Читать книгу Stormed Fortress: Fifth Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 11

Eight days’ rugged travel were required to cross the free wilds, after the belated discovery that took the Halwythwood camp by grim storm: young Jeynsa s’Valerient had not ventured north, after all. Her feckless pursuit of her crown prince had never planned for an apology. Instead, folly sent her due south, with but one of her elders the wiser. She sought a ruler’s counsel in Atwood, where, as she had confided to Eriegal, she meant to press a scathing inquiry into the moral probity of her sovereign.

Uninvested caithdein to Arithon of Rathain, and still enraged over the death of her father as sacrifice to salvage the royal blood-line, the girl was not faulted for her misplaced flight. Seventeen years of age, and outspoken, the daughter shared the impetuous dedication of her late sire.

‘No bad thing, that the minx has the spit to stand up to his Grace’s insufferable temperament,’ her brother, Earl Barach, had declared, astonished to fierce admiration at the time. No coward, his sister, to seize her shirked post with such brazen daring. The result would peel skin if she tried formal stature to cross-examine her prince. ‘The escapade should expose her, red-faced, for a rash idealist run riot.’

Except for the fatally explosive risk: that the Light’s active muster now converged for war in East Halla.

Sidir had lost his tolerance. ‘I’ll haul her back, trussed and gagged in a game sack!’ Become the firm arm that supported the bereft mother, the tall, grave Companion had gathered his weapons forthwith. ‘Fiends plague that girl for her idiot timing!’

Jeynsa’s volatile grief, heated by young-blood ignorance, outstripped the concept of dangerous. Etarra was unhinged by the cleanse of a death cult. Every sword-bearing Sunwheel fanatic frothed to burn suspect talent for liaison with Shadow. No kinsman stepped forward to argue the need, that the Teiren’s’Valerient must be fetched back by the scruff of the hair she had cropped in defiance of custom.

Sidir was not sanguine with the perils he faced. Now arrived at the verge of wide-open country, he knew that he shouldered an effort predestined to fail. The girl was a fit tigress, and she had an eighteen-day start on him. Worse, his hopeless journey was not made alone: the Koriani enchantress whose fate was entangled with Arithon’s packed her satchel in stride alongside.

‘You will need arcane help,’ Elaira insisted, against the innate distrust her kind aroused from the clans. ‘Or else waste the time you don’t have to go wrong, chasing hunches down a cold trail.’

Since no forest-bred talent could challenge her power, Sidir took charge. He would take her from Halwythwood, if only to keep her order’s suspect machinations under his direct sight.

Their hot-foot chase after Jeynsa had brought them to the fork in the River Arwent five nights past the dark of the moon. Now that the safe forest coverts must be left behind, the enchantress prevailed against the Companion’s rife urgency: she would take pause and use her arcane knowledge to measure the outlying territory.

‘You should heed my counsel,’ Sidir resisted, his impatient grip on his sword reflecting his disapproval.

‘We’re not at odds,’ Elaira reminded, loath to rattle the thorns under lying their mismatched alliance. Steamed by worry herself, she crouched with the wood at her back and pressed her spread palms to the earth. ‘I won’t risk letting our crown prince know why Jeynsa’s bolted hell-bent into trouble.’

The liegeman viewed her stifled need as transparent: to reach for heart’s ease through subtle awareness and link with her distant beloved. The concern was not groundless: her longing desire yearned towards the south. The same, searing stars that Arithon experienced at Sanpashir glimmered here, but not softened by late-summer heat haze. The torpid air would not wear the scent of high grass, or the song of the nightjar that stitched lonely notes through the shrilling of nocturnal insects. Elaira kept her firm hold on restraint. She limited her trace to the deep strata of bedrock, listening for the delicate, shimmering current that carried the local lane flux.

Looming above her, Rathain’s grim Companion unleashed his overtried nerves. ‘This is no secure place to dally for scrying. We should cross the north ford and push into the Barrens by daybreak to avoid the risk of a sighting by trackers.’

