Читать книгу Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 14

The swift onset of evening in the high Storlains welled a breath of dire cold off the glaciers, even in summer. Arithon shivered, chilled since the cloud-bank that rolled over the peaks had shrouded the sunlight. Caught in the gloaming with clothing and hair still damp from his wash in a freshet, he secured his gleaned bundle of rushes. Then he turned his dispirited steps towards the cabin in the ravine.

Night’s gloom deepened his cankered malaise. He skirted the feathered boughs of stunt firs, unmoved by the primal thrill of a wolf pack howling beyond the ridge. The vigorous rustles of nocturnal creatures failed to shake off his low spirits. Though a night and full day of hard labour had laid Vivet’s knifed attacker to rest, the nameless man’s violent passage left a nagging sense of unease.

No record remained to decipher the final words left unsaid. Arithon’s sensitive talent had failed to sift meaningful clues from the roiled cascade of the regional flux lines.

That arcane endeavour, and the back-breaking chore of hauling loose stone for a grave cairn, yielded an exhaustion without numb relief. Subsequent pursuit of wild herbals fell short as a peaceful distraction. Scraped hands and the ache of spent muscle could not blunt the appalling wound to his spirit.

Arithon had never grappled the scope of such pain. The brute history packed into a sliver of crystal seared his heart-strings to anguish and unreeled a desolate future.

Last place on Athera he wished to revisit, the cabin offered the nearest shelter. He needed the immediate warmth to dry off and sleep before he moved on.

The rose tint of the afterglow bled from the ranges as he retraced his path down the remnant track, cut by the harness mule that had once hauled an ice cutter’s sledges. Spent, he crossed the streamlet and mounted the log stair, zigzagged upwards from the deep ravine. His arrival at the derelict shack found no one inside. The unlatched door swung open to fastened shutters and quiet.

Except yesterday’s velvet-thick darkness had changed. No longer musty, the air wore the spiked fragrance of balsam. The boards underfoot were swept clean of debris. Once his fumbling, chilled hands lit a spill, he took stock of Vivet’s industrious tenancy: a bed of cut pine boughs arranged in one corner; also a table fashioned from the salvaged wreck of a muleteer’s sleigh. Logs hewn from a deadfall served as makeshift seats, with birch kindling stacked by the hearth.

The axe wielded to split the stockpiled fuel seemed nowhere in evidence.

Arithon ignited the woodchips in the grate. The quickened flame melted the shadows and confirmed: the tiny cabin lay empty around him, with Vivet gone off on her own.

The small blaze burned fast. Arithon added more logs. Then he shed the cross-strap of his baldric, unslung his sheathed sword, and settled to rest by the fireside with the black blade propped against his bent knees. He soaked in the heat, grateful for privacy. Later was soon enough to assist Vivet’s busy intent to claim residence. Since noose traps for game were best set before daybreak, he catnapped, forehead braced on the crooked forearm that cradled his weapon.

If the exquisite enchantments forged into the weapon spun him uncanny dreams, he was not given solitude to plumb their content. The scrape of the door, then the icy draught wafted over the threshold signalled Vivet’s return.

Snapped awake, Arithon surged erect in apology. “I shall leave at once for your peace of mind.”

But if his presence seemed cause for dismay, the woman did not shrink from the surprise encounter. The knot torch in her hand revealed tidied hair, russet coils pinned at her nape with a hazel sprig still jewelled with peridot leaves. She carried two woodcocks strung up by the legs. Also a resourceful haul of wild berries, tubers, and greens, bundled up in her mended overskirt. Pale cream, marked with bruises, her oval face turned. Wide-eyed, she regarded him.

“Please stay. I don’t fear you.” The hatchet looped through her sash lent teeth to a statement at odds with her tremulous grip on the brand.

Moved under the whispered flutter of flame, Vivet spilled her bounty upon the crude table.

“I brought food for two. In case you came back.” She nodded towards the evergreen bed, where the brightened light showed a cache of muddied belongings. “My things tumbled down-slope in the scuffle last evening. I saw your work during my search to recover them. You need not have shouldered my troubles to start with, far less stayed on to give decent burial to a criminal stranger’s remains. A meal’s the least you deserve for the kindness.”

Pain hitched her hesitant step. The livid bruises on her throat and neck strained her voice husky with swelling. Defiantly able to fend for herself, she jammed the knife used to dispatch her assailant into the boards, then attacked the gruesome task of dressing game.

Her presumptive gesture of repayment galled. Arithon shook off a stab of pique. Tired past sense, he recovered his misplaced courtesy. “At least allow me my fair share of the plucking.”

“I require no help!” Vivet’s quaver banished him to a safe distance.

