Kitabı oku: «The Wars of Light and Shadow»

Late Autumn–Winter 5653

III.

Caithwood

The sealed orders from Avenor reached the small settlement known as Watercross in the shortened days of late autumn. There, the river route through Ilswater intersected the trade road that spanned Caithwood, linking Valenford to Quarn and the southern seaports of Tysan. Built at the threshold of the ancient stand of forest, the massive old land bridge, with its mossy stone pilings, spanned the river in the elegant arches which bespoke the masterful skill of centaur masons. Since the departure of the Paravians, mankind had made free with the axe. Five inns clustered by the verge, a congested accretion of multiple wings of timber raised three storeys high. These were fronted by a commodious barge dock, and boasted between them a post stable and a prosperous smithy. The streetside cluster of shops fanned into a disordered tangle of clapboard cottages, each with a cow and a garden patch. The steadings were inhabited by the families of serving girls who had married rivermen or drovers, and raised sprawling families whose lifeblood was tuned to the movement of commerce.

The summer’s campaign to suppress Caithwood’s clansmen had spurred wider change. The inns were jammed to screaming capacity, each room and attic housing crown officers and stockpiles of perishable supplies. In response to demand, every Watercross resident had rented out bedrooms and haylofts at extortionist prices, then relocated their displaced and bickering offspring in the crannies of pantries and woodsheds. Talk of new building abounded, while tents and picket lines crowded the riverbank, and more timber fell to clear acreage. Amid the chewed ends of stumps and the trodden, pocked earth quilted over with flame-bright swatches of fallen leaves, the orderly tents of an Alliance encampment nestled into the river’s south bank. Its hub of command was a sagging board building that, in springtime, had served as a pig shack.

The sow and her farrow had long since graced the pot. Under the damp thatch that had been their last shelter, Etarra’s Lord Harradene snapped off his gloves and stamped the caked mud from his boots. The day officer delivered the most urgent news through the noise of his jangling impatience, while a gesture saw the wrapped packets of dispatches accepted by his breathless equerry. Harradene stilled as he heard the reports. His cliff-edged frown stayed quarried in place as he learned that the camp north of Caithwood had withdrawn in disorder back to Valenford.

‘No, don’t repeat that,’ he snapped. ‘I heard damn all the first time. Puling ninnies, every milk-nosed captain who let his company turn tail. Fact’s known well enough. Fellowship conjury never kills.’ He slapped the royal writ on the trestle with the maps and glowered at his ring of cringing officers. ‘I don’t care horse apples if some fools have fled from a display of arcane posturing! Your prince wants a fire. Therefore, this stand of wood’s going to burn! We’re driving clan dogs out of hiding with singed tails, and the crown’s bounties won’t wait for the hindmost.’

Through a spattering of cheers, someone’s raspy question prevailed. ‘Is this wise?’

The boldest of the sergeants appended a protest. ‘The Sorcerer claimed he would waken the trees.’

Lord Commander Harradene spun back, his spiked brows still furrowed, and the shoulders under his sunwheel surcoat bristled as a bear’s before a charge. ‘Oh, did he indeed?’ His rankling, Etarran sarcasm thundered, sifting fine dust from the thatch. ‘And what will that mean, do you think? That hundred-year-old oaks are likely to rise up and walk? That greenwood is going to bear steel?’ He turned in a tight circle, leaving no officer unwithered by his scathing contempt. ‘Is there anyone else present with the brains of a chicken?’

No one spoke or moved. Pent silence expanded like poison, sawn through at a distance by barking dogs and the wailing of some mother’s toddler.

‘Good!’ Lord Harradene slapped the wet ends of his gloves against the dulled mail of his byrnie. ‘Now show me you’ve kept the two bollocks Ath gave a newborn. In one hour, I want ten relays of messengers assembled. They’ll bear my orders the length and breadth of Taerlin. By dawn on the day of the new moon, every man marching in the service of the Light will be in position to torch trees. We’ll have archers in line to take down the flushed clansmen. Hereafter, these roads will be safe enough for a naked virgin to travel unscathed!’

Ahead of all argument, Lord Harradene snarled his ultimatum. ‘Any man who fears trees may turn in his insignia right here, right now, and go home stripped of all honors. Ones who run later, or ones who drag feet will be burned and run through by the sword as no less than Fellowship Sorcerers’ collaborators!’

The pig shack emptied to a stampede of boots, and the last couriers streamed away well ahead of the hour allocated for their departure. Some galloped north and east, mounted upon fast horses and given escort by tried veterans in sunwheel surcoats. Others ducked spray from the oars of swift boats, commandeered from trade service by crown authority. These careened downriver into the wilds, their course sped by the winding ribbon of the Ilswater’s lower branch in its rush to meet the sea estuary.

The trees dripped and brooded in the mist-heavy air. They exhibited no change as their sovereign territory became invaded by the Alliance couriers, who dispersed the written orders for Lord Commander Harradene’s campaign of fire and sword. Their stillness magnified the trepidation of the men, who rode with ears tuned to the wind in the leaves and heard nothing, only autumn’s chorus of dying vegetation as the unmoored foliage chattered and danced in the gusts. In the boats, beneath breaking cloud, sweat-drenched oarsmen watched the shadowed deeps on the bank, prodding at waterbound roots with unease as they moored to make camp for the night.

Yet no living tree displayed any sign of an uncanny movement. The fiery pageant of changed maples unveiled at each bend in the river, their outlines punch-cut and serene. The hollows wore carpets of scarlet and gold, turned by the furtive brush of night’s frosts presaging the advent of winter.

Whatever the Sorcerer Asandir threatened, no Alliance scout’s sharpened vigilance detected anything untoward or amiss. Mice continued to nest in blankets and stores, seeking shelter against the chill; the hunting owls sailed the starry dark, silent and sleek as lapped silk. Days, the hawks circled and called from a blue enameled sky. Geese clamored south in straggling chevrons as they had for time beyond memory. No one saw oak groves tear up roots or talk. If every place a man trod to seek firewood, his steps felt stalked by hidden watchers, that unease more likely stemmed from the clan scouts who shadowed their movements, unseen.

The spate of outrageous speculation peaked and subsided, restored to a general complacency as Lord Harradene’s orders reached the far-flung Alliance encampments, and the days waxed and waned without incident. The rank-and-file troops who occupied the deep wilds were experienced and staunch. They curbed all explosions of foolish hysteria lest they draw in the prankish attention of iyats, the invisible fiends that played living havoc with a man’s kit and gear. Evenings were spent wrapping fire arrows with cotton, or binding oiled rag to pine billets. The casks of pitch and resin that would fuel their brands were drawn from supply, and tallied in readiness for action.

Across Caithwood, the ordered companies marched into position, unmolested beyond the nipped flush of cold fingers and the paned skins of ice on the bogs. No signs appeared of arcane workings. The only change any troop captain could pinpoint was the scarcity of traps set by the lurking bands of clansmen.

‘Well enough, they know when to tuck tail and run,’ dismissed Lord Harradene when the duty officer drew the oddity to his attention. ‘We already know they were warned by that Sorcerer. Should they stay, do you think, just to burn?’

The eve of new moon arrived in due course. Over the jittering light of night campfires, tucked under cloaks against the wind, the archers waxed longbows and cracked bawdy jokes lest the silence be claimed by the rush of tossed leaves, or the bared scrape of oak twigs find voice. Dawn would see all of Caithwood aflame, by the grace of Prince Lysaer’s dispensation. If some men who had families lay awake out of pity for clan children and wives destined to fall in the carnage, Tysan’s headhunters celebrated. Other scarred, grizzled veterans recalled the bloody knives that had dispatched their wounded with no mercy given at Tal Quorin.

‘’Tweren’t natural,’ those whispered. ‘Our wounded all died, throat-cut and choking, done in by the hands of mere boys.’

Two hours before the new moon’s pale dawn, at chosen locations across Caithwood, every man not on watch as a sentry sharpened and readied his weapons. The archers checked arrows and quarrels, and positioned the casks of oil and pitch. No one sensed any flare of worked sorcery. Trees loomed dumb as they always had, amid their shed mantles of leaves. Against black, forest stillness and a nagging, keen chill, troops bolstered their courage with whatever cruel memories could fan their passion for vengeance.

The graying east sky brought a scouring north breeze that promised an auspicious campaign. In the posted positions set forth by Lord Harradene, the most hardened veterans wolfed down cold bread. They teased laggards with jokes as they girded on mail and weapons in the steadily strengthening half-light. By horn call and barked order, they formed ranks and fanned out, the forefront to wield torches and fire arrows, and the rest set at strategic points to intercept whatever might flee from the heart of the lethal conflagration.

‘On time, and no quarter,’ read Harradene’s last orders. The fires would be kindled at sunrise, with no reprieve given for clan prisoners, grown man or woman, child or newborn. The Etarran field troops blew on chilled fingers. They eyed the dense trees, their ink-blown branches entangled against the brightening skyline. The gusts smelled of dead leaves, and cookfires, and oiled metal; ordinary, even surreal before the butchering bloodshed to come. Today, fair retribution for the long string of massacres at Tal Quorin, at Minderl Bay, and at Dier Kenton Vale, each one the design of murdering clan war bands in collusion with the Master of Shadow.

Now came the fierce reckoning for so many dead, and a long-overdue salve for the interests of trade. Caithwood was to be cleansed of barbarians by decree of the Prince of the Light.

The Alliance ranks stilled in the mist-laden gloom, prepared with tinder and steel. They fingered the honed edges on their knives and drew swords; tested the grip on halberd and lance and soothed their restive horses, sweating in anticipation. A long-sought, elusive quarry would be theirs to bring down. The sunwheel banners fluttered in the stiffening north breeze, and the leaves spoke, scratching, against the eaves of the forest.

One moment rushed into the next. Under light turned pearlescent, the eastern sky brightened into a sheer, cloudless citrine. The black borders of Caithwood limned in silhouette, the wind-tossed verge of an ocean of linked trees, their collective awareness and their language dumb noise to more limited human ears. On that poised instant, a Fellowship Sorcerer spoke a word: the Paravian rune that meant one and which tied all things in Ath’s creation into the prime chord of unity.

The next second, the reddened edge of the sun sliced above the horizon.

Illumination speared the heavens. At each of two hundred and eighty locations, Alliance horn calls rang out; the cried order clove through the burn of chill wind, to execute Prince Lysaer’s sealed order. Men steadied drawn steel. Excited fingers grasped flints, began the decisive move to strike sparks and set pitch-soaked arrows and cressets alight.

There came no connection. On one Sorcerer’s word, a wave of awareness crossed time and space, sped fleeting as light on the cognizant tide that passed from one tree to the next. The moment lagged into an unnatural sense of hesitation. The stir of the wind gained a surreal impetus, and the susurrant scratch of dead leaves acquired a magnified roar of wild sound. That nexus of vibration caught the conscious mind and sucked human thought into a whirlpool that overwhelmed all reasoned continuity. No live thing was exempt. The deer ceased their browsing with wide, glassy eyes. Hawks on the branches mantled and blinked, for the moment too muddled for flight. Among the two-legged, whether clansman or soldier, that pause gripped the heart like old roots. Busy purpose made no sense. Logic lost meaning. A peace deep and vast as the slow turn of seasons, the ordered dance of a planet’s annual journey round its star grasped and drowned every shred of animal identity.

For that one given instant, the speech of the trees reigned in smothering supremacy. The staunch patience of fixed roots and the wine taste of sun rinsed warp and weft through the weave of all breathing, warm-blooded awareness. Iron prejudice shattered. Those Alliance-sworn men who were townbred and ignorant now learned what the hawk, and the deer, and the insect had always known, and what Caithwood’s clans kept alive by tradition. Their unbroken, old ways reaffirmed the immutable truth through words that gave thanks, and through timeworn, small rituals which renewed by expression of gratitude. That trees were alive. Their gifts and their bounty might be taken at will. They could be raped and robbed, or they could be acknowledged, a trust of consent sealed in the language of humility, granting each bough and trunk its due recognition for generous sacrifice.

Yet the wisdom of Paravian law had dimmed with the passage of centuries. Men now walked Athera who gave back no such grace. Whether the lapse stemmed from blind carelessness or the vice of acquisitive greed did not matter. The chain-linked communion that was forest discerned no gray shade of distinction. Trees grasped no code but the one that acknowledged the grand chord of Ath’s primal order. They owned no concept to forsake whole awareness for individual separation.

No second was given; no freed train of thought broke the noose for shock or humanborn fear. The vise grip of the dream on men’s minds was unyielding, a crescendo wrought of numbers too massive to deny, each note tuned to urgent communion.

The blow fell, bloodless, in that trampling breadth of vision. Lost in the vast ocean of forbearance that defined the existence of greenwood, the trees’ vision reclaimed hate and violence for peace. Townborn minds stilled and sank into an abiding continuity that frayed sensibility, and awoke a remorse without mercy: of wood cut, unblessed; of saplings uprooted. Each thoughtless twig broken in callous disregard framed a cry of acid-etched clarity. The impact stunned beating hearts like a wound. A day’s pitiless industry, which sought to turn fire and steel to rend life, ripped a chasm of shame through shocked conscience.

Men screamed without voice as the dream of the wood flooded through them and clamped like the embrace of black earth.

There came no reprieve, no concept for pity. Each hand that had moved with intent to strike spark; each arm, to grasp weapons for slaughter; all dropped, limp. Names and identity and meaningful purpose submerged without trace in the flux. What remained was the everlasting communion that passed between root and leaf and spread branch. The peace of the forest seized the mind like fast ice and held with the endurance of centuries.

Determined experience served none in that hour. The strongest and best of drilled veterans gave way, sapped of will and inclination. Any who ventured near Caithwood unprepared, all those who embraced human purpose beyond the encompassing calm of live trees was undone. To the last rank and file, to the most steadfast captain, the Alliance veterans buckled at the knees. They dropped swords and tinder, crumpled like rags, or slipped reins through slack hands and toppled off startled horses. When the messengers came riding from Watercross to inquire, they found Lord Commander Harradene’s troops felled to a man, sprawled comatose on the cold ground.

Flurried searches confirmed: not one Alliance supporter inside Caithwood was left standing. Nor did the camp servants who lurked on the fringes remain in command of their wits. Dazed, even weeping, they forgot their own names, while livestock and woods creatures raided their supplies, and their oxen browsed loose through the brush.

How the clans fared, no city man knew, since no one saw hide nor hair of them.

In the depths of a glen, ankle deep in red oak leaves, Asandir lifted long, lean fingers from the bark of the ancient patriarch that ruled Caithwood. He murmured a run of liquid, sweet syllables, a blessing framed in the tongue of the vanished Paravians.

Clear of eye, his mind and his purpose vised to ruthless alignment, he stepped back from the tree whose compliance had keyed a whole forest’s salvation. Subtle as shadow in his featureless leathers, he traversed drifted leaves with a step like a wraith’s and retrieved the tied reins of his horse. He tightened the animal’s slack girth and remounted. Two hours’ ride through the breezy afternoon brought him to a clearing in a glen, where he met the eldest in the circle of clan chieftains who maintained their caithdein’s guard over Caithwood.

Cenwaith was a great-grandmother, wizened, but not frail. Tiny hands with the weathered grain of burled walnut clutched a bronze-studded quarterstaff. By the scars crisscrossing her knuckles, she had wielded weapons throughout a hard lifetime. Her jacket of fox fur blended her diminutive form amid the changed leaves of the maples.

‘How long?’ she asked him, her voice the aged quaver of water-smoothed stone, rinsed by a tumbling brook.

