Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light

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 still in the swift, welling spurt of his life’s blood.

“Another augury?” The bedding rustled. A lavish fall of hair stroked his back, then a cheek, laid against his taut shoulder; his wife, arisen behind him, to link calming hands at his waist.

His tension would tell her the portent was ugly. Too often, in sleep, the prescient vision he inherited from his father warned him of death and trouble.

Jieret raked long fingers through his ginger beard. He braced his nerve, spun, and enfolded his lady into his possessive embrace. “I’m sorry, dove.” The soft, misted peace of the greenwood seemed suddenly, desperately precious. “I shall have to travel very far, very fast. The life of our prince is at stake.”

She would not question his judgment, not for that. Arithon s’Ffalenn was the last of Rathain’s royal line. Should he die with no heir, his feal clansmen would forfeit all hope to reclaim their birthright.

Feithan’s fingers unclasped, brushed down Jieret’s flanks, and withdrew. “How much spare clothing will you carry?” She caught up the blanket, still warm from their sleeping, and spread it to pack his necessities.

Jieret bent, caught her wrists, and marveled as always. The strength in her was a subtle thing, her bones like a sparrow’s in his hands, which were broad and corded beyond his youthful years from relentless seasons of fighting. Their eyes met and shared mute appeal. “I’ll take weapons and the leathers on my back, and you, first of all.” A smile turned his lips. The expression softened the fierce planes of his face, and offset the hawk bridge of his nose. “Leave the blanket.”

He rocked her against his chest, his touch tender. An urgency he could scarcely contain spoke of the perils he must weather on the solitary trek that would take him to Tysan’s western shore. Bounties were still paid for captured clansmen. Headhunters plied the wilds in bands, their tracking dogs combing the thickets. Towns and trade roads were no less a hazard, choked with informers and guardsmen sent out recruiting to replenish the troops lost in Vastmark.

The wife in Jieret’s arms would not speak of the risks. Strong as the generations of survivors who had bred her, she absorbed his need, then massaged to ease his old scars with skilled hands, until he kissed her and slipped free to dress.

Jieret s’Valerient, called Red-beard, was in that hour twenty-one years of age. Supple, self-reliant, clean limbed as the deer he ran down in the hunt, he was rangy and tall, a being tanned out of oak bark. War and early losses had lent his hazel eyes more than a touch of gray flint. Jieret’s inheritance of the caithdein’s title had fallen to him during childhood, both his parents and four sisters slain in one day by town troops on the banks of Tal Quorin. On his wrist, even then, his first badge of achievement: the straight, fine scar from the knife cut which bound him lifelong to the honor of blood pact with his prince.

Proud of his rugged courage, too shrewd to voice fear, Feithan reached beneath their mattress of spruce boughs and tossed him his worn, quilloned knife.

She smiled, a nip of white teeth. “The sooner you go, the better the chance you’ll be back to my lodge before autumn.”

Then she folded slim knees behind her crossed arms and watched him bind on sheath and sword belt. If she wept, her tears were well masked behind tangles of ebony hair. Not on her last breath would she voice her disappointment. If her young husband did not return, his line must live on in the child she knew to be growing within her. She would endure, no less than any other clan woman widowed in a sudden, bloody raid.

Her husband was the oathsworn caithdein of Rathain, his birthright an iron bond of trust. The needs of kingdom and prince must come first, ahead of survival and family.

Feithan held no rancor. If the Teir’s’Ffalenn died, no clanborn babe in Rathain could have peace. The future would be kingless, while the townsmen continued their centuries-old practice of extirpation. Headhunters would keep sewing scalps of clan victims as trophy fringe on their saddlecloths, until at last the survivors dwindled, their irreplaceable old bloodlines too thinned by loss to sustain.

“Go in grace, my lord husband,” were the last words she said, as her man kissed her lips and stepped out.

Three days on foot through his native glens in Strakewood saw Lord Jieret to the shores of Instrell Bay. There, a bribe to a Westfen fisherman secured his safe crossing to Atainia. From landfall just north of the trade port of Lorn, Jieret faced an overland journey of a hundred and fifty leagues. Anviled, rocky ridges arose off the coast, the country between summits guttered in dry gulches, and the scrub thorn which clawed stunted footholds in the sands of the Bittern Desert.

