Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  Their First Senior spoke the time-honored release. “Your will is your own.”

  Outside the slit window, new snow caught the aquamarine tint of the afterglow. Farther off, the eventide chime of the kitchen bell summoned the orphan wards to supper. Lirenda did not crave the teeming warmth of human company. Taxed by her hours of close concentration, she touched tapered fingertips to her shut lids.

  The flaring, harsh afterimage of the last, enchained sigils felt branded into her retinas. A tremor shook through her. Dampened skin under smothering layers of silk prickled through an aftershock of chills, as her stressed thoughts skittered across a razor array of dark facts. The Prime Matriarch’s workings to safeguard this portal had been unimaginably thorough.

  Wrapped in a disapproving silence like armor, the peeress remained stationed in the stairwell. The safety of the sisterhouse at Capewell was her given charge. Far removed from her cozy, first post as a ward matron, and happiest with a toddler on her knee, she shouldered the need to witness what passed, despite her stiff grounds for objection.

  Always made to feel unnatural before others endowed with the nurturing, female instincts, Lirenda arose. She closed a chilled hand over the icier brass of the latch. Her untamed thrill of anticipation never showed as she set herself to violate her Prime’s most guarded confidence. Aware that such elaborate defenses might stem from a need to thwart observation from the Fellowship, Lirenda loosed the bar. She pushed the portal inward, pressured by passions she had striven all her life to contain.

  The door swung wide to a whisper of pressed air. Darkness beyond hung like unmarked slate, sliced through by shining lines of argent. Morriel’s spell construct sheared across gloom in breath-stopping, masterful splendor. Circle upon square, each interstice sang in meticulous balance, multiple layers of enchained sigils looped in knots like filigree wire trapped in felt. The weave displayed an unnerving complexity, centrally anchored by a stayspell which fixed its point of origin in the past. Lirenda found herself mazed into wonder. Those entangling radiants resisted translation, nor could dazzled eyesight track every spiral, which channeled the conjury’s influence outward to arc through an unformed future.

  At a predestined moment, this majestic array of spells would resolve and shape an event of Morriel’s design.

  “Merciful maker!” Lirenda breathed in awe.

  Imagination foundered. The effects of stark beauty and sheer terror stopped her breath. Sparked to hot jealousy and raging despair, she knew beyond question her skills were inadequate to match such a broadscale endeavor. If Morriel Prime had passed the Wheel into death, that one shortfall might brand her successor forever. Lirenda coveted the knowledge not yet in her hands with a passion of savage proportion.

  The paradox stymied her raging ambition.

  Either she waited to assume the supreme mantle of her order, or she lived all her days galled by the loss of an irreplaceable legacy. A live Prime Matriarch or a shriveled corpse: the cipher which entangled her destiny lurked in fusty darkness, coiled inside of those perilous, dagger-edged spells.

  The peeress’s tentative inquiry shattered her furious thought. “Did anyone survive?”

  Lirenda called back through the entry, “I’m not sure yet.” She drew a steadying breath, freighted with smells of dank stone and charred herbs, but no reek of corrupted flesh. An untrustworthy reassurance, since the might of the inaugural stayspell itself would arrest the progression of decay. Nor could she plumb the silence with spells. Wards drawn and laid on the axis of the earth were not permeable. Even cursory review showed the outermost circle demarked a sealed pocket in time.

  The purpose which guided the construct stayed hidden. To know Morriel’s fate and recover the Great Waystone, her successor must bridge those dire protections, then walk the convoluted maze to its center.

  “You may enter the observatory,” Lirenda informed the peeress. “I’ll need a wise senior to keep vigil.”

  Three tentative steps masked in rustling cloth; then the stunned gasp as the enchantress arrived and shared sight of the construct’s magnificence. “First Senior, for prudence, the safest course would be a ritual cleansing to unmake every line of that patterning.”

  “I know. Yet we daren’t.” No flutter ruffled Lirenda’s poise as she cupped the spell crystal strung on silver chain at her neck. “The importance of this design must be paramount. How dare we countermand our Prime’s signal will? I fear worse, to unravel the least vector of power without knowing the reason for her act of self-sacrifice.”