Asandir paused, his gaze turned to flint beneath a fringe of dark lashes. ‘Days. Maybe five, before the first caravan from the south can use the road without leaving prone bodies. No man bearing steel will escape, even then.’ He brushed a caught leaf from his hair and firmed the reins to stall his inquisitive horse from nipping the sleeve of his shirt. ‘No victim will suffer, rest assured of that much. The awareness of trees regards time very differently. Lysaer’s troops who fell senseless will lie in stasis until they find release from the dream. Your people must take flight as soon as they may. Abide by my warnings. They’ll stay safe as long as none breaks the covenant laid down to appease the roused might of the greenwood.’

‘No steel and no fire?’ The grandame wheezed out a fluttery laugh. ‘Our folk know their place. We’ve laid in stores to hold us through the next fortnight.’ Before then, the last clanfolk would have slipped past Lord Harradene’s unstrung cordon. Their fighting strength would regroup in the rugged mountains in Camris. The young who had families would cross Mainmere estuary by boat to claim sanctuary in Havish. The Alliance’s campaign of persecution was this day deferred, with Tysan’s threatened bloodlines granted reprieve for continuance.

That such survival came at a price, the old woman and the Sorcerer never doubted. Tysan’s trade route to the east was now irremediably severed from the moment northern snows closed the passes; and with slave-bearing galleys disbarred from King Eldir’s coastline, the crisis would find no relief.

Blame for those woes would only lend impetus to Lysaer s’Ilessid’s pitched campaign of intolerance. Asandir foresaw the cost of this day’s reprieve written in bleak terms on the future: more armed troops raised for the purpose of war against mage talent and, ultimately, to hunt down and kill by the Mistwraith’s fell geas, the Shadow Master, who was Rathain’s last living prince. Too aggrieved for speech, he moved to return his borrowed horse.

Cenwaith’s firm touch caught his wrist in restraint. ‘You’ll not be staying, Kingmaker?’

The Sorcerer shook his head, the weariness bearing upon his broad shoulders a yoke he dared not defer for his own needs or comfort. ‘I cannot.’ He gathered himself, while her kind eyes sought and failed to plumb the extent of his urgency. ‘The troubles I forsook in Midhalla to come here have strengthened and grown in my absence.’

Courtesy kept her from pressing with questions. Since he need not seed pointless worry at his back, he answered with direct speech. ‘The trees will lapse back into somnolence on their own, once they’re left undisturbed, and if the crown rescinds its sealed edict to enact their destruction by fire.’

Caravan masters would eventually learn not to hack down live wood. Nor would Tysan’s leagues of armed headhunters fare reiving for scalps with their former impunity. An eerie unrest would settle and linger. In the odd, haunted glen, the oldest stands of forest would cling to isolate pockets of self-awareness. Years would pass, perhaps a century or more, before equilibrium was finally restored.

‘The Alliance offenders who are comatose will be carted away and cared for, if not by the crown, then by their own friends and families.’ A mote of thin sunlight struck through the chill air, and lent fleeting warmth to farseeing gray eyes as Asandir spoke his conclusion. ‘The trained men of war and those minds most firmly committed to violence may linger in trance. But unless they were sickly before this began, no lasting harm will befall them.’

Not so easily solved were the dangers in Mirthlvain left at large in his haste to cross the continent; nor must the stout heart give way before sorrow, that the act which spared Caithwood must force Taerlin’s clanborn to forsake their beloved home territory. ‘The forest will guard itself well enough. Your people can safely return in due time. Once Sethvir finds his way back from the grimward, he will act to settle what loose ends he can. The trees here will abide by his reassurance and release those lives held in abeyance.’

A gust raked the grove. Leaves fell, gilt and chestnut and flame red, ripped into capricious eddies. Cenwaith pressed thin hands into her fur jacket, the quarterstaff rested against the straight frailty of her stance. Her dark eyes tracked the flight of a jay and returned no reproach for fate’s cruelties. Then the locked moment ended. Her regrets stayed sealed into stoic silence. She cocked her head, her sparrow’s pert gesture infused with the implacable will to survive the onslaught of bitter storms. ‘Keep the horse, Kingmaker. May our gift of him speed you to trouble-free passage.’

Asandir’s leashed austerity broke before a smile of revealing warmth. ‘My need is far less.’ He unwound long fingers from the leather rein and clasped hers in their place with a moth touch that promised the endurance of mountains. ‘There will be strayed Alliance war mounts trailing their bridles and hanging themselves up in thickets. There I can borrow without hardship. Let my thanks be the more for your care of me, lady. Carry my blessing with your people, and pass on my regards to your caithdein.’

He left her then without fanfare, a reticent figure who fared forth on foot, mantled in forbidding solitude. His presence claimed no grandeur. The formal blue cloak with its loomed silver ribbon stayed bundled inside the rolled blanket he carried slung over his shoulder. His long strides bore him into the deepwood with the unconscious grace of the king stag. Nor did he look back as the grandame waved him on his way in farewell.

Already his restless thoughts bent toward Mainmere. For stark necessity, another word of thanks he owed the reigning clan duchess there must be deferred to blind haste. The spawned horrors of Mirthlvain would wait for no niceties. Shepherds on the Radmoore downs would see their flocks slaughtered if the seasonal migration from the mire was not swiftly curtailed.

Asandir quickened pace. Harried as he measured the hours he had lost in oblivious communion with the trees, he knew he must raise the power of the lane with the utmost dispatch and transfer his presence out of Tysan.

The first winter snows rimed the roads when the Alliance courier bearing word back from Caithwood reached the seat of state government at Avenor. Gace Steward gave the shivering, chilled rider a weasel’s darting inspection, asked once, and was shown an authentic set of seals from the supply officer stationed at Watercross.

‘Come along.’ A discerning intelligence lurked behind the royal house steward’s furtive, quick carriage. He snapped narrow fingers for the servants to open the door wider. Against the scream of raw wind and the stream of the wax lights set in the sconces by the entry, he beckoned the tired courier inside. ‘Follow me. His Grace of the Light is at light supper with his Lord Commander, Erdane’s resident delegate, and eight city ministers of trade, but for news out of Taerlin, I promise you’ll have his ear.’

Too weary to have scraped the mud and rime from his boots, even had time been given, the courier directed his stumbling step down the carpet that paved the wide hallway. The chink of his spurs cast thin echoes off the vaulted ceiling, and his cloak slapped, wet, at his ankles. His impression of gilt-trimmed opulence framed too great a contrast, after his weeks of enduring chapping gusts off the river and reeling, long hours ahorse on roads choked in wet snow and darkness. A liveried servant pattered ahead and flung open the door to the banquet hall. The light flooded outward, too bright, and packed with a heat of perfumes and rich sauces. Noise rolled into the corridor, a barrage of argumentative voices fit to stagger the exhausted courier where he stood.

Gace Steward’s clever grip set him steady. ‘Just wait. I’ll have you inside for your audience straightaway.’ As if the prospect of injecting disaster into the scene’s rampant discord amused him, he plowed like an eel through the close-press of Avenor’s shouting dignitaries.

On the sanctuary of the raised dais, only two men held their tempers in check. The Prince of the Light sat with his elegant, ringed fingers lightly curled on the stem of his wineglass. The other hand lay flat on the damask tablecloth, stilled amid a spread of gleaming cutlery and food that had not yet been touched. He wore no diamonds. A doublet roped with gold and white pearls hazed his outline in the glow of soft light, a display of pale magnificence artfully set off by the indigo tapestry hung behind his gilt chair. Beside him, dark panther to his bright grace, the Lord Commander, Sulfin Evend, leaned against a pilaster with his narrow hands hooked through the bronze-studded harness of his baldric.

Once a captain at arms in the Hanshire guard, he had eyes like poured ice water, a square jaw, thin lips, and a ruthless penchant for analysis that posed even the event of light supper as a mapped-out strategy of war. His whetted vigilance encompassed the room. Through the cadence of the servants who refilled carafes and platters, his slitted gaze noted Gace Steward’s furtive entry with the infallible assessment of a predator.

He unfolded crossed arms, bent, and spoke a word to the Exalted Prince.

Lysaer showed no change of expression. Intent and possessed of a monumental calm, he continued to listen as the current complainant shot to his feet, jewels sparking to his purpled state of fury.

‘… there’s no recourse and no redress! Every galley sent southward through Havish with slave oarsmen gets struck helpless by Fellowship sorcery!’

Hats jerked, feathers trembled, and vintage wine sloshed in its calyx of crystal as the uneasy company grumbled and muttered, engrossed in remonstrance for recent infamy. Angry sentences broke through the hubbub like the crack of stone shot through a hailstorm.

‘We can’t extradite the prisoners!’ The exasperated consonants of Lord Eilish, Minister of the Royal Treasury, spattered through the grim background of noise. ‘Yes, it’s the same damned numskull policy men bled to throw down with the uprising. Yes, we already tried. There’s no chance for ransom.’

His woolly head snagged in the turmoil like fleece off a peasant’s card, Avenor’s seneschal stabbed a harried finger and reviewed the core problem yet again to quell a latecomer’s uninformed temerity. ‘Word came through under High King Eldir’s seal just this morning. His Grace has freed the chained slaves from the benches. He won’t negotiate. Every officer and captain caught in breach of charter law will face his tribunal and be indicted under Havish’s Crown Justice.’

‘Sail’s no help at all!’ pealed an importunate voice. ‘Every laden vessel to strike out across Mainmere gets waylaid by barbarian pirates!’

More caustic, the delegate from Erdane slammed down his fist; cutlery and pastries jumped and resettled to a clashing complaint from fine porcelain. ‘Such marauding is done in hulls stolen from us! They’ve been outfitted with weapons and trained crews by hell’s minion! Arithon s’Ffalenn is the plaguing curse that’s gutting the marrow of our trade!’

Profits were being eaten alive by clan pests crying vengeance for kinfolk, branded and chained at the oar. Sweating in ermine too dense for the heat, the minister of the glass guild at last hurled the gauntlet. ‘What is your vaunted Alliance of Light doing to cap the bleeding breach?’

‘What’s being done? The crown seneschal hurled back, the stringy wattles of his neck creased by his massive chains of office. ‘Answer me this! Just why would we have four companies of crack Etarrans maintained at Alliance expense, given arms and standing orders to burn the clan dens out of Caithwood?’

Against that broil of seething, high temper, Gace Steward wormed onto the dais. Lord Commander Sulfin Evend straightened and met him. Tiercel pale eyes glinted like turned steel as he heard the man’s breathy, fast message.

‘News!’ he cracked over the burgeoning noise. ‘A courier’s brought word back from Watercross.’

The Prince of the Light pushed back his chair. He stood up, his grace like subtle, poured light before his less polished guests and court ministers. At his movement, the baying complainants faltered. Shamed by the calm in his steady blue gaze, they shuffled aside and made way for the courier.

His travel-stained cloak and mud-splashed boots screamed disaster the instant he entered. His stumbling step raised a jolting clangor of roweled spurs through the delicate chink of state jewelry. The last yammering talk crashed to blighted whispers. The scintillant glint of rubies and cut gemstones froze, nailed still within a tableau of choked quiet. Avenor’s favored dignitaries turned heads and clasped hands, breasts locked in an epidemic seizure of stopped breath.

The messenger reached the dais stair, caught and braced by Sulfin Evend. Against the gold-trimmed tablecloth, he folded to his knees in a homage that verged upon total collapse. ‘Your Grace, Prince Exalted.’ Every mile he had ridden rasped through his spare words, a cry of appeal for his sovereign’s mercy against the ill news that he carried. He offered up the sealed roll of his dispatch with hands that shook beyond recourse.

‘Give the rider my chair,’ Prince Lysaer said, his shaft of exasperation for the lapse of humanity exhibited by his own stunned staff. ‘See him comfortable at once.’

Caught staring along with everyone else, Gace Steward started, then leaped to obey that ominous, struck tone of command. A brisk snap of fingers summoned a page to bring wine in a crystal goblet.

‘Sit,’ Lysaer said. ‘Since I see that the missive you carry is secure, you may count your mission as accomplished. Please accept your due honor and my praise for the hardships imposed on you by the season.’ Nor did he move to accept the dispatch until the man had been settled, and had drained the glass of Carithwyr red to the dregs. The creased parchment changed hands in resignation, not fear. The courier’s gratitude for small kindness served as fuel, cranking the onlookers to an unbearable, fever-pitched tension.

All eyes tracked the Prince Exalted, poised on the dais with the scroll case in hand but not yet opened. The seal was genuine, its imprint that of the Etarran commander who captained the campaign to rout the clan enclaves in Taerlin. Yet the superscription was not in Lord Harradene’s bold script; his cipher had been imprinted in haste by the secretary posted with the supply train at Watercross.

The glow on Lysaer’s pearls hazed to sudden motion as he ripped through the ribbons and wax. He read, while his courtiers hung, their anxiety unrequited by his majestic demeanor.

He reached the end and looked up, locked in private shock. Then, overcome, he closed his eyes, while the last bloom of color receded from his fair skin. ‘We are to mourn,’ he announced in a strangled, gruff utterance. Brute strength sustained him. He regained full voice. His announcement sang out with hammering force and rocked the far corners of the room. ‘Every brave man who stood ground for the Light in Caithwood has been struck senseless by conjury set loose by a Fellowship Sorcerer!’

An indrawn gasp swept the company.

‘Worse,’ Lysaer said, ‘there’s a haunting by trees that has closed the road to armed caravans.’

An explosion of fiends in Avenor’s main market would have created less havoc; this fresh disaster slammed home even as the first blizzards choked the high passes through Camris.

‘Grace save us, now even our land routes are strangled!’ pealed the distressed Minister of the Royal Treasury.

Before wailing pandemonium could upend the whole room, the Prince of the Light met injured rage with a cry of derisive astonishment. ‘Did you expect our triumph over tyranny could be simple? Or did you believe the Fellowship of Seven would abdicate its stranglehold of power for this, our first stir of opposition?’ Avid as white flame, Lysaer paused. His gaze raked the choleric tangle of courtiers, and his rebuke rolled on like a dousing of pure arctic ice. ‘You amaze me, afraid as you are for your gold, when four companies of dedicated Etarrans lie stricken. They have offered their lives on foreign soil for a cause far more grave and far-reaching than a short-term hoarding of wealth.’

‘Our coin paid for those troops,’ a man in claret velvet dared from the rearmost ranks.

‘Are you so faint of heart you can cry for results, but not weather even one setback?’ Lysaer’s tone shaded into ineffable sorrow. ‘I am shamed, then. Count endurance so lightly, then expect to fall short! The course we embark on will not ride on one effort, nor even flourish without a concerted, long-range vision of sacrifice. Upon petty greed and divisive hearts will the Sorcerers and the evil embodied by the Shadow Master achieve our sorry defeat. Men will weep then, and not just for one season’s lost profits in trade. No. The suffering price will be written and paid by our children’s descendants for all time!’

Tense stillness descended, stirred by the shifting of hats and corpulent weight, and the sweating of bodies discomfited by constraining state clothes and pressed velvets. Only Erdane’s man seemed unmoved, as a volatile defensiveness swept through the gathering, the smoldering spark of unease touched against their deep-seated fear of dispossession.

Prince Lysaer gave the guildsmen’s sullen quiet no quarter. ‘Very well. If the great citizens of Avenor lack the character and dedication to sustain the full course of endeavor, I shall expend every resource I have to remember humanity first of all.’

An eruption of protests rattled the salvers, with the shrill, angered cries of Avenor’s guild ministers ringing the loudest of all.

‘What’s to be done?’ snapped the Minister of the Royal Treasury. ‘You have no vast funds to wage a winter campaign, and your dowry’s been promised to the shipyard.’

