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

by Melissa McPhail

As Ean soon discovered, the palace of Andorr was a massive fortress comprising many palaces, gardens, courtyards and temples. It crowned a mountaintop overlooking rich farmland, which in turn lay pinned between the palace and a tangle of stark, white-capped peaks that demarked the joining of the Dhahari Mountains and the Iverness Range.

  Easily the most opulent structure Ean had ever seen, Andorr boasted as many jeweled panels, screens and doors as colorful frescoes and arabesques. Not a wall had been left unadorned—one would think the Kandori gods would be offended to cast their divine gaze upon naked plaster—nor could such an ornate palace suffer the indignity of a simple arch. A single arch, column or minaret became three, their sides fluted, scalloped or otherwise embellished so as to dazzle the eye. Either that or confuse it, for the ornate decoration upon walls, floors, columns, ceilings and every other available surface dizzied and boggled the mind.

  “There is beauty in design, and there is beauty in simplicity,” Dareios observed as they walked. “This is my home, so of course I notice its artistry not at all.” He cast the prince a smile. “In my years studying at the Sormitáge, I walked with such wonder as lies within your gaze every day I trod the university’s Grand Passáge. It’s a miraculous masterwork of art—one of the true marvels of the Age—the last great work to be completed before Malachai’s scourge hit the empire.”

  Ean had but the fuzziest recollection of the Grand Passáge—Arion had walked its corridors while its ceiling was under construction, and Ean had some sense of its grandeur if no clear picture of it. “I hope to visit the Sormitáge one day.”

  “Yes, you must. I haven’t traveled extensively in Avatar, but in the Middle Kingdoms or the Empire, no city approaches the glory that is Faroqhar, birthplace of the angiel.” Then he added with a flash of pearly teeth, “Or so the Agasi claim.”

  They took their meal in a breezy pavilion on the very edge of the mountaintop, overlooking the valley and the razor peaks of the Dhahari. As they were sitting down at a table draped in azure cloth, Dareios pointed to the many dishes laid out before them and rapidly listed off their names—baba ganoush, fesenjan, ghormeh sabzi, fattoush, among a litany of others—none of which Ean had any familiarity with, so he tried them all. The wildcat, Babar, claimed a spot in the sun and cleaned her striped and spotted fur while they ate.

  Though he had many questions for his host, Ean remained in a tumultuous state of mind. So much had happened in so little time—only a handful of days had passed since he’d left T’khendar, since the First Lord had refused his oath and he’d learned that his loyal men were being held to lure him.

  Every day Rhys and the others remained in captivity twisted a barbed arrow further into Ean’s heart, but after encountering Sebastian… Never mind Ean’s own love for his eldest brother, but thirteen hells, Sebastian was still heir to the Eagle Throne! How could he choose any path but the one towards his brother’s salvation?

  Sensitive to Ean’s state of mind, Dareios ate in quiet contemplation, giving the younger prince an occasional glance but otherwise not intruding on his thoughts. There were benefits to making friends with truthreaders. One need never explain the troubles that plagued one, for some thoughts spoke loudly enough on their own.

  Ean admired Dareios for his tact as much as for the effortlessness of his manner. Ean found it daunting enough trying to meet everyone’s expectations of him based on the name he’d claimed in another life, but add to this being constantly surrounded by ageless Adepts whose depth of experience imparted wisdom beyond their seeming years…well, it only heightened his sense of inadequacy.

  Yet unlike Ramu or the First Lord, Dareios put him at his ease. From the first moment when the Kandori prince had greeted Ean with parity, he’d felt relaxed in his company. With his generous smile and knowing gaze, which ever danced with subtle humor, one couldn’t stand before Dareios of Kandori and feel anything but welcome…and a little awed. He had to wonder, what was it like being the heir to the Kandori fortune—rumored to be the greatest fortune in the realm?

  “Not so glamorous as you might imagine.” Dareios cast Ean a smile across the table. “Your pardon, but you’re free with your thoughts, Ean. I cannot help sometimes but overhear.”

  Ean cast him an apologetic look. “I forget to guard myself. It’s all still new to me—and yet…not.” He frowned.

