had Ranne installed in the Flocked Starling’s packed tap-room. The beer jack in the man-at-arms’ capable hand was scarcely tasted, although he had been at his ease at the trestle for some time. Since the inn yard’s grooms had gossiped about his arrival, and marked his acquaintance with the Varens courier, natural curiosity moved the florid bar-keeper to approach his available silence.
‘Yon message, just dispatched to our mayor,’ he inquired. ‘Did you know aught of the contents?’
Ranne dangled the question just long enough for the hush to acquire an edge. Brawny craftsmen and smiths stilled at the bar, and a sweating glazier elbowed two journeyman coopers aside, the better to hear the reply.
‘I witnessed the secretary who set the Sunwheel seal,’ Ranne admitted with loaded care. ‘Hard not to know what the document said. The scribe had penned only one line.’
Jeers, speculation, then ribald encouragement, as hecklers begged Ranne to continue. The wise bar-keeper said nothing. Arms folded over his apron, he waited. Few drinkers, shown such undivided attention, could bear to hold out for long.
Ranne sipped his beer. With his dark hair sleeked back from a bath, his fresh cool was a provocation. Challenged, the inn’s patrons dug into their pockets. Lysaer’s armsman accepted their impromptu kitty, if only to dare Fennick to cram more loose silver into his overstuffed saddle-cloth. ‘Just one demand,’ Ranne relented, while the near trestles quieted, and a maid’s laughter drifted, cut free of droned conversation.
‘Is it true the Light’s avatar wants a recruiter’s rights to flesh out his latest campaign?’ a bearded teamster called from the side-lines.
Half-smiling, amused, burly Ranne shook his head. ‘Nothing like. The scroll contained the genteel suggestion that the Light’s banner, now left with your gate watch, should be raised to fly above Tirans’ town standard by sundown. Damned odd request, I felt at the time. No thought over beer’s made much sense of it.’
Now, having roused the crowd’s blank astonishment, Ranne raised his jack in salute. He forestalled the rising clamour of questions by gulping the contents, then wiped his moustache, tossed a coin to pay up, and arose with a shrug of apology. ‘Time to go. There’s the master’s demand for my service.’
And on cue, Fennick’s straw head appeared at the railing that fronted the stair from the upper-floor chambers. The reluctant crowd parted, while across the inn’s tap-room, voices exploded in speculation.
Arrived in alert form at the top landing, Ranne cast a glance towards his stalwart companion.
‘White diamond,’ snapped Fennick, in cryptic summary of Lysaer’s current mood. ‘He’s blithe as an oyster chock-full of new pearls. No one can wring a frown out of him.’
‘Not good then,’ Ranne murmured. The pair were anything but Lysaer’s confidants; just two trustworthy fighters Sulfin Evend had ordered to guard in the uneasy breach. ‘Minding the young heir was the happier charge.’ For no mind kept pace with the forsaken father; not since Avenor’s young prince had decamped to join Ath’s adepts. Granted reprieve from a state execution for their lapsed vigilance on that score, the salvaged men-at-arms had been reassigned by their Lord Commander’s adamant word. Only a few in the regent’s honour guard shared the damaging secret, that their master was warped by the ongoing influence of Desh-thiere’s curse. They numbered a steadfast handful of officers, and two fighting men snatched from death by a felon’s pardon, who formed the frail shield to stem Lysaer’s unnatural fits of insanity. If any man could.
‘We’re not here to shape policy,’ Fennick reminded.
In fact, Sulfin Evend’s instructions remanded them to the role of observers who would, at need, draw their steel to defend the divine regent’s back. Not that any commonplace hazard should have power to threaten the life of the man hailed as avatar.
‘Dead is dead,’ murmured Ranne, despite his elite skill not liking the prospect of risking a murderous mob.
Fair-skinned and freckled, Fennick’s round face was not smiling as he tapped the shut door to the Divine Prince’s quarters.
The knock brought the diffident page, who admitted the senior men-at-arms. Inside, late-day sun slanted through the unlatched casements and brightened the inn’s threadbare carpet. Lysaer sat at ease, eating bread and stewed chicken. His masking sweatband and hat were discarded. Golden hair still tarnished with damp from his bath fringed the snowy collar of a fresh shirt. Overtop, he now wore the gilt fire of an emblazoned Sunwheel doublet. The sight arrested vision: even without the Alliance insignia, his presence shouted with the magisterial force of birth-born royalty.
The paired retainers stalled upon entry, challenged by gemstone-blue eyes.
‘You question the wisdom of state dress, but no retinue?’ Lysaer stated with sanguine charm. His magnanimous gesture offered two chairs, followed up by his striking smile. ‘Sit. Eat your fill, share some excellent wine. Since I’ve paid for the privilege of privacy, we aren’t going to need your bristling vigilance until the hour of sundown.’
While the watchtower with the controversial flag spire lengthened its shadow across the slate roof-tops of Tirans, far to the west, the downs of Atainia hung layered in cloud like a vein of blue jasper. There, the warded stone of Althain Tower cut a stark silhouette, with only one casement illuminated. Candles pooled light where Sethvir languished in his debilitating fight to check the corrosive charge that leaked from destabilized grimwards. His compromised straits had turned for the worse without warning: Asandir’s exemplary hold on the Scarpdale vortex had faltered. No means existed to assess the set-back. The Fellowship’s field Sorcerer might be hurt, even dying, beyond reach of immediate help.
Althain’s Warden endured that concern in fraught silence. From two minor vortices with minimal damage, once again, he had no viable choice but to shoulder the crushing burden of three. The increase already took its sapping toll: his aura displayed the febrile blaze of a spark reduced by a gale-wind. Sethvir maintained his obstinate grip on little more than dedicate will.
‘We are not victims,’ he reminded, the statement fierce at odds with the suffering etched into the face propped up by heaped pillows.
The draught he addressed took pause by the window, mingling chill with the breeze. ‘Say that to Ciladis, wherever he’s gone!’ Kharadmon snapped, frustrated.
Hands stilled on the coverlet, Althain’s Warden sighed. ‘Would you be so angry if you thought him lost beyond all recovery?’
‘Rage before grief,’ the discorporate shade temporized.
Yet his colleague’s point set a virulent sting. The posited chance could not be dismissed, that Ciladis might have abandoned their Fellowship’s interests: the wounding left by the Paravians’ withdrawal could well have broken a spirit beloved for his matchless tenderness.
Kharadmon added, ‘Asandir would be first to remind that the gentlest nature is never least powerful.’ Then, in ripped sorrow, ‘though I’d rather hang trust in the mouth of a fool than wait for the gleam on a pearl to stave off our defeat!’
‘No doubt to the pearl’s everlasting relief,’ Sethvir said, made tart by near-desperate duplicity. He scarcely dared breathe. If his irritable colleague should guess that fresh trouble now embroiled their interests in Scarpdale, the bitter predicament could not be salvaged: even a Fellowship shade could not survive the chaotic flux of an unshielded grimward.
‘Surely you haven’t come here to rant,’ Althain’s Warden pressed with weary delicacy.
‘No.’ Kharadmon had none of Luhaine’s stuffy knack for diffusing rough news with a lecture. ‘Raiett Raven’s effects at Etarra have been searched, down to the last jewelled cloak-pin.’ This testy spirit always delivered his impacts headlong. ‘My best effort failed. The dragon-skull wards copped from Hanshire’s state treasury are still at large in the world. My scour of the empty cult lairs at Etarra found no sign of the coffer that guarded them.’