Curse of the Mistwraith

The Four Ravens

After Erdane’s gates closed at dusk, the taproom at the Inn of Four Ravens was a rough and ill-considered place for a woman to linger by herself. Located in the disreputable wall district, the tavern was the nightly hangout of headhunters, coarse-voiced labourers and a hard-bitten, boastful contingent of off-duty garrison soldiers. The air reeked of overheated humanity, spilled beer and unscrubbed layers of cooking grease. The hearth smoked. By the quantity of large-busted barmaids and the well-sleeked look of the innkeeper, the upstairs rooms were obviously rented for activities other than lodging.

The Ravens’ ruffians were habitually too deep in their cups to discriminate between those girls who were goods and others who might be paying customers. Wedged between a drover who smelled like his mules and a bone-skinny journeyman cobbler, Elaira jerked her braid out of the indigo fingers of a dyer who leaned across three dicers to proposition her. She looked into the moist brown eyes of Dakar and said, ‘You’ve lost. Again.’

She turned the last battered cards in her hands face-up on the sticky trestle.

Dakar blinked, stirred from his stupor and glared intently at painted suits and royalty. ‘Damn t’Sithaer.’

A stir erupted to Elaira’s left as her blue-handed admirer tried to shoulder through the press to crowd closer. As if he did not exist, the enchantress leaned across the table toward the Mad Prophet. ‘Your forfeit. Answer my question. Tell the name of the dark-haired man who shares your travels with Asandir.’

Dakar shoved straight. ‘I’m drunk,’ he announced with injured cunning. ‘Can’t remember.’

Elaira waited with persistent determination. She dared not reach for her focusing jewel. Even a fool would not try spell-work in this place: not to bring clarity to Dakar’s muddled mind, nor to drive off unwanted male advances. Erdane’s citizens had aversions that ran to violence when confronted by any form of witchery; a disproportionate mix of the most zealous seemed to patronize the taproom at the Ravens. Dakar was crazy to come here at all; except that his sorrowfully rumpled appearance did not equate with his station as apprentice to a Fellowship sorcerer.

Artlessly innocuous, he huddled like a lump on his bench, his cheeks crumpled up under eyes like dreamy half-moons. He leaned on stump-fingered fists and sucked on his lower lip until Elaira desperately wanted to shake him. ‘Arithon,’ Dakar said at last, in snarling, petulant concession.

Elaira bit back triumph. A neatly-timed thrust of her elbow interrupted the dyer’s amorous swoop. Gouged in a place that made him grunt, he backed off and was fortuitously rescued by a bar wench. Laughter arose, and a smattering of ribald comment, as the pair ploughed a path toward the stairway.

Sweating, tired and faintly queasy from nerves and smoke, Elaira raked the cards in a pile. What relief she might have felt was cancelled twice over by aggravation. The junior enchantress assigned lane watch was lazy: she should have disclosed the location of her errant colleague hours since and dutifully reported to her senior. Until the gambling match needed for an alibi became substantiated, Elaira of necessity could not depart.

The minstrel in the corner stopped playing and laid aside his lyranthe. One of the listeners who arose from his circle would doubtless come pawing for favours, this man more drunken and lecherous than the last. Trapped, Elaira shuffled the dog-eared pack and began to deal another hand.

Dakar reached out and hooked her sleeve before the first card hit the trestle. ‘Tankard’s dry.’

Elaira looked for herself and resignedly signalled the barmaid.

‘No ale, no bets.’ Dakar managed a beatific smile.

The tavern door opened. A chill wafted through stale air as the crowd jostled to admit a newcomer. Roused by the draft from outside, the Mad Prophet laced his fingers across his paunch. He swayed a moment, hiccuped and suddenly shot upright. Something he saw over Elaira’s shoulder caused his eyes to show round rings of white. Distinctly, he said, ‘Like the tax collector, here comes trouble.’

Then the excitement and the drink undid him all at once, and he slumped on his face and passed out.

