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

by Melissa McPhail

  “You cannot see the pattern as I do.” Björn squeezed her hand in gentle reassurance. “But I’ve shown you where it sits. Look now and see how it will present itself to your view.”

  Her vision shifted—Björn had closed off his mind—and she saw Trell’s pattern again through her own rapport. She looked where Björn had shown her and saw a tiny thread of the lifeforce wiggling out of his now-glowing pattern. The thread was so small, so faint, that it nearly seemed a mirage.

  It reminded her of stories she’d heard of a desert snake that waggled its tail like a worm with the rest of its body buried in the sand, just waiting for a hapless creature to follow its lure and be consumed.

  “You’ll know how to search for such parasites now.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  Björn squeezed her hand and opened his mind to her again. She watched as he seared the offensive pattern from existence.

  Trell sucked in his breath with a gasp.

  Alyneri’s eyes flew open. She held Björn’s hand tightly in her own, unable to breathe, just waiting...

  Trell’s eyes fluttered open, and she saw his gaze slowly find focus…shift…settle on her. “Alyneri…” he managed a smile. Then his lids fluttered closed again, and he slipped into sleep.

  Alyneri burst into tears.

  Björn moved to the edge of Trell’s bed and drew her up into his arms. She sobbed into his shoulder as emotion and exhaustion and relief all flooded out of her.

  When the deluge abated, he brushed the hair from her eyes and the tears from her cheeks. Then he kissed her forehead and encouraged her to her feet. “Go and find sleep. I’ll stay, but we’ve nothing now to fear.” Cobalt blue eyes looked her over. “You saved his life, Alyneri.”

  She pressed both hands to her mouth and stared at him.

  He sat back down in his chair and smiled, his gaze holding a gentle insistence.

  Alyneri complied, yet as she walked in a daze back to her own tent, rest suddenly seemed the last thing on her mind.

  All Björn had done was show her a pattern, yet she felt as if he’d revealed to her an entirely new path branching with countless opportunities to make her life into anything she desired.

  A day ago Alyneri had wondered at the many people who’d sworn themselves to Björn van Gelderan. Now she understood. She’d seen of him even as she’d seen of Phaedor. Björn’s light seared all the shadows from the world to cast everything into stark illumination. There were no shades of grey while standing within that light, only truth. She would follow him anywhere.

  Sixty-Two

  “The light always comes round again, if one can stand the darkness long enough.”

  – A favorite Malchiarri saying

  Day and night blended for Isabel while Pelas exorcized Darshan’s compulsion, but finally a time came when they lay abed with moonlight as a blanket across their naked forms. Isabel lay on her back, Pelas with his head on her stomach. His long raven hair draped across the mattress, blending with hers, dark shadows amid a field of luminous white. Her fingertips traced the line of his temple and smoothed back his hair. His breath came evenly. He seemed at peace for the first time.

  They’d been hours in this stillness, not speaking…perhaps not daring to speak. She sensed him waiting for the horror to return, for that repulsive, irresistible urge to do harm…for the dark desire that had always before overtaken and enslaved him.

  “It’s been three hours.” She felt the roughness of his unshaven jaw scraping her belly as he spoke. The feeling reminded her heartbreakingly of Ean.

  Though Pelas lay calm, serene, nearly whole again, Isabel felt shattered. Hunger was an ache she barely recognized anymore, so faint it felt compared to her guilt. Her raw and damaged skin touching or being touched threaded throughout this constant ache. But these hurts were part of her sacrifice—she would give Pelas what he needed to ensure his freedom, no matter the pain she experienced.

  Her freedom…she wasn’t sure she could ever feel free again with such a cilice of guilt around her soul.

  “It just doesn’t seem possible,” he whispered.

  She lifted her head to give him a smile, then slowly laid it back again. The less she moved, the less she felt fire in her tortured flesh. “Perhaps we should begin keeping count of the hours.”

  His brow furrowed faintly. But seeing him and only him as he looked at her…the moment brought a sense of warmth she couldn’t otherwise feel.

