Free Fugitive Prince by Janny Wurts

and oiled steel, and the pitchy bite of cut balsam failed to restore him to balance. “Ath keep our sons!” he gasped through locked teeth. He could not shed his Sight of the last s’Ffalenn prince, crumpled and still in the swift, welling spurt of his life’s blood.
    “Another augury?” The bedding rustled. A lavish fall of hair stroked his back, then a cheek, laid against his taut shoulder; his wife, arisen behind him, to link calming hands at his waist.
    His tension would tell her the portent was ugly. Too often, in sleep, the prescient vision he inherited from his father warned him of death and trouble.
    Jieret raked long fingers through his ginger beard. He braced hisnerve, spun, and enfolded his lady into his possessive embrace. “I’m sorry, dove.” The soft, misted peace of the greenwood seemed suddenly, desperately precious. “I shall have to travel very far, very fast. The life of our prince is at stake.”
    She would not question his judgment, not for that. Arithon s’Ffalenn was the last of Rathain’s royal line. Should he die with no heir, his feal clansmen would forfeit all hope to reclaim their birthright.
    Feithan’s fingers unclasped, brushed down Jieret’s flanks, and withdrew. “How much spare clothing will you carry?” She caught up the blanket, still warm from their sleeping, and spread it to pack his necessities.
    Jieret bent, caught her wrists, and marveled as always. The strength in her was a subtle thing, her bones like a sparrow’s in his hands, which were broad and corded beyond his youthful years from relentless seasons of fighting. Their eyes met and shared mute appeal. “I’ll take weapons and the leathers on my back, and you, first of all.” A smile turned his lips. The expression softened the fierce planes of his face, and offset the hawk bridge of his nose. “Leave the blanket.”
    He rocked her against his chest, his touch tender. An urgency he could scarcely contain spoke of the perils he must weather on the solitary trek that would take him to Tysan’s western shore. Bounties were still paid for captured clansmen. Headhunters plied the wilds in bands, their tracking dogs combing the thickets. Towns and trade roads were no less a hazard, choked with informers and guardsmen sent out recruiting to replenish the troops lost in Vastmark.
    The wife in Jieret’s arms would not speak of the risks. Strong as the generations of survivors who had bred her, she absorbed his need, then massaged to ease his old scars with skilled hands, until he kissed her and slipped free to dress.
    Jieret s’Valerient, called Red-beard, was in that hour twenty-one years of age. Supple, self-reliant, clean limbed as the deer he ran down in the hunt, he was rangy and tall, a being tanned out of oak bark. War and early losses had lent his hazel eyes more than a touch of gray flint. Jieret’s inheritance of the caithdein’s title had fallen to him during childhood, both his parents and four sisters slain in one day by town troops on the banks of Tal Quorin. On his wrist, even then, his first badge of achievement: the straight, fine scar from the knife cut which bound him lifelong to the honor of blood pact with his prince.
    Proud of his rugged courage, too shrewd to voice fear, Feithan reached beneath their mattress of spruce boughs and tossed him his worn, quilloned knife.
    She smiled, a nip of white teeth. “The sooner you go, the better the chance you’ll be back to my lodge before autumn.”
    Then she folded slim knees behind her crossed arms and watched him bind on sheath and sword belt. If she wept, her tears were well masked behind tangles of ebony hair. Not on her last breath would she voice her disappointment. If her young husband did not return, his line must live on in the child she knew to be growing within her. She would endure, no less than any other clan woman widowed in a sudden, bloody raid.
    Her husband was the oathsworn caithdein of Rathain, his birthright an iron bond of