The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts

ride through Erdane. Should I come to die there, then Tysan will require no prince. A townborn man like yourself will go forward to rebuild Aveuor and unify this kingdom in my name,’

      The last time Lysaer crossed the Thaldeins by way of the Orlan Pass, the mountains had been mantled in mist and blizzard. Hastened then in the company of a Fellow-ship sorcerer, he recalled no landmarks beyond drifts and treacherous abutments of seamed rock. With the visible sky 4 ribbon of blue overhead, the scarp traversed today under knives of morning sunlight looked savage and strange, a tableau of broken slate overhangs, wind-chiselled ridges, and stands of gnarled evergreen slashed and skewed with the boulder-strewn scars of old slides. The road wound and jagged between buttressed peaks, a mere lip in places over vast, windy chasms of cold air. The forested valleys unfolded below like creases in a painted silk fan, delicately blued in haze and crisscrossed by the gliding flight of hawks.

      Here, a raffish band of barbarian scouts had once dangled Arithon s’Ffalenn upside down from a rope over a precipice. Lent abrasive reminder of a deceit that had once beguiled his trust and friendship, Lysaer gazed down a cliff wall bared of snow and jumbled with bone-grey, splintered timber and stone shards. He could wish now that the knots in the noose had failed.

      Had the Shadow Master fallen to his death on that day, seven thousand Etarrans would still be alive with their families.

      Over the bends and the rises, the wagons rattled and groaned, their hubs scraping rocks scarred by a thousand such impacts, while the opposite wheel rims flicked gravel in clattering spurts over the sheared edge of the verge. On the approach to the high pass, the carter’s quips echoed through the narrowing way, until Diegan sent outriders ahead to clear the road. Once committed, the drays could neither turn nor manoeuvre; caught between their lumbering bulk, horses and mules could not pass, should wayfarers meet them head on.

      Merchants who hauled goods through the pass of Orlan for that reason eschewed use of carts. Informed of the risks, Lysaer had ignored all advice. Mounted, exposed in the vanguard, he looked least surprised when three riders positioned abreast approached and blocked off the trail.

      Their mounts were a matched set of bays in gold-beaded bridles; silken manes and tails, and caparisons of loomed wool fluttered and tugged in the wind. Annoyed to see his advance guard had lapsed in their duty to detain so small a party until the prince’s retinue cleared the narrows, Lord Diegan flicked his boot with his crop and began to swear.

      His imprecations trailed tamely into silence as he noticed the leader of the trio was mounted sidesaddle. A woman; a boy in his late teens and an elderly man her sole escort, she carried straight shoulders impertinently mantled in a tabard bearing Tysan’s royal blazon. The habit underneath was of flowing black silk, her grey hair, close-cropped as any campaign-bound mercenary’s. Slung at a practised angle beneath her belt lay a baldric and a gleaming sword.

      ‘Fiends plague us all,’ Diegan said crossly. ‘Who in Sithaer is she?’

      Lysaer raised a hand to halt his column in the roadway. ‘The lady is Maenalle s’Gannley, chieftain of the clans of Camris, and if her records can be trusted for accuracy, empowered Steward of Tysan.’ Then, his lips curved in welcome, he spurred his gelding forward to greet her. ‘To judge by the hang of her blade, I’d hazard a guess it’s the living hides of Isaer’s merchants she hunts to furnish her wardrobe. I’ve been expecting her most of the morning.’

      ‘You know her? You’ve met her before this?’ Belatedly pressed to neaten his wind-crumpled mantle, Lord Diegan expelled a breathless laugh. ‘You do have a plan!’ Lost to confounded delight, he urged his horse into step.

      Fifteen paces beyond his honour guard, Lysaer drew rein. Uncrowned beyond the majesty of his sunlit gold hair, he seized royal prerogative and spoke first. ‘Lady Maenalle, well met.’ His nod acknowledged the elder, whom he recalled as her seniormost peer, Lord Tashan; his friendly smile was for the youngster, now grown, who had attended him as pageboy through his past brief visit, before he had joined his gift of light with an enemy’s shadows to banish Desh-thiere’s mists from the sky. In brisk invitation, Lysaer addressed the lady chieftain who had impressed him with her iron-willed fairness. ‘I go to raise Avenor out of ruin and hope you take joy in my tidings. Will you come, and bring your clans out of hiding to join in rebuilding the sovereign city of old Tysan?’

