While the bystanders watched, horrified, he leaned into the steel.
Braggen held firm, his skin drained sick white. The fixed point dimpled skin. Stressed tissue let go without sound, and parted under the pressure. A welled drop of scarlet sprang and flowed from the puncture.
Now trembling, Arithon pressed on inexorably. As the sword's tip encountered the banded cartilage of his windpipe, he gasped, 'Jieret!' his raw anguish a brother's. Eyes shut, in tormented disregard of the hostile steel ranged against him, he addressed his prostrate liegeman with the compassion that formed the very fiber of his heart. 'Forgive me.'
'Stop this!' someone shouted. Another bystander broke down weeping.
Braggen alone confronted the crux. He must pull his blade, or risk that Arithon's bearing onslaught would snap before his fixed steel inflicted fatal damage.
'His Grace is oathsworn to our earl by a sorcerer's blood pact,' a new voice entreated from the cleft. 'Braggen, put up! He can't stand down, though you kill him.'
Braggen's confounded consternation might as well not exist, for all the heed his liege paid that cry. Nor did he back down, or beg for a stay of clemency.
For Arithon s'Ffalenn, no pain of the flesh could unseat his agony of mind, that he may have overestimated Jieret's inborn strength, or worse, his natural talent. The horror that threatened would not be borne, that his error of judgment should have led the son of Steiven s'Valerient into jeopardy. 'Jieret! I swore on my blood to hold your life sacrosanct. You won't escape what that means.'
For the sake of this one life, he had spared Lysaer at Strakewood. The irony of that hour would not lose its cruel edge: that the price of love and integrity had come at excoriating cost. Had he allowed the Mistwraith's curse free rein then, had he immolated his half brother years ago at Tal Quorin, the geas of enmity would have ended, fulfilled. Tens of thousands of dead men would still be alive with their families. Nor would the Alliance war hosts have been given the purposeful reason to muster. Lacking the fuel of self-righteous zeal to ignite the cause of town greed, the gold pledged for bounties, which had set clan continuance into jeopardy across the breadth of two kingdoms, would never have swelled the headhunters' coffers.
A movement, a sudden shifting of shadows as parted bodies winnowed the candleflame.
'You will hear me, Jieret!' Rathain's Prince insisted. His wide, opened eyelids scarcely flicked in acknowledgment as Braggen gave way and stepped back. Arithon rejected all thought of the men who surrounded him. Lent the exacting self-discipline of the mage-trained, he exhorted for Jieret's hearing alone. 'I will give you the full measure of your worth, brother. Stand tall, my caithdein. Own who you are, or die craven.'
While fresh-runneled blood striped his collarbone scarlet, he raised a new song. Each note poured out of his stinging throat Iramed an edged contradiction of dissonance.
Nor did he take notice that a sent runner had finally summoned in Theirid. The influx of raised voices, as argument raged over the damning appearance that he had engaged in fell sorcery, did not move him. He sang, heart and spirit, with an artistry focused to stop breath and word in midsentence.
The clansmen fell mute. Stunned to awed stillness, they had no choice but listen as the bard's song for Earl Jieret s'Valerient framed a power of forced testament. Whether or not the masterful melody masked some heinous act of dark magecraft, the unalloyed majesty of Arithon's voice could and did bind each hapless listener into thrall. The soaring web of captivation undid distrust. Doubt unwound. First shamed, then ripped into mangling remorse, the scouts with drawn steel sheathed their weapons. They crept back, caught breathless, and gave the bard space to recall Earl Jieret from deep coma.
The snare of cruel memory must lose its hold before that fired influx of sound. Seamless melody entrained a sweet, timed perception that unlocked every closed, hidden door of the heart. Shown Jieret's Name in a language of trued harmony, given view of his selfhood, exalted to poignancy through the eyes of a friend, the Companions wept to a man. They knew their chieftain, none better: the patience that hardship could recast as intolerance; the care that strong character held in denial, to anneal the courage that enabled year upon year of unyielding defense by the sword.
Nor was Arithon himself untouched by the sacrifice. Blind with remorse, he hurled all that he was into song, each line in sere a cappella a spearcast flung hard to the mark of exacting pitch. His humility wrought art to a pinnacle of command that cried primal light across darkness.
