Traitor''s Knot (epub)

  'You cannot delay,' Kharadmon pointed out. 'The earth flux is charged. Its coil will back-flow, not dissipate. For each second you hesitate, the lane force burns hotter. You must lift the prince back to surface sensation or risk damage to his aware cognizance.'

  'Daelion Fatemaster's heart! This is cruelty,' Dakar gritted in useless protest. He braced himself, cringing, then murmured, 'Forgive.'

  Then, as Elaira laced her fingers through Arithon's hands, the spellbinder moved, and slackened one stay from his set of locked bindings.

  Arithon's lids fluttered. Held in a cloud-cotton state of suspension, he regained aware feeling, and thought, but not any freedom of movement. The spark that ignited deep in his eyes evinced no arrtbiguous doubt: he understood his demeaning condition. His fury was clear, and fuelled white-hot by the well of his unresolved passion.

  Elaira's breath caught, as his torn hurt flared across the restored link between them. She spoke at once to deflect his distress, though the admission shamed her past reason. 'My Prime spun a trap, which your friends have disarmed. If you wish to weep, I will bear it.'

  His glance shifted, alarmed, then discerned Dakar's pending intention. Cold ferocity became rage: towering; wild; and caged beyond reach of all recourse.

  The Mad Prophet stayed armoured against crippling remorse. There could be no sanity, otherwise. While Elaira averted her glance in raw grief, he proceeded. A deft stroke here, a flicked finger there, each measured sensation designed to unstring a sacrosanct self-integrity. He found his way, swiftly. Five hundred years of feckless dalliance delivered the expertise into his hand.

  Nor was the Fellowship Sorcerer withdrawn behind his adamant authority. Kharadmon held the lane's poised forces in balance. Throughout the hanging, volatile second, as the crux of the moment unfolded, he enclosed Rathain's crown prince within the charge of his limitless caring. Enveloped outside of that tender shield, Elaira cried out, forsaken.

  Arithon's body arched and released. His seed jetted over the grasses.

  Light flared, then burned, and a pealing note sounded. The summer air shimmered, while the pent-back ley burst and fired, and sorrow keened like desolation. While Kharadmon tempered the flash-point surge of energies, and down-stepped the spike in the lane flux, Dakar yanked back as though singed.

  'Necessity,' he said into those furious eyes, driven with the helpless pain of violation. 'Look carefully. See for yourself. Use my eyesight, if you don't believe me.'

  His reply held a subtlety of response, unexpected: Elaira sensed Dakar's revealing, quick gesture that opened a line of discernment.

  Along with Arithon, she beheld how Selidie Prime had engaged her high art for manipulation. The master sigil of her initiate's oath had been used to conceal an inexcusable meddling. Stamped into the aura just inside her hip, the enchantress was shown the planted sigil that would enact a conception, then the wound barb of the spring-lock intended to transfer to Arithon, that would plant a child upon any woman he might ever engage in the future. The ugly chain had been arrested just shy of enacting its malicious intent.

  Elaira went white. Then she shuddered, turned her face into Arithon's hair, and wept in outraged desolation. Dakar rallied enough to react, draped her crushed mantle over her, then supported her bowed shoulders. Nobody spoke. No word could ease heart-break. While Arithon languished, undone in forced sleep, Kharadmon resumed work with immaculate care. He cleared the entangling cords strung by sexual contact until the crown prince's aura burned clean, restored to astringent tidiness.

  When the Fellowship Sorcerer's presence stood down, it was Dakar who retrieved the dropped shirt and covered the unconscious crown prince.

  'I didn't know,' Elaira murmured, wrung sick.

  'Your Prime altered your memory,' Kharadmon said, precise. 'Luhaine did the back-trace, at Sethvir's request. The sigil would have been planted before last winter, in the course of your summons for audience.'

  She recalled the hour, clearly enough. A quartz sphere had changed hands within the Prime's presence, one fateful morning at Highscarp. Yet Elaira recollected no trace of the burn, as those vile, spelled ciphers had transferred. 'Ath preserve us both, I never suspected.'

  'You can't dwell on such misery,' Dakar entreated. 'Tonight's threat is disarmed, and you now hold an informed awareness. We need to be done, here. Let me call Sidir. With least offence, he should be asked to bear his sworn liege off to bed.'

  'On whose permission?' the Sorcerer demanded. 'Your wish is well-meant, but disrespectful. We're cosseting an embarrassment, not a bleeding trauma!'

