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

by Melissa McPhail

  He’d told her as much. To her credit, she’d understood, even though he couldn’t understand now. Now she was more important than anything or anyone—certainly more important to him than a game he could barely comprehend.

  He knew she lay awake, so he said quietly, “I remember asking you how long we would be apart. You didn’t tell me then because you said you didn’t want to frighten me. Did you ever tell me?”

  After a long silence, she answered, “Yes…on Tiern’aval.”

  Ean closed his eyes, but still the regret found him. Somehow it would’ve made it so much easier to accept his choice if he hadn’t known what it would mean. But he had, and he’d still chosen to die for the First Lord’s game. “Three hundred years?” his voice sounded embarrassingly high. “You told me we would be apart for three hundred years?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw all of my deaths in between?”

  She pushed up on one elbow and with a finger against his chin turned his gaze to her. “What dark places your mind treads, my lord.”

  “I naught but stumble in darkness without you, Isabel.” He clenched his teeth and shook his head and looked away from her again. “I feel like in all the centuries we were apart, I naught but stumbled in darkness.”

  He heard a strange noise escape her and turned back. “Are you laughing at me?”

  She tried and failed to suppress a smile.

  Ean cast her an affronted look. “You think I’m overreacting. Well…I’m not.” He slung himself off the bed and paced across the room, spearing a glare at her along with the complaint, “I’ll have you know my reactions reflect an eminently appropriate degree of desperation.”

  “Ean—”

  “I’m trying to play a game I barely understand, Isabel. I’m trying to be worthy of you, but—” He stilled and sliced fingers through his hair, letting out a growl. “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Abruptly, he came back and sank to his knees beside the bed, entreating her with his gaze. “I need you. I have so much yet to learn—or at least to remember—and the stakes are so high. I’m clearly not the hero this role requires.”

  “Ean, you do yourself an injustice.”

  He moved to sit beside her, took up her hand, and pressed his lips to her palm. “Maybe I was such a hero, once,” he admitted. Odd echoes of that perilous duality which had so possessed Arion accosted him suddenly, a clenching sense of purpose interwoven with regret. “Maybe I can be again someday.” He took her other hand and rubbed his thumbs across her palms, resisting the urge to pull her closer. He lifted his eyes and searched her hidden gaze. “But without you beside me, Isabel, what hope do I possess?”

  She regarded him quietly. “The Kandori have a saying: a man who complains that the sun rises and sets fills his belly with air.”

  “Which means what, exactly? Kandori proverbs are about as comprehensible as the Esoterics.”

  She withdrew her hands from his and stroked his hair back behind his ear. “It means that complaining about things one cannot change is a waste of time.” When Ean bristled, she continued quickly, “It also means that we must learn to make the best out of any circumstance, and,” she added as he opened his mouth to protest, “that the man who accepts his path reaps the greatest rewards from it.”

  “So you’re saying I should just accept this and let it go?”

  Isabel answered gently, “You’re expending a lot of energy in protest of something that hasn’t happened yet—energy that would be better expended elsewhere.”

  “I know what I perceive, Isabel.”

  “You perceive my confusion, Ean, but you fill the space of this unknown with your own fears.”

  Ean frowned at her. Then he set his jaw and frowned off into the night. He felt as if every mistake he’d ever made somehow clung to him still, and that his past failures were somehow endangering everyone he loved. Fear for his brother and Rhys mingled like shadows with his perception that Isabel intended to leave, and his guilt over mistakes he could no more remember than amend. The result was a tormenting black sea of frustration.

  Rather than face those impenetrable waters any longer, the prince stood and sought his clothes.

  Isabel turned her head to watch him dress. “A woman could only be flattered by such a dramatic display of devotion.”

  Ean poked his head through the neck opening of his kurta and paused. “The woman Isabel…but not Epiphany’s Prophet?”

  She arched a brow above her blindfold and exhaled resignedly. “Epiphany’s Prophet would say this display shows a lack of faith in one’s path.”

  He shoved his arms through the sleeves and tugged the tunic roughly down. “I wouldn’t say my path has proven exactly trustworthy, Isabel.”

  Her brow furrowed as she regarded him. “It isn’t the path that leads you astray but the choices you make upon it.” When Ean said nothing to this, merely clenched his jaw and continued dressing, she asked, “Where will you go? The hour is late.”

  “Dareios is probably awake in his lab. The man never sleeps.”

  “He is a scholar in the guise of a prince.”

  And I’m a fool in one.

  “Ean…”

  He grimaced, knowing she’d caught the thought. “My brother sleeps like the dead.” He tied the drawstring on his shalwar and glared up at her under his brows. “As you said, it’ll do me good to expend my energies on a situation I might actually be able to do something about.”

  He turned his back on her concerned frown and left.

  Thirty-Four

  “We all have within us the potential to be gods.”

  – The Fifth Vestal Björn van Gelderan

  Ean spent the rest of the night with Dareios until the man himself sought sleep a couple of hours before dawn. Then the prince walked the palace halls in silence and darkness, embroiled in thoughts far darker still. He eventually found his way back to the courtyard.

