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

by Melissa McPhail

  Pelas’s soft chuckling roused Tanis from his thoughts. He looked over at him.

  Pelas just kept chuckling.

  Tanis frowned. “What?”

  The Malorin’athgul waved his goblet with airy amusement, his eyes bright. “It’s only that you seem to have a thousand questions in your gaze, little spy—or perhaps only one question that yet seems to weigh upon you as if a thousand—while your tongue speaks not a word.”

  Tanis had forgotten how acutely Pelas could read him, even when their minds weren’t consciously connected. He shoved his hands beneath his legs to keep his twitching apprehension from plaguing them and stared off to sea. “I haven’t asked because…well, because…”

  “You’re afraid of what I might say.”

  Tanis turned him a swift look, redolent of confession.

  Pelas held his gaze. “You want to know if I’ve chosen a path.”

  Tanis nodded.

  “And what if the path I’ve chosen isn’t the one you’re hoping for?”

  The lad turned away with apprehension welling against a wall of protest. He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Every time I think of leaving, I…it’s like there’s an anchor dragging me back again.” Pelas himself had said that he believed their paths had become entwined; Tanis had felt connected to him in some indefinable way ever since the drums of duty had called him to follow the man in Rethynnea.

  Pelas flowed from sitting to standing. He pushed back the long folds of his coat, slipped hands into his pockets, and gazed out to sea. The night quieted beneath his inspection.

  “I think I made my choice the moment you left, Tanis.” He turned the lad a gentle look over his shoulder. “It just took me some time to realize it.” He exhaled a long breath, and a host of unreadable truths passed over his features, momentarily darkening them. “I’ve come to understand that my brothers and I have no path, unless we choose one…but I wonder if you truly know what that means.” He settled his gaze upon Tanis inquiringly.

  Tanis felt suddenly pinned to his chair with his breath caught far beyond his reach. “I’m…not sure, sir.” It took immense courage to ask the obvious next question. “What path did you choose?”

  The hint of a smile flickered across Pelas’s lips. “Yours.”

  A wave of elation propelled Tanis from his chair. He threw his arms around Pelas.

  Smiling, even laughing a little, Pelas returned his embrace. “Ah, my little spy…you have no idea what you’ve done for me.”

  Tanis drew back and pressed palms to his eyes. His heart fell too full, like he’d called too much elae and now couldn’t contain the forces surging through him. “What happened to you, sir?”

  Pelas laughed. “What happened to me?” He flung up a hand and turned the lad a brilliant smile. “You happened!” Then his gaze strayed past Tanis towards the sea, and he dropped his hand and added almost reverently, “Isabel happened.”

  Tanis blinked at him. “Isabel? My…my mother?” He searched Pelas’s eyes with his own. “You knew?”

  “I only recently learned this truth.” He regarded the lad for a time with a considering gaze. Then he nodded towards the cliffs. “Will you walk with me a bit, Tanis?”

  The lad dutifully followed Pelas off the patio onto a path that wove along the shearing cliffs. The recent storm had cleansed the world, and now the crisp air seemed to magnify the starlight, amplifying its intensity. Tanis saw every blade of grass on the high precipice, every luminous wave marbling the sea far below. Even the silver threads in Pelas’s damask coat glowed as if their patterned whorls were formed of starlight captured and bound.

  Or perhaps it was just the joy Tanis felt that made the world appear so bright.

  He wanted to know everything—everything—that had happened while they were apart, and not the least of these how Pelas had learned of his mother. Suddenly all the things he couldn’t ask before demanded voicing all at once. “Was it Darshan, sir? Did he remove his compulsion?”

  Pelas grunted dubiously. Then he cast the boy an enigmatic look that found its resolution in a smile. “I’ve confessions I need to make to you, little spy, but atrocities committed beneath my brother’s compulsion will never again plague my conscience.”

  Tanis hadn’t thought his heart could grow any larger, yet the relief and happiness he felt upon learning this seemed tenfold what he’d experienced even a moment ago. “Then…you’re free of him?”

