Читать книгу Grand Conspiracy - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 18

At the private banquet in Avenor’s royal palace, two deferent servants sprang to open the doors for the Prince of the Light’s precipitous exit.

Stunned silence reigned through the first, dizzy breath of disbelief. Then tumult resurged with a bang of wild noise that rocked echoes off the groined ceiling. On the high dais, seated in the royal chair, the road-muddied messenger who dispatched the bad news blinked over the abandoned spread of fine food. He watched Avenor’s state officers and trade ministers recover shocked wits and argue themselves into a fervent volte-face.

Their claims of bare coffers only minutes before suffered a miraculous readjustment. New offers of gold to be pledged for the Light materialized from dim places. Like chain lightning, caches hidden in deeper pockets resurfaced in the spate of high feeling that rolled and rebounded through the room.

Lord Eilish, Avenor’s Minister of the Royal Treasury, recovered grizzled eyebrows from the heights of his gray-fringed hairline. No fool, he clapped his hands to recall his scurrying secretaries. Then, shot to his feet, arms beckoning, he rousted pages and wine servers to clear aside platters of roast duck and strip the table near the door to bare boards. There, ensconced like a judge with a row of state witnesses and a brace of Prince Lysaer’s guardsmen, he dictated records and set under seal the promises that tumbled like charmed birds into his lap. He did not look up as Erdane’s delegate slipped out.

But Gace Steward, who missed nothing, expected a fast courier would ride the north road before midnight. The impact of that evening’s masterful play of statecraft would make itself felt far and wide.

Among the first to detect the fresh currents of change, an array of quartz spheres set in stands flashed to life in the stifling, close heat of a private chamber a hundred leagues distant from Avenor.

There, Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, sat her high chair in the sisterhouse at Capewell. Reduced by age and infirmity to a bundle of thin bones wrapped in a tissue of creased flesh, her robed form was propped upright in pillows. Wax candles burned like pale pillars at both elbows. A violet silk throw bordered with bullion ribbon mantled her lap. Her strengthless hands cupped another sphere of rock crystal, aligned by her trained circle of seeresses to fine-tuned spells of scrying.

In momentous synchronicity, the image of Avenor’s disrupted state banquet danced to the sigils and seals their inveigling mastery had stitched through the stone’s aligned matrix. Morriel absorbed every nuance of the scene, intent as a cat poised over a glass bowl of goldfish.

Her colorless lips pleated into vexed wrinkles, as, in distanced miniature, Lord Eilish arose and stretched, then closed and locked the boards of the ledger which kept his account of the Alliance treasury.

‘Clever man. Clever, clever man,’ she rasped on the tail of a stertorous exhale.

Though her attendant page boys and servants knew not to respond to anything but her direct summons, the dewy, blond woman perched on the stool at her knee had yet to be curbed from such frivolous liberties. ‘Do you mean Prince Lysaer?’ Her fluttery gesture singled out another quartz, the end sphere of the array of eight, cradled in its silver stand, and positioned in a semicircle around the Prime Matriarch’s chair. ‘But his Grace has apparently abandoned his council.’

While she spoke, the torchlit depths of the quartz showed Avenor’s Prince Exalted mounting a handsome cream horse in the taciturn company of his Lord Commander.

Morriel looked up. Her eyes sustained the drilled hardness of obsidian, opaque beside her younger colleague’s innocence. ‘He has left them, don’t you see? Let them know absolutely their money can’t buy his complaisant protection. Watch them. They’ll stew in his absence. They’ll sweat and pace themselves silly, then raise still more coin as a blandishment. Oh yes. Lysaer’s read their worth and their secret fears to an exquisite, fine point of accuracy. He’ll take his sweet time coming back. When he finally returns, his council and trade guilds will fall over themselves to welcome the policies they would once have argued past death to prevent.’

The woman’s youthful features stayed blank, lips parted as she awaited the binding conclusion.

‘Lysaer will have to take Sulfin Evend’s council, now,’ Morriel mused, finger tapping the quartz, and her eggshell brow tucked with speculation. ‘He must hire talent to keep track of his enemies, if he’s not to find himself continually blindsided by the doings of Fellowship Sorcerers.’

‘How can you know this?’ the girl said, admiring.

‘Study the present,’ the Prime Matriarch instructed in dry malice. ‘The clues to unlock the future ever and always are written into the patterns of each moment.’

The initiate furrowed her fresh brow and made a dutiful survey of the scenes logged and transmitted by the quartz spheres. Time passed, and the candles burned lower. Morriel Prime closed eyelids the webbed texture of dead leaves, her crabbed hands stilled upon the purple velvet in her lap.