Arithon tried conversation to soothe her jagged aggression. “You mentioned before you were on your way home?”

Vivet’s pinched mouth jerked. “Why not say what you think?” Knife brandished to lop off the birds’ heads, she sighed. “Surely you’d say these rugged mountains are no place for a woman alone.”

Which venomous bitterness attacked first in assumption: that men believed female vulnerability invited the opportune assault of a predator. Masterbard, healer, Arithon let her stung denouncement flounder in silence.

For a while, only the torch-flame whickered in dialogue with the drawing blaze in the fire-place.

Vivet presently dropped the halfway-gutted bird and banged down her fists. “Damn you!” Outrage pointed enough to drill flint turned her battered face towards him. “You act as though naught in the world has gone wrong!”

But the purple contusions on her flesh shouted testament to the contrary.

To stand with a sword, even sheathed, posed a threat. Arithon tucked up and sat by the hearth. He laid the shining, obsidian blade flat, deferent to the axe she kept within reach. “Should I forget? You knifed your attacker.” Arms folded atop his bent knees, he added, “I’ve witnessed your courage. Therefore, I’m able to bow to your fears without prejudice.” His grave regard was an initiate sorcerer’s, grounded in the self-knowledge to bear the most vicious hatred, unflinching.

Vivet spun away. The gleam on her hair like warm carnelian, she raised her blood-smeared wrist to her cheek to blot her ashamed tears.

Arithon’s patient remonstrance pursued her. “A past act of abuse can’t vanquish the strength of the survivor I see before me.” He petitioned for truce. “Tonight’s calm is equally real. And without pretence, despite the after-shock of an unspeakable trauma.”

Vivet quivered. Fragile poise undone at a stroke, she snatched the knife from the trestle and bolted. Her tempestuous exit slammed the plank door, forceful enough to shake cobwebs down from the rafters.

She could not be gone long. Without a wool mantle, the relentless cold must outface her emotional storm. Arithon slid the black sword out of sight behind the stacked firewood. Then he took charge of the half-prepared meal, goaded by the ruthless irony: that his platitude consoled nothing. Within and without, his presence was emptied by desolation. The core of his heart had been just as savaged as Vivet’s used body. Naught existed in the wide world to salve the anguish encountered within these four walls. His own needled urge to take flight found no respite in the rote plucking of carcasses.

Yet a master’s awareness viewed the hard road ahead without quarter. All pain must be measured, and met, and finally conquered. Life demanded resilience. Or else the mired spirit would languish, forlorn, crippled under self-indulgent regret.

Arithon stuffed the split birds with wild onion, then wrapped them in herb leaves for flavour. Spitted, they roasted over the coals, while his makeshift oven contrived with flat rocks baked the tubers inside their scrubbed skins.

Vivet returned to that savoury aroma, her downcast eyes puffed, and her arms burdened with additional evergreen. Not to seem useless, she dropped the fresh boughs for his bed in the opposite corner.

“I’m sorry.” Her strained limp brought her back towards the trestle. “I’ve given poor thanks for your civil forbearance.”

Arithon shifted at once to restore space between them.

“Stay,” Vivet objected, singed red with shame. “Don’t freeze yourself on the floor for my sake.”

The first torch had burned down. She kindled another and wedged the stake upright before perching in rigid defiance across the table.

His own raw emotion battened in shadow, Arithon studied her. Up close, underneath the patched bruises, her skin was too young for crow’s-feet. Barely into her twenties, she had a sparrow’s pert grace, a firm chin, apple cheeks, and an expressive dimple beneath coral lips. Her independence carried the cracked fragility of fine porcelain, savagely used but not ruined, though her shadowed glance had forever lost the care-free sparkle of innocence.

“I was returning to Ettinmere Settlement,” she admitted, a brazen effort to forge trust in good faith. Sooty circles beneath downcast lashes wore the pouches of recurrent weeping. Trembling unmasked her false confidence as she added, “I have family there. A father, now passed. Three brothers. Two married sisters. My mother fell ill. I heard through a fur trader. But no word since then to know if she’s living.”

Vivet’s lids flicked up, her bloodshot eyes the vivid blue of a fair-weather lake. “My people are proud of their insular ways. They’ll say, perhaps rightly, I should not have run off on a feckless adventure to Deal.”

The moment filled with the sibilant crackle of flames, while wind off the peaks swooped over the roof shakes, and prised a complaint from a squeaky shutter. Arithon studied Vivet’s clenched hands, without obvious marks of a gainful profession. Distress obscured her true personality. Left to his musician’s gift, he sifted the overtones of her remark and answered her plaintive uncertainty. “You’d have had good reason to seek your own way. One just as important as the resolve that drives your contrite return.”