  “I cannot believe I’m free of it.”

  She stroked his hair. “Belief will come in time.”

  Abruptly he pushed to his hands and crawled up the bed to stretch out his body alongside hers. He rested his head on his arm and gazed at her, tracing his thumb idly across her collarbone. “But how will I remain free if I must have you to exorcise this demon?”

  She gave him a look of soft acceptance. “You won’t need me. Even so, I will stay with you if you wish it.”

  He lifted to his elbow. “You would stay with me—here?” He stared at her for a moment, but then a frown overcame his expression. “You cannot mean what you say. You have your own path.”

  “Pelas…” She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, the better to ease the tension binding her. Slowly, to prevent her tortured back from screaming in protest. She looked at him until he met her gaze again. “Your freedom is my path.”

  He heard this, but then he shifted his head slightly, and his eyes tightened. “No…I sense something in this—a truth you’re not saying.”

  She gave a brief smile at his perception—proof again to her that no power had truly been taken from him—but she quickly turned her gaze away, that he wouldn’t see the sorrow in it also.

  “I am two. Even in a sense as you were two, yet mine is and has always been a battle between two selves. What I long for,” she looked bravely back to him, “what the woman Isabel desires, must defer to the path I walk first as Epiphany’s Prophet.”

  His gaze reflected his understanding, and his sympathy. “Then it’s Epiphany’s Prophet I took to my bed, not the woman Isabel.”

  She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and looked desperately away again.

  Pelas smoothed a strand of hair from her face and placed a chaste kiss on her cheek. “Dear, sweet Isabel…what you’ve sacrificed for me.”

  She turned him a fierce look softened with humor and darkened by grief. “I trust you will be worth it.”

  He chuckled. Then he laughed. “I can’t believe it!” He leaned and fastened a kiss of passionate gratitude across her mouth. “How long I’ve lived with that…demon haunting my thoughts! Always fearing the inevitable moment when it would raise its head and consume me. If not for Tanis—” Suddenly he stopped himself, his eyes became round, and he gave her a wondrous look, for now he saw what she had already surmised. “If not for Tanis, Isabel,” he said with deliberate slowness, “I would still be thinking I was that beast.”

  She lifted a hand and touched her fingers lightly to his lips. “Tanis truly saved you.”

  He held her gaze, nodded. Then he laid his head down beside hers again. “How did you know?”

  “How did I know what?”

  His fingers traced the curve of her bare breast. “How to help me?”

  She turned him an amused smile. “It’s just application of the Ninth Law. ‘Do not counter force with force. Channel it.’ Fighting the compulsion merely pits force against force—your will against Darshan’s pattern.”

  He pushed up on his elbow to look at her better. “Explain this to me.”

  “As you learned,” and she managed a smile on his behalf, “the way to escape compulsion is to rechannel its power to a harmonic of the pattern’s original intent. Once you’ve learned to sublimate and channel a compulsion along one harmonic, you’ll find you can channel it along any harmonic, any passion—be that a passion for sex, for exploration, for the creation of your art…” She held his quiet gaze and let her eyes convey more than words could ever express. “Yo
u’ll find infinite harmonics to explore, Pelas.”

  She could tell from his serious expression that he truly understood now, whereas before, perhaps he had not.

  “Darshan will never be able to compel me again—no one will.” His eyes were very wide and impossibly bright. “Isabel…” He planted a sweet kiss upon her mouth. “You really have set me free.”

  She closed her eyes and smiled and tried to keep from crying, for in setting him free, she had surely imprisoned herself. “Perhaps we should thank Cephrael,” she offered quietly.

  Pelas propped his head in his hand again and gave her an amused look. “Hmm…why?”

  She opened one eye and closed it again. “You’re laughing, but Cephrael wrote the Laws of Patterning to help Adepts solve the problems of Patterning. Had you known the Laws yourself, you might’ve found your own way free.”

  This made him quiet for a long time. After a while he murmured, “High Mage of the Citadel indeed,” and fell back onto the mattress to stare at the ceiling. “There is much I still don’t know about your Patterning.”

