Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

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

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

The clansman regarded him, stupefied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arithon, eyes blazing, said, ‘Yes.’

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

‘But why?’ a man pealed in protest.

Arithon’s attention never shifted from the child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scrying shattered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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