  Elaira pushed straight and responded at once. 'Let Sidir retire. Leave Arithon to me. My instinct will know what to do for him.'

  'Your Prime Matriarch could still take coercive action!' Kharadmon warned. 'Luhaine's on station, watching the enclave your order maintains at Forthmark. He's alerted Sethvir that we have complications. Elaira, did you know that Prime Selidie has taken charge of your personal crystal?'

  'Ath's pity!' cried Dakar, stunned by the weight of wide-ranging implication. Is there no ending? Such power has granted a clear line of reach into everything we have just done here!'

  'We can't mend that.' The discorporate Sorcerer's nettlesome nature poised back into contained cogitation. 'Ath's adepts were the ones who took charge of that quartz. Nobody knows what prompted their choice, since it's not in their nature to dispatch a crystal back into domination.'

  'But I do know.' Wrung pale, Elaira restated the facts as she remembered them. 'The adept who came honoured the crystal's clear preference. He told me the quartz wished to serve by free choice.'

  'A riddle!' fumed Kharadmon, out of patience. Unlike Luhaine, he found the esoterics of minerals a morass of vexing frustration. 'One day, perhaps, we'll pursue the answer. Quartz crystals perceive us in ways we can't fathom. Somewhere, there will be a future that's hidden from Sethvir's extended awareness. Tonight, we can't settle for blind speculation. A piquant mystery cannot avert the immediate possibility of an attack.'

  'Then set seals of safe-guard!' the enchantress appealed, at last stung to desolation. Frail as milk-glass, now subject to shatter, she appealed to Dakar's humanity. 'You're still holding Arithon's oath of permission! Lay down wards to ensure his defence. I'll handle his subsequent anger. Hurt and humiliation can be assuaged. But heed what I say for this hour, at least. You will drive us mad if you force us to separate.'

  While Dakar braced to protest, Kharadmon intervened. 'It's Prime Selidie's character that can't be trusted. On that score, Elaira, accept my sworn word. Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn stays in your charge. I will guard your space for him, personally.'

  The Fellowship Sorcerer upheld that promise.

  Under soft starlight, circled in peace, no mind on Athera saw what transpired as Dakar's crude stays of binding dissolved. No outsider stood witness. Alone with his beloved, Rathain's prince regained his shorn right to autonomy and received the sad shreds of the night's consolation.

  * * *

  Summer 5671

  Loyalties

  Sunrise burned coal-red through a cotton-thick mist that did not lift off, which presaged a drizzle by eventide. Huddled on the bank of the Willowbrook with her knees tucked up to her chin, Jeynsa swore to herself and tossed another rebellious pebble into the streambed. Shining ripples fled, shattering a reflection enveloped in streaming whiteness. Trees, rocks, and underbrush appeared cut adrift, their silhouettes snipped out of shadow. The morning seemed wrapped in a hush like held breath. Even the bird-song rang muffled.

  'Still there?' Eriegal strode out of the brush, clad in dew-streaked leathers and bearing his bow and bone-handled hunting knives. His stout frame as ever moved without sound, a surprise that often dismayed the young boys, who thought they might take advantage of his apparent clumsiness. 'If I'd sat there moping without supper all night, I'd be in a sore mood as well.'

  Another insolent stone struck the shallows. The splash frightened birds, and a squirrel scuttled, scolding. Jeynsa stir
red, the ends of her cropped hair tipped with moisture and her doeskin tunic littered with clinging pine-needles. 'I slept sound in a thicket, no thanks for your noise. And I was thinking, not moping.'

  'Guilty on one count, at least.' Eriegal knelt. He offered a brace of wriggling trout slung from a thong in his fist. 'If you choose a site and build us a fire, I'll overlook your bad temper and cook.'

  Jeynsa uncurled from her tight-laced crouch. She laid the last pebble back down on the stream-bank, then stood, stretched cramped limbs, and regarded the Companion who brought something more than an offer of fish. 'I didn't need you to stand guard at my back.'

  Eriegal raised his quizzical brows. That innocuous grin on his rounded face always masked convoluted intentions. 'I didn't. That's true. Not if you stayed out here for thinking.'

  A corner of Jeynsa's mouth crept up. The spark of challenge softened out of her eyes, which were a pale green flecked with silver when she was not angry. 'I suppose I owe our crown prince an apology. Damn him.'

