Читать книгу Grand Conspiracy - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 12

Asandir thumped back the lid of the battered wooden clothes chest, which held the few personal effects he kept at Althain Tower. Craggier, and cross-grained as beached driftwood from the harrowing events that had taxed him to infirmity last season, he chose a formal cloak of heavier wool, a deep enough blue to be taken for black, with borders edged in bands of silver foil ribbon. The rich color brought out his lingering pallor.

To Luhaine, attendant upon his preparations like a cloud of morose, glacial air, the detail became the caustic reminder of a convalescence cut short by necessity. ‘You know you ought to be resting.’

Asandir paused. Recovery had left him just short of rail thin, the creases around his eyes knifed into dry flesh, and the rubbed ivory knuckles of each capable hand embossed through his blue-veined skin. Yet workworn as he appeared, the Sorcerer who shouldered the Fellowship’s field work retained his uncompromised will. His gray eyes held the etched clarity of lead crystal, as he countered, ‘You could have asked my leave when you lent Sethvir the use of my black stallion.’

‘In fact, I could not,’ Luhaine said, plaintive. ‘At the time he departed, you happened to be comatose.’

That line of defense died into an unsettled quiet, neither of the Sorcerers anxious to pursue the confrontation head-on. Though Sethvir spent little time in his private quarters at Althain Tower, the chamber was cluttered as a junk stall. Mismatched chairs had acquired heaps of horse harness. Two marble plinths were piled with snake skins, spancel hoops of oak, a tea canister missing its top. The spare pallet held skeins of wool yarn, brought in to remedy a straw hamper stuffed to bursting with holed stockings. Their odd, distorted imprints came and went in the dance of shadows cast by the candle set on a tin pricket.

Asandir knelt on the scarlet carpet, a lit form against the gargoyle shapes sculpted from the surrounding gloom. Nor did he accept Luhaine’s comment as he rummaged through the bottom of the clothes trunk. ‘Even unconscious, I would have heard you speak. You know that.’ He unearthed an item that chinked metallic protest.

‘At least with no horse we forced you to rest until you regained strength to walk. Do we have to go through this all over again?’ Luhaine huffed aside from the grounding threat of steel as his colleague raised a black-handled hunting knife and tested the edge with his fingertip. ‘If you knew how it felt to live as a shade, you’d stop doing that.’

‘You’re right.’ Asandir snicked the blade back into its sheath. Draft fluttered the dribbled candleflame as he added the knife to his select pile of necessities. ‘Out of body, I’d have small use for skinning a deer.’ The invasive smell of vacancy and dust made petty argument seem a welcome affirmation of life. ‘An unnecessary sacrifice, whatever your case, had you taken a moment and asked the bread mold and field mice to feed anyplace else but the pantry.’

Luhaine snorted. ‘The Prime Matriarch has launched a new plot, and you’re bound in knots for a miserable few rinds of spoiled cheese?’

Asandir stood. Large boned and imposing as an ocean-flying albatross, with the same matchless grace when he moved, he folded one arm and tucked his other fist beneath the clean-shaven jut of his chin. ‘Luhaine?’ he asked with piercing mildness. ‘What under Ath’s sky have the Koriathain done this time?’

Stripped by a glance keen enough to shear granite, Luhaine regretted his impulsive choice to broach that particular sore subject. ‘I don’t know yet,’ he hedged. ‘Once Sethvir returns, I’ll hope to be freed to find out.’

Asandir grunted. Unfazed by his colleague’s transparent evasion, he knelt and bundled his supplies into a weatherproof blanket roll. ‘Whatever unpleasant hunches you harbor, I could venture to Capewell and confront the Prime’s purpose headlong.’

‘That shouldn’t be necessary.’ Rather than reveal the shattering ill turn, that Morriel’s interests had broken Elaira’s retreat at Araethura, Luhaine breezed toward the doorway. ‘Sethvir ought to find his way back before solstice. Koriani sigils can’t trace Arithon at sea. Since his fleet sailed from Innish with provisions to last through midwinter, the matter should bide until then.’

And must, Luhaine raged in concealing silence; with six camps of Alliance armed forces blocking the safe sanctuary of half the clan bloodlines in Tysan, Caithwood’s trees perforce must claim preference.

Blessedly practical, Asandir tied the last thong on his bundle and snuffed the failing candle. ‘Then I’ll enjoy being spared the company of a bedridden harridan with a grudge.’ Faced with a second, urgent transfer by lane force, then an overland journey to be started afoot, the bent of his thoughts swung full circle. ‘Sethvir needs my horse before I do in any case. That stallion’s the only flesh-and-blood creature I trust to stand firm through a flux of grand conjury.’

Luhaine called in droll gloom through the doorway, ‘I’m forgiven in advance if you’re tossed off the back of some clansman’s borrowed hack?’

Asandir straightened, a lank scarecrow in black leathers. His shoulder-length hair shone like loomed cloud in the fading light through the arrow slit, and his sudden, rare laugh shattered echoes off the ancient Paravian stonework. ‘You’re absolved if I happen to fall off a nag.’ He raised a lean leg, kicked the trunk shut, and strode clear of Sethvir’s belongings. ‘But for the rest of the secrets you’re brooding like eggs, I’ll hold mercy under advisement.’

The sundown surge of the lane tide carried the Fellowship Sorcerer southward to Mainmere. The circle that delivered him lay under the gloom of near dark. Stars bloomed like punched sparks on a cobalt zenith, and wind-combed, thin cirrus overhung the ink waters of a restless, tide-roiled estuary. Asandir stood motionless and allowed his reeling senses to reorient. More worn from the transfer than he liked to admit, he sorely missed the warm presence of his horse, and the satin black shoulder that usually braced up his balance on arrival.

He willed himself steady, while around him the raised play of lane force subsided. The bleached, weathered runes laid into rinsed bedrock sparked and flashed as the discharge bled off, actinic white to a whisper of blue, before fading through the spectrum of ultraviolet into the ordinary night.

