Peril's Gate

  Two hours before dawn, the temperature plunged, with the snow fine as ice-tipped powder. In the grotto by the Aiyenne, new spangles of hoarfrost etched the sandstone ledges in lacework traceries of leaded silver. Reclad in his own faintly damp shirt and the ribboned silk doublet first chosen to mingle in Jaelot, Arithon looked displaced, the nonchalant elegance of his dress at sharp odds with the predatory, lean face of the fugitive. Then he pulled on his freshly brushed jacket, laced up the leathers beaten soft by the riverside, and strapped on his boots, his small knife, and the tinder kit on its hide-and-cord strap, that he kept in remembrance of the dead trapper. No fine silk showed through as he knelt and stirred up the dying coals. He could have been overlooked as a younger clan scout, prepared to range out on a routine patrol, or to lay traps for marauding headhunters.

  Winter in Daon Ramon wore down all men alike. The diet of dried stores and lean game melted off summer’s flesh, until bone and muscle pressed through taut, windburned skin. Touched in faint outline by the ruddy glow off the embers, Arithon seemed neither clever or dangerous as he prodded the saturated clumps of tobacco spread to dry in the warmed, iron bowl of the pannikin. The natural grace of his movements lacked symmetry. Each simple task he performed became hampered by his injured hand, its bundled wrapping held cradled from harm’s way in the crook of his left elbow.

  Jieret observed the course of his halting progress, unable to sleep where he lay, curled in the restored warmth of his bearskin. A liegeman forgot at his peril that this prince had been trained to a sorcerer’s mastery.

  Memory too often forgave the sharp edges. The Crown Prince of Rathain was nothing if not a creature of shadow and subtlety. He might appear too slight for his clothing, the left hand’s clean fingers too finely bred for the sword. Yet the semblance of youthful fragility was misleading. On that day, Arithon s’Ffalenn was in fact fifty-five years of age. His black hair showed no dusting of gray. Beneath every mark of his mortal frailty ran the thread of uncanny design: his Grace had drunk from the Five Centuries’ Fountain, enspelled by Davien the Betrayer to endow an unnatural longevity. The mysteries had once opened to his power of command, until the slaughter done in defense at Tal Quorin seared out the vision that accessed his talent.

  Seventeen years had elapsed since the summons to Caithwood, when caithdein and prince had last exchanged words face-to-face. The spellbinder who had partnered the intervening absence was not here to lend counsel or valued perspective.

  Blind faith remained, for a blood-bonded loyalty flawed by the Mistwraith’s curse.

  The trust that Earl Jieret held for the man was now asked to transcend human reason and cognizance. He could not comprehend the uncanny dangers he might face. Nor would the seasoned skills he possessed afford any shred of protection. Arithon had explained with unvarnished clarity: once started, there could be no chance to turn back.

  Now, while nerve faltered, Jieret clamped his jaw hard. He thought instead of his daughter. Despite all the fire and verve of her character, she was too young for the weight of a caithdein’s inheritance. The difficult morass of this prince’s trials was no fit burden to lay on a green girl. Let Jeynsa enjoy her carefree, sweet innocence, before she must shoulder the brute course of learning that would lead her to Rathain’s stewardship.

  ‘Jieret?’ Arithon inquired gently. ‘The infused leaves are now dry enough to burn. Are you certain you want to go through with this?’

  Words came, with none of the heart’s hesitation. ‘I’m in your hands, liege.’ Earl Jieret threw off the mantling bearskin and sat up, annoyed that his effort to rest had bought nothing but disgruntled misgiving and the ranging, dull ache of stiff muscles. He linked his broad hands, stretched his shoulders until his tight joints popped in protest. Weather change coming, he noted by the twinge in the forearm that had once taken a headhunter’s arrow. He felt light-headed, hungry, but his prince had advised against having anything to eat. ‘Let’s have this thing over with.’

  ‘I’ll stand with you, each step.’ Arithon scraped the dried tobacco from the pan and packed the crushed leaves into a carved stone pipe. ‘I believe in your strength.’

