‘Lady Maenalle,’ he said, in his voice a jar like heartbreak. ‘This lyranthe is too fine for me. Let me play this one night and return her for your masterbards in the lowlands.’
But the Steward of Tysan dismissed his conscience with an imperious lift of her chin. ‘I don’t begrudge you my bracelet,’ she called across the quiet. ‘And our bards, every one of them, passed over that instrument for another of prettier appearance. Since they chose by their eyes and not their ears, I call their claim forfeit.’
Arithon’s hand remained frozen against glittering bands of new strings.
‘If the word of a prince carries weight, I stand by Maenalle’s judgement.’ Lysaer chose a seat and by example all in the chamber followed suit. ‘Brother,’ he said on a strange edge of exasperation, ‘will you have done with moping and play?’
Lacking the knowledge of Athera’s own lore, Arithon chose a sea ballad from Dascen Elur, a lively recap of a pirate raid in which a wily captain reduced three merchanters to ruin. Although the names of the vessels were changed in deference to his half-brother, Lysaer remembered the incident well; the merchanters had died badly, the seamen’s widows and their families forced to beg charity to survive. Yet singer and lyranthe wove their spell deftly. The clan lords responded to the tale in raucous and whole-hearted enjoyment. No one beyond the performer ever guessed how the laughter stung their prince’s pride. In fairness, Lysaer could not blame Arithon: his duty was to please his hosts, and in a camp without wives or sweethearts, he had performed with a minstrel’s true insight, his choice most apt for the setting. Yet the thievery that delighted these barbarians had roots in a past that reminded how terribly wide lay the gulf between subjects and sovereign.
Lysaer took his leave early, pleading weariness. He retired to the small chamber with all its comforts, but hours passed before he undressed and went to bed, and the peace of sound sleep did not visit him.
Confrontation
The hour grew late. Candles burned low in the hall by the time Arithon plucked the closing bars to his last dance jig of the evening. Although admiring listeners still surrounded him and the exultant flush remained high on his face, he silenced the rich tones of Elshian’s instrument with something very near to relief.
‘Another drinking song!’ called a roisterer from the back.
Arithon shook his head and set the lyranthe gently down on the boards of an empty trestle. ‘My fingers are shot, my voice long gone and I’ve a kink in my back from too much sitting.’
‘Have a beer then,’ a younger woman invited.
‘What, and spoil my head for clear thought?’ Arithon rose, grinning with the abandon of a thief. ‘I’ve swallowed enough to ruin me already. Too much praise has done the rest. Have some mercy and let me retire while I still have the wits to find my bed.’
‘She’d likely show you to hers,’ somebody quipped from the sidelines.
But the admirers nearest at hand perceived the musician’s weariness. Reluctantly they parted to give him passage between the bare trestles, the last few occupied chairs and the boys who cleared away goblets and gathered up the linens from the feast. Though the clansmen of Camris had entertained lavishly, there were no drunks on the floors. The celebrants who lingered in the late hours were alert enough that an alarm from a messenger could see their finery exchanged for weapons at short notice. Quietly, unobtrusively, Arithon crossed the expanse before the arch. He disappeared into the gloom of the outer hallway without drawing Maenalle’s notice; but slumped in a heap with one hand still curled around an ale mug, Dakar opened one eye. He saw Asandir break off his discourse with a clan chieftain and take purposeful strides toward the door.
‘I thought so,’ the Mad Prophet mumbled through his knuckles. ‘Our Master of Shadow is going to catch an ungodly dressing down.’ Dakar licked his lips and smiled before he slipped back into stupor; but his self-righteous prediction proved slightly premature.
Asandir did not follow Arithon immediately, but visited the quarters of Tysan’s prince for a lengthy interval first. Afterward, as the winds sang cold off the heights and the mists of Desh-thiere obscured the early blush of coming dawn, the sorcerer let himself out to find Arithon.
The Teir’s’Ffalenn was alone at the horse-pens, his back to the inside rails and his hands busy working tangles from the black forelock of the dun. Asandir approached without sound across the compound of trampled snow. For all his care, he was noticed. Arithon spoke as the sorcerer paused behind his shoulder.
