Such a brute storm choked the harbour-side inn where Elaira mewed up to outwait the weather’s delay. In the cheapest room closest to the cliff rim, the river’s tumult was deafening. For her, the constant barrage posed a blessing: gale-driven flakes and lofted showers of iced spray effectively foiled the order’s scryers. Which slender edge posed her only advantage against the tense set-back of a night’s enforced stay past the designate bounds of Ghent’s free wilds.
But no galley-man braved Rockbay’s treacherous shoals in harsh weather; and with Havish’s late queen on her bier, the kingdom’s commerce paused for the ritual Crown’s Night of Mourning.
Elaira paced, desperate. The prickle at her nape shouted in warning: she ought to be gone. Her sensitivity to Arithon’s location was too volatile a liability. She needed to make her escape on salt water, and quickly, since the jumbled-up flux in the Storlains no longer gave shelter, and charter rights under town jurisdiction placed a magistrate’s court between her direct access to crown-law redress. The Koriathain exploited that added disadvantage. The sharp sweep of the sisterhood’s probes had tested Elaira three times within the past hour. Just barely, she escaped being pinned at the dock, when she had treated with an out-bound captain to secure a sea-passage to Shand.
The vessel would sail on the ebb-tide at dawn, provided the snowfall slackened. Yet tomorrow’s hazards became a moot point if she failed to withstand the aggressive assaults sure to come through the night.
Since erratic motion made her harder to strike, she gave in to anxiety and quartered the floor-boards while flung spume from the gorge frosted the window-panes to dull white. Periodically the plastered crust shattered, cracked away as the casement rattled. Wind boxed at the rafters, and the limed walls shook to the boom as the Issing’s thrashed current smashed bergs and black water through the rock channel below.
Beneath the violence of the elements, Elaira sensed another disturbance: as if the ground under the building itself flexed to a shift in the flux stream. The oddity stabbed her weathered skin into gooseflesh and zinged frissons down her cranked nerves.
She tried soothing her fraught state by tidying her hair, when the sudden, sharp rap at the door jumped her nearly out of her skin.
‘Your dinner’s here, traveller!’ Snappish, the kitchen drudge banged again, impatient to deliver her meal.
Elaira threw her comb aside and unhooked the loop that secured the latch pin. Stressed to raced pulse, she endured the suspicious stare from the girl, who thumped the laden tray down on the armoire and fled. Elaira hoped the distrustful reaction stemmed from the tattered leathers and wind-burned squint that made her appear as uncivilized as the mountain trappers. Half-starved as well, she should have felt famished.
The inn’s savoury stew and fresh bread smelled delectable after weary weeks of fire-seared game gnawed straight off the bone. But relentless anxiety spoiled her appetite. Elaira made herself scrape the bowl clean. She needed her strength against the certainty she could face an attack at any moment. Ruffled by chills yet again, she laid down the last bit of bread. This upset was not caused by hostile scryers. Somewhere, a direct surge of power stamped concussive rings through the lane flux.
Elaira pushed to her feet, afraid not to identify the anomaly. Under threat for too long, she reached for the basin on the washstand, then discarded the idea of sounding for information through the interface of stilled water. The spate in the gorge caused vibration enough to ruffle the mirror surface required to cast a clear image. An attempt at tranced vision by way of the Issing’s river-course would become torn apart in the boisterous spate. Even had she been adept with air, the storm threw off too much static; and her paltry touch with fire was no use since her twopenny lodging lacked a hearth.
Earth had never been her natural element. But time spent in sanctuary with Ath’s White Brotherhood had opened Elaira’s awareness to Athera’s land sense. More, the Paravian maker’s mark cut into the inn’s worn threshold bespoke a foundation set into harmonic alignment with the deep strata of the bed-rock beneath. The stone building ought to resonate to the flux strongly enough to be tapped in rapport.
Elaira abandoned the meal tray. She crossed to the casement, her soundless tread on waxed floor-boards unnaturally smooth after years spent in rugged country. The thought made her wince, that extended exile had ingrained the habitual stealth of a deep-wilds clan scout. Separation from Arithon slowly drove her mad in more ways than she cared to admit.
