‘Where is Parrien s’Brydion’s renegade fleet? Fetch me an able seeress! One with natural talent. I want her to meld with the earth’s flux without using a crystal matrix. Then have her link her birth-born gifts through Lirenda’s power, directly. Move quickly!’ Selidie gestured with incandescent anticipation. ‘Find me the position of Alestron’s war galleys at once!’
Bold timing must play Parrien’s weakness into her order’s design. Selidie smiled, inwardly smug. She could fashion a warding, grounded through earth, that would shelter those ship’s companies from the effects of Arithon’s influence. Then, through more sigils, the men’s discontent could be pushed into mounting an assault on the mainland. They would strike while chaos distressed Lysaer’s troops. No s’Brydion sea-wolf would question the source of their vicious drive to attack. Steered through hell-bent desire, who among them would not snatch the chance to cut a swath through the ranks of their enemies?
Evening fell, chased in by a searing north wind, and the lowering cloud of a storm front. Snow would fall, blinding, within a few hours, a hardship that posed a back-handed blessing to any who risked crossing the battle-lines. Heavy drifts buried the tracks of all fugitives: both those who fled from the ranks of the war host, and others, braving the white-out blizzard, who chose to abandon the pent misery at Alestron.
Cloaked in unobtrusive, plain clothes, the small party sent under the charge of Sidir rowed across the north bay of the estuary, packed into an open boat. The ebbing tide sped their passage, helped on by the rising wind. Scudded eight leagues past the citadel’s watch beacons, they landed far outside of the chain that guarded the inner harbour. There, the huddle of chilled fugitives commandeered a farm-cart and rattled southward over the frozen ruts of the trade-road. Against the fast-falling dark, buffeted by whipping gusts, they unhitched the mule, reloaded the provisions in packs, and prepared to turn off the main thoroughfare.
Safety lay leagues from the site. Well past the Paravian standing stone that demarked the south bounds of Melhalla, the plain of Orvandir’s free wilds rolled, wind-raked, a dangerous, exposed passage to reach Lord Erlien’s secured encampment inside of Selkwood.
‘Your lady?’ Sidir inquired of Mearn, whose distracted concern fixed on Fianzia’s gravid condition.
‘Bearing up.’ No complaint, but the bitterly agonized regret: that his wife’s near-term pregnancy not only threatened the life of their cherished child but might fatally slow the escape, and hamper safe passage for all of them.
Sidir clapped Mearn’s shoulder with brisk encouragement. ‘Townsman! Our clans have birthed babes under hostile pursuit for more years than you’ve been alive. Trust our hardened experience.’ His new bow crossed his shoulder, a powerful statement of forest-bred prowess. He would hunt the wary, dun deer at their grazing and trap the swift hare in the hollows. ‘We won’t starve.’
Mearn protested. ‘But Fianzia –’
‘Your lady,’ snapped Sidir, ‘will ride in a litter. Jeynsa knows how to cut the green boughs and weave withies. We won’t suffer too much. This storm’s nothing worse than we’ve handled with our women, caught out on Daon Ramon Barrens.’
‘Then we rest in your hands,’ Mearn gouged back, resentful. The unpleasant odds raised his hackles. Scavenging packs of league trackers were deadly, without adding the unpredictable motivations of Alliance deserters and refugee craftsmen. Though their party had slipped past the Alliance sentries and left behind the drawn lines of the siege, soon enough, the trade-roads and the open country-side would be jammed by today’s unplanned exodus. No one might second-guess the result. Too many rough men were left foot-loose. Armed companies who had abandoned a strict discipline soon would encounter the pressures of short supply. Renegade soldiers and homeless civilians might try who knew what lawless acts out of desperation.
A wife so near term could not run, or withstand prolonged chill and privation. The grim husband was not sanguine. Mearn faced his precarious future with only two northern clan allies, Bransian’s indebted captain, and four of his most trusted retainers. Family honour protested. Too many of Alestron’s free citizens must be left at large to find their own way. That they might be guided by the odd field veteran, or seek protection with other rank-and-file men also leaving defence of the citadel scarcely settled his strident unease. ‘I feel remiss. More than my forebears would brand me a coward for leaving blood-bound obligations.’
