Kitabı oku: «The Wars of Light and Shadow», sayfa 8
Too weary to have scraped the mud and rime from his boots, even had time been given, the courier directed his stumbling step down the carpet that paved the wide hallway. The chink of his spurs cast thin echoes off the vaulted ceiling, and his cloak slapped, wet, at his ankles. His impression of gilt-trimmed opulence framed too great a contrast, after his weeks of enduring chapping gusts off the river and reeling, long hours ahorse on roads choked in wet snow and darkness. A liveried servant pattered ahead and flung open the door to the banquet hall. The light flooded outward, too bright, and packed with a heat of perfumes and rich sauces. Noise rolled into the corridor, a barrage of argumentative voices fit to stagger the exhausted courier where he stood.
Gace Steward’s clever grip set him steady. ‘Just wait. I’ll have you inside for your audience straightaway.’ As if the prospect of injecting disaster into the scene’s rampant discord amused him, he plowed like an eel through the close-press of Avenor’s shouting dignitaries.
On the sanctuary of the raised dais, only two men held their tempers in check. The Prince of the Light sat with his elegant, ringed fingers lightly curled on the stem of his wineglass. The other hand lay flat on the damask tablecloth, stilled amid a spread of gleaming cutlery and food that had not yet been touched. He wore no diamonds. A doublet roped with gold and white pearls hazed his outline in the glow of soft light, a display of pale magnificence artfully set off by the indigo tapestry hung behind his gilt chair. Beside him, dark panther to his bright grace, the Lord Commander, Sulfin Evend, leaned against a pilaster with his narrow hands hooked through the bronze-studded harness of his baldric.
Once a captain at arms in the Hanshire guard, he had eyes like poured ice water, a square jaw, thin lips, and a ruthless penchant for analysis that posed even the event of light supper as a mapped-out strategy of war. His whetted vigilance encompassed the room. Through the cadence of the servants who refilled carafes and platters, his slitted gaze noted Gace Steward’s furtive entry with the infallible assessment of a predator.
He unfolded crossed arms, bent, and spoke a word to the Exalted Prince.
Lysaer showed no change of expression. Intent and possessed of a monumental calm, he continued to listen as the current complainant shot to his feet, jewels sparking to his purpled state of fury.
‘… there’s no recourse and no redress! Every galley sent southward through Havish with slave oarsmen gets struck helpless by Fellowship sorcery!’
Hats jerked, feathers trembled, and vintage wine sloshed in its calyx of crystal as the uneasy company grumbled and muttered, engrossed in remonstrance for recent infamy. Angry sentences broke through the hubbub like the crack of stone shot through a hailstorm.
‘We can’t extradite the prisoners!’ The exasperated consonants of Lord Eilish, Minister of the Royal Treasury, spattered through the grim background of noise. ‘Yes, it’s the same damned numskull policy men bled to throw down with the uprising. Yes, we already tried. There’s no chance for ransom.’
His woolly head snagged in the turmoil like fleece off a peasant’s card, Avenor’s seneschal stabbed a harried finger and reviewed the core problem yet again to quell a latecomer’s uninformed temerity. ‘Word came through under High King Eldir’s seal just this morning. His Grace has freed the chained slaves from the benches. He won’t negotiate. Every officer and captain caught in breach of charter law will face his tribunal and be indicted under Havish’s Crown Justice.’
‘Sail’s no help at all!’ pealed an importunate voice. ‘Every laden vessel to strike out across Mainmere gets waylaid by barbarian pirates!’
More caustic, the delegate from Erdane slammed down his fist; cutlery and pastries jumped and resettled to a clashing complaint from fine porcelain. ‘Such marauding is done in hulls stolen from us! They’ve been outfitted with weapons and trained crews by hell’s minion! Arithon s’Ffalenn is the plaguing curse that’s gutting the marrow of our trade!’
Profits were being eaten alive by clan pests crying vengeance for kinfolk, branded and chained at the oar. Sweating in ermine too dense for the heat, the minister of the glass guild at last hurled the gauntlet. ‘What is your vaunted Alliance of Light doing to cap the bleeding breach?’
‘What’s being done? The crown seneschal hurled back, the stringy wattles of his neck creased by his massive chains of office. ‘Answer me this! Just why would we have four companies of crack Etarrans maintained at Alliance expense, given arms and standing orders to burn the clan dens out of Caithwood?’
