"Who would answer? The Sorcerers are all gone to Havish for King Eldir's wedding." Arithon did not turn his head, but shifted his van- tage between the piled quartz sand, the green piggins of iron oxides, and the sacks imported from the fens of West Shand where saltwort was burned into soda ash.

"Why can't you hear reason for once in your born life?" Dakar clapped his cheeks in frustration. "Now would be a nice time to start listening."

Sweat trickled down his spine, steamed through his clothes by the kilns, which beat rippled air through the gapped boards. While the miller's dogs yapped, and a woman's railing punched through the sonorous bass of crown authority, the sun scudded under a burl of cloud. Catcalls from the bystanders maligned the prisoner on his pile of oiled faggots, no encouragement. With at least ten guardsmen attached to the official now citing the formal charges, Dakar read bad odds. The crown soldiers were from Lysaer's elite division, their sun- wheel cloaks white as strewn snowdrifts amid the drab motley of the countryfolk.

Arithon regarded the tableau with the unswerving attention that boded the worst sort of consequence. "Felirin is condemned for singing the ballad of Tal Quorin, as written by Halliron sen Al'duin,"

389.

JANNY WURTS.

he said. "Ath knows where he learned the rendition. He must have spent time with the clans."

"Daelion's bollocks!" Dakar shivered, hands latched in his cloak to shut out the plucking breeze off the sea. "Small wonder they'll bum him."

"They won't." Arithon ducked, doubled back, and slid down beside Dakar. "Since I can't turn that crowd with steel in plain sight, I'll need to borrow your mantle."

The Mad Prophet rammed upright, swearing. "Man, that's a death wish! You dare not be seen here!" Certainly not after an unexpurgated ballad which maligned the s'Ilessid prince as a butcher made blind by self-righteous morality and arrogance.

"Your cloak," Arithon repeated. "Dakar, stop arguing.t"

The Shadow Master spun in fraught urgency as the door banged at the front of the glass house. A boy hurried out with a torch from the kiln fires, streaming a tang of dark smoke.

Still Dakar hesitated. "I can't sanction such risk."

"Then I must." The Shadow Master snatched up the drover's oiled wool, ripped the cloth through unwilling fingers until his companion stood stripped to his jerkin.

"Felirin delivered no less than the truth! A free singer's rights should hold his life sacrosanct, and I am Halliron's successor! If I don't stand forth and protest this injustice, can't you see? Any minstrel in Tysan could burn for composing an ordinary satire!"

In Arithon's hands, the vast, caped cloak flared and settled over taut shoulders. "I need you to frame up two runes of mastery for ele- mental fire. Draw them here, in my palms."

He pressed a twig of charcoal scavenged from the glassmaker's midden into the spellbinder's nerveless grasp. "Damn you, think!

Dakar, I can't douse live flame with bare shadow. Not when my mage talent's blinded."

A surging cry from the onlookers marked the moment the sun- wheel guard captain bent and set torch to the faggots.

The Crown Examiner hailed over their noise, "May Daelion Fatemaster find you repentant as you pass his Wheel in judgment!"

"Dharkaron, Ath's angel, avenge me instead!" the condemned musician hurled back. Disheveled, not young, his face scraped and bruised, he let outrage fuel his dignity. His voice sliced through the burgeoning crackle of flame and carved the first lines of a bard's curse.

Dakar pressed stubby fingers to his face. He could not look, lest he weep. While the singer's defiance clipped short in a rasping cough, 390.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

speech failed him. His throat closed, too parched to shape words to gamer the ritual permissions.

Arithon's prompt spurred on laggard memory. If his talent was silenced, he still had trained knowledge. The graven discipline of a masterbard's diction bridged a channel for clear concentration, even through the first stifled whimpers from the victim chained on the pyre. Then his slim, urgent hand, thrust through Dakar's damp one, firm enough to steady them both as the branching runes to blight fire were inscribed in crumbling ash.

"Touch anything, even your weapons, and the marks are going to smear," Dakar cautioned.

Arithon tossed off a nod, tucked cupped hands out of sight in the folds of the cloak.