  Jieret rubbed clammy palms on the thighs of his leathers. He felt no such certainty, though the rest of the items his prince had prepared seemed deceptively unprepossessing: a handful of acorns peeled apart and hollowed out; a green length of birch twig; the hoarded stub of a beeswax candle; a flake of clear mica picked from the gravel by the riverbed. Shaved bark, rolled for spills, and a handful of quartz pebbles had been gleaned from the drift-mantled countryside. A hollowed depression in the rock held a puddle of snowmelt, and beside that, a clod of black earth still spiked with hoarfrost. The deer-antler stylus Theirid used to scratch tallies had been borrowed and resharpened into an awl.

  Arithon pressed the packed pipe into Jieret’s unsteady hand. ‘Take this, sit down, and hold back for my signal. Certain ritual safeguards will need to be set before we can begin in earnest.’ He paused, expectant, while his caithdein settled near the fire pit.

  The coals had burned low. A bearding of ash damped the warmth that arose from the heated stone underneath. Jieret blotted the beading of sweat that sprang on his forehead and temples. ‘I’m sorry,’ he admitted, discomposed as Arithon’s concerned gaze read and weighed each sign of his unquiet turmoil. ‘Only a fool does not fear the unknown.’

  ‘The fine line that separates idiocy from courage.’ Arithon grasped his friend’s shoulder in sympathy. ‘I share the same doubts.’ Each safeguard he set must be done from memory, with no sighted guidance to know whether an obstruction deflected his course of intent. ‘We both must walk blind.’

  Jieret clasped the royal wrist in stark affirmation of an honesty that commanded his respect. The clean-breasted admission that hope was uncertain served to buttress his determination. He would not back down, could not so lightly abandon the lives of his war band and his Companions. Their brave stand must confront the Alliance of Light on the field. If they took the shock of Lysaer’s assault, he would risk himself first, that death not be granted the least invitation to triumph.

  ‘For Jeynsa and Feithan, I’ll see you come through this.’ Arithon turned his hand, completing the traditional grip shared between adult clansmen. ‘Not for my life’s sake would I forfeit the bonding first sworn to spare Steiven’s son at Tal Quorin.’

  The winter winds spoke through the interval while the two men sustained the wrist clasp of amity. Neither one wished to break free. The past at their backs held too much strife and bloodshed, with the future before them a landscape of thorny uncertainty. Too many hopes rode upon tonight’s stakes, and too many failures would cascade from false steps or misjudgment.

  Then Arithon said, ‘I have one wish, that we stand side by side on the hour of Jeynsa’s royal oath swearing.’

  Jieret tightened his hold, gripped by sudden, raw need. ‘Make me one promise, that after my death you honor my daughter with the same pact you gave me as a child in Strakewood.’

  ‘Ath!’ Arithon released his hold as though burned, his skin raised to a startled, bright flush. ‘She’s a woman! One day she’ll marry. If her man dislikes me, a blood oath of friendship would force closer ties than a kinship.’

  ‘Even so.’ Jieret smiled, a spiked twist to his humor. ‘She’s a vixen, sure enough, all sharp tongue and brash courage. When I’m gone, you’ll become her charge as Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince. As the girl’s father, I’d leave her in no other hands than your own. Your first pledge was given for Steiven and Dania. Let this one be done for me.’

  ‘For you, I refuse nothing.’ Hands crossed in formality at his heart, Arithon knelt, sovereign prince to sworn liegeman. ‘Take my royal oath, I’ll swear lifelong friendship with Jeynsa. Accept with the understanding my mage talent is silenced. Unless that fact changes, there can be no certainty the blood tie will be joined the same way.’

  ‘No matter.’ Throat locked by a sudden, fierce rush of emotion, Jieret coughed. ‘F
rom you, my brother, one word is enough to assure your honest intent.’ He rested content, the paralyzing weight of his apprehension lifted from his broad shoulders. ‘Do what you will. I am ready.’

  That affirmation of absolute trust made the next step most difficult to complete. Arithon broke away, green eyes too bright. He steeled his unsteady nerves. Veiled light from the embers imprinted his slight frame, swathed in crude hide and patched furs, the uninjured fingers pressed to his face, fine boned as a master’s engraving. For a struck moment, he could find no words, until the wealth of his bard’s gift ceded him lines from an ancient epic. ‘By the grace of such subjects, great kingdoms exist.’

