“Would I know?” Cosach coughed again, a sodden paroxysm that set his head reeling for lack of air. Not long now, he hoped, while he floated, adrift as a wisp in the velvet dark. Scent acquired a preternatural clarity: of deer-hide and steel, blood and sweat and exertion, threaded by the headier fragrance of meadow grass silvered with dew. Wrenched by sorrow, he remembered the night he lay with his first wife, dead these long years of childbirth in a lean winter. He had been a strapping eighteen, filled with braggadocio and a rebellious desire for a scarlet shirt. “Given a choice in this world, I’d have begged to be town-born.”
Resentment smouldered, for the harsh lifestyle that clan tradition scratched out in the wilds. His young bride, like so many, had perished in the cold, while women elsewhere enjoyed snug houses, bedecked in loomed cloth and bright silk. They went shod in slippers and raised daughters and sons with the luxuries of books and pens for their learning.
Rancour festered beneath the hard wisdom of years, and the fortunate bliss of Cosach’s second marriage to Jalienne. “I’d have the truth, from the prince who’s rejected his crown. Is the preservation of proscribed ground worth the toll in clan lives, or the toil and sacrifice needed to keep the free wilds untamed? There are days,” Cosach fumed, “when I endure my heritage by rote. In our cups, we all wonder. Is our labour to uphold the compact a high-handed check-rein to grind Mankind down and repress the advantage of progress?”
Arithon shifted. The pause of his fingers against stricken flesh suggested the terrible question not broached: that access to shelter and specialized instruments may have bought reprieve for an injury, lethal out here on the field.
“Should I die,” Cosach ranted, “for the sake of the ancient restrictions writ by Sorcerers for a moribund cause? If we hallow the land for a legend, why cling to a compact that stifles Mankind’s intellectual prowess?”
“Sethvir answered that point, once,” Rathain’s crown prince admitted. “I had challenged his grounds for a coronation with—politely, let’s say—a scathing remark on the evident tyranny of the kingdom charters.”
Cosach’s chuckle emerged as a wheeze. “Dakar’s said you’re the flaming stake in the arse of the Fellowship’s policies.”
The pause stretched, through an awkward rustle of cloth. Perhaps having shrugged in self-conscious embarrassment, Arithon qualified, seamlessly, “Althain’s Warden responded that Ath’s creation has infinite facets. He argued further, humanity’s endowment holds a raw possibility beyond the ingrained prejudice stifling the scope of our imagination. One avenue closed will open up an unlimited range of alternatives. Where reliance on mechanical industry is suppressed, creative solution must branch in other directions to compensate. The Sorcerers say Mankind’s residence on Athera has started that change. They insist, as our senses become more refined, that our destiny leads to a breakthrough of stunning invention. A Fourth Age, when our species learns, as a whole, the expansive ability to tap and harness the flux. The virgin resource springs from the free wilds, and access will open to us through an increased expression of harmonic empathy. Our future could bestow a heightened experience in cohabitation with Athera’s Paravians. The gift of that legacy to our children’s children is the shining promise behind compact law.”
“Do you believe that?” Cosach whispered, his cynical doubt punched through ringing ears and sharp vertigo.
“I have known the presence of a living Paravian,” Arithon stated with bed-rock simplicity.
Cosach hacked through his next laboured breath. “Which blessing I surely can’t stay to experience.”
From an eerie silence no longer creased by the whine of enemy bowfire, Arithon said, “Well, that does lie within my power to mend.”
Which arrogant claim slammed into the teeth of Cosach’s entrenched disaffection. “How, where the Fellowship Sorcerers themselves have failed beyond recourse?”
“We can’t waste the time on theoretical debate,” Rathain’s prince pointed out. “Permission’s required. Give me your hand and allow me the unreserved trust of an open heart.”
Cosach made his apology, aware the dimness leaching his senses was not anymore the effect of wrought shadow. “Too late. My fingers are numb.” He shivered, clutched by fear as the end overcame him.
Kindness supported him without stint. “You are not lost to the world’s beauty, yet.” Arithon’s clasp cradled his slackened fingers. “I’m with you. Let go in release.”