Here, where a man made a target against the luminous sky, Jieret kept to the gullies. Sweat painted tracks through his coat of rimed dust. He jogged, walked, jogged on again, refusing to measure the odds that his errand was already futile.

The winter storms had abated. Any day, the Master of Shadow would raise sail to ply the world’s uncharted waters. He would seek the fabled continent beyond the Westland Sea, and finally know if Athera held a refuge beyond reach of the Mistwraith’s curse.

The Sorcerer, Sethvir, Warden of Althain could have named Prince Arithon’s location. Yet at dusk on spring equinox, when Jieret passed his tower, the Fellowship held convocation. Where Sorcerers worked, the elements paid uncanny homage. The night air seemed charged to crystalline clarity, the land lidded under a transparent sky with its winds preternaturally silenced. Ozone tinged the silvered glow which speared in beams from the keep’s topmost arrow slits, and earth itself seemed to ring to the dance of ancient arcane rhythms. Though the clans did not share the widespread fear in the towns toward the powers called from natural forces, the man was a fool who held no mortal dread of disrupting the Sorcerers’ conjury.

Dawn saw Jieret on his way. His lanky stride ate the distance, through the rocky, slabbed washes bedded with black sand, puddled still from the snowmelt off the lava crags to the north. Before the ford, he veered west, to give the trade roads to Isaer wide berth. He kept to ditches and hedgerows through the flax bogs and farmlands, and moved softly by night where the headhunters scoured the flats. A stolen horse saw him to cover in the tangled stands of spruce which patchworked the Thaldein foothills.

There, better mounted by clansmen from Tysan, he galloped south with the relays who carried news between their fugitive enclaves in Camris.

The first scouts insisted the Master of Shadow would have left his winter haven at Corith.

Flanked by a campfire, the first cooked meat in his belly since the desert, and his undone braid fanned in hanks upon shoulders still glazed from a wash in a freshet, Jieret said, “I know that.” The bronze bristle of his jaw thrust out and hardened. “I have to try anyway.”

The scout who lounged across from him spat out the stem of sweetgrass he had meticulously used to scrub his teeth. “Fiends plague, then. Keep your bad news to yourself. We’ve heard enough already from Avenor to turn our hearts sore with grief.”

Every restive sinew in Jieret’s body coiled tense. “What’s happened?” A late-singing mockingbird caroled through the gloom with a sweet and incongruous tranquillity. “What has Lysaer s’Ilessid done now?”

The scout spat into the embers and spoke, and amid the fragrant, piney gloom beneath the Thaldeins, Jieret Red-beard first heard of the edict which endorsed live capture and slavery.

“Spring equinox has passed, with the ultimatum given,” the scout finished off in bitten rage. “Our Lord Maenol would never swear, but sent the false prince his black arrow proclaiming no quarter.”

Lysaer’s life, among the clans who by right should grant him fealty, was now irrevocably called forfeit. Jieret had no words. The event posed a vicious and unnatural tragedy, a warping of tradition provoked at its root by the evil of the Mistwraith’s curse.

The breeze carried the odd chill, breathed down from the snowfields, bathed pristine white under starlight. Jieret felt as if the cold inside had closed stealthy knuckles around the heart. He sat, eyes shut, and his knees clamped behind his clasped hands. “Events have turned grim in ways even Ath could scarce believe. How are you set when the headhunters start the spring forays?”

“Well enough.” The scout shrugged. “Troops and supplies are depleted since Vastmark. We’ll have a year, maybe two, before Lysaer’s Alliance regroups, but mark me. Then we’ll see sorrows.”

For a moment, like the drawn-out whisper of old grief, the wind stroked through the greening briar. Then the scout tipped his graying head. “You’ll need to go back,” he urged, gentle. “Our people will carry your message from here. No better can be done. The Khetienn will have sailed. If she has, your wait for your prince could be lengthy.”

The stiff pause came freighted with facts left unspoken: that whether or not the Master of Shadow had passed beyond reach, the headhunters’ leagues in Rathain were ever in Lysaer’s close confidence. The defeats freshly suffered at Arithon’s hand, then the loss of their late captain Pesquil by Jieret’s own arrow, had fanned their clamor for vengeance to fresh fervor.

