Читать книгу Peril’s Gate - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the door flap slapped shut on her heels, Earl Jieret folded his rangy height onto the split log he used for a camp stool. ‘Ath bless that girl’s spirit, Asandir chose her well. Jeynsa’s the only one of my brood with the nerve to withstand s’Ffalenn temper.’ Head cocked, his steady gaze wary in the flare of the pine torch that blazed in a staked iron sconce, he showed no trepidation, even now. ‘Since you’re here, Sorcerer, certain trouble rides the wind. Better say what you came for.’

Luhaine minced no words. ‘You’ve already mustered your clansmen to arms. Had you not, we would face a disaster.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arithon propped his lamed hand on the gelding’s damp crest, eyes closed as he absorbed the tactful implication that the Sorcerer lacked means to see him to shelter and safety. Too proud to plead, he still showed a gratitude that wounded for its sincerity. ‘That gelding carries everything I need to be comfortable. Thank you from the depths of my heart.’

‘Well, the officer who held him was foolishly negligent,’ Luhaine excused, embarrassed that freeing a horse from a lead rein had been the best help he could offer.

Conversation suffered a necessary lag, while the company of guardsmen swept jingling down the lane past the hedgerow. None seemed the wiser for the Sorcerer’s intervention. Over the ridge, the farmer’s yells entangled with the yelps of cowed mastiffs, until wind swept the outcry away.

The reprieve did not buy this night any peace. Magnetic imbalance and building storm still spun their partnered refrain. The frenetic pull of raw force scoured the land like the tension of overcranked harp strings. Snow winnowed down like crosshatch in scratchboard through the weathered slats of the corncrib, while seconds fled, closing the interval left before midnight.

Constrained by time, the Sorcerer dashed the hope that lingered, unspoken. ‘In sad fact, I bring you no other good news.’

Arithon straightened. Insight born of mage wisdom let him listen without questions until he received the raw gist.

Luhaine stayed blunt, since quickest was kindest. ‘There has been breaking crisis, and Dakar is needed. I must ask if you’re willing to go forward alone.’

‘The setback won’t come as a crushing surprise,’ Arithon admitted, unperturbed. ‘You know the Mad Prophet was sucking down gin to ward off a blind fit of prescience? To judge by the way he provisioned the packhorse, I expect he foresaw our escape to the coast would be forfeit.’

No sense mincing words over outright disaster. ‘That way is closed to you,’ Luhaine affirmed. He was loath to reveal any more than he must. Against the tenacity of Arithon’s enemies, more concerns would only serve the potential for fatal distraction. ‘I’ve already called your caithdein to service. He’ll await you in the black tower at Ithamon. Your safe haven lies there, but you must first cross the mountains. A company of headhunters will hound your back, whipped on by a Koriani geas. Can you manage?’

‘As I must.’ All banal practicality, Arithon snugged his cloak hem between toe and stirrup iron. A hard snap wrenched a tear in the fabric. He worked the rent larger, then wrung off a strip to bind up his dripping sword cut. ‘No, don’t apologize,’ he gasped through locked teeth as he knotted the ends in pained clumsiness. ‘I already know you can’t work a small healing. The flare would imprint in my aura. Since no tendons were cut, let’s not give Lirenda’s pack of scryers the free gift of a beacon to track me.’

He looked up, doubtless warned by Luhaine’s tacit stillness. ‘What’s wrong? Dakar told me he’d had a vision that Morriel Prime had stepped outside of her body. He presumed she’d passed the Wheel. Has she left a death curse? Did she somehow strike out in malice and upset your stewardship of the compact?’

‘Not yet,’ Luhaine assured, relieved that the core of his business stayed obscured from the nuance of mage-schooled perception. ‘Though you should be cautioned. The Prime Matriarch broke all law and precedent to arrange the transfer of power upon her succession. She caused a large-scale upset to Athera’s magnetic lanes, a distraction made for the unprecedented purpose of claiming a young initiate in possession.’

