Destroyed, the last shred of control he possessed: Lysaer strove to drive such innocence past the hazard of reckless endangerment. Proximity to him would see her dead, and far worse, unravel the dregs of his self-control that chose not to sully his last, tattered remnant of decency. Once, he had yielded himself to affection, only to endure heart-break great enough to demolish his principles. Never again would he divide his autonomy under the sway of feminine influence. He had cast off both women pledged to him in marriage, turned from them and denounced their memory. The Mistwraith’s fell madness blighted his future, too murderous an affliction for him to sustain.
Of all the mis-steps with power to wound him, he had lost control: nearly scorched alive the tender innocent pleading to save him. Lysaer rejected the unthinkable liability. He owned no sane means to protect Daliana or spare her from the fate that had destroyed Ellaine and Talith before her.
Lysaer fought venomous self-revulsion, too choked up for words, even had sickness not wrung him wretched.
He staggered forward, snatched the reins without touching her. Disability forced him to lean on the hack to stay upright but did not weaken his besieged defences. He clawed himself astride. Shaky and soaked in febrile sweat, he searched the gloaming for Dakar’s campsite. Though no fire burned to draw unfriendly eyes, he picked out the angular bulk of the dray, with the unhitched team tethered nearby. Lysaer turned his mount’s head in the other direction. Then he dug in his heels and set off at a break-neck gallop without a glance backwards.
Night swallowed him, sultry with the steam vented off the simmering hot springs. He did not slacken pace or guide the horse under him. Reckless, he let his mount’s keener instincts pick the path through treacherous country. Lysaer scarcely cared if he broke his neck. He drove the animal at clattering speed through the craters of hardened caldera, leaped over seams where the rills of old lava flows yawned underfoot. He coughed on the fumes belched from the mud pots, and taunted fate, where the pressurized gush of the geysers seethed in the obsidian shadows. Alone, he need not wrestle to mask the misery of total despair …
Under the ice-chip glitter of stars, her heart crushed, Daliana sank to her knees. Tears fell for the fracture she could not mend. But she did not sob aloud. Failure preferred the night’s silence since Dakar’s vindictive lecture surely would finish her. How many would come to die in the future lay out of her hands, nor might any measure of sore regret lift the gravity of tonight’s miscalculation. Done was done. She had acted as her intuition directed. No matter how dimmed the hope of Lysaer’s long-term healing, she had turned him loose with his spirit intact.
Numb to the bite of the volcanic gravel, she bore the disastrous hurt. She renounced self-pity, straightened, and rose, and gathered the reins of the gelding left to her. Unable to face the Mad Prophet just yet, she laid her wet cheek against the animal’s shoulder.
Lysaer’s cause would not be forsaken. For more than a sealed oath under Asandir’s auspices, she would search the breadth of the five kingdoms for a remedy. “Until I’ve found some way to redeem my liege, before Ath, I will not rest his case.”
“You are worth ten of him,” a dismissive voice snapped from the darkness.
Startlement whirled Daliana volte-face and dislodged the hazel twig pinned through her hair. Half-blinded, she clapped a hand to her belt-knife and braced for a defensive throw.
But the speaker’s stark stillness smothered her impulsive attack.
“Whatever you say, I promised my liege. Nothing else matters.” She drew herself up though the presence before her radiated the might of a Fellowship Sorcerer. “Kharadmon already forewarned that I pursued Lysaer’s better nature in vain.”
Her visitor strode forward. Angular and tall, he wore a belted tunic and simple hose. The lean face, brushed in starlight, was graven by absolute confidence; or else smelted by the flame of an arrogance that brooked no impertinent questioning.
Daliana regarded the dangerous creature last seen in the company of a dragon. The edge had not left him. His attention still blazed like a brand, even cloaked under nightfall.
Davien said, “I am not here to part you from your desire but to offer you means to pursue it.”
Her bitterness echoed off the naked rocks. “How? Lysaer distrusts women! Worse than that, he views affection as a fatal weakness. He won’t abide his deepest dread, that he might fall prey to his vulnerability.”
“Intimacy could bring him down, wide open to enemy leverage.” Davien capped her list, razored with irony. “The greater his love, the more fear of loss, added to the horror he can’t stand the guilt if his cursed nature drives him to murder.”
