‘What do you fear?’ she asked, soft as moonlight, and backed by a healer’s conviction.
His weathered skin drained, a shock that did nothing to blunt his ferocity. ‘You were not invited!’ Dark hair and hard stance, he still carried the stamp of his privileged origins. ‘Everywhere your accursed order appears, they bring the scourge of their hidden purposes.’
‘I have known that unpleasantness,’ Elaira agreed. Work-worn, too tired, she sensed his sharp talent beating at her innate balance. ‘I am not in regalia, or wearing white ribbons of rank. As you seem familiar with some of our ways, the lack of attire should tell you my practice is not attached to a sisterhouse.’
He was not without courtesy. A stiff word to his sergeant fetched a chair from the stern cabin, placed underneath the hung lamp. She accepted the grace. Chapped hands folded, she observed, while Sulfin Evend contained his sultry impatience before her. Such unease, wrapped in stillness, was too well controlled. The night breeze and the riffling flame rebounded off his spotless accoutrements. Confrontational, silent, he allowed her to read him, the cynical slant to his glance quite aware that her talent would plumb his aura. The exposure amused him. While this ceded the truth, that he did in fact carry an oath-bound tie to the Fellowship, the gift was not free. His rapacious alertness did not miss, in turn, that the groans of her wounded spurred her own vulnerability.
Nonetheless, she had enough brazen nerve not to volunteer information. The order’s wandering independents were a tough breed. They did not visit Hanshire. If he asked, she would cite him the reason.
But instead, Sulfin Evend waved his men back. His inquiry claimed the semblance of privacy, as much to limit the risk she posed him, through blood-letting exposure. At close quarters, Elaira grasped that, like her, he was unmanageable: the same dogged perception guided his honesty.
When he took up her thrown gauntlet at last, the sting was not pulled from his challenge. ‘I have just rid myself of three pavilions’ worth of your viciously meddling sisters.’
‘They are not my concern,’ Elaira said carefully. ‘You see here the extent of my charitable service. If meddling saves lives, then that has been my calling. The wounded and sick suffer for your delay. Some might die of neglect, while you hamper me.’
‘Charitable service? Your protestations ache my back teeth!’ Sulfin Evend bore in, ‘Don’t offend me, with caring. You’ve insinuated yourself a free passage to bring who knows what within reach of my war camp.’
Which woke rage, that his hazing implied a Prime Matriarch’s hand, plying intrigues. ‘You are here to serve Lysaer with steadfast defence, defined by a love that won’t waver?’ Shown his angry surprise, Elaira attacked. ‘Then take off the blindfold of your past resentment. Look again! My purpose and yours are not set at odds. Your distrust here harms only the innocent.’
‘But are they innocent?’ Sulfin Evend glared back, uncowed. ‘Some will be, I warrant. But all of them?’
‘The distrustful commander must see for himself?’ Elaira denounced, peeled to acid. ‘Then why not be less thorough? You could choose to get us all out of the cold. Send me packing straight off with an escort. I won’t need more than a cart for the stricken. Just leave me those few the camp’s healers don’t have the trained skill to keep on the mend.’
‘Sly vixen!’ exclaimed Sulfin Evend, amazed, while the cold-blooded strategist that never slept sized up her bold offer for tactics. ‘Maybe you’re telling me half of the truth. Shall we test your sincerity first? Since I’m versed with war injuries, your offer’s accepted if I’m left to choose. Who goes and who stays damned well ought to pose us a shockingly riveting chess match!’
Elaira measured his adamant will. Met those focused, hawk’s eyes, and gauged his amusement: he dared lure her on. Against the unknown stake she withheld, he would match ploy for ploy until he uncovered her secret.
‘Soonest started,’ she snapped, and stood for the contest, cornered at last by his stature.
The commitment he kept was too ruthlessly sure, the past grievance he held against the order’s seniors, quite likely a just call of honour. Yet that history lay above her rank to question. She would risk her oath if she tried. Therefore, she must rise to call this man’s bluff. Ride the chance, that event would not force her hand. Rather than seal her Prime’s clever entrapment, with sigils invoked to shield Arithon, Elaira played the least damaging card and bid for disarming subterfuge.
‘I would have you stay clear,’ Sulfin Evend declared, disallowing the arcane distraction that might tip the scales in her favour. He unhooked the glass lamp. Beckoned two men to cover his back, then commenced with the harrowing tour of her wounded.
