Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

‘When I pass beneath the Wheel, Dharkaron Avenger’s going to seem like an angel of mercy.’ He crooked his reins in one elbow, cradled his head and managed with well-practised grumpiness to direct his injury toward Asandir. ‘You said we’d be in Erdane for two more days.’

The sorcerer replied too softly to overhear; but the effect upon Dakar was profound.

His cheeks went white as new snow. Suddenly straight in his saddle, he swung the paint’s head and promptly spurred down the lane toward the gates. No further protest escaped him, even when the party clattered out of Erdane and turned eastward at a pace guaranteed to inflame his hangover.

Lysaer for once forbore from teasing. Aware that his half-brother had stolen out last night by himself, and disappointed not to have been asked along, he gained no chance for tactful inquiry; Arithon’s night-time outing remained unexplained. No mention was made of the tunic which a peculiarly wakeful Enithen Tuer had snatched off to wash before dawn. Asandir’s mood seemed preoccupied and brisk and had been so since daybreak. Had Dakar felt inclined to be talkative he might have offered a fellow miscreant fair warning: with a Fellowship sorcerer, silence on any topic boded trouble.

Yet Arithon was disinclined to worry in any case. With the mystery behind his mind-block resolved, the cutting edge eased from his reserve. Left less wary than watchful now that he understood the stakes involved a kingship, he trusted time and circumstance would show him an opening to overset Asandir’s prerogatives. Until then, he rode at his half-brother’s side and not even his restive mare diverted him from rapid-fire conversation. Lysaer welcomed the entertainment. Since too much quiet let him brood over the undermining losses of his banishment, he fielded Arithon’s quips in a spirited enthusiasm that outlasted interruptions by fast-riding couriers and packed farm-drays, and once, a dusty band of cattle whose herd-boys yipped and goaded their charges to market.

Then, as with West End, the farmlands thinned and ended. One hard day’s travel beyond Erdane the way became wild and untenanted. The scrublands of Karmak gave rise to forested downs laced with streamlets. The mist seemed alive with the rush of running water and the air keen and brittle with coming snow. More than once, the party started deer from the thickets. If the bucks were royally antlered, their incoming winter coats were flat and lacking gloss; even after summer’s forage, the does were sadly thin.

The mist’s blighted legacy afflicted more than creatures in the wild.

After nightfall, perhaps due to the chill, Asandir relented and engaged a room at a run-down wayside tavern that in better times had been a hospice tended by Ath’s initiates.

‘What became of them?’ Lysaer asked.

‘What happens to any order of belief when its connection to the mysteries becomes sullied?’ Asandir chose not to entrust his tall stallion to the ill-kempt groom, but attended to his saddle girths himself. ‘Desh-thiere’s darkness disrupted more than sunlight on this world. The link that preserved was lost along with the Riathan Paravians.’

The pent-back sorrow in his statement did not invite further inquiry; and if the carved gates at the innyard were still intact, the beautiful, patterned sigils of ward had lost any power to guard. The tavern’s musty attic proved to be riddled with iyats, which perhaps explained the dearth of clientele.

By the time the sorcerer banished the pests the hour had grown late; the commonroom with its great blackened beams stood lamentably empty. While here the accents of outland strangers did not provoke hostilities, still the stooped old innkeeper took care not to turn his back. He served his odd guests in silence, while his wife stayed hidden in the kitchen.

The fare was bland and too greasy; Lysaer left his plate barely touched. Arithon had seen worse on a ship’s deck. After sighs and a martyred show of eye-rolling, Dakar righteously forwent ale for mulled cider and a bowl of the inn’s insipid stew. The bread had no weevils that he could see, so he ate it, and Lysaer’s portion, too. Then he stalked from his emptied bowls to a bed that he swore would have lice and mildew in the blankets.

This failed to secure him permission to retire in the hayloft. Perhaps as a precaution, Asandir sat all night in the hallway, his back against the door panel.

‘Unforgiving as a reformed priest,’ Dakar commiserated to Arithon; yet whether the sorcerer stood vigil to curb the excesses of his apprentice or to curtail further outings by the Master of Shadow, or whether he simply wished space for clear thought, the Mad Prophet was too wise to ask. He flopped crosswise on a mattress of dusty ticking and his chain reaction of sneezes changed into snores that would have done credit to a hibernating bear.

Busy scooping ice from the enamelled ewer of washwater, and striving to rise above low spirits, Lysaer regarded the sleeping prophet with a mix of laughter and distaste. ‘If he weren’t apprenticed to a sorcerer he would have made a splendid royal fool.’

‘What a curse to lay on a king,’ Arithon observed from the corner where, stripped down to his hose, he spread out his blankets on bare floor. A cockroach scurried up from a crack near his foot; he reacted fast enough to crush it, changed his mind and let it race to safety under the baseboard. ‘Not mentioning that every princess within reach would have her bottom pinched to bruises.’

Lysaer splashed frigid water on his face, gasped and groped for his shirt, that being the nearest cloth at hand; the innkeeper was too stingy to provide towels. The prince chaffed his half-brother, ‘I’d say that upbringing by mages left you cynical.’

By now half-muffled under bedclothes, Arithon said in startled seriousness, ‘Of course not.’

Lysaer rested his chin on his fists and his damply crumpled shirt. Statesman enough to guess that the meat of the matter sprang from Arithon’s ill-starred heirship of Karthan, and not eased that the thrust of s’Ffalenn wiles now bent toward contention with Asandir, he gently shifted the subject. ‘Well, the loss of your roots doesn’t bother you much.’

One corner of Arithon’s mouth twitched. After a moment, the expression resolved to a smile. ‘If it takes sharing confidences to prove that you’re wrong, there was one young maid. I was never betrothed, as you were. Sithaer, I barely so much as kissed her. I think she was as frightened of my shadows as I was of telling her my feelings.’

‘Perhaps you’ll find your way back to her.’ The wind whined mournfully through the cracks in the shutters and a draft stole through the small room; touched by the chill, Lysaer shrugged. ‘At least, we could ask Asandir to return us to Dascen Elur once we’ve defeated the Mistwraith.’

‘No.’ Arithon rolled over, his face turned unreadably to the wall. ‘Depend on the fact that he won’t.’

‘You found out something in Erdane, didn’t you,’ Lysaer said. But his accusation dangled unanswered. Rebuffed and alone with his thoughts, and hating the fate that left him closeted at the whim of a sorcerer in the fusty lodgings of a second rate roadside tavern, he shook out his damp shirt and blew out the candle for the night.

Two days later the riders in Asandir’s party reached Standing Gate, a rock formation that spanned the road in a lopsided natural arch. Centaurs in past ages had carved the flanking columns into likenesses of the twins who founded their royal dynasty. Since before the memory of man the granite had resisted erosion: the Kings Halmein and Adon reared yet over the highway, their massive, majestic forelegs upraised in the mist and their beards and maned backs stained the verdigris of old bronze with blooms of lichen.