‘She’s succeeded? Ath’s mercy!’ Arithon measured Luhaine’s reserve, black hair torn loose by the wind flicking the drawn line of his cheekbone. To the Sorcerer’s refined vision, he seemed a figure spun out of Falgaire glass. More than the shock of physical exhaustion set his faculties under siege. His fresh separation from Elaira told deepest, left him heartsore and emotionally naked. Too bone weary, this once, to question just why he might be directed to seek shelter at Ithamon, he cast his net of logic too close and fixed on the problem nearest to hand. ‘Of course, if the Prime Matriarch’s abandoned all principle, then Dakar’s protection must guard Fionn Areth.’

Luhaine in hard wisdom chose not to expose the conclusion as fallacy. The s’Ffalenn prince faced a journey of terrible hardship to reach his fast refuge at Ithamon. Let him keep the false gift of his peace of mind and ride without fear that the wards over Rockfell were compromised.

‘I seek Dakar next with a list of instructions. Meanwhile, time is short. Align your flight with the crest of the midnight lane tide. The tonic effects of its passage should carry you into the foothills.’ The image of the Sorcerer’s presence flicked out. Behind him, he left the unmarked fall of the snow, and last words, whirled in the wake of precipitous departure. ‘The flux will do much to offset your exhaustion. Ath go with you, Teir’s’Ffalenn. Know the seals I have set on your two horses will bolster their stamina through the night.’

Six leagues to the southeast, Fionn Areth regained awareness, wrapped in a net of blazing pain. Too fuddled to groan, he felt as if his skull sloshed with acid and stewed all his brains into jelly. His body seemed just as abusively compromised. Jackknifed, facedown, and seized by sick vertigo, he attempted to stir. Wrists and ankles, his limbs had been snugly tied. Through scattered senses, he assembled the jangled impression that he lay tossed like a meal sack over a moving horse.

His gasped protest drew no response.

The horse kept on walking. The disjointed view through its scissoring legs showed blank snow lapped against wind-torn darkness. Through a brief, sweaty struggle, Fionn Areth raised his head. That effort bought him a lashing sting, as gouged brush slapped across his bare face. Somewhere beyond view, two voices engaged in unhurried conversation, one speaker a polished, resonant baritone whose accents belonged to a stranger.

‘The marker you seek lies fifty paces hence. Veer just a bit to your right.’

‘Thank you,’ the Mad Prophet said, testy as his toe snagged on a tree root and wrenched him into a stumble. The gelding flipped its nose as the lead rein jerked taut. Fionn Areth almost missed the next line, jostled to the beast’s broken stride. ‘I’d be pleased if you’d tell me what caused the delay, since I sent asking help several hours ago.’

A fir branch slashed back, dousing snow down the herder’s nape. His yelp raised no sympathy. The unseen arrival, in flowery prose, gave answer to Dakar’s question. ‘Morriel Prime has stirred trouble beyond everyone’s worst expectation. Her meddling hurled all seven lanes on the continent into magnetic imbalance. Sethvir’s earth-sense was compromised. If you called, very likely he failed to hear. Worse, I’ve not come to help, but to ask your willing support on a problem of grievous import.’

‘You think I don’t have enough on my hands?’ Dakar urged the burdened horse up a rise, snagged aback by its fellow, who had sidled wrong side around a fixed tree trunk. That difficulty resolved through a tug and ripe language, the Mad Prophet resumed in the same vein of bother. ‘This yokel herder is rescued from death, and what does he do? He bites the same hand that dragged his arse clear of the fire!’

Another piled branch unburdened its load over Fionn Areth’s strapped torso. His howl startled the horse underneath him to a jig that pummeled the pit of his stomach.

‘Oh, do stop your moaning, boy!’ Dakar bit back. His snap on the lead rein hauled the beast up short. It balked, then resumed its belabored pace through the deepening snowdrifts. ‘Given the fiends plaguing trouble you’ve caused, you’re damned lucky to find the breath of life still in your body. If your prince hadn’t spoken, I would have gifted the fish with a millstone tied to your ankles.’

‘I never asked to be saved by a criminal,’ Fionn Areth ground out.

The horse underneath him stopped as if jerked. Chill steel kissed his skin. The rag ties that secured him abruptly parted, and someone’s brutal, intolerant push spilled him head over heels in a drift.