An owl called, mournful. Beyond the stilled circle, the tumbled-down ruin of the Second Age fortress slept under its shrouding of vine. Past memory ran deep through the rain-scoured granite. Where the wide grasslands of the coast joined the sea, unicorns had once run like braided light on the hilltops, gathered for their seasonal migration. The songs of the sunchildren followed their course, while the joyous feet of the dancers had circled, waking the mysteries of renewal each cycle of equinox and solstice. The coming of mankind at the dawn of the Third Age had woven new thread through that ancient tapestry. From Mainmere, at midsummer, to the landing at Telmandir, the painted boats of townborn celebrants had rowed south under torchlight for the water festival. Each year, humanity made way for the passage of mysteries that were Ath’s gift to this world, their presence too bright for mortal endurance, outside of those families born into the time-tested strength of clan lineage.

Now, no burning torches etched the wavecrests like copper engraving. Nor did the memory of vanished powers linger, except in the unquiet peace of broken stones, and in the leashed sorrow of the Sorcerer who addressed them to settle the trace resonance of his urgent passage. He paid the abandoned fortress his respect. Despite the precision of Sethvir’s kept records, and the writings of the Paravian loremasters, Mainmere wore legends whose truths were no man’s to unlock.

The centaur mason Imaury Riddler was said to have placed a wisdom in each of the megaliths set into the primary foundation. At need, stone would answer, latent power unchained in whispered response to the step of the one who faced the hour of Athera’s most deadly peril.

Tonight, for Asandir, the dark rocks stayed silent. Only the storm-tattered crowns of the beech trees spoke on the stiff inland breeze, the first warning of winter borne on the dying taint of turned leaves.

Nor was the Sorcerer alone in that place.

As he strode from the quiescent white runes of the focus pattern, three forest-bred clan scouts stepped from the brush in cool, unafraid expectation.

‘Kingmaker,’ greeted the erect elder in the lead. ‘My Lady Kellis, Duchess of old Mainmere, bids you welcome. In her name, how may we serve the land?’

Asandir’s arched eyebrows showed surprise for the pleasure of the company. ‘She knew I was coming?’

‘She believed someone must.’ The lead scout reached the Sorcerer, arm extended for the customary wrist clasp. In clipped speech, he explained, ‘The grandmother seer who made simples at the Valenford crossroad was burned last month by the Alliance of Light’s Crown Examiner. She screamed as she died that her vision showed burning trees, and sunwheel soldiers wielding torches that opened the sky to a rain of scorched blood. The duchess was worried Caithwood might be threatened. She set us to watch in case help came.’

‘Daelion have mercy for the wrongful death sentence given that misfortunate seer! I’m here,’ Asandir affirmed, taller by a head, his blanket roll rammed under one elbow. Shock lent a quickened spring to his step as he let the scouts lead him onward.

‘So is Caithwood endangered?’ asked the woman among them, bitter with worry as her lanky, cat’s stride carried her through the maze of razed battlements.

Asandir followed through tufted bull grass toward the steep, crumbled stair to the sea gate. ‘Yes. Though the sealed orders from s’Ilessid were sent from Avenor only this morning. You have horses?’

‘Even better.’ The woman pointed toward the broken-down archway that funneled the hail of another voice, cautious above the muted splash of water off a bulwark of tide-washed stone. ‘We’ve got a smuggler’s boat from the river delta waiting. Her master’s a canny old fisherman who’s moved raided goods out of every deep cove in the forest. Where do you wish to make landfall?’

His descent economical on the mossy, cracked slabs of the stair, Asandir gave his answer. ‘The haven you have nearest a camp with fast horses, if I’m to spare more than green trees. How many refugee families are hiding south of the trade road?’

Just as sober, the scout captain replied, ‘All of them.’

Asandir’s response held barely leashed rage as the small party arrived on the landing. ‘Then thank that seeress’s unquiet shade for our chance of keeping them alive.’ He stepped from the crumbled breastwork into the battered fishing sloop held in waiting by a boy draped with cod-fragrant oilskins.

‘Grace, for your presence,’ he murmured in blessing, then assumed the dew-damp seat by the thwart. The bilge swirling under the boards at his feet stank of fish, and the prow held a heaped mound of trawl nets. To the balding, barrel-round man who surged to loose jib and mainsails, Asandir made direct inquiry. ‘Would you mind being loaned an unfair advantage?’

The fisherman’s teak face split with laughter. ‘Ye’d call down a gale? Toss up yer dinner, don’t come crying to me.’

‘How much can your craft handle?’ Asandir wedged his blanket roll out of reach of chance spray, while the boy and two of the duchess’s older scouts clambered in at his side. The woman stayed behind, her farewell brief as she shoved off the battered craft into the rip of the tide.

The dour helmsman grunted. ‘I’ll warrant my dearie’s canvas and sticks’ll take more abuse than your belly. We’ll do ten knots, if the old besom’s pushed.’

‘So, we’ll see.’ Grim since the news of the witch’s burning, Asandir touched the scout silent. He chose the heading for the helmsman himself, west-northwest, for the cove that lay nearest the trade road, which carved a diagonal scar through Caithwood and the low dales of Taerlin.

The fisherman stared at him, his meaty hands guided by instinct as he hauled in the mainsheet. Still regarding the Sorcerer, he called to his crew, a grandson or nephew by the look-alike stamp of young features. ‘Lad, clew in the foresail.’

His corded shoulders bunched as he made his line fast and hauled the boat’s tiller to port. The bow swung, sheered up a dousing sheet of spray while the headsail and main clamored taut. The hull rolled, settled into a steep heel, bashed and thrummed by the sucking drag of ebb tide. One squinted eye on the set of his canvas, the fisherman spoke at last in mild censure, ‘Can’t keep yon heading until the slack water at midnight. Current’s too stiff, no matter the lay of the wind.’

‘So we’ll see,’ Asandir repeated, his lean mouth pared thin with irony. He tucked his blanket roll under his shoulders, then reclined against the shining, wet wood and shut his eyes.

