Janny Wurts - Curse of the Mistwraith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elaira looked for herself and resignedly signalled the barmaid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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