“You see what must happen,” the scout said in staid logic. “Skannt’s going to claim sanction from Etarra’s fat mayor to harrow Rathain’s feal clans the same way.”

“I know that.” Jieret erupted in strung nerves, reached his feet, and resisted the blind urge to slam his fist into a tree. “Ath, for chained slavery? The guild merchants will cheer and donate the coin to forge manacles. Morality’s no deterrent. For years now, Etarrans have used our child captives as forced labor.” His back to the fire, he seemed a man racked, the passage of each breath made difficult. “I have to go on. What I know must not wait. Nor should my liege hear my word at second hand.”

By the embers, the scout swore in sympathy.

Forced to the crux of a terrible decision, Jieret summed up troubled thoughts. “My clans are more to me than the spirit in my body, but I am not irreplaceable. The Fellowship can appoint a new caithdein for Rathain if my liege is not at hand to make his choice. My spokesman, Deshir’s former war captain, Caolle, would agree. He knows the warning I bring is an augury which bears on Prince Arithon’s life.”

The last of his line, this fugitive Teir’s’Ffalenn; threat to him ended all argument.

“Ath guard your way, then,” the scout said, blunt as hammered metal. “May the clans in the south speed your journey.”

Jieret crossed the Thaldein passes, dismissed his friendly escort, and grew lean and browned from hiding in ditches through the Valendale’s sun-drenched, plowed farmsteads. He took no careless step. But headhunters picked up his trail west of Cainford. He left five hounds dead, and two men, and limped on with bound ribs and a calf with a festering dog bite. The hedge witch he challenged at knifepoint for healing cursed his barbarian tongue, then tried to sell him an amulet snagged together from squirrel skin and the strung vertebra of a grouse.

Jieret refused her the price of a cut lock of his bronze hair.

“‘Twould be useful for bird snares,” the crone muttered. She sniffled over her sticky decoction, then knotted a bandage over an ill-smelling poultice with vindictive and sharp ferocity.

“I like the birds free, and myself most of all.” Jieret wanted to flinch at her handling, but dared not, with his dagger point pressed to her back. The crone’s hovel had nesting sparrows in its eaves, and the pot on her brazier leaked. Poverty and townborn contempt for her simples had leached all her pride in her trade. Jieret harbored the cynical suspicion that any offering from his person would be sold back to headhunters by nightfall, twined into a tracking spell to trace him.

Despite his need, the crone put a grudge in her remedies. His leg swelled and ached. Through curses of agony, he tore the dressing away and soaked off the salves in a stream. Feverish, limping, he thrashed his way south through the brush. A second pack of tracking dogs winded his scent and burst into yammering tongue. Freshly mounted, their masters tried to run him to earth against the guard spells of a grimward, which no man living might cross. There, he might have perished, inadvertently killed by Fellowship defenses set to keep trespassers from harm.

But clan hunters from Taerlin heard the commotion and spirited him downstream in a boat. Safe at last under Caithwood’s dense cover, cosseted by a girl with cool hands, he slept off his lingering wound sickness.

Six weeks, since he had left his wife in Deshir. Early spring exchanged lace-worked blossom and bud for the sumptuous mantle of summer. On the sandy neck of Mainmere Bay, Jieret was met by the clan chief whose ancestral seat lay in ruins across silvered waters. She had ridden hard to bear him a message, the scout in her company said.

The hour was dusk, the sky, cloudless azure. Jieret crouched by her campfire under the eaves of scrub maples and spat out the bones of the rock bass netted for supper. While thrushes fluted clear notes through the boughs, and the deer emerged to nibble the verge of the bogs, he regarded the wizened little duchess who bore ancient title to Mainmere. She watched him eat, her gnarled hands folded. Along with age, she wore callus from sword and from bridle rein. The leathers belted to her waist were a man’s, and shaded under the fans of white lashes, her eyes met his own with stark pity.

“What’s wrong?” Against the soft, sustained lisp of the breeze, Jieret sounded boisterous and unseasoned.

Lady Kellis touched the battered satchel by her knee. “A documented accusation by Avenor, made against your sanctioned prince.” She resumed in her husked, worn alto. “My lord Maenol withheld this one writ from the packet, for your hand alone, he insisted. By your sworn duty, this becomes your legal charge as caithdein of Rathain.”