existence wore hoarfrost feathers of ice. Here, deadfalls might lurk under covering snow, the stubbed ends of snapped limbs poised like spikes to pierce through a boiled-hide boot sole, or twist an ankle on an incautious step. Arithon carried a staff for safe footing, and a hand compass in a bronze case.
A gust moaned and built to a shrieking crest. Arithon sheltered his face in his hood through a flaying barrage of sheared ice. He poised while the storm’s ferocity relented, as acutely aware as wild prey that the eye of the hunter would be drawn to movement. Sound reached him, instead, the chiming ring of clashed steel, broken by distant shouts. Then he caught the taint of smoke, borne down the length of the valley.
‘Merciful Ath!’ Arithon burst into a flat run, not back toward the horses, but ahead, in a sliding, tree-dodging charge that led toward the fur trapper’s cabin.
He could make no speed. The deep drifts and precarious, iced footing combined with blinding snowfall to slow him. The healing scar on his wrist bound free movement as he cast off his staff and clawed the strung bow from his shoulder. More clumsy, the right hand: the canker left by Fionn Areth’s sword thrust still oozed and bled through its tightly strapped dressing. Despite tendons that throbbed in fiery pain, and the swelling of traumatized tissues, Arithon groped for an arrow.
The tang of smoke thickened. Then the baritone voice he knew as the trapper’s climbed into a shredding scream. Arithon plowed ahead, fatally slowed by the uncertain ice of a streamlet. Too late, he knew as the cry shifted pitch. However he sprinted, three hundred yards and a dense copse of fir still separated him from the clearing. He drove himself onward, a punishing effort marked by searing breaths of chill air. Once inside the trees, the low branches hampered him. He fretted, inwardly cursing the care he must take to avoid the whipcrack report of snapped sticks. Each delay cost dearly. Smoke now rolled uphill in charcoal billows, acrid with the resins of burned pine logs. Men called and laughed, and a jangle of bit rings chimed through the covering forest.
Arithon worked his way downward in sangfroid awareness that even one rolling snow clod would serve warning and set Jaelot’s reivers upon him. The crackle of flame and a fanned gust of heat told him the cabin was burning beyond salvage. Past the trees, a horse snorted. An officer shouted a command, then wheeled his mount and trotted across the clearing. Through the snow-draped fringe of the firs, Arithon saw flurried movement as six more riders clambered astride and bunched back into ragged formation.
‘Make that wretch sing like a lark as he dies!’ someone called. The small column wheeled and moved on down the draw.
Arithon used the masking noise of their departure to close the last steps to the edge of the fir copse. Knelt down behind a thin screening of branches, he took stock.
The one-room log shack was a mass of gold flame, the roof timbers a sagging scrim of smudged embers. Amid trampled snow, splashed scarlet and pink, two men knelt over another, stretched prone. One pinned the trapper’s roped wrists in restraint. The other set to with bare hands and a gore-drenched long knife, to a grunting jerk of agony from the victim. A third man stood guard, thumbs jammed in his sword belt.
‘Where is he?’ questioned the tormentor, his wet fist and blade on a questing course over bloodied, quivering flesh. ‘Tell us, and your agony can be ended at once.’
‘I trap animals, not princes,’ came the ragged reply. ‘I don’t know any royalty.’
‘Pity, then,’ said the knifeman, unaware of the eyes that watched from the wood, or the hand which nocked patient arrow to bowstring and released in the lull between gusts.
Arithon’s shaft took the standing guard through the throat. The man clawed once, coughing blood, then toppled.
‘Bowman!’ The brute wielding the knife jerked erect, then dived flat, unsure where in the trees the attacker lurked in ambush.
His companion was a half second slow to react. The next arrow ripped through his abdomen. He sprawled, screaming, over the legs of the trapper, who jackknifed and kicked out. A brutal strike with a hobnailed boot smashed the gut-shot man in the skull.
Arithon nocked a third shaft, but spoiled the release as the bowstring ripped from his lamed fingers. Before he could draw again, the wind blew a veil of snow over the clearing. The knifeman snatched his moment, and charged. His scrambling plunge into the fir thicket was met by the black steel of Alithiel, wielded with left-handed, lethal precision in a thrust through the solar plexus.
‘Damn you to the joys of Dharkaron’s Black Chariot!’ Arithon set his foot on the twitching corpse, yanked his streaming blade free, and ended the man’s ugly, whistling shrieks with a mangling slash through the throat.
Bow and sword still in hand, he thrashed out of the tree line and slid to his knees in the rucked snow next to the trapper. ‘They’re dead. Be still.’ He raised his blade, cut the black-and-gold surcoat off the guard’s corpse, and used Jaelot’s lion to stanch the flow of the bone-deep gash in the thigh of the man who had given him shelter.
‘Say I won’t lose my leg, and that you’re not royal,’ the wounded man gasped through locked teeth.
‘You won’t lose the leg,’ the Shadow Master assured, then cursed the unhealed scabs that marred his accustomed dexterity.
An interval passed, while the wind screamed and buffeted. Arithon packed a compress of snow over the knifeman’s unspeakable handiwork. The injured man shivered and moaned at his touch, unstrung by shock and suffering. ‘Just say you’re not royal!’ he hissed through blind agony.
Arithon stayed silent, but in relentless efficiency bundled him into another dead enemy’s mantle. The trapper stared upward into a face of black hair and green eyes set in steep, angled features. ‘If so, damn you, man! You should never have come back. Your vengeful spree of slaughter can’t help but draw notice.’
Arithon laughed with an edge like smashed crystal. ‘Ath, I hope so!’ His tone more chill than the storm’s, he added, ‘By my name and ancestry, may I never condone such an act of extortion and cruelty!’
In anguish, again, ‘Say you’re not s’Ffalenn born!’
Arithon paused, rinsed in gold light by the flames, now chewed through the cabin’s four walls. He evaded, ‘There’s truth to the claim I’m a bastard.’
‘Go, get out.’ The huge trapper cried out at the delicate probe of the fingers that explored his gashed abdomen. ‘I’m a dead man. As a healer who’s seen wounds, you know this.’
Arithon shook his head, tied the stripped cuff lace and torn shirt into another snow compress.
Between dizzy bouts of pain the trapper gasped argument. ‘Those vultures from Jaelot are witched men, I swear, with your Grace bound as someone’s prized quarry. It’s unnatural. As many times as my cabin’s been searched, they come back. They’re out in a gale in the Skyshiels, pure folly! Even a pack of fell fiends out of Sithaer would have long since turned tail and gone home.’
‘Well, they haven’t discovered your root cellar yet.’ Arithon applied pressure to close a slashed vein. ‘My hand has scarred over. I’ve just proved I can hunt. Your traplines should not be beyond me.’
‘Are you listening?’ The trapper’s weakened struggles did nothing to curb the care taken to stanch the blood flow leaking from his mauled organs. ‘I can’t survive.’ He added the list, in graphic, hard logic, of the inexorable course of a stomach cut.
‘Your fate seals my conscience,’ Arithon agreed. Then, stilled and grave, his words chisel-punched through the crackle of flame, he swore the oath of sovereign prince to bound liegeman. ‘For the gift of feal duty, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath. Dharkaron witness.’ He knotted the compress, then finished, ‘You didn’t betray me.’
The trapper turned away his gruff, bearded face, unprepared, and embarrassed to be touched to sentiment. ‘Don’t mistake