LITMIR.BIZ

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above the manes of their shying teams. Mearn met each onslaught of outrage with bright-eyed, impervious humor.

      He was clanblood enough to relish the upset his antics caused any man townborn. No one was brash enough to hinder him. Though his clipped accent turned heads and roused threats, Lysaer s’Ilessid decreed that any old blood family bound to his alliance might walk Avenor’s streets with impunity. The duke’s youngest brother brought his happy tumult into the royal stable yard and shouted for a boy to bring his horse.

      Patience sat ill with Mearn. He slapped his riding whip against his boot in brisk tempo while the grooms fetched and bridled his mount. He paced. The horsecloth hooked over his shoulder flapped in the breeze each time he spun on his heel. Restlessness rode his thin frame like hot sparks, while the deer hounds bounded in frenzied gyrations around him.

      At last, infected past discipline, they bayed their uncontained joy. Their deep belling note spooked the highbred charger, who sidled and upset the rake the new horseboy had forgotten to tidy.

      Milling, shod hooves crushed the handle to splinters. The horse flung back, snapped its head tie, and added its thunderous commotion by galloping loose through the stable yard.

      Mearn cursed the groom for his inept hands, then tossed him a copper for his trials. In his bitten clan dialect he added language which raised the eyebrows of the drayman who idled beside his harnessed team. Then he insisted to all inside earshot that he should saddle his mount for himself.

      “Please, no lord! I dare not allow you,” the groom stammered, red-faced. The rest of the yard boys had wisely made themselves scarce. “Our Master of Horse would see me thrashed bloody if he catches me slacking my duties.”

      “He’ll thrash you anyway,” Mearn argued. “Or does he not care if your charges fly loose?” He pursed his narrow lips in disgust and emitted a piercing, high whistle. His bitch hound howled in chorus with the noise, but the charger, obedient, stopped its clattering flight. It poised blowing, its high neck arched and its ears swiveled back, listening to its master’s approach.

      Mearn’s grumbling irritation changed to endearments. He stroked the bay’s glossy shoulder. Then he laughed and spoke a command through the redoubled yaps of his hounds.

      The horse turned, dealt him a companionable shove, then trailed him like a puppy as he recrossed the stable yard.

      “Fetch out my saddle, and then get you gone!” Mearn called to the fidgety groom. “This gelding never did like a town-whelped runt. Likely you’d just find your skinny butt nipped as you tried to fasten his girth.” Suddenly all pared efficiency, he tossed his blazoned saddlecloth over the horse’s back. As the boy still hovered, he added, “Hurry on! Do you think the deer will wait while you stand there?”

      Minutes later, Mearn vaulted astride, shouted his hounds to heel, and wheeled his mount through the gate. A razor-edged irony whetted his smile.

      As his three older brothers would laugh themselves prostrate to explain, he held stag hunts in passionate contempt. His purpose in plying the wilds alone was for game and stakes far larger, dangerous enough that he risked his life as forfeit.

      Belying even the semblance of secrecy, Mearn made his racketing, flamboyant departure through the moil of the early-spring market. Chaos surged in his wake. Curs barked, and carriages swerved, and crated sows squealed in their wagon beds. Even the bored guards on Avenor’s inland battlement were relieved to see his turmoil pass the gates.

      He reined off the muddy road into the shrinking, gray mounds of old snowdrifts. The bare, tangled boughs of the oak forests engulfed his whipping scarlet horsecloth and his laughing whoops to his horse. The baying of his hounds rode the land breeze, until distance mellowed that also. The s’Brydion line was clanbred, barbaric to the bone. Lysaer’s captains agreed that their envoy from Alestron was unlikely to be troubled by his murdering, woodland kindred, even had any of Tysan’s blood chieftains dared to skulk in the bogs within reach of Avenor’s armed might.

      The spring was too new for greenery. Ice still scabbed the north sides of the dales, and the air held its chill like a miser. What warmth kissed Mearn’s shoulders was borrowed from the sun, half-mantled in streamers of cloud. Their shadows flowed like blown soot across the valleys, and rinsed the bright glints from the streamlets. Mearn gave on his reins, let his horse and his hounds drink the wind at a run, as man and beast might to celebrate life as frost loosed its hold on black earth.

      He carved further inland, his horse settled to a trot, through deeper thickets and trackless mires, beyond range of Lysaer’s royal foresters. His hounds coursed ahead. If their quarry was not always a swift-running deer, their master scarcely cared. The hound couple badgered any game they could flush. Wild lynx, or red fox, no boon to their training, they were left to track as they pleased, and only whipped off the scent if their hunt veered them northward or south.

      Due east, Mearn was bound, his brother’s ducal blazon now mantled beneath the drab folds of his cloak.

      By noon, under pallid gold sunlight, he reached a bare hillock, scattered with wind-stripped, buff grass. He drew rein there, dismounted, loosened his girth. His stag hounds flopped, panting, to snap at the tickle of dried seed heads as though they were bothered by flies. The bitch whined. The horse shook its mane and rubbed its sweated headstall against Mearn’s leather-clad hip.

      He shoved back the gelding’s nose with a gently spoken epithet, all trace of roguish pleasure erased from his taut, narrow features. One year and events had changed him. His quick mind and observant eye were bent now toward other pursuits than tumbling loose ladies and gambling. The breath of the breeze fanned a chill on his neck, the lovelock he had worn since his first growth of beard shorn off in cold purpose since Vastmark.

      A dove called, mournful, from a thicket.

      Mearn swung about at the sound, raised the corner of his cloak, and unveiled the ducal blazon. Then he found himself a dry, flat rock in a cranny, and sat out of the wind while his horse grazed.

      A slow interval passed, with Mearn touched to prickles by the certain awareness that he was being watched from all angles. Then, with no ceremony, a young man moved upslope to meet him. His approach scarcely woke any sound from dry grasses. He wore undyed leathers and a vest with dark lacing. He carried bow, knife, and sword as if weapons were natural as flesh. Large framed, deliberate, he had a step like a wary king stag’s. His light eyes, never still, swept the hillock behind, then Mearn, and measured him down to his boot soles. On that day, the high chieftain of Tysan’s outlawed clansmen was nineteen, one year shy as the old law still reckoned manhood.

      “Lord Maenol, Teir s’Gannley, caithdein of Tysan,” Mearn greeted. He arose, inclined his head in respect, and shared grief for the grandson, whose titles and inheritance now burdened his young shoulders through Lysaer’s murder of his predecessor.

      Unlike the deceased Lady Maenalle, the heir returned neither welcome nor greeting. He stood, chin tilted, silent, while the gusts flicked the laces on his clothing.

      No whit less stubborn, Mearn met that challenge with a sheared, bright-edged smile. If the s’Brydion ancestral stronghold had withstood the wars of the uprising; if his family owed fealty to another kingdom and another chieftain on the farthest shore of the continent, the ways of charter law and the old codes of honor were still held in common with Tysan’s clans in Tysan. Shared trust ran deep beyond words.

      “You have taken an unmentionable risk to come here,” the boy said at last in his startling, mellow baritone.

      “I bear unmentionable tidings,” Mearn countered. “And a packet, bound for Arithon, sewn in the lining of my saddlecloth. I went through Sithaer itself to keep that from the handling of Lysaer’s overzealous pack of grooms.” He added, “You’ll want to read the contents before you send them on. Your clans are the ones most threatened.”

      Tysan’s young caithdein took that ominous statement in stride; such troubles were scarcely new. His own parents had fallen to headhunters. “It’s risky to be sending late dispatches across,” he pointed out, vexed more for the snags in the timing. “Arithon plans to

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