Against that broil of seething, high temper, Gace Steward wormed onto the dais. Lord Commander Sulfin Evend straightened and met him. Tiercel pale eyes glinted like turned steel as he heard the man’s breathy, fast message.
‘News!’ he cracked over the burgeoning noise. ‘A courier’s brought word back from Watercross.’
The Prince of the Light pushed back his chair. He stood up, his grace like subtle, poured light before his less polished guests and court ministers. At his movement, the baying complainants faltered. Shamed by the calm in his steady blue gaze, they shuffled aside and made way for the courier.
His travel-stained cloak and mud-splashed boots screamed disaster the instant he entered. His stumbling step raised a jolting clangor of roweled spurs through the delicate chink of state jewelry. The last yammering talk crashed to blighted whispers. The scintillant glint of rubies and cut gemstones froze, nailed still within a tableau of choked quiet. Avenor’s favored dignitaries turned heads and clasped hands, breasts locked in an epidemic seizure of stopped breath.
The messenger reached the dais stair, caught and braced by Sulfin Evend. Against the gold-trimmed tablecloth, he folded to his knees in a homage that verged upon total collapse. ‘Your Grace, Prince Exalted.’ Every mile he had ridden rasped through his spare words, a cry of appeal for his sovereign’s mercy against the ill news that he carried. He offered up the sealed roll of his dispatch with hands that shook beyond recourse.
‘Give the rider my chair,’ Prince Lysaer said, his shaft of exasperation for the lapse of humanity exhibited by his own stunned staff. ‘See him comfortable at once.’
Caught staring along with everyone else, Gace Steward started, then leaped to obey that ominous, struck tone of command. A brisk snap of fingers summoned a page to bring wine in a crystal goblet.
‘Sit,’ Lysaer said. ‘Since I see that the missive you carry is secure, you may count your mission as accomplished. Please accept your due honor and my praise for the hardships imposed on you by the season.’ Nor did he move to accept the dispatch until the man had been settled, and had drained the glass of Carithwyr red to the dregs. The creased parchment changed hands in resignation, not fear. The courier’s gratitude for small kindness served as fuel, cranking the onlookers to an unbearable, fever-pitched tension.
All eyes tracked the Prince Exalted, poised on the dais with the scroll case in hand but not yet opened. The seal was genuine, its imprint that of the Etarran commander who captained the campaign to rout the clan enclaves in Taerlin. Yet the superscription was not in Lord Harradene’s bold script; his cipher had been imprinted in haste by the secretary posted with the supply train at Watercross.
The glow on Lysaer’s pearls hazed to sudden motion as he ripped through the ribbons and wax. He read, while his courtiers hung, their anxiety unrequited by his majestic demeanor.
He reached the end and looked up, locked in private shock. Then, overcome, he closed his eyes, while the last bloom of color receded from his fair skin. ‘We are to mourn,’ he announced in a strangled, gruff utterance. Brute strength sustained him. He regained full voice. His announcement sang out with hammering force and rocked the far corners of the room. ‘Every brave man who stood ground for the Light in Caithwood has been struck senseless by conjury set loose by a Fellowship Sorcerer!’
An indrawn gasp swept the company.
‘Worse,’ Lysaer said, ‘there’s a haunting by trees that has closed the road to armed caravans.’
An explosion of fiends in Avenor’s main market would have created less havoc; this fresh disaster slammed home even as the first blizzards choked the high passes through Camris.
‘Grace save us, now even our land routes are strangled!’ pealed the distressed Minister of the Royal Treasury.
Before wailing pandemonium could upend the whole room, the Prince of the Light met injured rage with a cry of derisive astonishment. ‘Did you expect our triumph over tyranny could be simple? Or did you believe the Fellowship of Seven would abdicate its stranglehold of power for this, our first stir of opposition?’ Avid as white flame, Lysaer paused. His gaze raked the choleric tangle of courtiers, and his rebuke rolled on like a dousing of pure arctic ice. ‘You amaze me, afraid as you are for your gold, when four companies of dedicated Etarrans lie stricken. They have offered their lives on foreign soil for a cause far more grave and far-reaching than a short-term hoarding of wealth.’
‘Our coin paid for those troops,’ a man in claret velvet dared from the rearmost ranks.
