Читать книгу Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 19

The hidden approach to Ettinmere Settlement devolved to a terraced footpath, ancient and weathered. Arithon followed Vivet’s lead with care, often required to leap crumbled gaps or surmount wheeling vertigo where the way narrowed. The precarious track notched a near-vertical slope, edged by sun-beaten rock crocheted in the cracks with the roots of crabbed firs. The dizzying view opened up over air, the milky haze of midday filmed over the gashed chasm below. Hawks soared like flecks of nicked gold, with the indigo sky overhead a stretched drum between snow-capped peaks.

In an open vista that extended for miles, the trail behind snaked like unreeled cord through the contorted vales. Any unfriendly movement could not be concealed. Yet Arithon could not shake the persistent impression of watching eyes.

“We’re not far.” Paused to sip from one of the spring-fed falls that splashed over the brink and frayed into mist, Vivet tipped her chin skywards. Her flushed, freckled skin was no longer yellowed by fading bruises. Two patient fortnights at the cabin, and more time on the trail had settled her nerves. Or else the familiar ground eased the tension that rode her like a whipped horse.

Arithon looked up at her prompt. A vulture spiralled on the thermals, distanced to a taut pen-stroke. Common enough in the Storlains, where wolves and mountain cats hunted, carrion birds circled in tireless search of gnawed carcasses: except that something shiny winked through the feathers on the raptor’s breast. “Yon creature is tame?”

“Not exactly. Our shamans link with them as observers.” Vivet qualified without artifice, “That one’s tracking our presence.”

“And Ettinmere doesn’t like trespassers.” Annoyance gouged Arithon back to his feet. “I hope you’ll be more forthcoming about how your folk receive strangers.”

“My people kill suspected rapists on sight,” Vivet answered, wilted. “That’s why we waited to leave. I dared not risk misplaced blame for my shameful condition.”

Arithon measured her belated sincerity, flicked to guarded distrust. “I have gone far enough. As one of their own, such arcane protection should see you the rest of the way without harm.”

Vivet exclaimed, “Please! You can’t go.” Alarmed, she expounded, “We have rigid customs concerning outsiders. If you turn away without proper leave, you’ll forfeit your place as my guest. My people must know who you are, first. If you don’t face them honestly, they will shoot you down. I can make things right!” she hastened to amend. “I promise you’ll be welcomed warmly once the formalities are satisfied.”

Arithon weighed his choices, pinned in discomfort as noonday sun smote the clear air and baked the rocks like a furnace. His sword was no use against concealed archers. Conjured shadow turned upon folk without any cause for hostility risked a notoriety that might draw his enemies. Better, he judged, to earn amity and let Ettinmere’s vigilant suspicion of strangers guard his back as a windfall advantage.

“Lead on,” he told Vivet.

“I cannot,” she added with chagrined regret. “By our ways, I must take you in, blindfolded.”

That protocol nettled him. Nonetheless, he endured with iron forbearance while she tore the dusty hem from her chemise. His bent head concealed his distaste as she bound his eyes and knotted the cloth at his nape. Her seductive scent and her touch offended his person. Yet indignity scarcely merited a fight, not when he was tired at heart and disinclined to provoke cultural friction.

“They will come for us,” Vivet said at a rushed whisper. “Do as they say and stay quiet.”

The sentries arrived fast, two on foot from behind, their step almost soundless, while two more unreeled from above, the creak of stressed rope occluded by the bounce and crack of dislodged pebbles. They asked no questions of Vivet but took brusque hold of Arithon. Because they did not attempt to disarm him, he allowed them the blistering liberty.

They bound his wrists. Roughly, as though they handled a criminal, he was noosed by the neck with a slip knot. Then he found himself prodded ahead, the man in front and the one at his heels his sole guidance on the narrow path.

Their intention was plain: if he resisted, a shove off the rim would hang him outright. Arithon broke into a sweat. On the whim of a woman he had no grounds to trust, his life lay at the mercy of eccentric strangers. Whether the Ettinfolk tested his courage, or tried his mettle to measure his earnesty, he had no recourse except to rise to the uncivil challenge.

Unrelenting, the Ettinmen were, but not cruel. They paused for rest when the ascent left him winded, and quenched his thirst from their unstoppered waterskins.

Yet the imposed conditions upon him overspent kindness or courtesy. Chilled after dusk, while the glacial gusts buffeted through his thin shirt, Arithon checked his temper, fed up by the relentless silence. Yet before he rejected Vivet’s advice, the footing beneath his nose-led step opened up in descent. The rock ledge broadened to packed gravel and mud, grooved by the passage of cart-wheels. Then the rutted track gave way to pasture, fragrant with alpine flowers. Through muffling cloth, Arithon scented the redolence of penned livestock. Breeze moaned through a nearby wind-break, embellished with the tinkle of goat bells and fragmented chatter: a woman’s chirped laugh, and the treble excitement of children, underscored by male voices and downhill, barking dogs, perhaps kept for herding.

