Читать книгу Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 11

The breezes stirring midsummer’s brass heat still carried the tang of defeat out of Havish. Rampant talk sown by Sunwheel deserters spread vivid accounts, embellished by the disaffected anxiety still building apace since the past spring’s explosive flux surge. Few townsfolk doubted an outbreak of sorcerous Shadow had broken the True Sect invasion. If rumour claimed the Light’s avatar also had vanished from the field in the after-shock, as dust settled in The Hatchet’s retreat, port towns along Instrell Bay moved more reliable news in sealed dispatches. These confirmed the Master of Shadow’s escape. Fewer, kept secret, traced Lysaer s’Ilessid’s reappearance in anonymous seclusion at East Bransing.

While Sethvir at Althain Tower strained errant hearsay from truth, news of the war trickled eastward across the continent, hampered where Athili’s bounds and the haunted pass through Lithmarin thinned the hectic flow of town trade across the Storlain ranges, and stalled altogether where the merchant guilds’ influence languished at Backwater. Itinerant tinkers crept word of mouth northward. Morbid fears and suspicion spread from Daenfal Lake gradually through Araethura’s back-country herders, where Iyat-thos Tarens and his youthful clan companions traversed the open steppe.

Footbound for weeks in an isolate vista of grassland and quicksilver streams thatched with briar, the party had been run off by vicious dogs. Where the goats grazed, unfenced, they were stoned on sight by furtive boys wielding hide slings.

Distance from the settlements added rank distrust. Appointed as spokesman for his friendly smile and crofter’s accent, Tarens found his most polite knock met by a screech from the cottage matron who answered her door. His honest request to trade for a waxed cheese was put off by a meat skewer, the uproar unpleasantly quick to draw riled kin from the byre brandishing hay-forks.

“You’d think I’m a sorcerer in league with Shadow!” he vented, chased to breathless flight. Returned to find that morning’s campsite stripped down, and no sign of his furtive companions, he required a clan tracker’s skills to ferret out their direction.

Tarens caught up with Siantra at midmorning, soaked to the neck and flushed after crossing the swift-running creeks that furrowed a landscape riddled by narrow ravines. “Slinking weasel!” he accused. “You knew my reception was going to cause mayhem.”

Sidir’s willowy descendant fingered her strung bow and shrugged. Seal-dark hair and the fey glint in pale eyes accented the wolfish cast to her cheek-bones. “Why the injured surprise?” Daughter of her lineage, she evaded with truth. “You look like a ruffian inclined to steal eggs.”

In fact, thieving was the most likely aim of a townsman this far off the beaten track: a large stranger scarred by a broken nose and armed with knife and sword posed a threat great enough to inspire hostility. Perhaps shamed she had played that advantage and bolted, Siantra flicked her sly glance askance. “You swam to throw off pursuit? That’s foolhardy.”

More than wet clothes prickled Tarens to chills. Warned he ruffled more than the young woman’s poise, he bristled with incredulity. “This near the Arwent Gorge? Brazen sneak! Don’t mock me with the belated concern that I might have drowned in the current!”

The vixen blushed. “If you’re all that wise to the lay of the land, why risk your life?”

“Because I don’t trust the pair of you out of my sight.” The glib request to restock supplies in hindsight should have been questioned. “Esfand’s gone ahead,” the frank crofter accused, doubly annoyed to have fallen for the transparent deception.

“I stayed.” Guilty, Siantra defended, “You can’t fault us! Esfand rightfully should report first as his sire’s heir apparent.”

“More than my own sensibilities would argue,” Tarens flared back.

“You can’t overtake him,” Siantra protested, hot on the crofter’s heels as he passed her. “I held back only to stop you! If you manage to find the way down to the gorge, Esfand’s alert will have warned the patrol scouts.”

But Tarens possessed in full measure the past memories of Jieret, once caithdein to Rathain and High Earl of the North. He required no guide. Unless two hundred and fifty years of weather had crumbled the gap through the notch, he knew the hidden access into Halwythwood better than any.

Tailed by Siantra’s dismayed footsteps, Tarens glanced backwards and spat in the dirt. “That, for cold-blooded murder! Your choice.”

Then he sprinted. Shocked, nearly tearful, Siantra could not check a grown man twice her weight, short of taking him down with an arrow. Which the forest scouts’ vigilance might well do anyway, denied their due chance to verify the outlandish twist: that this affable stranger who spoke in town dialect was not the bumpkin he appeared but a feal liegeman to Prince Arithon of Rathain.