His gift flowed like spun dream, love and will distilled into razor-edged clarity. But delay set the penalty. Through the lagged minutes of dissident distraction, Jieret's awareness had drifted too far.
Arithon extended his voice and his mind across every barrier of limitation; and still, his rare talent was not enough. He could not bridge the gap. Notes bundled and strung in single formation were too threadbare a loom for the tapestry. Jieret's ears were sealed clay. His beleaguered senses had ranged beyond reach, lost in the grand weave of subliminal vibrations beyond the bounds of the veil.
Arithon sensed the limit through the vibrating air and the slack flesh held cupped in his hands. The heartbreak undid him, that the kindled flame of his care could not unbind the sealed gates of the mysteries. Around him, the scouts stood in lacerated shock.
Silence reigned as the bard acknowledged the blank wall of his failure, and his melody faltered and faded. His face twisted, desolate. No recourse remained. The musician had no access to the harmonics he could have called forth, effortless, from the strings of the lyranthe left behind in Sanpashir. Nor would men in a war band have any substitute instrument. Scouts on campaign carried nothing but weapons, and the joyless necessities of survival.
The wail of the wind seemed to grind on the quiet left by the melody's cessation. Arithon opened his eyes, half-unhinged with distress, the fight in him catapulted into mad-dog desperation. 'Fetch my sword!'
His whiplash command jarred and broke the diminished grip of spellbound reverie. Wakened to reason, recoiled to distrust, the scouts by the cleft stirred, while Braggen's bellowed refusal clashed outright with Theirid's cry for patient tolerance.
'Find me Alithiel, do it now!' Arithon's urgency cut like a blade. 'Braggen! As you love your chieftain, stop arguing. Just let Theirid past. Allow him to give back my sword.'
'We daren't.' The protest was Theirid's, rough with tormented uncertainty. 'Earl Jieret left firm orders. That blade is all the surety we have against you if Desh-thiere's curse sunders your sanity.'
'Then bind my hands!' Arithon snarled back. 'You will do as I say, now. Unsheathe my sword. Lay her lengthwise, point down, with her hilt over Jieret's heart. Damn you for cowards, lash my wrists all you like. For this purpose I need not touch the weapon!'
Against deadlocked stillness, a scraped stir of gravel; a scout pushed through from the rear ranks. Just arrived from patrol, his clan braid pale flax against the striped fur of a badger hat, he appealed, 'Leave his Grace free! Were my father alive, he would have given his trust.'
'You're Eafinn's son?' Arithon's taut features eased into startled gratitude. 'Theirid's right. For Desh-thiere's curse, Alithiel should not be given into my charge. For your faith, I give you my honor to guard. For pity, step forward and tie me.'
Cord was found, amid somebody's kit. Lanky and competent, despite flushed embarrassment, Eafinn's son knelt at Arithon's offered back. 'Forgive the necessity.' He looped the knots expertly tight, well trained in the skill of handling dangerous captives.
The young man arose. His curt nod summoned Theirid, who tested the lashings himself. Only then did the older Companion allow the Named steel to be brought in and drawn from her sheath.
Alithiel's blade glistened like dipped jet, the refined silver tracery of Paravian runes reduced to dulled mercury in the close-gathered gloom. No sparkle of starspells spun gossamer light as Theirid laid the steel at flat rest upon Jieret's laboring breast. Each jagged, snatched breath ripped the stillness like rent canv
as, the stopped intervals now grown irregular, each one more frighteningly prolonged.
Arithon remained on his knees at the clan chieftain's head, his arms bound immobile behind him. No word from him was needed to spur haste. His patience itself framed a cold-cast warning to the scouts who completed his rapid directions. They tucked the bear-pelt cloak under Jieret's nape, then folded the slack hands over Alithiel's smoke-dark quillons.
'Stand away.' Rathain's prince bowed his head. For a terrible instant, he seemed to gather himself, as though he wrestled his crippling doubts, then coiled them into vised stillness. His last instructions framed a hammered command. 'Snuff out the candle. Once I have started, for Ath's mercy, stay clear. We'll have no second chance if I falter.'