Yet Arithon’s keepers did not turn towards the settlement in the valley. Blindfolded still, tugged by their rope, he was shepherded into a timber enclosure. The tight space cramped even his slight build, and soaked up sound without echo. Head ducked beneath the low, raftered ceiling, he sucked in the rancid aroma of a smoke-house recently used to cure butchered meat.

The door creaked shut, followed by a rasp and thunk as someone outside shot a timber bar stout enough to thwart bears.

Then urgent hands pushed and shoved till he sat on the packed-earth floor. The stale strip of rag was yanked from his face. Mage-sense plumbed a darkness frowsty as cut felt, with two of his escort huddled beside him.

Then one sparked a tallow dip. Painted by the yellow ripple of flame, Arithon studied the Ettinmen.

Each wore a peaked felt cap, with rolled brims and wool bands stuck with feathers or knot-woven oat straw. Fair-skinned and sunburned, they had cropped, sandy hair, and eyes pale as coin silver. Narrow, refined features bespoke insular blood and inimical lack of expression. Long-boned, with slender hands, they were as alike as fledged hawks with their thin, high-bridged noses and feral attentiveness.

Among their kind, Arithon was the crow tossed into a harrier’s nest.

The extravagant detail of their dress began with embroidered shirts, chamois vests, and elk-hide leggings stippled with indigo ink. Belts and boots were adorned with braided furs, or stitched quills, or the flayed bones of small birds. Each man wore a curved dagger, the handles inlaid with lapis and gold and topped with varnished knots at the pommels.

No move was made to free Arithon’s wrists or remove the looped rope from his neck. If he was a prisoner, no one yet asked him to forfeit his weapons. When loaded stares failed to pressure him to speak first, the fellow with eyes like steel grommets and the hatband with a cock pheasant’s crest snapped off a statement in his native dialect.

Arithon did not understand. Given his clammed silence, one of the pair at length ventured a stilted translation. “Vivet Daldari claims you as her guest. We wait with you here while Ettinmere’s elders hear her petition in your behalf.”

But Arithon had firmed his own course: to smile and be gracious, and smartly move on once he had established his harmless credentials. “No matter the outcome of Vivet’s appeal, I expect to fare eastward directly.”

The speaker bared wolfish teeth. “Stranger, our custom says otherwise. If the elders reject you in Vivet’s behalf, you will not leave here alive.”

Arithon controlled the spark of his anger. Conversational, uncompliant, he said, “You would seize rogue authority and condemn a blameless traveller subject to crown justice?”

The spokesman returned a bold ultimatum. “The blameless man does not venture here, and we answer to no other law beyond Ettin.”

Arithon kept his own counsel concerning the sovereignty of charter law. Rather than argue, he showed them contempt and settled back for a catnap. Mage-trained and in sharp command of his nerves, he slept, perhaps for an hour. Until inbound tension like a plucked string stirred the dead air and roused him.

Incomprehensible voices in dialect approached the barred door. A Masterbard’s sensitivity picked out the discordant notes of outraged surprise, fast tempered by someone’s authority. Whatever the unforeseen hitch, the Ettinmen with him surged to their feet. The bilingual fellow, eyes gleaming, explained in his stilted accent, “Vivet is brought here. You are permitted to speak with her alone. None will disturb you although our guard stays until the elders request your word on the matter.”

Prickled at his nape, Arithon probed with delicate courtesy, “What business of mine concerns Ettinmere’s council?”

The man smiled, eyebrows raised. “If the business in question is yours,” he began, then snorted back sudden laughter, and grinned. “Ah, by Teaah’s sacred pink tits! You don’t know, then? Well, laddie, bequeathed by my breath to your ears: our shaman’s confirmed that Vivet Daldari is pregnant.”

The news punched Arithon windless. Stone-faced, he watched the door open and shut behind the spokesman’s departure. The tallow dip fluttered to the influx of draught, then steadied and streamed again as the panel flung inward. The young woman entered, whose artless deceit had contrived this benighted embarrassment.

She had bathed and changed. Hair twined with primroses cascaded in splendour, reddish strands glinting over a draw-string gown that exposed the freckled, cream skin of her shoulders. Her scent pervaded the windowless gloom as she knelt at his feet, a scared doe in poised entreaty.

Her upturned face and the imposed view of her cleavage raised a stab of visceral hatred. Stung as though whipped, Arithon moved back, annoyed that his mindless male instinct still stirred to her flaunted attributes.

“I told my elders the quickened child was yours,” she confessed, scalded scarlet. “What choice did I have? Its life would become forfeit without a willing sire’s grant of child-right.”

“Your dishonest seduction was an attempt to establish paternity?” Arithon accused, stunned incredulous. Her claim was unconscionable, that one bungled tryst might pin her luckless conception on him. “The chance is slight, Vivet. Birth is likely to prove I am not the babe’s father.”

