Curse of the Mistwraith

‘What a superb effort, for the flat of the blade,’ he managed between whistling breaths. ‘Why not try the edge?’ But Arithon’s voice missed his usual vicious note.

Jarred back to reason, and burned by a shame that left him soiled, Lysaer strove for control. In all of his life he had never struck a helpless man; the novelty left him aching. Breathing hard, the lifted edge of the sword poised over his enemy, he said, ‘You want me to kill you!’ Sickened to discover his hand shaking, he flung away his weapon. ‘By Ath, I deny you that satisfaction. Your father’s lust for vengeance will fall on some other head than mine.’

The blade struck crosswise against the door. As the clamour of echoes dwindled, Arithon stirred and shut his eyes. A shudder swept him. That brief instant his control slipped, to reveal tearing grief and shocking desperation. Then, his mask of indifference restored, he said, ‘I sailed as first officer on board the Saeriat. The brigantine was my father’s command.’

The crown prince of Amroth drew breath, wrung by terrible understanding. Briane’s original log entry had been correct: Saeriat’s captain had burned with his brigantine. The pirate king of Karthan was dead. Here, helplessly fettered and pleading to die, was his sole heir, the last s’Ffalenn left living.

Arithon did not miss the change in his half-brother’s manner. He raised himself on one elbow, head flung back. ‘Loan me your knife. As one prince to another, I promise, the feud between s’Ffalenn and s’Ilessid will end here without any more cause for bloodshed.’

‘I cannot.’ Lysaer stared down at the mauled face of the captive and qualified with sympathy that cut. ‘Your death would ruin every man on this vessel, by my father’s decree.’

Arithon responded with damning sarcasm. ‘How admirable. Don’t neglect to mention the gold which rewards the virtue of such loyalty.’ Green eyes flicked up, pinned by lamplit highlights. ‘You preserve me solely for the king of Amroth. In his hands, I become a puppet for him to torment, a target for the hatred inspired by our mother, my father, and seven generations of captains who practised piracy before me.’ Arithon lowered his gaze. ‘I beg not to be forced to that role. Let me take my life. That will spare me and your family further shame.’

The bare simplicity of the appeal caught the crown prince like a blow. Left no breath to speak, he avoided answer by retrieving his fallen sword. He rammed the blade into the scabbard with a violence born of raw nerves. The original purpose of his visit seemed tawdry, a meaningless, arrogant charade that unmasked a hypocrite player. Unable to trust his reactions, he backed out of his half-brother’s presence and shot the bolt on the door. A few short minutes of madness had nearly brought him to murder, to sacrifice the lives of loyal sailors to end the misery of a criminal. Shaking, the crown prince of Amroth gripped the companionway rail. ‘Fatemaster’s judgement, you deserve what you get,’ he murmured to the closed door behind him.

‘Your Grace? Are you all right?’ Briane’s first officer had remained on guard in the passage, but with the lantern left in the sail-hold, darkness had hidden his presence.

Lysaer started in surprise. He had thought he was alone, and the sudden discovery of company embarrassed him. ‘I’m all right,’ he said quickly.

The first officer was too much a courtier to offer comment. Instead he fetched the light from the sail-hold, then reset both bar and lock with studied concentration.

Lysaer pushed away from the bulkhead, self-conscious in his sweat-damp silk. The sting of s’Ffalenn manipulation seemed still to pry at his thoughts. Uncertainty weakened the tenets of honour. Worse yet, he still felt pity. Arithon’s plight at the hands of the king would be unpleasant and prolonged. For the first time in his life, Lysaer fully understood his father’s deranged hatred of s’Ffalenn: to the last son left living, they were a breed of fiends.

Aware of the first officer quietly awaiting instruction, the prince raked a hand through his hair. ‘I’m all right,’ he repeated. At least his voice had stopped shaking. ‘Send down the healer, and be sharp about it. I want the prisoner drugged unconscious and this ship under sail for Port Royal before the turn of the tide.’

The first officer raised frightened eyes to his prince. ‘Your Grace, that’s not wise. Prolonged overdose of the herb is sure to cause madness.’

Lysaer raised eyes gone hard as the cut sapphires at his collar. ‘Ath’s grief, man, I know that! But insanity will surely be a mercy beside the judgement and sentence our prisoner will receive as s’Ffalenn. Let this pass beneath the Wheel be an easy one for him, for in truth, he is the last.’