Fionn Areth plowed upright, coughing up snowflakes. The gift of erect posture provided no boon. A cloaked, portly figure observed without pity as his bashed head spun him dizzy with pain. The ignominy sparked thoughtless temper. Fionn Areth surged to his feet with bunched fists. His bandaged right shoulder hampered his swing. He lashed out, regardless, driven wild by injured pride and confusion. His blow whisked through air. Though the body he swung at seemed rotund as Dakar’s, endowed with the same rooted obstinacy, his left-handed counterpunch passed straight through. He connected with nothing but an aching, dire cold that made his bones sting like struck glass.

‘Do you know,’ said the Sorcerer, Luhaine, offended, ‘just how high the price of your rescue might come to be worth?’

‘Should I care?’ Shivering, Fionn Areth glared back. The apparition was a sorcerer. Nothing alive could mistake such a presence. The spirit regarding the herder in return was not patient, his stature restrained to a self-contained power that would stand down bared steel on a glance. Hackled by his own reckless fear, Fionn Areth lifted his chin. ‘If I was a Koriani pawn before this, what am I now, but a plaything held captive by the fell forces of darkness?’

‘You are much less than that,’ Luhaine pronounced in frigid correction. ‘Just how much less, I hope by Ath’s mercy your family never finds out. The Crown Prince of Rathain might well die for his choice to indulge your adolescent ingratitude. If he does, this world could lose sunlight again without any chance of reprieve.’

That statement snapped Dakar’s complacency. ‘Not Rockfell!’ He shoved off the gelding that butted his chest, ice melt and snowflakes snagged in his beard, and his anxiety suddenly piercing. ‘Luhaine, don’t say the wardspells holding the Mistwraith have somehow been thrown into jeopardy.’

‘The very truth.’ Image though he was, Luhaine shared the gravity of the old, leaning marker stone crusted with lichens at his back. ‘When the lane tide crests barely minutes from now, the recoil set loose by Morriel’s upset will dissolve Rockfell’s outer defense rings. I must be well away before then. No one else could be spared to stand guard when the wards in the shaft go unstable.’

‘No one?’ Cracked to shrill disbelief, Dakar tugged his cloak off a thorn. ‘Where’s Asandir?’ Rocked by the scope of unsaid implication, he advanced on the Sorcerer who faced him. ‘Ath, your field strength is compromised. That’s why you need me?’

‘To travel to Rockfell with all speed, yes,’ Luhaine admitted. His focus upon Dakar stayed too acute to spare second thought for Fionn Areth. ‘You do understand.’

Dakar shook his head, bludgeoned to blunt terror. ‘How I wish that I didn’t.’ He stamped his feet, fumbled the lead reins, and regarded the horses’ trusting stance as though their placidity could soften his appalled disbelief. No such escape could negate the harsh truths. The defenses containing the Mistwraith were wrought to a strength born of frightening complexity. Their locked rings of power crossed on both sides of the veil. Such duality by nature required the skilled work of two Sorcerers: one in a stable state of free spirit, and one who still walked incarnate.

‘Asandir’s beyond reach, attending the emergency containment of Eckracken’s haunt.’ Luhaine’s agitation shook the capped snow off the megalith as he delivered the shattering setback, that Sethvir’s active resource became all that bound five other deranged grimwards to stability. ‘To safeguard Desh-thiere’s prison, we are left with a last, very desperate expedient: to stand a spellbinder as placeholder for Kharadmon to act through.’ A stilled silhouette against the storm that roared through the tops of the fir trees, he measured Dakar’s pained suspension. ‘Given your help, the wards over Rockfell might be fully restored. The Fellowship asks for the partnered possession of your body, loaned for our use in free will.’

‘Why not choose Verrain?’ Dakar begged, tautly sober. He had witnessed the working when Asandir and Kharadmon had last sealed those dire defenses. Even the memory of what he had glimpsed sickened him to the bone. Those ranging vibrations were laid counter to spirit, counter to harmony, a dissonance coiled and barbed to revile every last linking facet of life. That cutting, mindless edge of bound chaos transcended the bounds of mortality; crossed the safe limits of solid existence to challenge the weave of creation.

Luhaine’s stillness affirmed the stark fact the Guardian of Mirthlvain could not be spared from his posted vigil at Methisle. Why else would the Fellowship countenance the expedient of leaving Arithon s’Ffalenn unprotected?

