All at once, the night reechoed with a synchronous frenzy of admi- ration. The awe of the multitude expressed palpable excitement, that the Prince of the Light should give himself to their need before his own deeply personal sorrow.

His gold head a glittering beacon against the looming bulk of the warehouses, Lysaer s'Ilessid beckoned to the standing officer of his royal retinue. "Ready the best and the steadiest of my guardsmen."

Over the tumult, his edged tone was the drawn sword, that would cut in fulfillment of its purpose. "We ride at speed for the Middlecross ferry!"

Very suddenly, Lirenda became the only stilled point in the mael- strom, as purposeful activity erupted around her.

Men-at-arms came forward to depart for the flats, and servants ran to gather clothing and supplies for the journey. While the fleet captains 501.

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who had managed the sea campaign at Corith were reorganized for return to Avenor, the Koriani First Senior believed herself forgotten.

But where an ordinary man might have overlooked her insignificance, the Prince of the Light turned about.

He took her hand in his own and eased her small difficulty with the inspired attention to detail that marked his brilliance as a leader.

"You wish to be elsewhere."

"I've been too long away from my order." Lirenda took an inadver- tent step back, shaken by the impact of his caring.

Her trained senses perceived far too clearly. Lysaer's eyes were dark from the shock of his princess's death. Nor was his grip steady.

Ridden by an all-too-visible anguish, the marred grace of his features reRected a ~ranscendenf need which drew on the heart like a magnet.

Even in weakness, his presence turned lives.

Yet again, Lirenda killed her surge of instinctive response. Swept by a sharp, reckless longing to cast off all ties and follow this prince in defense, she sampled firsthand the pull which caused men to leave home and swear service for life. Her Koriani discipline was scarcely enough to stand down the temptation, and recall the stakes of the sac- rifice.

Belatedly she noticed that Lysaer was speaking, his offer an invita- tion to accompany his royal retinue as far as the landing at Middle- cross.

"Weren't you bound for the Koriani sisterhouse in Capewell?" The diamonds at his collar flicked like held stars as he raised her fingers in a gesture of warmth and inquiry. 'q presume you'd rather cross the inlet by ferry than ride the long way round through Riverton."

His selfless solicitude struck a chord of reciprocal concern. "Listen, you must know," Lirenda burst out in unpremeditated warning.

"Those men-at-arms from Hanshire very likely entangled themselves in the bounds of a Paravian grimward. If you persist in seeking what became of them, you ride into unimaginable danger."

"They were lost on my orders in pursuit of the Spinner of Dark- ness." Lysaer's affirmation was clear-cut dedication over the rhythmi- cal adulation of the crowd. "None of them will be abandoned for the sake of my safety. Your place is to accept my offer of escort as far as Middleton. There our ways part. Leave the fate and disposition of my people to me. You must serve your own order and bear my message on to your Prime."

Under the lucent weight of Lysaer's gaze, Lirenda knew no logical reason why she should feel humbled or shamed. Regal chivalry should not have overwhelmed pride. Bound into his debt by his dedi- 502.

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cated sincerity, she could not shake the illusion that she was the lesser power. Though her poise stayed unbroken, all her wisdom and accomplishment as First Senior seemed diminished before his true grace as she accepted the gift of his kindness.

503.

Summer 5653 Checks and Balance The hour that Arithon's sloop Talliarthe makes sail to cross Mainmere channel to Havish, a clan messenger departs for the sisterhouse in Capewell, in his hand a packet addressed to Morriel Prime which bears Rathain's leopard seal: the content, with Arithon's cordial regards, holds the First Senior's purloined spell crystal and cryptic promise that the debt has been duly discharged for Caolle's death ....

In the central chamber of the dragon skull at the vortex of the grimward, the Sorcerer Asandir leans on the shoulder of his black horse; near blind with fatigue, exhausting his last thread of depleted concentration, he frames the clear memory of the focus circle set into the dungeon of Althain Tower....

in the mires of Mogg's Fen, Luhaine carries tidings to the caithdein of Tysan, that Arithon is safe across the channel to Torwent, and three brigs crewed by clansmen guard Mainmere Narrows to bear the refugee families into sanctuary under High King Eldir's justice; and amid tears and sorrow for those too late to spare, Maenol makes painful disposition that henceforward, every surviving clan bloodline will maintain a secure branch on the protection of foreign soil ....

504.