“Although you could be!” She clung, head bowed, and disclosed in agony, “Outsider, you don’t understand. If my people find out I’ve been used, unwilling, they’ll say my womb’s been cursed. A forced woman brings sour luck. If no man claims the burden as ward, her offspring henceforward are shunned as ill-fated.”

“Without my protection, you claim to be ruined?” Brittle with sarcasm, Arithon snapped. “That’s bathos!” Her glass-beaded necklace shivered as she shrank. The glint against her trembling flesh did not stir him, and the tawdry effort to dress for appeal offended his natural intelligence. “Just leave. Why stay for this piteous drama, Vivet? Anywhere else, you’d live free. Why not marry for love, without stigma?”

“I prayed to Sky and Earth that my courses would come,” the woman gushed on, woe forced through a choked throat. “I wasn’t beyond a fortnight overdue!”

“Then why rush things into a public scene?” Arithon asked, furious the issue had been broached before strangers without his prior awareness.

Vivet lifted a face streaked with tears, delicate as the glaze upon an heirloom porcelain. Fragile enough to shatter at a touch, she reached for his hand, and the constraint of s’Ffalenn compassion entangled his personal need to pull back.

“A woman’s moon time is not private, here!” Vivet hastened to explain. “By Ettin tradition, females who travel abroad are questioned upon their return. The shaman condemns those who answer him false. Could I forsake my last pretence of virtue? Of course I told the truth! Roaco’s divination ascertains I will bear a male child in the spring.”

Arithon engaged his mage-sight straightaway, loath to rely on an Ettinman’s word. For self-integrity, he confirmed the ephemeral gleam of the quickened seed in her belly.

Yet Vivet refused to have her get’s rightful paternity deferred until birth. “What proof will matter, then, whose babe draws breath? Here, offspring of rape are killed without quarter! Exposed on the mountain side and left to die, unless someone of character agrees to foster them.”

Arithon’s fury exploded past restraint. “Murder in cold blood! Your people execute blameless newborns for the lack of a paternal name?”

Vivet flinched. “Ettinmere raises no half-orphaned children. More, as the mother abandoned, I would be outcast. Fit only to serve others, and never to be chia, cherished as a wife. A woman in pregnancy must have a provider to pledge surety for her welfare and the babe’s upbringing.”

Wisdom in this case spoke for mature strength. “A liaison gained by manipulation won’t give you that happiness.”

“Did I ask to be forced?” Sobbing, Vivet clutched his legs and poured out the dregs of her misery. “This is my home, with my ties to family thrown into jeopardy by an ill turn. Ettin’s way embraces tuoram, a code of responsibility that assigns privilege through honour.”

“I should walk away.” Arithon wrenched free in disgust. “Your people’s tradition is nothing but vicious barbarity.”

Yet in the dense distance between them, the unspoken, slim chance: her babe might in fact bear his lineage. And if the innocent get of a stranger, his choice to sacrifice that unborn life laid an infanticide at his feet. S’Ffalenn prince to the core, his blood heritage chained him to Vivet’s needy plight.

“What of the child?” Arithon pressed. “Could a luckless bastard find any joy amid this rigid culture?”

Crest-fallen, Vivet exclaimed, “But you sorely mistake us!” She flooded him with eager reassurances. “Outsider blood is highly prized! We may be an unworldly folk, hidebound by obligation and kin ties, but our lines are in need of fresh vigour. Your charge as a foster parent won’t last for life. The community holds our children as equals after they celebrate puberty. Mine would be sought as a coveted mate if, by your grace, he survives.”

Tallow-fed flame dipped the moment in gold, the flush on the woman’s over-bred skin transparent with hope, and the slim man before her armoured in retreat, his stubbled jaw clenched and his eyes chipped emerald. Twelve years of freedom, balanced against a blameless, new life: forced to capitulate through compassion, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn yielded to the bitter price that silenced the outcry of his royal conscience.

The static that deranged the flux through the Storlains allowed only erratic glimpses of Arithon’s straits. The bursts of connection brushed over Elaira where she camped under stars in the flatlands beyond the outskirts of Shipsport. The air smelled of dust and paper-dry grass, muddied by a south breeze fecund with marsh taint off the river delta. A squall line formed over the Cildein deeps riffled her skin to the distanced flicker of heat lightning.

The mainland would be sodden by dawn. Therefore, her blankets stayed laced in cerecloth, stuffed under her neck as a pillow. Her journey tomorrow would breast flaying wind and cold rain like the snap of a wet rag in her face.

But not yet. Poised as an indrawn breath before change, the electromagnetic currents in the high Storlains surged into a lucid stream.

