“Bow to the pressure, or else stand up and slaughter a starry-eyed horde of fanatics?” Arithon rejected equivocation. “No. My refusal to Asandir stays in force.”
Cosach bristled. “My office could declare you unfit!”
“Disown me?” quipped Arithon in fierce delight. “A pity I’m still the last of my lineage.” Maddening as the gad-fly, he stung, “An accursed thorn in the craw since you’re here, trusty steel at the ready! Or why haven’t the Seven bestirred themselves to snatch my infant ward from the insular bosom of Ettinmere settlement?”
Tarens roared first. “Don’t take the bait, Cosach! Your liege snaps worst when he’s pinned by his short hairs. Always, his viciousness is a bluff to defend his bare-arsed embarrassment.” Then, quick as balm on a wound, he addressed Arithon’s anguish point-blank. “Creative invention did not fall short! They all survived, the women and children you spared from the True Sect’s execution by fire at Torwent. I accompanied the dispossessed to Fiaduwynne, and saw them to safety under their High King’s protection.”
Arithon glanced away, not quite fast enough, as he wrestled emotion to find speech for Tarens. “You had earned my regard far and long before this.” But the stiff reproach was capitulation. Fist to heart, Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince acknowledged his caithdein at last though not yet by a formal acceptance of fealty. “Given your effort to find me, Lord Cosach, the courtesy’s owed. I am listening.”
There, hard-won truce met strategic disaster: a dislodged rock clattered down the cliff as another arrival, masked by furtive spellcraft, scaled the ridge-top behind Arithon’s back.
The outflanked prince did not spin to denounce the latest unwelcome intrusion. Fixated on Cosach instead, Arithon caught the brazen lack of surprise, contrasted by Tarens’s spontaneous gasp at the appearance of his rear-guard stalker.
The Mad Prophet had taken desperate steps: razed his unkempt frizzle of hair and beard, the fish-belly hue of his crudely shorn skin nicked everywhere with oozing scabs. Exposed beyond quarter, his shrinking advance trod a pitfall scaffolded with egg-shells.
But the thunder-clap of Arithon’s recognition did not break the electrified stillness. His caustic temperament failed to explode into damnably just accusations, but leap-frogged courtesy without a peripheral glance. “You would be the spellbinder who crafted the wardings to foil the Ettinmere shamans?”
Dakar shuffled his feet. “The working is mine.” Sweating through jellied nerves, denied sighted acknowledgement, he admitted, “We all carry a talisman. Need I broach the necessity? We have you surrounded to veil this encounter from a more perilous adversary. You must be aware. Your doings draw fatal attention from worse than Ettinmere’s watchers.”
“By all means, let’s not forget the Koriathain.” Arithon’s front-facing expression stayed bland, without nuance to sort true equanimity from the subtle poison of satire. “I’m meant to trust your honeyed promise of a full restoration of memory? Then let’s have surety. Deliver the name of the woman whose love sold me out to the sisterhood.”
Dakar choked, his moon-calf features drained white. “I can’t.” Suicidally terrified, nonetheless he sealed his courageous refusal. “To tell you would overturn your given word. And break the secrecy of a sacred covenant, once sworn between the two of you.”
Whatever Arithon expected to hear, that smashed his impervious poise.
Tarens thrust forward and quashed Cosach’s bid to wring the upset for advantage. “Your Grace, if you daren’t rely upon anyone else, you might lean on the one friend you know, verified by the sterling assurance of High Earl Jieret’s intentions.”
A straw-hope appeal, as sanguinity broke to the gut punch of horror. Arithon spun at last and beheld the fat spellbinder: whose traitorous countenance mirrored the moment’s shared desolation of grief. No grace salved the aghast remembrance of sedition, inflicted under the pitiless sun of yet another spring morning …
… when, in the saffron light of new day, the Mad Prophet and the Crown Prince of Rathain had stepped off the grand pattern of the Paravian focus at Caith-al-Caen, still tipsy with vertigo from the after-shock of an arcane transfer. Arithon, laughing, had snapped off a lewd joke, incandescent with joy at the prospect of playing to celebrate Jeynsa’s wedding to Sevrand s’Brydion.
