Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The liquid clouded, darkened, resolved: she beheld the vast, auburn sweep of the moorlands at the heart of Araethura. Under the bowl of a clear, autumn sky, two men sparred with the longsword. Lunge and parry entangled in thin scrolls of sound. Lirenda first recognized the grizzled old garrison soldier with the lightning hands and the unforgiving jaw as the man hired from Backwater to train young Fionn Areth.

  The student he opposed circled over the rough ground in steady, sinuous confidence. His body was shirtless despite the brisk chill, his boy’s frame fleshed out into a young man’s tigerish fitness. The rhythmic response of parry and riposte bespoke a flawless concentration. Paired shadows flowed over ocher grass, while testing blades snicked and clamored, dipped gilt and cerulean in sky-caught reflection. The dance-step exchange of attack and defense cast shivering, metallic echoes across the swept crests of the downs.

  Then the culmination, a blinding fast disengage followed through by a bind. The herder’s son whooped and wrenched. His mentor’s blade flew through a pinwheeling arc and thumped in the grass, a shimmer of stilled steel in the crisp clarity of the afternoon sunlight.

  ‘That’s the fifth time in a sevenday you’ve disarmed me.’ The older man rubbed his chafed palm, measuring his charge with rueful satisfaction. ‘Well-done.’ His gruff clap on the shoulder was earnestly meant. An aging soldier could not but take pride in a youngster who mastered the skills he had gained in the course of a lifetime. ‘Not another trick I can teach you, boy. What learning’s left will be found in experience. No man of the sword’s fully made until he’s blooded his blade and survived. Or else roistered with wenches. There lies another test that’ll bring you to maturity. Sure’s deep frost, no sparring can match a lively tumble in the hay.’

  A smile turned the lips of the victor, who saluted his teacher.

  ‘Don’t let my oldster’s maundering mess up your head.’ The veteran laughed. ‘Lasses round these hills have brothers with fleecing shears. You’d get yourself well blooded all right if you sport with a skirt in the bracken.’

  ‘It’s the skirts who invite me I worry about.’ The young man retrieved the forfeited sword. He straightened, flushed with exertion and praise, and the wind whipped black hair away from a face whose clean angles had no place amid families who raised goats on the moors of Araethura.

  Lirenda caught her breath. The impact of just what she had made slammed through her and raced the staid beat of her heart. Nor could she tear her hungry gaze free.

  Framed in the depths of the scrying bowl, Fionn Areth returned the sword to his master. He exchanged laughing comment with a mouth never made for humility. The bright irony of an innocence never seen in the man whose face had been copied made her gasp.

  ‘That’s uncanny!’ Indeed, those features lacked for nothing but the stamp of Arithon’s experience. Except for that one, trifling detail, Daelion Fatemaster himself might be taxed to distinguish that boy from the prince whose face had provided the model. ‘He’s perfect.’

  ‘He’s now twenty-one years of age, and itching to seek his promised destiny,’ Morriel rasped. ‘No discipline of his parents can hold him in obscurity for much longer.’

  ‘Then my hour is come.’ Lirenda straightened up. Excitement flushed her cheeks like sunrise on snow. ‘Why wait? The season is fortunate. Autumn storms will hamper the swift passage of news.’

  In fact, like the neat mesh of gears in a winepress, the events of the moment aligned remarkably in her favor. Lysaer s’Ilessid was at Erdane, lately returned from minding his affairs at Etarra. He would soon ride the last leg of his journey to Avenor, with his court unlikely to gain word of the disturbance she planned before the onset of winter closed the passes.

  ‘Snow and ice in the Skyshiels will forestall any deployment of Etarrans to the eastshore well enough. How could we choose a better hour?’ Lirenda crossed the narrow chamber to Morriel’s chair, hands clasped to contain her raw eagerness. ‘The only difficult hurdle we face is a decoy to divert the Fellowship Sorcerers.’

  Ensconced in white fur, Morriel blinked eyelids thin and naked as a songbird’s halved eggshells. The sultry spark which lit her black eyes seemed to feed off the fluttering candles. ‘You have something in mind?’

