Kitabı oku: «The Wars of Light and Shadow»

Winter 5670

IV.

Prime Successor

The eighty-league ride up the Eltair road from Jaelot to the city of Highscarp offered every discomfort of winter travel to the tight-knit party of enchantresses summoned for audience with the new Prime. Posthouses were few and scattered, and at this season, packed to the rafters. Day or night, the heaving waves of the bay shed chill spume, whipped on the biting east wind. Progress suffered the caprice of changeable weather. Ragged clouds and fair sky warred in crazy quilt patterns, brewed into fogs and wet snowfall as the air off the warmed, southern currents of the Cildein met the ice-honed fronts from the north. A steady onslaught of storms funneled through the Skyshiel summits, howling with shrill fury down the gorges; or they raged inland off the whitecapped bay and unburdened their tropical moisture.

As tangled were the contentions chafing the oathsworn ties of Koriani loyalty. Each enchantress bound to the initiate’s purple held a different view of the Prince of Rathain’s late escape. Cadgia’s circle of seeresses accepted the failure with stoic good spirits, the event just another professional setback to crimp the cogs of higher authority. For Elaira, withdrawn into worried silence concerning the fate of two fugitives abroad in the Skyshiel wilderness, the affray kept its bittersweet edge of snatched victory. Whatever accounting awaited in Highscarp at the hand of Morriel’s successor, her heart’s love still anchored the core of her private thoughts.

Lirenda vacillated. Her porcelain-fair features flushed to rage when discussion touched upon Arithon, or else chilled to an ice-sculpture mask of balked hatred as she choked on the rags of her shame. Once past the jolting news of Morriel’s death, the disparate facts sifted down to a core of disturbing suspicions. Lirenda wrestled her reservations concerning Selidie’s abrupt accession alone, while the winter rigors of the Eltair coast rankled her fastidious taste for silk clothes and comfort and cleanliness.

The days passed like punishment: over roads that softened to muck in the hollows and open-air campsites left trampled by the uncouth livestock tethered on their way to slaughter. Those rare nights spent under a roof offered poorly washed linen, and smoking hearths, and stifling taprooms jammed with boisterous drovers, and bearded, swaggering caravan guards who played dice, roared jokes, and pinched doxies.

On a blustery morning twoscore days past solstice, the travel- worn group of enchantresses drew rein before Highscarp’s gatehouse. Lirenda was windburned and aching tired, wrapped like the rest in mantle and gloves that reeked of woodsmoke, wet horse, and the turpentine bite of the evergreen boughs that had served her as last night’s bedding. The uncivilized journey had revised her priorities. Vengeance-bent hatred of Arithon s’Ffalenn could wait on her need for a bath.

‘If you’re primed for hot water, we’re facing a setback,’ an intrusive voice broached from the sidelines.

Lirenda turned her head, fixed her smoldering gaze on Elaira, who rode with her hood blown back. The gusts played havoc with her bronze plait, streaming tendrils of flyaway hair and snagging the ends into elf locks.

Nonplussed by hot glares and glacial silences, Elaira raised her eyebrows. ‘Look. Over there.’ She pointed toward the swarm of beggars jostling for coin in the lee of Highscarp’s outer keep, most of them missing hands or a foot from mishaps working the quarries. ‘See for yourself. That’s one of our initiates giving alms at the city’s main gatehouse. She’s looking our way. What will you wager? I say the Prime’s scryers have already broken the news of our arrival. Whom do you guess they’ll call onto the carpet for the privilege of the first reprimand?’

‘You might pretend to an earnest concern.’ Lirenda’s fist tightened without thought on the rein. Her mount, in sharp protest, shook its wet crest. A spray of fine droplets snapped off its mane, laden with gravel and ice melt. ‘Brute beast!’ Lirenda blotted her face with her sleeve, then added a silken warning.

‘The new Prime may not prove so lenient toward the weakness you bring to our order.’

‘But I have no regrets,’ Elaira attacked in stripped candor. ‘If I must suffer for my part in Jaelot, the price will be well worth the outcome. Why not join the company of the damned with good cheer? At least bet that chunk of grade amethyst in your cloak brooch. If you forfeit your dignity, you’d have a stake to enliven the sordid end play.’

Yet if Lirenda envied her younger peer’s gift to find humor amid life’s adversity, the haughty set to her lips did not soften. Nor would her cynical silence relent, even as the initiate by the gatehouse abandoned her clamoring circle of beggars. Red-faced from the cold, she threaded a no-nonsense course through the traffic and accosted the sisters from Jaelot.

‘Enchantress Elaira!’ She delivered her unwelcome summons across the clattering rush of guild couriers and the tumult of oxcarts laden with ale casks and firewood. ‘You are called to appear for immediate audience before your Prime Matriarch.’

‘At least there’ll be no tortured waiting.’ Elaira reined her brown gelding aside, well braced for her hour of reckoning.

Drawn to a halt, with her mounted peers bunched into a staring knot amid the pressed flow of commerce, Lirenda waited for the message that would see her included. None came; her presence was dismissed along with the sisters ranked under Senior Cadgia.

The novice gave Elaira the street address where the new Prime had established her residence. ‘Go at once,’ she commanded. ‘You’re expected. One of the orphan boys under wardship will receive your horse in the mansion courtyard.’

A flock of gulls flew, tumultuous as tossed paper against the stirred clouds held over from the last snowstorm. Elaira’s eyes tracked them, perhaps coveting their freedom as she parted from the safe circle of her peers.

While the brave line of the bronze-haired initiate’s back disappeared into the gatehouse, Lirenda raged, her bitterness charged to sheer disbelief as further instructions were delivered to Cadgia, and a stable was appointed to provide for the company’s post horses. In obvious haste to escape the stiff gusts, the Prime’s novice messenger made closure. ‘The rest of you are asked to take lodgings at the sisterhouse. The peeress in charge will make use of your services until the Matriarch calls general assembly.’

Dealt an unprecedented, blanket dismissal, Lirenda sat dumbstruck. Around her, the chatter of her peers rang as meaningless as the incessant cries of the gulls. Unguided, her mount trailed after its fellows through the ox-drawn drays dragging slabs from the quarries, their high, iron wheels grinding over iced cobbles and past weatherworn drivers wrapped in fringed rugs, cursing every other party inbound along Highscarp’s stone causeway.

The catcalls, the pithy challenge of the guard through the wind-torn snap of the mayor’s banner arose as so much patternless noise. As an eighth-rank initiate, set apart by her years of advanced training, Lirenda felt sealed into glass-walled isolation. Her fall from administrative privileges to the meniality of charitable service seemed a punishment of nightmare proportion.

Cast beneath the lowliest scullion who had served on her parents’ estate, she might be required to nursemaid orphaned infants, or treat scabrous beggars, or spoon-feed demented old women in the poor quarter. The ignominy rankled: as a candidate set apart for prime training, she had disdained to mingle with the low-rank initiates. The banter, the breathless laughter, the back-and-forth quips exchanged in the scullery, and the chapped hands she would earn in the laundry poured like venom through the shreds of her dreams and ambition.

‘I’m going with Elaira,’ she announced, her outrage driven bone deep by a background of wealth and privilege.

‘Your name was not called,’ Senior Cadgia reminded.

‘I don’t care.’ Lirenda pitched her horse into a headshaking trot.

Cadgia turned in the saddle, her round, kindly features transformed from asperity to disbelief. ‘Lirenda, that’s folly!’

But the demoted enchantress shook off well-meant warning. Impulse had solidified into mulish resolve. She could not accept ruin in gutless defeat, falsely masked under virtuous acceptance. Lirenda jabbed spurs to her tired mount, determined to narrow the lead Elaira had opened ahead of her.

The massive, carved gate arch loomed and then swallowed her, its dank shadow bleak as her mood. By the time the wan daylight found her again, more foraging gulls had taken wing from gleaning the fish-market midden. Their shadows flicked a street jammed by workaday masses, a teeming press of patched umbers and saffron, with no trace of Koriani purple.

Elaira had passed beyond view. Set under the threat of the new Prime’s authority, she would move unseen through the crowd. Her wary, street urchin’s self-reliance reflexively grasped that anonymous cover for protection.

Lirenda cursed for the inconvenience.

Highscarp was riddled with twisting alleys where a lone woman on horseback might vanish. Its massive breakwater skirted the foothills, a labyrinthine fortress grafted into the headland where the northbound combers thrashed into a granite coastline. The battlements were eyries that buttressed the sky, and the ramped eastern wall bore the brunt of the gales, hoary with moss between the repairs from the macerating wear of riptides and equinox storm surge. Highscarp endured, though the sea often triumphed. In a bad year, the pilings of the galley wharves became skewed and tumbled like matchsticks. Slate roofs capped by hammered lead rimmed the land, an anvil against the percussive onslaught of rough weather.

The cobbled streets Lirenda traversed smelled of fish-oil lamps, and raw turpentine, and the astringent fumes of the resin men boiled to make varnish. Here, the relentless siege of the sea was given brash challenge: backdrop to the thud of gray breakers, the dauntless clang of steel mauls, as skilled masons dressed blocks from the quarries. Nor was grace forgotten. From the striated mountains due west of the city came the opaline granite once used to lay floors in the palaces of the old high kings. Before them, the great centaurs had mined the veins of white quartz for the dolmens they chiseled with patterns to mark the lands held unspoiled for the mysteries. If the nurses’ tales whispered over cradles held true, the innermost halls of the citadel had been carved before First Age history, by drake packs laired in the ledged rock.

Certainly the thoroughfares were narrow enough to suggest such ancient origins. At each crossroads and turn, Lirenda was balked by piled-up snow, street stalls swarming with commerce and stopped carts, and racing urchins playing a northcountry game with flat sticks and a stitched leather ball. By the time she clattered into the walled courtyard and dismounted before the Prime’s residence, a whistling boy groom had already led Elaira’s unsaddled horse to the water trough. Minutes slipped past while the animal was stabled. Lirenda slapped her slack reins in her gloved palm and fumed throughout the delay.

The house the Prime chose for her quarters commanded the view before comfort. The gabled front wing hugged the rim of a bluff, the patterned terracotta tiles of the entry chilled under the shade of the watchkeep. Gusts off the bay snapped Lirenda’s thick mantle. Her tucked-up hair suffered, the frayed ends lashed into tangles. Regarded askance by the squint-eyed servant who shuffled to answer the door, she demanded to share the Prime’s audience on the impetus of aristocratic breeding.

The servant gave back a draconian glower. Lirenda waited. Her imperious foot tapped. Cowed by her scathing arrogance, the servant sniffed and led off through the hush of a wainscoted hallway. Rich carpets were pooled with marigold light cast by oil lamps hung on brass chains. At home in an atmosphere tanged with the citrus of polished linenfold paneling, and admiring the beauty of claw-footed furnishings with vine-patterned ivory inlay, Lirenda surmised the new Prime had invoked some well-to-do merchant’s oath of debt.

The massive, carved doors to the salon were not locked. Since the servant balked at tripping the latch, Lirenda was left the irrevocable choice of whether to proceed or turn back.

She paused, overcome. The crushing weight of the moment stalled thought. To enter the Prime’s private sanctum, unasked, was to force her fate to a summary resolution. She could lose everything, sealing her plight to a lifetime of thankless servitude. The young woman now wielding Morriel’s authority was a frustrating, unknown quantity.

Of all senior peers in the Koriani Order, Lirenda alone had been raised to eighth-rank training. Her knowledge would not let her gnawing doubt rest: the new Prime’s accession could never have taken the time-honored, legitimate steps. The vacuous chit who had stood as her rival never owned the deep strength, far less the arduous self-control to bear the accession to prime power. No measure of compromise existed behind that sand grain of irritable discrepancy: desperate, even dying, Morriel might have dared an unprecedented breach, casting aside untold thousands of years of uncompromised moral tradition.

Either Lirenda lived out her days cowed by that flagrant rebuttal, or she dared confrontation here and now at the risk of her very survival.

At the cusp, outrage drove her, and the wild-card threat, that Elaira’s frank testimony over Arithon’s escape might prove just as thoroughly damning. Lirenda seized her chance to wrest back her autonomy and brazenly opened the door.

The panel swung into a dimly lit anteroom, curtained with tapestries in glowing Narms dyes. Dried lavender wafted delicate scent from elegant, cloisonné vases. The space appeared empty. Lirenda shed her mud-splashed mantle by the entry, startled by an unexpected movement in the corner as another travel-stained figure whirled to face the rustle of wool.

‘You!’ gasped Elaira. Tension sharpened her carriage. ‘Are you here to make certain I don’t say too much? Or shall we agree to be allies in adversity?’

Lirenda draped her stained cloak on a chairback, her eyes the pale amber of poured whiskey. ‘Allies,’ she responded, begrudging acknowledgment that Arithon s’Ffalenn had spun a common thread between their disparate stations. ‘You don’t trust me, I see. To prove my sincerity, I’ll offer a warning. Throughout your audience, behave exactly as though you were examined by Morriel herself.’