      ‘Alliance!’ Shocked to white-faced incredulity, Lord Diegan rounded upon the prince. ‘Are you mad? The realm’s mayors will never condone this!’

      In the clan chief’s party, the grizzled aristocrat looked incensed. The young man seemed torn by a longing that drove his gaze sidewards and away; while the lady resplendent in Tysan’s state colours held her emotions so savagely in check that the sun-caught gold in her tabard flashed only once and fell still.

      Lysaer inclined his head toward his outraged commander at arms. ‘Why waste the resource to retrain our new garrison to fight and manoeuvre like headhunters?’ He added in compelling reason, ‘The clansmen these delegates represent are masters at wilderness tactics already.’

      Maenalle’s mount recoiled as her hand snapped taut on the rein. Amber-pale eyes centred in black like a hawk’s never left the features of the prince. Unlike the young grandson who wore his heart in plain view, and despite an unsettled royal bodyguard forestalled by the interposed body of their own liege from stringing short bows to take her down, she showed neither nerves nor defiance. ‘There has been no oath of fealty sworn here, nor any sanction for crown sovereignty given by the Fellowship of Seven.’ The fine-grained lines on her face stayed unsoftened. ‘How dare you speak of annexing my clans as a fighting force? We have no cause to support your wars.’

      ‘Do you not?’ The significance of her dress, with the colours of kingdom authority overlying the caithdein’s plain black, had not escaped Lysaer’s notice. Diminished a little by sadness, he crossed his hands on his saddle pommel and sighed. ‘Let me pray, then, that you haven’t been beguiled into giving your loyalty elsewhere. That would grieve me. The clans of northern Rathain were all but wiped out for abetting the Master of Shadow.’

      They defended their sanctioned prince,’ Maenalle corrected.

      ‘With children sent out to stab men in the back who were down and wounded,’ Lysaer shot back in bitter truth. ‘With sorceries and traps that slaughtered seven thousand souls in a day. The scion of Rathain is a trickster without morals, a sorcerer who preys on the innocent.’

      ‘That’s not how the Fellowship phrased it.’ Unflinching as swordsteel, Maenalle never glanced at her grandson, white-faced and stiff at her side. ‘Nor Jieret s’Valerient, Steiven’s heir, whose parents and sisters all died because of Etarra’s invasion.’

      ‘Who were these people but deluded allies?’ Lysaer’s attentiveness shifted to the boy. ‘If you doubt me, my Lady, look to your own, who is of the right age to be influenced.’

      The young man raised his chin. Silent, near to weeping from betrayal, he touched his mount with his heels. Hooves cracked like a shout against silence as his horse obediently turned, presenting the straight back of its rider to the man who once promised just sovereignty.

      ‘Oh, but Maien was influenced,’ Maenalle said, as drawn now as the grandson at her side, who held his station, trembling and flushed. ‘But not by Arithon of Rathain. The boy’s loyalty was yours, and his love, until Desh-thiere’s curse wrecked the peace. Let us not confuse our issues and deny the sad facts of this feud. You seek to kill a man who is your half-brother, who has these last six years made no effort to outfit a war host against you. My clansmen cannot support your towns against him. Nor may we acknowledge false claim to Avenor. Our allegiance is to be held in reserve for the one of your heirs that the Fellowship endorses to be crowned.’

      A cat’s paw of breeze fluttered the sigil on Maenalle’s tabard. Fresh with ice-scent and evergreen, the air seemed too sharp to breathe. Locked separate by nothing beyond glacial cold and state etiquette, Lysaer and the lady steward regarded each other through a charged and measuring silence.

      ‘We’re to be enemies then?’ the prince