  “You have lifetimes in which to learn,” she told him softly.

  Her comment brought a sudden darkness to his gaze, which she immediately perceived. Before he could sink beneath those shadows, she forced herself to sit up and moved her body to straddle his hips. He smiled up at her curiously but with a hint of suspicion in his gaze.

  She extended her wrists to him with their cuffs of silver rope. “Remove the goracrosta.” When his expression hardened, she pressed, “Let me help you—I’m the High Mage of the Citadel, if you recall.”

  “I recall.” Still, he watched her carefully, as if suspicious now of some hidden agenda.

  Isabel took one of his hands and then the other and pinned them over his head. She leaned and brushed her lips across his. “Do you trust me, Pelas?”

  He gazed seriously at her. “Trust was difficult even before Darshan took away my power.”

  She pushed slightly away and touched her fingers to his lips. “What does your heart tell you?”

  He searched her eyes with his own. Then he sat up and grabbed her into his arms and they tumbled back into a passionate exploration of his devising.

  The moon was shining on them from the opposite window when Pelas propped his head in his hand and looked at her. He ran his fingers down her face, traced a thumb across her lips…leaned and kissed her.

  “I want to trust you, Isabel.”

  She closed her eyes. Exhaustion, hunger and pain were all intermingled now. It was so hard to stay awake, so hard to stay alert to the shifting paths, but Pelas didn’t know the way. She was his only guide.

  “Trust will be a new experience for you.”

  He chuckled. “You were a new experience for me. I like new experiences.”

  After a moment, she felt him move off the bed and quickly return. When cold steel touched her wrist, her eyes flew open.

  He sliced the goracrosta cuff from one wrist and then the next, and Isabel—she tried not to for his sake, but she couldn’t help sucking in a shuddering breath of relief at the surge of life that elae’s return restored to her. The currents swarmed around her in warm waves, like children greeting a parent too long away.

  As her first action with elae so blessedly restored, she removed the concealment she’d worked to protect her mind from Darshan’s inspection. She felt a nearly immeasurable sense of restoration simply doing this.

  Cloaking herself in the lifeforce’s blessed warmth, Isabel looked back to Pelas. He was regarding her with a deep furrow between his brows.

  But now she saw truly—such power resided in him! Such capacity for greatness, for love, for expression of every harmonic on the scale of existence!

  Isabel sat up—she was careful not to let him see how much moving at all hurt her—and pushed him back on the bed. She straddled his hips and placed her hands to either side of his face. Then she leaned and kissed him deeply and afterwards lingered there, letting their lips almost touch, their breath mingle. “Do you trust me, Pelas?”

  He looked nearly undone when she withdrew to hear his answer. “I trust you, Isabel.”

  She held his gaze, opened a truthreader’s rapport with him, and flowed into his mind. Ah…treading upon the waves of light that filled his mind was like treading upon the sun—so bright, so brilliant.

  Perhaps that boundless sky had once been shadowed by Darshan’s storm, but as with all workings of elae, compulsion was merely a pattern; it collected elae and focused it towards an intention. Pelas had learned how to rechannel the power of that pattern into his own intention, and its darkness would never trouble him again.

  His mind was powerful and free.

  Except… Ah, there it is.

  “What is it? What do you see?” His voice rang with concern, though seeming far away, for she was deep inside his mind now on her own wondrous exploration. That he felt barely a whisper of her presence was less a result of the vicious trick worked upon him than a product of her skill. “Isabel, please…I see it on your face.”

  “Be at peace, Pelasommáyurek,” she whispered, using his full name in recognition of all that he was. “I’m merely sweeping up the brittle leaves of an illusion not long for this world.” In that moment, she sent the smallest spark of the fourth to sear the offensive pattern from his mind.

  He inhaled sharply.

  Isabel opened her eyes, and her lips spread in a slow smile.

  “I—” He gaped at her. Abruptly he sat up and took her hard by the shoulders. Fiery copper eyes searched hers. “How?”

