as she opened a wall chest and drew out the silk bag that
wrapped one of the order's lesser focus jewels.  Unveiled, the white
quartz burned with caught light, a spike of cold flame cased in crystal.
Morriel paid no heed to the movements of her underlings in the doorway.
She cupped the gem's faceted weight in palms like dead leaves, then cast
her stilled thoughts into its lattice to enhance her tuned reservoir of
power.

Heightened awareness flooded through her.

Brick and mortar, she sensed the framing presence of the mansion, board
floors infused like ghost dreams with the tap of women's steps and the
tears of growing children and the trace glow left by past conjuries.
Spent fragments of ward seals clung like grit in old plaster.  Layered
underneath in shadowy lacings of hallucination, Morriel could nearly
detect the subliminal groan of overstressed natural energies.  More than
ever as her years advanced, their febrile ring teased her consciousness,
as though the grain of painted molding and sea-damp stone walls struck
and vibrated, spun into contrary currents by the strictures of
time-faded sigils.

Morriel gave such fancy short shrift.  To pity the heart of inanimate
substance while breathing humanity still suffered was a Fellowship
affectation, as ruthless to life as their bloodless, isolate meddling.

She raged alone in bitter knowledge that since the Waystone's loss, the
Sorcerers perused her sisterhood's affairs at their whim.

The most potent ward at Koriani command never stopped Sethvir's prying,
or Luhaine's lugubrious surveillance.  At best, Morriel could impose a
construct upon the air to lend warning of Fellowship presence.

Sealed through the principles of elemental domination, every sound to
occur within her chamber could be tracked and confined by scribed runes.
The resonance she knotted through her crystal recorded the expanding
signature of each event in a shimmer of subliminal blue light.

Should any outside power seek to bleed off a trace pattern, Morriel
Prime would know at once, with First Senior Lirenda little the wiser.
The old Prime had learned when pursuit of perfection could become a
wasting mistake.  Serpent sly, she preferred to discover which facts the
Sorcerers came to monitor, then tailor her precautions to suit.

Lirenda was dedicated, but she had much to learn of the strengths to be
gained through abstinence.  She stood now in a simmer of prim impatience
while her Prime rearranged fragile limbs in their closest approximation
of comfort amid the quilts.

By contrast, the senior enchantress just in from Tysan presented herself
for audience in humbled quiet, her fustian clothes still wrinkled from
the road, and her seamed features chalky with weariness.

"Your will, matriarch," she murmured.  Beneath the probing regard of the
Koriani Prime, she sank to the floor in obeisance.

"You have my leave to speak." Mortiel nested her hands in her robes, her
porcelain hair strained through by cold fire in the shimmer of
spell-tempered air.

"My Prime," the beldame opened, while the grimy hem of her skirt
fluttered to her terrified trembling.  "A decision of grave moment was
given into my hands and I was forced to a choice.  For an act of
unconscionable independence, I throw myself on your mercy.  I closed a
bargain with Prince Lysaer s'llessid.  In exchange for the secret of his
half brother's interests at Merior, I have his witnessed assurance that
the Waystone of our order was never lost." In rising, uncontainable
excitement, she finished, "The jewel is whole still, and held in close
care by the Fellowship Sorcerers at Althain Tower."

Morriel raised clawed fingers to stifle a warbling cry.  This news was
momentous, their vanished grand crystal revealed at long last!

Thrilled by a tingling, expansive rush of joy after tedious years of
proscribed power, the Prime reached out a shaken hand and traced her
seal of blessing above the prostrate senior's hood.  "You are forgiven
your presumption.  Indeed, well done!"

These tidings afforded great hope.  If the stone was recovered, not only
could the disarranged humors of her body be drawn back into balance
until the trials of her succession were surmounted, but means might be
restored to quell damaging storms and banish disease, and even to throw
off the suffocating constraint imposed by the Fellowship of Seven.

In heady elation, Morriel locked eyes with her First Senior.

Lirenda's flush in the heat of stunning news showed more than
exhilarated eagerness: under her varnished layer of poise flashed a
spasm of unguarded anger.

Morriel seized upon that oddity.  Barbed with searching power, sped to
sharp force by the spell crystal still meshed with her mind, her
scrutiny lanced through the First Senior's reserve to wrest out that
sand grain of dissidence.

Understanding followed like a hammer blow to rock.

Lirenda's displeasure stemmed from personal betrayal, that the
Waystone's location had been bought at a cost of endangering the royal
fugitive at Merior.

Proof stung, that the prime candidate's recurrent fascination for
Arithon s'Ffalenn had indeed threaded deep enough to unbalance her grasp
of affairs.

Pricked spiteful in displeasure, Moriel narrowed eyes like black pebbles
and snapped an immediate order.

"First Senior, I charge you to take the Skyron focus stone.

Leave for Atainia and muster a grand circle of one hundred and eight
seniors.  You have one task: confront Sethvir and wrest back our Great
Waystone.  Fail in this, come back empty-handed, and you may consider
yourself unworthy of your post."

Expressionless as sculpted alabaster before the evident censure of her
Prime, Lirenda returned a polished curtsy.  Her back unbent, braided
hair like chiseled jet under the flicker of spelled air, she said, "Your
will is my pleasure.  I shall not disappoint you."

Morriel watched, arranged in brittle stillness as her appointed heir
arose in fervent grace and departed.

To the elder still prostrate at her feet, the Prime cast a less
jaundiced eye.  "Put aside your fear, Haltha.  Arise.  You acted at
great risk for an end you judged to be worth any sacrifice.

Your service deserves due reward, but necessity drives me.  I lay on you
my request for a small, additional service."

The beldame straightened before her mistress, head bent in submission.
"Matriarch, I am yours to command.  Morriel lifted an arm reduced to
bone wrapped in paper-thin tissue, twitched aside her shawl, and
selected an orb from the array beside the opened coffer.  She set its
glass weight into Haltha's hand and said, "Repeat the scrying you made
for Lysaer s'llessid, which exposed Arithon's shipyards at Merior.

Let the man whose likeness you hold be given the selfsame knowledge."

Permitted no leave to question, the senior enchantress cupped the
sphere, which held the tormented reflection of the dishonored captain
from Alestron.  "Your will," she intoned.

Outside the close chamber, like a sudden, clouding omen, a child in the
courtyard started wailing.  Worn beyond care for any infant's painful
trials, Morriel granted the weary senior her permission to retire. Alone
in the chamber as the morning's last sunlight retreated into chill
shadow, she closed her eyes to resume meditation.  Her ancient heart
beat unburdened by remorse for the mischief she had loosed to hound the
last heir of s'Ffalenn.

Should one rancorous, whip-scarred guardsman pursue his cherished
vengeance and bring the Shadow Master's death, or if his passion for
murder simply fouled s'Ffalenn machinations and caused a fatal delay for
Lysaer's war host to exploit, the difference would be moot.

Arithon dead or maimed at second hand would disentangle Lirenda from the
flaw that endangered her succession to Prime power.  One last detail
remained.

The instant Morriel felt restored enough to resume the burdens of her
office, she demanded the attendance of her errand page.

"I have a message for the duty watch to be sent immediately by lane
current," she commanded.  "Initiate Elaira is to be found and informed
that my sanction for congress with the Prince of Rathain is as of this
moment withdrawn."

Indeed, against the prospect of a restored Great Waystone, the woman's
assignation was no longer vital.  Of far weightier import, First Senior
Lirenda must succeed in her contest against Sethvir.  Then stronger
means would lie at hand to curb her ill-founded infatuation, if through
brute luck, or thrice damnable s'Ffalenn cleverness, the subject of her
weakness mastered the odds against him and survived.

Sunset, Midnight, and Noon

Informed on the lane surge at sundown that Morriel Prime has released
her charge to seek liaison with Arithon s'Ffalenn, a bronze-haired
enchantress in Merior weeps in gratitude for restored honesty, and in
loss for shared love that must languish unpartnered; through the quiet,
resolved hour as she packs to depart, she prays for the man, that he
might stay free to refound his happiness with another....

In the deeps of the night, ripped awake by an uncanny, clear dream that
tells where to find the sorcerer who had fired his duke's armory, a
bearded blond outcast scratches old whip scars, arises, and begins a
journey to Merior by the Sea to enact his sworn blood vow of
vengeance....

On a rocky slope above Valleygap, on the day of his twentieth year that
clan custom reckons full manhood, a red-bearded chieftain called Earl of
the North bends back his black bow, sets his aim on one figure above the
crews who shift rocks in hot sunlight, and lets fly an arrow inscribed
with the name of the killer who brought untimely death to a father, a
mother, and four sisters....

XIV.  Valleygap to Werpoint

The arrow launched.  The arc of its flight was vengeance, ripping down
from the heart of the sun, a hissing, humming resonance of parted air no
experienced man of war could mistake.

Captain Mayor Pesquil of the Northern League of Headhunters pitched
himself down and sideways into cover one fatal instant too late.  Before
he struck ground, the fourbladed steel broadhead aimed to take him
slapped into the small of his back.

He landed hard enough to slam the wind from his lungs and

trip a frost-rimed hail of stones into rattling descent down the slope.
Their noisy, bouncing fall through stunted brush and cracked saplings
caused men to glance up from their labor with wagons and shovels amidst
the boulders which jammed the road below.  Pesquil snatched air to shout
warning of attack, then gasped, wrung mute.  A spasm clamped his
muscles.  He could not breathe, could not seak, but only hug the flinty
soil, pain-white and clammy with weakness.

Felled in a helpless, curled bundle, his hands jammed into cold earth as
if by main force he could wrest back his grip on self-command, Pesquil
shuddered in the gravel.  If his scouts posted on the ridgeline had not
seen him go down, or if the others on watch on the-low ground ignored
the warning set off by disturbed pebbles, they deserved to be cut down
for negligence in the raid about to sweep down the defile.

Pesquil strained to hear past the hammered beat of blood in his ears.
Yet no more arrows hailed down.  He picked out no shouts of alarm from
his carefully posted guard of scouts.

The unbroken quiet spurred him to a rage of colossal proportion.

He had always understood the snares at Valleygap had been fashioned to
take down headhunters.  Now, lying agonized in the scald of his own
blood, Captain Mayor Pesquil cursed with ferocity: fool that he was, he
had not understood until the endplay.  Jieret Red-beard had blindsided
him.  Pressured too hard keeping others alive, he had never once thought
to imagine himself as the ultimate, targeted prey.

Ring within ring, by spring trap and rockfalls then the suspect boredom
of two quiet weeks without incident, the last ambush in these
inhospitable vales had been staged to deprive Lysaer of his most
effective commander.

The patrol arrived.  With breathless worry, they dispatched a runner to
fetch help and bring in a litter.  Pesquil lay slit eyed and gasping,
cut at each shallow breath as the sawing bite of the arrow lacerated
more vital tissue.  Throughout the ordeal as they raised his limp weight
and arranged him facedown to be carried, he mouthed silent curses
against the clan name of s'Valerient.

Twilight settled early in the pit between the hills.  Pesquil became
aware of a dimness thick with mildewed canvas, musty wool, and the
hated, dank smell of crumbled shale that pervaded the gap's deep
ravines.  The hospital reek of medicinal herbs and an uglier stink of
charred flesh lifted a curl to his lips.  A mauling throb in his back
and the virulent sting left by cautery played over every ugly bit of
trauma imposed upon his body to remove the barbarian arrow.  The injury
was bad.  He needed no doomsaying healer to tell him.

Prone on a camp cot, hating the jelly-limbed lassitude that kept him
there, Pesquil held no care at all that the coverlets cast over him were
woven silk, emblazoned with the star of s'llessid.

The first he knew of Lysaer's presence was a stir of movement at his
bedside, inflected with a gleam of gold hair.

"Dharkaron's divine vengeance, prince," he ground out.

"You must have better to do."

"If that's true, you're not fit to give orders." Lysaer made an
imperious gesture.  Across the field tent, a servant shoveled out from
beneath a chinking pile of horse trappings, tossed his oil rag into the
lap of a hovering page, then hastened to bear his lamp to the bedside.

The prince took the light, excused the man, and hung the carry ring from
a chain on the ridgepole.

He seated himself again beside the cot, in no apparent hurry to depart.
"The day brought no more attacks.  Harradene's division cleared the last
debris under cover of canvas and shields.

You can rest easy.  The war host is intact and still in high heart, and
the way through Valleygap lies open."

His stubbled cheek rough against the sheen of silk pillows, Pesquil
tracked Lysaer's presence with slitted eyes.  He fastened unerringly on
the single fact left out.  "So my patrols found no sign of the archer.
Tell Skannt to triple his sentries.

When the supply train arrives, don't trust the stores.  Test the biscuit
and cheese on my tracking dogs."

"I should have expected you'd not shirk for sick leave."

Lysaer smiled with that grave arrogance that seemed inborn into old
blood princes.  "Before you get wrapped up in duties that can wait, I
thought you'd like the chance to study this."

He bent, raised the limp, dry hand that trailed outside the bedclothes,
and pressed a sharp object into the captain mayor's palm.

"The broadhead removed from your back," the prince said.

"I see that." Pesquil turned the razor-sharp edges of the steel, nicked
here and there from the healer's probe that had grazed and slipped
through the effort to draw it out.  The lamplight skittered and flared
across the flanges, which were not smooth, but gouged with lettering
gummed black.

"If that's an inscription, I can't focus just now." His flame of nervous
energy quenched by lethargy and pain, Pesquil's disgust emerged as a
querulous snarl.  "Too many drugs.  I recall asking not to be dosed."

"The healer would never have held himself steady through your
screaming," Lysaer said in gentle censure.  "He had to dissect half your
backside.  If you hadn't worn silk beneath your gambeson, he'd never
have cleaned the wound at all."

The prince did not share the cold truth, that no soporific posset
troubled Pesquil's concentration.  Despite every effort and a brutal
round of cautery, Pesquil's sunken flesh and fevered skin affirmed the
healer's prognosis: the wound was still bleeding inside.  "Do you wish
to know what that says?"

"I can guess, sure enough." But Pesquil stirred in fretful effort to
pass the broadhead back.

Lysaer turned the steel blades.  "The letters on the first blade say,
'from the son of the Earl of the North."' "Jieret s'Valerient, I thought
so." Pesquil shut his eyes, his sallow complexion paled to rubbed ivory,
but without the grace of patina.  His skin hung paper dry under the
flutter of the lantern.  "Go on."

"The next says, 'for my lady mother, andfour sisters,' and the next,
'for the slaughtered innocents by Tai Quorin."' Lysaer trailed off into
silence, his eyes, cold blue, on his injured officer, and his hands
prepared to mete out a bracing restraint in case rage turned the wounded
man distraught.

Pesquil stirred, impatient, a hissed breath caught through his teeth as
the agony in his back snapped him short.  "The last engraving would show
my name.  You've never seen a clan vengeance arrow?  Stay lucky, my
liege.  Few men survive them."

The hesitation which followed affirmed Pesquil's suspicion, that the
sucking black weakness which raked him boded no good: the prince's
long-faced healer had surely pronounced him to be dying.

"A barbarous custom," Lysaer said in what seemed a disjointed interval
later.

Had Pesquil been hale, he would have laughed.  "The clans weren't first
with that practice.  Townsmen during the uprising assassinated the High
King of Havish with a sword engraved with his lineage." Too close to his
pass beneath the Wheel for tact, he ended on a wisp of scorching irony,
"You should know well, prince-since you carry a blade specially forged
to kill a sorcerer."

The prick struck home: the sword in Lysaer's scabbard since the hour of
his march on Tai Quorin bore his enemy's name in reverse runes.

Whatever Lysaer replied, Pesquil did not hear.  The throttling pull of
dizziness had dragged him too deep to unriddle spoken conversation. Like
a spark whirled in downdraft toward the nadir of night, the bullish,
stubborn thread of his thoughts spiraled off into emptiness.  He was too
tired, too thirsty, too cold.  A siren song of lassitude sapped away his
will to wrench the world back to clear cognizance.

And yet, one thing remained.  Today's arrow had proven that a lifelong
antagonist had sired a worthy son to succeed himself; Pesquil pushed
back against his shroud of fogged wits.  He gathered breath against the
dreadful gnaw of pain and said, "Lysaer s'llessid, fetch your scribe.  A
horrid, fraught interval passed, while he clung to awareness and waited.
Patchy vision showed him movement and a voice nearby said something
urgent.  A cup pressed his lips, filled with cold water and a bracing,
unpleasant sting of herbs.

Pesquil sucked down a greedy swallow.  "Is the man here?"

he gasped.  "Tell him, get out his pens and his ink."

"He's here," Lysaer answered from somewhere very close.

"Say your peace, man.  The words will be written as you wish."

But the surly old veteran wanted no letter to a loved one.

Captain Mayor Pesquil pushed restlessly at his pillow.  He poured the
last breath in his body and the dregs of plundered strength into
instructions to ensure Jieret Red-beard and his fourteen Companions
would not be left an opening to obstruct the army's passage on to
Werpoint.

The headhunter commander who despised rank and privilege delivered his
last bequest with a prince in attendance at his bedside; the hour had
been left too late for a scribe.  His dark eyes unseeing in the spill of
the lamplight, Pesquil never knew the hand that transcribed his racked
lines was royal, and steady in its office.  His last words came widely
spaced, fought out with the same fanatical dedication that had enacted
the bitter slaughter at Tai Quorin, and that even the act of dying could
not unhinge.

Captain Mayor Pesquil of the Northern League of Headhunters passed the
Wheel bound still to his duty.

Whether he dreaded his reckoning with Daelion Fatemaster, or felt
remorse at the last for the clan lives he had claimed for paid bounty,
no living man ever knew.  Prince Lysaer laid aside his lap desk and pen,
closed the fixed eyes with their joyless fervor extinguished, then
shrouded the gaunt, sunken architecture of the face in the colors of his
own royal blazon.

Shaken into a closer knit by the loss of their wiliest headhunter, the
war host pressed eastward in the hands of Lord Commander Diegan.

Lysaer s'llessid swore his intent to make Pesquil's monument their safe
arrival in Perlom.  To that end, he implored every garrison commander to
allow a staff officer from Avenor to ride at their sides to lend advice.

"The late captain mayor set the finishing edge on the training given to
these men." The prince ended in earnest entreaty, "I offer their
expertise to you in Pesquil's memory, to avoid another loss like the
last."

The irony followed, that the dour captain's death became the catalyst to
end petty adversity.  Since the absence of his abrasive bullying
revealed how they had come to rely on his experience, the royal request
was accepted.  The officers from Avenor were supremely well versed in
their handling of men.

From the moment their influence touched the garrison troops, the war
host began to cohere from an unwieldy amalgamation of divisions and
wagons into an order to surmount any odds.

In a victory over shared hunger and uncertainty, the last companies
cleared the pass of Valleygap under a cold, cloudraked sky.

Adversity met them, cruel enough to test their newfound unity.

The wagons sent west to resupply their stores nestled amid grass salted
gray under the season's first killing frost.  No one attended the pack
train.  The beasts which had drawn the drays wandered loose, wild-eyed
and skittish before the outriders who angled in to catch them.  A
sweeping patrol of the surrounding hills unearthed no traps and no sign.