Elaira weighed this through a pregnant pause, her level brows hooked to perplexity. ‘Should such a threat frighten me?’ In her few past encounters, the deceased Prime Matriarch had treated her with fairness, and at times a grandmotherly sympathy.

No chance remained to test Lirenda’s statement. The inner doors opened, and a liveried, blond page boy called out in formal summons.

Elaira squared her shoulders. Her snagged plait an auburn flame down her back, she clasped the bronze buttons sewn for luck into the lining of her mantle, then strode resolute through the doorway. She did not glance behind as Lirenda ran roughshod over protocol and followed her.

Gloom enfolded the hammer-beamed chamber beyond. The bow windows with their breathtaking view of the bay were curtained in night-colored velvet. Nicked to gold by the flame of beeswax candles, velvet upholstery and damascened silk braid glinted from corners and lover’s nooks. The furnishings were costly southern imports of Vhalzein lacquer and ebony. Carved tables and chairs wore graceful wreaths and the beardless faces of dryads. The carpets, with their twisted fringe borders, were the masterworks of skilled Morvain craftsmen. Glass and silver candlestands showed Paravian workmanship, eight centuries old, and exquisitely rare. Brought up to appreciate beautiful things, Lirenda curbed her wandering eyes and locked glances with the new Prime.

Elaira had already curtseyed to the floor. Lirenda eschewed the same rite of obeisance, instead giving the seated Matriarch on the dais her insolent, tight-focused survey.

Selidie wore silk the cream and lavender of spring irises, her supple, young limbs arranged in the austerity of a lion-bossed chair. The Prime’s mantle of purple velvet with its nine bands of office had been pinned at her neck with a brooch of red gold and amethyst. Her pale, corn-silk hair was clasped in mother-of-pearl combs, not the diamond pins Morriel had favored. No question remained that she wielded the powers invested with the Matriarch’s office. Her eyes watched all that moved, a sustained, nerveless focus as intent as polished steel rivets. A matched pair of ebony stands at her feet wore masked coverings, the ritual patterns of embroidered silk used to veil major focus stones. Flanking these, supported on beaten-ring tripods, were seven matched spheres of clear quartz attuned to the sixfold sigil for scrying.

Lirenda let silent seconds elapse before speaking the traditional statement of service.

Prime Selidie replied in a throaty, clipped alto, stripped of the sweet lisp affected before her whirlwind ascent to high office. ‘Did you think I’d be amazed by your uninvited entry? My page has already set out a chair. You will sit. Keep silent until my interview is done, and initiate Elaira receives disposition and final dismissal.’

A prime’s direct order demanded obedience. Lirenda accepted the chair, her chilled hands clasped in her lap. Elaira was left standing alone before the dais, defenseless beneath the stripping regard of those surgically measuring gray eyes.

‘Come forward,’ Prime Selidie commanded. ‘We are private.’ Yet if no ranking Senior attended her wearing the veils of Ceremonial Inquisitor, the exchange promised the razor-edged tension of an inquiry nonetheless. The outcome might easily invoke a trial, bearing stakes severe as the supreme penalty.

The victim must wait in unflinching subservience while her Matriarch posed the first questions.

‘You are called to serve because Arithon s’Ffalenn is still at large on the continent.’ Selidie paused, subtle in expectation.

Elaira gave away nothing, her calm stance itself a statement of blistering courage.

‘There are factions marching who seek his death. You don’t wonder how he fares in adversity?’ Selidie leaned forward, extended an almond-fair hand, and tapped the crystalline arc of quartz spheres in sequence one after another. Power surged at her touch, waking the sigils of binding. The scrying stones flashed like turned mirrors with light, then resolved to display scenes of tight-focused color and movement.

Even from the vantage of her seat, Lirenda recognized the streaming banners of town garrisons set on winter march across the bleak territory of Rathain. Etarra’s exemplary zeal had responded with eight field companies five hundred strong. Burdened with massive supply trains, slowed by freezing storms, their creeping progress advanced through the desolate terrain of Daon Ramon Barrens.

Another quartz showed Darkling’s militia, armed men and laden mountain ponies breasting the chest-high drifts toward the foothills and the vale of the Severnir. The crystal adjacent displayed Morvain’s bands of veteran headhunters moving apace through the deep glens of Halwythwood, where startled deer fled before them. Beyond all question, the three forces marched to a unified purpose.

‘Your prince faces bad odds.’ Selidie tapped the fourth quartz in its stand. That one aroused to an actinic flash: spurred on by no less than Lysaer himself, Narms fielded a smaller, fast-moving force under the sunwheel standard. They marched the old way through Caith-al-Caen, while the raised blast of Lysaer’s gift of light dispelled the gossamer forms of the unicorns’ memories like so much torched silk before them.

‘The Alliance has raised the hue and cry, as you see. They converge on Ithamon, if trust can be placed in an estimation based on direction.’ Selidie flicked the next-to-the-last sphere to life, unveiling the trials of Jaelot’s pursuit through the haunted pass of the Baiyen. ‘Why should Prince Arithon seek haven, do you think, in the ruin of his ancestral seat?’

Again, silence answered. Chin lifted, eyes wide, Elaira stood in squared quiet, the weight of the mantle she had not removed almost masking her small tremors of dread. Surprised to unwonted admiration, Lirenda locked clammy fingers and awaited the next step in this perilous testing of wills.

Prime Selidie stroked the last quartz in line with the chisel-point tip of her fingernail. ‘Dakar the Mad Prophet is no longer free to play watchdog and royal protector.’ The glass polish reflected her immaculate hand, as well as the travel-stained initiate held trapped in the lucent spill of candlelight. ‘Elaira?’ Selidie cajoled with a cat’s concentration. ‘We know that the Master of Shadow is injured. When he raves, he tends to get careless.’

‘He mentions my name?’ Elaira provoked in the faintest flush of first anger. She had little tolerance for playing the mouse before figures of higher authority. ‘Or how else could you garner the foothold to find him?’

Selidie straightened, the last quartz left blank. ‘He’s the stepchild of cleverness, just as you were never a creature of subtlety.’ Fine silk slithered like the whisper of ghosts as she whisked off the coverings that veiled the faceted jewels on the stands at her feet.

The first spat the glacial glimmer of pressed ice, no less than the Skyron aquamarine. The other, a faceted amethyst sphere, breathed an aura to raise the short hairs at the nape. Its surface seemed to drink in the light. Spindled glints at its heart flared to restless violet, alive with sullen rage and treacherous intelligence. Even from safe remove to one side, Lirenda wrestled the fear raised by the unshielded presence of the Great Waystone.

Elaira swallowed, the rough flush left by wind drained into chalky pallor. She would beg no reprieve. Facing the instruments of terrible, raw power that could strip her mind of free will, she managed the fiber to stop shaking. Straight in defiance, she transferred a glare like an equinox gale on the Prime in her seat of high judgment. ‘We have changed from an order of mercy to one that bends lives through coercion and force? How our founders would weep. Are, in fact, weeping. Or do their venerable memories not stand here as witness, imprinted into the same matrix jewels you invoke to enact your demands?’

Which insolence snapped the Prime’s patience. ‘Be silent!’

‘I will not betray Arithon,’ Elaira stated, blunt as nails in a suicidal challenge. ‘If that’s what you’ve brought me here to achieve, let me clear the least shadow of doubt. I’ll cast off my vow of obedience, even welcome the punishment that makes final end of my love as your private weapon. Never again will I be the tool to gain leverage for Koriani politics.’

Lirenda caught her breath, stunned. Against the Prime sigils, no sworn initiate held the power to keep personal secrets; Elaira had hurled down the gauntlet to compel her own immolation.

On the dais, Selidie settled back in her chair. ‘You will not betray anyone,’ she rebuked in flat quiet. Her oval face gave no clue to her thoughts, the lucent flesh unmarked in youth, and the disciplined iron that showed no trace of emotion. ‘I am no fool, to misread the strengths and shortcomings of any initiate bound to life service. I will not abet suicide. Nor will I ruin a valuable resource over a textbook adherence to propriety.’

Shocked to naked retreat by the point-blank rejection of her tactical sacrifice, Elaira fell back on bravado. ‘Swear, then.’ Prompted by her razor-sharp instinct for survival, she added, ‘Take oath on your personal crystal that I will never be asked to betray Arithon s’Ffalenn, nor coerce another innocent as crow bait to draw him into the hands of his enemies.’

Selidie raised a silver-toned eyebrow. ‘Is your trust in my office so diminished? I have forthrightly stated my case. You are too strong a will to be wasted.’ Then, as Elaira failed to relax, ‘Ah, I see.’ She clapped petite hands, caught remiss. ‘You fear a repeat of Fionn Areth’s constrained fate.’ Coquettish malice touched her coral smile as she said, ‘Of course, you couldn’t know that plan was Lirenda’s idea.’

But Elaira proved too wise to be swayed by the diversion of petty vengeance. ‘Morriel’s permission endorsed that mishandling.’

‘As a lesson, yes, to an eighth-rank enchantress who failed to unmask the true core of the test as a trap. In due course, Lirenda proved out the flawed weakness that disbarred her from the succession.’ With a girl’s catty shrug, that her subject of revilement was constrained to listening silence, Selidie cupped her palms to the glowering sphere of the Waystone. ‘Did you know our great amethyst can record and enforce promises?’

Elaira shivered, speared through by chills. The warning stopped breath, that this was no green antagonist who countered her moves like a predator loosed on a chessboard. ‘Don’t do this.’

‘I require your trust,’ said the Prime, unequivocal. A freezing finger of cold stirred the air, then a ripple of malice clothed in stinging power, as the Matriarch engaged her will with the wakened might of the order’s most perilous focus stone. ‘For the record, in duration of my lifetime, bear witness to my word as Selidie Prime: initiate Elaira will never be forced to betray Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn in the interests of the Koriani Order.’

Elaira shook her head, stunned. ‘I need to sit down.’

The closed chamber seemed to magnify stillness, until the pearlescent gleam thrown off Vhalzein lacquer furnishings seemed a lawless intrusion of movement. Selidie uttered no word. Her eyes the dense, polished silver of hematite, she stroked the dire amethyst back to quiescence. Dainty in grace, and butterfly fragile, she inclined her head in permission.

A page pattered forward bearing a footstool. Blanched paper white and never more wary, the bronze-haired initiate groped, and caught shaky hands on the cushion. She let her knees give way underneath her. Lirenda’s thunderstruck silence at her back endorsed shocking fact, that an oath on the Waystone would be held in trust by the Prime Matriarch’s very life.

Limp in the juddering light of the candles, Elaira braced her stripped nerves, too aware she fenced wits with an enemy who outmatched her every resource. ‘If not to lay strings upon Arithon s’Ffalenn, why should you trouble to summon me?’

‘Why indeed?’ Selidie loosed sprightly laughter, then dispatched her page to the kitchen to ask for a tray of tea and buttered cakes. ‘Because the man is Dharkaron’s own shadow to track. He’s alone, and ill, and probably injured. If he’s going to succumb and die in the Skyshiels, our world loses a powerful cipher. You offer the best link we have to trace him. Surely you share the same interest at heart?’

Elaira considered this. Taut fingers laced on the crossed ankles of her riding boots, she scarcely winced as the grit of dried mud flaked onto the priceless carpet. ‘You won’t seek to claim full advantage of his weakness?’

‘Our order has no means to pluck him from the wilds of Daon Ramon, in any case. Not with five musters of Lysaer’s armed allies beating the brush with drawn steel.’ Selidie rearranged the sleeves of her mantle over the lion-carved chair arms. ‘They wish him dead. We desire him living, but captive. You are offered the choice how you serve him.’

‘I would keep him alive, but not at the cost of integrity,’ Elaira admitted without heat, though the knuckles she locked on damp leather bespoke the backhanded sting of the trap barbed and set to waylay her. ‘Just what service are you asking me to perform?’

Selidie regarded her disheveled wariness with a startling, frank gesture of kindness. ‘You are linked to him, yes? At the outset, I ask for your help with a scrying. In exchange, I offer these safeguards. You alone will review the results. For my needs, you need share nothing except the fact of his death, or the word of his safe arrival at the ruin of Ithamon.’

‘And if the issue is not black or white?’ Elaira pressed. Distrust scraped through her strained fabric of hope, that the inevitable, unseen hook in the bargain must put her conflicted loyalty to a more punishing test.

Selidie answered without hesitation. ‘By my oath on the Waystone, you are left free to answer his need at your personal discretion.’

Which gift was a dangerous boon. The master ciphers possessed by the Koriani Prime enabled Selidie to follow Elaira’s every move; by extension, she would gain infallible means to dog Arithon’s position at will.

The door latch jostled warning. Two servants in house livery entered in soundless tact. Both gave the unshielded quartz crystals wide berth. One cast a lace cloth over the claw-footed table set at Selidie’s elbow. The other settled the tray of refreshments and poured steaming tea into porcelain cups.

‘You’re too thin,’ observed Selidie. ‘Why not make your choice after you’ve eaten some honey cake?’

‘No blandishments.’ Elaira had recovered the aplomb to strike back in wry humor. ‘I’m no longer the starving street orphan who could be bought for the promise of bread crusts. S’Ffalenn princes have ever looked after their own, and your quarry has already proved himself as Torbrand’s trueborn descendant.’

