Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  Dakar surfaced, weeping. ‘I can’t do this,’ he whispered. ‘It’s a straight violation.’ The desecration of such primordial beauty surely touched on the realm of the sacred.

  ‘You have to.’ Sidir’s urgent push shoved him onwards, while the tracker who knelt at the verge of the Willowbrook surveyed a tussock of moss.

  Relentless, he pointed. ‘This way. We’re close. They can’t have gone very much farther. There’s a falls and a stretch of white water, ahead.’

  Yet the gifts of the prophet, fired by tienelle, could sense the deep draw of the lane flux. The glen where the consummate act was unfolding lay well beyond those thrashed rapids. A guarded spirit who treasured his privacy, Arithon had challenged the reach of his talent to provide a setting of pristine peace.

  ‘Ath, please! I can’t do this,’ the spellbinder begged, while Sidir crouched over him, adamant. The loyal Companion dared not bend for mercy. The clay-pipe was relit, then the stem forced between the spellbinder’s chattering teeth.

  The smoke was inducted, its bitter astringency stripping the spirit out of the flesh…

  Savoured like wine in her lover’s embrace, Elaira encountered each layer of Arithon’s mage-taught defences. The stilled points of power that shielded his core were unmasked by her touch, then surrendered, the keys to their opening set into her hands.

  ‘Yours,’ he affirmed.

  Her fingers explored and trailed down his breast. Where she stroked, those seamless protections gave way. Opened, the vulnerable heart-line was freed to stream into partnered connection.

  Her being responded. Fine energies interlaced between them. Ancient in renewal as the dance between sun and tide, the rarified flux of the ley burst and burned, then blazed in meteoric splendour about them.

  The shower of ecstasy shuddered through flesh: in caught breath, in raced pulse, and in spurts of electrical tingles that ravished the nerves like a tonic.

  Elaira clung to her beloved’s sure strength. ‘Earth and sky, Arithon! Where are you taking me?’

  His kiss brushed her ear. While his reverent clasp cradled her, he let her down onto the shift, left tumbled amid dew-drenched grasses. ‘Athlieria, beloved,’ her Teir’s’Ffalenn answered. ‘We’ll sail through the realms of pure light, past the veil. Where else would such grandeur be fitting?’

  ‘You need no such setting,’ Elaira replied. ‘The oaks and the air by themselves frame your rightness. Your being requires no adornment.’

  ‘By myself, I am not enough.’ His inner longing verged upon desolate, as starving, he settled, and tenderly drew her against him…

  Ripped blind and deaf, Dakar cried out. He felt shaken and shattered in pieces. Sidir’s rough fists grasped him. The hold pinched his shoulders and harried his flesh, while he raked back his scattered awareness.

  ‘Which way?’ the Companion exhorted the scout. The white hair at his temples gleamed like thrown salt in the green-scented muddle of darkness. Dakar peered, but lost view of the man’s looming face. He spun, slipped his grounding, then dissolved as pure sound, back into the coiling vortex…

  She lay, tucked in sublime contact against his scorching flesh, while desire built like a storm front within her. Touch answered, a courtship that advanced and retreated, a fractional step shy of requital. His hair brushed her cheek. The loose ends drank the tears of unalloyed pleasure that welled through her gently closed lashes. As her form took fire, then blazed to match the explosive need channelled through him, he called to her spirit. His phrases in lyric Paravian chiselled their empathy into exquisite refinement. Led past inexperience, Elaira traced his taut flesh. Another access point snapped like silk thread. Resistance dissolved and poured forth his light. His bright, silver ribbons of essence met hers, weaving the warp and the weft. The tension unleashed by their building union meshed into the subtle lattice interlaced through the soil beneath them.

  Twined energies sang and locked into connection. A harmonic resonance forged out of love, the match of crown prince to paired mate was acknowledged amid the grand tapestry as their living geometry conjoined with the flux. The land’s mysteries welcomed their wholeness and set seal to their cadenced courtship.

  Wild light soared into expansion as their fervour awakened the upper registers that extended beyond the senses. The pattern spilled outwards, each unfurling ray netted into a spiral by Arithon’s worked protection. The surge also pierced downwards, ranging into the deeps of the earth, each crystalline tone beneath hearing.

  Suspended; sustained; simultaneously lifted, man and woman awoke to themselves.