Barbarian marauders were not in evidence, nor the hired drovers, nor any
of the men-at-arms appointed to safeguard the provisions.

Of three tracking dogs culled from the pack to test the jerked beef, two
died in snarling convulsions.

"Fire the stores," Lord Diegan ordered in compliance with Pesquil's last
testament.  The hounds were too valuable to waste trying to separate
which casks were tainted, and which not.  Despite the devastating
hardship, the last forty leagues to Perlom must be crossed by men with
empty bellies.

"They'll get there thin, but living," Lord Harradene cracked, braced to
forestall any dissidence.  But his order raised no dispute; after
Valleygap, the garrison divisions had learned when not to argue with
experience.

The vanguard completed the last leg to the walled city of Perlom, a
ten-day march that ended in cheerless disorder after dark.  Camp was
pitched under stone ramparts, while torches streamed in the gusts.  The
wind also hummed through the tent guy lines, and bit the skin red on
men's faces, and whirled the steam off supperpots filled for the first
time since Valleygap.

Its whine came interspersed by fitful, veering blasts from the east.

"Weather's changing, do you feel it?" announced the captain mayor's
successor as he barged into the royal command tent.  A middle-aged,
vigorous stick of a man with a boisterous sense of humor, blond
whiskers, and a squint, Captain Skannt sniffed air burdened with the
smoke from filled ovens.

"Autumn rains will soak us any time now.  Best to shake up the sentries
on the perimeter, your Grace.  Tonight, mark my word, you'll see the
first wave of deserters."

By morning, Lord Harradene had twelve men arraigned and stripped for
public whipping.  The garrison divisions with less vigilant guards
simply had gaps in their ranks.

Clouds like layered slate masked the hills at the horizon when,
reprovisioned at punishing expense by a city hoarding its harvest
against the onset of winter, the columns re-formed to continue their
march eastward.  They wound through hills and vales half-erased by a
gray smoke of drizzle, then slogged beside laden carts, bespattered with
mud thrown off mired wheels.  The teams slipped and labored over roads
transformed to soaked ruts, or washed out by freshets swollen from the
silvered rungs of water shed off the stone shoulders of the Skyshiels.

Yet even as the wagons groaned and stuck fast in muck, or an axle broke,
or someone sat to wad his boots with lint to ease the nip of raw
blisters, Prince Lysaer was there on his caparisoned destrier to call
encouragement, or share in rough jokes and commiseration.

Tired men straightened their spines as he passed.  Drovers took to
polishing their harness buckles in sure pride that the prince would
happen by.

As the road steepened through the north-facing spurs of the foothills,
the rain changed to sleet.  The hollows lay scabbed with gray ice.  Cart
wheels and oxen crunched through puddles snap frozen, then plowed by
their passage to shards like white cullet, salted in heaps at a
glassworks.

Their forward progress was impeded just as cruelly without the added
trials of clan raids.  Hard cold already shackled the mountains.

The peaks that fanged the southern horizon wore caps of new snow, and
over the chink of bit rings and harness, the outriders heard the hunting
song of wolf packs, moved down from the heights as the grazing game
sought shelter in lower country.  Advance scouts breasted the hills to
the stoop of northland falcons, plumed now in their winter white.

Thrashed by falling sleet, stung by the astringent, damp winds that
howled off the wave-battered coast, men marched wrapped in blankets and
slept bundled together for warmth.

The stock grew thin on frost-killed fodder, and the crossing of each
bouldered streamlet became a fresh ordeal, with leggings and boots slow
to dry.  Captains oversaw their troops, head down in frozen misery, and
yet morale did not flag.  When the rank and file from the garrisons
seemed too chilblained and dispirited to oil their weapons, the elite
troops from Avenor shamed them to reach for new standards.  A rivalry
arose and flourished on that comfortless, hard road, until no company
wished to appear less polished than the prince's personal troops.

After weeks in tenantless wilds, the last forty leagues became a trial
of discipline and endurance.  Across the flats, with their spindled
stands of salt-scoured trees and weathered rocks painted with lichens,
horses cast shoes.  Officers' tempers frayed to epithets.  The proud
columns that had marched from Etarra in splendor straggled at last into
Werpoint three months later, ragged, bone weary, but fused at last into
seamless dedication.

The divisions who formed up for camp assignment beneath the tall,
limestone battlements might be trail worn and hungry, but their spirits
remained undaunted.  Amid the petulant snap of banners and shouted
directions from their officers, they crawled into tents to sleep, or
hunkered down before the fanned flames of campfires and spoke of
southern lands and warm doxies.

The Master of Shadow was but one man before their armed thousands, and
Merior was a village on a sandspit.

"We'll be home with our families for spring planting," men said, and
made jokes, warmed to believe they were invincible under the steady
blaze of Lysaer's confidence.  Against all adversity they had made the
port of Werpoint before the winter storms closed the harbor.  While the
white crash of waves plumed and subsided against the shingle, the
lanterns of the anchored vessels commissioned to transport them
clustered and tossed on black waters, awaiting only full daylight to
begin the process of loading.

For the war host's ranking officers, the outlook was less rosy.

Inside city walls, dogged by strings of equerries sent with supply
lists, and accosted by pedigree garrison captains who demanded to be
billeted indoors, Lord Commander Diegan met harassed city ministers and
strove to placate upset tempers.  More a supply stop and a fishing port
than a bustling center for trade, Werpoint languished in a state of
seething chaos, ill prepared to offer succor to the encampment spread at
its gates.  Already burdened beyond capacity by the mixed fleet of
merchant brigs, galleys, and fishing sloops packed into each
south-facing cove, the harbor inlet was a crosshatched forest of spars
and tar-blacked rigging.  The narrow gaps of open water between hulls
seethed, busy as canals with lighters and oared boats bearing captains,
crews, and supplies to and from the congested wharfside.

No matter that Rathain's garrisons had arrived to eradicate the dreaded
Master of Shadow; everywhere Lord Diegan presented his requisition
orders, he was met with testy exasperation.

"The supply trains are late, what else?" snapped the beribboned city
seneschal, cornered at last in a cramped office behind a granary guarded
by pikemen.  He raked nail-chewed fingers through the kinked hair at his
temples.  Eyes pouched and bloodshot from sleepless fretting swiveled
sideward as he talked.  "Your troops want fresh bread and meat, well,
that's damned inconvenient.  Yon thrice damned fleet in the harbor has
made itself felt like an infestation of rats.  For each day your troops
were delayed, their crews had to be fed and housed.

Every captain and his purser thinks to bully our merchants for
provisions they frankly haven't got.  Have you checked the taverns?"

Unbathed, unshaven, heartily in need of mulled wine to cut the
inhospitable northcoast chill, Lord Diegan drummed his gloved fingers on
the hilts of his weapons and allowed that he had not.

"There's neither room nor lodging to he had," the testy little seneschal
ranted on.  "Every taproom's crammed to bursting with sailors, most of
them passed out drunk.  Our chief councilman's daughter walked outside
her garden gate two days ago and got solicited like a dockside bawd!"

Lord Diegan uttered a showy apology, then finished with his nastiest
smile.  "Now get me an empty council chamber with a fire and a staff
servant, and a board with hot food for my twenty officers.  After that,
I don't care if you throw your mayor out of his personal bed suite!  The
Prince of the West will have quarters befitting his station."

The seneschal paused like a terrier outfaced by a mastiff, measured the
threat in the Lord Commander's stance, then dispatched a cringing
underling to roust up the mayor's house steward.

Other setbacks could not be so easily bullied into correction.

Lysaer returned from his waterfront consultation with the fleet captains
in a towering, restless state of angst.  "The wind's blowing in from the
wrong quarter," he announced, ripping a glove off with his teeth.

Justifiably smug since his success at commandeering a room that
overlooked the harbor, Lord Commander Diegan glanced up in startlement.

Perched astride the settle, and relaxed in sanguine comfort for the
chance to shed his onerous shirt of mail, he watched his liege's signs
of temper with bland humor.  "Be careful.  You'll swallow forty carats
out of pique.

Are you saying we can't start the loading tomorrow?" When the prince's
taut expression failed to ease, Diegan tossed his surcoat aside, the
holes that wanted mending forgotten.  "Better put off the staff meeting,
then.  The garrison here will rend your royal hide.

Werpoint can't support thirty thousand mouths.  They've sold their
stores from the harvest, and news just came in.  Clansmen fired the
standing grain in East Ward.

Surplus can be bought to carry the city through, but only if we've freed
up the trade galleys before the harbor closes for the winter."

Prince Lysaer tossed his gloves and his silk-lined storm cloak to his
hovering equerry, then gestured the servant's dismissal.  A vexed stride
brought him to the table, where he ripped off the end of the bread loaf
pried away from the kitchen staff with threats.  He stared at the steam
that arose off the morsel, shot a glare at the darkened casement, then
spun in barely held fury.  "This can't happen.  I didn't raise and train
a grand war host only to be stopped by a run of poor luck and the
ridiculous misfortune that the winds choose to blow southeast!"

"Oh?" Lord Diegan lounged back against the stone beside the settle and
crossed his ankles on a footstool.  His roweled spurs snagged cuts in
the embroidery, a fact to provide a spurt of sour pleasure, since the
mayor's house steward had been niggardly about supplying clean towels,
and no servant had come to replenish the wood in the firebox.  While his
prince paced the carpet, too distressed to eat, Avenor's Lord Commander
said in gentle satire, "You'd think the better of setbacks if we were
frozen alive by some fell mix of sorcery and shadows?"

Lysaer stabbed the air in a sign to avert malfortune.  "Hold your
tongue!  It's a fool's move to invite an ill fate." Suspicion rode his
thoughts, every hour, that the Master of Shadow must have some hand at
play.  Although the delays at Valleygap seemed exclusively targeted in
revenge against Pesquil and his headhunters, Rathain's clansmen were
Arithon's real allies.

No man acquainted with s'Ffalenn wiles could rule out the chance their
strikes had been timed as one thread in some wider design.

Unease ate at Lysaer like acid on a burn, until even waking reason felt
like nightmare.

"The wind will shift," Diegan insisted.  Helpless in his need to ease
his liege lord's distress, he scrounged a goblet and shared his mulled
wine.  "We've overcome our due share of setbacks."

Exhausted and thin as any one of his officers, the Prince of the West
accepted the glass in distraction.  He had no heart to add the point
just argued in force by his fleet captains: that when the wind veered,
the winter storms would rake the east coast with the change.

If the blue water ships could batten their hatches and ride out such
gales in fair safety, the galleys could withstand no such punishment.

Their lower freeboard and oar ports would take on water in high seas.

Heavily loaded, rough conditions would force them to seek sheltered
harbors, or run the high risk of foundering.

"The supply shortage here is already critical.  If our troops aren't to
starve, we must move them south with all speed."

Lysaer swirled the dregs in his wineglass, driven in determination as
Lord Diegan had never heard him.  "This is our most critical hour.

If we don't put to sea within the next few days, the war host we have
gathered against the Master of Shadow is a wasted cause, and every loss
sustained at Valleygap gone for nothing.  I've arranged to start loading
tomorrow.  The fleet captains aren't happy, but I've forced their
consent.  The galleys will sail with the evening tide, whether we have
to row against headwinds every league down the length of Minderl Bay."

Strike at Minderl Bay

While unfavorable weather and supply shortage preoccupied the war host's
ranking officers, in the wind-torn darkness of Werpoint's outer harbor,
a returning longboat's crew shipped oars beneath the rolling hull of a
merchant brig named the Savrid.  The deck lantern swung cold on its
ring.  From a point halfway up the side battens, her captain cursed the
duty watch in dangerous, soft words, his breath a ghostly plume in the
raw and salt-laden air.  He vaulted over the rail, prepared to roust
miscreants, then gasped, caught short by the prick of a knife.

"Don't shout," murmured a stranger from a point just behind his right
ear.  "Just step forward, quietly." The accent was crisp, vowels lilted
in the dialect spoken by Rathain's forest clansmen.

Hooded against the wind, a packet of sealed dispatches snugged into his
breast from the officers' council with Prince Lysaer, the brig's captain
bristled.

The knife prodded harder and sliced clear through his best woolen cloak.

"Move on," the barbarian said, unreliably agreeable.  "Or don't.

I can bleed you like a pig right here, and my archers in your
-,rosstrees won't even twinge against firing on unarmed oarsmen.  You
wish your bullyboys to live?  My liege would prefer they don't suffer,
but I'd as soon run them beneath the Wheel if you balk."

The captain shut his eyes, his clean-shaven jaw clamped in outrage.
Mistakes could not be unmade.  Likely his watch officer had been huddled
by the galley stove sharing tales with the cook, instead of on patrol as
he should have been.  As a merchant's command, Savrid's hands were ill
suited to the rigorous demands of a war fleet.  Three weeks standing
dull rounds at anchor watch had undermined the best effort to maintain
vigilance.

Sorry, now, for his choice to secure his ship on the fringes to stay
clear of tangled anchor lines and crowding, the brig captain gave
clipped surrender.

At once he was blinded under the stifling wool of his own cloak.

Since his barbarian captor disliked foolish chances, his hands were
expertly bound.  Through muffling cloth, he scarcely noticed the
scuffles while his oarsmen were captured and silenced one after another
as they clambered over the rail.

Common sea hands all, they were no match for raids and practiced
violence.

Pricked by the knife, guided on by a shove, the captain could only let
himself be bundled aft, through the companionway into his stern cabin.
Against the squeal of the door hinge and the snick of the latch, he
heard short words exchanged with someone else of uninflected speech.
Then unfriendly hands spun him backward.  He toppled into an ignominious
sprawl in the blankets of his own berth.

His blindfold was whipped off with enough force to scuff his
fair-skinned cheeks to a flush.  Light haired, blue eyed, and burly
enough to have worked his way up from a mate's berth, the captain raised
his square chin and glowered into a flare of lamplight fierce enough to
make him squint.  "Sure's ebb tide, whoever you are, you're going to be
made to pay for this."

"How much is your dignity worth?" quipped a voice in stinging, cool
clarity.  The speaker was small, compactly made, and mantled in plain
cut wool.  The brassy spill of the oil flame played over black hair and
eyes like summer leaves.  A thin, chiseled mouth bent in dry irony at
the flustered state of his captive.

Whatever the shanghaied captain expected, that opening set him at a
loss.  "Who are you?"

The stranger gave an elegant smile, reached out a limber hand, and
snatched the dispatch packet out of his prisoner's tunic.  "I'm the one
wretch this lively war host has convened at Werpoint to eradicate."

The beautiful fingers snapped through the wax seal, flicked open folded
papers, and tipped them in unbreathing steadiness toward the light.

Savrid's captain gave a galvanic heave in protest, then

bellowed, his body slammed backward by the clansman's reflexive
restraint.  Silenced by pain, he fought to sort meaning from
insouciance.  "The Master of Shadow?  You?"

His outburst was ignored.  Allowed space to grapple his blind, staring
fear, the brig captain gasped, "Ath have mercy, you're here to close
with the army at Werpoint!"

Green eyes glanced in displeasure over the lit rim of parchment.

"You're nothing if not misled.  War is exactly what I'm here to
forestall."

"Lies!" The captain spat at the feet of the sorcerer his ship had
volunteered to help destroy.

The broad-shouldered clansman returned the insult with a low burst of
laughter and swiped his knife toward the harbor.

"Did you see an attack fleet?  No?  Well, you wouldn't.

Because all we have with us are eight quick men, a cockleshell of a
dory, and Arithon's dinky pleasure sloop."

The companionway door creaked open to an icy flood of fresh air.

Another rogue crammed into the stern cabin, planted as a wrestler beside
the man self-proclaimed to be the fugitive Prince of Rathain.

The deck lantern picked out details as the shadows slewed to the swell:
a hooked nose and shifty eyes, then the shelf of a tattooed cheek,
sliced by tangled, mud brick hair.

"Crew's all stowed." The newcomer's darted glance sheared over his
sorcerer master with respect, then brushed off all else in contempt.  A
brass hoop glinted in one ear, and scratched gold rings looped over
fingers toughly sinewed as grappling hooks.  With his flat thumbs laced
through his belt, the seaman had the same sleek grace as an unsheathed
scimitar left propped to rest against the bulkhead.

"When are you wanting to weigh anchor?"

"Inside the hour." The Shadow Master tapped the dispatch.

"As we hoped, Savrid's assigned on patrol."

Resentful, the captain broke in, "What have you done with my men?"

"They're unharmed." The sorcerer scarcely paused in his reading, at ease
with the brig's rocking dance against her cable, except for a tension
that suggested an attentive ear to the wind.  Through the fitful,
thumped footfalls as the prize crew on deck made thorough acquaintance
with the brig, he added, "I doubt they're pleased, trussed as they are
in the forecastle.  Short of taking their lives, that was the best I
could do."

"Don't expect me to thank you," the captain snapped.

"Why else are you here, but to kill?"

Again, he was ignored.  The black-haired prince cracked the dispatch
into folds and perused the parchment chart beneath.

"Jieret, your war captain's gloomy hunch is justified.  The Prince of
the West knows all about my shipyard at Merior.  I wonder who betrayed
my happy plans?"

As if that shuttered, flat tone signaled danger, the bearded clansman
shifted stance.  His knife hand started to a flash of sheared light.

The other swarthy scoundrel sidled straight from his slouch as the
Shadow Master closed his edged musing.  "Unless we want a war host down
our throats and in our blankets, there's no room left for half measures.
Some risks will have to be shouldered."

"Ath's Black Avenger!  Haven't we done that already?" The clansman
stared uneasily at the shifty-looking seaman, then swore afresh as the
creature glared back like a felon.  "My liege, you're mad just to be
here."

Unsettled enough to forget himself, he straightened, cracked his head on
a deck beam, and ripped out in rife exasperation, "Takes an underfed
stripling to love seafaring!"

Then, as the captive on the berth dared a move, he spun like a wolf, his
knife poised to throw.  "What do you wish done with this one?

Jam him in up forward with the rest?"

Disturbed beyond caution by the dispassionate gaze that swung from the
dispatch and pinned him, the brig captain wrenched at his bonds.

"Don't think to get rid of me so easily."

A spark of vicious humor lit the Shadow Master's mood.

"Stay then.  You'll do just as well.  Lysaer might fare better with a
witness." To his clansman's repressive dearth of comment, he added,
"Jieret, your moping isn't going to change my mind.  If the prisoner's
complaints drive you to distraction, you've got my permission.  Bind his
mouth."

The brig captain tried an immediate protest.

"No," rebuked the red-bearded clansman.  "It's quiet you'll stay as my
liege lord requires, or a good bit worse will befall YOU."

Trussed in his cloak, filed like a fighting cock bagged for the pit, the
brig captain fumed while the Master of Shadow gave over his command to
the mountebank.

The slant-eyed seaman displayed an evil grin throughout his crisp orders
to make sail.  As wary as though he hazed a coiled snake, the Shadow
Master clarified his wishes.  "See that this vessel takes timely station
in the channel.  The lanterns you'll need for running lights and signals
are listed with the passwords for handing off the watch."

The dispatch changed ownership in bristling tension, as if the pair made
uneasy allies.

