Janny Wurts - Warhost of Vastmark

‘They were to seek sanctuary in the hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood. It’s my plan to go there and rejoin them, and take whatever facts I know concerning Lysaer’s campaign plans. I’m telling you this, mistress, because I hold earnest hope that you will decide to come with me.’

‘I can’t.’ The thread that held Jinesse to composure came unravelled, and her slender body spasmed to the jerk of stifled sobs. ‘Fiark and Feylind are endangered. Lysaer insists he’s concerned for them. But he cannot be everywhere and atrocities happen where armies march. I fear what might come if my twins were caught in the path of the bloodshed intended to bring down the Master of Shadow.’

The brimming, liquid tracks of her tears and the anguish in her voice caused Tharrick to shove upright despite his pain. He gathered her against his warm shoulder. ‘I may have chosen to throw my lot in with Arithon. That doesn’t mean I support the ruin of small children. Come away with me. I’ll help see your young ones restored to you.’

‘So he did tell you where he was bound,’ Jinesse murmured. Her sigh of relief unreeled through a throat tight with weeping.

‘No,’ Tharrick whispered against the crown of her head. ‘But as Ath is my witness, he must have told you.’

In striking unconcern for the Koriani plot to break the wards over Althain Tower, Sethvir sits dreamy-eyed over an emptied mug of tea, while his misty regard quarters sights far removed from the winter sky outside his casement: on Avenor’s brick battlements, a desolate royal wife sheds lonely tears; two exuberant, blond-haired children laugh on a brigantine’s decks in Southshire harbour; in Vastmark, wyverns ride the winds like blown rags, their reptilian eyes alert for strayed sheep, while below them, a laggard band of shepherds herd their flocks through the defiles to lowland pastures …

In the steppelands of Shand, a motley assortment of raided livestock stampedes through the wilds of Alland, herd after herd of mixed horses and cattle hazed westward by Erlien’s clansmen …

In Merior by the Sea, patient as he waits out a widow’s tortured silence, Lysaer s’Ilessid pens a letter to his wife tender in assurance that war is not yet in the offing, until his watch officer interrupts with the bad news that Jinesse and the man Tharrick have evaded the guard on the cottage, and a search of the village has failed to find them …

On the morning that Lysaer’s cordon across the Scimlade peninsula was tightened in brisk effort to block Tharrick and Jinesse in their flight out of Merior, Arithon s’Ffalenn put his sloop Talliarthe in at the trade port of Innish. There, he spent a busy brace of days playing for small coin in the taverns. He renewed select friendships and secured help from a merchant to arrange for a ship’s crew to liberate the Khetienn from the rigger’s yard at Southshire. Then he collected the messages left waiting for him in posthouses and taverns throughout the city.

In the bone-lazy mood brought on by a night spent in a first-rate brothel, Dakar watched the Shadow Master answer his correspondence in hagridden hurry. Since the threat posed by Lysaer’s armies lay far removed from Innish, the Mad Prophet railed that the rush was a criminal waste. After more than a year lost to sea passages and the backwater boredom of Merior, only an idiot or a man possessed would not linger amid civilized comforts.

Arithon gave such complaint less weight than he ever had. On the following tide, he raised anchor again and set Talliarthe’s heading farther west. A rainy two-week passage brought her to landfall in the Cascain Islands.

Like everywhere else on the Vastmark coast, the shoreline was all hostile rock. Galleys made no ports of call there. Captains who plied the trade routes gave the chained islets with their reef-ridden narrows and foamnecklaced channels a nervous, respectful wide berth. Forbidding slate cliffs stabbed up through the froth of winter breakers, black, jagged-edged and desolate. Their knife-bladed faces, clean polished by storms, slapped back every sound in meshed echoes.

Assaulted from the moment the anchor splashed by the screeling cries of flocking gulls, Dakar puffed his cheeks in a sigh of relief. Today, he suffered no hangover. In a beady-eyed vigilance launched out of malice, he kept himself sober to see what Arithon would do next.

The loss of the shipyard in its way became as shattering a counterblow as the wreckage of the fleet inflicted upon Lysaer at Minderl Bay.

Never more patient, Dakar passed his days in coldblooded discontent. Arithon caught out in ignominious retreat was novel enough to be fascinating. The options left to choice were all mean ones. Lysaer’s warhost, so brilliantly reduced, now moved southward, pared down to its most dedicated divisions. Once the weather eased and more companies arrived to bolster the strike force at Merior, the Shadow Master dared not be caught cornered. No quarter would be shown by the specialized troops trained at Avenor for this war; Duke Bransian’s seasoned mercenaries and the hotly partisan garrison divisions lent by Etarra and Jaelot would vie to be first to claim his head.

‘Your tactics have only burned away the dross,’ Dakar pressured as Arithon turned the sloop’s second anchor line on a cleat and flipped in a sailor’s half hitch. ‘You now face the eastlands’ most gifted commanders. They won’t make misjudgments for the season and the supply lines. They’ll know to the second how long they can expect prime performance from an army in foreign territory.’

Dakar fiddled with his cuff laces, a half-moon smile of anticipation masked behind his moustache. Against established officers and hard-bitten veterans, the livestock raids made by Selkwood’s barbarians would gad this war host no worse than stings by a handful of hornets.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Erlien’s clansmen dance to their own mad tune.’ Arithon straightened and wiped salty hands on his breeches. ‘Am I meant to be grateful for your wisdom as a war counsellor? Lysaer and the duke won’t find much satisfaction using crack mercenaries to beat the empty brush at Scimlade Tip.’

Too wily now to rise to goading, Dakar listened and caught the fleeting catch of pain that even a masterbard’s skill could not quite pass off as insouciance. Merior’s abandonment to the whim of hostile forces stung, and surprisingly deeply. Just what the village had meant to Arithon, Dakar avowed to find out.

Asandir’s geas bound his person to the Shadow Master’s footsteps. Unless he wished to be crushed like furniture in the thrust of Lysaer’s campaign, he must sound Arithon’s plans, then use whatever vulnerable opening he could find to leverage influence over their paired fate.

But his nemesis acted first in that maddening, wayward abandon that seemed designed to whip Dakar to fury.

Given the intent to embark on a foray into the mountains of Vastmark, the Mad Prophet blinked, caught aback. ‘Ath, whatever for? There’s naught in these hills at this season but frost-killed bracken and starving hawks. The shale beds in the heights get soaked in the rains, and the rockslides can mill you to slivers. Those shepherds with sense will have driven their flocks to the lowest valleys until well after the first spring thaw.’

For answer, Arithon packed a small satchel with necessities. He heated his horn recurve bow over the galley stove to soften the laminate enough to string. Then he fetched his lyranthe, his hunting knife and sword, and piled them into the dory.

‘You’ll need warmer clothing,’ Dakar said in tart recognition that the shore excursion lay beyond argument. His dissent was ongoing as he squeezed his girth past the chart desk to delve in a locker and scrounge out a pair of hose without holes. ‘There’s ice on the peaks. How long are you planning to sulk in the hills if it’s snowing?’