The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  Once, Lady Talith would have sat front and centre to egg on admirers and dare foolish feats to gain her favour. She would have laughed at the cleverest wit and gleaned all the gossip to unravel the fierce tapestry of intrigue that underlay the glitter of Etarran society.

  But this night found her separate from the festivities, breathing in the outdoor airs that perfumes inside the ballroom behind her were selected with care to overpower. There was nothing attractive by night in damp stone; starlight, to her, was too uncomfortably new to feel safe. The laughter, the dancing and the delicate sparkle of light through the pierced porcelain of a thousand candle-shades should have drawn her back like a moth to flame. Her gown of costly damask was new, and her jewels simple, but dazzling.

  But the parties now seemed silly shamming. She resisted the creeping ennui to no avail and just as fiercely fought to deny its cause; to avoid setting name to the day, no, the moment, when the wild antics of the men had become reduced to just games, and empty ones at that.

  Diegan had experienced a similar change. Though brother and sister had not compared thoughts, his humour had been flat for days. Where once he would have battled jealously to retain his circle of admirers, now they were deserting his side like ebb-tide, with himself the one least dismayed. It felt, Talith decided, as if somebody had entered her childhood home and maliciously rearranged all the furniture.

  She could not flee the recognition that her life seemed dreary since Lysaer s’Ilessid had stepped into it.

  Talith leaned over the balustrade. Never before then had she known admiration that did not arise from flamboyance; humour that did not belittle; power not bought through brutish intrigues or bribes.

  The man’s direct nature had cut through Etarra’s convoluted greed and excesses like a sharpened knife through mould rinds.

  A breeze whispered through the garden, loosing a small blizzard of petals and almost masking the footfalls that approached from across the terrace. She was annoyed. She had fended off four dandies on her way to the doorway.

  ‘Go away.’ Cold, disastrously discourteous, she refused to look aside and so much as acknowledge the identity of the man she dismissed.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Warm hands reached out and gently gathered the twist of hair that trailed down the nape of her neck. She stiffened, dismayed to realize she could not spin and deal a slap for the impertinence. His fingers had tightened too firmly: like a boat, she was effectively moored.

  ‘They insisted inside that you had grown tired of the party,’ Lysaer s’Ilessid said in greeting.

  She shivered. Then blushed; and would have slapped him then for his boldness, that had wrung from her such a reaction. She was unaccustomed to being played like a fish.

  He let her go. Cool air ruffled through the strands his fingers had parted. Mulberry blossoms showered in a swirl of white, and eddied in the lee of the railing.

  Talith stepped around, prepared to use her pretty woman’s scorn to drive him off-balance. He deserved as much for his confidence that everywhere he went he would be welcomed.

  Wonder stopped her cold. Strung in his hands was a chain of lights, delicate as flame hung on beadwire.

  Lysaer smiled. His eyes sparkled with reflections; his face, struck out in shadow and soft light, held a beauty to madden a sculptor to fits of missed inspiration. The pale, fine hair that just brushed his collar was his sole ornament.

  The effect stopped Talith’s breath.

  ‘Do you want me to leave?’ Lysaer teased.

  Pique snapped her out of entrancement. ‘You haven’t been invited to stay.’ But her glance betrayed her, as she marvelled at the shining string that quivered and danced between his hands.

  His smile deepened at the corners. ‘No jewel can compare.’

  He looked down at the bauble, made it gleam and spit sparks like stirred embers. ‘This cannot compare. It’s a poor, flashy phantom. A worthless illusion sprung from light. But if you insist on hiding in the darkness, at least if you wear it, you’ll be gilded.’ He reached up, stepped closer and, with a gesture that brushed the bared skin of her collarbones, settled his spell around her neck.

  The lights were neither warm nor cold; in fact, their presence against her flesh raised no tactile sensation at all. That for an oddity made her ache. As if, like a gem or a pearl, she should feel something tangible from his gift.

  ‘Gold suits you,’ Lysaer murmured. He watched in quiet pleasure as she experimented with his handiwork, let it spill like captive fireflies through her fingers.

  And then, too suddenly, he gave the reason for his coming. ‘The army marches out on the morrow.’

