'I don't trust that one bit.' the first man insisted, quavering with tight-leashed hysteria. 'He's Master of Shadow, who killed thirty thousand. He'd leave us all butchered and never look back.'
'Well, we haven't enough faggots to roast his fell flesh!' napped someone who carried authority. 'Until we do, we can't finish the job properly. No sorcerer stays dead unless he's well burned. Our captain's no coward. He'll damned well want to be certain this fiend's vengeful haunt won't be able to rise up and plague us!'
Someone else howled protest on the point that a pyre in the wilderness would lose them their due claim of bounty. 'The Alliance at Avenor has pledged half its treasury in reward for the Shadow Master's capture.'
'Won't matter spit, if we're killed trying to claim it,' another man-at-arms argued.
'The demon bastard's charred skull will serve well enough as a trophy! You want better proof?' The authoritative man at last gave way to his explosive temper. 'Well, then root through the snow and dig out his dropped sword!' To a shirker who lurked on the sidelines, he bellowed, 'You there! Stop sniveling! Mount up, if you're scared, and ride back into camp. We'll stay here on guard. Ask the captain to send us an armed patrol as escort to bring in the prisoner.'
'Knock out his lights, first, he's coming around,' said the man who dismounted on orders to recover Alithiel.
Through half-cracked eyelids, Arithon saw a blurred movement. A flash of bright sun skittered off the blade of his confiscated main gauche. Then the jolt of a blow at the base of his neck brought the dark crashing down once again.
* * *
Spun back into herself where she sat by the trickling spring in Ath's sanctuary, Elaira pressed a damp hand to her face. Through the aftermath of transition, the fogs of distant spellcraft still seemed to coil through her whirling senses. An impression of lingering distortion remained, which had made the charged atmosphere seem to ring and reverberate to the cry of the men-at-arms' fanned emotions.
'That wasn't my crafting that snarled the forces of air in that way,' she gasped through clamped teeth and a tightness of throat that made even simple speech difficult. 'I'm left with the uneasy feeling that someone with talent has tampered to magnify fear in distraction. What else would provoke the guardsmen's confused thinking to hold Arithon as a live captive?'
'Your prince has attracted a powerful ally,' the adept agreed, moved from his perch on the boulder to stand in support just behind her. 'The stones of Ithamon themselves have been tuned to answer the call of that man's oath of crown service. Nor is your part diminished. Love is strung through all beings like a vast web of light. So the fire of your caring reaches all of creation, a signature wave of pure energy that raises a spike of shared resonance where like currents run in close sympathy. You attract your own destiny, in that same way. The patterns are fluid, and not locked in place, as some others might have you believe.'
A pause, filled with the splashing melodies of water tumbling over its bed of white stones. Elaira found her thoughts too dense with worry to ponder the range of that statement. 'What is my fate?' she whispered aloud. 'Where will my love for Prince Arithon lead me?'
'The spring knows.' the adept said in tacit suggestion. 'You may see, as you wish.'
Elaira never clearly decided to look. But the drifting, sweet fragrance of night-blooming flowers and the quiet of twilight stole over her. The pervasive peace crept into her heart, until the silver-braid trickle of water spellbound her scattered attention.
There followed no explosion of white fire, no visionary image of distant places. This time, she sank as though into a dream. Submersed in clear depths, soothed to reverie by the flow of the current, she gave way as the stones had, their broken, rough edges worn gently round by the water's caressing passage. Amid their smoothed company, one pebble stood out, alive with a rainbow glimmer of refraction.
Moved by the prompt of a child's fascination, Elaira dipped her hand in the water and touched.
Contact unfolded into a wild, sweet shudder of ecstasy. Like a wind from Athlieria, the connection raised a paean that chased order and reason from her mind. She cried out, swept away by delight. Around her, the night garden glittered with tiny pinpoints of light. Each one framed a dancing consciousness, weaving the tapestry of life, moment to moment in harmony. Then, stunned to stopped breath, Elaira saw the unicorn enter the glade.
The creature emerged, ghost quiet, between the hushed gloom of the trees. Her dance showered dew from night grasses. Her white coat was the ephemeral silver of spun moonbeams, and her moving grace, a beauty that seared the dross from all mortal awareness. She came, living mystery that raised song without sound out of the glade's sacred stillness, a cry of untarnished brilliance that rewove old sorrows and pain. The ache of fearful expectation uplifted, transformed into a moment of winged epiphany.