Siantra shouted, distraught. “Esfand went to break the news that the clan relay through Halwythwood may be overfaced. And he’s right! We can’t grasp how deeply the True Sect’s defeat has gutted treaty law, or what oppressive policy’s arisen since Lysaer abdicated the mayor’s seat at Etarra to Canon Law.”

The recent lane shift unleashed hard against the disastrous campaign to fight Shadow had recoiled into fanatical hysteria. Distrust fed the Light’s cause, while the volatile terror stirred by the heightened flux incited still more widespread purges. Old blood-lines were pursued under bounty again as True Sect doctrine inflamed the south. Irruptive outbreaks of latent talent at Backwater unleashed the renewed predation of trackers with dogs, funded in force by the head-hunters’ leagues and the temple’s coffers. Hounded under blood-letting unrest, the free wilds’ scouts would be primed to kill any outsider on sight.

When Iyat-thos refused to wait upon reason, Siantra shed her cumbersome pack roll and raced in scared desperation to flank him.

The snare dropped with barely a slither of warning. Twine mesh weighted with stones netted Tarens halfway down the notched path, zigzagged through the cliff where Araethura’s plateau dropped off sheer at the central fault-line. The cleft where he tumbled swooped a hundred yards downwards, straight for the rocky ravine that channelled the snaked froth of the Arwent. Banged and cut as he fell, unable to save himself, he slid at frightening speed towards the precipice.

A spindly, stunt fir snagged him short of fatality. Subject to a rough rescue, spluttering the spray inhaled from the white water boiling down the river-course, he swore vengeance in outraged Paravian. Siantra’s shouts, more than his fluent insults, forestalled the scouts’ ready swords. Murderous still, unimpressed by his grasp of old language, the clan patrol guarding the fringes of Halwythwood preferred distrust over lenient caution.

They trussed his hands, no surprise, given such callous handling deserved the honest retort of his fists. The gag that followed imposed an indecency Tarens fought tooth and nail.

The scouts jerked the knots brutally tight, while Siantra sniped from the side-lines. “Well, what did you expect? You’ve trespassed without leave, and not only that, crossed the honour of Esfand’s ancestral name.”

Which provocation Tarens already had acknowledged in unvarnished words. Restraints alone forestalled his scathing redress: Jieret’s outrage demanded due reckoning. Dharkaron Avenger’s Black Spear take the hour he should face High Earl Cosach s’Valerient: a blood chieftain, a father, and unconscionably terrifying, an invested caithdein whose cowardice had let three youngsters hare off after the realm’s rightful duty to Rathain’s crown prince.

That dangerous trek into enemy territory had led onto the red field of war and entangled their fates, with one feckless boy’s life lost untimely.

Where Esfand’s rebellious impulse had strained the leash of adult interference, not every rigorous standard had slipped since the day of Earl Jieret’s authority. The patrol scouts that Tarens had thrashed to singed rage still reacted apace to unsanctioned intrusion.

They hauled his bulk upright. Efficient and quick, they disarmed him, then prodded his person at weapons’ point down the precarious, switched-back trail into the ravine. Met at the river’s edge by Esfand, and spoken for over the thundering rapids by Siantra’s passionate argument, he found himself blindfolded and hoisted on a sling across the white race of the Arwent. Forced, stumbling, over the slippery rocks on the far bank, then from chilly shade into sunlight, he smelled grass, ears deafened by the shrilling of summer cicadas in the parched scrub underfoot. He endured more brisk handling. Another tussle, that ended with him in duress, lashed by a stout rope on horseback. By then, his captors’ exasperated forbearance suggested his fight, or Siantra’s insistent appeal, had been heard.

“Rest easy, fellow!” the scout captain snapped. “You’re under our escort for a clan hearing.”

If Jieret’s inherited wisdom approved of the ruthless precautions, Tarens endured a pace that blistered his knees, painful sacrifice for the blessing of speed. His imperative charge to reach Halwythwood’s council scalded his nerves to unease. Each passing hour since the past evening, the gut wrench of his instincts screamed warning. Wherever Arithon fared in the Storlains, whatever his current activity, Tarens sensed that a crucial dynamic had turned for the worse.

Family ties, before Sighted urgency, shaped the High Earl of the North’s explosive response to the news of the prodigal children’s return. The message relay that sent word by notched arrows flagged him down where he stood in tense conference. Cosach ran out on the council’s debate over the True Sect hazard brewing at Etarra.