"Remember our bargain." The scruffy seaman gave a sly, parting chuckle.
"if your move goes wrong, no loyalty.  I'll be sailing as I see fit."

Far and long after the brigand departed, the displaced captain worked
and tugged at his bonds.  He failed to loosen the rope or the wool by a
hairsbreadth; clan raiders were experts at knots.  Yet as the rush of
busy sailors swept across the deck topside, and commands rang out to
haul anchor, the dread prince that Lysaer had raised armies to destroy
did nothing more than embark on a virulent round of pacing.

Through the clack of the capstan's pawls, the bearded barbarian watched
his master cross and recross the tiny cabin, his restless touch roving
from chart locker, to table, to blanket chest through a crisp and
disquieting silence.

Little else about the sorcerer seemed remarkable.  The tunic he wore was
patched at the hem, and a sailmaker's stitch laced his scabbard.  At
each fresh change, while canvas was unbrailed and braced full, he held a
tigerish pause as he measured the activity abovedecks.

When the brig shouldered forward and heeled to the wind, he eased back
into soft, balanced steps.

Time passed.  The lantern flame fluttered and failed.  As if the
clansman's peace of mind frayed out with the light, he stirred in the
shadows and rummaged through lockers until he found the striker and
spare lamp.  By touch, he filled the oil well, lit the fresh wick, then
hunched in gloomy restraint at the table until the hot frame of the
doused one cooled.

Over the uneven jink of metal as he used his knife to dismantle the
workings for cleaning, he offered in deep-voiced hesitation, "There
isn't a damned thing I can say to talk you out of this."

"Merciful Ath!" The smaller man whirled in an explosive ferocity that
threw the bound captain to inadvertent recoil.

Crammed in confinement, his backbone knuckled against the side ribs, he
beheld an unalloyed agony stamped into the Shadow Master's face.

"Jieret," the criminal rebuked.  "What choice do I have?  If this war
host isn't stopped right here, right now, we're going to see another
bloodbath.  Well, whoever comes to die for the wrong cause this time, I
won't sit back and let it happen.  Not in my name, and not on Lysaer's
chosen battlefield!"

The knife blade flashed.  A crumble of carbon nicked off a tin screw and
dulled the varnished surface of the table.

Absorbed by blackened fingers and the fussy concentration required for
threading a new wick against the jostling toss of the ship, Jieret set
his jaw.  No man to contest what could not be governed, he scrounged a
rag to clean the lamp's sooty glass, while canvas cracked and bellied
abovedecks, and the brig changed to a northerly heading.

"Steady as she goes," cried the helmsman; the screeling wail of gusts
through the rigging subsided to eerie quiet as the vessel veered and
lumbered downwind.  Left the squeal of the yards in their trucks and the
creak of burdened stays in place of conversation, Jieret Red-beard
closed and latched the tidied lantern.  Past the stern windows,
distanced behind the roiled wake, the harbor of Werpoint spread like a
whore's gold-shot silk, the scalloped shores of the coves beaded with
the lights of a thousand closely anchored ships.  The headland glittered
also, limned from above by torches set streaming on the battlements; and
from landlocked, sheltered hollows, a widespread glow of fires sowed the
fields where the war host camped.

The clansman's bearded profile loomed a notch in the view like the anvil
silhouette of a squall line.  "Well if it's possible to provoke a
behemoth and survive, the least I can do, my prince, is back you with
all of my heart." The assurance came measured and steady; and yet when
Jieret arose to hang the lantern, the changed flare of light showed a
face tinged chalky with fear.

Hours crept by like slow torture, fretted out in nerves and
apprehension.  Minute to minute, the brig's trussed captain suffered in
sweating dread.  His vessel sailed large, the breeze on her quarter,
then hauled her wind, the enemy crewmen- given orders to brace sharp up.
Savrid swept the channel on the east leg of her patrol in faultless
trim, the slit-eyed mate an able enough master despite his disreputable
looks.  Before the black shoals that fanged Crescent Isle, a leadsman
was set in the chains.  His precise, timed shouts as he called off the
mark offered a morsel of reprieve.  Whatever the Shadow Master's
intentions, the luckless brig would not be scuttled on the rocks.

Gritty eyed and aching, the captain jerked awake from an unquiet catnap.
The swells beyond the stern counter heaved dull pewter under the advent
of dawn.  The wind still freshened.  Stiff southeast gusts had the
sailhands aloft to tie in a reef.  In snatched bits of invective they
maligned numb fingers and canvas turned unwieldy in the cold.

If the lamp had been left to burn out, the aft cabin was not empty.

Before the stern window, poised at the sill on propped forearms, the
Master of Shadow waited against the foam raked off the brig's rudder. He
said gently, "It's nearly time."

An oath lilted back from the gloom.  Jieret Red-beard shouldered into
view, a pair of fleece bracers in his hands.  At Arithon's swift query,
he said, "They're mine.  And yes, before you ask, they'll fit you.  I
trimmed them down with my knife."

Hardened against any protest, he added, "If you stay bull stubborn and
go through with this, I won't have you tear yourself raw.

Arithon managed a smile, slicked with the grimness a condemned man might
carry through his last march to the scaffold.

Then he drew a sword of spectacular artistry from his scabbard and laid
its black blade on the chart table.  Disarmed, his expression of
humility at odds with his killer's reputation, he freed his laced cuffs
and bared slender wrists to his liegeman.

The barbarian showed no surprise at the marring white tracery of scars
he tucked underneath the leather cuffs.  He drew the ties firm then went
on to lash his sovereign's wrists in braided leather.

"Jieret," Arithon said.  "Thongs can break.  I saw wire in the starboard
locker.  Forget about pity and use it."

The clansman drew a fast breath to argue; stopped.  The corners of his
mouth flexed down until his mustache bristled into his beard.  He
accepted the bidding in dumb misery, drawing the wire tight in forceful
jerks that had everything to do with a duty he found abhorrent.

His prince endured in distanced stillness, his averted gaze turned to
the brightening sky outside.  On deck, orders passed to counterbrace the
yards.  The prisoned captain shifted against the bulkhead, puzzled why
his vessel should heave to in the middle of the channel.

The barbarian finished trussing his prince, then positioned himself on
the chart locker.  "I'm ready," he announced in distaste.

Arithon squared his shoulders.  He made a last survey of the coves,
cluttered with mismatched hulls, masts and spars and crosstrees packed
in layered ranks like a forest denuded of foliage.  Angles of tarred
ratlines jagged scribbled ink above waters tinged silver and rose under
daybreak.  His stance stayed in balance despite the pull of tied wrists,
while the brig bucked the crests and lost way under him, shuddered by
the whitecaps that slapped her broadside from the south.

"Make sure this ship keeps her station," he insisted, then added in
cutting entreaty, "Jieret, by your oath as my liegeman, I charge you.

Don't let me give way, no matter how horribly I scream."

The clansman looked as hagridden as though he stared down the throat of
a waking nightmare.  "Ath's mercy on us both!  My liege, you don't have
to do this.  Can sparing one seaside village be worth the price of such
a risk?"

A slim form limned against salted glass, the Master of Shadow gave
stinging correction.  "Merior's folk aren't my birthright.  But a woman
there holds my signet ring as pledge that her children shall stay safe."

"Forgive me," Jieret whispered, for eight years in the past, on Tat
Quorin's greening banks, the decision had been no whit different.

"Don't hold me to blame in my fear for you."

"Wasted effort." Above the labored creak of ship's timbers, Arithon's
voice sounded easy.  "Save your pity instead for the captains lured here
in the misled belief they were threatened."

One moment the city of Werpoint rested in stilled peace, the anchorage
thatched with masts and hazed soft gold by daybreak.

Menace seemed absent; unreal.  No inhabitant expected the Shadow
Master's presence.  Unremarked, he gave no bodily sign in warning, no
showman's flourish designed to awe or terrify his audience.  Arithon
s'Ffalenn simply poised with a dancer's concentration and spun the
shadow he had ruled since his birth.

The snare he designed was for Werpoint.

A giant black leopard bounded over the rim of the southern horizon.  The
apparition swelled to monstrous proportion, then snarled in a silent,
silhouetted show of fangs and swallowed the risen disc of the sun.  For
an instant, two diminished slits of sky glared through its eyes; then it
blinked.

Darkness clapped down, soundless, complete, unnatural as if the air
compressed to felt.

No star burned, no light.  Werpoint's broad headland seemed snuffed from
existence, its harbor and ships swallowed up as completely as if Daelion
Fatemaster had gone berserk and unraveled the thread of creation.
Banished into fell darkness, a city in its entirety lay erased.

Terror undid the brig's captain.  He screamed in muffled panic behind
his gag.  Across the water, unseen through that featureless dark, the
fog bells of Werpoint pealed the alarm.

Trumpets shrilled on the anchored galleys, their clarion distress borne
downwind.

Low and urgent, Jieret spoke through the clamor.  "My liege, at least
leave the flame in the lantern.  I can't guard your reason if I'm unable
to see."

Arithon perhaps failed to hear him; or else words themselves became
meaningless noise as he braced in the dark for a retaliation now beyond
any power to revoke.

The bang of a thunderclap ripped the sky into light.  From Werpoint, in
strong defense, Lysaer s'llessid hurled his gift full force into
counterthrust against his sworn enemy.  Bolts split the darkness like
craze lines dashed through obsidian.

In a willful, cold-blooded dance with disaster, Arithon of Rathain had
wakened the curse of the Mistwraith.  The need bloomed and burned, to
hammer force against force, until one or both of them lay dead.

People, causes, Werpoint's naked vulnerability the next instant came to
mean nothing.  His body limned in actinic bursts of glare, Arithon
surged toward the stern window.  His lips peeled back from bared teeth
in a mask that abjured his claim to humanity.  Empowered but weaponless,
he sought to raise his hands.  The bonds on his wrists caught him short.
The jerk he tried to free them doubled his frame and an animal snarl
rasped his throat.

Worried, perhaps, that the force of his fury might come to dislocate his
joints, Jieret clenched his sovereign's elbow and dealt him a violent
shake.  "Arithon!  For your very life, don't give in to this now."

The Master of Shadow gave a scraped cry that violated mercy to witness.
The fury that knotted his limbs let go.  He staggered and all but fell.

Jieret caught him, while the veil of shadows that prisoned the daylight
flared and flickered, weakened under Lysaer's strike from Werpoint.

Steady as tide, Jieret murmured while the man in his hands hissed in a
shuddering breath.  "Easy, my liege.  Easy.  The effect of the curse can
be tempered.  If I didn't believe it, I'd never have let you attempt
this."

The sounds of wind and waves acting on hull and canvas marked time amid
flickering hell.  Then Arithon s'Ffalenn seemed to master himself.

"I can bide," he said.  In the edged blue flare of Lysaer's lightnings
he looked bloodless and drawn, flesh racked to bone by sourceless agony.

Aheartbeat's hesitation, and Jieret s'Valerient released

him.

Arithon turned back toward the stern window.  Now, the work of the brig
in the channel swell jostled his stance as he recovered his footing and
gazed outward.  His screen of darkness showed moth-eaten gaps, where
knives of fierce light had torn through.  Softly as rainfall, determined
as flint, he took patent charge of his handiwork.

Timed on the next flare of sheet light that rocketed from Werpoint's
battlements, he played with the tattered edges of his veil and let its
stressed fabric dissolve.  To an onlooker's eye, the shadow cloak over
Minderl Bay seemed to falter, then fray, then sear off like a flame
scalded web.  Sunlight and Lysaer's blaze in riposte sheared a swath of
glare across the waves.

The respite proved false: for across the cleared waters to the south
loomed the tanbark sails of an inbound fleet of black ships.

They were brigantine rigged.  Over hulls lean lined as greyhounds, the
bellied swell of headsail and spanker cupped the gusts and trampled up
spray.  The yards were squared to the wind.  Running a relentless,
downwind course, the fleet sheared in formation toward Werpoint.  As a
scythe set to raze through a stand of ripe grain, they spelled doom for
the vessels packed at anchorage.

The bugle calls from the galleys shrilled in treble urgency.

Captains screamed desperate orders and frightened crews rousted from
their berths.  Lines were cast off, or cut, and moorings splashed free.
The chattering plink of a capstan's pawls carried in strings on the
gusts.

In Werpoint the alarm bells pealed out their call to arms; the war camps
seethed black, distressed as kicked anthills with the distanced forms of
running men.  From his unseen vantage on the wall walks, Lysaer
s'llessid would recognize the oncoming fleet.  He would see in their
lines and the trim of red sails a memory resurfaced from childhood:
brigantines fashioned by the hand of s'Ffalenn, built in the shipyard at
Merior at sorcerous speed, and now, attacking for pillage and piracy.

Provoked as a cold point of strategy, his rage would burst all bounds.

The light bolt he launched in defense of his own slashed the dawn like a
scimitar.  Air shrieked.  The sky flashed blinding white, then rebounded
into fumes and smoke, lit to churned orange by a firestorm of raw,
ignited power.  The holocaust scalded across wavecrests rent to steam,
until the bay seemed a cauldron brewed by demons.

"Now," urged Jieret Red-beard.  "Now!"

Against the stern window, a silhouette etched into what seemed the
infernos of Sithaer, Arithon quivered like a string cranked taut and
then plucked, a quarter note shy of its breaking point.  Perspiration
gilded ribbons down his temples and jaw, and his soaked collar clung to
sinews like taut cable.  He seemed a man tormented by a course of
untenable stress.

On the berth, forgotten, the brig captain heard him snatch in a short,
sobbed breath.  A snarling tic twitched his cheek.  He controlled it.
The hands behind his back dripped clammy sweat, each finger clenched
until his short-cut nails stabbed a rash of red crescents in his palms.
In a brutal, contained courage, despite nerves peeled raw by the scourge
of Desh-thiere's curse, Arithon kept grip on his reason.  He danced his
shadows like catspaws across the water, by turns masking his oncoming
ships.  In and out of the light, through glare that waxed and fled
before countering darkness, his brigantines came and went like smoke.
They sailed substanceless, ghostly, all the more threatening for the
fact they seemed an apparition.

A clap and a boom volleyed over Werpoint.  Against the massed fleet and
his sworn mortal enemy, Lysaer retorted in pure light.  The sky above
the battlements split with the blast.

Arithon's teasing play of shadows became snuffed in one towering burst
of raw force.

The bolt jagged on and struck the bay, a hammer on an anvil of waves.
The inrunning fleet of brigantines exploded into crackling fire.  The
throaty report slammed a shock through the wind as timbers, canvas,
sails and spars ignited, touched off like a torch to inferno.

Struck by the backlash of that virulent, unbridled violence, Arithon
lost his last, harried hold on self-awareness.  Before Jieret could
react, he screamed primal rage and rammed the mullioned casement with
his shoulder.  The panes shrilled and burst to flying fragments.

Then the hands in restraint drove him mad.  Arithon twisted like an eel,
eyes wide open and wild.  Glass slivers stabbed through his shirt linen
and reddened his clansman's clenched fingers.

Jieret swore, shifted grip, and gasped in retching pain from a hit to
the belly.  "No you won't," he ground past a stopped hitch of breath.

Arithon thrashed free in a reeling charge that carried him toward the
companionway.

Jieret rammed after in pursuit.  "Show your face outside and you know
what will happen.  By your very orders, that criminal of a mate will
slit your throat and claim this brig as his prize."

The Master of Shadow flung back a mocking laugh not a man of his friends
would have recognized.  "Not if I freeze the living flesh off his bones
with bindings wrought out of shadow."

"Dharkaron's vengeance on your twisted bargains," Jieret swore.

He crashed past the table and tackled his prince from behind.

From the vantage of the berth where the captain lay bound, the
progression of the fight seemed unnatural.  A man so much slighter
should never be able to wrestle with success, hampered as he was by
bound hands.  The disparity in weight by itself should have forced a
surrender.  Paired in an insane violence, clansman and prince rolled and
battered across the deck, then struggled, still locked, to their feet.

"Arithon!  My liege!" Jieret's cry wrung off as a kick staggered him
into the gimbaled lantern.  Shadows flared and jumped to the swing of
tipped flame.  Arithon thrashed in possessed fury.  Backward and forward
he raged, Jieret's efforts to contain him marked in flittering
lamplight, each curse cut to grunts by the quick, starved breaths of
exertion.

Jieret clamped both arms around his prince but failed again to pin him
down; as well stay magma with silk thread.

A booted heel spiked his instep and rocked him backward.

Fast reflex spared him a bitten wrist.  In a blistering show of heart,
he kept both fists clamped in rucked shirt.  Bloodied from the glass, he
resisted with the tenacity of a fiend through the punishment, while the
pandemonium set loose against the city of Werpoint raged on unheeded
outside.

Across a bay serried in restless waves, the snarled, dark tints of spent
shadows stained the air, sliced through by light and fanned flame.  For
the fleet of fired brigantines bore downwind still, chivvied onward by
the gusts into a spark-torn, twisted chain of wreckage.  Every hapless,
trapped captain in Werpoint's harbor saw them come as they screamed
frantic orders to crewmen half-stupid with terror.  The brigantines now
were unmanned, a mindless, deadly threat against the galleys and
merchant brigs striving to pull up anchor and make way.

Shouts and horn blasts entangled on the gusts, overwhelmed at ragged
intervals by booming blasts of light as Lysaer sought to rout his
enemy's unnatural cloak of darkness.  Sails cracked out, loosed from
their gaskets by sailors whipped aloft to act by main fear and urgency.

Through the dross of patched dark, through rank bad judgment and
confusion as hull ground into hull, the imprisoned captain on the Savrid
deciphered a shattering truth: the straggle of fired hulls had lost
their clean lines.  The raked masts and spars glazed in outline by fire
no longer wore the shapes of the brigantines Lysaer had spent his powers
to destroy.

No fleet of deadly warcraft out of Mefior, this ragtag chain of hulls:
the hostile vessels which closed upon Werpoint were unarmed old hulks, a
derelict gaggle of fishing boats and rafts, packed with dried fir boughs
and floss, which exploded in fanned sparks and flurried in the breeze,
to touch alight whatever lay before them.  The illusion of shadows that
once masked their shapes had winnowed away to reveal the cunning trap
beneath.

Anguished witness to the fate of the eastshore trade fleet, the brig's
captain wept in beaten grief.  A hand's reach away, or one thrust of a
knife, the enemy responsible had his back turned.  Still locked hand to
hand with his clansman ally, the sorcerer showed no care for the ruin
his ploy swept through Werpoint's harbor.  His deranged fit raged on
unabating.  While the stern cabin's furnishings were trampled over,
upset, or smashed wholesale, the brig's captain hoped with a vindictive
turn of spite that the combatants would pummel themselves to mortal
injury.

Even bound, Arithon used his head, his knees, and his feet to bruise and
strike.  Jieret Red-beard vented pain in choked oaths.  The only grip
his prince could not break was the hand he held latched in black hair,
and that was insufficient to stay him.  The clansman came aware in clear
dread that Arithon maneuvered toward the uncanny blade still left
unsheathed on the chart table.

"Ah no, my prince.  Never that." Jieret at last resorted to blows in
return.  His merciless fist bashed his liege lord in the jaw.  While his
adversary reeled, half-stunned, he snatched up the black sword himself.

