Perhaps no such ties existed.
Morriel pinched colourless lips. The doubts, the error, the wearisome differences of opinion that evolved as her Senior Council argued out points of probability made a pitiable grasp of world affairs.
Stymied by circling thoughts, harassed by the hyperacute hearing inflicted by the seals to stall death, Morriel longed for the luxury of thick wool tapestries, that just for this hour, might ease the barrage of distractions. A colicky baby wailed through the voice of a house matron, scolding. In the courtyard beneath the arched casements, a boy ward chopped wood for the kitchens. A door groaned open on a lower floor to admit a chattering group of girls sent off to draw water from the well. A servant thumped through the shelves in the scullery, while the cook banged down a tin bucket to catch the wax peelings off a new wheel of cheese.
Morriel wrenched strayed attention from the disparate clamour, stitched by the winds off the bay that thrummed sullen notes through the shutters, and the clear, high peal of an officer’s horn that signalled a galley weighing anchor. Eyelids thin as blue eggshells twitched closed as she sought refuge in the calm of meditation.
The gnawing pain in her body pursued, even through the veils of iron discipline. Stillness brought no peace, but cased her thinned bones in aches that never for a second relented. Deep sleep in these hours lay beyond reach, and the frail, shallow whisper of each arrhythmic breath seemed to span the very width of eternity.
The day must inevitably come when she would fail to attain the peace of higher consciousness. Between herself and her long-sought release, at every turn of fateful event, hung the spectre of Arithon s’Ffalenn. Elaira’s love had captured his heart well enough, but had failed to win through to his bed; far better for First Senior Lirenda if the cursed prince had succumbed to plain lust.
A knock at the door snapped the threads of conjecture. The Koriani Prime roused like an unhooded falcon, blinked through a quick stab of pain, and in a scraped whisper of signal displeasure, demanded the reason for disruption.
The latch snicked up and the portal cracked to admit an oval face netted in coils of black hair. Lirenda, First Senior, did not step inside, but swept down in an arrowed mass of skirts until her forehead pressed her bent knee.
The contrast struck at odd moments, between this grown woman and a vain young initiate from a pedigree family who had begged to be taken in for training. Even humbled by desire, Lirenda had been too haughty for obeisance. Prodigious talent had burned in her like live coals, almost too wild to contain.
Blooded pride was still there, but tempered now by ambition. The driving desire to win, and the lonely heart that had prompted the girl to affect conceit now lay buttressed by ironshod discipline. Morriel pondered the change, satisfied that the precepts of mercy could be taught. Heartfelt emotion was less biddable, a fearful point of vulnerability in a candidate appointed for prime succession. Against the highest of stakes, Lirenda must be moulded to survive.
Ever testing to expose any trait that might admit loophole for failure, Morriel’s censure cut the fused moment of silence. ‘You dare much.’
Abased in the confines of the doorway, Lirenda did not flinch at the omission of her title. ‘I dare nothing. News has arrived for your ears alone.’
‘What under Ath’s sky cannot be made to wait?’ Morriel Prime contradicted. ‘If you came to say something important, let me hear.’
Lirenda’s frosty poise never wavered. ‘I beg you, reconsider. The subject is too weighty to broach without due precautions.’
Too subtle a creature to show disdain or approval, the Koriani Prime snapped fingers like dry sticks. ‘Rise, then. Admit the one who awaits in the corridor behind you as well.’
At Lirenda’s rebellious catch of breath, Morriel gave a cracked exhalation. ‘Do you think to gainsay my wishes? That’s unwise. I already know the source of your news. Another senior has travelled from Tysan to see me, yes? She was ordered to keep watch on events at Avenor. She would scarcely leave her post for a pittance.’
‘Matriarch, beldame Haltha is here,’ Lirenda admitted through a rustled hitch of skirts. ‘Shall I lay down a ward to preserve privacy?’
‘No. Fetch the news bearer. I shall attend what protections are needed myself.’ While Lirenda withdrew to obey, Morriel Prime veiled the glass image spheres in a shawl. Then she shrugged off her quilts with laborious care and stood upright.