Vivet’s breath hitched. “More than anything, I wanted the learning to read and write.” More tears might have spilled, had she not been wrung dry. Her loosened hair hazed under flame-light, she huddled like a storm-battered bird, fluffed after a cruel drenching. Her panicky outburst escaped before thought, “Fatemaster’s mercy, I daren’t be seen by my people like this!”

And that sharp, fateful phrase struck the sensitive ear of the Masterbard. Arithon sounded the unpremeditated truth and mapped Vivet’s untenable conflict. Beneath fear, under desperate, trapped rage and stunned hurt in the aftermath of violation, her mangled spirit required the unpressured solitude to recoup and heal. There, vital need floundered into the pit of her frantic anxiety. Wing-broken, her shattered confidence quickened the terror of being alone.

Arithon committed himself without thought. Rootless after his own love’s betrayal, the ashes of his desire embraced Vivet’s agonized need, uncontested.

Distraught incentive cared very little how long her predicament shackled him. Since his ancestral compassion abandoned no wounded spirit to languish, the man sanctioned as the Crown Prince of Rathain plucked the spit off the hearth in deferent anonymity.

“Your brace of woodcock appear to be roasted.” Pain masked by the trivial matter of supper, he set the unwarranted seal on his future. “You need go nowhere before you are ready. I’ll keep watch at the door while you sleep. When you’re comfortable travelling, and if you wish, I’ll guard your way back to your kinfolk in Ettinmere.”

Vivet’s tension unburdened in flooding relief. Arithon rode the impulse of his generosity, salved by his power to offer redress, where his personal hurt found no solace. No farsighted glimpse of dire complication ruffled his sensitive instincts.

Instead, as the evening deepened, the quiet camaraderie shaped by the meal wove a web of frail magic. Meat knifed off the bone and eaten with fingers wore down reserved self-consciousness. His teasing remark about duelling with straws to determine who washed up, without pots and plates, almost raised Vivet’s shy smile. The fleeting flicker of forgotten joy touched the moment she thought he looked elsewhere.

Eased by a beauty that transformed her marked face, Arithon conceded her path to recovery was not entirely one-sided. Though a prolonged stay at the cabin did nothing for his pierced heart, his earnest offer of escort to Ettinmere perhaps posed an unforeseen advantage. Vivet’s grateful family might give him shelter. If not to over-winter in safety, at least he might bargain for warmer clothing and needful supplies. The settlement was remote. Its insular society, hidebound in tradition, shunned outsiders and distrusted Sunwheel priests. As a passing haven, the site could thwart the deadly reach of his enemies.

The present meanwhile rested on the ordinary. While Vivet attended her necessities outside, Arithon tossed their leftovers through the window to fatten the scavenging mice. He secured the loose shutter, replaced the spent torch with a rushlight, and banked the embers in the fire-place. After Vivet’s return, he took up his sword and moved the piled evergreen boughs for his bed to the threshold. Then he sat with his back against the shut door. Tired himself, he honoured his word: burned reckless resource to keep wakeful vigil until the woman settled her nerves and rest overcame her anxiety.

The rushlight burned low. Melted into shadow, the swept boards smelled of damp. Long fled, the sweet fragrance of the bundled herbs once hung to dry in the rafters. No ephemeral trace of the healer’s presence remained to chafe Arithon’s overkeyed senses.

Aching, bereft, he watched Vivet fight the stir of incipient nightmares. Reflection sparked a fitful gleam in her opened eyes until the reed ember winked out. She did not toss and turn but lay in taut stillness into the deeps of the night. Chafed by her turbulent tension, and haunted by other ghosts from his gapped memory, Arithon yearned for the balm of his talent on the lyranthe. The cabin’s too-personal history made the silence ring loud on his ear. Each breath offended his nostrils with the stinging pungency of balsam: a strong scent, not her, and a signal wrongness that frayed every natural instinct.

Fretted past sense, Arithon shouldered the watch through another wearisome hour. The thud of his heart-beat yearned for another woman’s secretive thoughts. He felt more alone than ever before in his years of extended life.

The onerous minutes crept by. The risen moon silvered the cracks in the shutter. Naught stirred the fir boughs outside but the breeze, while the shuttlecock flight of an owl chased mice come to gorge upon the scrapped bones.

Until Vivet broke the unbearable quiet with a tremulous whisper, “I’m sorry. I never asked for your name.”

“Call me by Arin,” said the Prince of Rathain, disinclined to share his identity. That mistake had harmed the crofters in Kelsing, whose fortunes had turned for the worse by his presence. Better to consign Vivet’s well-being to her family and depart without leaving a trace.