Daliana leaned on the horse, all the brazen starch shaken out of her. “The honest spirit should panic, in fact.”
The Sorcerer stepped closer. “You’re weak at the knees?” Presumptuously bold, he prised her fisted grip off the bridle reins. “My dear, let go. If the horse strays, I will summon it back for you.”
Escorted aside, nostrils filled with the sulphurous taint ingrained in his clothing, Daliana permitted the steering touch that perched her on a nearby boulder. “How can I possibly keep my sworn charge if my liege allows no one near him?”
“Ah!” Davien straightened. “Is that strictly true?”
Daliana regarded the face notched out of the deep sky above her and conceded the point. “Well, he does have his retinue.” Galled by her defeat, she raised a nervous hand, yanked out the skewed twig, and let her crimped braid tumble over her shoulder. Rewinding the hair to steady herself, and through the stick clamped in her teeth, she carried her share of a dialogue that led nowhere. “My liege will bear no one’s familiarity. He isolates himself through his station. I know he has no one he consults for wise counsel though history records that my forebear Sulfin Evend relied on the steadfast allegiance of his Lordship’s personal valet.”
“A male lackey is invisible in that regard,” Davien agreed, too complacent.
Daliana jammed the hazel shim through her tucked plait and glowered at his insolence. “Yes, I played the lance squire. But not directly for Lysaer, and only at a safe distance. The disguise worked in the crowded confusion of the True Sect’s campaign. I got by, always by feigning to be the malingering servant of somebody else!” Amid the massed host, one face more or less risked little notice, and lazy boys everywhere contrived devious ways to shirk duty.
Davien said nothing. But one booted foot tapped in impatience.
Which cue emptied her chest in bolt-struck epiphany. Daliana shoved straight so hard, the pumice against her braced seat ripped sound cloth, and her braid came unmoored from its fastening. “You couldn’t!”
“Could I not?” The Sorcerer laughed outright. “Ask Dakar. In fact, more than once, your spellbinder stymied himself against my skilled touch for concealment. Although strictly speaking, a masking spell won’t fully address your straits. Illusion can’t blindside a necromancer, or evade the trained Sight of the True Sect’s diviners.” Head cocked, Davien peered down with an intensity to drill through pretence. “How strong are you, really?”
Daliana crossed her arms over her breast, while her heart raced, and dread lanced her viscera.
Once before this, Dakar had warned, “Don’t let him cozen you,” while the ceiling of an inn cellar became ignited by drakefire over their heads.
This Sorcerer’s bargains never were wont to tread the straightforward path. Flesh and blood, breathing, he was not mortal: the air in his company still crackled, unseen, with the volatile flame of a dragon’s live dreaming.
Daliana’s question ground through her tight throat. “What moonstruck scheme are you proposing?”
Davien bent, plucked a thorn cane barehanded, and gave it a vigorous shake. Sparks flew, as though flint had struck steel, and the whisper of fallen leaves pattered his boots. He extended his offering. The stripped stem was not as it had been: a fine lacquered hairpin glistened under the starlight. “Forms can be changed.”
Dali
ana accepted the perilous gift, finger-tips tracing the refigured wood through the Sorcerer’s resumed explanation.
“You don’t behold trickery, or a disguise. The thorn has not forsaken its nature. The core substance is not shape-shifted. Only the outer surface has been remade.”
Stunned as though hurled into the abyss, Daliana dropped the polished stick.
Davien picked it up, laid it flat on the boulder. His stride kept the grace of a predator as he paced before her, still speaking. “Lysaer does not confide in his servants. However, with time, the ones who are faithful do earn a measure of trust. They handle his person. Come and go when he sleeps. How strong are you, lady? Have you the fibre to lurk in the background, watch his struggles, his failures, and even, the ghastly course of his short-falls? Could you wait, hold your tongue, keep to the shadows behind his affairs and bide without snapping? Can you live for the day that unforeseen destiny might grant you the perilous opening?”