The older of the two clan scouts huddled into his fringed jacket and repressed the urgency to speak out of turn and disturb him.

Asandir sensed the man’s fretting. His speech came mild against the hammering tumult of wave and wind as the sloop fought the rip for her heading. ‘If your people have no horses tucked away near that landing, rest assured that I can make other arrangements.’

‘That’s well.’ Relieved to the point of embarrassment, the scout shifted aside for the boy, who moved forward, dripping, to find a cranny amid the wadded netting. The scout’s fox-thin features stayed trained toward the Sorcerer, pinched with frowning concern as he strove for politeness and subtlety. ‘In case you don’t know, there’s an Alliance war camp billeted next to the trade road.’

‘No setback at all.’ Asandir seemed removed, even distant, the seamed map of his features written in calm that verged on the borders of sleep.

That appearance deceived. Behind closed eyelids, the Sorcerer extended his awareness. He cast his trained consciousness outward in a web that missed nothing, from the skeined lines of force that guided the winds, to the deeper tie strung between moon and water, which commanded the pull of the tide. His mind tracked each wavecrest. He knew the purl of scrolled sound as salt water splashed into foam, each single event one word in a language his ear understood. He sensed the invisible, lightning tracks of magnetic current where the earth’s lane forces coiled through Mainmere and trailed a cascading signature of charged energy through the deeps.

His listening encompassed the fish in the shoals, and the gulls that bobbed, wing-folded in sleep on the swells. The sands of the seabed were singly made known to him, each grain by Name, their collective chord of existence laced through by streamered beds of kelp and live coral. The breadth of his thought embraced the four elements, and all else that touched upon the path of the fishing sloop’s crossing. To each varied and interlocked facet of existence, he gave solemn greeting, his tacit recognition a gift that awakened acknowledgment in turn. Through the vast stillness his announcement of presence engendered, he made known his need, then asked leave for the sake of the green trees threatened in Caithwood.

His answer came back as a white flood of power that sang through flesh and bone in sweet resonance. On a phrase, he could have bidden the sea to launch from its channel and punch through the sky like a fist. Fish and birds, all would rise for his cause; even the staid stone and sand on the bay floor would unbind in an explosion of volatile force.

Such was his strength, he asked none of these things.

Gentle as a filament spun out of starlight, he aligned his intent: to see one patched Torwent fishing sloop to the far shore, his course a shot arrow of desire that blazed west-northwest and marked the wide cove where the trade road from Valenford crossed under the eaves of the forest.

To that vectored appeal, he set mindful stays of limitation: that no life be harmed, and no bird become tossed or ruffled in flight from the recoil of contrary elements. That the tide’s rush through the estuary not falter, nor the anomaly his need would spin through the world’s wind unleash a stressed vortex that might seed a storm or drought later. He understood the flow of power, from force of element to breathing life, in all aspects of interlocked complexity. Rooted in wisdom, he shaped the offered gifts of the land with a feather touch of clean subtlety.

Nor did he invoke any power but his own to spark his laid pattern of conjury. To an adept of his experience, the charge contained in just one grain of sand could lay waste to the entire planet; therefore, he would not disturb the spin of any one fragment of matter. A single deep breath, a precisely aimed thought, he engaged the quickened awareness of his spirit and plucked, like a harp string, the subliminal current of light and sound which gave substance its material polarity.

Power answered through the greatest recognition of them all, the chime of affirmation that defined his own Name on the loom of unified existence.

‘An,’ whispered Asandir, the Paravian rune one that marked all beginnings since song first gave rise to Ath’s creation.

A ray of touched force flicked the air like a moth’s wing and deflected a kink in the clasp of gravity that linked Athera in her partnered dance with the moon. At Asandir’s directive, the twist became a spiral that touched water and air as a tuned breath might test the highest note on a flute.

Then change threaded through the coils of his conjury. The barest, soft shudder brushed the planks of the sloop as the bay arose in a swell of gleaming phosphorescence and nudged her. Changed breeze kissed her sails to a sullen flap of canvas, and the Torwent fisherman shot straight.

‘Ath’s deathless mercy!’ he gasped, shaken white as the helm went slack in his startled grasp.

Eyes still closed, his face wholly serene, Asandir smiled. ‘Not so far from plain truth,’ he said gently.

The wave at the sloop’s stern continued to build, rolling smooth and green, but not menacing. The small craft sheered ahead like a bead spilled down glass, her course west-northwest, though the tide roiled southward, its flow unimpeded by the loop newly wrought through its ebb. Then that first shifted breeze built into a gust that backwinded the headsail and clapped the main into banging frenzy.

‘Slacken the sheets!’ cried the captain to the terrified boy. ‘Move smart, don’t you see? This unnatural wind’s going to swing dead astern.’

‘Twenty points to starboard, in actual fact,’ said Asandir in mild correction. He opened his eyes, which shone silver-gray as a rain pool touched by the moon. ‘I thought you’d want steerage, since the standing wave we’re riding will bear us on at eight knots. You’ll get just enough breeze to keep headway.’

‘Aren’t like to toss supper, then.’ The fisherman rubbed his rope bracelets, his unsettled nerves transformed to trembling awe. ‘Who could’ve guessed? You’ve made us a passage so smooth a babe wouldn’t roll off the foredeck.’

‘We’ll make landfall by daybreak,’ the Sorcerer affirmed. His seamless act of grand conjury was dismissed as nothing outside of the ordinary. ‘Bucking the tide to windward, my spare clothes would get soaked. No one could have snatched an hour of sleep, besides.’ He folded lean arms, chin tipped to his chest, evidently prepared to take his own counsel in earnest.

The boy hauling lines stood stunned and mute; the seasoned clan scout gripped the rail in queer exultation. His forestborn sensibilities could scarcely encompass the rolling mound of water that propelled the sloop steadily toward Taerlin.

