'I'm not ready for this!' said Arithon, laid open and trapped by a wall of inner reluctance. But he was alone. The library vestibule was empty. He stood, shivering under a film of chill sweat, with the integrated balance of body and mind undone by the race of his heart-beat.
Too prudent to plunge headlong into deep waters, Arithon spent days immersed in odd books of esoterica. He perused the crabbed scribbles written by hedge talent on flocked sheets of vegetable paper; the smoke-scented parchments of conjurers and ceremonial healers, and the cedar boxes of slate wafers scratched with a stylus, inscribed by the desert tribes' loremen. Of Paravian knowledge on the forging of steel, he found nothing committed to ink. Only the odd reference, amid Ciladis's verse, of craftings done in the Ilitharan forges, then augmented by Riathan and Athlien singers. Such inferences lay past the concrete reach of thought or written words to encompass. Therefore, their access must be sought in mage-sight.
Since his point had been taken, Davien granted Arithon's request to borrow from Kewar's herb stores. Bearing a braided twist of sweet-grass, his own trail-worn wallet with flint and steel striker, and a precious glass phial of rose oil, the Master of Shadow made his way to the armoury at last to confront the heirloom sword bestowed on his distant forebear.
The Sorcerer whose riddle had prompted that step kept his meddlesome nature in hand. Rathain's prince was alone as he braved the threshold past the studded door.
The chain-hung oil wicks that streamed from the wall brackets were, thoughtfully, already lit. Ahead of him lay a circular chamber, surrounded by lacquer cabinets. Their abalone inlay gleamed in soft rainbows, patterned in the vine-leaf motif favoured by Vhalzein's master-craftsmen. The break-front doors were closed, but not locked. A visitor might examine their contents to satisfy curiosity.
Arithon was not tempted. He entered the armoury, barefoot, slightly shivering in the chill air. His sword, Alithiel, awaited his pleasure, hung on an upright stand.
The steel had been cleaned. The shining black blade was stripped of the mean sheath he had used through his flight across Daon Ramon Barrens. Quiescent, the inlaid Paravian runes gleamed like opal glass. The exquisite swept hilt and emerald-set pommel gave rise to a quiver of thrill. The exceptional grace that marked centaur artistry must always catch mortal breath in the throat.
Killing weapon, or not, the balance and temper of a sword forged at Isaer could not be equaled, or faulted.
Arithon lit the sweet-grass. Finely trembling, he blew out the flame and fanned air on the crimson embers. Then, decisive, he stepped forward and knelt. With slow passes, he wreathed the standing weapon in smoke, a time-honoured ritual of cleansing. For generations beyond living memory, the blade had been carried and used in armed conflict. If Davien's provocative implication held truth, such blood-letting destruction had evoked something worse than an ignorant mistake.
When the grass had burned down, and the air was hazed blue with its lingering fragrance, Arithon closed his eyes and centered himself. He steeled his raw nerves. Then he uncorked the glass phial of rose-oil, and anointed the tips of his fingers.
The rich fragrance enveloped him. He breathed in the scent. Ciladis's writings had taught that the flower's arcane properties touched the mind and entrained the emotions toward healing. Arithon embraced the response through mage-trained intent. Contrite with apology, he sat cross-legged on the stone floor.
Then he lifted the sword and laid the black blade with reverence across his bare knees.
A shudder rocked through him. He curbed his sharp dread. Deferral would save nothing. If this Paravian artefact had been misapprised, he could not make amends, except through the grace of an earnest, unflinching humility.
First step to knowing, he emptied his mind. Blank as clear glass, wide-open to nuance, he murmured a Paravian phrase of apology. Then he used the pure essence of rose to dress the fine steel. His light touch ran the oil into the metal, stroking from pommel to blade tip. As he worked, he could sense the old blood, and the agonized shock of the dying. His own kills, and others, extending back through his father's time; then the reapings enacted by an uncounted sequence of forebears. Arithon stilled further, listened more acutely. Beneath blood and pain, he encountered as whispers, embedded within the same register: the fire in the forges that had first shaped the steel, and the distanced ring of star song retained by the ore, once extracted from sky-fallen metal.
