The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts

upright by his manacles and towed his bulk from the hall. Stumbling and wordless, the insouciance of yesterday bled out of him, he never once turned his head in appeal; while Halliron and Medlir made swift departure through the crooked stair that led upward into the daylight.

      Later, in a dingy garret room where winter winds tore at loose slates, and draughts flowed and creaked through the gaps in warped shutters, Medlir sat over a mug of spiced wine, his flattened hands tapping a jig tune on the chipped and dingy porcelain. ‘Will you let him off?’

      ‘Was there ever any question?’ Four hundred and sixty royals of their store of coin had already been dispatched to the lumber mill and the wheelwright’s coffers. Halliron sat on the pallet opposite, swathed in quilts and coach rugs taken from the pony cart’s baggage. The inn’s bedclothes had been banished into care of the laundress; if this establishment maintained any servant to fill the post. Scraping an idle fingernail through the grime on the bed boards, Halliron was inclined to think not. ‘Your obligation to Asandir must take precedence.’

      Medlir jerked his chin up. ‘It does not.’ The fluttering tallow dip underlit his face, lending baleful emphasis to his anger. ‘The Fellowship sorcerers would agree. Your business is in Shand, not in mending the Mad Prophet’s excesses.’

      Halliron tisked gently. His slow grin unveiled gapped front teeth. ‘I can teach you as readily here as in the south. Shand can wait.’

      ‘If six months in Jaelot doesn’t contrive to ruin us both.’ Medlir’s veneer of irritation dissolved as he arose to add billets to the ill-vented hearth, burned down to a smouldering, sullen bed of coals that belched smoke at each breath of wind. As the new wood caught, he sighed. ‘All of this concerns my life before I accepted your apprenticeship. I’d rather you weren’t burdened.’

      ‘You’re more to me, now, than an apprentice.’ Fresh flame curled up, laying a bronze patina over the spider-tracks of wrinkles that scored the bard’s skin, and gilding age-chiselled face-bones still windburned from the open road. ‘And anyway, you’re the one most inconvenienced. I shouldn’t care to stand in your shoes when the Mad Prophet discovers you’ve deceived him.’

      His back turned, Medlir shrugged. ‘Forced labour won’t give him much chance.’

      Eyes clear as sky studied the tension in the younger man’s shoulders; noted the absorbed, almost desperate focus he bent upon the slate apron beneath his boots. As if his eyes could see into soot-dusted, grainy layers of stone, and perceive the dance and spark of primal energies that laced its matter into being; as indeed, Halliron knew, they once had, before raw abuse of such powers in Deshir’s defence had raised barriers. A mage once trained to know the mysteries was unlikely to forget the awesome, wild winds of destruction a binding of unmaking could unleash. Backlash and scarring had rendered the spirit blind and mute.

      With a gentleness roughened by the congestion in his chest, the bard said, ‘Be patient. The sight will come back to you. Nature offers more than one path to perception, and your musical gifts may grow to compensate.’

      The one who named himself Medlir raised hands to cover his face, the beaded ends of unstrung laces swinging and tapping against his knees. He crouched so for a long moment, then gathered himself, stood up, and turned toward his master an expression of unspeakable pain. ‘I’ve felt the power stir in snatches, an echo here and there between notes.’ His frustration revealed his difficulty, that he could not accustom himself to the change. The energies he had studied as pure spirit light felt indecipherably strange, transliterated to vibration and sound.

      Halliron’s smile held bedrock firmness. ‘Well, work at it. Six months in Jaelot will certainly leave you the time.’

      The Masterbard’s apprentice returned a clipped sigh and bent to unwrap the lyranthe. He extended a foot in a swordsman’s move and hooked the chamber’s one stool. Its broken brace scarcely troubled his poise as he perched on the rat-chewed rush seat.

      ‘Give me the Ballad of Taerlin Waters,’ Halliron said. ‘Mind you don’t slur the runs in the third bar, or the grace notes that lead into the chorus.’

      Medlir flicked back the untied gusset of his cuffs to free his fingers for tuning; here, where disguise was not needed, firelight caught raw and red on a scar that grooved the flesh in a half-twist from right palm to elbow. The hair that fronded his cheek as he bent to the sweet ring of strings was no longer the bland, ash brown Dakar knew, but glossy black as chipped coal.

      His eyes, when he finally raised them to sing, were as penetrating a green as the royal ancestor whose natural looks he had inherited.

       Links

      Before the spring winds thaw the Mathorn Pass, Lysaer s’Ilessid, Prince of the West, rides out at the head of a cavalcade bound for ruined Avenor, his fair betrothed at his side; with him, under heavy escort of Etarran men at arms and ex-mercenaries sworn to feal service, travel a hundred wains bearing funds for his city’s restoration, and tapestries, chests, fine furnishings and the jewels apportioned as his lady’s dowry…

      The journey of the royal retinue is marked by covert bands of scouts who relay word through messengers to the borders of Rathain and beyond; until news of Lysaer’s movement is shared by clansmen who muster in deep, hidden glens against the day that Prince Arithon may have need of them…

      On the east facing-wall of Jaelot, whipped by cold airs off the bay, the man who is prince and fugitive, Master of Shadow and Masterbard’s apprentice, sends a request intended for Sethvir, Fellowship sorcerer and Warden of Althain Tower; and his missive is not scribed on parchment, but in his own blood upon a flake of slate that he dries over live flame, then tosses into the heaving breakers at high tide…

       III. FIRST INFAMY

      Committed as an impulsive donation by Etarra’s Governor Supreme to the ruined city Prince Lysaer undertook to restore, Lord Diegan, ex-commander of the garrison, sat his glossy bay warhorse and glared through the pennons that cracked at the head of the unwieldy column bound for Avenor. The gusts off the Mathorn’s high slopes still bit like midwinter; as unforgiving were Lord Diegan’s eyes, bleak and flat as black ice.

      He wore the trappings of an Etarran dandy; intrigue still drove him as naturally as each drawn breath, but five summers spent in the wilds on campaign against forest barbarians had tempered him. He knew when boldness would not serve him. Yet masterfully as a man could contain himself, last night’s argument had flared too hotly to be masked behind banality. Lord Diegan found himself glaring once again at the blond-haired prince who rode to his left.

      Clad for travel in blue-dyed suede and a cloak of oiled wool, his hair like combed flax under the gold-stitched velvet of his hat, Lysaer s’Ilessid adjusted his reins in gloved hands and suddenly, generously smiled. Still looking forward, as if the roadway behind were not packed with a chaos of groaning, creaking wagons and the whip snaps and epithets of bored carters, he said, ‘Still angry? At least that way you’ll keep warm.’

      Too raw not to rise to provocation, Diegan felt his horse startle and jig. Annoyed to have dug in a thoughtless spur, he snapped, ‘I still can’t believe you’re dragging my sister Talith into this.’

      Lysaer turned his head. Eyes as brilliant as glacial ice touched Diegan, then flicked away. ‘Be careful. Don’t let me think you believe I take her so lightly as to cast her into needless danger.’

      Had Diegan not needed both hands to settle his sidling mount, he could have struck the prince in exasperation. ‘Ah, Ath, why won’t you listen?’ No need to repeat those facts already thrashed through: that town mayors in the kingdom of Tysan had never seen the horrors of the Shadow Master’s powers; to them the massacre that broke an army in Strakewood forest was history told at second hand. Of more immediate concern were the fragmented archives which survived the ancient uprising that first overthrew Athera’s high kings. If few guilds and merchants recalled the