An hour slipped by. The moon rose in the east like yellowed parchment. Asandir dozed, while tide and wind danced, flawless, to the unseen tapestry of his will. The fisherman manned a helm that answered his touch like poured silk, and for him, the resentment cut sharply as grit ground into a wound.

‘How can you sit like a beggar and accept this?’ he charged the clan elder, crouched at the thwart with his hands lightly clasped to his weapon hilts.

The younger scout spun from his contemplation of spelled water with a fierce, quelling motion for silence. ‘Mind your talk, man! Dreaming or not, yon Sorcerer hears what concerns him.’

‘So he does. Should that matter?’ The fisherman jabbed argumentative fingers toward Asandir’s motionless form. ‘If wind and tide can be turned on mere whim, why not act in kind to save children?’ Longtime friend of the clans, he had given passage to the pitiful bands of refugee families who fled Tysan to take sanctuary in Havish. ‘Your people deserve better help in misfortune.’

‘Oh, be careful,’ charged the elder, tense now as the scout, and braced with the same trepidation. He, too, had known the grief of the young mothers, and the misery of small babes displaced and chilled and afraid.

The toll of ravaged lives brought by the Alliance campaign to drive the clan presence from Caithwood showed no sign of abating. Dogged by an outrage too sharp to contain, the fisherman would not stay silent. ‘Why not choose to spare human lives instead of a stand of inanimate trees?’

Asandir turned his head, his cragged features not angered; yet the opened, gray eyes were tranquil no longer. ‘Our Fellowship has no license to use power to influence mortal destinies.’

‘That’s a damned heartless platitude!’ the fisherman shot back. ‘The ships stolen from Riverton will scarcely be enough to stem the inevitable slaughter.’

Wholly mild, Asandir saw past temper to the seed of a deeper, more subtle anguish. ‘I see you’ve met his Grace of Rathain?’

The fisherman responded as though goaded. ‘Our village sheltered him when he crossed out of Tysan. He came soaked to the skin, exhausted from beating a course against head winds. He’d been ill. A blind fool could see he was in no shape to make passage, and the fat prophet with him was too seasick to offer him any relief at the helm.’

Asandir drew a slow breath, the rise of his chest the sole movement of his frame as he marshaled his patience to speak. ‘Arithon of Rathain is safely offshore where the Mistwraith’s curse cannot touch him.’

‘Rumor claims you opened a grimward in his behalf.’ The fisherman twisted the braided, rope talismans that circled his sun-browned wrists. ‘I say, if that’s true, you could have done more, and more still for those families hounded by Prince Lysaer’s campaign of eradication. Folk born with mage talent suffer as well. Not just forest clansmen in Tysan will be dying while you gad about sparing trees.’

The scout gasped. ‘Merciful Ath, we’re not ungrateful! Kingmaker, forgive. Clanblood has asked for no intercession.’

Denial or warning, the words came too late. The Fellowship Sorcerer gripped the thwart and sat up, a stark, lean shadow against the silver-webbed foam sheered up by the sloop’s sped passage. He linked his large-knuckled hands at his knees. His unshaken calm in itself framed a dangerous presence, while the waters off the stern rose green at his bidding, and the winds curved the sails, whisper light and responsive to the tuned might of his will.

‘Our use of grand conjury is not subject to whim,’ he stated. ‘Crowned heirs who bear royal ancestry act as our agents, under the strict terms of the compact our Fellowship swore with the Paravians.’ That intercession spanned more than five thousand years, when sanctuary had been granted to humanity at the dawn of the Third Age. As if that agreement was not all but forgotten, or its tenets misconstrued for the gain of town politics, Asandir resumed explanation. ‘Prince Arithon’s born compassion is our granted legacy, no less than King Eldir’s gift of wise temperance. As rulers confirmed under Fellowship sanction, they have the right to receive our assistance. But they must ask. And then we can act only by the Law of the Major Balance, inside a prescribed set of limits.’

A brief pause, while the Sorcerer’s terrible bright eyes turned down and regarded the linked clasp of his hands. ‘I opened a grimward for the sake of Prince Arithon’s safety,’ he said, steel and sorrow gritted through the admission. ‘Thirty-eight sunwheel guardsmen pursued him inside, driven on by duty and hatred. Of those, only one escaped with his life. Willful pride and rank ignorance brought the rest to their doom. Their deaths were chosen, not forced.’

‘Why could you not save them?’ the fisherman pressed. ‘The power was yours.’

‘The power is mine,’ Asandir affirmed. ‘But not then or ever, the arrogance to enact intervention!’ He sat sharply forward, stern as chipped granite. ‘The compact was sworn on mankind’s behalf, but its tenets were designed to guard the land. Paravians hold our vow against greed and misuse. That grants no authority to impair human freedom, however the trade guilds cry tyranny. We take no license to enact judgment on others, except as the weal of this world becomes threatened. Town councils ignore this, yet the bare facts remain. Humanity exists here on sufferance. Forget at your peril! Your race would be homeless without our sworn surety that Athera’s great mysteries stay sacrosanct.’

‘You’re saying––’ began the fisherman.

Asandir cut him off, ruthless. ‘We who are bound know better than any how a yoke chafes and how spirit can languish without the grace of free will. By Fellowship choice no child born under sky in this place is destined to live as a pawn!’

‘I don’t understand,’ the fisherman whispered, mollified at last by the unsheathed pain he had aroused in the Sorcerer who confronted him.

‘You couldn’t know, but our people remember.’ The gray-headed clansman stirred in the uncanny stillness that locked the air, between the lisp of turned waters and the matchless, steady breath of the wind, which even now held to the intent of Asandir’s unimaginable control. He glanced at the Sorcerer, who granted a sharp nod of leave. ‘The Fellowship of Seven were drawn here, long past, by the dreams of the dragons that no mind in creation can deny. They were charged and tied by a ritual magic wrought from drake’s blood to ensure Paravian survival. That oath taking gifted them their knowledge of longevity. Record among the clans says their lives stay the course of a service that could last to the ending of time, if need be.’