The evil in Desh-thiere's curse roused the Paravian guard spells
ingrained since its forging to defend in the cause of just conflict.

Steel clove through air with a terrible, bell tone keen of overlaid
harmonics.  Silvered runes set into its smoky length lit and blazed,
sheened like mercury transformed to white light.

"Arithon, hear me!" Jieret screamed.

His anguished appeal went unheeded.  Tortured by pity, all but unmanned,
he grasped the quickened blade and in a tight, controlled cut, slashed
his sovereign's exposed shoulder.

Contact wrung a cry from the man and the elements.  A flare of white
sheeted through the cabin.  Nothing like any weaving of Lysaer's, the
clean blast of brilliance came twined with a peal of struck sound.

The resonance climbed in unbearable sweetness.  Its harmony unstrung the
mind.  The passions of hatred and sorrow alike were dashed out in a
celebration of life that made of all strife a desecration.

Smote by a longing that ached through his bones, the brig captain
groaned for the sorrows of the world.  Fired to unalloyed grief,
stripped in a heartbeat to the dross and clay that cased the naked sum
of his mortality, he heard Arithon s'Ffalenn cry aloud as if his heart
had been torn from his body.

Still screaming, the Shadow Master folded to his knees.

Blood streaked from the gash traced in flesh by Jieret's cut.

The enchanted scald of light nicked over the white bone, laid bare
beneath his slashed shirt.  A marring edge of scarlet flowed down the
black blade, then sublimated away in the heatless burn of magics laced
through immutable metal.

Jieret stood frozen.  Unaware of his sticky hand on the grip, or the
grazed pain of his knuckles, he shook with running tremors and wept
unabashed, tear for tear in shared anguish with his prince.

"Ath," Arithon moaned, crumpled finally to lean in sobbing weakness
against his liegeman.  He hid his face.  "Spare me.  I beg you.
Desh-thiere's works are too strong, too much for any born man to fight
sanely."

Earl Jieret showed him no quarter.  "You have no choice.

Stand up!" He raised the sword, the singing flare of spellcraft now
diminished to a fast-fading whisper.

Even the memory of its sustained chord made Arithon's voice grate like
gravel.  "Had my hands been free, you know very well I'd have killed
you."

"But they weren't," Jieret said, unequivocal.  "You made most sure that
wouldn't happen." As his sovereign still shrank in avoidance, he added,
"Shame on you, for cowardice!  Did you think you suffer anything I don't
feel also?"

Already pale, Arithon went colorless to the lips.  He tipped up his
head.  "The blood pact.  Ath's mercy, you feel this?"

"My liege," Jieret begged, appalled too late for the inadvertent cost of
his admission.  "Don't spurn my part.  You charged me to safeguard your
integrity, Whatever you say now, as caithdein, I am bound.  I shall hold
you to the letter of that promise."

"You feel this?" Arithon repeated, his tone skinned into shrill horror.

Merciless, Jieret cut him off.  "That can't be permitted to matter!  No
one alive can shoulder the burden you carry.  You have a job to finish,
or blameless people here and in Shand will start dying."

Brutal by necessity, he seized his prince's forearm, hurled him upright
and around to face the stern window.  When Arithon recoiled and tried to
flinch aside, Jieret wrestled him immobile in a shackling grip that
spared nothing.

Pinned still and gasping, Arithon had no choice but to behold the
unalloyed impact of his handiwork.

The conflagration touched off by Lysaer's defense still raged in
coruscating flares of torched sails.  Sparks and flying debris flew
windborne.  Passed from vessel to vessel in Werpoint's jammed harbor,
the fire was having its fell feast.

"So end what you've started," snarled Jieret, "and bedamned to your
whining." Then he touched the dire sword like Dharkaron's Black Spear
against his sovereign's quivering nape.

Wrung, wretched, dragged back from the precipice by Jieret's edged scorn
and the lacerating beauty of the wardspell instilled within his weapon,
Arithon s'Ffalenn bent his head.

He drew a breath.  His bound hands flexed and tightened.

Shamed to reclaim the scattered threads of his design, he raised his
chin at last, and measured what remained to press advantage from the
destruction his ruse had created.

Turmoil reigned in Werpoint harbor.  In the crush of frenzied flight and
confusion, vessel collided with vessel.

Bowsprits rammed broadside into galleys mired in anchor chains; Tuggers
swept downwind and battered into ships struggling with sails caught
aback as crews hauled to check their yards and claw free of the eye of
the wind.

To wrack and utter ruin, Arithon added shadow spun to a fiendish edge of
subtlety.  He dimmed the shores of Crescent Isle to make the shoals
appear more distant.  He cast masking flares of darkness in the eyes of
harried helmsmen through critical moments of judgment.  Those few
vessels brought safely under way were lured astray from the channel.
Some lurched aground, to be struck in a scream of broken timbers by
following ships unable to veer off.  Other captains tacked in misled
timing and found themselves against a lee shore, or else turned about,
once again in the path of the ruinous maelstrom that stewed in
Werpoint's harbor.

The fire, wind driven, showed mercy to none.

Where Lysaer's opposing talents were hampered by the need to spare
allies, Arithon stiffened shadow at will.  Even without access to the
wellspring of his mage talent, training lent advantage and finesse.  He
could play his gift to gossamer illusion, or snap wavecrests to ice in a
swift, freezing absence of light.  Where the fleet fled the fire, he
used cold as a weapon, to jam sails, and ice rudders in their pintles.

Many a stricken quartermaster fought to clear his fouled steering, while
the smaller slower Tuggers in their path were overtaken and mulched to
wreckage beneath the trampling bows of crippled ships.

Thin as the cries of flocking gulls, the screams of the injured carried
on the breeze to Arithon's vantage at the stern window.  For all his
clever strategy and willful bleak purpose, he was not unscathed by the
suffering.  Taxed to visible, shivering pain, he sought to spin aside
again; to abjure his killing touch on those fell tides of shadow and
give way at last to despair.

Like rock behind him, Jieret forced him back with a prod of spelled
steel, and never one shred of human mercy.

Denied leave to turn away, Arithon could not know that Jieret was
weeping.  Locked against the force of a grief stifled ruthlessly silent,
the clansman's knuckles on the sword's grip were rigid, marble white,
and his eyes showed the anguish of a spirit torn up piecemeal.

He held unbending to his given service, the black blade ever steadfast,
even as the inevitable few vessels tore free of the harbor's morass of
fire and billowed ash to run the straits toward the open sea.

By then, Arithon had recovered self-command.  Every raw nerve clamped
back under control, he called his own crisp order to the mate and crew
abovedecks.  Men jumped to lay the Savrid's yards until her canvas came
alive to the wind.  Grayed to an outline against a pall of blown smoke,
she sheared off on port tack, her course laid east across the channel.
She no longer sailed unaccompanied.  Off her bow, arisen like phantoms,
rode more ships spun out of shadow.  From his pirate father on Dascen
Elur, Arithon held brutal knowledge of the nautical tactics needed to
execute raids in close quarters.  The shadow fleet he designed to
blockade the channel was formidably arrayed, bristling with weapons and
archers, and flying full sail braced sharp up.

Harried like minnows before sharks' teeth, the vessels in flight wore
ship, their choice to run the gauntlet between a wedge of armed vessels,
or to turn behind Savrid, sailing free, and flying friendly colors from
her masthead.  They closed in brash confidence, their crews beaten limp
from perils but narrowly averted.

Too soon, their captains' guards were lowered; the shadows swirled and
thickened, and the fire arrows, shot by clan enemies in Savrid's own
crosstrees, hissed from the darkness to claim them.

A pall of choking cinders interleaved with the gloom.  The cries of
sailors who leaped overboard to escape being burned alive shrilled over
the crack of stressed timbers.  In Werpoint the bronze bells still
tolled in distress.  Here and there, amid planks that flamed and hissed
in the barrage of cold waves, those galleys left whole maneuvered to
spare survivors who thrashed at the mercy of the sea.

Against maritime misfortune, Lysaer s'llessid had no recourse.

His vast armies ashore were helpless to do aught but brandish their
weapons and curse.

The disaster to the merchant fleet played itself out, while under cover
of blown smoke and shadow, the pirate crew manning the Savrid launched a
longboat and slipped away.  They would seize a fatter prize, the reward
plucked from chaos that the Shadow Master left them for their service.
Under a helmsman carefully chosen for loyalty and two crewmen hired on
for risk pay, the brig rounded the headland and turned southeast, to
sail close hauled down the coast.  Werpoint slipped astern, eclipsed by
the forested shores of Crescent Isle.

In time, the taint cleared from the air.

Sunlight poured untrammeled through the shattered stern window and
sketched the man there in glancing light.  Slowly he turned his head.

In a voice grained hoarse from the aftermath of stress, he said,
"Jieret.  It's safe, I think, to free my hands."

The ebony sword flashed, moved; the gleaming tip dropped from fixed
guard.  The red-haired clansman whose age, in the daylight, was not a
day more than twenty, sawed through the bonds tied with cord.

Then he cast down the blade as though its mere touch burned his skin.

The clanging reverberation of tempered steel against the deck caused him
to shiver and shrink.  His hands trembled.  Minutes passed as he fumbled
with torn fingers to untwist the crimps in the wire.

When the last bond gave way, he dropped to his knees, hands clasped to
the ripped bracers that had scarcely spared the royal flesh beneath from
the rigors of curse-bound directive.  He could not bear to look up, nor
confront what awaited in the face of the sovereign he had obeyed to the
ruin of all pride.

"My liege lord," he entreated.  "I beg your forgiveness." In agonized
remorse, he convulsed his fingers in torn fleeces.

"Rathain's justice and Dharkaron hear my case, I had no way else to keep
your orders."

Arithon s'Ffalenn pried loose his chafed wrists.  He turned around,
careful in movement as if his bones were spun glass and his being might
shatter at the jar of a wrongly drawn breath.  A moment passed while he
stood with closed eyes.  The running blood from his shoulder seeped
through his torn shirt and tapped the white spruce of the deck.  Then he
stirred.  He laced narrow fingers over the damp, copper crown of the
caithdein who had abused him, who had broken his royal will on the point
of a sword to force a cruel round of strategy to its finish.

"Jieret," he whispered.  The tracks of his tears had dried on his face.
Rucked hair flicked his cheek in the play of the breeze through the
shattered panes of the stern window.

"Arise, man, I beg you.  We share a brother's trust.  What pride or
integrity do I have left that this curse hasn't thoroughly undone?"

His wounding note of compassion snapped all at once to bare a core of
acid bitterness.  "If ruin and despair are any cause for satisfaction,
take back your heart and stand tall.

By strict count of burned planks and wrecked ships, we have rather
brilliantly succeeded."

Indeed, no army would sail upon Merior to take down the Master of
Shadow.

Reckoning

On the smoke-hazed battlements of Werpoint, Lysaer s'llessid stood in
freezing wind and tainted sunlight and regarded a vista of wrecked
hopes.  The enormity of fate seemed unreal, years of careful planning
reduced to ruin within hours by one strike of diabolical cunning.

Longboats plied the bay to rescue what remained to be salvaged after the
Shadow Master's surprise attack on the harbor.

Lent the outlines of embossed paper under blown drifts of smoke and
cinder, tired oarsmen jagged tortured courses through clots of
half-submerged timbers and steaming wreckage.  They dipped skinned
knuckles into raw brine and hauled in survivors who were stunned,
half-dead from immersion in cold waters, or worse.  Too many were
brought in screaming from the hideous agony of burns, the jostling
passage back to safety and shore too much for seared flesh to endure.

Their cries cut Lysaer to the marrow and the heart.  The disaster spread
before him in wreckage and in suffering was no one's fault but his own.
He resisted the urge to knuckle his eyes to ease the raw sting of
windborn ash.  Nor would he bend to craven need and retire from view to
nurse his despair in private.

He felt a fool.

Cold, bitter fury consumed him for the lapse that had cost him his
fleet.  Despite the heat of conflict, a ruler's steady reason should
have prevailed: he ought to have known at once that the attacking fleet
of brigantines could be no more than illusion.  Even under direction of
a sorcerer, human craftsmen at Merior could never have completed so many
hulls since the shipyard's founding the past spring.

Alone among his war officers and ship captains, Lysaer had held
foreknowledge to unriddle this ruse in its fiendish turn of simplicity.

Eight years past, in a grimy back alley in Etarra, he had watched his
half brother spin a toy-sized ship out of shadow for the delight of a
ragged pack of children.  Small as that vessel had been, a creation of
whimsical fancy, her execution and design had been perfect to the last
detail.  On the banks of Tai Quorin, Arithon had criminally proven his
regard for the young was no more than a charade to lull suspicion and
buy trust.

On Minderl Bay, for stakes unconscionably higher, he had repeated his
game of illusion.  Except now his ploy with ships had been cast in life
size to enact a bloody toll in human lives.

Lysaer let the winds snarl his hair and dam back the tears he refused to
shed in remorse.  Shamed beyond self-forgiveness for the towering temper
that had pressured him out of control, he ached in guilt-fed silence.
How well his enemy had judged him.  Teased into anger, baited to a rage
as mad as his father's in Dascen Elur, he had savaged the very sky with
his gifted powers to ignite that chain of fire ships, and enact the very
letter of the Shadow Master's design.

How Arithon must be laughing, the poisoned depths of his adversary's
dishonor a personal and private triumph.  Lysaer slammed a fist on cold
stone until his knuckles split.

At his shoulder, Lord Diegan had to speak twice before his sovereign
prince heard him.  "Your Grace, if you insist on staying out here, at
least allow your valet to clothe you in warmer attire."

Lysaer succumbed to a violent shiver.  He choked back the burst of
undignified laughter that clawed for escape from his throat.  In fact,
he wore nothing beyond a holland shirt snatched in haste from his
bedside.  The tails flapped like flags about his naked buttocks; before
the world, he offered a ludicrous sight, standing in plain view,
chapping his muscular royal thighs.

"I shall dress." His words fell remote through the clamor of bells from
the quayside.  As a war prince, he was remiss.  His people had suffered
a shocking setback.  Whatever the enormity of his shortcomings, their
morale must become his immediate care.  His sorry error in judgment and
his disastrous, misled defense lent no excuse to deny them support
through his presence.

The garments he donned were cut from blue velvet and gold tissue, and
his jewels, the best ones he owned.  Arrived at the quayside in every
trapping of state rank, Prince Lysaer met the oared boats with their
pitiful cargoes and dirtied ringed hands steadying their gunwales at the
wharf.  From the unremitting, ugly task of dealing with the losses left
by his ill-turned defense, he spared himself no hardship.

Nor would he acknowledge the whispers of adulation offered by Werpoint's
populace, who insisted his gift of light had spared their city from
total ruin.

If word on the streets cast the Prince of the West as a hero who had
beaten back the Shadow Master, many a stranded ship's captain had cause
to curse the fires spawned by his powers of salvation.

Grim faced and diligent, his fine clothes marred with seawater, blood,
and smeared tar, Lysaer faced down every ship's master and sailhand to
confront him with incoherent rage.  To their faces, he rebuked them in
bracing, selfless dignity.  "Do you think you're the first to suffer for
the wiles of s'Ffalenn?

Did I never say his shadow-bending sorcery presents an unspeakable
danger?  If one glancing encounter makes you quiver and turn tail, leave
now and count yourselves lucky to go living.  My ranks have no place for
faint hearts."

In brisk, snatched moments between assignment of shelter and arranging
care for the injured, Lysaer dispersed patrols of headhunters with
tracking dogs.  These scoured the southern coastline for sign of the
fugitive crews who must have manned the enemy fleet of fire ships.

To the wounded who cried aloud for vengeance, he bent his bright head.
"Stay alive," he entreated.  "Any man hale enough to fight shall claim
his due right to justice." The maimed were promised a haven for
themselves and their families at Avenor.

For the dying, the prince gave solace: on his knees in the blood-rinsed
bilges of open boats, and on the docks, beneath the shadows of soldiers
set to work hefting litters.

Premature twilight dimmed the sullied, ash-silted air.

Relaunched under torchlight, the longboats rowed now to recover a
freight of cold corpses.  Officers labored under lamplight to tally the
full count of casualties and to list any ship that repairs could restore
and make seaworthy.

Then the headhunter patrols returned on lathered horses from their
southbound sweep of the countryside, exhausted and worn at their
failure.

"Sorcery," the heavyset rider appointed as spokesman insisted to Captain
Mayor Skannt.  He cast uneasy glances at the shadows to each side of
him, while his tired horse blew and dripped sweat.  "We found no track,
no sign.  Not so much as the cinders from a campfire.  If those fire
ships were crewed by living men and not demons, then some trick of fell
sorcery built them a bridge to escape across the face of the sea.  Had
they trodden the honest earth, we'd have scared up some sign of them."

Inclined to treat such fear as harebrained fancy, Skannt gave the prince
and the town council his report in the dockside warehouse set up as
headquarters, his rapid-fire speech at odds with his slouched posture
against the door lintel.  "Had to have hidden a few dories under shadow,
and a fishing smack to pick up swimmers," he summed up, succinct.  "Your
fugitives escaped by sail.  Had they once come ashore, there's no living
way they'd have slipped past the noses of my tracking dogs."

Lysaer silenced Diegan's intrusive comment with a placating touch of one
hand.  "I didn't expect the patrols to take prisoners.

Arithon's by far too clever to provide us loose ends and mistakes.

But our sea captains needed the belief that we tried.  The ones left
unsatisfied with the result of your search will become the more diligent
to pursue the criminals back to Merior."

Skannt took his leave with a disdainful smile, the spark of the fanatic
masked under lazy, half-lidded lashes.

The interrupted council resumed the grinding long list of its agenda.

"What use to give chase?" cried Werpoint's withered harbormaster.

"The winter's upon us." Crumpled on his chair like a heap of moldered
rags, he held onto manners through biting contempt, and managed not to
spit while in the royal presence.

"We've nary a handful of vessels not holed, and hulls with charred masts
won't sail anyplace.  What armies you move must now go on by land, and
the bay road's a rough march as the weather turns."

The grim knot of men in charge of supply lines exchanged glances in
freezing lack of comment.  The decision was going to have to be given
within hours to disband the proud war host from Etarra.  Ath's storms
would hold for no man's just cause, and soldiers brought to starving
could not fight.  Stockpiles in Werpoint were already drained from the
prior demands of the fleet.  No righteous need could change fact.  The
city had no more resource to spare the muster against Arithon s'Ffalenn.

As the mayor's council heated into chin-jutting argument, and officers
shouted and banged tables, Lysaer jumped erect and burst apart
declaiming factions in a bristling show of royal outrage.  "Will you not
stop?  Our men-at-arms are living!  That's reason enough to give thanks
to Ath, that we'll have them to fight again at need.  We are reduced to
sad choices, but all is not lost.

Let us act well and use reason, and salvage whatever we may.

Unless we wish to cede the Master of Shadow an easy victory, we must
review what resource we have left and seek the one alternative that
might make the next campaign unnecessary!"

And so began the sober process of remapping the assault over the
wreckage of old plans.

Aid might be garnered from Jaelot and Alestron; a fast courier was
dispatched southward through the post relay to Minderl, where petition
could be sped on by galley.

"How much of an army must we have to strike at Merior?"