  She took his face in her hands and shook her head slowly from side to side. “You are the progeny of a god. You are immortal. No one can ever take away your power. It is only you who permitted it by allowing them to deceive you…and then by deceiving yourself into believing that your abilities could be lost.”

  He stared at her with a tormented expression, nearly as broken by this understanding as he had been in the belief that he really had lost his power. He looked as if he was about to speak, but instead he threw his arms around her and gripped her into a desperate embrace. That time she couldn’t conceal the pain that flared, and she cried out.

  Pelas released her with immediate dismay. His eyes searched her face, scanned her body, and he seemed only then to remember what his demons had put her through, what she’d endured on the road to his salvation.

  He leapt from the bed and grabbed his pants off the floor. Even as he was bent over putting them on, a silver line split down through the air.

  “Pelas…”

  He turned her a look that silenced her. Then he stepped into Shadow and the portal vanished.

  Isabel inhaled a tremulous breath and buried her head in her hands.

  There was no other way… There was no other way!

  There had been no other way.

  Oh, perhaps if she’d known that all of Darshan’s efforts had been nothing more than smoke and mirrors, an attempt to deceive Pelas so that when he roused from unconsciousness he would believe his powers to be gone—the ruse helped along by lengthy torture capped off by a tawdry illusion… Perhaps if she’d known how easily she could restore his power, she might’ve been able to convince him, to bargain her way free.

  But if she had…

  If all she’d done was restore his power, he would still be the prisoner of that compulsion which had so desolated him.

  The only way to truly free him had been the path they’d walked together, and now he was truly free—more so even than if Darshan’s compulsion had simply been removed, for now that he knew how to channel compulsion, he would never again become a victim of it.

  She knew all of this. Surely his freedom had been worth her sacrifice—had she not posed as much to her brother ever before she chose this path? She should be rejoicing in his freedom, but all she could feel was devastating loss, for with the same act, she’d saved one good man but betrayed another.

  A silver line split the air, and Pe
las returned through the portal carrying an armload of supplies. With a breath of the fifth and a dismissive glance, all the knives flew off the table. He laid his jars and baskets and other things in their place. Then he came across to her with water and linen and a salve for her wounds.

  She looked up to meet his gaze.

  A host of emotions flickered through his fiery copper eyes: gratitude, amazement, admiration…perhaps a hint of fury at how carless she’d been with her life, how she’d nearly let him kill her. Was he comparing her recklessness to that of another who had walked a similarly dangerous path with him? She thought he might’ve been, and the idea brought a soft smile to her lips.

  He arched a brow at her, and she thought she heard his silent inquiry, wry and somewhat amused. What memories are you looking at in my head, Isabel?

  To which she dropped her eyes and replied, Loving ones.

  Then he was guiding her gently over onto her stomach and tending to the wounds he’d inflicted upon her. “Would that I was better trained as a Healer.” His gentle hands smoothed the salve onto her back. “I have but small facility with such patterns, but I’ll do what I can.”

  She felt him concentrating on using the first strand to ease her wounds and smiled in amusement. He would’ve had more success trying to work the first strand innately than by using patterns to do it, but some things he must learn on his own. Still, he managed to draw some of the pain from her skin, even if none from her heart.

  After he’d treated her wounds, he fed her light fare—broth and bread and wine, what small amount she could take—and wrapped her in a soft velvet cloak he’d brought back with him. Then he held her in his arms on the bed, cradled like a child.

  Isabel felt sleep coming and would embrace it when it arrived, for she saw that his path was set now and feared no more for his road. She leaned her head against his chest, let him enfold her with his arms and tried not to think about anything that would make her cry. Her voice sounded slow in her ears as she asked him, “How will you deal with Darshan?”

  Pelas shifted his eyes to the metal poles she’d been tied to, and his gaze darkened. “Those were the poles he bound me to when he punished me. He brought them here for me to use in binding you. That’s Darshan’s idea of irony.” He grunted and arched a rueful brow. “The real irony is that if my brothers hadn’t elected me to be their enemy, I wouldn’t have become one. Now…now there is no going back.”