Desperate not to wake her empathic link to him, she flattened her hands on the chill granite window-sill. Eyes closed, she quieted her breath, then loosened her defensive boundaries and settled into the straightforward grain of the masonry under her touch. Unlike the reactive nature of quartz, which responded to each slight deflection, the sturdy calm of aggregate mineral embraced her with dauntless endurance. She sank into its calm until her inward eye opened to refined awareness. Refigured before her, the latticed structure of fitted blocks unveiled the interface of their core energy, written through by the coruscation of flux currents beyond the range of visible light. The Paravian artisans always had shaped their working in partnership with the mysteries. The old inn’s alignment matched the bias of the greater lane flows that streamed through the landscape. Which resonant connection expanded Elaira’s vantage across a hundred-league radius.
If the Koriathain were hunting, their assault would be channelled to focus through quartz. Any collaborate crystal would shine out of the glimmering, cool back-drop of flux like a red-heated star.
She detected four of them! Not distanced, but within Redburn, and in close proximity to her position. If the sigils wrought here did not yet burn with the brilliance of fullest engagement, the sisters behind them already moved to seal their strung net. The tavern where Elaira sheltered would become a locked trap unless she fled straightaway.
Yet before she withdrew her refined connection, another phenomenon rippled across the vast web unveiled to her Sighted vision. The building presence snagged Elaira’s attention, too powerfully strong for her trained experience. Haplessly entrained, already ungrounded, she lost her solid awareness of the attic-room. Flurried like a spark snatched into an updraught, she reeled through a potent convergence of energies that rushed like a gale-wind over and through her. Drawn into concert, she shared the vision of a ceremony that occurred in another closed room, at a Second Age site also founded by ancient Paravian masons at Telmandir…
…where the Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, stood tall in bright candlelight, his combed hair a silver cascade over straight shoulders. He was clothed in state, his severe robe of midnight blue velvet banded at cuffs and collar with the glint of silver ribbon. A youthful figure knelt before him, dark brown hair braided clan fashion against the rich red-and-gold of a heraldic surcoat that seemed an awkward fit for his unfinished frame.
Yet there, initiate vision read power beyond the pale of surface impressions. This young man’s aura revealed the same stamped gleam of the attunement Elaira knew well as handfast mate to the Prince of Rathain. She understood that sanction by Fellowship auspices connected a royal heir designate into confluence with the land. The binding here matched the template of Havish, which identified this scion as the appointed successor to the realm’s queen.
More than curiosity held Elaira riveted. Arrested, all but laced into enthrallment, she witnessed the start of an elaborate construct of Asandir’s making. His capable hands, poised above the stilled prince, worked the precursive shimmer of intent as the primary stage of a seamless nexus. While she watched, a ring of live fire took shape, horizontal between his spread fingers. That seamless geometry no sooner formed when a second appeared, wrought of water, crossed at right angles and linked through the first. Another, invisible, welded out of air, whirled through the twined figures and spun them into blazing motion. Opposites, still, both fire and water braided into a fluid triad of balanced formation.
Then Asandir murmured a Paravian word and conjoined his masterful figure
into the flux. Power bloomed, widened, sang, a shimmering ripple that danced to the infinite song of Athera’s deep mysteries.
Breath stopped, Elaira viewed the formed circlet that raised an Atheran crown prince to sovereign accession. Melded upon contact, the prior attunement to earth would flower into its rightful completion and bestow the fulfilled power of the s’Lornmein heritage upon the next High King of Havish.
Asandir cradled the crackling diadem, its interlaced forces wrought with such matchless finesse, not a hair was disturbed on the royal head bent in trust to receive the burden. All else forgotten, roped captive by wonder, Elaira braced for the climactic moment when the prince aspirant already wedded to the land became engaged with the flux stream, then bound through the consummate marriage of all four wakened elements.
As a moth pulled towards flame, she could not turn away as the force that safeguarded the realm’s farthest quarters was bestowed into mortal hands.
