XXIII. Fugitive

MYKKAEL SENSED THAT BEACON WHERE HE KNELT, SOAKING HIS INFLAMED KNEE IN THE GUSH OF A STREAMLET TUMBLING OFF THE high glaciers. The chill that combed over his skin and ran through him had nothing to do with cold water. His unschooled, blood instinct understood that a change had just knitted through the fabric of the world’s energy. On his feet before thought, he snatched up the trousers and boots left heaped on the bank, and jammed them on over his wet skin.

The hound whined, uneasy, touched by her animal awareness that somewhere, a primary balance had shifted. She circled, anxious to pursue the cold trail picked up amid the grazed grass of the glen.

His soft word restrained her, until he had hoisted the bow and provisions on to his back. If the shaman’s mark on his sword remained silent, he could not shake his vague sense of dread. Stalking powers stirred through the unseen interface between the air and the earth. The drawing pull of that subtle disturbance rippled through the patterns of natural current, sure sign of the demonic powers entrained through the drawn lines of an active sorcerer.

Mykkael hastened onwards. The prod of his urgency increased at each stride. Even without knowledge to read into the flux, his inborn sensitivity was teased by the sense that a point of balance had shifted in Sessalie. Somewhere, the stream had altered against the sorcerer’s favour. Balked on one front, the thrust of the conflict must now narrow its target. Again, the enemy’s attention ranged outwards, the spearpoint of its focus turned in single-minded pursuit of the princess.

Before the insatiable drive of the predator, she would be the hare helplessly running.

By now, she was hungry, tired and worn. Crushed hope left her vulnerably defenceless. The challenge she faced had exhausted her resource, until she had nowhere to turn. Mykkael shared the lit flame of her desperation. Witch thought delivered the cold sweat of her nightmares, sown by the despair that had followed her exhausted collapse. Anja knew she was doomed. Flight into the rugged wilds would break her, a bodily failing that could not keep pace with the unflagging strength of her will. In whimpering sleep, she still bid for escape, stubbornly ploughing ahead through dreamed landscapes of storm-barren rock and scrub balsam. Yet even such adamant courage could no longer stave off the certainty of defeat.

Mykkael pressed upwards, embraced by the high mountain silence. Across weathered stone, and dense mats of fir needles, or ankle-deep cushions of mosses, he followed the trail worked by Benj’s best hound, step by unbalanced, lame step. Survival in war had taught him endurance to match the demands of necessity. Miles of scouting through enemy territory had schooled him to make his way quietly.

In time, Dalshie quickened. The white scythe of her tail threshed the brush as the scent she unravelled grew stronger. Mykkael kept her close. The advantage of using a poacher’s prized hound, she would track without giving tongue. Her exceptional nose at last brought reward: the pawing stamp of a horse broke the stillness ahead, from a hollow screened in by evergreens.

A hand signal brought Dalshie back to heel. Mykkael eased the supplies and the bow off his back, left them propped against a shagged boulder. The hound, he tied with a pack strap. Then he made his unencumbered way forward, one hand lightly clasped to the mark the Sanouk shamans had sung into his sword hilt. Its ward stayed quiescent. The vizier’s tattoo at his nape did not rouse.

A stalking, wolfish shadow, Mykkael entered the dense grove of pines. Their resinous fragrance washed over his senses, closed in by the blanketing darkness. A horse snorted warning. Shod hooves scraped on rock. Mykkael froze, waiting out the herd’s alarmed challenge in poised stillness.

Starlight shone down, and he saw them: equine forms cast into ephemeral outline, erratically slashed by the glimmer of white blaze, and star, and leg stocking. Emerged from their restive movement like smoke, the lone grey shook out his flax mane, his coat a gleam of tarnished pewter among them. The black with the chevron-marked forehead tossed his head to a glitter of bossed silver buckles. He was haltered, or bridled, his picket line tied to a tree that shivered with each nervous tug. Mykkael peered through the gloom, past the jostling horses. He surveyed the ground with quartering patience, and finally found Princess Anja.

