"Fine brandy in bottles and some Sanpashir gemstones, will that do?" Fiark measured the clan spokesman afresh, a warning hard glint in his eyes. "Should they be underwritten?"

Someone else's barbed dialect jibed from out of the darkness, "What, you don't truly want to stay honest?"

Before light words caused umbrage, the captain reassured, "The cargo you consign will be safe, with one small delay. We've an unscheduled stop on the coast of Alland to take on what our lists say we shipped out of Cheivalt."

"That's Erlien's territory," Feylind broke in. Her quick mind leaped ahead, taking stock. The barley would have been grown in Orvandir, and the wool shorn from Radmoore sheep. The Cariadwin's pending illegitimate cargo would be nothing else but the spoils from a caravan raided en route to Sanshevas or Southshire.

In typical fashion, her brother's thought flanked her. "Are the High Earl's scout raiders in conspiracy with Arithon?"

"Not precisely," the Cariadwin's captain corrected. "Don't have to take sides to hate chains and slavery. The High Earl's river inlets in Selkwood make an ideal place to load contraband. I used to shift 231.

]ANNY WURT~.

cargoes from there before Arithon hired me. And anyway, these days, a number of brash younger scouts want to ship out to Corith as volunteers for sea training."

"Volunteer pirates, more like," Fiark said, no stranger to the marauding ways of Erlien's chieftains. The factors at Innish knew well enough: the best silk from Atchaz always moved overland rather than risk the river route into Telzen. "You'll want a return cargo?"

"Not just then." In soft words and darkness, the plans were laid out. The brig's share of gold from Erlien's plunder would fund new rigging and canvas from the Southshire shipyards. "Those supplies and provisions are critically needed at the Shadow Master's outpost at Corith. Cattrick's crews have been busy," the clan spokesman said.

"Maenol was told to expect three more brigs for refitting early in the ~p-tr/vo? ,, "Why can't the Evenstar bear tt/ese"~rr~ev,trt Alland?" Feylind broke in, still angling for her chance to escape another decorous run dbwn the southcoast.

Fiark shook his pale head. "The Evenstar's bills of lading are clean.

Need one ship honest and yours was elected. If you didn't know, all her profits are going to buy weapons to outfit the ships purloined out of Riverton. With luck, by high summer, the clans will have their fleet of sail to play havoc on Alliance shipping."

"Slave-bearing galleys won't pass with impunity," a hard voice affirmed from the darkness. "Once our people have the armed ships to strike back, we can make rags of Lysaer's new edict by putting the screws to his trade."

Feylind was not mollified. "Looks to me like you've already started with that." She turned upon Fiark, tenacious, to nail home her point.

"If the Evenstar's clean, I don't see any reason why I can't run cargo to Capewell. The outpost at Corith's a short leg away. Supplies and dis- patches could be left on a regular schedule without any undue risk."

"No." The clan spokesman caught Feylind's shoulder and gave her a fatherly shake. "You care for Prince Arithon?" At her stubborn nod, he bon~ in. "Then see sense! Stay where he's placed you, or see him hurt if you fall to grief!"

Pearls flashed in the shadows as Feylind stiflened to argue.

The clansman cut her off, merciless. "Then look at these men and the cruelties they've suffered! You have no idea just how tense things have grown, and not just in Tysan. Havish's king is caught in con- tention as well."

They heard the news then, of how the forty men in the Cariadwin's hold had come to be freed by the seal of King Eldir's justice.

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"Three galleymen and the fat harbormaster at Cheivalt were just arraigned for treason." Seated once more, elbows braced on his knees and his hands jammed through the uneven hair at his temples, the clan spokesman qualified. "Those were put to trial for an exchange of bribes to refute Havish's crown edict. They'll die, and not nicely.

Lysaer's bailiffs have been rebuffed twice, denied any fight of extra- dition."