Turned to help Fianzia down from the tail-gate, Mearn almost rammed into Sidir, who had not moved: tempered lifelong by unjust persecution, the Companion gave the ideal of s’Brydion nobility short shrift. ‘You are the living name of your family, now, and your wife’s unborn heir, the hope of your future lineage!’
Mearn stared, lips pinched shut. The shock stayed too fresh, that Sevrand had chosen to stand beside Bransian inside the beleaguered citadel.
Sidir added, emphatic, ‘Don’t think for one moment you’ve chosen wrongly, or that the lives you protect are not paramount! If you try to turn back, Ath forgive, I must stop you! Good man, I would do so, that one day your child survives to applaud my priorities.’
‘There is nothing to salvage, if your lineage dies here,’ Jeynsa stated, come up beside him. ‘You know your lady is too close to birth to endure the slow pace of group travel.’
Fianzia’s cold fingers touched Mearn’s turned cheek. This once, even her razor tongue did not upbraid his uncertainty. Words and tradition offered no comfort. Nor could the sound backing of old charter law ease the sting of exiled displacement. A clansman’s place was to guard his progeny, and a father, to attend his child’s birth and ensure a stable succession.
Neither Jeynsa nor Sidir would cave in to argument. Mearn set his teeth. Still bristling, he braced to steady his wife, who would bear the brunt in the trial to come. He must abide. Yet nobody living could salve his torn heart, or make him feel other than mortified. The rank fear persisted, that Fianzia might die under hardship in childbed. Winter would wait upon no human mercy. Their precious first-born might freeze, a corpse left to rot in an unmarked cairn.
A fierce slap on his shoulder caused him to spin, enraged for the offensive presumption.
Sidir snapped backwards and missed getting stabbed by the reflexive thrust of Mearn’s dagger. Perverse creature, the forest-bred liegeman was smiling. ‘Bide easy! We have a hard journey of fifteen leagues to reach the Paravian marker, but there, in a hidden place shored up with boulders, the clans have dug out a snug hideaway. The chamber’s kept stocked with food and necessities for scouts pressed by hot-foot pursuit. We’ll have secure shelter, I promise. But we’ve got to move before the deep snow.’
‘Southward!’ Disgruntled embarrassment stiffened Mearn’s back as he resheathed his blade. ‘What’s on the plain of Orvandir for us?’ Durn and Six Towers would not welcome his family name, now. Nor could swift flight reach the safe enclaves in Alland before Fianzia’s pending travail.
Sidir shook his head, his weathered features softened to laughter. ‘Mearn! You’ve been mewed up behind walls for too long. We are not going to Alland! Or north, to East Halla, but up-country to the reed-banks of the River Methyl. This cold snap will freeze that placid current to ice. We’ll make speed in comfort on a carved sledge. Give me a fortnight, and this mule kept sound, and your lady will lie in under Verrain’s protection, inside the fortress at Methisle.’
At which moment, when flagging hope dared to rekindle, the change none had noticed was pointed out by the garrison captain assigned to guard Sidir’s return journey to Halwythwood. ‘Your liege’s Koriani enchantress has left us,’ he said, striding in from rear-guard. ‘And no, I did not see her leave.’ As though any man might have swerved an initiate sister from her chosen course.
‘Let her go!’ Sidir stated, gruff. ‘Elaira has her own business. She knows she could have asked for my help, had she needed the hand of a friend.’ In harsh truth, Arithon’s woman remained oath-bound to her Prime. Whether she wanted solitude, or if her order’s command had
remanded her to close service, she could scarcely continue backing clan interests without raising a scalding embarrassment.
‘The minion of Selidie Prime can’t share our right to claim Fellowship sanctuary at Methisle,’ Fianzia reminded.
Resolute, Sidir hurried his small party south, while the risen north gusts nipped hard at their heels and lashed at the mule’s heavy coat. They went, touched by grief as the night fell around them, and Elaira failed to return. Sidir could not speak of his desolation, or admit that her courage and indefatigable spirit were going to be sorely missed. Duty commanded Rathain’s steadfast liegeman. If his heart cried out, and his worry chafed over Elaira’s secretive departure, his feal priorities stayed unremitting. His crown prince had given him only one charge, and no margin to risk careless failure.
