Fugitive Prince.

Janny Wurts.

Acknowledgments.

This book would not be in material form without the help of so many, who gave: Jeff Watson, Mickey Zucker Reicheft, Jonathan Matson, John Silbersack, Caitlin Biasdell & Jane Johnson, Sara & Bob Schwager, Pieta Pentr Lazaris; Don Maitz, my long-suffering husbandmand not least, many hundreds of trees.

Thirty-five thousand marched to war.

Their weeping widows all died poor.

Swords against Darkness, reap for Light Fell Shadow's Prince and rend false night.

--verse of a marching song from the campaign of Dier Kenton Vale.

Third Age 5647.

I. Fionn Areth.

Strong arms closed and locked around Elaira's slim shoulders.

Fingers strengthened by the sword and sensitized to a master- bard's arts tightened against her back. The dark-haired, driven man who cradled her surrendered at last to his blazing crest of pas- sion. His lips softened against hers, the restraint, the control, the terri- ble doubts which bound him consumed all at once in a rush of tender need. She responded, melted. Her being exploded into sensation like fire and flight. At one with the prince who had captured her heart, her spirit knew again that single, suspended moment, with its promise of inexpressible joy.

Then the fulfillment of union snapped shy of release, doomed ever to fall short of consummation by the rough intervention of fate. This time, a harried, insistent pounding snapped the dream into frag- mented memory.

The small-boned enchantress entangled in threadbare quilts jerked out of her fretful sleep. A muted cry escaped her. Chilled in the drafts which flowed over the sill of an unglazed croft window, she fought to regain full awareness. Once again, she grappled the irreversible real- ity: Merior's mild sea winds and the Prince of Rathain lay two years removed in her past.

Elaira squeezed her eyes shut against the ache. Instead of the muf- fled boom of breakers creaming against stainless sands, the ferocious, JANNY WUI~TS.

clawing breath of winter whined over the white-mantled da Araethura.

Yesterday'~ blizzard had delivered a biting, cold night.

Over the open glens, through stands of scrub oak and acro rustling flats of frozen marsh, the ice whipped in driven bursts, tie the ill-fitted shutters of her cottage at the fringe of the moor.

tals found the cracks, tapped at the lintels, and fanned a frosted silver across the leaked bit of moonlight admitted through the chink. While the eddies moaned and clawed past the beams.

eaves, and the spent tang of ash cornmingled with the fragrance cedar and frost-damp miasma of moldered thatch, Elaira exh~ deep breath. Given time, the runaway pound of her heart woul~ side.

She untangled the fist still clenched through a coil of aubur~ Too many times she awakened like this, struggling against the urge to weep, while the ripping, slow agony of Arithon's m~ threatened to stop her will to live. In desperation, against the vc the Koriani Order which tied her lifelong to a cellbate servic refuge from despair became the fiercely guarded shelter of he: tude.

Tonight, even that grace was forfeit. The disturbance whic~ torn her from lacerating dreams came again, the insistent hamr a fist on wood.

There would be some emergency, of course. Elaira grumt filthy phrase in the gutter vernacular of her childhood and kick her tatty layers of quilts. "Fatemaster's two-eyed vigilance! D~ all think I'm deaf as a post?"

Whoever pounded for admittance, the abuse threatened to the tacked strips of leather that hung her rickety door.

Sped by awareness that she lacked any tools for small carp Elaira heaved up from her hoarded nest of warmth amid th~ clothes. The shock of cold planks against her bare soles dissolv~ invective to a gasp. She had retired unclothed, since yesteJ storm had soaked through to her shift. Through forced delay ~ fumbled past the clammy folds of her cloak to snatch the first su garment from its peg, the hammering gained a fresh urgency.

"Fiends plague!" The dank cloak would just have to serve.

ever you are, I don't dispense remedies naked!"

Elaira bundled the soggy wool over her shoulders. She closed ering fingers to secure the cloth under her chin, then shot the b~ stepped back as the door swung inward.

A dazzle of moonlight flooded through. The collapse of th~ left pocketed across her threshold doused her bare ankles in snow.