Arithon engaged mage-sight, sounding still deeper. Patience commanded his discipline. He gentled the steel, coaxing its essence to present itself for his inquiring inspection. Such a revelation could not be forced. The elusive qualities he sought to tap would lie octaves above the range of the physical senses. Receptive to impressions beyond the veil, suspending himself in surrender, Arithon waited. He stayed utterly calm. Hands flat on the sword, he slowed his breathing and engaged the fullest extent of his initiate talent.
The encounter began as he least expected. A light thrill brushed over him, testing.
A shiver rocked through him. His skin rippled to gooseflesh. The ice touch of the steel seemed to burn through his body, riffling the ache of an unformed possibility along the pith of his marrow.
'Mercy,' he whispered, too well aware: he would find no reprieve, if he faltered. He resisted the primal reflex to stir, kept his mind vised in absolute quiet.
And the touch came again, subliminally distinct. It poised for a moment, more fragile than thought. The slightest disturbance would shear its tenuous thread of connection. As Arithon held, the feeling moved, then swelled, a melting caress that seemed to shower his aura with welcome.
His heart responded before thought. Entrained as he was to his innate compassion, he could not choke his reaction, now. Arithon felt the scald of remorse press tears against his closed eyelids. The tender touch that embraced him did not withdraw. Nor did it disbar him in judgement. Shown grace for his flaws, he shuddered, then broke, then lost separation as the veil he touched suddenly parted. He had no breath to gasp, no time to test impact.
The living spells imparted by the Athlien singers seeped through, then flooded his naked awareness.
No study prepared him. Not when he had expected to find the residual imprint of a forgotten ceremony: a sword-blade used as the traditional symbol to mark the east quadrant, for air element.
Instead, his awareness was taken by storm, led into a grand unfolding. He encountered the elements, all four of them, living, imbued in the strength of forged metal. Earth, Fire, and Water embraced him like song, stitched into a tapestry of moving light. Yet of the four, Air stayed predominant: the sword Alithiel had been wrought by Paravians, who had been Ath's living gift to the world to redeem the contention engendered by the drake spawn. They had battled, not to kill, but to hold open the gateway to love and awaken the awareness of healing intelligence.
In the burgeoning hope sustained since the First Age, the old races had forged twelve swords at Isaer, and fashioned their metal with the primal forces to evoke an exalted beginning. Alithiel had been instilled with an aware presence. Her summons called in the essence of Air, a fourfold braiding of virtues that sourced the well-spring of inspiration: responsibility, power, freedom, and transcendence. Her presence incited the breath of new dawn and the innocence of fresh invention.
The blade was the contained seed of creative peace. The bearer who wielded her conjured strength could draw the line across time and space that opened the way for forgiveness. Her stroke, handled under initiate awareness, would cut free the constricting, old patterns and unbind the pain of the past. The sword shaped the key to open the mind: that the flow of water could nourish; fire could burn the residual debris and spark rebirth; and earth element, finally and fully, might bind change into manifest being.
Arithon bent his dark head and wept, for such a healing beauty abandoned to anguish. The sword on his knees was an instrument of change, razor-sharpened to slice through fear and hate, and blind violence born out of ignorance.
The fact she had
ever been misused to draw blood was no less than a tragic desecration.
* * *
Late Autumn 5670
Embarkation
The rigid fact the s'Brydion men hated women's interference in council posed Captain Feylind of Evenstar no deterrent. As set in her way as the duke's wizened grandame, she badgered until she was shown to the door that led to the small barracks ward-room. She was challenged there by two jumpy guards. Without second thought, she blistered their ears, then barged past, ignoring their obstructive arguments.
Once inside, she grinned, flipped her braid over her shoulder, and measured the hammer-beam chamber. Dented war shields adorned the stone-walls. The straw floor was sprawled with the duke's fawning entourage of flea-bitten deer-hounds and mastiff. Masked by the echoes of racketing voices, Feylind closed a light fist on her cutlass, then approached the trestle, where the soldiers' litter of cards and dice had been thrust aside by the duke's bearish habit of leaning on his out-thrust elbows. No one glanced sidewards. Head peeled of his mail coif, his whiskered chin bristled, Bransian s'Brydion stayed immersed in his brangle with his vociferous pack of brothers.
'Dharkaron's black bollocks!' Parrien denounced with wild venom. 'We've spent all these years like damnfool curs, nosing up the fat rump of Avenor's alliance!' His finger stabbed, incensed, toward the duke's face. 'Now you're suggesting we'll skulk in broad daylight, skittish as forestborn drifters?'