Elaira hung back, a snatched pause intended to seize the precaution of scrying. Since their landing ashore, an aberrant pulse in the lane tide had flicked at her trained sensitivity. Her foreboding stayed silent: that the earth’s natural flux wore the tingling stamp of a sigil-based conjury, sure mark of the Prime Circle’s meddling. Too much lay at stake to dismiss the order’s on-going agenda. Afraid to stay ignorant, Elaira slipped off. While Sidir’s escort saw Jeynsa and Mearn’s forlorn household away, she ducked into a thicket and crouched out of sight, where the brush broke the brunt of the wind. A cup of water poured from her hip-flask now lay tucked between her wrapped hands. She closed her eyes, settled into trance, and gently engaged her deep faculties.
A moment passed, two. Already forewarned of the spell’s driving imprint, the enchantress eased towards listening focus. Breath caught, and flesh shuddered, as the horror of what she encountered snapped her probe into harrowing clarity. The Prime’s bid for ruin ignited the spark on a tinder-box primed for disaster.
While the storm closed, and the song of Alithiel spun the effortful grace for two warfaring forces to suspend their hostilities, Parrien s’Brydion and his rag-tag fleet of galleys rampaged into the estuary. Vision unveiled the raw savagery of the crews, galvanized to exact vengeance. Whipped on by Selidie’s vile design, their passion had also been warded, denied the unilateral mitigation unleashed by the Paravian sword’s active influence.
Like mad wolves, they would venture ashore before dawn. With no alert sentry to cry the alarm, their angry steel would carve a lethal course through the unaware ranks of their enemies.
Revulsion snapped Elaira’s tight concentration. Wrenched back to herself, shivering under the frigid gusts that rattled the bare twigs around her, she wept for the brutal assault on Arithon’s painstaking integrity.
Past question, if Selidie’s conjury held, and this ugly counterstroke happened unchecked, every humane effort to spare pointless bloodshed would go up in flames, and for naught.
Worse still, if Mearn discovered the unconscionable spellcraft laid against his older brother, nothing would stop him from turning around in attempt to salvage the threat to his kinsman.
Chilled and alone, Elaira claimed that task. For Arithon, and not least for Fianzia’s child, who should not bear the sorrow of growing up fatherless, she measured her dearth of options. Though her reckless choice risked the fate of a Koriani oath breaker, she shoved through the trackless wilds and made her way towards the north road. Buffeted by the hard force of the storm that whirled spindrift off the thrashed harbour, she clutched her billowing mantle about her. The boat on the strand was a useless wish. She lacked the main strength to launch the small craft, or row its deadweight through the whitecaps. She must fare by land, and grasp any means to speed her way back to the citadel.
Elaira paced herself at a determined jog, crashing through the scrub, till she reached the iced ruts of the trade-road. Under snowfall, she avoided the light spilled from the first wayside inn. The gabled structure now served as an outpost for armies. Noise spilled from a tap-room well-stocked with beer. Despite the tempting aromas of fresh bread and stew, leaked from the bustling kitchen, Elaira ignored hunger. The worsening blizzard helped blindside the sentries. A shadow half-glimpsed, she masked her woman’s form in a shameless glamour and purloined a mount from the stables. The mare was fresh and willing, with a courier’s Sunwheel seal on her saddle-cloth. Urged to reckless speed, parting the marching columns of men who forsook the Light’s service to make their way home, the creature bore Elaira unchallenged into the burning, cold dark.
Early Winter 5671
Decision
The water-drop fell through the closed vault of stone, built under the Mathorn Mountains. The splash upon impact exploded through colours: in darkness, light bloomed on black water. The spark birthed a ring-ripple, spreading an image across the spring that welled over the intricate spirals of ciphers carved into the rim.
The poised Sorcerer surveyed the vision displayed in the seclusion of his sealed haven. Davien’s chiselled features showed no expression. His dark eyes stayed fixed as stamped rivets. The gleam of the living scene under reflection flickered high lights across his stilled face, as event moved apace at the seat of s’Brydion rule, and across the snowed vales at the verge of the estuary …
Breaking dawn wrapped the headland in howling storm. Scudded snow stewed the shallows to a salt rime of slush, where the fleet of lean galleys raked in and dropped anchor off the grey shore-line. Grim men launched tenders. They packed the oar benches, and jammed, crouched in mail, on the bilge-boards, armed and seething for war. Few spoke, as the bows ploughed the spume and bucked over the breaking combers. Unseen and unheard, they leaped the thwarts and rammed through the surf. Snow silenced their landfall; muffled their concerted charge as they fell on the Light’s outer lines and attacked all that moved without warning.
