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

by Melissa McPhail

  He handed his empty bowl back to Dorn. As the man was ladling out another serving, Ean asked, “Do you mind if I ask you a question, Dorn? About the night Isabel…” But the words failed him in the end, for how did one really ask a man what it was like to be resurrected from death?

  Dorn looked up under his bushy brows, considered Ean for a bit, and then shrugged. “It’s a strange thing, milord.” He went back to his whittling and continued as his knife shredded the wood, “I remember fighting you, I remember dying.” His face pinched at this memory. “Then I knew nothing. I only realized that I’d been in darkness when the light appeared again.” He stopped whittling and set his hands in his lap, and his gaze grew distant. “The light was the Lady, and she offered me a choice: to stay and find rest, or to come back and serve her, and you know…” His frown deepened. “It was like I could see differently in that place.”

  When his silence deepened, Ean asked, “Differently how?”

  Dorn glanced over at him. “I could see right from wrong like I never saw it before. Actually…I’m not sure I ever saw it before, so I chose to come back and serve her.” He shrugged and started whittling his stick again. “I daresay the others experienced the same.”

  Ean gazed wonderingly at him. How many men truly get a second chance at life?

  Isabel’s reply floated into his thoughts, Everyone. Every day.

  Ean caught his breath. He set down his bowl and jumped up—actually, he took his time getting up so as to keep his dinner inside his stomach, but in his mind he jumped—and turned to greet her as she emerged from the trees with her men following close. She still wore her fighting blacks.

  A deep tension inside Ean relaxed upon seeing Isabel whole and hale, and he exhaled a sigh of relief. “My lady.”

  “My lord.” Isabel stopped in front of him and cupped his cheek with her hand, and he felt her hidden gaze inspecting deeply of him as only a Healer could.

  Contrition swarmed him. “Isabel—”

  She moved her other hand to place a finger lightly across his lips, leaving her staff standing upright beside her. Then both hands cupped his face, whereupon something snapped in her own heart and she clutched him into a fierce embrace.

  “Come.” Dorn waved at the other men while Isabel and Ean clung to one another. They moved past in silence.

  Feeling her in his arms, knowing the danger he’d placed her in, Ean could barely contain the rage he felt at himself. He sensed in her thoughts the fear she’d had for him, concern that it had taken him so long to escape the Labyrinth when Arion had been able to dissolve the pattern in seconds, fear that he wouldn’t escape at all... but mostly he sensed her relief in having him back with her, and this filled him equally with joy and contrition.

  Finally Isabel released him, took up her staff, took Ean by the hand, and drew him into their tent.

  “Isabel…” Ean began again as he ducked inside behind her, desperate to gain her absolution.

  “What’s done is done, Ean.” She set down her staff and turned to him. “All that matters is what lies ahead.” She nodded to the opening. “Close the flaps.”

  While Ean complied, Isabel sent the fourth into a lamp and then sat on a stool to untie the straps binding her legs and boots.

  Ean stood by the portal, watching, admiring—shredding himself with blame—wondering how he could possibly deserve her…

  After a moment, he summoned the courage to ask, “Dore?”

  “I let him go.” She stood to undo the straps of her jacket. “I placed a tracing pattern on him though. After he fled my justice, he searched for and claimed your brother. We’ve been following them since.”

  “To Tal’Afaq.”

  “Yes.” She discarded her jacket, stepped out of her pants, freed the laces of her tunic and let the material slide down her shoulders. It fluttered to the floor at her feet. “But I would speak no more of these things.” She came towards him bound only in her blindfold.

  Captured as ever by the mere sight her, Ean watched her gliding towards him limned in lamplight and thought this is what Isabel must truly look like, this being haloed in gold, formed of power and compassion and fierce beauty. But that was the only thought he had time for. Then his arms had enfolded her and his mouth was on hers and no other thoughts mattered for a long time.

  Afterwards they lay with legs entwined and Isabel’s head resting on his chest. He trailed his fingers through her unbound hair. As his heart was settling into a contented rhythm, Isabel said, “After we separated in Tyr’kharta and you went after Sebastian, I found the source of the foulness we’d both been sensing.”

