‘What! Leave you the means to extend your pestiferous royal lineage and seat a successor on Rathain’s vacant throne?’ Selidie gloated outright. ‘Not a chance! Teylia was wrested away from your charge. Inept or not, even aged past senility, she may find a useful place in our order yet. No. Her loyalty stays tied to me. Unless you would care to rethink your position and release your ironclad grip, binding my will to your compact?’
The Sorcerer inclined his head, his large hands with their capable callus and the worn tracery of scarred experience now lowered and quiet. ‘Impasse. I rest my case.’
No more could be said. He would not lie. Even by inference, he dared not tip his hand. His last wild card must stay invisible: that the secret truth, and all of the facts still in play with regard to Prince Arithon’s issue, were not, and never had been, made known to Selidie Prime. Terrible, the self-restraint that checked Asandir’s urge to speak his mind; overwhelming, his fury for the twisted practice that permitted the abomination he confronted on the dais to live. He capped his latent rage for the abhorrent abuses that kept Selidie’s creamy skin smooth; smothered his heart’s need to let fly with rebuke for her cruelty, which once had commanded the separation of a three-year-old girl from the arms of her widowed mother.
While Selidie drew out his agonized wait, well aware how her practice offended, Asandir checked his torrential emotions. His nerves must withstand the terrible course!
Exposed, he endured the grueling pause, as the Prime prolonged the climactic chance to snatch her long-sought recompense. Too viciously clever to act on rash eagerness, she expected to cede him a failure to trump the annals of abject defeat.
For her crowning blow, she chose insult. ‘I shall not rely on your spoken word.’ Unable to resist the temptation, she meant to bond him with the validation demanded of common petitioners. Her tight gesture encompassed the gleaming white marble that paved the floor under his feet. ‘Seal your promise, Sorcerer. As was done before at Althain Tower, I would have your surety set into stone.’
An offence, past impertinent, fashioned to desecrate every clean ethic he cherished! Asandir bent his head. This was no time to give way to weakness.
‘Do this on your knees!’ Prime Selidie crowed, enraptured to vindication.
But the matter at stake did not stand or fall upon the blows to his dignity. Asandir knelt. His height made the gesture convincingly awkward. The long fingers he laid flat were a workaday labourer’s, the strong, weathered knuckles strangely naked against the pale mineral. No artifice masked his humility as he begged the stone slab to grant him forgiveness. His requisite permission was asked with apology for the betrayal: that the quarried marble came from a mountain under the sovereign charge of Rathain.
Asandir braced his will. He must proceed! The past’s cruel balance had to be served, despite the unknown course of the outcome. Nothing could be raised out of ashes if he failed to shoulder the crux. Under a loyalty commandeered by the dragons, his obligations had been fixed long before the dread purpose that brought him.
The quartz vein in the marble gave to his need, fearless in generosity. Into its patient suspension, the Sorcerer spoke a phrase tuned to yielding compassion. Light flashed. Between his spread palms, the firm slab blazed red and ran suddenly molten. No heat attended the empowered change. His flesh was not seared, while substance embraced transformation.
‘Stone as my impartial witness, behold!’ intoned Asandir, hammered steady. ‘The terms of the Fellowship’s stay of execution for Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn are withdrawn. Crown debt to Rathain, sworn at Athir, is confirmed. Koriathain are freed to determine his Grace’s fate, henceforward.’ The Sorcerer flipped back his right sleeve and bared a silver bracelet incised with runes. Deftly, he rolled the metal across the cherry red magma.
A swipe of his hand quelled the rouge glow. When he straightened, the paved floor underfoot subsided to its former polish: except the impressed string of ciphers remained as irrefutable proof of his vow.
‘I stand on my word,’ declared Asandir. ‘The hour is yours for the reckoning.’
Prime Selidie’s venomous gesture acknowledged the challenge that thwarted her passionate drive to claim unlicensed autonomy for Koriathain on Athera. Denied yet again, she would wreak the full score of havoc in retaliation and deny the Sorcerers their sole hope of requital.
‘Bring me the closed coffer!’ she commanded the enchantress in silent service behind her state chair. While the summoned Senior came forward, obedient, and proffered the requested item, the Prime’s icy study of Asandir’s face never wavered. ‘Open the lock.’
