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

by Melissa McPhail

  She understood better the formless darkness that she’d seen shrouding her path, understood why she hadn’t been able to see beyond it at the time…and why the world now remained a colorless twilight.

  She and Pelas both had passed through Darshan’s shadow, and now they were trapped together in a gloaming of his creation, trapped in some sense in Darshan’s world—Darshan’s rules—where all was a glamour.

  Only the pain would be real.

  Isabel forced a swallow. Though she could guess, she wanted to hear it from him. “What does…the compulsion require of you, Pelas?”

  He stopped with his back to her. For a long time, all she saw was the rise and fall of his breath. Then he turned and crossed the room to a table with a linen drape across it. He tossed one corner of the cloth roughly aside to reveal a panoply of knives, and swapped his dagger for a thin silver stylus. Turning, he held it up for her viewing pleasure. “Let me show you, Isabel.”

  Her heart was racing when he halted before her and presented the stylus across his open palms. One end was needle-sharp, the other flattened to a razor edge—an artist’s brush forged in steel.

  His copper eyes looked her over, traced the lines and curves of her body. She thought she perceived a flicker of the man he had once been as he admired her form—a man he must still be somewhere, beneath the compulsion, confusion and loss.

  He ran the back of his fingers across her collarbone, along her shoulder and down the inside of her upper arm, which lay open and bare to his inspection. “So lovely…too lovely to harm as I have harmed others.”

  The dark hunger in his gaze truly frightened her. She couldn’t close her eyes to shut it out, for they were closed already—this was elae showing her what was, revealing only truth where human eyes had lied before. Pelas should’ve glowed standing before her, a sun too bright to look upon—even as his brother had appeared to her in Ivarnen’s corridor…even with goracrosta diluting her elae-fuelled sight. Instead, Pelas was bound in twilight.

  Somehow…somehow she had to free him from this shadow.

  He dropped his arm to his side and his chin to his chest. “I tried, Isabel…” His voice came a bare whisper. “All day I’ve had you here…I’ve tried to disobey…out of fury and defiance…spite…but in the end…” He lifted his gaze. “In the end, we find ourselves inevitably back at our mutual beginning—subjects of Darshan’s will.” These last words sliced the air with animosity and hopelessness.

  “You don’t have to do this.” Isabel barely found the breath to form words. “You have a choice.”

  “No.” He shifted his gaze away and clenched his jaw. “My only hope is to do what my brother tasks me with. If I…please him enough, he may give me back my own will.”

  It nearly made her weep to hear him say such words. “You cannot believe he will ever do that.”

  His brow twisted. She saw a spark of fury flare in his gaze and quickly die, replaced by smoldering despair. “I fear you’re right.” The smile he lifted to her then was as bleak as the mountains beyond their tower. “But that just leaves us…here.”

  Suddenly that dark persona appeared again—sardonic, caustic…coldly indifferent. “And where is here?” He narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips and spun the stylus through his fingers. “Oh, yes.” The stylus flipped forward into an artist’s practiced hold, and he set the needle point against the skin of her left shoulder.

  His eyes flicked back to her, darkly inquiring, and he pierced the tip into her flesh. She inhaled sharply. “What shall we draw today, Isabel?” He drew the tiny razor end through her skin—not deep, no, but deep enough to trace a line of blood. Deep enough to leave a scar…that is, if she lived long enough to heal from this. If she could heal from this.

  “A pattern—” she gasped. Then she caught her bottom lip between her teeth to keep from crying out.

  He smiled into her hidden gaze. “A pattern. I hadn’t thought of that.” He drew a circle with the stylus and withdrew it from her flesh, leaving a streak that ended in a curlicue of blood. She inhaled a shuddering breath.

  “You needn’t be brave on my account.” He looked her over while his fingers spun the stylus again. “A woman’s screaming has never bothered me. Odd, I suppose. I doubt Darshan put that into his compulsion.” His gaze narrowed. “But what pattern should we start with, you and I?”

  Her heart was racing and she felt faint. She was finding it difficult to stay focused. “Something…”

  He eyed her with dark curiosity. “Yes?”

