Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light

“Please, no lord! I dare not allow you,” the groom stammered, red-faced. The rest of the yard boys had wisely made themselves scarce. “Our Master of Horse would see me thrashed bloody if he catches me slacking my duties.”

“He’ll thrash you anyway,” Mearn argued. “Or does he not care if your charges fly loose?” He pursed his narrow lips in disgust and emitted a piercing, high whistle. His bitch hound howled in chorus with the noise, but the charger, obedient, stopped its clattering flight. It poised blowing, its high neck arched and its ears swiveled back, listening to its master’s approach.

Mearn’s grumbling irritation changed to endearments. He stroked the bay’s glossy shoulder. Then he laughed and spoke a command through the redoubled yaps of his hounds.

The horse turned, dealt him a companionable shove, then trailed him like a puppy as he recrossed the stable yard.

“Fetch out my saddle, and then get you gone!” Mearn called to the fidgety groom. “This gelding never did like a town-whelped runt. Likely you’d just find your skinny butt nipped as you tried to fasten his girth.” Suddenly all pared efficiency, he tossed his blazoned saddlecloth over the horse’s back. As the boy still hovered, he added, “Hurry on! Do you think the deer will wait while you stand there?”

Minutes later, Mearn vaulted astride, shouted his hounds to heel, and wheeled his mount through the gate. A razor-edged irony whetted his smile.

As his three older brothers would laugh themselves prostrate to explain, he held stag hunts in passionate contempt. His purpose in plying the wilds alone was for game and stakes far larger, dangerous enough that he risked his life as forfeit.

Belying even the semblance of secrecy, Mearn made his racketing, flamboyant departure through the moil of the early-spring market. Chaos surged in his wake. Curs barked, and carriages swerved, and crated sows squealed in their wagon beds. Even the bored guards on Avenor’s inland battlement were relieved to see his turmoil pass the gates.

He reined off the muddy road into the shrinking, gray mounds of old snowdrifts. The bare, tangled boughs of the oak forests engulfed his whipping scarlet horsecloth and his laughing whoops to his horse. The baying of his hounds rode the land breeze, until distance mellowed that also. The s’Brydion line was clanbred, barbaric to the bone. Lysaer’s captains agreed that their envoy from Alestron was unlikely to be troubled by his murdering, woodland kindred, even had any of Tysan’s blood chieftains dared to skulk in the bogs within reach of Avenor’s armed might.

The spring was too new for greenery. Ice still scabbed the north sides of the dales, and the air held its chill like a miser. What warmth kissed Mearn’s shoulders was borrowed from the sun, half-mantled in streamers of cloud. Their shadows flowed like blown soot across the valleys, and rinsed the bright glints from the streamlets. Mearn gave on his reins, let his horse and his hounds drink the wind at a run, as man and beast might to celebrate life as frost loosed its hold on black earth.

He carved further inland, his horse settled to a trot, through deeper thickets and trackless mires, beyond range of Lysaer’s royal foresters. His hounds coursed ahead. If their quarry was not always a swift-running deer, their master scarcely cared. The hound couple badgered any game they could flush. Wild lynx, or red fox, no boon to their training, they were left to track as they pleased, and only whipped off the scent if their hunt veered them northward or south.

Due east, Mearn was bound, his brother’s ducal blazon now mantled beneath the drab folds of his cloak.

By noon, under pallid gold sunlight, he reached a bare hillock, scattered with wind-stripped, buff grass. He drew rein there, dismounted, loosened his girth. His stag hounds flopped, panting, to snap at the tickle of dried seed heads as though they were bothered by flies. The bitch whined. The horse shook its mane and rubbed its sweated headstall against Mearn’s leather-clad hip.

He shoved back the gelding’s nose with a gently spoken epithet, all trace of roguish pleasure erased from his taut, narrow features. One year and events had changed him. His quick mind and observant eye were bent now toward other pursuits than tumbling loose ladies and gambling. The breath of the breeze fanned a chill on his neck, the lovelock he had worn since his first growth of beard shorn off in cold purpose since Vastmark.

A dove called, mournful, from a thicket.

Mearn swung about at the sound, raised the corner of his cloak, and unveiled the ducal blazon. Then he found himself a dry, flat rock in a cranny, and sat out of the wind while his horse grazed.

A slow interval passed, with Mearn touched to prickles by the certain awareness that he was being watched from all angles. Then, with no ceremony, a young man moved upslope to meet him. His approach scarcely woke any sound from dry grasses. He wore undyed leathers and a vest with dark lacing. He carried bow, knife, and sword as if weapons were natural as flesh. Large framed, deliberate, he had a step like a wary king stag’s. His light eyes, never still, swept the hillock behind, then Mearn, and measured him down to his boot soles. On that day, the high chieftain of Tysan’s outlawed clansmen was nineteen, one year shy as the old law still reckoned manhood.

“Lord Maenol, Teir s’Gannley, caithdein of Tysan,” Mearn greeted. He arose, inclined his head in respect, and shared grief for the grandson, whose titles and inheritance now burdened his young shoulders through Lysaer’s murder of his predecessor.

Unlike the deceased Lady Maenalle, the heir returned neither welcome nor greeting. He stood, chin tilted, silent, while the gusts flicked the laces on his clothing.

No whit less stubborn, Mearn met that challenge with a sheared, bright-edged smile. If the s’Brydion ancestral stronghold had withstood the wars of the uprising; if his family owed fealty to another kingdom and another chieftain on the farthest shore of the continent, the ways of charter law and the old codes of honor were still held in common with Tysan’s clans in Tysan. Shared trust ran deep beyond words.

“You have taken an unmentionable risk to come here,” the boy said at last in his startling, mellow baritone.

“I bear unmentionable tidings,” Mearn countered. “And a packet, bound for Arithon, sewn in the lining of my saddlecloth. I went through Sithaer itself to keep that from the handling of Lysaer’s overzealous pack of grooms.” He added, “You’ll want to read the contents before you send them on. Your clans are the ones most threatened.”

Tysan’s young caithdein took that ominous statement in stride; such troubles were scarcely new. His own parents had fallen to headhunters. “It’s risky to be sending late dispatches across,” he pointed out, vexed more for the snags in the timing. “Arithon plans to sail as soon as the weather settles.”

Small need to dwell on the risk of disaster, if their covert crossings to his island haven at Corith were 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.

Three Warnings (#ulink_be23a240-db98-5db8-af7d-dbf63c7d617f)

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…

II. Fugitive Prince (#ulink_e71d3e0d-cea4-5fb4-81c0-d9319af00f81)

Spring-Summer 5648

The prophetic dream broke on a scream of sheer rage, torn from the throat of a doomed prince.