Her lavender robes dragged at her skeletal form like the wings of an exotic moth as she opened a wall chest and drew out the silk bag that wrapped one of the order’s lesser focus jewels. Unveiled, the white quartz burned with caught light, a spike of cold flame cased in crystal. Morriel paid no heed to the movements of her underlings in the doorway. She cupped the gem’s faceted weight in palms like dead leaves, then cast her stilled thoughts into its lattice to enhance her tuned reservoir of power.
Heightened awareness flooded through her.
Brick and mortar, she sensed the framing presence of the mansion, board floors infused like ghost dreams with the tap of women’s steps and the tears of growing children and the trace glow left by past conjuries. Spent fragments of ward seals clung like grit in old plaster. Layered underneath in shadowy lacings of hallucination, Morriel could nearly detect the subliminal groan of over-stressed natural energies. More than ever as her years advanced, their febrile ring teased her consciousness, as though the grain of painted moulding and sea-damp stone walls struck and vibrated, spun into contrary currents by the strictures of time-faded sigils.
Morriel gave such fancy short shrift. To pity the heart of inanimate substance while breathing humanity still suffered was a Fellowship affectation, as ruthless to life as their bloodless, isolate meddling.
She raged alone in bitter knowledge that since the Waystone’s loss, the sorcerers perused her sisterhood’s affairs at their whim. The most potent ward at Koriani command never stopped Sethvir’s prying, or Luhaine’s lugubrious surveillance. At best, Morriel could impose a construct upon the air to lend warning of Fellowship presence. Sealed through the principles of elemental domination, every sound to occur within her chamber could be tracked and confined by scribed runes. The resonance she knotted through her crystal recorded the expanding signature of each event in a shimmer of subliminal blue light.
Should any outside power seek to bleed off a trace pattern, Morriel Prime would know at once, with First Senior Lirenda little the wiser. The old Prime had learned when pursuit of perfection could become a wasting mistake. Serpent-sly, she preferred to discover which facts the sorcerers came to monitor, then tailor her precautions to suit.
Lirenda was dedicated, but she had much to learn of the strengths to be gained through abstinence. She stood now in a simmer of prim impatience while her Prime rearranged fragile limbs in their closest approximation of comfort amid the quilts.
By contrast, the senior enchantress just in from Tysan presented herself for audience in humbled quiet, her fustian clothes still wrinkled from the road, and her seamed features chalky with weariness.
‘Your will, Matriarch,’ she murmured. Beneath the probing regard of the Koriani Prime, she sank to the floor in obeisance.
‘You have my leave to speak.’ Morriel nested her hands in her robes, her porcelain hair strained through by cold fire in the shimmer of spell-tempered air.
‘My Prime,’ the beldame opened, while the grimy hem of her skirt fluttered to her terrified trembling. ‘A decision of grave moment was given into my hands and I was forced to a choice. For an act of unconscionable independence, I throw myself on your mercy. I closed a bargain with Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid. In exchange for the secret of his half-brother’s interests at Merior, I have his witnessed assurance that the Waystone of our order was never lost.’ In rising, uncontainable excitement, she finished, ‘The jewel is whole still, and held in close care by the Fellowship sorcerers at Althain Tower.’
Morriel raised clawed fingers to stifle a warbling cry. This news was momentous, their vanishe
d grand crystal revealed at long last! Thrilled by a tingling, expansive rush of joy after tedious years of proscribed power, the Prime reached out a shaken hand and traced her seal of blessing above the prostrate senior’s hood. ‘You are forgiven your presumption. Indeed, well done!’
These tidings afforded great hope. If the stone were recovered, not only could the disarranged humours of her body be drawn back into balance until the trials of her succession were surmounted, but means might be restored to quell damaging storms and banish disease, and even to throw off the suffocating constraint imposed by the Fellowship of Seven.
In heady elation, Morriel locked eyes with her First Senior.
Lirenda’s flush in the heat of stunning news showed more than exhilarated eagerness: under her varnished layer of poise flashed a spasm of unguarded anger.