Elaira yelped and leaped back. Her cloak caught in an eddy of wind, snagged the latch, and tugged itself free of her grasp.

The herder boy outside froze in startlement, saucer eyes pinned to the slide of the wool down the firm, naked swell of her breast.

Elaira managed the grace not to laugh at his expression. She caught the errant wool and snugged it back up to her collarbones. "Are you going to come in?" she asked with mild acerbity. "Or will you just stand 'til you freeze with your mouth hanging open?"

The shepherd boy shut his baby-skinned jaw with a click. Too young for subterfuge, still innocent enough to flush to the roots of his tangled hair, he ventured a slurred apology behind the snagged hem of his sleeve.

"Of course there's trouble," Elaira said more gently. "You've a year yet to grow before you start calling on ladies for that sort of randy interest, yes?"

The boy shrank and turned redder. Since he was also frightened enough to bolt back into the night, the enchantress caught his arm in a grip like fixed shackles. She bundled him inside, wise enough to slam the door before she plonked him on the stool by the hearth and let him go.

"Who's fallen sick?" she demanded, brisk enough to shock through his stunned silence. She groped meantime across darkness to sort through the pile of last night's discarded clothing. The fire had done its usual and gone out. Gusts hissed down the cottage's flue and scattered ash across the stone apron where her herbal still rested, a dismantled glint of burnished copper and glass reflecting a meticu- lous upkeep. Seized through by a shiver, Elaira drew on the icy linen layers of her underthings, then laced the stiffened leather of her leg- gings overtop.

The herdboy huddled under mufflers on her stool and could not seem to find his tongue.

"Don't say no one's sick," Elaira murmured through chattering teeth as she turned her back, cast off the cloak, and wormed into the dank, frowsty cloth of her shift. The hem which had been dripping as she drifted off to sleep now crackled with thin, crusted ice.

"My aunt," mumbled the boy. He stared at his toes, unaware of the stockyard pungency of goat carried inside on his clothing. "She's in childbed. The midwife sent me to fetch you."

Burrowed into her tunic and struggling with numbed hands to hook the looped leather fastenings, Elaira said, "How long since her labor pains started?"

"Since just after midda3~" the boy replied, miserable. "I cou]

run. Snow's piled too deep." He worried his chapped lip with st teeth. "Will she die, do you think?"

"I'll try not to let her." By reflex, Elaira stilled her thoughts.

used the trained edge of her talents to sound the night for the ti Past midnight, she sensed. The tidal pull of the full moon just dip past the arc of the zenith. She crouched to retrieve the fleece boots had kicked off and left where they fell. One hid in deep shac under the worktable, scattered still with oddments of tin stam with the sigils for fiend bane. The mate perversely eluded her. '

you know if her water had broken when you left?"

"Aye, so," the boy affirmed in his broad-voweled grassla dialect. "That's why the midwife would have ye. The birthing's g hard, and the caul broke and let forth an unlucky color, so she said Elaira caught a half breath in foreboding. "What color was fluid, do you remember? Was there blood?"

"No blood." The boy paused to trace a symbol across his breast, to avert the eye of ill fortune. "The stream was thickened greenish. That's bad, yes? My aunt's going to pass beneath Wheel?"

"No. She's unlikely to die." Sure of that much, Elaira blew on fingers, reached, found her other boot, the one she had dunked at ford when she slipped on a stone and the ice broke. The fleeces v still clogged and soggy. "It's the babe trying to come who's in t~ ble."

She gritted her teeth and thrust her toe in the cuff before her n~ snapped. No time could she spare to warm the wet out, even were fire still alight. Every second counted, if in harsh fact the boy's caF~ help had not already reached her too late. She scrambled up off knees and snatched her satchel from the table. Another mi~ strayed as she struck light to a candle stub and gathered up the ~ cialized herbs she might need, ones the midwife was least ap carry. More minutes fled, as she groped amid the disassembled c of her still to twist the curved segment of glass tubing from the ~ which capped the collection flask. She could only pray it woulc the right size as she stowed it amid her remedies, to chinking c, plaint from the crockery and small flasks that held her stock of a hol and tinctures.

