Paths of Alir (A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book 3)

by Melissa McPhail

  The ta’fieri of course involved more than merely making that sign in the air with one’s sword. It was an incredibly complicated form to master, and Tanis faced only the beginning of its instruction. The moment he clashed blades with Loghain, however, he saw for the first time how truly effective the ta’fieri could be. Though they practiced in much slower motion than any reasonable battle would prove, Tanis could yet see that were he to build up the strength to perform the ta’fieri in true, he might yet hold his own against such a Wildling—if not, perhaps, against Loghain.

  He couldn’t keep up the ta’fieri for long, however, so he felt immensely relieved when he saw a man carrying a wicker basket descending the cliff and recognized him as his valet, Birger.

  Loghain saw him, too, and he disengaged with a long step backwards and away from Tanis, followed by a brisk bow. “So…it would appear reinforcements have arrived.” He cast the lad a wry smile. “I’ll get a fire going.”

  Deft with flint and steel despite the blustery wind, Loghain had raised a nice blaze by the time Birger reached them, the valet having trudged unwaveringly yet slowly across the deep sand.

  “Madaé Giselle sends luncheon, milords,” Birger announced. He set down the wide basket and began distributing the meal while Tanis basked in the heat of Loghain’s fire.

  Birger dished out herbed chicken stuffed within round loaves of bread and smothered in wine gravy just off the stove. A flagon of mulled wine steamed when the valet pulled the cork, and Tanis and Loghain drank the spiced wine from deep copper mugs lined in tin, the cup’s warmth a balm to Tanis’s icy fingers. The lad wondered yet again what patterns Madaé Giselle had learned in order to keep the meals—like his morning tea—hot despite the elements, and who had taught them to her.

  Then he realized he knew after all: it had to have been his father.

  “Do you visit often, sir?” Tanis asked Loghain as they sat side by side with backs resting against a bleached driftwood log.

  “It’s been more than twelve passings of the sun since I last partook of your mother’s hospitality.” Loghain’s golden eyes flicked to Birger, who stood a discreet distance away, and back to Tanis. “It’s a privilege beyond measure to be welcomed here.”

  Tanis was finally feeling his fingers again; food and wine warmed his belly, and his spirits were climbing. “What brings you this time?”

  Loghain gave him a grave look. “Alas, I’m upon a regretful task, young Tanis. Would that it were happier circumstances that drew me to Agasan and your mother’s home.” He shook his head. “A grim task,” he added then, “and one I don’t relish. I needed some respite from this work…if not from my unrelenting conscience,” he added under his breath, “and the Villa Serafina has ever offered both.”

  Tanis’s eyes alighted on the daggered gauntlets lying in the sand at Loghain’s side and he thought he could imagine what grim task the man was upon. “Why do you do something if your conscience is at odds with it, sir?”

  Loghain gave him a rueful smile. “There is much in the First Lord’s game that engenders regret, Tanis. There are enemies and traitors aplenty who would seek to undo everything the First Lord has sacrificed so much to achieve. I feel no compunction about stopping them from committing such acts, but…” and here he sighed, “a life is a life. One must never claim a man’s life cursorily, nor be indifferent to its passing, no matter the doomed man’s crimes.”

  Tanis wondered why learning that Loghain was upon an assassin’s path troubled him so little, but he supposed it was because his instincts told him that the Whisper Lord was an honorable and kind-hearted soul. And my mother’s friend. Even had his own instincts tended otherwise, Tanis knew he would have trusted Loghain merely for claiming an association with his mother—for Tanis had come to know her well enough through their lessons to know he could trust any man who rightfully claimed her friendship.

  As the lad finished off his second sandwich and retrieved his copper mug from between his legs, Birger appeared at his side to refill it with more piping hot wine. Tanis thanked him and then looked back to the Whisper Lord.

  Loghain’s amiable nature and willingness to speak on things emboldened the lad toward questions he wouldn’t have dared ask the zanthyr. “Sir,” he posed as he sipped his wine, “how did you meet my mother?”