‘No one’s watching the star wards, either,’ Luhaine said, a bald-faced admission that finally imparted the shattering scope of the crisis. He was no willing messenger, to lay this crux upon Dakar’s unprepared shoulders. Morriel’s plots had brought desperate straits, and a peril beyond speech to encompass. The Fellowship lacked enough hands to avert the appalling cascade of fresh damages. ‘Khadrim fly and kill in Tysan, as well.’

‘Oh, you have my cooperation,’ Dakar burst out, bitter. ‘That’s given. I’ll act before letting the Mistwraith escape. Who wouldn’t, knowing the price of its capture?’ The dread in him stemmed from the wider concern that his scant resources might prove inadequate.

Luhaine gave such uncertainty short shrift. ‘Believe it, those of us who have tuned Rockfell’s wardings all suffer the selfsame doubts.’

‘That’s consolation?’ Dakar crowded into the warmth of the geldings, wishing their straightforward animal contact could lessen the chills that speared through him. Between the shrilling, furious gusts, and the shearing hiss of thick snowfall, he sensed the winding tension leading the advent of midnight. Lane forces flared and shimmered along the edge of peripheral vision. The Paravian marker stone cast a pallid corona that razed through the veil, and roused his awareness to mage-sight.

With solstice tide imminent, the Fellowship Sorcerer’s need to depart pitched his instructions to urgency. ‘Go to Rockfell by land. Take the route through the passes. I will wait there, holding guard, and Kharadmon will join us on your arrival.’

‘What about Fionn Areth?’ Unvarnished disgust for the herder’s welfare the bone that stuck in the throat, Dakar added, ‘I gave Arithon my word I’d look after him.’

Luhaine’s cast image reflected no change, and yet his icy regard encompassed the Araethurian still standing stiff witness to what would seem an incomprehensible conversation. Too rushed to scold through a long-winded lecture, the Sorcerer made disposition. ‘You are perfectly free to do as you please. Fare on with Dakar, and he’ll keep his promise to Rathain’s prince. Provided the problem at Rockfell can be solved, you can travel downriver to Ship’s Port next spring, and reach your safe harbor at Alestron. Or you can set off alone, Fionn Areth. Should you take your own path, mind well: you will be disowned. Your liege’s protection from that hour will become forfeit under my Fellowship’s auspices. My personal seal will ensure the Teir’s’Ffalenn never sees you this side of the Wheel. The sorry plight the Koriathain have set on you becomes yours alone to resolve. I’ll take the onus of breaking the word of your death to Prince Arithon when the time comes.’

‘That will tear out his heart!’ Dakar objected.

But Luhaine had no mercy to spare for anything past bare necessity. ‘Athera can withstand his Grace of Rathain’s broken heart. She will never again bear the risk of his compromised safety. Remember that, herder. Prince Arithon’s life is a singular thread that can bind this world back to balance. Why else should Morriel design for his capture, or Desh-thiere wreak ill for his downfall?’

‘He’s a criminal,’ Fionn Areth insisted, but softly, as though the ultimatum thrown to his discretion had sown a seed of uncertainty.

‘He’s a prince under curse by a Mistwraith to kill, or be killed in turn, by his half brother.’ Luhaine set the stress on each syllable for emphasis. ‘All of his acts, then and now, must be counted a desperate act of survival.’

‘Half brother?’ Fionn Areth glowered at the Sorcerer, confused. ‘I never heard tell of any half brother.’

‘Lysaer s’Ilessid shared the same mother,’ Dakar explained, brutally short. He could not ignore the spiraling build of the lane forces prickling his nape. ‘You know nothing at all, goatherd. Only the lies the Alliance presents to make puppets out of the ignorant.’ To Luhaine, he added, ‘Go. Now! You must. The young man will choose. I’ll meet you at Rockfell as soon as I may by crossing the peaks of the Skyshiels.’

‘Fare swiftly and well.’ Luhaine’s image dispersed, leaving darkness and snow, and the bite of a wind sharpened with winter misery.