Bald and self-effacing, Eriegal came forward to meet them, not in welcome, but with the bile of childhood losses crystallized into furious vengeance. The Companion had brought at his back a circle of twelve Koriathain, joined by the Prime Matriarch’s hostile directive. Their laid spells to trap the Teir’s’Ffalenn alive closed in at shocking strength.
Arithon unsheathed the black sword, Alithiel. Yet the might of a just cause abandoned him. No exalted chord sounded in his defence. The blade’s arcane wardings remained latent as he shouted in anguish to Dakar, “Step back! Escape is still possible if you re-energize the Paravian focus at once!” For where a Masterbard’s artistry might raise the lane force to pitch through the slow, artful resonance of music, the Fellowship spellbinder held the immediate keys the Sorcerers used to fire the power to peak.
Yet Dakar did nothing. By demand of the senior Koriathain, instead, he gave over to Prime Selidie’s use the Prince of Rathain’s free grant of permission, once entrusted to him for intervention under direst need.
“Why?” Arithon shouted, slammed to his knees in a hopelessly undermined fight. “Why, Dakar?” he pleaded, betrayed into captivity without explanation as the spellbinder wrested out of his hands Elshian’s lyranthe, then the heirloom Paravian sword with its star-spell inexplicably silent. Rathain’s crown prince fell into darkness, undone by the secret, back-handed bargain that sealed an arch-enemy’s claim on his person …
Across two yards of air, too portly to run, and hedged right and left by a thousand-span drop-off, Dakar regarded the friend he had condemned to bear a fate beyond imagining. His lips had stayed sealed, then. The more bitterly guarded, here, while against good faith and justice, he withheld two critical confidences from Arithon’s knowledge. One, the name of the beloved enchantress handfast as Princess of Rathain; and the other, that Cosach as caithdein must never find means to expose: of the intractable crisis at Athir two and a half centuries’ past, when at the crux, Dakar had sworn an oath of debt against Rathain’s crown under Fellowship auspice to salvage Prince Arithon’s life. Not even Elaira knew of the girl-child born to Glendien at Althain Tower, then taken hostage by Prime Selidie in the desperate bargain struck in the aftermath: when Kharadmon had unleashed the free wraiths from the star wards to leverage the historic stay on the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s execution.
Dakar bit his tongue until the blood ran.
He suffered the whipping-post fury in silence, while Arithon accused with the venomous scald of his aghast recognition, “You are poison in the vein, more cruel than back-stabbing steel, and a living blight on my spirit. Your friends are not mine! Tell them to leave until we are finished.”
Whether Arithon’s surge forward meant harm, or if he only moved to demand an honest accounting, Cosach reacted first. His deft blow to the nape, from behind, felled the Teir’s’Ffalenn in a senseless sprawl on the barren stone.
“Tarens, stand down!” Dakar shouted, appalled. “Don’t make this travesty any worse.”
Stopped short by the point of the caithdein’s sword at his breast, the blond crofter curbed his outrage a hairbreadth from bloodshed and tragedy. When he managed words, his fury was Jieret’s. “That I have lived to witness the day a crown prince was laid low by the hand of a Teir’s’Valerient! Cosach! As Shadow behind the Throne, you’re forsworn. His Grace was owed your steadfast protection, even as all others failed him.”
“On the contrary, this hour’s work is well done,” the High Earl rebutted. “Yon weasel-faced spellbinder has finally clarified my grasp of the realm’s priorities. He’ll confirm the necessity. Now that Arithon’s alienated in Havish, the Fellowship Sorcerers are freed for the task of upholding Rathain’s defence.”
br /> Spring 5924
Partings
Wakened to a sore head and the after-taste of another betrayal, Arithon discovers Dakar’s cryptic note, folded around select fragments of mineral and left tucked into his sleeve: “You have sufficient observant knowledge of wards to fashion yourself a clean talisman. For integrity’s sake, Tarens acted alone, and the fullest access to your heritage lies with the desert tribes in Sanpashir …”
Though wise enough to absent himself from his liege’s wounded recovery, Tarens rejects Cosach’s choice to withdraw in support of Rathain’s protection, and instead parts company to seek summer work as a farm-hand at Backwater until autumn, when the trapping season resumes …
The senior lane watcher’s summary report to her Prime lists three movements of urgent interest: Elaira’s leave-taking from Althain Tower, east-bound for the Mathorn Mountains; The Hatchet’s order by carrier pigeon to unleash the campaign troops kennelled at Morvain and Narms; and Asandir’s haste to reach Northgate side-lined by a summons from Kharadmon …
Spring–Summer 5924
VII. Sidesteps
Elaira’s covert plan to fare east from Atainia unravelled under the shock of rapport, as Arithon’s betrayal on Thunder Ridge spiked an echo she could not suppress. The volatile flare caught her en route to Lorn on the lonely verge of the waste.