The first officer looked up in surprise. ‘The pirate-king died also?’

Lysaer nodded. ‘That should please my father well enough. If the healer fears royal retribution, tell him and every man of Briane’s crew that I’ll sail along with them to intercede.’

Tracer

Daybreak glimmered through the arches of Rauven Tower and outlined the concerned face of the high mage in silver and deepest shadows. He had stopped pacing the floor. His tired eyes studied the listener who sat at his feet, but the tranced man’s form showed no stir of returning consciousness. The farseer’s features remained remote; fragile hands stayed folded and limp in the lap of his bordered robe as they had since sundown the day before.

The high mage wrestled extreme impatience. No sign hinted whether the images gathered by the listener’s delicate talent were terrible or benign.

‘What has happened to my grandson?’ The words escaped before the high mage realized he had spoken aloud; but worry allowed no chink for regret. The gaunt old sorcerer waited in stillness with the breath stopped in his throat.

The listener opened distant eyes. By the outburst and the expression on his master’s face, he became one of the few to discover how deeply the high mage loved his daughter’s s’Ffalenn bastard. He phrased his answer with extreme tact.

‘I see a place in constant motion, but lightless. It smells of canvas, mould and damp.’ But the listener mentioned nothing of the pain, hunger and thirst also encountered in that place. Why grieve a lonely man’s heart when for hours Arithon’s condition had not altered, except for a brief visit by a prince who wore the gold on blue of Amroth?

The listener closed his eyes once more. What words could tell an ageing man that his beloved grandson had tried to provoke his own death? Did phrases exist that could soften the despair behind such an act; that a king’s blind hatred for a wife’s transgressions might fall upon the hapless flesh of her son?

The listener misliked delivering ill news without a promise of hope. He slipped back into trance, braced to endure Arithon’s misery until he gleaned some small fact to lighten the grandfather’s distress. Far off, beyond the shudder of ship’s planking and the foaming splash of seawater, the high mage’s restless steps resumed.

Sunrise shone livid red through the tower windows. Gaunt as a crow in his dark robe, the high mage stopped with his heart chilled by foreboding.

The listener stiffened. Brown eyes sprang open in a face blanched like fine linen. ‘Dharkaron have mercy.’

‘The news is bad,’ said the high mage. ‘Tell me quickly.’

The listener drew a shaking breath and looked up. His hands knotted helplessly. ‘Arithon is imprisoned aboard a warship of Amroth. He tried with all his will to avoid surrender to the king’s justice alive. His effort failed. His captors have drugged him senseless. They intend to keep him passive until their ship can deliver him to Port Royal.’

The features of the high mage hardened like a carving blasted by wind. Behind blank, stunned eyes, his mind locked on the memory of a black-haired boy at the moment he mastered his first lesson of illusionary magic.

‘But it works like music!’ Alight with the wonder of discovery, a grandson’s trusting joy had absolved in an instant all the anguish of a daughter’s youthful death.

The high mage clung to the rough stone of the sill. ‘Arithon is the most gifted apprentice I have ever trained.’ The listener’s hand settled lightly on the elder man’s shoulder in comfort. The touch was shrugged off in irritation. ‘Do you know what that boy renounced when he left to accept his father’s inheritance?’

The high mage directed his words through the window, as if the breakers which crashed on the rocks beneath could hear and respond to his pain. Harshly, he continued. ‘If Arithon suffers harm, Amroth’s king will wish Fate’s Wheel could turn backward, and past actions be revoked. I will repay every cruelty, in kind, on the mind and body of his firstborn.’

‘Who is also your grandson!’ cried the listener, frantic to avert the anger behind the high mage’s threat. But the entreaty fell upon ears deaf to all but the sigh of the breeze off the sea.

