Traitor's Knot Part 42

'Guilty on one count, at least.' Eriegal knelt. He offered a brace of wriggling trout slung from a thong in his fist. 'If you choose a site and build us a fire, I'll overlook your bad temper and cook.'

Jeynsa uncurled from her tight-laced crouch. She laid the last pebble back down on the stream-bank, then stood, stretched cramped limbs, and regarded the Companion who brought something more than an offer of fish. 'I didn't need you to stand guard at my back.'

Eriegal raised his quizzical brows. That innocuous grin on his rounded face always masked convoluted intentions. 'I didn't. That's true. Not if you stayed out here for thinking.'

A corner of Jeynsa's mouth crept up. The spark of challenge softened out of her eyes, which were a pale green flecked with silver when she was not angry. 'I suppose I owe our crown prince an apology. d.a.m.n him.'

'His Grace doesn't want your contrition,' Eriegal agreed. He crouched with his skinning knife and began gutting his catch. 'Sidir always warned that our prince would be difficult.'

'Not so much if you knew him.' Prepared by her innate honesty to be fair, Jeynsa rubbed her bruised arm, which had stiffened during her solitary retreat. 'Father once told me his Grace acted vicious those times when he was most vulnerable.'

Eriegal met that opinion with silence. His blade remained busy. Blood streaked his short fingers as he sliced into rainbow-scaled bellies, and tossed the offal aside for the foxes. As the pause stretched, expectant, he finally shrugged. 'I didn't serve in the campaign at Vastmark. Sidir would know better than I.'

Nor had Eriegal fought in Daon Ramon; the remembered argument still stung, of the bitter hour when the past high earl had enforced his last orders. Eriegal's shrewd gift for tactics had tied him to the camp to advise Barach's inexperience as war captain. 'I was too young to swear when our liege first took his crown oath before Steiven in Strakewood.' In fact, Eriegal had been an observant, shy boy. One who still recalled a sickly and temperamental prince, carving whistles to fascinate toddlers.

What Caolle and Sidir had seen in the same man, neither one ever cared to discuss. Now, except for Braggen, and Deith, who maintained the understaffed watch in Des.h.i.+r, all of the other Companions were dead.

'We can talk as we eat,' Eriegal admonished, 'which can't happen if there's no fire.'

This was the heartcore of Halwythwood, and close enough to the well-springs where the mysteries held resonance that no spark could be struck without ritual. Jeynsa moved off to sound for a suitable site and invoke the due steps to establish permission.

Soon enough, she had a small blaze set against a flat boulder, and Eriegal had the fish roasting. Jeynsa sat to one side, nervously smoothing the fletching on the Companion's arrows, their filled quiver laid down with the recurve bow he had not yet warmed to unstring. The points were f.l.a.n.g.ed war tips, and not the hunter's broadheads used to take deer. Under dank mist, while crows called, and the crowns of the trees dripped fizzling drops on the coals, Jeynsa broached the th.o.r.n.y subject that had tormented more than her for two nights.

'When did you stop fully trusting his Grace?'

Eriegal started. His fresh skin, pale eyes, and tarnished tousle of hair made his face seem transparently innocent. Yet the cunning that made him a deadly tactician never displayed open thoughts. 'Even for you, Jeynsa, that's a bit specious. Arithon is Fellows.h.i.+p-sanctioned as crown prince!'

The Teiren's'Valerient did not back down. She stroked a striped c.o.c.k-feather into a razor's edge, then twirled the shaft, uncomplacent. 'Well, who else would you have been guarding against? Sidir's had the sentry scouts tripled since the day his Grace was brought into camp.'

Head bent, Eriegal speared a hot fillet on a stick and extended the offering to Jeynsa. 'Are you asking as Jieret's bereaved daughter, or as the realm's chosen caithdein?'

'Should there be a difference?' Too taut-nerved to eat, Jeynsa ignored the fish. Thrown a tart glance, she insisted, 'You're the one who said you were ravenous.'

Yet Eriegal was never so easily deterred. 'Oh, there's a difference,' he stated. 'One's a clear-cut act of crown treason. The other, a point of charter law I would be oath-bound to answer.' His steely glance nailed her, an unsparing a.s.sessment of the freshly shorn hair that even still, repudiated the ritual braid that denoted her rank and clan heritage.

Jeynsa flushed. Only Arithon s'Ffalenn had grasped the true reason behind her emphatic renouncement.

Yet if, like the rest, Eriegal presumed that her motive was no more than the pique of rebellion, he was not insensitive. The hard blink, then the tears that brightened her eyes were correctly acknowledged as grief. Wrapped in drifting mist, hot-blooded youth and staid Companion shared a moment of kindred distress.