  Then stillness became an insupportable trial; further thought weighed too grievous to bear. Resolved to grim purpose, the Master of Shadow bent to his herb stores and tipped crushed leaves of cedar on the coals. While the fragrant, white smoke coiled upward and billowed, he snatched up the birch twig and traced a ceremonial circle within the enclosed stone of the grotto. He joined the scribed line, with Jieret and himself set inside. Eyes shut, he whispered a Paravian invocation. He blew a breath to the east, stepped a quarter turn in place, then lit the candle stub to the south and set it upon the perimeter. Faced due west, he traced a rune symbol in water; northward, the same, but with earth.

  Nor was his face peaceful, or his speech unstrained as he enacted the ritual that called elemental forces to stand guard. Where once, he would have seen the fine blaze of light that affirmed each stage of his conjury, now, he performed by blind rote. The absence of response, the blank vacancy of senses that once had exulted in the layered intricacy of Ath’s creation remade each dance step of form into punishment. The tears spilled and ran; the matchless voice faltered, seared by a fire of remorse only three living spirits understood.

  Asandir had first measured the scope of the loss, six years after Tal Quorin. Dakar, as well, had shouldered the unendurable whole, on the night of grand scrying that had shaped the tactics whose failure had seen thirty thousand dead at Dier Kenton Vale. None else but Elaira, who knew Arithon’s true heart, could have foretold the bleak anguish brought on by tonight’s reenactment.

  Earl Jieret, as forced witness, shared the shocked revelation: the true price meted out for the clan lives spared from the sword in Strakewood Forest. Like the scant few before him, he watched Arithon lay flat his defenses. The focused purity of intent softened the severe s’Ffalenn features, left them exposed to a child’s stripped wonder of expectation. Then the moment of crux, when a lifetime’s honed talent launched in flight, and failed to cross through the veil. Base matter stayed obdurate. Sealed vision froze all the world’s dazzling majesty to the drab planes and angles within range of self-limited eyesight.

  Nor could the lamed spirit vised in the breach shield his bared will from the harrowing. Arithon’s vulnerable longing transformed, remade on a breath into ripping loss outside grief or tears to describe; as though light itself lost its luster to limitless darkness, or a dreamed, perfect pearl dimmed to crude gravel at the mere brush of a hand.

  Arithon drew in a tormented breath. His face, his whole posture seemed wracked out of true, as though the living heart had torn out of him, and Ath’s gift of life made his body a prison pinched out of songless clay.

  That moment, Jieret would have begged sky and earth to be anyplace else on Athera. He had seen scouts die of lacerating wounds, but not suffer such agony as this. The bitter understanding sucked him hollow with dread, that no mortal who touched the core of grand mystery could emerge from the crucible unchanged. Any subsequent break in connection left a scar which cut deeper than transient hurt to the flesh. Hard on the heels of unwanted recognition, he knew drowning fear, that he had agreed to embark on that journey without any grasp of the consequences. He had never glimpsed the irreversible sorrows, if tonight’s course of expedience succeeded, and he survived the first trial of initiation and cast his conscious awareness into the unseen realms past the veil.

  Too soon, Arithon s’Ffalenn knelt before him, his regard a set mix of flint determination and empathy, and a lit spill in his trembling hand.

  Just as racked by regret, Jieret accepted the offering. He raised the stone pipe, packed with the tobacco that had been soaked in an infusion of crushed tienelle leaves. ‘Whatever may come, keep your safe distance from the fumes as you promised!’

  Stripped to sincerity, Arithon said, ‘On that point, I won’t bend.’

  Amid myriad risks, untrained use of tienelle might prove the most unforgiving. Though spiked tobacco was too mild to be lethal, Jieret received warning: the herb’s myriad poisons would induce a withdrawal of sickness and cramping. The bystander who breathed tainted smoke could succumb. Arithon could not transmute the effects, reft as he was from his mage talent. The bard’s art he offered to guide Jieret’s progress relied on his voice, and even slight nausea would stress the control he required to sustain an exacting, true pitch. Beyond physical ills, the herb’s visionary properties would unshutter the gates of the mind. Every damaging event held in memory would break free, an unbridled reliving too virulent for conscious awareness to grapple. Under such influence, the Mistwraith’s geas might emerge in full force and smash the ties binding sanity.

  Lysaer s’Ilessid and the Alliance were too close at hand. Any such misstep would invite a swift fall to disaster.