‘His escape from Jaelot was no accident,’ Selidie agreed, ‘and you yourself honor his royal trust to the point where you won’t accept bread crusts without the old-law bonds of honest friendship.’

‘I’ll have surety before cake,’ Elaira insisted, her mettle steadfast under pressure. ‘A hard ride up the coast would make anybody thin. I’ll recover on gruel in a tavern, but after you’ve listed your terms of demand to offset my presumed gift of freedom.’

While Lirenda sucked in a breath of amazement, Selidie tucked her neat, coquette’s fingers around the scrolled handle of a teacup. ‘You should have been a merchant, the way you read nuance.’ She waved the hovering servants away. Steam plumed against the dimmed fall of the tapestries as she spooned in a thick gob of honey. Her gaze stayed thoughtfully level, but not discomposed, as she savored a lingering sip.

‘Merchants can’t traffic in slaves or prisoners, under terms of the Fellowship’s compact,’ Elaira attacked. ‘You need Arithon as your leverage to upset the old order, and to reach him, you plan to use me. I would have this over with.’

Selidie slapped down her cup. The furious chime of the spoon struck through silence, no less a warning than the testing tap of crossed sword steel. Robed in the Prime’s mantle, and charged with the unsheathed power of her office, Selidie glared down with quicksilver eyes. ‘Girl, you rankle! Don’t expect I’ll forgive your brash insolence. Hear your orders. Then decide what course you will take from this chamber. I will grant you the loan of a scrying quartz. You will use it to shadow the Prince of Rathain and report if he dies of wound fever. If he lives, you may engage your own powers as you will. I prefer him kept clear of Lysaer s’Ilessid and the armed forces of the Alliance.’

‘No limits?’ Elaira said, her voice rocked unsteady. The candlelight flared like chipped rust through her hair as she hung on the pause for an answer.

Selidie watched, snake still in her chair, while the steam twined the gloom like the half-coiled ribbons of a spell. ‘No limits but one: if his Grace survives the winter, you will go to him when the thaws reopen the Skyshiel passes. You will attach yourself to his company and behave exactly as you please until such time as his life becomes threatened. Then, you will be free to intercede in his behalf. You have claimed we’ve forgotten our precepts of mercy. Let this prove you wrong. You are given my sanction to wield the power of the Koriani Order in the cause of Prince Arithon’s life.’

‘Merciful Ath, of course!’ Elaira shot to her feet. ‘With the usual condition that he would owe us his personal oath of debt for our service. Even the Fellowship must honor that stricture, no matter if the price we demand should seal his final downfall.’

Selidie inclined her head. ‘We have never granted exception for royal birth or any other privilege of rank.’ A brittle smile bent her lips. ‘The choice remains yours, whether or not to offer your prince the option of our help. You are, as you see, the initiate best suited to carry out this mission. The only direct command you will bear is to stay involved with Prince Arithon’s affairs.’

‘A feat far easier said than accomplished.’ Elaira drew a steady breath that laid bare the unyielding mettle of her character. ‘If I don’t go, I suppose you’d send Lirenda?’

‘My ends can be served out of love, or from hatred,’ Selidie agreed in poisoned logic. ‘Which emotion will sway Arithon’s fate in the straits of his uncertain future?’

‘Love, of course.’ Elaira shouldered the weight of that vicious irony, no less besieged by the dumbstruck antagonist who now looked daggers at her back. ‘I have leave to start immediately?’

‘As you wish.’ Selidie raised the blank sphere from its tripod and gestured for Elaira to approach. An admonition followed as the crystal changed hands, too quiet for Lirenda to overhear. Then the audience ended. Elaira descended the dais and curtseyed, giving the ritual words of obedience. When she arose, her eyes glittered with unshed tears. Granted a terrible grace of reprieve, and the Prime’s formal word to depart, she beat a tormented retreat and slipped through the outer doorway. The Prime’s grant of choice held no triumph for her, but the promise of pain and a perilous, double-edged burden.

Prime Matriarch Selidie reclined in her chair, brilliant eyes closed through a moment of pleased relief. While the Waystone and the Skyron danced with the scintillant light of her ebullience, she said, ‘That woman had the straight courage to refuse me.

Our order’s future may ride on the stunning, weak fact that she didn’t.’

Lirenda cut in with acidic accusation. ‘I have leave to speak? Such a love as she bears could well be strong enough to allow your chosen quarry to die.’

‘Less willingly than hatred.’ Selidie flexed the hand she had used to bond with the Waystone as though the stone’s malice still seared an invisible burn through her flesh. ‘You will learn in due time. The carrot wins better cooperation than the stick.’

Lirenda arose, a whisper of damp silk masking her stifled resentment. ‘Where’s the carrot, for me?’

‘You were no invited witness.’ Selidie met her opening advance with wide-lashed, malevolent challenge. ‘Be most careful how you speak. I choose my weapons with meticulous care. When the last crisis breaks, Elaira will dance to the very same constraints that I’ll use to break and scatter the power of the Fellowship.’

Lirenda tested Selidie’s bitter thread of logic: that if Arithon provided a viable cipher to disrupt the grip of the compact, he must also be key to the world’s future balance. Neither the Sorcerers nor Elaira would sacrifice Athera to deny mankind’s rightful claim to seize dominance. A last, closing stride brought Lirenda to the foot of the low stair, her reflection overlaid in multiple imprint on the Alliance forces still marching through snow in the scrying spheres. ‘I thought you wanted the Shadow Master dead! Or is his Grace of Rathain no longer a threat to Koriani continuance?’

Selidie plucked a slice of cake from the plate and licked butter icing from her fingers. ‘He was a thorn in the path of Morriel’s succession. That issue is ended.’ She nibbled, amused, as she sensed Lirenda’s probe for the crone now securely ensconced within the purloined flesh of youth. ‘As you see, prime power has been transferred intact. The guard has changed. My predecessor is dead, her ashes dispersed by the rituals of due ceremony. Choose your stand on that matter very carefully.’

Lirenda regarded the creature before her with a lioness’s glare and a loathing that curdled her blood. ‘You dare to warn me?’ Challenged by an initiate who possessed eighth-rank training, Selidie must realize her unnatural state was transparently obvious. ‘I’m amazed you have the bald-faced effrontery to allow me to live!’

‘You weren’t listening. I never, ever cast off useful tools.’ Selidie shook out a napkin and whisked away a small blizzard of crumbs. ‘Did you think you retained any shred of good standing to bandy high charges against me? The facts lie against you. Your ambition left enemies, particularly since you made no secret of your disdain for my novice incompetence. In Jaelot, you fumbled a major assignment. Prince Arithon went free. Tell me truth, sister.’ The malice that flashed in those steel-rivet eyes held a chilling familiarity. ‘Will your integrity survive the course of a formal Ceremonial Inquiry?’

Lirenda’s skin rose to a violent flush.

‘I thought not.’ Selidie rescued her cooled cup of tea, tapping the gilt rim with a fingernail. ‘Like Elaira, you must follow my bidding, even if that leaves you with lifelong penance, scrubbing floors in the Highscarp sisterhouse. Who listens to rancor from the mouth of the fallen? You are excused. Understand clearly just how low you have stooped through your weakness for Arithon s’Ffalenn.’

Trapped in the coils of her own indiscretion, Lirenda glared. Pride of upbringing choked her. Crushed under the wreckage of hope and aspiration, she found that Elaira’s true spirit surpassed her. She herself lacked the insolent recklessness to cast fate to the wind for killing stakes. Her rage crumbled, impotent against the complaisance in Selidie’s too-knowing regard. As Morriel, the creature had always danced her inferiors on puppet strings of indebtedness. Before her unprincipled act of possession had usurped a young woman’s body, the crone would have measured and dealt with all setbacks that might steal her hour of victory.

Nor was her judgment of character inaccurate. Lirenda bent her head, unable to shoulder the shame of her outright failure. She could not follow through as Elaira had and stake the irrevocable loss of her awareness for the sake of compassionate principle.

Selidie’s vile nature could not be exposed against the ruthless strength of a matriarch’s hold on prime power.

Left no choice but to curtsey to the floor before her tormentor’s false youth, Lirenda arose in smoldering capitulation and swept from the darkened chamber. Candles flickered and streamed acrid smoke in her wake. Their reflections flagged fire across the sere winter hills pictured over and over in the activated quartz spheres; and in the equally stony eyes of the impostor who wore the Prime’s mantle on the dais.

The page boy flung open the paneled door to the corridor. Lirenda brushed past, well aware she had provoked a subtle and dangerous enemy. The cruel irony cut deepest: if not for the infamous Prince of Rathain, the Matriarch’s chair would never have been tainted by the dark secret of immoral practice. Once, as entitled First Senior, Lirenda could have earned a legitimate succession from Morriel Prime without obstacle. But for Arithon’s damning intervention and rogue cleverness, the wielded might of the Koriani Order should have rightfully fallen to her. With each step she took, Lirenda vowed Rathain’s prince would be made to pay.

Given Elaira’s permission to intervene, the geas driving Jaelot’s captain could end in another failure. Arithon might survive his passage over Baiyen Gap. Lirenda ground her teeth, no less determined. Though ensuring his ruin demanded a persistence that lasted the rest of her lifetime, she would bide. The Master of Shadow would suffer the sting of her vengeance as long as he lived.

Winter 5670

Proving

Outside the barred door to the Prime’s private residence, Elaira braced her back to the courtyard wall. She sucked in steady breaths of chill air to slow the raced beat of her heart. Around her, the sounds of routine industry filed an edge on her acid-stripped nerves. She could not shake her looming sense of disaster. The facts all converged, unremitting: in the white wilds of Daon Ramon Barrens, five cities dispatched armed companies on forced march to take down Arithon s’Ffalenn. Yet no pending sense of the world’s smashed equilibrium ruffled the winterbound city of Highscarp. A silvery trill of horsebells jingled down the lane beyond the gate. A servant banged open a second-story shutter and slapped the dust out of a bolster. Overhead, an ice crystal scumbling of cloud diffused the pyrite gleam of noon sunlight. The gusts turned northeast and smelled of the sea, sure signs that a gale would rage in before nightfall. The high mountain passes would lie sifted in snow, while the ridges shed their cover of drifts like fumaroles of blown smoke.

Storm and heartache came in lockstep with her mind-linked awareness: Arithon s’Ffalenn was still crossing the Baiyen, the conditions he suffered soon to become an onslaught of unalloyed misery.

As cuttingly cold, to Elaira’s bare hand, was the quartz sphere Prime Selidie had given her. The binding directive attached to its custody offered no chink for compromise. The new Matriarch had matched her most desperate move, and her wits still recoiled on the outcome.

‘The bitterest enemy is myself, then,’ Arithon had once flung back when the Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, had pinned him on a fine point of principle.

For Elaira, who loved him, flesh as one flesh, understanding of his anguish bore down without mercy, the razor edge of her predicament resharpened by Sethvir’s past assurance that she would be party to the Prince of Rathain’s final salvation or downfall.

‘Was this what you meant?’ Her appeal to the Warden’s earth-sensed awareness went unanswered, while the unkind wind off the bay tore her voiceless, and her knees refused to stop shaking.

‘Oathsworn?’ a boy’s timid voice addressed, breathless. ‘Initiate, do you wish a horse saddled for riding?’

Elaira stirred and regarded the young groom, her slate eyes still deadpan with shock.

The boy chewed his lip, then plowed ahead, gallant. ‘The mare that brought you needs rest and feed. Should the house loan you a fresh mount?’

‘Thank you, no.’ Elaira pushed away from the wall, resolute as the first, unwanted decision snapped scattered thoughts back to focus. ‘I won’t be going anywhere I can’t walk, but thanks for your gentleman’s kindness.’

The quandary posed by her changed obligations presented a future fraught with bloodletting thorns. Where Arithon was concerned, she knew better than to trust Selidie’s oath on the Great Waystone. Lirenda’s warning concerning the new Prime had not been mentioned lightly. Wary of every unseen subtlety that might lurk to entrap her, Elaira chose to make her way without help. She dared not accept either post mounts or shelter from the too-open hand of the sisterhood.

‘You have a mother? A family?’ she asked of the horseboy.

His grin showed missing gaps where his lost molars grew in.

‘Take this for their comfort.’ She pressed a worn copper into the child’s palm, offering the courtesy due from a guest stranger, and not an initiate sister whose order demanded unstinting service. ‘Off you go,’ she added, before he could shout his effusive gratitude. ‘Fetch me the pack off my saddle, and see that the mare gets the rest she deserves.’

The delay to reclaim her belongings chafed at her ripe sense of urgency. Elaira gauged the entangling pressures that might offer pitfalls and setbacks. If she wished to forestall the obligations her low rank would allow the sisterhouse peeress, she must act now, before Highscarp’s seniors discovered the Prime’s grant of autonomy, or caught wind of her unorthodox assignment.