Once again he raised his voice into song. The first line of melody invoked the sword's Name, a phrasing that extended beyond the three syllables in Paravian that tagged her earth-forged identity. This clear strand of harmony spoke first of star-fallen steel, then of coal fire in a cave, and the dedicated artistry of the centaur smith who had poured out his masterful skill as a craftsman in expression of love for his son. Arithon reached deeper, tracing out the unseen. He sang the sword's birth, and the delicate complexity of the Athlien spells, which had spun its fine-tuned enchantment using the chord which had Named the winter stars. Then, in darkened tonality, the thralled listeners tasted war and death, and blood spilled in tragedy as Durmaenir s'Darian fell. Arithon's skill encompassed the sorrow of Ffereton's grief. His tears streamed in sympathy, though the instrument of his voice remained sure, wedded to the stark demand of his art through a jarring transition in key.
Now the very rock in the wails of the cavern cast back his full-throated appeal: Arithon of Rathain gave his own Name and ancestry. As Alithiel's bearer, he asked to be heard in his hour of need. His melody underwent a towering transition, as he translated his love for Earl Jieret into free-ringing sound. Line upon line, he poured out his heart, a detailed account of what he stood to lose if his sworn caithdein slipped past Fate's Wheel.
The clan scouts who heard him shed silenced tears, for the depth of their misunderstanding. Given, firsthand, the steadfast integrity of their chieftain, wrapped like white flame in the gratitude of s'Ffalenn compassion, they realized that the sons and daughters of Deshir who had died in defense of their prince were remembered, each one. Cherished, such that their loss for the cause of s'Ffalenn survival had left their sworn prince indelibly wounded in spirit. Arithon begged, in eloquent pain, that Earl Jieret not be asked to suffer the same sacrifice. The cost of one life could come too high. As a spirit beggared beyond hope of restitution, as a prince indebted to his liegemen's dedication, the bard cried aloud for reprieve.
His humility touched Braggen with stunning force, until the huge man covered his face in shame, massive shoulders bowed and shaking.
The tension raised to an unbearable pitch. Such unfolding purity of expression in song could not be sustained for much longer.
Yet the bard did not falter in his delivery.
He arose to the impossible, climactic effort, and phrased the opening notes, one by one, of the chord that would waken the Paravian starspells.
First, nothing; the fluid beauty of Arithon's voice became flawed by a burr of rough anguish. He gathered himself, sang the sequence again, as though he might squander his living essence to fuel his expression in sound.
A faint shimmer glanced the length of the blade. A bystander loosed an awed gasp. Arithon hung on the last, powerful high note, heart and mind joined as the dimmed cavern burst and burned under an explosion of sound and white light.
Alithiel woke. Her cry was the grand chord of glorified illumination that seared reason away in a burgeoning blast of wild joy. While each mortal listener became swept headlong into unbridled rapture, the bard alone held to his purpose. Lent a near-to-inhuman concentration by the strength of his desperation, he wrapped his own song in counterpoint to that blaze of primal mystery. Through Alithiel's unbound might, he sang Jieret's name, interlinked with his own plea for mercy.
Harmonics awoke, born out of the melody twined with the dance of the starspells. The air quivered like stressed glass. The gathered scouts felt, to a man, as though their heartstrings might wind taut and burst. Arithon held, his face ribboned with silvered light, where the sword's burning brilliance lit the wet tracks of his tears.
Then the crescendo passed. Sound faded, diminished to a whisper that died away into a cavernous silence.
'Jieret?' Arithon said, desolate.
Yet under the dimmed flame light, the gray hazel eyes had reopened. Jieret sucked in a stressed breath. He coughed. Choked up by a throat stung yet from the tienelle, he gasped back a coherent answer. 'Blessed Ath, I feel scoured from one end to the other in forces impossible to bear.' He stared upward. The reverberation of remembered awe gained fresh impetus as changed senses took in the experiential vision of newly roused mage-sight. Yet the wonder of that sacred moment came marred by a welling burst of emotion.
'Arithon, for mercy,' Jieret gasped in iced clarity. 'Is this what you forfeited for our sake when you spared Deshir's clans on the banks of Tal Quorin?' He surveyed the form of his liege looming over him, the impact of that hideous truth vised behind the mute grip of Arithon's stillness.
His caithdein, in that instant more painfully vulnerable, could not match the strength of that effort. His aquiline features shuddered and broke, torn into lacerating pity. 'If so, how do you bear it?'