  Pelas smiled quietly, but his gaze held a fierce intensity. “I’m free in a way you cannot imagine.” He stopped and turned to Tanis. “Free to choose, Tanis—thanks to you.”

  He reached beneath his coat and withdrew Tanis’s dagger. Eyeing it meaningfully, he flipped it and caught it by the point, even as Phaedor had so often done. He put the hilt into the lad’s hand.

  “I’ve forsaken the brothers my Maker gave me.” Pelas kept hold of the blade as he captured Tanis’s gaze. “I would choose my own this time.”

  Tanis stared at him. Pelas’s gaze holding his seemed to say, You spoke it first. Do you recall?

  And Tanis did remember—so vividly—how he’d stood in the courtyard in Rimaldi and told the zanthyr that Pelas was the brother he’d never had. But Pelas had already left by then…hadn’t he?

  Feeling suddenly unbalanced in the most heady of ways, Tanis looked down at the dagger mutually held between their hands. It took on an ominous new meaning. Even so…the lad thought surely he must’ve misunderstood. His gaze conveyed this when he lifted colorless eyes back to meet Pelas’s again.

  “I believe your immunity to deyjiin is inherited through the bond you share with your zanthyr, Tanis.” Pelas held the lad’s widening gaze, pinning him between earth and endless sky. “I would offer you the same protection.”

  Now the lad really stared at him. “Sir…” he barely croaked out the word around his startled awe.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done for me.”

  “But, sir…” Tanis stared vainly down at Phaedor’s dagger in his hand. He couldn’t have released it if he’d tried—he couldn’t have moved from that moment if he’d tried, for a force far greater than himself suddenly bound him to it. It seemed as if all the world hung upon his words, waiting for him to make a choice and set it spinning again. “Whatever I did…” his voice sounded so faint against the vast listening void, “you owe me nothing in return.”

  “Tanis…” Pelas pressed the dagger’s hilt more firmly into his palm and held the lad fixedly beneath his attention, which felt not unlike the baking summer sun beating down on him. “The moment you followed me from the café in Rethynnea, you bound me to your path. I don’t know how,” and the hint of a smile flickered across his lips, “but I know this truth.” His copper eyes dazzled with meaning and challenge both. “Tell me aught else if you can.”

  Tanis slowly, wordlessly, shook his head. He couldn’t deny it, even if it made no sense whatsoever.

  Pelas’s eyes were immensely warm as they gazed upon him. “I’m bound to you already, little spy.”

  Tanis could barely find words to respond. “Sir…” He gripped the dagger in his palm. It suddenly felt a lifeline mooring him, lest the whirlwind of impossibility carry him away. “I was so young, I don’t even remember when Phaedor bound himself to me. He said he did it because he promised my mother he would protect me—”

  “I would make her the same promise.”

  Tanis felt that whirlwind pulling violently at him. He looked off into the night, seeking something to ground him. “But I don’t know the working—”

  “In all your many lessons, your mother—High Mage of the Citadel—never taught you a pattern of binding?”

  Tanis’s eyes flew back to Pelas’s. He swallowed. “She taught me…one.”

  Pelas’s eyes danced as if his point had been proven. He looked to their hands, implying clearly his intent.

  Tanis exhaled a tremulous breath and looked at the dagger they held together. Pelas closed his fist tightly around the enchan
ted blade. Then their eyes met again above the dark weapon.

  Tanis swallowed. He pulled the blade free.

  Pelas gripped his fist harder, and blood pooled between his fingers. He nodded to Tanis to continue.

  Swallowing nervously, Tanis reversed the dagger and closed his fist around the blade’s icy edge, slick now with Pelas’s blood. He lifted his eyes to meet the Malorin’athgul’s gaze again, and Pelas took the hilt and pulled the dagger across Tanis’s palm. Heat flared.

  Pelas dropped the dagger to the grass and gripped Tanis’s hand. His fingers felt icy in the lad’s grasp, cold as the blade that had just sliced his flesh, as deeply cold as the vast reaches of space. But Pelas’s gaze was sunlight itself.