Amid the dense quiet lying on all sides, Fiark accepted the tied packets of correspondence from Arithon's westshore contacts. Sweat- ing and sobered, he knelt by the candle to read. As always, the broad range of sources astonished him. From sheets soaked in the incense from the intrigue of court brothels, to others, encasing filched docu- ments with official ribbons and cracked seals, the damning, grim pic- ture unfolded, with warnings phrased in stark language. Feylind shared the written pages alongside her brother, cursing as he turned yellowed leaves too slowly, or the flame fluttered low, making thin, ciphered script too difficult to peruse.

In letters sent by prostitutes, officials, and tavernkeeps, the politi- cal brangles unfolded, of relations gone from displeased to con- tentious at every level of government. The coastal mayors resented King Eldir's sharp justice. Inbound trade from Tysan would suffer without galleys, cut off altogether while the winter's rough weather closed the north passage to oared transport. Tension waxed to dis- trust at the border, as Alliance officials were forced to discover their Prince of the Light's bold policies received no margin of tolerance in Havish.

The royal counselors at Ostermere might accept that their king would never back down.

"It's the rock-brained coastal mayors who refuse to hear sense," the clansman explained at agitated length. "They're howling protest.

Most won't understand that charter law can't be changed or repealed.

The crown's execution of a few arraigned traitors isn't going to deter them. Bribes will just double. Nobody's fooled. Enough gold will tempt any man to dishonesty, and the headhunters in Tysan are bringing in captives with no heed at all for the season."

Feylind perceived the stakes well enough. Until the ice broke in Stormwell, galleymen had no open route except southward through King Eldir's territory. Oared ships demanded more fresh water and provisions; their vulnerable low freeboard required close access to safe harbors, since storm swells could cause them to founder. Only a blue-water hull with full sail could achieve the passage from Capewell round West Shand in one leg.

233.

JANNY WLIRTS.

Fiark tapped the last document against his shut teeth. "I see back- lash and dangerous pressure coming to bear on Cattrick's shipw0rl~ at Riverton," he said softly.

"Man, we know that!" The clansman sheathed the knife he had used to scratch maps of Alliance troop movements and shoved to his feet in bursting, sore agitation. "Maenol himself's said Prince Arith0n should leave. Though how we could help to spirit him cross-country is a right sticky point at the moment. Can't even protect our own fami- lies in the forests, Alliance patrols are so fierce."

No need to voice the full scope of the problem. With guild profits affected, more than ever, the Alliance would covet the new vessels targeted by the Shadow Master's delicate plotting.

"One thing's sure," the clansman insisted, his fists clenched in sor- rowful emphasis. "Those ships are the last and only hope to save my Lord Maenol's people."

Under mounting persecution from the Alliance, the last bloodlines in Tysan faced an increasing threat of extermination. Their loss would open the gates to disaster, since the territory the clans spilled their blood to keep wild would become razed by the axes of townsmen.

"The cry is raised to seize land for development," the clan spokesman finished in a grief sharpened to desperation. "We are the grass roots of the Fellowship's compact. Kill us off, and all ties to law end." No proven line of descent would remain to keep faith with humanity's petition for sanctuary. "Ath help us all, if the Paravians return, and the Ath-forsaken mayors have the power in hand to cast off the Fellowship's sanctions."

234.

Midwinter 5653 Succession The Fellowship Sorcerer crossed the barrens of Rathain in the teeth of a howling storm. The gale which blasted the swept landscape of Daon Ramon razed over the rounded, low hills in an assault of horizontal sleet. Stone and dry gullies lay marbled in ice. The wind screamed and flayed, lent the cruel edge of a billion dashed shards of quartz. In weather that vicious, posted sentries were useless, even at the narrow mouth of the draw which sheltered the small clan encampment. The first Earl Jieret's scouts knew of Asandir's arrival was the presence of a steaming dark horse in their midst.

The young swordsman who wore his braid tied with fox tails gasped and reached in shot panic to draw steel.

His wrist was caught and yanked brutally short by the clamping hand of his elder. "No. That's a friend." To the muffled figure on his blowing mount, the veteran called, "Kingmaker?"

A nod answered. The cowled Sorcerer dismounted, cloak snapping in the whiteout scream of a gust.