‘Cast your net finer,’ she suggested, unprompted.

The young woman started. ‘Yes, Matriarch.’ She deepened her survey, saw a ship with furled sails rock at chilly anchorage at Tideport. She watched torches weaving through the gusty night at the crowded settlement of Watercross, where the fallen from Caithwood were bundled like cordwood in the common rooms of the inns, or sheltered under the gust-slapped canvas of the field tents. She tracked the Prince of the Light, who hastened his column of guardsmen southward, then followed the galloping outriders who raced ahead to secure them a galley passage out of Riverton inlet. She traversed a chain of dockside taverns in Orlest, and tight knots of men at the trader’s wharf, where talk ran to raids and losses to the minions of darkness.

‘I see widespread fear of the Master of Shadow,’ she lisped in uncertain conclusion. ‘The moil seems unfounded. He’s far at sea, and surely no direct threat to the continent.’

‘At sea, yes.’ Morriel spoke with shut eyes. ‘Yet he has not withdrawn his presence or his interests. Look for connections. Cast your net finer still.’

The girl fidgeted on her footstool, unable to find any relevance in the current view, of three trollops sharing gossip over hot chocolate in gilt cups, while a fourth one penned a letter in overdone script on the back of a secondhand parchment. Squint though she would, the initiate could make no sense of the contents. She raised a tentative hand and sketched a cipher for clarity, and watched the image shift from the prostitutes’ boudoir to the taproom of a seaside tavern, where a soap merchant with fat jowls and a marten collar lost a devastating hand of cards to the nerve-wound youngest son of the clanborn Duke of Alestron.

‘Nothing fits,’ she said, plaintive.

Morriel scarcely stirred, patient as none before ever saw her. ‘The trouble with new servants is the tedious time teaching them who should and should not be admitted. Lirenda is here.’ Eyes still closed, the Prime added, ‘She will demonstrate the thread of reason your inexperience has overlooked.’

The next instant, the latch clicked. The haughty, black-haired initiate swept in, a damp cloak on her arm, and her woolen skirts rimmed in the pale clay wicked up from the trodden-up yard of a countryside posthouse. She sank into obeisance, exuding the frost-keen scent of winter air. ‘I return from Araethura with word that the child, Fionn Areth, has been made our oathsworn servant.’

Morriel’s pinched face tipped aslant in the candlelight. ‘How convenient for you.’ Her eyes opened, black glass flecked in spite and the false, warm reflections of flame. ‘Forgive me if I don’t reward you with credit until your vaunted plan brings a success.’

Lirenda’s flare of rage was adroitly masked behind a façade of decorum. ‘How may I serve?’

The Prime goaded, relentless. ‘Since you’ve come, you can show Selidie how to draw out the connecting thread for the Shadow Master’s interests on the continent. I hedge all my options these days. You’ll know that already, since you’ve assiduously applied all your training to sorting the rumors.’ A rim of worn teeth lent an edge to her smile as Morriel watched for the signs her baiting had chafed on a weakness.

The former First Enchantress arose to full height, self-contained as a panther. She chose caution before argument. At the end of a difficult, cold-weather journey, this needling trap the Prime spun presented a mazework of pitfalls. Not least, the scrying would demand a calling rune set through the resonance of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn’s true Name. The ignominy burned, since a near-fatal fascination with that same prince’s character had tripped her downfall from the Prime’s favor. Her meddling desire for personal revenge had upset the grand construct that had formerly failed to take the wretched man captive.

Lirenda lidded her personal bitterness under a mask of humility. Morriel herself remained a cripple since that day, confined to the Capewell sisterhouse in the months that followed her collapse. Through her tedious convalescence, the most gifted of her healers yet failed to restore her lower limbs. While concern began to be fretted in whispers, that the Prime might never recover her lost strength and walk, Morriel herself was not sanguine. Burdened with the need for additional servants, and pinned between bedridden ennui, or the jostling discomfort of a sedan chair, her eggshell-frail bones and translucent flesh contained the irascible fury of a volcano denied any vent for eruption.

Over that whelming maelstrom of infirmity, the frustration of balked will and spent hope, amid the perilous turn just taken by Tysan’s curse-driven politics, the Prime Matriarch still ruled her domain like honed diamond. Nor did she allow fraility to loosen her grasp upon current events.