  The unquiet male spirit understood his pure silence; while Elaira’s laughter ran from her like water, pure as the child’s, fulfilled as the mother’s, and wise as the transcendent crone’s…

  …hurled off his feet, his sighted eyes dazzled, Dakar crashed to his knees in the streambed. Sharp stones bruised his shins. Chill water purled over his knuckles, and chased liquid ice through frail bone and taut sinew. ‘I can’t,’ he protested.

  Rude hands caught his wrists. Slung back to his feet, dragged ahead like a carcass, he shivered in agonized trauma. ‘They are raising a grand confluence,’ he gasped to Sidir. ‘If we break the warding set over their presence, the roused energies reined into a tempered eddy will run to ground with the charge of a levin-bolt. The effects will excite the entire fourth lane. The cresting wave will carry for leagues, and doubtless smash glass-work in Falgaire.’

  ‘You forecast a birth!’ Sidir shouted, unmoved. ‘Can we permit such a damaging risk? Who shoulders the price if a crown prince’s child should fall to the usage of Koriathain?’

  Hauled, dripping, onto the Willowbrook’s shore, Dakar panted while the scout stretched his talent to coax portents out of the game trails. A whippoorwill called through the darkened leaves. A bull-frog’s bass chorus answered. The Mad Prophet crouched with his ringing head in his hands, while trembling misery wrung him to nausea. Fragments of vision scored him like rain, etching across the transparent frame that demarked his frail hold on mortality…

  ‘Elaira, beloved. Elaira…’

  The spellbinder clapped his palms over his ears. Shamed as the eavesdropper caught by the scruff, he ripped out his savage rebuttal. ‘No reason holds meaning before such a breach!’

  Against the unfolding pavane of the mysteries, pounding against his mazed senses, the strivings of men and the warped practice of witches fell away as noise without meaning.

  ‘More smoke,’ Sidir commanded.

  Dakar coughed, wretched. No liegeman’s persistence was going to matter. As mage or as prophet, he could not be sure the pending completion could be stopped by any-one’s act of profane intervention.

  The pipe-stem touched his lips. Too beaten to argue, the spellbinder sucked in the harsh blend of tienelle and tobacco. The fumes wracked his lungs. His stabbed brain took fire.

  Far distant, he heard Sidir’s urgent voice, exhorting the tracker to hurry…

  She touched, and another access point joined. Current unleashed through the near-complete tapestry, with only a strand left remaining. Arithon gasped. Already the shocking, bright current of pleasure streamed towards the moment of confluence. At one in mind and emotion since Merior, now, their dimensional contact merged through the etheric and sounded the down-stepped octaves of physical frequency. The cresting resonance rocked the last, imposed stay of a master’s initiate restraint.

  A cascading shudder thrilled his aroused flesh. Riven through by the deluge, Arithon fought to brake the sweet, sliding rush towards unravelling ecstasy. Now, when precaution became a torment, and every faculty lay under siege by the drive towards sensual explosion, the potential for ruin was heightened.

  If Prime Matriarch Selidie had placed a hook, this would be the moment to trap him.

  He had entreated Elaira to trust him, a promise he held as sacrosanct. Adamant where he would have preferred to ease into the peace of full union, he held. Arithon summoned his mage-sense. He swept through the singing
bands of fine energies that comprised their interlocked auras.

  Nothing. The flux fields that wrapped them burned clean at each layering, their shimmering colours untainted.

  Elaira drew in a shivering breath. Tucked securely beneath her love’s cosseting warmth, she measured every rigorous step he entrained in safe-guard. Leashed, unwilling, upon the rarified pinnacle that presaged the plunge towards enraptured surrender, she met Arithon’s opened eyes, unconcerned.

  ‘Beloved,’ she whispered. ‘Your care is unmatched.’

  Her drowning gaze held him, as language could not, and the crystalline flood of her gratitude threatened the gossamer seal on the final barrier between them…

  Vision dissolved into stuttering static, undone by Sidir’s rousting shake, followed up by the scout tracker’s cry of dismay.

  ‘I have lost them!’ The trail his exacting talent discerned faded into the tangle of undergrowth. The subtle eddies left traced on the flux where a man and a woman had trodden, first diminished, then vanished away.

