by Janny Wurts
Then the music’s fierce honesty slapped him speechless.
For what Arithon described in the stunning command of his art was the signature pattern of a whole and healthy little girl. His melody captured Jilieth in her fabric of fresh innocence, extracted from one minute’s fleeting, splintered view through the window of her sole remaining eye.
The bard’s perception was an untamed awareness, unrestrained as the lofty flight of falcons; it did not judge, but accepted. It made no demand, but set free.
Dakar felt the small, contorted body in his grasp settle and ease across his knees. A tiny, stray smile bowed up the corners of colourless lips. Even through the fogs of unconsciousness, Jilieth met the song that was her living self and responded to the promise that lilted in light harmonics through each measure. In tripping runs, in fiery-sweet tangles of ascending and descending arpeggios, even Dakar could sense a glimpse of the woman she might become in the unfolded promise of later life.
The effect was to wrap the spirit spellbound.
Weakened as Jilieth had become, starved as her tissues were for air, she could not do other than rise above her affliction, then respond as the vital mirror image of herself looped and soared, and charged her fading spirit to delight.
Arithon played with half-lidded eyes. The intricate measures beneath his fingers flexed and flowed on a current of untrammelled intuition. Dakar had no space to marvel at his talent. Afraid for the cost of each second’s delay, he poised in wait for the opening when the link would be offered to his use.
The awareness flowed over him like the plunge into glacial waters. Arithon dissolved his inner barriers without constraint, without fear, without regret.
The Mad Prophet steadied his concentration, slipped into trance and mage-sight. He let the spiralled structure of the music seize his mind and draw him inside the circle of the Shadow Master’s consciousness.
The first contact all but disarmed him. Deflected and sent reeling by a vulnerability of shattering proportion, Dakar found his animosity disarmed, then submerged in a rush of expanding discovery: the forced gift of compassion lent to this s’Ffalenn prince a limitless capacity to forgive. Arithon owned no defence against hatred. He could do nothing before railing slights and prejudice except bare his heart in understanding. For a scion of his line, there existed no half measures; against misinterpretation and betrayal, even cold steel in the back, he had only temper to shield him. The pained patience that rooted his sarcasm became a lacerating revelation to upset Dakar’s entrenched hostility.
Even through the sweet pull of the music spun for Jilieth, Arithon was not unaware of the Mad Prophet’s distress. Solidly delicate as a wall of blown glass, constraints were offered to bolster him.
Against a lifelong assault to wide-open feelings, and the demands his own sympathy set against him, Arithon had learned to covet privacy. In the clear-cut solitude of a master’s restraint, he carved himself space for peace of mind.
Stormed through by a tearing desire to weep, Dakar heard the lyranthe speak out in sharp dissonance. The note jarred him separate, lent him footing to salvage a grip on his drowned sense of self. He regained the presence to remember: his purpose was not to be overwhelmed by pity for the plight of an enemy, but to restore the ravaged body of a child.
He owned the knowledge to reverse mortal wounding inside a strict set of parameters. The foundation of his learning followed Fellowship precepts: all change must begin with consent. Jilieth herself must agree to her healing. In a girl too young to grasp adult implications, permission must be garnered in stages. The first step was easiest. Afflicted by wounds of fatal severity, she would seize at the chance to escape pain. Eyes closed, ears filled by the ringing dimension of spirit described by Arithon’s lyranthe, Dakar laid light hands on the bandages that swaddled the wounds in Jilieth’s chest. The tidal play of life force under his fingertips spun in whorled patterns across his mage-sight. Here, the current faltered, all but cancelled out; there, her energies burned in a frenetic, bleeding burst, punished out of balance by trauma. The structure had lost its given shape like candle wax set too near flame.
Dakar raised a fingertip and traced the seal for stability over the stained linen wrapping.
He summoned from himself to lend it power. A flare of illumination bloomed in the path of his touch. For an instant his cipher glimmered like calligraphy inked in light. Then Arithon’s melody rang out in response and framed its pale resonance into sound. The construct glowed with fierce splendour, then dissolved in a shower of pinprick sparks and absorbed into the tracery of the girl’s aura.