‘Are you so faint of heart you can cry for results, but not weather even one setback?’ Lysaer’s tone shaded into ineffable sorrow. ‘I am shamed, then. Count endurance so lightly, then expect to fall short! The course we embark on will not ride on one effort, nor even flourish without a concerted, long-range vision of sacrifice. Upon petty greed and divisive hearts will the Sorcerers and the evil embodied by the Shadow Master achieve our sorry defeat. Men will weep then, and not just for one season’s lost profits in trade. No. The suffering price will be written and paid by our children’s descendants for all time!’
Tense stillness descended, stirred by the shifting of hats and corpulent weight, and the sweating of bodies discomfited by constraining state clothes and pressed velvets. Only Erdane’s man seemed unmoved, as a volatile defensiveness swept through the gathering, the smoldering spark of unease touched against their deep-seated fear of dispossession.
Prince Lysaer gave the guildsmen’s sullen quiet no quarter. ‘Very well. If the great citizens of Avenor lack the character and dedication to sustain the full course of endeavor, I shall expend every resource I have to remember humanity first of all.’
An eruption of protests rattled the salvers, with the shrill, angered cries of Avenor’s guild ministers ringing the loudest of all.
‘What’s to be done?’ snapped the Minister of the Royal Treasury. ‘You have no vast funds to wage a winter campaign, and your dowry’s been promised to the shipyard.’
A hard, weighty pause; then Prince Lysaer turned his back. His appeal was presented to no one else but his steadfast Lord Commander. ‘You have my direct order, and an open note on my possessions. Sell every furnishing, every tapestry, every chest of gold plate in my household and use the proceeds to succor those fallen. Give all in my power to provide for their care. You will make free of Tysan’s crown resources, and call the full garrison back into field service. Their immediate muster will lend you the muscle to move every man stricken down into dry quarters and comfort.’
Against the dismayed rustle arisen at his back, his words lashed with stinging reprimand. ‘Every captain or soldier who refuses my summons will be turned off without pay! More than that, any city too engrossed in self-interest to supply aid will be cast outside my protection.’
He exhorted no more, spoke of no retribution. In suspense, his courtiers craned forward. They expected the usual smooth flourish of statecraft that would frame the grand plan to build forces and see justice done.
Lysaer gave back the barest, leashed glance of exasperation. His carriage displayed his most acid contempt as he dismissed his Lord Commander to shoulder the duties set upon him.
The impact struck home: outside of all precedent, there would be no fiery speech of inspiration, no brilliant new strategy to banish the perils of high sorcery.
The Prince Exalted awarded the grave majesty of his regard to the mud-splashed courier, who sat dazed with exhaustion in his chair. As though that picked audience was intimately private, he bestowed the magnanimous accolade of his kindness. ‘For your care for your fellow Etarrans, please stay. Sit and sup in my place. Enjoy the best food and drink in good health, for in sad fact, my presence is wasted. The truth is a tragedy, as you see. Avenor begs for no guidance beyond the bare need to see its trade and its merchants feather their own nests, and I was not born, nor gifted with divine powers for the purpose of rich men’s protection.’
A muted flash of his pearls underscored his gesture to summon his page to his side. Then the Prince of the Light stepped down from the dais. Without further ceremony, he swept from the hall, leaving Erdane’s delegate struck thoughtful, and Avenor’s state ministers gawping like fishes tossed onto shores of dry sand.
Early Winter 5653
Prime Enchantress
At the private banquet in Avenor’s royal palace, two deferent servants sprang to open the doors for the Prince of the Light’s precipitous exit.
Stunned silence reigned through the first, dizzy breath of disbelief. Then tumult resurged with a bang of wild noise that rocked echoes off the groined ceiling. On the high dais, seated in the royal chair, the road-muddied messenger who dispatched the bad news blinked over the abandoned spread of fine food. He watched Avenor’s state officers and trade ministers recover shocked wits and argue themselves into a fervent volte-face.
Their claims of bare coffers only minutes before suffered a miraculous readjustment. New offers of gold to be pledged for the Light materialized from dim places. Like chain lightning, caches hidden in deeper pockets resurfaced in the spate of high feeling that rolled and rebounded through the room.
Lord Eilish, Avenor’s Minister of the Royal Treasury, recovered grizzled eyebrows from the heights of his gray-fringed hairline. No fool, he clapped his hands to recall his scurrying secretaries. Then, shot to his feet, arms beckoning, he rousted pages and wine servers to clear aside platters of roast duck and strip the table near the door to bare boards. There, ensconced like a judge with a row of state witnesses and a brace of Prince Lysaer’s guardsmen, he dictated records and set under seal the promises that tumbled like charmed birds into his lap. He did not look up as Erdane’s delegate slipped out.
