gle right pretty through the holes."

Jieret looked up, a squint to one eye as he took vengeful aim with the holystone.

But the sailhand's snide interest had swung toward the land, where the high, russet rock notched the sky in crazed patterns. Turn.

bled walls crowned the summit, bleached with sun, and the broke~ eggshell rims of the keeps which remained of a Second Age fortress Beyond, unveiled by the sliding shift of vantage as the fishing smack nosed downwind, there arose a trim set of masts stripped of canvas, and a dark, lean hull, rocking serene at her anchorage.

"Swamp me for a half-wit!" cried the sailhand. "Who'd have risked coin to wager? The Khetienn hasn't sailed after all."

Jieret reached his feet in a rushed, thoughtless movement, and th~~ bucket overset; a wet sludge of sand flooded over the offending set leathers. "Fiends plague!"

The language loosed next won a laugh from the boat's swarthy captain. "Ach, let her go, lad! The deck won't see harm. For your stripped buttocks, we'll scrounge a loan from our slop chest."

"My naked arse isn't like to be burned for dark sorcery," Jieret groused, his distress not at all for soaked garments. He glowered

48.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

across the closing gap of water. The brigantine's satin brightwork mocked him back, insolent, unmarred by the damage rough weather might cause to drive her back into shelter. Nor did her decks hold industrious crewmen, but languished untenanted in the heat. Jieret's foreboding deepened. His liege should be long away from known waters, with no trouble too dire to stay him.

The hard-run little fishing smack put in and launched her dory over the side. "We'll hold off for your signal," said the captain from his squint-eyed perch at the rail.

Jieret settled into the tender's stern seat, still damp, but pre- sentable. He brooded throughout the approach to the strand, limned in the flat glare of noon, the shade like slopped ink beneath the cedars. As the craft neared the shore, a figure built plump and round as a partridge bobbed amid the rocks, craned a short neck, then erupted into spectacular strings of epithets.

The oarsman listened, awestruck. "D'ye suppose yon one caught a hornet in his breeks?" He reversed his stroke, and the dory spun about in the wash of a slack tide breaker. "A collection like that's a rare masterpiece. Never heard the like, not in any cutthroat dive the length of the westshore dockside."

H'm speculation foundered against a peculiar, chilly reticence as, boots gripped in hand, his profile like the anviled rim of a thunder- doud, the muscled young chieftain from Strakewood splashed thigh deep in the shallows.

"Well then," the crewman said, stoic. "I'll be off. Show us a light from the point if ye want passage back to the mainland."

Oars creaked. The dory reversed direction, leaving Jieret to wade through the surf.

The diatribe from the headland hiccuped through a pause, then switched key to outraged recognition. "Ath! It's yourself!" Jieret forbore to glance shoreward.

"He's not with you!" The fat man on the beach hopped the last steps to the tidemark, shook his lard fist, and erupted, "Damn his lice- brained, sow-eared, rutting stubborn mind! He's bent on getting him- self killed."

Jieret arrived on dry shingle. "Not with me?" he echoed. Stopped erect in noon glare while salt droplets sluiced runnels down his ankles, he gazed from full height into an unkempt, round face and smoldering, cinnamon eyes.

"Turd-stupid, string-plucking goose," said Dakar, erstwhile spell- binder to a Fellowship Sorcerer, and known far and wide as the Mad Prophet. He licked bearded lips, then clapped his mouth closed,

49.

J^~ Wu~$ belatedly aware that the clansman who loomed over him like dammed acid with temper. Dakar's layers of mismatched ing heaved as he dredged up an ingratiating shrug. "Well, maybe!

a goose, exactly."

"You refer to my liege, Prince Arithon?" Jieret tossed a clipped ~ past his shoulder. Behind him, a wing-folded raptor on the settled~ of the sea, the brigantine seemed juxtaposed on the view, a wild imprisoned by the natural stone revetments ,w, hich bordered the hi bor basin. "Don't you dare claim he isn't here. : The Mad Prophet screwed his eyes shut. Wheezing like a rna~ from his headlong rush to the beachhead, he raised chubby, p ated hands and tugged at his fox brush beard.