Arithon’s deft progression of chords refrained the same vibration, then wove in an aching and beautiful counterpoint through the measures that framed the child’s Name.
Tears streaked in earnest down Dakar’s plump cheeks. For the span of an instant, nothing alive could withstand the tenderness expressed by the flight-dance of fingers across the length of a fretboard and fourteen silver-wrapped strings. Arithon’s talent held true as struck gold, commensurately brought beyond promise to potential by the gift of Halliron’s teaching. Jilieth could do naught but respond. Beneath Dakar’s hands, her next breath came easier. He dared another sigil for dampening pain, and the lyranthe’s song soared through and answered him.
The influx of power fired an exhilarated rush. Dakar framed the next seal for mending torn tissue, awed yet again as pure melody resounded in polished clarity, an airy flight of chords as carefree as wind through the petals of budding flowers.
Immersed deep in trance, joined in lockstep with Arithon, the spellbinder no longer felt the chill bite of frost. The music wrung him deaf to the hunting cries of wyverns and the erratic splash of the spring. Try though he would, his precautions bled away. The allure of bright harmony meshed his mind in fair coils; swept him hapless into the interlocked dance of spelled mystery until the threads of defence and mistrust came unwound and slipped through his loosened grasp.
The most perilous moment of the binding framed for Jilieth had arrived. His heart held to no thing outside his craft and the lyranthe’s uncontained joy. A smile on his lips, no shadow on his mind to trip and hamper him, Dakar initiated the twined cipher for renewal and ending that would link the spell’s resonance to prime power.
Tied by the strictures of his training to the Law of the Major Balance, the child he sought to help possessed sole volition to close the first step. To open within her the conduit to enable grand conjury, to empower her to thwart death, Jilieth would have to embrace change. Her wilful young nature and the pull of heedless passion that urged her to go her headstrong way must yield to wisdom beyond her years and development. She must of herself be encouraged to accept the loving boundaries that skilled parents would instil upon offspring too young to protect themselves.
To recover and rise whole, a six-year-old girl must unmake the decision to flout her brother’s care and run off to play alone among the rocks.
Jilieth heard the question that was asked of her. Enfolded in every protection a masterbard’s music could draw to set her outside pain and suffering, her spirit shimmered in playful rebellion. She would dance, and court danger, even as her lost mother, who had cruelly abandoned her in childhood; who had ventured out on unsafe footing to save a stranded lamb, and perished in the grinding thunder of a rockslide.
Arithon cried out in sharp warning. ‘Dakar, let her be! Don’t pursue. She must be left free to turn back!’
But the spellbinder had already lost himself to frustration. His annoyance stained the seals and the sigils dull red, and the music, denied its clear channel, faltered one fractional beat off true rhythm.
The Mad Prophet despaired for his clumsiness. He scrambled to recover a patience he had never seen fit to cultivate. Jilieth needed the firm-handed guidance of a teacher. The censure and correction dealt out in restraint, that over and over, Dakar had refused from his Fellowship master.
For the first time in life, that failing cut through his thick-skinned
obstinacy. He knew how to pleasure the most jaded of his whores; could wheedle his way to indulge in the worst forms of vice.
But in tragic revelation, he saw he owned no clue how to curb the same destructive urge in a child.
Arithon grasped the scope of Dakar’s dilemma; his masterbard’s empathy caught the jangled upset that flayed through the link holding Jilieth’s attention to the course that would buy back her life. He extended his talent to its desperate limit in attempt to drive a clear opening across the spellbinder’s flawed moil of indecision. When the cry wrung out in appeal from his lyranthe failed to win through, he opened his throat in a scream of wild hurt for the helpless, blind block that guilt had set over his mage-sight.
Arithon reached anyway, tried, his full will engaged in one piercing effort to break through and access his lost mastery.
Tapped into his talent, he could act in direct resonance and salvage the burst seals in the pattern.
But his attempt slammed against the blank barrier that fenced his inner vision like black glass. He floundered back, undone and crushed by untenable loss.
The shock tore him open, harrowed up his insufferable memories. Strangled afresh by the choices he had seen no moral avenue to escape, he had no control left to shield Dakar from the impact of shared sight.