Elaira cried a frustrated epithet. Left no partner for a stake ostensibly set up to explain what she knew from Asandir, she threw down her cards and shoved from her seat to kick the Mad Prophet from his stupor.

Yet something in the quality of the disturbance at her back made her pause. She turned around and craned her neck over the jostling press of male bodies, and her eyes went wary as Dakar’s.

Arithon, Teir’s’Ffalenn and Prince of Rathain, had entered the Ravens unaccompanied.

He stood just three paces inside the doorway. His hood lay half turned back from his face, the knuckles of both hands clenched on the fabric as if he had frozen in mid-gesture. Elaira traced the direction of his gaze and realized at once what transfixed him. Nailed to the grease-darkened rafters above the bar was a banner all torn and faded with years, its blazon the gold-on-blue star that times past had been sigil of s’Ilessid, sovereign dynasty of Tysan. In Erdane, since the rebellion, the taproom’s coarse-minded celebrants had used the standard for target practice. Two arrows, a tatty collection of darts and more than one rusted throwing knife skewered the artifact dead centre.

Arithon stared at the desecrated banner, a look of shocked confusion whitening the planes of his face. He took a step toward the bar, caught his weight on his hands as if dazed and unwittingly jostled someone’s elbow.

The bump slopped beer from a tankard, for which the owner snapped a furious obscenity.

Arithon apologized like a diplomat and the edged clarity of his accent turned every head in the room.

Conversations died to blank silence. Arithon’s chin jerked up. His confusion fled as he recognized his error and his danger, both disastrously too late.

A headhunter slammed back his chair and shouted. ‘Ath defend us, he’s barbarian!’

Someone else threw a tankard, which missed; the wench behind the bar ducked for cover. Then the whole room surged into motion as every besotted patron in the Ravens leaped to lay hands on the intruder. They thought the man they chased was an old-blood clansman who had dared to come swaggering inside town walls.

A moment ago, Arithon might have been dizzy, as well as dangerously ignorant; but he was cat-fast to react under threat. He side-stepped the first swung fist. As his aggressor overbalanced and stumbled against the rush of surging bodies, he dodged through a fast-closing gap and nipped behind the nearest trestle table. Plates, hot soup and chicken bones flew airborne as he upended the plank into his attackers.

Curses and yells erupted as the foremost ranks were borne backward. Diners still seated on the bench made a grab at the wretch who had upset their meal.

Arithon was already gone, raised by his arms and a half-kick into a somersault over the ceiling beams. He descended hard on a soldier, slammed the man’s jaw against his breastplate and sprang off as his victim went down.

‘Hey!’ an ugly voice responded. ‘Turd who was born through his mother’s asshole! Yer gonna die here, an’ not by the mayor’s executioner.’

Hotly pursued, Arithon jumped and caught hold of a wrought iron torch-sconce. As hands grabbed for his heels, he hoisted himself up out of reach into the cross-braced timbers of the rafters. Nimble as a sailor, he footed the width of the taproom, target for a crossfire of crockery. He somehow shed his cloak between sallies. With the fabric he netted a plate and sundry items of cutlery before a toss accomplished on a follow-through mired two pursuers in the folds. The casualties tangled and crashed in a clatter of dropped knives and wool. Stripped to shirt-sleeves and tunic, Arithon ran; and his enemies saw he was unarmed.

Elaira knew sudden, draining fear. The irreplaceable heir to a kingdom could be pulled down, beaten to his death by these roistering, ignorant townsmen. Dakar snored away in drunken oblivion, and the only soul in the taproom who had the decency to look concerned was the scarlet-clad singer by the fireside.

