He jabbed a thumb rubbed shiny from endless hours spent twisting fish twine. "Has a sword, see? Could be dangerous."

334.

"Isn't moving," the third party ventured.

The skiff jostled closer. The thwart gouged the peat bank.

"Still breathing," said the trapper, kneeling down. "Just barely." He stabbed his bloody knife into the reed basket shining with the scales of gutted fish, while his companions reached out tentative hands and lightly fingered the stranger gone lost in the bogs.

"Clanborn, and in trouble," the grandmother determined.

Another chimed in soft counterpoint, "Shelter then."

In silent efficiency, the two men arose from the skiff and stepped onto the marshy bank. Shadows wheeled, stitched with carnelian where plummeting raindrops sliced through the flickering lamplight.

They bent, grasped Mearn's arms at the elbow and shoulder, then startled back with hissed breaths as their find stirred and lifted his head.

He had gray eyes, the pupils wide and black with shock. The two fen folk poised, stilled as scared rabbits, while the rain sang and splashed unabated. The man squinted through the downpour. His vision seemed reluctant to focus, as if the skiff and its occupants were a nightmare come visiting, or a madman's distortion of Dharkaron Avenger's Black Chariot, filled with wizened little people with blood- ied knives and insistent plucking fingers.

Then he spoke, the ingrained courtesy of his ancestors set in the antique speech of his breeding. "Please. I beg help. If you know, if you can spare a runner to seek, let these cases I carry reach Lord Maenol s'Garmley or his kinsmen with all possible speed."

The grandmother clicked her tongue through shut teeth. "Whist, bring him in. Or this one that he seeks will receive his cold bones for naught but last rites and a burial."

335.

Early Spring 5653 Appeals At Althain Tower, the mood changed from downcast to grim in the darkened, chill hours before dawn. Sethvir sat, chin on fist, at the massive stone table in the library chamber, half-swallowed by the gloom which gathered under the star-patterned beams of the ceiling.

As his mind ranged through yet another chain of auguries, his fore- head stayed pinched into creases. The last such cast sequence had already fretted the white ends of his beard into finger-caught tangles.

The dark, polished table before him was swept clear of books. By his elbow, a filled mug of tea had gone cold. The casement windows at his back were latched shut, the tight fastenings kept under tireless siege by a barrage of sharp winds that, farther south, coalesced as a rainstorm.

The one dribbled candle alight in the stand fluttered anyway, tor- mented by the gyrating presence of a visiting discorporate colleague.

"Just say what you see," Kharadmon urged at length, his pique the snarl of a mewed-up predator, and his worry unsubtle as the flaying edge of a storm front. "I'm well aware the news out of Tysan bodes no good. Can the details make things any worse?"

Sethvir shut his eyes. Unmoving, he answered, "Dakar's warning framed an accurate judgment. Arithon eats, but his body rejects suste- nance afterward. He speaks, he perseveres. He stubbornly enacts all the movements of living. But the fire, the passion, his sense of self- worth and entitlement have all been strangled by grief. Like the Para- vians, who waste away in the absence of hope, our Teir's'Ffalenn tries 336.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

to endure against the grain of his born nature. He keeps the very let- ter of his oath to survive."

Through a plangent, fierce pause, Kharadmon spun in suspension.

"Say on. I can already guess."

"Oh, the gist isn't new." Sethvir stabbed distraught hands through the hair at his temples, the farseeing span of his vision all bitterness.

Morriel Prime had foreseen this crux years ago, that Arithon's inheri- tance from two royal bloodlines created an incompatible legacy. "The gifts of s'Ahelas foresight cross-linked with s'Ffalenn compassion poisons all that he does, all that he thinks. Now he's forced to betray the loyalties he holds sacrosanct, he has no defense against guilt and despondency."

While his colleague's roving angst churned a crock of quill pens into rustling agitation, Althain's Warden summed up. "In the absence of grace, entropy triumphs. The flesh loses its natural drive to renew itself."

