Steiven’s clansmen could be kept alive. How could a prince, mage or otherwise, brook the scale of such sacrifice? Etarra would suffer greater losses; but the cost would be cruel for a stalemate, particularly when mishap could yet play a hand, and snatch back the chance of even that.
No trick of magecraft could fully anticipate bad luck. All guarantees were forfeit, since the day Etarra’s garrison marched upon the north.
Arithon rapped the ashes from the pipe bowl. The slightest attempt at motion now shot lancing pains through his skull. Warned to pay heed to common sense, he took swift stock of his condition.
His clothing lay wrung with damp sweat and his flesh was drawn from dehydration. Since tienelle could kill if its lesser poisons were not rinsed from the body, he bent at once and tried a swallow from the stream.
The water hit his stomach and set off a rolling bout of nausea. He clamped his hands to his mouth, unsettled by the fight he underwent to keep the precious moisture down. Worn through a brutal and difficult scrying, he recognized his judgement had blurred. Had he considered with his full wits about him, he should never have dared try this much tienelle in one session, far less in seclusion. He needed herbal tea, a bed and the presence of another mage to ward the thought-paths that yet lay vulnerably open. Lacking such comforts, he had no choice left but to wait. The herb must be allowed time to fade. Only with his senses released from its burning scope of vision would he be able to transmute the residual poisons the water could not flush through. Until then, he could tolerate no human company.
Twilight fell. Birdsong stilled, and the boughs overhead became sprays of black lace against a sky pricked by pale stars. Engaged in private struggle against the fevers of withdrawal, Arithon sat with his head tilted back against an oak bole that kindly performed its appointed function and kept his body propped upright. The dark tunic lent by Lady Dania melted his form into shadow, while stray spurts of drug-born intuition stung him with unwanted revelation: that the clothing on his back had belonged to the lady’s younger brother, fallen wounded in a raid at fifteen. Caolle’s hand had delivered the mercy-stroke that gave the boy clean death. Arithon ground his knuckles in his eyes to drive off the scents of a forest clearing, and blood fallen hot on green ferns. Too beaten to avert the bounding starts of truesight that flickered like delirium through his consciousness, he schooled his thoughts to rough order by laboured, exhaustive reviews of longwinded ballads.
Engrossed in Dakar’s favourite drinking song, which was long and lewd, and only funny if both singer and listeners were flat drunk, Arithon groped through the first stanzas. He might be stretched thin, but he did not lack the fibre to master himself. Yet when between the fifth and sixth chorus his whispered recitation went ragged, he stumbled to shivering silence and realized. Someone had invaded his retreat.
Arithon felt his ears whine and his sinews draw tight under the eddying, electrical pull of another mind. Unlike the near-mystical calm radiated by birds or wild animals, this presence was unmistakably human. Its excitements, uncertainties and randomly chaotic energies tugged, burned and rebounded through the channels still defencelessly opened by the herb.
‘Come around where I can see you,’ he managed in a tone dragged husky by discomfort. Grateful that the falling darkness would conceal the worst of his weakness, he waited.
Sticks cracked. A stand of hazels shivered, parted, and disgorged Jieret, who emerged looking sheepish from the depths of a nearby thicket.
‘How did you know I was there?’ Peevish to find himself discovered, Steiven’s son approached, bent down, and with a curiosity that brazenly challenged, hooked up the empty tienelle canister from the verge of the streambank. He sniffed the pungent odour that lingered inside, curled his lip and darted a sidelong glance toward Arithon.
The boy expected a reprimand, Arithon knew; and also, he repressed the curious urge to ask if his prince was some sort of addict. His liege obliged him by saying nothing. Politeness triumphed. Jieret shrugged and set down the container, then fixed the man with an accusation quite spoiled for the fact that his tunic was plastered with damp leaves. ‘I made no noise.’
Arithon concealed a shudder of dry heaves behind a chuckle and lied outright. ‘The mosquitoes told me.’
‘But I didn’t swat even one!’ Jieret objected.
‘Next time, don’t scratch,’ the Master of Shadow advised. A flinch escaped his restraint at the boy’s explosion of laughter.
‘You don’t miss much, your Grace.’ The implication remained unspoken, that drugs or drink should deaden the senses.
‘You will use no title, when you address me,’ said Arithon. ‘Your blade was not one I swore oath over, yesterday afternoon. You owe me no homage at all.’
‘But I was too young!’ Jieret dropped to his knees. ‘Here.’ He groped at his belt and proffered the knife he kept for whittling. ‘Take my steel now. I’ll be of age next season.’
Arithon forced a smile over a discomfort that riled him to dizziness. The razor-edged perception of herb- prescience kept him humble, presented him bluntly with recognition that Jieret’s impetuous offer held no hero- worship. A piercingly observant child, his knife was a boy’s way of testing the mettle of a prince his clan elders but pretended not to scorn.
Tenderly as his condition would allow, Arithon chose his answer. ‘Lad, you’ve a good ten years to grow yet before you can cross your father’s will. If Steiven forbade you to swear vassalage, I cannot dishonour his judgement. We can share friendship, if you wish, but nothing more weighty than that.’
Jieret recoiled in affront and sheathed his knife. ‘I’ll be twenty in just eight more years.’ His presence a blur amid thickening gloom, he added, ‘Tashka says I’m large for my age. But she’s my sister, and what do girls know?’ His chin tipped up at a cocky angle his mother would have viewed with trepidation. ‘I’ll fight with the men at your side, prince, when Etarra’s army invades our forest.’
The blood-soaked visions still threatened. Arithon dragged back wandering attention. ‘I forbid you.’
‘But it’s custom!’ Jieret bounded to his feet. ‘Friends always fight together. And Halliron bet Elwedd you’re even better with a sword than Caolle is.’
‘The bard will lose his silver, then,’ Arithon snapped, and at once regretted his outburst. Unbalanced by his pounding head, he laboured to restore his pose of harmless indecision. ‘You can serve me best by staying aside to protect your little sisters.’
Jieret sneered. ‘Caolle’s right, you think like a townborn. Clan girls don’t need protection, a chief’s daughters least of any. Except for Edal and Meara, my sisters will be in battle too, disarming the fallen and catching the enemy’s loose horses.’