She was crumpled in an exhausted heap against the loom of a boulder. Wrapped in a dark cloak, she was all but invisible, except for the rat-tailed stripe of blonde braid, spilled over her huddled shoulder. A slackened hand was tucked over bent knees, fingers tangled in the cuff of a sleeve too long for her delicate wrist.

Asleep, Mykkael realized, her wary spirit overwhelmed by an exhaustion that served him the gift of surprise. He moved on her quickly, before the uneasy horses could startle her fully awake.

She roused anyway. Shoved to her feet with the surge of flushed game, her oval face turned in confusion. Widened eyes sighted his falcon surcoat. At once, her pale features went rigid. Every trace of wit and intelligence drowned under a flood of blank terror.

Bristled by witch thought, wrung breathless by the strangling, shared impact of a fear that overwhelmed the base instinct to scream, Mykkael reacted on barqui’ino reflex and launched as she whirled to run. He caught her wrist, hauled her short, called her name without title. ‘Anja!’

She slammed against his hold, twisted and thrashed, a creature gone mad with panic. When his grasp remained firm, she gouged his skin with her nails, then hammered his boots, lashing out with desperate kicks.

‘Anja, Anja, Anja!’ Mykkael reeled her in before she unbalanced him. As he had, countless terrible times for Orannia, he bundled her flailing body against his chest. Wincing for the hurt to last night’s strapped sword wounds, and the knuckles laid open that morning, he clamped her bucking struggles under his interlaced forearms. ‘Anja! Princess! Anja look at me!’

She had no choice. Her anguished green eyes met his own, with scarcely a handspan between them.

He held on. Granting her wild fight neither quarter nor space, he made her behold him fully: a dark man of desert descent who smelled of pine gum and balsam. Whatever she expected, he was warm-blooded and human, possessed of a calm deep enough to stand firm, even through mindless hysteria.

She broke all at once, like a puppet unstrung, and sagged sobbing against his shoulder. He held her, rock-steady, not moving a hair. His embrace caged her wracked frame, while the emotion stormed through, bursting the dam of choked-back desperation. When finally the tempest had played itself through, he braced her gently back on to her feet.

‘Your Grace of Sessalie, at your sire’s command, I am Mykkael, Captain of the Garrison.’ He granted the honorific due her royal station, hands crossed at the heart, as he had for the king who held his sworn service.

‘You’re not one of them,’ whispered the princess, her tone scraped and hoarse, and her proud carriage utterly shaken. A hand bare of rings arose, trembling. She swiped back the wisps of gold hair caught in the elfin curve of her eyebrows. Her features had sharpened under privation. She looked like a starveling waif, except for the poise that straightened the shoulders under her ripped shirt and skewed cloak. ‘Blinding glory, Captain, I’m sorry. I tore at you just like a harridan.’

‘No harridan born had the reason that you did,’ Mykkael said with simplicity. He never once glanced at his bleeding wrists, still respectfully crossed at his breast.

That shook her to tears. This time, she blotted the silenced outburst away with a soiled sleeve, and forced a deep breath. Her steadied, next phrase showed incredulity. ‘You know why I ran. My sire sent you?’

Mykkael answered the last question first. ‘His Majesty charged me to stand guard for your life. I’ve guessed why you ran. But the details still matter. We’re both better off if you can explain using your own words, your Grace.’

The princess hugged her clasped arms to herself as though raked by a savage chill. She subjected Mykkael to a scouring survey that lasted uncomfortably long. Then she shivered again, a violent spasm that shook her from head to toe. ‘The High Prince of Devall met me at the gate…’ She fought through reluctance, then swallowed. ‘His Highness was not the prince. Oh, he looked like the man in all ways that matter. Except, when he came close and kissed me, I knew. He is not my beloved. No longer human. Not any more.’

Those open, jade eyes regarded Mykkael, awaiting the word of disbelief that never came. The desert-bred did not speak, or prompt, or fill her strung silence with platitudes. He made no courtier’s effort to distance her jagged grief. He just watched her. Anchored by rooted quiet, he offered her all that he owned: the inadequate solace of his acceptance.

