Since the outset, he had ridden with the chance he might fail. Now, Braggen stared down the throat of bad odds, each passing second another strike fate would be counting against him. He must swiftly accomplish what had to be done, with no chance to fish for alternatives.
Braggen dismounted. He unstrapped his own saddlebags, spare quiver, and bow, and hung them on the breast strap and surcingle shortened to fit the loose pony. He changed the bridle as well, then peeled back Jieret's bearskin, robbed the cloak underneath from his liege's back, and knotted the hood through the stirrup iron of his gelding's vacant saddle. He left the hem trailing. A hard shove drove off the stripped pony, then the bay gelding bearing the grain sacks. If the pair ran fast and far enough, the cloth would act as a drag and leave tempting scent for the dogs. Braggen replaced the bear cloak over Arithon, then mounted the last, laden pony.
Moving again, he reined toward the ridge, where he could keep watch on the torches closing behind him. He drove the game little gelding beneath him, used its strength without mercy to breast the deep drifts or pick safe steps on the uncertain footing. Over the granite ledges, he muffled the beasts' hooves. Sound could carry for leagues in the clear winter air; and did, when the tracker's dogs caught the fresh scent at his heels, and slewed off at a leash-pulling tangent. Faint over distance, the voices of men called out excited encouragement.
Grim, his jaw locked, his rapid breath drawn through cold-reddened nostrils, Braggen picked through the scrub timber and boulders atop the high scarp. Apprehension prickled the hair at his nape. Below, he watched the streamers of flame judder and wink through the trees, nearer, and steadily gaining. Time had come for his next disposition. He dismounted again, transferred the provisions and spare arms onto Arithon's mount, then jammed his cloak through the neck strap of the pony that had gallantly borne him.
'Fly, brother,' he urged, and dispatched the animal at a clattering run downward, into the bowl of the next valley. With luck, the tactic might buy him an hour, with trackers and dogs mired in deep drifts, chasing a trail that went nowhere.
Alone with the tough chestnut bearing his prince, Braggen rechecked the packs that secured the provisions. He strung one of the bows, made sure knife and sword hung unhindered and loose in their scabbards. Then he drew his small dagger and sawed through the cords holding Arithon, except for the rag ties that bound his Grace's wrists around the pony's thick neck. All but shaking with haste, Braggen unhooked the silk-wrapped sword from his back and clambered onto the burdened pony. A snatched whisper of apology; then he asked the beast for its heart, to carry its double burden across the swept rock apron under the spine of the ridge.
So began the last leg of his journey from the banks of the Aiyenne, where he had accepted the vital charge his chieftain laid on him to finish. In darkness, under the cold scattering of stars, with no movement about him but the mournful north wind in the scrub pines, and the steam of the pony's puffed breath, Braggen dug in his heels. The surly beast under him surged onward at a jolting, short-strided trot.
His warmth shared with Arithon's, one hand on the bridle reins, and the other clasped to the weight of Alithiel, the clansman traversed the iced spur of the rimrock that gashed the steep face of the hillside. The cold air held the clarity of liquid glass. Bare gran-, ite rang to the strike of bare hooves as the overburdened pony scrabbled for purchase. The crux was a cruel one, which risk told the worse: whether the noise would hasten discovery, or whether a descent into muffling snow would trade silence for crippling penalty. Beside miring swift progress, the inevitable fresh trail must reveal their scant resources to the enemy tracker.
Braggen forged upward. Frequent sharp glances cast down his back trail marked the progress of his pursuit. He wrung what inadequate comfort he could from the fact that only one patrol hounded him. Had the Alliance commander realized his men coursed something more than a renegade clansman, the slope at his back would have been swarming with brands. As things were, in twelve hours, the valley would seethe with the tramp of advancing armed troops. Braggen threaded the scraped rock of the heights on the scant reassurance that no horn calls sounded. No shouts of alarm shattered the still night at his back.
In time, one of the torches disappeared, then blinked back into sight, meandering through the low ground in tortured pursuit of the pony. The wily tracker in charge was no fool. He had split his pack; two torches still clove to the ridgetop.