"Then you fear our Teir's'Ffalenn will succumb into wasting disease, over time." Kharadmon's presence sheared over the bookshelves, rais- ing dust like fine smoke from the rows of old, musty covers. Pages flipped madly on another opened tome propped on a lion-carved lectern. "Well give him some news." The self-contained tempest paused on its course, reversed direction, and whirled the quill pens on the opposite spin like small weathercocks. "Find him some word of encouragement."

The Warden of Althain simply looked up, his gaze the blank blue of a robin's egg.

Kharadmon stopped, a poured well of cold that exuded biting frus- tration. "There are moments your mind's just like knotted string, too vexingly layered to unravel."

Sethvir stirred, unfolded crimped fingers, and with a fingernail showing a black rim of ink, traced a circle on the obsidian tabletop.

"You won't like what you see."

"Well, that's nothing fresh," Kharadmon breezed on. "These times are rank chaos. Though Luhaine is a pessimist, and his theories are galling, I have to agree that entropy's been winning since Desh-thiere came calling through South Gate."

"Peace, here." Althain's Warden traced a glyph in blue light on the air.

Then he laid light palms on the table and pronounced a phrase in the slow, rolling consonants that awakened the Name for the primal awareness of this stone which held his attention. A permission was exchanged in language and pitch beyond range of ordinary hearing.

337.

JANNY WURTS.

Sethvir traced another glyph inside the closed figure, and awaited an inward alignment.

A connection closed like a spark in his mind. He framed his intent and sank his awareness into the dance of meshed energies which bound the obsidian into solidity. His grasp of grand conjury accom- plished what no other arcane order on the continent could achieve on the wings of pure thought: he invoked shift in resonance, and raised the vibrational frequency of dense matter.

Within his drawn circle, the stone's matrix dissolved, transmuted to a state of pure light.

Rinsed in a flare of actinic brilliance, Althain's Warden reached out again. He said, hand poised, the spiked snow of his eyebrows trained toward Kharadmon's breezy fidgeting, "The fish, at least, led the proper fishermen to the catch. I give you the brightest thread in the tapestry."

"Well, we can't all be scatterbrained and capture such nuance by dreaming." But this once, Kharadmon's baiting humor fell short.

Althain's Warden did not smile as he touched the field of unformed matter with his forefinger and imprinted the reenactment of a scene drawn in through his tie to the earth link...

Rain splashed and guttered through the reeds in Mogg's Fen, where a soaked party of marsh trappers poled their skiff northward through night's inky maze of shoals and mudbanks and flat water. Wrapped in furs and greased hide, a shuddering clansman lolled half-unconscious, raging curses against an Alliance invasion in feverish fits of delirium... .

"Meam s'Brydion? Taken north? But you know his warning will come far too late." Kharadmon wheeled over the shadowy aumbries, sarcastically unimpressed, since Lysaer's gathered forces were already present and closing upon Maenol's clansmen. "What's one coal raked from the flames of a building conflagration? Merciful Ath!

If that's a success, you'd better show me the failures. Or Luhaine will claim I've traded my bollocks for outright, shrinking fainthearted- ness."

Sethvir bowed his head. "Wiser, perhaps, to discount pride and praise the one gift as a blessing." But he honored Kharadmon's bid- ding and set the small linkage between transmuted stone and his powers of earth-linked perception. The scenes he translated through the ring of his scrying were indeed unrelenting bad news.

Lysaer's war galleys swept down on the Isles of Min Pierens and overran Arithon's small outpost at Corith. The site had no defenses. The ramshackle 338.

FUGITIVE PRIN sheds, the tools, the small sail loft which refitted the stolen hulls from River- ton were razed and burned inside the first hour of landing. The laborers had been trapped, killed as they resisted, or run down and captured as they fled through the brush by headhunters and trained packs of tracking dogs. The handful of survivors now languished in chains with the wounded, shortly to see the Alliance destroy their last outside hope of a rescue.

Into the harbor, unsuspecting, ran the Cariadwin with her crew of freed galley slaves and her hold filled with clan scouts just signed on as untrained volunteers. These expected to man three forthcoming new ships, and were yet unaware of the setbacks inflicted by Koriani intervention. None of them knew of the launching just gone bad at Riverton; neither they nor their cap- tain realized as they sailed that an Alliance trap lay in waiting.

