Framed by magelight and a backdrop of louring fog that imposed false dusk upon the scene, Arithon raised his head and looked around. Recognition suffused his glance as if he could sense the Koriani contact bridged through from Camris by crystal.
As acting surrogate for Elaira, Lirenda felt scorched by that gaze. But the rapport that would have quickened her sister initiate to excitement only tantalized the First Enchantress as elusively as the receding edge of a dream. She shivered. As if touched to recoil by empathy, the s’Ffalenn prince on the parapet frowned. He tossed back his hood in sudden tension as a man might measure an opponent. Through a space while the winds whipped his dark locks into tangles, his hand flicked a gesture to Dakar. Captivated by the movement’s instinctive grace, and spontaneously struck by stray recall, Lirenda shared a past memory – of those very same fingers plucking straw from her hair with a tenderness impossible to forget.
Morriel’s voice jabbed through the diversion in a whiplash tone of command: ‘Do not get involved, First Enchantress!’
Lirenda struggled to bridle Elaira’s fascination as Arithon knelt before Dakar.
Whispered words passed between them. Then the Mad Prophet’s face rearranged in pure devilry. ‘You’d never dare.’
A lift of Arithon’s chin gave challenge as he rose back to his feet. ‘Ah, but I would.’ Beneath laughter, his voice held a dissonance like mallet-struck iron. Were Lirenda in control, she would immediately have severed contact; but Elaira’s entrancement hampered judgement. The scrying enchantress dwelt a second too long and Arithon s’Ffalenn seized his opening.
He called to Lysaer, who raised his hands. For a heartbeat, the half-brothers centred a gathering vortex of pent power. Then light speared skyward, virulent as summer lightning. The hollow, booming report of heat-stressed air thundered outward over ruined Ithamon. Lirenda saw the Mistwraith boil clear with a howling clap of wind, to be razed aside by shadow that iced its vapours into a spindrift fall of new snow.
Then, impossibly, Koriani safe-wards crumpled, and the concatenation of reaction surged past shields and into the Skyron focus. Lirenda was tossed physically head over heels. She had no chance to feel bruises. A second surge erupted from Lysaer’s clenched hands, followed by another and another, until her eyes were dazzled sightless and hearing was stunned by rolling waves of sound. The link between the earl’s court and Ithamon buckled into pinwheeling chaos as the lane connection surged into backlash.
Lirenda barely felt the jerk as the Skyron crystal was wrested from her grip. Her awareness of Kieling Tower shattered and Elaira’s persona ripped away, shocking body and mind beyond reach of coherent sensation. Lirenda never felt the cyclone of turbulence that scoured Morriel’s chamber. Cushions exploded like confetti and chests tumbled; the rose and grey marble flooring erupted into a thousand eggshell cracks that showered sharpened fragments through the hangings. Daylight sliced in through rent felt and Lirenda came back to herself. She lay unable to move, winded, befuddled and half blind from the after-image of multiple bolts of pure light.
‘Ath, most merciful Ath,’ her own voice cried across confusion, the envy in her heart unmasked. ‘They hold command of elemental mastery, both of them.’
Through drumrolls of fading thunder and a headache that blossomed like a starburst, Lirenda heard Morriel’s shrill outburst. ‘Imbecile! Fool!’
A dry palm cracked her cheek. The sting to her flesh and her dignity negated any lingering after-image of Elaira’s tender sympathies.
Limp as rags on the floor, the First Enchantress recovered her rightful sense of outrage. Her vision swam back into focus, marred by embarrassing tears. Through their blur and the wan light that seeped through slashed drapes, she beheld a chamber that looked to have suffered the brunt of an earthquake. Wreckage lay everywhere. The page-boys crouched beneath the tumbled splinters of the armoire, holding each other and shaking.
Lirenda could not have eased their terror, even had she been of a mind to.
Morriel Prime towered over her, lividly displeased, the Skyron focus clutched in her claw-like grasp. ‘Were you blind and witless not to see? The s’Ffalenn bastard’s been trained to power! However else could he and Dakar have collaborated to upset our scrying? Mischief and misery! What unconscionable recklessness prompted the Fellowship to loose this abomination upon our world?’
