The Sorcerer used that summoned power to scribe a clean circle around the small islet of stones. Where the quartz wand passed, a thin sound keened, striking a blade of pure energy that parted a rip through the air.
“Not to fear,” Traithe assured as if from great distance. “These are but simple protections to bind and contain the regenerative forces we’ll raise here.”
Yet somehow Jieret sensed the import was more weighty, as if the spelled circle cut ties through time and space and engaged powers beyond mortal understanding. The raven launched into flight. Dense as pressed ink against the substanceless night, it shuttled in patterns overhead. The rings of its passage dizzied the mind. Jieret blinked, disbelieving, as his eye seemed to track an uncanny energy combed into alignment by the bird’s feathers. Each quill seemed attached to a streamer of light. Rather than lose himself forever in bewitching mystery, he settled for the ordinary task of unbuckling his belt.
Around him and past the water’s purled edge, Traithe moved about his work, his lamed tread uncannily silent. He placed what seemed an empty bowl to the east, then the fire bowl to the south, water to west, and one he had filled with plain dark earth to the north. Each pause involved a singing invocation that ignited another strand of unseen current, and wove its flow to the joined circle.
Jieret clamped back the unease that surged through his gut. As if violence could somehow reground his turned senses, he yanked the leather tie on his braid, then plowed stiffened fingers through the hair at his temples, dragging the plait loose at his nape. Another glance, darted sidewards; “You’re making my hair stand on end.”
Straight on his feet with his eyes closed, Traithe appeared halfway removed from the world, his cragged features remote as chased marble; and yet, when he answered, his human warmth was never more real and immediate. “Not to worry. There is no power raised here that is not a part of Ath’s order.” At the center of the circle, he took up the final bowl and shook out the last packet of herbs. This plant loosed a fragrance biting as snow, and a pungency that stripped all five senses to preternatural wakefulness.
“Tienelle,” Traithe explained. He tipped back his hat to unstick damp hair at his temples. “What you commonly know as seersweed. The properties of the flower break down the barriers between space and time, and release the mind to an unclouded view of the continuum. For your safety, the full potency will be weakened. You’ll receive just enough smoke to loosen the ties to your body, that your spirit can be freed to search.”
Jieret said nothing, his throat dried to sand that left him unable to swallow.
Traithe’s glance held a grave and reassuring kindness as he noticed the earl’s knotted fists. “You don’t have to go through with this. We can stop now.”
Jieret jerked up his chin, just shy of offense. “Keep on. I am blood bonded with my prince. This is my job and no other’s.”
“But a straight battle with steel would be simpler,” Traithe admitted in bald understanding. “Be steady. I stand with you, never forget that.”
He called fire and lit the herb. The smoke whirled and twined, spun silk against a darkness ingrained with the faint paling imprint of daybreak. Jieret drew a fast breath, apprehension tightening his chest despite every verbal resolve. He had but one moment for shattering fear. Then the herb’s fragrance burned through the floor of his lungs, seized his heartstrings, and hurled him into a spiraling vertigo that whirled him headlong from the earth.
Dimly he realized Traithe was still speaking. Hands touched his skin, a nagging distraction that badgered him to lie down. Wrung through and disoriented, he fretted at the contact. His mind rampaged through turmoil, then found its release like a beast sprung out of a trap. His awareness burst open. The shrill song of stars threaded the gaps between leaves, and the wind sighed through his being. Its rustling passage through summer green branches framed a language he could almost understand.
Traithe loomed above him, his dark clothes the same shimmering, iridescent obsidian as the plumage of his raven. He towered, a figure of primordial mystery punched through the spun cloth of twilight. He raised the stone knife, its blade of white chert trailing filaments of blue light.
Jieret blinked, while the earth turned, the majesty of her dance a vibration that thrummed through his bones. The stars paled, then burst into pearlescent sparks that burned through the backdrop of daybreak. Then the clouds ignited also, their drifting serenity shot into fire-opal patterns. Nesting thrushes sang out a chord that knitted the air into ecstasy. Jieret felt warm fingers clasp his right hand, then bear down, pinning his forearm. The textures of cold dew and mossy stones screamed detail like etched light down the trackways of overstimulated flesh.