Anja stirred finally, her scorching gaze lowered to the trampled moss underfoot. She resumed in the soul-wrenching tone he remembered too well, from refugees who had beheld the impossible, and found their lives upended by fears that were going to mark them for ever. ‘I went to confide in my brother, the first chance I could get him alone.’ Again those expressive green eyes overflowed. ‘Kailen was changed also.’

‘You see as your sire does,’ Mykkael stated gently. ‘Things that others don’t know are there.’

Her speechless nod answered him. A resilient spirit let her rally inside of a moment. ‘Oh yes, I see things.’ Anja raised her chin, fired to blazing rage as she fought to shake off an unnatural horror that no flight and no distance could wring back the hope to excise. ‘The brother I know is not there any more. Something else looks out of his eyes. That’s when I realized I had to run. An uncanny power is at large within Sessalie, and it threatens to destroy more than our lives.’

Mykkael absorbed this, aware of sudden discomfort as the skin on his scalp tightened into contraction. Each line of Perincar’s warding tattoo felt written over in fire. Though the sword at his shoulder showed no response, his ruffled nerves would not settle. ‘Shape-changers,’ he murmured, the taste of the word hammered iron and blood. ‘Mehigrannia’s mercy, your Grace, you have given me very bad news.’

The young woman, who had once laughed and worn silver bells, rubbed dispirited hands on the tunic she must have purloined from a page. ‘We have to get out. Into the lowcountry. I don’t know how I can do this alone. But I’ll have to seek audience in a foreign court, and try to bind an alliance.’

She had little to barter, as a younger sibling. Her tiny kingdom could not pay a sumptuous dowry, or attach her with marriageable estate. The shame burned her red. As a foreigner and a man, he must realize she held an empty hand, beyond her own female attributes.

Lest he laugh, or disparage, Anja showed him steel challenge. ‘What other way do I have to buy my people a vizier’s protection from sorcery?’

Mykkael did not argue the flaws in her premise. Starvation and day upon day of blind fright had left her too painfully brittle. ‘Princess, bide easy. You’ll eat something first. Then, yes, we’ll have to keep moving.’ Her dumbfounded stare raised the sharkish, clipped smile that had won over another scared royal heiress before her. ‘Did you believe I would run you to ground in these hills, and not trouble to think of provisions? Your Grace?’

‘I didn’t think half so wisely, if at all,’ Anja confessed, sadly chastened.

‘I beg your pardon, Princess, but you did.’ Mykkael’s humour vanished. ‘A sorcerer does not allow for mistakes. The timely escape you accomplished alone has so far spared Sessalie’s freedom. A victory you may not credit, perhaps. My knowledge says otherwise. The strength to take flight without pause to share confidence has been all that kept you and your sire alive.’

Anja stared at him, differently this time, as though, all at once, his unaccented speech and crisp manners smashed through her presumptions concerning an officer with a Lowergate commission. ‘Sire once mentioned that you were experienced.’ Her straightforward regard became piercing. ‘Are you telling me you have fought sorcery before?’

‘More than once, Princess.’ Mykkael saw no reason to embellish the statement. The truth he delivered omitted the bald fact: that no conjury he had ever opposed had commanded the skills of a shape-changer, far less an assault brought to bear by a pair of such murderous minions. He masked his anxiety. Guardedly still, he watched Sessalie’s princess try to measure the man behind his exotic southern breeding. In forthright self-honesty, she encountered the pitfall: that her sheltered background left her unprepared to assess the least compass of his experience.

‘Forgive me, Captain, but I’ve been remiss.’ Anja tucked her bright braid back under her cloak as though embarrassed by her northern ignorance. ‘I should be the one asking pardon in turn. You won our summer tourney with the arts of a champion, yet we in Sessalie have never troubled to appreciate your formidable assets.’

‘Good tactics,’ Mykkael excused her with velvet-clad equanimity. ‘Can’t be the thorn in the side of an enemy if you leave the choice weaponry set out on public display.’ To keep her diverted, he addressed the essential point first. ‘I carry a warding attached to my person, and a shaman’s line in my sword hilt. Their properties will offer defence, and mask us from scryers, but with limited range. Listen carefully. You must not stray from my presence, Princess. The warding starts to thin at ten paces. Its active power dissolves altogether another five paces beyond that.’