‘Elshian’s lyranthe should remain here.’ Pain threaded a voice worn rough by extended hours of performance. Too spent for nuance, Arithon added, ‘Better than I, you know how little she will be played.’
Asandir folded his arms on the top rail of the fence. Cloakless and hoodless in the cold, the wind stirred his silver hair and the night-darkened fabric of his tunic. ‘Much can change in the course of five centuries.’
Arithon at this moment preferred to forget the legacy left him by Davien’s enchanted fountain: he shrugged. ‘Quite a lot has not changed at all in the course of five centuries.’
At which point, directly confronted with the purpose of his visit, Asandir abandoned tolerance. ‘Did you believe me unaware of what happened in the loft of the Ravens’ stableyard? Or that, the other day in the pass of Orlan, you baited Grithen and his scouts with intent to force my hand and expose your half-brother’s inheritance?’
‘Lysaer has what he longs for: a crown and the cause of truth and justice.’ The dun blew softly through her nostrils, stepped back, and left Arithon’s hands empty. The cold made him wish he had his gloves.
Asandir seemed impervious to the wind’s cruel bite. ‘Let me tell you a thing, Teir’s’Ffalenn. You were left to your devices because the mindblock I set was never intended to bend your will.’
‘Was it not?’ Arithon retaliated fast and hard as a blow. ‘Then why bother setting any ward at all?’
The sorcerer did not rise to anger. Measured and wholly mild, he said, ‘Would you warm a man just tortured by fire before an open hearth? The memories of your failures in Karthan were all too hurtfully recent.’
Arithon flinched. The sorcerer pressed on, remorseless, though he never once sharpened his voice. ‘Maenalle was to receive the Prince of Tysan today. The Fellowship had already decided. She would have been informed of his lineage in private, that Lysaer not learn of his heritage until he had experienced the atrocity of the mayors firsthand. Except that your meddling with events caused your half-brother an unpardonable shock, and Grithen has been sent in shame to the camps in the low country. He may be denied his inheritance.’
Now Arithon went still as fire-hardened stone.
Asandir resumed, quietly precise as the tap a gemcutter might use to shear diamond. ‘Grithen is the last living heir to the late Earl of Erdane. Since his two siblings died on a headhunter’s spears, yesterday’s affray in the pass could disrupt a succession that has endured since the years before the uprising.’
Arithon did not leap to claim the implied responsibility. Inflectionless as the windborne scrape of loose ice, he said, ‘You’re telling me things that might all have been prevented.’
‘If the Fellowship were to use power to compromise a man’s destiny, yes.’ Asandir regarded the knuckles left at rest on the midnight cloth of his sleeves while Arithon absorbed implications: that his fate was neither absolute nor proscribed. That he might cross the corral, saddle the dun mare, ride out and not be pursued, except by townsmen who mistook him for a clanborn barbarian. Or he might take up the superlative lyranthe given him by Maenalle and study under her bards in the lowlands to the advanced senility of old age.
Arithon faced around and met the sorcerer’s eyes, which were clear as mirrors and as matchlessly serene. ‘You would let me go that simply?’
‘I would.’ The sorcerer added, ‘But let us be accurate. Would you let yourself?’
Struck on a nerve left raw since Dascen Elur, Arithon could no longer curb
bitterness. ‘Dharkaron, Ath’s Avenger might show more mercy.’
‘Who will speak for the clansfolk of Rathain?’ Asandir said, a dark and terrible weight of sorrow behind his words. ‘For them, what mercy will there be when the sun returns, and the townsmen order killings caused by fear of a king who is not there?’
Arithon made a sound halfway between a sob and a curse. The biting sarcasm he used to deflect unwanted inquiries would not serve, but only drive through Asandir’s tranquillity like a spear cast through seawater: passion dispersed without trace by the infinite. The sorcerer watched his struggle with neither cruelty nor challenge, but only an understanding as steady and deathless as sunlight.
Through a throat racked by tears he refused to acknowledge, Arithon said, ‘You give me Karthan, all over again.’
‘The man would not stand here, who did not choose Karthan first.’
‘Oh, Ath,’ Arithon let go a twisted laugh. ‘The bitterest enemy is myself, then.’ For the open-handed freedom set before him was no choice at all: just the repeat of a fate poisoned through by an unasked for burden of human suffering.