‘The drakes claimed us through the flaw of our own violence, and by the stain of slaughter already on our hands,’ Asandir qualified. ‘We were called as a weapon to destroy the drake spawn that could not be weaned from unconscionable killing. Only when Paravian survival is assured will our lives be set free once again.’

There passed an interval when only the wind spoke. The gruff, weathered fisherman could not bear to turn his head and suffer Asandir’s magnanimous acceptance. Moonlight edged the tableau in metallic, cold lines, and the lisp of the waves carried the salt tang of primordial beginnings. The Sorcerer sat, rock patient throughout, while the occupants of the sloop who still owned their mortality came to terms with the history of his Fellowship.

‘I have never understood,’ the young clansman ventured, made bold by the Sorcerer’s mild tolerance. ‘When the drake spawn were contained, or put down in the wars, were you not given liberty to break the drake’s binding and reclaim your own will once again?’

Asandir looked up, his eyes bleak with remembrance and his shoulders too straight against the moving weave of the wavecrests. ‘We had only the methuri left to attend. They posed a minor threat, and Ciladis, who hoped to transmute their warped offspring, saw no need to hasten their final disposition. We all failed to foresee how our obligation would compound on the hour that refugee humanity discovered this world of Athera.’

Now the fisherman looked puzzled. Perhaps out of weariness, the Sorcerer chose to unveil the depth of the Fellowship’s tragedy. ‘The terms of the compact reinstated the drake’s binding all over again.’

‘But why?’ The fisherman’s incredulity clashed like snarled thread with the Sorcerer’s shaded, soft sorrow.

‘Because once, we were a large part of the reason why humanity needed refuge in the first place.’ The confession was a bald-faced statement of fact, devoid of self-pity or guilt. Long since reconciled to the horrors of past history, Asandir seemed a figure carved out of oak. The sliding foam of the wake, and the stitched needles of reflection the night’s moon and stars streaked across heaving waters were made to seem transient by comparison. ‘We impair no man’s free will by the Law of the Major Balance, that we are charged never to violate. But our peril in these times holds a razor’s edge. For you see, if the Mistwraith’s curse that drives the two princes to hatred wreaks havoc enough to break the compact, the guiding charge of the dragons will reclaim us.’

The pall of the quiet held nothing of calm, as the old fisherman shrank at the helm of his boat, and the boy slept, oblivious, curled in oilskin. The elder clansmen for decency averted his face, aware as his younger scout was not of the weight of admission forthcoming.

‘You don’t understand, still?’ Asandir’s remonstrance came gentle, grief and tears bound in iron that must meet the crucible unflinching. ‘It’s the fear we live and breathe with each waking hour since the Mistwraith breached South Gate five centuries ago. If mankind upsets the balance, if the grand mystery that quickens renewal and life here ever comes to be threatened, then the Paravians who are Ath’s blessed gift to heal the dragons’ transgressions will fade from Athera forever. Our Fellowship will be called to act ere that happens. We will be forced to carry out the directive the drakes set upon us, to ensure Paravian survival no matter the cost of the sacrifice.’

All the subtle, deft power that now cajoled wind and tide potentially turned to destruction, even to arranging the extinction of the one race whose wants and ambitions brooked no restraint. Spoken language fell short of expression; renewed anguish seemed chiseled by the unconscionable memories stamped into the Sorcerer’s lined face.

Yet no resonance of bygone sorrow could prepare for the impact as Asandir concluded in stripped pain, ‘We could be forced to call forfeit our redemption, don’t you see? If the compact is broken, then our Fellowship must enact the annihilation of humanity all over again.’

Only this time, they would be compelled to the act of mass slaughter in full cognizance, causation set into a lens of awareness refined by ten thousand years of arcane wisdom. Sympathy faltered, and language became inadequate to express that stark weight of remorse. No mercy could soften the cruel edge of the paradox. Nor did means exist on a boat under way for the Sorcerer to recoup his privacy.

Sorry at last for the temerity of his questioning, the fisherman wept at the helm. The clan scouts maintained staid and dignified silence, while Asandir showed the grace of a humbling courage to grant them release from embarrassment. In unstudied diplomacy, he settled back on his blanket roll and slept.

He stirred once, at slack tide, to fine-tune the draw of the water that propelled the sloop on her heading. No one spoke to interrupt his dialogue with the elements. The boy was rousted up to handle the lines, and the sails were hardened upon the opposite tack to steady the keel against the shift in the current. When the last sheet was cleated, the Sorcerer moved his blanket roll to windward. Again he dozed, his large hands abandoned like driftwood in the hollow of his lap.

Dawn brightened the waves to opaque, leaden gray. Gulls dipped and called against a sky like smoked pearl, layered with shredding drifts of light fog. The merciless light touched the Sorcerer’s face and revealed his exhaustion, demarked in pinched lines, and sharp angles where the bone pressed against his thinned flesh. No one rushed to be first to awaken him, even when the shoreline of the estuary loomed ahead, notched with the torn sable outline of the forest he had come to spare from the torch.

Asandir needed no prompting in any case. Cued by the lift of the swell as his binding drove the sloop toward shoaling waters, he spoke the Paravian rune of ending and dismissed his ties of grand conjury. Wind and wave subsided. The small craft bobbed in the chop of a north breeze, freed to make landfall under the skill of her helmsman. In the rush toward shore, Asandir proved he knew how to handle a line. Nor was he proud. When the sloop reached the shallows, he thanked the fisherman for his passage and traced a ward sign of blessing on the craft’s planks and tackle. Then, with no fanfare, he stripped his dark leathers alongside the two clansmen and breasted the waist-deep surf to set foot on the beach of Taerlin.

The first ray of sunrise spun the mists to raw gold as the party of three pressed into the deep shade of Caithwood.

A day on foot carried the Fellowship Sorcerer and the two clan scouts across seven leagues of wilds to the grooved rut of the Taerlin trade road. Sheltered by brush that rattled in stiff, northern gusts, the small party took covert stock of the Alliance encampment, tents and picket lines and supply wagons packed like a logjam along the verge of the thoroughfare. Here, the patrols of headhunters that swept Caithwood requisitioned their supplies, and caravans en route to Ilswater and Quarn picked up Alliance outriders and the armed escort they needed to ensure their safe passage through the forest.

