Night passed. The bard’s face showed every sleepless hour, and Caolle wore an expression like boiled leather. While grey dawn crept in, and the forest rang with birdsong undisturbed by mankind’s sad strivings, they reached a dell scattered with the shafts of fallen arrows, and beyond, a broad beech, ringed with casualties so closely fallen that one lay entangled upon the next like tidewrack stranded by storm.
Roused from the half trance that had sustained his passage through the grotto, Arithon reached out sharp and suddenly, and touched Halliron on the wrist. ‘Let me work alone, here. There won’t be any wounded among these fallen.’
To kill a man untimely with a blade was not the same as using magics to twist his destiny, to overrule his fate by ill usage of the forces that endow life. To release those spirits cut down in Jieret’s defence was a costly, exhaustive undertaking more taxing than anything accomplished previously.
For these dead did not welcome intervention, but shrank from Arithon in stark fear. He was more than their killer; he was a master who had betrayed them on levels they had no conscious means to guard. To bind them long enough to free them, he had to expose to them all that he was. He had to lower his defences and let them shriek curses to his face. He had to endure their pain, let them hurt him in turn, until his passivity left them mollified and quiet.
And when the blessing of the Paravian release let them go, the peace they took with them was not shared. Arithon looked desolate and haunted, and remorse had stolen even tears.
Long before the end, Halliron found he could not watch.
Caolle, who had no gift to know the scope of what was happening, saw only that Arithon suffered. ‘Why should he do this? Why?’
But the answer the bard gave was inadequate, that this prince was both musician and king. Caolle understood only that the heart of the mystery lay beyond him.
When the captain who thought he knew all there was to sample of human grief could no longer abide the awful silence, he spoke the greatest accolade he could offer. ‘Arithon is greater than Steiven.’
‘You see that,’ said the Masterbard. ‘You are privileged. Many won’t, and most will be friends.’
By then, the town dead had been numbered and most of the clansmen. There remained now only Madreigh, open-eyed, his loose hands empty and outflung and a gaping hole in his chest. Aching in body, riven in spirit, Arithon paused in a moment of stopped breath. He looked upon the face of one scarred old campaigner not twisted in rigor, but content with the peace of the seasons.
This, the man who had defended his back, while, for Jieret, he had shaped baneful conjury. A cry wrung from Arithon’s throat before sluggish thought could restrain it. ‘Dharkaron Avenger witness, you should have had better than this!’
Shaking in visible spasms, he brushed back grey hair, and cupped Madreigh’s face between his palms. Blind to daylight, deaf in grief, he closed his eyes, and spoke Name; and met, not blankness or confusion but the abiding fall of spring rains, and snow, and warm sunlight. He encountered the peace of the trees.
The awareness shocked him. The spell that ensnared more than fifty to spare one had inadvertently preserved another life.
Rathain’s prince tilted back his head. Halliron and Caolle loomed above him. His balance tipped toward dizziness, and what seemed the yawning dark of Dharkaron’s censure opened before his wide eyes. ‘This one, also, I saved,’ he said as if pleading forgiveness. ‘Tend him well. I would beg that he lives.’
‘My liege,’ said Caolle. He knelt quickly; and when nerve and consciousness faltered, he was there to catch Arithon in his arms.
When the tors on the plain of Araithe were raked at sunrise by the winds, the mists still clung like combed cotton in the valleys as they had the dawn before. Only now the tick and splash of droplets of dew-soaked rock mingled with the moans of wounded soldiers. Wrapped in the tatters of his surcoat, his camp blanket long since given up to alleviate the shortage of bandaging, Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid knelt to hold the hand of yet another lancer who shivered and thrashed in mindless suffering.
‘Delirium, this time,’ the healer diagnosed: this victim raved from wound fever, not as some of the others, in a madness brought on by terrors of sorcery and shadows. His raw hands helpless and empty, the healer straightened up from his patient. He had abandoned his satchel, there being no more medicines to dispense. Needles could not suture without thread, and last night’s case-load of fatal injuries had burned him stark out of platitudes.
Not in a lifetime of service had he seen a war cause such damage as this one. To the prince still determined to lend comfort, he added, ‘I doubt this lad knows why you’re there. The wagons are loaded. Did you want to see Lord Diegan on his way?’
‘I’ll go in a moment.’ His head bent, the damp ends of his hair flicked in coils over his arm sling, Lysaer let the healer study him in a mix of exasperation and approval before, fed up and weary, he finally gave in and stalked off. One dying garrison soldier might well be past solace. But the prince responsible for the strike into Strakewood needed the interval to think.
Lysaer buried his face in the hand not strapped up in bandaging. Far off, the pop of a carter’s whip sounded over someone’s hoarse shouting; another officer striving to curb the paranoia that had men drawing steel at plain shadows.
No one who had tangled with Arithon’s sorceries in Strakewood would ever again view darkness as friendly.
Grooms hauling buckets to the picket lines observed Lysaer’s pose of despair. They murmured in sympathy for his exhaustion, for all the camp knew he had not rested. The prince had laboured with Pesquil to compile losses too massive to list. Commanding despite his discomfort, he had been on the riverbank to encourage each wave of tired soldiers who emerged alive from the forest. He had walked beside litters, talking, reassuring. Cracked bones had not stopped him from breaking up disputes, or throwing steady light with his gift to quell massive hysterical fear. Throughout a long and terrible night, he had chaffed frightened squires and bloodied his hands beside the surgeon to clean and staunch open wounds. However a man might deplore royalty, this prince had accepted no cosseting.
To find his ragged magnificence still among them in the cheerless grey of the morning made men break their hearts to meet his wishes. That Etarra’s concerns were foremost in his mind, no town survivor ever questioned.