  She looked up, her head tipped provocatively sideways; the necklace of lights brightened her chin to fine angles. ‘Should that trouble me?’

  Lysaer paused, thoughtful. He seemed not offended or set back. ‘I don’t think anyone in this city understands the threat in the man we leave to cut down.’

  ‘Arithon?’ Talith tossed back her mane of hair, about to say, disparaging, that even allied to barbarians the deposed prince could hardly challenge a fortified city.

  Lysaer stepped to her suddenly and caught her arms below her bared shoulders. He did not shake her. Neither did he raise his voice to chastise. His touch stayed soft and the eyes that stared down into hers were wide open, very blue and anguished only with himself. ‘Lady, I fear for your city, for your safety, for your happiness. And about Arithon s’Ffalenn, I can make nobody comprehend.’

  ‘What else is there to know?’ She looked back at him, graceful as some tawny cat assured of its power to captivate.

  Lysaer slid his palms down her arms lightly as a breath. He backed away, set his hands on the balustrade and stared out over the darkened garden. He was deeply troubled and she realized with a snap of vexation that her allure had not even touched him. He gave her no chance to retaliate, but said quickly, ‘I grew up in a land that was terrorized by the predations of the s’Ffalenn. We in Amroth had wealth, good ships, skilled men with quality weapons to defend us. We should have triumphed easily, for the isle of Karthan the pirate kings ruled was little more than a sandspit. The people were poor, with few resources, fewer men. But what they had, they used with the cleverness of demons.’

  He stilled for a moment. Talith saw that his hands had balled into fists. Unsure whether his tension might be troublesome to cross, she waited, patient because his lordly display of dedication was novel enough to intrigue her.

  Presently, Lysaer spoke again. ‘The killing and the grief went back for generations, through my great-grandfather’s time. Both of my uncles were lured into traps and sent back to us pickled, for burial. Grief left my father unreasonable, even mad. He lost a wife, before my mother. Two daughters died with her, who would have been my half-sisters, had I known them. No one told me they existed until I was twelve, when I forced my father’s seneschal to say why the royal crypt held an unmarked vault.’

  Lysaer took a breath. ‘All my life, I remember the campaigns, the fleets and the generals sent out to eradicate the s’Ffalenn. We accomplished little for great efforts. We managed to burn villages, poor shanties whose loss seemed scarcely to hurt. Karthish lookouts would spot the inbound fleets and warn the people to escape. Men sent ashore to track refugees would scour the desert to no avail. Sea engagements went as badly. Our ships were lured into exhaustive chases, wrecked in shoal waters because the artisans who drew our charts were once fed false information. Our captains and crews died fighting against lee shores in gales. They died of thirst, hunger, mutiny and fire because the weapon of the s’Ffalenn was ingenuity that seemed inexhaustible as the tides. The pirate princes revelled in feuding. Their trickery never repeated itself and they sailed to no predictable pattern.’

  Remembered anguish drove Lysaer to straighten from the balustrade. ‘These past captains were only men, clever and hungry for bloodshed. The last of their line, the s’Ffalenn heir bequeathed to Athera, is far more. He was born to an enchantres
s, raised to the ways of power. A sorcerer, a shadow master, his tricks will come barbed in spells.’

  His eyes at last turned and met Talith’s, dreadfully deep and revealing. ‘Arithon fooled even me, lady. He drew me to believe he was harmless, then cozened true friendship from me. If not for your brother’s apt questions, if not for the doubts he reawakened, no one might have acted in time. Arithon might never have stood before Etarra and revealed his true nature in the square.’

  Lysaer ended in harsh and personal discomfort. ‘That is what I cannot teach your people to know and fear.’

  Caught up in fascination exotic enough to make her shiver, Talith said, ‘But you are lord over powers of light. You can defend against witchery.’

  ‘I’m a man,’ Lysaer amended. ‘Men fail.’

  Uncertainty flawed Talith’s entrancement. She had been affected inside, and surprised by that recognition, she wanted his hands on her. ‘You’ll come back. Diegan’s army will win that black sorcerer’s head.’