A man grown since the slaughter that reddened Tal Quorin, Eriegal could never forget. He, too, knew the horror of losing close family to Arithon's feal defence. Childhood friends, siblings, his parents and cousins: all had been lost to Etarra's war host in the course of a single day. Of his generation, only fourteen young boys had survived, named by Jieret as his Companions. Through the years following, the unbearable losses had mounted. Indomitable, irreplaceable, Caolle had fallen. His wounding on Arithon's drawn blade at Riverton had been acquitted by Earl Jieret's bound inquiry. Of the nine slain the past winter on Daon Ramon Barrens, the tenth had been Red-beard himself. Deaths even Braggen's iron disposition had forgiven, though no one still living had been eye-witness to the ruthless sorceries that Arithon had spun; that had, at such inconceivable cost, broken the death grip of the cordon closed down by Lysaer's fanatics.

Eriegal was first to break the locked glance with his fallen chieftain's wayward daughter. 'His Grace accepted my oath upon his arrival at the circle in Caith-al-Caen.'

Yet Jeynsa's birth-born talent was Sight, that could sense where the heart's cross-currents twisted. She voiced the chilling thought, while the silver mist ghosted between them. 'He's also a master sorcerer. One who has accepted guest welcome from Davien the Betrayer. How much more of our precious clanblood will be spilled, you are thinking, before someone dares put the question? Whom do we have who has the main strength to examine that deadly connection?'

Eriegal sucked a sharp breath, while three trout fillets burned, and another one cooled, staked through by a sharpened stick. 'Go back,' he said, firm. 'Accept your position as Asandir's choice and shoulder your charge as the realm's caithdein. Then, if you decide to open an inquiry, I'll be there to stand at your shoulder.'

A frown pinched Jeynsa's brows, which were dark like her mother's. The war-tipped arrow was restored to its quiver, then returned, still hooked to its owner's antler-bossed belt. The stout Companion accepted the burden, then doused the fire and took up his bow.

Yet Jeynsa could not so easily reconcile her mora.s.s of conflicted thoughts. Against all she heard, through her desolate pain, she could not dismiss the impact of her royal audience.

The prince had attempted to treat with her fairly. Though stripped by exhaustion that overset tact, he had not belittled her vicious hostility. Nor had his initiate training been used to mask the most private core of his being: the oath of protection sworn on his blood had invoked the unimpeachable clarity of her Sighted perception. In that exposed moment, the reach and strength of his commitment had unmasked his inherent sincerity.

Jeynsa had beheld her lost father in Prince Arithon's eyes. The pain of shared love within that encounter had held nothing of falsehood: no burden of crown duty, no tarnish of sly scheming, and no trace of shallow, political plat.i.tude.

Reconciled to the weight of her obligation, she agreed to embrace her Named fate. But the young pride so brutally overturned would not easily bend before her s'Valerient integrity She needed Eriegal's shrewd mind and anguished uncertainty as her counterstay, lest she shame her tattered dignity beyond salvage by begging forbearance at her crown prince's feet.

Under mist that still clung like a cloying blanket, Jeynsa approached the clan chieftain's lodge tent. Dishevelled, her leathers and arms smeared with sap from two nights spent bedded in pine needles, she flushed, caught aback by Eriegal's suggestion that she amend her neglected appearance.

'Caithdein, you must. Your office demands the semblance of propriety.'

'Dharkaron's almighty b.o.l.l.o.c.ks!' she exclaimed, raised to a self-conscious flush. 'After putting an unsheathed dagger to royalty? If I run into Mother or Barach beforehand, they'll peel the last inch of hide off me!'

To evade that brangling brush with authority, she entreated Eriegal to divert the sharp eyes of the sentries. Stalker's skills let her skulk through the perimeter and worm her way under the back of the lodge tent. Breathless, now muddy, she reached the shelter of her personal quarters without being seen.

The shut cubicle was dark. Jeynsa dared not strike a light, lest the glow should alert the closed meeting in progress on the other side of the curtain. Moving by touch, she could not avoid overhearing the talk exchanged at the trestle.

'Where in Sithaer's black pit has Eriegal got to?' Braggen's expostulation ran on unchecked, through Feithan's placating murmur. 'Well, he's overdue back! We're going to need hours to catch him up with yesterday's round of bad news.'

'. . . can't be helped,' Sidir stated, unmoved. 'Sit down and stop pacing, will you?'

The trestle-board creaked, through the slide of a bench, and the clunk as a weapon banged wood. 'What's his Grace doing, anyway?'

'Still with his woman, far as we know,' said the muted voice of the night's watch scout.

