Curse of the Mistwraith. Janny Wurts

wreck victim raised listless, glassy eyes, but said nothing. Quite likely cold water had dulled the fellow’s wits. Weary of senseless ruin and the rescue of ravaged men, the bosun snapped impatiently, ‘Bring him in. We’ll get the other second, if he still breathes.’

      A crewman hooked the spar with his oar shaft to steady the boat. Others leaned over the thwart to lift the half-drowned sailhand aboard.

      The victim reacted with vengeful speed and doused his rescuers with seawater.

      Stung nearly blind by the salt, the nearer oarsman yelled and lunged. His hand closed over a drenched mat of hair. The man in the water twisted against the restraint. He kicked clear of the spar, ducked and resurfaced, a flash of bare steel in one fist. The oarsman recoiled from him with a scream of pain and surprise, his wrist opened stark to the bone.

      ‘Ath, he’s Karthan’s!’ someone shouted.

      The longboat’s crew erupted in confusion. Portside, those seamen within reach raised oars like clubs and retaliated. One blow, then another struck the enemy sailor’s head. Blood spilled from his nose and mouth. Chopped viciously on the shoulder, he floundered. His grasp loosened and the dagger dropped winking into the depths. Without even a curse of malediction, the Karthish sailor thrashed under, battered and finally drowned by the murderous hatred of enemies.

      ‘Man the oars!’ The bosun’s bellow restored order to the wildly rocking longboat. Men sank down at their benches, muttering, while seawater lapped tendrils of scarlet from the blades of the portside looms. Too tired even to curse, the officer tossed a scarf to his wounded oarsman. Then he pointed at the unconscious survivor who drifted still lashed to the spar. By now the smoke had cleared enough to see that the Karthish dog still breathed. ‘Fetch that one aboard. The king will want him for questioning, so mind you handle him wisely.’

      Sailors sworn to the pirate king’s service seldom permitted themselves to be taken alive. With one casualty wrapping his wrist in the stern, no man rushed the task. Amroth’s seamen recovered the last crewman of Karthan’s brigantine from the sea with wary caution and dumped him face-down on the floorboards. The bosun regarded his prize with distaste. Barefoot, slightly built and clad in a sailhand’s patched tunic, the man seemed no one important. Only the silver ring on his left hand occasioned any notice at all; and after hours of thankless labour, the oarsmen deserved reward for their efforts.

      ‘Beer-booty,’ invited the bosun. He bent, caught the captive’s wrist, and tugged to pry the ring from a finger still swollen from the sea.

      ‘Cut ‘er free,’ suggested the crewman who nursed his slashed forearm.

      Feud left no space for niceties. The bosun drew his rigging knife. He braced the captive’s hand palm upward against the stern seat, and lifted his blade to cut. That moment the longboat rocked. Dying sunlight caught and splintered in the depths of an emerald setting.

      The bosun gasped. He snatched back his knife as if burned, for the ring he would steal was not silver, but white gold. The gem was carved with a leopard device, hatefully familiar.

      ‘Fate witness, he’s s’Ffalenn!’ Shocked and uncertain, the bosun straightened up. He had watched the enemy brigantine burn, her captain sprawled dead on her quarterdeck; but a glance at the black hair which dripped ignominiously in the bilge now belied that observation. Suddenly hand and ring were tugged from his grasp as an oarsman reached out and jerked the captive onto his back.

      Bared to the fading light, the steeply-angled features and upswept browline of s’Ffalenn stood clear as struck bronze. There could be no mistake. Amroth’s seamen had taken, alive, the Master of Shadow himself.

      The sailors fell back in fear. Several made signs against evil, and someone near the fore drew a dagger.

      ‘Hold!’ The bosun turned to logic to ease his own frayed nerves. ‘The sorcerer’s harmless, just now, or we’d already be dead. Alive, don’t forget, he’ll bring a bounty.’

      The men made no response. Tense, uneasy, they shifted their feet. Someone uttered a charm against demons, and a second knife sang from its sheath.

      The bosun grabbed an oar and slammed it across the thwarts between sailors and captive. ‘Fools! Would you spit on good fortune? Kill him, and our liege won’t give us a copper.’

      That reached them. Arithon s’Ffalenn was the illegitimate son of Amroth’s own queen, who in years past had spurned the kingdom’s honour for adultery with her husband’s most infamous enemy. The pirate-king’s bastard carried a price on his head that would ransom an earl, and a dukedom awaited the man who could deliver him to Port Royal in chains. Won over by greed, the sailors put up their knives.

      The bosun stepped back and rapped orders, and men jumped to obey. Before the s’Ffalenn bastard regained his wits, his captors bound his wrists and legs with cord cut from the painter. Then, trussed like a calf for slaughter, Arithon, Master of Shadow and heir-apparent of Karthan, was rowed back to the warship Briane. Hauled aboard by the boisterous crew of the longboat, he was dumped in a dripping sprawl on the quarterdeck, at the feet of the officer in command.

      A man barely past his teens, the first officer had come to his post through wealth and royal connections rather than merit or experience. But with the captain unconscious from an arrow wound, and the ranking brass of Briane’s fighting company dead, none remained to dispute the chain of command. The first officer coped, though shouldered with responsibility for three hundred and forty two men left living, and a warship too crippled to carry sail. The bosun’s agitated words took a moment to pierce through tired and overburdened thoughts.

      The name finally mustered attention.

      ‘Arithon s’Ffalenn!’ Shocked to disbelief, the first officer stared at the parcel of flesh on his deck. This man was small, sea-tanned and dark; nothing like the half-brother in line for Amroth’s crown. A drenched spill of hair plastered an angular forehead. Spare, unremarkable limbs were clothed in rough, much-mended linen that was belted with a plain twist of rope. But his sailhand’s appearance was deceptive. The jewel in the signet bore the leopard of s’Ffalenn, undeniable symbol of royal heirship.

      ‘It’s him, I say,’ said the bosun excitedly.

      The crew from the longboat and every deckhand within earshot edged closer.

      Jostled by raffish, excitable men, the first officer recalled his position. ‘Back to your duties,’ he snapped. ‘And have that longboat winched back on board. Lively!’

      ‘Aye sir.’ The bosun departed, contrite. The sailhands disbursed more slowly, clearing the quarterdeck with many a backward glance.

      Left alone to determine the fate of Amroth’s bitterest enemy, the first officer shifted his weight in distress. How should he confine a man who could bind illusion of shadow with the ease of thought, and whose capture had been achieved at a cost of seven ships? In Amroth, the king would certainly hold Arithon’s imprisonment worth such devastating losses. But aboard the warship Briane, upon decks still laced with dead and debris, men wanted vengeance for murdered crewmen. The sailhands would never forget: Arithon was a sorcerer, and safest of all as a corpse.

      The solution seemed simple as a sword-thrust, but the first officer knew differently. He repressed his first, wild impulse to kill, and instead prodded the captive’s shoulder with his boot. Black hair spilled away from a profile as keen as a knife. A tracery of scarlet flowed across temple and cheek from a hidden scalp wound; bruises mottled the skin of throat and chin. Sorcerer though he was, Arithon was human enough to require the services of a healer. The first officer cursed misfortune, that this bastard had not also been mortal enough to die. The king of Amroth knew neither temperance nor reason on the subject of his wife’s betrayal. No matter that men might get killed or maimed in the course of the long passage home; on pain of court martial, Briane’s crewmen must deliver the Master of Shadow alive.

      ‘What’s to be done with him, sir?’ The man promoted to fill the dead mate’s berth stopped at his senior’s side, his uniform almost unrecognizable