‘They’ve dug in tight as ticks, since the summer,’ the older clansman said, bitter for the timber that had been cut to raise the rough quarters to shelter townborn officers.

The land bore the scars of that thoughtless inhabitancy from the trampled, bare quadrangles cleared for field drills to the grass and vegetation milled into pocked dust by the voracious foraging of livestock. The surrounding ravines had been picked clean of firewood. Streamlets ran turbid from the bucket brigades sent to fetch cooking and wash water, and everywhere, the slanting, low sunlight glanced off the war-polished steel of weapon and helm and horse armor.

‘They keep a company of heavy cavalry,’ Asandir said, surprised. ‘Why? Lancers can’t be much use in the deepwood.’

‘Those are assigned to move slave coffles.’ The elder spat on the clean, growing earth. ‘Double bounties are still paid for male clansmen, when they can be captured alive. You didn’t know? There’s an established auction at Valenford, now, where galleymen go to buy oarsmen.’

A chilling, subtle change swept the Sorcerer’s bearing. He knelt, all grim purpose, and untied his blanket roll, while an oblivious horn call sounded below and signaled the change in the watch. Several chattering grooms in sunwheel livery led a clutch of saddled remounts to water, unaware that their routine was watched.

‘You don’t plan to go down there,’ the young scout broke in, his hands gone damp from overtaut nerves as he watched the Sorcerer shake out his formal mantle. The deep blue wool and fine silver ribbon stood out like a shout in the sun-filtered shade at the tree line. ‘Archers and crossbowmen guard the perimeter with standing orders to kill. We’ve lost lives, trying to fire the grain stores in that accursed encampment.’

‘We aren’t going down there,’ Asandir reassured. ‘But I find I have a point to make, and that changes the grounds upon which we borrow three horses.’

The young scout sucked in a startled breath, while the elder expressed disbelief. ‘What use could we possibly be to your cause?’

‘Why should you devalue your worth?’ Asandir glanced up, his eyebrows bristled in rebuke. ‘Innate power walks in a company of three. Your presence joined to mine cannot but add depth to the impact of my demand.’

Done tying up knots, the Sorcerer straightened. He cast his long mantle around his broad shoulders, then issued his instructions, the lit gray of his eyes turned baleful as storm, and his purpose no mortal’s to gainsay. ‘Forget you bear weapons. We go empty-handed. I am going to raise a sphere of resonance that will forestall every aspect of violence. Its force will protect, but cannot discriminate. On your peril, remain at my back. Say nothing. Do nothing, no matter what threat arises. The solidarity of our defense will be underwritten by no other power than peace. Above anything else, I need you to stand fast. You must not give way to your hatred.’

Impatient, he broke from the dappled verge of the wood and strode down the slope in plain view. The two clansmen followed. Their bold disregard for enemy sentries with crossbows posed an affront that brooked no appeal.

They were spotted at once, set in sharp relief by the sunlight that poured molten brass over the browned stubble of the hillside. The first surprised shouts were cut through by an urgent challenge. ‘Halt, you! Hold fast and declare for the Light!’

Asandir paid the officer in authority no heed. Straight as Dharkaron’s Spear in his blue-and-silver cloak, he continued another three strides, his uncovered head like lit ice against the shadowy backdrop of evergreen, and his hands hanging loose at his sides. He stopped as he pleased. His falcon’s stare fixed on the party of horses and grooms, at large on the bank of the streamlet.

Down the mild grade, the Alliance crossbowmen knelt and notched quarrels in flurried alarm. They brought weapons to bear, the bitten reflections off lethal, aimed steel chipped glare through the dust-hazed afternoon.

‘Stand firm,’ the Sorcerer reminded the sweating clansmen beside him. He did not glance at the archers, but maintained his obstinate survey of the grooms’ innocuous activity on the streambank. ‘On my word, you will come to no harm when they fire.’

‘Release at will!’ cried the officer, in determined adherence to duty.

The discharge of the trigger latches mangled the drawn stillness, creased by the waspish whine of launched quarrels. Asandir made no move to cast spells. He uttered no word of invocation. Yet the air in his presence acquired a sealed calm, as potent as the tensioned silence that channeled the strike of bolt lightning. The quarrels arched up; descended in deadly convergence. Ten paces before the Sorcerer’s stilled form, they crossed the unseen boundary of his influence. The steel tips blurred out of focus, then shocked the charged air into spherical halos of gold sparks. All impetus died. The metal sang out in a queer, wailing dissonance, then dropped like shot stone back to earth.

At the same moment the horses led to drink at the streambed flung up their heads in excitement. Eyes rolling white, they reacted with one mind and shied sidewards. Hooves bit the muddied earth like balked thunder as they ripped their reins from the stupefied grasp of their grooms and bolted upslope toward the Sorcerer.

One last quarrel burst into a splash of fine static and crashed, limp, at Asandir’s feet. No others followed. In the crease of the valley, the outraged captain who ordered a second volley toppled out of his saddle. His ranked rows of crossbowmen crumpled also, fallen facedown in a faint. The freed horses hurtled past their sprawled bodies. Glossy and fit, the beasts pounded uphill. Their initial madcap dash unraveled into a brisk trot, and equine ears perked forward, inquiring.

‘Choose yourselves a mount,’ Asandir instructed the two clansmen. Their appalled uncertainty awoke his swift smile, then a near laugh as a shouting, pointing knot of men convulsed the Alliance camp to fresh turmoil. A wedge of mounted lancers disgorged from their midst, still strapping on their snatched armor and grabbing weapons from squires and page boys. Their rush was spearheaded by an officer in a streaming, loose surcoat. Ahead of his company, he spurred his bay gelding upslope in a howling charge.

