By the father and mother slain on the banks of Tal Quorin, he had never imagined the day he might face the temptation to reject his oathsworn heritage. ‘Ah, Caolle,’ he gasped. ‘I never understood why you abandoned your post, until now.’
Only wind answered. Nearby, his strayed pony browsed with its reins snagged over a branch. Earl Jieret pushed to his unsteady feet. He raked up the fallen cloth of his hood, every joint in him aching.
Sore irony burned him, that he must go on, though the role his last choice had set into motion now posed an unthinkable horror. He could not turn back. Another patrol would sweep his position inside a matter of minutes. Jieret recovered his pony. He unsnarled the reins with shaking, numbed fingers, set foot in the stirrup, and mounted. A lifetime of hard training and brutal war had done nothing to harden him for the punishing crux of this moment. To gather himself and set heels to his horse required an act beyond courage.
In Daon Ramon, alone, Earl Jieret s’Valerient wrestled the shadows of blighting uncertainty. For the first time since boyhood, the demon fear gnawed him: that he might fall short as his father’s son and disgrace the name of his lineage. Too real, the chance he might fail to uphold his caithdein’s vow to safeguard the kingdom. In Rathain’s most critical hour of need, he questioned whether he lacked the fiber to master the same crisis his crown prince had faced years ago at Tal Quorin: whether he, too, could summon the will to draw steel, and kill with his mage-sight unblinded.
A league of hard riding won no foothold for peace. Earl Jieret felt as though the chill blew clear through him, where he knelt on the flint stone of a rise. Light-headed as smoke that might disperse to the wisp of a wrongly drawn breath, he tightened his left-handed grip on a shard of white quartz. The prankster gusts whipped him, starched with the forerunning hint of new snowfall. Their force slapped a reddened bloom to his cheek and wisped loosened hair from his clan braid. Rathain’s caithdein closed the inaugural spell circle against the assault of undermining uncertainty. Across the bared rock of Daon Ramon’s heartland, he enacted the rune ring Arithon had shown him in the last, darkened hours before dawn.
Jieret shivered, beyond regret for his hazardous change in decision: that his Teir’s’Ffalenn had designed his instructions under the strict presumption the work would be done at safe remove from Alliance front ranks.
Regardless of placement, the lines must stay exact. Each quadrant of the inscribed figure held meaning, lens and focus to anchor his conscious intent.
‘You’re laying down the steps of a ceremony,’ Arithon had said, his spare words chosen for clarity. ‘My grandfather spoke this truth: that symbols created in sequenced awareness align the will on three planes. Mental, emotional, physical, your actions create the templates for thought and desire to enable manifestation. For the initiate mage, the drawing of runes sets the self in accord, preparing the channel through which invoked power will flow.’
Yet mere language could not touch the indescribable beauty that bloomed at each stage of completed connection. Given sight to invoke the hidden fires of grand conjury, Jieret trembled, struck breathless as the heart of the mystery responded. The precisely scratched ciphers under his hands flared into actualized being. Their flame was not separate. Around him, stone and tree and iced snowdrift, the greater web of creation resurged to the spark of his human invention.
Jieret sensed his own impact, heard his sacred self in the chord of Ath’s unity, a Named vessel of awareness cherished in celebration by the undivided paean of whole consciousness. Truth became etched through the nerve and the bone of him. He perceived the Wheel of Fate, birth to death, as no closed hoop, but an open spiral whose expanding coils encompassed the untamed gyre of eternity.
A man exposed to the scope of such knowing must fight to keep his hand steady. Jieret blinked back his tears, all but swept away as the thundering currents of prime power conjoined through the poised axis of his being.
The spelled circle surrounding him was little more than a crude framework made for the purpose of binding and holding an illusion. Yet its geometry held the echo of the majestic, universal design. Through its interlocked quadrants, Earl Jieret glimpsed the shimmering weave of the snake that devoured its own tail. Death and rebirth married into continuous reunion, as unseen light and consciousness danced the steps which sustained living form.
Shaken afresh by the ugly need that had set such forces in motion, Jieret sealed the outer band of the construct with invocation of the Paravian rune, Alt. Moment to moment, the destructive purpose he must enact became ruinously harder to sustain.