He heard Traithe’s voice, a whisper of sound strung on a filament that corded the arc of eternity. “By your blood bond to Prince Arithon s’Ffalenn, by the ties that lie beyond life and limb, you will seek. Let two become one.”
Then the knife traced the scar of a much older cut, taken before a past battle that left the banks of Tal Quorin soaked with the reaped fruits of hatred. The stone edge of the blade that was now scored and bit. Its savage, hot sting raised a sleeting, bright numbness. Freed blood scalded hot over the caithdein’s bared skin. The knife’s edge smoked light. Through half-opened eyes and a mind deranged by the herb smoke, Jieret watched the uncanny, cold fires off the sharpened chert meet and join with the haze that misted from the flow of his opened vein.
“Ride the winds with my blessing, Jieret s’Valerient!” Traithe scribed a sign that melded the trifold forces of stone knife, flesh, and life. The twined powers blazed, then towered, transformed into resonance fierce enough to blind vision and scatter the last vestige of reason.
A wind out of vacuum rushed through Jieret’s mind. He cried aloud, his voice a splash of raw noise amid the howling expanse of the infinite. Then his last tie to human awareness hurled up and out though the crown of his head. He whirled on the vast chord of sound and light that wove the span of Ath’s universe, insignificant and frail as a leaf unmoored by the chill gales of autumn.
The sun rose, spilling dappled gold spangles over the spring, and cascading sequined reflections off the small stream. But inside the scribed circle, where Traithe sat on vigil, the gray half-light of dawn hung and lingered. Time froze in place there, poised on the filament of Earl Jieret’s courage and the Sorcerer’s cast force of intent. A small stone pipe by Traithe’s knee held the spent ashes of more tienelle leaves, the last ember gone cold with the morning. Submerged in deep trance, poised as a bridge across the veil of the mysteries, he cupped his scarred hands over the brow of the prostrate Earl of the North. The stone knife was cleaned, the cut wrist neatly bandaged. Jieret’s hawk features were a stilled casting in wax, his fox hair a cry of bright color against a pillow of emerald moss.
Nothing moved in that tableau. The raven kept watch, its eyes amber beads that scarcely shifted or blinked though the days came and went in their natural rhythm outside of the spell-circle laid through the crystal.
Then, as if summoned by some unseen cue, the bird launched into flight and disappeared. Traithe’s tranced awareness sensed its departure, as under the distant guidance of Althain’s Warden, it departed the plane of dense matter and crossed into the spirit worlds, strung like infinite cast shadows between the poles of primal energy and firmament.
Though Traithe’s eyes remained closed, he stared beyond the brink of time’s prison and into the limitless unknown. He held guard in that place marking space for the gateway, while a finespun trail of magnetic light traced the path of Earl Jieret’s journey. Behind the caithdein’s lead, a shot arrow of feather and bone, a bird who was more than mere life and flesh flew on a mission of recovery. There existed no recourse. Either the blood tie would call Earl Jieret to Prince Arithon, and afford a firm contact to draw from, or all three would be lost, bird, man, and prince; and the prophet and bard along with them.
“Fly brother,” Traithe urged in spun dream to his raven. “Fo
llow, and bridge the connection to bring them all back.”
There were no guarantees. Earl Jieret’s awareness might ride the winds seeking for an untold span of time. If, in that interval, the Alliance attack swept through Caithwood, or if even one man disturbed the precise spells of suspension Traithe had laid down, the caithdein of Rathain would be torn back into the linear patterns of time and entropy. Should that misfortune happen, his comatose flesh would again become subject to the cruel passage of days. Severed from consciousness, Jieret’s tie to breathing life would fade and weaken. Attrition would claim his body and organs, until his vital signs failed and Fate’s Wheel turned, bringing final oblivion and death.