She descended the high road from the bluff on foot. Whipped by rising wind, she threaded between a cake seller’s cart and two wagons and sheltered behind a smokehouse’s woodpile. There, in brisk care, she bundled the burdensome scrying sphere into a silk scarf from her pack. Next, she counted her handful of coins, earned in the honest practice of dispensing simples and cough remedies in the wayside taverns. Two silvers, eight copper were scarcely enough to meet her critical needs. She would have to drive desperate, hard bargains to test the scope of the Prime’s two-edged promise of independence.

As her first defined act to invoke that autonomy, Elaira tore off the bronze buttons she kept for luck, then gave her thick, purple cloak to the first beggar she found whining for alms in the street. ‘Just turn the damned thing inside out,’ she insisted, as the shivering creature fingered the distinctive color in apprehensive distrust of its Koriani origins. ‘You’ll stay just as warm, the lining’s bleached wool, and no one will pay much attention.’

She asked for directions, found the common market, and spent her store of silver on a sturdy, used cloak of good weave that would be respectable once it was cleaned. From the smith’s, for a half cent, she acquired a tarred leather bucket with a broken strap. The winds now were rising, and tasted of spume. Puddles wore glazings of rime ice. Like chalk marks under a poured-lead sky, gulls roosted on rooftrees and pilings and chimneys, breasts fluffed against inbound bad weather. Elaira pressed on to the dockside stalls, where seamy old women with crabbed hands and sharp eyes sold oddments of bone and glass jewelry, pomanders and luck charms, and the fish-scale talismans made to ward drowning prized by enlisted sailhands.

The ramshackle awnings cracked in the gusts. A shrill couple argued in the tenements overhead, while a dog pack nosed garbage in the gutter. Elaira perused tables of knucklebones and brooches, her flyaway hair tucked under her cloak, and her saddle pack guarded against cutpurses. Craftsmen and tosspots jostled their way past, and a street minstrel scraped jigs on a fiddle. At length, she found the item she sought amid a stall with tied bundles of cedar, and braided lanyards with hens’ feet, and fiend bands of stamped tin and strung pebbles.

‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I’m in need of your help.’

The old woman wrapped in faded plaid shawls perked erect, both eyes pearly with cataracts, and her arthritic hands clasped to her wash-leather satchel. ‘Dearie, speak up. Henlyie’s deaf as a post.’

Elaira smiled. ‘I could whisper, and still you could hear me.’

The old herb witch blinked. She loosened a crabbed fist, and reached out, unerring. Her swollen fingers jinked the quartz crystal nested like a frost shard among her ragtag array of queer wares. ‘Stone speaks, for you. How much can you pay?’

The ancient bronze buttons scored Elaira’s clamped palm as she answered in trepidation. ‘I can offer two coppers, and your pick of the rarest herbs in my satchel.’

Old Henlyie sucked a breath through gapped teeth. ‘That desperate, are ye?’

Elaira shut her eyes, while the wind whined through the carved eaves overhead, and the thrash of the breakers against the seawall muttered under the boisterous shouts of the stonecutters on leave from the quarries. ‘Mother, if you only knew.’

The old woman peered through fogged marble eyes, attuned to some cue beyond sight. ‘Healer trained, are ye? Then ye know well enough, a true quartz will defend against lies and dishonesty. Go on, dearie. Take the crystal you need. Just give someone needy the eight silvers she’s worth when you manage to mend your lapsed fortune.’

‘Ath’s blessing on you, mother,’ Elaira replied. ‘I’ll see your kindness repaid tenfold.’ She accepted the crystal, and left in its place a tin of her own spelled emollient, made to ease the pain of stiffened joints.

The old woman touched the tin, lifted it, and sniffed at the contents. A smile touched her face, easing the wrinkles pinched at the corners of her eyes. ‘There’s a boardinghouse with red shutters on Cod Street. The landlady there may let her attic for a penny, if you offer to attend the complaints of her guests.’ The tin disappeared into the folds of the shawls, and a crabbed finger shook in admonishment. ‘No, dearie. I have lodgings elsewhere, and no memory left for recording elaborate recipes. What meager craft I still practice is more suited to amulets, besides.’

‘Then I owe you my heartfelt gratitude. Bless your days.’ Elaira gathered the quartz and moved thankfully on her way.

Hungry, but in too much hurry to eat, she squeezed past the hawkers who sold bread, hot fish cakes, and sausage. The alley she descended led to the seawall.

The bay was a heaving cauldron of spindrift. Green, foaming breakers reared up, steep sides glistening, then hammered an uneven percussion of spray against the riprap that fronted the harbor. Wheeling birds landed in the sluice of the runoff, pecking for crustaceans stranded like jewels amid knots of jetsam and weed. Elaira braved the stripping brunt of the winds and filled her tarred bucket with seawater. In shrewd afterthought, she added a gleaner’s harvest of kelp.

If she planned to earn bread treating quarrymens’ pulped knuckles, she would need to replenish her tincture of iodine.

The owner of the red-shuttered boardinghouse was a vivacious grandmother whose shrewd glance measured the cut of her seal riding boots, then the quality tanning of the leather pack slung over her cloaked shoulder. ‘One pence was summer rent,’ she insisted, and held out her palm for two coppers.

Elaira gave in and paid her last coins, well aware hard-nosed bargaining would not prevail on a night with an easterly brewing. Her work required a roof over her head. Soup and coarse bread was included with lodging, and if she did not mind standing in line for the privilege, she could use the common washtub in the laundry.

‘Just show me inside,’ she answered, too chilled to stand on the icy stone step any longer.

The grandame regarded the brimming bucket askance, then grudgingly widened the door and admitted her. Elaira followed her shuffling step over worn runners of carpet, then up a servant’s back stair. The attic landing led into a tiny room with a salt-streaked dormer window. The blankets on the truckle bed were moth-eaten, but clean. Beyond a washstand appointed with a battered tin cup and pitcher, the board floor was bare. Impressed by the size of the dust batts caught in the unswept corners, Elaira sincerely hoped the last occupant had earned her keep carding and spinning.

‘Candles cost extra,’ the landlady informed. ‘Water’s drawn from the crank well in the yard. Fetch and haul what you need for yourself.’

‘Thank you.’ Elaira stepped over the scuffed wooden threshold, cloak tucked against the drafts that sang through the gapped panes, and rippled the cobwebs over her head. Her breath scribed white plumes in the gray filtered light, and the basin wore armor-clad ice. She deposited her bucket of seawater and kelp, then latched the plank door after the landlady’s departure. Still badly shaken, she scarcely cared that the garret room was unheated. Far worse, to try a course of questionable practice in the precinct of a Koriani sisterhouse.

‘Dharkaron avert!’ She was no small bit frightened by her plan to enact reckless upset to Selidie’s expectations.

Elaira squared her shoulders, firmed quaking nerves, and raked the wet kelp from the bucket. She piled the mass by the frozen basin. Next, she unhooked the tin cup from the washstand and scooped it full of raw seawater. The tarred bucket remained under half-full, its handspan depth just sufficient. Elaira dug through her pack, fingers shaking. She removed the silk-wrapped weight of the scrying sphere. The dread burn of its active sigils of command cast a bone-chilling ache, even through layered cloth.

In naked trepidation, on a pent breath of terror, she eased the veiled quartz into the saltwater bath in the bucket.

Sparks flew from first contact. A whine of released power threw off a hot wind as the sigils of binding tore asunder. Elaira jerked back a singed hand, while the water spat and roiled to the blast of unwound coils of energy. Crouched on her heels, her blistered hand cradled, she held on to hope that the quartz sphere could withstand the liberating force as the sigils dissolved without cracking.

‘Be free,’ she whispered in earnest encouragement. ‘Let the spells of coercion be lifted.’

If the sphere had been loaned to help track Rathain’s prince, she would employ her own skills, leaving no loophole for unasked assistance through the seals of a preset binding. There would be no fertile ground for slipped steps, no avenue left for blind snares. The Prime’s bitter bargain to guard Arithon’s life would not be won upon hidden traps or sly trickery. By nightfall this day, Elaira avowed she would cast off all resource upon which to hang the obligation of her order’s oath of debt. If the hour ever came when for wisdom and compassion she must claim her given option to betray her heart’s love, she would use her own power by free choice. Though she die in the effort, she would shoulder a future that relied on naught else but the course of her cognizant will.

The steps she must tread held no recorded precedent. Each minute brought dreadful uncertainty. The quartz she had cast to its fate in the pail offered no safe reassurance. While it thrashed and rattled and shook through its passage to a cleared state of neutrality, Elaira sweated and hoped. The striking eruption of violence appalled her, as the virtue of salt water stripped out the yoked power of uncounted active sigils. Every instinct shrilled with alarm. The process appeared to be lasting too long. She had been a six-year-old child when the order’s seniors in Morvain had inducted her for her talents. All her Koriani arts had been learned by rote, her specialized experience aligned for an herbalist’s practice.

Closed in the barren solitude of a two-penny attic chamber, the quartz sphere her need had put to the test delivered a stark lesson in humility. Elaira pressed shaken hands to her heart. ‘Ath’s mercy, forgive!’ She realized how little she understood the coiling depths of the powers she engaged day to day, without thought, sheltered beneath the insular traditions fostered by the sisterhood.

Elaira endured, helpless and afraid as she measured the shocking scope of her ignorance. Compassionate care proved inadequate; her knowledge of healing fell woefully short. She had no advanced skills to ease the crystal through its rough passage. The efficacy of her talent fed through runes and seals, harnessed by the time-tested rituals that aligned cause to effect and bridged the veil in chained constructs that magnified will into raised power.

‘Bide whole!’ she entreated the traumatized sphere. ‘Please. Don’t let my folly lead to lasting harm.’

As though speech keyed response, the tempest in the bucket subsided. The churned water smoothed and settled to rest, with the crystal’s clear structure unfractured. Elaira crouched on her heels, her limpid relief spiked through by renewed trepidation. The release just effected would not escape notice. Any flux of shed energy deflected the lane current, and the dispersal of worked sigils always released a distinct signature. The peer sister assigned to keep routine watch would recognize that imprint. She might wait until sundown and list the incident amid her routine report. Or she might be a scryer gifted with foresight and sound the alarm at the prompt of sharp-eyed experience.

Elaira wiped dampened palms on her sleeves, then unstuck the wisped hair from her temples. Time was her enemy. If she paused for one moment to nurse her faint nerves, a Koriani senior might break down her door under outraged instruction to stop her. For the willful step of blanking the scrying sphere posed but the first stage of necessity. Her next course of action was going to spark fury, if not an incensed cry for arraignment.

She shoved back to her feet. A questing sense of Arithon’s awareness ranged in chills over her skin. She distanced his concern, too terrified to dwell on the chance of obstructive ramifications. Worst case, she might face the supreme punishment for oathbreaking, if Prime Selidie’s promise of unfettered choice did not allow her to claim full initiative. Elaira braced against the washstand, too wrung with dread to question the price she might pay for unbending self-honesty. The tin cup with its fateful cargo of seawater all but slipped from her nerveless grasp. She forced her wrist steady. One by one, she stamped down the gathering fears that threatened to shred her resolve. Her love for Prince Arithon was caught in the breach. She dared do no less than employ concrete safeguards.

Elaira unhooked the silver chain at her neck and drew off the strung quartz that served as her personal spell crystal. Talisman for her power, carrier of the seals and sigils which held the focal point for her talent, the sliver of stone had been her companion since the hour she passed her novice initiation. Today, the flaring warmth of the stone’s presence engendered no surge of confidence. Set against the Prime Matriarch’s insidious designs, its familiar quiet radiance masked pitfalls and dangers. Elaira could not evade the harsh truth. The crystal itself belonged to the order. It would be reclaimed and cleared at her death, then reissued to another enchantress. The fact its possession was a borrowed resource could pose an unseen liability. Elaira poised the tin cup. Shaking, she prepared to reject the temptation that its everyday usage might serve to trap Arithon under Koriani obligation.

She would clear the quartz, living, and unbind its attunements, and bear the gamut of unknown consequences.

Poised over salt water, the crystal looked innocent, a flashy bauble that sheared light into rainbow refractions.

In reality, its function sustained an intricate balance of forces. A personal spell quartz bonded with its wearer. The complexity of its matrix evolved with use, often aligned with prerogatory directives imprinted by the will of the Prime’s Senior Circle. Elaira fought ebbing courage. Twenty-eight years ago, Morriel Prime had selected her for longevity. The crystal held haplessly dangling had bindings laid into its fields that sustained and renewed living tissue. To clear out the quartz would disrupt patterned energies, with the recoiling effects of unsanctioned release rewritten in her hapless flesh.

All her experience with healing and craft lent no guidance to predict the near future. She had no grace for soul-searching thought, and no safe chance to seek deeper knowledge. The cleansing properties of salt were most final, and utterly unselective. Once the crystal was submerged, the spells of suspension that revitalized her body would unwind, then bleed away into entropy.

She could but hope, as she steeled nerves and will, that the shock of release would not kill her. To leave Arithon’s fate to Lirenda’s design posed the potential for outright disaster.