Battling to maintain his narrowing lead, Braggen dipped over the far side. Protected under the lee of the scarp, he slapped the rein ends to smarten the pony's pace until a copse of dense fir forced him to slacken. The snow deepened, silted where trees had broken the wind, and set drifts carved to whale-backed hillocks. Plowing breast deep, the pony bucked to make progress. By now, the obvious trail would not matter. Ahead, the dark seam of the cliff wall hemmed in the sequined span of the sky. Between its raised rampart, too high to scale, rose a narrow cleft like an axe cut.
For Braggen, the site marked the end of the trail. He would find no more favorable a position for defense. He must make his stand here and balk the encroaching patrol if he could.
'Go!' he cried, breathless, as the pony cleared the last drift and clambered up the rising ground. 'Reach the gap, little sister, your load will be lightened.'
Pressed to Arithon's back, man and game beast clawed past the low, needled branches and broke through the last, thinning trees. Heavy snow mantled the approach to the notch. Rather than muscle his mount through the difficult, deep footing, and blaze a cleared path for his enemies, Braggen reined right. The pony scrabbled upslope at an oblique angle, reached the south-facing scar of pebble and moraine melted bare by fortuitous sunshine. In clattering haste, the clansman wheeled, cutting back across the broken ground skirting the base of the cliff rim.
The pass loomed ahead, a twisted seam gouged through vertical rock and polished by eons of weather. Gusts screamed through the narrows, funneled to buffeting dissonance. The cold knifed through clothing with searing force, snapping loose strap leather and chilling the sweat streaking the pony's whorled coat. Braggen dismounted, the wrapped length of Alithiel cradled left-handed. Head down against the sting of the wind, he guided the blowing mare into that jagged rock gateway. The sky narrowed overhead, reduced to an indigo ribbon pinpricked with scattered stars.
Plunged into deep darkness, Braggen shrugged off a bristle of gooseflesh. A live presence seemed to brood over this place, as though history watched in attendance. No doubt, the steps of countless Paravians had trodden this pass through the course of forgotten ages. Whether the rift had once been hallowed ground, if the kinder breezes of high summer still rippled the hidden mirror of a rock pool or the gushing cleft of a sacred spring, winter hoarded the land's ancient secrets. The clatter of stone shards and the chink of steel weaponry tore the grace of that mystical peace, casting back the sharp echoes of thankless intrusion.
Braggen found shelter in a natural cavern formed under a tumble of fallen boulders. There, with time his worst enemy and no moment to ease his laboring breath, he drew his small dagger and sliced the last ties binding Arithon's slack wrists.
'Hold you steady,' he murmured to the pony. Spurred by necessity and hammered resolve, he crouched, laid the swathed length of the sword on his knee, and nicked through the cross-laced string ties. One frantic jerk tore off the silk binding.
'Merciful Ath guide your footsteps, my prince,' Braggen murmured in heartsore appeal. Then he grasped the bared hilt in nerve-deadened fingers and yanked the black sword from its scabbard.
The blade pulled free with a crackle of white sparks. A shearing snap followed. The shock of wild sound ascended, risen into a keening whine far above audible sound as the spell-sealed wards tore asunder. Braggen felt the flare of an uncanny heat spike through the steel in his hand. The sensation accompanied a ringing vibration that lifted his hair.
Then, on the pony, Arithon stirred. He drew in a shuddering breath. A frisson rippled the length of his frame,
and both hands spasmed closed into fists. Words passed his lips, a snatched, lyric phrase in Paravian cut short by a racking, dry cough. There followed a transitory moment of forgetfulness, blurring the edge of transition.
'Jieret?' the prince murmured. He lifted his head, his inquiring features yet veiled in fallen strands of black hair. 'Are we clear? Did the ruse with the fetches spare the worst blow to your war band?'
Braggen averted his face. Ripped into misery by that note of blind trust, half-crushed by the pending weight of an inevitable disappointment, he could not bear to witness a sorrow whose memory would brand him forever.
To Arithon's credit, there came no shocked gasp; no outcry against the wounding stab delivered by fate's latest cruelty. Only the soft rustle of disarranged cloth, as the Teir's'Ffalenn propped himself upright. By instinct, he settled his balance erect on the back of the pony. When he spoke, his inquiry fell gentle, the very soul of compassionate tact. 'Braggen? Forgive me. If you're ready, please say what has passed in my absence?'