  “You struggle with the Returning. My troubles—if they might be called troubles, which many would name ungracious of me—lay in the opposite extreme.”

  “How is that?”

  Dareios ran a finger across the tattoo between his brows. “This is the mark of the Khoda Panaheh. In Kandori, to work the Pattern of Life is to seek divine favor, Jai’Gar’s blessing, His permission, if you will, to remain upon this earth and do service to Him through the fair and honorable use of elae, which is His gift of godly power to mortal men. We tell many stories of how man first gained this power, but all of them end with the branding of the Khoda Panaheh.”

  He angled his chair away from the table and extended his feet towards the mountains, settling clasped hands in his lap. “As you will discover the longer you remain my guest, Ean, a great many of us wear this mark.” He searched Ean’s face with his crystalline gaze. “So I ask you, how can one inherit anything when the sires and the heirs live equally long lives?”

  Ean blinked. The idea had never occurred to him.

  Dareios scratched his head. “Sometimes the sires will linger for centuries, watching generations of their progeny mature and fade or choose to walk the pattern and join their ancient father in immortality; while other heirs decide to live but a single lifetime and move on, passing the torch to their chosen. But the former occurs more often than the latter—for many of us are born as Adepts, and it is in our nature to seek an understanding of our gifts, which understanding often requires longer than one mortal lifetime to acquire.”

  He looked up under his brows, and a thoughtful crease formed between them. One hand lifted to trace the edge of a silver knife lying beside his plate. “Subsequently the heirs linger, generation after generation, stacking up like firewood. We continue the tradition, of course, naming the heirs for each generation, though in truth there are often four or five others in any given house who might boast an earlier claim.” He gave a resigned shrug and met Ean’s gaze. “We are something of a dime a dozen, the Kandori heirs.”

  Ean considered him in wonder. “With such wealth, it would seem…well, you’d think there would be more…discord in this arrangement.”

  “Ah, yes, well…there’s a story to that.” A grin spread across his face. “As you will discover, Ean, we have a story for everything, in Kandori.” Abruptly he leaned across the table, laying a jeweled hand on the silk. “But tell me of your brother’s condition—Isabel said you saw into his mind. Let us speak of what you know, and then we’ll go to my lab and see if we can begin to unravel the tangled chains of his imprisonment.”

  Twenty-Eight

  “Count not what is lost, but what is left.”

  – Jayachándranáptra, Rival of the Sun

  Isabel removed her hand from Sebastian’s forehead. It was done. The healing was complete.

  She set her hand in her lap and exhaled slowly, letting the tension of countless hours of working the lifeforce bleed out with her breath. She’d mended Sebastian’s dreadfully frayed life pattern, making it whole again. It shone brightly in her consciousness as she withdrew from rapport.

  She’d done what she could as well to aid his older wounds—the crippled leg that caused him such pain, an easing of the scar that marred his check—but this man carried wounds no Adept could heal…soul-cleaving wounds that had sliced gaping rents in the fabric of his being. Even if Ean succeeded in extricating his brother from Dore’s treacherous patterns, Sebastian would still face his own path to full recovery of himself.

  Isabel turned to the Healers standing around the bedside, seven in all. She observed their faces, young and aged, so calm and yet so watchful, their ho
pe quietly concealed behind lovely dark eyes and beneath the shadows of the embroidered and jeweled scarves, chaadars, that covered their hair. Each of the women shone brightly to her elae-fuelled eyes, rose-hued and vibrant, with the rushing currents of the first crashing around them as the sea against island rocks. Many of these women she’d known since the womb. Now they were Healers of considerable talent, the rocks of their own shores.

  Isabel smiled. “It is done.”

  They broke into joyous clapping and kissed and hugged one another. Perhaps Sebastian’s life had not been in danger, but the effort to restore his body’s integrity had required no less of them than that life-or-death commitment.

  Isabel stood, signifying the end of their work that day, and the women as one moved to depart. As each Healer passed, Isabel pressed her palms together and bowed. “Sili ye naeghd beh aez haelva ye nesyaes.” One day is worth two tomorrows.