The thud of whetted steel and the cries of the slaughtered blended into the scream of the gale. Blood splashed stainless snow, as clotted blades reaped unwary targets one after the next. Berserk with revenge, Parrien drove his ship’s companies to attack, unaware of the spell-wrought tangle of sigils that lashed his grief to a spree of blind massacre.
‘They’re not fighting!’ cried Vhandon, shocked by the sight of a Sunwheel sentry cut down, with no move made to unsheathe his weapon. Another man crumpled without a shocked outcry, that might have forewarned his hapless fellows. ‘Something’s not canny.’ Sickened, the steadfast field-captain reached out. His fist locked on Parrien’s gore-soaked wrist and checked his swinging blade in midstroke.
‘I swear,’ Vhandon shouted, ‘for decency’s sake, we ought to take pause and fall back. Something terrible is amiss, here!’
Parrien spat past his bared teeth and snarled, ‘Who grieved for the reaping when Keldmar was burned with the best of our field-troop?’ The bereaved brother wrenched his arm free and surged onward, protesting over his shoulder. ‘Lysaer razed our folk to dead ash in a moment. We aren’t here killing farmers. Or cutting down helpless young girls and small children, tying up straw shocks at harvest!’
That festering outrage remained too raw. Alestron’s sea-wolves would brook no restraint, now. After balked months off the blockaded coast, hungry and helplessly hobbled, the ship’s crews seized upon Parrien’s passion. Amid the blanketing blast of the gale, they chewed their relentless course through the outlying Alliance entrenchments; except for Vhandon, who stopped, shivering.
He stayed, soaked and forlorn, while the tumult swept past. Masked in white-out snowfall, cut by cruel north wind, he listened as the screams of the dying dwindled into the howling elements.
Cold of heart, he longed for release: for the clean ferocity of a winter storm, roaring wild off the deeps of the Cildein. In childhood, he recalled the whiskered patterns of frost, stitched like a crazed seamstress’s lacework across the glass of his mother’s windows. Without knowing why, Vhandon wept. Something tugged at his core: an unseen note whispered of warm, secure days, and the forgotten sweetness of family happiness; of the languid summers, spent teaching the burly s’Brydion brothers to skip stones in the brook, while the boisterous rule of Bransi
an’s father had guarded the tiered walls of the citadel. Then, no man who honed his war skills had ever imagined a future where Alestron’s proud heritage could fall into jeopardy.
Through an uprush of wistful sorrow and tears, Vhandon heard the chord that healed all killing rage, also thrumming through the howling air. Veteran campaigner, he scrubbed his wet cheeks. Lowered his ice-crusted bracer and listened, while ice-crystals pinged off his helm and snagged in his stubble of beard. He strained to discern through the hiss of whipped snow that drifted around his stained boots. The presence of such an uncanny singing had uplifted him once, before this. Recollection stayed vivid, of the moment Alithiel’s raised cry had spared the Evenstar’s crew from a fiend plague sent by Koriathain.
Vhandon shuddered, afraid. He wondered if today’s murderous madness might also dance to an outside influence. Epiphany followed that thought like a thunder-clap, that Selidie Prime would never give up her effort to bring Arithon down! Parrien’s men could be her ready tools, to offset Alithiel’s grace.
A witch’s sigil might as readily blind vengeance-bent men, as inflame a wave of wild iyats. Vhandon gasped, horrified. The slack troops who guarded the Alliance lines might be bound under Alithiel’s peace, while the Prime’s twisted plot to smash Arithon’s credibility turned them into hapless targets. Parrien’s advance would not pause for mercy. Thousands would die without voicing an outcry, or acquitting themselves in a fair fight.
Snow fell, and swirled. The savage wind battered the terrified man who kicked his mired boots free and sprinted. ‘Dharkaron’s bloody vengeance!’ Vhandon despaired.
If Parrien fell afoul of a Koriani plot, he still hacked his way forward, unaware that his grief was the Prime’s eager wedge to betray the citadel’s chance for salvation …