"Come on," she urged the boy. "I'd make you some tea to warrr if I dared, but truly, your aunt's babe can't wait."

No coals lingered in the hearth to be doused. That lapse in corn became a twisted sort of blessing as she rammed out the door

4.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

plowed knee-high tracks through the dunescape of drifts to the shed.

A rumbling nicker greeted her from inside. Then a white-blazed face peered out from the dimness, hopeful.

"You idiot butterball," Elaira replied. "You won't be begging more grain."

The slab-sided roan gelding had come with the croft, no replace- ment in her heart for the spry little bay who had died of old age the past spring. Some frivolous initiate had named the beast Tassel, for reason outside of all logic. Elaira unhooked the rope hackamore that served as his bridle and looped his whiskered nose through the cavesson. He butted her, snuffiing in quest of a carrot as she flicked his ears through the headstall, then blew a resigned sigh as she bent to raise his forehoof and treat the cleft with goose grease to keep snow from bailing up against his soles.

"Wise one," said the boy in whispered diffidence, "I don't ride."

"You will. If your aunt's to have help, you must." Elaira stepped to the gelding's quarters and grasped a feathered fetlock, not without heart to spare sympathy. "I'll see you don't fall off." In belated, breathless courtesy, she asked his name.

"Kaid, wise one." From the comer of the eye, she caught the clumsy, mittened gesture he made with intent to ward off spells.

Her stifled smile of irony was lost as the wind flogged her hair against her cheek. "You'll do fine, Kaid. Not to worry." The odd con- tradictions of countryfolk, to summon her for the magics that refined the craft of healing, then to trace out a hedge witch's symbols to avert the dread effects they feared from the selfsame mysteries.

Elaira had never known the reverent respect once offered to initi- ates of the Koriani sisterhood. The arts of her order had been viewed with trepidation for as long as she could remember. The ignorant intolerance arisen since the uprising that upset the rule of the old high kings had not lessened with defeat of the Mistwraith's fell fogs, which had masked Athera's skies for five centuries. Quite the con- trary, the entrenched distrust the townborn folk held for sorceries had been inflamed to root deeper since the hour the vanished sunlight had been restored.

The Koriani Prime Enchantress held adamant opinion on the rea- son: the new strife arisen through the Mistwraith's curse of enmity, laid upon the two princes whose gifts had brought its captivity, just provoked such misguided beliefs. Blame was not shared equally upon the shoulders of Lysaer s'Ilessid, birth-born to wield the powers of light. Only the Master of Shadow, Arithon s'Ffalenn, was raised mage-wise. The Prime and her Senior Circle were swift to point out

5.

]ANNY WU~TS.

his shortcomings. Unlike the royal half brother set against hi had spumed the strictures of his training and invoked the hi~ without scruple.

Few would deny that across four kingdoms, Arithon's ham aow linked to destruction and unconscionable acts of bloodshed Elaira stamped back that distressed line of thought. The Sh Master's part in the ruin of Lysaer's war host on the field at Die~ ton Vale must never become her concern. She knew his heart; hac shared his deepest fears, and knew of the visceral horror of killin tormented him, mind and spirit. As sharply as she longed to whether the affray had unstrung his grip on integrity, the unruly tions burned into her heart lent iron to her resolve. Her order never be offered a second opening to use the attraction shared bel them. Shamed to rage that her love had ever come to be tested as to set Koriani ties on Arithon's destiny, the enchantress applied ?

to the crisis of the moment. She slapped grease in the roan's last straightened up, and wiped her hands on a scrap of old burlap.

"Out, you." She gave a suggestive tug at the roan's headsta~ pressed to delay for the saddle. "We've a hard night ahead. ~ going to have to do a generous bit more than shamble."

Another gust screamed past the comer of the shed. Gossame~ of snow unraveled from the lip of the drifts. The eddy stre Elaira's hair across her eyes. She clawed back the tangles, imp~ "Come, boy." A swift touch adjusted the hang of her satchel. '"

need to show me where to go." She raised her wet boot in qued, foothold in the buried logs of the woodpile, vaulted astride the ~ back, then extended her arm to haul the herder child up before h He was shaking through his furs, mostly from fear since he s]

as her arms clasped around him.