Lirenda propped herself upright, then pressed scratched and bleeding fingers to her pounding temples. She felt hollow as a drum and strangely reft: the banished intensity of Elaira’s susceptibilities left her drab and spiritless in spaces she had never known existed. She distanced such discomfort in a show of self-righteous propriety. ‘Elaira may have known of the Fellowship’s intent beforetime. That would account for her stubbornness throughout our probe into her escapade in Erdane.’
But Morriel’s priorities were wholly concerned with the future. ‘Recall the girl! Do it now! For pity us all, we’re going to need analysis of both these princes’ characters. If there’s any hope of setting a counterbalance to the trouble they’re bound to create, Elaira must find us an opening.’
First Enchantress Lirenda arose, bowed stiffly to the Prime, then departed to fulfil her directive. Joylessly intent, she took no pleasure in the miracle revealed by the scrying: that the princes promised by prophecy did battle against Desh-thiere from Kieling Tower.
In the remotest reaches of Athera, the Mistwraith no longer ruled the sky. Sunlight touched earth and ocean for the first time in five long centuries.
Triad
In Erdane, drowsing in her chair over knitting, the seer Enithen Tuer snaps awake with a cry, for dreams have shown her stars and moon against a backdrop of indigo darkness…
Caught treed like a monkey in an orchard where she prunes dead growth, Elaira stiffens as Lirenda’s arcane summons slices her awareness like a whip; that Morriel should demand her presence on the heels of last season’s disgrace means trouble, she knows, and she curses in language that draws grins from the boy wards who gather her cuttings up for firewood…
On a faraway isle, amid waters never charted, a unicorn stands sentinel as Desh-thiere’s mists part; and yet she does not dance for joy under the lucent sky – a horn-toss of inquiry displays her puzzlement as tree-filtered sunshine glances across a cave mouth and a weakened shimmer of ward-light fades back to quiescence without rousing the sorcerer sealed under sleep spells within…
XI. DESH-THIERE
In Daon Ramon’s heartland, atop the battlements of the tower Kieling, the ongoing battle to reduce the Mistwraith suffered an unscheduled interruption as rapport between the royal half-brothers frayed away into nothing. Lysaer broke concentration with a quizzical expression. His hands fell slack, and the last surge of energy he held poised to send a light bolt skyward dissipated as a harmless dance of sparks. He snapped a tangle of hair from his eyes and said irritably, ‘Will one of you please share the fun?’
No one answered.
Dakar remained curled on his knees, doubled helpless in a fit of laughter. Arithon seemed no more capable, close as he was to choking as he stifled an explosive whoop in the crumpled cloth of his cloak. Neither Shadow Master nor prophet recovered sobriety, even when Asandir emerged at a run from the stairwell. His brows were drawn down at an angle that should have been forbidding, had his eyes not held a glint of amused sympathy.
‘I heard,’ he addressed without preamble. ‘Sethvir informed me from Althain that you two have upset the Koriani Prime and her First Senior. Tell me what prank you pulled, and quickly, since we may now anticipate a round of angry repercussions.’
Although Arithon was quickest to rally, Dakar answered, through tears and outbursts of chuckles that he manfully strangled back to wheezes. ‘Damned witches tried meddling.’ He mopped streaming eyes, slapped his knees, and started again. ‘Morriel sought another scrying on the princes, through Lirenda and the Skyron focus. It was too obvious –’ Here speech failed and the Mad Prophet relapsed into a paralysing spasm of hiccups.
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The sorcerer shifted hopefully to Arithon. ‘So you hooked into the Koriani scrying, and allowed their matrix to absorb the energies you had gathered against Deshthiere?’
Wiser to his limits than Dakar, the Master of Shadow simply nodded.
‘Ath!’ Lysaer interrupted, mortified by his half-brother’s baldfaced confession. ‘You redirected our gifts at the enchantresses? You reckless fool! Somebody could have been killed!’
Arithon raised hands in denial, still grinning. ‘Not likely. The ladies had wards up. Nobody got hurt. Only curtains were shredded, and a lot of old stonework went flying to bits where their shields couldn’t dampen the counterforce.’
‘Dakar!’ cracked the sorcerer across the schoolboyish mood of jubilation. ‘Tell me now! However did the Koriani Prime gain foothold to scry across Kieling’s wards?’
The Mad Prophet shot straight as if smacked. ‘I haven’t a clue. Ask your prince.’