  In turn, each woman finished the traditional exchange, saying in the Kandori tongue, “May tomorrow know the joy of today.”

  Then Isabel was closing the door and returning to her chair to wait for Sebastian to wake. It wouldn’t be long. He’d been trying to surface from her enforced unconsciousness for the last several turns of the hourglass.

  As she relaxed back into her chair, Isabel pressed steepled fingers to her lips and let her thoughts range far. She saw a path—so thin it might barely be considered a path at all, more a trail through the grass of uncertainty, the shadow of Fate’s indifferent passing. Yet such trails could become paths…with the right encouragement. Seeds planted along these trails drew new creatures of opportunity to their nascent buds, and once those buds bloomed, many more foraging possibilities would come, leaving their mark upon the trail, the footprints of promise.

  She dared not directly influence Ean’s path more than she already had—Cephrael knew she’d done too much as it was. Her brother had been wise to warn her. Ever he displayed a nearly omniscient wisdom, so impressive when he found these truths merely through a study of the currents, while she must tread far upon the paths of possibility to see them. He was an easy man to admire, her brother, though a hard man to love—hard, because he would and had made any sacrifice for the sake of this game, and he expected the same unwavering dedication from those oathbound to play it with him.

  Sacrifice…Isabel pressed fingertips to her brows. She feared what floated beneath sacrifice’s desperate lake, far below the waves. She couldn’t see its shape yet, but she sensed it hovering there, and for Epiphany’s Prophet, sensing it was enough.

  Isabel exhaled another deep sigh, strained by the ache of conscience. Balance forbade her any deeper involvement on Ean’s path, yet she yearned to assist him. It was such a test of her discipline not to lay her hands upon Ean and rip away the veils of obscurity that prevented him from knowing his true self, from having the answers that were tormenting him so. Yet…such a working would hopelessly violate the balance in his life. It would mean his ruin, and perhaps the ultimate ruin of all.

  She knew what lay at stake, but it didn’t lessen her guilt. The woman Isabel saw in Ean the reflection of the only man she’d ever loved, while Epiphany’s Prophet knew that Ean’s talents would be desperately needed—all of his talents—if they were to have any hope of winning the game.

  Winning…such an odd description for the denouement she and her brother sought to this conflict.

  Across from her, Sebastian began to surface from his own shadowed depths.

  A low sound escaped him; not quite a groan, more his body’s acknowledged awareness that what once had been painful, now ached no longer. His lids opened slowly, blinking, once…twice. He made to lift his hands and found them strapped to the plaster molds—a necessary precaution for a few days more, to be certain his finger bones were fully hardened in their restored shape.

  “Do not.” Isabel leaned to place a hand on his arm and press it back before he strained too hard against his gentle bounds. “The plaster is merely to protect your hands.”

  Blue-grey eyes opened fully and settled upon her, striking eyes—so like Ean’s in shape, yet so different in the attitude they conveyed. Sebastian’s eyes had seen too much harm; they couldn’t but reflect the impression of experience. “You’re a Healer?” His voice came hoarse, a bare whisper.

  She moved to bring a goblet of water to his lips, and he drank.

  “Thank you,” he managed better then. His eyes scanned his own body, seeing hands taped and pinned, gauze-enwrapped shoulders, “…for all of this.”

  Isabel set down the goblet and sat back in her chair. “Your brother would see you whole. This is a beginning.”

  “My brother…” He frowned deeply at first, but then the slightest of smiles softened his expression. “To see him so…little Ean…” A light came to momentarily banish the shadows in his gaze. “I never imagined my littlest brother would one day come to my rescue.” Abruptly the shadows returned. “Or that I would try to kill him for it. How improbable, the paths of fate.”

  “Cephrael’s hand weaves, and His choices are mysterious to us, for we cannot see the larger pattern He shapes.”

  He turned and assessed her shrewdly. “You help him—my brother. You’re his wife?”

  “We are bound to each other’s paths.”

  “That sounds ominous.” He looked around the room, noting high windows and the mountains beyond. “Where has he brought us?”