Eyes tightly closed, Elaira tried and failed to calm the rushed pound of her heart. The rasping itch of wool mantle against skin; the draw of each breath through her lungs; the tempestuous shrilling of wind: all subtle sensation conspired to unstring her resolve and mire her in hopeless dread. Life tied her too strongly. The looming fear of greeting death’s shadow urged her to shrink from impeccable commitment. Worse, she might live, wasted or crippled by backlash thrown off as the linked sigils in her aura dispersed.

‘Ath help me, I can’t do this.’

Yet even as she wavered, stark honesty stung her. At the crux, she loved Arithon more. The integrity that cemented his trust crossed beyond life, went past nerve, flesh, and bone, and the bounds of sane limits and safety.

Elaira released the dangling chain. Hard braced for the shock of inflexible fate, she let her quartz take the plunge toward salt water.

The same instant, a firm hand closed over her slacked fingers. A half-sensed, fast movement, and a soft sigh of cloth intercepted the crystal’s immersion. A gentle voice chided, ‘There are better ways to establish the safeguards you seek.’

Elaira recoiled, instinctively too wise to scream. Her wide opened eyes met a white-robed, male figure who stood as though bathed in moonlight. His grip on her hand was warm, and not harsh. She could have pulled free on a wish, had she chosen. But the unearthly calm of his presence was not either forceful or threatening. The silver and gold ciphers that patterned his hood marked him out as an adept of Ath’s Brotherhood.

‘How did you get here?’ she gasped, stupid and stammering with shock.

His smile lit the bare room like new sunlight. ‘Sethvir of the Fellowship thought you needed help.’ He released her fingers, then pried the tin cup from the frozen grasp of her hand. The fluid economy of poured water graced each move as he set the tin next to the basin. Then, his brown, almond eyes deep and grave, he regarded the spell crystal caught in the cloth-wrapped palm of his hand. ‘Do you mind if I hold this?’

‘By all means, be my guest.’ Elaira stepped back, folded at the knees, and dropped rump first on the cot. Dust flew from straw ticking. She sneezed, blotted wet cheeks with the back of her wrist, then surveyed her uncanny visitor. ‘If I had a chair, I’d invite you to sit. Since I don’t, please feel free to share my perch on the landlady’s mattress.’

Beyond middle age, Ath’s adept inclined his head, then pushed back the folds of his hood. Graying ash hair tumbled over his shoulders. His face was strong boned, and serene as rubbed ivory, and his knuckles, workworn as a farmer’s. ‘Thank you. Be sure I won’t stay one moment more than I’m welcome.’

‘Sit then.’ Elaira slid over and made room. ‘Why didn’t I hear you come in?’

His step on bare floorboards was light, but not soundless; his weight settled like snowfall beside her. His clothes smelled of balsam, and his laughter fell rich as the deep shade of tropical night. ‘Well, you didn’t because the gateway that brought me resides in the crystal you just claimed from the market.’

Elaira opened her mouth, closed it, and forcefully stilled her clamor of thunderstruck nerves. ‘Then I need not be concerned that the peer seniors in my order should suspect I have mystical company?’

The initiate opened his palm and revealed her quartz pendant nestled inside a halo of grainy, gold light. ‘You need fear for nothing. This room, and our words from here forward are as a dream, one step removed from the reality you know. Sigils can’t breach this octave of vibration, far less carve a foothold for impact.’

‘Traithe once built a fire,’ Elaira allowed, too stressed and too tired to grapple nonlinear logic. ‘Since your time is a gift too precious to waste, I’ll let you explain without my green questions and curiosity.’

‘On the contrary.’ Settled at ease on his end of the cot, one shoulder braced to the wall, the adept seemed a figure loomed from ghostly silk and spun light from ethereal vision. ‘Time is an illusion shaped by need and belief. The trust you have embraced for Prince Arithon’s sake cannot be sustained without honesty. I’m here to open a doorway to knowledge, beginning with explanations.’

Elaira’s expression of owlish thought broke under the relentless strain. She arose and paced. The cramped garret could scarcely contain the scope of the terrors that threatened to shatter her. Since the fires of Sithaer yawned at her feet, she opened the point that could catapult her into trouble. ‘I made no conscious appeal to Sethvir.’

‘You did not.’ Ath’s adept tracked her agitation, amused, but not patronizing. Aware her question scratched only the surface, he answered her core of concern. ‘Your Prime Matriarch has been given no grounds to serve punishment, unless you can be taken to task for acquiring a piece of rock crystal. No rule forbids you. Yet there’s a quirk in your order’s history that’s only revealed to those in the highest ranks. Your major focusing jewels, and all personal quartz crystals held in Koriani use, were never mined on Athera.’

Elaira poised against the ice-etched panes of the dormer, her level brows pinched with reflection. ‘The stones were brought in when mankind begged sanctuary? Then those crystals won’t be tied by the compact?’

‘More.’ Smile vanished, the adept met and matched her determined stance. ‘Those crystals are not of Athera. Therefore they exist outside the scope of Sethvir’s earth-sense, as well.’

The cold little garret seemed suddenly dimmer, though sundown was two hours away. Elaira tucked her fingers under her cloak to ward off a creeping chill. ‘Are you telling me Althain’s Warden cannot see them at all?’

The adept denied nothing. ‘More to the point, Sethvir’s gift grants him intimate contact with those crystals whose being evolved on Athera. Through the one the crone gifted, he captured the echoed cry of your tormented emotion. In his wisdom, he deduced your intent to be clear of the sigils of power your order enacts to imprint the face of creation. The step you just took on your own strength of character has opened an alternate path. Put simply, you asked. Ath’s grace returns answers. My presence offers the means to pursue a gateway to higher understanding.’

Elaira swept back to her perch on the pallet, her gray eyes wide and intense. The first, incredulous tremor of excitement cut through clammy fear as she grasped the frayed threads of her courage. ‘You are offering me power without strings to the order, that I might use for Prince Arithon’s defense?’

‘True power is neither given nor taught,’ the adept said in mild correction. ‘The key to the great mysteries is a gift to be claimed, arisen from wakened knowledge of the self. The course of discovery must be your own. I can serve as a mouthpiece for truth. You must draw the map. My words may affirm your first footsteps.’

Too cautious to trust fully, given her assigned charge, Elaira pounced on the glaring discrepancy. ‘That’s why you spared my quartz from being cleared in salt water?’

‘No.’ The eagle’s gaze trained upon her stayed placid. ‘That act was done on behalf of Sethvir.’

He would not elaborate. Ath’s adepts were unyielding with confidences, and this one volunteered no more insights. His kindly expression masked patience like rock, a firmness disarmingly gloved in compassion that would make its will known without force.

Elaira tipped her head back against the board wall, her fingers tight clasped to lock down her desperate uncertainty. She felt too tired and small for this task, and her wisdom, too young, or else bound too narrow by the didactic constraints of her order. The moan of the wind in the eaves and the distant shouts from the harborside offered no anchor upon which to hang the drift of her unmoored thoughts. If her sweating anxiety was not crisis enough, the intrusive creak of a step on the stair jolted her to alarm.

The adept quelled her panic. ‘Dear one, don’t worry. That’s only a servant bringing the meal that comes with the cost of your lodging. The grandmother who owns this house thought you looked thin.’ As the arrival knocked, he encouraged, ‘Open the door, you’re quite safe. The kitchen boy sent up with the tray won’t see any trace of my presence.’

Elaira returned a look of raised eyebrows, then arose and crossed the plank floor. Each movement felt awkward, all angles and noise before the adept’s immaculate presence. Nor did his promise of anonymity fall short. The boy at the threshold proved painfully shy. Eyes glued to the floor, he passed her the tray with a few breathless words concerning the house tradition of hospitality.

‘Please thank your grandmother for her generosity.’ Elaira’s warm smile raised the boy to a flush.

‘Her kindness won’t count if she catches me slacking.’ He bolted downstairs, no doubt more unsettled by the fact she was spell trained, and a healer.

Left bearing a tray that was prodigiously laden, Elaira eased the door closed with her elbow. The bar was rendered unnecessary with an adept as her visitor. Since the room had no table, she could do nothing else but set the food on the pallet between them. Tempted by the rich odors of steamed mutton, fish soup, two loaves of brown bread, and last season’s apples stewed in syrup and vinegar, Elaira recovered her humor.

‘I do hope you’re hungry,’ she invited her guest.

‘I’m content as I am.’ The adept’s courtesy was instinctive, as though his ear stayed more closely attuned to the scream of the wind clawing over the roof slates. ‘Save what you can carry. You’ll need sustenance on your journey.’

Caught dunking a heel of bread in the soup, Elaira glanced up, surprised. ‘Journey? I’d thought to work healing in Highscarp until thaws.’

The adept turned his head. His desertbred eyes were unreadable in the storm gleam from the dormer, cut through the backdrop of gloom. ‘You could do that. Or, if you wish to set foot beyond reach of your order, you might consider taking sanctuary. Our hostel accepts travelers. You must take the road toward Eastwall, anyway, if your Prime’s charge sends you into Daon Ramon.’

Elaira bit into the bread, her methodical manner masking the bent of deep thoughts. ‘My order frowns upon hostels,’ she said slowly. ‘Fourth-rank seniors claim that quartz crystals become altered if they are carried inside of your gates.’

The adept watched her, his settled quiet grown profound.

Tempted to walk the first steps of a riddle, Elaira rose to the challenge. ‘Crystals change. Why? You will answer questions?’

‘I will tell you truth,’ the adept amended. ‘The primary Law of the Major Balance states that where there is substance, or energy, consciousness exists also. Self-awareness in all things is Ath’s unconditional gift, no matter the form of expression. Our Brotherhood keeps Ath’s law before that of man. Therefore, any consciousness that finds the way inside our precinct is restored to its sacrosanct right of unfettered being.’

‘Then the crystal kept under your province is set free,’ Elaira concluded. The bread crust rested, forgotten in her hand, while her searching gaze sifted through the faint gold halo of luminosity released by the adept’s tranquil presence. ‘And what passes your gates abides first by Ath’s law. Koriani power, then, cannot cross your threshold. I could enact the Prime’s will concerning Arithon s’Ffalenn, and incur no tie of indebtedness to the order?’

‘Those truths are self-evident, under the Law of the Major Balance. That precept holds the conscious will of all beings as sacred and therefore inviolate. I give you a parable.’

The adept paused, head tipped in tacit inquiry until he received her clear word to proceed. ‘Very well. Two men rode horses into a hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood. One was townborn, and his horse suffered a bridle and saddle, and was made obedient to his needs through domination and fear. The other man was clanblood, and drifter. His horse bore both saddle and rider without any bridle, or restraint by means of compulsion. Once inside our gates, both animals were stripped of their tack. They were left to do as their nature required. The townsman’s horse cantered into the hills, and never returned, though a chase was mounted for days in the effort to recapture lost property. The drifter’s horse remained standing at the gates. That one whinnied his glad greeting at his friend’s return. One horse had a master, and the other shared a companion. Ath’s freedom may be taken, or it may be given in accord with the law of free will.’

Elaira reached out of instinct and groped at the space where the quartz had hung, chained to her neck. Embarrassed, she swallowed. Beyond interest in eating, she set down the bread crust and regarded the adept who, apparently, had come at the Warden of Althain’s behest.

‘Sethvir believed that I needed protection. Since he acted to stop me from clearing my quartz, I need to see much more clearly. Can you lend understanding? There are complexities involved with this issue that I’m not wise enough to address.’

The adept inclined his head. ‘Brave lady, had you cleared your crystal, there would have been trouble indeed. I came here as Sethvir’s emissary, but I must serve as Ath’s order demands. Your quartz deserves freedom, except its own will has granted you deference. It prefers to remain a Koriani tool, that you may preserve your given trust with the one known as Arithon s’Ffalenn. Stone is patient. It bides lightly in time. Count yourself honored. This crystal spirit has given you the accolade of naming you as a companion. Therefore, since you planned to relinquish your claim, I suggest you let me take the burden of carrying out its preferred intent. With your permission, I will bear the quartz back to your sisterhouse. Let it remain in the peeress’s hands until you can safely resume your oathbound charge of its keeping.’

‘I would be grateful, as well as content.’ Self-conscious and flushed, Elaira pursued her dropped bread crust. Through the moment she required to recover her aplomb, the adept vanished without sound.

She started, glanced up, searched the shadowy space he had occupied. No visible trace remained of his presence, only a tactile patch of left warmth where he had sat on the coverlet. No small bit shaken that her spell crystal was also gone, Elaira swore like a fishwife. She had scarcely begun to ask questions.

Then, practical enough not to wallow in self-pity until the fish soup got cold and lost savor, she addressed the task of finishing off the perishable portion of her supper.

In hindsight, the adept had ceded her with fertile ground for new thought. Not all of her power derived from Koriani teaching. In the course of expanding her study of healing, independence had brought her odd bits of hedge lore. She had once learned a hill grandmother’s method of setting up wards using field stones. In principle, that knowledge might apply to a quartz, though the ranging of vibration directed by crude cantrips would become glass clear, and far stronger. By morning, the sphere in the salt bucket would be cleansed. She could borrow upon knowledge shared from Arithon’s trained mastery and attempt to engage its Named spark of awareness. In addition, she had the untapped potential in the crystal point given by the talisman maker in the market.

