TWOLAS - 06 - Peril''s Gate

  Still bedridden in trance at Althain Tower, Sethvir recovers command of the earth link; and, amid the uprush of restored awareness, he assimilates the near culmination of solstice, then an alarming new development that drives him bolt upright, as a nexus of forces converge on the lane tide about to rake south through the Skyshiels; 'Luhaine!' he gasps in urgent command. 'Your service is needed at once in Rathain . . . '

  Winter Solstice Night 5670

  II. Recoil

  Luhaine sped forth from Althain Tower, a comet tail of urgency whose southeastward course streaked to intercept the breaking disaster Sethvir foresaw in the Kingdom of Rathain. Between patches of bare trees, under the high, horsetail clouds that preceded an inbound storm front, the discorporate Sorcerer encountered the tight-knit band of horsemen who accompanied Prince Lysaer's raced passage toward the shores of the north inlet. As unclothed spirit, the Sorcerer's refined perception could discern the auras of the men, and sort them by Name and character. As well as the burning, oath-driven presence of Lord Commander Sulfin Evend, Luhaine recognized the avid sunwheel seer at Lysaer's left hand as High Priest Cerebeld's handpicked acolyte. Sethvir's terse summary had not flinched from grim facts. Either one of those men in a muster for war promised trouble for Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  Luhaine did not intervene. Since his Fellowship adhered to the Law of the Major Balance, he was bound to honor free will. Nor was he tempted by demeaning spite, though a word to the winds of the oncoming gale could have seen that select band of riders reduced to stripped bones, rusted steel, and pack canvas flogged into tatters. Even had Luhaine held license to act, the self-serving snarl of Alliance politics must bow to more pressing concerns.

  The Sorcerer's urgent presence arrowed on, stepped outside the constraints that ruled time and space and the dense limitation of flesh. Inside the hour, solstice midnight would unleash its tidal crest down the sixth lane's stress-damaged channel. Before then, he must shoulder a perilous mission and deliver two messages en route.

  The first drove him southeast through the snowbound wastes of Atainia, then across the wind-thrashed, ebon waters that sheared rip currents down Instrell Bay. Beyond, rimed in ice, the bare crowns of Halwythwood's oaks sheltered the free-running wolf packs. As well hidden, and equally guarded in cunning, the camps of the feal clanborn sworn to Rathain nestled into the landscape. They had gathered in numbers, Luhaine observed. Through the cold of deep winter, they kept no set fires. Light on the land as the foraging deer, they adhered to strict practice, both to honor the wilds that were their pledged charge and to evade the relentless patrols dispersed by the towns' scalping headhunters.

  Yet no trail-wise subterfuge could shadow the vision of a Sorcerer's upstepped awareness. The man Luhaine sought in his need stood out from the candleflame glow of his fellows as a firebrand, lashed into flaring, hot dissidence.

  Left no time for manners, and less for fair warning, Luhaine of the Fellowship dropped into the lodge tent of the chieftain who bore title as caithdein of Rathain. There, Earl Jieret stood his strapping, full height, his arms folded, immersed in fierce argument with his only daughter, just turned a headstrong seventeen.

  The infant girl that Asandir had Named Jeynsa had grown tall and resilient as willow. Her face was a study of cut angles, and her bearing, a young deer's for quick reflex. The mane of dark brown hair that licked down her back ran wild as curling bindweed. Fists set on her hips, her leathers belted with a carved antler buckle, and a baldric that hung three styles of knife and a sharpened longsword, she was a sight to give pause to any man living.

  Not the father, a half a hand taller than she, and a red-bearded lion in all matters that touched on the welfare of clan and close family. His bellowed reply shook the poles of the lodge and hide walls too close to contain the bristling pair of them. 'Girl, you aren't going! Accept and be done.'

  Flushed to high passion, young Jeynsa gave back no quarter. 'What do you fear, that I must stay behind?' Foot tapping, chin lifted, she surveyed his creased face with aventurine eyes that mirrored his own for sharp insight. 'Are you hiding a dream, that this time you won't come back?'

  If that truth struck a nerve, Earl Jieret had faced death too many times to bow to intimidation. Clad in tanned wolfhide sewn skin side out, and bearing edged weapons with more ease than most men wore clothing, he could rival old oak for tenacity. 'My gift of Sight has nothing to do with the exercise of common sense. You are my heir, girl, and Fellowship chosen. You stay for the weal of the realm.'

