total weariness. If he were to shy from using his talents, directed by every scrap of augury he could draw from the herb’s narcotic visions, the people who sheltered him must rely upon chance for survival. But in order to smoke the leaves to sound the future he required absolute privacy.
In that he was already thwarted.
Even if there had been a refuge between the bustle where no one would disturb or remark on him, the packers were hurrying to complete their tasks by afternoon. Aware that two boys had sneaked up to dog his steps in exaggerated imitation of his gait, Arithon regarded the rain-matted detritus of pine needles that his boots passed across without track. A thought and a chill ran through him: he might escape by becoming too visible. At once, with some savagery, he scuffled his heels to foster false impression of his ignorance, that these folk needed less than a secretive caution necessary to survival in the wild.
The contempt the boys copied from their elders, that Rathain’s royal scion was weak, or maybe helpless, was a trait it might suit him to foster, Arithon thought. The frustration he had leashed behind forced and mild courtesy perhaps was a perverse sort of kindness. Nights and days in the saddle had worn his body; in spirit, the wrenching realignment that had taken place in the course of Desh-thiere’s curse lay compounded by reckless overuse of spellcraft. Resisting the creeping and insidious urge to turn back to Etarra and attack Lysaer claimed further toll upon his strength. His depleted grip on self-command made mastery of the herb’s ill effects too risky to try until he rested: in the throes of the poison’s withdrawal symptoms Arithon knew he would be lucky to be able to walk.
Better if these clansmen believed him overbred to the point of uselessness. Once they had repulsed Etarra’s invasion, his shadows and his aid would not be needed. Their disdain might drive them finally to release him from the blood bonds of Rathain’s sovereignty.
Charged with perverse and bitter humour, Arithon left the canister’s deadly contents for later. He retrod his course through the wheeling pine-sparrows to Lady Dania, where, seemingly overcome by her distressed protestations, he allowed himself to be talked out of his earlier insistence that he help with a share of the packing.
In the course of the next four days, Arithon let slip the stern barriers imposed by a lifetime of mage training. For his puzzles and his oddments of sleight-of-hand illusion, he won the undying adulation of Dania’s daughters, who had never known a grown man to play games with them. The clan boys stayed aloof, until he captivated the smallest with a whistle carved of beechwood and given voice with shaved shims of river reed. After that, Arithon spent every waking hour the domestic camp was not moving on the trail seated by someone’s fireside, whittling.
For a morning, their going was made raucous by the young, hooting on their new toys. They laughed at their daring, to be making noises unnatural to the wakened wood; but the whistles were confiscated, and Arithon was chastised by a weatherbeaten woman who would have borne arms alongside the fighting men, had she not been near-term with a pregnancy. ‘You’ll have headhunters on us with your addle-headed ways. Our boys are needing no such silly influence!’
Arithon regarded her with green-eyed, languid resignation, and murmured soft apology. The woman left in disgust.
‘Royal he may be, but what use have the clans for a dreamer!’ he heard her exhorting some others, in a rest- stop farther down the trail.
He let the comment pass, though heads turned to see whether he had overheard, and what would be his reaction. He gave them back his closed eyes, and crossed hands behind his head, to all appearance asleep with his back against a tree so rough that the bark had turned silver with dried moss.
The whistles had drawn no headhunters, because he had set arcane defences against any outside seeker who should chance to track their company. The entrapments were subtle, a fooling of the eye to make sight linger on the flick of a leaf in the breeze, or deflect thought into futile reflection to read meaning in some willow’s gnarled roots.
Dania had to shake him out of trance, when the time came to move on.
During nights by the fireside, with one or another of Dania’s daughters fallen asleep across his lap, Arithon immersed himself in Halliron’s music. The M’asterbard had an exquisite, expressive style upon the strings, and he did not shy from imparting passionate emotion into his playing. The lyranthe he carried was ancient and ornate in a sparely elegant way. Her voice was so like the one that Arithon had been forced to abandon at Etarra that she, too, might have been crafted by a Paravian maker. Arithon dared not touch her fretboard to look for Elshian’s rune. The feel of polished wood, of responsive, silver-toned strings, would have overcome his defences like drugged wine. The hope could hurt too much, that the chance of reprieve from kingship seemed a scant step closer.
Those evenings by the fireside, Halliron’s ballads wove their mystery as though just for him. He chuckled at their merriness and let the tears track unabashed down his face. The whispers this created suited his purpose. By daylight, while he walked abandoned to reverie down the trail, he replayed in his mind Halliron’s polished arpeggios, his trills of ornamentation, the clean, meticulous cadences whose simplicity shaped naked force. At such times, when the stares of Deshir clanswomen turned aside in disgust, he would draw the eyes of the bard.
Halliron had depths of subtlety well disguised by his congenial nature. Since the oddity intrigued him, that the prince so taken with his music had never sought closer acquaintance, he took pains to hide his interest.
The domestic camp moved by night and rested only after full daybreak. On the morn they were to reach their destination, the mists of early dawn ripped and dispersed into tatters, cut by slanted shafts of white sunlight. The birds were loud at their nesting calls. Like strands of silvered silk wound through its green forest tapestry, the river Tal Quorin re-emerged in a bend to flow once again beside the trail. The thin, acid soil of the heights gave up its black mantle of pines. The fertile trough of the watershed here lay broken into long, irregular valleys. Winding through hollows and glens, the river current lisped over glacial deposits of smoothed granite, and skeined eddies around willow roots like the knobbled knees of old men. The demise of Desh-thiere had brought change. Little plants pressed up through moss and pine-needles, and opened coloured petals for the first time in five centuries untrammelled by the sooty prints of fungal spores.
Steiven’s daughters clung to Arithon like shadows as together they enjoyed discovery of each new bud and petal; where the wild flowers matched those he remembered from Rauven’s deep woodland glens, he gave their names. Where they did not, he knelt, the sun warm across his back, and shared wonders otherworldly and strange in drifts of dew-drenched leaf mould.
His absorption was not so complete that he overlooked the faint, sour ring of steel that threaded through the trilled cries and fast-beating wings of disturbed marsh flickers. Halliron’s fascination had not stopped at appearances, for all that the camp women had already dismissed their prince as a fanciful dreamer. Only the bard remained observant enough to spot the brief frisson that shocked through the prince’s bearing.
Puzzled, Halliron tossed damp hair from his temples the better to watch as Arithon straightened up from contemplation. Swift words from him and the children ranged eagerly ahead to scout their next find on their own. Arithon hung behind, a shadow in dark leathers under the light-flecked boughs of a hazel thicket.
From the crest of an unseen hillside, the axe blows reached ragged crescendo. The tree bole under punishment
