Havish’s emphatically neutral sovereign made a sound between a cough and a grunt as he considered Dakar’s penchant for trouble appended to the man called Master of Shadow, that half of the north wanted dead. ‘I shouldn’t presume to advise, but isn’t that fairly begging fate to get Rathain a killed prince?’
‘So one might think,’ Asandir mused, not in the least bit concerned. ‘Except Arithon s’Ffalenn needs none of Dakar’s help just now. On the contrary, he’s perhaps the one man alive who may be capable of holding the Mad Prophet to heel. The match should prove engagingly fascinating. Each man holds the other in the utmost of scorn and contempt.’
Petition
The next event in the widening chain of happenstance provoked by the Mistwraith’s bane arose at full summer, when visitors from Rathain’s clan survivors sought audience with another high chieftain in the neighbouring realm to the west. Hailed as she knelt on damp pine needles in the midst of dressing out a deer, Lady Maenalle bent a hawk-sharp gaze on the breathless messenger.
‘Fatemaster’s justice, why now?’ Bloodied to the wrists, her knife poised over a welter of steaming entrails, the woman who also shouldered the power of Tysan’s regency shoved up from her knees with a quickness that belied her sixty years. Feet straddled over the half-gutted carcass, the man’s leathers she preferred for daily wear belted to a waist still whipcord trim, Maenalle pushed back close-cropped hair with the back of her least sticky wrist. She said to the boy who had jogged up a mountainside to fetch her, ‘Speak clearly. These aren’t the usual clan spokesmen we’ve received from Rathain before?’
‘Lady, not this time.’ Sure her displeasure boded ill for the scouts, whose advance word now seemed negligently scant on facts, the boy answered fast. ‘The company numbers fifteen, led by a tall man named Red-beard. His war captain Caolle travels with him.’
‘Jieret Red-beard? The young s’Valerient heir?’ Grim in dismay, Maenalle cast a bothered glance over her gore-spattered leathers. ‘But he’s Deshir’s chieftain, and Earl of the North!’
A state delegation from across the water, no less; and led by Prince Arithon’s blood-pacted liegeman, who happened also to be caithdein, or ‘shadow behind the throne’, hereditary warden of Rathain. Maenalle let fly a blistering oath.
Then, infected by spurious, private triumph, for she despised formality and skirts, she burst into deep-throated laughter. ‘Well, they’ll just have to take me as I am,’ she ended with a lift of dark eyebrows. I’ve got time to find a stream to sluice off? Good. The hunting party’s off down the gorge. Somebody ought to go after them and let my grandson know what’s afoot.’ She bit her lip, recalled to the deer, too sorely needed to abandon for scavengers to pick.
The young messenger offered to take the knife in her stead. ‘Lady, I can finish up the butchering.’
Maenalle smiled. ‘Good lad. I thought so, but really, this should be Maien’s problem.’
Her moods were fair-minded enough to let the boy relax. ‘Lady, if you both meet Prince Arithon’s delegation reeking of offal, s’Gannley might be called out for insult.’
‘Imp.’ Maenalle relinquished her fouled blade and took a swipe at the child’s ear, which he ducked before he got blood-smeared. ‘Titles aside, Rathain’s warden is very little older than you are. If he cries insult, I’ll ask his war captain to cut down a birch switch and thrash him.’
Which words seemed a fine and suitable retort, until Maenalle’s descent from the forested plateau forced an interval for sober thought. Chilled by the premature twilight of an afternoon cut off from sunlight, she entered the hidden ravine that held her clans’ summer refuge. In silence, she numbered the years that had slipped past, all unnoticed. Red-beard was not a childish nickname. Jieret s’Valerient in sober fact was but one season older than Maien; no boy any more, if not yet fully a man.
Small wonder the young scout had stifled his smile at her mention of birch canes and thrashing.
Hatefully tired of acting the querulous ruler, and greeting nobody she passed, Maenalle crossed the dusty compound with its stinks of sun-curing hide. She barged into the comfortless hut that served as her quarters, flicked up cuffs still dripping from her stream-side ablutions and slammed back the lid of her clothes trunk.
Her hand hesitated over the folded finery inside, then snatched in sharp resolve: not the indigo regent’s tabard with its glittering gold star blazon. Instead Maenalle shook out a plain black overtunic, expensively cut, and worn but once since its making. She would don the caithdein’s sable, by tradition the symbol of power deferred in the presence of her true-born sovereign.
If she still held the regency in Tysan, the office was not hers by choice; the s’Ilessid scion forepromised by prophecy had returned to claim his royal title. But the Mistwraith he had lent his gift of light to help subdue had avenged itself and cursed Prince Lysaer of Tysan to undying enmity against Arithon, Master of Shadow. For that, the Fellowship sorcerers entitled to crown him had withheld their sanction for his inheritance. Grieved beyond heartbreak for the betrayals which had forced their judgement, the realm’s lady steward tugged the dark garment over her dampened leathers. She belted on her sword, firm in this one defiance. Let black cloth remind the envoy sent by Arithon of Rathain that the final call on clan loyalty in Tysan was not fully hers to command, however desperate the cause they surely came here to plead.
A brisk knock jostled her doorpanel. Maenalle raked quick fingers through hair cropped close as a fighting man’s, then straightened in time to seem composed as Lord Tashan poked his white head inside.
‘Your visitors have passed the last check-point.’ The rotten old fox was smiling. As age-worn as she through long years of shared hardship, he would guess she was flustered; and in hindsight, the blighted black cloth was a mistake that would accent any pallor born of nervousness.
Tartly, Maenalle attacked first. ‘I could go and maybe lend a semblance of decorum if you’d make way and let me pass.’
Before Tashan could move, she brushed by, still shrugging to settle the tunic over her shoulders. Canny enough not to query her forceful choice of wardrobe, the old lord hurried his limp to flank her, while dogs barked and dust flew, and sun-browned children in scuffed deerhides ran in a game of hunters and wolves through the stream-threaded shade of the defile. Built under cover on either side, the rows of ramshackle cabins sagged with the wear of storms and weather. If unglazed windows and walls laddered green under vines seemed uncivilized, Maenalle held no bitterness. Here, surrounded by inhospitable terrain; abutments of knife-edged rock and slide-scarred crags where loose shale and boulders could give way and break legs, the persecuted descendants of Tysan’s deposed liegemen kept a grim measure of safety. Even the most fanatical town enemies were deterred from ranging too zealously for fugitives. Poor as her people were, at least the mountains allowed them the security to raise children under timber roofs and to keep horses in limited herds.
The old blood clans elsewhere had far less in the centuries since the merchant guilds had overset kingdom rule, and headhunters rode to claim bounties.
None of Arithon’s envoy travelled mounted, which explained the scout’s misleading first report. Maenalle reached the palings that served as the outpost’s main gate just as the arrivals from Rathain filed through. Except for the eastern inflection as one commented, ‘Ath, will you look? This place could pass for a village,’ the party might have blended with one of her patrols, Jieret’s band were weather-worn, observant to the point