Burst into the lodge where his fair-haired wife nursed their four-month-old infant, he grinned ear to ear through his wiry beard and lunged for his weapons. “Esfand’s back at last!” Aware of her tears as she surged to arise, he kissed her forehead and resettled her before the babe lost its suckle and howled. “I’m going myself.” Busy with buckles, he answered her thought. “Laithen’s heard. She’s already away. When you’ve done with the wean, take over the reins and talk common sense to the chieftains. A few flaming maniacs think we can repel the Canon’s blood purge with a war band.”

The door flap slapped to his vigorous exit, through Jalienne’s bemused rejoinder, “I’m not the best choice to keep order in there. Ask me, our warmongering dolts should be cooled like a dog scrap with pails of flung water.”

“If only that worked,” Rathain’s caithdein lamented over his shoulder. A scrambled thud of hooves saw him mounted and gone, swiftly enough to meet the inbound scouts enroute from their post by the Arwent.

As usual, Laithen s’Idir’s stringent sense outpaced everyone else. Her advance dispatch saw a hide tent pitched in wait, tucked under the dappled shade at the southern fringe of Halwythwood.

Late-afternoon sunlight seeped through the tied-back entry when Cosach stalked in. He found pine torches staked in place, but unlit, beside a plank trestle surrounded with grass-stuffed hassocks. Surprised to raised eyebrows by the banner of Rathain, hung behind, his glance met the whipcord-tough woman who emerged from the shadows. “I’ve received state visitors with much less fuss. My son won’t be cowed. Are you trying to wake the fear of Dharkaron’s vengeance in your only daughter?”

“As if anyone could,” Laithen said, too blunt for his blustering. “Our youngsters may come in hungry and tired. Let’s welcome them home and hear their report. In formal quiet, before they are mobbed for details by a raucous audience.”

“Well.” Cosach gestured askance at the curtain strung to provide private quarters. “Jalienne will skin me alive if I stall our boy overnight.”

Laithen’s mouth quirked. Slender in restraint as a planted spear, she countered the feint. “They aren’t children, no matter they’ve not come of age. After this, you don’t think they deserve the respect of an adult reception?”

Cosach snorted. “Maybe.” He fumed, bunched broad shoulders, and swore with bad grace, then shucked his sword and filled the cramped tent with his restless anticipation. Ever the model of cool sobriety, Laithen leaned on a support pole to quell her impulse to pace.

A woodpecker’s tap pocked the stillness from the humid depths of the forest: no bird’s industrious foraging but a signal from a concealed sentry. Cosach froze between steps, while Laithen let go and shoved forward. Muscular High Earl and mercurial woman barely avoided collision as the outriders reined up lathered mounts in the glen. Both anxious parents poised with stopped breath until the boisterous commotion sorted itself out, and the dismounted pack of scouts swirled and parted.

The son whose rash exploits had sent him too dangerously far afield emerged first. Esfand was no longer the unfinished stripling, all elbows and knees with the gawky neck of adolescence. Taller, fleshed out, he advanced with confidence, his seal-dark clan braid secured with grass twine, and his leathers the worse for hard wear. Intent hazel, his eyes locked on the father poised at the tent’s entry.

Then mature poise shattered. Esfand surged forward in naked relief and burst out, agonized, “Khadrien—”

Cosach swept the lad into a bear hug. Gruff with pride for the young man in his clasp, he said, “Never mind. Later. We already know. Your mother’s well, and you have a new sister to welcome. Cordaya.”

Hard at Esfand’s heels came Siantra. Grown as well, but fretted rail thin, her coltish frame still moved with incongruous grace, but no more in impetuous innocence: under charcoal brows bunched into a frown, her enormous, pale eyes held an unearthly light. Met by her diminutive mother, she burst out, “I’m sorry! The black sword, Alithiel—”

“We’re aware of that, also.” Laithen embraced her daughter, tearful and smiling. “Khadrien’s exploits can be discussed later.” Overjoyed though she was by reunion, the fair-skinned outsider the scout guards hauled in blindfolded had not escaped her. “That won’t be his Grace. Who else have you brought us?”

Cosach scowled at the bound stranger, which prompted the patrol to present the unplanned arrival forthwith. “Inside,” he snapped, then, “You, as well,” to the son just reassessed at arm’s length. “Sit with us. I’ll hear your report once this trespasser’s case is settled to my satisfaction.”

Siantra and Esfand exchanged a tense glance, not canny enough to duck Laithen’s quicksilver intelligence. “Not now!” The jerk of her chin towards the tent implored them to retire without argument.

Commanded to the side-lines, the youngsters watched, silent, as the scouts dragged Tarens from horseback and hauled him to the tent for summary judgement. Laithen settled at the end of the trestle, overshadowed by Cosach, who stalked in and retrieved his sword. The baldric hung in place at his shoulder when the stranger’s person was manhandled before him and shoved onto his knees in the dirt.