Lirenda knew better than to misjudge the request as a petty bid for vindication. She stepped forward and accepted the ice weight of the quartz from her Prime, set on notice by the play of cruel ironies that her character stood on trial yet again. She must perform this small office without flaw, or be judged inadequate to win back her lost rank as the Koriani prime successor.

She dared not vent her towering rage, that her competency was being used to tutor the green candidate set up as her replacement. One deep breath, two; she reestablished her calm. Any work done in concert with quartz required absolute emotional control. Lirenda assessed the sphere held in hand, its directive the tuned key for the array of eight ranged in their stands about Morriel’s chair. One of the Prime’s unobtrusive servants brought her a claw-footed stool.

She sat. Travel-stained clothing could not dim the innate poise of her breeding; she might as well have been offered a throne. The eyes she fixed on the young, blond initiate were antique amber, notched with pupils like primordial night. ‘One begins with the rune of relationship,’ she explained, her tone detached as struck bronze. ‘Such power draws the lane forces into alignment, that one quartz sphere will resonate with the next, letting a live current pass between them.’

Her hand traced the symbol over the crystal, each cross stroke and upright inscribed in etched ribbons of light. ‘Bind the energy into unity with the sigil that demarks the joined circle.’

‘The rune seal for holding?’ the initiate asked, her diffidence emphasized by an affected flounce.

Lirenda’s smile turned graven. ‘Then you’ve learned the twenty-eight primary seals? Very good.’ Her polished encouragement showed none of her contempt, that an enchantress chosen for Morriel’s training should have mastered such basics beforetime. ‘Do you know the next step?’

The woman pinched a peony lip between her even, pearl teeth. ‘The circle is empty?’

‘Yes.’ Lirenda stifled an exasperated sigh. ‘Every spell needs a vector, an energy, to lend it purpose and direction. In this case, your Prime requests linkages to the affairs of the Master of Shadow. Therefore, the tie must begin with knowledge of the subject’s true Name.’ Lirenda cupped the master sphere, stared into its depths, and inwardly sealed herself into a calm that admitted no chink for distraction. She could feel the eyes of the Prime upon her like hot probes, testing, observing, awaiting a reaction that might expose any lingering canker of weakness.

But Lirenda had long since shielded her vulnerable core against Arithon’s beguiling attraction. Venomed hatred remained. She would see the last scion of s’Ffalenn struck dead before she allowed his compassionate potential to awaken the seed of her dormant passion. Disciplined to perfection, she spoke the invocation to call and to bind. Over that matrix, she added the sigil of self-mastery, then into that waiting vessel of containment, the shaped memory of an unmistakable male face. Three times, she called the name of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn.

The quartz sphere absorbed her building intent. Its matrix took fire and responded, amplifying the tuned alignment of gifted talent and aimed thought. Lirenda sensed the impacting force of that presence storm her unassailable calm. Prepared, she held firm. Trained will locked her mind into permafrost clarity, until an unexpected influx of outside force wrenched her alignment off course. A sweet, sustained note pierced through, then a chord that melted all armor. The opening measure swelled into an intimate play of glad sound that beguiled beyond will to deny.

Lirenda lost grip on her construct of ciphers. The unbearable purity of a melody she had most diligently expunged out of memory burst through and flanked her shield of defenses.

The quartz in her hand pealed back in kind, and magnified that clear cry of rapture into joy that burst all restraint. Then the wrought spiral of harmony raised raw desire, and whirled her off center into trance …

Sucked down, and down again into a well of absolute darkness charged with delights and addictive possibility, Lirenda cried out in furious protest. Her denial just raised a more clamorous, inward betrayal.

The whispered male presence of the musician gave her back his lilting, unbridled laughter. ‘But lady enchantress, surely in this case you made the first effort to call me?’

Dragged into a vista of dreaming vision, Lirenda beheld a starlit night where the winds blew mild and warm. Far beyond the winter’s fast grip, a ship’s masts with its spiderwork of running lines and tarred rigging sliced the sky into graceful geometrics. Nor was the vessel’s quarterdeck unoccupied.

Framed against the sturdy, spooled taffrail, and jeweled constellations skewed at unfamiliar angles by an extreme change of latitude, she confronted the brigantine’s helmsman: none else but the slim, dark-haired bard whose mastery had loomed the exquisite snare that entrapped her.

The angular, stamped features of s’Ffalenn royalty were unmistakable, cast now into a patent, amused inquiry that tipped up one corner of Arithon’s mouth. Across the friable trance which suspended her, his presence ignited her confusion, fed and fueled by a whirlwind of formless emotion.