'Merciful Ath!' Elaira gasped, stuck to awe. Half-blinded by tears, she sat like struck stone, while the Riathan Paravian came, and paused, and bent her silvery neck.
Her horn gleamed, hazed in a halo of shimmering golden light. The creature stood, perhaps offering tribute, or sharing the solace of communion. The beauty of her prescience seemed too much to bear, and her warmth, too tenderly real. She was wild, her being as elusive as the sheen on a pearl, her mane snagged and tumbled like argent silk that no civilized fingers might tame.
Elaira drowned in the grace of those velvet green eyes, slit pupils narrowed like a cat's. Then the horn lowered farther, and touched her breast. Contact whirled her senses away in a rainbow shower of light.
The adept caught and gathered her senseless form into his sturdy embrace. He bowed to the unicorn. 'Shining one,' he whispered in reverence. 'We are blessed, a thousand times blessed by your willing appearance.' Then, weeping himself as though life's latent goodness had unfolded a world beyond heartache, he bent his head, overcome. When next he dared look, the unicorn was gone. Her passage left only a swath of turned grass, darkened to tarnish where the gilding of dewdrops had fallen.
He became aware of someone arrived at his shoulder. Drawn by a tentative touch at his sleeve, he glanced aside, and welcomed the adept who came to assist with Elaira.
'What happened?' she asked, her gaze searching and awed. 'Outside, we heard the stones ring like bronze chimes.'
The spry old desertman closed reverent eyes. Gladness burst through, a rush of fine chills that pierced the flesh and the bone of him. 'A unicorn came.' As the lady's heart kindled to his shared spark of wonderment, he laughed. 'In warm life, not a sending! She bowed her neck and blessed this Koriani woman.'
The female adept shook her head, overwhelmed. 'Ath grant us this day, come again!'
Under the trees, surrounded by a field of damp grass and the delicate fragrance of flowers, the man raised his wrist and blotted the tears that spilled in gilt tracks down his cheeks. 'Joy has visited. We have not seen a Paravian presence for more than five hundred years. Now, the fresh promise is given. Upon right choice of destiny, Elaira's true love for a man might one day give rise to the key that recalls the lost Riathan home to the continent.'
The woman adept reached out and tenderly stroked a slipped lock of bronze hair from the sleeping enchantress's face. The skin, chapped by mountain weather, had softened into repose; the fierce worry smoothed over as her troubled mind found its solace in dreams. 'She may not remember, on the hour she awakes.'
The adept's walnut features split into a smile of irrepressible happiness. 'Her greater being knows. Her heart has been marked. We, here, who are guardians to Ath's deepest mysteries, will safeguard this moment without forgetting.'
Midwinter 5670
Noon Lane Tide
Sight of Rockfell Peak came and went many times, in the course of a journey that led through the Skyshiel uplands. No footpath marked the jumbled succession of cleft vales and serried ridges, or switched back up the jagged flanks of the crests. Nor did strayed travelers wander these deep wilds, where the narrow valleys twined like crooked mazes, and the stands of b
lack firs stitched the slopes, silently cowled with snow. Only the bravest of solitary trappers laid snares by the freshets that tumbled and roared over sculpted rocks and smoothed ice. Even that breed of experienced woodsmen did not hunt under the peaks that rose like dark, weathered iron to the west.
Rockfell, they said, was a place where the winds cried and moaned, tuned by the voices of haunts. The man who listened too closely went mad. In the desolation of winter, the croak of wild ravens and the creak of the snow-laden boughs might become the only sounds heard for days. Such times, the uncanny notes sung by the spirits of air drew the ear like a whispered seduction.
Dakar the Mad Prophet scoffed at such tales, until weeks of labored progress on foot brought him to make camp at the crest of a spine on the ridges. Well past dawn, with the cookfire lit, and Fionn Areth beside him, he broached the sensitive discussion concerning the uncanny difficulties ahead. If the weather was clear, the patterns of the gusts carried plaintive overtones that sawed away stamina and nerves. No comfort, since travel was not going to get easier.