Time came at long last when the body’s exhaustion surmounted distress and the throbbing complaint of fresh injuries. Vivet’s tortured breathing deepened and quieted. Beyond weary himself, Arithon fashioned a simple cantrip to awaken himself before sunrise. Then he retired the sword and snugged down his mantle. His depleted awareness let go at once. Alert for too long, reserves utterly spent, he welcomed oblivion and plunged without care into dreamless sleep. But not as he wished, until dawn.

Pulled from the drugged syrup of black-out exhaustion, Arithon stirred to the blissful, bold heat of a woman’s hands on him: fingers that teased through his parted clothes and caressed him with intimate urgency. Her touch trembled, shameless, arousing as fire, intoxicate with the fierce promise of release. The assault on his undone defences caught his breath, then drove the wind from him, branding his skin with desire that rushed him senseless.

He roused, consumed. Vital, alive, hazed by animal lust after repressive years of cruel abstinence, his flesh screamed. The air he fought into punched lungs wrung him dizzy. Clinging as velvet, musked in piquant smoke, the scent of exotic perfume unmoored him. He need only surrender himself. Falling into the abyss of raw pleasure, he plunged heedless towards blind conflagration. Past reason, the urgent clamour of male ecstasy trampled his desolate hurt.

Confusion welcomed the storm wind of passion, a forceful antidote for the heart-break that stranded him in bleak solitude. A longing too vast to contain might be drowned, if only for one fleeting moment.

If he dreamed, here was surcease. Veiled in a silken fall of warm hair, raised to heightened torment by blind need, Arithon groaned. Thought fled as her fecund weight straddled him.

Reflex took over. Yearning drove the leap of his being: but no answering spiral surged in response. No rarefied synergy kindled delight. The lightning bolt of her counterpoint harmony did not rise to balance him. If ever he had shared such exquisite joy, or flown, bedazzled, into the glory of a matched consummation, no such seamless experience unfolded. His spirit encountered no flowering grandeur but launched into nothing, unpartnered. No piercing tenderness thrilled his raced pulse with the grace of a mirrored response.

The hands gripping his shoulders were none that he knew: and in the burgeoning blaze where emotion should have melted him into cascading completion, Arithon slammed, bewildered, against an implacable separation.

In fact, the glad shimmer of physical pleasure on her part was utterly absent.

This frenetic bid to possess him was not carefree eagerness but the desperation of dread, overwritten by calculation. His shaken faculties curdled. Pain of the flesh and anguish of mind violated his initiate’s integrity.

Arithon recoiled as though struck in the gut. He broke the chokehold of her embrace. Wrenched free of her naked weight in revulsion that tore the eyelets of his unstrung laces out of his rifled clothing. Slammed backward against the cabin’s latched door, he cried out. The jolt to his frame scarcely registered. Cold to the bone, breached desire quenched utterly, he stared reeling into the dark, blistered to mage-sighted outrage.

The waif’s face he confronted wore bruises.

“Vivet!” he shouted, aghast. “Ath’s greater mercy!” Moved again, jackknifed upright, Arithon snapped off his shredded shirt. He flung her the garment with a hoarse plea to cover her nakedness. “What are you about? Grace above, you can’t want this! Not from me, tonight, surely not from any man!”

“Believe it.” She crumpled, shivering, the mangled cloth crammed beneath her soaked cheek. Damaged in body and spirit, she languished in artless prostration amid the scattered balsam. “More than life, I crave your affection.”

Which was an outright lie. The note of her falsehood jarred his musician’s ear and splashed ugly echoes across his rogue far-sight.

Arithon jerked away lest she debase herself further. Yanked up his small-clothes and breeches, even as she stretched and clasped his ankles in entreaty.

Offended, he shoved her off. “What do you want of me, Vivet?” Furious, he pressured her frigid intent. “Comfort? Favour? Security? Do you wish a house, a mate, or just a randy champion to cosset your injuries on a pedestal? Is it children you want to salve loneliness? Or do you seek a stranger’s infatuated sympathy to bury your sorrows? Take care how you answer! I am no puppet to be yanked on the strings of a craven manipulation.”

“I want nothing!” she retorted. “Only to win back a measure of happiness.”

Which indignant denial made Arithon feel soiled. “Stop cheating yourself.” The heated air gagged him, smoke-thick, floral sweet, and cloying enough to blanket his senses. “Tell me the truth before I walk out!”

She hung her head. Tangled hair, fallen, muffled her plea, “Is your offer to guard me so easily shaken?”