Morriel seized upon that oddity. Barbed with searching power, sped to sharp force by the spell crystal still meshed with her mind, her scrutiny lanced through the First Senior’s reserve to wrest out that sand grain of dissidence. Understanding followed like a hammer blow to rock. Lirenda’s displeasure stemmed from personal betrayal, that the Waystone’s location had been bought at a cost of endangering the royal fugitive at Merior.
Proof stung, that the prime candidate’s recurrent fascination for Arithon s’Ffalenn had indeed threaded deep enough to unbalance her grasp of affairs.
Pricked spiteful in displeasure, Morriel narrowed eyes like black pebbles and snapped an immediate order.
‘First Senior, I charge you to take the Skyron focus stone. Leave for Atainia and muster a grand circle of one hundred and eight seniors. You have one task: confront Sethvir and wrest back our Great Waystone. Fail in this, come back empty-handed, and you may consider yourself unworthy of your post.’
Expressionless as sculpted alabaster before the evident censure of her Prime, Lirenda returned a polished curtsey. Her back unbent, braided hair like chiselled jet under the flicker of spelled air, she said, ‘Your will is my pleasure. I shall not disappoint you.’
Morriel watched, arranged in brittle stillness as her appointed heir arose in fervent grace and departed.
To the elder still prostrate at her feet, the Prime cast a less jaundiced eye. ‘Put aside your fear, Haltha. Arise. You acted at great risk for an end you judged to be worth any sacrifice. Your service deserves due reward, but necessity drives me. I lay on you my request for a small, additional service.’
The beldame straightened before her mistress, head bent in submission. ‘Matriarch, I am yours to command.’
Morriel lifted an arm reduced to bone wrapped in paper-thin tissue, twitched aside her shawl, and selected an orb from the array beside the opened coffer. She set its glass weight into Haltha’s hand and said, ‘Repeat the scrying you made for Lysaer s’Ilessid, which exposed Arithon’s shipyards at Merior. Let the man whose likeness you hold be given the selfsame knowledge.’
Permitted no leave to question, the senior enchantress cupped the sphere, which held the tormented reflection of the dishonoured captain from Alestron. ‘Your will,’ she intoned.
Outside the close chamber, like a sudden, clouding omen, a child in the courtyard started wailing. Worn beyond care for any infant’s painful trials, Morriel granted the weary senior her permission to retire. Alone in the chamber as the morning’s last sunlight retreated into chill shadow, she closed her eyes to resume meditation. Her ancient heart beat unburdened by remorse for the mischief she had loosed to hound the last heir of s’Ffalenn.
Should one rancorous, whip-scarred guardsman pursue his cherished vengeance and bring the Shadow Master’s death, or if his passion for murder simply fouled s’Ffalenn machinations and caused a fatal delay for Lysaer’s war host to exploit, the difference would be moot.
Arithon dead or maimed at second hand would disentangle Lirenda from the flaw that endangered her succession to Prime power. One last detail remained.
The instant Morriel felt restored enough to resume the burdens of her office, she demanded the attendance of her errand page.
‘I have a message for the duty-watch to be sent immediately by lane current,’ she commanded. ‘Initiate Elaira is to be found and informed that my sanction for congress with the Prince of Rathain is as of this moment withdrawn.’
Indeed, against the prospect of a restored Great Way-stone, the woman’s assignation was no longer vital. Of far weightier import, First Senior Lirenda must succeed in her contest against Sethvir. Then stronger means would lie at hand to curb her ill-founded infatuation, if through brute luck, or thrice-damnable s’Ffalenn cleverness, the subject of her weakness mastered the odds against him and survived.
