gave a juddering crack and fell to earth in a whipping tangle of greenery that hissed like a rip through warm air. Arithon recoiled. He turned as if jabbed by sharp pain and his eyes passed unseeing across the bard, standing not twenty feet behind, with the forest shade hatching his elegant court velvets that stood out too plainly to be missed.
Another tree cracked and fell. Exposed full face to an observation he would have avoided, Arithon paled in the grip of some deep, introspective discomfort.
And Halliron caught his breath in comprehension. Acquainted with the Warden of Althain, befriended by Asandir, he saw into this prince and recognized like a watermark in fine paper the stamp of a mage-trained awareness.
Arithon’s interest in trailside wildflowers had been a ruse to mask attention linked to the deeper mysteries of the forest. Caught as he was in partial trance, the axe-cut, dying trees sent a scream of pain across his nerves. An unprepared part of him
Pushed by reflex before thought, Halliron hastened forward and caught the prince by an elbow to support his unsteady step.
The touch caused Arithon to snap stiff. His head came up, around, and in green eyes the Masterbard caught a flare that looked like smothered anger. The impression was false. Halliron saw past hostility to what perhaps was an envy sprung from offence; indisputably the resentment was directed fully and personally toward him.
Halliron’s startlement caused him to let go, simultaneous with Arithon’s instinctive jerk backward, with the result that sensitive musician’s fingers recorded an instant impression. The forearm under its covering of water- spoiled silk was wiry and fit, not at all the constitution of the fine-drawn dandy the prince purported to affect.
Arithon spun away to hide an expression Halliron would have bribed in gold to have read. Between the two men lay a silence heavy with secrets, and as if their burden were at once too much, the prince abruptly sat down. He fingered the edge of a rock hoarded like some hoary, moss-crusted jewel between the miserly grip of old roots. ‘I’m sorry.’ His apology was too quick and cold. ‘I believed I was alone.’
Halliron absorbed this display with narrowed, tawny eyes. He observed on intuition, ‘You had wards set, and not just to hide the notes of whistles.’
‘If so, that’s no business of yours.’ Arithon let his knuckles fall loose in dry grass, left wind-broken from winter’s snowfall like the bundled small bones of dead birds. He had regained control. At least, he no longer shivered as the axe-falls rang. Only the earth seemed to shudder in vibration as each quick trunk slammed the ground.
After a moment, the bard said, ‘If you want Deshir’s clans to disown you, desert them.’
That touched a nerve. Arithon’s smile at the barb was full lipped, and brimmingly, off-puttingly merry. ‘Desert me, instead. Your perceptions feel like a tinker’s spilled needles: a punishing trap for false steps.’
Halliron was not easily irritated. Years of settling vain, even senile patrons and short-tempered, envious peers had taught him to treat with human nature sparely, to unwind misunderstanding like a snarl in fine-spun wool. Intrigued by Arithon’s reticence, he gave no ground, even as Arithon pressed to escape and regain untrammelled access to the trail.
There was no gap. Halliron had him boxed between a stand of dense brush and the seamed, ungiving face of another rock.
Spoiled as his behaviour suggested, the Teir’s’Ffalenn did not have the nerve or the anger in him to shoulder an old man aside to have his way.
‘I could ask,’ Halliron said in the Shandian drawl that seeped back occasionally from his boyhood, ‘why, when you first met me, did you react as if I were a threat to you?’
‘Because,’ Arithon began, and on impulse, switched liquidly to the Paravian. ‘
His accent was flawless. And the coiled hardness in him this time would not be denied. Halliron moved aside before he was indeed physically shoved.
Undeceived by the show for a moment, the Masterbard watched the scion of Rathain’s murdered high kings stride away. The man was not angry. However desperately he wished to foster that impression, to a bard’s ear for nuance, it was obvious that Arithon was unbearably distressed.
Halliron resumed his walk in pensive thought. For some pernicious reason he felt guilty for even this slight an intrusion into the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s altogether raptly-guarded privacy. If anything left the bard irked, it was his suspicion that Steiven’s daughters were entrusted with an honesty nobody else in the camp seemed to merit.
The clans of Deshir were altering the landscape in the valleys to either side of the Tal Quorin’s watercourse. The woods rang with the noise of their feverish haste, of axes and falling timber and the grinding over stones of makeshift sledges. A party of raiders had stolen draught teams. The chink of chain and harness fittings blended with drovers’ calls. Even Halliron’s pony was pressed into service, hauling hampers of cut brush.
Upon arrival, the women left tents and belongings still furled in their packs in a clearing. Every free hand was set to work, while the children and the elderly were sent out to forage or dress the game sent in by the hunting parties who ranged the glades further afield. The racket had scattered the deer, the birds, and even the beavers were driven into hiding by rafts of cut logs sent downstream.
Lord Steiven was south, below the white-water rapids where the river fanned into sheets of open water between grassy green swards of marsh. There he oversaw the remaking of innocent landscape into traps to mire Etarra’s army. Arithon did not join him. Neither did he lend his strength to the shifting of logs and stones. Conspicuous for his idleness, for even the Masterbard had volunteered to help the cooks, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn sat in the shade through the morning, apparently taking a nap. Nobody saw him move, nor as much as open an eye.
When the work-crews returned to eat at midday he was still there and had to be wakened for the meal.
And yet, he must have stirred. A scout who passed through the armoury lodge found the tactical maps disturbed. Penned in the margins of a supply draft in fussy, over-ornamented script were concisely drawn summaries of the weapon and training profile of Etarra’s garrison troops, along with names, numbers and insightful characteristics of most of its ranking officers.
Since the prince never mentioned this contribution, the matter became overshadowed. The contempt of the