Lysaer said in forceful conclusion.  His trimmed blond hair feathered
shadows over his ringed and tired eyes, yet weariness stole nothing from
his character.  No trace of his gnawing anguish flawed his voice or his
bearing as he added, "The village there has no resources, no garrison,
nor any natural advantage of landscape beyond its troublesome access. My
troops from Avenor are hardened.  They'll survive a winter march.  The
core of our veterans from Etarra have the heart to weather setbacks.
Let's look to patch together a reduced fleet, and find captains stung to
rage enough to sail them."

Impelled by royal influence, the dignitaries of Werpoint and the
factions of disgruntled officers plunged into a night of rapt planning.

By first light, to a marvel of swift decisions, the process of
reorganization had been detailed and begun.  Lysaer scarcely ate or
slept.  Every moment he could spare from arbitration and the thankless,
unending task of smoothing the ruffled tempers of the merchants, he
spent at the bedsides of the wounded or scribing letters to the widows
of the dead.  No detail was too small for his attention, no diplomacy
too petty to express.

Men came into his presence worn, or frustrated, or enraged to the point
of violence.  Without exception, they left inspired to fresh purpose.

Sundown of the following day saw the bedchambers requisitioned for the
royal suite cluttered under layers of nautical charts, discarded stacks
of dispatches marked urgent, and plates of gnawed fish bones couched
upon crusts of stale bread.  The carpets were gritted with sand and soil
from the tramp of petitioning officers.  Red eyed, hoarse from talking,
chapped from prolonged exposure to the whipping winds off the harbor,
Prince Lysaer s'llessid cast himself with irked force into the depths of
a cushioned chair.

He looked pale enough to be ill.  The speech just delivered to the
garrison captains of Rathain had been a masterwork of hard statecraft.

Thwarted in purpose, cast down in defeat, the prince had shown not a
flicker of despair.  While in the public eye of his troop captains, he
had been the unbent picture of royal pride.

Only Lord Diegan could imagine the cost and the heartache such care for
his following had cost.  Every promise Lysaer had made had been ruined;
every hope built over the course of eight years crumbled down in one
hour of fire and trickery.

The main force would begin the laborious process of disbanding on the
morrow, lest they starve where they camped in the onset of winter.

The order should have caused mayhem, when trail-worn, hardened captains
were told to turn back, and retrace the steps of every brutal league
they had crossed since departure from Etarra.  No one spoke of the
fatalities they would suffer from weather and sickness throughout the
arduous march home.  Brought to fighting pitch, forged into a
magnificent weapon, they were to turn tail with their steel unblooded.

The tight-knit purpose, the hard work, the tremendous expenditure of
effort and gold: all had gone for naught.

Captain Mayor Pesquil lay under a stone cairn in Valleygap, his death
reduced now to a sacrifice without purpose, another name on a list
awaiting vengeance.

For Lysaer s'llessid, who had dedicated himself to the cause of
Arithon's defeat, there could be no more bitter a debasement.

From his place by the emptied command table, Lord Diegan waited for the
officers, petitioners, and city councilmen who clustered in knots in the
corners to clear themselves from the room.  As the glitter of the last
jeweled pourpoint disappeared in the shadow beyond the doorway, he
knuckled his eyes, crusted and stinging from the documents and tactical
maps perused for hours by candlelight.  "Your Grace, you must rest.  To
recoup from this setback will be daunting enough.

You'll never stay fit if you drive yourself harder to ease what cannot
be changed."

Insurmountable problems would grow no less.  What steps had been taken
in salvage had been completed at whirlwind expediency.  The markets were
emptied of food.  Those ships still fit to restock them had sailed for
Jaelot, crammed with Avenor's best troops; the rest were a loss, sad
snarls of burned spars on the beachheads.

The tap at the chamber door was unwelcome, another needless, petty worry
the s'llessid prince could do without, since every visitor came bearing
his burden of complaints.  Lord Diegan straightened sore shoulders as
the mayor's chamberlain poked in his head, his sorry, hound's face a
pale blur against the wilted lace of his collar.  "Your lordship?  Your
Grace?" He hurried to stave off rebuttal.  "A sea captain's here.

He demands to be granted admittance."

Lord Diegan lost his temper.  "By Ath!  Send him on with the others."

"I tried.  He wouldn't go." The chancellor's flurried excuses

cut off as Lord Diegan shot straight, hands mired to the wrists in the
litter on the tabletop.

"Whatever it takes, throw him out!" A quill pen tossed awry by the Lord
Commander's agitation sliced in arced flight to the floor.

"He can present his requisitions until the roof falls in and get no more
joy from the effort.  No stores remain to be issued."

"Your pardon, my lord." The chancellor coughed in forbearance.

"This man bears no supply writ.  He's from the brig Savrid, and he
claims on some authority to bear a message from the Master of Shadow."

"He has a whole ship?" Lord Diegan cut in, astonished enough to relent.
His query entangled with Lysaer's clipped gesture to hasten Savrid's
master in for audience.

The seaman wore a merchant's broadcloth.  Fair haired, his sturdy frame
fleshed on the spare side of corpulent, he had honest blue eyes and a
wary stance on the carpet.  The cap in his hands showed crushed prints
in the velvet from the fretted grip of thick fingers.  Too independent
to bow before royalty, he bestowed a curt nod of respect.

"My lord prince."

Lysaer regarded him in the unblinking, even quiet he kept while hearing
out arbitrations.  "You may sit," he said first, then waited in regal
patience while the man found a chair by the chart table.  "You say
you've met with the Master of Shadow.  I would know in your own words
exactly how that came about.  No one will question until you've
finished.  Take your time and be careful to tell everything."

The brig captain draped his mangled cap on his knee.  The same
clear-eyed squint he used to trim his sails measured the stately prince
by the casement.  The weariness on the royal features did not escape
him, nor the glacial, forced control behind the facade of poised
patience.  The captain spoke at length, a mulish set to his chin.  "The
man told me you were cursed by the Mistwraith to fight."

"Arithon s'Ffalenn is a sorcerer," Lysaer replied.  "He would say
anything to undermine your moral faith."

The royal sincerity moved the seaman to visible distress.

His boot scraped the carpet, and his troubled glance flicked aside.  "In
this case, I don't think so."

Lysaer's regard turned hard as chipped aquamarine.  An imperious
sideward gesture stilled his Lord Commander's affront as he urged, "Say
why, and plainly.  You need not fear for what you believe to be the
truth."

The story of Savrid's part in the raid upon Werpoint harbor unfolded in
slow, precise phrases, from the efficient act of piracy that had
requisitioned her use, to the neat manner she had been abandoned at an
anchorage on the north side of Crescent Isle.

In devilish ingenuity, every one of her yards had been unshackled from
the masts, with the halyards of headsail and spanker left flaked in cut
coils over her pinrails.  Her gear was left whole, but unable to carry
sail.  Nor was her captain entirely certain he would have pursued the
small sloop that Arithon had used for his escape, even had the option
existed.

Whatever Lysaer claimed, however he framed his grand cause, the prince
he called enemy was not the born killer he was named.

Until his last breath, Savrid's captain would recall the black sword in
the hands of the clan liegeman who had slaughtered pride, even broken
the man's will to hold him to a desperate act of prevention.

"We knew of the ship stolen from the fringes of the straits," Lysaer
said.  "You have the audacity to claim the theft was not done under
Arithon's auspices?"

"I said, not by Arithon's hand," the brig captain corrected.

"His reason was plain, when I asked him.  He said he'd rather a liaison
with a shiftless seaman for the risks he undertook to stop your fleet.
He wished no honest man to suffer in the backlash, if his intentions
chanced to go awry.  He worried.  Any ally of his might be tortured, if
caught.  He seemed anxious to keep that from happening.

If the captain he paid met a felon's death, at least such an end would
serve justice."

Cocked on the edge of explosive movement, Lysaer gripped his hands to
the arms of his chair, his chiseled features turned wry.  "An admirable
and plausible excuse.  The S'Ffalenn were born clever to a man.  You say
you bring me a message?"

The captain wrung out a breath in trepidation, his blunt fists clamped
on his knees.  He closed his eyes and spoke, haunted by the stark event
as the Prince of Rathain had knelt at his side to cut his bonds.

"I'm going to set you free," Arithon had said.  "But in return, I ask
for one service.  Go as my messenger to Lysaer s'llessid.  Tell him in
my name that I chose to destroy his fleet and strand his war host at
Werpoint.  Bid him remember, should he make disposition to purvue me.

The burning was provoked by my fullest intent while the vessels at
anchorage were not loaded."

For the blood on his hands, Arithon S'Ffalenn had made no apology.

Seamen would be dead in the wreckage and the flames, and some, from
drowning and exposure.  But the stabbing, awful facts lent him credence
through hard truth: the death toll by design could effortlessly have
been five times that of the losses inflicted by Tai Quorin.  Not only
the fleet, but the war host raised against him might have been decimated
in the selfsame stroke.

Thirty-five thousand lives had been spared an untimely pass beneath the
Wheel.

The stillness in the royal chamber as the captain finished speaking was
absolute.  Outside the latched casements, the whistle of a lampsman
drifted up from the street.  The jingle of harness bells on a rich
lady's carriage overlaid distant shouts from the waterfront.

Sailhands from wrecked vessels packed the taverns and the brothels, most
of them penniless and stranded.  The town watch spent increasing hours
stopping brawls, and theft was a mounting problem.

Lysaer s'llessid surveyed the ship captain whose message skirted very
near to treason.  Whether the man would ever have lent his unstinting
service was now moot.  His part at Werpoint had compromised his trust
through delusion that the Master of Shadow was no murderer.

Rather than pressure the issue outright in judgment, Lysaer clasped his
fingers in a flaring sparkle of sapphire rings.

He used a short interval to balance his thoughts, and to damp back the
sting of private shortcomings.  Once he, too, had been beguiled into
trust by his half brother's disingenuous, glib tongue.  "If I ask," he
said gently to the captain, "would you lend your Savrid to my cause? She
is needed more sorely than ever in the past to bear me south as an envoy
to Alestron."

Still shaken by the memory of the clear, harmonic tone roused from a
spelled edge of sword steel; pierced in conscience by recollection of
Arithon s'Ffalenn on his knees, unmanned by horror and begging release
from the trials laid on him by his oath to a widow in Merior, Savrid's
captain sighed and shook his head.  "I'm sorry, your Grace." A scar on
his heart he lacked words to express forced his reluctant decision.

"Your cause is not mine.  If you insist on pursuing Rathain's prince in
the south, you must do so with no help from me."

"The Shadow Master compromised your ship!" Lord Diegan protested.

"Are your crewmen complacent at his handling?"

"My crewmen are alive and untouched by the fires." The captain snapped
his cap off his thigh, jammed it over his hair, and without awaiting
royal leave, shoved in spare haste to his feet.  "Prince Arithon did not
a man of them harm.  I would have things remain as they are."

Stolid as seasoned oak, he spun on his heel to depart.

"You can't just let him go," Lord Diegan bristled to his sovereign,
while Savrid's master excused himself and closed the door.

Cat touchy in his annoyance, the Lord Commander plowed through the
stacked charts and papers, located the wine flask, and scrounged for
cloth to wipe two goblets clean.

"Ath knows, we can't spare the use of that ship."

"No," said Lysaer, his gaze like chipped flint as his closest confidant
served him.  "But this is not Avenor.  I have no rights of royal
requisition here."

Deceptively bland, absorbed in the thinking speculation he engaged to
solve his knottiest problems of state, the prince spun the warm wine in
his glass, the fingers of his left hand laced through the hair at his
temple.  Dying light from the casement picked glints in the rings
entwined through blond locks.

His eyes looked bruised and wounded tired, at odds with his reflexively
proud bearing as he wrestled with harsh thoughts and conscience.

in this hour, the flicker of the candleflames lit no prince, but a man,
punished by event and embittered by a cruel blow to pride.

The sight stopped his Lord commander's tirade.

Honored to humility, Diegan saw his prince had let down his lofty public
majesty before him in trust as a friend.  He felt his heart twist in
response.  Anguished by every thoughtless past moment, when he had
wished the royal self-esteem to falter, he now felt diminished in shame.

in the mortifying sting of defeat at Werpoint, he came at last to know
that the humanity had been there all along.

Beneath the lordly ruler, the bright poise, the unshakable,
inspirational confidence, Lysaer had the same flaws and needs as any
other.  The sacrifice he made to become an example to his people reduced
his Lord Commander to disgrace.

In a voice choked to gentleness, Diegan said to his liege, "All too
well, we both know, the Master of Shadow knows how to strike to
manipulate."

Lysaer said nothing, but only tossed off the wine to its dregs.

"The wiles of s'Ffalenn drove my father to mad acts of grief.

Given my stance against him, I should be foolish to expect the bastard
would not seek to try the same with me.  My given gift of light offers
strength, but no wisdom.  I am no better man, no less prone to frailty
than my sire.  But to bring justice to the Shadow Master's victims, and
for the protection of this land, I must find a way to stand strong.

Restraint must be arranged to guide me to act more responsibly."

Diegan refilled his prince's goblet and stood mute, the decanter
clutched in his hands.  He felt like the world's own tormentor to broach
the dangerous loose end which remained.

"My prince, you have a deep heart, and a morality this s'Ffalenn
sorcerer knows well how to twist into shackles.  He has you torn through
with pity, exactly as he wished, and I refuse to let you weaken in
remorse.  You are our strength an inspiration.  If you are susceptible
to the Shadow Master's subversive handling of events, what of the people
on the streets?  I am Etarran enough to lend warning.  I dread greatly
what Savrid's captain might say to undermine the staunch fiber of
society."

"Let the man go." Lysaer shook back bright hair and sighed.  "His fellow
captains who lost ships will scarcely applaud his choice of loyalty."
Distanced by exhaustion and a wrenching thread of melancholy, Lysaer
resumed in dogged force.  "Have you been to the infirmaries, Diegan,
where seamen lie dying of burns?  Or the taverns?

At every street corner, there are stranded sailhands left destitute and
begging for copper.  Werpoint has been dealt a harsh lesson.  I wouldn't
care to be caught in the quayside taverns alone with opinions in
sympathy with Arithon.  That could easily get a man killed."

So it might, Lord Diegan agreed in silent irony.  His prince's deep pain
could as well have been his own, for the error in judgment he had
suffered.  As Lord Commander of Avenor, with a war host at his disposal,
he should have set up some support plan to protect the Prince of the
West from this insidious attack on his honor.  Too much responsibility
lay on Lysaer's shoulders.  For the future, Diegan resolved that his
liege must never again be abandoned to bear the brunt of every
happenstance alone.

When the wine was drained to the lees, and Lysaer finally asked for his
valet, he gave his Lord Commander the last, most poignant observation.
"We shall weather this.  Never undervalue your part, my Lord Diegan.  At
Etarra, you'll recall, it was you and your lady sister who reminded me
of Arithon's wicked nature.  Whether or not the Mistwraith had a part in
any curse, whether or not my ungovernable temper was rooted in an
aberrant geas, two facts still cannot be argued.  I am the only spirit
alive with the gifts to battle Arithon's shadows; and the destructive
acts against Jaelot and Alestron remain proof positive of my half
brother's criminal nature.  To go on and see him dead will serve justice
and restore this land to final peace."

After Thoughts

Far offshore, under starlight on the deeps of the Cildein, Arithon
rouses aboard his sloop, Talliarthe, to find his swollen wrists wrapped
up in poultices, and his berth watched over by his caithdein; the
thought crosses his mind, with no small humiliation, that he will not
again risk the s'Valerient line in the course of his feud against
Lysaer.  "Jieret," he whispers, "by my royal command, you must marry and
get an heir, and look to your clansmen's survival.  .  .

Leagues to the south, in the shipyard at Merior by the Sea, two joiners
dicing through a drunken turn of watch are interrupted by the windborn
smell of smoke; in belated alarm, they stagger outside, to discover the
one finished hull ablaze on her ways, and the ropewalk set alight and
well burning....

Entangled in sleep in the Mayor of Werpoint's guest suite, Prince Lysaer
cries out in the throes of a nightmare; while outside his chamber
doorway, in a loyalty sprung from the heart, Lord Commander Diegan
arises, Etarran enough to shoulder for political expedience what his
prince is too merciful to condone-the assassination of the ship's
captain sympathetic to Arithon, that word of Desh-thiere's curse not
become common gossip in the streets....

Glossary

ADRUINoastal city located in East Halla, Melhalla.  One of two at the
head of a sea inlet, at odds with the brothers s'Brydion of Alestron,
usually over the setting of blockades to interfere with trade.

pronounced: ah-drum like "add ruin" root meaning: adruinne-to block, or
obstruct AL'DUIN-father of Halliron Masterbard.

pronounced: al-dwin root meaning: al-over; duinne-hand ALESTRON-city
located in Midhalia, Melhalia.  Ruled by the Duke Bransian,
Teir's'Brydion, and his three brothers.

This city did not fall to merchant townsmen in the Third Age uprising
that threw down the high kings, but is still ruled by its clanblood
heirs.

pronounced: ah-less-tron root meaning: alesstair-stubborn; anthe
ALITHIEL-one of twelve Blades of Isaer, forged by centaur Ffereton
s'Darian in the First Age from metal taken from a meteorite.  Passed
through Paravian possession, acquired the secondary name Dael-Farenn, or
Kingmaker, since its owners tended to succeed the end of a royal line.
Eventually was awarded to Kamridian s'Ffalenn for his valor in defense
of the princess Taliennse, early Second Age.  Currently in possession of
Arithon.

pronounced: ah-lith-ee-el root meaning: alith-star; iel-light/ray
ALLAND-principality located in southeastern Shand.  Ruled by the High
Earl Teir's'Taleyn, caithdein of Shand by appointment.  Current heir to
the title is Erlien.

pronounced: all-and root meaning: a'lind-pine glen ALTHAIN TOWER-spire
built at the edge of the Bittern Desert, beginning of the Second Age, to
house records of Paravian histories.  Third Age, became repository for
the archives of all five royal houses of men after rebellion, overseen
by Sethvir, Warden of Althain and Fellowship Sorcerer.

pronounced: al like "all," thain to rhyme with "main" root meaning:
alt-last; them-tower, sanctuary original Paravian pronunciation:
alt-them (them as in "the end") AMROTH-kingdom on West Gate splinter
world, Dascen Elur, ruled by s'llessid descendants of the prince exiled
through the Worldsend Gate at the time of the rebellion, Third Age just
after the Mistwraith's conquest.

pronounced: am-roth (rhymes with "sloth") root meaning: am-state of
being; roth-brother "brotherhood" ANGLEFEN-swampland located in Deshir,
Rathain.  Town of same name at the river mouth with port to Gulf of
Stormwell.  One of the six port towns that link sea trade routes with
Etarra.

pronounced: angle-fen root meaning not from the Paravian ARAETHURA-grass
plains in southwest Rathain; principality of the same name in that
location.  Largely inhabited by Riathan Paravians in the Second Age.
Third Age, used as pastureland by widely scattered nomadic shepherds.

pronounced: ar-eye-thoo-rah root meaning: araeth-grass; era-place, land
ARAITHE-plain to the north of the trade city of Etarra, principality of
Fallowmere, Rathain.  First Age, among the sites used by the Paravians
to renew the mysteries and channel fifth lane energies.  The standing
stones erected are linked to the power focus at Ithamon and Meth Isle
keep.

pronounced: araithe, sounds like "a wraith" root meaning: araithe-to
disperse, to send; refers to the properties of the standing stones with
relationship to the fifth lane forces.  , ARITHON-son of Avar, Prince of
Rathain,1,504th Teir's'Ffalenn after founder of the line, Torbrand in
Third Age Year One.  Also Master of Shadow, the Bane of Desh-thiere, and
Halliron Masterbard's successor.

pronounced: ari-thon almost rhymes with "marathon" root meaning:
arithon-fate-forger; one Nvho is visionary ASANDIR-Fellowship Sorcerer.