Lirenda fought to resist the influx of detail that split second of contact engraved on her inner awareness: the fine grace of his carriage offset by commonplace clothing, and the jet strands of hair fallen loose from their tie to tangle and wisp at his temples. If the events of the summer had harrowed his health, in seafaring solitude, Prince Arithon had won back a carefree, if temporary, freedom. His dark breeches were buttoned with engraved silver studs, and his strong, arched feet were bare. His plain linen shirt was a soft, unbleached ivory, and the loose, doeskin laces with their beaded pearl ends were flicked and teased by the winds. The agile fingers which had danced those honeyed measures on fret and string were wound now on the spokes of a ship’s wheel.

Apparently he had sensed her intrusion before her shocked moment of recognition. His sharpened gaze was not fixed anymore on the stars or the compass he steered by.

Nor was his face entirely invulnerable, caught as he was in the listening intensity of sounding her presence in return. She received the impression of eyes that were haunted and deep, and disturbingly focused until he captured her individual identity; not by sight, but by some unseen resonance of intuition kept entrained by his prodigious talent.

‘Ah, Lirenda.’ His voice made disturbing music of her name, while his expression showed dry irony, and his lips widened into the faintest, curved smile of mockery. ‘You’ve reconnected with the gift I left in your quartz crystal, I see.’

Formless in fury, imprisoned in the flux of an involuntary scrying, Lirenda reacted before thought. ‘This should not be possible!’

Arithon’s eyebrows arose. ‘No?’ He brightened. ‘Shall we use the occasion to indulge in a philosophical argument on the principles of magecraft? The result might leave you wiser, if no less enlightened.’

She disdained to answer.

‘Your thinking is crippled by limitations, dear lady, not to mention your beliefs.’ A pause, jammed by the stone-walled strength of her obstinacy. ‘What, no riposte in dry wit? No unhappy jabs at the cuticle? Enchantress, you wouldn’t prefer having me speak for us both?’

Head tilted sidewards, the free wind in his hair, he delighted in choosing the words for her anyhow, teasing and blithe as a swallow. ‘Well for argument’s sake, let’s say you’d affirm the crystal carries a vibration. If fire’s your base element, you would understand that water stands as the placeholder for emotion. Is your foot tapping yet? It would be, you know, as you moved on to insist the salt contained in the ocean must obey its coarse nature and negate every trace of transmission.’

A toy to his whim, Lirenda returned nothing. The dream held her fast, while the stars rocked to the gentle roll of a ship’s hull. The hand that had recently known trials and illness held her course with relaxed and infuriating competence.

‘Then perhaps you need clues to unravel the riddle?’ Arithon grinned in provocation. ‘Very well. I’ll be generous. The sound I created was vibration also, if pitched for the octaves inside the range of hearing. The seed for my music is carried by air, the primal element of inspiration. Dear lady, wind wanders where it will. It knows no boundary, nor heeds human law, nor answers to the earth-grounding virtues of salt.’

‘I reject your rank meddling,’ Lirenda hissed back, slapped by the truth that he had just volunteered the keys to reclaim her self-control. ‘One day you’ll know sorrow. My hand will break you. I promise you then, no schoolboyish prank played on learned theory will spare your insolent autonomy.’

A gust heeled the brigantine’s deck. Arithon glanced at a star to ascertain his heading, then spun his wheel two points to starboard to compensate. His green eyes lit then, alive to his shrug of apology. ‘No originality there. You’ll be one of a very large crowd falling over themselves to claim the first blood at my capture.’ He ended his byplay in corrosive apology. ‘There’s a curious reverse. I always thought you the type to rule the pack rather than follow.’

‘Demon!’ she gasped, riled into unwitting defense by his slicing truth of perception.

Shamed to have yielded that morsel of insight, she rallied her scattered self-command and framed the sigil of negation. Once she set the dark seal to command air, the shock of forced severance tumbled her back into vertigo. While she raged in the threadbare shreds of her dignity, her naked mind rang with the contrary echoes of his laughter …

The rinse of white static released her hobbled faculties and gave back the closed heat of the Prime Matriarch’s chamber. Lirenda shuddered through the moment of transition, whiplashed back to cognizant thought by the rasp of Morriel’s reprimand.

‘… must be a lackwit, girl! Haven’t I told you time and again? Keep that spell crystal doused in black silk!’

A snuffling stir of movement, as the young initiate returned a dutifully weepy nod. She fumbled for the remedy bag hung from her girdle, loosened the strings, then shoved tear-drenched fingers inside.