Summer 5653 XIV. Passages The handpicked company which rode out with the Prince of the Light pressed straight on through the night. They traveled light and without fanfare for speed, with only one bannerman to announce the royal presence. The muggy, moist heat of the flatlands clung like syrup over the land. Darkness rang loud with the clicks of singing insects. The men behind the torch-bearing outriders mopped tearing eyes from streamed trailers of oily smoke. They held their for- mation in columns two abreast and trusted their horses to negotiate the hard-packed alkaline footing.

They thundered down to the sea inlet as fast as the posthouses could supply their urgent demand for remounts.

On that hour, the sheltered cove by the ferry wharf lay wrapped in woolly fog, the herring gulls wheeling and crying unseen against the filtered, rose blush of dawn. While horseboys still tou- sled from sleep in the loft led off their blown mounts, the serving girls from the ferryhouse brought them a meal of bacon, hot bread, and steamed fish. Men grown slack from their long weeks at sea cursed their new saddle blisters and stretched the kinks from their legs.

"Damnfool waste of effort, all this rush," a fresh recruit groused to a pair of weathered veterans who lounged by the tied boats at the water- front. Experience had long since taught them not to waste themselves JANNY WURTS.

fretting. They listened, noncommittal, working their way throuh ha~l cheese and buttered biscuit.

While the incoming tide slapped at the bollards, their less experi- enced colleague nattered on. "Those riders from Hanshire have been lost for months. Whatever dark sorcery led them astray, they're prob- ably dead. If not, what's the difference? Another day, or a week are unlikely to matter." Engrossed in self-pity, he failed to notice his com- panions had stiflened and stopped eating in disquiet. "if you ask me, we tire men and horses in a cross-country race to no purpose."

Seemingly out of nowhere, hard fingers locked onto the whiner's shoulder and jerked him face about toward the innyard.

"No man oathsworn to fight the shadow at my side shirks his given duty to his fellows," cracked Lysaer s'Ilessid. The pale white of his tunic melding into the mist, he had moved up unseen.

The grief of his past night's loss still marked him. Yet even through exhaustion and the incandescent fire of just anger, he noticed the fer- ryman's youngest toddler, wandered in his wake from the guest- house. He knelt in the dust. "Go, child. The morning's too fine to spoil with shouting when you can pick shells from the beach."

As the girl wandered off, he straightened, confronted the miscre- ant, and resumed his lashing reprimand. "I will have it known beyond question that anyone needing help against the works of evil sorcery shall receive what they ask. Assistance will reach them with all the speed that crown resource can muster. My will on this matter shall brook no challense. For today's lack of diligence, consider your- self released from your oath of service to the Light." The recruit began a shocked protest.

Lysaer s'Ilessid cut him off. "Don't trouble to speak. I won't hear excuses." His blue eyes as inexorable as arctic ice, he insisted, "There can be no faint hearts in my ranks. As we shoulder the coming war against darkness, every man must stand ready to give his life without question."

"Mercy, bright lord." The young man fell to his knees, unmanned and broken to pleading. "Don't cast me out of your service!"

Lysaer snapped his fingers. The royal guard's captain stepped in on smart cue and ripped the sunwheel badge from the sleeve of the disgraced recruit's tunic.

"Leave us," commanded the Prince of the Light. "Stay clear of our crossing. The rest of this company has a task to accomplish in defense of this land and its people." He turned his back, let his icy regard sweep the rest of the company. "Believe this! Any man who looks back will be dismissed as well. Before threat of sorcery, we must har- 506.

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bor no weakness. Veer from our commitment for any man's faults, and the victory can never be ours."

Set against an ebb tide, the ferry passage to Middlecross required a half day to complete. The landing was accomplished amidst heat and haze in the close, summer fetor of a port town. While a dithering har- bormaster recovered from receiving the royal party unwarned, Lirenda went her separate way and arranged passage by galley to Capewell.

The Prince of the Light saw her off with smooth courtesy, then made his presence felt among the town council through the due pro- cess of royal requisition. His small company prevailed against gather- ing crowds and deafening cries of adulation. On demand, his captain procured the fittest, fresh horses. Under the limp folds of the sun- wheel banner, the two dozen mounted and rode out, watched by awed merchants and idle children, and by sailhands staggering drunk from the taverns who wandered upon the commotion. The prince's guard left behind a furor of fresh hope, and rumor that would spread east and north by the trade couriers.