Deftly as she noosed sympathetic emotion and stabilized her composure, she could not restore the untenanted stamp of the regional flux pattern. Useless even to try to bind a glamour wide enough to mirror the natural stillness of the heath: her presence would already be marked. The graphic imprint of her response would have flagged the Sighted vigilance of the Koriathain. An informant rushed to Prime Selidie’s ear surely revealed her departure from the impregnable sanctuary of Althain Tower: news that might extend the scope of disaster well beyond beleaguered Rathain.
Panic saved nothing. The damage was done. Elaira plonked on a boulder to regroup, while the gusts whined through the desolate brush, and swallows swirled in exuberant gyres through the bowl of blue sky overhead.
Her options to salvage the mis-step were few on a route sparsely travelled. Alone, she could do little but sow a broad-scale spell of gross misdirection. Elaira engaged her connection to water as conduit, then splashed the magnified echo of her distress the full length of the northern trade-road. With luck, the sisterhood’s scryers would waste themselves, sifting for her presence among the ramshackle taverns packed with Lorn’s dour fisherfolk.
Next, she masked her close signature under wards toned to mimic lichened granite and stunted thorn. The effort drained her to exhaustion by nightfall. She slept, then turned south across country in the saffron glow of new morning. Her passage as light as a field-mouse, she crept with the rustling swoop of the breeze through the wild. While the buttercups nodded their vacuous heads, she swore in ripe language to kick Cosach senseless, then string Dakar up by his cowardly neck. No callous justification excused their denouncement of Rathain’s crown prince.
Trouble would follow, surely as storm. She knew the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s temper. He was not going to bide, suffocated by Ettinmere’s culture and the barbed poison of Vivet’s allure. No surprise, when her next cautious scrying by night failed to draw his shuttered spirit. Instead, the tension linked to his name delivered a view of the Mad Prophet, his shaved scalp rouged by fire-light as he jerked straight from his sullen slouch. “What did you say?”
A hulk picked out by the carmine gleam of the coals, Rathain’s caithdein repeated his sour remark. “That you can quit your theatrical sulk. Our timely severance surely has spared the s’Ffalenn lineage from extinction. His Grace is better off past the reach of The Hatchet’s vicious campaign.”
Dakar gaped, licked dry lips, and shivered as though Dharkaron’s Black Spear had just skewered his vitals. “Ath wept. You blind dolt! You’ve learned nothing? Your sovereign prince won’t abandon Rathain. Or you, no matter the harrowing surety that now, the Fellowship Sorcerers are bound to support the kingdom’s defence.”
Cosach shrugged to an irked creak of his sword-belt. “You claim to grasp Arithon’s measure yourself? Then do me the favour. Prove your high-handed forecast and share the bent of his unlikely plans.” Disbelief edged his contempt as he added, “Roped firmly to heel by Ettinmere’s shamans, what under sky can the little man do?”
“I don’t know!” Dakar chewed his moustache. “That’s the problem. Guessing his Grace’s next move has bedevilled me to white hair and hounded the Seven halfway to doomsday. For centuries, he’s saddled everyone with a white-knuckled crisis of management.”
As though cued, an intransigent gust raked the campfire. Cosach cursed, pelted by flurried sparks. Busy slapping out errant cinders, he failed to interpret the spellbinder’s cringing, dough pallor.
“Daelion’s mark on the hindmost!” Dakar shoved bolt upright in the hellish glare. “We’re roped by the bollocks and already flayed.”
“Kharadmon, without pleasure!” The Sorcerer’s intrusive shade forwent mercy and blasted into a stinging whirlwind of agitation, “Since your blow-hard folly saw fit to dispense with a Fellowship-sanctioned Crown Prince, you’re appointed! Charged in full to bear the responsible brunt for Rathain in his Grace’s absence.”
Dakar quaked down to his scuffed boot soles. “Ath forfend!” Jaws working like a beached fish, he yelped, “Everything?”