Irrevocably committed, he emerged from the cover of the glass- works, strides limned by the diamond-shard heaps of white cullet. He advanced past the rain-channeled mounds of pure sand, straight as Dharkaron Avenger's ebon spear in the furling layers of his leathers.

When his head tipped that familiar listening angle askance, a friend could do naught but feel the heart tear for the moment's brazen, doomed courage.

"Daelion Fatemaster wept!" the Mad Prophet ground out. "For merciful sense, turn back."

For one hagridden moment, dogged by the leaping surge of the flames, Arithon raked and measured the backs of the crowd ranged against him. They were fifty against one: the curs circling the fringes in whining excitement; the knots of weeping women; and the glassmonger's burly craftsmen, bare arms and furrowed foreheads ruddied by the heat. They still wore hide aprons smeared with ash and the singe prints of cinders, while the rods and tongs of their trade hung cool between idle fists. Beyond them, drawn in from the plow, farmsteaders watched with their droves of barefoot children, the clappers to scare the wild birds from the seed grain clenched silent in slender fingers; next the hands from the mill, blanched head to toe with musty flour; then the grandames and old men, stoic as aged oak with the soldiers between them, impassive in their white-and-gold cloaks and prideful, expressionless faces.

All eyes tracked the fire, braiding hot tongues of carnelian through the snagged heap of faggots. In horror, in macabre, slack curiosity, the manifest presence of death held them riveted. The free singer writhed now for their sick fascination. His suffering became a spectacle, sup- ple hands rammed taut in steel bonds, all the gifted splendor of his 391.

voice broken hoarse as the inevitable, blistering pain cracked through its fallible timbre.

Arithon's survey touched last on the crown's high official, his bril- liance sullied by the risen smoke of his sacrifice, and his righteous- ness backed by the helmed ranks of his retinue.

Lord Examiner Vorrice sat enthroned on a plank propped across the clouded bricks that were pigs of raw glass, stacked ready for export to town craftshops. He wore the sunwheel of vested authority with an unswerving dedication, his jowls shaven, and his fleshy ~ mouth tucked like pleats basted into raw silk. His view was untram- meled as the slight, dark-haired Masterbard broke his stance and stepped forward, voice raised and soaring in song.

Th~ vcr~ und m~lody in ~r~ a cappella were the same ones per- formed long ago for Halliron's widow at Innish.

Dakar heard the words, mute. He sensed the true notes spin their harmonic magic. This was the appeal that Arithon's dead master had written for his art, a plea for mercy and a cry for understanding from a family abandoned through the demands imposed by his talent. In an expression of distilled pain, Halliron had claimed freedom to pledge his life to the immortal tradition of music.

Flattened against the glass shed, Dakar felt the first lines stab through him, whetted to a lance of bright power. Stripped of accom- paniment, Arithon's voice became a honed weapon. The spare, severe handling of each flowing lyric came tempered to unassailable force.

Another step, a second verse; song unstrung every tie of resistance and stormed the floodgates of emotion.

Arithon crossed the beaten earth of the commons. Through the rip- tide of release as his powers reached resonance, his directive held true: to captivate, then to bind, through a suspension of irresistible beauty. On his makeshift dais, the Lord High Examiner's pouched chin jerked in startlement. Below him, heads turned, those hatless and wind tangled and bald, and others in gold-blazoned helms. Then the bard who demanded in naked, clean song reached their midst.

He would be recognized. The yelping cur silenced. Humanity paused, pierced through by a masterbard's construct of absolute, unalloyed sorrow.

A figure alone, Arithon parted them. His nerve stayed as iron.

Above the evil crack of caught flame, his melody unreeled, simple and fine as poured water.

The sea breeze now wafted a sickening stink of singed flesh.

Sheltered, still safe, Dakar laced his hands over the clench in his gut. "Ath, merciful Ath."

392.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

Nearest to the pyre, Arithon s'Ffalenn must endure through the reek of the fumes. His concentration must not waver. Pitch and syn- tax must cleave to perfection, even through the ugly, shuddering moan as the victim's gray head thrashed to the first nip of agony.