  “Something of the light.”

  This made him frown. But then he nodded. “Perhaps you should design it with me.” Abruptly he spread his arms, backed away and barked a bitter laugh. “We’re trapped in this hell together, after all, aren’t we? At least…” his eyes looked her over again as his expression fell. “That is, for as long as you can last.”

  “Pelas, please.” She begged him with mind and tone and voice, but while the goracrosta couldn’t keep elae from washing through her, it could and did prevent her from framing it to her intention. “Please—don’t do this to yourself.”

  He drew back, blinking. “What?”

  She tried desperately to find the right words to get through to him, to reach the being beneath the dark creature of Darshan’s invention. “You’re letting him win.”

  He stared at her for a long time, his face twisted with pain. The he laid his hands upon her bare shoulders and pressed his forehead against her own. “Isabel, can you not see?” He brushed his nose along hers, his breath cool across her mouth. “He already has.”

  ***

  Isabel roused from darkness into pain. She lifted her head and let the twilight seep back in. Her body felt cold except for her left shoulder and upper arm, where he’d—

  She’d lost consciousness during the middle of his drawing. She looked now to the flesh of her shoulder. He’d blotted it, cleansed it of blood. The skin was red and slightly swollen around the swirling cuts, but the pattern…

  Even in that twilight world, it glowed.

  She’d never seen its like. She didn’t know if it was a real pattern with purpose or merely something of his artistic invention, but it collected elae to it like a star.

  Even in the darkness, he finds light.

  She knew why her path had brought her there now, but she didn’t know how to move forward upon it.

  Isabel looked around the room and found him standing at a distant window looking out. “Is there anything to drink?” Her voice was threadbare. She needed water if nothing else.

  He turned from the window, and his brow furrowed. After a moment’s thought, he grabbed a cup from the mantle, threw open a near window and scraped snow from the eaves into it. Icy air accosted her, rousing gooseflesh from neck to knees. Soon he had the window closed and set the cup by the fire to melt.

  “I should’ve thought of that before. You’ll last longer with water, and…” he shrugged, “well, you’re all the company I’m likely to have for a very long time.”

  He pushed his dark hair off his shoulders and came to look over his handiwork with a discerning gaze.

  She watched him inspecting her arm. “What does it do, your pattern?”

  He pursed his lips. “I’m not certain. It just came to me.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  He lifted his gaze to her. Then he smiled sadly and stroked her cheek with a gentle hand. “Something must be left of me somewhere.” The look in his eyes made a tortured confession of these words. “I couldn’t bear to diminish the beauty in you.”

  He turned away from her then, and she sensed a deep anguish burning in him.

  “I suppose…” She had to fight to keep her thoughts clear, for her head felt full of wool. “I suppose you’ve thought of trying to escape?”

  He grunted derisively and flung one arm towards the window across from her. “Four hundred feet on that side.” He opened his other arm to the opposite window. “A thousand feet over there.” Then he threw up
his hands in a gesture of hopelessness and gave her a pointed look. “So unless you can fly.”

  She smiled. “Perhaps if you released me.”

  He cast his head in a chastising tilt. “But if I did that, sweet Isabel, what hope could I possibly have of pleasing my brother?”

  She wetted her lips with a tongue too dry. “Perhaps my brother—”

  He shook his head. “You and I both know it’s too late for that. I should’ve listened to your warning.” He threw himself into a low-slung chair by the fire and pushed out his legs. “I don’t suppose it would make you feel better to tell me I told you so.”

  Isabel gazed sadly at him. “I would rather see you restored than humbled.”

  He grunted. “Would that Darshan shared your view.”

  “Pelas…” Her brow furrowed. “Would you really stay here a hundred years waiting for his forgiveness, even knowing as you must in your heart that it will never come?”

  “And a hundred more, Isabel. What else is there for me to do?”

  “You could…” Again she found herself searching for words to try to reach him, some spark to break through the melancholy, some hope to pierce the darkness. “You wouldn’t consider living life…without your power?”