But Gace Steward, who missed nothing, expected a fast courier would ride the north road before midnight. The impact of that evening’s masterful play of statecraft would make itself felt far and wide.
Among the first to detect the fresh currents of change, an array of quartz spheres set in stands flashed to life in the stifling, close heat of a private chamber a hundred leagues distant from Avenor.
There, Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, sat her high chair in the sisterhouse at Capewell. Reduced by age and infirmity to a bundle of thin bones wrapped in a tissue of creased flesh, her robed form was propped upright in pillows. Wax candles burned like pale pillars at both elbows. A violet silk throw bordered with bullion ribbon mantled her lap. Her strengthless hands cupped another sphere of rock crystal, aligned by her trained circle of seeresses to fine-tuned spells of scrying.
In momentous synchronicity, the image of Avenor’s disrupted state banquet danced to the sigils and seals their inveigling mastery had stitched through the stone’s aligned matrix. Morriel absorbed every nuance of the scene, intent as a cat poised over a glass bowl of goldfish.
Her colorless lips pleated into vexed wrinkles, as, in distanced miniature, Lord Eilish arose and stretched, then closed and locked the boards of the ledger which kept his account of the Alliance treasury.
‘Clever man. Clever, clever man,’ she rasped on the tail of a stertorous exhale.
Though her attendant page boys and servants knew not to respond to anything but her direct summons, the dewy, blond woman perched on the stool at her knee had yet to be curbed from such frivolous liberties. ‘Do you mean Prince Lysaer?’ Her fluttery gesture singled out another quartz, the end sphere of the array of eight, cradled in its silver stand, and positioned in a semicircle around the Prime Matriarch’s chair. ‘But his Grace has apparently abandoned his council.’
While she spoke, the torchlit depths of the quartz showed Avenor’s Prince Exalted mounting a handsome cream horse in the taciturn company of his Lord Commander.
Morriel looked up. Her eyes sustained the drilled hardness of obsidian, opaque beside her younger colleague’s innocence. ‘He has left them, don’t you see? Let them know absolutely their money can’t buy his complaisant protection. Watch them. They’ll stew in his absence. They’ll sweat and pace themselves silly, then raise still more coin as a blandishment. Oh yes. Lysaer’s read their worth and their secret fears to an exquisite, fine point of accuracy. He’ll take his sweet time coming back. When he finally returns, his council and trade guilds will fall over themselves to welcome the policies they would once have argued past death to prevent.’
The woman’s youthful features stayed blank, lips parted as she awaited the binding conclusion.
‘Lysaer will have to take Sulfin Evend’s council, now,’ Morriel mused, finger tapping the quartz, and her eggshell brow tucked with speculation. ‘He must hire talent to keep track of his enemies, if he’s not to find himself continually blindsided by the doings of Fellowship Sorcerers.’
‘How can you know this?’ the girl said, admiring.
‘Study the present,’ the Prime Matriarch instructed in dry malice. ‘The clues to unlock the future ever and always are written into the patterns of each moment.’
The initiate furrowed her fresh brow and made a dutiful survey of the scenes logged and transmitted by the quartz spheres. Time passed, and the candles burned lower. Morriel Prime closed eyelids the webbed texture of dead leaves, her crabbed hands stilled upon the purple velvet in her lap.
‘Cast your net finer,’ she suggested, unprompted.
The young woman started. ‘Yes, Matriarch.’ She deepened her survey, saw a ship with furled sails rock at chilly anchorage at Tideport. She watched torches weaving through the gusty night at the crowded settlement of Watercross, where the fallen from Caithwood were bundled like cordwood in the common rooms of the inns, or sheltered under the gust-slapped canvas of the field tents. She tracked the Prince of the Light, who hastened his column of guardsmen southward, then followed the galloping outriders who raced ahead to secure them a galley passage out of Riverton inlet. She traversed a chain of dockside taverns in Orlest, and tight knots of men at the trader’s wharf, where talk ran to raids and losses to the minions of darkness.
‘I see widespread fear of the Master of Shadow,’ she lisped in uncertain conclusion. ‘The moil seems unfounded. He’s far at sea, and surely no direct threat to the continent.’