‘I asked only that you travel with me to Althain Tower,’ Asandir said. ‘Wherever else will you find the guidance to reconcile your powers as a mage with the responsibilities of your birthright?’ The compassion in his tone was a terrible thing, a whip and a scourge upon a mind already mauled by the quandaries of duty. Arithon spun away, weeping regardless, and cursing the light hand of his tormentor. One threat, one compulsion, one word spoken with intent to bind would have given him opening to escape.
But Asandir closed the net with a pity that shattered and crucified. ‘If you finish the journey, your case will be brought before the Fellowship. I can make no promise. But if a compromise can be found to release you from kingship, I will plead in your favour.’
‘The last nail in the coffin,’ Arithon managed. ‘Of course, under protest, I accept.’ The air ached his lungs and his head hurt. His back to the sorcerer, his eyes on the shifting shadows of the horses, he clung to the fence, mostly to keep his hands from violence.
Asandir looked at him and did not miss the murderous undertones of conflict. ‘For Desh-thiere, the Mistwraith, the Fellowship has no other choice.’
‘Ath,’ Arithon said. He managed a savage jab at humour. ‘Dakar would be crushed if we wrecked his precious prophecy. But against the Mistwraith, I do recall giving my word.’
‘Of the two, your kingdom is equally important.’ The sorcerer might have departed then, his movements masked by a gust from the north.
Yet Arithon sensed his intent. Not yet ready for solitude, he whirled around, met the endlessly deep eyes and planted a barb of his own. ‘Then we understand each other all too perfectly well.’
Given clear warning that Arithon remained ambivalent concerning his inheritance, Asandir showed no annoyance. Rueful instead, he listened to the sigh of the wind across the compound as though it held answer to all suffering. ‘I’d like to know,’ he said at last to the prince who waited in jaggedly prideful silence, and who was far too wise to vent frustration through belief that the Fellowship sorcerers were his enemies. ‘If our roles were reversed, what would you do?’
Arithon hesitated barely an instant. ‘Find the Paravians.’
Asandir sighed. A sadness settled over him as oppressive as the mists on the mountains. ‘We tried,’ he said bleakly. ‘Ciladis of the Fellowship took on that quest, for he treasured the old races most of all.’ A minute stretched painfully through silence. ‘He never returned.’
As if the night were suddenly too dark, or the cold off the peaks too penetrating, Asandir abandoned the subject. He strode back toward the lights of the outpost, leaving Arithon to the company of the horses and a moil of frustrated thoughts.
Traithe
Set on a knoll above the scrub-covered dunes that bordered the Bittern Desert, the spire of Althain Tower endured winds that never eased. Time and seasons might change, but in snowfall or sultry summer, drafts moaned through the shutters on the highest floor, riffling the corners of parchments caught between musty stacks of books. Unwashed tea mugs nested between the piles like abandoned eggshells in straw; walled round by clutter, surrounded by unstoppered ink wells and a row of meticulously sharpened quills, Sethvir of the Fellowship minded his cataloguing. While his awareness ranged far and wide beyond his tower eyrie, tracking events and portents that encompassed the grand movements of armies to the change of polliwogs into frogs, he penned neat script onto parchment and recalled candles only as an afterthought. Darkness came and went in its daily rhythms, unmarked by sleep or lighted sconces.
And yet amid the wail of a gust off the fells, when something flurried at the casement as slight as the scuffle of a mouse, Sethvir lifted his head. His poet’s eyes lost their vagueness as he laid aside his quill pen.
‘Traithe?’ he said, on his feet in an instant. A six-day accumulation of dust billowed up from his robe as he shoved between chairs heaped with scrolls and opened the shutters on a predawn sky coiled with mist.
Rewarded the next moment by a downward rush of dark wings, the sorcerer’s pensive frown melted. ‘Welcome back, little brother,’ he greeted the raven that alighted on the knotworked border of his cuff. The bird croaked. It cocked a pert head and blinked an eye intent with intelligence.
Sethvir shut the casement, a detail he intermittently neglected. ‘Did you bring your master, little one?’