  He lifted his eyes and held her blindfolded gaze. “Would you?” When she said nothing to this, for in truth she didn’t know how to answer, he shrugged and murmured somewhat desperately, “It’s all I know.”

  As Isabel gazed at him, she better understood his twilight horror. Pelas was an immortal being. What could he ever have known of loss? Perhaps he’d experienced it glibly on a small scale…observed it in the vain struggles of mortal men, but such trials had never applied to him—how could they? Pelas was a being who could never die. What was a hundred years in the grand scheme of his eternity? What was the loss of a single lover, or a building where he laid his head at night, or even a kingdom he’d once been fond of? Empires rose and fell while such beings deliberated on their next idle pursuit.

  But now Darshan had given Pelas a taste of mortality. He couldn’t throw himself from the tower, for he had no power to stop his fall. He couldn’t call a portal of escape, for deyjiin was beyond his reach—and thus he felt that all of life was beyond his reach, now, without his power.

  That was real loss—experienced perhaps for the first time in the countless millennia of his existence—and he had no idea how to emotionally or rationally come to terms with such a thing.

  Pelas picked up her cup of snow, melted now, and brought it over to her. With the utmost care, he helped her drink. It cooled her parched throat but brought an empty ache to her stomach. He rested his cheek upon her shoulder while he held the cup to her mouth and watched her drink. His long hair felt silken against her skin. “When this is gone, we should continue.”

  She pressed her lips against the cup for a moment and then turned to look at him where he rested his head on her shoulder. “What’s the hurry?”

  Abruptly he thrust himself away and turned his back on her. “I hunger, Isabel!” He turned her a look of fury and flame. “It burns! Don’t you understand?” He waved ambiguously at himself while he glared at her with abject anger pouring off of him in waves. The currents pounded her, pinned her beneath the pummeling surf of his wrath. But it wasn’t his ire that stunned her in that moment so much as the sudden shocking certainty that his power remained, only…somehow he couldn’t access it—clearly, he couldn’t even sense it.

  Her mouth fell open with this crashing realization.

  “By Chaos born—” He stalked back to her, grabbed her around the waist, and dragged her body tight against his, straining at her bonds. She inhaled sharply. “I can’t control it, Isabel.” He buried his nose in her hair. “I’m sorry.” Then he thrust her away and walked to retrieve his stylus.

  Isabel tried to gather herself, to order her thoughts through the fear that clung to her. In the moment when he’d grabbed her, the spark of an idea had formed.

  Pelas came towards her with darkness veiled across his gaze again and the steel brush of his stylus at the ready.

  “What does it demand of you…the compulsion?” She turned her head to look at him as he came up behind her. It took the entire force of her considerable will not to tremble, not to scream.

  He swept her long hair aside and set the needle against her right shoulder. His gaze narrowed with careful inspection as he pushed the needle tip slowly into her flesh and drew it downward.

  Isabel sucked in her breath and clenched her teeth.

  “It’s difficult to say.”

  She turned away from him and tried to breathe through the pain.

  “I thought for a long time it had something to do with a Healer’s blood. Darshan bade me seek the Pattern of the World. We know it’s mirrored within the first strand…” He finished off a curl, plucked the stylus out of her flesh and started another. Pain flared in fire and slicing heat.

  Isabel gritted her teeth. She poured all of her intention into forming words. “It’s true…a Healer carries elements of this pattern…but so does every Adept. Including yourself.”

  She glanced over her shoulder in time to catch a rueful arch of his brow. Isabel sucked in another shuddering breath. “But the pattern is too vast to be contained in a single Adept…or their blood.”

  He grunted.

  “Even if you had it—” the words came out somewhat desperately, forced over pain, “the world cannot be unworked from within the realm itself.”

  Abruptly Pelas withdrew the stylus. He walked around and stood in front of her. “What do you mean?”

  For a moment, she thought she’d reached him, but then she saw she’d merely intrigued that dark specter who had usurped Pelas’s form.

  “The realm cannot be unmade from within. It can only be unmade from the plane of Chaos.”

