exactly like marks made by felon’s shackles. The subject was snapped up in speculation by a junior clerk who gasped out improvised doggerel between whoops and snorts of stifled laughter. Morfett saw no need to offer reprimand.
The damned Fellowship mages had been duly warned how his council felt toward monarchy.
The prince knelt on cue. His sorcerer chaperone bent with him and scooped a double handful of earth which he lifted above wind-ruffled raven hair.
Morfett choked back a grin. Less restrained, Diegan murmured from behind, ‘Ath, did anybody check whether pig’s dung and ditch waste had been spread in for fertilizer yet?’
The sorcerer must have overheard. He cupped his burden nonetheless and his voice echoed back from sandstone walls, cutting through the busy buzz of satire. ‘Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn, direct line descendant of Torbrand, first High King of Rathain, I affirm your right of succession. As this realm will be yours to guard, so are you bound to the land.’
Diegan’s chuckles choked off, replaced by blank rage. ‘Right of
Caught weeping tears of suppressed mirth, Morfett rounded in a dawning explosion of anger. Without care for the dearth of privacy, he loudly upbraided Sethvir. ‘You said the royal bastard was only to be affirmed in his ancestry!’
But the Warden of Althain had all too conveniently vanished. While the Lord Governor wildly sought to find him his peripheral vision caught a blurred flash of light. He whirled again to face the garden. There knelt the prince, and crowned, but not with soil or pig’s dung. A circlet of shining silver crossed his brow that had been nowhere in evidence before. Asandir’s hands fell away, and then steadied him back on his feet.
‘Ath!’ someone shouted in shaky awe. ‘Did you see? That sorcerer changed dirt into silver!’
Sethvir chose that moment to reappear. ‘It is done, the circlet of sanction wrought from the soil of Rathain. My Lord Governor. Time has come to congratulate your acknowledged prince.’
‘I gave no such consent! What has passed was done on false pretences!’ Morfett dug in his toes, his chin outthrust like a bulldog’s. Yet no sorcerer of the Fellowship forced him forward. Instead, Rathain’s prince came to him.
All his adult life Morfett had battled the misfortune that short stature forced him to peer up at even his lowliest scullion. The shock of meeting green eyes that were level with his own caused him an involuntary step back.
‘You need not kneel,’ informed the silver-crowned personage whose face turned out not to be delicate but as bloodless and defined as if chipped from white quartz. ‘I have not accepted your fealty.’
‘Nor will you!’ Trembling with mortification for being duped in public, Morfett curled his lip. ‘The governor’s council, of which I am head, refuses to acknowledge your existence.’
A breeze rattled the dry canes of the roses and flicked a twist of black hair from the circlet. Too late, Morfett saw that this prince had the look of a sorcerer: eyes that were piercing and level and strikingly devoid of antagonism. Like those Fellowship colleagues whose nefarious machinations had produced him, he could answer a man’s unspoken thoughts. ‘If you and your council rule justly, you need have no fear of me.’
The officials surrounding Morfett were belatedly recognizing the legalities behind Asandir’s late speech. From all sides, their ribald commentary was replaced by murmurs of incredulity and rage.
‘You have not been given any right of sovereignty in this city!’ Diegan, commander of the guard, interposed from behind his Lord Governor’s shoulder.
‘True.’ Arithon’s gaze left Morfett to encompass the courtier who had spoken out of turn, and whose dandyish cloak was thrown back to reveal a hand clenched on a sword hilt. The weapon was flashily bejewelled; if the steel behind its gold-chased quillons was something more than ceremonial, Arithon dismissed the threat. His brows twitched up in flippant challenge. ‘But if this contest were a footrace the outcome would hardly merit contest. Do you bet?’
‘All that I have,’ Diegan answered thickly. ‘That should warn you.’
‘Oh, I was warned,’ said Arithon with poorly concealed impatience. ‘Too well, too late and in rich and tedious detail. In some things, I’ve had less choice than you have.’
Too fast for verbal riposte, and in total disregard for the captain’s aggressive posture, he whipped around to address Asandir. ‘You’ve had your display. Whether or not the person who took charge of my boots reappears with intent to return them, I would be pleased to retire.’
The exchange ended so quickly that Morfett was left with his mouth open. The prince was whisked off amid his circle of sorcerers; but the edged and dangerous antagonism he had sown among the townsmen remained, festering and unsatisfied. Diegan stared after the departed royal party with his jaw clenched. Amid widening circles of loud talk, guildsmen in brocades were shaking fists, or banded together in disturbed groups. Etarra’s three fraternities of assassins were going to profit, to judge by the speed with which curses transformed into whispering. As husbands bandied plots like vigilantes, wives and daughters were being unceremoniously bundled back home.
Livid and speechless, and left no target for his outrage, the Lord Governor leaned gratefully on the hand that answered his need for support. ‘The effrontery of the bastard!’ he spluttered when he finally recovered his breath. ‘Footrace, indeed! Does he think us a pack of rank schoolboys?’
‘He can be difficult,’ an impressive personage with pale gold hair volunteered in commiseration. ‘But I have never known him to be anything less than fair.’
That instant Morfett realized that his benefactor was gently attempting to draw him apart from his councilmen. He yanked back, bristling fury. ‘Who are you?’ Blue velvet clothing might fail to jog his memory, but the green heraldic cloak folded over the stranger’s arm at once identified the prince’s blond-haired companion. ‘Never mind,’ Morfett snapped. ‘You’re one of the royal cronies, and assuredly no help to Etarra.’
Still smiling, Lysaer said, ‘Quite the contrary. I’m the one royal crony who’s not a sorcerer and also the only friend you have who understands the cross-grained nature of your prince.’
The commander of the guard perked up instantly. ‘I know a tavern,’ he invited and, grumbling, Morfett allowed himself to be swept along into their wake.
The heavy door boomed closed. Tired to his bones, Arithon s’Ffalenn leaned back against uncomfortable, brass-studded panels. Muffled, the voice of