He glanced up, apprehensive, saw the flicker of movement he expected amid the patched stands of the brush. Already the ranked lines of Alliance horsemen advanced down the cleft of the valley. Men and beasts as exalted by life as himself, whose patterns of expression were unique on the loom of Ath’s creation. The core truths disclosed by his opened mage-sight were not going to spare him the heat of the crucible.
Torn into anguish, Jieret sought solace in cherished memories of Strakewood. The care ran bone deep, for his clan’s ancestral ground with its tangled tapestry of evergreen, its fir and its vales of broad oak. He must bend with the winds of ill fortune, even as the graceful willows which knotted their gnarled roots in the riverbanks he recalled from his boyhood.
The men today’s effort must lure to their doom were whole beings who chose to embrace a dangerous ignorance. Their misled practice must never be permitted the free rein to triumph. Were the old ways to fail, Rathain’s charter would be riven. No high king’s rule would maintain the law and the balance. The forests that preserved Paravian mystery would fall to the stroke of the axe. Acres of greenwood would be shorn for the plow without blessing or regard for the weal of the sacrosanct wilds. The land’s bounty would be broken to fuel creedless towns, whose inhabitants salved their self-blinded fear through the limitless maw of their avarice.
The unveiled face of the mysteries themselves underscored the fragile thread binding the future. Paravian presence had withdrawn. Outside the eyes of the mage-trained, or the wisdom of Ath’s adepts, the high kingship’s justice alone gave protection to all living things – man, animal, insect, fish or plant – as equal parts of a whole cloth. Oathsworn for life to uphold that order, a caithdein had no choice but to act. Jieret stamped down his heartsore reluctance. For the s’Ffalenn crown prince who carried the Fellowship’s sanction; for the land he defended through selfless service, he unclenched shaking fingers and drew out the bundled silk veiling the ninth acorn, imbued with Arithon’s Named essence.
He unwrapped the string ties, well warned that he handled the seeds of impending disaster. Ripped by his need to embrace Jeynsa and his sons once again – to kiss Feithan’s lips a last time – Jieret cupped the swathed construct and began the innermost circle of ciphers that would frame the heart of the construct.
A minute flowed by. Another. Jieret invoked the requisite words of release, that changed binding into free partnership; schooled by a heritage of oral tradition, he made no mistakes as he traced the glyph that would call in the powers of the air. Hunter’s instinct prickled his nape, insistent warning of the closing proximity of his enemies. He cut off the distraction.
Whatever occurred outside the circle must not deflect him, now. His trial by fire that morning had taught him: listen too closely to subtle intuition, and mage-sight would crash down all barriers. The hilltop where he worked had been selected for its conductive resonance. If he heeded the wayward pull of his heart, he risked being swept away by the intimate, wrenching details as his war band was reaped like chaff before the might of the Alliance advance.
For each casualty fallen, the earth mourned alike. Pressed by the destruction sown on three sides, with the force under Lysaer s’Ilessid himself closing the fourth side of the square, Earl Jieret held fast. He persisted, though the lane tides tugged and swirled, the silvered flux wracked like gale-blown ribbons to the dance of men locked in violence.
More than on
ce, Sighted impressions leaked through. Each brought a vignette of tragedy. Jieret resteadied his shaking fingers. He gripped the quartz, and quashed back his wild grief, while three leagues to the west, Theirid’s band fought a bitter engagement to win opportunity for a scant handful of scouts to slip through. Men who would scatter and lose themselves in the trackless barrens, then fight afresh for survival amid the relentless winter elements.
Jaw clamped in stark effort, Earl Jieret focused his scattered attention. He unslung his bow. From his quiver, he drew out a wrapped arrow whose point had been consecrated for revenge. Though his taste for such violence had soured beyond recourse, he freed the black shaft from its deerhide covering. Time had not warped the walnut-stained wood. The razor-steel point retained its keen edge, and its message, engraved and sealed with his own blood.