  'And Barach? He stays to safeguard our bloodline?' Jeynsa cut back, but unwisely.

  Her father's hazel eyes assumed the glint of sheared iron. Scarred on hands and forearms by enemy steel in too many deadly skirmishes, he said, very softly, 'For shame, girl. Beware how you mock.' His baleful glance shifted, as though to acknowledge someone unseen at her back. 'You never know who might be listening.'

  'If it's mother,' Jeynsa ripped in retort, 'she can't claim I'm not just as good with a bow as the scout you took on your last foray.' Spun on her heel, prepared to do battle on two fronts like a tigress, Jeynsa found herself nose to nose with the image of a portly stranger who wore loomed gray robes, and whose presence shed the immovable chill of an iceberg.

  'Welcome to my lodge tent, Luhaine,' Earl Jieret greeted the Fellowship Sorcerer. Vindication that fought not to show as a smile flashed white teeth through his beard as he delivered the traditional words of respect. 'How may we serve the land?'

  Jolted to gaping embarrassment, Jeynsa swept to one knee. Her gesture affected no woman's curtsey, but the humility a future caithdein must show to acknowledge the given hierarchy of old law, that the authority of a Fellowship charter granted her s'Ffalenn liege his right to crown rule in Rathain.

  Luhaine accepted her act as apology, his reproof tart enough to ease the sting to young pride. 'I'm not Asandir, lady. He's far more likely than me to sanction your hour of heirship.'

  Behind her, Earl Jieret jammed his closed knuckles to his mouth, aware as his daughter surged erect that such tactful reprieve was misplaced.

  'Then you're here as a messenger from Althain's Warden to send father to Prince Arithon's side?' Jeynsa flung back the hair that no one, not even her mother, could convince her to bind in a clan braid. 'Say I can go.' Eager, unscarred, she was not yet touched by the grievous sorrows her parents had known at an age even younger than she. 'I've never seen the Teir's'Ffalenn I've been pledged to serve for a lifetime.'

  'Better pray that you don't meet his Grace for a good many years yet to come!' Portly and stern, Luhaine shook a schoolmasterish finger. 'Young lady, take heed. On the hour you swear fealty to Arithon s'Ffalenn, the caithdein, your father, will lie past Fate's Wheel. That day his duties become yours to shoulder. The tradition has lasted for centuries, unbroken. The heir to the title must never take risks that might leave the high kingdom stewardless.'

  'You stay, Jeynsa,' said Earl Jieret with granite finality. 'Barach holds the s'Valerient chieftaincy in my absence. Nor will you cross your older brother's good sense until you reach your majority.'

  'Well he won't be twenty for at least one more year,' Jeynsa lashed back, unmollified. Then the heat that sustained her brash fight bled away. 'Just come back.' She clasped her father's broad shoulders, her embrace as ferocious as her brangling penchant for argument. When she left, straight with prideful clan dignity, she shed no tears. Nor did she glance behind, though she ached for sure knowledge that Sorcerer and caithdein would share their ill tidings without calling her mother in counsel.

  After the door flap slapped shut on her heels, Earl Jieret folded his rangy height onto the split log he used for a camp stool. 'Ath bless that girl's spirit, Asandir chose her well. Jeynsa's the only one of my brood with the nerve to withstand s'Ffalenn temper.' Head cocked, his steady gaze wary in the flare of the pine torch that blazed in a staked iron sconce, he showed no trepidation, even now. 'Since you're here, Sorcerer, certain trouble rides the wind. Better say what you came for.'
br />   Luhaine minced no words. 'You've already mustered your clansmen to arms. Had you not, we would face a disaster.'

  Jieret yanked out the worn main gauche that, long years in the past, he had blooded to avenge his slain sisters. While his too-steady finger checked the blade's edge, and the relentless wind mingled the perfume of winter balsam with the brute tang of oiled steel, he addressed his worries with the same headlong brevity. 'I dreamed with Sight. This month's full moon will find sunwheel forces on the march across Daon Ramon Barrens. Sometime before thaws, the prey they course will be a lone rider on a flagging horse. The man I saw in the saddle was my oathsworn prince.'