The bard's step trod its measure, nerveless, detached. His voice did not quaver. Each sustained note razored out in true pitch, harmony and word interlaced to create one matchless tapestry. Power as wide as new morning forced the horror at bay; drew each of the onlookers singly and turned them. Pitted against time, and the fire's cruel lead, Arithon s'Ffalenn weaned the watchers away from their morbid fasci- nation. He thralled them to his art with spellbinding clarity. Each step, each staid beat, he must be aware: once Felirin gave way to a full-throated scream, his effort would be shattered wholesale.

The enchantment he fashioned was founded on nothing beyond a fugitive brilliance of sound.

Second to second, he fused his art's focus. His will, his voice, his irrefutable bearing netted guards and bystanders, and held them in rooted attention. Dakar watched them, terrified, aware of the flaw in the odds; his heart skipped for cold knowledge that one whelming dissonance would splash those superb ties of empathy to ruins.

All eyes tracked the bard, now, except for one rheumy, bent grand- mother.

"Damn her, she's deaf," Dakar whispered through the unbidden, salt taste of tears. Sweat dripped through his beard. His lungs felt strapped in lead. The thud of each heartbeat slammed hammer to anvil against the locked bone of his sternum.

Arithon threw back his head. Face tipped to sky, he hurled all he was into the song's final verse.

The talent he commanded ran through him like light, and snatched the stilled air into feeling.

Nothing moved but the flames. Dakar, himself paralyzed, felt mage-sense cry warning. Such winding power as this could not be indefinitely sustained. The tension had climbed to the threshold of peril, with each listener poised like blown bubbles of glass that the first jarring tap must collapse.

Then, at last, elbowed by the wizened grandfather at her side, the recalcitrant old woman turned her head.

"Now!" Dakar whispered. "Arithon, you have them, act now.t"

Immersed mind and heart in the throes of his art, his audience net- ted like fish, the bard freed his hands from the cloak. Dakar croaked the ritual word of release; and the sketched charcoal runes to bind fire laid into Arithon's palms raised their element to primal awareness.

393.

~,~',x~,'~'-,~,,~, While all eyes were averted, an unnatural and smothered the flames on the pyre. Felirin broke into choking, hysterical sobs.

Throughout, the descending beat of sung melody never missed precise rhythm. Each note rang true, each word place to hold the disparate bystanders enthralled. In timing the fine hairs at the neck, Arithon s'Ffalenn reached the dais.

stopped. He hurled down his falling, last line like a gauntlet; and fell silent at the feet of the crown's Lord Examiner.

In the aboT-m~,e of art, the tmchartged voice of nature ground as a shock on the ears.

Past the ramshackle eaves of the craft sheds, surf slammed and hissed over unyielding sand. The racketing creak of the mill's turning vanes, and the shrill calls of gulls grated on dream-wakened nerxes.

Against that structureless absence of melody, Felirin's wi~i~npers struck like a whiplash of shame.

Through the riveted focus cauterized by his art, Arithon s't~'tal~,nn addressed the robed man on the dais. "What is a song, or a wo~'d brita thought given wing? A man should not burn for expression ~,! id~.as.

The sentence passed here offers frightening precedents. tit-l~as forthright speech become one and the same thing, to be tr~,.~t as a deed that caused harm? Do we allow you to end a man's life ~~ ~ tire because you disagree with his music?"

"That's rank impertinence!" Vorrice leaned forward, t~r~. '~:~d raised to summon his guardsmen, and the knuckles of tt~t ,~ther splayed over the pristine lap of his robe. "This was a crown try. ~~ held under seal of the realm's lawful regent." His tight, narrowe~~ ~'ves refused the appeal, and his brows clumped above his wedged nos- trils. "I see no grounds for any commoner to intervene with the works of Prince Lysaer's justice."

Arithon stood his ground, arms lightly crossed beneath the caped shoulders of the drover's cloak. "I'm Athera's titled Masterbard, affirming the law of the land and a free singer's right, as you see."

Chiseled, imperious, yet in the crowd's sympathy through the spelled meshes tied by his song, he cracked a command to the guards. "You there! Unshackle the minstrel you have wronged. He's no felon, but the victim of injustice."