The enchantress persisted despite sound advice, stubborn beyond her slight build. She did not look the part of the initiate Koriathain. Clad in cross-laced leathers, her braided bronze hair tied with deer-hide, she could have passed for a forest-bred scout, searching for game sign; except her response second-guessed a man’s mind, before he set words to his thinking.

‘I won’t need a fire,’ Elaira demurred. ‘This near the fourth lane, just a rock-pool at the verge, where shoaling rocks don’t riffle the current.’

Which choice seemed the worse, to a forest clansman whose instincts were pressured. In this border-line country, where the Arwent’s deep channel could float an east-bound, keeled barge, more trespassing merchants each year dared to route their perishable freight through the lake-side town of Daenfal. Free wilds or not, no clansman crossed them without an armed company at his back. Never mind that traders caught flouting crown charter must be waylaid, or that the fools born outside of blood heritage did not perceive how their venal invasion disrupted Athera’s grand mysteries. The compact that served the aware heart of the land could not tolerate any compromise that degraded the harmonic flow of the fourth lane.

All the worse, that Jeynsa had tried this passage alone, when impending war drove invasive town interests to ever-more-vicious reprisal. Sidir shifted his sweating grip on his blade, not liking the fact his back was exposed as quarry for league-hunting bowmen.

Scalded at last by his smoking unease, Elaira broke off and stood. ‘Sidir, believe me, your fuming is groundless. The flux lines are pulsing in natural harmony. If any townsmen are hanging about, they will be peacefully dead!’ Against his stiff quiet, she finished off, clipped, ‘Anyone living who isn’t mage-shielded would stamp an emotional signature.’

Sidir raised a dark eyebrow, the silvered hair at his temples distinct even under faint starlight. ‘I should rely on your vision?’

Elaira sighed. ‘My dear man, are we dancing in blindfolds through hoops? I’ve stood tours of lane watch for my meddling order since I was a starving waif culled from an alley. Seen mirrored in earthforce, your distrust of my character may as well be a deafening shout.’

Not caught aback, Sidir chose his words to avoid a pitched fight. ‘I don’t like the fact I can’t fathom your motives.’ Grey eyes that discerned with birth talent for truth never flinched from unkind reservations. ‘If you’re wanting that pool, I’d as soon have this done with.’

Nonetheless, his guidance was considerate as he threaded the rough course through the overgrowth to the river-bank. Southside of Halwythwood, where Daon Ramon Barrens crumpled against the plateau of Araethura, the buttressed seam opened into a gorge. Beneath, the boisterous sluice of the Arwent thundered over its bed of split boulders. Poured ink since the set of the waxing moon, the misted air smelled of wet mineral. Game trails left by otters skeined through the scrub, raked to a leaning tangle of thatch by the floods at spring thaw.

Summer’s drought tamed the rampaging spate. Scoured stone scalloped the water’s edge, lapped by the cold depths where the trout swam.

‘Here.’ Elaira caught Sidir’s wrist before the tall clansman withdrew. ‘Stay as you wish. I won’t have secrets that fan the least doubt that I’d use my powers to betray you.’

‘To seek Feithan’s daughter, perhaps not,’ Sidir challenged. ‘But a man who serves Rathain’s crown has to wonder. Whose hidden cause are you backing?’

‘The civilized mask was already stripped, that night in the glen by the Willowbrook,’ Elaira snapped, a touch acid. Day upon day of exhaustive, harsh company chafed the barbs lying under the skin. ‘From chastened, need I grovel to beg a reprieve from the on-going punishment? I have no desire to harm your clan interests! My order’s knowledge will not be engaged, even for straightforward scrying.’

Sidir watched her elfin features turn haunted as she strained to recoup equilibrium. Not callous, at heart, he stripped away pretence. ‘Dare I suggest your concern for Jeynsa might further your sisterhood’s plot to trap Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn?’

