sighted. The fair, warming weather would see the first trade galleys nosing their way from snug harbors, the earliest at sea always manned by the keenest, most vigilant captains.
“I leave that decision in your hands, then.” Mearn strode to his grazing horse, removed girth and saddle, and sat down with the redolent, damp horsecloth. He used his knife to pick out the hem stitching. The packet inside was wrapped in cerecloth, by its weight and thickness no less than purloined copies of state documents.
“Oh, well-done,” murmured Maenol. Still standing, stiff backed, against a sky that now threatened fine drizzle, he nipped through the twine ties with his teeth, then flipped through the pressed, folded parchments. The dark arch of his eyebrows turned grim as he read. Documents recording rightful claim to clan prisoners to be bound over into slavery; documents of arraignment without trial for acts of dark sorcery, attested and signed, which named Prince Arithon criminal and renegade. Maenol’s sharp features, never animated, stilled to pale quartz as he perused the signatures and seals.
“Merciful Ath,” the words torn through his reserve as if jerked by the barbed bite of steel. “Is there no end? How can so many mayors bind these acts into law, upon no proof or surety beyond Lysaer’s spoken word? It’s not canny!”
“It’s happened,” Mearn said. “I’ve seen. Lysaer has a tongue like pure honey. Fiends plague, my own family once fell for his trumpedup cause before we discovered any better. I’ll need a courier sent to warn my brother Bransian.”
Maenol looked up. “That you’ll have.” He paused, squared fingers gripping the first lists and requisitions appointed for the planned royal shipyard; for the galleys where his people might come to suffer at the oar, under the whip and in chains. He took a moment, seemed to gather himself, then asked, “Is this truth, the accusation Lysaer s’Ilessid has laid against Prince Arithon at the Havens?”
Mearn looked back, intent, his mouth turned glass hard. “I don’t know.” He could not stay seated, but pushed to his feet, pressured to vent his raw nerves. “But there’s one proven fact every charge so far has omitted. Arithon lost his mage powers years ago, in defense of his own by the river Tal Quorin. If the slaughter at the Havens was committed to enable an act of dark sorcery, his hand could not shape the spells.”
“The deaths could be his,” Maenol said, blunt. “He could have used an accomplice.”
Mearn stopped. As his gaze bore into the younger man, relentlessly direct, Tysan’s caithdein raised his chin and would neither bend nor stand down. “I’m this realm’s steward, in the absence of its king. I must ask, since our fate’s been entangled with Arithon’s. As a mage whose talents were blinded and broken, who knows to what lengths desperation might drive him to wrest back his gift for grand conjury?”
“You never met him,” Mearn said, implacable.
“Once.” Maenol all of a sudden seemed heartsore. He stared toward the wood where a pheasant pair called, while the breeze framed the unrestrained joy of a lark. “I was eleven. Arithon seemed retiring, unimportant at the time. All my devotion was for our fair s’Ilessid prince, just arrived. I couldn’t imagine he’d betray us.”
Mearn at last looked away, his sigh a soundless exhalation. “Arithon’s nothing like his half brother. Trust me in this. As for his guilt, there’s no guessing, given the nature of the man. He’s determined, and beyond any doubt, the most dangerous creature my family has ever chanced to cross.” Attuned to his master’s distress, one of the brindle hounds roused and whined; the horse stamped, and clouds lowered, dimming the earth beneath their soft-footed shrouding. The sky threatened torrents before nightfall.
“This much I can say,” Mearn added finally, his arms folded as if the chill of the wetting to come later bit through his leathers beforetime. “I have never yet known Arithon to lie. He received the Fellowship’s sanction as Crown Prince. Since his oathswearing to Rathain, his integrity has been tested, once in life trial by the caithdein of Shand, and again, by my blood family. His morals were not found wanting. No act he undertook had been done without reason. Before I dared judge on those deaths at the Havens, I would ask in his presence to hear out his sworn explanation.”
The breeze hissed through the grasses, rich with the bearing promise of thawed soil.
“Well,” Maenol shrugged in that steely light fatalism better suited to a man years older, “the tangle won’t be yours or mine to unravel, but Earl Jieret’s, as Rathain’s sworn caithdein. If a boat can be sent, your dispatches will go across. Given luck, Arithon can be reached before he sails. Rest assured, my runner to your kin in Melhalla will leave my camp before nightfall.”
“One last thing,” Mearn said as he offered his forearms for a formal clasp in parting. “Lysaer has set scholars to work. They’ll comb the old archives until they’ve recovered the past arts of navigation.”
“So Arithon expected,” said Maenol. The practice of star sights, disused and forgotten through the centuries while Desh-thiere’s mists had smothered Athera’s skies, could not stay lost for much longer. For each day his Khetienn delayed her departure, the risk of discovery increased. Ancient charts might be found, or a rutter, to recall the location of the offshore Isles of Min Pierens. Arithon held neither the resources nor the men to repel an assault from the tumbledown fortress at Corith.
To be caught there would drive him to flight.
Aware like cold death that time was Lysaer’s ally, the two clansmen went separate ways. In birdsong, the day waned, while the gentle rain fell and pattered chill tears through the dark, blurred brakes of the oak forest.
Spring-Summer 5648
The day after Mearn’s duplicitous stag hunt, couriers bearing the same copied dispatches ride outbound from Avenor, their horse trappings emblazoned with the sunwheel on gold, new device of the Prince of the Light; and they pass another messenger inbound from the south, who delivers King Eldir’s ultimatum, that slave-bearing galleys henceforward shall be barred from all ports in his Kingdom of Havish…
While dawn mists mantle the oak forests of Avenor, a black arrow screams over the city walls, shot from a clan messenger’s bowstring; affixed to its shaft, sealed in Maenol s’Gannley’s blood, a letter pronounces a forfeit of life against the s’Ilessid pretender who has dared break the freedom of the first kingdom charter…
Far eastward, in the greenwood of yet another kingdom, the clanblood chieftain named Earl of the North cries out in torment from his dreams; and the warning delivered by his gift of Sight shows a packed city square with a scaffold, cordoned about with white banners and a dazzle of sunwheel blazons, and chained there for the blade of a public execution is his sworn liege, the Prince of Rathain…
Spring-Summer 5648
The prophetic dream broke on a scream of sheer rage, torn from the throat of a doomed prince.
A second, real cry became its live echo, wrung in drawn agony from the caithdein sworn to life service of liege and realm.
Jieret, Teir’s’Valerient, and Earl of the North snapped awake in Rathain with the vision’s cruel vista seared into indelible memory. Unmindful of peace, deaf to the birdsong which layered the spring dawn in the woodland outside his lodge tent, he eased himself free of his wife’s tangled limbs and arose from the blankets to stand shivering. Unsettled, naked, he sucked down breath after breath of chill air. The close, familiar smells of tanned deer hide and oiled steel, and the pitchy bite of cut balsam failed to restore him to balance. “Ath keep our sons!” he gasped through locked teeth. He could not shed his Sight of the last s’Ffalenn prince, crumpled and