Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

‘Merciful Ath,’ cried the minstrel from the fireside. ‘Someone in the scullery’s going to sally from the pantry and skewer him.’

Elaira spun in her tracks and fastened in desperation on the bard. ‘That entrance connects to the kitchens, back there?’ Answered by a worried nod, she made a ward-sign against misplaced trust and begged a favour of a total stranger. ‘Make me a diversion.’

The scarlet-clad minstrel rose to the occasion with a floor-shaking shout of discovery. ‘Ath preserve us, there are clansmen outside the windows!’

A dozen attackers abandoned Arithon and rushed to assess this new threat; and in the moment while the fracas stood diverted, one frightened-witless enchantress centred her mind in her focusing jewel. She cobbled together a glamour of concealment and disappeared.

Elaira did not physically vanish, but assumed an aura of sameness, one that mirrored the grain of worn pine, dented pewter and sanded floorboards. Had anyone amid the Ravens’ tumult paused and actually searched for her, she would instantly have been spotted. As it was, the press of the brawl directed Arithon’s aggressors everywhere else but toward her. The enchantress slipped rapidly across the taproom, unnoticed as she skirted upset trestles, bands of fist-waving craftsmen and barmaids who scuttled on hands and knees in a frantic attempt to rescue crockery.

Elaira reached the side door undetected. The lamp there had gone out: screened by convenient shadows, she fumbled at her collar and pulled out the white crystal she wore tethered to her neck by silver chain. She cupped the jewel in her palm and murmured litanies to refocus her inner mind. Her hand shook. So did her voice. She ignored impending panic and prayed instead that the junior initiate on lane watch would not choose this moment to expose her; far from an afterthought, she added her plea that no swordsman had attention to spare beyond Arithon’s fast-moving pot-hook. Acting with unconscionable recklessness, Elaira closed her gathered energies into a hard rune of binding.

Tiny, violet sparks snapped across the hinge-pins at Arithon’s back: the doorway stood secured. By then, Elaira was sprinting in a breathless charge that carried her headlong through the scullery. Cooks and pot-boys scattered from her path. She dodged the swing of the knife-waving drudge by the spit, slipped someone else’s grasping hands, then tripped over a pastry rack and stumbled through a rain of falling scones to snatch up the rolling pin that lay in a bowl of dough beyond. Before the befuddled kitchen staff could catch her, Elaira darted into the pantry closet, trailing a dusting of flour. The scrambles at her back became more frantic. All but within reach of her goal, she gasped, ‘Ath, stand back! There’s a riot out there, can’t you hear?’

Then she elbowed through a hanging string of onions and reached the narrow doorway to the taproom. A barrage of threats and thuds issued from the opposite side. Elaira recovered her wind, reassured. The s’Ffalenn prince still fought vociferously for his life. The wood under her palms bounced and vibrated to the rasping clash of swordplay, then the thump of a body fallen and somebody’s bitten-off oath. Elaira tripped the latch, readied her stolen bludgeon, then snapped the spell-bindings on the hinges with a shuddering whimper of fright.

The door crashed open and shoved her staggering as Arithon’s shoulder bashed the panel inward under force of a narrowly-missed parry. A sword blade whined through string: onions bounced helterskelter as five men harried the prince backward. Their eagerness hampered their weapons, which ironically worked to help spare him: the pot-hook had long since fatigued under punishment and Arithon defended himself with only the stub of the sheared-off handle. Elaira caught her balance and retreated as the fight erupted wholesale into the pantry. Bruised against corners of shelving, she received an impression of furious faces, a battering circle of steel and the tense, hard-driving brilliance of Arithon’s close-pressed defence. Then she caught her enchantress’s jewel in a grip that gouged her palm and struck the pastry roller on the crown of the prince’s dark head.

He folded at the knees, eyes widened in a moment of shocked surprise. His look became what might have been prelude to laughter before the charm Elaira wrought to fell him blanked his mind. He collapsed on the floor at the enchantress’s feet. She jumped past, committed beyond heed for further risks. Her crystal burned against her skin as once again she raised power. Her hastily-wrought net of spells caught and strained to stay the mob who now surged to butcher an unconscious victim.

‘Stop!’ Elaira shouted clearly. ‘This one’s mine. I claim his life as spoils.’

The front-rank aggressors rocked to a stupefied stop, hostility stamped on every red and sweating face; the swords flashed at angles still eager for slaughter. Trembling before that hedge of raised weapons, Elaira held her ground. Should even one man control hatred enough to see reason, the whole crowd would discover she was not the painted doxie her glamour made her appear.

Yet grudges in Erdane ran obsessively deep.

Startled by female intervention and emotionally charged from adrenalin, the furious ones were easiest to deflect. Elaira’s mazework of confusion hooked their anger and carved out a foothold for change: in something like sheepish embarrassment men glanced at the prince behind her knees. Their minds recalled no barbarian impostor, but instead saw a wine-raddled street-rat who had carelessly offended someone else.

The few who had sustained injuries were far less easily diverted. Some of these shoved forward, waving bludgeons of snapped-off chair legs; not a few still wielded knives and the fellow who had tumbled from the rafters was howling in self-righteous indignation. Sweating, Elaira strove to extend her spell of influence. But her fragile fabric of illusion only thinned and shuddered near to breaking: she had no more resource left to spare.

Beyond hope, past all recourse, she faced defeat. Erdane’s ongoing feud with the past was going to end her life and that of the prince she had rashly tried to rescue.

Then like a miracle, the voice of the minstrel offered surcease. ‘Let the doxie have him and be done! Dharkaron knows, he’s filthy enough to disgust a hog. Probably going to leave her with the Avenger’s own pox to remember him by.’

The slur raised a wave of scattered laughter.

‘Sithaer, now,’ Elaira added, somehow through terror and an unstable grip on two spells finding a note that approximated disgust. ‘It wasn’t my bed I’d be offering him!’

A weatherbeaten captain toward the fore loosed a bellowing guffaw. ‘Leave him to her!’ he said. ‘She’ll probably scald his ears well enough.’ He shrugged to unlock a battered shoulder, then sheathed his steel; around him, other off-duty companions backed off smiling. The most rabid of the headhunters wavered and in that instant of reprieve, Elaira hooked the door adjoining pantry and commonroom and slammed the panel closed. For the benefit of the kitchen staff who gawked in the path of her retreat, she jabbed her fallen prize in the ribs, then launched into spiteful imprecations.

‘Daelion mark ye in the hereafter for stinking bad habits! Ye wasted lump of a lout, ye dare te be stealin’ my hard-earned coin fer spendin’ on tankards at the tap!’

The cook stepped into the breach and shook Elaira’s arm. ‘Wench, if you’re minded to scold, spare us some peace and do it elsewhere.’

The enchantress whirled in crazed fury. ‘How will I, with himself sprawled there with the onions and limp as dead dogmeat into the bargain?’

She waved the fist with the pastry roller and set a row of canisters tottering. The cook snatched the implement away from her, jerked his greasy bangs toward his staff, then barked a command to lift the unconscious object of this madwoman’s scorn and forcibly heave him out.