Since on their last meeting, Dakar had been the Master of implacable enemy, Jieret added, "We are speaking of the same Dakar flounced stiff. "Nobody else drives me to fits of sick and anyway, you should know best. This isn't the first time you come chasing his shirttails the length of the continent."

Too wary to mind insults, Jieret kept his fierce glower. Dakar miracle was not wallowing drunk. Though the clownish, features were still slack from loose living, the spirit inside his pared flesh seemed transformed into change. The pouched eyes a glint of shrewd purpose. A queer incongruity, and one at odds with the Mad Prophet's scapegrace reputation. The silence extended too long.

"What's amiss?" pestered Dakar. "Something's turned wrong.

Ath's own Avenger couldn't have dragged you to sea."

"Oh, there's trouble, well enough." Jieret parked his hip against: boulder and jammed on his boots to mask his outright anxiety. "P, haps you'd best say where Prince Arithon went."

"Ashore," Dakar said. Sweating in his seamy, worn clothes, looked all at once beaten down, just another bit of flotsam cast up b]

storm to wilt on the waterworn rocks. "His Grace is alone, back 01 the mainland."

Jieret confronted the Mad Prophet's moon features like a swords man stunned silly by a mace. "The mainland," he echoed in stark di belief. "Please Ath, not now. He can't be."

"Best come up." Sly eyes swiveled askance; Dakar surveyed'

Rathain's tall caithdein, bitter himself with shared sympathy. "You look like you need to be out of the sun, and besides, there's a risk. We oughtn't discuss his royal affairs so freely here in the open." Jieret looked blank. "What?"

"Koriani," said Dakar. "Damn prying witches and their bother- 5O.

FUGI?IVE PRINCE.

~ane spells." Then he rolled his gaze skyward, remiss. "I forgot. You wouldn't know how far things went wrong last autumn in Vastmark.

The Koriani Prime Enchantress tried her level best to have Arithon s'Ffalenn assassinated."

Jieret shot tense, hand clasped on his knife, his color gone shatter~ ingly white. "On my oath as caithdein, is every living faction on Athera dead set to end my liege lord's life?"

"Damned near." Dakar closed his moist grip on the larger man's elbow and tugged. "You haven't brought dispatches in with the sloop? Just yourself? Best move along, then." He nodded toward the cliff path. "I've got quarters up in the old fortress."

Cicadas buzzed amid the crumbled rock stair that jagged up the flank of the headland. The dry air scarcely stirred, thick with the resin taint of cedar. Gray lichens silted like ash in the crannies, and the only visible inhabitants were the finches, flitting in startled bursts through the vines netted over bent limbs and black needles.

From the heights, the isle was a fissured, clenched fist, the fretted shoreline worried by tides, and seamed in jagged grottos, hazed over in lavender shade. Here, in the First Age, Paravian seers had held council with dragons, who flew the world's skies no more. Against the vicious aberrations spawned by the drakes' wild magic, defend- ers from four races had languished, besieged, in the cramped, ragged bounds of the curtain wall. Now strewn like kicked block, the last ridge of foundation housed basking, gold lizards which skittered away into cracks.

The eldest living dragons had spun their dream of desperation and appeal within these baked, cratered keeps, to draw to Athera the aid of the Fellowship Sorcerers. But if any ghost presence from that past remained to haunt Corith's ruin, the land retained no thread of disso- nance. Just bare stone, tuned shrill by the blaze of summer noon, and loomed on the untrammeled song of bundled energies which under- pinned all the substance of creation. Centuries of wind and battering storms had swept even the deepest, layered bedrock clean of the imprint of violent vibration.

"Through here," Dakar puffed. He beckoned into gloom and reap- peared beyond a crumbling archway.

