Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ he take harm from Lysaer’s miscalled judgments, I don’t think I could stand it. Let Dharkaron Avenger redress his wronged feelings. I had to send him back to his people.”

      “You did right,” Dakar soothed. “Lord Jieret will go, and soon after, the Khetienn will sail.”

      An interval passed without speech. Arithon tipped back his tangled head and rested against the worn stone of the bastion. The steep, angled features of his ancestry carved sharper in the uncertain scrawl of deep shadows. “If Cattrick succeeds, we’ll have ships,” he murmured, his ongoing effort to control his fraught nerves sketched in pained creases around his eyes. “The clans can be taken to safety. We only have to find the Paravians.” His hope was a refuge from the drive of Desh-thiere’s curse behind the strong wardspells that masked them.

      In the dimness, Dakar averted his face. Ill practiced at patience, he fiddled with his sleeve cuffs, then launched on a sharp change in subject. “What will you do about Jieret’s new augury?”

      “Ignore it, unless the Khetienn’s search fails.” Arithon’s bitterness scraped through like old rust. “What can I do anyway? My mage-sight’s still blind. Given your help, I couldn’t even scry through to find a sane outcome in Vastmark. Ath knows, since that blunder, naught’s changed.”

      “Stop,” Dakar snapped. “You can’t let your past write the future.” Like ill omen, the fading last flame in the torch dipped to an ember and died. This moment, Dakar found no comfort in darkness. “Right now you would do best by sleeping,” he advised.

      An oath ripped back in sharp, precise syllables. Bedding rustled. Arithon settled prostrate on the cot. His limbs did not move, but through mage-sight, Dakar sensed his eyes were still open. When an hour passed, and his needling conscience kept him wakeful, he loosed a soft word in resignation.

      The spidered threads of the spell already prepared between Dakar’s hands enfolded his consent on a thought. The wide, tortured gaze became masked by the sweep of black lashes. Tight breathing steadied. Arithon s’Ffalenn relaxed fully at last, the unquiet gnaw of his lacerated spirit eased back into dreamless rest.

      Weary, aching, the Mad Prophet arose from long vigil. He shuffled his way to the keep’s narrow doorway, and in the drawing pull of the earth through his bone marrow, measured the interval before dawn. Another figure bulked dark alongside the drum tower’s threshold. Lord Jieret lay curled there, his great sword at hand, and his hawk features set in repose. A contradictory tautness knit through his body warned of the fact he was wakeful. Dakar chose not to speak, but stepped out, his intent to seek solitude and settle drawn nerves on the heights overlooking the sea.

      A grip like fixed iron trapped his ankle. He tripped, crashed flat, and bit back an outraged howl as his cheek slapped into a mud puddle. Then outcry became moot. Rathain’s caithdein rolled over his felled form and pinned him facedown in the dirt. A predatory hand vised his nape and a knife bit a slanting, cold line across the pouched skin of his throat. Dakar gasped. Contact with the blade shot a dull jolt of misery through his mage-sense. The kept steel of its edge still shrilled with the strung resonance of despair, dark imprint of a crown prince’s blood oath.

      “Jieret,” he grunted. “For pity, let up.”

      “Ath, you’ve a fine sense of arrogance to try and keep me from my liege’s confidence!” But the hold loosened. The ugly touch of the knife blade lifted. Lord Jieret backed off and squatted on his haunches while his victim rolled upright and swiped a slurry of grime from his beard.

      “You were eavesdropping,” the Mad Prophet accused, plaintive.

      “Aye, and where else does any caithdein sleep, but across his sworn prince’s threshold?” Met by affront, the clan chieftain muffled a cough of laughter behind his wrist. “Dharkaron’s immortal bollocks, you forget. My forefathers were standing down testy s’Ffalenn princes while yours were still pissing in swaddling bands.”

      Dakar blotted his moist face with napped cuffs, spat something gritty, and forcibly noosed back his temper. “You couldn’t have helped. And your suspicions are wasted. I’m no longer Arithon’s enemy.”

      “Does that even signify?” Jieret snicked his knife back home in its sheath, careful to damp the steel silent. “I sat with my liege through the night when my people died for him at Tal Quorin. Again, the time he was forced to burn the trade fleet at Minderl Bay. I’ve seen how he weeps for the nightmares. I know his fear, that the ones he’s come to love will lose their lives.” All purpose, he finished, “My place is to stand at his side. Caith d’ein, shadow behind the throne.”

      “I’m unlikely to test his given will on that matter,” said Dakar. “He wants you safely back in Rathain. And he’s right. You can’t steward his realm from the uncharted sea aboard his brigantine.”

      Jieret looked away through a tigerish pause, the jut of his profile outthrust against the film of fine mist. “What do you know that you aren’t saying, prophet?”

      “Fiends plague, your whole line was bred to be difficult!” Dakar plowed mulishly erect. “Before you flattened me, I’d planned to take a long walk. The rocks here are practiced at minding themselves, and your liege is secure. I set wards.”

      The clan chief rose also, his oiled stride shortened to pace the Mad Prophet’s bobbling progress. The unlikely pair crossed the compound, captured in mismatched reflection through the silver-plate scattering of puddles. Beyond the gapped walls, the cliff path lay fogbound, shadowed in the refrain of wild surf hewing the obdurate shoreline.

      When the sailhand huddled wakeful by the notch to the harbor failed to challenge their passage, Jieret raised gingery eyebrows. “You’ve set spells of concealment? What do you fear? Or do you already know from the Fellowship Sorcerers that Arithon’s course carries risk?”

      “Damn you for being your mother’s son after all. She always guessed far too much.” Dakar snatched an irritable swat at his nape where a bloodsucking insect had bitten. “I share some wider knowledge from Sethvir of Althain, and Arithon as well, since the Paravian charts he was given to steer by were lent for his use by the Sorcerer.”

      The Mad Prophet stalled, hopeful, while the grate of his tread over chipped rock and gravel silenced crickets, and the mist silted droplets in his hair. Jieret ranged beside him, his panther’s stride soundless, and his expectancy taut as strung wire.

      “Shark,” Dakar ripped out. “One taste of blood, you keep circling.” He swiped past the dripping boughs of a cedar and resumed without apology for his companion’s adroit duck to avoid a slap in the chest. “Very well, yes, there’s more danger than you know, even granted your heritage as clanblood.” The Mad Prophet found a boulder, damp but sheltered from the wind. He sat to explain the gift of the grand earth link ceded to the Sorcerer Sethvir by Athera’s last guardian centaur.

      “The network ties the Sorcerer’s consciousness to everything on Athera, animate life or still matter. But the Seven have postulated the connection may hold selective blind spots. Its weave could be subject to guarding wards set by the old races themselves.” Dakar stabbed fleshy fingers toward the masked edge of the horizon. “The evidence lies in default. The Paravians appear to have vanished from Ath’s creation. And yet, though diminished, through strands and deep auguries, their presence still figures in the weave of Athera’s life pattern.”

      Simple words, to frame this world’s penultimate mystery. Dakar paused in sorrowful reflection, his brows snarled down above his pug nose, and his chin bristled out beneath his beard. What eluded the arcane acts of scrying СКАЧАТЬ