Discovery
Early Summer 5653
Summer sun streamed through the wide windows of the Koriani sisterhouse at Capewell, laden with the tang of green herbs from the gardens, and the brisk tonic of salt winds off the sea. The fish markets teemed under pale, golden light. Elderly women exchanged gossip at the well, their pails and jugs clumped on the cobbles, while through the lingering heat of afternoon, the craftsmen’s wives gathered on the colonnaded balconies and sewed sequined masks for the harvest festival. In the shade of the walled courtyard, the orphan boys shouted at their games, free through the indolent days while the crops slowly ripened, and the crofters required no labor. If the waterfront inns catered to men-at-arms wearing sunwheel surcoats, or if the roads wore the passage of couriers and patrols in hanging clouds of fine dust, Tysan’s crown treasury honored its debts for their lodging. In the lazy month while the barley ripened, the season left time for indulging the gifts of earth’s bounty.
The Koriani Prime Matriarch harbored no such soft sentiment through her tedious days of convalescence. Imprisoned by her debilitating weakness, and fed on the brew of yet another bitter defeat, she lay swathed in thin coverlets. Her eggshell flesh showed each blue track of vein. Bones pressed against skin seamed and worn to translucency, the joints like knobbed pearl beneath. Through the weeks since the spell construct’s release had roused her from coma, her glistening black eyes lent the sole spark of life to her visage.
She refused idle company. The least small disturbance barraged her strained nerves. Sound and light taxed her senses past endurance, as if the trial of living exhausted repetitive discipline. The bedchamber appointed for her recovery was always kept dim for that reason. Thick curtains were drawn over the paned windows to close out the noise and the frenetic stimulation brought in on strayed currents of breeze. The dammed-in heat of the summer afternoons burdened the stilled air, dense as a wool blanket, and choked with the scents of the medicinal teas to cosset her wasted flesh. The gnawing needs of her intellect were more difficult to appease.
Each day, by the sweltering light of a beeswax candle, a senior-rank seeress in dove gray silk sat in strict attendance with a scrying crystal tucked on her knees.
“Matriarch,” she responded, as she had countless times to the same scantly whispered request, “I search, but find no sign or presence of Arithon s’Ffalenn. The crystal shows me naught yet again but the cold fog of the veil.”
A dry breath stirred the bundled form in the bedding. “He’s too clever by far. That’s the bane of his mother’s lineage.” Morriel forced out another thready whisper, rough as scabbed rust in the gloom. “He is not on Athera, then.” Her hands lay half-curled, crabbed as the feet of a petrified songbird, each hideous detail exaggerated in shadow spun by the crawling spearpoint of flame. “Proceed.”
“Your will, matriarch.” The seeress bent to her travail, the bound knot of her hair bone ivory in the gloom, and her collar stuck to her moist neck. The drill she enacted would follow repetitive routine, her efforts divided between three futile searches, none of which changed from one day to the next. Already, the resident Senior Circle at this sisterhouse whispered in corners that the Prime had lapsed into her dotage. The rumors were kept guarded, with no successor at hand to receive an appeal for review. The peeress stayed loyal, and as an outsider, the seeress chose not to speculate. Bound by her vows to unquestioned obedience, she blotted the steamed moisture off her palms, then rebalanced her mind and gazed once more into the vast depths of the crystal.
This time, her intent was cast to draw in the location of First Senior Lirenda.
Ever since her awakening amid the spent ash of her construct, the Koriani Prime had been consumed by frustration. Her mind would not rest. Not until she knew what had destroyed her laid plan to capture Arithon s’Ffalenn.
Always before this, the crystal scrying had shown darkness, a barrier of blank, impenetrable density that the most gifted talent could not pierce. Resigned to another failure, the seeress tuned her effort with all the skilled force her experience could command. Her will became the refined filament, drawn like steel thread through the aperture of the mysteries.
This time the wall yielded as if no impedance had existed. The seeress gasped. Her mind reeled into vertigo as her gift met and tapped into a scene of turbulence and light. She centered and grounded, by instinct steadying the contact. Sound immersed her, a welter of voices all shouting at once. Jubilation reigned, amid a rushed tumult of tumbling impressions. Somewhere on a beachhead, a small knot of clan scouts were pounding each other’s backs and whooping in ecstatic celebration.