‘At sea, yes.’ Morriel spoke with shut eyes. ‘Yet he has not withdrawn his presence or his interests. Look for connections. Cast your net finer still.’
The girl fidgeted on her footstool, unable to find any relevance in the current view, of three trollops sharing gossip over hot chocolate in gilt cups, while a fourth one penned a letter in overdone script on the back of a secondhand parchment. Squint though she would, the initiate could make no sense of the contents. She raised a tentative hand and sketched a cipher for clarity, and watched the image shift from the prostitutes’ boudoir to the taproom of a seaside tavern, where a soap merchant with fat jowls and a marten collar lost a devastating hand of cards to the nerve-wound youngest son of the clanborn Duke of Alestron.
‘Nothing fits,’ she said, plaintive.
Morriel scarcely stirred, patient as none before ever saw her. ‘The trouble with new servants is the tedious time teaching them who should and should not be admitted. Lirenda is here.’ Eyes still closed, the Prime added, ‘She will demonstrate the thread of reason your inexperience has overlooked.’
The next instant, the latch clicked. The haughty, black-haired initiate swept in, a damp cloak on her arm, and her woolen skirts rimmed in the pale clay wicked up from the trodden-up yard of a countryside posthouse. She sank into obeisance, exuding the frost-keen scent of winter air. ‘I return from Araethura with word that the child, Fionn Areth, has been made our oathsworn servant.’
Morriel’s pinched face tipped aslant in the candlelight. ‘How convenient for you.’ Her eyes opened, black glass flecked in spite and the false, warm reflections of flame. ‘Forgive me if I don’t reward you with credit until your vaunted plan brings a success.’
Lirenda’s flare of rage was adroitly masked behind a façade of decorum. ‘How may I serve?’
The Prime goaded, relentless. ‘Since you’ve come, you can show Selidie how to draw out the connecting thread for the Shadow Master’s interests on the continent. I hedge all my options these days. You’ll know that already, since you’ve assiduously applied all your training to sorting the rumors.’ A rim of worn teeth lent an edge to her smile as Morriel watched for the signs her baiting had chafed on a weakness.
The former First Enchantress arose to full height, self-contained as a panther. She chose caution before argument. At the end of a difficult, cold-weather journey, this needling trap the Prime spun presented a mazework of pitfalls. Not least, the scrying would demand a calling rune set through the resonance of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn’s true Name. The ignominy burned, since a near-fatal fascination with that same prince’s character had tripped her downfall from the Prime’s favor. Her meddling desire for personal revenge had upset the grand construct that had formerly failed to take the wretched man captive.
Lirenda lidded her personal bitterness under a mask of humility. Morriel herself remained a cripple since that day, confined to the Capewell sisterhouse in the months that followed her collapse. Through her tedious convalescence, the most gifted of her healers yet failed to restore her lower limbs. While concern began to be fretted in whispers, that the Prime might never recover her lost strength and walk, Morriel herself was not sanguine. Burdened with the need for additional servants, and pinned between bedridden ennui, or the jostling discomfort of a sedan chair, her eggshell-frail bones and translucent flesh contained the irascible fury of a volcano denied any vent for eruption.
Over that whelming maelstrom of infirmity, the frustration of balked will and spent hope, amid the perilous turn just taken by Tysan’s curse-driven politics, the Prime Matriarch still ruled her domain like honed diamond. Nor did she allow fraility to loosen her grasp upon current events.
Lirenda knew better than to misjudge the request as a petty bid for vindication. She stepped forward and accepted the ice weight of the quartz from her Prime, set on notice by the play of cruel ironies that her character stood on trial yet again. She must perform this small office without flaw, or be judged inadequate to win back her lost rank as the Koriani prime successor.
She dared not vent her towering rage, that her competency was being used to tutor the green candidate set up as her replacement. One deep breath, two; she reestablished her calm. Any work done in concert with quartz required absolute emotional control. Lirenda assessed the sphere held in hand, its directive the tuned key for the array of eight ranged in their stands about Morriel’s chair. One of the Prime’s unobtrusive servants brought her a claw-footed stool.
She sat. Travel-stained clothing could not dim the innate poise of her breeding; she might as well have been offered a throne. The eyes she fixed on the young, blond initiate were antique amber, notched with pupils like primordial night. ‘One begins with the rune of relationship,’ she explained, her tone detached as struck bronze. ‘Such power draws the lane forces into alignment, that one quartz sphere will resonate with the next, letting a live current pass between them.’