As she measured herself, wrung by trepidation, the Sorcerer stopped before her. Features in shadow, his regard could be felt, searing as coals on her skin. “You would be alone as never before. None would know your identity. On the days you suffer in pain and despair, no one’s kindly word will support you. While you watch aggrieved, your beloved may destroy himself. His worst hour might break him. Can you survive? Is the purity of your love deep enough?”
Daliana swallowed. “Didn’t Dakar just warn that my decision to let him go would murder untold thousands of innocents?”
The Sorcerer regarded her, bleak. “But you were not blind to the danger inherent in the fool’s intervention the spellbinder proposed.”
A knifing breath, snatched into seized lungs. “Then we agree? Lysaer is a good man, yes, with human flaws that have been unconscionably pressured and twisted!” Daliana swallowed again. “Somebody has to stand by his character. Else watch the last fragment of his true grace fall to wrack and ruin.” A second justification, no steadier, “Asandir sent me into the breach already aware I was overfaced. So Kharadmon informed me, too late.”
Davien’s teeth flashed, not a smile. The line of his shoulders reflected no humour but only the indomitable steel that bore the weight of two ages. “Asandir did as he must. The options he had were most likely fatal. Lady, most brave, do not miscalculate the purpose that drives the Fellowship! Mankind on Athera walks the razor’s edge. All the more as the True Sect gains sway, humanity’s long-term survival is threatened. Against that disaster, you are hope itself. Or else the frail straw cast into the breach to buy a brief margin of time. Never doubt, Daliana, we Seven are ruthless.”
She shivered. “I accepted Sulfin Evend’s oath, willing.”
In whip-crack retort, Davien’s pacing resurged. “Did you know the bad odds? The best years of your natural life could be lost!” He spun and regarded her. “I will not lie. Nothing can guarantee the victory you seek.”
Daliana took up the hairpin. Defiant courage reached up, determined, and restored her braid into a coil. “You would make me appear as a man?” Despite iron will, her hands trembled. “Would I be so, in fact?”
Davien raised his eyebrows. “Enough to pass close up scrutiny, and not as a figment for show. You would need to shave, or the lack would raise questions. More, your aura must withstand the Sighted scrutiny of even the True Sect’s most gifted diviners. To alter your signature presence that deeply means, yes, you would have to bear a measure of masculine responsiveness.”
The idea made her choke. “Then what if—”
While her blush heated scarlet, Davien chuckled. “The young women need not be a problem, I think. As you wish, I could fashion a form that makes you seem older in years.”
Daliana reeled under suffocating apprehension. “Would I even know myself?”
“You will hold your self-image, but only in Name. And only the fullness of that true identity could sunder the binding. Few but the most wise own the vision to sound your true essence. No man alive, beyond Athera’s Masterbard, or through a human love great enough to surpass the awareness of flesh and blood. I would not leave you helpless. The means to free yourself will remain under your command, always.”
Daliana skewered the braid, wound too painfully tight as gooseflesh prickled her nape. She scrubbed her hands over her face, rattled by atavistic reservations. Sensible caution knew her experience was inadequate to plumb the enigma Davien represented. His motive could not be read in the hands casually hooked at his belt, with the sparkle of citrine set in his ring a captive spark under starlight. Unable to fathom his greater purpose, and hag-ridden: since only one choice upheld Asandir’s charge, Daliana picked at the flaw in the Sorcerer’s terrifying proposition.
“How many years would I have before death? Would the effect of your glamour shorten my lifetime? Lysaer does not age as a natural man.”
Davien’s snapped fingers dismissed the concern. “This point can be redressed without consequence.” Shown disbelief, his peaked eyebrows rose. “Ah! You’d have proof? Dakar never informed you? My hand engineered the Five Centuries’ Fountain that crafted your liege’s longevity.”
Rocked by that admission, Daliana leaped to mad impulse and bargained, “Then you’ll match that advantage since I gave my heart-felt promise to Lysaer that I would never desert him.”
“With your due permission?” Davien yanked a black thread from the embroidery stitched through his cuff. The strand flickered bright as contained lightning as he knotted it into an intricate bracelet. “Lady, push back your sleeve and give me your left wrist.”