Elaira held firm, torn ragged by fear. Sulfin Evend analysed all his details with adversarial intensity. Everything now relied on the others to withstand his ruthless inspection. She was Koriathain, disciplined to school the least nuance of expression and bearing. Dakar could rely on initiate practice to stay ignored as a servant. Yet the trained eye could scarcely miss Talvish’s tension, crouched beyond the remedy trunk. Or the sullen, trapped blaze of Parrien’s resentment, although he had the sense to lie back with shut eyes, feigning unconsciousness.
Sulfin Evend peeled back blankets, unreservedly thorough. He searched faces, and with unsurprising, skilled knowledge, probed the wounds beneath neatly strapped bandages. His explorative touch caused no harm. He was polite towards the hurt women, and unthreatening to the tearful child. Yet his fixated search was not going to be satisfied. Never, before he ascertained the afflicted did not harbour fugitives in prime health.
Elaira endured, despite screaming nerves. Forthright evidence must exonerate her character. As Sulfin Evend made rounds, she had to admire: his choices were just as he winnowed the superficially hurt from the dangerously infirm. For the wagon, he singled out two women with burns. Then a child with a crippling fracture. Next, a soldier whose leg threatened sepsis, and another whose chest cut progressed to filled lungs. Arithon ought to be passed as he seemed: an old man with a near-fatal gut wound. If Parrien was recognized, the dilated eye of a genuine head injury should remand him to non-partisan Koriani protection. Glendien’s talent was real enough. The claim of a sisterhood novitiate ought to shield her forest-bred origins from the persecution; and Talvish wore a Sunwheel surcoat, over gashes won fair, by the sword.
All would be well, if no one cracked under pressure, or gave way to needless stupidity.
Nonetheless, Elaira closed a damp hand on her crystal. She aligned her inner awareness, prepared, as Sulfin Evend dismissed a young girl with a crossbolt puncture. Neat on his feet, despite the heaving deck, his progress reached Arithon’s hammock. There, he took pause, his rapt focus resharpened. Something snagged his rapacious attention. The icy chill followed, as Elaira recalled Arithon mentioning that this man’s uncle, Raiett, had detected Davien’s wrought disguise during an interrogation by Kralovir necromancers. Disastrously late, she grasped Dakar’s frantic warning: a caithdein’s direct line would see everything!
Sulfin Evend possessed the gifted heritage of a teir’s’Gannley, awakened through Fellowship auspices. Intuition arisen from hand-picked descent surely might recognize the attuned binding borne by a sanctioned crown prince. Even if only subliminal awareness picked up the unconscious connection.
While Elaira looked on with stifled anxiety, Sulfin Evend peeled back the blankets. He lifted the cloth of the unmarked black cloak and perused the stained evidence of a wounding, quite real, and invasive enough to inflict the fresh onset of fever.
‘You earned someone’s vicious enmity, old man,’ he murmured, nettled by the hunch this was not just any civilian casualty. Frowning, Sulfin Evend extended his survey over the invalid’s body. Those exquisite, fine hands; the lithe bones and cat’s build; surely they woke recognition?
‘You!’ he gasped, his bitterness plain as a shout to the ear of the mage-trained.
And Elaira’s breath froze: for her shared empathy stirred to the sha
ttering sense that the disturbance roused Arithon back towards cognizance.
Talvish would not see, his vantage obscured by the blanket.
But the fogged eyes within Arithon’s falsely aged visage were open and searching for light. No doubt blind except for initiate mage-sight, he groaned and started to stir. Agony caught him short; a hissed gasp, as every razor-cut nerve exploded to ruthless sensation. Rathain’s prince languished, laid out in the hammock, and quite unable to move. Confused, convalescent, he came fully awake: alert to the furious oppressor poised over him, stunned yet by the shock of encounter.
Endangered, possibly fighting delirium, he mustered the rags of his resource. Elaira could follow by heart-tied rapport, as auric imprint let him identify his antagonist.
‘Full circle,’ Arithon managed at a frayed whisper. ‘The eldest of the Biedar foresaw this. How will you deal? I still am not your enemy, for all that I had to break my past promise to stand clear of the fight at Alestron.’