‘You helped tear him from me,’ she shot back, uncowed. ‘What could have changed?’ Her tight smile followed, both poisoned and wry. ‘My oathsworn obedience is not all-encompassing. Life has another facet called choice. You’ll see that girl safe because you cherish Feithan. Is my care as an honest woman no less? Or must one bad thread condemn the whole cloth? Which one of us isn’t embroiled in mankind’s stewpot of intrigue? I’ve been magnanimous,’ Elaira said, stung. ‘For the bitch in blind heat, my balked need’s in plain sight. It’s your mulish candidate for Rathain’s caithdein whose spiteful agenda might fray Arithon’s personal integrity.’

Sidir fielded her accusation, flat calm. ‘The crown liege whose shoulder I guarded at Vastmark would never abandon his oath of protection, sworn before death to her father.’

‘He wouldn’t,’ the mettlesome enchantress agreed. ‘That’s the reason our hopeless mission can’t fail and why you might want to muzzle your next slashing leap for the jugular.’

Epiphany struck with splintering force. ‘Your orders from Prime Selidie have not been revoked!’ While the sheeting curtains of spray smoked between them, the Companion most renowned for his tact found himself lashed to rare venom. ‘Should you not stay the course and refashion the snare so narrowly thwarted in Halwythwood?’

Which dart pierced too deeply: Elaira’s caught breath tore a pause.

Nor would Sidir relent, though she struck him. Not with the last prince of Rathain’s crown lineage become the marked target for Koriani malice. ‘Tell me you don’t endanger all I hold dear!’

‘I can’t.’ The enchantress bent her head, hands pressed to her face. Whether she masked agony for the unconsummated love that Sidir had invoked charter law and the help of a Fellowship Sorcerer to thwart, steel honesty would not prevaricate. Elaira had never pretended her passion was not the prime bait in her sisterhood’s bid to seize Arithon.

Although genteel instinct yearned for reprieve, if only to soften discomfort, Sidir held firm. He carried the charge of an aggrieved mother’s trust, as well as a kingdom laid open through the perils stalking its crown prince.

‘I’m duty-bound to keep contact with Arithon’s interests,’ Elaira ventured at last. She rejected bitterness, despite the straits that seized her affection as the killing piece on the political game-board. ‘My Prime’s command leaves me no other path. But, pleas to Ath, I will seek my beloved after I’m certain you’ve secured that young girl from harm’s way. She’s your task, after that. Rope her wildcat fury to heel, then use every persuasion to make sure she wields her feal office from the safety of Halwythwood!’

Such blistering courage deserved better grace. ‘I don’t like the need,’ Sidir allowed. ‘But I can’t drop my role as the diligent sentry.’

‘Don’t neglect the cold fact you’re my enemy?’ This time, Elaira’s sarcasm bit. ‘Then stay at my back. Keep your guard with drawn steel for as long as you think I lack basic human integrity.’

‘Your heart’s intent was never distrusted,’ Sidir corrected with stickling firmness. ‘The truth grants no quarter.’ Oathsworn over crystal, the enchantress could not enforce any claim to free will.

‘Let me enlarge on your view-point,’ she said. ‘If not me, you would have another Koriathain appointed to your prince’s fate. She would be a huntress, ruled by vicious hate. This was the choice I was given, at Highscarp. When the Prime’s bidding was laid before me, I claimed the burden upon the belief that the precepts of love would not hasten defeat, but instead seek a way to find triumph.’

‘A queen of the realm would be as courageous.’ Sidir swept her a bow, moved despite himself. ‘Consider my sword at your back as a friend. Let my stroke fall as Dharkaron’s own Spear and be welcomed, if ever your Prime tries to twist your resolve and enact my liege’s destruction.’

The tears rose too suddenly. Throughout the brutal rip tide of release, Sidir did not try the demeaning palliative of soothing her anguish. Wise man, he knew which wracking griefs could be tempered and which must abide, unconsoled.