“He’s unarmed?” Cosach cracked. “Then cut the wretch free. I would see a man’s face while he’s questioned.” Through the bustle as the scout escort wrestled their trussed prisoner back upright, the High Earl repeated Laithen’s clipped inquiry. “What have you brought us?”

Siantra’s swift assessment, called out of turn, “An ally who knows Prince Arithon better than we do!” entangled with Esfand’s appeal, “Let the fellow speak for himself.”

“Ally!” Surprise never softened High Earl Cosach to leniency. He kicked a stuffed hassock towards the armed scouts. “Sit the trespasser down.” Arms braced on the board at his back, he watched slit-eyed, while the scouts prodded their charge as directed, spring-wound to strike at the least provocation. They severed the knots at the intruder’s roped wrists, then whisked off the cloth bundled over his head.

Blond hair in need of a trim pasted the fellow’s flushed features: a visage moulded by country-bred honesty, handsome before the welted scar that disfigured his broken nose. Weathered to creases by sunburn, blue eyes blinked in the dazzle of sunlight shafted through the open tent flap.

A poised threat recessed into gloom, Cosach sized up the scouts’ catch at stilled leisure. His own stance stayed hackled as he found himself as directly surveyed in turn. The captive did little but chafe his cramped hands, an innocuous gesture that also lent space for his unmasked senses to reorient. Plain as a shout, his incensed silence protested his uncivil treatment.

“Rough times have returned,” Cosach allowed softly. “Town-born strays are apt to be head-hunters’ spies. Best give us your reason for slinking into the free wilds.”

The stranger’s response cut past Siantra’s protest. “I would have your name before I confide.” Head tipped upwards in dangerous inquiry, he laced his limbered fingers.

The realm’s caithdein showed teeth and responded with all of his titles. Then, mocking, he inclined his head and acknowledged the witness of Laithen s’Idir.

“Ah!” Wheaten eyebrows rose with brazen amusement. “By all means, I’ll endorse Sidir’s lineage for probity. Provided, of course, the lady serves also as unimpeachable oversight for my case in turn.” Clasped fists hardened, the rogue leaned aggressively forward. “I am known by Iyat-thos Tarens.” In flawless Paravian, he repeated Cosach’s state titles, added Laithen’s full name with deference, then declared, “Mind your impeccable tradition since I will deliver the tidings I bring on my feet!”

He shoved erect then, palpably angered as the armed guard behind slapped a hostile grip on their weapons.

Cosach’s barked order defused the attack. Equally matched in height and broad stature, he had not misread the capable stamp of the farmer. Yet the balanced stance wearing the guise of a crofter pitched more than his scouts onto prickling edge. Cosach acknowledged the fighting trim on a man whose business screamed primal danger.

Tarens invoked clanbred etiquette, crossed his wrists at the heart, and continued. “I bring word of your own. Be it known to s’Valerient kin that my best effort could not avert tragedy. Your boy, Khadrien, crossed the Wheel in Scarpdale in the brave service of Rathain’s prince.”

Laithen made a sound, hands pressed to her mouth, while Cosach’s chopped signal enforced her silence. “Town-whelped upstart! How dare you presume.”

“To your shame, on the contrary,” Tarens replied. “Explain why three youngsters not grown to majority left the safety of Halwythwood to shoulder a perilous cause for the realm. The answer you give better satisfy, obligated as I have been by the shade of your titled ancestor, Jieret s’Valerient. His outraged memory as a clan chieftain demands a reckoning in full.”

Cosach purpled.

“He’s telling the truth!” Siantra pealed, desperate.

Which shocking breach impelled Laithen to break protocol. A diminutive brown sparrow swooped in to scold at an eagle’s threat to the nest, she flung herself between the insolent stranger and Rathain’s incensed caithdein. “Sit down, both of you!” Her open palm slapped Cosach’s barrel chest, while she spun in chastisement on Tarens. “Don’t condemn the harsh choice you know nothing about. Ath above! If your claim of connection is genuine, then find the civilized reason to air both sides of the matter before you cause bloodshed.”

When Tarens folded back onto the hassock, face masked behind shuttered hands, she pealed over his shoulder to one of the scouts. “End this cruel falsehood. Now! I will not abide! You’re sent. Yes, at once! He’s assigned at the horse picket.”