Secondary name, Kingmaker, since his hand crowned every High King of Men
to rule in the Age of Men (Third Age).  After the Mistwraith's conquest,
he acted as field agent for the Fellowship's doings across the
continent.  Also called Fiend-quencher, for his reputation for quelling
Lyats; Storm-breaker, and Change-bringer for past actions in late Second
Age, when Men first arrived upon Athera.

pronounced: ah-san-deer root meaning: asan-heart; dir-stone "heartrock"
ATAINIA-northeastern principality of Tysan.

pronounced: ah-tay-nee-ah root meaning: itain-the third; ia suffix for
"third domain" original Paravian, itainia ATCHAZity located in Alland,
Shand.  Famed for its silk.

pronounced: at-chas root meaning: atchias-silk ATH CREATOR-prime
vibration, force behind all life.

pronounced: ath to rhyme with "math" root meaning: ath-prime, first (as
opposed to an, one) ATHIR-Second Age ruin of a Paravian stronghold,
located in Ithilt, Rathain.  Site of a seventh lane power focus.

pronounced: ath-ear root meaning: ath-prime; i'er-the line/edge
ATHERA-name for the continent which holds the Five High Kingdoms; one of
two major landmasses on the planet.

pronounced: ath-air-ah root meaning: ath-prime force; era-place "Ath's
world" ATHLIEN PARAVIANS-Sunchildren.  Small race of semimortals,
pixielike, but possessed of great wisdom/keepers of the grand mystery.

pronounced: ath-lee-en root meaning: ath-prime force; lien-to love
"Ath-beloved" ATHLIERIA-equivalent of heaven/actually a dimension
removed from physical life, inhabited by spirit after death.

pronounced: ath-lee-air-ee-ah root meaning: ath-prime force;
ll'era-exalted place, or land in harmony; llxalted in harmony
ATWOOD-forest located in East Halla, Melhalla.

pronounced: at-wood root meaning: ath-prime vibration/Ath's wood AVAR
s'FFALENN-Pirate King of Karthan, isle on splinter world Dascen Elur,
through West Gate.  Father of Arithon; also Teir's'Ffalenn 1,503rd in
descent from Torbrand, who founded the s'Ffalenn royal line in Third Age
Year One.

pronounced: ah-var, to rhyme with "fai" root meaning: avar-past
thought/memory AVENOR-Second Age ruin of a Paravian stronghold.

Traditional seat of the s'Ilessid high kings.  Restored to habitation in
Third Age 5644.  Located in Korias, Tysan.

pronounced: ah-yen-or root meaning: avie-stag; norh-grove
BECKBURN-market in the city of Jaelot, on the coast of the Bay of Eltair
at the southern border of Rathain.

pronounced: beck-burn root meaning not from the Paravian BITTERN
DESERT-waste located in Atainia, Tysan, north of Althain Tower.  Site of
a First Age battle between the great drakes and the Seardluin,
permanently destroyed by dragonfire.

pronounced: like bitter root meaning: to sear or char BLACK DRAKE-A brig
often hired to run contraband, captained by a woman named Dhirken.

BLACK ROSE PROPHECY-made by Dakar the Mad Prophet in Third Age 5637 at
Althain Tower.  Forecasts Davien the Betrayer's repentance, and the
reunity of the Fellowship of Seven as tied to Arithon s'Ffalenn's
voluntary resumption of Rathain's crown rule.

BRANSIAN s'BRYDION-Teir's'Brydion, ruling Duke of Alestron.

pronounced: bran-see-an root meaning: brand- temper; s'i'an-suffix
denoting , of the one"/the one with temper BWIN EVOC s'LORNMEIN-founder
of the line that became High Kings of Havish since Third Age Year One.

The attribute he passed on by means of the Fellowship's geas was
temperance.

pronounced:bwin to rhyme with "twin," ee-vahk as in 11evocative," lorn
as in English equivalent, mein rhymes with "main" root meaning:
bwin-firm; evoc-choice

CAILCALLOW-herb that grows in Athera's marshes, used to

ease fevers.

pronounced: rhymes with "kale-tallow" root meaning: call-leaf-,
calliew-balm CAIT-herdsman of a declining tribe of shepherds Vastmark.

pronounced: kate root meaning: to herd CAITH-AL-CAEN-vale where Riathan
Paravians (unicorns) celebrated equinox and solstice to renew the
athael, or lifedestiny of the world.  Also the place where the Ilitharis
Paravians first Named the winter starsr encompassed their vibrational
essence into language.  Corrupted by the end of the Third Age to
Castlecain.

pronounced: cay-with-al-cay-en, musical fil emphasis on second and last
syllables; rising note on first two, falling note on last two.

root meaning: caith-shadow; al-over; caen-vale vale of shadow"
CAITHDEIN-Paravian name for a high king's first counselor; also, the one
who would stand as regent, or steward, in the absence of the crowned
ruler.

pronounced: kay-with-day-in root meaning: caith-shadow; d'em-behind the
chair shadow behind the throne" CAITHWOOD-forest located in Taerlin,
southeast principality of Tysan.

pronounced: kay-with-wood root meaning: caith--shadow "shadowed wood"
CAOLLE-war captain of the clans of Deshir, Rathain.  First raised, and
then served under Lord Steiven, Earl of the North and caithdeitz of
Rathain.  Currently in Jieret Red-beard's service.

pronounced: kay-all-e, with the "e" nearly subliminal root meaning:
caille-stubborn CARITHWYR-principality consisting primarily of a
grasslands in Havish, once the province of the Riathan Paravians.  A
unicorn birthing ground.  Currently used by man for grain and cattle;
area name has become equated with fine hides.

pronounced: car-with-ear root meaning: ci'arithiren-forgers of the
ultimate link with prime power.  An old Paravian colloquialism for
unicorn.

CASTLE POINT-port city at the eastern terminus of the Great West Road,
located in the principality of Atainia, Tysan.

CAMRIS-north-central principality of Tysan.  Original ruling seat was
city of Erdane.

pronounced: kain-ris, the "i" as in "chris" root meaning: cairn-cross;
ris-way "crossroad" CHEIVALT-coastal city south of Ostermere in
Carithwyr, Havish.  Known for its elegance and refined lifestyle.

pronounced: shay-vault root meaning: chiavalden-a rare yellow flower
which grows by the seaside.

CILADIS THE LOST-Fellowship Sorcerer who left the continent in Third Age
3462 in search of the Paravian races after their disappearance after the
rebellion.

pronounced: kill-ah-dis root meaning: cael-leaf; adeis-whisper,
compound; cael'adeis colloquialism for "gentleness that abides" CILDEIN
OCEAN-body of water lying off Athera's east coastline.

pronounced: kill-dine root meaning: cailde-salty; an-one CILDORNity
famed for carpets and weaving, located in Deshir, Rathain.

Originally a Paravian holdfast, situated on a node of the third lane.

pronounced: kill-dom root meaning: cieal-thread; dorrmet "tapestry"
CLAITHEN-an adept of of Ath's Brotherhood in the hostel south of Merior.

pronounced: clay-then root meaning: claithen-garden, eardvsoil
CORITH-istand west of Havish coast, in Westland Sea.  First site to see
sunlight upon Desh-thiere's defeat.

pronounced: kor-with root meaning: cori-ships, vessels; itha-five for
the five harbors which the old city overlooked CRATER LAKE-small body of
water with an island at its center, located in Araethur-a, Rathain.
Where the Fellowship Sorcerers made landfall on Athera.

CRESCENT ISLE-large island located east of Minderl Bay in Ithilt,
Rathain.

DAEL-FARENN-Kingmaker, name for sword Alithiel; also, one of many
Paravian names for the Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir.

pronounced: day-el-far-an root meaning: dael-king;feron-maker DAELION
FATEMASTER-"entity" formed by set of mortal beliefs, which determine the
fate of the spirit after death.  If Ath is the prime vibration, or life
force, Daelion is what governs the manifestation of free will.

pronounced: day-el-ee-on root meaning: dael-king or lord; i'on-of fate
DAELION'S WHEEL-cycle of life and the crossing point which is the
transition into death.

pronounced: day-el-ee-on root meaning: dael-king or lord; i'onf fate
DAENFAL-city located on the northern lake shore that bounds the southern
edge of Daon Ramon Barrens in Rathain.

pronounced: dye-en-fall root meaning: daenlay;fal-red DAGRIEN
COURT-market in the city of Jaelot, on the coast at the southern border
of Rathain.

pronounced: dag-ree-en root meaning: dagrien-variety DAKAR THE MAD
PROPHET-apprentice to Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, during the Third Age
following the Conquest of the Mistwraith.  Given to spurious prophecies,
it was Dakar who forecast the fall of the Kings of Havish in time for
the Fellowship to save the heir.  He made the Prophecy of West Gate,
which forecast the Mistwraith's bane, and also, the Black Rose Prophecy,
which called for reunification of the Fellowship.

At this time, assigned to defense of Arithon, Prince of Rathain.

pronounced: dab-kar root meaning: dakiar-clumsy DALWYN-A clanswoman of
Vastmark; aunt to Jilieth and Ghedair; friend of Arithon's.

pronounced: doll-win root meaning: dirlnwyn-a specific aspect of
misfortune; to be childless.

DANIA-wife of Ran's Regen Steiven s'Valerient.  Died by the hand of
Pesquil's headhunters in the battle of Strakewood.

Jieret Red-beard's mother.

pronounced: dan-ee-ah root meaning: deinia-sparrow DAON RAMON
BARRENS-central principality of Rathain.  Site where Riathan Paravians
(unicorns) bred and raised their young.  Barrens was not appended to the
name until the years following the Mistwraith's conquest, when the River
Severnir was diverted at the source by a task force under Etarran
jurisdiction.

pronounced: day-on-rah-mon root meaning: daon-gold; ramon-hills/downs
DASCEN ELUR-splinter world off West Gate; primarily ocean with isolated
archipelagoes.  Includes kingdoms of Rauven, Amroth, and Karthan.  Where
three exiled high kings' heirs took refuge in the years following the
great uprising.

Birthplace of Lysaer and Arithon.

pronounced: das-en et-ur root meaning: dascenean; e'lier-small land
DAVIEN THE BETRAYER-Fellowship Sorcerer responsible for provoking the
great uprising that resulted in the fall of the high kings after
Desh-thiere's conquest.  Rendered discorporate by the Fellowsliip's
judgment in Third Age 5129.

Exiled since, by personal choice.  Davien's works included the Five
Centuries Fountain near Mearth on the splinter world of the Red Desert,
through West Gate; the shaft at Rockfell Pit, used by the Sorcerers to
imprison harmful entities; the Stair on Rockfell Peak; and also, Kewar
Tunnel in the Mathorn Mountains.

pronounced: dab-vee-en root meaning: dahvi-fool, mistake; anthe
"mistaken one" DEARTHA-wife of Halliron, Masterbard of Athera; resident
in lnnish.

pronounced: dee-ar-the root meaning: deorethan-sour tempered
DESHANS-barbarian clans who inhabit Strakewood Forest, principality of
Deshir, Rathian.

pronounced: desh-ans root meaning: deshir-misty DESH-THIERE-Mistwraith
that invaded Athera from the splinter worlds through South Gate in Third
Age 4993.  Access cut off by Fellowship Sorcerer, Traithe.  Battled and
contained in West Shand for twenty-five years, until the rebellion
splintered the peace, and the high kings were forced to withdraw from
the defense lines to attend their disrupted kingdoms.

pronounced: desh-thee-air-e (last "e" mostly subliminal) root meaning:
desh-mist; thiere-ghost or wraith DESHIR-northwestern principality of
Rathain.

pronounced: desh-eer

root meaning: deshir-misty DHARKARON AVENGER-called Ath's Avenging Angel
in legend.  Drives a chariot drawn by five horses to convey the guilty
to Sithaer.  Dharkaron as defined by the adepts of Ath's Brotherhood is
that dark thread mortal men weave with Ath, the prime vibration, that
creates self-punishment, or the root of guilt.

pronounced dark-air-on root meaning: dhar-evil; khiaronthe who stands in
judgment DHIRKEN-lady captain of the contraband runner Black Drake.
Reputed to have taken over the brig's command by right of arms following
her father's death at sea.

pronounced: dur-kin

root meaning: dierk-tough; anthe

DIEGAN-once Lord Commander of Etarra's garrison; given over by his
governor to serve as Lysaer s'Ilessid's Lord Commander at Avenor.

Titular commander of the war host sent against the Deshans to defeat the
Master of Shadow at Tai Quorin; high commander of the war host mustered
at Werpoint.  Also brother of Lady Talith.

pronounced: dee-gan root meaning: diegan-trinket a dandy might
wear/ornament DIER KENTON VALE-A valley located in the principality of
Vastmark, Shand.

pronounced: deer ken-ton

root meaning: then'ken&on-a jewel with a severe flaw that may result in
shearing or cracking.

DRUAITHE-Vastmark shepherds' dialect.  An epithet applied to emphasize
stupidity.

pronounced: drew-ate-the

root meaning: Vastmark dialect for idiot DURN-city located in Orvandir,
Shand.

pronounced: dem root meaning: diern-plain/flat DYSHENT-city on the coast
of Instrell Bay in Tysan; renowned for dmber.

pronounced: die-shent root meaning: dyshientedar EARLE-Second Age ruin,
once a Paravian stronghold, located on the southern tip of the peninsula
in West Shand.  Site of the defenses that contained the Mistwraith's
invasion prior to the uprising incited by Davien the Betrayer.

pronounced: earl

root meaning: erli-long light EAST BRANSINGity located on the shore of
Instrell Bay at the south border of Tysan.

pronounced: east bran-sing

root meaning: brienseng-at the base, at the bottom EAST
HALLA-principality located in the Kingdom of Melhalla

pronounced: hall-ah

root meaning: hal'lia-white light EASTWALL-city located in the Skyshiel
Mountains, Rathain.

EAST WARDity in Fallowmere, Rathain, renowned as a port that served the
trade route to Etarra from the Cildein Ocean.

pronounced: ward

no Paravian root meaning as this city was man's creation ELAIRA-initiate
enchantress of the Koriathain.  Originally a street child, taken on in
Morvain for Koriani rearing.

pronounced: ee-layer-ah root meaning: e'-prefix, diminutive for small;
laeregrace ELDIR s'LORNMEIN-King of Havish and last surviving scion of
s'Lommein royal line.  Raised as a wool-dyer until the Fellowship
Sorcerers crowned him at Ostermere in Third Age 5643, following the
defeat of the Mistwraith.

pronounced: el-deer root meaning: eldir-to ponder, to consider, to weigh
ELIE-name of a newlywed woman in Merior.  Short for Elidie, which is a
common southcoast girl's name.

pronounced: ellie (long form, el-ed-ee) root meaning:
eledie-night-singing bird ELKFOREST-wood located in Ghent, Havish; home
of Machiel, steward and caithdein of the realm.

ELSHIAN-Athlien Paravian hard and instrument maker.

Crafted the lyranthe that is held in trust by Athera's Masterbard.

pronounced: el-shee-an root meaning: e'alshian-small wonder, or miracle
ELSSINEity located on the coast of Alland, Shand, famed for stone
quarries used for ships' ballast.

pronounced: el-seen root meaning: elssien-small pit ELTAIR BAY-large bay
off Cildein Ocean and eastcoast of Rathain; where River Severnir was
diverted following the Mistwraith's conquest.

pronounced: el-tay-er root meaning: al'tierif steel/a shortening of
original Paravian name, dascen al'tieri-which meant "ocean of steel"
refering to the color of the waves.

ERDANEid Paravian city, later taken over by Men.  Seat of old Princes of
Canuis until Desh-thiere's conquest and rebellion.

pronounced: er-day-na with the last syllable almost subliminal root
meaning: er'deinia-long walls ERLIEN s'TALEYN-High Earl of Alland;
caithdein of Shand, chieftain of the forest clansmen of Selkwood.

pronounced: er-lee-an stall-ay-en root meaning: aierlyan-bear;
tai-branch; anone/first "of first one branch" ETARRA-trade city built
across the Mathom Pass by townsfolk after the revolt that cast down
Ithamon and the High Kings of Rathain.  Nest of corruption and intrigue,
and policy maker for the North.

pronounced: ee-tar-ah root meaning: e'-prefix for small; taria-knots
FAERY-TOES-A brown gelding Dakar won dicing with mercenaries.

FALGAIRE-coastal city on Instrell Bay, located in Araethura, Rathain,
famed for its crystal and glassworks.

pronounced: fall -gair, to rhyme with 'air' root meaning: fai'mier-to
sparkle or glitter FALLOWMERE-northeastern principality of Rathain.

pronounced: fal-oh-meer root meaning: fal'el'miere-literally, tree
self-reflection, colloquialism for "place of perfect trees" FARL
ROCKS-standing stones located in Daon Ramon Barrens, Rathain; site of a
rendezvous between Jieret Red-beard and Caoile.  These markers once
channeled the earthforces for the Paravian dances at solstice and
equinox.

pronounced: far(l) root meaning: ffael-Aark FARSEEoastal harbor on the
Bay of Eltair, located in East Halla, Methalla.

pronounced: far-see root meaning: faersi-sheltered/muffled FATE'S
WHEEL-see Daelion's Wheel.

FELLOWSHIP OF SEVEN-sorcerers sworn to uphold the Law of the Major
Balance, and to foster enlightened thought in Athera.

Originators of the compact with the Paravian races that allowed Men to
settle in Athera.

FEYLIND--daughter of Jinesse; twin sister of Fiark; inhabitant of
Merior.

pronounced: fay-lind root meaning: faelind'anutspoken one/noisy one
FIARK-son of Jinesse; twin brother of Feylind; inhabitant of Merior.

pronounced: fee-ark root meaning: fyerk-to throw or toss FIRST
AGE-marked by the arrival of the Paravian Races as Ath's gift to heal
the marring of creation by the great drakes.