  Pelas frowned at her and spun his stylus absently through his fingers. “Darshan says that something stands between the realm and Chaos or Rinokh would already have reached us again…that is, since your Ean val Lorian unworked the shell my brother claimed on this plane.” She couldn’t tell if it was dark humor or wrath smoldering in his gaze.

  “Yes.” She sucked in a shuddering breath, for her shoulder burned badly enough now to bring tears to her eyes. “Another realm stands between Alorin and Chaos…made to be a buffer, a shield.” She roused from the stupor of pain with effort. “My brother and his Council of Nine made it for this very purpose.”

  He regarded her strangely. “And invited us in—why…to level the playing field?”

  “You were already here by that time, but yes, having you here requires you to play on the same terms as the rest of us—or as close as we can hope for.”

  He barked an incredulous laugh. It was almost his own. His gaze when he looked back to her was still shadowed, but it also held admiration. “I had no idea anyone knew so much about us.”

  Isabel doubted he would believe her if she tried to convince him that he still held his power, but perhaps she could give him some hope. “Pelas, we can help you.”

  His gaze darkened, but she couldn’t tell what shadow overcame it. When he looked back to her, it was to level upon her a merciless stare. “Why would you?” He walked back around behind her and resumed his work.

  Isabel bit back a sob as the stylus bit into her flesh. That time she couldn’t stop the tears from falling.

  Fifty-Six

  “Thou art the avenger of the gods, judge and adjutant, guardian of the gate. Thou art the Great Cat.”

  – Inscription on the Royal Tombs of the Kings of Cyrene,

  circa 992aF

  Vaile stood behind Alyneri with her arms encircling her, her hands atop Alyneri’s hands as she held Vaile’s two Merdanti swords nearly touching, the blades extended straight. Alyneri and Vaile worked that day in a high meadow overlooking the sa’reyth, with a wide view of the green valley and the mountains beyond.

  “When you separate the blades from this position,” V
aile murmured at Alyneri’s ear in her feminine purr-growl, “the right blade must turn flat as it lifts to the right, while the left blade stays vertical as it sweeps down to the left.” She moved her arms to pull the blades as she spoke, drawing Alyneri’s arms with her. “This motion twists the thread of the cortata’s pattern properly. Without the twist, the pattern is incomplete. You will lose some of its strength.”

  Vaile released her and stepped back. Alyneri glanced inquiringly over her shoulder, and Vaile nodded and motioned her to work through the form again.

  Alyneri did as instructed, bringing the blades back together in front of her and then separating her arms in a diagonal with one moving high while the other split low. She made sure to twist the right-hand blade flat as she lifted it.

  “Very good. Now from the beginning.”

  Alyneri moved back to the center of the meadow, brought up her blades—Vaile’s blades—crossed before her chest, and gave her teacher the formal bow of respect. Then she sliced her swords apart with a scrape of Merdanti steel and stepped into the cortata.

  She knew this dance well now. Well enough to fall in and out of it without losing the overall thread.

  “One sword,” Vaile ordered.

  Alyneri slung the left-handed blade into the scabbard on her back. Both hands met on the hilt of her remaining sword, and she turned, spun the blade over her head and slashed down; rose and spun, slashed again, and rose with the blade up in front of her.

  “Two blades.”

  Alyneri reached for the left-hand blade behind her back. She brought both swords together and swept dual blades, united in their path, in an arc over her head. She split them apart as she turned and spun, arms extended, a spiraling top with daggered edges.

  “One.”

  She sheathed the left-handed blade with a sweep of her arm and caught her remaining blade with both hands as she lunged with it, made a low sweep of her opposite leg to spin around. She launched back to standing with a circular twirl of the weapon.

  So continued that day’s practice.

  As the sun fell into afternoon, they sparred. Vaile finally called for a break when all that was left of the sunlight was its golden kiss atop the trees. The zanthyr chose a spot on the hillside to sit, pulled out a bag of wine and offered it to Alyneri while she unwrapped a bundle containing nutcakes and hard cheese and apples so crisp and sweet that Alyneri suspected Balaji must’ve conjured them.