Under sparse clouds like melted enamel, they left the trade road and crossed into the flats with a local guide to lead them. Across the windswept leagues of tilled farmland, past barking dogs and the stares of herders and goodwives, they pressed lathered horses. Four men were left when remounts ran short, and the day bled away toward sunset. Angled light stabbed flecks in the mica which crusted the striated rock. In ragged order, the company clattered across bar- ren crests and dried gullies. They churned, slapping midges, through the mud of the sinkholes where the fog was first to gather, then camped by the glow of a three-quarter moon veiled under bridal-lace mist.

Astride once more in the half-light of dawn, the sea fogs like smoke about them, they passed the last inhabited farmstead; then its outly- ing sheep stanks of tumbledown stone, crusted in moss and gray lichen. Except for chinking bits and the creak of saddle leather, the riders might have been ghosts. They poured through the cross- stitched fronds of the willow thickets and exchanged no chatter at all.

Prince Lysaer led, his gleaming gold hair and scintillant jewels unearthly against the bald slabs of striated granite which scabbed that desolate setting.

The men at his back had outworn their will to raise spirits through railing banter. While the fogs rolled and shredded, and hazed sun speared down and raised trickling sweat under padded gambeson 507.

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and helm, they dared set no words to their dread. No mind amon them could grapple the horrors they might be required to face.

Somewhere ahead, forty competent soldiers had been swallowed alive by fell magic. The ones who rode now in sworn duty to try res- cue owned no better protection than steel swords and their obdurate faith in the Light.

For Lysaer s'Ilessid himself, the bleak landscape left unpleasant, slack hours to think. His aching grief for Talith's loss became a tor- ment of wretched persistence. As though the mainstay to his intellect had splintered like glass, pain left its branding reminder. Circling memories reopened old scars. The cycle of betrayal and abandon begun by his s'Ahelas mother now magnified and replayed, until he wished he was numb to all passion.

The friend who might have shared his hour of mourning lay dead, slain along with the war host massacred by the dark on the field at Dier Kenton Vale.

Nor could the Prince of the Light claim the luxury of solitude, even with the onset of night. The warren of scrub willow where the field troop made camp afforded no privacy for grief. Lysaer spoke and ate where necessity demanded. Duty bound to the needs of his men, he lay wakeful and watched the summer constellations melt slowly into the mist. The hour saw him more alone than he had ever been since the hour of his birth. Isolated by his royal rank, and by the cause that he shouldered to amend the defenseless plight of humanity, he still could not hide from himself.

Around him, no sound but the dry scrape of crickets; the plink of seeping water from a rock spring could not lull him to the forgetful oblivion of sleep. Nor could he silence his rampaging hurt.

Once, his marriage to a single woman had threatened to seduce him from his oathsworn obligation to bring down the Master of Shadow. Now Talith was gone. Temptation removed, he had not gained relief. Death had not brought him one iota of freedom from the drawing agony of her allure, which had dreadfully threatened to snap his integrity and undermine all his high principles. He felt newly lost. No grand cause could bridge the terrible vacancy love had left torn through his heart.

The only fire that remained to be fanned was his hatred for Arithon s'Ffalenn.

The Shadow Master's cleverness had manipulated Princess Talith to betrayal. In the months of her abduction, his accursed, scheming wiles had orchestrated her estrangement. Lysaer s'Ilessid endured the chill fact that he owned nothing dear in the world on which to build a so8 FUGITIVE PRINCE.

bright future. Empty himselL royal justice demanded he not shirk his responsibility for the needs of his people. His life had meaning only if he delivered their destiny from the manipulative powers of the mage- born.

Yet even the comfort of resolve left him hollow.

Lysaer locked his teeth against flooding, bitter rage as the scourge of his faithless mother's s'Ahelas farsight mocked him to gritty self- honesty. At least for tonight, he could not mask the lie: he shouldered the challenge of the grimward for raw need, that the rooted aversion he held for all sorcery might drown out the pain of his loss.

Dawn saw him the first man arisen from his blankets. He still led the company through the baked heat of high morning. Starburst reflections jumped off the mica from the flood of sun overhead.

Where bare rock was covered, the horses plowed chest high through topaz tassels of goldenrod and saw grass. Their hooves thudded over sod matted with gorse and bracken in the gullies which still hoarded moisture.

The land seemed empty, a circle of silence sealed under limitless sky. Then, with no warning, the horses took alarm. They snorted, necks rigid, their tails and ears raised, as if some uncanny presence raised distrust. No effort would settle them. Spur and rein, and feats of skilled horsemanship failed to restore their willing temperament.