All over again the children died on the field at Tal Quorin. Who else but he knew they had been spared a worse fate on the executioner’s scaffold in Etarra? Their deaths had been sealed, along with the clan survivors he had sacrificed his integrity to spare from the misguided coil unleashed by Desh-thiere’s curse when Lysaer had raised Etarra’s army.
He lived with the guilt and annihilating fear for the sway the Mistwraith’s geas held over him.
Cornered once again on the desolate sands at Athir, the humiliation bought at Minderl Bay a recent wound in his heart, Arithon had cried out in a despair that unmanned him. ‘You wish my blood oath? To hold me to life? Ath Creator show me mercy! You can’t know what you’re asking!’
Then the Fellowship Sorcerer’s unequivocal answer, ‘I do know.’ Through the Warden of Althain, Asandir was cognizant that one staunch liegeman’s hold on an unmerciful duty had spared an untenable reckoning. ‘It is all the more urgent that I ask. You’ve experienced the peril this Mistwraith represents. Whatever atrocities its curse may bring to pass, to spare humanity, your birth-born talents must be preserved for the future. Who dies and who lives cannot be made to matter before necessity as broad-scale as that.’
And so the knife to seal blood oath had bitten irrevocably, forging an unbreakable tie to a Sorcerer and a charge of responsibility to negate change of will. The sting of the steel shocked back the sundered currents of control.
Arithon wrung free of the past that tore his conscience, and Dakar snapped back to contained self-awareness with a gasp that rocked him like a blow. The link was severed, its purpose spent.
For Jilieth, the turning already lay behind. She was a wayward creature, heartset to go where she would, and for that she had met with her wyvern.
Her choice was made. In the wreckage of pride and the tatters of past pain, Arithon had no recourse left but to force back the semblance of dignity. He bent his head over wet knuckles and threw himself back into music; to loose his bard’s bindings one by one and play the lost child through her transition out of life. He guided her last breaths in joy, in peace, to ease final passage in cherished sympathy.
The vision Dakar caught through the discipline of his mage-sight as she passed the Fatemaster’s Wheel was of a carefree young girl, skipping through a golden flood of sunshine.
Day had long fled. The fire languished to ashes and the rags of the stormfront had dispersed. A night sky cold with stars cast ghost light into the ravine and spiked needles of reflection in the rock pool. Three bars after the girl’s spirit aura dimmed and flickered into dark, Arithon cupped his strings into silence. He clamped his palms over the sharp bones of his face while the tears spilled unchecked through his fingers.
Still trapped in the fading remembrance of linked sympathy, Dakar could not bear the grief. He had no means at hand to assume the blame that was his, nor to ease his lapsed burden off the shoulders of the bard. Perhaps worst of all, Arithon in his boundless capacity for understanding turned no word against him in reprisal.
‘You were all you could be for the one given moment,’ the Prince of Rathain said at length. Never more Tor-brand’s descendant, he stared into the shadowy depths of the pool, too exhausted to care if his heart showed. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind. You gave all you had. The girl saw her chance and made her turning.’
But for the spellbinder, that absolution fell short. He was no more than five centuries of debauchery had made him. The compounded waste of every year he had squandered stung now in cruel regret for the price meted out to Jilieth as he failed her.
‘What’s left to be done?’ Dakar asked, his canker of old spite set into eclipse by remorse.
‘I suppose, take the children to their kinsfolk. Where should we look for their people?’ Arithon set his lyranthe on the unfurled fleeces of its wrappings and pushed in numbed exhaustion to his feet. He scrounged by the fire, retrieved Ghedair’s cloak, then gathered the cooling body of the sister out of Dakar’s lap.
‘There should be a shepherds’ camp.’ Dakar forced his numbed mind to start working. ‘Their flocks would be moving down-country for winter. This one tribe must be delayed for some reason. Their young ones aren’t usually left unwatched.’
‘The fact this pair was deprived of one parent might explain that.’ When the little girl was shrouded in the rags of her brother’s garment, Arithon covered his lyranthe.
