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

by Melissa McPhail

  Balaji meanwhile came back in the room, walked over to Fynn and handed him a new goblet.

  Fynn brightened considerably. “Why thank you, Lord of the Sky Who Walks the Sun.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” Jaya protested.

  “Peace, Jaya, he’s tasting.” Balaji watched with a hopeful gaze as Fynn swished the wine around in his mouth, sucked in air with a great slurping noise, and then swallowed and smacked his lips. “Well?”

  “It’s still a little sweet.”

  Balaji looked crestfallen.

  “Maybe you’re not letting it age in the barrel long enough,” Fynn proposed.

  Balaji recoiled in horror. “My wine isn’t aged in a barrel.” He couldn’t have sounded more offended. “It is formed from the air in a complex blending of elements to produce the sublime flavors of cherries and blackberries with a hint of cassis, and a finish with undertones of vanilla.” He waved a hand to emphasize the wide range of elements that combined into the conjuring of his wine.

  Fynn seemed to not know how to advise him at that point. He put his nose back in the goblet and focused on draining it.

  Carian came and plopped down between Alyneri and Jaya, forcing the latter aside. She cast him a glare like a displaced cat.

  Carian looked Alyneri over as he made himself comfortable. “So, Your Grace, Fynn tells me you and our Trell of the Tides are betrothed. That makes a couple of princes on your dance card now, eh?”

  Alyneri opened her mouth and clapped it shut again. She turned Fynn an affronted look instead.

  “It’s not like that, Carian.” Fynn held up his goblet as he explained, “I don’t think her Grace was ever actually betrothed to Ean.”

  Alyneri’s eyes widened. “That’s hardly the point, Fynn!”

  “Two princes is nothing to be ashamed of, Your Grace,” Carian consoled. “Though, to be fair, it ain’t much to write home about either. Now if that dance card of yours had a pirate’s name on it…”

  Mithaiya hissed at him.

  Carian shrugged his eyebrows saucily at her.

  She gave him a daggered glare and swept from the room.

  Carian leaned back and draped his arms along the sofa, extended long legs and crossed his booted ankles with a flourish. “Oh ho, she’s got it in for me now.” He chuckled to himself. “I love it when she’s spittin’ mad. You won’t believe the things she can do with her—”

  “Do get on with whatever it is you came here for, Carian vran Lea,” Jaya remarked with a pointed stare.

  “I’m just waiting for Fynn, your lizardness.”

  Fynn exhaled a tormented sigh and stared into his now empty goblet. “I can’t believe you talked me into this. I was happy here in my insobriety. Now I’ll have to actually…you know…do something with my life.”

  “Only for a few hours. Look, Fynnlar, we need Cassius. He has contacts all around the realm and controls some ridiculous number of nodes—the man is critical to our rebellion. And you’re about the only person in Alorin he’ll talk to. Didn’t you say you knew how to play to his indiscretions?”

  “Insecurities,” Fynn grumbled. “I said I can play to his insecurities.”

  “Same difference.” Carian sprang off the seat. “So come along then, mate. It’s a fine night to travel the Pattern of the World.”

  Fynn pushed out of his seat with a sigh. He cast Balaji a pleading look.

  Balaji said nothing, but a dark wine swirled up into Fynn’s cup.

  Fynn gave him a rapturous look. “You’re a prince, my fine sir. I don’t care what they say about you.” He saluted the drachwyr with his goblet and followed Carian from the room.

  Alyneri watched him go, feeling as if her world had been turned inside out. Her head was spinning, her heart felt cleaved, and apprehension and fear churned a toxic mixture in her stomach.

  Balaji came over and offered her his hand. “Come…walk with me, Alyneri. We will keep this vigil together.”

  Looking up into his eyes, Alyneri felt suddenly as if she looked not into a man’s wheat-colored gaze but instead along the rim of the horizon, far beyond the curvature of the world…even into the distant heavens themselves. In Balaji’s gaze, the entire realm lay open to her inspection.