  The peeress smoothed back a loose wisp of hair, ill at ease in the face of necessity. “Be cautious, First Senior, for all of our sakes. With the world brought to strife by the works of cursed princes, the Koriani Order cannot afford to lose both Prime and successor.”

  Lirenda stared back, her eyes impenetrable as flawed amber. “I will not fail. And Morriel might still be recovered alive.”

  Too aware the ordeal would test every facet of her training, she dispatched her final instructions. “Stay alert. If the energy flow in the sigils turns sour, don’t rely on the wards of containment. Collapse the construct immediately, and close the door with a grave seal.”

  The peeress stepped back, torn into reluctant discomfort. “Your will, First Senior.”

  But already, Lirenda forged ahead. The chain in her hand stitched cobalt reflections across gloom as she bent her trained mind through the crystal, then dangled its focus as a pendulum over the rimwards of Morriel Prime’s outer circle.

  Just as a mirror would give back the light, the quartz caught vibrations in resonance. Attuned through its matrix, Lirenda allowed the stone’s captured energy to suffuse the waiting, blank eye of her consciousness. Guided by discipline, she allowed Morriel’s work to imprint its pattern in her mind.

  Guard and defense, the ward showed her emptiness, a fathomless well of negative space to freeze breathing flesh and stop the heart. The crystal spun deosil on its chain. A hint of a smile bowed Lirenda’s rose lips. She advanced a half stride widdershins, her quartz poised above the figured ward. Its clear facets flashed like flaked mica, whirling faster, then faster still. Lirenda took another step. The jewel flared brighter, a blue spark gouged out of stygian dark. Still the freezing void gripped its interface, translating through to her mind.

  The draw of the circle was steady in deception, its blankness cloaked in a numbing, seductive sense of peace. Lirenda stayed guarded. A Prime Matriarch’s protections were to be feared. Any gap in her personal defenses, and the ward’s shrouding vacuum would sweep past control and smash her link to conscious memory. An infinite expanse of null energy would draw spirit from flesh, and see her lost utterly and forever.

  Lirenda trod the rim of the construct, her palms lightly sweating, the chain between her pinched fingers a vibrating thread whirled by a crystal tuned to madness. Step upon step, she sought the one cipher of opening that should be wrought into every formal conjury fashioned under Koriani auspices.

  Another pace, another; the spinning quartz raised a faint, waspish hum from the chain. The darkness with its smells of tarnish and dust shrouded the edges of vision. Light-headed with strain, Lirenda forced burning eyes back to focus. She refused the undermining dread, that Morriel’s design might have omitted the sigil she required for access.

  That moment the chain jerked. Its tethered crystal snapped the links rigid and hung as if nailed to the earth.

  Lirenda wrung out a sigh of relief. Her nerve was iron and her left hand precise as she raised power and engaged the prime successor’s cipher through the heart of her focus crystal. The quartz flared acid yellow in reply. As that key answered its matching lock, a handspan arc of the ward circle flickered from blue to acidic gold. The access point opened.

  Lirenda crossed the abyss. Dread forces held in abeyance through her passage scoured her nerves into tingles. Her skin felt scraped by razor-edged steel and her vision blanched into static. She had no perception, no balance, no will. Only faith assured safe
completion of her step. Reason and substance reassembled at last as her foot came back down on solid stone. She was through.

  The blinding veils tore away.

  Around her, entombed stone and dusty darkness hung with an alkaline scent of chalk. Hemmed by the impeccable vibrations of the wards, Lirenda settled her riled senses. Her course was committed. From the moment she engaged with the spell’s inner workings, the sigil which granted her entry would fade. Should Morriel still live, the pattern must be followed through to its end without disturbing the least, subtle vector of laid force. Had Morriel died, Lirenda must survive to contain whatever raging chaos had brought her Prime Matriarch’s downfall.

