Earth was anything but blind or deaf to the deeds of her two-legged inhabitants as enemy met enemy in first contact.
The moment erupted in graphic display, the whirled sparks of each man's individual being fanned into explosive conflagration. Hatred and fear launched their savage attack. The staid hills resounded to the pound of sped hearts, each flesh-and-blood drumbeat mirrored threefold in the sensitive purl of the lane pulse. The event scored the flux as a fraught cry of light, tortured to raging disharmony. Scattered before the fury of the charge, ephemeral as moving shadows, Jieret recaptured the dedicated purpose of Rathain's fleet-footed clan scouts.
His throat closed in anguish. Haplessly trapped, he stood as eyewitness, shaking with impotent grief. The Companions who surrvived the fell slaughter at Tal Quorin had replaced the kinship of lost family. Tragedy bound them closer than brothers. Wrung by their plight, Jieret felt the torment of hearts pressed to bursting. He ached with the burn of each desperate, fast breath. His inner mind blazed with the pain of shared fears. Fired by sympathy, his mage vision flowered into Sight.
The immediate influx of smell touched him first, a musk of sweat-lathered horses. He felt the wind next, a raw blast of biting cold. Before him, etched into a clarity like torture, he beheld his war band's best scouts, standing their ground for Rathain. Jieret braced to endure as the staunch spirits his ironbound duty had sent into trial were called to play out the sacrifice.
The moment engulfed him, as Eafinn's son's party burst out of cover as decoy, their assigned task to lure the fanatics from Darkling into a preset array of spring traps. Jieret's pulse leaped to the panic of hill ponies pounding across frozen ground. He heard the shouted command as the townbred captain wheeled his mounted lancers. The hammer of shod hooves bearing down in pursuit rocked his mind, until all other senses rang, deafened.
His gift rode him, relentless, while new mage-sight exposed the blued fire of spirit light, warped and muddied by the savagery of human will bent upon killing destruction. He flinched with the shock of steel meeting steel; felt the wrenching jar of the first woundings. Around him, the stark horrors of death and the fierce passions of the chase exploded to blazing chaos. The fury of Sithaer itself was unleashed as plant, and dumb animal, and motionless stone ignited in subtle recoil.
The warriors enclosed in the clay blindness of five senses saw only the deadened reflection: the impacting force of their actions escaped them. Snapped bone and burst flesh became as crude overlays, masking the lights of more subtle energies, whose existence played through all form. Their voice was not dumb, but mistaken for empty silence. Through the window of mage-sight, their racked pain resounded, octave upon octave above the fixed range of flesh-bound, mortal perception.
Jieret experienced the unseen devastation firsthand, felt the spill of torn life crying out for cessation and peace. But hatred stopped ears, even to the screams of the wounded who writhed dying on the chill ground. Whipped on by self-righteous convictions, the townborn poured down the ridge in a frenzied rush of pack violence. Not one checked his mount as the first horse seemed to trip on its forelegs. It tumbled, kicking. None noticed the sharpened stake through its gut, until the heightened thrill of the hunt changed to horror as the next concealed snares dropped their prey. Sharpened wood, notched with barbs, had been lashed to green saplings, bent to the ground in brute tension. No trace of tampered ground granted fair warning: the sun-crusted face of the drifts shone pristine over the buried release strings.
Earl Jieret, who had helped lay those snares himself, now suffered the mage-sighted shock of his handiwork. He wept without voice, that he could not cry warning to enemies. By ruthless design, the trigger ropes mired the destriers' oncoming strides. Rope traps whipped taut. Horses hurled head over heels with noosed fetlocks, and their riders crashed, crushed and broken. They screamed, the potential invention of intelligent humanity reduced to burst organs and snapped bones. Their blood stained the ground as they whimpered. Enraged beyond mercy, the rear ranks rode over them, a howling storm that would not be assuaged, except by quenching cold steel in hot vengeance.
Jieret fought to breathe. Crushed under the milling storm of his visions, undone by the scope of shared suffering, he crouched, unaware, his face pressed to the earth. He could not detach. Nor could he endure, as the unraveling burn of torn life force marred the unseen world like a blighting, white mist, and the lane's pulse imploded to disharmony.
