Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

The pot-boys grinned and lent their efforts to the cause. Arithon was hefted under the armpits, dragged through dustings of spilled flour and the grease-scummed runoff from the dish tubs and ejected through an exit that led to the rear of the tavern.

Elaira followed, crying curses. She swore with redoubled vehemence upon discovery they had pitched her hard-won royalty headlong into the midden.

She shrilled at the fast-slamming door, ‘Dharkaron break ye for rogues, now I’ve got te wash his blighted clothing!’

The panel banged shut and a bar dropped in place with a final, sour clank.

Elaira subsided, shaking.

The alley behind the Four Ravens was dark and damply cold. Feeling the chill to her bones, the enchantress sucked a breath past her teeth that came shudderingly near to a choke as she gagged on the rank stench of garbage. ‘Sithaer and Dharkaron’s Five Horses,’ she muttered to the form at her feet. ‘What in this life am I to do with you?’

The prince, sprawled limply in a nest of wilted carrots, returned an involuntary groan; then, from the shadow to one side, a sane voice proffered reply: ‘Where do you think he would be safe?’

Startled, Elaira spun and released a hissing gasp. The speaker proved to be the singer, leaning against the alley wall with the prince’s salvaged cloak draped on his wrist. He smiled in quick reassurance. ‘You probably saved his life back there. He’d better thank you properly for the risks you undertook. If he doesn’t, make sure to break all his fingers, then tell him I gave you permission.’

Weak in the knees with relief, Elaira slumped against the midden door. ‘You know this man?’

‘We’re acquainted.’ The bard picked his way through the compost and crouched to check the victim’s prone body. Satisfied to find no lasting damage, he clicked his tongue. ‘Now where are you wanting to hide him? Or do you trust him so much you’d have him wake up alone and maybe blunder into further mischief?’

Elaira thought quickly. ‘The hayloft, please.’ Since the gates closed at sundown, no mounted travellers could be expected to arrive or depart from the tavern until day-light; the grooms would be carousing and the horseboy predictably asleep.

‘All right then,’ the bard said agreeably. ‘Help me lift him before some churl inside sits up and notices I didn’t duck out to use the privy.’

The loft above the Ravens’ innyard was dusty with the meadow-sweet scent of hay and warm from the couriers’ mounts and coach-horses stabled in stalls down below. Couched in a cranny between haystacks and the high, windowless north wall with Arithon sprawled by her knees, Elaira bent over a bucket and wrung out a strip of linen torn at need from the lining of her shepherd’s cloak. Lit by a glimmer from her crystal, the enchantress dabbed caked dirt and sweat from the unmistakably s’Ffalenn features of the prince. Belatedly, she discovered blood in his hair. His scalp had been split by the pastry roller.

She bit her lip, chagrined. She had surely not struck him so hard: his current unconscious condition was more due to her stay-spell than to the head blow staged to disguise her foolish use of magic.

Why then was she reluctant to free him?

Elaira regarded Arithon’s still face, its severe planes and angles unsoftened by her jewel’s faint radiance. Under her hands she felt the corded tautness of him, the light-boned, lean sort of strength that was easiest of all to underestimate. His handling of attackers and pot-hook had proved him no stranger to violence; and the raw new scars that encircled his wrists hammered home the recognition that only his bloodline was familiar. The man himself had a past and a personality unknowably separate. He had not even been raised on Athera.

The intuitive deduction that marked Koriani origins shot Elaira’s uneasiness into focus. She had been mistaken to bring this prince here, alone. Even incapacitated his person bespoke a man wayward in judgement and decisively quick to take action. The association that had set him off-balance when he entered the Four Ravens must run deeper than a defaced kingdom banner: he had not expected to be attacked. When he woke, Arithon, High Prince of Rathain, was bound to be mettlesomely, royally enraged.

Elaira blotted flour off miraculously ungrazed knuckles: the fingers seemed too finely made for the offensive delivered by the pot-hook. She tossed aside her rag as if it burned her. The remiss young junior on lane watch still had not touched her presence; worse yet, Elaira had no clue how she should handle the man, or herself, when the moment came to wake him up.

Arithon stirred on his own in that wretchedest moment of uncertainty. Elaira had time to panic and jack-knife clear as the heir apparent to a high kingship gathered his wits and sat up.

An immediate grimace twisted his face. He reached up, touched the swollen cut in his scalp, and looked at her. ‘Which wheel from the afterlife did you spare me from, Daelion Fatemaster’s or those of Dharkaron’s Chariot? I feel as if I’ve been milled under by something punishing from the Almighty.’

‘How could you be so utterly, unbelievably stupid!’ Elaira burst out. Damn him, he was laughing! ‘They could have killed you in there, and to what purpose?’

Arithon lowered his fingers, saw blood and thoughtfully hooked the rag she had discarded. He folded the frayed edges neatly over on themselves and pressed the compress to his scratch. ‘Now that’s a question you might answer for me.’

‘Dharkaron, Ath’s avenger!’ Elaira was fast becoming exasperated. ‘You’re in Erdane ! Your speech patterns are perfectly barbarian. And the Ravens is a headhunters’ haunt!’

Very still, Arithon said, ‘Whose heads are the hunted?’

His curiosity was in no wise rooted in insolence. Filled by creeping disbelief Elaira said, ‘Asandir never told you? They pay bodyweight in gold for the fugitive heirs of the earls. Half-weight for clan blood and probably every jewel off the mayor’s chubby daughters for anything related to a prince.’

Arithon lazed back on one elbow in the hay, his face tipped unreadably forward as he knotted the cloth around his head. ‘And what do you know of any princes?’

Elaira felt her heart bang hard against her ribs. ‘Do you mean to tell me, that you don’t know who you are ?’

His response came back mocking. ‘I thought I did. Has something changed?’

‘No.’ Elaira gripped both hands in front of her shins: two could play his game. ‘Your Grace, you are Teir’s’Ffalenn, prince and heir-apparent of the crown of Rathain. All that pompous rhetoric means true-born son of an old-blood high king. Every able man in this city, as well as the surrounding countryside, would give his eldest child to be first to draw and quarter you.’

A sound between a choke and a gasp cut her short.

Elaira glanced up to find Arithon’s hand fallen away and his head thrown back. The face beneath the black hair was helplessly stripped by confusion.

He had not been baiting her: he had plainly not been told. That was not all; around Arithon’s person Elaira sensed a gathering corona of power, invisibly triggered and unmistakably Asandir’s. She had a split-second to note that the forces that rang in opposition to Arithon’s will were in fact an ingeniously-laid restraint; then the gist of what she had said lent an impetus that provided him opening. He reacted with a practised unbinding, and the fabric of the ward sheared asunder.

A snap like a spark whipped the air.

Then Arithon did get angry, a charged, blind-sided rage that left him wound like a spring and staring inward. ‘ Teir’s’Ffalenn ,’ he said flatly. His Paravian was accentless and fluent and the repeated term translated to mean ‘ successor to power ’. In the glow of the jewel the ratty twist of rag around his head lent the shadowed illusion of a crown. ‘Tell me about Rathain.’