FORTHMARKity in Vastmark, Shand.  Once the site of a hostel of Ath's
Brotherhood.  By Third Age 5320, the site was abandoned and taken over
by the Koriani Order as a healer's hospice.

root meaning not from the Paravian GANISH-trade city located south of
Methias Lake in Orvandir, Shand.

pronounced: rhymes with "mannish" root meaning: gianish-a halfway point,
a stopping place GARTH'S POND-small brackish pond in Merior by the Sea,
on the Scimlade peninsula off Alland, Shand.

pronounced: garth to rhyme with "hearth" root meaning not from the
Paravian GHARMAGthe of the senior captains in Etarra's garrison.

pronounced: gar-mag root meaning not from the Paravian GHEDAIR-Vastmark
shepherd boy who stands off an attack by wyvems.

pronounced: sounds like "dead air" root meaning: ghediar-to persist
GHENT-mountainous principality in Kingdom of Havish; where Prince Eldir
was raised in hiding.

pronounced: gent, hard "g" root meaning: ghent-harsh GNUDSOG-Etarra's
field-captain of the garrison under Lord Commander Diegan; acting first
officer in the battle of Strakewood Forest; died in the flooding at the
River Tai Quofin.

pronounced: nud-sug to rhyme with "wood log" root meaning: gianud-tough;
sog-ugly GREAT WAYSTONE-amethyst crystal, spherical in shape, once the
grand power focus of the Kofiani Order; reputed to be lost since the
uprising.

GREAT WEST ROAD-trade route which crosses Tysan from Karfael on the west
coast, to Castle Point on Instrell Bay.

GUNDRIG-A mercenary in Alestron's field army, best known for his
womanizing.

pronounced: gun-drig root meaning: giunud-erig-a coarse suitor HALDUIN
s'ILESSID-founder of the line that became High Kings of Tysan since
Third Age Year One.  The attribute he passed on, by means of the
Fellowship's geas, was justice.

pronounced: hal-dwin root meaning: hal-white; duinne-hand HALLIRON
MASTERBARD-native of Innish, Shand.

Masterbard of Athera during the Third Age; inherited the accolade from
his teacher Murchiel in the year 5597.  Son of AI'Duin.  Husband of
Deartha.  Arithon's master and mentor.

pronounced: hal-eer-on root meaning: hal-white; lyron-singer
HALTHA-Senior enchantress of the Kofiani Order; assigned to keep watch
on Avenor at the time of the city's restoration.

prounounced: hal-the root meaning: halthien-white aged
HALWYTHWOOD-forest located in Araethura, Rathain.

pronounced: hall-with-wood root meaning: hal-white; wythe-vista
HANSHIRE-port city on Westland Sea, coast of Korias, Tysan; reigning
official Lord Mayor Garde; opposed to royal rule at the time of Avenor's
restoration.

pronounced: han-sheer root meaning: hansh-sand; era-place HARRADENE-Lord
Commander of Etarra's army at the time of the muster at Werpoint.

pronounced: bar-a-deen root meaning: harradien-large mule HAVENS-an
inlet on the northeastern shore of Vastmark, Shand.

HAVISH-one of the Five High Kingdoms of Athera, as

m

defined by the charters of the Fellowship of Seven.  Ruled by Eldir
s'Lommein.  Sigil: gold hawk on red field.

pronounced: hay-ish root meaning: haviesh-hawk HAVISTOCK-southeast
principality of Kingdom of Havish.

pronounced: hay-i-stock root meaning: havieshe-hawk; tiok-roost
HAVRITA-fashionable dressmaker in Jaelot.

pronounced: have-reet-ah root meaning: havierta-tailor HIGHSCARPity on
the coast of the Bay of Eltair, located in Daon Ramon, Rathain.

ILITHARIS PARAVIANSentaurs, one of three semimortal old races;
disappeared at the time of the Mistwraith's conquest.  They were the
guardians of the earth's mysteries.

pronounced: i-ii-thar-is root meaning: i'lith'earls-the keeper/preserver
of mystery IMARN ADAERnclave of Paravian gem cutters in the city of
Mearth, who dispersed in the times of the Curse which destroyed the
inhabitants.  The secrets of their trade were lost with them.  Surviving
works include the crown jewels of the Five High Kingdoms of Athera, cut
as focus stones which attune to the heir of the royal lines.

pronounced: i-marn-a-day-er root meaning: imarnrystal; e'daer-to cut
smaller INNISH-city located on the southcoast of Shand at the delta of
the River Ippash.  Birthplace of Halliron Masterbard.

Formerly known as "the Jewel of Shand," this was the site of the high
king's winter court, prior to the time of the uprising.

pronounced: in-ish root meaning: inniesh-a jewel with a pastel tint
INSTRELL BAY-body of water off the Gulf of Storrnwell, that separates
principality of Atainia, Tysan, from Deshir, Rathain.

pronounced: in-strell root meaning: arm'streal-strong wind IPPASH
DELTA-river which originates in the southern spur of the Kelhoms and
flows into the South Sea by the city of Innish, southcoast, Shand.

pronounced: ip-ash root meaning: ipeishrescent ISAERity located at the
crossroads of the Great West Road in Atainia, Tysan.  Also a power
focus, built during the First Age, in Atainia, Tysan, to source the
defense-works at the Paravian keep of the same name.

pronounced: i-sayer root meaning: i'saer-the circle ISHLIR-coastal city
located in Orvandir, Shand.

pronounced: ish-lear root meaning: ieshlier-sheltered place
ITHAMON-Second Age Paravian stronghold, and a Third Age ruin; built on a
fifth lane power-node in Daon Ramon Barrens, Rathain, and inhabited
until the year of the uprising.

Site of the Compass Point Towers, or Sun Towers.  Became the seat of the
high kings of Rathain during the Third Age and in year 5638 was the site
where Princes Lysaer s'llessid and Arithon s'Ffalenn battled the
Mistwraith to confinement.

pronounced: with-a-mon root meaning: itha-five; mormeedle, spire
ITHILT-peninsula bordering Minderl Bay, located in kingdom of Rathain.

pronounced: with-ilt sounds like 'with ill' root meaning: with-five;
ealt-a narrows ITHISH-city located at the edge of the principality of
Vastmark, on the southcoast of Shand.  Where the Vastmark wool factors
ship fleeces.

pronounced: with-ish root meaning: ithish-fleece or fluffy IVEL-blind
splicer hired by Arithon in his shipyard at Merior.

pronounced: ee-yell root meaning: iavel-scathing IYATnergy sprite native
to Athera, not visible to the eye, manifests in a poltergeist fashion by
taking temporary possession of objects.  Feeds upon natural energy
sources: fire, breaking waves, lightning.

pronounced: ee-at root meaning: Lyat-to break JAELOTity located on the
coast of the Bay of Eltair at the southern border of the Kingdom of
Rathain.  Once a Second Age power site, with a focus circle.  Now a
merchant city with a reputation for extreme snobbery and bad taste.

pronounced: jay-lot root meaning: jielot-affectation JIERET s'VALERIENT-
earl of the North, clan chief of Deshir; caithdein of Rathain, sworn
begeman of Prince Arithon s'Ffalenn.

Also son and heir of Lord Steiven.  Blood pacted to Arithon by
sorcerer's oath prior to battle of SuAewood Forest.  Came to be known by
headhunters as Jieret Red-beard.

pronounced: jeer-et root meaning: jieret-Thorn JILIETH-girl from a
Vastmark shepherd tribe.

pronounced: jill-ee-eth root meaning: jierlieth-to be stubborn enough to
cause pain; a Thorn of worry.

JINESSE-widow of a fisherman, mother of the twins Fiark and Feylind, and
an inhabitant of Mefior by the Sea.

pronounced: gin-ess root meaning: jienesse-to be washed out or pale; a
wisp KALESH-one of the towns at the head of the inlet to Alestron's
harbor, located in East Halla, Melhalla, and traditionally the enemy of
the reigning s'Brydion duke.

pronounced: cal-esh root meaning: caille'esh-stubborn hold
KARFAEL-trader town on the coast of the Westland Sea, in Tysan.  Built
by townsmen as a trade port after the fall of the High Kings of Tysan.

Prior to Desh-thiere's conquest, the site was kept clear of buildings to
allow the second lane forces to flow unwmmeled across the focus site at
Avenor.

pronounce : are root meaning: kar'i ffael-literal translation "twist the
dark"/colloquialism for "intrigue" KARMAK-plain located in the northern
portion of the principality of Canifis, Tysan.  Site of numerous First
Age battles where Paravian forces opposed Khadfim packs that bred in
volcanic sites in the northern Tomir Peaks.

pronounced: kar-mack root meaning: karmak-wolf KARTHAN-kingdom in
splinter world Dascen Elur, through West Gate, ruled by the pirate
kings, s'Ffalenn descendants of the prince sent into exile at the time
of the Mistwraith's conquest.

pronounced: karth-an root meaning: kar'ethan-one who raids/pirate
KARTH-EELSreatures descended from stock aberrated by the methurien, or
hate-wraiths, of Mirthlvain Swamp.

Amphibious, fanged, venomed spines, webbed feet.

pronounced: car-th eels root meaning: kar'eth-to raid KELDMAR
s'BRYDION-younger brother of Duke Bransian of Alestron; older brother of
Panien and Meam.

pronounced: keld-mar root meaning: kiel'd'maeran-one without pity
KELHORN MOUNTAINS-A range of shale scarps in Vastmark, Shand.

pronounced: kell-horn root meaning: kie/whem-toothed, jagged
KHADRIM-Arake-spawned creatures, flying, fire-breathing reptiles that
were the scourge of the Second Age.  By the Third Age, they hid been
driven back and confined in the Sorcerers' Preserve in the volcanic
peaks in north Tysan.

pronounced: kaa-dfim root meaning: khadrimagon KHARADMON-Sorcerer of the
Fellowship of Seven; discorporate since rise of Khadrim and Seardluin
leveled Paravian city at Ithamon in Second Age 3651.  It was by
Kharadmon's intervention that the survivors of the attack were sent to
safety by means of transfer from the fifth lane power focus.

Currently sent to the worlds cut off beyond South Gate to explore the
Mistwraith's origin.

pronounced: kah-rad-mun root meaning: kar'riad en mon-phrase translates
to mean "twisted thread on the needle" or colloquialism for "a knot in
the works" KHETIENN-name for a brigantine owned by Arithon; also a small
spotted wildcat, native to Daon Ramon Barrens, that became the s'Ffalenn
royal sigil.

pronounced: key-et-ee-en root meaning: kietienn-small leopard KIELING
TOWERthe of the four Compass Points or Sun Towers standing at Ithamon,
Daon Ramon Barrens, Rathain.

The warding virtue that binds its stones is compassion.

pronounced: kee-el-ing root meaning: kiel'len-root for pity, with suffix
added translates to "compassion" KITTIWAKE TAVERN-sailors' dive located
in the city of Ship's Port, Melhalla.

KORIANI-possessive form of the word "Koriathain;" see entry.

pronounced: kor-ee-ah-nee KORIAS-southwestern principality of Tysan.

pronounced: kor-ee-as root meaning: cor-ship, vessel; i'esh-nest, haven
KORIATHAINrder of enchantresses ruled by a circle of seniors, under the
power of one Prime Enchantress.  They draw their talent from the
orphaned children they raise, or from daughters dedicated to service by
their parents.  Initiation rite involves a vow of consent that ties the
spirit to a power crystal keyed to the Prime's control.

pronounced: kor-ee-ah-thain (thain rhymes with "main") root meaning:
koriathrder; ain-belonging to LANSHIRE-northwestern principality of
Havish.  Name taken from wastes at Scarpdale, site of First Age battles
with Seardluin that seared the soil to a slag waste.

pronounced: lahn-sheer-e (last "e" is nearly subliminal) root meaning:
ian'hansh'era-place of hot sands LAW OF THE MAJOR BALANCE-founding order
of the powers of the Fellowship of Seven, as written by the Paravians.
The primary tenet is that no force of nature should be used without
consent, or against the will of another living being.

LEINTHAL ANITHAEL-great Paravian navigator who was first to
circumnavigate Athera pronounced: lee-in-thall an-with-ee-el root
meaning: lienthal-Airection; anithael-to seek LITHMERE-principality
located in the Kingdom of Havish.

pronounced: lith-mere to rhyme with "with here" root meaning:
lithmiereompound word with the meaning "to preserve intact, or to keep
whole," as in maintain a state of perfection LIRENDA-First Senior
Enchantress to the Prime, Koriani Order; Morriel's intended successor.

pronounced: leer-end-ah root meaning: lyron-singer; di-ia-a dissonance
(the hyphen denotes a glottal stop) LOS MARoastal city in Carithwyr,
Havish.  Once a fishing village; grew into a caravan crossing after the
Mistwraith's invasion.  Known for its scholars.

pronounced: loss-mar root meaning: liosmar-letters, written records
LUHAINE-Sorcerer of the Fellowship of Seven-discorporate since the fall
of Telmandir.  Luhaine's body was pulled down by the mob while he was in
ward trance, covering the escape of the royal heir to Havish.

pronounced: loo-hay-the root meaning: luirhainon-Aefender
LYRANTHE-instrument played by the bards of Athera.

Strung with fourteen strings, tuned to seven tones (doubled).

Two courses are "drone strings" set to octaves.  Five are melody
strings, the lower three courses being octaves, the upper two, in
unison.

pronounced: leer-anth-e (last "e" being nearly subliminal) root meaning:
lyr-song, anthe-box LYSAER s'ILESSID-prince of Tysan, 1497th in
succession after Halduin, founder of the line in Third Age Year One.

Gifted at birth with control of Light, and Bane of Desh-Thiere.

pronounced: lie-sayer root meaning: lia-blond, yellow, or light,
saerircle MACHIEL-steward and caithdein of the realm of Havish.  in
service under King Eldir.

pronounced: mak-ee-el root meaning: mierkiel-post, pillar MAENALLE
s'GANNLEY-steward and caithdein of Tysan.

pronounced: may-nahl-e (last "e" is near subliminal) root meaing:
maeni-to fall, disrupt; alii-to save or preserve/colloquial translation:
"to patch togethee' MAENOL-heir, after Maenalle s'Gannley, steward and
caiin of Tysan.

pronounced: may-nail root meaning: maeni'alii'to patch together"
MAIEN-nickname for Maenalle's grandson, Maenol.

pronounced: my-en root meaning: maien-mouse MAGYRE-scholar who
discovered the secret of black powder.

In accordance with the Fellowship Sorcerers' compact, he was forced to
give up his studies, but a copy of his papers survived.

pronounced: mag-wire root meaning: magiare-a chaotic force MAINMERE-town
at the head of the Valenford River, located in the principality of
Taerlin, Tysan.  Built by townsmen on a site originally kept clear to
free the second lane focus in the ruins farther south.

pronounced: main-meer-e ("e" is subliminal) root meaning: maeni-to fall,
interrupt; miere-reflection, colloquial translation: "disrupt
continuity" MARAK-splinter world, cut off beyond South Gate, left
lifeless upon creation of the Mistwraith.  The original inhabitants were
men exiled by the Fellowship from Athera for beliefs or practices that
were incompatible with the compact sworn between the Sorcerers and the
Paravian races, which permitted human settlement upon the continent.

pronounced: mae-ack root meaing: m'era'ki-a place held separate MARLari
of Fallowmere and clan chieftain at the time of the battle of Strakewood
Forest.

pronounced: marl root meaing: marie-quartz rock MATHORN MOUNTAINS-range
that bisects the Kingdom of Rathain east to west.

pronounced: math-from root meaning: mathien-massive MATHORN ROAD-way
passing to the south of the Mathom Mountains, leading to the trade city
of Etarra from the west.

pronounced: math-orn root meaning: mathien-massive MEARN
s'BRYDION-youngest brother of Duke Bransian of Alestron.

pronounced: may-am root meaning: mieme-to flit MEARTH-city through the
West Gate in the Red Desert.

Inhabitants all fell victim to the Shadows of Mearth, which were created
by the Fellowship Sorcerer Davien to protect the Five Centuries
Fountain.  The Shadows are a light-fueled geas that bind the mind to
memory of an individual's most painful experience.

pronounced: me-arth root meaning: mearthmpty MEDLIR-name carried by
Arithon s'Ffalenn while he traveled incognito as Halliron's apprentice.

pronounced: med-leer root meaning: midlyr-phrase of melody MELHALLA-High
Kingdom of Athera, once ruled by the line of s'Ellestrion.  The last
prince died in the crossing of the Red Desert.

pronounced: mel-hall-ah

root meaning: maelhallia-grand meadows/plain-also word for an open space
of any sort.

MELOR RIVER-located in the principality of Korias, Tysan.

Its mouth forms the harbor for the port town of West End.

pronounced: mel-or root meaning: maeliur-fish MERIOR BY THE SEA-small
seaside fishing village on the Scinilade peninsula in Alland, Shand.
Site of Arithon's shipyard.

pronounced: mare-ee-or root meaning: merioren-cottages METH ISLE
KEEP-old Paravian fortress located on the isle in Methlas Lake in
southern Melhalla.  Kept by Verrain, Guardian of Mirthlvain.  Contains a
fifth lane power focus and dungeons where methuri, or hate-wraiths, were
held temporarily captive before transfer to Rockfell Pit.

pronounced: meth isle

root meaning: meth-hate

METHLAS LAKE-large body of fresh water located in the principality of
Radmoor, Melhalla.

pronounced: meth-las root meaning: nwth'ilass'an-the drowned, or sunken
ones.

METH-SNAKES-crossbred genetic mutations left over from a First Age
drake-spawned creature called a methuri (hatewraith).  Related to Lyats,
these creatures possessed live hosts, which they infested and induced to
produce mutated offspring to create weakened lines of stock to widen
their choice of potential host animals.

pronounced: meth to rhyme with "death" root meaning: meth-hate
METHURI-drake-spawned, and Lyat-related parasite that infested live host
animals.  By the Third Age, they are extinct, but their mutated host
stock continues to breed in Mirthivain Swamp.

pronounced: meth-yoor-ee

root meaning: meth-hate; thiere-wraith, or spirit MIN
PIERENS-archipelago to the west of the Kingdom of West Shand, in the
Westland Sea.

pronounced: min (rhymes with "pin") pierre-ins root meaning: min-purple;
pierens-shoreline MINDERL BAY-body of water behind Crescent Isle off the
east coast of Rathain.

pronounced: mind-earl root meaning: minderl-anvil MIRALT-port city in
northern Camris, Tysan.

pronounced: meer-alt root meaning: m'ier-shore; alt-last MIRTHLVAIN
SWAMP-boglands filled with dangerous crossbreeds, located south of the
Tiriac Mountains in principality of Midhalla, Melhalia.

Never left unmatched.  Since conquest of the Mistwraith, the appointed
Guardian was the spellbinder Verrain.

pronounced: mirth-el-vain root meaning: myrthl-noxious; vain-bog/mud
MORFETT-Lord Governor Supreme of Etarra at the time the Fellowship
sought to restore Rathain's monarchy following the captivity of the
Mistwraith, and during the muster for the war host against Arithon.

pronounced: more-let root meaning not from the Paravian MORNOSity on the
westshore of Lithmere, Havish.

pronounced: more-nose root meaning: moamosh-a coffer, specifically where
a greedy person would hoard valuables.

MORRIEL-Prime Enchantress of the Koriathain since the Third Age 4212.

pronounced: more-real

root meaning: moar-greed; riel-silver MORVAINity located in the
principality of Araethura, Rathain, on the coast of Instrell Bay.

Elaira's birthplace.

renounced: more-vain p

root meaning: morvain-swindlers' market

NANDIR-Vastmark tribal dialect word for a barren woman who is considered
unlucky.  To become involved with a nandir woman is to curse one's sons
to ill fortune.  These women wear bells on their braids.