A hard, weighty pause; then Prince Lysaer turned his back. His appeal was presented to no one else but his steadfast Lord Commander. ‘You have my direct order, and an open note on my possessions. Sell every furnishing, every tapestry, every chest of gold plate in my household and use the proceeds to succor those fallen. Give all in my power to provide for their care. You will make free of Tysan’s crown resources, and call the full garrison back into field service. Their immediate muster will lend you the muscle to move every man stricken down into dry quarters and comfort.’

Against the dismayed rustle arisen at his back, his words lashed with stinging reprimand. ‘Every captain or soldier who refuses my summons will be turned off without pay! More than that, any city too engrossed in self-interest to supply aid will be cast outside my protection.’

He exhorted no more, spoke of no retribution. In suspense, his courtiers craned forward. They expected the usual smooth flourish of statecraft that would frame the grand plan to build forces and see justice done.

Lysaer gave back the barest, leashed glance of exasperation. His carriage displayed his most acid contempt as he dismissed his Lord Commander to shoulder the duties set upon him.

The impact struck home: outside of all precedent, there would be no fiery speech of inspiration, no brilliant new strategy to banish the perils of high sorcery.

The Prince Exalted awarded the grave majesty of his regard to the mud-splashed courier, who sat dazed with exhaustion in his chair. As though that picked audience was intimately private, he bestowed the magnanimous accolade of his kindness. ‘For your care for your fellow Etarrans, please stay. Sit and sup in my place. Enjoy the best food and drink in good health, for in sad fact, my presence is wasted. The truth is a tragedy, as you see. Avenor begs for no guidance beyond the bare need to see its trade and its merchants feather their own nests, and I was not born, nor gifted with divine powers for the purpose of rich men’s protection.’

A muted flash of his pearls underscored his gesture to summon his page to his side. Then the Prince of the Light stepped down from the dais. Without further ceremony, he swept from the hall, leaving Erdane’s delegate struck thoughtful, and Avenor’s state ministers gawping like fishes tossed onto shores of dry sand.

Early Winter 5653

Prime Enchantress

At the private banquet in Avenor’s royal palace, two deferent servants sprang to open the doors for the Prince of the Light’s precipitous exit.

Stunned silence reigned through the first, dizzy breath of disbelief. Then tumult resurged with a bang of wild noise that rocked echoes off the groined ceiling. On the high dais, seated in the royal chair, the road-muddied messenger who dispatched the bad news blinked over the abandoned spread of fine food. He watched Avenor’s state officers and trade ministers recover shocked wits and argue themselves into a fervent volte-face.

Their claims of bare coffers only minutes before suffered a miraculous readjustment. New offers of gold to be pledged for the Light materialized from dim places. Like chain lightning, caches hidden in deeper pockets resurfaced in the spate of high feeling that rolled and rebounded through the room.

Lord Eilish, Avenor’s Minister of the Royal Treasury, recovered grizzled eyebrows from the heights of his gray-fringed hairline. No fool, he clapped his hands to recall his scurrying secretaries. Then, shot to his feet, arms beckoning, he rousted pages and wine servers to clear aside platters of roast duck and strip the table near the door to bare boards. There, ensconced like a judge with a row of state witnesses and a brace of Prince Lysaer’s guardsmen, he dictated records and set under seal the promises that tumbled like charmed birds into his lap. He did not look up as Erdane’s delegate slipped out.

But Gace Steward, who missed nothing, expected a fast courier would ride the north road before midnight. The impact of that evening’s masterful play of statecraft would make itself felt far and wide.

Among the first to detect the fresh currents of change, an array of quartz spheres set in stands flashed to life in the stifling, close heat of a private chamber a hundred leagues distant from Avenor.

There, Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, sat her high chair in the sisterhouse at Capewell. Reduced by age and infirmity to a bundle of thin bones wrapped in a tissue of creased flesh, her robed form was propped upright in pillows. Wax candles burned like pale pillars at both elbows. A violet silk throw bordered with bullion ribbon mantled her lap. Her strengthless hands cupped another sphere of rock crystal, aligned by her trained circle of seeresses to fine-tuned spells of scrying.

In momentous synchronicity, the image of Avenor’s disrupted state banquet danced to the sigils and seals their inveigling mastery had stitched through the stone’s aligned matrix. Morriel absorbed every nuance of the scene, intent as a cat poised over a glass bowl of goldfish.

Her colorless lips pleated into vexed wrinkles, as, in distanced miniature, Lord Eilish arose and stretched, then closed and locked the boards of the ledger which kept his account of the Alliance treasury.

‘Clever man. Clever, clever man,’ she rasped on the tail of a stertorous exhale.

Though her attendant page boys and servants knew not to respond to anything but her direct summons, the dewy, blond woman perched on the stool at her knee had yet to be curbed from such frivolous liberties. ‘Do you mean Prince Lysaer?’ Her fluttery gesture singled out another quartz, the end sphere of the array of eight, cradled in its silver stand, and positioned in a semicircle around the Prime Matriarch’s chair. ‘But his Grace has apparently abandoned his council.’

While she spoke, the torchlit depths of the quartz showed Avenor’s Prince Exalted mounting a handsome cream horse in the taciturn company of his Lord Commander.

Morriel looked up. Her eyes sustained the drilled hardness of obsidian, opaque beside her younger colleague’s innocence. ‘He has left them, don’t you see? Let them know absolutely their money can’t buy his complaisant protection. Watch them. They’ll stew in his absence. They’ll sweat and pace themselves silly, then raise still more coin as a blandishment. Oh yes. Lysaer’s read their worth and their secret fears to an exquisite, fine point of accuracy. He’ll take his sweet time coming back. When he finally returns, his council and trade guilds will fall over themselves to welcome the policies they would once have argued past death to prevent.’

The woman’s youthful features stayed blank, lips parted as she awaited the binding conclusion.

‘Lysaer will have to take Sulfin Evend’s council, now,’ Morriel mused, finger tapping the quartz, and her eggshell brow tucked with speculation. ‘He must hire talent to keep track of his enemies, if he’s not to find himself continually blindsided by the doings of Fellowship Sorcerers.’

‘How can you know this?’ the girl said, admiring.

‘Study the present,’ the Prime Matriarch instructed in dry malice. ‘The clues to unlock the future ever and always are written into the patterns of each moment.’

The initiate furrowed her fresh brow and made a dutiful survey of the scenes logged and transmitted by the quartz spheres. Time passed, and the candles burned lower. Morriel Prime closed eyelids the webbed texture of dead leaves, her crabbed hands stilled upon the purple velvet in her lap.

‘Cast your net finer,’ she suggested, unprompted.

The young woman started. ‘Yes, Matriarch.’ She deepened her survey, saw a ship with furled sails rock at chilly anchorage at Tideport. She watched torches weaving through the gusty night at the crowded settlement of Watercross, where the fallen from Caithwood were bundled like cordwood in the common rooms of the inns, or sheltered under the gust-slapped canvas of the field tents. She tracked the Prince of the Light, who hastened his column of guardsmen southward, then followed the galloping outriders who raced ahead to secure them a galley passage out of Riverton inlet. She traversed a chain of dockside taverns in Orlest, and tight knots of men at the trader’s wharf, where talk ran to raids and losses to the minions of darkness.

‘I see widespread fear of the Master of Shadow,’ she lisped in uncertain conclusion. ‘The moil seems unfounded. He’s far at sea, and surely no direct threat to the continent.’

‘At sea, yes.’ Morriel spoke with shut eyes. ‘Yet he has not withdrawn his presence or his interests. Look for connections. Cast your net finer still.’

The girl fidgeted on her footstool, unable to find any relevance in the current view, of three trollops sharing gossip over hot chocolate in gilt cups, while a fourth one penned a letter in overdone script on the back of a secondhand parchment. Squint though she would, the initiate could make no sense of the contents. She raised a tentative hand and sketched a cipher for clarity, and watched the image shift from the prostitutes’ boudoir to the taproom of a seaside tavern, where a soap merchant with fat jowls and a marten collar lost a devastating hand of cards to the nerve-wound youngest son of the clanborn Duke of Alestron.

‘Nothing fits,’ she said, plaintive.

Morriel scarcely stirred, patient as none before ever saw her. ‘The trouble with new servants is the tedious time teaching them who should and should not be admitted. Lirenda is here.’ Eyes still closed, the Prime added, ‘She will demonstrate the thread of reason your inexperience has overlooked.’

The next instant, the latch clicked. The haughty, black-haired initiate swept in, a damp cloak on her arm, and her woolen skirts rimmed in the pale clay wicked up from the trodden-up yard of a countryside posthouse. She sank into obeisance, exuding the frost-keen scent of winter air. ‘I return from Araethura with word that the child, Fionn Areth, has been made our oathsworn servant.’

Morriel’s pinched face tipped aslant in the candlelight. ‘How convenient for you.’ Her eyes opened, black glass flecked in spite and the false, warm reflections of flame. ‘Forgive me if I don’t reward you with credit until your vaunted plan brings a success.’

Lirenda’s flare of rage was adroitly masked behind a façade of decorum. ‘How may I serve?’

The Prime goaded, relentless. ‘Since you’ve come, you can show Selidie how to draw out the connecting thread for the Shadow Master’s interests on the continent. I hedge all my options these days. You’ll know that already, since you’ve assiduously applied all your training to sorting the rumors.’ A rim of worn teeth lent an edge to her smile as Morriel watched for the signs her baiting had chafed on a weakness.

The former First Enchantress arose to full height, self-contained as a panther. She chose caution before argument. At the end of a difficult, cold-weather journey, this needling trap the Prime spun presented a mazework of pitfalls. Not least, the scrying would demand a calling rune set through the resonance of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn’s true Name. The ignominy burned, since a near-fatal fascination with that same prince’s character had tripped her downfall from the Prime’s favor. Her meddling desire for personal revenge had upset the grand construct that had formerly failed to take the wretched man captive.

Lirenda lidded her personal bitterness under a mask of humility. Morriel herself remained a cripple since that day, confined to the Capewell sisterhouse in the months that followed her collapse. Through her tedious convalescence, the most gifted of her healers yet failed to restore her lower limbs. While concern began to be fretted in whispers, that the Prime might never recover her lost strength and walk, Morriel herself was not sanguine. Burdened with the need for additional servants, and pinned between bedridden ennui, or the jostling discomfort of a sedan chair, her eggshell-frail bones and translucent flesh contained the irascible fury of a volcano denied any vent for eruption.

Over that whelming maelstrom of infirmity, the frustration of balked will and spent hope, amid the perilous turn just taken by Tysan’s curse-driven politics, the Prime Matriarch still ruled her domain like honed diamond. Nor did she allow fraility to loosen her grasp upon current events.

Lirenda knew better than to misjudge the request as a petty bid for vindication. She stepped forward and accepted the ice weight of the quartz from her Prime, set on notice by the play of cruel ironies that her character stood on trial yet again. She must perform this small office without flaw, or be judged inadequate to win back her lost rank as the Koriani prime successor.

She dared not vent her towering rage, that her competency was being used to tutor the green candidate set up as her replacement. One deep breath, two; she reestablished her calm. Any work done in concert with quartz required absolute emotional control. Lirenda assessed the sphere held in hand, its directive the tuned key for the array of eight ranged in their stands about Morriel’s chair. One of the Prime’s unobtrusive servants brought her a claw-footed stool.

She sat. Travel-stained clothing could not dim the innate poise of her breeding; she might as well have been offered a throne. The eyes she fixed on the young, blond initiate were antique amber, notched with pupils like primordial night. ‘One begins with the rune of relationship,’ she explained, her tone detached as struck bronze. ‘Such power draws the lane forces into alignment, that one quartz sphere will resonate with the next, letting a live current pass between them.’

Her hand traced the symbol over the crystal, each cross stroke and upright inscribed in etched ribbons of light. ‘Bind the energy into unity with the sigil that demarks the joined circle.’

‘The rune seal for holding?’ the initiate asked, her diffidence emphasized by an affected flounce.

Lirenda’s smile turned graven. ‘Then you’ve learned the twenty-eight primary seals? Very good.’ Her polished encouragement showed none of her contempt, that an enchantress chosen for Morriel’s training should have mastered such basics beforetime. ‘Do you know the next step?’

The woman pinched a peony lip between her even, pearl teeth. ‘The circle is empty?’

‘Yes.’ Lirenda stifled an exasperated sigh. ‘Every spell needs a vector, an energy, to lend it purpose and direction. In this case, your Prime requests linkages to the affairs of the Master of Shadow. Therefore, the tie must begin with knowledge of the subject’s true Name.’ Lirenda cupped the master sphere, stared into its depths, and inwardly sealed herself into a calm that admitted no chink for distraction. She could feel the eyes of the Prime upon her like hot probes, testing, observing, awaiting a reaction that might expose any lingering canker of weakness.

But Lirenda had long since shielded her vulnerable core against Arithon’s beguiling attraction. Venomed hatred remained. She would see the last scion of s’Ffalenn struck dead before she allowed his compassionate potential to awaken the seed of her dormant passion. Disciplined to perfection, she spoke the invocation to call and to bind. Over that matrix, she added the sigil of self-mastery, then into that waiting vessel of containment, the shaped memory of an unmistakable male face. Three times, she called the name of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn.

The quartz sphere absorbed her building intent. Its matrix took fire and responded, amplifying the tuned alignment of gifted talent and aimed thought. Lirenda sensed the impacting force of that presence storm her unassailable calm. Prepared, she held firm. Trained will locked her mind into permafrost clarity, until an unexpected influx of outside force wrenched her alignment off course. A sweet, sustained note pierced through, then a chord that melted all armor. The opening measure swelled into an intimate play of glad sound that beguiled beyond will to deny.

Lirenda lost grip on her construct of ciphers. The unbearable purity of a melody she had most diligently expunged out of memory burst through and flanked her shield of defenses.

The quartz in her hand pealed back in kind, and magnified that clear cry of rapture into joy that burst all restraint. Then the wrought spiral of harmony raised raw desire, and whirled her off center into trance …

Sucked down, and down again into a well of absolute darkness charged with delights and addictive possibility, Lirenda cried out in furious protest. Her denial just raised a more clamorous, inward betrayal.

The whispered male presence of the musician gave her back his lilting, unbridled laughter. ‘But lady enchantress, surely in this case you made the first effort to call me?’

Dragged into a vista of dreaming vision, Lirenda beheld a starlit night where the winds blew mild and warm. Far beyond the winter’s fast grip, a ship’s masts with its spiderwork of running lines and tarred rigging sliced the sky into graceful geometrics. Nor was the vessel’s quarterdeck unoccupied.

Framed against the sturdy, spooled taffrail, and jeweled constellations skewed at unfamiliar angles by an extreme change of latitude, she confronted the brigantine’s helmsman: none else but the slim, dark-haired bard whose mastery had loomed the exquisite snare that entrapped her.

The angular, stamped features of s’Ffalenn royalty were unmistakable, cast now into a patent, amused inquiry that tipped up one corner of Arithon’s mouth. Across the friable trance which suspended her, his presence ignited her confusion, fed and fueled by a whirlwind of formless emotion.

Lirenda fought to resist the influx of detail that split second of contact engraved on her inner awareness: the fine grace of his carriage offset by commonplace clothing, and the jet strands of hair fallen loose from their tie to tangle and wisp at his temples. If the events of the summer had harrowed his health, in seafaring solitude, Prince Arithon had won back a carefree, if temporary, freedom. His dark breeches were buttoned with engraved silver studs, and his strong, arched feet were bare. His plain linen shirt was a soft, unbleached ivory, and the loose, doeskin laces with their beaded pearl ends were flicked and teased by the winds. The agile fingers which had danced those honeyed measures on fret and string were wound now on the spokes of a ship’s wheel.

