LITMIR.BIZ

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and reappeared beyond a crumbling archway.

      Jieret followed, but saw no sign of tenancy. The temporary, safe haven for a Third Age fugitive felt abandoned, as if the site had been owned for all time by naught but the wind and the seabirds.

      The stillness sawed at Jieret’s suspicion. “Where are my liege’s people? The crew of the Khetienn? Daelion, Master of Fate, save his Grace, has he kept none but you to stand by him?”

      Suddenly exposed before dangerous antipathy, Dakar stopped, sliding, to chinks in complaint from loose stone. “I’m not your prince’s enemy, not anymore. And he’s kept the Khetienn’s crew, her full complement. They’re all here, and safe, masked under my ward of concealment.” A note of plaintive unhappiness crept through. “That’s why, Ath forgive me, I had to stay. Given the choice, I wouldn’t be here.”

      Jieret regarded Dakar’s sweating tension. “I know the s’Ffalenn temper, none better. You were told to hide the brigantine, if galleys happened on her?”

      Dakar nodded, miserable. “Or fire her, should my spells of illusion fall short.” He shuffled breathlessly on. “Man, I couldn’t stop him from going. His Grace has a will to stand down the Avenger’s Five Horses, and no mercy on the fool who interferes. If he gets himself butchered on some mayor’s scaffold, I can’t argue his right to tempt fate.”

      At Jieret’s worried start, Dakar raised his hands. “No, rest assured. Arithon’s not taunting a death wish. He couldn’t if he wanted. The Fellowship of Seven forced him to take blood oath last winter. He’s bound and sworn to life, whatever the cost, against future threat from the Mistwraith.”

      “Mercy on him,” Jieret whispered, shocked. In all Athera’s history, so strict a measure had never been asked of a crown prince. “I didn’t know.”

      “That happened after you parted at Minderl Bay.” Dakar reached a gap in the masonry. Beyond him, the hazed jointure of sea and sky dimmed into distance, snagged with fluffs of white cloud. Innocent now, those scattered fleeces would mass into towers by late afternoon, and anvil into a squall line. Just as untrustworthy, Dakar turned right and vanished into clear space.

      Jieret’s startled shout entangled with a prosaic reassurance, flung backward. “Pay no mind to the wards. They’re illusion. The footing’s quite safe.”

      Faced by a jagged opening, then a yawning gap into air, the clan chieftain muttered imprecations against the spellbinder’s feckless character. A clutch of fractured boulders overhung the drop, ready to launch from their settings at the first wrong breath of the wind. No coward, Jieret stepped down.

      Chills roiled and rippled across his flesh. His senses upended. A fierce, hot tingle sang through his nerves, then stopped with a bracing jolt.

      The Earl of the North bit back a yelp, the steel hilts of his weapons turned hot to his hand. He blinked, wits recovered, to find himself standing in a dusty, flat compound, scattered with tents sewn from sailcloth. Nor was Corith any longer untenanted. A circle of sailhands hunkered in the shade of a gnarled cedar. The ones near at hand looked aside at him, bored, then resumed quarreling over a dice throw, the winning stakes a collection of sticks notched with tally marks. The crescent knife used to keep count flashed in the fist of a prune-skinned little desertman, who stabbed air and hurled his scathing invective at a ship’s boy for rigging the odds.

      “The defense spell is spliced reflection,” Dakar said, smug. “Those cliff rocks, and that span of ocean were borrowed intact from a site halfway down the north slope.” As the fracas erupted into knee-slapping mirth over the ship’s boy’s scurrilous rejoinder, the spellbinder admitted, “Of course, the noise was more difficult to mask.”

      Case in point, a shout pealed out like steel put to the hammer.

      The urchin shot erect from amid the pack of dicers. All coltish brown limbs and angular grace, the creature had blond hair tied in a glistening, long braid. The end was cross-laced with a frippery of ribbon bleached to rust. A second glance at a body clad in scruffy sailhand’s cottons showed the first, shy curves of a girl at the threshold of maturity.