Arithon had no allies to call on for rescue. The Ravens’ enraged riffraff swarmed onto trestles and benches, the most maddened and aggressive among them bearing down from two sides on the bracing beams. Arithon leaped across air to the adjacent span of rafters. Cornered against the far wall, he laughed at the mob and called challenge. Elaira fretted over the chance that he might resort to shadow mastery or magic; but better sense or maybe instinct restrained him. He crouched instead and seized a pot-hook from the peg beside the chimney. Back on his feet in an eyeblink, he spun his purloined implement like a quarterstaff and rapped the legs from under his closest pursuer. The man toppled into an arm-waving plunge that ripped down a swaying knot of combatants.

Arithon reversed stroke and jabbed. The next soldier in line nearly fell as he windmilled back out of range. Arithon moved to press his hard-won advantage. Then someone in the mêlée flung a dagger.

Warned by a flash of steel, Arithon swung the pot-hook. The blade clanged against iron and deflected point-first in a plunge that grazed the forearm of a bystander. At the sight of his own running blood, the afflicted broke into shrill screams. The mood of the mob changed from ugly to murderous. The headhunters pressed now for revenge instead of bounty and the off-duty guardsmen drew swords. Everyone else abruptly seemed to acquire weapons, and all without exception converged on the prince poised vulnerably in the rafters. Aware he was exposed, Arithon dropped.

His pot-hook blurred in a stroke that whistled the air and intimidated space on the floorboards. He landed and two men with longswords engaged him. The clang of thrust and parry rang dissonant over the shouting. Elaira saw Arithon side-step and swing to position a wall at his back. Wholly engaged in self-defence, he appeared not to notice that his stand had been made against a doorway.

‘Merciful Ath,’ cried the minstrel from the fireside. ‘Someone in the scullery’s going to sally from the pantry and skewer him.’

Elaira spun in her tracks and fastened in desperation on the bard. ‘That entrance connects to the kitchens, back there?’ Answered by a worried nod, she made a ward-sign against misplaced trust and begged a favour of a total stranger. ‘Make me a diversion.’

The scarlet-clad minstrel rose to the occasion with a floor-shaking shout of discovery. ‘Ath preserve us, there are clansmen outside the windows!’

A dozen attackers abandoned Arithon and rushed to assess this new threat; and in the moment while the fracas stood diverted, one frightened-witless enchantress centred her mind in her focusing jewel. She cobbled together a glamour of concealment and disappeared.

Elaira did not physically vanish, but assumed an aura of sameness, one that mirrored the grain of worn pine, dented pewter and sanded floorboards. Had anyone amid the Ravens’ tumult paused and actually searched for her, she would instantly have been spotted. As it was, the press of the brawl directed Arithon’s aggressors everywhere else but toward her. The enchantress slipped rapidly across the taproom, unnoticed as she skirted upset trestles, bands of fist-waving craftsmen and barmaids who scuttled on hands and knees in a frantic attempt to rescue crockery.

Elaira reached the side door undetected. The lamp there had gone out: screened by convenient shadows, she fumbled at her collar and pulled out the white crystal she wore tethered to her neck by silver chain. She cupped the jewel in her palm and murmured litanies to refocus her inner mind. Her hand shook. So did her voice. She ignored impending panic and prayed instead that the junior initiate on lane watch would not choose this moment to expose her; far from an afterthought, she added her plea that no swordsman had attention to spare beyond Arithon’s fast-moving pot-hook. Acting with unconscionable recklessness, Elaira closed her gathered energies into a hard rune of binding.

Tiny, violet sparks snapped across the hinge-pins at Arithon’s back: the doorway stood secured. By then, Elaira was sprinting in a breathless charge that carried her headlong through the scullery. Cooks and pot-boys scattered from her path. She dodged the swing of the knife-waving drudge by the spit, slipped someone else’s grasping hands, then tripped over a pastry rack and stumbled through a rain of falling scones to snatch up the rolling pin that lay in a bowl of dough beyond. Before the befuddled kitchen staff could catch her, Elaira darted into the pantry closet, trailing a dusting of flour. The scrambles at her back became more frantic. All but within reach of her goal, she gasped, ‘Ath, stand back! There’s a riot out there, can’t you hear?’