  'His Grace doesn't want your contrition,' Eriegal agreed. He crouched with his skinning knife and began gutting his catch. 'Sidir always warned that our prince would be difficult.'

  'Not so much if you knew him.' Prepared by her innate honesty to be fair, Jeynsa rubbed her bruised arm, which had stiffened during her solitary retreat. 'Father once told me his Grace acted vicious those times when he was most vulnerable.'

  Eriegal met that opinion with silence. His blade remained busy. Blood streaked his short fingers as he sliced into rainbow-scaled bellies, and tossed the offal aside for the foxes. As the pause stretched, expectant, he finally shrugged. 'I didn't serve in the campaign at Vastmark. Sidir would know better than I.'

  Nor had Eriegal fought in Daon Ramon; the remembered argument still stung, of the bitter hour when the past high earl had enforced his last orders. Eriegal's shrewd gift for tactics had tied him to the camp to advise Barach's inexperience as war captain. 'I was too young to swear when our liege first took his crown oath before Steiven in Strakewood.' In fact, Eriegal had been an observant, shy boy. One who still recalled a sickly and temperamental prince, carving whistles to fascinate toddlers.

  What Caolle and Sidir had seen in the same man, neither one ever cared to discuss. Now, except for Braggen, and Deith, who maintained the understaffed watch in Deshir, all of the other Companions were dead.

  'We can talk as we eat,' Eriegal admonished, 'which can't happen if there's no fire.'

  This was the heartcore of Halwythwood, and close enough to the well-springs where the mysteries held resonance that no spark could be struck without ritual. Jeynsa moved off to sound for a suitable site and invoke the due steps to establish permission.

  Soon enough, she had a small blaze set against a flat boulder, and Eriegal had the fish roasting. Jeynsa sat to one side, nervously smoothing the fletching on the Companion's arrows, their filled quiver laid down with the recurve bow he had not yet warmed to unstring. The points were flanged war tips, and not the hunter's broadheads used to take deer. Under dank mist, while crows called, and the crowns of the trees dripped fizzling drops on the coals, Jeynsa broached the thorny subject that had tormented more than her for two nights.

  'When did you stop fully trusting his Grace?'

  Eriegal started. His fresh skin, pale eyes, and tarnished tousle of hair made his face seem transparently innocent. Yet the cunning that made him a deadly tactician never displayed open thoughts. 'Even for you, Jeynsa, that's a bit specious. Arithon is Fellowship-sanctioned as crown prince!'

  The Teiren's'Valerient did not back down. She stroked a striped cock-feather into a razor's edge, then twirled the shaft, uncomplacent. 'Well, who else would you have been guarding against? Sidir's had the sentry scouts tripled since the day his Grace was brought into camp.'

  Head bent, Eriegal speared a hot fillet on a stick and extended the offering to Jeynsa. 'Are you asking as Jieret's bereaved daughter, or as the realm's chosen caithdein?'

  'Should there be a difference?' Too taut-nerved to eat, Jeynsa ignored the fish. Thrown a tart glance, she insisted, 'You're the one who said you were ravenous.'

  Yet Eriegal was never so easily deterred. 'Oh, there's a difference,' he stated. 'One's a clear-cut act of crown treason. The other, a point of charter law I would be oath-bound to answer.' His steely glance nailed her, an unsparing assessment of the freshly shorn hair that even still, repudiated the ritual braid that denoted her rank and clan heritage.

  Jeynsa flushed. Only Arithon s'Ffalenn had grasped the true reason behind her emphatic renouncement.

  Yet if, like the rest, Eriegal presumed that her motive was no more than the pique of rebellion, he was not insensitive. The hard blink, then the tears that brightened her eyes were correctly acknowledged as grief. Wrapped in drifting mist, hot-blooded youth and staid Companion shared a moment of kindred distress.

  A man grown since the slaughter that reddened Tal Quorin, Eriegal could never forget. He, too, knew the horror of losing close family to Arithon's feal defence. Childhood friends, siblings, his parents and cousins: all had been lost to Etarra's war host in the course of a single day. Of his generation, only fourteen young boys had survived, named by Jieret as his Companions. Through the years following, the unbearable losses had mounted. Indomitable, irreplaceable, Caolle had fallen. His wounding on Arithon's drawn blade at Riverton had been acquitted by Earl Jieret's bound inquiry. Of the nine slain the past winter on Daon Ramon Barrens, the tenth had been Red-beard himself. Deaths even Braggen's iron disposition had forgiven, though no one still living had been eye-witness to the ruthless sorceries that Arithon had spun; that had, at such inconceivable cost, broken the death grip of the cordon closed down by Lysaer's fanatics.