If the adepts’ store of wisdom might open an alternative way to access her natural-born talent, she must gather fresh courage, and against every obstacle, shoulder the risk in pursuit.

‘Fiends plague and Dharkaron’s fell Chariot, but Selidie Prime and Lirenda are going to be furious!’

Raised to devilish good cheer by the prospect of being a thorn in the side of high-caste Koriani authority, Elaira mopped the last broth from her bowl. She devoured the plate of stewed apples. Then, wildly reckless, she commandeered her last cloth length of linen for bandaging and packed the leftover victuals into her satchel.

Outside, the silver-plate gleam of last daylight was already rapidly failing. Black runners of storm cloud drove in off the sea. The first, gale-force gusts slapped and battered the dormer’s dilapidated shutters. The racket drummed a demon’s tattoo against the bass-note pound of the surf boiling into the seawall.

At least savage weather would discourage the sisterhouse peeress from rousting the poor quarter for a renegade. Elaira stifled her wild burst of laughter as she imagined the outrage raised by Ath’s adept when he knocked to deliver her spell crystal. Too bone weary to lug buckets for a hot-water bath, she steeled herself and settled for a bracing, cold wash from the basin.

Then she curled up under the blanket on the pallet and let her thoughts spiral toward sleep.

Before midnight, the storm broke. Elaira started out of unsettled dreams. She lay wakeful, strained and wary at each muted call of the watch from the street three stories below. Her overkeyed nerves would not let her rest. Worry circled her core of frustration. Over the whine of wind-driven ice, she ached for Arithon and Fionn Areth, one set on the run and exposed to cruel weather high in the Skyshiel passes, and the other gone outside her ken. While the dark fed anxieties that chafed her resolve to defeat the Prime’s Matriarch’s new plot, Elaira lamented her lowly third-rank status.

She had no means to access the Skyron aquamarine; nor could she breach its warded box and drag its dire weight through the gates of a hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood.

If she traveled the high road to Eastwall and claimed temporary sanctuary, then Ath’s order and the Law of the Major Balance might honor her born right to freedom. But the measure of reprieve from the Prime’s reach and power could last only while she was sequestered. As long as the major focus crystal of the order held the bound record of her oath, she could not clear her imprinted Name from the matrix. The autonomy she had sworn into Koriani service would stay subject to Selidie’s power.

Winter 5670

Tidings

Asandir’s night return to Althain Tower occurred without greeting or fanfare. He emerged from the flaring blue static of the focus circle to find the candles cold on their gryphon stands. His horse stood, still saddled, beside him. That fact served him rough warning: the pact Sethvir kept with the land’s fey spirits, which normally assisted his arrivals, had fallen into neglect. He could not have encountered a more certain sign that Althain’s Warden remained unwell. As the lane flux subsided to background quiescence, Asandir scanned the dungeon’s chill silence. No wardings had faltered. Yet, in line with his bleak foreboding, no colleague stepped forth to greet him.

The play of raw lane force under his feet spoke of winter. He had been gone for weeks. He could but hope the supplies in the stable had not been despoiled by mice. Beyond exhausted, his rangy, tall frame was now chiseled lean from channeling the extreme, dire forces required to mend a torn grimward. He stroked the black shoulder of his equally tired horse, then gathered the reins between cinder-burned fingers. Underlit by the phosphor pallor of the runes that channeled the thrust of the lane tides, he slapped out a persistent, smoldering spark still raising smoke from his sleeve cuff. Then he addressed an eloquent apology in Paravian to his long-suffering mount, whose tail and mane had been singed to the same sorry state as his rider’s tattered clothing.

Shod hooves clanged on the agate floor. The stallion trailed the Sorcerer’s step off the inlaid patterns which scribed the grand rings of the focus circle. By the sidewall, Asandir unbuckled girth strap and bridle. He bundled his holed cloak and mopped the foam from the animal’s face and lips, then rubbed down the sweat-drenched chest and flank, and the whorled hair left matted down from the saddle. The minor burns on fetlocks and cannon bones, he soothed with the healing of his spelled touch. When he straightened and strode into the portal which fronted the stairwell, the stallion pricked black ears and followed.

At the base of the stair, Asandir asked a permission. He spoke the true Name for his horse. The stallion whickered as though in reply, and stone responded, yielding up its fast secret.

An arched doorway melted into what had apparently been a seamless marble wall.

Beyond lay Althain Tower’s snug stable, and an underground passage mazed with spelled gates that led to the fells outside. Aware he was home, the stallion shouldered eagerly over the threshold. The portal was guarded. Paravians had laid wards through the grain of the stonework. Life and movement awoke the soft sheeting flare of those latent powers. A misty light winnowed the animal’s form as though testing each hair one by one. Despite mild appearance, the spell was not harmless.

Had the horse still worn saddle or headstall, rope and leather would have instantly incinerated. An ill-set nail in any one shoe would have raised a snapped spark of warning.

Aware his mount’s care had been measured to test his right to admittance, Asandir gave his true Name, then avowed, ‘The black stallion, Isfarenn, stands surety for my given word.’ As many times as this ward had challenged him, the Sorcerer still sucked a bracing breath. Then, in the respectful humility these protections demanded, he followed his horse’s footsteps.

The ward forces combed through him and screened his integrity until he felt scoured from within. Although he experienced no painful discomfort, each nerve in his body was touched. Mind and heart were stripped bare. Paravian wards pierced through all deception, the merciless clarity imbued in their workings a violation of privacy to any creature born human. Asandir harbored no illusion. Had his horse suffered thoughtless harm at his hand, he would stand in peril of his very life.

Yet the proper permissions had been asked and given. Where hardship had taxed man and beast, the stallion Isfarenn had shared his great strength in free-spirited partnership. Asandir received his due grant of entry, untouched except for the festering blisters branded on him through his trials in the grimward.

The horse had already entered the near box stall, which had no door and no chain. Asandir fetched bristle brushes and set about grooming the animal’s rank coat. When the black stud was dry, and sleek as new satin, he shook out fresh straw bedding, doled a generous grain ration, then filled the manger with clover hay.

The horse shook its crest and sighed deep with contentment.

‘Rest as you can,’ the Sorcerer agreed as he drew fresh water from the cistern. ‘The gate to the outdoors is left open for your use. Roll on the downs as you please, but don’t wander. I much doubt we’ll be blessed with the option of staying in comfort at Althain for long.’

The stallion returned a companionable nose butt, then sloshed his filled pail. Asandir rubbed the intelligent, wide forehead. ‘Once again, brother, I thank you.’

On departure, the stallion’s true Name and contentment allowed the Sorcerer’s safe return to the stairwell. While the arch faded away at his back, he swayed. Aching weariness dragged at his balance. Any bare-handed contact with grimwards wrought havoc. The insidious distortions of drake-dreams and the rip currents of primal chaos left a toll of leaching damage. The Sorcerer sensed the entropic tears laced through the ribbon-thin layers of his aura: the gadfly swarm of imbalanced energy required rest and patience to repair.

He steeled his worn spirit. Faced by the sure prospect of a swift return to the field, Asandir gathered Isfarenn’s grimed tack. The saddlebags collected from the focus-chamber floor burdened his shoulder like lead. Since his life, and the world’s fate, might come to hinge on his readied state of preparedness, the gear must be overhauled straightaway.

Fatigue made the stair interminably steep. Asandir paused between risers. He closed stinging eyes and, in iron fortitude, pressed his overfaced body to move on. Deadly languor enveloped him. He acknowledged the mental spur of alarm, and knew he would have to keep moving. The convoluted works of Eckracken’s haunt had taxed him beyond prudent limits.

‘For grace, and Ath’s mercy,’ he murmured.

A miracle answered. The burden of cinder-scorched harness was lifted out of his arms.

‘In truth, Ath’s mercy walks beside you, everlasting,’ a voice greeted in gentle encouragement.

Asandir opened the leaden weight of his eyelids. Washed in a dazzle of soft, golden light, he made out the white-robed presence of two adepts of Ath’s Brotherhood, one male, who took charge of the horse gear, and the other, a tiny, walnut-skinned woman, who extended a strong grip to brace him.

‘Welcome home.’ Her smile held the fire of a Sanpashir sunrise, replete with the promise of renewal.

Asandir took her hand in unabashed need. Gratitude filled his heart. Speechless, he bowed his silver head, and allowed her to tow his rangy frame up the long spiral staircase.

A wooden tub of heated water awaited in the chamber Sethvir kept to accommodate guests. Asandir had no chance to express thanks or show relief for that tender forethought. Met by lit candles and the fragrance of incense, he found himself accosted at the threshold by two more white-robed adepts. While the one with his trail gear hastened purposefully off, the new pair moved in without fuss to remove his scarred leathers and soiled clothing.

‘Allow us,’ urged the desertbred woman, whose tenacious grip resisted his urge to tug free. ‘We were told you would thread Eckracken’s maze, and leave the grimward by direct passage.’

In fact, expediency had demanded the Fellowship’s field Sorcerer to do just that, his risky transfer accomplished by harnessing the dire vortex within the king drake’s leviathan skull. Asandir found he lacked the strength to muster the courtesy to press the adepts for his privacy. ‘Sethvir knows everybody’s habits too well,’ he agreed, stoic as the woman’s neat touch eased off his singed shirt.

He was less able to mask his sharp flinch as the cloth scraped the blisters raised by rained cinders across his shoulders and arms. ‘My dear, you know that hot water’s going to sting like the eight blazes of Sithaer.’

The adept clicked her tongue and stepped back, leaving her male fellows to unlace the Sorcerer’s smallclothes. ‘The water is necessary to soothe your torn aura. We can reweave the ripped pattern fastest through that element. Unless you would rather be patient and rest?’ Her laughter was liquid and silver, dancing antidote to Asandir’s ripe flush. ‘I’d thought not. If you wish to recover and ride out by dawn, you’ll just have to sting, with our help.’

‘How many of your Brotherhood have transferred to Althain?’ Asandir asked, the concern in his tone gruffly testy.

‘Six.’ The female adept fetched cloth and soap, while her male henchmen helped his reeling step over the tub’s rim and through the unpleasant shock of immersion. ‘Bide and let go. Your colleague Sethvir is not left unattended. You shall receive a full summary of events just as soon as you regain your vitality.’

A scant hour later, refreshed and restored, Asandir dressed in a clean shirt and dark tunic, and his least-mended set of spare riding leathers. Neatly shaven, his hair a silver cascade on broad shoulders, he mounted Althain Tower’s worn stair to pay a visit to the king’s chamber. He went at the urgent behest of the adepts, before he looked in on Sethvir. Only the white-robed lady accompanied him. By time-honored custom, if the querent was male, a woman stood spokesman to reflect the balance inherent in Ath’s creation.

‘Sethvir is too taxed to share what he sees through direct link with his earth-sense,’ she explained, her peppery accent spiking echoes throughout the drafty shaft of the stairwell. She wore her hood raised, the entwined ciphers of silver and gold casting soft radiance about her. ‘Although in grace, our Brotherhood cannot use power to alter the way of the world, we can reflect the shape of events with the clarity of Ath’s truth.’ Arrived on the landing, she lifted the wrought-iron door latch. ‘Go in. Behold the picked scenes Sethvir left in trust for you. As I can, I will answer your questions.’

Asandir reached out, gathered her sun-browned fingers into a hand as capable and callused as a laborer’s. ‘Dear lady, you’ve all done enough. I am grateful.’ His understated touch as he ushered her aside bespoke an ironclad dignity. He was himself, his core power leashed to a presence as enduring as seamed granite. Wholly autonomous, he pushed back the oak door and entered the chamber himself.

The adept bent her head in frank homage as he passed, then trailed him inside and lit the wax tapers in the claw-footed candelabra.

The glow enriched the gold grain of the curly maple paneling.

A Cildorn carpet mellowed the plank floor, its vivid dyes muted before the jeweled silk of the heraldic king’s banners. Despite vibrant colors, the chamber felt cold. No fire burned in the hearth. The scrolled, ebon pilasters and marble-topped mantel gleamed untrammeled by dust, and the high, lancet windows wore the seal of deep night. Stabbed through the perfume of citrus-oil polish, the still air gave off the uncanny, frost tang of magic.

Now wary, Asandir approached the massive ebony table, with its pedestals of standing, paired lions. His step skirted the empty oak chairs with their chased-ivory finials. Braced to neutrality, he leaned on spread hands and surveyed the circular pane of smoked glass Ath’s adepts had placed on the tabletop. A sparrow perched on a chairback took wing and eerily vanished. A field mouse sat upright on tucked hind legs, whiskers pricked and attentive, while overhead its archenemy, the horned owl, blinked in disinterest from a settled roost in the rafters. Asandir showed no surprise. Such visitations occurred wherever Ath’s adepts engaged a portal to tap the prime life chord.

‘The glass holds those events Althain’s Warden deemed important,’ the lady ventured, her near presence casting a more refined light than common candleflame warranted. She perched on the seat nearest the black-and-silver leopard standard of Rathain, while Asandir, standing, absorbed the grim scenes gathered within the spelled glass.