  The answering smile on Lirenda’s lips could have been carved from rose coral. ‘A magnetic disturbance of the sixth lane would cast a veil of static over Sethvir’s earth-sense. If we placed a circle of twelve seniors wielding one of the order’s major crystals in the Skyshiels, they could spin resonance into a quartz vein. That would be enough to excite the lane’s energy into a random flux.’

  ‘You’ll have what you ask, and by my own hand.’ Rare satisfaction thrummed through the reedy timbre of the Prime Matriarch’s reply. ‘Through me, the powers of twelve sisters will be raised through the Great Waystone’s focus to shield you. Also send summons through the scryer on lane watch and recall Elaira from Morvain. The Mayor of Jaelot suffers from gout. She’ll do very well assigned to his household as healer.’

  Lirenda’s instinctive jerk of resistance hitched a whisper through rich layers of silk.

  Morriel raised porcelain fingers to her lips to forestall a dry snort of laughter. ‘Dare you forget? Through Elaira, you possess the sure key to bring Rathain’s prince to his knees. He’d empty the very blood from his veins before he saw her take harm. Keep her close, by my orders. If aught goes amiss, her Koriani vow of obedience will provide you with sure means to force his Grace of Rathain back to heel.’

  ‘Your will.’ Lirenda curtsied to the floor, her displeasure offset by an uncontained, dangerous joy. The slow years of waiting had ended. Concerning Elaira, the Prime’s logic was flawless. Lirenda would not let the Matriarch’s interference cloud her moment of overdue retribution. The clarity of mind left unbalanced by the Shadow Master’s influence would be reclaimed in sweet vengeance on the hour he knelt at her mercy.

  The heavy, paneled door clicked closed on the heels of Lirenda’s departure. Morriel Prime sank back in her chair, one finger crooked in summons to her pages. The boys were well trained. They came in response to even so subtle a signal.

  ‘Move the scrying bowl to my right hand,’ the Prime demanded in her scratchy whisper. While the boys did her bidding, she fumbled beneath her furs. Her wasted, claw hands shook with alarming palsy. The breath rasped in her throat, grown labored of late, through even such minimal exertion. Moment to moment, she lived in raw pain, held to life through indomitable will.

  She located the box she kept for her remedies, gasping for air as one of the pages assisted with unfastening the latch. The other boy uncorked the syrup-based tonic she used to ameliorate her most alarming onslaughts of weakness. She sucked greedily at the bottle, then lay back, hands flaccid, while the drugs and strong spells took effect.

  The room seemed to take far too long to stop spinning. Fretful, impatient, she gasped a command for her pages to leave her in private.

  The boys bowed, too intimidated to offer an argument. All but stumbling over their slippered feet, they hastened out of her chamber.

  Left utterly alone, Morriel clutched the inlaid cedar box to her breast. Words whispered over her personal spell crystal unkeyed a hidden lock. She slid open a secret compartment in the lid and removed four bundles, cloth-wrapped and tied with dark thread that seemed spun from the mapless void between stars.

  ‘Rue, wormwood, salt,’ she whispered under her breath as she unwound the ritual wrappings. ‘Tienelle to loosen the bindings of time and space, and lend force and spin to my banespell.’

  She turned next to the scrying bowl and tapped on the stone edge with a long, trembling nail. ‘Araethura, Fionn Areth,’ she rasped. Bound by the rune of subservience to her will, the stilled water inside obliged her by re-forming the image of the herder’s son, who currently perched on a sun-warmed boulder, working with an oiled rag and a whetstone to clean nicks and rust from his practice sword.

  Fionn’s brow was untroubled. Jacket sleeves unlaced to re
veal sturdy wrists, he smiled often, and whistled snatches of a jig tune, a quarter tone out of key. Nor did his carefree manner show change as Morriel Prime raised her spell crystal and traced the first rune of discord above the dark crown of his head.

  She cast a pinch of salt over the image in the water, then formed the sigil that would strip the boy’s aura of any natural protection afforded by blessings or amulets. The incantation passed her lips in a near-soundless stream of syllables as she sprinkled the three herbs on the water in the timeworn, ritual patterns. The language she used was no tongue native to Athera. The crystal responded and took focus through resonant sound, its properties linked to the finespun character of the plants to sow argument, discontent, and restlessness.