  She got the impression that Balaji would know what was happening on the distant shores of Darroyhan long before Náiir and Vaile returned.

  Swallowing, she took the drachwyr’s offered hand and went with him into the night.

  Fifty-Seven

  “Great minds are apt to work from hints and suggestions. A spark of inspiration is often sufficient to inspire bold new thought.”

  – The Adept wielder Arion Tavestra

  Tanis and Felix emerged onto the top level of the amphitheater just as one of the Quai teams scored a point and the left half of the oval stadium erupted into raucous cheering. Hundreds of rows below, on the ‘field’ of black and white marble tiles, the two teams broke formation to confer with their mates. All five Adepts of each team stood easily on a single massive tile.

  The crowd maintained a fever-pitched hum that made just the thought of conversation daunting. Thousands of fans crammed the theater, eking out every available space from row, staircase, tunnel or platform. Tanis had never seen so many people gathered in one place—and simply to watch a ball game?

  Admittedly, he had only a rudimentary understanding of Quai: each team of five Nodefinders hurled a melon-sized silver ball at the other team’s players. If an opposing player was hit, the offensive team scored a point.

  Where the game derived its challenge was in what happened when the ball missed its target. Depending on whether it landed on the opposing or defensive team’s square, who caught it or touched it before it hit the tile, and what they then did with it, any manner of points could be lost or gained.

  Actually falling off or knocking a player off their tile scored a weighted point and incurred a heavy penalty for the losing side. Likewise ending up with two players somehow occupying the same tile—which happened more regularly than one might think, considering that the players flashed randomly about the board like fireflies.

  In these confluences and divergences governed by endless rules, Tanis quickly sank over his head into a Quai quagmire. He marveled the game needed so many rules when just hitting a player seemed challenging enough. Every player could appear and vanish at random—providing they stayed on their own colored tiles and off the tiles occupied by their teammates—but this often meant somehow catching the ball before it touched down if your team threw it and missed. Regularly a player would catch the ball thrown at him, immediately vanish, and reappear on another tile to pitch it at the other team.

  Becoming skilled at Quai required insane talent as a Nodefinder, a head for strategy and tactics, and not inconsiderable athleticism.

  “Sancto Spirito, what a crowd!” Felix made a face as he peered around. He took Tanis by the sleeve and tugged him along the broadly curving rim of the stadium. They wove among the standing observers until they found a clear view. Five tiers, each encompassing fifty rows, spanned the distance between themselves and the field.

  “Must be so crowded because the Danes are playing. All the bloody Danes come out of their holes to watch their own team play.” Felix shot Tanis a grin. “And everyone else comes hoping to see them beaten—by the Lady, half of Faroqhar must be here tonight. When the Danes played the Caladrian team, they slunk off at the end like shamed dogs. Now that was satisfying.”

  Barely listening, Tanis scanned the crowd for Nadia and Shail, already feeling overmatched. The fans standing closest to the field looked barely larger than ants.

  Nadia… Tanis let his mind travel the bond, trusting the path to take him to his intended end. We’re here. Where are you?

  A moment’s pause, and then he felt her connection at the other end of the bond.

  Tanis! Relief threaded through her mental tone, twining among a wider band of apprehension. He sensed her distantly. I’m down in the first cir
cle in the eastern quarter.

  Tanis snared Felix’s sleeve and tugged him towards the closest staircase. We’re coming.

  Tanis… He felt uncertainty and a budding fear tingeing her end of the bond. I was so worried for you. N’abranaacht was exactly as you said. He—oh, by the Blessed Lady! He’s here! He’s—

  And then the feel of her mind vanished. Tanis came to a sudden halt and clutched Felix’s arm.

  Nadia? Nadia!

  ***

  Nadia swallowed as the Literato N’abranaacht emerged from the crowd on an unerring course in her direction. Though he wore his white hood now, she couldn’t mistake the set of his shoulders or the way his dark eyes speared the distance to fasten upon her. Even had she not recognized him from these attributes, she would’ve known him from the Merdanti blade strapped to his back.