Fragments

Summoned by the officer on sea watch, Amroth’s senior admiral counts sails as his returning war-fleet breasts the horizon beyond Port Royal; and when the tally reaches nine, he curses s’Ffalenn for eight more delayed, destroyed or captured…

Aboard the warship Briane a healer sucks greedily at a rum flask in a vain attempt to dull the screams as drug-induced nightmares torment the man held captive in the sail-hold…

Under misty skies, in another place, a world awaits with a prophecy five centuries old, and not even its most wise yet know that a prince and a prisoner hold all hope for deliverance between them…

II. SENTENCE

Twenty days out of South Isle, the last unaccounted warship breasted the horizon off Port Royal; Briane backed sail and dropped anchor in the harbour of Amroth’s capital. Word of her s’Ffalenn captive overturned propriety in the decorous court of the king. Shouting wildly, the nobles presiding in the council hall abandoned themselves to celebration. Briane’s first officer emerged from his audience with a dukedom; the king’s own collar of state circled his neck, and the fingers of both hands, including thumbs, were encrusted with rings bestowed by exuberant royal advisors. When word reached the streets, angry crowds gathered: the s’Ffalenn name was anathema in Amroth. Guardsmen in ceremonial regalia set about closing the stalls on Harbour Street, and the royal honour guard marched out under the crown prince’s direct command to transfer the Master of Shadow from Briane’s hold to the security of south keep’s dungeons.

‘The bastard sorcerer is mine to break,’ said the king.

The announcement brought a frown to the face of the realm’s high chancellor. His liege’s obsession for vengeance had caused events to transpire with unnatural speed. Although the facts of the prisoner’s condition were listed in the crown prince’s report, at present that document lay scattered on the carpet under the feet of a congratulatory crowd of favourites. The prince himself had been summarily dismissed to muster guardsmen; that others who were equally informed did not dare broach the subject was predictable. The king’s ire had too often broken the heads of the innocent over matters concerning the s’Ffalenn.

Within the city of Port Royal, one man alone remained oblivious to the commotion. Arithon s’Ffalenn never knew the men-at-arms who carried him through cordoned streets to the south keep of Amroth castle. Still drugged senseless, he heard none of the obscenities shouted by the boisterous mob which choked the alleys beneath the wall. The more zealous chanted still, while a smith replaced the wire which bound his hands with riveted cuffs and steel chain, without locks that might be manipulated by magecraft. When the guardsman dragged him roughly from the forge, the rabble’s screams of spite passed unnoticed; the cell which finally imprisoned the Master of Shadow was carved deep beneath the headland which sheltered Port Royal from the sea. No sound reached there but the rustle of rats. Shut in darkness behind a barred grille, the last s’Ffalenn lay on stone salted like frost with the residue of countless floods. Hours passed. The drug which had held Arithon passive for over two fortnights gradually weakened, and the first spark of consciousness returned.

He ached. His mouth burned with thirst and his eyelids seemed cast in lead. Aware, finally, of the chill which nagged at his flesh, Arithon tried to roll over. Movement touched off an explosion of pain in his head. He gasped. Overwhelmed by dizziness, he reached inward to restore his shattered self-command.

His intent escaped his will like dropped thread. Despite a master’s training under the sorcerers of Rauven, his thoughts frayed and drifted in disorder.

Something was seriously amiss.

Arithon forced himself to stillness. He started again, tried once more to engage the analytical detachment necessary to engage basic magecraft. Even small tricks of illusion required perfect integration of body and mind: a sorcerer held influence only over forces of lesser self-awareness.

But his skills answered with supreme reluctance. Distressed, Arithon fought to damp the pain which raged like flame across his forehead. Had he misjudged his balance of power? A mage who attempted to manipulate a superior force would incur backlash upon himself at the closing moment of contact. Arithon felt a small stir of fear. A mis-cast of this magnitude could not be careless error, but an act which bordered upon suicide. Why? He drew a shuddering breath.

The air smelled stale, damp, salt-sour as flats at ebb-tide. His eyes showed him vistas of blank darkness. Unable to pair either circumstance with logic, Arithon emptied his mind, compelled himself to solve his inner turmoil first. Step by step like a novice, he cut himself adrift from physical sensation. Discomfort made concentration difficult. After an interval he managed to align his mental awareness; though the exercise took an appalling amount of effort, at last he summoned mastery enough to pursue the reason.