  “Kandori.”

  He frowned. “Wasn’t there…I seem to recall a Kandori prince in my father’s court.” Then he gave a rueful shake of his head.

  “Perhaps you recall Prince Jair,” she offered. “He married the Healer Melisande d’Giverny, who birthed a daughter, a Healer, Alyneri.”

  Sebastian brightened. “Betrothed of Trell.”

  Isabel nodded. “We are at the home of her uncle, Prince Dareios.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Ean will need Dareios. As will you.”

  He considered her for a time after this statement. She felt his intelligent gaze assessing her, assessing his surroundings. This was a man used to perceiving danger in every breath. “I sense a new presence in my thoughts, intervening…bringing an uncommon peace. You?”

  She nodded.

  He seemed to infer her reasoning, for he didn’t ask why she held his mind in a binding of her own, but no doubt he’d made note that she could.

  “So…what now, my lady?”

  Isabel decided she liked Ean’s eldest brother. Without Dore’s lunacy twisting his thoughts, he had a quick mind and a discerning disposition. Time then, to seed her nascent path. “Ean risked everything to rescue you.”

  Sebastian winced at this. His countenance revealed a deep weariness, as if every day spent in the agony of Dore’s thrall had shaved a decade from his future, leaving his life spent at the bare age of twenty and eight. After a moment, he leaned his head back against the bed. His voice ached as he murmured, “You think I’m unworthy of his aid.”

  She placed a hand on his arm. “All good men are worthy of help.”

  He looked swiftly back to her. “Am I a good man?” He grunted and looked off again. “I hardly know who I am…and I’ve only glimmers of who I used to be.”

  “A man might say such at any moment in his life. We remake ourselves every day, with our every choice and action.”

  “A fine sentiment, my lady, but not so easily accomplished when your mind belongs to a madman.”

  Isabel recognized power in Sebastian—great power for a mind so imprisoned. If only his freedom could be gained as expeditiously as she’d restored his hands…

  Sebastian considered her as she thought on this, and his eyes narrowed with his inspection. Abruptly he latched onto the truth. “Whatever you’re doing—this intervention that’s allowing me such clarity of thought…it’s only temporary, isn’t it?”

  Isabel nodded.

  Sebastian clenched his jaw. “So…the moment you remove your working…out comes the ravening madman, in
tent on doing Dore’s bidding. Is that where we stand?”

  She nodded again.

  He frowned as he considered their predicament. “Can’t you just keep doing whatever you’re doing?”

  “I dare not, for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is the unhealthy number of bindings already compelling your thoughts. But this is only part of the issue we face, Sebastian.”

  He cast her a wary look. “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Dore has set his patterns with the fifth, as you know. Ean has the ability to unwork such patterns, but not without studying them with care, and the complexity of the patterns Dore has implanted on your mind will require deep inspection.”

  Understanding dawned in Sebastian’s gaze. He gave her a fleeting and bitter smile. “Therein lies the rub…I see. The moment Ean approaches me, I’ll be compelled to kill him. Not exactly an atmosphere hospitable to study.”

  “Yet…there is a way.”

  His eyes flicked over her. “So we come to it at last.” His gaze narrowed. “I take it I won’t like this idea, else you wouldn’t have engaged in such preamble before presenting it.”

  Isabel cracked a smile. “Your wit does you justice, Prince of Dannym. It is guaranteed you won’t like it.”

  “You have me at your mercy, my lady. By all means, let’s hear this hideous suggestion.”

  Isabel lifted a bag from beside her feet and drew out a coil of silver rope.

  Sebastian’s expression darkened.

  Isabel set the goracrosta down on her lap. “Not what you were you envisioning?”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of padded shackles and a warded room—perhaps this room. Comfortably contained…with a nice view.” He cast an agonized look at the goracrosta. “I’ll find ill comfort in the thrall of that dreaded stuff. Have you any idea what Dore—”

  When he couldn’t finish, only turned away with his jaw clenched, Isabel put a hand on his arm again. “There is another reason for using goracrosta, Sebastian. Two reasons. Will you hear them?”