Sickened, wrung dizzy by his raced pulse and the mangle of grief left by his own ravaged hope, Arithon side-stepped and flung open the shutter. He needed the shock of cold air in his lungs. Anything to quench the rife scald of his temper, before he vented his outrage and struck her.

Whatever forsaken sentiment drove her, Vivet rejected all instinct for self-preservation. “Why spurn my thanks for your generosity?”

Arithon met her pandering question with sarcasm. “Should I succumb? A strumpet requires less attention. How long, before you also demand my loyalty and my confidence? Poppet, enlighten me. Is wanton sport in my bed worth so much?”

But his cruel bid to win solitude failed to shake her tawdry masquerade. “The choice, of course, is still yours to make.”

Arithon’s smile bared teeth in the moonlight. “And if I am ruthless? Would you balk at vice? Or protest if my habits don’t suit your fancy?”

“I trust you,” she insisted. “Give my favour a chance.”

“Blindly?” he shot back, the more vicious as his rocked equilibrium resettled.

“Even so.” She swallowed, her bruised features ribboned with tears. Piteous under his blistering scorn, she wrestled down sobs to finish. “Yes. Blindly.”

“Then you debase yourself like a dock-side whore! Why throw me your charms without self-respect? That’s a dangerous folly. Because I could take you, Vivet, on those libertine terms. Hard and fast, with no pang of remorse, because to do otherwise mocks integrity.”

The revilement that ought to have shaken her only clenched her obstinate fingers in his rucked shirt. “Even so. I offer.”

His response mocked. “You offer me what?”

Moonlight mottled her mussed hair and shadowed her eyes too deeply to read what he sought: the least trace of the honest, misplaced feelings she denied for who knew what reckless purpose.

Restored to command by the bite of the draught, Arithon tried again to rend the pretence driving her to self-destruction. “Then who will drink the cup of pain that remains when I have deserted you?” He gripped the sill. Presented his back, whipped to a shiver that taxed his chilled frame. Masterbard, trained to interpret emotional nuance, he braced himself against flinching mercy and pitched his revulsion to break her. “For you would waken alone, my hot strumpet, because the passion you tender with such persistence is none of my making!”

Her riposte stung with anger. “Then go ahead and abandon me now since I’m ruined for life in the eyes of my kinfolk!”

Surprise caught him short. Arithon’s mage-sighted faculties slipped as her admission smashed his expectation. While he doused the blindsided scald of his temperament, sorting the puzzle of altered dynamics, Vivet hung shieldless and vulnerable through a silence that lasted too long. Shattered, she lunged upright. Faster than thought, she plucked out the trapper’s knife left impaled in the table-top. Steel flashed in self-determined aggression. Not against him, but angled inwards to pierce her own heart.

Arithon moved then. Shoved off the sill, he gripped her forearm with bone-crushing force. The blade tumbled free and clattered to the floor. The metallic clang too loud in his ears, he crushed Vivet’s balked agony into submission against his bare chest.

The contact unravelled his barriers again, spun him off centre, and ripped him wide open.

He reeled, fighting to ground his unhinged perception. Trained reflex escaped him. The exotic fragrance of Vivet’s perfume sucked his subtle awareness headlong into her fevered passion. Enveloped by frightening, intimate empathy, he drowned in the heat off her skin.

Her naked desire stormed his reserve. Thrown under redoubled assault and wrestling his besieged intellect, Arithon fought to breathe. The tainted air whirled him giddy and sapped his will to stay upright. Carnal instinct this time found no sheet-anchor. Nothing to stay his innate male response to her female bid for possessive conquest.

Dimly, he realized something was wrong. This prepotent beguilement could not be natural. In fact, his adamant outrage spoke true: a narcotic herb, unknown to his training, swirled through the trapped smoke in the cabin.

Disgust restored reason. Arithon shed Vivet’s clinging embrace. Plunged back to the window, he sucked a clean breath. Then he bent and retrieved the loose knife. Moved on, revolted, he dodged Vivet’s lunge and snapped the axe out of her reach. One stroke smashed the latched shutter opposite. He thrust the helve through, hurled the weapon into the ravine, beyond recovery until morning.

Arithon secured his abandoned sword next. Chest bursting, he surged to the hearth, where he hooked the hot iron damper with the quillon and reopened the draw of the flue. His kick scattered the poisonous coals. Tainted smoke swirled. He backed in retreat. Braced at the gapped window, he leashed his fired nerves. Inhaled the fresh air, again and again, while the restored draught cleared the fumes of Vivet’s potent aphrodisiac.

Streamed sweat and reaction by then made him shiver. Bitterly chilled, Arithon waited until his mage-trained reflex threw off the intoxication. In sharp command, fully guarded at last, he turned back and regarded the pitiful woman huddled in distraught collapse.