"We'll dismount." Lysaer vaulted off his skittering mount, then waved for the hook-nosed local shepherd who served as guide to approach for immediate consultation. "Are we near the place where the men disappeared?"

"Your Grace, no." The man rammed the cork in the neck of his skin flask, mopped his dripping mustache, and glanced uneasily over both shoulders. "That site lies another day's ride to the east."

Down the ranks, a man slapped a fly. The report caused the guide to start out of his skin. "We should leave here. Animals are wiser to danger than we."

"I didn't come this far to run at the first breath of trouble." Lysaer raised his head, squinting against the glare of full noon. The strained quiet extended, while around him, the breeze stilled and died. Men shuddered with odd chills and gooseflesh. An insidious need stole over the mind to turn tail and beat swift retreat.

Chin up, eyes forward, his dust-caked surcoat straight on trim shoulders, Lysaer s'Ilessid masked the icy, first onset of fear. Only his stance of unmalleable determination kept the men steadfast at his heels.

A horse stamped. On a choking intake of breath, the local guide 509.

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whirled and ran, thrashing a headlong course through the brush in blind panic to take himself elsewhere.

"Steady, keep sharp!" barked the captain. "Docked pay for any man who breaks from his place in the ranks!"

Suddenly the air gained an unsettled density, unsubtle and heavy as quartz. Sunlight fell magnified in unexplainable brilliance, as though the sky itself had tumed refractive. The stabbed reflections off mail shirts and metallic gear caught in queer, actinic sparkles that befuddled clear vision. Then all natural sense of direction dissolved.

"By the light, we're being witched!" the bannerman gasped, shaken.

Lysaer touched the man's shoulder with quelling strength. "Be still." In reckless defiance, he raised his fist high and issued his own challenge in pure light.

The bolt seared aloft like the quenching shriek of hot steel. Its daz- zling radiance slammed into resistance and summoned a veil of blank fog. Gray wisps eddied and curled, first as disorganized rags of vapor, then as a frothing, impenetrable veil which expanded to mask the known landscape.

To the men-at-arms rooted in trembling obedience, the surge of Lysaer's gift seemed to collide with an uncanny barrier of mage-force.

"Light save us!" the royal equerry cried through the murmur of another man's prayers.

The words rang flat and echoless with distance. Seared blind by the stifled, white radiance of his effort, Lysaer s'Ilessid fed the hard edge of his terror through the inborn channels of his talent. The more fight he raised, the more tightly he felt the unmalleable vortex of force twine like wire about his person. He sensed the connection. On the shaken verge of panic, he burned his gift like bale fire, determined to rout the magecraft which bore down as if he had been chained as its target.

Visceral fear ripped through him.

Then the veil which masked mortal sight from the infinite tore across and shattered into light. The beacon this time was not of his making; his birth mastery could not grapple or bind it.

He beheld no land, no rock, no live body. Around him and through rang the dance of pure energy that fired the chord of Ath's mystery. A fist of dauntless power embraced him. He could not move, could not think, only be, melded as one with the forces which pealed to unbear- able crescendo and Named him out of the void.

A cry like a shard of. clear crystal lanced his mind.

"Lysaer, Prince of the Light, deliver me safe from the darkness!"

510.

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For one sustained second, ephemeral as moonlight on snow, or the whisper of thermals through a hawk's wing, the whole substance of displaced reality seemed to pivot and spin on its balance.

Then a peal of thunder cracked the luminescent air. Vibrations slapped his person with ranging force, tearing earth and sky back into solidified existence.

The land had not changed. Clear sun shone down, untrammeled by strange mists. Shocked speechless and scarcely able to stand upright, Lysaer s'Ilessid saw that his company of guards had been thrown to a man from their feet.

For a disjointed moment, they remained in stunned fear, flinching and paralyzed from reaction. Then a breeze stroked the weed tassels.

A wren sang. The day resurged in all its diverse normality, while shocked men rubbed flash-blinded eyes. They groped after dropped weapons. A stupefied handful of seconds crept by before any of them noticed the miracle.

A dust-coated, haunted captain at arms was sprawled weeping at Lysaer's feet.

The prince blinked. He could not place the man's wiry, dark hair, nor the bloody gash raked down his forearm. The filthy, tom blazon on his surcoat was no sunwheel, but a sable stag on a scarlet shield.

His own captain was first to exclaim from the sidelines. "Hanshire?

Sulfin Evend?" The name raised a babble of incredulous shouting.

"Look! Ath, it's him!"

"One of those who was taken by dark sorcery!"