  Tanis summoned his courage. There was no room for error with a binding.

  Pelas opened his mind to the lad. Ever he seemed to predict Tanis’s next thought—or perhaps some natural bond truly did exist between them already, some thread in the tapestry that acted like a chain and made an anchor of each of them for the other.

  For this binding, blood is the catalyst, the first-strand foundation…the warp through which the threads of two are newly woven into one. Tanis remembered his mother’s words as she’d first described the working to him. Blood, representative of the first strand, forms a bond of connection, allowing the one forging the binding to find the life-essence of both who will be bound.

  This essence appears as threads extending from each person’s life-pattern—ephemeral, intangible—yet perceived through the blood-bond. These are the threads to be woven together.

  Gripping Pelas’s hand tightly—more for reassurance than any further need to seal the connection—Tanis closed his eyes and sought the bond as his mother had taught him. He expected it to be difficult to find the threads of which she’d spoken, but the moment he called the fourth to fuel his awareness, he saw them as clearly as silk scarves blowing on a clothesline—or rather, two clotheslines, where the scarves of each were blowing towards the other.

  Tanis took one rose-hued, silken thread from each line and joined them with his intent. They twined into one another as they sealed. He moved on to the next pair.

  As he bound more threads, a pattern began to form; the newly bound threads inclined towards each other, like a snowflake’s crystallization, or the rivulet channels of rain running down a windowpane, each newly formed connection branching and rejoining. He bound the threads, yet the pattern of their binding grew organically.

  Throughout the process, he felt Pelas working the fifth, but because the Malorin’athgul compelled this strand innately, Tanis couldn’t see any patterns to determine what he was doing. As the binding neared completion and the lad’s awareness of Pelas’s mind grew and deepened, Tanis realized with a start that with every thread he was binding, Pelas was likewise weaving in his intention of permanence.

  He was binding them with the fifth.

  When Tanis sealed the last thread, that budding awareness wakened into full bloom. Light blossomed, flowering out from the binding’s core, from a stem woven of threads from them both, cool starlight and warm sunlight intermingled. The kaleidoscopic light only grew in intensity as the pattern of binding continued drawing elae unto itself, until it filled with power and hovered there, secure in its own gravity like a newborn sun.

  As this awareness reached full strength and the connection between their minds solidified into permanence, Tanis felt like the very fabric of his soul was expanding towards infinity, being pulled towards the light that was now an integral part of himself, a circle of perception that extended through Pelas’s own far-reaching awareness and came back to him.

  Floating in this expanse, Tanis imagined he could see infinity at one end of the universe and the core of cosmic creation at the other. If not for Pelas’s hand grounding him, he thought surely he would’ve dissolved away, every particle of his own self stretched and dispersed to be reabsorbed by the greater existence…

  Tanis’s knees went a little weak. Then Pelas’s strong arm was around him and helping him sit down. The moment he felt the earth beneath him, Tanis laid back in the grass. The world spun dizzily.

  Pelas lowered himself slowly beside him. He seemed a star on the currents, so bright it hurt to look at him. Tanis closed his eyes, but the searing light remained.

  “That was miraculously done, little spy.”

  Tanis exhaled a tremulous breath. There was something immensely reassuring about the hard earth pressing against his back. “Somehow I don’t think that was the same working Phaedor used, sir.”

  Pelas chuckled. “And yet, it feels very right to me.”

  Tanis wasn’t sure right was the word he would’ve chosen. Sensory overload seemed more appropriate. Overwhelming, certainly. Incomprehensibly and mind-alteringly description-defying? Closer.

  Then the enormity of what he’d done suddenly doused Tanis back to a chill reality. He let out a low moan of disbelief, pushed both palms to his eyes and tried to keep his head from spinning away.

  What had come over him that he went from one desperately bold act to the next without any thought or consideration as to the consequences of his actions? He had no business being bound to one immortal, much less two. What by Cephrael’s name did he think he was doing?

  Humoring me. Pelas’s thought hinted of deep amusement.

  Tanis turned him a look of pained protest.