She would be freezing, unclad as she was. Arithon stirred to locate her shucked cloak. Minded as well to recover his jacket, he kept knife and black sword in hand, as much to shave tinder and rebuild the fire as to foil another attempted suicide.

Vivet flinched from his step. Weeping, she shouted, “I meant you no harm!”

Arithon granted her histrionics no sympathy. “Don’t prevaricate!” He hooked up the mantle from her rumpled bed. “I know my butchery better than that.” The cloth he shook out flicked over her shoulders, without human contact. “Why, Vivet? How could a planned seduction mend a rift with your family?”

He extended no hand to raise her up. No touch assuaged her limp pathos.

While the icy breeze leached the warmth from the cabin, Arithon retrieved his profaned shirt. Distasteful of the narcotic residue ingrained in the fabric, he proceeded with riveted patience to lay a fresh fire with kindling and birch. “I will listen,” he said, “when you’ve regained composure. Let’s discuss your problem with adult sense, or else forfeit my pledge to assist a safe return to your kinfolk.”

Althain Tower blazed with light from top floor to sallyport, a rare sight in the misty dark, where little but wind whipped the lichened rocks, gusts moaning a constant dirge through the stunt scrub and briar. Travellers seldom paused on Atainia’s bleak heath, bald hills heaped against the desolate Bittern, once laid to waste in a Second Age battle. Yet this night’s observer was not mortal.

Discorporate Sorcerer, summoned in haste, Kharadmon viewed with alarm the glow smeared through the fog from the library’s unshuttered arrow-slits. Sethvir’s normal, daft habit neglected the sconces, unless crisis threatened. Kharadmon reassessed the scale of the trouble behind this display, come already enraged by a train of events that defied credibility.

A cold gust embedded in summer’s northern chill, the Sorcerer’s vexed passage snarled the brush like jerked knit. His shade entered the tower with a gale-force shriek that rattled the panes in the casements.

Sethvir, Warden of Althain, peered up from his vigil, the black onyx table under his spidery hands cleared of pen nibs and clutter. Without his bastion of books and loose parchments, pocked with uncorked ink-wells and tea-mugs, he looked lost. The neglected beard tufted as a mouse nest overpowered his wizened features. But not his pale eyes, which tracked Kharadmon’s entry with piercing focus.

Keen as steel unsheathed, he did not prevaricate. “Don’t start, with Davien! We have worse afoot than his capricious obstinacy.”

“The Betrayer can jump with his eyes crossed and hang himself!” Kharadmon’s gusty essence prowled the chamber, candleflames guttering in his wake. “Was Luhaine stark crazy? Why should he shoulder the crass bargain with Seshkrozchiel to spare the Betrayer’s restored skin from decay? Am I meant to applaud him for back-handed genius? The wind-bag stickler is exquisitely fit to bore a great drake out of its skull, if the fool’s move had not seen him entombed for as long as that dragon’s sequestered in hibernation!”

Harangued to whipped elf-locks, Sethvir straightened to interrupt the tirade.

“Ah, no,” Kharadmon ranted, “you’re too cleverly glib! Don’t try again to excuse Davien’s back-stabbing games or brush off his baggage of vengeful neglect. Isn’t the criminal practice of the Koriani Matriarch busting our bollocks enough? That’s if our Fellowship has got a virile pair left intact between us!”

While the Warden of Althain stared, owlish, Kharadmon delivered his blistering grievance. “Well, you must have seen how that web-spinning crone’s blindsided Elaira’s perception.”

Sethvir did not flinch, which spoke volumes. “Do you think,” he lamented, “that current awareness of Arithon’s straits could do aught but destroy her last peace of mind?”

The wind devil seethed up by Kharadmon’s ire spiked hoar-frost across polished stone. “She would be free to act if her sight were not compromised!”

Althain’s warden blinked. “Free? At the risk of breaking her crown prince’s trust?”

Which unmalleable point should have reined a more sensible colleague’s rant up short: for Arithon’s need to secure Elaira’s safety, the enchantress who loved him had sworn she would keep his past liaison with her under a seal of secrecy.

But no appeal to moral nuance tamed Kharadmon’s agonized tirade. “Just what is Prime Selidie masking from view?”

Sethvir blinked again, and doggedly side-stepped. “You’re needed elsewhere. Traithe must be escorted away from Rathain. Yes, with all speed! He’s at dreadful risk. Twice, he’s been hounded by True Sect diviners since he challenged the trial for witchcraft as Daliana’s advocate.”