Her arm quaked, despite her hard-set resolve. The Sorcerer cradled her hand, his touch tenderly brisk as he slid his enchanted cincture over her skin. A quick movement noosed the weave firmly in place: nothing more, after all, than a frayed linen thread, except for a pattern that defied sight and sense to discern.
“Most brave,” Davien challenged, “you are quite certain?”
She dared not pause. Second thoughts would destroy her: love’s question, unanswered, would haunt her the worse if she failed to rise to this test. “Yes.” Consent melted the construct into her flesh. A wave of heat followed. Then a flush like high fever, while her ears rang through a barrage of dizziness.
Deft support rescued Daliana’s reeling balance as the firm bounds of her body seemed to dissolve.
Dimly, she realized the Sorcerer’s handling laid her down gently onto firm ground. His words echoed across a chasm of distance and chased her fall into reeling black-out, “You will waken refreshed. Spend enough time alone as you need to adjust. I will leave you with more than sufficient provisions to supply your journey from here. When you wish to restore your true form, the change back will become irreversible. Simply grip your left wrist. Repeat your birth name three times, and break the circlet as it resurfaces.”
Early Summer 5923
Pitfall
The country rose steeply beyond the pebbled moraine that lined the lake-shore of Lithmarin. Here, where a great fault-line bisected the continent, the Storlain foot-hills shattered into slopes of slab-sided rock. Stunted trees knuckled into the cracks, crabbed branches yawed over the shadowed gorges. A region riddled with bolt-holes aplenty for a hunted fugitive, including the desperate bands of deserters who fled the True Sect ranks from the warfront. A man alone set upon by such brigands survived by the sword, else, mage-gifted, slipped through the rugged vales undetected.
Such stalker’s cunning let Arithon move swiftly. He slept lightly by day. Travelled by night to elude the two-legged predators, who would cut a sleeper’s throat for his boots or be drawn by the glimmer of fire-light to steal a scrap of charred meat. Criminals under crown justice in Havish, the worst of them fled across the north range towards the backwater towns in Melhalla.
Arithon bent his solitary course due south, into the western spur of the ranges.
The desolate land climbed under his furtive steps, sap-green tangles of scrub oak replaced by black fir and interlaced balsam. Thinner air wore the perf
ume of pitch pine, lent the mineral tang of wet stone where the springs welled over the flanks of the gulches. Alert for human voices, Arithon re-entered the bounds of Havish. He climbed the baked ramparts, reared upwards into serried ridges where the snow-toothed peaks carded the summer clouds into ice-crystal wisps. Under the jagged spine of the Storlains, he sought a particular small cabin tucked into a sheltered vale. The site where the stuttering pulse of the flux lines still whispered the imprint of a woman’s presence.
With his journey’s end a short league as the crow flew, Arithon forged ahead as though drawn by a beacon. He ached to restore his memory of her, no matter how tenuous the fragment.
He crested a ridge-top lightly as wind. Breeze from the far side slapped his face like wet felt, stiffened with storm scent. He breasted the buffet, a cut silhouette punched against a wracked sky that spat lightning in actinic bursts. The descent plunged him back into pine forest that shuddered and tossed overhead. Snapped off needles smacked into his leathers. Such seasonal squall lines broke over the Storlains with tumultuous ferocity. Too far to bolt for the cabin’s dry roof, Arithon pushed to seek shelter before the deluge unleashed and stymied his subtle senses.
He could not trace her through the lane currents while the elements snarled in rampage. Better to wait than to wander astray and plunge off the brink of a gulch.
That moment, he heard a woman’s scream through the roar of the inbound gale.
Arithon altered his course toward the cry, odd though it seemed, that a Sunwheel deserter might push this far south. Few town-bred rogues owned the woodwise skills to outstrip his pace through these wilds.
Which puzzle must wait. A second cry sheared through the wind-tangled greenery. Even raised to hair-trigger alert, a mage’s tuned senses could not measure the danger he faced. Already, the storm charged the flux into tumultuous static. Arithon slipped his sheathed sword off his shoulder. Hand on the hilt, he ducked through the stunt trees. He heard a man’s grunt of exertion. Through the tossed boughs, veiled in gloom, someone’s curse guided him towards a scuffle screened by the undergrowth.