Sethvir spoke a word, and time bowed to his bidding. The colors in the scrying on the tabletop bled into the ghostly gray prescience that unveiled the unformed future. The sequence firmed into sharp- ening focus, as the few tracks of possibility in play merged into a remorseless junction. Kharadmon saw that the coming sea fight at Corith would end in a vicious defeat. Against an outfitted war fleet, caught in confined waters, the Cariadwin's fierce defense was fore- doomed.

"Aft," Sethvir murmured, the Paravian rune that marked closing.

The silver-point tones of unborn event bled away, replaced by another vision, this one a view of the Alliance shipworks at Riverton, grained in a mist of falling rain.

"What you see next occurred just this afternoon," Althain's War- den added in subdued explanation; and Kharadmon shared all the sorrowful details of Caolle's survival, now entangled with the last thread in the Koriani design that devolved from the arraigned yard workers and sail crews kept hostage to force Arithon's capitulation.

Sethvir's scrying perused the firelit chamber where Lirenda, First Senior, signed the requisite papers of extradition in the smug com- pany of Riverton's mayor. With a crystal wineglass poised in one hand, and an expression serene as milk porcelain, she delivered her order for the prisoners to sail on the dawn tide three days hence.

"I don't like her eyes," Kharadmon observed tartly. "Vindictive as nightshade to stop a man's heart in his sleep."

"She looks that way when she's hiding something." Althain's War- den considered the sorry prisoners held in chains in the cramped cell that once had confined Dakar. "The three new brigs will be diverted from crown orders by her Prime's will to form a blockade. If our Teir's'Ffalenn crosses through Korias without mishap, he could 339.

JANNY WURTS.

certainly fall to Morriel's conspiracy as he sails his small sloop out of Mainmere."

A wind like black ice, Kharadmon's course riffled a stack of loose parchments weighted down by a chunk of iron meteorite. "You sent me summons. What do you ask? What else have you seen that you are so loath to tell me?"

Still reluctant to answer, Sethvir raised one finger. His soft word sang release over his suspended conjury, and the bindings inside his drawn circle let go. The sustaining, fine energies carried from the Prime Source spiraled downward. Spell-fired light sank to a pale halo, then vanished. Residual heat fanned and stirred the pale ends of the Sorcerer's hair and beard, while spent forces dispersed, sighing away to stilled silence.

Between Sethvir's elbows, the stone table reverted to form, seam- less black as before, the sole remnant of change the upright candle, now snuffed to a febrile ember. Out of chill darkness, a stir of worn cloth as Althain's Warden stood up. "! can't say what tomorrow will bring. There are too many free-will choices involved to guess whether Arithon s'Ffalenn can achieve his escape into freedom. Yet one fact can't be argued: at large or held captive in Koriani hands, he cannot long sustain a despair of self-damning proportion."

Sethvir's library suffered another tempestuous dusting as Kharad- mon seized on the gist. Neither one of the half brothers had escaped the deranging sorrows linked to the bloodshed at Tal Quorin, Minderl Bay, and Vastmark. But where Lysaer s'Ilessid became driven to self- sacrifice for morality, ennobling his losses through a public campaign of justification, Arithon s'Ffalenn more quietly bled in compassion until his solitary resilience ran dry. No need to belabor the painful necessity, that the one threatened life held the lynchpin of the Black Rose Prophecy's resolution. All hopes for the Eellowship's restoration back to seven still hinged upon a crowned prince for Rathain.

"You want a mitigator," Kharadmon burst out, his mercuric impa- tience the springboard to seize on the direction of Sethvir's thinking.

"Someone to reforge the bond of his trust with himself?. Who's to ask?

Daelion Fatemaster wept! We're talking of Kamridian s'Ffalenn's direct descendant, and nothing we tried in that hour of trial turned his mind to seek self-redemption."