Since that particular man was renowned for sharp ears, and Sidir's keen perceptions too often sparked his talent for piercing insight, Jeynsa crept on cat feet. She stripped her soiled clothing, then scrounged through her satchel and hooked out her spare s.h.i.+rt. A hesitation, as her groping fingers encountered the weave of the garment beneath: the black tabard that once had belonged to her father, its folds already recut to fit for the invest.i.ture she had refused.

Jeynsa clenched her fist. Her apparent recalcitrance had sparked off her elders' exasperation, for months. Entangled in hurt and loss, driven inside herself, she had never shouldered the responsible burden by asking for their adult understanding. Only Arithon had exposed her deep grief, and beneath that, cracked the mask hiding her desperate fear. All her young life, she had never felt adequate to stand in her father's shoes. As Asandir's choice, she had no excuse to s.h.i.+rk her hard fate, or back down. Nor could she expect to be coddled through shame, as she surrendered her final resistance.

The aware recognition in her prince's eyes would be all she had to sustain the sting of a public humiliation.

Nerve steeled, teeth clenched, Jeynsa rugged the black tabard free of the satchel; while beyond the masking screen of the curtain, Braggen's combative tone sliced above the murmur of conversation.

'I'd have expected his Grace would show up by now, given the blood-bath that's bound to erupt when this wretched affray breaks wide open. After all that Alestron has done in his name? Who could ever believe that his Grace could disown the sworn alliance of the Teir's'Brydion!'

Shocked still, Jeynsa overheard Barach's snapped phrase, bidding Braggen to lower his voice.

As ever, the Companion's fierce temper prevailed. 'Well then, where's your sister? More than anything his Grace will require a caithdein's support at his back!'

'No!' Sidir objected. 'Let things stand as they are. You'll not drag Jieret's daughter into this!'

Dakar's gruff remonstrance held out in support. 'Your prince does not wish her to know right away. The girl cannot stay the horrific course! d.a.m.n pride, will you listen? His Grace's coming work at Etarra is altogether uncanny. No, Braggen, believe me, you have no idea! The dark practice of necromancy is unclean, and by far too deadly dangerous,'

Jeynsa let the dark tabard fall from her nerveless hands. Chilled to clammy sweat, she scarcely dared breathe. While the acrimonious debate surged ahead, her quick, silent hands gathered up her tossed leathers. Shaking, distressed, she groped for her weapons, then unhooked her storm cloak and baldric.

'. . . naught else to do but prepare,' Sidir was insisting. 'Melhalla's been warned. We must secure the north. When this ugly news reaches the sunwheel Alliance, Alestron will wake with its walls under siege. The clans have no choice but to face that grim hour. We must act now to brace for persecution such as no chapter of history has ever foreseen.'

Wrung white, Jeynsa dropped flat and skinned under the wall of the lodge tent. Unseen, she sprinted, then slammed into Eriegal, who had left the scout sentries and crossed the camp to find out what had delayed her.

'Cover for me!' she gasped in his ear. 'Don't ask. I can't face the clan elders with this. Not right away. Let them think I've run off to go hunting.'

Eriegal untangled himself from the wrack of storm cloak, flapping leathers, and baldric. He eyed the sheathed knives and sword; then the bow in her unsteady hand. 'You'll need my quiver,' he stated, nonplussed. 'I don't think you're going to want deer tips.'

Jeynsa shut her eyes. All but ready to weep for the gift of his understanding, she accepted the horn bow and quiver. Straightened up, now possessed of her sire's iron heart, she said, tense, 'I'm not s.h.i.+rking my charge to safeguard the realm.'

Eriegal gathered her trembling fingers, his eyes cool slate as he measured her. 'If you answer the call to test Arithon's character, that is not running away.' Since her inquiry concerned a devious man who was an initiate sorcerer, the Companion slipped her the heirloom amulet he carried, whose virtues were fiend bane and concealment. 'Be steadfast and safe, girl. Remember your background. You are as dear as a daughter to every father in this encampment.'

Jeynsa s.h.i.+fted her burden. She let Eriegal's solicitude slip the thong over her head and tuck the worn metal amulet beneath her s.h.i.+rt. Still too frightened to speak, she gripped his hard wrists, then bolted headlong into the misted murk of the greenwood.

Hours pa.s.sed, while the fog lifted to a pewter overcast that spat drizzle and finally spun veils of fine rainfall. The harried gathering inside the lodge tent acquired the presence of Halwythwood's three t.i.tled elders. Barach's authority became freshly tried, as the a.s.sembly accosted the risky exposure now facing the reduced remnants of Rathain's armed strength. Since a third of the war-band had been cut down in Daon Ramon, too few hands remained for the hazards of guarding the free wilds. The redoubled fervour as Alliance politics fanned the coals of town-bred persecution could only bring more death and hards.h.i.+p.