With balanced precision, Arithon probed his physical self and compared what naturally should exist to any detail imposed from without. A cold something encircled his wrists and ankles. The pattern matched that of metal; steel. No botched enchantment had snared him here; somebody had set irons on him. Firmly Arithon turned the implications of that discovery aside. He probed deeper, dropped below the surface sensations of chill, ache and muscle cramp. The damage he found internally made him recoil. Control broke before a tide of horror, and memory returned of the desperation that had ruled his every action since capture. He had sought the clean stroke of the sword because he had not wanted to reach Amroth alive. But now, oh now, the s’Ilessid who had taken him had no right!

Arithon expelled a whistling breath, enraged by the nausea which cramped his gut. Instead of granting death, his captors had poisoned him, drugged him with an herb that ruined body and mind just to salve their king’s demand for vengeance.

Arithon stilled his anger, amazed that so simple an exercise sapped his whole will to complete. Enemies had forced him to live. He dared not allow them liberty to unravel his mind with drug madness. As a mage and a master, his responsibilities were uncompromising: the dangerous chance that his powers might be turned toward destruction must never for an instant be left to risk. Rauven’s training provided knowledge of what steps he must complete, even as the self-possession that remained to him continued irretrievably to unravel. Already the air against his skin seared his nerves to agony. His stomach clenched with nausea, and his lips stung, salty with sweat. The stress to his physical senses had him pressed already to the wretched edge of tolerance; experienced as he was with the narcotics and simples used to augment prescience, for this onslaught, he had no space at all to prepare.

Slowly, carefully, Arithon eased himself onto his back. Movement made him retch miserably. Tears spilled down his temples and his breath came in jerks. The attack subsided slowly, left his head whirling like an oil compass teased by a magnet. Steady, he thought, then willed himself to belief. Unless he maintained strict mental isolation from the bodily torment of drug withdrawal, he could neither track nor transmute the poison’s dissolution. Should he once lose his grip on self-discipline, he would drown in reasonless, animal suffering, perhaps never to recover.

Arithon shut his eyes. Raggedly he strove to isolate his spirit from the chaos which ravaged his flesh. Dizziness ruined his concentration. His muscles tightened until he gasped aloud for air. An attempt to force will over a wheeling rush of faintness caused him to black out.

He woke to torment. Doubled with cramps and shivering violently, Arithon reached for some personal scrap of self to hook back his plummeting control. The effort yielded no haven, but opened the floodgates of despair.

‘No!’ Arithon’s whisper of anguish flurried into echoes and died. His thoughts unravelled into delirium as the past rose and engulfed him, vivid, inescapable and threaded through with the cutting edges of broken dreams.

Five years vanished as mist. Arithon found himself poised once again in a moment when a decision had faced him and he had chosen without thought for bitter consequences. Called in from a snow battle with the other apprentices at Rauven, he sat on the embroidered hassock in his grandfather’s study. Ice thawed from his boots and steamed on the stone before the hearth; the smells of ink and chalk and aged parchment enfolded him in a quiet he had appreciated too little at the time.

‘I’ve heard from your father,’ the high mage opened.

Arithon looked up, unable to suppress a flush of wilful excitement. At long last, Avar, king of Karthan, had chosen to acknowledge the existence of the son raised by sorcerers at Rauven. But Arithon held himself silent. He dared not be rude before the high mage.

The sorcerer regarded the boy at his feet with dark, passionless eyes. ‘Your father has no heir. He asks my leave to name you his successor.’ The high mage held up a hand and smiled, forestalling Arithon’s rush to reply. ‘I’ve already answered. You will have two years to decide for yourself.’

Arithon forgot courtesy. ‘But I know now!’ Often he had dreamed of inheriting his father’s crown. ‘I’ll go to Karthan, use magecraft to free the waters beneath the sand and help the land become green again. With grain growing in the fields, the need for piracy and bloodshed will be ended. Then s’Ffalenn and s’Ilessid can stop their feuding.’

‘My boy, that is a worthy ambition.’ The high mage’s voice remained reserved. ‘But you must not be hasty. Your talents are music and sorcery. Consider these, for you have great potential. A king has no time for such arts. As a man who holds judgement over others, his life belongs wholly to his subjects.’

The high mage’s warning rolled like thunder through Arithon’s dreaming mind. Fool! he raged at his younger self, you’ll go only to fail. But the drug-vision broke like storm-surf, battering protest asunder. The boy felt himself whirled ahead to another time as he entered the selfsame chamber. Then his interval of decision had passed and he knelt before the high mage to renounce the home he had known and loved for twenty years.

