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 re-echoed 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 h
eard. '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 short-handed 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.'