"I know." Sethvir reclaimed his tea mug and sipped its cold con- tents as he shared consternation and the grievous past memory of a valiant s'Ffalenn high king, driven to his doom in the Maze of Davien, where the Betrayer's insidious coils of truth spells faced a man with his own mirror image. Arithon's ancestor had died, torn 340.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

apart by the pangs of guilt-driven conscience. The thread which had seen him undone at the last was his line's royal gift of compassion.

"We lost King Kamri despite every conscious protection, and he had no damning entanglement with the effects of s'Ahelas farsight."

A spark jumped and grounded into the stone floor as Kharadmon vented his testiness.

"I thought you claimed Luhaine was the pessimist." As if the dregs of his tea showed him nightmares, Althain's Warden secreted the mug amid the snarl of old twine he scrounged when he needed a bookmark. He knew by Kharadmon's complete lack of argument that he could not mask the bare truth. Out of today's breeding quagmire of circumstance, the same tragedy that had ended King Kamridian's life could be repeated with Arithon. Sethvir pondered bad odds, while outside, the wind slapped and whistled against his sealed shut- ters, and within, Kharadmon expended his angst in small fits that raised havoc among his belongings.

As if the innate peace of the darkness had fled, Sethvir touched the wick of the candle alight. The feeble spear of new flame creased shad- ows over the timeworn hollows of his face. Worry pinched his lips like cracked leather, and lent his clasped hands the transient fragility of flesh that was fallibly mortal. "I know of only two individuals with the power to lay claim to Arithon's heart."

Kharadmon froze into ominous stillness. "The enchantress Elaira and Earl Jieret s'Valerient."

Sethvir nodded, brooding over the relentless perils implied by his posited remedy. "The lady could heal Rathain's prince the fastest. Her influence would be reliable and sure, but she must first step forward in free will and transcend the limitations the Koriani Order has imposed between her and the man she would love."

"I can't take that risk!" Kharadmon protested, all trace of the prankster razed off by uncoiling horror. "What if she martyrs herself as a sacrifice? She might well break her vows and accept self- destruction!" The quill pens flurried airborne and circled, caught up in the shade's consternation. "By the Avenger's black Spear and Chariot, Traithe already questioned her once. Luhaine also. Both met the same obstacle." Elaira had seen no truth beyond Morriel's binding; nor did she perceive her own power to ask help to claim back her right to free spirit.

Althain's Warden could not argue the razor-edged chances involved with breaching Elaira's self-imposed solitude. Shoulders bowed, arms tucked to his chest, he crossed to the sill of the casement.

While the storm raged with unrelenting raw violence against 341.

d~ A N N Y ~i~' U R T 5 Althain's spelled stone and latched glass, he did not share pain, that often his wardenship weighed on his heart like l~/t~', les. ~e ~gh~ protections of a dead centaur stonemason could 0~ no comfort, nor provide any haven against the pending poten~tal i0: disaster Desh-t~ere's curse stewed up in south Tysan.

Nor was ~aradmon left blinded to nuance, that a disc~rporate spirit could accomplish the errand to Araethura with neater dispatch.

His capi~lation came barbed with the sardo~c fire he used whe~ ~e masked hurtful sentiment. "If L~a~e went once, I'll bear teat rv~e now. At least the woman won't have to put up with his wi~d~ ~ ~ of lecturing."

~thvir~ ]~s ~itched wJ~ ~e b~rest t~ ~o~ '~J~l~ ,~z~z,;~,'

__h~ ~o[~bA~ ~,~'~it~,~woman' s' sens~ili~, ~ fact. Take wam~g &om that. Her superiors never did break her stree~ise impudence.

Airs ~d au~oriW of any kind still raise her blister~g contempt."

Outside, the gusts ripped and savaged the ~ers of ivy latched ~to blot stone. By lengths more obdurate, Sethvir laced chilled f~- gers.under his beard, ~s elbows propped on the sill. His statement blurred ~to the dream of the earth l~k as he summed up his final appeal. "If you fail ~ Araethura, and Earl Jieret is called, ~s people in Rathain will be left ~ the hands of an ~fant successor. He will ask our help for safe passage. Even so, ~s journey wi~ take several months. We could lose the short marg~ of time that is left to spare Arithon's equanimiW. Go swiftly."