  The sand lay damp and silvery beneath a clearing sky just shy of daybreak. Ean slipped out of his shoes and walked to the middle of the court. He looked up at the stars and let the night’s lingering chill drain the emotion from his limbs. He stood there for a long time.

  Eventually he wandered the court tracing lines in the damp, heavy sand with his bare feet. He didn’t recall when he began walking through the cortata. The Adept dance of swords merely came upon him as a natural course, the way a man will sometimes hum as he walks or works, hardly aware of the tune he casts into the day, yet kept company by the sound. So did the cortata comfort Ean as might an old friend, easing his thoughts—indeed, erasing all thought beyond the motion required in the dance, his entire mind focused on carving the cortata’s pattern through position and movement and line of limb.

  Day broke upon the world. The sky brightened to rose-gold, and the clear morning brought a still, cool calm, one mirrored in Ean’s mind as he finished the cortata sequence for the fourth time and started anew. His feet followed channels through the sand now, each time passing in the same sweep or curve, carving the trough deeper. It pleased him to move with slow precision, to know he formed each angle of the pattern perfectly in every moment.

  As his mind had begun to settle, Ean realized that he’d long depended on this dance to clear his head. Arion had worked the cortata thousands of times, perhaps in the tens of thousands, and had counted upon it not merely in battle but to vanish any thought that lingered against his will. No wonder the motions were so second-nature to Ean—he could’ve done it blindfolded and backwards.

  As the sky lightened to blue, Ean became vaguely aware of people walking beneath the colonnades bordering his cloister—servants, adjutants, women draped in colorful, flowing silks—but none of them disturbed his concentration. He’d gained such focus that he could move through each position perfectly and still perceive the happenings in the world around him. He felt distant from his body, as if his mind had wandered into the far heavens and now extended all the way to the dome of the horizon in every direction.

 
When he finished his fifth pass through the sequence and lowered his arms, applause floated to him from the colonnade, and he turned to see three women in colorful saris clapping their hands, dark eyes smiling beneath the jewel-encrusted chaadars that covered their hair. He smiled and bowed, recognizing Dareios’s two sisters standing with another woman he didn’t know.

  This woman pointed admiringly to the sand and said something in her Kandori dialect.

  One of the sisters—her name might’ve been Yasmine—translated to Ean, “She says you missed your calling, Prince of Dannym. She has never seen a man who can paint with his feet.”

  Ean looked down at the channels his feet had carved in the sand. Then he frowned. He retreated from the sand court to stand atop the stairs and gazed down at his creation.

  He’d always conceived of the cortata as a pattern in three dimensions formed of feet, body and arms. He held this pattern in his mind when he worked the forms—he’d hazard to say he knew the cortata’s pattern more instinctively than any other. Yet he’d never seen it as he was seeing it now.

  Looking down upon the sweeps and swirls carved so deeply into the sand—two-dimensional instead of three—he saw a portion of the pattern he’d never glimpsed before. Always he conceived of the pattern in its full concept—that is, three-dimensionally—yet this two-dimensional segment was a cross-section sliced through the pattern’s core, like an orange cut in half…

  Ean shoved palms to his temples and stared, wide-eyed, as realization dawned. Could it really be that simple?

  He called the fifth and in three steps had launched himself to the roof of the nearest walkway. The women gasped, but Ean heard only the sweet song of resolution singing in his ears. He found his footing on the tiles and turned to face the sand court. Then he called the illusion of Dore’s matrix into being.

  He might’ve remained upon the steps and merely turned the illusion to see it from a new angle, but he didn’t trust himself in such reconstruction. As he’d never seen the cortata from above—in the thousands of times Arion had worked it, he’d never viewed that representation of it—so Ean could not easily conceive of Dore’s pattern from any other angle than the one he reconstructed from studying Sebastian’s mind. But he could call the matrix into being and then change his position relative to it.

  The morning lengthened and a crowd began to gather while Ean studied the matrix, walking from rooftop to rooftop all around the courtyard. In the middle, his illusion glowed like a captured sun. He’d formed it larger than before so he could see each loop of every pattern with perfect clarity.

  He was still standing on the roof when Dareios arrived. Ean felt like they’d only separated a short while ago, though the day had seen at least three turns of the hourglass.

  Dareios stood on the steps, rested hands on his hips and craned his head back to view the prince atop the roof. “What is it you’re doing up there, Ean—besides entertaining my sisters?”

  “Come and see, Prince of Kandori.” He summoned the fifth and spared a moment’s thought to mold his intention. Rainwater swirled from rooftops and columns, from gutters and puddles among uneven tiles, to form a staircase of glistening dew.

  The onlookers gasped. Some clapped.

  Working the fifth in this way came naturally to Ean, as naturally as a truthreader gleaning veracity from another’s spoken words. He needed no patterns to change the shape of elements that would easily take any form, nor to command them from one static state to another. Such workings were native to him, intrinsic to the way he thought, and they left little trace upon the currents. Forces already acting upon the world—gravity, inertia, kinesis—these responded to his whim, shaped as easily as clay beneath a potter’s hands. Ean needed only to form his intention—a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish—and focus his will to make it become.