  Eriegal was first to break the locked glance with his fallen chieftain's wayward daughter. 'His Grace accepted my oath upon his arrival at the circle in Caith-al-Caen.'

  Yet Jeynsa's birth-born talent was Sight, that could sense where the heart's cross-currents twisted. She voiced the chilling thought, while the silver mist ghosted between them. 'He's also a master sorcerer. One who has accepted guest welcome from Davien the Betrayer. How much more of our precious clanblood will be spilled, you are thinking, before someone dares put the question? Whom do we have who has the main strength to examine that deadly connection?'

  Eriegal sucked a sharp breath, while three trout fillets burned, and another one cooled, staked through by a sharpened stick. 'Go back,' he said, firm. 'Accept your position as Asandir's choice and shoulder your charge as the realm's caithdein. Then, if you decide to open an inquiry, I'll be there to stand at your shoulder.'

  A frown pinched Jeynsa's brows, which were dark like her mother's. The war-tipped arrow was restored to its quiver, then returned, still hooked to its owner's antler-bossed belt. The stout Companion accepted the burden, then doused the fire and took up his bow.

  Yet Jeynsa could not so easily reconcile her morass of conflicted thoughts. Against all she heard, through her desolate pain, she could not dismiss the impact of her royal audience.

  The prince had attempted to treat with her fairly. Though stripped by exhaustion that overset tact, he had not belittled her vicious hostility. Nor had his initiate training been used to mask the most private core of his being: the oath of protection sworn on his blood had invoked the unimpeachable clarity of her Sighted perception. In that exposed moment, the reach and strength of his commitment had unmasked his inherent sincerity.

  Jeynsa had beheld her lost father in Prince Arithon's eyes. The pain of shared love within that encounter had held nothing of falsehood: no burden of crown duty, no tarnish of sly scheming, and no trace of shallow, political platitude.

  Reconciled to the weight of her obligation, she agreed to embrace her Named fate. But the young pride so brutally overturned would not easily bend before her s'Valerient integrity She needed Eriegal's shrewd mind and anguished uncertainty as her counterstay, lest she shame her tattered dignity beyond salvage by begging forbearance
at her crown prince's feet.

  Under mist that still clung like a cloying blanket, Jeynsa approached the clan chieftain's lodge tent. Dishevelled, her leathers and arms smeared with sap from two nights spent bedded in pine needles, she flushed, caught aback by Eriegal's suggestion that she amend her neglected appearance.

  'Caithdein, you must. Your office demands the semblance of propriety.'

  'Dharkaron's almighty bollocks!' she exclaimed, raised to a self-conscious flush. 'After putting an unsheathed dagger to royalty? If I run into Mother or Barach beforehand, they'll peel the last inch of hide off me!'

  To evade that brangling brush with authority, she entreated Eriegal to divert the sharp eyes of the sentries. Stalker's skills let her skulk through the perimeter and worm her way under the back of the lodge tent. Breathless, now muddy, she reached the shelter of her personal quarters without being seen.

  The shut cubicle was dark. Jeynsa dared not strike a light, lest the glow should alert the closed meeting in progress on the other side of the curtain. Moving by touch, she could not avoid overhearing the talk exchanged at the trestle.

  'Where in Sithaer's black pit has Eriegal got to?' Braggen's expostulation ran on unchecked, through Feithan's placating murmur. 'Well, he's overdue back! We're going to need hours to catch him up with yesterday's round of bad news.'

  '. . . can't be helped,' Sidir stated, unmoved. 'Sit down and stop pacing, will you?'

  The trestle-board creaked, through the slide of a bench, and the clunk as a weapon banged wood. 'What's his Grace doing, anyway?'

  'Still with his woman, far as we know,' said the muted voice of the night's watch scout.

  Since that particular man was renowned for sharp ears, and Sidir's keen perceptions too often sparked his talent for piercing insight, Jeynsa crept on cat feet. She stripped her soiled clothing, then scrounged through her satchel and hooked out her spare shirt. A hesitation, as her groping fingers encountered the weave of the garment beneath: the black tabard that once had belonged to her father, its folds already recut to fit for the investiture she had refused.