as the most wanted felon on the continent.
No one would believe the fact he was innocent. The uncanny likeness he wore was too real, a permanent imprint aligned by the wiles of the Koriani enchantresses. They had altered his face, then played him as bait. Their crafting was seamless: even his mother presumed the change was no less than his natural birthright. His late capture in Jaelot might have seen him dead for the deeds of his look-alike nemesis.
Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn, known as Spinner of Darkness, was too well renowned for obscurity. His horrific record of wanton destruction had dispatched fifty thousand armed men, sworn to serve the Alliance of Light.
‘Furies take Dakar for a witless wastrel!’ Fionn Areth gasped, sorely beset. Both marlinspike and dagger thrust in concert to maim him. He dodged the first, caught a gash on his forearm. His dive for the hat ran afoul of the brute with the cudgel dispatched to clear out the tap-room.
Fionn Areth crumpled, glassy-eyed and raging, into the dark of unconsciousness.
Roused by the throb of the bruise on his head and the stinging slice on his forearm, Fionn Areth groaned, limp and queasy with vertigo. Spinning senses revealed a small, panelled chamber, lit by a clouded casement. The fusty air smelled of ink and hot wax, while an old man’s voice stitched through his fogged thoughts, gravid with accusation.
‘…same pair wrecked the Kittiwake’s tap-room before, in the company of a known smuggler.’
Someone unseen cleared his throat and replied in the sonorous drone of state language.
While the debate sawed onwards over Fionn Areth’s head, he absorbed the fact that he slumped face-down, cheek pressed to a battered table. Iron manacles circled his wrists, which were draped like dropped meat on his knees. Somewhere nearby, a quill-nib scraped.
He tried to sit up. The effort spiked fresh pain through his skull, jogging the memory of terror. Where else could he be but in a magistrate’s custody? His despair was confirmed by the crack of a gavel, then a man’s bitten phrase, that the miscreants’ infractions were anything but a moot point.
While Fionn Areth mustered the shaken breath to assert his abused state of innocence, Dakar’s unctuous speech intervened.
‘Captain Dhirken passed the Wheel years before you took office. Lord Magistrate, the past charge was not left outstanding. Yes, her crew wrecked the Kittiwake. But the damages were settled in full at the time, paid off by the singer responsible.’
Fionn Areth shut his eyes. This was Shipsport, not Jaelot. His panic still haunted with visceral force. The nightmare repeat of prisoner’s chains could not be happening again. Through rising nausea, he tried to protest. ‘But I wasn’t th—’
A kick rapped his ankle. He gasped and shoved straight, snatched the swimming impression of a vaulted ceiling above a railed dais. There, a number of corpulent, robed men sat arrayed in stern judgement against him.
‘Shut up, you fool!’ Dakar hissed in his ear. ‘Handle this wrong, and we’re dog-meat.’ To Shipsport’s gathered tribunal, he temporized, ‘This time, to our sorrow, we haven’t the coin to pay fines for disorderly conduct. We can’t make amends to the Kittiwake’s landlord, beyond our respectful apologies.’
‘Well, sorry’s no recompense!’ The stout table jounced as the tavern’s greybeard owner thumped an indignant fist. ‘I’ve suffered enough of your hot air already to bore me past Daelion’s Wheel! The last time, your friend played his lyranthe for hand-outs. He sang, forbye, like a silver-tongued lark! Caroled until every last mark cleaned his pockets, and bedamned to your pleas that you’re penniless.’ To the magistrate rapping his gavel, he railed, ‘My tap-room’s in shambles! My son broke his arm. I demand satisfaction. Grant the Kittiwake use of the bard’s talent for one month. The house takes his proceeds until the debt’s paid, with the extra for punitive damages.’
The town clerk waggled his pen in remonstrance. ‘The accused in the dock broke the peace, don’t forget! Shipsport’s coffers are due a steep fine for their act of civil disturbance. These charges must be met beforetime.’
While the magistrate stroked his suet chin, and the spring’s nesting wrens cheeped in the eaves outside, Fionn Areth stirred to a sour clank of chain. ‘But I don’t—’
Dakar jammed an elbow into his ribs, then spun lies with pressured invention. ‘The bard has a head cold. Can’t sing a note. Force him to try, his sick croaking is likely to rile your patrons past salvage. You said yourself, the Kittiwake’s crowd likes to toss inept singers through the window. That won’t meet your fees, and my friend lies at risk of suffering a crippling injury’
Truth and impasse; the magistrate smothered a yawn. The victimized landlord glowered, arms folded, while the clerk licked his thumb and flattened a clean sheet of parchment. ‘Hard labour, then? Incarceration? Public whipping? The brawling was started without provocation.’ He tapped the scroll bearing the transcribed statement. ‘Disrupting the peace calls for a harsh sentence.’
Shipsport’s magistrate laced his prim knuckles and delivered the final verdict. ‘The accused have no money. Therefore, the bard will perform until the debts to the town and the tavern are discharged.’ He silenced objection with the superior glare he reserved for the low-class condemned. ‘No reprieve!’
‘I won’t sing for any man!’ yelled Fionn Areth, a mistake: his broad grasslands vowels displayed no congestion. ‘Not for a penny, not for struck gold, and not ever for settling damages over a riot that I didn’t start!’
The Kittiwake’s landlord stared down his beak nose. ‘Upright men don’t keep the company of smugglers.’
Since such shiftless character was the s’Ffalenn bastard’s legacy, the slung mud was going to stick. By luck alone, none of Shipsport’s officials connected today’s face with the infamous Master of Shadow. Draw undue attention, and some sharp-eyed busybody might come forward to point out the oversight.
Fionn Areth slumped in the prisoner’s dock, cowed by his fear as the steps of due process saddled him with the arraignment.
Experience taught him the futility of argument. His just plea would only fall on deaf ears and earn him a savage beating.
‘You dare the impertinence of claiming to refuse?’ The magistrate flicked a glance toward his clerk, then granted the case his sharp quittance. ‘Call back the guards to remove the offenders. Lock them in the dungeon on bread crusts and water till the singer sees fit to change heart.’
The dungeon in Shipsport outmatched even Dakar’s revolting description. Flood-tide clogged the drains with green slime, coating the floor with decomposing shell-fish, strained through the wracked straw and stranded kelp. Fionn Areth gagged on the nauseous stench. Too miserable to curse the rough handling of the wardens who hauled him into confinement, he sagged as they bolted his manacles to a chain spiked in the sweating stonewall.
Head tipped forward, shoulders hunched to avoid the damp masonry chilling his back, the Araethurian squeezed his eyes shut. The pound of his pulse split his skull to white agony. To make matters worse, the Mad Prophet had burst into a fit of inebriated singing. The cell had an arched ceiling. Within closed confines, his racket raised echoes fit to drive the dead to screaming torment.
Oblivious, Dakar belted on through a ballad expounding the exploits of two whores, a blind cobbler, and a goat. Cuffs from the guards failed to silence his noise. Dakar