Asandir held his ground. Unconcerned, he addressed the loose horses. The sound of his voice soothed their volatile nerves. Reins trailing, the mare in the lead subsided back to a walk. She ambled the closing, final strides to nuzzle his outstretched hand, her equine disregard all but flouting the mounted Alliance horsemen boring in at an earthshaking canter. Forced to swing wide to avoid trampling downed archers, the irate captain lost nerve, if not outrage. He dragged his gelding to a headshaking halt, half-strangled by the folds of his unbelted garment.

‘We’re borrowing these horses,’ Asandir informed. ‘They’ll come back sound and cared for.’ Behind him, the two scouts caught trailing bridles and checked girths, then vaulted astride.

The Alliance officer yanked an arm from snagged silk and gestured an impatient advance. ‘Surround them!’ The men at his heels reined aside, fanned out, then circled and closed in, lances leveled at the intruders. Reassured as his cordon settled in place, the officer vented his temper. ‘What’s harm to three hacks, when you’ve dropped our best squad of archers in their tracks by means of black sorcery?’

‘They’re sleeping,’ Asandir corrected point-blank. He flipped the reins over the mare’s chestnut neck, tightened the girth, then adjusted the stirrups two holes downward to accommodate his lean length of leg. As the captain at arms clapped a fist on his sword hilt, he added, ‘I’d advise you not to try violence.’

‘To Sithaer with your counsel!’ The captain closed his mailed fingers and hauled steel in a screeling wail from the scabbard. ‘Take them down, on my signal.’

Time hesitated, blurred, and for one binding moment, a flushed heat like a wind passed through the nerves and flesh of every man in the Sorcerer’s presence.

A white puff of steam plumed from the officer’s mail gauntlet. He yelled, instantaneously scalded, and cast down his scarcely drawn weapon. Those mounted companions called to act on his order gasped in dismay as he ripped back burned fingers. The sharp jerk at the rein and the smell of singed flesh caused his horse to snatch the bit and kite sidewards. Loose clothing billowed. A seemingly stray breeze flipped the flapping surcoat over the disgruntled officer’s head. The beleaguered man fought to untangle himself without tumbling out of his saddle.

Asandir looked on, guileless. ‘That attack was unwise. Your men would do well to avoid your mistake. I further suggest you disband this Alliance encampment. Pack up your gear and your tents, and let all the captives in your compound go free.’

Flushed with torment as his blistered fingers bore the weight of the rein to control his plunging horse, the captain threw back a murderous glower. ‘You hold no authority to revoke the direct command of Avenor’s Prince of the Light!’

‘Perhaps not.’ Asandir flicked the heavy, rich weight of his mantle back over nonchalant shoulders. The silk lining shone numinous silver against the forest’s turned foliage. ‘But your s’Ilessid idol has overstepped prudent limits and threatened the green life of Caithwood.’ Unwilling to grant any pause for rebuttal, the Sorcerer set foot in the mare’s stirrup and mounted. ‘Such desecration will not be permitted. By terms of the compact I will act.’

‘How? By sending more archers to sleep?’ the officer sneered in vain effort to bolster his men, who were fast losing the courage to stand firm. ‘Or will you just singe a few fingers?’

‘More than that. I am going to awaken the somnolent awareness of the trees.’ Asandir closed his heels and stepped the horse forward, trusting the two clansmen would have the good sense to stay close and follow his lead. To the captain at arms, helpless to prevent him as he and his party spurred past, he delivered his mild ultimatum. ‘On that hour, woe betide any two-legged creature in this forest who unsheathes cold steel or kindles a fire for harm’s sake. Remember my warning. The mind of quickened wood has no heart and no conscience, and no kinship at all with the needs of hot-blooded animals.’

Five days later, under pearl mists of drizzle, Asandir walked alone. His scout escort had departed, sent on as his emissaries to inform the scattered clan encampments of Prince Lysaer’s intent to fire the timber in Caithwood. They would spread word of the Sorcerer’s course of action to avert that looming catastrophe, and also deliver the list of necessary precautions to be observed by every man, woman, and child.

Asandir moved afoot on his long panther’s stride, the reins of a different horse hooked in slack loops through his fingers. This mount was a scrub-bred bay with surly teeth and an unkempt autumn coat. By inclination it did not balk at thick brush; nor did it fear to tread through the mossy, rank mud of black mires and the tumbled, round rocks of swift streamlets. In its cantankerous company, the Sorcerer ventured the deepest heartwood of the forest. His sifting search sought out the most ancient tree, the one he must win as his ally to configure and catalyze the awakening.

Such a patriarch tree embodied far more than the accumulated wisdom of advanced years. Its ancient being would span the four elements, the deep taproots twined with earth and water; its upthrust limbs of vigor and majesty would be anchored in the transformative fire of the sun and the windy, wild force of the air. A king tree was not given to reveal its true nature. By the elusive manner of its kind, it could only be found through the riddle of subtle communion with its fellows.

Asandir paused, as he had many times in the dull, gray chill of the morning. He touched the horse still, though it snapped at his wrist. ‘For shame,’ he murmured into its laid-back ears; then he listened. Amid the splashed tapestry of sound caused by water drops kissing moist leaves, he measured the tap of their fall on the earth. The palm of the hand he held flattened against the trunk of a middle-sized oak became like an eavesdropping ear at a keyhole.

For there was language embedded in the dreaming awareness braided through these acres of live foliage. Word and syntax were tapped in the endless percussion of interlaced twigs. In the sticky, slow river of the sap flowing beneath his touch, the trained mind could read the imprinted secrets that passed from one tree to the next, their world of overlaid messages given amplified breath by the unending conduit of weather: of the wind and the free-falling water.

Nor was the questing touch of this Fellowship Sorcerer any stranger to Caithwood’s vast silence. Asandir himself had once bespoken the world’s trees to anchor a spell of homing. The signal had been sent to recall Kharadmon from the far-distant world of Marak, from which Desh-thiere had launched its first invasion. The ghost signature of that conjury still lingered, imprinted yet in the live congress of the greenwood. Welcomed by a surge of recognition, Asandir returned tacit greeting. Guardian that he was, and for all that the drake’s binding had made him, his listening presence was admitted with forbearing tolerance.