No time to break the unpleasant news kindly, or appease the raw brunt with condolence. Braggen swallowed, turned, met his prince's taut state of calm with no saving poise to cushion the drive of necessity. His words held all of his gouging, rough pain and embarrassed humiliation. 'Jieret stayed. None could stop him. I was charged to stand at your back in his place. Your Grace, you must ride, and at once. A tracker with hounds is hard at our heels. He leads a patrol of crack veterans from Etarra.'
For a mercy, the Shadow Master bowed to the blow that Earl Jieret's decision had dealt him. 'How long was I down?' He accepted the deadly weight of Alithiel from his clan liegeman's urgent hands. 'Do you know how far my half brother's troop lags behind us?'
'You were out for two days. I don't know about Lysaer,' answered Braggen in ragged haste. 'We passed through the lines of the enemy last night. The way's open, northward. Please, liege, just listen! You've got provisions for a tenday, grain just for three. The pony's not fresh. I've left you a bow, half my good arrows, some tinder. Keep Jieret's cloak, and my spare in the saddle pack. Where I'm bound, I'm not going to need it.'
A brief, hurried wrist clasp, exchanged in the dark. 'Fare you well, liege. Stay free. Grant my sons a crowned heir for Ithamon.'
Braggen spun, snatched the bow from his shoulder, and bolted.
Head down, he sprinted back toward the mouth of the gap. He could not see, for the tears that welled in his eyes. Yet the wind, and the stumbling slap of his footfalls over raw stone did not cheat him.
He heard the parting line of his prince with utmost, terrible clarity. 'No man better, to have filled Jieret's shoes. Shoot straight, Braggen. More than my gratitude, you'll spin the thread of posterity with your courage. For tonight, know the truth, that I am as worthless, while you hold the weal of Athera between your two hands.'
Had Braggen glanced back for even a brief moment, he would have seen that the prince he dismissed to seek safety had no intent, then or ever, of leaving him.
Late Winter 5670
Shadows Behind the Throne
The raven blinked.
Dream ruptured, casting Earl Jieret out of the web of prescient Sight. The image of the high gap in the Mathorns dissolved, and with it the vision that had witnessed the parting between Rathain's crown prince and the staunch Companion sworn to his defense. Yet Jieret did not recover full waking awareness with the release of his seer's talent. Instead, he found himself oddly adrift, his disembodied awareness still cast in suspension above Daon Ramon's vast landscape. The hour was twilight. From his overhead vantage, the snow-covered vales rolled away, frozen spume on a storm-tossed sea.
Preternaturally attuned to the passage of time, Jieret understood he had suffered a fit of prescient vision. Alithiel had yet to be drawn from her wrapped and warded scabbard. The confrontation in the mountain foothills would not come to pass until several hours past nightfall. Arithon's anonymity rested on that scant margin. The risky protection safeguarding his sanity from Lysaer's closing proximity became the sole factor to stall the drive of Desh-thiere's curse.
The realm's caithdein was not resigned. Regret gouged him to relentless guilt. The accursed fact galled, that he should still breathe after his late string of failures.
The raven cocked her head in midflight, her intelligent regard turned piercing. 'You are alive. Since every man is the Fatemaster's partner in choosing his moment of death, your spirit remains on this side of the Wheel for a compelling reason.'
Disembodied in dream, Jieret's frustration erupted in silenced explosion. 'For what purpose, if I am left helpless?'
'But you are not helpless,' the raven cracked back, the downstroke of her wings whiplash curt. 'The thread of your consciousness is part of the life-weave that anchors Athera's existence. Every thought you have, every whisper of feeling, every desire you hold in your heart carries a distinct, measured impact.' Her. eye a bright bead of sheared obsidian, the bird concluded, 'No matter what straits, or how dire the circumstance, only the fool disowns his vested power to respond.'
Presented with Jieret's dumbstruck distress, the raven trimmed her ink pinions and shot forward. 'You disbelieve? Then behold, your own Sight will show you the truth. You have already looked out at your world. Yet the greater mystery will not stand revealed unless you allow what exists to see you.'