Sunset, Midnight and Noon
Informed on the lane surge at sundown that Morriel Prime has released her charge to seek liaison with Arithon s’Ffalenn, a bronze-haired enchantress in Merior weeps in gratitude for restored honesty, and in loss for shared love that must languish unpartnered; through the quiet, resolved hour as she packs to depart, she prays for the man, that he might stay free to refound his happiness with another …
In the deeps of the night, ripped awake by an uncanny, clear dream that tells where to find the sorcerer who had fired his duke’s armoury, a bearded blond outcast scratches old whip scars, arises, and begins a journey to Merior by the Sea to enact his sworn blood vow of vengeance …
On a rocky slope above Valleygap, on the day of his twentieth year that clan custom reckons full manhood, a red-bearded chieftain called Earl of the North bends back his black bow, sets his aim on one figure above the crews who shift rocks in hot sunlight, and lets fly an arrow inscribed with the name of the killer who brought untimely death to a father, a mother, and four sisters…
XIV. VALLEYGAP TO WERPOINT
The arrow launched. The arc of its flight was vengeance, ripping down from the heart of the sun, a hissing, humming resonance of parted air no experienced man of war could mistake.
Captain Mayor Pesquil of the northern league of head-hunters pitched himself down and sideways into cover one fatal instant too late. Before he struck ground, the four-bladed steel broadhead aimed to take him slapped into the small of his back.
He landed hard enough to slam the wind from his lungs and trip a frost-rimed hail of stones into rattling descent down the slope. Their noisy, bouncing fall through stunted brush and cracked saplings caused men to glance up from their labour with wagons and shovels amidst the boulders which jammed the road below. Pesquil snatched air to shout warning of attack, then gasped, wrung mute. A spasm clamped his muscles. He could not breathe, could not speak, but only hug the flinty soil, pain-white and clammy with weakness.
Felled in a helpless, curled bundle, his hands jammed into cold earth as if by main force he could wrest back his grip on self-command, Pesquil shuddered in the gravel. If his scouts posted on the ridge line had not seen him go down, or if the others on watch on the low ground ignored the warning set off by disturbed pebbles, they deserved to be cut down for negligence in the raid about to sweep down the defile.
Pesquil strained to hear past the hammered beat of blood in his ears. Yet no more arrows hailed down. He picked out no shouts of alarm from his carefully-posted guard of scouts.
The unbroken quiet spurred him to a rage of colossal proportion.
He had always understood the snares at Valleygap had been fashioned to take down headhunters. Now, lying agonized in the scald of his own blood, Captain Mayor Pesquil cursed with ferocity: fool that he was, he had not understood until the endplay. Jieret Red-beard had blindsided him. Pressured too hard keeping others alive, he had never once thought to imagine himself as the ultimate, targeted prey.
Ring within ring, by spring-trap and rockfall, then the suspect boredom of two quiet weeks without incident, the last ambush in these inhospitable vales had been staged to deprive Lysaer of his most effective commander.
The patrol arrived. With breathless worry, they dispatched a runner to fetch help and bring in a litter. Pesquil lay slit-eyed
and gasping, cut at each shallow breath as the sawing bite of the arrow lacerated more vital tissue. Throughout the ordeal as they raised his limp weight and arranged him face-down to be carried, he mouthed silent curses against the clan name of s’Valerient.
Twilight settled early in the pit between the hills. Pesquil became aware of a dimness thick with mildewed canvas, musty wool, and the hated, dank smell of crumbled shale that pervaded the gap’s deep ravines. The hospital reek of medicinal herbs and an uglier stink of charred flesh lifted a curl to his lips. A mauling throb in his back and the virulent sting left by cautery played over every ugly bit of trauma imposed upon his body to remove the barbarian arrow. The injury was bad. He needed no doomsaying healer to tell him.
Prone on a camp cot, hating the jelly-limbed lassitude that kept him there, Pesquil held no care at all that the coverlets cast over him were woven silk, emblazoned with the star of s’Ilessid.
The first he knew of Lysaer’s presence was a stir of movement at his bedside, inflected with a gleam of gold hair.
‘Dharkaron’s divine vengeance, Prince,’ he ground out. ‘You must have better to do.’
‘If that’s true, you’re not fit to give orders.’ Lysaer made an imperious gesture. Across the field tent, a servant shovelled out from beneath a chinking pile of horse trappings, tossed his oil rag into the lap of a hovering page, then hastened to bear his lamp to the bedside. The prince took the light, excused the man, and hung the carry ring from a chain on the ridge pole.