The raven hopped to his shoulder and reproachfully preened its left primaries. When Sethvir responded by waiting, it shifted its feet and spoke again, sharply impatient. The sorcerer chuckled. ‘All right, I’m on my way.’
Forgetful that wet ink now hardened on his favourite nib, the Warden of Althain bore the bird from the copy chamber and down the bare spiral stairwell that accessed the tower’s nine levels. Shadows of past ages lingered thickly here, but no place more than at ground level, where the mist-filtered gleam of first light etched the marble-carved statues of centaurs, sunchildren and unicorns. Jewelled eyes and gilt trappings flashed at Sethvir’s passage, wakened to glittering reflections as he brightened the torches by the tower’s sole entry. At the foot of a shallow flight of steps, Sethvir caught a ring from a recessed socket and slid aside gold-chased panels of red cedar. The dusty smells of books and old tapestries gave way before the sharper tang of oiled steel, while new flamelight threw grim highlights over a clockwork array of counterweights and chain. The raven unfurled its wings for balance as the sorcerer set hands to the windlass. He cranked back the bars on two massive, metal-bound gates, which opened on a vaulted sally port cut through the base of the tower.
Here the drafts sang in dissonance through arrowloops and murder holes. Sethvir touched ink-stained knuckles to a secondary barrier of carved oak; the arcane bindings he released next collapsed in a blue-white sheet of clean fire, letting in the moist scents of grasses and mist and damp earth.
Sethvir paused, fleetingly touched by regret. That Althain Tower had ever needed its antiquated, second-age defenceworks was sorrowful enough; but that he should require wards, and that he should need to unbind such protections to admit another sorcerer of the Fellowship went beyond tragedy.
The guard-spells that Sethvir had dissolved on a thought, that he could have stepped through with little more difficulty than breathing, lay beyond the grasp of Traithe who, at cost of the greater share of his powers, had singlehandedly sealed the south Worldsend Gate in the hour of greatest peril. For the Mistwraith that afflicted Athera was but one splintered portion of a vaster whole; had Traithe not limited its access, Desh-thiere’s rank coils would have strangled more than sun, but choked off all life on the planet.
The raven flapped irritably.
‘All right, little brother.’ Harried back to duty, Sethvir unbarred the wooden doors.
Outside, beyond the battered barrier of a final portcullis, stood a sorcerer, his deeply-lined face and hooked nose shadowed under a wide-brimmed hat. A patterned silv
er band and straight-cut silver-white hair were the only bright aspects about him; the rest of his clothing including scuffed boots was fashioned of unadorned black. The raven did not wait for Sethvir, but bounded through the grille to light on its master’s shoulder.
‘Welcome,’ murmured the Warden of Althain, the usual misty distance restored to his blue-green gaze. ‘I trust your passage was swift?’
Traithe of the Fellowship shrugged, his iron-clad stoicism shaded ineffably toward disgust. ‘I was only in Castle Point.’
The clang of the outer winch re-echoed through the arch while the portcullis ground ponderously upward. Traithe shouted over the din. ‘I searched for six days before I found a captain still willing to sail the coastline!’
The portcullis stopped. Sethvir ejected a rude word that rang isolate across fallen silence. Then he said, ‘That frustration won’t last, my friend. Banish Desh-thiere, and you can restore the lost arts of navigation.’
‘But that would take—’ Traithe’s sombre mien transformed before a smile of wounding hope. ‘The Prophecy of West Gate? Is this why you called me? A prince has returned from Dascen Elur?’
‘Princes,’ Sethvir said succinctly. ‘S’Ilessid and s’Ffalenn, on their way here with Asandir.’
Traithe chuckled outright. ‘Even better! Ath, I was going to grumble about sore feet, and here, you’ll have me dancing on them instead.’ He reached down, lifted the saddle and bridle heaped by his boots as though he no longer felt the miles he had ridden through the night.
Determinedly bent to mind the winch, Sethvir took no brightness from his tidings. That Traithe, who had sacrificed more than any to avert the desecration of Desh-thiere, who was most vulnerable to harm if town factions should discover his identity, who through these late and troubled years was most resilient over his failures – that of the Seven, Traithe must wait weeks and travel miles to receive news that Asandir, Kharadmon and Luhaine had all known on the wings of the moment itself was a grievous injustice.