His shadow had answered to spare Feylind’s life. For that, he would ask no man’s pardon. As Talvish well knew, by the wary movement that stirred in the gloom past the remedy trunk. The wounded liegeman gathered himself to enact a foredoomed intervention. Dakar might act also, protection being forfeit, and Sulfin Evend lashed into impenetrable rage by Arithon’s presumed betrayal.
The paired guardsmen stationed on duty behind failed to notice the building danger: they had no cause to fear a wounded old man, not inside a bristling cordon at battle-strength in full arms.
‘I will not act,’ said Prince Arithon in stark calm. ‘If I’d wanted you dead, you would have gone down, blindfolded and bound in the caverns.’
If the statement pleaded a line of appeal, Sulfin Evend stayed torn. His watch-dog guardsmen sensed no alarm yet. But Koriani-trained instincts were screaming.
Elaira firmed her heated grip on the crystal tucked beneath her draped cuff. Eyes open, thought stilled, she divided awareness to access the stone’s focal matrix. The sigils required for ascendant domination were ugly, when framed for compulsion. Elaira gathered the resource, regardless. She would not watch Arithon killed out of hand, although nausea raked her in warning: the advanced awareness schooled by Ath’s adepts ran utterly counter to all imposed spells of forced mastery.
Through dizzying strain, her beloved’s wracked speech laboured on to reach Sulfin Evend. ‘You are not at risk, here! Rely on my word, if you won’t hear a friend. The enchantress will not entrain any craft to serve my self-preservation!’
Ath above! He asked her straight out to stand off. His compassion yet held out for reason. Or maybe he thought to fall back upon Dakar, whose auric fields were shut down to muddy the etheric blaze of his talent. No saving angle existed for back-up, with Sulfin Evend near losing his grip, whip-sawed by conflicted emotion.
Through frantic dread, Elaira sensed Arithon’s touch in her mind, gentle as rain in the desert. ‘Listen. Beloved, we are not alone.’
Listen to what? The pound of her heart was as thunder. Even as her wracked balance floundered, the aligned crystal held at the ready flared in the palm of her hand. Its matrix opened. A sudden surge of unleashed reassurance flooded her being and steadied her.
‘Listen,’ sent Arithon, and urgency gave her the access to knowledge she needed: that the crystal she held had been mined on Athera, its innate consciousness encompassed by Sethvir’s earth-linked awareness. The Sorcerer was entrained, back at Althain Tower. As Warden, he had sounded the crown prince’s wound through the meticulous care in her healing. Now, Sethvir’s tuned sight tracked the peril that threatened aboard Adruin’s detained galley. As Elaira’s overset faculties quieted, the Sorcerer’s sending touched through to her: ‘If there may come a time to rely on your order, this is not the moment. Hold fast.’
Elaira glanced sidewards: saw the Mad Prophet’s fist locked on Glendien’s arm to curb her rash interference. The restraint eased the shrill edge of her panic. What nuance did Fellowship prescience see? Her frantic reassessment showed nothing else. Only the certain plunge towards disaster, juggernaut swift, still unfolding.
Across the deck, Sulfin Evend’s two guards had drawn swords, now distressed as their commander pressed his savage inquiry. ‘Lysaer lies in jeopardy as long as you live! The mere fact you breathe is a threat to him.’
‘Truth,’ allowed Arithon, drained ghostly pale. ‘Though I very much doubt my death at your hand will do anything to help save him.’
Which feverish utterance, born of despair, a Biedar forecast had vigorously denied. Sulfin Evend still bore the searing remembrance. The clear force of its imprint also reached Elaira, a Sighted transference likely steered by Sethvir, as the tribal elder’s past warning bridged time like a struck flare of lightning: ‘Alone on Athera, he is the key to secure your liege’s deliverance from jeopardy.’
‘Koriathain have plotted to undermine Lysaer!’ Sulfin Evend responded in smoking rebuttal. In the cold dark, under the wind-tossed lantern, his justified fears gained dimension. ‘Here and now, I have caught their sneak hands in, again! While I saw a corpse, the stark semblance of yours, delivered to my command tent, the true sorcerer languishes here in disguise. The deadliest foe, masquerading as wounded, being ushered under the false cover of charity into the heart of my war camp!’
‘You saw –!’ gasped Arithon, while distanced, his friends watched his breath stop. Then restart, on forced need to confirm the unbearable: that Fionn Areth was dead. The sorrow, just breaking, a devastating blow his nerves could never assimilate. Not in such harsh pain, pounded to stranded wits, amidst a charged confrontation.