Arithon’s exuberance vanished, his mien abruptly blank and implacable as a wall. The strained relations between himself and Asandir returned suddenly and in force, and knowing any query the Fellowship might pose would get rebuffed, the sorcerer abandoned further questions.
His mage-sight offered means to find clear answers. Not even the murk of Desh-thiere could dim the abrupt unshielding of his will as he scrutinized the Master’s taut stance. The effect was as merciless to the victim as a field surgery performed with cut glass. Out of stubborn, irate pride, Arithon neither flinched nor hid his face. This despite the shame that even to an uninvolved witness, the feelings bared to view were revealingly personal. Watching avidly, Dakar sweated outright; Lysaer found himself discomforted to the point where honour compelled him to avert his eyes rather than witness a violation of his half-brother’s privacy.
But neither sorcerer nor Master of Shadow had notice to spare for any onlookers, locked as they were in the absolute intimacy of their conflict.
‘Compassion,’ the sorcerer mused at length, his tone as apparently casual as a man counting facts on his fingers. ‘The Riathan Paravians set their wards in perfect surety. They never mistake false evidence, for theirs is the perception of Ath Creator. Kieling Tower may admit no force except unconditional love -’ Asandir broke off, his face abruptly drained colourless. ‘The lady enchantress in the hayloft at the Ravens,’ he surmised, a spike to his tone that caused Lysaer to shiver where he stood.
Now Arithon did speak, his antagonism barely held in check. ‘The Prime used her. Elaira herself was absent, and had neither knowledge nor consent. Now say to me, and mean it, that her thieving pair of seniors didn’t deserve the come-uppance they got.’
Confused by a name he could not place, Lysaer watched Asandir weigh the comment, then allow its ferocity to pass. The look he trained upon Arithon held entreaty commingled with pity. ‘You must never, ever in your life allow Elaira to indulge in her feelings where you are concerned. Her care is real enough, and generous; but to acknowledge her in any way would lead her to ruin. The Koriani creed she is bound to obey is unnaturally opposed to human nature.’
‘And yours is not?’ Arithon spun on his heel and braced his hands on Kieling’s embrasure. The mist that streamed past strung droplets in his hair, but the rigidity of his shoulders had nothing to do with its chill. ‘If I’m to be made a crowned puppet to drag this wasteland out of darkness, I’d hardly entangle a lady along with me.’
‘See you don’t,’ Asandir snapped back. ‘Where Elaira is concerned, I shall hold you to your word of honour, Prince of Rathain.’
Arithon drew a slow breath, then spun back with the brightest of smiles. ‘You’ll hold me to nothing against my will, sorcerer. Elaira is secure from my attentions, most certainly, since I’d die before I’d give your Fellowship even one chance of getting an heir.’
At this, Asandir released a bright laugh. ‘Five centuries is a very long abstinence, my prince. And if you want me to think that you hold the enchantress in light regard, you’ll need better subterfuge than lying.’
‘Touché,’ Dakar murmured from the sidelines. His quip was ignored.
For an instant Arithon looked murderous. Then his green eyes went wide, and he spoke with a candour meant only for the sorcerer. ‘What caused you to abandon the resolve you made to me after Maenalle’s banquet in Camris?’
The promise of the free will that he was persistently being hounded to abandon stayed unspoken through the gust that raked the battlements.
Already pale, Asandir turned death-white. For the first time Dakar could recall, the sorcerer looked as if he wanted to retreat. He answered instead, though he suffered for it. ‘You shared for yourself the echo of the mystery that gentles the vales at Caith-al-Caen. Could you bear to see what originated that resonance fade forever from this world? If prescience revealed such a thing might happen, could you stand aside and take no action in prevention?’
‘Oh, Ath! Not that!’ Arithon gripped the parapet as if warded stonework might steady a universe that rocked under his feet. ‘Do you say that my kingship over Rathain is connected to recovery of the Paravians?’
‘More and worse.’ Dakar could not resist his chance for vindication. ‘Refuse your crown and you seal their final disappearance.’
Asandir stayed silent; but the sorrow in his gaze denied nothing.
‘Truth or lies!’ Arithon exclaimed, suddenly savage. ‘The needs of this land are killing me, do you understand?’
The desperation to his stance caused Dakar regret for his outburst. Lysaer wished passionately to be anywhere else in Athera, but pity locked his limbs against movement.
