prince. No clansman will fight when he can ambush. He will not leave cover until his killing is accomplished and even then he’ll do so warily. To catch him and engage him, you must creep close and never let him sight you. And then you must lie in wait with the patience of almighty Ath.’ Pesquil suddenly froze and caught Lysaer back by the shoulder. ‘Don’t answer,’ he breathed sharply; and as the prince stiffened to his touch, ‘Don’t move.’
His attention was trained into the shadows, away from the lit expanse of flats. Lysaer too watched the forest. Past the sun-flecked dances of gnats, under the silvered boughs of beeches that upheld their vaultings of copper leaves, he saw gaping holes torn in the ground, and the slashed earth that marked where horses had struggled as the footing gave under their forelegs. He saw the white gleam of a fallen sword; the gilt fringes torn off a caparison; he saw too the bundled dead, with arms outflung, or hands slackly curled over the shafts of the arrows that had killed them. Through the raw beat of pulse through his veins, and a fury too bitter for expression, Lysaer forced himself to exhaustive search and to read, beyond omission, in ripped brush and scarlet-tipped stakes and desecrated flesh, the fates of the men who had fled the river.
Steiven’s clansmen had been nothing if not thorough.
A man whimpered, unseen in the gloom. Lysaer tensed to rise, prepared to succour survivors. Pesquil snatched him back with a grasp that jarred the broken ends of his collarbone, and also the cracked ribs in his left side that the scout who strapped him had not found. Next, Pesquil’s horny palm closed over his face, stifling even the hissed air that was all his expression of pain.
On a breath scented in garlic, Pesquil mouthed in his ear, ‘Keep silent. The wrong move, the slightest noise, and you kill us all.’ He maintained his suffocating grip, while, in cruel vindication of his warning, the unseen soldier’s suffering became cut off in mid cry.
There followed a bubbling sigh whose cause could not be mistaken. Somewhere very close by, barbarians were yet about their business of slitting the fallen men’s throats.
Slowly, deliberately, the headhunter captain released his restraint. Lysaer blotted his cheek where the studs of Pesquil’s bracer had gouged a scab, the look he returned a blast of stifled frustration.
Snake silent, the commander of Etarra’s headhunters dispatched a series of hand-signals to the hidden ranks of his scouts. Then he touched Lysaer’s wrist and crept deeper into the forest.
Progress was more cautious than before. Since deadfalls and traps might lurk unsprung between the trees with their matted mantles of creepers, Lysaer learned a headhunter’s way of probing the soil with a weapon before inching forward, and to stalk head down, careful to leave undisturbed any brush or vine or loose root that might hide the trigger for a spring trap. The scents of burgeoning summer foliage hung unsettled with the reek of recent death, and often the tufted mosses squelched under hand or knee with the wet heat of fresh-spilled blood. The gloom deepened. Ahead, his attention trained forward, Pesquil poised. With fingers pinched to steel to damp stray sound, he slowly, silently drew his blade.
Lysaer crept abreast and followed his guide’s line of sight.
Through a lattice of birches and black firs, a light-footed squad of boys busied themselves among Etarra’s fallen. Clad in deerskin, furtive in movement as wild creatures, they were there to pilfer weapons, Lysaer presumed; until his eye was arrested by a telltale glimmer of steel. Horrified incredulity shook him. The shaded depths of the thickets no longer masked the fact the boys’ hands were bathed scarlet to the wrists. Small fingers and sharp daggers ensured that town-bred wounded never rose. Before his stunned eyes he saw a son of Deshir’s clans end a man pleading for mercy with a practised slash across the windpipe. Other victims who sprawled unconscious, or moaned face down in their agony died as fast, of a well placed stab in the neck. The butchery was done in speed and silence, and ruthless efficiency without parallel.
‘The little fiends!’ Lysaer gasped softly.
‘Vengeance,’ Pesquil whispered. ‘This time we have them. There won’t be another trap waiting.’
Etarra’s league of headhunters deployed with oiled care, and at length the little rise lay triply ringed with poised men. When Pesquil signalled the attack, only the inner rank charged. They cut directly for the kill and did not mind if a child or two slipped past. The outer lines would mop up any fugitives.
At the forefront of the strike-force, Lysaer thrust his sword inside the guard of youngsters’ daggers with no more hesitation than a man might feel who stabbed rats. This was not war, but execution, the lives he destroyed of tainted stock. Royal requisites inured a man to cruel decisions; if they sickened him, it must not show, and if they softened him, he was no fit vessel to rule.
If Arithon s’Ffalenn used children for his battles, the scar upon the conscience must be his.
On a thicketed knoll amid the valley adjacent to Tal Quorin, the half-brother that Lysaer had sworn to kill sat in a brushbrake alongside five of Steiven’s archers. Young Jieret knelt, restless, at his shoulder, wielding a bow with a nervous prowess the equal of any grown man’s. Arithon himself bore no weapon. Empty handed, he perched with his legs drawn up, his wrists dangled lax on his knees. Head bent and eyes half lidded, he appeared on the lazy edge of sleep.
In fact, he kept his immediate senses detached out of bleakest necessity.
Clan runners had earlier confirmed that the s’Ilessid prince had marched with the doomed divisions that advanced up Tal Quorin’s banks. His fine chestnut horse had been seen to go down, but that its rider survived both flood and deadfalls was never for an instant in doubt.
The burning urge of Desh-thiere’s curse continued insidiously to gnaw at Arithon’s inner will. He felt it always, a tireless pressure against reason, an ache that pried between every thought and desire. The knowledge of Lysaer’s presence played on his nerves like a craving, volatile as a spark fanned dangerously close to dry tinder.
The nightmare was too substantial, that he could not encounter his half-brother alive and retain his grip on self-will. Had Deshir’s clans not relied upon his gifts for survival, he should have been far from this place.
‘Here, Jieret,’ one of the scouts chided, as the boy retested the tension of his bow and at full draw pretended to take aim. ‘Don’t be wasting your shots, boy. Use up those arrows that suit you for length, and we’ve not got spit for replacements.’
‘I know that.’ Jieret glowered, his fingers running up and down, up and down, the new gut string of his recurve. He wore his hair tied back in a thong like the men and tried brazenly hard to hide dread. Ever since the prescient dream that slipped his recall he had been moody and difficult to manage.
A word from Arithon might have eased him. But the Master of Shadow this moment had no shred of perception to spare anyone. No mage would willingly broadcast his finer vision across a field of war. The wrench as quickened