He saw Kharadmon, far afield in the void between stars, spinning spell after spell of deflection to divert an influx of wraiths bound from Marak. ‘Mercy on us,’ he murmured in blanched shock. ‘The worst has begun. What other ill news will you show me?’

Patient, the adept waited until Asandir had steeled his nerve to move on.

Next, the glass gave him sight of Luhaine’s discorporate presence, guarding the damaged wards which secured Desh-thiere’s prison at Rockfell. He awaited two others: Dakar and Fionn Areth turned their mounts loose and labored on foot through the arduous southwest passage across the white-crowned range of the Skyshiels.

He saw Arithon s’Ffalenn, asleep, huddled in a thicket; then armed companies from five cities converging on Daon Ramon, their purpose to bring war to the ancient ruin of Ithamon.

Farther south, the Master Spellbinder Verrain stood vigil at Mirthlvain Swamp. Methspawn stirred and fought beneath winter ice, feeding one on another in bloodthirsty eagerness for the release to come with the spring thaws. Traithe had left Vastmark with intent to assist him, but a flood on River Ippash would delay him.

Tension blanched Asandir’s knuckles to scarred ivory against the jet grain of old ebony. ‘We have no hand free to send,’ he despaired, while in the glass, the events tied to Methisle streamed into the next change of scene. In northern Tysan, where Westwood’s fringes thinned into a patchwork of hamlets, marauding Khadrim gorged upon the charred corpses of a trapper and his close family. ‘Does this sequence get any worse?’

The adept held her counsel, aggrieved in compassion, while another view bloomed and burned across the dark face of the glass…

In the High Priest’s chamber at Avenor, under furtive cover of night, the velvet curtains were drawn to hide the gleam of late-burning candles. There, a clandestine meeting commenced between Cerebeld and Lord Koshlin, Guild Master of Erdane, now appointed as his mayor’s delegate to serve the city’s close interests.

‘I’ve maintained the appearance of keeping my Lord Mayor’s instructions, and done your will without compromise,’ the sly man complained. ‘At every turn, I’ve thwarted the princess’s inquiries into the death of her predecessor. Her Grace has been diverted from finding the truth so many times, she’s justly begun to suspect my obstruction. Her trust is withdrawn. You must realize that leaves me exposed. At all costs, I can’t risk the loss of respect should the mayor, her father, hear of her reservations.’

‘I see that cost might prove a touch high,’ Cerebeld agreed, his purposeful attitude undaunted. ‘Therefore, we shall at one stroke change the princess’s distrust to subservience.’ He arose, crossed his chamber, and opened a locked chest. Gold rings glinted as he withdrew a sealed parchment. ‘You shall give the lady the proof that she seeks: incontrovertible evidence that her predecessor’s death was no suicide.’

Koshlin’s saturnine features went slack. ‘Proof?’

Cerebeld’s suave manner made his scrubbed skin seem a mask of polished enamel. ‘Proof, in the form of the sealed confession of the marksman whose shot sliced the rope. Lady Talith did not jump, but attempted escape on the hour she plunged to her death.’

‘Volatile paper,’ Lord Koshlin said. ‘You dare much, to risk having her murder made public.’

‘On the contrary.’ Cerebeld riffled the document, nonplussed. ‘The incumbent princess is distressed over her young son’s assignment to ride with the field patrol. Desperation and motherhood make her mood unpredictable. Her Grace might try something regrettable. I want Ellaine cowed. She’ll see how the last princess became a dead pawn, but not know the faction responsible. Fear will gag her questions. And where can this paper be taken, or shown, outside of her private chambers? She can’t leave Avenor. Her guards and her handmaids are mine, every one. Her husband’s kept his private distance since the heir’s birth. The lady has no champion to pursue her sad cause. If you stay discreet, she’ll have little choice but to retire in terrified silence.’

‘Merciful Ath!’ Asandir mused aloud. His seamed face turned grim as a scarp of chipped granite, while far off, in the High Priest’s closed chamber, the sealed parchment quietly changed hands.

Then the glass shifted scenes to reveal the tents of an Alliance patrol, horses and men encamped on the icy banks of River Melor.

‘Sethvir has divined a threat to Prince Kevor, of course,’ the Sorcerer said as his sharp glance encompassed the gold star banner flying amid the camp’s standards. The blue field displayed the heraldic crown, proclaiming the presence of the blood royal among the routine, armed cavalcade.

‘That boy’s trueborn to his s’Ilessid ancestry.’ Asandir saw clear warning, that the endowment of that line’s gifted justice might lead the boy to a disastrous confrontation with the pack of Khadrim seeding havoc and terror in Westwood.

‘Time I went to Sethvir,’ the Sorcerer announced. As the ominous record left in the glass subsided back into blankness, the silver-gray eyes raised to meet Ath’s adept were recast to the glint of forged steel. ‘If aught’s to be done, the choice must be aired well before the lane tide rises at daybreak.’

The oak door sighed open and revealed velvet darkness. Silence greeted Asandir on the threshold of Sethvir’s private quarters. The deep quiet bestowed no feeling of calm, but instead enfolded him like suffocation. The embrace of the air on his skin was too warm. Though the medicinal smell of sweet herbs was not cloying, every sense jangled warning he intruded upon something more than a sickroom.

‘He’s grown worse?’ the field Sorcerer inquired of the adept who kept ceaseless vigil by the entry.

The gentle, aged woman turned back her hood. Her lined face a mapwork of patience, she said, ‘The Warden feels no pain, nor is he unconscious. Though he might seem asleep, his state of suspension is dreamless. You may need to use Name to recall him.’

Asandir swallowed, for a moment not trusting the strength of his voice. ‘Do candles disturb him?’

‘Unshielded ones, yes.’ Wise in her way, the adept said no more, but let Asandir enter the chamber by mage-sight. Ever so gently, she closed the oak panel to grant him full measure of privacy.

Left in darkness, his guidance the smoke-haze of spirit light, Asandir made his unerring way to the bedside. Sethvir rested amid the combed billows of his beard, the gnarled, clean hands abandoned on the coverlet too far removed from splashed inkpots and mischievous life. Ath’s adepts had surpassed expectations in their meticulous care for him. The torn fissures in Sethvir’s aura were reknit, the spindled gold halo without any shadow of seam. If the glow was too scant, its radiance dwindled, the cause would be Sethvir’s willed choice. Minute to minute, he still poured out his vital forces for causes of perilous necessity.

Asandir paused. Upset by the pressures that demanded intrusion, he still groped for right words when a thready whisper arose from amid the piled pillows.

‘Asandir? Is that you?’

The Sorcerer dropped to one knee. Through mangling emotion, he managed a reply. ‘I am here. Say which grimward needs attending.’

The answer came back like a stab to the heart. ‘There are five, but of those, Alqwerik’s by Athir’s most pressing.’

‘I’ll leave on the dawn lane tide,’ Asandir promised, then drew a quick breath. ‘No, please. Don’t speak. The adepts kept their promise. I saw the unpleasant news left for me in the glass.’ He need not belabor the obvious conflict, that of the multiple crises revealed, none could take precedence over the threat of even one distressed grimward. If the worst happened, and the flawed wards at Rockfell escaped Luhaine’s vigilant guardianship, or if the wraiths questing from Marak slipped past Kharadmon’s mazed defenses, there would be no way left on Ath’s earth to recall him. No contact from Althain could cross through a drake-dream, even one spun by the ghost of a creature whose bones lay three Ages dead.

Hedged by the perils that closed on all sides, Asandir said in dire humor, ‘If I meet disaster upon my return, at least I’ll stand warned beforetime. You should rest.’

The stirred movement fanning through loose wisps of beard evinced Sethvir’s harrowed sigh. ‘No rest. Did you see? Davien’s shade has left the refuge he built in the caverns beneath Kewar Tunnel.’

‘Why should that surprise me? All else in creation seems ripe to breed chaos.’ Just as troubled by thought of Davien’s obscure motives, Asandir changed the subject. ‘I saw that you fear for Prince Kevor’s safety.’

‘Worse,’ Sethvir breathed in soft sorrow.

‘Cerebeld wants him dead, that was glaringly plain.’ Asandir leaned in close, elbow braced on the mattress. The other hand flexed to a fist on his knee, with his frown graven deep as worn leather. ‘Beset as we are, who could stand by to help?’

‘Ath’s hostel at Northstrait lies along the first lane,’ Sethvir pointed out, too enervated to be less abstruse.

Asandir weighed the statement, well aware that the Warden’s checkered thoughts masked disarmingly shrewd ingenuity. ‘Do you imply what I think?’ Sharply fast to grasp strategy, the field Sorcerer clarified, ‘You believe we could give Lysaer’s heir a spelled talisman?’

Sethvir’s eyes opened, heavy-lidded. To mage-sight, in darkness, their color shone an eerie, serene aqua that reflected a sense of vast distance. Asandir, watching, felt a bolt of black fear strike straight through him. Never before this had he seen breathing life so closely mirror the infinite. ‘Tell me in words. You need grounding. I can hope speech will help.’

‘The rock, chastising air?’ The ghost of a smile turned Sethvir’s lips as he struggled to meet the demand. ‘I’d hoped the same plan might be used to spare Arithon, but the adepts refused me the use of a talisman as a bridge. They perceive very well that his Grace of Rathain’s become too fated a cipher.’

‘No hostels remain active in Daon Ramon, anyway. Who else could have handled the problem?’ Asandir hooked a footstool, dragged it close to the cot, and assumed the unlikely perch. His lean length of limb and innate balance lent him the hunch of a wing-folded heron. ‘If Prince Arithon was refused, what grounds would grant an appeal for a boy not brought up to honor the old ways? Why should Ath’s Brotherhood offer their sanctuary to safeguard Kevor s’Ilessid?’

‘I can’t promise they would.’ Sethvir’s brow furrowed. ‘But suppose we created a talisman stone, imprinted with spells based in parallel with the powers that rule the scrying glass in the king’s chamber. Say it was delivered by a messenger who would not be heard, unless the young prince showed the honesty of his blood heritage.’

‘You mean, test him?’ Asandir leaned forward, braced on crossed forearms. The idea had merit. Heirship was sanctioned along similar guidelines. ‘If Kevor has the bare-bones humility to hear truth, and honors his heart ahead of the mores of his upbringing, I catch your drift.’

Sethvir’s eyes closed, his flesh like worn parchment beaten by storm to its craggy template of bone. ‘We could at least be sure the adepts at the hostel were made aware of his fate. Their compassion would mark his innocence, even if for a moment.’

‘But a moment might suffice.’ Lifted beyond pity by a glimmer of hope, Asandir traced the complex thread of logic himself. In extremity and need, the young prince might raise enough emotion and desire to engage the innate talent of his ancestry.

Given the birthright of s’Ahelas descent, in theory, Kevor could tap that stream of raw power himself.

‘Assuming that boy’s gift is strong enough.’ In desperation, or extreme pain, he might unwittingly waken his own talent and tear through the veil into mystery. If so, conscious forces pooled within the sanctuary might answer and draw him to safety. A desperate long shot. Asandir shook his head. ‘Even if all those unlikely conditions were met, you know, in the hands of Ath’s Brotherhood, we must lose him.’

Althain’s Warden dredged up his reply, whisper faint. ‘We’ve already lost him, entangled as he is in town politics and the thorns of Avenor’s false doctrine. At best, through a talisman, Lysaer’s son might be given a slim chance to claim his redemption. Would you lay the conjury into the stone as a boon, done for me?’

‘You’ve already culled a volunteer messenger? Since I won’t have to ride the west trade road in winter, I’ll have the work done before daybreak.’ Asandir gathered the limp hands which rested in disarray on the blanket, then gave back his firm reassurance. ‘One of the river pebbles you’ve cached in the library will surely be willing to give us the necessary service.’

He arose on the promise he would bid farewell ahead of his departure at dawn.

Yet before he could go, the outer door cracked. A female adept he had not seen earlier asked her permission to enter. ‘A message has come from our hostel in the Skyshiels.’

Asandir straightened, half-braced. ‘More bad news from the east?’

The adept shook her head. ‘Rest easy, no. The Warden’s desire was met. One of our Brotherhood went to Elaira. Her spell quartz has been sent to her peeress, uncleared.’ Which meant the order was not yet the wiser for the fact the imprinted longevity bindings on the enchantress’s life had been supplanted by Fellowship crafting.

Asandir stood, eyes shut through a moment of welling gratitude. Then he regarded his prostrate colleague and sensed the frail but mischievous encouragement sent by thought across the blanketing darkness. Sparked into hope too fierce to be guarded, he dared to frame the bold question. ‘You had an adept make contact with Elaira?’

‘Better still,’ the adept ventured, unoffended by his insolence.

‘By morning, the enchantress intends to set off for our hostel in the mountains by Eastwall.’

‘But that’s brilliant!’ His turbulent gaze still fixed on Sethvir, Asandir pondered the startling range of changed impact. Jubilation broke through his most solemn restraint. ‘You’re a fiendish, hard taskmaster. Why else would you hold the cheerful gossip for last?’