Rockfell's cragged summit reared to the west. A spike jabbed above mantled shoulders of stone, the peak ruled the rickled edge of the horizon, its implacable tip slicing the clouds like knapped flint. When they resumed their descent toward the flank of the next ridge, the dread view was not going to vanish. The approach from the northeast required a winding ascent through a notch in the ranges, then threading a flume to reach the base of the mountain itself.
By then grown wary of the younger man's whipsaw moods, melancholy complaint and stoic silences broken by volte-face spasms of idealism, Dakar understood he had best not avoid Fionn Areth's touchy questions. Soon enough, the issue of unseen powers was going to become unavoidable. Crouched over a pot of venison stew, his suet-round features nipped red by the cold, he gave grudging admission that the trappers' unease was not entirely unfounded. 'The Sorcerer, Davien, laid down spells of guard that don't treat kindly with strangers.'
Fionn Areth looked up. Thin, morning sunlight flashed off the horn-laminate bow he had delicately heated to unstring. While the weapon cooled, abandoned between mittened hands, he gave that statement his inimical attention. 'We're not strangers?'
Dakar licked his thumb, fished in the pot with the peeled end of a stick, and speared out a chunk of boiled meat. He nibbled, spat, and in unhurried nonchalance wiped a driblet of grease from his beard. 'Still tough. In fact, oak-tanned boot leather might taste more savory.'
'You didn't answer my question.' Fionn Areth wrapped a sturdy forearm around his tucked-up knees. The rigors of travel had worn his face hollow. Raffish and tense as a winter-lean badger, but with no such wild creature's wise patience, he leaned into the wind that snagged tangled black hair in the wire bristles darkening his jaw. 'Dakar?'
'Avenger's Black Chariot!' Meat and stick tumbled from slackened fingers and splashed back into the pot. Showered with scalding broth, the Mad Prophet shivered, as though Dharkaron's Five Horses had trampled over his gravesite. Eyes squeezed shut, with pungent deliberation, he swore, 'May the fiend hosts of Sithaer rain flaming piss on the doings of Jaelot's guardsmen!'
Fionn Areth gave up unstringing his bow. Surged to his feet, he snatched up his quiver and arrows. 'What's wrong? What's happened?'
Hunched under three cloaks like a feather-ruffled partridge, Dakar blinked. 'I had spells of guard sewn into Prince Arithon's saddlecloth.'
The pause stretched too long. Fionn Areth yanked off his right-hand glove with his teeth and tested the string to see how much the bow's tension had slackened. 'And?'
'Put your broadheads away! You can't shoot that far. The mare wearing that blanket broke its leg. She has just expired of a mercy stroke dealt on the downs near the walls of Ithamon.' The Mad Prophet recovered his cooking stick and jabbed it clean by ramming the point with concentrated viciousness into the snowbank beside the supply packs. The weeks of sparse rations had thinned him, but now he all of a sudden looked haggard. 'No, the animal didn't just stumble and pitch herself head over heels. The arrow that bled out her life had a broad head forged by the armory smith back in Jaelot. Furies of Sithaer! If I had a flask, I'd hole up in a thicket and drink myself flat senseless.'
'What of your prince?' Fionn Areth asked, vehement. 'Do you care if he's dead? What if his enemies took him alive, or left him mortally wounded?'
Dakar bit back an uprush of spite, then sharp grief, that the Araethurian herder's fickle change of heart could have come at the ruined mill, before Arithon of Rathain had been forced to play sacrifice as a decoy. Yet brutal honesty choked him from speech. Often enough in the past, his own mistimed hatreds had threatened the last s'Ffalenn prince. If guilt and care would allow no forgiveness for abandoning his charge of protection, Dakar at least forced a measure of tolerance. 'Since I didn't pack gin for sweet ease and forgetfulness, any answers must be sought through magecraft. Will I get your self-righteous knife in my back, Fionn? No? Then damned well show me proof the use of cast spells won't raise your chicken-heart moral hackles.'
Fionn Areth flushed. 'I know goats, not much else.' A furious gust off the heights flogged his cloak, and streamered the cook-fire to ribbons. Rigid and miserable, and chilled to the bone, he gestured with obdurate sarcasm. 'Since we don't have a white kid to kill as a sacrifice, I can't very well volunteer to pin its neck down for the knife.'