The kaleidoscopic chaos of this scrying resisted even the best-trained discipline. The seeress shifted her seeing crystal and probed for the reason. The scenes jerked and spun, spliced one to the next, tethered by what looked like a sparkling strand of silver chain. Darkness and blinding sunlight interfaced at random as the viewpoint swirled and jounced through a packed mass of bodies clad in the plain fringe of forest clansmen. A voice filtered through, distinct above others. “Ath, be careful! That trinket’s no booty to send to your sweetheart, but the spell crystal of a Koriani witch, and bound for another hand than yours.”
The seeress’s horrified gasp ripped the sanctity of Morriel’s bedchamber.
“What has happened?” came the Prime’s drilling treble.
“I’m not sure yet.” The seeress clasped her stone, desperate not to break ugly news until she could verify her first impression. “Let me make better sense of the images.” Sweat stuck her skirts to her thighs as she engaged a sigil to force order through whirling turbulence. Imagery continued to assault her trained senses. The smelting heat in the bedchamber dulled her touch as she grappled to find a thread to seize continuity.
“What do you see?” Morriel asked, querulous. Her hand twitched on the coverlet. “Has mishap befallen my First Senior?”
Eyes closed, hands cupped light as a butterfly’s shut wings around the warmed sphere of quartz, the seeress at last captured one angle of contact. She framed another sigil of control and froze the vision in place, then engaged the trained logic of observation to assess the stilled scene by its content. “I see a beach where clansmen weep, run, and shout in celebration. They are hunters or scouts, to judge by the carved-bone talismans laced into the cuffs of their boots. One is a chieftain, the son of a duchess by the four stranded knots in his braid. In the cove, at anchor, ride two blue-water brigs. They’re not under command of Lysaer’s Alliance of Light. The banner flying at their masthead is no sunwheel, but a crude rendition in dark colors.” She paused, tipped the crystal, but failed to extract any further helpful detail.
On the high bed, Morriel hissed in displeasure. “So. My plan failed at sea. What went wrong? I had allowed for every possible setback and contingency.” She ranted on, relentless, her words the grate of dead leaves dragged over unyielding granite. “What of my First Senior? She should have sailed with those ships. Is she held captive among enemies?”
The seeress swallowed, her dampened palms clouding a fog on the crystal’s slick surface. “Matriarch, no.” In distress and uncertainty, she blotted the moisture on her sleeve and exerted her powers of analysis. “I keyed my scrying to Lirenda, as you asked. It would seem that I did not find her directly. Instead, I appear to have captured t
he resonant signature of her personal quartz pendant.” A pause, while she braced to conclude the unthinkable. “What I read is not the First Senior herself, but the crystal that has come to be separated from her presence.”
The closed quiet of the chamber acquired the tension of the drawn bow, or the measured arc of the spear as it rushed to transfix flinching tissue. On the bed, the silk coverlet stirred to snatched movement as the Prime’s fingers closed into fists. “Who has caused this desecration?” She never asked whether Lirenda still lived; that fact was made obvious. A long-distance scrying could not have connected in the first place if the imprinted crystal had lost its energetic tie to the woman.
Gilt touched with sweat as she leaned to trim the wick of the candle, the seeress resisted the folly of platitudes. Well aware Morriel’s ire would find small surcease, she bent again to peruse her crystal. Past the flames’ renewed glow, the sealed darkness soaked her in thick, scented silence. No sound intruded. Remote with trance, the seeress suspended cluttered thoughts and quested through the deep focus of her quartz sphere. Now aware her linked imagery arose through an unfiltered contact with the matrix of another mineral, she aligned her intent to compensate for the random sequence of imagery.
Somewhere inside the stone’s spiraling lattice, caught in frozen light, she should find an imprint of the desecrating thief who had dared to strip a First Senior of her focus jewel. The stored memory would be encoded as a sequence of vibration from which her linked stone could reassemble a sequential string of events. Through the powers of sigils designed to draw truth from falsehood, she might sift through the traces and unveil the purpose of the stone’s present-day mishandling.