The horses milled, restless. Their animal instinct sensed the tightening coil of the earth’s rising magnetics. Dakar firmed his grasp on their lead reins, grateful a Sorcerer’s wisdom had guided them to the sole nexus of balance within a radius of twelve leagues. The Paravian marker had been carved and set by the centaur guardians to channel the flux of the mysteries. Jaelot’s townbred crofters had long since forgotten its meaningful connection. After five centuries of their unschooled husbandry, the network that once spanned the land like a star grid no longer remained intact. Patriarch trees had died or been cut, replaced by plowed fields and fenced pastures. Fixed stone was, thankfully, less volatile. Even marred in their settings, such ancient markers retained their dedicated purpose.

To Fionn Areth, who might ask probing questions, or even renew pointless argument, the Mad Prophet gave stiff advice. ‘I don’t care if you ever believe another damned thing that I say. Just pay heed to this: lane surge is in progress. Any element in disharmony caught in its path is going to get flung straight to chaos. If you don’t like that thought, put both hands on that marker stone. Then at risk of your sanity, stay put! When everything settles, you’ll wait for my word. I’ll say when it’s safe to let go.’

For a miracle, Fionn Areth seemed mollified. He assumed his place at the stone without protest, and even lent help with the horses. At his urging, the two geldings lowered their high-flung heads. Calmed by his singsong Araethurian dialect, they eased off the lead reins that threatened to separate both of the Mad Prophet’s shoulders.

Dakar had no chance to express his thanks. Across half the world, the sun’s disk reached the zenith. Midnight arrived at Jaelot’s old focus, and the last solstice lane tide peaked in a rush down the conduit of the sixth lane.

The channels through latitude wakened and sang, tuned into resonance by a masterbard’s skills, engaged twenty-four hours earlier. The Paravian marker stone roused to the primal cry of the mysteries. Beneath the sweating palms of two humans, the torrent rekindled to fire the land’s bounty licked through its interlaced carvings. As had happened for untold thousands of years, the quartz-ingrained granite resounded. The Mad Prophet was prepared as mortal flesh could be, alive as a boy when the Paravian rituals were still given active practice.

Yet the Araethurian goatherd at his shoulder had encountered no such experience. No word could prepare Fionn Areth as the surge struck the stone to a ringing crescendo. The note it sustained was downstepped in translation through the marriage of air and earth. The most subtle range of electromagnetic vibration became audible to mortal hearing. As the lane flux pealed to the chord of grand order, every formed object in Ath’s creation became touched into shared celebration.

This was the raised harmony that tore down stone walls, unhinged oaken doors, and shot green, budding leaves from the hewn beams of the rooftrees erected by humans, unaware they had trammeled its path. For the second time since the Paravian departure, the solstice tide crested, aligned to an arrow of clear force. Resistances shattered. Obstructive disharmonies became swept away, immolated in bursts of flash-point heat, or else shaken asunder by vibration. Where the spate passed, the unbridled mysteries demanded no less than a burgeoning rebirth of life.

Spiraled into whirling dizziness, Fionn Areth felt as though his whole being would take flight through the top of his head. He swayed, no longer aware of his hands, touched to the tempering megalith. The Mad Prophet’s shouted encouragement was lost. Fionn Areth saw and heard nothing else through that deluge of limitless ecstasy. The cascading tumult of sound unwound all reason and sanity. Hurled adrift, soaring beyond the earthbound ties of his moorland origins, Fionn Areth reeled as the boundaries framing his identity dissolved. Joy gripped him. Laughter burst from his throat, an irrepressible paroxysm that shook and rattled and shattered the fear in his heart.

In the trampling rush of abandoned acceptance, he recalled where he had heard fragments of the grand chord before this: first in the spelled cry of a sword, drawn to spare him from death and fire, and later, in the timbre of a masterbard’s voice, singing to heal his torn knee. Then his last scrap of cognizance shredded. He drifted, unmoored amid the vast flux that imbued Ath’s creation with life.

The suspension might have lasted one heartbeat, or closed the full arc of eternity. Fionn Areth could not finger the moment when time and space shrank him back into fleshly awareness. He understood that the lane surge was waning, the withdrawal of its tonic fire an ache beyond words to describe. He felt hollow, sucked clean, then grievously desolate, as under his hands the stone’s keening cry diminished into dumb silence. The gift of its presence had been all that allowed the clay senses to share the ephemeral event. Wrenched by the dulled aftermath, Fionn Areth realized he might bear a loss for the rest of his days that his mind had no means to encompass.