Apparently he had sensed her intrusion before her shocked moment of recognition. His sharpened gaze was not fixed anymore on the stars or the compass he steered by.

Nor was his face entirely invulnerable, caught as he was in the listening intensity of sounding her presence in return. She received the impression of eyes that were haunted and deep, and disturbingly focused until he captured her individual identity; not by sight, but by some unseen resonance of intuition kept entrained by his prodigious talent.

‘Ah, Lirenda.’ His voice made disturbing music of her name, while his expression showed dry irony, and his lips widened into the faintest, curved smile of mockery. ‘You’ve reconnected with the gift I left in your quartz crystal, I see.’

Formless in fury, imprisoned in the flux of an involuntary scrying, Lirenda reacted before thought. ‘This should not be possible!’

Arithon’s eyebrows arose. ‘No?’ He brightened. ‘Shall we use the occasion to indulge in a philosophical argument on the principles of magecraft? The result might leave you wiser, if no less enlightened.’

She disdained to answer.

‘Your thinking is crippled by limitations, dear lady, not to mention your beliefs.’ A pause, jammed by the stone-walled strength of her obstinacy. ‘What, no riposte in dry wit? No unhappy jabs at the cuticle? Enchantress, you wouldn’t prefer having me speak for us both?’

Head tilted sidewards, the free wind in his hair, he delighted in choosing the words for her anyhow, teasing and blithe as a swallow. ‘Well for argument’s sake, let’s say you’d affirm the crystal carries a vibration. If fire’s your base element, you would understand that water stands as the placeholder for emotion. Is your foot tapping yet? It would be, you know, as you moved on to insist the salt contained in the ocean must obey its coarse nature and negate every trace of transmission.’

A toy to his whim, Lirenda returned nothing. The dream held her fast, while the stars rocked to the gentle roll of a ship’s hull. The hand that had recently known trials and illness held her course with relaxed and infuriating competence.

‘Then perhaps you need clues to unravel the riddle?’ Arithon grinned in provocation. ‘Very well. I’ll be generous. The sound I created was vibration also, if pitched for the octaves inside the range of hearing. The seed for my music is carried by air, the primal element of inspiration. Dear lady, wind wanders where it will. It knows no boundary, nor heeds human law, nor answers to the earth-grounding virtues of salt.’

‘I reject your rank meddling,’ Lirenda hissed back, slapped by the truth that he had just volunteered the keys to reclaim her self-control. ‘One day you’ll know sorrow. My hand will break you. I promise you then, no schoolboyish prank played on learned theory will spare your insolent autonomy.’

A gust heeled the brigantine’s deck. Arithon glanced at a star to ascertain his heading, then spun his wheel two points to starboard to compensate. His green eyes lit then, alive to his shrug of apology. ‘No originality there. You’ll be one of a very large crowd falling over themselves to claim the first blood at my capture.’ He ended his byplay in corrosive apology. ‘There’s a curious reverse. I always thought you the type to rule the pack rather than follow.’

‘Demon!’ she gasped, riled into unwitting defense by his slicing truth of perception.

Shamed to have yielded that morsel of insight, she rallied her scattered self-command and framed the sigil of negation. Once she set the dark seal to command air, the shock of forced severance tumbled her back into vertigo. While she raged in the threadbare shreds of her dignity, her naked mind rang with the contrary echoes of his laughter …

The rinse of white static released her hobbled faculties and gave back the closed heat of the Prime Matriarch’s chamber. Lirenda shuddered through the moment of transition, whiplashed back to cognizant thought by the rasp of Morriel’s reprimand.

‘… must be a lackwit, girl! Haven’t I told you time and again? Keep that spell crystal doused in black silk!’

A snuffling stir of movement, as the young initiate returned a dutifully weepy nod. She fumbled for the remedy bag hung from her girdle, loosened the strings, then shoved tear-drenched fingers inside.

Morriel’s chastisement was instant. ‘Dry your hands! Never, never let salt near a crystal set into a resonant spell pattern!’

Trembling now, the girl blotted her damp knuckles on her skirt; and Lirenda, caught aback, received the demeaning revelation that she had been led to engage the Named resonance of Arithon s’Ffalenn in the presence of her personal spell crystal. The misfortunate quartz had yet to be cleansed of the melody Arithon had imprinted to lay bare her vulnerable heart. The girl initiate had been given the task of lifting the impurity from the quartz; and though months had passed under Morriel’s direct tutelage, she had not only failed to master so simple a task, but had also neglected the basics of handling an activated focus pendant.

The sheer magnitude of the incompetence rankled. The novice initiate Morriel had chosen to groom had raw talent without the brains of a flea. Lirenda contained her resentment, well aware that the Prime would discern far more than the young woman’s stupidity. She dared not invite the parallel comparison, that she herself had strong aptitude and skilled training, but a woeful inability to checkrein her personal feelings.

Eyes closed, wrapped in the evanescent perfume of hot candle wax, Lirenda forced down her inner turmoil. While the girlish initiate restored the crystal to proper wrappings and retied the cords of her remedy bag, the older enchantress slowed the sped beat of her heart. She doused heated nerves and noosed the wild, wakened spate of her anger back into settled calm, then rebalanced the sigils which fused the burst web of the quartz scrying. Left to mark time, she bent her will back to the master sphere in her hand.

Where the sigils of command already in place should have revealed Arithon’s image, the crystal hung smoke dark and veiled; no surprise. The effects of sea brine alone would inhibit the virtues of quartz scrying. In addition, the man would have cloaking spells and circles of guard set about him by Dakar the Mad Prophet. Morriel Prime herself had long since established the futility of scrying for the Prince of Rathain. Yet though his immediate presence stayed obscured, his peripheral connections were less ruly. In the marginal spaces, where random event and emotion spun loose ends, the quartz could tag subtle connections to Prince Arithon as the unshielded currents of conscious activity deflected the signature vibrations of the earth’s flow of magnetic lane force.

Linked through the darkened rock crystal in her hands, Lirenda changed focus. She searched the bloom of movement and color as vision coalesced in the depths of the slave-linked spheres on their stands.

One showed the stripped trees of a glen in Halwythwood. Under the night’s dusting of snowfall, a cluster of clan lodge tents, guarded by a large-boned, rangy man wrapped in a bearskin mantle. By the glint of bronze hair revealed as a woman passed by with a torch, Lirenda recognized the man as Jieret s’Valerient, caithdein and steward of the realm in the seafaring absence of its sanctioned crown prince. The trill of infant laughter that brought the smile to his lips would be his daughter, Jeynsa, named his heir by the Fellowship of Seven, and not yet aged one year. A steadfast adherent of the old charter law, the liegeman served as Arithon’s voice in Rathain. Like the Koriathain, Earl Jieret could do little else but wait for the day when his oathsworn sovereign chose to return.

In a scene purloined from a fortified tower farther east, another sphere revealed the massive frame of Duke Bransian of Alestron, sprawled at ease in a chair with a hound’s muzzle propped on his knee. His war-scarred fingers stroked the dog’s ears, while a diminutive old lady with crab-apple features stabbed an ebony stick in ripe argument over his decision to appoint his state galley for a winter voyage down the south coast.

In another, the clan chieftain who was High Earl of Alland broached a beer cask in a pine glade, while companions sharpened their knives for a cattle raid, and a runner sewed up a holed pair of leggings, his new orders to bear a message to a secret destination in the west.

Yet another sphere reflected a high mountain in Vastmark. There a herder woman with bells tied into her tawny braids regarded the stars, and thought wistfully upon Arithon s’Ffalenn. ‘Luck ride your shoulder, wherever you are,’ she murmured in dialect, then appended the heartfelt blessing of her tribe.

In the deserts of Sanpashir, an elder dipped a hawk feather in fresh blood and read omens in the scattered droplets. The augury received brought a spark to filmed eyes, and sent a young man to fetch darts and knives on his gruff bark of command.

Arithon’s contacts were varied and many, Lirenda was forced to concede; in yet another sphere, three chattering whores in a Sanshevas garret sewed a marked strip of goatskin into a hem of pink silk.

A minstrel playing a tavern in Etarra paused to converse with three dicers wearing the colors of the town guard; farther south, an innkeeper who owned a dingier dive in Ship’s Port threw silver to a galleyman, then engaged in whispered talk too faint for the crystal’s tuned matrix to capture.

A scribe in King Eldir’s service penned a letter by the fluttering light of a candle, while elsewhere a vivacious woman in sailhand’s slops and a gaudy scarlet shirt locked horns in ribald language with a stiff-lipped customs clerk in Tideport.

Immersed in close survey of the eclectic array, Lirenda could almost touch the intangible thread that tied each disparate player into a logical web of continuity. She sensed the flow of information and the movement of rumor. Yet whenever she grasped any piece of the puzzle and sought to find linear order, the pieces slipped, formless, through the sieve of hard cognizance. The pattern remained stubbornly elusive as water absorbed into felt.

Lirenda released a soundless sigh, too experienced not to realize when outside forces deflected her practiced technique. Arithon had a trained spellbinder for his watchdog. The Mad Prophet had seeded invisible snares that would smother her most determined attempt to link random event with its core of revealing conclusion. She might glean the surface viewpoint of the Shadow Master’s correspondents, but never decipher their interrelated connection, nor the guarded cache of their secrets: the links that would yield the site where the brigantine Khetienn made landfall to replenish provisions.

Lirenda shivered with starved longing to break through Dakar’s web of safeguards. How she ached to smash the flesh-and-blood source of her weakness, which had deprived her of privilege and the fruits of her earned inheritance. Immersed in dire passion, she failed to notice that the Prime’s reproval of the young initiate had long since reached final closure. Nor did she hear the crone’s scratchy address, or look up, until the yawning, expectant silence intruded, and quenched her rush of hot need.

‘Your pardon?’ she murmured.

A figure of shriveled ivory and wax in the faltering glow of the candles, the Prime Enchantress regarded her. Morriel’s hands were crabbed knots, tucked in smudgeless velvets, and her black eyes lightless wells of malice. ‘The sigil of summoning to trace and mark the future?’ she prompted, succinct as flung acid. ‘I bade you to finish the scrying.’

Lirenda flushed. The request was impossible, as the Prime knew quite well. Set up to fail before a green novice, she stiffened, her heart struck to glass-edged fury, and her thoughts plunged into a quicklime stillness that the Prime’s waspish wit could not pierce. Her voice was chilled honey as she made the traditional reply. ‘Your will.’

The sigil with its barbed runes and crossed square flowed off her scribing fingernail. Its coiled directive sank into the quartz orb like charged wire, filed to razor-edged light. The energy sank into the stone’s matrix, bit through its dimmed depths, and unfurled a riptide of backlash.

Lirenda fell into a flowering burst of color and noise, then a sleeting gray static through which one sensation emerged to rush the blood in her veins: she felt a man’s lips on hers, and an eruption of passion to burn every nerve incandescent.

Then Morriel’s laughter, like the scrape of dry leaves, hurled Lirenda earthward and grounded her back into shrinking humiliation.

‘It would appear your feelings of superiority are unjustified,’ the Prime said. While the initiate looked on in vacant confusion, she added, ‘Tell me to my face, if you dare, that I should not stake my trust in your replacement.’

Lirenda arose. Self-contained by her desperate desire for vindication, she curtsied in defiant breach of form, that she need not behave as all others in the order, and request formal leave to depart. ‘Stake your trust where you please, until the year Fionn Areth grows to maturity. Then I will face the sure test of your reckoning. On the day I deliver Prince Arithon in chains, let any latecoming applicant for your office overmatch my fitness if she dares.’

A pungent, breathy laugh brushed her challenge aside. ‘I do see that my years of infirmity won’t pass without entertainment. That is well. I have no intention whatsoever of biding my time in blind faith. You must prove your competence to assume the seat of my power.’ Small triumph became punishment as Morriel flicked her wrist in derisive finality. ‘You are excused.’

While Lirenda swept out to a rustle of splashed mantles, the Prime’s fathomless eyes fixed a predator’s stare upon the untried face of her current favorite. ‘We’ve seen what we needed,’ she rasped in conclusion. ‘Those spells Dakar’s cast throw off a wide resonance. When Lysaer s’Ilessid binds loyal talent to his cause, that unsubtle touch could become a dangerous liability …’ As her musing trailed off into stillness, she realized the young woman drooped like a lily kept past its best bloom. ‘Rest now, Selidie,’ the Prime crooned, almost fondly. ‘See yourself off to bed. One of my servants will go to the kitchen to arrange for a bowl of warmed milk.’

Winter 5654

Althain’s Warden

The guard spells securing the grimward in Korias were a maze framed in paradox, a blaze of wild power channeled through ciphers that bridged both sides of the veil. Entangling coils wrought through time and space framed both bulwark and bias, a weaving of consummate delicacy that layered chaos through primal order like acid burns struck through taut parchment. The barrier carved an isolate pocket between the fabric of Athera’s solidity and the dire peril contained inside. No spells in existence were more deadly; nor did the Fellowship Sorcerers command better means to stay the unbinding currents of flux energies unleashed by the dreams of dead dragons.

The juxtaposition of hours to months always made the last crossing a feat of unparalleled danger, even for a Sorcerer whose hand had renewed the bindings that laced those same ward rings to renewed stability. Flat weary, aching in shoulders and neck from the wear of unswerving concentration, Sethvir bent his head and whispered encouragement to Asandir’s long-suffering black horse.

The stallion flicked back an ear; responded. His stride lengthened. He bore his rider through the dusty, stale air locked in stasis within the outer perimeter. Sethvir raised a hand marked red with cinder burns and traced the final string of seals in blue fire. Power surged through him, sure as aimed lightning, the discharge drawn into an exacting harmonic balance. His labor completed, the Sorcerer sensed the shimmering currents lock shut in the windless void. He sighed his relief. The grueling task of sealing the breached grimward had reached completion at long last.

‘We’re done here, little brother,’ he confided to the horse.

The black stud shook his mane, gave a ringing stamp on the white-granite paving, and wheeled. The eerie song of charged forces slipped behind as his step carried through the outermost spell of concealment.

Waiting on the far side was the damp, winter blast of a sleeting snowfall in Korias.

Sethvir drew in a shuddering breath. Early dusk spread a pall over the land. Around him, the low, rolling ground was patched gray and white, rocks and lichens snatched bare where the gusts whined off the weathered hillcrests.

Bone tired as he was, for a half second the Sorcerer sat the ebony stud’s back, confused. The sting of the storm on his face, the bite of cold air on bare knuckles seemed discomforts that belonged to another man’s body. Althain’s Warden blinked as though jostled into a dream. He watched, all but mesmerized, while his breath puffed plumes in the gathering darkness.

Then even that fragmented awareness upended. His senses whirled away in kaleidoscopic chaos as the restored torrent of the earth link hurled his mind through a cataract of impressions.

For a brief, helpless interval he swayed in the saddle, hands locked in black mane to stay upright. Visions rinsed his mind like actinic static, a deluge of disordered, random events spiked by the odd, recognizable fragment …

He saw a royal birth in Havish laced through the mating of whales in the china blue reaches of South Sea. In a cedar-paneled room with red curtains, Duke Bransian of Alestron read a letter penned by his brother Mearn, his iron brows bristled to irritation. Black bears in Strakewood huddled deep in hibernation. An old tree dreamed of rage, and a snarl of stalled trade sent mounted couriers splashing through a rutted ford in Camris, led on by torchlight, and given right of way by their rippling sunwheel banner. A field mouse snatched kernels of corn from a granary, and a shepherd child in Araethura complained of a deep ache in the bones of his face. Southward, where windy rain fell, a brig with a white star carved on her counter cracked out full sail on command of a fair-haired female captain …

For one moment, two, Sethvir’s mind pinwheeled, hazed through the gauntlet of images that came on as senseless bundles of color and noise. Then the innate mastery of his gift resurged. He recaptured those uncountable, disparate threads, deftly sorted their origins, and loomed them back into one web of exacting, immaculate order.