Which bitter heroic had failed, in the end, to prevent the True Sect usurpation of Lysaer’s governance of Etarra. Kharadmon stilled his arctic tantrum to object.

“No! Forget Asandir.” Sethvir shoved erect. “He’s posted back to Havish directly to finish the High Queen’s instruction.” Past argument, the risk of King Gestry’s tragic sacrifice must not be repeated. “If the next ill turn calls a crowned sovereign to rise to the kingdom’s defence, we don’t have another grown s’Lornmein heir strong enough to bear the succession!”

“But Havish lies under no threat, tonight!” Kharadmon blasted in rejoinder. “And if, in fact, Traithe was in serious jeopardy, you’d have dispatched me there directly without this hopscotch summons through Althain Tower.”

Sethvir crumpled and sat, his eyes glacial turquoise. “You can’t break charter law. Or kite off to beard the Prime Matriarch without touching off a mass catastrophe.”

Kharadmon snorted with freezing contempt. “Thwarted by your shell game of diversion? I might wish instead Davien’s treasonous anarchy would smash Asandir’s unholy pact with the sisterhood at a stroke! Someone should obliterate that nest of harpies.”

“I know.” Sethvir foresaw all the bleak probabilities. The Seven’s hamstrung resource could scarcely stem the bleeding breach as Selidie’s plots pitched their guardianship of Athera to shambles. Tough as nails amid building disaster, he folded veined knuckles and temporized. “The short-term defeat may not lose us the war. And I lit up the tower on the outside chance Davien might take notice. A token show of his support at this pass might give the Prime wary pause.”

But even provoked a third time, Kharadmon never swerved. “What rankling ploy is that she-spider hatching?”

“Today? Another manipulation against us.” Sethvir picked a loose thread from his sleeve and sighed. “Her mission is desperate. Either she must snare a talented candidate strong enough to survive the succession, or she has to defeat the compact and fall back on her order’s cache of proscribed secrets. For one cause, or both, she’s playing a puppet initiate from Deal as the woebegone victim of rape.”

“And?” Kharadmon prompted, while the anguished pause stretched to the whicker of candleflame.

Sethvir glanced up, desolate. “The chit’s being used as the baited trap to exploit the glaring flaw in Prince Arithon’s character.”

The discorporate Sorcerer recoiled, aghast. “To acquire his blood-line?”

“Or break him,” Sethvir said, unflinching. “Either convenient happenstance suits the sisterhood’s cause.”

The worrisome scene tracked by Althain’s Warden unfolded in the Storlains, well into the nadir of night. The old ice-cutter’s cabin by then was snug, even cozy under latched shutters. Lit rushes spilled softer light over the makeshift trestle, littered with wintergreen sprigs shorn of berries to compound a liniment.

Vivet refused the astringent paste, mashed to soothe her livid bruises. “I’ll not touch the rank stuff!” She puffed a vexed breath. “It stings, and the smell makes me queasy.”

Seated opposite, his bowl of spurned remedy a strained declaration of tension between them, the Crown Prince of Rathain measured her sullen regard, too canny to rise to the bait. A woman scorned, Vivet well might try rejection as her next inveigling weapon. Braced by the tingling scent of crushed herbals, he matched her complaint with cool silence and did not volunteer to poultice her injuries.

Vivet slapped down her comb. Reclothed, erect in the tatters of her dignity, she began with crisp yanks to rebraid her hair. Arithon watched, careful to dampen the outrage smouldering beneath his leashed temper. As deeply betrayed by another woman, even yet beloved beyond measure, he dared not lose his grip on the embedded hurt that clouded his mage-sighted discipline. Vivet’s pique perhaps stemmed from misdirected pain and not venal manipulation.

Mindful of his thoughtless power to wound, Arithon waited for accurate insight, while she eyed him sidewise, unchastened. Empathy forgave her contrary behaviour, given how little he knew of the crisis she battled. Trauma alone would not drive an intelligent young woman to fling herself on him, try suicide, then irrationally neglect the physical marks of abuse.

Initiate restraint must outlast moody tumult. Tidied himself, reclad in his marred shirt, and in charge of both knife and his shoulder-slung sword, Arithon perched on the makeshift log seat.

He could do nothing else.

Althain’s Warden witnessed, in full, the invidious thread of Prime Selidie’s design. An innocent female, cast as victimized pawn, paired with the damning, implied falsehood sown by an incomplete record left planted in crystal, had skewed Arithon’s internal boundaries. The mix spelled disaster. Vivet’s straits grappled his vulnerability, abrasive as slivered glass on torn nerves in the confines of the remote cabin.