Since the pack with the provisions lay outside the pine grove, he could no longer conceal his appalling limp. His turn, now, to shrug off embarrassment for the flawed gift of his fighter’s protection. A king’s daughter would be too proud to comment, he thought, or too well bred to disparage a man she perceived as a low-caste foreigner.

Anja matched just three of his dragging steps before proving him wrong. ‘If the injury is an old one, I am saddened.’ Her glance at the captain’s face stayed unflinching. ‘If you’re hurt, let me know how I might help.’

Discomfited by her forthright compassion, where Orannia would have thrown him off balance with scorching words, then followed with a gamine’s smile, Mykkael skirted a leaning rock rather than highlight the shortfall posed by his battered leg. ‘Rest will improve things,’ he admitted, then caught himself frowning. He made himself rise to match Anja’s rare grace. ‘The loan of a horse would be timely. I’m perfectly well able to ride.’

Whether or not she accepted the evasion behind his request, they had reached the tree where he had tied Benj’s hound, and stashed the bow and provisions. Anja paused only to ruffle the dog’s ears. Then she turned and closed her fists on the bulging pack alongside his one-handed grasp.

‘To keep your grip free for your weapons,’ she said.

Since that showed the bare-bones good sense she was going to need to survive, Mykkael stood back and approved. He took charge of the arrows and bow. Then he untied the hound, mindful of the way Anja muscled her burden through the dark, upon uneven ground. Tired, half starved, she still carried herself well.

Unlike the pampered Efandi princess, King Isendon’s daughter would not require his assistance each time the footing turned rough. Mykkael’s sharp relief raised the burn of old bitterness, and whipped his mouth to a hardened line. Anja’s resourcefulness would do very well, since his game knee could scarcely support even her diminutive frame. Stinging where exertion pulled at his scabs, he trailed the sylph who mastered the wretched terrain with no complaint, and who shoved the cumbersome pack overtop of the boulders she was too slight to scale.

Such relentless, tough spirit demanded respect, and affirmed Mykkael’s short-term decision. Though foreboding prodded his instincts to urgency, he understood he must chance the time to shore up Princess Anja’s equilibrium. Small use to attempt the harsh perils ahead, if the shattering truth of her straits fell upon her when she was half starved and dispirited.

The food he delivered was hurried and cold, a link of Mirag’s hard sausage, some cheese, and a crumbling crust of coarse bread. Mykkael ate his share in impersonal silence, aware of the princess’s inquisitive regard through the moments when she thought him too busied to notice. He allowed her to stare. Since the short reach of his wardings was destined to undermine privacy anyway, he endured the revealing discomfort as he rolled up his trouser cuff and retied the binding that braced his bad knee. Darkness, at least, masked her sight of the scars, if not the extent of infirmity.

Manners triumphed. The princess let her unanswered question abide. Mykkael chose not to mention his spiking unease as he sensed the first signs of a foray made by the enemy.

The sorcerer worked, seeking through the unseen, an uncanny awareness that combed across the dark landscape and measured all things in its path.

To the trained eye of a shaman, the subtle energies underlying the tangible world would have burned with unfurling lines. Mykkael could not perceive their clear pattern. Yet even uninitiated, he felt the whisper of change ripple across the unseen. A sensation like vertigo tugged at his mind, as the questing trace of uncanny forces deflected the flow of earth’s natural alignment. The disturbance spun closer. High-pitched tension sang through him. He well knew the instant his wardings engaged, and the short spells written into the vizier’s tattoo stirred into active defence.

Sweat flushed him. He had to force his jaw to unclench. The desperate, long weeks he had been stalked by Rathtet had imprinted too many hideous memories. The flare of his wardings did not flicker quiescent, but increased. As though this new sorcerer expected a barrier, the probe of hostile forces tested and pried, yearning, searching, demanding to grasp the slightest opening for entry.