      “Arithon wasn’t on that fishing craft?” she shrilled across the brassy wash of sunlight.

      At Dakar’s headshake, she crowed her wild triumph. “Well then you owe me six royals! He wasn’t to embark ‘til the winds changed, and the weather’s stayed contrary this season.”

      “There are still three days left before solstice,” Dakar hurled back. “Your silver’s not won before then.” Soured by the prospect of forfeited coin, he confided to Jieret, “That’s Feylind, the pest. I misspoke myself teaching that girl to wager. She attached herself to Arithon at Merior by the Sea, and for her talent, your liege thought to train her. She’s gifted at navigation and seamanship when she isn’t cheating numbers on the dice.”

      “She has spirit, give her that.” Jieret watched her spin back to defend her hoarded spoils, then realized: this girl must be one of the twins that Arithon had spoken of granting his oath of protection. Years passed. Feylind had grown beyond childhood; nor would her brother Fiark remain beardless much longer, wherever his own fate had sent him.

      “Come on,” Dakar urged. “If the heat isn’t making you die for a drink, I want all your rumors from the mainland.”

      Dusk softened over the broken spires at Corith. The sea beyond the breakwater spread a flat, purple disk. The seasonal squall line rumbled off the coast, stalled through afternoon by the chancy, winnowing breezes. Cloud ramparts loomed off the islands, their sulfurous rims stained by the afterglow. When Jieret refused outright to say what drew him from Rathain, Dakar parked his bulk upon the creaking rope pallet he had strung in the shelter of a tumbledown drum tower. The furnishings consisted of axe-cut fir, lashed at the jointures with twine. A water jug, a basin, and a clump of holed socks lay cached in the niche of an arrow slit. Beneath this, a sea chest in use as a table held a spellbinder’s clutter of bundled herbs, and an edged pair of shearwater’s flight feathers. Jieret chose to sit on the stone floor through the exchange of desultory small news.

      They suffered but one interruption; the desertman burst in without word or apology, and left a meal of smoked fish and greens. The last of the day slowly fled. The ragged old walls were roofed with a haphazard patchwork of sailcloth, worried to threads and gaps by the wind until stars could be counted in constellations. Outside, the sailhands had laid off their dicing. Someone returned from trapping, and coals were laid in to roast conies. No stranger to the nuance of leading men, Jieret listened. Through spirited slangs and the odd burst of laughter he noticed the underlying worry.

      Arithon’s absence weighed on them all, though the subject stayed scrupulously unmentioned. Even the Mad Prophet’s prying, sly talk circled to evade the sore topic.

      The temperature cooled. Jieret cracked his knuckles and suddenly ran out of patience. “Why should my liege be alone on the mainland?”

      Silence; the fallen summer darkness cut by a yelp as a sailhand burned careless fingers at the spit. Dakar against custom had not touched his food. He regarded his laced fingers, as if he just realized his soft, dimpled knuckles were wearing a stranger’s rough callus. He was not drunk. His clothing was mended, and his beard, trimmed neat, as if dogged grooming might suppress the misery that impelled his anguished admission. “His Grace sought Cattrick. That huge master joiner he used to employ back in Merior.”

      “Dharkaron avenge!” Jieret cried. “His Grace went to Shand?”

      “I already know,” Dakar supplied. “Official books of grievances have been opened on the southcoast. Lord Erlien’s clansmen sent warning. Any town citizen can make claim of injury against Arithon. No proof is required. Just a sealed statement from the plaintiff. Those women left widowed at Vastmark have wasted no time recording all manner of spurious spite. The pages are filled to the margins, and the mayors have promised to appeal for redress at Avenor.”

      “This Cattrick,” Jieret snapped. “Is his loyalty secure?”

      “Arithon believed he’d

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