Jieret followed, but saw no sign of tenancy. The temporary, safe haven for a Third Age fugitive felt abandoned, as if the site had been owned for all time by naught but the wind and the seabirds.

The stillness sawed at Jieret's suspicion. "Where are my liege's people? The crew of the Khetienn? Daelion, Master of Fate, save his Grace, has he kept none but you to stand by him?"

51.

Suddenly exposed before dangerous antipathy, Dakar stop sliding, to chinks in complaint from loose stone. "I'm not yc prince's enemy, not anymore. And he's kept the Khetienn's crew full complement. They're all here, and safe, masked under my w ,o,f concealment." A note of plaintive unhappiness crept throuI That's why, Ath forgive me, I had to stay. Given the choice wouldn't be here."

Jieret regarded Dakar's sweating tension. "I know the s'Ffal temper, none better. You were told to hide the brigantine, if gall~ happened on her?"

Dakar nodded, miserable. "Or fire her, should my spells of illusi~ fall short." He shuffled breathlessly on. "Man, I couldn't stop from going. His Grace has a will to stand down the Avenger's Fi~ Horses, and no mercy on the fool who interferes. If he gets hin~ butchered on some mayor's scaffold, I can't argue his right to ten~ fate."

At Jieret's worried start, Dakar raised his hands. "No, rest assure Arithon's not taunting a death wish. He couldn't if he wanted.

Fellowship of Seven forced him to take blood oath last winter. Hi bound and sworn to life, whatever the cost, against future threat fr0~ the Mistwraith."

"Mercy on him," Jieret whispered, shocked. In all Athera's hist0r so strict a measure had never been asked of a crown prince. "Idich know."

"That happened after you parted at Minderl Bay." Dakar reache~ gap in the masonry. Beyond him, the hazed jointure of sea and dimmed into distance, snagged with fluffs of white cloud. Innoc~ now, those scattered fleeces would mass into towers by late noon, and anvil into a squall line. Just as untrustworthy, Dakar right and vanished into clear space.

Jieret's startled shout entangled with a prosaic reassurance, backward. "Pay no mind to the wards. They're illusion. The quite safe."

Faced by a jagged opening, then a yawning gap into air, the chieftain muttered imprecations against the spellbinder's feckless character. A clutch of fractured boulders overhung the drop, ready to launch from their settings at the first wrong breath of the wind. No coward, Jieret stepped down.

Chills roiled and rippled across his flesh. His senses upended.

fierce, hot tingle sang through his nerves, then stopped with a bracing jolt.

The Earl of the North bit back a yelp, the steel hilts of his weapons FUGITIVE PRINCE.

:rew, he~ ny :hoice, 'Ffaleru galleys illusion top him: r's Five himself o tempt ~ssured.

ed. The .~r. He's at from history, [ didn't ~ched a nd sky nocent ~' after- turned , flung Dting's te clan !ckless ady to td. No led. A racing apons ~lrned hot to his hand. He blinked, wits recovered, to find himself standing in a dusty, flat compound, scattered with tents sewn from sailcloth. Nor was Corith any longer untenanted. A circle of sailhands in the shade of a gnarled cedar. The ones near at hand looked aside at him, bored, then resumed quarreling over a dice throw, the winning stakes a collection of sticks notched with tally marks. The crescent knife used to keep count flashed in the fist of a prune-skinned little desertman, who stabbed air and hurled his scathing invective at a ship's boy for rigging the odds.

"The defense spell is spliced reflection," Dakar said, smug. "Those cliff rocks, and that span of ocean were borrowed intact from a site halfway down the north slope." As the fracas erupted into knee- slapping mirth over the ship's boy's scurrilous rejoinder, the spell- binder admitted, "Of course, the noise was more difficult to mask."

Case in point, a shout pealed out like steel put to the hammer.

The urchin shot erect from amid the pack of dicers. All coltish brown limbs and angular grace, the creature had blond hair tied in a glistening, long braid. The end was cross-laced with a frippery of rib- bon bleached to rust. A second glance at a body clad in scruffy sail- hand's cottons showed the first, shy curves of a girl at the threshold of maturity.