One critical instant, Elaira saw Arithon lose hold on the fact that he faced Lysaer’s liegeman, whose loyalty posed lethal peril. While for Sulfin Evend, the split-second silence extended too long for tenuous doubt to stay credible.
‘For there will come the dark hour. His life thread crosses the palm of your hand. The choice is yours, Seithur, whether or not to stay blinded,’ the desert elder had forewarned of this fateful meeting.
‘How long, before you planned to drive your nemesis over the edge?’ pealed the Light’s supreme officer.
‘My kin and my brother! I have raised no attack on him.’ Arithon closed the clouded eyes that veiled any humane expression of grief. He had small breath left. Only the presence to rephrase the gentle closure once used before, at Sanpashir. ‘You fight as my nightmare, Lysaer’s true caithdein. But never in life as my enemy.’
Sulfin Evend’s controlled temper broke. He had no thought for the onlooking ship’s crew; none for the by-standing wounded. No vision to spare for another wrapped form, slung in the adjacent hammock: a fighting man with his head swathed in poultices, who had listened apace with burning hatred dammed behind his shut eyes. Nary a glance acknowledged the blond soldier with the strapped right arm, crouched by the remedy trunk.
Poised over the s’Ffalenn bastard who was Spinner of Darkness, the Light’s Lord Commander unsheathed his sword, perhaps to strike, perhaps only to threaten. Perhaps, as a spirit bound under a caithdein’s oath to a Sorcerer, to test the given word of a crown prince, and ascertain whether arcane means or shadow might be turned in foul play against him. No one ever knew: for Parrien s’Brydion rolled out of his hammock, reclaimed by the berserker’s geas wrought by the Koriani Prime Matriarch.
Elaira detected the hard glimmer of spells spindled about his strapped form. She had no second to react, and no breath to cry warning, before Parrien’s hurled bulk crashed full length, and took Sulfin Evend behind the knees. While the war-captain toppled, and the two Sunwheel guardsmen lunged with bare steel to retaliate, Talvish uncoiled, threw back masking blankets, and drew the black blade of Alithiel left-handed.
Defence of the helpless unbridled the star spells.
Bright sound and dazzling light blazed aloft, dissolving the Matriarch’s ties of dark practice. The winter night rang to a chord of pure harmony that shattered the fabric of reason. Ecstatic reaction undid the armed
men. Every standing guard in the cordon was hurled off his feet. The vibration coursed through weapons and mail, stinging held steel from their grasping hands. As the Sunwheel ranks crumpled, Talvish stood tall, wrung to tears of relief, while the sword’s released power ranged outward. Soldiers and seamen and officers alike were wracked helpless, first crying, then laughing, rocked speechless by waves of wild harmony. The onslaught built, scaling octaves, until solid bone felt recast to struck glass, and flesh shuddered, lifted beyond strife by ineffable tingles of rapture.
If Alithiel’s song had been potent before, this explosive release surpassed bearing.
Already flattened, the witnesses overtaken on board the Light’s galley became whirled dizzy, then scattered witless. Prone on the deck, or dropped limp in the hold, they succumbed to euphoric unconsciousness. All, beyond the sword’s bearer, and two more: the Koriani enchantress, whose hand clasped a quartz still encompassed by Sethvir’s sent warding; and the clownish, fat prophet, whose auric fields were shut down far enough to slow the barrage.
Elaira had scarcely a moment to notice the shielding that spared her from the sword’s tonal confluence. Her hope, taking flight, became pressing necessity, sped on by word from Althain’s Warden.
‘Act now, my dear!’ Sethvir sent through the crystal. ‘Though I realize you’ll be concerned for your wounded, the tide in your favour won’t wait. Your prince and his retinue must be sailed out of harm’s way on the sloop. As a courier, the vessel’s officially scheduled. She’ll win you free course past Kalesh, where you’ll make clean escape through blue water. When Dakar gets seasick, remind him that Parrien s’Brydion knows how to navigate.’
Early Winter 5671
Star Song
While the sloop scuds in brisk winds towards the safety of open waters, Arithon lies senseless in the black weave of Davien’s cloak; and although the peal of Alithiel’s chord has restored his natural appearance and eased the healing of his dire wound, his shocked spirit has yet to recover awareness since the cry of sheathed steel, fallen silent …