Cards fluttered and dice leaped to the bang of Keldmar's mailed fist. 'As the Light's affirmed allies, we dare not send less than an escort suited for royalty. Give me the armed strength of a field troop! Let my lancers mow down any sad, sorry force with the bollocks to question our honour.'
'Allies?' Mearn coughed back his hoot of deprecation. 'After the family just spurned the priest who came knocking with ambassador's flags from Jaelot?'
'We did?' Sheathed knives jingling against his steel byrnie, Keldmar perked out of his slouch.
The debate over Princess Ellaine's due escort suffered a striking break. Eyes widened with dawning, bloodthirsty interest, Parrien also accosted the duke. 'An Alliance priest! Showed his chumbling face here?'
Keldmar laughed. 'What did you do, brother? Bundle the stripling in his sunwheel banner and use a trebuchet to sling his arse back where he came from?'
'Who needed a weapon?' Bransian's shrug was all chagrined innocence. 'Grandame Dawr got in ahead of me. She disdained the bother of using state language and showed the priest emissary and his train a shut gate.'
'Well, he would have been naught but a slinking spy,' Keldmar allowed in sharkish approval. 'Can't have such weasels inside our walls, slipping dispatches back to Raiett Raven. Not until we have Lysaer's wife safely packed off to the care of Ath's Brotherhood.'
Mearn snatched that opening to ram home his case. 'Which is why I should take our state galley to Spire! We don't need to declare there's a fugitive aboard. If our luck sours, and her presence is noticed, I'll have my fighting strength at the oar, and our ambassador's flags to claim honest support of her station.'
'Why sweat our best seamen?' Bransian folded his arms, set his boot on the trestle, and lounged back in his seat in sprawled comfort. 'That's a frank waste when we still have the deepwater keel that brought Ellaine sucking up bilge in our harbour.'
'I have an off-shore rendezvous scheduled!' That pealing, female voice swivelled heads. Pinned under the glare of four sets of grey eyes, Feylind advanced on the trestle. 'Not for any fool's errand up Rockbay Harbor will I run the Evenstar back to the west.'
Duke Bransian bristled; both feet thumped to the floor. 'You think your mercantile Innish registry gives you the brass to dictate to me?'
'I don't give jackstraws for the foibles of men, who clash swords over slogans and banners.' Feylind reached the trestle and matched the duke's glare, hackled as any hazed lioness. 'Just one question matters: are you Arithon's friend, or his enemy?'
Mearn followed the match with keen fascination, fast fingers busied with snatching up cards. A natural gambler who relished high stakes, he shuffled the deck in a slip-stream cascade, pitched to see how his brothers would declaw a woman armed with both cutlass and boarding axe.
No fool, Parrien stole his cue from Keldmar, who had brangled with Feylind before, and whose doused cat expression suggested the moment was unsafe to cross her.
Fur was hell-bent to fly: Duke Bransian's clenched jaw and thunderstruck frown forewarned of a hammering argument. 'Well, we've kept his made double kennelled and safe. By now, he'll be loaded in Evenstar's hold, dragged aboard by the scruff of his neck. Since my men are relieved to be shut of his misery, why are you not on your brig weighing anchor?'
Feylind braced her fists on the opposite rim of the trestle. 'Why won't you say where Prince Arithon's gone? The silence on that score is deafening!'
Mearn's shoulders twitched underneath the bronze studs of his tailored suede jerkin. Since he penned the duke's missives in coded script, he happened to know that Fiark had been informed of the ill-starred foray through Kewar sometime ago. Since none of his brothers would find the right words fast enough to dissemble, he ruffled the cards with a hissing snap. 'You'll have to ask the Mad Prophet.'
The captain's nailing regard swung his way. 'I would,' she said crisp, 'if I knew where to find the weasel-faced parcel of rat bait.'
'That's easy.' Mearn smiled, teeth gleaming. A connoisseur at stirring fresh trouble, he jettisoned the cards and snatched up the offered diversion. 'I'll take you.'
Not fools, his two middle brothers kicked back their chairs. They joined ranks just in time. Bransian's naked relief was eclipsed as, mail gleaming, they padded like wolves, the blonde captain shadowed as quarry before their swaggering tread.
'We're going where?' Feylind queried, as her escort tripped the latch.