  The seal of closure that knit the Prime’s intent into form also robbed her last vestige of strength. Morriel rested, flesh and bone nested in her throw of white ermine, and her eyes like chipped beads of jet. A faint smile of victory quirked her lips. Her spell of disharmony would not be stopped now, joined as it was with its victim.

  Lent that added spin of dark impetus, Fionn Areth would take leave of his family in Araethura two fortnights before Lirenda could possibly set her more restrained plan in motion. With the boy gone abroad on his own initiative, the disgraced First Senior must scramble and rush to enact the array of detail that would close her net over Arithon s’Ffalenn. Lirenda would be given no moment to spare to examine Morriel’s own interests.

  The Prime Matriarch clapped her hands to recall her pages from their post outside of her chamber. Once the boys had burned the wrappings and the stray leaves of spilled herbs, telltale evidence would be eradicated. No one in the order would be likely to notice that a temporary bane-ward had been cast over young Fionn Areth.

  Morriel snuggled deep into her furs, confident as a spider in a web. The diversion that arose when the boy left Araethura would allow her full license to complete the personal plot she had prepared in secret through the course of long, lonely years.

  Autumn 5669

  Overlook

  Seething inside for the fact she must importune help from a seer, Lirenda carries out the order set on her by Morriel Prime: ‘I require a message sent to the sisterhouse at Morvain. By the Matriarch’s will, the initiate Elaira is to be recalled from her independent practice and given direct assignment to serve as the Mayor of Jaelot’s personal healer …’

  Far out in blue waters on the Cildein Ocean, untroubled, the brigantine Khetienn and her companion fleet change course to sail back to the verge of known waters; despite the completion of seventeen voyages that have crisscrossed the seas of Athera, she and her clanborn complement of crewmen have encountered no trace of the vanished Paravians …

  The Sorcerer Kharadmon sends word to Althain Tower from his posted watch amid the ward circles set against wraiths, and his message is received by Sethvir to a grim repercussion of echoes. ‘I know we’ve seen nothing to cause an alarm in the quarter of a century I’ve stood sentinel. That’s the problem. I don’t trust the peace in the silence …’

  Autumn 5669

  X.

  Chain of Destiny

  Dusk veiled the windswept moorlands of Araethura, seeding stars across an indigo sky. Fionn Areth gritted his teeth, splashed the filled bucket over his head, and, shivering, groped for the lye soap his mother had left on the stone lip of the well. To shed the hateful, oily reek of the goats, he scrubbed and scoured until his skin flamed. Two more icy dousings rinsed off the suds. He snatched up the towel, snagged it over the soaked skin on his shoulders, then raked up the filthy pile of shirt, breeks, and boots. He juggled the load, dodging the puddles of runoff, and padded barefoot through the croft door.

  Wind banged the panel shut on his heels. The noise raised a sharp glare from the younger brother braiding goat collars but left no impression on the shrilling quarrel in progress between his two older sisters.

  Aching, still bruised from his sparring that morning, Fionn Areth basked in the smell of lamb soup. While the fire-heated air burnished the chill from his skin and dried off the last clinging droplets, his mother called from the hearth.

  ‘Fionn? Breta forgot to throw corn to the hens.’ She gathered her cleaver, cutting board, and wooden ladle, her hair stuck in rings to her temples. ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘Like this?’ Fionn Areth dropped his soiled clothing on the floor, while his sisters burst into a peal of giggles at his nakedness. ‘Why not ask Lachonn? He hasn’t yet washed.’

  ‘Because I asked you.’ His mother shed implements with a clatter and scooped up the youngest of his nephews, who had tripped on the poker and skinned a knee. ‘Hush, child, there.’ Through the toddler’s rising wails, she scolded, ‘Stop carrying on and dress yourself, Fionn! Those hens don’t thrive, we won’t have an egg to be seen come the spring.’

  Which was too much, for a son come into his manhood. ‘Eggs?’ Fionn Areth exploded. ‘Let them go to Dharkaron! I won a bout with my swordmaster today. Why should I stay to see spring?’

  ‘I heard that,’ interjected a gravelly voice.

  Fionn Areth shut his jaw, cheeks flaming. He had been a rank fool not to notice his father come in from sharpening the scythe in the shed.