Moon phase and tides reset his awareness. The grounding solidity of the earth lent him roots to withstand the vast void of the sky. Then the vista of storm-ridden landscape around him regained continuity and rebalanced his position to the cardinal points of direction. Restored to his venue as Althain’s Warden, Sethvir sat with closed eyes. In one snap-frozen second, he mapped the changed patterns of harmony and discord. Another fractional instant let him touch each of his distant colleagues with the informed assurance of his return.

Asandir stood, hip deep in a snowdrift on the Plain of Araithe, retuning a damaged stone marker that smoothed a confluence of earth’s lane force; Traithe, on the storm-beaten strands of Lithmere, was completing the final ward in the chain forbidding landfall to slave-bearing galleys. Luhaine, an arrow of liberated joy, rode on a breeze that ranged southward out of Atainia. Kharadmon still stood on watch amid the sealed silence of the void. There, where the distant sun of Athera was reduced to a candleflame glimmer, the star wards raised against the mist-bound wraiths trapped on Marak posted a vigilant guard across arc seconds of darkness. Last, though in pain and peril, never least, Sethvir sensed the presence of Davien the Betrayer, lurking in self-imposed isolation in the caverns beneath the roots of the Mathorn Mountains.

Of Ciladis, as ever, his earth-sense found no sign, though he combed all the planet in vain hope and sorrowful reflex. Then, the raw cold offered welcome distraction from the razor-sharp pain of old grief.

Sethvir stirred from his stupor. Mauled by the teeth of the gusts, he closed slackened hands on the reins. The sleet seeded droplets of melt in his beard, and the horse underneath him blew a loud snort of impatience.

‘Brave one, I’m with you.’ He stroked the stallion’s wet crest, chilled by much more than inclement weather as he measured the days that the grimward’s torn wards had engaged him.

Summer’s hot winds had changed guard to midwinter. Five months had elapsed since he left Althain Tower, a grievous interval, but necessary. Any overlooked weakness in the complex ring of guard spells could spin final havoc through Athera’s stability. For one crisis averted, old problems had acquired vicious new impetus. Foremost among them, Sethvir tracked repercussions from the roused trees in Caithwood, an event that had seeded a canker of strife across the Kingdom of Tysan.

Asandir’s stopgap action had jammed travel and trade to a strident halt. Balked merchants bandied damning accusations against sorcery, while their craftsmen hoarded every coin they could squeeze for the purpose of Alliance retaliation. While goods piled up on the barge docks at Watercross, and guild tempers frayed and shortened, tales of armed men falling prey to fell sorceries fretted the towns to hysteria. Quarn’s mayor was left indisposed after five hand-wringing weeks of protestation. Valenford’s treasury had been emptied in the purging belief that Lysaer’s claimed divinity could avert the ruin of prosperity. Each passing day and each fallen victim lent Avenor’s crown examiners refreshed cause to denounce the practice of magecraft as a felony. Despite the season, small troops of sunwheel riders scoured the backcountry settlements in search of herb witches and birth-gifted makers of talismans.

Sethvir shivered. Cloakless, hatless, and clad in holed leathers ingrained with a damning reek of cinders and brimstone, he knew he might need more than tact at the door where he stopped to ask shelter. He turned the stud’s nose north and westward toward Riverton, then spoke into a back-cocked black ear.

The horse picked sure steps down the ice-crusted slope, the reins looped slack on his neck. He had served as a Sorcerer’s mount long enough not to balk at spell-sent directions. Sethvir tucked his fingers under his beard to foil the blasting wind. Lapsed into the half-tranced, dreamy inattention that widened his access to the earth link, he sifted the montage array of new images that knit each moment into the next.

Lysaer’s thread of strategy snaked through the weave, steering Alliance interests to bind terrified trade guilds into a strangling dependency. Lord Harradene’s Etarrans still languished unconscious. Now lodged at conspicuous expense at Avenor, they were made the graphic incentive to catalyze townborn distrust of sorcery. In disturbing, hard knots, Sethvir saw the cry for redress shift into committed resolve to take action.

All points converged toward an outbreak of war in the spring.

From the public misfortune of the comatose Etarrans, Lysaer s’Ilessid built doctrine in tireless speech and skilled statecraft. His inferences became accepted as certainty, that Fellowship Sorcerers worked in collusion with the Spinner of Darkness. From close talks in town taprooms to the whispers of mothers threatening unruly children, the unrest took root in even the most far-flung farmsteads. Outside Tysan’s borders, frozen roads rang to the hooves of fast horses bearing sunwheel couriers. Alarmed city mayors heard the ready advice of crown officers and assumed the bright badge of the Alliance.

The flow of gold and information moved from hand to ringed hand, born out of the festering frustrations that raged behind the closed doors of the guildhalls. Savaged by seaborne attacks from clan pirates, gouty ministers were shown the Alliance hulls under construction at Riverton as firm proof of the crown’s promise of protection. Lord Eilish brooded over Avenor’s thickened ledgers and notated his fussy entries under a crawling halo of candlelight. Beneath his cramped office, Sethvir could hear the iron strapping the piled chests in Lysaer’s treasury sing to the pitch of struck currency tendered from cities across the continent’s five kingdoms.

Harried by more than the season’s chill winds, the Sorcerer traced the crosscurrents designed to consolidate power. Lady Ellaine’s handfasting to Lysaer wrought shifts: Erdane’s new-fledged ambition wound intrigues that stitched through state policy in clandestine meetings, and in the dunning of farm crofts for tithes in the cause to eradicate sorcery and shadows. The revenues outfitted forays in winter, when campaign was not normally feasible.

In Westwood, hare and sparrows fled the march of armed men, who scoured the forests to slaughter the wild game and starve out a dwindled encampment of clansmen. The earth link unveiled the gaunt faces of children, and the obstinate courage which kept bows and drawn steel in the hands of their driven parents. Death wrote its lines of spilled blood in the snow. In a bare, wind-raked hollow, Maenol s’Gannley’s cousin miscarried a seven-month pregnancy.

On the black stud in Korias, Sethvir wept, aggrieved for the loss of an irreplaceable infant who would not live to see daylight. He traversed the storm-swept barrens of Korias, nagged to chills, while Avenor’s high council convened in a snug tower chamber. Cosseted in furs and damascened silk, they sipped vintage wine and administered Lysaer’s policy with fatal ignorance of the stakes their chosen path courted. While their armorers forged weapons to uphold a wrongful cause, and crown instigators whispered their damning false testimony reviling minions of darkness, Kharadmon kept steadfast watch against a range of perils beyond the pale of mortal politics.

The massive, wrought ward ring that shielded Athera in the vast deeps between stars was never for a moment left unguarded. Should an invasion of free wraiths ever sweep in from Marak, a populace stripped of its natural-born talent would be left defenseless and wide open to threat of possession. Then would mankind have cause to fear, and women weep, and innocent children suffer horrors.

‘I fear the same thing.’ Kharadmon’s stray response reechoed across an incomprehensible distance as he affirmed the passing concern of Althain’s Warden. ‘All’s quiet here, now. Too peaceful, perhaps. Those wraiths never rest. Through the months when they stalked me, they seethed and hated like a wasp nest stirred up by fiends. My watch feels oppressive. Sometimes I worry that we’re being shown what we wish to see in a mirror.’

Sethvir winced, brought back to earth as icy runnels of snowmelt snaked down his open collar. His sleeves were soaked through, his leathers grown soggy. Against his back, the undaunted winds scoured down with their barbed burden of ice. He endured the cruel blast without rancor. As ever, the world’s broadscale tapestry of events left him small thought to spare for the nuisance of bodily discomfort.

Nor would another poured current of cold, just arrived through the barrage of gusts, allow him to dwell upon Kharadmon’s ruffled foreboding.

‘You’re back, and not one single moment too soon,’ Luhaine carped from a backdrop of tenantless landscape. ‘Of course the Koriathain used the months of your absence to their unscrupulous benefit.’

‘You refer to the shepherd boy set under a change spell last autumn in Araethura?’ Sethvir raised eyebrows the ice had grizzled like magnetized clumps of steel filings. His sharpened gaze tracked the invisible wraith flanking him. ‘Fionn Areth was beyond our protection from the moment of his ill-fated birth. Since Elaira could do naught to cast off the life debt he owed her, she was most wise to entrust his fate to Prince Arithon’s devices.’

Luhaine rattled through a gorse thicket hunched under a leading of sleet. ‘Then you’ve already seen what Lirenda’s wrought on the flimsy pretense of his innocent word of consent?’

Sethvir said nothing. The unnatural seals of regeneration which guided the transformation of Fionn Areth were too bitter a subject for talk. ‘First tell me how long Asandir was convalescent before he left Althain Tower.’

‘Four days.’ Luhaine whirled in place. ‘You’re evading my question.’ Presented with Sethvir’s obstructive inattention at its worst, he stormed into motion again. ‘Asandir asked for his stallion to be––’

‘… sent on to the master of horse at the Red Water Inn,’ Sethvir finished, unperturbed. The hostler there knew the stud’s habits, and kept a clean stable with glossy, contented occupants. ‘I already saw,’ he added, before Luhaine could drone through every mundane detail surrounding Asandir’s departure. Mirthlvain had brewed up a new strain of predator, and no colleague’s lingering weakness could excuse the dismissal of unpleasant facts. The spellbinder who stood guard as Methisle’s warden could never have curbed the late outbreak of aberrants without a Sorcerer’s help. ‘Just say whether Asandir was fit enough to be on his feet when he left.’

‘He blocked your inquiry also?’ Luhaine poised, a circle of seized stillness where the downfalling sleet changed course in midair and slashed like white needles straight earthward. ‘That’s worrisome.’

‘But scarcely the first time,’ Sethvir pointed out.

The vortex of Luhaine’s presence poured headlong through a barrier of blackthorn. ‘Stop hedging. I see how you’re vexed.’

Althain’s warden hunched his shoulders as the experienced stud plowed ahead through the winter-stripped branches. His answer came muffled behind his raised forearm as he rode a rimed gauntlet of storm-burdened sticks. ‘Asandir’s never been foolish.’

‘Well, foolish or not, I couldn’t hold him,’ Luhaine retorted. ‘We stand too shorthanded for any one of us to mismanage the limits of our personal resources.’

Sethvir disguised an untactful snort by wringing the ice melt from the draggled ends of his beard. The earth link exposed the residual glimmer of the warding maze Asandir had set on his back trail. In trying to eavesdrop on his progress through scrying, his discorporate colleague had been spun in blind circles for three days.

Flustered and embarrassed, Luhaine snapped anyway. ‘Don’t act so smug. Of us all, you know you’re the only one who can match him and win.’

‘Not always, and never in a contest of straight force.’ Sethvir stared back, his blue-green eyes wide in his guileless effort to invite a diversion through trivial argument.

But for the sake of the shapechanged child in Araethura, Luhaine fastened on like a terrier. ‘We should curb the plotting. That boy can’t be left as a Koriani puppet to lure Arithon s’Ffalenn into jeopardy. Morriel’s meddling nearly drove his Grace to insanity the last time! How dare she presume to risk triggering Desh-thiere’s curse again.’

‘We cannot interfere.’ Sethvir’s words were hammered iron. ‘Misled or not, Fionn Areth gave his unconditional consent.’

A silence weighted with terrible memories settled between the two Sorcerers. The brutal wind howled, while its freight of barbed ice tapped and bounced off the spears of browned sedge, and the frost-turned canes of wild briar. For a time, the only living sound in the world was the grate of the stallion’s shod hooves against the glazed crust frozen over the primordial slabs of scoured limestone.

However the Fellowship mages might be tempted to use power to stop the abuse of a child’s innocence, they had no grounds. The Law of the Major Balance disallowed any choice which obstructed the course of free will. Unless Fionn Areth came to ask their assistance, the Sorcerers could not act, could never engage the force of grand conjury against the informed consent of the spirit.

Sethvir regarded the knuckles of his hands as if the streaks of unforgotten, past bloodstains remained branded into wet skin. ‘We cannot step back and resume our old ways. The boy’s fate is Arithon’s, now.’

Though his agonized whisper seemed masked by the storm that whined over the barren landscape, Luhaine heard. ‘You’re shivering.’ The discorporate mage asked a permission of the elements, and shifted the brunt of the wind. ‘Have you given a thought to finding shelter for the night?’

Sethvir regarded the slow slide of moisture from the crusted rime on his sleeve cuffs. This time the grain of a desperate weariness let all his sorrow break through. ‘There’s a farmwife nearby who hid an herb witch from crown soldiers. If she knows me for a Sorcerer, she won’t turn me out.’

For her kindness, Sethvir could set wards of concealment on her cellar. He might lay a blessing over her livestock that would encourage them to bear twins for the next five years. The small comforts he could bestow for a night’s hospitality chafed against sensibilities left outraged by other, immovable bounds of restraint. Timeworn wisdom granted no comfort. Against the entanglement planned for Arithon s’Ffalenn through the fate of an innocent child, the uncertainties ahead posed too graphic a peril to dismiss. At least Luhaine chose tact and suppressed his need to list the appalling facts: that Arithon was no match for Koriani plots, not since the hour of the atrocities at Tal Quorin, when he had gone blind to mage-sense in remorse. The Mad Prophet could remain at his side to protect him only so long as his spellbinder’s powers could be spared by a Fellowship caught critically shorthanded.

‘You’ll return to Althain Tower to regroup?’ Luhaine asked.

‘Not yet.’ Diminished by the desolate landscape, Sethvir squared his shoulders against the flaying edge of the wind. ‘For the sake of the Etarran men-at-arms still spellbound by the dreaming of Caithwood’s trees, I intend to demand a state audience at Avenor.’

On that point, the compact gave the Fellowship Sorcerers clear entitlement to act. Balked as they were on all other fronts, Althain’s Warden resolved to wring merciless advantage from that narrow chink of opportunity.

Midwinter 5654

Developments

Just past his seventh birthday, the herder’s son, Fionn Areth, returns from a scuffle with a peer, one eye bruised black, and a cut on his lip; and is dispatched to his blankets in the loft without supper while his father snaps to his goodwife, ‘Well who wouldn’t pick fights with him? No child in this valley, nor even his own brothers can bear the arrogant look that boy’s learned to wear on his face …’

Far south of Araethura, a wizened desert seer recasts his third augury in bones on the sable sands of Sanpashir, and his reading affirms the arrival of Shadow, and the living future of his tribe; his instructions to his people carry the weight of action as he concludes, ‘We go now to the ancient ruins to stand guard …’

On the east shore of Melhalla, a galley flying the scarlet bull of Alestron embarks for Avenor, where the duke’s brother, Parrien s’Brydion, will attend the wedding of Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid and post an ambassador to relieve Mearn, whose appointed service to the Alliance of Light has kept him from home for eight years …

Midwinter 5654

IV.

Reckoning

At Avenor, the victims of the Caithwood campaign were tended in a string of dockside warehouses donated to the cause by the city’s disgruntled trade guilds. The arrangement proved far from felicitous. Always before, the rich sea trade through Havish had ensured steady profits through the lull while the passes in Camris lay snowbound. Other years at midwinter, those same buildings were crammed with the fruits of industrious commerce. The fact this season’s goods were summarily displaced by a misfortunate company of sick men raised a clamoring chorus of complaint.

