The sea rose, inexorable. Soon immersed to the waist, he fought chattering teeth, while the scrabbling rats became frantic.
‘Fiends plague you, Dakar!’ Fionn Areth jerked his chin left and right, but failed to dislodge the wet creatures that nosed at his ears. ‘Can’t you shut your mouth? Maybe fashion a bane-ward. Anything to send these fell pests to oblivion!’
Yet the rats’ splashing struggles and shrill squeals could not dampen the madman’s racketing choruses. He sang without let-up, each quavering line of botched metre an insult that mangled intelligence.
‘“Oh the sun brings us cherries, then ripe red berries, oat sprouts make malt whisky, while the barley king whispers, Praise for the bees and the willow trees, Seed for the birds and grass for the herds, Sweet grapes love spring rain, t’an li’arient, Lu-haine!”’
The emphasis set on the name at the end served Fionn Areth scant warning. The closed cell became charged. Hair rose at his nape, while his skin puckered into sharp gooseflesh. Not being chained, the rats squeaked and bolted. They splashed helter-skelter in panic. A knifing breeze that moaned down the stairwell, the discorporate Sorcerer drawn by Dakar’s summons, arrived with the force of a silenced thunder-clap.
If darkness still reigned, its texture had changed, filled by that ineffable presence.
Fionn Areth recoiled. He wished to be anyplace else in Athera. The affray with the Mistwraith’s prison at Rockfell had shown him the reach of Luhaine and the Fellowship’s power.
‘Wards!’ Dakar pealed in jagged hysteria. ‘Set them now! Koriani enchantresses are seeking the goatherd, and I can’t stand them off any longer!’
‘Done,’ Luhaine answered, mercifully brief.
Fionn Areth shut his eyes, braced for a blast of scouring light, or a purging release of wild energies.
Nothing happened.
The slosh of salt water did not abate. Apprehensive, the Araethurian cracked open one lid. Stillness remained, laced by a nexus of withering, cold air and a living awareness not to be gainsaid.
‘Rats,’ Luhaine qualified. ‘They gave their consent and carried the spells to lay down my guarding circle.’ Fixated on Fionn’s repressed jerk of startlement, he bristled, ‘What did you expect, goatherd? A flare of crude conjury? Such a beacon would have been grossly misplaced where the utmost of finesse is needful.’
‘What enchantresses? Where?’ Fionn Areth accused. ‘I saw no women but shameless harlots when Dakar’s lunacy rousted the Kittiwake.’
‘Be quiet, Fionn! Koriani spell-craft was the reason I tipped the damned beer on my head in the first place.’ To the Sorcerer, not drunken, the Mad Prophet said, ‘Then you knew the accursed witches were after him?’ His slurred speech in fact the sapped mark of exhaustion, he complained, ‘For my pains, then you might have come a bit sooner.’
‘Your goatherd is not a blood prince of the realm,’ Luhaine pointed out, miffed. ‘To strike a clean balance, you did have to ask. Even then, my act stands on tenuous ground. I could not defend, but for Arithon’s ill-advised pledge to spare a crown subject from injustice.’ Met by Dakar’s crest-fallen silence, the shade of the Sorcerer tempered his censure. ‘Though you need not have waited for use of salt water to mask your cry of intent.’
The Mad Prophet’s sigh echoed off dripping stonework. ‘Well, you’re scarcely the sort to choose congress with rats.’ Chain clanked as he shifted, trying to ease the strain on his manacled wrists. ‘Last I saw, Luhaine, you hated their ornery nature worse than the plague.’
‘I don’t enjoy rats,’ the Sorcerer admitted. ‘Although Koriathain please my sensibilities far less, our Fellowship is critically short-handed. Next time you cry out for help in a crisis, we may not be able to answer.’
‘What’s to be done, then?’ Dakar appealed, wracked by his galling frustration. ‘Shipsport’s dungeon can’t keep us protected.’ He need not press his point: once the brutal news of the Alliance’s losses travelled the eastshore trade routes, Fionn Areth’s unnatural resemblance to Arithon would turn into a red-hot liability. ‘We’ve missed our planned rendezvous. Evenstar’s already weighed anchor and sailed on her scheduled run south.’
Luhaine subsided to stilled cogitation, as much to measure the rigid distress behind Fionn Areth’s stark quiet. ‘You’ll have to change plans. A sea berth’s unwise.’
Fresh off the docks, even the back-country goatherd was forced to the same grim assessment. Every ship bearing flags of town registry flew the gold sunwheel of the Alliance. Aboard such a vessel, amid Arithon’s pledged enemies, the young double could all too easily find himself hung from the mainmast yard-arm. Yet lacking the natural defence of salt water, a spellbinder’s skills risked being outmatched by the quartz-driven snares unleashed by the Koriani Order. Until the pair reached warded walls at Alestron, Fionn Areth’s contested freedom was bound to remain under constant siege.
Begrudging the ice-water freezing his bollocks, and ambivalent toward the powers of sorcery, the beleaguered herder buried his fears behind his uncivil suspicion. ‘You’d rather we came to grief on the road?’
Luhaine had the grace not to rise to offence, though the chill in his silence rippled the brine, and the Mad Prophet hissed through his teeth.
‘I don’t like rats, either,’ Fionn Areth lashed back, tired of being a bone in the jaws of a deadlocked political conflict.
The stillness stretched, filled by the slosh of the tide. The Sorcerer’s presence stayed, a poised force welded into obsidian air. The truth kept its cruel edges: Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn would never have been forced into flight through Daon Ramon, if not for Fionn Areth’s obstinate wish to align with Lysaer’s Alliance. The Light’s war host would have had no hazed fugitive to chase and no fresh round of slaughter to lay at the feet of the man they called Spinner of Darkness.
Justly reviled by the uncanny weight of the Fellowship Sorcerer’s displeasure, the Araethurian flushed with embarrassment. No use to lie, or to pretend his deliverance by Arithon’s hand had not torn his youthful ideals to raw wounds and conflicted loyalty.
Thrown out of his depth, Fionn Areth clung yet to his obdurate, grass-lands honesty. He dared not rely on the spellbinder’s word or place trust in the doings of Sorcerers. The s’Ffalenn prince himself had yet to account for the criminal charges against him. Until guilt or innocence could be resolved, Luhaine must respect the unquiet fact: that the straightforward cut of country-bred cloth could not reconcile a stance that had plotted a cold-blooded massacre.
Though he drowned, gnawed by vermin, Fionn Areth would as soon run his steel through Prince Arithon’s heart. While he lived and breathed, he would not embrace the dread choice of abetting dark magecraft.
‘Boy you grant me no opening to respond,’ Luhaine pronounced at due length. ‘Your grounds for safe conduct must still rely on the oath Dakar swore to appease his Grace of Rathain. Remain in the spellbinder’s company, and the shield of crown justice will provide you with shelter. Leave, and all ties become forfeit.’
‘I can’t stand down the Koriani Prime Matriarch alone,’ Dakar appealed in trepidation. ‘My defence wards won’t hold. The instant the tide ebbs, we’ll be stripped and hung by our heels like a brace of skinned rabbits.’
Luhaine’s