The connected touch of her distant beloved raised Elaira to flash-point gestalt. The tumultuous wave of Arithon’s recent past and the burden of his entangled present threw her a jumble of impressions, the charge of emotional turmoil a surprise punch to the gut. Rapt mastery alone let her anchor until the morass settled into cohesion.

The impact of Vivet’s pregnancy surfaced first, her dread fear and vulnerability warped into a selfish demand for protection. The result wove a snare to bind the tenets of any s’Ffalenn born true to his lineage. The price wrung Elaira to empathic tears. “Don’t,” she gasped, helpless. “Arithon, don’t give way.”

Yet he would, he must: even as once before he had staked his life to spare Fionn Areth.

Elaira knew his true heart, as no other. She grasped the deep-set revulsion that savaged his dignity: the bitter trial laid on his spirit, suppressed under pressure through forty-eight days since the storm had compelled him to share the decency of charitable shelter. Woman herself and healer-trained, the enchantress stripped the false tissue from Vivet’s clinging need and exposed the manipulation behind the beguilement that fuelled this moment’s trapped anger.

The unstable flux in the Storlains rang to Arithon’s stifled revolt as he bent to appease his inflexible heritage. The sorrow driving his resignation stamped the crux like a granite engraving: what gave an extended life its self-worth? Where could a man go to find peace of mind, relentlessly hounded by enemies? What better priority ruled him if he could not commit a mere dozen years to salvage an innocent life?

Elaira shuddered, wrung in the crushed turbulence of his emotion as her beloved divested himself of his blades and stepped from the smoke-house in surrender. His own, or hers, the sense of suffocation and bleak foreboding? The hour felt lidded in darkness, each movement sealed in jet glass. Again blindfolded by Vivet’s possessive touch, Arithon resigned himself to the escort of four Ettinmen, three padding a wolf’s pack tread at his heels, with his bound wrists leashed to one in the lead. Their route skirted the nearby settlement, chased by snarling dogs and breezes sooted with woodsmoke from an open-air spit.

No offered meal assuaged Arithon’s hunger. Beyond water, no comfort had eased him. Tired, light-headed, discomposed, and ungroomed, he stumbled over a rootlet.

The cascade of connection wavered and broke. Dissipated, the thread of rapport frayed away in the thrash of the Storlain flux currents …

Elaira surfaced, enraged. Discipline shredded, she pounded the dusty ground with her fists. “Fight them!” she gasped. “Sweet man, for your own sake, and mine, lose your temper and damn that brazen hussy to the fruits of her own devices!”

Yet Arithon would not. Torbrand’s legacy bound him to wretched silence. Elaira bowed her head, overcome. “Don’t fall to the flaw that killed King Kamridian,” she pleaded, undone by enforced separation. Arithon would not hear: had in his past hour of desperate peril cut off his recall of her steadfast partnership. Lost at this terrible crux, the counterbalance that once shielded him from the inborn flaws of his character.

Elaira plumbed the bleak pain that stifled his innate perception. She knew, oh, she knew! the ache was sourced in the agony of her absence. Heart and spirit, she raged at her helplessness. For female instinct screamed warning that the hidden cost might impact far more than a child survivor and a vain woman’s dishonour.

That same night in the deeps of Halwythwood, the clan seeress retired, worn after three days spent in trance. Her arduous effort had unearthed no meaningful insight to suggest Prince Arithon’s whereabouts. Talented resource stayed stymied, while blood-letting change whetted the Canon doctrine for death, and choked Etarra with dedicate troops.

The danger of inaction chafed tempers, with the Earl of the North and Iyat-thos Tarens faced off like male wyverns, scales bristled in territorial challenge.

Big men, too well matched to cross steel without the risk of crippling injury, they hammered out their contention with practice sticks, each bout fought to a ferocious draw. Both were left wincing and mottled with bruises. Yet Cosach’s imperative question was satisfied, that Jieret’s skilled legacy left Tarens no weakness in training at arms. Measured through Jieret’s perspective, in turn, the realm’s current caithdein lacked the ruthless years of survival under persecution. Battered to welts, Tarens allowed the brute strength of the man’s constitution was not deficient.

Other arenas stayed open to challenge. The scouts’ dismissive regard for all town-born sparked the latest: a test of the upstart guest’s mettle through a knock-down contest at drink. Cosach pranced over his wife’s objections. To blindside his impressionable heir, and side-step her complaint that the boisterous noise would aggravate their teething infant, he sited the affray on the grassy knoll carved out by the meandering Willowbrook. There, where the summer crowns of the oaks wore tiaras of constellations, Rathain’s caithdein and his fettlesome rival took opposite seats at a massive table, hewn from a fallen tree ancient enough to be known by Name to the lost centaur guardians.