Where bribes had once sidestepped Havish’s crown rights of enforcement against galleys manned by slave oarsmen, now the wide-ranging deterrent of a Fellowship ward seal put closure to the market’s furtive evasions. With eight illegal craft snared outright by spellcraft, and no sign of reprieve in sight, the merchant factions sweated in their lace and brocades, and argued the dearth of alternatives. Their options were choked, they knew well enough. No palliative could salvage high losses. Not with the less direct route to the south closed by hazard, the land passage through Caithwood turned haunted by trees raised to wakened awareness.

In boneheaded fury, the most determined guildsmen attempted to bypass the forest. These dispatched slave galleys up Mainmere Narrows, or outfitted others with free labor at perishing expense to access the trade road beyond Ostermere. Few arrived there unscathed. Barbarian raiders roved the sea-lanes under sail, outfitted in the selfsame hulls the Spinner of Darkness had stolen from Riverton.

The wharfside taverns brewed up angry talk. Seasoned galleymen refused well-paid berths for fear of bloodthirsty predation. Clan crews lately reclaimed from chained slavery were likely to choose vengeance before mercy toward oppressors who had shown them the brand and the whip.

Alliance retribution would stay paralyzed until spring, when the royal marriage with Erdane’s daughter brought the dowry to launch the new fleet. In the dockside climate of snarling frustration, and the clatter of the mounted patrols sent out by Avenor’s Crown Examiner to redress the complaints against sorcery, one man handled the upsets of fate with ironclad equanimity.

In the wind-raked, cavernous warehouse jammed with stricken invalids, Avenor’s royal healer made his daily rounds in shorthanded resignation. He was a gangling man, given to brusque speech and a harried expression of perplexity. One cot to the next, he lugged his worn satchel with its chinking phials of remedies. An emetic prescribed here, and there, a soup of barley gruel and butter where one of his charges had lost flesh; the passing weeks had produced no improvement in the condition of Caithwood’s victims.

Their affliction followed no ordinary pattern of malady. Sprawled comatose on straw ticking, the body of the man he currently examined had lost neither tone nor vitality. The suspended state was unnatural. Muscle should atrophy from disuse, and the organs slowly fail in their function. Yet of the ninetyscore Etarrans afflicted that autumn, not one wasted from starvation. Wrapped in an uncanny hibernation, their heart rate and breathing had slowed. Their life signs languished, faint to near nonexistent, as though their animate function stood in abeyance. Somehow, they subsisted on infusions of broth, with most none the worse, while their bodily needs were tended in infantile helplessness.

Winter let in the damp drafts off the harbor, a seeping cold that defeated even the thickest wool stockings and waistcoat. The healer’s charges lay oblivious, muffled under blankets in thick quiet. A half dozen volunteer wives and a brace of overworked junior apprentices shuttled to and fro in the gloom, bearing trays of broth and hampers of soiled bedding, with the crown surgeon’s authoritative presence marked out by a bobbing circle of lanternlight.

For the twentieth time in an hour, sleeves rolled up and his cowlicks pushed back from his forehead, the royal healer peeled back the blankets and examined the next cot’s occupant. This one was a burly troop captain whose scars were by now familiar territory. He counted the man’s pulse rate and pinched slackened, papery skin for the first warning sign of dehydration. When the intrusive shadow fell over his shoulder, he barked from reflexive habit. ‘Please don’t block the lamp, boy! I’ve said so before. If you’ve stuffed all the cracks in the sea-side shutters, I need well water drawn and heated. We’ve got twenty more who need bathing today. No one gets supper till they’ve been groomed and dried.’

‘The wick in your lamp just wants trimming.’ That deep velvet tone belonged to no whining apprentice. The light brightened, set right by the same individual’s quiet touch. ‘The ladies in the factor’s office know your needs very well. You’ll find the tubs have been filled and heated already.’

The crown healer straightened, both fists knuckled into his aching lower back. He blinked, as if overstressed vision could be made to explain the mischievous old man waiting patiently at his left hand. ‘You’re here to help? That’s a gift and a miracle.’ Disbelief yielded to practical authority that would grasp and secure even chance-met opportunity before it slipped through the back postern. ‘We have women to manage the washing and towels, but the boys will be needed for the litters.’

‘They’re still busy stuffing the cracked boards with rags,’ the strange elder replied in his whiskey-grained baritone. Spry as a cat, his diminutive frame was doused in a shapeless old coat, cut from what seemed a ragpicker’s leavings, and mismatched swatches of worn blankets. Crimped white hair spilled into the riot of beard he contained in the grip of sensitive fingers. ‘I can manage one end of a litter well enough.’

The healer’s dubious glance met a pixie’s bright grin and turquoise eyes folded with laugh lines. ‘Did I not haul your water and roll in the washtubs?’ Then, in afterthought delivered with irreverent distaste, ‘Your magnanimous ruler might have provided something better than vats bought used from the dyer’s.’

‘They often have terrible splinters, I know,’ the healer apologized. ‘We’re pinched to the bone for expenses.’ Too honestly overworked to dismiss his good fortune, he tucked the blankets over the prone hulk of the captain and gestured toward the ramshackle shelving erected against the far wall. ‘Litters are stored over there. Our work’s laid out. A council delegation’s due here this afternoon, and the Prince of the Light won’t like their report if his former crack veterans are shabby with a week’s stubble.’

The old man retrieved the lantern in mild deference. ‘We’re trying to impress someone?’

‘You didn’t catch wind of last month’s proclamation?’ The crown’s master healer snorted his disgust. Granted the boon of unburdened hands, he stowed his loose remedies, hiked up his scuffed satchel, and threaded his way through the rat’s maze of invalids installed on their mismatched cots. ‘Avenor’s recruiting its own talent, these days. You know that snake-tongued Hanshire captain who’s been given the post of Lord Commander? Well, he’s pushed through a change in policy.’

A pause through a stop to adjust a slipped pillow, then a laugh that stabbed for its sarcasm. ‘Sulfin Evend’s said, for straight tactics, we need to sign mageborn into Alliance service. Use talent to divide and conquer the ranks, then make the ban against sorcery stick when all disloyal spellcraft’s eradicated. Now, every mageborn offender hauled in is offered a blandishment to practice for the Light. The one who can lift these Etarrans from ensorcelment will be awarded a paid crown appointment.’

The healer’s lips thinned to harried distaste. ‘The trials are held here. Stay and witness the farce, if you’ve got a fancy for uproarious entertainment.’

‘You don’t sound appreciative,’ the old man observed, his interest engaging, and his dreamer’s gaze grown astute.

‘I don’t like dead men. Or broken bones. Or amputations, or holes carved by arrows, not for any misbegotten cause made in the interest of crown politics.’ The healer secured the strap of his satchel and hoisted the pole handles of a litter, still talking. ‘Seen too much cautery and too many splints in this campaign to throw down the clanborn.’

The old man secured the lamp in a niche and stooped to bear up his share of the burden. ‘You don’t fear shadows?’

‘I should.’ The healer gave back a gruff, barking laugh. ‘Maybe I will, if I see any. You ask me, what we have is a crisis in trade that began with the bold-as-brass theft of crown ships by a scoundrel. I don’t see any Spinner of Darkness storming the kingdom by sorcery. His clan allies are left as convenient scapegoats, dragged in to vindicate the old hatreds.’

‘Strong words,’ the elder murmured in peppery provocation.

‘Men don’t burn in Avenor for opinions. Not yet, anyway.’ Arrived at the end of the near row of cots, the healer lapsed in his tirade. His scrutiny turned critical until he observed that the oldster knew how to raise and move a helpless man without causing careless injury. ‘Whoever trained you, you’re good with your hands.’ Then, the ultimate compliment, ‘Can I call you by name?’

The request raised a mumble drowned out by the scraping scuffle of footsteps as the litterborne man was conveyed toward the tiny, partitioned room that had formerly served as the warehouse factor’s day office. Sudden light knifed the gloom as a woman in a farmwife’s loomed skirts threw open the door to admit them.

Steam billowed out, spiked by a ghost taint of apricot brandy, and a drift of female chatter. ‘Bring the dearie in here. Aesha’s got balsam to sweeten his bath, and Ennlie’s cousin’s new babe needs a wee syrup for the croup. Could you mix her the dose? We’ll see to your work with the razor.’

‘Have I ever refused you, love?’ said the healer, absorbed as he maneuvered the burdened litter through the constraint of the doorjambs, careful not to scrape the chapped skin off his knuckles. He added in snatched explanation, ‘These are widows of the men lost on campaign back in Vastmark. They’re all volunteers, and we would be paralyzed without them.’

‘I can prepare cough syrup,’ the old man offered. His quick smile reassured the redheaded Ennlie; the healer was given his calm list of the herbs in proper proportion for the recipe. ‘If you haven’t any cailcallow, fresh wintergreen will do.’

‘Ath,’ said the healer, amazed. He braced the litter on a tabletop, planted his stance, then eased the heavyset occupant into a waiting tub brimmed with suds. ‘Wherever you came from, we could use six others just like you.’

‘Petition the crown to stop burning herb witches?’ the old man quipped.

The healer’s solemnity gave way to the first belly laugh he had enjoyed in long weeks. ‘Now, that might see me arraigned for collaboration with evil.’

‘Surely not,’ the old man argued. ‘Avenor’s palace pages could scarcely fill your shoes as replacement.’

‘Well then, definitely don’t brag on your skills while you’re here. I’d rather be sure this court gets no leeway to decide my sharp tongue’s a crown nuisance.’ Smiling, the healer offered his satchel and the freely made gift of his trust. ‘Everything you’ll need for that remedy is inside. Just rummage away. Oh, and shout if you can’t read my labels.’

The morning streamed past in camaraderie and hard work, with the harried master healer relying more and more on the old man’s competent assistance. If the fellow seemed given to peculiar silences, his lapses of woolgathering seemed not to affect the compassionate skill of his hands. Nor was his remark about arcane connections entirely the lighthearted artifice of humor. He had a gift, or else an empathic touch that wrought an uncanny string of small miracles. Those victims whose vitality had faltered through their prolonged and unnatural sleep seemed to stabilize under his influence. When yet again the royal healer felt a man’s fluttery pulse rebound and steady for no reason, he glanced up.

The oldster was only washing the unconscious man’s hair, his hands wrist deep in dripping lather, and his expression vague as a daft poet’s. Except that no mind could decipher his reticent secrets, nor read into eyes that held the innocence of a spring sky.

The healer stared over the rim of the washtub, a swift chill of gooseflesh marring the skin of the fingers still clasped to the guardsman’s limp wrist. His attentiveness this time demanded the courtesy of a straight answer as he said softly, ‘Who are you?’

The old man in his whimsical coat of sewn rags turned his head. He smiled, disarming, then tipped his chin toward the closed door, a half beat ahead of a disturbance arisen outside of the warehouse. ‘You’re going to know very shortly.’ As the commotion resolved into the scouring rumble of cart wheels, and the clatter of a sumptuous company of outriders, his seamed features kindled into beguiling delight. ‘We have company? Your party of councilmen has arrived two and a half hours early.’

‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear!’ The crown’s master healer rammed to his feet in flustered annoyance. He pressed through the busy women in the factor’s office, cracked the door, and yelled to his youthful assistants, ‘Get busy lighting the sconces and candles! Now! Jump on it! His Grace’s high officers have no liking at all for musty dim corners and shadows that remind them of darkness.’

Abandoned in the wake of last-minute preparations, the old man retrieved the dropped pitcher. He rinsed the soapy head under his fingers, and without visible hurry, toweled the comatose soldier’s streaming hair. Then he left his charge in the care of the women.

‘Don’t scream if he stirs,’ he admonished on parting, his amusement damped back to a madcap twinkle in the artless depths of his eyes.

‘Ye’re moonstruck,’ the grandmother among them replied, laughing, and shooed him back into the warehouse.

There, he might as well have been invisible for all the notice anyone paid him. The frenzied scurry of preparations flowed right and left, banked candles and lanterns set burning at profligate expense. If the Prince of the Light went nowhere without ceremony, his high council officers emulated court style. The old man chose an unobtrusive stance against the sagged boards of old shelving. His ancient, patched coat flapped against his booted ankles as the large double doors that fronted the dockside were unlatched and dragged open.

Two pages entered, their deep blue crown livery adorned with sunwheel sashes. Next followed a herald, his tabard roped with gold, the glittering white silk smirched with a dusting of snowflakes. While the chill swirled and flowed to the farthest-flung crannies, and candleflames streamed with the draft, he bawled out his formal announcement of the imminent presence of crown officers.

Two magistrates stepped in as the echoes died away. They wore their formal robes of judgment and collars of gleaming links. With them came the Lord Crown Examiner, robed in ermine and white silk, and a second figure of impressive presence and seal-colored beard and hair. Diamond studs shot scintillant fire, warmed by a linked chain of dragons masterfully wrought in tooled gold. The inclement weather had not ruffled his fine clothes, which meant that somewhere outside, a stoic pack of servants had borne a closed litter or palanquin.

The argumentative clutch of clerks trailing the first pair did not merit such nicety. They wore snow in their hat brims, and discommoded expressions of forbearance. Last came the lean and predatory form of the Alliance Lord Commander at Arms. That one strode in like a hungry hawk, his black-hilted weapons and alert carriage in sharp contrast to the disdainful court secretary who waddled, self-important as a citybred pigeon. Six sunwheel guardsmen escorted the retinue, their glittering trappings and ceremonial helms buffed to a dazzling polish. These ushered in their turn a trio of curiosities: a tall woman trailing a sequined train and a shoulder yoke of pheasant wings and peacock eyes. Next came a skinny, bald man robed in sable and purple velvet; then a wizened creature of indeterminate sex, with one gouged-out eye socket and a blackthorn walking stick capped with a crow skull and fringed with rattling bone beads. Four liveried footmen brought up the rear, loaded chin high with oddments and bizarre paraphernalia.

The array was eclectic. From his unobtrusive vantage outside the hub of activity, the old man picked out several portable bronze braziers, clay vessels stamped with runes, and two amphorae of ruby glass. Less wholesome than these, stained with the aura of dark usage, was a goblet made from a cranial bone rimmed in tarnished silver. A trailing tangle of embroidery identified the filched mantle from a ransacked hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood. Two matched onyx candlesticks wafted a perfume of heavy incense, even through the rampaging wind that rushed in, rank with the salt rime razed off the harbor.

Through a sifting swirl of snow, the rattle of bone beads, and the sonorous flourish of the herald, the page boys wrestled the heavy doors shut. There panoply paused. The crown’s master healer hastened forward and bowed under the gimlet regard of the Lord Commander. The high councilmen looked bored, and the clerks stood resigned, while the countrywomen whispered from the inner doorway of the factor’s office, their capable hands pink from wash suds.

Their interest was matched by the old man in the rag coat, tucked in his corner with the pert fascination of a house wren. ‘You know that’s a necromancer’s stick?’ he commented to no one in particular. ‘Very rare. Dangerous, too. I wonder whose unpleasant little sigil lends it power?’

Across the warehouse, the official with the resplendent dress exchanged smooth talk with the healer. His seamless, court bearing set each gesture apart, while the more heavyset Lord Examiner shifted from foot to foot in resentment, and the servants divested their burdens with thinly concealed distaste. The guardsmen and the robed magistrates looked on like cranes, overseeing disposition of the eccentrics, who were named as prisoners under arraignment for the practice of unlawful sorceries.