Morriel’s chastisement was instant. ‘Dry your hands! Never, never let salt near a crystal set into a resonant spell pattern!’

Trembling now, the girl blotted her damp knuckles on her skirt; and Lirenda, caught aback, received the demeaning revelation that she had been led to engage the Named resonance of Arithon s’Ffalenn in the presence of her personal spell crystal. The misfortunate quartz had yet to be cleansed of the melody Arithon had imprinted to lay bare her vulnerable heart. The girl initiate had been given the task of lifting the impurity from the quartz; and though months had passed under Morriel’s direct tutelage, she had not only failed to master so simple a task, but had also neglected the basics of handling an activated focus pendant.

The sheer magnitude of the incompetence rankled. The novice initiate Morriel had chosen to groom had raw talent without the brains of a flea. Lirenda contained her resentment, well aware that the Prime would discern far more than the young woman’s stupidity. She dared not invite the parallel comparison, that she herself had strong aptitude and skilled training, but a woeful inability to checkrein her personal feelings.

Eyes closed, wrapped in the evanescent perfume of hot candle wax, Lirenda forced down her inner turmoil. While the girlish initiate restored the crystal to proper wrappings and retied the cords of her remedy bag, the older enchantress slowed the sped beat of her heart. She doused heated nerves and noosed the wild, wakened spate of her anger back into settled calm, then rebalanced the sigils which fused the burst web of the quartz scrying. Left to mark time, she bent her will back to the master sphere in her hand.

Where the sigils of command already in place should have revealed Arithon’s image, the crystal hung smoke dark and veiled; no surprise. The effects of sea brine alone would inhibit the virtues of quartz scrying. In addition, the man would have cloaking spells and circles of guard set about him by Dakar the Mad Prophet. Morriel Prime herself had long since established the futility of scrying for the Prince of Rathain. Yet though his immediate presence stayed obscured, his peripheral connections were less ruly. In the marginal spaces, where random event and emotion spun loose ends, the quartz could tag subtle connections to Prince Arithon as the unshielded currents of conscious activity deflected the signature vibrations of the earth’s flow of magnetic lane force.

Linked through the darkened rock crystal in her hands, Lirenda changed focus. She searched the bloom of movement and color as vision coalesced in the depths of the slave-linked spheres on their stands.

One showed the stripped trees of a glen in Halwythwood. Under the night’s dusting of snowfall, a cluster of clan lodge tents, guarded by a large-boned, rangy man wrapped in a bearskin mantle. By the glint of bronze hair revealed as a woman passed by with a torch, Lirenda recognized the man as Jieret s’Valerient, caithdein and steward of the realm in the seafaring absence of its sanctioned crown prince. The trill of infant laughter that brought the smile to his lips would be his daughter, Jeynsa, named his heir by the Fellowship of Seven, and not yet aged one year. A steadfast adherent of the old charter law, the liegeman served as Arithon’s voice in Rathain. Like the Koriathain, Earl Jieret could do little else but wait for the day when his oathsworn sovereign chose to return.

In a scene purloined from a fortified tower farther east, another sphere revealed the massive frame of Duke Bransian of Alestron, sprawled at ease in a chair with a hound’s muzzle propped on his knee. His war-scarred fingers stroked the dog’s ears, while a diminutive old lady with crab-apple features stabbed an ebony stick in ripe argument over his decision to appoint his state galley for a winter voyage down the south coast.

In another, the clan chieftain who was High Earl of Alland broached a beer cask in a pine glade, while companions sharpened their knives for a cattle raid, and a runner sewed up a holed pair of leggings, his new orders to bear a message to a secret destination in the west.

Yet another sphere reflected a high mountain in Vastmark. There a herder woman with bells tied into her tawny braids regarded the stars, and thought wistfully upon Arithon s’Ffalenn. ‘Luck ride your shoulder, wherever you are,’ she murmured in dialect, then appended the heartfelt blessing of her tribe.

In the deserts of Sanpashir, an elder dipped a hawk feather in fresh blood and read omens in the scattered droplets. The augury received brought a spark to filmed eyes, and sent a young man to fetch darts and knives on his gruff bark of command.

Arithon’s contacts were varied and many, Lirenda was forced to concede; in yet another sphere, three chattering whores in a Sanshevas garret sewed a marked strip of goatskin into a hem of pink silk.

A minstrel playing a tavern in Etarra paused to converse with three dicers wearing the colors of the town guard; farther south, an innkeeper who owned a dingier dive in Ship’s Port threw silver to a galleyman, then engaged in whispered talk too faint for the crystal’s tuned matrix to capture.