  He turned his head to look at her better. “What was it?”

  She pressed her lips together tightly and exhaled a slow breath. “The tortured remains of men—of Dore’s experimentation.” Her fury, tightly controlled, migrated across the bond, and something else…something that left Ean unsettled without any understanding of why.

  “The residue of the patterns worked there told the doomed men’s story,” she continued. “Dore has been experimenting with patterns that change a body’s innate composition. Ean…he’s making Merdanti weapons out of men.”

  Ean jolted. Thirteen hells! Just the thought of such a thing… “But wouldn’t that kind of working kill a man?”

  “Evidence of bindings hints at an answer.” Isabel sat up and turned to look at him. “Ever Dore takes the chaste and corrupts it. My brother bound the Shades to him lest deyjiin claim those men forever, their very essence lost from the pattern for all eternity—true death, without the chance of Returning.” She stood to claim a robe from nearby, wrapped herself in soft wool and tied the sash with a fierce exhale. “From my brother’s desperate efforts to save the doomed, Dore derives dark inspiration. He kills men’s bodies with perverse patterns, crafting them into monsters, and then binds their consciousness…” She paused with fingers to her lips. “Not to himself,” she decided then. “Dore hasn’t the power to bind men’s souls to this plane. Another must hold them here.”

  Ean shook his head, staring hard at her. “You think he’s actually succeeded in this craft? Who would such creatures be bound to?”

  Isabel pulled her hair across her shoulder and returned to the bed. The air had grown cold enough to see their breath as she sank down beside him again. Her fingers absently captured a lock of dark hair and twirled it while her brow creased in thought. “My brother and I have long known the Malorin’athgul were hiding among Alorin’s populace. They’ve had decades—centuries—to entrench themselves in the workings of Alorin’s kingdoms and governments, long years to gain power. But only one of them shouts his identity through action and deed—boldly, as if he cares not if others recognize his true nature.”

  Ean could think of only one man that fit this description. Had he not personally borne witness to the darkest of powers in a Marquiin’s ravaged mind? Just remembering the moment, a cold chill skittered down his spine. “You speak of the Prophet Bethamin.”

  She leveled her blindfolded gaze upon him. “He is Darshanvenkhátraman, Destroyer of Hope, called Darshan by his brothers.”

  Ean sat up and pushed a hand through his hair. This was the man poor Kjieran van Stone had been sent to spy on? Gods above and below, had Kjieran any hope of surviving the encounter?

  “Franco Rohre tells us that Dore Madden is sworn to the Prophet—to Darshan,” Isabel said.

  Ean lifted his gaze back to her. “Then you think…?”

  “Darshan must be involved in the making of these creatures.” She exhaled and shook her head. “We don’t yet know the mortal identities of the other two Malorin’athgul, Darshan’s brothers, for they hide themselves well. But we have suspicions.”

  He caught the faintest pinching of her brow after this. “What is it?” He trailed the back of one hand along her arm. “Something else is bothering you.”

  She looked down at the lock of hair now tied in knots between her fingers and released it. The knots at once unraveled, likew
ise the tension in her brow, but Ean still perceived it in her thoughts. Whatever concern she harbored, she clearly didn’t want to tell him.

  “Isabel…?”

  He sensed her putting careful words to her fear, which only disturbed him more. What truth would require such delicate crafting?

  “When I left to come with you,” she finally answered, “my brother advised me, in his way, to take care that I knew where Epiphany’s Prophet ended and the woman Isabel began.”

  Her words and tone roused a wary unease.

  “Of course, I am certain of these things.” She lifted her head and reached a hand to cup his cheek, reassuring him, for she remained as keen to his emotions as he was to hers. “But I think now that my brother meant something else in cautioning me.”

  Unsure where this was going, Ean turned his lips into her palm. Her body called to his, and desire ever pulsed at her touch. Its beat was a welcome distraction from this topic in which he sensed a discomfiting truth. “What did he mean?”

  “He meant for me to beware of blending my path with yours.”