  Possessed by a clean, analytical calm, Lirenda surveyed her prospects. Behind her, the defense wards glimmered their fixed, arctic blue. Ahead, scribed in lines like hot fire, the active core of the conjury blazed like a slow fuse, bound to its preset course. The slate slabs underfoot wore a glimmer of chalked sigils, the inaugural runes dimmed to spiderworked tracks where the energy had consumed itself in completion. Among them, Lirenda picked out bronze pans of spent ashes arrayed at each point of the compass. The scents of charred herbs had long since melded into the ambient dust, yet the placement tied the construct through space and distance in ritual alignment with the land.

  Lirenda wadded her cloak hem and skirts into the grip of cramped fingers, that no haphazard eddy could smear the febrile chains of dead ciphers. She eased her way along the inner rim of the ward circle until she found the Paravian rune, An, which meant prime, or one, or beginning, and without which no work of Koriani spellcraft could be engaged on Athera.

  The significating figure interlaced with that rune seemed a knotwork of arcs, configured with maddening intricacy. Lirenda paused there, confounded. This elaborate work of conjury did not frame the foil she expected against interference by Fellowship Sorcerers. Hampered by the unsettled light, the Prime Senior freed her quartz and chain for another arcane sounding. She dangled the crystal above the faint chalk lines, hopeful, yet no residual energy remained for the stone to recapture in resonance. She had no alternative but to refire the sigil, lend it a spark from her own conjured will to trace its original vibration. The quartz as her focus, she bent her will through the matrix. A lifetime of training enabled its virtue to channel her talent into an applicable force.

  She stilled curiosity to listening silence, then threaded a tenuous connection. The lines on the floor responded and flared a fleeting, subliminal purple. Their imprinted resonance surged through the quartz link, and touched her ready awareness.

  She grasped that the construct framed the individual Name for a man, but no more.

  Her sounding of his analog presence stormed through her like tide, an unassailable, blanketing warmth of connection that shattered all pride and restraint. Lirenda could summon no breath for denial; her stunned mind allowed her no grace for retreat. His innate compassion sheared like struck lightning across the quartz interface, to flash-burn her frozen emotions. Unwanted fascination held her in thrall, while integrity unraveled before a force like winged song, an aching, pure expression of melody that pealed through her woman’s heart and filled all the hollowness within her.

  Lost as she touched what could never be hers within bounds of the Koriani Order, Lirenda cried out. However she cringed and postured, this one man held the potential capacity to know her. His intuitive awareness could strip away pretense and lay bare the self she kept hidden.

  Every buried sorrow escaped from containment as water might burst from shocked glass: all of a young girl’s mute yearning to refute her mother’s withering criticism. Cosseted by wealth and strict expectations, hounded to polished deportment, Lirenda still harbored the sawing, helpless misery left by her childhood feelings of uselessness. Her bleeding retreat from self-expression, then the refuge she carved out of rigid perfectionism had matured to a gnawing ambition. Hurt long denied now became pleasure thwarted, until the mask she wore ripped away. Her present existence became useless motion, a dance step play of meaningless shadows.

  Inner barriers crumbled as the male presence tied through Morriel’s spell invited her to discard empty posturing and anneal her whole being into change.

  Stranger to herself, spun giddy by a siren call to cast off restraint and embrace the freedom of laughter, Lirenda understood that her armor of reserve might dissolve at a touch and bare her vulnerable heart. One man might command such power to change her. She gasped, torn through by a savagery of need beyond the bounds of her past experience. Fear snapped her poise. She gave way to a firestorm of tears, when in callous fact, she had never before let self-pity over-whelm her.

  Her violated pride at last sparked true rage, to stab through rank turmoil and redeem her.

  Hurled back into still, dusty dark and the comfortless flare of sealed spells, Lirenda knelt in the suffocating velvet of her formal robes of high office. Her quartz pendant and chain hung slack in her hands, as though bone, flesh, and nerve had been scorched. Ath, Ath preserve, she knew this man’s nature, with his devastating, forthright perception of hidden truths. Never mind he was a living danger to the world, with no thought at all for her dedicated life inside the Koriani Order. His existence was a threat to unstring heart and mind, then whirl her like a moth to its brainless immolation in a lantern flame.

  Alone in chill darkness, Lirenda gasped a vengeful curse on his name. For the lynchpin of the construct Morriel had conjured held none else but the imprinted signature for Arithon, Prince of Rathain.

