‘Since you don’t know what set you to flight, let’s not rush to press judgement. You may be the marked quarry, but I’ve been condemned. Survival has joined our fate.’ Before that recrimination could wound, Tarens added, ‘I regret nothing, do you understand? In your own way, you took risks for my family. All of your acts have done right by them.’
Last gesture, the crofter snuffed out the rush lamp. In patent reassurance, he settled and slept, deliberately vulnerable to the busy works of his mage-sighted companion. Surely he heard, as he nodded off, the purposeful strokes of edged steel being honed across a scrounged whetstone.
At due length, three broken kitchen knives were refurbished as daggers. Arin’s cut-leather belt wrapped the grips, with his oversized breeches retied at the waist with a braid made from scavenged string.
Stretched out to rest, tensioned yet by unease, Arin listened as the gusts winnowed the thickened snowfall outside. Musty air filled his nostrils. He could not shake off the haunted impression of another prior experience: that somewhere before, the hitched breaths of an injured friend had been sealed by a blizzard inside of a root-cellar. The cramped ambience spun him a gruesome dream, stark with the memory of desperate straits, and more vivid than uncontrolled prescience…
Then, the reiving cohort of lancers had worn black-and-gold surcoats blazoned with entwined snakes and lions. The innocent’s cottage just put to the torch crackled in red conflagration, whipped under a white-out blizzard. In that day’s frigid air, amid drifts trampled pink, sprawled the large, honest man their knives had tortured to find him. Heart-sore, he strove with his healer’s skills to stem bleeding and bind riven flesh. The damage lay beyond any remedy. Even so, he rejected the dying man’s plea for abandonment: ‘For your gift of feal duty, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath, Dharkaron witness.’
He finished the dressing for honour alone. ‘You didn’t betray me,’ he told that wounded man, whose agony, suffered in his behalf, came to refuge in the comfortless chill of a root-cellar.
Amid winter’s freeze, sheltered in earth-bound quiet, the reliving carried the same fetid smells: of breathed air and wrapped wounds, congealed blood, and the hounding dread of uncertainty.
That man’s fatal anguish had wrung him to voice the bitter extent of his sorrow: ‘You failed nothing and no one. I could name you hero, gild a plaque in your memory that proclaims the cornerstone for a crown that will stand on the strength of your sacrifice. But the truth casts down rhetoric. A man who holds hospitality sacred is worth much more to the land than a king.’
‘Long life, and my blessing,’ said the ghost in his nightmare. ‘The Fellowship Sorcerers are right to restore you.’
Arin wrenched awake with a gasp, shuddered by the throes of after-shock. Somebody’s callused hand gripped his arm, and another muffled his screaming.
‘Arin?’ The concern was Tarens’s, not some long-dead trapper. ‘You shouted in your sleep.’
Carefully tactful, the crofter released him. Respect did not rush to ask probing questions. Yet the fabric of pretence had shredded. As fugitives roped together by destiny, one man understood that he was the sole cause of his fellow’s hapless endangerment.
Worse, the relentless peril that stalked them trafficked in blood-letting stakes. Arin sat up. Arms wrapped over tucked knees, he rested his forehead against his crossed wrists.
Tonight’s outbreak of recall suggested a history his spirit cried out to disown: chased as quarry before, he had survived because a strong man with great heart had died for him. More, his own peal of sorrow restated the lines of a prince’s oath to a feal liegeman. Incontrovertibly, he had a past and a name: dangerous facts all but certain to drive the committed factions that hunted him. Though to the last fibre, he viewed such a royal legacy as abhorrent, for the worse, Tarens was already ensnared in the weave of that intractable heritage.
Scalded, Arin reaffirmed the past vow hurled into the teeth of his enemies. ‘I don’t leave them my wounded.’
If the selfless kindness that brought Tarens to shelter a destitute stranger was not to share a dog’s end, the misery of their cooped quarters must be sustained throughout days to come. Just as before, the diligent searchers would leave no stone unturned, and no weedy field untrampled in their manic furor. Therefore, no quarry’s tracks must be found in the pristine drifts. With luck, under snow, the temple dedicates would overlook the buried depression at the root-cellar’s entrance. For safety, the fugitives holed up inside must stay immured until the next thaw. The bare ground would have to be frosted iron-hard before they dared emerge, first to forage, then to move on.
As wretchedly plagued by the capricious onset of an early winter, only one person alive stayed at liberty to illuminate Arin’s veiled past. Dakar the Mad Prophet sulked in shadow beneath the bleak spire of Althain Tower, buffeted by the cruel north wind. He needed no seer’s gift to forecast the squeeze of the crisis: beyond doubt, his accursed role in Prince Arithon’s past would run him afoul of the Koriathain.
Dakar had crossed their filthy agenda before, even quashed the wily gamut of their probes in his time as a crown heir’s appointed protector. Under Fellowship auspices, in lawful standing as Asandir’s agent, he had been the target of their baneful plots often enough to wring him to cold sweats. The fresh prospect woke the spectre of nightmare, since the thankless quittance of his apprenticeship stripped him of the Sorcerers’ backing.
At loose ends, three days later, Dakar reeled yet. From outraged denial, to obstinate dragged heels, to packing his tinker’s haul of possessions, he loitered outside the tower’s shut gates, abandoned to his own devices. The warded locks were fastened, behind him. Ahead, the worn spur of the north trade-road seamed the barren wilds of Atainia; daunting, inhospitable terrain for a traveller stranded afoot.
Southward, the ancient track flanked the iced current of the Isaer, passed the massive node that harnessed the lane force at the Great Circle, then met the cross-roads at the crumbled Second Age ruin, where the river’s head-waters welled from an underground cavern. Asandir’s journey lay that way, en route to the mountain outpost that sheltered a persecuted clan enclave.
Fed to the teeth with the hazardous affairs of his former master, and festered to a grudge like a canker, Dakar turned his back and set off for the nearest town habitation. Weeds snagged at his boots. Too short-strided for the rough ground, he stumbled across stony gullies washed through the wheel-ruts. Few wagons ventured this desolate land, laid waste since the tumult of a First Age battle, with bleak, scoured hill-tops whipped to thin dust, and vales that whispered of keening ghosts, slagged yet by the glassine pits of past drakefire.
Solitude gave Dakar too much time to brood. Independence did not leave him care-free. His tuned awareness picked up the warped flow of the lane flux, unbalanced still by the echo of ruin a wrathful dragon had unleashed at Avenor. Disharmony and disease still choked the realm of Tysan, a condition unlikely to find a reprieve under the True Sect’s doctrine. If such weighty matters correctly belonged under Fellowship oversight, Dakar had suffered the Sorcerers’ company too long to stay blinded by ignorance. Aggravated, each step, he vented and kicked a loose pebble.
The spiteful impulse injured only his toe. While the missile cracked off a boulder and bounced, the Mad Prophet hopped on one foot and let fly. ‘May Dharkaron Avenger’s immortal black horses drop steaming dung over Asandir’s field boots!’
The Sorcerer’s footwear, likely as not, would walk scatheless through the encounter. Worse, the maligned gravel would imprint the curse, since the Athlien singers had vanished.