'Son of Eafinn!' Arithon snapped in a harsh change of subject. 'Sheathe Alithiel. Let Theirid carry her out of my presence. Once you have that assurance, I ask you to cut me free.' He raised stunned eyes to take in the others, still staring, locked into paralysis by the drama unfolded before them.
'Leave us,' pleaded the Prince of Rathain, his voice frayed hoarse from strain and exhausted gratitude.
For mercy, this time, his heartsore appeal was obeyed. The clansmen who were his sworn liegemen departed, abashed. Eafinn's son stayed alone, to stand guard by the entry. As a gesture of profoundly inadequate apology, he was left the black sword, Alithiel, entrusted to his steadfast hand.
Late Winter 5670
Commitments
Two hours before dawn, in the hollow where the Alliance company takes pause to allow the diviner-priest his scrying, Jeriayish breaks from his trance, dazed incoherent and weeping; given his tearful confession that spellcraft and music have unbound his oath to the Light, Lysaer consults Sulfin Evend. Allow the cavalcade a brief rest. The priest's madness won't matter. I can sense the enemy by my own resource. He's not more than five hours' march distant . . .'
Clouds break from storm over the Skyshiels, leaving skies of rinsed blue above blanketed ridges, where the guarding shade of a Fellowship Sorcerer watches two diminutive figures inch up the trackless slopes toward their long-sought destination: the black scarp of Rockfell, thrust upright like a wracked tang of iron, and bearing the shaft of Desh-thiere's prison . . .
In Whitehaven hostel, Elaira attends the adept who has answered her earnest request to study the mystical properties of quartz; and his features stay shadowed by concerned reservation as he opens with a grave warning, 'First you must recognize the crystal you partner is a living, free consciousness. That truth you will honor, but at a high cost. For you will be set into headlong conflict with the practices of your order . . .'
Late Winter 5670
VIII. Evasion
Restored to the solitary company of his prince, Earl Jieret shut his eyes, overwhelmed. The shift wrought out of the fires of the tienelle trance had reforged the landscape of his mind. Sense and perception were overturned into change, until he could scarcely orient to any aspect of his surroundings. Ordinary objects had acquired a complexity beyond grasp of thought or reason. Solid rock seemed to shimmer with motion, while the air wore its currents of draft and convection in confusing, transparent overlays.
Jieret discovered that closed lids relieved nothing. Darkness itself seeme
d sheared into rainbows, each color a dancing glory of undying celebration. The drawing pull posed by that play of fine energies in fact owned a perilous fascination, a splendor that might hold a man mesmerized until he forgot the driving force of his birth-born identity.
Worse, the caithdein feared to look again at his prince, whose form now wore an aura of pale gold, streaming like needles of refined fire against a backdrop of shadow that lived in ways beyond language to express. Jieret reeled, still shocked to awe by a majesty he had never dreamed might exist underneath the day-to-day weave of creation. His heart felt all but torn asunder by the magnetic draw of powers that spoke as a layered tapestry of song.
The bewilderment dizzied. Jieret rested his head against Arithon's knees, helpless as a babe, while waves of rapture burned him to a dichotomy that remade the weight of his body into a shackling burden. 'Do you suppose this is how our ancestors felt after an encounter with Riathan Paravians?'
'Perhaps.' his liege ventured. The bard's voice wore its gifted richness as a tuned instrument, wakening an answering range of vibration. Reverberations streamed past the veil into mystery, transformed to expression as pure light. Such fullness of vision made a bothersome effort of hearing plain words, far less discerning their mundane meaning. 'Your senses have expanded past the limits of flesh,' Arithon qualified. All tender patience, he well understood not to rush his charge through the awkward process of assimilation. 'As the tienelle's effects wane, you'll be able to filter those added perceptions at will.'
'I feel like soft clay that was mashed into pieces, then fired with everything set in the wrong place.' As if a wind had punched gaping holes through his brain, admitting a range of alien sensation, Jieret balked at the opened gateway to new knowledge. If he wished, he could pick out the individual consciousnesses twined through the air, or laced through the matrix of stones. No part of Ath's vast creation was inert. In despair, wrenched to nausea as a shudder of reaction coursed through him, he agonized, 'How in the name of my oath to the kingdom am I going to handle a sword?'