Their condemned status notwithstanding, they argued. The discord swelled into an arm-waving clamor concerning who held right of precedence. The magistrates deadlocked over whose authority should silence them, while the herald, resigned, waded in and settled their shouting with a peasant’s practice of drawing straws. In decorous language, the clerk of the court then assigned each mismatched contestant to a cot with an unconscious occupant.

The bald man jabbed his splayed fingers and demanded that everyone stand back.

‘What, for you?’ the woman retorted, skirling in spangles to face him. ‘Why should we give way one inch for a showman who couldn’t draw spells to drop fresh dung from a pig?’

The altercation flared, while the withered oldster caught in between remained single-mindedly oblivious.

‘Good people!’ the herald called in vexation. ‘There will be no specialized treatment between you. The Lord Examiner and Avenor’s crown magistrates will judge merit upon equal standing!’

A strained truce prevailed, while the master healer looked irritated, and the contestants who had rudely invaded his domain reclaimed their sundry paraphernalia. Under the frosty regard of the Lord Examiner and the unnamed, dapper high officer, they began setting up with businesslike self-importance. The heavyset secretary broke out his lap desk and uncorked his inkwell, while his chilblained apprentice sharpened his quills, and the robed clerks readied the sunwheel seal and gold wax, and snipped lengths from a spool of white ribbon. The magistrates shook melting snow off drooped hats. They peered down long noses to render judgment as the woman unclipped the clasp at her throat, shed her train amid an electrical jitter of reflections, and undertook the first trial.

She began by spreading her sequin train over her assigned victim. She lit tapers. The ancient, carved sconces streamed cloying smoke as she waved long-nailed hands to a chiming descant of silver bracelets. For an interval, the officials coughed and dabbed runny eyes, while she circled the cot and muttered a singsong incantation.

‘A farce, indeed,’ muttered the old man in the shadows. His eyes became piercing, narrowed to slits as the flashy train was whisked off to unveil the man underneath. His pale face was still, the comatose limbs no more responsive than before.

The magistrates straightened from their whispered consultation. The elder one rapped out his verdict. ‘The accused is proved guilty of fraud.’

‘Another charlatan!’ the Crown Examiner concurred. He pronounced the lighter sentence. ‘The objects used for this act of chicanery shall be burned without recompense. The offender will be fined ten silvers and set free with a warning not to repeat her offense.’

‘No more have I coin, since your constables ransacked my lodgings!’ the woman yelled in defiance.

The magistrates lent her outburst no credence. ‘If she has no relations to dun for her fine, give her penury and hard labor with the city’s slop crews.’

The secretary scribbled the added amendment, and the woman resorted to curses. Her shouts turned shrill as two burly guardsmen ushered her, struggling, through the door and remanded her into the custody of the garrison men-at-arms posted in the snowfall outside.

Due process ground on, as ribbons and seal were proffered by the clerks, under candles that flagged in the draft as the outer doors were shoved closed. The healer masked his face in weary hands, and the raggedy character with the crow skull stick flashed a triumphant smile celebrating a rival’s departure.

‘Next defendant,’ droned the magistrate. ‘Make your case for the court.’

The man in gaudy velvet strode forward. Chin held high, each gesture theatrical, he unwrapped a set of shell rattles, then lit something in his brazier that gave off a reek like singed wool and cat piss. His display opened with patterns chalked in a circle around a row of candles, moved on through a muttered consultation with a smoky quartz scrying ball, then broke into rattling, witha swaying ululation over a brush tied from a hanged man’s hair. The act ended in daubing a sticky decoction over the face and the feet of his still unconscious subject.

The fine for his failure was double the woman’s.

‘Well, at least they recognize a fake when they see one,’ the old man said, bemused from the sidelines. His expression now shaded toward genuine concern, as though he perceived something more than straightforward trial and judgment.

Last came the shapeless oldster. The shed hood revealed female gender and a filthy bristle of white hair. She wore a necklace of pig’s teeth. The necromancer’s stick pinched within her twig fingers seemed to glare blue for an instant as she bent and ignited the twisted black rootstock she had shredded in her brazier.

‘No!’ The old man flipped up his cowled collar and strode out of the shadows, no longer deferent, but charged to a startling, sharp air of command. ‘You will not light that here, madam!’ Nor was his authority less than absolute as he entered the circle of candlelight. ‘The herb you’ve chosen will cause harm in this case, and that stick is an unclean implement with which to recall a man’s blameless, strayed spirit.’

‘The lad will awaken,’ rasped the crone, the glint in her single eye sullen.

‘Pass the Wheel, more likely,’ the old man corrected. The improved illumination fully revealed him, even to the peculiar, detailed threadwork that patterned his coat of drab motley. The boots he wore underneath the long hem were a horseman’s, scuffed with hard wear and marred at the toes with small holes that looked punched by cinders. For some reason beyond logic, that oddity lent his presence a fierce credibility.

Twins

While deep winter’s blizzards howled in whiteout gusts over the northern passes, the soporific perfume of citrus rode the southland breeze that rustled glossy leaves of the merchant’s gardens in the Shandian trade port of Innish. Yet tonight, other scents warred with the fragrance wafted through the cracked window of Fiark’s cramped garret office; his twin sister, Feylind, leaned on the sill in her slops. Her presence admitted the distinct bite of ship’s tar and a robust, smoky fug carried out of the seedier shoreside taverns.

‘That’s a ripe crock o’ bilge, and you know it.’ Arms folded over her breasts in black temper, Feylind bore into her argument. ‘To Sithaer you don’t know the names of his contacts, and the place he makes landfall also.’

Fiark tallied the last line in the ledger and fastidiously blotted his pen nib. Unfazed by rank language and accusations, he laced his hands above his head and stretched the kinks from his back. Clean fingers and unstained lace cuffs gave sharp contrast to his sister’s chapped hands and the sweat-stained string of the turk’s-head bracelets worn for luck by most blue-water sailors.

‘Whose contacts?’ he inquired, his disinterested reference to her nameless subject no less than a jabbing provocation.

‘Well, damn you for a spoon-fed liar!’ Feylind sprang off the windowsill, her long, yellow braid wisped silver at the ends from overexposure to strong sunlight. ‘For that, I should plow a fist through your jaw ’til your teeth greet the nape of your neck! You never kept secrets before this.’

‘Before this, there weren’t sword-bearing fanatics lining up to swear undying service against Darkness.’ Fiark regarded her, his hands clasped at the brass-buckled cuffs of his knee breeches, and his eyes tranquil blue in sincerity. ‘I see sunwheel talismans sprouting like mushrooms for each galley lost to a clan raid. The knowledge you ask for holds fatal stakes, and Prince Arithon swore his oath for your safety. You can’t reward the gift of his care without staying mindful that danger dogs every rumored move that he makes.’

His sister returned a spectacular, balked scowl, fists cocked on the belt which hung her man-sized cutlass. ‘Damn him to slow death on Dharkaron’s Black Spear! I was eight years old at the time of that pledge, and besides, his word was given to our mother!’

‘He’s still in the right.’ Fiark laughed in the irresistible way that made shreds of her need to stay angry. ‘You’re no whit less wild now that you’re grown, and anyway, eighteen’s not considered your majority. Not by the tenets of old charter law, which Prince Arithon is charged to uphold by crown obligation.’

‘You talk like a foppish, mealymouthed lawyer. And dress like one, too,’ Feylind grumbled. She paced, her agitation intractable as a caged lioness, while the clomp of her seaboots across the bare floor raised a bellowed complaint from the downstairs tenant.

Fiark closed the boards of the ledger and locked its bronze hasp fastening. ‘You know, you’re disturbing honest folks’ sleep.’ When his sister refused to abstain from her racket, he returned her spirited sniping. ‘Also, on the subject of clothing, you’re nobody’s walking example. You’d have trouble courting a draft ox, done up as you are like a sailhand on course for a tavern bash.’

His sister regarded the toes of her boots, her grin wicked, and her laugh deep and rich with enjoyment. ‘I need the brass caps to fend off randy suitors.’ For effect and demonstration, she stamped on the floor, which intimidated the disgruntled downstairs tenant back to meek suffering and silence.

‘You won’t be excused by changing the subject, forbye.’ Feylind cast herself into the battered leather armchair, her boisterous energy riffling the weighted stacks of lading lists piled over her brother’s desk. ‘Arrange me a cargo for the port where he keeps contact, and let my Evenstar carry the dispatches.’

‘I can’t,’ Fiark said, apologetic. Before she could embark on another spate of guttersnipe’s language, he handed across a scrap of correspondence written in neat, ciphered script. ‘His Grace gave the orders. Evenstar’s to be nowhere near the party who’s sent to make rendezvous. That’s for his own safety, as well as yours. He says the Koriani witches watch everything.’

‘But not here?’ Feylind snorted her frank disbelief. ‘That’s an excuse so brainless a baitfish won’t buy.’ She flicked back the paper, deflated by the fact the handwriting was recognizably genuine. Arithon s’Ffalenn remained the only living spirit she consistently failed to outwit or bully to gain her way.

‘Keep your boots off my desk,’ said her brother, aware of her intent in the fractional second as intention took form in her mind. Her time spent at sea had not changed the unspoken understanding between them. They still shared thoughts as though loomed from one thread, which made sustained argument difficult.

‘The warding was Dakar’s?’ Feylind asked. The capitulation Fiark had waited for, that had nothing to do with uncouth habits or seaboots, arrived with no fuss appended; Feylind twisted in the chair and unhooked the belt which hung her black-handled weapon. She drew a thick packet of letters from a pouch tucked underneath her man’s jerkin.

Fiark accepted the bundle with apology rather than triumph. ‘The spellbinder wrought a protection so strong, some days I find just crossing the threshold sets me into a cold sweat.’ He settled the packeted documents into a locked drawer, then dealt his twin sister the leveling honesty that kept their inviolate trust. ‘There’s everything at risk. The Shadow Master all but lost his sanity at Riverton, which is why you’ll collect no more unsolicited correspondence in Tysan, and also stop plaguing me with dangerous, prying questions.’

‘I’ll do that, perhaps.’ Feylind poked her cheek, thoughtful. ‘But only if you’ll shed your fine airs and fop’s clothes and share beer at the Gull and Anchor.’

‘That dive!’ Fiark raked exasperated fingers through his neatly trimmed golden hair. ‘You have the bar keeper there in your pocket. He’d spike my drink out of gallantry just to weigh the odds in your favor, and anyway, getting me drunk will damned well not loosen my tongue far enough to spill the secret you’re craving.’

‘Bet on that?’ Feylind’s freckled nose crinkled to her wide grin. ‘Drink or cards, brother. I’ll see you under the table or beggared.’

‘Witch.’ Fiark laughed, rising. ‘You never could.’ Grown unfamiliarly fastidious since their beginnings as mackeral shack urchins in Merior, he tipped his crockery jug of goose quills and fished out a candle snuffer. Gone were the days when he would black his fingers pinching out wicks, or cause a careless spatter of wax on his employer’s lading lists.

‘You’re coming?’ Feylind prodded, and flung him the mantle he kept on a hook by the doorway.

‘Oh, I’ll share your shore liberty, you ungrateful wench. But not at a den as notorious as the Anchor. We’ll sup at the Halfmoon.’ Fiark thumbed through his keys for the one that secured the hasp lock on his office. ‘That way, I haven’t very far to stagger home, and you can pass out where you won’t find yourself tucked in some oily galleyman’s bed come the morning.’

‘Halfmoon’s for milksops who can’t hold their liquor,’ Feylind retorted, impatiently starting her clumping descent of the stair. ‘The landlady there’s a damned child’s nurse.’

‘Oh? Say that to her face, fat Moirey will fell you.’ Fiark caught up and matched her long-strided energy with the effortless grace of old habit. ‘Two silvers says you don’t dare.’ On his way past the second-floor tenant’s shut door, he paused, then grinned at the abusive threats the matron yelled from inside. He elbowed his sister before she could retort. ‘Don’t be a pest. The couple have children. Your thoughtless noise could set them crying into the wee hours of the morning.’

With a shrug that reflected no shred of shame, Feylind answered his challenge. ‘Two silvers is ant’s piss, to brangle with Moirey. Do you want dinner, or a front seat to watch me get drubbed with a meat mallet?’ They reached the ground-floor landing; Feylind spun with a flourish and showed off her new trick, a neat, chest-high kick that tripped up the bar on the outside doorway. ‘I still have a fiends-plagued dent in my leg from the time the trull hit me with her fire iron.’

‘She did that?’ Fiark trailed into the narrow, brick-paved alley, rising with pleasure to the lively challenge of an evening in his sister’s company. ‘What was the offense? You pick a fight with one of her pimps?’

‘Drink or cards?’ Feylind persisted, a demented enjoyment setting a whetted edge to her grin. ‘Choose one or the other. You want every scrap of my sordid gossip? Then you’ll earn the right through a winning stake that proves you’re not the mim-faced town dandy you seem by the sissified cut of your clothes.’

‘Let it be cards,’ Fiark settled. ‘But if I win, the stake that I claim will be your promise, made on his own name, that you solicit no more news on behalf of his contacts. Nor will you try any other sly tricks that will lead to your knowing his business.’

‘I can’t give that promise,’ Feylind said in a sudden, desperate honesty. ‘You’ve seen for yourself how bad things are turning.’ She lowered her voice, lest the echoing sound of their passage carry too well down the alleyway. ‘Too many enemies are finding their way to the council tables. The Alliance’s cause has been tailor-made to further the townsmen’s entrenched hatreds. The hour could all too easily arrive when my role as Evenstar’s captain becomes the one cipher that could spare Arithon’s life.’

Plain facts, and a truth that cut with razored pain to the heart; Fiark found himself wordless. ‘All right,’ he agreed, when at last his dark thoughts loosened enough to let him speak. ‘No promise, but your given intent that you honor his Grace’s wishes where your personal safety is at stake. He lost Caolle to the dark machinations of the curse. If your careless misadventures ever came to break his personal bond to our mother, I don’t want to share in his anguish.’

Feylind drew breath, and Fiark interrupted in the same vein of brutal sincerity. ‘You didn’t see the damage wrought by Caolle’s death. Nor will you, if the Shadow Master’s fate resolves kindly. Wish for nothing else, Feylind. To do less would not be the act of a friend, but an axe blow to further the frightening cause of his Alliance enemies.’

Late Winter 5654

Foray

Parrien s’Brydion, next oldest brother to the Duke of Alestron, paced the decks in bad temper. That morning had brought his family’s state galley into the overcrowded port city of Southshire. Across the merle chop of the harbor’s pale waters, he could already see that the dockside berths were jammed to the point of insanity.

The lighterman he swore at dutifully shouted back. ‘We’ve got moorings still available. But only through making the proper application, with the fee paid in full at the harbormaster’s.’

‘May Dharkaron’s Black Chariot shear a linchpin and drop a wheel foursquare on the heads of the dolts in this city!’ Every bit as volatile as his youngest brother Mearn, but built with the shoulders of an axeman, Parrien snarled on in distemper. ‘Just what’re we expected to do meanwhile? Row in pissing circles while yon simpering, overdressed clutch of officials quibble and suck on their pen nibs?’

With gauntleted fists hooked on his studded sword belt, he glowered askance, and then raised another ranging bellow, this time addressed to his crewmen. ‘Damn you all for a pack of mincing laggards! Quit fiddling with whatever part’s itching and sway out this gilt tub’s excuse for a shore tender!’

The war captain and five mercenaries who strapped on their weapons to go ashore watched, resigned, since the shortage of dock space at this time of year was altogether predictable.