Mykkael resisted his impulse to shout. His head felt clapped under the maw of a bell whose dissonant tone vibrated just above hearing. Perincar’s workings touched him that way, when he sat in their raised field of resonance. As the vivid memories of the past’s gristly horrors resurged through his jangled mind, he held his ground. This was Sessalie, not the rocky vista of the Efandi plains. The power that tested for entry was cold-struck, a line sustained over distance; not a hot contact sourced out of warped ground, suborned to serve in demonic alignment with the nether realms of the unseen.

The raw edge of immediate fear was too real, that these were shape-changers he faced, full-fledged minions of a sorcerer of unknown name and origin. Not Rathtet, who still wielded a living matrix of influence; not the working of the defeated Sushagos; nor Quidjen, consigned to languish in oblivion after bloodshed and terrible loss had dispatched his bound sorcerer to final demise. Mykkael fought down sweating dread with grim logic: that Eishwin and Perincar had both held formidable experience with multiple styles of long spell. The geometries jointly twined through his flesh would be fashioned to counter the forms each vizier had mastered throughout the wise course of a lifetime. The powers wielded by Sessalie’s attacker might derive from a demon their lore could encompass.

Or might not.

Mykkael shut his eyes. He made himself sift for what nuance he could, sounding the depths of unpleasant sensation. He derived the vague sense that a scryer had cast testing lines, then noted the pulse as the warding geometries spun their threads into tangles that thwarted. Not cleanly, not fast; but the bulwark sustained him.

Where the princess breaking coarse bread with her fingers knew only an ordinary night, and cool winds sighing through the scrub forest, Mykkael caught the sudden, subliminal sting as a breach tore through the primary ring of protection. Instantaneous, sharp vibrations woke and ran through his sword hilt. The warding notes sung by the Sanouk shamans rang through air and cleared the intrusion, then stood fast, holding the breach. Their persistent ache buzzed through his marrow, low as the whine of a wasp trapped in glass. Mykkael loosed his pent breath. Saved though he was, he could not seize respite. The subtle resonance raised by the nomad singers never failed to exacerbate his blood instincts. The powers of the unseen pressed on his mind until he felt the probe of Anja’s curiosity, intrusive as an itch playing over his flinching skin.

Jumpy as a cat, Mykkael nursed his patience. He checked the hang of the bow; made sure that quiver and arrows were securely clipped to his belt. Then he sorted through the supplies in the pack, and fetched out the sacks of barley, corn and oats he had filched from Mirag’s pantry.

‘You brought grain?’ Anja said. ‘Powers bless you, for that. The horses are worse off than I am.’

He nodded, not letting her see his unease. Since the combined strength of his wardings seemed to be holding firm, he blotted the seeping scab on his knuckle, and fished out other items requisitioned from Benj’s condemned cottage: a pair of Timal’s sturdy boots, leather breeches, a clean shirt, and a heavy felt jerkin. On top of the pile, he laid a sharp skinning knife, borrowed out of the smokehouse.

‘Here, Princess,’ he said, gruff. ‘These ought to make you more comfortable.’ Not to mention the blessing, that changing her raiment would also divert her incessant staring.

Then, a narrow brush with disaster: Mykkael almost let himself laugh as the princess’s gratitude changed to dismay for the close proximity forced by the warding. Fume though she might, she could not leave his presence, even to guard her maidenly virtue. Since his smothered amusement was bound to enrage her, Mykkael snatched the saving excuse to acquaint himself with her horses.

He befriended them shamelessly, using the drive of their empty stomachs. Small rations, fed slowly; too much would cause colic. He let them snuffle the grain from his hands, and lip at his hair. All the while, the curse of his witch thought barraged him, and heated his cheeks with the echo of Anja’s flaming embarrassment. Though he kept his back most scrupulously turned, he felt her uneasy distress, knew the slide of each garment and the kiss of chill air against every last private patch of bared flesh.

