Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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