Resharpened contention was already on-going when Eriegal sauntered in through the door flap.

His tardy appearance was given short shrift by Sidir, whose place, with increasing, unabashed familiarity, was at the side of Earl Jieret's widow.

'Where's Jeynsa?' she asked.

'Hunting.' Soaked from the rainfall, and predictably curt, Eriegal declined to drip at the crowded trestle. Instead, he tucked his stout frame on the floor, his back braced against the tent's center pole. 'The quarry she's stalking scarcely requires the attentive eye of an adult.'

'Her bratty behaviour never needed any-one's shepherding in the first place,' her brother said, chafed. 'After two nights of sulking, we should applaud her initiative to supply the camp with provisions?'

Since Eriegal had spent all of those thankless hours standing watch in the open, Feithan was not unappreciative. She stirred from beneath Sidir's tucked arm, unhooked a gra.s.s basket, and bestowed the bundle of bread and dark sausage held for the Companion's return.

'No one will complain if you rest where you sit,' she told Eriegal. Distressed for his scars, that would ache with the rain, she refused his contrary insistence. 'We'll catch you up on the detailed news later. Barach's short-tempered because we've seen set-backs that force him to face some harsh choices. We all agreed, earlier: Jeynsa's too brittle. Until she's done grieving, she's better off gone on whatever errand she's chosen.'

Eriegal reviewed the shut faces of Halwythwood's elders, their rancour offset by Barach's clamped jaw and Braggen's hunched glare and clenched fist. Since Sidir's steady glance begged forbearance, the younger Companion opted not to announce that Arithon's character was the targeted quarry that Jeynsa had left to pursue.

The omission would spare the crown prince's dignity, or so Eriegal thought at the time. Jieret's daughter was trustworthy. She would rise to wear her caithdein's black with increased confidence, given the experience. Whether or not today's initiative determined Arithon's fitness to rule, someone needed to wrest the f.e.c.kless creature away from his amorous dalliance.

Shrewdly practical, Eriegal finished his overdue meal. Then he dragged up a ha.s.sock, folded his arms, and nodded off, while the council's discussion droned in the background above him.

By midafternoon the rain fell in torrents. The trail scouts reported, wet to the skin. Then the foragers returned, complaining. They snacked on jerked meat, since the kindling outside was as uselessly soaked as their bow-strings, and game could not be tracked in a downpour. Only the sentries maintained their strict schedule, swathed in oiled leather, while the outlying patrols sheltered as they could under the wind-battered oaks.

No one fretted that Jeynsa did not reappear. As discussion closed, and the elders arose to retire to the tents of their relatives, sly comments disparaged the Prince of Rathain's steamy pa.s.sion, beyond doubt holed up in some p.i.s.s-reeking den in a rock ledge claimed from a forest cat.

Twilight's gloom had dissolved into pitch-dark when the Koriani enchantress finally came in.

She had been gathering cat's-tail roots in the mires, to judge by the mud drawn up in rings at her hem-line and sleeves. Her sopped hair was tied back like a cart-horse's mane, and his Grace of Rathain was not with her.

Before Feithan could address her need for dry clothes, she was accosted by Dakar's jagged state of suspended torment. 'What did he say?'

Elaira surveyed the close-knit party of six, orange-lit by the flare of a pine knot: Sidir, seated with grave attention, a chart of the kingdom inked on rolled deer-hide under his sensitive fingers; and beside him, Feithan, her dark lashes downcast. She, at least, displayed aching discomfort for the past night's inconsolable handling.

Braggen leaned his bull frame by the door-post, great sword set aside and arms folded. If his fixed scowl wore a flush of embarra.s.sment, High Earl Barach's candid stare implied that he might not yet know what had occurred in the glen by the Willowbrook. Also oblivious, Eriegal lay in a tucked heap by the center pole, sleeping against a scrunched ha.s.sock.

The dearth of privacy scarcely troubled clan custom; Dakar's stricken glance refused to release her. 'Elaira, I beg you. What did his Grace say?'

The enchantress regarded him, eyes sparked to cold fire. 'That you should have trusted him to protect me.'

Braggen broke in with hot incredulity. 'Over Selidie's possession of your personal crystal and a babe of his lineage, defenceless?'

'Even so.' Her resharpened censure raked the huge clansman over, not sparing him the cut-gla.s.s state of her anguish. 'His friends could have let him attend his own fate.'