Between chieftain and guest, clumped like rain-sprouted fungus, spread the hoarded stash turned out of bunks, chests, and blanket rolls. In casks, corked bottles, and heirloom flasks, a liquid banquet for inebriation: beer, cider, honey mead, and cherry brandy, and worse, the evil, colourless poison that generations of hung-over misery had dubbed Dharkaron’s Redress. The raucous scouts crowded the stream-bank as witnesses. They tousled Tarens’s cropped hair while the merry fellow appointed as arbiter presented two ram’s horn flagons.

The antique rims were embossed with silver. Ornamental knobs at the pointed ends spurned the practicality of a flat base. The curved vessels might be rested upside down, but only if they were emptied.

“All right, listen up, hear the rules!” The gleeful speaker addressed the contestants. “The contest opens with beer. You’ll match drinks with your rival, flagon for flagon. Once you get sodden and can’t hold your piss, first penalty switches your refill to honey mead. The second time you void your bladder, you’ll step up to brandy. White spirits, third round, if you haven’t puked. Whoever heaves up his guts first or falls senseless becomes the loser.” Enthusiastic, he walloped the townsman’s back. “Accepted, Iyat-thos? Then cross wrists in a double handshake with Earl Cosach to seal your sober agreement.”

“Might we have an arbiter who’s not staggering soused?” To hooted laughter, Tarens shared a farmer’s ham-handed grip with the caithdein’s nutcracker fists. He hefted the cavernous flagon pressed on him, surrounded by ribald advice and reproof. A petite female scout wearing an acorn strung on a hoop earring tapped the selected cask, to the chink of coin placed on last-minute wagers.

“You’re all barking mad,” Tarens mused, while a prankster poured beer till the head foamed over his wrist. “This is how a rag-sop caithdein steers the kingdom’s affairs during royalty’s absence?”

But upright duty cut no bait with Cosach. “Case in point, swear that your unnatural memory doesn’t play devil’s advocate. In his time, Earl Jieret dumped the realm’s woes on his captain, Sidir. This occurred more than once, even while the clans were beset. Claim my ancestor didn’t chase Arithon’s shirttails and drag his Grace by the scruff out of fatal trouble.”

“Your cantankerous forebear succeeded,” said Tarens, and licked off his dripping fingers. “By his proven experience, I’m better equipped to shake your prince back to his senses.”

Provided, forbye, that anyone could. The impasse that dead-locked the quarrel was that nobody knew where to look. The search for a desperately hunted man, damned to fire and sword by the Canon, could not light off for the hinterlands without direction. Given the seeress had scried herself blank, theory argued his Grace had holed up in the most forbidding terrain on the continent.

“If Prince Arithon’s gone to ground in the Storlains, he won’t be found till he shows himself.” Cosach flourished his brimming horn. “Dharkaron avenge and Sithaer take the hindmost!” Flint eyes level, he blew off a splatter of froth, then chugged down the contents. “Jieret,” he declared as he clapped the drained cup bottoms up on the trestle, “never tested his skills in that benighted country.” A back-handed swipe of his soaked moustache bared the gleam of pearl teeth. “The place is a botched mess of radical currents. Our talent hunters can’t track wounded game through the griped flux in those ranges.”

“That may well be,” Tarens allowed, and drained his own vessel as smartly. Knowledge derived from the past chieftain’s identity validated Cosach’s objection. “Yet I say you’ve never brangled with Rathain’s royal blood-line in person. Kiss yon rabbit’s foot on the hilt of your eating knife. If you wear that for luck, you’re going to need it.”

Cosach belched behind a clamped fist. “The fuzzy token’s a gift from my sister. I wear the toy because she’s a shrew. Apt to notch the man’s ears who tries to dine with a war blade at her table. And did I hear you wrong? You’ve dared suggest I’m no match for a runt who stands barely chest high to a stripling?”

“Yes,” Tarens said, straight-faced.

“Then you’re mushy as pudding!” Cosach waved to hasten the refill, while to Iyat-thos, he demurred, “Caught in a scrap with his Grace, I’d whack his sovereign head with a stick and drag him senseless by the heels. Which question begs asking. Why didn’t you?”

“Because,” Tarens snapped, “just like you’re doing now, I stopped my ears with the bone-brained notion I knew better than Jieret’s instincts. You won’t blindside his Grace by brute force. He’ll foul your plan while you go for your club and be elsewhere before you can swing.”

As the side-lines chorus devolved to a chant for more drink, and a grizzled brute with a badger-pelt jerkin moved to oblige, Tarens stabbed back, “Who’s grown soft, besides? Under Jieret’s hard wisdom, you should burn down your lodge. Do away with the comfort of cabins, before the Light’s campaign to scour Halwythwood makes your people a sitting target.”

“Dismantle the outpost?” Cosach pounded the boards. “Only after I’m senseless! Defeat me, and by rights, you might pitch that besotted idea to our council. I’d have to be laid out unconscious, first. Else while you’re flensed for the barbaric sentiment, Jalienne would eviscerate me.”

“Fall quick, then,” quipped Tarens. “I don’t fear your wife.”