  Dakar shut his eyes. Defeat made no difference. Rampant vision induced by drugged smoke ran outside of the body’s five senses. Around and above him, life teemed beyond form. Aware of the night-flying moths as uncounted, jittering pin-points, and of the black well of the underground springs, overlaid by the knit web-work of roots underpinning a mystical forest, the spellbinder had little choice but to rely upon Sidir’s support. That, or else fall unconscious. To lose himself into an unbridled trance would be exceedingly dangerous. The insane mix of tienelle combined with strong brandy had already sapped his equilibrium. He felt himself tossed like a chip in a storm, without any anchor or mooring. He might easily dream himself out of his skin, to tumble amid the beguiling dark where the sublime chord of the star song keened in limitless harmony.

  At the dissolute verge, Dakar wrestled his unruly senses. The coiling spin of the lane flux resisted. His need to ground back into cognizant reason became flayed like a rag in a shredder. Belated chagrin touched through inchoate chaos: he divined why the tracker was blinded. The pursuit trail had cut off for a crown prince’s stay of protection. The ward had been spun with such seamless finesse, the land’s subtle nature would appear serene and unruffled.

  Yet, in fact, the flowed energies turned into a spiral that beguiled birth-born talent and mage-sense alike.

  That conclusion must have been mumbled aloud, with Sidir prompted to exclamation. ‘Ath preserve! We’ve no choice.’ Appalled, he insisted, ‘You’re going to have to break through.’

  ‘My powers are hobbled,’ Dakar stated, thick. Use of language encumbered him. Adrift as he was, he could scarcely explain: the line of permission garnered from Arithon might pass between the ribbon-thin dance of the flux. But the boundary itself was forged by aware partnership, through a sanctioned prince’s link with the land. Raw forces engendered by oathsworn attunement had invoked an inviolate well of protection. ‘I can’t gainsay the vested powers of guardianship bound over to Rathain’s blood heritage!’

  ‘You can’t,’ interjected an astringent voice, just arrived on a chill blast of air. ‘But our Fellowship underpins all charter law. We are the source of crown sovereignty’

  ‘Kharadmon!’ the spellbinder gasped, overwhelmed as the Sorcerer’s presence unfurled. Unshielded vision rinsed blind by that shearing vortex of spirit light, Dakar shrank, sweaty fingers jammed over his face. ‘Mercy on us, we’re desperate! If you’ve come to help, I fear that the crisis has already passed beyond saving.’

  ‘No.’ Kharadmon’s certainty excited the flux, and tripped off a fresh spate of imagery…

  …of Arithon, with Elaira pressed full length against him. The white pitch of their tension lay poised between heart-beats, as one final time, he wielded his disciplined focus. While earth and air blazed to the rising flame that was going to unleash a grand confluence, he curbed his fierce passion and went still. Dauntless in his care, restrained at the tremulous edge of completion, the Teir’s’Ffalenn scoured their auric fields for any spoiling taint of wrong spell-craft.

  For that drawn second the balance swung, hanging, the spirit tie to integrity stamped over the consuming drive of the flesh…

  ‘Dakar! Get ready,’ cracked Kharadmon. ‘When the ward falls, you will use the permission that Arithon gave into your hands.’

  A razing force clear as an arctic wind peeled the dross from the Mad Prophet’s mind. Snapped back to clarity by Kharadmon’s touch, he saw with the Sorcerer’s perception…

  …song, that unfurled in a cresting shimmer that was sourced in a dynamic joy. At the center, written in light, upon light, Arithon s’Ffalenn smiled upon his beloved. ‘Nothing,’ he murmured. ‘Your radiance is untarnished.’

  He gathered her nape in his interlaced hands, bent his head; kissed her mouth as she opened beneath him. She caught him close, then pressed into his warmth, embracing the tender pain of the thrust that would bind their ecstatic completion…

  ‘Too late!’ Dakar cried. ‘Ath preserve, we’re already too late!’

  He sensed the last access point, tearing free. Then the shattering flare, as the land’s flux responded. Skin burning, mage-sight deluged, he felt the flickering glow that presaged the electrified union. Through his bones, through his being, the rarified note of a cascading harmony peaked towards exaltation. The well of Athera’s grand mystery quivered, its silver-point matrix tuned to resound with the spark of explosive release.

  Except Kharadmon acted.