  Pelas chuckled and laid back in the grass beside him. He pushed hands behind his head, stretched out long legs and gazed up at the stars. “Through me, you’re bound to the heavens, and through you, I’m bound to the earth. Each of us becomes a child of two worlds, little spy.”

  Tanis tried closing his eyes again, but it only made the world spin more. You were always a child of two worlds, sir.

  Yes… Pelas cast him a look of affection mingled with wry humor, so I’ve come to see.

  Tanis drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing his pounding heart to settle. On the one hand, this connection he sensed so deeply filled him with excitement. On the other—

  By all the gods in the known, he’d bound himself to a Malorin’athgul!

  The realization just kept deluging him, the ramifications branching into more and more frightening directions. And yet…

  For all that the enormity of what he’d so impulsively done was still sinking in—would likely continue sinking in for some time—Tanis felt right in having done it.

  In the space of his awareness where he’d once felt that odd resistance, there now resonated only a sense of correctness, of satisfaction, like a purring cat curled on a sun-warmed cushion; he got the distinct impression that the cat wasn’t really a cat at all but some far greater force, which now abided, momentarily content.

  Indeed, when he looked back on the entire night—from the moment he’d first felt the world’s tablature shifting beneath him—he realized he’d felt guided. Or, if not guided exactly…well, something at least had been shouting at him from the sidelines and pointing in the direction he ought to run.

  Tanis turned to look at Pelas, who was lying beside him with hands braced behind his head and a smile curving his lips. Their minds were connected now in a marvelous and breathtaking and entirely mind-boggling way. He felt immense amazement at it all.

  When he looked back to the sky, the low bank of clouds had moved mostly out of view, revealing Cephrael’s Hand rising out of the west.

  It almost looked like the constellation was winking at him.

  Epilogue

  He woke to see a woman swathed in robes of emerald green bending over him. Her face swam before his vision, but the world beyond her remained too bright for his eyes, which felt dry and rough from sleep. As he lay amid disorientation, she settled dark, almond-shaped eyes on his to ground him and placed her hands to either side of his head.

  “How long…?” His first words emerged in a rough whisper.

  “Over a fortnight since they brought you to me.” Her accent gave a unique sharpness to the
common tongue. “For many days you laid unconscious. Many more I kept you this way, to aid my healing and see it complete.”

  She might’ve smiled as she straightened—it was hard to tell what shape her lips took beneath the strip of silk that concealed her face—but her next words remained with him like seeds sown in his head. “But now the healing is finished.” Odd to hear words so clearly without seeing the mouth that spoke them. “Do you recall your name?”

  He held her dark-eyed gaze. “My name…is Gydryn val Lorian.”

  That time her eyes crinkled with what could only be a smile. “Jai’Gar has given you another chance at life, Your Majesty. Use it well.” Then she pressed her hands together, bowed and departed.

  He laid in bed letting his eyes adjust to the bright day and thought deeply and long upon those words. Having stared into many faces of death on that long night—the last night he remembered—and having been certain as he lay bleeding out on the searing sands that he wouldn’t see another sunrise…to then wake and find himself whole, healed, cared for, treated with gentleness and honor…he did indeed feel as if he’d been gifted of a divine grace.

  He didn’t know what it meant, but he hoped it might herald another chance to right the mistakes of his rule; another chance to spare his army from war and his kingdom from the Duke of Morwyk’s greed; an opportunity to earn back the respect of his men.

  Another chance at life in all its vagaries, complexities, sorrows and joys.

  Once his eyes were working properly, Gydryn lifted the sheet and looked down at his naked body. He knew how close to death’s lands he’d traveled. It must’ve required powerful healing to carry him back. The scars of his ordeal looked weeks old but still told a macabre tale. Likewise the lingering invalid’s weakness that made his arms tremble just holding up the sheet.

  He turned his head and looked out the open balcony doors. A pale city of glittering domes winked back at him.

  That he’d been taken somewhere into the deep desert was evident, but who had claimed him from the sands, healed him, cared for him? And why they’d offered such generosity to an enemy king—these answers evaded his understanding.