“Merciful Ath! The more fool you, fellow.” Cosach beckoned the cup-bearer on, while a mirthful companion, gleaming with knives, hefted the beer cask and poured.

Tarens held no illusions. Something uncanny bothered his instincts: unease prickled his skin as he raised the next round. Whether for an unknown threat to his liege, or if the boisterous horse-play at hand masked untoward animosity, Jieret’s heritage as a Sight-sensitive talent lent no edge in the present arena. The legendary past chieftain had not been a hard drinker. No secret, apparently, since the on-going odds stacked fast in Cosach’s favour. Tarens prayed for his brother Efflin’s bone head, while dread worm-holed his gut at the unlucky prospect of failure.

To best his rival before he succumbed, he would cheat for bald-faced necessity.

The raptor’s gleam in Cosach’s eyes suggested he angled to muscle the victory, himself. Surrounded by wolves, Tarens needled, “The fatal flaw lies with the inbred drive of Rathain’s crown lineage.” He demolished his portion and banged down his horn. “Your prince can’t escape his compassionate empathy.”

Cosach belted off his share in turn. “That’s your lame excuse for the fact he shed your escort straight off?”

“Acknowledge the weakness,” Tarens attacked. “If not, you leave his Grace’s back exposed to his enemies.”

The grin Cosach returned showed contempt. “I’d correct your limited grasp of royal history. In this very glen, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn once built a gentle stay for his woman that required Fellowship might to unravel. He’ll protect his own interests if he has a mind.”

Tarens bucked the High Earl’s opinion in earnest, while the flagons were topped for the third time. “Before Arithon regains his full memory and recoups the informed mastery to raise such a warding, someone’s human frailty will flush him from cover.”

“That’s why we’re drinking,” Cosach declaimed. Yet the breath he drew for rejoinder stalled as he fumbled his grasp on his cup.

Splattered by spilled beer, Tarens gained only that instant of warning before vertigo up-ended his balance also. His awareness unravelled: no dizzy rush from inebriation. The surrounding forest appeared etched in light just before the night split under what felt like the shock of a thunderbolt. He sensed fear in the bystanders’ dumbfounded shouts. Then the stretched cloth of his cognizance burst. He plunged, wheeling, into the throes of tranced Sight, envisioned through Arithon’s experience …

… in a closed space heated by a cedar fire, rough hands snatched off the blindfold. Blinking, annoyed, he stood amid expectant quiet in a round log building. Facing him, a row of inimical elders perched like mushrooms on squat hide hassocks. Men and old women, each wore a ceremonial mantle stitched with feathers. Greased hair dangled from conical hats, the felt brims pinned with wheat cockades. A wizened shaman at the centre presided. Thin and unkempt as knotted string, his shaved head wore a crust of dun-coloured clay. Bird-black eyes glared from rims of eldritch red paint, and his shoulders were draped with a cape that stylized a mountain raptor.

Magic coiled here, uncanny and sere as an icicle shot through a hot spring.

Trapped in an amber-tinged moment of dream, Tarens felt Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn draw in a wary, taxed breath. Leashed rage burned as, before those uncanny witnesses, he swore a binding oath that seared his spirit to inward revolt …

… Sighted unconsciousness rippled. Tarens resurfaced to open air, seized in shocked silence. Flat on damp earth, bathed in sweat and trembling, he breathed in the musk scent of Halwythwood’s summer oaks and strove to steady his senses. Sobered faces bent over him. No longer ribald, the sturdy scout who had shouldered the cask knelt in shaken concern.

“Are you with us, Iyat-thos?”

“What happened?” Tarens demanded, confused. “That wasn’t the after-effects of strong drink.”

“An event woke the mysteries and tore through the veil,” murmured someone in tremulous awe.

Before explanation, a bullish intrusion elbowed the stunned onlookers aside.

“You received a tranced vision?” Earl Cosach accosted. “What did you see?”

Propped up by earnest hands, Tarens came back to his wits before the chieftain’s glowering presence. “Why did his Grace raise the wardings over this glen?” When no one answered, he pressed, “Earl Jieret was mage-bound to our liege. Whatever just happened, if the ripple twisting the flux cast an echo, I need to know the connection!”

Cosach folded his arms and reluctantly qualified. “Here, long ago, his Grace was said to lie with his beloved. The union begun was the first, and not consummate. Yet legend and our historical record confirm the couple’s twined passion awakened the mysteries. The linked spirits of the crown prince and his mate excited the land’s electromagnetics and unleashed a grand confluence. The upshift in resonance retuned the octaves this side of the veil. All reactive connections since then are more volatile. Possibly the event you experienced was provoked by a harmonic connection.”

“I dreaded as much.” Tarens covered his face, his anguish muffled through tensioned fingers. “But the fragmented view I received hasn’t disclosed the meaningful impact.”