A hitched sigh of cloth, as Sethvir stirred under his mantle of comforters. ‘You know why.’ Any one of the quandaries left mapped in glass could cancel out hope at a stroke. ‘The adepts will explain what has passed with Elaira. Did you want our pacts renewed with the earth sprites who tend the lower dungeon gate spells? Then leave me in peace. Or your black stud won’t stand saddled and waiting by the circle on the hour you take leave for Athir.’

Winter 5670

Couriers

Covered by night in the forest of Halwythwood, a clan rider leaps from a steaming mare, bearing urgent word from the north. ‘Morvain’s got a war host on the march in Daon Ramon, and headhunters ride out of Narms, led by Lysaer s’Ilessid himself. Find a fast horse and a rider double quick. Lord Jieret must be told he’s going to receive swarms of unwanted company at Ithamon…’

Two hours before dawn, Asandir twines talisman spells like fired ribbon between layers of a water-smoothed bit of quartz; once the power coils in balance at the heart of the pebble, he sets his work into concealment with a blessing rune drawn in Paravian, then places the construct on the windowsill, where an owl swoops down on silent wings, then flies off with the stone clutched in needle-sharp talons…

In the royal suite of Avenor’s state palace, Lord Koshlin bows, ending his private audience with Princess Ellaine, and moved to pity by her terrified pallor, advises: ‘Your Grace, the contents of that document are too damaging to set into a letter. I recommend that you burn the evidence at once, and trust me to bear word of the sensitive issue back to your father in Erdane…’

Winter 5670

V.

Spinner of Darkness

Morning broke over the Eltair coast, savaged in the black teeth of yet another onshore gale. This pelting storm struck days after the Koriani enchantress, Elaira, took her courage in hand and set forth to seek sanctuary with Ath’s adepts. By then, Arithon s’Ffalenn sheltered in the ramshackle cabin of a fur trader who set traplines in the remote Skyshiel uplands. His host was a solitary, half-breed clansman who had pulled him, unconscious, from a snowdrift.

On the subject of harboring dangerous fugitives, the huge man proved cross-grained as pig iron. ‘Won’t see a man needy, and not take him in. You want to march out and die of the elements? Then say so. I’ll show you a knife-edged cliff to fall off that’ll save needless bother and suffering.’

Two armed parties from Jaelot broached his glen. Their harrying, rude search of his humble dwelling did not change his adamant generosity. He hunted as usual, leaving Arithon the tools and new planks to repair the smashed wood of his doorjamb. The traplines replenished his ransacked larder. His rice and his millet he stored elsewhere to foil rats, and the only living creatures he refused to show welcome had hooves and smelled like horse.

The tough gelding and two extra mounts claimed as spoils from pursuers sent to grief in the Baiyen were turned loose to graze in the deep valleys. From the hour that Arithon regained the strength to stand upright, they were thrown fodder and grain from the store left by Jaelot’s decimated supply train. Today’s whiteout blizzard just made that necessity harder to carry out.

The valley cleft where the herd of three sheltered was silted chest deep in fine snow. The horses huddled, tail to wind, in a fir copse, visible only if a man knew where to seek them. Arithon doled out their daily ration and chipped the balled ice from their hooves. Then he faced back the way he had come, barraged by the hags’ chorus of weather. He was well clad against the assault, given leggings sewn from second-rate pelts and a hooded bear coat from the trapper. Underneath, he still wore his own fine tunic and hose, torn and repaired many times, but still prized, since silk retained the warmth under furs in peerless comfort. He carried a bow, and tinder, and sharp steel, small precautions that counted in a Skyshiel gale, when cloud and relentless snowfall mantled the high peaks, and strength and experience lent no guarantee in the brute fight to maintain survival.

Arithon plowed through a drift, the track he had broken scarcely minutes before already erased by the screaming wind. Through the worst gusts, he paused, blind and deafened. The most trail-wise of men could lose his bearings amid such extreme conditions. A wrong turn could drop him over a precipice, or send him sliding down the cleft of a ravine. Nor did he care to stumble headlong into an armed party of guardsmen.

Ruled by raw nerves and wary care, he slipped under the heaped boughs of a fir copse. Snow funneled in hissing currents around boles scoured clean of summer moss. The high-country weather spared nothing living; browsing deer had pruned the low-hanging branches, and the lichens that clawed out a lee-side existence wore hoarfrost feathers of ice. Here, deadfalls might lurk under covering snow, the stubbed ends of snapped limbs poised like spikes to pierce through a boiled-hide boot sole, or twist an ankle on an incautious step. Arithon carried a staff for safe footing, and a hand compass in a bronze case.

A gust moaned and built to a shrieking crest. Arithon sheltered his face in his hood through a flaying barrage of sheared ice. He poised while the storm’s ferocity relented, as acutely aware as wild prey that the eye of the hunter would be drawn to movement. Sound reached him, instead, the chiming ring of clashed steel, broken by distant shouts. Then he caught the taint of smoke, borne down the length of the valley.

‘Merciful Ath!’ Arithon burst into a flat run, not back toward the horses, but ahead, in a sliding, tree-dodging charge that led toward the fur trapper’s cabin.

He could make no speed. The deep drifts and precarious, iced footing combined with blinding snowfall to slow him. The healing scar on his wrist bound free movement as he cast off his staff and clawed the strung bow from his shoulder. More clumsy, the right hand: the canker left by Fionn Areth’s sword thrust still oozed and bled through its tightly strapped dressing. Despite tendons that throbbed in fiery pain, and the swelling of traumatized tissues, Arithon groped for an arrow.

The tang of smoke thickened. Then the baritone voice he knew as the trapper’s climbed into a shredding scream. Arithon plowed ahead, fatally slowed by the uncertain ice of a streamlet. Too late, he knew as the cry shifted pitch. However he sprinted, three hundred yards and a dense copse of fir still separated him from the clearing. He drove himself onward, a punishing effort marked by searing breaths of chill air. Once inside the trees, the low branches hampered him. He fretted, inwardly cursing the care he must take to avoid the whipcrack report of snapped sticks. Each delay cost dearly. Smoke now rolled uphill in charcoal billows, acrid with the resins of burned pine logs. Men called and laughed, and a jangle of bit rings chimed through the covering forest.

Arithon worked his way downward in sangfroid awareness that even one rolling snow clod would serve warning and set Jaelot’s reivers upon him. The crackle of flame and a fanned gust of heat told him the cabin was burning beyond salvage. Past the trees, a horse snorted. An officer shouted a command, then wheeled his mount and trotted across the clearing. Through the snow-draped fringe of the firs, Arithon saw flurried movement as six more riders clambered astride and bunched back into ragged formation.

‘Make that wretch sing like a lark as he dies!’ someone called. The small column wheeled and moved on down the draw.

Arithon used the masking noise of their departure to close the last steps to the edge of the fir copse. Knelt down behind a thin screening of branches, he took stock.

The one-room log shack was a mass of gold flame, the roof timbers a sagging scrim of smudged embers. Amid trampled snow, splashed scarlet and pink, two men knelt over another, stretched prone. One pinned the trapper’s roped wrists in restraint. The other set to with bare hands and a gore-drenched long knife, to a grunting jerk of agony from the victim. A third man stood guard, thumbs jammed in his sword belt.

‘Where is he?’ questioned the tormentor, his wet fist and blade on a questing course over bloodied, quivering flesh. ‘Tell us, and your agony can be ended at once.’

‘I trap animals, not princes,’ came the ragged reply. ‘I don’t know any royalty.’

‘Pity, then,’ said the knifeman, unaware of the eyes that watched from the wood, or the hand which nocked patient arrow to bowstring and released in the lull between gusts.

Arithon’s shaft took the standing guard through the throat. The man clawed once, coughing blood, then toppled.

‘Bowman!’ The brute wielding the knife jerked erect, then dived flat, unsure where in the trees the attacker lurked in ambush.

His companion was a half second slow to react. The next arrow ripped through his abdomen. He sprawled, screaming, over the legs of the trapper, who jackknifed and kicked out. A brutal strike with a hobnailed boot smashed the gut-shot man in the skull.

Arithon nocked a third shaft, but spoiled the release as the bowstring ripped from his lamed fingers. Before he could draw again, the wind blew a veil of snow over the clearing. The knifeman snatched his moment, and charged. His scrambling plunge into the fir thicket was met by the black steel of Alithiel, wielded with left-handed, lethal precision in a thrust through the solar plexus.

‘Damn you to the joys of Dharkaron’s Black Chariot!’ Arithon set his foot on the twitching corpse, yanked his streaming blade free, and ended the man’s ugly, whistling shrieks with a mangling slash through the throat.

Bow and sword still in hand, he thrashed out of the tree line and slid to his knees in the rucked snow next to the trapper. ‘They’re dead. Be still.’ He raised his blade, cut the black-and-gold surcoat off the guard’s corpse, and used Jaelot’s lion to stanch the flow of the bone-deep gash in the thigh of the man who had given him shelter.

‘Say I won’t lose my leg, and that you’re not royal,’ the wounded man gasped through locked teeth.

‘You won’t lose the leg,’ the Shadow Master assured, then cursed the unhealed scabs that marred his accustomed dexterity.

An interval passed, while the wind screamed and buffeted. Arithon packed a compress of snow over the knifeman’s unspeakable handiwork. The injured man shivered and moaned at his touch, unstrung by shock and suffering. ‘Just say you’re not royal!’ he hissed through blind agony.

Arithon stayed silent, but in relentless efficiency bundled him into another dead enemy’s mantle. The trapper stared upward into a face of black hair and green eyes set in steep, angled features. ‘If so, damn you, man! You should never have come back. Your vengeful spree of slaughter can’t help but draw notice.’

Arithon laughed with an edge like smashed crystal. ‘Ath, I hope so!’ His tone more chill than the storm’s, he added, ‘By my name and ancestry, may I never condone such an act of extortion and cruelty!’

In anguish, again, ‘Say you’re not s’Ffalenn born!’

Arithon paused, rinsed in gold light by the flames, now chewed through the cabin’s four walls. He evaded, ‘There’s truth to the claim I’m a bastard.’

‘Go, get out.’ The huge trapper cried out at the delicate probe of the fingers that explored his gashed abdomen. ‘I’m a dead man. As a healer who’s seen wounds, you know this.’

Arithon shook his head, tied the stripped cuff lace and torn shirt into another snow compress.

Between dizzy bouts of pain the trapper gasped argument. ‘Those vultures from Jaelot are witched men, I swear, with your Grace bound as someone’s prized quarry. It’s unnatural. As many times as my cabin’s been searched, they come back. They’re out in a gale in the Skyshiels, pure folly! Even a pack of fell fiends out of Sithaer would have long since turned tail and gone home.’

‘Well, they haven’t discovered your root cellar yet.’ Arithon applied pressure to close a slashed vein. ‘My hand has scarred over. I’ve just proved I can hunt. Your traplines should not be beyond me.’

‘Are you listening?’ The trapper’s weakened struggles did nothing to curb the care taken to stanch the blood flow leaking from his mauled organs. ‘I can’t survive.’ He added the list, in graphic, hard logic, of the inexorable course of a stomach cut.

‘Your fate seals my conscience,’ Arithon agreed. Then, stilled and grave, his words chisel-punched through the crackle of flame, he swore the oath of sovereign prince to bound liegeman. ‘For the gift of feal duty, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath. Dharkaron witness.’ He knotted the compress, then finished, ‘You didn’t betray me.’

The trapper turned away his gruff, bearded face, unprepared, and embarrassed to be touched to sentiment. ‘Don’t mistake your importance, prince. I wouldn’t give Jaelot’s dogs a stripped bone.’

‘I don’t leave them my wounded,’ said the Prince of Rathain. He arose, yanked the cloak off the third corpse, and breathed a blessing to Ath’s grace as he found the trapper slipped beyond consciousness. At least that small mercy would spare him the torment of being moved in the sling of a drag litter.

Three days later, the fur trapper used his last, labored breaths and named his next of kin to his prince: an uncle who ranged with Earl Jieret’s clans in Halwythwood, and a married daughter settled with a cooper in Eastwall. ‘’Twas my grandame who said I’d die tended by royalty. She had clan lineage, and with that, the born gift of Sight.’ A long pause, then the afterthought, trailed off in self-damning irony. ‘Though I thought these mountains were as far as a man got from the finicky habits of princes.’

Arithon gathered the slack, cooling hand, his touch firm through the wracking spasms. ‘My finicky habits don’t run to court ceremony. But that doesn’t explain the big-hearted trust that stood ground under torture to spare me.’

‘Thank grandame for that,’ gasped the trapper, eyes closed. ‘She said I would choose if the prince who called down Dharkaron’s Black Spear died beside me.’

‘You failed nothing and no one,’ Arithon assured, though remorse all but choked him from speech. ‘I could name you hero, gild a plaque in your memory that proclaims the cornerstone for a crown will stand on the strength of your sacrifice. But the truth casts down rhetoric. A man who holds hospitality sacred is worth much more to the land than a king.’

For answer, an unearthly sweet smile touched lips already blued to corpse pallor. ‘Long life, and my blessing. The Fellowship Sorcerers are right to restore you.’