  ‘Don’t dwell on distractions,’ Arithon cautioned. ‘They’ll only unbalance you. As you ease into trance, you don’t want to fall into the reflected morass of your fears.’ He retreated to the side of the circle by the cleft, where the influx of fresh air would sweep off the narcotic.

  Jieret settled against the support of the boulder. Flame fluttered as he lit the pipe. A curl of blue smoke stung his nostrils. Even weakened, the tienelle bit swiftly. An answering frisson shot a flash-fire reaction the length of his overstrung nerves. He whispered a final plea to Ath’s grace, that his lineage should stay safe. Then he set the stem to his lips and drew in a lungful of smoke.

  The scent overwhelmed him, acrid and keen as the cutting winds of high altitude. His thoughts jerked, and then eddied, tugged as the first, wild rush of expansion combed through the lens of his senses. His hearing exploded. The smallest sounds magnified into a whirling barrage of raw noise. Jieret gasped, flicked to vertigo, as his skin went on fire. He felt every current of breeze stroke his flesh, while the plain weight of clothing bore him down like prolonged suffocation.

  ‘Steady, hold steady,’ Arithon encouraged, his voice a cool current of calm through a lit conflagration of air.

  Jieret forced a grip on slipped courage, sucked down another breath. The smoke ripped, as it passed. His throat and his windpipe felt lye-stripped. His eyesight dissolved into rainbow sparks, while the merest sigh of the draft pummeled his eardrums like thunder.

  ‘Arithon, I feel lost.’ This experience held none of the spiraling, smooth uplift he recalled from his journey with Traithe.

  The reply came back mangled as hearing imploded. Jieret gasped, the frayed cloth of his mind sucked down and tumbled by the raced flow of blood in his veins. The sensation of the bare stone at his back raised a sleeting, bright tingle, distinct as a silver-tipped hail of needles. His awareness floundered, broken winged as a bird encased in a skull of cast lead.

  ‘Arithon, blessed Ath, I’m going to go mad.’ Jieret cringed as his note of raised terror stormed back, an onslaught of echoes that hurled him into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of chaos.

  The bard’s voice returned reassurance. ‘Take in more smoke. One more breath, maybe two, and your physical senses will stop overloading and shut down.’

  Before panic set in, that such loss would unmoor him, Arithon gently clarified. ‘You’ll still feel, still hear. But instead of responding to substance through flesh, the inner eye of the mind will begin to perceive through the range of higher vibration. The true sight of mages, Jieret, will be found as a tapestry wrought of the colors that lie beyond visible light. Don’t sink into fright.
Relax, let the tienelle raise you.’

  The stone pipe weighed like poured lead in the grip of stump fingers. Silver smoke swirled a ghost serpent’s dance on the drafts. Beyond that fascination, the deep waters beckoned, twined with the whispers of family and friends gone beyond Daelion’s Wheel.

  ‘My sister,’ Jieret whispered, drawn into the cold by the shimmering image of a girl child’s fire-seared hand. ‘Edal?’

  A note sang out of nowhere and speared him. Sound shattered the dangerous allure of the shadows and razed the dead spirits from the smoke. Snapped back to himself, Earl Jieret found the stone pipe still lit in the welded grip of his fingers. He forced the hot stem between his numbed lips. Weeping for grief and the rags of old anger, he inhaled another draft.

  Pain followed breath and set hooks in his heart. He felt upended, then dangled, hung like a gutted carcass of game on the prongs of a headhunter’s hatred. The air wore a luminous mist of red blood, alive with the faces of enemies. Seized by a lust to rend and kill, Jieret shouted. The need for a sword in his hand cut like pain, an exquisite, fine agony that promised him ecstasy, once he gutted the brute Etarrans who had slaughtered his family in their march up the banks of Tal Quorin.

  ‘Jieret!’ Arithon raised true song. His clean line of melody tore through blind rage like a clarion cry in white light. Into that breach, a stream of fast words quenched ugly memories to quiescence. ‘Beware. Before you discern mage-sight, you will perceive thoughts as form. Your own mind can spin traps and pitfalls. Don’t bow to illusion. Stay calm. Touch the earth. Stone itself will help ground and center you.’

  Jieret forced in a whistling, taxed breath. He was running vile sweat. The tienelle fumes made objects seem to startle and flash, as though form was remade into shapes of self-contained movement. His head felt cracked open. His addled perception leaped and recoiled like whiplash, too volatile for plodding reason.