Elaira sucked in a breath musked with wool and the rancid t~ goat. "Which way?"

The tilt of Kaid's chin said north. Elaira faced the gelding a~ into the teeth of the wind. Its cold pierced her clothes like honed The stars overhead were like flecks of chipped ice, and mooJ sheared the hillcrests in razor-cut brilliance against the strea: knotted shadows sliced by trees.

"Hup!" Elaira cried. She gathered the roan's reins and thu: him with her heels. The gelding shook his mane, grunted back ~ drummed another thud against his ribs. His steaming warmth trated the damp layers of her leggings, and a breathy snort sn from his nostrils. Too lazy to show displeasure beyond a flick.

tail, he roused into a short-strided walk.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

Elaira shook her cuffs down to muffle her exposed hands. "How long did it take you to reach me?"

"I left our steading before nightfall. Snow fell too thick to know the time." The boy clenched his jaw to still chattering teeth.

Questions remained, over details the midwife might have shared that would tell how far the aunt's labor had progressed. Yet as the gelding breasted through chest-high drifts, or plowed a crumpled trail across the pristine vales carved trackless by the scouring winds, Elaira held her silence. Nothing but hurry could improve the babe's threatened chances. If she failed to arrive at the steading before the moment of birth, the infant might already be lost. Rather than pass her distress to the boy, she reined alongside a thin stand of alder and picked off a branch for use as a switch to force the placid gelding to trot.

The night engulfed her in its landscape of silver and black. Amid the wind-tortured swirls of dry snow, the horse underneath her seemed all that moved in the world. If hare ventured out to gnaw bark and dry grasses, or if owls flew hunting mice, she saw no sign of anything alive. The tattered plumes of the gelding's breath embroi- dered hoarfrost on her patched leggings. His hooves stitched the hill- crests to avoid the soft drifts, and the boy sent as guide lolled against her shoulder and slept. Where the ground was swept bare, she flicked the gelding to a canter, the glassy chink of snapped ice compacted under the thud of his passage. The gentle, rolling downlands stretched ahead and behind, sere under unrumpled snow, the rippled ink of oak copse and the grayed trunks of alders snagged through by tinseled skeins of moonlight. Over marshes herringboned in storm- trampled cattails, and past the treacherous, inky wells of sinkpools, Elaira forged ahead in relentless urgency.

The fugitive hours were her enemy. The sensitivity of her talent let her feel them, slipping inexorably by as sand would sieve through a net. She drew rein at the crest of a dale, confronted below by the steep flanks of a gully, and the snake black outlines of iced-over current.

Araethura's downs were famed for such, obstructions to any traveler unfamiliar with the lay of the valleys. Elaira cursed, remiss with her- self. She ought to have wakened the boy sooner to ask guidance, for the narrow, swift-flowing streams which fed the River Arwent ran in treacherous, deep beds, too wide to jump over in snowy footing, and unsafe to attempt a crossing without a known ford. The same had been true of Daon Ramon, long ago, before the diversion of the mighty $evernir's flood by Etarran townsmen had rendered that golden land barren.

JANNY WURTS.

Elaira gave Kaid's shoulder a shake before the cold let her thou stray further. He said as she roused him, "No need to cross over.

steading's beyond that stand of alders."

Shadows obscured the building's outline, a patched, oblate pat where drifts had silted over the mosaic outline of roof shakes age the vale beyond. From some hidden byre, the bleat of confined breathed in snatched fragments between gusts. Elaira shook uF tired roan, pressed his laboring step downslope. The pricked glea stars came and went as the alders closed around her, branches v racked against the zenith. Two hours until dawn, her tuned av~ ness told her. That time of night when death was most apt to be comed by a body and spirit in distress.

She slid off the gelding's back, left the reins to the boy, to dism4 as he could and see it stabled. She wasted more seconds, fumblir close the iron latch of an unfamiliar gate. Finally arrived in the tered space between hay byre and cottage, she thought for a sec she heard the pained groans of a woman. Whether the sotrod born of labor, or grief, or just a last, cruel trick of the wind, the we of the moment crushed hope.