Nothing was left, except to move on. Elaira turned from the Companion’s staunch calm. Too desolate to indulge her deep sorrows, she knelt on the jumbled rock by the river-course, then rallied her adamant discipline.

Water with fast-flowing current was never easy to tap in rapport. Most impressionable of the four elements, in liquid state tumbling with gravity, its bonding properties unravelled as bursts of electromagnetics. Such whirlpool turbulence rejected all pattern. Yet that same effervescence, harnessed with skill, might key a scrying that could not be traced. Elaira’s affinity was an inborn gift. She let her active awareness dissolve into the flow of the Arwent.

An ephemeral thrill raced over her skin, leaving her momentarily deafened and blinded. Then her dissociate senses cleared: she became the black pool, scribed with whirling eddies, and the exuberant splash, necklaced with foam under starlight. She was the rampaging gush through the gorge, then the broad, placid sheet of Daenfal Lake, wind-ruffled and hemmed with plumed reed-beds. The expansion rushed through her, tingling her nerves, as near shore to far, she traced the meandering loops of the outflow, winding away towards the sea.

Elaira declared her bounds of intent before her reach encompassed the bay, and dispersed in the salt deeps of the ocean. Poised, she became the essence of water, inside a radius of one hundred leagues.

And water, an impressionably volatile medium, reflected the flows of the lanes, receptive as an echo to the harmonics struck off by human emotion. Awake to such whispers, Elaira could plumb the dreams of sleepers in Daenfal. She sensed the lampsmen and sentries on watch at the walls, and the individual moods of the goatherds encamped in Araethura. The scout patrols and the clan hunters of Halwythwood also were made known to her. Each living presence moved as liquid light, stamped into the streamlets and marshes, with exchanged conversation a subliminal resonance, laced through the underground springs.

At the cusp where earthly form bordered the mysteries, the innate cry of her hampered spirit burned for sweet return to the linked empathy only Arithon could partner. Elaira checked that yearning flame short. Since his late mission to curb the deadly cult at Etarra, she had promised him solitude for safety’s sake. Though a Sorcerer wearing the form of an eagle had brought word of his triumphant survival, his silence since suggested he was still in healing recovery. Ache though she might to touch his close presence, news of Jeynsa’s escapade would stress him. Elaira would not shake his peace, or breach polite ethic and invade the privacy of strangers. She quested, instead, for the signature presence of Jeynsa s’Valerient. The Fellowship’s marked choice for a caithdein’s inheritance, the girl’s imprint should stand out like a brand.

Yet no match arose to receive the sought pattern divined through the element. The essence of Water spoke across time. Had Jeynsa died, her passage would have left ranging echoes of the event. Unless she was warded. That thought raised ugly questions.

What covert motive would drive a candidate whose duty spoke for the law as a crown prince’s conscience?

Uneasy, Elaira refined her approach, sweeping for the resonant wake left by the girl’s spent emotions.

Those residual traces emerged, one vivid imprint embedded in Daenfal Lake, stamped just after midnight at the recent dark moon. Jeynsa’s terrified scream had distressed a young waterman and the steersman of the boat that had ferried her south towards Silvermarsh. The nightmare raised by the girl’s Sighted talent now bled through: a vision of the realm’s crown prince, strapped to a stone slab, his bleeding form ringed by tormented ghosts. The bound shades were young girls, wracked women, and boys, entrapped by the practice of necromancy …

Elaira smothered her visceral outcry. Cut free of gestalt awareness, revolted to nausea, she crouched on her knees and used merciless discipline to smother her stark bolt of fear. This event was the past! Arithon had confided his plan to bait the Kralovir to their downfall; yet his spoken word could never prepare for the impact of the horrors just witnessed. Elaira steadied her rattled nerves. Choked back springing tears for the glimpse of a suffering that defied endurance. Beyond sparing Sidir from a hideous explanation, her fierce reaction risked drawing Arithon himself into sympathetic rapport. Such carelessness could disclose Jeynsa’s ill-starred defection and, worse, inflame the fresh scar the traumatic ordeal must have set on his spirit.