  ‘You’ll feed the hens as you are, young man, and stay stripped after that for a strapping. No son of mine treats his mother with disrespect under the roof of her house.’

  Nor did the misery end with the sting of the weals his mother brought herb grease to soothe come the evening.

  ‘I couldn’t see to you any sooner than this.’ The candle lamp mapped her thin, careworn face in planes of ink and gold as she knelt to tend his striped back. ‘Your father took a long time to sleep soundly.’

  Fionn Areth lay prone on the loft’s bare wood floor, chilled speechless. The rough wool blankets and ticking were abrasively harsh on raw flesh, and his pride, too tender to seek a child’s solace, burrowed amid the huddled warmth of his brothers.

  A rustle of skirts, then the chink of crimped tin as his mother pried the lid off the ointment. ‘Your swordmaster’s dismissed, boy.’

  Her son said nothing. His head remained tucked into the crook of one elbow, the hair like black silk looped in tangles over young flesh.

  His mother’s deft fingers began salving his hurts. She could not help but feel the coiling tension sweep through him, though he tried to lie slack and unfeeling. He would not ask, so she told him. ‘’Twas not for punishment, Fionn. The swordmaster came in after supper to be sure we heard you weren’t boasting. He’s taught all he knows. Your father said, let him go, since your learning would seem complete. No need, now, to act as though life here was less than what you were born to.’

  Her ministrations grazed over a raw patch. Fionn Areth sucked air between his locked teeth.

  ‘Ah, boy,’ his mother murmured. ‘The thrashings seem ever to go worse for you.’ Whatever blessed ancestor had bequeathed him his face, the least glance always hackled his father’s quick temper. Her Fionn had a set to his cheekbones and brows that gave even his most honest apologies an air of deliberate insult.

  ‘There’s virtue in humility, one day you’ll see,’ she lied, as aware as he that her sensible counsel fell short. Her sigh brushed his shoulder as she pressed the lid back on the salve tin. ‘Try not to cross your father, Fionn. He’s gruffer most times than he means to be, and life on these moorlands is bitter enough without flaunting the fate that must part you in time from the family.’

  A last squeeze on the wrist; she hooked up her candle lamp and quietly left him, thinking and chilled in the darkness.

  Old enough to act with adult patience, Fionn Areth waited until his back healed enough to bear the chafe of the heavy fleece jacket he needed to break the raw winds. Then he caught a pony from the band on the moors and left her tied in the scrub behind the orchard. After dark, while the moon snagged the mist and silver-lit rims of the clouds, he bridled the mare with a twine hackamore. Since the family owned but one saddle, he fashioned
a buckle surcingle, to which he tied a leather pack filled with snares and what provender could be spared from the larder – cold waybread, hard cheese, and sausage. His snug herder’s cloak would have to serve him as bedding and shelter from the elements. Nor did he worry about bandits or barbarians, his felt boots being his only worthwhile possession. Since the swords used for practice had all gone with the arms master, he purloined his father’s skinning knife to gut coneys and shave kindling. Resolved to go forward and claim his own destiny, Fionn Areth turned his back on the steading he had known since his birth. He vaulted astride and nudged the mare east, toward the River Arwent and the trail that wound south toward Daenfal.

  A hundred leagues westward, the Koriani seer dispatched with the message from the lane-watcher picked her way through the waterfront stews of Morvain to the bait shack where Elaira had established her stillroom. The woman’s abrupt entry came with no warning, was graced by no courteous knock. She did not consider herself a visitor, she snapped, as she perched her ample behind on the only available stool.

  Elaira wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her wrist, one palm and three fingers being blackened with charcoal. Damp hair clung in whorls to her temples and neck. Of all possible days, she had chosen this morning to render the fat to mix her emollients. Her quarters were stifling. The cauldron hissed and spat, belching a noisome stench of hog suet. The kettle of steeped rose petals could not compete. Despite the fresh air let in by the roof leaks, and neglected gaps in warped planking, the waste from the knacker’s prevailed.

  Since the nearest public well was a brisk walk away, Elaira rinsed her hands in the rusted bucket she kept dipped full of fresh seawater. ‘Is this a summons?’ she demanded point-blank.