The killing raged on. Jieret suffered the full gauntlet of sorrows that left him unmanned and weeping. Each rag doll in armor who perished had Name; each crushed moss and lamed horse and chipped stone sang in pain, as death by willed violence sliced black wounds through the interlocked heart of the mysteries. Guilt choked Jieret's throat, a revulsion so deep the world's gift of free breath seemed to brand his rank tissue with self-hatred.
Nor were his personal ties dimmed or lost in the throes of expanded vision.
Earl Jieret sensed the individual desperation of the clan scouts his engineered tactics set to rout. He tasted the bitter courage of the archers waiting in ambush, who held to their obdurate discipline; who set aside fear and girded themselves with the love they held for their families. Their chieftain knew them, each man. He called their Names, helpless, while they fired their last arrows to unravel the enemy's charge. He felt them, each one, taking fatal wounds upon lance point and sword as their positions became overtaken.
Their deaths were quick, but not kind. Each man passed the Wheel aware that his sacrifice would not spare his fleeing companions. Cut down, abandoned, they spiraled into final unconsciousness, knowing their spilled blood snatched no more than the hope of diversion.
Time for Braggen with his burdensome custody of Alithiel to seize chance for the opening to slip Lysaer's cordon. Time that might win another precious league of distance for the hunted Prince of Rathain.
Earl Jieret muffled his choked-off sobs, as Eafinn's son met the same death as his father. As brave, that true spirit would pay his respects to Daelion Fatemaster twenty years younger than his late sire. Nor did his release at the turn of the Wheel absolve him of this life's responsibilities. He breathed his last agony upon ice-chill ground, unable to know if his wife of three months had quickened with the seed of a child to succeed him.
That peal of unquiet pain did not cease with the young scout's death. His sorrow endured, a cry of imbalance, recorded by stone in the stained ground beneath his torn corpse. The creatures who dined upon carrion would partake of that essence, and the winds that swirled over the site would be tainted, their song soured by unfulfilled purpose. Once, such lingering malaise had been cleansed by the rites of Paravian dancers. Now, Jieret perceived with a poignancy that striped his chilled cheeks with fresh tears: the path that promised to right the land's balance yet relied on the hands of Rathain's restored high king.
To that end, more clanblood must soak frigid earth.
'No!' The tormented whisper of Jieret's rebuttal ripped through vision and, finally, shocked him awake. Shivering in clammy runnels of sweat, he recovered his senses, curled on his knees on cold ground. For a long, wrenching moment, he could do nothing but weep for his lost equilibrium.
By the father and mother slain on the banks of Tal Quorin, he had never imagined the day he might face the temptation to reject his oathsworn heritage. 'Ah, Caolle.' he gasped. 'I never understood why you abandoned your post, until now.'
Only wind answered. Nearby, his strayed pony browsed with its reins snagged over a branch. Earl Jieret pushed to his unsteady feet. He raked up the fallen cloth of his hood, every joint in him aching.
Sore irony burned him, that he must go on, though the role his last choice had set into motion now posed an unthinkable horror. He could not turn back. Another patrol would sweep his position inside a matter of minutes. Jieret recovered his pony. He unsnarled the reins with shaking, numbed fingers, set foot in the stirrup, and mounted. A lifetime of hard training and brutal war had done nothing to harden him for the pun
ishing crux of this moment. To gather himself and set heels to his horse required an act beyond courage.
In Daon Ramon, alone, Earl Jieret s'Valerient wrestled the shadows of blighting uncertainty. For the first time since boyhood, the demon fear gnawed him: that he might fall short as his father's son and disgrace the name of his lineage. Too real, the chance he might fail to uphold his caithdein's vow to safeguard the kingdom. In Rathain's most critical hour of need, he questioned whether he lacked the fiber to master the same crisis his crown prince had faced years ago at Tal Quorin: whether he, too, could summon the will to draw steel, and kill with his mage-sight unblinded.