Mearn flipped open the door with a debonair flourish, kissed her caught wrist, and ushered her through. 'The stews by the lower town barracks, of course. No one told you? Dakar has been pie-faced since the moment he got here. Twenty-eight of our greenhorn recruits have been hazed under officer's orders to sober him.'
'He came through that undamaged?' Feylind said, amazed.
'Sooner weep for the victims,' Keldmar responded. 'Not one of the wretches succeeded in keeping the leash on that wastrel for more than five minutes.'
Outflanked by rough humour, Feylind was intrigued. 'You lot expect to fare any better?'
'We're not recruits,' said Parrien with nasty hilarity, and charged into the press on the street.
For Dakar, the secure haven of Alestron's walled citadel afforded the chance to make up for long years of privation. Flat on his back with his spinning head pillowed in the silken lap of a prostitute, the vacuous bliss that parted his lips could have rivalled the cream on a sated cat's whiskers. A dusky-haired doxie was massaging his feet, while another sylph traced an exotic dance on his groin with her gilded nails and a feather.
Sunk into a haze of beatitude and wine fumes, the spellbinder grumbled a slurred retort to the nagging prick of his conscience. 'May Dharkaron Avenger threaten me with a gelding if I so much as think to return to serve Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn.'
'Best suck in your bollocks, you twice-useless diddler, since wishing on that score won't spare you.'
The hussy who spoke was not from the brothel.
Dakar cracked open an offended eyelid as pandemonium arrived and disrupted the peace in his perfumed corner of paradise. The whore at his crotch dropped her feather and fled. Next, the melting, soft hands at his soles were replaced with the punishing bite of male fingers, clad in gauntlets.
Dakar lashed out, too late. The fists on his ankles hauled him like dressed meat from his nest of carnal distraction.
'On your feet!' cracked the harpy who had wrecked his bliss. This time, Dakar placed her memory.
'Feylind!' he howled. 'You sexless, cold fish! Keep this up, I'll see you and your dog pack of heavies marooned on a Stormwell iceberg!'
Laughter
answered. 'Try, my fat ram-dick. That predicament ought to be perishing fun, with you packed along for excitement!' As more sword-hardened fingers clamped on his wrists, the ship's captain finished with relish, 'The duke's men aren't sailing, besides.'
Fully incensed, and stabbed by the early pangs of a hangover, Dakar hissed a venomous string of obscenities. A slow death by flaying would have seemed kindly, set against the prospect of being dragged on board Feylind's blue-water brig. Riled enough to resist being shanghaied, the Mad Prophet refused to stand up.
A pail of cold water struck him in the face. Roaring with rage, now nakedly dripping, Dakar heaved at his captors. Although he fought like a goaded bull, the s'Brydion brothers contained him. With Keldmar behind, gripping both arms in a lock, and Parrien, unmoved rock, with a belt cinched over his ankles, no drunk had a chance. Not to be idle throughout their rude enterprise, Mearn tore up a sheet for the purpose of binding a gag on him.
'Feylind, just listen once in your born life!' Dakar ducked the fingers that groped for his mouth. 'You're making a dreadful mistake.'
'Do you think so?' Feylind chuckled with evil delight. 'I don't see your ladies shedding a tear or defending your dissolute character.'
Stripped to pink skin, and trussed hand and foot, Dakar was hauled from his joy in the pillows and into the open street. There, as captive bait for s'Brydion sport, he was dipped in the public horse-trough four times before Mearn drew a dagger and freed his lashed ankles. The reprieve was not done for humane decency. Parrien decided to place bets with some bystanders. The stake rested on how many wobbling steps he could take before measuring his length on the cobbles.
Dakar evaded that humiliation by sitting down, to the ruination of passing traffic. Pebbled with gooseflesh in the scouring wind, he swore incoherently into the muffling sheet, until Keldmar took umbrage, and winched his shivering carcass down to the sea-gate, crammed like a bale in the cargo sling. There, wretchedly chilled and sick from the swamp taste of slobber wicked through by the dripping gag, he was dumped in the bilge of a rolling tender. Four amused deck-hands jumped at Feylind's order. They scrambled aboard and threaded their looms to row out to the Evenstar's mooring. While Mearn's busy knife sawed the knot off the painter, Keldmar shouted over the racketing noise crowding the docks at the water-front. 'You can weigh anchor and sail with the tide. Vhan and Talvish are already on board.'