The act of surrender flushed Cosach’s dulled nerves with tingling warmth. As a drowning man offered a sweet gulp of air, he embraced the plunge into rapport. The transition was not seamless or impersonal. Tumbled into a buffeting turbulence, aflame with reined-in emotion, he encountered a tenderness beyond measure, vivid with the self-contained fury of Arithon’s utter helplessness: again on the desolate soil of Daon Ramon, another downed liegeman could not be saved. Cosach saw his name graven beside other giants from heroic legend, his loss the fresh entry on a bitter list to be mourned alongside Earl Jieret and Caolle.
Then the marvel of fellowship was swept away as Arithon nestled a commonplace pebble into the chieftain’s palm: and stone spoke, enlivened by the shared rapport of a sanctioned crown prince’s attunement.
A pinprick spark danced across Cosach’s innermind, igniting a flare that tightened his chest. He lost voice to protest or scream. Just shy of unbearable, the pressure burst. Failing vision shattered under a fountain-head dazzle of light.
Cosach gasped, whirled beyond the suffering of stricken flesh. He no longer noticed the bite of the lodged arrows, or felt the harsh ground, or heard the wind through the brush. Instead, he beheld a vista of meadow grass, fragrant under full sunlight. Over the downs that in living memory grew only sorrel and briar, he saw the shimmering glory of the Riathan Paravians. They came, golden horns lifted and polished coats gleaming: an ethereal presence as elusive in daylight as the silver shimmer of moonbeams. Joy seized him. Ecstasy bright as new morning uplifted him beyond all concept of mortal pain. Made witness to the unspoiled chord that sustained Ath’s creation, Cosach yearned for completion as never before. The drive to encounter the fullness of his Name amid the grand arc of eternity parched him with insatiable desire. Infinite self-awareness glimmered just within reach, a riddle’s answer no further away than a unicorn’s breath on the fingers of his outstretched hand.
Then the vision darkened like a snuffed candle.
Cosach surfaced, weeping, eyes still dazzled with light, stretched too large for a body that cased his belaboured spirit like lead. A lifetime’s aspirations had withered to ash, with earth-bound existence reduced to a cobweb that hindered his need to cast off old boundaries and soar.
Change had vaulted his human awareness too far. He no longer grieved. The outworn constraints he released lost all meaning, but for the single poignant regret that twisted his vitals.
“I never knew,” he apologized to the crown prince beside him. “I paid lip service to my s’Valerient heritage, ignorant of the terrible stakes if our clan diligence slackened. I let you down, and much worse, my people, that morning on Thunder Ridge.”
“Did your ancestors know any better?” Arithon responded without censure. “I’ve read Ciladis’s appeal for the foundation of the clan lineages. At the conclave that wrote the compact’s restraints, he said to your forebears, ‘The select individuals called forward today have the potential to procreate talent. Given they’re willing to commit their offspring, Mankind might shape a dream beyond reach of the species, born elsewhere. Ath’s grace touched this world. That gifted heritage could enrich the human race, unilaterally, provided the mysteries that forestall the spiral of entropy on Athera continue to flourish. Embrace coexistence with Athera’s Paravians, and the benefits of longer life and robust health will evolve an enhanced connection to heightened awareness. This potential would benefit more than your children. All people may inherit the chance to expand in ways unimagined.’
“You did not fail,” declared Arithon s’Ffale
nn. “The legacy Ciladis envisioned lives yet. You’ve experienced the incontrovertible proof: the Mysteries endure, and a Paravian presence still exists in seclusion. Rathain’s free wilds await their return, a restoration made possible through an unswerving trust, carried across generations.”
Cosach shuddered, chest seized as his heart-beat faltered. While flooded lungs foundered, he broached the last words left unsaid. “My liege, listen well. You placed an artifact from your past under seal in a hidden cove in the Cascain Islands.” The chieftain rammed onwards against ebbing strength. “You’ll have to locate the site by your wits, near the same place you once cached the shipwrights’ tools salvaged from the yard at Merior.”
Cosach spluttered through a gush of blood. Unable to feel the warm grasp that supported him, he finished his bequest. “My final wish! After your forgiveness, I beg the requite of your royal promise. Don’t abandon me as you were made to leave Caolle, at risk of usage by Koriathain. Don’t let me languish like Jieret, as a crippled pawn in the hands of your enemies.”