"Arithon wasn't on that fishing craft?" she shrilled across the brassy wash of sunlight.

At Dakar's headshake, she crowed her wild triumph. "Well then you owe me six royals! He wasn't to embark 'til the winds changed, and the weather's stayed contrary this season."

"There are still three days left before solstice," Dakar hurled back.

"Your silver's not won before then." Soured by the prospect of for- feited coin, he confided to Jieret, "That's Feylind, the pest. I misspoke myself teaching that girl to wager. She attached herself to Arithon at Merior by the Sea, and for her talent, your liege thought to train her.

She's gifted at navigation and seamanship when she isn't cheating numbers on the dice."

"She has spirit, give her that." Jieret watched her spin back to defend her hoarded spoils, then realized: this girl must be one of the twins that Arithon had spoken of granting his oath of protection.

Years passed. Feylind had grown beyond childhood; nor would her brother Fiark remain beardless much longer, wherever his own fate had sent him.

"Come on," Dakar urged. "If the heat isn't making you die for a drink, ! want all your rumors from the mainland."

53.

JANNY WURTS.

Dusk softened over the broken spires at Corith. The: breakwater spread a flat, purple disk. The seasonal squall line r bled off the coast, stalled through afternoon by the chancy, winn0v ing breezes. Cloud ramparts loomed off the islands, their sulf~~r~ rims stained by the afterglow. When Jieret refused outright ~~ ~~ what drew him from Rathain, Dakar parked his bulk upon the ~:r~i ing rope pallet he had strung in the shelter of a tumbledo~~.~ dru: tower. The furnishings consisted of axe-cut fir, lashed at the i~i~~.t~r~ with twine. A water jug, a basin, and a clump of holed sock, 1~ cached in the niche of an arrow slit. Beneath this, a sea chest in ~,~_,~ a table held a spellbinder's clutter of bundled herbs, and an ~.dge.

pair of shearwater's flight feathers. Jieret chose to sit on the ,lc~r floor through the exchange of desultory small news.

They suffered but one interruption; the desertman burst h~ w:tt~0~ word or apology, and left a meal of smoked fish and greens. l'h~ ia~ of the day slowly fled. The ragged old walls were roofed with ~ t~a: hazard patchwork of sailcloth, worried to threads and gaps k,~ t'r.

wind until stars could be counted in constellations. Outside, th~. ~ai.

hands had laid off their dicing. Someone returned from trappint,, a~: coals were laid in to roast conies. No stranger to the nuance of le,~dir.

men, Jieret listened. Through spirited slangs and the odd br~r,t laughter he noticed the underlying worry.

Arithon's absence weighed on them all, though the subject starx'e: scrupulously unmentioned. Even the Mad Prophet's prying, sl~ tal; circled to evade the sore topic.

The temperature cooled. Jieret cracked his knuckles and sud ~n?

ran out of patience. "Why should my liege be alone on the .~:~a~, land?"

Silence; the fallen summer darkness cut by a yelp as a sailhan~ burned careless fingers at the spit. Dakar against custom had ncl touched his food. He regarded his laced fingers, as if he just realize~ his soft, dimpled knuckles were wearing a stranger's rough callus. Ht was not drunk. His clothing was mended, and his beard, trimme~ neat, as if dogged grooming might suppress the misery'that impella his anguished admission. "His Grace sought Cattrick. That huge ma~ ter joiner he used to employ back in Merior."

"Dharkaron avenge!" Jieret cried. "His Grace went to Shand?"

"I already know," Dakar supplied. "Official books of grievanct~ have been opened on the southcoast. Lord Erlien's clansmen sent warning. Any town citizen can make claim of injury against Aritho~ No proof is required. Just a sealed statement from the plaintiff. Thost women left widowed at Vastmark have wasted no time recording all