‘How can I stay?’ Arithon found himself saying, for the mastery he had earned had left him wiser. ‘How can I remain at Rauven studying music and books, when my father’s people, and mine, must send husbands and sons to kill for bare sustenance? How dare I ignore such need? I might bring Karthan hope of lasting peace.’

Arithon looked up at the high mage’s face and there read terrible understanding. Heed your heart, his present, drug-tortured awareness pleaded. Forget kingship Abjure your father’s inheritance. Karthan might be made fertile from shore to shore, but Amroth will never be weaned from hatred. Would you suffer s’Ilessid vengeance for your mother’s broken marriage vows?

Yet time rippled out of focus once again. Arithon heard himself utter an oath of acceptance, the strong, calloused hands of his father resting on his dark head. He rose to his feet aflame with pride and purpose, and before the weather-creased eyes of Karthan’s captains, accepted Avar’s sword as token of his heirship.

The weapon was rarely beautiful. Memory of smoke-dark steel chilled Arithon’s palms, and the chased silver inscription which twined the length of the blade caught the breath in his throat. Legend held that his father’s sword had been fashioned by hands more skilled than man’s; that moment, Arithon believed the tale. His decision became difficult to complete.

He knelt at once before the high mage. The emerald in the sword hilt glimmered green fire as he laid the weapon flat at the sorcerer’s feet. ‘Let this blade remain at Rauven to seal my pledge. I go to restore peace in Karthan.’

Arithon stood carefully, afraid to look upon his father’s face; afraid of the anger he might find there. But Karthan’s captains raised a great cheer, and Avar smiled upon his heir with something more than approval. At the time, Arithon barely heard the parting words of the sorcerer who had raised him. Now, they resounded like the horn-call of Dharkaron, mocking ruined hopes and racking him through with the knowledge of present circumstance.

‘My grandson, you chose responsibility above your inner talents. That is a difficult turning. Win or lose, you give yourself in service to others. Although men might be inspired by a bard or enchanter, they cannot be led by one. The master’s mysteries you have learned at Rauven must never be used for political expedience, however pressing the temptation. You must guide your kingdom to the same harmonic balance you once would have striven to find in those gifts you now renounce. The ballad you write, the craft you cast, must henceforth be sought in the land and the hearts of Karthan. Ath bless your efforts.’

Torn from the vision of his grandfather’s final embrace, Arithon strove to stem the forward rush of time. But the reins of delirium ripped fate from his grasp. Again he sailed, and again he endured Karthan’s wretched poverty. He wept to relive the silent anguish of the widows when the casualty lists were read, and tears spilled silver down cheeks too proud to hide the face of grief.

Arithon shouted, tormented by the image of a fleet under the leopard banner of s’Ffalenn. ‘Stop them! Somebody stop them!’ Vast, unreasoning rage lent him a giant’s proportions. He reached out with hands the size of mountains and tried to fence the brigantines in the harbour. There were sons, fathers, and brothers on board who would never return. But wind swelled the dirt-red sails; the vessels slipped free of fingers robbed of strength.

Transformation of Karthan’s spoiled farmlands had proceeded too slowly to bring rain: one last voyage had been undertaken to beg Rauven for the aid of another mage. Tortured by cruel remorse, Arithon smelled blood and murder on his flesh. He screamed aloud within the confines of his cell, while the battle that had claimed his father’s life and his own freedom opened like a wound in his mind. Sucked into a vortex of violence, cut by a guilt that seared him blind, Arithon screamed again. ‘I used sorcery, as Ath is my witness. But never directly to murder. Not even to spare my liege lord.’

His cries brought guards. The cell door crashed back, rending the darkness with echoes. The captain of the king’s halberdiers peered down at the prisoner’s contorted, quivering frame. ‘Dharkaron’s vengeance, he’s raving.’

Arithon’s eyes flicked open, lightlessly black under the lantern. Men bent over him. Mail and gold braid hung a starfield of reflections above his head. His whole sight filled with weapons forged for killing; strapped to shoulder, wrist and belt, they shone fiery as the gates of the damned. Hands in scale gauntlets reached out, touched his sweating skin.