Asandir stared down and appeared to ponder his boots, which were wet and caught with brown bits of gorse from his walk upon the hills of Daon Ramon. ‘Even so, Teir’s’Ffalenn.’ His gentleness held an implacability that damned as he added, ‘I had to choose. Now so must you.’
‘Merciful maker, you call murder a choice?’ Arithon’s anguish rejected sympathy, enough that none dared to stay him as he spun away toward the stairwell.
Dakar shuffled his feet through the poisoned, abrasive stillness that remained. ‘I’m surprised you held him to that,’ he challenged, brash enough to fly in the face of the sorcerer’s brittle mood.
But it was Lysaer this time who provoked. ‘Less than the truth would not bind him, is that it?’
Asandir stirred as if from contemplation of a topic that held ugliness personified. ‘Truth is like a gem with many facets – reflection and illusion from every outward angle.’ His damp hair blew in the wind, and his hands hung helpless as he finished, ‘The one unsplintered view can only be found from within.’
Against all natural inclination the sorcerer chose not to correct Lysaer’s misapprehension. Truth by itself would not condemn the Paravians to extinction, as Arithon had so harshly presumed; but their exile might indeed become permanent, for by the uncompromising Law of the Major Balance, the old races were not any man’s concern unless he embraced them for his own. Truth, Asandir reflected sadly, was the one principle in existence that could release the musician from blood-ties to kingly heritage; but the barbs of the trap first closed in Caith-al-Caen had set full well and deeply.
No comfort could be gained, that Arithon was physically absent throughout the struggle as his personal desires warred and lost to the burden of guilt-induced duty. Asandir sensed to the second when the Shadow Master’s aspect became set. Brooding stillness claimed the sorcerer as his mage-sight stung him with awareness: for he saw the thread of probability that held all of a gifted man’s contentment fray away into nothing. The moment passed, and the chance died, that Arithon could become the bard the strands had forepromised at Althain, a musician cherished across the continent for his generosity and warmth of perception. The legacy of a beloved master singer, whose equal had not been seen since Elshian, for need had been cancelled out. In his place walked a prince whose competence would come to be feared, and whose gifts would be whetted by adversity to a cruelly focused edge.
Arithon would not now refuse the crown that waited at Etarra.
Consolation was nonexistent; through embittered years to come, the Fellowship must hope the man whose dream they had spoiled might become reconciled to the fate he had been coerced to undertake. Paravian survival might be bought with restoration of sunlight and war; but that the old races could be returned in joy to the continent, and the Fellowship be restored back to Seven was by no means certain. The particulars of Dakar’s Black Rose Prophecy remained in question still.
Asandir shivered in an icy blast of wind. He tugged his cloak closer to his shoulders and discovered himself alone on the battlements of Kieling. Lysaer and Dakar had abandoned him to solitude, and to the depthless mist that sheathed a glowering twilight sky. The Paravian towers seemed to brood through the gloom, lightlessly and empty and dark.
Elsewhere in Ithamon’s ruins, Arithon perched on the curve of a fallen corbel, his lyranthe rested silent on his knee. He had chosen his vantage site at random. The littered courtyard before him in prosperous years had served the merchants who supplied broadcloth to the tailors. Those slates not scabbed over with grit and moss showed wheel scars from the drays that had carried imported velvets and brocades from weavers in Cildom and Narms. But Arithon gave that past no thought where he sat, his hands clasped limp on his soundboard, and his eyes pinched closed in frustration.
His every nerve end was raw.
Music, which had always been his first solace, this day came to him soured. He could not play. Each time he set fingers to strings, the perception that inspired his art left him defenceless against the insatiable whirl of spirit life imbued within ruined Ithamon. Ancestors winnowed past his innermind, calling his name and imploring. Those whose ends had come untimely in the upheaval of the rebellion troubled him less than others born of an earlier era, when Paravians had inhabited the surrounding hills, and diversion of the Severnir’s waters had not rendered all the land barren. Spirits whose passage through time had left no regrets to sigh in descant between the winter winds; these had touched rock and soil and the weathered remains of fine carving with resounding vibrations of content. Their fragile, lost chord of celebration hurt an uncrowned prince the most, for in the absence of heritage and inhabitants, their song cried out for restoration of the city that lay splintered in ruin.