By the t~e the echo of the words died to silence, Altha~ Tower held no outside company. ~thvir was left to his own dis~rbed thoughts and the aimless whirl of the dust motes unmoored by ~aradmon's soldless depar~re.

In distant Araethura, where the herbalist's small cottage snugged into the sweep in the moors, the spring downpour drummed in balked thunder against thatch netted down with twine and stout stones. Deep night wrapped the land. In velvet-grained darkness, the incessant winds rattled shutters and door, and moaned litanies under the eaves. After six years, the complaints of harsh storms were famil- iar enough that Elaira did not stir in her sleep.

When Kharadmon's presence poured under the gap in her doorsill, the enchantress lay curled beneath tumbled blankets, wrists tucked to her breast. The spell crystal defensively cupped into one fist held her guard, the signature field spun off its facets like smoke hazed to a glow of spun phosphor That shifting, uncertain luminosity picked out details a discorporate mage could perceive with no shift in vibration.

342.

FUGITIVE I~RINCE.

Sethvir of Althain had said for years that this woman's hands held the threads of Arithon s'Ffalenn's future happiness. Since the fate of Athera also rode the same course, Kharadmon gave the sleeper his most exacting survey. The thin, elfin profile pillowed in waves of her deep auburn hair was serene. Her closed lips had softened from the habitual wry tilt of impertinence. Open to plain view was her heed- less sensitivity, the vulnerable heart she would defend with attacking dry wit when aware.

Brushed by a finger of inquiry from behind, Kharadmon stilled. A pinpoint of cold amid the rough play of drafts, he revolved in place, amazed as the touch came again. Apparently the woman had placed small defenses on her cottage. His embarrassment stemmed from the astounding oddity that her contrary wardspells had picked out his presence before he had noticed their existence.

He swept her surroundings. The tiny cottage reflected a character too large to contain it, from the fleece-lined boots flung off helter- skelter, to the clothes lopsidedly hooked on the tine of a deer antler.

Her pleasures were simple. Elaira had planted jonquil bulbs in a crock.

Two quilted pillows stuffed with lavender and dried catmint seemed the gift of a moorland matron. She kept a vase filled with fallen owl and crow feathers. Three slate bits with holed centers strung on a thong hung over a black bowl lined with marble for water scrying.

The crammed trestle table where she mixed her herbals showed no trace of the frivolous dreamer. The brazier, the worn pestles and cups, the stone knife, and earthenware jars of the healer's trade lay jumbled together with scarcely a bare space between them. More herbs dried in bundles dangled from the rafters. Last autumn's rootstock was wrapped in willow baskets, carefully labeled, and preserved with sig~ ils against rot. The runes and seals radiated a faint golden glow and the razor-edged haloes of energies that landscaped a spirit's percep- tion. Shoved by another questing emanation of inquiry, Kharadmon sent back a pure touch of compassion, and back-traced the carrier ray to its source.

Beside the wand crystal used to potentize the fine energy proper- ties of herbs, four rounded chunks of river granite rested in alignment with the cardinal points of direction. Their awareness was raised, and glowing faint blue with the intent the enchantress had set upon them to serve her as guardian protection.

Kharadmon found their awakened perception most piquant, since practice of earth magics ran against strict form. The peculiarity spoke volumes, that a small wisdom kept by field witches and country grandmothers should fmd credence here, in the dwelling of an initiate 343.

Aroused, proppea o~, ,~'~.;;;~,c ~'r,:;7og;~2z_-:ij:r~r:~z':2:_-_?d~:: the blank air by her worktable, the enchantm~ c~,~3%':~.:'

~%~ed. "Nor do hex~ets address pla~ stones from thin air.

your presence'~~~~m me cou~esy and reveal your- _ -t~ tt ~aradmon did her o~uur,-~b, ~*~red the iraace o~ a taXX, per personage furled ~ a flamboyant green cloak ~:i~: t~,~' ~ hair swathed w~te at the temples, a sha~, spade-p ~;*;~ '