The ploy almost worked. Two soldiers broke ranks in reflexive obe- dience.

394.

FUGITIVE I~RINCE.

Vorrice surged to his feet. "Hold hard! Are we half-witted dupes to jump for the first softhearted meddler who speaks?" To Arithon, he shouted, "You presume far too much!" The snap of his rage reordered his guardsmen, and a murmur arose, as one, then another of the bystanders awakened to the fact that the flames in the pyre had extin- guished.

"There's sorcery here, sure as the mother who bore me," someone cried.

Farmhands and craftsmen made signs against evil, while matrons snatched their children and hustled them to safety inside the craft sheds and cottages.

Dakar ripped out an oath, while fear stirred a palpable current through the gathering. The unarmed onlookers crowded a step back, while first one, then another guard's sword sang from their sheaths.

They advanced, bristling; not to un!eck shackles, but to hem Arithon s'Ffalenn inside a nervous circle of steel.

"You mistake what you see," Vorrice said, his confidence oiled by the shielding ranks of his guardsmen. He smoothed a wrinkle from his robe and explained in condescending forbearance, "Felirin does not burn as a singer. He stands duly sentenced as the minion of the Master of Shadow. As such, every man must agree, he poses grave danger to all of us. No masterbard's privilege can excuse those who side with the Spinner of Darkness. Such license would lead us to ruin.

My given office, by the seal of this realm, is to rout out hidden ser- vants of evil. You could be one of them. Tell me your name."

"Tell me yours, instead, puppet!" A brazen contempt sharpened Arithon's voice, clear over the crowd's stirring murmurs behind him.

"Or do you not wear another man's gloves, and parrot another man's lies to give yourself airs and importance? Show these people here you can think for yourself. Or take my promise, you'll have a satire the five kingdoms won't readily forget!"

"Remove him!" snapped Vorrice. "He has upset proceedings."

The guardsmen pressed in, hampered. They were many ranged against one, without proper space to wield arms. Dakar watched them close in, racked by agonized helplessness. Like the stag men- aced by the jaws of a wolf pack, their quarry must know: the least step in retreat would trigger aggression against him.

Arithon's feet shifted stance beneath the cloak as he answered in searing, soft mockery. "A contest of force cannot make your cause right. You're a misled zealot, or else hopelessly stupid."

Vorrice bristled. "Should I care what you think?" Gold braid flashed at his cuff as he snapped knobby fingers at his guard captain.

395.

JANNY ~URTS.

"Clap him in irons! He'll share the minstrel's pyre. Let him die in anonymity. The mother who named him won't even weep when the sea wind has scattered his ashes."

"But his mother didn't name him," a gruff, broken voice cut in.

"No," Dakar groaned.

Forgotten at the stake, sick and bewildered from inhaled smoke and the blistering pain of burned legs, the condemned minstrel cleared his throat and spoke out. "You don't know whom you address?"

Felirin raised his smudged face and laughed in dazed triumph for the fact he still breathed, singed and degraded, but graced with an unlooked-for protector. "You face the Master of Shadow himself, called Arithon by his maternal grandfather. And burn him? Just try!

With my own eyes, in Tornir Peaks, I once saw his birth gift quench the fires spat from the jaws of a Khadrim."

Arithon's shout pealed through the crowd's shocked astonishment.

"Fool!" he cried to Vorrice. As though he were not cornered, nor help- lessly outmatched, he surged ahead, seized the towering mistake of Felirin's loose tongue as a tactic of raw desperation. "Did you think you could threaten a sorcerer's minion with a mere ten guardsmen to defend you?"

He hurled off the cloak. The scream of black steel drawn from his sheath came entwined with a soundless descent of pure darkness.

Then that seamless, unnatural night burst in turn, smashed asun- der by unbridled light.

The guardsman singled out as Arithon's first target reeled back as the runes in the longsword, Alithiel, flared into white mage-fire in just cause of Felirin's defense. The Paravian blade in a masterbard's hand could not but welcome a free singer's right to disseminate truth, clothed in the fine art of music.