  Now she had his full attention. “Isabel—”

  “I cast the pattern that brought us here, Ean, but we were upon your path. In that sense, you should have fought Dore.”

  Ean gave her a look of frustration. “If I’d fought Dore without you, he would’ve killed me…taken me, had his way with me.” Ean suppressed the horror of that thought. His stupidity had nearly cost him his life—again. “If you hadn’t been there, I would be dead.”

  “We were upon your path, Ean…yet Dore is my wrong to right.” Isabel shook her head and looked away from him, blindfolded yet seeing more than any mortal man. “And this is what troubles me. The woman Isabel might follow you anywhere, but Epiphany’s Prophet has her own path to walk in this game—do you see? I fear my path unwittingly influencing yours, and it’s so perilously important that it doesn’t.”

  “It won’t—you won’t. I won’t let you.”

  She looked back to him with a deep furrow between her brow. “This was the true meaning of my brother’s warning. It’s why he’s kept his distance from you.” She took his hand and interwove their fingers. Though he couldn’t see her eyes, he knew they searched his face for understanding. “Like my brother, I must tread carefully, because yours is a path that skirts the fine edge of Balance, Ean, and three times dying for my brother’s game is three too many.”

  She leaned and kissed him deeply, a glimmering of her own desperate heart. Then she pressed her forehead to his, and a tremulous sigh escaped her. “I don’t want to be without you again.”

  Ean pulled her fiercely into his arms. He didn’t trust himself to speak, for the idea of being without her nearly unmade him. He lay them back on the bed, tucked her head beneath his chin and stared off into the shadows, clenching his jaw as guilt clenched inside, at war with protest and desire. “I would die a thousand deaths for you, Isabel.” Never had he meant anything more truly.

  He felt her smile against his bare skin. “Sometimes you surprise me with the things you say. So like Arion…yet so different.”

  These words brought an unexpected hollowness to his heart. He saw too clearly now the man Arion had been, and he knew he measured a good deal short of him. After a long silence, during which he argued with himself about the logic in asking what he meant to ask, he swallowed and eventually dared, “Do you miss him, Isabel?”

  She tightened her embrace around his chest. “You’ve Returned. I need miss you no longer.”

  It should’ve heartened him, but he felt instead a pang of regret, for he saw suddenly—the way she spoke to him now wasn’t the same as the way she’d spoken to Arion. The Isabel in Arion’s memory even felt different; their bond had encompassed so much more.

  Ean gritted his teeth. He hated himself for probing this topic, yet he couldn’t let it go. “I meant…do you miss Arion? The man you truly fell in love with.”

  She drew back from him with a gasp of surprise.

  Ean somewhat blustered on, “I saw him—really saw him—for the first time while in the Labyrinth.” Dreadful to be so envious of his own former self, but he wanted desperately to be that man, the one so coolly confident of his talents, the one who had claimed Isabel’s heart for all eternity. He pushed a hand roughly through his hair. “I know his memories are mine,” he admitted, casting her a look. “I know I’m the same person, Isabel…but I’m not the same man.”

  Her brow furrowed as she gazed at him, and concern pulsed through the bond. Her following kisses reassured him, but they didn’t convince him, and after a while she rested her chin on his chest. In the silence that followed, she trailed a finger along his collarbone and asked, “What did you remember?”

  Ean propped an arm behind his head and looked down at her. The curtain of her dark hair seemed like night captured and bound against her pale skin.

  “Dore had done something against you,” he managed quietly. “I swore to follow him through eternity until I’d exacted vengeance in your name.”

  She arched a brow above her blindfold. “You swore, or Arion?”

  He gave a slight smile, for he understood her point. “It felt like me.”

  Isabel sat up and slipped out of her robe. Then she settled back across his hips. Both the sight of her and the feel of her straddling him stirred him deeply. “In the morning we go to Tal’Afaq to rescue your brother.”

  Ean’s gaze swept her form. “The morning is a long time from now.”

  “Yes.” She pushed her hair back from her shoulders and leaned forward, pressing hands to either side of his arms. “You have a choice, Ean.”