  'Let things not reach that pass.' As though a swift plea could stem fate, Luhaine added, 'I go east across the Skyshiels to give timely warning. Your liege will be urged to seek sanctuary at Ithamon. He will meet you in the East Tower, the black one, whose warding virtue is endurance, and whose binding is held by the Paravian's concept of true honor. There, guard your liege against Lysaer's forces. Prepare for a siege. We know as fact the tower's wards can stem the onslaught of Desh-thiere's influence. Sethvir believes the oldest defenses may mitigate the madness of the curse. If that hope fails, then his Grace's life will be yours to secure in any manner you can.'

  'Just how long must my scouts stand down an army?' Earl Jieret placed the question with the same hammered courage that had been his father's before him.

  The Sorcerer's image seemed cast from dyed glass, an uncanny contrast to the earthbound man, who listened with unvarnished practicality. 'The tower will hold, and the weather will stand as your ally. Lay in provisions to last many months. You will suffer a winter such as you have never seen, nor any of your grandfathers before you. Cold and ice will break the Alliance supply lines. You must hold fast until then.'

  'Then your Fellowship is in crisis?' Earl Jieret waited through a clipped stillness, his hands on the knife motionless.

  'More than you imagine. The Koriani Order tried to upset the compact in the course of their Prime Matriarch's succession.' Luhaine's confession resumed, burred rough by weariness as his image thinned toward dissolution. 'Their spells were contained, but Athera has suffered a magnetic imbalance without precedent. That's why we can promise the storms will be harsh, and the spring locked in ice until close to the advent of solstice. Summer will be short. Northern crops will be stunted. Can you manage?'

  'As we must.' Earl Jieret arose, a threading of gray shot through the bonfire russet of his clan braid. 'Traithe once gave me the more difficult task.' Anytime, he preferred letting blood with forged steel to the unease of high mystery and magecraft. 'Tell my liege I will stand his royal guard at Ithamon. Say also, I'll stake him a flask of my wife's cherry brandy that my scouts will arrive there before him.'

  'May we meet in better times,' Luhaine said, ashamed to give such a lame parting.

  For this steadfast liegeman, who time and again had risked all for a prince most conspicuous for his absence, any tribute the Sorcerer might offer would carry a sting close to insult. Although Earl Jieret would swear that Prince Arithon's life held the future hope for his clans, in truth, the bonding between caithdein and sovereign ran deeper than dutiful service. Prince and liegeman shared a love closer than most brothers. For Arithon, that tie had thrice granted salvation from the drive of the Mistwraith's geas.

  A fourth such reprieve seemed an omen to beckon the crone of ill fortune. Yet if Jieret Red-beard shared the same dread, his fears stayed unspoken as he wished the Sorcerer safe passage.

  Luhaine left the s'Valerient chieftain to gather his weapons and muster his clan scouts for war. If the Sorcerer prayed for any one thing as he hurtled across the ice-mailed range of the Skyshiels, he asked that the price of this hour's intervention not end in bloodshed and tragedy.

  Beyond the mountains, the snow fell wind-driven, a blinding maelstrom of cyclonic fury lent force by the skewed flow of the lane tides. Firsthand, Luhaine measured the building pressures Sethvir had sensed from Althain Tower. The final crest of the solstice flux would peak inside the half hour. The pending event cast a charge through the air, a dance of compressed light past the range of sighted perception. As spirit, Luhaine traced the stressed energy as a static-flash shimmer, strung in between the whiteout snowfall that was nature's effort to clear and bleed off the imbalance.

  Sethvir had discerned the forked quandary too clearly. Relief could not come through the usual release, excess power sent to ground through stone and live trees, or the veins of ore threaded deep through the earth. Not since Arithon had used chord and sound to key his earlier transfer to Jaelot. His music had done more than channel raw lane force; its resonant ties to Paravian ritual had reopened the latitudinal channels. From the hour of first tide, at yestereve's midnight, through the day's dawntide, and noontide, and eventide at sundown, the land had already absorbed the burgeoning flux. Every stone and tree now rang to charged capacity. Each event cast the outflow farther afield, with the last crest at midnight still building.

  Once the tide touched the quartz vein that laced through the Skyshiels, the damage inflicted by Morriel's meddling would snarl the natural flow into recoil. Ungrounded backlash would deflect into chaos, and cause undue stress on the wards confining the Mistwraith at Rockfell. Luhaine held the task of guarding the breach. As spirit, alone, he could not hope to mend the subsequent toll of the damage. The crux of that problem brought him at last to the coast north of Jaelot, in search of the Prince of Rathain.