In extremis, Cosach sensed the flare of flash-point rage behind Arithon’s patience. Fading, he interpreted the sharp silence, broken by steel-clad resolve. “The Prime Matriarch won’t try extortion again, or set a bloodprice on my associates. After today, I’ll be taking the challenge onto the sisterhood’s turf.”
At the end, in regret, life ebbed too fast. Cosach crossed the veil, the illumined grace of his fleeting glimpse of Athera’s Paravians marred by a warning he never delivered: that his death in Daon Ramon surely had baited the snare meant to break Rathain’s charter and destroy the compact.
Late Summer 5924
Nexus
A trap had sprung under the night sky in the vales of Daon Ramon. Tarens awakened from vivid dreams whose grim fabric frayed to a fragment.
Somewhere an arrow had flown, drawing blood.
Yet his effort to recover the critical details slammed into vivid echoes of Arithon harried in close pursuit through the dark across the open heath. Perhaps his Grace was the stunned target of a hostile archer. Or maybe the nightmare stemmed from a phantom terror, born of the frustrated anguish endured since the emphatic severance atop Thunder Ridge. Tarens tossed, laced in sweat and haunted by formless anxiety. The glimmer of pre-dawn limned the loft’s eastern window, grey back-drop to the lumped forms on the adjacent cots, still peacefully sleeping.
The bell to roust the hired field-hands would ring shortly. Tarens flung off his snarled bed-clothes. Dressed before the pink advent of sunrise, he crept out and fetched his tools from the shed, shaken enough to try to unseat his foreboding. Contract labour tied him to Backwater until autumn. Before chasing after directionless phantoms, he exhausted his shoulders, swinging the scythe. Let work sustain him through another rootless day, until he sorted a clear-cut course of action by which to make a sound choice.
The brute effort failed. His disquiet persisted. The sense of pending danger to Arithon stabbed gooseflesh across his skin, even in the glare of full sunlight and the distraction of human company. Not the figment of stressed nerves after all but a crisis prompted by the uncanny Sight of Earl Jieret’s legacy.
Tarens dared not succumb. Not where suspect talent raised inquiry. Light-headed amid baking heat, his nose filled with the fragrance of timothy, he blotted his face on his sleeve and bent to the toil of raking the cured hay into windrows.
Noon brought him no respite. The blot of his shadow swam with incipient images, speared by the razed yellow stubble of sod. Solid earth underfoot seemed to shudder, threshed to powdered dust by distant ox-trains and the marching tramp of the Sunwheel war host. Surely activity too far away to threaten Arithon’s interests: yet the creeping suspicion continued, that some other power at large plucked the threads of connected event.
Tarens shivered. Reason insisted he need not panic. A crofter’s hire lent him the safety of anonymity. Or so he believed, when the bell clanged for the midday meal. He tossed his tool aside in the dirt. Flaxen head gleaming amid the sunburned straggle of field-hands, he joined their convivial tramp towards the open-air trestle stacked with wicker hampers.
Change visited, regardless. The aproned cook was not alone under the gaudy shade of her parasol. She broke off subdued speech with an angular, silver-haired stranger at the hireling’s approach.
Eyebrows raised, her dumpling face furrowed with sympathy, she breasted the inbound press of the hungry and clasped Tarens’s wrist. “You’re free to go straightaway—for a death in the family, I’m sorry to hear. Of course, you’re excused without obligation. Your outstanding wages have been paid in full to your kinsman.”
Kinsman? Tarens’s puzzled regard indignantly surveyed the brazen imposter. The seamed brow, gaunt nose, and cragged cheek-bones turned towards him were stern as quarried granite, set on a lean frame as imposing. The leathers on the long legs were briar-scraped, powdered with dust, and redolent of the saddle as the fellow’s brisk-strided impatience advanced.
Ice-grey, eagle eyes fixed on his objective with urgency. “Iyat-thos Tarens?”
Earl Jieret’s experience delivered the lightning-bolt recognition: come seeking him was a Fellowship Sorcerer, his demeanour as grim as disaster. The by-standing field-hands melted away. Whoever had died, the name would not concern the blood family abandoned in Erdane. Reflexive s’Valerient prerogative drove Tarens to meet the summary obligation head-on. He fell in with the Sorcerer’s ground-eating pace without pause to retrieve his belongings.