Then she elbowed through a hanging string of onions and reached the narrow doorway to the taproom. A barrage of threats and thuds issued from the opposite side. Elaira recovered her wind, reassured. The s’Ffalenn prince still fought vociferously for his life. The wood under her palms bounced and vibrated to the rasping clash of swordplay, then the thump of a body fallen and somebody’s bitten-off oath. Elaira tripped the latch, readied her stolen bludgeon, then snapped the spell-bindings on the hinges with a shuddering whimper of fright.

The door crashed open and shoved her staggering as Arithon’s shoulder bashed the panel inward under force of a narrowly-missed parry. A sword blade whined through string: onions bounced helterskelter as five men harried the prince backward. Their eagerness hampered their weapons, which ironically worked to help spare him: the pot-hook had long since fatigued under punishment and Arithon defended himself with only the stub of the sheared-off handle. Elaira caught her balance and retreated as the fight erupted wholesale into the pantry. Bruised against corners of shelving, she received an impression of furious faces, a battering circle of steel and the tense, hard-driving brilliance of Arithon’s close-pressed defence. Then she caught her enchantress’s jewel in a grip that gouged her palm and struck the pastry roller on the crown of the prince’s dark head.

He folded at the knees, eyes widened in a moment of shocked surprise. His look became what might have been prelude to laughter before the charm Elaira wrought to fell him blanked his mind. He collapsed on the floor at the enchantress’s feet. She jumped past, committed beyond heed for further risks. Her crystal burned against her skin as once again she raised power. Her hastily-wrought net of spells caught and strained to stay the mob who now surged to butcher an unconscious victim.

‘Stop!’ Elaira shouted clearly. ‘This one’s mine. I claim his life as spoils.’

The front-rank aggressors rocked to a stupefied stop, hostility stamped on every red and sweating face; the swords flashed at angles still eager for slaughter. Trembling before that hedge of raised weapons, Elaira held her ground. Should even one man control hatred enough to see reason, the whole crowd would discover she was not the painted doxie her glamour made her appear.

Yet grudges in Erdane ran obsessively deep.

Startled by female intervention and emotionally charged from adrenalin, the furious ones were easiest to deflect. Elaira’s mazework of confusion hooked their anger and carved out a foothold for change: in something like sheepish embarrassment men glanced at the prince behind her knees. Their minds recalled no barbarian impostor, but instead saw a wine-raddled street-rat who had carelessly offended someone else.

The few who had sustained injuries were far less easily diverted. Some of these shoved forward, waving bludgeons of snapped-off chair legs; not a few still wielded knives and the fellow who had tumbled from the rafters was howling in self-righteous indignation. Sweating, Elaira strove to extend her spell of influence. But her fragile fabric of illusion only thinned and shuddered near to breaking: she had no more resource left to spare.

Beyond hope, past all recourse, she faced defeat. Erdane’s ongoing feud with the past was going to end her life and that of the prince she had rashly tried to rescue.

Then like a miracle, the voice of the minstrel offered surcease. ‘Let the doxie have him and be done! Dharkaron knows, he’s filthy enough to disgust a hog. Probably going to leave her with the Avenger’s own pox to remember him by.’

The slur raised a wave of scattered laughter.

‘Sithaer, now,’ Elaira added, somehow through terror and an unstable grip on two spells finding a note that approximated disgust. ‘It wasn’t my bed I’d be offering him!’

A weatherbeaten captain toward the fore loosed a bellowing guffaw. ‘Leave him to her!’ he said. ‘She’ll probably scald his ears well enough.’ He shrugged to unlock a battered shoulder, then sheathed his steel; around him, other off-duty companions backed off smiling. The most rabid of the headhunters wavered and in that instant of reprieve, Elaira hooked the door adjoining pantry and commonroom and slammed the panel closed. For the benefit of the kitchen staff who gawked in the path of her retreat, she jabbed her fallen prize in the ribs, then launched into spiteful imprecations.

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