Son of Steiven s’Valerient and Dania, he had a personal debt to repay, a grim score left unsettled since Deshir’s wives and children had been violated, their massacred bodies broken and burned beside Tal Quorin over three decades past. Jieret rested the arrow across his bent knees, then mustered the brute will to survey the landscape before him.
The oncoming horsemen filed down the gulch, a moving flurry of pebbled steel helms, cloaked and hooded in drab cloth and leather. The advance guard was followed by Lysaer’s main company. Not a large force, but a field troop of headhunters welded by experience to mobile and deadly efficiency. They understood the terrain. Jieret noted their avoidance of scrub growth that masked sucking bogs and poor footing. They employed no voiced orders, but used hand signals alone to part ranks for an iced-over gully.
Their silent, seamless advance chilled the blood far more than the ceaseless north winds.
Moved by wary reflex, Jieret reviewed his surroundings. High overhead, a dark eagle circled, a speck against lucent silk sky. Behind, he felt as though hidden eyes watched him. Though his studied search caught no one lurking, his creeping unease would not rest. His mage-sight unveiled a queer, subdued blight cast over the rocks and bare bushes. As though the awareness of stone and live root shared his acid foreboding, and sought anonymity by dimming their essence of spirit light.
Jieret faced forward. He could ill afford to fret himself stupid over the spurious prompt of some haunt. The men in the vale would not wait on his doubts. They came on relentless, the gleam of bared steel like the glint on a reptile’s scales, half-glimpsed through the thickets and bracken. This was no troop led by pedigree dandies, but a strike force of hardened killers. The officers’ mounts were not plumed or caparisoned. They spurned war medallions and trinkets. For their badge of prowess, the headhunters from Narms preferred a fringe of cured clan scalps sewn to the edge of their saddlecloths.
Only an act of impeccable timing might disarm such ruthless dedication.
The riders were now a long bowshot away. Jieret could discern faces, bearded chins tucked into wool mufflers. He could count weapons. Some carried short bows tucked into scabbards hung from the horns of their saddles. Others preferred lightweight lances, or bludgeons to brain fleeing quarry from a gallop. Jieret had seen every ugly way to die, written into the flesh of kinsmen and friends cut down for the claim of town bounties. Clammy sweat slicked his shirt to his skin. Any crack archer who handled a horn recurve might spot him for an exposed target. Jieret hunkered down with his back to the hillcrest, trusting thin cover and stillness to hide him. He held his ground, locked in stonecast patience, while the gaps in the gusts brought the jingle of mail and the snorts of the enemy horses.
Nor did his selected prey stay elusive: the gold-sewn, light figure set at the troop’s forefront shone through the drab brush like white flame.
In arrogant disregard for the savage terrain; a bald-faced declaration that eschewed every sensible tactic, Lysaer s’Ilessid rode resplendent in glittering gold braid, spurs and bullion trappings buffed to a brilliant, high polish. The effrontery mocked. His palace courtier’s dress offered the open invitation to make his sunwheel surcoat a target. Cut the head off the snake, and the coiled hatreds that drove Alliance policy would lose their coordinated purpose. Arithon of Rathain would be set free, with Desh-thiere’s curse deprived of its focus.
Even without the conflicts of mage-sight, Jieret would not have succumbed. Clan marksmen from Tysan had been first to learn that the Divine Prince could raise light in protection against mortal arrows. Today’s blinding opulence offered the brazen invitation to display such invincible power.
Jieret laid bow and arrow within easy reach, well aware the success of his effort now hinged on the powers of grand conjury.
He must act by rote, steered step by step by his trust in Arithon’s trained knowledge. Any unforeseen departure, no matter how slight, could unbind the plan laid to spare the prince and Rathain’s clan survivors. Jieret picked up the quartz shard and scratched out, one by one, the innermost circle of figures. He sensed energies like pressure, grazing his skin. Small winds licked heat at his fingers. Though aware of the vortex of unseen movement turning inside the marked space, he lacked understanding of the forces he handled. For the strike prearranged to deflect Desh-thiere’s curse, the delicate strictures of check and balance had been instilled into formula. The steps framed a summons of appeal to the elements, a linked chain of command dangerously harnessed to the quickened awareness of powers so raw, their rising punched Jieret’s gut like a fist.