Her hand traced the symbol over the crystal, each cross stroke and upright inscribed in etched ribbons of light. ‘Bind the energy into unity with the sigil that demarks the joined circle.’
‘The rune seal for holding?’ the initiate asked, her diffidence emphasized by an affected flounce.
Lirenda’s smile turned graven. ‘Then you’ve learned the twenty-eight primary seals? Very good.’ Her polished encouragement showed none of her contempt, that an enchantress chosen for Morriel’s training should have mastered such basics beforetime. ‘Do you know the next step?’
The woman pinched a peony lip between her even, pearl teeth. ‘The circle is empty?’
‘Yes.’ Lirenda stifled an exasperated sigh. ‘Every spell needs a vector, an energy, to lend it purpose and direction. In this case, your Prime requests linkages to the affairs of the Master of Shadow. Therefore, the tie must begin with knowledge of the subject’s true Name.’ Lirenda cupped the master sphere, stared into its depths, and inwardly sealed herself into a calm that admitted no chink for distraction. She could feel the eyes of the Prime upon her like hot probes, testing, observing, awaiting a reaction that might expose any lingering canker of weakness.
But Lirenda had long since shielded her vulnerable core against Arithon’s beguiling attraction. Venomed hatred remained. She would see the last scion of s’Ffalenn struck dead before she allowed his compassionate potential to awaken the seed of her dormant passion. Disciplined to perfection, she spoke the invocation to call and to bind. Over that matrix, she added the sigil of self-mastery, then into that waiting vessel of containment, the shaped memory of an unmistakable male face. Three times, she called the name of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn.
The quartz sphere absorbed her building intent. Its matrix took fire and responded, amplifying the tuned alignment of gifted talent and aimed thought. Lirenda sensed the impacting force of that presence storm her unassailable calm. Prepared, she held firm. Trained will locked her mind into permafrost clarity, until an unexpected influx of outside force wrenched her alignment off course. A sweet, sustained note pierced through, then a chord that melted all armor. The opening measure swelled into an intimate play of glad sound that beguiled beyond will to deny.
Lirenda lost grip on her construct of ciphers. The unbearable purity of a melody she had most diligently expunged out of memory burst through and flanked her shield of defenses.
The quartz in her hand pealed back in kind, and magnified that clear cry of rapture into joy that burst all restraint. Then the wrought spiral of harmony raised raw desire, and whirled her off center into trance …
Sucked down, and down again into a well of absolute darkness charged with delights and addictive possibility, Lirenda cried out in furious protest. Her denial just raised a more clamorous, inward betrayal.
The whispered male presence of the musician gave her back his lilting, unbridled laughter. ‘But lady enchantress, surely in this case you made the first effort to call me?’
Dragged into a vista of dreaming vision, Lirenda beheld a starlit night where the winds blew mild and warm. Far beyond the winter’s fast grip, a ship’s masts with its spiderwork of running lines and tarred rigging sliced the sky into graceful geometrics. Nor was the vessel’s quarterdeck unoccupied.
Framed against the sturdy, spooled taffrail, and jeweled constellations skewed at unfamiliar angles by an extreme change of latitude, she confronted the brigantine’s helmsman: none else but the slim, dark-haired bard whose mastery had loomed the exquisite snare that entrapped her.
The angular, stamped features of s’Ffalenn royalty were unmistakable, cast now into a patent, amused inquiry that tipped up one corner of Arithon’s mouth. Across the friable trance which suspended her, his presence ignited her confusion, fed and fueled by a whirlwind of formless emotion.
Lirenda fought to resist the influx of detail that split second of contact engraved on her inner awareness: the fine grace of his carriage offset by commonplace clothing, and the jet strands of hair fallen loose from their tie to tangle and wisp at his temples. If the events of the summer had harrowed his health, in seafaring solitude, Prince Arithon had won back a carefree, if temporary, freedom. His dark breeches were buttoned with engraved silver studs, and his strong, arched feet were bare. His plain linen shirt was a soft, unbleached ivory, and the loose, doeskin laces with their beaded pearl ends were flicked and teased by the winds. The agile fingers which had danced those honeyed measures on fret and string were wound now on the spokes of a ship’s wheel.
Apparently he had sensed her intrusion before her shocked moment of recognition. His sharpened gaze was not fixed anymore on the stars or the compass he steered by.