Inside, darkened to black by the sigil fashioned to end life, rested a prepared crystal. The artifact radiated a halo of dire cold. Unfazed by its unpleasant proximity, Selidie directed her female attendant to remove her embroidered mitts and place the enabled jewel into the crippled stubs of her hands.
‘Now, bring the filled basin,’ she ordered, though usually others performed her brute work to spare the fumbling embarrassment of her deformity. ‘I shall align the spell of fatality myself.’
Asandir looked on, eyes open, unbending, although the practice enacted before him wrenched horror and sickness down to his viscera. He held on, lips sealed against outcry, as Arithon’s imprint was taken from a dried blood-stain, soaked out of a ripped scrap of cloth. The same shirt, torn off on the ruinous hour the prince had been run down and captured, now framed the foul means to target him as the Prime’s victim.
By force of character, Asandir did not flinch though all could be lost! The moment brought agony as Selidie dropped the crystal with its lethal directive into the turbid solution swirled in the glass bowl…
* * *
Far to the west, in the garden of the ruined earl’s palace where the shards of another crystal had lately been buried, a black ring of energy darkened the ground. The blight spread like ink, rippling outward, then stopped, contained by the hands of a hooded crone. She who still waited in steadfast vigil spoke no word of incantation. Shrouded in nothing else but fast silence, she let the blood heritage in her own veins intercept the vile binding, then absorb the spell’s lethal directive. The hideous taint crawled up her arms. Its vicious passage blackened her flesh, then razed skin and muscle to instant corruption. Stripped to a cadaverous horror, she toppled into a grisly heap as the final breath left her lungs. Shortly, naught but a tangle of bones lay wrapped in the rags of singed clothing. Above her grotesquely murdered remains, the violent release of her spirit stirred autumn brush and rattled the frost-brittle grasses…
Within the grand hall at Whitehold, the basin exploded. Water whined into a cloud of white steam, and the spent crystal crumbled to powder. At Prime Selidie’s shriek, her slavish attendant beat showered sparks from her hair and rich gown. The Fellowship Sorcerer observed her distress, impassive, his fierce eyes relieved.
‘What have you done?’ the Prime Matriarch shouted.
But, of course, upright upon bonded stone, Asandir had not lifted a finger: at his shoulder, wrapped in ephemeral spirit light, came the ghost of the departed crone. Gravely direct, his heart saddened, the Sorcerer bowed to the flame of her transient shade. ‘Have I your leave, Teylia?’ he asked, gently reverent. ‘Your remains properly should be returned to be blessed by the Biedar tribe in Sanpashir.’
The crone’s discorporate imprint smiled, fleeting, but like her wayward, importunate mother, without any shred of regret. ‘Kingmaker,’ she answered, ‘look after your own. My birth purpose has been accomplished.’
She faded then, fully, her subtle light snuffed like a candle.
Through the chill vacancy left by her passage, the gathered sisters exchanged whispers sharpened by uneasy fear and suspicion. Prime Selidie glared above them, her soaked finery dusted with chipped quartz and glass, her volatile rage beyond perilous. ‘We demanded custody of the child to vouchsafe your Fellowship’s intent,’ she accosted the Sorcerer. ‘What did you plant by your endless deceit but a serpent into our mid
st?’
Asandir sighed. ‘Your accusation carries no substance. Or did you brush off Sethvir’s statement when you struck your vile contract and demanded a hostage of us, back at Althain Tower? Our Fellowship has never endorsed, or permitted, the parting of child and mother! Teylia chose to dedicate to your order. She declared her destiny with her first words, long before that unkind fate was asked of her.’
‘As an infant, under three years of age?’ The Prime Matriarch rammed straight, seethed to outrage, while her coterie of Seniors drew hissed breaths of stark disbelief.
The Sorcerer answered with unabashed sorrow. ‘Don’t play your line of indignant ignorance. Teylia was no commonplace child! What arts she possessed sprang direct from her birthright. Admit the straight evidence in your own records! I assure you, her advanced age was no fluke, and her fate, without ties of our Fellowship’s making.’
‘Spin me another false tale!’ snapped the Prime. ‘The woman was gifted by a precocious lineage and stubbornly wayward as well! You foisted her on us. Gave us bad blood, foreknowing such headstrong stock would never submit to our discipline! Honestly, tell me she would have suited your purpose as a candidate heir for Rathain!’