* * *
A league of hard riding won no foothold for peace. Earl Jieret felt as though the chill blew clear through him, where he knelt on the flint stone of a rise. Light-headed as smoke that might disperse to the wisp of a wrongly drawn breath, he tightened his left-handed grip on a shard of white quartz. The prankster gusts whipped him, starched with the forerunning hint of new snowfall. Their force slapped a reddened bloom to his cheek and wisped loosened hair from his clan braid. Rathain's caithdein closed the inaugural spell circle against the assault of undermining uncertainty. Across the bared rock of Daon Ramon's heartland, he enacted the rune ring Arithon had shown him in the last, darkened hours before dawn.
Jieret shivered, beyond regret for his hazardous change in decision: that his Teir's'Ffalenn had designed his instructions under the strict presumption the work would be done at safe remove from Alliance front ranks.
Regardless of placement, the lines must stay exact. Each quadrant of the inscribed figure held meaning, lens and focus to anchor his conscious intent.
'You're laying down the steps of a ceremony,' Arithon had said, his spare words chosen for clarity. 'My grandfather spoke this truth: that symbols created in sequenced awareness align the will on three planes. Mental, emotional, physical, your actions create the templates for thought and desire to enable manifestation. For the initiate mage, the drawing of runes sets the self in accord, preparing the channel through which invoked power will flow.'
Yet mere language could not touch the indescribable beauty that bloomed at each stage of completed connection. Given sight to invoke the hidden fires of grand conjury, Jieret trembled, struck breathless as the heart of the mystery responded. The precisely scratched ciphers under his hands flared into actualized being. Their flame was not separate. Around him, stone and tree and iced snowdrift, the greater web of creation resurged to the spark of his human invention.
Jieret sensed his own impact, heard his sacred self in the chord of Ath's unity, a Named vessel of awareness cherished in celebration by the undivided paean of whole consciousness. Truth became etched through the nerve and the bone of him. He perceived the Wheel of Fate, birth to death, as no closed hoop, but an open spiral whose expanding coils encompassed the untamed gyre of eternity.
A man exposed to the scope of such knowing must fight to keep his hand steady. Jieret blinked back his tears, all but swept away as the thundering currents of prime power conjoined through the poised axis of his being.
The spelled circle surrounding him was little more than a crude framework made for the purpose of binding and holding an illusion. Yet its geometry held the echo of the majestic, universal design. Through its interlocked quadrants, Earl Jieret glimpsed the shimmering weave of the snake that devoured its own tail. Death and rebirth married into continuous reunion, as unseen light and consciousness danced the steps which sustained living form.
Shaken afresh by the ugly need that had set such forces in motion, Jieret sealed the outer band of the construct with invocation of the Paravian rune, Alt. Moment to moment, the destructive purpose he must enact became ruinously harder to sustain.
He glanced up, apprehensive, saw the flicker of movement he expected amid the patched stands of the brush. Already the ranked lines of Alliance horsemen advanced down the cleft of the valley. Men and beasts as exalted by life as himself, whose patterns of expression were unique on the loom of Ath's creation. The core truths disclosed by his opened mage-sight were not going to spare him the heat of the crucible.
Torn into anguish, Jieret sought solace in cherished memories of Strakewood. The care ran bone deep, for his clan's ancestral ground with its tangled tapestry of evergreen, its fir and its vales of broad oak. He must bend with the winds of ill fortune, even as the graceful willows which knotted their gnarled roots in the riverbanks he recalled from his boyhood.
The men today's effort must lure to their doom were whole beings who chose to embrace a dangerous ignorance. Their misled practice must never be permitted the free rein to triumph. Were the old ways to fail, Rathain's charter would be riven. No high king's rule would maintain the law and the balance. The forests that preserved Paravian mystery would fall to the stroke of the axe. Acres of greenwood would be shorn for the plow without blessing or regard for the weal of the sacrosanct wilds. The land's bounty would be broken to fuel creedless towns, whose inhabitants salved their self-blinded fear through the limitless maw of their avarice.