  He looked up from her breasts reluctantly. “I do?”

  “You can worry and fret over the man you used to be, or you can be here, now, with me.”

  His answering kiss proved there was no choice in this at all.

  In the darkest hours of the morning, Ean lay with Isabel’s sleeping form curled warmly against him while his thoughts dwelled on Sebastian. Since Ean’s earliest days, his adoration for his eldest brother had known no bounds. One memory felt especially vivid, and Ean smiled into the night as he recalled it…

  ***

  Trell had wanted to explore the sea stack called the Devil’s Horn, a massive outcropping of rock just off shore from their favorite beach.

  “That’s a bad idea,” Sebastian had said. He’d been perched on a boulder with his knees drawn up, a pad of paper trapped between his legs and the point of a charcoal pencil. His left hand tied his ever-present string into knots while his right hand sketched a mermaid with deft skill. Ean could tell even from that angle that he was drawing her in a very unladylike position. “It’s too far,” Sebastian added. He frowned at his drawing and rubbed at the shadow beneath the mermaid’s bare breast.

  “It’s not that far.” Trell shaded his grey eyes with one hand and peered at the rock.

  “I want to go,” Ean said.

  Ean had been eight years old, Trell twelve, and Sebastian ten and seven.

  “I’m going,” Trell said. He sat down to strip off his boots.

  “You’re staying,” Sebastian muttered.

  Trell squinted irritably up at him while pulling at his laces. “You’re not my keeper.”

  “No, apparently I’m your warden.”

  “I’m going, and I dare you to stop me.”

  “Disobey and you’ll be carrying me and my horse back to the palace.”

  “I want to go,” Ean said again. “I’m a good swimmer.”

  “Take off your boots then.” Trell flipped his black hair from his eyes and flashed Ean a grin. “Bet I can beat you.”

  “I doubt it. I swim better than you.”

  Sebastian assessed his drawing, blue eyes narrowed in scrutiny. “When I inherit the kingdom I’m having you both executed for stupidity.”

  “Ready-go!” Trell raced away.

  Ean tripped-tumbled awkwardly out of his boots and rushed after him.

  Low
-tide had just peaked, and the beach extended long before them as the boys raced. Even so, they still had to swim to reach the rock—apparently Sebastian had been right, for the mammoth rock turned out to be much farther than it appeared from shore—but eventually they gained their footing and proceeded to climb all the way to the top.

  There they hunted for petrel eggs and watched the distant ships returning to Mieryn Bay and sunned themselves on spiny ledges streaked white with guano.

  But the day got away from them, as days are wont to do with young boys, who are never very good at managing themselves much less the inexorable motion of time, and suddenly the tide was up and the boys found themselves stranded.

  They wasted a good deal of daylight then throwing blame back and forth at each other, and more after that trying to agree on what to do. Both knew better than to risk swimming back to shore at high tide—not with the rip currents charging around the Devil’s Horn. To make matters worse, the squall darkening the western sky looked like it was heading their way.

  Ean was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest, glumly watching the sun setting in a flaming pyre beneath charcoal skies and lamenting missing the evening meal—never mind the prospect of spending a frigid night atop a storm-washed rock—when he decided maybe Sebastian had been right and Trell’s adventure wasn’t such a fantastic idea after all.

  That’s when he saw the boat.

  The sea waves were so high by that time that the little skiff vanished between the swells. “Trell!” Ean shouted. He spun his head to where his middle brother sat above him staring defiantly off to sea, as if turning his back on Ean would somehow prove it all Ean’s fault, as he’d so many times insisted.

  “Just leave me be about it, Ean.”

  “It’s a boat!” Ean scrambled to his feet. “I think—it’s Sebastian!”

  Trell deigned to look. Then he jumped up and scampered across the spiny rock to join Ean on his ledge. The wind blew his dark hair into his eyes as he cast a narrow gaze across the sea. “You’re right.” He shoved hands onto slender hips and grunted. “Raine’s truth, I never would’ve thought it of him—he’s always such a bloody nesh.”