A scribe in King Eldir’s service penned a letter by the fluttering light of a candle, while elsewhere a vivacious woman in sailhand’s slops and a gaudy scarlet shirt locked horns in ribald language with a stiff-lipped customs clerk in Tideport.

Immersed in close survey of the eclectic array, Lirenda could almost touch the intangible thread that tied each disparate player into a logical web of continuity. She sensed the flow of information and the movement of rumor. Yet whenever she grasped any piece of the puzzle and sought to find linear order, the pieces slipped, formless, through the sieve of hard cognizance. The pattern remained stubbornly elusive as water absorbed into felt.

Lirenda released a soundless sigh, too experienced not to realize when outside forces deflected her practiced technique. Arithon had a trained spellbinder for his watchdog. The Mad Prophet had seeded invisible snares that would smother her most determined attempt to link random event with its core of revealing conclusion. She might glean the surface viewpoint of the Shadow Master’s correspondents, but never decipher their interrelated connection, nor the guarded cache of their secrets: the links that would yield the site where the brigantine Khetienn made landfall to replenish provisions.

Lirenda shivered with starved longing to break through Dakar’s web of safeguards. How she ached to smash the flesh-and-blood source of her weakness, which had deprived her of privilege and the fruits of her earned inheritance. Immersed in dire passion, she failed to notice that the Prime’s reproval of the young initiate had long since reached final closure. Nor did she hear the crone’s scratchy address, or look up, until the yawning, expectant silence intruded, and quenched her rush of hot need.

‘Your pardon?’ she murmured.

A figure of shriveled ivory and wax in the faltering glow of the candles, the Prime Enchantress regarded her. Morriel’s hands were crabbed knots, tucked in smudgeless velvets, and her black eyes lightless wells of malice. ‘The sigil of summoning to trace and mark the future?’ she prompted, succinct as flung acid. ‘I bade you to finish the scrying.’

Lirenda flushed. The request was impossible, as the Prime knew quite well. Set up to fail before a green novice, she stiffened, her heart struck to glass-edged fury, and her thoughts plunged into a quicklime stillness that the Prime’s waspish wit could not pierce. Her voice was chilled honey as she made the traditional reply. ‘Your will.’

The sigil with its barbed runes and crossed square flowed off her scribing fingernail. Its coiled directive sank into the quartz orb like charged wire, filed to razor-edged light. The energy sank into the stone’s matrix, bit through its dimmed depths, and unfurled a riptide of backlash.

Lirenda fell into a flowering burst of color and noise, then a sleeting gray static through which one sensation emerged to rush the blood in her veins: she felt a man’s lips on hers, and an eruption of passion to burn every nerve incandescent.

Then Morriel’s laughter, like the scrape of dry leaves, hurled Lirenda earthward and grounded her back into shrinking humiliation.

‘It would appear your feelings of superiority are unjustified,’ the Prime said. While the initiate looked on in vacant confusion, she added, ‘Tell me to my face, if you dare, that I should not stake my trust in your replacement.’

Lirenda arose. Self-contained by her desperate desire for vindication, she curtsied in defiant breach of form, that she need not behave as all others in the order, and request formal leave to depart. ‘Stake your trust where you please, until the year Fionn Areth grows to maturity. Then I will face the sure test of your reckoning. On the day I deliver Prince Arithon in chains, let any latecoming applicant for your office overmatch my fitness if she dares.’

A pungent, breathy laugh brushed her challenge aside. ‘I do see that my years of infirmity won’t pass without entertainment. That is well. I have no intention whatsoever of biding my time in blind faith. You must prove your competence to assume the seat of my power.’ Small triumph became punishment as Morriel flicked her wrist in derisive finality. ‘You are excused.’

While Lirenda swept out to a rustle of splashed mantles, the Prime’s fathomless eyes fixed a predator’s stare upon the untried face of her current favorite. ‘We’ve seen what we needed,’ she rasped in conclusion. ‘Those spells Dakar’s cast throw off a wide resonance. When Lysaer s’Ilessid binds loyal talent to his cause, that unsubtle touch could become a dangerous liability …’ As her musing trailed off into stillness, she realized the young woman drooped like a lily kept past its best bloom. ‘Rest now, Selidie,’ the Prime crooned, almost fondly. ‘See yourself off to bed. One of my servants will go to the kitchen to arrange for a bowl of warmed milk.’

Winter 5654