Asandir lowered the blazing crown construct. The instant of transfer deluged the interface with a clarity harmful to witness. Elaira gasped, blinded and witlessly deafened, when a bump shocked her vision off balance. Her awareness of the land’s confluence imploded. Shoved out, then pushed safely away, she heard the sent voice of Althain’s Warden admonish her over-bold reach. ‘Brave Lady! This is no time to be caught immersed in an earth-based linkage inside the bounds of Havish! Handfast to a sanctioned prince as you are, the high resonance involved in the accession ceremony could affect you. Spoken for by Rathain, you must stay well clear as High King Gestry receives coronation.’
Elaira plunged back into herself with a shudder of shock. Collapsed to her knees beneath the window-sill, she braced to recoup her frayed nerves. The cramped attic-room was lightless and cold, enclosed as a trap as four Senior enchantresses descended, under direct orders to corner her. Aghast with fear, Elaira realized their strike was deliberately timed: as the new sovereign assumed his fresh charge of the realm’s warded protections, the defenses that upheld crown justice in Havish momentarily would be under strength.
Worse, her tie to Prince Arithon disbarred any help from the Fellowship Sorcerers.
Elaira pushed erect, pressured to act before hot pursuit blocked her threshold. She snatched the last crust of uneaten bread and shoved it into the satchel she had not unpacked. Unwashed, still belted in her rugged leathers, she tossed the coin owed for her lodging onto the supper tray and flung on her damp cloak. Then she bolted from the room and careened down the darkened servants’ stair to the inn’s kitchen. The cook had retired, but three slatterns washed pots, immersed in salacious gossip. Elaira slipped past their turned backs, ducked behind the racked pans and chopping block, unlatched the rear door, and stepped out.
Her feet squished through the midden, while the cruel night veiled her form in the barrage of wind-driven snowfall. Icy mist seared her lungs, thrown off the rush of the flume far below. The air shook to the violent roar of white water while, sparkled in subliminal currents beneath, the event at Telmandir rippled etheric waves through the flux. She dared not tap into that excited flow to measure the proximity of her pursuit. While Asandir’s act of grand conjury eclipsed mage-sight, the Prime Matriarch’s pawns understood very well their quarry’s resources were weakened.
Elaira edged over the steamed hummocks of garbage, pressed against the inn wall at the jagged rim of the Issing gorge. At the hazard of a break-neck fall, she reached the cobbles of the adjacent by-lane and sprinted. She banged her shin on a buried hand-cart, which startled an alley cat to yowling flight. The adroit dodge that avoided a horse-trough blundered her into the slats of a hen-coop. The upset fowl shrilled with alarm, and several wooden shutters crashed open. Chased by the vociferous complaints of roused citizens, Elaira raced onwards through the pressed welter of black air and snowfall. Oriented by the percussive falls in the gorge, she stole down the switched back street, stumbled over the frozen ruts of the caravan road, and darted between the pillowed drifts that clogged the wood frames of the water-front market stalls. The rows of capped bollards beyond marked the wharf, where the tied galley under Havish’s flag promised her prearranged passage to Shand.
She must board at all costs. No matter if the gangway was run in, and the hatches dogged shut in the storm. Quartz-driven assault weakened over salt water. Better still, the order’s ranked Seniors might shy from the peril of a slippery deck. Since their privileged longevity was bound through crystal, they should be loath to chance the fatality of a sea-water immersion.
But her hope to seize that slim advantage was thwarted.
A mantled figure blocked the gateway where the customs men checked the tax stamps on inbound cargo. Elaira skidded to a frantic stop, her opening to escape forestalled by two more initiates, who closed in on both sides of the lane that flanked the spiked wall at the quay-side. The fourth would be placed at her back, with the spells woven to snare her the instant she tried an evasion. No appeal to crown justice might salvage her plight, even had Redburn’s delegate magistrate not been snoring in his bed. The raw weather emptied the dock side of witnesses, with even the town watch holed up in sheltered comfort.
Cornered, beyond desperate, Elaira confronted her adversaries. The least powerful of them outranked her by lengths: all wore the red bands of seniority. But the detail that hammered her pulse in her veins was their inhuman lack of expression. Past question the Koriani Matriarch wielded the sigil of mastery behind each woman’s stony facade. These sisters did not act by their own will but functioned as the Prime’s suborned puppets. Four ranged against her, thralled in locked synchronicity, they posed enough ruthless force to annihilate her at one stroke. Elaira still breathed the icy winter air only because the order’s usage desired her capture, alive.