  Breeze stirred a drift of mulberry petals between them. They dusted Talith’s cheeks and caught in her hair and on the abalone tips of lacquered pins. With a gentle hand he brushed them away. ‘We can try. We can hope.’ He cupped her face, bent and kissed her with maddening lightness.

  She reached to pull him closer, but the slithering drag of her caped sleeves warned him in time to draw back. From a safe half-pace away he smiled at her. ‘No. Not now. You’ll wait for me, lovely lady. When Arithon s’Ffalenn is vanquished and your city is safe, I’ll return. If your desire for my presence still endures, we shall build something great between us then.’

  She swallowed back her annoyance, the more amazed because he did not mock her frustrated passion as Etarran men might have done. ‘What if you don’t come back?’

  His lightness vanished. ‘Then you’ll be left to find out why Etarra’s army lost. In my memory, you’ll use such knowledge to warn your people, so that Arithon’s predations don’t catch them unprepared when the time comes to fight him again.’

  ‘You can’t believe you’ll be defeated!’ Talith cried, forgetting in distress to be artful.

  ‘I can’t be so cocky as to think for a second I might not.’ He gave a stiff shrug in apology. ‘S’Ffalenn pirates in the past have ruined better men than me.’

  ‘You’re all we have.’ Talith corrected herself with passionate sharpness: ‘All I have.’

  Inside the ballroom the musicians struck up a merry tune. Past the opened doubled doors dancers gathered, formed lines and began to tread the first measures. Their movements seemed meaningless. Mute in her appeal, Talith saw with a relief that made her tremble that Lysaer would not, after all, depart without thought for her happiness.

  ‘One dance.’ The s’Ilessid prince laughed gently and gathered her, silk, pearls and ruffled, layered skirts, as delicately as if she were a blown bit of thistledown captured in the circle of his arms.

  Deduction

  Under a breeze from the east, the soured mud of bare tideflats and the dyeworks of Narms swept a reeking pall over the town, which consisted of box-fronted wooden mansions, one storey warehouse sheds, and a harbour. A craft centre from first to last, the place recognized no elegance beyond the bustling purpose of commerce.

  Up-coast, where the beautiful yarns spun and dyed in these wind-raked, ramshackle shops were woven into famed rugs and tapestries, Cildorn’s stone buildings held the deeper mystery of more ancient sites: a resonance that lingered from Paravian inhabitance still drew the earth’s forces to flow very near to the surface. For the advantage such powers lent to spellcraft, the Koriani Prime would have preferred to conduct her errand there. But since the Fellowship’s gross misjudgement over Arithon’s failed coronation, Elaira could make Narms with better speed.

  The building let for Morriel’s use was owned by the widow of a former Koriani boy-ward. Since his death, hard times and slatternly management had caused his dyeworks to fail. Long abandoned to the whims of stray iyats, the yard stood cluttered with cracked buckets silted wrist-deep in dead leaves. The shop, crudely shuttered, lay sandwiched between a brewery and the mudflats. Storms in winter sometimes flooded the warehouse. The building smelled now of mouldered rags and worm-rotted planking, underlaid by the taint of hops and fish.

  One lingering fiend had to be chased from the rafters. Then the sole vat not cursed with slow leaks was dragged inside by Morriel’s servant, wedged level on packed sand flooring, and filled for scrying. A yarn rack propped up and sumptuously padded with quilts had been prepared for the comfort of the Prime, but disdained by the Koriani matriarch. Hunched under shawls like a crow draggled down by wet plumage, she waited in the flickering light of the resin torches with a patience her First Senior could not match.

  Sustained by voracious ambition, Lirenda revelled in being the only one chosen for active duty. Though it was well past midnight and her fellow seniors had long since retired, out of pride she would not show weariness and sit in the presence of her Prime.

  Sharing attendance upon Morriel’s needs was the huge half-wit who stood as her doorguard. Witness to more secrets than any living Koriani senior, the man sat crosslegged in a corner, drooping in his effort to stay awake. The streets outside were mostly quiet. Sometimes a late worker from the brewery strode whistling by. The stillness in between magnified the hiss of burning resin and the distant beat of combers off Instrell Bay. A sudden clatter of iron as a horse arrived outside caused the half-wit to startle up from his doze and hasten to unbar the door.