The land unreeled beneath Jieret's focused regard, stone and snow and hill and brush alive with the glimmerance of enhanced vision. The intricate patterns encompassed more than one layer, as though he discerned time and space through a series of stacked, colored templates. The sheer complexity stunned and confounded. Yet even without trained experience, or practice, he could intuitively grasp small details. Here, he discerned the bright spark of an owl gone to roost with fluffed feathers in a thicket. He watched the glittering, poured stream of a hunting wolf pack, and the placid emanations of deer. Daon Ramon unfurled secrets like a tapestry below, the life of all things animate and inanimate strung on the spooled flow of the lane flux. As an unseen observer, Jieret felt secure from a peril half-sensed, and beyond any language to express.
'Will you dare?' provoked the raven, a punch-cut black shape sailing light as a leaf, at her heart the vast chasm of eternity.
'Death would be simpler,' Jieret reproached. Bodiless, he still felt the pull of trepidation. Yet his shortfall had never been cowardice.
Given the choice between helpless captivity and passing the gateway of unknown fear, he embraced his decision. He cast off the innermost barrier of his selfhood and threw open the floodgates of consciousness, until he stood naked before every facet of Ath's vast creation.
The spun envelope of awareness that held him apart dissolved like gauze ripped by a gale.
His awareness exploded with contrary sensation: rising, falling, spinning, imploding, expanding. He had expected to forfeit his individuality, but no such oblivion befell him. Instead, all that he was, and had been, became more. Jieret tumbled in the maelstrom of forces that spiraled the limitless spectrum of wrought form. Nowhere became everywhere; darkness became light. He was wind, then fire, then water, then earth. He beheld the boundless space of infinity in a stone, then the space of the void packed into honeycomb vaults of energetic activity. Epiphany flooded him, that vision extended beyond the realm of perceptible light. To the thrum of a heartbeat, on the flap of the raven's outstretched wings, awareness smashed past the bounds of the limited mind.
Jieret s'Valerient perceived his own Name. Hard on the heels of that understanding came expansive recognition: that all Names in existence were contained within the imprint of his personal consciousness. Each mote and thread in the tapestry of Ath's being reflected the sum total of himself. He was the past, where Paravians danced at solstice, and he was the branching multiplicity of futures, where all possibilities existed, based on each ongoing moment of choice. He held the key to the hour a s'Ffalenn prince was crowned high king, as well as the hour the Mistwraith's curse triumphed, bringing down darkness beyon
d all redemption.
Both outcomes deployed from the palm of his hand. Two fates, for Rathain, strung on the balance of his unwritten destiny. At today's crux, as Rathain's sworn steward and acting caithdein, Jieret seized his chance to leave both futures open. The fork in the path would be left to posterity. Triumph or tragedy, the unclaimed legacy would remain, lodged in the web of unresolved possibility.
'Will you dare?' prompted the raven again.
From a point that was nowhere, and everywhere at once, Jieret s'Valerient answered. 'I have seen your promise that I am not helpless.'
'Then my task here is finished.' The dark harbinger banked on spread wings, doubled back, and flew through him, leaving her parting fragment of mystery: that Traithe and Sethvir had always been heard to address her presence as 'brother'.
In that eyeblink of time, Earl Jieret felt his awareness drawn back into resharpened focus. The part of his being that answered his Name gently drifted to rest above the slack form of his body.
Passing time had changed little. His inert, drugged flesh still lay senseless and bound within the Etarran command tent. The hour was past sundown. Lamps had been lit, their oil-soaked wicks casting a soot haze of smoke. The carnelian light flecked glints of reflection off oiled metal and the battered accoutrements of war: the racked swords and lances; the rolled pennons with their sunwheel finials; the horse harness with chased stirrups and bits. Nearer at hand, traced in gloom and spiked highlights: the brass corners of the locked chests; and the hanging flagons with their stamped tin necks plugged with rolled-leather stoppers.
Jieret's scarce-breathing form lay faceup on the pallet. The posted guard had been changed, his replacement no less than the Alliance Lord Commander.
Sulfin Evend had stripped off his field cloak and surcoat. Still clad in the pebbled gray links of his byrnie, a snagged pair of trunk hose, and boots ringed with damp from his tour of the camp, he had removed his fur-lined helm. His head was left bare, dark hair spiked and matted where the steel had pressed wayward cowlicks. His lean hands were stripped of scaled gloves as he bent keen inspection upon an arrow's repaired fletching. The activity was ongoing. Three sheaves in waxed quivers leaned at his knee. Cast underfoot, a loose scattering of shafts had apparently failed to pass muster.