Vertigo raked him, tinged by nausea. His ears seemed to crackle with subliminal sound, as though strayed pulses of charge played over his aura. He felt saturated. Like the slosh of a bucket brimful of stirred liquid, the primal potential of unformed event threatened to shatter his inner balance.
More terrified of that strangeness than of straightforward death by enemy steel, Jieret laid his petition to engage the winds into the central ciphers. He asked a permission, then observed the startling wonder of his need, granted. A flare of fine light flowed in from the scribed mark at east, and spread subtle fire throughout the hoop of laid runes. The experience raised a shudder of gooseflesh. Jieret resisted the seductive pull of an awe that whirled him to distraction. Within a thickening glue of poised forces, he invoked Prince Arithon’s Name. Then he asked the power of wind to conjoin with his plea and become catalyst in defense of Daon Ramon.
A gust flicked his cheek, sharp affirmation his appeal had drawn a response. One last step, and the ending rune of release would engage the finished construct; the dire coil that Arithon’s trained mind had conceived, and which now relied on his caithdein’s talents as cat’s-paw to enact into manifestation.
There, Jieret languished, doused in a cold sweat. He could not avoid one last, fatal glance to gauge the pace of the advance riders. They were close enough, now, that line of sight could pick out their individual preferences: the jaunty set to this man’s chin, and the wry laugh of another who joked to chaff at a disgruntled companion.
Jieret caught back his breath in wringing dismay. At the cusp of the moment, he could not shake the horror of the act his given word must commit. He could not dissemble, or evade the harsh truth, that the horsemen were sadly misguided. Despite hatred and prejudice, they were no less a part of the splendor of Ath’s creation. They had mothers and daughters and brothers and wives, just as the forest-bred war band who fled from their weapons of slaughter. The fine difference, that clanblood could treat with Paravians, scarcely justified the violent rending of life.
In the wholeness of mage-sight, a man was a man, no matter the choices that shaped his beliefs or his origins.
Teir’s’Valerient though he was, sworn to a blood-bonded legacy, Jieret found himself utterly unable to seal the spell’s final closure. The forces of deception and death hanging poised offended all life, not just these victims who marched under Lysaer’s sunwheel banner.
A stunned second passed, followed by another. A fleeting few moments, and the opening would pass to enact the sole course of strategy. Jieret cursed through locked teeth. Necessity demanded. Lives stood at risk. Even the cer
tainty of Prince Arithon’s death failed to sting him back to conviction. His grip on the quartz shard went nerveless and numb.
The memory resurged and stabbed through like vengeance, that once, he had drawn the black sword Alithiel and compelled his liege to complete an equally untenable strategy. Unmanned by horror, Arithon had pleaded; and for the ugly charge of an oath to guard his liege’s given integrity, Jieret had used the sword’s power and broken him.
Now, when the drive of Desh-thiere’s curse threatened more innocent lives, no implacable hand bearing the threat of spelled steel pricked at the caithdein’s back. Jieret stood alone. Against stripping doubt, he had only Arithon’s trust, the sworn covenant of a mage-bond, and shared love of a measure to humble. The clan chieftain knelt, his head rested on his slack forearms. Unable to master himself, he could not recoup his sapped will, even to raise his strung bow. He coughed back bitter tears. The shame rocked his core, and past record seemed inconceivable: that his prince had owned the magnanimous heart to forgive him for forcing his unwilling hand to an act of slaughter and mayhem. When, to avert a disastrous war, the fleet brought to bear Lysaer’s war host to Merior had been charred to ruin on the waves of Minderl Bay.
‘Move, call out, touch a weapon, and you die!’ cracked a voice in townborn accents.
Jieret started. He suppressed the raw reflex to rise, just barely. Instinct had been accurate. He had been watched. At the corner of his vision, he picked out the whipcord-lean captain sighting him over the glint of a spanned steel quarrel. The man had dark hair and eyes like chipped ice. The commander’s badge stitched to his shoulder seemed merited. Jieret must defer to the ruthless, cool poise in the hands that aimed the cocked crossbow.