“What did you observe?” Cosach repeated more gently. “I sensed that his Grace was held in duress. But the impression arose without context.”

Tarens shuddered and bared his flushed features. “If I saw true, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn has just willingly sworn a binding oath under an arcane power.” Burdened with grief, the crofter described the outlandish scene in detail.

Mention of the shaman in black scalded Cosach to swearing alarm. “Ath preserve, those wily creatures are Ettinmen! A tribal culture tucked up in the Storlains, ferocious as rabid weasels and inbred to the verge of stark madness. Their sentries use buzzards for scout’s eyes, did you know? Besides the unsavoury fact that they murder strangers on sight, they serve their retribution by ritual butchery. They could be holding our prince for a barbaric rite of execution!”

“No,” Tarens assured. “I gathered our liege is not under threat.” Muddled with drink and fretful unease, he sought the comfort of back-handed assets. “If the Ettin society is defensively insular, they’re unlikely to sell his Grace out to enemies, or welcome a dedicate invasion sent into their midst by the True Sect priests.”

“They’d skewer our peaceful emissary as readily.” Cosach fingered the dagger struck through his belt. “Don’t think you’d fare any better as town-born. Those savages desecrate their human kills. String the flayed carcasses over the cliffs for their pet vultures to feed on the carrion.”

Tarens offered a hand to the Halwythwood chieftain, grateful this once for the aggressive strength that steadied him onto his feet. “Then we have little choice but to fashion a plan to draw Arithon away.”

Legs braced to offset the surfeit of beer, Cosach shut his eyes in morose forbearance. “I would sooner dig my own grave with bare hands! But in fact, we need help from that gormless worm of a traitor.”

“Dakar?” quipped one of the by-standing scouts. “You want the raunch wastrel shaken down?”

Cosach grimaced. “First we have to find him. Much as the prospect pains me, that spellbinder’s the only spirit we have who might know what caused tonight’s rip in the veil. More, if we have to twist his fat arms and spit him over a bonfire, he’ll serve us with the arcane tricks to blindside the hexed birds that keep watch for the Ettinmen.”

In cold-sober fact, the Mad Prophet would fight tooth and nail before crossing his path with Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. Although a slow death by roasting seemed preferable did not mean fate granted him a blind eye. Always, his fickle penchant for augury upset his bone-deep cowardice. Where other seers lost their faculties in the static clouding the Storlain flux stream, the discredited master spellbinder sprawled in the gutter, naked and helplessly wrestling to stifle the torrent of unwanted vision.

Ratted out by a doxie, brow-beaten with threats, he cringed at the feet of a furious pimp outside the whore-house in Backwater. “Be off!” The ignoramus tossed Dakar’s shucked clothing after him. “I won’t peddle my girls to dark-mongering devils! Or risk them to the horrors of death rituals and evil practice!”

The spellbinder rolled clear of a puddle of horse-piss. Draped in flung cloth like a ragman, and pinked by the gravel paving, he cradled his splitting headache and winced. Since the region as yet had no temple faction frothing to burn suspect talent, he gave injured tongue in retort. “Crazy jape! Look past the ripe nuggets plucked out of your arse! I have nothing to do with black arts or necromancy.”

“Eternal Light burn your spirit, I’ll hear no more lies!” The bawdy-house rooster slammed his door with a boom that cracked echoes down the lake-front alley. In final retort from a top-storey window, the dainty hands lately prised off Dakar’s pleased flesh jettisoned his orphaned boots. The scuffed footwear plummeted, streaming the tongues of his hose, and thwacked into his hunched shoulders.

Which abuse failed to stem his Sighted view of the disaster unfolding in the high Storlains. Dakar cursed the spiteful doxie with a venom she scarcely deserved. She had not disparaged his prowess in bed, at least until his outburst in actualized Paravian ignited the mattress beneath them. The shocking disruption had done little good: his barrage of Sighted talent continued apace. Better the footwear had knocked him unconscious than to bear further witness to Arithon’s straits.

Dakar unhooked the small-clothes snagged on his ear. Spitting out the taste of horse-urine and sour nausea, he stood and jammed on his trousers. He refused to suffer the ghastly mistake; could not bear watching Rathain’s prince swear child-right at Ettinmere by the Prime Matriarch’s dastardly scheming. Without looking, the Mad Prophet knew how a crystal shard had been imprinted to spring Arithon’s downfall: how not, tricked into falsified belief that his cherished enchantress had betrayed him, with his steadfast love wielded as a tool by a dutiful Koriathain.

No recourse, for the misery: the record was true. A past Prime’s directive once had sought to turn Elaira’s affection against him. But the partial view had shaped a tactical deceit, deliberately planted for Arithon’s search of her cabin. The impact shook the deep bulwark of a trust yet held flawless between them. But only the uncut perspective of the complete incident could refute the invidious fragment of evidence.