  The Whisper Lord’s face split in a grin. “Your mother,” he murmured, eyes sparkling. Tanis caught flashes of his strongest thoughts, images of his mother on horseback on a deserted road…of her crystalline eyes gazing over a goblet, captured in darkness and firelight…

  “We traveled together in my youth.” Loghain shrugged bony brows. “I’m not sure why she chose me to accompany her. I thought at the time I was meant to be her protector.” He laughed heartily at this idea and leaned toward Tanis as he confessed, “The ego of my youth stood taller than Mt. Pisah and even more firmly rooted! Not that I alone suffered this folly. I’d wager you could float a barge ‘cross the South Agasi Sea on naught but the inflated egos of adolescent Tyriolicci warriors. Truth was,” he added, winking, “more often than not, she was the one protecting me.”

  Tanis heard a deeper truth in these words, but he didn’t understand its meaning.

  “Oh, to be sure I handled many a company of outlaws who got above themselves and thought to disrupt our caravan, but these were base ruffians, their attempts easily thwarted. And your mother is no fool.”

  “Did you travel together for long?”

  “Two years.” He cracked another smile. “I’m still not sure what task she was upon. We traveled at her bidding, sometimes staying but a night in a town and betimes a score of weeks. Your mother is unvaryingly fond of Kandori, and she spent some months there collecting stories and myths from the oldest villages and recording them in her journals.” Loghain smiled with the memory, whereupon his golden eyes flicked back to Tanis. “Women are ever indecipherable, are they not, lad?”

  Tanis thought of Her Grace and had to agree. “Utterly, sir.”

  Birger appeared at their sides again, this time offering lighter fare, and they finished off their meal with frothy meringues filled with apricots and tart cherries.

  As he was masticating a particularly chewy morsel, Tanis felt suddenly compelled to ask, “Sir…does my mother serve your First Lord, too?”

  The Whisper Lord watched Tanis in silence at this, his golden eyes pensive while visions danced within his thoughts. “I think that’s a question I’d best leave her to answer.” He stood and looked to the near cliff, whereupon he frowned slightly. “Tide’s coming in. It’s now or never if you wish to see those starfish I told you about.”

  Feeling well stated with food and wine, Tanis willingly followed the Whisper Lord to the tide pools near the blustery cliff. As he clamored over slippery, wave-washed rocks behind the long-legged Wildling, Tanis felt a little like a sea creature himself.

  They reached a crevice in the lengthy outcropping of volcanic stone like a blackened finger of blistered land, and peered down into a narrow corridor as the waves rushed in and out. Mollusks clung anywhere anemones didn’t, and amid the display of tri-colored sea life, huge orange-red starfish staked their own claims.

  As Loghain reached down to collect one for better inspection, Tanis crouched on his heels beside him. Looking up, he noted with a frown that Birger was heading back to the cliff, carrying his wicker basket with him. “Did you know my father also?”

  Loghain glanced up beneath leathery brows. “By reputation alone. Aha!” Looking triumphant, the Wildling brought up a starfish and showed Tanis its myriad tube feet.

  But the lad wasn’t interested so much in starfish anymore. He rested elbows on knees and watched the Whisper Lord pensively. Both of his parents seemed whisper-thin outlines of once great individuals, and the lad fervently wished he might gather more details with which to fill in the bare sketch in his mind. “Will you tell me of him, sir? That is, what you know of him?”

  The Whisper Lord returned the starfish to the tide p
ool and sat back on his heels to consider Tanis. “If I know anything of your mother, lad, it’s that she’s some plan for you in all of this. Trust her to tell you when the time is right.”

  Tanis dropped his gaze to hide his disappointment. “You’ll say nothing then?”

  “I dare not.” He clapped a strong hand on the lad’s shoulder. “Come. The day grows short, and I’d like to think myself less a fool than to rouse Phaedor’s ire by idle chatting when there’s daylight left for sparring.”

  As Tanis was reluctantly getting back to his feet, Loghain motioned to the empty scabbard at his belt. “I noticed that you wear a sheath but no blade. Where’s the dagger that belongs there?”