  Curving stone benches lined the row where Nadia stood, but the crowd was so thick that three people stood in every space intended for one. Somehow they all parted to let the literato pass, even when no room existed in which to move out of his way.

  Nadia closed her mind immediately when she saw the literato approaching through the crowd, but this necessarily also shut Tanis from her thoughts. She’d never felt so trapped by uncertainty as she did in that moment, watching the terrifying man coming towards her. How had he found her at all?

  “Why…Phoebe della Buonara.” The literato’s eyes were smiling as he reached her side. He clasped hands before his silk robes and gave a polite nod. “Providence shines upon us that we meet again so soon.”

  Nadia pushed up her glasses and turned an uncertain look towards the field. “I would that it might, Literato. Alas, my team is losing.”

  His eyes smiled at her, but his thoughts did not. “I think their luck is soon to change.”

  She sensed a deeper, darker truth beneath this statement, though the Rimaldi team did just then score a major point. The students near Nadia hooted and yelled and jumped up and down, and in the commotion, one of them knocked into Nadia, who in turn—and to her utter consternation—stumbled against the literato.

  He caught her by the shoulders while she muttered a hasty apology.

  “No harm done, my dear.” His eyes smiled at her, but the mildness of his tone seemed quite at odds with the hostile emotions radiating from him. Worse, he kept one hand resting on her shoulder.

  Nadia made to back away, and the hand became a claw firmly rooting her in place.

  Dark eyes bored into hers then, yet his voice sounded soft and melodious as he inquired, “Now, Phoebe, where are your cousin Felix and his friend Tanis? Have you seen them since last we parted?”

  She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. The hand at her shoulder felt a vice anchoring her to the stone pavers.

  “You planned to meet up with them?”

  Her head nodded of its own accord.

  “Here?”

  Again, her head betrayed her by saying yes when she’d wanted to say no.

  She couldn’t understand how he was compelling answers from her when she felt no compulsion—exactly as Tanis had warned her!

  “And are they here now?” His dark eyes scanned the crowd while her tongue treasonously answered, “Yes, Literato,” quite against her will.

  The chill seeping from his hand into her flesh was making her tremble, or perhaps it was just dread that had turned her bones to ice. Horrifying fears swarmed her—the danger of his learning her identity, how horribly she’d betrayed her mother’s trust, how no one even knew she was gone from the palace—a litany of deadly, foolish mistakes…

  And on top of the consuming guilt of what now seemed enormously foolhardy decisions, she feared that Tanis would be walking right into the literato’s hands!

  Desperation gripped Nadia. While the literato’s gaze searched the crowd, she opened her mind for a split-second to warn Tanis.

  And the unthinkable happened.

  Just as she felt his mind at the other end of their bond, another voice imposed into the silence, Hello, Tanis.

  ***

  Relief flooded Tanis when he felt Nadia’s mind open to him again, but then—

  Hello, Tanis.

  The lad’s heart very nearly stopped. Pain in the form of Shail’s anger flared through his head, so intense it felt the sun was exploding in his brain. Tanis stumbled and fell, hardly aware of the onlookers he dislodged in the process. Hands that must’ve belonged to Felix reached for him, but Tanis knew only blinding white light in a continuous explosion that seared away all capacity for thought.

  Soon you will truly learn the consequence of defying me. Shail’s voice lanced through the blinding pain, lightning bolts of agony further accentuating his displeasure. In the next moment, the man dove fully into Tanis’s mind.

  The feel of Shail inside his head was like a deluge of icy ocean pouring down upon his molten core—but the waters offered no relief, merely intensified his pain into a boiling torment. And the horror of it!

  Shail scoured Tanis’s mind like a river in flood, pouring into every chamber, filling it, absorbing its contents, and swirling on. Tanis had no command over his own thoughts, no way of even finding the door he’d once closed against the Endoge. The dark water swept his awareness on its tide that he might helplessly witness his own obliteration.