The blood-bound tenets of Rathain’s crown heritage disallowed comfort, or distance. S’Ahelas foresight stayed silent, as well, while Arithon’s recoil sought the blind solace of an outside distraction: easier for him to redress Vivet’s woes than to bear his own desolation.

Sethvir’s flash-point acuity plumbed the abyss of uncertainty caused by the prince’s blocked memory. Stripped of Tarens’s steadfast loyalty, Arithon’s purposful character lost firm direction. Where safety and solitude would have granted space for mage training to master the impasse, Arithon endured in resigned suspension, his innate faculties entrained on another’s behalf.

The battered victim in front of him trembled, too damaged to function. Sent as she was on a mission to ensnare him through her human weakness, Vivet leaned, and commanded his strength.

“What if my future is ruined?” she confided in jagged distress.

Arithon measured her lustrous hair, the blemished symmetry of temple and cheek, then the expressive eyelashes and pert chin. Against her dispirited anguish, he said, “You are individual as a melody sung once, then lost in a storm. Calm will refound the cadence again. Beauty survives, and healing demands a fallow time for renewal.” His tender entreaty insistent, he added, “I promise you this. The harm you have suffered is an affront to all that is right in the world. You will find the joy that eludes you tonight. But only if you gather your courage, stay the course, and live in the present.”

Vivet convulsed with sobs. He did not gather her misery close or smooth back the hair slicked to her swollen cheeks. And yet, though his intimate trust remained shaken, he did not disown her suffering.

“Your affection is not a gift to be squandered over a night’s inflamed passion.” The bitter edge underneath his straight speech eluded her wounded perception. “Entanglement now would upset better choices. Do you understand, Vivet? Your worth is greater than any male stranger’s thankless, quick toss in the sheets.”

Blinking through tears, she fastened on his promise of requite. “You’ll still see me home?”

“Better,” said Arithon. “I’ll make sure of your welcome. If your kin cast you out for what happened, we’ll leave them. Your fortune will thrive in a different place, among kindly folk who deserve, and appreciate, the unique grace of your company.”

Vivet mopped her face, encouraged to venture a tentative smile. “Then you don’t spurn belief in chance-met fate?”

“That upsets don’t happen by accident?” Arithon shrugged. “I’m too tired to hazard the question.” Slight as shadow itself, green eyes lowered, he stirred to retire.

Reluctant to release him, Vivet blurted, “My mother told futures. She taught me the art. What will happen is marked in the lines of your palm.” Flushed slightly, she seized his right wrist, poised on the trestle between them. Arithon curbed his recoil. He suffered the touch to appease her and let her uncurl his long fingers.

Shiny white, the old knot of scar tissue exposed to the rush-light. Apologetic, Arithon freed her shocked grasp. “I’ve no past and no future where you are concerned. Wiser for you to remember that.”

Yet the gathered probabilities of Sethvir’s earth-sense foreshadowed no simple release from his tacit engagement and no turning away. Bred to heal fractious conflict in whatever form, and royally gifted with the insight to forge unity between Mankind’s wayward factions and the mystical presence of Athera’s Paravians, Arithon could not resist his born nature or callously force disentanglement.

A snarling blast of frigid wind yanked the Warden’s distanced awareness back to Althain Tower.

“The hussy is pregnant!” Kharadmon snapped. Two shelved books toppled and smacked into the floor, while precipitate moisture crackled and froze under his ferocious outburst. “Not by Arithon, either, mark that!”

Sethvir caught the whip-cracked ends of his beard and peered through the gyre of snowflakes. “Two days ago, yes. I observed the conception. The woman is bearing the dead trapper’s get.”

“Our prince can’t ascertain that!” Kharadmon fumed.

Which nailed the strategic quandary behind Vivet’s attempted seduction. Sethvir kept his own counsel. Nothing could be salvaged. The Prime’s aimed directive ascertained the by-blow’s paternity would stay blurred until the misfortunate birth.

More, the discorporate tempest of Kharadmon’s rage already vaulted beyond that festering obstacle. “You suggest the Prime’s long-term desire seeks to breed the latent talent from Dari s’Ahelas’s line of descent? Then why hasn’t Selidie fashioned a second campaign aimed at Lysaer s’Ilessid?”

“I can’t say that she won’t; although at the moment, Lysaer’s better guarded.” Quick to divert Kharadmon’s inquisitive prodding, Sethvir pounced with the gambit. “You have Davien’s unlicensed genius to thank since the bold masquerade he staged for Daliana just made Selidie’s prospects immeasurably more difficult.”

Predictably nettled, and roundly upstaged, the discorporate Sorcerer abandoned debate, blew out the latched shutter, and blustered away on his assigned errand.