  Scarcely hampered by the mask of dense snowfall, Luhaine drew advantage from those quirks of nature accessible to him as a wraith. He was not bound by flesh to the side of the veil subject to linear time. From his upstepped perception, he could, as he chose, view events in simultaneity. Raised to static suspension, he could map Arithon's movements, past and present, and ahead through the multiple, hazy template of what might yet come to be. The future, as now, revealed itself as an array of free choices. Unlike true augury, each sequence branched exponentially. Images split into multiplicity, until the nexus points blurred into unformed event, and the arena of possibility thinned into an ephemeral mist too insubstantial to frame clear probability.

  Though an hour had passed since Arithon drew Jaelot's mounted guardsmen in flight from the ruined mill, Luhaine easily picked up his back trail. Guided by higher wisdom and mage-sight, the Sorcerer followed, unerring, the forking tracks where the Master of Shadow had dispatched the packhorse in careening panic. The ruse had bought distance. His pursuit had bogged down in the farmlands, their zealous chase balked by timber fences, sheepfolds, and occupied bull pens. The relentless storm cut down visibility. Gusting wind filled in a shod horse's tracks and mounded the ditches in drifts. Men floundered and swore, forced to bang upon cottars' doors to recover their sense of direction.

  Granted a hard-won few minutes' reprieve, Arithon happened into a pasture of hacks. He briefly dismounted to open the gate. Back in the saddle, he used the shrill whistle for fiend bane to set the freed herd to a gallop. The hazed animals melded their fleeing prints with those of his winded gelding. That ploy bought him a widening lead, until the loose livestock encountered a stud plowhorse, and the stallion's neighed challenge alerted the countryside.

  The fist-shaking farmer who unleashed his mastiffs found his dogs in a thicket, snarling over the shreds of a discarded jacket. Whipped off, and urged into a wind that froze scent, the brutes were lackluster trackers. When they gave tongue at last, their master was deterred by a shadow-wrought form that convinced him the fugitive had stolen refuge within the stone walls of his icehouse.

  While guardsmen converged on the farmer's hue and cry, and the dogs whined and circled over the ground trampled up by the destriers, Arithon nursed his winded gelding out of sight over the next hillcrest. He could do very little to offset the bloodstains splashed by the cornrick where he had stolen a short breather for his horse. Koriathain would assuredly seize on that slip and flag the site on their next scrying. Night and storm masked his for
m from the notice of men, a double-edged kindness, as the bitter chill flayed to the skin.

  Luhaine ached as the immediate past converged with a desperate present. He came up from behind with no sound at all, while Jaelot's sought quarry yanked off the shreds of his glove with his teeth. Arithon fumbled open the saddlebag, fished inside, and located Dakar's spare cloak. Shivering in sodden doublet and shirtsleeves, he whispered a snatched phrase of relief as he pulled on the garment's stained folds. The wound inflicted by Fionn Areth's sword left his right hand useless. He had no chance to arrange makeshift bandaging. His awkward efforts to pin Dakar's garment plundered the last of his lead.

  Jaelot's lancers bore in, hot set in pursuit.

  Nerve strung and desperate, Arithon spun. Overtaken on a blown horse, he prepared to recut the darkness into nightmare shapes of illusion. His strength was long spent, to bear weapons or sword. Exposed without cover, his birth gift of shadow became his last hope of evasion.

  The manifest image of Luhaine unfurled and utterly caught him aback. He sucked a hissed breath, defenses half-woven before recognition woke reason.

  'Dharkaron avert!' Rathain's prince dropped his veiling of shadow with a wrenching, breathless start. 'Luhaine! Daelion forfend, I thought you were Koriathain, come to claim vengeance and gloat.' Through the oncoming pound of his mounted pursuit, he added, 'Are you here to help doubleblind witches or horsemen? I need to know very quickly.'

  'Be at peace.' Luhaine loosed a swift binding to hide the scatter of bloodstains from scryers. While the snowfall laced through him, scribing gaps like flung static, he added, 'The Koriani plot's broken, and the guardsmen will pass and see nothing.' A small permission of air, a rearrangement of wind, and the pernicious cold bit less deeply. 'Bide here a few minutes. The packhorse is freed, and will find you. No guardsman's had time to pilfer for spoils. You'll recover your bow and provisions.'