  Utterly ruled by his binding directive, he did not entrain the gentled grace of the elements, woven by free-will permission. Nor, as the Paravian dancers shaped power, in summons that called down the paean of glory sourced in the grand harmony beyond the veil. The Sorcerer wielded the initiate magic, bestowed by the will of the dragons.

  The force he unleashed was a double-edged flame, forged from the raw stuff of paradox. Its nature encompassed the interlaced hoop of creative birth and rampant destruction. The conjury hammered down as a scouring Fire!

  Earth quaked to the shuddering impact. As lane flux tied into balance gave way, raw gusts lashed the trees, out of season. The gentle stay fashioned by Arithon’s singing tore apart with a bang like a thunder-clap.

  Ahead, in the glen, prince and lady entwined: most cruelly exposed as they reached their long-sought requital.

  The weaving between them was too fierce to sunder. No spoken warning might curb the impetus already set into motion. As the last check on Arithon’s mage-taught restraint yielded into replete consummation, Kharadmon intervened. At one stroke, he razed through. His fierce grip caught short and arrested the expanding flare of the crown prince’s subtle aura.

  Shorn defenceless, Arithon had no chance to recoil. Ripped blind and deaf, wrested wholly numb, he did not hear Elaira’s shocked outcry. Nor could he react as Dakar jerked the leash of his oath-bound permission. Necessity abrogated all mercy.

  The wrought cipher of severance sheared in like cut glass, straight down to his unguarded heart. The effect dropped the victim in senseless collapse. Bound in an uncompromised noose of tight spell-craft, Arithon s’Ffalenn tumbled limp inside of Elaira’s clasped arms.

  She keened as his conscious awareness snapped from her. Wrung to tears as his slackened weight sprawled onto her shoulder, she railed at the source of intrusion. ‘No. Damn you, no! I don’t care what disaster. He would have our joy unmolested.’

  Dakar jerked short, panting. ‘A child would come of your union! Dare you proceed without his free consent?’

  A step behind, Sidir knelt in the grass. He unlaced and peeled off his jerkin. Eyes averted, contrite, he tossed the shed garment. His gesture masked the half-coupled nakedness left stunned by their brute intervention. He retreated quickly. But the wounding could not be erased, that naught could be done beneath Ath’s wide sky to restore the enchantress’s raped privacy.

  Kharadmon had no moment to spare for regret. His chill presence moved in, and with exigent ruthlessness, sliced every ti
e of etheric connection. Granted his right by Torbrand’s founding oath, which bound every s’Ffalenn descendant, the Sorcerer disarmed the sprung coils of entrapment. He stopped off subtle access and kept the Prime’s lurking sigil from snaring the fate of Rathain’s hapless prince.

  ‘The babe would be a daughter,’ Dakar explained, breathless. ‘Your Prime meant to recall you back to cloistered service, with your unborn child claimed as Koriani property. Royal get would be bound to initiate service, through your prior tie to the order.’

  ‘Except that I know herb lore,’ Elaira said, tart. She flinched, as the Sorcerer’s swift ministrations raised chills across her damp skin. ‘Did you think I would so viciously serve a man that I love more than my very life?’

  Wrapped in her indignant, sheltering arms, Arithon’s unconscious form shuddered in recoil from Kharadmon’s stringent safe-guards. Painfully conscious, Elaira sensed the jarring sting of each break, as the energetic cords so tenderly forged in delight became sliced off, then capped, unrequited.

  Even pressed down into witless oblivion, Arithon’s body protested the shock of that intrusive working. Elaira cradled his senseless weight. With his mind and emotions cleaved from her awareness, she suffered the throes of a physical contact still living and seamlessly intimate. Her beloved’s rushed breathing feathered her cheek. She sensed, by the rapid pound of his heart-beat, the ache of his sundered need, ripped from the torrent of her own state of frustrated arousal.

  Her anger burned too sudden and sharp. ‘I find your manners without human grace, and your roughshod handling inexcusable.’

  Kharadmon fielded her acrimony, silent. Absorbed beyond pity, pressed to ruthless speed, he razed through each layer of the crown prince’s aura. He had surgical skill. His ranging power was most careful to honour the integrity of the enchantress. As well, he respected the active currents that still married the Teir’s’Ffalenn to the land’s flux. The Sorcerer proceeded without striking the least quiver of primal disharmony.