Kharadmon’s ire bit deep as frost. “Did you think Asandir has the resource to spare?”
Silence fell as though shrouded in grave cloth. Dakar mopped his brow. While Cosach gawped, thunderstruck, at the side-lines, the Sorcerer’s sarcastic tirade resumed.
“Everything, butty? You flatter yourself! Since I’ve no patience left to nurse-maid the incapable, another will be entrusted to guard the well-heads of the mysteries. Meanwhile, no free-wilds forest will get hacked down to fuel a True Sect invasion. You are tasked with Halwythwood’s outlying protection to the limit of your abilities.”
Dismissed like furniture, Cosach bridled. “Are trees worth more than the lives of my people?” Too outraged to heed Dakar’s frantic gesture, and blinded by two centuries of stable peace, he ploughed on, “Is Sethvir ungrateful that Rathain’s prince—”
“Ungrateful! We Seven?” Kharadmon’s whiplash rebuke froze debate. “The clan families have always shouldered the burden of their blood heritage on our sufferance! Mankind’s tenancy here is not entitled, and by Asandir’s authoritative word, your successor is already measured and marked.”
Dakar moved fast enough: kicked the clan chieftain silent, less afraid of a knife-thrust in retaliation than of watching the ruin unfolding before him.
Appeasement came too late. Kharadmon delivered his scathing retort with the speed of a wrathful kraken. “Cosach s’Valerient, his Grace of Rathain is no longer your concern.” That single phrase stripped away rank and title without space for appeal. The discorporate Sorcerer departed forthwith. The vacuum imposed by his sudden exit ripped the air and boxed ears to a thunder-clap inrush of wind.
Dakar reeled, distraught, as the disowned clan chieftain bowed his head, face shuttered in shame. No words existed to ease a proud man, dispossessed and cut off from his family. For in fact the foundation of crown obligation relied on far more than the preservation of the old-blood families in the free wilds. Cosach had never encountered a Paravian. Sheltered lifelong under the justice by which Lysaer had curbed Etarran excess, the chieftain lacked the experience to grasp the full scope of his s’Valerient heritage.
Which tragic oversight hurt all the worse, when the pealing cry through the flux served due warning that Fellowship wardings had raised the ancient defences in Halwythwood against the on-coming True Sect campaign.
Dakar railed through his teeth at the maladroit blows of Dame Fortune. “You’d think I’d have learned there’s no profit in crossing the doings of Fellowship Sorcerers.” But his recrimination floundered and died, smothered beneath Cosach’s stricken silence.
&nbs
p; Elaira shivered, too pressured to mourn the botched plight of Rathain’s rebuked retainers. Her own straits were precarious, embarked on a daunting, long journey, with every post stable and traveller’s inn crammed past capacity with Sunwheel troops. A sparrow among cats, sought by the Prime Matriarch, she walked, every step, in fraught peril. Night became her inadequate cover. She stole like the trackless imprint of moonlight past the volatile nexus at Isaer and slept lighter than the kiss of spring sun, her breaths meshed with the breeze through the budded brush. Any purposeful haste would distinguish her from the foraging animals. Fear of discovery dogged her, each moment, while her tuned mage-sense listened for threats.
Yet her heightened awareness discerned nothing beyond the marching clamour of The Hatchet’s host.
She reached the cross-roads as wary as any small prey sought after by predators. The way to Castle Point was choked with dusty columns of troops. Mounted officers in blazoned surcoats, and priests, and the white-liveried temple messengers claimed the right of way, coming and going from Erdane and Etarra. Trade caravans were displaced by gravid supply trains, toiling with commandeered crofters’ drays. A lone woman abroad in the turmoil of war watched her back. Since passage by galley across Instrell Bay increased the risk of entrapment, Elaira melted into the workaday traffic and continued southward, the long way, by land.
Weary, and itching for want of a bath, she sought news in the crowded tap-room of a public post-house. She picked a dim corner, her rapt interest in the surrounding talk obscured by a haughty dowager with two horse-faced attendants. Past her braying demands, an officer’s complaint rose over the rattle of crockery.
“… saying the campaign’s accursed with bad luck. Storms flatten the tents. Streams flood, and the fords wash out underfoot, no matter how often the priests mouth their sanctimonious prayers to the Light.”