Dakar ground his teeth, ridden by the benighted vision of Arithon’s reciting his oath before the Ettinmere elders. No recall of his Masterbard’s knowledge of law had served the gravity of due warning. To his Grace, bludgeoned into numbed bitterness, the sacrificed years while a child matured seemed a meaningless pittance, where by a more callous measure, the stakes should have hurled Vivet’s venal dilemma off the nearest cliff.

“Once in your life, just this once, Arithon!” Dakar fumed. “Be the natural bastard, scrap ethics and fly into a rage! Don’t indulge every damned self-righteous idiot who tweaks your bleeding heart! Lash out! Dharkaron Avenger wept, don’t shoulder the load for a wanton git who’s been gaffed by Selidie’s filthy directive!”

Yet Arithon checked his prickly temper and let himself become shackled.

Dakar winced, as the ceremony of child-right concluded. Stuffed back into his shirt, uncaring the garment was inside out, he ploughed into the marshy breeze off the lake and sought the first lit casement. Shoved into the rowdiest waterman’s dive, he perched like a glum toadstool and ordered a jug of cheap gin. He popped the cork. Swallowing down the raw liquid, he begged sorry fate for the grace to pass out before prescience disclosed the outcome.

Yet even Backwater’s rot-gut gin failed to grant him oblivion fast enough.

Dakar felt the visceral, glass edge of pain as Arithon stepped from the timbered building. Vivet met him on the plank stair, crowned by a wreath of flowers. Pulled forward and pounded on the back by her jubilant relatives, he found himself prodded by too many hands, then seized and kissed by chattering sisters. Revolted, in leashed fury, he endured the embrace of her brothers and cousins, gathered into the circle of family.

Prophet, accursed with true Sight, Dakar caught the wretched reaction twofold: as the fickle flux in the Storlains surged clear, and Elaira suffered the intimate view through Arithon’s dumbfounded eyes. She echoed the recoil of his clubbed surprise. Wept, while the noisy, exuberant crowd received him as one of their own.

Child-right, in Ettinmere, involved more than the rearing of offspring. The horror dawned late, that his earnest consent saddled him with a nuptial celebration. The happy crowd hazed him and plucked at his clothes. Crude laughter and jokes herded him towards a hut to bed Vivet as though joined in marriage.

Dakar recognized the set to Arithon’s shoulders. The Teir’s’Ffalenn met his unwanted bride like the chained dog jerked towards the kennel.

Then the evil belt of the gin did its work; or else static noise broke Elaira’s empathic connection. Cognizant vision dissolved like dashed foam off a breaker.

Dakar crumpled into a slovenly heap, the plunge into drunken unconsciousness welcomed. While his awareness dimmed, alone in Atainia, a last witness followed the turbulent thread of event closed at Ettinmere Settlement.

Warden of Althain, immersed in broad-scale earth-sense, Sethvir beheld Arithon’s vehement rejection of Vivet’s possessive embrace.

“Would you shame her in public?” a shocked celebrant cried, alike enough to be a sibling.

Arithon returned a vitriol glare. “Your customs,” he cracked, “have the delicacy of rats baked into a wedding cake. I’ve accepted guardianship for the child. After that, who sleeps under your kinswoman’s roof is not my affair. Or your business.”

“And if her brat’s yours?” the fellow pursued.

“No difference. Her babe is mine until he reaches puberty,” Arithon blistered in correction. “Sworn to my name by your council of elders and sealed before the eyes of your shaman. Best you Ettinfolk never forget that!”

The flare sprung off the vehement statement struck Sethvir as a spark touched to flame. If Vivet and her kin believed Arithon’s spirit could be leashed, they soon would find their net snagged on the thorn in the blossom of Torbrand’s descent. The Sorcerer winced. Almost, he pitied the Ettin elders, subject to the wicked explosion their repressive culture deserved.

Indeed, the bleak hour had come, forecast over two hundred and fifty years ago: the dimming of Arithon’s psyche, engineered by Koriathain through the tactical severance of Elaira’s influence. Once, on a damp tide-flat by a drift-wood fire, Traithe had served the enchantress due warning: “… for good or ill, you’re the one spirit alive in this world who will come to know Arithon best. Should your Master of Shadow fail you, or you fail him, the outcome will call down disaster …”

Sethvir bowed his head. Tangled hair like shaved ice in the moonlight streamed through the library casement, he listened with every hair prickled erect.

No whisper arose from the absent colleague whose silence stayed adamant: Davien ventured no overture towards a contrite return to his colleagues. Yet Althain’s Warden sensed the first whisper of avalanche. That dire wave of fore-running impetus, set off and gathering force, that could see the riven Fellowship of Seven restored back to unity at their full strength. Or else tonight’s consequence tripped their downfall. If destiny’s card came to shatter their covenant, entropy must not be allowed to unravel the harmonic that bridged the arc of Athera’s mysteries.