The clanlord sat down then, and in iron-clad example directed his attention to the maps. If a night of communion with nature had jolted Arithon out of apathy he would never ridicule the change. This prince’s hand had helped to banish Desh-thiere; if the powers used then could help now, he must be encouraged to offer them. Yet, confronted by Arithon’s unsteady bearing as he pulled up the stool and sank onto it, Steiven wondered silently if Caolle’s supposition had been right, and his liege had retired from the oathtaking to get himself royally drunk.
Arithon rested his chin on folded fingers. ‘I’ve had warning,’ he opened without preamble. ‘The lives of every clan woman and child will be lost if they are sent out to stand against Lysaer. Butchery best describes the method. I could sound no alternative sequence.’
Caolle for a mercy stayed silent, while Steiven adjusted to this implied application of mage schooled prescience with a care he might have used when taking aim on a half-startled buck. ‘Can you be more specific?’
‘Unfortunately not.’ Arithon resumed a tone beaten level by an unpleasant ringing in his ears. ‘Your son disrupted my scrying. Small talk of his sisters provoked a precognition. His presence masked further development. I suggest, and not lightly, that you take full heed and arrange safeguards.’
Steiven regarded his prince and desperately suppressed the thought that rose inside him like a scream: that his own life already had been pledged. It seemed most cruelly unjust that loyalty to this Teir’s’Ffalenn might claim his wife and five young ones as well. He said only, ‘You wish me to remove the women and younger children from the lines?’
‘At the very least.’ Arithon sounded strained.
‘Suicide,’ Caolle interrupted. He stuck broad thumbs in his belt and licked his teeth. ‘We cannot act in fear of who will die. If we hold back any one resource, where do we stop? We’ll have no need at all for fussy strategy, if our lines get overrun and all of our fighting strength falls jack-dead on the field!’
‘There are alternatives,’ Arithon interjected. At his word, the candle flicked out, though no hand had moved to pinch the flame.
When Caolle leaned out to test the wick, Steiven stopped him on instinct. ‘Don’t. Snuffed candles usually smoke. I smell none, which must mean the light is still burning.’
‘The sun can be blackened as easily,’ Arithon’s voice resumed out of darkness. ‘Mine is full command of shadow. Though I am loath to kill by trickery, the night can be a formidable weapon.’
He released the captive candle as abruptly, and in a steady, undisturbed spill, flamelight glinted in multiple reflection on the helms and scale brigandines of a dozen men-at-arms, conjured from nowhere and arrayed behind the prince’s chair.
Caolle broke his chief’s hold. He surged erect. His hands in frenzied urgency sorted through the weapons that weighted the map-ends for just one blade with a serviceable edge.
Arithon’s grating laughter stopped him cold. ‘Illusion only,’ the prince admonished. His magery dispersed into thin air, with Caolle left blinking and foolish, his fists interlocked behind the crossguard of an ill-balanced antique broadsword.
The prince said with stinging coolness, ‘I’m hardly the green boy you imagined. By the grace of my grandfather’s upbringing, I hold the sole alternative. Listen and live. Or I’ll step back, reject my oath, your feal defence and every last trace of your memory.’
As if taunting the temper that, in one move, could finish a swing up to gut him, the Shadow Master held the clan captain’s gaze in tight-lipped, bristling antagonism. Until, suspicious that the prince might not be drunk, but rather driving for the opening to provoke, Steiven intervened. ‘Caolle, put down that blade. Whether or not you’ve been mocked, I can tolerate no violence against a guest who’s sworn at my hearth.’
Caolle settled, hunched as a mastiff forced to give ground. He watched with hot eyes as Arithon applied a stick of charcoal to the map and re-formed the deployment of Deshir’s forces. As the fine, unsteady hands revitalized the plans with new strategy, the irascible veteran was forced to revise his impression of the s’Ffalenn heir. The prince was impressively clever, if weak. His hands trembled, and the green eyes burned beneath slack lids as though driven to fever by high-strung nerves. Battle experience might toughen him enough to make him a passable sovereign, Caolle thought; but he kept his opinion to himself.
Near the end, they suffered interruption. Framed suddenly against the torchless blackness of the doorway, a scout in weapons and leathers made a hasty entrance. ‘Your Grace. Lord Caolle. The Lady Dania requires the presence of her husband. Your Jieret has had another nightmare and is out of his senses with grief.’
‘Forgive me,’ Steiven blurted, on his feet and gone in a bound that riffled stacked maps in his wake.
Relieved to be quit of his message, the scout came fully inside and settled on the stool his chief had vacated. He gave Caolle an apologetic shrug. ‘Ath ease his suffering, poor young one.’ For Arithon’s benefit, he explained, ‘Jieret has Sight, as his father does.’
‘Jieret has natural prescience?’ Hunched over crossed arms on the tabletop, Arithon snapped straight in wild- eyed, sweating attention. ‘Ath’s mercy, why did nobody think to tell me?’
Cynical before this unlooked-for burst of concern, Caolle drummed his knuckles on his swordbelt and watched; while the scout, less dour, let out a sigh. ‘No kind gift for a boy, to be sure. Whatever he’s dreamed broke his heart.’
‘I’ll tell you what he saw.’ Arithon shot a vicious glance toward Caolle. ‘The slaughter of every living relative. If I’d known that child had Sight, I’d never have allowed him to stay near me. I was still half-tranced from scrying, and my defences at the time were wide open. If he’s gifted, he’ll have picked up the sequence from me. Mine the blame, if he’s taken any harm.’
Magecraft and jargon left no impression upon Caolle, who disdained outbursts of any sort. He pulled his skinning knife from his boot sheath, and in the extreme and failing candlelight expertly shaved off a hangnail. ‘You worry for nothing,’ he said to Arithon. ‘Deshir’s young are hardly fragile. Any such weakness in clan bloodlines, town headhunters have long since stamped out.’
The reassurance appeared to settle Arithon’s mind, for by the time the captain looked up to sheath his blade, the prince had apparently fallen asleep. His black hair feathered a pillowing wrist, with the other hand outflung across the map; as if he had started to surge to his feet, then surrendered the inclination.
If arcane scrying had exhausted the prince to the same degree as his recent flight from Etarra, the man was a fool who tried to roust him. The scout said as much, his long face gloomy in disgust.