Past earshot, unspeaking, the Sorcerer surrendered the wash-leather bag with his earnings.
Tarens’s stiff reserve snapped. “Kingmaker, don’t say you’ve come because Arithon’s lost to an enemy arrow.”
Asandir declined the grace of a direct answer. Blunt bronze, his fierce profile stayed trained ahead as he proceeded onto the rutted lane. “The death that brings me is Earl Cosach s’Valerient’s, and the call for your support involves the kingdom at large.” Then, through the crunch of desiccate grass, in a clipped string of consonants, “I’ve come to beg you to travel to Halwythwood and lend your service to Rathain’s young caithdein.”
“Esfand!” Tarens blurted, surprised. “Why, when my primary loyalty’s owed to Prince Arithon? Has his Grace been wounded? Is he under pursuit?”
Asandir disregarded the impertinent questions, veered across the dirt lane, and rammed through the entangled scrub at the verge. Pressed down-slope towards the wind-break of trees at the stream bottom, he addressed his original topic. “I ask because Althain’s Warden has foreseen your significant choices: to die at your liege’s shoulder for naught. Or else to ride north at my bidding to Halwythwood and give the clans your advice as a war captain.” The Sorcerer cast his piercing rebuttal across the chasm of poisonous doubt. “By my earnest word, your suspicion’s unworthy! Our Fellowship’s influence has not stifled the clarity of your Sight.”
Tarens tripped over a hummock and swore, flustered as the Sorcerer continued apace.
“We can’t help your liege’s predicament, regardless. Aside from the Law of the Major Balance, Arithon’s fate was cast outside our purview when my oath sealed the terms of our debt to the Koriathain.”
Tarens’s aghast recoil elicited no sympathy.
“The upshot is moot,” Asandir snapped. “Whether you were informed of his Grace’s straits, or if you knew where to seek him, your help could not change his lot for the better, hounded as he is by arcane interference. He must save himself at this pass.”
Tarens seized the grim gist. “You don’t think he can.”
Asandir shrugged, fatalistic as iron. “More hangs in the balance than a crown prince’s life.” Before anguish whiplashed in rebellion, the Sorcerer qualified briskly. “I’m here because your free course of action is not resigned to futility! The Hatchet’s recent brush with Shadow in Daon Ramon has redoubled the True Sect’s armed fervour. The whole of the north will see reiving and slaughter. For the world’s deep mysteries to stay viable, Rathain’s clan blood
-lines have to survive. They won’t, without every tactical trick that Caolle taught to Earl Jieret. Your support, paired with Esfand, may serve hope for the future, where perhaps none may be salvaged.”
The plunge from sunlight into dappled shade masked Tarens’s hamstrung onslaught of grief. He could not in conscience refuse this appeal. Nor could Asandir afford to waste time with a coward’s deliberation. Ahead, ink against the shagged boughs of the oaks, a black stud awaited, saddled and bridled, and equipped with bedroll and provisions.
“Ffiathli ot sanient, dasil am’n i’cuel’ien laere?” The stallion came at the Sorcerer’s call, ears pricked through more rapid instructions in Paravian.
The horse stamped at the finish. Its noble head lifted and turned. Tarens found himself transfixed by the eerie, intelligent gaze of the creature’s ghost eye. Anguish gripped the moment the field Sorcerer surrendered the bridle reins into his hand.
Gentleness softened Asandir’s final word, which ripped away consolation. “My own mount will bear you at speed across Araethura.”
“You don’t need him, yourself?” Implied, Tarens’s earnings could purchase a hack.
“No. Where I’m bound, flesh and blood cannot follow.” Hands with prominent knuckles raised the saddle-flap and tightened the girth. “When you reach the notch at the Arwent ford, turn the horse loose. He can fend for himself. My instructions will have primed the scout relay. They’ll provide your remount and a swift escort into Halwythwood.”
Tarens accepted the leg up that flung him astride. “You realize Caolle’s hardened sensibility will insist their clan lodge house must be put to the torch?”
“Lives rely on that wise lack of sentiment.” Asandir shoved Tarens’s foot home in the stirrup and slapped his calf to set him on his way. “Do as you must and take charge! Esfand’s youth will resist uprooting the chieftains, and ruin will overtake them if they hesitate.”