Asandir looked up at the dais, his steely glance harsh but not with pride or vindication. ‘The body begotten amid the raised mysteries on that signal moment at Athir was Arithon and Glendien’s, delivered by natural birth. But the spirit was purely of the old Biedar ancestry. Under the auspices of an ancient rite, Teylia’s incarnate destiny was claimed by the tribal matriarch on the hour of her conception. Your sisterhood embraced that enemy’s legacy at your own peril!’
But the bitter-sweet victory of today’s ordained sacrifice never would console the deep ache of the Sorcerer’s grief – for a small girl consigned, life to death, on cruel terms to an ignoble service: a child conceived in rare joy, brought into the world with prodigious talent, and sprung from an ancestry too mighty to tame. Asandir pressed onwards, left empty-handed, except to honour her steadfast achievement.
‘I clearly warned your machinations would fail,’ he told the Prime enthroned on her dais. ‘So did Althain’s Warden advise you with caution. Pretend you did not heed our words at the start, and I will have Sethvir recall the event, bonded under a sealed oath of truth.’
Prime Selidie fumed in her spoiled state robes. ‘This will not end here! Our lawful rights have become stymied by premeditated manipulation. I demand my due forfeit. By your oath of crown debt, grant me the access you owe to my order! Give over the key to Prince Arithon’s true Name.’
Now Asandir smiled. He gazed down at his feet, planted atop the runes just etched into the slab of cold marble. ‘My dear, I am sorry. You have no grounds at all. I stand on my oath of noninterference, as witnessed by impartial mineral.’
Entrapped as the spider in her own web, Prime Selidie lifted her mangled hands for her diligent attendant to slip into mitts. ‘Your Fellowship cannot side-step this obligation! I will take satisfaction. How dare you presume to forget? The Teir’s’Ffalenn is still my kept prisoner, and through him, you shall suffer undying regret.’
‘Perhaps,’ Asandir allowed with dry irony.
He understood the unmalleable stakes. Upon his departure, the Prime would invoke the fury of her obsession. For hours, or days, she would seek Arithon’s demise through an invocation aligned to his auric pattern. She would try and fail. For the personal imprint no longer existed, as sworn by the Mad Prophet long ago on the night sands at Athir. Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had been stripped of that memory, along with his greater identity. Nor was the prince still confined by the Prime’s power, not since the Biedar crone’s secretive working at dawn smashed the crystal that constrained his consciousness.
By the earth-linked assurance, sped to Asandir on a thought from the Warden at Althain Tower, the man the Koriani Prime Matriarch would cry down for murder had just crawled, anonymous, under a tarp in a crofter’s rattletrap oxcart. Precariously hidden from hostile eyes, he lay curled in oblivious sleep. As yet, no one realized he was there.
Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn was safe, for this moment. Until greater peril should stalk his location and fashion the ambush to snare him, the refugee slipped from the Prime Matriarch’s clutches did not recall his own name. More, he had lost a daughter he had never known, or been told that his love had bequeathed to existence.
The Sorcerer bled with inward sorrow for that; and for the unparalleled courage that had sealed Teylia’s silence through two hundred and forty-nine years of agonized secrecy. Rivers of tears should have fallen to acknowledge her selfless memory. No consolation might salve such a loss. Grieving, and saved beyond recompense by her monumental achievement, the Sorcerer tendered his final word to Selidie Prime. ‘You will not threaten anyone further, today, madam! Above any faithless action of ours, your debt of constraint against Rathain’s crown for now has been summarily thwarted.’
Autumn 5922
Tidings
The enchantress already knew, aware even before the visitation sent by Althain’s Warden brought news. From extreme isolation, immersed in a healer’s work from an old ice-cutter’s hut shadowed under the aquamarine wall of the Storlain glaciers, she had sensed the profound change on the moment when shock stopped her breath in the pre-dawn chill. Her satchel of simples slipped out of her hand. All her rare herbals and specialized instruments tumbled down an alpine cliff, lost amid puffed explosions of powdery snow.
She had not paused to swear. Had scarcely cared, that her follow-up check on the trapper’s wife’s recent childbirth would be set back by the inconvenience.