North, he sensed. The whispered flow of information meandered that way, from saplings to stands of mature growth trees in full prime, to the twisted, skeletal ruins of the eldest, with their scraping crowns of stripped branches.

The Sorcerer shifted his grip on the reins. He urged the horse onward, then strode like a wraith in his soaked, dark leathers and ducked under a leaning stand of conifers. The loamy forest floor cushioned the sound from his footfalls. Green needles hoarded the insipid wet, each laden branch strung with clutched hoards of diamonds. Asandir bent, picked up the tattered, black shells of last season’s cast-off fir cones. North, was repeated in the winding energy of spiraled petals from which fragile, winged seeds had departed.

He moved on. The horse at his heels snatched an opportunistic nip at his sleeve, but collided with the elbow he moved to intercept the tender flesh of its muzzle. It subsided, sullen, ears flopping. The squelch of each hoof into saturated moss stamped a pockmark of noise in the liquid symphony of runoff. The rain fell, dimming the light to dull mercury. Asandir’s hair held the wet like dewed cobweb, and the shadowy density of the trees wore the gloom like a scene viewed through a smoked mirror.

Set into the layered weave of the wood, a cameo cut from milk porcelain, an ancient beech flagged Asandir’s attention. The roots grasped the earth in an embrace that felt boundless and mighty as time, and the limbs framed a vaulted arch for the pearlescent sky. Asandir paused. He gave the old tree his intent, sweeping survey, as if the unveiling powers of his mage-sight would decode the manifest of its destiny in Ath’s primal language of sound and light.

This beech he knew from all other beeches, and it was not the one tree that he probed for: the giant that guarded the heart strength of Caithwood, whose prodigious endowment would be masked and cherished, kept hidden like a cached treasure. Ties of loyalty would reside in this tree as well, and for the ingrained pride of its kind, it would not lightly unveil the trust of its sovereign’s identity.

Asandir untied the tether rope knotted to his mount’s neck and secured the animal to a deadfall. The horse had long since grown accustomed. Too shrewd to expend restless energy, it tipped one shaggy hoof, slanted a hip, and shut its eyes, relaxed to the point where its lower lip dangled. The Sorcerer was not fooled. He was careful to stay well clear of its heels as he settled himself in damp moss. There, he reclined, with his head cradled amid the branching divide where the trunk of the beech engaged its splayed grip on the earth. He, too, shut his eyes, but not to subside into sleep.

Instead, he embraced the dream of the tree, stately, slow, a step in four attenuated beats that marched to the change in the seasons. He drifted there, an immersion into a peace so beguiling, danger lurked for the unwary. The thick crawl of sap lay far removed from the pulse of a red-blooded heartbeat; recast to the dance of a rooted perception, the endurance of a winter’s freezing winds became as poisonously gentle as a soundless, caressing fall of snow. All threads of human personality could unravel, lulled into forgetful slumber, and then drawn into deep coma that would spiral beyond the threshold that marked life from death. A mind trained to power embraced at its peril the engulfing, staid majesty of the greenwood.

The Fellowship Sorcerer took precautions and wove a small spell as an anchoring link to the sun. Should he lose his purpose and drift into languor, too much at one with the sugared tides of sap that subsided below ground for winter, the advent of nightfall would recall him. Earth’s shadow would snap that frail linkage. A jarring cry of dissonance would run through his nerves as that binding gave way into chaos.

Should he fail to harken, his bones might be found, clutched at length in the ingrown embrace of the beech. His mind would be absorbed, welded into the current of dreaming that made up the leafed weaving of Caithwood.

Asandir let go of awareness without hesitation, without fear, with no marring note of unease. He immersed his whole being into the slipstream of life that was the joined multitude, root, trunk, and bough, that comprised the forest of south Tysan. In fullest command of all that he was, unencumbered by barriers that would cloud true perception, he became at one with the gnarled old beech.

The dream claimed him wholly. He was knotted root, tasting the mineral-rich darkness of earth. He was leaves, speaking the summer’s endless, whispered promise of tranquillity. In the grasp of winter’s gales, he was bare branch and twig, drumming the untamed tempo of the elements. He was pollen, sifted under spring sunlight, and the spanging snap of bitter frosts. The old beech’s memory extended like fog past the dawn of Athera’s Third Age.

Beneath the layering of the tree’s individuality ran the currents that interlinked its being with its neighbors; and theirs, to their neighbors, until the forest’s webbed consciousness extended its reach to encompass the far borders of the wood. Asandir rode that tranquil sea of soft whispers, loomed from the speech of blown leaves in the wind, and braided amid the gossamer filaments of root hairs. He sensed flowing water, and the tidal pull of the moon; the warm, flooding canopy of sunlight. He knew the blind, reaching growth of the acorn, and the ground-shaking fall of the elder trunk, claimed by rampaging tempest. The lives of the trees entangled in dream like the trackless silence of owl flight.

Deeper, the flow of arboreal awareness lost its seamless, broad fabric of communion. A directional tide stirred the fathomless depths, spiraling outward in tacit connection with the mystery that encompassed Ath’s creation. Within that singing band of unity, Asandir found the signature he sought, encoded in language of sound and light, and steeped in the gentle nurture that was the wise province of trees.

He knew the wood’s heart, the given Name for the patriarch tree whose great presence could be called to awaken the dream of the forest, and make its form manifest in the minds of animate beings. Granted the key he required to arrange for the defense of Caithwood, the Sorcerer withdrew his consciousness. A whispered act of will freed him back into separation. Such was his care, he left no disturbed ripple to mar the transmission of spirit language. Within the core wisdom of everlasting silence, that ageless current passed yet on the unquiet air, leaf to leaf, tree to tree; and sky to earth at the behest of sun’s fire and cloud’s rain.

Autumn 5653