His silenced humiliation seared worst, for the intimate violation he could not prevent. To suppress the shared flush of the young woman’s outraged emotion, Mykkael immersed himself in the crowding warmth of her magnificent animals. They were tethered into the traditional pairs that made up a steed wicket team. No mare alive had foaled finer than these. Mykkael surveyed quality breeding drawn from the four quarters of the world, from the cloud-dappled black with his steppelands stature, to the racing blood of the west, to the delicate, fine beauty raised in the deserts, that deceived for the strength of its hardihood. He ran appreciative hands over the iron gloss of six proud necks. Felt the cool elasticity of firm tendons as his cursory check encountered a loosened shoe. He used the flat tang of his knife hilt, and his boot sole, to tighten the clenches, then set down the clean leg, admiring.

Whoever had conditioned these animals had brought them to an exceptional peak.

His comment raised Princess Anja’s reply, as she tugged at lacings to adjust the boy’s clothing. ‘Gurley’s lads followed my training instructions, when I could not ride them myself.’

Mykkael straightened, surprised, one hand fending off the impudent grey, who butted to relieve the itch of the tack her preparedness had wisely left on him. ‘These horses are yours?’

Anja approached, rubbed the nose of the sturdy northern mare some daft romantic had named Fouzette. ‘They were to have been my surprise gift to the high prince, following our formal betrothal.’ She blinked fast, turned away, then shrugged like a stoic. ‘I wanted him to share the glorious thrill of watching an upset team win the wickets.’

The aggrieved note of passion behind her flat voice said she might have been running them now; would have left these proud beasts to claim their due victory, had they not been the only mounts she could take without drawing notice. She laid her face against the satin hide of the buckskin, Bryajne, who turned his blazed head, comically flummoxed to realize she carried no stashed gift of carrots. ‘They’ll serve to carry me over the border. I can ride post once I get to the lowcountry, where people won’t know my face.’

Desperation rode behind those stark words, and witch thought derived the gist of the unspoken necessity: that a fast, timely sale must raise enough gold to regale her Grace in state clothing. She would stretch those scant funds, hire the minimal retinue a princess must have to present herself at a foreign court.

Mykkael seized the bitter opening. ‘You won’t need to sell them.’ The hurt lashed him, as hope transformed her thin face, and lifted her flagging spirit.

He braced himself to deliver a cruel string of facts that foreclosed any tactful kindness. ‘Princess, I’m sorry. But your plan to circle back down to the lowlands will bring nothing but death and destruction.’

Her wrenching shock stung him. ‘Oh bright powers! You aren’t telling me the palace has already fallen! Or that Sire—’

‘Not dead!’ Mykkael gasped, defenceless and fighting to breathe through the anguish of her grief at close quarters. The reactive connection aroused by Sanouk song lines was now haplessly bound to his person, lidded under the ranging fields of the active viziers’ wardings. ‘King Isendon lives, Princess! Your capital is imperilled, but not yet brought under conquest.’

Uncertainty ripped him, hers, as she whispered, ‘How do you know?’

Anja’s need seized his vitals, demanding response: the primal attachments to blood family and survival framed a drive too overpowering to deny. Mykkael shuddered, hurled off centre. His inborn talent unfurled into witch thought, searing a line of vibrant awareness across the unseen, towards the source of her deepest affection…

King Isendon aroused in the royal chamber, dizzied by the resin pungence of cedar smoke. As always his eyes would not focus, at first. There were people around him. He could hear loud voices, clashing in argument.

‘…pure folly trusting that murdering desert-bred!’ The reedy tone belonged to the seneschal, immersed in habitual complaint. ‘Such “instructions” could get us all killed.’

Someone the king did not know murmured answer, cut short by the Duchess of Phail, whose shrewd instincts seemed to have faltered. Danger would follow if anyone listened to her bitter condemnation.

King Isendon filled his weak lungs, and forced speech. ‘But Mysh kael has found Anja. He guards my daughter under my charge of protection.’

‘Your Majesty?’ said a deep, gentle voice, close at hand. A warm grasp supported his shoulder.

King Isendon blinked. His hazy sight cleared to unveil the anxious face of a steppeland nomad he recognized. ‘You can’t feel him, Jussoud? Tell my courtiers the truth. Captain Mykkael is no murderer. His skill on the field against sorcerers is legend. A fact quite well guarded, among eastern monarchs. Few wish the particulars of that history made public. The man’s been privy to far too many state secrets. Often guarded the chambers of royalty.’