Hours later, in daylight, after the long hike round the ridge to access the base of the vertical drop, she wept yet, whiplashed between unbridled release and bouts of joyous laughter. Gratitude overwhelmed her last grip on decorum. Never mind that her russet braid had torn loose. Or that her last pair of gloves became frayed to soaked holes at the finger-tips. She was heedlessly burrowing through rumpled drifts in search of her misplaced belongings when the shade of the Sorcerer tickled her presence.
A power to turn the world’s course in his own right, he slipped in softly, a breath of deeper cold against the sharp chill of high altitude.
‘He’s set free!’ the enchantress was first to declare, overcome once again. Arithon. She could not speak his name for the tears that spilled through another fierce smile of wonderment. The miracle rocked her, that she had endured: decades, then centuries, heart braced to withstand season upon season of unreconciled anguish. The onslaughts survived under crushing despair, when dreaming into the horrors he fought, she wakened each night bathed in terrified sweat, gasping for mercy from every bright power that she might live to see the impossible.
A Sorcerer come hard at the heels of reprieve triggered her most fearful question. ‘Whose help lent his Grace the chance to escape?’
A deep voice, wrought of wind, framed the Sorcerer’s reply. ‘The double-blind scheme was the careful work of the Biedar tribe of Sanpashir.’ Which was no lie, except by omission. If the enchantress sensed the gravity of the particulars that weighted the statement, she was wise enough not to broach the dangerous inquiry. ‘The tribe’s eldest wise woman and her male dreamers invoked the world’s greater mysteries,’ the Fellowship emissary to Elaira hastened to qualify. ‘Their reach extended across the veil and split time to achieve this triumph on Prince Arithon’s behalf.’
‘My Matriarch knows this,’ Elaira mused, quick to wield her trained intuition as circumspect caution required. She straightened up, turned, a slender woman with misted grey eyes, but courageous past measure to face the discorporate being sent as the Fellowship’s harbinger.
He stood, an illusion less solid than air, displayed before her as a dapper personage with tanned skin, and dark hair streaked white at his craggy temples. His extravagant dress was embroidered with lace, jaunty accents of emerald studs and silk ribbon agleam against elegant velvet. Orange satin cuffs set off his clever hands, expressiv
e as his narrow, fox features and clipped spade-point beard: which aspects perfectly mirrored his rapacious preference for edged conversation.
‘Kharadmon,’ the enchantress greeted him, pleased. ‘Always, the suave touch. This isn’t an ambush?’
‘Since Sethvir doesn’t favour the vogue for snared hostages, no.’ The image of the Sorcerer bowed, ever delighted to flights of dry irony by her tart wit. Their last meeting, of course, had been brusquely uncivil, her reproach the piquant reminder that once he had broached her close-warded cottage and disturbed her sleep while in her bed.
Today’s underhand tactic of announcing himself from behind was also deliberate though not a discourtesy. His amused glance directed her attention downwards, where a zephyr winnowed the snow at his feet and exposed the strap of her buried satchel. His own flagrant flourish: a long-stemmed red rose, too fresh to seem real, pierced the pristine drift alongside. ‘I’m not always ungallant. Or demanding. Or rude.’
‘Intrusive,’ Elaira corrected, and laughed. Flushed, she bent and accepted the bloom, her uncovered remedies left until later. ‘Should I also thank your Fellowship for a scandalous hand in the prisoner’s release?’ Her cross-grained concern was not overlooked, however she strove to stay circumspect.
‘We broke none of our covenant!’ Kharadmon snapped. ‘Would that we had, and years earlier!’
No need to expound upon his sudden rage: on-going for millennia, the sparring enmity between Fellowship Sorcerers and Koriani Matriarchs. A foregone conclusion, that the long, vicious pitch of the order’s rivalry must entangle the pawn just wrested away from the covetous Prime’s close control.
‘You can protect him?’ Elaira pressed gently.
Kharadmon dissolved into a self-contained whirlwind that whipped up a cyclone of ice-crystals. ‘Asandir was forced to swear! He laid down an oath by the witness of stone, of Fellowship noninterference. Damn your Prime’s machinations to Sithaer! The terms that completed her claim of debt towards the Crown of Rathain have extracted that ruthless stay!’