Dakar hurled his sharpened stick into the coals. 'I'm Fellowship trained!' He ducked wind-borne sparks, his exasperation stinging enough to scale the rust off old iron. 'They don't work dark rites on the death of small animals. Neither did Arithon s'Ffalenn, when he still had the use of his birth-born talents. He earned his high mastery under the mages at Rauven. Whatever fools' talk you've heard in town taverns, the teaching he received regarded such practice as misuse and abomination.'
'Never mind animals.' Fionn Areth hurled back. 'Some folk insist you use men, even children and babies.' His stare level green, though the hands clamped on the horn recurve were shaking, the herder wrapped himself in the clay dignity drawn I rom his backcountry origins. 'Do you wonder why townborn and craftsmen are frightened? The Alliance flaunts the sealed evidence of witnesses. If the best thing I can do for Arithon's cause is to take a long stroll down the ridge, then just say so!'
'Stay,' Dakar snapped. 'I'd rather you saw the bare bones of the truth. Better still, why not help? You could take the tin basin. Melt down some snow since I'm going to require clean water to call in a scrying.'
For a moment, the mismatched pair locked horns, the spellbinder resigned as a tortoise bearing the weight of the world on his back, and the younger man given no civil direction to vent his heated frustration.
'Or don't help. The worst may have already happened.' The Mad Prophet shed the wadded cloaks from bowed shoulders. He arose, upended the supply pack, and from the oiled cloth satchel that stored his herbs and bottled tinctures, removed a silk-wrapped packet.
'What's in that?' Fionn Areth laid his bow aside, his truce ambivalent as he fetched the tin basin. Unbidden fear and frank curiosity pinched a frown between his jet eyebrows, so like Arithon's. The likeness at times raised uncanny chills, or startled queer twists of juxtaposed memory.
'You'll see soon enough.' Dakar remained too pressured for tact. Nightmares had harried his sleep once too often, where the s'Ffalenn prince stood endangered, or dead, with himself caught hobbled and helpless. 'I already gave you my promise not to keep wicked secrets.'
'That's meant to reassure me?' As though the relentless chill granted the pretense for Fionn Areth to move, he gathered his nerve and set off. His goatherd's planted, deliberate stride jarred, so unlike Arithon's instinctive, cat grace as he footed his way down the scree slope.
Grumbling the impressive invective learned in the shoreside brothels, Dakar hunkered down. Always, the cruel, thin air of the heights worked his lungs like a stranded blowfish. In rugged country or mild flat lands, he never relished the nitpicking practice of spellbinding. He had long since
lost count of his cringing mistakes. For ongoing centuries, refined energies had slipped through his inept handling like spilled pins. He endured his defeats, sunk in shame and embarrassment, or shook them off with self-mocking deprecation. Often, he felt, he would have to be dead, to match even one minute of Asandir's wisdom, or rise to the standard of exacting, sure touch and utterly steadfast patience.
Nor could a man concentrate on an empty belly, with half a hundred hard corners of granite stabbing his backside like punishment. Dakar clawed underneath himself and singled out a particularly offending small stone. 'Daelion Fatemaster take pity!' He shied the fragment into the abyss that faced Rockfell in a flash-burn explosion of temper. 'Why in the name of Sithaer's sixtyscore fiends did I ever get myself born to woman' - the rock landed and plowed up a shower of snow - 'far less saddle myself with the cross-grained affairs of the almighty Fellowship Sorcerers?'
No natural force answered.
Overhead, frayed stringers of cloud raced over a zenith of bottomless indigo. The sun cast its dazzling patchworked light across acres of wilds, and gilded his face with scarcely a vestige of warmth. The rare glimpse of fair weather did nothing to lift the dread fastened over his heart. Dakar sucked a deep breath, and coughed. Bracing air made his lungs ache. Anytime, he preferred the sweaty, close fug of a second-rate tavern's taproom. Drowned in beer, or sunk in pumping bliss with some harlot, he would not have to care if the last s'Ffalenn prince died alone on the barrens of Daon Ramon.
'Mercy upon me,' he whispered, desperate to stem the tears scalding the backs of his eyelids. He steeled quailing nerves, stilled circling thoughts, and surrendered the comfort of his innermost mental barriers. He grasped the unruly threads of his worry and stifled their clamor in stern discipline. For good reason fear stalked him. He had never earned mastery, or achieved firm control over his gifted talent. Even as he invoked the calm to engage the expanded vision of mage-sight, he invited the chance that his mad bent toward prescience might resurge and rule him instead.