'That doesn't allow for the crux of the crisis,' Sidir stated without remonstrance. 'You imply that we should have permitted the lane flux to recoil and hurl the weal of two kingdoms to imbalance?'

Elaira just stared at him, while her bedraggled hems dripped, and her hands locked tight on her bundled roots, collected through her hours of cathartic foraging.

'What else under Ath's sky could we have done?' Dakar cried at last in stripped anguish.

Elaira stirred. She glanced sidewards at Feithan, who nodded. Given that tacit leave against the sensitive uncertainty, that her Prime's meddling had not reneged the lodge tent's grant of guest welcome, the enchantress finally stepped into the light thrown by the flickering brand. There, shoulders bowed, she sat down. 'You could have allowed Arithon the gift of respect for what was held sacred between us.'

Earl Barach proved not to be uninformed: his steady calm much too old for his years, his comment cut through without pa.s.sion. 'You would have set your man's dignity above the land's health and the critical need for a bountiful harvest to redress the west's blight and famine?'

Elaira said nothing, but covered her face with chilled hands. By the tenor of their silence, the men did not see: except for Sidir, who lifted the burden of roots from her lap and delivered his whispered apology.

'I don't understand,' Braggen insisted, his nerves sawed as the tension extended.

Feithan's unstinting spirit spared the enchantress the wretched need to explain. 'She means you to know that Prince Arithon would have chosen the child before he left the lane's kindled forces imbalanced or the land's needs unrequited.'

Dakar stood, shocked white. 'That would have set him, and you, against the unleashed might of your order! You're saying we should have left him such a risk? Dharkaron's black vengeance, lady! Where are the sane limits? For a Teir's'Ffalenn's arrogance and his gift of rogue talent, we should turn our backs on all consequence? You tell us we ought to have sanctioned his ruin!'

The Koriani enchantress uncovered her face and regarded the prophet whose ungovernable Sight had entangled too many lives in fast knots. 'I ask what you and your Fellows.h.i.+p will not give, in trust. Leave Arithon willing to fail on his merits!' Elaira's leashed temper gave way. 'What could have happened?'

'Arithon's child -' began Dakar.

'And mine!' cracked Elaira. 'His and mine! Not yours. Or your Fellows.h.i.+p's, or Prime Selidie's, despite what she thinks! We could have been left with the chance to look after our own, as a risk shouldered squarely between us.'

When the spellbinder's heated stance failed to buckle, Elaira lashed back in raw shame. 'Ath's mercy! He was helpless, and I lack the power to stand down a Fellows.h.i.+p Sorcerer! How would you feel?'

The Mad Prophet flushed. 'Lady, on that score, I daresay I have cause to know!'

That forced her acknowledgement: he did not practise vice. The burden he bore from the glen was no pittance; was made worse, in chill fact, since as the free agent, he could have refused Kharadmon's ruthless expedient.

Dakar faced away. If the humid scents of wet leather, oiled steel, and pine smoke clogged an atmosphere grown too close, there remained unavoidable details to discuss. Despite his stripped nerves and Elaira's reft heart-break, he stiffened resolve and pressed forward. 'I have to ask, lady. Has his Grace abrogated the permissions I held?'

'No.' Elaira knotted her fingers, scarcely aware as Feithan slipped off to fetch her mulled wine and a blanket. 'That says far more for Arithon's grace of forgiveness than for the regard given a crown prince's sanctioned integrity.'

'And now?' Language did not encompa.s.s the delicate words; Dakar could not frame the question, though she must know he could not leave that excoriating, last query unanswered: whether or not the Crown Prince of Rathain had willfully chosen to go forward and make her entangled love consummate.

Elaira replied, now shaking as the flushed hare pressed at bay by a wolf pack. 'He would not have me endangered, he said.'

She wept then, the silenced tears tracking down her already rain-soaked face.

Then Feithan arrived and wrapped her cold, huddled form into an heirloom blanket. 'My dear, you're exhausted. Let's see you to bed with a cup of spiced wine and a posset.'

Elaira did not protest the kindness and allowed the insistent clanswoman to guide her onto her feet. Checked as she stood by Sidir's tacit touch, she paused only to answer his last, gentle question.

'Your prince consulted with Kharadmon long enough to reach an accord for the timing to enact their planned purge of the Kralovir. Just before daybreak, Arithon left. If the Aiyenne's in flood, he'll ford at Narms, and ride post down the Mathorn Road. In fair weather or foul, ten days should see his Grace through to the gates of Etarra.' For the anxiety on the Mad Prophet's face, she added, 'He said you could abandon his service, or else catch up with him as you chose. He left an address for the purpose.'