  Tanis looked down and fingered the leather sheath he still wore every day for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. He remembered too well the morning he’d purchased it and all that had followed. It was almost as if the sheath had indeed fulfilled Her Grace’s prophecy when she’d claimed that sporting a Merdanti blade was only inviting trouble. Sometimes he really missed Her Grace.

  Looking back to Loghain, Tanis exhaled a long sigh. “It was Merdanti.” He felt a pang of heartache, for the dagger represented so much now. “I gave it to a Malorin’athgul.”

  Loghain drew up short. “Surely you jest!”

  Tanis grimaced. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  The Whisper Lord let out a low whistle and observed cryptically, “My…you are your mother’s son.” Then, casting Tanis one last wondering look, he jumped into the shallow surf and headed back up the beach toward their fire and his blades.

  Tanis looked down just in time to see the starfish tumbling away on the retreating waves. He felt strangely connected to the little creature, as if they both pitched within a tumultuous sea, each of their futures full as much of mystery as promise.

  “Coming, Tanis?” Loghain’s voice echoed on the breeze.

  And the lad hurried to join him.

  Nine

  “The difficult is done at once. The impossible takes a little longer.”

  – The Fifth Vestal Björn van Gelderan

  Ean stood in a maze formed of towering black walls beneath a bleak sky. Rising from his knees, he put a hand on the stone wall nearest him. It felt smooth, cool, and thoroughly solid. A part of him recognized the Labyrinth, even remembered having escaped this trap many times…innumerable times. Oddly, he couldn’t think of the means by which he’d accomplished any of those escapes now.

  The Labyrinth’s ingenious construction traps an individual’s attention—one experiences the feeling of being wholly caught within it. Yet in truth, a single pattern could never hope to encompass an entire mind, for a man’s mind forms a universe unto itself.

  The key to the Labyrinth’s power is its effect on units of attention. These nerve channels of reason connect experience with understanding; the lightning-swift translation of memory into consequence. When attention becomes trapped—when a mind is compelled to focus only on the Labyrinth—the Adept experiences an inability to think other thoughts. His attention is trapped inside the pattern and he’s cut off from his own mind.

  Ean couldn’t reach the experience from which to derive the solution to his escape; he couldn’t extend his thoughts beyond the maze. Every time he tried to reason through the problem, he felt his attention drifting off. He recalled only that he shouldn’t fight it—that fighting the Labyrinth meant giving it more power.

  Most patterns expended their energy creating some effect—a blast of heat, the shifting of elements, movement through time and space—but the Labyrinth was the pattern. Formed of the fourth strand, it devoured any energy put into it, making its hold upon the Adept’s mind that much stronger. To fight it was to surrender to it.

  Ean exhaled a frustrated sigh and turned a look around. He stood at a crossroads of spiraling corridors. A glance upwards showed the stars seeming to form a similar dizzying spiral. Standing still, resisting the maze’s call, felt like fighting it. So Ean picked a passage and started down its path.

  The mind forms a universe that is shaped by an individual’s thoughts and bound by laws of his own construction; thus, every Adept experiences the Labyrinth differently, and each one must devise their own means of escaping it.

  For Ean, who had once been called Arion, walking was the key. Walking the maze somehow freed his attention…as if in complying with the pattern’s intent, it slowly released its hold on him. Bit by bit, pieces of Ean’s attention slipped from the Labyrinth’s hold as he walked. These pieces collected outside of the pattern’s binding and began traveling the nerve channels of memory again.

  Ean walked, and he remembered…

  Oddly, the first memories that returned to him were of Dore. Perhaps because the wielder’s own pattern held the prince’s consciousness bound, or perhaps due to Ean having seen and recognized the man on a fundamentally aversive level, but Dore’s face had been seared into Ean/Arion’s mind in association with a slew of vehement curses.

  Each curse seemed to have a specific associated memory. Ean got the idea that Arion had attempted to pin Dore’s crimes in mind for all eternity, permanently searing them into his own mental consciousness with a sort of marker, so that Arion—no matter who he became in a future life—would see Dore’s face and remember the man’s crimes, and thereafter exact his promised vengeance.