  At last the water swirled into what Tanis felt must be the deepest parts of his mind, and there it banked against a solid wall, obsidian dark. This wasn’t a wall of Tanis’s devising, though he recognized someone had constructed it. As he felt the flood of Shail’s mind rising against this wall, unable to penetrate it, Tanis made several important connections.

  First, he realized that if Shail had been searching for the secrets of his identity instead of merely seeking to know his connection to Pelas, the Malorin’athgul would’ve found the truth, to deadly consequence. The same instinct warned Tanis that his parents were people whose very names held power, and that he must grant those names the same loyalty and protection he would grant to the people who owned them.

  The second thing Tanis realized—a small but wondrous grace—was that Shail sought no further knowledge of Nadia. His dark waters merely washed disinterestedly by the truths of her identity, for his torrent had but one objective: to discern what his brother Pelas understood of his plans.

  At last Shail’s ocean drained away from Tanis’s obsidian wall, but the man did not depart with his tide.

  Phoebe belongs to me now, foolish boy. Shail’s voice thundered so violently through his mind that Tanis’s teeth chattered. He clenched them tightly and sucked quick, desperate breaths through them. Go now and tell my brother that I will soon teach you both the price of interference.

  This last warning flared like sheet lightning through Tanis’s mind. Then the overwhelming presence that was Shail vanished.

  When the pain subsided and the spots cleared before Tanis’s vision, he found himself on his hands and knees sucking in air in desperate, rasping gasps. A crowd had formed around him.

  He blinked to focus on Felix’s worried face. Seeing Tanis aware, Felix helped him sit back on his heels. Tanis pressed hands against his knees, feeling like he’d just been pulled from the icy sea. “I’m all right.” He barely managed a hoarse whisper, still trying to scrape some breath out of the muck of his deluged composure. He looked to the many faces crowding around him and held up a trembling hand. “I’m okay.”

  “He’s fine, he said.” Felix glared at the onlookers. “Mind your business then!” Felix helped Tanis up and guided him away from those who’d seen him fall. Elbowing a space for the two of them to stand in, he took Tanis by the shoulders and searched his gaze for some explanation. “Tanis…what by the Sanctos—?”

  “He’s got Nadia.” Tanis felt sick just saying the words. “It’s going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon. We don’t have much time.” Weak-hearted, Tanis turned away to find the stairs again.

  “Wait—what’s going to happen?” Felix sounded exasperated. H
e rushed to catch up.

  They were pushing their way through the fans clogging the stairs when it began.

  At first no one realized anything was happening. The game continued; players vanished and reappeared on their tiles while the silver ball danced around the field, pitched or caught or deflected by expert hands.

  Until a player on the Dane’s team vanished and didn’t reappear. The game continued its fever-pitched pace for a few seconds more, and then one of the Rimaldi players vanished as well.

  Seconds passed, and neither of the Adepts reappeared. The players slowly stilled on their tiles and looked around at one another.

  Then they began disappearing, too.

  The crowd inhaled a collective gasp. When the last Rimaldi player vanished with a cry of alarm, the rising dismay in the audience exploded into outrage. Accusations flung like Quai balls from one side of the amphitheater to the other. People began shoving and shouting as the fans on both sides blamed the opposing team.

  Someone knocked Felix into Tanis, who in turn grabbed his friend’s arm to keep them both on their feet. “He must’ve done something to the node!” Felix shouted into Tanis’s ear.

  “How?” Tanis shouted back.

  “The whole Quai court is mapped into a node lying on the level just below it. It’s how the court works, because the leis are all tied together on top of the node. N’abranaacht must’ve found a way to untwist that node—”

  “Go see!” Tanis urged him off.

  Just as Felix rushed away, a man appeared on the Quai court, casting a new ripple of astonishment through the audience. Tall and broad-chested, with blonde hair hanging to his shoulders, he wore leather over mail and brandished a broadsword as his only sigil.

  Tanis heard loud thoughts rising on a tide of indignation. Some assumed it must be some kind of dramatic performance; many thought it a poorly conceived joke on the part of the Danes. Abruptly two dozen more armed men popped onto the field. They exchanged a look. Then they rushed into the crowd.