  Dareios inspected the glistening staircase. Then he set one tentative foot on the first step, testing the integrity of the stairs now extending to the rooftop where Ean stood. When the stair held his weight—water bound into a solid by gravity’s force reapplied from all sides—he broke into a broad grin and began ascending. The onlookers erupted with mad applause.

  “Long have the years been since a fifth-strand Adept made himself known by action and deed,” Dareios commented as he climbed. “A great long while.”

  Ean turned him a look as he gained the roof. “This pleases you?”

  Dareios watched the staircase fall into rain behind him. His eyes danced as he looked back to Ean. “More than a little.”

  “Would that everything came to me so easily.” Ean returned his attention to the pattern. “But the day is much brighter than when you and I parted. Look,” and he nodded to the matrix, “I think I’ve found it.”

  Dareios arched brows. “The fifth? Where?” He turned his colorless gaze to the illusion.

  “You must assume the view from above. Look down…look for the flat planes dissecting the vertical lines, a two-dimensional pattern hidden among the others.”

  While Dareios studied the illusion, Ean swept his hair back from his face with both hands. “I have to give Dore his due. This is brilliant.”

  While he’d been studying the pattern, the ghost of a recollection had come to him—a remembered conversation—Dore Madden’s grim-featured face nose to nose with Arion’s and the declaration, both promise and warning, ‘…your talent with the fifth is nothing compared to what I can do…’ and behind this, Arion’s thought—his concern at the time—that Dore would put the whole of his devious intelligence towards malevolent aims.

  “I see what you mean.” Dareios walked along the roof just as Ean had, peering down at the pattern. “Rather than encase the entire matrix within the fifth, he’s built the matrix around his fifth-strand pattern.” He made a complete circle of the rooftops, studying the pattern from every side.

  He beamed as he rejoined Ean. “Well…shall we go break it apart?”

  They moved from the cloister to Dareios’s laboratory—much to the disappointment of the assembled princesses, who’d made quite the morning of watching Ean cavorting atop the roof—and spent the remainder of the day extracting the fifth-strand pattern from Dore’s matrix.

  Because so many other patterns connected through it, Ean had to meticulously separate each pattern, one by one. As they pulled each pattern apart from the whole, Dareios both drew its two dimensional representation on sheets of clear glass—the parchment of a Patternist—and formed his own illusion of the singular pattern and left it floating. By midafternoon, Ean was passing through floating patterns just to cross the room.

  When Ean struggled to separate a pattern from those connecting through it—often due to unfamiliarity with the pattern in question, making it difficult to know what threads among that jumbled intersection belonged where—Dareios would work a Telling to see the original pattern again as Ean had first seen it in Sebastian’s mind, and in this way he would help Ean extract it.

  By early evening, they’d isolated the fifth-strand pattern of binding and nearly all of the other patterns in the matrix. Those still missing were the ones Dareios called deadfalls, patterns Dore had placed to prevent anyone from working the fifth to attack or otherwise deconstruct his binding.

  Ean had the most important piece in the fifth-strand pattern that held all the other compulsion patterns in place, but he couldn’t go in and unwork it with those deadfalls still active. They would have to be addressed first. He suspected the deadfalls—like the fifth-strand pattern that had eluded him for so long—were hidden within other patterns.

  As night blanketed the world and Dareios excused himself to visit his wife, Ean sank down on a stool, leaned back against the table’s edge and rested clasped hands atop his head, letting his elbows hang. His eyes ached, and his head felt full of wool. He hadn’t truly slept in days. Ean thought it ironic how some cosmic power seemed to hold him and his brother on the extreme opposite ends of the spectrum: Ean couldn’t sleep, and Sebastian couldn’t wake. />
  Or maybe he didn’t want to.

  Ean stiffened with the thought. He remembered walking the paths of the dead, remembered the hopelessness that had possessed him and the whispering voice that kept him from imagining any other existence. Yet when he’d lain for a week unmoving, walking those paths, the First Lord hadn’t waited for him to find his own way out. He’d gone in and found Ean.

  What if Sebastian walked those endless moors? What if he now traveled with that same melancholy voice murmuring doleful platitudes to degrade his hopes? Ean didn’t know how to find the dead moors, but he’d be damned if he’d sit around and wait for his brother to give up.

  He left the laboratory with purpose lengthening his stride and called the currents to light the way through the palace’s dark corridors. He walked with his hands in his pockets, his head down and his thoughts ranging far. While his mind explored the problem of the deadfalls, his eyes observed how the currents of the fifth pooled and swirled around his legs. Then he suddenly realized what he was seeing.

  And came to a standstill.

  It was a particular aspect of the fifth strand that it magnetized to itself. None of the other strands displayed this attractive property. The fifth collected to Adepts of its aspect, who inherently thought in fifth-strand patterns, and as Ean had so many times observed, the fifth collected around the patterns themselves.

  Gods—how could he have missed this?

  If he called the currents while looking into his brother’s mind—essentially pulling them through his brother’s mind—the currents should collect, even minutely, around the patterns of the fifth binding Sebastian’s consciousness, thus revealing the deadfalls.

  By Cephrael’s Great Book, if he’d only thought of this before, he could’ve saved himself days of searching!