‘I will not be stopped,’ she defied through the ache of exhaustion. ‘Through every avenue I might claim, seen or unseen, by any right power and with all my heart, I oppose you!’
Once before, the same declaration had summoned a Sorcerer’s aid, and the perilous wrath of a dragon. But not tonight. Her bluff must be called, since Asandir’s sworn constraint upon Arithon’s fate dropped the shield of the Fellowship’s protection.
‘Submit now to the bonds of your sisterhood oath,’ the enchantress in the gateway demanded. Her implacable command wore the steely ring of Selidie’s supreme confidence as she added, ‘Do so, and you may retain your right mind. Refuse, and you will be served with the lifelong penalty of witless obedience.’
‘I give you nothing!’ Terrified, trembling, Elaira gripped the strap of her satchel and braced for the worst.
The rage jabbed after centuries of harsh resistance, that every breath taken in agonized pain throughout Arithon’s captive separation should have been endured for naught! She had not been born, nor shared such a magnificent love only to be vanquished in this desolate winter-cold alley.
‘May Dharkaron Avenger stand as my witness!’ she gasped, ‘Whatever you try, no matter the outcome, my spirit will pass through your hands whole and unscathed.’
Yet the bravest words rang uselessly hollow: her initiate’s vow, recorded in crystal, had not been sworn under duress. The Prime’s minions opposed her, supremely unmoved, harnessed through the might of the Skyron focus and backed by the intimate signature linked through Elaira’s abandoned spell crystal. The stone had not been cleared, or detached from her personal imprint. Selidie had only to impose her master sigil upon the closed net to claim her victim’s defeat. Elaira stood erect, beyond caring how hard she would fall when the Prime’s will drove her unconscious. Since nothing more could be done, she chose to step forward and meet her fate.
The whisper of her footfall raised no flash of cold force. Cruel as a false promise, the moment hung, then strung out, while the raced blood sang in Elaira’s taut veins. Why did the Prime’s thralled minions not strike? Did they push to snap her defiance beforehand? Since she refused to cave in, why not wrest Arithon’s location from her outright, unless the small fact she refused
to surrender carried a thread of significance?
Elaira drew in a shuddering breath. Between the thick snow and the bone-chilling wind, might she scent the faint trace of brimstone? Her heart surged and lifted. Dragon! Was such a reprieve even possible? Did the Sorcerer Davien in fact turn Betrayer against the unbroken honesty of his colleagues? Could he stand to her defense in direct violation of Asandir’s oath without rending the terms of the compact?
‘Come on!’ taunted Elaira, charged to an insane burst of courage. ‘Will the Koriathain dare to cross the might of Seshkrozchiel?’
The Name of the great drake hung on the storm-whipped air: could the Prime in fact risk a rescue from that quarter expressly to rend the Fellowship Sorcerers’ inviolate integrity and break their bound service to Athera’s vanished Paravians? The dread prospect screamed that such a terrible price was beyond all conscience to risk. But the outrage inflicted by Arithon’s captivity cut Elaira too sharply for selfless reason.
‘Invite total ruin at such stakes, if you will!’ she challenged her hesitant enemy. ‘I am not your bargaining chip, nor even the Fellowship’s keeper!’
Another step, then two more, Elaira advanced.
Power spoke then to her overstrained senses: not the blow that fore-ran her annihilation at the hand of the Selidie Prime. Instead, the shudder that ripped through her viscera was the unmistakable threat of an immanent scorching fire: no dragon’s! This emanation was not acrid but clean as a sunbeam struck through a glass lens. Elaira had been visited by Davien before. Since the drake’s dire bargain had claimed his fate, she knew, well enough to raise hackles of terror, the perilous shape-shifting presence that coiled in the aura of a living dragon. Yet this strange force – inexplicable beyond knowing – was other. Perturbed by the puzzle, she leaned on bravado and questioned her foes. ‘Why should you hesitate, sisters?’