  Elaira’s voice carried in on the gust that swept the threshold as she dismissed the livery groom who would return her mount to the stable. She entered a moment later. Hair blown loose from her braid was screwed into wisps by the seaside humidity and her skin was like chalk with exhaustion.

  She had ridden a hundred leagues in under three days. Chafed raw at the knees from leathers stiffened with horse sweat, she made obeisance to the Koriani matriarch. The formal words of greeting came courageously steady from her lips.

  Lirenda watched, avid, as Morriel beckoned Elaira closer. Under browless hoods of bone, the Prime’s deepset eyes did not merely study, but raked the rider who stepped forward on command.

  Exposed full-figure in flamelight, Elaira withstood the inspection. Awareness that the sisterhood’s arts of observation would take in all, from the scuffs on her boots left by pebbles kicked in impatience at post stables too slow to tack her remounts; to the stains on her cloak where a drunk in a wayside tavern had upset the broth she could not stay to have replenished.

  The Prime observed, ‘Your journey was trying, I see.’

  Eased by the unexpected kindness, Elaira straightened sore shoulders. ‘Not so bad.’ In wry humour that Lirenda found particularly grating, she added, ‘If the inns had lice in the bedclothes, at least I escaped finding out.’

  Morriel’s lips twitched, perhaps in the ghost of a smile. ‘Your spirits are intact, I can see. When did you last eat?’

  Elaira paused for thought, which gave answer enough in itself. The crone gestured to her half-wit. ‘Quen, go next door to the brewer’s and buy some bread and sausage.’ To Elaira, in disarming solicitude, she added, ‘Do you wish beer?’

  Not so tired she failed to sense a trap, Elaira shook her head. ‘On the heels of an emergency summons, I think not, thank you. Unless I have leave to go to bed?’

  ‘You have not.’ But the Prime’s approval was apparent, that the girl had kept sharp wits. ‘Though you deserve the rest, surely. I’m not unaware that you had to bid against the trade guilds’ couriers, jammed as the livery stables have been with bearers carrying ill news.’

  Inordinate numbers of state messengers had crowded the roads as well, but Elaira had been too pressed to hear gossip. ‘Worse happened since I left Etarra?’

  ‘A great deal.’ Fog curled through the door as Quen slipped back in with a steaming parcel. As the torches hissed and spat in the damp, Morriel motioned toward the vat. ‘Bring your meal while y
ou study the water. I would see you brought current with events, that you understand the importance of the demands you’ve been called to attend.’

  To thank Quen for any service was to invite an embarrassment of obsequious gratitude. Elaira patted his rough hand and took the food, half-braced in pity in case his fawning should displease the Prime. But Quen only ducked his head in pathetic ecstasy for her kindness, then retired back to his corner.

  Elaira unwrapped greasy coils of sausage and trailed after her mistress toward the vat.

  Lirenda knew bitterness that the order’s most incorrigible junior initiate should be casually stuffing her mouth, while beside her, Morriel Prime prepared to admit her to the highest level of Koriani affairs, and for no better cause than a disobedient escapade with a man.

  With no thought spared for Lirenda’s disaffection, Morriel hitched up one hip and with a drag of thick woollens, perched on the rim of the vat. Graced by a balance at odds with her years, she hooked the crystal that hung on fine chains at her neck and informed Elaira, ‘The images you will observe reflect events that occurred today.’

  Morriel dangled her jewel above the ruffled water, then completed a pass that engaged spellcraft. Elaira leaned over a surface bound into mirror-smoothness, while the vision induced by the Prime’s clairvoyance overlaid the madder-stained depths…

  Morning sun tinted the square brick turrets of Etarra’s watch-keeps and struck shafts through the dust billowed up by the garrison that tramped outbound from the northwestern gate. Its columns were narrowed by the flanks of the Mathorn pass, and rank after rank of raised pikes and lances gridded the pale, hazed sky. Windowed in water, men marched like toy figurines given life, the gold and red banners of the city guard cracking in the breeze like snipped cloth.