"Take his horse, boy." The older scout turned the younger one loose with a companionable clap on the shoulder. "Don't be shy. If there's Fellowship business, and not just a traveler's need to ask shel- ter, our guest will ask for your High Earl."

Asandir surrendered his wet reins. His reassurance fell like a struck mote of sunlight against the gray storm that kept the land mantied in winter. "Is Jieret in camp?"

The older scout nodded. "I'll fetch him. You'll find his wife Feithan 235.

in the lodge tent, the one with the stag antlers hung on the javelin rack by the door flap."

"I'll find my way." Asandir peeled a glove, used the back of his wrist to scrape the ice from his eyebrows. His level gray eyes then measured the scout, who was shivering, his buckskins soaked through to the skin. He said in tacit handling of stiff pride, "When you find Jieret, give him my word. There are no headhunters out reiv- ing within eighty leagues of this site. No need to stand guard until this weather has lifted. I left wards on my back trail and a spell of confusion to spin any tracking hounds widdershins. The seals won't release for three days. If dogs or armed townsmen try to push through, they'll just make themselves dizzy running themselves into "Ath bless you for that!" The scout's reddened features broke into a pleased smile, masked as he shouldered head down through the gale.

Asandir tucked his bare hand back under his mantle, then footed his way over iced rock and the rimed crusts of dead grass to the clus- ter of wind-beaten lodge tents.

The antlers on the rack proved still fresh from the hunt, and the small, dark-haired woman who unfurled the door flap was wet to the wrists from a fatty emulsion of boiled deer brains.

When she saw who awaited outside her threshold, her thin, gamine features blushed scarlet. "Come on in. The place reeks." Her shrug framed apology as she let the flap fall, enclosing her visitor in a steamy fog of white woodsmoke and the odorous stench from the pot where two scraped hides were set curing. "Couldn't be helped. If I waited for sunsh'me, the boys wouldn't have the leggings they need to cover their new growth of ankle."

She stepped back to her labor, one skin draped and dripping over a rope stretched taut between the two lodgepoles. "Let me just wring this out, and I'll see to your needs. No doubt you're famished. Hang your cloak, if you want, by the fire."

With competent, chapped hands, she flipped the ends of the hide into a neat loop, tucked in the edges, then inserted a stick through the center and twisted. The raw leather gave up its burden of moisture, pattering runnels into the beaten earth floor.

Asandir watched her in light, alert silence. The unassuming move- ments as he cracked the cased ice off his shoulders and peeled off his layers of soaked wool were deceptive, even ordinary. Yet Feithan's blush remained high in tacit awareness that everything about her was being measured, from the sable coil of hair fallen loose at her neck, to 236.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

the skinning knife on its thong that had thinned from too many years of sharpening. She felt like that steel: worn with use, but still strong, still keen, still able to cope with the hardships that seemed to increase with each year as Alliance patrols pinched and harried clan move- ments.

"The scouts have gone for Jieret," Asandir said. Unasked, he had bent. He caught up her forked stick and fished the next hide from the pot, his upturned smile flashed through his austerity like quicksilver.

"I'm already wet, yes?" He slung the saturated buckskin over the rope and lent his arm to the heavy work of wringing.

"You shouldn't," Feithan chided. "You'll stink just like me." Then she whooped like a girl as she realized just what he was doing with his hands.

Magelight flared soft indigo over the wet hide, then brightened, changed, slid down the spectrum to bloom into clear, fiery scarlet.

The leather steamed and unfurled, dry and warm from his spell seal, finished inside the span of one heartbeat for its final curing in smoke.

"I won't have to stretch this?" Feithan asked, dumbfounded.

The Sorcerer shook his head, running his testing touch down the velvety surface. "Nor smoke it, either, unless you wish to darken the color." Luminosity trailed where his fingertips passed. The thick air seemed to shimmer through an unheard song, as though a resonance of his blessing did honor to the dead buck. "The hide wouldn't have dried before nightfall, and this storm could be better spent sewing.

Do you wish me to treat the next one as well?"