Since life among the tribes is unpleasant for them, they often end as
prostitutes in coastal cities.  In the southcoast trade towns,
specifically Ithish and Innish, belled women are generally considered
available; hence the custom of bawds wearing bells to attract customers.

pronounced: nan-deer root meaning: from Vastmark dialect ancient term
for "without" NARMS-city on the coast of Instrell Bay, built as a craft
center by Men in the early Third Age.  Best known for dyeworks.

pronounced: narms to rhyme with "charms" root meaning: narmsolor
NORTHSTOR-city located at the northern tip of the East Halia peninsula
in Melhalla.

pronounced: north-store root meaning: stor-summit, or apex of a triangle
NORTHSTRAIT-narrows between the mainland spur of northern Tysan, and the
Trow Islands.

ORLAN-pass through the Thaldein Mountains, also location of the Camris
clans' west outpost, in Camris, Tysan.  Known for barbarian raids.

pronounced: or-Ian root meaning: irlan-ledge ORVANDIR-principality
located in northeastern Shand.

pronounced: or-van-deer root meaning: orvein-crumbled; dir-stone
OSTERMERE-harbor and trade city, once smugglers' haven, located in
Carythwyr, Havish; current seat of Eldir, King of Havish.

pronounced: os-tur-mere root meaning: ostler-brick; miere-reflection
PARAVIAN-name for the three old races that inhabited Athera before Men.
Including the centaurs, the Sunchildren, and the unicorns, these races
never die unless mishap befalls them; they are the world's channel, or
direct connection to Ath Creator.

pronounced: par-ai-vee-ans root meaning: para-great; i'on-fate or "great
mystery" PARRIEN s'BRYDION-second youngest brother of Duke Bransian of
Alestron; older brother of Meam, younger brother of Keldmar.

pronounced: par-ee-en root meaning: para-great; lent-Aart
PASYVIER-meadows in Korias, Tysan, where clanblood drifters raise
horses.

pronounced: pass-ee-vee-er root meaning: pase'vier-hidden little vale
PERDITH-city located on the east shore in East Halla, Melhalla; known
for its annorers.

pronounced: per-dith root meaning: pirdith-anvil PERLORN-city in
Fallowmere, Rathain on the trade road midway between Etarra and
Werpoint.

pronounced: pur-lorn root meaning: perlorn-midpoint PESQUIL-mayor of the
Northern League of Headhunters, at the time of the battle of Strakewood
Forest.  His strategies cause the Deshir clans the most punishing
losses.

pronounced: pes-quil like "pest-quill" root meaning not from the
Paravian PRANDEY-Shandian term for gelded pleasure boy.

pronounced: pran-dee root meaning not from the Paravian QUAID-trade city
in Carithwyr, Havish; inland along the trade road from Losmar to Redbum.
Famous for fired clay and brick.

pronounced: quaid to rhyme with 'staid' root meaning: cruaid-a specific
form of clay used for brickmaking RADMOORE DOWNS-meadowlands in
Midhalla, Melhalla.

pronounced: rad-more root meaning: riad-thread; mourarpet, rug
RATHAIN-High Kingdom of Athera ruled by descendants of Torbrand
s'Ffalenn since Third Age One.  Sigil: black-andsilver leopard on green
field.

pronounced: rath-ayn root meaning: roth-brother; them-tower, sanctuary
RAUVEN TOWER-home of the s'Ahelas mages who brought up Arithon s'Ffalenn
and trained him to the ways of power.  Located on the splinter world,
Dascen Elur, through West Gate.

pronounced: raw-yen

root meaning: rauven-invocation REDBURNity located in a deep inlet in
the northern shore of Rockbay Harbor in Havistock, Havish.

pronounced: red-burn

root meaning not from Paravian RENWORT-plant native to Athera.  A
poisonous mash can be brewed from the berries.

pronounced: ren-wart

root meaning: renwarin-poison RIATHAN PARAVIANS-unicorns, the purest and
most direct connection to Ath Creator; the prime vibration channels
directly through the horn.

pronounced: ree-ah-than

root meaning: ria-to touch; ath-prime life force; ri'athonthe who
touches divinity ROCKFELL PITeep shaft cut into Rockfell Peak, used to
imprison harmful entities throughout all three ages.  Located in the
principality of West Halla, Melhalla; became the warded prison for
Desh-thiere.

pronounced: rock-fell root meaning not from the Paravian ROCKFELL
VALE-valley below Rockfell Peak, located in principality of West Halia,
Melhalla.

pronounced: rockfell vale root meaning not from the Paravian
s'AHELAS-family name for the royal line appointed by the Fellowship
Sorcerers in Third Age Year One to rule the High Kingdom of Shand.

Gifted geas: farsight.

pronounced: s'ah-hell-as root meaning: ahelas-mage-gifted
SANPASHIR-desert waste on the southcoast of Shand.

pronounced: sahn-pash-eer root meaning: san-black or dark;
pash'era-place of grit or gravel SAVRID-merchant brig chartered to
transport armed men from Minderl Bay to Merior.

pronounced: sahv-rid root meaning: savrid-thrifty s'BRYDION-ruling line
of the dukes of Alestron.  The only old blood clansmen to maintain rule
of their city through the uprising that defeated the rule of the high
kings.

pronounced: s'bride-ee-on

root meaning: baridien-tenacity SCIMLADE TIP-peninsula at the southeast
corner of Alland, Shand.

pronounced: skim-laid

root meaning: scimlait-curved knife or scythe SEARDLUIN-drake-spawned,
vicious, intelligent cat-like predators that roved in packs whose
hierarchy was arranged for ruthless and efficient slaughter of other
living things.  By the middle of the Second Age, they had been battled
to extinction.

pronounced: seerd-lwin root meaning: seard-bearded; luin-feline

SECOND AGE-Marked by the arrival of the Fellowship of

Seven at Crater Lake, their called purpose to fight the drake spawn.

SELKWOOD-forest located in Alland, Shand.

pronounced: sellk-wood root meaning: selk-pattern SETHVIR-Sorcerer of
the Fellowship of Seven, served as Warden of Althain since the
disappearance of the Paravians in the Third Age after the Mistwraith's
conquest.

pronounced: seth-veer root meaning: seth-fact; vaer-keep SEVERNIR-river
that once ran across the central part of Daon Ramon Barrens, Rathain.
Diverted at the source after the Mistwraith's conquest, to run east into
the Bay of Eltair.

pronounced: se-ver-neer

root meaning: sevaer-to travel; mr-south s'FFALENN-family name for the
royal line appointed by the Fellowship Sorcerers in Third Age Year One
to rule the High Kingdom of Rathain.  Gifted geas: compassion/empathy.

pronounced: fal-en root meaning:ffaelark, anthe s'GANNLEYfamily name for
the line of Earls of the West, who stood as caithdeinen and stewards for
the Kings of Tysan.

pronounced: gan-lee root meaning: gaen-to guide; llxalted, or in harmony
SHADDORN-trade city located on the Scimlade Peninsula in Alland, Shand.

pronounced: shad-dom root meaning: shaddiem-a type of sea turtle
SHAND-High Kingdom on the southeast corner of the Paravian continent,
originally ruled by the line of s'Ahelas.  Device is falcon on a
crescent moon, backed by purple-and-gold chevrons.

pronounced: shand as in "hand" root meaning: shand-two/pair
SHANDIAN-refers to nationality, being of the Kingdom of Shand.

pronounced: shand-ee-an root meaning: shand-two/pair SHEHANE
ALTHAIN-Ilitharis Paravian who dedicated his spirit as defender and
guardian of Althain Tower.

pronounced: shee-hay-na all-thain root meaning: shiehai'en-to give for
the greater good; alt-last; thain-tower SHIP'S PORT-town on the coast of
the Bay of Eltair located in West Halla, Melhalla.

SICKLE BAY-body of water located inside the Scimlade Peninsula in
Alland, Shand.

s'ILESSID-family name for the royal line appointed by the Fellowship
Sorcerers in Third Age Year One to rule the High Kingdom of Tysan.
Gifted geas: justice.

pronounced: s-ill-ess-id

root meaning: liessiad-balance SITHAER-mythological equivalent of hell,
halls of Dharkaron Avenger's judgment; according to Ath's adepts, that
state of being where the prime vibration is not recognized.

pronounced: sith-air root meaning: sid-lost; thiere-wraith/spirit
SKANNT-headhunter captain, served under Pesquil pronounced: scant root
meaning: sciant-a lean, hard-run hound of mixed breeding SKYRON
FOCUS-large aquamarine focus stone, used by the Kofiani Senior Circle
for their major magic after the loss of the Great Waystone during the
rebellion.

pronounced: sky-run root meaning: skyronolloquialism for shackle;
s'kyr'i'on-literally "sorrowful fate" SKYSHIEL-mountain range that runs
north to south along the eastern coast of Rathain.

pronounced: sky-shee-el root meaning: sa:yshia-to pierce through;
iel-light/ray s'LORNMEIN-family name for the royal line appointed by the
Fellowship Sorcerers in Third Age Year One to rule the High Kingdom of
Havish.  Gifted geas: temperance.

pronounced: slom-main

root meaning: liemmein-to center, or restrain, or bring into balance
SORCERERS' PRESERVE-warded territory located by Teal's Gap in Tomir
Peaks in Tysan where the Khadrim are kept confined by Fellowship magic.

STEIVEN-Earl of the North, caithdein and regent to the Kingdom of
Rathain at the time of Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn's return.

Chieftain of the Deshans until his death in the battle of Strakewood
Forest.  Jieret Red-beard's father.

pronounced: stay-yin root meaning: steiven-stag STORLAINS-mountains
dividing the Kingdom of Havish.

pronounced: store-lanes root meaning: storlient-largest summit, highest
divide STORMWELL-Gulf of Stonnwell, body of water off the northcoast of
Tysan.

STRAKEWOOD-forest in the principality of Deshir, Rathain; site of the
battle of Strakewood Forest.

pronounced: strayk-wood similar to "stray wood" root meaning: streik-to
quicken, to seed SUNCHILDREN-translated term for Athlien Paravians.

SUN TOWERS-translated term for the Paravian keeps still standing on the
site of the ruins of Ithamon in Daon Ramon Barrens, Rathain.

See Itharnon.

s'VALERIENT-family name for the Earls of the North, regents and
caithdeinen for the High Kings of Rathain.

pronounced: val-er-ee-ent root meaning: val-straight; erient-spear
TAERLIN-southeastern principality of Kingdom of Tysan.  Also a lake of
that name, Taerlin Waters in the southern spur of Tomir Peaks.

Halliron teaches Arithon a ballad of that name, which is of Paravian
origin, and which commemorates the First Age slaughter of urticom herd
by Khadrim.

pronounced: tay-er-lin root meaning: taer-calm; lien-to love
TAERNOND-forest in Ithilt, Rathain.

pronounced: tear-nond root meaning: taeraim; nond-thicket, copse TAL
QUORIN-fiver formed by the confluence of watershed on the southern side
of Strakewood, principality of Deshir, Rathain, where traps were laid
for Etarra's army in the battle of Strakewood Forest.

pronounced: tai quar-in root meaning: tai-branch; quorin-canyons TALERA
s'AHELAS-princess wed to the King of Amroth on the splinter world of
Dascen Elur.  Mother of Lysaer s'llessid, by her husband; mother of
Arithon, through her adulterous liaison with the Pirate King of Karthan,
Avar s'Ffalenn.

pronounced: taler-a root meaning: talera-branch or fork in a path
TALITH-Lord Diegan's sister; betrothed lady of Lysaer s'llessid.

pronounced: tai-with to rhyme with 'gal with' root meaning: tai-branch;
lith-to keep/nurture TALLIARTHE-name given to Arithon's pleasure sloop
by Feylind; in Paravian myth, a sea sprite who spirits away maidens who
stray too near to the tidemark at twilight.

pronounced: tai-ee-arth root meaning: tai-branch; llxalted, in harmony;
araithe-to disperse or to send TAL'S CROSSING-town at the branch in the
trade road that leads to Etarra and south, and northeastward to North
Ward.

pronounced: tai to rhyme with "pal" root meaning: tai-branch TASHANider
on Maenalle's clan council, present at the raid on the Pass of Orian.

pronounced: tash-an root meaning: tash-swift, quick; anthe TEAL'S
GAP-pass in the northern spur of Tomir Peaks in Tysan, which passes
through the Sorcerers' Preserve.

pronounced: teel's gap root meaning: tielle-ravine TEIR-title fixed to a
name denoting heirship.

pronounced: tay-er root meaning: teir's-"successor to power"
TELMANDIR-ruined city that once was the seat of the High Kings of
Havish.  Located in the principality of Lithmere, Havish.

pronounced: tell-man-deer root meaning: telman'en-leaning; dir-rock
TELZEN-city on the coast of Alland, Shand, renowned for its lumber and
saw millworks.

pronounced: tell-zen root meaning: tielsen-to saw wood
THALDEINS-mountain range that borders the principality of Camris, Tysan,
to the east.  Site of the Camris clans' west outpost.  Site of the raid
at the Pass of Orian.

pronounced: thall-dayn root meaning: thai-head; dein-bird THARIDOR-trade
city on the shores of Bay of Eltair in Melhalla.

pronounced: thar-i-door root meaning: her'i'dur-keep of stone
THARRICK-captain of the guard in the city of Alestron assigned charge of
the duke's secret armory.

pronounced: thar-rick root meaning: thierik-unkind twist of fate THIRD
AGE-marked by Fellowship's sealing of the compact with the Paravian
races, and the arrival of Men to Athera.

THIRDMARK-seaside city on the shores of Rockbay Harbor at the edge of
Vastmark.

TIENELLE-high-altitude herb valued by mages for its mindexpanding
properties.  Highly toxic.  No antidote.  The leaves, dried and smoked,
are most potent.  To weaken its powerful side effects and allow safer
access to its vision, Koriani enchantresses boil the flowers, then soak
tobacco leaves with the brew.

pronounced: tee-an-ell-e ("e" mostly subliminal) root meaning:
tien-dream; iel-light/ray TIRANS-trade city in East Halla, Melhalla.

pronounced: tee-rans root meaning: her-to hold fast, to keep, to covet
TIRIACS-mountain range to the north of Mirthlvain Swamp, located in the
principality of Midhalla, Kingdom of Melhalla.

pronounced: tie-ree-axe root meaning: tieriach-alloy of metals TORBRAND
s'FFALENN-founder of the s'Ffalenn line appointed by the Fellowship of
Seven to rule the High Kingdom of Rathain in Third Age Year One.

pronounced: for-brand root meaning: for-sharp, keen; brand-temper TORNIR
PEAKS-mountain range on western border of the principality of Camris,
Tysan.  Northern half is actively volcanic, and there the last surviving
packs of Khadrim are kept under ward.

pronounced: for-neer.

root meaning: for-sharp, keen; nier-tooth TORWENT-fishing town in
Lanshire, Havish, where the smack Royal Freedom was sold.

pronounced: tore-went root meaning: for-sharp; wient-bend
TRAITHE-Sorcerer of the Fellowship of Seven.  Solely responsible for the
closing of South Gate to deny further entry to the Mistwraith.

Traithe lost most of his faculties in the process, and was left with a
limp.  Since it is not known whether he can make the transfer into
discorporate existence with his powers impaired, he has retained his
physical body.

pronounced: tray-the root meaning: traithe-gentleness TYSAN-one of the
Five High Kingdoms of Athera, as defined by the charters of the
Fellowship of Seven.  Ruled by the s'Ilessid royal line.  Sigil: gold
star on blue field.

pronounced: tie-san root meaning: tiasen-rich VALENDALE-river arising in
the Pass of Orian in the Thaldein Mountains, in the principality of
Atainia, Tysan.

pronounced: val-en-dale root meaning: valen-braided; dale-foam
VALENFORD-city located in Taerlin, Tysan.

pronounced: val-en-ford root meaning: valen-braided VALLEYGAP-pass on
the trade road between Etarra and Perlom in the Kingdom of Rathain,
known for shale slides and raids.

VALSTEYN-river which springs from the Mathorn Mountains in Rathain, and
which crosses the Plain of Araithe.

pronounced: val-stain root meaning: valsteyne-to meander
VASTMARK-principality located in southwestern Shand.

Highly mountainous and not served by trade roads.  Its coasts are
renowned for shipwrecks.  Inhabited by nomadic shepherds and wyvems,
non-fire-breathing, smaller relatives of Khadrim.

pronounced: vast-mark root meaning: vhast-bare; mheark-valley
VERRAIN-spellbinder, trained by Luhaine; stood as Guardian of Mirthlvain
when the Fellowship of Seven was left shorthanded after the conquest of
the Mistwraith.

pronounced: ver-rain root meaning: ver-keep; ria-touch; an-one; original
Paravian: verria'an WARD-A guarding spell.

pronounced: as in English root meaning not from the Paravian WARDEN OF
ALTHAIN-alternative title for the Fellowship Sorcerer, Sethvir.

WATERFORKity located in Lithmere, Havish.

WERPOINT-fishing town and outpost on the northeast coast of Fallowmere,
Rathain.  Muster point for Lysaer's war host.

pronounced: were-point root meaning: wyr-all/sum WEST END-small merchant
town in Korias, Tysan.  Once was a great port, before the Mistwraith's
invasion, but the loss of navigational arts set the city into decline.

WEST GATE PROPHECY-prophecy made by Dakar the Mad Prophet in Third Age
5061, which forecast the return of royal talent through the West Gate,
and the Bane of Desh-thiere and a return to untrammeled sunlight.

WESTLAND SEA-body of water located off the west shore of the continent
of Paravia.

WESTWOOD-forest located in Camris, Tysan, north of the Great West Road.

WHITEHOLDity located on the coast of the Bay of Eltair in East Halla,
Melhalla.  Once saved from storm surge and flooding by a circle of
Koriani seniors.

WORLDSEND GATES-set at the four compass points of the continent of
Paravia.  These were spelled portals constructed by the Fellowship of
Seven at the dawn of the Third Age, and were done in connection with the
obligations created by their compact with the Paravian races which
allowed men to settle on Athera.

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		la	I lwaihost of Vastmark 105667-7 $5.99
U.S./ $6.99 CAN.

			SUBTOTAL....	$

	SHADOWFANE		POSTAGE AND "i4D' SALES TAX (Add
applicable sales tax)	$ 	With laric embroiled in a life
and death struggle to master his inherited TOTAL $ 	powers, Taen
Dreamweaver stands alone.  She must find a way to assist Name his
survival, or risk the Stormwarden to eternal imprisonment. Address
Should she and laric succeed, mankind will regain the stars.  Should
City State Zip they fail, Scait, Demon Lord of Shadowfane will enslave
human talent 4 or more titlcs and p(,stagc & handling is FREE!  Ordcrs
of fcwcr thai 4

please includc $2.00 postagc & handling.  Allow up to 6 wecks for and
destroy the last free outpost of humanity.ry.  Rcinit it, U.S.

funds.  Do not send cash.  Valid in U.S.  & Canada.

subicct to change.  H]2711

LWCJ73 dW 12 -LJL3 a L3 MEEMPEEV

I