The unveiled face of the mysteries themselves underscored the fragile thread binding the future. Paravian presence had withdrawn. Outside the eyes of the mage-trained, or the wisdom of Ath's adepts, the high kingship's justice alone gave protection to all living things - man, animal, insect, fish or plant - as equal parts of a whole cloth. Oathsworn for life to uphold that order, a caithdein had no choice but to act. Jieret stamped down his heartsore reluctance. For the s'Ffalenn crown prince who carried the Fellowship's sanction; for the land he defended through selfless service, he unclenched shaking fingers and drew out the bundled silk veiling the ninth acorn, imbued with Arithon's Named essence.
He unwrapped the string ties, well warned that he handled the seeds of impending disaster. Ripped by his need to embrace Jeynsa and his sons once again - to kiss Feithan's lips a last time - Jieret cupped the swathed construct and began the innermost circle of ciphers that would frame the heart of the construct.
A minute flowed by. Another. Jieret invoked the requisite words of release, that changed binding into free partnership; schooled by a heritage of oral tradition, he made no mistakes as he traced the glyph that would call in the powers of the air. Hunter's instinct prickled his nape, insistent warning of the closing proximity of his enemies. He cut off the distraction.
Whatever occurred outside the circle must not deflect him, now. His trial by fire that morning had taught him: listen too closely to subtle intuition, and mage-sight would crash down all barriers. The hilltop where he worked had been selected for its conductive resonance. If he heeded the wayward pull of his heart, he risked being swept away by the intimate, wrenching details as his war band was reaped like chaff before the might of the Alliance advance.
For each casualty fallen, the earth mourned alike. Pressed by the destruction sown on three sides, with the force under Lysaer s'Ilessid himself closing the fourth side of the square, Earl Jieret held fast. He persisted, though the lane tides tugged and swirled, the silvered flux wracked like gale-blown ribbons to the dance of men locked in violence.
More than once, Sighted impressions leaked through. Each brought a vignette of tragedy. Jieret resteadied his shaking fingers. He gripped the quartz, and quashed back his wild grief, while three leagues to the west, Theirid's band fought a bitter engagement to win opportunity for a scant handful of scouts to slip through. Men who would scatter and lose themselves in the trackless barrens, then fight afresh for survival amid the relentless winter elements.
Jaw clamped in stark effort, Earl Jieret focused his scattered attention. He unslung his bow. From his quiver, he drew out a wrapped arrow whose point had been consecrated for revenge. Though his taste for such violence had soured beyond recourse, he freed the black shaft from its deerhide covering. Time had not warped the walnut-stained wood. The razor-steel point retained its keen edge, and its message, engraved and sealed with his own blood.
Son of Steiven s'Valerient and D
ania, he had a personal debt to repay, a grim score left unsettled since Deshir's wives and children had been violated, their massacred bodies broken and burned beside Tal Quorin over three decades past. Jieret rested the arrow across his bent knees, then mustered the brute will to survey the landscape before him.
The oncoming horsemen filed down the gulch, a moving flurry of pebbled steel helms, cloaked and hooded in drab cloth and leather. The advance guard was followed by Lysaer's main company. Not a large force, but a field troop of headhunters welded by experience to mobile and deadly efficiency. They understood the terrain. Jieret noted their avoidance of scrub growth that masked sucking bogs and poor footing. They employed no voiced orders, but used hand signals alone to part ranks for an iced-over gully.
Their silent, seamless advance chilled the blood far more than the ceaseless north winds.
Moved by wary reflex, Jieret reviewed his surroundings. High overhead, a dark eagle circled, a speck against lucent silk sky, Behind, he felt as though hidden eyes watched him. Though his studied search caught no one lurking, his creeping unease would not rest. His mage-sight unveiled a queer, subdued blight cast over the rocks and bare bushes. As though the awareness of stone and live root shared his acid foreboding, and sought anonymity by dimming their essence of spirit light.
Jieret faced forward. He could ill afford to fret himself stupid over the spurious prompt of some haunt. The men in the vale would not wait on his doubts. They came on relentless, the gleam of bared steel like the glint on a reptile's scales, half-glimpsed through the thickets and bracken. This was no troop led by pedigree dandies, but a strike force of hardened killers. The officers' mounts were not plumed or caparisoned. They spurned war medallions and trinkets. For their badge of prowess, the headhunters from Narms preferred a fringe of cured clan scalps sewn to the edge of their saddlecloths.