"I thank you, yes." Flushed now with pleasure, Feithan stepped back and let him lift the moist pelt still draped on the rope. "Though, Ath, I could have used a few of your tricks on the morning I tackled the scraping. The camp boys were to help, but my truant of a husband spirited them off to go hunting."

She untied the taut cord, then knelt to collapse the frames used ear- lier for stretching and dry'rag. Immersed in false brusqueness, she tried not to care how desperately her fingers were shaking. But her uneasy questions loomed too large to ignore, and the forceful quiet of Asandir's presence was too palpably real at her back. She would mask her sharp worry in chatter before she dared to ask why a Fel- lowship Sorcerer should visit her hearth in the comfortless misery of deep winter.

Stilled as old oak, his silvered hair lying lank on broad shoulders, the Sorcerer spoke as if he heard her thought anyway. "I'm here to Name the next heir to Jieret's title."

Feithan closed her eyes. The rank smell of deer brains all at once 237.

JANNY WURTS.

seemed to unstring her senses. Fighting a tight chest, then wheeling faintness, she crouched half-unmoored, as if the dependable solidity of the earth must give way to a yawning void. She hung on, her lips clamped shut against desperate fear, and her arms clutched into an awkward embrace around a disjointed bundle of ash sticks.

While the moment hung, she forced her stunned thoughts to sort out what the Sorcerer had told her.

Jieret's life was not endangered. An heir for his title as steward of Rathain was only chosen by the Fellowship when the s'Ffalenn royal line became threatened.

No confirmed ill news, then; not an immediate disaster to her fam- ily, but too likely a larger one pending for the realm. In mechanical habit, she continued to tidy the collapsed slats of the hide frame. Then she drew on raw courage and a forced, hammered steadiness. "Which son should I call?"

A hand touched her shoulder, light as a moth's wing, and uncan- nily warm for a traveler just spared from the battering siege of harsh weather. "Neither son, lady."

Asandir had reached her side in one long, soundless step. Another move saw the wood lifted out of her hands. His understated strength raised her upright and gripped her in bedrock support. "Dismiss every fear for your husband as well. He stays here in Rathain, under my binding command if need be. This appointment of succession is but a formality and, life willing, should stay so for many years to come."

Steadied enough to stop shivering, Feithan tipped up her angular face. She surveyed the Sorcerer, who topped her by a head, his patience like glacial scarred granite. Then the wonder broke through and wakened a flutter in her veins. "You want Kei?"

Asandir's smile was quietly luminous, subtle and fleeting as the spill of a moonbeam in the sultry flare of spent coals. "She will be Kei no longer. And yes. Be proud. Your daughter shall become the next Teiren's'Valerient, steward to the royalty of Rathain."

"She's with the neighbor," Feithan explained, straightened now with relief. "The smoke from the tanning sometimes bothers the new- borns. Let me just rinse my hands and fetch her back."

The Fellowship ceremony for Naming the caithdein's heir took place in hurried solemnity. There was no feast, no celebration, no joy- ous gathering of far-flung clans the tradition usually warranted. Only Jieret and his wife attended the ritual when Asandir in his travel- stained leathers accepted the infant from Feithan's arms.

238.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

On that day scarcely one month old, she was tucked in a sheepskin laced at the front with plain thongs. Her gems were the glints of melted sleet caught in silk of the fleeces. Her wide eyes were blue, still uncolored from birth, but tracking the Sorcerer's finger as he traced a glyph in white light over the dome of her forehead. "You who were Kei shall be Jeynsa Teiren's'Valerient henceforward."

Translation from the old Paravian meant successor to power. For a moment, the Sorcerer's presence seemed raised to a level that tran- scended mortality. His hair, his large hands, the very life in his veins seemed to sing with a subliminal silvery aura. The babe in his grasp seemed both flesh and light, surrounded and infused by the majestic force of a power too fierce to be captured by reason. Felthah raised cramped knuckles to dash away tears. Jieret stood silent, perhaps in remembrance of his own hour of oath taking, years past in Strake- wood when his parents stood living beside him.