Two months past the solstice, the rag ends of winter still closed off the northshore ports. While howling white blizzards cast snowdrifts like nets over the mountain passes, the wharfside dives on the south coast of Shand enjoyed their peak season of prosperity. What trade moved at all in the months before thaws must pass by the southern sea routes. Since no man could predict when the ice packs would break, or the high peaks shed their mail of slurry and ice as spring rains sluiced open the roadways, the blue-water captains drove their vessels in a cutthroat race to seize profit. Each year, ships vied to complete one last run east or west before the premium price of their cargoes could be undercut by the first overland caravans.

The month before thaws, every harbor in Shand held a maze of anchored vessels. Having zigzagged an oared course through the crisscrossing traffic of lighters to gain the docks, Parrien clambered onto the sun-bleached boards, steel studs and weapons flashing. Bystanders and longshoremen scattered from his path. With his cadre of mercenaries trailing, he stalked to the sanctum of waterfront authority.

‘Wait here until I come out,’ he commanded, adding a flicked signal to his captain. Under a graceful, tiled arch and the puckered bliss of a spouting nymph, Parrien rammed through double doors that led into the stuffy, paneled foyer of the harbormaster’s office. There, he made his s’Brydion presence felt in blustering language. The three scurrying stewards strove to placate him, then flushed red to the ears and gave in.

A servant swiftly ushered him into the main office in vain hope of keeping him quiet.

Not about to stay mollified, Parrien paced. The sheath of the broadsword he wore at his belt sliced wide arcs that clipped tasseled furnishings. He fumed as he stomped, and disgruntled the robed secretaries by insisting on preferential treatment. When asked to show more seemly decorum, he raised his iron-flecked brows in astonishment. ‘Show me why an overdecorated galley from Jaelot should outrank a duke’s brother where there’s space at the docks to tie up.’

An elderly official in Southshire’s silk livery answered in stiff-lipped reproof. ‘That vessel’s sworn to the Alliance of Light.’

‘You say!’ Parrien jutted his square chin across the propped ledgers arranged like a barrier on the desk. The foghorn bellow he shared with three brothers rattled the walls as he ranted, ‘So what if some puffed-up captain from that mayor’s prissy galley flies the sunwheel banner? Alestron’s in league with that cause as well. You won’t see a sniping scrap of white cloth on my masthead, just our own family banner. S’Brydion don’t claim borrowed loyalty out of need to protect what’s ours! Any ignoramus who holds his life cheap can slight our name at his peril. He’ll get his head dunted with no cry for help for the Prince of the Light to send in armed might for backing.’

Rawboned and mean as a fidgety tiger, the duke’s oldest sibling crashed his forearm into the ordered papers of officialdom. Reed pens and parchments jumped from the blow. The flask burped up a dollop of black ink, to a trilling squeak from a clerk.

For a moment the quiet became thick enough to wring running sweat from cowed servants. The balding harbormaster tapped an attenuated finger into a cheek like boiled leather, while two onlooking captains and several wattled ministers peered with circumspect caution from under their hat brims.

‘Sithaer’s biting furies, man!’ Parrien stormed. ‘You know what’s good, you’ll see me happy. I’ve a shipload of my brother’s best mercenaries manning the oars belowdecks. Once they’ve drunk a skinful, they like to make sauce out of unsuspecting lightermen with their fists. I suggest you find me a berth at the docks. Let my men stagger back from their whoring on foot, and maybe your bonesetters can keep their chance of getting an honest night’s rest.’

The harbormaster blinked, bored. ‘Banners aside, we have no berths free at the moment.’ His enervated shrug made Parrien’s high temper seem overdone to absurdity. ‘And if there’s a bonesetter anywhere in Southshire’s sea quarter who gets an uninterrupted night before equinox, I don’t know him. One brawler more or less before thaws isn’t likely to matter.’

Which was the plain truth; late winter on the south coast was no place for a man too refined to withstand the roughneck pursuits of a seafaring neighborhood. Even here, overcrowding made way for no nicety. The raw noise and shouts from the thoroughfare beat through the clay walls, interspersed by the croaks from the rooks nesting in the harbormaster’s watch turrets. From that high vantage, each day, sharp-eyed tally boys stood counting ships. They matched their numbers against each entry in the register, and made accurate lists for the constables. Those captains who tied to a mooring without paying were systematically accosted and fined.

The shoreside watch was in fighting trim, with the taverns and brothels packed night and day, and the wharf quarter tuned to the hysterical pitch of a carnival. Street stalls under their sun-faded awnings shook and bulged to capacity crowds. Each morning, men were knifed in hot-tempered arguments. Fights and trade conflicts heated to boiling in minutes, as vendors and landlords elbowed to rake in the easy flow of winter silver.

‘What’s the price of your extortion, then?’ Parrien grumbled, not beaten, but shrewd enough to know when intimidation became wasted enterprise.

The secretary’s clerk peered up from his rodent’s perch over the cash box. ‘Cost for a mooring’s six coin weight the night.’

Parrien howled.

The harbormaster shrugged. ‘No pay, then no anchorage.’

His bland-faced indifference would not yield to s’Brydion wrath at this season. The slow months would return all too soon. Today’s raucous press of patrons would dry up after equinox, until only the high-class establishments could stay open. No responsible captain allowed crewmen on shore leave in summer, when spoiled stores and green flies, and the humid, sick airs hazed the sea quarter, and the brothels, with their louvered galleries, languished in the dense south coast heat.

‘Six silvers for mooring? That’s robbery.’ Parrien leaned forward; paperwork crackled and ivory marquetry groaned to the press of his weight. ‘Find me a berth. I’ll pay eight, and my mercenaries will toss no one’s taproom.’

‘The galley from Jaelot has priority. They carry a half company of new sunwheel soldiers as well.’ A last shrug from the harbormaster ended debate. ‘Those brutes were recruited from Alland’s league of headhunters. Since they’re just as likely to hammer my lightermen, your threat of bashed noses is moot.’

Parrien flashed teeth in a barracuda grin. ‘Very well, man. Don’t say you weren’t warned. I don’t give any six of your town watchmen a chance against just one of mine when he’s pissed.’ The duke’s brother slapped down the coin for his mooring, then clomped to and fro to vent ripping impatience while the clerk marked the register and the tally boy recited the colored markings on the buoy assigned to his galley.

‘Make sure you tie up at the designated mooring,’ fussed the hovering clerk. ‘Claim another, and you forfeit your legitimate fee and subject yourself to a squatter’s fine.’

‘Do I look blind or stupid?’ Parrien glared. ‘I sure as blazes see well enough not to splash my own shoe, which does me credit, looking at you.’

He turned on his heel and shouldered his way out, laughing gales at the whey-faced official, who had swallowed the jibe and now bent like a stork in a worried inspection of his slippers.

Outside in the streets, under sun like fine wine, the reek of human sweat wove through the stench of the midden carts, stale horse urine, and the bouquet of patchouli and lavender worn by the half-silver whores. Parrien collected his captain of mercenaries, a hatchet-faced man with scars on his arms who had no smile to spare for the doxies. Like black steel struck through cloth, the cohesive armed party sauntered off down the docks toward the sailors’ quarter.

‘Boys,’ Parrien flipped back to the swordsmen, who padded like wolves at his heels, ‘you’ve got my leave to tear up this town for the threefold hell handed down by its windbag officials.’

His pantherish stride clove through the press, the otter sleek knot of his clan braid cruising level with the froth of feathers that spilled from the trade factors’ hat brims. On either side, between loiterers begging handouts and the clouds of grease smoke from the sausage vendors, his eye caught the gleam of fresh paint.

Parrien’s mouth twitched. ‘Will you look at that?’

His captain also noted the sunwheel emblems newly blazoned on the doorposts of the houses. His sole comment became the gob of spit he ejected into the gutter.

The frown set in place at the harbormaster’s furrowed the ridge of Parrien’s nose. ‘You saw the sunwheel flying alongside the banners over the guildhalls.’

‘I did.’ The captain’s grin came and went like the cold gleam of quartz in a streambed. ‘This town’s fawning terrified of piracy, looks to me.’

Parrien curled his lip. ‘It’s their purses they’re protecting, sure enough.’ His laughter slapped echoes off the shaded arches of the shop fronts, and turned the heads of three girls buying ribbons.

The raids had become the scourge of seagoing trade. Afloat in armed strength in their contraband ships, Tysan’s clans came down like plague on those galleys bearing slave convicts. Despite his family’s lip service loyalty to Prince Lysaer, the spreading fashion of Alliance support galled s’Brydion independent sensibilities.

‘Best walk softly on our business indeed,’ Parrien said in low warning to his captain.

The mercenary gave back a wary, clipped nod. Southshire had declared for the Light with a fervency they had seen repeated with unsettling frequency in their port-hopping voyage down the coast. Just like the guard garrisons at Elssine and Telzen, the uniformed watch here had sewn sunwheel patches beneath the city blazon on their sleeves. At the Fat Pigeon Inn, the recent trend proved entrenched. When Parrien arrived to complete his small errand, the louvered dimness of the taproom was crammed with a large party wearing the white tunics denoting a vow of life service.

‘What’s this, the new kennel?’ Parrien grumbled, but softly. Only his captain overheard.

What seemed a whole troop of Alliance men-at-arms sprawled at ease, dicing and wenching and swilling down beer. Others arm wrestled for coin, companionably mingled with burly deckhands on leave wearing Jaelot’s rampant lion livery. Officers in gold braid commandeered all the corner nooks. Their immense, florid captain lounged with his boots propped on the best table, his beefy hands laced over his belly as he hobnobbed with a trio of pouting merchants. Behind their pastel velvets and lace, a ferret-nosed official in a spotless white tabard lounged against the frame of the window sash. He appeared to listen in, but did not participate. His searching glance raked the taproom’s noisy patrons with a focused reserve that lifted Parrien’s hackles.

‘Slinking headhunters,’ he mouthed under his breath. ‘Never mind those milk-sucking dockside clerks, I’d buy any man a night’s pleasure to cripple a few of these ham-brained murderers, and give a life pension for the head of that weasel-faced sunwheel informer.’

A seasoned veteran of Alestron’s service, the captain rubbed his old scars. ‘Won’t stay the night to catch lice for that lot.’ He passed a surreptitious signal and closed his men into a wedge, prepared when the familiar wry twist curved the duke’s brother’s lips.

‘Well, you’re right on that score.’ Parrien laughed. ‘Bloodying faces is a sight cleaner fun than the whores would provide at this season.’

Together, he and his companion plowed through the flattering hands of those wenches not engaged by drunken sailhands.

The landlord of the Fat Pigeon held nothing in common with the comfortable name of his establishment. Slender as worn string, he limped on arthritic knees, which had led many to underestimate the hand that could strike with the speed of a cobra. More than one swaggering brawler had found himself flattened, spitting smashed teeth on the floorboards. Given the sight of Parrien’s squared jaw and soft tread, the man dropped the damp rag he used for buffing the enameled glaze on his tankards. His black eyes brightened to recognition like a spark chipped off a struck flint. ‘Don’t give a rat’s tail for my customers, I see. That’s no excuse. Make trouble, and just like any other scum, you’ll land facefirst in the gutter.’

‘That’s what happens with fleabrains who draw their damned steel in this taproom,’ Parrien quoted in an evil imitation of a southcoaster’s drawling vowels. He grinned wide as the moon, folded his arms, and leaned across the bar top. The muffled grate of metal beneath his loose sleeves betrayed the fact he wore a mail shirt. ‘Don’t tempt me. The bodies you’d toss alongside mine in the midden would be for the dogs, stone dead.’ He measured the spotless, bleached cloth of his cuff as if weighing the cost of the penalty. ‘For that lot, a roll in the garbage might just be worthwhile.’

As a beery new recruit in a sunwheel tunic swiveled to sling return insults, the Fat Pigeon’s landlord scowled. ‘Fighting armed packs of drunks was beneath your family dignity once. Or has your clan honor gone to mayhem along with the peace in this Ath-forsaken port?’

‘So Southshire’s been raided, too?’ Parrien laughed.

‘Three galleys hit, just this past week. Made off with the chained oarsmen and sank every hull without troubling to off-load their cargoes.’ The landlord inclined his head toward the merchants wringing lace sleeves in the company of the Alliance captain. ‘That lot were just hired on with the gold sent for the cause by the Mayor o’ Jaelot’s generosity. So now you know why this joint reeks like a barracks.’

‘Never mind.’ Parrien’s grin broadened. ‘I like my shirts clean and my steel sticky, right enough. That finicky habit’s unlikely to change. Not for as long as I walk on two legs without need of a stick to stop doddering.’

‘What’s to do then? Do I pour you a beer?’ The landlord wiped oversize knuckles on his apron and hefted a crockery mug thick enough to be used for a cudgel.

Parrien folded an elbow, eased the wet rag aside, and leaned close. ‘Beer’s fine.’ His blunt, sword-scarred finger traced a cipher on the dampened wood of the bar, then idly swiped the mark out. ‘Along with the drink, I need a wee dispatch slipped to the next courier who happens through.’

The landlord looked up, his shrewd eyes intense.

That instant, the door to the kitchen banged open. Parrien’s wary start passed unnoticed amid the leaping commotion as a sweaty, cursing drudge barged into the taproom, hauling a yelping cur by the scruff.

The snapping animal and the woman tussled their way toward the streetside exit, while sailhands caught in her path staggered clear. As she passed, the sunwheel mercenaries hooted and pinched, or called noisy wagers to name which combatant would wind up arse down in the gutter.

‘Damned Jaelot thugs have the manners of swine.’ A whipcrack snap of Parrien’s fingers dispatched one of his mercenaries, who took two fast strides and relieved the girl of her problem. The outer door swung closed on the heels of the cur, to a pounding on tables and derogatory hoots of displeasure. Alestron’s swordsman never once turned his head, an astounding display of strong character.

‘Those blighty curs take advantage all the time,’ the landlord smoothed out by way of wry thanks and apology. ‘Though their fracas serves Kats right, since her little daughter steals from my tables to feed them.’ Turned reticent since the byplay with the cipher, he blinked, while Parrien waited.

No revealing move was forthcoming from the s’Brydion or his mercenaries. The one given orders reassumed his post, planted and watchful at his lord’s shoulder. The coded request would not be repeated, nor the sketched sign, too dangerous to redraw on the bar top where the sunwheel informer might notice.

The landlord repressed the nervous urge to glance backward over his shoulder. ‘The next man who could make your delivery isn’t due for six months.’

‘No matter.’ Parrien jerked loose his cuff lace. ‘This news will keep.’ He fished a sealed square of parchment from beneath the gambeson under his mail shirt.

Long since, the Fat Pigeon’s landlord had given up trying to fathom the recipient: like all such missives, this parchment’s wrapping had no mark. Nor did the wax impressions in the seals ever show a device to reveal the point of its origin.

As Parrien pinned him with the same narrow look used to sight down a fresh-sharpened sword blade, the landlord gloved his unease in forced humor. ‘Though actually, this could be your day for blind luck. It just happens the carrier who made last month’s pickup hasn’t left here on schedule.’

That news made Parrien’s flesh crawl. Without turning, he knew: someone’s eyes watched his back. A flashed glance toward his captain confirmed the suspicion by way of a covert hand signal: the shifty, robed informer billeted with Jaelot’s company now took an unwelcome interest.

A silver coin passed across the bar top. ‘Get your prettiest wench to sally over to that clerkish type in robes, and trip up, and maybe spill a trayful of beer in his lap,’ Parrien suggested. ‘His prissy white silk is making me wonder if there’s a man with natural parts underneath. Now, say on. Why hasn’t this courier taken his bundle and gone?’