  The first scene presented itself to Ean with startling clarity, all wrapped up in a complete package of recollection as if bundled and sealed, to be opened later upon utterance of the appropriate curse…

  ***

  Ean saw himself as Arion for the first time. He stood looking in a mirror—a tall man, fit, with dark blonde hair and aqua eyes. Ean saw intelligence in Arion’s gaze, and perhaps a hint of humor, but mostly the gaze struck him with a certain compelling intensity. Something in the shape of Arion’s eyes and straight nose stirred a different memory…but no, that memory wouldn’t come. Only this memory had returned, complete and whole unto itself.

  Arion rubbed a hand along his jaw and frowned as he stared at himself. His manner was that of a man in his prime, confident, secure in the love of an incomparable woman.

  He saw her behind him in the mirror in that moment and turned quickly to her. Sudden feelings of dismay and fury flooded him. “Isabel, what in Cephrael’s name—?” She came and pressed fingers to his lips. As ever, her touch sent an electric current through him, but just then his fierce protectiveness overshadowed any other sensation. He took her hand. “The charges against you—”

  “Any Questioner will see the truth.” Her smile soothed, but her eyes held a deep sadness. “This is meant to be a warning.”

  “From whom?” He took her by the shoulders and captured her gaze. “Who would dare threaten you?”

  She frowned and did not answer him.

  The scene shifted, as if in a dream, and connected to a later memory that Ean somehow understood was part of the same recollection, though separated by a span of weeks.

  Arion stalked down the central atrium of a massive library. Four floors of shelves towered above him, while the moon shed its light in gentle beams through the glass oculus of a dome high above. Circles of lamplight illuminated each table, but all stood empty save for one in the far back, near the doors to the restricted section.

  At this table sat a slender man with longish hair that gleamed pale in the lamp’s muted light. He was absorbed in reading a book. His hair brushed his shoulders as it fell towards the table, obscuring his features from view, but Arion knew him—there was no mistaking Dore Madden from any angle.

  Arion slammed his hands on the table, and Dore recoiled in his chair. “I know it was you!” Arion captured Dore’s hooded eyes with his own and bound the fifth around him, pinning the startled man to the mercy of his inspection.

  The face that confronted him appeared much younger than the one that had cast the Labyrinth over Ean, but his gaze hadn’t changed. Something foul ever seemed to lurk behind Dore Madden’s eyes. You cou
ld catch a glimmer of it, if you could stand staring into them long enough.

  Pinned against the back of his chair, Dore licked his lips. “If she did it, she should be convicted.”

  “But she didn’t do it!” Arion felt his fury bleeding into the currents and quickly curtailed his emotion. A great many people would be vexed with him if he carelessly disintegrated Dore Madden and the Sormitáge Archives along with him—though he couldn’t imagine any of them thinking Dore alone would be any great loss.

  Dore smiled thinly. “The evidence is compelling.”

  “That evidence was planted.”

  Dore arched the faint wisp of hair over bone that passed for his eyebrow. “Be wary, Arion—the evidence was found in her own chambers, I’m told.” He gave a fitful, fleeting smile full of cowardly threat. “Careful they don’t call you in for questioning, too.”

  Arion pressed his hands hard against the table lest they claw for Dore’s throat. He said through gritted teeth, “I would die a thousand deaths before I see harm come to Isabel.”

  “You may get that chance,” Dore smirked. “I hear Questioning in Illume Belliel can last for decades.”

  Abruptly Arion growled an oath and spun away. “In what universe could it possibly be imagined that the High Mage of the Citadel would work forbidden patterns?”

  The question was rhetorical, but Dore replied in his abrasive tenor, a voice like the churning of grit left in a prospector’s pan, “People cannot be trusted with power, Arion. Not even the greatest of them can drink it without falling prey to its corruptive allure. Isabel van Gelderan has drunk from that well for a very long time, and it has clearly tarnished her, even as it erodes the Fifth Vest—”

  Arion spun and slammed his hands on the table again. “Dare you!”

  The fifth snarled with his anger; an elemental wind snuffed the lamp, tore through the pages of the open book and spit Dore’s hair upwards. Pinned as he was, Dore could do no more than return a wild stare at Arion. His breath came faster, however, pushing against the ribs of his bony chest.