‘He’s maundering,’ an authoritative officer in palace armour broke in.

‘Not a bit! Damn your insolence, soldier!’ King Isendon thrashed erect, assisted by the timely arm of a pink-faced man wearing spectacles. Short of breath, too short, to be asking strange names, Sessalie’s sovereign resumed cogent speech. ‘Captain Mysh kael’s worth any ten of you, officer! His sword alone spared Prince Al-Syn-Efandi’s daughter from falling to Rathtet. Who better, to guard my own Anja?’

Spent, sorely trembling, King Isendon sank back. While the darkness pressed him, narrowing down his fuzzed vision, he clung to his ebbing awareness. ‘By royal decree, Mysh kael’s instructions must stand.’

Then blackness descended, let in by a roaring red maelstrom. Isendon’s consciousness sank and drowned. He let the dark swallow him, grateful, while the world beyond his blanketed senses crackled with tendrils of fire…

King Isendon’s distant awareness cut off, snapped like a strand of chopped string by the shrieking descent of spelled fires. The kin tie that had drawn Anja’s consciousness to her sire frayed away, dividing Mykkael’s perception: as witch thought showed him the royal apartments, set under siege by a spell line, he also felt the princess beside him, bereft, and ripped into shock.

He reacted before thought, caught her shoulder and spun her, then clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle her keening outcry. ‘Your Grace, be still! Your sire’s not harmed!’

Mykkael had no time to ponder the warding he had sensed, springing cold blue over Isendon’s chamber; no chance to describe the dread perils of spellcraft, or warn against the dangers let in by voiced panic. Witch thought still showed him the thrust of cold sorcery, guided in by the perilous, ephemeral connection forged out of his volatile talent, and Anja’s overpowering desire. A raging attack that could not touch Isendon now ran wild, reaching, stretching, seeking: yet the destructive assault of the enemy found no weak point of access to claim Sessalie’s king. The reflective, joined force of nine gathered talismans, and a chamber fumed with green cedar, turned the strike of the spell line aside. Too focused, too strong, too murderously fashioned to dissipate, the stream of attack spilled down the path of least resistance: the thinning, last trace of the contact that had linked a father’s anxiety to his daughter’s distanced distress.

Mykkael foresaw disaster. A split second shy of full impact, he suspended thought and let go into barqui’ino reflex. One move hurled Anja astride the grey horse. The next drew his sword and slashed through the picket line. He grabbed mane, vaulted on to the sturdy Fouzette. Yelling like a crazed nomad herder, he drove horses and princess to headlong stampede, while Benj’s best hound showed her innate good sense, and bolted flat out alongside them.

Fire struck at their heels. Flames crashed roaring over the trees, igniting hemlock and fir like dry tinder.

‘Go! Move!’ Mykkael shouted, drummed heels into the mare and whipped the horses from under the edge of the conflagration. He yanked rope, slapped rumps with the flat of his wailing sword. While the combined effects of three sets of wardings ringed his presence in shielding force, he charged the shying animals through springing wildfire and a hellish rain of splashed cinders. His protections unwound the raw balefire of sorcery. Their proximity was sufficient to guard Anja’s person, himself and all seven terrified animals. But the place in the cleft where the princess had stood through the vulnerable mischance of contact now became a naked target, packed with acres of volatile timber.

The dense stand of evergreens roared up like a torch, as balked spell-craft seeded a forest fire. If the lethal impact of cold-struck power was sent to ground, or quenched out by the captain’s wardings, no beast could escape getting ravaged by burns, if the wall of natural flame overtook them.

‘Ride!’ Mykkael hauled hard on the picket rope, kept the horses together, and steered Anja’s wild-eyed grey to close quarters. With its nose jammed in matched stride at his knee, he shouted, ‘Ride, don’t look back. If you can’t stay astride, or if your mount falters, we’re not going to escape this.’

The Princess of Sessalie proved herself then as a woman of mettle and courage. She grabbed up loose reins, found the dangling stirrups. Then she ran the game grey over rocky terrain with the nerve of a woman possessed.