  The discovery wounded like double-edged steel, that the Shadow Master’s fate lay entangled with Koriani destiny. Lirenda locked her teeth in frustrated resentment. Of course, the Prime Matriarch must suspect her hidden weakness for the ill-starred Teir’s’Ffalenn. No other reason explained Morriel’s need to tie his movements in dire spells and secrecy.

  Lirenda stood. A twisted cry escaped her. Arithon, unholy fires of creation, Arithon s’Ffalenn had been the instrument of disaster to trigger the Matriarch’s downfall. The irony all but choked her, that he might also became the signal turn of fate to transfer the reins of prime power into her impatient hands. The reason why remained twined with the riddle behind Morriel’s grand conjury.

  Between the glacial glimmer of the defense ward and the surging, core brilliance of active magecraft, the chalked chains of ciphers which keyed the spell’s purpose extended in tangling spirals. Lirenda released the crushed links of silver embedded into her palm. Unable to quell the tremor in her knees, she buffed the clammy fog of perspiration from her crystal. The misfortune of Arithon’s Name as significator posed a most thorny complication.

  Her annoyance found voice in startling venom. “Merciful Ath, prince, if Morriel’s died of this, you’ll regret the light of day that saw you born.”

  Lirenda grasped her quartz and rapped out a cantrip to raise a spark of illumination. Its firefly glow caught the rune Shayn, for two, stitched through the seals of a tracking spell. The locus which keyed its activation sprang from a riverside inn along the Ilswater in Tysan. Slaved to that sequence, Lirenda uncovered the Name form for Dakar, then Caolle’s as well, hooked and tagged by the spellbinder’s glamour to disguise his native clan accent. The reason for the triad presented no mystery. Morriel had wished to trace Arithon’s movements. As safeguard against his wily nature, she tied in his henchmen to assure an unbroken connection.

  The lines off the third figure held branching complexity. Lirenda recognized the triplicate axis of the seer’s rune, then the mazed ciphers for diversion and secrecy, joined to trigger threads for a delicate array of spring traps. The spell became more than a straightforward scrying. Morriel had wrought against the code of the Koriani Order to curtail the freedom of a prince.

  Lirenda refused to pass judgment for that transgression of founding principle. Arithon s’Ffalenn was a catalyst of unprecedented and volatile potential. Discomfited herself by unruly attraction, she saw too well how his influence had once spoiled the faith of
a promising young initiate. Perhaps in the greater reach of her wisdom, Morriel Prime saw past Elaira’s tragic defection to some threat to the sisterhood at large. Or worse: the might of this construct may well have been raised to shield Lirenda herself from temptation. Koriani code held no recourse. Any romantic entanglement would disbar her from prime succession.

  “Never that,” the First Senior avowed, shamed by demeaning possibility. Hatred scorched through her, that the man could exist with potential to tear the least flaw in her loyalty.

  She pressed on to shed her embarrassment. Meticulous strings of sigils fanned into a widening net, until Arithon’s movements were not only traced, but stalked outright. As the first chains of circumstance branched right and left to rearrange destiny and entrap, Lirenda felt no surprise. By then, leading evidence established his role as Morriel’s earmarked quarry. The progression unfolded with diabolical care, the Prime’s plot stitched unerringly through Arithon’s machinations at Riverton to suborn Lysaer’s royal shipyard.

  Lirenda deciphered the unwinding course of events, forced to admire the artistry of invention, as a bard’s salty repertoire made the Laughing Captain a haunt for sailhands and shipwrights. Through a season’s cagey dealings with Cattrick, while Dakar blunted his worries through drink, Morriel’s neat craft passed unnoticed. Spring trap and trigger, Arithon’s course became flanked in a narrowing channel, scribed in surreptitious power and plain chalk.

  Lirenda paused to stretch a cramp from her hand. The crystal on its chain had warmed from hard use. She nestled it between her palms and chanted clearing cantrips, while her arcane connection to a fragment of happenstance reeled on to display a spectral recast of a dialogue spoken days since. The trace resonance of sound preserved by spent sigils cast whispered echoes through the deadened air of the observatory…