At some point Dakar recovered willpower to move. He packed up the satchel and wrestled to shed an unwelcome legacy of skewed viewpoint. The imprint of Arithon’s consciousness clung to his thoughts like fine cobwebs. Dakar shrank from the coiled question in obstinate fear for another prince: the fair-haired s’Ilessid half-brother he cherished as his closest friend.
Discomfort gnawed him. He dared not re-examine the hour of Desh-thiere’s revenge lest he encounter an unthinkable truth, that the past might no longer support his beliefs. The creeping thought answered, that nine years ago during the crisis at Etarra, it may have suited Prince Lysaer not to fight back against the wraith that had twisted foothold through s’Ilessid justice to seed its undying curse of enmity.
Later evidence lent credence. No Fellowship Sorcerer ever stepped back from human need without cause. There would be compelling reason why only one prince had been asked to swear blood oath at Athir.
In a cowardly need to plough past ugly doubts, Dakar resumed conversation. ‘If we strike downslope, we ought to find the sheep.’ He watched Arithon shoulder his share of their belongings, then hoist the unconscious boy across his back. The bard seemed as he always had, spare and assured in his competency.
On the strength of stolen insight, Dakar realized he could pierce that crafty mask of self-reliance. He was Lysaer’s man, always, as Arithon well knew. What came to pass through tonight’s unnerving partnership would not be simple, nor freely given. No law insisted that their bid to spare a child had occurred without the underlying subterfuge that trademarked the Shadow Master’s style.
Dakar heaved the packed satchel off the ground and gathered up the corpse of the girl. The thought struck in fired clarity, that his splintered faith in Lysaer’s decency could be restored but one way: by testing and prying until he forced out the proof that Arithon had exposed his royal gift of compassion for gain. The possibility existed. In cold calculation as Shadow Master, ruled by Desh-thiere’s curse, he might have acted behind cover of Jilieth’s need to disarm Dakar’s enmity and twist a just hatred in diabolical change to complicity.
Ath’s Adepts
Bored with the confines of the command galley, and fed up with dicing with sailors, Mearn s’Brydion paced in a rampaging temper across the carpets of Lysaer’s campaign tent. ‘Your Grace, it’
s a farce!’ His thin fingers jabbed air by the tent flap, tied open to catch the sea breeze. ‘The villagers we question hate talk worse than clams. Two men got snakebitten, beating the bushes. They found nothing else. Your officers at the cordon all swear by what hangs in their breeks that no fugitives have left Scimlade Tip. The only place we haven’t searched is the hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood. Have you ever questioned the adepts?’
Mearn cast a steely eye over the prince’s settled calm. ‘I see you haven’t. Their kind don’t deal in warfare or hostages. If they don’t like your purpose, you may as well try to shift sand in a bucket with the bottom dinged full of holes!’
Unmoved by Mearn’s ranting, Lysaer s’Ilessid pushed his lap desk off his knees, sat up straight, and tossed the dried nib of his quill pen across the clutter of dispatches spread in ranked piles at his feet. ‘You want to send the galleys along the coastline, north and south, to seek the Shadow Master directly?’
‘Yes.’ Mearn gave a tight spin to glare over the darkened dunes, the braid on his oversleeves a stitched flare of sparks in the candles just lit to cut the grey fall of twilight. ‘I hate sitting. We’ve no proof any sailhands survived Shearfast’s burning. If my duke’s exiled guardsman or that village goodwife knew aught of Arithon’s plans, they’re not at hand to speak. Why stall for them? Catch a rat on the run, or wait and have the worse time digging him out while denned up.’
‘Your rat is s’Ffalenn,’ Lysaer said in forced patience. ‘He’ll be denned up already. You’d break the backs of your oarsmen in a needless, blind search.’
‘Not blind. The villagers say he had dealings with a smuggler’s brig called the Black Drake.’ When this bit of news failed to move Lysaer from planted disagreement to enthusiasm, Mearn flicked at the salt a wet landing had left encrusted on his sleeve cuff. ‘All right then.’ Suspiciously triumphant, as though he had won some obscure point of argument, he grinned at the prince in a sparkling, new depth of malice. ‘You can inquire at the hostel yourself, and welcome to the errand by my lights. Righteous types give me the creeps.’