Slashing winds and the singing whine of the sleet ruled the moment as Asandir's arcane rune sank and touched. Its intricate angles blazed bright as a meteor, and then dimmed, softly melded against the smooth warmth of the girl child's skin. "Jeynsa, little spirit, be strong. Prove worthy of the destiny you will come to carry forward from the time-honored lineage of your ancestors."

Then the choosing was done. The Sorcerer raised the bundled child. Smiling and dazzled, she was returned to the care of her mother, More than Name had changed. Jeynsa's future was sealed. A sign like a gossamer tracing in starlight gleamed under the rim of her hood.

"My mark will bear witness, she is Fellowship chosen." Dimin- ished once again to a weathered old traveler, sturdy, but worn from long service, the Sorcerer gave last instructions. "The sign will fade in one cycle of the moon. Raise the girl to bear the proud title of caithdein, with all of the powers and charges therein. She will swear formal service to her prince in the fullness of time."

Earl Jieret touched his daughter's soft cheek. Still wrapped in the crumpled furs he had worn in the thorn brakes, his wolf-pelt hat dripping ice melt through his braid, he raised his bearded chin and regarded the Sorcerer who stood unmoving before him. In all of Athera, he was one of the few who stood tall enough, and bred of a stern enough fiber to endure a prolonged, level stare. "You're not staying?"

Asandir's silence became palpably heavy. For a second,'he seemed a phantom figure, pressed out of velvet against the dimmed hides of the lodge tent. "I can't," he admitted at unpleasant length. "The Koriani 239.

]ANN ~LIRT$.

witches have been much too busy or anyone's peace of m/nd." The regret in his words held the masked strain o dangers unfit to be shared.

Yet Jieret was no man to settle for plat/fudes, far less from a Fellow- ship Sorcerer. "If the enchantresses pose any danger to my prince, best tell me." His courage was agony and his heart, hammered steel, as he refused to back down under pressure. "I know from Dakar that Morriel Prime once laid a plot to assassinate him."

Asandir did not try to evade brutal truth; neither would he answer directly. "Your liege has Caolle at his side. Bide here. There's nothing more you can do for your crown prince or your realm in the west, except suffer the most ugly of deaths."

When Jieret drew breath out of protest, the Sorcerer spun away, snatched his cloak from the stool by the fireside, and flung it, still wet, over the squared frame of his shoulders. "No, Jieret. You cannot come with me. I am bound now for the focus circle at Caith-al-Caen, and from there, with all speed, on a m/ssion more urgent than this one."

Hands clutched to a child whose life was now promised to the ser- vice of people and realm, Feithan sucked back a small gasp for the hurt unexpressed behind Jieret's wooden dignity.

Asandir fastened his cloak. In the close, reeking air, still befouled with smoke and the lingering, grease stink of tanning, he shook out his damp gloves. Deliberate in each precise movement he made, and with no spell expended for comfort, he slipped the chill leather over his capable hands. Then he looked up. His eyes were rinsed slate, utterly blank and unreadable. "Jieret, we are not stewards of any man's life, no matter how precious his bloodline. What can be done, will be. Sethvir has cast auguries. His assurance was this: the enchantress who works healing in the moorlands of Araethura has not been recalled by her Prime Matriarch. Whatever the Warden at Althain perceived, he said, keep you here in Rathain. Until the Kori- ani initiate named Elaira is pressed back into active service by her order, your prince should fare well enough under Dakar's wards and protection."

Jieret bent his head. Better than most, he understood the strict lim- its the Law of the Major Balance set over Fellowship actions. The fists at his sides locked in helpless, white tension. Unwittingly recast in the image of his father, his anguish screamed through every restrained joint of his bearing. "You will tell me, at once, if there's anything I can do?"

Asandir reached out his gloved hands and grasped the caithdein of Rathain by both forearms. "Trust us that much. For now, for your 240.

FUGI?I~E I~RINCE.

there will be small reprieve. Lysaer's convocation at Etarra is to lose impetus. All the armed resource the guilds raised for the Alliance to scour the forests of Rathain will soon be diverted else- where. Pack up your camp when the storm breaks. For this year at 'least, you can summer in Halwythwood with no more than the usual precautions."