Yet the person she summoned required no messenger: a sheepish cough and a crack in the privacy flap disclosed the eavesdropping presence of a gangling scamp in trail leathers, the carroty wisp of yesterday’s clan braid gnawed between nervous teeth. “I’m here, actually,” confessed Khadrien, singed red for the prank played on his aghast companions. “Sorry about that. But who could resist? Since you thought I was dead, you deserved the comeuppance for leaving me.” He managed no more, overturned with a yelp as Siantra and Esfand pounced both at once, knocked him flat, and pounded him breathless.

Amid bemused commotion, Laithen transferred her repressive scowl from Cosach. Sympathy moved her to grip Tarens’s wrist as she realized his shaken clasp masked relieved tears.

She said quickly, “We had word from a Sorcerer, yes, within days. The youngsters should have been informed straightaway. Since our miscreant carelessly lost the heirloom sword and the horse, the Fellowship decided he had no further business mucking about in the Kingdom of Havish. Asandir dispatched Khadri home from the focus circle at Fiaduwynne. As you see, he has suffered less than he deserved. I’m so sorry! No one meant to be callous. We had no idea that you’d shouldered a harrowing trip and misplaced anguish in our behalf.”

Cosach recoiled and roared at Laithen, “Dharkaron’s grief, woman! What insanity prompts your trust in an outsider whose outrageous claim is not verified?”

Laithen paused. Rod thin, she glared upwards at her chieftain: who backed off a step, hiked one hip on the trestle, and perched in stonewalled confrontation.

Laithen’s whiplash grin followed. “Likely I’ve seen the same thing as my daughter. This man shares your lineage in truth. You’re not convinced yet? Let me show you proof.”

She bent once more to the town-born on the hassock, stunned yet in mortified after-shock. “Here’s the filthy secret to dealing with Khadrien. If his exploits bother your conscience again, understand that fecklessness runs in his blood. As our High Earl’s family descends from Barach, here’s the flip side of history: Khadri’s branch springs from the sister, who wed Sevrand s’Brydion.”

Tarens lowered his hands. “You say Jeynsa married the bullheaded nephew of Alestron’s warmongering duke?” Through an unembarrassed sheen of stalled tears, his expression showed genuine horror. “The minx! Was she mad to breed with that clutch of rife trouble?” He winced. “Though fiends plague the hindmost, nobody else owned the cast-iron bollocks to deal with her spitfire nature.”

All at once, he succumbed to the irony, threw back his blond head, and laughed.

When finally Iyat-thos recovered his breath, he bypassed the shield of Laithen’s acceptance and tackled Cosach’s recalcitrance directly. “I’ve been endowed with Jieret’s memories and the full measure of his trained skills. Not to supplant your sworn charge as caithdein, but to grant Arithon a reliable ally to access his forgotten past.”

Cosach fielded the remarkable statement, prepared to seek disposition. “This is an appeal?”

“Perhaps,” Tarens ventured. “I came to help your effort to contact his Grace and restore his connection with Rathain’s feal clans. As a friend, I entreat your council to weigh my attributes in good faith. My background bought your youngsters safe passage through Backwater.” Through the distraction of Khadrien’s glib talk, and Siantra and Esfand’s recounted experience, the outsider offered, “A town-bred crofter might move freely where clansfolk would face deadly risk.”

Granted his own shrewd angle of insight, Cosach spun and accosted the youngsters in cahoots by the curtained alcove. “I’ll have your opinion before your report! Do I rely on this fellow to keep the integrity of our affairs?”

As observer, Laithen interpreted two boys’ crest-fallen consternation, then lost her breath, chilled by the uncanny depth in her daughter’s regard. “Surely we must.” She brushed off her chieftain’s disgruntled surprise. “Well, how else can we hope to thwart these three miscreants from trying their next lame-brained escapade?”

But Cosach’s assessment of the errant trio belied her dismissive remark. The stunning expansion of Siantra’s talent, offset by Esfand’s obdurate commitment and Khadrien’s hot-headed impulses, suggested that the three together posed something greater than their individual destinies.

“Ath wept!” muttered Cosach, jellied by a fore-running tremor of prescience. He folded onto the nearest hassock and dismissed the scouts’ guard from the tent. His capitulation called upon Laithen to scrounge someone’s brandy and a suitable vessel.

“Iyat-thos!” he concluded in outright demand. “You’re prepared to swear a guest’s oath of amity?”

Shown the man’s unreserved acquiescence, Cosach’s broad gesture invited the townsman to claim a proper seat at the trestle. “Let’s hear your story. Leave nothing out! You say our dead ancestry has seen fit to provide living guidance from beyond the veil? Then I’ll have the facts on the matter straight up! What under Athera’s mysteries are Rathain’s liege folk being stiffened to face?”