The humid night wrapped the enchantress like a blanket. Plumed spray off the thrashing falls braced her skin. Life’s concert of crickets still pealed from the grasses, small balms to lean on until calm returned and overwrought pulse slowed and settled. Elaira steeled herself to proceed. No way else could she hope to trace past the warding that cloaked Jeynsa’s movement from scryers. Determined, the enchantress plunged back into immersion, aligning her search south and east.

She sounded the bogs and the turbid reed-beds that fringed the lake-shore, into Silvermarsh, and there, detected a dark thread of silence that stitched a straight course through the landscape. A talisman would soak up the natural flow of electromagnetics. Jeynsa’s trail led into Melhalla, where she did not move alone. Elaira’s tuned senses detected a glimmering fan of pack-focused intent closing in on the girl from behind. The pattern fitted a tracker’s array, running dogs for the head-hunters’ league.

Elaira wrenched out of trance, shoved erect much too fast. Her staggered step encountered Sidir, his alert courtesy charged to alarm by the sight of her stricken face.

‘What’s wrong?’ Just as fast, his bracing grasp steadied her. ‘Has Jieret’s daughter been killed?’

‘No.’ The enchantress shivered. ‘Not yet. She’s endangered.’ Displaced senses still reeling, Elaira unburdened. ‘Jeynsa’s already crossed Daenfal Lake. She’s set on the run through the game trails of Silvermarsh, pressed by a bountymen’s ambush.’

‘Fatemaster’s mercy!’ Sidir pealed in anguish. His grey eyes held the urgency seen once before, that unthinkable night when he had forced the breach of his crown prince’s intimate privacy. ‘How can I tell her mother we’ve failed? Dharkaron avert the cold hand of necessity! That girl’s got a lead of sixty-five leagues, too far to hope we can help her.’

‘Not if we chase her,’ Elaira agreed. ‘She’s ahead of her enemies. She may outwit them. If not, the trackers will haze her into West Halla.’

‘Straight into the swords of the Alliance’s muster, by now choking the trade-routes through Pellain!’

As Sidir loosed his grasp, lashed frantic, Elaira captured his sleeve. ‘Wait. There’s more.’

Restrained at the edge of explosive impatience, the Companion still listened.

‘Jeynsa’s bearing a talisman,’ said Elaira, aggrieved.

His sharp wit took stock. ‘Then why didn’t Eriegal decide to tell us, since he saw her off back in Halwythwood?’

Elaira met that probing dissection with silence, reluctant to suggest a conspiracy. Since the man at her side would shatter himself in a doomed attempt to best fate, she strove to avert suicidal disaster.

‘I know you’re loath to rely on my trust. But, Sidir, if you ask, I can hasten our journey. Snag a ride on the deck of a trespassing barge, and my resource can buy a swift passage. From Daenfal, we could fare southward by river.’

‘You could disguise my origins?’ The clansman’s bleak glance mapped that prospect, displeased. ‘Perish the thought! Far more than my life will reside in your hands.’

‘I know.’ Elaira withstood the balked heat of his rage. ‘Dharkaron’s revenge strike me dead if I’m false, since I don’t see a more hopeful recourse.’

‘On your head, then,’ snapped Sidir, his staunch courage proof of his iron-heart character.

No use, to pretend that his stakes were not desperate. For every step taken to speed their pace to Melhalla, the Light’s call to war would raise obstacles. The inns and the roads would be seething with troops. Each officer bearing a stamped requisition would be clamouring for transport, alongside contingents of Sunwheel priests, with the eyes of their zealot examiners. Should her power of arcane concealment fall short, or should her Prime Matriarch’s fickle interests command Sidir’s betrayal, he would be condemned. Clansmen caught inside town precincts were granted no trial. She asked Rathain’s most loyal liegeman to run the risk of a death that began with public dismemberment.

Late Summer 5671