The legacy was two-edged, in the way of all wisdom. Recast in the light of compassionate truth, the note of blind discord he could not sustain was his distrust of Arithon s’Ffalenn.

More than shaken, the scalpel cut of the wind on his face chasing an unwonted spill of tears, Fionn Areth leaned on chilled stone until his clamped knuckles bruised from the stress. ‘I don’t understand. Who is he?’

Out of the dark, and the harrying storm, through the jostling warmth of wet horses, the Mad Prophet gave level answer. ‘He is who he said: Rathain’s sanctioned crown prince, bound to serve by his oath. As you saw, he also bears living title as Athera’s Masterbard.’

Fionn Areth swallowed. ‘That doesn’t explain everything.’

‘I have answers.’ Dakar for a mercy met nerve storms with patience. ‘They’re not simple, or short, or infallible, since at heart the man beats a fiend for complexity. He’s as human as you, but his motives can be by lengths more difficult to fathom. If you wish me to speak, you’ll have to stay long enough to hear through the telling.’

Fionn Areth would make no apology for an upbringing meant for the tending of goats. ‘If I accept Prince Arithon’s offer of protection, I deserve to know why he has criminal charges for black sorcery on record against him.’

‘Ask what you will.’ Refreshed by the euphoric riptide of lane force, Dakar grasped the reins of the broad-backed roan gelding and swung his bulk into the saddle. ‘What I know, I’ll share freely, as long as you’re willing to ride. We need to set distance between us and Jaelot while we have bad weather to cover us.’

Fionn Areth mounted the lanky chestnut, his first question dropped as he closed his heels to the animal’s steaming flanks. ‘What actually happened on the banks of Tal Quorin?’

Dakar rolled his eyes. ‘You Araethurians don’t mince your words, do you?’ Grateful at least that Arithon’s last order gave him free permission to reply, he opened an ordered recital of facts that could wring tears from blue sky for sheer tragedy.

Yet breaking dawn cast silvery light through the diminishing veils of fresh snowfall before Fionn Areth had exhausted curiosity. He rode faced forward, staring at nothing, while the horse underneath him followed herd instinct and trailed Dakar’s mount to a stop.

Silence descended like muffling cotton, sliced by the trills of a chickadee. The sky to the east gleamed lucent aquamarine between scudded streamers of cloud. In a crook tucked amid the steep-sided foothills, beneath evergreens mantled like ermine-cloaked matrons, the Mad Prophet dropped his reins and dismounted. His words fell diminished in the bitter air as he announced his intent to set up a warded camp. ‘If you want to hunt game, be advised, we can’t cook. Koriathain have a knack for noticing fires. Their skilled scryers can sense a dying deer if they’re vexed enough for deep sounding.’

No reply; just a determined rustle of clothing as Fionn Areth reined his tired gelding around.

‘Where in Ath’s name do you think you’re going now?’ Dakar cracked in ill temper.

Echoes ranged back from the slab-sided hills and shook snow in heaps from the treetops.

‘Back.’ The Araethurian herder glared over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps you speak the truth. If so, I made an unpardonable mistake.’ Uncertain, in daylight, whether the event at the marker stone had been a dream wrought by enchantment to turn him, he said, mulish, ‘I would know if your prince spared my life in good faith.’

‘Well, you can’t prove a damned thing by riding straight into the scalping knives of Jaelot’s headhunters!’

For answer, Fionn Areth dug in his heels.

Quite able to move with astonishing speed, Dakar sprinted. In three bounding strides, he hauled horse and rider back to a stumbling halt. ‘Nor will I let you blunder cross-country, asking after his Grace’s true parentage. You’ll only draw notice from meddlesome Koriathain, then bring his armed enemies after you. No. You’ll do as your liege wished, and take Luhaine’s advice, and accompany me straight on to Rockfell. That way, we’ll both live to reach sanctuary. Once on board the Khetienn, you might earn the chance to ask certain questions in private. Though how you’ll make up for the cost you’ve exacted for Arithon’s bleeding kindness would leave even Daelion Fatemaster stymied.’

Winter 5670